On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  But there is another kind of restlessness that can be experienced on the road, a fatigue that stems from knowing where home is but also realizing you’re not there yet—a kind of “directed” impatience.25 The first is a baseline aimlessness that keeps looking for home; the second is the weariness of being en route, burdened by trials and distracted by a thousand byways and exhausted by temptations along the way that sucker you into forgetting where home is.

  Augustine’s spiritual realism doesn’t shrink from honesty about this ongoing struggle.26 You can hear this counsel in his sermon on Psalm 72, reflecting on Israel’s experience after the exodus, its liberation through the sea. “Notice this point, brothers and sisters,” he admonishes. “After crossing the Red Sea the Israelites are not given their homeland immediately, nor are they allowed carefree triumph, as though all their foes had disappeared. They still have to face the loneliness of the desert, and enemies still lurk along their way.” Here is a template for the experience of a converted life: “So too after baptism Christian life must still confront temptations. In that wilderness the Israelites sighed after their promised homeland; and what else do Christians sigh for, once washed clean in baptism? Do they already reign with Christ? No; we have not reached our homeland yet, but it will not vanish; the hymns of David will not fail there.” The key is to know where we are, and whose we are, and where we’re headed, and not be surprised by the burdens of the road. “Let all the faithful listen and mark this; let them realize where they are. They are in the desert, sighing for their homeland.” The Egyptians might not be pursuing us anymore, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t new threats on the way, “lying in ambush along our path.”27 To know where you’re headed is not a promise of smooth sailing.

  This is why book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions is such a gift: it is the testimony of a broken bishop in the present. You realize Augustine isn’t just narrating past temptations he has escaped; he’s confessing all the ways he’s still tempted to camp out in alcoves of creation as if they were home. “I struggle every day,” he admits, and I love him for doing so.28 This is the authenticity we should value. As Jay-Z puts it in his memoir, Decoded:

  This is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bull—— is when you act like you don’t have contradictions inside you, that you’re so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.29

  Any version of Christianity that isn’t honest about this is not Augustinian. As French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion points out, conversion doesn’t solve temptation; rather, it heightens temptation, because conversion creates resistance. In some sense, the tension of time is experienced more intensely by the soul that is on its way home. In conversion I find myself; I’m pulled together from the liquefaction of disordered loves and distractions that dissolved me. But conversion introduces a new kind of tension in my experience: “resistance of what I have become to what I used to be.” Even if, by grace, I find wholeness, find myself, the experience of conversion—of reordering, reorienting—“renders me different from myself.”30 “Coming to myself” isn’t an escape; instead, it makes the struggle more quotidian: every day I’m haunted. Selfhood is an ordeal not just before conversion but because of conversion. It is the converted, baptized, ordained Augustine who confesses, “Onus mihi, oneri mihi sum”: “I am a burden to myself.”31

  The question is how to bear this burden. As Marion rightly comments, this “weight of the self,” this burden of conversion, means “deciding between two burdens: that of the self reduced to itself, the weight of a deadweight, or that which I would love and which would lighten me.”32 There is a burden that actually takes the weight off, a yoke that liberates. Augustine invites his parishioners to consider giving themselves over to one who gave himself for them, the Christ who assures them, “My yoke is kindly and my burden light” (Matt. 11:30). “Every other burden oppresses you and feels heavy, but Christ’s burden lifts you up; any other burden is a crushing weight, but Christ’s burden has wings.”33 Not only can you make it home; you can fly.

  Augustine Our Contemporary

  How to Find Yourself

  We are philosophical heirs even if we don’t realize it. We have inhaled invisible philosophies in the cultural air we breathe. Our everyday quests for authenticity and identity are grooves in the heart laid down by the ripple effects of an existentialism we’ve perhaps never heard of.

