Sublime

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.”

Augustine might make Christianity plausible again for those who’ve been burned—who suspect that the “Christianity” they’ve seen is just a cover for power plays and self-interest, or a tired moralism that seems angry all the time, or a version of middle-class comfort too often confused with the so-called American Dream.

As Augustine says, “such is the strength of love, that the mind draws in with itself those things which it has long thought of with love, and has grown into them by the close adherence.”

Cambridge historian Henry Chadwick argued that Augustine “marks an epoch in the history of human moral consciousness.”47 For the first time the supreme goal of life was not self-control and rationality but love. Love was required to redirect the human person away from self-centeredness toward serving God and others. Augustine’s Confessions laid the

to trust

The irony, Augustine points out, is that we experience frustration and disappointment when we try to make the road a home rather than realizing it’s leading us home, when we try to tell ourselves “the road is life.”

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.