•YAUE^MVEiaainnr- DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

ST. AUGUSTINE

ST. AUGUSTINE

ASPECTS OF HIS LIFE AND THOUGHT

BY

W. MONTGOMERY, M.A., B.D.
f RECOGNISED LECTURER ' IN DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
CO-EDITOR OF ST. AITGTJSTINE'S ' CONFESSIONS ' IN THE
CAMBRIDGE PATRISTIC SERIES

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
MCMXIV

X

PREFACE
St. Augustine has been described as " the first
modern man." A statement of that kind can
always be attacked from various points of view ;
it can also be defended. I quote it here neither
for attack nor for defence, but simply to focus
an impression. It may serve, that is, to suggest
a certain unity of purpose underlying the series
of studies here offered to the reader. For they
will deal, at least chiefly, with those aspects of
his life and thought which appeal most readily
to us as moderns.
In the case of all the great figures of European
history, in some respects they stand in lines of
development which have come down to us, and
along these lines it is comparatively easy to
reascend to them. In other respects they
belong to their own time, in ways that render
them remote from us and make it a matter of
long and painful study to think ourselves back

vi ST. AUGUSTINE
into their thoughts and surroundings. The
historian must not of course neglect this more
difficult task, but it is obviously sound method
to make a first approach along the lines of less
resistance. In the case of a man like St. Augustine, who
has left his permanent mark for good and ill
upon the Western civilisation amid which we
stand, it is natural that there should be many of
these lines along which it is comparatively easy
to approach him. And this way of approach
has for most of us a special fascination. Andrew
Lang has somewhere remarked that " there is
a peculiar pleasure in finding ourselves, our
common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our
joys, in the writings of men severed from us
by race and speech and [he is speaking, of course,
of a more remote era] half the gulf of recorded
time." Such were the general considerations which I
had in mind in selecting materials for a course of
lectures upon St. Augustine given in the Lent
Term of last year in St. John's College, Cam
bridge. The lectures were not directed especially
to examination requirements, but received some
encouragement from various quarters as an
attempt to promote, in some small degree, a

PREFACE vii
wider interest in Church History. The scope
of the lectures would perhaps best be defined
by saying that they were intended, not indeed
as a general introduction to St. Augustine —
a much more ambitious undertaking — but as a
series of introductions to particular aspects of
his thought. They were intended, that is, to
provide the student with a choice of starting-
points, from one or other of which, according
to his tastes and previous training, he might
usefully approach the study of this great and
many-sided figure.
That is the genesis of the studies which are
here offered to a wider audience. They have
been carefully revised and to some extent
recast, but I have not attempted to remove all
traces of their origin.
In a book of this kind it is hardly necessary
to give a bibliography, but among works to
which I have been indebted I should like to
mention especially G. J. Seyrich, Die Geschichts-
philosophie Augustins (Chemnitz, 1891) ; Joseph
Mausbach, Die Ethik des hi. Augustinus (Freiburg
im Breisgau, 1909) ; W. Thimme, Augustin, Ein
Lebens- und Charakterbild auf Grund seiner
Briefe (Gottingen, 1910) ; R. C. Trench, Exposi
tion of the Sermon on the Mount drawn from the

viii ST. AUGUSTINE
Writings of St. Augustine (London, 1869), with
its valuable introductory essay.
The lectures were written before I came across
M. Bertrand's articles in the Revue des Deux
Mondes. It seems worth while to mention this,
as it gives the value of independent agreement
to the concurrence of our views regarding what
may be called the " economics " of the Cassi-
ciacum period — a point which, so far as I know,
had not previously been so clearly brought out.
As regards the translations, I have made my
own wherever it appeared desirable to do so,
but in many cases I have been glad to avail
myself of the generally admirable rendering in
Dods' Select Works of St. Augustine (by various
translators), which do not, however, include the
Early Dialogues or the psychologically important
De Genesi ad Litteram. W. MONTGOMEEY
St. John's College,
' Cambridge.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. St. Augustine the Man — Character and Tem
perament ...... 1
Character best seen in social relations — A fourth-
century reading-party — Catholicity of his friendships —
Interest in the external world — Keenness of sense and
emotion — Characteristics as a thinker — Literary style —
General impression.
II. His Conversion — A Study in Criticism and
Religious Psychology .... 32
Critical difficulties — Contrast between the Dialogues
and the Confessions — The character of the retirement at
Cassiciacum — Its practical side— Augustine's inner hfe
— Tone of the Dialogues — References to scripture and
theology — Relation of philosophy to religion — Analysis
and vindication of the account of the conversion in the
Confessions — A real but minor difficulty.
III. His Correspondence — Relations with Men and
Affairs ...... 66
Variety and interest of his letters — Letter to an old
pupil — The humbling of a pedant — A crisis in his
parish — A scholars' controversy (with St. Jerome) —
To a hot-tempered bishop — To the victim of an excom
munication — To a tyrannical landowner.

x ST. AUGUSTINE
PAGE
IV. Outlines of his Psychology ... 99
• Preliminary questions — Origin of the soul — Relation
of soul to body — Augustine's scientific caution — An V
unintentional experiment — The physics and physiology "*
of sensation — The special senses — The " Inner Sense "
— Memory — Imagination — Reason, discursive and
intuitive — Platonic theory of reminiscence rejected —
Will and emotion.

V. His Powers of Psychological Observation and
Description ...... 130
Difficulty of doing justice to a pioneer — " We are all
psychologists nowadays '' — Interest of Augustine's
descriptions — Crowd psychology : the gladiatorial
shows ; a street accident ; the orator and his audience
— Child psychology : the first smile ; turning to the
light ; learning to speak — Introspection : the divided
self ; the pains of spiritual struggle ; when praise is
distasteful — Skilful use of everyday illustrations —
Observation of abnormal states : hallucinations ;
delirium ; remarkable dreams.

VI. His Psychology as the Key to his Philosophy
and Theology ..... 148
His " anticipation " of Descartes — Pascal's view —
The facts — The nature of time : An anecdote and 'an
epigram; Psychological analysis; Conclusion — Which
comes first,_faith or reason? — Illustration of the
^octrine of the Trinity— ^Psychology of crime— Doc
trines of "sin and grace based on experience ; original
sin, original good; a parallel from Goethe — Tendency
of character towards fixity — The paradox about true
freedom — Grace not magical ; the strongest motive.

CONTENTS

xi

PAGE

VII. St. Augustine as Expositor and Preacher . 180
The expositor needs training — An ironic argument —
Secular learning "gold of Egypt" — Principles of
exegesis — Allegorical interpretation — His own love of
allegory — His ignorance of Hebrew — Extent of his
knowledge of Greek — Textual criticism — Higher criti
cism — Examples of his exegetical skill, and of curious
allegorisations — Interpretation of Gen. i. 1, 2.
Training of the preacher — Formal rhetoric undesir
able ; learning by example — Various styles of oratory
— Prime necessity of clearness — The preacher's sense of
discouragement — Some illustrations from the Sermons —
Peroration of a memorial sermon on St. Cyprian — Con
trasted treatment of same subject for different audiences.

Vlll. His Philosophy of History, Theory of the
State, and Teaching on Social Ethics . 222
What is philosophy of history ? — How Augustine
came to write the Be Civitate Dei — Its general plan —
The unity of human history — Parallel between stages of
development of the individual and of the race — The
education of the race.
The state — Founded in social instinct — The family —
Principle of cohesion, justice — The ruler ordained of God
— Varied political organisations suited to varied national
conditions — Persecution for religious opinion; Augus
tine's change of view — Legitimacy of war. _^^
Social ethics — Augustine personally ascetic in practice
— Liberality of his views — Marriage — The " goods of
civilisation " — Wealth and poverty — Legitimacy of
inheritance — Limitations of almsgiving — Moral value
of work — Legitimacy of gains from trade — Force of
public opinion — Ethical responsibility of the com
munity.

I

ST. AUGUSTINE THE MAN— CHARACTER
AND TEMPERAMENT
What manner of man was St. Augustine ?
There are probably few figures of antiquity in
regard to whom there exist fuller materials for
answering such a question. Every one knows
of the famous Confessions, but only those who
have studied him with some care have any idea
how much material of a personal kind is scattered
up and down his works. He was of those
writers who cannot help revealing themselves ;
and not only in those "orthodox sources" for
biography, memoirs and letters, but in the
midst of the severest theological disquisitions,
you will suddenly come upon these Httle personal
touches. I am not even sure that a scientific"
biographer would regard the Confessions as his
primary source for a knowledge of Augustine's/
temperament and character. To say that is
not to throw any doubt upon his good faith ;
he writes with a sincerity which has probably
l B

2 ST. AUGUSTINE
never been surpassed in this type of literature.
But it is in a sense a work of art. The dominant
interest is rehgious, and the whole has the
definite emphasis and subordination which the
unifying purpose of a work of art necessarily
involves. So it seems possible that the bio
grapher might prefer the less conscious self-
revelations found elsewhere. The attempt to
combine the whole of these scattered touches
into a portrait would doubtless be worth making,
but the task would be quite unmanageable on
the present scale. What shall be attempted here
is not a finished full-length, but a portrait-sketch,
and one ventures to draw some slight — perhaps
delusive — encouragement from remembering how
often in the case of actual portraiture the rough
sketch contrives to be more Hfelike than the
finished portrait.
Let us take, then, as our starting-point, not
the Confessions but some of the less-known early
works, which offer certain advantages of their
own. Man is a social animal, and we get to
know the individual best, not by analysing him
in isolation but by observing him in a definite
environment, in his relations with his fellow-
men and with the external world. In these
works we have, by good fortune, the oppor
tunity of observing Augustine in a certain
definite milieu, which is sufficiently restricted

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 3
to be easily grasped, and of which he has him
self given us a remarkably interesting picture.
That curious interlude in his life, his retire
ment to Cassiciacum, is passed over rather
hghtly in the Confessions, but it fives for us in
a number of incidental touches in the Dialogues
written at that period. After his conversion,
as we are summarily told in the ninth Book of
the Confessions, he withdrew, accompanied by
his mother and a few friends and pupils, to a
country house, placed at his disposal by one of
his friends in Milan. There he spent several
months. The significance of this retirement
for his inner life was doubtless that he there
adjusted the intellectual relationships of his
new faith, but the aspect in which we chiefly
see him in the Dialogues is that of " guide,
philosopher, and friend " to the younger men,
teaching them, stimulating their thought,
rallying them, on occasion, with a pleasant
humour. It will put the picture, I think, in
an interesting perspective if I borrow a happy
suggestion made by my friend, Professor Gibb,
in his introduction to our joint edition of the
Confessions, and work it out in some detail.
" A comparison has been instituted," writes
Dr. Gibb, " between them [that is, Augustine
and his Httle company] and Cicero with his
philosophical friends in the shades of Tusculum.

4 ST. AUGUSTINE
But they were so youthful and exuberant that
an apter comparison would be a reading-party
from an EngHsh University, under the leadership
of a sympathetic tutor."
The youthful portion of the party shows
perhaps greater inequality of attainment than
we should expect in these days of speciafisation.
There are two slow-witted youths, Lastidianus
and Rusticus, distant cousins of Augustine's,
who had, as we might say, never even been at a
Secondary School (" nullum vel grammaticum
passi sunt " 1). They owe their inclusion in the
party to their relationship to Augustine, who
has now taken in hand their neglected education.
There is the all-round man, Trygetius, just
back from camp (" Trygetium item nobis mifitia
reddiderat," De Ordine, i. 5). Augustine remarks
elsewhere that this experience of an active Hfe
had sent him back to bis studies with renewed
zest {C. Acad. i. 4), and here adds slyly, " he had
all a veteran's love for history " (where there is
possibly a word-play on " historia " in the further
sense of "story"). Then there is Licentius,
brilHant but nighty — the kind of man who is
described as " a possible First if he would only
work " — who thinks one day that there is no

1 In a rough parallel, the ludim agister or iitlerator corresponded
to a Primary School teacher, the grammaticus to a Secondary School
master.

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 5
study to compare with philosophy, and the
next is so deeply absorbed in verse-making that
he loses all interest in the discussions. And
there is Augustine's son, Adeodatus, younger
than the rest but already showing high promise.1
These are the youths, the reading-party proper,
but the company includes one or two others.
There is Augustine's old pupil and personal
friend, Alypius, a young and rising lawyer, tres
affaire, who finds himself obliged to run up to
town for a few days (C. Acad. i. 5 ; De Ordine, i. 7),
but is eager to take his share in the discussions
on his return. Then there is Navigius, Augustine's
brother, a quiet, non-philosophical but sensible
person, who is not ashamed to admit frankly
that he has not seen a point, and can smile at a
joke at his own expense {De Beata Vita, 7, 14).
Last but not least, there is the hostess, Augustine's
mother, Monnica, " who ruled us all like a
mother, but served us like a daughter" (Conf.
ix. 22), who hustles the party briskly in to lunch
(" trudere in prandium coepit ") when they are
1 He died a year or two later, and the wistful tenderness of
Augustine's references to him is admirably suggested in the lines of
that scholar-poet, the late Archbishop of Armagh, in his quaintly-
named St. Augustine's Holiday :
Him evermore a shadow overhung
Not of the great Numidian forests born —
The prophecy of genius that dies young,
The far cloud film of a too radiant morn.
Ah ! they who early pass through one dark gate
Have looks like thine, thou young Adeodate !

6 ST. AUGUSTINE
inchned to lag debating by the way, but is ready
to give a shrewd opinion herseK upon any point
that is put to her in plain language.
The external circumstances of the Hfe may
be made clear by one or two quotations. In the
Contra Academicos, i. 15 he notes : " We put off
the remainder of the discussion to another day,
for we had only begun it when the sun was
getting low, the rest of the day having been
spent, partly in looking after the affairs of the
farm, partly in revising the First Book of Virgil."
On another occasion we read that the party
" rose earfier than usual and helped the rustics
with some work for which time pressed " {C.
Acad. ii. 10). Again : " We had intermitted our
discussion for nearly a week, but had only
worked through three Books of Virgil, from the
second to the fourth — I lecturing on them as
fully as seemed necessary " (" . . . atque ut in
tempore congruere videbatur tractaremus," C.
Acad. ii. 10). Their discussions often took place
in the open air : " It was a brilfiant day, and
the temperature, which was very mild for winter
in those parts, invited us to go down to the
meadow as we very frequently did " (De Ord. ii. 1).
Again : " Though but two hours of day fight
remained, we went to the meadow ; for the
unusual fineness of the evening tempted us,
and we resolved not to lose what remained of

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 7
the day. So we came to our accustomed tree
and took up our positions " (C. Acad. ii. 25).
How fresh and natural the Httle picture shows
after so many centuries ! Once, as they were
on the way to the scene of these debates, their
attention was arrested by a sparring-match
between a pair of cockerels. There are a few
touches of vivid description — " the necks craned
forward at full stretch, the erected combs, the
vehement blows, the skilful evasions " ; but
behind this there is a pleasant touch of humanism,
something that recalls White of Selborne in the
interest shown in the subsequent conduct of
victor and vanquished — something, too, of the
philosopher in the suggestion that the law and
order of the universe are illustrated even here.
And along with all this there is the frank
avowal that, apart from these higher considera
tions, " the moving incidents of the fray induced
in us a certain pleasure in the spectacle " (De
Ord. i. 25, 26).
But we have touched on the background of
circumstance only as a setting for the human
relationships. Here, for instance, is a charming
Httle incident between Augustine and his mother.
Monnica enters during the dialogue and asks
what progress they have made, " for she knew,"
says Augustine, " what was the subject of our
discussion." Augustine bids the person who

8 ST. AUGUSTINE
is recording the debate note her entry and
her question. The good lady is, or pretends to
be, rather taken aback, and protests that it is
not the custom for women to take part in such
discussions. Augustine repfies that if philosophy
means, as it ought to mean, " love of wisdom,"
she is the best philosopher of them all, and that-
he thinks he could not do better than enrol him
self in her class. To which she answered, as he
says, " pleasantly and good-temperedly," " I
never heard you talk such nonsense in all your
Hfe ! " (De Ord. i. 31, 32, 33).
The soft answer which turneth away wrath
is, as we know, sometimes the better for a touch
of humour. Alypius, the young lawyer, is a
Httle apt to lose his temper when the debate is
going against him, and Augustine on one occasion
pulls him up, rather happily, thus : " I thought
just now; we were coming to the heel of the debate,
but since then you have struck in with your
fists." " He laughed, and we went off to lunch."
(The pun is, of course, better in the Latin : " Mihi
enim cum videretur iam nos ad calcem per-
venisse, pugnos etiam miscuisti.") There is a
good deal of chaff of this kind, good enough in
situ, but not often sufficiently pointed to quote
separately. At the discussion held on Augustine's
birthday, which was to provide a feast of reason
as a counterpart of the meal " a Httle better

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 9
than the ordinary " with which the day was
celebrated, Licentius makes a somewhat arbitrary
suggestion as to the future conduct of the debate.
Augustine repfies : " You must invite me to your
birthday-party, and then you shall choose the
dishes ; it wiU be good manners now not to ask
for what may not have been prepared ! " This
is mild enough certainly, but pleasantly natural ;
and we have an equally famifiar type of jest
when it is hinted that the shades of night which
interrupt a discussion are the natural allies of
the opposite party ! (C. Acad. ii. 29).
Once or twice we get a hint of Augustine's
methods as a teacher. Here, for instance, we
see him reviewing in lively style a discussion
between two of his pupils : " Then Trygetius
got a foothold in your citadel and you would have
been driven out and whoUy defeated if a cessation
of hostifities had not enabled you to call up
reinforcements. For the Academic definition of
error, which you had forgotten, is the very key
of their position. And if you had not remembered
that during the night — perhaps it came back to
you in a dream ? — you would not have been able
to make any reply."
The opening of the Dialogue De Ordine
presents to us an especially intimate and vivid
Httle scene. " One night," writes Augustine,
" I had awakened as usual ... for my eager

10 ST. AUGUSTINE
pursuit of truth made that my custom.1 I did
not allow the youths at that time to caU me away
from myself . . . and I had told them that if
they were awake they must do something for
which books were not required, and accustom
their minds to quiet thought. So, as I said, I
was awake, when suddenly the sound of the
stream which ran down behind the baths caught
my ear, and I noticed it more attentively than
usual. It struck me as curious that the water,
as it ran over the stones, sounded now louder
and now less loud. I began to ask myself what
was the cause of this, and I confess no explana
tion readily occurred to me. Just then Licentius
tapped on his bed, to frighten away the mice
which were disturbing him, and thus announced
himself to be awake. So I asked him had he
ever noticed how irregularly the streamlet ran ?
' I noticed that long ago,' he said ; ' for often on
awaking, wishing to know if it was a fine day
[how near that Httle natural touch brings it to
us !], I have listened to the stream, in order to
judge from its volume whether it was raining
or not, and it always varied, as it does now.'
Trygetius agreed. He too had been awake with
out our knowing it, for it was dark — in Italy
even the rich must generally put up with that."
1 Namely, to spend either the earlier or the later half of the
night in thought.

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 11
Licentius ingeniously suggests that the" varia
tions in the sound may be due to masses of fallen
leaves periodically choking the channel, and
then, as the water gathers head, giving way
again. This is accepted, and a consideration of
the number of causes which must have con
curred to produce this apparently simple effect
leads to a discussion on the order of the universe
and the difficulties which are aUeged against
befief in a Divine providence. In the discussion
Licentius shows that he has been thinking
seriously about the deeper things, and the scene
has a Httle epilogue (De Ord. i. 23) of a still more
intimate and personal character. In the morning
Licentius, after going out along with his com
panions, comes back alone to Augustine, to ask
him privately, " What do you really think of
me ? " He does not mean, of his abifities, but
of himself. That is an opening which brings
men face to face, and the lad's purpose is to tell
his older friend that the real things have begun
to mean something to him.
Having thus glanced at Augustine as tutor,
we may get another point of view by recalHng
that, writing of an earfier period when he himself
was studying in Carthage, he has left on record
one of the most admirable short descriptions of
the social side of University Hfe which is any
where to be found : " To converse together, to jest

12 ST. AUGUSTINE
together, to give and take the lead by turns
with cheerful good-humour, to read pleasant
books, to trifle together and together to be
serious, to differ sometimes without heat, as a
man may differ with himself, and by that same
dissension to give a spice of piquancy to a
wide range of agreement, to teach one another
and learn from one another, to long for absent
comrades with impatience and hail their return
with defight ; these and similar relations between
mutual friends, made manifest by the features,
the tongue, the eye, and a hundred Httle mutual
services, supply the warmth which welds souls
together and make one of many " (Conf. iv. 13).
It makes one think of the Cambridge " Apostles "
in the days of Tennyson and Hallam.
Another point to be noted about Augustine's
College friendships is their cathoficity. The
description just quoted appfies evidently to a
reading set, but in another passage (Conf. iii. 6)
he has something to say about a very different
set, the " Eversores," the rowdy people who at
the same time prided themselves on being good
style ("urbani"). Of them Augustine says,
that while he had no taste for their wild doings
he took pleasure in knowing some of them
(" amicitiis delectabar afiquando quorum
semper factis abhorrebam "). Few men have
ever been better quafified by nature than

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 13
Augustine for reafising the "homo sum" ideal,
and it is interesting to note how that natural
gift is turned to account in his correspond
ence as a bishop, where we find aU manner
of people writing to him on a great variety of
subjects, and attaching the greatest importance
to his sympathy and advice.
Less important than a man's attitude to his
fellow-men, but of considerable interest for the
understanding of his temperament, is his relation to
the external material world. The degree of interest -¦
which it holds for different men varies, of course,
enormously, and of the two great classes, Eyes
and No Eyes, Augustine belongs emphatically
to the former. There is, for instance, a delightful
touch of self-revelation in Conf. x. 57, where,
reviewing his temptations, he tells us : " I do not
go nowadays to see a hound chasing a hare in
the circus, but if it happens in the fields as I am
passing, the interest of the chase will sometimes
distract my mind from some grave meditation,
and though I do not turn my mare to follow it
[he would be riding, no doubt, on a pastoral
visitation] my thoughts are turned aside."
This is mere " interestedness," direct response
to the external stimulus ; but there are several
passages in which he shows the rudiments of a
naturafist's observation. Thus in De Trinitate,
xii. 16 he notes that the apparently continuous

14 ST. AUGUSTINE
gfiding of the snake is the sum of an infinite
series of minute movements, "coluber . . .
squamarum minutissimis nisibus repit." There
is a long discussion in De Quantitate Animae on
the continued vitality of the severed parts of a
worm or centipede ; and when in another place
the question arises whether fishes have memory,
he is able to decide it from personal experience.
He knew of a fountain where there were a number
of fishes which were often fed by onlookers, and
so well did they remember this that if any one
walked up and down along the edge of the pool,
a shoal of fishes swam up and down beside him
(De Gen. ad Lit. iii. 12). It belongs perhaps
rather to the sphere of aesthetic observation when
we find him writing with enthusiasm of the
nightingale's song — the Latin must be quoted
for its music — " quam suaves sonorum pul-
chritudines verberatus aer traiciat cantante
luscinia " (De Vera Rel. 79). The man who wrote
that might not have understood the Romantic
element in Keats's Ode to the Nightingale, but the
sounding phrase shows the same sympathy as
Milton's full-throated Hne :
She all night long her amorous descant sang.
The response of the eye to aesthetic impression
was equally keen. In his self-examination in
Book X. of the Confessions he complains of the

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 15
constant unescapable appeal which Hght and
colour made to him. " Light itself," he says,
" the queen of all the colours, bathing with its
varied flow all things on which the eye rests on
all the daytime, wheresoever I may be, lays its
spell upon me, even when I am doing something
else and not thinking about it, and so strongly
does it affect me that if I am suddenly deprived
of it I miss it keenly, and if it is long withheld
I grow depressed." In another passage he speaks
of "the glorious spectacle of the sea, which
clothes itself with changing colours as with a
garment, now with green, and that of many
shades, now with purple, and now with the
blue of heaven" (De Civitate Dei, xxii. 24. 5).
Illustrations might be multiplied, but it is
time now to turn to a rapid analysis of the
temperament and mentafity which we have to
some extent exhibited in action.
Corresponding to the keen interest in the
external world which we have just noticed,
forming its basis and supplying it, so to speak,
with its raw material, we find, as we should
expect, a highly developed sense-organisation.
In the course of his wonderful analysis of the
powers of memory, one of the details which he
mentions is this : "I can distinguish the odour
of lilies and violets when neither is present."
The language and the context show that he does

16 ST. AUGUSTINE
not merely mean that he can remember that
there is a difference, as we can all do, but that he
can imaginarily " sense " the difference, seem
to himself to smell each odour as if it were
present. Now that power of voluntary recall
is quite common in regard to visual impressions
— we can all see Oxford and Cambridge blue in
our mind's eye. And it is common enough in
regard to auditory impressions — musical people
can, I believe, often recall the exact difference
of timbre which two famous sopranos exhibit
in their " high C." But in regard to olfactory
impressions the power of voluntary recall is
rare. (It must not, of course, be confused with
the well-known and almost universal power of
the actual occurrence of an odour to recall a
scene or incident formerly associated with it.)
The fact that Augustine possessed it may be
taken, I think, as evidence that his powers of
sensation were unusually keen, and the impres
sion is confirmed by what he tells us about the
Hvefiness of his visuafising faculty. In the De
Trinitate, viii. 7 he mentions that when he read
the Pauline Epistles aU the persons mentioned
appeared before his mental gaze. This may
seem a small point to lay so much stress upon,
but a clue to the physical organisation of a
historical personage whom one is endeavouring $
to reconstruct is not to be despised by the

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 17
discerning student of history. Special keenness
of the senses is the basis of the sensuous tempera
ment, and the sensuous temperament is especially
exposed — though it by no means necessarily
falls victim — to the temptations of sensuafity.
It is an example of sensuousness when Augustine
tells us that in Hstening to Church music, in
which he took great delight, he was prone to
aUow the mere aesthetic pleasure to outstrip
devotional feefing (Conf. x. 49 f.). It is an
example of sensuafity when he tells us that he
was incfined to be over-fond of the pleasures of
the table (Conf. x. 45). And we know, of course,
that as a young man he fell into the graver forms
of sensuafity. The characteristic reaction of
the sensuous temperament when awakened out
of sensuafity is to turn to asceticism, and it is
not surprising that we should find the ascetic
side of religion attracting Augustine's admira
tion prior to his conversion, and claiming his
devotion afterwards.
Just as Augustine's attitude to the external
world is the natural expression of a sensuous"
temperament, so his relations with his f eHow-men
are the expression of a warm, emotional tempera
ment. It is not your cold man, as a rule, who
wins such loyalty and*affection as Augustine's
friends showed him in foUowing him over sea
and land, and into one spiritual venture after
c

18 ST. AUGUSTINE
another. That he was not cold there is ample
direct evidence. The passage in Book IV. of
the Confessions describing the death of his friend
has a sustained intensity of emotion which has
rarely been equalled. It constantly recalls the
language of that great monument to friendship,
In Memoriam. Where Tennyson says of Hallam's
death that for him it
sicken'd every living bloom,
And blurr'd the splendour of the sun,
Augustine says with a terser vigour, " The
very Hght grew hateful to me " (" horrebant
omnia, et ipsa lux"). The emotion of the
stanza beginning, " I dreamed there would be
spring no more," goes into the full-charged phrase,
" quidquid aspiciebam mors erat " (" the face of
death looked out at me from all things "). There
is another passage of which we best appreciate
the force when we see how Shakespeare has
expanded the same thought.
In King John in. iv. Phifip says to Constance :
You are as fond of grief as of your child.
She replies :
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts, . . .
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 19
It is almost exactly Augustine's phrase : " Grief
alone was sweet to me, and was the sole sweetness
that in any measure filled the place of my friend."
In most if not aU of his friendships, Augustine
was doubtless the leading partner. His mental
vigour and energy of temperament would ensure
that with men of more ordinary mould. But
one does not get the impression that he was
overbearing in friendship ; it was possible for
a lesser man to be his friend " without capitula
tion," to use Stevenson's fine phrase.1
That he was choleric there is some evidence,2
but he does not mention it in his self-examina
tion as one of his besetting sins. Like many
strong and vehement men he could be exceedingly
tender and self-restrained where he really loved.
No son could desire a finer testimony than his
mother gave him on her death-bed, when,
" answering some Httle service with a caress,"
she told him that she never remembered having
heard from him a single ungentle word (Conf.
ix. 30).
Turning now to Augustine's qualities as a
thinker, the first point which I wish to make is
a negative one. It may seem a rash thing to
1 His letters to Nebridius give an interesting glimpse of his relations
with a friend who, though not his intellectual equal, was at least
interested in and capable of following his deeper speculations.
2 There is an amusing description, apparently drawn from his
own experience, of impatience with a refraotory pen, in Ep. 9.

20 ST. AUGUSTINE
say of the " Carthaginian Aristotle," 1 the great
Doctor of the Western Church, but I believe
there is good ground for saying that he was
not of a pre-eminently metaphysical cast of
mind. That is not to deny that he was a great
thinker ; what I wish to suggest is simply that
his mind did not move easily or by preference
in the region of abstract ideas and non-material
conceptions. He has himself suppfied us with
direct evidence on this point. Over and over
again in the earlier part of the Confessions — I have
noted half a dozen passages, and I believe there
are others — he dwells on the difficulty which he
experienced in forming the conception of spiritual
existence. The following may be quoted : —
" Seeing that I knew no way of thinking of
God save as a corporeal magnitude — for it did
not seem to me possible for anything to exist
except in this form — that was the greatest and
almost the sole cause of the error which held
me fast " (v. 19).
" Of what was meant by a spiritual sub
stance I could not form even a faint and shadowy
notion " (vi. 4).
" So slow of heart was I . . . that whatsoever
was not extended in space or diffused through
1 " Aristoteles Poenorum." He is so denominated by his Pelagian
opponent, Julian of Eclanum. The stress is doubtless on the
" Poenorum," with a similar suggestion to that in Porson's " Hermann's
a German " epigram.

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 21
it, I supposed to have no existence at all "
(vii. 2).
A graphic metaphor in the same context as
the last-quoted passage explains to some extent
the nature of his difficulty. " I strove vehe
mently," he says, " against the swarm of visual
images x which crowded upon me, and tried to
drive them off, but scarcely had I beaten them
away when lo ! they gathered again and rushed
into my face and bfinded my eyes." That seems
to indicate that Augustine had the defect of his
quafity. The man who was so keenly sensitive
to the impressions of the external world found a
difficulty in escaping, even when he desired to
do so, from the mental presentations to which
it gave rise. The passages quoted refer, of
course, to a time prior to his acquaintance with
Neo-Platonism ; and undoubtedly the discipHne
of that highly abstract philosophy greatly
strengthened this side of his thought. But if
we look at his work as a whole, I think it bears
out the impression which has just been suggested.
The departments of thought with which his
name is especiaUy connected are the doctrines
of sin and grace, and the philosophy of history.
But the doctrines of sin and grace are those
which are especially in touch with experience,
1 There is no doubt about the translation: Augustine uses a
psychological technicality which he defines elsewhere.

