They really loved this life; yet they weighed it up. They thought of how much they should love the things eternal; if they were capable of so much love for things that pass away. . . . I know you want to keep on living. You do not want to die. And you want to pass from this life to another in such a way that you will not rise again, as a dead man, but fully alive and transformed. This is what you desire. This is the deepest human feeling: mysteriously, the soul itself wishes and instinctively desires it.14
The desire to live forever is a desire to live, to know love, to be happy. It is the realization of our most human cravings and longings, not their evisceration. How to die is a question of how to live, how to love, how to hope.
HOW TO DIE, though, is also a question of how to lose in the meantime. In this vale of tears, how to live is synonymous with the question of how to grieve. Augustine is most honest about the fear of death when he talks about the horror of grief—even if his self-criticism on this score might puzzle us.
Augustine gives us a glimpse into two gut-wrenching experiences of loss in his life. The first is early in the Confessions, when he recounts the sudden, unexpected death of an unnamed friend in his hometown of Thagaste. He and Augustine had become friends when Augustine returned to teach, though part of their camaraderie stemmed from their mutual disdain of the Christian faith of their parents. When his friend fell ill with a fever and was unconscious, his devout parents, fearing the worst, had him baptized without his knowing. When he later recovered, Augustine laughingly derided the parents’ benighted efforts, expecting his friend to share in his enlightened dismissal of such superstition. But in fact his friend was aghast at Augustine’s impudence. He received this gift of unexpected recovery as an opportunity to live into this baptism and curtly told Augustine that if that was going to be his attitude, they could no longer be friends. Augustine, “dumbfounded and perturbed,” reeled at this response and waited for his friend to come back to his senses. But in the days of his waiting, his friend died, and he was never able to restore their friendship.
The bottom fell out of Augustine’s world. “Everything on which I set my gaze was death,” he confesses. “My home town became a torture to me.”15 What was familiar became Unheimlich, uncanny, not-at-home. He was swimming in a sea of despair; nothing could hold him; nothing seemed solid anymore; his world melted away in grief; everything familiar became a sea of sadness. “I found myself heavily weighed down by a sense of being tired of living and scared of dying. I suppose that the more I loved him, the more hatred and fear I felt for the death which had taken him from me, as if it were my most ferocious enemy. I thought that since death had consumed him, it was suddenly going to engulf all humanity.”16
When Augustine reconsiders this episode in retrospect, his analysis is incisive, if somewhat off-putting at first. By the time he’s writing the Confessions, he is trying to get a handle on why his world dissolved at this loss. He suggests it’s because he hadn’t yet learned how to love, and hence hadn’t yet learned how to live amid mortals. He resented those still alive, and wanted to die himself, because “he whom I had loved as if he would never die was dead.”17 The problem wasn’t that he loved his friend, or that he loved something mortal, or even that he grieved. The problem was how he loved him and hence how he lost him. He had loved him as if he wouldn’t die, grasping onto him as if he were immortal. “What madness not to understand how to love human beings with awareness of the human condition!”18 This is not some gnostic diminution of earthly goods, nor a pie-in-the-sky resignation that talks itself into imagining happiness as trying to live like angels without bodies or friends. It is once again a realist spirituality that is trying to understand how to love what is mortal, how to live amid the ephemeral, how to deal with the crooked timber of our hearts and our penchant to deny all of this and cling to the mortal as if it were immortal.
“The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply,” he concludes, “was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.” Notice, the problem isn’t that he loved his friend; the problem is how. “I loved what I loved as a substitute for you.”19 If Augustine invokes idolatry here, that is not a harsh dismissal of our grief but a diagnostic account of what’s going on in our grief in order to help us imagine grieving otherwise. Indeed, Augustine is honest enough to admit that he made an idolatry of his grieving: “I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend.”20 Such is the curvature of the crooked human heart: it is always prone to bend back upon itself, such that I make even grief about me.
