Augustine had to work through some of his own early “didacticism.” It’s worth remembering that Augustine was trained in rhetoric, in the flourishes of speech meant to elicit the affect. He had always wanted to put this at the service of the emperor (and his own ambition), so when he finally scored a post in the imperial court in Milan, he had realized that goal. But when he became a Christian there, significantly influenced by Platonism, one of the first things he did was abandon his post as a rhetor and retreat to a philosophical monastery of sorts north of town. For the young Augustine, conversion seemed to require privileging logic over rhetoric. He assumed that becoming a Christian meant converting to didacticism.
By the time he writes the Confessions, though, we can already see him reconsidering this assumption. In many ways, the Confessions represent the redemption of rhetoric for Augustine. He doesn’t give us a philosophical dialogue or a collection of syllogisms: he invites us into a story. But that means deploying the dynamics of drama. The Confessions are more art than science, more aesthetic than logic. In the Confessions, Augustine doesn’t just analyze his thoughts; he paints a picture of the adventures (and misadventures) of his loves. The parallel isn’t Descartes’s Meditations, populated with “thinking things”; the parallel is more like Kerouac’s On the Road, filled with characters who hunger and thirst, strive and fail, and yes, bump and grind.
Near the end of the drama, in book 10, Augustine owns this. He openly worries about his motives in writing the book: “Why then should I be concerned for human readers to hear my confessions?” he asks.27 (Augustine the bishop is still haunted by ambition, by a heart that drinks up the “praise of men.” In a sense, Augustine probes a dynamic that many artists grapple with.)28 The point of the Confessions isn’t to parade himself or to write a treatise trying to argue people into the kingdom of God. Instead, Augustine is writing to move hearts. The “good” he hopes will result from this undertaking, he says, is that God would “stir up the heart when people read and hear the confessions of my past . . . which you have forgiven and covered up to grant me happiness in yourself.”29 Augustine is writing to the imagination, appealing to the affections, to move people into a different story—just as Augustine’s heart burned when he heard the stories of St. Antony of Egypt, Victorinus, and others.30
Why does Augustine give us the drama of this narrative instead of the arguments of a treatise? Because his apologetic is aesthetic. Augustine knows that the heart traffics in stories, that the lingua franca of love is more like poetry than logic. It’s a song that takes you home. And so he pens his Confessions to “prevent their heart[s] from sinking into the sleep of despair and saying, ‘It is beyond my power.’” Don’t despair, Augustine pleads; listen to my story. If even someone like me can find grace, you can too.
If Augustine is a cartographer of the human heart, it’s because the Scriptures are the God-breathed map that orients his understanding of the human condition. He suggests exactly this years later in City of God when he returns, once again, to his favorite metaphor: the journey. The problem is that we can’t think our way home. “The mind of man, the natural seat of his reason and understanding, is itself weakened by long-standing faults which darken it.” Our eyes are too weak even for the light. So “in order to give man’s mind greater confidence on its journey towards the truth along the way of faith, God the Son of God, who is himself the Truth, took manhood without abandoning his godhead, and thus established and found this faith, so that man might have a path to man’s God through the man who was God.” Christ is the Way, the road, the bridge who, as God-become-human, makes it possible for humanity to reach God.
For there is hope to attain a journey’s end when there is a path which stretches between the traveler and his goal. But if there is no path, or if a man does not know which way to go, there is little use in knowing the destination. As it is, there is one road, and one only, well secured against all possibility of going astray; and this road is provided by one who is himself both God and man. As God, he is the goal; as man, he is the way.31
Augustine then immediately points to the Scriptures, which function as a map given to us by the Mediator. The one who is the road has given us a map. “This Mediator spoke in former times through the prophets and later through his own mouth, and after that through the apostles, telling man all that he decided was enough for man. He also instituted the Scriptures, those which we call canonical. These are the writings of outstanding authority in which we put our trust concerning those things which we need to know for our good, and yet are incapable of discovering by ourselves.”32
Here Augustine suggests a different test for why you might consider the Bible as a guide: Does it provide guidance you couldn’t get elsewhere? Even if the way it delineates is difficult, does it look like a way out, a way home? If every other map has left you lost, what’s to lose trying out this one? In Augustine’s experience, the Word was like an enchanted map. It not only told him, “You Are Here” and pointed him toward home; it also gave him legs to run.
THE FIRST TIME I visited the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) was also my first encounter with the arresting work of Kehinde Wiley. Now a presidential portraitist, over a decade ago Wiley was making a name for himself in the New York art scene but hadn’t become a household name. A rainy day in Seattle seemed like a good excuse to hide out in the SAM for a while, so I wandered rather indiscriminately into the European Baroque gallery only to be gobsmacked by a large canvas (six feet by five feet) in almost-neon fuchsia and blues, featuring the confident gaze of a young black man in contemporary attire—a military jacket, teal pants, a funky octopus necklace hanging around his chest (see figure 7). His garb said “Brooklyn,” but his pose and demeanor said “Renaissance.”
