Not long after his conversion, in one of his early works, Augustine comments on an episode in which a grieving widow approaches Jesus because now she has also lost her only son (Luke 7:12–15). He had compassion on her, Luke tells us, and Jesus raises him from the dead. Augustine, from his own experience, knows the power of a mother’s faith: “What benefit did the widow’s son get from his faith, which he certainly did not have while he was dead? Yet his mother’s faith was so beneficial to him that he was restored to life.”19
SUCH MOTHERS ARE like sacramental echoes of the unfailing love of God, the Shepherd who goes looking for lost sheep, the Father who welcomes prodigals at the end of the lane because he’s already been there looking for them. Such mothers are preambles to grace, a grace before grace, a primal, natal grace.
Indeed, years after Monica’s death, Augustine, preaching a sermon in Carthage, considers the motherlike grace of God and the Godlike virtue of maternal devotion. He is meditating on Jesus’s promise to “gather the chicks of Jerusalem under his wings [Matt. 23:37], like a hen that is weakened with her babies.” He is struck by the power of maternal “weakness,” the saving power of the one who humbled himself, a power that mothers exhibit every day. “This is maternal love, expressing itself as weakness,” he tells his congregation. “All this is the mark of a mother’s weakness, not of lost majesty.” The mother, in other words, is an icon of the incarnation, that central mystery of the faith, in which the God of the universe would humble Godself, become human, and take on our sin and brokenness (“we confess that he participated in our weakness, but not in our iniquity, to the end that by sharing weakness with us he might destroy our iniquity”).20 That kind of “power” is often despised in a world that can only imagine power as domination, in a patriarchal world—let’s be honest—where power is confused with testosterone-laden bravado. But Augustine is reminding us of that uniquely maternal power of God, echoed in the sacrifices that mothers make every day—the “weakness of God” that is stronger than men (1 Cor. 1:25).
That prayer card now hangs on the wall on Deanna’s side of the bed, its own relic of that encounter at Monica’s tomb. When I look across the bed, these two mothers are one—I see two Monicas, two dogged lovers of their children, steadfast. And on those mornings when tears spring from Deanna’s eyes closed in prayer, brokenhearted but hoping, anxious but trusting, I commend her to Monica, and to the grace of God who, from stones, can raise up sons and daughters of Abraham.
ULTIMATELY, MONICA SHOWS Augustine how to go home, even though she’d never see Africa again. In his paean to Monica in book 9 of the Confessions, one of the most moving eulogies in Western literature, Augustine recounts their conversation that became an ascent to the divine they both craved—Augustine as a Neoplatonist, Monica as one who, quite apart from philosophy, had long looked for “another country.” After a lengthy land journey from Milan, they withdrew from the bustling crowds of Ostia, busy in commerce and pagan devotion, to rest up for the voyage back to Africa. In this quietude, looking over the garden, they mused together, not nostalgically about Thagaste, but about what it would be like in that heavenly city, where the Son is the light. They found themselves transported, to the extent that Monica turned to her son and asked, “So what am I doing here?”21 “I’m ready to go,” she as much as said, not back home, across the Mediterranean once again, but to the home she sighed for, for which she was homesick, because she’d just caught a glimpse of it. Augustine’s émigré spirituality is something he learned from Monica.
Augustine’s brother was perplexed by Monica’s nonchalance about her homeland as she approached death: “My brother,” Augustine recalls, “said something about hoping she would pass away not in a foreign country but in her own native one.” But “she scolded him with her eyes,” as only mothers can do. “Soon afterward she said to both of us, ‘Bury this body anywhere you like.’” She let go of the dream (“this frivolity,” Augustine calls it) of being buried in the tomb alongside her husband. “Nothing is far from God,” she told Augustine’s friends. “And there’s no reason to fear that when the world ends, he won’t know the place from which to resurrect me,” she joked.22
When Monica died, Augustine’s son Adeodatus cried out in grief. For Augustine “the fresh wound from the sudden tearing asunder of our close day-by-day relationship” was especially searing, given the ways he had sought to evade his mother on the other side of the sea. “And yet, my God who made us, how could the respect I paid her possibly be compared to her servitude to me?” he cried out.23 Having found himself in the One who made them both, Augustine had learned that being himself meant depending on others—a lesson his mother had been showing him his whole life. “I have a pain in my mother” is finitude’s thorn in the flesh, an embodied reminder of the dependence that characterizes creaturehood.