22 ST. AUGUSTINE
and the philosophy of history is the most con
crete of the philosophies. It is true, of course,
that he wrote an important work upon the
Trinity. But this is rather of the nature of the
exception which proves the rule, in the sense of
being found capable of explanation in accord
ance with it. In the first place, he treated the
subject not so much because he was spontane
ously attracted by it, as because his clergy com
plained that nearly all the Hterature of the
subject was in Greek, which they could not read.
In the second place, the method of treatment is
that of a thinker whose mind moves most easily
in the concrete. It is for its analogies that the
De Trinitate is most often cited.
My next point is that whether he was a great
metaphysician or no, he was certainly a very ,
-great psychologist. Nothing that has been said
heretofore goes any distance in explaining his
greatness in this direction ; we have here to do
with the incalculable element of genius. It is
possible that it may seem to some readers a
paradox to distinguish thus sharply between
metaphysical and psychological abifity. There
is an old association between the two studies,
but in point of fact the main affinities of psycho
logy are with the natural sciences, the sciences
of observation. And, be it noted, it is on the
natural science side, the observational side of

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 23
psychology, that Augustine shows his greatness.
There is nothing wonderful about bis system,
his classification of the mental powers and so
forth ; it is an eclectic system drawn from various
sources. It is Augustine writing with his eye
on the object that is unsurpassed. He possessed,
in fact, very unusual powers of introspection and
extraordinary skill in recording his observations.
It is not merely that he gives vivid descriptions
of refigious feefings ; his observations in general
psychology are such as to evoke the admiration
of modern experts in the subject — having regard,
of course, to the point at which he comes in the
Hne of development. But the psychology calls
for treatment in a separate study ; we may
therefore leave it for the present and turn to
his characteristics as a writer.
The famifiar dogma that the style is the man,
like all such bold generafisations, needs a good
deal of quafification before it will fit the facts
with any completeness. The style is often far
more the school than the man. It is perhaps
only in those writers who may fairly claim to
be called great, that the personal note becomes
at all distinctive. And even then it is more
often expressed by a modification than by a
contravention of the prevailing canons. Now
Augustine undoubtedly was a great writer, but
he was in the first place a trained rhetorician;

24 ST. AUGUSTINE
and in those days the training of a rhetorician
was directed as much towards writing as towards
speaking. The ideal which the rhetoricians of
to-day set before them was not that of the Classical
age. Instead of the fuU-sailed Ciceronian period,
what was aimed at was a short antithetic sentence,
with the antithesis often pointed by the asson
ance of emphatic words, and the antithetic
clauses sometimes, though by no means always,
exactly balanced. The Classical restraint has
given place to a certain intensity — one might
almost say exuberance — of expression, and the
Classical economy in the use of metaphor, which
becomes so painfully impressed upon us when
we attempt to write " Latin prose," has entirely
disappeared. The use of metaphor is as free as
in modern writing, and not infrequently errs on
the side of extravagance. On the whole, the
general effect of the changes is that a modern,
not trained in the Classical tradition, would feel
a style Hke Augustine's to be less remote from
him than the Classical style. The most obtrusive
feature is the antithetic structure, and though
that is not quite of to-day, we do not need to go
very far back to parallel it. Here, for instance,
is a Httle passage of characterisation which, if it
were sufficiently well translated,— a feat I do not
profess to accompfish, — would have a faint sug
gestion of Gibbon about it :

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 25
" Three times he had now acted as Assessor,
arousing the wonder of his associates by his in
tegrity, while he on his part had wondered how
they could prefer gold to innocence. His probity
had been attempted not only with the bait of
lucre but with the goad of menace. This
occurred when he was acting as Assessor at
Rome in the Court of the Treasurer of the
Itafian Finances. There was at that time a very
powerful senator, to whom many were attached
by benefits, and many were subservient from
fear. This man desired some favour, which his
influence usuaUy commanded, though by the
law it was forbidden. Alypius opposed it.
Bribes were offered ; he laughed them to scorn :
threats were held out ; he spurned them : while
all wondered at the exceptional firmness which,
confronted with a man so great and so famous
for his powers of either injuring or rewarding,
neither desired his friendship nor dreaded his
enmity " (Conf. vi. 16). In this passage there
is Httle to remark beyond the antitheses which
appear in the translation ; but one or two ex
amples of more elaborate balance and assonance
of endings may be given :
" Qui laudari vult ab hominibus vituperante
te, non defenditur ab hominibus judicante te,
nee eripietur damnante te " (Conf. x. 59).
" Cito sonuerunt exultatione, quia videbant

26 ST. AUGUSTINE
eum, et cito siluerunt intentione, ut audirent
euro. " (Conf. viu. 5).
Word-plays are frequent, mu are often suffi
ciently pointed and striking. Here, for instance,
is a parallel in meaning to our proverb, " One
man's meat is another man's poison," in which
we have both pun, alfiteration, and assonance :
" Palato non sano poena est panis qui sano sua vis
est " ; and here is a saying about procrastination
which we might imitate by, " Presently was
never present " : " Modo et modo non habebant
modum " (Conf. viii. 12). A particularly elaborate
example, which for once lends itself to reproduc
tion, is the following. Speaking of the suspense
of judgment advocated by the Academic philo
sophy, he says : "I hung back from every assent
(ascent), dreading precipitation, and was Hke to
die by hanging instead " (" tenebam enim cor
meum ab omni assensione, timens praecipitum,
et suspendio magis necabar," v. 6). Sometimes, in
less elaborate forms, a word-play is used with good
effect in quite serious passages. It contributes
something to what is perhaps Augustine's finest,
as it is certainly his best-known saying : " Thou
hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are
restless till they find their rest in Thee " (" Fecisti
nos ad te ; et inquietum est cor nostrum donee
requiescat in te," Conf. i. 1).
In a style Hke this,which aims at striking effects,

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 27
the figure known as " oxymoron " — the piquant
combination of opposed ideas — is a favourite :
" adero absens," " loquaces muti," " severa
misericordia," " sobria ebrietas " ; and sometimes
more elaborately, as "ad satiandas insatiabiles
cupiditates copiosae inopiae et , ignominiosae
gloriae " — which one might reproduce by, " for
the satisfaction of the insatiable desires which
spring from an abundant lack of means and an
inglorious lust of fame." A style such as this
lends itself to epigrammatic phrases, and these,
when not over - elaborated, are often pleasing
enough. " Happy is he who loves Thee, and
his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thy sake "
(Conf. iv. 14). To refuse to confess one's sins
is to " hide God from oneself, not oneself from
God." Sometimes we find a trace of rather
mordant wit. " The trifling of grown-up persons
is called business ; boys' trifling, though not
different in kind, is punished by their elders."
We have spoken of a free use of metaphor as
characteristic of the style of the period, but
exceUence in the handfing of metaphor is always
an individual distinction, and in turning now to
Augustine's metaphors we come to what is, I
think, the most striking and individual feature
of his style. And his skill in this respect was
of special importance, owing to the character of
the subjects dealt with in much of his writing. In

28 ST. AUGUSTINE
the Confessions, for instance, whiiih is generally
recognised as his greatest Hterary monument, he
had a difficult subject, a record almost wholly
concerned with inner experience. If we ask
what enabled him to give it its extraordinary
interest, we find the answer in a combination of
two of the characteristics which we noted earlier :
his unusual powers of introspection and his
interest in the ongoings of the external world.
It was his introspective power which made the
inner world so vivid to himself ; it was the keen
ness of the outward eye and ear which enabled
him to make it so vivid to others. For he
makes it vivid mainly by means of metaphor.
It was just that quick response to the impressions
offered to ear and eye for which the anxious
bishop takes himself to task, which enabled him
to fill the " hollow land " of the invisible — as
Pater says of Plato — " with defightful colour and
form," and to make his Confessions literature,
instead of " materials for Church History."
To give the most striking example, we should
have to quote from the account of his inward
struggle at the time of his conversion ; but as we
shall have to come back to that from another
point of view, we must be content for the present
to take some scattered metaphors from various
passages. His first half-hearted efforts to turn
from the things of sense are thus described :

CHAEACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 29
" The pressure of the world lay heavy upon me
Hke a not unpleasant drowsiness, and my thoughts
when I strove to raise them to Thee were Hke
the efforts of a man trying to awaken and con
stantly falling back into slumber." This is how
he describes why the perception of truth in the
arts and sciences did not lead him to higher
things : " While I rejoiced in them, I knew
not whence came whatever in them was true and
certain. For I had my back towards the light,
and my face towards the objects which it iUumin-
ated, and so the eyes wherewith I beheld
these iUuminated objects were themselves not
enlightened." The general conception is Neo-
Platonic, but the literary handling is distinctive.
He is not afraid of a homely image when it will
serve his turn. One had supposed that the
phrase " swelled head " was a piece of very
modern slang, but it is difficult not to think of
it when you read, " nimis inflata facies claudebat
oculos meos " ; and the additional touch sug
gesting why this condition should result in
bfindness has a value of its own. Sometimes
an inteUectual conception is set forth in a simile
of considerable elaboration : "I imagined Thy
creation as one vast mass adorned with various
kinds of corporeal beings, and Thee, 0 Lord, I
thought of as surrounding and penetrating it in
every part, as though there had been a universal

30 ST. AUGUSTINE
sea extending on all sides through Hmitless
immensities and having within it a sponge, as
vast as ever one can imagine it and yet finite,
and as if that sponge were filled throughout every
part of it by the infinite sea ; so it was that I
thought of Thy creation as filled with Thee."
In the following, a very simple metaphor is
reinforced by the arts of Hterary suggestion:
" When my thought, ranging the secret depths,
had swept together and piled up in the sight of
my heart all my misery, a mighty storm broke
forth, bringing with it a great rain of tears."
Here only " storm " and " rain " are strictly
metaphorical, and the weight of language does
the rest, almost compeUing us to think of his
misery as a piled-up cloud.1
By way of contrast with these elaborate
examples let us conclude the series with a
metaphor in which he is content to trust the
effect to a single full-charged word.
It occurs towards the close of a keen dialectical
discussion of the nature of time. Of the subject-
matter of the passage we shall have to speak
1 "Ubi vero a fundo arcano alta consideratio contraxit et con-
gessit totam miseriam meam in conspectu cordis mei, oborta est
procella ingens, ferens ingentem imbrem lacrymarum " (Conf. viii.
28). There is perhaps a reminiscence, though not, of course, direct
imitation, of Virgil, Georg. i. 322-4 :
Saepe enim immensum caelo venit agmen aquarum,
Et foedam glomerant tempestatem imbribus atris
Collectae ex alto nubes : ruit arduus aether,
Et pluvia ingenti . . .

CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 31
again in another connexion Here it may suffice
to remark that it is conducted throughout with
a Hterary skill which makes the reader feel at
each step the toil and the excitement of the
search. Finally, when at last he comes in sight
of his conclusion, Augustine makes the reader
share the joy of discovery with the fine phrase :
"Attende ubi albescit Veritas" ("Mark where
truth brightens to the dawn").
Even this hasty survey can hardly have
failed to give us some impression of the man ;
for he is of those who impress themselves. A
man of keen, subtle, penetrating intellect, defight-
ing in the play of dialectic and the analysis of
thought and feefing ; possessing, too, a Hterary
skill capable of doing full justice to his thought.
A man sensitive to the beauty of nature and
keenly ahve to the ongoings of the world about
him. A large-natured, warm-hearted, impulsive
man, with a strong love for his fellows and a
great capacity for friendship. That is the
impression one gets of his temperament, of his
natural endowment ; in subsequent chapters we
shaU endeavour to trace some of the aspects of
his " reaction upon Hfe."

II

HIS CONVERSION— A STUDY IN CRITICISM
AND RELIGIOUS PSYCHOLOGY
St. Augustine's account of his conversion in
the Confessions is a locus chssicus for the psycho
logy of refigion. Unfortunately, as is the case
with so many of our most valuable documents,
we are no longer at fiberty to use it as it stands
without first vindicating its trustworthiness.
The question is not, of course, regarding the
authorship, — there has never been the sHghtest
doubt that Augustine wrote the Confessions, —
nor, among sober critics, is there any doubt of
his essential good faith. But the account was
not written immediately after the events, and
it has been suggested that it may have been so
modified by later experiences as to be misleading.
The question arises in this way. The Confessions
was not written until some twelve years after
the date at which its record closes ; on the
other hand, the Dialogues referred to in the
previous essay were written a few months after
32

HIS CONVERSION 33
his conversion. These writings are, the Contra
Academicos, a debate about the Sceptical philo
sophy ; the Dejieata Vita, a discussion about the
highest good ; the De Ordine, a discussion on Pro
vidence and the order of the universe ; and the
Soliloquia, deafing with the immortafityof thesoul.
The last-named, in spite of its title, is not im
properly called a dialogue, for it is arranged in the
form of a colloquy between Augustine and Reason.
It is contended by some critics that the im
pression as to Augustine's spiritual state which
we should draw from these Dialogues is not re
concilable with the account given in the Confes
sions. These critics, of whom we may take as
typical M. Louis Gourdon and Dr. Hans Becker,1
urge the following considerations :
(1) That the whole situation impfied in these
Dialogues is incompatible with the representation
of the Confessions. Augustine, they say, retires
to a pleasant country-house to discuss philosophy
and read Hterature with Hke-minded friends.
whereas we should have expected him to retire
into sofitude to weep and pray.
(2) Coming more to close quarters, it is urged
that these writings make no mention of the
conversion, and leave no place for it in his
mental history.
1 L. Gourdon, Essai sur la conversion de Saint Augustin (Cahors,
1900) ; H. Becker, Augustin, Studien zu seiner geistigen Entwichelung
(Leipzig, 1908). D

34 ST. AUGUSTINE
(3) That they display a cheerfulness not to
be expected in a man with the experiences of
the Confessions behind him.
(4) That they show a very fimited knowledge
of Christian theology.
(5) That they are filled with the praises of
philosophy and say Httle about Christianity.
I propose first to deal with these objections
seriatim, endeavouring to show that they are
untenable, and then to examine carefully the
account in the Confessions with a view to showing
its inherent credibility.
First, as to the suggestion that Augustine
retired to Cassiciacum with a company of philo
sophic friends to enjoy a philosopher's heaven
of lettered ease and dialectical discussion. Now
the passages on which this representation is
based are precisely those which we noticed in
the previous chapter, about the discussions under
the trees, the reading of Virgil, and so forth.
The aspect in which they were there presented
did not in any way tend to minimise the interest
or importance of these passages, but it does, I
think, suggest a different explanation of them.
There was, of course, a certain artificiahty in
speaking of the gathering as a reading-party, but
nevertheless that representation is a good deal
nearer to the facts than this picture of a philo
sophic coterie. That is to say, the youths really

HIS CONVERSION 35
were Augustine's pupils. In another work
written a Httle later (De Quant. Anim. § 62), he
speaks of them in so many words as having them
with him for the sake of their education (" nostri
ilfi adulescentes qui tunc mecum erant studiorum
suorum gratia "). There was, in fact, no philo
sopher present except Augustine himself. The
only other member of the company for whom
that title could possibly be claimed was the
young lawyer Alypius, who was young enough
to have been Augustine's pupil a year or two
before in Carthage, and himself tells us in one
of the Dialogues that if he knew any philosophy
he had learnt it from Augustine. Moreover,
during a considerable portion of the discussions
he is absent, having been obfiged to go up to
Milan on business. Thus the engaging picture
of the philosophic coterie rather fades away on
close examination.
The reading of Virgil, again, which is incident-
aUy referred to, was not a dilettante amusement ;
it was part of the education of the youths. Virgil
may almost be said to have been the universal
text-book of the time. A whole cycle of know
ledge could be introduced by way of lectures on
his works, including philosophy, mythology,
history, grammar, and rhetoric, as well as more
obviously appropriate subjects Hke versification
and Hterary criticism. For Virgil was held, as

36 ST. AUGUSTINE
Macrobius says, to have been " skiUed in every
branch of learning " (" omnium disciplinarum
peritus ").1 Even the discussions recorded in the
Dialogues were to some extent subordinated to
this educational purpose. We have seen how
Augustine reviews and criticises the arguments
of two of his pupils,2 and we find him writing
to Romanianus, the father of one of them, a
report on his progress to this effect : " Your boy
is beginning to take an interest in philosophy, but
I restrain him somewhat, that he may make
firmer and better progress when he has first
been thoroughly trained in the necessary dis
ciplines." By the " necessary discipfines " he
means grammar, logic, and Hterary studies
generally. It is highly probable that Augustine's main
motive in undertaking this educational work at
this time, was a very simple and practical one.
He was giving up his profession as a pubHc
teacher of rhetoric, and he had to find some
means of support, not only for himself but for
his mother and son, and possibly other members
of his family, for whom the income of the small
farm left by his father would not suffice.8 (He
1 On this subject see T. E. Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth
Century, pp. 181 ff. 2 Sup. p. 9.
3 Cf. Contra Academicos, ii. 4, where he refers to the necessity of
providing for his dependents as having for a time hindered him from
giving up his profession.

HIS CONVERSION 37
speaks in one passage of its " scant acres " —
" pauca angellula "). He needed a period of
comparative leisure for retirement and self-
recollection, and he bought his leisure, so to
speak, by taking pupils. This is not a fanciful
or modernising suggestion. To the evidence
given above we have to add that the fathers of
Licentius and Trygetius were both wealthy men,
while the former, Romanianus, had been, at an
earfier period of Augustine's Hfe, a generous
patron to him. But if this be the correct reading
of the situation, there is no difficulty raised by
Augustine's having these young men about him
and reading Virgil with them. After all, most
men have to go on with some daily work, whether
they be passing through a spiritual crisis or no.
Similarly the references to agriculture, which
the critics seem to think of as belonging to a
doctrinaire scheme of philosophic " simple Hfe,"
have, in all probabifity,an equally practical origin.
The friend whose villa Augustine was occupying
was not a wealthy landowner, but a school
master in Milan. We can imagine him saying
to Augustine, as he offered him the use of the
house : " And you know you will be doing me
a service too ; that viUicus of mine needs to be
kept up to his work in the busy seasons." Is
not that the way things happen in real Hfe ?
There is nothing unlikely, it should be said, in

38 ST. AUGUSTINE
supposing Augustine capable of wo'rk of this
kind, for he was himself the son of a small land
holder. The phrases in which he alludes to the
farm work exactly bear out this interpretation.
Augustine speaks on one occasion of having
spent part of the day " in rebus rusticis ordi-
nandis " (C. Acad. i. 15). This suggests farm-
management, not leaning on the handle of a
rake while one talks philosophy, nor even plant
ing trees in quincunces to remind oneself of
Cicero's De Senectute. On another occasion the
whole party " rose earfier than usual to help the
labourers with some work for which time pressed "
(C. Acad. ii. 10). There is a practical ring about
this too. Men do not generaHy rise earlier than
usual in order to carry on pro forma occupations.
Thus the whole circumstances of the Dialogues
are, it would seem, simpler and more natural, less
inspired by any doctrinaire philosophical ideal
than these critics would have us believe.
It was necessary to take this objection first,
on account of its generality, but we come now
to what is, I think, the weightiest of the negative
arguments, namely, that there is no mention, and,
our critics would add, no sufficient indication
of any such crisis in the immediate past as the
conversion described in the Confessions.
Here we must first consider for a moment
what kind of Hterature it is with which we are

HIS CONVERSION 39
deafing. On this point we may quote Cicero, an
acknowledged master in this kind. In sending a
copy of the Academica Posteriora to a friend, he
writes : " You will wonder, perhaps, to find that
we have said things here which we never really
did say, but you know how it is in Dialogues "
(" nosti morem dialogorum ").1 This refers, no
doubt, chiefly to Hterary embelfishment, but it
may be quoted as evidence of a certain con-
ventionafity in the form. How this might
operate to exclude certain elements we get a
hint from Augustine himself. He tells us in the
Confessions (ix. 7), that his friend Alypius was
at first reluctant to allow the name of Christ
to appear in these Dialogues. This means that
in the Hterary redaction of the Dialogues, in
which we are told he helped Augustine, when
he found the name of Christ in the rough notes
of the discussion, he was loath to insert it in the
" fair copy." Not apparently that he was
ashamed of the name of Christ as such, but he
felt it to be out of place in this milieu. We get
an indication as to his point of view in a very
r interesting passage of the Contra Academicos.
Wanting to say that, perhaps, truth can only
be known by a divine revelation, he says that
it may be that truth is Hke Proteus, who could
only be recognised by the aid of a " divine
1 Ad Varron., ad Fam. ix. 8. 1.

40 ST. AUGUSTINE
power," using the Classical, one might almost
say, " pagan," word numen for the divinity who
gives the revelation. Evidently, in the opinion
of Alypius, if one had to refer to religious matters
in this kind of writing, the way to do it was by
means of a skilfully turned mythological allusion
— much as your scholarship candidate trans
poses a parfiamentary report in terms of the
Roman Senate. Augustine, as we shall see, was
strong enough to break the convention, to intro
duce the name of Christ, and numerous direct
references to Christianity. But the fact remains
that, from this point of view, he was working
in a reluctant medium, and that it would be
absurd to expect here a self-revelation of an
intimacy and fulness comparable to that of the
Confessions. On the other hand it would, no doubt, be
distinctly curious if there was a complete absence
of aUusion to, or implication of the circumstances
indicated in the Confessions. That, however,
is not the case. In the Contra Academicos,
ii. 5 he writes to his friend Romanianus that
as a result of his Neo-Platonic studies he " set
out to return unto himself." And then he adds
these remarkable sentences : "I cast but a
backward glance, I confess, Hke one starting out
on a journey, towards that religion which was
instiUed into us as children and entered into the

HIS CONVERSION 41
very marrow of our bones ; but though I knew
it not, it was drawing me to itself. And so,
trembhngly, hastily yet hesitatingly, I took up
the Apostle Paul ; for I said to myself, those
men could not have Hved as it is manifest they
did live, if their writings and reasonings had
been at variance with this so great good. I
read through the whole with the utmost intent-
ness and alertness." Thus, writing to a philo
sophic friend, he tells him that his philosophic
development had not been uniform and homo
geneous. It had been interrupted and modified
by an incursion of the religious interest.
To pass to the next point, it is urged that
the tone of the Dialogues is different from what
we should expect. There are a number of smaU
jests scattered through them ; Augustine some
times rallies his pupils with a certain gaiety.
This, it is argued, is not the tone of a man with
the experience of the Confessions behind him.
Now, as a psychological generafisation quite
apart from its apphcation to the present case,
that remark seems far from being axiomatic.
No man with any sense of humour preserves
unmitigated gloom for months together. But,
beyond that, it may be confidently denied that
we should expect the Augustine of the Confessions
to be at this time in a mood of unmitigated
gloom. According to his own account he had

42 ST. AUGUSTINE
reached, in the garden at Milan, after long
struggles, the momentous decision to break with
that in his Hfe which he felt to be wrong, and he
befieved that he had received Divine aid in
doing so. Now, it is a familiar psychological
fact that the immediate result of any momentous
decision is to bring a sense of relief : and if it
be a decision in favour of that which the deeper
self has long approved, it tends to bring with it
a Hghtening of the whole mood. It is no sufficient
reason for denying that Augustine had come to
Christianity by a bitter and painful struggle,
that we find him, some months after the crisis,
occasionally seasoning his discourse with a touch
of humour. But after all the kind of humour
that meets us in the Dialogues belongs merely
to the surface of social Hfe, and we find traces
enough of a deeper life that was going on below.
In the De Ordine (i. 29), rebuking two of his
pupils who have quarrelled, he says : "Do not,
I pray you, add to my distresses. Surely my
wounds are enough, which I pray God with
almost daily tears to heal, though I often tell
myself that I am not worthy to be healed as
quickly as I would."
In another passage of the same writing he
speaks of long vigils of anxious thought, during
which he did not aUow himself to be interrupted
by the youths who slept in the same room with

HIS CONVERSION 43
him. At the close of that passage he says :
" When the morning came, I arose and prayed
with many tears," and he several times speaks
of his daily prayers (De Ord. i. 25 ; Solil. i. 2-6 ;
Ep. iii. 4). Becker, with German thoroughness,
quotes the passages in the Dialogues about
weeping and prayer, but thinks that he gets rid
of them by remarking that they bear a very
small proportion to the whole. This is a very
curious argument. If your informant be a truth
ful person ; surely it comes to exactly the same
thing, so far as the facts are concerned, whether
he tells you that he weeps almost every day
or whether he tells you almost every day that he
weeps, although in the latter case his statements
on the point bear a much larger proportion to
his total speech than in the former. If, that is,
he be a truthful person; but ex hypothesi the
Augustine of the Dialogues is a truthful person,
because his evidence is required to confute the
Augustine of the Confessions.
Another critic suggests that Augustine was
emotional, and his weeping, therefore, does not
mean very much. But surely this is one of
those cases where you cannot have it both ways.
It wiil not do to argue that if Augustine weeps
in the Dialogues, it is because he is emotional,
and does not mean very much ; but if he says
in the Confessions that he wept, that indicates

44 ST. AUGUSTINE
a condition of spiritual distress which is irrecon
cilable with the lighter mood of the Dialogues.
By a similar argument from silence, or rather
from inadequate proportion of references, it is
urged by M. Gourdon that Augustine at this
time knew very little of Christian doctrine. The
Confessions, on the other hand, M. Gourdon
seems to think, represent him to have been
converted to a ready-made system of Catholic
theology. I do not know whether any one ever
did hold such a view. If so, it must have been
read into the Confessions ; it is certainly not
in the text. The Confessions expficitly repre
sents his knowledge as in some respects seriously
defective up to a time shortly before bis con
version (Conf. vii. 25), and does not represent
him to have received any supernatural illumina
tion in matters of doctrine. Still, a man who had
been listening, at least occasionally, to the
preaching of Ambrose, during a considerable
period (Conf. v. 23, vi. 3, etc.), and who had
studied the Paufine Epistles (Conf. vii. 27),
would not be grossly ignorant of theology.
Perhaps M. Gourdon means that the theology
of the Dialogues is incompatible with these
statements. But both statements receive con
firmation from the Dialogues, the former by the
fact that Ambrose is thrice referred to, twice as
' sacerdos noster ' (De Beata Vita, 4 and 35), and

HIS CONVERSION 45
the latter by the mention in Contra Academicos,
quoted above, of the reading of the Paufine
Epistles. Moreover, there is a significant Httle
passage in the De Ordine, i. 29. Trygetius, one
of Augustine's pupils, says that when we name
God, it is not Christ who occurs to our minds,
but the Father. We think of Christ when we
name the Son of God. Licentius at once
catches him up. " You're making a nice mess
of it," he says (the colloquial " bellam rem facis ").
" Are we to deny that the Son of God is God ? "
Trygetius, the account goes on, saw the difficulty
in which he was placed, but forced himself to
say : " He is indeed also called God, but it is
the Father who is properly called God." Here
I interposed (says Augustine) saying, " Stop !
You must not say that the Son is not properly
called God." Licentius laughs at Trygetius for
making such a mistake, and Trygetius begs that
it may not be put on record. Now if these
youths, Augustine's pupils, thought it disgraceful
to make a mistake in the doctrine of the Trinity
— and moreover a rather technical mistake, for,
as Trygetius explains, he did not reaUy mean
to deny that Christ was God — if they thought
such a mistake disgraceful, the argument is a
fortiori that Augustine was not ill-instructed
about the main doctrines.
Another objection of a similar character is

46 ST. AUGUSTINE
that the Augustine of the Dialogues does not
make the free use of Scripture that we should
expect from the Augustine of the conversion
story. In view of the character of the Hterature
in question very Httle weight could in any case
be attached to this argument. But, as a matter
of fact, where it is in place, as in the opening
prayer of the Soliloquia, there is a series of quota
tions : " God who bringest us to the door and
causest it to be opened unto us when we knock ;
God who givest unto us the bread of life ; God
who givest us to drink of that water whereof if
we drink we shall never thirst ; God who con-
victest the world concerning sin and righteous
ness and judgment ; God by whom we overcome
the enemy, I cry unto Thee." In connexion
with Scripture quotations another Httle point
is worth mentioning, because it tends to confirm
Augustine's statement in the Confessions (ix. 8),
that while at Cassiciacum he took a special
delight in the Psalms. In the De Ordine, i. 22
he mentions that Monnica on one occasion
rebuked Licentius for humming over a phrase
from a psalm in inappropriate circumstances.
Augustine explains that the tune, which the lad
had lately learned, was running in his head as
tunes do. That certainly seems to point to a
familiar use of the psalms in the household.
We come now to a more serious difficulty.

HIS CONVERSION 47
There is, it is pointed out, very Httle said about
rehgion, whereas there are eloquent praises of
philosophy. In fact, we sometimes find " philo
sophy " where we should have expected rehgion,
as when he tells Romanianus that he rejoices to
have escaped from the world to take refuge in
the bosom of philosophy (C. Acad. i. 3), or when
he says that, after reading the Pauline Epistles,
the face of philosophy appeared to him in all
its attractive beauty (ii. 6). But do not just these
unexpected turns of expression give us a clue to
the explanation — which is, I believe, that in these
Dialogues Augustine means by philosophy Chris
tianity, as interpreted through Neo-Platonism %
That may seem a bold statement, but here
are a number of items of evidence. In the De
Ordine, i. 21 Licentius says that philosophy
has now become fairer to him than all the love-
tales of the poets, " and with a sigh he gave
thanks to Christ." In the De Ordine, i. 32
Augustine points out that philosophy simply
means "love of wisdom" ("amor sapientiae ")
and goes on to say that the sacred Scriptures teach
us to avoid and despise, not all philosophies,
but only " the philosophers of this world " (with
allusion to Col. ii. 8) Whoever teaches us that
aU philosophy is to be shunned, teaches us not
to love wisdom. Monnica is, therefore, he says,
a better philosopher than he, for she loves wisdom

48 ST. AUGUSTINE
more than he does. The " wisdom " which he
has in view here is therefore something not very
different from Christianity.
When he distinguishes them in thought,
while noting their partial coincidence, it is not
to philosophy that he awards the primacy. In
De Ordine, ii. 16 we read : " There are two ways
that we can follow when we are troubled with
difficulties, that of reason and that of authority.
Philosophy offers us reason, and scarcely succeeds
in liberating a very few ; and so far from teaching
them to despise these mysteries " (i.e. the deeper
doctrines of Christianity) " it only brings them
to understand them as they ought to be under
stood. True and genuine philosophy has no
other business than to teach us what is the un
caused Cause of all things ('principium sine
principio '), how great is the Intelligence which
abides in it, and what it was that for our salva
tion issued thence without any degeneration.
Now it is this same omnipotent God, who is at
the same time tripotent, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, who is taught in those sacred mysteries
which, by the way of a sincere and firm faith
deliver the masses of mankind (this seems to be
the meaning here of ' populos ') ; and they
teach this neither confusedly, as some assert,
nor arrogantly, as many allege. And further,
how great a thing it is that a so great God should

HIS CONVERSION 49
assume and use even this body of our race ;
the greater the humifiation the greater the
mercy, and the more widely distant from the
kind of pride of some intellectual persons."
Here we find already Augustine's characteristic
teaching about humility as the lesson of the
Incarnation, and the contrasting of it with pride
as the besetting sin of the philosopher. Now,
when a man writes thus, is it correct to say of
him, as Becker says, that he valued Christianity
for the sake of Neo-Platonism % Would it not
be much more correct to put the statement the
other way round ?
There is a similar passage in the Contra
Academicos (iii. 43), and in this case with a
personal note which almost recalls the manner
of the Confessions. " There is no doubt that
we are impelled to learn by two forces, authority
and reason. With me it stands fast never to
depart from Christ's authority, for I find no
stronger. But as for those matters which it is
possible to seek out by subtle reasoning, such
is my cast of mind that I am eagerly desirous of
apprehending the truth, not only by believing
but also by understanding it. I am confident
that I shaU find among the Neo-Platonists that
which does not conflict with our rehgion (' sacra
nostra ')." One more passage from the Dialogues
and we may leave them. It is for our purpose E

50 ST. AUGUSTINE
peculiarly significant. In Contra Academicos,
ii. 2, after speaking of his prayers for his friend
Romanianus he says : " Shall Augustine have
made these prayers for Romanianus in vain ?
Nay, that will not be permitted by Him to whom
I have given myself wholly, and whom I have
begun in some measure to recognise." Notice
the " to whom I have given myself wholly "
(" cui totum me dedi "). That is surely a clear
enough allusion to the decisive act described in
the Confessions. The increase in knowledge
comes afterwards : " quern nunc recognoscere
aliquantum coepi." When an intellectual man
undergoes an emotional conversion he needs a
subsequent period for the readjustment of his
mental attitude, and that, it seems to me, is just
what we find traces of in the Dialogues.
Let us turn now to the positive side and see pre
cisely what is the representation of the conversion
which we find in the Confessions, and whether
it is inherently credible. Here we are met in
limine by the question : Are we at liberty to
use the data of the earfier part of the Confessions
in constructing our idea of the conversion ?
Becker and Gourdon both say Yes. The Con
fessions may be freely used up to the time of the
conversion, it is only at this point that they be
come untrustworthy. That is, from their point
of view, a generous concession, but as it seems

HIS CONVERSION 51
to me also a just one, I shall accept it without
more ado. We are at any rate safe in taking
as our starting-point the fact that Augustine
received through his mother a very strong im
pression of the power and beauty of the Christian
faith. This is amply confirmed by the Dialogue
Contra Academicos, where he speaks of " that
rehgion which was instilled into us in childhood
and entered into the very marrow of our bones "
(" medullitus impficata est "). For lack of
suitable teachers the impression remained un
related to his rapid mental growth, and yet he
kept it in the background of bis mind, and
cherished the vague hope that he would some
day find a way of rationalising it to himself,
rationalising, I mean in the sense of adequately
relating it to his thought. He was Hke a man
who has come into possession of a locked casket
which he befieves to contain some treasure, but
of which he cannot find the key. Wherever he
comes across a key which seems likely to open
it he at once tries it in the lock. This happens
several times in the Confessions. The first
occasion was when he read the Hortensius and
the glory of philosophy dawned on him (Conf.
iii. 7). Thereupon his thoughts flew to the
religion of his childhood, and he turned, he says,
to the study of the Scriptures. But the lock
refused to yield, and he soon gave up the attempt.

52 ST. AUGUSTINE
Another intellectual advance was marked, he
tells us, by the study of Aristotle's Categories
(Conf. iv. 28). The immediate use which he
made of this new knowledge was to apply it to
the elaboration of his notion of God. The
attempt was not a success ; what is significant
is that it should have been made.
His adhesion to Manichaeism was itself in one
aspect a rationafising venture of this kind. In
the De Utilitate Credendi (§ 2) Augustine writes
to his friend Honoratus : " You know that the
real reason why I feH into the hands of these
men was that they promised without any use of
a dreadful authority to lead up to God by pure
and simple reason those who listened to their
teaching." The similar passage in De Beata
Vita, 4 : "I persuaded myself that those who
taught rather than those who commanded, ought
to be believed," seems to suggest that about that
time he had taken his difficulties to some Chris
tians of repute who, not being quahfied to deal
with them, had flourished " authority " in his
face, saying : ' You must not question, you
must simply be content to befieve what the
Church teaches " ; and that in contrast with
this treatment he had been attracted by the
Manichaean promises of explanations and revela
tions. It was, by the way, the discovery that
these vaunted explanations were mythological

HIS CONVERSION 55
and conflicted with what he knew of astronomy,
which first weakened the hold of Manichaeism
upon him (Conf. v. 3, 6).
We come now to the most important of these
adventures in pursuit of truth. It was at this
point that he fell in with the writings of the Neo-
Platonists. It has been necessary to argue above
that the Augustine of the Dialogues was not
merely a Neo-Platonist ; on the other hand we
have here to emphasise that the Augustine of
the Confessions is by no means niggardly in his
acknowledgments of what he owed to Neo-
Platonism. He devotes most of the seventh
Book to the reckoning of his debt, and he shows
it to have been very great. The Neo-Platonic
teaching restored, he tells us, his confidence in
the possibility of attaining Truth, which had been
shaken by his disappointment with Manichaeism
and his subsequent study of the Academic philo
sophy. It enabled him to grasp the conception
of the spirituafity — the non-materiafity — of God,
which had hitherto eluded him, it prepared him
to accept the doctrine of the Trinity, and it
reheved his difficulties regarding the problem of
evil by its doctrine that evil is negative.
At the close of this account he proceeds
abruptly : " And so I caught up most eagerly
the revered writings of Thy Spirit, and above all
the writings of the Apostle Paul." The " and

52 ST. AUGUSTINE
so " would be rather puzzHng if we did not by
this time know his habit of treating every new
mental acquisition as a possible key to bis locked
casket. This time the key worked. He now under
stood St. Paul, he says, and found in him the
same truths as in the Neo-Platonists, only accom
panied by praises of the Divine grace and a
corresponding humifity — the same reservation
that is made, we may recall, in the passage cited
above from the De Ordine. x
The history of Augustine's intellectual develop
ment does not, however, lead straight up, at this
point, to his conversion. To reach that, we must
go back and take up the other thread which was
intertwined with it — that of his ethical develop
ment. Here again the starting-point is an early
impression, not leading, however, to the accept
ance of the ethical demand of Christianity. He
speaks particularly of the earnest exhortations
of his mother, urging on him purity of Hfe, and
how he scornfully rejected them. It is not
necessary to use the language of exaggeration
as some have done, but bis statements, and not
merely his comments from a later point of view,
make it evident that his year of idleness at home
and the beginning of bis student Hfe at Carthage,
prior to his quasi-marriage, were marked by
1 P. 48 sup.

HIS CONVERSION 55
grave moral disorders. And yet there was an
undercurrent of inner protest. As a youth, he
tells us, he used to pray, " Give me chastity —
but not yet," longing and fearing at the same
time. His adhesion to the Manichaeans, indeed,
was partly prompted by bis admiration for the
supposed ascetic sanctity of Manichaeus and his
" Elect " (Conf. v. 9 ; De Mor. Eccl. Cath. § 2).
Another stream of ethical influence he traces
to the reading of Cicero's Hortensius, which
increased his enthusiasm for the things of the
mind, and gave him a lower estimate of wealth
and worldly success (Conf. iii. 7 f.) ; though it
did not, in the meantime, slacken his pursuit
of them. The loss of a friend at Tagaste gave
him that first vivid reaHsation of death which
marks an epoch in most men's experience (Conf.
iv. 7 f.), and he himself passed through a danger
ous illness (Conf. v. 16). Thus amid varied
influences the struggle of ideals and practice goes
on right down into the period immediately pre
ceding his conversion. That period was marked,
not by an advance but by a grave moral lapse.
In fact, the ugliest blot upon his Hfe falls here.
It must be referred to, because it is sometimes
implied in attacks upon the Confessions that
Augustine for some time prior to his conversion
had been Hving an irreproachable Hfe, and had
reaUy very little to be converted from, so to

56 ST. AUGUSTINE
speak. Now the facts are these. It is quite
true that his Hfe had not been one of wild debauch
ery. After a short period of dissipation in
Carthage he had Hved in virtual wedlock for
many years with the mother of his son, Adeo
datus. If this connexion had continued down
to his conversion and had then been either
regularised by marriage,1 or broken off with a
view to cehbacy (the latter alternative being
more in accordance with the Christian sentiment
of his time), the favourable view referred to
above might fairly have been maintained. But
what happened was that about a year before
his conversion, he put away the mother of his
child, not from Christian sentiment, but to
prepare the way for an advantageous marriage.
That was the most repeUent act of his Hfe, and
in view of what follows it becomes very base.
Let him tell it in his own words, for he has made
what amends are possible by telfing it with an
unsparing directness which cuts deeper than
invective. " She had gone back to Africa,
vowing that she would never know any other
man. But I, unhappy that I was, and weaker
than a woman, could not endure the delay of
two years which must elapse before I could
obtain my promised bride, and so, being not a
1 Goethe's regularisation of his Gewissensehe will occur to some
readers. It would, of course, be unhistorical to press the contrast.

