Hello again. Today we’re going to talk about a thrilling topic—Augustine and his conversion. Conversion takes such an important role in our lives, at the beginning of our life of faith, and historically as we look back at those who were for the Lord and served Him in the past. Conversion stories are important, and they all seem to have their origins in one way or another in Scripture, and we’re going to explore Augustine and his conversions and his Confessions. But as our habit’s been, we’ll begin with prayer, and I’d like to start by reading a short thought from Augustine’s works on prayer and then a brief prayer from Augustine’s works.
Augustine said in one place concerning prayer: “The person whose attitude toward Christ is correct does indeed ask in His name and receives whatever He asks for. If it’s something which does not stand in the way of his salvation, he gets it. However, only when he ought to receive it, for certain things are not refused us, but their granting is delayed to a fitting time.” And that’s an important lesson for all of us to be reminded of continually.
Let me read a brief prayer from Augustine’s Confessions, and it will be from book 9, just after his conversion. It’s the prayer of new life, and let’s pray it together and consecrate ourselves to the work set before us as Augustine did. Let us pray. O Lord, truly I’m Your servant. I’m Your servant and the child of Your handmaid. You’ve loosed my bonds and I’ll offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving. Let my heart and my tongue praise You and let all my bones say, “Lord, who is like unto You,” and let them answer and say to me, “He is Your salvation.”
Father, we do consecrate ourselves to You as Augustine did, kneeling in his shadow and pray out to You and ask that we may offer ourselves as a sacrifice to You as well. Give us the grace to do that. We ask these things in the name of our salvation. Amen.
Scott T. Carroll, PhD Experience: Professor of Ancient History,
It’s good to be with you again today, and I hope your studies have been refreshing and you’ve been able to keep up with things. Let’s begin briefly by looking back at the last lecture and summarize some of those details. Then we’ll talk about some of the objectives that we’ll aim at today and how they tie together, and we’ll dive into some interesting material.
In the last lecture we kind of covered the early life of Augustine—his education, his background, where he came from, you’ll recall, from North Africa. I hope that you’re engrossed in reading Peter Brown’s book and the Confessions. They will help you get richer insight and details and interpretation of the matters that we discuss here as we try to flesh out some of these aspects.
With Augustine’s early career, one of the things that I take away from his early life that is of primary importance is that he’s a man that’s driven for success. And in his world, coming from where he did in Africa, success was found through education, and success would be found through a political appointment. The way that he would achieve it was in rhetoric. He was given over to speech and the power of words. He must have been a very compelling speaker, and in order to make his living, he taught rhetoric. We saw the frustrations that he experienced teaching rhetoric in Carthage to disrespectful students. We also feel the tinge of anguish for the frustration that he experienced in Rome with students who refused to pay their tuition bills, so as he’s trying to make his way he also enters into rhetorical contests. He wins an award in Carthage. He has access to meet some great rhetoricians in Rome through contacts that were made through Manichean friends. Augustine would also seek to make money giving speeches for wealthy patrons, for politicians, and so he was a hired tongue, so to speak.
In the midst of all of this, the chief aim or direction of this would be focused on hopefully on a political appointment, and there were others like Augustine; certainly Augustine was following in the footsteps of other people who had succeeded and following this professional trail. Everything seemed to be reaching a climax when he was finally able to make it to an imperial seat of power in Milan and here, now not surrounded by disrespectful students, having been appointed to a state-funded position in Milan, he was no doubt anticipating the fruit of his labors with a life of ease, luxury, and prominence.
All of this will come into crisis though in Augustine’s life because of the moral and intellectual crises that were taking place. He was on the one hand a person who is not embarrassed at all to talk about the kind of fleshly lust that he was battling.
For the most part they are related in terms of his excessive carnal sexual desires and how he sought to satisfy those. At the same time, he was taken by the theater; the gladiatorial shows in Carthage were something that would fetch the young men at that time and capture their fancy.
