The Roots of Christian Mysticism Session 6
Summary of Margaret Lane's "The Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo" talk, The London Christian Meditation Centre, St Mark's, Clerkenwell, 18 October 2005

(1) Introduction

The influence of Augustine on the history of Western theology cannot be underestimated. Much maligned as responsible for the doctrines of original sin and predestination he has also been credited with the invention of the form that the Christian mystical tradition took in the West.

(2) Augustine in his Historical Context

Augustine was pretty much a contemporary of Gregory of Nyssa and the other Cappadocians.. He was born in 354 and died 430. At this time the Roman Empire was becoming Christian. At first Christianity was tolerated and then adopted as the official religion of Empire All the Emperors since Constantine (who was baptized on his death bed) were Christian except for Julian the Apostate. Not having to worry about persecution from without the Church began to squabble internally and this was the period when out of the wrangling the great doctrines were developed.

Augustine was born in North Africa in a little place called Thagaste, in rural Numidia about 200 miles inland, a town built by the Romans in the first century. Therefore as a typical Roman town it would have had baths, theatre, forum, temple, amphitheatres. In the first century it would have been prosperous but now like all towns it was faded, with attention moving to the olive groves in the countryside. Olive oil was an important commodity and Rome relied on Africa for its supplies. Thagaste was administered from Carthage, an extremely important intellectual centre. The peasant farmers spoke Punic but otherwise Latin was the language spoken, at a time when Latin was declining in Rome in favour of Greek. Africa though was no backwater. By the 2nd century it had already begun to dominate intellectual life of empire. Nearly one third of senators were of African origin. Emperor Severus was from Africa, Terence the playwright and Apulieus who wrote the Golden Ass.

State of African religion and beginnings of Christianity
There is no evidence of Christianity in Africa until the end of the second century when we hear of the martyrs of Scilli. Prior to then the Romans were tolerant of the native religion though insisted on worship of the Emperor. Roman gods were being identified with or worshipped alongside the old Punic gods in accordance with the usual practice of the Romans when attempting to subjugate a new people. Also there were the international cults of Isis and Mithras not forgetting of course the Jews.

Only religion not tolerated at first was Christianity. The bible was translated into a rough sort of Latin. Tertullian was the first theologian to write in Latin. He was very severe and did not countenance fleeing in the face of persecution. Cyprian was the great bishop of Carthage in the 3rd century. By 3rd century Christianity was the dominant religion but it had much in common with the religion it replaced so it was superstitious, a wrathful god, a god to be feared and propitiated rather than a loving god. Martyrdom seen as important, also correct observance of ritual, rigorous acts of penance so rather than being converted to a new religion the adoption of the Christian religion was by a process of identification much like the Roman situation.. Saturn was the god worshipped by the Africans until the advent of Christianity.

(3) Augustine’s life and work in brief

The sources for information about his life are the Confessions, the biography of Possidius who lived in community with Augustine and sermons and letters of Augustine and indeed snippets in his other works.

Education was the only way of escaping for Augustine from the small town life and his parents apparently sacrificed a great deal with the help of a wealthy local patron to educate him. His father was an impoverished gentleman and a Pagan until his deathbed. His mother, St. Monnica was a very devout Christian. The nature of Latin education was literary: really only Virgil and Cicero. Rhetoric and grammar were the main subjects and the object was to turn someone into an orator. There was no philosophy. Augustine learnt Greek but was useless at it. There is a question over how much Greek Augustine knew; it is unlikely to have been enough to read the Greek Fathers or Plotinus in the original. However he would have been introduced to the Cappadocians and Origen through Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. He became a teacher of Rhetoric which was a very respectable occupation particularly as he ended up in Milan on the fringes of the Imperial civil service. He had done well for himself. Carthage was a major intellectual city in Roman world comparable to Alexandria. Clever boys went to Carthage for further study. Those who were well off would go abroad.

Augustine’s conversion put an end to all his career for he left his teaching to embark on the contemplative life in community before he was called to be a priest and subsequently Bishop of Hippo, (an unimportant town 9 days inland from Carthage). He spent the last 35 years of his life as a bishop and died as the town was being besieged by the Vandals. There is an interesting story associated with his death. Fleeing African bishops took his body with them and it ended up in Sardinia. A king of Lombardy then had the body transferred for payment of an amount of gold equal to Augustine’s body weight hence the expression “ its weight in gold.”

