I am a neurodivergent disabled woman, and for most of my life I was suicidal. Nearly every semester of my undergraduate studies culminated in my friends finding me unconscious or incapacitated, until one day, after my most dangerous encounter with death, my mother asked me: “살거야 말거야?” (Are you going to live or not?) I stood there, trembling with fear, and answered: “살거에요.” (I’m going to live.) It was a promise.
When I first encountered the fifth-century theologian Augustine, it was not serendipitous and certainly not love at first sight. He was simply another author asking the question I was asking: What is it to live? Or rather, What is it to live well? But I found in Augustine an invitation into exploring what the true meaning of life could be.
Augustine wrote in Latin. When we read him in English, we are reading his words filtered down through scholars and translators. But translation is an art, not a science; each translation is an interpretation, and each interpretation can carry a host of problems. The beata vita, typically translated as the “good” or “happy” or “blessed” life, is an especially fraught example. These translations are insufficient to encompass the full breadth of what Augustine sought to describe.
