On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  Augustine has no illusions about innocence. But his activism does not bear the burden of bringing about the kingdom. His clear-eyed recognition of the perdurance of evil—in his own heart as much as anywhere—generates a politics of hope rather than Pelagian revolution. The naturalization—and idolization—of politics generates its own injustices. For Augustine, citizenship in the city of God means laboring as an ambassador of the way things ought to be, hoping to bend the way things are to follow the arc of justice, of shalom. Politics is one of the ways we respond to the reality of evil, so long as we recognize that only resurrection can overcome it. Evil is not a puzzle to be solved but an incursion to be beaten back.

  DOES THIS MAKE belief in God more believable? I don’t know. But I know that one arresting mystery in the midst of horror stopped us short: the inexplicable forgiveness extended by the saints of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, after the heinous massacre carried out by a young white supremacist. The evil itself is enough to make anyone question the existence and goodness of God. Which is why the forgiveness is even more mysterious, especially since this upsurge of grace and mercy was nourished by their faith in the crucified God who rose from the dead—the same faith that made them the sort of people who would welcome the unsettled young man to their Wednesday night Bible study, the outcast who would become their executioner. Such hospitality and forgiveness—such light in the midst of darkness—is generated by a trust that, to some, will look mad, or even irresponsible. Such irruptions of grace are a sign that jars us into considering whether the ball of fire at the heart of the cosmos isn’t, after all, in spite of everything, the fire of love.

  Fathers: How to Be Broken

  What do I want when I want to be embraced?

  If a trope is perennial, does that make it cliché? Or is it simply a reality that needs to be relived in the first person? If a hunger is replayed over and over again, generation upon generation, does that make it tired and stale—or does it signal something enduring within us, a palimpsest of human nature that refuses to be effaced? If I spend a lifetime searching for what a million ancestors before me have hunted, does that make my longing derivative—or cosmic, a hunger planted in the human chest? Even if Freud would reduce it to an archetype, can heartbreak be “typical”?

  Such is our longing for absent fathers—the fathers who left, opening up black holes in the fabric of a child’s universe, along with the fathers who stayed but whose mercurial distance made them absent even when present. So many people on the road are looking for their fathers.

  The quest is epic, as old as Homer, whose Odyssey opens with a son who goes in search of his absent father and ends with that father returning to find his own father, his son in tow.1 Fathers and homes blur and blend: the taciturn father makes us born to run, “exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.”2 Bruce Springsteen sees this trope as the heart of rock and roll: “T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s one embarrassing scream of ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s just fathers and sons, and you’re out there proving something to somebody in the most intense way possible. It’s, like, ‘Hey, I was worth a little more attention than I got! You blew that one, big guy!’”3 Even when it looks like we’ve given up the search and couldn’t care less, we act in ways that keep saying, “Look at me, Dad. Do you see me now?” We can’t stop wanting to be seen, known, loved.

  “You do not stop hungering for your father’s love,” Paul Auster observes, “even after you are grown up.”4 His memoir, The Invention of Solitude, is a long meditation on this hungering: “From the very beginning, it seems, I was looking for my father, looking frantically for anyone who resembled him.” He would hungrily eat up any scraps of attention or some faint echo of affection. “It was not that I felt he disliked me. It was just that he seemed distracted, unable to look in my direction. And more than anything else, I wanted him to take notice of me.” Auster recalls a trivial moment suffused with significance in this respect:

  When the family once went to a crowded restaurant on a Sunday and we had to wait for our table, my father took me outside, produced a tennis ball (from where?), put a penny on the sidewalk, and proceeded to play a game with me: hit the penny with the tennis ball. . . . In retrospect, nothing could have been more trivial. And yet the fact that I had been included, that my father had casually asked me to share his boredom with him, nearly crushed me with happiness.5

  To be invited into such boredom is the height of intimacy, a rest that need not be covered with nervous chatter. Auster would spend the rest of his life looking for this again.

  So many people on the road are looking for their fathers. In fact, the quest courses through Kerouac’s On the Road, which ends with an ecstatic paragraph in which Sal Paradise is imagining the energy rippling across the country they have traversed. “So in America when the sun goes down,” he muses from New Jersey, “the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”6 The road is life where you never find your father. It’s a familiar path.

  Some have suggested this is the oldest story, the baseline narrative of the human condition. Thomas Wolfe, whose Look Homeward, Angel is a bald instance of the genre, later reflected on the impetus for the story. His answer appeals to the epic:

  From the beginning—and this was one fact that in all my times of hopelessness returned to fortify my faith in my conviction—the idea, the central legend that I wished my book to express had not changed. And this central idea was this: the deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way or another was central to all living was man’s search to find a father, not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of a strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger, to which the belief and power of his own life could be united.7

  And it’s not only sons who go looking. The search is human. Margo Maine, for example, invented the term “father hunger” to help diagnose the cause of eating disorders in daughters, young women for whom the experience of father absence deflected their father hunger into unhealthy relationships toward hunger and food.8 Who of us isn’t an heir to the dreams of our fathers?

