Take up and read

The scene in the garden has been told ten thousand times and it still stops people. Augustine himself returns to it with a precision that suggests he has been over every detail of it many times in his mind.

He is lying under a fig tree, weeping, his will finally broken open by the long strain of resisting what he has known for years he needs to do. He has heard Ambrose preach. He has read the Platonists. He has had long conversations with Simplicianus and Ponticianus about faith. He knows. He cannot do what knowing requires.

And then from a nearby house — a child's voice, or something that sounds like a child's voice, he is never entirely sure — sings a phrase in a singsong rhythm:

Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege. Take up and read. Take up and read.

He has never heard children play a game with those words. He interprets it as a divine command. He goes back to where he left the letters of Paul. He opens at random. His eyes fall on Romans 13:13–14: not in carousing 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.

He later writes: I had no wish to read further, and no need. For immediately, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty.

The long journey is over. He finds his friend Alypius and tells him. He goes to find his mother.

Monica weeps differently now.

The conversion of Augustine happens in a garden, with a child's voice, over a passage opened at random. The most intellectually formidable theologian in the Western church was not argued into the kingdom. He was undone in it.

All the philosophy, all the reading, all the conversations with Ambrose — they were preparation. But the moment itself was not intellectual. It was the will finally saying yes to what the mind had known for years.

Knowing and surrendering are not the same thing. Augustine knew for years before he surrendered in minutes.

What is the gap between what you know and what you have surrendered to? What would it take to close it?