The Garden in Milan Where a Restless Man Finally Listened

In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping beneath a fig tree in a Milan garden. Augustine of Hippo had spent years drowning out every whisper of the Divine with ambition, pleasure, and philosophical debate. He had heard the voice before — through his mother Monica's prayers, through Bishop Ambrose's sermons, through the stories of others who had surrendered — but each time he mistook it for something else.…