The Road to Character

Augustine was born near the end of the Roman Empire in the year 354 in a town called Thagaste in what is present-day Algeria. Society at the time of his birth was a chaotic mix of Roman paganism and African Christianity. His father was an upper-middle-class town counselor with no spiritual drive who hoped his son would be successful. His mother, Monica, was both a devout religious follower and a strong-willed individual. She managed the household, her husband, and her son’s material and spiritual life.

Monica’s control over Augustine was domineering and possessive. When Augustine was 28, he tried to escape her grasp by sneaking to Europe on a boat with his mistress and son. His mother followed him, “stalk[ing] his soul.” Although she stifled him, he couldn’t make himself dismiss her. He was proud of her fierce love, and they shared profound moments of spiritual communion.

Augustine was a sickly child but a brilliant student. Growing up, he was caught between the tension of two classical ideals: Hellenism and Hebraism. The Hellenistic mindset wants to see everything as it really is, exploring the world’s excellence with a playful spirit. Hebraism, on the other hand, focuses on a higher truth and immortal order and is uneasy in a world believed to be full of sin. Augustine lived under the rule of semidivine emperors and studied in the greatest schools. He grew up desiring posterity.

Augustine went to study at Carthage when he was 17. While there, he found himself assaulted by temptation and lust. He had never loved a person but was constantly in love with the prospect of being loved. His soul was divided: he desired shallow pleasures, but also disapproved of these desires. Despite his turmoil, he was an excellent student and eventually got a job in Milan, the center of power. He got married and was committed to his wife.

While he was young, Augustine followed the Manichees’ philosophy. The Manichaeans believed the world is divided into a Kingdom of Light and a Kingdom of Darkness. In their worldview, good constantly battles with evil, and, in the process, light gets mixed up with darkness. In other words, a pure soul is trapped inside a corrupted mortal body. Therefore, human beings aren’t responsible for sin. Instead, the Kingdom of Darkness is to blame for the evil in the world.

Outwardly, Augustine had a perfect life, but internally he was unhappy and fragmented. He felt his words were “empty lies.” His feeling was similar to the fear of “missing out.” People with this fear are hungry to seize every experience and feel every feeling. This causes them to make partial commitments and spread themselves thin. When one organizes their life around their desires, everything becomes an object to them. Lust, for instance, is a void that a person hopes to fill with sex. But they never succeed in filling it because they refuse to commit themselves fully to the other person.

Augustine eventually felt his marriage was based on lust. However, when his mother convinced him to leave his wife for a higher-class woman, he was devastated. He’d sacrificed a commitment for the sake of social status. Then, he observed a smiling beggar on the streets one day and realized that this man, who had nothing, was happier than he was. Augustine now felt utterly alienated, wondering why he still followed desires that clearly weren’t leading to happiness.

In response to this realization, Augustine looked inward. He started an almost scientific examination of his psyche. What he found was a vast and complex landscape full of light and darkness that constantly revealed new depths to itself. He realized that although people are born with great qualities, sin has corrupted and twisted their desires. Augustine himself desired fame and status, but these weren’t making him happy. He wondered what kind of “creature” a human being was, unable to follow their own will. He realized people are problems to themselves.

In his memoir, The Confessions, Augustine uses a prank he pulled as a teenager to illustrate the fact that man is a problem to himself. One night, he and his friends stole some pears from an orchard. They weren’t hungry, and the pears were nothing special; the boys simply lusted to steal. The mundane purposelessness of this crime now struck Augustine. A tendency toward the wrong things is central to human nature, and people commit such small perversities daily.

When Augustine examined himself, he noticed that the human mind is infinite. He found both sinfulness and sensations of perfection within his mind. Augustine saw that a human life couldn’t be understood through the individual, but only with reference to the universal things beyond them: the sin in them that comes from the past, and their longing for holiness that comes from above. A person can conceive of perfection but can’t obtain it themselves.

Augustine set out to reform his life. First, he abandoned the Manichaean philosophy. Instead of viewing the good and evil in the world as black and white, he started to see that each virtue came with its own vice. For instance, self-confidence comes with pride. He could see that the Manicheans were prideful because they thought they’d figured everything out. Augustine wanted to live a truthful life, but he wasn’t ready to give up his desires. He still thought that he was the master of his own life, and that he could undertake self-reform like a homework assignment.

Over time, Augustine realized he couldn’t reform himself. His biggest flaw was that he thought he was in control of his own life. His own mind and the world around him were too vast for him to understand. He realized that by thinking he could reform himself, he was exaggerating his biggest sin: believing he was his life’s captain was committing the sin of pride.

