The preface to De Ordine speaks, in an entirely conventional manner, of the need of the soul (animus) that wishes to become known to itself to avoid ‘the crowd’—‘and I don’t mean the crowd of men, but of everything which relates to the senses’ (multitudinem autem non hominum dico sed omnium, quae sensus attingit: ord.1.2.3). Yet this pious convention- ality is immediately subverted—or at least, revised—by the opening scenario of the dialogue.
It is night. I was lying awake, says Augustine, when ecce!—‘listen!’—I heard the sound of waterXowing past behind the baths. He uses the ‘ecce’—normally an exclamation used to draw attention to something seen6—to hold that aural image in place for an instant, before moving
on to wonder aloud (as it were) why theXow of water should be so irregular. It turns out that Licentius and Trygetius are awake too—it is so dark that Augustine doesn’t realize this, until Licentius disturbs a mouse, and Trygetius speaks—and they ponder the problem together. In the darkness, there can be no pen or secretary to record the words as they are uttered: the conversation takes place in the liminal space of the half-real, half-imaginary. Far from removing themselves from the world of sense-perception, their conversation takes its beginning from that world, if in the most pared-down form possible: it is pitch dark, no other stimuli are at hand; only the sense of hearing is in play. The implication is that even if one wishes to move beyond sense-perception, one needs precisely to make a start with sensibilia.
The three discern the ordering principles of the universe in the explanation of the water’s Xow; and the dialogue moves on to stage the conversion of Licentius, once he has become convinced of the divinely-organized ‘order of things’ (ordo rerum), from poetry to philoso- phia Christiana(called here simply philosophia : ord.1.3.9). At the height of this extravagant and publicly-witnessed conversion experience, as Augustine marvels at the transformation in his pupil, Licentius bursts out:
If I could just say what I wish! Words—wherever you are—please come to help! Both good and evil things are ordered ( in ordine). Believe, if you like; for I don’t know (nescio) how to explain it.
6 TLLs.v.: pro particula demonstratiua animi attentionem dirigit ad apparentiam aut praesentiam siue
o si possem dicere quod uolo! rogo, ubiubi estis, uerba, succurrite. et bona et mala in ordine sunt. credite, si uultis; nam quomodo id explicem nescio. (ord.1.6.16)
Licentius the glib, the writer of poetry, has never been lost for words before. The nescio which sums up his outburst seems to recall that of Augustine in De Beata Vita, when he acknowledges that he doesn’t know what might be in store at his intellectual feast (beata u. 3.17). There, it was an acknowledgement of a higher power, of a divine origin for the discussion; and it took its cue from Monnica’s displacement onto the divine of her own claims to knowledge. Here, Licentius’ nescio comes in the wake of his explicit bow to the cogency of divine order; and, signiWcantly for this garrulous young man, it comes linked to a comment on the failure of language. (There is, of course, the appeal to the uerba to come to his aid; but they are already failing him. Presumably the sentence et bona et mala in ordine sunt is deliberately banal. The words, apparently, have not come.) Once again—and if anything, more pro- nouncedly—this is not a nescio which brings the dialogue to an aporetic halt. It does not indicate the impossibility of knowledge, but merely the limitations of human knowledge. It serves, above all, to invite wonder and belief.
Lest we are tempted to make too much of this, Augustine—as writer/compositor—immediately anticipates a sceptical reaction: Try- getius thinks that Licentius’ insight is ‘idiotic, and obviously foreign to the truth’ (absurdum et plane alienum a ueritate : ord.1.7.17). Later, however, even Trygetius is struck into silence by Licentius’ observation that the origin of divine justice is apportionment (distributio : ord.1.7.19).
At the moment of Licentius’ conversion, day breaks.7 The young
men get up; and Augustine says many tearful prayers, hearing Licentius sing a psalm laete atque garrule—in a sort of joyful but repetitive chant. This introduces the unforgettable story (supposed to have happened the previous day) in which mater nostra reproves him for singing the passage—repeatedly, and insupportably loudly—in the lavatory. Mon- nica, ‘an extremely pious woman, as you know’ (religiosissima, ut scis, femina8), considers the place utterly inappropriate for such a song.
