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

by James K.A. Smith

The attractiveness of the Manicheans was an intertwined set of benefits that spoke directly to an aspiring provincial, running from his mother’s backwater faith, newly interested in being “in the know,” and still clambering for positions of power and influence.

The attraction to Manicheanism was about association with people who confidently offered a posture as much as a doctrine.

From Richard Dawkins to Steven Pinker, the priests of enlightenment are prophets of overreach, promising a status more than an adequate explanation. And we buy in, less because the “system” works intellectually (we often don’t even expend the energy to confirm the evidence, and we suppress lingering questions), and more because it comes with an allure of illumination and sophistication, with the added benefit of throwing off the naivete of our parents’ simplistic faith.

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. If someone says believing is wrong, Augustine wryly notes, “I do not think he can have any friends. If it is wrong to believe anything, then either one does wrong by believing a friend, or one never believes a friend, and then I do not see how one can call either oneself or the friend a friend.”18

Augustine pleads with his congregation in a sermon: “You cannot be your own light; you can’t, you simply can’t. . . . We are in need of enlightenment, we are not the light.”21 You’re going to entrust yourself to somebody. Would you entrust yourself to the One who gave himself for you?

Augustine kicks out the pretentious stilts of intellectual striving: “Those who are raised high in the air, as if by the stage boots of a loftier teaching, the platform boots of actors supposed to represent divinities, don’t hear Jesus saying, ‘Learn from me, since I am gentle and humble at heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’”35 Platonism offered a ladder to (re)connect God and humanity; in Christianity, God climbs down.

Sometimes doubting your doubts is the beginning of wisdom.

for. If in my past they can see themselves (“That’s me”), perhaps in my present they might be able to imagine: “That could be me.” The despair of “I can’t” is invited into the story Augustine shares: “You can.”

THE BOOK THAT would finally arrest this search for a story was the Bible.

this section means a lot to me on Scripture

But then it isn’t evil. Evil is what ought not to be, the disorder of creation, the violation we protest. Evil has no place, no room to fit, no home here

Exactly! replies Augustine. Which is precisely why this choice is not natural. It is voluntary, and thereby inexplicable.15 Free will is an answer to this question

But if you say evil is natural, then it’s no longer evil. It’s the way things are, the way things are supposed to be. You can’t protest what is natural; you can’t lament what is meant to be. The price to pay for explaining evil is to give up naming and opposing it. As soon as you “explain” evil, it vanishes. Augustine considers the Devil as a limit case in this regard. If God created everything, and everything God creates is good, then where did the Devil come from? Not even the Devil is “naturally” evil. His fall, like mine, is inexplicable.

While in principle Augustine refuses to give evil the comfort of an explanation, he constantly fends off intellectual options that would either make evil an illusion or make God blameworthy. As a result, he is sometimes given to painting schemes that, even if he refuses to name

intelligence left me awestruck. Who but you could be the Maker of such wonders?” He remembers their baptism: Adeodatus, together with himself and Alypius.

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.”

God condescends to inhabit and absorb the mess we’ve made of the world. God “has not abandoned humanity in its mortal condition.”

So he handed over this flesh to be slain, so that you wouldn’t be afraid of anything that could happen to your flesh. He showed you, in his resurrection after three days, what you ought to be hoping for at the end of this age. So he is leading you along, because he has become your hope. You are now walking toward the hope of the resurrection; but unless our head had first risen, the other members of the body would not find anything to hope for.

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. Sometimes his body, the church, will display the same compassionate solidarity in the face of evil, a cruciform

What was Jesus thinking, when he let you sink into the arms of the Lord? Then he took the cup, lifted it up, and drank the night away.29

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

Augustine’s life as a bishop in North Africa could be described as an activism campaign against evil on the ground. Augustine knew himself well enough to appreciate that the injustices

So Augustine wasn’t content just to have an account of evil; he had an agenda for addressing it, countering it, and mitigating its effects.

“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. “He, therefore, who punishes the crime in order to set free the human being is bound to another person as a companion not in injustice but in humanity. There is no other place for correcting our conduct save in this life. . . . And so, out of love for the human race we are compelled to intercede on behalf of the guilty lest they end this life through punishment.”

institution of slavery. As Robert Dodaro recalls, “Augustine frequently drew from his church’s treasury in order to purchase the freedom of slaves. Moreover, on one occasion, while he was absent from Hippo, some members of his congregation stormed a ship and freed over 100 slaves held captive there.”32 He was also an active supporter of the right of sanctuary in the late Roman Empire, which was to stand with debtors and take the side of those ground under by economic inequality. Augustine’s church was a sanctuary for economic migrants, and he would appeal to imperial authorities on behalf of those displaced and in jeopardy.33 In all of these ways and more, Augustine responded to on-the-ground evils and injustice as an ally and advocate—imitating the Advocate who gave himself for his enemies (Rom. 5:10).

like cosmic justice, collective hope, and national redemption had no meaning for me,” Coates admits. “The truth was in the everything that came after atheism, after the amorality of the universe is taken not as a problem but as a given.” Coates sees this as liberating: “Life was short, and death undefeated. So I loved hard, since I would not love for long. . . . I found, in this fixed and godless love, something cosmic and spiritual nonetheless.”34 The logic of that “so” eludes me, I confess. I’m not at all sure how it follows.