But he was given over to lust, and he hoped to try to contain that, no doubt reaching back to his early childhood and the moral instructions of his godly mother and thinking about the moral constraints with which he was expected by his mother at least to live within. Hoping to find help for his excesses, he joined a Manichean cult, which was a Gnostic cult given over to dualism. We’ll talk more about them in just a second. Finding no satisfaction there, no help, and, in fact, weighing their intellectual arguments and finding them wanting, he decided that there was no release from his personal moral turmoil.
He then turned to philosophical writings that were in vogue and hoped maybe in a more enlightened intellectual pursuit to find release from his passions, but alas could not at all. And these things were coming to crisis at this very point in time where Augustine was hoping to be achieving the fruit of his labor. Just think, this young African boy now in a prominent role with the hope of a bright future but morally and intellectually in crisis, and that’s where we pick up today. And we’re going to look exclusively today at conversion. Augustine’s conversion, we’re going to look at it against the backdrop of conversion in the early church and see the important role that it played, both in Augustine’s life and to understand the themes that were at play and the prominent role that Augustine’s conversion would play later with other writers of the Reformation and so forth, to look back at this time and even today to see it as a source of inspiration and direction.
As far as my objectives, they are very clear. I want to look specifically at the notion of conversion in the early church. What did it mean to be converted in the early church, and what kind of role does it play in Confessions? I want to try to provide as well, second, some backdrop to the moral climate of the late ancient world to give you an idea of the rise of asceticism and the important role that it played and how it found expression in
religious cults like the Manicheans and in the same time within orthodoxy and monasticism.
I’d also want to look at some of the prevalent intellectual trends, give you a little more background on the philosophical schools, and the kind of intellectual trends that were influencing Augustine that were also contributing to this internal crisis that he was experiencing. And finally, as we look at Augustine’s conversion as described for us in his Confessions, I’d like to look at the role that individuals played and, as well, the primacy of the church representing Christianity and the Word of God. So that’s where we’ll be heading, and let’s begin by looking at this first aspect of conversion in the early church.
What did it mean to be converted in the early church? Sometimes we think about conversion and we look at it through a very narrow lens. We think about it in terms of our own experience, and yet that is embedded in culture and in capsulated in time, and what I’d like you to do is to think outside of the Four Spiritual Laws, to think outside of the date signed in the front of your Bible, to think outside of a Billy Graham campaign, and to transport yourself back to the ancient world and try to understand what it meant to be converted in the early church, and you’ll see that there are elements that we share in common with them all together and they share in common with us. The elements of faith, the object of our faith, the elements of grace are all the same Old Testament, New Testament, early church period, but these are the important objects to keep focused on.
And when we think about conversion in the early church period, I’d go back to think about the models that are found in the Bible in not just the New Testament but also the Old Testament, and now we get into an area of biblical theology and what did it mean to be converted under the old covenant. What did it mean to be converted in the new covenant period? And again, I would reinforce the primacy of the faith, the primacy of grace, the object of the atoning work of God on behalf of His people, that these are important elements in salvation and will be primary elements throughout church history. And so in the earliest church, while they didn’t have tracts with the Four Spiritual Laws, the elements in their preaching were to focus on these issues of faith and grace, the objective importance of the atonement of Christ, His substitutionary atonement, and the righteous fulfillment of the Law in terms of its claims and requirements on our life, and the satisfaction of God, the Judge, the Father, with the Son’s
atonement and His resurrection as being the basis for salvation and faith in that.
But then one asks the question, What about then baptism, and how did various rituals that have their origins in the Bible and are played out then in the life of the earliest church, what kind of role did they have then in this conversion? In the ancient world conversion was radical. Christianity was illegal. and in Augustine’s time, paganism was still alive and well.
In some ways there was a greater crisis that took place when one publicly vocalized their commitment to Christianity in a way that might only be understood from those of you who may come from an eastern European or repressed context where there’s not the kind of freedom that may be enjoyed in the West, but might in some ways fade the lines that separate conversion from non-conversion.
