SECTION X
Chapter 2. Conversion of St. Augustine to Orthodox Christianity


"In humility therefore there is this to be wondered at, that it elevates
the heart; and in pride this, that it dejects it...godly humility
subjects one to his superior and God is above all; therefore humility
exalts one, in making him God's subject."

                --St. Augustine, CITY OF GOD

(John Healey(trans.) St. Augustine's THE CITY OF GOD, Everyman's Library;
New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1945, I, 43.)


  Augustine was born in 354 AD at Tagaste, in Roman Africa near Tunis
(which is now in Algeria.)  His mother, Monica was a Christian. His father
was a pagan.  Augustine studied law at a university in Carthage.  Even
then, his professors took note of the young student's keen mind and flair
for writing.

  Augustine later reflected in his CONFESSIONS, of his sinful nature
during this period--as he sought the lustful company of women:

  "It was a sweet thing to me both to love and to be loved, and more sweet
   still when I was able to enjoy the body of my lover.  And so I muddied
   the clear spring of friendship with the dirt of physical desire and
   clouded over its brightness with the dark hell of lust."

  While a student, Augustine discovered philosophy. He was extremely impressed
by a book he read by the pagan Cicero, called HORTENSIUS. In it, Cicero
argued that only the philosopher's life is worth living. Augustine later
stated that it was this book that had set him on his own spiritual quest
to find God.

   Augustine described how, at first, he joined a group of sun-worshipers,
to uncover the mysteries of the universe.  On this experience, he wrote,
"I thought they concealed something of great importance, which afterward
would be revealed to me."  Discouraged, Augustine, who was even then
fascinated with the problem of evil, turned to Manichaeism which combined
Christianity with the concept of Persian dualism. According to its founder
Manes (or Mani), the universe is comprised of two eternally opposing
substances--light and darkness. Man has the potential while on earth
of joining forces with the kingdom of light, through an austere program
including the avoidance of meat and sex. As a reward, the souls of the
faithful would upon death levitate upwards towards the kingdom of light,
and partake in the victorious battle over the forces of darkness.
Those who failed to join with the forces of light, were doomed to be
reincarnated as a lower form--say an animal or an insect,

  Looking back in his CONFESSIONS, Augustine wrote how it was the death
of his closest and dearest friend, that later triggered his return to
Christianity.  He had known this "youth who was sweet to me above all
sweetness of this life" even in his university days.  Augustine was
tormented with grief at his loss: "Darkness lay upon my heart, and wherever
I looked there was only death.  My eyes sought him everywhere, and found
him not.  Tears were my only comfort."  When Augustine discovered his friend
had taken the Catholic sacraments before he died, he was shocked.

  At the age of twenty nine, Augustine left for Rome to become a teacher and
speaker. He was not very successful, and became sick. Augustine saw his
illness as the third stage in his road towards Christianity. (His reading
of Cicero's HORTENSIUS was the first stage, and the death of his close friend
the second). He returned to Milan to accept a university post.  By this time,
he had begun to seriously question his Manichaen beliefs.  In depicting the
world as in a state of battle between the forces of good and evil, the Manichees
had prepared detailed categories clearly listing "good" from "bad".  Augustine
came to find these lists to be ridiculous and arbitrary, saying--

  "They say the golden melon comes from God's treasure house, but the golden
  fat of the ham and the yoke of an egg are evil? How so?"

  In Milan, Augustine invited him mother to live with him. She came, only
to accuse Augustine of living in wanton sin with his Carthaginian mistress.
She argued with such force, that Augustine finally relented to send her back
to Carthage.  The parting was very painful for Augustine, who wrote, "When
they took from my side her with whom I had slept for so long, my heart was
torn at the place where it stuck to her, and the wound was bleeding."
(Augustine's son by his mistress died several years later.)

  Augustine's mother found a suitable bride for him, But because she
was too young to be married to him right away,  Augustine gave into his
sexual drive and took another concubine.  His acute sense of guilt over
his actions, and his inability to "will" his sexual feelings away,  would
be later interpreted by Augustine as proof that not only him--but all mankind--
was inherently corrupt.

