On the Road with Saint Augustine by James K. A. Smith

Author:James K. A. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality;REL062000;REL012000
ISBN: 9781493419968
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

HEIDEGGER MISSED THE rest of the story. He heard Augustine say, “Alone I would not have done it” but missed it when Augustine confessed, “I couldn’t be happy without friends.”32 If friendship can be a dangerous enemy, for Augustine it is also the conduit of grace. The problem isn’t other people but what they love, and how they love me.

Heidegger fixated on Augustine’s portraits of inauthentic friendship, the camaraderie of the gang, the solidarity of the mob that, in the end, doesn’t care about me and only loans me a sense of belonging as long as I perform, “join in,” conform. This faux friendship provides thin gruel that pretends to feed what is a creaturely hunger: “to love and to be loved.”33 It’s the infomercial form of friendship that feeds on my weakness and despair, with grand promises and big stories and people who have talked themselves into thinking they’ve discovered the good life. And because all Heidegger saw in Augustine was this disordered mode of fake friendship, to him it looked like others were always a distraction from myself, as if “friendship” was how you lose yourself. Authenticity, then, is a private project of individuation. Forget all the haters (and, for Heidegger, everybody else is a hater): you do you.

But that’s inheriting a stunted Augustine, and it misses the end of the story. Augustine has his own rendition of what we might call “authenticity.” Like Heidegger’s version, it involves answering a call, hearkening to an appeal, responding to a summons to become who I’m made to be. But that call doesn’t come from an echo chamber; it comes from the One who made me, a “friend who is closer than a brother,” who laid his life down for his friends. And who calls to me through others, through friends.

Friends, in fact, are at the heart of Augustine’s conversion narrative. Book 8 of the Confessions is a series of episodes where other people keep showing up in Augustine’s life, refusing to let him remain where he is, prodding and prompting him to answer the call. This climax of the narrative is a kaleidoscope of friends and exemplars—friends who point to exemplars for Augustine to imitate. In this frame, others are not a threat to his authenticity; they’re the lure drawing him toward it.

Book 8 opens with Augustine in a waffling despondency, “attracted to the way, the Savior himself, but . . . still reluctant.”34 So God makes a kind of divine suggestion to him: maybe go visit Simplicianus, an older Christian who circulated in Ambrose’s orbit (and who, in fact, had baptized Ambrose). When Augustine shares his struggles, both intellectual and spiritual, mentioning his wrestling with Platonism, Simplicianus sees an opening to tell him a story about someone else, an exemplar. Marius Victorinus had been a learned, well-regarded orator in Rome. In many ways, Victorinus had achieved everything that Augustine would have hoped to achieve, even being honored with a statue in the Roman forum. And he was the translator

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