The most profound love story of the summer is also one of the most unlikely -- and one of the funniest. It is the latest animated Pixar/Disney feature film, "WALL-E."

Its eponymous robot hero is not much to look at. He's a rusty, vaguely ET-shaped waste disposal robot, but somewhere within his digitally rendered circuitry lies the wisdom of the great Christian theologian, Saint Augustine.

As the movie opens, WALL-E is alone on earth, with only a cockroach as his companion.

We learn that he is the last of an army of robots charged with cleaning up the global mess left behind by the Buy-N-Large corporation, which had supplied all manner of goods to a planet of insatiable consumers. When the accumulation of trash and concomitant environmental degradation made Earth uninhabitable, the humans departed for what was supposed to have been a five-year pleasure cruise in space (on a Buy-N-Large spaceship, of course) while the robots cleaned up.

But the mess was too much for the robots, and the cruise became a permanent vacation for humanity.

Centuries of solitary work have altered WALL-E, however, so that he is no longer the mindless garbage robot he was programmed to be. Now, before he gathers trash for compacting and disposal, he sorts it, taking a keen interest in the treasures he finds among the ruins of human civilization.

WALL-E's interactions with items familiar to us but unknown to him are some of the funniest in the movie, but these scenes are touching, too: he collects and cherishes the best of what he finds, using his discoveries to adorn his home.

WALL-E's world changes when he meets Eve, a sleek egg-shaped iPod of a robot, whose mission is to find any sign of reviving life on Earth. She, too, demonstrates a sense of whimsy that her programmers surely had not intended. WALL-E loves her at once, though she does not immediately reciprocate his affection. Eventually Eve returns to the human ship with proof that Earth is ready for recolonization, and we, like WALL-E, are introduced to the ultimate consumers of what Buy-N-Large sells.

Many commentators have smugly taken the Buy-N-Large corporation to be a futuristic stand-in for Wal-Mart and the helpless, blubbery and infantile consumers aboard the cruise ship as a parody of Wal-Mart shoppers or of over-consuming Americans.

But this interpretation, favored by the sort of writers who don't shop at Wal-Mart and look down on those who do, misses the deep point the film conveys. The philosophical center of the movie is the extended contrast it draws between WALL-E's approach to existence and the life of the consumers aboard the starship, Axiom. This contrast echoes the contrast Saint Augustine draws in his great work, "The City of God," between the Christian way of life and the pagan.

WALL-E experiences the world with a sense of wonder and even of grace. Like Augustine's Christians, who strive to order their lives and loves according to the pattern God has drawn for them, WALL-E puts himself in the service of others, orienting himself according to a standard independent of mere desire.

When he finds something beautiful, he cherishes it; when he encounters something fragile, he cares for it; what he loves, he nurtures and protects.

The film's humans, by contrast, are a bit like Augustine's pagans, with (at least at first) no aim beyond themselves. They, or their ancestors in the heyday of the Buy-N-Large corporation, proudly remade the Earth to satisfy their desires, and when they had used up everything they could here, created their own artificial world peopled with robot servants to cater to their every whim.

Seeing the world only as a set of resources to exploit they do not experience wonder; having no purpose other than amusing themselves, they are bored. Loving only themselves, they are isolated and lonely, despite being surrounded by others.

The danger the film warns against is not over-consumption, or buying at a big box store instead of an expensive boutique.

It warns against forgetting that man is not God.

When human beings try to create, as if we were God, we produce monsters. The pleasure ship Axiom was designed to be an orbiting Eden, but proved instead to be its opposite. In getting mankind expelled from that false Eden, the robot Eve opens the door to the possibility of cultivating and reclaiming the earth -- and redeeming humanity.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American Constitutional Law and chairman of the Department of Government at Colby College in Waterville.