The Odyssey of Saint Augustine

In 430 A.D., with the Vandals laying siege to the city of Hippo, Augustine of Hippo died with Count Boniface by his side. The Roman general was once a good friend of the bishop’s but mismanagement of the Vandal invasion of North Africa brought a rupture in their friendship. Having retreated inside the city, Augustine and Boniface were reconciled as the Vandals laid siege. Two years later, Boniface died from wounds he suffered fighting Flavius Aetius near Rimini. It is fitting, however, that the great saint of North Africa—the “bishop of all North African writers” as Albert Camus would call him—died surrounded by his friends. For it brought full circle another famous death in Augustine’s early life: the death of his mother, Saint Monica, and the love that this story told about Augustine’s own understanding of love as the appetitus inveniendi of life itself.

Confessions is arguably Augustine’s best-known work. What began as a response to Christological controversies in schismatic Christian communities in North Africa over the interpretation of Genesis 1 sprawled into a pseudo-autobiographical confession that made Augustine relatable and literarily immortal; as the great Henry Chadwick wrote, “as a literary figure [Augustine] must rank as one of the most remarkable writers of his age.” As we know, young Augustine reflects on his life of sin, his life of being indoctrinated in a perverse Roman educational system that extolled selfishness and social climbing (“glory”), and his struggles in Carthage, Milan, and beyond.

Augustine, however, never abandoned his Virgilian pretensions and love of the great Roman epicist and poet whom he quoted more than Plato (which is oft forgotten in the historically inaccurate statement that Augustine “baptized” Plato; Augustine spoke highly of Plato in some places, but Plato ranked beneath even the Hebrew Prophets of Scripture and Virgil and Cicero in Augustine’s voluminous writings). Just as Virgil offered poetic odyssey, Augustine emulated Virgil in the composition of his autobiographical section of the Confessions. That, perhaps, is the grandest achievement of Augustine’s classic and why it remains such a deeply moving and enduring work. We find ourselves in Augustine: our hope, our desire, our journey; per Chadwick once again, “Augustine’s story of his quest is all his own, and yet is simultaneously (and evidently consciously) intended to be a portrait of Everyman.”

When Augustine mused who he was: mihi quaestio factus sum (who am I, or literally: I have become a question to myself), we reach the fullest crystallization of Augustine’s interior odyssey. But Augustine’s interior pilgrimage is not divorced from his physical pilgrimage he undertakes in the Confessions. Like Aeneas, his poetic idol crafted by his beloved poet, Augustine’s spiritual journey is accompanied by a physical sojourn across the Mediterranean.

Reading the Confessions makes clear Augustine knew Virgil well. Perhaps too well. He even laments that he learned to weep for Dido more than his own depraved state of being. If Dante had a man crush on Virgil, Dante was merely following the footsteps of Augustine who had the first Christian man crush on Rome’s most sublime poet.

Indeed, it can be argued that Augustine modeled his own journey in the Confessions after Aeneas’s journey in the Aeneid. We have an exile driven to Carthage, from Carthage that exile manages to find his way to Rome where he experiences a conversion of grace and happiness through a vision halfway through the work just as Aeneas receives his theoria in the underworld halfway through the Aeneid. The exile now becomes a member, more intimately, of a community and becomes a warrior for love just as Aeneas becomes the warrior of love for his community of exilic Trojans as war in Italy commences for the future of civilization. From a “region of destitution” Augustine journeys to a place of “inexhaustible abundance” which echoes the very journey of Aeneas out of a city of destitution to a peninsula of Arcadian fragrance and abundance:

Intersea videt Aeneas in valle reducta seclusum nemus et virgulta sonantia silvae Lethaeumque, domos placidas qui praenatat, amnem. hunc cicum innumerae gentes populique volabant; ac velut in pratis ubi apes aestate serena floribus insidunt variis et candida circum lilia funduntur, strepit omnis murmure campus.

(Meanwhile in a quiet valley, Aeneas sees a secluded grove and roaring forest thickets and the river of Lethe rippling past many peaceful homes. In the valley danced innumerable peoples and tribes. Out in the meadows, with the blue skies of summer shining overhead, bees land and feast on many hued blossoms and stream round lustrous flowers and lilies, and all the green pastures murmur with the buzzing and humming of life.) [My translation.]

That Region of Destitution

Augustine’s restless heart moves him to a place of extreme restlessness. As Augustine enters Carthage to become a professor of rhetoric as a teenager, he reminisces on the hissing and bubbling cauldron that he finds himself in. And far from rejecting the temptations of his imaginative Babylon, Augustine openly indulges his passion in that crackling frying pan of illicit loves. Describing Carthage, Augustine bluntly states that it is a “region of destitution.”

