Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
easily have doubted that I was alive than that there is no truth "which is clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made" (Rom 1:20). . . .
(17.23) I marveled that I now loved You, and not a phantasm in place of You. Yet I did not stand still in the enjoyment of my God. Rather, I was snatched up to You by Your glory, but was soon snatched away from You by the natural weight of my will, and I fell back on these lower things with a groan. This was the weight of carnal custom. However, memory of you remained with me.30
Conversion of Victorinus
Here and there within Confessions, Augustine offers mini-portraits of other converts that circle round the larger central portrait of his own conversion. Here Augustine describes the conversion of Marius Victorinus (d. c. 364).31 Like Augustine, Victorinus was a North African and a rhetor who had made his way to Italy to win fame and fortune. Victorinus was the one responsible for translating those Platonist books that were so revolutionizing Augustine's thinking. Augustine heard that Victorinus, at the end of his life, had converted to Christianity. In the following passage, he hears the full story from Simplicianus (d. 400), a presbyter of the church of Milan and Ambrose's mentor and eventual successor.32 From Confessions, Book 8:
(2.3) So I went to Simplicianus, the spiritual father of (then) bishop Ambrose in his reception into grace and loved by Ambrose like a father. I told him the winding course of my error. When I mentioned that I had read some books of the Platonists, which Victorinus (at one time a rhetorician in the city of Rome who had, I heard, died a Christian) had translated into Latin, he congratulated me that I had not happened on the writings of other philosophers filled with errors and deceptions "according to the elements of this world" (Col 2:8), while in the writings of the Platonists God and His Word are indirectly introduced at every turn. Then, in order to exhort me to the humility of Christ, which is hidden from the wise but revealed to the little ones (Mt 11:25), he recalled Victorinus himself whom he had known as a very close friend when he was in Rome. And he told me a story about him concerning which I shall not keep silent. It offers ample opportunity to praise Your grace, which
30. Conf. 7.9.13–13.23 (CCL 27:101–7); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21:176–86. 31. See Pierre Hadot, Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie et ses oeuvres, CEASA 44 (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 1971); Stephen A. Cooper, Marius Victorinus' Commentary on Galatians, OECS (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Nello Cipriani, "Marius Victorinus," AugEncy, 533–35.
32. Simplicianus would play a key role not only in Augustine's conversion, but also in his later work as a theologian. Augustine's Ad Simplicianum in 396 would prove a watershed in his evolving theology of grace and his interpretation of Paul's letters; for a discussion and excerpts, see Chapter 10.