In the ancient world, they were marked, they were very clear, they could be seen. They had economic and social ramifications, and they would affect one’s career. In the earliest church you have hints in the New Testament laid out chronologically in those books that were written by the apostle John. We begin to get ideas of individuals who are working within Christian house churches that are teaching and false teaching. What is happening is that the early church leaders have to respond to that, and they want to be careful to direct new converts into solid teaching and truth, and they want to be sure that the church is made up of true believers and committed believers. And the way that the church devised to respond to that was through a kind of an evolving confirmation that took place. Those of you who are from or have come from an orthodox tradition, either Western or Eastern, you may well remember confirmation and confirmation classes where there’s a solid body of truth that’s taught and embraced by confessed converts and they are inducted into and indoctrinated in the foundational teachings of the church. These were done so that one could on the one hand ensure that the church was made up of, as much as is possible, pure believers, true believers.
Second, it was a way of keeping false teachers out of the church. What would happen as these things gradually developed, they became expressed through credal formulae, and so they were encapsulated in the profession of a creed. And so some very enriching, doctrinally complete creeds are formulated early on in the church, and they are developed, and if any of have ever
sat down with the church constitution to try to encapsulate your ideas, you’ll know the challenge and difficulty of that.
These creeds were memorized and professed, and as one professed them then, typically were done and culminated with one of the rituals of the church, ordinances or sacraments of the church, and baptism would be the one that would be the focal point where an individual publicly professed their conversion. Baptism, in terms of its origins, we don’t have time to go into that, but it certainly had, I believe, its origins in Jewish intertestamental ritual washings. There’s not really an Old Testament precedent for it. And these things develop out of the intertestamental period. During the early Christian period, there were similar kinds of rituals going on in the mystery cults,
but they are described to us by Christian authors and so consequently are kind of described in Christian terms, but I want you to be careful to realize that they are distinct, yet there are some shared similarities.
Baptism takes on an increasingly important role as a culmination of this confirmation process, and baptism was a way of publicly pronouncing one’s identification with Christ and His church. As well, the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, took on an increasingly important and increasingly defined kind of role in the church, as there was greater insistence in the second century on not only the elements representing Jesus’s body and His atonement, but as well that in some ways they literally embodied those things. It became a nifty way for the church to keep Gnostics out because they would have a disdain for a Eucharist of that sort. I might get into that later on as we talk about the kind of asceticism that developed, but suffice it to say that where conversion is based on grace through faith in the objective realities, the atoning work of Christ, yet these others things, confirmation and the importance of baptism, was a culmination of this confirmation which typically would be delayed until Easter, and one’s baptism was synchronized with the day that was commemorated for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And so these things took on important symbolic value, but they were delayed. Their delay and because of the backload of teaching that went into it also increased their prominence. So in the earliest church, the influx of false teaching, the influx of competitive ideas forced the church to work on a system of confirmation and to use baptism as an important focal point where one would profess not merely saving faith, but to show and to articulate their understanding of the orthodox teaching, these
of the declaring the creed and so forth and then being baptized publicly.
These things get conflated with conversion, and increasingly baptism takes on more of a kind of a magical role because of its importance, its delay. By the early third century, in the writings of Tertullian and onward, there will be more heightened language about the place of baptism and its place as a culmination for conversion.
The very earliest baptismal prayers that we have from the early church that date to the second century don’t load into it this kind of magical terminology, but certainly by the third century and onward this become rather standard. Also, it became a standard practice for people to delay baptism until their deathbed or until the Easter before their deathbed.
Because of the expectations of moral perfection, they would hold off on being baptized until the very end, and the idea that baptism in some ways would remit sin as those ideas of faith and baptism and works were kind of conflated together.
So this is the evolving terrain of conversion in the earliest church, and when we then look into baptism in the Confessions we’ve got Augustine as a young boy, you’ve read, when he was on his deathbed and his mother ironically refuses to have him baptized, though he wishes to and those around him would wish to have him baptized because he’s going to die. He needs to be converted, and the magical role of baptism and their ideas of it, but, you see, his mother expresses elements of a deeper understanding of faith, and it may have been in that case faith that he would be healed and have yet a life in front of him. But more profoundly it was a conviction that she held that an individual had to have converting faith and that then was expressed in baptism.
Another interesting aspect with baptism is that Augustine comes from a mixed home. His mother is a believer, his father is not, but his father’s baptized on his deathbed, perhaps showing that he was converted at the end of his life. As I said that, this was customary and people would delay baptism until their deathbed. Hence, there’s a lot of debate about whether Constantine was truly converted or not because of his delay of his baptism, but this was the custom then.
