Confessions

The most famous conversion story after Paul's is told firsthand in the Confessions: the ambitious rhetorician torn between faith and habit, the child's voice in the Milan garden chanting “take up and read,” and the verse that ended the struggle. Augustine tells it himself, as prayer.

Read the original conversion story in a clean, readable edition, with the original linked free.

Augustine's Confessions is a thirteen-book autobiographical work written in Latin around AD 397-400, addressed throughout as a prolonged prayer to God. The first nine books narrate Augustine's life from his birth in 354 in Roman North Africa through his early career as a teacher of rhetoric, his years following the Manichaean sect, his restless intellectual searching, and finally his conversion to Catholic Christianity in Milan in 386. He writes with unflinching honesty about his ambitions, his sexual life, his long resistance to belief, and the famous boyhood theft of pears that he uses to probe the nature of sin.

The emotional center of the book is Book 8, the account of his conversion. After conversations that stir him deeply, Augustine sits weeping in a garden in Milan, torn between his old life and the new one he cannot bring himself to choose. He hears a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opens Paul's letters at random, and reads Romans 13:13-14. The words settle his struggle at once. Book 9 then recounts his baptism by Ambrose and the death of his mother, Monica, whose prayers had followed him for years.

The final four books leave straightforward narrative behind. Book 10 is a meditation on memory and the search for God within the self; Book 11 explores the nature of time and eternity; and Books 12 and 13 offer a contemplative reading of the opening of Genesis. Across the whole work runs Augustine's central conviction, stated at the very start: that the human heart is restless until it rests in God.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was a North African born in Thagaste, in present-day Algeria, to a pagan father and a devout Christian mother, Monica. He trained as a teacher of rhetoric, lived for years with a partner who bore him a son, Adeodatus, and spent much of his youth following Manichaeism and later the philosophy of the Neoplatonists while delaying any commitment to the faith his mother urged on him.

His turning point came in Milan, where he had moved to teach and where he heard the preaching of Bishop Ambrose. The intellectual obstacles to belief fell away gradually, but the decisive moment was the garden scene of 386: hearing a child chant "take up and read," he opened Paul's letter to the Romans and read a verse calling him to put off his old life. He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter 387, later became bishop of Hippo, and went on to become one of the most influential theologians in Western Christianity.