The philosopher and Augustine scholar James K. A. Smith speaks to Vatican News about St Augustine’s “deep sense of interiority and subjectivity”, and the way his political writings are used and abused today.
By Joseph Tulloch On Monday, Pope Leo departs for Algeria, the homeland of St Augustine. The 4th century African theologian is a major inspiration for the Pope, who is a member of the Augustinian order, and will use his time in the country to visit sites in Hippo – modern-day Annaba – connected to the saint’s life. Ahead of the trip, Vatican News spoke to the philosopher James K. A. Smith, author of On the Road with Saint Augustine, about the saint's "real sense of existential decision and resolve", his ‘refugee spirituality’, and why his work still feel fresh today. The following transcript has been lightly edited for reasons of style and brevity. Vatican News: You‘re known for your focus on the existential dimension of Augustine‘s work. What are the ways that Augustine speaks to our lives today? Smith: I came to Augustine through 20th century French philosophy. It‘s interesting how much Augustine just kind of reverberates through the philosophical tradition. He is a fascinating, ancient character who exhibits all kinds of modern traits, and it‘s almost like he feels familiar to us for that reason. I think one of the reasons why Augustine can feel contemporary to us, and it's almost hard to appreciate how singular this was in his context, is that he writes as somebody who has a deep sense of interiority and subjectivity. There's a real sense of existential decision and resolve, and decisions that have to be made, so you can understand why someone like Heidegger or Camus in the 20th century find him to be an evocative character. The other thing that intrigues me about Augustine can be found in the opening line in his Confessions, which is probably one of the most famous lines of Western literature. The whole of the Confessions is an autobiography written as a prayer, and he says to God: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This is, firstly, a deep recognition that what defines the human person is our yearnings, our hungers, our desires, our longings. But also, do you see how he's really attuned to anxiety? I think Augustine is somebody who is attuned to the weight of anxiety, of trying to find what we love, what we're longing for, and how much that defines us. I just think he's incredibly prescient in that regard. Q: The Catholic Church has just elected its first ever US Pope, and he’s a member of the Order of St Augustine. You yourself are a joint US-Canadian citizen. Do you have any thoughts about how Augustine speaks to a modern US context? There’s several things that question provokes me to think about. One is that, as someone has commented, the United States plays out a deeply Freudian culture without ever actually naming and embracing psychoanalysis. I think that’s because the individualism of American culture and ethos does spawn a deep sense of subjectivity and interiority. That part of Augustine resonates. I'm also interested in Augustine's thinking about public life and political life, and what Augustine would call the ‘idolatry’ of American political culture. In one of Augustine's late works, The City of God, he distinguishes between the heavenly city and the earthly city, or the City of God and the City of Man. That’s not a distinction between some aethereal heaven and some gritty, particular, earthly reign. It's really two ways of imagining social life. The difference between the City of God and the City of Man is just two fundamentally different political imaginations for what it means to be a community. The earthly city is defined by the desire for power and domination - the libido dominandi - whereas the City of God is a community of citizens who are defined by humility and sacrifice. I think that Pope Leo, as an Augustinian, sees and comments on political and social realities through that kind of Augustinian lens. Q: You’ve written about what you call Augustine's ‘refugee spirituality’. Can you explain what you mean by that? I think one of the keys to understanding Augustine's thought is the Gospel parable of the Prodigal Son. In that story, the son departs his homeland and ventures into a distant country and dissipates everything that he's been given. He is dehumanised, reduced to animality, and experiences this wake-up call, and remembers who he is. Then he makes his way back home where the father runs out to embrace him. That structure of exodus and return is part of Augustine's life. When Augustine leaves North Africa with all these dreams of conquest, in many ways he’s the prodigal son. Because of this, Augustine's view of the Christian life is deeply shaped by this sense of journey, of movement, of the road, the highway. So in some ways, the language here is actually the language of the migrant, of the refugee, of the one who is adventuring to another country with the hopes that it will be a homeland. That is all over Augustine's preaching. It's all over the way that he reads the biblical text. It’s interesting that this also plays out in the way he was a bishop. Augustine was a very significant champion of principle of sanctuary for those who were fleeing situations of injustice. In fact, there's places where he says the Church has to make room for refugees, for people who are fleeing bad situations. He asks if that means we risk letting in people who are bad, and he says yes, that is a risk. But he says, it’s better to accept that risk than to shore up our walls and exclude the vulnerable migrant. So this ‘refugee spirituality’ really became practical policy for Augustine. You know, Augustine wasn't just the great theologian or a philosopher in the Western tradition. He spent his days as a pastor and as a pastor of pastors. If you want to hear the human voice of Augustine, you have to read his sermons. This is where you'll see him with his flock. He's constantly enjoining them to remember that this is a long road, a difficult road, but one we journey together. We’re like a refugee camp. The City of God is a refugee camp and we are migrants on the way in this caravan who are journeying towards our homeland, which is God himself. Q: Of course, Augustine's theology has also been used to justify the opposite kind of approach: you look after those near to you first, and everyone else afterwards. Is that a misreading of Augustine? I think, yes, it's a misreading of Augustine, and of Aquinas. Augustine is constantly enjoining people to love their neighbour, which requires risk and vulnerability. Of course, Augustine's corpus is so massive – he's one of those thinkers that you can always find a passage to make him say what you want him to say, if you want to turn him into a puppet for your preferences. But I think that's a fundamental misreading of the heart of Augustine's theology. That, of course, is not to say that there aren’t shadow sides to Augustine and his legacy. There were unfortunate and, in a way, inconsistent moments where he was willing to invoke imperial power in order to take care of some of his heretical opponents. I just think that in our retrieval of Augustine, it's pretty easy to show how that doesn't make sense in Augustinian terms. We have this marvellous letter where he writes to a Roman general named Boniface, who's a Christian and functioning as a governor in a North African territory. Boniface is getting impatient, and he basically thinks he knows what the kingdom of God looks like, and he wants to impose it, he wants to take care of implementing the kingdom of God. Augustine writes him a letter and he says “We ought not to want to live ahead of time with only the saints and righteous.” This shows that Augustine has an eschatology, right? He has a sense that there is an important way in which we are waiting for the kingdom to arrive. We don't make it arrive. We are ambassadors of it. We are trying to provide a foretaste of it, but in the end, we can't dominate in order to bring about a kingdom of love. That doesn't make any sense. Q: You got your PhD in philosophy at Villanova, and where the future Pope Leo XIV also studied philosophy. I believe your doctoral advisor also taught the future Pope. Can you give us any insights into the philosophical culture of Villanova at the time, and some of the ways maybe that shaped Pope Leo? The Villanova philosophy department has long been identified with both the Catholic tradition and a catholic interest in 20th century European thought, in particular French and German thought. I went there for my doctoral studies because I wanted to study figures like Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. It is precisely this German and French milieu that kept returning to the thought of Saint Augustine in the 20th century. I mean, it's fascinating. People like Heidegger, Camus, Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard – the last three of whom, by the way, are all connected to Algeria in some way. Born in Algeria or working there as adults, they became intellectual stars in France in the middle of the 20th century, and they all had occasion to return to the thought of Saint Augustine. So that is the philosophical milieu which would have shaped part of Pope Leo's training.