As Augustine’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.
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.
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 Fritsch 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.
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.
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.
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. Heidegger, 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.
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).
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 these 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).
7. Confessions 2.2.2 (trans. Chadwick, 24).
8. Confessions 2.4, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 37.
9. Confessions 3.1.1 (trans. Chadwick, 35).
10. “Joe Rogan Experience #1021—Russell Brand,” YouTube, October 5, 2017, https://youtu.be/iZPH6r_ZDvM. Quotes in this section come from this podcast.
11. Emily Chang, “‘Oh My God, This Is So F——ed Up’: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side,” Vanity Fair, February 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/brotopia-silicon-valley-secretive-orgiastic-inner-sanctum. This article is an adaptation from Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley (New York: Portfolio, 2018).
12. Recall Augustine’s silent scream: “If only someone could have imposed restraint on my disorder!” Confessions 2.2.3 (trans. Chadwick, 25).
13. Confessions 2.2.4 (trans. Chadwick, 25).
14. Brand’s own “confessions” repay reading, however. See Russell Brand, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions (New York: Henry Holt, 2017).
15. Confessions 8.11.27 (trans. Chadwick, 151).
16. Confessions 8.11.27 (trans. Chadwick, 151).
17. On the Reformation as an Augustinian renewal movement within the church catholic, see James K. A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010), 38–41. See also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 62–66, on two-tiered Christianity.
18. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 137. See also Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
19. Augustine, City of God 14.22–23.
20. Augustine, Against Julian 14.28, cited in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 393.
21. Cf. Jenell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011).
22. Cf. Confessions 6.11.20.
23. Cf. Kyle Harper’s discussion of “pastoral Christianity” as a gracious accommodation to the realities in which Christians found themselves (From Shame to Sin, 177–90).
24. Augustine, On the Good of Marriage 6, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 1st series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 14 vols. (1890–1900; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 3:401.
25. Joseph Clair, Discerning the Good in the Letters and Sermons of Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 67.
26. On the Good of Marriage 5.
27. Cf. Caitlin Flanagan’s tongue-in-check comment in one article: “Take it a step further. What if we asked for a lifetime commitment, a binding legal document and the presence of witnesses at the vow taking? Could work.” Flanagan, “Getting ‘Consent’ for Sex Is Too Low a Bar,” New York Times, July 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/well/getting-consent-for-sex-is-too-low-a-bar.html.
28. See Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 77.
29. For a creative, novelistic insight into this relationship, between Augustine and his concubine, but also between his concubine and Monica, see Suzanne Wolfe, The Confessions of X (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2016).
30. Confessions 4.2.2 (trans. Chadwick, 53). A lot has been made of the fact that this woman is unnamed by Augustine. I follow Peter Brown (Augustine of Hippo: A Biography [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967]) in seeing this as actually a sign of respect, a way of guarding her from what would be the late ancient paparazzi who would be looking to find a bishop’s old flame. (There is some evidence that she lived in a convent not far from Hippo.) Interestingly, in On the Good of Marriage when Augustine disparages exactly what he himself had done—taking to himself someone for a time, “until he find another worthy either of his honors or his means”—he also embeds a kind of backhanded praise of the woman in such an arrangement: “there are many matrons to whom she is to be preferred” (5).
31. Confessions 6.15.25 (trans. Chadwick, 109). Augustine immediately takes another concubine, which might also explain why he was so tired of having to “take care of” his sexual desire by book 8.
32. True Religion 1.16.30, in On Christian Belief, trans. Edmund Hill, OP, ed. Boniface Ramsey, The Works of Saint Augustine I/8 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2005), 48.
Mothers
1. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 75–76.
2. Recounted in Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1997), 305–6, 359. Perhaps Camus’s point about a “Mediterranean” account of freedom, at the end of Rebel, hints at why freedom isn’t synonymous with independence, and why a mother’s love doesn’t rob a person of identity, but grants it.
3. Todd, Albert Camus, 378. A journalist later said that what Camus meant was, “If that [terrorism] is your ‘justice,’ I prefer my mother to justice” (379).
4. Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 19.
5. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 22.
6. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 23, 25.
7. An important plotline in Suzanne Wolfe’s fictionalization of the relationship in her novel The Confessions of X (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2016).
8. Augustine, Confessions 5.8.15, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 82.
9. Confessions 6.1.1 (trans. Chadwick, 90).
10. Justo L. González, The Mestizo Augustine: A Theologian between Two Cultures (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 18.