Often pride is a positive attribute found in someone who builds happiness around their accomplishments. Negatively, it is found in a boastful person. However, pride is also present in people with low self-esteem. The proud person tries to establish self-worth through success, which makes them dependent on other people. Therefore, they are always hurt and lonely. Augustine realized that one must give up the idea that they can solve their unhappiness through their own successes.

Augustine was plagued by the sensation that there was a better way to live. Through a sense of divine absence, he knew there must be a divine presence. In order to become less fragmented, he needed to eliminate some possibilities. However, he didn’t want to give up his options and wants. So, he hung between a spiritual life he knew was true and a material life he wasn’t willing to give up. He wouldn’t obey himself.

One day, Augustine was in a garden with a friend, Alypius. Alypius was telling him stories about Egyptian monks who sacrificed everything to serve God. The story struck Augustine, and he started to reproach himself for believing in God but still stubbornly refusing to renounce his earthly desires and serve Him. He paced the garden as God’s presence tempted him. However, his desires still tempted him, too.

Then, Augustine envisioned the ideal of self-control as a woman called Lady Continence. This woman offered him the pleasures of faith to replace the pleasures of the world. Augustine still wavered. He cast himself under a tree, weeping. Then he heard a voice outside himself urge him to open the Bible and read a certain passage. He opened it and read, “put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh.”

Suddenly, Augustine felt light flooding into his heart. He felt his will turn away from worldly desires, renouncing them happily and turning to Christ. He ran to Monica to tell her of his transformation, and she was overjoyed. What happened to Augustine in the garden was not a conversion. Rather, it was an elevation in which he rose above his earthly pleasures to higher ones.

Augustine’s elevation was a renunciation of the idea of self-cultivation. He realized that Adam I’s philosophy—that a hard-working person can create their own life—is ineffective; one doesn’t achieve inner joy through agency but through surrendering to God. God has already given a person the rules He wants them to live by and has already justified each person’s existence. Also, Jesus has already stood trial for everyone’s sins.

For most of his young adulthood, Augustine climbed upward, moving into more prestigious circles. He discovered, however, that a sublime life is low and humble rather than high and exalted. One should approach everything from below, serving instead of mastering. A person’s worldly success means little because the Earth is only a stop for the soul on the way to a final destination. Augustine didn’t think lowly of human nature, but he believed that human beings weren’t capable of reorganizing their desires on their own without submitting to God’s will. 

Augustine believed a person’s life would be terrible if they got what they deserved. God gives a person grace, which is much more than they deserve. Grace is a gift that cannot be earned—in order to receive it, one has to stop believing that they can earn it. People are used to thinking they are loved because they are this or that good thing. However, God’s grace, like passionate love, is unconditionally given.

As people rise up to receive God’s gift of grace, they transform, and their desires sort themselves out. They achieve self-conquest, but not through a battle of self-discipline. Rather, they achieve it through leaving the self and doing whatever they can to return God’s love. After this process, a person feels realigned, and their old desires cease to excite them.

Augustine offered a new theory of motivation. His process started with self-examination, then acceptance of God’s existence. Next, one is humbled, then they adopt a posture of surrender and empty themselves. This opens them to God’s grace. Then follows gratitude and a desire to return God’s love. Finally, vast energies are awakened in them. As they become dependent on God, they become more motivated.

Augustine’s life after his conversion wasn’t easy. After his initial flood of optimism, he had to live with the knowledge of his sin. In all his writings, he reminds readers they are not the centers of their own lives and praises a vastness that surpasses the human world. He finished a term teaching lessons he no longer believed in, then left for the village of Cassiciacum with his mother, his son, and some friends, where they engaged in communal spiritual contemplations.

Augustine’s group went back to Africa. On the way, they stopped in Ostia, where he and Monica had a profound conversation. Together, they experienced a hush taking over them by degrees, silencing the world, their desires, and even their praises of God. It was a moment of elevation in which the world grows silent. They were lost in joy, unified in their outward love of God. Monica expressed that her only desire had been satisfied: her son found Christianity.

Augustine’s story shows that the proper course toward healing is outward. For instance, one can only achieve inner peace if they forget themselves by focusing on something larger than they are. Also, knowledge isn’t enough to motivate one to be good. Only love of God impelled Augustine to active faith.

A few days after her profound conversation with Augustine, Monica died. Augustine was overcome with grief. But the next day, he found solace in weeping for her in God’s sight. In his writing, Augustine uses Monica as an example of ardent faith set against worldly ambition and rational thought. He spent the rest of his life preaching and writing. His life took an “advance-retreat-advance” arc in which he descended to submission in order to rise to great height.