![]() ![]() It is easy, even across a vast distance in time, to conjure up a teen-ager’s exquisite embarrassment. ![]() That day, Patricius, his father, saw in him the signs of inquieta adulescentia, restless young manhood, and was-in Sarah Ruden’s new, strikingly colloquial translation-“over the moon” at the thought of someday soon having grandchildren. In the “Confessions,” written around 397, Augustine described what happened in the bathhouse many years earlier. There has probably been no more important Western thinker in the past fifteen hundred years. Hardly a world-historical event, but the boy was named Augustine, and he went on to shape Christian theology for both Roman Catholics and Protestants, to explore the hidden recesses of the inner life, and to bequeath to all of us the conviction that there is something fundamentally damaged about the entire human species. At some point during their visit, the father may have glimpsed that the boy had an involuntary erection, or simply remarked on his recently sprouted pubic hair. ![]() One day in 370 C.E., a sixteen-year-old boy and his father went to the public baths together in the provincial city of Thagaste, in what is now Algeria. Poring over the story of Adam and Eve, Augustine came up with original sin. ![]()
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