Augustin-Louis Cauchy

“ An active mind like Augustin's could not remain indifferent before this spectacle of the world thrown open by Rome to all men of talent. He had the soul of a poet, quick to enthusiasm; the sight of the Eagles planted on the Acropolis at Carthage moved him in a way he never forgot. He acquired the habit of seeing big, and began to cast off race prejudices and all the petty narrowness of a local spirit. When he became a Christian he did not close himself up, like the Donatists, within the African Church. His dream was that Christ's Empire upon earth should equal the Empire of the Cæsars. ”

“ The world pursues him and occupies him even in his retreat. He says to himself that down there at Rome, at Carthage, at Hippo, there are men speaking in the forums or in the basilicas, whispering in secret meetings, seducing poor souls defenceless against error. These impostors must be immediately unmasked, confounded, reduced to silence. With all his heart Augustin throws himself into this work at which he excels. Above all, he attacks his old friends the Manichees.... ”

“ In this love for love's sake, Augustin discerned the sign of the predestined soul whose tenderness will find no rest but in God. That is why he repeats this word "Love" with a kind of intoxication. He knows that those who love like him cannot love long with a human love. Nor does he blush to acknowledge it:—he loved—he loved with all his soul—he loved to the point of loving the coming of love. Happy intimation for the Christian! A heart so afire is pledged to the eternal marriage.
With this heat of passion, this lively sensibility, Augustin was a prey for Carthage. ”

“ Silence being finally restored, Peter Cauchon rises with the parchment in his hands and says: "Joan, you shall now repeat with your heart and your lips, the following formula of abjuration, in the measure that I pronounce it. Listen!" and he proceeds to read in a voice that is heard by the remotest ranks of the pressing crowd: "'Any person who has erred in the Catholic faith, and who thereafter by the grace of God has returned to the light of truth and to the bosom of our holy mother the Church, must be careful not to allow himself to be provoked by the evil spirit into a relapse. ”

“ It is the battle of every moment, the never-ceasing combat of body and spirit, which the poets of that time dramatized, and which is the history of the Christian of all times. The stake of the battle is a soul. The upshot is the final triumph, the redemption of a soul.
What makes the life of Augustin so complete and so truly typical is that he fought the good fight, not only against himself, but against all the enemies of the Church and the Empire. If he was a doctor and a saint, so was he too the type of the man of action in one of the most disheartened periods. ”

“ Augustin was not a man to keep quiet, nor yet to spend his strength in small local quarrels. He saw big; he did not imprison himself within the limits of his diocese. He knew that Numidia and a good part of Africa were in the hands of the Donatists; that they had a rival primate to the Catholic primate at Carthage; that they had even sent a Pope of their community to Rome. In a word, they were in the majority. Everywhere a dissenting Church rose above the orthodox Church, when it did not succeed in stifling it altogether. At all costs the progress of this sect must be stopped. ”

“ They spoke of the community which St. Ambrose had either founded or organized at the gates of Milan, and in comparison with a life so austere, Augustin perceived that the life he had led at Cassicium was still stained with paganism. He must carry out his conversion to the end and live as a hermit after the manner of Antony and the solitaries of the Thebaid. Then it occurred to him that he still owned a little property at Thagaste—a house and fields. There they would settle and live in self-denial like the monks. The purity of the young Adeodatus predestined him to this ascetic existence. ”

“ Forty years afterwards, Augustin, in his Confessions, pondered this slight ordinary fact of his birth, which happened almost unnoticed by the inhabitants of Thagaste, and in truth it seems to him a great event, not because it concerns himself, bishop and Father of the Church, but because it is a soul which at this imperceptible point of time comes into the world.
Let us clearly understand Augustin's thought. Souls have been ransomed by a Victim of infinite value. They have themselves an infinite value. Nothing which goes on in them can be ignored. ”

“ Thus it came about that Barbarians held against other Barbarians one of the last Roman citadels in Africa. From the end of May, 430, Hippo was blockaded on the land side and on the side of the sea.
In great tribulation, Augustin resigned himself to this supreme humiliation, and to all the horrors which would have to be endured if the city were captured. As a Christian, he left all to the will of God, and he would repeat to those about him the words of the Psalm: "Righteous art Thou, O Lord, and upright are Thy judgments." ”

“ Doubtless to some host of Patricius, a pagan like himself. Or did he lodge with his master, a grammarian, who kept a boarding-house for the boys? Almost all these schoolmasters were pagan too. Is it wonderful that the Christian lessons of Monnica and the nurses at Thagaste became more and more blurred in Augustin's mind? Many years after, an old Madaura grammarian, called Maximus, wrote to him in a tone of loving reproach: "Thou hast drawn away from us"—a secta nostra deviasti. Did he wish to hint that at this time Augustin had glided into paganism? Nothing is more unlikely. ”

“ The theologian and the disputer ended by hiding the man in Augustin. To-day, the man perhaps interests us more. And this is a mistake. He himself would not have allowed for a moment that his Confessions should be preferred to his treatises on Grace. To study, to comment the Scriptures, to draw more exact definitions from the dogmas—he saw no higher employment for his mind, or obligation more important for a bishop. To believe so as to understand, to understand the better to believe—it is a ceaseless movement of the intelligence which goes from faith to God and from God to faith. ”

“ Augustin takes no heed of that. Of himself he no longer thinks; he no longer belongs to himself. If he has accepted the episcopate, it is so as to give himself altogether to the Church, to be all things to all men. He is the man-word, the man-pen, the sounding-board of the truth. He becomes the man of the miserable crowds which the Saviour covered with His pity. He is theirs, to convince them and cure them of their errors. He is a machine which works without ever stopping for the greater glory of Christ. Bishop, pastor, leader of souls—he has no desire for anything else. ”

