It should be added, that in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there was pressing him to return. Perhaps she told him that she was about to become a mother. Always ready to go away, Augustin scarcely hesitated. It is more than likely that he did not consult Monnica. He only told Romanianus, who, as he had all kinds of reasons for wanting to keep Augustin at Thagaste, at first strongly objected. But the young man pointed to his future, his ambition to win fame. Was he going to bury all that in a little town?
Romanianus yielded, and with a generosity that is no longer seen, he paid the expenses this time too.
Augustin was going to live nine years at Carthage--nine years that he squandered in obscure tasks, in disputes sterile or unfortunate for himself and others--briefly, in an utter forgetfulness of his true vocation. "And during this time Thou wert silent, O my God!" he cries, in recalling only the faults of his early youth. Now, the silence of God lay heavy. And yet even in those years his tormented soul had not ceased to appeal. "Where wert Thou then, O my God, while I looked for Thee? Thou wert before me. But I had drawn away from myself and I could not find myself. How much less, then, could I find Thee."
This was certainly the most uneasy, and, at moments, the most painful time of his life. Hardly was he got back to Carthage than he had to struggle against ever-increasing money difficulties. Not only had he to get his own living, but the living of others--possibly his mother's and that of his brother and sister--at all events, he had to support his mistress and the child. It is possible that the infant was born before its father left Thagaste; if not, the birth must have occurred shortly after.
The child was called Adeodatus. There is a kind of irony in this name, which was then usual, of Adeodatus--"Gift of God." This son of his sin, as Augustin calls him, this son whom he did not want, and the news of whose birth must have been a painful shock--this poor child was a gift of Heaven which the father could have well done without. And then, when he saw him, he was filled with joy, and he cherished him as a real gift from God.