O'Connell outlined the three basic images Augustine employs to frame his view of the human condition. In the present study, he applies the same techniques of image-analysis to the three major conversion recounted in the Convession. those conversions were occasioned first by Augustine's youthful reading of Cicero's Hortensius then by his reading of what he calls the books of the Platonists and finally, most decisively, by his fateful reading in that Milanese garden of the explosive capitulum, or chapterlet from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Dissection of Augustine's imagery discloses a chain of striking connections between these conversions. Each of them, for instance, features a return to a woman-now a bridal, now a maternal figure, and finally, a mysterious stand-in for Divine Wisdom, both bridal and maternal. Unsurprisingly, conversions-imagery also provokes a fresh estimate of the sexual component in Augustine's religious biography; but the sexual aspect is balanced by Augustine's insistent stress on the vanity of his world ambitions.