Cast a cold eye
On life, on death
Horseman, pass by! –epitaph: W.B.Yeats
Not alone because anytime the immensely respected Augustine is omitted in the discussion of a Catholic issue on which he has weighed in I start thinking suspect things are likely afoot, but also, too, for that reason I urge here that Pope Francis and/or his Vatican deep-state ghostwriters were up to no good when they decided not to mention the Confessions and City of God author in the Holy Father’s letter on literature of the summer just past.[1] As for what they were up to, that would be these two things:
the furtherance of their Pelagian, relativistic, embrace-the-World agenda, and
in the Catholic cultural/ethical memory, the displacement of the Augustine hagiography with that of Francis.
Yes, if you’re throwing a let’s-forget-sin, let’s-celebrate-humankind party, as is Francis in his letter on literature,[2] you don’t want to invite the author of the two works by Augustine I’ve already mentioned, for the conviction that sin is pandemic is alive in both. On an early, representative page of The Confessions, for example, the memoirist says this about his own moral state: “The house of my soul is in ruins.”[3] Speaking of humankind on another typical page of the same book, he says, “There is none free from sin, not even the infant who has lived but a day upon this earth.”[4] So, too, in the City of God the Doctor of Grace lets no one off the hook in terms of his or her wickedness: “For every man, however laudably he lives, yet yields in some points to the lust of the flesh. Though he do not fall into gross enormity of wickedness, and abandoned viciousness, and abominable profanity, yet he slips into some sins, either rarely or so much the more frequently as the sins seem of less account.”[5]
Nor would you invite Augustine to the party if your celebration’s theme were the all-embracing relativism encouraged sub rosa and sub voce, say I and one other in the Catholic commentariat, by the letter.[6] For that’s not the Bishop of Hippo’s mindset either. Indeed, a thirst for relativism’s disqualifier, “the Truth,…is one of the basic characteristics of his existence,” said Benedict XVI in one of his five general audiences of 2008 dedicated to the saint.[7] And, lastly, Augustine gets no invites to embrace-the-World parties, for he was not an embrace-the-World type of Saint (presuming there is such a type). Far from it. Living, for example, in the heyday of the Desert Fathers movement, he read St. Athanasius’ Life of Saint Anthony at a crucial moment in his own coming-back-to-the-faith journey and thought for a time about joining.[8] Then, not much later, when his “conversion”[9] was accomplished, he chose to live, not as yet another married, bourgeoise citizen of the late-Roman world, but as an unmarried member of a monastic community.[10]
As to where exactly Augustine set down his opinion on Christians’ looking to secular literature for inspiration and enlightenment, he did it in his most read work The Confessions (as well as, later, elsewhere[11])—though, to be honest, few have much grasped that reality for want of the theme’s ability to get itself noticed in the crowd of that multi-faceted text’s several interests. And, yet still, no, the question of the value of secular-lit reading for Christians is a live one in what is universally regarded to be one of Catholicism’s classic saint-in-the-making stories.[12] And that fact, in combination with the text’s thoughts per se on the matter—Beware secular literature! Augustine basically advises in the Confessions. It will mess with your head!—disqualifies its mentioning in Francis’ letter on literature. For in the letter, in addition to advising Catholics to go to secular literature for spiritual nourishment, Francis (and/or his Vatican communications team) offers a saint-in-the making story of his own, one that, say I, he hopes will displace the Augustine offering. Does that sound preposterous? That a Pope (and/or his handlers) should begin the construction of his hagiography before his passing on? And that in doing so he (and/or they) should suppress the competing, canonical, contrasting story in the genre that he would wish his own to displace? Yes, long ago, before I had my baptism in conspiracy theory (a story for another day), I would have thought so too. But now that I’ve had that baptism, it is the easiest idea in the world for me to give my assent to.
