Augustine and the Economy of Sacrifice: Ancient and Modern Perspectives 1108481396, 9781108481397

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Augustine and the Economy of Sacrifice Business is generally viewed as a means to generate personal or ­corporate wealth, but business transactions can also sacrificially serve the common good. In conversation with contemporary social theorists, Joshua Nunziato critically evaluates the spiritual significance and aims of economic exchange. Inspired by Augustine’s vision of the church as a “universal sacrifice,” Nunziato explores how Augustine’s approach teaches us detachment – both personal and collective – which releases us from illusory claims of ownership and reframes business as an ­exercise in loving and letting go. Nunziato’s volume engages with the big questions of economic life and considers both why and how we acknowledge people through business in a way that results in collective well-being. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Augustinian studies, philosophy of exchange, and economic ethics. Joshua S. Nunziato is a full-time Instructor in the Business Ethics and Social Impact division of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research reframes the relationship between economic culture, ethical reflection, and inner life. Nunziato has ­published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Modern Theology, and other venues.

Augustine and the Economy of Sacrifice Ancient and Modern Perspectives

JOSH UA S. N U NZI ATO University of Colorado, Boulder

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, usa 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108481397 doi: 10.1017/9781108630467 © Cambridge University Press 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nunziato, Joshua, 1986- author. Title: Augustine and the economy of sacrifice : ancient and modern perspectives / Joshua Nunziato. Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019026039 | isbn 9781108481397 (hardback) | isbn 9781108481397 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430. | Sacrifice--Christianity. | Social exchange--Religious aspects--Christianity. Classification: LCC br65.a9 n86 2020 | DDC 261.8/5092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026039 isbn 978-1-108-48139-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Damien, my son

The whole redeemed city … is offered to God as a u ­ niversal sacrifice. Augustine, City of God 10.6

Contents

Acknowledgments page ix Introduction 1 1 Mortal Economies

27

2 Unacknowledged Sacrifices

66

3 Sacrificial Acknowledgment

100

4 Sacrificial Community

144

5 Sacrificial Economy

170

Conclusion 217 Works Cited 221 Index 230

vii

Acknowledgments

This book is a product of the economy that it describes. It is with joy that I acknowledge those whose offerings made this project what it is. I am particularly grateful to Jim Wetzel for his friendship, e­ ncouragement, and inspiration. He models – better than anyone else I know – the Augustinian genius. Ronald Paul Hill has been a fiercely supportive advocate, mentor, and collaborator. I admire how he brings the contemplative life to ­business. I am fortunate to have had the example and guidance of William Desmond in forging my own approach to the philosophical life. Early in my academic career, Telford Work and Shirley Mullen proved to be models of scholarly ingenuity and fidelity. Both believed in my potential and helped me grow into it. This book was conceived at Villanova University. I would not have begun my doctoral degree there (much less completed it) without the friendship of Paul Camacho. His charity of spirit and clarity of mind have enlarged my compassion and sharpened my thinking. During my years at Villanova, Erika Kidd was another kindred spirit, whose camaraderie has been an unfailing source of encouragement. Sherri Anderson pressed me to say in this book what I really meant – especially, to explain why sacrifice is not simply a profane instrument of control. For her uncanny attunement to how the common good comes home to us through our relationships, I am grateful. My years in Philadelphia were deeply enriched by friendships with all the members of the “Game Night Group” – especially Paul and Amanda Camacho, Kate and Andy Rife, Tim and Alison Jussaume, and Meredith and Tim Brunk. The early-career scholars of religion working in Princeton adopted me into their circle. Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Justin Nickel, Michael Lamb, ix

x

Acknowledgments

Mel Webb, Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, Joseph Clair, and others unstintingly offered their camaraderie and conversation. I’m gratefully indebted to them. This book benefitted from extensive feedback offered by those who participated in the summer 2016 “Augustinefest” at Princeton cohosted by Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary. My thanks are due especially to John Bowlin and Eric Gregory, who co-hosted the event. Eugene McCarraher provided piquant – and much appreciated – feedback on this project in its nascent phase. As I have turned the manuscript into a book, it has been a pleasure working with the editorial team at Cambridge University Press. My sincere thanks to Beatrice Rehl, who understood the ambition of this project and enthusiastically provided the opportunity to bring it to market. The comments of anonymous readers also greatly improved the final version, and I am grateful for the time and attention they invested in helping me sharpen it. I completed this project in Denver, where new friends have continued to stretch my philosophical imagination. Special thanks to Chris and Grace Wojdak and the Beach clan. Finally, I am grateful for the love of my family: especially my wife, Chelsea; my parents, Bob and Colleen; my brother, Josiah and his wife, Cari – their sacrificial wisdom and service have never ceased teaching me what I do not simply know. This book is devoted to my son, Damien – with all my love.

Introduction

The Work of Parting Sacrifice is a work of parting. This is a book about that work. More specifically, it is a book about how Augustine saw and practiced the work of parting. It considers what his vision and life can teach about contemporary economics. But it also moves beyond Augustine and his thought to sketch the logic of an economy of sacrifice. That economy is where we live. Life is inherently sacrificial. It is conditioned, throughout, by the work of parting. So our economic transactions are always sacrificial (even when we do not see them that way). Our task is to understand what our sacrifices have to teach us about ourselves and our corporate life – and then to realign our economic culture to better acknowledge that reality now. This book takes on that task. All economic exchanges involve parting with things that we value. The easiest way to understand these partings is as sacrificial losses, which we accept for the sake of a greater good. But parting with something need not be simply the same as losing it. Thus, sacrificial exchange is not just a means for making loss pay. Augustine, the late antique North African philosopher, theologian, and saint, reminds us of how much is at stake – for our understanding of economic life today – in the difference between giving up what is ours and relinquishing what we share. Instead of seeing sacrifice as a loss accepted for a greater gain, Augustine invites us to see sacrifice as an offering made for the sake of the common good. When we lose something, we part with what is ours. Sacrifice, then, might be a renunciation; or, if the loss is forced, a deprivation. But, in either case, we lose what originally belonged to us. The sacrifice was ours

1

2

Introduction

to make. We have a moral claim on such losses.1 Sometimes, we expect to be compensated in kind (and then some) for what we give up. At other times, we expect someone else we care about to benefit from our loss. In the second case, we benefit indirectly because we compassionately identify our interests with theirs. But, either way, sacrifice is a quid pro quo. As such, it is the opening move in business exchange. It operates according to the logic: “I will make a sacrifice, you will make a sacrifice, and we will both (ostensibly) be better off in the end because of what we get out of the deal.”2 But such arrangements depend on something prior: a claim to own that with which we are parting. In contrast, parting without loss is an offering. We part with what had never been our own. And we do so by acknowledging a common good that precedes all our conditional property claims. By challenging us to convert our partings from losses into offerings, Augustine unsettles the easy assumption of ownership that underwrites the idea of sacrifice as renunciation or deprivation. For him, sacrifice becomes the work of making an offering of our lives. We do so by turning the things we buy and sell, trade and borrow, into media of openhearted dialogue, which connect us to one another. Originally, sacrifice meant sacrum facere – the work of making things sacred. Augustine shows how the economy of sacrifice makes humans sacred through the work of parting. The things we buy and sell, lend and borrow, give and take – things like money, contracts, goods, or services – are capable of making us sacred by teaching us how to live together with constant openheartedness. We offer something to one another through our economic exchanges. What we offer is not the rights to ownership. It is life, represented through the things that enable and enrich it. And life – our life in the body – is a life of parting. A life of division. Bits and pieces. Some now and some later, and nothing all together here and now.

For one sophisticated account of sacrifice that defines it in terms of dispossession and asymmetry between the sacrifice and its cause, cf. Peter Jonkers, “Justifying Sacrifice,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 50, no. 3–4 (December 1, 2008), 293. 2 In the words of Georg Simmel: “It is above all the exchange of economic values that involves the notion of sacrifice. … [E]conomic exchange – whether it is of objects of labour or labour power invested in objects – always signifies the sacrifice of an otherwise useful good, however much eudaemonistic gain is involved,” Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London, New York: Routledge Classics, 2011), 86–7. 1

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3

But, precisely in and through that life of parting, Augustine sensed the possibility of acknowledging the unparted goodness that gives life to all parting things. For him, that goodness takes on a life in the body and makes it an openhearted offering for all. Humans make that offering within a community that represents the economy of sacrifice. This community turns the transactions of daily life into gestures of openhearted attention, recognition, and devotion. Sacrifice organizes the logic of exchange and, thereby, the logic of economy. The term economy of sacrifice alludes to this structure. But the phrase also suggests something more – and something more enigmatic. Sacrifice orders economy by pointing beyond its own conditions: that is to say, beyond the terms set by its economy. Ultimately, sacrifice releases the relationships that it structures into an offering that it does not structure. And that offering is love: an openhearted acknowledgment of self and others that can be expressed, here and now, in each transaction. Put differently: the term “economy of sacrifice” says two distinct things. First, it names the economy to which sacrifice belongs – the context in which it plays an inevitable role. It highlights the fact that any economy depends on exchange relationships. And those exchange relationships inevitably require the work of parting, which is sacrifice. Second, the term “economy of sacrifice” names the sacrifice that reveals the economy in which it plays a role for what it really is: namely, an exercise in openhearted detachment from the media with which we part for the sake of the common good that we share with our exchange partners.3

These two uses of the term loosely correlate with what Dennis Keenan, the poststructuralist theorist, names “economic” and “aneconomic” sacrifice, Question of Sacrifice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 2. However, for Keenan, aneconomic sacrifice is impossible because one only ever gives up something in the context of some exchange, no matter how sublimated the terms are: one might make a sacrifice for “a supreme moment of transcendent truth” – yet such a moment is still one term within the sacrificial exchange made to achieve it, ibid., 1. Yet, for Keenan, though aneconomic sacrifice is impossible, it is also (paradoxically) necessary because sacrifice can only be what it is – a “holocaust,” or something burnt whole – aneconomically: one can only truly sacrifice if one expects no reciprocity, looks for no reward, gives something that is utterly consumed in the giving, ibid., 1–2. Given this impossible necessity, the aneconomic moment of sacrifice is always quivering above the economy that it virtually enables. Keenan says that the aneconomic moment gets “inevitably sublated” into the economic (now at a higher level of self-awareness), while this economic moment of sacrifice, in turn, gets inevitably sublated through its “sacrifice” to aneconomic self-transcendence, ibid., 2. This process is apparently interminable: an “eternal return of the same” that is “without reserve” and “inevitably impossible,”

3

4

Introduction

Sacrifice is conversational: a rational dialogue between partners. Thus, seeing our place in the economy of sacrifice means recognizing exchange as a conversation that affords mutual illumination. It means buying and selling as a dialogue in which we give others the authority to teach us about ourselves and vice versa. It means allowing others to help us get the things we want in exchange for helping them get the things they want – while recognizing that such exercises teach us about ourselves by giving us a voice.4 Such transactions show us our standing. They reveal how our desires bring us into relationship with one another. Because our needs and desires are different, so are we. Even pedestrian transactions bring home to us our existential singularity. Each of us is alone. That is why we ask each other for help in meeting our needs. Yet, each request also shows us something else: our desire for different things simultaneously links us together. We part, not just to gain – but so that others may also part and gain from us. We ask for help so that we may

ibid., 2–3. There is no end to such sacrificial striving, which Keenan calls the “­sacrifice of sacrifice,” cf. ibid., 1–3, 8–9. Yet, Keenan enjoins dwelling at this place of strife, this point at which the aneconomic dimension of sacrifice is always slipping back toward the economy to which is belongs and from which it arises: “Ours is the moment in history, if only for a moment, that calls for dwelling with this aporia of sacrifice rather than stilling this strange oscillation between the aneconomical and the economical (by sublating the aneconomical into the economical),” ibid., 3 (emphasis original). Keenan challenges us to make our peace now within this endless interplay: making sacrifice always within an economy, yet always beyond it. There is something real about this fraught dialectic – but also, perhaps, something misleading. Sacrifice, when made as an offering, is always a gesture of repose. Peace. And, most of all, love. Keenan situates sacrifice in the unstable (unlivable?) force field between possibility and its opposite. Or, one could say, between sacrifice as an economic claim to possession and it aneconomic claim to dispossession. But, on my reading, sacrifice is neither: it is detachment. Sacrifice affords us a peacable paideia into what has always been true of our economy: namely, that the terms we exchange have never been ours to possess or dispossess. Yet, the truth in the dialectical turmoil of Keenan’s view stems from the inevitable illusion of possession from which an education in sacrificial detachment begins and through which it passes. Think of this as the felix culpa of the Augustinian economy of sacrifice. The inevitability of imagining that we possess the things that pass through our hands and hearts is not absolute (as Keenan’s view implies). But, given our experience of fallen attachment and memory – through which we find it inconceivable to fully reimagine a time before the fall, a time where detachment was our native state – this illusion has become inevitable for us. And this is where we begin. And this is where we have always begun. 4 For an account of business exchange as a conversation that deepens self-understanding and clarifies self-expression through the instruction we offer, in it, to one another, cf. Joshua S. Nunziato and Ronald Paul Hill, “Perfectionism and the Place of the Interior Life in Business: Toward an Ethics of Personal Growth,” Business Ethics Quarterly 29, no. 2 (April 2019): 241–68.

The Work of Parting

5

provide others what they need by providing them the chance to meet our needs. We offer what we have in order to offer others the chance to offer what they have. True sacrifice expresses itself through the ongoing circuit of exchange – not just through a snatch of monologue. The economy of sacrifice teaches us that we are alone together. This need not mean that our desire for connection perversely isolates us from one another. (Though it certainly can.) Rather, it means (if we will acknowledge it) that we are acknowledged in our singularity through the economy that shows us how to love. Sacrifice, Augustine suggests, is not renunciation or deprivation in the face of a greater good. Rather, it is what we make of life itself when we offer the things of life to others in the service of our common good. However, sacrifices are not gifts. And the economy of sacrifice is not a gift economy. That Augustinian idea cuts against conventional ways of thinking about sacrifice and sacred offering. In an article of great concision and clarity, Raymond Firth outlines the representative view (which Augustine’s undermines). For Firth, an offering is a particular type of gift, distinguished from other gifts by a difference in status between the one who makes the offering and the one who receives it. (The one who makes an offering is always lower than the one who receives it.)5 Sacrifices, in turn, are said to be the subset of offerings that represent a costly loss to the one making them.6 Firth elaborates: “[S]acrifice is ultimately a personal act, a giving of the self or a part of the self. The self is represented or symbolized by various types of material object. Such a material object must have social significance or value, or the implication will be that the self is trivial or worthless. Part of the theory of sacrifice then is the giving of a valued object involving some immediate personal loss.”7 In this view, a sacrifice is a particular kind

Raymond Firth, “Offering and Sacrifice: Problems of Organization,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 93, no. 1 (1963): 12. 6 Ibid., 12–13. 7 Ibid., 22. David Weddle provides a variation on the same theme: “[T]he closest we come to a common meaning of sacrifice is that of giving up natural and human goods for spiritual benefits. In this most inclusive sense, sacrifice is the cost of religion,” Sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York: New York University Press, 2017), xi. Weddle elaborates, “Religious sacrifice is a costly act of self-giving, in denial of natural inclinations, that is offered in suspense, under conditions that threaten failure, for the purpose of establishing a relation with transcendent reality,” ibid., 22. The Augustinian account of sacrifice I offer here challenges Weddle’s definition nearly point-by-point: sacrifice is an offering of what had never been one’s own. Therefore, it is not a gift or a 5

6

Introduction

of offering; and both sacrifices and offerings are particular kinds of gifts. In contrast, my rendering of Augustine sees sacrifice differently: a sacrifice is only made in the spirit of a gift when the people making it do not fully understand what they are doing – and need to learn the deeper significance of their action. An offering to God is never a gift.8 A gift implies a prior ownership of the thing given. When we make a gift, we place a claim upon the thing we give: we register our attachment to what we are leaving behind. But, for Augustine, the work of parting teaches us how to make sacrifices as offerings, which acknowledge that what we offer is not – and never was – ours to give up.9 From that perspective, Firth conflates the means by which acknowledgment is communicated with the communication itself.10 The real offering is the expression of acknowledgment – not the gift taken to be the means for articulating it. And the offering of acknowledgment can be made (and, ultimately, is always made) without giving up anything that was ever our own. Perhaps the richest and most sophisticated recent account of sacrifice comes from John Milbank.11 His approach sees sacrifice as gift and loss or a cost. Sacrifice transforms natural inclinations but does not deny them. Sacrifice is made without suspended expectations because it achieves – in the very offering – everything it seeks: true sacrifice is made without hope of ulterior return. And, finally, sacrifice acknowledges (but does not establish) relationship with a divine reality that always dwells (as Augustine puts it in The Confessions (conf.) III.vi (11)) more closely to me than I dwell to myself: which is to say, sacrifice recognizes a transcendence more immanent than immanent creatures are to themselves. (All subsequent references to The Confessions are abbreviated in text as conf. All subsequent Latin references to conf. are taken from Augustine and James J. O’Donnell, Confessions: Introduction and Text, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Sometimes, the English translation of conf. given in the text is Augustine, Confessions (Confessiones), trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); sometimes it is Augustine, Confessions, trans. Albert Outler (London: SCM Press, 1955). I have indicated which translation I use in-text. Where I have departed from either translation to provide my own rendering of Augustine’s Latin, I have also noted as much. For the sake of orthographic consistency, I follow the convention of rendering all Latin words containing a consonant u form using a v.) 8 I use the term “offering” to conceptually translate what I think Augustine means by true sacrifices [vera sacrificia], when these are circumspectly made. 9 In this respect, my reading of Augustine differs from that Eugene Schlesinger, who defines Augustinian sacrifice as “the unreserved gift of self to God,” cf. “The Sacrificial Ecclesiology of City of God 10,” Augustinian Studies 47, no. 2 (2016): 145. 10 To his credit, however, Firth does acknowledge – at the close of his article – ­development in sacrificial thinking toward a “moral act” which he identifies as “a ­conception at a different level from sacrifice as a material loss,” Firth, “Offering and Sacrifice,” 23. 11 John Milbank, “The Midwinter Sacrifice,” in Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 107–30.

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transforms the economy of sacrifice into an endlessly open gift exchange: “Joyfully estranged from ourselves, we should sometimes find in this loss our gain, and always know that this would finally be so.”12 The vision of sacrifice presented in the present book is close to Milbank’s. Yet he and I diverge on a central point: I do not see sacrifice as a gift. Rather, sacrifice is an offering that transcends the gift economy of gains and losses and embodies the art of openhearted detachment.13 By detachment, I do not mean indifference or apathy – though the term has been used that way to critique economic culture.14 Instead, I mean a spiritual serenity that sees and loves without grasping or clinging. This means caring

Ibid., 121. For his more fully articulated account of gift, in conversation with Marion, Heidegger, and Derrida, cf. Milbank, John, “Can a Gift Be Given?” in Rethinking Metaphysics, ed. L.G. Jones and S.E. Fowl (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 13 Rowan Williams sees Augustine as pioneering the insight that changing interpretations of loss are essential to the journey into mature self-understanding, Rowan Williams, “Time and Self-Awareness in the Confessions,” in On Augustine (London, Oxford, New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016), 5–6. I, perhaps, go beyond Williams in claiming that Augustine would have us ultimately convert loss, altogether, into parting. This conversion does not release us from the task of mourning, but it changes the affective texture of grief. 14 William Cavanaugh has used the term detachment to refer to the “constant dissatisfaction” of a late capitalist consumer culture driven to commodify (nearly?) everything, William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids, Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008), p. 35. Later in the same c­ hapter, Cavanagh will offer another definition of detachment, which provides a counterpoint to the first: “In the Christian tradition, detachment from material goods means using them as a means to a greater end, and the greater end is greater attachment to God and to our fellow human beings,” ibid., 52. This second definition of detachment is much closer to what I mean by the word. Nevertheless, even means/end thinking is not quite what I have in mind when I describe the role of exchange media in the economy of sacrifice. To frame material goods solely in terms of their usefulness for getting something else still betrays an attachment to the things being used as tools or instruments. And the intensity of our attachment to the means will vary in direct proportion to the importance of the goal they help us reach. To the extent that “material things” afford the means to an ultimate end, our attachment to them in their role as means should be very intense. To focus distracted desires in our economic culture, it may be necessary to go further than practicing detachment from material things that we use to get to God and others. Perhaps, we will need to detach ourselves from the entire assumption of ownership that organizes our affective relationships to material things – and do so as an offering that links us (in different ways) to the divine and to one another. A further complicating issue is that a particular kind of detachment from other people may be crucial for expressing openhearted attachment to them. We need more than simply greater attachment to one another. (In what follows, I will eventually describe this detachment from others as an acknowledgment of our singularity, or solitude, in community.) 12

8

Introduction

about something without allowing it to simply swamp one’s attention or affection. Consider, for example, so-called soccer neutrals: fans who enjoy “the beautiful game” without investing themselves in the outcome of any particular match or the fortunes of any specific team. Their lack of affiliation makes it easier to recognize in them – and perhaps also easier for them to cultivate in themselves – a sense of detached delight. No team has an exclusive claim to their affections. Conversely, they do not claim any team as their own. They are free to simply enjoy. So, too, does sacrifice teach us to see economic life differently: not as an arena for celebrating wins and grieving losses, but as a place for learning detachment from both wins and losses in the interest of releasing ownership as an offering of delight.15 In general, Milbank is rethinking “self-sacrifice” as a paradigm of ethical action: an ideal he finds variously celebrated by Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas, and other post-Kantian thinkers.16 What these philosophers ostensibly push to the breaking point is an ideal of ethical self-possession achieved through mortal self-dispossession. Milbank rejects such an ethics17 – and rightly so. The Christian offering makes no claim to own what it sacrifices: “[H]ere we give up ‘absurdly’ to God in order to confess our inherent nothingness and to receive life in the only possible genuine mode of life, as created anew. Here we hold onto nothing, here we possess nothing securely.”18 This is a beautiful

In some ways, my portrait of sacrifice as an offering reflects the Stoic ideal of parting without loss. This ideal is beautifully summarized by Epictetus: “Never say about anything, ‘I have lost it,’ but instead, ‘I have given it back.’ Did your child die? It was given back. Did your wife die? She was given back. ‘My land was taken.’ So this too was given back,” Epictetus, The Handbook, trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 11. However, there are several important differences between my Augustinian account of sacrifice and the Stoic discipline of returning the objects of one’s love to their source. First, Epictetus’ image still draws on the idea of gift to describe sacrifice; mine does not. Second, the Stoics relinquish any claim to ownership over externals – but assert a very strong claim to ownership over inner life. For Augustine, one’s inner life is also offered up as ultimately not one’s own. Third, my Augustinian image of sacrifice sees the offering as a gesture of openhearted love. The Stoics, on the other hand, counsel a serenity detached from the ardor of gratitude. 16 “This complex of ideas, or characterization of the ethical as gift-exchange, feast, marriage, and resurrection, I am seeking to set in deliberate opposition to a recent consensus which would try to understand the ethical as primarily self-sacrifice for the other, without any necessary ‘return’ issuing from the other back to oneself,” Milbank, “Midwinter Sacrifice,” 122. 17 For the peroration of his thesis, cf. ibid., 126. 18 Ibid., 128. 15

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image of the resurrected self. But is the vision itself held in openhanded hope? While Milbank criticizes the image of sacrifice as an unconditional gift and counter-proposes the image of sacrifice as an eschatological gift exchange, Milbank and those he criticizes both assume that sacrifice is a gift. I question that assumption.19 Perhaps Milbank’s attempt to move beyond the logic of ownership (and, ultimately, of attachment to self) by liquidating exchange into an image of radical gift economy fails to provide the full release it seeks. It thereby seems to reintroduce a falsely sacrificial self-image through the equation of sacrifice and gift. Milbank will postulate: “[S]acrifice is only ethical when it is also resurrection.”20 However, there is, perhaps, a subtle – yet misleading – understanding of hope that shapes Milbank’s portrait of gift-exchange. To insist that we offer ourselves – even to the point of death – in prayerful hope that Christ will remember us beyond our own ability to remember ourselves is not the same as assuming or presuming that Christ will do so. Milbank strikes the wrong chord when he ventures (albeit tentatively) to talk about resurrection as “automatic.”21 So, too, when he notes: “[I]t is when we are giving, letting ourselves go, sometimes with unavoidable sacrificial pain, that we are always receiving back as ever different a true, abundant life (this is the gospel).”22 There is something poignant about such a line – but also something that rings false. When we die, we let go of even our ability to receive back life. And this release need not be a token of despair or resignation: it can be an acknowledgment that

Though I do not deny that the language of gift can sometimes describe true ­sacrifice – and that Augustine himself sometimes has recourse to such language – I regard the image as provisional and approximate. Gift is neither the best nor most illuminating word for characterizing the offering of life to God. Although he himself is still inclined to use the language of “gift,” Joseph Clair’s work on oikeiōsis implicitly suggests the provisionality of that language by showing how Augustine uses the logic of ownership (e.g., appealing to images like “treasure in heaven”) as a pedagogical device to challenge his auditors to move beyond the logic of proprietorship (whether of earthly or heavenly goods) to take detached delight in the divine good, cf. Joseph Clair, Discerning the Good in the Letters & Sermons of Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 124–6, 162–6. 20 Milbank, “Midwinter Sacrifice,” 122. 21 Ibid., 123. Milbank refers to the “automatic, self-raising dimension of Jesus’ resurrection,” ibid. But, theologically speaking, would it not be better to say that Christ raises himself only by the Triune power of God? Perhaps our flesh is raised in him by that power in hope. And maybe it would be better to say that Christ raises himself with respect to his divine power so that, with respect to his human nature, humans might be raised in him. 22 Ibid. 19

10

Introduction

the promise of such a reception lies hidden in God, beyond the purview of our offering. If we claim for ourselves, already in this life, a share in the resurrection (Milbank says that we “participate” in the resurrection now23), we risk reserving, in our imaginations, an image of ourselves that cannot be offered in death – and, therefore, an image that cannot be raised. Perhaps Easter somehow (a word that crops up several times in Milbank’s essay) radiates through Good Friday. But can it do so in a mode discernible to us mortals now? If we imagine our lives as being instantaneously, continually re-created – if we think that the “absolute eternal coincidence of gift and exchange in the same moment which is ceaselessly perpetuated”24 is our own moment – can we really envision the offering made in mortal life now? Perhaps, instead, what resurrection communicates in each instant of our lives is precisely its hiddenness in our own deaths – as these are hidden in Christ and as Christ is hidden in God. Only by acknowledging as much do we recognize our lives as redeemed through sacrifice. We cannot see beyond death to integrate resurrection “regifting” into the self-image we offer up now.25 It is crucial to let go of the temptation to repossess – in our hopeful imaginations – the fragments of lives that we could only hope to be redeemed beyond all horizon of our recall. I worry that Milbank risks trading faithful, loving hope for a claim to vision.26 And claiming resurrection life – instead of hoping for it simply in the work of parting – leaves us hazarding another version of the presumptuous self-apprehension that Milbank criticizes in others. When it comes to hope, I take my bearings from T. S. Eliot: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without / love / For love Ibid., 117. Ibid., 120. 25 This is not to dismiss the potential value of eschatological images of redemption. But it is to say that such images ultimately get offered up in death, too. They don’t secure any post-mortem continuity with our present self-understanding. 26 Rowan Williams has cannily observed: “There is indeed a requies promised to the people of God, the ‘presence’ of heaven and the vision of God’s face; but by definition this cannot now be talked about except in the mythological language of future hope (as if it were a future state like other future states, like what I shall feel tomorrow). It is the presence of God as our own end, our death, the end of time for us, and in some sense the end of desire in fruitio; not, therefore, for possession now in the language of belief, or any other language,” Rowan Williams, “The Nature of Christian Formation,” in On Augustine (London, Oxford, New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016), 55–6. I wonder whether Milbank exchanges the mythological futurity of hope for a metaphysics of faith’s fruitio now. 23 24

Economy

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would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. / Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the / dancing.”27 Eliot’s waiting leaves us ready. Available. Receptive. And supremely free to express ourselves through an offering that is being made through us. Only that offering can harbor the seeds of hope. Its fruit, here and now, is a lively center in a luminous night. Such images do not point to a voided abyss or the endless postponement of our deepest desires. Eliot’s waiting would not leave us there. Instead, such waiting harbors the joy of eternity at home in time’s lacrimosa. The entire account of sacrifice that follows articulates a fidelity to such waiting.

Economy An economy is an ordered system of exchange designed to provide for its members what they want and need by providing for the wants and needs of other members of the community. In a colloquial sense, we think of the economy as the set of activities that involve exchanging goods or services for money. However, normally, when I use the term in this book, I am referring to something much broader: the configuration of exchange relationships devoted to tending for our collective well-being as humans.28 The latter definition includes the former. But it also includes things we often exclude from a financialized picture of economy: things like friendship, religion, sexuality, and family life.29 Seeing the financial economy as a part of a larger economic matrix allows us to recontextualize its significance. The economy is more than just one compartment of social reality, subject to laws and logic that can leave us feeling like strangers in our own skin.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 28. Though I do not read sacrifice along the Derridean dialectical axes of possibility/impossibility as Dennis Keenan does, at least on this point of sacrifice as a discipline of “waiting without hope” our readings of sacrifice harmonize, Question of Sacrifice, 8–9. 28 This definition would not, of course, exclude ecological concern from economic calculation. Indeed, quite the opposite, given a sufficiently expansive sense of human well-being as intrinsically involving the well-being of non-human creatures. For one approach this might take, cf. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (2015). 29 The household, ironically, was the focal point of economics as originally understood by the ancient Greeks. Production, distribution, and consumption all happened at home. The household was not (as now) simply a standard unit for counting and taxing consumers. 27

12

Introduction

Our economy is always limited because our needs and desires are conditioned by embodiment. Limited goods cannot always meet our appetite to own them. Conventionally, economists have interpreted this limit as scarcity.30 But that identification trades on an assumption about ownership. It is, in fact, the same assumption that turns parting into loss. Learning the work of parting without loss teaches us to acknowledge that the goods we exchange are limited – but not necessarily scarce. But leaving behind an economic mindset oriented toward managing scarcity requires more than a willingness to give up ownership. If ownership is not ours in the first place, it is not ours to give up either. Rather, as Augustine shows, a journey toward a new sacrificial imagination is necessary for recognizing what ownership actually represents. That journey will teach us to acknowledge all ownership as conditioned and provisional – premised on the dispositions of open-handed gratitude and wise leave-taking. Underneath our pragmatic claims to ownership lies a dance of loving and letting go, which cuts to the center of what it means to be human. Sacrifice negotiates the limits of embodiment. If these limits are thought to represent scarcity, sacrifice will take the form of renouncing one good for the sake of some higher good. But if these limits are seen as occasions of parting without loss, then sacrifice can take the form of openheartedness: attention to others that recognizes our common good through exchange. Indeed, as we shall see, Augustine himself identifies sacrifice with openheartedness (cf. the discussion of the City of God 10.5–6 in Chapter 5). Contemporary economic thought tends to take for granted several assumptions about the limits of embodiment. First, participants in an economy know how to define the limits of their flesh: mortality and the chronic inability to fully satisfy one’s desires – an impotence that humans experience as suffering – limit their flesh. Second, economic participants know how to judge the value of their flesh’s limits. Suffering and death are bad, while the ability to survive and to satisfy one’s desires is good. Therefore, the limits of one’s flesh are bad. Death and suffering must be impositions on human flesh. Therefore, the limits of flesh are also its

30

Lionel Robbins provided the paradigmatic definition of economics as “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses,” Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (Ludwig von Mises Institute: 1932, 2007), 15.

Economy

13

limitations. And the ability to resist such limitations is good. The limitations of flesh can be resisted by surviving for as long as possible with as little suffering as possible. The better the economy, the more efficient it will be at facilitating resistance to the limitations of flesh. Its members will survive longer and have lives of less suffering than the members of inferior economies would. In short, the better the economy, the less renunciation it will require of its members and the lighter the sacrifices necessary to negotiate the demands of scarcity. In this picture, since the limitations of our flesh may be resisted but not overcome, sacrifice is a necessary feature of economic life. It provides an indispensable management technique for resisting the flesh’s limitations by negotiating the terms on which bodies will suffer least and survive longest. Sacrifice becomes a necessary evil essential for achieving a greater good. On the one hand, sacrifice is necessary because the limits of flesh may not be overcome. On the other, sacrifice is evil because it necessarily compromises with the evil it resists. It accepts a lesser evil as a condition for resisting a greater one. However, sacrifice thereby achieves a greater good than would be possible without the resistance it provides (as much as possible, for as long as possible) to the evil imposed by the limits of flesh. If the limitations of flesh could be overcome, then the evil of sacrifice would end. But since they cannot be overcome, sacrifice endlessly haunts economic life. It is an ineliminable specter, never ceasing to remind humans that their lives and happiness remain conditioned by a battle against limitations that will always overwhelm them in the end. Sacrifice thus drives home the fact that resistance to suffering is always a matter of painful half-measures: a helpful palliative, perhaps, but never a solution for suffering. Similarly, it reminds us that resistance to death is always futile – only not for now. In the meantime, growth and sustainability supply our economic culture with the dominant ideals dictating where sacrifices must be made in order to carry on under the constraints of scarcity. Augustine’s view of sacrifice as the aspect of exchange through which we acknowledge our common good is counterintuitive from the vantage point just outlined. Augustine challenges us to see that we cannot evaluate the limits of our flesh without openhearted attention to the needs and desires of others. I cannot know what separates me from you unless I have learned to acknowledge the good we share in common through our separation from one another. Augustine does not deny that death and suffering are limits of flesh. He thinks they are. But he also knows that these boundaries need not separate humans from the good they collectively express. Suffering and death need not be experienced as evils

14

Introduction

foisted upon human flesh. We can recognize these as the limits of our flesh without suffering them as limitations. To live in flesh without limitations relieves humans of the tragic burden of resisting death and suffering as evil. It links us together in a common acknowledgment of our shared good. And it enables us to learn how to suffer and how to die well – a crucial impossibility within the constraints of a conventional economic approach to sacrifice.31 Just as the limits of flesh are not evil in Augustine’s view, neither does sacrifice respond to those limits with tragedy. Rather, sacrifice embodies the acknowledgment that knows the boundaries of the body and sees the good of mortal life through those bounds. Therefore, the desire to understand oneself and one’s neighbor better lies at the heart of the work of parting. Through sacrifice, humans attend to their common goodness in mortal, suffering flesh. For Augustine, Jesus Christ – and those who belong to his ecclesial body – bear this vision on behalf of all: a universal community that includes those who cannot bear it for themselves. For Augustine, the limits of human flesh are the limits of Christ’s sacrificial body. And those limits are constantly expanding to define a universal offering. The history of that expansion expresses the economy of sacrifice in time. Therefore, according to Augustine, its limits cannot be conclusively defined before the end of history. But their working definition is an achievement of sacrificial recognition.

Acknowledging Community Stanley Cavell has devoted himself to exploring how we sound out the limits of our common language and life by recognizing our true needs and desires. He thereby illuminates the Augustinian logic of sacrifice. For Cavell, our recognition of one another simultaneously communicates that we are alone and that our solitude links us to one another.32 And For example, consider the rhetoric of cancer or other terminal illnesses: sufferers are battling the disease. Their bodies are fighting the malignancy. To die under such conditions is a matter of holding death at bay for as long as possible, while reducing suffering as much as feasible. One does not, however, die well under such conditions. One only dies more slowly and less painfully. Perhaps more heroically. But one does not suffer well. For a perceptive Augustinian reflection on the misleading imagination about evil reflected in the contemporary rhetoric of dying, cf. Austin L. Campbell, “Medical Manichaeism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 41, no. 2 (2013). 32 Cavell uses a flexible and polyvalent vocabulary to express what he takes it to mean to be human. He acknowledges (and invites his readers to acknowledge in a variety of ways) that humans are separate, e.g., The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, 31

Acknowledging Community

15

this conjunction – our incarnation, the flesh we share with one another as those given to be alone – is not simply something we know. It is something that we acknowledge – or decline to. Typically, skeptical worries have been regarded as epistemological problems, begging for conceptual solutions. But Cavell demurs. Instead, he sees skepticism as the partial expression of a genuine ethical insight into the character of what it means to be human. Skepticism is the knowledge of our solitude, coupled with the refusal to acknowledge how interiority links us together in community. Skepticism attempts to substitute the pursuit of knowledge for the responsibility of acknowledgment. And it stems, Cavell implies, from our ­persistent inability to distinguish being alone from being isolated. Our shared flesh leaves each of us alone. But it does not (have to) leave us stranded.33 Therefore, the body need not be regarded as a prison occluding, excluding, or precluding communication. Rather, human flesh mediates our contact with one another. We communicate through the limits of our body. Sometimes we commune. The boundaries of our flesh bind us together. But our commerce in the body links us together only because we are always alone. Indeed, our shared solitude is precisely Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 369, 493, 496; “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 142; “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 245; “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 311–13; The Senses of Walden, Expanded ed. (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 54. At other times, he describes humans as finite, e.g., Claim of Reason, 464. Elsewhere, he describes us as being alone, e.g., Senses of Walden, 50, 54, 80; “Ending the Waiting Game,” 113, 142. In my interpretation and adaptation of Cavell, I have preferred to rely on this final descriptor – that of being alone – along with (what I use as) the synonymous substantive: solitude. These adjectives, however, as I hope to make clear, do not name the same condition as do the words isolation, loneliness, lack of community, or solipsism (the condition that skepticism takes itself to embody). Rather, to be alone, or to dwell in solitude, everywhere communicates to us – and through us – our sense of community: of belonging to others and being responsible to them and for them. To be alone and to be together as human beings are not opposites: they are mutually implicating correlates. Or so Cavell suggests. I will follow him in this respect, while drawing somewhat different implications from the observation than he does. 33 Espen Dahl gives a sophisticated account of how Cavell’s interpretation of skepticism enables him to sound out the difference between finitude and fallenness, cf. Espen Dahl, “Finitude and Original Sin: Cavell’s Contribution to Theology,” Modern Theology 27, no. 3 (2011).

16

Introduction

what our acknowledgment of one another expresses. I will argue that this expression of our collective solitude commits us economically to one another. Like Augustine – and because of Augustine (especially as he was interpreted by Wittgenstein and Luther) – Cavell remains exquisitely attuned to the enigma of human interiority.34 Humans have insides. To be alone is to be capable of expression, not incapable of expression or capable of withholding all expression.35 This also means: empowered to acknowledge ourselves and one another. Having an inner life, Cavell suggests, is not like owning private property. My thoughts, emotions, feelings, convictions, and experiences are not simply available to me to be used as I see fit. But neither, on the other hand, are they simply manifest aspects of my persona, to be appropriated and exploited by others as they see fit. My inner life is not simply myself as I know myself. (This would leave my self-knowledge excluded from the inner life it knows.) Nor is my inner life simply myself as others know me. (This would dissolve inner and outer life. There would be no difference between how I know myself and how others know me.) Rather, my inner life expresses me. It reveals to others what remains within me. (And, by dint of my self-consciousness: my intelligibility to myself as a self – I am also, always, other to myself.) And by expressing me, my inner life invites others to do more than know me. It challenges them to acknowledge me. Indeed, by the same token, it challenges me to acknowledge myself. But it is not access to this inner life – private knowledge of it, as if it were a possession to be disposed of as I wish – that singles me out from others. Rather, expressing my inner life expresses my solitude – the fact that I am one person, one creature, and not another. But it does this in a fashion that will sometimes give others better understanding – and more compassionate attention to who I am – than I myself have. Thus, Cavell remarks: “At least we can say that in the case of some mental phenomena, when you have twisted or covered your expressions far or long enough, or haven’t yet found the words which give the phenomenon expression, I may know better than you how it is with you. I may respond even to the fact of your

For a reliable orientation to the role of acknowledgment in Cavell’s thought and how it links him to Augustine, Luther, and Wittgenstein, cf. Espen Dahl, “Acknowledging God,” in Stanley Cavell, Religion, and Continental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 35 See Cavell’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s private language argument in Claim of Reason, 350–2. 34

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separateness from me (not to mention mine from you) more immediately than you. To know you are in pain is to acknowledge it, or to withhold the acknowledgment. – I know your pain the way you do.”36 To acknowledge my inner life (or another’s) with open heart means expressing myself – my attention, my intention, my awareness – as an offering. And that offering invites others to cultivate attentive detachment through mine. Although Cavell offers a richly nuanced exploration of the human condition, he does not always provide a clear and unambiguous affirmation that our solitude is good. Indeed, a subtle pathos runs through Cavell’s writings. It is as if his work has transmuted skeptical desperation at the prospect of being left alone into a softly resonant sadness in our solitude. There is something deeply Augustinian about this. However, for Cavell, the experience of being alone is profoundly shaped by the modern condition. More specifically, the pathos of his work is conditioned by the presumptive disintegration of a culturally persuasive ecclesiology. Thus, Cavell comments: When Luther said, criticizing one form in which the sacraments had become relics, ‘All our experience of life should be baptismal in character,’ he was voicing what would become a guiding ambition of Romanticism – when religious forms could no longer satisfy that ambition. Baudelaire characterizes Romanticism as, among other things, intimacy and spirituality. This suggests why it is not merely the threat of fraudulence and the necessity for trust which has become characteristic of the modern, but equally the reactions of disgust, embarrassment, impatience, partisanship, excitement without release, silence without serenity. I say that such things, if I am right about them, are just facts – facts of life, of art now. But it should also be said that they are grammatical facts: they tell us what kind of object a modern work of art is. It asks of us, not exactly more in the way of response, but one which is more personal. It promises us, not the re-assembly of community, but personal relationship unsponsored by that community; not the overcoming of our isolation, but the sharing of that isolation – not to save the world out of love, but to save love for the world, until it is responsive again.37

Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” 245. Cf. Andrew Norris’s excellent interpretation of this passage in Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 89–93. 37 Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 211–2. Tellingly, the gloss of Luther given here is also the epigraph that Cavell selected for Senses of Walden. For a probing consideration of whether art – especially music – comes, for Cavell, to serve as the surrogate for (and not merely as the successor to) religion, cf. William Desmond, “A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism,” in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 166–9. 36

18

Introduction

Contemporary art communicates something about our spirituality: the basis of communion now is not simply being alone. Rather, it is suffering isolation together. Simply to be alone need not be a cause for grief. But being isolated is. Therefore Cavell’s acknowledgment of the limits of embodiment under the conditions of modern culture evokes a sadness that grieves the fact that we are bound now to be isolated, and not merely alone. Skepticism grows in the soil of such cultural ferment. Nevertheless, our modern condition still need not imply that we must be lonely. But it does imply, Cavell suggests, that we must grieve our conditional – so to speak, our given – isolation. We lack the community, Cavell suggests, in which to harbor solitude as the means of communion. Espen Dahl reads the passage just cited by observing: “This is probably a scant foundation on which to build an ecclesiology, but at least it suggests the importance of acknowledgement, in aesthetic, philosophical, as well as religious terms.”38 Perhaps. But perhaps Cavell’s point in this passage is stronger. He is claiming something more than that corporate isolation fails to foster spiritual belonging. He is also suggesting that humans now tend to experience their interiority in terms of a refusal to acknowledge any religious community that might articulate it. We have forfeited – Cavell suggests – any viable ecclesiology.39 As a consequence, we no longer share a corporate identity – or collective flesh – through which we might express our interiority. So we are left alone with our grief. Perhaps living together at places of parting will lead toward different possibilities for recognizing one another. Perhaps. But maybe there are means of sacrificial recognition still accessible to us, even now, that maintain the promise of communal belonging. Augustine himself, I argue, evokes the perdurance of such unacknowledged possibilities. When ecclesial community is pushed to the margins of public life, political economy takes on a stopgap role of religious mediation. In this respect, it serves contemporary culture much as art served the Romantics. This is (part of) what Cavell observes when he notes: “Political economy is the modern form of theodicy, and our labors are

Espen Dahl, Stanley Cavell, Religion, and Continental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 65. 39 I imagine that this is at least one aspect of what a commentator like Richard Eldridge registers by labeling Cavell’s work “markedly postreligious,” Richard Eldridge, “Romantic Rebirth in a Secular Age: Cavell’s Aversive Exertions,” The Journal of Religion 71, no. 3 (1991): 417. 38

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our religious mysteries.”40 Why must we suffer the limits of our flesh? Political economy will answer in terms of the “sacraments” of production, consumption, capital, labor, and marginal utility. Instead of allowing us to grieve our isolation – or relieving us of it – political economy confirms our isolation by assuming it as given – and then constructing systems that promise to make it tolerable. Sans an ecclesiology to accord our acknowledgment of one another the significance of communion, our stopgap economic systems will settle for conditioning our isolation and making it (feel) preferable to any alternatives. For Augustine, on the other hand, our common solitude – the interiority that remains ours as we share it with others – expresses the goodness of having been created. It is good for us to be together alone. Recognizing as much allows the human spirit to dilate in an offering of detached attention and mindful devotion. This insight translates Cavell’s vision of acknowledgment into an Augustinian perspective on the economy of sacrifice. In what follows, I will follow Cavell’s lead in an Augustinian direction that sometimes goes beyond what Cavell himself is willing to say. I will argue that economic life affords humans the conversational context in which to communicate the goodness of our mutual solitude. Such communication embodies our acknowledgment of one another through the limits of our flesh. Solitude is the condition of communion with one another and with the divine. Economic life expresses that communion (or, like skepticism, fails to express it when it refuses to acknowledge our common good). Drawing on Cavell’s insight about the logic of acknowledgment, while joining his vision to the conviction that Augustine’s ecclesiology is not yet obsolete,41 I argue that Augustine’s conception of sacrifice as the work of parting does not merely achieve a greater good through loss. It embodies an acknowledgment of our common good in limited, mortal flesh. Sacrifice thereby teaches us how to die well. Suffering and death challenge us to recognize the good in the midst of the economy that links these terms together. The limits of our flesh commit us to a shared responsibility for one another’s well-being. Our real economy “leaves us in one another’s keeping.”42 In Augustine’s case, ecclesiology offers the picture of what it looks like to be left in one another’s keeping. The

Cavell, Senses of Walden, 91. For helpful observations about “Cavell’s tendency to assume that Christianity is historically outmoded,” cf. Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 286–92, esp. 291–2. 42 Cavell, Senses of Walden, 119. 40

41

20

Introduction

Church, for him, is a community whose role it is to acknowledge the good of each member’s incarnate solitude as God’s. That acknowledgment defines both the Church’s internal economy and its relationship to the broader economy as of one sacrificial responsibility. Such responsibility embodies and reflects – embodies by reflecting – the economy of sacrifice as a universal offering. That offering commits all humans to one another in the flesh of Christ. In this body, humans are invited to acknowledge the limits of their flesh as the condition of communion alone.

Augustine and Contemporary Economic Culture Many perceive an acute need today for moving from narrowly transactional exchange relationships toward an economic culture that better acknowledges the full range of human experience and desire.43 Augustine, at first glance, seems an unlikely source of inspiration for such an effort. Although much has been written about his politics,44 very little has been For instance: there is a growing literature on spirituality and meaning at work, cf. Richard Peregoy, “Toward a Further Understanding of Work as Spiritual,” Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion 13, no. 4 (October 1, 2016); Christopher Michaelson, Michael G. Pratt, and Adam M. Grant, “Meaningful Work: Connecting Business Ethics and Organization Studies,” Journal of Business Ethics 121, no. 1 (2014): 77–90. In recent decades, questions of virtue and human flourishing have entered mainstream business ethics scholarship, Kevin T. Jackson, Virtuosity in Business: Invisible Law Guiding the Invisible Hand (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). An older, more humanistic style of political economy has come back into vogue, with special attention to questions of social equity, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2014). Insights from evolutionary theory and developmental psychology are shaping the design of flat, self-organizing companies with organic purposes distinct from those of their members, Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations (Nelson Parker, 2014). New corporate legal forms like benefit corporations and social enterprises are emerging, which promote exchange ecosystems of reflective mutuality instead of competitive manipulation. New capital structures are being created, such as socially-responsible investment funds, employeeowned companies, and local co-ops. Many other examples could be added. 44 Influential works that discuss Augustine’s politics or draw on it for contemporary political thinking include, e.g., R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine, Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Oliver O’Donovan, “Augustine’s City of God XIX and Western Political Thought,” in The City of God: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Dorothy F. Donnelly (New York: Peter Lang, 1995); Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008); Charles T. Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 43

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written about his economic theory.45 Augustine seems mostly focused on other things. In his early life, he was an intellectual who made his living as a professor of rhetoric. In his later life, he was a religious leader, preacher, and polemicist who lived in a commune. He was never a businessperson – much less an economist. Matters of the marketplace often seem to slip into his writings as potential distractions from more important affairs. Even if he had given close attention to the structural details of his late antique North African economy, these would probably survive as little more than historical trivia. In light of all this, it takes some imagination to read Augustine as a philosopher for today’s economy. But that is the reading given here. Two convictions guide this reading. First, as already mentioned, economy is an idea much bigger than we normally admit. It organizes facets of our life that we often try to exempt from its logic. And if we understand the big economy of human life better, we will also better understand the smaller sphere where we buy and sell things using money. Second, when Augustine talks about sacrifice, the body, and death, or when he discusses family life, religious community, and politics, he is outlining economic relationships. Although the economy governing these relationships is often tacit, it is real. And it operates according to a logic that casts light on our economy today, both in its more expansive guise and its narrower, financial expression. Augustine does not speak to us about perennial questions out of an indistinct and irrelevant past. Augustine belonged to a vivid political epoch. He lived in an empire that thought of itself as a global economy. His was a complex, cosmopolitan world. Although by the time of Augustine, Christianity had become considerably more influential in

45

Two recent – and important – exceptions proving this rule are Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012) and Joseph Clair, Discerning the Good in the Letters & Sermons of Augustine. A focal point of Clair’s reading is oikeiōsis – a Stoic concept he translates as “social appropriation,” ibid., 22: the discipline of acknowledging one’s relative proximity to others (like family, friends, strangers) – then cultivating an increasingly cosmopolitan sense of responsibility for all without compromising the structure that constellates them around oneself. Clair traces how Augustine reframes oikeiōsis as the centripetal orientation of interlocking economic relationships toward God. The present book deepens Clair’s approach by centering Augustine’s understanding of economic life on sacrifice. Rather than appropriation or renunciation, I make the case that contemplative detachment is the hinge on which the centripetal force of Augustinian economics turns.

