Faith & Spirit Quote by Saint Augustine

Augustine turns introspection into an act of reverence and, quietly, a rebuke to anyone who thinks the human self can be neatly inventoried. The line opens like a challenge - "Who can map out" - borrowing the language of surveyors and planners, only to declare the project impossible. What follows is less self-help than spiritual anthropology: the soul is not a problem to be solved but an abyss to be approached with humility.

The craft is in the compression. "Man is a great depth" works as both diagnosis and prayer, and the sudden address to God ("O Lord") signals the real audience: Augustine isn’t performing insight for readers so much as confessing before an omniscient witness. That move carries subtext. If even Augustine, the rhetorician-turned-bishop, can’t fully read his own motives, then moral confidence without God is suspect. Human accountability remains, but self-knowledge is partial, prone to self-deception, and therefore in need of grace.

The hair-counting comparison is a sly rhetorical trap. Hair is famously uncountable in practice yet, by contrast, it becomes easy. Augustine uses a hyperbole everyone recognizes to make an interior point: feelings and "movements of the heart" aren’t just numerous; they’re shifting, layered, and resistant to measurement. In late antiquity, amid debates about will, sin, and conversion, this is Augustine staking out his signature terrain: the inner life as a battlefield of competing loves, where certainty arrives not through mastery but through surrender.