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

by James K.A. Smith

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.” But what I hope you’ll hear in this is not a solution or an answer, not merely a dogmatic claim or demand. 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.”

Not all prodigals need a passport.

ancestors. But ours is a pilgrimage without a destination—which is to say, it’s not a pilgrimage at all but rather a pilgrimage deferred, not because we stay home but because we revel in the roaming, or at least try to talk ourselves into that.

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?

For Augustine, psychology is cartography: to understand oneself is a matter of mapping our penchant to look for love in all the wrong places.

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.

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.

He’s the father running toward you, losing his sandals on the way, his robes spilling off his shoulders, with a laughing smile whose joy says, “I can’t believe you came home!” This is what grace looks like.

Jesus is the shout of God, the way God runs out to meet us.

Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road; it just changes how you travel.

As French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion points out, conversion doesn’t solve temptation; rather, it heightens temptation, because conversion creates resistance.

It is the converted, baptized, ordained Augustine who confesses, “Onus mihi, oneri mihi sum”: “I am a burden to myself.”

Hope is found in a certain art of saying goodbye, but also in looking ahead to the day when Someone will greet us with, “Welcome home”—and knowing how to navigate in the meantime.

The “authentic happy life,” Augustine concludes, is “to set one’s joy on you, grounded in you and caused by you. That is the real thing, and there is no other.”30 Those found by God find in him “the joy that you yourself are to them.”

“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

“In your gift we find our rest,” Augustine concludes. “There are you our joy. Our rest is our peace.”33 Joy, for Augustine, is characterized by a quietude that is the opposite of anxiety—the exhale of someone who has been holding her breath out of fear or worry or insecurity. It is the blissful rest of someone who realizes she no longer has to perform; she is loved. We find joy in the grace of God precisely because he is the one we don’t have to prove anything to.

As French theologian Henri de Lubac would later put it, we are made with a natural desire for the supernatural.

Conversion is not an arrival at our final destination; it’s the acquisition of a compass.

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.

What he envisioned as freedom—the removal of constraints—started to feel like a punishment. The obliteration of boundaries looked like liberation to the young Augustine; but he could feel himself dissolving in the resulting amorphousness.

What’s emerging here isn’t just an admission of failure; rather, it’s the problem of getting exactly what you want. In the reframing of his experiences, Augustine comes to a radically different way of thinking about freedom. 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.

To read Augustine in the twenty-first century is to gain a vantage point that makes all of our freedom look like addiction. When we imagine freedom only as negative freedom15—freedom from constraint, hands-off liberty to choose what I want—then our so-called freedom is actually inclined to captivity. When freedom is mere voluntariness, without further orientation or goals, then my choice is just another means by which I’m trying to look for satisfaction. Insofar as I keep choosing to try to find that satisfaction in finite, created things—whether it’s sex or adoration or beauty or power—I’m going to be caught in a cycle where I’m more and more disappointed in those things and more and more dependent on those things. I keep choosing things with diminishing returns, and when that becomes habitual, and eventually necessary, then I forfeit my ability to choose. The thing has me now.

But the paradox (or irony)—especially to those of us conditioned by the myth of autonomy, who can imagine freedom only as freedom from—is that this gracious infusion of freedom comes wrapped in the gift of constraint, the gift of the law, a command that calls us into being.

“I neither wished nor needed to read further,” Augustine recalls. “At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart.”

If Augustine spent half his life battling the heresy of Pelagianism—the pretension that the human will was sufficient to choose its good—it’s because he saw it as the great lie that left people enchained to their dissolute wills. And no one is more Pelagian than we moderns.

As he wrote to a group of monks in Marseille, citing the Bishop of Milan, “‘Our hearts and our thoughts are not in our power.’

The question is: Who are you following and where are they headed?

What are we looking for in our ambition? What do we hope to find at the end of our aspirations? In Augustine’s experience—like our own—the answer is complicated. There is a bundle of hopes and hungers bound up with our ambitions, but so often they boil down to the twin desires to win and to be noticed, domination and attention—to win the crown and be seen doing it.

