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.”

IN HER MEMOIR Hold Still, photographer Sally Mann quotes one of her father’s diary entries: “Do you know how a boatman faces one direction, while rowing in another?”3 This book you are holding is an invitation to a posture like that: to move forward by looking back, to make progress by considering ancient wisdom. To get in a boat headed for a new future, looking back to Augustine on the North African shore as a landmark to orient us.

“You boys going to get somewhere,” a Nebraska farmer asks, “or just going?” Looking back, Sal now sees: “We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question.”9 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?

IT IS PERHAPS ironic, and a sign of how far he’d come, that a decade after his move to Milan the middle-aged Augustine who had roamed in search of happiness found that the blinking beacon of hoped-for joy kept receding despite his pursuit. This might explain why he would come to identify happiness with rest. If the young Augustine was tempted to imagine that “the road is life,” that happiness was synonymous with adventure, with going out, with departing for distant shores and escaping the strictures of home, then his midlife Confessions reveal a U-turn of sorts. If the aspiring Augustine was looking to Virgil as a model, imagining himself on his own odyssey of conquest in Italy, only later will Augustine see a different pattern emerge in his wanderings: the prodigal who comes home.

When Augustine put on this prodigal lens to look at himself, he had an epiphany. This narrative frame would reframe everything and explain what had puzzled him; it would give him concepts to name what had been gnawing away at him and permission to be honest about his disappointment with what everyone else saw as “success.”

Isnt this what evangelistic preaching does or should do? 'step inside this story to see life from a different angle. See if you can dare to ignore this complete re-orientation.Be honest - doesnt it put its finger on everything you've ever thought & everything you've ever known?

The road, the journey, the quest not only organizes his Confessions; it is a dominant metaphor of Augustine’s spirituality. In Teaching Christianity, his manual for preachers, he describes a heart on the run. 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.

SOME OF AUGUSTINE’S most interesting journeys were posthumous. He shows up in places you wouldn’t expect. His influence is in the water, so you don’t notice it. This struck me once when we were staying in Santa Monica, California—the city named for Augustine’s mother.

corpus permixtum, the mixed-up body of Christ

this is only an intensification of how he has always experienced the burden of life. Like Socrates practicing to die, Meursault has unwittingly spent a life learning to be guilty, denied his freedom. When I was first imprisoned, the hardest thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man. For example, I would suddenly have the urge to be on a beach and to walk down to the water. As I imagined the sound of the first waves under my feet, my body entering the water and the sense of relief it would give me, all of a sudden I would feel just how closed in I was by the walls of my cell. But that only lasted a few months. Afterwards my only thoughts were those of a prisoner.2 When all you’ll see is this walled yard, decide that walking around within it is the only journey that could ever make you happy.

As long as he could squelch these murmurings that it could be otherwise, as long as he could convince himself that this, indeed, was all he wanted, then this stranger could make a home out of exile: “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.”4 Such resignation—the consolation of alienation—is the deep bass note in Camus’s corpus that makes his work resonate as contemporary. If

But for Camus, this isn’t about pilgrimage; it’s about exile. In his notebooks, Camus once wrote, “We travel to cultivate our most private instinct, which is that of eternity.” We are compelled to look for home. What makes it absurd is that we’ve never had one.

But the adventure of Camus’s exile is not Odyssean; it is Sisyphean. Joy is predicated on the impossibility of arrival.

Is scaling the fence over and over again where they should determine they’ll find joy? Or do such Sisyphean philosophies—that “the road is life”—turn out to be bourgeois luxuries indulged by those safe enough to pretend this is all there is? Does the hunger and hope of the migrant show us something more fundamentally human? Maybe our craving for rest, refuge, arrival, home is a hunger that can’t be edited—the heart an obstinate palimpsest that suggests there might be another way. If there’s a map inscribed in the human heart that shows where home is, the fact that we haven’t yet arrived doesn’t make it a fiction. It might just mean there’s a way we haven’t tried.

