On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  “I’ll be wherever you and Dad want to be,” Denise said.

  “No, I’m asking you, though. I want to know if it’s something you’re especially interested in doing. If you’d especially like to have one last Christmas in the house you grew up in. Does it sound like it might be fun for you?”

  “I can tell you right now,” Denise said, “there’s no way Caroline’s leaving Philly. It’s a fantasy to think otherwise. So if you want to see your grandkids, you’ll have to come east.”

  “Denise, I’m asking what you want. Gary says he and Caroline haven’t ruled it out. I need to know if a Christmas in St. Judge is something that you really, really want for yourself.”1

  Fathers you can leave, but the reach of mothers transcends geography and chronology. Leaving home and growing up never seems to be enough. Independence is the affront mothers cannot countenance. We saw and saw and saw on this umbilical-cord-cum-tether, frantic to unhook, to achieve ourselves, our independence, only to feel the cord snap taut again, surprised to find it’s reeling us in.

  Mothers seem to cast a unique spell on philosophers from North Africa, haunting and hounding them long after they cross the Mediterranean. Albert Camus, author of The Rebel, rushed home to his mother in Algeria when she broke her leg, despite the literary furor in Paris surrounding his new book. On his writing desk he kept photos of Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and his mother.2 His affection for his mother impinged on his political and philosophical positions in ways that made him anathema in postwar Paris. When in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, Camus was shouted down by an Algerian protestor, who was castigating him for failing to champion Algeria’s independence. When he finally had an opportunity to explain why he distanced himself from the National Liberation Front, Camus remarked: “I must condemn a terrorism that works blindly in the streets of Algiers and one day might strike at my mother and my family. I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”3 And in the uproar of criticism that followed, Camus continued to choose his mother. When Camus died in a car accident southeast of Paris, inside his briefcase was found the unfinished manuscript of his last novel, Le Premier homme (The First Man). Handwritten on the first page was a dedication to his mother: “To you, who can never read this book.”

  When Jacques Derrida wrote his “Circumfession,” he established his solidarity with fellow North African Augustine not in terms of geography or theology but in terms of their orienting relationship to their mothers. “What these two women had in common,” Derrida noted, “is the fact that Santa Monica, the name of the place in California near to which I am writing, also ended her days, as my mother will too, on the other side of the Mediterranean, far from her land, in her case in the cemetery in Nice.”4 As he writes, his mother, Georgette, has already lost her memory, has lost language for the most part, has lost the ability to name what was so dear to Derrida. “I am writing here at the moment when my mother no longer recognizes me,” he confesses, “and at which, though still capable of speaking or articulating, a little, she no longer calls me and for her and therefore for the rest of her life, I no longer have a name.”5 In one of her last semicoherent moments, his mother tells him, “I have a pain in my mother”—“as though she were speaking for me,” he remembers, wondering if, in the end, “I am writing for my mother.”6

  “I have a pain in my mother.” Augustine could identify. But that pain might be a symptom of a deeper issue—the challenge of negotiating an identity without effacing the dependence that makes us human. Mothers are a reminder of both, which is why they are so often a foil.

  WHAT DID AUGUSTINE see in his mother? It depends on which Augustine you ask.

  The young Augustine is ambivalent, resistant, perhaps even resentful. As a young man itching to make his mark and carve out his own territory of identity, his mother, Monica, was an omnipresent force who imposed her own life path on him, scripting events to conform to what she’d plotted. Augustine bristles at playing the role of a puppet in her schemes. Even if he comes to want the same things that she wants for him, he, like any emergent adult, wants to own the decisions as his own, to establish his agency in the face of the one who birthed him into being. Finding one’s freedom is an odd dance: the very power to choose is given—“gifted,” one might even say—but its realization requires a refusal of that status. The mother gives birth to the child who becomes an adult by living as if he materialized ex nihilo. And so the mother’s designs grate against not so much his own goals as his sense of ownership of those goals. (We might recall that when Heidegger takes up these themes much later, “authenticity” is Eigentlichkeit, “ownmostness.”) These are tendencies we develop early, as every parent of a two-year-old who insists, “I do it myself!” can attest.

