Milan for Augustine is our Manhattan or London or, well, Milan—a metropolis made of money and power. What John Foot says of contemporary Milan is true of the ancient city (and all other sites of earthly ambition): “Milan is a city obsessed by one thing, or rather by two—work and money.”11 It’s the place where you either “make it” or slink home in defeat. The hopes of such urban pilgrimages are perennial: to realize the “you” that’s been buried in the provincial version of yourself until now. These cities are like sculptors in a sense, unearthing the “you” that was always just beneath the surface. So you go to climb, achieve, win, conquer; you go to realize your potential and demonstrate your worth; you go to enjoy the good life and inhale the energy of influence, the freedom that comes with privilege; you go to remake yourself, but in so doing you expect to find the “you” you always knew you could be. It’s why you “find yourself” someplace else. The road is the road to that “you.”
Which is why this young man is so rattled when Milan disappoints him. Milan was supposed to be the end of the road, the destination he had envisioned as synonymous with happiness. Working in the precincts of the imperial palace, unleashing his creative energy and expertise, mingling with the great and the good, he would be seen for who he was: Augustine, the precocious provincial, the African from the edge of the empire who’d made it to the center. The happy life had a zip code, and Augustine now lived there.
So why didn’t he feel at home? Why did the Unheimlich still haunt him? He thought he was coming to Milan to get close to the emperor; he didn’t expect to fall for a bishop.
Augustine is a saint who’s been down that road we still travel, fueled by ambition, trailing our hopes behind us. He’s familiar with all the things we carry.
IN SAN GIMIGNANO, a Tuscan hill town south of Florence—not far from the path that would have taken Augustine from Rome to Milan—is a small Augustinian church from the thirteenth century. Not to be confused with the magnificent Duomo in the center of town, the Chiostro di Sant’Agostino is a humble affair just inside the north wall. On the day we visited, our heels clopped on quiet, narrow streets. We seemed to have the place to ourselves. A bright spring sun turned the sky neon indigo, the heavenly ceiling for a memorable alfresco meal of Tuscan pici and lamb ragù at the Locanda di Sant’Agostino Osteria next door.
But we were here for the frescoes inside the church. In the apsidal chapel is a stunning series of paintings that capture Augustine on the road. Painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in the fifteenth century (1464–65), the images narrate the life of Augustine from his childhood education in Thagaste to his death in Hippo. The cycle of seventeen episodes, circling from left to right, bottom to top, is a bit like staging Shakespeare as a hip-hop drama: Gozzoli’s realism transposes Augustine to Renaissance plazas adorned in fifteenth-century attire. The realism demystifies the saint. Because we can imagine him being like us, a solidarity that is at the heart of the Confessions, it encourages imitation. When fourth-century Carthage looks like thirteenth-century Florence, and ancient Hippo looks like medieval Milan, it might help us see why the aspirations of ancient Rome aren’t so different from those of contemporary Los Angeles.
Gozzoli’s rehearsal of Augustine’s life is inflected with intriguing emphases. Education and teaching dominate the cycle, from Augustine’s own boyhood education in Africa to his role as teacher in Rome, Milan, and Hippo. This is Augustine the humanist rediscovered in the Renaissance—the Augustine who read Plato, reformed rhetoric, and championed the liberal arts. Not surprisingly, his mother Monica appears in five of the scenes, including a heartrending scene of her being left behind.12
But utterly singular is Gozzoli’s fascination with Augustine’s various journeys. The frescoes might as well have been called “On the Road with Augustine.” Gozzoli paints Augustine on the move. We see Monica praying he won’t leave, and then immediately beside it Augustine’s journey to Rome, Monica now at the left with hand upstretched in prayer over the saint at sea.
We see him landing at the port in Ostia, en route to the Rome that will disappoint him. The cycle later brings us back to Ostia to witness the death of Monica. But in Gozzoli’s unique attempt to convey temporal dynamism in a single static frame, through the columns on the right we see Augustine set sail, returning to the Africa he’ll never leave (see figure 1, top). True to one of the most enduring aspects of Augustine’s character, he never travels alone.
The panel that most captivated me, though, depicts Augustine’s departure from Rome for Milan. Augustine has acquired relationships of note. Dignitaries attend his departure. Medieval Rome is in the distance behind him, the Tuscan hills lie before them, and over the horizon lies Milan (figure 1, bottom).13 The regal transport of the imperial courier means he can travel on horse. The beasts are stately, powerful, and—curiously—looking right at us. Are you coming? their eyes seem to ask. Have you considered this road? Do you know where this leads? Does he?