HIS CONVERSION 57
lover of wedlock, but a slave of lust, I procured
another mistress — I cannot call her wife — in
order that under the guard of an unbroken
custom the disease of my soul might be fed and
carried on as strong or stronger than ever into
the realm of marriage " (Conf. vi. 25). That is
written, no doubt, from a later point of view,
but at this period of his Hfe there could be no
question, if there ever could have been, of a mere
fight-hearted paganism ; he was deliberately false
to his own ideals.
Now, just such a state of tension, of conflict
of ideals and practice, suppfies the psychological
pre-conditions for a conversion. Psychologically
speaking the conditions of a conversion are
reahsed when an undercurrent of inner protest
is reinforced by influences from without or from
within, until at a given point it becomes strong
enough to overpower and reverse what has
hitherto been the dominant current of the Hfe.
There is no psychological reason why the critical
point should not be a definite and assignable one.
If so, the conversion is in a sense sudden, though^
it has been long prepared.
Now let us see what happened in Augustine's
case. At the point we have reached, the intellectual
and the ethical lines of development intersect.
Neo-Platonism and the teaching of Ambrose had

58 ST. AUGUSTINE
removed his principal inteUectual difficulties, or
at least inspired him with the confidence that
they could be removed.1 The new enfighten-
ment called for a new decision. But the decision
hung fire. After his study of the Neo-Platonists,
and the reading of the New Testament, described
in Book VII. of the Confessions, his position,
he teHs us at the beginning of Book VIII., was
this : " I had found the pearl of great price ; and
I still hesitated to sell all and buy it." Other
influences had still to come in before the decisive
point was reached. There was first the story
told him by Simphcianus, himself a Neo-Platonist
Christian, of the conversion of Victorinus, the
famous rhetorician, the scholar whose transla
tions of the Neo-Platonists Augustine had him
self read. He, after long repugnance, had
humbled himself to confess Christ pubficly, and
had been obliged to give up his chair of rhetoric
in the JuHan " persecution." Then came — with
all the advantage of an assault from an unex
pected quarter — the interview with Ponticianus
and his story of the life of Antony and of the
two young courtiers who renounced the world.
This brought to Augustine, according to his own
account, a flash of self-revelation. He saw that
his intellectual difficulties had drawn part of
their strength from an unrecognised ally. He
1 See below, p. 63, for some further remarks on this point.

HIS CONVERSION 59
had flattered himself that these were the barriers
to bis pursuit of the higher Hfe ; in reahty they
had served him as shelters against the rigour of
its demands. " I had supposed that the reason
I was putting off from day to day the decision
to renounce the world and follow Thee only,
was that I could find no certainty towards which
to direct my course. But the day had come for
me to be stripped naked in my own eyes ; and
conscience clamoured in my ears : ' What have
you to say now ? ' " Then follows the famous
scene in the garden at Milan. It shapes itself
as a struggle to give up that in his Hfe which he
knows to be wrong, and it is evident that that
is primarily sensual indulgence. " The things
which held me back were vanity of vanities and
folly of folhes to which I had given my love, and
they plucked at the garment of my flesh and
whispered : ' Wilt thou indeed cast us off ?
From this moment shaU we be separated from
thee for ever ? ' And what were the imagina
tions which they called up — what were they, 0
my God ? May Thy mercy cast them out from
the mind of Thy servant ! What vilenesses,
what shames did they not caU up ! And now I
was scarce Hstening to them, far less than half,
and they no longer withstood me to my face,
but, as it were, whispered from behind and
plucked furtively at my garments to make me

60 ST. AUGUSTINE
look back." If this be invention, what a
dramatist was lost in Augustine ! And it must
be remembered that there was no large con
ventional Hterature of conversion for him to
draw on in those days ; he either invented
this, or he experienced it.
Before long comes the crisis. He throws
himself down beneath the fig-tree, and gives the
rein to his emotion. " And not indeed in these
words, but to this effect I broke forth : ' But
Thou, 0 Lord, how long ? Wilt Thou be angry
with us for ever ? 0 remember not against us
our former iniquities ' — for I felt that it was by
these that I was held fast, and I exclaimed in
my distress : ' How long, 0 Lord, shall it be
to-morrow, to-morrow ? ' Why not now ? Why
should there not be an end of my vileness this
very hour ? ' "
Then comes the voice : " Take, read," the
taking up of 4he codex of the Apostle, the
reading of the words that seem to leap forth
to meet his need. And at once his heart " was
fiUed with a sunshine of confidence, before which
his dark doubts fled away."
This last passage with its suggestion of
miracle raises a difficulty for the modern mind,
and it is therefore worth while to point out the
sobriety of Augustine's handling of this experi
ence, and the completeness of the psychological

HIS CONVERSION 61
preparation for it. In a modern, that might be
art, but Augustine had no interest in minimising
the miraculous character of the experience. He
believed, as we know from other passages, in
many miracles which most of us could not
accept at all, and so far as most of his readers
were concerned, the greater the miracle the
better they would be pleased ; and yet in regard
to this experience he leaves it standing, with —
as the German phrase goes — a note of interroga
tion against it. The voice is " as though of
some boy or girl " (" quasi pueri aut pueUae "),
and comes from the neighbouring house. And
though the explanation that it might be a
formula from some game is mentioned only to be
rejected — in so far as Augustine knew no game
in which it occurred — he was after all an African,
and this was Italy ; he may not have known all
the games that ever were played there, and even
children have been known on occasion to invent
a new game — so that that explanation remains
open. I do not urge it ; inclining rather to the
theory of an " audition," a subconscious impres
sion interpreted as external. But in any case
we may note the level way in which the experience
is refatecfc * "We get just the right touch of con
trast when we find that the scribe of one of the
manuscripts of the Confessions, not satisfied
with the commonplace suggestion of " from the

62 ST. AUGUSTINE
neighbouring house " (" de vicina domo "), and
resolved that there shall be no mistake about
the miracle, gives us " from the Divine abode "
(" de divina domo "). Then there is " the
codex of the Apostle." This is no chance book,
but one which he had been studying for some
time past (Conf. vii. 27). It was the book which,
lying on the table, had suggested the conversa
tion with Ponticianus, and he had caught it up
in going out, meaning perhaps to read in it when
he grew calmer. The idea of looking into it for
guidance, as the interpretation of the vague
command of the " voice " was suggested by the
story of Antony, about whom he had just
been hearing : " For I had heard concerning
Antony that going into a church he had taken
as addressed ito himself the words which were
being read : ' Go and sell all that thou
hast.' "
The fact that we find Augustine representing
things thus, when, so far as we can tell, a more
magical account would not have been inherently
distasteful to him, makes strongly in favour of
the reahty of what is told. One other Httle
point is, I think, worth mentioning in this con
nexion. When he gives us his cry in the words
of the Psalm passage (" How long, 0 Lord . . . ")
he adds that it was not reaUy in these words,
but to this effect. Why does he say that ? It

HIS CONVERSION 63
does not belong to the logic of the Hterary situa
tion that he should not have known the Psalms
at this time. He has told us previously that he
had read other scriptures besides the Pauline
Epistles, and he had been going from time to
time to the Church (Conf. v. 23) where they
were in constant use. Why then does he men
tion this unimportant detail ? The answer that
occurs to me is : Because he is dealing with
facts. Thus, in my view, we have no serious grounds
for impugning the accuracy of the Confessions,
so far as the account of the conversion is
concerned. The real critical difficulty which arises on
comparing the Confessions with the Dialogues
is quite a different one, and does not seem to be
noticed by Becker or Gourdon. It is that — on
the evidence of the Dialogues — Augustine was,
during the Cassiciacum period, not a more, but
a less, complete Neo-Platonist than we should
gather from the Confessions. The fact is, that
we find him in the Dialogues still struggfing with
certain inteUectual difficulties, which we should
gather from the Confessions he had already
solved on the fines of Neo-Platonism. The
simplest explanation seems to*- be that he had
made acquaintance with the Neo-Platonist books
at the period mentioned in the Confessions, and

64 ST. AUGUSTINE
had, so to speak, " glimpsed " the solutions of his
difficulties, had seen the direction in which they
lay, but that he had still to work them out as we
see him doing in the Dialogues.1 Alternatively
of course, it might be argued that the working-
out of these questions in the Dialogues is pro
forma — that it represents a process which had
been completed sometime before. But, while it
is doubtless quite true that most of the argu
ments used by Augustine did not first occur to
him while actually talking with his friends and
pupils, it is difficult to resist the impression
that he is here dealing with questions which
were really agitating his mind at that time
(cf. C. Acad. ii. 22-24) — the questions which he
was debating in those hours of silent thought
which he mentions in the De Ordine. It must
be remembered, of course, that the existence of
these difficulties is in no way incompatible with
the refigious experience of the Confessions. As
he tells us in the Dialogue C. Acad. iii. 43, he
had already made the decision to befieve, on
grounds of authority. The question which re
mained — the question raised by the Academic
Scepticism with which we find him still wresthng
1 I am glad to find myself in agreement on this point with Thimme,
Augustins geistige Entwinkelung, who writes (p. 19), that the Con
fessions would need only a very slight alteration of phraseology
(" leichte Nuanzirung einzelner Redewendungen ") to represent the
state of affairs exactly.

HIS CONVERSION 65
earnestly in the Dialogues — was whether a purely
inteHectual certainty could be reached. The
determination to believe stood fast, but the
restless intellect ceaselessly endeavoured to reach
the same conclusions along its own lines.

Ill

HIS CORRESPONDENCE— RELATIONS WITH
MEN AND AFFAIRS
The correspondence of St. Augustine fills one
of the large-quarto volumes of the Benedictine
edition, and even after deduction has been made
of several letters which might well be classed
as treatises, the extent and variety of it are
amazing. Not to speak of personal friends, bishops,
Government officials, pagan philosophers, Chris
tian scholars, poor widows, wealthy landowners,
town corporations, hermits, heretics, and schis
matics all come into some kind of epistolary rela
tion with Augustine of Hippo, himself scholar,
philosopher, theologian, ecclesiastic, pastor,
citizen, ascetic, and with it all a friendly and
helpful human being.
It will not be possible to cite here even a
representative selection, and it seems better to
give the circumstances of a few of the letters or
exchanges of letters pretty fully, rather than
66

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 67
to take a stray paragraph here and there from a
greater number.
The department of personal friendship in its
more intimate aspects is perhaps the least well
represented. Probably many letters of this
kind have perished. If the early Dialogues had
been lost, the letters would not entirely have
supplied their place as materials for reconstruct
ing the temperament and ethos of the writer.
We may begin, however, with the most
interesting of the few letters of this personal
character. It is addressed to a correspondent
with whom we have already had to do, the
young Licentius, the briUiant, flighty pupil of
the Cassiciacum days. But it is written more
than seven years later, and we must briefly
indicate the changes which had taken place
in Augustine's Hfe in the interval.
It was the winter of 386 to 387 which was
spent at Cassiciacum, foUowing his conversion
in the summer of 386. In the spring of 387 he
was baptized by Ambrose in Milan. In the
summer of the same year his mother died at
Ostia, and after her death he spent some months
in Rome. In 388 he returned to Africa, sold his small
property at Tagaste, and for a time lived what
was virtually a monastic life in company with a
few friends.

68 ST. AUGUSTINE
In 391, however, when visiting the town of
Hippo Regius, he was practicaUy compelled by
the urging of the people and their aged bishop
to allow himself to be ordained a presbyter. As
he says himself in one of his Hvely metaphors,
the post of second helmsman was thrust upon
him before he well knew how to handle an
oar. Four years later he was made co-episcopus
or colleague to the now infirm Valerius. In the
same year he received a letter from Licentius,
who was still in Italy. The letter itself is not
preserved, but Augustine has quoted in his
reply a poem which it contained addressed by
his pupil to himself. The letter seems to have
given Augustine some anxiety — not apparently
that his pupil was plunging into dissipation, but
simply that his interests were what may be
caUed worldly. Augustine fears that he is in
danger of losing touch with the things that
matter most, and writes him a letter fuU of
solicitous affection (Ep. 26). He quotes, as we
have said, the poem, and we may give a few
lines from it here to indicate the relation sub
sisting between them. The poem as a whole
is in a rather turgid style, overweighted especia-
aUy with strings of names Classical and bar
barian, and it is just in one or two passages
which express the writer's feeling of affection

HIS CORRESPONDENCE . 69
that the style simphfi.es itself a little and rises
into real impressiveness. RecaUing that pleasant
interlude at Cassiciacum when Augustine came
into such close relations with his pupils, he
writes some Hnes which may be rendered thus :
Oh, if the Dawn's joy-bearing chariot wheels
Could bring back once again those long-past days
We spent in Italy's bosom 'mid the peaks,
Tasting with thee fair leisure, and the laws,
The lofty laws, to which the good obey —
Oh, then, not cruel cold of winter's frost,
The West's fierce gales, or raging of the North
Should stay my eager steps from following thee :
Speak, and I follow . . .
The expression is perhaps over-elaborate, but
it is evident, I think, that Licentius looked
back with real affection to that pleasant sojourn
at Cassiciacum. The following Hnes also may
be quoted. To explain the aUusions it should
be said that Augustine and Licentius were both
natives of Tagaste, and that Augustine had
been for a time an inmate of his father's house :
Skills not to write us of one city sprung,
Nurtured in the same halls, of the same blood
Of ancient race, and linked by Christian faith ;
Nor yet that now the wide sea flows between :
Love laughs at both. . . .
That last half-fine — amor contemnit utrumque
— in its terse surprise-effect seems to me to carry
a real hint of poetry.
And while it is a commonplace that love laughs

70 ST. AUGUSTINE
at distance, the recognition that love is as far
from being a necessary product of close associa
tion as it is from being destroyed by separation
is not so commonplace.
In his reply, Augustine begins by saying he
regrets that his answer has been delayed by
circumstances which he will not enter into;
Licentius must just take his word for it — the
touch of authority to his old pupil is not out of
place. Then he turns to the poem and remarks
that Licentius would have been bitterly ashamed
if there had been any disorder in his verses ; is
he not ashamed to exhibit disorder in his Hfe ?
This strikes us, perhaps, as a rather artificial
argument, but he goes on to use Licentius'
affectionate words about himself as the basis
of a reaUy moving appeal. " Remember
what you wrote, ' Speak and I follow ; it
needs only your command.' Well, my com
mand is this : Give yourself to me, that is
the one thing needful, or rather give yourself
to my Lord, who is Lord of us all, and who
gave you your abifities. For I, what am I but
your servant through Him, and your fellow-
servant under Him ? And does not He himself
command you ? Hear the Gospel : ' Jesus
stood and cried, saying, Come unto Me, all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest.' . . ."

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 71
Then he urges the young man to go to visit
the saintly PauHnus of Nola, whose acquaintance
Augustine had himself lately made by an exchange
of letters. And in his next letter to PauHnus
he introduces Licentius to him. " The son
of Romanianus," writes Augustine, " whom I
count also my son — whose name you will find
mentioned in some of my writings — I have
decided, whether he visit you or no, to hand over
to you by letter, that you may console, exhort,
instruct him, not so much by the sound of your
voice as by the example of your fortitude. I
desire earnestly that while his Hfe is still in the
green blade he may turn the tares into fruit, and
may beheve those who have experienced that
which he desires to endanger himself by experi
encing. You will understand from his poem, and
from my letter to him [Augustine encloses a
copy], what I deplore in him, what I fear, and
what I desire. And I have good hope that by
the Lord's favour my anxieties about him may
be set at rest through you." PauHnus accepted
the charge, and wrote a friendly letter to the
young man ; but there our knowledge ceases.
By way of contrast with this intimately
personal and warm-hearted letter, we have now
to consider one in which Augustine deals with an
unknown correspondent, a young man of a very
different type (Ep. 118). This was a Greek

72 ST. AUGUSTINE
named Dioscorus who had studied both in Rome
and Carthage, and who seems to have been a
finely developed specimen of the genus bore.
He is about to return to Greece, where he desires
to pose as an authority on Latin Hterature and
philosophy, and suddenly realising that there
are a great many gaps in bis knowledge, he
writes off post haste to Augustine, whose reputa
tion has reached him in Carthage, to ask for
solutions of a whole catalogue of difficulties.
With a naivete which almost disarms criticism
he frankly says that his object in wanting to
know is that on his return he may, so to speak,
astonish the natives. And, with a touch which
borders on the farcical, he adds that he thinks
there is nothing improper in his request, but
even if there is, he begs Augustine to fulfil it,
because — of aU reasons in the world — he is just
on the point of saifing ! Augustine was, as we
gather from many indications, a good-natured
man, but he was not without a sense of his own
dignity, and a wholly justifiable estimate of the
value of his own very fully occupied time. It
is not surprising that he should have felt that
this enterprising young man needed the appfica-
tion of something in the nature of an astringent
to his inflated self-conceit.
. He begins : " You seem to have intended to
blockade me with an innumerable host of ques-

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 73
tions, or, rather, completely to overwhelm me
with them " ; and he goes on to make play with
the curious suggestion that the young man's
impending sea-voyage gave him a pecufiar claim
upon Augustine's attention. " The impropriety
of this request," writes Augustine, " you are
yourself aware of, though in your absorption
in your own interests you are unwiUing to
recognise it. For what else does it mean, when,
after saying that you see nothing improper in it,
you add, ' But be this as it may, I pray you to
answer me, for I am on the point of saihng ' ?
. . . For the effect of this is, that while you your
self see no impropriety in the request, yet if
there is anything improper in it you nevertheless
implore me to grant it — because you are about
to start on your voyage. Now what is the force
of this plea, ' because I am about to start on
my voyage ' ? You think, it would seem, that
impropriety can be washed away by salt water !
But even if it were so, my share in the fault
would remain unexpiated, for / have no intention
of making a voyage ! " Then he applies to him
a trenchant comment from the young man's
favourite poet, Persius :
Knowledge itself, it seems, is nought to you
Unless another knows you know it too.1
1 Scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter. Sat. i. 27.

74 ST. AUGUSTINE
" 0 cause," says Augustine grimly, " weU worthy
to occupy the hours which bishops devote to
study while other men sleep ! "
But the curious and interesting thing is, that
instead of dismissing the importunate inquirer
with this rebuke, Augustine ends by writing him
a long and learned letter, deafing with the history
of philosophy and the relation of philosophy to
rehgion. He intimates also that he has answered
many of the detailed questions in the margin of
his correspondent's manuscript. What led him
to answer so fully? It was partly, no doubt,
good-nature ; partly zeal for bis correspondent's
weffare, for the answer is adapted to put the
young man's whole conception of learning on
a higher plane ; and partly perhaps — one is
tempted to conjecture — that, Hving as he was,
remote from his old interests [he tells us
incidentally that there was not a copy of Cicero
to be had in all Hippo], he may not have been
altogether loath to have his thoughts directed
to them again. But, it may be noted, he entirely
decfined to answer such of the questions as
dealt with Cicero's treatise on rhetoric, the De
Oratore. That art, which in his view lent itself
so much to trifling, to flattery, to making the
worse appear the better reason, he had re
nounced on becoming a Christian, and refused
henceforth to have anything to do with — at

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 75
least on its formal side. His style, of course,
bore to bis dying day the marks of his
rhetorical training, and in his advice about
preaching in the De Doctrina Christiana he
turns his technical knowledge to very good
account. We next turn to a letter of a more public
character, a historical document, in fact, of
some importance, for it gives an account of
how Augustine dealt with, and succeeded in
putting a stop to, an ecclesiastical abuse (Ep.
29). In the North African Church a custom
prevailed of holding feasts in the chapels or
oratories dedicated to the martyrs upon the
martyr's "birthday" — the anniversary of
his martyrdom. The feast was an Agape,
such as had originaUy been attached to the
celebration of the Communion, but which it
had been found advisable at an early date to
separate from it. No doubt in the case of many
devout and sober-minded Christians the feast
was very much a pro forma affair, and feUowship
in prayer at the martyr's tomb was the import
ant matter. St. Augustine has himseK given us
in the Confessions a very interesting account of
the way in which his mother used to celebrate
it. " When she brought her basket, with the
festal viands, to be given away after she had first
tasted them, she never set forth more than one

76 ST. AUGUSTINE
cup of wine, diluted to suit her own very sober
palate, from which she would take her sip, for
courtesy, and if there were more than one
oratory to be visited she would carry round the
same cup to each" (Conf. vi. 2). But the
majority of the African Christians were not so
temperate. These festivals were treated as occasions for
boisterous revelry. Augustine himself, in fact,
tells us that they were originally permitted
as a substitute for the pagan festivals, an
accommodation to the weakness of new con
verts from paganism. " It seemed good to our
ancestors," he says, " making for the time a
concession to this infirmity, to permit them to
celebrate, instead of the festivals which they
had renounced, other feasts in honour of the
holy martyrs, which were observed, not as before
with a profane purpose, but with similar self-
indulgence " ; and the Greek Father, Gregory of
Nyssa, gives a similar account. Augustine had
found when resident in Milan that these festivals
had there been abohshed by Ambrose, and when
he himself became a presbyter in Hippo, even
before he was made bishop, he determined to use
his best endeavours to get them abohshed there
also. He was not, Hke Ambrose, a man of
autocratic temper, nor had he as yet a position
of authority comparable to that of the great

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 77
Bishop of Milan, but he used the means at his
disposal with exceUent strategy. He secured
the sympathy of his own bishop, and he wrote to
Aurefius, Bishop of Carthage, to propose that a
Council should be held to pronounce against
the abuse ; and this was done. The Council
met in 393, definitely forbade the clergy to take
part in any such festivals, and directed that
every effort should be made to restrain the
people from engaging in them. Thus fortified,
Augustine set about his personal task of dealing
with the question at Hippo. One factor in the
situation which we must realise clearly to our
selves, is the temperament of the North African
populace. They were extremely emotional —
easfiy moved to tears, but on the other hand
easily roused to violence. They were capable
of raising, even within the walls of the church,
a riot in which the lives of the clergy might be
endangered — Augustine himseK gives us else
where an account of such a disturbance. They
were extremely attached to these festivals, which
had been rendered reputable by the prescription
of long usage. Moreover, the Donatist schis
matics, who had the reputation of being, in
general, stricter than the Cathohc Church, con
tinued to countenance them. To attack the
custom needed therefore some personal courage,
because it might raise a dangerous riot ; and

78 ST. AUGUSTINE
some moral courage, because it might strengthen
the schismatics at the expense of the Church.
Such were the circumstances in which Augustine
planned his campaign, and carried it to a success
ful issue.
Most men, I suppose, if they had gained a
success of that kind in a matter which lay so
near their hearts, would feel a keen desire to teU
some understanding friend aU about it, and that
is just what Augustine did. He wrote a full
account of the matter to his old friend Alypius
— whom we last met as a rising young lawyer,
but who had in the meantime entered the
Church, and was now Bishop of his native place,
Tagaste. Augustine begins by reminding him
how they had prayed together about the matter
beforehand, and he rejoices that they may now
give thanks together. The prohibition had been
announced during a recent visit of Alypius, and
soon after his departure, says Augustine, he
became aware that some were violently declaring
that they would refuse to obey it. Shortly before
the festival of a certain martyr named Leontius,
the verse about casting pearls before swine
occurred in the ordinary lesson of the day, and
Augustine took occasion to preach from it. "I
discoursed therefore," he says, " concerning dogs
and swine in such a way as to compel those who
clamour with obstinate barking against the

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 79
divine precepts, and who are given up to the
abominations of carnal pleasures, to blush for
shame." This sermon, he teUs us, was much discussed
and " found many opponents." The eve of the
festival of Leontius fell upon Quadragesima
Sunday. Augustine read and commented on
the passage about the cleansing of the temple,
and argued a fortiori, if the Lord abominated
trafficking in the temple, how much more
drunkenness and revelry within the church. Then
he read the passage about the golden calf in
Exodus xxxii. to show that even in Israel such
feasting was only known in connexion with idol
worship. Here we may note a very interesting
Httle incidental touch. Augustine says that he
had this passage of Scripture prepared, ready to
be put into his hands — presumably by a deacon.
In an ancient manuscript, finding a particular
passage is a matter that takes time, and Augustine
as a practised orator knew that the break caused
by even a few moments' delay may lead to
completely losing the attention of a popular
audience. To have provided against that Httle
difficulty beforehand was a piece of real general
ship, and shows how carefuUy he must have
thought out his plan of campaign. Having
made his apphcation of the passage in Exodus,
Augustine went on to point out how grave are

80 ST. AUGUSTINE
the sins with which Paul associates drunkenness,
how severely he comments on the disorders at
the Communion, and how vividly he contrasts
the works of the flesh with the fruits of the Spirit.
So far he had confined himself to reading and
comment, but as he handed back the manuscript
the people cried out for a discourse (apparently
much as people nowadays at a pofitical meeting
caU out, "Speech, Speech" ("imperata oratione"
are Augustine's words). Perhaps he had expected
this ; at any rate he rose to his opportunity.
" I set before their eyes," he says, " with aU the
power at my command, as the danger itself
constrained me, and as the Lord was pleased
to give me strength, the peril shared by them,
who were committed to my care, and by me who
must give account to the Chief Shepherd, and
implored them by His humifiation, by the un
paralleled insults, the buffetings and spittings
which He endured, by His pierced hands and
crown of thorns, and by His cross and blood,
to have pity on me at least, if they were enemies
to themselves. ... In this appeal I put forth
aU the power in thought and utterance which
in an emergency so great and hazardous our
Saviour and Ruler was pleased to supply. I
did not move them to weep by first weeping
myself ; but while these things were being
spoken, I own that, moved by the tears which

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 81
they began to shed, I myself could not refrain
from following their example. And when we
had thus wept together I concluded my sermon
in the fuU persuasion that they would be re
strained by it from the abuses denounced."
Next morning, the day of the festival, some of
the malcontents came to him privately, stiU in a
very uncertain mood. He talked them over, how
ever. Then, going to the church, he explained
how the custom had arisen by way of accom
modation to heathen practices, and how most of
the Churches beyond the sea had already sup
pressed it. He gave notice that in the afternoon
a meeting would be held for the reading of
Scripture and singing of psalms, "and by the
number who should assemble for this purpose it
would plainly appear who were guided by
reason and who were the slaves of appetite."
In the afternoon, he records with satisfaction,
a greater number assembled than in the morning.
He spoke only a few words, expressing gratitude
to God, but he could not refrain from referring
to the sounds of revelry which proceeded from
the neighbouring Donatist church, and remark
ing that the beauty of day is enhanced by
contrast with the darkness of night. We should
have been weU content, no doubt, to spare that
touch of self-righteousness ; but he had reason
for satisfaction, for he had won a real victory G

82 ST. AUGUSTINE
for the cause of spiritual rehgion. And the
victory was complete. When he retired from
the church the people remained there, continu
ing to sing psalms " even tiU dayhght failed."
This . letter has shown us Augustine as
a Churchman — a parish clergyman — dealing
vigorously with a practical abuse. We have
now to look at him as a scholar discussing
Scriptural problems with a f eUow-scholar. In the
whole of Augustine's wide correspondence there
are few more interesting letters than those which
he exchanged with the greatest of contemporary
Church Fathers, St. Jerome. I say " exchanged,"
because here we have fortunately the letters of
both parties. In the main, they are occupied
with a scholars' controversy, and the fluctua
tions of tone and temper in the contributions of
the two disputants are in themselves of some
human interest. Before we go on to the subject-
matter, however, it is worth while to realise to
ourselves the local circumstances in which the
correspondence took place.
Jerome, after Hving the Hfe of a wandering
scholar, recalling in some respects that of
Erasmus, had settled down at Bethlehem, where
he presided over a monastery founded for him
by his convert Paula. Here he was devoting
himseK mainly to the work of translating and
commenting upon the Scriptures. The two

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 83
scholars were thus widely separated in space,
and stiU more so by difficulties of communica
tion. Whereas, for example, between Rome and
Alexandria there would be fairly regular com
munication — though trade had much fallen off
from the early days of the Empire — it was only
by roundabout journeyings that Bethlehem
could be reached from Hippo Regius. We are
sometimes told that there was an elaborate
postal service in those days ; and there was, in
fact, a system of couriers and change -horses
on some of the main routes, but it was not
maintained for the convenience of individuals
but solely in the interests of the Government,
to carry administrative messages. The corre
spondence of Augustine and Jerome was wholly
dependent on the finding of brethren travelhng
from one country to the other ; and accident,
illness, or change of plan on the part of the
messenger might delay the arrival of a letter
indefinitely. There is a passage in Kingsley's
Hypatia which well illustrates this private carry
ing of letters. There, in a certain case, both
speed and secrecy are necessary in the delivery
of a letter, and a monk who bears it works his
passage as an oarsman on the benches of a
galley. When he presents the letter the recipient
courteously invites him to be seated ; and the
monk feehngly rephes, in words which command

84 ST. AUGUSTINE
the special sympathies of rowing men : "Of
sitting, as of all carnal pleasure, cometh satiety
at the last " ! Several passages in the letters
make pathetic references to the uncertainties
attending such means of communication ; for
instance, Augustine writes : " I can scarcely
send a letter to you, and scarcely receive one
from you at intervals not of days nor of months
but of several years " (Ep. 166. 1) ; and again,
still more strikingly : "I remember writing to
your Holiness about these words in the Epistle
to the Galatians when I was young ; and behold
I am now advanced in age and have not yet
received a reply" (Ep. 73. 5). Of course in
this case some accident had befallen the original
letter. The subjects discussed in the letters are
mainly two : the dissension between St. Peter
and St. Paul at Antioch, described in Galatians
ii. ; and Jerome's new translations of the Scrip
tures. In regard to the incident at Antioch,
Jerome had maintained in his Commentary on
Galatians that St. Paul did not really rebuke
St. Peter : it was an arranged scene between
the two apostles, an object-lesson which they
gave to their converts. He argues that St.
Paul, who elsewhere declares that " to the Jews
he became as a Jew," could not have found fault
with St. Peter for foUowing the same principle.

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 85
The argument is felt by the modern reader
to be artificial ; for his contemporaries it derived
its real strength from a prepossession. The
reverence felt for St. Peter made it difficult to
befieve that he could have been rebuked by St.
Paul, his junior as an apostle. Here Augustine
has our complete sympathy when he argues that
if Scripture could be made to mean the opposite
of what it says in this way, it would cease to
have any authority for us whatever, and that
St. Paul, who is, so to speak, on oath in all this
narrative — having introduced it by saying,
" Behold, before God, I He not," — could not
possibly have described a pretence in this way
without giving any hint that it was a pretence.
As regards St. Paul's becoming a Jew to the Jews
and a Greek to the Greeks, Augustine, with fine
insight, says that this means that St. Paul put
himseK by sympathy in the place of those whom
he desired to help. " He became all things to
all men, not with the subtlety of a deceiver, but
with the love of one filled with compassion, using
the remedies required by the ills under which
other men laboured, as though their case had been
his own " (82. 27 fm.). And he shows historical
discernment in meeting the argument : " How
do you account for the fact that St. Paul per
mitted Jews to continue in the performance of
their ancestral customs, whereas you as a bishop

86 ST. AUGUSTINE
would refuse to receive a Jewish convert unless
he abandoned them ? " " Slowly and by degrees,"
he says, " aU this observance of these types was
to vanish away. . . . The toleration for the
time of their continuing to observe these was
enough to declare their exceUence as things
which, though they were to be given up, were not,
Hke the worship of idols, worthy of abhorrence ;
but they were not to be imposed on others lest
they should be thought necessary to salvation "
(Ep. 82. 15, 16). " The Apostle," he goes on to
say, " provided that these ceremonies should, so
to speak, receive an honourable burial. They
are now dead and buried, and any one who pro
poses to continue their observance is not piously
performing his part in the funeral obsequies, but
impiously violating the sepulchre." That, it
seems to me, is not only wittily said, but pro
found in thought. The case is not, of course,
allowed to go by default. Jerome was as skiUed
a dialectician as Augustine, and makes effective
use of the well-known difficulties about the cir
cumcision of Timothy, the non-circumcision of
Titus, and the case of the men who were purified
from the Vow. He also fortifies himseK with
the agreement of some of the Greek expositors.
There is some sharp speaking on both sides, and
Jerome, who shows the greater acerbity, has
some excuse, for one letter of Augustine's attack-

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 87
ing bis views failed to be defivered, but was
copied by unauthorised persons and circulated
at Rome, so that Jerome first heard of it in
directly, and indeed received an unsigned copy
before the original. It is interesting to note,
however, that in the end Jerome allowed himseK
to be convinced by Augustine, or, at any rate,
came round to his view. This does not appear
in the letters exchanged between them, though
the tone of the last of these is very cordial ; but
Augustine notes in a letter to Oceanus (Ep. 180)
that Jerome in his last work against Pelagius
" has maintained the same opinion concerning
what was said and done by the apostles on that
occasion as I myseK, following the blessed
Cyprian, had done." The aUusion to Cyprian
as his own authority for this view, pleasantly
avoids any hint of triumph in this statement.
When we turn to the other question debated
between the two scholars, the position is reversed
as regards the strength of their arguments. In
a matter of Hnguistic scholarship, Augustine,
with his restricted knowledge of Greek and
ignorance of Hebrew, was no match for the
amazingly learned Jerome. To understand the
points at issue between them we must briefly
recaU the main facts in regard to the Latin
versions of Scripture. Up to Jerome's time
there had been numerous different recensions of

88 ST. AUGUSTINE
the Latin version in circulation, and in the case
of the Old Testament the version was not from
the original but from the Septuagint. At the
request of Pope Damasus, Jerome undertook a
revised version. Beginning with the Gospels he
went on to the rest of the New Testament. Later
on, he seems 1 to have revised the whole of the
Old Testament from the Septuagint, making use
of the critical marks given in Origen's Hexapla,
and finally he made a new translation of the Old
Testament direct from the Hebrew. Of these
various undertakings, Augustine approved of
the revision of the New Testament, and he had
no objection to the current Latin version of the
LXX. being improved from a better text ; but
the idea of a new translation from the Hebrew
filled him with suspicion and alarm. For one
thing, he had an extremely high estimate of the
authority of the Seventy translators. He was
rather inclined, as appears from De Doctrina
Christiana, ii. 22, to befieve the story according
to which they aU worked in separate ceUs and
miraculously produced versions agreeing in every
particular. He expresses himseK, it is true, with
some reserve about this, and stiU more guardedly
in De Civitate, xviii. 42, 43 ; but he adds in both
cases the further suggestion that even if they
1 There is some doubt whether this revision was completed. See
H. J. White in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, " Vulgate," iv. 875a.

