Augustine wrote a rather lengthy letter to Jerome on James 2:10: "Whoever shall keep the whole law but offend in one point is become guilty of all." In the course of his argument, he sets out two metaphors for the attainment of wisdom, for what we might call conversion. Which better fits the experience?

I believe the Stoics are mistaken when they deny that someone who is stillmaking progress in wisdom has that virtue at all; they think that he has it only when he is quite perfect in it. They dont deny that he has made progress, but in no way is he wise unless, emerging from some deep, he suddenly springs forth into the fresh breezes of wisdom. Just as it makes no difference, when someone is drowning, whether there are many fathoms of water above him or only a hands or a fingers breadth, so they say that people who are tending toward wisdom do make progress but they are like people rising from the depths of the sea into the air. Unless they have entirely escaped from all folly as from oppressive waters, progressing by emerging, they do not have the virtue and are not wise. When they have escaped, however, they have all the virtue at once, no folly remaining from which any sin could arise.This analogy, where folly is like water and wisdom like air, so that the mind fully emerges from the drowning folly and breathes in wisdom immediately, does not seem to me to correspond to our authoritative Scriptures. Another analogy is needed: one in which vice or folly is compared to darkness, and virtue or wisdom to lightto the degree that such similarities can be transferred from bodily to intelligible realities. Its not like rising out of water into air so that as soon as ones out of the water, one can at once breathe as much as necessary. Its like coming out of darkness into light, like being illumined as one slowly makes ones way. Until this is entirely completed, we may say that one has already emerged from the deepest cave, inspired the more as the light nears, the closer one comes to the exit. What light one has comes from the light toward which one is advancing; what still is dark comes from the darkness from which one is emerging. Thus "no one living is justified in the sight of God" (Ps 142:2), and yet "the just one lives by faith" (Hab 2:4). And "the holy ones are clothed in righteousness" (Job 19:14), one person more, another less, and no one lives here without sin, one person more, another less, the best person, of course, the one with least sin. (Augustine, Ep. 167, 12-13; PL 33, 738)