One reason is that the author’s biography is both powerful and relatable. His life’s path started in a way familiar to many, and he progressed successfully along that path to a point which many envy: a solid education, and the beginnings of a career which could lead to a position of financial, political, and social power, as James Smith writes:
A promising young man from the provinces, both he and his family had dreams of him making it to the center of cultural power and influence. He believed his education would be a ticket to the upper class and “the good life.”
Many people have lived lives like that. Many others want to. Augustine was climbing: he was on his way to becoming an elite.
Another reason for interest in the Confessions is that it is a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted book. It combines, and alternates between, autobiography, philosophy, psychology, theology, and personal counselling. Without being explicitly a “self-help” book, its insights have offered guidance to many readers over the centuries.
In addition to the pursuit of money, power, and influence, “Augustine also thought sex would satisfy his deepest cravings.” Augustine ultimately found his enviable career path to be unsatisfying. His situation speaks to both modern and postmodern audiences. The superficial happiness which he attained was insufficient. He sought a deeper peace, contentment, and joy. Augustine’s search for a better life readily translates to the twenty-first century, as James Smith explains:
Despite being a citizen of ancient north Africa, Augustine was well-acquainted with the demons that plague us in late modern America: the pressure to succeed; the driving ambition to climb social and professional ladders; the disorienting thrill of so-called “freedom”; the anxieties that beset our quests for power and pleasure; and the persistent frustration of foisting inordinate expectations upon our accomplishments and possessions. Like us, Augustine knew the exasperation of looking for love in all the wrong places.
Augustine was young, upwardly-mobile, and had a promising career. He was unsatisfied. He hadn’t yet found what he needed. He was continually on the move, whether travelling physically through the world, or moving through the realm of ideas and philosophies, yet found himself feeling stuck. He was free, and yet felt captive. He felt restless and anxious.
He didn’t find a solution to his problem. The solution found him, as James Smith describes it:
The opening prayer of his Confessions — “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” — has turned out to be a perennial insight into the human condition. Augustine’s writings are like a been-there-done-that theological account of the young and the restless.
Looking at the last half of the twentieth century, and the first quarter of the twenty-first century, one sees that life in first-world countries share some common features with Augustine’s life in the late Roman Empire:
Our culture begins to resemble the fractured, frantic world of Augustine’s waning Roman empire.
To be always on the move, always exploring, is never to feel at home. To be always pushing the limits, seeking maximum freedom, is never to know contentment or peace. He had lived this first-hand:
Augustine understood this human penchant for quests. But he also experienced the disappointments of a life lived in perpetual exile. Never arriving means you’re always leaving.
Augustine found this paradigm built into the narrative of the Prodigal Son, as James Smith reports:
Augustine structures his analysis of the human condition around the travels and travails of the Prodigal Son, the tale of an ungrateful son who runs off with his premature inheritance having effectively told his father, “I wish you were dead.” And this odd, surprising Father acquiesces: “Here you go,” he says. “I love you.” The son spends everything, wasting these gifts on loose living that calls itself “freedom,” losing himself in the process. He is no longer himself. But at rock bottom, “in a distant country” Luke tells us, the son wakes up and remembers who he is, and Whose he is, and makes his way home to his father’s grace.
“And there, in the grace of God, he finds what” so many others, before him and after him, “were longing for: He finds himself.” To know one’s self as loved is a cornerstone of identity. To know one’s self as unconditionally, powerfully, meaningfully, and eternally loved is the cornerstone for a confident identity. The ‘he’ is both Augustine and the Prodigal Son.
Paradoxically, the peace and contentment of this confident identity is the launchpad for adventure. Augustine did not become tamed and domesticated. He traveled and debated. He could move throughout the world precisely because he had a home. He could engage in passionate intellectual debate precisely because he was at peace.
The Prodigal Son is an archetype:
The reason Augustine tells his story is because he thinks it is simply an example of the human story. We are all prodigals. And he wants us to ask ourselves a question: “What if I went home?” But what’s interesting is that it also traces his own geographical excursions from Africa to Italy, from the fringes of the empire to its heart. And it’s precisely when Augustine is as far away from home as he’s ever been, in Milan, that the still small voice of God reaches him and sets him on a path back home — to his heavenly Father, but also back to Africa, where he will serve God for the rest of his life.