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 89
worked together they were miraculously guided
in such a way that their departures from the
Hebrew represented the mind of the Spirit —
that they were led to deviate from it in a way
which would adapt the Divine message better
to the Gentiles. They were, in fact, as he some
times expresses it, not merely interpreters but
prophets, speaking with an authority coUateral
with that of the text. Holding these views,
he presents to Jerome what seems to him an
inescapable dilemma. " It is to me," he says,
" most extraordinary that anything should at
this date be found in the Hebrew MSS. which
has escaped so many translators perfectly ac
quainted with the language. . . . Now these
things are either obscure, or plain : if they are
obscure, it is believed that you may possibly be
mistaken ; if they are clear, it is not believed that
the previous translators could possibly have been
mistaken." To this Jerome replies, effectively
enough, that the same principle would equally
discredit Augustine's own commentaries on Scrip
ture, or indeed any attempt to come nearer to
the meaning of the sacred text. Another con
sideration which weighed with Augustine may
be described as a kind of perverted scholarly
instinct. " So long as we had to do with transla
tions from the LXX.," he says, " we could check
the version by the original, but now that the

90 ST. AUGUSTINE
translation is based upon the Hebrew, we are
helpless." This, of course, is not an argument of
any weight, but members of a generation which
has seen Greek scholarship obhged to yield place
to Aramaic scholarship in regard to so many
questions connected with the Gospels, can at
least sympathise with Augustine's feehngs. But
he is not confined to theoretical and sentimental
arguments ; he has also a very practical one. As
in the early days of our own Revised Version,
though with less justification from a Hterary
point of view, the people simply would not have
it. Augustine tells (Ep. 71) of a curious incident
at a Httle town in North Africa. The bishop
there had introduced the reading of Jerome's
new version in the church. In reading the Book
of Jonah he came to the familiar passage about
Jonah's gourd. Here, instead of " cucurbita "
(gourd), Jerome's version had " hedera " (ivy).
And when this was read, destroying the familiar
detail of the mental picture, immediately the
church was in an uproar ! We find it hard to
imagine so much excitement arising over so
small a point, but these emotional North Africans
were in many respects Hke children, and, Hke
children Hstening to a favourite story, they
resented any alteration in the consecrated
wording. " Thereupon," says Augustine, " arose
such a tumult in the congregation, correcting

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 91
what had been read and denouncing the transla
tion as false, that the bishop was compeUed to
ask the testimony of the Jewish residents.
These, whether from ignorance or spite [he
diplomaticaUy says to Jerome], answered that
the words in the Hebrew were correctly rendered
in the Greek and in the [Old] Latin based upon
it. What further need I say ? The bishop was
compelled to correct your version in that passage
as if it had been falsely translated, as he desired
not to be left without a congregation — a calamity
which he narrowly escaped." In a later letter
Jerome gives learned reasons for his choice of
the word, but botanicaUy he seems to have been
quite wrong — indeed he admits that " hedera "
is a compromise. But the interesting thing is
that, in spite of this unfortunate instance,
Augustine came round to the better opinion
regarding the advantage of a direct translation.
" Regarding your version," he says, " you have
persuaded me of the advantage of your plan of
translating from the Hebrew " (Ep. 82. 34),
though apparently mainly on the ground that it
was a safeguard against omissions or corruptions
on the part of Jewish translators.
To be able to admit oneseK convinced by
argument after vehemently maintaining the
opposite opinion, is a test of character, and it
is interesting to observe that these two Church

92 ST. AUGUSTINE
Fathers, both of them vehement men and keen
controversiaHsts, each had the candour to accept
the better opinion at the hands of an adversary.
One other passage from this correspondence
I should Hke to quote, because it shows St.
Augustine's temper at its best. Jerome had
written to him about his bitter quarrel with his
former friend and pupil, Rufinus. Augustine
expresses his sympathy but avoids abusing
Rufinus, and breaks out into this memorable
appeal : "HI could anywhere meet you both
— which, alas, I cannot hope to do — so strong are
my agitation, grief, and fear, that I think I should
cast myseK at your feet, and there, weeping till
I could weep no more, would, with all the
eloquence of love, appeal first to each of you for
his own sake, then to both for each other's sake,
and for the sake of those, especiaUy the weak
for whom Christ died, whose salvation is in peril
as they look on you, who occupy a place so con
spicuous on the stage of time, imploring you not
to write and scatter abroad these bitter words
against each other " (Ep. 73).
It is passages Hke that, and there are not
a few such in his letters, which bring home to us
the great Churchman's claim to the title " Saint."
Nor is the emotional tenderness shown in this
passage incompatible with sternness where he
feels it to be necessary.

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 93
On one occasion, we learn from Ep. 250, a
young bishop named Auxifius had taken very
high-handed action against a Christian govern
ment official named Classicianus. This official
in the execution of his duties had come to the
church in pursuit of certain law-breakers who
had taken refuge there. He had not forcibly
violated the right of sanctuary, but he had
protested against the bishop's affording sanctuary
in this case. The bishop, who was young and
headstrong, had thereupon inflicted excommuni
cation, not only upon Classicianus himself but
upon all his household. This was a very serious
matter. A child born while the sentence held
and dying unbaptized would, according to the
prevaihng view, be eternally lost. The official
complained to Augustine. The latter had no
direct jurisdiction over his fellow-bishop ; but his
years and the consideration in which he was
generally held gave him great authority, and he
writes with a kind of courteous severity which
is very effective. " For my own part," he says,
" although I have been most grievously troubled
by the cruel excesses with which some men have
vexed the Church, I have never ventured to do
as you have done, for this reason, that if any one
were to challenge me to justify such an act, I
could give no satisfactory reply."
Notwithstanding the number of years for

94 ST. AUGUSTINE
which he has been a bishop he is wilhng, he says,
to learn from one who has not yet been a twelve
month in the same office, " if he undertakes to
teach me how we can justify our conduct either
before men or before God if we inflict a spiritual
punishment on innocent souls because of another
person's crime." A Httle further on comes the
fine human touch, going beyond mere officiafism,
which is rarely lacking in Augustine. " And
think not," he says, " that because we are bishops
[notice the " we " ; how very different it would
have sounded if he had said because you are a
bishop] — think not that because we are bishops
it is impossible for unjust passionate resentment
to gain secretly upon us ; let us rather remember
that because we are men our life in the midst of
temptations and snares is beset with the greatest
possible dangers." When he comes to the point
he speaks out quite directly. " Cancel therefore
the sentence which perhaps under the influence
of unusual excitement you have passed ; and
let the mutual love which united Classicianus
and you since the time when you were a cate
chumen be restored again. Let strife be banished
and peace brought back, lest this man who is
your friend be lost to you, and the devil who is
your enemy rejoice over you both."
To the victim of the excommunication he
writes : " One thing I say dehberately as an

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 95
unquestionable truth, that if any befiever has
been wrongfully excommunicated, the sentence
will do harm rather to him who pronounces
it than to him who suffers this wrong. For
it is by the Holy Spirit dwelhng in holy persons
that any one is loosed or bound, and He inflicts
unmerited punishment upon no one ; for by
Him the love which worketh not evil is shed
abroad in our hearts " (Fragment attached to
Ep. 250).
On another occasion we find him standing up
energeticaUy for social righteousness in a case
between landlord and tenant. The circum
stances have to be gathered from the allusions
in the letter (Ep. 247), but it appears pretty
clear that a rascally land-steward had coUected
the rents from the peasant occupiers and
absconded with them. He had no authority to
coUect these rents, and the landowner, acting
apparently within bis legal rights, was proposing
to exact the rents a second time from men who
were very near the poverty Hne. The land
owner was professedly a Christian, and Augustine
writes him a very trenchant letter. He argues
the equity of the case, pointing out that these
ignorant peasants could not be expected to know
just at what point the authority of the agent
stopped. The landowner, he says, ought either
to have given them definite instructions in writing

96 ST. AUGUSTINE
that they were not to pay the land-steward in
any circumstances, or alternatively he ought to
have told them only to pay him on the produc
tion of special written authority. [Augustine
had a good deal of Church property under his
own charge, and seems to have been a careful
business man.] He reminds the landowner —
apparently from personal knowledge — that he
had in several cases been rather inconsistent
in the amount of authority he permitted to
these land-stewards. He taxes him with deliber-
ately dodging a personal interview with himseK
— one fancies Augustine was not a pleasant
person to meet when he had grounds for righteous
indignation — and he offers him by letter what he
caUs a draught of that bitter medicine, truth.
" Would that any abuse which you direct against
myself might do you as Httle harm as it will do
me, and would that the injustice which you are
inflicting on the poor and wretched might do you
no more harm than it does them. For they
suffer for this present time, but be well assured
that you are laying up to yourseK wrath against
the day of wrath and of the revelation of the
judgment of God. I beseech His mercy that He
will correct you here rather than reserve you for
that day when there wiU be no place for correction;
and I pray that He who has given you the fear
of Him, for which cause I do not despair of you,

HIS CORRESPONDENCE 97
will open your understanding, that you may see
what you are doing, and abhor it and amend it.
For you think Httle or nothing of things which
are so great evils that when your greed is suffi
ciently tamed to allow you to consider them, you
will water the earth with your tears that God
may have mercy upon you. If I am wrong in
thinking it unjust that men should have twice
exacted from them what they are scarce able
to pay once, then do what you choose. But
if you recognise that it is unjust, then do what
is right ; do what God commands and what I
urge upon you. I ask it not more for their sake
than for your own." One may venture to
hope that the rents were remitted.
By way of contrast with this severe letter
we may conclude with one which shows the
touch of humour so often noticed in Augustine.
Astrological fatalism, the theory that men's
actions are governed by the stars, was a very
Hving belief in his day, and in writing to one
correspondent he meets it with the following
effective argumentum ad hominem : " When one
of these astrologers," he says (Ep. 246), " after
selHng to wealthy chents his absurd prognostica
tions, caUs back his thoughts from the ivory
tablets [on which he inscribes them] to the
management of his own house, he reproves his
wife, not with words only, but with blows, if he
H

98 ST. AUGUSTINE
finds her, I do not say jesting too freely, but even
looking out of the window. Nevertheless, if
she were to expostulate saying : ' Why beat me,
beat Venus rather, if you can, since it is under
that planet's influence that I am compelled to
do what you complain of ' — he would certainly
apply his energies, not to invent some of the
absurd jargon by which he cajoles the pubhc,
but to inflict some of the just correction by which
he maintains his authority at home ! " 1
1 Augustine frequently uses his gift of humour to ridicule super
stition, and although it is not from the letters, I may quote, by way
of pendent to the above, the following rather good story : " Many
people," he says, " hold that to have anything belonging to one eaten
by mice portended some disaster. The story goes that some one
once came to Cato with a long face announcing that the mice had
eaten his boots. Cato replied : ' It would have been a very much
stranger thing if the boots had eaten the mice ! ' " (De Doct.
Christ, ii. 31).

IV
OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY
If one were asked for a good iUustration of the
contrast between poetry and prose — between
essential poetry and prose, that is — one might
offer it in a pleasantly paradoxical form by com
paring a famous verse of Pope, as iUustrating
the prosaic treatment, with a famous passage of
St. Augustine's prose, as illustrating the poetic
treatment. Pope, in the often-quoted line, in
forms us didactically that
The proper study of mankind is man. 
Augustine, in a perhaps less well-known passage,
expresses his astonishment that men " go forth
to marvel at lofty mountains and mighty torrents,
and the expanse of ocean, and the movements
of the stars — and pass themselves by."
That was a mistake which Augustine at least
was in no danger of making ; in that sense he
could not pass himself by. He had, as we have
already seen, a keen enough eye for external
99

100 ST. AUGUSTINE
nature, but that to which he constantly returns
as by a kind of fascination is what he elsewhere
calls the " abyss of human consciousness "
(" abyssus humanae conscientiae ").
I do not know that there is much use in specu
lating on the cause of his keen interest in
psychology. We are sometimes told that it was
his Neo-Platonic studies which made him a
psychologist. There is, it seems to me, an un
answerable argument against that. The earlier
part of the Confessions, prior to his acquaintance
with Neo-Platonism, is full of accurately observed
and vividly remembered inner experience. A
subsequent study of Neo-Platonism would not
have suppfied him with either the observation
or the memory of that previous period. More
over, the psychology of Plotinus is of quite a
different stamp from that of Augustine, being
much more metaphysical in character.
Others have suggested that the explanation
lies in the intensity of his refigious experience.
But surely this is — I will not say to put the cart
before the horse, but at least to suggest a
relation of cause and effect where the real relation
is one of interaction. The intensity of his
religious experience is surely in part at least due
to the vividness with which his inner life was
present to his consciousness.
I do not think we can get much beyond the

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 101
plain fact that he had a natural bent for psycho-
logising. The fact itself is indisputable. His
psychology is the centre of his thinking, and
suppfies the standpoint from which he approaches
other inteUectual problems. It will therefore
be worth while to go into it in some detail.
First, I propose to sketch his system, then to give
some general illustrations of his observational
powers ; and then to trace his application of
psychological methods in the treatment of
some of his main philosophical and theological
doctrines. In regard to two questions which stand on
the threshold of the subject, Augustine displays
a genuinely scientific caution, refusing to speak
dogmatically where evidence is inaccessible.
These are, the origin of the soul, and the manner
of its union with the body. By the origin of the
soul is here meant, not the ultimate origin of its
existence — that, of course, Augustine unhesitat
ingly refers to God — but the question whether
each individual soul is newly created, or whether
it is derived through the parents from the primal
man, or whether all souls were created at the
beginning, and continue to exist in a kind of
storehouse or reservoir of soul life, from which
they are either sent into bodies, or find their
way into them by a kind of natural tendency.
It is not from any lack of interest in this question

102 ST. AUGUSTINE
that Augustine refuses to decide between the
rival theories. He discusses them at some length
in at least four different works — De Libero
Arbitrio, iii. 55 ff. ; De Genesi ad Litteram, vii.
§§ 35, 36; Epistle, 166; and the De Anima et ejus
Origine. It is obvious that the theory which
would best support his doctrine of original sin
is traducianism, the theory that the soul is
derived from the parents, and so ultimately from
the first man. This advantage was perhaps
outweighed for him by the fact that it seemed
to lend itseK to a materiafising conception of
the soul (cf. De Gen. ad Lit. x. § 40).
Of creationism he says, in Letter 166, that
he " could wish it were true," but as this was
the opinion of Jerome, to whom he was writing,
and as Augustine states the objections to it
very fully, the form of the remark is perhaps due
to courtesy. The other opinion, that of the
storehouse of soul Hfe, was commended to him
by his Neo-Platonic studies, and he discusses it
with a certain sympathy in De Genesi ad Litteram,
vii. §§ 35, 36, especiaUy in the form according to
which the soul finds its way into the body by a-
kind of natural tendency — very much the theory
which is suggested by those Hnes in the epilogue
of Tennyson's In Memoriam :
A soul shall draw from out the vast
And strike its being into bounds.

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 103
But the fact remains that though he felt attracted
to one or other theory on various grounds, he
refused, in the absence of sufficient evidence,
to come to any definite conclusion. In his
Retractations, his final review of his works,1 he
says frankly, referring to an earlier allusion to
the subject : "I did not know then, and I do
not know now."
The other subject, of which he equally recog
nises the mysterious character, is the nature of
the union between soul and body. In the De
Civ. Dei, xxi. x. 1, he avows : " The manner in-
which the spirit inheres in the body ... is
altogether wonderful, nor can it be understood
by man." He has a clear consciousness of what
may be called the metaphysical difficulty of the
inter-relation of spirit and matter, which has led
so many modern psychologists to adopt some
form of psycho-physical paraUehsm. So much
so that, assuming the inter-relation as a fact, he
can use it as an a fortiori argument for the con-
ceivabihty of the Incarnation. Writing to a
pagan philosopher who had raised some of the
1 In accordance with its derivation from re- and tractare, retractatio
means a " re-treatment," " revision," not a " withdrawal " of a
previously expressed opinion. It is only in comparatively few cases
that Augustine " retracts " (re-traho) in the modern sense his earlier
statement. It seems necessary to say this, since a well-known English
dictionary quotes from the preface to the A.V. a passage which is,
at least, misleading : " St. Augustine was not ashamed to retractate,
we might say revoke, many things that had passed him."

104 ST. AUGUSTINE
difficulties regarding the Incarnation, he says:
" In the person of man there is a combination
of soul and body. In the person of Christ there
is a combination of the Godhead with man,
that is to say with a soul having a body. Of
the two events the combination of two im
material substances [God and the soul] ought to
be more easily believed than a combination in
which one is immaterial and the other material "
(Ep. 137. 11). But in spite of this sense oL
the difficulties he boldly expresses his belief in
the reciprocal influence of mind and body.
-" It is my opinion," he writes in Ep. 9, § 3,
"that every movement of the mind affects in
some degree the body. This is patent even to
the senses when the movements of the mind
are vehement, as in grief, anger, and so forth.
Whence we may conjecture that when we are
thinking, although no bodily effect of the
mental state is discernible by us, there may
be some such effect which would be discernible
by beings of a higher perceptive faculty.
Therefore, these footprints of its motion, so
to speak, which the mind impresses on the
body, may perchance not only remain but set
up as it were a certain disposition."
He is not, however, without a conception of
the manner of the soul's presence in the body,
and it is a tribute to his acuteness of mind that

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 105
— to use modern terms — he does not treat it as
an explanation, but only as a description of the
facts. He holds that the soul is, so to speak,
dynamically omnipresent in the body, capable
oT acting "and feefing as a whole at every point.
It is present, as he says, " vi et potentia " and
" tota singulis partibus " (De Immort. An. 25 ; De
Quant. Anim. § 69). This does not mean, it
wUl be seen later, that he underrates the physio
logical importance of the brain, and, so long as
it is not regarded as an explanation, it is, no
doubt, a better conception than the location of
the soul in the pineal gland, or any of the other
localisations with which the psychology of a
century or so ago made play.
It is interesting to note also that he has con
sidered a difficulty arising from what may be
caUed the side of natural science, though it is
fair to say that the experiment which brought
it home to him occurred accidentally.
" One day," he says, " at Cassiciacum the
youths as they were recfining on the ground in a
shady place noticed a little many-footed creeping
animal, a kind of long worm, I mean. It is
quite common, but I had never known about
it what I am going to tell you. One of the
youths took the butt-end of the stylus which he
happened to have in his hand and struck it,
severing it in two. Forthwith the two parts

106 ST. AUGUSTINE
of its body made off in opposite directions,
moving just as rapidly and vigorously as if it
had been two animals of the same kind. Dumb
founded at this miracle, and curious as to its
cause, the youths quickly carried the Hving
sections to where Alypius and I were sitting.
We were no less astonished to see them run
about the writing-tablet in every direction.
And if one of them was touched with the
stylus, it twisted itself up on feeling the touch,
while the other part felt nothing, but pursued
its own line of movement elsewhere. Further,
we tried how far this would go on, and divided
the worm, or rather, I should say, the worms,
into numerous parts, and they all continued to
move in such a way that if we had not divided
them ourselves, we could have befieved each of
them to have always existed separately" (De
Quant. Anim. 62).
Augustine is quite aware of the difficulties
which this raises. He says : " Had I not already
been acquainted with many abstruse and subtle
reasonings concerning the body and its organisa
tion, concerning space and time and motion
which bear upon this question, I should have
inclined to award the palm to those who say
that the mind is corporeal " (" qui corpus esse
animam dicunt "). Unfortunately he does not
confide to us the whole of these subtle reasonings.

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 107
He takes the fine that if the weight of other
evidence makes in favour of an immaterial unit
ary soul, dynamicaUy rather than locally present
in the body, then we must be content to sus
pend our judgment as to the explanation of this
phenomenon of the divided worm.1 A Httle
later on, however, we come on what is perhaps
a clue to his real opinion. To his interlocutor
Evodius — who, he indicates, is not trained in
philosophic speculation — he remarks : " If I
should say that there was but one soul, you would
be up in arms, because it is happy in one and
unhappy in another, and the same thing cannot
be at once happy and unhappy. If I say that
it is both one and many, you will laugh, nor can
I easily find a way of restraining your laughter.
But if I say that souls are many only, I shall
laugh at myself, and I Hke stiU less to displease
myself than to displease you " (De Quant. Anim.
§ 69). Here it is evidently the second alternative
— that (the) soul is at the same time one and
many — which appeals to him. In this he is
1 It is amusing to find that the French philosopher Nourrisson,
writing some fifty years ago, solemnly takes Augustine to task for
confusing the issue by bringing in this question of the animal soul,
whereas in the latest defence of Animism, M'Dougall's Body and Mind,
the same phenomenon is noted as a real difficulty in the way of
belief in a unitary soul or consciousness. "Many of the lower
animals," he writes, notably some of the segmented worms, " may
be divided by the knife into two or more portions, each of which
continues to live and to manifest all the indications of psychical life
proper to the species."

108 ST. AUGUSTINE
no doubt influenced by the Neo-Platonic view
of the World-Soul.1
But it is time to leave these speculative
matters, which modern psychology is incfined
to think of as lying rather outside its borders,
and turn to the details of Augustine's psycho
logical teaching/ It should be said at the outset
that his originality is not especially shown in
his system as such. He wrote no systematic
work on the subject, and bis system when pieced'
together from various writings is found to be
eclectic, embodying elements from Plato and the
Neo-Platonists, from Aristotle and the Peri
patetics and Stoics. " The main influence is un
deniably Neo-Platonic, and in accordance with
this Augustine is a thorough-going Animist in
the philosophical sense of the word.' That is
to say, he holds — as we have already seen — that
the soul is a non-material entity distinct from
the body, and is very decidedly the predominant
partner in the combination of body and soul.
This active, dominant relation of soul to body
is well brought out by a passage in the Confessions
1 Cf. Plotinus, Ennead iv. 9. 4, 5. It would take us too far afield
to enter further into this matter here, but another interesting modern
parallel may be quoted. Such facts as the divisibility of certain
animal forms, referred to above, have been used by some philosophers
as the basis of a theory of the composite nature of consciousness,
and M'Dougall ut sup. remarks : " This view is strictly in harmony ,
with the widely accepted speculation that an absolute mind or <
consciousness comprehends or includes within it the consciousness
of all lesser minds."

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 109
(x. 11), where, in referring to the different grades
or degrees of soul life, he begins at the bottom
with " that power of the soul whereby I vitalise
my body " (" qua vivifico carnem meam "). This
power, he says, in another work, " unifies the
body, resists disintegration, regulates the dis
tribution of nutriment within the body, and
presides over growth and generation " (De Quant.
Anim. 70). He is quite aware that such action is
unconscious : "It knows not what it does nor -
how it does it " (De Anim. et ejus Orig. iv. 6).
Next comes " the_power by which I endow the
body j^th_sense;perce.ption." Again the same
active form of word " qua sensifico carnem
meam " : The body, of course, receives the sense
impression, but this does not become sensation
until the soul, so to speak, reads it off.
He defines sensation as "passio corporis per
se ipsam non latens animam " (De Quant. Anim.
58), where " passio " means simply " anything
that happens to the body " — in modern termin
ology a modification of the sense organ — and
" non latens animam " means coming into con
sciousness, the negative form (Ht. " not escaping
the notice of the soul ") being perhaps used in
contrast with the unconscious vital functions
mentioned above.
As regards the physics of sensation, the
relation of the organ with the external object,

110 ST. AUGUSTINE
he is, of course, not in advance of the science of
his day. The eye, for instance, sees by project
ing a ray of light out of itself to its object. In
-Serm. 277, § 10, he says : " In this body of ours
I find something the celerity of which astonishes
me. What is that ? The ray of our eye, with
which we touch what we perceive, for whatever
object we see, we touch it with our visual ray."
-In the De Quant. Anim. 43, 44, he says that we
touch the object of our vision " as though with
a wand." This wand consists of a ray of Hght
emanating from the eye (De Gen. ad Lit. i. 31).
This is, of course, a very unsatisfactory
theory. Even regarded purely as a hypothesis,
apart from its relation to the facts, it is not so
good as the Platonic theory, according to which
vision depends on a ray from the eye meeting
with a ray from the object, for that at least
explains (theoretically) why we do not see in
the dark, which this theory fails to do.1 And
it is, of course, on a different plane from the
Aristotefian recognition of motion in a medium.
It is interesting to note that in one of his later
works, the De Trinitate, Augustine expresses dis-
1 I am not sure, however, that this is not what Augustine means.
In the above-cited passage from De Gen. ad Lit. he says that the
visual ray is held (docetur) to be so weak that unless we were aided
by the external light we could' see nothing ; and in Conf. vii. 16 he
speaks metaphorically of the weakness of his vision being " beaten
back " by the radiance of the Divine light (? conceived as meeting
it too strongly).

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 111
satisfaction with this view. After mentioning
the ray-theory, he says that it is a subtle and
difficult question whether the fact be so or no,
and goes on : " For whatever is the nature of
the power by which we discern through the eyes,
whether it be the rays or anything else . . ."
The nature of sound was more generally under
stood, in so far as it was known to be transmitted
by a movement of the air. Augustine uses-
phrases like " verberatus aer," " aere percusso,"
and in speaking of God's word at the Creation
he argues that it was not a literal word, because
there was as yet no medium by which it could
be transmitted (De Vera Rel. 79 ; De Mus. vi.
11 ; Conf. xi. 8).
In regard to the sense of smell, he says that
it may perhaps be reasonably disputed whether
it is exercised by direct contact or no (Ep. 137. 6).~
But he evidently incfines to think it is so, and
in this he is in accordance with what is, I befieve,
the prevailing modern opinion, namely, that
bodies which possess odour discharge into the
atmosphere infinitely minute particles which come
in contact with and excite the olfactory nerves.
Turning from the physics of sensation to its
physiology, that is to say, from the relation of
the senses with the external world to the inner
mechanism of the body, we find that Augustine
has enquired and thought a good deal about

112 ST. AUGUSTINE
this also. And it is interesting to note that he
here betakes himself not to the philosophers
but to the physicians. Some of this ancient
physiology is curious enough, but every here and
there we come upon a strand of fact in it. In
De Gen. ad Lit. vii. 20 he writes :
" If the opinion deserves respect, which the
physicians not only affirm but say they can
prove ... all organisms have within them a
certain amount of air, which is contained not
only in the lungs, but is also distributed from
the heart by the channels which are called
arteries ; and also fire — [This is of course an
allusion to the old theory of the ' four elements '
in man's composition] — fire not only of a fervid
character such as has its seat in the Hver, but
also of a lucent character, which, according to
their demonstrations, becomes subfimated, and
flies aloft into the upper part of the brain, which
is as it were the heaven of our body. Thence
come the rays which shoot forth from the eyes.
From the middle of the brain, as from a centre,
there go forth not only to the eyes but to the
other senses, narrow tubes (' tenues fistulae '), to
the ears, that is to say, the nostrils, the palate,
for hearing, smelfing, and tasting. While the
sense of touch, which is distributed throughout
the whole body, they say is also directed by the
brain by means of the spinal marrow and the

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 113
marrow of the bones to which the spine is united,
so that thence the very finest ducts (' tenuissimi
rivufi') which form the sense of touch are
distributed through all the members. By these
messengers, so to speak, the mind receives
whatever corporeal facts are accessible to it."
Further (ibid. § 24), he describes the localisa
tion of function in the brain as follows : There
are, he says, three " ventricles," so to speak,
of the brain, the anterior, which has to do with
the senses, the posterior, which has to do with
all movement, and the third or central portion
in which memory is located. The reason he gives
for this division is thoroughly scientific in char
acter, in that the physicians assert that disease
or injury of one or other of these portions is
accompanied by disturbance or suspension of one
or other of these functions. The facts are, of
course, not quite so simple as is here implied,
but the physicians whom Augustine is here
following were on the track of an important
physiological truth in thus locafising function.
The special senses are presided over, according
to Augustine, by what he caUs the inner sense
(" interior sensus "), to which, as he says in Conf.
vii. 23, the special senses make their report —
" cui sensus corporis exteriora nuntiunt." It is
in some respects equivalent to the Aristotefian
koovw alo-Qr)Tr)piov or " common sense." When I

114 ST. AUGUSTINE
an object affects several of the senses at once,
we distinguish between the various simultaneous
sense impressions. ^ Now it is absurd to suppose
that any one of the special senses exercises this
act of discrimination. "We have therefore to
refer it to some other power, and this is what
Augustine caUs the inner senge (De Lib. Arb.
, ii. 8). But, beyond distinguishing and correlat
ing the sense impressions, it is also conscious of
sensation as such, not merely of the thing
" sensed," but of the act of " sensing " it.
Further, it judges whether the sense-organ is
performing its office or not, and whether it is
performing it properly (De Lib. Arb. ii. 12).
The interior " sensus " thus appears to be
•nothing more nor less than consciousness so far
as it is concerned with sensation, and it is not
quite clear why these functions should be
assigned to a special faculty. -* The explanation
suggested by Augustine himself is that we share
these powers with the animals, and as he cannot
ascribe reason to the animals, he prefers to assign
these functions to the " interior sensus." It
thus becomes Httle more than a matter of classifi
cation and nomenclature. We agree, so to
speak, that those mental functions which have
to do with sense, and which are obviously
possessed by the animals also, shall be called
" inner sense." But even so there is not much

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 115
gained by this division, for above the " interior
sensus ' ' in Augustine's classification come memory
and imagination ; and he freely recognises that
memory and even a certain rudimentary imagina
tion are found in animals, so that we do not part
company with them just at the point marked
by the " interior sensus."
One or two other points may be noted before
leaving the subject of Augustine's treatment of
the senses.
He has observed that when the eye is directed
to an object in the foreground, more distant
objects are seen more dimly than when we look
right at them, though from the same distance
(De Gen. ad Lit. i. 31) — a psychological fact
which, I believe, hardly received its due in
painting until the coming of the Impressionists.1
And he has tried some mild experiments in
regard to vision. He knows, for instance, that
by deflecting the eyeballs a Httle you can get a
double image of a candle. And — allowing for
the perverse theory of the visual ray proceeding
from the eye — he explains this effect correctly
enough by saying that the two rays are affected
severaUy, instead of meeting evenly in the
object. He remarks that if one eye be shut
1 What is referred to has nothing to do either with geometrical
or aerial perspective, but is simply a question of the different effect
produced by the concentration of vision on one portion or other of
the field of view.

116 ST. AUGUSTINE
you may do what you like with the other — " draw
it down or press, or distort it as you please " —
and no such effect will be produced (De Trin. xi. 4).
He has observed also the positive after-image
which is seen on shutting the eyes after gazing
at a bright surface, and remarks that if the
bright object is a window the lattice- work may
often be seen cutting up the bright panes. He
uses these observations to show that what is
perceived in sense is not the object directly, but
its impress on the sense.
~ The analysis of vision in De Trinitate, xi.,
from which these iUustrations are taken, is, how
ever, notable for another point. Besides the
object and the sense-organ as affected by the
object, there is to be recognised in sensation a .
purely mental act, the attention which directs
the sense-organ towards its object and keeps it
focussed upon it. This is an 'act of will.
Another acute observation is that a further
mental process, namely memory, is involved in
acts of hearing. If this is not immediately
apparent Augustine has an iUustration ready
to convince us. Take a word of two syllables.
You do not hear the second syllable tiU after the
first is finished. Therefore, if the first syllable
were not retained in the memory while the second
was being spoken, you would never hear the
word as a whole. But even in the case of a word

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 117
of one syllable you do not hear the end of it in
the same moment as the beginning, so that, to
get the complete impression, memory must
retain the first part till the last is sounded (De-
Mus. vi. 21).
This brings us to speak of memory, in
general, which in the ascending order of the-
powers of the soul comes next above the inner
sense. It has always been recognised that in
the treatment of memory Augustine displays his
special powers to advantage. The palmary
passage is in Confessions x. from chap. viii.
onwards, and we may foUow its general Hnes,
supplementing from other sources. The passage
is eloquent, but eloquence is not in Augustine,
as in some writers, a signpost indicating that
at this point the author has ceased to think.
In the course of his survey of the powers of
the mind, he comes " to the spacious halls of
memory." " There are laid up treasures of
innumerable images, drawn from all manner of
things that have been presented to the senses.
There are laid up also the images formed in
thought, whether by increasing or diminishing
or varying in this way or that, what the senses
have encountered and whatever else has been
bestowed and laid up there, and has not yet
been buried in obHvion." Noteworthy is the-
clearly drawn distinction between the direct

118 ST. AUGUSTINE
memory-image of sense impressions, and the
images which are mentally constructed by
elaborating the materials derived from sense
impression. We shall have to recur to this
point when we come to speak of " imagination."
Another point to be noticed is the recognition
that the content of memory is not stable, but
shows a constant tendency towards disintegra-
tionJl In another work he remarks on the gradual
"and elusive character of the process — if we find
that we have forgotten something which we knew
a year ago, that does not mean that we forgot
it suddenly the day before yesterday ; -from the
very moment when we learned it, it began to
slip away (De Mus. vi. 6).
To go back to the Confessions passage — he
goes on to remark on the various degrees of
readiness of recall : "I demand the production
of whatsoever I will, and some things come forth
immediately, some need longer search and are
drawn out, as it were, from more remote
receptacles, and some rush out tumultuously,
and when something else is being asked and
sought they leap forward as though saying :
' Are not we what you want ? '" " Others,"
he proceeds, " present themselves in an orderly
sequence as they are wanted, as happens when
I teU a story that I know by heart."
Then he goes on to remark that the impres-

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 119
sions arriving by the various senses are kept
distinct. We have, in modern terminology, a
visual, auditory, tactual memory, and so forth.
" DweUing in darkness and in silence," says
Augustine, " I can, if I wiU, bring up in my
memory colours and compare them together,
and sounds — meaning auditory images — do not
break in and interrupt when I am dealing with
the material derived from the eye, though they
are latent in the memory, put away separately
as it were." Siebeck, the German historian of
psychology, remarks that many of Augustine's
problems are still problems, and instances this
power of memory to classify its contents. The
next point he notices is that experience is
remembered not merely objectively but as the
experience of the self as such. " There," he says,
" I find myself and recall what I have done, and
when and where, and how I felt when I was
doing it."
He goes on to point out that there is in
memory another kind of content, differing from
that derived from sense impressions, namely, the
memory of principles, of scientific knowledge,
and so forth. This differs in that the act of
recaU is not the summoning up of an image but
of the knowledge itseK. In contrast with know
ledge, the recall of which involves complete
reinstatement, it is evident that the emotions are

120 ST. AUGUSTINE
not recalled by re-experiencing them, since we
are sometimes sorrowful in recalling happiness,
and happy in recalhng sorrow. They must,
-therefore, he observes, be recalled by something
which, though not exactly an image, may be
described as a " notio " or " notatio." A little
further on (Conf. x. 28), after indulging in some
verbal paradoxes about remembering obHvion,
he gives a very accurate analysis of the process
of forgetting, or imperfect recall. The fact that
we seek for the forgotten impression, he observes,
and if something else is offered reject it without
hesitation, shows that we have not entirely for
gotten it. " It has not wholly fallen out of the
memory, but the part that is retained leads us to
seek the other, the memory feeling that the whole
of that to which it is accustomed is not present."
" Lopped of this accustomed part," he says, " it
seems as it were to limp, and craves the restora
tion of the missing portion." The sense of dis
comfort which we experience from an imperfect
reminiscence is well conveyed by the metaphor
of limping (" claudicans "). He goes on to
illustrate from the famifiar case of trying to recall
a man's name which we have forgotten. " What
ever else than the right name occurs to us does
not link on properly to our impression of the man
and is rejected, until at last that name occurs
to us which sHps into its place and satisfactorily

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 121
completes the accustomed impression " (" donee
illud adsit, ubi simul adsuefacta notitia non in-
aequaliter adquiescat ").
If no part of the impression, however, remains
in the memory you may try in vain to recaU it,
as he points out in another work in the following
lively iUustration (De Trin. xiv. 17) : " Some
one whom you do not recognise says to you,
' You know me,' and in order to remind you,
tells you where, when, and how he became known
to you ; and if after the mention of every sign
by which you might be recalled to remembrance,
you stiU do not recognise him, then you have
so come to forget as that the whole of that know
ledge is altogether blotted out of your mind, and
you have either to take his word for it, or, if he
dc^tot appear worthy of credit, to disbelieve
him." In addition to this recall by attendant
circumstances, due to what some modern writers
call " association by contiguity," Augustine also
recognises, of course, the still more obvious
" association by similarity." " There occurs
to the thought," he says, " by occasion of similar >
things, a movement of the mind which is not yet
extinct, and this is what is caUed reminiscence"
(" recordatio ") (De Mus. vi. 22).
Some other points from various works may
be noted. He has several illustrations of the
necessity of the " will to remember," and there

122 ST. AUGUSTINE
are few readers to whose sympathies the
following plaint will not appeal: "It happens
in reading, and to myself very frequently,
that when I have read through a page or
an epistle, I do not know what I have read,
and have to begin again. For, the purpose
of the will being fixed on something else, the
memory was not so appfied to the bodily sense
as the sense itself was to the letters."
In a passage in the De Quantitate Animae, 72,
he distinguishes the habitual or mechanical
memory, arising from mere repetition, from the
intellectual and voluntary memory with a clear
ness which would be approved by M. Bergson.
" Mount to the next grade," he says, " and
consider memory, not that which arises from
habituation to famihar things (' consuetudine
inofitarum rerum'), but of those innumerable
things which are committed to memory by
intellectual attention (' animadversione ') and
retained by their signs."
There is one other point which should be
noticed before leaving memory, and that is that
Augustine sometimes extends it to mean the
storehouse not merely of experience but also of
potential thought. In De Trin. xv. § 40, he
first uses memory in the ordinary sense, remark
ing that when we have thought out a truth we
hand it over to the memory to keep, and then

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 123
he goes on to say : " But there is a deeper depth
of our memory (' abstrusior profunditas nostrae
memoriae ') in which we found that truth, when
we began to think about it." When he wrote
this he had given up the Platonic doctrine of
reminiscence in its cruder form,1 so that it
approaches very nearly to the modern conception
of the subconscious mind. We shall have to
recur to this later in connexion with his illustra
tions of the Trinity.
Next above memory in the scale of mental
life comes Jmagmation. The most important
passage on this subject is in a letter (Ep. 7) to
Nebridius, one of the most thoughtful of his
friends. Nebridius had suggested that since our
imaginations can conceive objects which we have
never actually seen, it would appear that imagina
tion can create its own materials independently
of the senses. Now one might perhaps have
expected this argument to appeal to Augustine.
He was philosophicaUy a spiritualist, and there
fore incfined to welcome anything that suggested
the soul's independence of matter. But he was
too sound an observer to be misled on this point.
" Whence comes, you ask," he writes, " our
capacity for conceiving in thought things which
we have never seen ? Whence do you think,
save from a certain faculty of subtracting or
1 See below, 126 f.

