But Augustine does not conceal his failures, his inability to understand very important things about human life, and, most important, his inability for many years to accept the apparent contradictions of Christianity. We love him for his admissions of what he considered to be sins (but only in later life), most notably the time when as an adolescent he stole some pears, not because he wanted the pears, not even because it was exciting to break the law, but mainly because he was “ashamed to be ashamed”—that is, it was easier to go along with the other boys than to say to them that he was ashamed of what they were all doing. Many of us may remember similar occurrences from our own childhoods! And then, just as notably, his admission that for years he was unable to overcome his desire for women and had even kept a mistress for many years while praying most fervently for the strength to control these desires, but without his heart really being in it. “Give me chastity!” was his prayer—“but not yet.” Few readers have failed to recognize the humanity in those six words.
The heroine of Augustine’s Confessions is not that mistress, whom in fact he never names—she is one of the lost women of history—but instead his mother, Saint Monica, who was a Christian (her husband was not) and who prayed and worked to bring about the conversion of her son. Augustine was studying under the renowned theologian Saint Ambrose, in Milan. Monica came to Ambrose and pleaded for his help. “The son of these tears,” he comforted her, “will not perish.” But there were still many difficult philosophical and theological obstacles for Augustine to overcome. Finally he had resolved all doubts, but he still felt that something essential was missing. He could accept Christianity with his mind, he said, but not yet believe with his whole heart.
It is one of the famous scenes in the history of the Christian religion. Augustine is sitting in a garden, struggling to believe, unable fully to understand the Holy Scriptures which he holds in his lap. He dozes off in the sun. Suddenly he hears a voice saying, “Take up and read.” He asks himself whether that is a cry ordinarily heard in children’s games—there are children all around him, playing in the garden. No, he thinks, there is no such cry in a children’s game. He hears it again: “Tollete lege,” “Take up (the book) and read.” He opens the book and reads a passage, and at that instant his heart is filled.
Like all the greatest books, this one possesses great images. The pears, the prayer for chastity (but not yet), the conversion in the sunny garden. The greatest of all is the Window at Ostia. Monica is dying and her son, who has long since accepted Christianity, journeys to Ostia, the seaport of the city of Rome, to be with her in her last days. She lies in a room with a window on the sea. Augustine often stands at the window, listening to the sounds of the sea as it breaks against the shore. One day shortly before her death Monica is able to join him at the window, and they stand there together, he supporting her, she leaning on his arm, and talk of the life they have shared and of the life to come. Suddenly they grow silent, and the world grows silent, the sea becomes silent, there is no sound whatever, and then they hear or seem to hear the Universe itself, turning on its great center, turning by the will of God, and they hear, very faintly in the distance, the angels singing in praise of Him and of all His works. Monica dies soon after, happy in her dying because of her son and because of her vision of that life beyond death—“when we shall all be changed.”
The last part of the Confessions of Augustine is not autobiographical in the strict sense; rather, this part of the book consists of some profound philosophical discussions of the nature of time. Many readers stop at the end of Book Ten of the Confessions, but I urge you to go on, to read to the end, even though the last three books are not easy, requiring considerable care and attention to follow and understand. The reason is that the discussion of time in this book written more than fifteen hundred years ago is one of the most probing and interesting in all of literature. Note: There are many translations of the Confessions, but in my opinion the only really readable one is by Francis X. Sheed. Most other translations are hard to follow because of Augustine’s habit of interspersing biblical quotations in his text. Sheeer alone makes it clear.
Augustine wrote many other books besides Confessions. Toward the end of his life he prepared a list of his writings: as well as he could remember, there were more than two hundred and fifty different titles and that did not include several hundred letters, some of them very long, and perhaps thousands of sermons delivered before and especially after he became Bishop of Hippo. Two among this enormous number of works deserve mention here.
One was On Christian Doctrine, a relatively short (only a hundred pages or so) treatise seemingly for young priests or other neophytes. If you are interested in knowing what a good Catholic Christian was supposed to believe in the fourth century, try to find a copy of this (it is reprinted in Great Books of the Western World). The work is interesting for two reasons. First, you will find that not much has changed in the last sixteen centuries. That is either shocking or reassuring, depending on your point of view. Second, the treatise contains a long section on the difference between signs and symbols. The distinction interests me, although it may not interest you.
The other work is a very great book of several hundred pages. Called The City of God, it draws a distinction between two “cities,” as Augustine called them, one of God, the other of man. The book was completed near the end of Augustine’s life, in the year 430. Twenty years before, in the year 410, Rome had been sacked by marauding barbarians, and the pagan Romans who survived that defeat blamed the Christians. Augustine began to write The City of God immediately, to counter that charge and to show that the real culprit was the so-called gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, whose worship had been the work of the Devil. As he lay dying in Hippo in November 430, word came that his own city was under siege by another barbarian tribe. The destruction of his home, and then of the city of Rome itself a few months later, has been taken as a convenient date by which to begin the Middle Age. It is true that his Catholic doctrines had enormous influence for the next thousand years and were held by many to be an alternative orthodoxy to the system of St. Thomas Aquinas.
ANONYMOUS
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The Song of Roland
No one knows who gave the Song of Roland its final form. Undoubtedly many poets and troubadours made contributions to it: in a sense it was the product of an entire age, that of the ninth and tenth centuries in Western Europe. Nothing expresses the beliefs of that age better than this poem.
Composed over a period of perhaps a century and a half—from 850, say, to about 1000—the poem describes an event that had occurred long before, during the reign of Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor and king of the French, who died in CE 814. Charlemagne was a real man but he was also mythic: he attracted legends as a pot of honey attracts flies. This, the best of all his legends, is the story of the heroic champion who was known as his nephew Roland, or as he later came to be called by Italians, Orlando.