The Way That Leads There

St. Augustine formulated the classic Christian understanding of desire, that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.  Gilbert Meilaender maintains that this frustrated desire is the crux of our existence.  In The Way That Leads There he takes Augustine as a conversation partner to explore subjects that have plagued humanity for centuries: duty, desire, politics, sex, and grief.

Deep and carefully reasoned, these six essays rescue Augustine from many of our misperceptions and meaningfully dialogue with both C. S. Lewis and Catholic moral theology, generating insights on difficult topics – lying, contraception, food, and grief, among others.  A final chapter on method acts as a well-reasoned apology for his innovative method of reading the famous Bishop of Hippo.

The picture of life that emerges in Meilaender’s work is one of incompleteness, of our inability to perfect and unify our moral lives. Yet this inability is not a cause for despair; it is rather a call to look, with Augustine, to God as the source and object of our greatest desire.