Augustine was baptized by Ambrose at Milan during Eastertide, 
A.D.  387.  A short time later his mother, Monica, died at Ostia 
on the journey back to Africa.  A year later, Augustine was back 
in Roman Africa living in a monastery at Tagaste, his native town.  
In 391, he was ordained presbyter in the church of Hippo Regius (a 
small coastal town nearby).  Here in 395 -- with grave misgivings 
on his own part (cf. Sermon CCCLV, 2) and in actual violation of 
the eighth canon of Nicea (cf. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, II, 
671, and IV, 1167) -- he was consecrated assistant bishop to the 
aged Valerius, whom he succeeded the following year.  Shortly 
after he entered into his episcopal duties he began his 
Confessions, completing them probably in 398 (cf. De Labriolle, I, 
vi (see Bibliography), and di Capua, Miscellanea Agostiniana, II, 
678).

     Augustine had a complex motive for undertaking such a self-
analysis.[1]  His pilgrimage of grace had led him to a most 
unexpected outcome.  Now he felt a compelling need to retrace the 
crucial turnings of the way by which he had come.  And since he 
was sure that it was God's grace that had been his prime mover on 
that way, it was a spontaneous expression of his heart that cast 
his self-recollection into the form of a sustained prayer to God.

     The Confessions are not Augustine's autobiography.  They are, 
instead, a deliberate effort, in the permissive atmosphere of 
God's felt presence, to recall those crucial episodes and events 
in which he can now see and celebrate the mysterious actions of 
God's prevenient and provident grace.  Thus he follows the 
windings of his memory as it re-presents the upheavals of his 
youth and the stages of his disorderly quest for wisdom.  He omits 
very much indeed.  Yet he builds his successive climaxes so 
skillfully that the denouement in Book VIII is a vivid and 
believable convergence of influences, reconstructed and "placed" 
with consummate dramatic skill.  We see how Cicero's Hortensius 
first awakened his thirst for wisdom, how the Manicheans deluded 
him with their promise of true wisdom, and how the Academics upset 
his confidence in certain knowledge -- how they loosed him from 
the dogmatism of the Manicheans only to confront him with the 
opposite threat that all knowledge is uncertain.  He shows us (Bk. 
V, Ch. X, 19) that almost the sole cause of his intellectual 
perplexity in religion was his stubborn, materialistic prejudice 
that if God existed he had to exist in a body, and thus had to 
have extension, shape, and finite relation.  He remembers how the 
"Platonists" rescued him from this "materialism" and taught him 
how to think of spiritual and immaterial reality -- and so to 
become able to conceive of God in non-dualistic categories.  We 
can follow him in his extraordinarily candid and plain report of 
his Plotinian ecstasy, and his momentary communion with the One 
(Book VII).  The "Platonists" liberated him from error, but they 
could not loose him from the fetters of incontinence.  Thus, with 
a divided will, he continues to seek a stable peace in the 
Christian faith while he stubbornly clings to his pride and 
appetence.

     In Book VIII, Augustine piles up a series of remembered 
incidents that inflamed his desire to imitate those who already 
seemed to have gained what he had so long been seeking.  First of 
all, there had been Ambrose, who embodied for Augustine the 
dignity of Christian learning and the majesty of the authority of 
the Christian Scriptures.  Then Simplicianus tells him the moving 
story of Victorinus (a more famous scholar than Augustine ever 
hoped to be), who finally came to the baptismal font in Milan as 
humbly as any other catechumen.  Then, from Ponticianus he hears 
the story of Antony and about the increasing influence of the 
monastic calling.  The story that stirs him most, perhaps, relates 
the dramatic conversion of the two "special agents of the imperial 
police" in the garden at Treves -- two unlikely prospects snatched 
abruptly from their worldly ways to the monastic life.

     He makes it plain that these examples forced his own feelings 
to an intolerable tension.  His intellectual perplexities had 
become resolved; the virtue of continence had been consciously 
preferred; there was a strong desire for the storms of his breast 
to be calmed; he longed to imitate these men who had done what he 
could not and who were enjoying the peace he longed for.

     But the old habits were still strong and he could not muster 
a full act of the whole will to strike them down.  Then comes the 
scene in the Milanese garden which is an interesting parallel to 
Ponticianus' story about the garden at Treves.  The long struggle 
is recapitulated in a brief moment; his will struggles against and 
within itself.  The trivial distraction of a child's voice, 
chanting, "Tolle, lege,"  precipitates the resolution of the 
conflict.  There is a radical shift in mood and will, he turns 
eagerly to the chance text in Rom. 13:13 -- and a new spirit rises 
in his heart.

     After this radical change, there was only one more past event 
that had to be relived before his personal history could be seen 
in its right perspective.  This was the death of his mother and 
the severance of his strongest earthly tie.  Book IX tells us this 
story.  The climactic moment in it is, of course, the vision at 
Ostia where mother and son are uplifted in an ecstasy that 
parallels -- but also differs significantly from -- the Plotinian 
vision of Book VII.  After this, the mother dies and the son who 
had loved her almost too much goes on alone, now upheld and led by 
a greater and a wiser love.

     We can observe two separate stages in Augustine's 
"conversion." The first was the dramatic striking off of the