What was augustines conversion

In his teens, Augustine took a mistress—a concubine—who bore him a son. Even after his conversion to Christianity, his negative attitude toward sex reflected the Manichaean position. After nine years of holding to Manichaeism, Augustine became disillusioned by the failure of a leading Manichaean teacher to answer his questions. He gradually drifted into Neoplatonism. Meanwhile, vocationally, he moved from Carthage to Rome to Milan, teaching rhetoric.

In Milan, Augustine met the Christian bishop, Ambrose, who impressed him with his intellect and answered his objections to the Bible. Augustine also learned about saints who had conquered sexual temptation by surrendering themselves to God. This was the right combination: a faith that would overcome his sexual temptations and let him be a thinker. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.

This was his conversion. On Easter eve in , Ambrose baptized him. Augustine returned to his joyful mother and spent time in retreat and study. Augustine could have been happy living a quiet monastic life.

But his reputation spread. While visiting Hippo Regius on the North African coast, he was seized by the people and presented to the bishop to be ordained. He asked for time to develop his knowledge of Scripture, and in he was ordained. Four years later he was consecrated bishop. Bishop Augustine was involved in every church controversy of the day. One was Donatism, a movement that refused to accept clergy who had handed over Scriptures to the authorities during persecution or even to accept clergy who had been consecrated by such a person.

Augustine wrote that there could be no rival church; the church is one, though it may include some less-than-holy persons in it. But the Bishop's preaching led Augustine to a new understanding of the Bible and the Christian Faith.

Some time in the year , Augustine and his friend Alypius were spending time in Milan. While outdoors, Augustine heard the voice of a child singing a song, the words of which were, "Pick it up and read it. Pick it up and read it. Then, realizing that this song might be a command from God to open and read the Scriptures, he located a Bible, picked it up, opened it and read the first passage he saw. It was from the Letter of Paul to the Romans.

Augustine read:. Not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual excess and lust, not in quarreling and jealousy. Augustine wrote about how at different points of his life he fell into various traps that kept him from finding true happiness in God. The traps that enslaved him included his obsession with theater, his acting out carnal desires, his involvement in a heretical sect and his distorted understanding of God.

As a youth, Augustine invested himself emotionally in the portrayals of myths and legends in dramatic works in the theater. An older, wiser Augustine, reflecting on this time of his life in his Confessions ,came to see how too much time focused on the fantasy world of the theater caused him to ignore the reality of his life, and his need for God and for conversion.

In his Confessions , Augustine also referred to the careless behavior and the moral indiscretions of his youth, and later, as an adult, living with a concubine. Augustine related in his Confessions that he became involved in the heretical Manichean sect for a time. After his conversion, he was able to see that this sect enslaved him into a false understanding of God, a distorted view of human nature and a denial of the need for moral conversion. Later, Augustine began to immerse himself in the study of pagan philosophy, which required a tremendous amount of his time and energy to understand.

Looking back on this, Augustine concluded that studying philosophy without proper guidance seemed to lead him nowhere. Another form of enslavement that Augustine wrote about in his Confessions was that of an overly anthropomorphic image of God, which he harbored for a time.

This narrow image limited his understanding of a God, who is infinite, omnipresent and omniscient. In his Confessions , Augustine narrated how when he resided in Milan, he found liberation in a religious experience involving Sacred Scripture. One day, Augustine had a weighty spiritual conversation with an acquaintance, Ponticianus, who related to him, among other things, the story of St.

Antony of the Desert. The story of the great saint deeply moved Augustine, and he began to ponder the condition of his own life. In a state of inner turmoil, he retired to the garden adjacent to his lodging, accompanied by his friend Alypsius.

He then read the Letter of St.