Rosso agrodolce

 

Restlessness, sin, and the difficult art of lifting one's gaze beyond earthly things

There are men who attain holiness only after passing through sin, doubt, and restlessness. Men who are not born with their eyes turned toward the heavens, but who, at a certain point in their lives, feel the need to lift them.

Holiness is not the absence of sin

I was born on August 28, the day the Church commemorates Saint Augustine, my patron saint of heart. I do not know if there is a particular reason why I feel so closely bound to his figure, but within his torments, his contradictions, and his quest, I sense something that resonates within me. It is as though, through the trials of his own life, Augustine left a trace capable of speaking even to those who, many centuries later, continue to interrogate the meaning of existence.

His story, after all, bears little resemblance to the saccharine hagiography with which we sometimes prefer to depict saints. Augustine was not a man who was always good, always wise, always at peace with himself. He was a restless spirit, swept by desires, enticed by pleasures, seduced by ambitions, capable of losing his way in the labyrinths of his own intellect and passions. He sought the truth, yet could not always discern it. He yearned for the good, yet lacked the strength to choose it.

In other words, he was human.

And it is precisely this, perhaps, that brings him so close to us.

We are often tempted to imagine saints as beings belonging to an entirely different tier of humanity: exceptional creatures, immune to the weaknesses that plague ordinary people. We place them upon pedestals so high that we can no longer recognize anything of ourselves within them.

Yet Augustine tells a different story.

Before becoming the Bishop of Hippo, the great Christian thinker, and one of the most profound interpreters of the human soul, he was a man who knew the conflict between what he deemed right and what he truly desired. His conversion did not retroactively erase the contradictions of his past: it endowed them with new meaning, weaving them into a journey of seeking and transformation.

In the Confessions, Augustine does not conceal his wretchedness. He lays it bare. He makes no attempt to forge an edifying self-image, nor to justify every choice he made. He gazes inward with an honesty that, even today, can prove profoundly unsettling.

And perhaps the first lesson he bequeaths to us is precisely this: holiness does not consist in having always been superior to others, but in having summoned the courage to acknowledge one's own truth and allowing oneself to be transformed by it.

It is a crucial distinction. For acknowledged sin can become the starting point of a journey, whereas the presumption of righteousness can turn into a prison from which we feel no need to escape.

In this regard, a thought comes to mind that echoes one of Pascal's great insights: there are saints who know themselves to be sinners, and sinners who believe themselves to be saints.

This is not merely a moral paradox. It describes one of the subtlest forms of human blindness: the blindness of one who can no longer perceive the gulf between what they are and what they imagine themselves to be.

The saint, acutely conscious of their own frailty, never ceases to question. The self-righteous, convinced they have nothing left to mend, cease to seek.

Thus, it may happen that those who feel far removed from the good are already on their way toward it, while those who consider themselves its custodians have long ceased to question themselves.

“Our heart is restless”

There is a phrase of Augustine's that spans the centuries with the force of truths that never age:

“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

It is the opening of the Confessions, and it is also one of the fundamental keys to deciphering his entire existence.

Augustinian restlessness is not merely sadness, dissatisfaction, or the inability to savor life. It is something deeper: the conviction that no particular good, however desirable, can ever fully sate the depth of human longing.

We pursue pleasure, and once achieved, we discover it is not enough. We seek success, and immediately glimpse its limits. We strive for love, recognition, security, the possession of things; yet, even when we secure what we sought, something within us continues to ask for more.

We do not always know how to name this longing. Sometimes we mistake it for boredom, sometimes for ambition, sometimes for the urge to begin everything anew. We persuade ourselves that, once the next goal is reached, we will finally encounter the peace that has eluded us thus far.

And so we resume the race.

Augustine suggests that the problem may not lie in the scarcity of what we possess, but in the expectation that these things can wholly fulfill our desire.

This is not a summons to despise the world. It is an invitation not to demand from the world what it cannot, on its own, provide.

Feet on the ground, eyes toward the heavens

It is not easy to look upward when, down here, the world around us teems with earthly entities that keep our feet anchored to the ground and compel us never to avert our gaze.

Things continually clamor for our attention. Money, work, success, relationships, ambitions, everyday concerns. And alongside them, the desire to be recognized, the dread of losing what we have attained, the necessity of defending our place in the world.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. We are embodied creatures; we dwell within time; we bear responsibilities, affections, and needs. We cannot withdraw from the tangible reality of existence by pretending the world does not concern us.

The dilemma arises when that which should merely be a part of our life becomes its ultimate horizon. When we can no longer distinguish between the important and the essential; between what we want and what we truly need; between the goods we can possess and that sovereign good which, by its very nature, can never be reduced to an acquisition.

Augustine does not ask us to abandon life here below. Rather, he invites us not to mistake the earth for heaven.

His spiritual journey can also be understood as a gradual release from this confusion. Not because human ties, the body, knowledge, or material things are intrinsically evil, but because none of them can serve as the ultimate center around which to organize our entire existence.

