So they kept their lives, most of them. But sooner or later they or their progeny lost almost everything else: titles, property, way of life, learning—especially learning. A world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries maintained. It is not a world where learned men have the leisure to become more learned. It is not a world for which the grammaticus schedules regular classes of young scholars and knowledge is dutifully transmitted year by placid year.
Between the Sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 and the death of the last western emperor in 476, the Imperium became increasingly unstable. The large landowners—more and more, laws unto themselves—ignored the emperor’s decrees, going even so far as to use the great public edifices as quarries for private palaces. Rome itself, abandoned by the emperors for the more defensible marshes of Ravenna, saw the splendor of its public buildings crumble before the destructiveness of private greed. Though the emperor announced dire punishments for any official who cooperated in this destruction—fifty pounds of gold for a magistrate, a flogging and the loss of both hands for a subordinate—the looting continued unabated. The Vandals were not the only vandals.
The straight Roman road, solidly paved, unwilling to compromise with the vagaries of local landscape, and for centuries the symbol of safe and unmolested travel, now presented the likelihood of unwelcome adventure. Not only were there bands of highway robbers, increasingly composed of the ruined and the dispossessed; the emperor’s own curiosi (a combination of highway police and customs guards) began to extort bribes from travelers desperate to reach places of greater safety, often halting the wayfarers’ progress when they had no more bribes to proffer. Throughout the countryside, once the very image of Roman peace, illegal brotherhoods of extortionists formed—the proto-Mafiosi. Curiales and other struggling middle-class townsmen, who had been accustomed to sending their infants to be nursed by shepherds in pure mountain air, began to find it impossible to retrieve those children. Snatched away to inaccessible mountain fastnesses, the children were raised brutally as shepherd-slaves, and the nameshepherd became synonymous with thief, kidnapper, trafficker in children. The fear of such kidnapping still finds echoes in the lost children and loathsome adults who haunt the deep wood of European fairy tales.
As barbarian attacks became not a distant possibility but the order of the day, records of ownership and purchase were often lost in raids, thus presenting a fine opportunity to the emperor’s discussores (the super-curiales). These rapacious bullies would descend with a large retinue on a recently looted farm, demanding of the disoriented owner that he render all accounts forthwith. What would follow, as described in the emperor’s own reform-minded, if ineffectual, edict, is enough to curl one’s hair—“innumerae deinde caedes, saeva custodia, suspendiorum crudelitas, et universa tormenta” (“thence innumerable slaughters, savage imprisonment, the cruelty of hangings, and every kind of torture”)
The borders of the empire were contracting. By the end of the third decade of the fifth century, the grain-heavy plain of northern Africa—Rome’s breadbasket—was lost to the Vandals, who had already seized or savaged large swaths of Spain and Gaul. Through most of the century, various armies of Goths, then of Huns, driving westward over the Danube and decimating the eastern provinces, marched up and down the Italian peninsula, raising panic and leaving desolation. As the fifth century opened, the Roman garrison in Britain was already on its way to depletion, so desperately were soldiers needed elsewhere. By 410, the year of Alaric’s Sack, it had been withdrawn completely, exposing Britain more than ever to the depredations of the Germanic Angles and Saxons on its eastern shore and to the even more terrifying slave raids of the Celts of Ireland along its jagged western bays.
One of the most horrifying features of the period is the wholesale enslavement of freemen and -women. Estate agents for the great landlords often acted as redemptores, redeemers of Roman citizens seized in barbarian raids. The object was usually not the freedom of the Roman prisoner, but his fresh enslavement as a serf on the landlord’s estate. The ransom paid was a cheap price for a lifetime of service from the liberated prisoner. Sometimes the ruse was even simpler: at the time of an invasion, a local farmer would be given shelter for himself and his family on a great estate, only to find that, when the barbarian hordes had passed, neither he nor his would ever be free to leave.
The barbarians, too, were likely to enslave whomever they could lay their hands on. In the slavery business, no tribe was fiercer or more feared than the Irish. They were excellent sailors—in skin-covered craft that they maneuvered with consummate skill. Just before dawn, a small war party would move its stealthy oval coracles into a little cove, approach an isolated farmhouse with silent strides, grab some sleeping children, and be halfway back to Ireland before anyone knew what had happened.
The Irish moved in larger war parties, as well. One day in 401 or thereabouts, a great fleet of black coracles swept up the west coast of Britain, probably into the Severn estuary, and, seizing (according to an eyewitness) “many thousands” of young prisoners, returned with them to a slave market in Ireland. We still have the testimony of one of the captives, a boy of sixteen who called himself Patricius. He tells us that his father, Calpurnius, was (God help him) a curialis and that his grandfather Potitus had been a Catholic priest—so he was a middle-class lad, a Romanized Briton looking forward to a classical education and a career. Not surprisingly, he was not interested in following in his father’s footsteps: “I sold my noble rank, I blush not to state it nor am I sorry.” Whatever the plans of this brash young man, they were cut short by the terrible Irish raid. He finds himself “chastened exceedingly and humbled in truth by hunger and nakedness and that daily,” as a shepherd-slave in the Irish district of Antrim, as the property of a local “king” named Miliucc. What became of Patricius will form the subject of a later chapter, after we have left the civilized world for good and journeyed to the unholy land of Ireland.