  In her wonderful introduction to twentieth-century philosophy, At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell pictures the mélange of existentialists—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel—seated “in a big, busy, café of the mind, probably a Parisian one, full of life and movement, noisy with talk and thought.” She pictures the scene that her book eavesdrops upon:

  When you peer in through the windows, the first figures you see are the familiar ones, arguing as they puff their pipes and lean toward each other, emphasizing their points. You hear clinking glasses and rattling cups; the waiters glide between the tables. In the largest group in front, a dumpy fellow and an elegant woman in a turban are drinking with their younger friends. Towards the back, others sit at quieter tables. A few people are on the dance floor; perhaps someone is writing in a private room upstairs. Voices are being raised in anger somewhere, but there is also a murmuring from lovers in the shadows.1

  They are talking about freedom and authenticity, being and nothingness. Sartre dominates the conversation, though Beauvoir is the sharper mind. Camus is at times boisterous, at other moments unsure of himself. This is a philosophy that is engaged, concrete, even erotic. There are cocktails and cigarettes.

  Amid the tables in the back, assiduously avoiding the dance floor, there is another African, a compatriot of Camus. He listens with interest, sometimes leaning in to grasp a finer point, sometimes grimacing at a conclusion. He is a silent patron of the café and, truth be told, a catalyst of the conversation, even if it’s taken a turn that pains him. He recognizes himself in many of them. In their conversation he relives the frustration, the alienation, the burden of being free. Which is why, as the night winds down, Augustine quietly picks up the check before he slips out.2

  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. Thousands of miles and a world away from Hippo, in a city whose coast and light would have felt familiar to Augustine, his mother is mostly unknown to those who now envision “Santa Monica”—its palm trees and promenade, its glistening beaches and glittering stars. Santa Monica almost looks like an Augustinian monastery in negative. And yet his mother, praying over the son of her tears, covers the city.3

  Santa Monica lies at the end of a famous road: the fabled ribbon of pavement known as Route 66, whose terminus is the Santa Monica pier. The frivolity of the pier’s amusements are the sorts of circus distractions Monica’s son would criticize in his Confessions. But just a few blocks from the pier, as you walk by shops on the promenade like “True Religion” and “Saints Hair Salon,” you’ll find St. Augustine by-the-Sea parish, an Episcopal church on Fourth Street. Located in the heart of the city, the white building reflects a 1960s modernism with a vaguely Spanish accent. Simple white walls inside are made dazzling by stained glass refracting the California sun.

  On the Sunday morning we visited, the sanctuary was animated by a healthy, vibrant congregation, notably diverse and affirming, with a clear sense of belonging, of family. Indeed, I was struck by the gay couple in front of us: in seculari
zed California, in liberal Santa Monica, they don’t “need” to be here. There’s no social capital to be gained, and perhaps not a little to be lost. And yet here they are: hungry, open, welcomed, worshiping. This is the Augustinian journey, replayed in the twenty-first century in a California sanctuary where a banner hangs with a heart aflame, Veritas inscribed across it. Still seeking. Still on the road with the saint.

  The city named for his mother embodies the cross-pressures and complexities of faith in a secular age, where transcendence still haunts but where consumerism threatens to domesticate everything. In the incubator of LA narcissism and its cult of the image, even Augustine’s legacy can be reduced to a veneer, like the façade of a film set. This was my sense one afternoon as I was writing at Holy Grounds, the café in St. Monica Catholic Church on the corner of California Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard, not far from St. Augustine by-the-Sea. The church, together with St. Monica Catholic High and Elementary, elite parochial schools, formed its own complex nestled in a bougie enclave. I was on the patio of the café when school let out. Coiffed moms and dispatched nannies arrived in BMWs to pick up children of privilege—children receiving the sort of elite education that Augustine’s parents desired for him, come to think of it. It was an odd mix of handbags and high heels, backpacks and sneakers, suffused with an air of aspiration and ambition and not a little entitlement, all under the guise of Monica’s legacy. But then again, you’ll find this perplexing concoction of sacred and profane in the Confessions too. And this world isn’t so unlike the world reflected in Augustine’s sermons and letters, counseling the corpus permixtum, the mixed-up body of Christ who are supposed to be in the world but instead seem very much of it. Augustine doesn’t just help us understand saints; he will help us make sense of La-La Land.

