Augustine and the Restless Heart. How One North African Invented the Inner Self

Thagaste. A small town in Roman Numidia, deep inside what is now Algeria. On 13 November 354 Aurelius Augustinus was born here. His father Patricius – a minor Roman official, ambitious, hot-tempered, pagan. His mother Monica – a Christian from a local Berber line. One of these two will win.

Allow me to be serious for one paragraph. The town of Thagaste is today called Souk Ahras and lies about eighty kilometers from the Tunisian border. This is the place where a man was born without whom Western civilization as we know it does not exist. I know how that sounds. I am not exaggerating. Anyone who reads Kierkegaard, Strindberg, Lewis, Bonhoeffer reads Augustine. Anyone who reads Descartes, Kant, Heidegger reads Augustine. Anyone who writes confession – and today billions of people on social media write confession – writes it in the form he invented. Half of what we call "Western man" stands on his bones.

He was gifted. His father strained his last money to send him to school in Carthage. Augustine mastered Latin perfectly, Greek poorly (he hated Greek all his life, the way one hates everything one was beaten for in childhood). By seventeen he already had a concubine – we never learn her name, because in the Confessions he does not name her. A year later a son was born of her. Augustine named him Adeodatus – "Given by God." He loved this boy. This is the most important thing to know about the young Augustine: he was capable of deep love. That is not the vice that will later bring him down.

One more proof of that capacity. In these years a friend of his youth died in Thagaste – a boy he had grown up with, baptized unconscious in fever and dead within days. Augustine fled his home town because every street in it burned; the friend, he wrote, had been "half of my soul."

At nineteen he read a book. Cicero's Hortensius – an exhortation to philosophy. The book set him on fire. He writes in the Confessions: "All my vain hopes suddenly became loathsome to me, and with an incredible heat of heart I began to long for the immortality of wisdom. I roused myself to return to You."

He did not return to God. He returned to what at that moment seemed to him philosophy. He returned to Manichaeism.

Try to feel what this was. Manes, a Persian prophet, in the third century proclaimed that there are two equal divine principles: Light and Darkness. The world is their mingled battlefield. In every human being there is a piece of Light (the soul) and a piece of Darkness (the body). The task of a human being is to free the Light from the material darkness it has been trapped in. Everything good in you is from the Light. Everything evil in you is not yours: it is Darkness imposed on you from outside.

Do you see why this seduces a young, ambitious, educated man? I am not guilty of what I am guilty of. All my sins are not me. I am pure light, caught in matter.

Augustine was a Manichee for nine years. He held the sect's second rank – an Auditor, a Hearer who prayed its prayers and fed the celibate Elect above him, and never entered that inner circle. He recruited. He argued with Christians. A brilliant rhetorician, he was able to demolish other people's faith in half an hour. He writes of himself: "I was a hunter of souls. For Manichaeism."

Here is the key detail. For nine years he lived inside a community that told him evil was not his fault. For nine years he knew that this could not be true. Somewhere inside him he knew that he was the one doing what he was doing, not some external Darkness. But no one could say this to him convincingly enough. Until he met the bishop of Milan.

In 384 the city of Milan – seat of the boy-emperor Valentinian II and his court – sent to Rome for a public orator. The appointment ran through the city prefect, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus: a leading pagan senator who had once governed Augustine's own African province. Augustine pressed for the chair through his Manichaean friends in Rome and won it on the pagan's recommendation. He is thirty. The work was to praise power to its face. In November he delivered a panegyric to the twelve-year-old emperor and wrote of it: "In a speech to the emperor I had to tell many lies and be approved by people who knew I was telling them."

The court went to hear the bishop of that city – Ambrose, a former imperial governor who had leapt from state service into a bishopric and now refused to yield to emperors. Augustine went for the rhetoric. He came with no letter of introduction and found Ambrose almost unreachable: the bishop had no free time, and Augustine would often find him reading in silence and slip away. There was no warm mentorship; Augustine only thought Ambrose "loved" him. The real gift came from the pulpit – a way of reading. He heard one sermon, then another, then a third, and began to hear the content. Ambrose read the Old Testament allegorically – and suddenly the children's stories the Manichees mocked (a God who walks in a garden; patriarchs with several wives; ritual sacrifice) began to read as complex theology in images where the Manichees had seen only a primitive fairy-tale.

In parallel Augustine reads what every educated pagan in Milan is then reading: Plotinus. The Latin translation by Marius Victorinus. The whole emanation. The whole ascent. All the levels of the soul.

Hadot, whom we read in the last lecture, describes what happened in Augustine's head with extraordinary precision. Augustine understood three things.

