On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  The monks on campus should have been a sign. Villanova is a Catholic university founded by the Augustinian order and named after St. Thomas of Villanova, a Spanish friar of the Order of Saint Augustine. If it was Heidegger and Derrida that led me to Villanova, it didn’t take me long to realize that Augustine was the heartbeat of the place. The philosophy department, along with the rest of the humanities division, was housed in the St. Augustine Center for the Liberal Arts, with the departments of philosophy and theology on the ground level to provide a “foundation.” The president of the university was (and still is) an Augustinian friar. I had come to study deconstruction among devotees of the doctor of grace.

  This would turn out to be fortuitous in ways I couldn’t have imagined. That same year, the cabal in charge of publishing Heidegger’s collected works—his Gesamtausgabe—released volume 60, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens (The Phenomenology of Religious Life).8 This volume would turn out to be a revealing backstory to Heidegger’s famous bombshell of a book, Being and Time, published in 1927. Being and Time unleashed some of the central concepts of existentialism that would ripple into French cafés and cinemas, eventually making their way to American universities and magazines, and even to Hollywood. It was from Heidegger, via Sartre and others, that we would learn to prize “authenticity” and seek to resist the flattening effect of mass society. Heidegger offered an account of all of this through an analysis of a strange beast he called “Dasein,” his version of the self. Unlike philosophers before him who spoke of some abstract “ego” or of a vague “subject,” Heidegger took up Dasein, which means “being there.” The point was to remember that I am embedded in a world, heir to a history of possibilities that opened up the world, if only I could resist falling prey to the “idle talk” of “the they” (das Man). And so Dasein functioned like a philosophical saint of sorts, an exemplar to imitate. Could we measure up to “authentic” Dasein, seizing possibilities and resisting temptation? Could we learn to be resolute, to resolve to answer the call of being, to seize our inmost possibilities—to become the “I” that I’m destined to be? As Bakewell rightly notes, while later existentialists would frame this as a call to “be yourself,” for Heidegger it was “a call to take up a self that you didn’t know you had.”9

  Much of this was crammed, in nuce, into Heidegger’s Being and Time, which then became something of an urtext for everyone from Sartre to Walker Percy, from Ingmar Bergman to Terrence Malick, even for renegade winemakers in Napa Valley.10 Existentialism seeped into the postwar water and was disseminated not only in philosophy books but in film and art, perhaps especially in movies that ranged from The Seventh Seal (1957) to Groundhog Day (1993) to I Heart Huckabees (2004). Bakewell captures the ubiquity of this invisible philosophy in our culture:

  Existential ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all. People (at least in relatively prosperous countries where more urgent needs don’t intervene) talk about anxiety, dishonesty and the fear of commitment. They worry about being in bad faith, even if they don’t use that term. They feel overwhelmed by the excess of consumer choice while also feeling less in control than ever. A vague longing for a more “real” way of living leads some people to—for example—sign up for weekend retreats in which their smartphones are taken away like toys from children, so that they can spend two days walking in the country landscape and reconnecting with each other and their forgotten selves. The unnamed object of desire here is authenticity.11

  The DNA of our quest for authenticity points to the legacy of Heidegger and existentialism.

  What made the 1995 publication of an obscure volume of Heidegger’s works of particular interest was that it filled in the backstory of Being and Time, which in 1927 had seemed to come from nowhere. In fact, Heidegger had been honing its concepts and ideas for a decade. And the year I arrived at Villanova, to study the young Heidegger at this Augustinian university, volume 60 of his collected works provided its own bombshell of a revelation. The volume includes lecture notes for two courses the young Heidegger taught at the University of Freiburg that look like a first draft of Being and Time. But they also show us the unexpected provenance of these notions of authenticity, conformity, and the call to be.

  In the winter semester of 1920–21, Heidegger taught “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.” After a typical survey of other scholars, the bulk of the course is devoted, almost bafflingly, to a philosophical reading of the apostle Paul’s Epistles to the Thessalonians. Here we realize that what will later, in Being and Time, become Dasein’s “being-towards-death” first finds its articulation in Heidegger’s encounter with St. Paul’s exhortations about the second coming of Christ. Even more significantly, we see that some of the central existential concepts of Being and Time—core notions like despair, “falling,” thrownness, and care—first emerge in Heidegger’s 1921 summer semester course on (you guessed it) Augustine!

  The notion of inauthenticity that will be so central to existentialism’s diagnosis of our malaise is generated in the chemical reaction of Heidegger’s reading of Augustine’s Confessions. What Heidegger will later call “fallenness,” our tendency to “fall prey” to the vague, mass society of “the they” (das Man), is something he learned from Augustine’s account of our “absorption” in the world. The aversion to inauthenticity that suffuses our cultural attitude is a trickle-down from Augustine’s critique of disordered love. Working through this freshly minted German text as a young doctoral student, it was dawning on me: we are more Augustinian than we realize.

