On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  Like all of our addictions, promiscuity fails to deliver what we’re asking of it.

  PAIN IS HOW the body tells us to stop, to slow down, to attend to a problem. Frustration, sadness, and heartbreak are the pains of a life that’s running against the grain. What’s both sad and endlessly ingenious in a diabolical way is the extent to which we can deny the pain, paper over it with explanations and rationalizations, mute it with louder music and more partners. We are masters of dissimulation; we can construe almost anything as if it were pleasure in order to talk ourselves into being happy. We are great pretenders.

  Those superpowers of self-deception are amplified when society tells us that pain is pleasure, that our disappointment is happiness, that we’re living the dream. Getting the emperor out of his clothes is the new lie we’re all complicit in, even if it’s killing us, isolating us, and leaving us lonelier than ever. We don’t just buy the spin; we purvey it.

  This dynamic was illustrated in an episode of the HBO drama Succession. The story revolves around the Shakespearean family drama of a Murdoch-like media empire, presided over by the unforgiving, heartless patriarch, Logan Roy. One of the outsiders in the clan is Tom Wamsgans (played masterfully by Matthew Macfadyen). A midwesterner who has somehow fallen in love with Logan’s daughter, Siobhan (“Shiv”), Tom is constantly marginalized, looking for approval, hoping to climb the ladder of the family business only to feel Shiv’s brothers stomping on him each time he tries to grab the next rung. But he is devoted to Shiv and manages to convince her to marry him.

  His bachelor party is the occasion for an episode that is sad and dark despite the glitz and glam of lights in the club. Roman Roy, who couldn’t care less about Tom, has taken over arrangements, mostly as a means to a business deal. Their crew is whisked into the underworld of New York to an exclusive sex club with shades of the stories coming out of Silicon Valley of late.11 Taking the ritual of the bachelor party to a new level, the club is a Disneyland of lust, where every man’s dream can come true. You can tell that Tom is trying to talk himself into buying this story, making this dream his own. If this is what everybody dreams of, he assures himself, then look at me: I’m the luckiest guy in the world. But you don’t believe him, and you know he doesn’t believe it himself, despite how many times he keeps telling himself, out loud, over and over. Indeed, he can’t stop calling Siobhan, assuring her, needing her, wanting to hear her voice, longing for her to tell him what he can’t do because he doesn’t actually want to anyway.12 But Shiv only grants permission. The rites of the bachelor party are sacrosanct; the ritual calf must be slaughtered to the god of pleasure.

  When he finally feels like he needs to cave into the debauch, he returns to his soon-to-be cousin, recounts the disgusting sex act he just engaged in, and keeps telling everyone, unconvincingly, “It was so hot.” When he sees Shiv the next morning, he’s embarrassed to kiss her with the mouth he used last night.

  Augustine tells us that there was a pain that attended his pleasures, and for the longest time he ignored it. But “you were always with me,” he says, looking back, “mercifully punishing me, touching with a bitter taste all my illicit pleasures.”13 Becoming attuned to that pain was like a first revelation, a nudge that gave him permission to say, like Brand, “Hold on a minute: this is bull——.”

  What Augustine offers us is a strange new lens to look askance at the story we’ve been suckered into. It’s like Brand’s account of addiction, but it dives even deeper into a spiritual diagnosis. It’s not just that I’m hooked and need a fix, or that I’m overly dependent on external stimuli to try to achieve happiness (and hence doomed to disappointment because of the law of diminishing returns).14 That can all be true yet still an inadequate diagnosis of what’s really going on if it doesn’t recognize that the insatiability of my hunger isn’t a bug but a feature—a signal that I long for something infinite. Wanting more isn’t the problem; it’s where I keep looking for it.

