On the Road with Saint Augustine

by James K. A. Smith

  If Christianity is ultimately the proclamation of a gracious Father who runs to the end of the road to gather up his prodigals, it is decidedly not an ethereal appeal to yet another absent but heavenly Father. To the contrary, Augustine’s encounter with Ambrose is testimony to the incarnational nature of the grace of God, who gives us surrogates like sacramental echoes of his own love. Indeed, to be adopted by this Father is to be enfolded in a new household where family is redefined and bloodlines transcended by the genealogy of grace. In the household of God’s grace, you find sisters and brothers you never knew you had, and father figures where you didn’t expect to find them. God’s grace has been tangible for me, as it was with Augustine, in no small part because God has lavished me with Ambroses in my life. There are wounds and scars from the fathers that left, but they have healed because of the fathers I’ve found in the body of Christ—who chose me without obligation, loved me without reservation, were present when others were absent—who know me and yet still love me. Like Augustine, I think they deserve to be named: Gary Currie, Gary Dix, Jim Olthuis, Ron Bentley, Tim Hibma, and Norris Aalsma have joined the mothers I’ve also found in the church—like Sue Johnson, Karen Bentley, and Lois Aalsma—as icons of the Father I met through the Son, signs that “a man can be kind and a father could stay.”18 They are reminders to me that the gospel speaks to that most human of hungers: for a father who sees me and knows me.

  A RECURRING THREAD in Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering is John Berryman’s ongoing struggle with addiction and his hopes for recovery, trying to claw his way toward a new life. In a particularly poignant episode, we learn of Berryman’s estranged son, Paul, who sometimes writes to his father with news about school and grades, signing off each one with his full name—Paul Berryman—“as if writing to a stranger.”19 We have one of Berryman’s replies to his son. Jamison, I think mistakenly, reads it as still self-absorbed, as a note primarily about the father rather than reaching into the life of the son. But I think she misses one of the ways fathers want to love their sons—by sharing wisdom, giving some guidance, owning fatherhood by offering insight for living. If one appreciates that, the note is a veritable sacrament of extended love from the midst of brokenness.

  FOR MY SON: On the eve of my 56th birthday, after struggles, I think I have learned this: To give an honest (sincere) account of anything is the second hardest task man can set for himself. . . . The only harder task, in my opinion at the moment, is to try to love and know the Lord, in impenetrable silence.20

  Even broken fathers can be reborn, and honesty is its own sort of love. From the fog of his recovery, Berryman’s missive reads like the best life raft he could throw to a son who felt distant, a word of wisdom pointing not to himself but beyond, not to himself as father but to God the Father. Indeed, the best way to be a father is to point your children beyond you, to a Father who never fails.

  One of my favorite images in all of Augustine’s life is the picture he paints of his baptism. After a philosophical retreat with his friends in Cassiciacum, having tried their hand at writing their own Platonic dialogues, they return to the bustle of the city and the bosom of the bishop of Milan to present themselves for baptism. In recalling the scene, Augustine adds this touching detail: “We made the boy Adeodatus our partner in baptism as well.” Like Berryman, Augustine realizes one of the things he can do is be a father who points his son to a Father beyond. “We included him in your gift of baptism,” Augustine testifies, “so that being born again with us, he was the same spiritual age, to be raised in your training.”21 Augustine could best be a father by learning to be an icon that his son sees through rather than an idol he worships. And before that Father, they are brothers—“the same age,” as Augustine puts it.

  I thought about this when we visited Milan and climbed down the narrow stairs to the archaeological area beneath the Duomo to see the baptismal font where Augustine, Adeodatus, and his friend Alypius were all baptized together. I didn’t think of all the fathers who had left me. I thought about the Father who had found me—the Father who had gifted me with Deanna, my Alypius, still alongside me after all these years. And then I cast a sideward glance at my children, exploring nooks and crannies of the ancient cathedral’s ruins, and I noticed they were watching me, and wanted to be there, making this pilgrimage with me. I recalled that one of the most persistent mercies in my life was their constant forgiveness of my faults as a father. And I realized that the most revolutionary grace in my life was the gift of a heavenly Father who, against all odds, graced me with the power to stay.