11. The term “the Brights” comes from a famous op-ed by philosopher Daniel Dennett, “The Bright Stuff,” New York Times, July 12, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/opinion/the-bright-stuff.html. We’ll return to this in the “Enlightenment” chapter.
12. Confessions 6.2.2 (trans. Chadwick, 92).
13. González remarks about Augustine, “Throughout most of his life, it would seem that the Roman in him had become dominant; but when, after the Roman disaster of 410, he tried to read what had happened from a Christian perspective, he was quite critical of the entire Roman culture and civilization, and this criticism was partly grounded on principles learned long before from his Berber mother.” Mestizo Augustine, 18–19.
14. Augustine, Confessions 9.22, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 262.
15. Rob Doyle, This Is the Ritual (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 18.
16. Doyle, This Is the Ritual, 29, 30.
17. Doyle, This Is the Ritual, 31.
18. Karr, “The Burning Girl,” in Tropic of Squalor: Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 6–7. Copyright © 2018 by Mary Karr. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
19. Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will 3.23.67, 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), 119.
20. Exposition of the Psalms 58(1):10, 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), 3:156.
21. Confessions 9.26 (trans. Ruden, 266).
22. Confessions 9.27, 9.28 (trans. Ruden, 267, 268). She didn’t “care about a tomb in her homeland” (9.36, trans. Ruden, 274).
23. Confessions 9.30 (trans. Ruden, 269).
1. Heidegger’s term “Dasein” is a technical term he uses instead of the usual philosophical notion of “the subject,” “the ego,” etc., trying to give a more existential, embedded picture of what it means to be “me.” Dasein means “being there,” being here and now, existing in a world. Heidegger’s English translators almost universally leave the term untranslated, such that “Dasein” is now almost like a Germanic philosophical character.
2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 154.
3. Heidegger, Being and Time, 163–64.
4. Heidegger, Being and Time, 164.
5. Heidegger, Being and Time, 163.
6. Heidegger, Being and Time, 164.
7. Heidegger, Being and Time, 165–66.
8. Heidegger, Being and Time, 317.
9. Heidegger, Being and Time, 372–73.
10. Heidegger, Being and Time, 354.
11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003), 463.
12. See discussion in Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 213–14. She cites Iris Murdoch’s droll remark that Sartre turns love into “a battle between two hypnotists in a closed room” (214).
13. Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Citadel, 1956), 82.
14. As we’ll see below, this will be an interesting point vis-à-vis Heidegger.
15. Marcel, Philosophy of Existentialism, 79.
16. Marcel, Philosophy of Existentialism, 76.
17. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 170.
18. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 171, 176.
19. Augustine, Confessions 2.4.9, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29.
20. Confessions 2.8.16–2.9.17 (trans. Chadwick, 33–34).
21. “This Place Is a Prison,” track 8 on the Postal Service, Give Up, SubPop, 2003.
22. Confessions 2.8.16–2.9.17 (trans. Chadwick, 33–34). Augustine admits he himself played this role of frenemy to a friend who died (4.4.7–8).
23. Confessions 6.8.13 (trans. Chadwick, 100).
24. Confessions 6.8.13 (trans. Chadwick, 100–101).
25. Augustine, Confessions 6.13, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 152.
26. Kipling D. Williams, “Ostracism: A Temporal Need-Threat Model,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 41, ed. Mark P. Zanna (London: Academic Press, 2009), 279–314.
27. See Edward Davies, “Loneliness Is a Modern Scourge, but It Doesn’t Have to Be,” Centre for Social Justice, accessed December 18, 2018, http://thecentreforsocialjustice.cmail20.com/t/ViewEmail/y/7CB805AF716F58B3/FC687629C2073D80907C5D7C792C0FF8.
28. Franz Wright, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (New York: Knopf, 2003), 17.
29. Clay Routledge, “The Curse of Modern Loneliness,” National Review, January 16, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/01/digital-age-loneliness-public-health-political-problem.
30. Heidegger, Being and Time, 156–57.
31. Marina Keegan, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” Yale Daily News, May 27, 2012, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/05/27/keegan-the-opposite-of-loneliness.
32. Confessions 6.26 (trans. Ruden, 166).
33. Confessions 2.2.2 (trans. Chadwick, 24).
34. Confessions 8.1.1 (trans. Chadwick, 133).
35. Confessions 8.5.10 (trans. Chadwick, 139).
36. Confessions 8.6.15 (trans. Chadwick, 144).
37. Confessions 8.7.16 (trans. Chadwick, 144).
38. Heidegger, Being and Time, 158.
39. Heidegger, Being and Time, 158–59.
40. Confessions 8.8.19 (trans. Chadwick, 146).
41. Confessions 8.11.27 (trans. Chadwick, 152).
42. Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), 192.