But before we bid goodnight to the late classical world and make our way to the fiercest of the fierce barbarians, we must consider one last question: What was lost when the Roman Empire fell? The life of Ausonius can show us the why of the Fall, but it gives us nothing to weep for. Classical civilization—the world that came to birth in the Athens of Pericles five centuries before Christ and that dies now five hundred years after Christ in the century of the barbarian invasions—is worth a far better elegy than Ausonius can provide. What died, when no one any longer had the leisure to pass on the essentials of the classical tradition, when the barbarians burned the libraries and the books turned to dust, when the stones remaining were reassembled into rural outhouses?
We find the answer in the life of Augustine of Hippo, almost the last great classical man—and very nearly the first medieval man.
Just thirty years before Patricius was brought in chains to Ireland, another teenager with a similar background—a Romanized African whose father was a petty official—came all too willingly, not to an impossible hinterland, but to the seething capital of Roman Africa. “To Carthage I came,” recalled Augustine later, “where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. As yet I loved no one, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated need, I hated myself for not being needy. I pursued whoever-whatever might be lovable, in love with love. Safety I hated—and any course without danger. For within me was a famine.”
This is clear, poignant, ruthless prose. But though it still reads awfully well, the words of Augustine’s Confessions no longer jump with the fresh shock they held when he published his memoir in 401—probably the same year Patricius was kidnapped. The reason for this is that Augustine’s is a sensibility that has since become so common that we no longer experience the Confessions as the earthquake they were felt to be by readers of late antiquity. For Augustine is the first human being to say “I”—and to mean what we mean today. His Confessions are, therefore, the first genuine autobiography in human history. The implications of this are staggering and, even today, difficult to encompass. A good start is made, of course, by reading the Confessions themselves and falling under their spell. But in order to grasp the immensity of Augustine’s achievement, one must read the “autobiographies” that went before him.
Open any collection of Great Thoughts or Great Sayings—especially one that, like Bartlett’s, goes in chronological order—and let your eye pick out the I’s. In the oldest literature their paucity and lack of force will begin to impress you. Of course, characters in Homer refer to themselves occasionally as “I.” Socrates even speaks of his daimon, his inner spirit. But personal revelation, such as we are utterly accustomed to, is nowhere to be found. Even lyric poems tend to be objective by our standards, and the exceptions stand out: a fragment (“The moon has set …”),* attributed to Sappho, and the Psalms, attributed to King David.
When in the classical period we reach the first works to be designated as autobiographies, we can only be confounded by their impersonal tone. Marcus Aurelius, by Gibbon’s standards the most enlightened emperor and the great philosopher of Roman antiquity, speaks to us in epigrams, like Confucius and Ecclesiastes before him: “This Being of mine, whatever it really is, consists of a little flesh, a little breath, and the part which governs”—he means his mind. This is as confidential as Marcus gets. Or how about this for a personal revelation? “All that is harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me.” For all their ponderousness, the great emperor’s thoughts are never more personal than a Chinese fortune cookie.
Then we reach Augustine, who tells us everything—his jealousies in infancy, his thieving as a boy, his stormy relationship with his overbearing mother (the ever-certain Monica), his years of philandering, his breakdowns, his shameful love for an unnamed peasant woman, whom he finally sends away. His self-loathing is as modern as that of a character in Camus or Beckett—and as concrete: “I carried inside me a cut and bleeding soul, and how to get rid of it I just didn’t know. I sought every pleasure—the countryside, sports, fooling around, the peace of a garden, friends and good company, sex, reading. My soul floundered in the void—and came back upon me. For where could my heart flee from my heart? Where could I escape from myself?”
No one had ever talked this way before. If we page quickly through world literature from its beginnings to the advent of Augustine, we realize that with Augustine human consciousness takes a quantum leap forward—and becomes self-consciousness. Here for the first time is a man consistently observing himself not as Man but as this singular man—Augustine. From this point on, true autobiography becomes possible, and so does its near relative, subjective and autobiographical fiction. Fiction had always been there, in the form of storytelling. But now for the first time there glimmers the possibility of psychological fiction: the subjective story, the story of a soul. Though the cry of Augustine—the Man Who Cried “I”—will seldom be heard again in full force until the early modern period, he is the father not only of autobiography but of the modern novel. He is also a distinguished forebear of the modern science of psychology.
What prepared Augustine to be Augustine? What was the ground, and what the seed?
Augustine was among the last of classically educated men. Born in 354 into what all believed to be a stable world, he would witness in old age—in the 420s—the last days of the grammaticus. His Latin has a refinement and a piquancy that few could match in any period of antiquity. The delicate changes rung on three words—love, need, hate—in the famous passage from the Confessions quoted above mark him as adhering to the highest standards of classical rhetoric. What Ausonius wore like a medal Augustine bears stamped on his heart: the show-off accomplishments of Ausonius are for Augustine honored disciplines of the spirit.
Augustine gives us the world’s first description of how a child may fall hopelessly in love with literature—a fall so palpable it is almost carnal. Like creative children in every age, he despised his first school assignments in “reading, writing, and arithmetic” because they were nothing but rote: “‘One and one are two; two and two are four’—what hateful singsong.” Nor did he like any better his first lessons in Greek, accompanied by the teacher’s “punishments and cruel threats”; and he states succinctly the complaint of numberless generations of students before and after him: “Mastering a foreign language was as bitter as gall, for not one word of it did I understand.” But then, after all the dreary classes of grinding recitation, he is handed real literature in his own tongue: “I loved Latin … and I wept for Dido slain, she ‘seeking by the sword a stroke and wound extreme.’”
