St. Augustine’s conversion began, on his own telling, when, as a nineteen-year-old boy – roughly the age of a college sophomore today – he encountered a dialogue by Cicero called the Hortensius:
Quite definitely it changed the direction of my mind, altered my prayers to You, O Lord, and gave me a new purpose and ambition. Suddenly all the vanity I had hoped in I saw as worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire I longed after immortal wisdom. I had begun that journey upwards by which I was to return to You. (Confessions, III.4)
Later on, after years of seeking, and still in the grips of Manicheism and fleshly desires, he would judge his progress against that earlier event:
I was much exercised in mind as I remembered how long it was since that nineteenth year of my age in which I first felt the passion for true knowledge and resolved that when I found it, I would give up all the empty hopes and lying follies of vain desires. And here I was going on for thirty, still sticking in the same mire. (VI.11) ….
