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

by James K.A. Smith

fathers, when he wrote: You are the only man of all men whom I would wish to surpass me in all things.’”25 An aged father musing on the untimely death of a child is not the way it’s supposed to be. It is in his preaching that we get beyond the Neoplatonic frames and greater-good schemes. In sermons, what is offered is not an “answer” to evil, as if it were merely a problem or a question; instead, what is offered is a vision of the gracious action of God, who takes on evil. The cross of Christ—the incarnate God—is the site of a cosmic inversion where all that is not supposed to be is absorbed by the Son, taken to the depths of hell, and vanquished by the resurrection. Evil isn’t answered; it is overcome. As Augustine would put it in a sermon in 404, “He took flesh from the lump of our mortality, yes, and he too took to himself the death which was the penalty for sin, but didn’t take the sin; instead with the merciful intention of delivering us from sin, he handed over that flesh of his to death.”