Augustine doesn’t write from the sky; he writes from the road. He knows ditches, and as he’ll confess in book 10 of the Confessions, not even a bishop can avoid them. We are still on the way. He comes to this realization not long after his own conversion. As he points out in one of his early dialogues, “Just as the soul is the whole life of the body, God is the happy life of the soul. While we are doing this, until we have done it completely, we are on the road.”23 Peter Brown, Augustine’s magisterial biographer, captures this creeping realization:
