Why We Return to Augustine, by Michael R. Gonzalez

Despite the rise of “Nones” (the non-Church-affiliated), Augustine’s Confessions tends to attract college-age readers. Christians generally turn to Augustine in troubled times, intuiting that he probably offers prophetic guidance for us somewhere in his voluminous corpus. But it isn’t just Christians who find something to connect with in the Confessions. My secular and religious students alike consistently hold up this text as one of the two most helpful texts they are assigned in a Great Books course. The other is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Why Augustine? Perhaps because Augustine invites us to wrestle with limitations and longings that modernity tends to ignore. Our greatest limitation is death, and we long for what does not die. More precisely, according to Augustine, we long to glorify what is more complete than ourselves: “[Man] is but a tiny part of all that Thou hast created. . . .yet this tiny part of all that Thou hast created desires to praise Thee.”  ….