  LATE CAPITALISM IS the age in which everyone has a computer in their pocket and a gaping hole where a father should be. It’s part of what has drawn something of a cult following to filmmaker Wes Anderson, particularly from a generation (my generation, I should admit) whose parents reveled in the amorphous freedoms of the 1970s and found the permission to dissolve their marriages in the 1980s. While they comforted themselves with tales of enlightened divorces and intentional custodial practices, they rarely asked us or gave us permission to offer counterevidence. So we absorbed and internalized their stories that this was “better for everyone” and repeated the script. It was our way of trying to talk ourselves into believing it was true, with the added benefit of giving comfort to those who had rent our world in two.9

  Anderson’s body of work can be read as an aesthetic protest against this official narrative. At the heart of almost every Anderson film is a child on a quest born of absence and disappointment and failure, a quest that bears the imprints of a hunger for a father. From Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, through The Royal Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic, to Moonrise Kingdom and Isle of Dogs, the drama of these stories is propelled by an absence—the absence of what ought to be in the relationship between a father and his children, or our enduring sense of what ought to be, even if we’ve never experienced it. Many of Anderson’s characters hit the road looking for fathers and find only substitutes.

  The father figures in Anderson’s movies are not without charm. They are never an
gry cartoonish villains we’d be only too happy to leave. They are instead broken vessels who give us tiny glimpses of their humanity, of wanting to be otherwise, which only deepens our disappointment because it teases us with the possibility. So when, after a horrible accident, the scheming Royal Tenenbaum approaches his son Chas with a Dalmatian, a replacement for the dog Chas and his sons have just lost, we are touched by his confession: “I’m sorry I let you down, Chas. All of you. I’ve been trying to make it up to you.”

  “Thank you,” Chas replies. “We’ve had a rough year, Dad.”

  “I know you have, Chassy.” Every once in a while, Royal’s narcissism stutters, and he sees his children, and they know what it’s like to be seen by a father.

  But often this becomes just another occasion for the child to console the father’s failure to be one, the parent demanding to be seen for his brief flash of virtue. “Do you still consider me your father?” Royal asks his other son, Richie.

  “Sure I do,” Richie assures him.

  “I wish I had more to offer in that department,” he admits, looking for sympathy.

  “I know you do, Pop,” pleasing and appeasing his fragile failure of a father.

  The fragility of Wes Anderson’s fathers is why we can’t quit them, why we keep getting suckered into hoping they might actually be the fathers we need. Our empathy stems from sensing that maybe these fathers still haven’t found what they’re looking for. This crisscrossing of quests is seen in Life Aquatic. Oceanographer Steve Zissou is chasing his white whale, a mythical jaguar shark that killed his partner. But since only Steve saw it, many are questioning whether it really exists, and perhaps even Steve’s role in the death of his partner. At the same time, a Ned Plimpton has arrived on ship, suggesting he may be Steve’s son. While Ned is looking for his father, we get hints that Steve is looking for more than a fish.

  In a culminating scene, the entire zany cast of the film is crammed into a steampunk submarine. Having finally tracked the shark, the crew is preparing to encounter it in this campy submersible. (Do yourself a favor and Google “Life Aquatic and Sigur Rós” to see the scene with its ethereal soundtrack.) The luminous Leviathan swims at and over them, confirming its existence as everyone sits mesmerized in silence, jostled by its indifferent, hulking presence.

  “It’s beautiful, Steve,” his ex-wife comments.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty nice, isn’t it?” But then Steve pauses, almost tremulous.

  “I wonder if it remembers me.”

  His face scrunches to a grimace; his eyes well up with tears; a sob grabs at his throat. The entire crew extend their arms and lay hands on him, like some underwater altar call, a Pentecost of self-realization.

  AUGUSTINE’S FATHER, PATRICK, died when Augustine was seventeen. Patrick would know nothing of what his son would go on to become. The son’s recollections of the father in the Confessions are mostly a litany of disappointments. Early on his father is like an icon in negative, the poster boy for disordered love: “His delight was that of the intoxication which makes the world oblivious of you, its Creator, and to love your creation instead of you. He was drunk with the invisible wine of his perverse will directed downwards to inferior things.”10 And when, much later, he recalls all that his mother had to endure being married to this man, it’s clear the metaphors here are intentional: Augustine recalls alcoholism, infidelity, and abuse.11 Augustine the grown man is both embarrassed and resentful when he recalls his father’s failure to channel his passion with the gift of discipline. Instead, Patrick enthuses over the son’s new possibilities for concupiscence, almost cheering him to join the father in adventures of lust. His failure as a father reflects a certain failure at being human. Even when Augustine recalls his father’s end-of-life conversion, it is an occasion to praise his mother for “gaining him” for God.12

  The same year his father died, Augustine became a father. His son, Adeodatus (“gift of God”), was unexpected but welcome. If my own experience, millennia later, is any indicator, it’s not hard to imagine Augustine’s realization of his father’s failures becoming clearer with the arrival of his own son. Trying to answer the call of fatherhood without a net can be a new occasion to feel an absence you had learned to live with, a reason to question the stories you’d been told. It can also unleash an anger and resentment no one had let you express before because it disrupted your parents’ peace with their decisions.

