A Dialogue in The Open Space:
Speaking with St. Augustine
Tom: Augustine, welcome. I have to say that when I first met you, I expected to meet a saint. Instead, I found a young man who seemed very familiar. You wanted love, friendship, success, pleasure, intellectual recognition. You stole pears with your friends just because you could. Do you recognize yourself in that young man?
Augustine: I recognize him very well. Perhaps too well.
He was not a stranger who happened to become me. He was me. I loved many things then, though I did not always know how to love them. I wanted happiness, but I often mistook pleasure for happiness. I wanted truth, but I also wanted the admiration that came from appearing to possess it.
And yes, there were pears.
The pears were never really the point. What troubled me was that I had done something wrong for the pleasure of doing it, and because others were doing it with me. I spent many years asking what sort of heart finds pleasure in such a thing.
Perhaps that is what I was learning all along: that the hardest person to understand is yourself.
Tom: You spent years searching. You moved from one intellectual position to another, from Manichaeism to skepticism and philosophy, and eventually toward Christianity. Looking back, were you searching for truth—or were you searching for somewhere to rest?
Augustine: At first I would have told you that I was searching for truth. And I was.
But I was also searching for myself.
I wanted an answer that would satisfy the mind, but I had not yet understood that the mind alone does not govern a life. I could argue one position brilliantly and still rise the next morning and live according to my old desires.
That was my difficulty.
I knew more than I could live.
I do not think I was unique in this. We are often very good at understanding what we ought to do and surprisingly poor at doing it.
The restless heart does not become still merely because it has acquired better arguments.
Tom: You are unusually candid about desire. You write about ambition, sex, friendship, grief, vanity, and the difficulty of giving up things you love. Yet sometimes you seem almost severe with the young Augustine. Did you ever learn to distinguish between understanding your desires and condemning yourself for having them?
Augustine: I learned slowly.
Desire itself is not a simple enemy. To desire is to be alive. The question is what we love, and whether our loves have been rightly ordered.
But I was severe with myself because I knew how easily I could deceive myself. We are remarkably talented at giving noble names to things we simply want.
Still, I came to understand that self-knowledge cannot be the same as self-hatred.
You cannot heal what you refuse to look at. But neither do you heal it by despising yourself for being wounded.
That might be the reason why I wrote the Confessions. I wanted to remember the man I had been without pretending that I had always been the man I wished to become.
Tom: And then there is your mother. You spent much of your life moving away from her faith, even as she continued to hope for you. When she finally died at Ostia, you were with her. What did she mean to you?
Augustine: More than I understood while she was alive.
Mothers have a curious power. We spend years trying to become separate from them, and then discover that they have been part of us all along.
My mother prayed for me when I had no desire to be prayed for. She loved me when I gave her very little reason for confidence. I sometimes thought her persistence excessive.
After she died, I understood that love is often patient in ways that reason is not.
At Ostia, we spoke together about the life beyond this one. For a moment, there seemed to be no distance between us—not mother and son, not teacher and student, but simply two people looking beyond themselves.
Then she was gone.
I discovered that conversion does not spare us from loss;
It only changes what we do with it.
Tom: You called the human heart restless. After everything you lived through, did yours ever become still?
Augustine: Not entirely.
But I don’t think that this is the right question.
A heart that loves will always be restless for something. The question is, what is it restless for?
I spent many years trying to fill the emptiness with knowledge, pleasure, ambition, friendship, and achievement. None of them was enough.
In the end, I discovered that the restlessness itself was telling me something.
Tom: Then maybe the restlessness was not the problem.
Augustine: Maybe not. It might have been the beginning of the conversation.
