The Conversion Before Augustine's Conversion

Positive Mimesis and Conversion

I was reading the end of Book VIII of Augustine’s Confessions, as I have been lately, and came again to a scene that I’ve known about for years, though I had forgotten precisely where it occurred. It is the famous moment when Augustine hears the voice of a child singing, “Take and read, take and read.” For many people, this is the decisive moment of Augustine’s conversion.

But this time I noticed something I had never really paid attention to before.

Between hearing the child’s voice and actually taking up the Scriptures, Augustine remembers another story. He remembers St. Anthony of the Desert, who had experienced something similar. Anthony had heard the Gospel read and understood it as being spoken directly to him. As Augustine says in Confessions, “By that experience [Antony] had been in that instant converted to you.” He acted immediately, and his life was forever changed.

What struck me is that Augustine does not simply hear the voice and instinctively know what to do. The grace-filled moment is mediated through the example of Anthony. It is because Anthony had responded to Scripture in this way that Augustine thinks to do likewise.

The book of Scripture was not lying beside him. Augustine had to get up, go to where he had left it, and deliberately decide to open it and read the first passage his eyes fell upon.

Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. (Romans 13:13-14)

Immediately afterward Augustine writes that he had no desire to read further. The sentence had given him everything he needed. “I had no wish to read further, and no need. For in that instant, with the very ending of the sentence, it was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the darkness of uncertainty vanished away.”

This comes after two books of agonizing over his divided will. Augustine longs for the good and yet remains captive to habit, ambition, and lust. He wants to follow God, yet cannot bring himself to do so. He feels himself divided between two worlds until, in this grace-filled moment, everything changes.

What I had never noticed before was that even this moment is not unmediated. Augustine’s response is learned through another.

That immediately brought to mind several other mediated spiritual experiences.

The first is St. Ignatius of Loyola. My children have been talking about him lately, and I was reminded that during his recovery from injury he wanted the great romances of chivalry. None were available. Instead he was given The Life of Christ and the Lives of the Saints. It was not that he suddenly desired an entirely different kind of story. The model of heroic greatness was already there. The saints simply became the new heroes. His desire remained mediated, but now toward a different end.

A less obvious example, though one I return to often, is Babette’s Feast. General Löwenhielm serves as an essential mediator for the rest of the dinner guests. Without his experience—without his recognizing what Babette had actually prepared—the others might well have missed much of the gift that had been placed before them. They had already resolved not to praise the meal, almost to pretend that they were untouched by it. They would still have eaten it, but perhaps only as consumers. Löwenhielm allows them to receive it as something more.

That contrast seems important.

Without the model of General Löwenhielm, the guests risk becoming mere consumers or spectators of Babette’s feast.

Without the witness of the saints, Ignatius might simply have remained a consumer of heroic stories, pursuing worldly glory instead of sanctity.

Without Anthony standing behind him, Augustine might have dismissed the voice of the child as nothing more than an odd coincidence, another passing moment, and missed an encounter with Christ.

Grace may be given in a moment, but the capacity to recognize grace is formed over a lifetime.

All of this brings me back to something Gil Bailie says in his reflections on the vine and the branches. We are always imitating someone who is imitating someone who is imitating someone. The question is never whether we have mediators. The question is whether the chain of mediation ultimately reaches Christ.

Jesus says, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” Yet the life of Christ ordinarily reaches us through those who are already abiding in him. Anthony learns from Christ. Augustine learns from Anthony. We learn from Augustine. This is not a defect in the Christian life. It is precisely how the life of the Vine reaches the branches.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest meanings of Christ’s image of the vine and the branches. The life of Christ does not bypass human relationships. It flows through them. The sap of the spiritual life reaches each branch through another branch already united to the Vine.

Augustine’s memory of Anthony is simply one beautiful—and unusually self-aware—example of that reality.

Most of us are not nearly so aware of the holy mediators through whom we ourselves first learned to hear the voice of Christ.