Teaching rhetoric, the death of a friend, and grief
A close friend from Thagaste falls ill, is baptized in a coma, wakes as a Christian, and dies. The grief is so severe that Augustine cannot remain in the same city. He treats his own bereavement with the same philosophical attention he brought to the pear theft.
Summary
Book 4 covers the years Augustine spends teaching rhetoric back in Thagaste, roughly ages twenty-two to twenty-eight. He is now a committed Manichaean, consulting astrologers about everything from his students' fortunes to his own rhetorical competitions. A physician named Vindicianus — a figure of real wisdom — tries to warn him away from astrology on empirical grounds: twins have the same horoscope but different fates. Augustine is not yet persuaded.
More important is the unnamed friend. A schoolmate from Thagaste with whom Augustine had become inseparable, the two of them drawn together by shared interests and then by what Augustine calls "a friendship too dear to me." The friend falls seriously ill with a fever, is baptized while unconscious (his family's precaution), and wakes briefly. Augustine makes a joke about the baptism; the friend, to Augustine's complete surprise, tells him sharply not to mock what has been done to him if he wants to remain his friend. Days later the friend dies, before Augustine can speak to him again.
The grief, described in Book 4, is one of the most acute treatments of bereavement in ancient literature. Augustine cannot stay in Thagaste; everything there is a wound. He moves to Carthage. He asks what friendship is — why one person becomes so interwoven with another that the self seems to vanish when the person is gone. He asks what he was loving when he loved his friend: was it the person, or was it his own pleasure in the friendship? He does not answer cleanly. But the question already points toward the larger theological argument: every finite love carries within it the risk of this wound, and the wound will not be healed until the love is oriented toward something that does not die.
- Book 1The opening prayer, the paradox of calling on God, and the childhood years: infancy, the hated Greek, the loved Latin, the school...
- Book 2Adolescence in Thagaste, the first serious entanglements with desire, Monica's unheeded warnings — and the pear theft, which...
- Book 3Augustine at seventeen in Carthage: the theater's pleasurable grief, the shock of Cicero's Hortensius redirecting his ambition...
- Book 4Augustine teaching rhetoric in Thagaste, the dangerous years with the astrologers, and the death of a close unnamed friend...
- Book 5The long-awaited meeting with Faustus the Manichaean bishop, who is charming and admits he cannot answer Augustine's questions....
- Book 6Milan, Ambrose's sermons unlocking the scriptures, and the departure of the fifteen-year concubine — sent back to Africa by...
- Book 7The philosophical turning point. The Platonic books — probably Plotinus in Latin translation — give Augustine the concept of an...
- Book 8The conversion at Milan: the story of Antony, the garden, the weeping under the fig tree, the child's voice chanting tolle lege...
- Book 9Baptism by Ambrose at Easter 387. Monica and Augustine's shared vision at the window in Ostia. Nine days later, Monica's death....
- Book 10The autobiography ends; the philosophy begins. Augustine examines his memory and finds it vast beyond comprehension — a hall that...
- Book 11What is time? Augustine works through the question forced by Genesis — what was there before the beginning? — and gives the answer...
- Book 12A close reading of Genesis 1:1–2. What is the heaven of heavens? What is the formless earth? Augustine reads the creation...
- Book 13A theological reading of the six days of Genesis: light, waters, land, the luminaries — each read as a figure of the soul's...