Sublime

You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.

But St Augustine warns us not to be proud - we didn’t make the mansion, we’re a guest in our own souls. We need to seek the Lord in our minds and memories, which is not easy, because He is transcendent to our human imagining.

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:

Augustine is our contemporary. He has directly and indirectly shaped the way we understand our pursuits, the call to authenticity.

Much of the most influential part of Saint Augustine’s theology was concerned in combating the Pelagian heresy.

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.

The longing that Augustine describes is less like curiosity and more like hunger—less like an intellectual puzzle to be solved and more like a craving for sustenance (see Ps. 42:1–2).

Speaking broadly, Saint Ambrose determined the ecclesiastical conception of the relation of Church and State; Saint Jerome gave the Western Church its Latin Bible and a great part of the impetus to monasticism; while Saint Augustine fixed the theology of the Church until the Reformation, and, later, a great part of the doctrines of Luther and Calvi