The Water, the Window and the Grave

Where We Left Off

Parts One to Five covered Books One to Eight. Here is what you need. This part stands on its own.

The man. Born 354 in Roman North Africa, educated at his family’s expense towards a career as a professional public speaker. By 384 he held the public chair of rhetoric in Milan, the city where the western emperor lived. He wrote this book in his early forties, around 397 to 400, about eleven years after the events in it.

The book. Confessio means three things at once: confessing sin, confessing faith, and confessing praise. This is a prayer, addressed to God throughout, and you are overhearing it.

The story so far. Nine years with the Manichees, a religion teaching two eternal powers of Light and Darkness. It collapsed. He drifted through scepticism to Milan, where the bishop Ambrose showed him that scripture could be read figuratively. Books of the Platonists then broke the assumption that had trapped him — that anything real must be made of stuff — and once that went he could accept that evil is not a substance but a privation, a missing good in something that ought to have had it.

Book Eight, which this part follows directly. Having the answer turned out not to be the same as being able to live in it. Book Eight is about a man who is certain and cannot move. It is built out of other people’s stories — Victorinus, Antony in the Egyptian desert, two imperial agents at Trier — before it reaches his own. In a garden in Milan in the late summer of 386 he heard a voice from a neighbouring house telling him to take up and read, opened the letters of Paul at random, read four lines, and stopped arguing. Alypius read the next line and joined him. They went indoors and told Monica.

Two threads run in. The first is the woman. In Book Six the partner he had lived with for over a decade, and whom he never names, was sent back to Africa so that he could make an advantageous marriage. He took another woman while waiting. The engagement is still standing when Book Eight ends. The second is grief. In Book Four a friend died and Augustine was destroyed by it, and the older man writing the book judges that grief a fault: the natural consequence of having loved a mortal thing as though it were permanent. Part Three said that Book Nine is where he has to live with his own verdict. It is.

A Reminder About the Boxes

Six kinds of box run through this series. Word Box explains a hard term the moment it first appears. In Real Terms turns something abstract into something you can picture. How We Actually Know This names the evidence and says what it cannot show. The Argument is for places where experts genuinely disagree, and gives each side its strongest case. The Hidden Assumption digs out the premise everybody is quietly taking for granted. Remember This closes every chapter in the plainest words available.

Three Things to Watch For

Book Nine is the last book of the life story. After it the Confessions stops being a narrative and becomes something else. Three threads to keep hold of.

One. Almost nothing dramatic happens, and everything changes. Book Eight has a garden, a voice and a famous scene. Book Nine has a resignation timed to the school holidays, a country house, a toothache, a font, a window and a funeral. If you have been reading this series for the arguments, this is the part where the arguments get quieter and the stakes get higher.

Two. This is the part where other people finally get room. Verecundus, Nebridius, Adeodatus, Evodius, Navigius and above all Monica are given more space here than anywhere else in the book. Four of the thirteen sections are about his mother. That is a deliberate act by a writer who has spent eight books on himself, and Chapter Six is about what he is doing with it.

Three. He breaks his own rule and knows it. Part Three reported his verdict that grief for the dead is a fault. In this book his mother dies, he fights his tears all day, he loses, he is ashamed of losing, and then he is ashamed of the shame. Chapter Nine reports that sequence exactly and does not tidy it up, because the untidiness is the evidence.

Contents

1Leaving Quietly

Book Nine opens with a man deciding not to make a scene. What he does next is undramatic, slightly shabby, and the most consequential thing in the book.

1.1Three weeks

The garden happened in the late summer of 386. Augustine was thirty-one and held the public chair of rhetoric in Milan. The obvious thing for a man in that state to do is to walk into the lecture hall the next morning and resign in front of everybody. He did not do that.

He checked the calendar. The schools broke up for the vintage holiday in a few weeks, and he decided to serve out the time and simply not come back. He says so plainly, and he says he did not want to make a noise about it.

His reason for waiting is given in one line and it is a reason about other people. He did not want it to look as though he were tearing himself away in order to be seen tearing himself away. Milan was a court city, the chair was a state appointment, and a professor of rhetoric who resigns publicly in the middle of term is making a speech whether he means to or not. He had spent twenty years learning exactly how such a speech would be read.

So the plan was: finish the term, let the holiday arrive, and not return. A few weeks of standing in front of paying students teaching them the art he had just decided was a trade in words. He calls it, without much sympathy for himself, a stretch of time to be endured.

1.2The chest, and what a voice was worth

Then something happened that he reports with an honesty most people would have edited out. His health failed in a way that was convenient.

He had been having trouble breathing. There were pains in his chest, and his voice was going: he could not speak clearly or for long. The diagnosis available to him was that too much literary work had damaged his lungs. Whatever it actually was, the effect was that the instrument he made his living with was failing.

Augustine then does the thing that makes him worth reading. He does not present the illness as providence and leave it there. He tracks his own reaction to it. At first, he says, it distressed him, because it was going to force him out of the job whether he liked it or not, and he wanted the leaving to be his. Then he noticed that it pleased him, because it handed him a true and respectable excuse, and a true and respectable excuse would soften the offence to the parents and patrons who had a claim on him.

That is the sentence to slow down on. He is telling you that he was glad of an illness because it made his resignation less awkward, and he is telling you that he noticed being glad.

1.3What he says about how it looked

The whole passage is arranged to prevent a particular reading of himself. He knows how the story is going to sound to anyone who liked him and to anyone who did not.

To the friendly reader it sounds like modesty: a man who has had a religious crisis and refuses to advertise it. To the unfriendly reader it sounds like hedging: a man who has had a religious crisis and waits for a medical certificate and a public holiday before acting on it. Augustine supplies the evidence for the unfriendly reading himself, which is a strange thing for a defendant to do, and is one of the reasons this book has survived.

This series is going to declare a position here, because the material invites a verdict and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The managed exit is the least suspicious thing in Book Nine. A man who wanted the story to look good would not have mentioned the chest, and certainly would not have mentioned being pleased about the chest. The passage is constructed to be slightly damaging, which is a poor strategy if the aim is to look good and a reasonable one if the aim is to be believed.

What the passage cannot settle is whether the man in the lecture hall that autumn already thought of himself as somebody who had been converted. That question belongs to Chapter Two.