  Death: How to Hope

  What do I want when I want to live?

  Who really wants to live forever? We scoff at the idea as a recipe for ceaseless boredom. We don’t worry about what happens to us after we die because we’re assured of nonexistence. This is less the fruit of some considered naturalism and more the default of a culture that’s made a god out of present pleasures. “Do you really want to live forever?” the eighties band Alphaville asked under the threat of nuclear holocaust. No, we want to be forever young. We’ll settle for temporal happiness, or at least incessant distraction, as a trade for some vague promise of immortality. “Why would anyone want to live forever?” asks Ernie on the AMC series Lodge 49. “I just want to live for real, for a little while, right here.” He then surveys his lonely situation and ruefully adds: “What’s the use of living forever if you’re all alone on a Sunday?”

  We’ve made peace with death. We’ll settle for notoriety and memory. Even our funerals are elaborate exercises of denial, transposed into “celebrations of life.”1 Our hope is not life eternal but a legacy that survives us. And our confidence that we can achieve such immortality seems odd when you consider the myriad of forgotten ones who’ve preceded us.

  Nobody really wants to live forever, but nobody wants to die either. Nobody wants to watch people dying, so we have created entire industries to sequester them or rid ourselves of them, or we cleverly convince them to excuse themselves from our attention by exercising their autonomy. Perhaps even more pointedly, we don’t want to be seen dying, so the padded and privileged expend their energy and reserves on the creeping harbinger of death we call “aging.” Thus emerges another market, the wellness industrial complex, which at once capitalizes on our fear of dying and leverages what physician Raymond Barfield calls our “desire to be desirable.” “The fear of death, with no grasp of what makes a life truly good, is the stupendously irrational desire for mere duration.”2

  Nobody wants to live forever, and nobody wants to die, so our hope settles for extension, a posthuman future we will achieve, triumphing over mortality, at least for a while. Since we can only imagine this as more of the same, it starts to look like lingering too long at a party. These Silicon Valley dreams of technology mastering mortality have been explored (and satirized) in prescient novels like Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Don DeLillo’s Zero K. They capture both the longing and the sadness, the hope and the lingering futility. In Super Sad True Love Story, for instance, we witness an encounter between Lenny Abramov, the benighted protagonist, and Joshie Goldman, the owner of Post-Human Resources, a startup firm devoted to the technological achievement of immortality, a company where they use “a special hypoallergenic organic air freshener . . . because the scent of immortality is complex.”3 Lenny, at thirty, is already an embarrassing elder in the company, showing signs that he’s not long for this world. He asks Joshie, the CEO, if he could maybe get some special access to “dechronification treatments” at a reduced rate. “That’s only for clients,” Joshie replies. “You know that.” But Joshie assures him: “Stick with the diet and exercise. Use stevia instead of sugar. You’ve still got a lot of life left in you.” But we feel Lenny’s response:

  My sadness filled the room, took over its square, simple contours, crowding out even Joshie’s spontaneous rose-petal odor. “I didn’t mean that,” Joshie said. “Not just a lot of life. Maybe forever. But you can’t fool
yourself into thinking that’s a certainty.”

  “You’ll see me die someday,” I said, and immediately felt bad for saying it. I tried, as I had done since childhood, to feel nonexistence. I forced coldness to run through the natural humidity of my hungry second-generation-immigrant body. I thought of my parents. We would all be dead together. Nothing would remain of our tired, broken race. My mother had bought three adjoining plots at a Long Island Jewish cemetery. “Now we can be together forever,” she had told me, and I had nearly broken down in tears at her misplaced optimism, at the notion that she would want to spend her idea of eternity—and what could her eternity possibly comprise?—with her failure of a son.4

  What’s the use of living forever if you’re all alone on a Sunday?

