Late Love. Augustine and Beauty

Sometimes it seems that the most important things in life come too late. We search the world—and lose. We chase things—and remain empty. We touch the visible, forgetting that the true was always close by, within. This drama—the drama of belated love—became the heart of Augustine's Confessions.

In Book X he utters lines that still sound like a prayer and a revelation: “Late have I loved You, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved You!”

These words are not about regret, but about awakening. Augustine confesses: he sought God in the external, in things, in pleasures, in knowledge, in the splendor of culture. But there he found only reflections, shadows, fragments of radiance. The beauty he pursued always eluded him. And suddenly he realized: it is not without, it is within. God is not in what we consume, but in what fills us with breath, meaning, a living presence.

Augustine calls God Beauty. But this is not the kind of beauty that can be seen with the naked eye, not the play of forms and lines, but a Beauty "ancient and new"—eternal and yet always fresh as the morning. It unites past and present, memory and renewal. It never becomes outdated, but it also never becomes familiar.

This paradox—"so ancient and so new"—lies the secret of spiritual life. We seek the new to free ourselves from boredom, but the truly new is always born from the eternal. We thirst for renewal, but it comes not from without, but from within.

When Augustine says, "You were with me, but I was not with you," he formulates the most precise metaphor for human alienation. We live in a world full of presence, yet we don't notice it. We are surrounded by Beauty, and yet we are deaf, blind, indifferent. Only when this Beauty suddenly breaks through—through light, through scent, through touch—does one feel that one is not just a spectator, but part of a great breath.

For "The Central Planet," Augustine becomes a bridge: his prayer is not just theology, it is a universal experience of awakening. Sooner or later, every seeker encounters the moment: everything you sought outside yourself was already within you. And what seemed lost returns as a beginning.

Beauty is the name of God, and at the same time, the mirror of the soul. It is ancient because it is older than time. It is youthful because it is always new. And when a person discovers it, even belatedly, they understand: in eternity there is no such thing as "too late." We can read Augustine as a saint, as a philosopher, as a poet of inner experience. But most importantly, he speaks of ourselves. Everyone at least once in their life recites their own version of this prayer: "Late I loved, late I understood, late I saw..."

And yet, it's never too late. Because the Beauty he speaks of is always older and always newer than us. It waits for us to open our eyes.

And then what we called "late" will become a beginning. This line is one of Augustine's most poignant prayerful confessions. It appears in his famous Confessions (Book X, Chapter 27):

In Latin:

Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi.

Et ecce intus eras et ego foris, ibique te quaerebam,

et in ista formosa quae fecisti deformis irruebam.

Mecum eras, et tecum non eram...

Translated into Russian (I quote the classic translation by N. N. Butlerov):

Late have I loved You, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved You!

And behold, You were ins