Augustine of Hippo
Milan, late summer of the year 386. Augustine was thirty-one — already a celebrated teacher of rhetoric, already convinced on every intellectual point that the Catholic faith was true — and for years he had been unable to make himself live it. He had read the philosophers, sat under the preaching of Ambrose, watched friend after friend give up everything and convert while he could not. On this particular afternoon, in the garden of the house he shared in Milan with his friend Alypius, something in him finally gave way. He tells the story himself, in the eighth of the thirteen books he wrote looking back on his own life.
But when a profound reflection had, from the secret depths of my soul, drawn together and heaped up all my misery before the sight of my heart, there arose a mighty storm, accompanied by as mighty a shower of tears. Which, that I might pour forth fully, with its natural expressions, I stole away from Alypius; for it suggested itself to me that solitude was fitter for the business of weeping. So I retired to such a distance that even his presence could not be oppressive to me. Thus was it with me at that time, and he perceived it… I flung myself down, how, I know not, under a certain fig-tree, giving free course to my tears, and the streams of my eyes gushed out, an acceptable sacrifice unto You… I sent up these sorrowful cries — “How long, how long? Tomorrow, and tomorrow? Why not now? Why is there not this hour an end to my uncleanness?”
Confessions, Book VIII, Chapter 12 (§28)
He had barely finished speaking when a voice interrupted him — a child’s voice, from over the garden wall, in a sing-song he didn’t recognize from any game children played.
I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo, I heard the voice as of a boy or girl, I know not which, coming from a neighbouring house, chanting, and oft repeating, “Take up and read; take up and read.” Immediately my countenance was changed, and I began most earnestly to consider whether it was usual for children in any kind of game to sing such words; nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So, restraining the torrent of my tears, I rose up, interpreting it no other way than as a command to me from Heaven to open the book, and to read the first chapter I should light upon… So quickly I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I put down the volume of the apostles, when I rose thence. I grasped, opened, and in silence read that paragraph on which my eyes first fell — “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.” No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the sentence ended — by a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart — all the gloom of doubt vanished away.
Confessions, Book VIII, Chapter 12 (§29)
He closed the book. Alypius, it turned out, had a verse of his own waiting a few lines further on.
Closing the book, then, and putting either my finger between, or some other mark, I now with a tranquil countenance made it known to Alypius. And he thus disclosed to me what was wrought in him, which I knew not… Thence we go in to my mother. We make it known to her — she rejoices. We relate how it came to pass — she leaps for joy, and triumphs, and blesses You, who art able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think; for she perceived You to have given her more for me than she used to ask by her pitiful and most doleful groanings.
Confessions, Book VIII, Chapter 12 (§30)
His mother, Monica, had prayed for this for over fifteen years. Augustine was baptized by Ambrose the following Easter, in Milan, in the spring of 387. He would go on to become bishop of Hippo, in what is now Algeria, and the most influential theologian the Western Church has produced — but every account he gives of that garden afterward comes back to the same shape: not an argument that finally won, but a voice, a verse, and a choice he had spent years unable to make on his own.
The verse he read
Above, the words are Augustine’s own — his account of the moment, in the standard English translation of the Confessions. Here is the actual passage he read, Romans 13:13–14, in the same Douay-Rheims Bible used throughout this library:
Let us walk honestly, as in the day: not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy: But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences.
Romans 13:13–14 · Douay-Rheims
Conversion narratives are told from the convert's own public-domain writings or from Scripture, dated and attributed like every other source here. Where that isn't yet possible, we say so rather than tell the story for them.