  This secular stew seemed to find its quintessential expression as I began walking home. I peeked inside the sanctuary of St. Monica’s church where the music of a wedding rehearsal resonated softly. Augustine the bishop presides to the left of the altar; his mother Monica prays on the right. I listened and prayed, and as I turned to leave, a statue outside on the corner of the block caught my eye. A slender, youthful, bronze Monica, hands outstretched in welcome and prayer, was surrounded by fresh flowers, white lilies and pink ranunculus, withering yellow carnations, and a lone pink rose laid at her feet. Votive candles were interspersed among prayer notes. One prayer was written on a paper airplane; another had been folded into a paper boat. Prayers for the journey, prayers from the road, missives of devotion and intercession. In stone under the statue was a word about its provenance: “Dedicated to the priests and people of St. Monica’s who inspired the making of the 1944 film, ‘Going My Way.’”

  JUST UP THE street from the Santa Monica pier, where Route 66 dreams of freedom and the open road crash into the Pacific Ocean, there is another statue of Augustine’s mother, at the foot of Wilshire Boulevard. The art deco sculpture was a New Deal public works project completed in 1934. Her back to the ocean, looking over the city, Monica stands serenely in Pacific Palisades Park, hands folded over her bosom in prayerful contemplation.

  If you were to follow Monica’s gaze and make your way up Wilshire Boulevard, perhaps taking the 720 bus downtown, you would pass through Brentwood and past UCLA, curving around the Beverly Hilton before crossing Rodeo Drive and perhaps catching sight of incognito stars dining at Spago or the Four Seasons. Just after skirting the north edge of Little Ethiopia, you would arrive at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). There, amid midcentury modern design and contemporary transgression, you will find an iconic image of Monica’s son (see figure 2).

  Her son has aged, but his eyes remain bright, hungry, illuminated by the light of truth, his heart aflame with love. In his right hand is a quill, the tool of this verbose doctor of the church who penned volumes. We find him in the place where, in many ways, he’s most at home: his study, surrounded by his library, books open all around him (save the volumes of Caelestius, Pelagius, and Julian on which he stomps with his blue suede shoes!). One imagines Augustine would be somewhat uncomfortable in the gilded vestments that the artist, Philippe de Champaigne, has cloaked him with. And his face looks more northern European than North African.4 His face is turned toward the Word, looking expectantly for revelation. But situated here on Wilshire Boulevard, in the City of Angels, it almost seems like he’s looking back toward Santa Monica, to his mother on the coast, a new-world Ostia.

  We visit LACMA every year when we spend time in Los Angeles, and each time I make a pilgrimage to Champaigne’s Augustine as an exercise in cultural vertigo. LACMA is a place you go not only to see but to be seen. Urban Light, the forest of street lamps just outside the entrance, is a perfectly Instagrammable backdrop. Ray’s and Stark Bar on the museum’s plaza is a hip space for sipping fifteen-dollar cocktails and schmoozing on jazz nights. The museum is a place where the stars turn out; as we’ve toured the galleries we’ve bumped into Will Ferrell, Minnie Driver, and others. And with typical LA nonchalance, everyone treats their proximity to fame casually, even while incessantly watching. (In LA everybody looks like they could be famous.) To visit LACMA is to make a secular pilgrimage where being seen seeing art is like an Escher illusion of devotion.

  And then you run into Augustine: ancient, devout, looking past you, beyond you, oblivious to your stare (or oblivion). He’s so anachronistic he could be avant-garde (you think Beyoncé doesn’t want a cape like that?), and his presence here in Los Angeles is an opening for a conversation.

