Sublime

St Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Jesuits, who went so far as to proclaim that he would have counted it a cause for pride had he been of Jewish extraction.

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.

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.

I’m not who I used to be; I’m on the way to being who I’m called to be; but I’m not there yet, Augustine counsels.

Saint Augustine’s Confessions, published around 1600 years ago, is considered the first Western autobiography, but it might most accurately be described as the first Quarterlife memoir. In it, Saint Augustine—then Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis—wrote: “I found much to bewilder me in my memories of the long time which had

WHOSE HEART ISN’T prodigal? One of the gifts Augustine offers is a spirituality for realists. Conversion is not a “solution.” Conversion is not a magical transport home, some kind of Floo powder to heaven. Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road; it just changes how you travel.