  But what if forever weren’t just an extension of a sad, solitary present but instead meant being welcomed home—to the place that made up for all those lonely Sundays that you hoped could be otherwise? What if it’s not just that I live forever but that we live forever? What if forever was meeting your mother, who could finally convince you that she doesn’t see a failure but only a son, whom she loves?

  THIS MODERN ALLERGY to death is a stark contrast to Christianity’s almost morbid comfort with mortal remains. The hope of resurrection and eternal life doesn’t generate an evasion of death but rather a raw, sometimes creepy honesty about it. You can sense this today at a site that is like a time slice back to Augustine’s own age, offering an opportunity to step into a world that Augustine himself saw.

  The Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, near the university, was not always so named. Its first designation was the Basilica Martyrum, the Basilica of the Martyrs. Built by Ambrose when he was bishop of Milan, the church was consecrated with the relics of Protasius and Gervasius, martyred by an earlier Roman emperor.5 On the day we visited, a warm spring sun seemed to deepen the blue of the sky between the two towers of the basilica as we walked through the portico toward the sanctuary. We passed a twentieth-century baptistry that commemorated Ambrose’s baptism of Augustine and made our way toward the altar, then descended into the crypt.

  The scene is jarring to modern sensibilities. Through a compressed entrance you descend into a squat space, like a gothic cave. At first you see a few rows of small pews, but once you’re inside you see it: the pews are facing what looks like a macabre aquarium, a glass wall behind which are three skeletons with ghoulish grins. They are the remains of Protasius and Gervasius, and now Ambrose. But they are adorned in robes, awaiting their resurrection. Ambrose is still wearing his bishop’s mitre.

  To descend into this crypt is to be transported to a different world. It is like a time capsule, not just because it houses ancient remains, but because it is designed for an encounter that runs counter to modern sensibilities.6 I saw this play itself out while there. The day we visited, a rambunctious class of elementary school students was visiting the basilica on a field trip. I had noticed them in the sanctuary—energetic, slightly irreverent, a few being mischievous. We were already in the crypt when a gaggle of them barreled down the narrow stairs, bustling and bumping one another, then almost screeching to a halt when they saw it. Their irreverence was hushed by a fascination, perhaps itself slightly grim. These children came from another world above—a world of plasticized youth and botoxed grasping at longevity; this crypt was a descent into a world where they came face-to-face with memento mori.

  The schoolchildren’s jarred surprise stood in contrast to two other visitors we saw that day. When my daughter, Madison, and I had first made our way down the stairs, we were behind an older couple, shuffling slowly, the wife leading her aged husband by the arm. Once we were in the crypt together, it became clear that the husband was suffering from dementia. But they settled into the pews quietly, one might even say expectantly, the old man’s body finding a habit that came easily to him. Heads bowed in prayer, this wasn’t a foreign world for them. It was something like home, or an outpost of the home they were longing for.

  In his marvelous book Letters to a Young Catholic, George Weigel unpacks the unique way Catholic devotion to relics works—not as a morbid fascination or as superstitious magic, but as a tangible, tactile connection to hope. Commenting on a memorial to martyrs like this one, Weigel observes that, while such memorials of persecution “are a powerful and sobering reminder of the depravity to which hatred and evil can and do lead,” still,

  the Memorial is ultimately a place of comfort and a place of joy: comfort, because we are reminded here that ordinary men and women, people just like us, are capable of heroic virtue under extreme circumstances; joy, because . . . this great multitude of witnesses and heroes, who have “washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb” [Rev. 7:14], now live in the radiant presence of the Thrice-Holy Trinity, their every tear wiped away and their every longing satisfied, interceding for us that we might remain faithful to the gift of Baptism and to friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ.7

