The Garden, Part 2, Notes

Saint Augustine's Conversion
by Garry Wills

(Page 8 of 8)

Why is this vivid scene included in the book? Various psychosexual explanations have been resorted to; but the norms of inclusion in this book are primarily theological. Considering how much is omitted - all about his siblings, for instance, or his life under Romanian's patronage in Thagaste - one must ask why this, of all things, is reported. Those who think Augustine is obsessed with sex have answers for this - too many answers, in fact.⁵² Few concentrate on what is the most surprising and revealing word in the passage, indutum. Augustine says that he was nude but was "clothed in unstable young manhood." "Unstable" (inquietum) because man is fallen, no longer secure in the garden of Eden - our heart, Augustine memorably says, is unstable (inquietum) until stabilized in God (T 1.1).⁵³ He is clothed, as the naked Adam was "clothed," in the shame of a damaged humanity - which Adam tried to cover with fig leaves.

The encounter with his father in the public baths looks forward to Book Eight's garden scene, where he moves from the fig tree to Paul's admonition to "be clothed (induite) in Christ." That is what happens at baptism. The baptizands, after undergoing a scrutatio - an inspection of the body, like (but how unlike) his father's gaze - went naked into the water, to come out on the other side and be clothed in Christ, wearing white robes of regained innocence.

2. The pear theft. Critics of Augustine, typified by Nietzsche, have mocked the inflation of what would later be called "a second-rate burglary" in the long agonizings of Book Two. The first sin reported in Augustine's time of young manhood is not sexual, but a gratuitous act, not motivated by desire for the stolen fruits. Because the act seems at first undriven by passion, this sin comes close to what Augustine considered the primary characteristic of Adam's sin - that it took place without the distortions of passion resulting from that act. It was sin in an unfallen state, a cold act of disobedience [22]. Augustine's sin for its own sake approximates the passionless original sin.

Of course, after long psychological rumination, Augustine concludes that his sin was not really motiveless - he would not have done it alone, so his motive was solidarity with his fellow delinquents (T 2.17). That, too, brings the sin close to Adam's, since Augustine argued that Adam was not swayed, as Eve was, by the Devil's spurious promises - Adam knew they were false. Then whey did he sin? He did it for the comradely compulsion (socialis necessitudo) of solidarity with Eve.⁵⁴ There can be no doubt that Augustine wants this scene to be read as referring back to the sin of Adam. He says that the young felons took away huge loads (onera ingentia, T 2.9) of pears, and the hell-raising would hardly have made its mark if only one tree were stripped - yet Augustine refers to a symbolic single tree, to underline its relationship with the tree in Eden. A passionless sin is what is at issue when Augustine takes up the heritage of original sin by, in effect, repeating its commission. This puts the pear scene in alignment, as well, with the scene in the baths that preceded it in Book Two. The shame-in-nudity at the baths showed the potential of sin inherited from Adam. The pear theft shows that potential becoming a reality.⁵⁵

3. The friend's death. A second occasion for agonizing, and for Nietzsche's mockery of Augustine's self-reference, is the emotional reaction to his friend's death described in such detail at The Testimony 4.7-12. It is the impurity of his motives for grief that is emphasized there, the selfishness at his own loss, the anger that he could not bring the friend to renounce the baptism he had undergone. He uses a citation from Psalm 41.6 to reveal his anger at not being able to deprive his friend of the gift God had given him. The psalm says: Quare tristis es, anima mea, et quare conturbas me? (Why, in your anguish, are you, my soul, whirling me about?) God asks of Cain, angry at Abel's acceptance by God: Quare tristis factus es, et quare concidit facies tuus? (Why, in your anguish, is your face twisted about?) Once again, Genesis is echoed in Augustine's own life.

4. The garden scene with Monnica. The garden, that recurring scriptural image, once again plays a key role in the scene of Augustine's shared mystical silence with his mother (T 9.25). After his baptism, Augustine is clothed in Christ, saved from the consequences of original sin, so far as that is possible in one's lifetime, and the harmony of the garden of Eden (before original sin ruined it) is partly experienced, or almost experienced, for a moment in this scene of reconciliation not so much between Monnica and Augustine, as between humankind and its Creator.

