Abstract

There are words the study of which maps out whole tracts of spiritual history. This is particularly true of the early Christian centuries. Single terms often fuse in a new unity material accumulated separately in the preceding Hebrew and Greek traditions. ‘Conversion’ is one such term—or epistrophe, to use the vulgate which the Jews took from the Greeks for the LXX, and the Christians took from both. Besides, it covers a phenomenon of some actuality, when belief is understood as more than the result of abstract demonstration. C’est... un bouleversement total... le moment décisif d’une existence....