The Moment Augustine Put On the Light

In the summer of 386 AD, a thirty-one-year-old rhetoric professor sat weeping in a garden in Milan. Augustine of Hippo had spent years chasing ambition, pleasure, and philosophy, always restless, always hungry for something he could not name. He knew the truth of Christ intellectually, but he could not release his grip on the old life. "Give me chastity," he had once prayed, "but not yet."…