The Garden

Saint Augustine's Conversion
by Garry Wills

(Page 7 of 8)

Just as the Damascus story is not told by Paul but only later by Luke, so the garden story is not told by Augustine in any of the discussions of his conversion written at the time, but only later in The Testimony. That has been enough to raise doubts about its literal truth. A long line of scholars denied the garden story's veracity - Boissier (1888), Harnack (1888), Loofs (1897), Gourdon (1900), Becker (1908), Thimme (1908), Alfaric (1918).⁴⁷ But it was not till 1950, when Pierre Courcelle published his assault on the literal reading of Book Eight (among other things), that the debate became widespread and impassioned.⁴⁸ O'Donnell says that Courcelle's book "worked a Copernican revolution in Augustine scholarship" (O 1.xxi). He thinks that the emotional resistance to Courcelle's book resembled the previous century's struggle over "higher criticism" of the Bible: "The controversy replicated the earlier battles occasioned by application of scholarly instruments and criteria to biblical texts: literal narrative seemed threatened, and with literal narrative faith itself seemed threatened" (O 1.xxv).

The doubters of the garden story so far cited all work from the contrast between the writings at Cassiciacum and The Testimony. But some have been troubled, more generally, by the artificial presentation of the tale, the pat way conversion narratives surge up opportunely and converge on the dramatic climax to Book Eight. Even the highly wrought rhetorical presentation makes some uneasy about the sincerity of the account. Book Eight does not give us a spontaneous account, but a calculated one. Augustine relishes his storytelling gifts - the heightened alliteration, for instance: volvens et versans me in vinculo (churning and chafing in my chains). Or the epigrammatic paradoxes: "crazed to be sane ... dying to be alive." Or the patterns of antithesis: "aware of how bad things were with me, unaware of how good ..." But if rhetoric of itself precludes truthfulness, then we had better give up on Augustine entirely. He cannot speak at all without using his inmost language, which is rhetoric.

The idea that calculation cannot go with sincerity is naive. Bach's religious music is not insincere because of his immense technical cleverness. Nor is Fra Angelico lacking in piety because he learned Florentine perspective and sophisticated color harmonies. Augustine, in the same way, is a master of words because he sees in their paradoxes the mysteries of the Word. He could describe the soul's interior only through convolutions of language he had mastered as a tool for knowledge, not a mere exercise in ornament. The rhetorical presentation of his own turmoil is no different from his highly rhetorical presentation of the life and suffering of Jesus. He is entirely serious and sincere in both.

Of course, everyone admits that some points in Augustine's treatment of the garden scene are a matter of imagery, not of reportage - the way lusts pluck at his garment, for instance, or attack him from the back; or the way God wields over him a "double whip." No one could think those things were actually seen or suffered in a literal sense. Even more striking is the "revelation" of Self-Control as a female beckoning him to cross over into the company of the pure. Such personification as a way of representing a moral problem was traditional - like the appearance of the Laws to Socrates, asking if he will disobey them by escaping the verdict of his fellow citizens.⁴⁹

Well, what about the fig tree? Was that real or figurative? Why mention it at all if it were real? This was not a moment to digress into dendrology. What relevance can the species of tree have to Augustine's inner state? Courcelle argued, convincingly, that the fig tree was charged with such scriptural symbolism in sermons and Bible commentary, that Augustine must have that tradition in mind when he refers to the fig tree.

In that case, which scriptural reference was foremost in his mind - the fig tree under which Jesus saw the disciple Nathaniel (John 1.47-48), or the blasted fig tree of the parable (Matthew 21.19-21), or the fig tree from which Adam and Eve took leaves to cover their nakedness (Genesis 2.7)? Courcelle thinks it is the first of these.⁵⁰ O'Donnell says that it is all three (O 3.57-58).

One could go along easily with the idea that Self-Control was figurative, as well as the nagging lusts, and the "double whip," and even the fig tree. But Courcelle destroyed the last vestige of literalism when he said that even the voice telling Augustine Tolle! Lege!, even the reading of a crucial Pauline verse, were also figurative. He said that the voice was internal, and the reading was a summary of longer delvings into Paul's work. He found support for this in a textual variant. Instead of saying that the voice came from vicina domo (a nearby house), one manuscript said that it came from divina domo (God's house).⁵¹ But the computer indexing of Augustine's words now establishes that domus divina was not a locution Augustine used, with one possible and partial late exception - his preferred form for God's house was domus Dei (O 3.59-61).

Besides, if the voice were coming directly from God, why would Augustine not only take the singsong as being chanted by a child, but search his mind to decide whether this was a chant connected with any childhood game he knew? Augustine treats this voice in a way different entirely from the way he responds to his own image of Self-Control. He did not ask himself whether that virtue normally had her arms full of temperate people. He says that Self-Control addressed him in "some such words" as the ones used, not in the direct but puzzling quotation Tolle! Lege! Unless that quote were exact, Augustine could not have asked himself to make sense of it. The whole presentation of the child's voice is meant to emphasize its literal reality. If there was no such literal reality, then Augustine has been at some pains to deceive us. If we are not to call Augustine a liar, then, we must conclude, as unambiguously as Courcelle concludes the opposite, that the voice was real.

But that does not mean that Courcelle's approach is fundamentally wrong. The point is not whether the voice occurred, but what Augustine made of its occurrence, both at the time and in writing The Testimony. After all, other events actually occurred, but were used retrospectively to make theological points in Augustine's program for The Testimony. The pear theft's meaning is elaborated far beyond the literal facts involved, presuming (as I do) that there were some literal facts at the base of the elaborations. The same is true for his father's comment in the public baths, for the death of Augustine's friend, and for the garden experience with Monnica. All are the subject of later reflection on their ultimate meaning for Augustine; yet all depart in some way from what can be accepted as a real event.

I would go further, and say that they all have meanings that are linked with the overall structure of The Testimony, and therefore with the book of Genesis. The entire Testimony moves toward the probing of the mysteries of God to be found in the opening book of the Bible. Augustine's Testimony is an act of purification from sin, of the kind priests invoke as they prepare to read Scripture in public. It is, then, a prayer to be made worthy, a petition for entry into the sacred revelation. In this light, Augustine is approaching Genesis by a process that attunes him to it, makes him see its patterns in his own life, revealing the relevance of what he has undergone to what he is proposing. It is a case of ontogeny forecasting phylogeny. Each of the events in the book that is given profound theological reflection has a relationship to the Genesis mysteries.

1. The public baths. The first vivid event reported in The Testimony comes near the beginning of Book Two - the observation of Augustine's sexual maturity by his father (T 2.6). Up to this point, Augustine's memories were vague or generic - of childhood stealing, delinquency from school, resistance to learning Greek. The most specific thing mentioned in Book One was an illness that made him cry for baptism; but this event too is described vaguely - the disease is not named, nor are his mother's comments directly quoted. The scene in the public baths is far more specific - it even tells us what was going through his father's mind (that now he could have grandchildren).

© 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.