“ The whole moral crisis that Augustin is about to undergo might be summed up in these few words so concentrated and so strong. No more to scatter himself among the multitude of vain things, no more to let himself flow along with the minutes as they flowed; but to pull himself together, to escape from the rout so as to establish himself upon the incorruptible and eternal, to break the chains of the old slave he continues to be so as to blossom forth in liberty, in thought, in love—that is the salvation he longs for. If it be not yet the Christian salvation, he is on the road which leads to that. ”

“ Augustin was among those who had the courage to choose, and who, having once chosen their faith, proclaimed it without weakening. The belief of a thousand years was dying out, quenched by a young belief to which was promised an eternal duration. How many delicate souls must have suffered from this division, which cut them off from their traditions and obliged them, as they thought, to be false to their dead along with the religion of their ancestors! All the irritations which the fanatics of to-day inflict upon believing souls, many must have had to suffer then. ”

“ If he were dealing with fashionable people who had a taste for literature, he did not fail to exalt the beauties of the Scripture, although, he would say, they had there a very trifling attraction compared to the truths contained in it. Of all the catechumens, the hardest to deal with, the most fearsome in his eyes, were the professors—the rhetoricians and the grammarians. These men are bloated with vanity, puffed up with intellectual pride. Augustin knew something about that. It will be necessary to rouse them violently, and before anything else, to exhort them to humility of mind. ”

“ People withdrew prudently from those suffering from infectious disorders, who were left to their unhappy fate. If, from a sense of shame, they sent a slave to the patient's bedside, he was ordered to the sweating-rooms, and there disinfected from head to foot, before he could enter the house again.
Augustin must have had at least the good luck to be well looked after, since he recovered. He had gone to the dwelling of one of his Manichee brethren, an auditor like himself, and an excellent kind of man, whom he stayed with all the time he was in Rome. ”

“ In Augustin's case, these reports of his lectures at Cassicium have at least the value of shewing us the state of soul of the future Bishop of Hippo at a decisive moment of his life.
For these Dialogues, although they look like school exercises, reveal the intimate thoughts of Augustin on the morrow of his conversion. While he seems to be refuting the Academics, he is fighting the errors from which he, personally, had suffered so long. He clarified his new ideal. No; the search for truth, without hope of ever reaching it, cannot give happiness. And genuine happiness is only in God. ”

“ Politics are no business of yours. Look after your Church!" This is why Augustin very cleverly speaks to him from beginning to end of his letter simply as a bishop, eager for the salvation of a very dear son in Jesus Christ. And so, by keeping strictly to his office of spiritual director, he gained his end more surely and entirely; and, as a doctor of souls, he ventured to remind Boniface of certain truths which he would never have dared to mention as counsellor. ”

“ But no man can teach, lecture, discuss, write, during twenty years, in vain. However much Augustin might be converted, he remembered the school at Thagaste, just as he did at Cassicium. Still, it was necessary to finish with this sort of thing once for all. The new monk made what may be called his will as a professor.
He finished, at this time, or revised his school treatises, which he had begun at Milan, comprising all the liberal arts—grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, philosophy, music. ”

“ Still another object may be discerned in these educational treatises—namely, to prove to the pagans that one may be a Christian and yet not be a barbarian and ignorant. Augustin's position in front of his adversaries is very strong indeed. None of them can attempt to cope with him either in breadth of knowledge, or in happy versatility, or in plenitude of intellectual gifts. He had the entire heritage of the ancient world between his hands. Well might he say to the pagans: "What you admire in your orators and philosophers, I have made my own. ”

“ When a man was at the end of his arguments, he knocked down his opponent. The authorities had a good deal of trouble to keep order. Augustin, who was an intrepid logician, must have longed to take his share in these rows. But one cannot exactly improvise a faith between to-day and to-morrow. While he awaited the enlightenment of the truth, he studied the Carthaginian Babel.
First of all, there was the official religion, the most obvious and perhaps the most brilliant, that of the Divinity of the Emperors, which was still kept up even under the Christian Cæsars. ”

“ How human and how wise! Here is clearly indicated the double ideal of those who continue to live in the world according to the Christian law of restraint and moderation, and of those who yearn to live in God. With Augustin the choice is made. He will never more look back. These Dialogues at Cassicium are his supreme farewell to the pagan Muse.
II THE ECSTASY OF SAINT MONNICA They stayed through the winter at Cassicium. However taken up he might be by the work of the estate and the care of his pupils, Augustin devoted himself chiefly to the great business of his salvation. ”

“ Augustin was on the point of being, if not poor, at least very hard up. He must do something to earn his living, and as quickly as possible. In these conditions, the quickest way out of the difficulty was to sell to others what he had bought from his masters. To live, he would open a word-shop, as he calls it disdainfully. But as he had only just ceased to be a student, he could not dream of becoming a professor in a great city such as Carthage, and setting himself up in rivalry to so many celebrated masters. ”

“ What! was Catholicism to become an African religion, a restricted sect, wretchedly tied to the letter of tradition, to the exterior practices of worship? To reign in a little corner of the world—did Christ die for that? Never! Christ died for the wide world. The only limits of His Church are the limits of the universe. And besides, in this resolution to exclude, what becomes of the great principle of Charity? It is by charity, above all, that we are Christians. Faith without love is a faith stagnant and dead....
Augustin also foresaw the consequences of spiritual separation ”

“ I urge you to save the Roman city. Rule your soldiers like a good Count. Do not trust too much to your own strength. Put your glory in Him Who gives courage, and you will never fear any enemy. Farewell!"
The words do not matter much. Whatever may have been Augustin's last farewell to the defender of Hippo, it was no doubt couched in language not unlike this. In any case, posterity has wished to believe that the dying bishop maintained to the end his unyielding demeanour face to face with the Barbarians. ”