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

by James K.A. Smith

This is an invitation to journey with an ancient African who will surprise you by the extent to which he knows you.

Augustine will unapologetically suggest that you were made for God—that home is found beyond yourself, that Jesus is the way, that the cross is a raft in the storm-tossed sea we call “the world.”

For Augustine, this was a hard-fought epiphany that emerged after trying everything else, after a long time on the road, at the end of his rope.

The Christian gospel, for Augustine, wasn’t just the answer to an intellectual question (though it was that); it was more like a shelter in a storm, a port for a wayward soul, nourishment for a prodigal who was famished, whose own heart had become, he said, “a famished land.”2 It was, he would later testify, like someone had finally shown him his home country, even though he’d never been there before. It was the Father he’d spent a lifetime looking for, saying to him, “Welcome home.”

Augustine is uncanny for us: he is so ancient he is strange, and yet his experiences are so co...

That’s not necessarily because you’ve been looking for God, but because you’ve been trying to find yourself.

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.

Do we tell ourselves we’re “just going” in order to guard against the disappointment of never arriving? Do we call the road “home” to avoid the pain of never being welcomed? What if you met a saint on the road, and that saint had a map and had spent time at every stop-off that lured but then disappointed you? What if he’d already met the “you” you somehow want to be? What if he could introduce you to the person you’ve been looking for and lead you to a house with many rooms, where

Augustine is a saint who’s been down that road we still travel, fueled by ambition, trailing our hopes behind us. He’s familiar with all the things we carry.

IT IS PERHAPS ironic, and a sign of how far he’d come, that a decade after his move to Milan the middle-aged Augustine who had roamed in search of happiness found that the blinking beacon of hoped-for joy kept receding despite his pursuit. This might explain why he would come to identify happiness with rest. If the young Augustine was tempted to imagine that “the road is life,” that happiness was synonymous with adventure, with going out, with departing for distant shores and escaping the strictures of home, then his midlife Confessions reveal a U-turn of sorts. If the aspiring Augustine was looking to Virgil as a model, imagining himself on his own odyssey of conquest in Italy, only later will Augustine see a different pattern emerge in his wanderings: the prodigal who comes 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. The reason Augustine tells his story is that he thinks it is simply an example of the human story—that we are all prodigals—and he wants us to ask ourselves a question: “What if I went home?” For Augustine, psychology is cartography: to understand oneself is a matter of mapping our penchant to look for love in all the wrong places. The

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.

One does not go far away from you or return to you by walking or by any movement through space. The

What looks like attainment in Milan—success, conquest, arrival—was experienced as one more letdown. What looks like the good life is experienced as loss of nothing less than one’s self. Just as the prodigal son spends down his inheritance to nothingness, so 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. Humans

There is joy in the journey precisely when we don’t try to make a home out of our car, so to speak. 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. There is delight in the sojourn when we know where home is.

Augustine has been there. Later in his life, in a sermon on the African shore in Hippo, he would revisit this with his congregation. When you’ve tried everything but keep finding that what you grasped as ultimate bleeds through your fingers as finite, he says, It is as if someone could see his home country from a long way away, but is cut off from it by the sea; he sees where to go, but does not have the means to get there. In the same way all of us long to reach that secure place of ours where that which is is, because it alone always is as it is. But in between lies the sea of this world through which we are going, even though we already see where we are going (many, however, do not see where they are going).19 The brutal truth: You can’t get there from here. Not even a map is enough. You might already have realized where you need to go, but the question is how to get there. What if God sent a boat? What if the Creator captained a ferry from that other shore? “So that we might also have the means to go, the one we were longing to go to came here from there. And what did he make? A wooden raft for us to cross the sea on.”20 God sends a raft from home: “For no one can cross the sea of this world unless carried over it on the cross of Christ.” Get on, God invites. Hang on. I’ll never let you go. It’s not just a matter of finally settling down or coming to the end of the road. We find rest because we are found; we make it home because someone comes to get us. The prodigal’s ...

Meditating on the incarnation, on God becoming human in Jesus, Augustine describes the God who runs to meet us: “He lost no time, but ran with shouts of words, acts, death, life, descent, ascent, all the time shouting for us to return to him.”21 Jesus is the shout of God, the way God runs out to meet us.

“Oh, the twisted roads I walked!” Augustine recalls. “But look, you’re here, freeing us from our unhappy wandering, setting us firmly on your track, comforting us and saying, ‘Run the race! I’ll carry you! I’ll carry you clear to the end, and even at the end, I’ll carry you.’”

Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road; it just changes how you travel. One of the reasons I’ve found Augustine a

Augustine doesn’t write from the sky; he writes from the road. He knows ditches, and as he’ll confess in book 10 of the Confessions, not even a bishop can avoid them. We are still on the way. He comes to this realization not long after his own conversion. As he points out in one of his early dialogues, “Just as the soul is the whole life of the body, God is the happy life of the soul. While we are doing this, until we have done it completely, we are on the road.”23 Peter Brown, Augustine’s magisterial biographer, captures this creeping realization:

For some years, he remained perched between two worlds. There was no more talk of an “ascent” in this life.