43. Jamison, The Recovering, 193.
44. Lena Dunham, “The All-American Menstrual Hut,” Lenny, January 31, 2017, https://www.lennyletter.com/story/the-all-american-menstrual-hut.
45. Confessions 8.12.30 (trans. Chadwick, 153).
46. Augustine, Soliloquies 1.2.7, in Earlier Writings, ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), 26.
47. Soliloquies 1.3.8 (Burleigh, 28).
48. Letter 10*.1, 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), 4:262.
49. The text of the Rule of Augustine can be found at https://www.midwestaugustinians.org/roots-of-augustinian-spirituality.
1. Augustine, Confessions 3.3.6, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 38.
2. Confessions 3.4.7 (trans. Chadwick, 39).
3. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 300–304. For discussion, see James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 62–65.
4. Hence he connects this with the “buzz of distraction” (Confessions 10.35.56).
5. Augustine, Confessions 6.9, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 147.
6. Confessions 10.23.34 (trans. Chadwick, 199–200).
7. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 147.
8. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 148.
9. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 147. See the Atlantic’s conversation with William Deresiewicz: Lauren Cassani Davis, “The Ivy League, Mental Health, and the Meaning of Life,” Atlantic, August 19, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/qa-the-miseducation-of-our-college-elite/377524.
10. Cf. Augustine, The Happy Life 1.4.
11. Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 105–11, quote on 105.
12. For an introduction to the cult of the Brights, see Daniel Dennett, “The Bright Stuff,” New York Times, July 12, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/opinion/the-bright-stuff.html.
13. Augustine, The Advantage of Believing 1.1, in On Christian Belief, trans. Ray Kearney, ed. Boniface Ramsey, The Works of Saint Augustine I/8 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2005), 116.
14. Advantage of Believing 1.2 (trans. Kearney, 117).
15. Confessions 5.6.10–5.7.13.
16. Advantage of Believing 9.21 (trans. Kearney, 133).
17. Advantage of Believing 10.24.
18. Advantage of Believing 10.23 (trans. Kearney, 134).
19. Advantage of Believing 14.30 (trans. Kearney, 141).
20. Advantage of Believing 15.33 (trans. Kearney, 144).
21. Sermon 182.4–5, cited in Justo L. González, The Mestizo Augustine: A Theologian between Two Cultures (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), 93.
22. See Augustine’s early dialogue, Contra academicos, in Against the Academicians and the Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995).
23. Confessions 5.23 (trans. Ruden, 131).
24. Confessions 5.23 (trans. Ruden, 131).
25. Confessions 6.5 (trans. Ruden, 141).
26. Augustine, Soliloquies 1.6.12, in Earlier Writings, ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), 30.
27. Soliloquies 1.6.12 (Burleigh, 31, emphasis added).
28. Confessions 7.1.1.
29. Confessions 7.5.7 (trans. Chadwick, 115).
30. Augustine, Of True Religion 3.3–4.7.
31. Confessions 7.9.13 (trans. Chadwick, 121).
32. Confessions 7.9.14 (trans. Chadwick, 121–22).
33. Confessions 8.9.19 (trans. Chadwick, 146).
34. Confessions 7.9.14 (trans. Chadwick, 122).
35. Confessions 7.14 (trans. Ruden, 186–87).
36. Albert Camus, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, trans. Ronald D. Srigley (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 53.
37. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 67, 69 (emphasis added).
38. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 93.
39. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 108.
40. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 116, 117.
41. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 46.
42. On Reprimand and Grace 8.17, 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), 199.
43. Augustine, The Retractations, trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan, RSM (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), prologue, 1.
44. Augustine, True Religion 39.73, in On Christian Belief, trans. Ray Kearney, ed. Boniface Ramsey, The Works of Saint Augustine I/8 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2005), 78.
1. Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), 9.
2. Jamison, The Recovering, 9.
3. Jamison, The Recovering, 310.
4. Jamison, The Recovering, 205. This function of “witness authority” is precisely why Simplicianus told Augustine the story of Victorinus—because he knew that at the end of such a story, Augustine could realize: “That’s me.” Or: “That could be me.”
5. Confessions 10.3, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 278.
6. Confessions 10.4 (trans. Ruden, 279).
7. Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 41–42.
