On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  Exactly! replies Augustine. Which is precisely why this choice is not natural. It is voluntary, and thereby inexplicable.15 Free will is an answer to this question only if you’re also willing to live with the mystery. When Evodius tries to plumb beneath this and figure out what causes the will, Augustine cautions him: you can’t really have what you want. You’re going to get sucked into an infinite regress, so you’re going to have to settle for recognizing a certain mystery of the will here—“the wanton will,” as Augustine describes it, “is the cause of all evils.”16 Which is just to say: it is the sort of cause that can’t be explained, only witnessed. Augustine takes us back to Private Train’s questions about roots and seeds: “We may conclude that the root of all evils is not being in accordance with nature. . . . But if you ask again about the cause of this root, how will it be the root of all evils?” The cause of the root is the seed, one could say, but what causes the seed to grow into the root? There lies dark mystery. “Hence either the will is the first cause of sinning, or no sin is the first cause of sinning.”17 Here we confront the will’s disordered, almost godlike power: it operates ex nihilo, without a why.

  Twenty-five years later, in City of God, Augustine reemphasizes this point: “If you try to find the efficient cause for this evil choice, there is none to be found.”18 Instead, Augustine sees darkness. “One should not try to find an efficient cause for a wrong choice,” he cautions. “It is not a matter of efficiency, but of deficiency. . . . To try to discover the causes of such defection—deficient, not efficient causes—is like trying to see darkness or to hear silence. Yet we are familiar with darkness and silence, and we can only be aware of them by means of eyes and ears, but this is not by perception but by absence of perception.”19

  What’s the alternative, after all? If you could discern a cause and hence provide an explanation, then evil makes sense. You might even say evil is “natural.” But if you say evil is natural, then it’s no longer evil. It’s the way things are, the way things are supposed to be. You can’t protest what is natural; you can’t lament what is meant to be. The price to pay for explaining evil is to give up naming and opposing it. As soon as you “explain” evil, it vanishes. Augustine considers the Devil as a limit case in this regard. If God created everything, and everything God creates is good, then where did the Devil come from? Not even the Devil is “naturally” evil. His fall, like mine, is inexplicable. “The Manichees do not realize,” Augustine points out, “that if the Devil is a sinner by nature, there can really be no question of sin in his case.”20 The very face of evil, in that case, just is. You can’t complain otherwise.

  When we fall prey to the hubristic need for intellectual mastery, the need to comprehend everything and hence explain everything, we end up naturalizing evil and thus eviscerating it, undercutting the ability to protest against it. Such explanation takes us beyond good and evil. The quest for the root, the seed of evil—to identify the cause of how it stole into the world—undercuts the tortured perplexity that generated the question in the first place. The question arises from our experience of dissonance (“This can’t be right! This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be!”). Our answers too often squelch that dissonance and thus make the question moot.

  We also devalue or deny our intuitions of what ought to be—what is good and beautiful, what gratitude is for. When we try to extinguish the dark mystery of evil with the light of explanation, we simultaneously dim the radiance of beauty that befalls us unbidden. We forfeit the impulse to say “thank you”; we rule out the joy that attends those moments when we think, “This is how it’s meant to be.” We explain evil only to explain away love.

  This is the bookend to Private Train’s query in The Thin Red Line. While the diabolical machinations of humans understandingly raise the question of where evil comes from, there is a corresponding mystery that lurks throughout the film in epiphanies of sky and light and play. Private Bell, in a letter to his wife at home, asks the question this mystery engenders:

  My dear wife. You get something twisted out of your insides by all this blood, filth, and noise. I want to stay changeless for you. I want to come back to you the man I was before. How do we get to those other shores? To those blue hills? Love—where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free.21

  Is that flame in you too? Have you passed through this light?

  THAT SAID, I wish there was more lament in Augustine.