5. The garden scene in Book Eight. All of the other references to Genesis themes in Augustine's life come to a climax in his garden "conversion." He reverses the progress of Adam by moving from the fig tree of sinful shame to the innocence regained by being clothed in Christ. But there is a further resonance here as well. Gardens are symbolically charged places in Scripture, and Augustine's agony in the garden is bound to suggest the greatest agony in a garden, that of Jesus himself. What some consider the emotionally overwrought descriptions of Augustine's suffering are not more extreme than the words used of Jesus in the gospels. He is sorrowful unto death, so worked upon that he sweats blood, so afflicted that he asks that the cup of suffering pass him by - though he finally surrenders his will to the will of another, using the very words of the greatest Christian prayer, "Thy will be done" (Fiat voluntas tua).

Augustine, too, is tortured unto death - "dying to be alive" [19]. He too is asked to undergo a suffering sent by God, who is "wielding the double whip" over him [25]. Though he does not sweat blood, he is drenched "in great sheets of showering tears" [28]. To stress the connections between these two agonies in the garden, Augustine first enters the garden with Alypius, then leaves him behind, silent and excluded from the agony, before rejoining him to go forth to Monnica. In the same way, Jesus enters the garden with three of his closest disciples, leaves them behind to fall asleep in their ignorance of what he is undergoing, then rejoins them to go forth to his task. The New Testament garden is here joined with that of Genesis, since clothing oneself in Christ can only happen because God suffered with man by becoming incarnate, clothing himself in flesh. The anguish of Adam has to be undone by the agony of Jesus. Augustine, as the heir of that great triumph, moves backward from sin to regain innocence through the redemptive suffering of Christ. He goes from being clothed (indutus) in nakedness to the passage of Paul that says "Be clothed." (This is not a matter of Augustine "presuming" to link his suffering with Christ's, but of Christ coming down to share all the miseries of humankind, while remedying them.) The rich resonances of the garden scene contain more of Christ than of Adam. That is the theological meaning of the decision to be baptized.

The myths of conversion in Book Eight are, therefore, all myths elaborated by Augustine himself. They reveal what was going on "behind the scenes," as it were, things he was not aware of at the time - the power of grace in Monnica's prayer and Ambrose's example, the action of God in his own efforts toward chastity. This is a kind of palinode to the earlier writings, which relied too much (Augustine has come to believe) on natural causes and personal effort, on Mallius Theodore and "Platonic books." The conversion myths are devised to show that God directed the sequence by which Augustine was "making daily progress."

Is the garden scene not true, then? Only if we assume, as too many do, that Augustine is writing an autobiography. He is not. The whole work, and not just the final books, is a theological work, a preparation for the reading of Scripture, for an entry into God's mysteries which God must himself make possible. The God of Genesis is not a text in the past, but an unrecognized constant in Augustine's life, "deeper in me than I am in me" (intimior intimo meo, T 3.11). The garden scene is based on a real event, as were the scenes in the public baths, in the pear orchard, at his friend's deathbed, or with Monnica in Ostia. But they all fit into a larger testimony that celebrates the word of God more than the life of Augustine.

Notes to Introduction

1. For Monnica as the proper (African) spelling of her name, see W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 250.

2. Rebecca West, St. Augustine (D. Appleton & Co., 1933), pp. 26-27.

3. For Augustine's early rejection of post-New Testament miracles, see Order in Creation 2.7.7, on people "daunted by hollow claims of the miracles," and The True Religion 25.47, "Miracles are not permitted to stretch into the present, or the soul would always be looking for sensations, and the human race would grow jaded with their continual occurrence."

4. Augustine, Order in the Universe 1.11.

5. Augustine, Happiness in This Life 2.10, 2.16.

6. Order in the Universe 2.45.

7. Ibid. 2.10.

8. Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (Boccard, Editeur, 1950), pp. 28-32.