First: evil is not a thing. Evil is an absence. Darkness is not a force. Darkness is the absence of light. The Manichees were fundamentally wrong: there is no equal evil principle. There is only the good, present at varying intensities in things. A stone has more good than a heap of rubble, because it holds together more. An angel has more good than a stone. God is the Good itself. Evil is the lack of the good, as cold is the lack of heat.

Second: the soul is not material. The Manichees imagined God as a fine gas pervading matter. Nonsense. God is not material. The soul is not material. It is not "subtler stuff." It is a different kind of being.

Third – and here Augustine catches himself on something. If all evil is an absence, then in my evil there is nothing except my own choice. Not Darkness. Not another principle. Mine.

It is a blow. Nine years of Manichaean defense fall in a week. And suddenly there is nothing to hide behind.

He sinks into crisis. To understand him with the mind is one thing. To understand him with the body is another. With his body he is still bound to all his habits. He is still living with the woman he has loved and been faithful to for over thirteen years, the mother of Adeodatus. And he is about to drive her away. Monica has arranged a profitable marriage to a girl from an influential Christian family – a child of about ten or eleven, so the wedding must wait two years for her to come of age. The partner of thirteen years is, in his own words, "torn from my side," and his heart went on bleeding. She returned alone to Africa, vowing she would never lie with a man again, and left her son behind. Augustine did not wait for the child-bride in chastity; he promptly took a second concubine. He knows this is filth. He cannot stop. Her silent vow of lifelong chastity ran ahead of the choice he would make years later – unwritten, the less famous of the two.

Beside him in these months is his friend Alypius, whose own story Augustine kept as a parable of the powerless will. Friends had dragged Alypius bodily to the gladiatorial games; he swore he would keep his eyes shut and be "absent though present." Then a roar over a fallen fighter, and his eyes opened. "He took a deeper wound in his soul than the fighter did in his body… at the sight of blood he drank in savagery." One glance was enough, and the will was lost. Augustine knew this in himself just as well.

The end of July, 386. Milan. In the house where he is staying there is a small garden. His friend Ponticianus has just come and told the story of two young officials of the imperial court who read the Life of St. Anthony and decided on the spot to give up everything and enter a monastery. On the spot.

Augustine listens and comes apart. He says to his friend Alypius, sitting beside him: "What is wrong with us? These uneducated men take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm, and we, with all our learning, wallow in flesh and blood!"

He runs into the garden. A small, walled garden. Alypius follows quietly. Augustine flings himself down beneath a fig tree.

Let me quote Augustine here in Peter Brown's rendering. This is Confessions VIII, 12:

"I tore my hair and hammered my forehead with my fists; I locked my fingers and hugged my knees... I was held back by mere trifles, the most paltry inanities, all my old attachments. They plucked at my garments of flesh and whispered: 'Are you going to dismiss us? From this moment we shall never be with you again, for ever and ever. From this moment you will never again be allowed to do this thing, or that...'"

"And I was weeping in the most bitter sorrow of my heart. Then suddenly – a voice. A child's voice. Singing from a nearby house: 'Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege.' Take and read. Take and read. I looked up. I could not remember any children's game with those words. I understood it as a command. I picked up the book lying near Alypius, opened it at random, read the first sentence my eye fell on:"

"'Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and spend no more thought on nature and nature's appetites.'"

"And I had no need to read further. Before I had finished the sentence the light of certainty flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled."

He is 31. The end of July, 386. Under a fig tree in a garden, one man passed through what the Western tradition will later call conversion. Not a change of mind. Not a change of school. A change in what he is.

Ten years after that night he will write a book about it. The book will sound like a prayer. From the very first sentence: not "I will tell you how I converted," but "O Lord, what I was and what I have become. Let me say it to You, in Your presence."

This is unheard of. In the ancient world people wrote memoirs – Caesar on his wars, Cicero on his consulship. But those were public justifications. Augustine writes to God. Before a God who already knows. Why write, then? Because the act of confessing itself shapes the soul. Only by saying who you were can you understand who you have become.

Peter Brown observes: "What we know about Augustine's childhood we know because, in middle age, the bishop of Hippo looked at babies and asked: what was I like? In the ancient world, no educated person, no one, asked that question seriously before Augustine."

Because for Augustine what mattered was what before him had only been scenery. Childhood? Not interesting. Dreams? Not interesting. Momentary feelings? Not interesting. Trivia for the grown educated man.