  While in principle Augustine refuses to give evil the comfort of an explanation, he constantly fends off intellectual options that would either make evil an illusion or make God blameworthy. As a result, he is sometimes given to painting schemes that, even if he refuses to name a cause, almost give evil a place—either as a tendency that stems from our creatureliness22 or as the shadow of creation’s tapestry that makes the whole all the more beautiful.23 As a result, evil becomes something of an abstraction for Augustine, a generic, vague challenge that lacks concretion. But when he turns to inward evil—the darkness in himself—Augustine is a Proustian observer of all the specific ways his will is twisted and perverted and monstrous. The Confessions are a long lament of the devil inside.

  But something of the Stoic remains in Augustine. Confronted by the tragic brokenness of the world, he looks more like the placid Socrates than the Jesus groaning in the garden of Gethsemane or weeping at the death of Lazarus. All of the psalmists’ laments he spiritualizes inward, which leads him to weep over his own sin yet still feel an impulsion to account for the invasive reality of violence and heartbreak. This seems oddly un-Augustinian. An Augustine who laments his own evil will should just as loudly and publicly lament the injustices that leave children hungry and women abused and creation exploited. He is sometimes so keen to defend the just punishment of mortality that he leaves himself no room to protest the tyranny of death.

  Perhaps no episode is more jarring in this respect than his almost casual remembrance of the premature death of his son, Adeodatus. In book 9 of the Confessions, Augustine happily recounts the gift of his departed boy. He brags on his son’s brilliance, displayed in The Teacher, one of his early dialogues. Augustine glows like any father who sees his son become a young man with an independence that surprises him. Adeodatus was a “partner in the conversation” and possessed a philosophical acuity that left Augustine (not so secretly) thrilled. “He was 16 at the time. I learnt many other remarkable things about him. His intelligence left me awestruck. Who but you could be the Maker of such wonders?” He remembers their baptism: Adeodatus, together with himself and Alypius. And then the cursory recall: “Early on you took him away from life on earth.”24

  Perhaps a lingering guilt prevented Augustine from being more demonstrative in his grief. His biographer Peter Brown describes this as “one of the most significant blanks in Augustine’s life.” There is so much he leaves unsaid. But perhaps an unspoken wound remained. “In the last book he ever wrote,” Brown reminds us, “Augustine will quote a passage from Cicero that, perhaps, betrays the hurt of this loss: ‘Surely what Cicero says comes straight from the heart of all fathers, when he wrote: You are the only man of all men whom I would wish to surpass me in all things.’”25 An aged father musing on the untimely death of a child is not the way it’s supposed to be.

  It is in his preaching that we get beyond the Neoplatonic frames and greater-good schemes. In sermons, what is offered is not an “answer” to evil, as if it were merely a problem or a question; instead, what is offered is a vision of the gracious action of God, who takes on evil. The cross of Christ—the incarnate God—is the site of a cosmic inversion where all that is not supposed to be is absorbed by the Son, taken to the depths of hell, and vanquished by the resurrection. Evil isn’t answered; it is overcome. As Augustine would put it in a sermon in 404, “He took flesh from the lump of our mortality, yes, and he too took to himself the death which was the penalty for sin, but didn’t take the sin; instead with the merciful
intention of delivering us from sin, he handed over that flesh of his to death.”26 God doesn’t abstractly solve a “problem”; God condescends to inhabit and absorb the mess we’ve made of the world. God “has not abandoned humanity in its mortal condition.”27 This, Augustine encourages his listeners, should serve as a source of hope in the face of fears and sorrows.

  So he handed over this flesh to be slain, so that you wouldn’t be afraid of anything that could happen to your flesh. He showed you, in his resurrection after three days, what you ought to be hoping for at the end of this age. So he is leading you along, because he has become your hope. You are now walking toward the hope of the resurrection; but unless our head had first risen, the other members of the body would not find anything to hope for.28

  The appeal here is not to the greater good or the free choice of the will or constitutive nothingness of creation that corrodes the good. Augustine the pastor and preacher avoids such abstractions and instead appeals to the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith: a humble God who endured evil in order to overcome. The point isn’t that God has a plan; the point is that God wins. We shall overcome because of what the Son has undergone in our stead. This isn’t an answer to evil; it is a response. Hope is found not in intellectual mastery but in divine solidarity.