124 ST. AUGUSTINE
adding which is innate in the mind." In another
work he gives the examples of imagining a black
swan, which as an actual phenomenon was, of
course, wholly unknown to him, or a bird with
four legs. " Therefore it is possible for the mind
to produce by the exercise of the imagination
that which as a whole has never been within the
senses, but the parts of it have aU been present
to the senses in a variety of different connexions."
In the same letter he distinguishes (besides
the simple memory-image) two varieties of such
-imaginary constructions. To the first belong
-all ordinary pictorial imaginations such as the
image that we form in reading the poets of the
appearance of Aeneas, or of Medea with her team
of winged dragons. To the second belong the
-kind of schematic images that we make for the
purpose of assisting thought. " This class of
images," he says, " has to do chiefly with numbers
and measure, as when the figure of the entire
world is discovered and an image consequent on
this discovery is formed in the mind of one
thinking upon it, and with geometrical figures,
and so forth " ; and he acutely remarks that even
logical divisions and syllogisms are a kind of
mental counters to facifitate reasoning. In con
nexion with this subject he introduced a refine
ment of terminology. He says that Nebridius
and many others classed all three — the memory-

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 125
image, the pictorial imagination, and the schem
atic image — together as phantasiae. But he him
self in the De Musica, vi. 32, proposes to reserve -
phantasia for the simple memory-image, and to
designate the imaginary constructions as phan-
tasmata. His memory-image of his father, he
says, was a phantasia ; that of his grandfather,
whom he had never seen, was a phantasma.
In connexion with imagination he has also
some interesting things to say about dreams and
hallucinations, to which we may recur when we
come to give some examples of his descriptive
psychology.1 When we come to the .Reason, we find
Augustine following the Neo-Platonists in laying-
stress on the distinction between discursive and
intuitive reasoning, and placing the latter high
above the former. The discursive reason he
designates by the terms " r atiocinandi potestas ' ' or
"ratiocinatio," and he describes it thus : "When
by means of what is known and manifest, by
connecting with it other things, we pass to what
is unknown. By it the mind searches, by the
intuitive reason it sees." (" Ut ratio sit quidam
mentis aspectus, ratiocinatio autem rationis
inquisitio." De Quant. Anim. 52, 53.) Psycho
logically the interesting point is the relation
1 He notes, by the way, the familiar fact of dogs barking or growling
in their sleep as evidence that they possess memory-images capable
of being revived in dreams (Contra Epistolam Manichaei, xvii.).

126 ST. AUGUSTINE
between these two functions. The discursive
-reason compares and judges, but the principles
by which it judges are suppfied by the intuitive
reason. The laws of thought, the laws of mathe-
-matical truth, as well as the sense of justice, and
the sense of harmony which makes us admire
beauty in art and nature, are all thought of as
data supplied by the intuitive reason. He tells
us, for example, that when in the course of his
search for God he was impressed by the order
and beauty of nature, he found himself judging
of these things by an immutable law. He felt
that this could not have come from his own mut
able discursive reason (" ratiocinans potestas "),
and so was led up to the higher inteUigence,
which he found to be directly illuminated by
the Divine Hght.
If we ask how or when the contact with the
Divine in which this knowledge is generated
takes place, we find Augustine giving a different
answer at different stages of his career. In some
of his earliest works, the Soliloquia, the De
Quantitate Animae, and the Letter to Nebridius
(Ep. 7), he adopts the old Platonic doctrine of
Reminiscence — such truths were learned in a
former state of existence — but in the De Trinitate
and the Retractations he explicitly rejects it,
and substitutes a doctrine which is practically
that of the Neo-Platonists. After referring to

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 127
Plato's example of the slave-boy, in the Meno,
he remarks that nearly any one can answer in
this way if properly questioned, and we can
hardly suppose that aU the world have been
geometers in a former existence. " But," he-
says, " we ought rather to befieve that the
nature of the rational mind is so constituted
that being, in the natural order of things, by the
disposition of the Creator, in touch with the
things of the intelhgible world, it sees them by
a certain incorporeal Hght of a unique character,
as the eye of the flesh sees by the corporeal Hght
the things by which it is surrounded " (De Trin.
xii. 24).
We come now to the will. Will is defined by
Augustine in an early work (De Duab. Anim. 14)-
as " an uncoerced movement of the mind towards
obtaining or retaining something " (" Voluntas est
animi motus, cogente nuUo, ad afiquid vel non
amittendum vel adipiscendum "), and although
in the Pelagian controversies he found his
opponents endeavouring to make capital out of
this definition, he stiU theoreticaUy maintained
it. Of the psychologically interesting points in
his treatment of the will we may notice :
(1) The wide extension which he gives to it.
His main division of mental function is twofold,
not threefold as in most modern writers. It .
consists of " intelhgentia " and " voluntas."

128 ST. AUGUSTINE
What is therefore usuaUy classed as feehng or
emotion, falls under the head of wiU. This is
quite expHcitly recognised and stated. In the
J)e Trinitate, xv. § 41, he speaks of " our wiU, or
love or affection, which is a stronger will." And
other emotions are in turn referred to love. In
De Civitate Dei, xiv. 7, he says, " A right wiU is
a good love and a perverse will a bad love."
.Then, adopting the Stoic classification of the
four passions or " perturbations of the soul " —
desire, fear, joy, and grief — he goes on : " Love,
longing to have what it loves, is desire ; enjoying
it, is joy; fleeing what is adverse to it, it is fear;
if this adverse thing happens to it, what it feels
is grief." ^
The classification is defective and the defini
tions are unsatisfactory. To say that desire is
love longing for its object, comes very near actual
tautology. On the other hand his descriptions
of the passions are in some cases classical, such
as that of the grief of bereavement, which was
quoted in an earlier chapter, or his description
of hatred as anger that has turned sour with
keeping. The second point to be noticed is his
full recognition of the way in which will is inter
woven with all other mental acts. We have
observed this above in regard to sensation,
memory, and imagination. It is also, of course,
-involved in reason, for it is the will which draws

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY 129
out the inchoate thought and moulds it into
that definite thought which may be described as
the " word " of the inner man (De Trin. xv. 29 ff.).
And it is also involved in seK-consciousness*-
" For we both are and know that we are, and
we love that being and that knowledge " (De
Civitate Dei, xi. 29 ff.).

HIS POWERS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVA
TION AND DESCRIPTION
There was once, so runs a familiar story, an old
lady who in her youth had been brought up to
eschew " stage-plays " as a work of the devil.
In later life she gradually extended the range of
her literary interests, and was finaUy induced to
read Shakespeare ;. when she gave it as her
verdict that it was a pity he had tricked out his
writings with so many familiar quotations. In
estimating the interest of Augustine's observa
tional psychology we need to be on our guard
against a somewhat similar error. It is not
here, of course, a case of famihar quotations,
but it is quite true that much of the psychologis-
ing which was new and fresh in Augustine's day
is over-famihar at present. The fact is, that
whether we have ever formally studied the
subject or no, " we are all psychologists now
adays." The modern novehst has made us so.
There is more minute observational psychology
130

HIS POWERS OF OBSERVATION 131
in a novel by Meredith or Henry James than in
haK the philosophers of antiquity ; and a host
of minor writers can tap the end of the egg quite
neatly, now that they have been shown the
trick. AU the same, you will turn a good
many pages of average novels before you will
find a piece of description which combines
psychology and incident more vividly than the
following. Augustine's friend, Alypius,had been as ayouth
an enthusiast for the gladiatorial shows. Later
he had renounced them — from a kind of ethical
disgust, for this was long before he became a
Christian. Augustine here describes how the
taste was accidentaUy revived. " Certain of his
friends and feUow-students, meeting him by
chance, dragged him off to the theatre, he pro
testing vehemently the while, and even resisting
with friendly violence. ' Though you drag my
body to that place,' said he, ' can you force my
eyes and mind to give attention to the spectacle ? '
Nevertheless they did not relax their efforts,
eager, perhaps, to put him to the test and see
whether he could make good his words. So they
came to the theatre and found seats for them
selves ; and aU about them was the excitement
of dehght in cruelty He, closing the gates of the
soul [the eyes], forbade it to go forth to look
upon such evils. Would that he had stopped his

132 ST. AUGUSTINE
ears as effectually ! For at some crisis of the
combat, when a great shout of the whole assembly
smote upon them, he was overcome by curiosity,
and thinking himseK prepared to despise and
contemn whatever he might see, he opened his
eyes . . . and fell more pitiably than he whose
faU had been hailed with that shout. . . . For
when he looked on the flowing blood, he drank in
the lust of it, and turned himseK not away, but
fixed bis eyes upon it and drank deep of mad
ness, and knew it not, and became intoxicated
with the lust of cruelty. He was no longer the
man who had come thither, but one of the crowd
amid which he stood. What then ? He gazed,
he shouted, he raved with the rest, and took
with him thence a madness which drove him to
go again, not merely with those who had brought
him thither, but yet more eagerly than they,
and dragging others with him " (Conf. vi. 13).
Now, there is one point here to which I want
to direct particular attention. We are accus
tomed to think that the psychology of crowds is
a modern study, and many modern critics have
illustrated how a crowd absorbs the personalities
composing it into something simpler, cruder,
more vehement, of which the individuals become
in turn the organs. As the German dramatist
Keyserling makes one of his revolutionaries
say, " It shouts through one." Now Augustine

HIS POWERS OF OBSERVATION 133
gives us just this in one of his illuminating
phrases : "He was no longer the man who had
come thither, but one of the crowd " (" unus de
turba "), infected, as it were, with its bloodthirsty
excitement. Equally true to Hfe is the following Httle
picture of a crowd drawn by an accident : " What
pleasure can there be, for instance, in looking at
a mangled body, and yet if there is one to be
seen, men come running up, to be horrified and
nauseated. [You hear them say] they fear they
wiU see this again in their sleep — as if any one
had compelled them to look at it when awake,
or as if some fame of its beauty had drawn
them ! " (Conf. x. 55).
It is interesting to note, too, that while he
satirises this morbid curiosity from an ethical
point of view, he assigns a rational motive for
it — the desire to extend experience.
One particular form of " crowd psychology "
was especiaUy famihar to Augustine, namely, what
may be caUed oratorical sympathy, the rapport
between speaker and audience. In the following
passage it is regarded from the point of view of
the speaker, and it is iUustrated by a very happy
paraUel. In his treatise on the instruction of
the unlearned (De Catechizandis Rudibus, § 17)
he has occasion to remark on the difficulty which
a teacher often experiences in keeping up his own

134 ST. AUGUSTINE
interest in the more rudimentary part of his
work, and he suggests a means for overcoming
it. " If we feel it wearisome to go over repeatedly
matters which are very famihar, and adapted,
rather, to children, we should endeavour to meet
them with a brother's, a father's, and a mother's
love, and ... to us not less than to them will
these things seem new. For so great is the power
of a sympathetic disposition, that, as they are
affected while we are speaking, and we are
affected while they are learning, we have our
dwelhng in each other ; and thus, at one and
the same time, they, as it were, in us speak what
they hear, and we in them learn, in a sense, what
we teach." That is well said, as any one knows
who has had experience of being in touch, or not
in touch, with an audience. And now for his
iUustration, which is extraordinarily fresh and
happy. " Is it not a common experience that
when we show to persons who have never seen
them before beautiful views, whether in the
city or the country, which we have been in the
habit of passing by without any sense of pleasure,
simply because we have become so accustomed
to the sight of them, we find our own enjoyment
renewed in their enjoyment of the novelty of
the scene ? "
Another modern development, we are apt to
think, is child psychology. The spirit in which

HIS POWERS OF OBSERVATION 135
the modern observer laboriously chronicles the
first appearance of any action which has the
faintest suggestion of dawning, or growing, in
telHgence, is, we might have thought, foreign to
the temper of antiquity. It is almost with a
start of surprise that we come on the statement
in Augustine's brief account of his infancy :
" Then I began to smile, first in sleep, and then
waking. This has been told me of myself, and
I believe it, for we see it to be so in other infants."
This fact, that an infant generally first smiles
in sleep, might well have seemed too trivial to
chronicle, but you will find it duly noted
by a well-known German authority on child
psychology — Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes,
p. 189. In the De Trinitate, xiv. 7, he observes that
the eyes of an infant have so strong a tendency
to seek the Hght, that if it be laid down in a
position in which it can only see the Hght by
turning the eyes awkwardly, a squint may be
the result. Things Hke this were, I suppose, as
weU known in the nurseries of antiquity as they
are in those of modern times, but the philosophers
of those days did not usuaUy think it worth
while to put them on record. He notes in one
place that while the intelHgence is undeveloped,
the senses of the infant are probably in some
respects keener than those of mature life (De

136 ST. AUGUSTINE
Quant. An. 54). And in the De Civitate Dei,
xiii. 3, commenting on the fact that the helpless
ness of infancy lasts so much longer in man than
in the lower animals, he remarks that this is in
proportion to his ultimately higher efficiency,
"as an arrow has to be drawn further back the
further it is to shoot " — a very exact and illumin
ating metaphor.
Here again is a striking description of the
process of learning to speak : " For I was not
taught by my elders giving me words to learn
in a definite order, as I was afterwards taught
letters, but when I found that by making in
articulate cries and sounds and gestures of
various kinds, I could not express my meaning
in such a way as to have my will . . . then
using the mind which Thou hadst given me, I
taught myseK by the aid of memory. When
grown-up persons called anything by its name
and, after using the word, made some bodily
movement towards the thing, I saw and re
membered that the thing was known by the
sound which they made when they wished to
indicate it . . . while the tone of the voice
showed whether it was a case of desiring, possess
ing, rejecting, or avoiding something. By hear
ing words frequently and in different connexions,
I gradually gathered what were the objects of
which these were the signs, and having broken

HIS POWERS OF OBSERVATION 137
in my tongue to these signs I was able to make
known my wishes by means of them " (Conf. i. 13).
That is a Httle too much schematised, perhaps
— gives too much the idea of a logical process —
but the logic, though unconscious, does after all
underlie the process, and one point can often
be paralleled in children who have made some
progress in learning to speak. " I taught my
seK," says Augustine, " memory playing school
master, and saying the word over for me." Now
a child that has just acquired a new word,
preferably a fairly long one, may often be heard
laying it up in this way for future use.
Without introspection psychology is impos
sible, for even in cases which are not accessible
to direct introspection, Hke child psychology and
crowd psychology, man is himself the instrument
by means of which he interprets his fellows ; but
we may now turn to one or two examples of
introspection proper. With what clear percep
tion he deals with the problem of the two wills
in man, the phenomena of inward struggle !
" Whence comes this marvel ? The mind gives ^
a command to the body, and is immediately
obeyed ; the mind commands itself and meets
with opposition. The mind commands the hand
to move, and it moves so readily that you can
scarcely distinguish the command from its fulfil
ment ; and yet the mind is the mind, while the

138 ST. AUGUSTINE
hand is not the mind but the body. The mind
commands the mind to will, and the mind which
it commands is not other than itseK, and yet it
does not obey. Whence and why is this marvel ?
The mind commands the mind, I say, to will ;
and it could not command unless it wiUed, and
yet it does not do that which it commands.
The secret is that it does not wholly will it, and
therefore it does not whoUy command it. . . .
For if it wholly willed it, it would not even need
to command it, because it would already be it.
This partly willing, partly not wilhng, is not
therefore a miracle but a diseased condition of
the mind, which prevents it from rising up as a
whole ; for while truth draws it up, ill custom
drags it down. And that is why there seem to
be two wiUs ; it is one wiU which is disunited.
The second wiU consists of that which is lacking
in the first" (Conf. viii. 21).
That is analysis ; he goes on to description,
and surely hesitation upon the point of a decision
has never been more vividly pictured. " Thus
was I sick and suffering in mind, upbraiding
myseK more bitterly than ever before, twisting
and turning |in my chains in the hope that they
would soon snap, for they had almost worn too
thin to hold me. Yet they did still hold me.
But Thou wast instant with me in the inner
man, with merciful severity redoubfing the

HIS POWERS OF OBSERVATION 139
lashes of fear and shame, lest I should cease
from strugghng. ... I kept saying within my
heart, ' Let it be now, now ! ' — and with the
word I was on the point of going on to the
resolve. I had almost done it, but I had not
done it ; and yet I did not shp back to where
I was at first, but held my footing at a short
remove and drew breath. And again I tried ;
I came a Httle nearer, and again a Httle nearer,
and now — now — I was in act to grasp and hold
it ; but still I did not reach it, nor grasp it, nor
hold it, . . . for the worse that I knew so well
had more power over me than the better that
I knew not, and the absolute point of time at
which I was to change filled me with greater
dread the more nearly I approached it . . ."
(Conf. viii. 25).
And how fine and deficate is his analysis
when he comes to speak, in his self-examination,
of the love of praise. His ideal is singularly
austere, but he quite frankly acknowledges that
he comes short of it. " I should like," he says,.
"to be so minded that the approval of another
would not even increase my joy [in doing right].
But it does increase it ; and not only so, but
dispraise diminishes it. And when I am dis
turbed at this weakness, an excuse suggests
itseK to me, the value of which Thou, 0 Lord,
knowest ; as for me, I am in doubt. It is this.

140 ST. AUGUSTINE
Seeing Thou hast commanded us ... to bestow
our love where it is meet, and hast commanded
us to love not only Thee but our neighbour,
often I seem to myseK to be pleased with the
progress or promise shown by a neighbour when
I am pleased with his intelfigent praise, and to
be grieved for his sake when I hear him finding
fault ignorantly or mistakenly. And indeed I
am sometimes distressed when I am praised for
things in myseK which displease me, or when
things good in themselves but of small moment
are esteemed more than is fitting." [Most
people, I suppose, have experienced that sense
of exasperation in being " praised for the wrong
things."] " But again," continues Augustine,
" how can I teU whether I feel in this way because
I do not Hke him who praises me to differ from
me, not because I am thinking of his advantage
but because those things which I think good in
myseK please me better when they please another
also ? For, in a certain sense, it is not I that am
praised when my own estimate of myself is not
approved " (Conf. x. 61).
It is perhaps more commonplace, though still
accurately observed, when he goes on to remark :
" This love of praise is a temptation to me even
when I rebuke it in myself, on the very ground
that I do rebuke it ; and often men glory the
more vainly in their very contempt for vain-

HIS POWERS OF OBSERVATION 141
glory, and therefore in no true contempt for it ; -
for he who glories does not condemn vainglory "
(Conf. x. 63).
His readiness in psychological illustration is
very marked — his Hvely handhng of everyday
incidents for this purpose sometimes reminds one
of Professor William James. In the foUowing
passage, for instance, he is iUustrating the law-
of association, or, more exactly, the fact that the
wiU to remember cannot arise if the " forgotten "
incident is reaUy wholly forgotten. Some part
of its context, at least, must be in the mind to
form a starting-point. " For example, if I wish
to remember what I supped on yesterday, either
I have already remembered that I did sup, or if
not this, yet at least I have remembered some
thing about supper-time, if nothing else ; at aU
events I have remembered yesterday, and that
part of the day in which people usuaUy sup.
. . . For if I had remembered nothing at aU of
this kind I could not remember what I had
supped on yesterday " (De Trin. xi. 12).
" Anger seems to me to be a violent eagerness
to take out of the way things which restrict our
freedom of action. Hence we vent our anger not
only on men, but on such a thing, for example,
as a pen with which we write, crushing or break
ing it in our annoyance ; and so does the gambler
with his dice, the artist with his pencil, and

142 ST. AUGUSTINE
every man with the instrument which he may
be using if he feels himseK in some way thwarted
by it " (Ep. 9).
In the following his gift of metaphor enables
him to convey an impression very happily.
" For anger habitually cherished against any one
becomes hatred, since the sweetness which is
mingled with what appears to be righteous
anger makes us detain it longer than we ought
in the vessel, until the whole is soured and the
vessel itself is spoiled " (Ep. 38. 2).
When he wishes to iUustrate the three kinds
of vision, Hteral, imaginative, and intellectual, he
brings them together neatly thus : " When you
- read : ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyr
seK,' you see the letters with the bodily eye, your
neighbour with the mind's eye,1 and love by
intellectual perception " (De Gen. ad Lit. xii. 22).
Among his iUustrations of the famihar law of
reaction there is a pleasantly human touch about
this : "A dear one is sick and his pulse clearly
indicates danger. All those who are longing for
his recovery are themselves sick at heart. Things
go well with him ; and even before he can walk
with his former vigour there is such rejoicing
as was not before when he was safe and well "
(Conf. viii. 7).
1 Augustine's expression is " spiritually," but he is using the word
in a special sense indicated in the context, which is fairly represented
by the above translation.

HIS POWERS OF OBSERVATION 143
The common human tendency to inquire into
the origin of unusual things while overlooking
the mysteries which underlie more famihar
things is weU iUustrated by the following : " Just
as in the case of words — on hearing an unf amihar
word men ask first ' what is that,' namely, what
it signifies ; and then when they have learned
that they inquire why it is so called, whereas
they contentedly remain in ignorance of the
origin of so many words which they use con
stantly " (De Gen. ad Lit. xii. 39).
But if the good psychologist never loses sight
of the interest of the commonplace, he does not
forget that abnormal states also may have some
thing to teach us ; and Augustine has many acute
observations of states of haUucination, mental
aberration, and the perennial mystery of dreams.
He notes, for instance, that intense mental con
centration may give rise to hallucination. If the
attention be whoUy withdrawn from the outward
senses and concentrated upon the inner image
" then so exact a Hkeness of the bodily appear
ance, derived from the memory, is presented,
that not even reason itseK can discern whether
the corporeal object is seen without, or only
something of the kind thought of within. For
men sometimes through overmuch dwelhng in
thought upon visible things, either from defight
in them or from fear of them, have even suddenly

144 ST. AUGUSTINE
uttered words as if in real fact they were engaged
in the midst of such actions or sufferings "
(De Trin. xi. 7). From this case, in which the
mind is the sole source of the haUucination, he
distinguishes this in which "the senses of the
body are either lulled to torpor, as with sleepers,
or thrown out of gear x as with madmen, or
disturbed in some other mode as with diviners
or prophets, and so, from one or other of these
causes, the mind is forced by a kind of necessity
upon the images which occur to it " (ibid.). Of
¦dehrium he distinguishes two stages : that in
which, while the senses are not whoUy withdrawn
from the surroundings, intrusive images occur ;
and another, in which there is complete uncon
sciousness of the surroundings. I have known,"
he says, " persons thus affected to speak with
those who were really present, and also with
others who were absent as though they had been
present." In the other case, corporeal objects
which are present, even though the eyes may be
open, are not seen nor are any actual sounds
heard. "The whole attention of the mind is
directed either to inward images of corporeal
objects, or to immaterial objects by a purely
mental vision " (De Gen. ad Lit. xii. 25).
A very remarkable case of second sight is
1 This seems to be just what is meant by " ab interiore campage
turbati."

HIS POWERS OF OBSERVATION 145
thus described: "I have heard, too, of a case
where a possessed man while in his own home
used to say when a certain presbyter, starting
from a place twelve miles away, set out to come
to him, and at various stages of his journey
used to say where he was and what speed he
was making, and when he reached the farm, and
the house [in which the sick man was], and the
room, until he actually appeared in his presence.
" The man was suffering from fever, and used
to say these things as if in a dehrium, and
perhaps he reaUy was in dehrium, but on that
account was thought to suffer from demonic
possession. And [? at such times] he would take
no food from any of his own family, but only
from this presbyter. For he resisted his own
people to the utmost of his ability, and it was
only on the coming of the presbyter that he grew
calmer ; and him he obeyed and answered sub
missively. But his mental aberration, or demonic
possession, did not yield to the presbyter's
influence until he recovered from his fever, as
delirious people usually recover. Nor did he at
any time afterwards experience anything of the
kind " (De Gen. ad Lit. xii. 35).
Of course one sees that there are a number
of questions which the Psychical Research
Society would want to ask about this story.
" Did the man know that the presbyter had been
L

146 ST. AUGUSTINE
sent for ? " " Was the synchronism of his state
ments with the stages of the latter's journey
reaUy remarkably accurate ? " and so forth.
These difficulties do not apply when we come to
an experience of his own, a curious dream which
seems to be very accurately remembered and
reported. It should be said, perhaps, that its
interest is not psychic in the special sense which
that word has acquired, but purely psychological.
There is no question of prediction or extra
ordinary coincidence, only a rather curious com
plexity of mental attitude. After noting that,
as a rule, objects seen in dreams appear real, he
goes on to say : " But it has sometimes happened
to me, and I do not doubt, therefore, that it may
have happened to others, that when seeing things
in a dream I have known that I was seeing them
in a dream, and although asleep have been
firmly convinced that those images which usuaUy
delude us into accepting them were not real
corporeal objects. But on some such occasions
I have been in so far deceived that I tried to
convince a friend of mine, whom I also saw in
the dream, that the things which we saw were
not real objects, but dream images, though I
certainly saw him just in the same way as I saw
them. I told him too that it was not even true
that we were talking together, but that he him
seK was seeing something else in a dream and

HIS POWERS OF OBSERVATION 147
was quite unaware that I was seeing those things.
But at the same time that I was trying to per
suade him that he was not real, I was partly
inclined to think him real, for I should certainly
not have spoken to him if I had altogether felt
him to be unreal " (De Gen. ad Lit. xii. 3).

VI
THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER
The psychology of which we have traced the out
lines is not a mere by-product of St. Augustine's
thought. It has been worth while to give so
much attention to it because we find here the
clue to the general character of his thinking.
When he has to deal with philosophical or theo
logical problems it is from the psychological point
of view that he tends to approach them. It will,
I think, be of interest to follow out in detail some
examples which illustrate this characteristic.
There has been some controversy as to
whether, and if so how far, Augustine anticip
ated Descartes in enunciating the principle, " I
think, therefore I am" ("cogito, ergo sum").
There is always a certain interest in seeing
what one great man has to say about another,
even though his information may be something
less than complete, and we may take as our
starting-point some remarks which Pascal, a
contemporary of Descartes and an admirer of
148

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 149
Augustine, has made about this question. In the
course of his essay, De Vesprit geometrique,
Pascal writes : " I should Hke to ask fair-minded
persons whether this principle, ' Matter has a
natural, invincible incapacity for thought,' and
this, ' I think, therefore I am,' are reaUy the
same in the mind of Descartes as in the mind
of St. Augustinej who had said the same thing
twelve hundred years earfier ? In truth, I am
far from saying that Descartes is not the real
author, even if he had learned them by reading
the great saint. For I know how great a differ
ence there is between putting down a striking
saying at a venture, without reflecting upon it
at length, and perceiving in this same saying a
remarkable series of consequences . . . and so
making it the firm and solid principle of an
entire system of philosophy, as Descartes claimed
to do. For without examining whether he has
reaUy succeeded in what he claims, I assume
that he has done so, and on this assumption I
say that there is as much difference between this
observation in his writings and in those authors
who have made the remark in passing, as there
is between a man fuU of Hfe and force and an
inanimate body."
Now there is a mixture of truth and error in
this passage, and I think I shall be able to show
that it at least does Augustine considerably less

150 ST. AUGUSTINE
than justice. That need not surprise us. Pascal
was a great thinker, but he was not apparently
a great scholar. When he wrote his briUiant
Provinciales, the references, the materials with
which he dealt, were supphed to him by his
friends at Port Royal. So it is probable enough
that he had not read the passages of Augustine
in their sources, but merely knew that Descartes
had been accused of plagiarising from him. The
reference, moreover, is quite incidental. It is
brought in as an illustration of the general
principle that the same observation may be much
more fruitful in the mind of one man than in
that of another.
The fact is, that while it is of course true that
Augustine does not formally develop his whole
system out of this principle, it is on the other
hand no mere passing remark such as an author
sometimes throws out without realising its
bearing. It occurs repeatedly, in several of his
most important works, and he definitely makes
it the primary point of certainty, the impregnable
fortress against the assaults of scepticism.
In the period of retirement at Cassiciacum —
to which I make no apology for recurring so often,
for I believe that we find here the seed-bed
of much of Augustine's thinking — we find that
.while he has accepted Christianity on grounds
of authority and inner experience, he is stiU

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 151
wrestfing with the problem whether there is
any independent point of inteUectual certainty.
In the Soliloquia, the most intimate of the
writings of this period, at the beginning of the
second Book he says :
" You, who wish to know yourself, -do you
know that you exist ? "
And answers : " I know it."
Then, after he has professed ignorance on
various other matters, comes the question :
" Do you know that you are thinking ? "
(" cogitare te scis ? ")
Answer : " I know it."
" Therefore this is true, that you think ? "
Answer : " It is true."
That is perhaps the nearest verbal coincidence,
with its cogitare te scis, but it is not by any
means the most important passage.
Here, for example, is a passage in which the
principle is quite definitely taken as the starting-
point of metaphysical investigation.
In the De Liber o Arbitrio, ii. 7, he proposes to
inquire whether God exists, and begins thus :
" In order that we may take our point of depar
ture from what is most clear, I ask you in the
first place whether you yourseK exist ? Can you
possibly fear to make a mistake in the answer to
this question ? — for it is obvious that unless you
existed you could not possibly make a mistake.

152 ST. AUGUSTINE
' That suffices,' says his interlocutor, { we may
go on.' "
In the De Vera Religione, xxxix. 73, after
enunciating some Neo-Platonic ideas, he says :
"Or if you do not understand these assertions
„or are doubtful whether they are true, examine
at least whether you doubt that you doubt
them ; and if it is certain that you doubt them,
ask whence it is certain. . . . And think it out
in this way. Every one who knows that he
doubts, knows something true [namely, that he
doubts], and concerning this thing that he
knows, he is certain that there is something true.
Every one, therefore, who doubts whether truth
exists has in himseK a truth which he cannot
doubt ' ' [namely, his consciousness of doubt] . And
this, he indicates, ought to lead to the acceptance
of the Neo-Platonic theory that such intuitively
apprehended certainties are discerned by contact
with the Divine wisdom — so that here one might
almost say that it does appear as the foundation
of a system.
Again, in the De Civitate Dei, xi. 26, he says :
" For we both are, and know that we are, and
we love that being and that knowledge. And
in reference to these things we cannot be deceived
by any specious probabifity. For we do not
come into contact with these things as we do
with things outside ourselves by any of the

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 153
bodily senses, nor as we hold in the memory
images of these corporeal things. But apart
from any visual images, or imaginary images,
with their risk of error, I know with absolute
certainty that I am, and that I know and love
my own existence. And in regard to these
truths, I do not dread the arguments of the
Academicians who say : ' What if you are
deceived ! ' For, if I am deceived, I am (' si
fallor, sum'). For one who is not at aU, can
not possibly be deceived. If then the very fact
of being deceived proves my existence, how
can I be deceived in feeling certain that I
exist ? "
Moreover, he treats this as the typical form
of certainty, with which others may be compared.
" In my inner man," he says, " I both am, and-
know that I am ; and I love that being and
knowledge, and I have a similar certainty that
I love them " (De Civ. Dei, xi. 27 fin.).
These quotations have at least made it quite
clear that for Augustine " I think, therefore
I am " is no mere passing remark accidentally
thrown out, as Pascal suggests. He does not
indeed develop its impfications systematically, but -
it is for him, just as definitely as for Descartes,
the primary point of certainty.
But to take seK-consciousness in this way as
the starting-point of thought is to find a basis

154 ST. AUGUSTINE
for metaphysics in psychology. Let us now
look at his apphcation of psychological analysis
to one of the special problems of philosophy —
that of the nature of time. Like many important
discussions in Augustine it comes up incidentally.
In approaching the exegesis of the Creation-
narrative he feels it incumbent upon him to
meet the difficulty, "What was God doing
before He made the world ? " He wiU not, he
says, make the reply which was once made by
a witty but irreverent person : "He was pre
paring a heU for people who pry into mysteries."
[It is amusing to observe how he gets in the
story, while disclaiming moral responsibihty
for it.] He goes on to suggest the elusive char
acter of the problem in an epigram of a higher
order of humour. " So long as no one asks me
what time is," he says, " I know perfectly ; but
if you ask me I cannot tell." He then reviews
and rejects with sound criticism the theory that
time is the movement of the heavenly bodies.
If the movement of the heavenly bodies ceased,
he says, and a potter's wheel should continue
to revolve, we could still measure the revolutions
of the wheel, and say that one was faster or
slower than another. Nor is it the motion of
any body whatever. For if a body sometimes
moves and sometimes stands still we can measure
its standing still as well as its motion, and say

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 155
it stood stiU as long as it moved, or twice as long,
as the case may be.
So we come to bis own analysis. He takes
as his starting-point the indisputable fact that
in some way or other we do measure time. We
mean something when we speak of a long time
or a short time. How then do we measure it ?
We cannot measure it when it is future, because
it is not yet here to measure ; we cannot measure
it when it is past, for then it is gone ; and we
cannot measure it when it is present, because,
on reflexion, the present is found to narrow down
to a single indivisible instant, a point without
parts and without magnitude, and therefore
incapable of being measured. So we seem to
have reached an impasse. But now he takes a
concrete example, and the matter begins to
clear itseK. He selects his iUustration from a
department with which he is thoroughly famihar,
that of metre. It is a fine from a well-known
hymn by bis friend Ambrose — a Hne of the
simplest character, consisting of four iambic
feet. Deus Creator omnium.
" I repeat it," says Augustine, " and my trained
ear pronounces that each of the long syUables is
double the length of a short syUable. But how
do I compare them ? For while I am pronounc
ing one of them, the other is not present. More-

156 ST. AUGUSTINE
over, not one syllable is wholly present -at a time,
for the whole of it is not sounded until you come
to the end of it ; and when you have come to the
end of it, it is gone. Therefore," he says, " I can
not measure the sounds until they are gone ; so
it is not the sounds themselves that I measure,
but my memory of them. Therefore it is in my
mind that I measure time. . . . The impression
which passing events make on the mind, and
which remains after they have passed, that is
what I measure when I measure time, not the
events themselves which are only complete in
the moment of passing away " (Conf. xi. 12-36).
That does not, of course, solve all the difficulties
about time, but so far as it goes it is perfectly
sound. The Histories of Philosophy note it as
a real advance in clearness of thought. It is
-attained, as we have seen, wholly by psycho
logical methods.
A question which Hes on the border -land
between philosophy and theology is that of
relative priority as between faith and reason in
deafing with rehgious matters. The principle
that faith precedes understanding is often treated
as characteristic of Augustine's teaching ; and
it is true that he often uses language to this
effect. But he is too good an observer not to
know that there is a sense in which reason must
precede faith.

