St. Augustine’s conversion began, on his own telling, when, as a nineteen-year-old boy – roughly the age of a college sophomore today – he encountered a dialogue by Cicero called the Hortensius:
Quite definitely it changed the direction of my mind, altered my prayers to You, O Lord, and gave me a new purpose and ambition. Suddenly all the vanity I had hoped in I saw as worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire I longed after immortal wisdom. I had begun that journey upwards by which I was to return to You. (Confessions, III.4)
Later on, after years of seeking, and still in the grips of Manicheism and fleshly desires, he would judge his progress against that earlier event:
I was much exercised in mind as I remembered how long it was since that nineteenth year of my age in which I first felt the passion for true knowledge and resolved that when I found it, I would give up all the empty hopes and lying follies of vain desires. And here I was going on for thirty, still sticking in the same mire. (VI.11)
Even the saint’s famous half-hearted prayer for chastity comes up in connection with Cicero: “Many years had flowed by – a dozen or more – from the time when I was nineteen and was stirred by the reading of Cicero’s Hortensius to the study of wisdom; and here was I still postponing the giving up of this world’s happiness to devote myself for the search for that of which not the finding only but the mere seeking is better than to find all the treasures and kingdoms of men, better than all the body’s pleasures though they were to had merely for a nod. But I in my worthlessness. . .had begged You for chastity, saying: ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ For I was afraid that you would hear my prayer too soon.” (VIII.7)
As St. Pope John Paul II summarized in his Apostolic Letter, Augustinum Hipponensem, on the 16th centenary of the conversion of St Augustine, “He awoke at the age of nineteen to the love of wisdom, when he read the Hortensius of Cicero.”
This great convert from paganism, materialism, and a life of fleshly pleasure, would go on to become one of the two surpassing theological masters of the Church alongside St. Thomas Aquinas. The author of The City of God, and On the Trinity, and also of many richly illuminating shorter works, homilies, and letters, he would be proclaimed “The Doctor of Grace” – a teacher to the world, really, and, in his way, a savior of civilization.
One might think that a practical lesson to be drawn from Augustine’s conversion is that Catholics should foster the reading of Cicero’s Hortensius, on the grounds that what so inspired Augustine would likely inspire many others.
But, sadly, the Hortensius was lost in the 6th century.
What do we know about it from fragments and reports? We know that it was a “protreptic,” that is, it contained a carefully constructed argument, intended to persuade the reader to seek wisdom above everything else. (The word protreptikos in Greek means “exhortation.”)
Plato has various “protreptic passages” scattered throughout his dialogues. Aristotle wrote an entire dialogue, once lost but now reasonably reconstructed, called Protrepticus. Cicero probably used these as models. The Hortensius, we also know, was composed as a dialogue among a poet, a rhetorician, and an historian, with Cicero, the fourth participant, taking the side of philosophy. But otherwise, we do not know its contents.
And yet are there books like the Hortensius which Catholics can use today?
Yes, I know of two books which, although not protreptics in the technical sense, can succeed in persuading students to love wisdom above all else: Joseph Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture, and Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. Catholics should indeed be using these unfailingly in education.
But at the same time, Catholics might advisedly also back away from positions which at first glance at least, seem at odds with what Augustine learned from the Hortensius, such as that happiness, our highest goal, is “human flourishing.”
Cicero did not persuade Augustine to love human flourishing above all else, but divine wisdom. (Cicero himself wrote Hortensius in his coastal villa in Astura, in retirement from practical affairs, after Julius Caesar had begun converting his beloved Roman republic into a kingship, and when the death of his daughter, Tullia, had destroyed any prospect for him of domestic contentment. He was by no means flourishing.)
Catholics must also, obviously, back away from appearing to hold that the ultimate point of education, especially higher education, is simply to get a good job or maximize ROI.
One wonders if yet another, and more radical practical step, would be for bishops and even the Bishop of Rome to compose protreptics, addressed not simply to Catholics but even to “all persons of goodwill,” which were intended to persuade hearers to love wisdom above all.
What we have had so far are treatises – truly magnificent treatises, to be sure – which assert, rather, the need for philosophy to have the character of wisdom, such as: “philosophy needs first of all to recover its sapiential dimension as a search for the ultimate and overarching meaning of life,” (Fides et Ratio n. 81); and, “[there is a need for] a philosophy of genuinely metaphysical range, capable, that is, of transcending empirical data in order to attain something absolute.” (n. 83)
But that such philosophy be offered is different from Catholics, or others, hungering and thirsting for that sort of philosophy.
An economist might say that the “problem of wisdom,” among Catholics in our time is not supply-side – it’s easy enough, after all, with a few clicks to find all the works of St. Thomas Aquinas online in good translation, and those of St. Augustine besides – but rather demand-side.
Our problem, clearly, is that few of us yearn after wisdom the way that the nineteen-year-old St. Augustine did.
