Notes
on Augustine's Confessions
Book
8: Augustine's Moral Conversion
Contents of Book 8:
Summary
Book 8 represents the
immediate steps that led to Augustine's ultimate conversion in August of 386
AD. In 8.1 Augustine affirms his intellectual certainty--gained from
reading the books of the Platonists and the epistles of St. Paul--that God
exists and that He is supremely good and all powerful. But he finds that
there is a big difference between knowing something intellectually and living
one's life according to this knowledge (between knowing the good and
doing the good).
By this time, Augustine is aware that his is
not a problem of intellectual certainty, but of moral stability. In order to
attain this stability he needs to accept the way of the Savior (i.e., humble
acceptance of his own moral infirmity and openness to the healing power of
Christ), but he is unwilling to abandon the conviction of his own moral
autonomy: "The way-the Savior himself-pleased me;" he says,
"but I was still reluctant to enter its narrowness."
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Examples
of Simplicianus and Victorinus (8.2 - 8.4) |
Summary
In order to receive some guidance, Augustine
goes to see Simplicianus, a bishop in Milan. Simplicianus
tells Augsutine the story of Victorinus, who was a pagan noted for his
translation of Neo-Platonic philosophical texts. After studying Scripture with
the same intensity as he previously did pagan literature, Victorinus suddenly
informs Simplicianus that he has decided to become a Christian. Simplicianus
in turn replies that he will not believe that Victorinus is a Christian until
he see him in the Church. Hesitating to enter the Church for fear of offending
his important pagan friends, he responds to Simplicianus’ challenge by
sarcastically questioning whether it is in fact "walls….that make the
Christian." Eventually, however, Victorinus begins to overcome his doubt
and hesitation and seeks to be baptized within the Chuch.
The result of this experience is that
Victorinus becomes a model of Christian piety, giving up his career as a
rhetorician for the sake of his new faith. But the account of Victorinus also
serves the purpose of inspiring Augustine to following Victorinus’
footsteps. "When this man of yours, Simplicianus, told me all this about
Victorinus, I was on fire to imitate him, and this, of course, was why he had
told me the story."
But what aspect of the story in particular
is Augustine set on fire to imitate? The significance of Victorinus is
that of a great man who chooses obscurity within the Church. By humbly
submitting to its authority, he now has the power of the collective body of the
members of the Church to inspire and guide him. Augustine compares Victorinus
to Paul, another great man whose pride was beaten down and who also became a
"simple subject" of Christ. Both Paul and Victorinus are compelled
to forsake their pride, arrogance and self-reliance and in doing so find
greater strength by becoming members of the Church. The example, then, that
Augustine is set on fire to imitate is the example of one who rejects the
presumptuous path of self-autonomy and places himself at the mercy of Christ
by inscribing himself within the institution of the Church. This is the
example that the reader is likewise inspired to be "set on fire" to
imitate.
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Read
Confession 8.2 - 8.4 |
Summary
Augustine may be "set
on fire" to imitate Victorinus' example, but he finds himself being
"held back...by the iron bondage of [his] own will." Now that
he is no longer a Manichean, he can't simply think that it was the "force
of darkness" that was compelling him to sin against his own will.
He now knows that he himself must ultimately be responsible for his own
failings. But how can he account for the fact that he cannot simply will
himself to stop sinning, even though he desires to do so?
To answer this question, Augustine devises
his theory of the divided will. In general, an act of the will is quite
simple. When it comes to moving a limb, for example, all one has to do
is will the limb to move, and it does so automatically. Will and action
here are one and the same. On the other hand, it is not quite so simple
to think that we can overcome our illicit desires and inclinations, simple by
willing them to disappear. I may desire to stop smoking, for example,
but instead of being able to throw away my pack of cigarettes, I experience a
conflict within my own will. I want to stop smoking, but I find myself
incapable of doing so.
What is the reason for such a conflict?
The answer, according to Augustine, is that I am not really desiring to do the
good resolutely. Part of me wants to give up smoking, but another part
doesn't really want to give up the pleasure of a nicotine rush. I am not
completely sincere in my desire to stop smoking, so I lack a will that is
unified enough to help me kick the habit.