Despairing Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, slain by her own hand as her magnificent lover Aeneas lifts anchor and sails away forever: this is one of the most haunting and permanent images of the classical world. What opened Augustine’s heart to Latin literature was Virgil’s Aeneid, the literary masterpiece of the Roman world, its Bible and its Shakespeare in one. The Aeneid is a conscious literary epic, not a folk epic like the Greek Iliad. Picking up where Homer leaves off—with the fall of Troy to the Greek forces, who penetrate its impregnable walls by the “gift” of a huge hollow horse lined with armed men—Virgil recounts the exploits of his hero, Aeneas, son of Venus and a Trojan father. “Arma virumque cano” (“I sing of arms and the man”), begins Virgil in a great trumpet fanfare. As all Virgil’s readers could savor with thrilling foreknowledge, Aeneas will miraculously escape the certain doom of burning Troy, faithfully carrying his ancient father on his back and holding his little son by the hand. A wanderer, he is received with high celebration by the queen of Carthage, who is riveted by his tale. Dido and Aeneas are fated to fall passionately in love, but Aeneas always knows—as does the reader—that, though it will break Dido’s heart and end her life, he must move bravely on to his destiny, the founding of the City of Rome.
Virgil wrote in the age of Caesar Augustus, the first emperor, and he conceived the Aeneid as a national epic (the only completely successful one in world literature), orchestrated artfully to evoke in the reader a wave of patriotism for the great empire’s heroic beginnings. This younger, less seasoned civilization of the Latin west, having absorbed, both politically and culturally, the lofty civilization of the Greek east, needed to establish its own legitimacy to rule and to overwhelm. To the Greeks, the Romans were cocky and underbred. To the Romans, the Greeks were too clever by half—and more than a little unsavory. (In observing a refined Hellene flaunt his superiority, your regular, plainspoken Roman could not help but let the suspicion of perversion play at the back of his mind: by Jupiter, don’t they look the other way and let those faggoty tutors they hire bugger their own children?) The cultural relation of Roman to Greek was, in many ways, not unlike the cultural relation of Englishman to Frenchman and of American to Englishman: in all three relations, simplicity is the virtue and complexity the vice on one side, while on the other subtlety is prized and (supposedly rustic) straightforwardness can give offense.
In Virgil’s new myth, forthright Rome is the moral superior of sneaky Greece and (surprise!) actually the older civilization, since it can trace its roots to fabled Ilium—ancient Troy. Virgil makes his new myth unforgettable by framing it in a new language that rivals anything Greece ever produced: a heroic but flexible Latin that still rings down the ages. In recounting the story of the hollow horse, by which the Greeks won through duplicity what they could not win fair and square on the field of battle, Aeneas warns not only Dido but all of subsequent humanity: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis” (“I am wary of Greeks, even bearing gifts”).
In Dido there is more than a hint of another dusky African queen—the Cleopatra whose “eastern” sensuality did in Mark Antony. But our hero Aeneas is virtuous enough, in the end, to reject even this temptation against his—and every Roman’s—destiny. Of course, he is flesh and blood, and no prig either, and the lovemaking of these two is the occasion for some of Virgil’s most exciting poetry. But Dido’s suicide, though genuine tragedy, is necessary. This is—for Greeks as well as Romans—the ancient meaning of tragedy: unavoidable catastrophe. And it is to Dido, especially, that we may apply the greatest of all Virgil’s great lines:
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
These are the tears of things,
and the stuff of our mortality cuts us to the heart.
To Augustine, provincial Roman of Africa born, Dido was less exotic than she would have appeared to an Italian; she was, in some respects, an incarnation of Africa, and her catastrophe was Africa’s catastrophe: sensuous Africa, whose great City of Carthage was Dido’s city … and was now, from his lascivious seventeenth year, Augustine’s city—the city that boiled without while Augustine boiled within.
The famous sentence “To Carthage I came …” contains a purposeful rhyme, one of the first in Latin literature.* The city’s name, Carthago, rhymes with sartago, cauldron. This is incantatory, meant to draw our attention to the bubbling of the city and the bubbling of the boy, macrocosm and microcosm. A powerful and subtle rhetorical device, it would nonetheless have been eschewed by all earlier writers as indecens—rustic and inappropriate. But, unlike the déraciné Ausonius, Augustine, the budding African Latinist who could identify so completely with Dido’s passion, can allow his inner bubbling to surface from time to time in the form of African rhythms and rhetorical devices. After his conversion and consecration as bishop of Hippo, Augustine will repeatedly delight his congregations by employing verbal pyrotechnics with an African “swing.” “Bona dona” (“good gifts”) will become one of their favorites. In this vernacularizing of Latin, we may discern the first step toward the simplified, rhythmic, rhyming “people’s Latin” of the Middle Ages.
If Virgil was the great teacher of language and style (or grammar and rhetoric, to use the categories of the medieval school), Cicero was the great teacher of argument or disputation (dialectic, to use the medieval term). As Virgil’s Greek counterpart was—very roughly speaking—Homer, so Cicero’s Greek counterpart was Demosthenes. The two dialecticians have cast their shadows over the otherwise happy schooldays of countless students of the Greek and Latin classics. The boy C. S. Lewis, deliriously satisfied while basking in the high sun of Homer’s war stories and in the soft afternoon of the discreetly erotic Catullus and the discreetly precise Tacitus, at last confronts the approaching gloom: “The Two Great Bores (Demosthenes and Cicero) could not be avoided.”
