On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  The books of the Platonists, Augustine says, helped him grasp half the gospel: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” as the prologue to John’s Gospel puts it. “But that ‘he came to his own and his own did not receive him; but as many as received him, to them he gave the power to become sons of God by believing in his name,’ that I did not read there.”31 That the Son could be equal to God is something the books of the Platonists effectively helped him to understand. “But that ‘he took on himself the form of a servant and emptied himself’ [Phil. 2:7] . . . that these books do not have.”32 Philosophies of ascent would confirm his worst vices: the pride and arrogance of the climber, the self-sufficiency of the intellectual who would think his way to salvation and congratulate himself upon arrival. But here was the scandal of Christianity: You can’t get here from there, God says, so I’ll come get you.

  For someone who had been drawn to the elitism of enlightenment, who had tried to make it into the exclusive Manichean club of the elect who had risen above the masses and made it to the top, perhaps what was most scandalous about Christianity was its utter democratization of enlightenment—the way the gospel held out the grace of illumination to any and all. You can feel this in a snobby remark Augustine made right before his conversion in the garden. After hearing story after story of people finding their way to the Way, he says, “I turned on Alypius and cried out: ‘What is wrong with us? What is this that you have heard? Uneducated people are rising up and capturing heaven, and we with our high culture without any heart—see where we roll in the mud of flesh and blood. Is it because they are ahead of us that we are ashamed to follow?’”33

  Platonism made some crooked places straight in Augustine’s imagination, enabling him to find his way to the Way in Jesus—in God’s condescending to become human, and more so in humbling himself to the point of death, even death on a despised cross. Augustine saw a humility that was unparalleled in the ancient world and unthinkable to philosophers. That humility spilled over into an offer of grace and epistemic mercy that transgressed all boundaries of class and tribe. The affront to philosophy was that “you have hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to babes, that toiling and burdened they should come to him to be restored.”34 Augustine kicks out the pretentious stilts of intellectual striving: “Those who are raised high in the air, as if by the stage boots of a loftier teaching, the platform boots of actors supposed to represent divinities, don’t hear Jesus saying, ‘Learn from me, since I am gentle and humble at heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’”35 Platonism offered a ladder to (re)connect God and humanity; in Christianity, God climbs down.

  Albert Camus, in fact, is someone who appreciated this crucial difference—that at stake in the confrontation between philosophy and Christianity, between Platonism and the gospel, was the reality of epistemic grace. “In Christianity, it is not reasoning that bridges this gap,” Camus rightly observes, “but a fact: Jesus is come.”36 This, inevitably, is how many earnest seekers end up shipwrecked. They insist on paddling their own boat, and they refuse the raft that is a cross.

  Gnosticism, on Camus’s reading, was “one of the first attempts at Greco-Christian collaboration,” but one in which the Greek trumped the Christian precisely because, in the end, Gnosticism refuses the scandal of grace: “The spiritual are saved only by gnosis or knowledge of God. . . . Salvation is learned.”37 The result is an epistemic Pelagianism akin to the hubris of the addict: I’ll figure this out, I’ll find a way, I’ve got this covered, to which those in recovery reply: “Your best thinking got you here.”

  At its heart, Neoplatonism is another version of the same pretension, confident in its own ingenuity. Salvation is contemplation, and only epistemic elites have the wherewithal (and luxury) of achieving such a state. “Here God allows only his admirers to live,” as Camus put it.38 Which is why the Neoplatonist is revolted by Christianity’s “anarchy,” its refusal of an epistemic meritocracy and the spiritual aristocracy of the “wise.” “The theory of unmerited and irrational Salvation is at bottom the object of all the attacks” in Plotinus’s Enneads, Camus points out.39 And what we get in Augustine, he concludes, is “opposing Incarnation to Contemplation.” It is Camus, haunted by but still refusing the Augustinian option, who provides one of the clearest insights into what was at stake:

  Greek in his need for coherence, Christian in the anxieties of his sensitivity, for a long time he remained on the periphery of Christianity. It was both the allegorical method of Saint Ambrose and Neoplatonic thought that convinced Saint Augustine. But at the same time they did not persuade him. The conversion was delayed. From this it appeared to him that above all the solution was not in knowledge, that the way out of his doubts and his disgust for the flesh was not through intellectual escapism, but through a full awareness of his depravity and his misery. To love these possessions that carried him so low: grace would raise him high above them.40

  If Camus himself ultimately opted for the Greek, he knew it was because he was refusing grace.

  Sadly, this may have stemmed from his own misreading. At the opening of his dissertation, when he is summarizing what he calls “evangelical” Christianity—a fabled “primal” Christianity of the New Testament—he encapsulates it as a dichotomy. “One must choose between the world and God.”41 Camus himself accepted the dichotomy, then chose the world. What if he had read Augustine a little more closely and had seen that Christianity imploded the dichotomy—that in the incarnation, God chose the world?

  AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSION, HIS intellectual stand on this mystery, did not preclude humility. Conviction is not synonymous with dogmatism. Augustine was more than willing to admit: “I do not know.”42 Indeed, one of his last acts as an author was a remarkable project: he became his own critic. Augustine’s (unfinished) Retractations—a personal, critical survey of the vast corpus of his writings (he made it through ninety-three of his works)—is a remarkable testament to intellectual humility. It is an ancient version of “how my mind has changed” in which he entreats his readers to cheer his progress rather than denounce the change as intellectual compromise. Augustine hopes for readers not to take glee in his mistakes but to appreciate the honesty of his admissions (“only an ignorant man will have the hardihood to criticize me for criticizing my own errors”).43 It is an intellectual virtue, for Augustine, to follow illumination where it leads, even if it means admitting one was wrong.

  We see him make the same appeal to those who are so confident that Christianity is wrong or that it is intellectually feeble and thus something to be abandoned, outgrown. He encourages caution about hastily considering the matter settled: “If you are not sure what I am saying and have doubts about whether it is true, at least be sure that you have no doubt about your having doubts about this.”44 Sometimes doubting your doubts is the beginning of wisdom.

  Story: How to Be a Character

  What do I want when I want an identity?

  One of the obstacles that novelist Leslie Jamison had to overcome on the road out of addiction was the peculiar way stories function in recovery groups. For the novelist, of course, the burden is to be original: to tell the story that’s never been told, the one that makes a new world, discloses something we’ve never seen before. It’s why the anxiety of influence hangs over the artist’s aspiration: to make something new as if you had no influences, no debts, no history.

  But in Alcoholics Anonymous, she noticed that the “addiction stories” traded back and forth as the oxygen of the group all made you think, “I’ve heard this before” because “addiction is always a story that has already been told.”1 It’s why every book on addiction and recovery seemed like the same book (I’ve already read that book, the glazed eyes of others told her). So why write another?

  It took Jamison a while to realize that stories function differently for such a community. The point of a story isn’t originality or ingenuity; that would make the story really about the storytel
ler. “Look at me” is the secret desire of originality. But the stories that circulated in a recovery meeting served a different end: they were weaving a web of solidarity. The point wasn’t to draw attention to the storyteller; the hope was to give a gift to the listeners, to create a world in which listeners could see themselves, orient themselves, and maybe even see a way forward, a way out. “In recovery,” she recalls, “I found a community that resisted what I’d always been told about stories—that they had to be unique—suggesting instead that a story was most useful when it wasn’t unique at all, when it understood itself as something that had been lived before and would be lived again. Our stories were valuable because of this redundancy, not despite it.”2 What is meant to be damning in the review of a book (just another addiction memoir) “gets turned on its head by recovery—where a story’s sameness is precisely why it should be told. Your story is only useful because others have lived it and will live it again.”3

  But why would I listen to the stories of this motley crew in a church basement who’ve never seen me before and know nothing of my own story? What makes their stories matter?

  A therapist gave Jamison a concept to name how these stories function: witness authority. This is the authority you accord to someone who knows the trouble you’ve seen, who garners authorial attention from you because they’ve walked in your shoes. And when they tell their story, it’s like they’ve been reading your mail. Addiction stories work because of this solidarity of experience. Jamison recalls what her friend Dana whispered at her first meeting, upon hearing someone else’s story: “‘That’s me,’ as if her whole life had been spent listening to the wrong radio station.”4

  To find ourselves in someone’s story—to feel known by the witness of another—is not unique to addicts, surely. Rather, the brokenness of addiction only distills what is a human hunger: to be known, to find a place, to be given a story that gives us bearings, a sense of identity that comes from solidarity. “I’ve found my people,” we say when we discover a community that shares with us what we thought was a solitary passion or alienating affliction. Despite all the ways we’ve been schooled in expressive individualism, we are all the more aware of the dynamics of identity, of finding ourselves in relation to some group that gives us meaning, significance, a cause. Identity is a characterization to which we accede because the group comes with a story that makes us a character, gives us a role to play. Someone bears witness to what it means to be them, and we whisper, “That’s me.” Identity is our name for being found by a story someone else told.

  WHY SHOULD WE care about Augustine’s story? Why listen? This is a question he wrestled with explicitly. And his only appeal—his only claim to authority—is witness authority. Augustine recognizes that he can’t prove anything: “I can’t prove to them that what I confess is the truth.”5 He’s not offering a demonstration that marshals evidence to prove a conclusion. He’s not trying to argue anyone into his story. Instead, he shares a story that he invites his readers to “try on” and see if it might perhaps fit their own experience. Why write these confessions to God “in such a way that other people can hear?” he muses. If I’m just confessing to God, why not keep a journal, work all of this out in private? Well, for the same reason that addicts share their story at a meeting: maybe someone will see themselves in my story, Augustine says. Maybe someone will hear this prodigal tale, with all its dead ends and heartbreak, and whisper, “That’s me.” And maybe if they can see themselves in my story, they might be able to imagine finding themselves in God’s story as the one making their way home, being gathered up by a father who runs out to meet them and throws a feast. Augustine’s story is only of interest if it is unoriginal, a story that’s been told a million times, one that rehearses the prodigal adventures of the human condition.

