Sublime

But what place is there in me where my God can enter?

In a very real sense, Western Christianity is Augustinian Christianity.

“If to be a ‘Romantic’ means to be a man acutely aware of being caught in an existence that denies him the fullness for which he craves, to feel that he is defined by his tension towards something else, by his capacity for faith, for hope, for longing, to think of himself as a wanderer seeking a country that is always distant, but made ever-present

“happening” (arriver) without ever quite “arriving” at a final, fixed, and finished destination. We cannot simply “derive” (dériver) direct instruction from it, but we must instead allow it a certain drift or free play (dérive), which allows that tradition to be creative and reinvent itself so that it can be, as Augustine said of God, ever ancient

Augustine is striking at the very heart of what the Manicheans offered: not just enlightenment, but belonging, a circle of those “in the know,” a friendship of light.

Johannes Agricola