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.
This might not be the prodigal you know. This is the existential prodigal, the wayward son filtered through philosophy, hearing the Gospel of Luke through Platonic ears as a cautionary parable of human existence. It is the tale of an ungrateful son who runs off with his premature inheritance, having effectively told his father, “I wish you were dead.” And this odd, surprising Father acquiesces: “Here you go,” he says. “I love you.” The son takes his Father’s property (ousia) and departs for a distant country, squandering it in “dissolute living” and ending up with nothing—and nothingness.
How could Augustine resist reading this as a parable of human existence itself? Being (ousia) is gifted to us by our Creator, but we take the gift as if there were no Giver, and we set off to “live” according to our best lights. The result? You, a good Jewish boy, wake up one morning and realize that even the pigs are eating better than you are, and you start to ask yourself some questions, like “What the hell am I doing?” And “Who am I?” And “Whose am I?” So despondent you can’t even voice it, you nonetheless wonder, timidly, desperately: “Would my father ever take me back?” By some grace inexplicable, you start on your way back home. And as you’re yet again rehearsing a long speech that is three parts apology and two parts legal plea for reinstatement, you’re bowled over when that Father of yours comes running and gathers you up in his arms while your head is down, and your mother later tells you, “He walked to the end of the road every single day waiting for you.”
This is the road trip in which Augustine finally saw himself, and it becomes the literary skeleton of the Confessions, a travelogue of the human heart. The reason Augustine tells his story is that he thinks it is simply an example of the human story—that we are all prodigals—and he wants us to ask ourselves a question: “What if I went home?”
For Augustine, psychology is cartography: to understand oneself is a matter of mapping our penchant to look for love in all the wrong places. The range of our exterior wandering is mirrored by the interior expanse of the soul. “A human being as such is a huge abyss,” he would later muse to his God. “You know the number of hairs on his head, Master, and in you there’s no subtraction from that number; but it’s easier to count his hairs than his moods or the workings of his heart.”14 One’s own heart can be foreign territory, a terr
a 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.
That’s why, Augustine suggests, you can be prodigal without moving an inch. What we’re mapping here is the geography of desire. It took running from Carthage to Rome to Milan for Augustine to realize that his exile was inward:
One does not go far away from you or return to you by walking or by any movement through space. The younger [prodigal] son in your Gospel did not look for horses or carriages or ships; he did not fly on any visible wing, nor did he travel along the way by moving his legs when he went to live in a far country and prodigally dissipated what you, his gentle father, had given him on setting out, showing yourself even gentler on his return as a bankrupt.15
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.” What looks like attainment in Milan—success, conquest, arrival—was experienced as one more letdown. What looks like the good life is experienced as loss of nothing less than one’s self. Just as the prodigal son spends down his inheritance to nothingness, so the wandering, ravenous soul consumes everything and ends up with nothing: no identity, no center, no self. The “distant country” where the prodigal ends up isn’t just far off and lonely. It dissolves. It fragments. It liquefies. “I was storm-tossed, gushing out, running every which way, frothing into thin air in my filthy affairs.”16 The frantic pursuit of the next place is symptomatic of his self-alienation. “I had left myself and couldn’t find me,” Augustine recalls. “I turned myself into a famished land I had to live in.”17
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. Humans are those strange creatures who can never be fully satisfied by anything created—though that never stops us from trying. The irony, Augustine points out, is that we experience frustration and disappointment when we try to make the road a home rather than realizing it’s leading us home, when we try to tell ourselves “the road is life.” Then we foist infinite expectations upon the finite. But the finite is given as a gift to help us get elsewhere.
This we should be making use of with a certain love and delight that is not, so to say, permanently settled in, but transitory, rather, and casual, like love and delight in a road, or in vehicles, or any other tools and gadgets you like, or if you can think of any better way of putting it, so that we love the means by which we are being carried along, on account of the goal to which we are being carried.18
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.
But how to get home? Is there really hope of rest? What if the road is long and we’re sick and tired of rest-stop food and the cheap motels we called “success,” and the pleasures of this journey have turned stale? What if we can see through the finite, and we have some inkling of another shore but despair of ever getting there? What if we’ve gotten just far enough to see that no place will make us happy and so have given up the quest altogether?
