Augustine on love found late
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you.”
Plain English
Augustine is looking back on years of searching in the wrong places. He realizes that God was not absent; Augustine was turned away.
Why it matters
The line gives Christian conversion a vocabulary of desire, regret, and discovered beauty.
About Augustine
Augustine became the grammar of Western Christianity. Confessions gave the church a new way to write about memory, desire, sin, grace, and the divided self; City of God gave it a way to think about history after Rome's collapse; his anti-Pelagian writings shaped later arguments about grace and freedom. Catholics, Protestants, medieval scholastics, Reformers, and modern philosophers all keep returning to him because he asked questions that did not expire. To understand the Western church, you have to understand what Augustine made possible.
- Lifespan
- 354 – 430
- Era
- Nicene
- Born in
- Thagaste
- See
- Hippo Regius
- Region
- Africa
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