As Heidegger would put it—in a way he learned from Augustine—I am absorbed by “everydayness”; I give myself over to those “producers of bustling activity” who are more than happy to take the burden of selfhood off my hands.16 We learn to forget our alienation by letting ourselves be taken over by the distractions and entertainments and chatter of the world. We trade one sort of self-alienation for another that gives the illusion of homey comfort: “You belong here” is the lie told to us by everyone from Disney to Vegas. We try to cover up not knowing who we are by letting everyone else sell us an identity, or at least a distraction from needing one. This is why Camus’s honesty is a gift.

When we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking we’re at home with distraction, tricked ourselves into feeling “settled” only because we’ve sold our home-hunger for entertainments, then the irruption of the uncanny, a sense of not-at-home-ness, becomes a gift that creates an opening to once again face the question of who we are. Angst’s disturbing disclosure of meaninglessness is a door to walk through: it opens onto the possibility of finding yourself. Not-at-home-ness could be the place from which you finally hear the call to be yourself. If Camus advises us to wake up from our absorption and learn to live without appeal, Heidegger suggests that the wake-up call of anxiety might be how we learn to hear “the Appeal” that comes from beyond us, a transcendence calling us to something—calling us to ourselves.

What if the human condition was understood not as Odyssean (a neat and tidy return) or Sisyphean (learning to get over your hope for home), but as being like the experience of a refugee?

The exhaustion we experience from perpetually seeking, the fatigue of trying to live as if “the road is life,” the times we crumple onto the road just wishing someone could find us and take us home—the persistence of this hope almost makes us wonder if it could be realized.

But what would it mean to “entirely belong to myself”? Is self-possession the way I find security? Or could even this experience be a door to a different way of being, where my dependence is not something I resent but something that I learn is the condition of creaturehood? While this might be an affront to my autonomy, perhaps it is my autonomy that is the source of my dis-ease, not its solution. What if dependence is a gift because it means I’m not alone? What if the welcome I experience elsewhere is how I learn to be human?

not only honors those experiences of not-at-home-ness but also affirms the hope of finding a home, finding oneself. The immigrant is migrating toward a home she’s never been to before. She will arrive in a strange land and, in ways that surprise her, come to say, “I’m at home here,” not least because someone is there to greet her and say, “Welcome home.” The goal isn’t returning home but being welcomed home in a place you weren’t born, arriving in a strange land and being told, “You belong here.”

He’ll never be at home here. But when he returns to Africa, he finds himself suspect there now too.

He is tainted with “foreignness” even at home now.

Baptism isn’t a capsule that transports us to the end of the road. Conversion is not an arrival at our final destination; it’s the acquisition of a compass.

Pilgrimage often has an Odyssean itinerary: a journey to a holy site only to later return home. This mimics the Neoplatonic journey of the soul “returning” to the One. But Augustine’s peregrinus isn’t on a return journey; he is setting out, like Abraham, for a place he’s never been.

Christian is not just a pilgrim but a refugee, not just embarking on a pilgrimage but emigrating to find a refuge. Conversion is not the end of the journey but the placing on the right 'Way', with a map and a compass to finally find the way. Bu it's not just being set on the way by yourself, as an individual. No, you're joined to a big group of people, a caravan trail. But more than that, the host of your true home has even come to accompany you on the journey, so you won't be alone and you'll know that you'll get there.

Saying God, make me famous If you can’t, just make it painless. But naming the symptoms is easy. The challenge is diagnosing the disease. The question is: What do we want when we want attention? What are we hoping for when we aspire to win this game of being noticed? For Augustine, the only way to get to the root of this desire is to understand it as a spiritual craving. That’s why we can only truly understand disordered ambition if we read it as a kind of idolatry. If our ambition becomes a roadblock to peace, an inhibitor that robs us of the rest and joy we’re looking for, it’s because we’ve substituted something in place of the end for which we were made. The point of discussing ambition in terms of idolatry isn’t denunciation; it’s diagnostic. Our idolatries are less like conscious decisions to believe a falsehood and more like learned dispositions to hope in what will disappoint. Our idolatries are not intellectual; they are affective—instances of disordered love and devotion. Idolatry is caught more than it is taught.