He wrote prolifically and most of what he wrote we still have. There are Sermons, commentaries, treatises and letters. We see that he had made a couple of attempts to write confessions before embarking on the final version, in On the Usefulness of belief 8:20 and On Free Choice Of The Will. His most well known works apart from the Confessions are probably City of God and On Christian Teaching both readily available.

In several works he gives us a ladder of the soul’s ascent to wisdom-in his first book into print in the 15th century which was On Christian Teaching a book about the interpretation of scripture,also in a work De Quantitate Animae and On True Religion.

(4) Introduction to the Confessions

Originally written in Latin there are many translations.

It was written somewhere between 395-401 taking between 1 and 6 years to write. He would have written by dictating it to scribes. It may have been written in small town Hippo where he was a bishop or cosmopolitan Carthage on one of his many trips there. For his friend was bishop of Carthage and Augustine became his main advisor.

Augustine had changed between the events he describes in the book and the time of writing, a gap of about 10 years. Peter Brown, Augustine’s biographer says that if he had written the book immediately it would have been quite a different work. In the past 10 years, his mother, son and best friend had all died within a short space of each other. But something else had also happened. Augustine had undergone another conversion. In about 395 just before Augustine embarks on the Confessions Simplicianus, spiritual director of Ambrose and successor to his see of Milan, asked Augustine among other questions a question concerning the individual destiny-why did God say “I have hated Esau?” In considering the answers to these questions Augustine came to realise that man is totally dependent on God even for the initial coming to faith. It is delight that motivates the will towards an object but how we can come to delight in something that is a hidden process out of our conscious control. This conversion belongs to a period not covered in the Confessions but affects the writing of them. Had the book been written shortly after the events recounted there it would have been a very different book placing more emphasis on ascent by reason through academic argument.

What kind of book is the Confessions

It is normally classified as spiritual autobiography. It consists of 13 books the first 9 are an interpretation by Augustine of his past life in terms of a spiritual journey. Book 10 is about his current spiritual state and books 11 -13 are an interpretation of the beginning of Genesis.
Essentially the thirteen books of the Confessions are written in the form of a prayer to his “dominus” which was not an unusual form though the use of it, as one author has put it, “to gossip with God” was quite extraordinary.

Book 10 is extremely long. The “amazing” Book 10, as Peter Brown in his very readable biography says “is not the affirmation of a cured man: it is the self-portrait of a convalescent” O’Donnell who has written a new biography of Augustine (2005) calls book 10 a “repellent and frustrating text” where a bright mystical vision is derailed by an obsessive and meticulous examination of conscience.

Peter Brown regards the last three books as the most strictly autobiographical with their allegorical interpretation of Genesis and Augustine’s prayer “complete your work in me o Lord and open these pages to me.” Augustine’s search for wisdom was totally concentrated on scripture now. Some years later he wrote “for such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures that, even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else, from boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and with talents greater than I possess, I would still be making progress in discovering their treasures.” Books 11-13 look beyond the life of the individual who therefore is perhaps put in his true place as a microcosm of the created order (Paul’s letter to the Romans 8).

The title is significant because in a word it sums up Augustine’s attitude to the human condition accusation of oneself and praise of God. Indeed we do talk about a confession of praise, a confession of sin and confession of faith.

Why write it?

Probably according to his biographer Possidius so that men wouldn’t think him other than he was. People had a very high opinion of African bishops and this would certainly put them right. Or perhaps Augustine was anxious to prove that he was no longer a Manichee as some people thought. O’Donnell certainly regards the Manichees as one of the central preoccupations of the Confessions even though they are ostensibly dismissed after only a third way through. He believes the other preoccupation is the Donatists who Augustine never mentions! Monica had grown up in the Donatist Church although had moved over to Catholics along with the rest of the community. He was never really able to allay people’s suspicions fully that he had left his Manichee days behind. After all he had left Africa a Manichee and returned saying he had been baptized an orthodox Christian. Augustine himself in reviewing all his work at the end of his life in a work called Retractions had this to say about the Confessions:

“Thirteen books of my Confessions, which praise the just and good God in all my evil and good ways, and stir up towards Him the mind and feelings of men: as far as I am concerned, they had this effect on me when I wrote them, and they still do this, when now I read them. What others think is their own business: I know at least, that many of the brethren have enjoyed them, and still do.”