1.4Verecundus and Nebridius

Two friends get a section each, and both sections are short, and both are about people who did not get where Augustine got.

Verecundus was a Milanese schoolmaster and a close friend, and he owned a country property. He offered it. Without that offer there is no Cassiciacum, no autumn of writing, and possibly no Book Nine, so it is worth noticing that the retreat everybody remembers as Augustine’s was somebody else’s house.

Verecundus was not a Christian at the time and was unhappy about it. Augustine’s account of why is uncomfortable and he does not soften it: Verecundus was married, and he had got the idea that the way his friends were going was not open to a married man. He wanted in and believed the door was a size too small for him. Augustine reports his distress, records that he was baptised later during a final illness after Augustine had already left Italy, and moves on.

Nebridius is the friend this series has been following since Part Three, the one who argued against astrology and would not let a bad argument stand. He had held a view of Christ that treated the body as an appearance rather than a real body, and he gave it up. He was baptised. He went back to Africa. He died young, and Augustine, writing more than a decade later, still writes about him in the present tense.

The placing is deliberate. Before Book Nine tells you about a baptism, a vision and a good death, it tells you about two men who were part of all of it and who died first. Book Nine is the part of the Confessions where people start dying, and Augustine sets the tone in the second section.

2Cassiciacum

A borrowed house in the hills, eight or nine people, one winter, and four books that survive. This is the only stretch of Augustine’s life where we can read what he was writing at the time and compare it with what he says about it later.

2.1Where they went, and who went

Some time in the autumn of 386 the household left Milan for Verecundus’ estate in the country. Augustine calls the place Cassiciacum. Where exactly it was is not known, and Chapter Ten says more about that.

The important thing is who went, because it was not a hermitage and it was not a monastery. It was a house party with an unusual reading list.

On the evidence of the books written there, the group was: Augustine; his mother Monica; his son Adeodatus, then about fourteen; his brother Navigius; his friend Alypius, who had been in the garden with him; two teenage pupils, Licentius and Trygetius, whose fees were presumably still being paid by their families; and two cousins, Lastidianus and Rusticus, who are described as having had almost no formal schooling and who are nevertheless in the room and speaking.

That list is worth holding on to for the rest of this part. Nine people, three generations, one of them an uneducated woman in her fifties, two of them teenagers, two of them relatives with no Latin training. This is the company in which Augustine spent the months between his conversion and his baptism.

2.2Otium, and what they were doing all day

The routine, as far as it can be reconstructed, was mornings of agricultural business and reading, and afternoons and evenings of sustained discussion, some of it taken down by a stenographer. When the weather was bad they moved into the baths. When it was fine they sat in a meadow. A rooster fight interrupts one session and turns into an argument about order. Somebody complains about the noise of water in a channel outside and that becomes an argument too.

Four works survive from those months, and their subjects are: whether certainty is possible at all, what happiness is, whether there is order in the world including its evils, and a dialogue between Augustine and his own reason about the soul and God.

In English they are usually called Against the Academics, On the Happy Life, On Order and the Soliloquies. Augustine also mentions letters going back and forth with Nebridius, and those survive too.

2.3The psalm, and the anger in it

One passage in this chapter of Book Nine is not about philosophy at all. Augustine describes reading the Psalms and what they did to him, and singles out the fourth.

What he describes is not calm. He says he was set on fire by it; that he would have shouted it at the whole human race if he could; and — this is the part that is usually skipped — that he wished the Manichees could have been watching him read it without his knowing they were there, so that they could see what the psalm was doing to him.

Two things are worth pulling out of that. The first is the competitive edge. Nine years of his life had gone into a religion he now thought was false, and he wants his old friends to see him. Even in the middle of what he presents as an ecstatic reading, he is thinking about an audience of Manichees.

The second is what the psalm was doing. The Psalms are not philosophical texts and they do not argue. They complain, accuse, plead and celebrate. A man who has spent his whole education learning to construct arguments is reporting that the thing which moved him most in that autumn was a book that does not make any.

Whether the reading of Psalm Four happened as described in the autumn of 386, or whether an older Augustine has placed a later experience there because it belongs there in the argument, cannot be settled. The Cassiciacum books do not mention it.

2.4What the dialogues look like from outside

Now the difficulty. Part Five set out the central dispute of Confessions scholarship — whether the garden scene happened as described — and said the strongest evidence against it comes from these books. This is where that evidence sits, so this is where it has to be handled.

The problem in one sentence: a man who has just had the experience described in Book Eight sat down within weeks and wrote elegant philosophical dialogues in which Christ is barely mentioned, the church hardly appears, and the frame of reference is recognisably that of an educated late-Roman Platonist.

That is not a hostile summary. It is what the books are like, and anybody can check.

A position, declared: the genre objection seems to me the strongest of the three, and I will write the rest of this part on the assumption that the dialogues and Book Nine are compatible. But that assumption should be visible to you, because it shapes how Chapter Seven reads, and a reader who takes the first position will find Chapter Seven far more suspicious than I do.

What is not in dispute is the shape of the winter. He stopped teaching, moved to somebody else’s house with his mother and his son, wrote four books, argued with teenagers about the order of the universe, read the Psalms, and waited for Easter. Then, in the middle of it, he got toothache.

3The Toothache

A book of this size, on subjects of this weight, stops for a paragraph to tell you that Augustine’s tooth hurt. It is not a lapse. It is one of the most carefully placed things in Book Nine.

3.1What he says happened

Somewhere in the middle of the Cassiciacum months, Augustine got toothache. He says the pain grew until he could not speak at all.

He wanted the others in the house to pray for him. He could not ask them out loud. So he wrote the request on a wax tablet and handed it over to be read.

They knelt. The pain went. He says it went completely, and that it went at once, and that it frightened him.

That is the whole episode. It occupies a few lines in a book that gives roughly the same space to the death of Nebridius.

3.2Why it is in the book

Three things are doing work here, and they are worth separating.

The first is the silence. This is a man who a few weeks earlier could hold a hall in Milan for an hour, and whose chest had already begun to take the voice away. Now he cannot form a sentence to ask for help, and has to write it down and pass it to somebody else to say aloud. Book Nine keeps taking his voice off him. The lungs take it in Chapter One. The tooth takes it here. In Chapter Nine he stands at a graveside and cannot make a sound because he has decided not to.