The problem for Augustine is not that he
does not want to follow God’s law--his anguish over his moral failings
clearly indicates that he does--but that he is not deliberate enough in his
commitment to this law. As Mary Clark puts it, "If the
will already desires what the command imposes, a command is given
half-heartedly, and not obeyed, so that it is useless to give
it." In order for Augustine to overcome the division within
his will, it is necessary for him to will resolutely and sincerely to follow
God’s law, and not in the half-hearted way that he had done so up until this
point. In Confessions 8.8, for example, Augustine specifically says
that although in principle he wants to adopt a Christian lifestyle he does
not, in fact, really want to give up his lustful way of life: "I was
afraid that you might hear me too soon and cure me too soon from the disease
of a lust which I preferred to be satisfied rather than extinguished."
Likewise, his lament in 8.7 to be made "chaste and continent, but not
yet" is symptomatic of one who is not yet fully committed to change his
life according to the requirements of the law.
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Read
Confession 8.6 - 8.7 |
Summary
In the midst of his struggles with his
divided will, Augustine receives a surprise visit from Ponticianus, a fellow
African. Ponticianus notices a collection of the epistles of Paul
lying on a game table before him, and expresses his delight that Augustine is
reading this work. He goes on to tell the two about the conversion of St.
Anthony and about the various communities of ascetics living in the desert.
After describing these incidents, Ponticianus then recounts another incident
that he had personally witnessed. He explains to Augustine that, while he was
in Trier, he and three friends went for a walk in a garden outside the wall of
the city. Having split up during the course of the walk, two members of the
group came upon a house in which some Christian ascetics resided. Upon
entering, they discovered a book containing an account of the life of Anthony,
which they proceeded to read. As a result of reading the text, one of these
men became "filled with a holy love" and after a period of intense
internal conflict decided to become a Christian:
So he read on, and his heart, where you saw
it, was changed, and as soon appeared, his mind shook off the burden of the
world. While he was reading and the waves of his heart rose and fell, there
were times when he cried out against himself, and then he distinguished the
better course and chose it for his own. Now he was yours, and he said to his
friend: ‘I have now broken away from all our service now, this moment, in
this place. You may not like to imitate me in this, but you must not oppose
me.’
His companion, far from opposing him, is
immediately moved to follow him. Furthermore, when these two informed their fiancées
of the path that they had chosen, they in turn also decided to enter
the service of the Church. Ponticianus, on the other hand, still filled
with a love for worldly ambition, is not yet able to put aside his career
goals and follow his friends.
Although on the surface it again appears
that this conversion account is meant to inspire Augustine to reject the
married life or his secular career, this is not the aim that Augustine has in
relaying it to the reader. Ultimately what impresses Augustine about
Ponticianus’ story is not specifically what his two friends had been able to
give up (i.e., their fiancées and careers) but that they had been able to let
go of their own wills, while he is completely unable to do so: "the more
ardent was the love I felt for those two men of whom I was hearing and of how
healthfully they had been moved to give themselves up entirely to you to be
cured, the more bitter was the hatred I felt for myself when I compared myself
with them." Augustine’s aim in sharing this story with the reader-like
Ponticianus’ aim in sharing it with Augustine-is to convince the reader that
his own salvation depends, not upon the specific vocation he adopts, but upon
the particular moral attitude he adopts. The use of medical imagery here is
highly appropriate: Augustine and the reader must both admit that they are
sick, that they are helpless to cure themselves and that they need to rely
totally and exclusively on the divine physician’s care in order to be cured.
Neither Victorinus nor Ponticianus’ friends in Trier had brought about their
own conversion; their sole virtue lay in "giving themselves up" to
God in order to be cured. Having done this, they experience precisely what
Monica and Alypius eventually come to experience-liberation from the slavery
of their respective habits. All of them, writes Augustine, "have had the
weight taken from their backs and have been given wings to fly." As a
result they not only have the will (voluntas) to follow God’s law,
but the power (facultas) as well.
The result of these stories is heightened
sense of despair that slowly begins to tear down the walls of Augustine’s
pride. For the first time Augustine recognizes that his intellectual
prowess can never assure him of the happiness he seeks, and, for the first
time as well, he begins to experience a real sense of his own moral impotence.
Only when Augustine has reached the point of utter desperation-the confidence
in the strength of his own will completely shattered-can he sincerely and
resolutely begin to look for a higher power to heal the division within his
soul. It is at this moment of utter helplessness, and of complete surrender,
that he experiences his greatest triumph in the garden of Milan.
