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Of course, James could always validate his view of conversion by invoking the least questioned examples of sudden change - the voice that came to Paul on the road to Damascus and the voice that came to Augustine in the garden of Milan. These conversion narratives have some similarities. Both were not only sudden, but were triggered by the intrusion of an external authority. Each involves not a vision but an audition. A voice from heaven asks Paul, "Why do you persecute me?" Another voice, which Augustine takes to be intended for him by God (divinitus), says, "Lift! Look!" Former conduct is implicitly condemned - Paul's actions against Christians, Augustine's sexual indulgence. A crisis is passed, leading to the resolution of inner turmoil. On the literal level, there is much to be compared. But how far is a literal reading trustworthy?

It is significant that Paul himself, in all his extensive writings, never tells the story of his experience on the road to Damascus. He tells of other mystical revelations (II Corinthians 12.2-4). He says that Jesus appeared to him (I Corinthians 9.1, 15.8), and that he received his teachings direct from him (Galatians 1.12). But he connects none of his own visions to a conversion experience in general, or to the Damascus road in particular. That story is told only by Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, where the story is told three different times, a little bit differently each time (9.1-19, 22.1-21, 26.15-18) - which suggests that literal reporting is not the main concern. The important thing for consideration here is that none of Luke's three versions of his tale matches anything Paul says of his mystical experiences. He says later that he saw Jesus, but he does not see anyone in the Damascus event, which involves not a vision but a photism (bright light) and an audition (disembodied voice). Nor does a conversion take place on the spot. Saul is told that he should go to the city and await further enlightenment. It is only after Ananias heals his blindness that Saul is baptized. This seems to be shorthand for a gradual teaching and healing process that takes place after the photism.

Sending Paul to a city resembles the messages sent to prophets in the Scripture, who are given a mission and a message to deliver. Though Saul is told to receive a teaching rather than to deliver a message, the literary genre that Luke is using to create a double ministry - one for Peter, with direct experience of Jesus, and one for Paul, with indirect experience - seems to draw on vocation stories, not conversion ones. Alan Segal argues that Luke is using the genre of prophetic commissionings as his model in Acts - the Damascus story is especially close to that of Ezekiel's calling.⁴⁰ After being stunned by a vision of God's glory (Hebrew kavod), Ezekiel says:

When I saw that, I threw myself on my face, and heard a voice speaking to me: Man, he said, stand up and let me talk with you. As he spoke a spirit came into me and stood me on my feet, and I listened to him speaking. He said to me, Man, I am sending you to the Israelites, a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me. Past generations of them have been in revolt against me to this very day, and this generation to which I am sending you is stubborn and obstinate. When you say to them, These are the words of the Lord God, they will know that they have a prophet among them, whether they listen or whether they refuse to listen, because they are rebels. But you, man, must not be afraid of them or of what they say, though they are rebels against you and renegades, and you find yourself sitting on scorpions. There is nothing to fear in what they say, and nothing in their looks to terrify you, rebels though they are. You must speak my words to them, whether they listen or whether they refuse to listen, rebels that they are. But you, man, must listen to what I say and not be rebellious like them (Ezekiel 1.28-2.8, NEB).

At this, a hand appears with a scroll in it, and Ezekiel is told to eat the scroll - acquiring the knowledge he needs for his mission (which is given to Paul by Ananias).

That Segal is not just making a wild guess is confirmed by Luke's third telling of the Damascus tale. In the first two, the voice says simply, "I am Jesus, whom you persecute. Rise up and enter the city and you will be told what you must do" (Acts 9.6). But in the third account, a long speech is recorded, and it is clearly a vocation statement, the call to a mission:

Saul, Saul, why do your persecute me? It is hard only on you to kick back when prodded.... I am Jesus, whom you persecute. But rise up and stand firm on your feet. This is why I have appeared to you, to single you out as my worker, as a witness to what you have seen of me and what further things I shall reveal to you, as I rescue you from this people and from the nations to which I am sending you, that you may open their eyes and convert (epistrepsai) them from darkness to light, from Satan's thrall to God, so they may, by faith in me, gain forgiveness of sins and a share with the sanctified (Acts 26.15-18).

Luke makes clear here his theological purpose in telling the Damascus story. He intertwines in Acts the missions of Peter and of Paul, one to the Jews, the other to the Gentiles. And since Peter knew Jesus and was directly called by him from his fishing boat, it is important to emphasize that Paul, too, was called, however indirectly. Luke presents the roles of Peter and Paul as complementary, and plays down the conflict between them that Paul is frank about (Galatians 2.11-14). Luke is the author who used Hebrew poetry to create the great canticles of his nativity narrative (Luke 1.46-55, 1.68-79). He has used similar artistry in drawing on the Hebrew tradition of prophetic callings to shape his theological reflection on the meaning of Paul's mission. It compresses into symbolic form what was a more gradual process, made with the help of Ananias, that took Paul from being a Pharisee to being a Christian.

It is important, for Luke's purpose, that all three versions of the Damascus experience begin with the question "Why do you persecute me?" Paul's former persecution is the recommendation he himself uses to show the authority of a gospel even he has come to receive. That is how Paul uses his earlier life as a teaching credential (Galatians 1.13). In the same way, Augustine uses the fact that he was not only a heretic but a sinner to show that grace can redeem even him. This is typical of the evangelical use of conversion stories (a tactic Augustine justifies in his citation of celebrity converts like Victorinus and Sergius Paul). It is most reasonable to conclude that the Damascus story is Luke's theological construct to give the inner meaning of Paul's ministry its supernatural credentials.

We should also note that the recruiting of other apostles came from a vocation call that only gradually led to conversion in their beliefs: "Come with me, and I shall make you fishers of men" (Mark 1.17). The "conversion" of the disciples, the revelation of the meaning of Jesus, was gradual, and was not completed even by Christ's passion and resurrection - since they were told that the full meaning of these would be revealed to them only by the Paraclete, sent after Christ's ascension (John 15.26, 16.7-9). Even if we take the Damascus event as literally true, therefore, Paul would be the exception among apostles in undergoing a sudden conversion, as Pratt noticed.⁴¹ But there are many reasons for not reading Luke literally. Paul himself does not use conversion language (metanoein, epistrephesthai) of his response to God, but mission and vocation language (kl-etos, apostolos).⁴² The Luke story is misleading if it is used to say something not only about sudden conversions but about conversion itself. It is mainly a tale of vocation, not of conversion.

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

Tags: St. Augustine of Hippo

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.