ABSTRACT
Although there are disagreements about the details, commentators on the Confessions seem to agree that Augustine had various mystical experiences of a roughly Plotinian sort before his conversion to Christianity, and that his vision at Ostia was the same sort of experience, although considerably changed by his Christianity. Mandouze, for example, says that “there was no difference in nature at all” between the Milan ascent of 7.17.23 and the Ostia ascent of 9.10.24-25 (Mandouze 1968, 697). And although O’Donnell rejects this position as “extreme” and dismisses Mandouze’s arguments for it as “wrongheaded,”1 his own account is not, in the end, so different. The ascent at Ostia, he says, “was better than what [Augustine] had found through the Platonic books: not different, not uniquely better, not a denial of the excellence of Platonic mysticism, but better. This is high flattery for Platonism, combined with a final regretful suspension of allegiance and transfer of that allegiance to Christianity” (O’Donnell 1992, 3:128).