  Indeed, I’ve sometimes wondered if there isn’t a tacit conversation happening in the gallery itself. If you make your way out of the Thomas V. Jones Gallery that is home to Augustine, wander past works by Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne (who, like Augustine, was interested in the invisible becoming visible), spanning continents and centuries, you will, in the opposite corner of the Ahmanson Building, encounter Ferdinand Hodler’s 1892 painting The Disillusioned One (see figure 3). He is a study in contrast: wearing simple, black, monkish robes, sitting on an unadorned bench amid a barren landscape, here is the priest on the leeward side of modernity’s disenchantment. There is no chorus of witnesses, no communion of saints on his shoulders, not even books to occupy him (and certainly no blue suede shoes). The loneliness and isolation are palpable in the palette and setting. His gaze is downcast, hands folded from a habit of prayer, but he’s not pleading. His eyes have the glaze of dejection.

  Does Augustine have anything to say to him? Or is Augustine safely benighted in his ancient world, railing against a paganism irrelevant to those of us who endured the disenchantment of modernity? We live between Augustine and the disillusioned one—except that Augustine was the disillusioned one. Maybe there’s new light to be found by looking back?

  Champaigne’s Augustine, now at home in Los Angeles, was the fruit of one of Augustine’s first posthumous journeys to France, in connection with the renaissance of interest in his work during the seventeenth century. Primarily associated with Port-Royal and figures like Blaise Pascal and Antoine Arnauld, Augustine also made a dent in the thinking of René Descartes, who would so influence the subsequent questions and conversation in modern philosophy.5 In many ways, modernity is Augustinian. And Augustine has continued to arrive on the shores of contemporary thought, shaping us in invisible ways. This is how Augustine made it to that Parisian café, a journey to the Left Bank via German roads.

  WHEN I VENTURED to the United States to pursue graduate study in philosophy, I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be returning home. I also didn’t realize I would be joining Augustine on the road.

  As a student in Toronto, it was existentialism and phenomenology that had captured my imagination. Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida were asking my questions—about meaning and interpretation, about authenticity and mass society, about identity and selfhood. Unlike the analytic logic games that seemed to be solving problems no one else had, this stream of continental philosophy flowing from Ger
many and France was grappling with difference—“the Other”—and the challenge of knowledge in pluralist societies. (One might recall that Jean-François Lyotard’s famous little book The Postmodern Condition was commissioned as a report for the government of Quebec on “the question of knowledge in advanced industrial societies.”6) Here were philosophers tackling fundamental questions about justice, ethics, and obligation, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust.

  My gateway drug was John Caputo’s Radical Hermeneutics, a book that was at once instructive and intoxicating.7 A masterful teacher, Caputo engaged in exegesis of Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Søren Kierkegaard, and Hans-Georg Gadamer that gave a young student the confidence to tackle these texts firsthand (no mean feat). But by this time, Caputo had found his own voice, and so Radical Hermeneutics was also something of a manifesto for a philosophy that mattered. The introduction was titled “Restoring Life to Its Original Difficulty”; the final chapter, “Openness to Mystery.” This was a postmodernism with philosophical chops and a religious heartbeat.

  In the summer of 1995, my wife, Deanna, and I, along with our two children (ages three and one at the time), packed all of our worldly possessions into a Ryder truck and a 1983 Chrysler LeBaron station wagon (complete with faux wood paneling) and set out for Villanova University, where I would begin a PhD program working with John Caputo. We were the first in either of our families to move away from home, let alone move out of the country. We crossed the border armed with letters and paperwork, always aware of the capriciousness of the situation, of how subject we were to the moods and whims of border officials. (“Are you bringing more than $10,000 with you into the country?” they asked. We wished!) Working to maintain our little convoy, we barreled through upstate New York and chugged up and down the Poconos, sometimes audibly coaxing the stuttering yellow moving truck up the hill. When we finally made it to Villanova’s campus, it felt like arriving in paradise, both because of the youthful thrill of getting to devote myself to studying phenomenology, but also because Villanova’s campus was an idyllic setting, recognized at the time as a national arboretum. Here I arrived to study Heidegger, who was most at home in the Black Forest. Little did I realize I would end up studying Augustine.