A young man sits in a garden in North Africa in the late fourth century of our era, sobbing. He is not poor, not powerless, not stupid. He has a respectable job teaching rhetoric in Milan, he has friends, he has read widely in philosophy. By the standards of his time, he is a success. And yet he cannot stop crying because he feels divided against himself. He wants one kind of life and lives another. He knows, or thinks he knows, what is good, but he keeps choosing something else. “Grant me chastity and continence,” he once prayed, half joking, “but not yet.” Now the joke has worn thin. In the garden, between tears, he hears a child’s voice chanting from somewhere nearby: “Take and read, take and read.” He picks up a book lying close at hand, opens at random, and reads a passage that feels like a command to change his life. This is the scene that will become famous as the turning point of Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential thinkers in Western moral history.Selenius Media

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