Augustine: The Restless Heart

Late one night, in a small town in Roman North Africa, a gang of teenage boys finished their games in the street and went looking for something else to do. Near the vineyard that belonged to one of their families stood a pear tree, heavy with fruit. The pears were not especially good. They were not a pretty colour and they did not taste of much. None of the boys was hungry. Every one of them had better fruit at home.

They shook the tree anyway. They stripped it, and carried off armfuls of pears, more than they could possibly eat. They took a bite or two. Then they threw the rest to the pigs.

That was all. It is the kind of thing that happens in every town in every century, and most of the people who do it have forgotten it by twenty.

One of those boys never forgot it. His name was Aurelius Augustinus, and we know him as Augustine. Nearly thirty years later, when he was a bishop and one of the most respected thinkers in the Christian world, he sat down to write the story of his life, and he spent page after page on that stupid night with the pears. He could not leave it alone. He kept asking the question every honest teenager has asked at some point: Why did I do that?

“I lusted to thieve, and did it,” he wrote, “compelled by no hunger, nor poverty.” He had not wanted the pears. “Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself.” And then the line that still makes readers stop: “It was foul, and I loved it.”

He was, by his own count, in his “sixteenth year”, which in the way he reckoned ages means he was fifteen or sixteen. The book he wrote is called the Confessions, and it is the reason we know anything at all about a provincial teenager who lived more than sixteen hundred years ago. It is also one of the most honest books ever written about what goes on inside a restless young person who is clever enough to ask hard questions and not yet ready to hear the answers.

Born in Thagaste

Augustine was born on 13 November 354 in Thagaste, an inland market town in the Roman province of Numidia. Today it is Souk Ahras, in Algeria. North Africa was then one of the richest parts of the Roman Empire, full of farms and olive groves and busy cities, and its people spoke Latin, read Latin books, and dreamed of getting on in the Roman world.

His father, Patricius, owned a little land and was always short of money. He was not a Christian, and he had a quick temper, though Augustine says he was also warm-hearted. His mother, Monica, was a Christian, and a determined one. She made sure her son learned the name of Jesus as a small child, and that name, Augustine later said, went into him “with my mother’s milk” and never quite came out again. When he fell dangerously ill as a boy, he begged to be baptized. Then he got better, and the baptism was put off. In those days many families delayed baptism, thinking it better to wait until the wild years were over.

He was brilliant, and everyone could see it. He hated Greek, which he was beaten for not learning, but he loved Latin literature, especially the poet Virgil, and he could make an audience cry with a speech. His parents decided he would be an orator: a professional speaker and teacher of speaking, which in the Roman world was the path to a good career, perhaps even to a government post. They sent him to school in Madauros, a larger town about thirty kilometres away. And then the money ran out.

A Year with Nothing to Do

So, at about fifteen or sixteen, Augustine came home to Thagaste and waited while his father scraped together the money to send him on to the great city of Carthage. It was a year with no school, no work and no supervision, and Augustine later looked back on it as the year everything began to slide.

He describes it plainly. His body was changing, and his desires with it. He says he wanted “to love, and be loved”, but could no longer tell the difference between love and lust. His father noticed at the public baths that his son was becoming a man, and went home pleased, already imagining grandchildren. His mother was alarmed. She took him aside and warned him privately not to sleep around, and above all never to go near another man’s wife. Augustine’s reaction will sound familiar to anyone whose parent has tried to have that conversation: he thought her advice was embarrassing, “womanish”, and he was ashamed to take it.

What shocked him most, looking back, was not what he did but why he did it. He wanted to impress his friends. When they boasted about what they had been up to, he felt small if he had done less, so he made things up. “I would say that I had done what I had not done,” he admitted, “that I might not seem contemptible.” He was lying about sins he had not committed, to be accepted by people he did not even admire.

That is the background to the pears. When the older Augustine finally asked himself what he had loved in that theft, he realised it was not the fruit, and not even really the stealing. It was the gang. He wrote that “alone I had never done it,” and he repeated it several times, as if he could hardly believe it. He described the moment we have all seen happen in a group, when someone says, “Let’s go, let’s do it,” and suddenly everyone is “ashamed not to be shameless.”

The older Augustine did not think this was a small thing. For him, the pears were a window onto a much bigger question: where does evil come from? If the boys were not hungry and did not want the pears, then the evil was not in the fruit, or in their stomachs. It was in their hearts, in a will that wanted to do wrong simply because it was wrong. He would spend years trying to find an answer that let him off the hook. He never found one, and in the end that honesty was part of what saved him.

To Carthage

At about seventeen he finally reached Carthage, the second city of the Latin-speaking West, on the coast near modern Tunis. His father had borrowed and stretched to pay for it, and a wealthy family friend called Romanianus helped too. Around this time, Patricius died. He had been baptized shortly before the end, after years of Monica’s prayers.