The second is the ordinariness. Book Eight is the most famous religious scene in Latin literature, and the reader arrives at Book Nine with the volume turned up. Augustine turns it down, hard, within a few pages, by inserting the least exalted physical fact available to him. Whatever is being claimed about these months, it is being claimed about a life that includes toothache.

The third is that it is his first. He presents this as the first time he asked for something and had it, and the fright in his account is the fright of a man who has just found out that a transaction he had been discussing for years might be live. He had spent a decade arguing about the nature of God. He had not, on this account, asked God for anything and had it happen.

3.3The trap, which catches both kinds of reader

A believing reader arrives at this passage and finds a miracle. A sceptical reader arrives and finds a stress-related pain that remitted on its own at the moment when a frightened man was finally surrounded by people paying attention to him, which is a well-known pattern.

Both readings are available and this series is not going to choose between them, for the reason given in Part One: it does not adjudicate religious claims. But it is worth noticing that the two readings are usually held in a way that makes them rivals, and that Augustine himself does not hold them that way at all.

The reason this matters beyond the tooth is that the same structure is about to be used on much bigger material. Chapter Four has a blind man who says he could see. Chapter Seven has an experience at a window that two people claim to have had at once. In both places the argument tends to collapse into the same false pair, and it will help to have noticed it here, on a subject where nobody has anything invested.

4The Water

A letter to a bishop, a book he could not get through, a night in April, and a congregation that had spent the previous year sleeping in its own church to keep the soldiers out.

4.1The book he could not read

When the vacation ended, the household went back to Milan to prepare for baptism at Easter. Augustine wrote to Ambrose asking what he should read to get ready.

Ambrose said Isaiah. Augustine started it, could not follow the opening, assumed the rest would be as hard, and put it down, meaning to come back when he had more practice at this kind of writing.

It is a very small thing and it is worth a moment. This is a professional reader — the best-trained reader in the city, arguably, a man who taught other people how to take texts apart for a living — reporting that his bishop set him a book and he could not do it.

He is also, quietly, telling you something about Ambrose. The relationship between the two men is one of the strange gaps in the Confessions. Ambrose is the reason Augustine could take Christianity seriously at all, and by Book Nine they are exchanging notes about a reading list, and there is not one recorded conversation between them about anything that had happened in that garden. Part Four already noted that Ambrose was permanently busy and effectively unreachable. Book Nine does not fix that.

4.2What being baptised meant

The baptism took place at the Easter vigil, on the night of 24 April 387. Three of them went in together: Augustine, Alypius, and Adeodatus, who was about fifteen.

On the ceremony itself Augustine says almost nothing. There is no description of the water, the words, the oil, the white garment or the bishop. What he gives instead is one sentence about the effect: that the anxiety about his old life ran out of him.

This is a writer who has just spent an entire book on a scene in a garden. He gives the sacrament that scene was heading towards a line and a half. Chapter Ten comes back to why.

4.3The singing

What he does describe, at length and with obvious feeling, is the singing.

He says the voices of the congregation went into his ears, and the truth was distilled into his heart out of them, and the feeling overflowed, and he wept, and it did him good. It is one of the very few places in the Confessions where he describes an experience without immediately taking it apart.

4.4Why they were singing

Then Augustine explains where the singing came from, and the explanation is a piece of hard political history dropped into the middle of a conversion narrative.

About a year before, the imperial court and the bishop of Milan had gone to war over a building.

The congregation occupied the church and would not leave. They slept in it. They were prepared, Augustine says, to die there with their bishop. And the reason the hymns were introduced was practical: people who are camped in a building waiting for troops need something to do that is not being frightened, and Ambrose gave them something to sing.

Then Augustine names one of the people in that building. His mother was in the front rank of them, he says, among the leaders of the watch, living on prayer.

And he places himself: not yet warmed by any of it, he says, but stirred all the same by the state of the city.

It is a small, precise piece of self-placing and it does a lot of work. In the spring of 386 Monica was sleeping on the floor of a church expecting soldiers, and her son was a professor with an interesting new philosophical position. The two of them are eighteen months and one window at Ostia apart.

4.5The bodies under the floor

The crisis ended, in Augustine’s telling, with something else.

Ambrose was shown in a dream where the bodies of two forgotten martyrs, Gervasius and Protasius, were buried. They were dug up, reportedly undecayed, and carried in procession to Ambrose’s new basilica. Augustine reports that a man in the city who had been blind for years touched the bier with a cloth, put the cloth to his eyes, and could see. He says the court’s hostility was checked by it, though not converted.

This series does not rule on the blind man. What it can do is say exactly how much of this is checkable, because the answer is unusual.

The honest summary is that we know a great deal about the circumstances and nothing at all about the man’s eyes, and that anyone who tells you the corroboration settles the miracle has confused two different questions — which is exactly the confusion Chapter Three was about.

5Adeodatus

Augustine had a son for about seventeen years. In four hundred pages of self-examination the boy gets roughly a page, and one sentence of it has been read against his father ever since.

5.1What we are told

Adeodatus was born around 372, when Augustine was about eighteen. His mother is the woman Part Four was about: the partner Augustine lived with for over a decade, whom he never names, and who was sent back to Africa in 385 so that he could make an advantageous marriage.

The name means “given by God”. It was a real name in Roman Africa, not an invention, and it is also the sort of name you notice.

When the woman was sent away, the boy stayed. Book Six does not say so and Book Nine does not say so; we know it because Adeodatus is at Cassiciacum in 386, arguing, in books that survive. A child of about thirteen was separated from his mother and kept by his father, and neither the separation nor the keeping is anywhere described.

What Augustine does say about him, in Book Nine, comes to about four things. That he was baptised with them at Easter 387 at the age of about fifteen. That his intelligence was extraordinary — better, Augustine says, than that of many serious and educated adults. That God took him early. And that he remembers him without anxiety, because there was nothing in the boy’s childhood or adolescence to be afraid of.

5.2“Nothing of him was mine but the sin”

And then the sentence. Speaking of Adeodatus, Augustine says that he contributed nothing to the boy except the sin.

It is one of the harshest-sounding lines in the book and it has been quoted against him for sixteen centuries. It is worth being careful about what it does and does not say.

It does not say the boy was a sin, or that Augustine wished he had not existed, or that he did not love him. The clause it belongs to is a piece of praise: everything good in this child came from you, and the only part of him I can claim as my own contribution is the wrong in how he was made. It is the standard shape of Augustine’s compliments, applied to his son.

