Augustine relates how he learnt Latin, painlessly, at his mother's knee, but hated Greek, which
they tried to teach him at school, because he was "urged vehemently with cruel threats and
punishments." To the end of his life, his knowledge of Greek remained slight. One might have
supposed that he would go on, from this contrast, to draw a moral in favor of gentle methods in
education. What he says, however, is:
"It is quite clear, then, that a free curiosity has more power to make us learn these things than a
terrifying obligation. Only this obligation restrains the waverings of that freedom by Thy laws,
O my God, Thy laws, from the master's rod to the martyr's trials, for Thy laws have the effect of
mingling for us certain wholesale bitters, which recall us to Thee away from that pernicious
blithesomeness, by means of which we depart from Thee."
The schoolmaster's blows, though they failed to make him know Greek, cured him of being
perniciously blithesome, and were, on this ground, a desirable part of education. For those who
make sin the most important of all human concerns, this view is logical. He goes on to point out
that he sinned, not only as a school-boy, when he told lies and stole food, but even earlier;
indeed he devotes a whole chapter (Bk. I, Ch. VII) to proving that even infants at the breast are
full of sin--gluttony, jealousy, and other horrible vices.
When he reached adolescence, the lusts of the flesh overcame him. "Where was I, and how far
was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when
the madness of lust which hath licence through man's viciousness, though forbidden by Thy
laws, took the rule over me, and I resigned myself wholly to it?" *
His father took no pains to prevent this evil, but confined himself to giving help in Augustine's
studies. His mother, Saint Monica, on the contrary, exhorted him to chastity, but in vain. And
even she did not, at that time, suggest marriage, "lest my prospects might be embarrassed by the
clog of a wife."
At the age of sixteen he went to Carthage, "where there seethed all around me a cauldron of
lawless loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved
* Confessions, Bk. II, Ch. II.