The Baptism of Augustine

The most consequential encounter of Ambrose’s life was with a young African professor of rhetoric who came to Milan in 384. Augustine came to hear Ambrose’s celebrated eloquence and stayed for his matter: Ambrose’s spiritual, allegorical preaching of the Old Testament dissolved the Manichaean objections that had blocked Augustine’s way to the faith, and at the Easter Vigil of 387 Ambrose baptized him. This file follows the encounter through Augustine’s own Confessions — the coming for the rhetoric, the famous observation of Ambrose reading in silence and the scholarly dispute over it, the spiritual exegesis, and the baptism — and disentangles the medieval legend that the Te Deum was improvised at the font.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

Augustine Comes to Milan

Augustine arrived in Milan in 384 to take up the imperial chair of rhetoric — a post secured, with one of history’s ironies, through the recommendation of the pagan senator Symmachus, Ambrose’s antagonist over the Altar of Victory (see The Altar of Victory and the Basilica Crisis). He was then a man of about thirty, an accomplished rhetorician, a Manichaean drifting toward skepticism, and far from the Church. Out of professional curiosity and the courtesy due a famous orator, he went to hear the bishop preach (Augustine, Confessions 5.13).

His own account is candid about the order of his interest. He came to assess the eloquence, “to see whether his fluency answered to its reputation,” indifferent to the content — “the things he was saying I held to be of no account.” But the matter came in with the manner, undefended: “while I was opening my heart to learn how eloquently he spoke, there came also into my mind, along with the words I was prizing, the things I was slighting; for I could not separate them” (Augustine, Confessions 5.13–14, trans. after Chadwick). He had come for the style and was caught by the substance.

The Milan Years and Augustine’s Circle

Augustine did not come to Milan alone, and the conversion of 386 was the conversion of a whole circle. With him, or gathering to him in those years, were the people who fill the middle books of the Confessions: his mother Monica, who had followed him from Africa and who attached herself devotedly to Ambrose’s church, keeping its fasts and revering its bishop (Augustine, Confessions 6.1–2); his closest friend Alypius, who would be baptized with him and become bishop of Thagaste; his fellow-townsman Nebridius, the sharp-minded companion of his philosophical doubts; his son Adeodatus, born of the concubine whom Augustine, in one of the bleakest passages of the Confessions, dismissed in order to make an advantageous marriage that never came (Augustine, Confessions 6.15). For a time this group entertained a scheme of withdrawal — a planned philosophical community, some ten friends pooling their goods to live a shared life of contemplative leisure (otium) apart from public ambition — a plan that foundered on the question of wives and was, in a sense, only realized later in the Christian form of the retreat at Cassiciacum and the monastic community Augustine would found at Thagaste and Hippo (Augustine, Confessions 6.14; Brown, Augustine of Hippo, ch. on Milan; Wills, Font of Life). Ambrose presided over the church into which this entire restless circle was, one by one, drawn.

The Books of the Platonists

Alongside Ambrose’s preaching, a second intellectual force was at work on Augustine in Milan: the “books of the Platonists” (libri Platonicorum) — Latin translations, probably by Marius Victorinus, of works of Plotinus and perhaps Porphyry — which a certain unnamed proud man put into his hands (Augustine, Confessions 7.9). From them Augustine learned to conceive of God and the soul as immaterial substance, breaking the Manichaean materialism that had made him unable to think of God except as an extended body, and giving him the metaphysical vocabulary of being, of evil as privation rather than substance, and of the ascent of the mind to the unchanging Light (Augustine, Confessions 7.10–17). It is a much-debated question how far this Neoplatonism was itself mediated through Ambrose, whose sermons (drawing on Plotinus and on the Greek fathers’ use of Platonic categories) had prepared Augustine to read the libri Platonicorum Christianly (Brown, Augustine of Hippo; Wills, Font of Life, on the Milanese Neoplatonic circle around Ambrose and Simplicianus). The two influences worked together: the Platonists gave Augustine a spiritual metaphysics, and Ambrose’s preaching and the Scriptures showed him the Word made flesh, the humility and the grace that — as Augustine pointedly observed — the Platonist books did not contain (Augustine, Confessions 7.18–21).

