Sublime

for Augustine the journey inward was an open battle with devils and demons. Augustine’s pastoral practice gave us an inner self, but this self, to use Taylor’s language, was porous.

“Oh, the twisted roads I walked!” Augustine recalls. “But look, you’re here, freeing us from our unhappy wandering, setting us firmly on your track, comforting us and saying, ‘Run the race! I’ll carry you! I’ll carry you clear to the end, and even at the end, I’ll carry you.’”

Augustine framed this as the paradox of our unhappiness: “How does anyone suffer an unhappy life by his will, since absolutely no one wills to live unhappily?”

In City of God, St. Augustine wrote: “God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are always too full to receive them.

St Augustine, who’d studied the mind-palace memory technique when he was an orator, develops the mystic metaphor of the soul as mansion in his Confessions . ‘Narrow is the mansion of my soul, oh Lord’, he declares. ‘Enlarge it, that you may enter it.’ He is connecting, of course, the Greek tradition of soul-as-mansion with the beautiful image of Je

to trust