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Read
Confession 8.8 - 8.12 |
Summary
In the midst of the crisis brought about by
the conversion accounts told to him by Simplicianus and Ponticianus, Augustine
finds himself in a garden with Alypius, where he has resolved to settle once 
and for all the conflict within his soul. He describes himself as "sick
and in torture" over his inability to put aside lustful desires and finds
himself growing progressively more ashamed of his own moral weakness. In what
is certainly the most artfully written section of the Confessions, Augustine
creates an imaginary conflict within his own mind between the personifications
of the objects of his lust, his mistresses of old, and that of "calm and
serene" Continence. These objects of his lust (sex, power, wealth and
fame) taunt him with the challenge of whether he can live without them.
Implied in this taunt is the idea that if he cannot live without these lesser
goods, then they, rather than God, have become the ultimate source of his
delight.
At the same time, Augustine receives a
vision of Continence, urging him towards an ordered love of worldly things.
But how can he maintain an ordered love, when his will is still captivated by
a disordered longing for worldly pleasure? The answer that Continence reveals
to him is by not trying to rely on his own strength to accomplish this end,
but rather by depending on God. Showing Augustine the images of men and women
who have managed to give up worldly pursuits, Continence then reminds him that
the strength they have to forsake the ways of the flesh is not their own
doing:
‘Can you not do what these men and these
women have done? Or do you think that their ability is in themselves and not
in the Lord their God? It was the Lord God who gave me to them. Why do you
try to stand by yourself, and so not stand at all [quid in te stas et non
in te stas]? Let him support you. Do not be afraid. He will not draw
away and let you fall. Put yourself fearlessly in His hands. He will receive
you and will make you well.’
The choice that Augustine is faced with at
this crucial juncture of the Confessions, then, is whether to continue
along the path of presumption--the path of philosophy and of
self-autonomy--and, in doing so, continue to fall prey to the force of habit;
or whether to humbly implore the aid of the Liberator, forsaking the pride
that has been the central driving force of his life until this point. Should
he give up Cicero, Plotinus and the entire Latin philosophical tradition, that
is, and return to the African religion of his childhood with its frightening
tendencies toward authoritarianism and superstition? In light of fifteen
hundred years of Catholic doctrine the choice does seem as horrifying today as
it must have been in 386. But the question that Augustine is ultimately faced
with at this time is whether to forsake a philosophy of the will that was
considered the common intellectual currency of his time for an approach to
religion emphasizing original sin, election and grace that must have appeared
dubious, at least, to his more enlightened contemporaries. He must decide, in
the end, whether to take the insights that he had garnered from his reading of
Paul to their logical, albeit frightening, conclusion, and in doing so subvert
a tradition for which he had previously been a chief spokesman. Understood in
this light, one can hardly blame Augustine for his reluctance to relinquish
the last vestiges of his self-autonomy.
In the midst of this crisis--Augustine’s
confidence in the power of his own will at its lowest point in the Confessions--he
tearfully throws himself under "a certain fig tree," and in utter
desperation pleads for divine assistance. At that very moment he hears the
voice of a child, which he interprets as a divine admonition:
Suddenly a voice reaches my ears from a
nearby house. It is the voice of a boy or a girl [quasi pueri an puellae],
I don’t know which, and in a kind of singsong the words are constantly
repeated: ‘Take it and read it. Take it and read it. [tolle lege]…I
check the force of my tears and rose to my feet, being quite certain that I
must interpret this as a divine command to me to open the book and read the
first passage which I should come upon….So I went eagerly back to the
place where Alypius was sitting, since it was there that I had left the book
of the apostle when I rose to my feet. I snatched it up [arripui], I
opened it, and read in silence the passage upon which my eyes first fell:
‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in clamoring and wantonness, not in
strife and envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not
provision for the flesh in concupiscence.’ I had no wish to read further;
there was no need to. For immediately [statim] I had reached the end
of this sentence it was as though my heart was filled with a light of
confidence and all the shadows of my doubt were swept away.
Upon receiving this admonition, Augustine
shares his experience with Alypius, who coincidently is going through his own
crisis. Upon opening the same text, Alypius receives a similar admonition,
with the result that he too is strengthened in his resolve to follow God’s
law. Both decide immediately to put aside thoughts of marriage and a secular
career and decide to enter the Church.