22

Introduction

the political affairs of Roman life than it had been during the previous century, Augustine still lived in an era of religious pluralism. As in our own epoch, the late Roman Empire was a mix of highly devolved modes of self-government regulated by a tightly centralized nexus of political power.46 As in our own context, wealth was concentrated in the estates of a small group who were able to maintain their status by passing on their property to kin.47 Noting the huge social importance of fungible assets in the fourth century, Peter Brown characterizes the period as an “age of gold.”48 And Georg Simmel, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, provides a link from Brown’s “age of gold” to the modern era: “At present – as in the period of decline in Greece and Rome – and far beyond the inner state of the individual, the whole aspect of life, the relationships of human beings with one another and with objective culture are coloured by monetary interests.”49 Now, well into the twenty-first century, Simmel’s comparison continues to ring true. In the case of late antiquity, the sack of Rome was the spectacularly abrupt sign of the whole social system’s slow disintegration. Death was threatening a centuries-old, transcontinental economic and political order. Indeed, the subsequent flight of the wealthy to the relative safety of Roman North Africa prompted Augustine to write the City of God (civ. Dei).50 These well-endowed fugitives represented more than a harried elite, who were wealthy enough to be mobile and vulnerable enough to move. They were figureheads of an economic system that had stopped expanding its frontiers and become unsustainable. And that made them privileged refugees, wondering how to make sense of social disintegration. Augustine wrote the civ. Dei in response to this political crisis among Brown explores how the local town councils functioned as all-too-familiar emissaries working on behalf of a cohesive, empire-wide tax collection system, cf. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 3–8. 47 For a discussion of this wealth and the politics of its transmission, cf. ibid., 14–18, 93–119. Brown uses the case study of Symmachus, pagan aristocrat and one-time political sponsor of Augustine when the latter was a rising rhetorician. 48 Ibid., 14–15. 49 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 254. 50 All subsequent references to City of God (De Civitate Dei contra Paganos) are abbreviated in text as civ. Dei. All subsequent Latin references to civ. Dei are taken from CCSL 47–48, published online in the Library of Latin Texts – Series A (Turnhout: Brepols). Sometimes, the English translation of civ. Dei given in the text is Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 2003); sometimes, it is Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1913). Where I have departed from either translation to provide my own rendering of Augustine’s Latin, I have also noted as much. 46

Structure

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the learned guardians of the collapsing order.51 Facing the prospect of an entire economy’s destruction, they began an alarmed self-examination. Was there anything that could have been done – or could yet be done – to preserve the old economic order? Some of Augustine’s would-be readers were wondering whether a disciplined cultural pluralism might have been more politically sustainable than the ascendant Christian synthesis. Augustine’s massive response takes a subversive approach by claiming that sustainability was not the key economic or political problem facing the threatened empire. Augustine suggests that, instead of asking how to survive, the most important question was how to live well together; and living well requires the discipline of memento mori – remembering one’s death. During times of personal and social disintegration, the imperatives of endless growth or limitless sustainability can be at their most beguiling. And that paradoxical fact gives special urgency to the problem of how to die well. Although Augustine wrote civ. Dei in a context historically remote from our own, he was grappling with problems that remain proximate to our own sources of economic anxiety. As Cavell suggests, people like Augustine raise a bigger question for us than whether we can usefully adapt their ideas to our contemporary problems. Rather, they invite us into a living conversation. The inability to enter such a conversation may hint at an impoverished, provincial self-understanding – at least when it comes to our theory of economy.52 Perhaps the distance between Augustine and us is not best gauged by our powers of creative reappropriation and application. Maybe, instead, it is best sounded out by the quality of conversation that Augustine sparks with us and for us now.

Structure This book has five main chapters. The first two criticize the role that sacrifice plays in supporting the economic ideals of endless growth and limitless sustainability. They do so by bringing contemporary social theorists Max Weber, René Girard, and Nancy Jay into conversation with Augustine’s deconstructive analysis of sacrifice in the first ten books

For a vivid account of the intended audience of civ. Dei and their particular concerns, including an examination of the upheaval that occasioned its writing, cf. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography – A New Edition with an Epilogue, Forty-Fifth Anniversary ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 285–96. 52 Cf. Cavell, “Avoidance of Love,” 310. 51

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of City of God. Augustine divides his analysis there into two halves. The first half analyzes pagan sacrifices made for the sake of increasing access to economic goods in this mortal life. The second considers pagan sacrifices made for the sake of achieving limitlessly sustainable life (cf. civ. Dei 6, Preface and Chapter 1). I follow Augustine’s division in my first two chapters. The first makes an Augustinian case against sacrifice as a means to endless growth in the service of private appetites. The second makes an Augustinian case against sacrifice as a means to limitless sustainability in the service of tribal self-preservation. Together, these chapters critique sacrifices taken simply as losses for the sake of “higher” economic ideals. In slightly more detail: Chapter 1 looks at the sacrificial loss of any claim to a common good in our exchange relationships, which we accept as the condition for unlimited collective growth in pluralistic Weberian marketplaces. By drawing on the recapitulation of the first five chapters of civ. Dei in 19.17, this chapter shows how Augustine’s wayfaring city provides a model that represents another vision of sacrificial community: one that acknowledges a common good, shared even with those who imagine that all their goods are private. The growth of that community is limited by the flesh of those whose common good it serves. Along the way, I critique Danielle Allen’s picture of democratic society as a political economy predicated on the composition of wills, rather than a harmonized unity of will rooted in openhearted attention to a shared good. The second chapter evaluates sacrificial losses accepted for the sake of partisan corporate sustainability. Corporations collectively embody human groups. When we try to maintain these groups by strategically excluding certain members, we turn sacrifice into an instrument of cruel economic manipulation, which corrupts the very identities that it seeks to conserve by sequestering them from the larger community to which they belong. Augustine plays out the logic of strategic loss management for the sake of limitless corporate life in his account of demonic immortality, which is appropriated by human worshippers through sacrifices that animate bodies for malignant possession. The final three chapters shift away from critique and toward a constructive task: reframing sacrifice as an offering of detachment, which teaches humans how to die well by incorporating them into a sacrificial community of openhearted exchange. These three chapters trace the story of Augustine’s conversion narrative told in conf. 7, 8, and 9, respectively, while simultaneously drawing on his later thinking in civ. Dei 10 and 13. Together, these passages outline what the economy of

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sacrifice does, what it looks like, and what it reveals about ourselves – ­personally and collectively. And it shows how Augustine models a process of growth and illumination through which people discover their place in that economy. More specifically, Chapter 3 considers how death shadows contemporary economic culture in the form of sacrificial losses, large and small, that we accept as the means to survival. Death, of one kind or another, is the price of living – and living well. But separating death from the goods that it is serves codes loss into the matrix of exchange as a necessary evil. Death is the antagonistic enemy of the ends served by economic culture. Therefore, exchange is always shadowed by the specter of fear. However, by recovering the Platonic discipline of memento mori (as adapted by Augustine) and learning what philosophy has to teach us about dying well through our economic exchanges, it is possible to see death as a good end, quietly accompanying us in all of our transactional means – not as a nameless fear but as the promise of offering a life in love through all our works of parting. Making that offering of sacrificial acknowledgment is what the economy of sacrifice does. Chapter 4 explores what the economy of sacrifice looks like. It shows how seeing the parting of exchange as an offering, rather than a loss, opens new possibilities for relating to economic partners as friends. Exchange is not merely a transaction inspired by different judgments about marginal utility. It is a conversation that helps us see who we are more clearly. Augustine discovered his place in the economy of ­sacrifice – represented by the community of the Church – through friends and family, who already knew their place as one of openhearted hospitality. Responding to their invitation released Augustine from manipulative uses of sacrifice. Ultimately, joining the sacrificial economy is about finding friends who offer us opportunities for offering ourselves more fully by providing the stuff of life to one another together in an intensifying circuit of exchange that acknowledges our common good. Therefore, the economy of sacrifice is embodied by a specific, visible community with borders open to all. The fifth, and final, chapter outlines what the economy of sacrifice reveals about ourselves. Following Augustine, it considers how humans offer a “universal sacrifice” (civ. Dei 10.6): an offering that offers all for the sake of each. Augustine came to understand this universal community through his experience with his mother at Ostia, right before her death. Universal sacrifice teaches us two things about ourselves. First,

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each of us is always alone, singular, and unique. And, second, all of us are always together, connected, in community. To explore this paradox, I rely on both Cavell and Henry David Thoreau, while engaging Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together – a book that challenges us to recover the value of solitude within a technology-driven culture marked by loneliness. Together with these thinkers, my reading of Augustine ultimately suggests that we offer each other the sacrifice of solitude: not its loss, but its compassionate opening to include the solitude of others. All that is ours to offer is love. And that love can be expressed through the media of everyday exchanges in the marketplace. Where does such a reading leave us? It commends a specific work of inner transformation that reorients our personal and collective attitude about ownership. It detaches us from claims to private gain and loss. And it keeps the media of our common well-being in continuous circulation. The lesson is not that we are only “stewards” of someone else’s property (whether that be God or the state). That style of thinking tends to recapitulate the questionable logic of ownership by simply projecting it onto a bigger screen. It makes us into agents of transcendental proprietors. They are the true owners, and we are simply borrowing what is theirs. But transferring owners does not change the logic of ownership. The power of attachment to what may be gained or lost remains unaltered. Whether acting as civil servants or as divine functionaries, designated agents continue to exercise the power of ownership on behalf of their nominal proprietors. For Augustine, God offers sacrifice – and thereby offers up claim to ownership even over the creation God made. Thus, in sacrifice, we do not just give back to God what is already God’s own. Instead, we (like God) express through the work of parting the unity of love. Economic life teaches us that finally (like God) all that is ours is our love.

1 Mortal Economies

Growing Desire What business do we have with one another? We live in a global economy geared toward helping us grow. Indeed, we sometimes imagine that we simply do business for the sake of growth. But how are we growing? And why? Does our economy grow by expanding our power to satisfy our desires? And is that growth a joint venture simply because it is often easier to expand one’s private power by expanding others’? In this view, all the participants in an economy are simply using one another to expand their partial power.1 Even large corporations and their capital simply exist as sophisticated instruments for serving individual appetite.

The canonical representative typically cited for this view is Adam Smith: “But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens,” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 18. However, Smith was also a sophisticated moral philosopher, whose work focused heavily on sympathy. Thus, whether the popular representation of Smith’s thought is fairly attributed remains a different question.

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Mortal Economies

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Such a picture divorces economic desire from goodness. I am neither required nor expected to discover whether the demands of the marketplace are worthwhile – whether meeting a given desire truly enhances the well-being of all stakeholders served. Instead, all that is necessary for profit is meeting an existing demand. I need not investigate what that demand signifies: where it comes from, or where it points in the broader matrix of cultural life. All I need to recognize is that some powerful collective – representing consumers – has a given desire that I can exploit to get what I want. Let me offer an example. Over the past fifty years, human activities has eliminated 60 percent of vertebrate life on earth.2 This precipitous decline is a direct function of economic activities responding to increased consumer demand for meat and other products. Corporations satisfy the private appetite of investors by growing their capital. They grow capital by meeting the private appetites of consumers for bacon, cheeseburgers, and thousands of other products, which require the conversion of natural habitats into farmland. When combined with other practices like over-fishing, irresponsible forestry, and the collective emission of climate-changing levels of CO2, the conversion of habitat to farmland has resulted in an epoch-defining collapse of natural life. Nevertheless, within an economic culture geared toward open-ended growth, such a consequence is simply the sacrificial cost of doing business. Today’s economic culture has not eliminated the ancient rites of animal sacrifice: it has globalized them. And many of the corporate agents who think they benefit privately from such growth seem poised to continue it until they simply cannot. Many consumers who feel helpless in the face of such catastrophe, or who do not see the connection between purchasing a hamburger and killing spider monkeys in the Amazon, will continue to satisfy their hunger for more and more until they simply cannot. Such seem to be the economic sacrifices necessary for growing desire. True, our actual business decisions are seldom so starkly separated from a human concern for the well-being of exchange partners and the biosphere. But when the values that drive marketplace decisions are excluded from public conversation and scrutiny (as long as they are deemed harmless to others) manipulation becomes the golden rule of business. I exploit others – “human resources,” “natural resources,”

WWF, “Living Planet Report – 2018: Aiming Higher,” ed. Grooten, M. and R. E. A. Almond (Gland, Switzerland, 2018), 90.

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Growing Desire

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“consumers,” “investors” – in order to get what I want. And everyone else, presumably, does the same to me. Under such circumstances there is – and there can be – no ­common good. There are collective means but no shared good that they are acknowledged to serve. Therefore, little thought is given to whether economic means are commonly good and whether they represent something truly beneficial for both exchange partners. There is only the question of whether the means seem good to both exchange partners and, as long as they do, we are inclined to imagine that business has met the highest bar of judgment to which it might reasonably be subject. Members of such an economy imagine that they can only acknowledge private goods: which is to say, the goodness of goods becomes private. What is yours is good for you, but not for me and vice versa. Instead, their mutually excluding privacy is the only commonality they will bear. We seem, then, to live in an economy of private values, public exchanges, and unacknowledged goods. That is the stuff of tragic theater. In his celebrated essay on King Lear, Stanley Cavell delineates a crucial difference between two conditions. The first imposes a space of separation between us, forestalling communication. The second acknowledges a space of separation between us as already fostering our communication: How is acknowledgment expressed; that is, how do we put ourselves in another’s presence? In terms which have so far come out, we can say: By revealing ourselves, by allowing ourselves to be seen. When we do not, when we keep ourselves in the dark, the consequence is that we convert the other into a character and make the world a stage for him. There is fictional existence with a vengeance, and there is the theatricality which theater such as King Lear must overcome, is meant to overcome, shows the tragedy in failing to overcome. The conditions of theater literalize the conditions we exact for existence outside – hiddenness, silence, isolation – hence make that existence plain. Theater does not expect us simply to stop theatricalizing; it knows that we can theatricalize its conditions as we can theatricalize any others. But in giving us a place within which our hiddenness and silence and separation are accounted for, it gives us a chance to stop.3

To recognize the significance of one’s place in a theater – whether on the stage or in the audience – is not to theatricalize. It is rather to perform or to participate in a performance by recognizing one’s own life in what one communicates or sees – and allowing it to be recognized by others.

Cavell, “Avoidance of Love,” 306–7.

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In contrast, to theatricalize another means placing oneself in the role of spectator to another’s imposed isolation. It means watching another’s life play out absent one’s own. To block communication between us – to position ourselves as if we were spectators of one another’s values with no interest in their goodness or the shared conditions under which they are acknowledged – is to theatricalize each other economically. (Cavell argues that King Lear pervasively enacts this expression of violence socially and politically.) But Cavell here also simultaneously argues that the theater affords more than a parable of our violence. It also “gives us a chance to stop.” When we theatricalize, we construct an artificial state of solitude that alienates us from one another, instead of recognizing solitude as an essential condition of our community. (As if we only ever live in a theater that we might choose to leave at any time. As if the theater were a parable of how our lives might sometimes be – not a synecdoche of how they always are.) Theater reminds us of the true condition that theatricalizing each other falsifies: we are always alone. We need not contrive our solitude. We must decide how to respond to the human condition of solitude. Will we see it as opening space for a life together that joins us as inalienable singularities? Or will we regard it as insulating us from one another’s interests, and thereby licensing indifference? When we construe our economy as one defined by private values, public exchanges, and unacknowledged common goods we remain cut off from one another by the very logic of our commerce. We theatricalize our exchange partners. We imagine that the terms of our exchange – which trade on the unacknowledged commonality of their good – confirm our mutual isolation. Exchange partners would thereby not merely play audience and actor for one another: they would each regard the other’s intelligibility as confined to a dramatic space from which one’s intelligibility remains excluded. We place each other on stages of our own design. Economic participants play such roles by exchanging media of value stripped of any claim to establish communion. Reciprocal economic exchange trades on distance. The partners who enter into exchange are – and remain – separate throughout. Lacking such separation, the partners would lack a motive for exchange. But more than mere separation marks their relationship. Simple separation would leave nothing to say, no media of communication, and no motive for exchange. People do not enter into economic exchange as bare individuals. Rather,

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theirs is a separation of desires. Each party regards what the other has to give as being more valuable than whatever she has to give up in order to get it. (Economists will tend to speak here of marginal utility even though more than use is at stake in what exchange partners have to gain or lose from one another.) In exchange, I see what you have as possessing a greater value for me than it does for you, relative to the value of what I have to swap. Since what each partner gives up in trade is what the other stands to gain, and since both stand to gain (or seem to gain) more than they lose, the difference between partners is decisive. It is, in fact, the condition of the augmentation of the value communicated through the exchange. I must be different from you (or at least seem different from you) in order to desire things differently than you do. And only such a difference makes trade intelligible. Exchange depends upon our being different (or at least seeming different). And exchange realizes the value of that difference.4 That difference charges the field, so to speak, across which the current of our exchanges pass like an electrical current. Our exchanges bear out the conviction that we can augment our collective wealth by extending to each other something more desirable to the one receiving it than it had been to the one trading it. Nevertheless, there remain different ways of parsing the value of our economic differences – different ways of making sense of what we do when we do business. If I regard my transaction partner’s desires as being of value to me only insofar as they enable me to pursue my own values, I theatricalize her.5 I treat the differences that polarize our transaction as nothing more than an instrument for making my own isolation more comfortable. To isolate one another thus reveals the loneliness at the center of our contemporary economic situation. And that loneliness keeps us practical skeptics about the goodness – the reality of the value – of our exchange partners’ values. I need not disparage the values that inspire

Indeed, even if the difference between us that motivates our trade only seemed to be different, it is, after all, the case that partners really do seem to be different. It is not simply that we seem to seem different or only ever seem to value different things differently. Even only seeming to be different would make us, in fact, to differ here. 5 Cavell describes such theatricality as failing to make others present to us by recognizing our presence – the salience of our own lives, values, and goods – to them: “In failing to find the character’s present we fail to make him ­present. Then he is indeed a fictitious creature, a figment of my imagination, like all the other people in my life whom I find I have failed to know, have known wrong,” ibid., 310. 4

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your exchange with me. Perhaps they simply fail to be of significance or concern. I find no value in them. I detach the play of your life from the significance I attribute to my own. I make your concerns into a theater for indulging my desires in a life I live outside of it. I make the expression of your desires, the ways (for instance) you choose to make and spend your money, into a show: a performance that discloses a character – not you and not your interior life. In short, I imagine exchange as an exercise in palliating my loneliness through the entertainment provided by the loneliness of others. I leave you to your own devices and so confirm the condition I seek to salve. But what good are the mutually divergent values that inspire us to trade? What do they teach us about ourselves? Simply that we want and need different things and that we seek different means for acquiring them? When it comes to the marketplace, each of our counterparties finds us – and leaves us – alone. But what good is that solitude? Perhaps no good at all. Maybe it is only the condition of our values. We want what we want and we need what we need. Happily, others’ desires make some things seem better to us than seem good to them – and vice versa. So we trade. And that is all. Our desire is not good. It simply makes other things (seem) good (to us). But then again, might not our solitude itself be good? Even more: Could our solitude reflect a common good that all our economic exchanges communicate and foster? Does our economy nourish life alone – not loneliness, but interiority? Perhaps that is what makes our exchanges with one another good. How we imagine the significance of exchange will shape how we conduct it. If we take our economy as a system of exchange that both presupposes and confirms our isolation from one another by pretending to render it tolerable, sacrifice will simply represent the cost of being comfortable with our differences. To the extent that our economy exists to make our isolation palatable, it will maintain that appearance by seeking to alleviate the severity of our sacrifices – to lower the cost of keeping comfortable. Although exchange partners in an economy of isolation provide one another the means of satisfying their desires, paradoxically enough they also impose limits upon the scope of each other’s satisfaction. In order to provide for others’ growth, one sacrifices something that could be used for one’s own. Of course, the implicit expectation is that one will receive more potent means for one’s own growth than those one gave up. One’s exchange partner expects the same; but providing for one’s growth by providing

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for the means of others’ will always require sacrifice.6 Economizing, then, simply means navigating exchanges to minimize the sacrifices necessary to maximally expand one’s own power. In other words, economizing amounts to giving up as little as possible in exchange for as much as possible. Sacrifice, in this picture, instrumentally mediates between the mutually resistant limitations of one another’s desires. It is a disciplined lossmanagement strategy. Since one’s power to satisfy one’s own desires will never be absolute, there will always be limits imposed upon oneself by the desires of others. Therefore, sacrifices of some kind will always be necessary. However, a healthy economy continually reduces those sacrifices, relative to their return. We call this the pursuit of efficiency. The better the economy, the less sacrificial it will be. But consider this alternative to the manipulative and self-isolating economic culture I have just outlined. Perhaps we want more from an economy than the desire to maximize our own power to satisfy our private desires. Perhaps desires betoken more than just the desire for their own satisfaction. And that may be good. Indeed, it may reflect a common good that members of an economy share with one another: no aggregate satisfaction of private goods, but the desire for a good without end, represented by the desire for the satisfaction of specific goods, with their own ends.7 But saying that the satisfaction of desires is never

Joseph Schumpeter influentially described such sacrifice as “Creative Destruction,” calling this “the essential fact about capitalism,” Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 83. The price of evolutionary growth in a capitalist economy is sacrifice. And that growth structurally expands the power of private individuals to expand their consumption: “Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort. … [T]he capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses,” ibid., 67–8. 7 Jeffrey Stout suggests that there is a “leavening” effect of the common good, which remains unacknowledged even though it is quietly at work in our lived experience of contemporary political community: “Communitarians and liberals alike tend to view liberal society as centered in the idea that we can get along without what Cicero called ‘an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good.’ … I wish now to raise the possibility that this picture of our society, so widely shared by its defenders and its critics, is seriously misleading. … We should therefore be less impressed by the opposition between Cicero and Augustine or by overly sharp contrast between societies that agree on such matters and societies that do not. If we think of our society as oriented, by virtue of shared intentions and a 6

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desired as the simple satisfaction of desire is an insight that must be acknowledged – or not. Imagining that private values hold their own satisfactions – and that desire ends in such satisfactions – leads to one vision of secular economy. But that vision is not the only interpretation of economic life and the sacrifices that it requires.

Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of the Earthly City In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously traced the secularizing of economic life to the religious sensibilities of the  Reformers. In so doing, Weber highlighted the religious character of the original motives behind secularization. However, Weber overlooked the fact that his own thought continued to exemplify the religious spirit that lingered on in the secular economic forms that he analyzed. By religion, I mean the coordination of different domains of life by worship. And this coordination is precisely what is at stake – incognito – in Weber’s own approach to interpreting modern culture. Consider the following quote from the author’s introduction to Protestant Ethic: There is, for example, rationalization of mystical contemplation, that is of an attitude which, viewed from other departments of life, is specifically irrational [spezifisch »irrational« ist], just as much as there are rationalizations of economic life [der Wirtschaft], of technique, of scientific research, of military training, of law and administration. Furthermore, each of these fields may be rationalized in terms of very different ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from one point of view may well be irrational from another. Hence rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in various departments of life and in all areas of culture.8

self-limiting consensus on the good, toward a provisional telos, we should be able to avoid thinking of the question, ‘individual freedom or common purpose?’ as presenting an exclusive choice. We have so little sense of common purpose in part because we have become so accustomed to a picture that hides the actual extent of our commonality from view,” Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 236–7. 8 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, [1904] 2001), xxxviii–xxxix. Later on in the body of the book, Weber repeats – and emphasizes – the same point more concisely: “In fact, one may – this simple proposition, which is often forgotten should be placed at the beginning of every study which essays to deal with rationalism – rationalize life from fundamentally different basic points of view and in very different directions,” ibid., 38. German text taken from “Vorbemerkung. [Zur 1ten Auflage der »Ges. Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie«],” in Die Protestantismusschriften, Max Weber: Gesammelte Werke. Electronic ed. (Charlottesville: InteLex Corp., 2002), 12.

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Weber here lists “economic life” [der Wirtshaft] as if it were simply one aspect of human life among other parallel dimensions, including “scientific training,” “military research,” and “law and administration.” However, rather than thinking of it as one particular department among others, it might be more fruitful to imagine economic life itself as the whole context within which each of the other departments listed here – even “mystical contemplation” – exists. After all, Weber here enumerates different departments of economic life. He thinks these “bureaus” are organized by some rationale. Each rationale lends thematic significance to the activity that it orders.9 And each facet, with its attendant rationale, may take on a different significance and meaning depending upon the end for which it is used. Taken in one sense, Weber refers to facts that seem obvious. A businessperson’s economic decisions serve the aims of business. The mystic’s economic decisions serve the aim of contemplation.10 But what is to

Weber invites an expansive definition of the realm of the economic along the lines of what I am proposing here when he notes in a later work: “If anything, the most essential aspect of economic action for practical purposes is the prudent choice between ends,” Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, trans. Ephraim Fischoff, inter alia, vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 65 (emphasis original). Elsewhere, he adds, “All serious reflection about the ultimate elements of meaningful human conduct is oriented primarily in terms of the categories ‘end’ and ‘means.’ We desire something concretely either ‘for its own sake’ or as a means of achieving something else which is more highly desired,” “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 52. Is this distinction between means and ends really as obvious – or as basic – to economic rationality as Weber thinks? Perhaps by cultivating a spirit of detachment, the economy of sacrifice delivers what we desire in each moment by relieving us of attachment to anything we might imagine as a means for achieving it. Detachment returns us to the here and now as the sacrificial fulness of time. By contrast, the economic structure of means and ends always refers us to an unsatisfied desire as the meaning of the present moment. 10 In a passage of special interest for linking Weber’s thought to Augustine’s, Weber notes: “In contrast to asceticism, contemplation is primarily the quest to achieve rest in god and in him alone. … [M]ystical knowledge is not new knowledge of any facts or doctrines, but rather the perception of an overall meaning in the world,” Economy and Society, 1, 545. The theme of rest in God is, of course, an especially pronounced dimension of Augustine’s contemplative meditations in conf. It appears again in civ. Dei 19 under the guise of the desire of all things for peace. Weber clearly imagines that the contemplative seeks this rest by fleeing from the world. Indeed, he identifies “flight” as a defining characteristic of the contemplative, cf. ibid., 544–51. But even fleeing from economic engagement is a mode of economic engagement. Therefore, even “contemplative flight” from the world, as Weber imagines it, is an orientation toward the world’s economic facts, cf. ibid., 546–7. 9

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prevent there from being a mystical businessperson? Or an ­economical mystic? What is to prevent a businessperson from seeing a contemplative end represented in all the opportunities of exchange? And why could not a mystic recognize all exchanges – even the most transactional – as opportunities for living the contemplative life? What remains far from obvious is how the motives of these two archetypical actors – the ­mystic and the businessperson – differ. Weber gives one interpretation. He indicates that organizing economic ends are intrinsically indifferent to one another. Therefore, the ability of one economic rationale to serve its purpose relative to a given economic end remains totally independent of the rationality of other economic purposes organized by other ends. But, for Weber, such reasons and the goals they serve are not merely independent and indifferent. They are also (at least sometimes) ­irreconcilable.11 Indeed, as we have already seen, Weber insists that “mystical contemplation … is specifically irrational” relative to other modes of economic rationality.12 This picture s­uggests that the ­mystic and the businessperson are simply strangers. Their alienation does not consist in rational disagreement about the ends of their economic life. Disagreement always implies at least the belief, on the part of the antagonists, that they share common points of orientation for sounding out the basis of their d ­ ifferences. But Weber suggests that the businessperson and the ­mystic cannot even disagree about the purposes of their ­economic ­activity. They are mutually incoherent. Contemplation is economic nonsense if your purpose is making money. Making money is economic nonsense if your purpose is contemplation. In Weber’s picture of the division of labor implicit to economic rationality, the life of the

11 12

Cf. ibid., 85–6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, xxxviii. In Economy and Society, Weber elaborates: “Value-rational action may thus have various different relations to the instrumentally rational action. From the latter point of view, however, value-rationality is always irrational. Indeed, the more the value to which action is oriented is elevated to the status of an absolute value, the more ‘irrational’ in this sense the corresponding action is. For, the more unconditionally the actor devotes himself to this value for its own sake, to pure sentiment or beauty, to absolute goodness or devotion to duty, the less is he influenced by considerations of the consequences of his action. The orientation of action wholly to the rational achievement of ends without relation to fundamental values is, to be sure, essentially only a limiting case,” ibid., 26. The caveat at the close is revealing: if values always figure in the determinations of the ends of action, then an irreducible irrationality is intrinsic to the very idea of instrumental rationality.

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contemplative simply does not make sense to the businessperson.13 It cannot. And, similarly, the life of the businessperson simply cannot make sense to the contemplative. The best such agents can do is to recognize that their economic purposes are inexplicably different. They remain perfect strangers, united by the mutual unintelligibility of their economic purposes. And yet, unintelligible as our economic rationality often appears to be, we still do business. Our desires criss-cross. The strength of Weber’s analysis is that it defines a secular space within which economic participants may suspend their mutual disbelief in the goodness of one another’s values for the sake of exchange. Weber’s weakness, however, is that he refuses to recognize his vision of a secular economic space as – itself – a religious insight: one that orchestrates life to worship.14 The businessperson and the contemplative can still do business while disagreeing about why they do business. In this sense, the businessperson and the contemplative remain strangers, but not – after all – perfectly so. They do help each other reach economic ends (irrational as these may appear) precisely in order to fulfill their own. But fulfilling their own economic ends cannot be cleanly severed from sharing the means to those ends with one another – and being thereby implicated also in each other’s ends.15 In the relationship between our mystic and businessperson, the participants believe in the rationality of the economic purposes for the sake of which they act. It might be the case that the businessperson judges that the contemplative life is an irrational expression of economic activity. But the businessperson does, after all, think that she is right to act as she For an insightful discussion of what gets obscured about business when contemplation – theoria – becomes disenchanted theory cf. Peter Case, Robert French, and Peter Simpson, “From Theoria to Theory: Leadership without Contemplation,” Organization 19, no. 3 (May 1, 2012): 345–61. 14 While my argument differs in both focus and ultimate intent from John Milbank’s, I am offering a perspective that resonates with his thesis in Theology and Social Theory: namely, that the secular is a fundamentally religious category. Milbank documents how Weber occludes that insight at John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, 2006), 84–100. 15 It may seem as if the exchange I am imagining here between a mystic and a Weberian businessperson is out of proportion with the passage from which I have taken my inspiration. However, Weber himself stages an extended, and closely parallel, engagement between the “contemplative mystic” and the “ascetic” in Weber, Economy and Society, 1, 544–51. He identifies the ascetic par excellence with the Calvinists, whom he also identifies as businesspeople par excellence, cf. ibid., 548, 556, 587–8. 13

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does in her dealings with the mystic because her own economic purposes are rational. Conversely, the mystic approaches the businessperson in the same way. Crucially, however, Weber seems to rule out the possibility that the mystic would be right in trying to convince the businessperson that her own desire for financial fulfilment points beyond itself to a spiritual possibility that she refuses to acknowledge. Conversely, it would seem gauche for the businessperson to try to persuade the mystic that his own contemplative aspirations are really just sublimated expressions of acquisitive desire that have no end beyond a variety of immediate gratifications. Within the context of the society Weber has us imagine, the mystic and the businessperson do well to limit themselves to the level of negotiating financial means that prove to be mutually beneficial in pursuing their different ends. However, as soon as either party starts to articulate the rationality of the other’s economic means in terms of her own sense of ultimate ends, Weber would counsel caution.16 But does his insistence on the irreducible unintelligibility of our economic ends – and their insuperable distance from the means used to reach them – silence something essential to negotiating our economic life together? When pressed, Weber seems convinced that all ultimate economic ends can only be different. In this sense, Weber insists on the ultimacy of economic plurality. However, to deny that the mystic has religious insight into the goodness that material goods share in common is, itself, a religious insight. And Weber does deny this. Indeed, he denies it while refusing to recognize his denial as a religious insight. That partial blindness results in a religious confusion about means and ends. In denying the mystic’s religious claim, Weber aligns himself with the businessperson’s declaration that the ultimate source of value lies in the very plurality of economic purposes. Initially, it may seem as if Weber also distances himself from 16

Weber maintains: “Certainly, the dignity of the ‘personality’ lies in the fact that for it there exist values about which it organizes its life; – even if these values are in certain cases concentrated exclusively within the sphere of the person’s ‘individuality,’ then ‘self-realization’ in those interests for which it claims validity as values, is the idea with respect to which its whole existence is oriented. Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith. It may perhaps be a task for the speculative interpretation of life and the universe in quest of their meaning. But it certainly does not fall within the province of an empirical science in the sense in which it is to be practiced here,” “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” 55 (emphasis original). As we have already seen, to rationally negotiate matters of faith, on Weber’s telling, is impossible – just because of his vision of the role of “empirical science” in human life.

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the pluralistic confidence of our imaginary businessperson. After all, on Weber’s account, is not the businessperson’s perspective just another mode of organizing one’s life in a pluralistic society? Ultimately, however, the logic of business – at least in the guise I have just imagined it – reproduces the logic of Weber’s sociology of economic life. For Weber, the businessperson’s perspective is not, simply, one interpretation, among others, of economic life. Instead, the figure of the businessperson best exemplifies Weberian wisdom about the organization of all possible dimensions of human life. The ultimate source of value looks like a variety of independent and irreconcilable economic purposes, all of which simply open so many trading opportunities. Weber views these as if they were a whole held together only in terms of the differences of the diverse purposes that constitute its pluralistic space of secular negotiation. Ironically, the businessperson I have been postulating is more transparent about the ultimate value that she attributes to the ­plurality of economic values than Weber himself is. For the businessperson, the plurality of economic purposes presents different occasions for making money. For Weber, the ultimate purpose of economic life remains opaque because he is reticent to admit that whatever value his sociological perspective has stems from its contemplative attunement to the ultimate source of value, manifested in countless mediate expressions of rational worth. To claim that all of the different rationales of economic life provide reasons for which they cannot, themselves, account is – itself – a rational claim that requires some accounting. But the accounting of such a claim is inevitably religious. By refusing to recognize the religious provenance of his own perspective on the difference between rational means and irrational values, Weber renders his claim irrational. Weber’s insights about the relationship between economic purposes and the orientation of economic life as a whole is a religious insight that fails to own up to its expression of devotion. Why does Weber single out the contemplative perspective as specifically irrational relative to other “departments” of economic life? Could it be the ironic proximity of the mystical perspective to Weber’s own? Weber recognizes that he shares with the mystic a concern with seeing how all things communicate something of value. However, Weber denies the religious source of his own vision precisely in order to demonstrate that it privileges no communication of the good, as if to say, “There’s no religious absolute hiding here!” But this, too, expresses piety and devotion. Weber thinks of it as devotion to scientific rationality. He does not pause to notice in the

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process that – not only is his own devotion to rationality a mode of piety – it is also a quiet permutation of the Reformed devotion that he thematizes. Ironically, Weber invests himself in a genealogy of the Protestant sources of contemporary economic culture, without fully taking stock of his own place in that family tree. Weber unwittingly shares with the Christian groups he studies the conviction that rationality’s devotion – such as it is – is to avoid conflating the communication of value with the value communicated. This religious concern could be traced differently among different Protestant communities. But one of the most characteristic – and far-reaching – manifestations of the Protestant earnestness to avoid conflating value with its communication is the Reformers’ strenuous refusal of the Catholic Church’s claim that the mass mediates the sacrifice of Christ. All parties to this dispute agreed that Christ’s sacrifice was uniquely valuable and – therefore – unrepeatable. Since repetition can only mediate something by differing from what it represents, and since no Christian sacrifice differs from the sacrifice of Christ, the mass could not be a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice. So far, so good: Catholics and Protestants agree. But for the Reformers, representation could only mediate what it represented by repeating it. Since it was a given that the Eucharist (which is to say: what the meal represented) could not repeat Christ’s sacrifice, neither could it mediate it. It could only repeat a representation of Christ’s sacrifice, while insisting that the meal itself was not the thing that it portrayed. Representation of the “Lord’s Supper” only became possible under the condition that it repeats an event it could not claim to embody.17 The media of sacrifice and the mediator of sacrifice had to be kept sharply distinct lest Christ’s sacrifice evaporate into a mere symbol

17

Thus, John Calvin insists: “Christ, dying, testifies that by his one sacrifice all that pertained to our salvation has been accomplished and fulfilled. Are we to be allowed daily to sew innumerable patches upon such a sacrifice, as if it were imperfect, when he has so clearly commended its perfection? When God’s Sacred Word not only affirms but cries out and contends that this sacrifice was performed only once and all its force remains forever, do not those who require another sacrifice accuse it of imperfection and weakness? But to what purpose is the Mass, which has been so set up that a hundred thousand sacrifices may be performed each day, except to bury and submerge Christ’s Passion, by which he offered himself as sole sacrifice to the Father? Who, that is not blind, fails to see that it was Satan’s boldness that grappled with such clear and open truth?” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. 2, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975), 4.18.3.

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of the sacrifices of others.18 Therefore, Christ’s sacrifice simply could not be mediated. Instead, it represented a value that could never be present in its representation. Precisely because the meal represented something of infinite value, it offered nothing of exchange value.19 Such a meal belongs to a religious economy that can only picture sacrificial value by representing its mediated absence.20 Since nothing and no one may present the value of Christ’s sacrifice, anything and anyone (in principle) might represent it – under the condition that they do so by referring to an offering whose value they cannot incarnate. Under such conditions, the possibility of sacrificial exchange in the present age must be precluded as a rule of faith: devolved onto pictures upon pictures of an actually absent offering. Two seemingly opposite tendencies will follow from these shared commitments. One will tend to abstract spiritual contact from its economic entanglements in secular life. Private religious interiority will become the domain of an immediacy insulated from the ambiguity – but also the ecstasy – of value. The other will tend to identify secular economic engagement with individual spiritual calling. One’s chosen

Calvin cautions, “And it is no way out to say that we obtain forgiveness of sins in the Mass solely because it has already been purchased by Christ’s death. This amounts to nothing else than to boast that we have been redeemed by Christ on condition that we redeem ourselves; for this is the kind of doctrine that is spread abroad by Satan’s ministers, and today is defended with shouting, sword, and fire: that we, when we offer Christ to the Father in the Mass, by this act of oblation obtain forgiveness of sins and are made participants in Christ’s Passion. What now remains of Christ’s Passion, except that it is an example of redemption by which we learn that we are our own redeemers?” ibid., 4.18.6. 19 Intriguingly, Calvin judges the coup de grâce (“coronidem”) of his polemic against the sacrificial significance of the mass to be the following observation: “[T]he Sacred Supper…has been taken away, destroyed, and abolished by the raising up of the Mass. Indeed, the Supper itself is a gift of God, which ought to have been received with thanksgiving. The sacrifice of the Mass is represented as paying a price to God, which he should receive by way of satisfaction. There is as much difference between this sacrifice and the sacrament of the Supper as there is between giving and receiving,” ibid., 4.18.7, cf. fn. 11. The crucial assumption, of course, is that giving and receiving do, in fact, dramatically differ. Whether sacrifice is offered to undermine such an assumption is not considered. 20 “Finally, in his [i.e., Augustine’s] writings you will repeatedly find that the Lord’s Supper is called a sacrifice for no other reason than that it is a memorial, an image, and a testimony of that singular, true, and unique sacrifice by which Christ has atoned for us,” ibid., 4.18.10. The story of the development of Eucharistic theology in various Protestant traditions is complex. However, I have chosen to highlight Calvin’s thinking because it is clear, exemplary, and represents the closest link to Weber’s incognito piety. 18

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career (whatever it might be) simply become one’s vocation. The public communication of value might hold potentially limitless ­opportunities for religious expression. Lutheranism (especially its more pietistic dimension) was drawn toward the first option. Calvinism (especially its more entrepreneurial side) was drawn toward the second. While discussing Weber’s hypothesis, Georges Bataille describes the Lutheran tendency: [I]n making divinity radiate in the works of this world, Rome was reducing it to base actions. The only recourse, in the eyes of a Luther, appeared to lie in a decisive separation between God and everything that was not the deep inner life of faith, everything that we can do and really carry into effect. Wealth was thus deprived of meaning, apart from its productive value. Contemplative idleness, giving to the poor and the splendor of ceremonies and churches ceased to have the least worth or were considered a sign of the devil.21

Bataille highlights a Lutheran turn inward. And it seems like the opposite of the Calvinist turn outward, which Weber himself cites as the motive energy for the emergence of capitalist culture.22 But, in reality, these are simply two expressions of the same underlying inclination to renounce the incarnation of mediate value, while making this abdication into a touchstone of representation’s fidelity to its transcendent source of value. Referring to value always displaces it. But if there is anything left that is not displaced, what good is its representation? If one thus imagines the religious orientation of economic life, no privileged contemplative vocation remains distinct from the economic demands of work. The contemplative life simply is the life of the marketplace, and conversely. Weber’s own approach to sociology gives fresh expression to this distinctively Protestant piety, which identifies the contemplative life and the economic life. However, Weber is less frank about

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1: Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 121–2. In the same chapter, Bataille also notes the centrality of Calvin’s theology for Weber’s interpretation and adds, “Calvinism in a sense carried the overturning of values effected by Luther to its extreme consequence,” ibid., 123. 22 Weber notes, “[T]his peculiar idea, so familiar to us to-day, but in reality so little a matter of course, of one’s duty in a calling, is what is most characteristic of the social ethic of capitalistic culture, and is in a sense the fundamental basis of it,” Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 19. He later comments: “The idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs,” ibid., 124. Yet Weber’s own approach suggests that the rumors of this death may be somewhat premature. 21

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the religious milieu of his thought than his sources were about theirs. Just like the Reformers, Weber urges us to see that no economic mode of life communicates value more validly than any other. Any given economic rationale can be oriented toward a given value. There is no negotiating between ultimate values. Therefore, no given aspect of life ultimately plays a privileged role in communicating value. There are merely more or less suitable economic instruments for arbitrary ends. Rationality identifies the media of value without falling prey to the presumption that any medium actually incarnates the value it represents. Therefore, exchange partners must give up any claim to a common good expressed through their different values. The sharp distinction between the good and the created communication of the good allows Weber simply to drop the good in favor of value, which advertises worth without ever claiming to be good.23 Being good disappears in favor of seeming good. And seeming good can be what it is without being good at all. Economic value can persist independent of any good to lend it value. (Or so it seems.) Anything and everything can seem to be good, depending upon where you stand – and nothing need be good. After all, the good was never, itself, communicated in the first place. Piety toward the good mandates that we respect its resolute absence from our economic lives. And, ultimately, our lives are completely articulated in terms of their economic possibilities. Therefore, when Weber deems irrational other visions of life that seem to fixate on some communication of the good, he implicitly makes a negative religious judgment about their ability to honor the good they claim to identify. His assessment is that such perspectives provide a denuded contemplative appraisal of economic life by identifying the communication of value with the incarnation of the good – and then imagining that there is anything left to see.

23

Cf. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 91–2. In fairness to Weber, there is a wistfulness in his thinking, which suggests an unease about the modern condition he helps to rationalize. His famous image of the “iron cage” registers this reticence. Indeed, in context, the iron cage is an icon of sacrificial renunciation: not an offering, but a condition that teaches us to accept our losses with the gains they buy. More specifically, it is the condition that results when we collectively cede the full range of our human possibility to the service of a hyperspecialized, values-driven capitalism, cf. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 123–4. Our rigid, technocratic framework both confines and enables us. And the interplay between these factors is the stuff of sacrificial economy, as Weber imagines it. I am grateful to Eric Gregory for pressing me to acknowledge the pathos in Weber’s response to the social realities that he describes.

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Weber’s perspective is just as contemplative as the mystic’s. The term contemplative refers to the quest toward seeing things as they really are – and seeing such seeing as having inherent (not merely instrumental or ­relative) value. But, since he identifies the contemplative life with e­ conomic vocation, his perspective on the contemplative life is – itself – confused with intellectual work, which takes on the sanctity of a vocation. One passage that beautifully exemplifies this trend in Weber’s thought is “He who yearns for seeing should go to the cinema, though it will be offered to him copiously to-day in literary form in the present field of investigation also. Nothing is farther from the intent of these thoroughly serious studies than such an attitude. And, I might add, whoever wants a sermon should go to a conventicle.”24 What else, if not a sense of the piety of intellectual labor, inspires Weber to mock those contemplatives who would go to the theater in their free time to seek some communication of the good instead of laboring to understand themselves in terms of his own rigorous sociology? (And heaven help those who, instead of the theater, turn to less serious alternatives within their own discipline!) Does not the humorless earnestness of Weber’s studies also aim at seeing?25 Weber does not, after all, stand clear of the disagreement that we have imagined between our mystic and our businessperson. His insistence on the singular value of a plurality of economic values aligns him solidly with our businessperson in a shared religious opposition to the economic (ir)rationality of the mystic. Weber does not, it turns out, advocate a secular religious neutrality between competing positions with motives remaining inscrutable to rational inquiry and judgment. Instead, he gives a religious vision of economic life with a rational basis in the appeal to the singular finality of distributed, incommensurable values.26 And yet those who would point out the religious dimension of Weber’s own vision will appear, on Weber’s account, to be providing (at best) one among a

Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, xli. For biographical indications of Weber’s own attraction toward the contemplative dimension of life, cf. Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 536–7. Radkau here notes, “By late 1919 at the latest he had recognized that his path was not the vita activa but the vita contemplativa,” ibid., 536. 26 Georg Simmel, one of Weber’s contemporaries, provides a closely aligned perspective in his Philosophy of Money: “Money’s value as a means increases with its value as a means right up to the point at which it is valid as an absolute value and the consciousness of purpose in it comes to an end. … We are supposed to treat life as if each of its moments were a final purpose; every moment is supposed to be taken to 24

25

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variety of competing economic values. At worst, the religious critic will appear to be imposing her own private sense of the ultimate religious unity of mediate economic ends upon secular purposes that will not bear such imposition. Weber reinforces the ostensibly non-religious character of his approach to sociology by methodologically treating religion as an irrational prejudice and, in particular, rhetorically branding contemplative wisdom as “specifically irrational.”27 For Weber, an irrational approach to economic life appeals to something other than a diversity of values as the basis for unifying a human community. What he obscures, in the process, is the religious – and indeed, the contemplative – dimension of his own thought. And yet, the subterranean religious impulses and insights that I have just identified in Weber’s conception of human life left a trace upon his own. Weber’s mother, Helene, was a Huguenot, with a lively religious sensibility that was also influenced by the Unitarians.28 When Weber wrote about the Protestant “spirit,” he was describing a devotional temperament that he had first encountered in his own home. Although Weber gave up the Calvinist piety of his mother as an adult, he still nursed a covertly religious attitude. A recent biographer has noted that be so important as if life existed for its sake. At the same time, we are supposed to live as if none of its moments were final, as if our sense of value did not stop with any moment and each should be a transitional point and a means to higher and higher stages. This apparently contradictory double demand upon every moment of life, to be at the same time both final and yet not final, evolves from our innermost being in which the soul determines our relation to life – and finds, oddly enough, an almost ironical fulfilment in money [und findet wunderlich genug, eine gleichsam ironische Erfüllung am Gelde], the entity most external to it, since it stands above all qualities and intensities of existing forms of the mind,” Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 249–50. Simmel’s point is not that money almost fulfills (albeit ironically) a contemplative desire to recognize each thing’s ultimate end communicated in every medium of exchange. The point is that money does fulfill such an intimate desire to see the end in the means, but it is close to an irony that money does so [findet … eine gleichsam ironische Erfüllung], given how we tend to imagine interiority. For the German text of this passage, cf. Philosophie des Geldes, ed. Otthein Rammstedt, 2nd ed., Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 299. Simmel seems to suggest here that money poses as something like the divine end of economic life by providing itself as the material means to all valuable ends. Money, as Simmel describes it, looks like the iconic material of Weberian economic instrumentality. 27 One telling comment is as follows: “[W]e turn to a document [i.e., remarks by Benjamin Franklin] of that spirit which contains what we are looking for in almost classical purity, and at the same time has the advantage of being free from all direct relationship to religion, being thus, for our purposes, free of preconception,” Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 14 (emphasis mine). 28 Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, 15.

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“Weber was not the closed personality he seemed to be to others; his ‘polytheism of values’ corresponded to fissures within himself. The values that gave life a meaning for him did not all originate in the same spirit. But the fact that they were sacred to him, and that he timidly kept them hidden, indicated that they came from religious roots that were removed from discussion.”29 These observations suggest that Weber had a quiet sense of religious discretion – or perhaps a tendency toward sacral repression. This silence occluded any overt expression of faith on his part. But ultimately, that silence itself allowed him to articulate a polytheistic fidelity to the ultimacy of a plurality of final values.30 His own religious “irrationality” communicates a spirit of rationalistic pluralism reticent to disclose its own ultimate end – along with the virtual presence of that end in the means used to reach it. The same biographer adds: “It would, of course, be a much too forced rationalization to cobble together a perfect theological system out of the fragments of Weber’s religiosity. Probably he had his reason for finding any personal admission of faith deeply repugnant. After all, his religion had no rational logic that could be clearly set out; it all fits together best if one assumes a half-conscious religion of nature. … Such a nature religion was already instilled in him by his mother’s Unitarianism.”31 Such a description comports well with Weber’s intellectual piety, which follows the Reformers’ own fastidious enforcement of a sharp distinction between the creator and the creation, God and nature. Such a distinction, in its original religious setting, was a secularizing gesture that yielded a world purged of the power – and confusions – of divine mediation precisely in order to celebrate the Ibid., 531. For a suggestive consideration of Weber’s private religious life, cf. ibid., 531–7. For a survey of the development of Weber’s thinking about mysticism, with special attention to the influence of Ernst Troeltsch, cf. Christopher Adair-Toteff, “Max Weber’s Mysticism,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 43, no. 3 (2002): 339–53. 30 In his famous “Science as a Vocation” lecture, Weber tellingly remarks: “Up to now, I have spoken only of practical reasons for not imposing one’s personal opinions on others. But we must go further. There are much deeper reasons that persuade us to rule out the ‘scientific’ advocacy of practical points of view – except, that is, for the discussion of what means to choose in order to achieve an end that has been definitely agreed. Such advocacy is senseless in principle because the different value systems of the world are caught up in an insoluble struggle with one another. The elder Mill, whose philosophy I do not otherwise admire, was right on this one point when he said that if you take pure experience as your starting point, you will end up in polytheism,” Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 22. 31 Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, 535. 29

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transcendence of God. As Weber himself first argued, such secularity was a religious insight of the Reformers. And that insight gave rise to our contemporary economic common sense. In the case of Weber and the spiritual culture he represents, such a secularizing religious piety can so strongly separate a sense of the divine from the secular order that our economy comes to evince the divine precisely by referring only to its own, ostensibly intrinsic, value. Rational secularity – taken to represent an economy of inexhaustibly intermediate godlessness – finally starts to look strangely indistinct from a nature pregnant with divinity. Apparent religious opposites coincide in a strange economic alliance.32 Playful polytheism and austere monotheism are united economically in Weber’s “half-conscious religion of nature.”33 Max Weber’s sociology is a particularly lucid articulation of much that contemporary economic culture tends to take for granted. However, when the veneer of unimpeachable obviousness fades, it becomes clear that Weber’s analysis brings a distinctively modern articulation to a very ancient religious dialectic. The Calvinists’ version of secularism was, itself, a transformation of influential Augustinian insights about economic life in the present world [in hoc saeculo].34 One of the most important texts for understanding those insights is civ. Dei 19.17.

