Augustine's Confession in the Garden

In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping in a Milan garden. Augustine of Hippo had spent years enslaved to desires he could not master. "Grant me chastity," he had once prayed with devastating honesty, "but not yet." He knew what was right. He could articulate virtue with the eloquence of a trained orator. But his body, he believed, owned him.…