Also, it’s the conclusion I reach when I read in the Francis-on-lit letter the self-congratulatory, autobiographical anecdote descriptive of then cleric Bergoglio’s performance as a literature teacher,[13] and recall, as I do so, Augustine’s self-diminishing account of himself as a professor of that same subject in The Confessions. The first of those two stories goes like this: Back in the mid-60s, when he was a twenty-eight-year-old and yet still a Jesuit cleric, Brother Bergoglio was assigned to teach literature at a Jesuit high school in Santa Fe, Argentina. (All to the good, as far as the anecdote’s implications go. Humble is as humble was, so to speak.) However, little fond of the curriculum’s prescribed text, El poema de mio Cid, the cleric’s students balked at being required to read it. They wanted instead to read the Spanish poet and dramatist García Lorca. Thus, seeing what he was up against and considering his alternatives, the future Pontiff acceded to his students’ wishes. He ruled that he and they would discuss the works of contemporary authors in the classroom, and they would read El Cid at home. In short, impasse averted. Progress made. Souls won over to literature. For by capitalizing on his students’ natural interests in books and stories the enlightened instructor had set them up for the subsequent reading of canonical fare.[14]
Are you getting my drift here? Namely, that slipped into an official Church document of the very early First Post-Orwell Millenium and signatured by a dogma-averse, eighty-seven-year-old Holy Father whose requiem can’t be too far off, this little bit of hoke autobiography—testified to as true, God forbid, by one of his former students—[15] is clearly an exercise in proto-hagiographic construction? As well as, too, a clever one for its simplicity. For what does it say about the now Pope Francis that he was once that enlightened, nice-guy, high school teacher who, in the long-ago, end-of-the-world place where he began his career, junked the syllabus in favor of what his students preferred? Why, of course, that he’s a nice-guy Pontiff too, and, beyond that, a Pastor more interested in the spiritual progress of his pastorate than in the querulous protection of the deposit of faith. And what does the anecdote say about his Pontificate? Why, of course, that it might be similarly characterized and, beyond that, that its object has been to occasion a paradigm shift in Church culture, one wherein hard-and-fast theology will matter less going forward than it has in the past, while the care of souls will matter more.
As for the Augustine-as-lit-prof narrative in The Confessions, it is, I should tell you first, more like a thematic thread in a novel’s busy weave than it is an isolated anecdote, and, yet still, for the reader attentive to it, it is obvious throughout the work, and Wow! how prominent it becomes in the work’s most iconic scene! That passage would be, of course, the Eighth Chapter’s tolle lege moment, wherein, to recall it, the now 32-year-old Augustine, entirely beside himself for his inability to get beyond his last, remaining hesitance about the Christian faith, its sexual ethics, hears a voice telling him tolle lege, tolle lege [take and read, take and read], to which he responds by reading in the Codex of Paul’s letters the precise verses in the Apostle to the Gentile’s epistle to the Romans that he needs to hear: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom.13:13-14).[16] Yes, as I shall shortly explain, signaled in that scene, just as it is in many of The Confessions’ better-known, earlier passages, is the on-going plot thread of the making and unmaking of Augustine’s career in rhetoric/literary expertise and instruction. Consider with me then, if you will, in the context of the work’s more remembered thematic interests, some few recursions to the Augustine-as-rhetoric/lit-prof motif in the autobiography’s earlier parts, and, then, after that, we’ll look for its appearance in the memoir’s climactic scene:
Born into a mixed-faith household, the boy Augustine received from his parents a mixed sex-ethical message. His father, a pagan, exampled in front of him and actively encouraged in him a pagan outlook and practice. His Christian mother, on the other hand, advocated restraint.[17] However, from both mom and dad he got this message: that he should study hard in order that he might make something of himself in life. They so urged their eldest son because the historical moment in which they were rearing the boy was the middle of the 4thCentury, and the place of his raising was the tiny North African town of Thagaste, which was then more an outpost of the Roman Empire than it was an indigenous village on the continent on which it was located. These two realities in concert meant that if the boy did well with scrolls and ledgers and such, he could do better in the Empire’s ever-expanding, bureaucratic superstructure than had his dad, “a poor man, a tenuis municeps, a burgess of slender means.”[18] As for the core curriculum, its centering on pagan myths and gods, and, thereby, its potential for messing with the boy’s unbaptized, vaguely Christian head, no, certainly his father was not concerned on that account. Nor, as it happened, his mother, for though she and her Christian community knew well that in the post-persecution times in which they were living the art of being a Christian and too a citizen of the world was a tricky one morally and spiritually, she, an uneducated woman, would have had little awareness of the content of her son’s studies.[19]
Initially, the boy Augustine showed himself to be capable enough academically, though more interested in sport than learning. However, buckling down per force of his family’s necessity and his tutors’ lashes,[20] he showed yet more scholarly promise as he was marched through the conventional curriculum of the day, one in which the memorization, recitation and correct pronunciation of set, pagan texts was insisted upon. As a schoolboy, he took readily to the works of Vergil and of other Latin authors, while, at the same time, resisting instruction in the Greek classics. As for the region’s local languages, he knew next to nothing of them. For what was the point in doing so? And, anyway, when Augustine heard those tongues, they seemed to him crude relative to the intricately designed Latin he spoke and was mastering.[21] Yes, verbal eloquence meant more than it ought to its protagonist, says many of the early and later pages of The Confessions.