Many however did not believe the portrait of the man presented to them including Augustine’s last and formidable opponent Julian of Eclanum. The Confessions really began to come into their own in the 12th century. Since then they have had a profound effect on many people including some of the best- known Saints of the mystical tradition. For example Teresa of Avila has this to say:

“In that time I was given the confessions of St. Augustine,, which it seems the Lord ordained, because I did not get them and had never them. I am very devoted to St. Augustine, because the convent where I lived as a secular was of his Order, and also for having been a sinner, because I found great comfort in the Saints whom the Lord had turned to himself after they had been so. I thought there was help to be had from them, and, because the Lord had pardoned them, he might do it for me; except that one thing discouraged me, as I have said: that the Lord had called to them only once, and they had not gone back to falling, and I had done it so often that it distressed me. But thinking of the love which held me, I would return to confidence, because I never lost faith in his mercy; I often did in myself.
Oh, God help me, how the hardness of my soul amazes me, after so much help from God! It frightens me to think how little I could do for myself, and how tied down I was so as not to resolve to give myself wholly to God. When I began to read the confessions, I seemed to see myself there, and I began to commend myself often to that glorious saint. When I reached his conversion and read how he heard a voice in the garden, it seemed just as if the lord said it to me, as my heart felt. I was for a long time all dissolved in tears, and was in great affliction and distress. Oh, how a soul suffers, God help me, from losing the freedom it had to be its own master, and what torments it endures! It amazes now that I could live in such torment; praised be God who gave me life to come out of such fatal death! (The Life of St. Teresa of Avila by Herself ch. 9)

Bede Griffiths was encouraged by C S Lewis to read the Confessions in the original Latin. He tells us in The Golden String what an enormous effect it had on him:

“It was so that the splendour of St. Augustine’s Confessions broke upon me. I do not think that I took in a tithe of their meaning, but the sense of contact with a mind, which was consumed with an ardour for truth and for that life of virtue which I desired, penetrated into the depths of my soul. ….Here was, in fact, what I had so long desired to find, a record of a personal experience of passionate intensity and immense imaginative power, engaging all the energies of the intellect and the will in the search for truth.”

He goes on to say that Augustine’s interpretation of the bible fascinated him, particularly in the last three books of the Confessions which showed him ways of interpretation he would never have thought of. It was also from Augustine that he got the idea that the Catholic Church was worth considering. So although Bede Griffiths at this time was a long way from being a Christian Augustine’s Confessions were instrumental in him finding his way back.

Structure of the Confessions

O’Donnell believes he has discerned an underlying structure to the book which is worth paying attention to. The relevant scriptural text is 1 John 2:16;
All that is in the world-the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches-comes not from the Father but from the world.
If you look at the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness they fall into these categories.(turning stones into bread, all the kingdoms of the world, throwing himself from pinnacle to prove he’s Son of God)
Likewise Augustine is tempted in that order and is brought back to God in reverse order. Books 1 and 2 dealing with desire of the flesh, book 3 the desire of the eyes and book 4 worldly ambition. Book 5 is a sort of depression and then book 6 brings the beginning of the healing process with a healing from pride in riches, book 7 healing of the eyes and book 8 a healing of the flesh. Book 9 is full of deaths and rebirths.

(5) The details of Augustine’s journey as we have them in the Confessions
Interestingly in middle age Augustine’s image of the search for truth changed from that of an ascent to a vision of God to that of a never-ending (in this life) traveling a long highway where we may be given glimpses of the divine to console us in our traveling. By the time we get to his treatise on mystical theology The Trinity the ascent is the beginning of the search. The longest journey of all for Augustine, and I suspect for many of us, was the journey from head to heart and from heart to will.

There is a great deal of all kinds of journeying in the Confessions. Augustine travels from Thagaste where he was born to Carthage to be educated, to Rome and Milan to teach and back home to Thagaste after his conversion. He sees himself as the prodigal son journeying away from God until the moment of his awakening to the search after which he begins his journey home to God. He begins his journey as a Christian by a very devout Christian mother and a pagan father. He had a child’s view of God “as some large being with power, even when not present to the senses, of hearing us and helping us.” (Book I ix (14).

