When he was fifteen, Augustine was called home from his studies in Madauros so that his family could save up for a better education—the next rung—in Carthage. His recounting of the situation is dripping with disdain: “During that time funds were gathered in preparation for a more distant absence at Carthage, for which my father had more enthusiasm than cash.” Many who were wealthy didn’t invest in their children’s education in this way, and so neighbors praised Patrick for this investment. “But this same father did not care what character before you I was developing, or how chaste I was so long as I possessed a cultured tongue—though my culture really meant a desert uncultivated by you, God.”5
Justo González sees in this an experience that is familiar to immigrant children—a vicarious, imposed ambition. “One may see in Monica signs of a social mestizaje that was taking place—a mestizaje in which some among the ‘Africans’ sought to climb within the social Roman ladder, very much as immigrants today who, while insisting in the value of their ancestral cultures, insist also in having their children learn the language of their adopted country and leave aside their own culture, so that they may have a great chance at social and economic success.”6 Monica the tiger mom.
But imposed ambition can come from elsewhere. In Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, his micro-epic novel about two academic couples across a lifetime, he traces the ambition that Charity, the daughter of an eminent classics professor, channels into her husband, Sid, a young English professor whose fault, in her eyes, is that he loves literature rather than the tenure game. Their best friends, Larry and Sally Morgan, reflect on what this imposed ambition has done to Sid. “He’s always comparing himself, or getting compared to other people,” Sally observes. “Charity sometimes compares him to you, and it isn’t fair. You’re a producer, he’s a consumer, a sort of connoisseur.”7 When Charity reasserts her expectations of Sid, giving him a to-do list of ambition that would have him spend his summer writing criticism of Browning, Sid just wants to write poetry and learn Italian well enough to revere Dante in the original. At heart he is a dilettante in the truest sense: he just wants to delight in these things. In an earlier discussion, Larry tells Sally that Sid’s articles on Browning are unremarkable: “‘What’s the matter with them?’ Sally asks. ‘Nothing in particular. Everything in general. His heart isn’t in them. Only her heart is.’”8
The saddest thing about imposed ambition is that it nonetheless forms us. Our resentment doesn’t inoculate us. Just because others set the path for our hearts doesn’t mean we don’t run there.
EVEN IF THE son’s ambition was originally imposed by his parents, it eventually came to be owned by the son. “I wanted to distinguish myself as an orator for a damnable and conceited purpose, namely delight in human vanity.”9 In his twenties, the chase is all his. As a “teacher of the arts they call liberal,” he was really after something else: “We pursued the empty glory of popularity, ambitious for the applause of the audience at the theatre when entering for verse competitions to win a garland of mere grass.”10 What are we looking for in our ambition? What do we hope to find at the end of our aspirations? In Augustine’s experience—like our own—the answer is complicated. There is a bundle of hopes and hungers bound up with our ambitions, but so often they boil down to the twin desires to win and to be noticed, domination and attention—to win the crown and be seen doing it.
Augustine’s map of this particular terrain of the hungry heart is as useful as ever because so little has changed. When Augustine reflects on ambition, he’s really delving into the dynamics of fame. Could anything be more contemporary? We live in an age where everybody’s famous. We’ve traded the hope of immortality for a shot at going viral. What is Instagram if not a platform for attention? Arcade Fire’s song “Creature Comfort” is a chilling assessment of the extent to which the quest for attention has almost become synonymous with the conatus essendi, our reason to be. And if we can’t have it, we’d rather not be. We
Stand in the mirror
and wait for the feedback
Saying God, make me famous
If you can’t, just make it painless.
But naming the symptoms is easy. The challenge is diagnosing the disease. The question is: What do we want when we want attention? What are we hoping for when we aspire to win this game of being noticed?
For Augustine, the only way to get to the root of this desire is to understand it as a spiritual craving. That’s why we can only truly understand disordered ambition if we read it as a kind of idolatry. If our ambition becomes a roadblock to peace, an inhibitor that robs us of the rest and joy we’re looking for, it’s because we’ve substituted something in place of the end for which we were made.
The point of discussing ambition in terms of idolatry isn’t denunciation; it’s diagnostic. Our idolatries are less like conscious decisions to believe a falsehood and more like learned dispositions to hope in what will disappoint. Our idolatries are not intellectual; they are affective—instances of disordered love and devotion. Idolatry is caught more than it is taught. We practice our way into idolatries, absorb them from the water in which we swim. Hence our idolatries often reflect the ethos of our environments. To consider ambition through the lens of idolatry is not to wag our finger in judgment but to specify the theological and spiritual nature of disorder. Augustine wants you to consider: What if, buried in your ambition, is a desire for something more, someone else? Might that explain the persistent disappointment?
For Augustine, we are made for joy. Joy is another name for the rest we find when we give ourselves over to the One who, for the joy that was set before him, gave himself for us. We find joy when we look for the satisfaction of our hungers in the Triune God who will never leave us or forsake us, when we find our enjoyment in an immortal God whose love is unfailing. That is rightly ordered love, and it is rightly ordered worship.
