Take Up and Read

Today's Reading

Read Romans 13:13-14: "Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."

Then read 2 Corinthians 5:17: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come."

Augustine's Insight

The garden scene in Book VIII is the dramatic climax of the entire Confessions. All the years of searching, the intellectual arguments, the inner warfare of the divided will — it all converges in a single afternoon in a Milan garden in the summer of 386 AD.

Augustine is in agony. He knows Christianity is true. He wants to surrender. But he cannot let go of his old life — particularly his sexual relationships and his ambition. He describes his former pleasures tugging at him like old companions, whispering, "Are you really going to dismiss us? From this moment will this or that be forbidden to you forever?"

He flings himself under a fig tree, weeping violently.

"I flung myself down under a certain fig tree, and gave free rein to my tears... And I heard from a nearby house, a voice like that of a boy or a girl, I know not which, chanting and repeating over and over, 'Take up and read. Take up and read.'"

Augustine took this as a divine command. He picked up the book of Paul's epistles that lay nearby, opened it at random, and read the first passage his eyes fell upon — Romans 13:13-14.

"I had no wish to read further, and no need. For in that instant, with the very ending of the sentence, it was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the darkness of uncertainty vanished away."

Reflection

Notice what happens in this scene. Augustine does not convert himself. He does not summon a final burst of willpower. He collapses — and in his collapse, grace meets him. A child's voice. A random page. A sentence from Paul. God works through the most ordinary means to accomplish what all of Augustine's striving could not.

The passage itself is telling. Paul does not say "try harder." He says "put on the Lord Jesus Christ." The image is of clothing — of being wrapped in something from the outside. Augustine's divided will could not heal itself. It needed to be clothed in Christ, covered by a righteousness and power not its own.

This is the heart of the gospel that the Confessions proclaims: conversion is not an achievement of the will but a gift to the will. Augustine was not the hero of his own story. God was.

Going Deeper

Paul's declaration in 2 Corinthians — "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation" — is exactly what Augustine experienced. He did not simply reform his behavior or adopt better ideas. He became someone new. The old Augustine did not gradually improve; he passed away. Something entirely fresh began.

If you have been trying to change yourself through sheer effort and finding the chains too strong, Augustine's garden offers both rebuke and hope. The rebuke: you cannot save yourself. The hope: you were never meant to. The same God who sent a child's voice into a Milan garden is able to reach you in whatever garden of indecision you occupy today. The invitation is the same: take up and read. And then, let the Word do its work.