  Sometimes his body, the church, will display the same compassionate solidarity in the face of evil, a cruciform being-with that is not an intellectual dodge but rather an embodied epiphany. I have seen this close up. Several years ago, our niece died suddenly and tragically of an unexplained illness. She was seventeen months old. This is surely not the way it’s supposed to be. Her parents had drifted from any connection to a faith community back in our hometown. But our own faith family back there wanted to reach out and minister to them. So we called our pastor, a dear friend and a model of Christ’s servant love.

  When Pastor Charlie arrived at the house, the grieving mother was rightly inconsolable. In fact, she was sprawled on the floor of her daughter’s bedroom, tangled in her blankets and stuffed animals, variously sobbing and numb, not willing to emerge from the room. After waiting for a time, Pastor Charlie went into the room. She didn’t even acknowledge his presence. And so Charlie did the only thing he could think of: he laid down on the floor beside her. He cried out for her and with her and longed with Spirit-filled groanings. He was Christ to her simply by being present to her in her lament.

  The Minneapolis band Romantica offers an image that has lodged in my imagination. In their song “Drink the Night Away,” they recount the playful joys of some Irish boys headed to a rival school for a cricket match (“Tell my little brother to look after my mother, I won’t be coming home today”). They are boisterous and eager, looking forward to meeting girls from another school, with mischievous plans for some post-match libations:

  Oh it’s gonna be cool, all the boys from school, and the girls from down the way.

  Gonna dance round the fire until we get tired and then we’ll drink the night away.

  They’re dreaming about winning and filling the tournament cup with chardonnay: “then we’ll drink the night away,” the refrain repeats.

  But tragedy disrupts everything, upending their plans and turning their world upside down. “Hear your momma crying when you lay there dying, somewhere in Donegall.” The song turns to lament: “What was Jesus thinking,” they plead, “when he let you sink into the arms of the Lord?” This is not the way it’s supposed to be. As the song continues to voice this question, there is a decisive turn at the end: a different cup, a different drink.

  What was Jesus thinking, when he let you sink into the arms of the Lord?

  Then he took the cup, lifted it up, and drank the night away.29

  The cup Jesus drinks is the cup of our suffering, filled with a wine-dark sea of anguish. This is not some cosmic cost-benefit analysis in which God calculates “the greater good.” This is the historical scandal of God-become-flesh, taking the evil and injustice of the world—our evil and injustice—onto himself and then bursting forth from the grave to announce, as the Puritan John Owen put it, “the death of death.”30 God doesn’t give us an answer; he gives us himself.

  THERE ISN’T REALLY an “answer” for evil, according to Augustine; there is a response, a divine action-plan rooted in solidarity and compassion. That action, first and fundamentally, is grace. When the aged Augustine is reading back through his corpus to write his Retractations, he is jarred by what is so glaringly absent in his account of evil in On the Free Choice of the Will: grace. Grace is the light that floods the darkness in me, too. Grace is what flows from God’s response to our evil, the spillover effect of Jesus drinking up the cup of suffering and vanquishing evil.

  That spills over into our own response such that Augustine doesn’t just parse evil in a philosophical system; he battles it as a bishop and an activist. He undertakes the work of protection and protest on behalf of the wronged, and even wrongdoers. Augustine’s life as a bishop in North Africa could be described as an activism campaign against evil on the ground. Augustine knew himself well enough to appreciate that the injustices of his world were concatenations of bad actors and diabolical systems—that injustices could be generated by good intentions as well as evil conspiracies. So Augustine wasn’t content just to have an account of evil; he had an agenda for addressing it, countering it, and mitigating its effects. And Augustine undertakes such advocacy not only for the just and deserving but even for the unrepentant and recidivist.