To be clear, in hindsight anyway the narrator of The Confessions has a problem with the secular texts that he was required to memorize and declaim as a child. I have already passed by without mentioning it a moment in the text when he summed up the goal of his early education this way: “to flourish in the world and distinguish myself in those tricks of speech which would gain honor for me among men, and deceitful riches!”[22] But no matter, for a few pages later when he complains of being “compelled to learn about the wanderings of a certain Aeneas, oblivious of my own wanderings, and to weep for Dido dead, who slew herself for [a] love,” that, even if she had attained it, would have done her no good without an awareness of God’s love,[23] he is essentially saying the same thing, which is this: bad, bad idea is the proposing to children as models for emulation characters such as the super-self-pitying Dido of Vergil’s Aeneid. Better, if in learning to read, the texts put in children’s hands admonished them to weep for what they really needed to regret, namely, the wretchedness of their moral state if they were in any way holding off the Lord’s advances towards them.
In the middle of his teen years, Augustine’s father passed away, and that event set him back both morally and academically. Without his father’s salary, he could not go to school, and without a classroom to go to, he apparently went to the streets in town where he ought not go and hung around with boys who, like himself at that age, were up to no good.[24] Soon, however, with the help of a benefactor, he went off to Carthage to continue his academic training, and, in that North African city of sexual debauch and high Latin culture, he partook liberally of both. It was at about this time too that he started living with the lower-caste young woman that would be his concubine for the next fifteen years. This was not an irregular arrangement in the world that was Augustine’s, nor even in the eyes of his saintly mother, who, harboring lofty hopes for his academic career, did not want to see him married too soon—“lest,” as Augustine puts it in The Confessions, “a wife should prove a burden to [those] hopes.”[25] In other words, says the author of that lest, shortsighted was his otherwise saintly mom’s decision to cut him the moral slack that she cut him as a teen only for the sake of his “learning how to make a powerful speech and becoming a persuasive orator.”[26]
Augustine comes back once more in the Carthage section of his memoir to the question of literary devotion’s worth to the Christian when he talks about his experience as a fan of dramatic performances in that “unstable period of [his] life,” and therein once again he advises against such devotion. For what did he see on the stage, a proxy, of course, for literature in general, but “images of [his] own miseries.” However, rather than occasioning self-reflection and an improved mental and emotional state—the presumed consequence of such things in Francis’ letter—those renderings of excess feeling worked on Augustine, as he puts it, like “fuel on my own fire.” And how stupid was he in that regard? he next asks. To take delight, that is, in that which provoked in him feelings inimical to his soul’s good and his life’s sane realization? Further, and important to us in the context of the Francis letter which testifies oppositely,[27]Augustine holds it against stage performances that the compassion they supposedly stimulate in their audiences is a scapegrace, pious fiction. If theatre goers were running away from theatrical venues at the conclusion of plays to help their fellow man, Augustine hadn’t seen it. And, lastly, Augustine speaks against theatre’s power to make look morally good that which is bad, and vice versa. As he watches the stage enactments, he finds himself congratulating lovers “when they sinfully enjoy one another,” and he knows that to be a perverse thing.[28] In sum, a piece in the puzzle of the early Augustine’s flawed making was the plays he attended as a young scholar in Carthage. Also, apropos our interest, no, says The Confessions author, the partaking of secular literature does not quicken one’s moral discernment, something that Francis asserts in his letter;[29] rather, it disables it.
