What is our aim in life? What are we aiming for when we aim our lives at some aspiration?
The question isn’t whether we aim our lives. Our existence is like an arrow on a taut string: it will be sent somewhere. It’s not a matter of quelling ambition, of “settling,” as if that were somehow more virtuous (or even possible). The alternative to disordered ambition that ultimately disappoints is not some holy lethargy or pious passivity. It’s recalibrated ambition that aspires for a different end and does so for different reasons.
What is the arc of a life whose aspiration is to be a friend of God? What difference would that make? This young striver already senses one difference: this is the only ambition that comes with security, with a rest from the anxiety of every other ambition. Because all other ambitions are fragile, fraught. The attention of others is fickle. Domination of others is always temporary; you can’t win forever (just ask Rocky). Attainment is a goddess who quickly turns a cold shoulder. To aspire to friendship with God, however, is an ambition for something you could never lose. It is to get attention from someone who sees you and knows you and will never stop loving you. In short, it’s the opposite of fickle human attention, which is temporal and temperamental. God’s attention is not predicated on your performance. You don’t have to catch God’s notice with your display. He’s not a father you have to shock in order to jar his attention away from the game, crying out, “Look at me! Look at me!” God’s attention is a place where you can find rest and where, “in the father’s lap,” as Augustine later puts it, you don’t have to be worried about getting attention from anyone else.20 You can rest.
At the end of his moving memoir, Open, Andre Agassi recalls a scene before his last professional match at the 2006 US Open. The story has been one of imposed ambition and a lifetime of alienation from his father who forced him to play tennis. And now, on the cusp of his retirement:
I’m hobbling through the lobby of the Four Seasons the next morning when a man steps out of the shadows. He grabs my arm.
Quit, he says.
What?
It’s my father—or a ghost of my father. He looks ashen. He looks as if he hasn’t slept in weeks.
Pops? What are you talking about?
Just quit. Go home. You did it. It’s over.21
Our culture of ambition has only two speeds: either win or quit. But perhaps our ambition to win is a hunger to be noticed—maybe even a lifelong, unarticulated hunger to be noticed by a father, to hear him say, “Well done. You did it.”
But that’s not why he loves you. You don’t have to win, but you also don’t have to quit. You only have to quit performing, quit imagining his love is earned. You can rest, but you don’t have to quit. You just need to change why you play.
BUT, OF COURSE, you can’t change your game overnight. The habits of attention-seeking domination have deep roots, and often our attempts to weed them out, even with the grace of the Spirit, don’t seem to pull them up. They keep sprouting.
One of the things I most love Augustine for is his honesty about his continued struggles with ambition and the unique pride that feeds off of being noticed and garnering praise. The shadow side of ambition is a constant companion of even reordered aspiration in this mortal life. A later Augustinian, Blaise Pascal, named this with the same sort of self-knowledge: “Vanity is so anchored in the human heart,” he observed, “that a soldier, a cadet, a cook, a kitchen porter boasts, and wants to have admirers, and even philosophers want them, and those who write against them want the prestige of having written well, and those who read them want the prestige of having read them, and I, writing this, perhaps have this desire, and those who will read this . . .”22
This is the sort of self-doubt that would plague someone who dared to write something like the Confessions. He admits it. The risk of self-aggrandizement is a constant worry for Augustine.23 This is why the turn in book 10 from past to present is oddly encouraging. Because here is Augustine the bishop confessing to his continued struggles and temptations—his love still falling for fool’s gold, his aim still unsteady as he finds himself settling for earthbound targets.
Meditating on John’s injunction to avoid worldly loves—“the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the ambition of the secular world [ambitio saeculi in Augustine’s Vulgate]” (1 John 2:16)—Augustine the bishop confesses he is still prone to fall for the third temptation: The “wish to be feared or loved by people for no reason other than the joy derived from such power, which [he now realizes] is no joy at all. It is a wretched life.” It is the sort of life that hollows you out, sucking every ounce of your energy to the surface to maintain the veneer that captures attention. Indeed, we’re prone in this idolatry to make ourselves the idols: “It becomes our pleasure to be loved and feared not for your sake, but instead of you.”24 We make ourselves little gods even while falling prey to the lie that the attention of others will make us happy.
