Faustus, Rome, and the exit from Manichaeism
Augustine has waited years to meet Faustus, the great Manichaean bishop whose learning is supposed to resolve the astronomical difficulties in Manichaean cosmology. Faustus turns out to be charming, eloquent, and philosophically empty.
Summary
Book 5 covers Augustine's twenty-ninth year. He has been a Manichaean for nine years — years in which the cosmological and astronomical questions he brought to the sect have never been satisfactorily resolved. The great Manichaean teacher Faustus of Milevis has long been promised as the mind that can resolve them. When Faustus arrives in Carthage, Augustine is ready. The encounter is brief and decisive: Faustus is charming, literate, a better-than-average speaker, and openly admits that he cannot answer the astronomical difficulties. He is not a fraud; he is simply not equal to the questions. Augustine is released from Manichaeism not by refutation but by disappointment.
He moves to Rome, ostensibly because the students there are better behaved than the rowdy Carthaginians. Monica, who does not want him to go, is left behind by a trick — Augustine boards the ship at night. In Rome he nearly dies of a fever. Monica, who does not know how close to death he comes, prays for him in Carthage; he recovers. He goes on to teach in Rome, still technically a Manichaean but holding the sect's doctrines with increasing detachment. When the position of public orator in Milan comes available through the city's prefect Symmachus, he applies and is appointed.
Book 5 ends with Augustine in Rome — neither Manichaean nor Christian, no longer believing the Manichaean answers, not yet having found any others. He settles into the academic skepticism of the New Academy: the position that certain knowledge is impossible, and that one should hold one's opinions lightly. It is an honest position and an unsatisfying one. The heart is still restless; the doctrine of the Academy does not address the restlessness.
- 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...