The teachers of Augustine in Carthage took note of his keen mind and flair for writing.
Augustine's dream was to become a famous speaker. He turned to the renowned pagan writer Cicero.
Through reading
Cicero, Augustine was riveted and turned toward "the wisdom of eternal truth."
Augustine became a great admirer of Cicero, acknowledging him as "the greatest master of Roman eloquence."
He studied
rhetoric with eagerness and pleasure, but his motives were vanity and ambition, and to these he joined loose living.
And so at the age of seventeen years Augustine read the
Hortensius by
Cicero, a now lost treatise that inspired him to seek true wisdom through the study of philosophy.
The
Hortensius advised against the pursuit of sensual pleasure as harmful to the discipline of thinking in a philosophic manner; however, the sexual drives within Augustine were then too strong for him to be willing to separate from his
concubine.
He sought a philosophical way to explain - or at least to be able to live with - his uncomfortable experience of knowing that he wanted Truth and sensual pleasure simultaneously.
This is part of the so-called "problem of evil" in the world. With this quandary in mind, he thought there might be a solution offered by the
Manichees.
They were a religious group that specifically stressed purity of life and the need to place emphasis on the importance of Christ.
The Manichees seemed so valuable to Augustine because they promised to provide him with the "truth" he was seeking.
With the Manichees, Augustine in the year 380 at the age of twenty four years was able to write his first work which dealt with aesthetics and was entitled,
De Pulchro et Apto ("On the Beautiful and the Fitting,") a work that unfortunately has been lost.
(Another theory is that Augustine failed to keep a copy of it because he regarded it as too imperfect to be kept for posterity. It is the only one of the hundreds of works listed by Augustine in his
Retractions that is not extant.)
A very honest comment about De Pulchro et Apto was made by Augustine himself when he wrote, "Although I found no one else who admired it, I was quite fond of it myself." (Confessions 4, 13-15)
He wrote this short philosophical book to display his intellectual and literary abilities and to advance his career.
Augustine remained in Carthage from his seventeenth to his twenty eighth year, first as a student and then, from the year 374 onwards, as a teacher. Seven years in Carthage matured the young teacher.
One of his pupils during that time was Alypius, who then became a friend for the rest of his life.
Alypius re-entered the life of Augustine again in Rome, Milan (where they received baptism together), and in North Africa after both of them took up leadership in the Catholic Church.
When, however, he became unhappy with conditions there, for an ambitious person there was only one direction in which to go - Rome.
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