What was this doing in the European Baroque gallery, alongside Italian and Spanish paintings from the 1600s? As I inched closer and saw the title, there was a clue. The artist, Kehinde Wiley, called the painting Anthony of Padua. This young man that Wiley had encountered on the street was given a new name, a new identity carried in his very pose. And not just any identity: Wiley invoked a saint, Anthony of Padua. As a young man, the Portuguese Fernando Martins had left his home to become a novice at an Augustinian abbey just outside Lisbon. But when he heard the story of Franciscans who had been martyred in Morocco, Fernando, who would become Anthony of Padua, was granted permission to leave the abbey and join the Franciscans.
Anthony was known for his immersion in the Scriptures and his power as a preacher and orator—which is why in later iconography he would be pictured with a book, sometimes with the Christ child resting upon it (as in El Greco’s portrayal). His tongue is displayed for veneration in a large reliquary, along with his jaw and vocal cords, relics of his proclamation of this story. In popular piety, St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things (“Tony, Tony, look around. Something’s lost and must be found!”), a charism that seems to trace back to an episode in which Anthony lost his psalter and, after much prayer, found it.
What’s happening, then, when Wiley titles this work Anthony of Padua? As critics have pointed out, the painting is a contemporary example of the “swagger portrait”—a style of portraiture that signals social status and communicates power and bravado.33 Wiley is bringing together two worlds of swagger, the European and the African American, the portrait and fashion, Rembrandt meets Kanye.
But Wiley is also giving this man a story and hence an identity, which has echoes—of one who served the poor, who was studiously devoted to the Word, who was looking for the lost. An identity comes with its own sort of swagger, the confidence of knowing who one is, and whose one is. Anthony the exemplar gives orientation for aspiration.
So I had to grin when I turned to the opposite wall and saw a painting I recognized from prints: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Saint Augustine in Ecstasy, a Spanish painting from the late 1600s (see figure 8). Augustine is again surrounded with books. But his arms are outstretched. The weight of his bishop’s mitre is resting on a
table, the staff leaning in a corner. He is alone before God, face turned upward, pleadingly. A light illumines his face. And inscribed in the upper left corner are Augustine’s own words: “My heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Everyone is looking for rest, which is just another way of saying we’re looking for an identity, a story that gives us the kind of gifted swagger of being known, named, and offered a map home.
Justice : How to Protest
What di I want when I want to change the world?
There is an atheism that is entirely understandable. It is not the comfortable disbelief of the new atheists, for whom atheism is the overreach of their epistemic hubris, the blinkered conclusion of a reductionistic scientism that closes its eyes to all the facets of human mystery it can’t explain, settling for just-so stories as if they were explanations. The atheism of the Brights is a dim shadow of the atheism I have in mind.
The hard-won atheism I have in mind, the atheism that is understandable and for which I have much sympathy, is an atheism forged in suffering. Rather than an arrogance that imagines it has outgrown belief, such an atheism is an inability to believe born of an empathy for those trod underfoot by the machinations of an inexplicable menace. This is not an atheism of comfort but of agony. It is the begrudging conclusion of cosmic loneliness arising from the experience of injustice.
“I would like to believe in God,” Ta-Nehisi Coates admits. “I simply can’t.” This isn’t a defiance; it is the despair of “can’t,” not the confidence of “won’t.” It is an atheism that wishes things could be different. Coates goes on to share the reasons for the hope that is not in him.
The reasons are physical. When I was nine, some kid beat me up for amusement, and when I came home crying to my father, his answer—Fight that boy or fight me—was godless, because it told me that there was no justice in the world, save the justice we dish out with our own hands. When I was twelve, six boys jumped off the number 28 bus headed to Mondawin Mall, threw me to the ground, and stomped on my head. But what struck me most that afternoon was not those boys but the godless, heathen adults walking by. Down there on the ground, my head literally being kicked in, I understood: No one, not my father, not the cops, and certainly not anyone’s God, was coming to save me.1
This is not the sherry-sipping philosophical conclusion of a Bertrand Russell who has coolly assessed the evidence and lack thereof. This is protest that emerges from trenches. When Coates slips into his own overreach (“nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality”), it would be grotesque to criticize the unsustainability of that categorical claim and better to admit his follow-up: “and a great deal argues against it.”2 To which even the believer can—and should—only nod in assent.
This was the atheism of Albert Camus. We might even call it an Augustinian atheism, a regrettable conclusion reached after a long journey through what Camus called “the blood-stained face of history.”3 As he told the priests at the Dominican monastery on the Boulevard de Latour-Maubourg in 1948, “I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it.”4 He would not haughtily dismiss Christianity, but neither would he pretend to be one. Instead, Camus evinces a sincerity that is disarming (“the world needs real dialogue”) and emphasizes a point of solidarity: “I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.”5 In fact, this is Camus’s solidarity with St. Augustine: “We are faced with evil,” he concludes. We hear anew a line we’ve encountered before: “And, as for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said: ‘I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.’”6
After his talk at the monastery, a priest who was an ex-revolutionary stood during a time of discussion and confronted Camus: “I have found grace, and you, Mr. Camus, I’m telling you in all modesty that you have not.” Olivier Todd, his biographer, recounts: “Camus’s only response was to smile. . . . But he said a little later, ‘I am your Augustine before his conversion. I am debating the problem of evil, and I am not getting past it.’”7 Albert Camus: Augustine sans grace.
