Sublime

To read Augustine in the twenty-first century is to gain a vantage point that makes all of our freedom look like addiction.

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.

When the Church was substituted for the Jewish nation, this change became essential, since the Church, as a spiritual entity, could not sin, but the individual sinner could cease to be in communion with the Church. Sin, as we said just now, is connected with self-importance. Originally the importance was that of the Jewish nation, but subsequently

That’s why, Augustine suggests, you can be prodigal without moving an inch. What we’re mapping here is the geography of desire. It took running from Carthage to Rome to Milan for Augustine to realize that his exile was inward:

The frantic pursuit of the next place is symptomatic of his self-alienation. “I had left myself and couldn’t find me,” Augustine recalls. “I turned myself into a famished land I had to live in.”

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.