On the Road with Saint Augustine
Page 25
16. Sartre would describe Camus as having “a classic temperament, a man of the Mediterranean.” Jean-Paul Sartre, “Camus’ The Outsider,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier, 1962), 28, available at http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/sartre_camus02.html.
17. In Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (1960; repr., New York: Vintage, 1974), 69–71.
18. Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1997), 296.
19. Sartre, “Camus’ The Outsider,” 29.
20. David Bellos, introduction to The Plague, The Fall, Exile and Kingdom, and Selected Essays, by Albert Camus, ed. David Bellos (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2004), xv.
21. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Camus (Glasgow: Fontana, 1970), 81. O’Brien points to Camus’s confirmation of this reading: “When in a review in The Spectator of the English version of The Fall, I stressed its Christian tendency, Camus wrote to his English publishers . . . confirming that this approach to the novel was sound” (81).
22. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 155.
23. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
24. Mark Lilla, review of Augustine by Robin Lane Fox, New York Times, November 20, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books/review/augustine-conversions-to-confessions-by-robin-lane-fox.html.
A Refugee Spirituality
1. Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 19.
2. Camus, The Stranger, 73.
3. Camus, The Stranger, 100.
4. Camus, The Stranger, 116–17.
5. Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 147–48.
6. Captured in a more recent translation: Camus, The Outsider, trans. Sandra Smith (London: Penguin, 2013).
7. Cf. Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic (New York: Knopf, 2017).
8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, in The Plague, The Fall, Exile and Kingdom, and Selected Essays, ed. David Bellos (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2004), 497.
9. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 506.
10. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 504.
11. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 509. For Camus, the absurd does not “inhere” in the world, so to speak. It is forged in the space between us and the world; it is inherently relational: “What is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world” (509). Later: “The Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together” (517). I can’t help but think of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), §44: There is no truth apart from Dasein. (And only Dasein can be lonely.)
12. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 535.
13. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 534.
14. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 592.
15. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 593.
16. See Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 157–84, where we see that what will be analyzed as “fallenness” in Being and Time first emerges here as “ruination,” his account of temptation in Augustine’s Confessions.
17. In his notes for the Augustine course, Heidegger sees “the Appeal” as the alternative to “temptation” that pulls us into worldly everydayness (Phenomenology of Religious Life, 202).
18. Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 47.
19. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Anthea Bell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 438–39.
20. Zweig, World of Yesterday, 184.
21. Zweig, World of Yesterday, 378.
22. Zweig, World of Yesterday, 378.
23. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 22.
24. Even later in his career as a bishop and polemicist, Julian (the Pelagian) basically made racial slurs against Augustine, ad hominem disparagements of “the African” and the “hard-headed Numidian,” the “Punic polemicist.” He also claimed Augustine was still a Manichean (François Decret, Early Christianity in North Africa, trans. Edward Smither [Cambridge: James Clark, 2011], 179–80). Much later, Barack Obama, an American of African descent, might recognize these sorts of tactics.
25. Zweig, World of Yesterday, 299.
26. Justo L. González, The Mestizo Augustine: A Theologian between Two Cultures (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 15.
27. González, Mestizo Augustine, 9.
28. Letter 91.1–2, in Augustine, Political Writings, ed. E. M. Atkins and R. J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2–3.
29. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998): “I only have one language, yet it is not mine” (2). But “when I said that the only language I speak is not mine, I did not say it was foreign to me” (5).
30. Augustine, Confessions 10.22.32, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 198.
31. Confessions 1.1.1 (trans. Chadwick, 3).
32. Confessions 13.35.50 (trans. Chadwick, 304).
33. Confessions 13.9.10 (trans. Chadwick, 278).
34. This is the core thesis of Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Herder & Herder, 1998).
35. Confessions 5.13.23.
36. M. A. Claussen points out that Augustine stops associating peregrinatio with reditus (the Neoplatonic concept of the soul’s “return”) just about the time he started writing City of God when he realized “one could not, in any meaningful sense, peregrinate to a place where one had already been.” Claussen, “‘Peregrinatio’ and ‘Peregrini’ in Augustine’s ‘City of God,’” Traditio 46 (1991): 72–73. In terms of the prodigal structure noted above, Augustine would say that now, after the Fall, we are born already exiled, in a distant country, born on the run (original sin).