He went home. Physically, he went home to Africa. Spiritually, he went home to God. So even when he traveled away from Africa to discuss or debate, he was still at home.
This allowed him to encounter conflict or hostility without being overcome by anxiety — to be sure, he had times of anxiety, but they did not master him. He had changed, but the world around him had not. When he was in the capital city, he was surrounded by “the mix of paganism and politics in Rome.” He was intellectually and spiritually now an alien in those places in which he’d formerly been at home. Just as anxiety didn’t master him, neither did this feeling of being stranger.
Augustine must have constantly felt like an outsider wherever he went. Indeed, the experience probably started at home. The child of an African mother and a father who was a Roman official, Augustine was bicultural (and quite likely biracial): He lived in two worlds from the time he was born. When he ventured to Rome, he would arrive as an outsider. And even when he returned to Africa, as a product of the Roman education system, he would be an outsider again.
He effectively lived in two worlds. If the Confessions is his most popular book, The City of God is certainly in the top five. Augustine uses the metaphor of living in a city — or rather, of living in two cities — to express this sense of being an alien, and yet being content to be an alien.
The young African would later come up with the concept of the Christian living in the tension between two cities — the City of God and the city of the earth.
He wrote The City of God to explain not only his outsider status, but the outsider status of his fellow believers. A century after Constantine, Christians in the Roman Empire, and in the city of Rome, were still a minority. The city had been attacked, sacked, and looted by the Goths in 410 AD, and the pagan majority blamed the Christians. According to the pagans, the Christians had weakened the city by failing to appease the pagan gods. The gods, feeling insulted, had not helped the city defend itself against the Goths.
It was a classic case of “blame the outsiders” and “blame the numerically small minority group.” In this context, Augustine, who’d been an up-and-coming member of the Roman establishment, was now explaining to that establishment how and why this oppressed little group wasn’t to blame for Rome’s failed foreign policy and for the inability of Rome’s military to defend the city. He argued that the presence of Christians in the empire was in fact beneficial to society.
He understood his audience. He knew that they’d view Christianity as a set of childish fables. He knew this, because he had also once viewed it this way. Now Augustine was changed. He saw inestimable value in the teachings of Christianity. Augustine had been shaped by experiences he’d had with Ambrose, whom Augustine had heard speak many times. “Bishop Ambrose made” a difference “in his life.”
When Augustine arrived in Milan, he still thought sophisticated, learned people couldn’t believe in the “fables” of Christianity. But then he heard Ambrose preach — erudite, empathetic, unapologetic — and something in Ambrose’s witness helped Augustine imagine himself coming home to God.
Ambrose was less about debating and proving the truths of the faith, and more about inviting listeners to explore and experience it. Ambrose was “not so much ‘defending’ the faith as showing how it could be believable.” Augustine learned much from Ambrose and employed it in his own writings and lectures.
These early lessons from Ambrose appear in The City of God and Augustine, who himself had formerly mocked Christianity, knew how to formulate his words for the Roman readers.
The audience to whom Augustine wrote The City of God is not too different from twenty-first century Americans, as James Smith explains:
Given that we’ve spent generations looking for love in all the wrong places, and have experienced the pain and disappointment that results from idolizing wealth, power and sex, perhaps our culture is finally ready to consider Augustine’s radical solution: Our rest lies not in acquiring, but in being found.Augustine not only helps us find home, he also helps us be brutally honest about the Christian’s ongoing penchant to run away.
Augustine’s narrative is not a simple “happily ever after” story. He continued to wrestle spiritually. His former life of material wealth, social influence, and indulgence still called to him. It was at times a struggle for him.
As James Smith phrases it,
Even when we are in Christ, the pull and tug of the mythical “open road” can lull us into thinking the grass is greener elsewhere, that freedom is the absence of obligation, that the goods of creation could be a substitute for the Creator. But Augustine’s honesty about his own continued struggles with ambition and vanity are oddly encouraging. They remind us that we can never reach the end of God’s grace, that the Father is always waiting for us at the end of the road, ready to forgive and throw a feast. His grace is the fetter that sets us free.
What other authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, John Steinbeck) did in fiction, Augustine did in his autobiography. He sought fulfillment in the sparkling attractions of society, didn’t find it there, and was grasped by a spiritual power — a higher power.
