Augustine’s Conversion to Christianity: The Voice of a Child

Aurelius Augustine (354-430 AD) used the story of life to discover what is universally true. Following upon St. John, Augustine conceived of knowledge as a universal transcendent phenomenon represented at particular times and places by the individual knower. Augustine knew this relationship between himself the knower and God (knowledge) because of “a voice” “within me” that “cries out” to “truth itself.” This personal, temporal realization of God is what John meant by the word (Logos). Augustine’s more complete portrait of the individual’s experience of the word is his Confessions.

Late in life Augustine was so overwhelmed by the memory of his early years, even infancy and childhood, of sin that he forgot that humans are made in the image of God, that human existence is encompassed, transcended, by the Son of Man. It took years for Augustine to understand this simple truth. In the meantime he recalled with horror his youthful awareness of God’s power and presence even as he rejected Him. Introspective even when growing up in the North African city of Thagaste, arrogance and vanity compelled him to reject his mother Monica’s Christian teachings to pursue success and fame as a scholar and orator. Sin drove him to unhappiness even as he sought happiness through philosophy. Cicero and Roman Stoicism had an early influence on Augustine, who found appealing the Stoic notions of humanitas: a common humanity, equality, and the dignity of humankind. The Stoics emphasized human experience as the key to happiness, but all of Augustine’s attempts to unlock the door failed. During these years of his late teens and twenties Augustine was a materialist who, when Stoicism could not provide sufficient answers, sought elsewhere. The words of Confessions exude the pain of recollection that he strayed so far as to embrace an eastern materialistic philosophy, Manicheism. Augustine sought from the Manicheists an explanation of the pain and sorrow he felt, the evil within him. The Manicheist solution was simple: evil has a material presence within oneself; likewise the material of good can be increased or decreased depending upon one’s bodily habits. It did not take Augustine long to discover how ludicrous were the teachings of the Manicheists.

In pursuit of success--in pursuit of truth--Augustine migrated to Rome, then on to Milan, where he taught rhetoric. At Milan he came under the influence of Bishop Ambrose. Augustine admired Ambrose, who influenced Augustine to begin a reassessment of Christian scripture, which Augustine had long considered with disdain as filled with fantastic stories. But Ambrose suggested and Augustine considered, what if the stories of the Old and New Testaments were allegories of more profound spiritual phenomena? Meanwhile Augustine read Neoplatonist philosophers such as Plotinus, who helped to convince Augustine that truth is spiritual not material, and that sin is not a substance but willful error in behavior.

Slowly, under the onslaught of the appeals of his mother, the sermons of St. Ambrose, and Neoplatonic arguments that reality is spiritual, Augustine turned to Christianity. He studied the Scriptures, particularly the Epistles of the Apostle Paul. He found in Paul a rational theology of a mind equal to his own. Paul of Tarsus was like Augustine a one time pagan, that is, a Jew, a Pharisee, a persecutor of Christians. Son of a tent-maker and Roman citizen, Paul had the benefit of a good education--he became of a master of the Torah, the Law. Like most Pharisees he was conservative, dogmatic, and inflexible. When he heard that followers of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth were still spreading his teachings, Paul did what he could to repulse this intellectual invasion. Luke, the author of Acts, recorded an incident where the follower of Jesus Stephen was stoned by an angry mob of Jews; Paul was in the midst of the crowd, in tacit approval of the murder. Later, having heard of an enclave of Christians at Damascus, Paul set out to search them out and rid the city of this heresy. On the road to Damascus, however, all the guilt over the sins of the preceding years caught up with Paul; he was blinded by a dazzling light accompanied by a voice that demanded, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The experience changed Paul forever. He went to Damascus not to persecute but to recover his sight and to learn what was His will. Paul became the most fervent and dedicated apostle of the word: he became the great teacher of the Gentiles, bringing the teachings of Jesus to Greeks and Romans. On his travels he often took time to write long letters to burgeoning Christian communities in Asia and Europe; in these Epistles Paul set forth his interpretation of the Christ.

As a Pharisee, Paul was an expert on the Old Testament, the Law. He knew the prohibitions and restrictions and demands upon behavior and habit that permeated the Pentateuch as well as other books of the Bible. The Law informed humans how to live their lives to conform to God’s will. The Pharisee Paul did just that, following the Law to conform to God’s will. But his many efforts brought him to a startling conclusion: he could never live up to the strictures of the Law, and the effort to try to do so made him extremely unhappy. The rules of the Law and the nature of human behavior simply did not mix. Paul knew what was right and good; his reason told him that the Ten Commandments were important to obey. The problem was that Paul could never quite obey all the commandments. How could someone constantly, day by day, avoid coveting a neighbor’s property, or disobeying parents, or baring false witness against another? It was impossible. The Law, an ideal that the reality of human existence could never match, made Paul miserable: the will, the desires of the body, always come to dominate the mind, the logic and reason that indicates how one should behave. Will limits Reason. Bodily experiences, temporal experiences, the search, but inability, to know, are the fruits of sin. Paul sought to will his behavior by planning how he would act in the future. But his bodily sensations, his movement through time, the constant passing moments, his ignorance about what the future would truly bring, save death, left him without direction, without purpose. Life seemed to be a moment by moment experience of failure that led to ignorance, sickness, and death. How could such misery be avoided?

