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

by James K.A. Smith

As already noted in our discussion of ambition, Simplicianus proves himself a friend to Augustine by stoking an ambition for better things. And he does so by pointing him toward exemplars who answered such a call in their own encounter with The Life of Antony, a book that extols the example of someone who gave up worldly ambition to pursue the kingdom of God.

“No, dear. You eat,” one of them encourages him. “We came over to sit,” another says. “That’s what people do when tragedy strikes,” a third offers. “They come over and sit.”

“Pride lurks even in good works.”

“Whenever you go out, walk together, and when you reach your destination, stay together.”

Understanding doesn’t transcend belief; it relies on belief.

The problem with everything from Enlightenment scientism to mushy Eat-Pray-Love-ism is us. If anything looks irrational, it’s the notion that we are our own best hope.

Our cerebral struggles are often intertwined with other anxieties. What we identify as intellectual barriers are sometimes manifestations of emotional blocks. We pride ourselves on being rational but then miss the biases and blind spots that constitute our rationality (a feature of the human condition confirmed by recent developments in behavioral economics). We decide that something “doesn’t make any sense” when we no longer want to be associated with the people who believe it, or a “light goes on” and we “see” something after we’ve spent time hanging around people who believe it. Rationality turns out to be more malleable than we’d guess.

This relationship between love and knowing, affection and intellection, would become a hallmark of Augustine’s thought for the rest of his life. By constantly emphasizing, “I believe in order to understand,” Augustine’s more subterranean point was, “I love in order to know.”

“I searched in a flawed way and did not see the flaw in my very search.”29 It was slowly dawning on him: the cabal that had promised him enlightenment turned out to be remarkably parochial. The enlightened ones who prided themselves on being rational were working with a limited intellectual toolkit but had never told him (likely because they didn’t realize).

“In Christianity, it is not reasoning that bridges this gap,” Camus rightly observes, “but a fact: Jesus is come.”

Conviction is not synonymous with dogmatism. Augustine was more than willing to admit: “I do not know.”

But the stories that circulated in a recovery meeting served a different end: they were weaving a web of solidarity.

“Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story.”

He doesn’t give us a philosophical dialogue or a collection of syllogisms: he invites us into a story. But that means deploying the dynamics of drama. The Confessions are more art than science, more aesthetic than logic.

Why does Augustine give us the drama of this narrative instead of the arguments of a treatise? Because his apologetic is aesthetic.

“My heart is restless until it rests in you.”

The hard-won atheism I have in mind, the atheism that is understandable and for which I have much sympathy, is an atheism forged in suffering. Rather than an arrogance that imagines it has outgrown belief, such an atheism is an inability to believe born of an empathy for those trod underfoot by the machinations of an inexplicable menace. This is not an atheism of comfort but of agony. It is the begrudging conclusion of cosmic loneliness arising from the experience of injustice.

This is protest that emerges from trenches.

What’s the alternative, after all? If you could discern a cause and hence provide an explanation, then evil makes sense. You might even say evil is “natural.” 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.

Augustine the pastor and preacher avoids such abstractions and instead appeals to the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith: a humble God who endured evil in order to overcome. The point isn’t that God has a plan; the point is that God wins. We shall overcome because of what 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.

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.

THIS IS WHY Augustine could commend politics as a calling worthy of the Christian. The hard, good work of politics is a way to love your neighbor in a tragic, fallen world. If politics is the art of the possible, it can also be a prudential way to secure justice, beat back evil, and mitigate the effects of the Fall.

If we’re all we’ve got, then any hope for justice is on us, and politics is as close as we’ll get to an engine for bringing about the naturalized kingdom of god. Pelagian activism—resigned to, yet confident in, human power and ingenuity—is prone to being blinded by innocence. Indeed, as a later Augustinian, 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.”

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.

But a Father did. 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.”

Christianity is ultimately the proclamation of a gracious Father who runs to the end of the road to gather up his prodigals, it is decidedly not an ethereal appeal to yet another absent but heavenly Father. To the contrary, 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.

Indeed, the best way to be a father is to point your children beyond you, to a Father who never fails.

I recalled that one of the most persistent mercies in my life was their constant forgiveness of my faults as a father. And I realized that the most revolutionary grace in my life was the gift of a heavenly Father who, against all odds, graced me with the power to stay.

Happiness is loving everyone and everything in God, the immortal one who holds all mortal creatures in his hand. 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.”

So the hope Augustine commends isn’t simply “rational,” like a Platonic conclusion to immortality, or the achievement of some kind of Buddhist detachment from loss. It is a hope that is bought by the One “who can restore what has been lost, bring to life what has died, repair what has been corrupted, and keep thereafter without end what has come to an end.”

A beautiful irony is performed in sculpture: this tomb bustles with life. That irony is what Christians call hope.