Augustine's Confessions - Manichee and Astrologer (Book IV)

This book covers a nine year period (age 19-28), when Augustine was mired in gnostic heresy.  He describes this period as one of "being seduced and seducing, being deceived and deceiving." It was during this spiritually dark stage of life that he took a concubine from Carthage, who became his partner for fifteen years and bore him a son.  Even though Roman law and social convention prevented a formal marriage, Augustine still viewed the relationship as far less than ideal. Augustine the gnostic was also mired in pagan superstition and would frequently consult astrologers in spite of his being warned by a wise old medical doctor named Vindicanus that astrology was really pseudo-science and a waste of time and money.

Much of this book is taken up with a discussion on grief and disordered emotions, stemming from the death of Augustine's close friend Nebridius.  Under Augustine's influence, Nebridius had left the Catholic fold and converted to gnosticism.  Sometime later, he fell deathly ill and was baptized by his Christian family while in an unconscious state.  When he regained consciousness, Augustine began to joke around with him about the sacrament of baptism, but Nebridius rebuked him harshly and died several days later.  There are strong overtones of baptismal regeneration as Augustine reflects back on this incident.  The sudden death of Nebridius pushed Augustine over the edge of despair:  "Everything on which I set my gaze was death.  My hometown became a to me."  The grief was toxic and unnatural, and Augustine testifies that "I had become to myself a vast problem" and "my life was to me a horror."  After several pages of painful analysis, he relates his intense grief to the sin of idolatry: "The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die."  Nebridius had become a substitute for God for Augustine.

Augustine the gnostic was firmly indoctrinated in the Manichee worldview which was fundamentally materialist.  This 'materialism' became a tremendous barrier to further spiritual progress because he was utterly unable to conceive of God as a spiritual Being:  "I thought that you , Lord God and Truth, were like a luminous body of immense size and myself a bit of that body.  What extraordinary perversity!"  Along these same lines he wrote, "My mind moved within the confines of corporeal forms."  This materialist worldview also led Augustine to embrace a dualistic view of good and evil, where evil had "not only substance but life." The spiritual blindness caused by gnostic presuppositions is a theme which carries on for several chapters until Augustine finally discovers the writings of the Neo Platonists and comes to the conclusion that evil is actually the "privation" of good.

Looking back on this stage of his spiritual journey, Augustine can only describe his time with the Manichees by means of Plato's famous "cave" illustration:  "I had my back to the light and my face toward the things which are illuminated.  So my face, by which I was enabled to see the things lit up, was not itself illuminated."