That gives you a little bit of understanding of conversion in the early church, and I’ll briefly say something about the moral climate of the late ancient world and how it relates to this idea of conversion. I specifically want to talk about morality, immorality, the idea of the excesses, of sensual sin, and in particular look at an important philosophical trend that was developing in the early church period that one has to have a handle on to understand what’s going on in Augustine here, and that’s the idea of dualism.
You may hear this word used, and sometimes it’s used benignly, but the word can be packed with a lot of meaning and one has to be careful how it’s defined. One can talk about ethical dualism, and one can talk as well about cosmological dualism. These are two separate issues. We’ll be talking about cosmological dualism when we talk about Augustine’s anti-Manichean works and Gnosticism. We may mention something briefly at the end of this short discussion about it, but what I want to focus on is this idea of moral or ethical dualism, and the notion behind it is that you have two spheres in reality. You’ve got the spiritual sphere and the material sphere. You’ve got the world of the spirit, which is the world of God, it’s the world of good, and you’ve got the world of the flesh, which is the world of sin and the world of matter. This is the ancient idea. This idea would then deposit goodness in the spiritual realm and evil in the material realm and would find the sources to evil in the world of matter and flesh and the sources of goodness in the world of the spirit, and these two then are in conflict with one another.
As far as the religious manifestations of dualism, I personally do not believe that the Bible teaches dualism at all. In fact, I think quite the opposite. I think the language of the New Testament, of flesh and spirit, that flesh is in fact used in the New Testament commonly as an immaterial substance. It’s something that’s immaterial also. It’s not your body, your carcass, but is something that resides within you that predisposes one to sinful rebellion. If taken literally, flesh could be your carcass, and one could see that maybe the language of the New Testament might avail itself to this kind of dualism, but I personally don’t think that that is at all the teaching of the New Testament.
The idea then is where did this develop, this idea of this demarcation between flesh and spirit? A lot of people say, It’s Platonic, isn’t it? Not really. Platonism goes through, as we mentioned in the last time we were together, stages of development. Plato after all was a fifth-century BC philosopher, and we still talk about Plantonism
alive and well in Augustine’s time, and it evolves over that period of time. The idea of ethical dualism will be evolving out of the Platonic schools. It will be coming through Hellenistic Judaism at this time and will also be developed based on corruptions of New Testament teachings, but the earliest expressions perhaps in the Christian church are a group of people who we encounter in John’s writings called the Docetists, who said it comes from the Greek word dokein, which means “to appear.” The idea is that Jesus didn’t really have a body. I mean, after all, if he had a carcass, he would be a sinner. He would be in enmeshed and trapped by the same devices that trap us, the flesh. But you see, and these folks would teach a variety of ways of explaining Jesus’s incarnate ministry then, and there are different devices in the second and third centuries used to try explain that. That is called Docetism: the idea that Jesus’s body was not real.
Don’t think that these ideas are so farfetched and removed from our present day today. They find their ways through strains of Gnosticism, they’re certainly found in legalistic settings where inordinate and improper emphasis is placed on flesh and sin as being material, and a kind of Protestant monasticism or asceticism develops out of that. As well, you may know this or it may be of interest to you to know that Menno Simons, the founder of the Mennonites, believed that Jesus had a celestial kind of flesh, that he couldn’t have, in fact, had real flesh because then he would have been a sinner. So these ideas will find themselves expressed at other times in church history. But John’s writings are very clear that we touched, tasted, and handled Him. He had a real body. Died a real death. He was a true substitutionary atonement on our behalf and a true substitutionary vicarious second Adam who fulfilled all the expectations of the Law, and so this would be an important bone of contention in the earliest church in the writings John.
