Augustine's Manichaean Dilemma, Volume 1 - (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion) by Jason David Beduhn (Hardcover)

About the Book

Jason David BeDuhn reconstructs Augustine's decade-long adherence to Manichaeism, apostasy from it, and subsequent conversion to Nicene Christianity.

Book Synopsis

Augustine of Hippo is history's best-known Christian convert. The very concept of conversio owes its dissemination to Augustine's Confessions, and yet, as Jason BeDuhn notes, conversion in Augustine is not the sudden, dramatic, and complete transformation of self we likely remember it to be. Rather, in the Confessions Augustine depicts conversion as a lifelong process, a series of self-discoveries and self-departures. The tale of Augustine is one of conversion, apostasy, and conversion again.

In this first volume of Augustine's Manichaean Dilemma, BeDuhn reconstructs Augustine's decade-long adherence to Manichaeism, apostasy from it, and subsequent conversion to Nicene Christianity. Based on his own testimony and contemporaneous sources from and about Manichaeism, the book situates many features of Augustine's young adulthood within his commitment to the sect, while pointing out ways he failed to understand or put into practice key parts of the Manichaean system. It explores Augustine's dissatisfaction with the practice-oriented faith promoted by the Manichaean leader Faustus and the circumstances of heightened intolerance, anti-Manichaean legislation, and pressures for social conformity surrounding his apostasy.

Seeking a historically circumscribed account of Augustine's subsequent conversion to Nicene Christianity, BeDuhn challenges entrenched conceptions of conversion derived in part from Augustine's later idealized account of his own spiritual development. He closely examines Augustine's evolving self-presentation in the year before and following his baptism and argues that the new identity to which he committed himself bore few of the hallmarks of the orthodoxy with which he is historically identified. Both a historical study of the specific case of Augustine and a theoretical reconsideration of the conditions under which conversion occurs, this book explores the role religion has in providing the materials and tools through which self-formation and reformation occurs.

Review Quotes

"A major contribution to Augustine studies."-- "Journal of Religion"

"BeDuhn's prose is, as usual, lucid and engaging. He brings a historical and methodological sophistication to his work that is sorely lacking in many studies of the patristic period. BeDuhn's deep knowledge of primary Manichaean sources and ritual procedures, along with his formidable grasp of his subject, makes him uniquely qualified to tackle the central importance of Manichaeism within a figure that looms so large in western intellectual tradition, but whose story is so often incompletely told."-- "Journal of Early Christian Studies"

"What did Augustine see in Manichaeism? Why did he stay so long? . . . BeDuhn's richly explored answers are worth a cover-to-cover read, presenting as he does such treasure culled from every aspect of Augustine's relationship with Manichaeism from his conversion to that sect to his apostasy from it."-- "Church History"

About the Author

Jason David BeDuhn is Professor of Religious Studies at Northern Arizona University and author of The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual and Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament. Augustine's Manichaean Dilemma, 1, is the first part of a projected three-volume examination of Augustine's career-spanning engagement with Manichaeism.