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 157
In the De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, written
quite at the end of his life, he writes : " For who -•
does not see that thought precedes behef ? For
no one would ever believe anything unless he
had first thought that it ought to be beheved.
For by however brief a moment some kind of
thought precedes the will to beheve, and however
rapidly the latter follows, so as to seem most
closely joined with it, yet it is necessarily the
case that everything which is believed, is beheved
after thought has preceded. Though indeed
behef itseK is nothing else than thinking with —
assent (' cum assensione cogitare '). Not every
one who thinks, believes, but every one who
beheves, thinks. He both beheves in thinking
and thinks in believing " (§ 5).
To a correspondent, Consentius, who had
remarked that we must not so much ask for
reason, as follow the authority of the saints, and
had at the same time requested an explanation
of the doctrine of the Trinity, Augustine rephed
(Ep. 120. 2) : " If you are not unreasonable in
asking me, or any other teacher, to help you to
understand what you already beheve, you must
correct your statement, not in such a way as to
repudiate faith, but so that those things which
you hold by the strength of faith you may also
perceive by the Hght of reason. It cannot be
that God should disapprove in us that very thing

158 ST. AUGUSTINE
in which He has made us more exceUent than
other animate beings. Far be it from us, I say,
to beheve in order to avoid receiving or seeking
reason ; for we could not even beheve unless we
had rational minds." He goes on to explain that
even the acceptance of the principle that in some
matters faith precedes reason, itseK involves
reason. For, if it is reasonable to accept' it, the
modicum of reason which persuades us of this
itseK precedes faith.
It ought perhaps to be pointed out that for
Augustine this prefiminary exercise of reason
does not in any sense He outside the refigious
sphere. The passage quoted above from De
Praedestinatione Sanctorum arises in the f oUowing
way. Augustine quotes 2 Cor. iii. 5 in the
form, " For we are not able to think of anything
of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God.'' The
argument is a fortiori. If we cannot beheve
without understanding, and we cannot under
stand without God's aid, how much less can we
beheve without that aid?
Turn now to his theology. When in his
important work the De Trinitate — his most
ambitious theological work — he endeavours
to make the doctrine of the Trinity in some
measure intelhgible, the method which he em
ploys is almost wholly psychological. In De
Trinitate, ix. 17, indeed, he describes his method

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 159
thus : " And this question we are endeavouring
in some way to investigate in the human mind,
in order that from a lower image, in which our
nature itseK, as it were, answers, on being
questioned, in a way more famihar to ourselves,
we may be able to direct a more practised mental
vision from the illumined creature to the un
changeable Hght." He begins with simple com
binations of three factors and is careful to say
that here there is not the faintest analogy in
any strict sense ; all that is iUustrated is the
combination of three somethings in some kind
of union. For instance, when we look at any
visible object, three things are closely associated
— the external object, the mind's perception of-
the image in the sense - organ, and the act of
attention, or will, which keeps the sense fixed
upon the object (De Trin. xi. 2).
Here, as he freely recognises, the three are
in no sense in pwri materia, the object being
corporeal and the other two factors spiritual.
From this he passes on to various more subtle
combinations of three factors, till at length, at
the close of the work, he comes to an illustration
which he seems to feel affords some real analogy.
It is drawn, to put it briefly and in modern
language, from the nature of thought itseK.
The form in which Augustine himself puts it is
rather curious, and we shall have to study his

160 ST. AUGUSTINE
language rather carefully and see how he leads
up to his illustration, if we are to understand
exactly what he means by it. It is the Scriptural
designation of the Second Person of the Trinity
as The Word which suggests the form of the
illustration. Take, then, as starting-point the
ordinary spoken word. It is the function of
the word to give form to thought. Even in the
word of ordinary speech there is a kind of
trinity — the thought, and the word which gives
- it form, and the will which unites the word with
the thought. But this is only a shadow of a
deeper process which goes on wholly within the
mind. He does not mean, and he is careful to
explain that he does not mean, merely that in
thinking we usually fit unspoken words to our
thoughts. We must go behind that again and
ask how thought, how the apprehension of
truth, actually proceeds. Thought consists in
bringing out into clear consciousness what is
already latent in the mind, what is present, so
to speak, in the sub-conscious mind. [This is
modern terminology, but the quotations which
will follow will show, I think, that I am not
wresting Augustine's language from its intention.]
This process of giving form to our thought may
be described as the inward speech of the mind.
The formed thought, brought fuUy to conscious
ness, is, as it were, the inner word of the mind.

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 161
And what causes the formation of it? — meta
phorically speaking, the utterance of the inner
word — why, our will, the act of seeking, the
turning of things to and fro in the mind, which
thus forms the bond of union between the latent
and the conscious thought. This prefiminary
analysis wiU, I think, enable us to follow
Augustine's language, which is made a Httle
difficult by his here giving to the terms which
he uses a pecufiar sense.
First, there is the pecuhar sense of " Word."
He justifies this, characteristically, by quoting
Scriptural passages in which thought and
speech are equated, e.g. Wisd. ii. 1 : " They
said within themselves, thinking not aright," and
concludes, " some thoughts, then, are speeches
of the heart " (De Trin. xv. 17). This prepares
the way for his description of the process of
thought (ibid. 25). " What is it that is capable
of being a word, and is therefore held worthy
of the name of word, because it is capable of
being a word ? What is this thing that is form-
able but not yet formed — what is it but a some
thing in our minds which we toss to and fro by
revolving it this way and that. And the true
word comes into being when that which we thus
toss to and fro arrives at that which we know,
and receives its form from it, taking on its like
ness in all respects." . . . For our thought, M

162 ST. AUGUSTINE
arriving at that which we know and taking its
form therefore, is our true word (ibid.).
Now we may come to the analogy (xv. 40).
" I have endeavoured, as well as I could," he
says, " by this Hkeness-in-an-enigma [vague
Hkeness], to suggest an analogy to God the
Father and God the Son, that is, to God the
Begetter, who, so to speak, uttered in His
Word, which is coeternal with HimseK, all
that belongs to His substance — to suggest an
analogy in the memory and intelligence of our
minds. |]One is incfined to say, But why the memory,
what is memory doing here ? Augustine is pre
pared for the challenge, and goes on to explain] :
- " I here understand by memory all that we know,
even when we are not thinking of it, and by
intelligence I mean the imparting of form to
thought. For when by thinking we discover
some truth, this is more especiaUy called intelH
gence, and when we have found it (we say that)
we leave it laid up in the memory. But there is
a more profound depth of memory where we first
found that truth when we began to think of it, and
the inner word, the intelligence which comes to
light in thought, is born from the intelligence
which was already in the memory, but was latent
there." So far, then, we have had an analogy,
in the primal source of thought and the formed

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 163
thought which proceeds from it, to the relation
of the Father and the Son in the Trinity.
Augustine goes on to say : " But about the Holy-
Spirit; I have shown nothing in this enigma
which might appear to be Hke Him except our
own will, or love or affection, which is but a
stronger wiU — love [as he says a Httle later],
which combines the vision existing in the memory
with the thought - vision formed thence, Hke
parent and child."
As an analysis of the process of thought this
is very striking. As an illustration of the nature
of the Trinity, Augustine is weU aware that it
has its Hmitations — he goes on indeed to point
out some of them himseK.
Its strong point is that it suggests a move
ment of life within the Deity, a dynamic, and
not a static, conception. The idea of a movement
of self-reafisation eternally complete within the
Divine nature offers interesting points of com
parison and contrast with some modern specula
tions. But into this it is not our business to
enter. We may notice, however, that another
of his illustrations, which he does not develop
by any means so fuUy, has met with still more
favour in modern times. That is the Trinity
which he suggests as involved in love. In the
love of friend for friend he says there are three
things : He that loves and that which is loved,

164 ST. AUGUSTINE
and^fche love which is the bond between them
(De Trin. viii. 14)T^
"ItT was 'suggested in a former chapter that
there is a remarkable difference in the degree oi
efficiency which Augustine shows as a psycho
logist and as a metaphysician, respectively. We
find a striking example of this in the fact that he
held a metaphysical theory of evil which is very
nearly nonsense, and a psychological theory of
sin which can give a very good account of itself.
He held, to put it quite briefly, that the evil~oi
the world is due to its having been created out
of nothing. The " nothing " out of which the
world is made, continues in some mysterious way
to exercise an influence upon that which is,
according to the usual figure of speech, made
out of it.
In his Contra Epistoktm Manichaei, § 44,
Augustine says : " When we speak of a ' cor
ruptible thing ' we use two terms [namely,
' corruptible ' and ' thing '] ; and again when
it is said God made out of nothing we use two
terms [' God ' and ' nothing ']. Now in these
two pairs of terms, combine each one with the
one to which it is appropriate in the other pair,
and refer the ' thing ' to God, the corrupti-
bifity to the ' nothing.' "
It is not surprising that in the Pelagian
controversv his opponent JuHan of Eclanum.

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 165
who was a skilful debater, should have seized
on this pecufiar view as a remnant of the
Manichaean Duafism. " This nothing," he says,
" plays the same part in your teaching as the
Ruler of the Realm of Darkness does for the
Manichaeans." And he proceeds sarcastically :
" This thing which had no existence, has had,
according to you, great influence, from the very
fact that it never existed ; and its power was at
the maximum after it had lost even its name
[by becoming something]. Truly it obtained
a great dominion after its very appellation had
perished " (Op. imperf. c. Jul. v. 32. 33). Now,
so far as I can see, that criticism is in essence
perfectly justified. Only, I beheve that JuHan
is wrong in attributing the pecuharity of the
view to Manichaean influence. It was really
a desperate attempt to combine the Neo-Platonic
doctrine of matter with the Christian doctrine
of creation out of nothing.
Now let us look at his theory of sia, It
belongs to the idea of the soul to find its chief-
good in a Hving relation to its Creator. It is-
incomplete in itseK, and conscious of this in
completeness, and only in Him can it find com
pleteness and satisfaction. Sin consists in seeking
its satisfaction in itseK or in other lesser goods.
Evil is not sought per se. It is mistaken for a
good, i.e. for something intrinsically desirable.

166 ST. AUGUSTINE
There is thus an element of seK-deception in aU
_sin. " Pride imitates true loftiness, ambition
seeks honour, severity desires to be feared — all
prerogatives which belong to God. Curiosity pro
fesses to be the desire for knowledge ; ignorance
and foUy assume the name of simplicity and
innocence ; cowardice affects to desire quiet ;
luxury would fain be called sufficiency and
abundance ; lavishness assumes the semblance
-of fiberafity, and so forth " (Conf. ii. 13). " For
souls in their very sins strive after some kind of
Hkeness of God, though they use a proud and
preposterous, and, so to speak, slavish liberty "
(De Trin. xi. 8). When obvious crimes are com
mitted we assume that there is some further
motive, that the man is seeking not the shameful
thing itseK but something else by means of it.
If we hear of a murder, we ask why did he do it ?
And the answer is : he desired the other man's
wife, or his lands, or he was trying to steal the
means to Hve, or he dreaded to meet with Hke
treatment at the other's hands, or he had suffered
wrong from him and sought vengeance. " Would
any one do a murder for the mere pleasure of it ?
Who could beheve it ? "
No doubt this theory has its dangers. It
may be so handled as to become, in Tennyson's
phrase, "Procuress to the Lords of Hell."
But there is no suggestion in Augustine that

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 167
the motive is innocent ; in some of the cases
mentioned it is not less bad than the action.
The point is merely that it is rational ; the
motive of sin is not mere mafignity.
When we turn to the special doctrines of sin
and grace which are more particularly associated
with his name we find a number of points of
psychological interest arising. These doctrines
are usuaUy thought of in connexion with the
Pelagian controversy, but it is important to
remember that in aU essentials they were
developed many years before that controversy
broke out. In the first Book of the Retracta
tions, section 9, paragraph 6, Augustine remarks
that he had answered Pelagius by anticipation
in his work De Libero .4r&^no, written within a
few years of his conversion ; and if in conjunc
tion with this we take another early work, De
Diversis Quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, we find
the outlines of his system already pretty fully
present. That suggests what I believe to be
the fact, that his doctrines of sin and grace were
mainly based on his experience — his experience,
of course, as interpreted through Scripture, and
more especially through the Pauhne Epistles.
In one of the anti-Pelagian writings, the De Dono
Perseverantiae (53), he remarks that the account
in the Confessions of how he was granted to his
mother's tears is a striking illustration of the

168 ST. AUGUSTINE
way in which God by His grace can convert
men to the faith even when they are opposing
it. Augustinianism, in fact, did not arise as a
protest against Pelagianism, but vice versa, and
their first encounter, as described by Augustine
himseK, was of a curiously personal character.
The incident is narrated in the passage of De
Dono Perseverantiae referred to above. There
is, he recalls, a saying which recurs several times
in the Confessions : " Give what Thou com-
mandest, and command what Thou wilt." This
is a prayer, faith's chaUenge to God, as it were,
a paraphrase of St. Paul's " I can do aU things
through Christ which strengtheneth me."
Now, this saying, " Give what Thou com-
mandest, and command what Thou wilt,"
happened to be quoted by a bishop at Rome in
the presence of Pelagius. It roused Pelagius to
indignant protest, so much so that he almost
quarrelled with the bishop who had quoted it.
The encounter is, as I said, almost personal, for
though Augustine was not present in person it
was his intimate self-expression in the Confessions
which roused the indignation of his opponent.
And the passage where the phrase occurs is not a
theoretic discussion ; it introduces that account
of his spiritual condition at the time of writing
his Confessions with which he closes his narrative.
It is in the main an expression of confidence, of

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 169
a confidence based on his experience. Some
thing, he feels, has been already attained, he has
attained it through the Divine aid, and for what
remains he trusts the same source of power.
It was this sense of a truth verified in experi
ence which was the ultimate driving power of
his anti-Pelagian polemics. It is unnecessary
here to review that long, weary, and in parts
unpleasant controversy. It wiU be sufficient
just to recall the main outhnes by way of intro
duction to some points in which Augustine's
psychological treatment of the questions is of
interest. We may sum up Augustine's view broadly
thus : Man, in his present condition, has not the-
power of effectively- willing good. He has a
bias~towarcls~evil which he cannot by his own
efforts overcome. But this condition jdoes not
belong to" the idea of human nature. It is not
normal, so to speak, but is a penal condition
resulting from the sin of the first man, who was
in a condition of real freedom, in the sense of
having the power to choose between good and
ill. As a consequence of his sin he lost this power,
and transmitted to his descendants the bias
towards evil which he had thus acquired. In
regeneration God restores to man the power of
choosing good, and the goal of redeemed humanity
is to arrive at a condition where it will have the

(170) ST. AUGUSTINE
power^of choosing good only, and not evil. The
first man, as Augustine puts it, possessed the
posse non peccare, the capacity no_t_.tp_._sin ; the
redeemed man is destined to possess the non
posse peccare, incapacity to sin. The grace by1
¦^which God turns man to Himself operates irre
sistibly, or rather invincibly, for though it may
be resisted it cannot be overcome. God has His
way with the man. Of course, a statement on
this smaU scale can only be roughly accurate.
If we were treating the History of Doctrine as
such we should have to introduce various shadings
and modifications. As against the above tenets,
Pelagius held that Adam's sin affected no one
but himseK, except by way of bad example, and
further, that the commission of personal sin left
the wiU just as free as it was before. As to
grace, that consisted merely of all the external
aids which God has provided.
As regards man's actual condition, in the
Pelagian controversy, where Scripture is common
ground to himself and his opponents, Augustine
generally prefers to use Scriptural arguments,
but in his great apologetic work, the De Civitate
Dei, where he is addressing a wider audience,
he also appeals to experience. That the whole
human race has been condemned in its origin,
this Hfe itself, if Hfe it can be caUed, bears witness
by the host of cruel evils with which it is filled.

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 171
Then he gives a long catalogue of sins and evils,
hatred, deceit, flattery, fraud, theft, robbery,
perfidy, and the Hke. He does not, however,
exaggerate the universahty of the grosser forms
of evil. He holds them to be potentially rather
than actually present. These, he says, are the
crimes of wicked men, but they spring from that
root of error and misplaced love which is born
with ,. every son of Adam. "For who has not
observed with what a superfluity of foohsh
desires, beginning to appear even in boyhood,
man comes into this Hfe, so that if he were left
to five as he pleased and to do whatever he
pleased, he would plunge into all, or certainly
into many, of those crimes and iniquities which
I have mentioned" (De Civ. Dei, xxii. 22. 1).
This is put more concretely in the Confessions.
In Conf. i. 30, after speaking of childish greed,
deceit, and iU-temper, he exclaims : "Is that
the innocence of childhood ? It is not, 0 Lord,
nay surely it is not, 0 my God ! For these are
the same offences which, as our years advance,
come to be committed, not against tutors and
teachers, and for the sake of nuts and baUs and
sparrows, but against kings and governors for
the sake of gold, estates, and slaves — just as the
rod gives place to proportionately heavier
penalties." But what he perhaps feels to be even more

172 ST. AUGUSTINE
convincing evidence of something amiss with
human nature is the constant conflict, the warfare
with temptation, which has to be waged by
those who desire to do right. " For," he says,
-*' though sometimes more violently and some
times less so, yet without intermission does the
flesh lust against the spirit and the spirit against
the flesh, so that we cannot do the things that
we would, and extirpate all evil desire, but can
only refuse to consent to it as God gives us
abihty, and keep it under ; vigilantly keeping
watch lest a semblance of truth deceive us, lest
a subtle discourse blind us, lest error involve us
in darkness, lest fear should hinder us in doing
what is good, or desire precipitate us into doing
what we ought not " — and so on through a long
catalogue, which leads up to the inference :
" Consequently even this our warfare, in which
we are exposed to peril, belongs to the iUs of
this Hfe, which is proved by the witness of so
many grave evils to be a Hfe under condemna
tion " (De Civ. Dei, xxii. 23).
This doctrine of original sin is not attractive
to the natural man ; but many thinkers who
have not accepted its dogmatic basis have come
to a result not in essence very different. It is
interesting to note, for example, that Goethe
changed his mind on this point. In his younger
days he had attacked Kant with extreme bitter-

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 173
ness for admitting radical evil, declaring in
language the violence of which strikes us as
unworthy of one great man in speaking of
another, that after spending a long lifetime in
cleansing his philosopher's cloak from many
dirty prejudices, he had wantonly defiled it with
the shameful stain of radical evil, in order that
Christians also might be drawn to kiss its hem.
But in a review written in 1827 x he holds a
different language, admitting that certain phases
of human nature compel us to ascribe to it a
certain Erbsunde, original or inherited sin. He
adds, no doubt, that other features of human
nature require us to recognise in it an Erbtugend
or "original virtue," an inborn goodness and
rectitude — and especially an inclination to
reverence. But to this latter point also a com
plete parallel may be quoted from Augustine —
a recognition not merely of the original sin
but also of the original virtue.
In the De Civ. Dei, xxii. 24. 1, he writes :
" But in this river, as I may call it, of the human
race, two currents flow together, the evil which
is drawn from the parent and the good which
is bestowed by the Creator." He is not merely
referring here to the possibility of redemption,

1 I am indebted for this interesting reference to my friend Dr.
Gibb, Emeritus Professor of Church History in Westminster College,
Cambridge.

174 ST. AUGUSTINE
for he is speaking of what man receives by
natural generation ; and he continues, a little
further on : " It is God, then, who has given to
'the human soul a mind in which reason Hes
dormant during infancy . . . but is destined
to be awakened and exercised as years increase.
... It is by this capacity that the soul drinks
in wisdom, and becomes endowed with the
virtues. . . . And even though this be not
uniformly the result, yet who can competently
utter or even conceive the grandeur of this work
of the Almighty, and the unspeakable boon
which He has conferred upon our natural nature
by giving us the capacity for such attainment ? "-
Thus his views on original sin by no means
bhnded him to what is exceUent in human nature.
Moreover, while he insists on the ravages which
original sin has made in our nature, he distinctly
recognises that only freely committed sin is sin
in the fuU sense. In the De Libero Arbitrio, iii.
§ 54, he has the following striking iUustration :
"As we use the word tongue not only of the
member, but of what follows the movement of
the member, namely, language [as we speak, he
means, of ' the Latin tongue '], so we call sin,
not only what is properly called sin, as being
committed voluntarily and knowingly, but also
the existing consequences which necessarily
foUow from the punishment of this sin."

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 175
In support of the view that only that is sin
which is done wiKuUy, he is content to appeal
to the universal consciousness, using the f oUowing
examples : " Suppose when a man was asleep
some one else wrote with his hand something
criminal — would he be responsible ? Or suppose
a man was bound, aU but his hand, and then
some one stronger than he forced him to write
something criminal, would he be responsible ? "
Any one, he says, to whom these questions are
put would be indignant at being asked anything
so absurd. To turn to another point, it hardly needs
proof that he is on much firmer psychological
ground than his opponents in holding that the
commission of sin — or indeed for the matter of
that action of any kind — does not leave the will
exactly as it was before. Indeed I suppose
there is hardly any one nowadays who hold so
completely atomistic a view of human action
as that imphes. It may be just worth while,
however, to quote a passage from his Pelagian
opponent, JuHan of Eclanum, showing how
distinctly he did profess this view, and a passage
from Augustine on the other side.
In his unfinished work against JuHan (Opus
imperf. c. Jul. i. 91), Augustine quotes the
latter as roundly asserting that " Free wiU is
as complete after sins as before sins." It is not

176 ST. AUGUSTINE
that he attributes this view to JuHan inf erentially
as a kind of reductio ad absurdum. His method
in this work is to quote a passage from JuHan,
and comment upon it, and this is one of the
quotations. In this place he is content to answer it by an
appeal to Scripture, quoting St. Paul's avowal :
" The good that I would, I do not ; but the evil
that I would not, that I do."
In the De Libero Arbitrio, iii. 52, however,
he writes more fully : " Nor is it to be wondered
-at that a man should not have free will to choose
to do right, either from ignorance or from the
resistance of the habit of our carnal nature,
which by the strong force of mortal succession
grows inveterate as it were naturaUy, so that
while he sees what ought to be done and wills it,
he is unable to perform it. For it is a most just
punishment of sin that a man should lose what
he was unwilling to use when he could have done
so without difficulty had he willed it ; namely,
that he who, knowing what is right, does not do (
it should lose the power of knowing what is right, !
and that he who is unwilfing to do what is right
when he could, should lose the power of doing
it when he would."
k That is a very clear statement not merely of
a theological doctrine, but of the weU-estabhshed
natural law of the atrophy of unused faculties.

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 177
Then again, his doctrine that true freedom
is only reac^d..whe^Jte wiiriMes'tne^ capacity
to chooseanything butgood, though paradoxi-
caUy expressed, contains the recognition of a
truth. It is paradoxical, in that it uses freedom
in a sense different from the ordinary ; it is true,
in that it is based on a sound psychological
generafisation, namely, that character does tend
towards fixity. Probably every one of us has
some friend in regard to whom, if some particular
charge were made against him, we should say :
" The thing is inconceivable. I would not
beheve it unless he told me himseK." We
constantly see character attaining to that kind
of fixity on certain Hnes. Augustine's ideal is
that it should end by attaining to that kind of
fixity aU round.
Thus in the Tractates on St. John (xh. 10) he
writes : " The beginning of Hberty is to be
free from gross sins. When Paul prescribed
rules for the choosing of presbyters and deacons
he did not say : ' If any man is without sin,'
but, 'if any man is without crime' — such as
murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, fraud,
sacrilege, and the Hke. When a man has begun
to be free from these (and every Christian man
ought to be free from them) he has begun to
raise his head towards Hberty ; but that is an
incipient not a perfect liberty. ... So far as

178 ST. AUGUSTINE
we serve God we are free ; so far as we still serve
sin we are slaves."
Again, grace, though it acts irresistibly, does
~not act magically. It is not thought of as a stream
of force turning our will this way or that. Its
action may sometimes be mysterious, but where
we can trace it we find that grace acts psycho-
-logically — it acts by providing the strongest
motive. " But the will itself, unless something
be presented to it which defights and attracts
the mind, cannot possibly be set in motion ; but
to cause this ' something ' to be presented to it,
is not in the power of man. What was Saul's
will, save to assail, drag off, bind and kiU Chris
tians ? How raging, how mad, how blind a
will ! Yet when by a single utterance from
above he was cast down, and there was pre
sented to him a vision by which, his rage being
broken down, his mind and his will might be
turned back and brought to faith, suddenly from
a persecutor of the Gospel he was made a preacher
of it " (De Div. Quaest. ad Simplic. i. 22).
On the same Hnes, in expounding Galatians v.
22, 23, he says : " These spiritual fruits reign in
the men in whom sins do not reign. These good
things reign if they uphold the mind amid
temptations, that it may not faU into sin. For
we must necessarily act in accordance with the
strongest motive (" Quod enim amplius nos

THE PSYCHOLOGIST AS THINKER 179
delectat, secundum id operemur necesse est,"
Expos. Ep. in Gal. 49). This, of course, does not
mean that we are always obhged to do what
appears pleasantest at the moment. All it
means is that in a balance of motives which
may include, besides the sense of immediate
pleasantness, expectation of reward or punish
ment, ethical conviction, love of God or one's
neighbour, — that on a balance of all these
the strongest or the strongest combination
prevails. Except as against a magical theory
it is, in fact, a truism. What Augustine has
in mind is perhaps made clearer by the following
examples. In De Musica (vi. 52) he writes : ,
" The love of temporal things would never be
driven out except by a certain sweetness of the
things eternal " ; while in the warmer, more
personal language of the Confessions he exclaims :
" How sweet it suddenly became to me to give-
up the sweetness of those vanities. . . . For
Thou, the true, the supreme sweetness hadst
cast them out and hadst entered in their stead,
sweet to me beyond all pleasures " (Conf. ix. 1).

VII
ST. AUGUSTINE AS EXPOSITOR AND
PREACHER
St. Augustine himself treats as two parts of one
whole the two subjects which we are to consider
in this chapter — his work as a preacher and as
an interpreter of Scripture. Scripture he thinks
of as the quarry from whioh the preacher draws
his materials ; preaching as the means by which
the expositor brings home the truths of Scripture
to the minds of those whom he has to instruct.
Thus it comes that his work " On Christian
Instruction," De Doctrina Christiana, is a
treatise both on Exegetical method and on the
principles of Homiletics.
That both interpretation and preaching are
arts, needing to be acquired by careful study, he
had the fullest conviction. In his day, as in ours,
there were people who distrusted such prepara
tion, and he meets them with an ingenious argu-
mentum ad hominem. ' ' As regards those who talk
vauntingly of Divine grace and boast that they
180

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 181
can understand and explain Scripture without the
aid of such instructions, it should mitigate their
wrath if they would remember that, however
justly they may rejoice in God's great gift, it
was, after aU, from human teachers that they
themselves first learned to read. Now, they
would hardly think it right that they should for
that reason be held in contempt by the Egyptian
monk Antony, a just and holy man, who, not
being able to read himseK, is said to have com
mitted the Scriptures to memory by hearing them
read by others, ... or by that barbarian slave
Christianus, of whom I have lately heard from
very respectable witnesses, who, without any
teaching from man, attained a fuU knowledge
of the art of reading, simply through prayer
that it might be revealed to him ; after three
days' supphcation obtaining his request that
he might read through a book presented to
him on the spot by the astonished bystanders.
But if any one think that these stories are false,
I do not strongly insist on them " (De Doct.
Christ. Prol. 4). In the context, I think that
last remark must be suspected of a touch of
irony. He goes on to recall that the Ethiopian
eunuch, for example, was not enlightened by
an angel, but that, " by the suggestion of God,
Phifip, who did understand the prophet, came
to him and sat with him, and in human words

182 ST. AUGUSTINE
and with a human tongue opened to him the
Scriptures." What, then, does Augustine consider to be the
proper equipment of the interpreter ? In the first
place, he ought to know the languages in which
Scripture is written, Hebrew and Greek. Then
there are the subsidiary studies of grammar,
rhetoric, and dialectic, which help us to appreciate
the niceties of language, the force of argument, or
the energy and beauty with which the thoughts
are expressed. History helps us to organise our
knowledge of Scriptural events and relate them
to the general history of the world. The know
ledge of mechanical arts and of natural objects
helps us to understand circumstances, allusions,
figures, and so forth.
And in regard to matters of this kind it is
interesting to note, in view of modern develop
ments, that he suggests the compilation of some
thing in the nature of a Bible Dictionary. He
refers to an existing dictionary of proper names
and to " what Eusebius has done in regard to the
history of the past with a view to the questions
arising in Scripture that need a knowledge of
history for their solution," and proceeds.: " The
same, I think, might be done in other matters
if any competent man were wilfing in a spirit
of benevolence to undertake the labour for the
advantage of his brethren. In this way he might

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 183
arrange in their several classes and give an
account of the unknown places and animals, and
plants and trees, and stones and metals, and
other species of things which are mentioned in
Scripture " (De Doct. Christ, ii. 59). The philo
sophy of the heathen, too, especiaUy, for example,
of the Neo-Platonists, is not to be left out of
account. To use this is to foUow the example
of the Israelites, who, when they came up out
of Egypt, borrowed from their heathen neighbours
gold and silver and raiment. In an eloquent
passage he exclaims : "Do we not see how
richly laden with gold and silver and raiment
Cyprian came up out of Egypt, and Lactantius,
Victorinus, Optatus, and Hilary — not to speak
of Hving men and Greeks without number ? "
(De Doct. Christ, ii. 61).
Thus a wide and thorough general education
belongs to the equipment of Augustine's ideal
expositor. What are the special principles
which he is to apply when he comes to the
practical work of exegesis ?
TheoreticaUy, Augustine accepts the principle
that the primary object of exegesis is to dis
cover what the author actually meant. " We
aU," he says, in Confessions, xii. 27, " endeavour
to discover and understand what he whom we
are reading intended." But it is fair to say
that he does not give it the same finality as a

184 ST. AUGUSTINE
modern expositor would do. In the same passage
from which we have quoted this he goes on :
" While therefore every one endeavours to under
stand the Scriptures in the sense intended by
him who wrote them, what harm is it if he under
stands something that is true, even if the author
intended some other truth." It should be said,
however, that he is here speaking of difficult
and ambiguous passages, not of prejudiced
interpretations or arbitrary allegorisation. And
in De Doctrina Christiana, i. 41, he guards the
principle in this way : " If his mistaken inter
pretation tends to build up love, which is the
end of the commandment, he goes astray in much
the same way as a man who by mistake quits
the high-road, yet reaches through the fields
the same place to which the road leads. He is
to be corrected, however, and to be shown how
much better it is not to quit the straight road,
lest if he get into a habit of going astray he
may sometimes take a road at right angles to
the true road, or even go in the wrong direc
tion altogether." In regard to those obscure
passages where diversity of interpretation is
legitimate, he lays down the sound general rule
that we should, where possible, " draw examples
from the plainer expressions to throw Hght upon
those that are more obscure, and use the evidence
of passages about which there is no doubt, to

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 185
remove all hesitation in regard to the doubtful
passages " (De Doct. Christ, ii. 14).
We turn now to the department in which he
sins most against modern canons — that of
aUegorisation. It is to be noted, in the first
place, that he is not, in theory, at any rate, a
wild and reckless aUegoriser. In the De Unitate
Ecclesiae,1 chap, v., for instance, he recognises
that in dealing with heretics or schismatics it
is useless to appeal to allegorical interpretations,
in which an arbitrary element necessarily comes
in. Only plain passages in their obvious Hteral
sense are here of any avail.
Further, he insists that when we are going to
allegorise, the aUegorical sense must, as a rule,
not oust the literal sense, but be built upon it.
In Serm. ii. 7, when about to give an aUegorical
interpretation of the ram at the sacrifice of
Isaac as prefiguring Christ, he says : " Before
all things, brethren, we earnestly exhort and
instruct you in the name of the Lord that when
you hear expounded the symbolical meaning
of a passage of Scripture which narrates facts,
you should first beheve that what you read
happened as it is stated ; lest, the foundation
of fact being removed, you should seek to build,
as it were, in the air."
The only exception to this is in the case of
1 Otherwise known as Ad Catholicos Epistola contra Donatistas.

