Here is a passage from The Rhetoric of Religion (1961):
The divine scheming had gone still further. Recall, in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, how love of language figures in Stephen's apostasy from Catholicism to aestheticism. Though having lost his belief in the Bible as doctrine, Stephen still savours the words for their style. This is nearly the reverse of Augustine's course. At first Augustine listened to Ambrose purely through professional admiration for him as a speaker, being interested in the manner rather than the matter of his sermons. Yet imperceptively, unknowingly (sensim et nesciens) he was being drawn closer to belief; and about three years before his conversion, while still methodically doubting, largely under Ambrose's influence he decied to become a catechumen in the Catholic Church. (80)
