On the Road with Saint Augustine
On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
By: James K. A. Smith
“The heart’s hunger is infinite, which is why it will ultimately be disappointed with anything merely finite. Humans are those strange creatures who can never be fully satisfied by anything created— though that never stops us from trying.”
“On the road, you’re always already following somebody. The question is: Who are you following and where are they headed?”
It is said “It’s about the journey, not the destination.”
Or perhaps as Miley Cyrus puts it- It’s the climb.
But is it?
Sure the journey is important and teaches us things and refines us, but what if we never arrive anywhere? What if we just feel like we’re constantly on the road, searching, but never feeling home?
“Do we call the road ‘home’ to avoid the pain of never being welcomed?”
Do we convince ourselves it’s better to be traveling than to reach our destination? Is it because we don’t actually know where we’re going?
Is our life the life of Sisyphus, an endless toil to push the stone to the top of the mountain only to watch it roll back down waiting for us to do it again? And do we tell ourselves we prefer it that way, that it’s fulfilling?
Worthwhile questions.
But share this view with an actual migrant, Smith says. “…to those risking their lives today in boats…trying to cross this fabled line to apply for asylum, only to be refused and returned over and over again. Are they to look to Sisyphus as the hero?”
There is something innate in us, that is seeking belonging, a place to call home.
“For Augustine, so much of our restlessness and disappointment is the result of trying to convince ourselves that we’re already home. The alternative is not escapism; it is a refugee spirituality— unsettled yet hopeful, tenuous but searching, eager to find the hometown we’ve never been to.”
James K. A. Smith has written this book because he believes Augustine’s story is all of our stories. Augustine has experienced the restlessness of the road, the pain of failure, the loneliness of achievement. He has asked the questions and ultimately he found his way home.
This is not a biography of Saint Augustine. Smith uses Augustine’s writings (like his Confessions) as a guide for us to traverse through a variety of topics like freedom, ambition, sex, mothers, fathers, friendship, enlightenment, identity, justice, and death.
We encounter questions like- What is freedom? What is authenticity? Why do we fear death? Who are we?
“If you’re weary from the chase, broken by the journey, tired of the disappointment, unsettled by a sense that you’d like to find some rest not in accomplishment but in welcome, then Augustine might be the stranger you could travel with for awhile.”
Whether or not you are a Christian, this book can easily be read by all people. Augustine understands the struggle and though he lived centuries ago, the same fears, frustrations, and pains are relevant today. They are the struggles of the human condition.
But there is hope to leave the road more or less traveled and find rest for your weary soul.
If you travel with Augustine, he can point you home.
My Favorite Chapters
This is the kind of book that covers a lot of topics. Some might resonate more with you than others, depending on your life stage. Maybe it’s a book you come back to often.
There is something to glean from each chapter but there were a few that I liked more than the rest: Freedom, Ambition, Friendship, and Death.
Freedom.
Freedom is the mantra of the masses today. But what is freedom?
So many of the freedoms people think they want today actually end up enslaving and hurting them. Our choices for immediate satisfaction turn into habits which turn into addictions.
Smith says,
“When you’ve been eaten up by your own freedom, and realize the loss of guardrails only meant ending up in the ditch, you start to wonder whether freedom is all it’s cracked up to be— or whether freedom might be something other than the absence of constraint and the multiplication of options.”
I love this. Freedom does not mean ‘no-boundaries’ and ‘endless choices.’
He calls this disordered freedom. And attached to this disordered freedom is the concept of self-sufficiency and independence. But maybe what we really need is someone else.
“Coming to the end of oneself is the way out of disordered freedom. And so the irony: my freedom of choice brings me to the point where I need someone else to give me a will that is actually free. And not merely free to choose— since that’s what got me here in the first place— but free to choose the good.”
Augustine says, “Without you, what am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?”
This is the entrance of grace. Grace is freedom— “a revolution of the will and wants.”
Ambition.
One of the biggest measures of success in America is achievement and ambition. Our ambition may be placed in our careers or our social media accounts.
What does disordered ambition look like?
“The opposite of ambition is not humility; it is sloth, passivity, timidity, and complacency. We sometimes like to comfort ourselves by imagining that the ambitious are prideful and arrogant so that those of us who never risk, never aspire, never launch out into the deep get to wear the moralizing mantle of humility. But this imagining is of just just thin cover for a lack of courage, even laziness. Playing it safe isn’t humble.”
Laziness and complacency is on one end of the disordered spectrum, but the other side is ambition for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way.
“If our ambition becomes a roadblock to peace, an inhibitor that robs us of the rest and joy we’re looking for, it’s because we’ve substituted something in place of the end for which we were made.”
