Volume 46, Number 8 · May 6, 1999
Augustine's Magical Decade
By Garry Wills
In 397, when Augustine had been two years a bishop and six years a priest, he was summoned deeper into the consequences of his own thinking, deeper into himself. That is when he began The Testimony, an intimate form of writing set apart from the sermons, pamphlets, and letters his episcopal duties drew from him in a constant stream.[1] The explosion of writing that had occurred after his conversion in 387 was accompanied by a desire to catapult himself up out of his past, in a Neoplatonic ascent to God. Beginning in 397, there was an implosion of his mind, down into himself, back into his past, as the place where God could be found. His own mystery was an echo of God's; and God was hiding in the vaster areas he felt opening 'within'—intus, the key word of his current quest: 'You were inside me, I outside me' (intus eras et ego foris). God was 'deeper in me than I am in me' (interior intimo meo). So, with a spelunker's hardy nerve, Augustine lowered himself into himself:
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