Augustine needs the help of Someone who can resurrect a will, gift him with a freedom he’s never had. He’s tried the alternative and is exhausted: “Without you, what am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?”26 Do you really trust yourself with yourself?
Augustine’s account honors the complexity of our experience. He recognizes that knowing what to do isn’t enough. He names that experience of feeling divided, like there are two (or more!) of me. “The self which willed to serve was identical with the self which was unwilling. It was I. I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling. So I was in conflict with myself and was dissociated from myself.” But even this dissociation and self-alienation “came about against my will.”27 In one of his earliest works, shortly after his conversion, Augustine framed this as the paradox of our unhappiness: “How does anyone suffer an unhappy life by his will, since absolutely no one wills to live unhappily?”28 They’re unhappy, not because they choose to be but because their will is in such a condition that it can’t choose what would ultimately make them happy.
He’s “torn apart” in this painful condition; “old loves” hold him back; “the overwhelming force of habit was saying to me: ‘Do you think you can live without them?’” His heart is a battleground of loves, manifesting in a body that is contorted and weeping.29 Is there a Way Out, as the recovery program put it?
GRACE IS THE answer to that question. Grace is the answer to the call for help. Grace isn’t just forgiveness, a covering, an acquittal; it is an infusion, a transplant, a resurrection, a revolution of the will and wants. It’s the hand of a Higher Power that made you and loves you reaching into your soul with the gift of a new will. Grace is freedom.
But the paradox (or irony)—especially to those of us conditioned by the myth of autonomy, who can imagine freedom only as freedom from—is that this gracious infusion of freedom comes wrapped in the gift of constraint, the gift of the law, a command that calls us into being.30 This was Augustine’s experience: in that fabled garden, he hears children chanting a curious song, “Pick up and read, pick up and read.” The fateful moment is hermeneutic: “I interpreted it solely as a divine command.”31 The tortured soul will be called into new life by obeying a command. And what was that command? To read. And so Augustine, in a way that is almost cartoonish, picks up the volume of Paul’s epistles lying nearby, breaks it open, and seizes on the first verse he sees—which, not unsurprisingly, is also a command: “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13:13–14). “I neither wished nor needed to read further,” Augustine recalls. “At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart.”32
Augustine deconstructs our false dichotomies between grace and obedience, freedom and constraint, because he has a radically different conception of freedom that we’ve forgotten in modernity: freedom not as permission but as power, the freedom of graced empowerment, freedom for. Such freedom doesn’t expand with the demolishing of boundaries or the evisceration of constraints; rather, it flourishes when a good will is channeled toward the Good by constraints that are gifts. That’s not the shape of a ho-hum life of rule-following; it’s an invitation to a life that is secure enough to risk, centered enough to be courageous, like the rails of a roller coaster that let you do loop after loop. It’s the grace that guards your being, the gift that gives you your self again. It’s why the father exclaims upon the prodigal’s return: “This son of mine was dead and is alive again” (Luke 15:24).
THERE IS A scandal here for our autonomous sense of entitlement: this new will, this graced freedom, is sheer gift. It can’t be earned or accomplished, which is an affront to our meritocratic sensibilities. “The human will does not attain grace through its freedom, but rather attains its freedom through grace.”33 If Augustine spent half his life battling the heresy of Pelagianism—the pretension that the human will was sufficient to choose its good—it’s because he saw it as the great lie that left people enchained to their dissolute wills. And no one is more Pelagian than we moderns.
But it’s a long way from that garden to kingdom come. Augustine has many miles to go before he sleeps. If he might have first been enthused about some here-and-now attainment of perfection, then eventually his own experience, and the realities of pastoral care, disabused him of any illusions that this struggle is over. What we see across his letters and sermons and subsequent writing is an understanding of renewed freedom that reflects the temporal journey of the pilgrim soul. The story of the soul is still unfolding. Grace is a game-changer, not a game-ender. I’m not who I used to be; I’m on the way to being who I’m called to be; but I’m not there yet, Augustine counsels. His spiritual realism harbors no illusions about hasty arrival even as it nourishes his unflagging hope of getting there.