7 ord.1.8.22. It is hard to resist a symbolic reading of this timing: see McWilliam, ‘Cassi-
ciacum Autobiography’,37: ‘day replace[s] night as the intellectual as well as the practical defeat of evil is completed.’ She also remarks on the cocks, whoseWght the interlocutors witness on their way to the baths, as ‘the classical symbol of light and hope and therefore, for Christians, of Christ.’
Licentius answers with a cheeky joke: so is God not going to hear his voice if an enemy locks him in? And the cavilling female is apparently dismissed.
The story, however, oVsets an anxious teˆte-a`-teˆte with Augustine— back on the morning of Licentius’ enlightenment. What does Augustine think of this, asks Licentius? And Augustine reassures him: ‘you feel, you believe, you understand’ (sentis credis intellegis : ord. 1.8.23). This foreshadows Augustine’s later espousal of the line from Isaiah, nisi credideritis, non intellegetis(‘unless you believe, you will not understand’), but explicitly includes sense-perception as theWrst stage of the process.9
Licentius exults that Monnica’s superstitious anxiety, her scrupulus super- stitionis, was directed against him in vain: ‘Isn’t this a true turning towards God?’(Nonne hoc est uere in deum conuerti? ).10
The line of the psalm in question was: ‘God of powers, turn us around (conuerte nos) and show us your face, and we shall be saved.’11
What is the implication, then, of Licentius’ satisfaction that he went on singing? Whose scrupulus superstitionis are we really talking about? Is the psalm portrayed as serving as some sort of incantation? Certainly, Augustine emphasizes the repetitiveness of Licentius’ rendition; and he explains that he had just learnt the tune and (apparently) had it on the brain!12 At the end of De Beata Vita, it was Monnica’s line from
Ambrose which symbolized the banishment of superstitio in the face of the acknowledgement of the Trinity (exclusis uanitatibus uariae superstitio- nis: beata u.4.35). Altogether, it seems unlikely that we’re talking about a simple opposition between superstition and religious enlightenment. And Augustine turns aside Licentius’ importunate question—‘isn’t this a true turning towards God?’—with a comment on the symbolic suitability of the place ‘of bodily Wlth and darkness’ as a place from which one might appeal for deliverance.
But Augustine’s implicit answer to Licentius’ question—‘isn’t this a true turning towards God?’—seems to be ‘No’. Like the excellent teacher that he is, he doesn’t give his ‘No’ as an outright response and discourage his pupil (and, perhaps, alienate his readers); he gently
9 Isaiah7: 9. ‘Later espousal’: see e.g. mag. 11.37. Discussed by Rist, Augustine, 56–63. 10 On superstitio in Augustine, see O’Donnell at conf.3.6.10 incidi.
11 Augustine reXects again on this psalm (80: 7) at conf. 4.10.15. Note the dynamics here:
God is the agent of change (one doesn’t change one’s own mind); conversion is deipetal, and conceived as a return to God. Burton explores this notion in Sermo: Language in the Confessions, ‘Talking Books’ (Oxford, forthcoming).
12 ord.1.8.22: nihil aliud dicebat, quoniam ipsum cantilenae modum nuper hauserat et amabat, ut Wt,
suggests how the pupil might move on from here. The way on, it seems, is through the liberal disciplines to a true knowledge of the beata uita. Go, Augustine exhorts him ( picking up an image from the obsessions of his pupil), to those Muses—a phrase he later regretted writing, even in jest (retr. 1.3.2). To rely on an incantation and a sudden conversion experience, this passage implies, is intellectually and theologically sus- pect: one must ground one’s conversion in hard work and an ongoing eVort of will.13
It is impossible, of course, not to think of another sudden conversion experience juxtaposed with an incantation: that of Augustine himself.14
If the account in the Confessiones is even remotely historical, the ‘tolle, lege’ episode had only just happened to him (conf.8.12.29)—the mo- ment in the garden at Milan, when he heard a child chanting ‘pick it up and read, pick it up and read’, and decided that this must be an exhortation to seek a message from the Bible. In that case, the treatment of Licentius’ ‘conversion’ here serves as a reminder to Augustine and to his audience that such experiences should not come in a vacuum: the ‘tolle, lege’ episode, set in its context, was simply another stage on a long and winding road of enquiry and exploration, leading him slowly towards God. (The verb which Augustine puts in Licentius’ mouth to describe his singing of the psalm in the lavatory, cantitare, is the same as that used for the chanting of children’s games at this point in the Confessiones.)
