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Charles Kingsley's semi-historical novel Hypatia, which describes scenes in and around Alexandria at the beginning of the 5th century, makes a number of references to Augustine, though he appears in the action only in one scene, when some of the Alexandrian `dramatis personae' meet with Synesius and Augustine somewhere in the remote North African desert. The fictional Raphael Aben-Ezra (who, more than Hypatia, is the central character of the novel) stumbles - literally - upon Augustine after a skirmish while riding with Synesius:
Augustine! Raphael looked intently at the man, a tall, delicate-featured personage, with a lofty and narrow forehead, scarred like his cheeks with the deep furrows of many a doubt and woe. Resolve, gentle but unbending, was expressed in his his thin close-set lips and his clear quiet eye; but the calm of his mighty countenance was the calm of a worn-out volcano, over which centuries must pass before the earthquake rents be filled with kindly soil, and the cinder-slopes grow gay with grass and flowers. ...
... In spite of himself, Raphael soon became interested in Augustine's conversation. He entered into the subject of Cyrenian misrule and ruin as hearily and shrewdly as any man of the world; and when all the rest were at a loss, the prompt practical hint which cleared up the difficulty was certain to come from him. It was by his advice that Majoricus had brought his soldiery hither; it was his proposal that they should be employed for a fixed period in defending those remote southern boundaries of the province; he checked the impetuosity of Synesius, cheered the despair of Majoricus, appealed to the honour and Christianity of the soldiers, and seemed to have a word -- and that the right word -- for every man; and after a while, Aben-Ezra quite forgot the stiffness and deliberation of his manner, and the quaint use of Scripture texts in far-fetched illustrations of every opinion which he propounded.
It had seemed at first a mere affectation; but the arguments which it was employed to enforce were in themselves so moderate and so rational, that Raphael began to feel, little by little, that his apparent pedantry was only the result of a wish to refer every matter, even the most vulgar, to some deep and divine rule of right and wrong. ...
[ And later, at an impromptu service in a ruined desert church ... ]
And now the service began; and as Augustine stood for a moment in prayer in front of the ruined altar, every furrow in his worn face lit up by a ray of moonlight which streamed in the=rough the broken roof, Raphael waited impatientle for his speech. What would he, the refined dialectitian, the ancient teacher of heatheen rhetoric, the courtly and learned student, the ascetic celibate and theosopher, have to say to those coarse war-worn soldiers, Thracians and Markmen, Gauls and Belgians, who sat watching there, with those sad earnest faces? What one thought or feeling in common could there be between Augustine and his congregation?
At last, after signing himself with the cross, he began.
[ description of the sermon missing from this file ]
.END
(The Rejoice & Sing Enchiridion:edited by David Goodall; last amended 14/10/00)