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

by James K.A. Smith

The cup Jesus drinks is the cup of our suffering, filled with a wine-dark sea of anguish. This is not some cosmic cost-benefit analysis in which God calculates “the greater good.” This is the historical scandal of God-become-flesh, taking the evil and injustice of the world—our evil and injustice—onto himself and then bursting forth from the grave to announce, as the Puritan John Owen put it, “the death of death.”30 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. That spills over into our own response such that Augustine doesn’t just parse evil in a philosophical system; he