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. In this case the road is the endless exhaustion of continuing to try to locate home, the frantic search for rest. That is the angst of the prodigal still in exile. 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.25 The first is a baseline aimlessness that keeps looking for home; the second is the weariness of being en route, burdened by trials and distracted by a thousand byways and exhausted by temptations along the way that sucker you into forgetting where home is.

You can hear this counsel in his sermon on Psalm 72, reflecting on Israel’s experience after the exodus, its liberation through the sea. “Notice this point, brothers and sisters,” he admonishes. “After crossing the Red Sea the Israelites are not given their homeland immediately, nor are they allowed carefree triumph, as though all their foes had disappeared. They still have to face the loneliness of the desert, and enemies still lurk along their way.” Here is a template for the experience of a converted life: “So too after baptism Christian life must still confront temptations. In that wilderness the Israelites sighed after their promised homeland; and what else do Christians sigh for, once washed clean in baptism? Do they already reign with Christ? No; we have not reached our homeland yet, but it will not vanish; the hymns of David will not fail there.” The key is to know where we are, and whose we are, and where we’re headed, and not be surprised by the burdens of the road. “Let all the faithful listen and mark this; let them realize where they are. They are in the desert, sighing for their homeland.” The Egyptians might not be pursuing us anymore, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t new threats on the way, “lying in ambush along our path.”27 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.

There is a burden that actually takes the weight off, a yoke that liberates. Augustine invites his parishioners to consider giving themselves over to one who gave himself for them, the Christ who assures them, “My yoke is kindly and my burden light” (Matt. 11:30). “Every other burden oppresses you and feels heavy, but Christ’s burden lifts you up; any other burden is a crushing weight, but Christ’s burden has wings.”33 Not only can you make it home; you can fly.

Augustine doesn’t just help us understand saints; he will help us make sense of La-La Land.

One imagines Augustine would be somewhat uncomfortable in the gilded vestments that the artist, Philippe de Champaigne, has cloaked him with. And his face looks more northern European than North African.

And then you run into Augustine: ancient, devout, looking past you, beyond you, oblivious to your stare (or oblivion).

We live between Augustine and the disillusioned one—except that Augustine was the disillusioned one. Maybe there’s new light to be found by looking back?

A vague longing for a more “real” way of living leads some people to—for example—sign up for weekend retreats in which their smartphones are taken away like toys from children, so that they can spend two days walking in the country landscape and reconnecting with each other and their forgotten selves. The unnamed object of desire here is authenticity.

I anachronistically read Augustine, as if he were doing the same thing. I 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.

“I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it.”

As long as he could squelch these murmurings that it could be otherwise, as long as he could convince himself that this, indeed, was all he wanted, then this stranger could make a home out of exile:

how to adopt the posture of the refugee who travels light.

A refugee spirituality does not make false promises for the present. It is not a prosperity gospel of peace and joy in the present.

As Charles Taylor puts it, in modernity we remade the human person into a “buffered self,” protected and autonomous and independent, free to determine our own good and pursue our own “authentic” path. We shut out incursions of the divine and demonic to carve out a privatized space to be free on our own terms. We didn’t realize the extent to which we were shutting ourselves in.

Maybe the fact that every road movie is a buddy movie points to some other fundamental hunger of human nature, some ineffaceable impulse to communion. 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!”

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.”32 If friendship can be a dangerous enemy, for Augustine it is also the conduit of grace. The problem isn’t other people but what they love, and how they love me.

A friend is not an enabler; love doesn’t always look like agreement. I’m reminded of a scene

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 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.

Friendship is staying close enough to put a hand on their shoulder while giving them enough room to feel the weight.

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.

And would be for the rest of his life. Alypius would be one of the most constant presences in Augustine’s life, even if they didn’t get to enjoy living in proximity. Baptized together, Alypius too would go on to become a priest and then bishop in Thagaste. They are nearly inseparable, and if Augustine’s life is a road movie, Alypius is the faithful sidekick who, in the end, proves to be the most faithful friend. In one of his earliest dialogues, the Soliloquies, Augustine testifies to the depth of their friendship in a sort of backhanded way. The Soliloquies are a kind of internal dialogue that Augustine has, arguing with “Reason.” “What do you want to know?” Reason asks. “God and the soul,” Augustine replies. “Nothing more?” Reason asks. “Nothing whatever.”46 But this raises questions about the very possibility of knowledge. Can we know God with any sort of intimacy and confidence?

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. Why should we be surprised that even our closest friends have a kind of transcendence that eludes us, a depth we cannot plumb? Friendship makes room for the mystery of communion and the mystery behind our communion.

“Pride lurks even in good works.”49

“I was seeking to use my education to please other people—not to teach them, but just to please them.”

It’s the exhaustion of being perpetually “in the know.”

These purveyors of Light and of secret enlightenment were the “Brights” of their day; they prided themselves on refusing authority and instead knowing how things worked.12