Sublime

If the heart is like a stomach (another reason to affirm “gut” as a contemporary translation of kardia!), we could render Augustine’s prayer in line with this metaphor: “You have made us for yourself, and our gut will rumble until we feed on you.”

If Augustine spent half his life battling the heresy of Pelagianism—the pretension that the human will was sufficient to choose its good—it’s because he saw it as the great lie that left people enchained to their dissolute wills. And no one is more Pelagian than we moderns.

So one can wonder whether Camus’s project isn’t governed—or at least stalked—by something like Augustine’s vision, a world that ought to have meaning, where evil is vanquished, where tragedy doesn’t have the last word, even if Camus concludes that’s not true.

THE CULT OF Monica is as wide as the world, found wherever there are weeping mothers. Indeed, if you roam around Italy with your eyes peeled, looking for Augustine’s legacy, Monica seems more ubiquitous. She represents the yearning of mothers everywhere, weeping over their children, hoping, praying, tenacious in their fierce love that the children

ST. ALPHONSUS MARY DE LIGUORI

“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.’”

It was Arendt who showed me that Augustine was a cartographer of the heart.