OF COURSE, THE road is already somebody else’s idea of where you should go. The highway is not a blank slate; it is a network of channels laid down where many others wore a path before. The irony is that even when you’re alone on the open road you’re following somebody. To answer the call of the asphalt is to follow “them.” But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
AUGUSTINE REMINDS US how ancient the identification of freedom with leaving is. Long before there were Shelby Mustangs and Route 66 and rebels without a cause, the prodigal was itching for freedom from the scowl of his father and the scolding of his mother. If freedom is the absence of constraint, it will never be found at home.
Augustine’s arrival in Carthage as a student anticipates countless fraternity and sorority rushes in the centuries to come. Unfettered, with room to get his elbows (and various other appendages) out, he swells to fill more space, chasing all kinds of new opportunities and delights. He falls “in love with love,” he recalls. “I rushed headlong into love, by which I was longing to be captured.”1 It’s funny how we can consider being captured as “freedom” as long as we’re the ones who choose it, like every time I click “Agree” and voluntarily give myself over to the whims of Google and Apple.
So the young Augustine uses his newfound freedom to devote himself to pursuits that will conscript him. His appetites become voracious. He will be captivated by theatrical shows, giving himself over to entertainments that will enslave him to his own passions. He falls in love with love, but he also falls in love with suffering, not unlike the way we love to mourn on social media.2 Freedom is the right to be titillated, entertained, absorbed, all on one’s own terms. Freedom is freedom from, and the way to get from is to leave.
This notion of freedom is the only freedom we know now: freedom as self-determination. The freedom to decide what is my own good is enshrined in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”3 Freedom means, “Hands off, I’ve got this. I know what I want.” I’ll know I’m free when I get to decide what’s good for me, when every choice is a blank check of opportunity and possibility.
In fact, we call such freedom “authenticity” and don’t even realize how much this is a trickle-down effect from existentialist philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre. In the laborious prose of Being and Time, Heidegger sketches the outlines of many a Hollywood screenplay to follow. Buried in the Teutonic heaviness of being-towards-death, what really interests Heidegger is the way my confrontation with death can disclose possibility in ways I never consider when I’m immersed in conformity to the tired habits of mass society (what Heidegger calls “the they” [das Man], as in what “they” always say you should do). The point isn’t to be fixated on death or to try to imagine what it is like to die (impossible, for Heidegger); rather, in facing up to my death there is the possibility of my realizing that nothing is set in stone for me—the horizon of possibility is endless. Being-towards-death, Heidegger says, is to live in anticipation, to live toward possibility.4 It’s the realization that what’s possible is up to me and only me (my “ownmost” possibility, as Heidegger puts it): there is a potential for me to be if only I will realize it, if I will answer the “call.”5 But this call isn’t coming from someone else. It isn’t just another mode of conformity. I’m calling myself. And that is authenticity: realizing some possibility on my own terms.6 It doesn’t matter what you choose; what matters is that you choose. Freedom is getting to make up what counts as the Good for yourself.
THIS IS NOT unlike what Augustine thought freedom was when he first made his way to Carthage and later to Rome. What he hadn’t anticipated, and what he tried to ignore even as he was experiencing it, was the exhaustion of it all. What he envisioned as freedom—the removal of constraints—started to feel like a punishment. The obliteration of boundaries looked like liberation to the young Augustine; but he could feel himself dissolving in the resulting amorphousness. When you’re swimming in a tiny aboveground pool at your cousin’s house and keep bumping up against the walls, you start wishing they weren’t there. But when, in your rambunctiousness, you succeed in knocking them down, you realize the pool didn’t get bigger: it just disappeared. You’re left in the soggy ruins. “I was storm-tossed,” Augustine confesses in retrospect, “gushing out, running every which way, frothing into thin air in my filthy affairs.”7 Freedom to be myself starts to feel like losing myself, dissolving, my own identity slipping between my fingers.
What’s emerging here isn’t just an admission of failure; rather, it’s the problem of getting exactly what you want. In the reframing of his experiences, Augustine comes to a radically different way of thinking about freedom. When you’ve been eaten up by your own freedom, and realize the loss of guardrails only meant ending up in the ditch, you start to wonder whether freedom is all it’s cracked up to be—or whether freedom might be something other than the absence of constraint and the multiplication of options. For Patty Berglund in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, this illusion of freedom is pulled back in a moment of self-pity. “Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.”8
The luxury of unfettered agency coupled with the multiplication of options should be a formula for liberation. But Patty, like so many others, finds that this only leads to a different kind of misery. For a long while, the pleasures offered by such “freedom” can give the allure of fullness; imagining ourselves denied for so long, the new possibilities opened up by taking off the yoke feel like the realization of new potential—like this is what it’s all about, what we’re made for, what freedom feels like. But then, like the child on a field trip sidling up to the dinner buffet without his mother curtailing his appetite, he slowly reaches the point where his freedom feels like nausea. Engorged, he’s rethinking his choices. On the far side of such freedom, sometimes a long way down the road, is regret. The shadow cast by this kind of freedom can be very dark. “I loved my own ways, not yours,” Augustine realized. “The liberty I loved was merely that of a runaway.”9 Hounded, haunted, pursued, exhausted: sounds like an ugly sort of freedom.