Negotiating Peace Civ. Dei 19 is a seminal text of Western political theory.35 But it is also an account of economic culture. In it, Augustine imagines the world as a global marketplace for negotiating the ultimate value of things. This marketplace offers more than a clearinghouse for arriving at fair prices on goods denominated in a shared medium of exchange. It offers, also,

For one account of how this coincidence plays out in the culture of contemporary organizations, cf. Blake E. Ashforth and Deepa Vaidyanath, “Work Organizations as Secular Religions,” Journal of Management Inquiry 11, no. 4 (December 2002): 359–70. 33 Milbank notes: “The modern world is for Weber basically a function of monotheism turned into this-worldly formal rationality with a resurgent polytheism which applies to the realm of private values,” Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 99. 34 Cf. civ. Dei, 1.35. For a discussion of the conceptual range of the saeculum in Augustine’s thought, cf. Paul J. Griffiths, “Secularity and the Saeculum,” in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. James Wetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 35 For a brief and lucid introduction to key issues and questions, cf. Oliver O’Donovan, “Augustine’s City of God XIX and Western Political Thought.” 32

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the chance to continually renegotiate its own significance: the boundaries of the market and the limits of our concern for ourselves and others. By drawing attention to the universal stakes of our everyday exchanges, Augustine enlarges our economic imaginations. He thereby enables us to assess, with sharpened vision, what (if anything) our quotidian transactions communicate of ultimate significance. In civ. Dei 19.17, Augustine imagines two different approaches to economic life. Augustine frames these approaches in the following terms: But the household of humans who do not live by faith [ex fide] chases an earthly peace by the goods accommodated to this temporal life. However, the household of humans living by faith [ex fide] expects those things that have been promised, into the future, as eternal and uses earthly goods and temporal things just as a wayfarer does, not captivated by them and turned away where tending toward God, but sustained by them to more easily tolerate and reduce as much as possible the cares of the corruptible body that makes the soul heavy. (19.17, my trans.)

Augustine’s two households are a metonymy of two cities. Those two ­cities, in turn, are the typological images of different modes of human community, which Augustine employs as the central literary conceit of the civ. Dei (cf. the celebrated contrast of the two cities in civ. Dei 14.28). Significantly, however, in civ. Dei 19.17, Augustine imagines his two world-historical cities in terms of intimate domestic space. The domus is the place where provision is made for the most immediate needs and desires of human life. It is where childbirth, rearing, nurture, production, education, and family care happen. When Augustine turns to the economic imagination exemplified by his two different cities and their approaches to providing for the stuff of life, he thinks in terms of the home. Indeed, in this respect, Augustine reflects the Greek identification of economy – oikonomia – with the ordering [nomos] of the household [oikos]. However, Augustine differs sharply from the Greek tradition in identifying the economic concerns of the household with the political concerns of the city.36 In one sense, the heavenly city [­civitas caelestis], which Augustine will also call the wayfaring city [civitas peregrina] is comprised of various households with particular temperaments and family arrangements. However, in

36

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 28–58. Arendt takes Augustine to task for conflating the economic with the political. The former, she claims, is what we put up with for the sake of the latter.

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another sense, Augustine imagines the heavenly city, as such, to constitute a household.37 Thus, the civitas caelestis has its distinctive way of organizing family life. And that family life ultimately orders its politics. All politics is local. But the local, in turn, for Augustine, is always economic: a matter of how humans order their exchanges in a community that allows them to recognize one another as family.38 The earthly city [civitas terrena] also has its way of organizing life. Here, too, economy and politics remain closely interconnected. However, in this other household, one’s sense of what it means to be “family” – to belong with the other members of one’s political community – is sharply different. Economic life, in turn, looks radically different here. What distinguishes these two households is their different interpretations of how death figures in economic life. One lives by faith [ex fide] and the other does not. And faith, as Augustine understands it, has to do with prayerful transparency to an undying, unparted good. Death – and the partings of mortal life that represent it – become occasions of an offering that acknowledges that good. In this sense, the work of parting is also good. Faith “expects those things that have been promised, into the future, as eternal” (civ. Dei 19.17, my trans.). Faith is not simply the belief that one’s life shall go on after death. It is the confidence to see the future of one’s mortal life pregnant with an eternal significance represented by sacrifice. It is a willingness to recognize divine life communicated through temporal goods. On the other hand, those who do not live by faith allow death to strip mortal life of its articulate interiority. Mortal goods come to seem mute on the question of the eternal. Our economic life speaks only to remind us of death by distracting us from its imposing significance. And death – along with the partings that represent is – figure only as insistent enemies of life and goodness.

At the conclusion of civ. Dei 19.16, while setting up the comments in 19.17, Augustine says, “[A] human household ought to be the origin or part [initium sive particula] of the city,” (my trans.). Several lines into 19.17, Augustine transitions seamlessly from talking about his two typical households to discussing his two orienting cities. Augustine is thinking of the home as a member of that city of which it is an image. 38 Cf. Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 55–72. Williams here gives an amplification of the relationship between the political and the economic in Augustine, organized around a sensitive engagement with Arendt and her concern that Augustinian politics gets coopted by economic life. For Arendt, our contemporary Augustinian political legacy fails to prize politics as the privileged forum for attempts to exemplify free human excellence. Williams argues that free human excellence always involves the immediacy and vulnerability of caring for other human beings as if they were family. 37

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What makes – and keeps – the relationship between Augustine’s two households interesting is that they share the same goods in the same space at the same time. Augustine sums up the situation by noting: “Thus the use of those things necessary for this mortal life is shared in common between both kinds of people and both kinds of household; but the specific end for which these things are used is multiple and diverse” (civ. Dei 19.17, Bettenson modified). The two cities that Augustine describes in civ. Dei 19.17 are not neighboring households. They are not overlapping households. They are one household, divided by radically different selfunderstandings. What sometimes look like different families, representing different economies, turn out on closer examination to be different parts of the same family sharing a common household. Which is to say: the two different economies represented by these two different cities actually comprise just one economy, which its different members interpret differently. The members of the two cities also ascribe different interpretations of their shared economy to one another. This difference splits along lines set by two different interpretations of economic life in the face of death. Because the two apparent households share an economy without sharing an interpretation of that economy’s orientation and purpose, the members of the two households are consigned to a process of indefinite, open-ended negotiation amongst themselves about the significance of their economic exchanges. Such negotiation is coordinated by a political aspiration for peace, which they have in common – even while they disagree about its meaning. In a sense, then, this mediating peace becomes, itself, a pivotal condition for exchange in a situation where the parties may not agree on the significance of their exchange. Therefore, Augustine notes: “The earthly city, which does not live by faith [ex fide], seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes, in the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and rule [concordiam civium], is the composition of human wills [compositionem voluntatum] concerning the things of mortal life. The heavenly city, or rather the part of it which is able, which sojourns on earth and lives by faith, makes use of this peace necessarily, until this mortal condition which necessitates it shall pass away” (civ. Dei 19.17, Dods modified). In the household of the earthly city, economic life is worked out by trying to arrange a composition of wills. In this economy, the wills of its members must be composed because the goods that they desire refer them to intrinsically partial and frequently incompatible ends. The will itself becomes partial, just like the goods it desires. The will of one is only ever accidentally fulfilled through the fulfillment of another’s will. Politics becomes the task of orchestrating partisan desires to maximize

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one’s power. And the body politic becomes a provisional whole, patched together out of consistently antagonistic parts. How can the “peace” secured by such a politics of arbitrary halfmeasures ever serve as the economic condition for exchange between the members of the wayfaring city and the earthly city? Unless the peace of the earthly city communicated something of the peace toward which the wayfaring city journeys, it would be useless to the latter.39 The wayfaring city is never dependent on means wholly cut off from the end they serve. (To imagine it might be is a temptation to faithlessness.) Thus, one dimension of the wayfaring city’s life by faith is its willingness to recognize in the apparently faithless ceasefire continually renegotiated within the earthly city the token of a peace that transcends the mortal life it fosters. Faith sees in a politics – seemingly bereft of hope – the quiet promise of something more. Part of the wayfaring city’s role is to remind the earthly city that the economy they share cannot be quite so dispirited as the politics of the earthly city would seem to suggest.40 Danielle Allen’s political theory in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education highlights the contemporary stakes of Augustine’s thinking about the peace of these two cities. Moreover, Allen’s account is especially pertinent because of the role that sacrifice plays in cementing the social composite: “An honest account of collective democratic action must begin by acknowledging that communal decisions inevitably benefit some citizens at the expense of others, even when the whole community generally benefits. Since democracy claims to secure the good of all citizens, those people who benefit less

Cf. James Wetzel, “Saint Augustine Lecture 2012: A Tangle of Two Cities,” Augustinian Studies 43, no. 1/2 (2012). Wetzel there argues that “God’s city remains, as it has always been and will be, something perfect, but its mixture with its counterpart – the imperfect city – needs to be seen as having more reality than the ghost of a limited perspective,” ibid., 12. Cf. also, “Splendid Vices and Secular Virtues: Variations on Milbank’s Augustine,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 32, no. 2 (2004): 271–300. 40 Drawing on Robert Dodaro’s work on Augustine’s politics, Gregory Lee has recently argued that Augustine’s ecclesiological resistance to the Donatists gave him a framework for politics that would enable Christians to be involved in – but uncontaminated by – its secularity, cf. Gregory Lee, “Using the Earthly City: Ecclesiology, Political Activity, and Religious Coercion in Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 47, no. 1 (2016): 41–63. The same insight applies to Augustine’s thinking about how members of Christ’s ecclesial body negotiate the economy they share in common with others – a point that Lee also suggests in his reading of civ. Dei 19.17, cf. ibid., 55, 62. The sacrificial solicitude of the wayfaring city prevents its members from imagining that the economy they share with the earthly city might be contaminating. 39

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than others from particular political decisions, but nonetheless accede to those decisions, preserve the stability of democratic institutions. Their sacrifice makes collective democratic action possible.”41 Allen provides here a paradigm case of the sacrificial economy that Augustine challenges. Consider five characteristics of Allen’s picture of political sacrifice. First, sacrifice is a loss: an expense that costs some people while distributing benefits to others. Second, by implication, those who make sacrifices have a moral claim to what they gave up: it was theirs to lose. Sacrifice is a loss of ownership, actual or virtual. (In Allen’s example from economic policy, some members of society accept the loss of their employment – something to which they have a moral right – in order to maintain the economic health of the larger economy.42) Third, by making democratic sacrifices, citizens give the gift of peace.43 Sacrifice is a gift. Fourth, as a gift, sacrifice establishes a relationship of anticipated reciprocity: the expectation that the future sacrifices of others will compensate those who make sacrifices now.44 Thus, Allen emphasizes “the need for taking turns at losses as well as gains.”45 Sacrifice is a quid pro quo. Fifth, sacrifice is a necessary evil. Again: “communal decisions inevitably benefit some citizens at the expense of others, even when the whole community generally benefits.”46 Sacrifice hurts; but it is necessary for the flourishing of others – and for the community collectively. One crucial assumption links together these five characteristics of Allen’s sacrificial economy: my good and yours are inevitably exclusive. The goods that enable well-being are partial. If I have them, you cannot – and conversely. What I gain politically, someone else loses and vice versa.

Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 28–9. 42 Ibid., 39–49. 43 Allen remarks, “When citizens find themselves newly jobless as a result of collective decisions and accept their losses without violence or rebellion, they grant their fellow citizens stability, a gift of no small account,” ibid., 45. Stability here precisely matches Augustine’s description of the peace of the civitas terrena. 44 Thus, Allen claims, “Democracy is not a static end state that achieves the common good by assuring the same benefits or the same level of benefits to everyone, but rather a political practice by which the diverse negative effects of collective political action, and even of just decisions, can be distributed equally, and constantly redistributed over time, on the basis of consensual interactions. The hard truth of democracy is that some citizens are always giving things up for others,” ibid., 29. 45 Ibid., 48. 46 Ibid., 28 (emphasis mine). 41

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Our politics exist to distribute proprietary advantages. Their circulation is governed by the logic of ownership: a law of mutual exclusivity. Allen assumes the oppositional character of our interests as a truism that should be obvious to anyone undeceived by utopian idealism.47 Augustine’s economy of sacrifice undermines all five of these interconnected assumptions about sacrifice by challenging the proprietary character of the good that sacrifice supposedly serves. To see how, consider the sacrificial calculus that Allen proposes. As members of their political community, those who make sacrifices for it generally benefit by the sacrifices they make. Yet, those sacrifices are expensive. Privately, those who sacrifice are dispossessed of some personal benefit. Yet – finally – those who sacrifice have calculated that the dispossession they suffer individually is (more than) offset by the benefit that their suffering will secure for them as members of the larger community. (If it did not, they would be unmotivated to sacrifice in the first place.) But, in what sense can such sacrifices really count as losses? If sacrifice simply benefited others – that is, if it were better for the political community that certain members sacrifice, but worse, on the whole, for the members who made the sacrifices, even regarded as members of their political community, then it would be easier to account for the sense in which their partings are losses. But, by the same token, it would be difficult to make sense of how the political community “generally benefits.” Instead, one part would benefit and another part would bear the expense. There would be no general benefit. But without any general benefit to the community – including to the sacrificers – why would any part of it consent to unrequited losses for any other part? Unless the sacrificers thought that they would be better off as members of the collective to which they belong, what would induce them to make democratic sacrifices? But if they are truly better off, why imagine that they are losing anything personally when they sacrifice? What gives them the original claim to own, privately, what they are willing to part with for the sake of their own communal well-being? Why not rather acknowledge that they are parting with something to which the political community as a whole has always had prior claim? And why not see their sacrifice as simply letting go of any absolute claim to own that with which they are being asked to part for their own common good? That is, why not regard the original claim to private ownership, which gets sacrificed in the service of the collective, as always conditioned by the prior claim of the entire community? 47

Ibid.

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Allen emphasizes that people make democratic sacrifices with a view to the anticipated sacrifices that others will make for their benefit in the future.48 This diachronic calculus extends the evaluation period for deciding whether sacrifices benefit those who make them. But it does not resolve the question of whether, as members of their community, those who make sacrifices are generally benefited by their sacrifices – or whether they are only benefited when other elements of the community meet the anticipation of quid pro quo compensation. In the latter case, however, those who sacrifice never benefit in general from their sacrifices. They only benefit privately from the sacrifices made by other parts of the community. Sacrificial economy becomes the practice of offsetting gains and losses for specific coalitions in order to aggregate the competitive, and mutually exclusive, desires of different people into some semblance of society over time.49 But what kind of trust (faith?) is needed to imagine that others will reciprocate one’s losses, even though it is always at their direct expense to do so – and never to their (or our) collective benefit? In what common well-being is such trust vested?50 Indeed, why would we want to support a polity premised on the hope of reciprocal sacrifice unless we imagined that such an order would be most advantageous to our personal interests? And, if that were the case, what motive could any privileged group have for promoting democratic fairness if its members believed, in the long run, that the sacrifices they made for fairness could only erode their present position of relative social advantage? But if only disadvantaged groups are motivated to make democratic sacrifices, what reason would they have for expecting that their losses might be reciprocated in the future by relatively advantaged groups? Perhaps it is better – and more realistic – to imagine that people make sacrifices in a democratic polity because they believe that they benefit, as members of their society, from their sacrifices – even now. But this implies that sacrifice does not simply operate according to a quid pro quo logic, which always needs to be fulfilled in the future. Sacrifice is not a gift of peace perpetually dependent upon a counter-gift. It is not a Ibid., 46–8. Ibid., 25–49. 50 Allen remarks: “The phrase ‘the common good’ manages the problem of loss in politics simply by asking citizens to bear up in moments of disappointment,” ibid., 47–8. But if this phrase really “manages” true loss, then perhaps it is nothing more than a specious rhetorical device. If, on the other hand, it reframes real disappointment as a parting that serves a common good that we actually share, then loss gets changed into an offering. 48

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loss always looking for compensation. It is not the forfeiture of ownership on behalf of someone else. It is not, in short, a necessary evil. It is an offering that joins us together in open-hearted attention and devotion to a common good. Such offerings do not sideline questions of justice in favor of unilateral self-abdication. Quite the contrary. But they imply that justice is less a matter of fairly and efficiently allocating loss51 and more a matter of challenging others, through one’s sacrificial partings, to accept the work of parting as a shared, cooperative offering for the sake of the common good. Consider one case of economic sacrifice that Allen highlights. Given the opinion of some economists that a certain level of unemployment exerts a countervailing pressure against inflation, some “marginally employed” workers may be required to give up their jobs for the sake of the overall health of the broader economy.52 This demand, according to Allen, might elicit in the newly unemployed an intractable discrepancy between cognitive and affective responses to losing their livelihood. Rationally, such workers (Allen suggests) might recognize the justice in their loss: the economic policy that cost them their jobs makes sense for their entire economy. However, emotionally, such workers may still feel threatened and aggrieved. Recognizing the justice of their situation is inadequate to change the emotions that reflect private loss: “[M]arginally employed citizens could perfectly well assent rationally to a policy for the common good, and nonetheless feel anger at having to be the people who bear the costs of preserving the polity as a whole. Their judgment of the common good would simply have come into irreconcilable conflict with their opinion about their personal good. The divergence between the two goods may well jeopardize their own sense of security within the state.”53 This apparent conflict, though – if it is truly irreconcilable – suggests that the common good is not really common. It is an inherently tragic compromise. Violence is essential to politics. At least sometimes, one part of a society exacts sacrifices from another part in the name of a common good that is actually illusory. The anger of the unemployed is the emotional clue inviting them to see through that illusion – and recognize that their cognitive buy-in to the myth of a common good was actually misguided. But there is Cf. Allen’s portrait of such an approach to justice through sacrifice, ibid., 46–9. Ibid., 39–49. 53 Ibid., 46 (emphasis mine). 51

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another possibility here: the anger is real, but its source stems from an illusory perspective about one’s own good. It comes, in short, from the assumption that one’s work was a private right, to which one had a proprietary claim irrespective of one’s relationship to the broader economy and community. Letting go of that assumption requires cultivating an attitude of detachment. Such an attitude will not dissolve the emotional pain of having to part (for now) with one’s livelihood. But it will change one’s interpretation of that pain. Instead of signaling an intractable conflict between one’s private and common good, detachment will transmute the pain of loss into the passion of an offering made for others – but also for oneself in common with them.54 These observations do not minimize or deny the agony and value of democratic sacrifice. The African American community in Arkansas during the 1950s, which Allen makes her narrative focus, showed extraordinary sacrificial courage. And Allen convincingly argues that more should be done to acknowledge everyday acts of sacrificial devotion to democracy, which this community exemplified.55 My counter-narrative will have failed if it does anything to obscure such offerings. However, my point is to emphasize, precisely, that such sacrifices are offerings. Collectively, they represent a gesture of transformative acknowledgment, not a loss conditionally accepted as a quid pro quo for some anticipated greater good. Allen’s analysis of sacrifice implies that wholeness, not unity, is the political ideal of democratic society. While wholeness is achieved through integration, unity – she thinks – tends to be achieved through assimilation. And only the former respects the heterogeneity of the parts it joins together.56 But in what sense, exactly, are the members of a society really its parts? Political integration aims to achieve what Augustine calls “the composition of wills.” And a composition is a whole, comprised of heterogeneous parts: wills whose desires point toward livelihoods that always impede the well-being of others. Bodies have parts, but wills do not. If a society is a unity of wills, can it really be a whole? (Augustine says the earthly city thinks it is, but thinking something is a whole does not make it so.) Must we really assume that political or

Although Allen highlights the practical importance of addressing the negative emotions that sacrifice tends to elicit, cf. ibid., 47, it is difficult to see (given her account) how such overtures to the wounded might be made sincerely. 55 Ibid., 200, n. 1. 56 Ibid., 13–20. 54

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economic exchange is always driven by partiality? Allen appeals to the experience of disappointment, disillusionment, and disenfranchisement endemic to American public life.57 These are all reactions to the painful reality of parting, and their significance remains open to reconsideration. Competition, compromise, and mitigated violence are not fixed data of political reality. They are inferences from the pain of isolation, prejudice, and alienation to the conclusion of social fractiousness. When Allen appeals to common sense realpolitik to ridicule “the dreamscape of democracy” in which each member happily accedes to the collective will,58 I imagine that she conflates inevitable experiences of personal pain and public affront in an era of grudge-match identity politics with the impossibility of reflectively acknowledging a political community for the sake of which we might part with things we value in service to others – without imagining that our work of parting amounts to taking private losses. We need not understand partiality and competition as the givens of our political or economic life. And, if we do not, perhaps unity – rather than wholeness – is, after all, the more illuminating political ideal. And perhaps that ideal need not be achieved through the violence of assimilation. Maybe, instead, it is best served through open-hearted attention, which recognizes the common life we already share and then aspires to honor and express that life more fully through the transformation of provisionally partial and prejudicial structures, including schools, businesses, and even national economies. But if sacrifice serves unity, then perhaps politics is all about talking with neighbors, not strangers. Augustine sees sacrifice as an offering that cultivates detachment from the claims to ownership over exclusive private goods. And such an offering points toward a different account of sacrifice’s role in political community. Instead of offsetting gains and losses, sacrifice teaches us to see property signifying something beyond itself: an impartial, common good shared without prejudice by all. This good is not a necessary fiction, stemming from political expediency or ideology. It is an offering that releases claim to ownership over the goods that communicate our shared well-being. This order expresses itself in exchange as an open-hearted attitude that offers the stuff of life to others in order to elicit an offering in response from them. This mutual exchange is a conversation, of sorts,

57 58

Ibid., 41–9. Ibid., 28.

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between neighbors, who are both less strange and stranger than Allen seems ready to acknowledge. Less strange because the interests of our political and economic neighbors are not ultimately at odds with our own: we share a good in common. (Though we do not always recognize it. But when we do, that acknowledgment unites us more deeply than parts can be joined to make a whole. Our desires need not, ultimately, be incommensurate and heterogeneous.) In another respect, though, we are stranger to each other than Allen recognizes. What distinguishes us from one another goes deeper than our differences of interest or desire. These differences point to something more. Think of this something as the responsibility of living a life that no one else can live for you. Each of us has an existential standing that no one else can assume. Our different desires represent each of us in solitude. But they do not comprise it. Even the work of parting acknowledges our existential singularity. It does not create it. Such are the lessons of the wayfaring city in the midst of a secular polity defined by the composition of wills. However, returning to civ. Dei 19, such timely considerations imply that the wayfaring city cannot interpret the peace that it shares with the earthly city as one achieved through the cumulative alliance of their members’ wills.59 Secular economic life is not maintained by a political ceasefire between the earthly city and the heavenly one. Nor is this life organized around some consensus concerning those things about which the members of both cities can agree.60 In terms of their ultimate ends, When Augustine notes that “the heavenly city … defends and seeks the composition of human wills,” [humanarum uoluntatum compositionem] civ. Dei 19.17 (Chadwick modified), he is not suggesting that the wayfaring city supports and endorses the political strategy of the earthly city per se. Rather, he is pointing out that the heavenly city living now by faith applauds and supports the provisional expressions of peace that are communicated through the composition of antagonistic wills precisely because these embodiments of peace bespeak a harmony that is not strictly possible or intelligible in terms of the earthly city’s own political strategy. In doing so, the members of the wayfaring city draw attention to a peace that actually undermines the composition of wills insofar as this composition is treated as the goal of political activity, which is designed to facilitate the achievement of private and arbitrary economic ends. 60 R. A. Markus makes the following claim: “The discussions of Book XIX of the City of God in effect pushed such fundamental commitments as a man’s religious beliefs and the values he lives by outside the field of political discourse. The only links between the realm of politics and the realm of faith and morals were now those which existed inwardly, in the way in which individuals’ valuations are structured. At this personal level, political life, as all other aspects of human living, must of necessity have some place in the overall pattern of the values which guide a man’s actions, or some place in the pattern of motivations expressed in his activities. But these relations to a wider 59

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there is nothing about which the members of the two cities can agree. From the perspective of the heavenly city, the appearance of any alternatives to its own end are ultimately illusions. From the perspective of the earthly city, there is no end to ultimate alternatives. And all of their members’ approaches to economic means are irreducibly linked to this understanding of those ends. Therefore, the wayfaring city shares in the earthly city’s peace without making the meaning of that peace its own. The wayfaring city neither sets nor endorses the apparently arbitrary terms of the secular peace that its members exploit along the way. Therefore, Augustine uses the language of captivity to describe the wayfaring city’s relationship to its counterparty. The wayfaring city uses a peace that serves the seemingly more settled civic society through which it is passing. Augustine says that it is “leading, as it were, the captive life of its travels” (my trans.); as such, “it has no scruples about obeying the laws of the earthly city” (civ. Dei 19.17, Dods modified). Such laws, arbitrary though their genesis and maintenance may be, are still “accommodated to sustaining mortal life” (civ. Dei 19.17, my trans.). Because mortal life is the economic condition of both cities, the laws sustaining that life – alien though they may be to the wayfaring city’s ultimate orientation – ­foster the ongoing exchange between them: “[S]ince this mortality is shared by both cities, a concord may be preserved between them in things that are relevant to this condition” (civ. Dei 19.17, Bettenson modified). This concordia is an ongoing negotiation in which each party gives different

context of values and motives lie in a dimension which Augustine took care to exclude from the sphere of politics. This is confined to the outward, the social, the area which is defined, formally, by the possibility within it of coincident decisions springing from fundamentally differing structures of motivation,” Markus, Saeculum, 70, cf. pp. 59–71. Markus here gives a thoroughly Weberian reading of Augustine. Indeed, Markus underlines his own modern intellectual inheritance later in the book by venturing to suggest: “The main lines of his [i.e., Augustine’s] thinking about history, society and human institutions in general (the saeculum) point towards a political order to which we may not unreasonably apply the anachronistic epithet ‘pluralist’, in that it is neutral in respect of ultimate beliefs and values,” ibid., 151. In the course of the argument I am making here, I hope to indicate why I think such a reading is ­problematic – both in principle, as a construal of secular society, and hermeneutically, as a representation of the structure of Augustine’s thought. I am hardly the first thinker to criticize Markus along these lines. Rowan Williams, for example, has observed simply: “The risk in accepting a ‘pluralist’ reading of Augustine is that it ascribes to the saint an anachronistic view of the political arena. Augustine does not presuppose a political space in which ‘values’ are negotiated,” Rowan Williams, “Reading the City of God,” in On Augustine (London, Oxford, New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016), 127.

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significance to the things that they share and exchange – while continuing to share and exchange them. But the wayfaring city sees and says that the pragmatic peace of the earthly city is not limited by the so-called art of the possible. Instead, the peace that composes competing, partial desires into a fragile political accord witnesses to something beyond it. A peace is at work in the midst of antagonistic competition, which undermines the earthly city’s own insistence that death gets the final word in economic life. For Augustine, the economy of the earthly city testifies to the truth of its own incoherence – and does so in spite of itself. As it turns out, the rational, bureaucratic polytheism that Weber commends as the best economic strategy for negotiating the meaning of means amidst incompatible ends is simply a modern reincarnation of the peace that Augustine attributes to the earthly city. As we have already seen, Weber’s sociology implies a political strategy for engineering the composition of wills. This strategy depends on acknowledging the irrationality of economic ends while simultaneously endorsing those irrational values as ends that guide all economic rationality. Values arrange economic facts by dictating the means employed to reach them. But the only relevant evaluation of values is that all are to be valued – at least as values for others – since all ultimate values are finally irrational. In such a situation, it is economically impious to call into question the irreducible plurality of values, since that plurality allows for the engineered peace provided by the ad hoc alliances of realpolitik. To those vested in maintaining the social composition of wills, refusing to endorse the polyphony of valued ends will look like inexcusable arrogance: a refusal to take political responsibility. Often enough, such protests will prove to be of little concern to the power brokers who oversee the maintenance of bureaucratic polytheism. At other times, however, the threat will seem more acute. In such moments, the provisional character of the wandering city’s life can be brought home with force. The contemplative’s faith that the end of economic peace is an uncomposed unity, harmonized in the wills of those who desire it by love and manifested in all of the means to reaching it, must be kept in check for the sake of peace. To the extent that Weber’s mystic has something of the vision that Augustine attributes to those who live by faith, Weber’s analysis suggests why the traveling peace of contemplative wayfarers paradoxically remains captive to political powers who will always tend to resist them. But economic life can also be imagined otherwise. Perhaps the provisional peace of the wayfaring city – strained though it may be by the arbitrary pieties of the earthly city – testifies to an economic good that

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orders the ends of instrumental service. And it insists that this good is an uncomposed unity: “[T]he celestial city, on the other hand, knew that one God only was to be worshipped, and that to Him alone was due that service which the Greeks call [latreia], and which can be given only to a god” (civ. Dei 19.17, Dods). Given the polytheistic piety of the earthly city, the wayfaring city’s insistence that only God finally links together all economic interests will seem to be a declaration bent on destroying the essential diversity of the marketplace. However, the wayfaring city does not harbor the same kind of antagonism toward the economic pieties of the earthly city that the latter bears toward them – precisely because these testify to a divine peace that the earthly city enjoys without recognizing or acknowledging its provenance. Peace brooks no genuine alternatives, so the members of the wayfaring city and the members of the earthly city cannot be opposed to one another as symmetrical antagonists. Paradoxically, the earthly city must see the wayfaring city as undermining its religious piety while the wayfaring city cannot see the earthly city’s piety as undermining its own. Just as the gods of late antiquity structured the miscellaneous departments of life around acts of piety and sacrifice, so, too, do final (and finally irrational) economic values organize the miscellaneous departments of modern life in Weber’s view. Recall Weber’s catalogue of ­economic orientations in the author’s introduction to Protestant Ethic. He mentions “rationalizations of economic life, of technique, of scientific research, of military training, of law and administration.”61 Weber’s schematic of our contemporary divisions of labor mirrors Augustine’s mocking litany to the gods of ancient Rome: But, as the earthly city has had some philosophers whose doctrine is condemned by the divine teaching, and who, being deceived either by their own conjectures or by demons, supposed that many gods must be invited to take an interest in human affairs, and assigned to each a separate function and a separate department, – to one the body, to another the soul; and in the body itself, to one the head, to another the neck, and each of the other members to one of the gods; and in like manner, in the soul, to one god the natural capacity was assigned, to another education, to another anger, to another lust; and so the various affairs of life were assigned, – cattle to one, corn to another, wine to another, oil to another, the woods to another, money to another, navigation to another, wars and victories to another, marriages to another, births and fecundity to another, and other things to other gods. (civ. Dei 19.17, Dods)

61

Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, xxxviii.

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Augustine is not haranguing an archaic religious milieu that we have long since left behind. Rather, his panoply of demonic divinities personifies the irrational piety owed to ultimate economic purposes in a Weberian society. Indeed, paradoxically, the very finality of such purposes proves to be their instrumental value as means to other “ultimate” ends. The gods of the economy must be worshipped so that they may be used. And no end is more ultimate than the process of such useful piety. Today, we seldom personify our goods and set up shrines to celebrate their divinity. (Though, sometimes, we do: we talk about “the Market” or “the Homeland” or corporations “Too Big to Fail” – as if these personae deserve our sacrifices. And we set up shrines, of a sort, to honor them.) But the force of a Weberian imagination agrees perfectly with Augustine’s on this point: if one makes death the horizon of one’s economy and declines to acknowledge the unity of the good communicated by that horizon, there are no other goods – besides the pluralistic avatars of human appetite – for the sake of which economic sacrifices can be made. Human finitude, conjoined to the inexhaustibility of human imagination and will, ensures that sacrifices are always being made. These can be devoted to many ends. And the ideal of endless growth mandates that sacrifice serve them all. Crucially, in the Weberian picture, since sacrifice can only ever be made for the determinate goods that human appetite values for itself, such sacrifices will inevitably take the form of giving up one good for the sake of another, different, good. Moreover, sacrifices will always be a response to limitations imposed upon the desires of the flesh – since only flesh can have or lose the partial things that the members of the earthy city imagine that they want. Therefore, sacrifice merely serves private interests. And the limitations of flesh communicate nothing of value. Nor does negotiating those limits lead to an acknowledgment of any common good. The picture of sacrifice in the earthly city that Augustine gives in civ. Dei 19.17 summarizes and distills the economic thinking that he had already examined – and criticized – on a much grander scale in the first five books of the De Civitate Dei contra Paganos. Those pages had been programmatically devoted to contesting the claim “that the many false gods … are to be worshipped for the advantage of this mortal life, and of terrestrial affairs” (civ. Dei 6 Preface, Dods). Civ. Dei 19.17 represents both a return – and a dramatic summary – of the argument of those earlier books, relative to the countervailing economic imagination of the wayfaring city. In theorizing the modern pluralistic marketplace, Weber also outlines the spirit in which Augustine’s earthly city makes sacrifices

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for moribund goods that nourish the appetites of mortals with nothing else to live for before their death. But the earthly city remains tone deaf to the sacral significance of its economic means.62 When we entrust our well-being to money, we act religiously. But, for the most part, we remain oblivious to the religious significance of our financialized economy.63 We entrust ourselves without believing and thereby act in bad faith. We assume that separating our economic goals from the means to those ends keeps us at a safe distance from socially endorsing any particular form of piety. As a result, maintaining this separation itself paradoxically takes on the significance of a religious task.64 But the more rigorously we enforce the separation, the more difficult it becomes to keep in mind the central religious insight of secularism itself: the media of economic exchange signify something distinct from themselves. The means easily become means to yet other means: we focus on getting from one to another. But the question of the religious

Max Weber claimed, in religious matters, to be “unmusical.” Radkau mentions the comment while calling its sentiment into question, cf. Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, 532. 63 Philip Goodchild gives the following diagnosis: “Money is regarded as the means, human flourishing as the end. It is in modern life that alienation is complete and the consciousness of humanity departs entirely from the conditions of its existence. It is in modern life, rather than religious life, where ideology is most fully instantiated. If modern economic life differs essentially from religious life, it does so not because it possesses a truer understanding of its conditions of existence or of practical efficacy. The essential difference lies in its lack of consciousness. … This book, on the theology of money, is therefore an anachronism: it is written to bring our collective faith back to consciousness,” Philip Goodchild, Theology of Money (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2009), xv–xvi. Goodchild suggests that our unconsciousness about the religious significance of modern economic life is real but not total. His point is that secularizing our economy has not given us a social space devoid of religion. It has given us an incognito public religion of the marketplace – what he calls “our collective faith” – mostly voided of thought about the ultimate meaning of our trust. In a sense, Augustine anticipates the possibility of an incognito religion manifested through the modern economy in his etymological definition of religio as being bound together, Augustine, “True Religion (De vera religione),” in On Christian Belief, trans. Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2005), lv.111. (Whether Augustine’s etymology of religio is, in fact, spurious matters little here.) Augustine’s concept of religion always implies a tie that binds – but the difference between true religion and false is that the former binds humans to God alone. False religion, on the other hand, ligatures human beings to counterfeit forces. Goodchild traces the counterfeiting power of credit in modern economic culture. I am grateful to David Henreckson for encouraging me to clarify this link between modern credit and Augustine’s concept of religion. 64 Cf. Goodchild, Theology of Money, 49–57. 62

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significance of this economic mediation recedes into the background. We live by a faith that declines to acknowledge its own character as faith. We lose sight of the end that remains quietly available in all of our means. Thus, Augustine goes on to describe in civ. Dei 19.17 how the members of the wayfaring city willingly play along with the laws and customs of the earthly city “if doing so does not impede religion” (my trans.) [si religionem … non impedit]. None of this is about forming a coalition between members of the earthly city and members of the wayfaring city in which both sides agree not to talk about religion. (In a certain sense, maybe all that the members of both cities ever talk about is religion – that is: how to direct the intention of worship – though, often enough in terms that seem only to concern everything else.) We are always negotiating ultimate loyalties through our proximate dealings with one another. It is rather, as Augustine sees it, a question of using occasions of peace to discern our common good together. Through this conversation, the wayfaring city “refers the earthly peace to the heavenly peace, which truly thus is peace” (civ. Dei 19.17, my trans.). It “uses the composition of wills” [utitur … voluntatum compositionem] to undermine the earthly city’s political conviction that its only final good is a constantly renegotiated compromise between those wills. From the perspective of the heavenly city, the members of the earthly city misunderstand what they really want. And that misunderstanding stems from misdirected trust. Trust is actually coded into the heart of economic life as credit (from credere).65 But credit can reflect trust in different things. When we simply trust others to extend our private power and satisfy our individual appetites, we use credit faithlessly. We refuse to entrust ourselves to one another. We idealize endless growth in the service of partial interests. That ideal will require taking sacrificial losses. And what we lose is more than just items we value: we also lose any claim to the common good. Thus our business goes mute on questions of the spirit.

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Credit, as Goodchild argues, is the soul of money: “Money therefore stands in the place of and represents credit. As the advance that is offered on the basis of credit, money, as the measure of prices, is essentially credit,” ibid., 99. A few pages later he adds: “As a promise, the power of money is subject to uncertainty, confidence, and even strategy. It may perhaps best be understood through theology rather than economics, for the absolute purchasing power of money consists in the power of a promise. It consists in credit,” ibid., 102. In his influential work on the economy of gift exchange, Mauss has noted that even barter economies – not just financial ones – depend upon credit, Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 1990), 35–6.

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However, credit can also express sacrificial trust in our common good. Augustine calls this faith. An economy of faith does not sacrifice for the sake of limitless private growth. Instead, it serves the collective well-being. And that well-being is realized through acknowledging the limits of the community’s corporate life. The recognition of those limits is a gesture of faith toward the unlimited good that is our life’s unity. The peace for which the wayfaring city hopes, and which it encounters now by faith, requires living as people who hope to become “a society most well-ordered and perfectly concordant [concordissima] enjoying God and mutually in God” (civ. Dei 19.17, my trans.). In the heavenly city, wills are united to one another as a community of multifaceted desire. They are not joined as parts to a whole. But they become joined without parts through the work of parting. Our economy is a marketplace of bits and pieces, parts and wholes – the things we trade and exchange. These become the media for joining human spirits, which do not have parts and which are joined into a unity without parts. How? Through the acknowledgment that everyday moments of parting signify one offering that unites different people in a universal community of sacrifice: that offering alone realizes our common good.

2 Unacknowledged Sacrifices

Sustaining Life In today’s ecologically untenable economy, sustainability seems crucial for the survival of market participants.1 And sustainability requires sacrifice. In particular, sustainability seems to come at the cost of economic growth. Groups and individuals must learn to accept greater limitations upon their desires in order to simply maintain the conditions of life for themselves and others. Even if we eventually make our peace with such limitations, we still tend to imagine that we would be better off if we could do without them. But (so the argument goes) better to live under greater – and more painful – constraints than to grow ourselves to death. Better to sacrifice the lesser good (a reduced power to satisfy our desires) in exchange for the greater one (having a life with desires to satisfy). Dramatic steps to increase the sustainability of our global marketplace are, of course, necessary. But there are different ways of framing the underlying motivation. And if we see economic sustainability as simply a means for ensuring that specific corporations endure for as long as possible at whatever cost necessary, limitless survival becomes a doppelägnger to the goal of endless growth. Both become ideals sacrificially devoted to partial ends. However, by organizing an economy around a calculus of limitless corporate survival, death comes to haunt our collective sense of value.

Cf. e.g., Kate Raworth’s economy of “enough,” Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Reprint ed. (Hartford, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018).

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Things are valuable simply insofar as they help to delay the ultimately inevitable. Exchanges that keep death in abeyance are worthwhile: those that do not are not. Death becomes the ultimate limitation imposed upon flesh, which we, together, resist for as long as possible. If we could resist it forever (at least in the collective), we would. In any case, sacrifice becomes the technique for maintaining that resistance. The point of economic life – in such a picture – is simply to keep it from ending while clinging to whatever quality of life can coexist with aggregate survival. Just as growth can seem to be an ideal end of economic life, so can limitless survival – or what we often call “sustainability.” Although the rhetoric of sustainability is frequently deployed today by ­economic and political progressives, the populist, nationalistic political movements that have swept Western democracies in recent years are largely driven by the economic goal of limitless tribal survival. Although the macroeconomic picture is complex,2 the basic ideas behind such movements are simple: immigrants – documented and undocumented – are taking away “our” jobs. Global political policies, including low tariffs conducive to free trade and the unfettered flow of capital, have led to the outsourcing of domestic production. “We” (e.g. America, Germany, Western Europe) are losing and “they” (e.g., China, Mexico, India, other developing countries) are winning. In order to sustain “our” industry, we must restrict ­immigration, raise tariffs, and impose restrictions on capital (like transnational mergers and acquisitions). Such steps may result in sacrificial losses to international industry and domestic consumers. But they will sustain “our” industry while retaining jobs for those who have held them in the past. The global economy has not eliminated the ancient logic of tribal ­sacrifice, made at the expense of neighboring clans. Now, we simply play out that drama on a global stage. Defining national insiders and outsiders is a zero-sum game in which each nation is trying to maximize the winnings for itself. The losses to “outsider” nations is just the cost of doing business in an economy that serves the ideal of limitless collective survival. But the economic ideal of sustainability often emerges as a sophisticated social psychology for distracting us from our fear of death. Simon Critchley has recently argued in The Book of Dead Philosophers: [W]hat defines human life in our corner of the planet at the present time is not just a fear of death, but an overwhelming terror of annihilation … We are led, Cf. e.g., Dani Rodrik, “Populism and the Economics of Globalization,” Journal of International Business Policy 1, no. 1 (2018): 1–22.

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on the one hand, to deny the fact of death and to run headlong into the watery pleasures of forgetfulness, intoxication and the mindless accumulation of money and possessions. On the other hand, the terror of annihilation leads us blindly into a belief in the magical forms of salvation … What we seem to seek is either the transitory consolation of momentary oblivion or a miraculous redemption in the afterlife.3

In the marketplace, distracted self-indulgence can look like a limitless mandate to grow. But countering that illusion can lead to a twin daydream, spawned by a similarly incognito religious imagination. Sustainability may transpose the religious hope for an eternal good into an economy that simply perpetuates the life of moribund flesh for as long as possible. Perhaps self-forgetful growth refuses to acknowledge death. And maybe surrealist survivalism keeps fear of the inevitable at bay. Growth and survival are, perhaps, twinned ideals of business that together embody a collective bad faith. They both sacrifice for partial ends – private appetites or the survival of particular corporate forms – rather than the unity of a collective good. Perhaps simple sustainability cannot provide a good economic goal – at least not on its own. After all, can survival be good if what survives is not? The fact that an unjust economic and political order manages to continue maintaining itself does not constitute a justification for it to continue doing so. Paradoxically, focusing on sustainability without examining the true worth of what is being sustained tends to corrupt it. Such an ideal conflates feasibility with worth. Strangely enough, the desire to simply live will undermine an organization’s fidelity to its own well-being – just as the desire to live at any cost to oneself or others will tend to undermine personal well-being. The sacrifices made to sustain such groups or people will compromise their identity by refusing to acknowledge their mortality. Ironically, treating limitless survival as the guiding purpose of business might make corporate life insufferable. Perhaps moving forward requires learning to acknowledge the common good of our mortal end. That would also mean refusing to turn death into a tool of unconditional survival. Economies face the question of sustainability in the first place because their members are incarnate in mortal flesh. Sometimes, people act as if everyone’s private organism were the only thing worth calling their body. They tend to think and behave like isolated consumers, united with others

Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), xv.

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only by mutual self-absorption. This, more or less, is the implicit corporate body image of Weberian citizens, whose economic motives were discussed in the previous chapter. However, there are many other ways in which people identify themselves with corporate reality. Sometimes, people recognize their bodies in the members of their family. They see themselves in one another. And they care for each other just as they look after themselves. Sometimes, humans are capable of regarding – and treating – those outside of their biological families with the same concern. They see their flesh in one another and provide for each other’s care. At other times, people recognize the business to which they belong as a corporation – and they allow such avatars to embody them. So, we dedicate vast tracts of our lives to companies. We cooperate with the people around us to form effective organizations. On still other occasions, humans imagine that their bodies encompass the extended political community to which they belong: the body politic. This can be a tribe or a state. Some may even be willing to die for the sake of such political identities. In expansive moments, we might recognize that our corporate identity includes every human being – not just those who belong to our particular community. That sense of embodiment could be extended even further to embrace the whole biosphere or the cosmos itself.4 Each of these bodies represents a different context for realizing mortality. But they also represent different levels at which we may refuse to identify ourselves: opportunities for extending or withholding solidarity. Thus, they offer different vantage points for seeing sacrifice as a response to the body’s mortality. One kind of sacrifice – that which makes limitless survival its aim – refuses to acknowledge the mortality of the corporate identities it supposedly serves. But, when death is seen as an offering – not simply a threat – each level of corporate identity invites

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s identification of Christ as the “Omega” affords one such cosmic image of universal incarnation: “Christ, principle of universal vitality because sprung up as man among men, put himself in the position (maintained ever since) to subdue under himself, to purify, to direct and superanimate the general ascent of consciousnesses into which he inserted himself. By a perennial act of communion and sublimation, he aggregates to himself the total psychism of the earth. And when he has gathered everything together and transformed everything, he will close in upon himself and his conquests, thereby rejoining, in a final gesture, the divine focus he has never left. Then, as St. Paul tells us, God shall be all in all … The universe fulfilling itself in a synthesis of centres in perfect conformity with the laws of union. God, the Centre of centres. In that final vision the Christian dogma culminates,” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 294; cf. 254–72, 291–9.

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the acknowledgment of a good beyond our shared flesh. (More on this possibility in Chapter 3.) Though the members of the earthly and heavenly cities may disagree about their good, they seem agreed on this: all good things in this life must come to an end. But even that modicum of agreement is not quite what it seems. Lives in the earthly city do not end (at a particular telos) as much as they simply stop (cease to be). Death points to nothing. Communicates nothing. Means nothing. It simply stops those who live from going on. Therefore, the goods provided by business – the things we buy and sell, earn and exchange – bear no significance beyond the lives that they support. And those lives are always simply stopping (­precisely because they never end anywhere). By contrast, the members of the other city see the end of life as an orienting good, harbored mysteriously within all of our means. Therefore, they see in the stuff of living a sacramental promise, which communicates undying divine life through the maintenance of mortal flesh. However, even within the earthly city there are different ways of imagining goods’ endlessness. Goods can be endless because the life that values them stops – or because it fails to stop. The indefinite span of mortal life makes goods endless just as surely as does life’s simple cessation. And Augustine exploits the difference between these two kinds of endlessness to divide the first five books of the civ. Dei from the second five. The first are focused on the members of the earthly city who see their goods ending in death (which is to say, stopping without an end). The second five are focused on the members of the earthly city who see immortal life as the indefinite extension of life in mortal flesh. Such economic participants try to use the death of those to whom their life is bound as an instrument for achieving their own immortality. But both commitments share the assumption that death is not – and cannot be – a good end. Moshe Halbertal’s recent account of sacrifice suggests that the nation– state is one contemporary collective that exploits sacrifices (ostensibly made for the sake of sustainability) in a way that renders the body making them incoherent. His account is organized around a central division between “sacrifice to” and “sacrifice for.” Halbertal identifies sacrifice to someone as the original, archaic orientation while sacrifice for something (or someone) becomes the dominant understanding of sacrifice in the contemporary milieu. Sacrifice to someone is directed toward a sacred source of transcendence beyond the one who offers it. Sacrifice for something – on the other hand – is generally a gesture in the service of

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self-transcendence.5 But the self that is being transcended remains ambiguous because it must identify (in some fashion) with the end to which it has made its self-sacrifice a means. Halbertal (understandably) worries that many perverse sacrifices have been inspired in recent centuries by the hopes of achieving self-transcendence through the nation–state.6 We sacrifice ourselves for the sake of the state in order to find ourselves again in the corporate body we take our sacrifices to serve. Halbertal’s analysis of “sacrifice for” illustrates my own interpretation of sacrifice as a tool for corporate survival. When we sacrifice for another in the service of self-transcendence, we make sacrifice into an instrument of our own survival in the corporate collective for the sake of which we accept losses to ourselves.7 Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–5. My own account does not map neatly onto Halbertal’s distinction – not least because Halbertal associates sacrifice to with “the religious sphere,” ibid., 2. He sharply separates this from sacrifice for, which ostensibly “involves different realms altogether – the political and moral spheres,” ibid., 4. Following Augustine, I see the political and moral spheres as endemically religious: ordered toward worship organized by one intention or another. Therefore, “sacrifice for” is a matter just as religious as “sacrifice to” – and, indeed, I would suggest that appearances to the contrary fuel exactly the perversions of sacrifice that Halbertal analyzes and associates with “sacrifice for.” Humans misunderstand the character of their sacrifices when they refuse to acknowledge their religious significance. Nevertheless, the distinction between “sacrifice for” and “sacrifice to” does suggest something akin to the distinction I make between sacrifice as a tool for survival or growth (sacrifice for) and sacrifice as an education in dying (sacrifice to), which finds its fulfillment in learning to acknowledge the good. 6 Halbertal observes: “The modern history of the state as the locus of the sacrificial quest is testimony to this form of perversion. In positing itself as a sacrificial stage and the genuine realm of noninstrumental action, the state threatens to exhaust and monopolize the realm of the transcendent. It thus becomes a false god, providing the loyal citizen a misdirected sense of redemption from his selfish cage,” ibid., 116. Halbertal’s worry about the violence of the nation state as a primary expression of sacrifice today resonates with Mary Condren’s argument in her unpublished dissertation, Mary Teresa Condren, “The Role of Sacrifice in the Construction of a Gendered System of Representation and Gendered Social Order” (Dissertation, Harvard, 1994). Condren sees in war – experienced as a malignant festival – a conspicuous expression of our sacrificial impulses and a reminder that these are far from historical artifacts. By drawing on René Girard and Nancy Jay – along with Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and others – Condren links her reading of sacrifice with critical feminist analysis. 7 Halbertal concludes the body of his book with the following lines: “There should be a realm beyond such a sacrificial stage [i.e., the stage defined by the nation-state] that sets a higher, limiting standard for the political association. Different traditions will articulate that realm in different ways, from human rights that ought to limit state interests, to the image of God that all humans are supposed to share regardless of their associational affinities. A political body that lacks such a category directs the 5

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And yet, when we acknowledge that the self surviving its own transcendence might be corrupt, we also admit that our sacrifices for the sake of something else might finally be intolerable. To confess as much allows us to begin learning how to acknowledge our good through death, not in spite of it. And, perhaps, acknowledging that good will not be, finally, a matter of sacrificing for something or someone else. Maybe it will move us beyond the realm of gains and losses, ownership and dispossession. Maybe it will be a matter of offering ourselves to one who can acknowledge both that we are good and that we are bound to die.

