Unconditional Love

Abstract

In 375 ce, Augustine of Hippo — Saint Augustine — returned from the splendour of the Roman University at Carthage to his hometown of Thagaste, an outpost of farmers now called Souk Ahras in Algeria. A few years earlier, he had left as a pagan. He came back now a Manichean. This illegal sect that believed in the radical separation of good and evil was almost bound to appeal to the sometime student, now young teacher. It brought him not only philosophical certainty but also the fellowship of a cultivated group of friends. As he settled down to teaching in Thagaste he quickly found a new set of Manichean friends and established for himself a way of life that was a model of classical friendship — something we know about from the record he provides of it in his autobiographical Confessions:

All kinds of things rejoiced my soul in their company — to talk and laugh, and to do each other kindnesses; to read pleasant books together; to pass from lightest jesting to talk of the deepest things and back again: to differ without rancour, as a man might differ with himself, and when, most rarely, dissension arose, to find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it; to teach each other and to learn from each other; to be impatient for the return of the absent, and to welcome them with joy on their homecoming; these, and such-like things, proceeding from our hearts as we gave affection and received it back, and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes, and by a thousand other pleasing ways, kindles a flame which fused our very souls together, and, of many, made us one.

‘Because they love no one, they imagine that they love God.’

Thomas Keneally