Carthage was huge, loud and exciting: a harbour full of ships, theatres, chariot races, schools of rhetoric, and thousands of young men from the provinces trying to make their name. Augustine’s first sentence about it is one of the most famous in the whole Confessions: “To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves.” He went on: “I loved not yet, yet I loved to love.” He was not looking for anyone in particular. He was in love with the idea of being in love.

He worked hard, too. He quickly became the top student in the school of rhetoric. Some of the students called themselves the “Subverters” and amused themselves by bullying new arrivals. Augustine ran with them, but says he never joined in their cruelty, and felt a strange shame at not being as bad as they were.

Around this time, probably when he was seventeen or eighteen, he began to live with a woman. He never tells us her name. They were not married; in Roman society a young man with ambitions often lived with a partner of lower social class until he could make a “good” marriage. Augustine stayed faithful to her for many years, and she bore him a son. They named him Adeodatus, which means “given by God”, a strangely hopeful name from a young man who was running from God as fast as he could. Augustine never pretends this part of his life was right, and he never pretends he did not love them.

A Book Without a Name in It

Then, in what he calls his “nineteenth year”, so when he was eighteen, something happened that he had not planned at all. As part of the ordinary course of study, he was given a book by Cicero, the greatest Roman orator, called Hortensius. It has since been lost, but it was an appeal to young people to stop chasing money, fame and pleasure and to give themselves to the search for wisdom. The Greek word for “love of wisdom” is philosophy.

Augustine had picked the book up to improve his style. Instead, it changed what he wanted. The book, he wrote, “altered my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself O Lord.” Suddenly his ambitions looked small. “Every vain hope at once became worthless to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom.” He was eighteen, and for the first time in his life he wanted truth more than applause.

It is worth noticing that the thing that first stirred Augustine towards God was not a sermon or a church. It was a hard book by a pagan writer, read for a school assignment. God, it seems, is not limited to the obvious channels.

But there was one thing wrong with Hortensius: “the name of Christ was not in it.” The boy who had heard that name from his mother could not settle for any wisdom without it, however learned and polished it was. So he did what seemed obvious. He opened the Bible.

And he was disappointed. The Latin Bibles of North Africa in his day were rough, word-for-word translations, and to a young man trained in the music of Cicero, they sounded crude. The stories of the Old Testament seemed primitive, even shocking. Beside what he called “the stateliness of Tully” (“Tully” is Cicero), they seemed unworthy of a serious mind. Looking back, he saw the real problem: the Scriptures were written to be entered by the humble, “such as would grow up in a little one”. But, he confessed, “I disdained to be a little one.” He was too proud to become a beginner. So he closed the book.

The Religion That Promised Reasons

It was at this moment that he met the Manichees.

The Manichees followed a third-century Persian teacher called Mani, who taught that the universe was a battle between two equal powers, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. They used the name of Jesus and talked a great deal about “Truth”, but they rejected the Old Testament, cut out the parts of the New Testament they disliked, and taught a complicated mythology about particles of light trapped in matter. They had strict rules about food. Augustine later laughed at himself for believing that a fig wept when it was picked.

Why would a brilliant eighteen-year-old fall for that? Partly because the Manichees promised exactly what he was hungry for. They said they did not ask anyone to believe on authority; they would give reasons. And they asked the questions that were troubling him. They asked “whence is evil?” and “is God bounded by a bodily shape, and has hairs and nails?” They made fun of the Old Testament heroes, with their many wives and their wars. These were real questions, and the Church people Augustine knew did not seem to have good answers.

The Manichees also offered something more comfortable. If evil was a separate power, a kind of dark substance fighting against the light in us, then the evil was not really me. It just happened in me. For a young man who did not want to change his life, that was a very convenient answer to the question of the pears.

He stayed with them, as one of their “Hearers”, for about nine years. He argued for them, brought friends into the sect, and enjoyed winning debates against ordinary Christians who could not keep up with him.

At home, Monica was devastated. For a time she would not even let him eat at her table. Then she had a dream. She was standing on a wooden rule, weeping, and a shining young man asked her why. When she told him she was mourning her son’s ruin, he told her to look: where she was, there her son was also. She looked, and saw Augustine standing beside her. When she told him the dream, Augustine, ever the debater, tried to twist it: perhaps it meant she would one day be where he was. Without a pause she answered that the dream had not said that he was where she was, but that she was where he was. He admitted later that her quick reply moved him more than the dream itself. But he did not change.

She went to a bishop, whose name Augustine does not give, and begged him to argue her son out of his errors. The bishop refused. Augustine was too puffed up for argument, he said; let him alone, and pray; he would find out the truth by reading. When Monica kept begging and weeping, the bishop finally said, a little impatiently: “Go thy ways and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” She held on to those words for years.