Girard, Jay, and the Logic of Disingenuous Communion Many contemporary accounts of sacrifice are deeply indebted to René Girard.8 His account of mimetic violence suggests that social interactions are pervasively structured by the human proclivity to imitate: “[T]here is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behaviour that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation.”9 Even what we love, Girard claims, we are taught to love. Others show us what we want by creating desire in us, not by revealing to us something we already had it at heart to love: “Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object. The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject, not only in regard to such secondary matters as style and opinions but also, and more essentially, in regard to desires.”10 For Girard, the rival does more than alert the subject to a pre-existing desirability, which would be reflected first in the object itself and – only then – in the rival’s desire for it. Rather, Girard suggests that the rival creates the

sacrificial urge to an unworthy cause. An absolute commitment to an unworthy cause is the modern form of the old problem of idolatry,” Halbertal, On Sacrifice, 113. Of course, having a “higher” source of validation for one’s sacrificial motivations hardly ensures that one will avoid idolatry. Indeed, a defining characteristic of sacrificial deception is providing “higher” legitimation for a disordered intention. 8 For an intimate collection of scholarly testimonials celebrating the scope and magnitude of Girard’s influence, cf. Goodhart, Sandor, Jorgen Jorgensen, Tom Ryba and James G. Williams, eds. For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009). 9 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 7. 10 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 145 (emphasis original).

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object’s desirability (for the subject) by desiring it. After all, the rival’s own desire (presumably) must have been learned in the same way: by noticing what someone else desired, then imitating that desire.11 Girard summarizes this line of thinking: “To untie the knot of desire, we have only to concede that everything begins in rivalry for the object.”12 Girard traces mimetic desire-creation back to pre-human forms of life – while also insisting that humans uniquely express this impulse.13 For him, mimesis constitutes desire. Recognizing goodness is produced by imitation. Imitation is not – as the Platonists, for instance, would suggest – the response to a prior recognition of something good.14 On Girard’s picture the ultimate origin of desire must remain shrouded in mystery: After all, who could have first learned how to desire if learning desire is intrinsically mimetic? But, granting such an origin, Girard would have us imagine that all other desires follow the pattern of mimetic desire-creation.

Girard tellingly acknowledges, “As for the [mimetic] model, no matter how self-sufficient he may appear, he invariable assumes the role of disciple, either in this context or another. From all indications, only the role of disciple is truly essential – it is this role that must be invoked to define the basic human condition,” ibid., 147. It should be added: one is always a disciple of desire before one is a model of it. No one, thus – in principle – could originate desire. It follows that Girard can only explain the transmission of desire – how it is taught and learned – by leaving unexplained and inexplicable how it originates. 12 Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 294. Elsewhere, he adds: “We must understand that desire itself is essentially mimetic, directed toward an object desired by the model,” Violence and the Sacred, 146. 13 Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 8. 14 Though Girard criticizes Plato for repressing the importance that possession plays in imitation, Plato does so precisely because he would think of the good as wholly without jealousy: one in which possession betokens no more – and no less – than reflective acknowledgment of a prior good. For Plato, mimesis is always an active likening to the good, enabled by the good’s generation of all things in greatest likeness to itself, cf. Plato, “Timaeus,” in Plato – Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. Donald Zeyl (Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 29e–30b. These considerations make me sympathetic to John Milbank’s worry that, “given Girard’s identification of culture with a mimetic desire, and apparent denial of the possibility of an objective desire or a benign eros, it is difficult to see what ‘the Kingdom’ [of God] could really amount to, other than the negative gesture of refusal of desire, along with all cultural difference,” Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 398. In an earlier article, Milbank similarly argues that “the logic of Girard’s analyses of desire supposes that the price for the foundation of a totally new form of non-violent community is a kind of self-abnegating denaturation, where all self-expressive attainments and erotic yearnings must be foregone. Is this not a new variant of positivist altruism which demands a surrendering altogether of the poisoned world of subjectivity to something peaceful at the price of its impersonality?” “Stories of Sacrifice,” Modern Theology 12, no. 1 (1996): 50. 11

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We have an inexorable, magnetic urge to possess the goods that we make desirable for each other. Yet, when we cannot obtain them, we let desire transmute into fractious envy. The tensions inherent in such polarities generate and maintain the magnetic fields within which we find ourselves attracted to and repelled from one another.15 We are drawn together because we recognize in each other reflections of goodness and beauty (ostensibly produced by mimesis) which we desire to share. But we do not simply want an object that another has caused us to desire. We come to desire the power to create value (i.e. desirability) itself – a power that seems to represent value in the creator – and we want it for ourselves.16 We are pushed away from one another because we recognize that another’s excellence – their goods and their power to make them good for us – is not our own. We do not merely desire to recognize and acknowledge goodness in another. We want to have it for ourselves. And we imagine that having and holding such excellence is something more, something different, than beholding a goodness that holds our desire. Therefore, Girard argues that Plato decisively identifies the centrality of mimesis for human life while paradigmatically ignoring its “acquisitive” character.17 Contrary to Plato, for Girard, we want to become alike by seizing the difference between us for ourselves. Thus, our very mimetic desire paradoxically repels us from each other. We simultaneously lack and admire one another’s goodness, especially others’ power to make things seem good. Thus, the very thing that draws us together ultimately forces us apart. The magnetic field of mimetic desire guarantees that human relationships will always remain volatile. We resent our own inadequacy to get what others have made us want, which, in turn, inspires us to eliminate our weakness by effacing those relative to whom we seem inadequate. When individuals live together in a community, the instability of these processes of eclipsed admiration get linked together in complex and

Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 26–7; 294–8; Violence and the Sacred, 145–8. 16 Girard suggests that our jealousy of one another takes objects as mediating occasions, but these objects eventually slip from sight and never serve as the ultimate ends of our contests with one another, cf. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 26. And yet, mimetic desire, as Girard describes it, begins with three terms: a desirable object, a mimetic subject, and a desiring rival, cf. Violence and the Sacred, 145. Girard goes on to describe what I am calling a desire for the power of value creation as the desire for “being” or “superior being,” ibid., 146. 17 Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 8, 15–18. 15

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unpredictable ways. And these links threaten to breed chaos in the community that harbors them. For Girard, mimetic desire – which originates from us – binds us to malign forces beyond our control, which threaten to erupt in overwhelming violence. Religion negotiates this threat of violence through sacrifice: The sacred consists of all those forces whose dominance over man increases or seems to increase in proportion to man’s effort to master them. Tempests, forest fires, and plagues, among other phenomena may be classified as sacred. Far outranking these, however, though in a far less obvious manner, stands human violence – violence seen as something exterior to man and henceforth as a part of all the other outside forces that threaten mankind. Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred.18

The obscurity of acquisitive mimesis is our own. And yet, this desire to own the goodness that we see in others overwhelms us. Far from containing the violence of its desire to have what it beholds, our desire becomes beholden to violence. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard comments: “The sacred is violence, but if religious man worships violence it is only insofar as the worship of violence is supposed to bring peace; religion is entirely concerned with peace, but the means it has of bringing it about are never free of sacrificial violence.”19 So holiness gets wedded to chaos. The scapegoat magnetically centers the energies at play in the community’s diffuse network of contested relationships by sacrificially refocusing them. As she does so, the scapegoat displaces the mimetic significance of the community’s other relationships onto the significance of her own connection with the entire community: “Mimeticism is the original source of all man’s troubles, desires, and rivalries, his tragic and grotesque misunderstandings, the source of all disorder and therefore equally of all order through the mediation of scapegoats. These victims are the spontaneous agents of reconciliation, since, in the final paroxysm of mimeticism, they unite in opposition to themselves those who were organized in opposition to each other by the effects of a previous weaker mimeticism.”20 Thus, the scapegoat establishes the polarity of desire.21 Violence and the Sacred, 31. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 32. 20 The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 165; cf. Violence and the Sacred, 148. 21 Girard claims: “The sacred is the sum of human assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis,” Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 42. 18

19

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She becomes the focal point around which the entire community gathers to destroy. Indeed, the members’ acrimonious relationships with one another – the fruit of envy – gets refocused and amplified in their shared animosity toward the one who draws them to herself as she is singled out. Their mutual loneliness only amplifies their collective lust for blood.22 Made miserable by one another, we would intensify our wretchedness to claim revenge. So we stick together by destroying the one who drew us together in antagonistic relationship. Lynch mobs represent the default state of society. In order to contain their chaos, society must go to extreme sacrificial lengths.23 The sacrifice of the scapegoat is solemnly dedicated to the survival of the community.24 But the “peace” that this group enjoys as the fruit of its scapegoat’s death is a cold-war ceasefire in a contest of unending acrimony. Eventually, Girard suggests, the cold war will break out again in a “hot spot” of local conflict, which perpetuates the appearance of change even as everything remains the same. The scapegoat will reappear to serve the function that she has always served: to maintain the terms of an untenable suspension of hostilities. And, for Girard, Jesus is both the scapegoat who personifies all scapegoats in himself and the scapegoat to end all scapegoats.25 Cf. ibid., 24–7. Girard remarks: “It is possible to think that numerous human communities have disintegrated under the pressure of a violence that never led to the mechanism I have just described. But the observation of religious systems forces us to conclude (1) that the mimetic crisis always occurs, (2) that the banding together of all against a single victim is the normal resolution at the level of culture, and (3) that it is furthermore the normative resolution, because all the rules of culture stem from it,” Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 27. Nevertheless, sacrifice does not always involve scapegoats directly. Much as the deactivated pathogens within some vaccinations immunize the patient against the full-blown disease, Girard argues that religious ritual inoculates the community against graver manifestations of violence: “There is every reason to believe that the minor catharsis of the sacrificial act is derived from that major catharsis circumscribed by collective murder. … It goes without saying that the rite has its violent aspects, but these always involve a lesser violence, proffered as a bulwark against a far more virulent violence,” Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 102–3 (emphasis original). Thus, the specter of the scapegoat haunts every sacrificial ritual. 24 Girard argues: “Mimetic desire is simply a term more comprehensive than violence for religious pollution. As the catalyst for the sacrificial crisis, it would eventually destroy the entire community if the surrogate victim were not at hand to halt the process and the ritualized mimesis were not at hand to keep the conflictual mimesis from beginning afresh,” Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 148. 25 Girard claims, “[Christians] tend to see in the trial of Jesus, in the crowd’s intervention, in the Crucifixion, an incomparable event in itself, as a world event, whereas the Gospels say that Jesus is in the same position as all past, present, and future victims,” Girard, Scapegoat, 126. 22

23

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Christ’s revelation of our violence fully represents his goodness and, by doing so, exhausts it. On Girard’s account, Jesus’ goodness simply is his capacity to exhaust our violence by disclosing that violence for what it truly is. Christ vanishes into the freedom he proclaims, which is the lucidity of self-knowledge: the power to know ourselves as we are. If our ignorance of what we do when we scapegoat is the problem, its solution is understanding.26 We must know what we do, and we must know ourselves as those who do it. Presumably, this knowledge will set us free to finally stop making sacrifices: “It is a question of forcing people who from time immemorial have been imprisoned by mythological representations of persecution to accept certain decisive truths that would prevent them from making their own victims sacred and thereby free them.”27 But is knowledge of our violence really enough to make us stop? Could human beings possibly imagine that the future, which vindicates the scapegoat to end all scapegoats, might include us? How could we, who are so pervasively entangled in the seductions of jealous devotion, fail to be casualties of Christ’s vindication? Given Girard’s systematic demonstration of our complicity in worshipping “the gods of violence,” how could our knowledge of this complicity possibly exempt us from it? A final passage suggests that Girard is aware of the internal tension between his mimetic theory of sacrifice and his interpretation of a divine father/son duo as the revelation that discredits all such perversions. Near the conclusion of Scapegoat, Girard says: To confound the world, therefore, and show that it is reasonable and just to believe in Jesus as sent by the Father and returning to the Father after the Passion (in other words as a divinity that shares nothing in common with those of violence), the Spirit is necessary in history to work to disintegrate the world and gradually discredit all the gods of violence. It even appears to discredit Christ in that the Christian Trinity, through the fault of Christian and non-Christian alike, is compromised in the violence of the sacred. In reality, the world’s lack of belief is perpetuated and reinforced only because the historical process is not yet complete, thus creating the illusion of a Jesus demystified by the progress of knowledge and eliminated with the other gods by history. History need only progress some more and the Gospel will be verified.28

Various people will make spurious appeals to the God of Jesus Christ in order to validate their violence. But Girard suggests more than that. Ibid., 110–1. Ibid., 165. 28 Ibid., 207 (emphasis mine). 26

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(After all, perhaps it is possible to exclude oneself from aligning with such people.) And Girard hopes that history will do more than teach us to see through these claims. (Maybe it will. Maybe it will not.) Rather, Girard claims that the Spirit’s own revelation of our mimetic violence will (seem to) implicate the Father and Son in the perverse rivalry they reveal – just insofar as they fail to fall silent. Girard insinuates that we must be on the side of history to look at the Trinity and see anything besides a sublimated mythology of mimetic violence. But how could we assure ourselves of a place in that history, given our culture’s universal infection by violence? Does Girard’s Spirit have anything to give us besides disembodied selfknowledge? Perhaps seeing our way to acknowledgment will take more than the progressive illumination of our collective unconscious. Perhaps, in some sense, we need to be identified with the offering that the Son makes in order to recognize our own violence – done in the name of corporate sustainability – and to be absolved of it. Perhaps parting with our violence will require a body in which to offer the sacrifice of confession. In summary, Girard imagines scapegoating as the indispensable tool for resolving the social problem of group survival. Scapegoating serves our sacrificial purposes by defining the bodies in which we choose to live. This self-definition trades on the violent elimination of select members of our social bodies and the disingenuous reconstitution of the remainder, devoted to carrying on without our victims. Though we may grieve them, their loss was the necessary price of our life. The power of our desire takes on a life of its own. And we hallow its name by calling it our father – the source of life, whom we propitiate by sacrifice. By showing our violence for what it is, Jesus gives us the power to stop offering sacrifice. The story of this father’s son is the story of Girard’s scapegoat. Their Spirit effectively dissolves Father and Son both into the self-knowledge of ourselves that they provide. But is such self-knowledge – afforded by the Spirit of a sacrificing Father and his scapegoated Son – really free of the violence it shows in us? Because he misunderstands the gendered logic of scapegoating, Girard – so Nancy Jay implies – remains a kind of unwitting accessory to the violence that he diagnoses.29 Indeed, Jay has ingeniously argued that sacrifice is an inherently patriarchal phenomenon. Her account draws on a sociology of religion that shares much in common with Girard’s approach. For Jay, offering sacrifice to a divine Father in and through

29

Ibid., 130–3.

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a divine Son would probably function as a sublimated validation of the patriarchal group dynamics that – she argues – lie at the heart of sacrifice’s purpose. Like Girard, Jay notices how sacrifice constitutes organic groups through a process of division and consolidation: Sacrifice joins people together in community, and, conversely, it separates them from defilement, disease, and other dangers. This opposition of joining and separating is so widespread that one of the clearest indications that a ritual killing is properly sacrifice is that it is part of a religious system of this kind. Joining and separating aspects of sacrifice have received different names … The traditional terms ‘communion’ and ‘expiation’ recognize a similar distinction. The logic of sacrifice I want to describe is grounded in this opposition.30

For Girard, the scapegoat is separated out from the community. And that separation galvanizes a previously discordant aggregate into a (relatively) harmonious crowd, organized by its murderous opposition to the scapegoat. Thus, Jay’s observation that division and recollection are at the center of the phenomenon of sacrifice tracks closely with Girard’s claims about scapegoating. Like Girard, Jay draws attention to the insidious forces driving the processes of sacrificial division and constitution. Nevertheless, Jay and Girard identify these powers differently. While Girard sees possessive imitation as the root of all sacrificial evils, Jay identifies a different origin: the desire to protect the processes of generation from the threat of mortality. Thus, Jay suggests: The twofold movement of sacrifice, integration and differentiation, communion and expiation, is beautifully suited for identifying and maintaining patrilineal descent. Sacrifice can expiate, get rid of, the consequences of having been born of woman (along with countless other dangers) and at the same time integrate the pure and eternal patrilineage. Sacrificially constituted descent, incorporating women’s mortal children into an ‘eternal’ (enduring through generations) kin group, in which membership is recognized by participation in sacrificial ritual, not merely by birth, enables a patrilineal group to transcend mortality in the same process in which it transcends birth. In this sense, sacrifice is doubly a remedy for having been born of woman.31

Sacrifice provides the social body a life without death or birth. This deathlessness, Jay suggests, is the source of its profound appeal. It promises immortality to mortal bodies by incorporating them into a collective Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 17. 31 Ibid., 40. Cf. also, ibid., 30–2, 39. 30

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shorn of its maternal links to birth – and therefore, also, from the only life that mothers bring forth: lives destined to die. Sacrifice, in Jay’s account (just as in Girard’s) turns out to be a brilliant group survival strategy. But, for both thinkers, the strategy remains violently disingenuous. Scapegoats cast a lingering shadow over the collectives they constitute. Thus, Jay uses scare quotes to discredit the eternity or immortality that sacrifice achieves. Instead, all sacrifice can really promise is corporate longevity, which trades on the death of its members. Through sacrifice, women are necessarily forgotten. They are the life-bearers who cannot help but signal death to those whom they bear. Therefore, they must be occluded by those who refuse to be reminded of their death. This casts male priests in the role of mediators of exclusion, trafficking in religious amnesia. Given the mythology that links women to mortal life and men to its immortal surrogate, their priesthood is necessarily gendered. Their male bodies represent immortality to all who are willing to join the community constituted by their sacrifice. Both Jay and Girard give compelling critiques of sacrifice. Both show how sacrificial economy can serve as a powerful survival technique for groups confronted with their own mortality. Together, they suggest how a pact with death props up the appearances of limitless corporate “sustainability.” Each thinker also insinuates that envy is a vice at the heart of the human condition. For Girard, envy is endemic to mimesis. For Jay, the ersatz immortality that male priests provide only imitates the authentic female power to communicate life: an imitation, one might suspect, born of jealousy and a desire to possess a life that is only ever received from mothers. Compelling though it is, Jay’s account also raises crucial questions that it does not answer. What role, after all, do men play – and should they play – in mortal life-giving? Can men and women acknowledge each other as life-givers in a fashion that reflects irreducibly different contributions to a shared economy of embodied life? Can mortal life give access to true eternity – without scare quotes? If so, what role does sacrifice play in offering that access?

Rethinking Corporate Sources Girard and Jay both point out that we fail to recognize the goodness of our bodies’ limits when we destroy the scapegoat in order to guarantee our corporate survival. We amputate limbs, insisting all the while that

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these losses – no matter how painful, no matter how loudly we lament them – are the necessary cost of survival. And, in the end, what good is it to be good if doing so costs your community its life – and its ability to continue being as good as it is able to be, under the circumstances? So goes the reasoning. The knowledge of our collective unconscious that Girard proposes as the antidote to sacrificial rivalry is the insight that the stranger’s goodness is essential to defining our own bodies: the communities and corporations in which we invest our self-identity and worth. Therefore, the apparent stranger is never our stranger. In a salient passage Cavell remarks: “I notice, looking back over the skeptical recital, that it contains the following, so far unexamined, feature: that the moment at which I singled out my stranger was the moment at which I also singled out myself.”32 Girard, in effect, treats sacrifice as the violence by which we make ourselves into strangers who embody us through their losses. Scapegoating thus represents, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a harrowing literalization of what Cavell calls “the skeptical recital.” But who must we become – what body must we incarnate – in order to live up to such a recognition? Girard leaves us no corporate form in which to repent, to confess, to acknowledge – by grieving and remembering – those from whom we have been parted. We have defined our bodies – individually and corporately – through the sacrifices of mimetic violence. But a disembodied self-knowledge of that fact can make no difference, in the end, to the bodies dismembered by the demonic sacrifices that Girard and Jay so cannily diagnose. But, contrary to Girard, Jesus will not offer us a deus ex machina: a god who enters at history’s finale from beyond the horizon of the scapegoating mechanism in order to relieve us of our place in that machine.33 Perhaps, instead, Christ shows us ourselves in the face of our scapegoat. Stanley Cavell, reworking a line from Wittgenstein, remarks: “The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul.”34 Maybe Jesus reminds us that our common good is inseparable

Cavell, Claim of Reason, 429. Milbank notes the adventitious quality of a deus ex machina in Girard’s Christology, cf. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 400. 34 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 430. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorism, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul,” Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, Rev. 4th ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), II.iv (25). 32

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from those we refuse to acknowledge. When we withhold acknowledgment from those to whom our lives our linked, we become incapable of acknowledging ourselves. And the scapegoat is just one particularly poignant representative of the many ways in which we turn corporate life into an instrument of partial desire and mutilated survival. The problem here is not that we part with people and parts of ourselves that we had once been one with. Such partings are part of life. They are the stuff of sacrificial economy. But everything turns on how and why we part with them. When we do so to keep on living, no matter what the cost or what we say about ourselves by doing so, we sometimes part with the very things and people that give value to the corporate life we are trying to preserve. We destroy what we would save. Such is the drama of scapegoating – but also of more mundane bargains we make with human limitation. At other times, we part with things or people for the sake of their well-being and ours. But when we frame those partings as losses, not offerings, we shut down the possibility of acknowledging the good beyond a life of parting that those partings express. We mourn dishonestly. We grieve what is not ours to grieve. And, in either case, we withhold acknowledgment. We fail to recognize who and what we are parting with. And, in that refusal – by specifying our stranger and our losses – we become strangers to ourselves. Perhaps Jesus shows us this by inviting us to see our bodies in his: broken by us, but also for us. Maybe what humans see in the crucified human body is their blindness to the actual character of mortal embodiment: its character as an offering of compassion and solidarity, not a negotiated settlement with loss and death. Christ affords those who have refused his body in their strangers’ bodies a chance to stop living in unacknowledged flesh.35 To die with eyes wide open to the good inscribed in mortal flesh, even where humans have attempted to gainsay it – perhaps this is a picture of sacrificial wisdom. And maybe that wisdom would free us to die in a manner that turns death into an acknowledgment of the good in the mortal economies where we live. According to traditional Christology, instead of constituting a body for himself, the eternal Son assumes one. But this assumption is wholly without presumption. He assumes his body as his own by receiving it as an offering from his mother. Jay’s critique of Christian sacrifice overlooks the fact that the 35

Peter Dula gives a closely observed Christology of forgiveness, which elaborates the possibility I am entertaining here at Peter Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213–22.

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eternal Son’s – male – body is mediated to him by his mother. She, like her son (and, strangely enough, because of him) lacks any complicity with the compromising and compromised bodies upon which the rest of us find ourselves dependent. Therefore, this mother offers her son a body like her own: one that is mortal but not moribund. Their bodies share our vulnerability to death – though not our compromises with it. Therefore, this son and mother will remain exposed to the economy that other humans construct by their perverse survival tactics. This vulnerability bears witness to the perversity of attempting to keep our lives going by refusing to acknowledge the bodies of those to whom our lives are actually bound: the bodies, perhaps, that bind us to them. If Jay is right about the sociology of sacrifice, then the gendering of sacrificial economies will tend to leave us with less-than-memorable bodies. Female bodies are forgotten for the sake of constructing a corporate male fiction, which deserves to be remembered only in order to be deconstructed. But maybe Christ embodies remembrance differently. His male body acknowledges the maternal origin of his mortal life by elevating that life – in the glory of its female embodiment – to share in his own immortality.36 But Christ’s assumption of his mother’s mortality does not deny it, any more than the assumption of flesh by the eternal Word denies it. Christ will not give up his mother in order to constitute (the semblance of) his own everlasting male body. Rather, he will gather, through his sacrifice, a community of women and men who ceaselessly acknowledge – as members of his body – his mother as their own. This community will learn, through sacrifice, to remember its own mortality and to recognize the life-givers who confer it – both human and divine. Instead of systematically consigning women to serve as thankless mementos of a mortality humans would rather forget, Christ’s male body represents both women and men on the model of his mother: as those whose fruitful fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum to the Father makes mortal life into the means of an immortal sacrifice.37 “Let it be with me according to Such, at least, is implied by the doctrine of Mary’s assumption in the Western Catholic Church and the doctrine of her dormition in the Eastern Christian churches. Given its thematic foci, it is remarkable that Jay’s book contains no references to Mary – much less a sustained treatment of the role she plays in Christian theology and piety. Especially in a book featuring an entire chapter on the link between a sacrificial doctrine of the Eucharist and the male priesthood, the absence is conspicuous. 37 Luce Irigaray offers an exploration of this possibility, as embodied by Christian female mystics, in a chapter entitled “La Mystérique,” cf. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 191–202. Here, in a striking phrase, Irigaray calls Christ “[t]hat most female of men, the Son,” ibid., 199. 36

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your word” (Luke 1:38, NRSV) expresses a willing readiness to welcome the good into one’s life, irrespective of the form that it might take. Doing so can transform the life we call our own. Such is an offering of constant openheartedness. It is consent that evokes a transparent availability to an unanticipated good. That recollection looks like a “yes” to the body one has been given (and to the bodies of those to whom one has been given) instead of an attempt to construct more durable – and duplicitous – avatars. To live by such consent is to die well. Suppose, as Girard and Jay would have us believe, that instead of assuming the bodies we have been given and living in them honestly, we perpetually substitute other bodies for ours by excluding parts in order to identify with a durable – but disingenuous – remainder. Perhaps Christ, the son, suspends the finality of our own fragmentary bodies in his one body, broken for us: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself,” Jesus had claimed (John 12:32, NRSV). He will not break or exclude the bodies of others in order to devise his own survival. Rather, he will allow his body to be broken in order to withhold the final word from the violence of our corporate self-constructions – to retain a memory of us as totally available to his Father’s goodness (a goodness that is also his own – and his mother’s). Christ will offer this memory in various ways, but especially by inviting others to remember him: “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in memory of me” (Luke 22:19b, NRSV). Perhaps being remembered in that flesh offers relief from the lies by which we remember ourselves. Especially, perhaps, that lie by which we define the boundaries of our bodies by excluding his.38

38

The Baptist theologian S. Mark Heim has recently elaborated a Girardian soteriology in S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). The title of his eighth chapter is telling: “Substitute for Sacrifice: Living with an Empty Cross.” Christ departs in order to leave behind the reminder of our obligation not to condone mimetic violence. But Christ leaves us no body in which to give this new self-knowledge flesh and blood. Thus, one important theological corollary of Heim’s perspective is that the Eucharist comes to represent the replacement of Christ’s body and blood with bread and wine: “Here on this table, bread and wine are to be continually substituted for victims, substituted for any, and all, of us. At this table, the sacrifice stops,” ibid., 236 (emphasis mine). Christ is here thought of as giving humans food instead of himself in order to enable us to see that sacrifice is a moral mistake. Christ gives us no (Eucharistic) body in which to repent of our perversions of sacrifice. But this again leaves us with the specter of disembodied self-knowledge – and a community unable to recognize the meaning of its sacrifices as anything other than perversions.

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From such a perspective, the Eucharist is offered as the event of contemplative availability through which the human community grieves, remembers, and confesses the character of its body. These three practices undermine the perversion of our corporate identities and the sacrifices that foster such distortion. First: grief. To grieve those from whom we have been parted acknowledges that their passing shatters us. We are not quite ourselves in the face of those who have died. We mourn because we are no longer with someone whose life continues to be linked to ours. Our corporate identity cannot simply persist as it always has in the face of such casualties. It must tarry with its wounds. Second, and intimately related to the first: memory. Remembering those who have died acknowledges that the members of the group who remain are who they are only because of those who are absent. Our partings linger on with us virtually. And we admit it by remembering. Third: confessing. We confess by admitting that we are never quite ourselves. Confession voices two things: first, that we are not whole because our flesh is always fragmented by parting; second, that our losses – often enough – are self-inflicted. But what flesh can give voice to such grief, memory, and confession? Christ offers his body to others as the place for these. À la Cavell, Christ thereby makes himself the neighbor whom we acknowledge that we have refused to acknowledge. And he does this in order to recollect, in his own broken human body, the truth of our estranged remainders. (“Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” (Matt. 25:44, NRSV)) Perhaps being seen in such flesh releases us from defining ourselves through our strangers.

Attempting a Partial Incarnation Chapter 1 of this book outlines how the sacrifices Augustine considers in civ. Dei 19.17ff. give a compelling diagnosis of the sacrificial logic that plays out in contemporary Weberian economies, which are designed to maintain a marketplace for exchanging irreducibly pluralistic goods. And Augustine’s critique in Book 19 recapitulates his analysis of Roman religion in Books 1–5 of the civ. Dei: “[T]he first five were directed against those who think we should worship the gods for the sake of the blessings of this life” (civ. Dei 10.32, Dods). In that picture, sacrifice wrests the pluralistic market commodities of a moribund life from the spiritual powerbrokers who control them. But there are also other reasons that humans might sacrifice to various gods. The second set of five

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books in civ. Dei are directed “against those who think that the cult of the gods [cultum deorum] should be kept up with a view to the future life after death” (civ. Dei 10.32, Bettenson). As Augustine emphasizes throughout these books, the pagan cultus is saturated with sacrifice. But, in civ. Dei 6–10, sacrifice is used to transcend human mortality – not simply to satisfy private appetites for as long as they last. René Girard’s and Nancy Jay’s accounts of scapegoating provide contemporary terms for reinterpreting Augustine’s analysis of sacrifice to demons “with a view to the life which is to come after death” (civ. Dei 6.1, Bettenson).39 In particular, Augustine’s critique of hermetic theurgy in civ. Dei 8.23–4 provides an illuminating – if non-obvious – point of comparison. Speculatively reconstructing the ancient rite of animating statues can tell us something about the fraudulent ideal of corporate immortality. The means for achieving such an incarnation, on Augustine’s account, is sacrifice to “the pagan gods” [deos ­gentium … colendos esse] (civ. Dei 6.1) – also known as demons [daimonii] (cf. civ. Dei 8.24; 10.1). Augustine suggests that humans sacrifice to demons when they proffer the possession of their bodies to powers who will make of their mortality an occasion for self-definition. By killing off unwanted parts, a body’s mortality can be exploited to define its perduring identity in terms of the “healthy” corporate remainder. The body’s mortality thereby becomes an occasion for reorganizing itself in terms of a select subset of the original organism’s parts, which come to represent the ongoing life of the body. The victims necessary to maintain the perduring life of the corporate form can be remembered as heroic victims whose sacrifice was 39

Even where Augustine is not using the Latin term sacrificium daemoniis, I use the term “sacrifice to demons” to single out a definitive aspect of the pagan cultus, which Augustine relentlessly criticizes in civ. Dei. Here in civ. Dei 6.1, Augustine refers more generally to the worship of pagan deities [deos gentium … colendus]. But Augustine emphasizes elsewhere that such deities are worshiped through sacrifice. For example, in a crucial passage from civ. Dei 8.24 (discussed below), Augustine quotes St. Paul to identify the sacrifices of the nations with sacrifices to demons: “[T]hose things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons,” (Dods modified) [quae immolant gentes, daemoniis immolant]. Here, immolare is a synonym for sacrificare. Elsewhere, early in civ. Dei, Augustine will refer to Christianity’s proscription of pagan worship as specifically ruling out “abominable sacrifices to demons,” [nefandis sacrificiis servire daemonibus] civ. Dei 2.2 (Bettenson). Later, he will criticize the Platonists for saying, against their better judgment, “that divine honour by worship and sacrifice should be rendered even to the demons,” [daemonibus divinos honores sacrorum et sacrificiorum deferendos esse] civ. Dei 10.1 (Dods). Thus, I use the term “sacrifice to demons” even where Augustine employs a more flexible range of semantic cognates.

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necessary for maintaining the life of the community from which they were parted. But there is a grim necessity in their heroism. They had to be sacrificed for the sake of their community’s survival. And this makes even the grief that remembers them self-serving. They simply had to go: so we grieve our loss, rather than their offering. (Perhaps the hyperbole with which Americans tend to celebrate their service members reflects a half-conscious admission of such disingenuous grief.) Admittedly, certain pages of Augustine’s discussion of Roman paganism in the first ten books of civ. Dei read like extended excursions into archaic superstition, for the most part happily forgotten (or left to historians of late antiquity). In such passages, Augustine’s own thinking veers uncomfortably close to the religious milieu it (mostly) seems dedicated to debunking. Augustine can easily come off as giving too much credit to (and, thus, investing too much credibility in) arcane pagan theology. One conspicuous example is civ. Dei 8.23–24, which is dedicated to an involved discussion of the sacrificial theology of Hermes Trismegistus.40 Here, Augustine examines such unfamiliar themes as the theurgic animation of statues, anthropic theogony, and the claim that Egypt is “the temple of the whole world” [mundi totius templum] (civ. Dei 8.23, Dods). All of this is liable to strike many as bizarre fantasy. But such things are not as far from contemporary life as they at first appear. In civ. Dei 8.23–24, Augustine suggests that demonic sacrifice consigns a body for possession in exchange for that body’s ersatz immortality. The insinuation trades on seeing the idol that mediates communion between the demon and its worshippers as an icon of the worshipper’s own body. Thus: [Hermes] asserts that visible and tangible images [simulacra] are, as it were, only the bodies of the gods, and that there dwell in them certain spirits, which have been invited to come into them, and which have power to inflict harm, or 40

For an excellent introduction to the pseudonymous Hermes Trismegistus, which focuses on how the cultural ferment of Egypt, Greece, and Rome shaped the formation of the literature that took his name, cf. Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Fowden suggests that the way Augustine uses the Hermetic document in civ. Dei 8.23–4 is a bit of historical overreach. It is not, as Augustine alleges, a pagan concession to Christianity. Instead, it is a eulogy for a people on the brink of cultural catastrophe, cf. ibid., 38–44. Admittedly, Augustine creatively appropriates Hermetic quotes to characterize the relationship between Christianity and paganism in his own milieu. But he also acknowledges a tone of grief in the writing and admits that “[Hermes] makes no express mention of Christianity by name,” civ. Dei 8.23 (Bettenson).

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to fulfil the desires of those by whom divine honours and services are rendered to them. To unite [copulare], therefore, by a certain art, those invisible spirits to visible and material things, so as to make, as it were, animated bodies, dedicated and given up to those spirits who inhabit them, – this, he says, is to make gods, adding that humans have received this great and wonderful power. (civ. Dei 8.23, Dods modified)

Late antique pagan religious devotion featured practices that attempted to mystically couple [copulare] divine life with simulacra of human ingenuity.41 It was this religious practice of animating statues, as Hermes describes it, that Augustine reinterprets as sacrifice to demons, made in the hope of immortal life. Such sacrifice trades on two key assumptions. First, worshippers sacramentally represent themselves through the statues that they make available to the gods as bodies.42 Second, the worshipper sacrifices the statue – and, by implication, herself – by making it available to a divine power as the site of its incarnation. The cultic logic does not merely suggest that a worshipper begins her sacrifice with a lifeless body (a statue), which belongs to her, then subsequently sacrifices what is hers by allowing it to be repossessed by the god as a focal point of its manifestation. The logic is more subtle and profound: the statue is “born” already possessing divine life.43 But as the statue of the worshipper, sacrificed to the god, the birth of the animated statue reveals what has always been the case: the worshipper, represented in her statue, has always been animated by divine life.44 The sacrifice simply declares the mystery that

For a sympathetic account of this cultus, cf. Algis Uzdavinys, “Animation of Statues in Ancient Civilizations and Neoplatonism,” in Late Antique Epistemology: Other Ways to Truth, ed. Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Stephen R. L. Clark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Uzdavinys summarizes the character of such religious activity: “As the supreme God is the fashioner, begetter, irradiator, or – to coin a phrase – imaginator of the gods, so man (though indirectly) is the maker of the gods who dwell in temples, or rather, of their material bodies, which then need to be consecrated, sacralized, permeated by the divine and living Soul, or pneuma, and thus be ‘animated’ in the sacramental liturgical sense, and so made a means of theurgic communication with the divine,” ibid., 119. 42 Ibid., 118, 136–8. 43 Ibid., 129–34. 44 Hermes was regarded as a representation of Egyptian wisdom. Algis Uzdavinys observes of this cultic wisdom, “For the ancient Egyptians, the world as a whole was animated from the beginning; therefore any secondary ‘animation’ is tantamount to re-establishing or reactivating the otherwise hidden theurgic relationship between an image (the visible shape of a hieroglyph) and a certain spiritual will or 41

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precedes it. The sacrifice of the animated statue sacramentally performs a reality that the worshipper acknowledges for herself: her body hosts divine life. What is hers has always been the god’s. The sacrifice simply recognizes this reality. Such sacrifices are offerings: gestures of acknowledgment, made without gain or loss, of a divine reality at one with the one who acknowledges them. However, the force of Augustine’s polemic suggests that such an offering, when directed to one god among others, refuses to make the essential acknowledgment of our common good, hidden in the divine unity: “[The angels] do not wish us to worship them as our gods, but to join them in worshipping their God and ours; nor to sacrifice to them, but, together with them, to become a sacrifice to God” [nec eis sacrificemus, sed cum ipsis sacrificium simus deo] (civ. Dei 10.25, Dods; cf. civ. Dei 10.3). Refusing to recognize one common good through sacrifice perverts the offering by proffering the worshiper – through the medium of an idol – as the site of a daemonic incarnation. Such an incarnation defines a body for the possession of a spiritual partisan. And it is the partiality of such sacrifices that turns them into perverse offerings.

power, between a corporeal vehicle (such as the royal throne, the sacred barque, or any representation carved or painted according to the strict rules of symbolic iconography) and its archetypal principle,” ibid., 128. David Lorton has argued that the birthing of animated statues was more characteristic of Mesopotamian religiosity than Egyptian; the former occluded the process of manufacture, while the latter celebrated it, “The Theology of Cult Statues in Ancient Egypt,” in Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Creation of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, ed. Michael B. Dick (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1998), 173. Therefore, animating Egyptian statues was less analogous to bringing divine life into the world than it was to bringing life back into a dead body, ibid., 133; cf. 150. Thus, Lorton highlights “a transvaluation of the manufacturing process, through the ritual, to a new and higher purpose, namely the quickening of the statue,” ibid., 157 (emphasis original); cf. 173. At first, this interpretation seems to suggest that Egyptian theurgists brought divine life into a human artifact that lacked it. However, the underlying logic here, too, aims at acknowledging the manifestation of a virtual life already latent in the statue. Theurgists did not begin with something inert that needed to be imbued with life. (Indeed, even a corpse is only dead because it is the body of a creature that had been living.) They started with something whose life needed to be returned through the acknowledgment of the divine force already tacitly present within it. This is precisely why there had to be an explicit acknowledgment that crafting the statue was not an act of violence against the god whose statue it was, cf. 155–6. If the god were not already virtually present in the statue under construction, the specter of possible violence against the god would not even need to be disavowed.

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Augustine’s analysis suggests that there are three distinct, but interrelated, terms involved in the animation of statues: the god (or demon), the worshipper, and the idol (or body), employed by the worshipper as the sacrificial medium of communion. The body, which is provided to the demon as an abode, joins the mortal worshipper to the malignantly immortal power she worships. The communion (Augustine talks about “society” [societas] (civ. Dei 8.24; cf. 19.24)) between the worshipper and worshipped is achieved through sacrifice. In civ. Dei 8.24, Augustine quotes St. Paul to link demonic sacrifice [daemoniis immolant] together with the mystical coupling of sacral powers to iconic bodies, which consolidates a society between pagan worshipers and those they worship. Here, Augustine claims: “But unclean spirits, associated through that wicked art with these same idols [­simulacris … conligati], have miserably taken captive the souls of their worshippers, by bringing them down into fellowship with themselves [in suam societatem]. Whence the apostle [Paul] says, ‘We know that an idol is nothing, but those things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons, and not to God; and I would not [want it to be the case that you] should have fellowship with demons [quae immolant gentes, daemoniis immolant, et non deo; nolo vos socios fieri daemoniorum]’ [1 Cor. 10:19–20]” (civ. Dei 8.24, Dods modified). The worshipper sacrifices a body to the demon by giving it up – as a representation of herself – for divine use. The demon employs the body it appropriates as a mortal instrument of its own immortality. And because the appropriated body is mortal, it is susceptible to dismemberment. Such bodies are vulnerable to parting in ways that demonic bodies are not.45 Paradoxically, their susceptibility to disintegration lends mortal bodies an “exchange value” that immortal bodies lack. Death provides immortal beings a potency of self-expression that their immortal bodies are strangely missing. Augustine reminds his readers that there is no difference in the natures of angels and demons. The only difference between them lies in their will. And, although a faulty will can change an angel’s relation to its body, it cannot change the nature of that body – nor its significance in the economy to which it belongs. The immortal bodies

45

Augustine does imagine that demons have bodies – which he calls corpora aeria, cf. civ. Dei 7.16.

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of demons belong, against their possessors’ will, to the sacrificial economy of heaven: That the contrary propensities in good and bad angels have arisen, not from a difference in their nature and origin … but from a difference in their wills and desires, it is impossible to doubt. While some stedfastly continued in that which was the common good of all, namely, in God Himself, and in His eternity, truth, and love; others, being enamoured rather of their own power, as if they could be their own good, lapsed to this private good of their own, from that higher and beatific good which was common to all. … [S]o, when we say that it is a fault [vitium] of the angelic creature that it does not adhere to God, we hereby most plainly declare that it pertained to its nature to adhere to God [eius naturae ut deo adhaereat convenire]. (civ. Dei 12.1, Dods modified)

Indeed, adherence to God still befits the nature of the fallen angels – even after the fall. But theirs is now an unacknowledged adhesion. It is this refusal to acknowledge their own natural adhesion to God that Augustine describes as “a fault … [that] injures the nature, and is consequently contrary to the nature” [omne autem uitium naturae nocet ac per hoc contra naturam est] (civ. Dei 12.1, Dods).46 Such denied acknowledgment vitiates the good nature that is still the fallen angels’. The immortal bodies of demons testify deathlessly to their (rejected) sacrificial vocation – but they do so against their possessors’ will. Perhaps Augustine has this in mind when he proposes the memorable caricature of the demons as permanent captives of their own desires, always suspended upside down: [T]hese mediators, by whose interposition things human and divine are to be harmonized [divinis humana iunguntur], have an eternal body in common with the gods, and a vicious soul in common with humans [corpus aeternum, vitiosum … animum], – as if the religion by which these demons are

46

Augustine gives two examples to illustrate his point: “[W]hen we say that blindness is a defect of the eyes, we prove that sight belongs to the nature of the eyes; and when we say that deafness is a defect of the ears, hearing is thereby proved to belong to their nature,” civ. Dei 12.1 (Dods). The nature of blind eyes is to see – just as the nature of deaf ears is to hear – even though particular eyes and ears may not be able to realize that nature. So, too, the nature of all angels is to adhere to God – even if some of the angels refuse to acknowledge that adherence. Thus, when Augustine says: “The cause, therefore, of the blessedness of the good [angels] is adherence to God. And so the cause of the others’ misery will be found in the contrary, that is, in their not adhering to God,” civ. Dei 12.1 (Dods), I take him to mean that the fallen angels are miserable because they have refused their own natures, which adhere to God.

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to unite [iungi] gods and humans were a bodily, and not a spiritual matter. What wickedness, then, or punishment has suspended these false and deceitful mediators, as it were head downwards, so that their inferior part, their body, is linked to the gods above, and their superior part, the soul, bound to humans beneath; united to the celestial gods by the part that serves, and miserable, together with the inhabitants of earth, by the part that rules?… [T]hey are as it were suspended and bound head downwards, having the slave, the body, in common with the gods, the master, the soul, in common with miserable humans, – their inferior part exalted, their superior part depressed [parte inferiore exaltati, superiore deiecti]. And therefore, if any one supposes that, because they are not subject, like terrestrial animals, to the separation of soul and body by death, they therefore resemble the gods in their eternity, their body must not be considered a chariot of an eternal triumph, but rather the chain of an eternal punishment [aeternum vinculum damnatorum]. (civ. Dei 9.9, Dods modified)

Here, with mischievous glee, Augustine accepts the picture of demonic mediation given by the theurgists and puts it to ironic use. Augustine’s cunning suggestion is not merely that the demons live with bodies permanently doomed to lead, rather than follow, the souls to which they are attached. Nor is it simply that the demons threaten to inflict their own condition on those who worship them. Augustine also suggests that the demons will experience the permanent adhesion of their sempiternal bodies to God as torture. This punishment ceaselessly confutes their refusal of acknowledgment. In order to find relief from such punishment, the demons seek respite from their inescapably sacrificial bodies. And they do so by trying to co-opt the mortal bodies of humans who refuse to see death as an offering that acknowledges God as their common good. Insofar as they are able to identify themselves with such bodies, demons can exploit their host’s mortality as the expression of their own successful refusal of divine acknowledgment. To die without acknowledging one’s incarnate life as an offering would seem to give one’s refusal of the economy of sacrifice the final word. And this is precisely the word denied to the demons in their own bodies. But, Augustine would have us imagine, as immortal partisans, demons will do what they can to express their insistent refusal of a common good that is not their own through the bodies of others. Thus, the self-expression of demonic immortality takes the form of living in a body that is constantly defining itself in terms of the deaths of its members. That living death incarnates (as much as possible) the demons’ refusal to offer sacrificial recognition of their – and their worshipper’s – one God.

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Such a living death is precisely how corporations seek limitless survival through strategic loss management.47 The partiality of the sacramental acknowledgment implied by sacrifice to demons – the implication that sacrifice recognizes a good that is not at one with itself and not shared in cosmopolitan fellowship by all members of the human ­community – is reproduced in the unacknowledged partiality of collectives that are constituted by scapegoating. In the first case, the worshipper taps into a power that partially manifests divine power and makes it her own, thereby mirroring the partiality of the power she channels. In the second case, the community assumes that what is good for it is different from what is good for the whole human (or even the whole living) community. Indeed, its constitution through vitiating exclusion trades on that assumption. In either case, the exploitation of mortality to withhold sacrificial acknowledgment from the goodness of unparting unity lies at the heart of sacrifice to demons. In both cases, sacrifice fosters the perennial refusal of one offering made to God alone in favor of a sacrifice made to forces that preserve the partial (and ostensibly immortal) constitution of one group among others. In both cases, what remains missing is the direction of the sacrificial work of parting toward the acknowledgment of a universal good (whether that of the entire human community or that of the whole spiritual community). Augustine’s critique of sacrificial partiality – deploying the work of parting only to acknowledge partial goods – trades on a crafty contrast 47

Channon Ross aptly glosses the passage cited above about the “upside-down demons” by suggesting that ancient Roman entertainment afforded fans a virtualreality glimpse of the demonic perspective: “The Coliseum simulated the topsy-turvy existence of the demons by elevating the spectators above the death and suffering occurring on the amphitheater floor. From his privileged seat, the spectator looked down upon the mortality of the victims as if he were gazing [at] it all as an immortal demon. Through an objectifying gaze, he consumed the excitement and psychosexual allure of the spectacular violence. The unfolding drama of death ignited his lusts and most wicked desires; such desires were enflamed when a lion ripped a man’s arm from his body or when a gladiator delivered the deathblow. By means of a consuming gaze, he experienced life as a topsy-turvy demon, immortal yet rapt in the passions of the soul,” Chanon Ross, Gifts Glittering and Poisoned: Spectacle, Empire, and Metaphysics (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 59. Ross’s account suggests how such games constituted a demonic collective through scapegoating. The rabid fans prepared a body for the demon whose perspective they were invited to enjoy by the imaginative separation of their own enthusiastic social collective from the dismembered bodies of those who constituted it. For a discussion of how the economy of the games situated wealthy patrons and their municipal public in a dialectical relationship of interdependence – and how Augustine responded to this situation in his preaching, cf. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 61–75, 116–19, 353–4.

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between the animated bodies of the gods and the body of God, incarnate in the Church as Jesus Christ. Thus, Augustine remarks: “After this captivity, therefore, in which humans were held by malign demons, the house of God is being built in all the earth” (civ. Dei 8.24, Dods modified). This is a shrewd borrowing of scriptural imagery for his own polemical purposes. It echoes Augustine’s comment earlier in the same chapter: “For a house is being built to the Lord in all the earth, even the city of God, which is the holy Church, after that captivity in which demons held captive those people who, through faith in God, became living stones in the house [cf. 1 Pet. 2:5]” (civ. Dei 8.24, Dods modified). Augustine figuratively interprets the Jewish exile into Babylon as the perverse enslavement of worshippers to the deities of Roman religion, whom their worshippers embody through theurgy. In keeping with this image, Augustine construes Christ’s body, the Church, as the temple that the repatriated Jewish people would construct after their liberation. And he imagines the members of Christ’s body as those who comprise this temple. A contrast is implied between animated statues, which sacramentally communicate the theurgic mysteries of Hermetic religion, and “living stones,” which make the whole world into a sanctuary for offering sacrifice to God alone. Augustine demeans what he sees as the parochialism of pagan religion by playing it off against the catholicity of the Church. In order to make his point, Augustine quotes the gnomic claim of Hermes: “Egypt is an image of heaven, or, more truly, a translation and descent of all things which are ordered and transacted there … it is, in truth, if we may say so … the temple of the whole world” (civ. Dei 8.23, Dods). Augustine insinuates that this claim smacks of parochial self-importance, not cosmopolitan solicitude. While Hermes may suggest that Egypt is the world’s temple (implying, perhaps, that the rest of the universe is not), Augustine will claim that Christ makes, through his church, the whole world into a temple, in which sacrifice is offered to God alone as the common good of all life.48 Augustine will also imply that Hermes’ regret about the eclipse of Egyptian piety stems from the power of Christ’s religion to globally undermine every pagan cultus in favor of the catholic sacrifice offered by the Church, which “is being built in all the earth” [aedificatur … in omni terra] (civ. Dei 8.24, Dods). Thus, by employing a complex web of 48

In an influential article on Augustine’s sacrificial imagination, Joseph Lécuyer has observed: “One should then say also that the Catholic Church is a true temple, insofar as it is the body of Christ and it offers the true sacrifice, which goes back to God,” Joseph Lécuyer, “Le Sacrifice selon Saint Augustin,” in Augustinus Magister (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1954), 911 (my trans.).

