On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  In a way, Alypius is an icon of the community of friendship that is the church. The church will fail at this in a million ways. And yet the church is still one of those places, in spite of itself, where you can count on people to be an Alypius for you: present, listening, leaving you room but not leaving you.

  One of my favorite pictures of this ho-hum, mundane-yet-miraculous friendship that is the church is a quiet scene in the remarkable film Lars and the Real Girl. While the narrative is driven by drama surrounding a sex doll, don’t miss the fact that it is probably the most powerful portrayal of the church in recent cinema. I want to zoom in on just one scene later in the film, where Lars (played by Ryan Gosling) is sadly awaiting the death of his “friend,” Bianca, the sex doll he has imagined is his missionary girlfriend. He awakes once more during this vigil and emerges bleary-eyed from the house, standing on the porch to consider the day. When he turns around, he finally notices that the porch is awash in flowers and candles and prayer cards for Bianca.

  Stepping back inside, he finally notices several older ladies knitting on the couch. “We brought casseroles,” one of them points out. The quiet clicking of their knitting needles is the soundtrack of compassion.

  Lars sits quietly, moving his food around the plate. “Is there something I should be doing right now?”

  “No, dear. You eat,” one of them encourages him.

  “We came over to sit,” another says.

  “That’s what people do when tragedy strikes,” a third offers. “They come over and sit.”

  Alypius is the model for the community of friendship the church is trying to be: a people who are called to come and sit with the world. To be present with it in its tragedy. You might not have imagined it, but sometimes the good life looks like casseroles in the quiet sadness of a mournful home—a table prepared in the wilderness by a people who are hoping for a feast to come.

  I realize that there are many places that call themselves “churches” that don’t feel like this, that seem anything but hospitable. You won’t find any defense of them from me. But I might encourage a second look. Let your eyes skate past the megachurch industrial complex and take note of the almost invisible church in your neighborhood that you’ve driven past a thousand times without noticing. Check on it some Tuesday night, and see if there aren’t lights on in the basement. Maybe the food pantry is open. Or the congregation is offering financial management classes or marital counseling for couples who are struggling. It might just be the choir practicing, giving some souls an appointment to look forward to each week that pulls them out of their loneliness.

  Or it could, quite likely, be an AA meeting, which are themselves echoes of a very different take on authenticity, a radically different construal of “others.” As Leslie Jamison notes, at the heart of recovery is meeting, communion. “The meeting itself,” she recalls, “was just a bunch of strangers gathered around a huge wooden table, past a kitchen tracked with footprints, old linoleum curling upward at the edges of the room. People smiled like they were glad to see me, almost like they’d been expecting me to come.”42 You don’t go to the meeting to get information, to figure something out. The point of the meeting is meeting, the solidarity forged in shared struggles. While she hems and haws about whether to go in, she realizes that in there is a community of strangers who know her and are waiting for her. Maybe they’re friends? “No matter how long you sit in the car, somebody is waiting in that wooden building.”43 Maybe it’s not an accident that building is a church.

  The church you’ve probably never seen is the invisible community of friendship in your neighborhood. The church isn’t a group of holier-than-thou saints who’ve formed a club; it’s a remarkable, otherwise impossible communion of people who, by the grace of God, stick alongside one another. I remember a jarring but touching example of this in a conversation between Lena Dunham and poet Mary Karr. Dunham, as you might guess, is not much given to religious impulses, but she is quietly fascinated by Karr’s faith, her association with this guy “Jesus.” So Dunham asks: “What’s it like to be a person who thinks and cares about Jesus and has religion in your life but hangs out with the New York literati?” Karr tries to defuse some mistaken impressions of Christianity, but then tells a simple story about church.

  I had this amazing thing happen to me in Mass a couple of weeks ago. A guy came up to me. I had my iPad, and there’s a thing that lets you follow the readings, the Church readings. I’m looking at that. I’m not reading my email, I’m looking at that. This guy comes up from the back of the church, dressed up in a coat and tie like Uncle Assistant Principal or something. He says, “Could you turn that off?” I said, “Excuse me?” He said, “The light is bothering me.” I thought for a minute, I’m trying to be a Christian, and I said, “OK, yeah, sure. I can. Yeah, no problem.” Then I sat there and wished him dead during the entire Mass. Then when I was walking out of the church, he came up to me and said, “I’m so sorry. I know there’s something wrong with me.”

  “No he did not,” Dunham retorts. “He did,” Karr assures her. She reflects on the experience: “I was so glad that I had turned it off. I got to help him to feel a little better or whatever, feel like he had some agency in the world. What did that cost me? Do you know what I mean? For me, a lot of times I walk into Mass and I look at people and I think, These are not my people. Invariably, by the end of Mass, I walk out and people look different to me.”44

  People look different through the lens of grace: instead of being competitors or threats, they’re gifts. Some are even friends.

  IT’S NO SURPRISE that after Augustine’s breakthrough, when grace has finally made the choice possible, when he embraces and becomes the version of himself he’d been haunted by, Augustine immediately turns to his friend Alypius. Turning to the next passage of Scripture after Augustine flipped open the Bible to Romans 13, “Alypius applied this to himself,” and “without any agony of hesitation he joined me.”45 But of course, he’d been there all along.

