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To refuse the existentialist script for authenticity is not to embrace inauthenticity; it is to imagine why friends are gifts, how grace is communal, and how I find myself in communion.
IF HEIDEGGER CONSTRUED the influence of others in overwhelmingly negative terms, we should be honest that he learned this lesson from Augustine.
When Augustine remarks that all of temporal life is a trial, Heidegger translates: “Dasein, the self, the being-real of life, is an absorption. The self is being lived by the world, all the more strongly so if it in fact thinks that it lives authentically.”
When the self gives in to the temptation of ambition and “worldly praise,” the self’s “care” (curare) is taken over by others, and “the self is lost for itself in its ownmost way.” I “fall into the communal world.”
Others, it is true, are characterized as the accomplices of Augustine’s fall.
Indeed, others are not only companions in this fall; they are the condition for his fall: “Alone I would not have done it,” Augustine repeatedly protests.
“My pleasure was not in the pears,” he tells us. “It was in the crime itself, done in association with a sinful group.”
Alypius “was not now the person who had come in, but just one of the crowd which he had joined.”
You can trace here the genealogy of Heidegger’s resolute “authentic” self, which then spawned Sartre’s authentic “free” self, which then bequeathed to us the generic cultural version of authenticity we drink up with our Disney Channel subscriptions: resist the crowd, rise above the masses, be true to yourself, forge your own path.
But this isn’t a game. As the researchers discover, that ostracized person will testify to an increased sense that life is meaningless and devoid of purpose.26 The game is just a way to pull back the curtain on a fundamental human need.
Loneliness—often a factor of social isolation—has become a societal epidemic in late capitalist societies.
17 per cent of older people interact with family, friends or neighbours less than once a week, while 11 per cent do so less than once a month. It is linked to cardiovascular disease, dementia and depression and according to some researchers, its effect on mortality is similar to smoking and worse than obesity.
It rends and destabilizes the commonweal.
What if authenticity is the source of our loneliness?
HEIDEGGER MISSED THE rest of the story. He heard Augustine say, “Alone I would not have done it” but missed it when Augustine confessed, “I couldn’t be happy without friends.”
Augustine has his own rendition of what we might call “authenticity.” Like Heidegger’s version, it involves answering a call, hearkening to an appeal, responding to a summons to become who I’m made to be. But that call doesn’t come from an echo chamber; it comes from the One who made me, a “friend who is closer than a brother,” who laid his life down for his friends. And who calls to me through others, through friends.
Friends, in fact, are at the heart of Augustine’s conversion narrative.
He was a “true” friend, Augustine would say, because he was spurring Augustine to become himself. Not every Other is the “they.”
In this case, the influence of the Other is not diminishing but revivifying. The Other isn’t stealing the oxygen of my individuality and authenticity; he’s breathing new life into a self on the verge of resurrection.
These friends are friends to Augustine, not because they come with affirming praise, but because they love Augustine enough to bring him face-to-face with himself, with who he is not, and unapologetically hold up a substantive vision of who he is called to be.
The first is an inauthentic relation he calls “leaping in.” When others leap in to my life, they relate to me in a way that takes over. It’s an influence from others that robs me of agency, makes my decisions for me, turns me into a kind of puppet of the “they.”
Friends who leap in imagine they’re helping by preventing you from facing the question: Who am I?
Heidegger contrasts this with a mode of other-regarding concern he describes as “leaping ahead.”
Such a friend leaps ahead “not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time.” This, says Heidegger, is “authentic care.”
The friend who leaps ahead is one who’s glimpsed what you’re called to be and is willing to let you be uncomfortable as you wrestle with the call, who loves you enough to let you struggle for your soul but is standing by with a bandage and a map.
The church you’ve probably never seen is the invisible community of friendship in your neighborhood. The church isn’t a group of holier-than-thou saints who’ve formed a club; it’s a remarkable, otherwise impossible communion of people who, by the grace of God, stick alongside one another.
I know Alypius better than anyone, and Alypius knows me better than anyone, Augustine is saying. And yet we remain mysteries to ourselves. The vision of friendship here is also haunted by a realism—namely, that we see (ourselves and others) through a glass darkly. There are secrets we don’t know about ourselves.
Thus the Rule admonishes: “Nor should they put their nose in the air because they associate with people they did not dare approach in the world. Instead they should lift up their heart, and not pursue hollow worldly concerns.”
In the Rule, what looks like advice for travel turns out to be advice for the cosmic journey we’re on: “Whenever you go out, walk together, and when you reach your destination, stay together.”
Colleges are credential factories, and the Ivy League is a ridiculously expensive employment agency connecting the new meritocracy with hedge funds and Supreme Court clerkships that function as escalators to wealth and power.
“My studies which were deemed respectable had the objective of leading me to distinction as an advocate in the lawcourts, where one’s reputation is high in proportion to one’s success in deceiving people.”
The liberal arts, in Augustine’s experience, were something to be weaponized rather than a curriculum for cultivating the soul.
quest and not just sexual conquests, and that there is a kind of learning that doesn’t just position you but transforms you.
What masquerades as the pursuit of truth becomes an agenda for confirming my biases and making me comfortable, for justifying my enjoyment of what I ought to be using.
Curiositas is the anxious burden of having to always be clever.
The attraction, then, was less to explanatory power and more to association with people who confidently imagined they had an explanation for everything—and were well connected in high places, to boot.
The attraction to Manicheanism was about association with people who confidently offered a posture as much as a doctrine.
This is a familiar recipe for recruitment, trotted out today by rationalist purveyors of scientism who promise to unlock all the mysteries of the universe by a “science” that shows there are none.
the Manicheans prided themselves on their refusal to submit to any authority outside of their own reason, which was not so different from the rallying cry of Immanuel Kant’s essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” fourteen centuries later: Sapere aude!
But Augustine pulls the rug out from under the feigned stance of rational self-sufficiency. Everyone believes. Everyone submits to some authority. And all these people priding themselves on enlightenment have decided to simply trade belief in one set of authorities for belief in another.
Trust is the oxygen of human society, Augustine says, and believing the testimony of others is at the very heart of the scientific enterprise. Understanding doesn’t transcend belief; it relies on belief.
The question isn’t whether you’re going to believe, but who; it’s not merely about what to believe, but who to entrust yourself to.
Our cerebral struggles are often intertwined with other anxieties. What we identify as intellectual barriers are sometimes manifestations of emotional blocks.
what I’d so obnoxiously accused it of teaching.”25 From Ambrose, Augustine would realize that the Christianity he’d rejected was not Christianity. But it was Ambrose’s love and welcome that created the intellectual space for him to even consider that.
By constantly emphasizing, “I believe in order to understand,” Augustine’s more subterranean point was, “I love in order to know.”
It’s not just that reason needs love in order to know; I need to be loved into such knowing, welcomed into such believing, embraced for such hoping.
Augustine slowly started to realize how stunted his philosophical imagination was.
It was slowly dawning on him: the cabal that had promised him enlightenment turned out to be remarkably parochial. The enlightened ones who prided themselves on being rational were working with a limited intellectual toolkit but had never told him (likely because they didn’t realize).
He wouldn’t have to choose between faith and reason; philosophy would be the preamble to his embrace of Christianity.
In Of True Religion, one of his earliest works, Augustine paints Christianity as the completion of Platonism—that if Plato were alive in the Christian era, he too would be a follower of Jesus.