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scriptural images and marshalling those creatively within the context of withering cultural criticism, Augustine exacts from Hermes’ grief a backhanded confession of Christianity’s victory over paganism. To link Girard’s and Jay’s account of perverse social self-definition with Augustine’s theology of sacrifice to demons implies that humans are not always the masters of the manifest evils in which they become complicit. There are malign forces at work in our politics and economy that exceed our collective powers of self-determination. This is not to say that specific corporations, nation–states, NGOs, religious organizations, or other collective social identities might be helpfully construed as demons. Such bodies are not, themselves, truly immortal (an essential condition for being a demon, as Augustine imagines such things) (cf. civ. Dei 9.9). Rather, Augustine implies that we might fruitfully regard certain corporate configurations as representing bodies made available for the malignant expression of powers that exceed them. And such society is achieved at the cost of mutilated corporate forms.49 Demonic communion contrasts with the sacrifice that Augustine canvasses and critiques in the first five books of the City. Those who make 49

Sometimes political theorists (especially those professing to be “realists”) are tempted to treat violence as an inevitable constituent of economic life – and not simply as the perversion of its peace. Goodchild seems to accept such a perspective in the closing remarks of Theology of Money: “True redemption occurs only through new creation. If the basis for cooperation with harmful spectral forces is not yet present, then it remains to be created. True forgiveness does not consist in the separation of the sin from the sinner or in the separation of the sinner from the spiritual power of sin. Sin, sinner, and spectral power are not conceivable without one another. That which God has joined cannot be put asunder. Instead, true forgiveness consists in cooperation with sin, sinner, and spectral power to create good out of evil. Forgiveness is not a matter of sovereign decision. It is not something that already lies within our power. Forgiveness is a matter of divine creation. It consists in creating or discovering a new basis for cooperation. It is a challenge to be achieved. Redemption from debt therefore consists in the creation of a new basis for cooperation with debt. It consists in a new ordering of time, attention, and devotion alongside debt so that the renewal of life in all of its fullness is once more possible,” Goodchild, Theology of Money, 261. But is fullness of life really compatible with the creation of a good that has been synthesized out of evil? (And how ought we to imagine the “once more” to which we take ourselves to be returning?) What Goodchild envisions as cooperation with “spectral power” may be quite close to Augustine’s vision of colluding with demons. Elsewhere, when describing his own suggestions for transforming economic structure, Goodchild suggests that bloody sacrifice will never be eliminated from our economic life and, thus, neither will “the intrinsic violence that makes the entire system possible,” ibid., 250. But to regard violence as inherent to an economic system is also to regard that system as irredeemable. For Augustine, creation is not – and never has been – a cooperation between the powers of evil and the power of God. Instead, creation has always been God’s affirmation of goodness – and the invitation to echo that acknowledgment through sacrifice.

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sacrifice in exchange for the goods of mortal life use others manipulatively to get what they need and want. This is the style of religion that Augustine ridicules in civ. Dei 19.17. But something different is going on in civ. Dei 8.23–4 – something that focuses the thematic concerns Augustine develops throughout books 6–10. In the case of sacrifices made for mortal goods, that for which sacrifice is made remains sharply distinct from the sacrifice itself, since one is exchanged for the other. Worshipper and worshipped remain clearly different, locked into an economy of duplicitous admiration and fraudulent remuneration. But the more profound – and more diabolical – mystery that Augustine criticizes in civ. Dei 8.23–4 is an aspiration toward demonic co-inherence in human flesh. By giving up parts that we think we can do without, our social forms often consolidate their sustainability at the cost of refusing to acknowledge members who belong. The “creative destruction” of the scapegoat is a particularly virulent form that this refused acknowledgment can take. We place a partial, provisional immortality above mortal solidarity that lives and dies for the common good. And that is precisely what worries Augustine about sacrifice to demons. Thus, he notes: “For although humans made gods, it did not follow that they who made them were not held captive by them, when, by worshipping them, they were drawn into fellowship [societatem] with them, – into the fellowship not of stolid idols [idolorum stolidorum], but of cunning demons” [versutorum daemoniorum] (civ. Dei 8.24, Dods modified). On the one hand, mortal lives seek to be immortalized through calculated loss. On the other, immortal powers seek relief from their insufferable embodiment by identifying themselves with the mortal bodies of those who premise their association on the mutual refusal to recognize the limits of its sustainability. The parties to this fellowship use one another to achieve their own desires. And eviscerated corporate identities become the sacrament of communion uniting them. Augustine’s account of sacrifice to demons in the hope of obtaining immortal life plays out the economic logic behind the ideal of limitless tribal survival. The violence of animating statues lies in the intention to represent oneself as a partisan of fractious forces seeking to fabricate everlasting life out of loss and death – instead of representing oneself as a sacrificial emissary of a universal good.50 Seeking limitless life for 50

Elizabeth Klein notes, “The secretive nature of demonic religion also reflects the true intent of the devil, which is to privatize and thus fragment praise,” Augustine’s Theology of Angels (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 70. Secrets always define insiders and outsiders. And religious secrets define in-groups and out-groups through sacrifice.

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particular social forms today manifests a parallel violence. No matter how ragged the corporate form becomes, we continue to do what we must to survive in them – rather than respecting their limits and letting them go when their lives are no longer contributing to the collective wellbeing of the broader human community. We become partisans of a partial remainder. Of course, most people today do not call the depersonalized causes that their groups exist to serve demons. (Nor do they typically recognize that there might be covert spiritual forces at work in the bureaucratically managed “mechanisms” of social life.) But it is easier to host such spiritual forces than it is to recognize them for what they really are. That is precisely why Augustine’s rhetorical strategy in the first ten books of the civ. Dei is so devastating – and enduringly compelling.51 The recent sex abuse crises in the Catholic Church exemplify the economic logic of malignant sacrifices made for the sake of tribal corporate survival. In 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury investigation documented the systematic suppression by the Catholic Church’s hierarchy of sex crimes committed by its priests. Drawing on thousands of diocesan records, the report provided detailed documentation of how Church leaders collectively silenced the victims of childhood sex crimes.52 On the analysis of the situation implied by an Augustinian account of demonic sacrifice, these children were turned into human sacrifices for the sake of preserving the institutions of the Church in their current form. As the report shows, the goal of these cover-ups was frequently to mitigate risks to the social and financial capital of the Church. Those in positions of authority explicitly attempted to limit the reputational costs of public scandal and the financial exposure of diocesan assets to legal liability.53 The desire for limitless survival is the underlying logic driving such sacrifices. It is a logic willing to impose sacrificial losses upon some of the community’s most vulnerable members in order to prevent sacrificial losses to the rest of the community. The 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report made several specific policy recommendations for increasing accountability. Among these measures was the suggestion that criminal statutes of limitations for sex crimes For a provocative interpretation of how departments of “human resources” can deploy spirituality to turn employees into willingly complicit victims of what amounts to demonic sacrifice, cf. Richard H. Roberts, “Contemplation and the ‘Performative Absolute’: Submission and Identity in Managerial Modernity,” Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion 9, no. 1 (2012): 17–19. 52 “Report of the Fortieth Statewide Investigating Grand Jury” (Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: Office of Attorney General, 2018). 53 Cf. e.g., ibid., 70, 115, 205–6, 290. 51

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against minors be eliminated and that a “window” be opened for victims to file new charges in cases where the civic statutes of limitations had expired.54 However, such changes have been strenuously resisted on the grounds that they would expose the Church and its insurers to unacceptable liability. However, such responses risk perpetuating the same economic ideal that motivated the original cover ups: a willingness to impose sacrificial losses upon past victims as the cost of maintaining institutional “sustainability” in the present and future. From the perspective of an Augustinian economy of sacrifice, such a posture is unconscionable. The Church, as a community called to represent the universal economy of sacrifice against its demonic permutations, must be willing to accept whatever partings are necessary to bring justice and show compassion to past victims and prevent the sacrifice of future victims – irrespective of the institutional cost of doing so. If the consequences include bankrupt dioceses, shuttered parishes, and defunct social programs, so be it. Such are the offerings of compassion that acknowledge a common good in the face of violence. Various kinds of institutional discontinuity in the present and future may be the partings necessary to express compassion. And that witness alone expresses the value of the Church’s life. The Church’s witness is not best expressed by seeking to maintain the institutional continuity of its present form. Rather, it is best expressed by its own willingness to offer its life, even to the point of death, in representing a universal community marked by openhearted attention to all – especially the most vulnerable. Testifying to that community requires learning how to die well. Parting with collective attachments to valuable programs, beautiful institutions, and beloved social forms is a way of offering true sacrifice. The work of parting thereby becomes a gesture of mourning, compassion, and solidarity. Bodies are inherently partial. Thus, there is nothing intrinsically problematic about parting with parts of them to preserve our well-being. Everything hinges on how and why we part: with whom and under what conditions. However, the integrity of a group is never a good unto itself. It is always a partial good: even if the parts (seem to) make a whole. If, as discussed in Chapter 1, the common good is an impartial unity – not an avatar of pluralistic appetite – it cannot be represented by any body, no matter how sustainable. Our corporate forms can offer us the means of acknowledging our common good. (And the final three chapters of this book are dedicated to exploring how.) But when we try to make our 54

Ibid., 7–8.

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corporate forms represent the common good, the work of parting will always threaten our well-being – never express it. Then, simple sustainability becomes the highest social virtue. And losses that threaten our collective life seem as if they must be accepted, no matter how much they compromise us. Death comes to look like a fate that is always worse than corruption. Our social bodies appear to be worth preserving for as long as possible – no matter how mutilated. After all, they have no good to witness beyond themselves. And so we never let go of claiming the partial remainder as our own. Under such conditions, we are cut off from remembering and grieving how our partings recognize our common good. The modern sociology of scapegoating and the ancient philosophy of sacrificing to demons for immortal life provide complementary vantage points on the economic ideal of limitless tribal survival. This ideal says that it is more important to survive – no matter how compromised the corporate form that does so – than it is to keep the parts one cannot live well without, even if that means the social body dies. However, Girard and Jay offer no relief from this ideal. Their analyses can only provide disembodied self-knowledge of our misguided desire for limitless life in the body. Simply renouncing sacrifice provides us no freedom from the corporate identities in which our violence has constrained us to live. Augustine suggests instead that Jesus Christ fleshes out sacrificial selfknowledge. He does so by offering humans his body as the corporate identity in which to confess who we really are by remembering and grieving our partings for what they really are. As Christ’s ecclesial body, it is the calling of the church to make that offering universal.55 55

My primary critique of Girard – namely, that he gives us self-knowledge without indicating the body in which we could conceivably confess such knowledge – parallels, in certain respects, John Milbank’s critique of Girard’s Christology, cf. Theology and Social Theory, 398–402. (For a more extended critical interpretation of Girard by Milbank, cf. “Stories of Sacrifice,” esp. pp. 46–54.) Milbank asks: “[I]f Jesus suffered perfectly, or if he alone really refused a dominating violence, then how do we know this, how does it ‘come through to us’?.... [T]he attribution of ‘a final perfection’…must be meant to call our attention to, and to reinforce, a discovery in the ‘shape’ of Jesus’s life and death, of the type of an exemplary practice which we can imitate and which can form the context for our lives lived in common, so that we can call ourselves ‘the body of Christ,’” Theology and Social Theory, 399. Milbank is primarily focused here on a “shape” or “idiom” (cf. ibid., 401.) that we appropriate by imitating Christ, our exemplar. But, perhaps the primary question to ask of Girard is how we might belong to any body uninfected by mimetic jealousy. Thus, following Augustine, the primary focus falls less on imitating Christ as an exemplar whose life reflects a refusal of violence and more on becoming Christ through incorporation into his body, in order to confess the truth about the bodies whom our jealousy has disfigured. Perhaps that confession embodies an acknowledgment of our good.

3 Sacrificial Acknowledgment

Accepting the End in the Means If neither endless growth nor limitless survival provide adequate ideals for orienting economic life, what does? Endless growth fails to acknowledge the limits of desire imposed by the common good. Limitless survival fails to acknowledge the limits of corporate life directed toward its common good. Both are shadowed by sacrificial loss and death. And both reflect failures of acknowledgment. Reorienting economic life requires learning how to recognize the common good through the limits of our lives and desires. We make that acknowledgment through sacrifice. This chapter discusses how an economy might do so. Stanley Cavell observes: “What we forgot, when we deified reason, was not that reason is incompatible with feeling, but that knowledge requires acknowledgment. (The withdrawals and approaches of God can be looked upon as tracing the history of our attempts to overtake and absorb acknowledgment by knowledge; God would be the name of that impossibility.)”1 Participants in an economy suffering the withdrawal of God decline to admit that sacrifice requires acknowledgment of the good that one shares in common with other mortals.2 An economy that fails

Cavell, “Avoidance of Love,” 319. For one example of social analysis that foregrounds knowledge while allowing the role of acknowledgment to slip into the background, consider Durkheim’s ecclesiology: “Religious beliefs proper are always shared by a definite group that professes them and that practices the corresponding rites. Not only are they individually accepted by all members of that group, but they also belong to the group and unify it. The individuals who comprise the group feel joined to one another by the fact of common

1 2

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to see itself as an exercise in acknowledgment will give rise to the following illusion: we always know (or always could know, in principle) what we have to give up in order to get what we want. (Of course, we will not always be able to get what we want. We will not always be able to sustain the growth of our power to satisfy our desires. We will not always be able, even, to keep on maintaining ourselves. But we will always be able to imagine the terms on which our means are failing us.) What we want seems not to require our acknowledgment. What we want is simply given. And it takes the form of our values, drives, habits, freedom, flesh, or even unending life. Sacrifice in such an economy becomes the executed outcome of a logical deliberation between two (or more) incompatible goods. Thus, anyone knows how to offer sacrifice who knows which instrumental goods to give up in order to get better ones. Acknowledging sacrifice – by contrast – requires offering ourselves in recognition of a good that we cannot negotiate – indeed, of one that is not even ours to give up. (No more than it had ever been ours to claim.)3 faith. A society whose members are united because they imagine the sacred world and its relations with the profane world in the same way, and because they translate this common representation into identical practices, is what is called a Church. In history we do not find religion without Church. … [W]herever we observe religious life, it has a definite group as its basis,” Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 41. What slides into the background of an account of society oriented around shared concepts, categories, and representations is the economic significance of the flesh. Incarnation, conversely, always raises the question of whether and how one will acknowledge one’s solitude. Can Durkheim’s dialectical account of the social and the individual (cf. ibid., 446–8) fully acknowledge the solitude of the members of a community? For a contrasting account of the religious significance of economic life, which foregrounds the role of the flesh, cf. Eric Santner, The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Santner’s account raises different questions. With an economy of flesh now running (as Santner appears to suppose) only on the theological fumes of defunct religious communities, how does one acknowledge the flesh’s good? Is it simply the self-gratifying frisson of an ultimately unintelligible eroticism? What good does flesh bespeak? And what does that good communicate about the singularity of the members of an economy? Does it ultimately leave them lonely and isolated from one another by their flesh? 3 Jean-Luc Marion characterizes sacrifice in the following terms: “Sacrifice gives the gift back to the givenness from which it proceeds, by returning it to the very return that originally constitutes it. Sacrifice does not separate itself from the gift but dwells in it totally. It manifests this by returning to the gift its givenness because it repeats the gift on the basis of its origin,” Jean-Luc Marion, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice,” in The Reason of the Gift trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Charlottesville, VA; London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 83. However, for reasons outlined in the introduction of this book, I do not follow Marion (or Milbank) in identifying sacrifice as a type of gift.

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Rowan Williams links the problem of sacrificial economy to the politics of Augustine’s two cities: So we arrive at the paradox that the only reliable political leader, the only ruler who can be guaranteed to safeguard authentically political values (order, equity, and the nurture of souls in these things) is the man who is, at the end of the day, indifferent to their survival in the relative shapes of the existing order, because he knows them to be safeguarded at the level of God’s eternal and immutable providence, vindicated in the eternal civitas dei. Politics and the art of government take on the Socratic colouring of a discipline of dying; and only so do they avoid the corruption of the civitas terrena, the anti-city, the realm of what Bathory aptly calls ‘anti-politics,’ in which value and unity rest on essentially divisive and contingent factors and yet are bitterly and unscrupulously fought for.4

What Williams here calls a “Socratic … discipline of dying” means mindfully living with one’s end by learning to see one’s life as an offering. Indeed, what Williams says about politics really amounts to an observation about economic life, too (a point consistent with William’s critical engagement with Hannah Arendt elsewhere in the same article5). An economy is only well-ordered when those who participate in it, and especially those who play a large role in directing it, live with their end constantly in sight. This entails being mindful of the ends of others. To live thus requires learning how to die well by acknowledging our common good. And learning to die well is a way of living. Perhaps, in fact, it is the only way of living well.6 As discussed in Chapter 1, Augustine distinguishes the divine city from the earthly city on the basis of living by faith (or not). One city is learning how to die without fear by entrusting the good of its life to others in a body that it will offer for all. The members of this city keep faith with the common good of their mortal end. The members of the other city live out of fear that each one’s good remains indistinguishable from a body whose loss will separate it irrevocably from all others. And yet, sacrifice gets offered here. Everyone lives in the saeculum, where these Williams, “Politics and the Soul,” 67. Cf. ibid., 55–7, 64, 68–9. 6 Yves de Montcheuil points out (citing Augustine) that seeing sacrifice as a benign responsibility requires appreciating the connection between sacrifice and communion with God, cf. Yves de Montcheuil, “L’unité du Sacrifice et du Sacrament dans l’Eucharistie,” in Mélanges théologiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946), 62–3. Though Montcheuil’s insight is an important one, he seems to suggest that there is nothing really to suffer in sacrifice, save the illusions imposed by sin, cf. ibid., 65–6, 70. But such a view risks dismissing death and parting as if these could simply be seen through, not only borne out. 4 5

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two different orientations to life in the flesh share the same economy. Therefore, Augustine says that the wayfaring city and the earthly city belong together. Living with one’s end in sight requires discerning the link between the conclusion of one’s life and its value. Death, generally, does not seem good. Even if the death of someone else benefits you, it is difficult to imagine how your death could be good for you. Is there any connection between your good and your mortal end? If these are simply opposites, then one can define one’s good in terms of avoiding death. If death seems unequivocally bad, survival looks unequivocally good. The economic imperatives of desperate sustainability draw their power from this opposition. Yet, if death is evil, that fact will shadow life’s joy with fear. Can a life’s duration really be good if its finish is bound to be bad? If death cannot be a good end, then its malign threat will haunt each moment of life. Conversely, to fully embrace one’s life as good, one cannot live in fear of death. Such fear will always betray a corruption – either of oneself or of one’s sense of what is good. Indeed, the fear of death inspires the drama that Augustine plays out in conf. VII.v (7). Here, he remembers himself on a threshold. His Manichean days are over, but he is not yet ready to accept a Christian vocation. He is wavering and anxious. At first, it seems as if his worries revolve around an arcane metaphysical question: “Unde malum?” “Where does evil come from?” Initially, this appears to be an abstract source of existential disquiet: the sort of thing that would only bother an obsessive metaphysician. But appearances are deceptive. Augustine tells us why by unfolding a startling puzzle. Start by supposing (as his departure from Manicheanism was leading him to suspect) that evil is not a material principle co-determining the cosmos. Instead, evil is actually nothing. Given that God, as the creator of all things, is the good of all creatures, “Where, then, is evil, and whence does it come and how has it crept in? What is its root and what its seed? Has it no being at all?” (conf. VII.v (7), Outler). To simply deny evil the gravity of being relives us of needing to give its genealogy. But such an elegant solution to the problem of evil’s origin was not yet able to satisfy Augustine, since he sensed the power of evil gnawing at him from within. He was keenly aware of fearing something that he could not explain – but knew to be his own. Fear served as evil’s self-confirming proxy. Where could fear originate if evil truly were nothing? Thus, Augustine observes: “[I]f we fear it needlessly, then surely that fear is evil by which the heart is unnecessarily stabbed and tortured – and indeed a greater evil since

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we have nothing real to fear, and yet do fear” (conf. VII.v (7), Outler). The logic is inescapable: imagine that fear only reflects some other evil to which it is a response. Perhaps, then, fear itself is no evil – but it responds to what is. Evil, then, cannot be nothing. But, on the other hand, imagine that fear is baseless and debasing. Nothing but shadows and phantoms make cowards of us all. Then, the fear itself is evil since it deceives the human being and deprives her of the happy life without reason or motive. Such baseless fear, one is tempted to say, would be worse than evil itself, since it creates evil out of nothing. And what could be a more loathsome power than that? All of this could still represent (relatively) esoteric puzzles for an intellectual were the evil – and the fear – merely hypothetical. In Augustine’s life, they were not. All of these ingenious reflections on evil and fear are bound up with a keen awareness of his oppressive mortality. Augustine was worried about his own death: “Such questions revolved in my unhappy breast, weighed down by nagging anxieties about the fear of dying before I had found the truth” (conf. VII.v (7), Chadwick). More specifically, Augustine was afraid of dying while he was still afraid of dying. He was afraid of dying as long as he still carried an evil within himself whose source he could neither escape nor deny. That evil threatened to corrupt the whole life it promised to stop. And the representation of the evil clutching at his heart was his fear of death. Augustine was trying to figure out some alternative to defining his life in terms of a bad end that he could not control. His shifting philosophical imagination played directly into the fear that plagued the prospect of his conversion. As he found himself starting to imagine his own life as defined by an immaterial evil (not the evil of the Manichean philosophical imagination), there remained the shadow possibility that leaving behind a material self-defined by evil would leave him defined by nothing at all: would leave him entangled in the immateriality of the evil he had thought out of existence. Perhaps death, like evil, could simply be argued away, either because the soul simply outlives a body with which it never truly identifies or because the soul’s life ceases with its body’s. (Augustine recalls countenancing the second possibility in conf. VI.xi (19).) But whence, then, fear? The fear of death presented itself as evil’s (re-)assertion of its own materiality. But this was precisely what Augustine’s emerging conviction about God’s unconditional goodness, and thus, the unconditional goodness of his creation, had induced him to leave behind. But the question would keep recurring: What will you do with your fear of death? Augustine could not fully acknowledge God

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as his good end until he somehow came to terms with his suspicion that death might represent the creation of his own evil. The Platonists proposed the contemplative life – living in sight of one’s end – as an education in acknowledging death as an end that is good. But the Platonists neither identify nor contrast death and the divine. Instead, they propose a lifetime devoted to dying well. And that means acknowledging by one’s death the divine good as one’s own – even in mortal flesh. Augustine took much of his own orientation in thinking about death from the Platonic conception of the contemplative life. Nevertheless, the corporate identity (or ecclesial community) to which Augustine was coming to see himself bound (and which bound him to the Platonists) was not the link that bound the Platonists to him.

Augustine, Cicero, and Plato on Dying Augustine credits Cicero with having been the first person to evoke in him a desire to live the philosophical life. Augustine describes reading the Hortensius as a teenager and being inspired to a conversion (cf. conf. III.iv (7–8)). Though the Hortensius has not survived, the Tusculan Disputations have. And in this dialogue, Cicero provides his own account of the education at the heart of philosophy. Although Cicero is not generally regarded as a Platonist, he credits Plato with being the one who defined for him the particular shape that a philosophical itinerary ought to take: “For the whole life of the philosopher, as the same wise man [i.e., Plato] says, is mindfulness of death.”7 When it comes to making sense of death, Cicero sides with the Platonists. Philosophy is a matter of learning how to die: not just one day, but now and always. Literally, it is living with one’s death kept in mind [commentatio mortis]. Cicero goes on to add: For what else do we do when we sequester the soul from pleasure, for that means from the body; from private property, the handmaid and servant of the body; from public interests; from any kind of business [negotio omni]: what, I say, do Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1.xxx (74) (trans. modified). All subsequent references to the Tusculan Disputations are cited in text as Tusc. Disp. and are taken from King’s translation, which also includes the Latin text. Simon Critchley frames his approach in Book of Dead Philosophers using this quote and then commenting: “The main task of philosophy, in this view, is to prepare us for death, to provide a kind of training for death, the cultivation of an attitude towards our finitude that faces – and faces down – the terror of annihilation without offering promises of an afterlife,” Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers, xv–xvi.

7

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we then do except summon the soul to its own presence, force it to companionship with itself and withdraw it completely [abducimus] from the body? But is severance of the soul from the body anything else than learning how to die [mori discere]? Let us, therefore, believe me, make this preparation and dissociation of ourselves from our bodies, that is, let us habituate ourselves to die [consuescamus mori]. This will, both for the time of our sojourn on earth, resemble heavenly life, and when we shall be released from our chains here, the progress of our soul will be less retarded. (Tusc. Disp. I.xxxi (75))

At first, this picture sounds singularly unattractive – even obscene. Cicero was well aware of the rhetorical appearances: thus, his plea for the indulgence of the reader’s trust – “mihi crede.” In effect: risk believing me until you are able to see the plausibility of this proposal for yourself. Plato was similarly cognizant of how Socrates’ account of the philosophical life was liable to sound.8 In order to recognize what appealed to Cicero about Plato’s counterintuitive description of the delights of philosophy (and what, in turn, might have attracted the young Augustine to Cicero’s reworking of this ideal9) we must revisit certain assumptions about human life, which Plato and Cicero both undermine. The first is that one already knows what one’s soul is. The second is that one already knows what one’s body is. The third is that, given the terms of their marriage, the soul’s task is to exploit its body to define itself. The point of Cicero’s exhortation – like its parallel from Plato’s Phaedo – is to offer an educational proposal for gaining self-knowledge while refusing to take these three assumptions for granted. Previously in the same book, Cicero had already argued that the soul is – and remains – its own terra incognita: “Where then and what is such a mind? – Where and what is yours? Can you say? … The soul has not the power of itself to see itself, but, like the eye, the soul, though it does not see itself, yet discerns other things” (Tusc. Disp. I.xxvii (67)).

Plato, “Phaedo,” in Plato – Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 65a. All subsequent references to the Phaedo are cited in text as Phaedo and are taken from Grube’s translation. 9 Augustine read Cicero’s Hortensius well before suffering the existential angst that he describes in conf. 6. The purpose of interpreting Tusc. Disp. here is not to claim that this text freed Augustine from his fear of dying. Rather, it is to explore, on terms set by a writer whom Augustine knew and loved, key Platonic insights about the practice of memento mori. These insights most fruitfully illuminate how Augustine might have found a way through his fear of death with help from the “books of the Platonists,” conf. VII.ix (13). The payoff is to clarify how we might employ reconstructed Augustinian ideas to reorient an economic culture driven by a fear of death. 8

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The soul characteristically knows itself as a riddle. Even earlier, Cicero had borrowed the same observation to argue for the soul’s immortality. There he reasons that those inclined to suppose that the soul ceases with death presume to know something that they do not. If one lacks a good idea of what the embodied soul is, why conclude that it cannot outlast its body’s demise (Tusc. Disp. I.xxii (50))? Cicero adds that the soul knows itself more clearly when conceiving of its (relative) isolation from its body (cf. Tusc. Disp. I.xxii (51)). Cicero rounds out the line of thought by adding: “When then Apollo says, ‘Know thyself,’ he says, ‘Know thy soul.’ For the body is as it were a vessel or sort of shelter for the soul: every act of your soul is an act of yours” (Tusc. Disp. I.xxii (52)). The soul’s self-knowledge is not a given. It is a (never-to-becompleted) vocation. Therefore, to know one’s soul is to know oneself. Whether – and how far – the soul can know the body as its partner remains an open question. If one seeks to know oneself without taking for granted the assumption that one already knows what one’s soul and body are and how these are wedded in the flesh, one must be prepared for a lesson in discerning the body – a task fit only for a soul freed from false self-images. The soul’s liberation will eventually return it to its body, but only after it has relinquished its fraudulent ideas of incarnation. Such relief requires learning to imagine what life in the body means from the vantage point of a self-knowledge not fully defined by the perceived exigencies of its flesh. The process of growing into such self-knowledge requires learning how to die. And one learns how to die through purifying catharsis. That catharsis is desirable because it reveals to oneself the truth about oneself. Returning to the long passage cited above (Tusc. Disp. I.xxxi (75)): the soul’s “abduction” from its body teaches us how to be absolved of claiming those things by which most of us are tempted to invest our sense of worth: our body, goods, political commitments, and business ventures (cf. Tusc. Disp. I.xxxi (75)). This is an exercise in personal reassessment – not an invitation to self-immolation. To “force [the soul] to companionship with itself” [secum esse cogimus] is really a matter of re-centering. It is the discipline of remembering who we are. It re-centers the soul by reminding it how to be at home with itself again after suffering incorporation as if it were dissipation. Death as “severance of the soul from the body” [sescernere autem a corpore animum] stops the soul from continuing to use its body as an instrument of self-definition. That separation communicates to the soul a truth about itself that it might

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not otherwise have been forced to confront. It is related to a body that it will never be capable of fully grasping. (Augustine will make of that insight the occasion for confession.) Learning how to die [mori discere] means living in constant admission of one’s incarnation. It means admitting that one’s soul cannot specify itself by demarcating the boundaries of its body. (This is not to say that the body lacks boundaries; it is to say that the soul will not be able to comprehensively define itself through those.) The soul’s responsibility to others keeps open the question about where, exactly, its embodiment (and theirs) ends. Likewise, to “habituate oneself to die” [consuescamus mori] means acclimating oneself to living in flesh to which one cannot cling. And that means being relieved of the illusion that the soul ever failed to live apart from such a body. For the Platonists, the soul and body are always separate. They do not simply become separate at death. This summarizes at least one important dimension of Plotinus’ remarkable conception of the undescended soul.10 His is a picture of soul always aware of its true condition. But, if the soul never descended in any respect, it would never – could never – be in a position to learn its separateness. Nor would it be in a position ever to have forgotten it – and thus to be in need of re-learning it. It would simply know itself as separate. Therefore, if the soul must learn its separation from the body, this would suggest that it is intended for the body from which it will always remain separate – and from which it will learn the significance of this separation. Death does not sunder what previously had been one. Rather, death teaches mortals that their soul’s separation must be learned, and that means remembered. It is not clear to most of us what it means to be separated from the body. This is a condition whose significance must be discerned. The economy that the soul and body share will offer the means of recovering such memory in order to discern the significance of their separation. For Plato himself, the soul must remember that it has been sent into the body. That process of recollection gets achieved, paradoxically, through purification: releasing the soul to be separate from false images of its body, which renders it freely available (not enslaved) to serve the body it

10

Cf. e.g., Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Burdett: Larson Publications, 1992), 4.3.12. Hereafter, I note references to the Enneads in text as Ennead. I rely on a mix of MacKenna’s translation and Armstrong’s, cf. Plotinus I–VII, trans. A. H. Armstrong, 7 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1966–2006). I indicate whose translation I have used in the relevant notes.

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was sent to enliven.11 In Phaedo 67c, Socrates suggests, in the form of a rhetorical question, that the goal of true philosophy is “to separate the soul as far as possible from the body and accustom it to gather itself and collect itself out of every part of the body and to dwell by itself as far as it can both now and in the future, freed, as it were, from the bonds of the body.” By linking the philosophical separation of soul and body to catharsis and to death (cf. 69c,d; 80e–81c), Plato implies that death is a matter of purification. In 69c, Socrates adds another key connection: “Wisdom itself is a kind of cleansing or purification.” To love wisdom, then, is to seek it. To seek wisdom is to desire purification. And to desire purification is to want to learn how to die well. It is easy to read such passages in the Phaedo and conclude that Socrates is giving his friends a briefing on the ultimate psychic survival strategy. Identify the part of yourself that lasts (call it the soul), separate it from the part of yourself that does not last (the body), then hang on for dear life to the part of you that endures. To do so, you will need to sacrifice the part of you that seems most impermanent. But would that not be a small price to pay for living life in peace – and living such a life forever? Fear of death, in this picture, comes from imagining that it would be good to last forever by clinging indefinitely to one’s mortal body. Whether one imagines one’s body by picturing one’s children, one’s nation, one’s artistic creations, the impact of one’s professional legacy, or one’s financial endowments matters little. By contrast (according to this reading of Plato) humans avoid the tragic confusion of soul and body by making it clear just how clean the separation between them really is. Even if one’s self-division into durable and non-durable goods turns out to have been calculated self-deception, at least one will live and die without fear, since one managed to talk oneself into believing

11

It may seem, on its face, implausible to suggest that Plato and his followers really think of the soul as serving the body when so much in Plato’s thought points toward the inflexible subordination of the body to the soul. All I provide here in defense of my reading is the judgement of Plotinus, whom I regard as one of the most ingenious and perceptive guides to the spirit of Platonic thought. According to him (and here, he is explicitly engaged in harmonizing seemingly discrepant dimensions of Plato’s own thinking about whether life in the body is really good), “[T]hese experiences and actions are determined by an eternal law of nature, and they are due to the movement of a being which in abandoning its superior is running out to serve the need of another: hence there is no inconsistency or untruth in saying that the Soul is sent down by God,” Ennead 4.8.5 (MacKenna). This “running out to serve the need of another” I understand as a matter of attending with care to one’s body – and also to those of others.

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that one’s life is bound to last forever – even though it does not. As plausible as it may initially sound, I doubt that this picture is really what Plato (or Cicero or Plotinus or Augustine) means by preparing to die well. The first, and most important, clue that undermines such a reading of Platonic memento mori is that one must receive an education in how to do it. (Socrates is giving the last lecture of such an education on the day of his death. But Plato would continue the lessons and pass along the lecture he was not there to hear for himself (Phaedo, 59b).) Dying must be learned. And since, as Cicero notes, “according to Plato, learning is nothing but recollecting” (Tusc. Disp. I.xxiv (58)), dying is something one must remember how to do. And the body/soul combination I have just sketched is incapable of remembering its death. In the first place, death could not be remembered by a soul related to its body as the mere vehicle of its psychic survival. Death would mean nothing to an immortal soul whose life remains indifferent to its body. How could such an immortal being remember something it has never suffered – and never will? Death, in this view, is something that overtakes the body – but not the soul. Strictly speaking, from this perspective, Plato’s (and Cicero’s) definition of death as “the separation of the soul from the body” (Phaedo, 64c; cf. Tusc. Disp. I.ix (18); I.xxxi (75)) should actually be inverted: it is the body that gets cut off from a life that always came from elsewhere. Death simply brings home to the body this cold, hard fact of its isolation from its soul’s immortal life. And so the body ultimately dies bereft of its soul. On the other hand, if body and soul are simply separate parts of the person, the body itself cannot be reminded of anything at all. Recollection and memory are always purely the province of the soul, never that of the body. Indeed, Cicero points to the soul’s memory as a mark that identifies the soul to itself and distinguishes it from other animals and vegetative life (Tusc. Disp. I.xxiv (56–57)). Memory must be distinct from anything corporeal, and that fact affords evidence that the soul itself – which possesses memory – is also incorporeal (Tusc. Disp. I.xxv (60–61)).12 Finally, in Cicero’s account, the soul’s memory links it directly to the divine: “For in these [corporeal] elements there is

12

Although at Tusc. Disp. I.xxv (60), Cicero is willing to consider the possibility that soul is fire [ignis] (though none of the grosser elements), by I.xxvii (66), he is even ready to rule out soul’s being fiery [igneum].

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nothing to possess the power of memory, thought, reflection, [memoriae, mentis, cogitationis] nothing capable of retaining the past, or foreseeing the future and grasping the present, and these capacities are nothing but divine” [quae sola divina sunt] (Tusc. Disp. I.xxvii (66); cf. conf. X.xvii (26)). Memory is the soul’s capacity, not the body’s. The body does not remember anything (and therefore cannot learn anything) that its soul does not absorb on its behalf. Thus, if the soul cannot learn how to die because it cannot remember a death it will never suffer, the body – on the other hand – cannot learn how to die because it simply cannot remember anything at all on its own. No part of the person we have just imagined is capable of learning how to die. And since the person we have just imagined is, ex hypothesi, comprised simply of the conjunction of these two parts – an imperishable soul and a perishable body – she could never remember how to parse their separation. There is simply no one left, in this picture of the human person, who could conceivably remember how to die. And that – the Platonists claim – is precisely the task of the contemplative life. Thus, to see Platonic philosophy as a sophisticated psychic lesson in selfpreservation is misleading. The willingness to learn the art of mortality by actually dying keeps humans from presuming that they already know themselves well enough to kill off the part of themselves that seems to have nothing left to teach. If the soul already knew what it meant to be separate from its body, perhaps it would have nothing to lose in biding it adieu. Indeed, perhaps it would have much to gain. Enacting such a separation would be a matter of telling the truth about the soul’s immortal separation from its mortal host. And what better declaration of this separation than to relieve the body of its illusory attachment to its soul? Suicide would, at first, seem to make the cleanest separation of soul and body – and thus to enact the wisdom of philosophical purification.13 But, according to the Platonists, the goal of philosophy is not suicide.14 The philosopher does not separate

Porphyry was actually tempted to kill himself. And Plotinus, not incidentally, counseled him against that path. Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books,” in Porphyry on Plotinus and Ennead I, trans. A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1966, 1989), 11. Hereafter, I abbreviate references in text as Life of Plotinus. 14 In order to suggest that suicide is not the path of wisdom, Cicero gives a figural analysis of Socrates’ decision in Plato’s Crito to remain in prison when given the chance to flee: “All the same he [i.e., the wise person] will not break the bonds of 13

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her own soul from her body. To commit suicide is to pretend to already know something about oneself that one still needs to learn. The tragedy of the act lies in its admission of the soul’s poverty – its need to learn the passion and grace of dying – and the simultaneous foreclosure of that very possibility: “While we live, we shall be closest to knowledge if we refrain as much as possible from association with the body and do not join with it more than we must, if we are not infected with its nature but purify ourselves from it until the god himself frees us” (Phaedo, 67a).15 At first glance, it appears as if Plato recommends self-purification. But, the philosopher, strictly speaking, cannot purify herself, since only the god can release soul from body. The best the philosopher can do is to make her life available for a catharsis that will be accomplished through her willing and peaceable acceptance of the divine messenger who brings tidings of her end. It is the hallmark of the true philosopher to admit her desire for a wisdom she does not – and cannot – master. Therefore, death lies beyond the philosopher’s control simply because it represents the purification of her wisdom.16 There is something more interesting (and more honest) at stake in the Platonic preparation for death than the anticipation of a farewell

his prison-house – the laws forbid it – but as if in obedience to a magistrate or some lawful authority, he will pass out at the summons and release of God,” Tusc. Disp. 1.xxx (74). Cicero reads the “prison” as Socrates’ body and his submission to the laws of Athens as his willingness to patiently await the divine will rather than imposing his own in deciding his fate. Augustine will rule out suicide by making the Scriptural injunction to love one’s neighbor incumbent upon oneself as one’s own neighbor, cf. civ. Dei 1.20. 15 By way of comparison, Plotinus’ argument against suicide elaborates what I take to be a fundamentally Platonic insight: one cannot kill oneself “cleanly.” One can only make the cut between soul and body by presuming upon a familiarity with oneself that one lacks. (One’s very desire to do away with oneself gives confirmation that one lacks the discretion to do so.) The only condition under which Plotinus is willing to countenance suicide is in the case of one who has become aware that her sojourn in the body has stalled – that she has become incapable of making further progress. But who, in principle (given Plotinus’ account of the soul), would ever be in a position to make such a judgment about herself? Suicide is only permissible “under stern necessity”: in other words, when one accepts a death one refuses to master or initiate oneself, cf. Ennead 1.9. (Perhaps one “stern necessity” Plotinus has in mind was Socrates’ free acceptance of the hemlock from his Athenian jailer. But that was not suicide.) 16 Commenting on the Phaedo, Plotinus remarks, “For, as the ancient teaching was, moral-discipline and courage and every virtue, not even excepting Wisdom itself, all is purification. … Courage is but being fearless of the death which is but the parting of the Soul from the body, an event which no one can dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self,” Ennead 1.6.6 (MacKenna).

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that one party cannot suffer and the other cannot anticipate or recall. Instead, the Platonists suggest that the body teaches the soul that it is separate. It is remarkable that the soul could ever learn of its separation without compromising it – but no more remarkable than the fact that bodies can live with the knowledge that they shall eventually be separated from the ones who know them as their own. The soul learns the significance of its immortality through remembering the end of its life in the body through all of the means to that end. Only a soul that needs to learn the significance of its own immortality could possibly learn how to die, while finding in the recollection of its death the clue to the meaning of its life. Socrates sees in “the mystic rites” that prepare souls for the afterlife an esoteric reference to philosophical memento mori (Phaedo, 69c,d). To learn how to die is to make one’s life available for a purification achieved through sacrificial ascesis. Through sacrifice, the soul becomes aware of the body for which it has been called to be responsible and from which it learns the significance of its immortality. The body and the soul are not two “parts” that, when pieced together, make one “me.” In this sense, soul and body cannot be separated. (That assumption gives rise to a dualism widely – and rightly – derided.) But such a dualism is not the philosophy of Plotinus and Augustine – or of Plato. What these thinkers mean when they say “separation of soul and body” is that the body is parted from the soul – the life that holds it together. Only the body has parts, so only the body can be parted or separate – whether from itself or from others. The paradox, therefore, is that death parts the body from that of which it was never a part. On the other hand, the soul is not really parted from its body. It always was alone – and always is. Our bodies make us who we are. They constitute us. But none of us knows exactly how. That is why death is such a mystery. We are parted from our bodies – we depart – but we cannot say how. We cannot name the being we are that is being parted. Our bodies are not parts of us. (With soul making up the remainder.) But neither are they simply us. (Otherwise, we would be indistinguishable from our corpses.) In death, we – who cannot grasp ourselves as wholes – part with what we cannot grasp. And so, too, in our daily offerings: the experiences of death that permeate quotidian life. We are continually letting go of things that we care about. We are constantly dying. And, thus, we part. But we cannot name any whole that is split: any totality, now incomplete. And that is as true here and now as it is at the moment of our death. We cannot grasp ourselves. Rather, we simply offer ourselves in the partings and

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departures. That offering does not make us whole – any more than do the things we part with. But our offerings link us together, in our singularity, to others in theirs. And, for Augustine, that linkage is the matrix connecting us to God. In and as divine flesh. Learning how one belongs to a separate body from which one will eventually be parted is – inevitably – awkward. Near the conclusion of his philosophical memoir Little Did I Know, Stanley Cavell remarks: I have, I find, now closing this writing from memory, been drawn to exemplify still with some surprise, the condition that telling one’s life, the more completely, say incorporating awkwardness, becomes one’s life, and becomes a way of leaving it. And now that seems to be as it should be, given that it is a human life under question. The news is that this awkwardness, or say, self-consciousness, or perpetual lack of sophistication, stops asserting itself nowhere short of dying.17

I take it that when Cavell says that “telling his life … becomes his life, and becomes a way of leaving it” he means both that voicing his story is a contemplative modus vivendi that trains his soul in how to bid its flesh farewell and that the telling itself renders his life in the flesh befitting. It fits, as much as possible, his flesh to its memory. But the fact that these never fit together seamlessly – the fact that one must remember how to die – occasions an irreducible awkwardness. Indeed, Augustine himself felt this very same awkwardness. His flesh never quite “fit” the memory of his life fulfilled. That means, paradoxically, in such a situation, that awkwardness itself may be befitting. Cavell’s preoccupation with the question of acknowledgment inevitably links him to the Platonists. Acknowledgment always implies recollection. And, for the Platonists, recollection is the means by which we learn what we already bear within us – indeed, what we have always borne within us. To acknowledge something means seeing it again and owning up to what it means – as if for the first time. But acknowledgment is never wholly original. Instead, it consists in fidelity to a prior truth whose very priority it expresses as a commitment. Acknowledgment means recognizing, admitting, and owning up to one’s own perennial lack of primordial originality. In short, acknowledgment, as Cavell conceives of it, makes recollection into an instrument of confession. Cavell thus reflects Augustine’s own translation of the Platonic account of the incarnate soul’s self-discovery into the confession of a sojourner seeking the flesh of

17

Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 547.

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the happy life. Like Augustine, Cavell turns to memory seeking a clue for enlarging his sense of the flesh to which, and for which, we answer. Such recollection represents a mode of thinking about memory that befits one’s flesh by expanding it. The incorporation of that expansive memory in flesh means that the process of acknowledgment will be – inevitably – awkward. Notably, the subtitle of the book in which these reflections occur is “Excerpts from Memory.” Cavell credits Augustine (channeled through Wittgenstein’s recollection of Augustine’s account of how humans learn language) with offering him the memory – or recognition – of philosophy’s ­vocation: “If there is such a task as remembering the present, the task is ­philosophy’s – as if we chronically forget to live.”18 And remembering to live requires learning how to negotiate the awkwardness of dying with sacrificial grace. These ideas provide context to the rhetoric of humility and reserve that Socrates uses in the Phaedo to couch his own attitude toward the afterlife (cf. 77e, 85e, 91b). Socrates’ reserve in living before his end – and Plato’s in telling of it – does not betray a lack of conviction about the truth of his soul’s immortality, which his contemplative life in the body had taught him to discern. Rather, it communicates a sense of reverence that comes from the refusal to presume that one can foretell the significance of one’s life before one has borne witness to it by dying. Such reserve bespeaks the humility of wisdom. And such humility recognizes the sacrifice of incarnation by praying for a life beyond her flesh’s memory. To see how remarkable it is that any human being could be tasked with the labor of learning how to die, consider how remarkable it is that the soul could ever remember its own immortality. If any being were blessed with endless life, would not the inability to forget it be intrinsic to the blessing? Cicero juxtaposes the admonition of the oracle: “Know thyself” (Tusc. Disp. I.xxii (52)) with the Platonic picture of the soul as its own primordial energy, source of its own motion, both grantor and guarantee of its own life (Tusc. Disp. I.xxi (53)–xxii (54)). How would a soul that ceaselessly sources its own activity respond to the imperative of self-knowledge – as if it needed to remember something forgotten? If the soul moves itself, how could it fail to remember itself – remember that it is the source of its own life? Thus, Cicero comments, “But what do we understand by divine attributes? Activity, wisdom, discovery, memory. 18

Ibid., 519; cf. 518.

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Therefore the soul is, as I say, divine, as Euripides dares to say, God” (Tusc. Disp. I.xxvi (65)). But what sense does it make to admonish God not to forget that God’s life is immortal? If the soul is really divine, how could it ever learn that it cannot fail to live? And yet what else is Cicero himself doing in the dialogue of the Tusculan Disputations, which the author stages as a conversation between himself and a tentative, fearful friend? Augustine is evidently far more reticent to endorse the divinity of the soul than is Cicero. (Though, Augustine’s sense of the intimacy between the creator and its creation leads him to certain formulations of thought less alien than is often assumed to Cicero’s endorsement of the soul’s divinity.19) And yet, the same perplexity of memory recurs: How could an immortal soul possibly forget its own life? And what would that s­ uggest about the soul’s ability to remember its death? Augustine’s remarkable discussion of memory in conf. 10 culminates with the confession: “What, then, shall I do, O you my true life, my God? I will pass even beyond this power of mine that is called memory – I will pass beyond it, that I may come to you, O lovely Light” (conf. X.xvii (26), Outler modified). What exactly is Augustine wishing for here? He expresses his desire to transcend his power [hanc vim meam] of memory. His confessional wish is not simply to be released from the responsibility of remembering into the thoughtlessness oblivion of divine light. It is to be released from the confines of a memory not yet fully embodied in

19

For representatives of the view that Augustine remains fundamentally opposed to the Platonists on the question of whether or not the soul is divine, cf. A. H. Armstrong, “St. Augustine and Christian Platonism,” in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1972), 6–7; Phillip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 38–40. However, for one hint that Augustine and the Platonists may not be so far apart on this question as they initially seem, consider Augustine’s claim: “But for those who see these things through your Spirit, it is you who see them in them. When, therefore, they see that these things are good, it is you who see that they are good. … [I]t is not they who see, but God who sees that it is good,” [Qui autem per spiritum tuum vident ea [i.e., opera tua], tu vides in eis. ergo cum vident quia bona sunt tu vides quia bona sunt. … ita quidquid in spiritu dei vident quia bonum est, non ipsi sed deus videt, quia bonum est] conf. XIII.xxxi (46) (Outler modified). If the Platonists mean something more than this by claiming that the soul is divine, it is unclear to me exactly what that difference amounts to. (I have argued elsewhere that the Platonists share in common with Augustine a theology of creation – so that is not the difference that their view of the soul’s divinity makes, cf. Joshua S. Nunziato, “Created to Confess: St. Augustine on Being Material,” Modern Theology 32, no. 3 (2016): 361–83.)

