Take Up and Read: Augustine in the Garden

The wailing came through the garden wall before I understood whose voice it was. I had been drawing water at the well behind the kitchen, and for a moment I thought some stranger had wandered into the grounds to grieve, the sound was so raw, so unguarded. Then I recognized the cadence under the sobbing — the same voice that argued philosophy at supper, that could turn a Roman magistrate's ear with a single well-placed clause. It was Augustine, the rhetoric master, on his knees somewhere among the fig trees, tearing at something inside himself that no one in that house had ever seen him admit to owning.

We had watched him for months by then, all of us who kept that household running in Milan — the cook, the boy who tended the horses, myself with my buckets and baskets. He was the most talked-of tutor in the city, brought west from Carthage and then from Rome on the strength of his tongue alone, a man who could make an audience believe whatever he chose to prove that hour. But underneath the polish he was a man at war with himself, and by that late summer of 386 the war had come out into the open where even the kitchen staff could hear it.

He had not always fought so hard against himself. In his younger years, by his own telling, Carthage had been a city that boiled with temptation, and he had waded in gladly — a mistress before he was even a man grown, a son born of her, nights he later called, in words I heard him repeat more than once with a kind of bitter wonder, a cauldron of unholy loves sizzling and crackling around him. He had wanted truth the way other young men wanted glory, chasing it first through Cicero and the old Latin orators, certain that eloquence and reason together would deliver it to him. Christianity he had dismissed outright in those years, a faith fit for the simple and the credulous, not for a mind like his.

So he had gone looking elsewhere, and for nine years he found what he thought was an answer in the Manichees, who taught him that the world split cleanly down the middle, light against dark, spirit against flesh, and that a man's evil was not fully his own doing but the dark half warring in him. It fit his troubles conveniently. But when the great teacher of that sect could not answer the hard questions Augustine finally worked up the courage to ask him, the whole structure went hollow in his hands, and he drifted next toward the Neoplatonists, chasing truth again through a different door.

All this happened while his feet carried him steadily north and west — Carthage to Rome, Rome to Milan — always teaching, always persuading, never settling. And it was in Milan that his mother caught up with him. Monica had prayed over that man since before he could speak a word, a devout woman married to a pagan official who never shared her faith, and she had followed her son across the sea rather than let him wander without her prayers reaching him. I saw her often that summer, kneeling in the small chapel near the house, and I never once heard her voice raised, only low and constant, the way water wears stone.

It was in Milan, too, that he met the bishop, Ambrose, and something in that meeting cracked the ground under him for good. Augustine had gone to hear him first for the man's famous eloquence, the way another rhetorician might size up a rival craftsman. He left disarmed instead. Ambrose answered the objections to Scripture that Augustine had been nursing for years, turned them over and showed him they weren't as solid as they'd looked, and alongside that he told him of others — men who had once burned with the same appetites Augustine carried and had laid them down entirely, given themselves over, and lived free of them. That combination worked on him like nothing else had: a faith serious enough for a serious mind, strong enough to loosen a grip that reason alone had never broken.

By the time that late summer day arrived, he was a man split down the center, and everyone near him could feel the strain of it. I had heard him once, half joking and half in earnest, throw up a kind of prayer to whatever God might be listening — asking to be made chaste, but not yet, not just yet — and laugh afterward in a way that did not sound like laughter. He wanted the thing and could not make himself want it enough to let go of the rest. That was the shape of him walking into the garden that afternoon: a brilliant man cornered by his own longing, with nowhere left to argue his way out.

I did not follow him in. It was not my place, and besides, something in the way he walked told me to keep distance. He went out among the trees alone, and for a long while there was nothing from that part of the garden but stillness, and then the weeping began, low at first and then breaking loose entirely, the sound of a man finally letting something go that he had held clenched for years. I heard him fling himself down under one of the fig trees near the far wall. I heard, faintly, words rising out of the weeping — asking how long, how long, tomorrow and tomorrow again, why not now, why should this hour not be the end of it.

And then, over the wall, from the courtyard of the house next door, came a child's voice, sing-song and careless, the kind of chant children invent for a game and repeat without knowing why it pleases them. Take it and read it, the voice went, take it and read it, over and over, light as nothing. I heard it too, from where I stood, and thought only that it was a strange little rhyme for a child to be singing. I did not know yet what it would do to the man crying under the fig tree twenty paces away.