We are now prepared to understand what we find in the Confessions: a love of God characterized not by a neat intellectual progression toward contemplative purity, but by a pervasive sense of longing, incompleteness, and passivity. This love has more in common with the Platonic picture of ordinary love than with its reformed version. The metaphor of ascent still appears, but rarely. In its place we tend to find the image of a journey that goes on and on – especially a journey deep into the inner spaces of the mind. We even find images of a descent of the soul into itself, with proper humility. Instead of exaltation, we find poverty and lowness, dust and ashes (e.g., X.28, 1.6); instead of the fullness of the Platonist soul, emptiness and barrenness (e.g., X.28, II. 10); instead of the ease with which that soul, once purified, turns to contemplation, we find toil and labor (e.g., X.39, X.16, X.40); instead of safety, danger (X.35, 39); instead of light, darkness and obscurity, fog and mist (II.2, X.5). Instead of purity and health, we find sickness, hunger, and thirst; God is invoked as “my intimate doctor” (X.3, II. 10; X.27, 28, 43).

Augustine plainly views himself as continually in danger. He stresses his openness to external happenings, depicting himself as a container (I.2, 3) that stands open to receive what God will choose to pour in (I.2, 5). Nor does he feel confident that his own internal processes are fully under his own control. In his own aspiration he exemplifies the very difficulties about grace that he describes theoretically in the Ad Simplicianum. For he prays that God should present Himself to him, happen his way, in such a manner that his soul may be moved by love and delight:

Hear, Lord, my prayer. Let my soul not fall short under your discipline . . . so that you might become sweeter to me than all enticements that I used to follow, and so that I might love you most firmly and embrace your hand with all the strength of my heart. (I.15)^[17]

Through prayer, Augustine can make a powerful effort to become responsive to the right, and only the right, stimuli. But this effort does not guarantee success.

The final aim of this earthly lover, like that of his Platonist counterpart, is a complete union with the beloved object, in which all desire and emotion will at last be stilled. But this goal is now seen to be both impossible and inappropriate to this life:

When I shall be united to you in every part of myself, there will be for me no more sorrow or toil, and my life will be alive, in every way full of you. But now . . . since I am not yet full of you, I am a burden to myself. My joys, which ought to be lamented, contend against my sorrows, concerning which I ought to rejoice. And which way the victory will go, I do not know. (X.28)

The first part of the passage points to the unattainability of the lover’s aim while human life continues. The equally important second half insists that the sorrow arising from unattainability is precisely what the Christian ought to value for himself in this life, the pride of a human joy just what he should avoid.[^18] What is appropriate to this life is not erotic union, but erotic longing, distance, incompleteness. The wanderings of Aeneas have been rejected in favor of wanderings even more painful and laborious; and Augustine resembles Dido more than he does the somewhat Stoic Aeneas, whose journey was prompted by pietas rather than by love. The subjectivity of the two states has great similarity; the moral difference, which is huge, is made by the difference in their objects.

A now wants to know where we are with our account of the continuity and discontinuity between human and divine love. If she takes the Christian path rather than the one the Platonists map out for her, where will she find herself? One way to let her know will be to tell her a love story, and to let her see whose story it seems to be.

Imagine, then, we tell her, that you have for many years been deeply involved in a passionate relationship that has brought you neither stable satisfaction nor a quiet conscience. You have felt yourself to be the slave of forces beyond your control, both external and internal. You feel that your entire life is out of order. (She will have no trouble telling herself this, for all this is in fact her story.) For the sake of living and living well, you feel that you ought to turn away from the person whom you have loved, blinding yourself to that person’s beauty and power, closing yourself to the deep influence that your response to this beauty exercises over imagination and action. You see that to succeed in this you must not merely avoid the immediate stimulus of that person’s physical presence; you must also close off his access to your feelings through habit and memory, and the memory of habit, and the habit of remembering.

While you are struggling with these things, with uneven success, you are suddenly struck – briefly and obscurely, in an uncertain, momentary encounter – by another person. You feel strangely moved. You see your own responses only dimly: you cannot even begin to describe what has happened. You are exhilarated; you have a sense of motion toward something, a vague, undefinable hope. And yet you feel hopelessly far from whatever it is you want from this person, far even from being able to say what it is you want. After all, you know almost nothing about the object of this longing. You can barely give him a name. All you can do is to learn from others about who he is and what he has done. And this increases both your interest and your sense of distance. You feel convinced that this hope is the hope of a better and more fruitful life, if you could only allow yourself to be touched by it deeply enough to change. You want to respond. You also want to want to respond. But at the same time, of necessity, you continue on with the old life, since that is where your life is lived. You easily become reabsorbed in your old relationship; and when you are reabsorbed you find that you do not even want to care about anything or anyone else. The power of habit and the memory of your own previous actions and feelings, stand between you and any change. You know that what must happen now is that the new person must approach you and call to you. And you must respond. But you know that you cannot guarantee your own response. He must call to you in just the right way, so that you will respond. You hope that you will be such, and that the call will be such, that your life will change; but you do not control this. You want it to happen, but you do not control happenings. What is more, you do not even see or become aware of all that is happening. You know that much of the drama is being played out in depths of memory that are not fully accessible to consciousness. You do not, however, want to sever yourself from memory and its power. For your history, as the person who has those memories and has loved that powerful love, is constitutive of whatever you are and bring to anything new in life. If the new lover does not call to and move that, it is not you that he calls and moves.

So you go about, feeling sick a great deal of the time, and powerless, and ugly;^[19] feeling thirsty, and dark, and endangered. Whether you will be united with the person and life that you long to want, or whether the power of habit and the obtuseness of desire will hold you where you are – this is, to you, the most mysterious matter in the world. You feel like a child lost in a dark wood.[^20] And yet it is not that you long for a life without these pains and risks, a life lived in your own power. For you obscurely judge that this contest full of bewilderment and exposure, motion and tension, is the only way to deal, humanly, with these human questions.