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the God who is his life: “How, then, do I seek you, O Lord? For when I seek you, my God, I seek a happy life. I will seek you that my soul may live. For my body lives by my soul, and my soul lives by you” [Quomodo ergo te quaero, domine? cum enim te, deum meum, quaero, vitam beatam quaero. quaeram te ut vivat anima mea. vivit enim corpus meum de anima mea et vivit anima mea de te] (conf. X.xx (29), Outler modified). In order to seek his life, Augustine must already be living. And yet, strangely enough, he cannot quite remember that the life he is living is his own. He does yet not have the flesh to embody that recollection. Or rather, he has that flesh only as he grows into it. And he grows into it only by learning how to bid it farewell. It was no accident that reading the books of the Platonists reminded Augustine of Christ’s flesh (conf. VII.x (16)). The Platonic practice of learning how to die embodies memory by teaching the soul the sacrificial significance of its unending life. For Augustine, only Christ’s body offers humans the occasion to bear that flesh. Augustine goes on, “How, then, do I seek a happy life, since happiness is not mine till I can rightly say: ‘It is enough. This is it.’ How do I seek it? Is it by remembering, as though I had forgotten it and still knew that I had forgotten it?” (conf. X.xx (29), Outler). The alternative, he quickly adds, is to postulate that “I seek it in longing to learn of it as though it were something unknown, which either I had never known or had so completely forgotten as not even to remember that I had forgotten it” (conf. X.xx (29), Outler). Augustine’s line of thinking would seem to rule out the possibility that the happy life is “something quite unknown.” (Why not just as well seek for nothing at all? Could such an effort, were it possible, really be called seeking?) But if the happy life haunts the human memory, how could such a life possibly have been forgotten? (Was a forgettable life really so happy in the first place?) But, conversely, if the happy life has been forgotten, how could it be remembered – unless one simply were to enjoy that of which one’s memory is a memory? “Is not the happy life the thing that all desire, and is there anyone who does not desire it at all? But where would they have gotten the knowledge of it, that they should so desire it? Where have they seen it that they should so love it? It is somehow true that we have it, but how I do not know” (conf. X.xx (29), Outler). All of these considerations return Augustine to the riddle of memory: “[I]f [happiness] is in [the memory], then we have been happy once upon a time” (conf. X.xx (29), Outler modified). The search for the life fulfilled leaves a riddle for memory. If one’s soul was once happy, how could it possibly be so no more? How could it be left with only a memory? But if one’s soul had never been happy, then how could

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it possibly seek happiness? How could it have as much as a memory of a life it never knew?20 The drama of Augustinian thought reprises the mystery of Platonic anamnesis. The contemplative life devotes itself to an exercise in the recovery of memory. This exercise trains the soul to learn the beatific significance of its immortality by submitting itself to the education of a mortal life. This life, for the Platonists, brings (if we will pay attention) the growing awareness that we have never completely forgotten the life fulfilled. This also means that we have never completely stopped embodying it. One’s dawning insight belongs to the very life that is waking up to itself. But in a life destined for death, how could that memory retain its credibility? Augustine suggests that the soul grows to trust its memory of sharing in the happy life as it comes to see its parting from its body as a gesture of unselfconscious grace that acknowledges the flesh to which it belongs. The memory of one’s death and of the life fulfilled are, thereby, inextricably linked.

The Punishment of Death: Augustine and the Platonists Like Plato, Cicero, and Plotinus, Augustine regards death as the separation of soul from body (cf. civ. Dei 13.2). Apparently, however, unlike the Platonists, Augustine sees death as a punishment for partiality (civ. Dei 13.3). But what does it mean to call death a punishment? Augustine hardly thinks that sinful humans deserve death as retribution for crimes committed elsewhere, against others. Instead, he suggests that death teaches humans the true significance of their partiality. Consider, for example, sacrifices made in the name of limitless corporate survival, as discussed in Chapter 2. Such sacrifices had been

20

Jean-Luc Marion interprets this puzzle in Augustine by remarking: “The common rule that connects knowledge to love remains valid, but in the case of the desire for the happy life, it functions in an inverse sense: I do not desire beatitude because I would first know it (for, at least in the mode of representation, I do not know it), but from the incontestable fact that I desire it unconditionally, it is necessary to infer that I know it, though in an exceptional way – in a knowledge without concept or representation, but desiring. … In other words the life fulfilled precedes us as an immemorial,” Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 93. A few pages later, he concludes: “I am each time that, as lover and as gifted, I let the immemorial come over me, as a life that does not belong to me and that, for that very reason, inhabits me more intimately than myself,” ibid., 100.

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meant to power the flight from mortality at the cost of a mutilated social body, marred by losses we feel forced to accept for the sake of collective survival. Or consider, as discussed in Chapter 1, how the alienation of private goods in an economy predicated on incommunicable values trades on a parallel bargain: partial fulfillment of private appetite for the sake of endless growth. But insofar as corporate life propagates the fiction that our well-being is partial, the “punishment” that we deserve for living out that story is simply that we see how it has made our lives illusory. Partial consumer desires and mutilated social bodies have turned us into shadows of ourselves. We haunt lives that could have – and should have – been ours. When we understand that we have failed to understand the value of our flesh – how it points to a collective good that it neither represents nor contains – we recognize that our self-knowledge has become disembodied. Our bodies no longer incarnate the good that we see. They represent partial and private desires for what is neither partial nor private. They reflect wounds inflicted by losses that had seemed necessary for survival – instead of partings that we grieve for our common well-being. We do not live in a body that might embody our impartial and unparted good. But such self-knowledge separates the soul that recognizes its true good from the body that has failed to offer its flesh. We cannot live with ourselves on such terms. Such memory kills what it recalls. Our corporate life becomes unbearable, insufferable. And we go on living like spiritual zombies in a body we cannot remember how to call our own. To “live” on such terms is to suffer death as a punishment for partiality. But, although Augustine thinks of death as a punishment, he – strikingly – argues that it need not be suffered as such. He points, for example, to the martyrs, whose identification in death with the body of Christ is so complete that, by the time they die, they embody no cause for death’s punishment – just as Christ, himself, embodied no justification for execution.21 Even unbaptized martyrs die without suffering the

21

Guy Stroumsa points out that late antique Christians simultaneously insisted on offering only unbloody sacrifices – yet were ready to offer their own blood as sacrificial martyrs, cf. Guy Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 72–4. Stroumsa contrasts the Christian sacrificial imagination with the Jewish sensibility that emerged after the loss of the cultic center at Jerusalem: “While the rabbis gathered in Yavneh in 70 succeeded in transforming Judaism … into a non-sacrificial religion, Christianity defined itself precisely as a religion centered on sacrifice, ever if it was a reinterpreted sacrifice,” ibid., 72. Sacrifice did not stop for

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separation of soul and body as a punishment for their sin: “[D]eath, the recompense of sin, sometimes ensures that there is no sin to be recompensed” [cum sit mors peccati retributio, aliquando inpetrat, ut nihil retribuatur peccato] (civ. Dei 13.6, Bettenson). Anyone unwilling to suffer death as an offering to others will be consigned to bear it as a punishment for themselves. Death will be suffered as a punishment as long as humans experience separation from their bodies as the ultimate limitation on their ability to be good. When we fear death, we fear separation from the good that we communicate by sharing an economy that fosters our life in the body. The dread of death is the fear of final loneliness: an isolation so complete that it separates one from oneself, from others, and from one’s good, leaving the desirability of one’s own existence inconceivable. Augustine distinguishes two different kinds of death. One is the body’s separation from the soul that gives it life. The other is the soul’s separation from the God who gives it life (civ. Dei 13.2). The fear of death comes from the worry that these two deaths are really one: separation from one’s good is inseparable from the separation from one’s body. Augustine and the Platonists agree that these two modes of mortal separation are distinct. They also concur that coming to embody a life that acknowledges this distinction liberates us from the fear of death.22

Christians as it did for Jews. But the manner in which it stopped for Jews shaped the form that sacrifice continued to take for Christians. For Christians, Jesus made every Eucharistic altar throughout the world – and every community gathered around that altar – into Jerusalem, cf. ibid., 80–1. But Stroumsa worries that Christian sacrifice leads toward an interior piety that does not always stick to its own business: instead, it always threatens to break out into oppressive political forms of cultural prescription. Indeed, Stroumsa identifies Augustine as a key figure in this drama between public politics and private religion, cf. ibid., 90–3, 108. Stroumsa recommends reinforcing the secularity of the state by keeping it cleanly separated from religious community and conviction, ibid., 131. But perhaps political and economic life is always an articulation of religious interiority. Our cultural economy will inevitably give expression to some mode of religious commitment. The only real question is which one. Keeping religion private is not a genuine alternative to negotiating our place in the economy of sacrifice. Trying to keep religion private betrays a misunderstanding of the stakes of economic and political life today – which has never managed, really, to separate church from state without turning the state into an ersatz locus of civic religion. 22 Cicero’s conversation partner in Tusc. Disp. tellingly laments the fact that as soon as he finishes reading Plato’s proofs for the immortality of the soul, the conviction he had had while perusing them vanishes, Tusc. Disp. I.xi (24). This places him into the same position as Socrates’ disciples in the Phaedo, cf. 88 b,c. For both Cicero and Socrates, the discipline of remembering death teaches the soul how to live out the difference between alienation from its good and alienation from its body.

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Like the Platonists, Augustine will claim that the separation of soul from body is “good for the good, bad for the bad” [bonis bona sit, malis mala] (civ. Dei 13.2, Bettenson). For both Augustine and the Platonists, therefore, living with one’s end in sight means learning to harbor no ultimate separation between one’s mortal end and one’s divine end. Nevertheless, unlike the Platonists, Augustine will insist that dying well does not transform death itself into a good: “[T]hus the law is indeed good, because it is prohibition of sin, and death is evil [mors autem mala] because it is the wages of sin; but as wicked people make an evil use not only of evil, but also of good things, so the righteous make a good use not only of good, but also of evil things. Whence it comes to pass that the wicked make an ill use of the law, though the law is good; and that the good die well, though death is an evil” [hinc fit, ut et mali male lege utantur, quamvis sit lex bonum, et boni bene moriantur, quamvis sit mors malum] (civ. Dei 13.5, Dods modified). Indeed, Augustine’s assertion that death is bad [mala] runs like a refrain through the early chapters of civ. Dei 13. For instance, in a parallel passage discussing the martyrs (especially those who die for Christ while still unbaptized), Augustine notes: “Death therefore ought not to be regarded as a good thing because it has been turned to such great advantage. For this happened not in virtue of any quality of its own, but by the help of God; so that death, which was put forward as a fearful warning against sin, is now set before humans as something to be accepted when that acceptance means the avoidance of sin and the cancellation of sins committed, and the award of the palm of victory as the just reward of righteousness” (civ. Dei 13.7, Bettenson modified). In these passages, Augustine simultaneously commits himself to three positions which seem difficult to hold together: Death is bad. Death is a punishment. Death is good. Augustine acknowledges the difficulty head-on: “Whether in very truth death, which separates soul and body, is good to the good? For if it be, how has it come to pass that such a thing should be the punishment of sin [poena peccati]?” (civ. Dei 13.3, Dods). Yet he is prepared to respond with a subtle explanation. For Augustine, the evil of death is tied to its origin as a punishment: “The condition of human beings was such that if they continued in perfect obedience they would be granted the immortality of the angels and an eternity of bliss, without the interposition of death, whereas if disobedient they would be justly condemned to the punishment of death” (civ. Dei 13.1, Bettenson). Insofar as punishment responds to an evil by aiming to correct it, death is evil simply because it reflects the character of that to which it reacts. But once the evil to which death responds is

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disembodied – once partiality has lost its grip on the body to which it pretended to have a claim – death loses its original signification and becomes good for those who no longer embody evil. And yet, even for the good, death never becomes a good. Death is good for them without thereby becoming something desirable: “But as it is, death is a reality; and so troublesome a reality that it cannot be explained by any verbal formula, nor got rid of by any rational argument” (civ. Dei 13.11, Bettenson). Augustine refuses to indulge in dialectical acrobatics to dissolve the aporia of mortality. It is an evil that is good for the good. Death is acknowledged, Augustine reminds us, just as the reality of the present is acknowledged: by confessing it (cf. civ. Dei 13.11).23 Confession makes of even our evil an acknowledgment of the good. And that is good. To die in that confidence is to die well in sight of one’s end. Why, then, do those who no longer mistake the true character of their flesh still die? As for the Platonists, so too for Augustine: only the process of dying well confirms the self-knowledge that liberates humans from the evil that their fear of death represents. And one is dying, already, in each moment of a life that ends in death: “[I]f all begin to die, that is, to be in death, as soon as death has begun to show itself in them (namely, by taking away life; for when life is all taken away, each person will be then not in death, but after death), then all begin to die as soon as they begin to live” (civ. Dei 13.10, Dods modified). Both the good and the bad live a life that is death – but only the good make of this occasion a gesture of recognition, which accepts the good of a mortal life. For Augustine, death teaches human beings who have been given the flesh in which to embody impartial self-knowledge how to commit that knowledge to the memory of faith. For the baptized, suffering and death are no longer borne as limitations imposed upon flesh. Suffering and death are not suffered as punishments for sin. In such cases, Augustine claims, “the experience of the separation of soul from body remains, although its connection with guilt is removed” [relinqui animae experimentum separationis a corpore, quamvis ablato iam criminis nexu] (civ. Dei 13.4, Bettenson). And

23

His argument implicitly evokes Augustine’s famous meditation on time in conf. 11: and, not least, his celebrated observation, “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know,” conf. XI.xiv (17) (Outler modified). The same, Augustine implies here, might be said of death.

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one cannot be punished for that of which one is not guilty. The removal of the nexus criminis implies that the baptized who die in their baptismal grace do not suffer their death as a punishment for sins. Augustine explains why those who no longer deserve death’s punishment still die using a (characteristically) literal thought experiment. Counterfactually imagine, he suggests, that at the very moment of emerging from the baptismal waters, every new convert received an incorruptible body. Under such conditions, who could possibly resist being baptized? Augustine argues that “if the immortality of the body followed immediately upon the sacrament of regeneration, faith itself would be thereby enervated. For faith is then only faith when it waits in hope for what is not yet seen in substance” (civ. Dei 13.4, Dods). In short: if one saw one’s own body (or another’s) being transformed before one’s eyes, one would not need to trust that such a thing will happen after death. Initially, this argument seems comically self-serving, coming from a Catholic bishop: death is necessary because it keeps faith alive by suppressing knowledge. And faith is just what Christianity provides to anxious mortals. In short, Augustine seems to be claiming: “Death keeps the faith I represent relevant to you, if you find yourself worried (as I was) about death.” But perhaps the argument is not quite so facile. After all, faith is not merely a weak substitute for knowledge. It is the gesture of commitment by which one entrusts one’s life and death to others and to God. Augustine is pointing out a risk that runs deep. If baptism were a prodigious sign that visibly, immediately made visible the life that it invisibly confers, it would tempt humans to imagine that they could possess their flesh faithlessly: “Who would not, then, in company with the infants presented for baptism, run to the grace of Christ that so he might not be dismissed from the body? And thus faith would not be tested with an unseen reward; and so would not even be faith, seeking and receiving an immediate recompense of its works” (civ. Dei 13.4, Dods). A “faith” that demands to possess what it believes is simply not faith.24 On

24

Cf. Augustine, “The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins and the Baptism of Little Ones (De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum),” in Answer to the Pelagians, trans. Roland J. Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), II.xxxi (51). All subsequent references to De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum are abbreviated in text as pecc. mer. All subsequent Latin references to pecc. mer. are taken from the Latin edition of the text published online in the Library of Latin Texts – Series A (Turnhout: Brepols).

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the contrary, faith’s role is to protect humans from imagining that they might possess an immortal body without having learned how to love it. Augustine’s imaginative experiment is more subtle than it initially seems. It implies that “immortalization on-demand” would leave human beings with souls that had not yet learned how to live in their bodies – the bodies that express their true value. Having imagined Christ’s death as a substitute for their own, such humans would not know how to recognize Christ’s incorruptible flesh as theirs – even if it were (so to speak) staring them in the face. They would only experience such flesh as the loss of their own: the loss of the occasion for their souls to learn the significance of their own immortality. After all, Augustine thinks, Christians actually have been given an immortal body already through their participation in the Eucharistic sacrifice. But it is a body into which each member must learn how to grow (cf. conf. VII.x (16)).25 Those who suffer death as punishment think that they are being deprived of a body that they know how to possess. They imagine that they can understand how suffering and death limit their flesh without having learned to love it. Such love (had they learned it) would have revealed that they belong to stranger – and larger – flesh than their lust for possession and survival knows how to grasp. Through death, such lonely souls are not being deprived of the body they think they can grasp without loving it. They are being parted from a body to which they belong without loving or acknowledging it. In short, they are being deprived of their own recognized membership in Christ’s universal flesh. Suffered as a punishment, death will seem like the loss of a possession – or as the loss of all opportunity for satisfying private desire. That is exactly what makes it a punishment. But this punishment stems from the illusion that it addresses. What actually gets lost is the opportunity for acknowledging one’s own beloved body as the offering of detached care for flesh

25

Augustine remarks: “Here is something to which we ought to pay attention and which we ought to bear in mind, especially on account of the questions which have been and still can be raised on this subject: Baptism only brings about the full and complete forgiveness of sins, but it does not immediately transform the whole condition of the human being. Rather, in those who are making good progress, as their renewal grows from day to day, the first fruits of the Spirit transform into themselves what pertains to the old flesh [spiritales primitias in bene proficientibus de die in diem novitate crescente commutare in se quod carnaliter vetus est], until the whole is so renewed that even the weakness of the animal body attains spiritual strength and incorruption,” pecc. mer. II.xxvii (44).

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that has been embracing one’s own all along. The punishment will have been a parting left uncomprehended. And yet, ignorance here – concerning the good of one’s flesh – is never absolute (otherwise even the lust for possession would be inconceivable). So the punishment of death means suspecting that one is being parted from flesh one loved (not merely a flesh one feigned to possess) without being able to acknowledge – much less confirm – the truth of that suspicion. Being returned to one’s true body under such circumstances is being damned. The implication is that hell (if occupied) would be simply the experience of belonging to the universal flesh of Christ while having lost the ability to acknowledge it as representing oneself.26 That means belonging to a body without the ability to acknowledge it – because one has neglected to love it. This line of thinking follows John Bowlin’s conclusion about hell in Augustine’s thought: namely, that all the damned are offered the flesh of Christ in a kinship that extends across the entire human family.27 However, I do not draw Bowlin’s universalist conclusion: perhaps it remains possible that some may never acknowledge the flesh offered in Christ as their own. Persistence in that refusal, if possible, would be the condition of damnation.28

Here I am implicitly linking heaven to Augustine’s image of the city of God at home with itself in the body of Christ. Nevertheless, I am hardly the first to have imagined that perhaps hell is simply heaven as experienced by those who cannot love it. For James Wetzel’s argument that “hell is original to creation and not part of a default plan,” James Wetzel, “A Meditation on Hell: Lessons from Dante,” Modern Theology 18, no. 3 (2002): 376. 27 John Bowlin, “Hell and the Dilemmas of Intractable Alienation,” in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. James Wetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp., 201–4. 28 For a theological meditation responding to this possibility, cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope ‘That All Men Be Saved’? With a Short Discourse on Hell, trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). Balthasar gives the last word to Edith Stein, “Then faith in the unboundedness of divine love and grace also justifies hope for the universality of redemption, although, through the possibility of resistance to grace that remains open in principle, the possibility of eternal damnation also persists,” ibid., 220 (emphasis original); cf. Edith Stein, Welt und Person: Beitrag zum christlichen Wahrheitsstreben (Freiburg: Herder, 1962), 158ff. While Balthasar acknowledges that his own position goes beyond that articulated by Augustine, Balthasar nevertheless implies that his vision is not inconsistent with the overall tenor of Augustine’s thought: “[W]e are not entitled to regard [Augustine’s] hard eschatological statements, which grew still harder in his old age, simply as a turning away from his innermost concern. It was part of his loving care for human souls that he saw himself forced to cast his warning of possibly becoming lost in so extreme a mold,” Balthasar, Dare We Hope ‘That All Men Be Saved’? 71. 26

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Later in civ. Dei 13, Augustine reveals the identity of the interlocutors whose contrasting perspective had led him – earlier in the same book – to place such heavy rhetorical emphasis on the claim that death itself is not good. As it turns out, his hedging in those earlier chapters had been intended to resist the Platonists, who “seem to themselves to have good cause to deride us, because we say that the separation of the soul from the body is to be held as part of humanity’s punishment. For they suppose that the blessedness of the soul then only is complete, when it is quite denuded of the body, and returns to God a pure and simple, and, as it were, naked soul” (civ. Dei 13.16, Dods modified). Augustine here maps out a critical distance between himself and the Platonists on the central question of how exactly one ought to imagine the discipline of dying well. Nevertheless, the actual difference is far less obvious than it at first appears. There is a genuine difference here. But it is not quite what it seems.29 Here in civ. Dei 13.16, Augustine uses an argument from Plato to criticize what he represents as the Platonic picture of the soul’s release from the body. In short, he develops a Platonic critique of the Platonists. In order to make his case, Augustine quotes Timaeus 41a,b and uses it to challenge those who imagine death as a welcome relief from the body. In this passage – as Augustine reads it – Plato imagines the gods being addressed by their maker and promised lives of unending beatitude in their bodies. Since divine bodies remain contingently linked to their souls, only the goodwill of the creator guarantees this unending alliance. But precisely that guarantee makes the union of soul and body into a divine grace, not a corroded and corroding liability. Augustine thus sets up a polemical either/or: “If, therefore, it is a punishment to the soul to be connected with any body whatever [si ergo animae poena est in qualicumque corpore conligari], why does God address [the gods] as if they were afraid of death, that is, of the separation of soul and body? Why does He seek to reassure them by promising them immortality?” (civ. Dei 13.16, Dods modified). Augustine has already suggested in the

29

My reading of the mature Augustine’s view of death places him much closer to the Platonists (and, by extension, to Ambrose) than an interpretation like David Jones’s, which emphasizes the Platonism of Ambrose’ theology of death while sharply contrasting his position with Augustine’s, cf. David Albert Jones, Approaching the End: A Theological Exploration of Death and Dying (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 52, cf. 2–4, 36, 45–55.

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earlier chapters of civ. Dei 13 that he sees the separation of soul and body as punishment. In turn, he implies here that the Platonists see the union of soul and body as punishment. On the view he attributes to the Platonists, the separation of soul and body, far from being punitive, actually represents the commutation of the original sentence to incarnation. But, Augustine points out, such a view runs counter to Plato’s vision of the gods at repose in immortal flesh. Flesh, in the picture provided by the Timaeus (Augustine insinuates) fulfills the lives of beatified immortals. It presents no liability to consummate felicity. Crucially, for Augustine, it is not any body whatsoever [qualiscumque corpus] that degrades the life of the soul. Therefore, it is not simply flesh that the soul can be thought to bid good riddance at death. Is there then anything from which the soul might happily be parted at death? This question leads to the heart of Augustine’s Platonic counterproposal. Before quoting the passage from Timaeus, Augustine had already made available a distinction between two different kinds of bodies, one corruptible and one (perhaps) not: [I]t is not the body, but the corruptibility of the body [non corpus esse animae, sed corruptibile corpus onerosum], which is a burden to the soul. Hence that sentence of Scripture we quoted in a foregoing book, ‘For the corruptible body presses down the soul’ [cf. Wis. 9:15]. The word corruptible is added to show that the soul is burdened, not by any body whatsoever [non qualicumque corpore], but by the body such as it has become in consequence of sin. And even though the word had not been added, we could understand nothing else. (civ. Dei 13.16, Dods modified)

Augustine agrees with the Platonists about this: there is some sort of body that burdens the soul as a punishment. But more than that, Augustine seems – at this point – to have provided his interlocutors with precisely the conceptual distinction necessary to reconcile Plato’s account in the Timaeus with their own conviction that the separation of soul and body is good. By insisting that there is a difference between the corruptible body – marred by partiality – and the incorrupt body of the gods, the Platonists could simply argue that it is departure from the corruptible body that renders death a benefit while permanent union with the incorrupt body keeps the gods enduringly incarnate. All the Platonists would need to concede is that death is no unqualified good. Instead, it is good simply because it separates the soul from a corrupt body, not from any body whatsoever. The catch, for the Platonists, however, in accepting such a reconciliation is that it would imply either that the gods lack the felicity that the human soul, returning to its source “naked” and “alone,”

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enjoys; or that the disembodied human soul lacks the blessedness that immortal flesh confers upon the gods. Neither option is particularly attractive. And Augustine knew it. In counterpoint, the force of Augustine’s argument trades on the implication that humans, in death, bid farewell to a flesh they have failed to recognize. The flesh they ought to have seen as their own is the incorrupt body that promises them the life fulfilled. In short, the Platonists cannot recognize that they already have the body of God. Therefore, their leave-taking of flesh is not a boon. Instead, it is a failure of recognition that corrupts the flesh they imagine for themselves by making it out to be something that it is not. Being parted on such terms is no good. Augustine will diverge from the Platonists in his confidence that the body burdening the soul is, itself, the misunderstood replacement for other flesh. And that other flesh – the flesh that fulfills the life of beautified immortals – is the ecclesial body of Christ. The soul’s punitive burden is its own inability to recognize the flesh that it claims as its own to be the universal body of Christ: parted only and always and everywhere to acknowledge our common and impartial good.30 That failure of recognition is why Augustine lambasts the Platonists in civ. Dei 13.16. Indeed, he makes his intention (though not all of its implications) quite explicit: “This much only I deemed right to bring forward, in opposition to those who so pride themselves on being, or on being called, Platonists that they blush to be Christians, and who cannot bear to be called by a name which the common people also bear, lest they vulgarize the philosophers’ coterie, which is proud in proportion to its exclusiveness” (civ. Dei 13.16, Dods modified). This is no general indictment of thinkers ostensibly too haughty to accompany fellow travelers in the body. This is a specific call to recognize the ecclesial body of Christ as the humble flesh that liberates the soul for beatitude. It is not any body whatsoever [qualiscumque corpus] that punishes the soul with its company. Rather, it is the body that the soul imagines as only the bearer of its own corruption. Such flesh could only be worthy of death. And that 30

Sarah Byers observes that, like the Stoics, Augustine imagines the bliss of repose as apatheia, where this term means a “lack of morally bad emotions.” Byers concludes: “So, like the Stoic sage, the saints in heaven have only morally good emotions, which arise from their completely wise and virtuous state,” Sarah Byers, Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 68–9. To be released to recognize one’s true – and sinless – flesh is to be offered apatheia.

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is what makes it corrupt. It is also what makes, for the Platonists whom Augustine imagines, its departure a welcome relief. Nevertheless, there is deception implicit in such relief: the thought that the naked soul might be freed from the corruption that its departed body would seem to have borne away on its behalf.31 The souls severed from a corrupt body will, Augustine’s line of thinking implies, be very far from innocent of the degradation they imputed to their flesh. Therefore, the punishment of the corruptible body is its soul’s inability to recognize in its mortal flesh the body of God: a flesh that suffers and yet offers itself incorruptible. That punishment is ultimately a failure to love one’s flesh by recognizing that it was never simply the moribund corruption one faithlessly claimed for oneself when one imagined for oneself a happy death. Death, under punishment, separates the soul from the flesh that binds it – unaware – to God. And such a death is surely evil. The process of growing into a body to which one can entrust one’s death releases one from fear. It is possible to resent death as if it were one’s punishment. Those who suffer death thus will always be confused about the body from which they are being separated. But it is not necessary to experience our separation from our bodies as such. Augustine envisages another possibility: that we might suffer separation from our bodies as sacrificial solidarity with one another: “Not that death, which was before an evil, has become something good, but only that God has granted to faith this grace, that death, which is the admitted opposite to life, should become the instrument by which life is reached” (civ. Dei 13.4, Dods). Instead of seeing death simply as an evil, those who die well make even death’s evil a witness to the good (cf. civ. Dei 13.5). Those who die well turn the mortal work of parting with one’s flesh into an occasion for acknowledgment. They acknowledge the good of the flesh of those to whom they are bound. And they see their own offering linking them even to the lives of those who imagine that their flesh is merely their own and the province of private desire. Death, when suffered well, offers a sacrament of life to others. It shows the flesh from which we are bound to be parted – and assures others that this parting need not be feared as evil since it affords the means of growing into incorruptible flesh.

31

For a discussion of this insight in connection with Augustine’s reading of Virgil in civ. Dei 14, cf. James Wetzel, “Agony in the Garden: Augustine’s Myth of Will,” in Parting Knowledge: Essays after Augustine (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 20–6.

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In both civ. Dei 13.4 and pecc. mer. (the anti-Pelagian tract to which Augustine refers his readers in civ. Dei 13.4), Augustine zeroes in on one key reason why those who no longer deserve to die still do: by suggesting that all our flesh is remembered by God, they remind us that we have no more to fear in death than they did. Because the saints have nothing to fear in death, neither do those who acknowledge themselves in their flesh. Thus, Augustine comments, “[B]y the vigour and conflict of faith, at least in times past, was the fear of death overcome. Specifically was this conspicuous in the holy martyrs” (civ. Dei 13.4, Dods). This echoes the stronger connection Augustine makes in pecc. mer.: “[W]e must say to the people who are similarly disturbed over the death of the body that we admit that it came about as a result of sin and that we do not deny that after the forgiveness of sins it was left as a challenge for us so that, as we grow in strength, we might conquer our great fear of it” (pecc. mer. II.xxxiv (54)). The courage of those who die without fear offers hope to those (like the young Augustine) who are “weighed down by nagging anxieties about the fear of dying” before having been relieved of the evil that their fear insinuates (conf. VII.v (7), Chadwick). A fearless death offers hope. It suggests that those who die without fear have something to say to the rest of us. Perhaps their fearlessness stems from their commitment to remember a body from which they are departing while calling it good. Robert Dodaro has pointed out that there is a difference – in Augustine’s telling – between the Christian martyrs’ triumph over their fear of death and the triumph of Roman civic role models.32 Dodaro perceptively observes: “While appearing courageous, Roman heroes fear death in the guise of defeat or dishonour. Under these conditions, fear of death does not act as a means to the perfection of virtue, because the soul cannot overcome the pride which prevents it from abiding the loss of honour through an acknowledged dependence upon God alone.”33 For these Roman heroes, their union with their bodies needed to be compromised in order to maintain the integrity of their virtue. Or so they thought. The implication is that virtue may be possessed without a body in which to possess it. Virtue is

32 33

Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine, 53. Ibid., 56. Dodaro especially has in mind Augustine’s discussion of pagan virtue in civ. Dei 5. However, these remarks also tie into Augustine’s discussion of violence in civ. Dei 1. For an appreciative analysis of Augustine’s resistance to suicide as a tool for expressing virtue, cf. Melanie Webb, “‘On Lucretia Who Slew Herself’: Rape and Consolation in Augustine’s De ciuitate dei,” Augustinian Studies 44, no. 1 (2013).

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only accidentally incarnate. The martyrs, on the other hand, model a different kind of virtue: one that acknowledges that human excellence is embodied precisely because human excellence is sacrificial. Such virtue lets go of even the claim to self-possession. To fearlessly surrender their bodies in order to confess Christ is no matter of maintaining a disembodied virtue. Instead, it is a question of recognizing Christ’s ecclesial body as the only place in which their own excellence might be acknowledged. In this fashion, the martyrs remind us that their fearless flesh – transfixed by death – is inseparable from ours. We do not mistake our bodies when we see ourselves in them. Instead, we entrust our flesh to those who have experienced our fearful isolation without presuming that such loneliness defines the conclusion of our mortal lives. To die without fear is an act of encouragement toward those whose lives remain lonely and fearful. This is precisely why Augustine describes the “glory” and the “virtue” of the fearless deaths of the martyrs by citing scriptural passages about dying for the sake of someone else: “If faith that works through love demanded only a small amount of virtue, then it would not be so great a glory for the martyrs to conquer the fear of death, nor would the Lord say, No one has greater love than that one gives his life for his friends (Jn 15:13). In his Epistle John puts it this way, As he gave his life for us, so we too ought to give our life for our brothers (1 Jn 3:16)” (pecc. mer. II.xxxiv (54)). Christ’s body – represented by those who are freed from fearing death – dies in solidarity with those who fear death and suffer it as a punishment. Christ’s body does not extricate itself from their suffering.34 By the same token, this solidarity is so complete that it refuses to credit the isolation of mortal punishment with the final word about the meaning of death. Simply by suffering with those who fear, Christ’s body insists that death’s suffering is incapable of representing utter isolation. (This need not entail, of course, that none suffer ultimate isolation, which is to say: hell. It merely means that one can only suffer it on the condition that one remain utterly isolated from one’s flesh, which will always be remembered in the ecclesial body of Jesus Christ.) The martyrs are witnesses to courage in the face of our common mortality, and they thereby link Christ’s sinless death to us.

34

Dodaro observes: “Here Augustine once again implies that the unrivalled character of Christ’s virtue is rooted in his unique freedom from fear of death. This freedom marks for Augustine the vast difference between Christ’s virtue and that of even the most virtuous human beings,” Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine, 205.

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For Augustine, Christ gives humans flesh in which to learn how to take leave of it. Therefore, Christ’s ecclesial body hides a paradox: death is only a punishment for those who have given up on the body in which they might truly die. To suffer death as a punishment is to die without recognizing that one belongs to that from which one is being separated. In other words, Augustine’s view of sacrifice suggests a strange and surprising corollary about death: death is capable of punishing no body. On the one hand, those who have a body in which to die offer that body for the sake of others who do not. There is no one here to punish. On the other hand, those punished by their failure to recognize their place in the economy of sacrifice have forfeited the body from which they might be separated for the sake of others. (Instead, they have only a memory of dissimulated flesh: a body that cannot recognize itself because it cannot acknowledge its end for what it is.) Therefore, the only ones capable of suffering death as a punishment have, in fact, ironically, already been deprived of the bodies from which their punishment would part them. To die on such terms is to bid oneself farewell without knowing to whom, exactly, one addresses the adieu. But death need not be simply the disingenuous farewell to a fiction. There are other ways to die. Christ (and the martyrs), for Augustine, die without suffering death as a punishment. Instead, their death returns them to their bodies on behalf of those who face death without them. It is in this sense that they suffer death as punishment for others. They give a body to those who otherwise cannot die (well) since they have refused the bodies in which they might offer sacrifice.

The Flesh of Christ in the Books of the Platonists In conf. VII.ix (13) ff., Augustine recounts his watershed run-in with the “books of the Platonists” [libri platonicorum]. These books were probably a mix of excerpts from the writings of Plotinus, and perhaps Porphyry, translated by Victorinus (the famous rhetorician whose conversion Simplicianus would recount to Augustine as a model of conversion (cf. conf. VIII.ii (3)–v (10))).35 The Platonists offered Augustine a vision of God. And that vision revealed to Augustine that his own worries about

35

For one attempt to reconstruct a probable genealogy for these books, cf. Pier Franco Beatrice, “Quosdam Platonicorum Libros: The Platonic Readings of Augustine in Milan,” Vigiliae Christianae 43, no. 3 (1989): 248–81.

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“dying before [he] had found the truth” (conf. VII.v (7), Chadwick) had been displaced. Therefore, this perplexity about the evil that he had thought his death represented was reoriented. The Platonic books in conf. 7 inducted Augustine into a life devoted to living before his divine end by learning how to remember the significance of his death. Augustine describes the vision mediated to him by the Platonists in the following terms: [B]eing admonished by these [Platonic] books to return into myself, I entered into my inward soul, guided by you. This I could do because you were my helper. And I entered, and with the eye of my soul – such as it was – saw above the same eye of my soul and above my mind the Immutable Light. … When I first knew you, you did lift me up, that I might see what I saw to be, and not yet me to be – I who saw [ut viderem esse quod viderem, et nondum me esse qui viderem]. (conf. VII.x (16), Outler modified)

James Wetzel has observed that Augustine is invited in this passage to see God’s world without him in it: “Augustine has been experiencing his life from a place of unlikeness. His God recreates that unlikeness for him and invites him to see through it.”36 Strangely, Augustine’s vision of God, mediated by the Platonists, is one that he is not yet [nondum] there to see. He could not yet embody the vision he was having. More strictly, he did not yet have the flesh in which he saw his vision of God because he did not recognize or acknowledge that the flesh in which he saw God was already his own.37 Whose, then, was it? The subsequent lines show that the vision of God Augustine saw by the aid of the Platonists was Christ’s. The Platonists led Augustine to God by giving him Christ’s vision. But the Platonists offered Augustine Christ’s vision of

James Wetzel, “Life in Unlikeness: The Materiality of Augustine’s Conversion,” in Parting Knowledge: Essays after Augustine (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 115. On translating this passage – and on its conceptual implications – cf. James Wetzel, “Crisis Mentalities: Augustine after Descartes,” in Parting Knowledge: Essays after Augustine (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 38–9. 37 James Wetzel draws attention to Augustine’s recognition, clarified by confessional reexamination, that even his life before his conversion had been graced: “If I were to speculate about the silence in Augustine’s moment of inner illumination [i.e., in conf. 8], when he reads the verse and finds peace, I would say that it contained his recognition that the divine presence had been with him all along. It did not have to enter from outside to resolve his crisis from within,” Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 160. Later, he adds: “Those who come to the scene of conversion expecting to encounter God for the first time come too late,” ibid., 191. Before his conversion, too, God was already present to Augustine in the intimacy of his own flesh. 36

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God without offering him Christ’s flesh. And that fact places Augustine into the company of the Platonists on strange terms: sharing flesh without acknowledging it. They see God together without offering sacrifice together – without even being able to see how they might and without recognizing the community of their flesh. Augustine will only learn how to acknowledge the significance of the vision he narrates in conf. 7 through the events he records in conf. 8. Nevertheless, the vision in conf. 7 already contains – inchoately – the revelation that would lead to his conversion in the subsequent book. Christ is not absent from the vision that the Platonists offer Augustine. Indeed, Augustine goes on: “I found myself far from you ‘in a region of dissimilarity’, and it was as if I heard your voice from on high: ‘I am the food of the grown-ups; come forth and you will ruminate on me [cibus sum grandium: cresce et manducabis me]. And you will not change me into you as the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me’” (conf. VII.x (16), Chadwick modified). Augustine hears the voice of Christ “from on high” [tamquam audirem vocem tuam de excelso]. But Augustine confides to his readers, in retrospect, that his hearing at the time had been a bit confused. It was as if [tamquam] he heard what he heard. He was listening (just as he was seeing) in the subjunctive. At the time of his vision, he had not figured out the difference between humility’s elevation and pride’s abasement. Therefore, although the voice seemed to come from on high, it was actually calling out to Augustine from below – from sacrificial flesh into which Augustine had yet to learn how to descend (cf. conf. VII.xviii (24)). After informing Augustine that he is the “food of grown-ups” [cibus grandium], the sustenance of those who have learned how to descend in order to care for others, Christ gives Augustine a charge: cresce! This Latin word can be variously translated. Chadwick renders it as “grow,” which complements the image of Christ as “grown-up food.” On this rendering, Augustine needs to grow up so that he can eat the kind of food that Christ offers – not merely the food of children. Christ is the food of grown-ups, which must be chewed and digested (ideas implied by manducabis), but he is also milk for babies (cf. conf. VII.xviii (24)): food that teaches humans how to grow into the sacrificial flesh they already recognize themselves to have – but need to learn how to love. Thus, while not inaccurate, “grow” does not exhaust the connotations of cresce. This word can also mean come forth or emerge – whether from a womb or a tomb or some other source. This meaning, too, is implied by the context of Augustine’s vision. After all, it is not simply that Augustine sees what

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he sees – but understands that he is yet too little to take it all in. Rather, Augustine has already told us that he is not yet [nondum] there to see the vision that he is seeing. Something more dramatic than simple growth is necessary. (Though growth will certainly accompany the more dramatic change.) Augustine needs to be born: to come forth into his own flesh. And that flesh, he is being told explicitly, is Christ’s.38 Christ’s message for Augustine is, therefore, a startling one. In effect he is saying: “You do not yet have your flesh. Be born, and you will have mine.” Augustine had yet to be born. And, thus, he had yet to take on Christ’s flesh. James Wetzel comments: “The words speak to gestation, not digestion. When Augustine is ready to leave the womb and take his place in creation as a divine being, he will truly have put on his flesh and walked with God.”39 And that is precisely why Augustine was not yet there to see the vision he was being offered – he did not yet have his flesh. The good news here is that, since Augustine has not yet been born, his old fear of dying had been misplaced. He did not need to fear losing his flesh since he does not yet have it. Augustine’s fear of dying before he discovered the truth had been premature. But, in order to be born, Augustine needed to learn why his death was not the evil he had feared it to be. To see God is also for Augustine to be offered a memento mori. His imagination about death had come from his soul’s failure to remember its sacrificial vocation. It is apt that the Platonists – who thought that parting with one’s flesh is not the evil that most imagine it to be – had been the ones to show Augustine that his fear of dying was misdirected. Although Augustine had feared losing his flesh before he found the truth, Augustine had known the truth before he knew that he knew it. Thus, he found himself loving the truth before he recognized the flesh in which to do it: “I was astonished to find that already I loved you, not a phantom surrogate for you” [et mirabar quod iam te amabam, non pro te phantasma] (conf. VII.xvii (23), Chadwick). He already loved God in the flesh he had yet to be born into. And that very insight convinced Augustine that his own death must be something other than a serendipitous farewell to an impediment blocking his new-found vision.

Cavanaugh glosses this passage in Augustine by observing: “The act of consumption is thereby turned inside out: instead of simply consuming the body of Christ, we are consumed by it,” Being Consumed, 54. But, it must be added, for Augustine we are consumed by growing up. 39 Wetzel, “Life in Unlikeness,” 115. 38

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Having been released from fearing his death, Augustine would also be confronted by the pall cast over his sight. Here was the bad news. Something had been left unacknowledged by the offering of the Platonists. Just as they had inducted Augustine into a vision essayed from unrecognized flesh, so, too, the vision of his own fleshless life – too young to die – left unrecognized the sense in which Augustine’s conception of fleshlessness was itself a deathly one. The failure to acknowledge his flesh would lead to an alienation from it – into a place of unlikeness. And that place would afford Augustine the true icon of his moribund disembodiment. After all, Augustine did have flesh already. So how could he have seen God without it? He describes his Platonic epiphany by remarking: “I awoke in you, and beheld you as the Infinite, but not in the way I had thought – and this vision was not derived from the flesh” [evigilavi in te et vidi te infinitum aliter, et visus iste non a carne trahebatur] (conf. VII.xiv (20), Outler modified). Augustine had seen God without his flesh. After all, in his vision, he had not yet been there to see it. His idea of his own flesh had been (mercifully) left out of sight. And yet, as it would quickly turn out, his flesh had not been so excluded from the vision as it seemed: [Y]et I was not stable enough to enjoy my God steadily. Instead I was transported to you by your beauty, and then presently torn away from you by my own weight [pondere meo], sinking with grief into those things [in ista]. This weight was my attachment to flesh [pondus hoc consuetudo carnalis]. But your memory dwelt with me, and I never doubted in the least that there was One for me to cling to; but I was not yet ready to cling to you firmly. For the body which is corrupted presses down the soul, and the earthly dwelling weighs down the mind, which muses upon many things [cf. Wisdom 9:15]. (conf. VII.xvii (23), Outler modified)

How could Augustine be “torn away from God” by his flesh – if his vision had been truly fleshless? If he had really left his body behind in seeing God, there would be no obvious cause to ever return. But he would return. His vision had not been so fleshless after all. What he was not yet able to see is that his flesh was already hosting the vision of God – but that his flesh was other than he was imagining it to be. His flesh was already Christ’s – the food of the fully grown. But he had not yet grown into that acknowledgment. For now, Augustine’s clue to seeing his true flesh – the flesh with which he was with God – was his memory: “With me there remained a memory of you.” This was no memory of a fleshless vision. It was the memory of a

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vision of God in which God had presented himself to Augustine as food. God had appeared to Augustine as the means of life for his mortal flesh. But this means of life promised to transfigure the flesh it would vivify into its own offering: “And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me” (conf. VII.x (16)). The memory of God that clued Augustine into the flesh to which he was truly attached was the memory of the divinity who offers himself to others as the means of life. In so doing, God incorporates those whom he feeds into his offering by making their lives into the means of life for others. Again, I quote Wetzel’s reading: “Augustine is not being sent back to prison; he is being returned to the place where he can experience love for all the beings, himself and others, who are being changed into God’s flesh.”40 Augustine came to know that he would have the flesh of God by offering his own flesh for others as “the food of the fully grown.” To eat that flesh would be to offer his life in service. The memory that kept Augustine honest about the character of his attachment to flesh [consuetudo carnalis] was the memory of a God who gave himself flesh, in order that he might give flesh to others: “The food which I was too weak to accept he mingled with flesh, in that ‘The Word was made flesh’ (John 1:14), so that our infant condition might come to suck milk from your wisdom by which you created all things” (conf. VII.xviii (24), Chadwick). Augustine “never doubted in the least that there was One for [him] to cling to” (conf. VII.xvii (23), Outler modified): the God who offered his life as flesh to others, so that Augustine might offer his own flesh as life to others. This was the God he had encountered through the books of the Platonists. But Augustine “was not yet in a state to be able to do that.” Why? Because he still imagined that the flesh pulling him down was also ripping him away from God. Or, more precisely, Augustine saw that the flesh pulling him down was ripping him away from God – but he saw that because he was mistaking his own flesh and thereby corrupting it. Augustine did not yet see that his flesh was taking him where he wanted to go. In order to find the God who spoke to him as if from on high, he needed to go down: “Come down so that you may ascend, and make your ascent to God” (conf. IV.xii (19), Chadwick). Down was precisely where Augustine’s flesh was drawing him. And it felt like being ripped away from God’s presence [diripiebar abs te]. But nothing was farther from the truth: “[I was] carrying along

40

Ibid., 116.

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with me nothing but a loving memory of my vision, and an appetite for what I had, as it were, smelled the odor of, but was not yet able to eat” (conf. VII.xvii (23), Outler). In order to eat, he would need to go down to get low enough to discover the flesh of Christ – and see it as his own. Augustine could not yet see that the direction in which his flesh was pulling him was the vector by which he would attach himself to God. Later in the conf., Augustine will acknowledge, “My weight is my love. By it I am carried wherever I am carried” (conf. XIII.ix (10), Outler). But Augustine’s pondus – the weight of love that, in conf. 7, kept Augustine attached to his flesh while causing him to fall apart – had always been the love of God at work in him in flesh he failed to recognize. Augustine needed to crash down in order to see that his weight had always been pulling him up to offer his flesh in unattached joy. In conf. 7, the attachment of Augustine to his flesh was a manifestation of Christ’s love for him operating under the guise of his own mistaken identity. But Augustine could not yet see that because he was not yet there to see it: he did not yet have the flesh in which to see the God who gave him weight to descend. In order to keep faith with his memory of God, Augustine would need to recognize that his fleshless vision was a vision of his own death. Augustine was seeing God in refusal of Christ’s flesh. He had a body he was denying as his own. And that meant that Augustine’s soul was already separated from his body but without the wisdom to recognize what was really going on. Augustine was stillborn – dead before he had ever truly accepted the chance to live in his flesh, precisely because he had never acknowledged the flesh that was his as his own. This vision of alienation represented his spiritual death, not just a separation from Christ’s incorruptible body, offered to give him mortal flesh, but also the oblivion of his soul, which could not admit its own displacement: “And I understood that you chasten humans for their iniquity, and make my soul to be eaten away as though by a spider” (conf. VII.x (16), Outler modified). Augustine sees the truth of his moribund condition – in seeing it he gets freed to confess it and in confessing it, he finds that he is already growing into Christ.41 Augustine’s body had been corrupted by 41

James Wetzel summarizes: “The unnecessary unlikeness between Augustine and his God, the alienating kind, originates from Augustine’s resolution to cast himself as the perverse lover, the lover who rejects his beloved and embraces undoing. … He is not the being he imagines himself to be; he is not where he thinks he is. He has no history to undo, and creation is not the plaything of his imagination. He is already forgiven, has been from the start. Now he lives in God,” ibid., 115.

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his refusal to recognize it as Christ’s. But even before Augustine called Christ’s flesh his own, he had Christ’s flesh virtually. Eventually, the acknowledgment of his baptismal (re-)birth would bring him forth – cresce! – into Christ’s flesh. But not yet. To summarize: death – not the one he had been fearing, but the one he had yet to see as his own: the offering for the common good that he had yet to make – would separate Augustine from a body he knew and loved. But that separation was not an evil to be feared. It could not separate him from his good. In fact, that separation occasioned the acknowledgment of his good. That is how the Platonists taught Augustine to countenance the good by remembering death. He had forgotten and needed to learn. Who would teach him? The one who offered his flesh as the food of the grown-ups. Those who are grown-up have learned how to die.42 No wonder that Augustine credits the Platonists with leading him to a vision of God that only Christ could incarnate. To credit them with that much was a matter of acknowledging the flesh in which their vision was offered. Ultimately, it was that confession that was missing from the books of the Platonists.

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Phillip Cary claims, “The body of Christ cannot be in our hearts, for bodies do not dwell inside souls. Nor does Augustine ever suggest that the soul of Christ dwells in our heart … Hence what remains is his divinity, not his humanity. That alone is what we find if we turn inward to seek Christ in the heart. The Christ who dwells in our hearts, for Augustine, is not life-giving flesh nor human soul but the eternal Wisdom of God. To turn inward is, for a Platonist, necessarily to turn away from bodily things. Consequently, Augustine’s inward turn is necessarily a turn away from the flesh of Christ as well as a turn toward his divinity,” Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist, 50 (emphasis original); cf. Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4, cf. 244. However, in conf. 7, it is precisely by turning inward under the tutelage of the Platonists that Augustine encountered his call to see the flesh of Christ as his own. The voice that seemed to come “from on high” suggests that Augustine’s vision of inwardness is not a retreat from flesh. Rather, it is precisely an acknowledgment of flesh: just as putting on Christ’s flesh will prove to be the means by which he articulates his interior vision of God (cf. the discussion of conf. VIII.xii (29) in the following chapter). There are two, coordinated, limitations of Cary’s (mostly implicit) counter-proposal to Augustine’s vision of ensouled flesh. First, if flesh bears the interiority that it represents simply by being the interiority it represents, then death communicates nothing. It teaches nothing. It is a memento of nothing. Death is simply senseless and wholly unintelligible since it marks the simple cessation of all (our?) intelligibility. And that senselessness is fearsome. Second, if resurrection is the antidote to the human fear of death, can eternal flesh represent anything other than the interminable extension of mortal life? Is the promise of everlasting self-expression really what relieves humans of their fear of dying? In short, Cary’s understanding of flesh risks making it incapable of offering sacrifice.