  And would be for the rest of his life. Alypius would be one of the most constant presences in Augustine’s life, even if they didn’t get to enjoy living in proximity. Baptized together, Alypius too would go on to become a priest and then bishop in Thagaste. They are nearly inseparable, and if Augustine’s life is a road movie, Alypius is the faithful sidekick who, in the end, proves to be the most faithful friend.

  In one of his earliest dialogues, the Soliloquies, Augustine testifies to the depth of their friendship in a sort of backhanded way. The Soliloquies are a kind of internal dialogue that Augustine has, arguing with “Reason.” “What do you want to know?” Reason asks. “God and the soul,” Augustine replies. “Nothing more?” Reason asks. “Nothing whatever.”46 But this raises questions about the very possibility of knowledge. Can we know God with any sort of intimacy and confidence?

  Well, asks Reason, “if anyone promised to give you a knowledge of God like the knowledge you have of Alypius, would you not be grateful and say it was enough?” The knowledge of Alypius is as intimate as Augustine could imagine. “Indeed I should be grateful,” Augustine replies, “but I should not say it was enough.” Why? “I do not know God as I know Alypius,” Augustine admits, “but even Alypius I do not know sufficiently well.” This isn’t an indicator that Alypius isn’t close; to the contrary, the point is that even when it comes to those who are closest to us, who are kindred souls, our “better halves,” even they retain a secret, an “inside” that eludes us. “Do you dare to say that your most familiar friend is unknown to you?” chides Reason. “There is no daring about it,” Augustine responds. “I think that law of friendship is most just which lays down that a man shall love his friend as himself, neither less nor more. So, seeing that I do not know myself, how can I be reproached for saying that I do not know him?”47 I know Alypius better than anyone, and Alypius knows me better than anyone, Augustine is saying. And yet we remain mysteries to ourselves. The vision of friendship here is also haunted by a realism
—namely, that we see (ourselves and others) through a glass darkly. There are secrets we don’t know about ourselves. Why should we be surprised that even our closest friends have a kind of transcendence that eludes us, a depth we cannot plumb? Friendship makes room for the mystery of communion and the mystery behind our communion.

  And none of that undermines or weakens a friendship. It certainly didn’t for Alypius and Augustine, who would remain the closest of friends until the end. More than forty years later, in 428, Augustine still longs to see Alypius: “For I desire also to see Your Fraternity as soon as possible now that the hope for your return, which you indicated to me by letter, draws near.”48 As they approach the end of life, both of them near to knowing as they are known, Augustine still can’t wait to see the friend who has been there since the beginning.

  AUGUSTINE WAS, IN fact, rarely alone. He lived in community his entire life. When he was pressed into his role as bishop, one of the conditions he stipulated was that he be permitted to found a monastic community of clergy who would live with him in the bishop’s residence. The Rule of Augustine—the oldest monastic rule in the Western church—was originally written for this intimate community around Augustine himself, later taken up as the rule of life for Augustinian monastic communities around the world. The Rule is another example of Augustine’s spiritual realism: it is an honest, unsentimental guide for the challenges of living in community, well acquainted with the heart’s crooked bent toward selfishness, snobbery, greed, and exclusion. The Rule confronts the realities of class condescension as well as the perverted sanctimoniousness of those who see themselves as “slumming it” with the hoi polloi. Thus the Rule admonishes: “Nor should they put their nose in the air because they associate with people they did not dare approach in the world. Instead they should lift up their heart, and not pursue hollow worldly concerns.” Many of the guidelines of the Rule can be summed up in one of its asides: “Pride lurks even in good works.”49

  The Augustinian embrace of community and friendship is not utopian or idealistic. It is unstintingly clear-eyed about the realities of being-with, identifying the sorts of grievances and annoyances that still infect even our best friendships. Affirming the good of community, the Rule is a set of guidelines that provides a script for real-world friendships where every friend is still prone to egoism and selfishness, where jealousy is a struggle even for the saints among us. “I couldn’t be happy without friends,” Augustine testified. The community he lived in for the rest of his life was testament to that. We find ourselves in community; we need friends on the road. In the Rule, what looks like advice for travel turns out to be advice for the cosmic journey we’re on: “Whenever you go out, walk together, and when you reach your destination, stay together.”

  Enlightenment : How to Believe

  What do I want when I want to be rational?

  For the aspiring provincial, the university looks like a ladder. An education is a tool for climbing. Sadly, we live in an age in which the university has adopted this picture of itself. Colleges are credential factories, and the Ivy League is a ridiculously expensive employment agency connecting the new meritocracy with hedge funds and Supreme Court clerkships that function as escalators to wealth and power.

  In other words, not much has changed since a young Augustine made his way to Carthage. Study was almost a distraction from the extracurricular activities of playing games and getting laid. And learning itself was instrumentalized as a means to achieve some other good: “My studies which were deemed respectable had the objective of leading me to distinction as an advocate in the lawcourts, where one’s reputation is high in proportion to one’s success in deceiving people.”1 The liberal arts, in Augustine’s experience, were something to be weaponized rather than a curriculum for cultivating the soul. The notion that his university education might touch on matters of wisdom was almost laughable.