8. Marion, In the Self’s Place, 44.
9. “The majority of modern readers (even the most knowledgeable or the most devout) remain essentially curious. But they must be granted an excuse: the most notable retrievals of the Augustinian project, Montaigne and Rousseau, have deformed the model and, willing or not it matters little, missed the point.” Marion, In the Self’s Place, 51.
10. Marion, In the Self’s Place, 45 (translation modified).
11. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 318–19.
12. Thomas Wright, Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 1–3.
13. Wright, Built of Books, 5.
14. Wright, Built of Books, 6.
15. Wright, Built of Books, 7.
16. Augustine, The Retractations 2.93, trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan, RSM (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), xvi.
17. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 273.
18. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 5.
19. Cf. Marion, In the Self’s Place, 45: “I find myself cited to God by citing the word of God.”
20. Confessions 10.3.3, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 180.
21. Confessions 8.29 (trans. Ruden, 236–37).
22. Confessions 10.6 (trans. Ruden, 281).
23. Confessions 9.8 (trans. Ruden, 246).
24. Confessions 9.13 (trans. Ruden, 252).
25. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Funeral Homily for Msgr. Luigi Giussani,” Communio: International Catholic Review 31, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 685, available at https://www.communio-icr.com/files/ratzinger31-4.pdf.
26. Confessions 10.3.4 (trans. Chadwick, 180).
27. Confessions 10.3.3 (trans. Chadwick, 180).
28. Confessions 10.36.59.
29. Confessions 10.3.4 (trans. Chadwick, 180).
30. Confessions 8.5.10; 8.8.19.
31. Augustine, City of God 11.2, in City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), 430–31.
32. City of God 11.3 (trans. Bettenson, 431).
33. See Michael Clarke, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “swagger portrait” (p. 240).
1. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York: One World, 2017), 109.
2. Coates, Eight Years in Power, 110.
3. Camus’s 1948 remarks at the Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg are included as “The Unbeliever and Christians,” in Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1960), 71.
4. Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 69–70.
5. Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 71.
6. Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 73. Camus is alluding to Confessions 7.5.7.
7. Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1997), 230.
8. Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 116–17.
9. You can listen to these lines sampled at the beginning of Explosions in the Sky’s song, “Have You Passed through This Night?” where the soundtrack evolves into a discordant score of defiance.
10. Augustine, Confessions 7.5.7, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 115.
11. Confessions 2.4.9 (trans. Chadwick, 29).
12. Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will 1.1.1, 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), 3.
13. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, proposition 7.
14. On the Free Choice of the Will 3.1.1.
15. On the Free Choice of the Will 3.1.2.
16. On the Free Choice of the Will 3.17.48 (trans. King, 107).
17. On the Free Choice of the Will 3.17.48–49 (trans. King, 107).
18. Augustine, City of God 12.6, in City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), 477.
19. City of God 12.7 (trans. Bettenson, 479–80).
20. City of God 11.15 (trans. Bettenson, 446).
21. Google the scene “Who Lit This Flame in Us” to appreciate the visuals and soundtrack.
22. In City of God 12.6, Augustine explicates the evil will as a perverse choosing of lower over higher goods but emphasizes that this doesn’t mean these “lower” goods (temporal things) are to blame. “It is not the inferior thing which causes the evil choice; it is the will itself, because it is created, that desires the inferior thing in a perverted and inordinate manner” (trans. Bettenson, 478, emphasis added). Now, I think Augustine is saying created wills are susceptible to this because they are not divine; but it leaves open the door that finitude qua finitude is a problem.
23. City of God 11.22. The danger here is that the darkness of evil can become an “apparent” evil that we see as evil only because we can’t see the whole. In this case, Augustine is trying to defend God’s goodness by assuring us that everything has a “purpose.”
24. Confessions 9.6.14 (trans. Chadwick, 164).
25. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 135.
26. Sermon 159B.9, in Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill, OP, ed. John E. Rotelle, 11 vols., The Works of Saint Augustine III/1–11 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1997), 5:155.
27. Sermon 159B.4 (trans. Hill, 5:149).
28. Sermon 159B.9 (trans. Hill, 5:155).
29. Lyrics used with permission.
30. This is the title of John Owen’s 1647 treatise The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.
31. Letter 153.3, 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), 2:392. For a compelling account of what an Augustinian criminal justice might look like, particularly in an age of mass incarceration, see Gregory W. Lee, “Mercy and Mass Incarceration: Augustinian Reflections on ‘The New Jim Crow,’” Journal of Religion 98, no. 2 (April 2018): 192–223.