It would develop and would be seized by the Gnostics. All Gnostics are docetic, but not all Docetists are Gnostic, and we’ll talk about that a little more when we talk about Manichaeism and Augustine’s anti-Manichean writings. But suffice it to say that at the end of the first century there were people who said Jesus didn’t have a real body, flesh is your real problem, meaning your bod, your carcass, and that is where sin resides. Gnosticism would seize on this and would then develop a whole system of how the material world was created by a fallen god of the Old Testament and how the god of the spirit hopes to enlighten your spirit and my spirit with knowledge and to bring deliverance to us, and that
Consequently, as these things emerged in the second and third centuries AD, based on philosophical teachings of the Platonic school, influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas, they became very popular, and it would be difficult to weed them out of one’s thinking, and so a young man like Augustine would have a real dilemma. He would have this very real struggle between what he saw as good and spiritual and yet what he lived with in Carthage and in Rome and in Milan—himself and his body and his lust and his flesh.
The Christian church responded with monasticism and the rise of monasticism, which sought to renounce one’s flesh, one’s body, by going to live outside of the world. Monasticism is a very interesting phenomenon. Your earliest examples are in the mid-third century. There are some very prominent individuals like Saint Antony, who we’ll mention here briefly in a few more minutes, and eventually monasticism would evolve from individuals living (“monk” comes from the word single or one or solitaire), and then they would develop community around themselves.
It’s interesting that Christians cannot live on their own. We are a body. We require living together with one another. That’s the thrust of the teaching of Ephesians 4, that it requires a body as we’re knitted and fitted together, and as these individuals went to live in the deserts—and by the way, some of the early motivation to run to the desert was it was the second-best option to dying in Decian’s persecution. I mean if you don’t want to give up your life after all, just give up your property. That’s the second-best thing, live in the desert. And these people certainly, as well were motivated by high motivations, and monasticism would increase astronomically after the persecution was over because it was a new frontier for the zealot to do battle against Satan and his emissaries in the desert or following the wilderness pattern of Jesus or the Israelites or something. But this idea that one would go out and do battle against your flesh, this is a notion called in Greek philosophy and referred to in the early church as asceticism, that one would renounce the body. The tent of this body is where we get the word from.
And the earliest examples of monasticism were in Egypt. Communities were developed. The need for the liturgy in the church and various expressions, and in order to live and to protect one another and to provide for one another and their physical
well-being required the building of a community in the desert, and so community followed them out to the desert as did flesh and the sin principle. But this would be the Christian alternative, this kind of monastic life, to live in solitaire and there’s some prominent examples, Antony being one who we’ll mention here in a minute.
Now, having understood this, Augustine himself is living in the excesses of lust. He finds no relief in Gnostic Manicheanism, which tells him about this dualistic principle that really, you know, you have the life of the Spirit, the life of dualism. Their arguments could not match his wit. He had some sensibilities found in Scripture that come from his childhood and the great mind that God had given him, and experientially he realized that there was no release from the frustrations that he felt, the bondage that he felt.
He thought maybe he could find these things in philosophy, and that’s where we need to give a little background , briefly on Augustine’s quest for wisdom. It was an intellectual quest, a pilgrimage for wisdom. He began reading in Carthage and in Rome works of Greek philosophers. He came to these works through Cicero, for instance, and the teaching of what was called the New Academy that was inspiring and was written in beautiful Latin speech, and Cicero was a great statesman and rhetorician, was a person, no doubt, that Augustine idealized. And his emphasis on the good life and on morality and on the place of the state and the role of the individual and the place of philosophy was inspirational to Augustine. His work [Hortensius], now lost to us, was an important work and impacted the life of Augustine.
Augustine, as well, was influenced by neo-Platonism. Plotinus, the founder of the neo-Platonic school, wrote in Greek, and we already recounted that Augustine couldn’t read Greek. So his access to these works were through a recent translation by a Roman rhetorician by the name of Victorinus, who translated the works of Plotinus into Latin, and Augustine began to read this. And remember I said last time we chatted that Plotinus had direct confrontations in his lectures which are called the Enneads with Gnostic schools. And so Augustine’s beginning to read these things, and he’s seen philosophical responses to Gnosticism or Manicheanism in his case, and he’s trying to tie this together to look for a life of wisdom that would help him to escape the bondage of his lust, but again, alas, it’s just a different kind of dualism. And so this is where we have this young man. Shattered,
somewhere between lust for the intellect and lust for his sensual passions, and we leave him here in Milan. And I’d like to look now for our last minutes together at some of the individual influences that led to his conversion.