Augustine’s map of this particular terrain of the hungry heart is as useful as ever because so little has changed. When Augustine reflects on ambition, he’s really delving into the dynamics of fame. Could anything be more contemporary? We live in an age where everybody’s famous. We’ve traded the hope of immortality for a shot at going viral.

Plus ça change, as they say. Every age has its Milans—the dense centers of our aspiration that collect all the more people to see us, the urban arenas of attention. If we’re chomping at the bit to get out of the provinces, it’s in no small part because there’s no one to see us in our lonely backwaters.

Attainment is a goddess who quickly turns a cold shoulder.

God’s attention is not predicated on your performance. You don’t have to catch God’s notice with your display. He’s not a father you have to shock in order to jar his attention away from the game, crying out, “Look at me! Look at me!” God’s attention is a place where you can find rest and where, “in the father’s lap,” as Augustine later puts it, you don’t have to be worried about getting attention from anyone else.20 You can rest.

Our culture of ambition has only two speeds: either win or quit. But perhaps our ambition to win is a hunger to be noticed—maybe even a lifelong, unarticulated hunger to be noticed by a father, to hear him say, “Well done. You did it.” But that’s not why he loves you. 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.

One of the things I most love Augustine for is his honesty about his continued struggles with ambition and the unique pride that feeds off of being noticed and garnering praise. The shadow side of ambition is a constant companion of even reordered aspiration in this mortal life.

The “wish to be feared or loved by people for no reason other than the joy derived from such power, which [he now realizes] is no joy at all. It is a wretched life.”

Resting in the love of God doesn’t squelch ambition; it fuels it with a different fire. I don’t have to strive to get God to love me; rather, because God loves me unconditionally, I’m free to take risks and

launch out into the deep. I’m released to aspire to use my gifts in gratitude, caught up in God’s mission for the sake of the world. When you’ve been found, you’re free to fail.

“The single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and to be loved.”

We are masters of dissimulation; we can construe almost anything as if it were pleasure in order to talk ourselves into being happy. We are great pretenders.

When I stop looking to some facet of finite creation to feed a hunger for the infinite, I don’t have to reject or detest creation. To the contrary, in a sense I get it back as a gift, as something to be (small-e) enjoyed as a way to (big-E) Enjoy the Creator who made it. It’s when I stop overexpecting from creation that it becomes something I can hold with an open hand, lightly but gratefully.

There is a freedom that comes from not being a slave to my libido. Indeed, it is also a gift to my partner to learn not to need, not imposing a disordered hunger on our relationship—a hunger that, even in the context of a marriage, can be (if we’re honest) rapacious.

When he finally had an opportunity to explain why he distanced himself from the National Liberation Front, Camus remarked: “I must condemn a terrorism that works blindly in the streets of Algiers and one day might strike at my mother and my family. I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”3 And in the uproar of criticism that followed, Camus continued to choose his mother. When Camus died in a car accident southeast of Paris, inside his briefcase was found the unfinished manuscript of his last novel, Le Premier homme (The First Man). Handwritten on the first page was a dedication to his mother: “To you, who can never read this book.”

As Justo González aptly comments, “The form of religion that his mother, Monica, was calling him to accept had clearly African overtones, and this was partly the reason why Augustine, a man versed in Greco-Roman letters and traditions, could not accept

faith. He needed an Ambrose to make Christianity intellectually respectable enough to be plausible again, and once he stepped inside the faith he saw his mother’s piety—and hence his mother—in a new light.

Augustine had learned that being himself meant depending on others—a lesson his mother had been showing him his whole life. “I have a pain in my mother” is finitude’s thorn in the flesh, an embodied reminder of the dependence that characterizes creaturehood.

Authenticity, then, always looks like an emergence from “them,” a refusal of conformity, because inauthenticity is, by definition, a failure to resist the domination of Others, the tyranny of the “they.”

We thought we were our own liberators; turns out we might be our own jailers.