What is unique about Augustine’s description of Carthage is how he pairs the physical lusts and destitution of the city with his own spiritual lusts and destitution. The spiritual is never separated from the carnal. Carthage is a godless place. A new Babylon, Augustine implies, to tempt the godly into the infernal fires while masking this pain with the false pleasures of fleeting ecstasy. (We must never forget that this is the same reality Carthage offers Aeneas when he arrives in Carthage.)

Over the course of the Confessions, we witness the progressive apotheosis of Augustine. While we remember his visions in Milan, his Neoplatonic ascent and crash, and then his famous weeping scene of conversion in the gardens of Milan when hearing the voice of the Christ Child speaking to him: Tolle Lege, Tolle Lege (take up and read, take up and read). What we forget, however, is that Augustine tries to climb to God while in Carthage but fails. And he fails miserably—which is why we probably forget it. For Augustine doesn’t tell us of any vision of God he had, he only tells us of his abysmal failures to ascend to God.

Augustine dug himself a pit of destruction while in Carthage. Now trying to climb out, he weeps over his inability: “Despite my frequent efforts to climb out of it, I was the more heavily plunged back into the filth and wallowed in it.” In this deep mire of darkness and falsity, Augustine has enslaved himself from God’s blessedness and love that he nonetheless seeks. Moreover, while Monica has dreamt about Augustine (and has talked to Augustine about her dreams and her prayers for her son), Augustine is otherwise alone and alienated in Carthage. He has contacts with the Manicheans. He has sex with prostitutes. But all of this only serves to dig Augustine’s ditch even deeper. Thus, when he attempts to “climb out of it” he only manages to plunge himself “back into the filth” and “wallow in it.” As Augustine also writes, “I tried to approach you, but you pushed me away so that I should taste death, for you resist the proud.”

Augustine’s language in Carthage is deeply carnal and physical befitting the physical destitution that the city represents in his rhetorical composition. Thus we get the infamous physical imagery of Augustine stealing from the pear tree, feeding the fruit to a pig, wallowing in the hissing and crackling oil of his lusts, and plunging into the filth of the hole he dug for himself. Tears flow from his eyes. His mother also weeps for him. In this destitute and godless place, Augustine is himself destitute and godless. His spiritual emptiness is tethered to the emptiness of Carthage. Thus Augustine—like Aeneas—must flee Carthage to a godlier place: Italy.

From Augustine’s own language, he cannot approach God while in Carthage. As a godless place, Carthage is no region to approach the God of abundance and heavenly fragrance. As I’ve written before about this remarkable imagery and language constructed by Augustine, “[T]hese failed early attempts at climbing the ladder to God fail when he is in that province of barren destitution. Devoid of truth, wallowing in spiritual darkness, and living a life according to the wicked will, Augustine’s attempt to ascend to God are not only held back because of his spiritual state, they are held back because of the physical place he is sinning in. The emptiness of Carthage leads to empty attempts to ascend whereby he falls back into the crackling and burning frying pan of his illicit loves. Carthage is not just a spiritual barrier but also a physical barrier to his journey with God.” So break free from that physical barrier which doubles as a spiritual barrier Augustine must.

“I Found Myself Far From You”

Following Augustine’s stint in Carthage, he makes use of his networking to meet with imperial officials in Rome. He then journeys to Milan, the city where the great Catholic bishop and priest Saint Ambrose resides. Between the pages, however, Augustine’s flight from Carthage is to escape a woman: his mother. Readers of Virgil, of course, will find echoes of Aeneas’s flight from Carthage to escape a woman: Queen Dido.

While in Milan Augustine experiences his first immortal vision, his glimpsing of the Beatific Vision as he slowly sheds his Manicheanism and now finds himself in a more wholesome place than Carthage. Italy is not that region of barren destitution as Carthage was. On the contrary, it is place teaming with life: gardens, trees, and, of course, godly men. It is also the place where Augustine sheds his wrongful thinking and abundant sinning which acts as a preparation for his journey to God.

The seventh book of the Confessions contain two infamous episodes in the work: a discourse on the philosophy of good and evil and the Neoplatonic vision which ends with Augustine crashing spectacularly back to earth having just glimpsed a mystical theoria. Interestingly, the movement to Augustine’s encounter with God begins because he picked up some “books of the Platonists” which allowed him to free himself of his Manichaean thinking.