If the Christian is still prone to this, how much more the priest or pastor whose role demands a kind of publicity—a role that requires him or her to be seen and heard and to exercise influence? But Augustine isn’t willing to give himself the easy out of simply excusing himself from leadership to avoid this temptation, as if the way to avoid the shadow side of ambition was to eschew excellence or the power that comes from public influence. “If we hold certain offices in human society it is necessary for us to be loved and feared by people.” Abandoning the office to avoid the temptation is its own sin of irresponsibility, a Jonah-like evasion of the call on one’s life. The trick, Augustine points out, is to aspire to one’s office, and aspire to excellence in that office, without letting praise for your excellence be the overriding goal of your ambition. “Be our glory,” he prays. “Let it be for your sake that we are loved.” And if our excellence in the pursuit of God’s call on our lives engenders the proverbial praise of men, let us learn to receive even that as a gift. “If admiration is the usual and proper accompaniment of a good life and good actions, we ought not to renounce it any more than the good life which it accompanies.”25
Augustine’s spiritual realism is enacted here: the esteemed bishop admits that he’s still a sucker for praise and adoration. He can’t always be confident that he’s doing the right thing for the right reason. Or, to put it differently, he’s quite confident that he’s often doing things for both sorts of reasons at the same time. If you ask him, “Are you doing this for God or for your own vanity?” Augustine’s answer is an honest “yes.” Indeed, you can feel him constantly asking himself, “Just why am I writing these Confessions? What am I hoping for? Whose attention am I seeking?” If he were alive today, he’d admit all the time he spends posting on Instagram about his upcoming book on humility. But he’d risk it, confident not in his own purity but in the grace of a God who can use his best efforts in spite of his motives.
Resting in the love of God doesn’t squelch ambition; it fuels it with a different fire. I don’t have to strive to get God to love me; rather, because God loves me unconditionally, I’m free to take risks and launch out into the deep. I’m released to aspire to use my gifts in gratitude, caught up in God’s mission for the sake of the world. When you’ve been found, you’re free to fail.
Sex: How to Connect
What do I want when I crave intimacy?
Jacques Derrida, the famous (notorious?) French philosopher, is seated in his living room. Evening has settled on Ris-Orangis, the Parisian suburb Derrida called home. He looks tired, but remains patient and attentive. Amy Ziering Kofman, producer and director of the documentary Derrida, puts to him an open-ended question: “If you were to watch a documentary about a philosopher—Heidegger or Kant or Hegel—what would you like to see in it?”
After a long, pensive pause, Derrida names it briefly and decisively: “Their sex lives.”
Kofman is obviously taken aback, so Derrida explains: “Because it’s something they don’t talk about. I’d love to hear about something they refuse to talk
about. Why do philosophers present themselves asexually in their work? Why have they erased their private lives from their work?” His interest isn’t prurient (“I’m not talking about making a porno film about Hegel or Heidegger,” he clarifies). It’s a matter of love. “There is nothing more important in one’s private life than love. . . . I want them to speak about the part love plays in their lives.”
Has any philosopher done this more baldly, more vulnerably, or more transparently than Augustine? He not only recounts his past escapades; he’s a bishop who admits his continued wet dreams.1 And, confirming Derrida’s hypothesis, Augustine concludes that what was going on in his sex life, even if disordered, really was about love: “The single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and to be loved.”2 There are hints of euphemism here, and maybe a bit of sublimation (albeit some fifteen centuries before Freud)—a deft deflection that is the stuff of Woody Allen films. Though Derrida was looking for a philosopher willing to talk about his sex life, he might have complained that Augustine overdid it. He could have left more to the imagination.3
But what could we possibly learn about sex from the so-called “inventor” of original sin, this celibate scold and ancient misogynist?4 What could we, liberated from repression, possibly learn from a monk?