Reinhold Niebuhr, would put it, our atheistic confidence makes us “incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency.”36

Augustine has no illusions about innocence. But his activism does not bear the burden of bringing about the kingdom. His clear-eyed recognition of the perdurance of evil—in his own heart as much as anywhere—generates a politics of hope rather than Pelagian revolution. The naturalization—and idolization—of politics generates its own injustices. For Augustine, citizenship in the city of God means laboring as an ambassador of the way things ought to be, hoping to bend the way things are to follow the arc of justice, of shalom. Politics is one of the ways we respond to the reality of evil, so long as we recognize that only resurrection can overcome it. Evil is not a puzzle to be solved but an incursion to be beaten back.

Margo Maine, for example, invented the term “father hunger” to help diagnose the cause of eating disorders in daughters, young women for whom the experience of father absence deflected their father hunger into unhealthy relationships toward hunger and food.8 Who of us isn’t an heir to the dreams of our fathers?

At the heart of almost every Anderson film is a child on a quest born of absence and disappointment and failure, a quest that bears the imprints of a hunger for a father. From Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, through The Royal Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic, to Moonrise Kingdom and Isle of Dogs, the drama of these stories is propelled by an absence—the absence

This crisscrossing of quests is seen in Life Aquatic.

EVERY CHILD LOOKING for an absent, distant father is on the road to cover up a deeper desire: that such a father would come looking for them—that the arrow of hunger would be reversed and the father would return.

At the heart of the madness of the gospel is an almost unbelievable mystery that speaks to a deep human hunger only intensified by a generation of broken homes: to be seen and known and loved by a father.

Maybe navigating the tragedy and heartbreak of this fallen world is realizing this hunger might not be met by the ones we expect or hope will come looking for us, but then meeting a Father who adopts you, who chooses you, who sees you a long way off and comes running and says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Augustine recalls, “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.”

What won Augustine’s attention was first and foremost Ambrose’s kindness.

Augustine’s encounter with Ambrose is testimony to the incarnational nature of the grace of God, who gives us surrogates like sacramental echoes of his own love. Indeed, to be adopted by this Father is to be enfolded in a new household where family is redefined and bloodlines transcended by the genealogy of grace.

In the household of God’s grace, you find sisters and brothers you never knew you had, and father figures where you didn’t expect to find them. God’s grace has been tangible for me, as it was with Augustine, in no small part because God has lavished me with Ambroses in my life.

There are wounds and scars from the fathers that left, but they have healed because of the fathers I’ve found in the body of Christ—who chose me without obligation, loved me without reservation, were present when ...

himself but beyond, not to himself as father but to God the Father. Indeed, the best way to be a father is to point your children beyond you, to a Father who never fails. One of my favorite images in all of Augustine’s life is the picture he paints of his baptism. After a philosophical retreat with his friends in Cassiciacum, having tried their hand at writing their own Platonic dialogues, they return to the bustle of the city and the bosom of the bishop of Milan to present themselves for baptism. In recalling the scene, Augustine adds this touching detail: “We made the boy Adeodatus our partner in baptism as well.” Like Berryman, Augustine realizes one of the things he can do is be a father who points his son to a Father beyond. “We included him in your gift of baptism,” Augustine testifies, “so that being born again with us, he was the same

spiritual age, to be raised in your training.”21 Augustine could best be a father by learning to be an icon that his son sees through rather than an idol he worships. And before that Father, they are brothers—“the same age,” as Augustine puts it. I thought about this when we visited Milan and climbed down the narrow stairs to the archaeological area beneath the Duomo to see the baptismal font where Augustine, Adeodatus, and his friend Alypius were all baptized together. I didn’t think of all the fathers who had left me. I thought about the Father who had found me—the Father who had gifted me with Deanna, my Alypius, still alongside me after all these years. And then I cast a sideward glance at my children, exploring nooks and crannies of the ancient cathedral’s

his lonely situation and ruefully adds: “What’s the use of living forever if you’re all alone on a Sunday?”

Nobody really wants to live forever, but nobody wants to die either. Nobody

Perhaps even more pointedly, we don’t want to be seen dying, so the padded and privileged expend their energy and

Nobody wants to live forever, and nobody wants to die, so our hope settles for extension, a posthuman future we will achieve, triumphing over mortality, at least for a while.

“The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply,” he concludes, “was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.” Notice, the problem isn’t that he loved his friend; the problem is how. “I loved what I loved as a substitute for you.”19 If Augustine invokes idolatry here, that is not a harsh dismissal of our grief but a diagnostic account of what’s going on in our grief in order to help us

How we grieve tells us something about how we have loved, and it can sometimes disclose the twisted logic of our loves: “For wherever the human soul turns itself, other than to you, it is fixed in sorrows, even if it is fixed upon beautiful things.”21 Even

how. “‘Happy is the person who loves you,’” Augustine says (citing Tobit 13:18), “and his friend in you, and his enemy because of you.” Happiness is loving

When one loves in this way—in this “order,” so to speak—then, “though left alone, he loses none dear to him; for all are dear in the one who cannot be lost.”

“Let your heart be lifted up”—the passive here seems especially tender—“and your eyes will be dry. For the love by which Timothy loved and loves Sapida has not perished because those things, which you mourn as having been removed from you, have passed away over time.

So take consolation, Sapida, that I am clothed with the tunic you wove for Timothy, Augustine says; but see it as a sign, an icon of our greater hope. For “how much more amply and certainly ought you to be consoled because he for whom it was prepared will then need no incorruptible garb but will be clothed with incorruptibility and immortality.”