  Augustine left us so many words, shelves and shelves of articulated thought, that we almost never have time to ask: What did he leave unsaid? About his father? His son?13 His hopes? How much was Augustine existentially working through the emotional distance from his own father, or his own failures as a father? In what way is his search for home really a search for a father? Does he embrace the role of the prodigal because he knows there’s a father at the end of it?

  EVERY CHILD LOOKING for an absent, distant father is on the road to cover up a deeper desire: that such a father would come looking for them—that the arrow of hunger would be reversed and the father would return. Because then we would know he was thinking about us, looking for us, loving us. What to make of this father hunger other than a deep longing to be seen and known by the One who made us?

  Paul Auster recalls something close to this in Invention of Solitude—in a scene, much later in his life, of fatherly attention, an instance when his father went looking for him.

  Once, while I was still living in Paris, he wrote to tell me he had gone to the public library to read some of my poems that had appeared in a recent issue of Poetry. I imagined him in a large, deserted room, early in the morning before going to work: sitting at one of those long tables with his overcoat still on, hunched over words that must have been incomprehensible to him. I have tried to keep this image in mind, along with all the others that will not leave it.14

  This, of course, is exactly the dream come true at the climax of the parable of the prodigal son. The son looking for home realizes that his father has been looking for him: “But while he was still a long way off,” Jesus says, “his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The son slinking home in shame is gathered up in compassion; the child who’s been lost is found by a father who runs out to meet him. The air is charged with celebration: “Let’s have a feast and celebrate,” the father cries. “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found” (vv. 23–24). If Augustine will later be known as the doctor of grace, it’s because Jesus introduced him to a father who came looking for him. In his search, he was found.

  Augustine would have occasion to return to this parable later in a series of reflections on the Gospels. Reading Luke 15, Augustine sees the loving arms of this father as a picture of God’s embrace of humanity made possible by the incarnation of his Son. But the intimacy is not lost in his cosmic account. “To be comforted by the word of God’s grace unto the hope of pardon of our sins,” Augustine comments, “is to return after a long journey to obtain from a father the kiss of love.”15

  Maybe this is what has drawn me to Augustine on an unconscious level: a shared longing for a father I’ve never known. I suspect I’m not alone in this. I know I’m not the only one whose father has left, whose stepfather left, who’s been left bereft of fathers despite their multiplication in a world of serial marriages. I was almost thirty before an Everclear song (of all things!) dislodged an anger and sadness within me like an anthem of absence:

  Father of mine

  tell me where have you been

  I just closed my eyes

  and the world disappeared.16

  My father left us when I was eleven. I’ve not seen or heard from him since I was twenty-one, the year I became a father. (I’ve been a father longer than I had a father.) My stepfather disappeared when I was thirty-three, and I haven’t heard a word from him or laid eyes on him since. I don’t know where either of them lives, nor do they know a thing about me.
As a father, this is unfathomable to me: I can’t imagine my children making their way somewhere in this cold, hard world without knowing we’re at home for them. I can’t imagine my children as a blank space vaguely “somewhere.” Suffice it to say, neither my father nor my stepfather has come looking for me.

  But a Father did. At the heart of the madness of the gospel is an almost unbelievable mystery that speaks to a deep human hunger only intensified by a generation of broken homes: to be seen and known and loved by a father. Maybe navigating the tragedy and heartbreak of this fallen world is realizing this hunger might not be met by the ones we expect or hope will come looking for us, but then meeting a Father who adopts you, who chooses you, who sees you a long way off and comes running and says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  IT’S NO ACCIDENT, then, that Augustine finds his way home because he is found by a father figure. We have already met Ambrose and hailed him as a decisive figure in making the Christian faith intellectually plausible for Augustine. But that is not the whole of the story, and it may not even be the most important part. Ultimately, what Augustine found in Ambrose is a father he never had. “That man of God,” Augustine recalls, “took me up as a father takes a newborn baby in his arms, and in the best tradition of bishops, he prized me as a foreign sojourner.”17 Ambrose is the anti-Patrick (which explains why Monica’s relationship to him is so intimate). What won Augustine’s attention was first and foremost Ambrose’s kindness. He helped Augustine over some intellectual hurdles by first loving him like a father.