“What if you’re wired not to be ‘liked’ but to be loved, and not by many but by One?”
“You don’t have to win, but you also don’t have to quit. You only have to quit performing, quit imagining his love is earned. You can rest, but you don’t have to quit. You just need to change why you play.”
“Resting in the love of God doesn’t squelch ambition; it fuels it with a different fire.”
Friendship.
I thought this chapter was really interesting because of his relating friendship to authenticity. What does it mean to be authentic? What role do our friends play in this?
“…the generic cultural version of authenticity we drink up with our Disney Channel subscriptions: resist the crowd, rise above the masses, be true to yourself, forge your own path. “You do you!” They tell us. Of course, you need to Instagram your trailblazing path to self-discovery so everyone can see, and constantly check your likes to confirm that your authenticity has been validated.”
Then why is everyone so lonely? Loneliness is an epidemic and is killing many people.
“What if authenticity is the source of our loneliness? What if it’s precisely this unquestioned, unrecognized construal of others as threats to my freedom and autonomy that has sequestered us?”
“The problem isn’t other people but what they love, and how they love me.”
Authenticity is “answering a call” to become who we were meant to be. And who knows better what we were meant to be than the One who created us?
“The true friend is the other who hopes you’ll answer the call, who’s willing to challenge you and upset you in order to get you to look at yourself and ask yourself: What am I doing? What do I love? Who am I? The true friend is the other who has the courage to impose a conviction, who paints a substantive picture of the good, who prods and prompts you to change course and chase it—a promise to join you on the way.”
This chapter flows well into the next one on identity and finding a group to belong to that gives us meaning and purpose.
We all want to find our place in the story. This is where authenticity meets identity.
Death.
“Nobody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to die either.”
Smith posits that this is because love is a form of craving and what “haunts” craving is losing. We fear what could be lost. And this is true for me even though I have eternal hope. I still fear losing my kids or losing time together as a family. I fear losing the future in the way I want it.
“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 morality either.”
We cannot treat things on earth as ultimate things.
“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…”
So we can’t love them as ultimate, but that doesn’t mean we steel our hearts against love lest we experience pain. No:
“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.”
The hard and sobering reality of this, which I’m not sure where Smith stands on this, is that not all of us have this eternal hope. Those who do not believe and trust in the Lord will not be ‘caught up in the immortal Beloved.’
So the best way we can love our people is to share with them the Good News of God’s grace, hope, and life. We may want to push thoughts of ‘the after’ to the background because we don’t want to think about it. But we must not hide from death. It is a reality we must all be ready for.
“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.”
Recommendation
This is a bit of an existential read. It’s one to spend time reflecting on.
Smith is a professor of philosophy at Calvin so philosophical musings are definitely in his wheelhouse. He makes many references to figures like Derrida or Sartre and art renditions of Augustine or his mother that may not do much for the average reader. That’s fine. You don’t have to know philosophy or art to grasp the primary conversation.
Smith also incorporated a lot of pop culture references from shows, movies, or plays. I didn’t particularly like this either. I would rather have had different illustrations or personal stories than reading a scene from something fictional, however relevant. Most of them were not earth-shattering to me. But they weren’t the main focus and can easily be skimmed over.
I had not read anything by Augustine before. This was a good introduction to what his book Confessions is like. It may inspire readers to learn more about his life and his other writings.
This is a pretty universal and useful read. There is a gospel message because there is only one home we were created for that will satisfy our restless hearts and both Augustine and Smith point us there, but I’m not sure if there is any Scripture references or anything like that to alienate those who are not Christians.
This is a book to challenge us in our journeys. To look at the road we are on, to ponder who we are following, to consider where we are going, and to honestly ask ourselves where ‘home’ is.
If we recognize that Jesus is the Way and we walk that way, our journey here doesn’t stop.
“Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road; it just changes how you travel.”
And so this book is a guidebook on travel. It won’t transport you to some ethereal place with no pain or suffering, but it will help you find a compass, a map, and a personal and powerful guide.
“The one who is the road has given us a map…In Augustine’s experience, the Word was like an enchanted map. It not only told him, “You Are Here” and pointed him toward home; it also gave him legs to run.”
To return to the idea of ‘refugee spirituality,’ this book was a good reminder that I am not yet home, but I know where I am going and my hope is secure.
Smith wraps up his book with a description of a sign he found marking off a section of a church in Europe that read “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.”
Some other books that explore some of the things he discusses.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl S. Trueman (this one also speaks about historical philosophers and their influence of how we view the self)
Happiness by Randy Alcorn
You Who?: Why You Matter and How to Deal with It by Rachel Jankovic
When Strivings Cease by Ruth Chou Simons
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