(I) The away journey (books 1 and 2)
In books 1 and 2 he portrays his childhood and adolescence as a time of journeying further and further away from God. The attitudes of parents and teachers didn’t help: it was all about getting on in this world. He regales us with tales of his dissolute youth the nadir in his mind being the theft of pears with some other teenage boys just for the sheer hell of it. This is portrayed as Augustine’s fall.

(II) the Turning point (book III)
“I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves”

His awakening came with his discovery in the course of his studies in Carthage of a book by Cicero called Hortensius. This is a lost dialogue by Cicero in which he seeks to persuade the reader to enter a life of philosophical reflection. Hortensius plays the part of the unpersuaded worldly man. Augustine returns to this book again and again during his life. There are about 15 quotations from the lost work throughout Augustine’s writings which is useful when it comes to piecing together what it said. He says:

“The book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you, yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour in my heart. I began to rise up and return to you.” (III.iv.7)
So here was the awakening of desire and longing in Augustine, the longing captured right at the start of the Confessions “you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Or rather it was the reorientation of longing and desire. “I longed to love..I sought an object for my love: I was in love with love…to me it was sweet to love and be loved, the more so if I could also enjoy the body of the beloved. I therefore polluted the spring water of friendship with the filth of concupiscence.“

It is interesting that the psalm he quotes from most often in the Confessions is Psalm 42 “As the hart panteth after the water brooks so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God…”

“Give me a man in love; he knows what I mean. give me one who yearns; give me one who is hungry. Give me one far away in the desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the Eternal country. Give me that sort of man. He knows what I mean. but if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about. (Studies in John)

It is the centrality of the love of God in his thinking that is one reason he has had an influence on so many of the mystics.

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. (Book X.xxvii(38))

Note the spiritual senses

(III) The Return Journey

(a) Initial encounter with Scripture
Augustine’s encounter with Hortensius sent him off to study the scriptures. But he was very disappointed with what he found there. He did not have the benefit of a very good translation and for a man trained in the use of words this was very off putting. (“words those precious cups of meaning” Conf. 1) But also the content was off-putting. He was particularly phased by the conflicting genealogies and the Old Testament portrayal of God. And very much took what he read literally.

(b) The Manichees
Age 19-30 years, a Manichee and interest in astrology. Manichees called themselves Christians because Christ was their redeemer. However they were really a Gnostic sect which like all Gnostics had a very dualist world view. Soma sema is a catch phrase associated with them. The Body a Tomb. Christ was a redeemer because he came to rescue the divine spark which had become trapped in evil matter (the body) and carry it home. They appealed to Augustine for many reasons-they rejected the Old Testament, they seemed to have an answer for where does evil come from (an active evil principle and a passive good) and they led an ascetic life which attracted Augustine or rather possibly assuaged his guilt. In fact long after he began to appreciate the intellectual difficulties of their position he remained attracted by their moral stance.
During this time he was probably also reading Pythagoras and the Hermetic writings although he doesn’t mention them.. These were very much part of the African culture. He was a Manichee for about 11 years altogether. He remained associated with them even after he began to be disillusioned intellectually because he was attracted by their ascetic stance. He was very keen on living in some sort of contemplative community. It was still early days in Italy for Catholic monastic communities so he only had Manichean and Pythagorean examples.

c) Sceptics
He had a brief flirtation with the Sceptics once he had become disillusioned by the Manichees. Their view was that man could never hope to discover the truth. This was a brief but significant fling for Augustine began to understand that the pursuit of wisdom was a life-long quest. The Manichees had offered him a ready-made solution. There was no room for growth and progress.

(d) Ambrose
We all need others on the journey who can act as signposts or guides. There is a saying “When the disciple is ready the Master appears” and that was certainly true of Augustine’s encounter with Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. He was truly in awe of him. Ambrose had had an upper class Roman education and unlike Augustine could read Greek fluently. Ambrose was more educated but not as clever as Augustine. Apart from yielding a lot of personal information we can pick titbits of social history from the Confessions. For example we know from Augustine’s meeting with Ambrose how unusual it was to read silently to oneself because Augustine was very puzzled by this habit of Ambrose’s. What he learnt from Ambrose was that it was possible to interpret the Scriptures figuratively. He also came across for the first time the idea of God as something other than a material reality although the reality of spiritual substances remained something of a block for him for a while thereafter.

