Who told the bucket and spade story?

Marina Warner, that civilised collector of savage myths, “embarked on a paper chase in a strong breeze” last week, she told readers of the London Review of Books. She was trying to track down the origin of the story of St Augustine and the child on the seashore.

As she tells it, a boy is sitting on the sand, scooping up water with a spoon and pouring it into a hole. St Augustine asks him “what he thinks he’s up to; to which the child replies that he’s trying to empty the sea into the hole. When the saint points out this can’t be done, the child – who reveals himself to be Jesus – ribs him, saying that he, Augustine, is trying something equally intractable and absurd when he tries to comprehend, with his little brain, the mystery of the Trinity.”

In the Hermitage in St Petersburg last year, Dame Marina had seen a panel of the scene by Filippo Lippi, the 15thcentury Florentine painter. What was his source?

Not, she pretty soon discovered, Augustine’s autobiographical Confessions. But then she says something odd: “Ecstatic anguished visions mark his life, his ferocious changes of mind, and his conversion, above all.” That sounds quite unlike Augustine’s character.

Teresa of Avila might have seen visions and Julian of Norwich experienced a series that she turned to poetic and spiritual account. But Augustine? He was moved to take up a book from the New Testament after hearing a voice saying Tolle, lege: “Take it and read it.” But it was not a visionary voice, only a child nearby playing a game, perhaps.

Or when he was carried away by the triple exclamation of adoration, “Holy, holy, holy”, he did not see a vision of angels, he was merely bowled over by the idea of a Triune God. Never mind; it is, as she says, true that Augustine does not recount the vision of the child on the shore.

The internet told Dame Marina that The Golden Legend was the source. This compendium of saints’ legends, written by Jacobus de Voragine in the 13th century, remained a bestseller for centuries. Yet her edition did not have the tale. The funny thing is that if she had gone to a less learned source, she might have found it. For the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus was translated, edited and printed in the 1480s by William Caxton, who had a nose for the market. His edition, later cannibalised and retold for modern readers, has the story Dame Marina seeks.

He explains that it was not in the English, French or Latin sources he used, but he had seen it, like Dame Marina, in a painting. For him it was not in a gallery, but “on an altar of St Austin at the Black Friars at Antwerp”. Usually the Black Friars are the Dominicans, but I wonder whether he meant here the Augustinian or Austin Friars, whose habits were black. The Augustinian churches in Antwerp were messed up by the Reformation and war, so I doubt we’ll find Caxton’s picture. But it was a popular 15th-century subject.

The panel by Botticelli (pictured), more seasidey than Filippo’s, was painted for San Barnaba in Florence, an Augustinian church, too. Perhaps Luther, an Austin Friar, contemplated such an image in his own friary.

Caxton points a surprising moral, fideistic in flavour: “That no man, and especially simple lettered men, ne unlearned, presume to intermit ne to muse on high things of the godhead, farther than we be informed by our faith, for our only faith shall suffice us.” That seems to miss the point, and certainly St Augustine didn’t stop musing on high things all the days of his life.