Augustine, 4

BOOK V: Going to Rome and then to Milan

I want to speak now in the presence of my God of that twenty-ninth year of my life… Night and day my mother offered you for me the sacrifice of her heart, flooded with tears.

My mother, who wept bitterly at my departure and accompanied me to the seashore… wanted me to stay or to take her with me…

What a mother!… You made the rivers of tears that my mother shed for me dry up, watering the earth beneath her face every day. She was reluctant to return home without me, but that very night I hoisted the sails, leaving her alone crying and praying… You didn’t do what she asked of you then, so you could make of me what she always asked of you…

As soon as I arrived in Rome, a bodily illness brought me to the brink of the grave… Had it happened, where would I have gone but to the fire and torments that my deeds deserved according to the justice of your law… My mother would never have recovered from such a wound. I have no words to express the love she had for me.

But that wasn’t healthy love. For those who have read my Letter to mom Medusa, it is like believing that the love my mother felt for me as a teenager was healthy!

That chaste and sober widow, so given to almsgiving, servant of your saints, who never left a day without offering at your altar, went to church twice a day morning and evening, never missing a day.

Pages later Augustine confesses:

I believed that your only-begotten Son and our Saviour was something like the shining body of your substance for our salvation. I felt nothing else of him but what I could imagine in my vanity. I thought that with such a nature he couldn’t be born of the Virgin Mary without mingling with the flesh…

The Manichaeans said that the books of the New Testament had been falsified by persons unknown, who wished to impose the Jewish law on the Christian law…

I arrived in Milan and went to see Bishop Ambrose… I refused to entrust the cure of my soul’s illnesses to these philosophers, in whose books the saving name of Christ didn’t appear. I opted, therefore, to become a catechumen in the Catholic Church.

BOOK VI: His mother catches up with him in Milan

By this time my mother had already come to my side. Her piety had given her the strength to follow me over sea and land…

Her heart wasn’t startled or troubled with joy when she heard I had done much of what she tearfully asked me to do. I saw myself free from falsehood, though I hadn’t yet reached the truth. Sure as she was that you would grant her the rest—for you had promised her all—she answered me, full of serenity and with a heart full of confidence, ‘by my faith in Christ, I hope to see you a faithful Catholic before I leave this life’.

This is what she told me. I ran with more solicitude to the church, hanging on Ambrose’s lips. She loved that man as an angel of God… She loved him greatly because he could lead me to salvation. [Ambrose for his part] was full of praise for her when he saw me, congratulating me on having such a mother.

Then Augustine tells us of his new friendships:

I had met Alypius on my arrival in Rome and we became such good friends that he came with me to Milan. He didn’t want to be separated from me… Nebridius too… had come to Milan for the sole purpose of being with me and thus be able to search for truth and wisdom… I was now thirty years old…

I thought I would be very unhappy if I lacked the caresses of a woman… Alypius was not in favour of my marrying… He, for his part, was, in that city very chaste… As for me… I was wounded by the disease of the flesh…

Alypius couldn’t quite understand how I, whom he truly admired, could be so attached to those sexual pleasures… I wanted to marry at all costs… I had already asked for the hand of a girl who was almost two years younger so that she could get married.

A cute nymphet! (today it would be called paedophilia). But Augustine entered into a concubinage with a woman older than the precocious brat:

And she left me the natural son I had had with her… I couldn’t hold out for the two-year term.