By
Sarah Jones,
senior writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and labor
In Augustine’s Confessions, the saint speaks of his turn to God in language so potent that it has reverberated through centuries. He is “gnawed within,” in Garry Wills’ translation, “stalled in a terrible regret.” He tells God that he “lashed” his soul, “trying to force it along with me in my quest for you,” but his soul would not comply. Instead, “it could only tremble in silence, holding it death to escape the stream of habits that were draining it to death.” When he goes into a garden to consider his torment, he tears his hair and pounds his head and weeps. Only Scripture gives him any respite, and he discovers, having resolved at last to follow Christ, that “light was flooding my heart with assurance, and all my shadowy reluctance evanesced.” Thus illuminated, he leaves his profession as a teacher of rhetoric and commits himself to a deeper truth. Catholic converts often take Augustine as their patron today, and the vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance, is one of them.
Vance’s new memoir, Communion, owes its form to Confessions, though not its substance. For 304 pages, Vance travels away from Christianity through the wilderness before returning, Bilbo-like. Communion is a tale of conversion and of spiritual renewal, as Vance finds in Catholicism the meaning that eluded him at Yale.