9. Happiness in This Life 1.45.

10. Given the importance of both figures, any genuine correspondence between Augustine and Ambrose would instantly have been copied and widely disseminated. It is striking that not even forged letters have ever surfaced.

11. For Augustine's changed views of Theodore, see his Reconsiderations on Happiness in This Life: "Though the man I dedicated this book to was a scholar and a Christian, I gave him more credit than he deserved" (O 2.419-20).

12. Happiness in This Life 1.4-5.

13. Augustine, Dialogue with Myself 2.26.

14. Epistle 10.2.

15. Augustine, The Uses of Belief 8.20.

16. William James, The Variety of Religious Experience, in Writings 1902-1910 (The Library of America, 1987), p. 183. 17. Ibid., p. 226.

18. Ibid., p. 211.

19. Ibid., p. 193.

20. Ibid., p. 196.

21. Ibid., p. 213.

22. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (D. Appleton & Co., 1904).

23. Edwin D. Starbuck, "A Study of Conversion," American Journal of Psychology, January 1897, p. 80.

24. Elmer T. Clark, The Psychology of Religious Awakening (Macmillan, 1929), p. 19. Starbuck's book is The Psychology of Religion (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899).

25. James, op. cit., pp. 185-86.

26. Paul Emanuel Johnson, Psychology of Religion (Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1920, 1959), pp. 100-101: "The more radical awakenings of crisis tend to occur about the age of seventeen - which coincides with earlier reports of Starbuck and Hall. But when religion develops as a gradual process, the awakening comes as early as twelve years. If the process is interrupted or resisted at this age, it is then deferred about five years and requires an emotional crisis to overcome obstruction." Twelve was the average age Elmer T. Clark set for conversion (op. cit., p. 17).

27. There are elaborate tables breaking down this information in Clark, op. cit.

28. James Bissett Pratt, The Religious Consciousness (Macmillan, 1920), p. 153.

29. Johnson, op. cit., p. 99.

30. See, for instance, Bernard Spilka, Ralph W. Hood, Jr., and Richard L. Gorsuch, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach (Prentice-Hall, 1985), pp. 199-224.

31. Pratt, op cit., p. 153.

32. James, op. cit., p. 246.

33. Joseph Addison, The Spectator (Oxford University Press, 1965), vol. 4, p. 252.

34. Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York University Press, 1963), p. 90.

35. Ibid., pp. 10-38.

36. Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 169-72.

37. Edwards diary quoted in George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2003), p. 105.

38. Caldwell, op. cit.

39. George S. Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937), p. 308.

40. Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 8-11.

41. Pratt, op. cit., p. 155.

42. Segal, op. cit., p. 19.

43. Albert Grilli, Ciceronis Hortensius (Istituto editoriale cisalpina, 1962), p. 52.

44. Epistle 1.1.

45. Augustine, What Is Good in Marriage 6-7.

46. Ibid. 6.

47. The doubters' works are cited in Charles Boyer, Christianisme et néo-platonisme dans la formation de Saint Augustin (Gabriel Duchesne, 1920), pp. 2-6.

48. Courcelle, op. cit.

49. Plato, Crito 50-54.

50. Courcelle, op. cit., p. 193.

51. Ibid., pp. 195-96.

52. Psychiatrist Charles Kligerman thinks that Augustine's father found him with an erection (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 5, 1957, pp. 469 ff.). Psychiatrists R. Braendle and W. Neidhardt think he found his son masturbating (Theologische Zeitschrift 40, 1984, pp. 157 ff.). The claims have nothing to do with the text or with the practices of Roman baths. See further in my Saint Augustine (Viking, 1999), pp. xvii-xix.

53. For more on Augustine's statics, see my Saint Augustine's Childhood (Viking, 2001), pp. 83-89.

54. Augustine, City of God 14.11.

55. For more on the pear theft, see my Saint Augustine's Sin (Viking, 2003), pp. 7-19.

© 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.