Life-Change and ‘Conversion’ in Antiquity: An Analysis of the Testimonies of Dion of Prousa and Aelius Aristeides

Abstract

Our image of ‘conversion’ takes its form from well-known episodes in the lives of St Paul and St Augustine. Paul's life is turned around by a blinding vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus (Act. Ap. 9.1–22); Augustine is directed by an oracle to a scriptural passage that ends his hesitations and sets him on the course that he has long known he should take (August. Conf. 8.12). Very much in parallel, although in a non-Christian context, are crisis-provoked life-changes reported by the Second Sophistic orators Dion of Prousa and Aelius Aristeides. Aristeides finds his life transformed by the intervention of the god Asklepios; Dion receives – he claims, from a god – advice that, put into effect, makes him the philosopher he has aspired to be. Were Dion and Aristeides ‘converts’? Adopting a conservative definition of ‘conversion’, I will argue that their accounts – though not autobiographies in the strict sense of that term – can legitimately be called ‘conversion narratives’. I will then test each for its goodness-of-fit to two influential life-change models, the first developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner in the context of initiation rituals, and the second, Lewis Rambo's process model of conversion.