The Beautiful Scandal of Conversion: Saint Augustine's Timeless Truth

There is something delightfully preposterous about the fact that one of the greatest saints in Christian history began his career by stealing pears. Not because he was hungry, mind you—Augustine himself tells us he wasn't particularly fond of pears. He stole them for the sheer wicked joy of stealing, which is rather like saying a man became a pianist because he enjoyed the sound of breaking piano strings. It is exactly this sort of magnificent illogicality that makes Augustine of Hippo not merely a saint to be admired from a respectful distance, but a friend to be consulted in the smaller crises of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

I confess that when I first encountered Augustine's Confessions, I was struck by what seemed to me a fundamental contradiction. Here was a book that had influenced more minds than perhaps any other Christian work save the Gospels themselves, and yet it began with what appeared to be the spiritual autobiography of a man who could not keep his hands off other people's fruit. It was rather like discovering that the Sistine Chapel had been painted by a man whose chief qualification was an irrepressible urge to doodle on walls. But then, as I have learned again and again in my stumbling journey toward something resembling wisdom, God has a particular fondness for such contradictions. He seems to delight in making His most profound points through His most apparently ridiculous servants.

The truth about Augustine—and it is a truth that modern Christianity desperately needs to recover—is that he understood better than perhaps any other thinker the precise relationship between our failures and our faith. He did not become a great Christian despite his sins; he became a great Christian because of his sins. This is not, as the sentimental modernist might suppose, because sin is good, but because Augustine discovered that sin could be a teacher more instructive than virtue, provided one listens to its lessons with sufficient horror and sufficient hope.

Augustine lived in an age very much like our own, though he would have been puzzled by this assertion. The Roman Empire was not yet dead, but it was certainly dying, and dying in that peculiar way that great civilizations die—not with a bang but with a whimper, not through honest barbarism but through sophisticated decay. It was an age of religious confusion, when every philosophy seemed equally plausible and therefore equally implausible. A man could choose from Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, Christianity, or any of a dozen other spiritual systems as easily as we might choose between breakfast cereals. It was, in short, an age of that terrible modern freedom which consists in having so many choices that choice itself becomes impossible.

Into this confusion stepped young Augustine, equipped with a brilliant mind, a passionate heart, and exactly the sort of restless energy that tends to get young men into precisely the sort of trouble that Augustine got into. He was, by his own account, very much the sort of person we would today call a "seeker"—though in his case the seeking involved considerably more wine, women, and intellectual pride than is generally recommended in contemporary spiritual literature.

But here we must pause to consider what Augustine was actually seeking, for it was not at all what he supposed himself to be seeking. He thought he was seeking truth, beauty, love, knowledge—all those splendid abstractions that bright young men seek when they are old enough to be articulate about their seeking but not yet old enough to know what seeking costs. What he was actually seeking, though he did not know it for years, was God. Not the God of the philosophers, with their careful distinctions and their mathematical proofs, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God who has the distressing habit of calling people by name when they least expect it and certainly don't want to hear it.

The story of Augustine's conversion is justly famous, but it is famous, I think, for the wrong reasons. Most people remember the voice in the garden crying "Take up and read," and Augustine's subsequent encounter with Paul's letter to the Romans. It makes a tidy narrative: confusion, crisis, revelation, resolution. The sort of story that can be told in a children's book with illustrations of a man sitting under a tree holding a scroll.

But Augustine's real conversion was not an event but a process, and a process so gradual and so complicated that it took him thirteen books to explain it even to himself. It was less like a man suddenly seeing the light than like a man slowly discovering that he had been walking in the right direction all along, only backwards and with his eyes closed. For years he had been seeking God everywhere except in the one place where God might actually be found: in Augustine himself, not as some sort of divine spark or inner light, but as the voice that had been calling him from the beginning, the voice he had been running from with such impressive energy and creativity.

This is perhaps the most difficult thing about Augustine for modern Christians to understand. We live in an age that has made peace with itself by dividing the world into the spiritual and the secular, the sacred and the profane, the religious and the ordinary. We go to church on Sunday to be spiritual and go to work on Monday to be practical, and we have convinced ourselves that this makes perfect sense.

Augustine knew better. He understood that if Christianity is true at all, it is true about everything—about pears and prayers, about lust and liturgy, about the price of bread and the nature of eternity.

