Catholic Thought discussion

The chapter opens with his mother Monica making her way to Milan, and is comforted by the notion that her son is no longer a Manichean. Still she resolves to not give up on him until he comes fully into the Catholic faith.

Having settled in Milan and now thirty years old, Augustine describes the various people who were important to him in that major city. Milan at this time had surpassed Rome as the prominent city in western half of the Roman Empire. While he seems to lack the opportunity to fully discuss Christianity with the great scholar and future saint, Bishop Ambrose, Augustine observes Ambrose’s piety, faith, and intellectual discipline and comes away with great admiration.

We are also introduced to two friends. Alypius is a friend from his home town and a young man studying law, and while wealthy seems to be infatuated with circus games and, though initially against his better judgement, gladiator games. Two events concerning Alypius are described, how he lost his aversion to the gladiator games and how he is almost winds up in jail in a case of mistaken identity. Nebridious, also wealthy and from the Carthage area as well, followed Augustine to Milan in a search for truth. The three young men are on a journey together to discover the truth.

Monica now has concluded that Augustine has reached an age in which he must marry. She arranges a marriage with a Christian girl, but she is two years under the legal marrying age, and so he must wait. In the meantime he has to send away his concubine and mother of his son, apparently breaking her heart. But because of his inability to do without sex, he takes another lover in the interim.

I absolutely loved this quote from paragraph 6.5.8, the closing sentence. Augustine is looking back and the ups and downs of his religious journey and realizes God was there all along.

"I sighed and you heard me; I was tossed on the waves, and you guided me; I was walking along the world’s broad path, and you did not desert me."

From the Philip Burton translation.

Thanks Manny for getting the post started!

I did have the intros for these books already prepared before I went on my trip, so we'll just do both :)

Monica joins Augustine in Milan. She is still fervent in her prayers for her son’s conversion and her tears haven’t ceased. I don’t know what to make of her intensity, especially the tears. However, I don’t doubt her sincerity and passion.

Then we come to an interesting North African custom Monica practices at the tombs of martyrs. “(2) But as soon as she learned that it was the bishop who had forbidden the practice she complied in so devoted and obedient a spirit that I marveled at the attitude she had so readily adopted: criticizing her own custom rather than sitting in judgment on his prohibition.” My footnotes explain:

”This ancient custom of feasting at the tombs of one’s beloved dead was one or North African Christianity’s favorite ways of celebrating. A pagan custom originally, the refrigerium (from to refresh or cool”, meaning here “to revive” the memory of the dead) and include celebration of Mass, or could simply refer to a “funeral meal” in which relatives and friends gathered at a beloved’s tomb to pray, eat, and drink. Excesses inevitably arose, and while many bishops sought to turn such feasting into charitable outreach for the poor, who could also come and receive sustenance (i.e., agape meals) many bishops simply condemned the practice.”

Augustine gets to know Ambrose a little better, and he is so different from any person of his stature and renown he ever expected. His celibacy is perplexing, why would anyone deliberately burden themselves with it? He is available to everyone, including the unwashed masses, which must have been highly unusual in the stratified societies of late antiquity. This made it hard for Augustine to get the good bishop alone for some of the questions he had.
Augustine, now free of the Manicheans as an association, still has to overcome deeply entrenched beliefs. One of them, that man, made in the image of God, is not a limitation on God himself. “(4) I came to realize that your spiritual children, whom you had brought to a new birth by grace from their mother, the Catholic Church, did not in fact understand the truth of your creating human beings in your image in so crude a way that they believed you to be determined by the form of a human body.” Slowly the truth of the Catholic faith starts to take root. “(5) I had not yet come to accept her teachings as true, but at least I now knew that she did not teach the doctrines to which I had gravely objected … I rejoiced to find that your one and only Church, the body of your Son, that Church within which I had been signed with Christ’s name in my infancy, did not entertain infantile nonsense or include in her sound teaching any belief that would seem to confine you.”However, he isn’t quite ready yet to take the full plunge. Anyone who has gone through a major conversion knows exactly where Augustine stands. You are afraid that if you do, there is no turning back, and as a result you place yourself smack in the middle of limbo. “(6) In my heart I was hanging back from any assent, dreading a headlong fall, and nearly died by hanging instead.”

“(8) All the while, Lord, as I pondered these things you stood by me; I sighted and you heard me; I was tossed to and fro and you steered me aright. I wandered down the wide road of the world, but you did not desert me.”

At the end of the chapter social norms and expectations catch up with Augustine. A marriage is arranged for him, though he has to wait for two years before the young woman is of marriageable age. His common-law wife returns to Africa, leaving their son with Augustine. Augustine is heartbroken. Even though he only mentions her very briefly in these pages, there is no doubt she was the love of his life.

You all have noticed already what I found as a major step in St. Augustine’s progress toward conversion in this book. He and his friends and associates Alypius and Nebridius are in the darkness looking for reason why they are suffering not having yet discovered anything certain. He writes that he fell in love with wisdom in his nineteenth year and now he is getting close to thirty and looking for certainty and guidance in life.

His discovery that the Catholic faith does not teach what they thought it did is a step in finding this certainty and guidance.

Galicius wrote: "You all have noticed already what I found as a major step in St. Augustine’s progress toward conversion in this book. He and his friends and associates Alypius and Nebridius are in the darkness loo..."

Augustine had a keen sense for truth. He knew long before he left the Manicheans that their philosophy didn't add up. Now that he is probing deeper into the Catholic faith the layers of false teachings that seemed so rational to him before need to be dismantled one by one in the light of Christ.

It’s a very interesting part of his life.

I'll place this comment here since this is the chapter Augustine sends away his concubine. It occurred to me while reading of Adeodatus's lamenting in Book IX that one could write an interesting novel from the point of view of Augustine's concubine. What a feminist novel that could make. We don't know her name, she's powerless within the social dynamics, and she has her heart torn asunder by one of the patriarch's of western culture. I wonder if that novel has already been written. If not, here's an idea for any feminist willing to take it on. ;)

I think there is at least one book where she is the protagonist. I saw something like it once. Personally, it would not be my cup of tea ;)

Kerstin wrote: "I think there is at least one book where she is the protagonist. I saw something like it once. Personally, it would not be my cup of tea ;)"

Yes, that outline would not be my cup of tea either. But there could be a more profound perspective, something that actually complemented Augustine, perhaps from a woman's point of view.