It is commonly said that St Augustine (feast day tomorrow) is the most knowable man of antiquity; and it may well be the case that his mother, St Monica (feast day today), is the most knowable woman of antiquity. We have a huge amount of information about Monica and Augustine, thanks to Augustine’s enormous output: letters, sermons, the Confessions, various works of theology, and his vast, sprawling and very readable City of God. Augustine was not the first to write about himself, but he is the first to develop an authorial voice that is personal. Julius Caesar wrote about his achievements in the Gallic War, but throughout refers to himself in the third person. For Caesar, the interesting events are those he witnessed; but with Augustine, the interesting events are those that took place not in his field of vision, but within his heart. Augustine, long before Henry James came along, discovered the stream of consciousness technique. Theologically, he demonstrates that the human heart is the locus of salvation. This is one of the reasons why we owe so much to Augustine: he illustrates for us, articulating the discovery of those before him, that religion is a matter of the heart. Roman religion, by and large, was a state cult. It was something you did, a series of hoops through which you jumped, a sequence of sacrifices of propitiation that you made; but with Augustine it is clear that religion is now faith, a personal adherence, an act of love: not action but passion. Augustine cannot have been the first to make this discovery. It was something that St Ambrose,  who baptised him, knew. You may remember this famous passage from the Confessions (VI, 3, 3) :