One of Augustine's greatest contributions to Christian thought was his insistence on what he called original sin, though the phrase does him something of a disservice. Original sin sounds like something that happened to our great-great-grandfather Adam and was passed down through the generations like a family heirloom or a hereditary disease. What Augustine actually meant was something far more immediate and far more personal: that every human being, regardless of education, social status, or moral intention, is born into a world that is fundamentally out of joint, and that each of us contributes to that disorder in ways both dramatic and trivial.

This was not, for Augustine, a cause for despair but for democracy. If all men are sinners, then no man has the right to lord it over another on the basis of moral superiority. The emperor and the slave, the philosopher and the farmer, the saint and the thief—all stand equally in need of grace. This is why Augustine could write with such devastating honesty about his own failures. He was not engaging in an elaborate form of self-humiliation; he was conducting a scientific experiment in moral archaeology, digging down through the layers of rationalization and self-deception to discover what actually motivates human behavior.

What he found there was both worse and better than he had expected. Worse, because he discovered that even his virtues were tainted with pride, even his love was mixed with selfishness, even his pursuit of truth was corrupted by the desire to be thought clever. Better, because he discovered that this very corruption was itself a kind of evidence—evidence that human beings are made for something higher than they typically achieve, evidence that we are, in fact, made for God.

Modern Christianity has largely forgotten Augustine's most radical insight: that we do not find God so much as God finds us. We speak of seeking God as if He were a lost object that might be recovered through sufficient effort, like looking for one's keys or trying to remember where one put the car.

Augustine discovered that the situation is rather the reverse: God is seeking us, and our supposed seeking of Him is actually our response to His seeking of us. We love because He first loved us, as John puts it, but Augustine understood this to mean that even our capacity to love, even our desire to seek, even our dissatisfaction with the things of this world, are all gifts from the God we imagine ourselves to be pursuing.

This turns the whole religious enterprise upside down in a most salutary way. Instead of religion being primarily about human achievement—what we can accomplish through prayer, good works, spiritual discipline, or theological understanding—it becomes primarily about divine grace. Instead of faith being something we work up to, it becomes something we are worked into. Instead of conversion being something we do, it becomes something that is done to us, something we submit to rather than achieve.

Augustine learned this lesson slowly and with considerable resistance. His Confessions are full of passages where he describes trying to pull himself up by his own spiritual bootstraps, trying to think his way into faith, trying to will himself into virtue. And again and again he failed, not because he wasn't trying hard enough, but because he was trying to do something that cannot be done by trying. He was attempting to lift himself by his own moral shoelaces, which is precisely as impossible as it sounds.

There is a moment in the Confessions where Augustine describes his state of mind just before his conversion, and it is one of the most psychologically acute passages in all of literature. He says that he was like a man who wants to wake up but keeps falling back asleep, like someone who knows he should get out of bed but finds the covers too comfortable, too familiar. He could see the truth of Christianity; he could feel its attraction; he could even understand intellectually why he should embrace it. But between understanding and doing lay what seemed an unbridgeable chasm.

It was only when Augustine stopped trying to bridge that chasm himself that the bridge appeared. Not because he had achieved some higher level of spiritual development, but precisely because he had admitted that he could not achieve it. His conversion came not when he was strongest but when he was weakest, not when he had finally gotten his life together but when he had finally admitted that he could not get his life together.

This is what makes Augustine such a valuable guide for contemporary Christians. We live in an achievement-oriented culture that has infected even our understanding of faith. We think of spiritual growth as something like physical fitness—a matter of discipline, technique, and gradual improvement. We measure our progress, set spiritual goals, and generally approach the divine life as if it were a particularly challenging form of self-improvement.

Augustine knew better. He understood that the Christian life is not about becoming good enough for God but about discovering that God is good enough for us. It is not about achieving spiritual success but about learning to fail gracefully. It is not about solving the problem of our moral imperfection but about discovering that our moral imperfection is not actually the problem we thought it was.

Perhaps Augustine's greatest insight was his understanding of love as the fundamental human motive. Everything we do, he argued, we do because we love something. The question is not whether we will love—we cannot help loving—but what we will love and in what order. Sin is not the absence of love but misdirected love, love that has gotten its priorities confused, love that has mistaken the gift for the Giver.