Ambrose Reading in Silence

In these months Augustine recorded one small scene that has fascinated readers ever since. Hoping to consult the bishop privately, he found Ambrose so besieged by the business of the church and the needs of petitioners that he could rarely be approached, and when he was free he was reading — silently. “When he read, his eyes ran over the page and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were still… often when we came we found him reading like this, silently, for he never read aloud” (Augustine, Confessions 6.3, trans. after Chadwick).

[Disputed: this passage became the principal evidence for a once-popular claim that silent reading was rare or remarkable in classical antiquity — a thesis associated with Josef Balogh (“Voces Paginarum,” 1927) and popularized by Paul Saenger, Space Between Words (1997). It has been decisively rebutted: Bernard Knox, “Silent Reading in Antiquity” (GRBS 9, 1968), and especially A. K. Gavrilov and M. F. Burnyeat (Classical Quarterly 47, 1997), showed that silent reading was in fact well known in antiquity. On their reading Augustine’s remark expresses not astonishment that Ambrose could read silently but a comment on his motive — perhaps to spare his voice, perhaps to avoid being drawn into discussion of a difficult passage by listeners, perhaps simply to guard his scarce time.] The scene, in any case, shows a bishop whose study of the Scriptures was relentless and private, behind the press of his public life (see Preaching and Care).

The Letter and the Spirit

The decisive thing Ambrose did for Augustine he did from the pulpit, and it was exegetical. Augustine’s Manichaeism had fed on contempt for the Old Testament — its anthropomorphic God, its violent histories, its polygamous patriarchs — which the Manichees mocked and which Augustine could not reconcile with a worthy idea of God. Hearing Ambrose preach those very texts spiritually, opening their figurative and Christological sense, removed the obstacle: “I was glad too that the old Scriptures of the law and the prophets were set before me to be read no longer with that eye to which they had seemed absurd… I heard first one and then another and then many of their difficult passages explained figuratively, where, taking them literally, I had been killed” (Augustine, Confessions 6.4, trans. after Chadwick). Ambrose’s watchword, the Pauline “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6), unlocked the book that Augustine’s literalism had closed (Augustine, Confessions 6.4; see The Mysteries and the Hexameron on Ambrose’s allegorical method).

This was the hinge. It did not by itself convert Augustine — that came through the priest Simplicianus, the example of Antony and the monks, and the garden at Milan (Augustine, Confessions 8) — but it cleared the intellectual ground, and it set the pattern of biblical reading Augustine would carry for life.

The Garden and the Groundwork

The conversion itself, narrated in Book 8 of the Confessions, was a crisis not of the intellect but of the will. By the summer of 386 Augustine was intellectually persuaded of the truth of Catholic Christianity but could not break the chain of habit — the “two wills” warring within him, the longing for continence and the clinging to old lusts — and the recoil from the cost of conversion (Augustine, Confessions 8.5, 8.8–10). The hearing of the story of Antony of Egypt from his countryman Ponticianus, and of the desert monks and the two imperial agents who renounced the world for Christ, struck him with shame (Confessions 8.6–7). The climax came in the garden in Milan: torn and weeping, Augustine heard a child’s voice from a neighboring house chanting “tolle lege, take up and read”; opening the book of Paul that lay to hand, his eye fell on Romans 13:13–14 — “not in rioting and drunkenness… but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh” — and “instantly… all the darkness of doubt vanished away” (Augustine, Confessions 8.12, trans. after Chadwick). It is essential to see that Ambrose’s groundwork made this moment possible: the bishop’s spiritual exegesis had already removed the intellectual obstacle, so that by the day in the garden nothing stood between Augustine and faith but his own divided will. The garden did not supply Augustine with arguments — those Ambrose had given him from the pulpit — but resolved a struggle of the heart. Without the years of preaching there would have been no garden.

The Counsel to Read Isaiah

When, after the garden, Augustine asked which book of Scripture he should read to prepare himself for baptism, the counsel came through Simplicianus (Ambrose’s own spiritual father, who had instructed him before his episcopate): Augustine should read the prophet Isaiah (Augustine, Confessions 9.5). The advice is revealing — Isaiah was read in the West as the most “evangelical” of the prophets, the foreteller of Christ and the calling of the Gentiles, and so the natural bridge for a convert from the prophetic Old Testament Augustine had once despised to the Gospel he now embraced. But Augustine, by his own admission, could not yet follow it: he found the opening obscure, “not understanding the first part,” and laid the book aside to take up again when he was more fitted to the Scriptures (Confessions 9.5). The episode is one of the few direct, practical counsels the Ambrosian circle is recorded as giving Augustine, and it caught the convert at the very limit of his readiness.

