Patricius’s joy in the promise of carnal posterity most strikingly contrasts with the blessing of Abraham’s seed as a reward for his faithfulness. Abraham’s spiritual reward signals his spiritual worthiness; Patricius’s delight, however, not only reveals his carnality, but also his presumption: in contrast with Abraham, he rejoices before any display of worthiness, and in spite of his unfaithfulness. This desire for grandchildren is especially perverse when we remember that Augustine condemns those marriages intended only for sexual pleasure rather than procreation. At least such marriages might literally die out, leaving no progeny behind; Patricius, however, celebrates the potential for offspring precisely because now concupiscence might now engender even more concupiscence. This celebration of generative carnality amounts to a perverse parody of the blessing of Abraham’s seed. In De civitate dei, Augustine remarks upon the body’s proper role as a sacrifice: “Corpus etiam nostrum cum temperantia castigamus, si hoc, quem ad modum debemus, propter Deum facimus, ut non exhibeamus membra nostra arma iniquitatis peccato, sed arma iustitae Deo, sacrificium est” (”Our body, too, is a sacrifice when we chasten it by temperance, if we do so as we ought, for God’s sake, that we may not yield our members instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but instruments of righteousness unto God” [civ. 10.6]). Patricius, however, uses his son’s body for precisely the opposite purpose: to sacrifice to the false idol intemperance. The bathhouse episode depicts Patricius and Augustine sinning both bodily, through their celebration of the flesh, and rhetorically, through their dramatization and concretization of interpretive sin as figured in De doctrina christiana.Before Ambrose’s arrival, Monica is complicit in, if anxious about, the behavior of her son and husband. While she knows that Patricius’s joy is misguided–”illa exilivit pia trepidatione ac tremore” (”She shook with a pious trepidation and a holy fear” [2.3.6])– she nevertheless does not fulfill her role as well as she might have: “sicut monuit me pudicitiam, ita curavit quod de me a viro suo audierat, iamque pestilentiosum et in posterum periculosum sentiebat cohercere termino coniugalis affectus, si resecari ad vivum non poterat” (”Although she had warned me to guard my virginity, she did not seriously pay heed to what her husband had told her about me, and which she felt to hold danger for the future: for she did not seek to restrain my sexual drive within the limit of the marriage bond, if it could not be cut back to the quick” [2.3.8]). Monica’s family is slipping away from her guidance–their sinfulness has even infected her judgment–and Augustine’s rhetorical practice reflects his bodily carnality: as he writes about his subsequent encounter with the Bible, “tumor enim meus refugiebat modum eius et acies mea non penetrabat interiora eius” (”My inflated conceit shunned the Bible’s restraint, and my gaze never penetrated to its inwardness” [3.5.9]). This state of spiritual flux prepares the reader for the interconnected reconfigurations of both Augustine’s family and his rhetorical practices that effect his escape from the bonds of concupiscence on both fronts. These changes enable the bishop to construct what Vance identifies as the “verbal tomb” for his mother.Ambrose’s appearance, as we have seen, is the catalyst for these reconfigurations. He thus fills an important role in Augustine’s depiction of his family: Vance remarks: “On an obvious level, his new teacher displayed a specifically paternal charity: ‘that man of God received me in a fatherly fashion’ [paterne, 5.13.23], and this demeanor made of Ambrose a welcome antitype both of the paterfamilial Patricius and of those grammarians who had dispensed the justice of a wrathful God in their classroom beatings.” Ambrose can also serve as husband to Monica:Given that Monica had never enjoyed her conjugal duties and had considered marriage as the legal slavery of wives to their husbands, the surge of spiritual love that Monica felt for Ambrose–this ‘angel’ sent by the very God she had always yearned to wed–was the perfect opposite of her carnal tribulations with the violent and unfaithful Patricius.Vance locates this new familial structure within the development of Augustine’s thought:The burgeoning triangle of Ambrose, Monica and Augustine amounted to a radical recasting of the nuclear family as a spiritual bond from which all of the traumas of real experience were now expunged. This is a waypoint, perhaps, toward Augustine’s theology of the Trinity, but this latter will demand an expulsion of woman (in the person of Mary) from the bond of the Father and Son, and the inclusion of the yet-to-be-defined Holy Spirit.23In this reconfiguration, the real-life traumas are expunged, so that the crisis that arose in the bathhouse, amounting to a real sacrifice by a real father, becomes in the narrative a negative prefiguration of Augustine’s victory over lustfulness upon his baptism. The real-life sacrifice to which daughters are subject, therefore, is transformed into that figural plane of Christian cosmology occupied by the sacrifices of Isaac and Christ. The expulsion of woman from the Trinity thus parallels the expulson of daughters from Augustine’s depiction of sacrifice.Given that, as Vance has shown, Augustine’s use of