The graced soul gifted with freedom is still on the way, still sighing after an ultimate release from the parts of myself I hate and hide. This longing, for Augustine, is eschatological—a kingdom-come hunger: “What shall be more free than free choice when it is unable to be enslaved to sin?”34 It’s not that nothing’s changed. Grace gives a power I couldn’t have found in myself. So now I’m on this road strung between the Fall and the Parousia. I’m better off than Adam, but I’m not yet home. “The first freedom of the will was therefore to be able not to sin; the final freedom will be much greater: not to be able to sin.”35 My graced freedom in Christ now is better than that “first freedom” given at creation, though even that first freedom was a grace.36 A “second grace . . . more potent” has made it possible for me, even now, to choose the good: a grace “by which it also comes to pass that one wills, and wills so greatly, wishing with so strong an ardor, that he overcomes.”37 But I’m still awaiting a “final” freedom, when the vestiges of my old will are eviscerated, and there are no more mornings when I wake up hating myself, ashamed, even if I “know” I’m forgiven. That grace has already broken in like a dawn; I’m waiting for the splendor of its noontide light that never ends and for the shadows of my old self to dissolve.
The Christian life is a pilgrimage of hope. We live between the first and the final freedom; we are still on the way. Grateful for the second grace, we await the final.38 And we are emboldened in our waiting on the way by the example of the martyrs. They give us hope that we might find the power to choose well.
In fact, greater freedom is necessary against so many great temptations that did not exist in Paradise—a freedom defended and fortified by the gift of perseverance, so that this world, with all its loves and terrors and errors, may be overcome. The martyrdom of the saints has taught us this. In the end, using free choice with no terrors and moreover against the command of the terrifying God, Adam did not stand fast in his great happiness, in his ready ability not to sin. The martyred saints, though, have stood fast in their faith, even though the world—I do not say “terrified” them, but rather savagely attacked them—in order that they not stand fast. . . . Where does this come from, if not by God’s gift?39
These martyrs give us hope because, in fact, they are just like us: although their wills had been enslaved, they were “set free by Him Who said: ‘If the Son sets you free, then you shall truly be free’ [John 8:36].”40
WHAT DOES IT look like to live in such hope on the way? It takes practice. It is a life characterized by clear-eyed self-knowledge, for starters. Such self-knowledge Augustine learned from Ambrose. As he wrote to a group of monks in Marseille, citing the Bishop of Milan, “‘Our hearts and our thoughts are not in our power.’ Everyone who is humble and genuinely religious recognizes that this is entirely true.”41 At the end of the tract, he returns to this insight from Ambrose with further practical advice, pointing out that the same person who said, “our hearts and our thoughts are not in our power” also says, “Who is so happy as one who always ascends in his heart? But without divine assistance who can make it happen?”42 And
where do we learn to turn our hearts upward?
The language would have been all too familiar: this is the sursum corda, the opening invocation of the Eucharist: “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord!” Where do we learn to live into this freedom on the way? Where do we learn the graced dependence that sets us free? It’s not magic, Augustine counsels: look no further than “the sacraments of the faithful.”43 The cadences of worship are the rhythms where we learn to be free.
Freedom takes practice; the liberation of dependence has its own scripts. This has nothing to do with ritualistic earning, let alone with some bottom-up willpower on our part. To the contrary, the point of the sacraments is that they are embodied conduits of grace that nourish new habits.44 We can see the echo of this insight in Jamison’s account of AA meetings:
Meetings worked in all kinds of different ways. Some had a speaker who gave her story, and then other people shared in response. Others started with everyone taking turns reading paragraphs of an alcoholic’s story from the Big Book, or with someone choosing a topic: Shame. Not forgetting the past. Anger. Changing habits. I began to realize why it was important to have a script, a set of motions you followed: First we’ll say this invocation. Then we’ll read from this book. Then we’ll raise hands. It meant you didn’t have to build the rituals of fellowship from scratch. You lived in the caves and hollows of what had worked before.45
A bit like following a path someone has already blazed for you. On the road, you’re always already following somebody. The question is: Who are you following and where are they headed?