That is the defence, and it is a real one. Here is what it does not cover. Augustine had a theological account of sexual desire on which a child conceived outside marriage carried something of the circumstances of its conception, and by the time he wrote this sentence he had been developing that account for years. The line is not only a rhetorical flourish. It is also load-bearing, and it became more load-bearing in the twenty-year fight with Pelagius that Part Seven has to deal with.

A position, declared: I think the sentence is both things at once, and that the arguments about it usually fail because each side needs it to be only one. It is genuinely a compliment. It also genuinely contains a doctrine that would go on to do a great deal of damage. Those are not in competition.

5.3The dialogue

The claim should be handled carefully, because a philosophical dialogue is a literary form and the interlocutor in one is normally a device. Augustine knew that better than anybody. He goes out of his way to say that this one is not — which is either an unusual piece of testimony or an unusually specific piece of literary decoration.

Read as testimony, it says something quite moving and quite uncomfortable at once. A father wrote down his son’s arguments, kept them, published them, and then in a later book told the world they were real. He did that after the boy was dead. It is the only monument he built to him.

5.4The death, and the page

Adeodatus died young. Augustine says only that God took him early from the earth. He does not give a date, a place, a cause, or a scene. From other evidence the death is usually put around 389 or 390, in Africa, when the boy was about seventeen.

Set that beside what the same book does with the death of Monica. She gets four sections, a deathbed conversation, a funeral, an argument about grief, and a prayer. Adeodatus gets a sentence.

There is one further thing worth having, which is not a defence and is not a charge, but a piece of context that most modern readers of this passage do not carry.

Both of those sentences are true at once, and a reader who can only hold one of them will get this chapter wrong in one of the two available directions.

6Monica, Told Backwards

Before the window and before the funeral, Augustine stops the narrative and gives you his mother’s whole life. What he chooses to put in it is the most interesting decision in Book Nine.

6.1Where the chapter sits, and why that matters

The order of Book Nine is worth having in front of you. The resignation. Cassiciacum. The baptism. The siege of the basilica. Then two sections on Monica’s life from childhood. Then Ostia. Then her death.

The retrospective comes before the window and before the deathbed. By the time you reach the famous scene you already know about the wine, the violent husband, and the advice she gave to women who were being hit. That is not how a hagiographer arranges material. A hagiographer puts the faults early and small, or leaves them out, and builds towards the death.

Augustine builds towards the death too. But he insists on loading the run-up with a drinking problem in a child and a marriage that a modern reader will find hard to read about. Whatever he is doing, he is doing it on purpose.

6.2The old servant and the rule about water

Monica was born around 331 or 332 in Thagaste, in a Christian household with money and servants. The person who actually brought her up was not her mother.

It was an elderly household servant who had, as a girl, carried Monica’s own father about on her back — the way older children were used to carry small ones. Because of that history she was trusted, and the daughters of the house were handed over to her.

She was severe, and she had a theory. She would not let the girls drink water between meals, however thirsty they were, and her reasoning was not about water. Augustine records it: you drink water now because you cannot get at the wine; when you are married women with the keys to the store-room, water will not be good enough for you, but the habit of drinking will still be there.

It is a piece of practical psychology from a fourth-century domestic servant, preserved because a bishop thought it was worth writing down, and it is more sophisticated than a great deal of what gets said about habit today. The claim is that the object of a habit is not what forms the habit. The reaching is what forms the habit. Change what is within reach later and the reaching will go on.

6.3The wine

The rule did not work, and the way it failed is the best-told small story in the Confessions.

Because she was a sober and obedient girl, Monica was the one sent down to draw wine from the cask. She would dip the cup in through the opening at the top, and before pouring it into the jug she would put it to her lips and take the smallest possible sip.

Augustine is careful about the motive, and the care is the point. She did not do it because she wanted wine; she disliked it. She did it out of what he calls a surplus of high spirits, the kind that bubbles out of children in silly impulses and that is normally kept down by the weight of adults in the room. In the cellar there were no adults.

Then the sentence that makes the passage: adding a little every day, she came to be drinking cups nearly full, and enjoying it.

He does not say she became a drunk. He says a girl who did not like wine, doing something mildly naughty for fun, ended up drinking seriously without ever making a decision to. Nobody chose anything. The quantity moved on its own.

This is the same mechanism the series has met before under a different name. Part Five spent a chapter on Augustine’s account of habit — the thing you chose so often that it stopped being a choice and started being a weight. He gives the clearest illustration of it in the whole book to his mother, and puts it thirty years before he was born.

The cure came from a quarrel. The maidservant who used to go down to the cellar with her fell out with her one day when they were alone, and threw it at her as an insult. Monica heard it, saw what she had become, and stopped.

Augustine draws the moral himself, and it is characteristically sideways: flattering friends corrupt people and quarrelling enemies often correct them, and God gets no less credit for using someone who meant harm. The servant was not trying to help. She was trying to win an argument.

6.4The marriage

Monica was married young to Patricius, a man of some standing in Thagaste and no great wealth. Two things about him are stated flatly and never softened: he was unfaithful, and he had a violent temper.

Her method with the temper is described as a technique, which is exactly what it was. She never opposed him while he was angry — not in an act, Augustine says, and not in a word. When it had passed and he was calm, she would explain what she had done, if it looked as though he had lost his temper over nothing.

On the infidelity she said nothing at all, and waited.

6.5What she told the other women

This is the hardest passage in Book Nine and the series is not going to walk past it.

Other wives in Thagaste, Augustine says, whose husbands were milder than hers, came to conversation with the marks of blows on their faces, and complained about their husbands’ behaviour. Monica told them the fault was in their tongues.

Her argument, delivered in a joking tone about a serious thing, was this: from the day you sat and heard the marriage contract read out, you should have understood it as the document that made you a servant; so remember your position, and do not set yourself up against your master.

Augustine reports that the women were amazed, because they knew what Patricius was like, and it had never been heard in the town that he had struck her, or that the two of them had quarrelled for a single day.

Four things need saying and they need saying separately.

One. The advice is that women being beaten should speak less. There is no way to phrase it that removes that, and attempts to do so usually work by leaving out the faces.