  Because almost everything we know about Monica comes from Augustine’s haloed recollections of her, we need to read between the lines to see this drama playing itself out. If he were to follow the professional path she had predetermined for him, he would at least do it on his own terms. Hence the eagerness to throw off boyish innocence, which looked too much like the chastity his mother praised. When lack of parental funds means a hiatus from school, back at home he takes up with the local crew in acts of defiance and vandalism. Eventually, sick of her meddling (and perhaps the way she treated his unnamed concubine7), it gets to the point where he has to take drastic measures: deceiving his mother, he and his small family escape Africa under cover of night and the machinations of a lie. Even in his sanctified recollections, you can hear Augustine’s lingering sense of her cloying presence: “As mothers do, she loved to have me with her, but much more than most mothers.”8

  Not even leaving the continent is enough. This mother—“strong in her devotion,” Augustine coyly notes—will track him down all the way to Milan, “following me by land and sea.”9 And perhaps what most sticks in his throat is that Augustine, to his own surprise, is starting to be the answer to her prayers. Nothing is more distasteful to the rebel child than realizing mom was right.

  But there is another dynamic buried in these recollections: embarrassment. If the young Augustine in Africa couldn’t imagine being a Christian, it’s in no small part because he associated Christianity with the simple, “ethnic” expression of what he saw in Monica. Her own professional ambition for Augustine birthed in him a resistance, even revulsion, to the “Punic” faith he associated with his mother. The education she and Patrick funded would be precisely what made a biblical faith so implausible for Augustine. As Justo González aptly comments, “The form of religion that his mother, Monica, was calling him to accept had clearly African overtones, and this was partly the reason why Augustine, a man versed in Greco-Roman letters and traditions, could not accept it.”10 The son has become a snob who prides himself on his “enlightenment,” an intellectual and spiritual snobbery that only intensified when he joined the Manicheans who took themselves to be the “Brights” of their day—the rational, enlightened ones who saw through the myths that everyone around them had been suckered into believing.11 It was the enlightened Manicheans who wove Augustine into the networks of power that got him his posts in Rome and Milan, not Monica’s backward “brothers and sisters” in the church.

  These worlds would collide in Milan. In Ambrose’s preaching, Augustine heard a Christianity that he had never entertained, a faith with intellectual firepower that could stand toe-to-toe with philosophy. In Ambrose he saw a sophisticated, intelligent influencer who had relinquished power and privilege (and, ahem, reproduction) to follow One who had died on the despised Roman cross. Then, just as Augustine is starting to entertain the plausibility of Christianity once again, trying to get close to Ambrose, his mother shows up and gloms on to the bishop. Monica shows up with her “African” faith and backward customs that Ambrose had forbidden in his diocese. When she hears the bishop’s admonishment, she respectfully obeys his exhortation and finds other channels for her devotion. So now when Augustine has the chance to run into Ambrose, hoping to talk about
skepticism or the problem of evil, he can’t get two words out of his mouth before Ambrose is praising Monica for her devotion, “congratulating me on having such a mother, unaware of what kind of son she had in me.”12

  THIS OVERLAP AND intersection between Ambrose and Monica, the convergence of his spiritual father and earthly mother, would birth in Augustine a new hermeneutic, and a completely different take on his mother and her “African” faith.13 If Ambrose could praise his mother’s Christianity, then it must be the same faith. He needed an Ambrose to make Christianity intellectually respectable enough to be plausible again, and once he stepped inside the faith he saw his mother’s piety—and hence his mother—in a new light.

