On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts by James K. A. Smith (review)

A philosopher in the existentialist tradition by training, James K. A. Smith is perhaps best known for his involvement with the erstwhile group "Radical Orthodoxy." Smith has gone on to publish numerous popular books (some fifteen since 2006) on Calvinist theology, secularity, and Postmodernity. In recent years, Smith has turned his attention to Augustine or more specifically a kind of Augustinianism, such as is found in his successful book, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (2016). This book, On the Road with Saint Augustine, continues Smith's desire to think with and often through Augustine.

On the Road with Saint Augustine is a book aimed at a popular audience. Specifically, it appears that Smith is writing toward struggling Christians who believe that Christianity is either intellectually dogmatic or merely moralizing. Sympathetic to his intended audience, Smith complains that his own initial encounter with Augustine led him to think of the bishop only as a dogmatic theologian. Yet, Smith assures us, there is more to Augustine; indeed, Augustine offers more than the intellectualism of Aquinas or Newman. Augustine, Smith imagines, is like an ancient existentialist. For Smith, this is a very encouraging and promising insight.

Smith uses two fundamental approaches to exposit his Augustine. The first is to place Augustine among existentialists such as Camus, Heidegger, Derrida, and Arendt (though the latter only very briefly). Through these figures, Smith highlights the themes of authenticity, being toward death, and even the absurd. To correspond with such themes, Smith lands on "restlessness" and a "refugee spirituality" as a main entry into Augustine. Augustine, like us "late moderns," was concerned with the journey of life. At least in the first few chapters, though abating as the book progress, Smith presents existentialism (and a superabundance of pop culture references) as a way of getting to the wisdom of this Augustine.

The second approach is Smith's psychological reading of Augustine. Though Smith does refer to other works by Augustine, the central and omnipresent text is the Confessions (and not the whole of the Confessions, Smith draws almost exclusively from books 1–9). Stories of Augustine's voyage to Rome, his time in Carthage, his friendships and relationships with his mother, father, and son, and especially Augustine's "mixed" status as Roman and African (which I will discuss below) are examined for psychological impact. In a very simple way, Augustine can journey with us on the road because he has given us stories that we can psychologize.

There are numerous problems with Smith's approaches. First, however, it must be said that Smith's book is a popular book for a broad audience. To this end, it may not matter that Smith has read narrowly in Augustine's corpus and has extremely limited knowledge of the immense literature on Augustine, his theology and philosophy, and even studies that have very astutely placed Augustine in conversation with modern thinkers. Indeed, Smith somewhat superficially presents in a loosely genetic fashion Augustine's relation to and appropriation by the existentialists (for example, Camus wrote his dissertation on Augustine or Heidegger gave early lectures on Augustine). However, studies have shown much more definitively, extensively, and clearly the ways that these thinkers draw from and reject Augustine.

To this reviewer this raises the question of why Smith lands on existentialism or certain existentialists as the co-pilots on his journey (for which Augustine takes the backseat for the first half of the drive)? Smith at times identifies ways in which Augustine might respond to Camus and especially Heidegger. Yet, Smith also positions himself within Augustine's diagnosis of the agonism of Manichaeism. Perhaps Smith fails to realize this not only because of his focus on select sections of certain books in the Confessions, but also because of his exclusion of Augustine's understanding of the Church. Smith reduces the Church to the...