Unless, I suppose, Augustine’s heart is truer to his faith than his head. For three things endure, and these only: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of them is love. Chase after it, and the gifts of the Spirit, that you may know the truth. That’s the original Aramaic, rendered as best I can, and you wouldn’t on the face of it find a lot of room for confusion. But it applies to some other love, apparently, not this one. That love has to pass a higher standard than just existing and even than being reciprocated. Even than producing a child. All this time I misunderstood: I thought love was what granted sanction, and everything else came after, but it seems love has to undergo strenuous examination and be approved by the board. It has to be holy love, duly qualified and proper and pointed not at some hometown girl from Thagaste with oil on her skin and burning incense tied into her hair as she rides you, but at God, who evidently does not enjoy sex, else why impregnate a virgin through the intervention of an angel? Other gods, in the past, have taken a more direct approach—but not ours, it seems, not in Augustine’s mind, though I’ve read other gospels than the ones he favours, in which the Father and the Mother were far less ascetic about their conception. It just shows how you can be wrong about something you think you know beyond a doubt. Oh, well and well. He was fading from me long before that. Something in him yearned for dominion, and for authority not merely over bodies and prefectures, but over souls. A fatal flaw, perhaps, or contrarily, a fatal flaw in me that I do not understand it.