Augustine's Conversion Experience

  Augustine was thirty-two, when he had his conversion experience. He
was staying at his villa with his mother and some friends in Milan, when
he was visited by a Christian officer. Finding a volume on the epistles of
St. Paul, which Augustine had been half-heartedly reading, the officer
related his own conversion experience. He spoke of his sure faith, his
certainty with what the future held for him, and of St. Antony and the
contentment to be found from a celibate life in a monastery.

  After he left, Augustine felt himself to be in a kind of trance.  As he
walked outside his villa, he debated whether he should put away his pride
and submit to the Church.  Suddenly, he became aware of a child chanting:

 "Tolle, Lege" ("Take up, read").

   He rushed back in the house and opened up the epistle of St. Paul,
and read the lines,

  "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not
  in contention and envy; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make
  not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof."

Augustine was convinced that God had meant for his eyes to fall on this
passage, and to be converted into Catholicism.

  Augustine converted to the Catholic faith, and shortly thereafter (the
year was now 387 AD), he had another religious experience, this time inside
a villa in Ostia Italy.  Augustine and his mother Monica "were alone and
talking together and very sweet our talk was." Looking out from a window
on their garden, they began to muse on "what the eternal life of the
saints could be like."  Following upwards, step by step all the bodily items
in the sky, they felt themselves touch the deity "just lightly", and were
immediately overwhelmed with an mystical ecstatic rapture. Augustine later
recalled of this event how, "the greatest possible delights of our bodily
sense, radiant as they might be with the brightest of corporeal light,
could not be compared with the joys of that [spiritual] life."

  After the sensation of joy and happiness passed, Augustine and his mother
became silent, and they "sighed". Monica however later turned to her son and
said, "My son, as to me, I no longer find any pleasure in this life. What
more I have to do here, and why I am still here I do not know."  Within a
fortnight, she was dead. (Augustine, CONFESSIONS, 9:15, quoted from
McDannnel and Lang's HEAVEN A HISTORY, Yale University Press, New Haven
and London 1988, p 56)

  In his CONFESSIONS, Augustine wrote how he had struggled to tap again into
this mystical higher reality. Inspired by his readings of philosophy, he
concentrated on his soul's heavenly descent to this highest realm of the
universe.  His first attempts, in 386 AD in Milan, at envisioning the divine
were fleeting and disappointing.  He wrote how he felt that his lack of
moral strength prevented him from sustaining any lasting union with the
divine.

  At this point, he realized that achieving a mental, spiritual union
with God was the ultimate happiness one could hope to ever achieve in life.
In his CONFESSIONS, Augustine not only reported on the successes of his
mystical raptures, but explained the methods by which one could advance
"step by step" to ever higher realms of the divine.--The Christian must
mentally focus his mind inwardly towards his soul, leaving the material
world behind.  Then, "in a flash of a trembling glance", one could achieve
union with the deity.

  Augustine described such moments as "a kind of sweet delight." To remain
in such a state forever, would be something not of this world, not of this
life," but of the life to come.  To Augustine, these feelings were a taste
of what a heavenly existence with God would be like. (HEAVEN: A HISTORY, p 57)

  To experience such divine raptures, Augustine foreswore his previous sinful
sexual life, replacing it with a purely ascetic and celibate lifestyle.
He now prayed, "may your scriptures be my chaste delight".

   To Augustine, the joys of knowing and experiencing God far outweighed
all other social human relationships: "Whoever knows you [God] and others
besides, is not happier for knowing them, but is happy for knowing you
alone."  (Augustine, CONFESSIONS 5:4). Not that Augustine did not have
very strong friendships-- he did. it was just that compared to the ecstacy
of knowing the divine, Augustine felt they could never provide one true
happiness.  Augustine's vision of bliss from "seeing God" would later be
known as the "beatific vision".  (Augustine, CITY OF GOD, 413-27, McDannell,
op. cit, p 59) Answering the question in a sermon, what would humans DO in
the afterlife Augustine responded, "to stand, to see, to love, to praise
[God]". (Ibid, Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., PATROLOGIAE CURSUS COMPLETUS. SERIES
LATINA 38:1147)

Influence of NeoPlatonic Thought on St. Augustine's Doctrines and Beliefs

  Many scholars believe that Augustine, along with other Christian
intellectuals of this time, were influenced by the Greek philosophies, which
were generally regarded as the most sophisticated culture of their time.
It would be natural for some Christians to take, what they saw to be
the best features of Greek Platonism, which was widely respected at this
time, into their Christian doctrine.

