Saint Augustin | Page 3

For us, that is the
Lower-Empire, a time of shameful decadence which deserves nothing
but our scorn. However, it is out of this chaos and this degradation that
we have arisen. The wars of the Roman republic concern us less than
the outlawry of the Barbarian chiefs who separated our Gaul from the
Empire, and without knowing it, prepared the dawn of France. After all,
what are the rivalries of Marius and Sylla to us? The victory of Aëtius
over the Huns in the plains of Chalons concerns us a good deal more.
Further, it is unfair to the Lower-Empire to view it only as a time of

feebleness and cowardice and corruption. It was also an epoch of
immense activity, prolific of daring and high-flying adventurers, some
of them heroic. Even the most degenerate of the last Emperors never
lost the conviction of Roman majesty and grandeur. Unto the very end,
they employed all the ruses of their diplomacy to prevent the Barbarian
chiefs from imagining themselves anything else but vassals of the
Empire. Honorius, at bay in Ravenna, persisted in refusing Alaric the
title of commander of the _Cohortes Urbanæ_, even though his refusal
were to lead to the sack of Rome and imperil his own life.
Simply by his fidelity to the Empire, Augustin shews himself one like
ourselves--a Latin of Occitania. But still closer resemblances draw him
near to us. His time was very like our own time. Upon even a slight
familiarity with his books we recognize in him a brother-soul who has
suffered, felt, thought, pretty nearly like us. He came into an ending
world, on the eve of the great cataclysm which was going to carry away
an entire civilization--a tragic turning-point of history, a time troubled
and often very grievous, which was hard to live in for all, and to even
the most determined minds must have appeared desperate. The peace of
the Church was not yet settled; consciences were divided. People
hesitated between the belief of yesterday and the belief of to-morrow.
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. The sceptics were infused by the intolerance of the others.
But the worst (even as it is to-day) was to watch the torrent of
foolishness which, under cover of religion, philosophy, or
miracle-working, pretended to the conquest of mind and will. Amid this
mass of wildest doctrines and heresies, in this orgy of vapid
intellectualism, they had indeed solid heads who were able to resist the
general intoxication. And among all these people talking nonsense,
Augustin appears admirable with his good sense.

This "intellectual," this mystic, was not only a man of prayer and
meditation. The prudence of the man of action and the administrator
balanced his outbursts of dialectical subtility, often carried too far. He
had that sense of realities such as we flatter ourselves that we have; he
had a knowledge of life and passion. Compared to the experience of,
say, Bossuet, how much wider was Augustin's! And with all that, a
quivering sensitiveness which is again like our own--the sensitiveness
of times of intense culture, wherein the abuse of thought has multiplied
the ways of suffering in exasperating the desire for pleasure. "The soul
of antiquity was rude and vain." It was, above all, limited. The soul of
Augustin is tender and serious, eager for certainties and those
enjoyments which do not betray. It is vast and sonorous; let it be stirred
ever so little, and from it go forth deep vibrations which render the
sound of the infinite. Augustin, before his conversion, had the
apprehensions of our Romantics, the causeless melancholy and sadness,
the immense yearnings for "anywhere but here," which overwhelmed
our fathers. He is really very close to us.
He has broadened our Latin souls by reconciling us with the Barbarian.
The Latin, like the Greek, only understood himself. The Barbarian had
not the right to express himself in the language of the Empire. The
world was split into two parts which endeavoured to ignore each other,
Augustin has made us conscious of the nameless regions, the vague
countries of the soul, which hitherto had lain shrouded in the darkness
of barbarism. By him the union of the Semitic and the Occidental
genius is consummated. He has acted