How we grieve tells us something about how we have loved, and it can sometimes disclose the twisted logic of our loves: “For wherever the human soul turns itself, other than to you, it is fixed in sorrows, even if it is fixed upon beautiful things.”21 Even the most beautiful things and faithful friends share something in common: they are made, created, finite, temporal, and therefore mortal. To love them as ultimate, to cling to them as what gives meaning, is to stake one’s happiness on realities that are fugitive and fleeting—or as Augustine already hinted: it is to build one’s house on the sand.
But what if we leaned on the rock instead of the sand? What if there was someone who gathered up all that is lost? What if there was a beloved who could never die, who loved you first, whose love called everything into existence and is therefore stronger than death? It is this radical alternative that makes possible a very different how. “‘Happy is the person who loves you,’” Augustine says (citing Tobit 13:18), “and his friend in you, and his enemy because of you.” Happiness is loving everyone and everything in God, the immortal one who holds all mortal creatures in his hand. When one loves in this way—in this “order,” so to speak—then, “though left alone, he loses none dear to him; for all are dear in the one who cannot be lost.”22 The solution to loving mortals isn’t to withhold our love in a protective hedge against loss; rather, we can love long and hard, trusting in the God who is all in all, who gathers up our losses in a time beyond time. Even our grieving is suffused with hope because all our loves are caught up in the immortal Beloved who loves us first. All is not lost.
This is the difference between the death of Augustine’s unnamed friend and the loss of his cherished mother, Monica. It’s certainly not the case that Augustine no longer grieves. In fact, you can still detect a hint of embarrassment in the middle-aged man at how much his mother’s passing undid him. Like Mersault swimming after the death of mama in Camus’s The Stranger, Augustine went to the baths with some cathartic hope, but it didn’t work. His inner Stoic refuses to cry. But then the breakthrough: “I felt like crying in your sight, about her and for her, about myself and for myself. I let go the tears I’d held in, letting them run out as freely as they wanted, and out of them I made a bed for my heart. And it rested on those tears, since there only you could hear.”23
By this point the way he grieved his friend has become unimaginable to him, because he can’t imagine how anyone could survive such loss without the comfort of God’s mercy and the consolation of eternity. Even his loss is now tethered to kingdom come. The resurrection casts a long shadow over his grief, a shadow that is its own sort of light. Augustine never made it “back home” with his mother; but now his loss is released into the hope of seeing her in the home country of the city of God, where God will wipe away every tear.
THERE IS A tender letter that Augustine wrote to a grieving young woman, Sapida, whose brother Timothy had recently died. Sapida had woven a tunic for her brother, who served as a deacon, but Timothy died before he was ever able to wear it. So Sapida gave it to the bishop, Augustine. The first words of Augustine’s letter paint a moving picture for the grieving young woman: he’s wearing Timothy’s tunic for her. “I have accepted the tunic you sent, and, when I wrote this, I had already begun to wear it.” All is not lost of your labors, Augustine assures her. He meets Sapida in her mourning. “It is of course reaso
n for tears that you no longer see, as you once did, your loving brother, a deacon of the church of Carthage, coming and going, busy with the work of his ministry in the Church. . . . And you do not hear from him the words of respect that he paid to the holiness of his sister with indulgent, pious, and dutiful affection. When one thinks of these things, one must do violence to one’s feelings, one’s heart is pierced, and the tears of one’s own heart flow like blood.”24
