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.
Story
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).
Justice
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).
Death
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.
Index
absurd, the, xiii, 32–33, 38–39, 44, 229n11
addiction, 65–67, 96–97, 99, 125, 156, 158–61, 202
Adeodatus, 104–5, 118, 169, 185, 198, 203, 219
Agassi, Andre, 79, 89
Alypius, 113, 125–26, 135–36, 139–40, 155, 167, 169, 185, 203–4, 219
Ambrose, 50–51, 73, 87, 105, 110–11, 113, 131, 150–56, 170, 201–2, 207–8, 219
Anderson, Wes, 196–97
angst, 16, 41, 55, 181
Anthony of Padua, 175–76
Arendt, Hannah, xiii, 30–32, 54, 211
Arnauld, Antoine, 25
atheism, 177–78, 190
Auster, Paul, 194, 199
authenticity, xiii, 4, 18, 20–21, 26–30, 34, 61–62, 74, 109, 120–27, 130–37, 168, 210
autobiography, 161–62, 168
Bakewell, Sarah, 20, 28, 38, 42, 228n2, 234n12
baptism, 17, 50–51, 111, 161, 169, 185, 203–4, 208–9, 213, 219
beata vita, 145
Beauvoir, Simone de, 20–21
being-towards-death, 28, 61, 210, 230n4
Benedict XVI (pope), 172, 219
Bergman, Ingmar, 28
Berryman, John, 202–3
Brand, Russell, 96–97, 99
Brights, the, 110, 146, 177, 233n11, 235n12
Brown, Peter, 16, 46, 185, 224, 228n26, 232n18, 233n30
Camus, Albert, xiii, 20–21, 32–34, 36–42, 46, 49, 107–8, 155–57, 178–79, 210, 215
Carthage, 2, 6–7, 9, 12, 60, 62–63, 78–79, 96, 104, 114, 117, 142–43, 216–17, 220
Cassiciacum, 2, 105, 169–70, 203, 226
celibacy, 101–2, 105
Champaigne, Philippe de, 24–25
chastity, 100, 102–3, 109
Cicero, 143, 145, 153, 166, 185
Clarkson, Kelly, 237n18
Claussen, M. A., 52, 230n36
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 177–78, 180, 190–91
concubinage, 104–5
Continence, Lady, 100–101
Corrections, The (novel), 106–7
cross, the, xii, 14, 156, 185–86, 223
curiositas, 143–45
cursus publicus, 7, 231n18
Dasein, 28–29, 120–21, 124, 229n11, 233n1
Derrida, Jacques, xiv, 26–27, 34, 92–93, 108, 169
Descartes, René, 25, 173, 228n5
Devil, the, 183
/> Dodaro, Robert, 94, 189, 224, 236n32
Don Quixote, 166
Doyle, Rob, 114–15
Dunham, Lena, 138
Eigentlichkeit, 109. See also authenticity
Emanuel AME Church, 192
enjoyment, 13, 82, 94, 100, 121, 125, 144–45, 162. See also joy
evil, 33, 68, 111, 153, 178–92, 209, 236n22
exile, 12, 16, 32–33, 34, 37–39, 46, 49–50, 54, 193, 230n36
fame, 25, 78, 81, 96–97
Flanagan, Caitlin, 232n27
Fox, Robin Lane, 34, 146
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 27