  Augustine invites us to look at our promiscuity through the lens of idolatry, not in order to induce shame, but in order to illuminate the depth of the hunger and the significance of its disorder. The problem isn’t sex; it’s what I expect from sex. The problem with promiscuity isn’t (just) that it transgresses the law or that it chews up other people and spits them out as leftovers; it’s not simply the fact that it hollows me out and reduces me to my organs and glands all as a perverted way to feed a soul-hunger. The baseline problem with promiscuity is that it doesn’t work and is doomed to fail. “You can’t get there from here” is what Augustine finally heard Lady Continence telling him. And by that point, after telling himself for years that “this is so hot,” Augustine is ready to listen. The incessant chatter of his loins and the constant inciting of his old habits “was now putting the question very half-heartedly.” The volume of those passions had been turned down just enough that he could hear another voice: the voice of “the dignified and chaste Lady Continence, serene and cheerful without coquetry, enticing me in an honorable manner to come and not to hesitate.”15 Exhausted by his pursuits, Augustine was susceptible to the lure of a different direction for his loves. Restraint looked like release from the frantic chase he’d been on. If the soul-hunger that had been trying to feast on the ephemeral could finally be fed by the eternal, then his expectations wouldn’t be constantly disappointed. He was being wooed by chastity.

  BUT PROMISCUITY ISN’T synonymous with sex. Like anything, creaturely goods are gifts when they are enjoyed in the right way. When I stop looking to some facet of finite creation to feed a hunger for the infinite, I don’t have to reject or detest creation. To the contrary, in a sense I get it back as a gift, as something to be (small-e) enjoyed as a way to (big-E) Enjoy the Creator who made it. It’s when I stop overexpecting from creation that it becomes something I can hold with an open hand, lightly but gratefully.

  If Augustine overcorrects, it’s because his own demons propelled him to confuse promiscuity with sex. The result is a tendency to collapse his conversion into answering the call to celibacy. The existential struggle in the garden plays out as a question of whether he is willing and able to be celibate for the rest of his life. Lady Continence gets more lines than Jesus, you might say. The infusion of grace is the gift he needed in order to make the “leap.”16

  While he might have overcome his old carnal habits, his old habits of mind persisted. At times the vision of healthy sexuality that Augustine extols—prioritizing celibacy—simply looks like the inversion of promiscuity and suggests his failure to imagine a sexual hunger that runs with the grain of a good creation. (This privileging of celibacy would be a primary target of reform when a later Augustinian renewal movement called the Protestant Reformation would revisit the question.)17

  The collapsing of the two—identifying sex with sin—is understandable, in a way. It stems partly from his own demons and partly from a lingering Platonic devaluing of the body in vogue at the time—what Kyle Harper describes as the “grand ascetic experiments that are such a stunning feature of late antiquity,” a movement “that originated in the desert and then hurtled itself across the Mediterranean.”18 And, of course, this also stems from an honest wrestling with Scripture, with the exemplar of the unmarried Jesus and the counsels of the apostle Paul that privilege virginity and celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7. In his reading of Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, Augustine turned what was a strategic eschatological priority—“time is short” (1 Cor. 7:29)—into a metaphysical hierarchy laden with biological disdain. As a result, he backs himself into strange backstories about procreation in the garden of Eden—procreation without passion, intercourse without arousal, genitals copulating like shaking hands: body parts, he envisions, will simply obey the will without the messiness of desire.19 But this ends up demonizing the creaturely per se. Even when Augustine defends the good of marriage in an early tract, the rhythms he recommends look like monastery lite. In fact, in a later debate he castigates Julian for encouraging couples to “jump int
o bed each time they are overcome with desire, sometimes not even waiting for night to come.”20 There’s no afternoon delight in Augustine’s vision of ordered sexual desire.

  Because Augustine felt least in control in the face of his sexual urges, and because of his cold-turkey recovery, he ratifies an all-or-nothing approach that reflects an emerging orthodoxy at the time—a vision that would stay in place, mostly unquestioned, until the Protestant Reformation. But we can demur to this and still learn a lot from him. Don’t let disagreement about celibacy shut down the opportunity to hear wisdom in Augustine’s provocative account of chastity, which might be exactly the sort of peculiar take on sex that we need to hear.

