The Book of Conversions

Saint Augustine's Conversion
by Garry Wills

The fourth and final volume of Garry Wills's acclaimed translation of Saint Augustine's Confessiones.

As relevant today as it was when it was originally written sixteen hundred years ago, Augustine's Confessiones continues to influence contemporary religion, language, and thought. Reading with fresh, keen eyes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills has brought his superb gifts of analysis and insight to bear on this classic of Western tradition in a series of ambitious and critically acclaimed translations and interpretations. In Saint Augustine's Conversion, Augustine's story draws to its dramatic conclusion in what Wills calls the "hinge" chapter of the bishop's confessional opus. With an illuminating introduction and extensive notes throughout, Wills provides a richly rewarding and inventive interpretation of Augustine's seminal work for a new generation of readers.

Book Eight of The Testimony tells the second most famous religious conversion story in Western literature, second only to that of Saint Paul, on which it is modeled. These two accounts have jointly determined much of what has been thought and written on the whole subject of conversion - in such classics on the subject as William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) or Arthur Darby Nock's Conversion (1933). The stories of Paul and Augustine have led to a belief that "real" conversion is sudden, effected by the incursion of an outside force, and emotionally wrenching. Certainly Augustine does everything he can to create that image in the emotional paroxysm of the garden scene that closes Book Eight. He prepares for that moment by an elaborate arrangement of conversion stories - seven of them, with his own coming as the climactic eighth case, and with Paul's as a ninth one implicit in the text that Augustine reads in the garden. The artistry of Augustine's presentation as well as the gripping nature of its contents has made Book Eight the most famous and most cited book in The Testimony. Among other things, it contains the most frequently cited sentence - "Lord, give me chastity and self-control, but not just now" [17].

But what does conversion mean here? We often use the word to indicate the adoption of a new religion. One is a Jewish convert, or a Muslim convert. But Augustine tells us he had accepted the Christian faith before he went into the garden. He already believed in the basic doctrines of the church [1, 18]. In fact, only one of the conversion stories he uses involves the acceptance of a new creed, and that one, exceptionally, is not recounted to Augustine by another person but inserted by him into one such reported story. This tale-within-a-tale (of Sergius Paul's conversion at Acts 12.6-12) is used to show that celebrity conversions are worth encouraging. Everyone else "converted" here was already a Christian in belief, and most of them (Anthony, the four in Trier) were not only doctrinal believers but had been baptized. The only such "convert" who had not been baptized is the subject of the first and longest story, about Victorinus, who was a believer though he did not want to sacrifice his worldly position by open profession of Christianity. His is a baptism story, and the story is expressly told to Augustine (by Simplician) to make him give up worldly ties by undergoing baptism.

With the exception of this baptism story, the other conversion narratives are more properly vocation narratives, telling how a person already Christian (and already baptized) receives a higher calling - to the monastic life (Pontician's friends) or to a hermit's life (Anthony). Augustine has chosen his parallel narratives carefully, since his own case will combine both kinds of spiritual change - he will come not only to accept baptism, but to undertake a further commitment, to celibacy. These are separate matters, as Augustine tells his mother in reporting the garden struggle's outcome. He reports that her prayers have been rewarded beyond her own expectation. She had wanted him, when she had a dream about him (T 3.19), to be converted from Manicheism to Christianity, joining her on the ruler's edge of belief in Jesus. He now tells her that the garden experience has gone beyond the conversion she prayed for, giving him the further call to celibacy [20]. This is more properly a vocation story than a conversion one - which is why he chose six of his seven parallel narratives from people already converted to the faith.

Of course, conversion in the broad sense does not necessarily entail a change of creed. It can refer to any significant spiritual reorientation (whether sudden or gradual). In that sense, Augustine's life up to the garden scene was one long tale of conversions - from Christianity to Manicheism, from Manicheism to a Ciceronian Skepticism, from Skepticism to Materialism, from Materialism to Neoplatonism, and from Neoplatonism to Christianity. None of these breaks was absolutely clean. As a Skeptic, he still felt a need for the savor of Christ's name (T 5.25), something that had retained its hold on him from the time when he begged for baptism during a childhood sickness (T 1.17). And he would always retain a Manichean sense of the struggle with evil (O 3.48). The Christianity he embraced in Milan retained for a long time as many Neoplatonic as gospel elements. "The conversions of Augustine were many, and they did not end in the garden in Milan"

(O 1.xlii). There was as much continuity as disjunction in his life's development - which makes the clean break described in Book Eight so striking by its contrast with what went before.

It is a contrast striking enough that one must ask whether Augustine has not, for theological or other purpose, exaggerated its suddenness and violence. This suspicion is reinforced by the conflict between what he was writing, in or near Milan, at the time of his conversion and what he tells us, over ten years later, in Book Eight. The garden story has long been doubted - at least from 1888, when Boissier and Harnack challenged it, and that has involved Book Eight in controversy. It is hard to sort out all the problems of the book because so many of us first approached it with presuppositions derived from what we knew, or thought we knew, or had been told, about Augustine's life and conversion. There are many myths that have accumulated around this subject. In calling them myths I do not claim that they lack truth of some order - just what kind and degree of order will be the matter for decision - but that they do not give a literal report of what was happening or being thought at the time being described. There are at least four such myths - that of Monnica, that of Ambrose, that of Paul at Damascus, and that of Augustine in the garden.

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.