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In book III, the escapades of the 19/20-year old Augustine sound a lot like those of a college freshman. He wasted his days at the shows, fell in with a rough crowd (the Eversores), stumbled across a book that changed his life, used his newfound knowledge to examine his traditional beliefs, and joined a cult. OK, that last one was a cheap shot, but you can almost see the bemused older Augustine shaking his head at the young man who spent nine years with the Manichees. The bishiop is far more polemic in texts like Contra Manichaeos; here he sounds like a middle-aged man laughing at some old college photos he and his wife found while cleaning out the attic.

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But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. During the class, we talked for quite a while about Augustine’s discovery of Hortentius. Ille vero liber mutavit affectum meum, he says, non ergo ad acuendam linguam referebam illum librum, neque mihi locutio sed quod loquebatur persuaserat. More than one reader compared this infatuation with Cicero’s book to the influence of “Atlas Shrugged” on some college sophomores–do I really need to remind you that word means “wise fool” in Greek? Please, don’t think I’m comparing Ayn Rand and Tully here, just the fact that their words could still rouse disciples long after their death.

Augustine admits that before the Hortentius he judged writing only for its rhetorical value. Cicero’s writing changed that–Augustine became interested in quod loquebatur–but beyond just the content he saw for the first time a serious work placing rhetoric in service of and subordinate to good ideas. This IMO is what gave the work such a power over him, and it was this newfound admiration tha led him back to the religious texts of his youth–could he find that same power in Scripture? His comment that the Scripture seemed rem non compertam superbis neque nudatam pueris - “a thing not comprehended by the proud nor obvious to children” shows him stumbling before a work he couldn’t categorize. It isn’t that he could dismiss the Scriptures as childish, but that he couldn’t even approach them because (as he realized later) Verum autem illa erat quae cresceret cum parvulis, sed ego dedignabar esse parvulus. - “But in truth they were the sort of thing that grew up with the very small, and I refused to be very small.” Parvulus is meant to contrast with superbus, but it’s also an obvious reference to Matthew 18:3–nisi conversi fueritis, et efficiamini sicut parvuli, non intrabitis in regnum caelorum
. Notice how Augustine looks beyond the literal meaning of the term as used in the Gospel and applies it more abstractly, a good example of how he interprets plain Scriptural text as holding a deeper truth below it’s literal meaning–rem incessu humilem, successu excelsam et velatam mysteriis.

Despite the influence of the Hortentius, which introduced a glimpse at the truth that lay beyond the tricks of rhetoric, he was still only following the single, familiar method of his schoolwork. This explains why his subsequent re-read of the Scriptures was a spiritual non-starter, and IMO it explains why he fell in with the Manichees. But that story really deserves a separate post…