  When Ambrose raises Augustine from the baptismal waters, Augustine’s heritage is retroactively reframed. A child of God, he sees anew what it meant to be a son of Monica. What did Augustine see in his mother? Once he becomes her brother in Christ, almost everything about his relationship with her looks different. An epistemic empathy becomes possible; he can see what it was like to be his mother from the inside, as it were: the tenacity of her concern for his soul, her confidence in God’s promises, her unflagging faithfulness to a wayward son, her pain as she watched him spin out of control. “She had tended to her sons, suffering birth pangs, so to speak, again every time she saw them leave the true path and move away from you.”14 He sees, now, that he was a son of tears, reborn, finding himself—of all places—in his mother’s faith.

  THE CULT OF Monica is as wide as the world, found wherever there are weeping mothers. Indeed, if you roam around Italy with your eyes peeled, looking for Augustine’s legacy, Monica seems more ubiquitous. She represents the yearning of mothers everywhere, weeping over their children, hoping, praying, tenacious in their fierce love that the children confuse with control. It took a pilgrimage to Rome for me to finally grasp this—and watching Deanna, my wife and the mother of our four children, encounter Monica.

  At Deanna’s suggestion, we wound our way from the splendor of the Pantheon through a maze of narrow side streets in search of the Basilica di Sant’Agostino on the Piazza di Sant’Agostino. A busker in the piazza was strumming “Your Own Personal Jesus” (I kid you not) while a gaggle of young boys were playing with a beat-up soccer ball in the square. The church itself didn’t seem worthy to house what was inside. The travertine façade felt fortresslike, with pockmarks in the stone that were reminiscent of bullet holes. Cardboard boxes littered the entrance. Someone was curled up under a soiled blanket on the stairs.

  We creak our way tentatively inside. The back of the church is dark and silent, but a cacophony of marble almost overwhelms. The humble, beaten-down exterior explodes in pinks, persimmon, and gold when we pass through the diminutive door. A crossing ray of light feels suspended in the upper reaches of the transept.

  We make our way past a few scattered worshipers in prayer and begin to wander independently. I’m struck by the chapel of St. Joseph, in which Joseph is hidden in darkness, a father not present. Noting the columns astride the altar, to the left I’m heartened to see Augustine paired with his lifelong friend Alypius. Across from them are Simplicianus and Ambrose.

  Turning, I stop, caught by surprise: at the chapel to the left, Deanna is weeping and I don’t know how to read these tears. As I inch closer, I realize she’s found what she came looking for: Monica’s tomb. On the outer wall is the original sarcophagus that held her remains in Ostia, transferred to this location in Rome in 1430. The relics of Monica now lie under the altar. The vault of the chapel is a series of frescoes by Ricci recounting Monica’s life, culminating in her ecstatic vision with the son of her tears in Ostia just a few days before she died (see figure 5).

  What has moved Deanna is a small prayer card. On one side is a detail of this fresco, Monica with hands raised in prayer and adoration. On the other side is a prayer that, even in its clunky English translation, is like a prayer that so many mothers know by heart:

  God, Holy Father,

  mercy for those who trust in You.

  You granted Your servant Monica

  the invaluable gift for reconciling

  the souls with you and one another.

  With her life, her prayers and her tears

  she took her husband Patrick

  and her son Augustine to You.

  In her we praise Your gifts;

  by her intercession

  give us Your Grace.

  O Saint Monica,

  who spiritually nourished your children

  giving them birth so many times

  as you saw them becoming estranged from God,

  pray for our families, for young people

  and for those who can’t find the path of sanctity.

  Obtain for us the fidelity to God,

  the perseverance in longing for Heaven

  and the capacity to lead to the Lord

  those he puts under our care. Amen.

  In this hushed space, witnessing this encounter, I realize something I hadn’t appreciated before, and probably can’t ever fully understand: a solidarity that spans centuries, a sympathy that transcends geography, this bond between Monica and mothers who weep and pray and chase their children—misunderstood, unappreciated, resisted, resented. And yet none of that resentment could stop them, none of that resistance will deter them, no lack of gratitude could ever persuade them to give up. Like grace, Monica and her emissaries don’t work on a logic of return.