similitude and association in the Confessions raises the text’s events to the figural plane, what role does the negative bathhouse scene play in Augustine’s spiritual development? I suggest that the location of the episode in the bathhouse prefigures the miraculous transformation of earthly water into three spiritual substances: wine, with the connotation of the eucharist; the Word of God, as represented by Ambrose’s sermons; and baptism, so important in Book 9, in which the bathhouse appears again. The juxtaposition of water and wine in the sacrificial episode–Patricius is “gaudens vinulentia” and “de vino invisibili perversae atque inclinatae in ima voluntatis suae”–suggests a parody of Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding at Cana. The water of the bathhouse turns into the wine of Patricius’s carnal excitement. Moreover, wine, like sex, can be used for the glory of God (as in the sacrament of the eucharist), but its misuse constitutes a grave sin. This is why Augustine defends Monica against charges of drunkenness for wishing to bring cakes and wine to the memorial shrines of the saints in Milan: “pietatem ibi quaerebat,” he explains, “non voluptatem” (”Her quest was for devotion, not pleasure” [6.2.2]); and also why, in his “verbal tomb” for her, he emphasizes Monica’s victory over alcoholism (9.8.18). Just as Patricius perverts the notion of procreation, so too does he act with the perverse will of intoxication.Augustine also uses water as a figure for the Word of God in Confessions 6.1.1, when Monica crosses the ocean to Milan. Augustine’s revision of Genesis 22– so crucial to his conception of similitudo–to occur in a bathhouse helps to explain his later use of aquatic imagery to consider tropological issues. The paragraph concerning Monica’s arrival also offers the most explicit evidence that Ambrose, by means of his divine words, has taken over Patricius’s role. This passage thus carries a palinodic force, for the errors of the bathhouse scene are recalled and corrected here. The negative associations of water appear when Augustine writes, “et veneram in profundum maris, et diffidebam et desperabam de inventione veri” (”I had come into the depth of the sea. I had no confidence, and had lost hope that truth could be found” [6.1.1]). His mother’s faith, however, could overcome such depths: “nam et per marina discrimina ipsos nautas consolabatur, a quibus rudes abyssi viatores, cum perturbantur, consolari solent, pollicens eis perventionem cum salute, quia hoc ei tu per visum pollicitus eras” (”During a hazardous voyage she encouraged the crew themselves who are accustomed to offering consolation to frightened travellers with no experience of the deep sea. She promised them a safe arrival, for in a vision you had promised this to her” [6.1.1]). Having arrived in Milan, Monica remains hopeful about her son’s spiritual prognosis, and she relies on Ambrose’s words to buoy her faith: “tibi autem, fons misericordiarum, preces et lacrimas densiores, ut accelerares adiutorium tuum et inluminares tenebras meas, et studiosius ad ecclesiam currere et in Ambrosii ora suspendi, ad fontem salientis aquae in vitam aeternam” (”To you, fount of mercies, she redoubled her petitions and tears, begging that you would hasten your help and lighten my darknesses. She would zealously run to the Church to hang on Ambrose’s lips, to the fount of water bubbling up to eternal life” [6.1.1]). In retrospect, we can more fully see Patricius’s actions as a perversion: he runs, rejoicing in his news, from the bathhouse to Monica, but in the later palinodic episode it is Monica who runs ad fontem salientis aquae of Ambrose’s sermons. At issue in both episodes are words and life: Patricius’s carnal words celebrate the barren life of licentiousness, whereas Ambrose’s spiritual words prompt Monica’s prayers for her son’s resurrection from his sickness. The emphasis on Ambrose’s sermons shows once again that spiritual interpretation is crucial to avoiding the dangers of concupiscence. Patricius should have seen his son’s pubescence as an opportunity to lead him on the right path, and we readers should understand these events in a figural context.Both the figurative and literal levels of Augustine’s narrative culminate in his most important sacrifice in the text, the sacrifice of himself in the sacrament of baptism. Baptism, Augustine believed, signals the Christian’s participation in the fulfillment of the Old Testament figurae, for it supersedes the sign of faith instituted by Abraham: “circumcisio quippe fuit illius temporis sacramentum, quod praefigurabat nostri temporis baptismum” (”of course circumcision was the sacrament of that time, which prefigured the baptism of our time” [nat. et or. an. 2.11.15]).24 Likewise, the dominance of baptism in Book 9 of the Confessions signals that Augustine’s conversions, to both the rhetorical models of the Christian Word and to his mother’s faith, are complete. For even though the narrative of Monica’s arrival in Milan, and of her encounter with Ambrose, corrects the sacrifice depicted in the bathhouse scene, it nevertheless does not represent a compete redemption of that episode. Had Patricius fully succeeded in offering his son to licentiousness, both he and Augustine would have been spiritually dead. The baptisms of both of them, as well as Augustine’s friends and son, in Book 9 represent their deaths to the