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chapter nine A New Man? By the standard tropes of conversion, and by Augustine’s own later occasional , if inconsistent, portrayal of his story, we expect to see a new man embodied in his writings of 386–388, transformed by a breakthrough of new commitments and identifications. Yet even Augustine in his Confessions admitted that he could see continuities between the persona he takes in these materials and his pre-conversion preoccupations (Conf 9.4.7; cf. Retr 1.1.1–1.4.4), just as the earlier convert acknowledged being at the beginnings of faith. The faith that must precede understanding—the faith of the convert—involves becoming open and receptive to a system of thought and action, trusting it enough to begin a process of assimilating that system to one’s predispositions, and reciprocally conforming one’s dispositions to the expectations of the new paradigm. The new sources of one’s self gradually supply elements that displace or integrate with previously existing convictions and habits. The initial “take” of a new faith, therefore, will be syncretistic, gradually yielding in varying degrees to a permeation of the self by the adopted system. This is decidedly not the way many religions portray conversion; they have motivation to prefer the model of an instantaneous and total creation of a new self, completely cut free of its past. Augustine puts his own story in the service of this cliché in the Confessions, displacing to the pre-conversion part of the narrative the process we see under way in his early post-conversion writings of a tentative, incremental assimilation of brave new ideas into an existing grid of personal assumptions and preferences. In this way, he seems to leave the garden fully supplied with the full set of insights into his new faith that A New Man? 245 he has at his disposal as he writes the Confessions, erasing the intervening decade in deference to the ideal of an instantly completed and static “Catholic” self. But his writings of the intervening period betray this image as a fantasy, and reveal how Augustine gradually rationalized the discrete set-pieces of the new amalgam of past identity and present commitment, putting them into dialogue with each other, finding ways to make them consistent with one another , inter-referential, and in this way a system of consistent self-performance. Just how systematic or thorough such an integration of discrete commitments becomes will vary greatly from one person to another; but in Augustine we have someone very intent on this process. We should bear in mind the performativity of religious identity, that is, the unavoidable limitation of assessment of religious commitment by external , visible behavior, both physical and verbal. One is not a convert unless and until one acts and speaks the part. And as in all such learned behavior, it involves a process proceeding from the outside in, as performance deepens from a script introduced from outside oneself, to a carefully referenced mimicry of the script, to a gradually habituated unselfconscious embodiment of a tradition of selfhood as the most efficient arrangement of a consistent selfperformance . Because conversion occurs publicly from the first taking up of the script of the convert, it entails no more than a decision to declare one’s intention to proceed with the learning process within the particular community ; and no one can say how far the individual convert may go in internalizing the performance. For that reason, Robert Hefner observes, “conversion need not reformulate one’s understanding of the ultimate conditions of existence , but it always involves commitment to a new kind of moral authority and a new or reconceptualized social identity.”1 It entails taking up a role and a set of performative expectations, and putting oneself at the disposal of an epistemic apparatus as a reproduction and transmitter of its self-ordering system . Only such a decision of self-subjection is required; the rest follows from the convert’s own desire and effort to take oneself as “an object of knowledge and field of action,”2 as Foucault phrases it, knowing oneself in confirmation of the supplied paradigms and enacting a replication of the given models of self-realization. Much of what Augustine has to say at the beginning of this process about the new ideology with which he had come to identify, therefore, cannot be regarded as much more than rote repetition of stock phrases or, at best, piecemeal clusters of concepts that do immediate...

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