For Augustine these are material. He describes a night in "that sixteenth year of my age" when he and a gang of youths stripped a neighbor's pear tree. He was not hungry – he had better pears at home. The fruit was not even good. He stole for the theft itself. And here is the detail he circles for pages, a bishop of forty-three writing about one adolescent night: he would never have done it alone. "Alone I would not have done it," he writes. The pleasure was in the company of the accomplices, in the shared offence. In this trivial act he sees the architecture of original sin – a will that loves a thing because it is forbidden, and loves it more because others are breaking the rule too. Four centuries before the phrase existed, this is peer pressure, dissected.

This is news for the Western world. The inner life of a human being is not the secondary stage. It is the main stage. Everything Kafka, Proust, Bergman will later do – is in the shadow of this book.

Peter Brown catches why the Confessions could not end at the conversion. The age wanted a dramatic story of conversion, and Augustine could have stopped there – at Book Nine. Instead he added four more. Because for him conversion was no longer enough: no such experience should delude a reader into thinking the past can be cast off so easily. "The amazing Book Ten of the Confessions is not the affirmation of a cured man: it is the self-portrait of a convalescent," Brown writes. The convert's "harbour" is "still troubled by storms." This is where the inner self is born: in the refusal to let conversion close the account. (One contemporary, Consentius, admitted to Augustine that he had bought the Confessions twelve years earlier, scanned a few pages, and set it aside: the book struck him as "much too modern.")

Augustine does not "think" – he hunts himself with his own consciousness. He says to God: "I have become a great question to myself."

Here is the moment that separates Augustine from Plotinus. Here is the turn.

Plotinus says: climb up, toward the One. The soul must rise.

Augustine also climbed – and hit a wall. As he describes in Confessions VII, he performed the Plotinian ascent. He gathered himself inwardly. He felt the moment in which "for an instant I touched the eternal." And then – fell back. He was, as he says, "above and below at the same time." He could not stay there.

And here Augustine reads the New Testament. Not as a rhetorician now. As a man looking for life. He reads the Prologue of the Gospel of John: "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us."

He writes: "In the books of the Platonists I found much that means this. I found there the Word. I found there God. But I did not find there: and the Word became flesh. That was not there."

This is the "almost everything."

The God of Plotinus is unreachably high. He waits for you to ascend. If you fall – that is your problem. He will not interrupt his radiance to lift you. He cannot. It is not in his nature.

Augustine's God is the same God. The same Highest. The same One. But this God came down himself. Took on a body. Lived in time. Died on a cross. Not climbing – bearing.

This is not just another metaphysics. It is another anthropology. If God himself came down for your sake – then you are not alone. You do not have to drag yourself up. You are being dragged. If you have fallen – He comes after you. If you have betrayed Him nine times – He will meet you once more.

This is grace. The word will become central for Augustine. Unlike the Plotinian "graceful, gracious motion of the One," which touches all equally and none personally, Augustinian grace is the personal intervention of God in the life of a specific human being. In you. In me.

Book VII was the failed solo climb. There is one place in the Confessions where the climb succeeds. Years later, at the port of Ostia, days before his mother's death, Augustine and Monica stood leaning at a window over a garden. Talking, they rose by degrees – past bodies, past sun and stars, past their own minds – and for one instant, "with the whole effort of the heart," they touched eternal Wisdom, then sighed and fell back into speech. This time the ascent held, because it was not climbed alone. It was shared and given – two people lifted together by the God who came down.

And the question immediately follows. If grace is personal – why does it touch some and not others? Augustine will tear his heart open on this question until the end of his life. It will produce his hardest teaching, on predestination. And it will poison Christian theology for a thousand years. That is the lecture's own verdict; Peter Brown judges more gently. For him predestination is first of all the psychology of an old and anxious man who badly needed to see his own youth as a preordained process, a "tiny speck of gold" worked over tirelessly by a master-goldsmith. The teaching that the elect were "permanently inscribed in the archive of the Father" gave a person what he could never create for himself: "a permanent core of identity." And an honest opposing voice was already standing by – Julian of Eclanum, whom we will meet in a moment. We will come back to this in another lecture. Late in life he compressed the whole struggle into one sentence: "I made strenuous efforts on behalf of the free choice of the human will, but the grace of God defeated me."

For now, one thing matters: the Christian God is not the top of a ladder you climb. He is the one who came to you. That is RADICAL news in the fourth century. The Greeks knew nothing like it. This is a different God.

24 August 410. Alaric, king of the Visigoths, enters Rome with his army. A city no one had sacked in 800 years is plundered for three days. What happened was a psychological catastrophe for the whole Empire. The Eternal City turned out not to be eternal.