(e) The Neo-Platonists
Augustine’s education had been a purely literary one so he had not come across any Greek philosophy however Milan, which was briefly the seat of Imperial government for Italy and Africa until Ravenna took over, was buzzing with a newish fusion of Christian Platonism. It is possible to trace literal borrowings from Plotinus in Ambrose’s sermons. Another African Professor of Rhetoric, Marius Victorinus, had become a Christian and had translated Plotinus and other Neo-Platonic writings into Latin. At some stage Augustine was introduced to these writings which led to a profound change in his thought. There Augustine saw that he was effectively reading the prologue to John’s Gospel but with one crucial difference the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, I did not read there.” Philosophy points to the goal but not to the way. “I would learn to discern and distinguish the difference between presumption and confession, between those who see what the goal is but not how to get there and those who see the way which leads to the home of bliss, not merely as an end to be perceived but as a realm to live in.” (bk.VII.xx.(26)

THE FIRST TWO ASCENT NARRATIVES AND COMMENTS

(1) “By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With you as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel, and was given power to do so because you had become my helper. (Ps. 29:11). I entered and with my soul’s eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind-not the light of every day, obvious to anyone, nor a larger version of the same kind which would, as it were, have given out a much brighter light and filled everything with its magnitude. It was not that light but a different thing, utterly different from all our kinds of light. It transcended my mind, not in the way that oil floats on water, nor as heaven is above earth. It was superior because it made me, and I was inferior because I was made by it.

The Platonic books were probably Plotinus and his pupil Porphry, Neo-Platonists who had been translated into Latin by Marius Victorinus . Note the reference to the light. For Plato the doctrine of the soul’s return involved a remembering (Greek for truth is “Aletheia” which literally means “unforgetting”). For Plotinus and Augustine it was more in the nature of an illumination. We see here Augustine’s realization that the search for God is an inward search into the depths of himself. This is very Plotinian but there are differences. Plotinus believed that part of the soul remained undescended and what when first saw with the eye of the soul was the undescended part of the soul and then the One who was the ground of being. Augustine immediately sees a light which is distinctive from the self and productive of it. Also Divine intervention is involved at the start. The soul has no natural claim to this realm and therefore no natural means of achieving participation in it.

The person who knows the truth knows it, and he who knows it knows eternity. Love knows it. Eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity: you are my God. To you I sigh “day and night.” (Ps. 42:2). When I first came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet being. And you gave a shock to the weakness of my sight by the strong radiance of your rays, and I trembled with love and awe. And I found myself far from you “in the region of dissimilarity”, and heard as it were your voice from on high: “I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.”

Note the Eucharistic imagery. Augustine has discovered a God who is being and love therefore more than the god of Plotinus who was an impersonal god.

And I recognized that “because of iniquity you discipline man” and “cause my soul to waste away like a spider’s web” (Ps. 38:14), and I said: “Surely truth cannot be nothing, when it is not diffused through space, either finite or infinite?” And you cried from far away: “Now I am who I am.” (Exod. 3:14). I heard in the way one hears within the heart, and all doubt left me.” I would have found it easier to doubt whether I was myself alive than that there is no truth “understood from the things that are made.” (Rom. 1:20) (Confessions VII.x.16)

A God who is not diffused through space. This had always been a problem for Augustine to conceive of something in immaterial terms. The Manichees didn’t. Also the African Christian tradition was quite a materialist one. The Platonic theory of two worlds being and becoming helped Augustine and the other early Church Fathers to formulate a Christian metaphysics of a transcendent God. The words of the creed “visible and invisible” did not require belief in a God that was transcendent to this world. The recognition of the reality of God was the central insight of this episode.

(2) “I was astonished to find that already I loved you, not a phantom surrogate for you. But I was not stable in the enjoyment of my God. I was caught up to you by your beauty and quickly torn away from you by my weight. With a groan I crashed into inferior things. This weight was my sexual habit. But with me there remained a memory of you. I was in no kind of doubt to whom I should attach myself, but was not yet in a state to be able to do that. ”The body, which is corruptible, weighs down the soul, and our earthly habitation drags down the mind to think many things” (Wisd. 9:15). Moreover, I was wholly certain that your invisible nature “since the foundation of the world is understood from the things which are made, that is your eternal power and divinity” (Rom. 1:20)