  But even broken clocks are right twice a day, and even a bastardized curriculum can be a portal to another world. In a university that revolves around the quest for profit and prestige, a lingering liberal arts curriculum is like a distant echo that keeps calling. You never know when the still, small voice of Plato can pierce through all the noise in a marauding frat boy’s life and resound as a wake-up call for a soul—that his taut, frantic, voracious body has a soul, that the soul is made for a quest and not just sexual conquests, and that there is a kind of learning that doesn’t just position you but transforms you.

  This is what happened to Augustine. In the seething carnal cauldron of Carthage, where students took vandalism more seriously than they took learning, where everyone was on the make and only there to find a way up and out, Augustine was assigned to read Cicero, and in that reading we witness his first conversion. Cicero’s Hortensius, an exhortation to pursue wisdom, caught Augustine off guard and set him off-kilter. It plucked strings in his soul he didn’t even know he had. “The book changed my feelings,” he recalls. “It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities. Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour in my heart.”2 Philosophy had lodged an existential thorn in his heart and he couldn’t shake it.

  For the next decade, Augustine would live what Charles Taylor might call a “cross-pressured” existence, tugged and pulled in various directions, a playboy who’s caught the philosophy bug.3 A new interest and curiosity has been kindled, but old habits and hungers remain alive and well. Philosophy became something he added to his life, not a way of life. And in fact, it’s remarkable how philosophy—the alleged love of wisdom—can be domesticated by those other lingering habits of the heart, such that philosophy actually becomes just one more lust, one more game of domination and conquest (something I’ve seen in a thousand sophomore philosophy majors and, sadly, much of “professional” philosophy). The encounter with Cicero’s Hortensius birthed something new in Augustine, but his infant interest in wisdom became the child that served other masters still ruling his heart.

  Augustine would give a name to this kind of disordered relationship to wisdom and learning: curiositas. Curiosity for Augustine is not the spirit of inquiry we prize and encourage; rather, it is a kind of quest for knowledge that doesn’t know what it’s for—a knowing for knowing’s sake, we might say, or perhaps more to the point, knowing for the sake of being known as someone who knows.4 For Augustine, the reason I want to know is an indicator of the sort of love that motivates my learning. Am I learning in order to grow, learning in order to know who and how to love? Or am I learning in order to wield power, get noticed, be seen as smart, be “in the know”? The disordered love of learning makes you a mere technician of information for some end other than wisdom, and the irony is that philosophy could devolve into just another way of idolizing. Indeed, Augustine could still see this in himself by the time he was a teacher: “I was seeking to use my education to please other people—not to teach them, but just to please them.”5

  Curiosity is characterized by a fetishization of something as “truth” in order to serve my own interests and ends. When learning is reduced to curiositas, actual truth and wisdom are disdained as an affront to my interests, my authority, my autonomy, and I become a so-called philosopher (lover of wisdom), Augustine says, for whom actual truth “engenders hatred.” Augustine’s diagnosis of what is going on here is timely:

  Their love for truth takes the form that they love something else and want this object of their love to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be deceived, they do not wish to be persuaded that they are mistaken. And so they hate the truth for the sake of the object which they love instead of the truth. They love the truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong.6

  What masquerades as the pursuit of truth becomes an agenda for confirming my biases and making me comfortable, for justifying my enjoyment of what I ought to be using. If the actual truth disrupts my enjoyment, I rese
nt the truth all the more. What I love in this case is my truth, not the truth. “What is loved at the moment,” Heidegger comments, “a loving into which one grows through tradition, fashion, convenience, the anxiety of disquiet, the anxiety of suddenly standing in vacuity; precisely this becomes the ‘truth’ itself.”7 This Augustinian diagnosis, taken up by Heidegger in the 1920s, seems ever more true in a culture of clicks and likes:

  They love [the truth] when it encounters them as glitzy, in order to enjoy it aesthetically, in all convenience, just as they enjoy every glamour that, in captivating, relaxes them. But they hate it when it presses them forcefully. When it concerns them themselves, and when it shakes them up and questions their own facticity and existence, then it is better to close one’s eyes just in time, in order to be enthused by the choir’s litanies which one has staged before oneself.8

  Curiositas generates its own frenetic anxiety, because now I have to “keep up” and stay in the know, striving to be the person who knows before everybody else (Google “Portlandia OVER”). It’s the exhaustion of being perpetually “in the know.” Which explains why this sort of pursuit of “truth” doesn’t ever feel like the beata vita, the happy life. As Heidegger puts it, “The bustling activity in which they are absorbed, the cheap tricks to which they abandon themselves, rather makes them even more miserable.”9 To be among “the enlightened ones” comes with its own anxiety—of being found out, of not knowing, of being in the out-group of the ignorant rather than the inner sanctum of winks and nods and inside jokes. Curiositas is the anxious burden of having to always be clever.