Augustine at this moment is the bishop of Hippo, a coastal town in Algeria, 1500 kilometers from Rome. Refugees begin arriving. Wealthy Romans who got out in time. They bring with them what we today would call a conspiracy theory: Rome fell because we abandoned the old gods. As long as we bowed to Jupiter, Jupiter held our walls. Now we worship a crucified Jewish peasant – and the Visigoths walked into the Capitol.

The accusation has to be answered. Augustine begins to write the reply, and writes it for thirteen years. Twenty-two books. The title: De Civitate Dei, The City of God.

The argument: Rome was always falling. Rome was always going to fall. All earthly cities fall. Because they are built on love of self – amor sui. That is their nature. The old gods preserved nothing. The old gods were themselves products of that self-love, projections of Roman virtues and Roman pride onto the sky.

There are two cities, says Augustine. *Two civitates, two communities, running through all human history, woven through one another.*

The first – the Earthly City (civitas terrena), built on love of self to the contempt of God. Its history begins with Cain, who killed Abel. Abel did not build a city – he was a shepherd, a wanderer. Cain built. The first city in the Bible is a murderer's city. It is Babylon. It is Assyria. It is Rome. It is every state that holds itself together through violence and calls that order.

The second – the City of God (civitas Dei), built on love of God to the contempt of self. Its citizens are not a nation, not a class, not a caste. They are scattered through all earthly cities. Some are monks in the desert. Some are emperors, like Constantine (sometimes). Some are slaves, like some of the Christian martyrs. This city has no capital on earth. Its capital is at the end of time.

Here is the genius of Augustine. He severed Christian identity from any earthly politics. No longer is Rome = Christianity. No longer is the state = God. The Empire can fall – the City of God goes on living. It lives in you, in me, in two people breaking bread in a basement. Civilization is not the stone of walls but fidelity in hearts.

One honest shadow before we leave him. The same bishop who cut the faith loose from the state reached for the state's whip. In his own province a rival church, the Donatists, held half of African Christianity, and their zealots maimed Catholic clergy; Augustine once escaped a Donatist ambush only because his guide took the wrong road. He began with strong reservations against imperial force, fearing conversions made from terror. Then he watched the pressure work – in Hippo a Catholic minority became a majority – and he reversed. He built his defense from one line in Luke, the master who orders his servants to bring the guests in from the roads: "compel them to come in." The man who invented the inner conscience wrote the first theological justification of religious coercion in the Christian West. That, too, is Augustine.

The second shadow fell in his old age. Against the doctrine of original sin rose Julian of Eclanum – a bishop who had sold his estates to relieve a famine and spent half his life in exile, the "Cain of our times," for refusing to sign the condemnation of Pelagius. Julian struck plainly: the idea of an inherited sin is "improbable, it is untrue; it is unjust and impious; it makes it seem as if the Devil were the maker of men," and it destroys the freedom of the will by saying that children "in the very wombs of their mothers are filled with bygone sins." To Julian's challenge Augustine responded, in Brown's words, with "an unintelligent slogging-match" – far from the subtle dialogue he had kept up with pagan Platonists in the City of God. Brown's verdict is severe and honest: "Seldom in the history of ideas has a man as great as Augustine, or as very human, ended his life so much at the mercy of his own blind-spots." Julian was no saint either – vain, with bile on his tongue, he called Augustine "the African" and "the lord of all donkeys." Neither man is the hero here. And one more irony pointing forward: in his use of Aristotle, Julian anticipated a Christian humanism that would only ripen 700 years later – the "Council of the Aristotelians" Augustine jeered at would meet in the Paris of the thirteenth century, and Thomas Aquinas would be among them.

And beside that, a shadow of powerlessness. In 422–423 the coast of Africa, in collusion with the local authorities, was opened to slave-traders and kidnappers who "with ululating war-cries, dressed up as soldiers and barbarians to inspire fear, invade sparsely populated and remote rural areas" and drove free Romans down to the slave-ships – anchored at Hippo itself, in full sight of the coastguard. Augustine in person questioned a terrified girl about the raid on her farm; the Christians of Hippo ransomed some 120 captives, and the bishop's staff, who had tried to interrupt the trade, were sued by the merchants' well-placed protectors. He dictated appeals for a distant court: "But who resists these traders who are found everywhere, who traffic, not in animals but in human beings, not in barbarians but in loyal Romans?… Who will resist, in the name of Roman freedom?" The same bishop who cut the faith loose from the state remained, before the state, one of "little men with little power."