This deconstructs the myth of authenticity bound up with negative freedom. In that story, I’m authentic if I’m “sincere,” and I’m only sincere if I act as if I’m making things up from scratch, expressing something “inside” me that’s all my own. Augustine—and Jamison—are turning that on its head. You do to be. Jamison realized that learned dependence on a Higher Power required the awkward, messy business of getting on her knees to pray. “I understand arranging my body into a certain position twice a day as a way to articulate commitment rather than a bodily lie, a false pretense.”46 She had to overcome her nagging sense that she shouldn’t say what she didn’t already believe.
Years later, recovery turned this notion upside down—it made me start to believe that I could do things until I believed in them, that intentionality was just as authentic as unwilled desire. Action could coax belief rather than testifying to it. “I used to think you had to believe to pray,” David Foster Wallace once heard at a meeting. “Now I know I had it ass-backwards.” . . . Showing up for a meeting, for a ritual, for a conversation—this was an act that could be true no matter what you felt as you were doing it. Doing something without knowing if you believed it—that was proof of sincerity, rather than its absence.47
How do you practice your way into freedom, depending on the grace of the God who loves you, turning your heart out and up? Join the community of practice that is the body of Christ, lifting up your heart to the One who gave himself for you. You might be surprised to see how committing yourself to such a ritual, keeping such an obligation, translates into freedom and liberation.
IN GRETA GERWIG’S moving film Lady Bird, we meet a young woman who embodies the quest for freedom as escape. Tired of the bored, backward backwaters of Sacramento, bristling at the nagging authority of her mother, embarrassed by her father’s lack of ambition, the young heroine refuses even the name she was given, imposition that it is. Demanding to be called “Lady Bird” is just one of her acts of defiance as she chomps at the bit to get away to college, anywhere but Sacramento. (“Is that your given name?” a teacher asks her. “I gave it to myself. It’s given to me by me.” Freedom is receiving gifts from yourself.)
But at the end of the film she “comes home” without leaving her college campus. She calls her parents and leaves a voicemail. “Hi Mom and Dad. It’s me, Christine. It’s the name you gave me. It’s a good one.” Maybe the imposition was a gift after all. Maybe being named without your choosing is a sign that you’re loved.
She then speaks more directly to her mother. As she does, images of Sacramento bathed in golden light are accompanied by the plaintive soundtrack of “Reconcile” by Jon Brion. “Hey, Mom, did you feel emotional the first time you drove in Sacramento? I did, and I wanted to tell you, but we weren’t really talking when it happened. All those bends I’ve known my whole life, and stores and . . . the whole thing.”
We next see images of Christine driving around Sacramento, quietly awed and grateful, spliced with images of her mother doing the same. “I wanted to tell you. I love you. Thank you. I’m . . . thank you.”
Turns out, the “confines” of Sacramento were the scaffolding that gave her an identity; it was her Catholic school that made her compassionate; it was the “imposing” love of her mother that gave her the confidence to be herself. Home made her free.
Augustine found a Father waiting for him after he ran away. “You alone are always present even to those who have taken themselves far from you . . . after travelling many rough paths,” he testifies. “And you gently wipe away their tears, and they weep yet more and rejoice through their tears. . . . Where was I when I was seeking for you? You were there before me, but I had departed from myself. I could not even find myself, much less you.”48 But then it turns out that being free isn’t about leaving; it’s about being found.
Gabriel Marcel, a Christian among the existentialists, appreciated our road-hunger. Marcel described humanity as homo viator, “itinerate man.” But he was staunchly critical of Sartre’s view of freedom. Freedom isn’t digging a tunnel to escape, he counseled; it’s digging down into yourself. In a 1942 lecture, Marcel appeals to the wisdom of Gustave Thibon, friend of Simone Weil.