  THE THINKER WHO perhaps most freshly broke open Augustine for me, who taught me to read him with new eyes and to see him as a prescient analyst of our own cultural anxieties, was Hannah Arendt, whose insights into totalitarianism have received timely reconsideration of late.

  Not long after the publication of Heidegger’s early lectures on Augustine, Arendt’s doctoral dissertation on Love and Saint Augustine, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the informal tutelage of Heidegger, was translated into English.12 Lots of devotees of the famed New York intellectual were surprised to learn Arendt had cut her philosophical teeth on Augustine. Equally surprising was that Arendt, the political thinker, instead of focusing on City of God as one would expect, had focused on the central theme of love in Augustine’s Teaching Christianity, Confessions, and a wide range of sermons. It was Arendt who showed me that Augustine was a cartographer of the heart.

  Up to that point, my encounters with Augustine had been badly framed. Inexplicably (though not uncommon), I had been introduced to him as a “medieval” thinker who was primarily a theologian. My first brush with Augustine was citations in dogmatic theology texts, and my later interactions in philosophy classes tended to lump him with Thomas Aquinas, which meant that Thomas’s late medieval scholasticism—which felt a little too much like analytic philosophy’s logic-chopping—was the lens through which I anachronistically read Augustine, as if he were doing the same thing. I had been taught to read Augustine to get doctrines, dogmas, and propositional claims about sin and God and salvation. Only later did I realize what a travesty this framing was—not only the way it domesticated a protoexistentialist but also the way it dehumanized a fellow traveler.

  Which is why Arendt came along at a critical point and introduced me to Augustine again for the first time. The pivot was a bold methodological move early in the work: she would try to disclose Augustine’s unique genius, the incisiveness of what we might call his “psychological” insight, by bracketing doctrinal concerns. She would fixate not on why Augustine said x but on whether and how x proved illuminating for our experience. For the purposes of trying to grasp Augustine’s insights from the inside, as it were, to get a feel for the dynamism of his thought, her interpretation of Augustine “was not dogmatically bound.”13 This was not a way of eviscerating Augustine or remaking him in our secular image. What she meant was that she would
read Augustine as, well, a phenomenologist, a philosopher of experience, a protoexistentialist who, as a philosopher, had something to show us about ourselves.14

  I never looked back. It was like scales fell from my eyes. A human Augustine emerged from the flat, two-dimensional caricature I’d been looking at. Arendt’s suggestion, coupled with Heidegger’s reframing, made the Confessions a new book for me. No longer merely a narrative dress-up for doctrine or the tortured machinations of an ancient Puritan, Augustine was reshelved in the philosophical canon of my imagination—moved from the medieval A’s alongside Aquinas and Anselm, he was bumped to the shelf with dog-eared, coffee-stained copies of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, alongside Heidegger, Arendt, and Camus. They weren’t at all surprised to see him.

  THE CAFÉS AND theaters of postwar France were the incubators for existentialism because they were a confluence of streams from Germany and Africa, Algeria in particular (the country that now occupies the region Augustine called home). What’s remarkable is that, while Sartre was unwittingly drinking from Augustinian wells via Heidegger, his friend and collaborator Albert Camus was independently wrestling with Augustine’s legacy in his dissertation, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, submitted in 1936.15 Camus felt a solidarity with Augustine, he emphasized, as a Mediterranean.16 The first resonance was geographical. They shared the same sky, the same sun, the same sea. These were geographical resonances they both felt.

  Camus’s dissertation gives us insight into the Christianity that Camus said he couldn’t believe. After World War II, in 1948, Camus gave a talk at a Dominican monastery in Latour-Maubourg, in which he made an interesting concession: “I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it.”17 In his biography of Camus, Olivier Todd recounts an episode where Camus and a friend were walking through the village of Le Chambon. After passing a Salvation Army poster that read, “God Is Looking for You,” Todd says, “Camus wisecracked, ‘He wouldn’t be looking for me if he hadn’t already found me.’”18

  But apart from the question of God’s existence, a persistent theme that has a deep Augustinian resonance weaves its way throughout Camus’s corpus. It could be named in different ways: exile, alienation, stranger-hood. Sartre noted this upon first reading the pairing of Camus’s novel The Stranger and his accompanying essay on the absurd, The Myth of Sisyphus. “Camus might as well have chosen the title of one of George Gissing’s works, Born in Exile.”19 This is something like Heidegger’s “thrownness,” or like an Augustinian fall without Eden or eschaton. We are strangers in the world, but also strangers to ourselves. This is not unrelated to Camus’s (early) notion of the absurd—a sense of being under obligation but without meaning or rationale, without hope of redemption. It’s tragedy all the way down, and yet we can be (godless) saints. It’s here that one wonders whether Camus’s very notion of the absurd isn’t itself haunted by something like Augustine. As David Bellos has remarked,