IT IS THE irruption of evil, its inexplicability, the madness of suffering, that plagues Camus. It is the weight that hangs over The Stranger, the peculiar story in which Mersault inexplicably shoots an unnamed Arab man on the shores of Algiers. Why did Mersault do it? There is no answer, no explanation, no chain of causality that grants the crime a place in the world. Not even Mersault can answer the question. The crime, like evil, is a surd, its own perverted ex nihilo. Mersault tries to stop asking “whence?” and instead finds happiness in “the gentle indifference of the world.”8
And yet the whence keeps finding us, keeps asking itself in and through us, a guttural discomfort coughed up like a bark. At other moments the question is asked in quiet dejection that borders on awe before an inscrutable mystery. We keep asking it because this evil still feels like a cosmic affront to placid joys that sneak up on us: a warm rain in summer twilight that leaves us laughing as we run home with friends; the furtive, fierce grasp of a newborn around her father’s finger; the way sunlight dapples the sand in a dune forest on the Michigan shore; the way your partner of thirty years still reaches for your hand.
This incongruity is pictured in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece The Thin Red Line, where the horrors of war play out in the theater of Guadalcanal’s stunning beauty. Sometimes the canopy of palms is like the vault of a cathedral, and Hans Zimmer’s score sends us soaring as, with Private Witt, we catch glimpses of another world. But then the scream of a bomb pierces the quiet, and the blood and fire of our war-making erupts again. In a scene of terror, as a village massacre unfolds, staging the fear and fearsomeness of these human animals, Malick puts “whence?” on the lips of a minor character named Private Edward Train, whose voice-over surveys the scene.
This great evil. Where does it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doin’ this? Who’s killin’ us? Robbing us of life and light. Mocking us with the sight of what we might’ve known. Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?9
This is almost exactly Augustine’s question—in fact, it’s hard to imagine Malick, a former Heidegger scholar, not having the Confessions in mind. Augustine was dogged by this question of evil since his youth. It was what first drove him to the Manicheans, and ultimately why he left them disappointed. His sojourn in skepticism was an attempt to stave off the question. But in Milan, as his defenses were breaking down, the question burbled up again: “Where and whence is evil? How did it creep in? What is its root and what is its seed?”10
In a way that’s harder to find in Coates, yet still present in Camus, Augustine’s question turns inward like Private Train’s haunted wondering: “Is this darkness in you, too?” It is not only the atrocities others commit that are inexplicable; there is a dark mystery to the evil that drives his own behavior. Evil is out there, other, and it is in here, all too close. Yet it is still unfathomable. His own heart is an abyss, and when he looks at the atrocities he commits, only a dark mystery stares back at him: “I became evil for no reason.”11 Mersault would look familiar to Augustine. “Is this darkness in you, too?”
AUGUSTINE SPENT THE rest of his life grappling with this surd without cause. From his early work On the Free Choice of the Will to the mature reflections in City of God, Augustine keeps tackling the problem of evil. But the point isn’t to identify the cause as much as it is to fight for an intellectual coherence that will allow him to hold two convictions in tension with integrity: the corrosive nature of evil that eats away at the world and the goodness of the God who made such a world.
You can feel Augustine’s angst in Evodius’s question that opens Free Choice: “Tell me whether God is not the author of
evil.”12 It is the plea of one who is looking for rest from intellectual anxiety, unwilling to deny the reality of evil but equally terrified if God is not the Good. This isn’t the same as looking for a solution, hoping for some gnostic insight that grants intellectual safe harbor to then live placidly “in the know” and effectively act as if evil isn’t real. To the contrary, Augustine looks for some kind of anchor in the midst of the storm, or a lighthouse that holds out hope as the waves of evil continue to roll. If he points to free choice—to the misuse of the good will God created us with—that isn’t so much an answer or a solution or an explanatory cause as it is a plausible halfway house with room to hold these things in tension. The “answer” is an account of the mystery that gives us handles to hold on to without denying what we wish wasn’t true. To say evil has its source in the choice of free wills still leaves a black box in the middle of our experience that we can’t peer into. But we all live with black boxes of explanation—the things we don’t want to hear questions about, that we’ve decided to take for granted because we’ve built so much of our lives upon them, the “whereofs” of which we cannot speak and about which we therefore remain silent (as Wittgenstein put it).13
Augustine is not trying to “make sense” of evil. To make sense of it, to have an explanation for it, to be able to identify the cause would mean that it has a place in the world. But then it isn’t evil. Evil is what ought not to be, the disorder of creation, the violation we protest. Evil has no place, no room to fit, no home here in a good creation. When Evodius tries to understand Augustine’s attribution of evil to the rogue choice of the will, it’s understandable that he wonders whether this is something that “comes naturally,” so to speak. Because if the will is just prone to this, if “this movement” of the will is “something natural,” then that means it becomes absorbed by lower goods as a matter of necessity. If I’m naturally compelled to disorder, how can I be blamed for it?14
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 19
