Augustine's Conversion: A Guide to the Argument of Confessions I-IX (review)

Too often Augustine's Confessions is read only in part. Books I-IX tantalize readers with the life of a man who revelled in the fleshpots of Carthage and longed to receive the gift of chastity but not yet. From birth to conversion, readers follow Augustine's journey in faith only to part company when the good saint turns down the paths of philosophy and theology in Books X-XIII.

Colin Starnes of King's College and Dalhousie University, Halifax, puzzled over the structure of the Confessions for several years and finally proposes that the division between Books I-IX and the rest of the work does not correspond solely to the flagging interests of readers but is a legitimate separation intended by Augustine and conforming to the deepest literary structures of the work itself. In these first nine books two structuring elements coalesce. The first is historical: the books trace the history of Augustine's life from birth to his conversion and baptism. The second element is theological: in conformation to Augustine's Trinitarian thought, Books I-IX are confessions of faith directed to the three persons in God. Books I-VII, dedicated to the Father as Creator, explore the nature of the universe, of rationality, and of self. In this section of the work, Augustine rejects and later accepts the objective truth of Christianity. Book VIII is devoted to the Son as Mediator and to Augustine's subjective side, especially to the struggle to submit his will to God in his conversion. Book IX, as one might expect, focuses on the Holy Spirit and church. Here Augustine explores the meeting between objectivity and subjectivity, between knowledge and will (236). This last book is appended as an exploration of the Christian's life in the world after a new birth in Baptism (247).

These initial books may be read by any audience, for this part of the Confessions "presumes nothing more than an acquaintance with the common realities of human nature, the divine law, and with the objective elements of the Christian gospel and church," unlike Book X which assumes a Christian audience and Books XI-XIII which require a background of Christian philosophy (1).

Book by book, section by section, Starnes explicates the text of the first nine books of the Confessions. He presumes a familiarity only with the most prominent of the incidents of the Confessions and provides a short description of each section on which he comments. Where the specific words Augustine wrote are important to his argument, Starnes provides translated excerpts. In this respect his is a book for several audiences: for the scholar following the Latin text he notes the incipit and final word of his translation; for the student, he points out the puns and verbal resonances of the original text and supplies ample notes and bibliographical references; for the motivated general reader he unfailingly provides the cultural background for Augustine's text and his own comments.

In his commentary on Books I-IX, Starnes follows the text very closely and sympathetically. Only where necessary for his portrait of Augustine's psyche in the process of conversion does he directly engage other authors. For example in his comments on Book VIII, he disputes both Courcelle and O'Meara, minimizing the influence of Augustine's Neo-Platonism on his conversion. He claims that Augustine sought out Simplicianus not to learn the way to Christianity through philosophy but to investigate what differentiated Christianity from the Neo-Platonic thought he already embraced (214-20).

In his "Appendix: An Essay on the Historicity Debate," Starnes explores the relationship between two vexing questions. The first concerns the similarities and differences between Neo-Platonism and Augustine's Christianity. The second is the impact of such an assessment on an acceptance of the historicity of the conversion scene in Book VIII over the description in the Dialogues. These pages could easily provide an example...