Augustine distinguished between what he called uti and frui—between using and enjoying, between loving something as a means and loving something as an end. The root of human misery, he suggested, is that we tend to use the things we should enjoy and enjoy the things we should use. We use God (if we think about Him at all) as a means to get what we want—health, happiness, success, security. And we enjoy things like money, pleasure, power, and reputation as if they were ends in themselves.

Conversion, for Augustine, was fundamentally a reordering of love. It was learning to love God for His own sake and to love everything else in relation to God. This did not mean becoming indifferent to the goods of this world—Augustine was no world-denying ascetic—but it meant learning to love them properly, to see them as gifts rather than goals, as means rather than ends.

This insight has profound implications for how we understand the Christian life. If Augustine is right, then spiritual maturity is not primarily a matter of moral achievement but of emotional education. It is not about learning to do the right things but about learning to love the right things in the right way. It is not about suppressing our desires but about redirecting them, not about becoming passionless but about becoming properly passionate.

What makes Augustine eternally relevant is not that he solved the problems of the human condition but that he diagnosed them so accurately. He understood, as few thinkers have, the precise nature of human restlessness. He saw that we are creatures caught between time and eternity, between the finite and the infinite, between what we are and what we are called to become. He recognized that this tension is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

Augustine's famous prayer—"You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you"—is not merely a pious sentiment but a piece of psychological analysis. It is Augustine's way of saying that human dissatisfaction is not accidental but essential, not a flaw in the system but a feature. We are designed to be dissatisfied with anything less than God, and our dissatisfaction is actually a form of guidance, a kind of spiritual compass pointing us toward our true home.

This is why Augustine remains such a powerful voice for contemporary Christianity. In an age of easy answers and spiritual shortcuts, he reminds us that the Christian life is fundamentally about learning to live with questions. In an age of self-help spirituality, he insists that we cannot help ourselves, that the very attempt to do so is part of the problem. In an age of moral relativism, he maintains that there are indeed absolutes, but that we discover them not through rational argument but through the long, slow work of conversion.

Perhaps most importantly, Augustine teaches us the art of confession—not merely in the sacramental sense, but in the broader sense of learning to tell the truth about ourselves. His Confessions are revolutionary not because they reveal scandalous secrets but because they reveal ordinary secrets, the small compromises and petty vanities and hidden resentments that make up the substance of most people's inner lives.

Augustine understood that we cannot be healed by God until we admit that we need healing, and we cannot admit that we need healing until we stop pretending that we are well. The great obstacle to conversion is not our sins but our unwillingness to acknowledge our sins. It is not that we are too bad for God but that we are too proud to admit that we are bad at all.

In our contemporary context, where confession has largely been replaced by therapy and sin has been replaced by dysfunction, Augustine's example is particularly valuable. He shows us how to take responsibility for our failures without being crushed by guilt, how to acknowledge our need for grace without falling into self-pity, how to be honest about our condition without losing hope for our future.

And so we return to those stolen pears, which seem less ridiculous now than they did at the beginning. Augustine saw in that childhood theft a perfect image of the human condition: taking what we do not need, wanting what we should not want, breaking rules for the sheer pleasure of breaking them. But he also saw in his memory of that theft something else: the first stirring of conscience, the first dim recognition that something was wrong, the first faint call of the God who would spend the rest of Augustine's life pursuing him.

The boy who stole pears became the man who stole hearts, and the man who stole hearts became the saint who taught the world how to confess. It is a perfectly Augustinian paradox: the theft that led to the greatest honesty in Christian literature, the sin that opened the door to the most profound understanding of grace.

We who live fifteen centuries after Augustine still struggle with the same fundamental questions: How do we learn to love rightly? How do we live with our failures? How do we find peace in a world that offers only temporary satisfactions? Augustine cannot answer these questions for us, but he can show us how to ask them better. He can teach us that the questions themselves are a form of prayer, that our restlessness is a form of seeking, and that our very need for answers is itself a kind of answer.

In the end, perhaps that is Augustine's greatest gift to us: not solutions but companionship, not answers but better questions, not the end of the search but a more honest way of searching. For in teaching us how to confess, he taught us how to hope. And in teaching us how to hope, he taught us how to love. And in teaching us how to love, he pointed us toward the Love that will not let us go, the Love that pursued him from his childhood theft to his deathbed prayer, the Love that pursues us still.

-The Seeker's Quill