37. Letter 92A, in Letters, trans. Roland Teske, SJ, ed. Boniface Ramsey, 4 vols., The Works of Saint Augustine II/1–4 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2001–2005), 1:375 (modified slightly).
38. Claussen, “‘Peregrinatio’ and ‘Peregrini,’” 48.
39. My thinking on these matters was significantly catalyzed by a presentation by Dr. Sean Hannan of MacEwan University entitled “Tempus Refugit: Reimagining Pilgrimage as Migrancy in Augustine’s City of God,” at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, November 2017. My thanks to Dr. Hannan for sharing a copy of his talk with me.
40. Hannan, “Tempus Refugit,” 8.
41. Claussen, “‘Peregrinatio’ and ‘Peregrini,’” 63.
42. Zweig, World of Yesterday, 435.
43. González, Mestizo Augustine, 166.
44. Augustine, Sermon Guelfer 25, cited in Decret, Early Christianity in North Africa, 168.
45. Michael Jackson, Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 263.
46. Jackson, Lifeworlds, 263, 262.
Freedom
1. Augustine, Confessions 3.1.1, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 35.
2. Confessions 3.2.2–4.
3. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).
4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), §50: “Being-towards-death, as anticipation of possibility,” he summarizes, “is what first makes this possibility possible, and sets it free as possibility.”
5. Heide
gger, Being and Time, §§56–58.
6. “Anticipation turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being—that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 307.
7. Augustine, Confessions 2.2, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 35.
8. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 181.
9. Confessions 3.3.5 (trans. Chadwick, 38).
10. Confessions 3.1 (trans. Ruden, 52).
11. Confessions 8.5.10 (trans. Chadwick, 140).
12. Confessions 8.5.10 (trans. Chadwick, 140).
13. Confessions 8.5.10; 8.5.11 (trans. Chadwick, 140).
14. Confessions 8.5.12 (trans. Chadwick, 141).
15. See Isaiah Berlin’s classic discussion in “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–217.
16. Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), 9.
17. Jamison, The Recovering, 112.
18. Jamison, The Recovering, 328.
19. Jamison, The Recovering, 304.
20. Augustine, On Reprimand and Grace 1.2, 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), 186.
21. Confessions 2.2.3–4 (trans. Chadwick, 25).
22. Listen, e.g., to Declan McKenna’s “The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home.”
23. Confessions 2.6 (trans. Ruden, 38–39).
24. On Reprimand and Grace 11.31 (trans. King, 212).
25. Confessions 8.8.19 (trans. Chadwick, 147).
26. Confessions 4.1.1 (trans. Chadwick, 52).
27. Confessions 8.10.22 (trans. Chadwick, 148).
28. Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will 1.14.30, 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), 25.
29. Confessions 8.10.24; 8.11.26 (trans. Chadwick, 150, 151). See also 8.10.24–8.11.27, 8.8.20.
30. For more on this dialectic and dance, see James H. Olthuis, “Be(com)ing: Humankind as Gift and Call,” Philosophia Reformata 58 (1993): 153–72.
31. Confessions 8.12.29 (trans. Chadwick, 152–53, emphasis added).
32. Confessions 8.12.29 (trans. Chadwick, 153).
33. On Reprimand and Grace 8.17 (trans. King, 200).
34. On Reprimand and Grace 11.32 (trans. King, 213).
35. On Reprimand and Grace 12.33 (trans. King, 214).
36. “God did not want Adam, whom He left to his free choice, to be without His grace,” so God gives an original “assistance” that humanity abandons. Nonetheless, “this is the first grace which was given to the First Adam” (On Reprimand and Grace 11.31 [trans. King, 212]). Don’t let the language of Adam distract you too much here. For an account that weaves this into our evolutionary understanding of human origins, see James K. A. Smith, “What Stands on the Fall? A Philosophical Exploration,” in Evolution and the Fall, ed. William Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017): 48–65.
37. On Reprimand and Grace 11.31 (trans. King, 212).
38. This hope for “second grace” is found in Nick Drake’s “Fly,” which is the plaintive soundtrack for Richie Tenenbaum’s postsuicidal bus ride home in Wes Anderson’s film The Royal Tenenbaums. We’ll revisit the film in the “Fathers” chapter.