But then he offers consolation on a higher register: “Let your heart be lifted up”—the passive here seems especially tender—“and your eyes will be dry. For the love by which Timothy loved and loves Sapida has not perished because those things, which you mourn as having been removed from you, have passed away over time. That love remains, preserved in its repository, and is hidden with Christ in the Lord”—the Lord who “was willing to die for us so that we might live, even though we have died, so that human beings would not fear death as if it were going to destroy them, and so that none of the dead for whom life itself died would grieve as if they had lost life.”25 The hope of enduring love, a love stronger than death, is not some natural immortality; it is a life bought by the death of God, the resurrection of the Crucified, which now yields hope as a spoil of victory over the grave. So the hope Augustine commends isn’t simply “rational,” like a Platonic conclusion to immortality, or the achievement of some kind of Buddhist detachment from loss. It is a hope that is bought by the One “who can restore what has been lost, bring to life what has died, repair what has been corrupted, and keep thereafter without end what has come to an end.” So take consolation, Sapida, that I am clothed with the tunic you wove for Timothy, Augustine says; but see it as a sign, an icon of our greater hope. For “how much more amply and certainly ought you to be consoled because he for whom it was prepared will then need no incorruptible garb but will be clothed with incorruptibility and immortality.”26
We have another snippet from Augustine of what we might call “self-consolation,” in which he mourns the loss of a friend and tries to address his own sense of loss with the assurance of hope. Augustine’s dear friend from Africa, Nebridius, had been a constant companion from their time in Carthage, even leaving Africa to join Augustine in Milan, and eventually joining Augustine in the journey to Christian faith back in Africa. But Nebridius died prematurely and when, in the Confessions, Augustine recalls his friend, he also hopes that he is remembered by his friend. Recalling so many animated conversations, humbled that Nebridius was always interested in what Augustine thought, Augustine imagines his friend in heaven: “He no longer pricks up his ears when I speak,” Augustine admits. He’s not around to put up with me the way he did, constantly asking questions and hungry for conversation. Instead, he is hidden with Christ in God where he “puts his spiritual mouth to your fountain and avidly drinks as much as he can of wisdom, happy without end.” Then Augustine allows himself a happy, consoling thought: “I do not think him so intoxicated by that as to forget me, since you, Lord, whom he drinks, are mindful of us.”27 I miss our conversations, Augustine says, and I take comfort in the thought that Nebridius remembers them too, and is eager to pick up where we left off.
DEANNA AND I spent several weeks retracing Augustine’s steps in Italy, from Ostia to Milan. It was like retracing his long Italian detour that turned out to be the road to himself, disembarking at the port in Ostia with Manichean dreams and imperial aspirations, only to end up in Milan, entranced by a bishop who would become his spiritual father. After Augustine buried Monica in Ostia, he set sail home to Africa—to the vocation that was before him and to a legacy he could never imagine. He would never set foot in Italy again.
But Deanna pointed out that Augustine’s bones had made a posthumous journey back to Italy, his relics now interred in Pavia in the San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro basilica, just twenty-five miles south of the cathedral where he was baptized. Our journey there was, in many ways, the culmination of a pilgrimage we’d been making, on the road with St. Augustine.
I recall the day vividly: I’m exhausted and, to be honest, have been a jerk all day. The fatigue of travel has finally coalesced, compounded by the guilt of the privileged guest (who am I to complain?). I’m baffled by the regional train system, and my frustration bubbles over into a curt anger that is the iceberg tip of my anxiety and exhaustion. I’m buying tickets to visit the remains of St. Augustine, one of the few philosophical psychologists of the West who could honestly identify the pains of affluenza, the unique temptations and burdens and idolatries that come with success and privilege. Having alienated Deanna with my anger, we board the train in tense silence.
The train courses through dense suburbs of high-rises on the south side of Milan, which quickly give way to flat wheat fields and the ruins of family farms. In the tension, forty-five kilometers feels like forever. As is always the case, upon arrival, Deanna forgives me yet again (I have a treasured picture of her postmercy smirk at a café on a narrow cobbled street). We wend our way to the basilica. It is out of the way, a humble red brick church that seems to be crumbling at its edges. It feels like we walk in through the back door, a small entrée into a space that then explodes open. What looks almost abandoned from the outside has a quiet hum of activity inside, where we witness an active parish. People are praying in the chapels and pews. Fittingly, we are greeted by an African priest who is warm and friendly.