Around the age of twenty, Augustine went back to Thagaste to teach. There he had a close friend, someone he had grown up with, whom he had drawn into the Manichees too. The friend fell ill with a fever and, while he was unconscious, was baptized. When he came round, Augustine made a joke about the baptism, expecting him to laugh. Instead his friend turned on him, and told him that if he wanted to stay his friend, he must never speak like that again. Augustine was startled, and decided to wait until he was well to win him back. A few days later the fever returned, and his friend died.

Augustine was shattered. “I became a great riddle to myself,” he wrote. Everything in his home town reminded him of his friend. His Manichaean beliefs gave him nothing to hold on to, and when he told his soul to trust in God, it would not listen, because the “God” he had been taught to imagine was less real than the friend he had lost. He fled back to Carthage.

What Came After

The rest of the journey took more than ten years, and the Confessions tells it in full. Here it is in brief.

The Manichees kept telling Augustine that his hardest questions would be answered when their famous bishop Faustus came to Carthage. When Faustus finally came, Augustine was then twenty-eight or twenty-nine. He found him charming and fluent, and unable to answer anything. The spell began to break. In 383 Augustine sailed for Rome, slipping away by night after lying to Monica at the harbour so that she would not come with him. The next year he won a prestigious post as professor of rhetoric in Milan, where the emperor’s court then lived.

In Milan he went to hear the bishop, Ambrose, at first only to study his preaching style. But Ambrose showed him that the Old Testament he had sneered at was deeper than he had thought. Then some books of the Platonist philosophers helped him imagine, for the first time, a God who was spirit and not some vast shining substance, and showed him that evil is not a thing at all but a twisting of something good. In those books he found much that agreed with the opening of John’s Gospel. But one thing, he said, he did not find there: “that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” The philosophers could point to God from a distance. They could not tell him that God had come down. He found no way home, he wrote, “until I embraced that Mediator betwixt God and men, the Man Christ Jesus.”

His mind was coming round. His will was not. Meanwhile Monica, who had followed him to Milan, arranged a respectable marriage for him, and the woman he had lived with for about fifteen years was sent back to Africa. She vowed never to be with another man and left their son with him. Augustine wrote that his heart was “torn and wounded and bleeding”. He knew what he ought to do, and could not make himself do it. As a young man he had prayed, “Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.”

In August 386, when he was thirty-one, in a garden in Milan, he finally broke. He threw himself down under a fig tree and wept, asking how long he would go on saying “tomorrow”. Then he heard a child’s voice from a nearby house chanting, “Take up and read; Take up and read.” He picked up the letters of Paul and read the first lines his eyes fell on, from Romans 13: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence.” (That is the old English translation of his Confessions; a modern Bible reads, “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.”) “No further would I read; nor needed I,” he wrote, for at once “all the darkness of doubt vanished away.” His years of arguing were over. What he needed was not one more answer but a Saviour, and he took him.

At Easter 387 he was baptized by Ambrose, together with his friend Alypius and his son Adeodatus, then not quite fifteen. A few months later, on the way home to Africa, Monica died at the port of Ostia, content that she had seen what she had prayed for. Adeodatus died a couple of years later, still in his teens. Back in Africa, Augustine was pressed, in tears, into becoming a priest in 391 in the port city of Hippo, and a few years later its bishop. He served there for about thirty-five years, preaching, judging disputes, writing letters and books that shaped Christian thinking for centuries, including the Confessions and The City of God. He died on 28 August 430, aged seventy-five, while an invading army besieged the city.

He had spent his teenage years asking where evil comes from, and his answer, in the end, was not an argument but a confession: it comes from me, and only grace can heal it. The questions were real, and he never stopped asking them. But he found that they came to rest in a person. He put it on the very first page of his book: “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

In Their Own Words

“Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

— Augustine, Confessions, Book I (written about 397–400)

Think It Through

1. Augustine says that alone he would never have stolen the pears. Why do people do things in a group that they would never do on their own? Have you seen it happen?
2. The Manichees attracted Augustine partly by asking good questions, and partly by giving him answers that let him off the hook. How can you tell the difference between an answer that is true and an answer that is merely comfortable?
3. A pagan book written for a school assignment first turned Augustine’s heart towards God, but he was too proud to read the Bible as a beginner. What would it look like for a clever person to become “a little one” without switching off their mind?
4. Monica prayed for her son for years while nothing seemed to change. What do you think kept her going, and what does her story say to someone praying for a friend who wants nothing to do with God?

Read More on Ochorus

Augustine tells this whole story himself in the Confessions, which you can read on Ochorus in the classic translation quoted here, or in Confessions (For Teens), a retelling that follows him from the pear tree to the garden in Milan and beyond. For what he came to believe, read The Enchiridion, a short handbook of the Christian faith he wrote for a friend who asked for the essentials. His full biography is on his author page.