In fact such freedom often slides back into its own form of enslavement. In his Carthage revel, Augustine made his way “to the shackles of gratification, and was gleefully trussed up in those afflicting bonds.”10 This dynamic of freedom lost—especially a lost freedom experienced as if it were liberation—would occupy Augustine for the rest of his life. Indeed, when he recalls the cataclysm of his conversion, the revolution of love that grace brought about, it comes down to a question of freedom because he had ultimately come to see himself in chains. If he had hoped to find himself—and freedom—by escaping the constraints of home, by the time he’s in Milan, Augustine realizes he is his own worst master. His only hope is to escape, but he has concluded that is impossible. He is Sisyphus. But he gave himself the stone.
It is a terrible and terrifying thing to know what you want to be and then realize you’re the only one standing in your way—to want with every fiber of your soul to be someone different, to escape the “you” you’ve made of yourself, only to fall back into the self you hate, over and over and over again. After the thrill of independence and experiments in self-actualization, drinking your so-called “potential for Being” to the dregs, when the exhaustion starts to set in and then eventually morphs into a kind of self-disgust, you can reach a point where you know you want a different life but are enchained to the one you’ve made.
This was the point Augustine eventually reached. When he glimpsed a different way of life, seeing the example of peers who had
chosen the Way and relinquished power and privilege and success to follow the One humiliated on a cross, he found new desires bubbling up within him: “I sighed after such freedom,” he recalls, “but was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice.”11 He’s back to feeling bound, hemmed in, constricted. But now the culprit isn’t Mother or the Man; c’est moi. The freedom he chased was a chain in disguise. What Augustine offers now is a rereading of his own so-called freedom.
How did his freedom end up being a prison? Augustine identifies the links in the chain that read like a chronicle of the road he’s been on. “The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity. By these links, as it were, connected one to another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint.”12 The first link in the chain that binds him was his own free choice. The trajectory here will feel familiar: the night he made that choice, he caught a taste for blood, as it were, a taste for flesh, a passion that primed him to try again. Eventually, that satisfaction of the passion settles into the predictability of a habit—probably just about the time that it’s no longer a pleasure. The honeymoon is over; the thrill has lost the sheen of novelty; one hit isn’t enough. But by then the habit has become a necessity and what I want is a moot point: this is what I’ll chase because this is what I need.
At first it looks like he’s blaming someone else. “The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain for me to hold me prisoner.” But that’s only because he gave the enemy the key. “I was responsible for the fact that habit had become so embattled against me; for it was with my consent that I came to the place in which I did not wish to be.”13 I am my own jailer.
WHAT AUGUSTINE DESCRIBES is the “freedom” of the addict. The habit that becomes a necessity, the sighing after an impossible freedom, the longing for a new will, the despair of ever overcoming it. Indeed, he goes on to draw a picture of someone who can’t get out of bed, and it sounds a lot like an existential hangover: “The burden of the world weighed me down with a sweet drowsiness such as commonly occurs during sleep.” He felt like “those who would like to get up but are overcome by deep sleep and sink back again.” He hates himself for doing it, but at the same time “he is glad to take a bit longer.”14 But then he realizes this isn’t just laziness; it’s a kind of involuntary paralysis, like waking up to find your limbs heavy, foreign, unresponsive to your wishes. Unable to say what you want, even your screaming is internal, and you wonder if someone will find you and deliver you from the tomb that is your bed. This is what the Fleet Foxes call “helplessness blues.”
To read Augustine in the twenty-first century is to gain a vantage point that makes all of our freedom look like addiction. When we imagine freedom only as negative freedom15—freedom from constraint, hands-off liberty to choose what I want—then our so-called freedom is actually inclined to captivity. When freedom is mere voluntariness, without further orientation or goals, then my choice is just another means by which I’m trying to look for satisfaction. Insofar as I keep choosing to try to find that satisfaction in finite, created things—whether it’s sex or adoration or beauty or power—I’m going to be caught in a cycle where I’m more and more disappointed in those things and more and more dependent on those things. I keep choosing things with diminishing returns, and when that becomes habitual, and eventually necessary, then I forfeit my ability to choose. The thing has me now.