32. Robert Dodaro, “Between the Two Cities: Political Action in Augustine of Hippo,” in Augustine and Politics, ed. John Doody, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005), 104.
33. Dodaro, “Between the Two Cities,” 106–7.
34. Coates, Eight Years in Power, 110–11.
35. Coates, Eight Years in Power, 214.
36. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, in Major Works on Religion and Politics, ed. Elisabeth Sifton (New York: Library of America, 2015), 480. Niebuhr notes that though such “innocence” suffuses much of modern liberalism, American political institutions are more Augustinian than we might realize, containing “many of the safeguards against the selfish abuse of power which our Calvinist fathers insisted upon” (481).
Fathers
1. As Daniel Mendelsohn remarks in his moving book, An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic (New York: Knopf, 2017), the four opening books of the Odyssey, the “Telemachy” of the son, Telemachus, is “that mini-bildungsroman in which the character of Odysseus’ young son comes to be molded, educated, in the course of the search for his father” (118).
2. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 451.
3. David Remnick, “We Are Alive: Bruce Springsteen at Sixty-Two,” New Yorker, July 30, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/30/we-are-alive.
4. Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude, in Collected Prose (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), 15.
5. Auster, Invention of Solitude, 17.
6. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1999), 293.
7. Thomas Wolfe, The Story of a Novel (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 39.
8. Margo Maine, Father Hunger: Fathers, Daughters, and Food (Carlsbad, CA: Gurze, 1991).
9. See Andrew Root on the ontological effects of divorce in Children of Divorce: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).
10. Augustine, Confessions 2.3.6, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 27.
11. Confessions 9.9.19–21.
12. Confessions 9.9.22 (trans. Chadwick, 170).
13. Augustine leaves laudatory testimony about his son, who died young, in Confessions 9.6.14.
14. Auster, Invention of Solitude, 54.
15. Augustine, Questions on the Gospels, bk. 2, q. 33 (Patrologia Latina 35:1344–48).
16. Everclear, “Father of Mine.”
17. Augustine, Confessions 5.23, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 131.
18. Kelly Clarkson, “Piece by Piece.” Again, do yourself a favor and Google “Piece by Piece American Idol” to listen to Clarkson’s tearful rendition of this. Watch Keith Urban’s face.
19. Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), 414.
20. Cited in Jamison, The Recovering, 415.
21. Confessions 9.14 (trans. Ruden, 253, emphasis added).
1. For two different slants on this, see Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, and Jessica Mitford’s still-relevant classic, The American Way of Death Revisited (New York: Vintage, 2000).
2. Raymond Barfield, “When Self-Help Means Less Help,” in Comment, October 11, 2018, available at https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/when-self-help-means-less-help, reviewing Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (New York: Twelve, 2018).
3. Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story (New York: Random House, 2010), 57.
4. Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story, 126.
5. Augustine mentions the martyrs and Ambrose’s discovery of their relics in Confessions 9.7.16.
6. Jeremy Bentham’s “auto-icon” notwithstanding.
7. George Weigel, Letters to a Young Catholic (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 209.
8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 303 (§52).
9. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10.
10. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 11.
11. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 35.
12. Augustine, Homilies on First John 9.2, cited by Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 35 (emphasis added).
13. Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will 3.7.21, 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), 88.
14. Sermon 344.4, cited in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 431 (emphasis added).
15. Confessions 4.4.9, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 57.
16. Confessions 4.6.11 (trans. Chadwick, 59).
17. Confessions 4.6.11 (trans. Chadwick, 59, emphasis added).
18. Confessions 4.7.12 (trans. Chadwick, 59).
19. Confessions 4.8.13 (trans. Chadwick, 60).
20. Confessions 4.6.11 (trans. Chadwick, 58).
21. Confessions 4.10.15 (trans. Chadwick, 61).
22. Confessions 4.9.14 (trans. Chadwick, 61).
23. Confessions 9.33, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), 272.
24. Letter 263.1–2, 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), 4:209.
25. Letter 263.2 (trans. Teske, 4:209–10, first emphasis added).
26. Letter 263.4 (trans. Teske, 4:211).
27. Confessions 9.3.6 (trans. Chadwick, 159).
28. François Decret, Early Christianity in North Africa, trans. Edward Smither (Cambridge: James Clark, 2011), 167.
29. Letter 10.2, in Decret, Early Christianity in North Africa, 189.
30. Letter 222.3 (trans. Teske, 4:82).
31. Letter 229.1–2 (trans. Teske, 4:113).
32. Letter 230.2 (trans. Teske, 4:116).
Homecoming
1. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1999), 43.