On the Road with Saint Augustine
Page 24
Darius writes a long letter of fanboy enthusiasm in reply. It gushes in exactly the way you’d expect, just as I’m sure I would have done. But at the heart of it is a wise plea to the aging St. Augustine: “I pray to the sovereign God on your behalf,” Darius tells Augustine, “and I ask for your intercession, my holy father, so that, though I am aware that I have not merited such high praise, I may at some point turn out to be such a man.”32 Pray to the Father, St. Augustine, that I might become the person you’ve made me want to be.
Homecoming
“That last thing is what you can’t get,” Sal Paradise reminds his fellow wanderers in On the Road. “Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all.”1 This is the counsel of someone who has decided “the road is life.” The road is long enough to tempt you to believe this. It seems like there is no end in sight—that we can’t get the last thing, can’t even glimpse its end, can’t imagine rest. Despair is natural.
Running faster won’t help. Crumpling into the middle of the road and giving up doesn’t really solve anything either. And telling yourself “the road is life” over and over and over again starts to ring as a hollow consolation.
You can’t get there from here. But what if someone came to get you? You can’t get to that last thing, but what if it came to you? And what if that thing turned out to be a someone? And what if that someone not only knows where the end of the road is but promises to accompany you the rest of the way, to never leave you or forsake you until you arrive?
This is the God who runs down the road to meet prodigals. Grace isn’t high-speed transport all the way to the end but the gift of his presence the rest of the way. And it is the remarkable promise of his Son, who meets us in this distance: “My Father’s house has many rooms” (John 14:2). There is room for you in the Father’s house. His home is your end. He is with you every step of the way there.
IN THE DUOMO in Milan, built on the site of the cathedral Augustine visited so often, sitting now atop the baptistry where he was raised to new life, there is a quiet section of the church where you will see a curious sign. Marking off an “Area Reserved to Worshipers,” this sign instructs: “Please, no tourists. Do not go beyond this point except for confession.”
You reach a point on the road with Augustine where mere tourism comes to an end. You’re faced with a choice: Do you want to step in there? The next step isn’t arrival. It’s not the end of the road. To make that step won’t solve all your problems or quell every anxiety. But it is the first step of giving yourself away, arriving at the end of yourself and giving yourself over to One who gave his life for you. It is the first step of belonging to a pilgrim people who will walk alongside you, listen, and share their stories of the God who doesn’t just send a raft but climbs onto the cross that brings us back.
Acknowledgments
I feel like I’ve been writing this book for half my life, so I will undoubtedly forget to thank some of those who’ve nourished me along the way. But that failure is worth the risk of expressing my gratitude.
I have to begin with a word of thanks to the community I found at Villanova University. While I was warmly greeted and supported by my doctoral advisor in philosophy, John Caputo, this book reflects the impact of those I didn’t know I was going there to meet, particularly a cadre of Augustinian priests and patristics scholars who welcomed a curious Protestant into the conversation (I always used to tease them by reminding them about Martin Luther, OSA). I’m especially grateful to Fr. Robert Dodaro and Fr. Thomas Martin (of blessed memory) for their exemplary scholarship and warm teaching that introduced me to the “whole” Augustine—not just the author of treatises, but the pastor, bishop, and advocate who preached sermons and wrote letters. I can’t imagine this book without that lesson.
There is also a community of Augustine scholars beneath much of this, even if they don’t show up in the notes. Who isn’t still indebted to the magisterial biography by Peter Brown, for example? But closer to me is the work of friends like Eric Gregory, Gregory Lee, Joseph Clair, and others from whom I’m still learning.
Undergirding this book is a three-week journey in the footsteps of Augustine in Italy in March 2017 (terror threats in the border region of Algeria and Tunisia frustrated our plans to visit his African homeland). The trip was a series of epiphanies for me, made possible by a grant from the Calvin Alumni Association, which is itself a beautiful testimony to the way the wider constituency of Calvin University remains invested in scholarship. A Calvin Research Fellowship also bought me some time, early on, to draft a couple of early chapters. And a grant from the Theology of Joy project of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation, underwrote a trip to southern France to revisit some of Camus’s haunts in Provence and consider the émigré community of Marseille. I’m grateful for all these tangible modes of patronage.
