Augustine’s Concept of Pilgrimage and the Journey of the Soul

I write transiting in Paris en route to Tunis, the former Carthage of St Augustin of Hippo (354–430), where I am going for the laying of the Foundation Stone of the new theological College in the Diocese of North Africa. This is a very splendid development which is well worth celebrating. It is an extension of the Alexandria School of Theology for which I vividly remember undertaking a feasibility study while I was Dean of All Saints’ Cathedral in Cairo – so it is a great delight to see the project grow as it has over the subsequent years. The Rev. Fr. Jeff Boldt PhD, who has only recently visited us in Boston, is heading this college while also still working in Cario as well.

I am also mindful of my last visit which was for the consecration of Dr. Ashley Null as the Bishop of Africa not all that long ago. We were all greatly alarmed to hear of his recent open heart surgery, but relieved to know he is recovering well and looks forward to visiting the parish sometime soon. We shall all be thinking of him in Tunis this weekend and praying for his continued and full recovery.

There could be no better place than Carthage, or modern day Tunis, upon which to consider the thought of St. Augustine and his extraordinary influence in shaping later theology and Anglican thought in particular.

In this regard, I am also delighted that we shall shortly, on 2^nd October, be hosting a colloquium on the subject of St. Augustine and his view of life as a pilgrimage of faith. This will be in conjunction with the Elliott House of the US and Canada and is intended also to promote awareness of the profound thought of the Rev. Dr. Robert Crouse, who was based in Toronto after studying at Harvard and being a parishioner at The Advent.  The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, among many others, has paid much tribute to Dr. Crouse’s work in furthering Anglican theology in ways that continued to build upon the Augustinian legacy, so I do hope that as many as possible will join us for the colloquium and indeed read the series of books being published now of the work of Dr. Crouse — available here at: https://a.co/d/0iQjGDh9

With all this in mind, it is apposite to reflect briefly on St. Augustine’s view of the Christian life as fundamentally one of peregrination — which is to say a pilgrimage – which in its grandest sense is the journey of the soul toward its ultimate heavenly estate.

It is clear that this overarching imagery pervades Augustine’s entire theology, as well as his preaching. This befits its power as his fundamental spiritual anthropology, as the theologians put it. In other words, we human beings are viatores (wayfarers), destined to be truly ourselves as citizens of heaven who are dwelling only temporarily here in this life, and for this reason our restless hearts can but seek rest ultimately in God alone.

His fully developed doctrine of pilgrimage emerges most clearly in De Civitate Dei (The City of God), where he contrasts the two cities of the earthly (civitas terrena) and the heavenly (civitas Dei). The citizens of the heavenly city are peregrini—which is to say pilgrims or sojourners—whose true citizenship lies not in any earthly polity but in the Jerusalem above.

As he writes:

“They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labour under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country… They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven.” (City of God XIX.17) 

This passage echoes 1 Peter 2:11 and Hebrews 11:13–16, and encapsulates Augustine’s vision where Christians inhabit the world without being of it, participating fully in earthly society yet all the while orienting their ultimate loyalty toward their true patria which is the homeland of heaven.

The term homo viator—“the traveller” or “pilgrim”—becomes thus a definitive image for Augustine’s anthropology. As one scholar summarizes it: “For Augustine, the Christian is always a pilgrim, homo viator, man on the march. Relatedness to God is not a position but a movement, not a point but a process.”

Several further and famous passages can serve to illuminate Augustine’s pilgrimage spirituality:

“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” ((Confessions I.1.1)This opening expresses the soul’s innate orientation toward God as its final end and the restlessness (inquietum) of which it speaks is not pathological but teleological: for the soul is intrinsically designed for motion toward its proper resting place which is ultimately in the divine.

Then there is the image of love as weight, “My love is my weight; wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me” (pondus meum amor meus; eo feror quocumque feror (Confessions  XIII.9.10)). In speaking thus, Augustine identifies love (amor) with weight (pondus), and draws on the physics of his time to suggest that just as a stone falls downward by its weight, so is the soul moved toward its beloved object by the “weight” or pull of love much like the force of gravity, as we might say. The soul’s journey is thus governed by the direction of its love—ordered love (caritas) draws it upward to God, while disordered love (cupiditas) pulls it downward to the transient distractions of the world.

In one of his many Sermons, Augustine writes: “Behold, Christian, heavenly seed, pilgrims on earth, you who seek a city in heaven, who desire to be joined to the holy angels: understand that you have come in order to depart.” (Eia, christiane, coeleste germen, peregrini in terra, qui civitatem in coelo quaeritis, qui angelis sanctis sociari desideratis, intelligite vos sic venisse ut discedatis). Thus we see Christ as the Way and Patriato which we are called (Sermon 81.7–8). This sermon exhorts believers to remember their transient status: in this earthly life is but a passage as on a ship, it is not our destination. Christ Himself is both the via (way) and the patria (homeland)—the path and the goal or in the words of the gospel “the way the truth and the life.”

In his sermons on the Psalms, Augustine indeed frequently depicts life as a sea-journey toward the “port of philosophy” or the heavenly homeland. The believer navigates the turbulent waters of earthly existence, guided by Christ, who “makes a way across the sea and over land to the homeland.”

Then, in addition, we also have an upward and downward imagery to consider as St. Augustine discusses the Soul’s Ascent: in both interior and exterior domains. Dimension in Augustine’s pilgrimage is therefore not merely spatial or temporal but also profoundly interior. The soul’s journey involves an itinerarium mentis in Deum—an itinerary leading into the mind of God—but moving first inward from external, sensible things inward to self-knowledge, and upward to the knowledge of God.

