“Intellectual discourse and good company” would be Jason David BeDuhn's short answers to the perennial questions, “what did Augustine see in Manichaeism?” and “why did he stay so long?” It is that simple, but BeDuhn's richly explored answers are still worth a cover-to-cover read, presenting as he does such treasure culled from every aspect of Augustine's relationship with Manichaeism from his conversion to that sect to his apostasy from it, covering the years 373 to 388.

BeDuhn finds it historically untenable to imagine that Augustine thoroughly understood either Manichaeism, Neo-Platonism, or even Nicene Christianity at the time of his conversions, or that somehow at each stage he consciously held every detail as an active faith that (at the time) he believed determined the ends and means of his spiritual life. His evidence includes references from all of Augustine's works that mention those years of that affiliation, which are illumined by extensive material from Manichaean texts. Much that had been hiding in plain sight now makes sense. BeDuhn's lynchpin is late twentieth-century research on the sociology and psychology of grouping and conversion, research that assesses what it means for any person to make a religious commitment, and how doing so subjects that person to self- and group-imposed constraints. Conversion, BeDuhn posits, is “one of the crucial passages that religions intensively script” (4). Converts are socialized into the group by providing the newcomer with “language to help the convert shape an account of the past rejected self, the new embraced self, and the appropriate motivations that serve to justify and sustain the choice of one over the other” (4). So, Augustine first as a Manichaean and later as a Nicene convert would have learned new ways to express himself and new ideas to think as rote speech-acts, before he found ways to think with these ideas. By these means, he would signal his membership in the group and his conformity to the rules and expectations. That would be all the others would expect.

But Augustine would continue to try to find reason in his stance. BeDuhn presents Augustine's story as first a failed attempt to make himself a “Manichaean,” then to become a “Platonist,” and ultimately successfully to become a “Catholic.” BeDuhn's narrative vivifies the social make-up of Manichaean communities in North Africa, Rome, and Milan, making it historically tenable to imagine Augustine with them. Even if BeDuhn cannot definitively prove that X is what happened and that Y is how it was, he presents Augustine's experience as plausible in light of the reasonable ways in which, on one hand, Augustine constructed his own story and, on the other, how social scientists have deconstructed how all people behave, especially how any person would behave when considering and then actually joining groups with particular social and spiritual boundaries.

Consequently, it seems right that BeDuhn depicts Augustine not as feckless but yearning. Time is given to considering what is appealing and what becomes repulsive. Taken seriously is the degree to which Augustine's intellectual interests were “shaped by a decade of engaging them from within Manichaean discursive structures” (69). Illuminating is the long chapter on Faustus, who appears here as a successful Manichaean, juxtaposed with Augustine, who was not (106–34).

The penultimate chapter, “Rationalizing Faith” (218–43), locates Augustine at the same point he had previously been with Manichaeism, but now drawn by the attractiveness of Nicene Christianity and his own expectations. BeDuhn cautions against presumptions that Augustine was searching for alternatives to every aspect of Manichaean theology, and against reading the Garden Incident straight. He argues that Augustine had become a Manichaean auditor because in the company of Manichaeans as with no others, the ideas that interested him were explored with the rigor and breadth which he thrived upon. For most of the time that he was with Manichaeans he had no reason to leave them, and by the time that there was less in it for him, his intellectual dependence upon discoursing with his friends sufficed to hold him there anyway until circumstance and something better came along. At the time, Augustine holds back his motives for his choices; by the time we hear him speak of his reason for converting, “we are already too late to catch the act of conversion itself” (6).

This time, Augustine hesitates: he neither rushes to be baptized nor presents himself for instruction; instead he abruptly leaves Milan, ostensibly to pause to gather his thoughts. As before, he expects “great and hidden goods” (Ord. 2.9.26), but does not know what they would turn out to be, and so (for fear of repeating his experience as a Manichaean) holds back from full commitment.

Evidently he had reason to leave Milan as abruptly as his departure from North Africa three years earlier. In 383, Augustine's move to Rome from Carthage coincided with fresh pressure on Manichaeans there. In summer 386, Augustine's withdrawal to Cassiciacum coincided with worrying news “that he had been named in the prosecution of Manichaeans in Carthage, and that an indictment or judgment against him, having the force of a warrant, had been issued” (220). It seems to have been the right time to break off. After all, a Manichaean self had failed to take root. Augustine was restless from lack of progress in the faith, which no longer was sufficiently compelling to risk active participation in an illegal sect. The precariousness of his position suggests to BeDuhn why Augustine stayed on at Cassiciacum for several months until his baptism would make-good his former Manichaean ties—coincidentally at about the same time as a general amnesty, the nota publica of Theodosius and Arcadius of January 387. “We do not need any of Augustine's later claims about the unsatisfactory premises of Manichaeism to explain his exit from the faith” (289). Impetus to leave Manichaeism eventually came from outside this rational discourse, in social factors and subconscious pressures that were able to move Augustine. BeDuhn sees in Augustine's circumstance between his encounter with Faustus in 383 and his retirement in 386 a textbook case of the typical conditions of apostasy: successive relocations, disruption of his prior social network, rapid socioeconomic advancement, close engagement with an elite class associated with another religion, and the rising potential costs of affiliation with a socially deviant group.

Augustine remained deeply affected by those years. He may have no longer identified with the sect, but for the rest of Augustine's life Manichaeism would continue to challenge the meaning of his “Catholic” conversion. BeDuhn's forthcoming volume 2 promises to undertake that story.