I was able to present early drafts of some of these chapters as part of two lecture series: the 2018 Parchman Lectures at Truett Seminary of Baylor University and the 2018 Bailey Lectures, hosted by the Front Porch ministry of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas. Both communities provided a warm welcome, thoughtful engagement, and incredibly helpful feedback.
As always, I remain thankful for the team at Brazos and Baker Publishing Group, particularly Bob Hosack, my longtime editor, and Jeremy Wells, marketing director, both of whom have championed my work and given me a long leash, dreaming with me about what this book might be.
I’d also like to acknowledge the significant role of Tim Hibma, my counselor during a critical season of my life, who helped me live into the story of a gracious heavenly Father who found me and loves me and will never leave me. This book is in many ways the fruit of soul work we did together—and it’s a veiled way of trying to share that same story with others.
A significant portion of the first draft of this book was written in the enchanted space of David and Susan Hoekema’s home on the shore of Lake Michigan. At just the right time, in ways I couldn’t have realized, they offered Deanna and me a respite and retreat that turned out to be both restorative and productive, a combination that is sure to make any Calvinist’s heart glad. Thank you.
Finally, the most inadequate thank you of all. As I mentioned, in many ways this book is fueled by an extraordinary journey that Deanna and I took in the footsteps of St. Augustine. What began as a research itinerary (with, sure, a fair bit of Tuscan wine-tasting built in) turned into a spiritual adventure that was both a microcosm and a blossoming of our twenty-nine years together. Like Augustine with Alypius, I started on the Way with Deanna by my side from the beginning. We’ve grown up together, kids raising kids. But we’ve also grown in the faith together—we’ve walked valleys of doubt together, mourned losses together, been humbled by parenting together, and been surprised by God in ways we wouldn’t have known to dream. The vignettes in this book won’t adequately capture what we learned about ourselves and God’s grace on the way. But for us, the Via Agostino has become a road we share. We will treasure memories of our children alongside us in Milan and Cassiciacum. And we’ll never forget the bright sun on our shoulders while walking the ancient stones of Ostia, the cool hush of Monica’s tomb in Rome, or an unforgettable lunch at the café in San Gimignano that was like its own foretaste of a heavenly banquet. If I’ve entrusted myself to the One who will never leave me or forsake me, it’s because he was gracious enough to give me this partner who is the embodiment of that on the way home.
READERS HAVE COME to expect a soundtrack for my books, and I don’t want to disappoint. The background music for this project is an eclectic mix, from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” to “February Seven” by the Avett Brothers, Tunde Olaniran’s remarkable album Stranger, Jason’s Isbell’s “Cover Me Up” (a favorite of Deanna’s), Jeff Tweedy’s “Via Chicago,” Moby’s Play: The B Sides, and more. Watch for a Spotify playlist online.
Notes
As A
ugustine’s works were later compiled into standard editions, they were “versified,” in a way, like the Scriptures: organized into chapters and subsections. I follow the standard practice of citation for each work so readers can locate a passage across different translations.
Introduction
1. Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), 361.
2. Augustine, Confessions 2.18, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 50.
3. Sally Mann, Hold Still (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 361.
Heart on the Run
1. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1999), 200.
2. Kerouac, On the Road, 1.
3. Kerouac, On the Road, 23.
4. Kerouac, On the Road, 31.
5. When, on “the saddest night,” the women that Dean and Sal use and abuse finally resist, to denounce Dean’s scoundrelness, then look “at Dean the way a mother looks at the dearest and most errant child,” Sal’s response is to distract them with geographical redirection: “We’re going to Italy.” Kerouac, On the Road, 184.
6. Kerouac, On the Road, 79.
7. Kerouac, On the Road, 115.
8. Kerouac, On the Road, 197.
9. Kerouac, On the Road, 18.
10. Augustine, Confessions 5.8.15, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 82.
11. John Foot, Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture and Identity (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 4.
12. Cf. Patty Griffin’s song “Mary”: “Jesus said, ‘Mother, I couldn’t stay another day longer.’”
13. In the next scene, the arrival in Milan, we see a servant removing Augustine’s riding clothes, almost as if Milan will become his home. Of course, Augustine finds home elsewhere.
