To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning…
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land)
Eliot’s allusion, among countless others strewn about the pages of the single most consequential poem of the last century—so many “fragments,” he called them, “shored against my ruins”—recalls the famous opening line from Book III of the Confessions, where a youthful Augustine, having come at last to Carthage, finds himself “in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust.” He is not yet in love, he tells us, but nevertheless finds himself “in love with the idea of being in love.” But finding no object with which to slake so imperious a need, he is reduced to a kind of howling frustration that will not go away. And a self-loathing that only sharpens the torture.
“Scratching the itching sore of lust,” is how he will describe it. “Although my real need was for you, my God, who are the food of the soul, I was not aware of this hunger.” And so he will stagger drunkenly about in the shadows, feasting on food that quickly spoils, while the deepest desires of his heart go unassuaged. “The only hope, or else despair,” writes Eliot in Four Quartets,
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire
It would seem that Augustine, at least for now, has made his choice. Not the fire of the Holy Ghost but a very different and far deadlier fire, one that cannot easily be put out. Without grace, and without a nature open to receive it, there remains no remedy in this world for such an affliction. Still, God is not done with Augustine, nor will he remain a mere spectator passively witnessing the sexual torment that presently assails his creature. “Far above,” notes Augustine in his anguish before God, “your mercy hovered faithfully about me.” And while for a time he may have, as he puts it, “exhausted myself in depravity, in the pursuit of an unholy curiosity,” God will not suffer gladly such a fool to continue his folly indefinitely.
He will intervene, in other words, teaching him over time to learn the art and the discipline of virtue. And what will God, whose chief instrument is often irony, choose as His weapon to pull Augustine back from the brink? A book. On philosophy, of all things, which Augustine had been assigned in the course of his studies.
“It was my ambition,” he tells us, “to be a good speaker.” And pursuant to acquiring the skill set necessary to exercise the art of eloquence, he reads a text written by Cicero, who lived four centuries before, called Hortensius, a small treatise no longer extant save for a handful of fragments, that will instantly change his life. Not so much as an axe, to paraphrase a line from Kafka, for the frozen sea within him, but as a stimulus, a fiery torch, to light up the darkness that had been his life.
Augustine is only nineteen years of age when it happens, when the quest for wisdom sets his mind and his heart on fire, disposing him in the direction of a lifelong pursuit of philosophy. Following the urgings of Cicero to transcend the things of the body in favor of the life of the mind, Augustine resolves to give himself over to the pure love of sophia, whose attractions are not of this world. His whole life thus upended, he turns once more to God to announce how even a book may set in motion a sea change in the relationship that matters more than all else:
It changed my prayers to you, O Lord, and provided me with new hopes and aspirations. All my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth. I began to climb out of the depths to which I had sunk, in order to return to you.
How reassuring it is to be reminded that even pagan authors may have their uses. Apparently, the arsenal of God includes all sorts of weapons, even those deployed by nonbelievers. Cicero has proven to be a most useful catalyst in the story of Augustine’s conversion.
So, what exactly did reading Cicero accomplish for Augustine? It wasn’t as if the young man was in serious want of a sense of style or polish, and thus was drawn to what Christopher Dawson, in an essay on “St. Augustine and His Age,” has called “the limpid classicism of Cicero.” Because it was never a matter of picking up a rhetorical technique or two. Augustine’s own disclaimer on the subject is plain enough: “I did not use the book as a whetstone to sharpen my tongue. It was not the style but the contents which won me over…”
So, what were the contents of the Hortensius that proved so effective, so galvanizing in reorienting Augustine’s life? The answer is nothing less than a complete intellectual reawakening, one in which an entirely new life awaits him. Spent no longer in sensual longing amid the fleshpots—“polluting,” as one translator has it, “the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, darkening its brightness with the fire of lust”—but rather in the most serious and intense search for wisdom, for union in love for all that wisdom has to offer.
