A Child's Chant Beneath the Milan Fig Tree: Take Up and Read

Motionless late-August heat pressed down upon the walled courtyard in Milan, yet the Emperor's thirty-one-year-old master of rhetoric was shuddering like a half-drowned sailor dragged onto gravel. Driving all ten fingers through his hair, digging his thumbnails into his temples until red crescents marked his skin, Aurelius Augustinus bolted upright off the stone bench where his loyal friend Alypius sat watching in mute alarm. Behind his breastbone, Truth was no longer a courtroom thesis; it had become an iron anvil crushing his ribs.

Right behind him on the sun-warmed stone lay a stitched parchment codex of the Apostle Paul's Epistles—still splayed open at the leaf where his shaking hand had dropped it moments earlier. Judged from outside, nobody across northern Italy in that summer of three hundred and eighty-six looked luckier than Augustine: court ministers applauded his imperial panegyrics, a wealthy Milanese betrothal stood negotiated, and a provincial governorship lay within easy reach. Inside, one casual visit from a fellow North African official named Ponticianus had just blown his gilded palace to splinters.

By what road had the scoffing Manichaean debater arrived at such agonizing lucidity? Two years earlier, curious solely to test whether Bishop Ambrose's celebrated eloquence matched its rumor, Augustine had slipped behind the rear stone columns of Milan's basilica. He came to grade Latin cadences; Truth ambushed him through the ear. Watching Ambrose read silently in his chamber without theatrical pose, hearing him unlock the spiritual architecture of the Old Testament—for the letter kills, yet the Spirit gives life—Augustine watched every cheap Manichaean caricature of Catholic faith crumble like rotten plaster.

Before long his formidable intellect stood disarmed completely: the Catholic Church neither peddled nursery fables nor demanded blind credulity; Christ the Incarnate Word truly was the sole Mediator whom proud Neoplatonist philosophers glimpsed from afar while lacking the humility to kneel before His Cross. Yet if his mind already saw the harbor in broad daylight, why were his feet still backing away from the baptismal font? Because spotting a quay on a chart and snapping an iron shackle around one's ankle are two altogether separate wars.

Years afterward he laid bare his own paralysis in the most devastatingly honest prayer ever penned in Christian prose: since early youth his lips had whispered in secret Grant me chastity and continence—only not yet! He dreaded lest God hear him too promptly and cure the fever of sensual habit which his conscience loathed yet his appetite could not bear to dismiss. Two wills—one old and earthbound, one new and heavenward—locked throats inside a single skull, ripping his soul cleanly in two.

That August afternoon, spotting Saint Paul's codex upon a game table, Ponticianus had recounted the life of Saint Anthony in the Egyptian desert—an unlettered peasant youth who heard one Gospel sentence proclaimed at Mass and gave away his estate on the spot—and told how two imperial intelligence officers at Trier had picked up Anthony's biography inside a garden cottage and immediately abandoned court promotion and marriage contracts to belong wholly to God. No sooner had the guest bowed out the door than Augustine gripped Alypius's forearm, eyes blazing against his own cowardice: What is wrong with us? The unlearned rise up and seize Heaven by storm, while we with all our heartless learning wallow in flesh and blood!

Retreating down the farthest path of the orchard so not even Alypius could witness his collapse, Augustine hurled himself face-down onto the grass beneath the broad, dusty leaves of a green fig tree. Do you remember the white sail fleeing Carthage harbor in Chapter One? For thirty years his mother Monica had soaked altar steps with tears over him; now, beneath Milan's fig boughs, the fugitive finally broke open floodgates of his own weeping! How long, O Lord? How long shall I keep crying tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not right now? Why not in this very hour an end to my uncleanness?

Old carnal phantoms tugged softly at the hem of his memory like familiar voices murmuring behind his ear: Are you truly sending us away forever? From this instant forward, shall this or that never be permitted you again? His fingers tore up dry turf. By sheer muscle of will he could neither crawl back into yesterday's lie nor leap the abyss. Grace had to speak from outside his besieged mind.

Suddenly, over the sun-baked brick wall from a neighboring house, floated the clear, high sing-song voice of a child—boy or girl, he never learned till death—chanting the same refrain over and over: Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege! Take up and read! Take up and read! Choking back his sobs instantly, Augustine scoured his razor-sharp memory: did any Milanese children's street game use that rhyme? None whatsoever! Remembering in one flash how Saint Anthony had opened the Gospel taking the first verse his eyes struck as God's direct personal command, he leaped upright.

Striding swiftly back to the stone bench where Alypius waited beside the forgotten codex of Saint Paul, Augustine seized the parchment volume, opened it in dead silence, and dropped his wet eyes onto the very first lines before him: Let us walk honestly as in the day: not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy: But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences. He refused to read further. Not one syllable more was needed! Instantly, as though a serene flood of certainty had poured into every dark vault of his chest, every shadow of hesitation vanished forever.

Slipping his finger between the leaves, he calmly told Alypius what had happened; his friend read the next line, joined his vow on the spot, and together both men walked straight indoors to find Monica! Try to picture the fifty-four-year-old widow's face inside that quiet Milanese chamber when the son who had lied to her on Carthage wharf stepped across the doorway and told her softly: Mother, the flight is over—I ask for Catholic Baptism. She leaped with triumphant praise toward the God able to accomplish infinitely beyond all we dare ask or imagine, canceling every worldly marriage alliance on the spot—never suspecting that barely fourteen months of earthly breath remained to her before a quiet stone window at Ostia would open before them both onto eternity.