"... quam intime medullae animi mei suspirabant tibi": De spriritualiteit van Augustinus' "verborgen jaren" tot aan de bekering in 386

Abstract

In popular works, and even in handbooks of (church) history, it is often assumed that Augustine was converted from paganism to Christianity. This perception is incorrect. Augustine (354-430) was a North African by birth. In all likelihood his mother Monnica was of Berber extraction, i.e. she originated from the indigenous black Berbers. She became a Catholic Christian (though with some touch of the Donatist Christianity prevalent in Augustine’s inland home town Thagaste). Augustine’s father Patricius was a conservative heathen and only baptised a Catholic when Augustine was sixteen. Young Augustine thus grew up in a religiously very diverse environment. His school education in Thagaste and nearby Madauros strengthened the pagan element. During his student years in Carthage Augustine became a member of the Gnostic- Christian Church of Mani (216-276), the prophet from Babylon who established a new Church which expanded from present day Iraq until the Atlantic and the Pacific. More than ten years Augustine was a member of the New Age-movement of his time. After a long and intense spiritual journey came, in 386, his final conversion to Catholic (= orthodox) Christianity. The article aims to indicate that – both thetically and antithetically – all previous spiritual factors had a lasting influence on the spirituality of the future doctor gratiae. During all these periods he sighed for true knowledge of God: “how in my inmost being the very marrow of my soul did pant after You!” (Conf. III,6,10).