186 ST. AUGUSTINE
passages which, when HteraUy understood, do
not make in faveur of purity of Hfe or soundness
of doctrine. It has often been pointed out that
this was a necessary resource, so long as men
had not fuUy grasped the principles of historical
evolution, progressive revelation, and the human
element in Scripture. Caird, for instance, in his
Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers
(ii. 187), speaking of Philo, writes : " [The
allegorical method] served in fact the same
purpose which in modern times has been served
by the theory of evolution, enabling men to
connect the present with the past, without
allowing that connexion to become a hindrance
to progress." It is clear, of course, that to
accept the ethics of the Old Testament as in
every respect valid for later times would be
reactionary ; and in this connexion the alle
gorical method did valuable '¦ service to the
Christian Church in its early days. It should be
said, however, that Augustine himself had a per
ception of the truth of historical development
which, consistently carried out, might have
rendered him largely independent of the allegori
cal method so far as this purpose is concerned.
In De Doctrina Christiana (iii. 15) he writes :
"As men are prone to estimate sins not by
reference to their inherent sinfulness, but rather
by reference to their own customs, it frequently

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 187
happens that a man will think blamable nothing
except what the men of his own country and
time are accustomed to condemn, and nothing
worthy of approval except what is sanctioned
by the custom of his companions ; and thus it
comes to pass that K Scripture either enjoins
what is opposed to the custom of the hearers, or
condemns what is not so opposed, and if at the
same time the authority of the word has a hold
upon their minds, they think that expression
is figurative." " Surely they might understand,"
he writes again, in Confessions, iii. 13, " when they
see that in one man, one garment fits one member
and one another ; that in one day a thing is
permitted at one time and prohibited later ; that
in one house something is permitted, or it may
be commanded to be done, in one part, which in
another, close to it, is forbidden under threat of
punishment. Does this mean that justice is
changing and inconstant ? No, but times, over
which it is enthroned, change, for that is the
very quality of time." One could hardly ask
a clearer statement than this of the principle
of historical evolution.
Further, he recognises that some passages of
Scripture are there, not so much for their own
sake, but as a framework to bind the others
together, as in a stringed instrument the frame is
there for the sake of the strings (Contra Faustum,

188 ST. AUGUSTINE
xxii. 94). If this be taken in conjunction with
the principle of development, it is obvious that
he was not forced back on the allegorical method
quite so inevitably as a thinker of less breadth
of mind might have been. His fondness for
allegory has therefore to be explained partly on
other grounds. The fact seems to be that, for
one thing, he enjoyed the exercise of ingenuity
for which the allegorical method gives scope ;
and, for another, he found as a preacher that it
gripped the minds of the people better. In De
Doctrina Christiana (ii. 7) he gives the foUowing
curious iUustration : " Why is it, I ask, that if
any one says there are holy and just men whose
life and conversation the Church uses as a means
of redeeming those who come to it from all kinds
of superstitions, and making them, through their
imitation of good men, members of its own body,
— how is it that if a man says this, he does not
please his hearer so much as when he draws the
same meaning from a passage in Canticles, where
it is said of the Church, when being praised under
the figure of a beautiful woman : ' Thy teeth
are Hke a flock of sheep that are shorn, which
came up from the washing, whereof every one
beareth twins, and none is barren among them? ' '
"I do not know why," he says, "but I feel
greater pleasure in contemplating holy men when
I think of them as the teeth of the Church tearing

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 189
away men from their errors, and bringing them
into the Church's body with all their harshness
softened down, just as if they had been masti
cated by the teeth. It is with the greatest
pleasure, too, that I recognise them under the
figure of sheep that have been shorn, laying
down the burdens of the world Hke fleeces, and
coming up from the washing, that is from
baptism, and aU bearing twins, that is the twin
commandments of love, and none of them
barren in that holy fruit."
He remarks elsewhere on the freedom and
absence of artificiafity which characterises the
Scriptural use of figures. There is no fixed
system of symbohsm : the same figure may in
different passages signify opposite things. The
Hon is at one time the Lion of the tribe of Judah,
at another a figure for the Devil ; the serpent at
one time typifies the Tempter, at another it is
a symbol of the wisdom of the saints, and so
forth (De Doct. Christ, in. 36 ; Serm. 32. 6).
So far we have been occupied with his theory
in regard to exegesis ; let us now turn to his
qualifications and his practice.
In regard to his knowledge of languages he
freely admits his deficiencies. He knew practi
cally no Hebrew, and he knew much less Greek
than he could have desired. His ignorance of
Hebrew had various consequences ; among them

190 ST. AUGUSTINE
an exaggerated reverence for the Septuagint
translation. We touched on this in an earher
chapter in connexion with his epistolary con
troversy with Jerome, and we then saw that he
objected to Jerome's new translation from the
Hebrew, partly from a perverted scholarly
instinct, because he Hked to check the Old Latin
version by the Septuagint, from which it was
made ; partly from a theory that the Seventy
translators in their departures from the Hebrew
were divinely guided, being, as he puts it, not
only interpreters but prophets. Occasionally
he mentions Punic words known to his hearers
which had some resemblance to the Hebrew;
but he did not himself speak Punic, or he might
perhaps have approached Hebrew from this side
with the aid of some of the numerous Jews who
were to be found in North African towns. He
seems to have possessed a kind of dictionary
which gave the meanings of the Hebrew proper
names. As regards his knowledge of Greek, there has
been some controversy, and his ignorance has
often been greatly exaggerated by writers who
have made passing allusions to it. The evidence
on which they rely — where they are not merely
repeating some one else's opinion — supphes a
very interesting example of the fallacy of build
ing a theory on a sentence detached from its

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 191
context. The sentence is this. In the Contra
Litteras Petiliani, Augustine certainly says quite
definitely : " I indeed have studied Greek very
Httle, indeed almost not at aU." Now this is,
of course, quite enough for the " young man
in a hurry." He immediately writes down,
" Augustine, unfortunately, knew next to no
Greek, see Contra Litteras Petiliani, ii. 91," and
goes on his way with a virtuous sense of having
given his references. But if he had " looked
before and after," in addition to " sighing for
what is not " (namely, Augustine's ignorance),
fie would have found another illustration of
the fact that things are not always what they
seem — at least to him who wants to read while
running. For, having made this profession of
profound ignorance, Augustine immediately pro
ceeds to trip up his adversary in a mistake in
Greek ! Under these circumstances the profes
sion of ignorance is hardly to be taken au pied
de la httre. It is simply the rhetorical trick
of fence which prepares the way for the thrust
that foUows. An appeal, of course, Hes to the
facts. Now, we find that Augustine has written
six short books of comments on the verbal diffi
culties of the first six books of the Bible. He
is dealing primarily with the Latin, but it is
quite evident that for a large portion of them,
at least, he had compared the Latin with the

192 ST. AUGUSTINE
Septuagint verse by verse. In his Commentaries
generally, he frequently appeals to the Greek
text. In the Contra Julianum (i. 26) he quotes
a passage from Chrysostom, and, the current
version being inaccurate, he gives a more exact
rendering of his own. He can remark, too, on
the force of a particular tense, notes a construc
tion Hke the accusative of limitation, and in
several passages discriminates accurately between
synonyms. Now,thecapacityto do all these things
is far removed from gross ignorance of a language.
The fact seems to be that he had had the elements
painfully drilled into him at school, as he tells us
in the Confessions, and that later, with the aid
probably of some of the Greek-speaking clergy,
he increased his knowledge very considerably.
His bishop, Valerius, was, we are told, more at
home in Greek than Latin. Thus, though he
never acquired the power of reading Greek
authors with ease, he knew his way about quite
well in the New Testament and Septuagint.
As regards the general equipment which he
desiderates in an expositor — grammar, logic,'
rhetoric, philosophy, history, and general know
ledge — he was, as we know, unusually well
provided. We may now turn to some examples of his
practice. The Hterary training included under
the term " grammar " in ancient education

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 193
included some knowledge of textual criticism,
and he frequently remarks on textual points.
In discussing the difficulty of the ascription
to Jeremiah in Matt, xxvii. 9 of a prophecy
which comes from Zechariah, he shows a sound
knowledge of critical principles. Some MSS., he
points out, have no name, reading simply " by
the prophet." " He who is satisfied with this de
fence," he says, " may use it, but it does not satisfy
me, for the following reasons. The MSS. which
have the name of Jeremiah are more numerous,
and those who have studied the matter say that
they find it in the more ancient Greek manu
scripts.1 And, moreover, there was no reason
for putting in the name and making it wrong ;
but there was reason enough why in certain
manuscripts a rash ignorance should remove it,
in alarm at the difficulty that this prophecy
was not found in Jeremiah " (De Consensu
Evangelistarum, iii. 29).
With the question of interpolation on a wider
scale he was brought in contact in connexion with
the Manichaean heresy. The Manichaeans, it
seems, were great exponents of Inter polationskritik.
Professing to accept the New Testament, they
got rid of any passage which did not square
1 Among Greek MSS. he gives most weight to those found in the
Churches which are distinguished for learning and research (De
Doct. Christ, ii. 22).

194 ST. AUGUSTINE
with their views by declaring it to be spurious.
On this Augustine writes trenchantly in Contra
Faustum, xi. 2 : " It is one thing to reject the
books as a whole ... as the Pagans reject our
Scriptures, or the Jews the New Testament . . .
and it is another thing to say, ' This holy man
wrote only the truth, and this is his epistle, but
some verses are his and some are not.' And
when youare asked for a proof, instead of referring
to more correct or more ancient manuscripts . . .
your reply is, ' This verse is his because it makes
for me ; and this is not his because it is against
me.' Are you then the rule of truth ? What
answer could you make to an opponent as un
reasonable as yourseK who should assert, ' The
passage in your favour is spurious, and that
against you is genuine ' ? "
In one of his vigorous metaphors he describes
this plea of wholesale interpolation as " the last
gasp of a heretic in the grip of truth." x
As regards what may be called higher criticism,
we do not, of course, find him going very far,
but it is interesting to note that he had too much
historical acumen to be troubled by discrepancies
between the Evangefists in the narration of the
same event. For instance, when his Manichaean
opponent, Faustus, attacks the narrative of the
1 " Manifesta veritate faucibus pressis, anhelitu saucio dicitis esse
falsata " (C. Faust, x. 3).

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 195
healing of the Centurion's servant on the ground
that in one gospel the Centurion himseK comes
to Jesus, in the other makes his request through
the Jewish elders, Augustine rephes : "I wish
one of those fooHsh people who found their
captious objections to the gospel on trifling
difficulties of this kind would himseK teU a
story twice over, honestly endeavouring to give
a true account of what happened, and that his
words should be taken down and read over to
him. We should then see whether he would not
say more at one time than another ; and whether
the order would not be changed, not only of
words but of things ; and whether he would not
put some opinion of his own into the mouth of
another, because, though he never heard him
say it, he knew it perfectly well to be in his
mind; and whether he would not sometimes
express in a few words what he had before
narrated at length. In these and other ways,
which might perhaps be reduced to rule,1 the
narratives of the same thing by two persons, or
two narratives by the same person, might differ
in many things without being opposed, might
be unlike without being contradictory " (C.
Faust, xxxiii. 8).
It will be noted that it is Augustine's psycho-
1 This is an interesting suggestion of the possibility of a science of
historical criticism.

196 ST. AUGUSTINE
logical insight which here serves him as guide
in his criticism, just as in a former chapter we
saw it supplying argument and illustration to
his theology.
Augustine's acute mind and trained dialectical
skill are seen to advantage in dealing with
apparent contradictions. We saw in a former
chapter how he reconciled the temporary reten
tion with the subsequent setting aside of Jewish
ceremonies as " the honourable burial " of
customs, good in their time and place, which yet
must not be resuscitated. A more fimited and
verbal difficulty is the apparent contradiction
between Galatians vi. verses 2 and 5, " Bear ye
one another's burdens," and " Every man shall
bear his own burden," which he doubtless inter
prets rightly in remarking, " The burden of
bearing infirmity is one thing, the burden of
responsibility to God for our actions is another.
The bearing of the former we are to share with
our brethren, the latter must be borne by each
individual for himseK " (De Cons. Evang. n. 72).
In his Exposition of the Epistle to the Galatians
he dismisses with equal ease the difficulty that
Paul repudiates in Gal. i. 10 the idea of pleasing
men, whilst in 1 Cor. x. 33 he says that he
pleases all men in all things. The difficulty is
solved by noticing the motive added in the
latter case, that Paul pleases them for their

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 197
profit, with a view to their salvation ; for
" to please men thus is to please not men but
God." In regard to the precept, " If a man smite thee
on the one cheek, turn unto him the other also,"
Augustine shows both ethical and exegetical
insight in deahng with the question whether it
is to be taken HteraUy. He points out that
we have an authoritative interpretation in our
Lord's action. When the servant of the High
Priest struck Him, we do not read that He
offered the other cheek, but that He quietly
rebuked the smiter. " And hereby," says
Augustine, " He rather showed what needed to
be shown, namely, that those great precepts of
His are to be fulfilled not by bodily ostentation,
but by the preparation of the heart. For it is
possible for a man HteraUy to hold out the other
cheek, with rage in his heart the while " (Tract.
in loann. cxiii. 4). But he is not " screwing
down " the ethical demand of the saying ; the
standard is love. If a literal fulfilment will
best touch the heart of the wrong-doer, then it
becomes right ; in another case a rebuke may
be more profitable to him (Ep. cxxxviii. 11 f.).
That frequent stumbfing-block, the blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit, he explains soundly as
not some particular form of words that a man
might chance to utter, nor even some particular

198 ST. AUGUSTINE
sin that he might commit, but " a desperate and
impious obstination in sin, with a proud refusal
to humble oneseK before God " (Inchoata Ex-
positio Epistolae ad Romanos, § 23).
It is interesting to note that he takes what
is usuaUy thought of as the " Protestant " view
in regard to the famous passage, " Thou art
Peter," Matt. xvi. 18 ff. In Serm. 76. 1 he says :
" The Lord conferred upon him this name Peter,
and the meaning of it is that he symbohses the
Church. For since Christ was the rock (Petra),
Peter is the Christian people. For Petra is the
root-word ('principale nomen'). Hence Petrus is
from Petra, not Petra from Petrus, just as
Christian is from Christ, and not vice versa.
' Thou art Petrus,' He says, ' and I will buUd my
Church on this petra which thou hast confessed,
on this petra which thou didst recognise when
thou saidst, " Thou art the Christ, the son of
the Hving God." That is, upon myseK, the Son
of the Hving God, wiU I build my Church. I will
build thee upon myseK, not myseK upon thee.' '
In another Sermon (295, § 2) he adds that it was
as the representative of the Church that the
keys were given to Peter : " These keys were
received not by a single man, but by the unity
of the Church."
It should be added that in the Retractationes,
i. 21, he mentions that in a single work against

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 199
the Donatists, now lost, he had given the inter
pretation which makes Peter the rock, but that
in a great many passages (" saepissime ") he had
given the other interpretation. He does not
repeat the argument from the lost work, but
repeats in brief the argument quoted above, and
then remarks that the reader may decide for
himseK which is the more probable interpretation.
Having dwelt hitherto on the more favourable
aspects of St. Augustine's exegesis, it would
hardly be fair not to give an example of his
artificial aUegorisation. We may take as an
outstanding specimen Sermon 8, in which he
makes the ten plagues of Egypt the counter
part of the ten commandments, each plague
typifying the vice which is opposed to the
commandment. As the counterpart of the first commandment,
" Thou shalt have no other gods before me,"
the first plague, the turning of water into blood,
is allegorised thus : God, as the one source of
all things, is symboHsed by the water, out of
which aU things are born. Blood, on the other
hand, typifies mortal flesh. Therefore the
turning of water into blood stands for the
changing of the glory of the incorruptible God
into the Hkeness of corruptible man — that is,
idolatry. Interpreting the second commandment,

200 ST. AUGUSTINE
" Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy
God in vain," in the sense " Thou shalt speak
the truth and not vanity," he says that the
loquacity, the constant croaking, of frogs, typifies
speaking vanity.
The Sabbath calm finds its contrary in the
plague of Hce, which are, however, understood
as gnats, which are never still and give no rest,
and are therefore Hke the vain imaginations of
the contentious.
The greatest triumph of ingenuity is perhaps
that by which the plague of flies is brought
into relation with the commandment, " Honour
thy father and thy mother." The word for the
special fly here mentioned is in the Septuagint
KwdfMia, dog-fly. Now, indifference to parents
is, it seems, characteristic of the canine race,
quite in accordance with the fact that puppies
are born bfind ! After this we have, of course,
no difficulty in perceiving the appropriateness
of the locust to typify the false witness, since
both have a destructive tooth !
There are many curious allegorical interpreta
tions of numbers, of which we may take as an
example the interpretation of the 153 fishes in
John xxi. " Start with the number 10, standing
for the Law ; add 7, the number symboHcal of
the Spirit, and you have 17. Add together all
the numbers from 1 to 17 — 1 +2 + 3+4, etc. — and

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 201
you get 136. To this add the original 17, and
you get 153. This stands for aU those who have
shared in the grace of the Spirit (typified by 7) ;
by which grace harmony is established with the
Law of God (represented by 10).
" This number has, besides, three times over
the number 50, and three in addition, with
reference to the mystery of the Trinity, while,
again, the number 50 is made up by multiplying
7 by 7 with the addition of 1. The one is added
to show that there is One who is expressed by
seven on account of His sevenfold operation,
and we know that it was on the fiftieth day
after our Lord's ascension that the Holy Spirit
was sent " (Tract, in Ioann. cxxii. 8).
As a final example of his ingenuity and, in
certain respects, also of his philosophic grasp,
we may take the various interpretations of
Gen. i. 1, 2 which he gives in Confessions, xii.
There are no fewer than five of these, so they have
been numbered for clearness.
(1) "The heaven" means the dwelling-place
of the angels, the visible heaven being com
prehended under the term earth. " Without
form and void " — in the Old Latin " invisible
and unordered " — imphes that the earth was
created first as formless matter, which was sub
sequently formed during the days of creation.
No " day " is mentioned in connexion with this

202 ST. AUGUSTINE
first creation, because the angels, so long as they
retained their right relation to God, were above
mutabihty, while the formless matter, incapable
of showing any variation, was below it, and the
idea of time is inseparable from that of muta
bihty — hence no " day " is mentioned until we
come to the detailed acts of creation.
(2) The heaven and earth means the whole
material universe. " God made the heaven and
the earth " is a summary statement which is
afterwards amplified in the succeeding verses.
The detailed account then begins with verse 2,
in which the earth without form and void means,
as before, the formless matter prior to its being
shaped. (3) In verse 1, as in verse 2, it is the formless
matter which is referred to, but it is caUed
heaven and earth by anticipation, merely as a
figure of speech.
(4) Heaven and earth are used by anticipa
tion as in the former view, but they include the
spiritual as well as the material universe. In
this case, however, verse 2 describes each of them
in its original inchoate condition, the earth
without form being formless matter, and " dark
ness upon the deep " being spiritual existence as
yet not fully organised.
(5) The original formlessness was called
heaven and earth because all things spiritual and

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 203
material were contained in it, as yet confusedly,
but destined to be formed and differentiated.
This last, it will be seen, is a thorough-going
theory of what may be called " creative evolu
tion," and it would appear that Augustine, who
admits it as a possible view, could have faced
modern scientific progress with a calmer mind
than many of its contemporaries.
Having studied Augustine's ideas as to the
proper way of ascertaining the meaning of
Scripture, we now turn to his observations on
the mode of making known the meaning when
it is ascertained. It is in this close fashion, as
we saw, that he himself connects Exegesis and
Preaching. He has no doubt that preaching is an art,
and that it deserves careful study. " Who wiU
dare to say," he writes, " that those who attack
the truth are to teU their falsehoods briefly,
clearly, and plausibly, while the defenders of it
are to express the truth in such a way that it is
tedious to Hsten to, hard to understand, and, in
fine, not easy to beheve it ? . . . That the former,
while imbuing the minds of their hearers with
erroneous opinions, are by their power of speech
to awe, to melt, to enfiven and arouse them,
while the latter shaU in defence of the truth be
sluggish, frigid, and somnolent ? Who is such a

204 ST. AUGUSTINE
fool as to think this wisdom ? " (De Doct. Christ.
iv. 3).
But it does not follow that the Christian
preacher should undergo a rigid training in the
formal art of rhetoric. Eloquence can better be
learned by becoming familiar with good models
than by poring over rules — as a child brought
up among educated people speaks good grammar
without knowing it. Examples of unstudied
eloquence, composed probably without a thought
of the rules, yet naturally exemplifying them,
can be found in abundance in the Scriptures.
Augustine analyses two of these — St. Paul's
reference to his sufferings in 2 Cor. xi., and the
prophet Amos's invective against luxury. Both
are well chosen, and Augustine's analysis of
them, from the rhetorical point of view, is of
great interest. It is unfortunately too long to
quote. We may just recall that he finds the
effect of the former to depend mainly on its
movement, the variation of pause, the sharp,
quick sentences interspersed with longer ones :
" Are they ministers of Christ ? (I speak as
a fool) I more ; in labours more abundant, in
stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent,
in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received
I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten
with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered
shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 205
deep . . ." We do not need to follow Augustine
into his detailed analysis to see that he has
seized on the distinctive feature. The passage
from Amos is that beginning, " Woe unto you
that are at ease in Zion, and trust in the mountain
of Samaria, who are heads and chiefs of the
people, entering with pomp into the house of
Israel ! Pass ye into Calneh and see ; and from
thence go ye to Hamath the great ; then go
down to Gath of the Philistines, and to all the
best kingdoms of these : is their border greater
than your border ? " and so forth. Augustine's
analysis is again too long to quote, but I cannot
refrain from noticing one admirable touch of
Hterary criticism. He caUs attention to the
effect of those sounding names — Zion, Samaria,
Calneh, Hamath the great, and Gath of the
Philistines. " The style," he says, " is adorned
with the names of places as with lamps." That
is an effect which the great stylists have always
understood. One recalls how by means of it
Milton makes sheer magic out of the commonplace
statement that the western extremity of England
looks somewhere in the direction of Spain —
Where the great vision of the guarded mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold.
Coming to more specific directions, Augustine,
though he does not recommend the detailed

206 ST. AUGUSTINE
study of formal rhetoric, offers what he evidently
considers a useful division of rhetorical styles,
into subdued, temperate, and magnificent. The
subdued is what we should caU, rather, plain or
simple ; the temperate is what we should call
ornate or elegant — that does not appear from
the name but from the apphcations ; and the
magnificent is perhaps rather what we should
call vehement. The aim of the simple style is
to teach, explain ; of the elegant to please ; of
the vehement to rouse the feehngs and produce
action. Augustine illustrates these various styles both
from Scripture and from famous preachers, such
as Cyprian and Ambrose. We must not stay to
follow his illustrations, but I cannot resist the
temptation to quote one touch from Cyprian.
Inveighing against the practice of dyeing the
hair, he exclaims, " With rash and sacrilegious
hand thou wouldst fain change the colour of thy
hair ; I would that, with a prophetic look to
the future, thou shouldst dye it the colour of
flame ! " (De Doct. Christ, iv. 49). This, it need
hardly be said, is in the vehement style.
It is a mistake, Augustine says, to suppose
that because the preacher's theme is inherently
great, he must always be using the magnificent or
vehement style. In fact this, from its intensity,
wearies the audience soonest. The preacher

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 207
should stimulate attention by passing frequently
from one to the other even within the limits of a
single sermon. He gives an especially sympathetic
description of the simple style. " The plain
style again in its own naked simphcity, when it
unravels questions of very great difficulty, and
throws an unexpected Hght upon them ; when
it draws forth and brings to Hght acute observa
tions from a quarter whence nothing was expected;
when it seizes on and exposes the falsity of an
opposing opinion, which seems at its first state
ment to be unassailable ; especiaUy when all this
is accompanied by a natural unsought grace of
expression, and by a rhythm and balance of
style which is not ostentatiously obtruded, but
seems rather to be caUed forth by the nature of
the subject ; this style so used frequently calls
forth applause so great that we can hardly
beheve it to be the plain style. For the fact
that it comes forth without either ornament or
defence, and offers battle in its own naked
simphcity, does not hinder it from crushing its
adversary by weight of sinew and muscle, and
overwhelming and destroying the falsehood that
opposes it by the mere strength of its own
right arm " (ibid. iv. 56).
In accordance with this admiration for the
simple style, we find Augustine insisting that
while beauty and persuasiveness as well as

208 ST. AUGUSTINE
perspicuity are to be sought in all styles,
yet clearness is to be the first preoccupa
tion of the preacher. He is not to shrink
even from a vulgar word -form if it wiU be
better understood. African ears, for example,
being rather duU as regards the distinction of
long and short vowels, were apt to confuse
os, mouth, with os, bone. It is therefore
better, he says, to use the vulgar form ossum
for bone.
When we turn to Augustine's Sermons we
find that he took his own advice in this respect —
clearness and Hveliness are the usual character
istics of the style. If you want purple patches
from Augustine, it is not to the Sermons that you
turn for them. Even the grammar has some
times a coUoquial freedom, and there are words
which, to use Milton's famous phrase, " would
make Quintilian stare and gasp." This was
doubtless all to the good from the point of view
of the effectiveness of the spoken word — it is not,
as a rule, the man whose sermons " read Hke a
book " who is really the best preacher. Nor are
the Sermons distinguished for any architectonic
quafity ; they are not models of form and
arrangement. As a rule, they are loosely-con
structed expository discourses. I do not think
that they give us any clue to the character of
his oratory in the days when he was a pro-

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 209
fessional rhetorician. There are passages in
the De Civitate Dei, ostensibly addressed to an
educated pagan audience, which are probably
much more nearly in that vein,' such as the
great passage on human achievements in Book
xxu. As a preacher he felt that something
simpler, less formal, more direct, was required.
The Sermons were to breathe the air — to use a
metaphor of his own^— not of the * proud , cedars
of Lebanon, but of the humble salutary herbs of
ecclesiastical piety (Conf. ix. 7).
Of the spirit in which he does his work as a
preacher it is not necessary — if our previous
studies have given us any just impression of his
character — to speak at length here. It may
suffice to say that no preacher could read without
profit the incidental remarks bearing on this
subject in his work " On the Catechising of
the Unlearned." It is perhaps worth noting,
however, that he writes with knowledge and
insight on that sense of discouragement which
often besets the conscientious preacher. Advis
ing one who had written to him under this sense
of discouragement, he says : "I would not have
you to be disturbed by the consideration that
you have often appeared to yourseK to be defiver-
ing a poor and wearisome discourse. For it
may very weU be the case that the matter has
not so presented itself to the persons whom you
p

210 ST. AUGUSTINE
are trying to instruct, but that what you were
uttering seemed to you unworthy of the ears of
others, simply because it was your own earnest
desire that there should be something better to
Hsten to. Indeed with me too, it is almost always
the fact that my speech displeases myself. For I
am covetous of something better, the possession
of which I frequently enjoy within me before
I begin to body it forth in intelhgible words;
and then, when my capacities of expression prove
inferior to my inner apprehensions, I grieve over
the inability which my tongue has betrayed of
answering to my heart " (De Catechizandis
Rudibus, 3).
An impression of his quahties as a preacher
will perhaps best be given by first quoting some
incidental sayings, then a longer passage, and
then, by way of iUustrating the simphcity and
Hvehness of the Sermons, we may compare the
different style and method in which he treats
the same subject in a theological treatise and in
a sermon. As might be expected from what we have seen
earlier of his skul in the use of metaphor, his
imagery and illustrations are often very effective,
and not infrequently have a touch of poetry.
Thus, for example, in iUustrating the state
ment about John the Baptist, "He was not
that Hght, but was sent to bear witness of that

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 211
Hght," he compares John to an illumined
mountain, catching the first gleams of the rising
sun. That is one of those simple, absolutely
fitting images which satisfies the mind as com
pletely as it delights the imagination. Many
readers wiU remember the exactly similar use
of the same image by the late F. W. H. Myers
in his St. Paul : —
John, than which man a sadder or a greater
Not till this day has been of woman born ;
John, like some lonely peak, by the Creator
Fired with the red glow of the rushing morn.
Augustine adds the further and sufficiently
appropriate thought that it was easier for the
weak eyes of men to look first on the iUumined
mountain before looking on the Hght itseK
(Tract, in Ioann. ii. 5 f.).
Another simple and effective image is that
which he uses in speaking of the effect of the
persecution after the death of Stephen. "The
church of Jerusalem," he says, " suffered griev
ous persecution." " The brethren were driven
away ; only the apostles remained, the rest were
scattered. But, Hke burning torches, wherever
they came they kindled a fire. The Jews in
their f oUy , when they drove them from Jerusalem, .
were casting firebrands into a wood " (Serm.
316. 4). The brands, as he says in another place

212 ST. AUGUSTINE
(Serm. 116. 6), were scattered, and the world was
set on fire.
We get a poetic touch, too, though not of
the same inevitable character — rather, indeed,
of a certain ingenuity — when he suggests the
dove's " moan " as one reason why it is a fitting
emblem of the Spirit. " Now if the dove's note
is a moaning, as we all know it to be, hear what
the apostle says, and wonder not that the
Holy Ghost willed to be manifested in the
form of a dove. ' For what we should pray
for as we ought, says the apostle, we know
not, but the Spirit HimseK intercedes for us
with groanings that cannot be uttered ' " (Tract.
in Ioann. vi. 2).
An example of bold playing on a Scripture
figure is seen in his comment on Ps. civ. 15,
" Wine that maketh glad the heart of man " :
" If the glorious cup of the Lord intoxicate you,
it shall be seen indeed in a certain ahenation of
your mind, but an ahenation from the things of
earth to those of heaven" (Enarr. in Ps. 103,
Serm. 3, § 13).
We find some examples of the imaginary
natural history which was to play so large a
part in the preaching of the Middle Ages : " The
statement that the serpent gets rid of its old
skin by squeezing itseK through a narrow opening
and thus acquires new strength — how appro-

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 213
priately this fits in with the direction to imitate
the wisdom of the serpent, and to put off the
old man, that we may put on the new ; and to
put it off, too, by coming through a narrow
place, according to the saying of our Lord,
' Enter ye in at the strait gate ' " (De Doct.
Christ, ii. 24).
But sometimes these natural history metaphors
have a touch of homely truth, as when, to iUus-
trate Christ's saying, " How often would I have
gathered thy children together as a hen gathers
her chickens under her wings," he remarks that
a hen with a brood of chickens suffers in health,
weakens herseK, for the sake of her offspring.
" I refer to a well-known fact," he says, " which
constantly comes under our notice. The hen's
voice grows hoarse, her whole plumage grows
rough, the wings trail, the feathers droop . . .
and it is her maternal love which is thus
found weakness. . . . And the Lord gathers all
nations as a hen gathers her chickens, becoming
weak for us, taking flesh of us, that is, the human
race. This His weakness arises, not from the
loss of majesty, but from mother-love " (Enarr.
in Ps. 58, Serm. 1, § 10).
Augustine's ethical insight comes out in the
recognition that a severe rebuke may be the
truest expression of love. " The Lord rebuked
the Jews sharply and harshly, ' Woe unto you,

214 ST. AUGUSTINE
Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,' but it was
in love. When He said this, who would not have
thought He hated them ? But He came to the
cross, and He said, ' Father, forgive them.'
So Stephen, too, in his discourse arraigned them :
' Ye stiff - necked and uncircumcised in heart
and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Spirit.'
So saying he seemed to hate them, to rage against
them. But, whilst the tongue chides, love abides
(lingua clamat, cor amat). For when they made
haste to stone him, he kneeled down and said,
' Lord, lay not this sin to their charge ' " (Serm.
317. 5).
An impressive spirituafity speaks in such
sayings as " There is no voice for the ears of
God save the affection of the soul " (De Cat.
Rud. 13), or this from a sketch of Christian
character in a specimen discourse which he gives
in his work " On Catechising " : "A person of
this character wiU also advance in attainments
until he comes to that disposition of mind which
will make him love God more than he fears heU ;
so that even were God to say to him, ' Avail
yourseK of material pleasures for ever, and«sin
as much as you are able, and you shaU neither
die nor be sent into heU — only, you shall not
dwell with me,' he would be terribly dismayed,
and would altogether abstain from sinning, not
now with the purpose of not falHng into that

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 215
which he formerly dreaded, but with the
wish not to offend Him whom he so greatly
loves ; in whom alone also there is that rest
which eye hath not seen, neither hath ear heard,
neither hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive — the rest which God hath prepared for
them that love Him " (De Cat. Rud. 27).
A considerable number of Augustine's sermons
were delivered on the anniversaries of the
martyrs. These festal orations, being more of
the character of set pieces, tend to have a more
formal eloquence than the expository sermons,
and a passage from one of these may be quoted
as iUustrating another side of Augustine's pulpit
oratory. For Cyprian, bishop of Carthage,
martyred in 258, the great churchman and
champion of orthodoxy among the North African
Fathers, Augustine had an especial admiration,
and several sermons preached upon his festival
are extant. In one of these, alluding to the
words in Psalm xxxv. 3, " Draw out the sword
and stop the way against them that persecute
me," he says that the faithful are as a sword 1
in the hand of God : —
" This sword he drew when he flung forth his
martyrs on every side and stopped the way against
1 Framea, more properly " spear," came to be used in Late Latin in
the sense of " sword," and is so understood by Augustine, who says
explicitly " framea Dei, hoc est gladius Dei " (Serm. 313. 4).

216 ST. AUGUSTINE
those who were persecuting the Church, that
since the adversaries could not be bent by the
words of the preachers they might be broken by
the valour of their deaths. For God prepares,
as strong weapons against His enemies, the men
whom He makes His friends. And so that sword
of God, the soul of the most blessed Cyprian,
shining with charity, keen-edged with truth,
wielded by the valour of God who Himself fought
in the battle — what wars did he bring to an
end ! What troops of gainsayers did he refute
and overcome ! How many assailants did he
smite, how many adversaries did he lay low !
In the minds of how many enemies did he slay
the enmity by which he was attacked, and turn
them into friends, to strengthen the forces of
God against other foes ! But when the time came
that his enemies should seem to prevail against
him and take him, then, lest he should go down,
overwhelmed by their impious hands, God was
at hand to keep him undefeated ; he won his
final victory when there remained no longer any
victory for him to win over this world. God
was present to His faithful witness when contend
ing for the truth even unto death, and, answering
his prayer, He delivered his soul from the wicked,
his own sword from the enemies of his hand —
whose sacred flesh, as though the sheath of that
sword, we honour here with an altar dedicated

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 217
to God — that flesh destined to be restored at
the resurrection to the triumphant soul, thence
forward to be no more laid aside in death "
(Serm. 313. 5).
There are few severer tests of a preacher than
his power of popularising speculative thought.
Nothing is more common than for a man of some
mental force to be able to interest his inteUectual
equals, but to be helplessly tongue-tied when
he endeavours to communicate his ideas to men
of less capacity or narrower education. The
first thing he needs to realise is that the same
method of presentation wiU not do in the two
cases ; something of the suggestiveness of the
thought must often be sacrificed for the sake of
clearness, and it must be more concretely and,
if possible, more personaUy expressed. It wiU
therefore, I think, be of some interest if we take,
by way of conclusion, a case in which Augustine
has presented the same thought in a theological
treatise and in a sermon, and note the contrast
in his method.
In a formeT chapter, the reader may recall,
we examined the psychological iUustration in
which Augustine shows how memory, intelHgence,
and wiU combine in the process of thought as
a kind of trinity, distinct yet united. In
one of his sermons he has given a popular
presentment of the same illustration, so that the

218 ST. AUGUSTINE
materials for a comparison are ready to our
hand. In the De Trinitate he writes — I give
the passage as it comes, heavy with parentheses :
" Whoever, therefore, is able to understand what
is meant by a ' word,' not only before it is uttered
in sound, but also before the images of it are con
sidered in thought — for this is the word which
belongs to no tongue, to wit, of those which are
called the tongues of the nations, of which our
Latin tongue is one — whoever, I say, is able to
understand this is able now to see, through this
glass and in this enigma, some Hkeness of that
Word of whom it was said, ' In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God.' For of necessity when we
speak what is true — that is, speak what we know
— there is born from the knowledge itseK, which
the memory retains, a word which is altogether
of the same kind with that knowledge from which
it is born. For the thought when it is formed by
the thing which we know is the word which we
speak in our heart ; which word is neither Greek
nor Latin nor of any other tongue." He adds
that he uses memory here not in the ordinary
sense, but as meaning " that more profound depth
of memory in which we found the thought before
we thought it."
This does not make exactly easy reading.
Augustine expected people who undertook to

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 219
read a disquisition on the Trinity to be prepared
to study it slowly and carefully, and he is more
concerned to give them aU his thought than to
make it easy for them to foUow.
Now compare the popular treatment. In
Serm. 52, "On the Trinity," he proposes to
show (§ 18 f.) some adumbration of the Trinity
in the mind of man. First, he puts his hearers
on their guard against expecting any too exact
analogy : " No one is to say, ' See what he is
comparing to God ! ' I told you before, and
I teU you again ; I warned you, and I warned you
carefuUy. The things are widely distant, as
low things from highest, as mutable from im
mutable, as created from Creator, as human
from divine. So, when I ask your ears, there
is no reason to show your teeth instead, for what
I have promised to show you was simply three
things which can be distinguished in thought,
but are inseparable in action.
" So now I ask you, ' My friend, have you a
memory ? ' If you have not, how can you
remember what I have said ? But perhaps you
have forgotten what I said a moment ago ?
WeU, then, this very word that I am now saying,
' dixi ' — you could not retain its two syUables
unless you had a memory. For how would you
know there were two syUables unless you re
membered the first while the second was being

220 ST. AUGUSTINE
spoken ? That need not delay us longer. It
is clear you have a memory.
" So I ask you a second question, ' Have you
an intelligence ? ' 'I have,' you say. If you
had no memory, you would not remember what
I had said ; if you had not an intelHgence, you
would not recognise that you remembered it.
So you have this too. You direct your intelH
gence to that which you have within, and you
look at it, and by looking at it you give it form,
that you may know it and speak of it. You
have then a memory, by which you remember
what is said ; you have an intelHgence, by which
you understand what is remembered.
" I ask you a third question, ' Do you wish
to remember and understand ? ' ' Certainly,
I do,' you say. You have then also a will.
" These are the three things which I promised
to teU you of. In you there are these three
things which you can count, but you cannot
separate." What a difference ! He has deliberately
sacrificed that more recondite conception of
memory, valuable as it is in the original passage ;
for once bring that in and the thing is not only
difficult but mysterious — and mystery does not
yield to treatment.
Then, instead of the long, cumbrous, involved
periods, he uses short, crisp sentences, and, above

EXPOSITOR AND PREACHER 221
all, he takes his audience into his confidence
and makes them work with him by asking them
direct questions, and forcing them to perform
the experiment upon themselves, so to speak,
thus keeping their minds awake instead of
letting them go to sleep while they Hstened to
a description of it.
One is inclined to think that there are preachers
even at the present day who might have some
thing to learn from St. Augustine.

