The Garden and the Flame: Meeting Augustine of Hippo
He chased every pleasure the empire sold, and found his heart still restless. A complete 21,000-word book, free and yours to keep. Not a sample chapter.
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Under a fig tree in a garden in Milan, a man is weeping so hard he cannot speak. It is late August, the year 386. The city outside the garden wall goes on about its business, carts, market voices, the ordinary clatter of a Roman afternoon, but here, in this narrow strip of ground attached to the lodgings he shares with his friend Alypius, none of that reaches him. He has thrown himself down beneath the tree because his legs will no longer hold him upright. His hands tear at his own hair. He beats his forehead. Something in him is being torn in two, and he does not yet have words for what it is, only that it hurts in a way no fever or grief has ever hurt him, and that he cannot make it stop by wanting to. He is thirty-one years old. He has spent his whole adult life being clever, the most celebrated teacher of rhetoric in Milan, a man who could argue any side of any question and make audiences weep at his eloquence whether or not he believed a word of it.
9 movements, carrying the whole life of Augustine of Hippo from beginning to enduring memory.
- Take Up and Read
- A Mother's Tears, a Boy's Wild Heart
- Far Country: Carthage, the Manichees, and Rome
- The Voice, the Vision, and the Water
- A Reluctant Shepherd
- The Mind on Fire: Confessions, the City of God, and Grace
- The Storm at the Walls
- Still Speaking: Augustine Through the Ages
- The Invitation Deeper
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No catch. The Invitation is a real book, free, and yours to keep: a complete portrait of this life in about 20,000 words, not a sample or a teaser. It is the doorway. The three volumes tell the life in its fullness, and they are here whenever you wish to go deeper.
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Lives that walk beside Augustine of Hippo, chosen for their likeness, not their fame.