We cannot underestimate the role of his mother. We perhaps know as much or more about Augustine’s mother than any other woman in the early church up to this point. He had a great love for her and revered her and gave her a high station of prominence in his life, and this woman was pursuing him. Here is a woman who while she was praying all night for her wayward son, Augustine, she had other children. On the shores of the Mediterranean, he was in Carthage arranging a night travel to Rome and he ditches his mother, and she’ll pursue him, and she shows up in Milan, shortly after Augustine arrives there. She’s already made connections. She knows her son’s there, and she’s working to have Christians try to influence him, and she’s praying incessantly for his soul. And she pursues him, evidently leaving the other kids behind. She’s a widow now.
The plight of the widow in the ancient world was a miserable plight. It was one that unless they had the proper social apparatus around them, could drive them into prostitution and shameful living in order to try to provide for themselves if they didn’t have family or some other social resource to provide for them. This woman has left all and is pursuing this son hundreds and hundreds of miles away on a different continent. One can’t underestimate the role of his mother in his own conversion—the foundations of Christianity that he received from the teachings of his mother, her prayers, and guidance, and so forth.
I would say, second, the role of Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. He’d been bishop there for just over a decade. He was about fourteen years older than Augustine, but a near contemporary. Someone that Augustine respected. He was a power broker. He was a great speaker. He was a statesman. He was everything that Augustine aspired to be and was forcibly made bishop of the city. He was a man of courage. He was man who had a powerful command of language. He was a man of raw intellect who used it in his teachings in a way that Augustine had never experienced before. No one in Carthage could rival this one, or in Rome, for that matter. The Manicheans fell short, and as Ambrose taught on Scripture, Augustine found his way into Ambrose’s church, and let me encourage you at this point to look at the maps that are provided for you in the back, to look at the line drawings of cities,
of churches. I’ve been to Milan and to Ambrose’s church and the courtyard there; see what the plan is like and look to imagine what it would have been like for Augustine to live in Carthage and the layout of the city and what we know about the early churches there, as well in Rome, and in Milan.
Augustine finds his way to this huge basilica in Milan, and he listens to the preaching there, and he’s fetched by it, and it’s inspiring him and causing him to think. He witnesses the courage of this great bishop who, when the empress requests that basilica in the city be used for refuge of the Arians, says, “No way. You can send your troops against us. We will sit in here.” He composed hymns and songs, and the people closed up the doors against the empress’s troops, and they sang and occupied the church and a sense of orthodoxy that showed courage and commitment, and all of this was happening while Augustine was around.
As well, Ambrose had an assistant, Simplicianus, was very wise in his dealings with Ambrose, and look at him, he was appointed from Rome by the pope to help Ambrose. And as he worked with Augustine in his conversion, he realizes that Augustine has a high regard for Victorinus. Remember, Victorinus is this rhetorician who’s translated the works of Plotinus. And Simplicianus describes to Augustine that he knows that Victorinus, who’s now dead, was converted to Christianity, and he describes his conversion to this young rhetorician and statesman, and he uses personal aspects, people who he knows Augustine would respect, and uses those to try to influence this young man.
As well, there was a fellow countryman and a former statesman, a person Augustine knew, who was in Milan, who began to tell Augustine (Apuleius is his name) stories of monks and Christian monks and Saint Antony. All these stories now are of these great heroes who are champions of orthodoxy and asceticism, and Augustine begins to try to work to put these things together.
His conversion, his experience sinning, and the command to lift up Scripture, to take up and read, which were words of a common children’s game, kind of like our game Marco Polo. It was a children’s game in Latin. He picks up Scripture. He reads in the book of Romans, and he is converted.
I would say in conclusion a thing to remember is that Augustine had two bedrocks that were important in his conversion. One is the high prominence of authority given to the church. The second
is the role that the Word of God played in bringing release and relief to him as he opened up the book of Romans and read in it that he could find true release from his lust, from the sinful aspirations that drove him by putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. May we aspire to do the same as we deal in Augustine’s shadow together. God bless you.
