Eloquence and Truth

Editor’s Note: This is the fifteenth in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.

The Manichees had always been eager to enlist a bright young fellow like Augustine to help spread the word. And for a period of nine years, first in Carthage, then later in Rome, he remained one of their star pupils, a brilliant aspirant in the cause of Mani, with whom he shared the same view of the universe, which was that it remained an excrescence of evil. But cracks in the cloister were bound to appear, which is why, fearing the loss of so gifted a disciple, they dispatched one of their own, a fellow by the name of Faustus, described by Peter Brown, as “the most spectacular leader of the Manichees, who had gained a vast reputation for learning.”  

A top party member, in other words—a very big wheel!—prepared to explain everything. But, of course, he couldn’t explain anything. “As soon as it became clear to me,” writes Augustine, “that Faustus was uninformed about the subjects in which I had expected him to be an expert, I began to lose hope that he could lift the veil and resolve the problems which perplexed me.” Poor Faustus, you see, had simply not reckoned on the possibility that, despite his great learning and cleverness, the ease and suavity of his manner, his arguments might not wash, that Augustine would not finally be persuaded, as indeed he was not. 

“I was beginning to distinguish between mere eloquence and the real truth,” says Augustine, “and I wanted to see what scholarly fare he would lay before me, and I did not care what words he used to garnish the dish.” Judging it to be all garnish, however, Augustine soon begins to distance himself from his earlier enthusiasm, and over time he will jettison all that he had once held to be true and good from the days of his misspent Manichean youth.

Soon thereafter, he is invited to teach literature and elocution in Milan, which is where the imperial court was then located, arriving in a state of deep disgust and disaffection from all the false certainties he’d been pursuing with such unwonted zeal since age nineteen. It is the year 384, and his mother, who will follow him from Carthage to Rome to Milan, will shortly be on site to continue the work of reclaiming his soul for Christ. Armed with enough piety and patience to outlast even the most obdurate of sons, the clock is clearly running out on Augustine’s capacity to resist.  

It is in Milan that Augustine meets Ambrose, its justly acclaimed bishop. “Your devoted servant,” he calls him, “who was known throughout the world as a man whom there were few to equal in goodness.” Who, thanks to his close reading of Origen, the great master of the Alexandrian School, would introduce to the Western Church the practice of Lectio Divina, a method whereby the student enters into the most prayerful listening and reading of God’s Word. It was the method he used to teach his own catechumens, a summary of which he set down in his great work On the Mysteries. 

“Every day,” he tells them, 

when we were reading about the lives of the Patriarchs and the maxims of the Proverbs, we addressed morality, so that formed and instructed by them you may become accustomed to taking the path of the Fathers and to following the route of obedience to the divine precepts.

Soak your minds and hearts in the wisdom of our shared past, in other words. Which is to say, the legacy of Israel, our elder brothers in the faith, those towering figures on whose shoulders we stand. Do that and you shall surely come to Christ, who is the fulfillment of all.

Meanwhile, Augustine has yet to come fully to Christ, but he is more than ready for a sea change. And Ambrose, the wise and holy bishop of Milan, will be the one—in concert, to be sure, with God’s own plans for Augustine’s life—to assist him in making it. “Unknown to me,” he writes—confidingly, as it were, to God—

it was you who led me to him, so that I might knowingly be led by him to you. This man of God received me like a father and, as bishop, told me how glad he was that I had come. My heart warmed to him, not at first as a teacher of truth, which I had quite despaired of finding in your Church, but simply as a man who showed me kindness. 

He will show Augustine the things that matter, whether by speech or silence, including (as cited above) his way of reading the Old Testament, in which hidden meanings are brought to light, meanings which point unmistakably to Christ. Such difficulties as Augustine had first faced, for instance, on seeing how stylistically inferior the Scriptures were to the many grace notes of Cicero, will fall away on hearing Ambrose’s use of typologies to explain how Christ becomes both ground and figure for the journey of the Old to the New Adam.

But for all that Augustine still needed to know in order finally to rid himself of the Manichean malaise, he could not, practically speaking, ever directly approach Ambrose for advice or relief. So that, for his part, Ambrose remained unaware of the continuing peril which Augustine felt himself to be in. “He did not know,” Augustine tells us, 

how I was tormented or how deeply I was engulfed in danger. I could not ask him the questions I wished to ask in the way that I wished to ask them, because so many people 

used to keep him busy with their problems that I was prevented from talking to him face to face.   

What Augustine does experience, however, are so many beautifully crafted sermons, delivered Sunday after Sunday to a rapt congregation, the happy outcome of which is that, as Augustine himself will put in Book VI, 

I grew more and more certain that it was possible to unravel the tangle woven by those who had deceived both me and others with their cunning lies against the Holy Scriptures. I learned that your spiritual children, whom by your grace you have made to be born again of our Catholic mother the Church, do not understand the words God made man in his own image to mean that you are limited by the shape of a human body, and although I could form not the vaguest idea, even with the help of allegory, of how there could be substance that was spiritual, nevertheless I was glad that all this time I had been howling my complaints not against the Catholic faith but against something quite imaginary which I had thought up in my own head.

Accordingly, the paramount need for Augustine at this moment is to get him out of his own head—to enable him to look elsewhere for truth, indeed, to the God who is truth, and to His Incarnate Word whom He reveals to us both in the Scriptures and in the Bride who is perfectly wedded to Him.

“O God,” he will exclaim, 

you who are so high above us and yet so close, hidden and yet always present, you have not parts, some greater and some smaller. You are everywhere, and everywhere you are entire. Nowhere are you limited by space. You have not the shape of a body like ours. Yet you made man in your own likeness, and man is plainly in space from head to foot.

Thus will a whole congeries of Manichean nonsense and superstition be put to flight, leaving but a few details to fall into place before there will be baptism and the beginnings of a new life.