Sublime

Sin gains entrance through these and similar good things when we turn to them with immoderate desire, since they are

The Christian gospel, for Augustine, wasn’t just the answer to an intellectual question (though it was that); it was more like a shelter in a storm, a port for a wayward soul, nourishment for a prodigal who was famished, whose own heart had become, he said, “a famished land.”

The best purely philosophical work in Saint Augustine’s writings is the eleventh book of the Confessions. Popular editions of the Confessions end with Book X, on the ground that what follows is uninteresting; it is uninteresting because it is good philosophy, not biography. Book XI is concerned with the problem: Creation having occurred as the

In his famous Confessions, Augustine observes that memory is a place that’s not a place. Locus non locus. He privileges memory as the most sublime human capacity. “Great is the power of memory,” he says, “a fearful thing, oh my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind and this am I myself” (194).