Homer and Virgil are art, and each was to his age and place what good movies are to ours—never a chore, always refreshing, occasionally ennobling. Demosthenes and Cicero are hard work, and were studied in Augustine’s day as paragons of the “art” of persuasion—the kind of thing one might study today in journalism school. If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero’s speeches are language as practical tool. A two-thousand-year-old poem may still, conceivably, speak to us with as much force as it did to the people of its day. We would not expect the same from a two-thousand-year-old newspaper editorial or a two-thousand-year-old advertising jingle. Nor should we expect it from Cicero.
Cicero, born in the century before Christ, exercised his techniques when republican Rome, in all its vigor, welcomed public men. Augustine loved Cicero, as did the whole Latin world, which placed the Roman orator just below Virgil on the divinity charts. (Jerome, the cantankerous translator of the Latin Bible, awoke one night in a frenzied sweat: he had dreamed that Christ had condemned him to hell for being more a Ciceronian than a Christian.) The ancients held the practical use of words in much higher regard than we do, probably because they were much closer to the oral customs of prehistoric village life—so clearly reflected in Nestor’s speech to the Greek chieftains in the Iliad and in Mark Antony’s speech over Julius Caesar’s body—in which the fate of an entire race may hang on one man’s words.
But we are made uncomfortable and bored by Cicero’s elaborately coaching us in all the tricks of his trade—the many techniques for convincing others to act the way we want them to. For Cicero, “to speak from the heart” would be the rashest foolishness; one must always speak from calculation: What do I want to see happen here? What are the desires of my audience? How can I motivate them to do my will? How shall I disguise my weakest arguments? How dazzle my listeners so they are no longer able to reason matters through independently?
The techniques of the successful politician, the methods of modern advertising—the whole panoply of persuasion is to be found in Cicero. The figure closest to him in our own age might be Dale Carnegie, who advised that every single word and gesture be calculated to “win” and “influence.” However squeamish such advice may make us, to the ancients it made perfect sense. For in addition to learning how to write a poem for one’s own satisfaction, in addition to learning how to turn a phrase in a letter so as to please a friend, there was a larger literary task to be played out in the larger world—the polis—to which all educated men were bound to make their contribution, to bring their positive influence to bear. And this world of politics required the arts of persuasion, if one were to meet with success. In Ausonius, classical education calcified into the merely ornamental. In Augustine, it remains as vigorous as it had been in Cicero’s day, and Augustine will spend his life using Cicero’s elaborate and nuanced arsenal of techniques on behalf of a new worldview and a new political agenda. This will be the public contribution of Augustine, the Roman citizen, to the dying Roman Res Publica.
Besides the arts of rhetoric and persuasion, there was a third pursuit for the liberally educated man, a pursuit only a gifted seeker could successfully embark on: the way of philosophy. Beyond the literary arts lies, however dimly perceived, the Ascent to Truth, to Wisdom. In Augustine’s day, this ascent was illumined by the works of one great teacher: Plato, the Greek philosopher who had been Socrates’s pupil and who was born in the time and place that all educated men looked to as the Golden Age—Athens in the fifth century B.C.
If the liberal arts were for the few, philosophy was for the fewer. Many liberally educated men did not even assent to the goal of philosophy, because they did not think it possible to attain to Truth or Wisdom with any certitude. Cicero was such an agnostic: after a long pursuit of philosophical truth, he found himself siding with the Skeptics, who believed in the uncertainty of all ultimate knowledge (though he inclined in moral matters to the school of the Stoics, who believed with certitude that virtue will yield happiness). Cicero’s even-tempered agnosticism will come as no surprise to anyone in our world who has noticed what a convenient philosophy it makes for Cicero’s contemporary children: publicists, marketeers, and all those who seek to motivate us to do what we might otherwise not think to do. As a philosopher, Cicero was the great packager of his age, an unoriginal thinker with real flair, a sort of Will Durant, who could dramatize all the currents and schools of thought so that anyone might understand them well enough to talk about them at a cocktail party.
But Augustine wanted Truth, not cheap success: such a pressure-cooker psyche can settle for nothing less. He soon abandoned the simple, emotional Catholicism of his mother and adopted something more exclusive and recherché: the religion of Mani, a Persian syncretist who had taken this and that from here and there and come up with something that can only strike us as a California cult—a little Christian symbolism, a large dose of Zoroastrian dualism, and some of the quiet refinements of Buddhism. It was called Manicheism. For a while, it let Augustine off the hook. For one thing, it absolved him from any responsibility for his raging lusts: in Mani’s system, Good was passive, unable to battle the gross and fleshly evils that raged against it. It was a made-to-order religion for a smart young provincial who needed to explore every dark corner of the boiling city and experience every dark pleasure it had to offer—and at the same time think himself above the herd. But it couldn’t keep up with Augustine’s fearlessly inquiring mind. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormonism, it was full of assertions, but could yield no intellectual system to nourish a great intellect.
