On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

by James K.A. Smith

So just when you think friendship or wealth or a family or influence was your ultimate destination, you hang out there for a while and the place starts to dim. What once held your fascination—even, for a time, seemed like it was your reason to live—doesn’t “do it” for you anymore. You won’t admit it to yourself for a long while. After all, you sent out all those celebratory announcements about your new existential home. You effectively told everyone you’d arrived; you believed it yourself. But at some point you’ll finally be honest with yourself about the disappointment, and eventually that disappointment becomes disdain, and you can’t wait to get away. Fortunately, just as you start to look around, you see the promise of a new destination down the road.

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. We still can’t find what we’re looking for because we don’t know what we want. If we never seem to arrive, growing tired of every place that promised to be the end of the road, it’s because the terrain of our interior life is a wilderness of wants. When we leave home looking for happiness, we’re in search of the self we never knew.

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.

If there’s a map inscribed in the human heart that shows where home is, the fact that we haven’t yet arrived doesn’t make it a fiction. It might just mean there’s a way we haven’t tried.

Love this.

What if being human means being a cosmic émigré—vulnerable, exposed, unsettled, desperate, looking for a home I’ve never been to before?

We find joy in the grace of God precisely because he is the one we don’t have to prove anything to.

LIKE HIS REALIST spirituality, Augustine’s refugee spirituality is an account of what the Christian life feels like. The disciple as much as anyone finds herself between, on the way, fatigued yet hopeful. Baptism isn’t a capsule that transports us to the end of the road. Conversion is not an arrival at our final destination; it’s the acquisition of a compass.

Fuck. Yeah.

But if the road has beat you down; if the sights have become predictable and tired, and there are nights that you look at your friends in the car and wonder, “What the hell are we doing? Please just let me out”; if you’re weary from the chase, broken by the journey, tired of the disappointment, unsettled by a sense that you’d like to find some rest not in accomplishment but in welcome, then Augustine might be the stranger you could travel with for a while. Not because he’s going to blow sunshine and tell you feel-good stories, and not because he’s going to fast-track you to rest (beware of any religious types who roll up in a DeLorean promising time travel to either a nostalgic past or a pristine future). Augustine is the perfect guy for the road because he’s been on it and is sympathetic to all our angst on the way. There’s almost nothing you’re going to tell him that he hasn’t already heard. You’d be surprised by what a patient listener he is. He was born on the road, and he’s seen right through “the road is life” philosophy. He knows who he is, whose he is, and where he’s headed, and almost everything he writes is an effort to help fellow migrants on the way find an orientation that feels like peace. You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.

When you’ve been eaten up by your own freedom, and realize the loss of guardrails only meant ending up in the ditch, you start to wonder whether freedom is all it’s cracked up to be—or whether freedom might be something other than the absence of constraint and the multiplication of options.

It is a terrible and terrifying thing to know what you want to be and then realize you’re the only one standing in your way—to want with every fiber of your soul to be someone different, to escape the “you” you’ve made of yourself, only to fall back into the self you hate, over and over and over again.

The desire for grace is the first grace. Coming to the end of your self-sufficiency is the first revelation.

We might be surprised by how many people are hoping someone will give them boundaries,

Years later, recovery turned this notion upside down—it made me start to believe that I could do things until I believed in them, that intentionality was just as authentic as unwilled desire. Action could coax belief rather than testifying to it. “I used to think you had to believe to pray,” David Foster Wallace once heard at a meeting. “Now I know I had it ass-backwards.” . . . Showing up for a meeting, for a ritual, for a conversation—this was an act that could be true no matter what you felt as you were doing it. Doing something without knowing if you believed it—that was proof of sincerity, rather than its absence.47

it turns out that being free isn’t about leaving; it’s about being found.

In a 1942 lecture, Marcel appeals to the wisdom of Gustave Thibon, friend of Simone Weil. You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.49

Yes. This. Vanity runs, love digs.

Arcade Fire’s song “Creature Comfort” is a chilling assessment of the extent to which the quest for attention has almost become synonymous with the conatus essendi, our reason to be. And if we can’t have it, we’d rather not be. We Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback Saying God, make me famous If you can’t, just make it painless.

disordered love is like falling in love with the boat rather than the destination.11 The problem is that the boat won’t last forever and is going to start to feel claustrophobic. Your heart is built for another shore.

“Tell me, I beg of you, what do we hope to achieve with all our labours? What is our aim in life? What is the motive of our service to the state? Can we hope for any higher office in the palace than to be Friends of the Emperor? And in that position what is not fragile and full of dangers? How many hazards must one risk to attain a position of even greater danger? And when will we arrive there? Whereas, if I wish to become God’s friend, in an instant I may become that now.”

You don’t have to win, but you also don’t have to quit. You only have to quit performing, quit imagining his love is earned. You can rest, but you don’t have to quit. You just need to change why you play.