Interpretation
Several important factors reveal that
Augustine is once again attempting to illustrate the process of conversion
that we saw in the stories of Alypius, Victorinus and the friends of
Ponticianus, this time using his own conversion as a model. First, as in the
earlier accounts, the scene in the garden is replete with chance occurrences
and indefinite expressions. He thus throws himself "under a certain fig
tree" (sub quadam fici arbore), is aroused from his sorrows by the
almost mystical voice of " a boy or a girl" (quasi pueri
anpuellae) coming from a nearby house, and turns to a volume of the
epistles of Paul, which he just happens to have with him. As John O’Meara
points out, Augustine’s fondness for indefinite expressions (as well as for
chance occurrence) at the most crucial points in the Confessions reflects
his belief that Providence disposes all things, however unrelated they might
appear from a human perspective, for its own purposes: "Augustine had
such confidence in this unerring Providence that he is content sometimes to
indicate a detail in the pattern in the most general way only-as if to be too
precise and explicit about petty facts were to distract one’s attention from
the really important thing-the working of Providence." O’Meara goes on
to observe that in no other section of the Confessions does indefinite
phasing occur to the degree that it does in Book 8.12.
The result of Augustine’s experience of
divine grace is a sense of inner peace, conviction and joy that overtakes him
almost immediately. He describes himself as being "shot through [the]
heart" with divine charity, as "on fire" to follow God’s law,
and "boiled again" with hope in divine mercy. Like Victorinus before
him, Augustine is inspired to give up all worldly ambitions and the desire for
a wife, and is instead moved to a life of celibacy in the Church. By the
beginning of Book 9 he has already sacrificed a lucrative career as a teacher
of rhetoric for the sake of his new-found faith and subsequently discovers
that he is better able to order the temporal goods in his life, since now his
"good things were not external were not sought with the eyes of the
flesh. Having been given the grace to attain an ordered love of worldly
things, Augustine slowly begins to discover the joy that comes from loving all
things in God rather than in themselves:
Those who find their joys in things
outward easily become vain and waste themselves on things seen and temporal
and, with their minds starving, go licking at shadows....if only they could
see the eternal light inside themselves....I had tasted of it....Nor did I
wish for any multiplication of earthly goods; in these one wastes and is
wasted by time. In the Eternal Simplicity I had other corn and wine and
oil."
But the delight that Augustine experiences
after his conversion in the garden of Milan is only a foretaste of what awaits
him in Ostia. Having strived for years to attain the beatific vision, and
having failed time and again, Augustine suddenly discovers that his greatest
ambition is to be realized at the moment he has let go of all ambition.
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Read
Confession 8.8 - 8.12 |
Suggestions
for Further Reading |
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Babcock, William.
"Augustine and the Spirituality of Desire." Augustinian
Studies 25 (1994): 179-199.
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Brown, Peter. Augustine
of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
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Clark, Mary T. Augustine:
Philosopher of Freedom. Tournai: Desclée, 1958.
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Ferrari, Leo.
"Paul at the Conversion of Augustine." Augustineian
Studies 11 (1980): 5-20.
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Henry, Paul. The
Path to Transcendence: From Philosophy to Mysticism in St. Augustine.
Trans. Francis Burch. Pittsburg: Pickwick, 1981.
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Mallard, William. Language
and Love: Introducing Augustine’s Religious Thought Through the
Confessions Story. University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1994.
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Miles, Margaret. Desire
and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions. New York:
Crossroad Publishing, 1991.
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O’Meara, John J. The
Young Augustine. London: Longman Publishing, 1954.
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Stark, Judith.
"The Dynamics of the Will in Augustine's Conversion." Collectanea
Augustiniana. Vol. 2. Ed. Joseph C. Schnauholt and Frederick
Van Fleteren. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
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Starnes, Colin. Augustine’s
Conversion: A Guide to the Argument of Confessions I-IX. Waterloo,
Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press (1990).
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Frederick Van Fleteren,
"St. Augustine's Theory of Conversion." Collectanea
Augustiniana. Vol. 2. Ed. Joseph C. Schnauholt and Frederick
Van Fleteren. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
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Wetzel, James. Augustine
and the Limits of Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992.
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