was born his son, Adeodatus. The sixteen years that followed would be a
long and thorny journey for St. Augustine, a journey in which he had to
wrestle against his pride, ambition, and sensuality.
At the age of nineteen, St. Augustine began to develop a love for wisdom
after reading Cicero’s Hortensius. A crisis of faith as well as morals now
began to devour him. In 374, he joined the sect of the Manichees, believing
he had found in the teachings of Mani a wisdom higher than that taught by
Christ. The attractions of this oriental sect were twofold: its deceptively
simple teaching that evil was the creation of the god of Darkness, or the
“Evil Principle”; secondly, that not man himself, but the darkness within
him, was the cause of personal sin. St. Augustine went beyond being
simply a Manichean by name but ardently attacked Christianity and strove
to win as many converts as possible, including his closest friends. He
officially became an “auditor” among the Manichean hierarchy. In all, St.
Augustine would remain a Manichean for nine years.
During these wayward years, St. Monica continued to pray for her son’s
conversion. At one point she became so disgusted with her son’s anti-
Christian opinions that she refused to even eat with him. However, she
soon received him back again after a dream in which she was told that
where she stood, there her son would one day be also. On one occasion
while speaking to a bishop about how she feared for her son’s salvation the
bishop replied, “Go thy ways, and God bless thee, for it is impossible that
the son of so many tears should perish.”
Always searching for the truth, St. Augustine eventually abandoned in
disgust Manicheism when confronted with the ignorance of its supposed
champion, Faustus of Milevis: the Manichees “destroyed, but built
nothing.” In 383, St. Augustine secretly left Carthage for Rome to work as
a lecturer in rhetoric, but he was unknown and the few students he had did
not pay their fees. He therefore eagerly accepted a teaching position in
oratory in Milan through the offices of the pagan Prefect of Rome,
Symmachus. In Milan, St. Augustine fell to the skepticism that was so
fashionable among the pagans of the time, and soon despaired of ever
knowing truth. The turning point came when some works of Plato and
Plotinus came into his hands and he came to realize that God was the
ultimate source of all being, truth and goodness and that evil was not a
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