  What Augustine offers us is a slant of detachment—a recognition of the power of sexual desire with a resistance to letting it define anyone.21 “Continence”—Augustine’s technical Latin term that Sarah Ruden translates as “self-restraint”—isn’t just for the celibate. Indeed, continence isn’t even just about sex. Continence is a general principle of being held together rather than dispersed, having a center rather than dissolving oneself in a million hungry pursuits.22 Sexual continence—chastity—outside of celibacy looks like a relationship to sex that doesn’t idolize it, doesn’t let it define us, doesn’t let it become a hunger that eats us alive. In other words, the gift of chastity is that it trains us not to need; it grants us an integrity and independence and agency in the face of various drives and hungers.

  While Augustine emphasizes procreation as the end of sex, he begrudgingly makes room for a kind of remedial sex life beyond the procreative, yet another aspect of his pastoral realism.23 As he recognizes in On the Good of Marriage, couples will “have intercourse also beside the cause of begetting children.” This, he says, “is not committed because of marriage, but is pardoned because of marriage”; it is “a mutual service of sustaining one another’s weakness.”24 Although I might resist this way of framing it, I can see the counsel of wisdom embedded in Augustine’s point: part of a healthy sexuality will be refusing to let it consume me. There is a freedom that comes from not being a slave to my libido. Indeed, it is also a gift to my partner to learn not to need, not imposing a disordered hunger on our relationship—a hunger that, even in the context of a marriage, can be (if we’re honest) rapacious. As Joseph Clair comments, “By claiming that all conjugal acts not aimed toward the goal of offspring are venially sinful, Augustine intends to highlight how difficult it is to achieve sexual intimacy in marriage without fleeting moments of selfishness—whether in the form of self-satisfaction or domination.”25

  I’ve been thinking about this a lot as my wife and I have worked to navigate the realities of menopause. I can still remember the morning when Deanna tearfully explained to me her experience of this natural season in a woman’s life—the way her body felt like it was a stranger, recalcitrant, behaving in ways she couldn’t predict and didn’t like; the way she resented this diminishment of desire, even as she grappled with its chemical reality; the way she worried this would frustrate me and erode the bonds between us. I was immediately ashamed of all my socialization as a male sexual being and admired her courage and transparency. I was humbled by her honesty and pained by her sadness as she mourned her own body and rhythms we’d come to cherish (which, I’ll confess to Augustine, included its fair share of afternoon delight). And in that moment Augustine’s counsels took on a new relevance for me as I realized that in this season of our marriage and in this stage on the road, the kind of detachment Augustine encouraged—the refusal to be dominated by the libido—was exactly the word I needed to hear.

  It also strikes me as paradoxical, or at least surprising, that an ancient celibate bishop might have insight that speaks directly to our #MeToo moment, as the systemic monstrosities of male sexual desire are uncovered and named for what they are: domineering, predatory, heedless, abusive. The myth of sexual fulfillment and self-expression doesn’t look like it has coherent resources to curb the habits of the lecherous men of late modernity (men we have made, it should be noted). Perhaps it will be the horrors of abuse that get us to consider the virtues of chastity, monogamy, and even marriage. As Augustine puts it at one point in On the Good of Marriage, “For this purpose they are married, that the lust being brought under a lawful bond should not float at large without form and loose; having of itself weakness of flesh that cannot be curbed, but of marriage fellowship of faith that cannot be dissolved.”26 This theme returns over and over again in Augustine’s defense of the good of marriage: the centrality of friendship, the importance of covenant, both finding expression in exclusivity. What if consent isn’t enough? What if what we’re looking for is covenant? What if only marriage will protect us?27

