What Augustine Missed from His Father

Photo by Liane Metzler on Unsplash

Sometimes the ancient writers can speak with surprising relevance. As I work on my book-length account of my rediscovery of the Trinity, and as I delve into my sketchy memories of my earliest years, Augustine, the fourth-century African bishop, has been helping me.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Augustine looked hard for God’s presence in the earliest moments of earthly life. I’m moved by how in his book, Confessions, he stays on the lookout for such traces in ordinary experiences, even in the ones that precede a person’s first memories.

Augustine was particularly intrigued with the way his parents—with their loves and imperfections—gave him life. That’s been the twist in my reading Augustine lately—I didn’t know how like me he was.

He came to see the life given him in his birth as an overflow of longing and love from his earthly parents. I certainly do—with gratefulness. His mother, especially, and others with maternal instincts, wanted to pass on to him, as said to God, the “overflowing gift they received from you.” A moving prayer!

And I was amazed to see Augustine grappling with what I did: a mother who routinely failed to resist a temptation to over-parent, who would not only embrace but also cling. Who had mixed feelings about my own independence. Who, as Saint Augustine said of his own mother, “She had a passion for my presence, which is the way mothers are, but with her it was far more the case than with most.”

James K.A. Smith notes how a mother’s love, for all its vibrancy in the making of a self, can also undo: The recorded presence of Augustine’s mother Monica “swells and overwhelms and inhales all the oxygen an independent self needs to breathe.” Her presence storms and dawns over the whole book, all the more striking next to a somewhat distant and aloof father.

For Augustine’s earthly father does inhabit the account, if in a more shadowy way. In my early life, too, while I am grateful for a steady father who never left, who cared about me and my brother, what he gave was also divided. Like many of his era, work, the office, the ways his boss evaluated him, proved the focus of his greatest energy. I was more than an afterthought but less than a fervent focus.

Augustine, here too, gave me insight. The wrestling I see in his Confessions has helped me more than I’d expected in my sifting of my own life’s stories. And made me better understand my own longings for God.

For it would not have been Augustine’s father who most warmed the young Augustine’s view of the divine. Augustine reluctantly said that his father not only encouraged his son’s wandering sensuality and jarring lusts but was what we would today call emotionally distant. His father died young, the same year Augustine, at 17, became himself the father of a son. Augustine at times ached in his account over his disappointments over what could have been in a relationship that seemed anemic and famishing.  It’s possible to feel profound loneliness while set in a home and household. His mother supplied more than her share, perhaps.

But was Augustine’s restless spiritual quest a way to work out a longing for a father he’d barely known? So while he rang the praises of a father-God—a relatable, relational God—behind the trinitarian language he inherited (and some that he would innovate) was he hot on the trail of an intimacy that he missed from his earthly father?

Did that turmoil and deep loneliness affect him even before he began to name you, O God, as a heavenly, welcoming Father? Did you supply what he lacked? Can you do so for me, for us?