Saint Augustine's Conversion - Hardcover

Wills, Garry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670033529 ISBN 13: 9780670033522

Publisher: Viking, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

part i

Introduction

1. The Book of Conversions

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 conversionùin such classics on the subject as William JamesÆs The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) or Arthur Darby NockÆs Conversion (1933). The stories of Paul and Augustine have led to a belief that ôrealö 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 storiesùseven of them, with his own coming as the climactic eighth case, and with PaulÆs as a ninth one implicit in the text that Augustine reads in the garden. The artistry of AugustineÆs 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 sentenceùôLord, give me chastity and self-control, but not just nowö [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 PaulÆs conversion at Acts 12.6û12) is used to show that celebrity conversions are worth encouraging. Everyone else ôconvertedö 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 ôconvertö 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 callingùto the monastic life (PonticianÆs friends) or to a hermitÆs life (Anthony). Augustine has chosen his parallel narratives carefully, since his own case will combine both kinds of spiritual changeùhe 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 struggleÆs 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 rulerÆs 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 oneùwhich 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, AugustineÆs life up to the garden scene was one long tale of conversionsùfrom 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 ChristÆs 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. ôThe conversions of Augustine were many, and they did not end in the garden in Milanö

(O 1.xlii). There was as much continuity as disjunction in his lifeÆs developmentùwhich 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 doubtedùat 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 AugustineÆs 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 orderùjust what kind and degree of order will be the matter for decisionùbut 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 mythsùthat of Monnica, that of Ambrose, that of Paul at Damascus, and that of Augustine in the garden. In order, then:

2. The Myth of Monnica1
His mother joined him at Milan, and he was
under the influence of her life and faith ...
ùNock, Conversion

It is often assumed or asserted that AugustineÆs conversion was the result of his motherÆs efforts and prayers. It is true that by the time Augustine wrote The Testimony, he attributed his conversion to GodÆs grace, and attributed much of that grace to MonnicaÆs prayers. But the idea that she had a controlling influence at the time, or even a very strong one, cannot be substantiated in the natural order, or by any literal reading of the evidence. The hagiographical approach to her life has greatly inflated her roleùyet all that we know of her comes from The Testimony, which does not present her as a perfect mother or Christian. The exaggeration of her influence reaches a dark apogee in Rebecca WestÆs biography of Augustine:

She did not want her son to grow up.... It was fortunate that in her religion she had a perfect and, indeed, noble instrument for obtaining her desire that her son should not become a man. Very evidently Christianity need not mean emasculation, but the long struggles of Augustine and Monnica imply that in his case it did.... With her smooth competence she must have been able to make the Church a most alluring prospect.2

The most significant thing Augustine says of his mother during his own youth was that she had fled from the epicenter of Babylon (worldly corruption) but was loitering (tardior ibat) in other parts of it (T 2.8), which is not the definition of a saint, by his own exacting standards. He rebukes Monnica for worldliness on several occasionsùwhen she did not baptize him after his childhood sickness (T 1.18), when she did not urge marriage on him earlier (T 2.8), when she arranged a worldly marriage to an underage heiress (T 6.23). She was far from controlling his life. He ignored her advice on sexual continence, saying he would have blushed to obey words he considered ôwomanishö (T 2.7). He remained a Manichean for a decade despite her objections. He lied in order to give her the slip before leaving Africa (T 5.15). He mentions her name only once (T 9.37) in all his five million words of writings.

He did not initially share her admiration for Ambrose, the bishop of Milan who would baptize him. He did not join her in the church when Ambrose held his long vigil of defiance against the empress Justina (T 9.15). He did not, at that point, believe in church miracles (as opposed to gospel miracles), and he no doubt differed with her on AmbroseÆs theatrical introduction of miracle-working martyrsÆ bodies into his fight with the empress (T 9.15).3 This attitude toward miracles would not have made him well-disposed to his motherÆs claim that she could tell divine visions by their odor (T 6.23). Nor would he have sympathized with her semi-Manichean rites at martyrsÆ tombs, from which she would not have desisted but for her reverence toward Ambrose (T 6.2).