  For all the caricatures of mothers we’re trying to escape, literature gives us glimpses of the Monicas all around us, who we so often fail to see. The Irish writer Rob Doyle has no investment in religion (quite the contrary, in fact), but in his short story “No Man’s Land,” Monica’s presence is palpable, if unintended. A young man has just returned home from university in the wake of a mental health episode (“a severe nervous affliction,” he tells us, in a kind of nineteenth-century euphemism). I thought it was a tick of my own Augustine-soaked imagination that called to mind the young Augustine’s hiatus from school in Carthage that brought him back to Thagaste—until in the very next paragraph we meet a weeping mother who sounds like a latter-day Monica. The young man’s mother leaves her job to care for her son in his depression. “On several occasions I walked in on her weeping in the kitchen, or in the cemented back garden that was hidden from the neighbours by high, grey-brick walls. Sometimes I heard her weeping in the bathroom. She always tried to hide her crying from me.”15 We’ve met a son of such tears before.

  His mother enfolds the lethargy of his depression; she becomes to him (again) an amniotic sac of compassion, hoping against hope to birth him back into a life. He eases out of his lethargy with a ritual of daily walks in an abandoned industrial estate, wandering contemplatively amid the labyrinthine corridors of this rusted region of former industry. Here he regularly encounters a thirtysomething man who has gone mad, spouting proverbs of nonsense (“There is no therapy. There is no father.”). The young man is jarred, disturbed, mostly because he sees in this raving wanderer a possible future for himself. After a chilling dream, a revelation of brokenness generates a new resolve.

  I woke up sobbing, drenching the pillow with tears that streamed out of me like never before or since, pierced with a desolation I knew to be incurable, a condition I would carry with me for ever. I rose from the bed, feeling my way through the dark. I found my way to my mother’s bedroom and turned the handle on the door. I heard her gasp in the dark. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Go back to sleep. I’m sorry. Just let me lie here on the floor, just like this.” I could hear her hesitating, waiting to get up and fix this, but it couldn’t be fixed and she lay back down. I knew she was staring upwards into the dark, her face gaunt with worry. After a while she got up and draped some covers over me, then got back into bed. I closed my eyes and tried to hear her breathing.16

  Rituals are not solutions. They don’t “fix” things. They are how we live with what we can’t fix, channels for facing up to our finitude, the
way we try to navigate this vale of tears in the meantime. But precisely for that reason they can also be conduits of hope and rhythms of covenant. Mother/Monica didn’t need to say anything; she needed to be there, present, breathing, placing the covers over her boy.

  When he later wakes up, he tells his mother that he’s going to call the university about returning. “Peering at me with widened eyes over the curve of her teacup, my mother nodded faintly. [There are unspeakable wells of restraint and fear in that “faintly.”] She hesitated, fearful of crushed hopes. Then she said, ‘I knew ye would. I never stopped prayin for ye.’ Tears welled up, her voice was cracking. ‘I never stop praying for ye. I mean it. I never will.’”17 This is the ritual; it’s just that someone else performs it. So be it: the mother as monastic, a quiet Benedictine of the everyday praying for the world that forgets her, keeping a fire alive for the future when the gleam of transgression is dulled and the hubris of our enlightenment wears out.

  Perhaps it’s not an accident that the arts best capture such mothers. Embedded in a longer poem called “The Burning Girl” by Mary Karr is a moving portrait of this unswerving, Monica-like devotion, with a mother’s appreciation for its power:

  She was an almost ghost her mother saw

  Erasing the edges of herself each day

  Smudging the lines like charcoal while her parents

  Redrew her secretly into being over and

  Again each night and dawn and sleepless

  All years long. Having seen that mother’s love,

  I testify: It was ocean endless. One drop could’ve

  Brought to life the deadest Christ.18

  I know this mother. She sleeps beside me every night. She prays at a Pentecostal church in Lagos every Wednesday. She is awake in Rio, heart whirring, until the door clicks and the light goes out. She keeps prescriptions filled in Los Angeles like a sacramental fight against the darkness. . . . Her name is Monica. She is legion.