Our identities intrinsically involve relationships to things that exist beyond us, affecting us as objects of desire. Most importantly for Augustine, we have been created in such a way that only the love for God can fulfill our desiring, relational nature, and that overarching love should integrate, inform, modify, and prioritize all our penultimate loves. The true self is not the self-possessed master of his own internal house, but is a passionately doxological self whose identity is rooted in its joyful adoration
