The Directional Language of Interior Movement

Discernment of Spirits using Girardian insights

“Tolle lege” (“Take and read”)—Augustine weeping under a fig tree, the moment before he hears a voice prompting him to pick up a book and read.

Desire Is Movement

I’ve been reading a lot of Augustine recently, partly as research for a (potential) new book project.

I was struck to find that, in his Confessions, Augustine describes the period just prior to his conversion experience as one in which mimetic models of desire were the main catalyst.

Augustine was studying in Carthage at the time, and he was increasingly anxious and unsettled. It seemed to him that he was wasting his life away following his egotistical desires—including his “burning passions”—at every step of the way.

All the while, he longed for an interior peace which eluded him.

He lived in the unbearable tension between desiring something intellectually—a new way of life—and his revelation that his will was too weak to pursue it. A nightmare.

“The will does what it wants,” a wise mentor once told me after I flung myself at …