What is the arc of a life whose aspiration is to be a friend of God? What difference would that make? This young striver already senses one difference: this is the only ambition that comes with security, with a rest from the anxiety of every other ambition. Because all other ambitions are fragile, fraught. The attention of others is fickle. Domination of others is always temporary; you can’t win forever (just ask Rocky). Attainment is a goddess who quickly turns a cold shoulder. To aspire to friendship with God, however, is an ambition for something you could never lose. It is to get attention from someone who sees you and knows you and will never stop loving you. In short, it’s the opposite of fickle human attention, which is temporal and temperamental. 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.

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.

Augustine invites us to look at our promiscuity through the lens of idolatry, not in order to induce shame, but in order to illuminate the depth of the hunger and the significance of its disorder. The problem isn’t sex; it’s what I expect from sex. The problem with promiscuity isn’t (just) that it transgresses the law or that it chews up other people and spits them out as leftovers; it’s not simply the fact that it hollows me out and reduces me to my organs and glands all as a perverted way to feed a soul-hunger. The baseline problem with promiscuity is that it doesn’t work and is doomed to fail.

What Augustine offers us is a slant of detachment—a recognition of the power of sexual desire with a resistance to letting it define anyone.21 “Continence”—Augustine’s technical Latin term that Sarah Ruden translates as “self-restraint”—isn’t just for the celibate. Indeed, continence isn’t even just about sex. Continence is a general principle of being held together rather than dispersed, having a center rather than dissolving oneself in a million hungry pursuits.22 Sexual continence—chastity—outside of celibacy looks like a relationship to sex that doesn’t idolize it, doesn’t let it define us, doesn’t let it become a hunger that eats us alive. In other words, the gift of chastity is that it trains us not to need; it grants us an integrity and independence and agency in the face of various drives and hungers.

What if following Augustine means disagreeing with him?

Rituals are not solutions. They don’t “fix” things. They are how we live with what we can’t fix, channels for facing up to our finitude, the way we try to navigate this vale of tears in the meantime. But precisely for that reason they can also be conduits of hope and rhythms of covenant.

Again each night and dawn and sleepless All years long. Having seen that mother’s love, I testify: It was ocean endless. One drop could’ve Brought to life the deadest Christ.18 I know this mother. She sleeps beside me every night. She prays at a Pentecostal church in Lagos every Wednesday. She is awake in Rio, heart whirring, until the door clicks and the light goes out. She keeps prescriptions filled in Los Angeles like a sacramental fight against the darkness. . . . Her name is Monica. She is legion. Not long after his conversion, in one of his early works, Augustine comments on an episode in which a grieving widow approaches Jesus because now she has also lost her only son (Luke 7:12–15). He had compassion on her, Luke tells us, and Jesus raises him from the dead. Augustine, from his own experience, knows the power of a mother’s faith: “What benefit did the widow’s son get from his faith, which he certainly did not have while he was dead? Yet his mother’s faith was so beneficial to him that he was restored to life.”

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.” Others constitute an existential threat. Is it any wonder, then, that in his play No Exit Jean-Paul Sartre would put in the mouth of Joseph Garcin the jarring suggestion that “hell is other people”? This is not a bland misanthropy; rather, it stems from a picture of intersubjectivity not unlike Heidegger’s, in which others are fundamentally competitors, threats, robbers of my peace and rest. If for Heidegger this finds expression in the dynamics of conformity, for Sartre Others represent a diminishment of my freedom—other people suck up the oxygen I need to realize the “absolute” independence that alone deserves to be called freedom.

For Sartre, being is a zero-sum game: it’s you or me. This cosmos isn’t big enough for the two of us to be free.

Not quite fair.

Forget all the haters (and, for Heidegger, everybody else is a hater):

Not quite fair?

the Manicheans’ epistemic posture: they were the “rationalists” of their day. While their worldview seems fantastical to us, the Manicheans prided themselves on having escaped superstition and the embarrassments of believing, instead arriving at the shore of enlightened knowledge. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say the Manicheans considered themselves the scientists of significance: instead of trusting the testimony of prophets, their knowledge was rooted in the course of the sun, moon, and stars. These purveyors of Light and of secret enlightenment were the “Brights” of their day; they prided themselves on refusing authority and instead knowing how things worked.