Two. Augustine puts it in. He is writing a book in praise of his mother, at the height of his powers, in full control of what goes on the page, and he includes the beaten women and her answer to them. He could have left it out and nobody would ever have known.

Three. He presents it as evidence of her wisdom. He does not flag it as troubling, and there is no sign that he found it so.

Four. The strategy worked for her, in the sense that she was not hit, and the town noticed. Whether it worked because of the strategy, or because Patricius happened not to be a man who hit his wife, is not something anybody can know. Augustine assumes the first. The evidence is equally consistent with the second, and the sample size is one.

A position, declared, because this series says where it stands rather than hiding behind the material: the advice is bad, the reasoning behind it is worse, and the passage is nevertheless one of the most honest things in the book. Those are not in tension. A man constructing a saint does not hand you the sentence about the marriage contract making you a servant. He hands you the patience and stops.

6.6The mother-in-law, and the thing she would not do

Two more items complete the portrait, and both are about handling other people.

Patricius’ mother lived with them and was set against Monica at first by servants carrying stories. Monica did not fight back and did not complain; she was simply relentlessly deferential until the older woman changed her mind, at which point the mother-in-law went to her son, named the servants who had been making trouble, and asked him to deal with them. He had them beaten. Augustine records the beating without comment, as the ordinary outcome it was.

The last item is the one Augustine says he values most, and it is characteristically unglamorous. When she heard two people saying bitter things about each other, she carried nothing between them except what would help to reconcile them. Not a word of the rest.

He adds, drily, that this looks like a small virtue only to people who have not had much experience of the alternative.

And at the end of it: Patricius was baptised shortly before he died, in 371, when Augustine was about seventeen. Monica outlived him by sixteen years and never remarried.

A position, declared: the third reading seems to me clearly right about the function of these two sections in the book, and it does not settle the first question, because a portrait can be true and be doing a job at the same time. What I would resist is the idea that noticing the job is a way of catching Augustine out. He is not hiding it. The sections are placed exactly where the argument needs them.

7The Window

A man and his mother lean on a windowsill in a port town, waiting for a ship, and have a conversation that people have been arguing about for sixteen hundred years.

7.1Why they were at Ostia at all

After the baptism the household decided to go home. Not back to teaching, and not back to Thagaste to resume anything, but home to Africa, where Augustine intended to set up some kind of shared life of study and prayer on the family property.

They went as far as Ostia and stopped.

Augustine does not say what the delay was. Historians have a strong candidate: in the summer of 387 the usurper Maximus came over the Alps into Italy, the imperial court fled, and there was a naval and military emergency across the western Mediterranean for the best part of a year. Whether that is what held them at Ostia is a reasonable inference and nothing more.

7.2The conversation

They were alone and they were talking, Augustine says, very sweetly. He describes them as forgetting what was behind and reaching for what was in front, which is a phrase from Paul and which sets the register for everything after it.

The question they were on was: what will the eternal life of the saints be like? Not whether there is one. What it would be like.

And then, in the space of one paragraph, the conversation does something that Augustine reports as having happened rather than as having been thought.

7.3The climb

The movement has steps and he numbers them in effect, so it is worth laying out plainly.

• They went through bodily things — everything you can touch — and past them.
• They went through the heavens, sun, moon and stars, and past them.
• They went up further by talking about God’s works and being astonished at them, which is a strange and important detail: the ascent is happening through the conversation, not despite it.
• They arrived at their own minds and went past those too.
• And they came to a region he calls one of never-failing plenty, where what there is is the Wisdom by which everything else was made — which is not made, and in which there is no “was” and no “will be”, only “is”.

Then the sentence everybody remembers. While they were talking about it and straining towards it, he says, they touched it a little, with one whole beat of the heart.

And then they sighed, and left something of themselves attached to it, and came back down to the noise of their own mouths, where a word starts and stops.

Three things in that are worth flagging now and will matter in Chapter Eight. It is brief. It is shared. And the return is described without any of the language of failure.

7.4The sentence that follows

What comes next is a single enormous conditional sentence, one of the most famous in Latin, and it is worth understanding what kind of sentence it is before worrying about what it says.

It is not a claim. It is an “if”. It runs, in substance: suppose everything went quiet.

Suppose the noise of the body went quiet, and the images of earth and water and air, and the heavens, and the soul went quiet to itself and got past itself by not thinking about itself, and dreams went quiet, and every language and every sign and everything that comes into being by changing — suppose all of that stopped, completely.

And suppose that then the one who made all of it spoke, not through any of those things but directly, so that you heard it without a human voice or an angel’s voice or thunder or any picture standing in for something else.

And suppose that went on, and everything else was taken away, and this one thing held the person who was hearing it.

Would that not be what the gospel means by entering into the joy of your Lord?

It ends on a question mark. Augustine does not assert that eternal life is like this. He builds a conditional the length of a paragraph and hands it to you unresolved. Whatever happened at that window, the most careful writer in Latin declined to make a statement about it.

7.5What she said afterwards

Then Monica speaks, and this is the part that tends to get cut from anthologies because it is not beautiful in the same way.

She says, in substance: as far as I am concerned, there is nothing in this life that I want any more. I do not know what I am still doing here or why I am still here. There was one thing I wanted to stay for — to see you a catholic Christian before I died — and God has given me that with more thrown in, because I see you serving him and caring nothing for the happiness this world hands out. So what am I doing here?

Augustine says he does not clearly remember what he answered.

That admission is worth more than most of the paragraph before it. A man capable of composing the conditional sentence, writing eleven years later, tells you that he cannot recall his own reply. It is the kind of gap real memory has and constructed memory usually does not.

Within five days, or not much more, she was in bed with a fever.

8What Is Being Claimed

Augustine has now described something like this twice: once alone in Milan in Book Seven, once with his mother at a window. Whether they are the same kind of thing is the central question of Book Nine, and the question is harder than it looks.

8.1The other one

Part Four covered the Book Seven passage and it is worth having back in front of you, because everything in this chapter is a comparison.

In Milan, in 386, after reading the Platonist books, Augustine turned inward and reported seeing — with what he calls the eye of the soul, and above that eye — an unchangeable light. Not a brighter version of ordinary light. Something above his own mind, which had made him.

He says he shook, with love and with dread. He says he found himself a long way off, in a country unlike the thing he was looking at. He says he heard something like a voice telling him he was food for grown men, and that he would not be turned into the one eating him, but the other way round.