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Between Augustine’s account of having received and read the books of the Platonists in conf. VII.ix (13) and his account in conf. VII.x (16) of the divine insight that those books occasioned, he interposes a remarkable rhetorical interlude. In this segue, Augustine renders an account of what he discovered in the libri platonicorum. By employing the Johannine prologue as a point of reference, Augustine outlines the religious wisdom that he had discovered in the Platonists – along with a contrasting record of what had been missing. The passage is a key text for trying to sound out Augustine’s relationship to the Platonists (a challenge that more than a few readers of Augustine have attempted in recent years).43 The text is comprised of a series of rhetorical pairs: the first member of each couplet enumerates an insight that the Platonists had offered. The second lists an insight that they had not. For example, in one of these pairs, Augustine observes: “I read there [in the books of the Platonists] that God the Word was born ‘not of flesh nor of blood, nor of the will of man, nor the will of the flesh, but of God’ [John 1:13]. But, that ‘the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’ [John 1:14] – I found this nowhere there” (conf. VII.ix (14), Outler). The cumulative impact of Augustine’s rhetorical series expresses different facets of one central contrast: the Platonists had revealed Christ to Augustine as the eternal Son of the divine Father. But they had failed to acknowledge Christ’s ecclesial flesh. Readers who have interpreted this passage simply as implying that Augustine thought the Platonists were missing a doctrine of the incarnation are not entirely wrong. Nevertheless, it is important to fully size up

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For one recent attempt to sound out the differences between Augustine and the Platonists, which serves as an instructive exemplar of how these differences often get parsed in other contributions to the secondary literature, cf. John Cavadini, “Ideology and Solidarity in Augustine’s City of God,” in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. James Wetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Robert Crouse provides an excellent summary of the key contributions to the debate about Augustine’s relationship to the Platonists; however, he himself finds the small but crucial difference between them to be rooted in Augustine’s Trinitarian theology, not his ecclesiology, cf. Robert Crouse, “Paucis Mutatis Verbis: St Augustine’s Platonism,” in Augustine and His Critics, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, Revised ed. (London, New York: Routledge, 2002). Another illuminating history of the debate over Augustine’s Platonism is given at the start of Mateusz Stróżyński’s sophisticated article on the role of Platonic philosophy in Augustine’s theology, cf. “Mateusz Stróżyński, “Spiritual Exercise in the Proem to Augustine’s Confessions,” Augustinian Studies 49, no. 2 (2018): 221–45. For a helpful overview of key interventions in the secondary scholarship on the question of how the early thought of Augustine was influenced by Plotinus, Porphyry, and others, cf. Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian (Eugene, OR: Herder and Herder, 1970), 43–55.

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what Augustine thought might be involved in acknowledging the flesh of Christ. What separates the Platonists from Augustine is not simply a theological disagreement about whether or not a Jewish sage who had lived in Palestine several centuries before really was God. Nor does their difference boil down to a difference of opinion about the relative value of the body. Rather, their disagreement concerns the question of identifying the embodied community – the ecclesial corporation – in which their wisdom was lived out and for which it was responsible. Near the end of conf. 7, there is a brief reprise of Augustine’s contrapuntal evaluation of the books of the Platonists in conf. VII.ix (13–5). This final statement provides a pithy summary of how things stand between Augustine’s Christianity and the Platonists who had helped him learn it: What shall ‘wretched man’ do? ‘Who shall deliver him from the body of this death’ [Rom. 7:24–5], except your grace through Jesus Christ our Lord; whom you have begotten, coeternal with yourself, and did create in the beginning of your ways … The books of the Platonists tell nothing of this. Their pages do not contain the expression of this kind of godliness – the tears of confession, your sacrifice [sacrificium tuum], a troubled spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, the salvation of your people, the espoused City, the earnest of the Holy Spirit, the cup of our redemption. (conf. VII.xxi (27), Outler modified)

This litany is not a hodgepodge of assorted differences between Christianity and Platonism, loosely clustered around the theme of incarnation. Augustine’s claim here is not that Christianity simply fills out some religious deficiencies of Platonism by supplying authentic human color. Instead, this is an account of Christianity that distinguishes it from Platonism by appealing to the Church. To Paul’s question, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24, NRSV). Augustine answers: “The body of God’s eternal Wisdom, incarnate as the church’s universal sacrifice.” What is absent from the Platonic books, it turns out, is the acknowledgment of a community: the community that incarnates the vision of God by offering its life for all. What goes missing in the books of the Platonists is “your sacrifice.” Christ’s flesh, embodied in “the espoused City” remains the unrecognized, but ever present, community about which these books seem silent. The “salvation of your people” is the offering communicated eucharistically through “the cup of our redemption.” Augustine himself models how that devotion manifests itself through “tears of confession … a troubled spirit, a broken and a contrite heart.” Finally, the Holy Spirit is the one who guarantees salvation by offering Christ’s ecclesial body its vision (cf. conf. XIII.xxxiii

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(48)–xxxiv (49)). For Augustine, what is missing from the books of the Platonists is the Church: a community that offers decisive representation, as the body of Christ, of the universal economy of sacrifice. “Where is the body that gives flesh to the vision of God?” This question is at the heart of Augustine’s decision to part ways, intellectually and spiritually, with the Platonists. For Augustine, Christ’s body hosts creatures’ divine vision. For the Platonists, apparently, it does not. That ecclesial (and ecclesiological) difference is crucial for understanding the terms on which they part.44 Since humans see the vision of God in community with mortal flesh, their vision is an offering of acknowledgment. That acknowledgment makes death into an occasion to remember the divine good. The Platonists did not imagine that Christ’s flesh represents the community that could express their vision in flesh and blood. But Augustine did. He thought that the Platonists’ vision of God would be made incarnate only by the universal sacrifice of Christ’s ecclesial body. The Platonists would be left with insight divorced from its incarnation. Augustine will respond by acknowledging the vision of the Platonists as divine insight, while sacrificially specifying the site of their vision as the Church. Augustine’s conversion raises, in microcosm, a big economic question we have not outgrown: Will we let the fear of death structure our exchange relationships in ways that reinforce our corporate isolation? Or will we see death as the occasion for fearlessly acknowledging our universal corporate solidarity? Death can take many forms: private incapacity, public disintegration, punishment for partiality, liberation from hidebound desire. It is a parting that teaches us our limits. It raises the

44

Paul Griffiths’ writes, “The characteristic doctrine of Christianity, the assertion that makes it not Platonism and not, really, anything but itself, is that we shall be resurrected in the flesh, the selfsame flesh that we have now (though the meaning of ‘selfsame’ remains deeply obscure), there to be in the company of the other saints resurrected before the face and within the reach of the ascended LORD and his mother. … [W]e expect whatever it is that the resurrection of the flesh adds to the capacity for sight and understanding, and that can only be touch. We expect the LORD’s caress, skin to skin. That is the culmination of the Christian life. That is when Christian flesh becomes fully itself, unveiled to Jesus and with Jesus unveiled to it, in full tactile intimacy with its LORD,” Paul J. Griffiths, Christian Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 146. I would add that what this flesh – Christ’s as ours and ours as his – adds to the sight and understanding of God is the acknowledgment of an eternal offering. Such touch is a gesture of sacrifice.

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question of what we are willing to part with – and why. Fearing death, we frame it as a loss. We orchestrate economic life to mitigate it. And we leave what we think we lose unrecognized. Released from this fear, however, we are freed to reframe death as a gesture of openhearted attention and devotion to people we love. And that changes the terms on which we organize our economy.

4 Sacrificial Community

Finding Friends In exchange, my gain is my partner’s loss. And my loss is my partner’s gain. Or so it appears. Exchange seems to attach us firmly to the logic of ownership, possession, and dispossession, which the Augustinian economy of sacrifice is supposed to unsettle. Can exchange point us beyond these terms on which it appears to depend? If so, how will such references change the relationship between exchange partners? What we exchange is different because we value the same things differently. (If we did not, we would not bother to trade.) Economists describe this difference as marginal utility. The same things matter differently to different people. And that difference sets the polarity of exchange, which – like an electrical current – flows through the circuits of an economy. The differences of our desire also mark our existential difference from one another: call it our solitude, our aloneness, our singularity. But something else also gets expressed in exchange: call it our solidarity, our community, our togetherness. That linkage is inspired by the desire we share to grow through our transactions with one another. To get more and to be better off collectively – not just privately. To thrive – not merely to survive. We part with things we value in exchange because we are only detached from the logic of possession together. We enter into exchange not just to get what we need or to maximize what we have but to offer others what they need while providing them the chance to offer us something in return. Marginal utility is the engine of perpetual desire. But it need not be simply the desire for more and more stuff or endless

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survival. Economic desire points to a deeper human possibility: friendship in sacrificial community. In our transactions, we are regularly tempted to use the language of sacrifice manipulatively: to treat economic partners as adversaries, not companions. We impose dubious responsibilities on one another (or upon ourselves) by staking a moral claim on what we have given up. We especially do this in the name of growth or sustainability – personal or collective. And such rhetoric – rightly – ought to make us suspicious about the language of sacrifice. But, in the economy of sacrifice, one’s offerings are more than an unholy instrument of control: something we use to cajole others into doing what we want them to do for us. Instead, refusing to lay moral claim to our sacrifices is – paradoxically – a true sacrifice. Those who recognize their place in the economy of sacrifice stop using their losses to gain leverage over others. Instead, by seeing their sacrifices as offerings, they let go of the moral high ground, which places others in their debt. Their claim to the power of the deal is offered up. In the economy of sacrifice, we part with every unconditional claim to be compensated for the losses we accept on behalf of others. Rather, the moral imperative of sacrifice is redirected toward an invitation: that others might join one’s offering by making it their own. However, the economy of sacrifice does not simply introduce a gift economy to supplant a contractual economy. Paying others for their services or honoring our economic commitments is not simply optional, as if such things called for supererogatory generosity instead of mature responsibility. We owe it to one another to offer ourselves through the conversation of exchange. And we owe it to ourselves to challenge others to offer themselves in return. The economy of sacrifice reminds us that our responsibilities toward one another are open-ended and up for continual renegotiation. Voluntary contracts may settle the legal question of whether a business deal is valid. But they do not settle the ethical question of whether our exchange aptly recognizes the offerings of others. Only open-hearted discernment – a posture of having without holding and parting without losing – can show us whether we have given others what they really deserve. Only such wisdom can see whether justice has been served in our economy. After all, justice is (as Cavell reminds us) an ongoing conversation.1 Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism: The Carus Lectures, 1988 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxv–xxvii.

1

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It is often possible to make others do something we want them to do. It is much more difficult to get others to express what they mean by doing what they do. Those who understand the economy of sacrifice recognize that business is not just about getting others to do what we want them to do (for example, meeting our needs in exchange for meeting theirs). Rather, it is about helping each other to articulate, through our exchanges, what we actually mean to offer one another. Such communication cannot be forced. It can only be taught and learned, elicited and acknowledged. Within the economy of sacrifice, business is a conversation of mutual instruction, through which we help one another offer the recognition of solidarity and love. True sacrifice seeks to call forth an offering from others. But it will never demand it. It cannot. It releases that claim. And it only imposes what moral claims it does make in order to call forth a sacrificial response. Those who understand the economy of sacrifice can still settle contracts and enforce them. They can still make promises and keep them. But they will not imagine that the moral significance of economic life has been exhausted in doing so – or that economic justice has been served on those terms alone. In the economy of sacrifice, we require and demand more of each other than that. We remain open to the possibility that the moral claims we make on one another are more or less or different than the legal obligations, social expectations, or political policies under which we labor. Coming to acknowledge such variance could lead to a wide range of responses: trying to change a contract or policy or convention, to end it, to endure it, or to make our agreements more adaptive. But, whatever our responses, they will acknowledge the sacrificial community to which we belong by using economic exchange to forge friendship.2 Such friendship is not an elective affinity, based on natural association or shared background. It is a relationship polarized by the differences in our desire and geared toward deeper selfawareness and mutual delight. The economy of sacrifice is formed by finding friends in places we might not have expected – or dared – to look for them.

For a more extended discussion of this economic possibility in the context of Cavellian moral perfectionism, cf. Joshua S. Nunziato and Ronald Paul Hill, “Perfectionism and the Place of the Interior Life in Business.”

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Augustine and Ascetics on the Fidelity of Parting Augustine discovered his place in the sacrificial economy by finding friends. But it was not so much he who found them. They found him. And they invited him into a sacrificial fellowship that preceded him and elicited his offering. Augustine tells this story in conf. 8. Shortly before Augustine’s conversion, he had been visited by a colleague named Ponticianus (conf. VIII.vi (14–5)). A collection of scriptural writings from St. Paul caught the eye of Augustine’s visitor. The book revealed something about Augustine’s religious journey, which caught Ponticianus off guard and prompted him to make a revelation or ­confession – of sorts. He told a story that conscripted the unsuspecting Augustine into the role of secondhand witness to a conversion that Ponticianus had seen firsthand, wished to imitate, and reluctantly refused. Which is to say: Ponticianus’ story put Augustine in his place. In it, Ponticianus recalled the sudden transformation of two colleagues, who had abandoned their promising professional roles in the Roman imperial bureaucracy to devote their lives to celibate monasticism. Their shocking career change had been the response to hearing another famous conversion story: that of St. Anthony. St. Anthony’s conversion, in turn, had been prompted by hearing the story of another (failed) conversion: Christ’s unrequited challenge to the wealthy young ruler in the Gospels, whom he had told to sell everything (cf. Matt. 19:16–22; Mark 10:17–27; Luke 18:18–23). St. Anthony responded to Christ’s call as the rich young ruler in the story had found himself incapable of doing. Anthony thereby shouldered – as the young ruler had not – the fear of losing his flesh by renouncing the stuff that sustained it. In the process, he identified with the collective that the young ruler in the Gospels had not when the latter declined to follow Christ. By contrast, St. Anthony embraced Christ’s flesh through his response to one who had not yet been able to recognize it. He thus turned his willingness to let go into a witness for others, like Augustine. St. Anthony’s conversion, in turn, elicited a reaction from Ponticianus’ colleagues, when they encountered his story in a book they discovered while on a business trip. Anthony’s story had been enough to persuade Ponticianus’ colleagues to accept the call of Christ by joining a monastic community. In a significant detail, Augustine notes that this pair who had been converted to religious life “had fiancées who, when they heard of this [i.e., the story of their partners’ conversion to the celibate life of the monastery], likewise dedicated their virginity to you” (conf. VIII.vi (15), Outler modified).

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All of this, in turn, placed Ponticianus and his unnamed friend in the unenviable position of witnessing a conversion they would not join – but wanted to. Although they grieved their own inability to follow the decision of their colleagues, their grief did not loosen their resolve to continue in the career that their friends had abandoned. All of this left Ponticianus where Augustine found himself at the present moment when he heard the story. And that was, in turn, the very place in which the rich young ruler had found himself when confronted with the challenge of Christ: “[H]e was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:22, NRSV; cf. Luke 18:23; Matt. 19:22). In the subsequent paragraphs, Augustine’s conversion unfolds through a chiastic reversal of Ponticianus’ implicit casting of Augustine as his own body double: the rich young ruler of the Gospel story. Ponticianus’ departure thus marked the beginning of Augustine’s own conversion. Just like Ponticianus (and the rich young ruler) Augustine would mourn his own inability to convert. Augustine’s grief, however, already hinted at something more: “The streams of my eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to you [acceptabile sacrificium tuum]. And, not indeed in these words, but to this effect, I cried to you: ‘And you, O Lord, how long? How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever? Oh, remember not against us our former iniquities.’ For I felt that I was still enthralled by them” (conf. VIII.vii (28), Outler modified). Augustine’s tears were a confession of solidarity with others (like Ponticianus and the rich young ruler) who had not been able to confess for themselves. Yet Augustine admitted that he could not quite make good on that solidarity yet. He was bound to a knowledge of his isolation from a corporate group with which he desired to identify. But he could not provide for himself a context in which to be relieved of such knowledge. Nevertheless, he was given the body in which to grieve his partings. Throughout Augustine’s conversion story, reading represents the memory of sacrifice, embodied (as it were) “in the scroll of a book” (cf. Heb. 10:7). Reading links Christ and the rich young ruler to Anthony. Another book links Anthony to Ponticianus and his friends. Yet another book connects Ponticianus and Augustine. When Augustine hears, “Pick it up, read it” (conf. VIII.xii (29), Outler), he responds to the injunction by referring to a collection of St. Paul’s writings – presumably the same book that had prompted Ponticianus to tell Augustine the story of his colleagues. And Augustine self-consciously seeks guidance from that

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book just as Anthony had: by listening to the words as if they were being spoken directly to him (cf. conf. VIII.xii (29)): So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard how Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: ‘Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me’ [Matt. 19:21]. By such an oracle he was immediately converted to you. So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. (conf. VIII.xii (29), Outler modified)

When Augustine read Paul, he remembered that the body that Ponticianus’ colleagues and Anthony had acknowledged through their reading had been the ecclesial body of Christ. And if they could find their fear of death relieved through reading his flesh as their own, then so could he. Anthony made good on the grief of the rich young ruler by renouncing the wealth that the former could not let go. Conversely, Ponticianus had grieved that he could not detach himself from the career that his confrès had walked away from. (In fact, his career was precisely what had brought him to Augustine on the fateful day of their encounter.) Augustine’s own conversion involved a complex gesture of parting, which made good on Ponticianus’ own paralysis. It did so by directly reflecting the conversion of Ponticianus’ colleagues, who had left behind both careers and fiancées for the sake of devotion to Christ. Like them, Augustine adopted the story of Anthony and the rich young ruler as his own by reinterpreting the “wealth” at stake. For him, wealth was not direct political power or a large inheritance. In his case (as in that of Ponticianus’ friends), wealth meant a bright career and its attendant social capital. It also meant the reassurances of romantic partnership designed to insulate his own flesh from isolation. Indeed, Augustine prefaces the entire narrative of his conversion (including the run-in with Ponticianus) by identifying the impediments to his conversion as “the chain of sexual desire by which I was so tightly held, and … the slavery of worldly business” [de vinculo quidem desiderii concubitus, quo artissimo tenebar, et saecularium negotiorum servitute] (conf. VIII.vi (13), Outler). His career and his sex life were (apparently) the only things standing between him and his baptism. His conversion, like the conversion of Ponticianus’ friends, would release him from seeing either as a source of bondage.

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Besides the sophisticated narrative chain linking Christ to Augustine, there is an intimate act of openhearted attention and devotion echoing quietly through the drama of his conversion. The farewell gesture of Augustine’s common-law wife would eventually determine the specific shape and conditions of his own conversion.3 Leaving his longtime partner for the sake of a career-advancing liaison with a more socially advantageous mate (cf. conf. VI.xiii (23)) irrevocably joined the puzzle of Augustine’s career (and what he should be willing to give up for it) to the problem of his erotic flesh. His career would have to carry the burden of the bodies he had been ready to sacrifice – both his partner’s and his own: “My girlfriend was torn from my side as an impediment to my marriage, and my heart which clung to her was torn and wounded till it bled” (conf. VI.xv (25), Outler modified). But his career, as it quickly turned out, could not compensate for what he had done. It provided him no society in which he could grieve his wounds as an acknowledgment of the common good. Instead, Augustine’s flesh left him isolated and lonely – a condition that he could only confirm by finding a would-be sexual surrogate: “I procured another girlfriend – not a wife, of course. … [T]he wound [was not] healed that had been caused by cutting away my former girlfriend; only it ceased to burn and throb, and began to fester; it gaped, so to speak, cold and hopeless [quasi frigidius sed desperatius dolebat]” (conf. VI.xv (25), Outler modified). His career ambitions and his sex life were not two separate impediments to Augustine’s conversion. They were interrelated symptoms of the same inability to stay openhearted toward himself and those around him. He could not see the collective identity to which he, and they, belonged. This inability kept Augustine’s tortured self-knowledge suspended in a condition of misunderstanding (cf. conf. VI.xvi (26)). His lust was confirmation of this failure to recognize himself. James Wetzel has observed here, “Lust is love that has lost its trust that the flesh of others can be loved and still remain inalienably their own. For that very reason, lust lacks a sense of its own flesh.”4 Augustine’s summary judgment on this period in his life should be read in that light: “Meanwhile, my sins were being multiplied” [interea mea peccata multiplicabantur] (conf. VI.xv (25), Outler).

I am grateful to James Wetzel for helping me appreciate the significance of Augustine’s relationship to his partner in light of Augustine’s decision to couch his conversion as a quest to be liberated from his linkage ex femina, cf. conf. VIII.i (2); Wetzel, “Agony in the Garden.” 4 “Life in Unlikeness,” 116. 3

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Augustine’s conversion would transform his experience of loss into a discipline of loving and letting go. It unfolded as a kind of antiphonal response to all of these witnesses who had preceded him. But it took shape, especially, as he accepted the invitation to become “the imitator of a woman” [feminae imitator] (cf. conf., VI.xv (25), my trans.): flesh of his flesh, whose parting he would learn to remember by learning what it meant to die.5 It was Augustine’s lingering sense of fidelity to his partner’s trust that made celibacy the necessary condition for his conversion to Christ in conf. 8. Celibacy was not so central to Augustine’s idea of conversion simply because he thought that everyone was obligated to strive for it. He did not.6 Instead, celibacy became the key axis along which his conversion turned because it was his only remaining option for showing fidelity to flesh he had forsaken. Celibacy would be the condition sine qua non for embracing Christ’s flesh through baptism because that alone would allow Augustine to keep faith with the body that the mother of his child had entrusted to him when she had promised to partner with no one else (cf. conf. VI.xv (25)).7 Augustine’s partner promised to live thereafter as if they had been married while he would leave her precisely in order to be freed up to marry someone else. In short, she made of their separation the occasion for offering true sacrifice: a detached gesture of openheartedness, acknowledging their common good. By such a commitment, Augustine’s partner implicated him in her fidelity to flesh For a remarkable reading of this passage against the background of the creation of Adam’s partner in Genesis, cf. Danuta Shanzer, “Avulsa a Latere Meo: Augustine’s Spare Rib – Confessions 6.15.25,” The Journal of Roman Studies 92 (2002): 157–76. 6 In “The Good of Marriage,” Augustine would write: “[M]arriage and fornication are not two evils, the second of which is worse; but marriage and continence are two goods, the second of which is better. Just so, your temporal health and sickness are not two evils, the second of which is worse; but your health and immortality are two goods, the second of which is better,” “The Good of Marriage (De bono coniugali),” in Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, trans. Charles T. Wilcox, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1955), 8. (The Latin is taken from the Latin edition of the text published online in the Library of Latin Texts – Series A (Turnhout: Brepols).) What is good – but not the best – is not, therefore, bad. Not all are obligated to seek what is best. Although De boni coniugali was written a few years into Augustine’s life as a bishop, it is probably reasonable to assume that he is articulating an ethical vision consistent with the expectations that would have been communicated to him as a Christian catechumen in Milan in the 380s. Celibacy was not an obligation that Augustine had to accept prior to his baptism. Indeed, Monica had been hoping that Augustine would get baptized after his planned marriage, cf. conf. VI.xiii (23). 7 For some instructive remarks about the circumstances of this relationship, cf. Peter Brown, “Introduction,” in Confessions (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), xv. 5

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that he would only fail (for now) to acknowledge (just as he had failed to acknowledge it by refusing to accept her as his wife). She left behind her son, Adeodatus, as a poignant reminder that the fruitfulness of their flesh had been a gift from God. Meanwhile, her life would be devoted to learning how to die by facing up to her partings – and Augustine’s – while remembering the goodness of the relationship in which those had been suffered. Under these conditions, only celibacy could keep faith with her devotion. Celibacy was not Augustine’s renunciation of the sexual economy. It was his way of acknowledging his place in that economy by relinquishing a proprietary relationship to his own flesh and that of others. Sex was not his prerogative to give up: only his claim to his flesh was his to let go of. That release would become an offering. Celibacy would serve as Augustine’s offering of gratitude to those with whom his flesh had been bound, especially his partner’s – through her, their son’s – and, with them, the entire ecclesial community’s. But the key to this offering is detachment, not denial. Though only implicit at this point in Augustine’s story, Augustine would make the contrast between the offering of detachment and the false sacrifice of renunciation explicit through his part in a complimentary story. That story forms the narrative subtext of his Letter 262 to Ecdicia.8 This note provides pastoral guidance under thorny circumstances. Ecdicia, in her zeal for spiritual excellence, had, without her husband’s buy-in, renounced their sex life. Eventually, her husband joined her in the commitment. But, in her exuberance, she added further renunciations: she gave away her family’s estate to itinerant religious ascetics (again, without her husband’s consent). And she started presenting herself socially as if she were a widow. Her husband started living with a girlfriend. In this context, Augustine would address the woman’s desire for spiritual excellence by suggesting an idea that must have felt counterintuitive: her true offering, in these circumstances, was to release the desire for renunciation. She needed to sacrifice her sense of what was hers in the household economy that she and her husband shared with their son – and not because her body or her property actually belonged to her husband, but rather because ownership is not the table stakes of sacrifice. Augustine called her to recognize that neither her

Cf. Augustine, Letters 211–270, trans. Roland J. Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2005), 204–9.

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possessions nor her spiritual exceptionalism were hers to be claimed or given up. Instead, she owed it to others – especially to her husband and their son – to recognize that her possessions were held in common with them for their collective good. Their proprietorship is spiritually provisional, not the precondition of sacrificial ascesis. Ecdicia’s holiness is not something she would attain and offer to God alone, whether with or without her family. Rather, she would only offer her life as a sacrifice through her attention toward theirs: through her practical, economic concern for the everyday needs of her husband and their son. But that called for openhearted attention. And that, Augustine says, would be her true sacrifice.9 So, too, for Augustine. Perhaps his celibacy expressed attention and devotion toward his partner and their son – albeit in a less obviously economical register than Ecdicia’s sacrifice. Augustine did regard a commitment to chastity – either in the mode of celibacy or marriage – as requisite for initiation into the ecclesial body of Christ. Perhaps, by the point of his conversion, Augustine was willing to reciprocate the acknowledgment that his partner had invited him to make at her departure: that the only way of witnessing to the truth about their life together would be to make of their union a marriage. And, just maybe, Augustine believed that fidelity to Christ in baptism required that his sexual life now could only take the form of celibacy since there was no other avenue left for keeping faith with the wife to whom he remained bound – but from whom he would always remain parted. (The fact that his partner had vowed celibacy likely meant that, by the time of Augustine’s conversion, she was living a religious life in monastic community. In this respect, Augustine’s eventual celibacy would echo the responses of Ponticianus’ friends’ fiancées to their partners’ vows.) I do not think it is essential to insist that Augustine’s actions be read as a belated response to a virtual marriage. But it is crucial to see that Augustine had to admit (and knew that he had to admit) the claim that his erstwhile partner’s flesh continued to make on his in order to accept the flesh of Christ as his own. To admit her claim would require devoting himself to finding and remembering her flesh in Christ’s. And honestly remembering the

Joseph Clair offers a perceptive reading of this letter and the moral lessons it surfaces about “non-possessive desire” in Discerning the Good in the Letters and Sermons of Augustine, 119–20, 135–43. However, Clair thinks that such desire “reckons every good as a gift and follows each one toward its source in the highest good,” ibid., 142–3. I would suggest, rather, that even our attachment to the goods we accept as given must be offered up along the journey of sacrificial detachment.

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parting of their flesh would be the essential condition for Augustine to accept and grieve it. To keep faith with the terms of her farewell might not mean acting henceforth as if she had been the wife whom he had always refused to recognize. But it would certainly mean learning to keep faith with her by responding rightly to the goodbye. And that required imitating her example of quiet sacrifice. It would also mean refusing to imagine that he could afford to give up on his flesh – or the flesh of those he loved – as the necessary cost of living out his career ambitions. At the time of their separation, Augustine had been “unhappy and no imitator of a woman” (conf. VI.xvi (25), my trans.). But through his conversion, Augustine finally accepted the capacity to imitate his partner. That imitation was a discipline in dying. And it would look like putting on the flesh of Christ. In the garden, Augustine finally hears the voice calling him to “Pick it up, read it” [tolle lege, tolle lege] (conf. VIII.xii (29), Outler). He obeys. What he reads are the words of St. Paul: “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts [cf. Rom. 13:13–14]” (conf. VIII.xii (29), Chadwick). What seems at first like a snippet of moral guidance, mixed with a bit of mystical Christology, had an effect on Augustine no less profound than his reading of the books of the Platonists had. Both readings offered Augustine a transfigured selfunderstanding. Both allowed him to recall something about himself that he had somehow forgotten – though it would be impossible to say precisely how.10 The first set of books had reminded him that the memory of divine blessedness never ceased haunting his death-bound life. The second collection of writings reminded him that he had not yet begun to live as if his mortal flesh could really make its work of parting into an offering. Augustine had always been keenly aware that it was necessary to make sacrifices in order to live well. But what Augustine finally saw when he read Paul in the garden was that he himself was the sacrifice

10

Cavell has commented, “If philosophy sometimes looks as if it wishes nothing more than to strike us dumb, then it should not be overlooked that philosophy also claims to know only what an ordinary man can know, and that we are liable to silence so produced only because we have already spoken, hence thought, hence justified and excused, hence philosophized, and are hence always liable not merely to say more than we know (a favorite worry of modern philosophy) but to speak above the conscience at the back of our words, deaf to our meaning,” Cavell, “Avoidance of Love,” 249. When Augustine read the Platonists – and St. Paul – he encountered thinkers who reminded him of “the conscience at the back of his words.”

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to be made.11 His sex life and his career ambitions were not tokens of an offering that he could not bring himself to make. Instead, nothing remained to be given – except the acknowledgment that he had already become an offering. Making that confession would take on the dimensions of a career and the duration of a life. It would irrevocably alter both his occupation and his sex habits. But it would do so by giving him the body in which to confess that his life was simply sacrifice. That was what he had to offer. And that, it turned out, had already been offered. His flesh was already hidden in Christ’s. It only remained for him to acknowledge as much through baptism – and thereby to emerge into his new ecclesial life in Christ’s flesh.

Fleshing Out the Vision of God Though Augustine never explicitly frames them as such, the opening chapters of civ. Dei 10 provide a searching theological interpretation of his own conversion. When Augustine read St. Paul’s commission to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” in the Milanese garden, he understood it as an invitation to find his own flesh – and the life that it represented – in the ecclesial body of Jesus. Only by learning to acknowledge that Christ gave him his flesh could he offer God the recognition – the latreia – he had come to believe that God alone deserves. In civ. Dei 10.2, Augustine explicitly credits Plotinus with acknowledging the one true God. The Plotinian soul is akin (Augustine claims) to St. John the Baptist insofar as it reflects a readiness to publish its wisdom as the expectation of another’s. And yet, at the beginning of civ. Dei 10.3, Augustine immediately adds (by borrowing, as he frequently does in such contexts, from Romans 1) that the Platonists had failed to worship God as the one whom they had recognized him to be. It is a strange allegation. What exactly had the Platonists failed to do?12 Augustine suggests that they were not strict Later in civ. Dei 20.25, Augustine glosses an Old Testament prophecy of eschatological fulfillment by commenting: “Now they themselves, when they have been purified, shall be sacrifices [hostiae] of complete and perfect righteousness; for what more acceptable offering can such persons make to God than themselves?” [quid enim acceptius deo tales offerunt quam se ipsos] (Dods). In conf. 8, Augustine recognized that this also described himself. 12 Notably, although Plotinus receives direct praise in Chapter 2, he avoids direct censure here. Instead, Augustine indicts more generally “the Platonists, or any others who shared those opinions” [si platonici vel quicumque alii ista senserunt] – leaving open the question of whether Plotinus himself was implicated in the religious infidelity of his intellectual colleagues. It is tantalizing to speculate about whether Augustine could 11

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monotheists. Instead, the Platonists had indulged (or at least overlooked) the religious excesses of the dissipated political communities to which they belonged, whose members could not restrain themselves from imbuing the pluralistic character of their values with polytheistic religious significance. By refusing to let their philosophical vision set the tone for their cultural involvement, the philosophers had failed to embody the truth of their contemplative insight. In short, the vision of the Platonists was good but they had not acknowledged the economy in which they might own up to their vision as flesh and blood. They lacked the body in which to worship God alone by offering sacrifice. What St. Paul provided Augustine that the books of the Platonists had not was a sacrificial economy ready to keep faith with the Platonists’ vision of God by giving it a communal incarnation. And that economy would take the form of an ecclesiology: the flesh of Christ as the body of the Church. Augustine heard the words of Paul, “[P]ut on the Lord Jesus Christ” as an invitation to baptism. And that meant full participation in the Church. Precisely because of its religious implications – not in spite of them – Augustine’s conversion in the garden was also his acceptance of a philosophical vocation modeled on the pedagogy of the Platonists. It was there that he took on the task of seeking wisdom by remembering how to die. The very body that made him a Christian by incorporating him into the catholic community of worship and service afforded him flesh in which to acknowledge the Platonists’ vision of God by responding to that vision with a true sacrifice. It is, Augustine saw, the God whom the Platonists knew who alone deserves the sacrifice of one’s life: To [God] we owe the service which is called in Greek [latreia], whether in each of the sacraments or in us ourselves [sive in quibusque sacramentis sive in nobis ipsis]; for we are all His temple, each of us severally and all of us together, because He condescends to inhabit each individually and the whole harmonious body, being no greater in all than in each, since He is neither expanded have possibly had access to Porphyry’s “Life of Plotinus,” whether in the books of the Platonists or elsewhere. After all, Plotinus was the one who responded to an invitation to join a pagan religious festival by commenting: “It is for those Beings to come to me, not for me to go to them,” “Life of Plotinus,” 10 (in MacKenna’s Enneads). Had he been so inclined, Augustine might have discerned in such a remark a refusal to endorse the popular cultus, which could have been taken to distinguish Plotinus from other Platonists. For more on Augustine’s cautionary attitude when it came to those like Pythagoras, who had avoided investing their philosophy in theurgy, cf. Hans Feichtinger, “‘Nothing Rash Must Be Said’: Augustine on Pythagoras,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89, no. 2 (2015): 253–76.

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nor divided. Our heart when it rises to Him is His altar [cum ad illum sursum est, eius est altare cor nostrum]; the priest who intercedes for us is His Onlybegotten; we sacrifice to Him bleeding victims when we contend for His truth even unto blood [ei cruentas victimas caedimus, quando usque ad sanguinem pro eius veritate certamus]; to Him we offer the sweetest incense when we come before Him burning with holy and pious love; to Him we devote and surrender ourselves and His gifts in us [ei dona eius in nobis nos que ipsos vovemus et reddimus]. (civ. Dei 10.3; Dods modified)13

In this passage, Augustine imagines the Church as a temple comprised of many parts. Just as the soul is present simultaneously in full to each part of its body (an observation Plotinus found highly significant (cf. e.g., Ennead 4.3.3)), so too, God is present to each member of Christ’s church. The image suggests that the Church is the body of God. And yet Augustine knew only one person in whom God had assumed a body: Jesus Christ. God is not a body. But God assumes one in order to make the divinity sacrificially present to his creatures through a life of parting. And the manifest expression of that body is the Church, whose head is Christ. Augustine’s logic implies that if God were to have a body, he could have only one. For Augustine, the Church acknowledges God’s unity by offering itself to him as his one body, through Christ “the priest ... His Only-begotten.” Thus, the Platonists failed to embody their vision of God by failing to embrace the ecclesial catholicity of the sacrifice by which God’s unity is acknowledged. Offering sacrifice to God by directing it to and through ostensibly various manifestations of deity (for Augustine, angels or demons) implies that God has many different bodies. But God accepts only one offering as his own. To imagine otherwise is to ­confuse the collective identity – or corporation – through which one’s soul responds to its vision of God. When the members of the church offer sacrifice, they do not sacrifice one of their own at a loss for the sake of survival. Nor do they give up certain things they desire in order to acquire other things more conducive to private religious rhapsody. Instead, the members of the Church

13

Here is one place where Augustine tactically employs the language of gift to describe sacrifice – but, in the very process, points beyond the gift exchange as an image of sacrifice. We devote [vovemus] and surrender [reddimus] gifts that are God’s [ei dona eius] – not our own. They never were. Indeed, even as God’s they are offered, not owned, since we fulfill our sacrificial vows ultimately only in God’s own sacrifice. (Cf. the discussion of divine sacrifice in Chapter 5.) Admitting that releases us to make an offering of unattached openheartedness.

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sacrifice by offering their collective life in recognition of their common good: “[W]e sacrifice to Him bleeding victims when we contend for His truth even unto blood.” Sacrifice here is not a survival mechanism or a growth technique. It is grace in the face of death. It offers a sacrament of life. Thus, the offering of martyrdom is not (strictly speaking) self-sacrifice. Only Christ offers himself.14 The members of his body only recognize that their lives have already been offered in his. And they live and die accordingly. This means not presuming to offer themselves but simply confessing that they have already been offered through the witness of others. It was precisely the living testimony of others – Augustine’s beloved partner, Anthony, Ponticianus’ friends, and more – who came to represent for Augustine the flesh of Christ. Through their sacrifices, Augustine recognized that Christ had already situated him within the community of the Church – even before he had been freed, by the words of St. Paul in the garden, to join it. It was they who modeled for Augustine what it means to “devote and surrender ourselves and His gifts in us.” It would ultimately require moving beyond a gift economy entirely to an offering of what was never his. Although gift giving can provide one image of sacrifice, it is provisional, destined to be replaced by deeper and richer references directing creatures to the divine, who offers Godself in them. Decades after his conversion, Augustine would sum up his sacrificial self-understanding in the following line: “[F]or the Church, being the body of which he [i.e., Christ] is the head, learns to offer itself through him” [ecclesiae sacrificium, quae cum ipsius capitis corpus sit, se ipsam per ipsum discit offerre] (civ. Dei 10.20, Bettenson). By recognizing that his flesh had been joined to the sacrifices of others, those who offered him Christ’s ecclesial body, Augustine received the body in which to mourn partings in prayerful hope. The gesture of a grieving yet joyful spirit is, for Augustine, the heart of the human offering: “[God] does not desire the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast, but He desires the sacrifice of a contrite heart” [non vult ergo sacrificium trucidati pecoris, et vult sacrificium contriti cordis] (civ. Dei 10.5, Dods). This was the sacrifice that Augustine had to make in the garden of conversion. Augustine could imagine (at least in confessional retrospective) an entire ecclesiology implicit in the little injunction: “[P]ut on the Lord Jesus Christ.” But those words were not all that he read. The remainder 14

Wetzel suggests: “Christ’s human relation to perfection is perfect because his self-sacrifice to God is perfect,” Wetzel, “Saint Augustine Lecture 2012,” 22.

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of the passage that Augustine found in his garden of conversion outlined a corollary to putting on Christ: “[M]ake no provision for the flesh in its lusts” (conf. VIII.xii (29), Chadwick). Providing for Christ’s ecclesial flesh would mean refusing to imagine that self-indulgence could ever tender real flesh. Instead of lust, providing for flesh would now mean serving Christ’s body, the Church, in which Augustine had become ready to see himself. Rather than restraining his flesh, virtue would come to express the embodiment of his soul’s contemplative vocation. More specifically, giving up on things like “riots, drunken parties … eroticism and indecencies … strife and rivalry” (conf. VIII.xii (29), Chadwick) would train him to offer sacrifice – not by renouncing things that could sustain his flesh or cause it to grow, but by acknowledging that these had never sustained his flesh or caused it to grow at all.15 Virtues do not simply represent the sacrifices one makes when one chooses to provide for someone else’s flesh instead of one’s own. Virtues represent the acknowledgment of another’s flesh as linked to one’s own by a common good. And, for Augustine, that acknowledgment trades on an ecclesial recognition. He sees the Church as flesh in which we can recognize our own in Christ’s – and therefore, also recognize ours in everyone whose flesh is (or might be) joined to his. Therefore Augustine pictures virtue as the will’s fecundity, expressed through its union – with other wills – in their good: For he himself is the source of our bliss, he himself is the goal of all our striving. By our election of him as our goal – or rather by our re-election (for we had lost him by our neglect); by our re-election (and we are told that the world ‘religion’ comes from relegere, ‘to re-elect’), we direct our course towards him with love [dilectio], so that in reaching him we may find our rest, and attain our happiness because we have achieved our fulfillment in him. For our Good, that Final Good about which the philosophers dispute, is nothing else but to cleave to him whose spiritual embrace, if one may so express it, fills the intellectual soul and makes it fertile with true virtues. (civ. Dei 10.3, Bettenson)

To live virtuously, in this sense, links the acknowledgment of our divine good to the recognition of the flesh that manifests it. Christ is, for Augustine, the only one capable of joining the two commands that sum up “all the law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:40, NRSV). His body

15

James Wetzel renders the passage, “No more wild parties and drunken fits, bedroom antics and indecencies, rivalries and wrangling; just put on Jesus Christ, your master, and don’t look to lusts to care for your flesh,” “Life in Unlikeness,” 98.

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conceives virtues in us by linking our lives in openhearted obligation to one another. Our virtues thereby become new life that is not our own. Thus Augustine immediately glosses the significance of “true virtues” [veris virtutibus] in the following terms: “We are enjoined to love this good with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength. To this good we ought to be led by those who love us, and to lead those we love” (civ. Dei 10.3, Dods). Our lives become virtuous as they respond to others who have drawn us to see our common good in Christ by embodying his flesh for us. Virtue, in this picture, is always responsive. (And the problem with lust is that it seduces the soul into imagining itself capable of preparing a body for its own possession.) One does not choose one’s flesh. Rather, one is chosen for it. But this election is, actually, a re-election since those joined to Christ’s flesh have (somehow) forgotten how to embody the life fulfilled. Therefore, they must be reminded of their life and taught their death by being shown that their flesh – Christ’s flesh – has never failed to acknowledge its good. Others remind us of our end. We learn how to respond to their reminders by reminding others that their good is linked to ours. In civ. Dei 10.3, Augustine describes this linkage as an ecclesial community – the same community that he confesses having recognized for himself in conf. 8. It is a group to which others had already committed him. By doing so, they bound him to offer his flesh for the life of others who could not yet see their flesh belonging to Christ. They brought Augustine to see that self-love is not the opposite of sacrifice. It is its consummate expression: “And so, when one who has this intelligent self-love is commanded to love her neighbour as herself, what else is enjoined than that she shall do all in her power to commend to her the love of God? This is the worship of God, this is true religion, this right piety, this the service due to God only” (civ. Dei 10.3, Dods modified). To offer one’s life to God is to invite others to join in offering their lives to God alone.

Rethinking Walls: Augustine and the Platonists on the Common Good When Augustine tells his readers what separates him from the Platonists – his intimate interlocutors – he says that they are too proud: “Why is it that you refuse to be Christians, on the ground that you hold opinions which, in fact, you yourselves demolish? Is it not because Christ came in lowliness, and you are proud?” (civ. Dei 10.29, Dods modified). Just prior to this passage, Augustine had been demonstrating that several

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articles of Christian teaching that might at first have seemed intellectually scandalous to Platonists were actually not. In fact, Augustine argues, Christianity is more Platonic than the Platonists themselves. On questions like the link between the body and the happy life of contemplation, Christian teaching was more faithful to the central insights of Platonism than Platonism had been when it drew the conclusion that “any kind of body” [omne corpus] is incompatible with ultimate human felicity (cf. civ. Dei 10.29). No specific doctrinal “hang-up” ought to prevent earnest Platonists from being baptized. Something other than a divergence of intellectual perspectives on key philosophical problems is at stake in the Platonists’ refusal to join the Christian community. And Augustine identifies the true stumbling block as pride [superbum]. But what exactly does Augustine mean by indicting the arrogance of the Platonists? Pride is not a vice that can be evaluated in abstraction from the community with which the Platonists had chosen to identify. Conversely, humility is not a virtue that Augustine imagined himself or his co-religionists – or even his God – to possess in abstraction from the flesh. And the flesh, for Augustine, is what commits the humble to economic community with others. Our flesh refers us to the goodness we share. In reading Dolbeau Sermon 26, Robert Dodaro argues: “It is true that the via humilitatis that God embraced by entering into history is the sole pathway to salvation; however, it is also a universal pathway. As such, humility becomes a criterion for evaluating all soteriologies, while it also provides something of a common ground between them, should there be other, valid explanations for salvation than that provided by the Christian religion.”16 This is an appealing suggestion. However, humility is not a quality that can be used in the abstract for discriminating between those who might belong to the city of God incognito and those who could not. Humility cannot be abstracted from Christ’s sacrifice. Dodaro, it seems, would not disagree. He adds later, “Humility, thus, derives from, and does not proceed [sic], the encounter with this divine mystery. Otherwise humility would falsify itself as yet another accomplishment of a ‘virtue’ achieved through self-discipline, and not the result of grace gratuitously given.”17 And he links “this divine mystery” that produces humility to Christ.18 Nevertheless, the humility of Christ is inseparable from what Robert Dodaro, “The Secret Justice of God and the Gift of Humility,” Augustinian Studies 34, no. 1 (2003): 87. 17 Ibid., 92. 18 Ibid., 89. 16

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roots him in our experience of human life. Therefore, if Christ’s humility provides “common ground” to different soteriologies, it must do so by linking them to the universal economy of sacrifice that the church represents. This is not to deny that Christ’s sacrifice may manifest itself incognito in many places beyond the visible church. It is only to insist that humility – considered in abstraction from ecclesiology – cannot be a shibboleth for identifying “anonymous Christians.” Pride and humility are not individual character traits that Augustine imagined he (and Christ) possessed and Platonists (like Porphyry) lacked.19 Instead, the form that humility took for Augustine was representing the universal economy of sacrifice through membership in the Church. Victorinus, in particular, modeled this humility for Augustine. His place in the narrative of conf. is crucial. He appears after Augustine had read the books of the Platonists (which Victorinus himself had translated) but before Augustine’s conversion. Like Augustine, Victorinus had been a successful rhetorician and respected intellectual. Like Augustine, he had been strongly drawn to the wisdom of the Platonists. And, like Augustine, Victorinus had been hesitant about submitting himself to the constraints of ecclesial life. When Augustine sought out Simplicianus for spiritual counsel, the older man cannily sized up these parallels and invited Augustine to read his own situation in light of Victorinus’ story (cf. conf. VIII.ii (3)–v (10)). The point of Simplicianus’ narrative, Augustine says, was “to encourage me to copy the humility of Christ, which is hidden from the wise and revealed to babes” (conf. VIII.ii (3), Outler). And the story had its intended effect: “[W]hen this man …, Simplicianus, told me the story of Victorinus, I was eager to imitate him” (conf. VIII.v (10), Outler). But why did this narrative have that effect on Augustine? Victorinus was Augustine’s exemplar for how to respond to the vision of the Platonists without presumption [praesumptio] (cf. conf. VII.xx (26)). Victorinus translated the Platonists for Augustine – and not just with his pen. Victorinus situated the Platonists’ insight about God by acknowledging his own place in the community that remembered and celebrated Christ’s offering. Victorinus thereby exemplified the humility required to fit Platonism to an ecclesiology that would tender the vision of God to all. 19

For an argument that the “one inflated with the most monstrous pride,” conf. VII.ix (13) (Outler), whom Augustine credits with having given him direct access to Platonic philosophy, is not (as some have supposed) Manlius Theodorus but Porphyry himself, cf. Beatrice, “Quosdam Platonicorum Libros: The Platonic Readings of Augustine in Milan,” 257.

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Before becoming a Christian, Victorinus had (more than once) gently mocked Simplicianus: “Is it then the walls that make Christians?” [ergo parietes faciunt christianos] (conf. VIII.ii (4), Outler). He was asking, in effect: Do not the walls of the church wall it out at least as much as they wall it in? Victorinus refused to claim the title of “Christian” at the cost of sectarian exclusivity, which would exile him from the company of colleagues and friends not yet ready to make the acknowledgment of Christ. Thus, Victorinus already claimed for himself, so he said, the title of “Christian” – but incognito. However, Simplicianus was not willing to endorse Victorinus’ closet Catholicism. Instead, he insisted: “I shall not believe it, nor shall I count you among the Christians, until I see you in the Church of Christ” (conf. VIII.ii (4), Outler). Simplicianus was pressing Victorinus to admit that he could only claim to anonymize his Christianity by refusing to identify with those who socially embodied it. He could only see himself as an anonymous Christian by remaining aloof from the community of people whose lives publicly manifested Christ for him – and allowed him to acknowledge himself as a Christian in the first place. The members of the Church had offered him a body, already, that he had not yet decided to call his own – even though he recognized that he belonged to it. His subsequent baptism and public declaration of faith (to the riotous acclaim of those assembled (cf. conf. VIII.ii (5)) were an acknowledgment of the community that was already his – but from which he had been alienated in his own private “place of unlikeness.” Flesh embodies the soul’s power of expression. Similarly, “walls” – whether literal or figurative – function as institutional boundaries of social organizations. They enable groups to communicate who they are and what they represent. Like flesh, walls mark interstices of communication and exchange. They define by partition – and what they define is part of a larger economy. Nevertheless, what is partitioned off can refer to an unparted unity. For example, a living body expresses the soul that gives it life. But the soul need not be imagined as part of the embodied world around it (as if the body demarcated its soul as some segment of the wider world).20 Likewise, while the “walls” of the church 20

In a passage that Augustine knew, Plotinus describes the soul as follows: “The material body is made up of parts, each holding its own place, some in mutual opposition and others variously separated; the Soul is in no such condition; it is not whittled down so that life tells of a part of the Soul and springs where some such separate portion impinges; each separate life lives by the Soul entire, omnipresent in the likeness of the engendering father, entire in unity and entire in diffused variety,” Ennead 5.1.2 (MacKenna); cf. conf. IX.x (25).

