Augustine's Conversion

In my search for Augustine’s basic inspiration, I note that, despite many developments in his life, there was always a constant element, from which he never deviated, and that he has developed more and more during his life. That has to be found in his philosophy, his love of wisdom, particularly his philosophy of the inner self as the ultimate place where Truth reveals itself in everyman.

With this observation I try to avoid a strictly theological and churchly approach of Augustine’s ideas, because it would narrow immediately his view on spirituality. That sort of approach tends inadvertently to an exclusive way of thinking, that is to say that the ideas of Augustine are especially seen as belonging to the domain of churchly believe.

Augustine's view of the Inner Teacher, however, eludes this strict way of thinking. It assumes that the Christ as the divine creative Wisdom dwells in every person as an Inner Teacher. If you still want to speak of church, then you have to identify the church with the whole world and covers it all humanity, including the whole universe.

The inclusive view

There are many reasons to give an inclusive approach to Augustine's spirituality. That means: to give him the room he deserves, because you cannot define his thinking in unequivocal and dogmatic terms. In the course of his life he did assimilate and integrate every stage of his development. Therefore it is in his view never either/or but always both/and. So does for instance the immanence of God in the human soul not exclude God's transcendence and does his emphasis on God's grace not diminish human activity. This tendency is connected with his desire to bring to unity all opposites and to reconcile oppositions at a higher level. Moreover, he lived in a time when the human reality was not as today divided and classified in exact areas, so it is difficult to stick our actual labels on him. Theology, philosophy and literature were inextricably united in him.

Such an inclusive approach should also be applied to what is called Augustine’s conversion. The current view is that its development is one of numerous fractures with the errors of a previous period. Augustine himself has in his Confessions given the start to this view, when he presents his development and in particular his conversion in the garden of Milan as a complete break with his former life. Although I don’t take off anything the radicalism of his conversion, it would be wrong to assume, that he by this step left his past completely behind him and did nothing of it integrate in his new situation. In a contribution to the history of Western and Oriental philosophy I read about Augustine: He was a passionate intellectual, who converted himself from orator to philosopher and from philosopher to a Christian.

This easy description gives unintentionally the suggestion that Augustine after his conversion to the philosophy totally renounced being orator, and after his conversion to Christianity being philosopher. Such a description gets stuck in what is external and says little about his conversion which is much more an inner process. With at least as much right you could approach his conversion the other way and argue that Augustine as a Christian more than ever developed himself as orator and philosopher.

A conversion to the inner man

This is why the term conversion asks to be described from the inside. Romano Guardini states in his study on the Conversion of St. Augustine that his conversion was not a conversion to Christianity. His argument is that Augustine never has been a pagan. By birth he was always a Christian, albeit one who believed, but had not given to that faith a clear content or direction. Guardini says: His conversion was not only an definitive turning towards God and Christ, but also to what he already in his innermost was. Anyway, if he originally should be mentioned a pagan or an Christian, that last comment is I think more important. What matters is that his conversion was a development of a religious awareness that originally was already present in him and that he had to develop with the help of his Inner Teacher.

You could therefore describe Augustine’s conversion as a movement from outside to within. In the Tenth Book of the Confessions, he expresses it as follows:

Late have I loved you.(...)

And see, you were within me and I was in the world outside,
and sought you there.

(X, xxvii (38))

It expresses the ultimate conviction that God reveals himself not from outside, but from within. For Augustine, knowledge about God is not a knowledge that people can obtain from external sources, but it is a knowledge from the heart. Hence his admonition:

redite ad cor: turn to your inner self,

and

Do not go outside, turn inside yourself,
in the inner man dwells the truth.

The universality of his conversion

When Augustine makes his conversion the subject of his Confessions, it is in a special way an autobiographical story. But it is a story that is not intended to be purely historical. It selects and shapes the facts of his life serving a higher more or less apologetic purpose. That purpose is:

To confess the good and evil deeds in his life in order to praise God.

These praiseis meant:

to excite the people, his brothers, to the understanding and love of God.

In these words summarizes Augustine the intention of his Confessions in the Rectractationes, an revision of his work at the end of his life.

This purpose gives the biography an exemplary character. The emphasis lies not so much on the strictly personal, but on the universal significance of his life. Through his personal experiences Augustine weaves a general pattern of the inner quest of the human soul to God and how He can be found. This description is super-personal. This is also evident from the more general, more cosmic observations he adds to the story of his life in the last chapters of his Confessions.

Conversion as psychological development

There has been debate about the question if Augustine describes in his Confessions his conversion to Christianity or to the philosophical vision of Platonism. The question is not simply to answer, because it is wrongly put. It tries to think exclusively again, as if the one would exclude the other. She has also still the concept of conversion as adherence to a doctrine or system, while the conversion is more taking place on a psychological level.

Conversion is one of those concepts that get a completely different content, if you assume that religion is based on inner (psychological) experience. Conversion is not so much a transition to a new doctrine or religious content, but rather a full orientation to an inner truth that is potentially already present and known. It is an experience in the depth, in which God does not need to be experienced in temporal and spatial representations, but mentally as a source of pure truth and beauty. This process of spiritual conversion does not necessarily mean that everything which was adhered in the past has to be rejected. Conversion is an total turnabout, but it also means that elements from the past are regained, purified and incorporated within the new vision.

The latter is the case with Augustine, who was so aimed at unity. With him are influences that he has undergone interwoven in an inseparable way. In his Confessions we find, besides elements which are derived from the Bible, a non-negligible number of elements, indicating that he integrated Neo-Platonist and Gnostic views in his vision. That can frighten those who are accustomed to think in exclusive orthodox terms. In that case one is afraid that a mix of systems would be ascribed to Augustine, which is called syncretism. It is the fear of foreign influences, which could be pagan or heretic. Hence that one often tries to minimize these elements in Augustine or, if not possible, to argue that they are in fact Christian.

Connecting Christian and classical elements

You can also see it the other way and consider it as one of the greatest merits of Augustine that he has managed to unite different traditions with each other. He has been able to connect significant elements of the classical ideas, as they had taken shape in the Neo-Platonism, with Judeo-Christian thinking. By this he broadened the vision on truth by seeing it as universal and basically accessible for everyone. In doing so he has given a universal base to the Christian faith that had a tendency to sectarian seclusion.

Churchly chauvinism

Churchly thinking is often inclined to chauvinism. It can hardly bear to see that the truth that it cherishes could be found elsewhere and claims about it a kind of monopoly. But in the view of Augustine, one does not possess the truth. For him, the truth is a transcendent reality to which he has converted himself and which he constantly seeks, but never wholly can possess in this life.

Conversion in the spirit of Augustine is an personal turning to that universal Truth, which is present in the inner depths of everyone's consciousness and to which all outward forms of religion must be brought back. It is true, the holy scriptures, the dogmas, the religious tradition refer to that Truth, but they do not function if this inner word does not sound. In Augustine's view this word did not only sound in the past, but is still heard by everyone who has ears to hear. The Spirit is still blowing wherever it wants. Then it is essential not to fix on outward forms but to turn to that inward Word and be sure that it will incarnate.