The Baptism (Easter 387)

After his conversion in the summer of 386 and a season of retreat at Cassiciacum, Augustine returned to Milan, enrolled among the competentes for Easter, and was baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387, together with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius (Augustine, Confessions 9.6). [Disputed: Augustine gives no calendar date; the night of 24–25 April 387 is a secure modern reconstruction — Easter 387 fell on 25 April, and baptism at the Easter Vigil was the Milanese norm (Wills, Font of Life; van Oort).] Augustine’s own words are brief and full: “we were baptized, and anxiety about our past life fled away” (Confessions 9.6).

The Te Deum Legend

A famous legend grew up around this baptism: that Ambrose and Augustine, filled with the Spirit, improvised the Te Deum laudamus antiphonally at the font, each supplying a verse in turn. [Disputed: this is a medieval legend, not history. Its earliest substantial witness is Hincmar of Reims (c. 859–860), who relays it “as we have heard from our elders”; many medieval manuscripts accordingly head the hymn Hymnus Ambrosii et Augustini. Modern scholarship attributes the Te Deum not to Ambrose or Augustine but to an uncertain late-fourth- or early-fifth-century author, with Niceta of Remesiana the most-discussed but contested candidate (see Father of Latin Hymnody).] Ambrose did father Latin hymnody — but not, on the evidence, at Augustine’s baptism, and not the Te Deum.

The Limits of the Friendship

It is worth not overstating the personal closeness. Augustine reveres Ambrose in the Confessions but records that he could seldom get near him; his real spiritual mentor in the run-up to conversion was the priest Simplicianus, who had instructed Ambrose himself and who told Augustine the story of the conversion of the rhetorician Victorinus (Augustine, Confessions 8.1–2). The relationship was that of a great bishop and an admiring inquirer who became, in time, the greater theologian. What Augustine received from Ambrose was not intimacy but two gifts of incalculable weight: a way of reading Scripture, and baptism. Through both, Ambrose’s hand lies on the whole of the theology Augustine would go on to write (see The Shaping of the West).

It is equally worth marking what Augustine did not get from Ambrose. The distance was real: Ambrose was a busy bishop besieged by petitioners, and Augustine could never lay before him the questions that burned in him — when he came, the bishop was reading, or surrounded, and the longed-for private conversation never took place (Augustine, Confessions 6.3, 6.11). The personal direction Augustine craved he found instead in Simplicianus and in the books and examples that reached him at second hand; the metaphysics that broke his materialism came from the Platonist books, not from Ambrose’s lips (Augustine, Confessions 7.9; Brown, Augustine of Hippo; Wills, Font of Life). Ambrose seems never to have singled Augustine out — in the vast correspondence and the Vita of Paulinus the African rhetorician goes unmentioned, and there is no sign that the bishop knew he was forming the mind that would define Western Christianity. The encounter was, from Ambrose’s side, almost incidental; its weight is visible only in retrospect. What passed between them passed not through friendship but through the public acts of a bishop — the sermon and the sacrament — which is perhaps the truer measure of how the Church forms her children.

References

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 5.13–14 (coming to hear Ambrose); 6.1–2, 6.14–15 (Monica, the circle, the planned community); 6.3 (the silent reading); 6.4 (the spiritual exegesis); 7.9–21 (the books of the Platonists); 8.1–2 (Simplicianus), 8.6–7, 8.12 (Antony, the garden, tolle lege); 9.5 (the counsel to read Isaiah); 9.6 (the baptism); trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991).
Knox, Bernard M. W. “Silent Reading in Antiquity.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 9 (1968): 421–435.
Gavrilov, A. K. “Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity,” and Burnyeat, M. F. “Postscript on Silent Reading.” Classical Quarterly 47 (1997): 56–73, 74–76. The rebuttal of the “silent reading was rare” thesis.
Saenger, Paul. Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. The disputed thesis.
Wills, Garry. Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. On the baptism and its date.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. On Ambrose’s influence on Augustine.
Ramsey, Boniface. Ambrose. London: Routledge, 1997, 24–30.