In her remarkable book The Recovering, Leslie Jamison provides both an insider account of addiction (and recovery) and a curated anthology of how writers have borne witness to their captivity. Addiction, she says, “is always a story that has already been told, because it inevitably repeats itself, because it grinds down—ultimately, for everyone—to the same demolished and reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.”16 As a clinician later described it to her, addiction always ends up as a “narrowing of repertoire”: life contracts to a fixation on what you can’t live without, and the rhythms of a day, a life, are engineered to secure this thing that never satisfies, is never enough.17 The shame of this has its own perverted delusion: an addict’s pride in the genius it takes to satisfy an addiction.
But you can’t self-help your way out of this. Every addict who breaks free of this bondage comes to that realization. “The Big Book of AA,” Jamison notes, “was initially called The Way Out. Out of what? Not just drinking, but the claustrophobic crawl space of the self.”18 Coming to the end of oneself is the way out of disordered freedom. And so the irony: my freedom of choice brings me to the point where I need someone else to give me a will that is actually free. And not merely free to choose—since that’s what got me here in the first place—but free to choose the good. If freedom is going to be more than mere freedom from, if freedom is the power of freedom for, then I have to trade autonomy for a different kind of dependence. Coming to the end of myself is the realization that I’m dependent on someone other than myself if I’m going to be truly free. Jamison recalls her own epiphany in this regard: “I needed to believe in something stronger than my willpower.” Her own willpower was inadequate to secure her liberation. “This willpower was a fine-tuned machine, fierce and humming, and it had done plenty of things—gotten me straight A’s, gotten my papers written, gotten me through cross-country training runs—but when I’d applied it to drinking, the only thing I felt was that I was turning my life into a small, joyless clenched fist.” The turning point of recovering was her coming to the end of herself, turning outward and upward to what AA simply calls the Higher Power: “The Higher Power that turned sobriety into more than deprivation was simply not me. That was all I knew.”19
A reflection from Augustine is poignant and encouraging here: “To desire the aid of grace is the beginning of grace.”20 If you come to the end of yourself and wonder if there’s help and are surprised to find yourself at times hoping for a grace from beyond, it’s a sign that grace is already at work. Keep asking. You don’t have to believe in order to ask. Here’s the thing: You can ask for help believing too. Wanting help is its own nascent trust. The desire for grace is the first grace. Coming to the end of your self-sufficiency is the first revelation.
THIS OUTWARD, UPWARD turn is Augustinian. It is the posture of a dependence that liberates, a reliance that releases. Once you’ve realized you need someone not you, you also look at constraint differently. What used to look like walls hemming you in start to look like scaffolding holding you together. If freedom used to look like the no-obligation bliss of self-actualization, once that unfettered freedom has become its own bondage you look at obligations as a restraint that gives you a purpose, a center, the rebar of identity. When Augustine looks back at the way his younger self poured his soul out into sand, he cries: “If only someone could have imposed restraint on my disorder. That would have transformed to good purpose the fleeting experiences of beauty in these lowest of things, and fixed limits to indulgence in their charms.” Instead, “I in my misery seethed and followed the driving force of my impulses, abandoning you. I exceeded all the bounds set by your law.”21
We might be surprised by how many people are hoping someone will give them boundaries, the gift of restraint, channeling their desires and thereby shoring up a sense of self. Indeed, there may be a generational dynamic to this, where boomers—whose revolution of negative freedom remade the world—imagine younger generations wanting the same but instead hear those young people asking for the gift of constraint, the charity of boundaries.22
This is not unlike Augustine’s frustration with his father. Rather than encouraging his son to channel his desires, Augustine’s father only encouraged his frizzante dissolution with “the sort of tipsy glee in which this sorry world has forgotten you, its creator, and fallen in love instead with something you’ve created; it’s from the unseen wine of a self-willfulness distorted and tipped down into the depths.”23 He was being parented by someone still drunk
on negative freedom, who hadn’t yet reached the point of realizing this wasn’t freedom at all. As he’ll later write to some monks in North Africa, “Free choice is sufficient for evil, but hardly for good.”24 Free choice got me into this mess, he realizes, but it can’t get me out.
Augustine needs help. The most revolutionary hope would be a new will—one with not only the desire but the power to choose the good. But the help Augustine needs can’t come from just anyone; it has to come from Someone who has the power to give him this power, Someone with the mercy to share, Someone who is a giver. He needs Someone like the prodigal’s father, who was a giver from the get-go. And so, back in a garden once again, he can see home, as it were, from a long way off.
But to reach that destination one does not use ships or chariots or feet. It was not even necessary to go the distance I had come from the house to where we were sitting. The one necessary condition, which meant not only going but at once arriving there, was to have the will to go—provided only that the will was strong and unqualified, not the turning and twisting first this way, then that, of a will half-wounded, struggling with one part rising up and the other part falling down.25
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 7
