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

by James K.A. Smith

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.