  It has often been pointed out that Camus’s concept of the absurd is itself rather absurd. Why should anyone find it at all remarkable—or even more strangely, lamentable—that there is no transcendent meaning to human acts? Things would surely be far worse if the opposite were the case. If the world were not at all absurd, in Camus’s sense, then things in general and acts in particular would be endowed irrevocably with “meaning.” And that would make the world a very strange and inhumane place indeed.20

  So one can wonder whether Camus’s project isn’t governed—or at least stalked—by something like Augustine’s vision, a world that ought to have meaning, where evil is vanquished, where tragedy doesn’t have the last word, even if Camus concludes that’s not true. Conor Cruise O’Brien, for example, argues that Camus’s novel The Fall “is profoundly Christian in its confessional form, in its imagery, and above all in its pervasive message that it is only through the full recognition of our sinful nature that we can hope for grace. Grace does not, it is true, arrive and the novel ends on what is apparently a pessimistic note. Yet the name of the narrator [Jean-Baptiste Clamence]—that of the fore-runner—hints, however teasingly, at the possibility of a sequel.”21 Augustine represents the Christianity Camus doesn’t believe, which might make him more Augustinian than he realizes—and might make us more Augustinian than we imagined. An Augustinianism sans grace might nonetheless be a gateway.

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO when I was in Paris, I stepped out of the university onto La Place de la Sorbonne. I was headed for the Presses Universitaires de France bookshop (sadly, no longer there) but stopped short in front of a smaller bookstore just across the street, the equally famous Librairie philosophique J. Vrin. There, in the middle of twenty-first-century France’s intellectual center, was an entire display window devoted to St. Augustine. There, beside the hallowed halls of the Sorbonne—in the land of liberté, égalité, fraternité, and deconstruction—was a celebration of philosophical works, both ancient and contemporary, devoted to a Catholic bishop from the African provinces.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the late twentieth century, interest in Augustine continued to be fostered by French intellectuals from colonial Africa. After Camus came Algerians Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Derrida’s coy, playful, even somewhat sacrilegious “Circumfession” was written from his apartment in Santa Monica, while he was a visiting professor at the University of California Irvine, his mother dying on the Mediterranean coast in Nice at the time. Derrida leverages the parallels with his ancient North African forebear (Derrida grew up on Rue St. Augustin in Algiers) to wrestle with his own identity, as an exile from his homeland (even in his homeland), and how he “passes for an atheist.”22 Lyotard likewise substantively revisited Augustine in a posthumous volume. And since then, Sorbonne professor Jean-Luc Marion has published his own book on Augustine.23 We don’t need to “make” Augustine postmodern: the postmodern is already Augustinian. We are already Augustinian; we just didn’t know it.

  Augustine is our contemporary. He has directly and indirectly shaped the way we understand our pursuits, the call to authenticity. In some ways, he put us on the road we’re on. It’s why he continues to fascinate.

  Mark Lilla, in a review of Robin Lane Fox’s biography of Augustine, succinctly encapsulates the choice that is before us:

  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’ve been asking Augustine’s questions for a century. Perhaps it’s time to consider his answer.

  A Refugee Spirituality

  How to Live Between

  We cultivate indifference as a cocoon. We make irony a habit because the safety of maintaining a knowing distance works as a defense. If you can’t find what matters, conclude that nothing matters. If the hunger for home is always and only frustrated, decide “the road is life.”

  Such concession is the cultivated posture of Meursault, the antihero at the center of Albert Camus’s breakout novel, The Stranger. He exhibits an odd aloofness from the very beginning. He can’t remember which day his mother died. The day after receiving the telegram, he is laughing and frolicking with Marie in the Mediterranean Sea. Puzzled when he puts on a black tie, Marie asks in jest whether he’s in mourning.

  I told her Maman had died. She wanted to know how long ago, so I said, “Yesterday
.” She gave a little start but didn’t say anything. I felt like telling her it wasn’t my fault, but I stopped myself because I remembered that I’d already said that to my boss. It didn’t mean anything. Besides, you always feel a little guilty.1

  And are.

  Later in the novel, his guilt well established, Meursault is imprisoned. But 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. When your only visitor is your lawyer, convince yourself hell is other people. When happiness eludes you, believe that eschewing happiness makes you happy. You can learn to stifle the stubborn suggestions otherwise, as Meursault learned. During the incessant drone of his trial, through “all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul,” he says,