What We Love First Shapes What We Become

Fifth Day from Augustine of Hippo (Twelve Days of Christmas Gift Series)

As we arrive at Day 5 in the 12 Gifts of Christian Theology, we turn to Saint Augustine, son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, who discovered that restlessness is often a sign of loving the wrong things first.

Augustine’s story did not begin as a saint with calm answers. He was a young man in Carthage chasing applause, romance, and intellectual victory. He wanted to be admired, desired, and remembered. His life looked successful from the outside. Inside, he felt scattered and tired, as if every win demanded another.

One day, Augustine was sitting in a garden in Milan, exhausted by himself. Then he heard a child’s voice, light and strange, repeating a phrase like a game: “Take and read.” He opened a book nearby. What followed did not soothe him. It broke him open.

Detail from The vision of St. Augustine by Ascanio Luciano

Augustine’s core discovery was painfully simple. Human beings are not confused because they want too much. They are confused because they want everything in the wrong order. He realized that desire itself was not the enemy. Misplaced desire was. In his Confessions, Augustine describes a life spent chasing brilliance, status, love, pleasure, and control, only to find that each one collapsed under the weight of expectation. The problem he determined was desire’s aim not its intensity. The human heart, he concluded, is restless until it rests in something that does not decay.