You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.49
Or, as an itinerant Rabbi once said, “Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:39).
Ambition: How to Aspire
What do I want when I want to be noticed?
Ambition is a many-splendored, much-maligned thing. Your take depends on what demons you’re trying to exorcise. If you’re surrounded by prideful, power-hungry egomaniacs bent on making a name for themselves through Babelian endeavors, ambition looks ugly, monstrous, and domineering. But if you’re surrounded by placid, passive, go-with-the-flow, aw-shucks folk who are leaving unused gifts on the table and failing to respond to their calling, then ambition looks like faithfulness. Sometimes ambition is ugly; sometimes the critique of ambition is uglier, as when powerful white men worry that others (brown women, say) are getting “uppity.”
Ambition isn’t any single thing; it can’t be simply celebrated or demonized. A recent collection of meditations on ambition by writers and poets gets at its many facets. If we were to think of ambition as a jewel, we could thus envision these different writers donning their loupes to consider it from different angles, approaching the phenomenon from their own personal histories. Some find an enticing glint, as in Jeanne Murray Walker’s meditation on the gift of encouraging ambition in young women, drawing on her own experience when she was young. “It was my mother’s ambition for her children to have ambition,” Walker recalls, for example. “My ambition is to write poetry that defeats time. . . . This ambition isn’t a drive for power in the world,” she continues. “It feels more like a journey driven by curiosity.” Here is ambition that should be stewarded and fanned into flame. “Either we are called to greatness,” Scott Cairns remarks, “or we are not called at all.”1
Others peer closer and see impurities, even
fakes—as when Emilie Griffin gazes closely at the alleged diamond of ambition and finds only the zirconia of a hunger for fame. There is a shadow side of such aspiration. “On reflection,” confesses Eugene Peterson, “I realized that I had become busy, a bastard form of ambition.” “Ambition carries us into terrible places,” suggests Erin McGraw (and I want to encourage her to add the qualifier “can”). Luci Shaw wards off “celebrity and fame, the bastard offsprings of unfettered ambition,” while Griffin warns us about the “goddess” of fame—warnings that are especially germane for an evangelical subculture so susceptible to the cult of celebrity.2
If you keep walking around the phenomenon of ambition, you’ll start to note a couple of features. First, the opposite of ambition is not humility; it is sloth, passivity, timidity, and complacency. We sometimes like to comfort ourselves by imagining that the ambitious are prideful and arrogant so that those of us who never risk, never aspire, never launch out into the deep get to wear the moralizing mantle of humility. But this imagining is often just thin cover for a lack of courage, even laziness. Playing it safe isn’t humble. Second, it is the telos of ambition that distinguishes good from bad, separating faithful aspiration from self-serving aggrandizement. Augustine never stopped being ambitious. What changed was the target, the goal, the how of his striving. What do I love when I long for achievement? That is the Augustinian question.
AUGUSTINE DRANK IN ambition with his mother’s milk. If the scrappy provincial was hankering to make it in Carthage, then Rome, climbing the ladder of recognition all the way to Milan, it’s in no small part because he was propelled by his parents. Like many before and after him, the map of Augustine’s aspiration was drawn by his parents. His ambition was imposed by the expectations of parents with their own ambitions. One of the only times you’ll hear a criticism of his mother is when Augustine thinks back to why his parents sent him to school. “They gave no consideration to the use that I might make of the things they forced me to learn. The objective they had in view was merely to satisfy the appetite for wealth and for glory, though the appetite is insatiable, the wealth is in reality destitution of spirit, and the glory something to be ashamed of.”3 That this endangered his soul was hardly their concern. “My family did not try to extricate me from my headlong course. . . . The only concern was that I should learn to speak as effectively as possible.”4 Like Andre Agassi, who hated tennis because it was his father’s dream, Augustine hated learning in no small part because his parents treated it so instrumentally, as a means to fulfill their own ladder-climbing hopes, living vicariously through the son who had no choice but to endure it.
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 8
