On the Road with Saint Augustine

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On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 6

by James K. A. Smith


  But when he returns to Africa, he finds himself suspect there now too. His meteoric rise through Roman channels of power is a sign to some African compatriots (Berbers and Donatists) that he’s gone over to the other side. He is tainted with “foreignness” even at home now. And so he is caught between worlds, between classes, falling through the cracks of belonging by virtue of his emigration and return. Indeed, one could describe him the way Zweig describes a fellow traveler: an “amphibian between two worlds.”25

  For Augustine, this experience turns out to be a hermeneutic key to the human condition, a place from which he read the Bible, understood himself, and grasped something about humanity’s cosmic sojourn. In a provocative, creatively anachronistic proposal, historian Justo González sees in Augustine the makings of a mestizo and suggests that this experience of tenuous hybridity was both a burden and a fund for theological creativity. González summarizes the concept:

  To be a mestizo is to belong to two realities and at the same time not to belong to either of them. A Mexican-American reared in Texas among people of Euro-American culture is repeatedly told that he is a Mexican—that is, that he does not really belong in Texas. But if that Mexican-American crosses the border hoping to find there his land and his people, he is soon disappointed by being rejected, or at least criticized, as somewhat Americanized—or, as Mexicans would say, for being a pocho.26

  “Augustine’s restlessness,” González observes, “was not due only to his distance from God, as he tells us in his Confessions, but also to the inner struggles of a person in whom two cultures, two legacies, two world visions clashed and mingled—in short, of a mestizo.”27 Even Augustine’s home was hybrid, which prepared him for his later experiences of emigration and return, all informing a theology of the Christian life as one of migration, a quest for a home one has never seen. Joy is arriving at the home you’ve never been to.

  One can hear this paradoxical notion—a homeland where one has never lived—in a letter to Nectarius in which Augustine praises him for his devotion to his patria, his hometown, but urges him to look for another country, a “much finer city,” “a certain country beyond.” The beautiful paradox is that this heavenly city is waiting to be discovered as another “hometown” by Nectarius, ready to welcome him as it already welcomed his father.28 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. This is not the mere joy of return; it is the joy of the refugee who has found a home. For Augustine, this isn’t just the situation of the expat; it is the human condition, we sojourners navigating our not-at-home-ness and our built-in hunger for a home, code-switching between comfort here in the world and longing to be anywhere but here, made for another world but immersed in this one, variously asking, “Are we there yet?” and “Do we have to go?”

  This between-ness, as Augustine imagines it, is a dynamic space of movement. I am pulled in two different directions, and the question is how I’ll navigate this sense that I find myself here (“thrown” here, as Heidegger might have put it) but with an inexplicable longing for somewhere else. I’m an alien here, even though “here” is the only place I’ve ever lived.29 In contrast to Sisyphus’s manufactured happiness—resolving to imagine his punishment as joy, settling for the situation in which he finds himself—Augustine imagines the human condition like that of the émigré in search of not just the security of a home but peace, rest, joy. One of the distinguishing markers of the happy life found in God is a joy and delight that could not be achieved otherwise—a rest and contentment that stems from being found. The “authentic happy life,” Augustine concludes, is “to set one’s joy on you, grounded in you and caused by you. That is the real thing, and there is no other.”30 Those found by God find in him “the joy that you yourself are to them.”

  Augustine frames this search as a quest, a pilgrimage to the country called joy, where we find peace and rest because we find ourselves in the God who welcomes us home. Like the exhausted refugee, fatigued by vulnerability, what we crave is rest. “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”31 This insight in the opening paragraph of the Confessions is echoed at the very end of book 13: “‘Lord God, grant us peace; for you have given us all things’ (Isa. 26:12), the peace of quietness, the peace of the sabbath.”32 The soul’s hunger for peace is a longing for a kind of rest from anxiety and frantic pursuits—it is to rest in God. And for Augustine, to find this rest—to entrust ourselves to the one who holds us—is to find joy. “In your gift we find our rest,” Augustine concludes. “There are you our joy. Our rest is our peace.”33 Joy, for Augustine, is characterized by a quietude that is the opposite of anxiety—the exhale of someone who has been holding her breath out of fear or worry or insecurity. It is the blissful rest of someone who realizes she no longer has to perform; she is loved. We find joy in the grace of God precisely because he is the one we don’t have to prove anything to. But it is also the exhale of someone who has arrived—who can finally breathe after making it through the anxiety-inducing experience of the border crossing, seeking refuge, subject to the capricious whims of a world and system that could turn on her at any moment. What we long for is an escape not from creaturehood but from the fraught, harrowing experience of being human in a broken world. What we’re hoping for is a place where a sovereign Lord can assure us, “You’re safe here.”

