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7. Conversion
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chapter seven Conversion Conversion tends to be thought of and discussed as a sudden, dramatic, and complete transformation of the self, instantly creating a new person changed at the core.1 The paradigm owes not a little to Augustine’s dramatic account of his own sudden decision to change his life one late summer day in 386 in the garden of a friend’s home in Milan (Conf 8.6.13–12.30). But if anything like the famous scene in the Milanese garden ever occurred, it was only a point along the course of a conversion process. By the time he writes his Confessions, Augustine sees his entire life—not without good reason—as that conversion process, a continuous remaking of self. His literary gifts in constructing the garden scene, however, have obscured this larger theme for many of the work’s readers. While acknowledging Augustine’s insight into the necessarily protracted character of self-transformation, the historian must be a bit less teleological than Augustine could afford to be. Even though Augustine’s change from a “Manichaean” to a “Catholic” identity made a tremendous historical difference, there was nothing inevitable about it. As it happens, Augustine’s uptake of Manichaean models of selfhood proved inadequate and incomplete. As it happens, his reservations were met not with a dogmatic challenge of an either/or choice, but by the liberal skepticism of Faustus, who directed Augustine toward a practice-oriented construction of selfhood rather than an intellectual one. As it happens, certain characteristics in Augustine’s antecedent self resisted the neglect of intellectual satisfaction entailed in Faustus’s proposal. These historical accidents produced the conditions under which a process of deconversion and apostasy from 194 chapter seven Manichaeism could occur. Augustine committed himself to Faustus’s skepticism initially, but apparently found the reorientation to practice hollow without intellectual conviction. While remaining a practicing Manichaean in the world of visible conduct, he gradually found greater intellectual satisfaction on some issues in non-Manichaean sources. He drifted out of the Manichaean community, eventually finding his way into the Nicene churches and Platonic reading circles of the elite strata of society he had joined in Milan. Writing in the Confessions more than a decade later, Augustine maintains that he felt compelled to supplement his intellectual interests with membership in a religious community. I decided that I must leave the Manichaeans; for in that time of doubt, I did not think I could remain in a sect to which I now preferred certain of the philosophers. Yet I absolutely refused to entrust the care of my sick soul to the philosophers, because they were without the saving name of Christ. I determined, then, to go on as a catechumen in the Catholic Church—the church of my parents—and to remain in that state until some certain light should appear by which I might steer my course. (Conf 5.14.25) We can compare this statement to another made at the time of the events themselves, in The Academics, where Augustine declares his resolve not to abandon the authority of Christ in the face of changes in his metaphysical commitments away from those he held as a Manichaean (Acad 3.20.43). It has been all too easy heretofore to ignore the fact that he had been conditioned to this high valuation of Christ’s authority not by Nicene Christianity, but by Manichaeism, which alone had maintained his tenuous interest in anything remotely “religious,” and which had even built on the foundation of his attraction to its rationality a respect for spiritual authority. In writing The Academics and the other works coinciding with his conversion process, Augustine shows clearly that his interests still fall primarily on epistemological, cosmological, and metaphysical questions, and secondarily on ethics; the devotional rhetoric and references to cultic activity typically thought of as “religion” in his day make no stronger appearance in these writings than they do in Cicero’s literary gestures to conventional piety. Augustine ’s deference to Christ attests less to a radical individual choice than to the triumph of Christian culture in the late fourth century, whereby all of Au- Conversion 195 gustine’s viable options had some connection to the Christian tradition. The “saving name of Christ” featured so little in Augustine’s discussions with his friends at this point that his close companion Alypius could propose it be left out altogether from the polished version of his writings (Conf 9.4.7). Could Alypius have...