  IN FACT, AUGUSTINE experienced a kind of preamble to reordered love when he made a commitment to a concubine while living in Carthage. Concubinage is not what we tend to project back onto this relationship. Rather than a kind of sophisticated prostitution, as we might think, the arrangement reflects the class structure of the day, and the way ambition infiltrated sex. A concubine was a kind of temporary but exclusive partnership that would be made while someone was climbing the ladder on the way to status or wealth that could secure a more “appropriate” marriage. It’s worth noting, in fact, that right around the time Augustine made a commitment to a concubinage, a church council ruled that unmarried men who made such commitments could receive the Eucharist.28 (It should also be noted that Monica was generally happy with this arrangement for a while, since she harbored high hopes for her son’s marital prospects.)29 “In those years,” Augustine recalls, “I had a woman. She was not my partner in what is called lawful marriage,” he admits. “Nevertheless, she was the only girl for me, and I was faithful to her.”30

  In fact, they also had a son together. His name says something about their relationship: Adeodatus, a gift of God. She and Adeodatus would journey with Augustine across the Mediterranean to Rome, would follow him to Milan, faithfully trailing him in his ambitions. Surely Augustine learned something about friendship in this relationship, knew something of covenant. Indeed, the depth and intimacy of their relationship is attested in Augustine’s heartbreak when ambitious Monica finally pressures Augustine into dismissing her for a more promising marital contract. She was “torn away from my side,” as Augustine recalls: “My heart which was deeply attached was cut and wounded, and left a trail of blood.”31 But Adeodatus, the fruit of their union, the gift of God, remained. We see the precocious son participating in some of the early dialogues that emerged from a season in Cassiciacum after his conversion. And when Ambrose would baptize Augustine, he would also baptize his son.

  Both his partner and son are effaced from the tradition. These companions that journeyed with him to Rome and Milan, alongside him in his anxieties and struggles, appear nowhere in the iconography of later centuries. They are conspicuously absent from those frescoes by Gozzoli in San Gimignano, nowhere to be seen in that ship braving the Mediterranean, not even in the frame as he departs Rome. Augustine’s later arguments about celibacy end up retroactively rewriting history.

  But who are we to spurn the gifts of God? Who is Augustine to do so, to efface the datus deo? What if following Augustine means disagreeing with him? Indeed, as Augustine himself would recognize, the central mystery of the Christian faith, the incarnation of God, says something surprising about sex: “For the same nature had to be taken on as needed to be set free. And lest either sex should imagine it was being ignored by its creator, he took to himself a male and was born of a female.”32 Every saint has been born of lovemaking. It’s when we stop idolizing sex that we can finally sanctify it.

  Mothers: How to Be Dependent

  What do I want when I want to leave?

  If ambition means leaving home, it often means spurning family. For many, like Gatsby, ambition requires the erasure of the family name and its claim on us. Finding and forging an identity means asserting our independence, breaking the bonds of dependence we’re thrown int
o as children. Like the prodigal, we effectively say to our parents, “I wish you were dead,” then gather up all they give us and strike out to make a life of “our own.” In ancient, literary, and even Hollywood versions of this story, the assertion of our independence is usually a father-directed defiance, even violence: the father as competitor, controller, master is the obstacle to our autonomy, the enemy to be overcome.

  Mothers, often caricatured, come off differently in such tropes. From Portnoy’s Complaint to Lady Bird, from Everybody Loves Raymond to Gilmore Girls, the mother must be overcome because her suffocating embrace is the means of her manipulation. Her presence swells and overwhelms and inhales all the oxygen an independent self needs to breathe. She denies our autonomy with kisses; she steals our self-reliance with hugs. She manages to make us hate ourselves for resenting her, which makes us all the more resentful. A snippet of conversation in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is a subtle example of this maternal power. Enid Lambert, midwestern mother, eager to gather her grown chicks once again, poses a question to her daughter, Denise:

  “Anyway,” she said, “I thought that if you and Chip were interested, we could all have one last Christmas in St. Judge. What do you think of that idea?”