Images of Conversion in St. Augustine's Confessions

In his preceding work Soundings in Augustine's Imagination Father O'Connell outlined the three basic images Augustine employs to frame his view of the human condition. In the present study he applies the same techniques of image-analysis to the three major conversions recounted in the Confessions. Those conversions were occasioned first by Augustine's youthful reading of Cicero's Hortensius then by his reading of what he calls the books of the Platonists and finally most decisively by his fateful reading in that Milanese garden of the explosive capitulum or chapterlet from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Dissection of Augustine's imagery discloses a chain of striking connections between these conversions. Each of them for instance features a return to a woman - now a bridal now a maternal figure and finally a mysterious stand-in for Divine Wisdom both bridal and maternal. Unsurprisingly conversion-imagery also provokes a fresh estimate of the sexual component in Augustine's religious biography; but the sexual aspect is balanced by Augustine's insistent stress on the vanity of his worldly ambitions. Perhaps most arresting of all is Father O'Connell's analysis showing that the text that Augustine read from Romans consisted of not only two but four verses: hence the dramatic procession of images which make up the structure of the Confessions Book VII; hence too the presence subtle but real of those same image-complexes in the Dialogues Augustine composed soon after his conversion in A.D. 386.