  He pleads with God: “Make clear to me what the advantage is of my testimony.” Why risk satisfying all the haters who will chalk this up to my vanity? Why give fodder to the ancient African TMZ station so eager to get its hands on dirt about the bishop of Hippo? His response: “When the confessions of my past wrongdoings—which you forgave and hid so that you could make me happy in yourself, changing my soul with faith and your rite of baptism—are read and heard, they arouse the heart out of its sleep of despair, in which it says ‘I can’t.’”6 It’s all worth it, Augustine says, if someone despairing might find herself in my story and imagines she could be otherwise—imagines that grace could irrupt in her life too. Someone might hear my story, Augustine hopes, and see in my past a familiar stretch of road. They might hear me describing my misadventures and anxiety and be able to say, “I’ve been down that road”—which means they might also be able to see a way out, a way forward, a way home. I write for others, he says, as “partners in my joy and sharers in my mortality, my fellow citizens and sojourners abroad with me”—so they might find compatriots of a patria they didn’t know they were longing for. If in my past they can see themselves (“That’s me”), perhaps in my present they might be able to imagine: “That could be me.” The despair of “I can’t” is invited into the story Augustine shares: “You can.”

  This is why the Confessions should never be confused with a memoir or an autobiography. If Augustine shares his story, it’s not to disclose something about himself. To the contrary, there’s a sense in which his own particularity is diminished, his biography eclipsed. The point is to share a story that is “generic” enough for any and all to be able to imagine themselves in it. In that sense, his story is not unlike the addicts’ stories in recovery: Dave and Arlene aren’t sharing their stories so you can get to know them; they’re sharing their stories so you can get to know yourself. Their story discloses something about you. It’s meant to help you face up to yourself. What the Confessions ask of a reader is not, “What do you think of Augustine?” but rather, “Who do you think you are?” Augustine is writing to get readers to respond not to him but to God. Jean-Luc Marion, in his philosophical study of Augustine, discerns this better than anyone: “The readers do not have to respond to the author about their literary enjoyment, nor about their psychological sympathy, but to God about their own confessing affectus,” their own desire. “The response asked for by the author does not ask of the reader that he or she respond to the author (for example, to pity him, to approve him, to acquit him, to admire him, etc.) but to respond directly to what God asks.” The Confessions, Marion suggests, are really “a machine to make a confession made by each of its readers by inciting in them the human intellectus and affectus for God.”7 Augustine’s story is a tool, a machine, that—like everything else in creation—is to be used in order to enjoy God.

  This is not a stern demand, as if God were standing there, arms crossed, scowling, waiting for an answer. Rather, the story is meant as an invitation to see oneself in a new frame, as a “character” in a very different story—“to see oneself as God alone sees us: as lovable, however deformed we might have let ourselves become.”8 The Confessions, far from being an egocentric memoir or autobiography (like those penned by Montaigne and Rousseau),9 are “a hetero-biography,” as Marion puts it, “my life told by me and especially to me from the point of view of an other [hetero], from a privileged other, God.”10 Augustine’s story is the story that was given to him by the grace of God, an identity in which he found himself, and he tells his story for others with the same hope: that they might find themselves in the story God has to tell about them as his children, his friends, his beloved—as those for whom he is willing to lay down his life.

  In the Confessions, but also in the preaching that would occupy the rest of his life, Augustine constantly invites fellow sojourners, sisters and brothers in the human condition, to try on a story they might not have considered, the story that they are made for more than the mundane, that they have hungers no thing can satisfy, that they are loved by the One who made them, that there is a home that’s already been made for them, that the God of the universe knows everything about them and still love
s them and is waiting to welcome them home with scars on his outstretched hands. “That can’t be me,” we might at first protest. It’s too fantastical, too unbelievable. It might even offend our need to earn God’s love or prove ourselves. “I know what you mean,” we can almost hear Augustine saying. “I’ve been there. What if I told you that you can be released even from that? Would that be the secret you’ve been hoping is true? Welcome to a story you’ve imagined. I’m here to tell you it’s true.”

  OUR LONGING FOR an identity is bound up with finding a story. That story might be covert and submerged. Its plot may never be diagrammed. But we nonetheless find ourselves adopting a role, playing out a script that has been given to us by some narrative. That’s not inauthentic or some version of bad faith. To find a role is to find yourself (“I was made for this”). It can be freeing to effectively live as the understudy of some exemplar who gives us an orientation to the world, something to live for and a way to live. To be without a story is to live without any sort of script that might help us know who we are and what we’re about. We flail and meander. We frantically try on roles and identities to see if they fit. To be character-ized by a story is to have a name, a backstory, a project—all of which serve as rails to run on, something stable and given that we count on. We can be known because there’s someone to know. Jonathan Franzen captures the anxiety that stems from being un-storied in a passage in Freedom, documenting an episode where the protagonist, Walter, feels like his world is melting because he keeps flitting from narrative to narrative.