And then the two clauses that matter for this chapter. He got to what is, in the flash of one trembling glance. And he could not hold his eyes on it; he was beaten back by his own weakness; and he returned to his ordinary habits.

8.2Five differences

Set the two side by side and the differences are not subtle. They are also not usually listed, because the Ostia passage is so much better written that people tend to read it for the prose.

One: company. Book Seven is one man alone in a room. Ostia is two people, and the text keeps saying “we”. Whatever happened, Augustine claims it happened to both of them at the same time.

Two: method. Book Seven is introspection — a turn inward after reading. Ostia is a conversation. They climb by discussing. That is a strange thing for a mystical ascent to do, and it is stated twice.

Three: the ending. Book Seven ends in defeat. He cannot hold it, he is thrown back, and the verb he uses is the one you would use about losing a fight. Ostia ends in a sigh and a return to normal speech, and something is described as being left behind up there, still attached. The first is a failure. The second is a visit.

Four: the senses. Book Seven is all sight — the eye, the light, the gaze, the flash. Ostia is all hearing and silence — the whole great conditional is about everything falling quiet so that one voice can be heard directly. Augustine chose two different sensory vocabularies for two passages a hundred pages apart, and he did not do that by accident.

Five: what is missing. Augustine’s own verdict on Book Seven, delivered a few pages later, was that the Platonist books had given him the destination and no way of getting there — no humility, no mediator, nothing that could carry a person. At Ostia the framing is scriptural from the first line to the last, and the question they are discussing is not “what is real” but “what will it be like for the people who arrive”.

8.3The Plotinus question

Now the difficulty, and it is a real one.

The structure of the Ostia ascent — from bodies, up through the soul, to what is above the soul — is the structure of Plotinus. Not vaguely. Step for step. Plotinus describes exactly that movement, in those stages, and Augustine had read him, or read something very like him, eighteen months earlier.

The strong version of the argument, made in a well-known study in 1938 and pressed further by Courcelle, is that the Ostia passage is Plotinian philosophy in Christian clothing, and that the historical Monica cannot have been party to any of it, because she had no Greek, no philosophical training, and no access to the ideas the passage is built out of.

The counter-case is that the resemblance is the resemblance of two people climbing the same staircase, that Augustine is using the only vocabulary his century had for this kind of description, and that the load-bearing material — the phrase from Paul at the start, the Wisdom by which all things are made, the joy of your Lord at the end — is biblical, not Platonist.

On Monica specifically, the counter-case has one hard piece of evidence that gets forgotten. We do not have to guess whether she could hold her end of a difficult conversation. Four books written at Cassiciacum survive, she is a speaker in two of them, and in one she is given the closing argument and wins it. Augustine was not shy about her lack of education; he mentions it. He also put her in the room.

A position, declared: I find the second reading the strongest, mainly because of the shift from seeing to hearing, which is too thoroughgoing to be an accident and too easy to miss to be a display. But the third position has the better epistemology, and a reader who takes it will regard the previous two paragraphs as an elaborate way of preferring one piece of prose to another.

8.4The trap underneath the whole argument

There is an assumption running under this chapter that is worth digging out, because it is doing more work than any of the three positions above.

Which is why the honest thing to carry out of this chapter is not a verdict but a distinction. Book Seven describes a man reaching something and being thrown off it. Book Nine describes two people reaching something together and coming back down on their own feet. Whether those are two events or one event told twice, they are certainly two claims, and the second is the one Augustine chose to end the story of his life with.

9Nine Days

His mother dies. He has spent Book Four telling you that grief like this is a mistake. This is the chapter where the doctrine and the man are in the same room, and this series has owed you it since Part Three.

9.1The fever

Five days after the conversation at the window, or not much more, Monica went down with a fever. There is no diagnosis available and there never will be; a fever at a Mediterranean port in late summer covers a great deal of ground.

At some point during the illness she lost consciousness. The household came running. She came back, looked at them, and asked where she was.

Then, seeing them standing there unable to speak, she said: you will bury your mother here.

9.2“Lay this body anywhere”

What happens next takes about four sentences and contains an entire family.

Augustine says nothing, and holds back his tears. His brother Navigius says something — the gist is that he hopes she will die at home rather than abroad. She turns and looks at him with an expression that Augustine describes as troubled, and rebukes him with her eyes for thinking that way. Then she turns to Augustine and says: listen to what he is saying.

And then, to both of them: lay this body anywhere at all. Do not let worrying about it take up any of your attention. The only thing I ask is that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you happen to be.

The force of that only lands if you know what she was giving up. She had wanted, for years, to be buried beside her husband at Thagaste. She had gone as far as preparing the place. Augustine says that she let it go and that she said, of the idea that distance from the grave might matter, that nothing is far from God, and there was no danger that at the end of the world he would not know where to find her.

He also records that he heard about this second-hand: that at Ostia, in his absence, she had been talking to friends with what he calls the confidence of somebody looking forward to it. She had told nobody in the family. The son who wrote four hundred pages about himself found out what his mother thought about her own death from other people, after she was dead.

She died on the ninth day of the illness. She was fifty-six. He was thirty-three.

9.3The room

He closed her eyes.

What he says happened then is precise and physical. An enormous sorrow gathered in his chest and was turning into tears, and his eyes, under the hard order of his mind, drank the spring dry. He says the struggle went very badly for him.

Adeodatus, who was fifteen and had just watched his grandmother die, burst out crying. Everyone in the room told him to stop, and he stopped.

Augustine then compares the boy’s crying to his own: something childish in him was doing the same thing and was put down in the same way, by what he calls the adult voice of the mind. He is not reporting a difference between himself and his son. He is reporting the same event happening twice, once out loud and once inside.

And then somebody starts singing. Evodius, another African in the party, picked up the book of Psalms and began one — the one about singing of mercy and judgement — and the whole household came in on the responses.

That is what the room looked like an hour after she died. A dead woman, a teenager who had been told to be quiet, a man with his jaw set, and everybody singing.

9.4Why they were not crying

The reasoning is given, and it should be taken seriously rather than treated as repression with a theological label on it.

They thought it wrong to mark this particular death with weeping and groaning, because that kind of mourning is for one of two situations: the person died badly, or the person is simply gone. Neither applied, on what they believed. So the tears would have been a statement, and the statement would have been false.