Augustine has been there. Later in his life, in a sermon on the African shore in Hippo, he would revisit this with his congregation. When you’ve tried everything but keep finding that what you grasped as ultimate bleeds through your fingers as finite, he says,
It is as if someone could see his home country from a long way away, but is cut off from it by the sea; he sees where to go, but does not have the means to get there. In the same way all of us long to reach that secure place of ours where that which is is, because it alone always is as it is. But in between lies the sea of this world through which we are going, even though we already see where we are going (many, however, do not see where they are going).19
The brutal truth: You can’t get there from here. Not even a map is enough. You might already have realized where you need to go, but the question is how to get there.
What if God sent a boat? What if the Creator captained a ferry from that other shore?
“So that we might also have the means to go, the one we were longing to go to came here from there. And what did he make? A wooden raft for us to cross the sea on.”20 God sends a raft from home: “For no one can cross the sea of this world unless carried over it on the cross of Christ.” Get on, God invites. Hang on. I’ll never let you go.
It’s not just a matter of finally settling down or coming to the end of the road. We find rest because we are found; we make it home because someone comes to get us. The prodigal’s story reframes everything because of how it ends: “While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The wayward son is not defined by his prodigality but by the welcome of a father who never stopped looking, who is ever scanning the distance, and who runs to gather him up in an embrace. God is not tapping his foot judgmentally inside the door as you sneak in, crawling over the threshold in shame. 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.
Meditating on the incarnation, on God becoming human in Jesus, Augustine describes the God who runs to meet us: “He lost no time, but ran with shouts of words, acts, death, life, descent, ascent, all the time shouting for us to return to him.”21 Jesus is the shout of God, the way God runs out to meet us. Augustine shares the story of his prodigality as an invitation to find ourselves in the end of the story. To map our roaming like that of the prodigal is not a cartography of despair or self-loathing and shame; to the contrary, it is a geography of grace that is meant to help us imagine being welcomed home.
“Oh, the twisted roads I walked!” Augustine recalls. “But look, you’re here, freeing us from our unhappy wandering, setting us firmly on your track, comforting us and saying, ‘Run the race! I’ll carry you! I’ll carry you clear to the end, and even at the end, I’ll carry you.’”22
WHOSE HEART ISN’T prodigal? One of the gifts Augustine offers is a spirituality for realists. Conversion is not a “solution.” Conversion is not a magical transport home, some kind of Floo powder to heaven. Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road; it just changes how you travel.
One of the reasons I’ve found Augustine a comforting companion on the way is that he is honest about how hard the road is even once you know where home is. His pastoral realism recognizes something I hear in the music of Jason Isbell about winding roads and ditches that seem to have a magnetic pull about them. You can hear it in “Heathens,” a song he performed with his earlier band, the Drive-By Truckers:
It just gets so hard to keep between the ditches
when the roads wind the way they do.
Or in Isbell’s solo work, like “Flying over Water”:
From the sky the highway’s straight as it could be.
A string pulled tight from home to Tennessee.
And still somehow those ditches took a better part of me.
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Augustine doesn’t write from the sky; he writes from the road. He knows ditches, and as he’ll confess in book 10 of the Confessions, not even a bishop can avoid them. We are still on the way. He comes to this realization not long after his own conversion. As he points out in one of his early dialogues, “Just as the soul is the whole life of the body, God is the happy life of the soul. While we are doing this, until we have done it completely, we are on the road.”23 Peter Brown, Augustine’s magisterial biographer, captures this creeping realization:
For some years, he remained perched between two worlds. There was no more talk of an “ascent” in this life. “Remember . . . you have postponed your vision” [On the Free Choice of the Will 2.16.42]. A new image will make its appearance: that of a long highway, an iter. The moments of clear vision of truth that the mind gains in this life, are of infinite value; but they are now the consolations of a traveller on a long journey: “While we do this, until we achieve our aim, we are still travelling.” These moments are no more than points of light “along this darkening highway” [2.16.41]. Augustine, himself, always resented travelling: he always associated it with a sense of protracted labour and of the infinite postponement of his dearest wishes; and these associations will colour the most characteristic image of the spiritual life in his middle age.24
There are two very different kinds of dissatisfaction or restlessness. One is engendered by disappointment, by not knowing where home is, by thinking you’ve arrived only to later become tired of the place or realize it’s not home in the way you thought it was. In this case the road is the endless exhaustion of continuing to try to locate home, the frantic search for rest. That is the angst of the prodigal still in exile.
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 2