  My visit to this crypt made a special impression because I shared the journey with my daughter. Both mesmerized, we sat quietly together on one of the pews, not exactly sure what to do, but held there somehow by a weight that was not sad yet was tinged with an eerie eternality. It can be a somber experience, parent and child facing death together. Worries and fears well up unbidden. A future we try to forget about—of departure and rupture, loss and being left behind—roars into the present. But these fears were swallowed up by something bigger, by an uncanny sense of connection with these bones, these brothers. We were no longer parent and child; we were sister and brother on the field leveled by death but also haunted by the resurrection. Though we had descended to get here, we were being invited by these brothers to some place higher, some place else, into a time beyond time where they were already alive in God, praying for us. And all of us, even we in our still-breathing bodies, we are all waiting with the same hope of resurrection. So when I glanced and saw the tears in Madison’s eyes, I knew they weren’t tears lamenting a loss but the tears of one overwhelmed to be part of such a cosmic fellowship that faces the fear of death with eyes wide open.

  TO THEIR CREDIT, the existentialists did not shy from talking about death. For Camus, suicide is the “one truly serious philosophical problem,” the problem that occupied his Myth of Sisyphus. And for Heidegger before him, being-towards-death is a definitive feature of human existence that holds the key to discovering authenticity. As Heidegger points out, one of the ways we actually evade the sting of death is by conceding its certainty as a vague abstraction—we push it to the background of “death and taxes,” and thereby neutralize it by according it a mere certainty, a kind of biological fact that doesn’t impinge on us. What this does, in fact, is grant me the comfort of not having to face up to my death. Death is deferred—to others, to “later.” When it comes to death in general, we are certain that everyone dies. But when it comes to our own death, Heidegger says, we are “fugitives” from the truth: we run from facing it.8

  And yet death, for Heidegger, is exactly what I need to face in order to achieve authenticity—not to be constantly thinking about death (morbidly “brooding over it,” as Heidegger says) or trying to imagine this possibility “become real” for me (which is impossible); rather, to “face up” to death is to anticipate death as “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all”—it is being-towards my not being, not as a vague certainty but as something I “understand” in such a way that it focuses my life. To face this, Heidegger says, is disclosive: it’s revealing, unveiling; it lays bare who I am, what matters to me. “They” can’t answer for me. To face up to death in this way is to face up to what I’m doing with my life. That, says Heidegger, is authenticity.

  How to die is really a question of how to live. This insight of Hannah Arendt, who was Heidegger’s student, emerges from her own direct encounter with St. Augustine. “The trouble with human happiness,” she points out, “is that it is constantly beset by fear.”9 If love is a kind of craving, and
“to love is indeed nothing else than to crave something for its own sake,” as an end in itself, then the possibility of losing what I love hangs over my happiness like the sword of Damocles. Craving is haunted by losing. Hence “fearlessness is what love seeks.”10 What love hopes to find is a beloved who could never be lost.

  Which is precisely why the fear that death spawns has to somehow be lived with. As she later formulates it: “It is no longer so much a question of coming to terms with death but life.”11 Arendt then cites Augustine: “For there are those who die with equanimity; but perfect are those who live with equanimity.”12 How to die is a question of how to live, but how to live is a matter of knowing how to love: how to find a love that isn’t haunted by fear, a love that is stronger than death—figuring out how to love rightly and live lightly with all the mortal beauties of creation without despising or resenting their mortality either. To love and live in a way that faces up to our death, and the mortality that hangs over our finitude, without simply becoming what Kierkegaard calls “knights of resignation,” caught in the false dichotomy of God or the world, who can only manage to live with death by hating this life.

  Pretending you never wanted life anyway is decidedly not the Augustinian solution. Augustine affirms the conatus essendi, our desire-to-be. “The more you love to be,” the early Augustine remarked, “the more you will desire eternal life.”13 The hope of eternal life does not efface the desire to live—it is the fulfillment of the desire to live, to live in a way that we can never lose what we love. Much later in his life, in a sermon praising the heroism of martyrs, he would affirm our love of life while also noting the trick of knowing how to love and live. “They really loved this life,” he says of the martyrs. Their death wasn’t some sort of sanctified suicide, an eagerness to get out.