I asked myself why I approved of the beauty of bodies, whether celestial or terrestrial, and what justification I had for giving an unqualified judgement on mutable things, saying “This ought to be thus, and that ought to be thus.” In the course of this inquiry why I made such value judgements as I was making, I found the unchangeable and authentic eternity of truth to transcend my mutable mind. And so step by step I ascended from bodies to the soul which perceives through the body, and from there to its inward force, to which bodily senses report external sensations, this being as high as the beasts go. From there I ascended to the power of reasoning to which is to be attributed the power of judging the deliverances of the bodily senses. This power, which in myself I found to be mutable, raised itself to the level of its own intelligence, and led my thinking out of the ruts of habit. It withdrew itself from the contradictory swarms of imaginative fantasies, so as to discover the light by which it was flooded. At that point it had no hesitation in declaring that the unchangeable is preferable to the changeable, and that on this ground it can know the unchangeable since, unless it could somehow know this, there would be no certainty in preferring it to the mutable. So in the flash of a trembling glance it attained to that which is. At that moment I saw your “invisible nature understood through the things which are made” (Rom. 1:20). But I did not possess the strength to keep my vision fixed. My weakness reasserted itself, and I returned to my customary condition. I carried with me only a loving memory and a desire for that of which I had the aroma but which I had not yet the capacity to eat. (Confessions VII.xvii.23)

These two descriptions may well be of the same incident seen from different perspectives. Theoria was the way that access could be gained into the world of being. This passage shows the stages through which the soul moves.

Is it deliberate that unlike the vision at Ostia which occurs after baptism the ascent(s) here is not tied to a time or place (suggestion of timelessness which is not Christian). There was a dispute after Plotinus between different schools of Neo-Platonists as to whether contemplation amounted to salvation. Those who believed like Plotinus in an undescended aspect of the soul believed that contemplation was salvation. Others thought that the soul required more help and stressed ritual as a means of help. It is quite clear from this passage that Augustine does not equate the two. He believes that his soul’s moral condition prevents a more sustained experience.

CONVERSION IN THE GARDEN

Augustine had thought about putting himself up for baptism early in 386 but lost his nerve because he did not feel morally prepared. He did not feel worthy. This is a change from early on when he did not feel that Christianity was worthy of him!
Why did he feel he needed to be sexually continent to be worthy of baptism?
Various possible influences on him were:
1. Hortensius carried a warning that sex was distracting for the pursuit of higher things
2. Manichees influence remained
3. Porphry, a Neo-Platonist who Augustine had almost certainly read said one must be sexually pure.
4. There had always been an ascetic strain in Christianity
5. Ambrose wrote a treatise now lost called On Philosophy, that is to say, On Baptism a few quotes from this are to be found in Augustine. One that he uses emphasizes the role of sexual continence:
Continence is the pedestal of piety, for it gives people slipping and sliding in the pitfalls of this world a firm place to stand.” Ambrose was a notable praiser of virginity and Verecundus, who was one of Augustine’s circle and baptized at the same time also seemed to think he had to renounce sex to be baptized.
6. Augustine was competitive. He wanted to be better than others and there are suggestions in Paul whom Augustine was reading at this time that the celibate life was better.

As part of the build up to his conversion in book VIII he presents a compilation of conversions which have influenced him most important is the conversion of St. Antony.
Augustine was suffering mental, physical and emotional exhaustion and lay down weeping under a fig tree in the garden:

“Suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again, “Pick up and read, pick up and read.” At once my countenance changed, and I began to think intently whether there might be some sort of children’s game in which such a chant is used. But I could not remember having heard of one. I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find. For I had heard how Antony happened to be present at a gospel reading, and took it as an admonition addressed to himself when the words were read: “Go, sell all you have, give to the poor and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Matt.19:21). By such an inspired utterance he was immediately “converted to you” (Ps. 50:15). So I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting. There I had put down there the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts” (Rom. 13: 13-14).

I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled. (Confessions VIII.xii.29)

Augustine’s utter helplessness turned into consoling trust of dependence.

VISION AT OSTIA

The day was imminent when she was to depart this life (the day which you knew and we did not). It came about, as I believe by your providence through your hidden ways, that she and I were standing leaning out of a window overlooking a garden. It was at the house where we were staying at Ostia on the Tiber, where, far removed from the crowds, after the exhaustion of a long journey, we were recovering our strength for the voyage.

