Around 394 or 395, Augustine and Paulinus of Nola engaged in a correspondence in which they appealed to Augustine’s former student Licentius, calling on him to commit himself fully to the Christian faith. This “Licentius Correspondence” (Letters 26, 27, 31, and 32) provides a window into the nature of the liminal space between Christianity and literary paganism in the late fourth century, while Augustine and Paulinus’ attempts to woo Licentius into full commitment to Christianity offer insights into the rhetorical tools of evangelism during the period. I will argue that for Augustine and Paulinus, conversion to Christianity meant commitment to a particular way of life and not merely to a particular narrative about the world. Their purpose in corresponding with and about Licentius was therefore to draw him into both the Christian narrative about the world and the Christian way of life.
While Augustine came out of the retreat at Cassiciacum and threw himself fully into the Christian faith with his baptism at Easter in 387, Licentius had remained in the ambiguous space between Christianity and the larger culture identified by Catherine Conybeare (The Irrational Augustine) and more recently by Nadya Williams (Cultural Christians in the Ancient Church). The method by which Augustine and Paulinus attempted to move Licentius toward a fuller Christian commitment included quotes from one of Licentius’ favorite pagan authors (26.3) the rhetoric of extended metaphor (26.4, where Augustine compares the state of Licentius’ moral life to his beloved poetry), and a strong appeal to Paulinus of Nola as a moral exemplar on which Licentius could model his life. This last feature in particular places Augustine and Paulinus’ effort in line with Augustine’s narrative of his own conversion in Confessions VIII. In that book, as Robin Lane Fox (Augustine: Conversions to Confessions) and Garry Wills (Augustine’s Conversion) have observed, a series of exemplary conversions serve to move Augustine toward the moral conversion he experienced in the garden in Milan. Similarly, Augustine and Paulinus present Paulinus’ own conversion and holy life as a model for Licentius’ imitation. I will therefore argue that, in line with recent scholarship on the protreptic functions of ancient biography (Tomas Hagg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity, Patricia Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man) a biographical account served as an essential component of this evangelistic effort.