Augustine’s Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity (review)

Brian Dobell’s Augustine’s Intellectual Conversion offers a revisionist interpretation of book 7 of the Confessions as an account, not of a few months’ ruminations in 386 CE, but of the key developments in Augustine’s thinking from that time up to circa 395 CE. The author thus joins the growing number of scholars (this reviewer among them) who emphasize retrospective and ideologically anachronistic elements in the Confessions, bringing that analysis to bear on a particular section of the work in close comparison with Augustine’s earlier compositions. Dobell does not wish to deny a conversion in 386 (which he identifies with the “volitional conversion” of Confessions book 8). Augustine was indeed converted on the terms he understood at the time, but not “on the terms set by the narrator of the Confessions” (23). These new terms were “arguably . . . not even necessary” to the initial conversion, but represented a new understanding of the Catholic faith to which Augustine had come, from the vantage point of which his earlier form of faith was inadequate (18–19 and n.116). Warning against letting Augustine’s later positions determine how we read his earlier ones, against demanding consistency of Augustine throughout his literary career, and particularly against accepting the Retractationes as a reliable guide to Augustine’s original meaning in his earlier works (38–39), Dobell questions the interpretive choices of his predecessors and frees the historical Augustine of the burden of being at all times and in every way a perfectly orthodox saint.

Following a succinct summary of Augustine’s path to conversion, the first major part of the book (“The Way of the Authority and ‘the Falsity of Photinus’,” 29–107) is a masterly study of Augustine’s Christological development from his conversion in 386 to circa 395 CE. Taking his cue from Augustine’s self-criticism in Conf. 7.19.25 of an earlier period of his life when he had held a “Photinian” view of Christ, Dobell goes in search of that period, and builds a case that it extended over much of the first decade of Augustine’s life as a “Catholic.” We need not assume that the early Augustine was self-consciously “Photinian,” nor that what he characterizes as “Photinian” in his past will correspond to Photinus’ actual views. Rather, Augustine employs the term to mark a distinction between an earlier Christology and the one at which he arrived “sometime later” (“aliquanto posterius”) and held by the time he wrote the Confessions. Sifting through Augustine’s works from the first half-decade following his conversion, Dobell demonstrates that the controlling image of Christ found in them is of “a wise man who has been inwardly illuminated by the Virtue and Wisdom of God” (31), who thereby provides the rest of humanity with the ultimate exemplar of the path back to God (42–43, 71–72); only in the mid-390s did Augustine arrive at a more “orthodox” view both of the unique nature of the bond between man and God in Christ and of the role of the latter as redeemer, not just role model. Dobell is adept at identifying close verbal parallels in different passages that illuminate each other on these issues (see especially 69–70 and 97–98).

The second half of the book (“The Way of Reason and the Ascent of the Soul,” 109–236) attempts to map the two attempted “ascents” of Confessions 7 across the same developmental period leading up to the composition of the work itself. Dobell proposes that the ascent of 7.10.16 properly belongs to 386, while that of 7.17.23 “should be understood, not as a single experience undertaken by Augustine in 386, but rather as a type of ascent that Augustine was elaborating in the period between (roughly) 387/8 and 391” (137; cf. 198). Here, too, Dobell is at his best in drawing close verbal parallels between Confessions 7 and...