14. Augustine, Confessions 4.22, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 96.
15. Confessions 1.18.28 (trans. Chadwick, 20).
16. Confessions 2.2 (trans. Ruden, 35).
17. Confessions 5.2, 2.18 (trans. Ruden, 107, 50).
18. Augustine, Teaching Christianity 1.35.39, in Teaching Christianity, trans. Edmund Hill, OP, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA, The Works of Saint Augustine I/11 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1996), 123.
19. Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 2.2, in Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, trans. Edmund Hill, OP, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald, OSA, The Works of Saint Augustine III/12 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2009), 56.
20. Homilies on the Gospel of John 2.2 (trans. Hill, 56).
21. Confessions 4.19 (trans. Ruden, 93).
22. Confessions 6.26 (trans. Ruden, 166).
23. Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will 2.16.41, in On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 62.
24. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 152.
25. This is exactly why Osteenism is such a lie: Christianity never promises “your best life now”!
26. Peter Brown describes a similar dynamic as a sign of Augustine’s “romanticism”: “If to be a ‘Romantic’ means to be a man acutely aware of being caught in an existence that denies him the fullness for which he craves, to feel that he is defined by his tension towards something else, by his capacity for faith, for hope, for longing, to think of himself as a wanderer seeking a country that is always distant, but made ever-present to him by the quality of the love that ‘groans’ for it, then Augustine has imperceptibly become a ‘Romantic.’” Augustine of Hippo, 156.
27. Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms 72.5, in Expositions of the Psalms 51–72, trans. Maria Boulding, OSB, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA, The Works of Saint Augustine III/17 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2001), 474–75.
28. Confessions 10.31.47 (trans. Chadwick, 207). Oscar Wilde shared this admiration: “Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendor and his shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented—if that can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect—may not, cannot, I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness.” Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891), in The Portable Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1981), 52.
29. Jay-Z, Decoded (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010), 239–40, cited in Wyatt Mason, “A Comprehensive Look Back at the Brilliance That Is Shawn Carter,” Esquire, June 7, 2017, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a55372/a-to-jay-z.
30. Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 146.
31. Confessions 10.28.39 (trans. Chadwick, 202).
32. Marion, In the Self’s Place, 154.
33. Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms 59:9, in Expositions of the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, OSB, ed. John E. Rotelle, OSA, 6 vols., The Works of Saint Augustine III/15–20 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2000–2004), 3:186.
Augustine Our Contemporary
1. Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 33.
2. Augustine makes one cameo appearance in Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café, on the very first page, along with Pascal and Job, as historical antecedents of existentialism: “anyone, in short, who has ever felt disgruntled, rebellious, or alienated about anything” (1).
3. One legend has it that Spanish Franciscans named the place Santa Monica because the flow of the local springs reminded them of Monica’s tears over her wayward son.
4. Unlike, e.g., Botticelli’s famous portrait of Augustine in his studio, hand on heart, his visage reflecting his North African heritage.
5. See Stephen Menn’s masterful study, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Michael Hanby’s more polemical account, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003).
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 13.
7. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
8. The later translators of this book into English (in 2004) were both members of my doctoral cohort at Villanova University. We graduated together in 1999.
9. Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 79.
10. See Adam Gopnik’s engaging profile of philosophically inclined winemaker Randall Graham, which opens with a paragraph about Heidegger: “Bottled Dreams,” New Yorker, May 21, 2018, 66–73.
11. Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 317.
12. My notes in my copy show that I read Arendt in June 1997, likely just after, or even concurrent with, my first reading of Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life.
13. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4.
14. This may have been something she saw modeled in Heidegger’s engagement with Augustine. As Heidegger exhorted his students when reading book 10 of the Confessions: don’t reduce Augustine’s observations to the “mere hair-splitting reflections of a pedantic ‘moralizer.’” Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Frit
sch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 155.
15. Albert Camus, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, trans. Ronald D. Srigley (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015). Camus’s dissertation was passed with a grade of 28/40. But because of his health (he suffered from tuberculosis his whole life), Camus was unable to sit for the agrégation exam that would have allowed him to become a teacher. This perhaps confirmed what one of the dissertation examiners noted: “More a writer than a philosopher.” For the situation around the writing of this text, see Srigley, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 1–7.