  It’s not that the temporal, material world is foreign to me, as if I’m a fallen angel who’s been punished by being embodied (which is closer to the Platonism Augustine ultimately refused); it’s that I’ve been made for enchantment. The earthy, embodied, material world that is all I’ve known would be “natural” for me if I didn’t have a penchant for treating it as an end in itself. It’s precisely when I try to make creation my home—when I disenchant it as an end in itself—that it becomes a foreign country, that “distant land” of the prodigal’s wandering: arid, barren, a region of nothingness even if it’s filled with earthly delights. As French theologian Henri de Lubac would later put it, we are made with a natural desire for the supernatural.34 When I try to convince myself that “nature” is all I need—when I, like Camus, try to convince myself that exile is natural, that any other home is a fiction—I am effacing a built-in desire. And the suppression and deflection of that desire generates all kinds of pretzeled, frustrating machinations of self-denial. For Augustine, those moments of “uncanniness”—of Unheimlich not-at-home-ness—are like postcards from the self you’re called to be.

  The question is whether this tension of the between becomes a catalyst for pilgrimage—prompting me, like Abraham, to answer the call and “Go!”—or whether I try to decamp in that distant country, turning my exile into arrival, suppressing my sense that there must be something more, that another shore is calling. For Augustine, so much of our restlessness and disappointment is the result of trying to convince ourselves that we’re already home. The alternative is not escapism; it is a refugee spirituality—unsettled yet hopeful, tenuous but searching, eager to find the hometown we’ve never been to.

  LIKE HIS REALIST spirituality, Augustine’s refugee spirituality is an account of what the Christian life feels like. The disciple as much as anyone finds herself between, on the way, fatigued yet hopeful. 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.

  Under the stunning Duomo in Milan is an archaeological area where visitors can see the remains of the baptismal font where Ambrose baptized Augustine during the Easter Vigil of 387. The octagonal shape of the large pool speaks to the hope of “eighth-day” renewal—the hope that catechumens, upon arising from the watery “grave,” would be a new creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). While it was Ambrose who broke through Augustine’s deepest intellectual skepticism about Christianity, what he
found in Ambrose, he tells us, was a father who showed kindness, welcomed him, enfolded him.35 Augustine, unsettled and anxious, an African outsider in Milan, was welcomed by Ambrose as by an ambassador of the country for which he was made, for which he had been sighing all these years. Perhaps that’s why, while I was in the cathedral proper, I was fascinated by the Chrismon of Saint Ambrose, preserved on the wall of the sanctuary (see figure 4). Constructed of the Chi Rho (a symbol consisting of the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ) and the Alpha and Omega of Revelation 22:13, it struck me how much the Chrismon looked like a compass, and how Ambrose had led Augustine to the one who is “the Way,” setting him on the road with a new orientation. He emerged from the waters of baptism as an émigré with a new passport declaring his heavenly citizenship (Phil. 3:20). He had miles to go before he’d sleep, but now he knew where home was.