These misgivings, no doubt stronger at the time than when he records them a decade later, are countered, of course, by the marvelous tribute he pays to Monnica in Book Nine of The Testimony. But that tribute follows on his rediscovery of Monnica at Cassiciacum, just before his baptism, when for the first time she was included in the discussions of his philosophical friends. Before this, he had the prejudice of his time and class against the intellects of women. His first plan of a philosophical community, formed in Milan, fell through over the issue of including women (T 6.24). OÆDonnell suggests that Monnica may have been illiterate (O 3.115). Monnica at first resisted her inclusion in the Cassiciacum discussions, but Augustine encouraged her.4 He laughed with surprise at her earthy wisdom, on this first occasion of her displaying it to him.5 He tells her, ôI am daily struck anew by your natural ability.ö6 The sexist compliment he pays her is itself revealing: ôForgetting her sex, we almost thought that some important man had joined us.ö7

On the basis of his new respect for Monnica, the mystical experience he shared with this unlettered woman (as first reported a decade later from his bishopÆs residence) is meant to destroy the presumption that soul- culture demands exercise in the liberal artsùthough he continued to hold that view for some time after the reported experience. Monnica did not lead him to baptism. Rather, baptism led him to Monnica. The long excursus on her in Book Nine is very likely derived from a eulogy composed first for the benefit of her children and grandchildren. We know how much his own son loved his grandmother (T 9.29). Presumably, AugustineÆs sister and brother had the same feeling for her, as did his brotherÆs children. If, as Courcelle plausibly maintained, Augustine could write the tribute to Alypius (T 6.11û16) for Paulinus of Nola, surely he could have done the same for his own relatives.8 Augustine only realized her worth in MonnicaÆs last months, after his conversionùfor which she was not responsible, except by prayer.

3. The Myth of Ambrose

... he was under the influence of her life and faith,
as well as of AmbroseÆs sermons.
ùNock, Conversion

It is a commonplace that Ambrose, presiding in Milan, played the key role in AugustineÆs conversion, mainly by showing him that the Jewish scripture, which had seemed crude, could be read symbolically. AmbroseÆs sermons are supposed to have brought about this change in attitude. But Augustine tells us that he listened to the sermons for their style, not their content, and that he thought the style inferior to that of Faustus the Manichean (T 5.23). Far from opening the scripture to him, Ambrose just recommended that he read Isaiah after Augustine told him he was already willing to be baptizedùand Augustine, far from reading Isaiah symbolically, found the book impenetrable (T 9.13). Augustine found what he needed with the help of Simplician, who directed him to the New Testament, to the letters of Paul, which would play a key role in the garden. Ambrose was still a distant and useless figure when Augustine underwent what he describes in that garden:

He [Ambrose] was unaware of my seethings at the pit of peril. I could not inquire of him what I wished, crowded out as I was from his hearing and speaking by a swarm of those with worldly needs, to whose demands he gave his attention (T 6.3).

Except for brief interviews on business, there was clearly no occasion to pursue fully all that I desired from that oracle of yours, his breast. To pour out my needs would have taken up time that was simply not available (T 6.4).

Those passages are enough to refute the old idea that Augustine was referring to Ambrose when he wrote his Neoplatonist mentor, Mallius Theodore, about ôconversations held with you and our priest friendö (presbyter noster).9 The man referred to is clearly Simplician, AmbroseÆs Neoplatonist teacher, who baptized Ambrose and succeeded him as bishop of Milan. Augustine went to him for spiritual guidance. He corresponded with Simplician in later years (Epistle 37), something that Augustine never did with Ambrose.10 It was as the doyen of Milan Neoplatonists that Simplician would have known and conversed with Theodore. And Theodore, to whom The Testament makes only glancing and denigrating reference (T 7.13), is described by Augustine, when he was at Cassiciacum, as a leading force in his conversion and Christian aspirations.11

Since, my Theodore, I look only to you for what I need, impressed by your possession of it, consider what type of man is presented to you, what state I believe I am in, what kind of help I am sure you can give me.... I came to recognize, in the conversations about God held with you and our priest friend, that He is not to be considered as in any way corporeal.... After I read a few books of Plotinus, of whom you are a devotee, and tested them against the standard of the sacred writings, I was on fire.... So I beg you by your own goodness, by your concern for others, by the linkage and interaction of our souls, stretch out your hand to meùto love me and believe you are loved in return and held dear. If I beg this, I may, helped by my own poor effort, reach the happiness in this life that I suspect you have already gained. That you may know what I am doing, how I am conducting my friends to shelter, and that you may see in this my very soul (for I have no other means to reveal it to you), I thought I should address you and should dedicate in your name this early discourse, which I consider more religious than my other ones, and therefore worthy of you. Its subject is appropriate, since together we pondered the subject of happiness in this life, and I hold no gift of God could be greater than that. I am not abashed by your eloquence (why should that abash me which, without rivaling it, I honor) nor by the loftiness of your positionùhowever great it is, you discountenance it, knowing that only what one masters can turn a truly favorable countenance on one.12

Augustine complains that at the point when he was desperately seeking enlightenment, ôThere was no time to be had from Ambroseö (T 6.18), and in his early writings he says that it was cruel of the bishop not to help him in his need.13 His comments on the bishopÆs concern with worldly adjustments indicate that he thought he and his fellow Christian phil...

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0670033529
• ISBN 13: 9780670033522
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144