All philosophy and theology students are undoubtedly familiar with Augustine’s treatment of evil here. He argues that there is nothing intrinsically evil, for if there was something intrinsically evil that would jeopardize the benevolence of God. Augustine’s philosophy of evil is also a shielded theodicy protecting God from he would consider sacrilege and blasphemy. He goes on to argue that evil is a privation of nature, a depreciation of that which is inherently good by virtue of its created status. Evil, thus, is located in an act of will—action—rather than anything natural or inherent.

What is often missed in Augustine’s rumination on evil is how will manifests evil: lack of understanding.

The entirety of the Confessions is a longwinded poetic treatise on the nature of truth. Augustine argues that humans are made for truth and love (since God is Truth and Love and humans are made in the image of God this logically follows). Where we sin, or fall short, is in our misapprehension of truth and love—a misunderstanding that distorts the goodness that does, in fact, drive human desire. By improperly understanding nature, Augustine is arguing, our will engages in evil actions because misunderstanding is the precondition to the will privating goodness in the natural world. Properly speaking, one’s logos must be unified with one’s voluntas.

Only after having learned this truth from the Platonists can Augustine free himself from the shackles of Manichean misunderstanding which prevented him from ascending to God in Carthage. Augustine employs a rhetorical and intellectual—indeed, poetic—skill in building the momentum toward his first, though distant, glimpse of the Godhead. Augustine must first begin to understand before he can proceed to see, reason and will are united at last to offer him something more than the emptiness which has otherwise dominated his life: “I entered and with my soul’s eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind—not the light of every day, obvious to anyone, nor a larger version of the same kind which would, as it were, have given out a much brighter light and filled everything with its magnitude.”

Augustine glimpses the sublime and the beautiful, the radiance of God—Christ—in his mystic ascent begotten from his encounter with the Platonist books. Yet Augustine does not yet know Christ and His name, thus, he is still rebuffed. Augustine, here, implies that Platonist theology and mysticism contains the seeds of divine truth, but lacking divine revelation it is not capable of actually seeing Christ and bringing one’s soul into paradise. Having glimpsed paradise, Augustine nevertheless falls back to earth in a weeping wreck: “I found myself far from you ‘in a region of dissimilarity,’ and heard as it were your voice from on high: ‘I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me.’”

By now we know Augustine is, and still remains, a proud human being. However, unlike the stuffed-up pride of the Platonists (like Porphyry, his great Platonic interlocutor he self-cultivated in The City of God) who would have patted themselves on the back for such a vision, Augustine finally embraces a moment of humility—dwelling not on how close he came to God but how far he found himself from God. “I found myself far from you,” Augustine laments. (Though we might detect a trace of hidden pride in Augustine being satisfied with himself in acknowledging how far away he was.)

But this vision of the mind, which is the soul, is only possible because Augustine has freed his mind from the pollution of Manichaean thought and the crud of Carthaginian mud. Again, it is important for the reader to recognize that Augustine’s odyssey is not merely spiritual and interior; it is physical and carnal. Augustine’s glimpse of God comes not only after he has gained some spiritual and intellectual insight, it comes also in a place far removed from the hissing and crackling cauldrons and frying pans of Carthage.

Augustine has soared up Diotima’s Ladder and found it lacking: “I sought a way to obtain strength enough to enjoy you; but I did not find it until I embraced ‘the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who is above all things, God blessed for ever…To possess my God, the humble Jesus, I was not yet humble enough.” As fruitful as the Platonist books were in setting Augustine free, they were not enough to save Augustine. No, the books of Plato and Plotinus may point you in the right direction but it will take the voice of Christ in the form of a babe to finally push Augustine across the finish line in crushing humility. (Halfway through the work, in following the tradition of Virgilian poetry, and with the presence of another, Augustine finally receives his revelation of new life that will drive him toward this epic’s conclusion.)

“Step By Step We Climbed”

Augustine’s final vision occurs after his conversion in the gardens of Milan when the voice of Christ in the form of an infant cries out to him: Tolle Lege, Tolle Lege. Augustine listens, at last, and begins reading the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans. Augustine has finally swallowed the medicine of the soul he has long sought. En route back to North Africa, with Monica once again by his side (along with his friends, most notably Alypius), Augustine and Monica are no longer separated (by the phantasmagoria of dreams or the literal running away from his momma). They are, at last, together and at peace.

Let us briefly return to another point of compositional brilliance on the part of the bishop of Hippo. In Carthage, he was alone. Even in Milan, he was alone. Augustine’s loneliness and emptiness are directly tied to his spiritual alienation.