  The Christian isn’t just a pilgrim but a refugee, a migrant in search of refuge. The Christian life isn’t just a pilgrimage but a journey of emigration. Augustine, in his writings, would often use the Latin word peregrinatio to speak of the Christian life, and most translations of his work render the cognates of peregrinatio in terms of pilgrimage. But that doesn’t quite fit the journey Augustine is describing. 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.36 We are not just pilgrims on a sacred march to a religious site; we are migrants, strangers, resident aliens en route to a patria, a homeland we’ve never been to. God is the country we’re looking for, “that place where true consolation of our migration is found.”37

  In fact, it is important that, as peregrini, we are we and not just me, the solo migrant. Peregrinatio is a social event. “The essential characteristic of the true Christian,” for Augustine, “lies in his status as peregrinus, as belonging to a societas peregrina.”38 Like Israel, like migrants everywhere, we could never brave this treacherous road alone. Conversion is joining this caravan, not setting out alone. As one scholar has recently suggested, this community, this civitas Dei, this societas peregrina, is a tent city, a refugee camp on the run.39 It is a city, a civitas, Sean Hannan argues, but perhaps we’d do better to look for a model of such a city not in New York or Milan but in the refugee camps in our world today, each its own metropolis: “Think of Dadaab in Kenya (population: 245,000), Bidi-Bidi in Uganda (285,000), and (somewhat closer to Augustine’s Thagaste) the Sahrawi camps in the Algerian Maghreb (50,000–100,000, depending on which authority you consult).”40 Each is a civitas, structured, organized, and governed in a sense; but their tented tenuousness is perhaps a better reminder of the peregrini than are hulking cathedrals of stone.

  The city of God as tent city, as refugee camp, speaks to the vulnerability and risk of the life of faith, bringing out an essential aspect of Augustine’s understanding of our journey. If we look at Augustine’s understanding of peregrinatio through the synonyms of his preaching, we see an arduous picture of the Christian life, M. A. Claussen points out: “It is filled with labors and burdens, it is uncertain and long, it is hunger and thirst, sedition and temptation, a desert, filled with sighing, weeping, wailing, and tribulations.”41 This is a long way from the sham Joel Osteen sells as Your Best Life Now. If we want a snapshot of what the Christian life looks like, don’t pay attention to “the malls and the megachurch stadiums” (as Josh Ritter puts it in his song “Golden Age of Radio”): look at the suffering hopeful in Calais, France, or in McAllen, Texas. It is a vulnerability that Zweig captures:

  Only at the moment when, after some time spent in the applicants’ waiting room, I was admitted to the British office dealing with these matters, did I really understand what exchanging my passport for a document describing me as an alien meant. I had had a right to my Austrian passport. It had been the duty of every Austrian consular official or police officer to issue it to me as an Austrian citizen with full civil rights. But I had had to ask for the favour of receiving this English document issued to me as an alien, and it was a favour that could be withdrawn at any time. Overnight I had gone down another step in the social scale. Yesterday I had still been a foreign guest with something of the status of a gentleman, spending his internationally earned money here and paying his taxes, but now I was an emigrant, a refugee.42

  Zweig backhandedly highlights what Augustine sees as a feature of the migrant city of God: it is well aware of its dependence. If these tent cities remind us of the tenuousness of the migrant family that is the body of Christ, they also remind us that the migrant soul is one that is aware of its dependence and is animated by hope.

  González sees in Augustine’s experiences the fuel for his theological imagination: “Augustine combined all of this with his own mestizaje—he, who was both African and Roman, and therefore both and neither one nor the other—in order to develop a philosophy of history, a vision of God’s action, that did not depend on Roman civilization, and in which even the Visigoths had a place.”43 The migrant soul, a stranger in the earthly city, citizen of the heavenly city, lives lightly. Not being at home anywhere, looking for the home that is the refuge of the city of God, the Christian can also, with a kind of sanctified indifference, manage to pitch her tent anywhere. This indifference is not quietist or escapist. Indeed, it is worth noting that Augustine was particularly sensitive to those seeking sanctuary in a very concrete, temporal sense. He preserved the basilica as a place of sanctuary and erred on the side of offering refuge even when it was a risk. As he once told his congregation, “There are three types of people who take refuge in the church: the good who are fleeing the wicked; the wicked fleeing from the good; and the wicked who are fleeing from the wicked. How can such a knot be untangled? It’s better to give sanctuary to one and all.”44 It’s no mistake that God enjoins his peregrinating people to be especially attuned to the fate of the vulnerable: widows, orphans, and strangers.