Just twice more in his memoir’s busy, subsequent middle (late Book Three through Seven), on his way to its climactic tolle lege scene in Book Eight, does Augustine offer a scene or a sentence whose immediate purpose is the derailing of a reverential regard for literary texts and/or their vaunted eloquence. That’s not many given the quantity of events and plethora of theological issues hashed out in those several chapters of the memoir. However, it does not mean that the question of literature’s worth is not central to the text. Rather, it means the opposite. For think about it. Augustine handles all of the manifold professional and spiritual events of his young adult life—his career’s ascent from one rhetoric/lit-prof’s post to two others (Carthage to Rome to Milan); his intellectual passage from Ciceronian, to Manichean, to Neoplatonist, to Christian; his sparrings with his mom; the death of a friend that was dear to him; his encounter with St. Ambrose, then Bishop of Milan; his separating himself from the longtime concubine/lover who was also the mother of his only child; his taking up briefly with a second concubine as he waited for the girl he had agreed to marry to come of age; and so on—without once having explicit, articulated recourse for guidance to a secular-lit verse or to an analogous situation in the stockpile of such things in his learned head! And what does that say about his regard for such things as vade mecums? That his regard for them in this wise is minimal (unlike Francis’)[30].
But, no, will say those of you who know something about these things. Numerous are the echoes of Vergil and of other Roman authors in The Confessions, say a significant number of the scholars who have interpreted the work.[31] Yes, I am aware of that scholarship. However, read those scholarly postings closely and you will see that when their authors speak of Augustine’s “reconstructing” or “transforming” or “transmuting” or “rechanneling” toward Christian and Biblical paradigms the rhythms and energies of the prototypical Roman texts that ineluctably played in his and in his readers’ heads, as the authors frequently do, they are in actual fact saying things much like what I’m saying, namely, that Augustine despairs of ever getting to the bottom of things by way of such texts. What’s needed in the analysis of our lives’ events, says Augustine’s example in The Confessions, is not the discovery of their sharing in the dynamics of scenes offered by authors such as Vergil or their susceptibility to encapsulation in verses composed by poets such as Horace. Rather, what’s needed by those who would understand their own lives is a bottom-line awareness of themselves as children of a Father-Creator who has a plan for them. Also, what’s needed is a solid grounding in Scripture. To offer just one example of this second emphasis in The Confessions, I’ll point to that novelesque scene in the memoir in which Augustine, now twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old and tired of his mother’s urgings, installs her in a North African, port-city lodging house and then sails for Rome without her. True to form, various interpreters of the scene have detected in its construction a shaping of Monica in the likeness of Dido, Vergil’s quintessentially bereft and betrayed female character.[32] Yes, if you say so. However, as I read the passage, Augustine’s way of understanding his mom’s hurt in that moment is not in the context of any pagan-lit passage, but, instead, in the Biblical way his mother herself likely understood it: “She wept and mourned and saw in her agony,” says he, “the inheritance of Eve—seeking in sorrow what she had brought forth in sorrow.”[33] In other words, look not to secular literature for the prototypical models of your lives’ experiences, but instead look to the Scriptures, says Augustine’s Confessions.
As for the two instances in which the memoirist in these many pages engages the question of classical, pagan literature’s worth to the Christian, the first is that early Third Book moment in which the yet-still student of rhetoric Augustine, frustrated by a Cicero text’s inability to supply him with the Christ-centered Truth that he is looking for, picks up the Scriptures hoping to find the lacking. And, “behold,” as he says, he does find it in that Book of Books! Finds, that is, “something not comprehended by the proud, not disclosed to children, something lowly in the hearing, but sublime in the doing, and veiled in mysteries!” But, no, Augustine’s literary sensibilities get in the way of his “bending his neck,” as he says, to what he is reading. He is looking at, you see, one or another of the several Latin-language New Testaments then circulating in the pre-Vulgate era. And it, unfortunately, is too little couth in its style to command his respect. Very likely, too, he couldn’t see himself appealing to its clumsy sentences in his discussions with his teachers and fellow students. In short, he puts the Scriptures down, and his conversion is delayed for another dozen years.[34]
