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Jason David BeDuhn Augustine's Manichaean Dilemma 1: Conversion and Apostasy, 373-388 C.E. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010 Pp. viii + 402.
Traditionally, the so-called "conversion" of Augustine from the "error" of Manichaeism to the emerging orthodoxy of Nicene Christianity has been viewed by scholars as simply one, often preliminary, episode in his later career and legacy as a revered theologian. Few have paid any real attention to what initially attracted Augustine to Manichaeism in the first place and to the pivotal role his experience within that community played in his later intellectual and theological development. Typically, historians are content to take Augustine's own version of these events, as recounted in his Confessions, for granted and to dismiss his attachment to the Manichaeans as the product of an immature mind. In this book, however, Jason BeDuhn puts Augustine's Manichaean experience under a microscope, meticulously dissecting it in vivid and compelling detail, demonstrating once and for all the crucial importance this period has within the wider arc of Augustine's career.
The journey begins in backwater Numidia, in the town of Thagaste, where Christianity was still an amorphous mixture of sectarian communities,...