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Book III

In book iii the pace of the Confessions begins to

quicken. As part of Augustine’s education in Carthage, he seeks to grow in eloquence by reading the great orator Cicero’s book Hortensius (now unfortunately lost to us) (39). We can catch a glimpse of Augustine’s view of his education by thinking of how today’s cynics view lawyers or politicians: as people who will speak whatever is necessary, regardless of the truth, to get their way and become wealthy. Rhetoric was of enormous political import in the ancient world, for those who could speak well could get their way with crowds, senators, emperors. Augustine remembers that he had been merely searching for more such lucrative tricks while reading Cicero, but instead found that the book “changed my feelings.” His prayers, desires, even his very loves, were all altered through the reading of a single book. His former hopes seemed vain now, and “how I burned, how I burned with longing to leave earthly things and fly back to you” (39). We might see this as the first of several “conversions” in the Confessions: the conversion from uncritical worldly ambition to philosophy.

Augustine’s ardor for Cicero’s work is cooled only by the noticeable absence there of the name of Jesus, which he had loved from his infancy as he drank it in with his mother’s milk (40). Turning back to the scriptures of the Catholic Church of his youth, he found them crude compared to the “dignified prose” of Cicero. So he fell in with the Manichaeans, a group that never tired of speaking of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit—they believed the latter had become incarnate in their founder Mani, as the Son had become incarnate in the man Jesus. The Manichaeans explained the brute reality of evil in the world as the result of a cosmic clash between two opposed principles: light (exemplified in the sun and moon) and darkness (seen above all in the evil of material existence). In this mythic battle some of the light has been captured, imprisoned in darkness, and can only be restored to the realm of light by proper action of the “elect” within the Manichaean community—actions such as eating cucumbers and sexual renunciation (before we Christians laugh too hard, we should remember the oddness of much of what we believe about good, evil, eating, and sex!). Much more could be said here,1 but suffice it to say that for the retrospective-looking Augustine, the Manichaeans were principally appealing because they had an explanation for the evil in the world, for which the Catholics left him wanting. Further, the Catholics were unable to account for the anthropomorphic depiction of God in their own scriptures (describing God in human terms, as having a “face” for example), and for the obvious immoralities of their own greatest biblical figures—the patriarchs.

That the Manichaeans’ erudition so appealed to Augustine shows that the learning of Catholics in Roman north Africa left much to be desired (and that the appeal of esoteric eastern religions began long before the hippies of the 1960’s!). Just think of Monica, whose fidelity to the church no one could doubt, but whose intellectual training in the faith is shown to be wanting several places in Confessions. In Augustine’s life’s work after his conversion he almost single-handedly redressed this wrong.

A final note on this book is the lovely depiction in it of Augustine’s mother Monica, especially in her prayers for her son. She drew some comfort from a dream that her wayward son would return to God (49). Yet she continued to pester church leaders to work on the willful boy. A certain bishop refused even to speak with Augustine, calling him unteachable. Nevertheless, he encouraged Monica to take heart, for “it is inconceivable that he should perish, a son of tears like yours” (50–51).

For Reflection

. Have you had a book change your desires in the same way? Which one(s) and why?2