Admittedly, to journey with Augustine on these matters is like an awkward road trip to your grandparents’ cottage with a great uncle you hardly know. An hour into the long drive, you realize he holds opinions that seem unfathomable, even revolting, to you. He seems irrelevant to the world you inhabit. But about four hours into the trip, he lets slip an insight you’ve never considered, one that inexplicably sets your world atilt and has you almost hate the fact that you’re rethinking things. There’s something uncanny about his corny metaphors: they speak to your experience. You realize that he too was once young and that his world is not so different from yours. Six hours into the trip, after vociferously arguing with him, confident of all the things he gets wrong, you nonetheless hear in his counsel the hints of a soul who knows something about disappointment, and something about happiness because of that. By the time you reach the cottage, in the bliss of summer’s late twilight, with your extended family bustling around the edge of the lake and guffawing on camp chairs, you thank your great uncle for more than the ride.
I have my own disagreements and frustrations with Augustine on this score. I can still recall the moment when our profound differences came to the fore—and why journeying with Augustine didn’t always look like agreeing with him. While a doctoral student at Villanova University, investigating Heidegger’s debts to Augustine, I had the opportunity to learn from Fr. Robert Dodaro, an Augustinian priest and scholar, then president of the Augustinianum in Rome. Father Dodaro taught summer institutes at Villanova, which were a critical part of my immersion in patristic scholarship on Augustine. It was Father Dodaro who taught me to read the sermons and letters, not just the treatises. So as I was preparing for my dissertation year, we came up with a plan for me to spend the year in Rome, with my family, studying at the Augustinianum. I had set about applying for funds and arranging logistics. I can recall a wide-eyed visit to the Italian embassy in South Philly, where every agent was encased in thick bulletproof glass, shades of Scorsese movies creeping into my imagination. The red tape was arduous and almost dissuaded me.
But another surprise is what would derail the plan. I can still remember the afternoon Deanna came home from work and told me, “I’m pregnant.” This would be our fourth child, and we both immediately knew this meant Rome was out of the question. But we were both perfectly OK with that, grateful and excited for this rather unanticipated expansion of our burgeoning household.
That spring, Father Dodaro was back in Philadelphia for a conference at Villanova, so I was able to tell him the news in person. Apologetically, I told him that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the year at the Augustinianum because we had just gotten word that we were expecting our fourth child. I remember his eyes widening, albeit with a grin, but one that communicated its own assessment of the situation. Worlds were colliding: the celibate Augustinian scholar, the “fecund” young Protestant. It’s like I was proving Augustine right: sex and marriage and the “affairs of the world” would distract from higher goods. My wife’s and my fondness for bodily pleasure and for one another was stealing the opportunity to focus on matters of the mind.
I didn’t regret a thing. I harbored no inferiority complex. I was answering a call, and it was Augustine who taught me to listen carefully to the unexpected cries of children.5
Sometimes learning from Augustine means deconstructing Augustine. We’d been on the road long enough that I’d mustered the courage to point out some of his missteps. But in the long road since then, I’ve continued to appreciate how much this celibate saint has to teach me about sex.
WHAT DO WE want when we want to have sex? More starkly: what are we hoping for when we imagine happiness looks like having as much sex as possible? What story are we buying into when we believe a dominant narrative that tells us fulfillment looks like the multiplication of orgasms? What does it feel like to live into that story?
Sexual hunger comes naturally and has its own complex of desires embedded in it. We crave an intimacy that blurs the boundary between lover and beloved. We want to give ourselves away, to lose ourselves in a tangle of limbs and folds, to speak our love in tongues, as it were.6 At the same time, it is a hunger that craves satisfaction. Our self is its most self-interested as it seeks the titillation of nerve endings that lie dormant in our workaday lives. We yearn for the release, the exception, the explosion that we hope pours sparks on the mundane we inhabit the rest of the time. Sex is that paradoxical combination of vulnerability and assertion, giving ourselves up and wanting all the more.