Humans, being made in love for love, are not meant to be alone. Truly, “it is not good for man to be alone.” Augustine, who has thus far been alone, is now surrounded by the company of friends and loved ones. Love, at long last, has taken hold of Augustine. For the first time in the Confessions Augustine is not alone or surrounded by the crowd and hissing cauldrons of lust that manifest, in their raucousness, the isolation that Augustine was in despite the seeming appearance of others around him. (Take, for example, Augustine’s stealing of the pear/fig with friends; when he confesses his sin, he is alone because he was always alone.)

Moreover, in escaping Thagaste for Carthage, and Carthage for Rome, Augustine was fleeing from the persistent presence of Monica. Between the lines, although Augustine was an undeniable momma’s boy, he felt suffocated by her tears, prayers, and dreams. Augustine’s flight to ruin, celebrity, and conversion were also motivated by his want to free himself from the presence of his mother. Yet Monica persists in her love for Augustine and tracks him down in Italy and is with him as they journey together to Ostia in hope to return to North Africa.

There, however, Monica falls ill. The mother that was always praying for Augustine (and beside Augustine) was a true conduit of love. Augustine, at long last, recognizes this. No longer alone, Augustine recounts his most brilliant vision in his mother’s arms:

The conversation led us towards the conclusion that the pleasure of the bodily sense, however delightful in the radiant light of this physical world, is seen by comparison with the life of eternity to not even be worth consideration. Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporeal objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon, and stars shed light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works, and we entered into our own minds. We moved up beyond them so as to attain to the region of inexhaustible abundance where you feed Israel eternally with truth for food. There life is the wisdom by which all creatures come into being, both things which were and which will be. But wisdom itself is not brought into being but is as it was and always will be. Furthermore, in this wisdom there is no past and future, but only being, since it is eternal… And while we talked and panted after it, we touched it in some small degree by a moment of concentration of the heart. And we sighed and left behind us the ‘firstfruits of the Spirit’ bound to that higher world, as we returned to the noise of our human speech where a sentence has both a beginning and an ending.

The odyssey of love has finally triumphed. In love, with another—his mother, no less, who had dreamt of their being together—Augustine finally beholds that Love which had eluded him his whole life. The ascent to have a vision of the Love that is the Beatific Vision occurs only because Augustine has finally come to understand what love is.

In De Trinitate, Augustine defined the Trinity as a relations of love. In his voluminous other writings, though entailed and implied throughout the Confessions, he also had much to say on friendship. Friendship and family, Augustine would come to argue, are the first instantiations of the love of the Trinity in our life. God is love. Therefore, Augustine would eventually conclude love is God. And love is first nurtured with our family and our friends, the two pillars of love in the world that most intimately reflect the love of the Godhead.

It is here, in Ostia, we witness the “firstfruit of the Spirit” of love that Augustine had long sought. He had “wanted to love and be loved.” In the arms of his mother he ascends with her and her with him to the realm of “inexhaustible abundance,” the inexhaustible abundance of Love itself. This is an odyssey we do not take alone. The journey to Love is a pilgrimage that always entails others. “It is not good for man to be alone.” The very image of God, the image of love, is not merely beheld by Augustine and Monica, they themselves have become incarnate manifestations of the imago Dei in the love they shared in that final moment.

From Loneliness to Love

Augustine’s Confessions begins in loneliness and lust but ends in fellowship and love. The alienated lust that so grips Augustine’s heart like crackling oil in a frying pan becomes a still calm spirit producing the fruit of serenity. Love flows freely between Augustine and Monica, and between Augustine and his friends (principally Alypius) at the conclusion of the autobiographical portion of the Confessions in a way heretofore unseen in the narrative.

Confessions is a book of images. And it concludes, both in the autobiography and the spiritual commentary (Book XIII) with grand imagery. What is more loving, and beautiful, than the flourishing of human love—especially between a mother and son—which is, itself, a human manifestation of the Divine Love that Dante would later say “moves the sun and the other stars.”

The endurance of Augustine is that we, like him, seek love and desire to be loved. Like Augustine, we too have dug ourselves holes, tried to ascend, persisted in stubborn loneliness, and only climbed out with the help of a face out of whose smile flows the love that we have always sought. Love truly does “move the sun and the other stars.” Dante knew his Augustine. And it was in that loving fellowship that Augustine, like Aeneas, finally saw Arcadia and the valley of life and love eternal with the company of others, not alone or alienated like in Carthage, not in a valley of tears, but a valley teeming with life and the dancing laughter of all creation.

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