And also—this is the thing—when you get the things your culture tells you you should be doing and you experience them now you know you can stop chasing the carrot ’cause you’ve had a bite out of it and it’s like, “Hold on a minute: this is bull——.” It’s a hard one to learn because anything that’s got an orgasm at the end of it, you know, there’s a degree of pleasure to be had. But it takes a while to recognize the emotional cost on me, the spiritual cost on other people, the fact that it’s preventing me from becoming a father, from becoming a husband, from settling, from becoming rooted, from becoming actually whole, from becoming a man, from becoming connected. It takes a while to spot that. I think a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to break out of that pattern. I would never have spotted it had I not first been a heroin addict and gone, “Hold on a minute, you’re doing that thing again.” Same with fame and same with celebrity. . . . Because I had the template and experiences, “Ooooh, this is addiction; you’re expecting this thing to make you feel better.”

Russell Brand :)

Wanting more isn’t the problem; it’s where I keep looking for it.

SUCH MOTHERS ARE like sacramental echoes of the unfailing love of God, the Shepherd who goes looking for lost sheep, the Father who welcomes prodigals at the end of the lane because he’s already been there looking for them. Such mothers are preambles to grace, a grace before grace, a primal, natal grace. Indeed, years after Monica’s death, Augustine, preaching a sermon in Carthage, considers the motherlike grace of God and the Godlike virtue of maternal devotion. He is meditating on Jesus’s promise to “gather the chicks of Jerusalem under his wings [Matt. 23:37], like a hen that is weakened with her babies.” He is struck by the power of maternal “weakness,” the saving power of the one who humbled himself, a power that mothers exhibit every day. “This is maternal love, expressing itself as weakness,” he tells his congregation. “All this is the mark of a mother’s weakness, not of lost majesty.” The mother, in other words, is an icon of the incarnation, that central mystery of the faith, in which the God of the universe would humble Godself, become human, and take on our sin and brokenness (“we confess that he participated in our weakness, but not in our iniquity, to the end that by sharing weakness with us he might destroy our iniquity”).20 That kind of “power” is often despised in a world that can only imagine power as domination, in a patriarchal world—let’s be honest—where power is confused with testosterone-laden bravado. But Augustine is reminding us of that uniquely ma...

So what does authenticity look like, then? Singular, resolute, individual. For Heidegger, to be authentic is to answer a call that resounds above the din of “the they.” And who is calling? Myself.

What if the opposite of loneliness is finding ourselves together? What if friends aren’t threats or competitors but gifts? In the deepest corners of our hearts, we all want the person next to us to turn, with a smile, and shout: “Catch!”

The problem isn’t other people but what they love, and how they love me.

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. A friend is not an enabler; love doesn’t always look like agreement.

The true friend is the other who hopes you’ll answer the call, who’s willing to challenge you and upset you in order to get you to look at yourself and ask yourself: What am I doing? What do I love? Who am I? The true friend is the other who has the courage to impose a conviction, who paints a substantive picture of the good, who prods and prompts you to change course and chase it—and promises to join you on the way.

The Rule of Augustine—the oldest monastic rule in the Western church—was originally written for this intimate community around Augustine himself, later taken up as the rule of life for Augustinian monastic communities around the world. The Rule is another example of Augustine’s spiritual realism: it is an honest, unsentimental guide for the challenges of living in community, well acquainted with the heart’s crooked bent toward selfishness, snobbery, greed, and exclusion.

it’s remarkable how philosophy—the alleged love of wisdom—can be domesticated by those other lingering habits of the heart, such that philosophy actually becomes just one more lust, one more game of domination and conquest

Curiositas generates its own frenetic anxiety, because now I have to “keep up” and stay in the know, striving to be the person who knows before everybody else (Google “Portlandia OVER”). It’s the exhaustion of being perpetually “in the know.” Which explains why this sort of pursuit of “truth” doesn’t ever feel like the beata vita, the happy life. As Heidegger puts it, “The bustling activity in which they are absorbed, the cheap tricks to which they abandon themselves, rather makes them even more miserable.”9 To be among “the enlightened ones” comes with its own anxiety—of being found out, of not knowing, of being in the out-group of the ignorant rather than the inner sanctum of winks and nods and inside jokes. Curiositas is the anxious burden of having to always be clever.

I'm guilty of this and at risk of it when I'm not already guilty.

What ultimately shifted Augustine’s plausibility structures? Love. His recollection is warm and speaks to a hunger even more fundamental than the intellectual: “That man of God took me up as a father takes a newborn baby in his arms, and in the best tradition of bishops, he prized me as a foreign sojourner.”23 More than arguments or proofs, Ambrose offered the seeker Augustine something he’d been hungering for: a home, sanctuary, rest. For this refugee in a new city, arriving with questions and with so much unsettled in his life, the cathedral in Milan became an outpost of the home this spiritual émigré had been seeking. And there was a father there waiting to welcome him.

That's how I feel. Christianity may not be rational, but it offers home, rest, solace. 'Thank God,' my tired soul whispers as it surrenders to that love. I don't care what it's source is, and whether it's rational--only that it is Love, and it is Real.

