The Garden at Milan

The conversion of Augustine in the late summer of 386: prepared by the preaching of Bishop Ambrose of Milan, who dissolved Augustine’s objections to the Old Testament and gave him the catholic faith as something an intellect could hold; brought to crisis by the stories of others’ conversions; and consummated in a Milanese garden when, hearing a child’s voice chant tolle lege — “take up and read” — Augustine opened the Epistle to the Romans and read the verse that ended his long delay. This file follows the conversion through to his baptism at Easter 387 and the death of his mother Monica at Ostia.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

Ambrose: The Bishop Who Opened the Scriptures

When Augustine arrived in Milan in 384 to take up the public chair of rhetoric, the bishop of the city was Ambrose (c. 339–397), the former Roman governor who had been acclaimed bishop by popular demand and had become the most powerful churchman of the West — the bishop who would compel even the Emperor Theodosius to public penance (Brown 2000, ch. 8; on Ambrose, see St. Ambrose of Milan). Augustine went to hear Ambrose at first as a professional, to study the rhetoric of a famous orator; but he found himself caught by the matter and not only the manner (Confessions 5.13; trans. Chadwick 1991).

Ambrose’s decisive gift to Augustine was a method of reading. Schooled in the allegorical exegesis of the Greek Fathers — above all Origen and the Alexandrian tradition, mediated through his own reading of Philo and Basil — Ambrose preached the Old Testament figurally, finding in its narratives a spiritual sense beneath the offensive letter. Augustine, whose flight to the Manichees had begun in disgust at the anthropomorphisms and crudities of the Hebrew Scriptures, heard Ambrose “frequently in his sermons… lay down as a principle the text ‘the letter kills, the spirit gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6)” and unfold the difficult passages spiritually (Confessions 6.4; trans. Chadwick 1991). At a stroke the central Manichaean objection collapsed: the Old Testament could be held as Scripture by a thinking man. The catholic faith, which Augustine had abandoned as intellectually beneath him, now appeared to him “not… defeated” but defensible (Confessions 5.14; Chadwick 1986, ch. 3).

This intellectual liberation was completed by the “books of the Platonists,” which taught Augustine to think of God and the soul as immaterial and of evil as privation rather than substance (Confessions 7.9–17; see The Restless Heart). But Platonism, Augustine insists, could not save him: it showed him the goal but not the road, the homeland but not the way home — for it lacked the humility of the Word made flesh and the grace to reach what it glimpsed (Confessions 7.20–21; trans. Chadwick 1991). By 386 Augustine was intellectually a catholic Christian and morally a paralytic, persuaded of the truth and unable to embrace the continence he believed it asked of him.

The Mounting Crisis

The crisis was precipitated by the conversions of others, told to him in a series of mounting examples. The aged Roman rhetor Marius Victorinus — a celebrated pagan philosopher who had translated the very Platonic books Augustine read — had in old age publicly professed Christ before the Roman congregation, and the story of his conversion stirred Augustine to long to imitate him (Confessions 8.2–5; Brown 2000, ch. 9). Then a fellow African and court official, Ponticianus, visiting Augustine, told him of the Life of Antony by Athanasius and of two imperial agents who, reading it, had abandoned their careers on the spot to embrace the monastic life (Confessions 8.6; trans. Chadwick 1991). The story of these unlettered men seizing the kingdom of heaven while he, the learned rhetorician, hung back, threw Augustine into an agony of self-reproach: “The unlearned rise up and take heaven by force, and we with our high culture without any heart — see where we wallow” (Confessions 8.8; trans. Chadwick 1991).

Augustine’s account of this final struggle is one of the most penetrating analyses of the divided will in all literature. He describes a will commanding itself and not obeyed — “the mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed; the mind commands itself and meets resistance” (Confessions 8.9; trans. Chadwick 1991) — and locates the bondage not in two opposed natures, as the Manichees taught, but in a single will divided against itself, “the law of sin” of Romans 7 (Confessions 8.10, citing Romans 7:22–25). The reading of conversion as the liberation of a will it cannot liberate by its own effort — the seed of his entire later theology of grace — is already present in this analysis (see Against Pelagius).

