Renaldo W.
St. Augustine’s Confessions is an amalgam of autobiography, theology, and exegesis which he wrote when he was about forty-five. Throughout the document it is filled with personal reflections on the nature of conversion and the arduous avenues by which Augustine accredited God to have led him to Christianity. Augustine’s own conversion was one of initial spiritual discontent as a youth to what Ehrman describes an “emotional surrender to God,” in his thirties.
Augustine narrates the emotional turmoil of his eventual conversion and misspent youth and adolescence with guilt and full of remorse:
“The new will, which was beginning to be within me a will to serve you freely and to enjoy you, God, the only source of pleasure, was not yet strong enough to conquer my older will, which had the strength of old habit. So my two wills, one old, the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual, were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of concentration.” After hearing about the Life of the Egyptian monk Antony, Augustine writes:
“I did not wish to observe myself, and you set me before my face so that I should see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered in sores and ulcers. And I looked and was appalled, but there was no way of escaping myself.” It is shortly thereafter Augustine explains how he was moved by the Roman orator Cicero’s Hortensius which “stirred to a zeal for wisdom,” in him. Lynch explains the attraction to Cicero due to the language of Latin being for the poor and uneducated missionaries who conducted translations that were inferior to that of the likes of Cicero and Virgil. As an adolescent Augustine was even a Manichaean, in which he later repudiated that association (in Confessions in fact). According to Lynch “Ancient and modern critics of Augustine’s views, especially his negative views on sexuality, accused him of bringing some remnants of Manichaeism with him into the church,” (Lynch 217).
By the end of the document Augustine recounts how he finally converted fully to Catholicism in his thirties. One could argue that his whole life led to this but three major incidents I believe contributed to the conversion. The accounts of Antony’s life, hearing Bishop Ambrose of Milan’s sophisticated Christian message, and the preverbal straw that broke the camel’s back, Augustine was inspired by a voice he heard one day of a boy or a girl, which he did not know, chanting repeatedly “pick up and read, pick up and read.” This prompted him to pick up and read Paul’s letters. After reading the first passage he neither wished nor needed to read further, for “At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All shadows of doubt were dispelled.” Finally after all of those long hard years his tortuous journey of conversion was now complete; and while a personal account, it can also describe many other’s journey to God.
St. Augustine’s Confessions is an amalgam of autobiography, theology, and exegesis which he wrote when he was about forty-five. Throughout the document it is filled with personal reflections on the nature of conversion and the arduous avenues by which Augustine accredited God to have led him to Christianity. Augustine’s own conversion was one of initial spiritual discontent as a youth to what Ehrman describes an “emotional surrender to God,” in his thirties.
Augustine narrates the emotional turmoil of his eventual conversion and misspent youth and adolescence with guilt and full of remorse:
“The new will, which was beginning to be within me a will to serve you freely and to enjoy you, God, the only source of pleasure, was not yet strong enough to conquer my older will, which had the strength of old habit. So my two wills, one old, the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual, were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of concentration.” After hearing about the Life of the Egyptian monk Antony, Augustine writes:
“I did not wish to observe myself, and you set me before my face so that I should see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered in sores and ulcers. And I looked and was appalled, but there was no way of escaping myself.” It is shortly thereafter Augustine explains how he was moved by the Roman orator Cicero’s Hortensius which “stirred to a zeal for wisdom,” in him. Lynch explains the attraction to Cicero due to the language of Latin being for the poor and uneducated missionaries who conducted translations that were inferior to that of the likes of Cicero and Virgil. As an adolescent Augustine was even a Manichaean, in which he later repudiated that association (in Confessions in fact). According to Lynch “Ancient and modern critics of Augustine’s views, especially his negative views on sexuality, accused him of bringing some remnants of Manichaeism with him into the church,” (Lynch 217).
By the end of the document Augustine recounts how he finally converted fully to Catholicism in his thirties. One could argue that his whole life led to this but three major incidents I believe contributed to the conversion. The accounts of Antony’s life, hearing Bishop Ambrose of Milan’s sophisticated Christian message, and the preverbal straw that broke the camel’s back, Augustine was inspired by a voice he heard one day of a boy or a girl, which he did not know, chanting repeatedly “pick up and read, pick up and read.” This prompted him to pick up and read Paul’s letters. After reading the first passage he neither wished nor needed to read further, for “At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All shadows of doubt were dispelled.” Finally after all of those long hard years his tortuous journey of conversion was now complete; and while a personal account, it can also describe many other’s journey to God.