"So Tiny a Child, So Many Pages": Augustine's Beginnings

Nigel Nicholson, Hum 110, 4/22/05

 

 

1. Dependence on God

2. The Evil Will

3. An Idea of the Self

4. A New Idea of Childhood

5. The Location of Truth

 

1.     Afterwards I began to smile, first in my sleep, then when awake. That at least is what I was told, and I believed it, since that is what we see other infants doing. I do not actually remember what I then did. (Conf. I.vi.8)

 

2.     Tell me, God, tell your suppliant in mercy to your poor wretch, tell me whether there was some period of my life, now dead and gone, which preceded my infancy? Or is this period that which I spent in my mother's womb? On that matter also have I learnt something, and I myself have seen pregnant women. What was going on before that, my sweetness, my God? Was I anywhere or any sort of person? (I.vi.9)

 

3.     Without you, what am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction? When all is well with me, what am I but an infant sucking your milk and feeding on you, "the food that is incorruptible"? What is a human being (name anyone you may please) when he is merely a man? So let the mighty and powerful laugh at our expense. In our weakness and indigence, we make our confession to you. (IV.i.1)

 

4.     "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." (Matt. 18.3-4)

 

5.     So the feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant's mind. I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby. He could not yet speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother's milk. Who is unaware of this fact of experience? (Conf. I.vii.11)

 

6.     If "I was conceived in iniquity and in sins my mother nourished me in her womb," I ask you, my God, I ask, Lord, where and when your servant was innocent? (I.xii.12)

 

7.     It is plain, then, that incontinent people [the weak-willed] must be said to be in a similar condition to men asleep, mad, or drunk. The fact that men use the language that flows from knowledge proves nothing; for even men under the influence of these passions utter scientific proofs and verses of Empedocles, and those who have just begun to learn a science can string together its phrases, but do not yet know it; for it has to become a part of themselves, and that takes time; so that we must suppose that the use of language by men in an incontinent state means no more than its utterance by actors on the stage. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VII.3, 1147a18)

 

8.     I sighed after such freedom, but was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else, but by the iron of my own choice. The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain for me to hold me a prisoner. The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity. By these links, as it were, connected to one another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint. The new will, which was beginning to be within me a will to serve you freely and to enjoy you, God, the only source of pleasure, was not yet strong enough to conquer my older will, which had the strength of old habit. So my two wills, one old, the other new, one carnal, one spiritual, were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of all concentration. (Conf. VIII.v.10)

 

9.     A weakness for wine gradually got a grip on her. By custom her parents used to send her, a sober girl, to fetch wine from the cask. She would plunge the cup through an aperture at the top. Before she poured the wine into a jug, she used to take a tiny sip with the tip of her lips. She could not take more as she disliked the taste. What led her to do this was not an appetite for liquor but the surplus high spirits of a young person, which can overflow in playful impulses and which in children adults ordinarily try to suppress. Accordingly to that sip of wine she added more sips every day -- for "he who despises small things gradually comes to a fall" -- until she had fallen into the habit of gulping down almost full cups of wine. (IX.viii.18)

 

10.   ...he listens, first, to his mother complaining that her husband isn't one of the rulers and that she's at a disadvantage among the other women as a result. Then she sees that [her husband]'s not very concerned about money and that he doesn't fight back when he's insulted, whether in private or in public in the courts, but is indifferent to everything of that sort. She also sees him concentrating too much on his own thoughts, neither honoring nor dishonoring her overmuch. Angered by all this, she tells her son that his father is unmanly, too easy-going, and all the other things that women repeat over and over again in such cases. (Plato, Republic 549c-d)

 

11.   In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist; this is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken or despised. The idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children: it corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult. In medieval society this awareness was lacking. (Ariès, 128)

 

12.   Even as / a top that spins beneath a twisted whip / which boys, when bent on play, will drive across / the empty courtyards in a giant circle: / drawn by the thong it whirls along in curving / spirals; the crowd of children, puzzled, bend / above that turning wood in their amazement; / and each lash gives it life.... (Vergil, Aeneid 7.502-9)

 

13.   When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. (Paul, 1 Cor. 13.11)

 

14.   I cannot entertain that passion for caressing new-born infants that have neither mental activities nor recognizable bodily shape by which to make themselves lovable; and I have never willingly suffered them to be fed in my presence. ...We are generally more moved by our children's frolickings, games, and infantile nonsense that afterwards by their mature acts. It is as if we had loved them for our amusement -- not as human beings, but as monkeys. (Montaigne, Essays II.8)

 

15.            Of course I realised in a moment what I had done, and I sat frozen with alarm, waiting to be denounced. But my Mother remarked on the visit of the plumbers two or three days before, and my Father instantly took up the suggestion. No doubt that was it; the mischievous fellows had thought it amusing to stab the pipe and spoil the fountain. No suspicion fell on me; no question was asked of me. I sat there, turned to stone within, but outwardly sympathetic and with unchecked appetite.

                  We attribute, I believe, too many moral ideas to little children. It is obvious that in this tremendous juncture, I ought to have been urged forward by good instincts, or held back by naughty ones. But I am sure that the fear which I experienced for a short time, and which so unexpectedly melted away, was a purely physical one. It had nothing to do with the motions of a contrite heart. As to the destruction of the fountain, I was sorry about that, for my own sake, since I admired the skipping water extremely, and had no idea that I was spoiling its display. But the emotions which now thronged within me, and which led me with an almost unwise alacrity, to seek solitude in the back-garden, were not moral at all, they were intellectual. I was not ashamed of having successfully -- and so surprisingly -- deceived my parents by my crafty silence; I looked upon that as a providential escape, and dismissed all further thought of it. I had other things to think of. (Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, 27-28)

 

16.   Where was I when I was seeking you? You were there before me, but I had departed from myself. I could not even find myself, much less you. (Conf. V.ii.2)

 

17.   What is more pitiable than a wretch without pity for himself who weeps over the death of Dido dying for love of Aeneas, but not weeping over himself dying for his lack of love for you, my God, light of my heart, bread of the inner mouth of my soul, the power which begets life in my mind and in the innermost recesses of my thinking? (I.xiii.21)

 

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. R. Baldick (NY, 1962)

Peter Brown, Augustine's Confessions (Berkeley, 1967)

Hugh Cunningham, "The History of Childhood," Images of Childhood, ed. C. Hwang, et al., (NJ, 1996)

Véronique Dassen, ed., Naissance et Petite Enfance dans l'Antiquité  (Fribourg, 2004)

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (NY, 1978)

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, ed. W. Irvine (Boston, 1965)

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. J, Cohen (London, 1958)