I ST. AUGUSTINE THE MAN-CHARACTER 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 little 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 never been surpassed in this type of literature. But it is in a sense a work of art. The dominant interest is religious, 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 biographer might prefer the less conscious selfrevelations 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 lifelike 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 fellowmen and with the external world. In these works we have, by good fortune, the opportunity of observing Augustine in a certain definite milicu, which is sufficiently restricted to be easily grasped, and of which he has himself given us a remarkably interesting picture. That curious interlude in his life, his retirement to Cassiciacum, is passed over rather lightly in the Confessions, but it lives 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 little company] and Cicero with his philosophical friends in the shades of Tusculum. But they were so youthful and exuberant that an apter comparison would be a reading-party from an English 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 specialisation. 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"). 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 militia reddiderat," De Ordine, i. 5). Augustine remarks elsewhere that this experience of an active life had sent him back to his 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, brilliant but flighty-the kind of man who is described as "a possible First if he would only work"--who thinks one day that there is no In a rough parallel, the ludimagister or litterator corresponded to a Primary School teacher, the grammaticus to a Secondary School master. |