  Augustine and other Christians greatly admired the work of the
Neoplatonist, Plotinus, who lived from 205-70 AD.  Plotinus, wrote that
the material world we live in is contaminated, and that the true aim
of philosophy is to strengthen the soul in preparing for its heavenly
ascent upon the death of the physical body. To achieve this, Plotinus
strongly recommended that the devotee renounce the material entanglements
of this world, and to live an ascetic life devoted to mediation and
contemplation.  In this way the soul could be loosened and one could
attain "deliverance from the things of this world...escape in solitude
to the Solitary." (Plotinus, ENNEADS, 6:9, as quoted in HEAVEN: A HISTORY,
PP 56-7).

  Another pagan treatise, POIMANDRES, probably dating from around the same
period, also described how the well-prepared soul of the ascetic philosopher
could, upon death, levitate upwards on its journey towards the deity. Rising
through seven spheres of heaven before finally reaching the highest sphere of
the Deity, the soul at last joins with other spirits who spend eternity
"singing with sweet voice to God." (Corpus Hermeticum, POIMANDRES, 24ff. in
C.K. Barrett, THE NEW TESTAMENT BACKGROUND, SELECTED DOCUMENTS (New York:
Harper  Row, 1961), p 87, as quoted by HEAVEN, A HISTORY P 57)

  In his earlier years, Augustine analyzed Paul's verses on "spiritual bodies"
(ON FAITH AND THE CREED written in 393 AD).  He was careful to interpret this,
so that it would be in line with Neoplatonic philosophy.--That is, after the
general resurrection, Augustus described an "angelic change" whereby our
bodies would lose their material quality, with only its spiritual essence left
over.  To Augustine, there could be no material or "flesh and blood" dimension
in the next life, but only a pure spirit.

  Augustine did modify this vision, however during his later years. In his
RETRACTATIONS (427 AD), he now maintained that the spiritual bodies of
resurrected Christians would be made of flesh and bones, and be touchable by
others.  Although not explicitly stated, possibly one reason for this change
by Augustine, was because he recognized this would make it easier for Christians
to be recognized by family and friends after the glorious resurrection.

  Augustine used his strong intellect to REASON his way through much of
his doctrine.  Because of this, some of the positions he took in his
later life were complete reversals of earlier positions he had taken.
(For example, this was true with earlier stances he had taken regarding the
existance of sex in Eden, and the desirability of using coercion against
heretics). Augustine admitted his struggles in arriving at his doctrines
where an ongoing process, when he wrote

 "I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who
  makes progress by writing."

  Augustine's experience was to be a major turning point for Christian
history.  Most of his doctrines were taken up by the Catholic church, and
in this way dominated all of Western Christianity for the next thousand
years.  One exception, was his doctrine of predestination.  There has been
numerous speculation as to why the Catholic Church did not choose to follow
St. Augustine on this doctrine.--One possibility suggested by some scholars, is
that the Church wanted the authority to decide for itself whether a person
was worthy of going to heaven--as opposed to this condition being
"predetermined" by God.

  Augustine's writings were reread by early Protestant reformers, such as
Martin Luther and John Calvin. John Calvin, revived Augustine's doctrine
of predestination, to make it one of the cornerstone beliefs within Calvinism.
Of course, St. Augustine's influence can still be felt today within BOTH
Protestantism AND Catholicism--wherever there is a call for strong
authoritative powers to take control over a "sinful" community.  (See Section
V, Chapter V for the historical discussion of St. Augustine.)