Introduction

This is not a biography. This is not a book about Augustine. In a way, it’s a book Augustine has written about you. It’s a journey with Augustine as a journey into oneself. It’s a travelogue of the heart. It’s a road trip with a prodigal who’s already been where you think you need to go.

But it’s also the testimony of someone who has spent time on the road with Augustine. In Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel On the Road, the narrator Sal Paradise plays chronicler to the antics of the star of the story, Dean Moriarty, who is really the exemplar, the hero, the model. So just call me Sal. I’ve been on a ride with Augustine. Here’s what I’ve seen; here’s what he’s shown me (about myself); here’s why you might consider coming along.

This is an invitation to journey with an ancient African who will surprise you by the extent to which he knows you. It’s not because he’s some guru, some Freudian analyst who haughtily sees through you. He only knows you because he’s been there, because he has a sense of the solidarity of the human race in our foibles and frustrations and failed pursuits. If he jackhammers his way into the secret corners of our hearts, unearthing our hungers and fears, it’s only because it’s familiar territory: he’s seen it all in his own soul. Augustine isn’t a judge; he’s more like an AA sponsor. “Nothing you could tell me would surprise me,” he would say. “Let me tell you my story.” One could say of Augustine what Leslie Jamison notes about Don Gately in Infinite Jest: He’s “no saint. That’s why he made salvation seem possible.”1

But the reason to consider Augustine as a guide for the journey is not just because he’s an incisive psychologist familiar with the antics of the mind in exile, or because he’s mapped the joyrides of “liberated” selves. What makes Augustine a guide worth considering is that, unlike Sal’s Dean, he knows where home is, where rest can be found, what peace feels like, even if it is sometimes ephemeral and elusive along the way.

I won’t pretend there isn’t something scandalous about his advice. Augustine will unapologetically suggest that you were made for God—that home is found beyond yourself, that Jesus is the way, that the cross is a raft in the storm-tossed sea we call “the world.” But what I hope you’ll hear in this is not a solution or an answer, not merely a dogmatic claim or demand. For Augustine, this was a hard-fought epiphany that emerged after trying everything else, after a long time on the road, at the end of his rope. The Christian gospel, for Augustine, wasn’t just the answer to an intellectual question (though it was that); it was more like a shelter in a storm, a port for a wayward soul, nourishment for a prodigal who was famished, whose own heart had become, he said, “a famished land.”2 It was, he would later testify, like someone had finally shown him his home country, even though he’d never been there before. It was the Father he’d spent a lifetime looking for, saying to him, “Welcome home.”

Augustine is uncanny for us: he is so ancient he is strange, and yet his experiences are so common they feel contemporary. My hope is that this uncanniness might give you a sense of what an authentic Christianity feels like from the inside. The wager here is that an ancient African might make Christianity plausible for you, mired in the anxieties and disappointments of the twenty-first century. That’s not necessarily because you’ve been looking for God, but because you’ve been trying to find yourself. When you go spelunking in the caves of your soul with Augustine, you might be surprised who you meet down there.

Augustine might make Christianity believable for you even if you’ve heard it all, been there, done that, and left the stupid Christian T-shirt at home. Here’s a Christianity to consider before you stop believing. Augustine might make Christianity plausible again for those who’ve been burned—who suspect that the “Christianity” they’ve seen is just a cover for power plays and self-interest, or a tired moralism that seems angry all the time, or a version of middle-class comfort too often confused with the so-called American Dream. If the only faith you can imagine is the faith of your parents, Augustine has been down that road. What if it was precisely the strangeness of his ancient struggles that made Augustine perennial, someone with the distance from our own immersion to give us a vantage point for seeing ourselves—and the Christian faith—anew?

IN HER MEMOIR Hold Still, photographer Sally Mann quotes one of her father’s diary entries: “Do you know how a boatman faces one direction, while rowing in another?”3 This book you are holding is an invitation to a posture like that: to move forward by looking back, to make progress by considering ancient wisdom. To get in a boat headed for a new future, looking back to Augustine on the North African shore as a landmark to orient us.

You might be surprised how many radicals and innovators have been in that boat. Thinkers and writers and playwrights who’ve shaped us more than we realize have looked back to Augustine across the twentieth century. You’ll be reintroduced to them on the road here: Martin Heidegger, the father of existentialism, whose cascading influence across France and beyond eventually made us all seekers of authenticity; Albert Camus, who named our experience of the absurd, spent the early part of his career wrestling with Augustine, and perhaps never stopped; Hannah Arendt, who probed the nature of love and friendship in conversation with Augustine; Jacques Derrida, enfant terrible of postmodernism, who deconstructed and unsettled our confidence in eternal verities and would later return to consider the secrets his North African compatriot offered. There are ways in which the twentieth century was Augustinian, which makes him our contemporary in ways we haven’t considered. What if he still speaks? What if Augustine is not only behind us but also ahead of us, waiting for us to arrive where he ended? Maybe it’s time to consider his answer to the questions he gave us.