The protagonist of the second such incident in these many pages of the memoir is much closer to his spiritual journey’s definitive arrival point than was the grad-student Augustine just described. Now past thirty, now in Milan, and now, it seems, an up-and-coming rhetoric instructor of some promise, he is awarded the opportunity “to recite a panegyric on the emperor.” For any other early- to mid-career scholar an opportunity such as this one would no doubt have been regarded as a confirmation of his talents and efforts, as well as a likely stepping-stone to yet greater honors. However, no, Augustine is in no such frame of mind. Instead, he is gravely troubled by what he must do. His problem is that he believes not a word of the text that he is preparing. Also, to make matters worse, his audience will put little stock in what he calls its many “lies,” when he declaims them in front of them. And yet they will applaud him. “Wretched” for this reason is the lit-prof Augustine as he practices his panegyric, and yet more wretched does he become, later in the day, when he sees in the performance of a street beggar behaviors that mirror his own. For what does that unwashed panhandler do if not sweet-talk and compliment passersby in the hopes of being thrown a coin? Yes, no better than a beggar complimenting whomever for the sake of a coin Augustine thinks of himself and his role in life as an expert declaimer of verse! To be clear, he does not look down on the mendicant. Rather, he wishes that he could be like him, that is, content in the required performance of his professional obligations. But, no, he can’t, and it pains him to acknowledge as much. In sum, the teacher Augustine of this Confessions anecdote is indeed closer to his conversion’s home base than was the grad-student protagonist of the linguistically fussy-Bible-reader event of some dozen years before. However, he is clearly yet-still unarrived. For if he were fully on the convert’s side of the saved/unsaved line, he would tell us that he had somehow taken a pass on the delivery of the panegyric. But, no, he doesn’t do that. Presumably, then, Augustine delivered his liar’s panegyric, qualms of Christian conscience notwithstanding, and presumably too, when his conversion is finally achieved some year or two later, he will have yet more to repent of in terms of the devotion to rhetoric and literature that had been his professional calling before it.[35]
And now no more, as I say, in The Confessions occur significant instances of Augustine’s grimaced, hindsight regard for his career in rhetoric and literature until we get to the memoir’s oft-recalled Eighth Book. But Wow! as I’ve already said, how striking is the theme’s presence in that memoir segment’s pivotal scene—the one wherein, to recall it again, a maximally distressed Augustine, having gone out to the garden to regret with his Maker his inability to get beyond his reluctance to sign on to Christianity’s demanding sexual ethics, suddenly hears a voice, as of a child, telling him Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege. [Take up and read. Take up and read.] And, thus, understanding the voice to be a directive from God to go inside and pick up the Codex and Paul’s Letters that he knows to be there, and to read at random in it, Augustine does so, only to be shaken to his soul’s core by the pair of verses from Paul’s Letter to the Romans that his eyes first land on: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom.13:13-14). And, thus, as the conventional story goes, Augustine’s conversion is accomplished. Yes, for the most part it is. However, no, before leaving the scene, let’s notice another detail in it that I have not yet told you about. That would be the specific place where the Codex awaits Augustine’s picking it up, namely, on the “game table” where he usually kept his “wearisome rhetoric textbooks.” We know that to be the place because in the scene that immediately precedes this one in The Confessions, Augustine’s good Christian friend Alypius had noticed the Codex there on coming into Augustine’s residence to visit with him, and, too, he, Alypius, had been pleased by his host’s having apparently given up rhetoric/lit reading in favor of the reading of Holy Writ.[36] Thus, in the next scene, when Augustine goes rushing inside to see the Scriptural passage that he feels God urging him to look at, he goes to the precise place where he used to go for readings in rhetoric and literature.
Is my point clearly enough made? My proposition, that is, that integral to Augustine’s larger conversion story is the story of his setting aside his devotion to rhetoric and to literary texts in favor of a devotion to Holy Scripture? If it’s not, I could say more about the implications of the future saint’s having kept his rhetoric textbooks on a “gaming table” and about, too, his conversion’s definitive completion in the first pages of the next Confessions Book—in which, after some twenty dawdling days, Professor Augustine finally lets go of his rhetorician’s chair, or, as he calls his last teaching position, his “chair of falsehood.”[37] But, no, it is clear enough, isn’t it? As is, too, the antithetical leaning of Augustine’s account of himself as a literature teacher relative to Francis’ account of himself in the same role. And as is, lastly, all the weighty issues for the Church implied by that antithesis.
As for my thesis that Francis’ (and his legacy’s shiners’) choice to not mention Augustine in his letter on literature was a conscious one, no, admittedly, I haven’t quite nailed down that proposition yet. For, to do so, I need, in addition to outlining the good reasons why he wouldn’t want the Augustine story mentioned, to demonstrate his consciousness of the story itself. And that I haven’t yet done, have I? No, I haven’t.
