AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO PART 2 BY JANET SOSKICE

He wanted something more intellectually sophisticated, and he became involved with a sect called the Manichees. The Manichees considered themselves to be Christians, although were not considered so by what emerged as mainstream orthodoxy. But they were a dualistic cult. They believed that the good powers of the good created God were counterbalanced the dark powers of matter. So fundamentally, the material world was bad. It was associated in Manichean thought with a creator God of the Old Testament, and then there was a spiritual God that was good, but these are sort of rivals. And Augustine, it seems hard for us now to understand why a man of such intellectual sophistication, a reader of Cicero, was attracted to Manicheans, but he had been very interested in the problem of evil. He had lost at this time a very great friend of his childhood and that clearly affected him very much. The problem that everyone has, if a wonderful person dies young, someone who's gifted in every way, charming, athletic, intelligent, dies young, how can this be? So he was attracted perhaps to this dualism which said that there were darker powers that were almost not in control of the God of light, but yet the Manicheans were not ultimately convincing. It took him a long time, though, to shed them off. He said they used to say truth, truth, but there was never any truth in them. So at the age of about 20, Augustine, now qualified, begins to teach himself in Thagasti in North Africa. He decides he does believe in God abstractly, but he has a great deal of difficulty thinking about what that God could be. I've said he's already articulated this vague sense of a large being with some powers. He's worried about the problem of evil. He has had his worries exacerbated by the death of his good friend. He says grief darkened my heart. How do we understand our human condition, our transience, our frailty, early death? What kind of a God could there be, the problem of evil, the problem of human suffering? How can it be that children die young? What am I here for? He says of himself this time, I had become to myself a vast problem. It was this, in a way, to which Manichean dualism provided an answer. The Manicheans and Augustine at this stage mocked the stories of the Old Testament prophets as ludicrous legend, but as Augustine point out, they simultaneously believed that a fig tree weeps when its figs are picked, unless some Manichean saint eats the figs, and then he can release the energy that's in the fig and breathe it out as an angel. This is part of the way in which spiritual things was restored. The Manichean saints would live lives of great austerity, and then by eating certain fruits or certain practices, they could release, as it were, a cosmic energy back to the realm of the good. Monica, now a widow, of course, was distraught at her son's rejection of Christianity, and we can only guess what she thought about him hanging out with the Manicheans, who were not particularly respected. They were a rather recherche cult, not liked by pagans or Orthodox Christians in North Africa at the time, and Augustine portrays her in these early books of the Confessions as constantly in tears, constantly sobbing to Augustine or to various bishops or preachers who might help her son, her errant son, return to better ways, and there's a lovely stage in it, in the book where Monica recounts to her son a dream that she had, and she's standing on a rule, like a rule or a meter bar, and Augustine comes and stands next to her, and Augustine, quick to tease his mother, said, aha, mother, then you'll learn to me, you'll learn that I'm not so bad after all, and Augustine's mother, Monica, snaps back, no, no, in the dream, you came to me, you came to where I was standing, so he tells this story rather against himself. A year later, he's back in Carthage, the bigger town, he's gone from Fugacity to Carthage, and he's beginning to be concerned about some inconsistencies in the Manichean narrative. It doesn't match up very well with the works of the philosophers, he's begun to think, but he's told that there's a great Manichean sage, Faustus, Faustus, we'll make it clear, Faustus will come and tell all, and eventually Faustus does come to Carthage, and Augustine meets him, but decides on meeting that despite a certain fluency in speech, he had a very conventional mind, and just tried to brush away some difficulties, so this is a point where Augustine begins to think that there's too many holes in the Manichean garment. He's also concerned with moving on, not just from the Manichees, but from North Africa, he wants to advance his teaching career, and perhaps move into a more important civic function. Fed up with the students in Carthage, he says they're rowdy and rude, and he says, and this is rich coming from someone who's depicted his own adolescence as pretty bawdy, that the license of the students is foul and uncontrolled, and they disrupt order with astonishing mindlessness, so he decides to move to Rome, and does so assisted, it must be said, by his Manichean connections. He has to actually deceive his mother in order to slip away, he leaves her weeping on the ocean shore, and he says, rivers flow daily from my mother's eyes, irrigating the soil beneath her face, she's still so alarmed about her son, but a year in Rome was enough to disillusion Augustine. Roman students, it turned out, weren't any better paid than those in Carthage, plus they didn't pay their fees, so that was the way he made his money, so he didn't much like Rome, and some said he didn't much care that it was destroyed, he did care, of course, that people were killed, but that the slaughtering of monuments, those are just bricks and stones, you know, he's not a great fan of the city of Rome, but a greater prospect had come for him, again, still assisted by his Manichean friends. He moved to Milan to take up the post of professor of rhetoric. Augustine is now 31, and this is a stellar appointment for a boy from the provinces, and from a modest background, and it shows how able he was, and how a person of ability could move in the structures of late antiquity. At this time, Milan was the capital of the Western Roman Empire, had been so since a decree by the Emperor Diocletian in 286, so this was the place to be if you were interested in jockeying for a position of power, but although this might have been a move that, from a professional point of view, you would imagine might fill him with great joy and satisfaction, existentially, he represents himself as very torn, very anguished, and he doesn't say, so I came to Milan, the capital of the Western Roman Empire. He says, so I came to Milan, to Ambrose, the bishop, anticipating some changes that will take place. He now had very grave doubts about the Manicheans, and in Milan, he met some very.