Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
The Philosopher 45 what segment of the land—what alone offers happiness—I should move towards and how I should chance to reach it. What solid ground do I hold onto? Even now, for me, the question of the soul sways back and forth and surges in great waves.22
Conversion to Philosophy
Augustine's earliest extant work is a philosophical dialogue entitled Against the Skeptics. He dedicated it to his longtime patron and friend, Romanianus, who had helped finance his higher education. At the time of its writing, in fall 386, he served as tutor for Romanianus's teenage son, Licentius, who plays a major role in the dialogue. Augustine here gives the earliest account of his conversion to philosophic Christianity. From Against the Skeptics, Book 2:
(2.4) Whatever I now enjoy in this leisure of retreat—the fact that I have escaped from the chains of excessive desires; that I have laid aside the burdens of deadly cares and am beginning to breathe again, to recover, to return to myself; that I am searching with great focus on a quest for the truth and have already begun to find it; and that I am confident of reaching even the supreme Measure:23 you encouraged me, you pushed me on, you made it possible. The One whose minister you have been has been, thus far, more conceived by faith than understood by reason. For when I had opened up to you, face-to-face, the deep inner stirrings of my mind, and when I repeatedly and fiercely asserted that to me no fortune seemed favorable if it did not afford the leisure to apply oneself to philosophy, that no life could be happy unless it was lived in philosophy, but that I was held back by so great a burden regarding my family and relatives, whose very life depended on my profession, and by various expenses that were occasioned either by my own empty shame or by the anguishing distress of my relatives—on such occasions you used to be so elated with gladness and so inflamed with a sacred enthusiasm for this kind of life that you used to say that you would break all my chains by sharing even your own inheritance with me if you were in some way freed from the shackles of those troublesome lawsuits.
(2.5) When the fire had just been kindled in us and you had to leave, we did not cease yearning for philosophy and for that way of life which had won favor among us, and we agreed to make no other plans. We aimed at it steadi-
22. De beata vita 1.1–1.5 (CCL 29:65–68); my trans., based on Schopp, FOTC 5:43–49. See Robert J. O'Connell, "Augustine's First Conversion: Factus erectior (De beata vita 4)," Augustinian Studies 17 (1986): 15–29.
23. "Supreme Measure": a circumlocution for God the Father. See De beata vita 4.33–34 (quoted below) in which Augustine expands on the term.