Images of Conversion in St. Augustine's Confessions (review)

What was Augustine trying to communicate to his readers when he wrote the Confessions? How much of what we read was intended to be historical as a present-day historian might describe history? In this book of scholarly musings, O’C uses his vast experience of Augustine scholarship to show how Augustine brought his experience and his talents as searcher, thinker, rhetorician and Christian to the composition of this book. Clearly, one “should expect him [Augustine] to present as mature and finished a world-view as he is capable of fashioning” (306). That the Confessions are the work of a bishop whose vision was considerably more refined than the newly-converted rhetorician is a legitimate conclusion. The route that O’C chooses to reach that conclusion, however, is both scenic and full of twists and turns than cannot be fully accounted for in these few words.

A fuller exposition of the particular way that O’C uses images to interpret Augustine can be found in Soundings in Augustine’s Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994). There, O’C explored three significant images that he found in Augustine’s works: the ordered gathering of ‘all things’ (Omnia), human pilgrimage (peregrinatio), and Divine care (fouere). Here, by developing a set of image-interpretations around Augustine’s reading of the Hortensius and the conversion he experienced at that time, O’C not only lets his imagination, nourished by his “habitual acquaintance with the man” (159), run freely over the incident itself, but ‘plays it off’ against similar images in the earliest dialogues and in books 7 and 8 of the Confessions. O’C seeks to identify and explain the images used in these “crucial turnings” as they relate and/or grow toward other images of conversion, all with a view to ‘reading’ Augustine’s mind (xix).

Given Augustine’s varied vocabulary, whereby a single idea is evoked by a variety of words, the process of making connections by way of images is rife with potential. Even if a particular reader does not follow O’C along every path he suggests, the process of beginning with Augustine’s usage, rather than with a carefully-articulated theory of imagination or image is, in this book, both wonderfully suggestive and organizationally frustrating. More than once did I wish that I had the whole corpus of Augustine at my fingertips to check an affirmation or follow a line of thinking that O’C set in motion. More than once does his tendency to ask a question and then put off the response lead to a need for a fully-detailed index so that the many strands of the argument could be easily located.

In the last chapter, O’C raises the question of the “two Augustines,” the Augustine of the Confessions and at Cassiciacum. On the one hand, he discusses Augustine’s use of the text from Romans 13, recognizing a need to expand the investigation to include verses 11–14 so that the image-connections between the Confessions and the Cassiciacum Dialogues can be more clearly identified. Thus, Augustine’s consistent attention to sexual attachment is connected to the burden of secular activity; but his desire for a contemplative life, rising above encumbrances and doing so now were also significantly consistent images (cf. 220–38). Thus, the presence of clear interconnections between Romans 13, 11–14 and the Confessions can also be found in the early Dialogues (278–90). Whether it was the Philosophia of Cassiciacum or the Continentia of the Milanese garden, or the Sapientia sought after reading the Hortensius, all emanated “from ‘that religion’ which had penetrated to his very marrow as a child (Acad 2.5)” (262).

On the other hand, O’C discusses the Christian quality of the Cassiciacum writings, arguing for the “overarching Christian intention of Augustine’s early Dialogues” (263). Hence, “beata vita consists precisely in the ‘vision’ of the Trinitarian God” (263; see too...