The end came within his lifetime. In the summer of 429 an army of Vandals – the whole tribe, eighty thousand souls, Arians certain the God of Battles was on their side – crossed at Gibraltar and moved slowly along the coast. Their king Genseric: "a cripple, deep in his designs, speaking little, contemptuous of luxury, given to mad fits of rage, greedy for wealth, a master of the art of intrigue." Roman Africa simply collapsed, without resistance. Augustine's last books, On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance, he sent across the Mediterranean at the end of 429 – exactly as that army crept up the coastline. His friends, gathered again at his table, met now as refugees "who had seen their life's work disappear within a few months."

If you live in a time when the earthly city you live in is threatening to fall – you are reading what Augustine wrote for you. He too watched his world collapse. In 430, while he lay sick in Hippo, the Vandals stood at the walls. A few months later the town would fall. Augustine died before the Vandals entered – God gave him that small mercy. But he knew it was coming. And he wrote what he had been writing since 410: what holds is not the walls.

If you read the Confessions once, it is the autobiography of a genius. If you read it a second time, it is a textbook of self-knowledge. If a third, it is a prayer.

Augustine knew that a human being is torn apart from inside. He knew that you can simultaneously want to do right and want to do wrong, and the second wanting is stronger. He knew that you can pray: "Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet." (That is his own youthful prayer; he quotes it against himself.) He knew that a human being cannot save himself by himself. A small, important, hard piece of knowledge.

Remember Monica, the Christian mother who was going to win. Days after the shared vision at Ostia, she fell into fever. All her life she had wanted to be buried beside her husband in Africa; now she let it go. "Lay this body anywhere," she said. "Only remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you are." Asked whether she feared to die so far from home, she answered: "Nothing is far to God." She died on the ninth day, aged fifty-six; Augustine was thirty-three. One of the two had won.

And yet – he does not write like someone who has given up. He writes like someone who has found. Not a final answer, not safety, not peace. Found the One who knows me. That is not the same as knowing everything. It is what gives you the strength to keep going when you know nothing.

"You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You."

This sentence is the opening line of the Confessions. The most famous sentence in everything Augustine wrote. Every part of it matters:

– "Made us": we do not come from a natural process. We are made. With intent. – "For Yourself": we are not made for work, for country, for family, for pleasure. All of those, yes – but none of them is the final end. – "Our heart is restless": there will be no peace here. Do not look for peace in things. You will not find it. – "Until it rests in You": there is peace. It is in one place.

In the last books he turns to the hardest question he can find – what is time? "If no one asks me, I know; if I try to explain it, I do not." Past and future exist nowhere but in the soul; that stretched-out soul is the restlessness the book began with.

Is this true? Maybe. Maybe not. It is a position that a man in the fourth century, in a garden, in North Africa, in a time when his empire was crumbling, decided to live by. He lived by it for thirty-four years and wrote three hundred books from it.

One last change of tone. In 410, when Rome fell, Augustine had preached "the indiscriminate scourging of God" and the grim approach of the old age of the world. Now, in the actual disaster, he speaks differently. Looking at the refugees who reached the walls of Hippo naked and penniless, "yet alive," the old man who once taught contempt of the world voices his love of it: "I know you want to keep on living. You do not want to die... This is the deepest human feeling."

He died on 28 August 430, in the third month of the Vandal siege, aged seventy-five. His disciple Possidius, who was there, tells us Augustine had the penitential psalms copied onto the wall beside his bed, to read and weep over as he lay dying. Chadwick – and Brown, independently – records another memory of that deathbed: his comfort was the saying "He is no great man who thinks it a great thing that sticks and stones should fall, and that men, who must die, should die." It was a line of Plotinus. Brown: "Augustine, the Catholic bishop, will retire to his deathbed with these words of a proud pagan sage." Both witnesses can stand. The man who spent his life confessing his sins to God went out reading grief off a wall, with a line of pagan philosophy on his Christian lips. The "almost everything" he found in Plotinus stayed to the last breath.

Possidius, looking round the emptied room, summed it up: "There was nothing left of Augustine now but his library." A life whose ends were profoundly unlike its beginnings: in 386, newly converted, he had hoped to grow quietly wise at leisure, "to grow god-like in retirement"; forty years later he was dying in a besieged town, weeping over the psalms. "No historian had come to tell the old Augustine that the Dark Ages were about to begin."

Seventy years after his death, when the Vandals finally wiped Hippo from the map, Augustine's Roman library somehow survived. His texts survived all the migrations, all the conquests, all the empires. A thousand years later Western Europe was still reading him. Fifteen hundred years later a young Luther will read Augustine and tear the Reformation out of him. Two thousand years later we are sitting here reading him now.

He came back from the garden. And we are still standing on what he wrote there.