VIII
HIS PHILOSOPHY OP HISTORY, POLITICS,
AND SOCIAL ETHICS
Philosophy of History is one of those high-
sounding titles which do not convey any very
exact information as to the character of the
subject. History we know, and philosophy we
know — or at least we think we know what we
mean by the terms — but what is philosophy of
history ? Even the suggestion which, though
not too obvious, is perhaps. the most natural,
does not turn out to be right. Since history is
for the race very much what remembered experi
ence is for the individual, and since philosophy
sometimes bears the sense of practical wisdom,
it would not be unnatural to think that the
philosophy of history meant the study of the
lessons of the past as a guide to poficy and state
craft. But that is not the meaning, and the
philosophy of history takes no direct account
of such applications.
The question with which the philosophy of
222

HIS PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 223
history is primarily concerned is simply this :
Is it possible to discern in-the .course ol history
a meaning and a purpose ? When we look at the
past, spread out as from some point of vantage
beneath the eye of the thinker, does it present
itself to us as a confused welter, a dim plain
" where ignorant armies shock by night," a
succession of episodes which lead nowhere, such
as we sometimes experience in dreams ? or is it,
on the other hand, a drama of which we can trace
the plan, appraise the significance, and to some
extent conjecture the conclusion ?
The conditions under which this question has
to be answered are, in a rough analogy, these.
We come into the theatre while the action is in
progress. We do not even know beforehand
whether it is a drama or only a series of tableaux.
We receive from our neighbour, a moderately
intelligent person, a whispered account of what
has gone before — that may serve to suggest to
some extent the difficulties and uncertainties of
recovering the past from history ; we watch the
stage for a little while, and we have to leave
before the close. From what we see, and from
our neighbour's fragmentary account, we have
to conjecture whether it be a drama or no, and,
if so, what is its meaning and purpose.
Of course, if on other grounds we believe in a
Divine all-ruling Providence, we have at once,

224 ST. AUGUSTINE
a priori, a principle of unity and purpose in
history. But that is not philosophy of history
in the strict sense. It approximates thereto so
soon as we begin to confirm or iUustrate this
belief by reference to the facts. In this sense
we find the germ of a philosophy of history in
the prophets — when Amos, for example, tells
us that God has not only brought up Israel out
of Egypt, but the Philistines from Caphtor and
the Syrians from Kir (Amos ix. 7) ; when Cyrus
is described in Isaiah xii v. 28 as the shepherd
of the Lord ; or when a scheme of world-history
is laid down in Daniel ii. ; and still more con
sciously and expHcitly in St. Paul's address at
Athens. A^ugustine, of course, shares with these
thinkers their a priori belief in ProvideJICBr'What
gives him a claim to be considered a pioneer of
the philosophy of history in the stricter sense
is the comprehensive way in which he attempts
to illustrate and confirm his thesis from the facts,
by outfining, from this point of view, the whole
history of the world so far as known to him.
The juncture in the history of the world at
which the attempt was made lends to it a peculiar
interest, and certainly enhances our respect for
Augustine's boldness as a thinker. A priori one
would have said that the most probable moment
for such an attempt to be made by a Christian
thinker would have been when Constantine

HIS PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 225
estabhshed Christianity as the rehgion of the
Empire. At the moment when the attempt was
actuaUy made by Augustine the world was still
ringing with the fall of a professedly Christian
Rome. This disaster was, in fact, used as an argument
against Christianity. The pagans asserted, and
the half-hearted were inclined to beheve, that
so long as Rome had worshipped her ancient
gods, she had prospered ; since she had turned
from them, these calamities had overtaken her.
Augustine's friend Marcelhnus, who was in
touch with high government officials, some of
whom were interested in Christianity, but whom
he found impressed by these arguments, urged
Augustine to write a refutation of them. At
first Augustine thought a few letters would suffice,
but the work grew on his hands till it became
the great De Civitate Dei, in twenty-two books.
The earlier books are devoted to answering the
argument which attributed Rome's disasters to
Christianity. It is answered by showing that
calamities no less great had befallen her in the
past, at a time when her old gods held undisputed
sway. So far this is merely an argument from
historical fact; there is no question as yet of
the philosophy of history. But Augustine seems
to have felt that the negative argument derived Q

226 ST. AUGUSTINE
its real strength in the minds of the pagans from
a deeper feeling, namely, that the old religions
had on their side the prescription of antiquity ;
compared with them Christianity was an up
start. As against this, Augustine undertakes
to show that the contrast of the two communities
now represented by Christianity and Paganism
lay in the plan of God from the first.
The form into which he throws the contrast
is that of two " cities," but we must remember
that while for us a city suggests primarily streets
and buildings, the Latin civitas suggests primarily
an organised community, and can indeed be used
without any reference to a material city. The
two contrasted communities come into being
at the fall of the angels. Passing to humanity,
we see the two communities incorporated in
Cain and Abel; and after the murder of Abel,
his place is taken by Seth as the head of the
Divine community. The constitutive principles
of these two communities were respectively the
love of God in the one, and the love of self or
earthly goods in the other. From that point
onward Augustine sketches the history of the
two communities side by side. With Abraham
begins a clear prophetic reference to the consum
mation of the Divine community in Christianity.
Of this, Israel is the type and shadow, and
Augustine follows its history right down to the

HIS PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 227
coming of Christ and the estabfishment of His
Church. Over against Israel he sets as the
embodiment of the earthly community the
Assyrian Empire. Here he supplements the
Old Testament from such other sources as are
known to him,1 and tells us that the Assyrian
Empire comprised all Asia with the single excep
tion of India (De Civ. xvi. 17). Assyria was the
Rome of the East ; other nations and kingdoms
are but as appendages to these. Of the western
countries prior to the rise of Rome only Greece
calls for mention, because of her fame in the
arts and sciences.
When the power of Assyria was waning, Rome
was founded — Rome destined to be the new
head and fuUest embodiment of the earthly
city, especially in its persecution of the heavenly
city, namely, the Christian Church. Neverthe
less the heavenly city is confident, looking to
its end, an eternal Hfe of blessedness, which, true
to its character as the " city " of God, is still
thought of as social in character.
Of course, this brief abstract gives no idea
of the fulness and richness and, it must be
said, the bewildering multiplicity of detail in
Augustine's treatment. It has hardly even, I
am afraid, shown us clearly where we are to
1 For the East chiefly Justinus, the Epitomiser or Excerptor of
the historian Tragus Pompeius, whom he names in De Civ. Dei iv. 6.

228 ST. AUGUSTINE
look for the unity which Augustine finds in
history. But this may now be pointed out.
There is, in fact — if it be not a contradiction
to say it — more than one kind of unity suggested,
or, to put it better, the unity is envisaged from
more than one point of view. There is first what
may be caUed a transcendental unity. The two
communities, in their opposition, both belong
to the plan of God ; together they constitute
a revelation, in face of which we may say with
the Apostle, " Behold the goodness and the
severity of God." The evil of the world is
made subservient to the plan of God. Here
Augustine makes use of an aesthetic conception.
As the shadows, as well as the fights, go to
make a picture, so the world, even with sinners,
is beautiful (xi. 23j.
But alongside of these conceptions, which
belong to theology and metaphysics, there is the
more genuinely historical conception that the
nations, even those summed up in the earthly
city, make their contribution to progress. This
is not much worked out, except in the case of
Rome. Augustine does, of course, refer to the
inteUectual achievements of Greece, but he has
nothing so fine in this connexion as Clement of
Alexandria's saying that philosophy was the
" covenant of the Greeks." But he has a large
appreciation of the civilising influence of Romel

HIS PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 229
He valued the pax Romana with its order and '
organisation. " Rome," he says, " by which
God was pleased to conquer the whole world,
and subdue it far and wide, by bringing it into
one fellowship of government and laws " ; and
.again : " While Herod therefore reigned in
Judea, and Caesar Augustus was Emperor at ,
Rome, the world being set at peace by him, Christ/
was born in Bethlehem. . . ." (xviii. 22, 46).
Yet another principle jjfjinity — again not
fully worked out— is suggested by his representa
tion of the success, the temporal greatness, of
Rome as a kind of survival of the ethicaUy fittest.
The virtues of the Romans had not, indeed, the
true root of love to God, but yet they did recognise
that the way to honour was virtue, " for they built
in very close proximity the temples of Virtue and
Honour, worshipping as gods the gifts of God."
..." And God granted to this nation such men
as, for the sake of honour and praise and glory,
consulted well for their country, in whose glory
they sought their own, and whose safety they
did not hesitate to prefer to their own, suppres
sing the desire for wealth and many other vices
for this one vice, namely, the love of praise. ' ' And
so they had their reward. " By all these means
. . . they pressed on to honours, power, and glory;
they were honoured among almost all nations ;
they imposed the laws of their Empire upon

230 ST. AUGUSTINE
many nations ; and at this day, both in literature
and history, they are glorious among almost all
nations. They have no reason to complain
against the justice of the true God — ' they have
their reward ' " (w. 12-15).
There are several other directions in which
Augustine threw out suggestions which have
been regarded as fruitful.
The idea of development appears under the
interesting form of a parallel between the Hfe
of the race and that of the individual. This is
a favourite idea with Augustine, appearing, for
example, in a quite early work, the De Vera
Religione (§ 50), where he speaks of " the whole
human race, whose life from Adam up to the
end of the age may be compared to the life of a
single individual." And he appfies to the race
the divisions of Hfe, the successive ages seen in
the individual. Sometimes this takes the simpler
form of three ages — childhood .j-manhood^^ajid
old age, the first being before the law, the second
under the law, the third under_gxacfi. Some-
times he has a more elaborate division into six
ages. These are, in the individual, infancy,
childhood, youth, early manhood, later man
hood, old age. In the race, the period of infancy
extends from Adam to Noah, childhood from
Noah to Abraham, youth from Abraham to
David, early manhood from David to the

HIS PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 231
captivity, later manhood from the captivity
to the coming of Christ, and old age from the
coming of Christ to the end of the world.
No special value can be attributed to the
divisions as such ; the significant thing about
the analogy is that it is definitely associated
with the two great principles of development
and education.
The infancy of the race is the time when the
physical predominates, as shown in the giant
size and protracted life of primeval man.
The age of early manhood was the age of
the kings and prophets, a time of vigour and
splendour. As regards the time of Christ's coming being
that of man's old age, he points out that old age
does not in the race, as in the individual, neces
sarily mean declension of vigour, and makes the
analogy to consist in the fact that in this age the
inner life takes precedence of the outward ; so
it should be a time of spiritual renewal and
putting off of the old man (Retract, i. 26 ; De
Gen. c. Manich. i. 40).
As regards the educational analogy, Augustine
has himself distinctly stated it thus in the De
Civitate, x. 14 : " The education of the human
race, represented by the people of God, has
advanced Hke that of an individual through
certain epochs, as it were, or ages, so that it

232 ST. AUGUSTINE
might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly
things, and from the visible to the invisible."
A curious and interesting, though not wholly
satisfactory, application of this educational
principle is his reference to the value of Roman
patriotism as an example for the citizens of
the city of God. " And therefore," he says, " it
was not only for the sake of recompensing the
citizens of Rome that her empire and glory had
been so signally extended, but also that the
citizens of that eternal city during their pilgrim
age here might diligently and soberly contem
plate these examples, and see what a love they
owe to the supernal country on account of Hfe
eternal, if the terrestrial country was so much
beloved by its citizens on account of human
glory (v. 16)."
One would have welcomed a recognition that
this training in patriotism, besides serving as
an example to others, would tend to make
those who subsequently became members of the
heavenly city better citizens of that also. For
it should be said, and this is perhaps the best
place to say it, that the outward division between
the heavenly and the earthly city, between, for
example, Rome and the Church, is not absolute.
Augustine recognises that there are always some
members of the one within the external bound
aries of the other. He gets rid, that is to say,

HIS POLITICS 233
of the artificiafity which is Hkely to arise from
this external conception, by applying to both
" cities " what we may perhaps conveniently
describe 'in theological terminology as the con
ception of the visible and invisible Church.
We may now turn to Augustine's views on
Pofitics, understood, of course, in the wider
sense of the theory of the State.
The social instinct, the impulse to form some
kind of community within which there shall be
peace and concord, is the subject of an eloquent
passage in the De Civitate, xix. 12. We cannot'
believe, he says, in the giant Cacus of whom
Virgil teUs, whose whole attitude towards the
human race was one of pure enmity. " For
even the most savage animals encompass their
own species with a ring of protecting peace.
For what tigress does not purr over her cubs and
lay aside her ferocity to caress them ? What
kite, though he wheels sofitary when he seeks
his prey, does not take to himself a mate, build
a nest, help to hatch out the brood and feed the
nesthngs ? . . . How much more powerfully do
the laws of man's nature move him to hold fellow
ship and maintain peace with all men, so far as
in him lies ; since even wicked men wage war
for the peace of their own circle, and wish that
if possible all men belonged to them, and that

234 ST. AUGUSTINE
all men and things might serve but one head,
and might either through love or fear make an
agreement of peace with him."
The primary unit of social Hfe is the family
(xix. 14). Domestic peace, he says, is the well-
ordered concord between those of the family
who rule and those who obey. Civil peace is
a similar concord among citizens (xix. 13).
As regards the ruler, it is the Divine appoint
ment that he should receive honour, even though
his subjects may be better than he (Enarr. in
Ps. cxxiv. 7). Augustine does not shrink from
the consequences of this view. In De Civitate
v. 21 he says boldly, " God who gave power
to Augustus gave it also to Nero. He who gave
it to the most benignant emperors, the Ves-
pasians, father and son, gave it also to the cruel
Domitian. He who gave it to the Christian
Constantine gave it also to the apostate Julian."
And the Christian is to obey even bad rulers,
except when their commands come into direct
conflict with his religion. " Julian," he says,
" was an unbeHeving Emperor, nay, he was
an apostate, unjust, an idolater. There were
Christian soldiers in the service of the unbeliev
ing Emperor. Where the cause of Christ was
at stake, they recognised only that Ruler who is
in heaven. If the Emperor desired them to
worship idols, to throw incense on their altars^

HIS POLITICS 235
they put God before him; but when he said
' form line of battle,' or ' march against this or
that nation,' they at once obeyed. They dis
tinguished between the eternal ruler and the
temporal ; nay, indeed, it was for the sake of
the eternal ruler that they were subject to the
temporal " (Enarr. in Ps. cxxiv. 7).
In Serm. 62. 13 he uses the analogy that if
a minor official commands something against
the will of the proconsul, he is rightly to be
disobeyed ; if a proconsul commands something
against the will of the Emperor, he is rightly to
be disobeyed ; similarly if the Emperor com
mand something against the will of God, he is
rightly to be disobeyed. For God is the Higher
Power. This has the effect of making the civir
powers a kind of hierarchy with God at its head.
The foundation of the State is, ideally, justice,
though this has never been perfectly realised in
any earthly state. A saying of Augustine's
in this connexion has often been misquoted in
the form that " great states are great robber-
bands " ; what he did say was that without*/
justice states were great robber - bands ; and
what he had in mind in saying it was not
primarily the outward relations, but the inner
relations of such states. The, point is that even
a robber-band has a bond of cohesion, only it is
an unsound one — seK-interest instead of justice —

236 ST. AUGUSTINE
and that is the respect in which a state without
justice resembles it (De Civ. Dei, iv. 4, cf . xix. 12).
There is an interesting passage in which he
recognises that different forms of government
may be appropriate to different national circum-
stances._jlt is cast in dialogue form, and we
may give it as it comes, with its pleasantly
Platonic flavour :
Augustine. First tell me whether the law which is
outwardly promulgated is for the service of men in
this present life.
Evodius. Manifestly it is ; for of these men certainly
nations and states consist.
Augustine. Well, then — are these men and nations
so constituted that they cannot perish or change, and
are truly eternal ? Or are they mutable and subject
to temporal vicissitude ?
Evodius. Who can doubt that the human race is
mutable. Augustine. Therefore, if a people be self-restrained
and serious, a faithful guardian of the common good, and
every member of it be less concerned for his individual
prosperity than for that of the whole ; would not
a law be justly passed whereby this people should
be permitted to create its own magistrates, by whom
its own wealth, namely, the commonwealth,1 might be
administered ?
Evodius. Certainly it would be right.
Augustine. But now if this same people became
gradually demoralised and preferred private interest
1 " Sua res, id est publica."

HIS POLITICS 237
to the common weal, and put up its vote for sale, and,
corrupted by office seekers, committed the rule over
itself to wicked and criminal persons ; would it not then
be right that if some good man arose of sufficient ability
he should deprive this people of the power of bestowing
office, and transfer authority to a few good men, or
even to one ?
Evodius. That also would be right (De Lib. Arb. i. 14).
Augustine is not, of course, here advocating
the " sacred right of revolution." The passage
is couched in an abstract philosophic vein. It
is the desirability in certain circumstances of
change, not the manner or practicability of it1
that he has in view.
Among Augustine's political views, one of
the most far-reaching in its consequences, and,
we may be permitted to think, one of the most
regrettable, was his justification of persecution
by the State on the ground of religious opinions.
It is the more regrettable because it represents
a change of opinion on his part.
In an early work against the Manichaeans,
Contra Epistolam Manichaei, i. 1, he writes :
" It behoves us to desire the better part, that
we might attain our end in your correction, not
by contention and strife and prosecutions, but
by kindly consolation, by friendly exhortation,
by quiet discussion ; as it is written : ' The
servant of the Lord must not strive ; but be

238 ST. AUGUSTINE
gentle towards all men, apt to teach, patient ;
in meekness opposing them that oppose them
selves.' "
But in his African diocese he was brought into
contact with heretics, or rather schismatics, of
a harder temper than the Manichaeans. These
were the Donatists, who laid claim to greater
purity of principle and life than the Catholic
Church, and denied the vafidity of the latter's
sacraments. Their consequent practice of re-
baptizing those who came over to them from
the Catholic Church was, from the ecclesiastical
point of view, the head and front of their offend
ing, but relations were stiU further embittered
by the bands of fierce fanatics — known as
CircumceUiones — who espoused their cause, and
subjected CathoHcs to the most aggravated
personal violence.
The extent to which the Donatist leaders
were responsible for these people was a moot
point, and Augustine took up at the outset
a conciliatory attitude. While he was still a
presbyter, a case occurred in which a Donatist
bishop had baptized a deacon who had " gone
over." -"By so doing he had put himself within
the grasp of the law, for re-baptism had been
illegal since 373. But Augustine expHcitly
refuses to bring the law into operation against
him, and is content to rely on argument. He

HIS POLITICS 239
would have Hked the Donatist to meet him in
debate and attempt to justify his action. Faifing
that, he asks him to send a reply to his letter, in
order that he may read both in the Church before
the people. If the Donatist refuses even that,
Augustine will at least read his own letter as
a warning to his people. But, he adds, he will
take good care not to do this in the presence
of a detachment of Imperial soldiers who were
temporarily in Hippo, but only after their de
parture, " that aU who hear me may understand
that I do not propose to compel men to embrace
the communion of any party, but desire the
truth to be made known to persons who, in their
search for it, are free from disquieting appre
hensions. On our side there shall be no appeal-
to the civil power ; on your side let there be^
no intimidation by a mob of CircumceUiones "
(Ep. 23. 7). This letter dates from 392. ¦<
As late as 403 we find him proposing to meet '
Donatist bishops in conciliatory conference.
About this time, however, the excesses of the
Circumcelhones took a more aggravated form.
" Not content," says Augustine, " with beating
us with bludgeons, and killing some with the
sword, they even, with incredible ingenuity in
crime, threw Hme into our people's eyes to bhnd
them." In 404 the bishops met in council in Carthagev

240 ST. AUGUSTINE
and resolved to petition the Emperor to put in
practice retaliatory measures. They were amply
justified in demanding protection from the vio
lence of the CircumcelHones, but what they asked
was that an existing law should be put in force
which imposed a severe fine on every Donatist
| as such. Augustine, indeed, and his party
favoured a restriction of the penalty to the
districts where Donatist bishops did not take
steps to repress the CircumcelHones. In this
form it might be justified as an administrative
expedient ; but before the petition was actuaUy
presented, the Emperor, moved by the death of
a bishop who had been maltreated by Donatist
adherents, had resolved on sterner measures.
The Habihty to the heavy fine was made uni
versal, while the clergy were made Hable to
banishment.
4 It is evident that the civil arm was not caUed
in without provocation ; but it must be clearly
pointed out that what ultimately led Augustine
to approve of the principle of religious persecu
tion was not the provocation given by the out
rages of the CircumcelHones, but the apparent
success of the severe measures in bringing about
the conversion of the Donatists. Whole cities, he
says, once Donatist, are now Cathohc, vehemently
detesting that diabolical schism, and ardently
loving the unity of the Church. Therefore, so

HIS POLITICS 241
ran the unfortunate inference, the part of love^
is to apply compulsion. " For if any one saw
his enemy running headlong to destroy himseK
when he had become defirious through dangerous
fever, would he not in that case be much more
truly rendering evil for evil if he permitted him
to run on thus, than if he took measures to
have him seized and bound ? " (Ep. 93. 2). And
in the same connexion he appeals — certainly
not in his best exegetical style — to the verse in
Luke xiv. 23, " Compel them to come in,")
which has, I suppose, been the favourite mottd'
of persecutors ever since (Ep. 93. 5).
Having once adopted these principles, he is
prepared to go to all lengths. We find him
even writing to officials and men of influence to
incite them to increased zeal in the enforcement
of the penal laws (Epp. 89, 97).
On the other hand, it is to be said that he did
bis utmost to prevent a death sentence from
being carried out, even in the case of certain
CircumcelHones who were proved to have done
to death two Cathohc priests. He dishked the
death sentence on principle, as cutting off the
last hope of repentance, and he felt that it
befitted the Church to show mercy and not
demand a Hfe for a Hfe (Ep. 133). His theory"
might make him hard, but vengeful cruelty was
not one of his natural temptations. E

242 ST. AUGUSTINE
It has been worth while, I think, to trace in
some detail the curious, gradual, and round
about course by which Augustine became a
champion of persecution. First, the violence
of the CircumcelHones makes repressive measures
necessary, on grounds that would be recognised
by any civil government, apart from any question
of persecution or toleration. Then the severity
appears to have a good effect — good not only for
others but for the sufferers, and on that ground
Augustine approves it, as being only the due
severity of love ; and so, tragicaUy enough, takes
his place in the line of development which leads
to the tortures and burnings of the Inquisi
tion ; whereas had he remained firm in his
earfier convictions, _he_ might r_h&ve stood forth
as one of the earliest., champions .of _ religious
Hbertv. A subject which Hes rather on the borderland-
between Pofitics and Social Ethics is that of the
legitimacy of otherwise of war. Augustine has
no doubt on this point. War would not have
a place in an ideal state of things, but in
present conditions it is legitimate. That is to
say, there are just wars and unjust wars. " To
carry on war and extend a kingdom over sub
jugated nations seems," he says, " to bad men
to be fehcity, to good men to be necessity. But

HIS POLITICS 243
because it would be worse that the injurious
should rule over those who are more righteous,
therefore even that is not unsuitably caUed
fehcity. ... If, therefore, by carrying on wars
that were just, not impious or unrighteous, the
Romans have been able to acquire so great an
Empire, ought they not to worship as a goddess
the Injustice of Foreigners ? " (This is a hit
at the Roman practice of assigning every possible
quality and condition to a separate divinity.)
" For we see that this has co-operated much in
extending the Empire, by making foreigners so
unjust that they became people with whom
just wars might be carried on, and the Empire
increased " (De Civ. Dei, iv. 15). There is irony
here, of course, but it is directed against false
pleas of justice, not against the idea of a just
war as such.
Quite definitely in Ep. 138. 15 he says that,
" If the Christian rehgion condemned wars of
every Mnd, the command, given in the Gospel
to soldiers asking counsel as to salvation would
be to cast away their arms and withdraw them
selves wholly from mihtary service . . . whereas
the command to be content with their wages
manifestly impfied no prohibition to continue
in the service."
This attitude in regard to war is the more
remarkable as he takes the very strictest view

244 ST. AUGUSTINE
in regard to private homicide. Roman, like
EngHsh, law treated it as justifiable homicide
to slay a man in defence of one's Hfe or honour.
Augustine held it right that this should be
permissible by the law of the land, but that
a Christian ought not to avail himseK of the
permission. As we saw in a previous chapter,
this is not due to a Hteralist interpretation of the
Sermon on the Mount.
He writes in answer to a questioner : " As to
killing others in order to defend one's own hfe,
I do not approve of this, unless one happens to
be a soldier or a public functionary acting in
defence of others " (Ep. 47. 5). Short of killing
the aggressor, however, he would not object to
the use of force. He goes on to say :_" When,
however, men are prevented, by being put in
fear, from doing wrong, it may be said that a
real service is done to themselves. The precept
' Resist not evil ' was given to prevent us from
taking pleasure in revenge . . . not to make us
neglect the duty of restraining men from sin."
On what principle, then, does he hold that the
Christian should not kill even in seK-defence?
The principle was this, that a Christian should
not hold any temporal possession, even his Hfe,
so dear to him as to be willing to take another's
in defence of it. As he puts it in De Libero
Arbitrio, i. 13, it is not right to shed men's blood

HIS SOCIAL ETHICS 245
for the sake of those things which we ought to
despise. This last passage has already brought us into
touch with Augustine's Social Ethics, and we
may now take one or two examples of his appfica-
tion of the Christian standards to some of the
relations and problems of practical Hfe.
It will give us, I think, the right point of view
for appreciating his breadth and sanity, if we
begin by recalling that his personal practice was
of the strictest. He was an ascetic, eschewing;
marriage as a hindrance to the highest Christian,'
Hfe, and Hving along with his clergy a Hfe of
communistic semi-poverty.
This personal attitude gives piquancy to the
Hberahty of some views not in themselves, or
from a modern standpoint, very remarkable.
There is perhaps no subject on which one might
have expected him a priori to take a less adequate
view than marriage ; and of course, if any one
expects to find in him as sound teaching, from
the modern Protestant point of view, as in the
Reformers, he wiU no doubt be disappointed.
We have to remember the background. The,
absolute condemnation of marriage was, of
course, only found in some heretical sects, but
several of the Fathers taught that, but for the
Fall, the human race would have been preserved

246 ST. AUGUSTINE
and multiphed by some other means. As against
this, Augustine points out that the blessing upon
marriage was given before men sinned, that the
rearing of children might be recognised as belong
ing to the glory of marriage (gloria connubii),
and not to the punishment of sin (De Civ. Dei,
xiv. 21).
In the De Bono Conjugali (32) he says that
the good of marriage is threefold — fidehty,
posterity, and its sacramental significance. / He
fuUy recognises also the spiritual side of
marriage. In fact, this was ratheTforced on his
attention because he had to consider the nature
of the bond in cases where both parties to the
marriage, as sometimes happened in those days,
adopted the ascetic Hfe. So that he speaks with
emphasis of the special relation of friendship
which should characterise marriage (ibid. 3).
The family, we have already seen, is, so to speak,
the germ-ceU of ethical life, where the children
are " lovingly welcomed, kindly nurtured, con
scientiously trained and educated " (De Gen.
ad Lit. ix. 12).
Again, we should hardly expect an ascetic to
have a high appreciation of the material goods
of civihsation, of man's progress in shaping the
external world to his purposes. But — setting
aside the famous chorus in the Antigone — I
hardly know where we should turn for a more

HIS SOCIAL ETHICS 24^
eloquent passage on this subject than the foUow
ing : " What wonderful — one might almost saj
astounding — advances has human industrj
made in the arts of weaving and building, oj
agriculture and navigation ! With what endless
variety are designs in pottery, painting, ane
sculpture produced, and with what skiU executed
What wonderful spectacles are exhibited in the
theatres, which those who have not seen then
can hardly credit ! How skiKul the contrivance!
for catching, killing, or taming wild beasts
And for the injury of men also how many kinds
of poisons, weapons, engines of destruction, hav<
been invented ; while for the preservation ane
restoration of health the apphances and remedies
are infinite. ... To express and gain entrance
for thoughts, what a multitude of signs there are
among which speaking and writing hold the firs!
place. What ornaments has eloquence at com
mand to delight the mind ! What wealth oJ
song is there to captivate the ear ! How many
musical instruments and strains of harmony
have been devised ! What skiU has been
attained in measures and numbers ! With what
sagacity have the movements and relations of
the stars been investigated ! Who could teU ah1
the thought that has been spent upon nature,
even though, despairing of recounting it in detail,
he endeavoured only to give a general view of it ?

248 ST. AUGUSTINE
In fine, even the defence of errors and mis
apprehensions, which has illustrated the genius of
heretics and philosophers, cannot be sufficiently
declared " (De Civ. Dei, xxii. 24).
Of course he does not approve of aU these
activities equally. He expressly says that some
of them are dangerous and some superfluous.
But the note of honest pride in human achieve
ment is unmistakable. ^ If this ascetic " despised
the world," it was not with an ignorant contempt.
If we ask what is the right attitude of the
individual towards temporal goods, the answer,
is that they are to be used, but not enjoyed)
This does not mean that we are painfully to
eschew any feehng of satisfaction in the use
of them. The equivalent in modern rehgious
terminology would be that they are not to be
" loved." In fact, Augustine himseK gives the
definition : "To enjoy a thing is to restJ
with love on it for its own sake " (De Doct.
Christ, i. 3, 4).
This brings us to speak of bis views as to
poverty and wealth. There is no merit, he holds,
in poverty in itseK. A humble rich man is j
better than a proud poor man, he says in
Serm. 36. 7.
When the disciples exclaimed, " Who then
can be saved ? " after hearing Christ's saying
about the rich man, had they forgotten that the

HIS SOCIAL ETHICS 249
majority of men are poor ? No, but they
remembered that most poor men are at heart
rich men, that is, they desire to be rich (Quaest.
in Evang. xxvi.). It is a matter not of posses-,
sions but of jittitude. " You see," he says, in
Serm. 14. 5, " that though poverty abounds, it
takes some searching to find a real poor man."
Apparently there were in his day a good many
poor men who boasted of their poverty, and
affected to despise their richer brethren. He
reminds them with a touch of his usual humour
that while Lazarus was a poor man, his reward
was to be received into the bosom of Abraham,
who was a rich one. If they hope for the same
reward, they had better not begin by slandering
Abraham !
He regards inheritance of property as per
missible, and he refused to accept for the Church
property of which a son had been disinherited.
" Any one," he says, " who wishes to disinherit
his son and make the Church his heir, may look
for some one else to receive his benefaction, and
not Augustine." It is one of the few passages
where he names himseK. " Nay, God willing,"
he adds, " he will find no one to receive it." And
he applauds the action of Aurelius, bishop oi
Carthage, who in a case where a childless mar
had made a donation of his property to the
Church, and subsequently had children born tc

250 ST. AUGUSTINE
him, restored the property without being asked
to do so (Serm. 355. 5).
His views in regard to Charity— in the modern
sense — are interesting, especiaUy in view of the
immense stress laid on almsgiving in those
days. The command, "Give to every man that asketh
of thee," is not to be taken HteraUy. " Am I,"
he asks, " to give to a man that he may consume
it upon his lusts ? " You are to give him what
wiU do no hurt either to him orjfco_you. Some
times the best thing you can 11 givjL^L an,. Jin-
worthy beggar is a rebukej as Our Lord, when
some one asked of Him that He would make
his brother divide the inheritance, gave him a
warning against covetousness (In Serm. Dom.
i. 67 ; Serm. 359. 3).
And there is a very interesting passage about
not giving to satisfy our own Jeehngs^ the force
of which I think I may bring out by first quoting
a few sentences from an article in a modern
Review : " If your heart is touched by mis
fortune, that is no virtue in you, but only a
natural physiological reflex ; if you respond by
casual almsgiving, that is only a natural human
weakness ; but it is the intelligent preoccupa
tion of your mind with the misfortunes that your
heart has pointed out to you which constitutes
at once the difficulty and the strength of sustained

HIS SOCIAL ETHICS 251
social endeavour " (Cambridge Review, January
1913, p. 206).
Augustine is equally emphatic that we are
not to act merely to satisfy emotion. In his
work on Christian Morals he writes : " Hence
those who seasonably and wisely supply all
things required for the warding off these evils
and distresses [he has mentioned above food,
shelter, clothing, medicine!] are called compas
sionate, although they may have been so wise
that no painful feehng disturbed their mind
in the exercise of compassion. . . . Still the
epithet compassionate is a proper one, although
he acts with tranquillity of mind, not from the
stimulus of painful feehng, but from motives of
benevolence." *
We are apt to think that what is sometimes
called the " Gospel of Work " is a modern
discovery. Augustine, however, has a high
estimate of its ethical value. One of his short
treatises is caUed " Concerning Work for Monks."
It was caUed forth by the fact that some African
monks claimed that the Hfe of the cloister should
be wholly contemplative, and that no manual
tasks should be undertaken. Augustine wrote
1 The analogy must not be pressed too far. Augustine when he
wrote this passage was probably still somewhat under the influence
of the Stoic condemnation of any " perturbatio " ; and in the Retract.
i. 7. 4 he remarks, practically, that no one ever really is so free from
feeling.

252 ST. AUGUSTINE
to bring them to a better mind. He uses some
sharp language about those who " would fain
make idleness the patroness of piety." He points
to the example and precept of St. Paul, and
suggests that if nothing whatever is to call them
from their prayers it seems hardly logical to
pause for meals ! (De Opere Monachorum, 20). If
he held work necessary to men's spiritual weU-
being in the cloister, it goes without saying that
he held it to be necessary in the world.1 Indeed,
in one of the passages where he admits the
legitimacy of inheritance he clearly implies that
a man is none the worse for having to earn his
own Hving (Serm. 86. 9 fin.).
His economic attitude in general is interesting.
Gains from business (as well as from handi
crafts) are allowable (Serm. 177. 5),a and, in his
Hvely preaching style, in a sermon on Ps. 70,
§ 17, he makes the merchant himself explain the
legitimate basis of bis gains : " See now, says
the merchant, I bring merchandise from a
distance to places in which the goods which I
bring are not found, and in order that I may
live, I ask as a reward for my labour that I
may sell dearer than I have bought. Does not
1 There is an interesting passage about Adam's work in Paradise,
De Gen. ad Lit. viii. 15 ff.
8 In the Middle Ages the Church was inclined to look askance on
the profits of the trader, partly from a want of the clearness of thought
which Augustine shows in the passage quoted.

HIS SOCIAL ETHICS 253
the Scripture say that he who works is worthy
of his reward ? " In the De Trinitate, xiii. 6,
he tells a good story of an actor who drew an
immense crowd by promising that he would teU
them what was the secret wish of every man's
heart, and when he made his great revelation,
it was this : that every man wished to buy cheap
and sell dear !
Augustine, however, declares that he has
known cases to the contrary, and tells how he
himseK had known an honest collector. He
was offered a manuscript at much below its
value, and instead of taking advantage of the
vendor's ignorance, gave him the just price.
These examples, which have iUustrated
mainly the interest, from the modern point
of view, of Augustine's social ethics, may be
fittingly concluded with a passage in which he
insists on the power of a Christian public opinion,
and the responsibility of putting it in operation.
It occurs in a sermon preached in a town where ,
a riot had lately taken place, in which some un
popular official had been kiUed. Augustine gives
an impressive warning against such attempts at
reform by assassination, and touches very effect
ively upon that sense of irresponsibility which
goes with mob violence. " How ready men are
to say, ' What the people has done it has done ;
who is to punish a whole people ? ' ' Who is

254 ST. AUGUSTINE
there ? ' you say. Have you forgotten God ?
God is not afraid of a mob (Deus non timet
turbas) ! "
This will indicate the circumstances in which
he makes the following appeal : " But it is not
enough that you should not yourselves have a
hand in it ; it is not enough that you should be
sorry for it ; unless you do what in you lies to
prevent such action by the populace. I do not
say, brethren, that any one of you can go out
and restrain the people. . . . But let each of you
in his own home restrain his son, his slave, his
friend, his cfient, his dependant. Use your
influence with them to prevent them from doing
such things. Persuade such as you can persuade,
and in the case of those over whom you have
authority, exercise constraint. I am weU aware,
and you are well aware, that there is in this place
not a single household in which there are not some
Christians ; there are many in which there is not
a single pagan. Nay, on careful examination
you will find no household in which there is not
a majority of Christians. That is true ; I see
you assent to it. You see, then, that the bad
deeds cannot be done if the Christians wiU not
permit them. There is no denying that. Secret
misdeeds can be done ; but public crimes are
impossible if the Christians oppose them " (Serm.
302. 19, 20).

HIS SOCIAL ETHICS 255
The nature of these detached studies makes
any summing up unnecessary. It is possible
that they may have introduced some readers to
St. Augustine ; to others they may have offered
a new point of view. If in either case the result
is an increase of interest in a great jnan and great
teacher, whose appeal is somewhat unnecessarily
restricted by the fact that he is thought of as
belonging to the supposedly dull subject of
Ecclesiastical History, their purpose will have
been fulfiUed.

THE END

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