When Augustine was a young student in Madauros, all of this was anticipated just over the horizon, as if he’d heard rumblings of possibilities that his body already knew. The lure of sex was haloed with the aura of the unknown, the mysterious, as it so often is in adolescence, causing us to pour into it all the more hope and expectation. Such hunger was in the water, so to speak, and he swam in it like everyone else. It was no wonder, then, that “the bubbling impulses of puberty” asserted themselves.7 What he would later describe as a “lunatic lust” took over; it “had come to lord it over me, after I made a complete surrender.”8 Similarly, when his family finally saved up the funds to send him to university in Carthage, “all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves,” and Augustine was more than happy to drink it up. “I was in love with love,” he recalls.9 Retroactively, he recognizes a hunger behind this, a hunger that stemmed from a certain kind of starvation. The soul’s built-in hunger for the transcendent, the resplendent, the mysterious was deflected to the sensual, the bodily, the reverberating shudder of climax. The inherent desire to give himself away settled for giving up his body. Ignoring infinite Beauty, he pursued finite beauties all the more. He traded the cosmic for the orgasmic.
He could recognize what Leslie Jamison calls that “narrowing of repertoire” that nonetheless comes with widening expectations. This helped explain his disappointment and exhaustion. Because the satisfaction of sexual hunger was really a way of trying to stave off a more fundamental, transcendent hunger, it meant he was always expecting too much, asking sex to do something it could never do. And so, the aura of mystery and unparalleled delight that sex had as Augustine arrived on the shores of puberty began to look different a few years later when seen from the other side of disappointment, through the tired haze of a malaise that had hoped for more. Promiscuity didn’t keep its promises.
This is not the conclusion of a detached square, the wishful thinking of a celibate who never got any, like the virginal geek telling the playboy that sex isn’t all that important in some imaginary John Hughes movie. To the contrary, Augustine speaks “from experience,” as we say. And his conclusion, while jarring in a libertine culture (like his own, we mig
ht add), is not unheard of from others who tried to find something more in sexual pursuit. Indeed, one might be struck by some remarkable parallels between Augustine and a contemporary like Russell Brand. Having leveraged his fame for a life of philandering, for which he became more famous, Brand looked at his sexual hunger anew when he broke free of other addictions in his life. In a podcast conversation with Joe Rogan, Brand offers his own introspective reading of what he was looking for in his promiscuity: “The great gift of promiscuity,” he told Rogan, “is that you get to experience all of the intimacy with all of these strangers and it seems exciting. And the kind of sexuality that I’ve always had is more about worship than any kind of domination. I adore, I adore, you know?”10 This recognition of an almost liturgical aspect to sexual desire would not surprise Augustine. But, as Brand goes on to ask, just who am I worshiping in this? What am I giving myself away to? Is this devotion, or is it a sacrifice?
Brand confesses to the isolation he experienced in this chase: you acquire “all of these wonderful experiences and encounters,” he says, “but . . . within it, this kind of ongoing seam of loneliness, unignorable.” When he can’t ignore the unignorable any longer, he starts to be honest in his appraisal of just what he’s getting out of this:
And also—this is the thing—when you get the things your culture tells you you should be doing and you experience them now you know you can stop chasing the carrot ’cause you’ve had a bite out of it and it’s like, “Hold on a minute: this is bull——.” It’s a hard one to learn because anything that’s got an orgasm at the end of it, you know, there’s a degree of pleasure to be had. But it takes a while to recognize the emotional cost on me, the spiritual cost on other people, the fact that it’s preventing me from becoming a father, from becoming a husband, from settling, from becoming rooted, from becoming actually whole, from becoming a man, from becoming connected. It takes a while to spot that. I think a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to break out of that pattern. I would never have spotted it had I not first been a heroin addict and gone, “Hold on a minute, you’re doing that thing again.” Same with fame and same with celebrity. . . . Because I had the template and experiences, “Ooooh, this is addiction; you’re expecting this thing to make you feel better.”
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 10