Friendship: How to Belong
What do I want when I want to belong?
Road movies are always buddy movies: the Blues Brothers, Thelma and Louise, Wendy and Lucy, Billy and Wyatt easy-riding across America, the entire family crammed into their VW van in Little Miss Sunshine. We hit the road to find ourselves but hardly ever do it alone. The paradox is that the voyage of discovery—the search for authenticity—is mine, and yet the search almost always seems to be shared. Becoming authentic is how we’re alone together. Our individualism remains oddly communal. “I’m off to find myself,” we exclaim. “Wanna come?”
This tension, even contradiction, is inscribed in our screenplays because it’s baked into existentialism from the start. Take, for example, Dasein, that strange pilgrim character we meet in Heidegger’s Being and Time—the character who is us, Heidegger claims.1 My world is always shared, he emphasizes: “The world is always the one that I share with Others. The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt].” Indeed, “others” are not “out there,” the swirling external mass of not-I; rather, they are “those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too.”2 I am others; I live and move and have my being in the world they have made.
That’s why Heidegger suggests that “proximally and for the most part”—his favorite phrase for naming our cultural defaults—our “everyday” existence is an unreflective absorption and immersion in the defaults “they” have set for me. I run in the grooves that everyone else is running in; the rutted paths worn by others become the easiest way to go. And so I go with the flow and live someone else’s life—except it looks like the bland mass life that all of us are living. Who am “I” when I live absorbed in this shared world? I am “they,” as Heidegger awkwardly puts it; I am das Man, the “they” we invoke when we defer to social defaults (as in “they say you shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day” or “they say our love won’t pay the rent”).3
There is a working picture of intersubjectivity here: in this everyday version of “Being-with,” Heidegger says, I live “in subjection to Others.” Indeed, in a sense, I am not: my “Being has been taken away by Others.”4 “They” have taken over my identity; I am them. It’s like we’re all Manchurian selves. “When Dasein is absorbed in the world . . . it is not itself.”5 And this happens simply by the way I swim in my milieu, by going with the flow of an environment. Heidegger’s 1920s illustrations can be easily extrapolated to the twenty-first century.
In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of “the Others,” in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find shocking.6
Heidegger’s insights ar
e at once dated and prescient. It doesn’t take much imagination to project this into a digital world of mass consumer (de)formation. Even our nonconformity is mimicked: I refuse mass-marketed fast fashion by shopping at thrift stores like “they” do; I rail against the hegemony of the bourgeoisie with my tats and piercings like “they” do; I refuse the demure gentility of “political correctness” like “they” do by watching Fox News. “Every secret loses its force,” Heidegger concludes: instead, what we get is an inauthentic “averageness,” a “levelling down” of possibilities to what is shared. “In these modes,” he observes, “one’s way of Being is that of inauthenticity and failure to stand by one’s Self.”7
So what does authenticity look like, then? Singular, resolute, individual. For Heidegger, to be authentic is to answer a call that resounds above the din of “the they.” And who is calling? Myself. The “call of conscience” is that appeal that snaps me out of my everyday absorption, my inauthentic they-self, and calls me to become Myself. The call of conscience is an appeal that rings like some existential cell phone and, when you pick it up, on the other end of the line is the Self you’re supposed to be, exhorting you: “Be yourself!” “To what is one called when one is thus appealed to?” Heidegger asks. “To one’s own Self.”8 Authenticity, then, is having the courage to take that call—the “anticipatory resoluteness” to live into what you alone can be, not what “they” have been offering and suggesting.9 “When the call of conscience is understood, lostness in the ‘they’ is revealed.”10 I once was lost (in the “they”) but now am found (by Myself). As Heidegger loves to put it, this is a matter of seizing my ownmost possibility.
