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

by James K.A. Smith

For a millennium Augustine’s portrait of himself served as a model for self-cultivation in Christian civilization. The imitation of Christ was the ideal, but those falling short could turn to Confessions for help getting there. It was during the Renaissance that this conception of the self came under serious challenge, most powerfully in Montaigne’s “Essays,” which mocked the idea of sin and preached self-acceptance. To Augustine’s anxious admission that he was a problem to himself, Montaigne simply responded, So what’s the problem? Don’t worry, be happy. As modern people we have chosen Montaigne over Augustine. We traded pious self-cultivation for undemanding self-esteem. But is love of self really enough to be happy? You know the answer to that, dear reader. And so did Augustine.24

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.

Your hometown is the place you’re made for, not simply the place you’ve come from. Your hometown—where joy is found—is a place you arrive at and immediately feel “at home” in, even though you’ve never been there

before.

Our hearts and our thoughts are not in our power.’

She had to overcome her nagging sense that she shouldn’t say what she didn’t already believe.

Continence is a general principle of being held together rather than dispersed, having a center rather than dissolving oneself in a million hungry pursuits.

Independence is the affront mothers cannot countenance.

The mother gives birth to the child who becomes an adult by living as if he materialized ex nihilo.

Now imagine this isn’t an experiment but the shape of a life: instead of waiting for a ball to come your way in a silly game of catch, you’re waiting for anyone to call or drop by or speak your name. You can’t even express it, but you’re hungering for some sign that you are known. But no one calls. No one asks how you’re doing. No one listens to your thoughts about the morning news. You are alone. Except there are hundreds of thousands of you. You’re not alone in being lonely—not

Colleges are credential factories, and the Ivy League is a ridiculously expensive employment agency connecting the new meritocracy with hedge funds and Supreme Court clerkships that function as escalators to wealth and power.

learning itself was instrumentalized as a means to achieve some other good:

In a university that revolves around the quest for profit and prestige, a lingering liberal arts curriculum is like a distant echo that keeps calling. You never know when the still, small voice of Plato can pierce through all the noise in a marauding frat boy’s life and resound as a wake-up call for a soul—that his taut, frantic, voracious body has a soul, that the soul is made for a quest and not just sexual conquests, and that there is a kind of learning that doesn’t just position you but transforms you.

Curiosity for Augustine is not the spirit of inquiry we prize and encourage; rather, it is a kind of quest for knowledge that doesn’t know what it’s for—a knowing for knowing’s sake, we might say, or perhaps more to the point, knowing for the sake of being known as someone who knows.

This is a familiar recipe for recruitment, trotted out today by rationalist purveyors of scientism who promise to unlock all the mysteries of the universe by a “science” that shows there are none. 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. What their “knowledge” offers is a shortcut to respectability.

And all these people priding themselves on enlightenment have decided to simply trade belief in one set of authorities for belief in another.

believing the testimony of others is at the very heart of the scientific enterprise. Understanding doesn’t transcend belief; it relies on belief.

Augustine is not promising a different version of self-sufficient enlightenment to counter what the Manicheans are offering. He’s calling into question the very myth of such a stance. The question isn’t whether you’re going to believe, but who; it’s not merely about what to believe, but who to entrust yourself

He let the phone slip from his hand and lay crying for a while, silently, shaking the cheap bed. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake. . . . How to live?

the comfortable disbelief of the new atheists, for whom atheism is the overreach of their epistemic hubris, the blinkered conclusion of a reductionistic scientism that closes its eyes to all the facets of human mystery it can’t explain, settling for just-so stories as if they were explanations.

Evil is out there, other, and it is in here, all too close. Yet it is still unfathomable. His own heart is an abyss, and when he looks at the atrocities he commits, only a dark mystery stares back at him: “I became evil for no reason.”

‘Surely what Cicero says comes straight from the heart of all fathers, when he wrote: You are the only man of all men whom I would wish to surpass me in all things.’”

Even when it looks like we’ve given up the search and couldn’t care less, we act in ways that keep saying, “Look at me, Dad. Do you see me now?” We can’t stop wanting to be seen, known, loved.

“You do not stop hungering for your father’s love,” Paul Auster observes, “even after you are grown up.”

The road is life where you never find your father. It’s a familiar path.

LATE CAPITALISM IS the age in which everyone has a computer in their pocket and a gaping hole where a father should be.

often this becomes just another occasion for the child to console the father’s failure to be one, the parent demanding to be seen for his brief flash of virtue.

it’s not hard to imagine Augustine’s realization of his father’s failures becoming clearer with the arrival of his own son.

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

I know I’m not the only one whose father has left, whose stepfather left, who’s been left bereft of fathers despite their multiplication in a world of serial marriages.

Even our funerals are elaborate exercises of denial, transposed into “celebrations of life.”

Thus emerges another market, the wellness industrial complex, which at once capitalizes on our fear of dying and leverages what physician Raymond Barfield calls our “desire to be desirable.” “The fear of death, with no grasp of what makes a life truly good, is the stupendously irrational desire for mere duration.”

What’s the use of living forever if you’re all alone on a Sunday?

For Camus, suicide is the “one truly serious philosophical problem,”

“The ultimate voyage—death—is the only one that should occupy your thoughts.”

Pray to the Father, St. Augustine, that I might become the person you’ve made me want to be.