  ANTHROPOLOGISTS TALK ABOUT what they call “stranger value”: “While insiders find it difficult to see the world from any point of view other than their own, the pariah has no fixed position, no territory to defend, no interest to protect. As a visitor and sojourner, as one who is always being moved on, he is much freer than the good citizen to put himself in the place of another.”45 The pilgrim and sojourner has an outsider status that brings the gift of insight. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, anthropologist Michael Jackson talks about this “visiting imagination” as “the work of exiles”: “The art of ethnography is to turn this deterritorialization to good account, to make a virtue out of not being at home in the world.”46

  My goal in the rest of this book is to introduce you to Augustine as an ancient ethnographer of our present, of us—someone who has “stranger value” both because he is a citizen migrating to kingdom come, never quite at home in the world, and as a stranger to our time who nonetheless seems to have read our mail, so to speak. In On the Road, Sal thought Dean was “the perfect guy for the road because he was actually born on the road.” Augustine was also born on the road, in a way; indeed, he thinks we’re all born on the road, on our way into self-imposed exile, looking for home in all the wrong places. The difference between Dean and Augustine is not their experience of the road; it’s what they make of it. If you still find the chase exhilarating; if you’re still convinced “the road is life”; if life to you feels like an open-top joyride in pursuit of the next experience, the next thrill, the next conquest, then Dean is likely going to look like your guide and exemplar.

  But if the road has beat you down; if the sights have become predictable and tired, and there are nights that you look at your friends in the car and wonder, “What the hell are we doing? Please just let me out”; if you’re weary from the chase, broken by the journey, tired of the disappointment, unsettled by a sense that you’d like to find some rest not in accomplishment but in welcome, then
Augustine might be the stranger you could travel with for a while. Not because he’s going to blow sunshine and tell you feel-good stories, and not because he’s going to fast-track you to rest (beware of any religious types who roll up in a DeLorean promising time travel to either a nostalgic past or a pristine future). Augustine is the perfect guy for the road because he’s been on it and is sympathetic to all our angst on the way. There’s almost nothing you’re going to tell him that he hasn’t already heard. You’d be surprised by what a patient listener he is. He was born on the road, and he’s seen right through “the road is life” philosophy. He knows who he is, whose he is, and where he’s headed, and almost everything he writes is an effort to help fellow migrants on the way find an orientation that feels like peace. You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.

  Freedom: How to Escape

  What do I want when I want to be liberated?

  The road is iconic because it is the symbol of liberation. From On the Road to Easy Rider to Thelma and Louise, the road is a ribbon that wends away from convention, obligation, and the oppression of domesticity. Freedom looks like the top down, hair whipping brazenly in the wind, refusing to be constrained, en route to “Wide Open Spaces” (Dixie Chicks). It’s hitting the road and heading west, loading up the car and leaving for college, hopping on a bus to New York City, backpacking through Europe, or hitchhiking to Memphis.

  While modernity has made this myth almost universal, the mythology is particularly potent in the United States, land of the free, born from a fight for independence then gobbling up a continent with a network of railways and interstate highways. When you crest the Toano Range on I-80 and the salt flats of Utah stretch a hundred miles in front of you, it can feel like the vast horizon is an expanse of possibility that keeps unfolding under vaulted skies. Your soul swells with potential. It’s why getting your driver’s license is a coveted rite of passage, one of the only ones left in our culture. To put the key in the ignition and roll out of the driveway is the on-ramp to independence. On the road there’s room to move, unhindered by walls and, more importantly, unconstrained by “their” rules, out from the hovering, watchful eye of the Man and your mom and Mr. Wilson next door. If we worship the automobile it’s because it’s the glossy god that gives us our freedom. So we build altars to the Corvette, the Mustang, and the motorcycle as vehicles that liberate us, symbols of our autonomy. “Here are the keys” is a quasi-sacramental pronouncement that unleashes you to finally be yourself. The highway is my way.

 

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