It’s not that Augustine immediately comes to affirm the catholic faith; rather, Ambrose’s kindness and hospitality to a precocious outsider was the affective condition for him to reconsider the faith he’d spurned. “I fell in love with him, as it were, not at first as a teacher of the truth—as I had no hope for that whatsoever in your church—but simply as a person who was kind to me.”

This is sort of like the story of Rumi and Shams. It is through one's experience with the beloved that one comes to know God. Deus caritas est.

This relationship between love and knowing, affection and intellection, would become a hallmark of Augustine’s thought for the rest of his life. By constantly emphasizing, “I believe in order to understand,” Augustine’s more subterranean point was, “I love in order to know.”

But this gearing together of Platonism and Christianity would generate its own tensions and cause Augustine to have to make a choice. Much has been made of Augustine’s Platonism, and it’s beyond question that Platonism—or, more specifically, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus—provided a crucial intellectual scaffolding at the time of his conversion and through the rest of his life. 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.30 Yet to overstate the continuity is to miss what Augustine sees as a fundamental distinction of Christianity that makes all the difference: humility. Platonism lifted his attention from the temporal and material to the eternal and invisible. Platonism helped him conceive of an ascent to higher things, to the purity and eternity of the Good. But what Platonism could never have imagined was that the Good would descend to us; that the eternal God would condescend to inhabit time and a body; that the divine would humble itself and swing low to carry humanity home.

Philosophies of ascent would confirm his worst vices: the pride and arrogance of the climber, the self-sufficiency of the intellectual who would think his way to salvation and congratulate himself upon arrival. But here was the scandal of Christianity: You can’t get here from there, God says, so I’ll come get you.

Goodness, it's like Augustine KNOWS me. I'm getting goosebumps!

the Way in Jesus—in God’s condescending to become human, and more so in humbling himself to the point of death, even death on a despised cross. Augustine saw a humility that was unparalleled in the ancient world and unthinkable to philosophers.

Platonism offered a ladder to (re)connect God and humanity; in Christianity, God climbs down.

Gnosticism refuses the scandal of grace: “The spiritual are saved only by gnosis or knowledge of God. . . . Salvation is learned.”37 The result is an epistemic Pelagianism akin to the hubris of the addict: I’ll figure this out, I’ll find a way, I’ve got this covered, to which those in recovery reply: “Your best thinking got you here.”

Sometimes doubting your doubts is the beginning of wisdom.

we see ourselves in characters of mythology and fiction. Sometimes we see our own vices and resolve not to play out that character trajectory. In other cases, the allure of a character’s heroism or sacrifice or compassion becomes an aspiration: “I want to be like that,” we say in our hearts, and live a life that steals from the character’s script. Books, as the arks of such stories, are not just technologies for information transfer; they become incubators of life, enshrining icons of who we want to be.

The problem is that we can’t think our way home.

Everyone is looking for rest, which is just another way of saying we’re looking for an identity, a story that gives us the kind of gifted swagger of being known, named, and offered a map home.

Evil is out there, other, and it is in here, all too close. Yet it is still unfathomable. His own heart is an abyss, and when he looks at the atrocities he commits, only a dark mystery stares back at him: “I became evil for no reason.”11

The point isn’t that God has a plan; the point is that God wins. We shall overcome because of what the Son has undergone in our stead. This isn’t an answer to evil; it is a response. Hope is found not in intellectual mastery but in divine solidarity.

God doesn’t give us an answer; he gives us himself.

THERE ISN’T REALLY an “answer” for evil, according to Augustine; there is a response, a divine action-plan rooted in solidarity and compassion. That action, first and fundamentally, is grace. When the aged Augustine is reading back through his corpus to write his Retractations, he is jarred by what is so glaringly absent in his account of evil in On the Free Choice of the Will: grace. Grace is the light that floods the darkness in me, too. Grace is what flows from God’s response to our evil, the spillover effect of Jesus drinking up the cup of suffering and vanquishing evil.

injustices of his world were concatenations of bad actors and diabolical systems—that injustices could be generated by good intentions as well as evil conspiracies.

“It is easy and natural to hate evil persons because they are evil,” Augustine replies, “but it is rare and holy to love those same persons because they are human beings.” A just and merciful punishment, he argues, can be a means of unleashing their humanity.

Better to risk leniency and create room for reform than to stand for law and order and end up crushing any opening for transformation.

Augustine could commend politics as a calling worthy of the Christian. The hard, good work of politics is a way to love your neighbor in a tragic, fallen world. If politics is the art of the possible, it can also be a prudential way to secure justice, beat back evil, and mitigate the effects of the Fall. Nevertheless, when Augustine counsels political actors like Boniface and Macedonius, he does so with wide-eyed realism. He is at once trying to roll back the effects of the curse while at the same time recognizing the enduring reality of evil and original sin. He’s under no illusions about human nature triumphing over selfishness or escaping its proclivity for disordered love. He has no expectation of legislating our way to the kingdom; to the contrary, it’s a matter of legislating in a world where we have to keep praying, “Thy kingdom come.”