To look toward the heavens, then, means to alter one's perspective. Not to flee from the world, but to learn to see it as it truly is: an assembly of genuine, precious, yet finite goods that deserve to be loved without being turned into idols.

The true challenge lies here. It is easy to despise what remains out of reach; it is far more demanding to recalibrate what we love, particularly when it seems indispensable to our happiness.

Conversion: when man ceases to flee from himself

Augustine's conversion was not merely the transition from a disordered life to an ordered one. It was a transformation of vision.

For years, he had searched for truth outside and within himself, traversing varied doctrines and divergent conceptions of the world. He did not lack intellect; what he lacked, rather, was that peace which no intellectual conquest could ever bestow.

In the Confessions, he recounts the tragedy of a divided will: perceiving the good without yet possessing the strength to embrace it fully; yearning to change while remaining tethered to the habits that forestall transformation.

It is a profoundly human condition.

How often do we know what we ought to do, yet perpetually delay it? How often do we acknowledge a truth without finding the strength to live it? How often do we cling to what makes us unhappy, simply because it is familiar?

Reason may illuminate the path, but it rarely possesses the power, on its own, to make us walk it.

Conversion, for Augustine, is thus never a mere theoretical conclusion. It demands the entirety of the person: intellect, will, desire, memory, affections. It is not enough to recognize the truth; one must learn to love it deeply enough to let it reshape one's life.

This is why his journey continues to speak to us. Not because it promises that change is effortless, but because it reminds us that our present condition is not necessarily our destiny.

We can be contradictory without being condemned to contradiction. We can have erred without defining ourselves forever by our failures. We can acknowledge our weakness without using it as a justification to cease striving.

Fragility is not yet a virtue. But it can become the very ground where the search for truth begins.

It is not enough to know where heaven lies

Perhaps this is what binds me most to Augustine: the awareness that man is never merely what he appears to be, nor does he coincide definitively with the choices he has made.

Within us coexist contradictory desires, reason that fails to govern passion, elevated aspirations, and petty attachments. We are capable of discerning what truly matters and, at the same time, losing ourselves in trifles. We can speak of truth while living in deceit, preach moderation while succumbing to excess, invoke freedom while remaining prisoners of our habits.

Our contradiction is no marginal accident; it is one of the profound experiences through which we learn to know ourselves.

Yet recognizing our contradictions does not mean celebrating every inconsistency, as though self-awareness were itself a form of absolution. It means assuming responsibility for the distance between what we are and what we might become.

Augustine offers no easy consolation of a perfection attained once and for all. Rather, he reveals the arduous struggle of a man who had to learn how to redirect his desires.

Because it is not enough to know where heaven lies. One must find the courage to lift one's gaze, even when everything around us seems to insist that nothing exists beyond the earth beneath our feet.

And we must do so without forgetting that we are made of dust, that we need worldly things, that we remain vulnerable to temptation, and that no achievement renders us permanently immune to losing our way.

Perhaps spiritual maturity consists precisely in this: learning to dwell in the world without being consumed by it, loving worldly things without being possessed by them, and acknowledging one's limits without relinquishing the possibility of transcending them.

My August 28th

Every year, on August 28th, the feast of Saint Augustine reminds me that life is not merely a sequence of days, accomplished goals, and problems to resolve. It is also an enduring question that accompanies us: toward what are we orienting our existence?

I do not believe the answer must necessarily be simple, nor that one can ever claim to have settled it once and for all. Certain questions sustain us precisely because they never cease interrogating us.

Augustine walked through desire, error, ambition, doubt, and restless longing. He did not arrive at truth because he was exempt from human weakness, but because he refused to accept that weakness as the final word on his life.

This is the deepest meaning I find in his figure: the possibility of a transformation that does not erase the past, but passes through it; that does not deny fragility, but acknowledges it; that does not despise the world, but seeks to comprehend its place within a grander horizon.

I was born on his feast day, and perhaps because of this, I feel his journey as a personal summons. Not the summons of someone claiming to have arrived, but of one who knows how easy it is to lose oneself among the things that constantly demand to be desired, possessed, and defended.

Because heaven is always there, above us. Yet, even when so close before our eyes, it can sometimes feel infinitely distant.

The challenge is not knowing it exists. The challenge is remembering it when the earth holds us back, when passions divert us, and when our small urgencies assume the proportions of the absolute.

And so I like to think that Saint Augustine, in all his profoundly human restlessness, continues to remind us of precisely this: that we are defined not merely by where we have fallen, but by the direction in which we choose to rise again.

PERHAPS BECOMING A SAINT DOES NOT MEAN NEVER HAVING BEEN A SINNER. IT MEANS NEVER CEASING TO SEEK—EVEN AFTER LOSING ONE'S WAY—THE PATH THAT LEADS HIGHER.

And continuing, despite everything, to look toward heaven.