'Tolle, scribe': Augustine at Cassiciacum

This study considers why Augustine wrote his earliest extant works, soliloquia, de ordine de beata vita, and contra academicos . Writing about his life with some friends at Cassiciacum during the months between his turn from Manichaeism and his enrollment for baptism enables Augustine to reveal what he is doing, how he think, and what means he utilizes to solve problems. Although it may seem odd that a public figure known even to Ambrose, bishop of Milan, would feel that he must do this, nevertheless Augustine helps explain himself when he observes in de ordine that people are judged by reputation. Mistaken judgment occurs because persons who have been converted to a good and edifying life are nevertheless still believed to be what they used to be until something they do leads others to see them anew. This perspective provides a valuable clue to Augustine's rationale. Milanese ecclesiastical leaders who would have known the Augustine they thought they knew were also responsible in some way for imperial edicts against Manichaeans. In such an environment, Augustine's challenge was to change their image of him so they would see the bona fide Catholic catechumen he has become. The Cassiciacum literature comprises Augustine's self-portrait of a teacher enacting a pedagogy that effectively equips ordinary but unbaptized persons to understand fundamental religious questions that the Church had made no provision to answer prior to commitment to baptism. Therefore Augustine has taken up his pen to write about himself at work in a certain kind of school to make a case for a Christian education. Its object is not to teach doctrine, as the bishop does; its curriculum is not like episcopal mystagogy, and therefore does not duplicate it. Instead Augustine argues for Christian education that recognizes that the divinely ordered disciplinae in the hands of a certain kind of teacher do provide a curriculum whose anti-Manichaean outlook coheres with fourth century Catholic doctrine, and therefore would effectively immunize unbaptized lovers of wisdom against error while drawing them to the font and the Church.