What, then, is idolatry? Idolatry, on this account, isn’t just a problem because it’s “false” worship, on the register of truth, or merely a transgression of a commandment (though it is both of those). Existentially, the problem with idolatry is that it is an exercise in futility, a penchant that ends in profound dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Idolatry, we might say, doesn’t “work”—which is why it creates restless hearts. In idolatry we are enjoying what we’re supposed to be using. We are treating as ultimate what is only penultimate; we are heaping infinite, immortal expectations on created things that will pass away; we are settling on some aspect of the creation rather than being referred through it to its Creator. Augustine describes this by using the metaphor of a journey: disordered love is like falling in love with the boat rather than the destination.11 The problem is that the boat won’t last forever and is going to start to feel claustrophobic. Your heart is built for another shore.
When our ambition settles, as it were, for attention or domination—when we imagine that our goal is to be noticed or to win, or both—we are actually lowering our sights. We are aiming low. The arc of our ambition hugs the earth, and we expect to find fulfillment from people looking at us, from beating everybody else in this competition for attention.
But what happens when their attention turns away, fleeting as it is? What happens after you get the grass garland, the medal, the scholarship, the promotion? How many “likes” is enough? How many followers will make you feel valued?
What if you’re wired not to be “liked” but to be loved, and not by many but by One? Could that explain why all the attention is never enough? Or why a kind of postpartum depression sets in after every “win,” every time you make it to the top of what you thought was the mountain of achievement? Why does winning leave you feeling so restless?
WHAT DO I want when I want to win? Sometimes ambition is just about competition. Then aspiration becomes just another form of the libido dominandi, the lust for domination. At some point you stop caring about the specifics of what you’re trying to accomplish and only care about doing it first, doing it be
st, doing it better than the others who are trying to do it. Standing on the top of the podium or sitting in the corner office will be evidence of your arrival.
Won’t it?
The story of a frequent flier named Ben Schlappig could be a cautionary tale in this respect. As Ben Wofford recounts in an engaging Rolling Stone profile, Schlappig, who was twenty-five at the time, “is one of the biggest stars among an elite group of obsessive flyers whose mission is to outwit the airlines. They’re self-styled competitors with a singular objective: fly for free, as much as they can, without getting caught.”12 Schlappig is a master of travel hacking, which he and his community of mileage hoarders simply call “the Hobby.” “His fans aren’t just travel readers,” Wofford observes. “They’re gamers, and Schlappig is teaching them how to win.”
In April 2014, at the end of his lease on a Seattle apartment, he walked into Sea-Tac Airport and, as Wofford wryly remarks, “hasn’t come down since.” In the past year, “he’s flown more than 400,000 miles, enough to circumnavigate the globe 16 times. It’s been 43 exhausting weeks since he slept in a bed that wasn’t in a hotel, and he spends an average of six hours daily in the sky.” But Schlappig doesn’t consider himself a nomad. “The moment he whiffs the airless ambience of a pressurized cabin, he’s home.”
His passion for flying was born of heartbreak: Ben, when he was just three years old, lost his oldest brother, who was fourteen. Ben’s brother had been a stand-in for a largely absent father, but now even he was gone. Ben was undone. He was eventually dismissed from preschool because he wouldn’t stop screaming. “On the worst days, Barbara [his mother] did the only thing that seemed to calm her son. They drove to the airport and sat together in silence, watching the airplanes take off and land.” What’s he chasing there, up in the air?
Schlappig became a master of the game of turning air miles into currency, maximizing the return on investment like a Wall Street hedge fund manager. He distinguished himself, gathered a fan base through his blog, and became a millionaire. Known the world over, Schlappig is welcomed giddily by airline attendants and is familiar to the hosts of first-class lounges. But Wofford notes a telling absence: “His trip reports betray a theme, in photo after photo entirely devoid of human companionship: empty lounges, first-class menus, embroidered satin pillows—inanimate totems of a five-star existence.” But he’s winning.
“Schlappig repeatedly insists that his life can go on forever this way. But he also announces, genuinely, that he wants to settle down one day.” He longingly recalls the scenes he’s witnessed in Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport: “You see a whole family, 20 people, picking up someone at the airport. People with signs, people with balloons, with flowers. There’s something beautiful about that.” But of course, those greetings are always when people are welcomed home.
“‘The world is so big, I can keep running,’ Schlappig says. ‘At the same time, it makes you realize the world is so small.’ After a long pause, he continues, ‘I want what I can’t have. There’s nothing gratifying about that. . . . I’d still like to think I’m a reasonably happy person.’ He grins. ‘Despite all that.’”