That is a coherent position and it is not cowardice. It is also, as the rest of the chapter demonstrates, unliveable.

Augustine spent the rest of that day performing it. Mourners arrived. The people whose job it was prepared the body. He sat in another part of the house talking to visitors who did not think he should be left alone, and he says he soothed the pain with what he calls the medicine of truth. Nobody who was there heard him grieve.

He says he was complaining to God the whole time about his own weakness, and holding the flood back, and that it would give way a little and then come back up, and never quite reach tears.

The body was carried out. He went to the grave and came back and did not weep. He did not weep during the prayers, either — and he is specific about the moment, which is the point in the rite, before the body went into the ground, when the eucharist was offered beside the grave. He stood through the most charged moment available to him and produced nothing.

9.5The bath, and the sleep

Then comes the detail that persuades me, more than anything else in Book Nine, that this is a report of a real day.

He decided to go to the baths. And he explains why, and the explanation is embarrassing: he had heard somewhere that the Latin word for a bath comes from a Greek word meaning to throw anxiety out of the mind. So he went, on the strength of an etymology.

He notes that the etymology is not much of a reason. He went anyway.

It did not work. He says the bitterness did not sweat out of him. He came back exactly as he had gone.

Then he slept. And when he woke, he found the grief had gone down a little on its own, which is the one thing in the whole day that actually helped and the one thing he did not choose.

9.6The hymn

He was alone in bed. And the verses of Ambrose came into his head — the evening hymn, the one that begins by addressing God as the maker of everything and the one who sets the sky turning.

The same hymn form he had wept at three months earlier in the baptistery. The same bishop’s words. And this time he was on his own with them.

And he let the tears go. He describes it as letting them run wherever they wanted, and spreading them under his heart, and his heart resting on them.

A day of held breath ends with a man crying in the dark because a tune arrived. That is not a defeat of the argument in Chapter Nine Section Four. It is the argument meeting a hymn and losing.

9.7The double grief, and what he does with it

Now the part that pays the debt.

During the day, Augustine says, the fact that these ordinary human feelings had so much power over him was itself a source of distress, so that he was grieving over his own grief and being worn down by two sadnesses at once.

Read that slowly. The Book Four doctrine is not an abstraction being quietly dropped. It is present in the room, operating, and it is making everything worse. He is not simply sad. He is sad, and then he is ashamed of being sad, and the shame is a second injury on top of the first.

And then, having wept, he does something that Book Four gives him no permission for at all. He defends it.

Writing it down eleven years later, he addresses the reader directly — which he almost never does — and says: read this and make of it what you like; and if you decide it was a sin that I cried for my mother for a fraction of an hour, then do not laugh at me; if you have any largeness in you, cry for my sins instead.

That sentence has three moves in it and all three matter. He does not retract the doctrine. He does not claim the tears were fine. He asks not to be mocked, and he asks for charity rather than agreement. It is the reply of a man who still holds the theory and has discovered what it costs to be the person the theory is about.

This series will not resolve the tension for you, because Augustine did not resolve it either, and the refusal is the most valuable thing in the chapter. What can be said is what changed and what did not.

A position, declared, and this is the one I hold most firmly in the whole part: the third reading is right about the facts and the first is right about the direction. He did not change his mind between the two books, because there was no between. He had already changed it, or was in the middle of changing it, and he wrote both states down rather than tidying either away. The Book Four verdict reads to me like a position he had inherited and could still argue for, and Book Nine reads like the evidence he could not argue with.

And the debt this series has been carrying since Part Three is now paid, in the only way it could have been: not with a resolution, but with a sequence. He held the doctrine. He wept. He was ashamed. He wrote it down anyway, and asked you not to laugh.

10An Honest List of What We Do Not Know

Every part of this series ends the same way, by separating what is genuinely open from what is settled, and saying why in each case.

10.1Genuinely unknown

These are open questions, not gaps in this document. Each one is followed by the reason it is open, because “we do not know” is only useful when it comes with a cause.

Where Cassiciacum was. Why: Augustine names the estate and never locates it. Two places in Lombardy have claimed it, on the strength of later tradition and arguments from place-names. No excavation has settled it and probably none can.

When, where and how Adeodatus died. Why: Augustine gives the death one clause and no other ancient source mentions the boy at all. The usual dating of about 389 or 390 is worked backwards from Augustine’s movements, not from any record.

What became of Adeodatus’ mother. Why: Augustine withheld her name deliberately, as Part Four set out, and nobody else in antiquity knew her. She was sent to Africa in 385 and the record stops. Her son was kept in Italy and the arrangement is never described.

What he said to Monica at the window after she spoke. Why: he says he cannot remember, which is a better answer than a reconstructed one and is worth flagging as the only place in Book Nine where he admits the memory has failed.

Whether the experience at Ostia was shared in the way he claims. Why: two people were there, one of them died five days later, and the other is the only witness. Chapter Eight sets out how far the argument can be taken and where it stops.

Why the household was stuck at Ostia. Why: he does not say. The military emergency of 387 is a strong inference from the calendar and nothing more.

Whether the toothache and the blind man happened as described. Why: the first has a single witness and the second has several who were all on the winning side of the fight the event helped to win. Neither of those is a reason to disbelieve; both are reasons not to call it settled.

What Monica would have said about her own marriage. Why: everything known about her comes from her son, except her dates and a poem somebody else wrote on her tomb. The wine, the temper, the advice to the beaten women and the patience are all his selection.

The exact sequence of the Milan basilica confrontations. Why: the primary sources are Ambrose’s own letters, which are hard to put in order, and specialists divide between one crisis and two, in 385 or 386 or both.

10.2Solid

And these are as firm as anything in ancient biography gets. Again with reasons, because “solid” is a claim that has to be paid for.

The Cassiciacum retreat, its dates and its cast. Why: four books written there survive, name the participants and describe the setting, and one of them dates itself to his thirty-second birthday in November 386. This is the best-evidenced stretch of Augustine’s entire life.

The baptism at the Easter vigil of 387, with Alypius and Adeodatus. Why: Augustine states it plainly, it fits the Milanese calendar, and every subsequent fact about his life is consistent with it.

That he resigned the chair and never taught for money again. Why: forty years of documented public life with no trace of a return, and hostile contemporaries who would have used it.