Then (in this hasty survey) we must pay especial attention to Augustine’s conversion experience. In the Confessions, chapter VII.10, Augustine describes this conversion experience in the following terms:

“And thus warned to return to myself, I entered even into my inward self, Thou being my Guide… And I saw with the eye of my soul… an unchangeable Light upward in its essence” (sì come foco, / che per sua forma montar è nato in suso). This image echoes Augustine’s Confessions XIII.9.10:  where as we have seen love is the soul’s “weight”, drawing it toward its proper place. For Dante as for Augustine, human beings are in their essence ones who love (amantes), and salvation at its core consists in the corrective reordering of love from lesser to greater goods.

And this idea of reordering brings us to the point that the Commedia can be understood as in fact an Augustinian Conversion Narrative:

Dante does after all intend the poem to effect in readers the same interior transformation it dramatizes in the pilgrim Dante. As Augustine’s Confessions seeks to convert its readers by awakening desire for God, so Dante’s poem “seduces the reader for the sake of a conversion—a conversion occasioned by the very experience of love enacted in our encounter with the text.” The progression from Inferno (ignorance and disordered love) through Purgatorio (awareness and purification) to Paradiso (contemplation and ordered love) neatly mirrors Augustine’s account of the soul’s ascent from exteriority to interiority to transcendence.

All of which in turn also brings us to Robert Crouse, the Anglican Canadian “Theologian of Pilgrimage.”

Robert Crouse (1930–2011) was n priest (of the Church of Canada) and theologian based in Crousetown, Nova Scotia, and a distinguished twentieth-century interpreter of Augustine and Dante. Described as “a world authority on Augustine and Dante,” Crouse taught at Dalhousie University and the University of King’s College, Halifax, and was the first non-Roman Catholic to hold a visiting professorship at the Augustinianum in Rome.

In his short work, Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality (drawn from addresses at a 1980s clergy retreat at St. Augustine’s Monastery, Nova Scotia), he presents pilgrimage as the central metaphor for Christian life. In it he writes that: “The spirituality of St. Augustine is the spirituality of pilgrimage, and abounds in images of wilderness and paradise, of exile and repatriation.”

For Crouse, Augustine thus advances the Christian conception of pilgrimage as the soul’s journey from the wilderness of earthly exile to the paradise of heavenly homeland. And Crouse further emphasizes Augustine’s Christological resolution of the pilgrimage paradox: wherein Christ is both the way (via) and the homeland (patria); “Christ, as both way and goal, via and patria, grants full weight to the plight of human longing for God, but, in the Incarnation, Christ not only illumines the path but becomes the way itself.” This formulation synthesizes Augustine’s Confessions and De Civitate Dei: the pilgrim soul longs for its rest in God, and that rest is made accessible through the incarnate Christ, who is Himself the path to the Father.

On a wider stage, Crouse developed a profound critique of modern culture and the modern church for “intellectual and cultural amnesia”—forgetting how the past shapes us, and thus losing self-understanding. He wished instead to recall the church to the consensus fidelium—the common mind of the faithful through the ages— a continually reformed by conscious return to Scripture and creeds.

For Crouse, therefore, pilgrimage is not merely individual but ecclesial: the church itself is a pilgrim community, journeying through time toward the eschaton.

Thus did Crouse’s scholarship and preaching consistently weave together Augustine and Dante. He lectured on both figures in his celebrated Great Books program at King’s College, and his posthumously published works include commentaries on Dante alongside sermons and theological essays are all rooted in Augustinian spirituality. As one reviewer noted: “What emerges is a comprehensive spiritual vision of the Christian life as pilgrimage—well-trod terrain, perhaps, especially for the Augustinianly inflected among us.”

Crouse described the Confessions as an itinerarium mentis in Deum—an itinerary of the mind into God—echoing both Augustine’s own language and the medieval tradition of spiritual journeying that Dante inherits.

Augustine’s concept of pilgrimage—as the soul’s restless journey toward rest in God, structured by love as weight, and fulfilled in Christ as Way and Homeland—became a defining motif in Western Christian spirituality. Dante appropriated this framework in the Divine Comedy, dramatizing the soul’s ascent through reordered love and poetic conversion. Robert Crouse, the Anglican Canadian theologian, recovered and articulated this Augustinian-Dantean vision for the modern church, presenting pilgrimage as the comprehensive metaphor for Christian life, ecclesial identity, and spiritual formation.

The thread connecting these three figures of Augustine, Dante, and Crouse is the understanding of human life as pilgrimage—a journey of the soul toward God, governed by love, structured by Christ, and fulfilled in the vision of the heavenly homeland; exactly this will comprise the heart of the terrain to be surveyed in the coming colloquium at The Advent on 2^nd October, of which the details are below.

REGISTER for the Colloquium HERE

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Augustine. Confessiones (Confessions). Trans. Maria Boulding. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997.
• Augustine. De Civitate Dei (The City of God).
• Augustine. Sermones (Sermons), esp. Sermon 81.
• Dante Alighieri. La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy). Trans. Robert and Jean Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2000–2008.

Secondary Sources

• Camacho, Paul. “‘Fire, Born to Rise’: On Dante the Augustinian.” The Augustine Blog, 2025.
• Careless, Sue. “On Pilgrimage with Robert Crouse.” The Living Church, June 2024.
• Crouse, Robert D. Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality. Halifax: Works of Robert Crouse, 2024.
• Stewart-Kroeker, Sarah. “Preaching on Life as a Pilgrimage.” In The Cambridge Companion to Augustine’s Sermons, ed. Andrew Hofer, OP. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
• “Pilgrim’s Paradise: The Works of Robert Crouse.” North American Anglican, January 2024.