Authenticity, then, always looks like an emergence from “them,” a refusal of conformity, because inauthenticity is, by definition, a failure to resist the domination of Others, the tyranny of the “they.” Others constitute an existential threat. Is it any wonder, then, that in his play No Exit Jean-Paul Sartre would put in the mouth of Joseph Garcin the jarring suggestion that “hell is other people”? This is not a bland misanthropy; rather, it stems from a picture of intersubjectivity not unlike Heidegger’s, in which others are fundamentally competitors, threats, robbers of my peace and rest. If for Heidegger this finds expression in the dynamics of conformity, for Sartre Others represent a diminishment of my freedom—other people suck up the oxygen I need to realize the “absolute” independence that alone deserves to be called freedom. For Sartre, being is a zero-sum game: it’s you or me. This cosmos isn’t big enough for the two of us to be free. “Man cannot be at times free and at other times a slave: either he is always and entirely free or he is not free at all.”11 The Other is a scandal to my consciousness. Intersubjectivity, for Sartre, is an essential and ongoing contest of assimilation and objectification—of either devouring or being devoured. Even love, for Sartre, is a contest, a battle of wills for domination—to seduce is to entice the Other to give up their freedom to me.12
Behind Heidegger’s account of authenticity and Sartre’s notion of freedom—which have seeped into our collective popular consciousness in ways we still don’t realize—is a take on intersubjectivity, on what it means for human beings to be alongside each other, sharing a world; it is a take on being-with. And that take is overwhelmingly negative. It construes our relationships with others as a threat to authenticity. Others are like dementors that threaten to suck out our very selfhood. Which is why authenticity is imagined as a matter of individual resolve, stand-alone resistance, an individuality that breaches defiantly above the sea of mass humanity.
These are takes, construals, interpretations that we have tacitly imbibed without realizing it, and therefore never challenged or questioned. We let them script not only our movies but our lives, and so we valorize “resolute” individuality even if it mostly keeps looking like some new conformity. More significantly, we tacitly adopt the construal of other people embedded in this vision of freedom and authenticity, even if we keep asking our friends to join us on the road trip to the Self-calling-itself that no one else can hear.
Gabriel Marcel, a contemporary of both Heidegger and Sartre, already saw this when existentialism was winning hearts and minds in the middle of the twentieth century. At the heart of Sartre’s absolute freedom is an independence that has to refuse any and every gift. “For Sartre,” Marcel observes, “to receive is incompatible with being free; indeed, a being who is free is bound to deny to himself that he has received anything.”13 Freedom is debt-free, which means living without attachments, connections, absolved of relation to others. “Is this not plainly contrary to experience?” Marcel asks. Is there any one of us who isn’t indebted to a past that makes our choices possible, to relationships that have birthed and formed this “I” with agency?14 Maybe freedom looks different from such a fabulous independence. Maybe others could be our friends.
And maybe Jean-Paul Sartre received more gifts than he realized. Marcel crystallizes his point: “I do not believe that in the whole history of human thought, grace, even in its most secularized forms, has ever been denied with such audacity or such impudence.”15 Indeed, Sartre’s entire dialectic “rests upon the complete denial of we as a subject, that is to say upon the denial of communion.”16 To refuse the existentialist script for authenticity is not to embrace inauthenticity; it is to imagine why friends are gifts, how grace is communal, and how I find myself in communion. It would be a different kind of road movie that has to be a buddy movie.