39. On Reprimand and Grace 12.35 (trans. King, 215).
40. On Reprimand and Grace 12.35 (trans. King, 215).
41. Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance 8.19, 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), 231, citing Ambrose, The Escape from the World 1.2.
42. On the Gift of Perseverance 13.33 (trans. King, 244), citing Ambrose, Escape from the World 1.2.
43. On the Gift of Perseverance 13.33 (trans. King, 245).
44. For a more extended discussion, see James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016).
45. Jamison, The Recovering, 196–97.
46. Jamison, The Recovering, 301.
47. Jamison, The Recovering, 302–3, quoting David Foster Wallace.
48. Confessions 5.2.2 (trans. Chadwick, 73).
49. Cited (without reference) by Gabriel Marcel in Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysics of Hope, trans. Emma Crawford and Paul Seaton (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), 22.
Ambition
1. Walker, “Troy, Betty Crocker, and Mother Mary: Reflections on Gender and Ambition,” in Luci Shaw and Jeanne Murray Walker, eds., Ambition (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), 72, 74, 77; Scott Cairns, introduction to Ambition, edited by Shaw and Walker, xi.
2. The preceding essays and quotations appear in Shaw and Walker, Ambition. Eugene Peterson, “Ambition: Lilies That Fester,” 56; Erin McGraw, “What’s a Heaven For?,” 2; Luci Shaw, “What I Learned in Lent,” 22; and Emilie Griffin, “The Lure of Fame: The Yearning, the Drive, the Question Mark,” 31.
3. Augustine, Confessions 1.12.19, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14–15.
4. Confessions 2.2.4 (trans. Chadwick, 26).
5. Confessions 2.3.5 (trans. Chadwick, 26).
6. Justo L. González, The Mestizo Augustine: A Theologian between Two Cultures (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 31.
7. Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (New York: Penguin, 1987), 263.
8. Stegner, Crossing to Safety, 187.
9. Confessions 3.4.7 (trans. Chadwick, 38).
10. Confessions 4.1.1 (trans. Chadwick, 52).
11. Augustine, Teaching Christianity 1.4.4.
12. Ben Wofford, “Up in the Air,” Rolling Stone, July 20, 2015, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/up-in-the-air-meet-the-man-who-flies-around-the-world-for-free-43961. Quotes in this section come from this article.
13. John Foot, Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture and Identity (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 21.
14. Confessions 6.6.9 (trans. Chadwick, 97).
15. Confessions 6.6.9 (trans. Chadwick, 97).
16. Augustine, Confessions 6.19, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 158.
17. Confessions 6.19 (trans. Ruden, 159).
18. Ponticianus was working in the branch of the emperor’s government that managed the cursus publicus, the imperial communication system and its routes, the means of transport Augustine enjoyed from Rome to Milan, given his imperial appointment.
19. Confessions 8.6.15 (trans. Chadwick, 143).
20. On “the father’s lap,” see Homilies on the Gospel of John 3.17, 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), 80.
21. Andre Agassi, Open: An Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 2009), 375.
22. Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), §520, p. 124.
23. See, e.g., Confessions 10.3.3.
24. Confessions 10.36.59 (trans. Chadwick, 213–14).
25. Confessions 10.36.59–10.37.60 (trans. Chadwick, 214–15).
Sex
1. Augustine, Confessions 10.30.41–42.
2. Confessions 2.2.2, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 24.
3. When Kofman asks Derrida, “Do you think you would want people to ask you such a question?” he is more reticent: “I never said I’d respond to such a question.” But as he goes on to point out, it’s not like his books don’t include such divulgences. Indeed, he divulges a lot in “Circumfession” (in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999]), the same work in which he tracks Augustine.
4. For an eyes-wide-open consideration of t
hese sorts of critiques and caricatures of Augustine, see Feminist Interpretations of Augustine, ed. Judith Chelius Stark (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).
5. Confessions 8.12.29.
6. Often best attested in poetry, e.g., Michael Donaghy, “Pentecost,” and Heather McHugh, “Coming,” both in Joy: 100 Poems, ed. Christian Wiman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).