Augustine's Tears in Milan

On the night of April 24, 387 AD, in the great basilica of Milan, a forty-two-year-old rhetoric professor named Aurelius Augustinus stepped down into the baptismal waters. Bishop Ambrose placed his hands on the head of the man who had spent decades running — through Carthage's lecture halls, through Manichaean philosophy, through a mistress and a son born out of wedlock, through every intellectual escape route a brilliant mind could devise.…