6 - The divine nature

Summary

In 386, at the age of 32, Augustine converted to Christianity. As he tells the story in the Confessions, the complex and dramatic events that constituted his conversion brought to successful conclusion a search he had begun as a teenager at Carthage with his reading of Cicero's Hortensius. Cicero had inspired in him a passionate yearning for the sort of immortality that comes with wisdom. After more than a decade of fruitless searching, Augustine finally discovered that the wisdom he had longed for was to be found with the God of Christianity. The discovery came in a moment of intellectual vision in which Augustine glimpsed and thereby came at last to understand the divine nature. “At that moment,” he tells us, “I saw [God's] 'invisible nature understood through the things that are made' [Romans 1.20]” (Conf. 7.17.23).