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he jackhammers his way into the secret corners of our hearts, unearthing our hungers and fears, it’s only because it’s familiar territory: he’s seen it all in his own soul.
The wager here is that an ancient African might make Christianity plausible for you, mired in the anxieties and disappointments of the twenty-first century. That’s not necessarily because you’ve been looking for God, but because you’ve been trying to find yourself.
You’ll be reintroduced to them on the road here: Martin Heidegger, the father of existentialism, whose cascading influence across France and beyond eventually made us all seekers of authenticity; Albert Camus, who named our experience of the absurd, spent the early part of his career wrestling with Augustine, and perhaps never stopped; Hannah Arendt, who probed the nature of love and friendship in conversation with Augustine; Jacques Derrida, enfant terrible of postmodernism, who deconstructed and unsettled our confidence in eternal verities and would later return to consider the secrets his
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We’ve inherited their pilgrim penchant, but it’s morphed into unsettledness, a baseline antsy feeling that leaves us never feeling at home (which brings to mind the Freudian notion of the “uncanny,” the Unheimlich, not-at-home-ness). We’re
The trick is to convince yourself that the road is life, making restlessness peace, uprootedness home,
This is the road trip in which Augustine finally saw himself, and it becomes the literary skeleton of the Confessions, a travelogue of the human heart.
One’s own heart can be foreign territory, a terra incognita, and this lack of at-home-ness with oneself generates our propensity to run.
What we’re mapping here is the geography of desire.
would give him concepts to name what had been gnawing away at him and permission to be honest about his disappointment with what everyone else saw as “success.”
What looks like the good life is experienced as loss of nothing less than one’s self.
the wandering, ravenous soul consumes everything and ends up with nothing: no identity, no center, no self.
Where we rest is a matter of what and how we love. Our restlessness is a reflection of what we try to “enjoy” as an end in itself—what we look to as a place to land.
The heart’s hunger is infinite, which is why it will ultimately be disappointed with anything merely finite.
The irony, Augustine points out, is that we experience frustration and disappointment when we try to make the road a home rather than realizing it’s leading us home, when we try to tell ourselves “the road is life.”
There is love on the road when we stop loving the road.
There are myriad gifts along the way when we remember it’s a way.
We find rest because we are found; we make it home because someone comes to get us.
Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road; it just changes how you travel.
Augustine doesn’t write from the sky; he writes from the road.
There are two very different kinds of dissatisfaction or restlessness. One is engendered by disappointment, by not knowing where home is, by thinking you’ve arrived only to later become tired of the place or realize it’s not home in the way you thought it was.
But there is another kind of restlessness that can be experienced on the road, a fatigue that stems from knowing where home is but also realizing you’re not there yet—a kind of “directed” impatience.
To know where you’re headed is not a promise of smooth sailing.
As French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion points out, conversion doesn’t solve temptation; rather, it heightens temptation, because conversion creates resistance.
In conversion I find myself; I’m pulled together from the liquefaction of disordered loves and distractions that dissolved me.
Selfhood is an ordeal not just before conversion but because of conversion. It is the converted, baptized, ordained Augustine who confesses, “Onus mihi, oneri mihi sum”: “I am a burden to myself.”31 The question is how to bear this burden.
We are philosophical heirs even if we don’t realize it. We have inhaled invisible philosophies in the cultural air we breathe.
They are talking about freedom and authenticity, being and nothingness.
His influence is in the water, so you don’t notice it.
corpus permixtum,
Augustine also made a dent in the thinking of René Descartes, who would so influence the subsequent questions and conversation in modern philosophy.5 In many ways, modernity is Augustinian.
had come to study deconstruction among devotees of the doctor of grace.
It was from Heidegger, via Sartre and others, that we would learn to prize “authenticity” and seek to resist the flattening effect of mass society.
Heidegger offered an account of all of this through an analysis of a strange beast he called “Dasein,” his version of the self.
Unlike philosophers before him who spoke of some abstract “ego” or of a vague “subject,” Heidegger took up Da...
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The point was to remember that I am embedded in a world, heir to a history of possibilities that opened up the world, if only I could resist falling prey ...
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Existential ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all.
The notion of inauthenticity that will be so central to existentialism’s diagnosis of our malaise is generated in the chemical reaction of Heidegger’s reading of Augustine’s Confessions.
What Heidegger will later call “fallenness,” our tendency to “fall prey” to the vague, mass society of “the they” (das Man), is something he learned from Augustine’s account of our “absorption” in the world.
The aversion to inauthenticity that suffuses our cultural attitude is a trickle-down from Augustine’s...
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It was Arendt who showed me that Augustine was a cartographer of the heart.
had been taught to read Augustine to get doctrines, dogmas, and propositional claims about sin and God and salvation. Only later did I realize what a travesty this framing was—not only the way it domesticated a protoexistentialist but also the way it dehumanized a fellow traveler.
She would fixate not on why Augustine said x but on whether and how x proved illuminating for our experience.
Arendt’s suggestion, coupled with Heidegger’s reframing, made the Confessions a new book for me.
But apart from the question of God’s existence, a persistent theme that has a deep Augustinian resonance weaves its way throughout Camus’s corpus. It could be named in different ways: exile, alienation, stranger-hood.
We don’t need to “make” Augustine postmodern: the postmodern is already Augustinian.
We cultivate indifference as a cocoon. We make irony a habit because the safety of maintaining a knowing distance works as a defense. If you can’t find what matters, conclude that nothing matters.
Such resignation—the consolation of alienation—is the deep bass note in Camus’s corpus that makes his work resonate as contemporary.
In his notebooks, Camus once wrote, “We travel to cultivate our most private instinct, which is that of eternity.” We are compelled to look for home. What makes it absurd is that we’ve never had one.
The journey is one of our oldest tropes for the adventure of being human.
But the adventure of Camus’s exile is not Odyssean; it is Sisyphean. Joy is predicated on the impossibility of arrival.
