Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Take up and read, take up and read.”
Augustine of Hippo · Christian Platonism · Medieval · c. 397–400
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the chant as the occasion of a conversion already prepared by years of conflict, not as a magical method anyone can repeat by picking up a book at random. He remembers Anthony's conversion by a gospel sentence, opens Romans, and treats the verse he finds as addressed to him. A rival reading reduces the scene to coincidence dressed up afterwards, which is a live historical question and not what the chapter claims. The words sit at the climax of book eight, after the prayer that asked for virtue and postponed it.
Did Augustine of Hippo really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Henry Chadwick's translation of the child's chant in Confessions book eight, tolle lege. Augustine reports what he heard in the garden at Milan and how he took it as a command to open Paul. The Latin is secure. This English is a translation.
Where it comes from
Confessions VIII.12.29
Approximate date: c. 397–400.
How to use it
A person on a wet evening in a Liverpool library opens a page because a phrase overheard on the bus will not go away, and then has to decide whether the page is an instruction or a mood. Augustine treats the chant as a command with a history behind it, not as a technique for manufacturing certainty. Copying the gesture without the conflict that gave it weight turns a reported crisis into a superstition about books.
A mindset reading
The scene is easy to sell as a hack: open something and obey the first line. He does not offer it as a hack. He offers it as what happened when a will that had been split finally took a voice in the garden as more than noise; A rival use, colder, dismisses every such report as fiction because reports of this kind can be shaped in the telling; Both the piety and the dismissal skip the chapter.
Understand the philosophy
Book eight stages the conversion as a healing of the will, and the chant is the turning point he narrates rather than a principle of epistemology. The key term is the command to take up and read, heard as a child's repeated words and interpreted through the example of Anthony. What he reads is a sentence of Paul against excess and strife. Chadwick keeps the repetition, which is part of the sound he says he heard.
- change
- knowledge
- meaning
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the chant as the occasion of a conversion already prepared by years of conflict, not as a magical method anyone can repeat by picking up a book at random. He remembers Anthony's conversion by a gospel sentence, opens Romans, and treats the verse he finds as addressed to him. A rival reading reduces the scene to coincidence dressed up afterwards, which is a live historical question and not what the chapter claims. The words sit at the climax of book eight, after the prayer that asked for virtue and postponed it.
Did Augustine of Hippo really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Henry Chadwick's translation of the child's chant in Confessions book eight, tolle lege. Augustine reports what he heard in the garden at Milan and how he took it as a command to open Paul. The Latin is secure. This English is a translation.
Which work is it in?
Confessions VIII.12.29 Approximate date: c. 397–400.