“Tolle Lege”

The breaking point came in a garden of the house Augustine shared at Milan, in the company of his friend Alypius. Overwhelmed, weeping, Augustine flung himself down under a fig tree and cried out, “How long, how long? Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? Why not an end to my impurity in this very hour?” (Confessions 8.12; trans. Chadwick 1991). Then came the event that gave the scene its name:

“Suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read’ (tolle lege, tolle lege).” (Confessions 8.12; trans. Chadwick 1991)

Taking it as a divine command, and recalling that Antony had been converted by hearing a Gospel reading as if addressed to himself, Augustine seized the codex of Paul’s Epistles lying nearby, opened it, and read in silence the first passage on which his eyes fell — Romans 13:13–14:

“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.” (Confessions 8.12, citing Romans 13:13–14; trans. Chadwick 1991)

“I neither wished nor needed to read further,” Augustine writes. “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 8.12; trans. Chadwick 1991). Alypius read the verse that followed — “receive the one who is weak in faith” (Romans 14:1) — and joined him; and the two went in to tell Monica, whose long prayers were answered beyond her asking (Confessions 8.12). The date is the late summer of 386.

Whether the tolle lege scene records an event exactly as it happened or is shaped by literary art — patterned on the conversion of Antony, framed by the garden as a new Eden and a new Gethsemane — has been discussed since the work’s first readers [Disputed: the historicity of the garden scene is debated; Pierre Courcelle (*Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin*, 1950) argued that the scene is substantially a literary and theological symbol shaped by the Antony parallel rather than a bare report, while Henry Chadwick (1991, notes) and Peter Brown (2000) hold that an artful telling need not be an unhistorical one and that the conversion itself is beyond doubt; the present file follows the text as Augustine's own retrospective testimony, neither certifying nor dissolving the literal scene]. What is not in doubt is the reality and the consequences of the conversion.

Baptism, Ostia, and the Return

Augustine resigned his chair of rhetoric — pleading, in part, ill health — and withdrew with a small circle of friends and family to a country estate at Cassiciacum, where he spent the winter of 386/387 in philosophical conversation that produced his first Christian dialogues (Confessions 9.3–4; Brown 2000, ch. 10). At Easter (24/25 April) 387 he was baptized at Milan by Ambrose, together with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius (Confessions 9.6; Possidius, Vita 1). The tradition that Ambrose and Augustine improvised the Te Deum antiphonally at the font is a later legend, not found in the early sources [Disputed: the *Te Deum* legend first appears centuries later and is rejected by modern scholarship, which attributes the hymn most probably to Niceta of Remesiana; it is recorded here as a legend, not as fact].

Resolving to return to Africa, the company traveled to the port of Ostia near Rome to await passage. There, at a window overlooking a garden, Augustine and Monica shared the great mystical conversation the Confessions calls the vision at Ostia — rising together in thought past all created things toward “that region of inexhaustible abundance” and touching, for a heartbeat, eternal Wisdom (Confessions 9.10; trans. Chadwick 1991). Days later Monica fell ill, and she died at Ostia in the autumn of 387, aged fifty-six, content because she had seen her son a catholic Christian; “nothing is distant from God,” she told them, asking only to be remembered at the altar (Confessions 9.11; trans. Chadwick 1991). Augustine’s grief, and his refusal at first to weep, and his eventual tears, close Book 9 — and with it the autobiographical narrative of the Confessions.

Augustine returned to Africa in 388, to Thagaste, where he established a small ascetic community of friends, “servants of God,” living in common prayer, study, and continence on his family property (Possidius, Vita 3; Brown 2000, ch. 11). He intended a life of philosophical retirement in the service of God. The Church had other plans for him.

References

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. (Books 5–9: Ambrose at 5.13–14 and 6.4; the divided will at 8.8–10; the tolle lege and Romans 13 at 8.12; baptism at 9.6; Ostia and Monica’s death at 9.10–11.)
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Chs. 8–11.)
Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Ch. 3.)
Courcelle, Pierre. Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin. Paris: De Boccard, 1950. (The literary reading of the garden scene.)
Possidius. The Life of Saint Augustine. Trans. in F. R. Hoare, The Western Fathers. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954.