IT WAS AMBITION that brought Augustine to Milan, but it was attainment that unsettled him. Augustine’s Milan is not so different from contemporary Milan. Or London or New York or Washington, DC, for that matter. The cities of our ambition are perennial. They are always places to be seen. If, in Augustine’s day, the goal was to be noticed by the emperor and noticed rubbing shoulders in the court, then contemporary Milan is not so different. As the center of fashion and design, it’s the place that drapes people in ways they’ll be noticed and envied. The fashion district’s “block of gold” is just the latest outpost of our arenas for being noticed. The Pirelli Tower is a manifestation of architectural ambition, rivaling the cathedral as the center of the city. The prophetic films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, critical of the consumerism of postindustrial Milan, are almost like updated versions of the Confessions in this respect: “All the deep cultural values of the popular classes,” John Foot summarizes, “had been reduced to one cultural model: to decide whether to dream of having a Ferrari or a Porsche . . . with the pretence of being ‘free.’”13
Plus ça change, as they say. Every age has its Milans—the dense centers of our aspiration that collect all the more people to see us, the urban arenas of attention. If we’re chomping at the bit to get out of the provinces, it’s in no small part because there’s no one to see us in our lonely backwaters.
Augustine comes to Milan with that sort of ambition: “I aspired to honours, money, marriage”—marriage being another way to secure money—“and you laughed at me. In those ambitions I suffered the bitterest difficulties; that was by your mercy.”14 The difficulty didn’t stem from failure but from success. He wasn’t unhappy because he didn’t make it; he was unhappy where he “made it.” And he was becoming less and less adept at pretending otherwise.
The consciousness of his own unhappiness snapped into focus on the day of one of his most hoped-for achievements: the day he delivered a panegyric on the emperor—a public speech of notoriety that all the networks would broadcast, so to speak. He was a long way from Thagaste. He’d made it. His mother couldn’t be prouder.
“How unhappy I was!” he recalls. “The anxiety of the occasion was making my heart palpitate.” While pacing the Milan streets before the event, sweating and sick to his stomach with worry, he passed a destitute beggar on the street. “Already drunk, I think, he was joking and laughing.” On the day he’s realizing a lifelong dream, Augustine is stopped short with a realization: “In all our strivings such as those efforts that were then worrying me, the goads of ambition impelled me to drag the burden of my unhappiness with me, and in dragging it to make it even worse; yet we had no goal other than to reach a carefree cheerfulness. That beggar was already there before us, and perhaps we would never achieve it.”15 There’s the beggar, a “failure,” laughing in the morning while Augustine, a “success,” is racked with anxiety. “He had no worries; I was frenetic.” It’s funny, he remarks in retrospect, how we choose anxiety and fear over simplicity and merriment. It’s as if we imagine our frantic ambition will bring joy.
“To hell with all of this!” Augustine and his friends would sometimes think.16 A philosophical inkling was rumbling in them. They were starting to care about different things. The learned, welcoming Ambrose even had them considering Christianity. Like Dartmouth frat boys who’ve been headed to Wall Street or K Street but are befriended by a gentle Plato scholar, there would be nights when they’d muse about chasing other things. A seed of doubt was planted on their road to “success.” A different kind of ambition was bubbling up in them.
Then the morning would come and the old habits of ambition would reassert themselves under the guise of pragmatism. “But wait,” they’d remind one another.
This stuff itself is pleasant; it’s got quite a bit of its own sweetness. It’s not a straightforward thing to cut off our pursuits in that direction; it would be very embarrassing to go back to them. And just think how much progress there’s been already toward an appointment to some high public office. What more is there to wish for in this world? Plenty of powerful friends are backing us; provided that we pour our effort—a lot of effort—into one thing, we could even be granted a lower-ranking governorship.17
Then Augustine hears a story of others who actually recalibrate their compass of ambition. Ponticianus, a fellow African, visits him and his friends. Ponticianus notices a copy of the epistles of Paul lying on top of their gaming table—a bit like seeing a copy of Augustine’s Confessions sitting on top of the Xbox in the frat house. These young men are perhaps more complicated than Ponticianus would have guessed. So he proceeds to tell them a story about a pivotal experience in his own life when he was a younger man living in Trier, with the same ambitions as Augustine and his friends, working in a special branch of the imperial government.18 One morning, “when the emperor was d
etained by a circus spectacle” (shade thrown!), Ponticianus and a few of his friends went for a stroll outside the city walls. They broke up into pairs, and the other two wandered afield and came across a small, humble house that was home to some monks. Welcomed inside, one of Ponticianus’s friends, scanning the shelves, picked up The Life of Antony, a biography of the Egyptian monk by Athanasius. He was immediately pulled in by the book and “set on fire.”
Suddenly he was filled with holy love and sobering shame. Angry with himself, he turned his eyes on his friend and said to him: “Tell me, I beg of you, what do we hope to achieve with all our labours? What is our aim in life? What is the motive of our service to the state? Can we hope for any higher office in the palace than to be Friends of the Emperor? And in that position what is not fragile and full of dangers? How many hazards must one risk to attain a position of even greater danger? And when will we arrive there? Whereas, if I wish to become God’s friend, in an instant I may become that now.”19
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 9