As my eyes acclimate to the light, what I’m looking at comes into focus: just behind the altar is a stunning, mammoth “ark” that towers above the relics of St. Augustine, who, like his mother, was indifferent to the location of his body since he knew his homeland was a city not built by human hands. A memorial obelisk includes a small map illustrating the early medieval journey of Augustine’s remains, from Africa, through Sardinia, ultimately settling in this small town under the care of Augustinian hermits. Around the altar are other memorials of pilgrimages made by Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI. A notebook includes handwritten petitions in Italian, English, Thai, and other languages. People from different corners of the globe have traveled long roads to revere this saint.
The ark itself is Augustine’s story in stone, like a gothic cathedral in miniature. Its size, I begin to realize, is just to make room for all the people who crowd around it in admiration and gratitude. The ark is its own communion of the saints, with ninety-five statues and fifty bas-reliefs that include kings and popes, Monica and Simplicianus, as well as an array of ordinary folk—mothers and children, laborers and masons—who have been caught up in Augustine’s story. Ambrose is preaching from a pulpit. Around the top are scenes from Augustine’s life, a marbled echo of Gozzoli’s frescoes not far away. This cycle includes a touching portrayal of Ambrose helping Augustine into his baptismal gown with Adeodatus kneeling beside him, waiting to receive the sacrament with his father. And then a tender portrayal of Augustine, the bishop, baptizing a crowd of children in Hippo. A beautiful irony is performed in sculpture: this tomb bustles with life. That irony is what Christians call hope.
High above our heads, a life-sized Augustine is veiled from us. Lying in repose, he is surrounded by attendants who lift the edges of a shroud round about him. We catch only a glimpse of his face and mitre. The sculpture reiterates the posture of the Confessions themselves: “This isn’t about me.”
Not even my Protestant heart can resist the frisson of proximity here. I seem to have the space to myself, though Deanna, my Alypius, is nearby, just like Augustine in the garden. A silence descends on everything. I’m standing before the urn that holds Augustine’s mortal remains, and for the first moment I think: “I can’t believe I’m this close to him.” But that geographical inclination gives way, and I realize that the sacred charge that enchants this place for me is an odd sense of arrival, the convergence of two journeys. I’ve been on the road with this saint for what feels like a lifetime, and here we finally cross paths and all I can think to say is, “Thank you.”
AUGUSTINE TRAVELED FREQUENTLY, often on the bac
k of a mule, in harsh weather, to visit the members of his diocese. In 418, at the age of sixty-five, he journeyed more than 1,000 kilometers to Mauretania Caesarea. In fact he traveled over 2,200 kilometers that year.28 In one of his earliest letters, Augustine the seasoned traveler wrote, “The ultimate voyage—death—is the only one that should occupy your thoughts.”29 And at the end of his life, in some of his final letters, death occupies his thoughts. Corresponding with a deacon in Carthage, Augustine closes with a request: “Also, if you have perchance heard of the passing of any holy bishops, let me know about it. God keep you.”30 Without the obituary pages to study, the aging Augustine is looking for news about the passing of his friends.
In the final year of his life, Augustine corresponded with Count Darius, an official of the imperial court in Ravenna who had recently visited North Africa to try to make peace with Boniface, a Roman general who’d gone rogue. Darius had hoped to meet Augustine, but Augustine’s age and illness prevented it. Because his fellow bishops sang the praises of Darius’s virtue, Augustine reached out with a letter. He apologizes that “the double chill . . . of winter and old age” prevented their meeting in person. But he feels that he has already seen “the form of your heart” through the testimony of others. He blesses Darius the peacemaker, noting that “a mark of greater glory” is not to slay human beings with the sword but “to slay wars themselves by the word,” encouraging Darius in his diplomatic peace mission.31 Augustine is tickled to find out that not only has Darius heard of him, but he has read him. And so Augustine praises and exhorts Darius in his work and character, then eagerly entreats him to send a letter in return. There’s something beautifully human in this: the rock-star bishop and influential author, who’s already admitted he’s a sucker for praise and admiration, is asking a government official what he thinks about Augustine’s books.
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 23