Rubbing salt into the wound of sin was the reality of God’s characteristics, which were completely opposite to man’s. God is timeless, all-knowing, pure Reason, the Truth. No gulf could be greater than that between God and man. God is in a sense the Law, the perfection of which made men, failures by comparison, frail and unhappy. Only God could reconcile this apparent dilemma. To Paul, this was the mission of Jesus of Nazareth. The word became flesh. God bridged the gap by becoming man, being born of a Virgin, experiencing life, time, despair, temptation, ignorance, pain, and death. The incarnation meant that Jesus, the Son of Man, experienced all human experiences, symbolized and became Man itself. As one man, Adam, symbolized the fall of man--the human experience of time, ignorance, and sin--so one man, Jesus, symbolized the elevation, life, joy, happiness, and release from the bonds of sin of all humans. Jesus died, but was resurrected in bodily form, as a distinct living being; hence all humans would be as well.

At this point living at Milan, wealthy, successful, and famous, understanding the contributions to human understanding of the Stoics, Neoplatonists, and Manicheists, deeply influenced by Ambrose and his own mother, Monica, Augustine now realized that his experiences were Paul’s experiences. He, too, had been burdened by the reality of sin, the constant helpless recognition of his own willfulness and error. Notwithstanding his new awareness, Augustine found the struggle with the flesh defeated his desire for chaste living. Eventually sin and unhappiness drove him to the pinnacle of personal anguish where he sought the strength to control his temporal desires. While in the garden at the home of a friend, Augustine experienced a nervous breakdown during which he heard a child’s voice cry “Take it and read, take it and read.” Augustine answered the child’s call by picking up the New Testament and reading the first passage upon which his eyes fell, which was Paul’s epistolary comment, “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” The words hit home and Augustine was changed.

What is most fascinating about his conversion experience was the child’s voice. What really happened? Was it the wind? Was it Augustine’s imagination? Perhaps it was his unconscious mind, the voice of despair from his sinful youth. Upon hearing the voice Augustine’s first response was to think “hard whether there was any kind of game in which children used to chant words like these”--clearly it was an auditory event. But why a child’s voice? Why not a blinding light or a booming expression of omnipotence? Notwithstanding Augustine’s beliefs respecting original sin, a child represents innocence if for no other reason than that a child is beginning, newness, potential--and the future awaits. A child best represents humanity in its purity, for it is new to the world, and in its questioning, its wide-eyed wonder. It is not surprising that the Gospel writers Matthew and Luke began their stories of the life of Jesus with tales of his birth. Their message was that the Messiah was ever youthful, ever innocent, ever pure, ever simply human--uncorrupted, unmoved, by civilization. The child symbolizes the inherent equality and dignity of humanity; the child is a model of humanity, transcending time and place: what can be less unique, less an individual, than a newborn? So, too, was the Son of Man. Augustine’s experience of the voice of the child was all things and more: imagination, the unconscious mind, the wind blowing, a thought and a memory, corporeal and auditory, distinctly heard in a passing instant. The voice was all the phenomena, events, thoughts, and feelings that make up an individual human--a transcendent occurrence in a single moment of time.

The conversion was complete. Augustine henceforth controlled his sensory appetites even if thoughts and the imagination did not cooperate. Ambrose baptized the convert, who after his mother’s death returned to North Africa where he lived the remaining decades of his life with other religious brethren. When he was about forty, Augustine, feeling the need to open his heart to God in a public way, penned the Confessions.

The Confessions recounts Augustine’s life from childhood to middle age, tells the story of his conversion, then, seeking to explain its significance, provides a detailed discussion of memory and time. Time fascinated Augustine even as a youth. As he traced his own passing, he became aware that neither the past nor the future exist, only the fleeting present of no duration. Augustine discovered the human quandary of how to achieve knowledge in the passing moments of fluid experience. Augustine concluded that time is the experience of each individual’s mind as it recalls the past by memory, awaits the future by expectation, and gauges the present by momentary awareness. Time, the movement from future to present to past, hence history, is completely personal, in the mind, an individual’s fleeting recollection of events experienced either vicariously or actually.

The Confessions portrays Augustine’s experience of time as the human experience of time. Birth and death, creation and judgment, were the beginning and the end of Augustine’s life-span of seventy-six years. His life was one of infancy and childhood, rather like the creation of Adam and Eve and the age of the Patriarchs; his teen years were similar to the Hebrew sufferings in Egypt and the wanderings in the wilderness. His twenties were like the years of the kings of Israel and Judah and the captivity in Babylon. The first millennia, B. C., were centuries of expectation of the Messiah; likewise Augustine’s young adult years were in expectation of the truth. Then it came in an instant: the Incarnation, a moment in time when God became Man--the Voice of the Child. Subsequent years were filled with memories of the grand event--Christians recalled the life and death of Jesus and tried to use memory to confront their own individual presents and futures as they approached, collectively, the end. Augustine used memory to recall the single most important event of his life, which lasted all of four seconds--but which irrevocably altered him and prepared him for death.

(Quotes from Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin Books, 1961) and Wippel and Wolter, Medieval Philosophy, New York: Free Press, 1969; the text is based on Russell M. Lawson, Metamorphosis: How Jesus of Nazareth Vanquished the Legion of Fear (Wipf and Stock, 2019.))