We don’t know what Augustine read, but we know he devoured books. By his own admission, he never learned Greek properly. Plato, however, was readily available in translation— and “packaged” by commentators of far greater profundity than Cicero. Plato was in the air Augustine breathed, the figure a thoughtful young man must sooner or later test himself against.
Augustine, disappointed with Manicheism and now appointed to his first big job as professor of rhetoric at Milan, forms a new—and, of course, exclusive—group: a temporary “monastic” community of like-minded young men who mean to ascend to Truth with the aid of Plato and his Latin commentators. Their earnest intentions will eventually be thwarted when their wives-to-be object to all this moping about. And, soon enough, Augustine’s mother will arrive on the scene, creating, as she always does, emotional tornadoes and hurricanes— a sort of one-woman African Sturm und Drang. But the establishment, even for a short time, of such a community gives us an idea of how seriously and personally the pursuit of philosophy could be taken in the ancient world—something far closer to an ashram than to a modern department of philosophy. And this community will provide Augustine with the seedbed he needs for his own philosophy to germinate.
Socrates, at least in Plato’s accounts of him, did not so much build a positive philosophy as pose questions, questions that show up the utter foolishness of his interlocutors’ assumptions. He, of course, invented the Socratic method, forcing his students to start their quest for Truth with a confession of their own ignorance. Plato, the product of this method, reasons with delicate skill toward the creation of a large and airy edifice—the grandest construct of ancient philosophy.
Plato begins with his own experience of a spark of divinity in all the creatures of the natural world, a spark he experiences particularly in himself and other human beings—in other words, the daimon of Socrates. But the spark is experienced within a world of corruption and death, the world of the flesh. It is worth our while to take a few moments to receive Plato in his own words, for they give us an idea both of the challenge confronting Augustine and of the flavor of the Augustinian ashram. (Most of Plato is impenetrable on first reading. If it begins to give you a headache, skip to the end of the passage— and just take my word for it.) Here is Plato in the Phaedrus on the spark, the daimon—the soul:
Of the nature of the soul [psyche in Greek], though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly and in a figure. And let the figure be composite—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him. I will endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing:—when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground—there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no such union can be reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not having seen nor surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout all time. Let that, however, be as God wills, and be spoken of acceptably to him. And now let us ask the reason why the soul loses her wings!
The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away. Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way to heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him the array of gods and demigods, marshalled in eleven bands; Hestia alone abides at home in the house of heaven; of the rest they who are reckoned among the princely twelve march in their appointed order. They see many blessed sights in the inner heaven, and there are many ways to and fro, along which the blessed gods are passing, everyone doing his own work; he may follow who will and can, for jealousy has no place in the celestial choir. But when they go to banquet and festival, then they move up the steep to the top of the vault of heaven. The chariots of the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide happily; but the others labour, for the vicious steed goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer to the earth when his steed has not been thoroughly trained:—and this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul. For the immortals, when they are at the end of their course, go forth and stand upon the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? It is such as I will describe; for I must dare to speak the truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colorless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the food proper to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth, is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds brings her round again to the same place. In the revolution she beholds justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute; and beholding the other true existences in like manner, and feasting upon them, she passes down into the interior of the heavens and returns home; and there the charioteer putting up his horses at the stall, gives them ambrosia to eat and nectar to drink.
Such is the life of the gods; but of other souls, that which follows God best and is likest to him lifts the head of the charioteer into the outer world, and is carried round in the revolution, troubled indeed by the steeds, and with difficulty beholding true being; while another only rises and falls, and sees, and again fails to see by reason of the unruliness of the steeds. The rest of the souls are also longing after the upper world and they all follow, but not being strong enough they are carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another, each striving to be first; and there is confusion and perspiration and the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their wings broken through the ill-driving of the charioteers; and all of them after a fruitless toil, not having attained to the mysteries of true being, go away, and feed upon opinion. The reason why the souls exhibit this exceeding eagerness to behold the plain of truth is that pasturage is found there, which is suited to the highest part of the soul; and the wing on which the soul soars is nourished with this. And there is a law of Destiny, that the soul which attains any vision of truth in company with a god is preserved from harm until the next period, and if attaining always is always unharmed. But when she is unable to follow, and fails to behold the truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath the double load of forgetfulness and vice, and her wings fall from her and she drops to the ground, then the law ordains that this soul shall at her first birth pass, not into any other animal, but only into man; and the soul which has seen most of truth shall come to the birth as a philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature; that which has seen truth in the second degree shall be some righteous king or warrior chief; the soul which is of the third class shall be a politician, or economist, or trader; the fourth shall be a lover of gymnastic toils, or a physician; the fifth shall lead the life of a prophet or hierophant; to the sixth the character of a poet or some other imitative artist will be assigned; to the seventh the life of an artisan or husbandman; to the eighth that of a sophist or demagogue; to the ninth that of a tyrant;—all these are states of probation, in which he who does righteously improves, and he who does unrighteously deteriorates his lot.
Plato is the greatest of all Greek prose stylists, and through his tightly woven sentences run threads of delicate beauty and allusive grace. He doesn’t sound like anyone else; and he convinces us not only of the largeness of his mind, but of the genuine mysticism of his spirit. He tells us from the start that he is using metaphor, but we cannot help believe that he has glimpsed the world beyond the veil. He has at least as much in common with the wisdom of the east—with Buddhism and Taoism—as he does with the subsequent philosophy of the west. He is simply the great philosopher, and the difficulty one experiences in understanding him is not a difficulty based on superficial obfuscation but on his genuine profundity. No one grasps Plato by reading him through quickly or once.