The basilica crisis, the introduction of congregational hymn-singing at Milan, and the discovery of the two martyrs. Why: Ambrose describes them in letters written at the time, a biography by his former secretary describes them a generation later, and Augustine reports them independently in another work thirty years on.

That Adeodatus existed, was Augustine’s son, and was unusually able. Why: he is a named speaker in a surviving book, and Augustine states in the Confessions that the arguments there are really his.

Monica’s death at Ostia in 387, in her fifty-sixth year. Why: Augustine’s own statement, plus the next section.

10.3Two boys with a spade

10.4What happened next

Book Nine ends the life story, so it is worth closing the outer circle before the book turns into something else.

They did not get their ship. Augustine spent about a year in Rome waiting for the sea and the war to settle, and wrote two books against his old religion while he waited. In 388 the party finally crossed to Africa. He sold or gave up the family property, kept enough to live on, and set up a shared household of study and prayer at Thagaste. It is the life he had been describing at Cassiciacum, finally happening.

It lasted about three years, and in that time Adeodatus died and Nebridius died.

In 391 he went to the coastal town of Hippo on business, walked into a church, was recognised, and was effectively press-ganged by the congregation into ordination as a priest. He wept, and everybody assumed he was weeping because he had wanted to be a bishop rather than a priest. He became a bishop anyway, four or five years later. He never got the quiet life back.

And somewhere around 397, in his early forties, he began writing this book.

Which is where Book Ten starts, and why the Confessions stops being a memoir at exactly this point. Nine books have got the reader up to the present. The remaining four ask what a man is, what memory is, what time is, and what the first sentence of the Bible means — and they ask it about the man holding the pen, not the man in the story.

Timeline

Book Nine covers about a year, with a long retrospective on a life that began fifty-six years earlier. The public dates are firm. The private sequence is Augustine’s own and is not independently checkable.

Glossary

Every hard word used in this part, in plain English. Terms carried over from earlier parts are repeated so this part stands alone.

About the Author

This series is read and explained by Lovepreet Singh, and published as part of The Living Archive at misterlove.in.

The Living Archive takes difficult material and rebuilds it so that anyone can follow it, without dropping the hard parts along the way. Its first series was a fourteen-part history of Punjab running to around nine hundred and fifty pages. This is its second.

I read the book, I did the reading around it, and I wrote down what I found. I am not a specialist in late antiquity and I am not going to pretend to be one. Where a question is genuinely contested among people who are, I have said so and given each side its strongest case rather than choosing for you. Where I could not find out, I have written that I could not find out.

The method used here was worked out on the Punjab series and is written up as a portable specification, so that any part of this work can be checked, continued or rebuilt by somebody else. That is the point of an archive that calls itself living.

[Editorial note, to be replaced before publishing: the method requires a one-line statement of the author’s own position with regard to religious material, placed where readers will see it. This is the only field in the document still unfilled, and it has now been carried forward six times.]

The Living Archive

The Living Archive is a method for writing hard things simply without making them shallow. It was developed by Lovepreet Singh and tested on a fourteen-part history of Punjab. It runs on three rules.

One. Simplification is not compression. The simple version is usually longer than the difficult one. Words are being spent to buy comprehension.

Two. Two dials, turned in opposite directions. Language as simple as it can be made. Content as deep as the subject actually goes. Turning both down produces something readable and useless.

Three. Every side gets its strongest case, and where nothing settles a question, that gets said. A verdict that honestly reports a deadlock is worth more than a tidy answer that is not true.

A word on sources

This document carries no footnotes. It is a synthesis of the published record rather than new primary research, and it is written for readers who want to understand a book, not for specialists who want to check my workings.

What the archive is unusually good at here. Two stretches of this part can be checked from outside Augustine, and both checks are strong. The Cassiciacum months are covered by four books he wrote at the time, one of which dates itself and names everyone in the room. The Milan basilica crisis is covered by Ambrose’s own letters, by a biography written by his former secretary, and by Augustine again thirty years later in a different work. Nothing else in this series has that.

What it is bad at here. Everything private. The toothache, the conversation at the window, the deathbed, the day of the funeral and the tears at night all rest on one witness writing about eleven years afterwards, with a case to make. So does the whole portrait of Monica, who left no writing and whose only independent trace is a poem carved by somebody else.

On the dispute in Chapter Eight. The literature on the Ostia passage and its relation to Plotinus is large and technical, and the modern debate runs from a study of 1938 through Courcelle’s work of 1950 to the present. I have tried to give all three positions their strongest form and to keep my own preference visible where it could shape the summary.

On the dates. Where a date is given as firm it comes from the standard chronologies, which agree on the public events of 386 and 387 and disagree at the edges. Where specialists disagree — the sequence of the basilica confrontations, the death of Adeodatus, the site of Cassiciacum — Chapter Ten says so rather than picking.

On translations. All renderings of Augustine in this document are my own plain-English paraphrases, made deliberately loose so that they explain rather than reproduce. They are not quotations from any published translation and should not be cited as such. Where the exact wording matters, go to a proper edition.

Corrections are welcome and will be acted on. Later editions will record what was changed and who caught it.

What Comes Next

Part Seven covers Book Ten, and the book changes shape. The life story finished at Ostia. What follows is a man in his forties turning the same attention on the person writing, and it is where the Confessions becomes the strangest and most influential thing in the whole work. These are the questions it takes on.

• Why does a book about a life stop being about the life at exactly the halfway point?
• What is memory, and why does Augustine describe it as a building he gets lost in — the passage that has been read by every philosopher of mind since?
• How can you look for something you would not recognise if you found it, and how can you remember having been happy if you are not?
• The debt from Part Three: he wrote that he had become a great question to himself. Book Ten is the answer, and it is an answer about memory.
• What is Augustine still tempted by at forty-three — and why is his list the most peculiar and most modern thing in the book?
• And the sentence. Somewhere in Book Ten there is one short prayer that a British monk read out loud, could not stand, and objected to. The argument that followed lasted twenty years, took in two church councils and an emperor, and shaped what the western church would say about free will for the next thousand years.

That last one has been outstanding since Part One, Chapter Six. It gets paid in Part Seven, along with the memory material promised in Part Three. The Wittgenstein debt, which is about time and not about language, belongs to Part Eight and Book Eleven.