The Conversion of Augustine

Augustine of Hippo was an African from Thagaste (Possidius, Life of Augustine 1) who taught rhetoric and for nine years followed the Manichaean religion (Augustine, Confessions 4.1.1). The prefect of Rome sent him to Milan, where the emperor’s court then sat, as the city’s professor of rhetoric (Augustine, Confessions 5.13.23) (Possidius, Life of Augustine 1). There he went to hear the bishop, Ambrose, at first for the style of his preaching and not for its content (Augustine, Confessions 5.13.23). His mother Monica, a Christian, followed him from Africa (Augustine, Confessions 6.1.1).

By his own account he became convinced that the church’s teaching was true well before he could bring himself to act on it, held back by what he calls the chain of his own will (Augustine, Confessions 8.5.10–12). Two stories moved him. Simplicianus, whom Ambrose loved as a father, told him how Victorinus, a celebrated teacher of rhetoric at Rome, had made public profession of the faith (Augustine, Confessions 8.2.3–5). Then Ponticianus, a fellow African serving at court, told him and his friend Alypius about Antony of Egypt, and about two imperial agents at Trier who had given up their careers on reading Antony’s life (Augustine, Confessions 8.6.14–15). Augustine reckons that some twelve years had then passed since his nineteenth year, when a book of Cicero first stirred him to seek wisdom (Augustine, Confessions 8.7.17).

Augustine went out into the garden of the house where he lodged (Augustine, Confessions 8.8.19). Weeping under a fig tree, he heard from a neighbouring house a child’s voice repeating “Take up and read”. He remembered that Antony had taken a Gospel reading as spoken to himself, went back to the book of Paul’s letters that he had left beside Alypius, and read the first words he saw (Romans 13:13–14). He writes that all his doubt vanished at once. Alypius resolved to join him, and they went in and told Monica (Augustine, Confessions 8.12.28–30).

A few days later the vintage holiday began. Augustine resigned his post and withdrew with his mother, his son and his friends to a country house, where he wrote several books (Augustine, Confessions 9.2.2) (Augustine, Confessions 9.4.7). They returned to Milan to enrol for baptism, and he was baptised with Alypius and his fifteen-year-old son Adeodatus (Augustine, Confessions 9.6.14). His friend Possidius adds that it was at Easter and at the hands of Ambrose (Possidius, Life of Augustine 1). On the way home to Africa Monica died at Ostia (Augustine, Confessions 9.8.17) (Augustine, Confessions 9.11.28).

Augustine became a presbyter and then bishop of Hippo Regius (Possidius, Life of Augustine 4, 8), and wrote this account about ten years after the event, as a bishop interpreting his own past. Near the end of his life he pointed to it himself as evidence that God by grace turns wills that are set against him (Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance 20.53), which was the point at issue in his dispute with Pelagius.