No...get put notes concerning this.

By constantly emphasizing, “I believe in order to understand,” Augustine’s more subterranean point was, “I love in order to know.”

That's a substitution.

“If the mind does not believe that only thus will it attain vision, it will not seek healing.” In other words, if skepticism leaves us despairing of ever attaining the truth, we’ll never go looking. “So to faith must be added hope.” But reason will only be motivated to set out on the quest if it is also animated by a desire, if it longs for the promised light. “Therefore a third thing is necessary: love.”

An actor, unlike a model, at least has the potential to show us a character we can adopt. It might be an aspirational call to justice in the Mr. Smith who goes to Washington, or crusading for the same in the character of Atticus Finch. It might be black empowerment in Black Panther or female empowerment in Wonder Woman. It might be journalistic communities chasing the truth in Spotlight or The Post. In response to any of these a young person might say, “That’s me,” and then spend a life following their lead. Our fictions often hold out better characters to emulate than the dead-end desire to be merely “famous” (and “famous for being famous”) that plays out in “reality” TV.

Derrida, his fellow North African, would say something similar much later: “I said that the only language I speak is not mine, I did not say it was foreign to me.”18 This is the lexicon of an émigré spirituality, when a foreign tongue finds you and becomes your first language. You become who you are because this Word gives you the words to finally say who you are.19 “To hear you speaking about oneself is to know oneself.”20

Augustine suggests a different test for why you might consider the Bible as a guide: Does it provide guidance you couldn’t get elsewhere? Even if the way it delineates is difficult, does it look like a way out, a way home? If every other map has left you lost, what’s to lose trying out this one?

What if i toldd you...woild that be x?

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Saint Augustine in Ecstasy, a Spanish painting from the late 1600s (see figure 8). Augustine is again surrounded with books. But his arms are outstretched.

THAT SAID, I wish there was more lament in Augustine. 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 a cause, almost give evil a place—either as a tendency that stems from our creatureliness22 or as the shadow of creation’s tapestry that makes the whole all the more beautiful.23 As a result, evil becomes something of an abstraction for Augustine, a generic, vague challenge that lacks concretion.

THERE ISN’T REALLY an “answer” for evil, according to Augustine; there is a response, a divine action-plan rooted in solidarity and compassion.

Not really according yo Augustine but according to Jamie Smith!

study, the outcast who would become their executioner. Such hospitality and forgiveness—such light in the midst of darkness—is generated by a trust that, to some, will look mad, or even irresponsible. Such irruptions of grace are a sign that jars us into considering whether the ball of fire at the heart of the cosmos isn’t, after all, in spite of everything, the fire of love.

The road is life where you never find your father. It’s a familiar path. Some have suggested this is the oldest story, the baseline narrative of the human condition. Thomas Wolfe, whose Look Homeward, Angel is a bald instance of the genre, later reflected on the impetus for the story. His answer appeals to the epic: From the beginning—and this was one fact that in all my times of hopelessness returned to fortify my faith in my conviction—the idea, the central legend that I wished my book to express had not changed. And this central idea was this: the deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way or another was central to all living was man’s search to find a father, not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of a strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger, to which the belief and power of his own life could be united.7

“The more you love to be,” the early Augustine remarked, “the more you will desire eternal life.”13 The hope of eternal life does not efface the desire to live—it is the fulfillment of the desire to live, to live in a way that we can never lose what we love.

how to deal with the crooked timber of our hearts and our penchant to deny all of this and cling to the mortal as if it were immortal. “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 imagine grieving otherwise. Indeed, Augustine is honest enough to admit that he made an idolatry of his grieving: “I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend.”20 Such is the curvature of the crooked human heart: it is always prone to bend back upon itself, such that I make even grief about me.

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 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.”