So it was for Augustine, and thus the necessity of the ashram and stillness and philosophical companionship. Augustine’s spirit resonates with the plangent chords of Plato: the restless, exiled soul, looking everywhere for its true home, feasting on sewage while dimly remembering the nectar and ambrosia of high heaven. Plato is right, and his are the most profound descriptions in all the ancient world of the miraculous golden flashes of yearning embedded in the dross of reality—the out-of-jointness of the universe. Who else, Augustine asks himself, even talks of these things? And then the answer comes to him: Saul of Tarsus, the wiry, bald-headed Jew whose awkward, importunate letters, signed “Paul,” the Christians have been using as scripture: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”
Surely this is meaningless coincidence: what could a sweaty little nobody, dashing about the Mediterranean basin, have in common with the loftiest philosopher of all? And yet … Augustine begins to read Paul seriously. He entertains the possibility that Plato even has something wrong—that the ascent to Truth is not a task the philosopher takes upon himself and succeeds at by his own effort. Has the great Plato mistakenly equated knowledge with virtue? For if the flesh and the spirit are at war, isn’t the human enterprise doomed to failure—even when joined by the most exalted philosophical types? Mustn’t Paul be closer to the mark when he says of preborn souls (the same souls Plato is describing in his metaphor of the charioteers): “For whom [God] did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified”? In other words, if we mud-spattered human beings are ever to ascend to Truth, we can do it only because God, a force ineffably greater than our war-torn selves, has predestined us and calls us upward. We will never make it under our own steam.
Having made this connection, Augustine falls apart. What he describes at this point in the Confessions is a full-scale emotional breakdown. And all over an idea? Yes, for Augustine ideas do not float free, abstracted from their human context. He personalizes everything, even the most rarefied philosophical utterances. Without education, he would probably have been a self-destructive provincial roustabout, always smoldering with one fire or another. With the discipline of his education, he is transformed into that unusual specimen: neither denatured academic nor effete upper-class connoisseur, but a man of feeling who takes ideas seriously. As with Tolstoy and Joyce, both educated wildmen, the riotous blood of his homeland beats forever in his veins—and animates his every thought.
While talking with his fellow seeker Alypius, he begins to weep uncontrollably. This “mighty shower of tears,” as he calls it, comes upon him out of nowhere—“from the secret bottom of my soul.” Abashed, he runs from the house into the garden, throwing himself under a fig tree and “giving full vent to my tears.” He begins to wail near-nonsense, for no reason he can understand: “And Thou, O Lord, how long? how long, O Lord! Will you stay angry forever?”
From a house bordering the garden, he hears a child’s voice, chanting nonsense of its own: “Tolle, lege, tolle, lege” (“Take, read, take, read”). Never having heard this children’s song before, he decides it is a sign, meant for him. He returns to the house and takes from the table (where the stunned Alypius is still sitting) the book he had been reading earlier, an edition of Paul’s letters. In the time-honored fashion of the ancient world, he opens the book at random, intending to receive as a divine message the first sentence his eyes should fall upon. The sentence he reads is: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.”
Augustine is caught. He submits himself to the death of the flesh through baptism—and to the Christian God.
We have been using Augustine as a lens for viewing the classical world. What is about to be lost in the century of the barbarian invasions is literature—the content of classical civilization. Had the destruction been complete—had every library been disassembled and every book burned—we might have lost Homer and Virgil and all of classical poetry, Herodotus and Tacitus and all of classical history, Demosthenes and Cicero and all of classical oratory, Plato and Aristotle and all of Greek philosophy, and Plotinus and Porphyry and all the subsequent commentary. We would have lost the taste and smell of a whole civilization. Twelve centuries of lyric beauty, aching tragedy, intellectual inquiry, scholarship, sophistry, and love of Wisdom—the acme of ancient civilized discourse—would all have gone down the drain of history. All but a few lines of Sappho and much of the work of the Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—did go down that drain. And we very nearly lost the whole of Latin literature.
We did lose, at any rate, the spirit of classical civilization. “At certain epochs,” wrote Kenneth Clark in Civilisation, “man has felt conscious of something about himself—body and spirit—which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection—reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways—through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed upon the visible world.” The struggle for existence and the struggle with fear now gain the ascendancy once more, and what remains of classical civilization will be henceforth found not in life but between the covers of books.
What is really lost when a civilization wearies and grows small is confidence, a confidence built on the order and balance that leisure makes possible. Again, Clark: “Civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity—enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers…. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations—or civilising epochs—have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.”
Whether insoluble political realities or inner spiritual sickness is more to blame for the fall of classical civilization is, finally, beside the point. The life behind the works we have been studying—the passionate nobility of Virgil, the cool rationality of Cicero, the celestial meditativeness of Plato—this flame of civilization is about to be extinguished. The works themselves will miraculously escape destruction. But they will enter the new world of the Middle Ages as things so strange they might as well have been left behind by interstellar aliens. One example will suffice to illustrate the strangeness of books to medieval men. The word grammar—the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine—will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as “glamour.” In other words, whoever has grammar—whoever can read—possesses magic inexplicable.