IF HEIDEGGER CONSTRUED the influence of others in overwhelmingly negative terms, we should be honest that he learned this lesson from Augustine. In fact, we can now see that some of the crucial passages about das Man (the “they”) in the 1927 Being and Time were reworked from his 1921 lecture notes on the Confessions. What becomes his analysis of “everydayness” and inauthenticity in Being and Time is forged in a reading of Augustine’s account of temptation in book 10. When Augustine remarks that all of temporal life is a trial, Heidegger translates: “Dasein, the self, the being-real of life, is an absorption. The self is being lived by the world, all the more strongly so if it in fact thinks that it lives authentically.”17 When the self gives in to the temptation of ambition and “worldly praise,” the self’s “care” (curare) is taken over by others, and “the self is lost for itself in its ownmost way.” I “fall into the communal world.”18
Others, it is true, are characterized as the accomplices of Augustine’s fall. In a key passage of the Confessions (in book 2), Augustine recounts the time that he and some of his crew of idle students were overcome by a kind of mob mentality that led them to steal fruit from a nearby pear tree only to toss it to some nearby swine (again echoing the parable of the prodigal son). Augustine emphasizes the way his own garden transgression—stealing fruit not even to enjoy it but to enjoy enjoying what ought to be used (“I loved my fall”19)—was a communal endeavor. Indeed, others are not only companions in this fall; they are the condition for his fall: “Alone I would not have done it,” Augustine repeatedly protests. Others appear in this drama as tempters, pulling me away from myself, drawing my loves from higher goods to lower things. “Friendship can be a dangerous enemy,” Augustine remarks.20 (“These people aren’t your friends,” as the Postal Service sings.21) Indeed, Augustine seems to withhold the honorific title of “friendship” from such collectives. Instead, they are a crew, a mob, a gang. “My love in that act was to be associated with the gang in whose company I did it,” he recalls. What does he love when he loses himself to this gang? He loves the association, the belonging, the affirmation and recognition—distorted as it is. “My pleasure was not in the pears,” he tells us. “It was in the crime itself, done in association with a sinful group.” It makes no sense, Augustine concedes (this influence of others lies “beyond the reach of investigation”), and yet we all know its power. It’s the collective power of transgressive association, a camaraderie in crime. “As soon as the words are spoken ‘Let us go and do it,’ one is ashamed not to be shameless.”22 I lo
se myself to others.
These self-sucking others show up again, in a different episode involving the young man who would become Augustine’s lifelong and best friend, Alypius. Having struggled with an addiction to the gory, dehumanizing violence of the gladiatorial games, Alypius had achieved a new level of resolve to resist the temptation. But one evening on his way back from dinner, Alypius runs into a crew of fellow students—think roguish frat boys—who invite him to come along to the games with them. What starts as an invitation turns to razzing and then devolves to “friendly violence to take him into the amphitheatre during the days of the cruel and murderous games.” The young but earnest Alypius overestimates his resolve and willpower—and simultaneously underestimates the power of spectacle on the body. When he finally caves to their insistent jostling, he remains (overly) confident: “If you drag my body to that place and sit me down there,” he told them, “do not imagine you can turn my mind and my eyes to those spectacles. I shall be as one not there, and so I shall overcome both you and the games.”23 He was that young.
When they arrive, the coliseum “seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty.” In his resistant resolve, Alypius, like a choir boy at a strip bar, kept his eyes shut and intently thought about other things. In Augustine’s play-by-play he wryly remarks: “Would that he had blocked his ears as well!” He then succinctly replays the drama, both external and internal:
A man fell in combat. A great roar from the entire crowd struck him with such vehemence that he was overcome by curiosity. Supposing himself strong enough to despise whatever he saw and to conquer it, he opened his eyes. He was struck in the soul by a wound graver than the gladiator in his body, whose fall had caused the roar. The shouting entered by his ears and forced open his eyes. Thereby it was the means of wounding and striking to the ground a mind still more bold than strong, and the weaker for the reason that he presumed on himself when he ought to have relied on you.
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 13
