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Introduction At Easter in the spring of 387, Augustine, recently retired civic rhetor of Milan, received baptism at the hands of the city’s bishop, Ambrose, formalizing at the same time both his conversion to the “Nicene” faith of the “Catholic ” Church and his apostasy from the Manichaean sect to which he had belonged for more than a decade. Some of Augustine’s critics, in his own time as well as ours, have suggested that he never ceased being a Manichaean.1 The Manichaean commitment he held overtly for more than a decade, they have contended, had sunk so deeply into his thinking, or so closely matched the predispositions of his character, that he carried fundamentally “Manichaean ” perspectives into his understanding of “Nicene” Christianity, however inadvertently or unconsciously. Even if Augustine consciously intended to commit himself fully to his new faith, the leopard could not change its spots. If these opinions were true, the tremendous impact Augustine has had upon Christian theology and culture might properly be understood as a direct importation of Manichaeism into that tradition. But I disagree with this assessment. The evidence, I think, supports a different story, yet one that makes Manichaeism every bit as central to Augustine’s legacy. Augustine genuinely broke with Manichaeism and wholeheartedly embraced the religion of Ambrose, as he understood it, as the tradition with which he would identify and within which he would find meaning. Certainly , he carried across that apostasy and conversion lingering habits of thought and self-expression. How could he not? By his act of conversion, he presented himself to the authority of his newly adopted community to be educated and shaped by its program. He did not already possess that which 2 introduction his entry into the community promised to provide. He committed himself to belief in that which he did not yet understand. Yet, for various reasons, he did not disappear into the schooling and development the community’s authorities offered, only to emerge later as a fully mature representative of the faith. He started writing from the moment he anticipated that his new religious commitment would open up a whole new identity and life for him. That fact is a rare gift to us as historians, because it allows us not only to study a representative late fourth-century “Catholic” self, but to trace the making of that self as it finds articulation in Augustine’s rhetorical output over time.2 By following the record provided by Augustine’s dialogues, treatises, sermons , debates, and letters, we can follow a gradual expansion of the role played in his discourse by the creedal and biblical phrasing, and the broader literary tropes, of his new community, as well as a growing integration of these figures of speech in his discursive apprehension of reality. It did not take long for the latter to be purged of the lingering Manichaean elements discernible in his earliest writings at the time of his conversion. Although he recognized some common ground between his former religious outlook and his new one, it might even be said that he tended to gravitate toward those aspects of his new faith that offered the strongest contrast to his former one. But the Manichaeans would not go away; Augustine remained entangled with them—both in his personal ties to former friends who remained in the sect, and in the role he was called upon to play as an apostate in the ongoing religious rivalry for the hearts and souls of the people of North Africa. In learning more about the resources of the tradition to which he had committed himself, Augustine came face to face with themes and attitudes that bore a closer affinity to Manichaeism than he initially recognized. The apparent reappearance of “Manichaean” elements in Augustine’s system, I argue, actually represents his attempts to come to terms with those aspects of the Christian tradition that Manichaeism in some sense “got right” about the tradition, and which the kind of Christianity presented to him as a convert in comparable respects “got wrong”—at least as Augustine apparently came to see it. Never wavering from his commitment to the “Catholic” Church, and never ceasing to offer an anti-Manichaean position, Augustine found it necessary not to cut loose what he considered valid and valuable insights into the human condition to be found in the Christian tradition, just because the Manichaeans grasped and emphasized them in a way “Nicene” Christians up to that point had neglected to...

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