So the living civilization died, to be reassembled and assessed by scholars of later ages from the texts preserved miraculously in the pages of its books. There is, however, one classical tradition that survived the transition—the still-living tradition of Roman law.
We have encountered Roman law already—as a dead letter, promulgated by the emperor and circumvented, first by the powerful, then increasingly by anyone who could get away with it. As the emperor’s laws become weaker, the ceremony surrounding them becomes more baroque. In the last days, the Divine One’s edict is written in gold on purple paper, received with covered hands in the fashion of a priest handling sacred vessels, held aloft for adoration by the assembled throng, who prostrate themselves before the law—and then ignore it.
But this picture alone would be misleading. Just as we found earlier that the ancients had far greater respect than we for practical, public discourse, so they had far greater fear of chaos. The Britons, the Gauls, the Africans, the Slavs who long ago had flocked to the Roman standard, forsaking their petty tribal loyalties and becoming Roman citizens, gained greatly. By exchanging tribal identity for the penumbra of citizenship, they won the protection of the Pax Romana—and its predictability. With the decline of sudden and unexpected violence of all kinds, they could look forward, in a way they had never been able to do before: they could plan, they could prosper, they could expect to live a normal life span.
As Roman culture died out and was replaced by vibrant new barbarian growths, people forgot many things—how to read, how to think, how to build magnificently—but they remembered and they mourned the lost peace. Call them the people of the Dark Ages if you will, but do not underestimate the desire of these early medieval men and women for the rule of law. There was, moreover, one office that survived intact from the classical to the medieval polis: the office of Catholic bishop.
In late antiquity, as municipal and provincial governments disintegrated and imperial appointees abandoned their posts, there was one official who could be counted on to stay with his people, even to death: the episkopos (say it quickly and you will hear where the English word bishop came from), a Greek word meaning “overseer” or “superintendent.” In the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul, bishops are mentioned occasionally as church functionaries, hardly distinguishable from priests (from the Greekpresbyteroi, or elders). Most early Christian congregations seem to have been run by some combination of bishops and priests, local men—and, in the first stages of development, women as well—who were chosen by the congregants for specified terms to take care of practical matters. With the deaths of the apostles (apostoloi, or envoys), who had been the chief conveyors of Jesus’s message, the role of the bishop grew; and by the beginning of the second century we find him being treated in a more exalted manner—as a successor to the dead apostles and symbol of unity for the local congregation—but still the appointee of his congregation. As its symbol of unity, he was duty-bound to consult his congregation in all important matters. “From the beginning of my episcopacy,” the aristocratic Cyprian of Carthage, monumental bishop of third-century Africa, confided to his clergy, “I made up my mind to do nothing on my own private opinion, without your advice and without the consent of the people.”
By the end of Augustine’s life, such consultation was becoming the exception. Democracy depends on a well-informed electorate; and bishops could no longer rely on the opinion of their flocks—increasingly, uninformed and harried illiterates—nor, in all likelihood, were they averse to seeing their own power grow at the expense of the people. In many districts, they were already the sole authority left, the last vestige of Roman law and order. They began to appoint one another; and thus was born—five centuries after the death of Jesus—the self-perpetuating hierarchy that rules the Catholic church to this day.
The Roman polis had always depended more upon living men than written laws. Laws had to be interpreted and executed; and men of property and standing were allowed much leeway in interpreting the laws. Now, bishops, along with the petty kings and princes of the New World Order, would become the only men of property and standing left. The “king” or local chief was likely to be a barbarian with peculiar notions of justice and few whatever of order. It would become the task of the bishop—often the only man who still had books of any kind and, save for his scribes, the only man who could read and write—to “civilize” the ruler, to introduce to him diplomatically some elementary principles of justice and good government. Thus did the power of the bishop, sometimes himself the only “prince” in sight, continue to wax.
Augustine died as the Vandals besieged the gates of the city he served as bishop, so he didn’t live quite long enough to experience the disorderly tempests of this New World Order at their most ripping. Still, his last years were crammed with stress and controversy. Following his conversion, he had hoped to continue in the quiet pursuit of Truth in a philosophical community of like-minded friends. But the stiffness of his backbone, which in a more peaceful age would have retarded his ecclesiastical progress, gave him the appearance of a ready-made bishop—a shepherd of courage, who would not desert his vulnerable flock—and it was only a matter of time before some church drafted him. In the event, it was Hippo, second city of Roman Africa.
If the ancient eastern (or Greek) church has many “fathers”—theologians who articulated the classical formulations of faith to the Greco-Roman world—the ancient western (or Latin) church has only one worth speaking of: Augustine. Out of his interior dialogues with Plato and Paul, he formulated the doctrine of original sin—the sin of Adam and Eve, passed from generation to generation in the fleshly act of generativity. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”: Augustine interprets these words of Paul as description of the necessary solidarity of the human race, both in falling hopelessly into sin and rising by grace to redemption. He formulates the doctrine of grace—the gift of God, freely given to men who cannot merit it. He even formulates an explanation of the Trinity. God is One—as in the “Old” Testament, the scripture of the Jews—but at the very heart of reality is relation, the relatedness of friends: for God the One is Three, the Father Who loves the Son, the Son begotten of the Father’s love from all eternity, and the holy Spirit—the love of Father and Son, so strong that it forms a third “person” in this divine Trinity.