But that’s ok. Because I have the evidence to do so, and, at the start of my next and last essay in this series, a piece in which I mostly reflect on the types of books that Francis would have us read, I’ll present it.
[1] Pope Francis. “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation.” The Holy See. Dicastero per la Comunicazione – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. July 17, 2024. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2024/documents/20240717-lettera-ruolo-letteratura-formazione.html.
[2] John Cussen. “Casting a Cold Eye on Francis’ letter on literature, Part II: the letter’s sly rhetoric,” Catholic Journal, 24 Oct. 2024,
[3] Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated and Edited by Albert Cook Outler (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2002 [1955]), p. 4.
[4] Ibid, p. 7.
[5] Augustine. The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Vol. I, The City of God. Ed. Rev. Marcus Dods, M.A. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1871), p. 12. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45304/45304-h/45304-h.htm.
[6] See endnote 2.
David Deavel. “Reading with a Second Friend: Francis on Literature,” The Imaginative Conservative, Sept. 5. 2024, https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/09/reading-second-friend-pope-francis-literature-david-deavel.html.
[7] Benedict XVI, “General Audience, Papal Summer Residence, Castel Gandolfo, 25 August 2010,” Holy See, Benedict XVI,
[9] Several features of the Augustine biography make problematic the term conversion in his regard, among them, his instruction in the faith as a child by his mother. Still, going forward in this essay, as have many others, I will use that word.
[10] “Saint Augustine,” The Augustinians, Province of St. Thomas of Villanova, https://augustinian.org/spirituality/saint-augustine-of-hippo/.
[11] Most notably in the second book, fortieth chapter of his essay On Christian Doctrine.
On this topic, see Alan Jacobs, “Paganism and Literature,” Christianity and Literature, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Summer 2007), 669-670.
[12] Henry Chadwick. “Introduction” to Augustine of Hippo : A Life by Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, OUP Oxford, 2009), 36.
William E. Mann. (ed.), ‘The Life of the Mind in Dramas and Dreams’, in William E. Mann (ed.), Augustine’s Confessions: Philosophy in Autobiography (Oxford, 2014; online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 June 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.003.0006, accessed 25 Nov. 2024.
[13] See the letter’s seventh paragraph.
[14] Ibid.
[15] A. SPADARO, “J. M. Bergoglio, il ‘maestrillo’ creativo. Intervista all’alunno Jorge Milia”, in La Civiltà Cattolica, 2014, pp. 523-534.
[16] Ibid., pp. 145-46.
[17] Peter Brown. Augustine of Hippo: a biography (Berkeley: University of California Pr, 1967), 30-31.
[18] Ibid, 16.
[19] Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated and Edited by Albert Cook Outler, 24.
[20] Ibid., 9.
[21] Brown, 22.
[22] Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated and Edited by Albert Cook Outler, 9.
[23] Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated and Edited by Albert Cook Outler, 12.
[24] Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated and Edited by Albert Cook Outler, 23.
[25] Ibid., 24.
[26] Ibid., 22.
[27] See Letter’s 34th paragraph.
[28] Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated and Edited by Albert Cook Outler, 32-33.
[29] See Letter’s 26th paragraph.
[30] Ibid.
[31] See, for example, John Ó’Meara. “Virgil and Augustine: The ‘Aeneid’ in the ‘Confessions.’” The Maynooth Review / Revieú Mhá Nuad 13 (1988): 30–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20556998.
See, too, Carol L. Ramage. “‘The Confessions of St. Augustine: The Aeneid’ Revisited.” Pacific Coast Philology 5 (1970): 54–60. https://doi.org/10.2307/1316762.
See, too, Michael C. McCarthy. “Augustine’s Mixed Feelings: Vergil’s ‘Aeneid’ and the Psalms of David in the ‘Confessions.’” The Harvard Theological Review 102, no. 4 (2009): 453–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40390029.
See, too, Vincent Hunink. “Hating Homer, Fighting Virgil: Βooks in Augustine’s Confessions.” In Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel, edited by Michael Paschalis, Stelios Panayotakis, and Gareth Schmeling, 12:254–67. Barkhuis, 2009. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13wwxzb.22.
[32] Ramage, 56-57.
[33] Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated and Edited by Albert Cook Outler, 75.
[34] Ibid., 35-36.
[35] Ibid., 90-91.
[36] Ibid., 136.
[37] Ibid., 150.