Alone with each other, we talked very intimately. “Forgetting the past and reaching forward to what lies ahead” (Phil. 3:13), we were searching together in the presence of the truth which is you yourself. We asked what quality of life the eternal life of the saints will have, a life which “neither eye has seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man” (1 Cor. 2:9). But with the mouth of the heart wide open, we drank in the waters flowing from your spring on high, “the spring of life” (Ps. 35:10) which is with you. Sprinkled with this dew to the limit of our capacity, our minds attempted in some degree to reflect on so great a reality.

Our colloquy led us to the point where the pleasures of the body’s senses, however intense and in however brilliant a material light enjoyed, seemed unworthy not merely of comparison but even of remembrance beside the joy of that life, and we lifted ourselves in longing yet more ardent toward that which is, and step by step traversed all bodily creatures and heaven itself, whence sun and moon and stars shed their light upon the earth. Higher still we mounted by inward thought and wondering discourse on your works, and we arrived at the summit of our minds; and this too we transcended to touch that land of never-failing plenty where you pasture Israel for ever with the food of truth. Life there is the Wisdom through whom all these things are made, and all others that have been or ever will be; but Wisdom herself is not made: she is as she always has been and will be for ever. Rather should we say that in her there is no “has been” or “will be”, but only being, for she is eternal, but past and future do not belong to eternity. And as we talked and panted for it, we touched the edge of it by the utmost leap of our hearts; then sighing and unsatisfied, we left the first-fruits of our spirit captive there, and returned to the noise of articulate speech, where a word has beginning and end. How different from your Word, our Lord, who abides in himself, and grows not old, but renews all things.

AUGUSTINE’S MEDITATION ON THE ASCENT AT OSTIA

Then we said,
If the tumult of the flesh fell silent for someone,
And silent too were the phantasms of earth, sea and air,
Silent the heavens,
And the very soul silent to itself,
That it might pass beyond itself by not thinking of its own being;
If dreams and revelations known through its imagination were silent,
If every tongue, and every sign, and whatever is subject to transience
Were wholly stilled for him
-for if anyone listens, all these things will tell him,
“We did not make ourselves;
He made us who abides for ever”-
And having said this they held their peace

Then we said,
If the tumult of the flesh fell silent for someone,
And silent too were the phantasms of earth, sea and air,
Silent the heavens,
And the very soul silent to itself,
That it might pass beyond itself by not thinking of its own being;
If dreams and revelations known through its imagination were silent,
If every tongue, and every sign, and whatever is subject to transience
Were wholly stilled for him
-for if anyone listens, all these things will tell him,
“We did not make ourselves;

He made us who abides for ever”-
And having said this they held their peace
For they had pricked the listening ear to him who made them;
And then he alone were to speak,
Not through things that are made, but of himself,
That we might hear his Word,
Not through fleshly tongue nor angel’s voice,
Nor thundercloud,
Nor any riddling parable,
Hear him unmediated, whom we love in all these things,
Hear him without them,
As now we stretch out and in a flash of thought
Touch that eternal Wisdom who abides above all things;
If this could last,
And all other visions, so far inferior, be taken away,
And this sight alone ravish him who saw it,
And engulf him and hide him away, kept for inward joys,
So that this moment of knowledge-
This passing moment that left us aching for more-
Should there be life eternal,
Would not Enter into the joy of your Lord
Be this, and this alone?
And when, when will this be?
When we all rise again, but not all are changed?” (1 Cor. 15:51)

I said something like this, even if not just this way and with exactly these words. ((Confessions IX.x.23-26)

Note Acts 4:32 (being of one heart and mind means looking together towards God.) There is considerable feeling in this passage. There is greater understanding of the importance of listening and silence and revelation. The distance between Augustine and God has disappeared if only temporarily. It can only be temporary in this life so baptism has made no difference to his ability to sustain the vision of God. note that the vision is enclosed in resurrection quotes from scripture.

After Ostia and Monica’s death Augustine goes back to Thagaste to live in a lay community. When he goes to Hippo he lives in a community consisting of lay and clergy. At one time his first biographer Possidius lived in this community. Augustine’s institution of African monasticism was one of the reasons why people thought that he had remained a Manichee for it was only Manichees and philosophers who lived in this way. He spent the rest of his life in active service as bishop rather than as a contemplative.