St Augustine of Hippo in Lightner Museum, St Augustine, Florida

He describes to us that he was walking in a garden being harassed by the memories of the “mistresses of his youth,” while simultaneously being attracted to Lady Continence, who shows him a long line of those who have lived the life of celibacy.

As we are at the start of the 21st century which again tells us that celibacy, and indeed chastity itself, is impossible, it is interesting to reflect upon what happens next. Simply, Augustine hears a child cry out “Tolle, Lege” (Take and Read) over and over again.

He does take up and read the words of the letter of St. Paul to the Romans “Let us walk honestly, as in the day: not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ: and make not provision for the flesh in its lusts.” This led to his conversion.

The significance of this episode, however, is not just in itself, but the way in which it points to a key theme in Augustine’s Confessions and indeed in all of Augustine’s work.

This is the idea that God keeps acting in the human world, constantly and unexpectedly, in even the minor things that happen to us.

It is this that makes the Confessions the greatest love story ever told – a story in which, like many lovers before and after him, Augustine, laments that he came late to the love of God.

But this lament goes side-by-side with a the question “Where have you been all my life?” addressed to his beloved, as he queries, picking particular incidents in his life, why an all-powerful God allowed him to fall away.

But it is a great love story, not just in this fact that Augustine speaks about the one he loves and of the wonders of God’s action in the world, but also in Augustine’s ecstatic realization that, insofar as anything is possible for him at all, it is only possible through the love of God that comes to him in Grace.

It is a love story, paradoxically, just because there is no happy ending, or at least not yet. Augustine is in a constant state of being transformed, transformed into a better lover of the God who loves him until he can love without measure, and Augustine recognizes it.

It is this call from a God who is a measureless lover, which helps make sense of Augustine’s anguished recollection of his sins, whether in himself as a jealous child, or as a stealer of pears, or his later womanizing.

It would be quite wrong to see in these recollections, a wallowing in sin.

When Augustine speaks of stealing pears as prototypical of all sin, he is not exaggerating, but rather placing the act of stealing pears in the right context, the context of his relationship with God, and God’s call to love without measure.

The Confessions do not come to an end with Augustine safely reaching the port of the Church, but he knows that God will have to lead him on, and he comes to an end in a song of hope in which he points out in loving detail the wonders of God’s creation.

It is this that more than anything else makes Augustine worth reading in a period where hope seems to be a mere illusion perpetrated in a dark and gloomy world.

St Augustine's  feast day is celebrated in Australia on August 28.