  Macedonius, the vicar of Africa (a governor of sorts) and the sort of official to whom Augustine often presented entreaties for mercy and leniency, sent a letter to Augustine in 413 or 414 expressing his confusion. Why would Augustine undertake to advocate for mercy and leniency for the unrepentant, who haven’t promised correction? “It is easy and natural to hate evil persons because they are evil,” Augustine replies, “but it is rare and holy to love those same persons because they are human beings.” A just and merciful punishment, he argues, can be a means of unleashing their humanity. “He, therefore, who punishes the crime in order to set free the human being is bound to another person as a companion not in injustice but in humanity. There is no other place for correcting our conduct save in this life. . . . And so, out of love for the human race we are compelled to intercede on behalf of the guilty lest they end this life through punishment.”31 Better to risk leniency and create room for reform than to stand for law and order and end up crushing any opening for transformation. Augustine would constantly plead for authorities to not exercise the death penalty. He would plead for leniency and sometimes clemency in criminal cases, recognizing the principalities and powers that compel and constrain both criminals and victims.

  Augustine’s advocacy for penal reform was complemented by his interventions in the particular injustices of the Roman institution of slavery. As Robert Dodaro recalls, “Augustine frequently drew from his church’s treasury in order to purchase the freedom of slaves. Moreover, on one occasion, while he was absent from Hippo, some members of his congregation stormed a ship and freed over 100 slaves held captive there.”32 He was also an active supporter of the right of sanctuary in the late Roman Empire, which was to stand with debtors and take the side of those ground under by economic inequality. Augustine’s church was a sanctuary for economic migrants, and he would appeal to imperial authorities on behalf of those displaced and in jeopardy.33 In all of these ways and more, Augustine responded to on-the-ground evils and injustice as an ally and advocate—imitating the Advocate who gave himself for his enemies (Rom. 5:10).

  THIS IS WHY Augustine could commend politics as a calling worthy of the Christian. The hard, good work of politics is a way to love your neighbor in a tragic, fallen world. If politics is the art of the possible, it can also be a prudential way to secure justice, beat back evil, and mitigate the effects of the Fall. Nevertheless, when Augustine counsels political actors like Boniface and Macedonius, he does so with wide-eyed realism. He is at once
trying to roll back the effects of the curse while at the same time recognizing the enduring reality of evil and original sin. He’s under no illusions about human nature triumphing over selfishness or escaping its proclivity for disordered love. He has no expectation of legislating our way to the kingdom; to the contrary, it’s a matter of legislating in a world where we have to keep praying, “Thy kingdom come.”

  So Augustine never overexpects from politics. If he is an advocate, an activist of sorts, intervening in unjust systems, he will never be prone to what we might call activismism—a kind of Pelagian overconfidence in our abilities to overcome evil with our political prowess. That is the danger that besets Coates’s (understandable) atheism. Human action and sincerity and ingenuity are deified. “Ideas like cosmic justice, collective hope, and national redemption had no meaning for me,” Coates admits. “The truth was in the everything that came after atheism, after the amorality of the universe is taken not as a problem but as a given.” Coates sees this as liberating: “Life was short, and death undefeated. So I loved hard, since I would not love for long. . . . I found, in this fixed and godless love, something cosmic and spiritual nonetheless.”34 The logic of that “so” eludes me, I confess. I’m not at all sure how it follows.

  It does, however, explain the ensuing investment of politics with a sense of urgency and ultimacy: “The need for purpose and community, for mission, is human,” Coates later notes. Agreed. But then this move: “It’s embedded in our politics, which are not simply fights over health coverage, tax credits, and farm subsidies but parcel to the search for meaning. It is that search that bedeviled the eight years of power.”35 If we’re all we’ve got, then any hope for justice is on us, and politics is as close as we’ll get to an engine for bringing about the naturalized kingdom of god. Pelagian activism—resigned to, yet confident in, human power and ingenuity—is prone to being blinded by innocence. Indeed, as a later Augustinian, Reinhold Niebuhr, would put it, our atheistic confidence makes us “incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency.”36