augustine matters here for one reason: he was the first person in the western tradition to sit down and write, in detail, about the gap between wanting to change and changing. confessions is a long book, written when he was already a bishop looking back, and the middle of it is a case study of a loop.
the shape of it: bright kid from a small town, off to the big city at 17, and then twenty-odd years of chasing status, approval and pleasure while feeling more and more hollowed out by all of it. a long relationship he never made official. a son. a religion that let him off the hook. a better job in rome, then a better one in milan — each move framed, by him, as another lap of the same track.
the honest bit is that he could describe the pattern perfectly and still not stop. that's the whole point of book 8. he says his will was divided against itself: part of him wanted out, part of him wanted one more day, and both parts were him. 'give me chastity and continency, only not yet' isn't a joke line. it's the exact bargain most of us make with the thing we can't put down.
and then the ending, which is his own account and can't be checked: a garden, a fig tree, crying, a child's voice from next door chanting 'take up and read', a book opened at random, and a certainty he says arrived all at once. he was baptised the next easter. his mother monica, who'd been praying about him for years, died a few months later, before they made it home to africa.
one thing worth saying plainly: he was a bishop with a lot of opinions and not all of them have aged well. you don't have to take the theology to take the observation. the observation is that 'not yet' is a real place, that a lot of people live there for years, and that naming it out loud is the first honest thing you can do about it.