The possibility is open, however, for quite another interpretation: that Augustine used the ‘tolle, lege’ sequence, ten years later, to epit- omize precisely the type of conversion that he is interrogating in De Ordine.15By the time he writes the Confessiones, perhaps he has come to
see the utility of a short, neatly deWned episode such as this as a pedagogic technique for leading others to God: he leads them to expect a clear marker of the moment of conversion, a distinct command from God. The form the conversion takes in the Confessiones reXects suspiciously closely Augustine’s obsession with reading and the textual,
13 The historical Licentius is a particularly aptWgure on which to hang this insight: look at
the letter of Paulinus of Nola, written at Augustine’s request a decade later, and still trying to persuade Licentius to forswear poetry in favour of philosophia Christiana! ( Paulinus, ep.8).
14 Noted also by Cary, ‘What Licentius Learned’, though he ‘reads’ this conversion
diVerently, comparing conf. 7.10.16, not conf. 8.12.29.
15 A diVerent reading of the two conversions, but still emphasizing the contrast between
them, is Paula Fredriksen, ‘Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self’, JThSNS37 (1986), 3–34.
and so suggests a high degree of conscious framing and rearrangement:16
Augustine carefully rejects (an over-intellectualization?) the connection of ‘tolle, lege’ with children’s games; he stages the event in intertext, not only with the Bible, but with that great Urtext of conversion, the Vita Antonii. He concludes the account in terms which recall the suspiciously happy timing of the dawn in De Ordine : ‘ The instant I reached the end of this sentence, my heart was Xooded with the light—as it were—of certainty, and all the darkness of doubt was put toXight’ (statim quippe cumWne huiusce sententiae quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo, omnes dubitationis tenebrae diVugerunt: conf. 8.12.29). In that case, we see Augustine being far more cautious and experimental in De Ordine, daring to undercut swift and easy symbolisms, than he was to be in the Confessiones.
One element may supplement this picture, and provide a clue to Augustine’s reworking of his life: the depiction of Monnica in the two episodes. In the Confessiones, Augustine and Alypius rush straight in to report their experiences to her:
Thereupon, we go in to mother; we tell her about it; she rejoices. We narrate how it happened; she revels and exults in it; and she blessed You . . . because she saw for herself that You had granted to me so much more than she had been asking with her pitiable, tearful groans.
inde ad matrem ingredimur, indicamus: gaudet. narramus quemadmodum gestum sit: exultat et triumphat et benedicebat tibi . . . quia tanto amplius sibi a te concessum de me uidebat quam petere solebat miserabilibusXebilibusque gemitibus. (conf.8.12.30)
Here, Monnica has been reduced to the two-dimensional image familiar from the literature: her only role is to pray for Augustine’s conversion, and to rejoice when it happens. ( Note the swift succession of verbs in asyndeton which introduces this passage: ingredimur; indicamus; gaudet.) It is not surprising that, from the works produced in her lifetime, a far more complex Wgure emerges. Her role in Licentius’ ‘conversion’ is ambivalent, and ambivalently signalled. She is still ‘incredibly pious’, religiosissima, in her son’s words; yet he depicts Licentius accusing her of superstitious anxiety. She is not simply present as a receptor of male experience; she attempts to intervene, and elicits both respect and irritation. In the narrative of De Ordine, the possibility is left open that her superstitio represents deeper feeling than Licentius’ shallow conver- sion. The ‘staging’ of Monnica in the dialogues is extremely nuanced
16 Hardly an original observation; see Stock, Augustine the Reader, ch.3, ‘Reading and
compared with her presentation in the Confessiones; her persona is used as a tool for interrogation, not a simple ampliWer or catalyst.
We shall turn later to Monnica’s relationship, in the De Ordine, to the course of improvement that Augustine proposes for Licentius. She is, however, shortly to appear in the dialogue in propria persona; and her appearance makes a resoundingWnale for the Wrst book.