Augustine: A New Biography

Chapter One

The View From Africa

Hippo and Beyond

Augustine's Hippo Regius was the center of the universe for some who lived there and the back of beyond for many who visited. A port city on the Mediterranean coast of Africa, where the river Seybouse came down from the mountains to the sea, it stood a distant second to Carthage in commerce and prestige. Augustine hadn't lived there all his life.

He had grown up between two Africas: the more Romanized coastal land with its port cities and settled society, and the up-country olive- and breadbasket of Numidia, a society less consciously dignified and Romeoriented. Even at this date, the mid-350s, Numidia felt a little like western Canada before World War II.

Augustine never saw the sea as a child. He tells of imagining what it was like from a glass of water, and then is enthralled by its colors, but he's afraid to go out upon it again after his one trip to Italy and back, and he never saw the other sea to the south, the Sahara. He was born in a green valley in the mountains, in the market town of Tagaste (the modern Souk Ahras), in a landscape reminiscent of Tuscany, his horizons bounded within a couple of miles on each side by hill crests and forests. As a boy, he headed farther inland, to Madauros, climbing up out of his valley to find the beginnings of the broad expanse of high plain that lies between the coast and the desert of North Africa. From a closed-in valley, he entered vertiginous open spaces, where grasslands stretched to the horizons, interrupted only by the well-cultivated olive groves that brought this land its prosperity.

He was a nobody, the son of a minor landowner in a third-rate town, with no money to speak of and few connections. For such nobodies, proximity to power was the first step to eminence. A precise sense of the wealth and standing of his father, Patricius, eludes us, but the things we know are: (1) he belonged to the curial class, that is, the "senate" of landowners of Tagaste who were responsible for the community's governance, including collective responsibility for civic works (not surprisingly, membership on those councils was an honor many would just as soon avoid, and many, like Augustine, did so by joining the clergy); (2) he owned a "few little acres" (pauci agelluli); and (3) he relied on the friendship and support of Romanianus, a much richer landowner in the same town, to provide the financial resources to send Augustine off to university in Carthage (then the greatest port city of Africa). Augustine's important luck was in continuing to have Romanianus support him through his Milan days. (The patron fell in with Augustine's philosophical and religious enthusiasms up to a point, but in the end, he reverted to type, taking baptism only at death's door, recovering, and taking up in widowhood with mistresses. Augustine is last seen writing to Romanianus to rebuke him.)

Augustine succeeded three times in the public eye when still very young. It was an achievement when he was a young man that he got to teach in Carthage; an achievement again when he was crowned there by the proconsul Vindicianus, the man who lived in the palace on a hill, as winner in an oratorial contest (a very familiar and very "pagan" public scene in the old city); and an achievement again when he went to Italy and won appointment to Milan as imperial professor of rhetoric through well-placed friends. When Augustine went to Milan, his family's ambitions pursuing him, he had hopes he later reconstructed this way: "We have our powerful friends, and if nothing else (I say this in a rush), at least a governorship could come our way, and I could marry a wife with money (so she wouldn't be a burden on our outgoings) -- that's the limit of my desires." Many provincials from backwaters like Tagaste would have shared this ambition, but it was remarkably within reach for Augustine. If he was not yet a "friend of the emperor," he was closing in on that status during his time in Milan.

Yet his worldly career came to an end, as we shall soon see, and when it did, he did as most others would do: he went home to make the best of things. Even with a worldly career of the sort we have just imagined, it's likely that he would still have ended, sooner or later, back where he started. In 388, he settled on his family property and lived there without visible hopes or plans for three years. Here is how his first biographer, Possidius, described his intention:

And it pleased him, after he had been baptized, to take his friends and neighbors who had joined him in serving god, and go back to Africa, to his own house and lands. When he got there and settled down, for about three years he put aside worldly cares and with those who stayed with him he lived for god, with fasting, prayer, and good works, meditating on the law of god day and night. And whatever god revealed to him as he thought and prayed, he taught to others; with conversation and with books he taught one and all, near and far.

Many writers have spoken of the Augustine of 388–91 as a monk, or at least a monk-in-all-but-name. That is an anachronism. His retirement to the family property was entirely in character and entirely typical. That he chose philosophy over philandering would have puzzled only a few of his neighbors or relatives. In Tagaste, after his time in Italy, he was an oddity, to be sure. No one we can see in Africa of that time at all resembles the gentlemanly Augustine.