A Cauldron of Unholy Loves

“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” — Matthew 18:3 (KJV)

At seventeen Augustine arrived in Carthage, the biggest city in Roman Africa. He describes it in one of his most famous lines: “To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves.” He wasn't in love with anyone yet. He was in love with the idea of being in love: “I loved not yet, yet I loved to love.” When he did get what he wanted, it came with “jealousy, and suspicions, and fears, and angers, and quarrels.”

He also loved the theatre, especially tragedies. He noticed something odd about himself: he paid money to feel sad. Of the theatre-goer he writes, “this very sorrow is his pleasure.” He wept for characters who weren't real, while doing nothing for people who were. If you have ever binged a show that left you emotionally wrecked and wanting more, you know what he means.

At school he was a star, top of the rhetoric class, and proud of it. Carthage had a student gang who called themselves the Subverters, whose idea of fun was mocking and harassing newcomers. Augustine didn't join in, and he hated what they did. But he hung around with them anyway, “with a shameless shame that I was not even as they.”

Then, at eighteen, something real happened. His father had died two years before, and in a set reading for class he came across a book by the Roman writer Cicero called Hortensius, which urged people to love wisdom above everything. It changed him. “But this book altered my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself O Lord.” He says, “How did I burn then, my God, how did I burn to re-mount from earthly things to Thee.” Only one thing held him back: “the name of Christ was not in it.” He had taken in that name “with my mother's milk,” and anything without it couldn't fully hold him.

So he opened the Bible. And he was disappointed. Compared with Cicero's polished Latin, the Scriptures looked plain and simple, and “my swelling pride shrunk from their lowliness.” The Bible, he later realised, is the kind of book that grows up with a person who is willing to be little. “But I disdained to be a little one; and, swollen with pride, took myself to be a great one.”

Instead he joined the Manichees, a religious movement founded in Persia about a century before. They promised clever answers for everything: the world was a battlefield between two powers, Light and Darkness, and when you sinned it wasn't really you, but the dark part mixed into you. They talked about truth constantly. “Yet they cried out 'Truth, Truth,' and spake much thereof to me, yet it was not in them.” Augustine, the brilliant student, ended up believing things like that “a fig-tree wept when it was plucked.” He stayed with them for nine years.

Even then, he says, God was closer than he knew: “But Thou wert more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest.”

Being clever is not the problem. Augustine was one of the sharpest minds of his age. The problem was pride: he wanted a truth that matched his own sophistication, and he skipped over the one that asked him to bow. Jesus said the kingdom belongs to those who become like little children. That isn't a call to stop thinking. It's a call to stop thinking you are too big to be taught.

One thing to do this week: read one short chapter of a Gospel, such as Mark 1, slowly. Write down one thing you understand and one thing you don't. Read it as someone willing to be “a little one,” not as a critic.