In 410, Rome, the Eternal City, fell to Alaric the Goth. The moral accusations against the Christian majority by the shrinking pagan community then rose to a final crescendo. Augustine could little appreciate how beside-the-point the pagan criticisms would soon appear. He summons all his powers to write his final masterpiece, The City of God, in which human reality is divided in two: Babylon, the City of Man, which necessarily ends in corruption and death, and the New Jerusalem, the City of God, which flourishes eternally beyond all strife. Rome, though better than most human political establishments, is doomed to perish, like all things in the corruptible sphere.
Augustine’s enemies are many. He crosses swords with Pelagius, an egregiously fat British monk who posits that God’s grace is not always needed, that men, unassisted, can do good with the aid of their rational minds and their goodwill. Pelagius is a sort of Norman Vincent Peale, who thinks everyone who really wants to can pull himself up by his bootstraps. It is a case of Pelagius’s “Be all you can be!” versus Augustine’s “Just as I am without one plea.” Pelagius is also an elitist who believes that some men—the nice, educated ones—are better than others. Augustine smells the Platonic fallacy, the equation of knowledge with virtue, and attacks mercilessly. He scores an easy win.
He is surrounded, as are all the African Catholic bishops of his day, by Donatists, heretics who deny that the grace of the sacraments can be conferred through the offices of an unworthy priest, but in all other respects resemble their Catholic brethren. For Augustine, the sacraments of the church are profoundly necessary: without their aid all men would in their inevitable weakness succumb to evil. Sacramental efficacy simply cannot hinge on the character of the administering priest. Augustine aligns himself with the civil arm to persecute the Donatists and bring them forcibly within the walls of Catholicism. He subsequently writes the first Catholic justification for state persecution of those in error: error has no rights; to disbelieve in forced conversions is to deny the power of God; and God must whip the son he receives—“per molestias eruditio” (“true education begins with physical abuse”). This from the man who condemned the “punishments and cruel threats” of his childhood classroom. Augustine, the last great man of Roman antiquity, is going over the edge. The doctrine he has enunciated will echo down the ages in the cruelest infamies, executed with the highest justification. Augustine, father of many firsts, is also father of the Inquisition.
In his old age, Augustine is challenged by Julian of Eclanum, a young, aristocratically educated, married bishop, a species of Pelagian, who finds distasteful Augustine’s theories of original sin—or at least some of their implications. Augustine, who, as we saw, believed that God had predestined each of us from all eternity, therefore finds it necessary to assume that God will condemn to hellfire all the unbaptized—even infants who die without the sacrament. Augustine justifies God’s justice as inscrutable. Julian counters that Augustine’s God is a cruel tyrant. Augustine assumes that original sin is passed along in the very fluids of procreation and that sexual intercourse, because it involves a loss of rational control, is always at least venially sinful—and should be indulged in as little as possible. (Remember how important control—the opposite of chaos—was to the ancients: Augustine’s is an argument that could have been made by a Stoic or Buddhist as well as a Christian.) Julian informs Augustine that he has sex with his wife whenever and wherever he feels like it. Augustine explodes:
“Really, really: is that your experience? So you would not have married couples restrain that evil—I refer of course to your favorite good? So you would have them jump into bed whenever they like, whenever they feel tickled by desire. Far be it from them to postpose this itch till bedtime: let’s have your ‘legitimate union of bodies’ ‘whenever your natural good’ is excited. If this is the sort of married life you lead, don’t drag up your experience in debate!”
Here is Augustine at his Ciceronian worst, arguing without regard to fairness or truth, arguing to win—by the most scurrilous kind of argument, the ad hominem. We should not forget that the ancient world, both western and eastern, often found sexual passion—especially in women—an object of mockery and even of contempt. Augustine goes further, and by the end of his life the reformed profligate deems a woman’s embraces “sordid, filthy, and horrible.” Julian is proposing a new approach, based on his own experience. But he is a rational man, who will not receive his justification till the thought of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.
Augustine, the feeling man, here shows the limits of feeling when mind has shut down to all that opposes its already established propositions. Augustine lived before the time of crucifixes, confessionals, and statues of the Virgin Mary, but one can imagine that he would have approved of them all. The bloody corpus is Augustine himself, splayed like Christ between heaven and earth. The shadows of the confessional would have given him the perfect outlet for his exquisite sympathy toward sinners: against Pelagius’s prissy claim that a man is responsible for his every action, Augustine had insisted that “many sins … are committed by men weeping and groaning in their distress.” Mary, mother of celibate clerics who have turned their back on human love, would have presented Augustine with the perfect heavenly projection of his own domineering mother.
Augustine, for all his greatness, has become in old age the type of the evil cleric, full of mercy for those who fear him, full of seething contempt for those who dare oppose him, scheming to make common cause with Babylon and whatever statesponsored cruelty will, in the name of Order, suppress his opposition. There is not a country in the world today that does not still possess a few examples of the type.
Meanwhile, on an island off the Atlantic coast that had never heard of Augustine or his battles …
* The moon has set and the Pleiades: it is the middle of the night, and time passes, yes passes—and I lie alone.
* I think it is the second. The first I find is in Jerome’s Latin translation of Paul’s second letter to Timothy: “Bonum certamen certavi, cursum consumavi, fidem servavi” (“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept my word”). But, rather than being deliberate, this rhyme may have appeared simply unavoidable to Jerome.