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In his preceding work, Soundings in Augustines Imagination, Father OConnell outlined the three basic images Augustine employs to frame his view of the human condition. In the present study, he applies the same techniques of image-analysis to the three major conversionsrecounted in the Confessions. Those conversions were occasioned, first, by Augustines youthful reading of Ciceros Hortensius, then by his reading of what he calls the books of the Platonists,and finally, most decisively, by his fateful reading in that Milanese garden of the explosive capitulum, or chapterlet,from St. Pauls Epistle to the Romans. Dissection of Augustines imagery discloses a chain of striking connections between these conversions. Each of them, for instance, features a return to a woman - now a bridal, now a maternal figure, and finally, a mysterious stand-in for Divine Wisdom, both bridal and maternal. Unsurprisingly, conversion-imagery also provokes a fresh estimate of the sexual component in Augustines religious biography; but the sexual aspect is balanced by Augustines insistent stress on the vanityof his worldly ambitions. Perhaps most arresting of all is Father OConnells analysis showing that the text that Augustine read from Romans consisted of not only two, but four verses: hence the dramatic procession of images which make up the structure of the Confessions, Book VII; hence, too, the presence, subtle but real, of those same image-complexes in the Dialogues Augustine composed soon after his conversion in A.D. 386.