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mark it off as a part of the larger human community, it is a part that refers the entire human economy to its common good through sacrifice. Therefore, Victorinus eventually realized that he could become a member of the Church without identifying himself as a sectarian partisan. Rather, the walls around him and the flesh holding his place would make him a cosmopolitan ambassador of universal wisdom. Victorinus came to recognize (at least as Augustine would have imagined him) that walls do make Christians just as flesh makes a human being. The walls provide power of expression to the community in which Christ’s incarnation is acknowledged. And that community represents an economy offered for all and by all. Indeed, Victorinus must already have had some inkling of this before his baptism. Otherwise, if the church’s walls really would have cut him off from those outside, how could he ever have claimed to already be a Christian – even quietly? It was Victorinus’ betrayal of those inklings that led to Simplicianus’ allegations of bad faith. Conversely, embracing conversion meant accepting the walls of the church as the means of advertising the church’s cosmopolitan standing even on behalf of those outside it. And making that shift required humility. Augustine took Victorinus’ eventual readiness to leave behind the selective camaraderie of the pagan cultural elite in order to join the Christian community as a token of his humility (cf. conf. VII.iv (9)). There were perhaps few in the Church of Rome who would have considered this celebrated member of the intelligentsia their social equal. Thus, in converting, Victorinus chose to leave behind the elite company of his social peers in order to join a diverse religious group whose members hailed from different strata of the cultural and economic sediment.21 In Augustine’s eyes, the Church’s diversity represented a testament to the

21

Peter Brown notes: “Charity to the poor in the fourth century was presented by many Christian writers in much the same way as the ‘gratuitous act’ was once presented by existentialist writers of the 1950s. It was an almost terrifying statement of potential boundlessness. But it was also an act of imaginative conquest. To claim such useless persons as part of the body of the Christian community was to claim society as a whole, in the name of Christ, up to its furthest, darkest margins,” Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 76–7. Elsewhere, Brown adds: “Augustine always thought of himself as living among a new ‘people’ – the populus Dei, the ‘people of God’, the direct successors of a compact and distinctive tribe, the ‘people of Israel’. … Thus, like the old ‘people of Israel’, the congregation was a mixed body. Differences in wealth and behaviour were only too public among them,” Augustine of Hippo, 246. Against such a background, it is easier to imagine the depth of the descent that Augustine attributes to Victorinus’ conversion in conf. VIII.iv (9).

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humility of its catholicity. Peter Brown notes here: “Augustine believed that the Church might become coextensive with human society as a whole: that it might absorb, transform and perfect, the existing bonds of human relations. He was deeply occupied by the idea of the basic unity of the human race.”22 Therefore, Victorinus’ willingness to join the Christian community would have looked like letting go of a selective religious partiality in order to embrace a social mélange reflecting the Church’s organic claim to universality. And that mélange, in turn, would represent the cosmopolitan reach of the economy of sacrifice. But, one must also suspect that the humility of conversion – as Augustine would have applied Victorinus’ story to himself23 – was not merely a matter of being released from sectarian religious elitism. It would have, conversely, seemed a matter of being willing to accept the walls of the church – its corporate specificity – as the markers of a universal vocation. It was this possibility that had once seemed impertinent to Victorinus, the incognito Christian. And it was this possibility that would continue to seem inane to the members of his social network that he left behind when he converted. The religious discipline of the philosophers, especially the Platonists (tempered though it was by various pragmatic concessions and indulgences to popular religious expression) offered cosmopolitan wisdom. To become a Christian would have looked, to the eyes of a pagan Platonist, like abandoning a religious commitment to the universality of the receptive intellect and clinging, instead, to a group idiotically insistent about the epochal importance of its own specificity. Perhaps this second aspect of Victorinus’ conversion would have especially struck Augustine when he heard about it from Simplicianus. Humility is most

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Augustine of Hippo, 220. Robert Markus argues that Victorinus’ conversion was neither as difficult nor as humbling as Augustine imagined it must have been: “Victorinus’ passage from neoPlatonism to Christianity had been a smooth progress along the route of a fourth century intellectual. But Augustine, retelling it, was unable to comprehend the ease with which the pagan rhetor had passed into the ranks of the Christians. His incomprehension made him represent Victorinus’ paganism, anachronistically, in militantly anti-Christian terms, and his conversion to Christianity as a dramatic renunciation of his pagan past and a painful break with the circle of his aristocratic friends,” R. A. Markus, “Conversion and Uncertainty,” in The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 29. However, it makes little difference for the purposes of my analysis exactly how true-to-life Simplicianus’ tale might have been. What does matter, though, is what Augustine took the story to mean for his own situation.

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painful and demanding when it appears to others – and when one knows that it appears to others – like arrogance. It takes humility to identify with a specific community when doing so seems like settling for intellectual partiality. For Augustine, embracing Christ’s ecclesial work of parting took humility since doing so placed him in the awkward position of claiming to represent a universal offering at the cost of making himself the apparent partisan of one religious sect among others in the pluralistic milieu of late antiquity. Temperamentally, Augustine always had a strong religious predilection for unity and universality. As a middle-aged bishop, it was the drive toward catholicity that led Augustine to resist the Donatists. As a young convert, that same impulse had made him confident in the authority of the Catholic Church – the community that he thought could plausibly claim to represent the universal people of God throughout the world.24 Even earlier, Augustine’s religious commitment to catholicity had been a central motive spurring him to break with the Manicheans. Peter Brown notes that, at the core of the young Augustine’s disillusionment with that esoteric sect was his frustration about the inadequate space it provided him to grow.25 But the Manicheans had failed to give him such space

In a work that Augustine wrote as a young priest to a friend still attracted to Manicheanism, he contends: “First we must ask what religion we shall commit our souls to for cleansing and renewal. Without question we must begin with the Catholic Church. There are now more Christians than even pagans and Jews combined. Although there are numerous heresies among those Christians, and all want to be seen as Catholics and they call those other than themselves heretics, everyone agrees that there is only one Church. Taking into account the whole world, it has the greatest numbers. Also, as those who know assert, it is more sincere about the truth than all the rest. Truth, however, is another question. For the one who is investigating that is enough. There is one Catholic Church, although different heresies give it different names, because each of them has its own name that it does not dare to reject. Consequently it is left to the judgment of those who assess it unhampered by any special interest to judge which one should be accorded the name of Catholic to which all aspire. In case anyone thinks there has to be a lengthy, wordy discussion on this point, there is no dispute that it is one Church only, and in a certain way even human laws are Christian in it. I do not want any prejudgment to be drawn from this; but I think it is the most appropriate starting point for our inquiry,” “The Advantage of Believing (De utilitate credendi),” in On Christian Belief, trans. Ray Kearney, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2005), vii (19). Later in the same book, Augustine identifies the Catholic Church in terms of “the apostolic throne” and “the chain of succession of the bishops,” [ab apostolica sede per successiones episcoporum] cf. ibid., xvii (35). 25 Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 48. Intriguingly, Brown argues that the Donatists also exhibited organizational sclerosis, cf. ibid., 216. 24

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because they did not recognize their religious vocation as a matter of becoming an organic social body accessible to all. But such esotericism ultimately proved unpalatable to Augustine. This is one reason why the Platonists – who shared his attraction to the universal – represented such a potent alternative to the Manicheanism Augustine was struggling to leave behind.26 However, if one is disposed to seek wisdom in unity, it will always be a temptation to find one’s sense of wholeness by abstracting from the claims of any specific religious community. The imposition of “walls” can easily seem like a perverse insistence on local integrity, expressed through a provincialism that prizes one part over the whole to which it belongs. Fidelity to religious truth can easily seem to require relegating religious specificity to the margins. Remaining unattached to any particular figure or doctrine can look like the best celebration of the glimmers of insight one senses in all religious figures or doctrines. Spirituality without religion then looks more authentically religious than any (other?) religion. In short, religious wisdom comes to look like the habit of refusing to commit. In that picture, humility requires conscientiously withholding one’s assent from any specific religious tradition – while trying to prevent that very act of ascesis from developing into a specific tradition of its own. This is not the route that Augustine took in articulating his philosophical desire for unity. With the help of Victorinus, Augustine came to see that humility is not the habit of refusing walls and the parts that they define. Rather, Christ partitions off the members of his body as mediators of a universal offering. This is an ecclesiological work of parting. “[W]here was that love which builds upon the foundation of humility, which is Jesus Christ? Or, when would these books [of the Platonists] teach me this?” (conf. VII.xx (26), Outler) – so Augustine complains as he thinks back on his encounter with the religious wisdom that showed him God. But what does charity build on the foundation of Christ’s humble flesh? What had been missing from the books of the Platonists? Just the walls of the church. And that means the offering of a place that recognizes the flesh of specific people as the means for all to acknowledge God.

26

In civ. Dei 10.32 for instance, Augustine polemically highlights Porphyry’s concern to discover “the universal way of the soul’s deliverance” [universalem viam animae liberandae] (Dods). Augustine shares Porphyry’s concern. He simply disagrees with Porphyry about where to look for this “universal way.”

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But what does all of this have to do with the logic of sacrificial economy today? Ancient questions about walls continue to crop up in new guises. Walls define communities. But they do so in different ways and for different reasons. In nation-states like the United States, border walls take various forms: concrete barriers, police agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and political bureaucracy. But all of these tend to serve the same function: they prevent trespassing. They keep people out who are not entitled to share in the economic benefits of the enclosed community. They thereby provide emblems of economic policies devoted to the ideal of limitless tribal survival, as discussed in Chapter 2. Within neighborhoods, gated communities serve a parallel function. By fending off “outsiders” thought to threaten the private property (or even the lives) of those who dwell within, they provide peace of mind to residents. But the cost of that peace is social separation from members of one’s own community.27 In such a capacity, walls reinforce a defensively self-absorbed economic posture devoted to the survival of partisans – no matter the cost of their isolation. Rather than serving a cosmopolitan economy rooted in local cooperation and friendship, such walls tend to define insular economies, predicated on exclusion and partiality. By contrast, instead of keeping people out, the walls of the church voluntarily define those who choose to live within them as a community that exists for the sake of those outside.28 Life within is accepted, not imposed. Such walls function like the edges of a homestead, not the concrete bulwark of a border wall or the razor wire perimeter of a prison. They mark those who are inside as a “household”: a diverse family linked together in a thick matrix of affection, attention, and ungrasping reciprocity.29 Insofar as this community represents the universal economy of Robert Putnam notes how gated communities have been marketed as exclusive spaces where lost forms of local community can be recovered. The condition of that recovery looks like security from outside threats. And such security is represented by the community’s walls. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Putnam also suggests that the social life within such communities tends to reproduce the community’s self-imposed isolation from the larger social matrix. “Gated communities” he says, “are innately introverted,” R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 210. 28 Cf. Justin P. Ashworth, “Who Are Our People? Toward a Christian Witness against Borders,” Modern Theology 34, no. 4 (October 1, 2018): 495–518, esp. pp. 510–2, where Ashworth points out the dissimilarity between the walls of the church and the borders of a nation state. 29 Cf. Wendell Berry, It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012). 27

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sacrifice, its members commit to dwelling together as a gesture of unity for the sake of those outside. Anyone outside such walls may enter at any time. And they enter by helping to offer the goods that the walls enclose to those without. Ultimately, those goods simply direct those both inside and out to their common good. The community enclosed within the walls of the church need not endorse specific immigration or trade policies. Its logic can be expressed through a range of practices and laws. But this community ought to model a critique of contemporary corporate formations that reinforce private attachment to partial goods or survivalism, rather than shared detachment from collective goods, intended – through their ­circulation – to serve the common good of the global community. We come to acknowledge our place in that economy – as Augustine did – by finding friends through everyday exchange. Such friends help us respond to their offerings by extending them also to others.

5 Sacrificial Economy

Making a Detached Offering Desire inspires exchange. It is the power of economy. And it is a motive with the power to purify our giving and getting from all attachment to what is given and gotten. We always want more but what is it that we really want more of? Stuff? Pleasure? Power? Perhaps, instead, we want more sacrifice. Maybe, we desire to elicit an even greater offering – an even more intense delight of parting and surrender – from our partners. But why? Simply to squeeze more out of them and keep more for ourselves? Perhaps we would elicit from our partners an even greater demand from us – a stretching of our own sacrificial capacity in response to their own desire for more, for better. But more or better of what? Simply to extract more from us in order to enrich themselves? Why not that their desire to bear fruit in our lives should be more and more fully realized? And how? Perhaps by eliciting in us a more total release from the fruit of our action by releasing them more completely from the fruit of theirs. As we grow together through our exchanges with one another, we practice – with ever greater intensity – this work of parting, which teaches us detachment from the outcome of all our exchanges. What about growth and sustainability – those ideals of economic life with which this book began? Given the logic of the economy of sacrifice, those who think that economic culture exists to serve our private growth are not simply wrong. Likewise, those who see sustainability as the touchstone of a healthy economy are not simply mistaken. Such views are partial, not incorrect. An economy does exist to grow. But what it exists to grow is the capacity and intensity of our collective sacrificial

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offering. An economy does exist to sustain life. But the life it exists to support (as well as possible, for as long as possible) is one devoted to continually dying well. Maybe our gains and losses are real – but not ultimate. Perhaps they are local. Proximate. Relative to what they say about ourselves and others and our belonging together. Sacrifice gives us no absolute claim to property because what we sacrifice was never ours to grasp in the first place. Property is just what all of us have to gain and lose in the service of offering up our claim to ownership: nothing more – but also nothing less. To think that our sacrifices give us unconditional claims on others – to dispose of their gains as we alone see fit – means falling prey to the rhetoric of sacrifice: using the moral high ground to manipulate others. When we do this, we convert the existential condition of solitude, shared by all, into an alienated condition of isolation. We manipulatively separate ourselves by acting as if others’ interests were irrelevant to our own. When we treat people in this way, we refuse to acknowledge their actual differences from us. But when we acknowledge our place in the economy of sacrifice, we see that the only absolute moral claim we make through our offerings is an unconditional invitation to join it. There are moral claims to be made in the economy of sacrifice. Perhaps we have a right to be paid a predetermined rate of interest. Or to share in the return on an investment. Or to be compensated for the costs we incur by selling goods or services. These claims, however, are not grounded in the losses we have accepted on behalf of others (the abstinence we practiced; the risks we took; the time we spent; the labor we exerted). Rather, their ethical force is rooted in the desire we rightly harbor that our offerings to others elicit an offering from them in return: a gesture of openhanded parting that communicates a recognition of our common good. We do not simply take a loss, then expect others to satisfy our moral claim to get back what is ours (and then some) for our trouble. Instead, we challenge others to recognize us – who we are and what we care about – by acknowledging the offerings we make to them. And they make that acknowledgment by making an offering of theirs to us. It is through such offerings that we are released, together, from our attachment to the things we value. It is not, simply, our business to match gains most efficiently to losses for the sake of sustainable growth. It is the business of our economy to give us room for offering, as best we can, all that we can in love.

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Augustine and the Perfection of Sacrifice Indeed, sacrifice – as Augustine conceives of it – is not merely the ligament joining together all death-bound flesh. Sacrifice, in the Augustinian imagination, was a feature of Eden before the fall: “[When] our first parents were in paradise[, t]hen, indeed, intact and pure from all stain and blemish of sin, they offered themselves to God as the purest sacrifices” [mundissimas hostias] (civ. Dei 20.26, Dods). Sacrifice is not simply – or primarily – a remedy for human brokenness. Indeed, it predates the mortality in which human lives express it. Moreover, just as there was sacrifice in Eden, so too there will be sacrifice in heaven. Thus, later in the same chapter, Augustine likens the purity [munditia] of the saints’ bodies and souls [immortalis caro ac mens sanctorum] to the purity of the animals offered in the ancient Jewish sacrificial economy (civ. Dei 20.26). Those who have fully assumed their immortal flesh will have done so in order to offer it. Even the angels, whose lives have never been enfleshed, are joined to incarnate mortals by sacrifice.1 Augustine claims that “these blessed and immortal spirits, who inhabit celestial dwellings … do not desire us to sacrifice to themselves, but to Him whose sacrifice they know themselves to be in common with us [erito illi in caelestibus sedibus constituti inmortales et beati … ei, cuius et ipsi nobis cum sacrificium se esse noverunt]. For we and they together are the one city of God … the human part sojourning here below, the angelic aiding from above” (civ. Dei 10.7, Dods). In contrast with the demons, who disavow the embodiment of sacrificial acknowledgment, the angels worship God by assisting mortals. By inviting human beings to acknowledge that their sacrifice – offered through the death of their flesh – is the same sacrifice that the angels offer through their sempiternal availability to God’s love, the angels acknowledge that our life in the flesh has never been separated from the life fulfilled that they unendingly enjoy. Perhaps even death may not wholly alienate humans from the memory of that community that remembers our flesh without suffering it. The sacrifice of the angels joins their spiritual life to ours by insisting that we who bear mortal flesh by acknowledging its end embody a life as wayfarers that is perfectly at rest

John O’Grady observes: “[T]he angels also offer a sacrifice as members of the holy city and by this they too adhere to God in a holy communion. The whole city, angels and men, offer themselves and by this offering achieve their beatitude,” John O’Grady, “Priesthood and Sacrifice in City of God,” Augustiniana 21 (1971): 35; cf. 41.

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in their enjoyment of God. The sacrifice of the angels allows their lives to be embodied by others who worship God with them. Our wayfaring mortality thereby gives flesh to the sempiternal latreia of heaven itself, where even deathless life offers its life to God as a sacrifice. It is nearly irresistible to imagine that sacrifice is supposed to set things right or at least redress something that is not as we would want it to be. To cite one recent example: in his theological ethics of tolerance, John Bowlin remarks, “Christ’s forbearance and his sacrifice are one.”2 Sacrifice, as Christ models it for humans, is a response to injustice, disorder, and hatred, which holds out healing hope that things may be made new. Augustine, no doubt, would agree. But, from an Augustinian perspective, are forbearance and sacrifice really one? True: Christ’s sacrifice involves forbearance. But perhaps Jesus offered humans more than the promise that our alienating differences might ultimately be overcome in him.3 Augustine’s claim about sacrifice in paradise suggests that Jesus’ sacrifice – insofar as he embodies and models sacrifice for all – is not simply a response to ruptured relationship. It is not defined by what it forbears. Rather, it embodies – in the context of responding to evil – the native response of humanity to God. By doing so, it places into permanent question the human ability to refuse that response. Given our perennial temptation, as human beings, to see sacrifice as a way of coping with the disorder of the cosmos, Augustine’s image of sacrifice in paradise is more than some arcane theological speculation. It is part of his larger effort to help readers rethink the significance of the sacrifices we make here and now, in this world that is often not as we want it to be. Sacrifice is the way life was always meant to be. Even in a perfect economy, life would be inherently sacrificial. But sacrifice does look different in our world than it might have in some other world uncompromised by brokenness.

Sacrifice at Ostia In conf. 9, Augustine narrates a story of spiritual ascent with his mother, Monica. The event takes place shortly before her death. And it provides both her and her son new insight about the timeless offering made

John R. Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 230. 3 For Bowlin’s discussion of how forbearance plays out sacrificially among friends, cf. ibid., 218. 2

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through mortal lives. The vision of Ostia is a glimpse of heaven. But heaven, as Augustine conceives of it, is a place of unbloody sacrifice: the keeper of time’s vows. Elsewhere, Augustine will call this place “heaven’s heaven” – a phrase he borrows from the Psalms to distinguish the resting place of the heavenly city from the starry sky (cf. conf. XII.ix (9)–xii (15)).4 This interface for exchanges between time and eternity hosts Augustine’s and Monica’s contact with divine wisdom (cf. conf. IX.x (24)). Augustine describes their encounter using the language of sacrifice: “And while we talked and panted after it, we touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of the heart. And we sighed and left bound there ‘the first fruits of the Spirit’ (Rom. 8:23) [et suspiravimus et reliquimus ibi religatas primitias spiritus], and we returned to the noise of our human speech where a word has both a beginning and an ending” (conf. IX.x (24), Chadwick modified). Augustine borrows the Pauline image of “first fruits of the spirit.” According to Paul, the first fruits are within human beings, who sign (or “groan”) in anticipation of the renewal of all flesh. Paul calls this longed-for renewal “adoption [in Christ], the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23, NRSV; cf. 8:22–5). Augustine follows this Pauline logic to suggest that groaning expresses the hope of incorruptible flesh – one’s own flesh – borne within a life fast wearing out and destined to die. Sighs are the signs of hope grieving. When Augustine describes himself and Monica leaving [reliquimus] their first fruits “there” [ibi], the image is not (primarily) that of descending from heaven to earth. They are not leaving behind their first fruits. They are expressing them. But the expression of their offering to God – the offering of their own spirits in and to God’s – will be limned as a lament in a world where words – and lives – have both a beginning and an end. To leave the first fruits looks like entering a raucous conversation bearing sacrifice, carrying a token of the eternal within. The silent offering of incorruptible flesh – held for now in hope – that Augustine and Monica find themselves carrying around within is exhaled into mourning. But this mourning, too, is ­sacrifice. Leaving the first fruits is inseparable from the sempiternal offering that they represent.

John Peter Kenney observes, “What Monica and Augustine enter spiritually in the ascension at Ostia is the house of God, the caelum caeli, the heavenly place where collective souls exercise continuous contemplation,” John Peter Kenney, Contemplation and Classical Christianity: A Study in Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 149, cf. 147–51.

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The first fruits are heaven’s offering – but heaven’s offering as made by wayfaring mortals. In the Ostia narrative (conf. IX.x (23–6)), the first fruits are bound [religatas primitias] because the promise of creation’s repose links together those who offer their lives in time to God. Sacrifice thereby gathers creatures who are, and always remain, alone: alone as creatures of time’s solitude and joined – through time’s separation – as members of a sempiternal community of praise. Creatures offer sacrifice alone and that offering binds them together in communion. Therefore, Augustine appeals to Rom. 8:23 again in conf. 12 when he resolves: “I will not be turned away until you have brought back together all that I am from this dispersion and deformity into the peace of the dearest mother [i.e., ‘Jerusalem,’ or heaven’s heaven], where the first fruits of my spirit are to be found and whence are my certainties, and you confirm and conform it unto eternity, my God, my openheartedness” [et non avertar donec in eius pacem, matris carissimae, ubi sunt primitiae spiritus mei, unde ista mihi certa sunt, conligas totum quod sum a dispersione et deformitate hac et conformes atque confirmes in aeternum, deus meus, misericordia mea] (conf. XII.xvi (23), Outler modified; cf. XII.xi (12–13); XII.xv (21)). The first fruits bind Augustine to his dearest mother [mater carissima]. They link him to Monica. At Ostia, they had linked Augustine and Monica to the sacrifice of heaven, which binds together their separate lives. That linkage would not prevent them from parting. They were standing on the threshold of an imminent departure. Monica would die. Her son would live. And their separation would manifest their solitude: they had always been alone.5 But the first fruits bound

I am mindful here of Cavell’s observation: “Those who have felt that the past has to be made relevant to the present fall into the typical error of parents and children – taking difference from each other to threaten, or promise, severance from one another. But we are severed; in denying that, one gives up not only knowledge of the position of others but the means of locating one’s own,” “Avoidance of Love,” 310. At Ostia, Augustine and Monica owned up to their singularity or their solitude – the fact that they are irreducibly different from one another – through their experience of the communion of the first fruits. It was this that gave them the ability to “locate” themselves relative to each other and relative to the history to which their offering bound them. Augustine had entered Monica’s life as a parting: not (yet) a goodbye, but as someone received into her life and heart as a person utterly distinct from her. From birth, parents and child are parted. At birth, the work of parting operates through addition. In death, it operates through subtraction. But both moments represent one offering that teaches us loving detachment from those to whom our lives are most intimately bound in care. Cavell is right: we are severed. But we are not (necessarily) cut off. The first fruits reveal how our severance connects us.

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them together in that solitude by recalling them to its, and their, beloved source. Their contact with eternity in the offering of the first fruits brought home the sacrificial significance of Monica’s death. The wheat harvest would have been a familiar sight to Augustine and Monica. Their North African homeland supplied grain to the Roman Empire.6 At Ostia, the memory of those sheaves became a vision of their lives. Out of a thousand fragmentary moments, episodes, and instances they would be collected as one offering to support and maintain the lives of others. Within the economy of sacrifice, first fruits typically stand in for the whole harvest without actually being the whole harvest (and certainly without being the entire life that the harvest supports). But the first fruits of Ostia are not exactly a part of a larger sacrifice. Indeed, this is so for the same reason as the city of God at rest in heaven’s heaven is not exactly a part of the heavenly city. It is not as if God’s city were incomplete for now and will only someday be constituted by adding in all those parts still on pilgrimage. There is no “still” or “yet” in heaven’s heaven – a point that Augustine makes clear in the Ostia narrative itself (cf. conf. IX.x (24–5)). Certainly, Augustine can imagine new members of God’s city being born: “This City has been coming down from heaven since its beginning [de caelo quidem ab initio sui descendit], from whence, through the time of this age, the grace of God is coming down by means of the ‘washing of rebirth’ in the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven; thence its citizens are springing forth” [adcrescunt] (civ. Dei 20.17, Bettenson modified).7 But, for as long as the citizens of this city have been “springing forth,” they have also been leaving behind the first fruits of their spirit – simply because the mortal members of God’s city live and speak in time. In bits and pieces. Parts. But we live and speak, Augustine thinks, as those who bear within us the first fruits of a homeland [patria] (cf. conf. XII.xvi (23)) where there is no future or past, no coming to be or passing away, no addition and no subtraction. We carry around an eternal offering in time. Therefore, coming home is not quite a matter of

Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 326–7. In a related passage, Augustine remarks: “[F]rom this mortal race, deservedly and justly condemned, He would by His grace collect, as now He does, a people so numerous, that He thus fills up and repairs the blank made by the fallen angels, and that thus that beloved and heavenly city is not defrauded of the full number of its citizens, but perhaps may even rejoice in a still more overflowing population,” civ. Dei 22.1 (Dods).

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transposition (as if members of God’s city were not yet home – but one day, perhaps, will be). At Ostia, Augustine and Monica were not having a vision of something that would only come after death (as if death had a history). The first fruits of Ostia are not an initial sacrifice that will need to be subsequently filled out and completed (as if this were the reason for their return to mortal life). Instead, the return to carnal cacophony belongs to the first fruits. It is ingredient in their sacrifice. And the first fruits themselves represent all Augustine, or Monica, or anyone ever has to offer. But that offering must be borne in time. And so humans live with the offering of their first fruits as a token of eternity. The Ostia ascent is an Easter vision. It is a glimpse of how death appears when seen through the eyes of Christ’s incorruptible flesh. Augustine signals that setting in his manner of introducing the vision; through his subtly polyvalent description of the means by which the vision is seen; and by his retrospective account, after the vision, of its occasion. Thus, Augustine opens the passage devoted to recounting what happened by remarking: “As the day now approached on which she [i.e., Monica] was to depart this life – a day which you knew, but which we did not – it happened (though I believe it was by your secret ways arranged) that she and I stood alone, leaning in a certain window from which the garden of the house we occupied at Ostia could be seen” (conf. IX.x (23), Outler modified). The timing of their vision is charged with symbolism. Augustine is signaling the glimpse their experience gave into the significance of their impending farewell. Augustine introduces their vision thus: “Alone with each other, we talked very intimately” [conloquebamur ergo soli valde dulciter] (conf. IX.x (23), Chadwick). The motif of conversation recurs throughout the narrative. Indeed, it structures the story into three distinct pericopes: the first, an experience of drinking (conf. IX.x (23); cf. Ennead 6.9.9); the second, an experience of eating (conf. IX.x (24)); and the third, an experience of seeing and being joined with what they saw (conf. IX.x (25)). Together, these complementary perspectives suggest a subtle Eucharistic triad: a feast that joins those who consume it to the one who offers himself in it. Tellingly, these different angles of the same event are introduced, joined, and concluded by references to talking. Thus, after Augustine and Monica “drank in the waters flowing from your spring on high, ‘the spring of life’ (Ps. 35:10) which is with you” (conf. IX.x (23), Chadwick), Augustine transitions to the second pericope by adding: “The conversation [sermo] led us towards the conclusion …” (conf. IX.x (24), Chadwick). At the end of the second pericope – after

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Monica and Augustine “attain[ed] to the region of inexhaustible abundance where you feed Israel eternally with truth for food” (conf. IX.x (24), Chadwick) – Augustine describes “return[ing] to the noise of our human speech where a word has both a beginning and an ending” [ubi verbum et incipitur et finitur] (conf. IX.x (24), Chadwick modified). He contrasts that condition to “your word [verbo tuo], Lord of our lives … [who] dwells in you without growing old and gives renewal to all things” (conf. IX.x (24), Chadwick). And then, Augustine immediately introduces the third pericope by adding: “Therefore, we were saying …” [dicebamus ergo] (conf. IX.x (25), my trans.). Augustine and Monica found themselves speaking the eternal word to one another in time.8 But they were also anticipating the moment when they would no longer be able to continue speaking with one another discursively. Then their lives would have become a sacrifice silently at peace. The third and final pericope, too, concludes with a conversational acknowledgment: “I said something like this, even if not in just this way and with exactly these words” [dicebam talia, etsi non isto modo et his verbis] (conf. IX.x (26), Chadwick). At Ostia, looking together out of a window near a garden, Augustine and Monica were talking – explicitly – of last words: words of rest, goodbye, parting. Their words reminded them that their lives had been an offering to one another and to God. Each pericope features a different version of a cathartic memento mori, which liberates the conversationalists to recognize their life fulfilled. In the first, Augustine and Monica are musing over “what is the nature of the eternal life of the saints: which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has entered into the heart of human beings [cf. 1. Cor. 2:9]” (conf. IX.x (23), Outler modified). Reaching that life will mean dying. In the second, they see that departing the body does not require renouncing everything good: “[H]owever great the delight of the senses of the flesh, glimmering in however bright a corporeal light, faced with the festivity of the life flowing from you, God, it does not bear comparison but it may be seen to be utterly unworthy of commemoration” (conf. IX.x (24), my trans.). Death makes mortal jouissance memorable only in God. Finally, in the third pericope, Augustine and his mother ponder death as the

Phillip Cary astutely observes: “This is not a tandem mystical experience but a moment of shared insight, of looking together at the same inner but public truth. This would also explain how it could all happen while they were talking, as Augustine explicitly tells us. They do not go into some sort of simultaneous trance; they are having a conversation,” Outward Signs, 184.

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tranquility of an embodied life that has come to be still before its God: “If to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent …” [si cui sileat tumultus carnis] (conf. IX.x (25), Chadwick). Having said their piece, mortal bodies rest in God. This third – and most elaborate – pericope deserves closer examination. In it, Augustine would have his readers imagine him preparing to say farewell for the last time to his mother while listening for a divine word yet to be spoken to them both. Augustine frames the expectation of hearing that divine word through an unmistakable – and unforgettable – invocation of Plotinus: If to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air are quiescent, if the heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making no sound and is transcending itself not thinking itself, if all dreams and revelations of the imagination are silent, if all language and every sign and everything transitory is silent – for if anyone could hear them, this is what all of them would be saying, ‘We did not make ourselves, but you – who abides in eternity – made us’ (Ps. 79:3, 5) – if after this declaration they were to keep silence, having directed our ears to him that made them, then he alone would speak not through them but through himself [loquatur ipse solus non per ea sed per se ipsum]. (conf. IX.x (25), Chadwick modified)

Augustine describes here what it must be like to die – though, of course, strictly speaking, dying must not be like anything at all. (What, after all, is like similarity slipping away from its original, representation ceasing to present what it reflects, language falling quiet?) The description is inherently paradoxical. Augustine is imagining death as a naked confession: the soul leaving its flesh to become a silent prayer. Such utter availability to God cannot speak further of itself until a resurrection word be spoken through it. The parallel passage in Plotinus is, likewise, a stunning memento mori. As in Augustine’s adaptation of it, the Plotinian original envisages death as a reminder of how to pray. Also akin to its Augustinian permutation, the Plotinian passage intends to make creatures complicit – through prayer – in divine self-knowledge: This is how soul should reason about the manner in which it grants life in the whole universe and in individual things. Let it look at the great soul, being itself another soul which is no small one, which has become worthy to look by being freed from deceit and the things that have bewitched the other souls, and is established in quietude. Let not only its encompassing body and the body’s raging sea be quiet, but all its environment: the earth quiet, and the sea and air quiet, and the heaven itself at peace. Into this heaven at rest let it imagine soul as

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if flowing in from outside, pouring in and entering it everywhere and illuminating it: as the rays of the sun light up a dark cloud, and make it shine and give it a golden look, so soul entering into the body of heaven gives it life and gives it immortality and wakes what lies inert … before soul it was a dead body, earth and water, or rather the darkness of matter and non-existence, and ‘what the gods hate’, as a poet says. (Ennead 5.1.2, Armstrong)

Plotinus’ scene is either a resurrection or a creation sequence – depending upon how one sees the “dead body” that soul enlivens. (Indeed, we have already explored in Chapter 2 how this duality is inherent in the logic of animating statues: a practice that Plotinus is probably evoking in this passage while adapting it to his own purposes.) This “body” represents materiality: patent receptivity to the divine power manifesting itself in the life of all corporeal realities. And Plotinus invites his readers (just as Plato had in Phaedo) to see death betokening the soul’s readiness to see God through sacrifice.9 Augustine’s deployment of this Plotinian sequence would make it a story of resurrection. (But Augustine also sees resurrection as new creation.) In Plotinus’ account, soul is learning how to recognize itself as the cosmic life-giver. It is cultivating the acknowledgment of the divinity within.10 In Augustine’s account, the soul – along with all created realities – is remembering how to confess that it is not God. After the confession falls silent, God speaks by himself. Strangely, however, in Plotinus’ account, soul recalls the divinity that it bears by remembering its death in the body it enlivens (a death figured by the utter formlessness and silence of its materiality). Strangely, too, in Augustine’s

Such an association surprises Eric Perl, who comments: “This passage is rendered confusing by an unmarked shift in the sense of ‘quiet’ (hēsychos) that seems not to be sufficiently noted by most commentators. At first … this term refers in a positive sense to the contemplative stillness of a soul that is free from external distractions. This is the sense taken up by Augustine in his famous paraphrase of this passage in Confessions 9.10. In the next sentence … it at first appears to have the same meaning. But we then find that the stillness of this ‘universe at rest’ is not peace in any positive sense but rather the inertness of a corpse … the stillness not of contemplation but of lifelessness,” Plotinus and Eric D. Perl, Ennead V.1: On the Three Primary Levels of Reality – Translation with an Introduction and Commentary (Las Vegas, Zurich, Athens: Parmenides Publishing, 2015), 73–4. My suggestion is that Augustine recognized this remarkable juxtaposition of death and contemplative attunement in the Plotinian text and adopted both connotations. 10 For an account of how Plotinus’ language actually invites the speaker into this acknowledgment by performing it as an event, cf. Michael A. Sells, “Awakening without Awakener: Apophasis in Plotinus,” in Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 14–33. 9

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account, the God that the soul (and all created reality) confesses itself not to be is nevertheless borne within the mortal creation. After all, God speaks by himself to the silent creatures who hear him. God could not be closer to those with whom he speaks without simply addressing himself. In both Plotinus’ and Augustine’s accounts, the creation acknowledges God by seeing God as God. In both, the creature makes an acknowledgment – and does so alone before the divinity. No creature interposes. But creatures only make that solitary acknowledgment by God. In both passages, God sees God, allows creatures to share the vision, and calls the vision good. By sacrifice, creatures accept the offering of God’s vision. That receptivity joins creatures to one another. Indeed, it was that receptivity that joined Augustine to Monica in their vision at Ostia. And it was that alone that would keep them bound together even in death. It is easy – and tempting – to read the Ostia story as a description of an altered vision: of having one’s focus changed from a preoccupation with the world to an absorption in God. The mother/son duo seem to be released from the realm of incessant mediation into a place of immediate contact with God. Just after describing rapport with “the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things” [aeternam sapientiam super omnia manetem], Augustine laments – without missing a beat: “If only it could last, and other visions of a strikingly unequal kind could be withdrawn!” (conf. IX.x (25), Chadwick modified). This can easily seem like a wish to always be with God – and (thus) never to have to return to life in the world. The impression gets heightened further by Monica’s admission, in the midst of those words with her son [inter verba] – when “this world with all its delights became worthless to us” – that she had lost the thread of her life’s motivation (conf. IX.x (26), Chadwick). Perhaps the light of heaven makes mortality unbearable. Perhaps. But is that really the lesson of Ostia? Monica’s disinterested ennui was not a rejection of her life. It was a recognition that she did not know any more what else she desired that such a life might include. Monica was transferring her calling – such as it was – to her son: “Now that my hopes in this world are satisfied, I do not know what more I want here or why I am here. There was indeed one thing for which I wished to linger a little in this life, and that was that I might see you a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has answered this more than abundantly, so that I see you now made his servant and spurning all earthly happiness. What more am I to do here?”

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(conf. IX.x (26), Outler modified). Sharing life with her son had been one of Monica’s great offerings. But Monica was now unsure of what – if anything – was left of that life to be lived. As it turned out, what remained was simply that she enjoin her son to bear her sacrifice in his: “Only this I ask: that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you are” (conf. IX.xi (27), Outler). After all, whatever changed in Monica and Augustine after their gusto [delectatio] in things here and now had faded (conf. IX.x (26)), neither of them lost the love with which God is loved in the things of this world [sed ipsum quem in his amamus] (conf. IX.x (25)). That was the love which the Ostia vision revealed to them when it gave them a glimpse of God: a love that loves God in the things of this world, just as God loves himself in and through the things of this world. The Ostia ascent did not elicit in Augustine and Monica the desire to quit living here and now so that they could commit themselves to full-time living with God. The “other visions of a strikingly unequal kind” [aliae visiones longe imparis generis] (conf. IX.x (25), Chadwick modified) – relative to what they saw at Ostia – are not visions of the world instead of God. They are not ways of seeing that block God out of the world. They are visions of the world that see it without seeing it as God sees it. These “other visions” are glimpses of the world seen without seeing that one sees precisely what God does – and that she sees by God’s seeing it (cf. conf. XIII.xxxi (46)). Instead of communicating the unbearable prospect of being related to God by means of other creatures that can never keep themselves from interposing, Augustine’s and Monica’s shared vision shows how everything that is not God relates to him. When Augustine actually narrates the tête-à-tête at Ostia, he describes it as a meeting with God alone. A meeting after his words – and his mother’s – had all fallen silent: We would hear his word [ut audiamus verbum eius], not through the tongue of the flesh, nor through the voice of an angel, nor through the sound of thunder, nor through the enigma of likeness. The very one whom we love in these things we would hear without them [sed ipsum quem in his amamus, ipsum sine his audiamus]. That is how it was when at that moment we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things. (conf. IX.x (25), Chadwick modified)

All creation falls silent to bespeak its love of God. Creation had never failed to be quiet. It was never mute – but it had always been communicating something that it could only say by staying silent. But creation’s silence does not shut it up. It is not as if, most of the time, creatures are

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noisily chattering about everything else – but then, at special moments, they fall silent to speak of God. No. Even when pulsing with raucous energy, creation bespeaks the divinity in silence. Just as there is a solitude that accompanies our closest communion, there is a silence that companions all of our speech. Like the wooden body of a musical instrument that amplifies the notes of its resonant strings only by anchoring them in stillness, creation’s communication emerges from a perennial silence that is never drowned out by the words to which it gives voice. And, in both visions – Augustine’s and Plotinus’ – that original communication is heard. In their vision, Augustine and Monica are learning how to acknowledge the silence of creation as an offering offered through them and by them. They listened – and said what this silence always says – by dying well. Offering with an open heart until everything had been released. Augustine learned this, at least in part, from Plotinus and the other Platonists. Indeed, the passage just quoted echoes final words of Plotinus (or, more precisely, words that Porphyry – in arranging the writings of Plotinus – left as his teacher’s last): The one formed by this mingling with the Supreme must – if he only remember – carry its image impressed upon him. … [H]e is like one who, having penetrated the inner sanctuary, leaves the temple images behind him – though these become once more first objects of regard when he leaves the holies; for There his converse was not with image, not with trace, but with the very Truth in the view of which all the rest is but of secondary concern. … Things here are signs; they show therefore to the wiser teachers how the supreme God is known; the instructed priest reading the sign may enter the holy place and make real the vision of the inaccessible. (Ennead 6.9.11, MacKenna modified)

Like a Plotinian priest, Augustine offers “the vision of the inaccessible.” His telling of the vision at Ostia – just like Plotinus’ final words – is intended as a memento of something to which one has never been a total stranger. They invite those who read them to call to mind something that they have never – simply – been able to call to mind (and never simply will be). Augustine and Plotinus both suggest that creatures point toward God by signifying their unity with one whom they can only envision by ceasing to represent him. Images, icons, reminders are all important – even crucial. And none has the power to interfere with the vision of God. But none of them can communicate that vision either – except by referring others to God alone. And that is what Augustine and Monica did for one another at Ostia: they referred one another beyond themselves to the one who always remains simpler than our silence.

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Augustine concludes his final Ostia pericope with the following words: “So too eternal life is of the quality of that moment of ­u nderstanding after which we sighed [momentum intellegentiae cui suspiravimus]. Is not this the meaning of ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord’ (Matt. 25:21)? And when is that to be? Surely it is when ‘we all rise again, but are not all changed’ (I Cor. 15:51)” [an cum omnes resurgimus, sed non omnes immutabimur] (conf. IX.x (25), Chadwick). Even the sacrifices of this sad world will not be all changed. And that is the sign of redemption. It is “the first fruits of the spirit.” Augustine and Monica see the day of resurrection: the offering of fully grown flesh beyond corruption. At Ostia, they were already given the resurrection eyes with which to see the flesh from which their death would part them – while seeing that the very flesh they see is also the flesh with which they see God, even now. In this sense, the Ostia vision is paradoxically framed in a fashion both akin to – and different from – Augustine’s vision in conf. 7 after he had read the books of the Platonists. In that earlier vision, Augustine saw God with flesh that he had not yet acknowledged as his own. It was a disembodied sight that showed him God by calling him to his true flesh. The vision in conf. 9 is one in which Augustine and Monica see together that they already live in their resurrection flesh. They already have the body in which to see death and recognize it as a sacrifice – but they have not yet died in the resurrection flesh with which they see.11 That will come next. But they will have first seen what is coming together. Does this existential representation of parting make the Ostia vision a mystical drama? And, perhaps, not just for us, as Augustine’s readers, but also for Augustine and Monica? Drama, as Cavell describes it in his Lear essay, characteristically reveals something to its audience about what it means for it to be an audience. What the audience sees shows – if they have the eyes to see – how they see it. And drama is not simply an artifice contrived to reveal the texture of life outside the theater. Rather, it reveals life in the theater as a conspicuously revelatory moment within exchanges that extend beyond its conventions. Thus, how an audience sees what it sees in the theater teaches it something of who it is. It shows its members how their relationship to one another binds them together. And it reminds

11

Such a vision complements the idea ventured in the introduction to this book that (contrary to Milbank) our knowledge of the resurrection here and now must be hidden in the reality of our death.

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them that what links them is not merely a mock-up of other connections in “real life.” Rather, it is a peculiarly illuminating slice of life itself.12 The house in which Monica and Augustine were staying at Ostia was not a theater. Nor was the garden they found themselves overlooking together, through a window, a stage. Nor was their vision of actors performing a drama. The whole setting seems, in fact, quite different from what Cavell envisions when he describes the members of an audience viewing King Lear and responding to that tragedy with a recognition of their own impulses toward skeptical self-insulation. Notwithstanding these differences, however, the vision at Ostia is a mystical drama. It binds together the members of an audience (Augustine and Monica, regarded as representatives of the entire creation). It situates them in a “present” that dramatically coincides with the “present” of the reality they are seeing.13 (This present is the sempiternal repose of creation in God.) It leaves them silent and dramatically incapable of interacting with the reality that they envision. Augustine and Monica, as it were, drink, eat, hear, and see. But throughout the vision their role remains wholly receptive. God is the “actor” and they, like the rest of creation, are only God’s silent audience. They do not interact with God in the vision – any more than audience members interact with actors in a drama.14 Rather, Augustine and Monica see God, hear him – even eat and drink from him – through their simple availability, figured as the silence to listen. Their whole action simply acknowledges what God does. Their “performance” is only the sacrifice of seeing and acknowledging God’s. And through this offering, they leave behind the first fruits (cf. conf. IX.x (24)). Finally, by showing them how they see what they see, the drama of Ostia teaches Augustine and Monica who they are. The vision – like Cavellian drama – does not afford an escape from

Cavell, “Avoidance of Love,” 304–8. Cavell asks, “Then what expresses acknowledgment in a theater? What plays the role there that revealing ourselves plays outside? That is, what counts as putting ourselves into a character’s presence? I take this to be the same as the question I asked at the beginning of this discussion: What is the mechanism of our identification with a character? We know we cannot approach him, and not because it is not done but because nothing would count as doing it. Put another way, they and we do not occupy the same space; there is no path from my location to his. (We could also say: there is no distance between us, as there is none between me and a figure in my dream, and none, or no one, between me and my image in a mirror.) We do, however, occupy the same time. And the time is always now; time is measured solely by what is now happening to them, for what they are doing now is all that is happening,” ibid., 307–8. 14 Cf. ibid., 305–6. 12

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real life. It reveals life’s texture. It shows what those who see it must see about themselves to see themselves as they really are. The central insight of Cavellian drama is that we, who see it and know our lives through it, are alone. The theater reveals the solitude of the characters in two different dimensions: first, relative to one another and second, relative to the audience. We who see them, know that they are alone. And there is nothing that we, as an audience, can do to break through the characters’ solitude – any more than the knowledge the characters have of one another’s solitude can eliminate it: “[W]hat is revealed is my separateness from what is happening to them; that I am I, and here. It is only in this perception of them as separate from me that I make myself present. That I make them other, and face them.”15 But the final insight of the theater – the one that reveals to the audience members who they are by showing them how they see what they see – is that each member of the audience remains no less alone than the characters that she sees and knows in common with the rest of the audience.16 The members of an audience finally see what they see alone. And their solitude is no fiction of the theater. It is a dramatic revelation of life: Now I can give one answer to the question: Why do I do nothing, faced with tragic events? If I do nothing because I am distracted by the pleasures of witnessing this folly, or out of my knowledge of the proprieties of the place I am in, or because I think there will be some more appropriate time in which to act, or because I feel helpless to un-do events of such proportion, then I continue my sponsorship of evil in the world, its sway waiting upon these forms of inaction. I exit running. But if I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another’s to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition. The only essential difference between them and me is that they are there and I am not. And to empty ourselves of all other difference can be confirmed in the presence of an audience, of the community, because every difference established between us, other than separateness, is established by the community – that is, by us, in obedience to the community.17 Ibid., 311–2. For a discussion of how dramatic isolation stages – and thereby reveals – the finitude of the human condition through the characters’ radical estrangement from one another, cf. Claim of Reason, 492–3. 16 Cavell suggests that the isolation of the audience members from themselves comes to focal awareness only in modernist art. Nevertheless, he also suggests that it had always been the aim of drama such as Lear to remind audience members of their solitude, recognized with and for one another collectively in the context of the theater and borne out in other parts of life, “Avoidance of Love,” 319. 17 Ibid., 312. 15

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To “exit running” means to reject the dramatic revelation that solitude is the condition of solidarity. It means condoning cultural and economic violence of just the sort that King Lear presents – while refusing to take responsibility for playing the role of witness. We exit running when we imagine that business transactions happen in a Weberian economy of private values and unacknowledged goods. We exit running when we heartlessly part with others as the condition of our own survival. We take our existential solitude as cover for functional solipsism: acting as if the values and lives of others were indifferent to our own. And we are alone. But our solitude speaks – just as our silence does. More to the point: our solitude speaks through our silence. We convey our solitude to one another through the motivating asymmetry that runs like a thread through all of our exchanges. I offer something to you and you to me; and we witness that we are alone, and also, just so, together. This establishes what Cavell calls “the unity of our condition.” The tragic recognition, as Cavell describes it, is an acknowledgment that communicates to those who cannot hear it (namely, the actors) so that those who can hear it (namely, the audience) can understand what we have to say to each other.18 What we can communicate – but frequently do not – is that our solitude does not leave us deaf to one another’s interior life, values, delights – in short, to our common good. Rather, it is our solitude (and nothing else) that commits us to our common good. But such a message can only be communicated by “giv[ing] over the time and space in which action is mine.” This does not mean ceasing to act. It does not mean distinguishing between time for action and time for inaction. It means recognizing a fecund silence, a creative rest, a pregnant stillness that lies at the center of all of our acting. It looks like letting go of the presumption that acting is an alternative to expressing that reflective calm. It requires articulating the center of one’s life as a gesture of recognition, which invites others to reciprocate. What Cavell calls “the community” gives place to the silences that our economy communicates. Or not, but if not, all that will be left to us is to reckon our losses. There does remain one crucial difference between theater as Cavell imagines it and mystical insight as Augustine narrates it. And that difference would alter the significance of what drama shows. Cavell observes that actors – insofar as they are functioning in their dramatic

18

Cf. ibid., 306–8.

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personae – cannot interact with their audience.19 But in the vision at Ostia, the divine “actor” addresses his audience. God breaks the fourth wall.20 What difference does this make? In Cavellian drama, the audience’s separation from the characters (and the characters’ separation from one another) reveals the separation of the audience members from one another – both in and out of the theater. But in Augustinian drama – when God himself is the subject – the “audience” is separate from God while God is not separate from those who see and know him. This diverges from the logic of separation – and solitude – as Cavell pictures it. But it does not eliminate creaturely solitude. It simply imbues it with a different import. And this significance will be central to understanding what sacrifice says. Augustine and Monica were given a glimpse of what it will have been like to assume Christ’s body as their own. Their resurrection bodies give them the eyes with which to see themselves – and all of creation with them – as a silent sacrifice to God. As a sacrifice, they see that everything created mediates God alone. Everything that is not God, sees itself – and everything else that is good – by God alone (cf. conf., XIII.xxxi (46)). Seeing God alone, they offer the sacrifice of acknowledgment together. The vision at Ostia is a mystical drama. In it, Augustine and Monica see what they see while simultaneously seeing how they see it. What they see is God alone. What God reveals is how they see him: alone.21 But divine solitude does not isolate creatures from one another. Creation’s silence acknowledges its members’ collective solitude. Its solitude binds together separate creatures through their one offering of life. Sacrifice acknowledges that creation’s solitude – the singularity of each creature before God – is good because God alone is good. The work of parting

Ibid., 305–6. Perhaps in this respect, Augustine’s mystical vision bears a strange parallel to modern theater as Cavell describes it: both undermine the structural division between actors and audience. Augustine’s, however, does so in order to establish a community of sacrifice. Cavell’s analysis of modernism mourns the loss of any such community, cf. ibid., 318–25. 21 Theophany confirms – rather than denies – the solitude of creatures, who are distinct from both their creator and all other creatures. God does not abrogate our solitude: he reveals it as a condition of our creation. In this sense, Christians also aspire – like Platonists – to a “passing of solitary to solitary,” Ennead 6.9.11 (MacKenna). Such a reading runs counter to that of a commentator like Judith Tonning, who regards God as a relief from Cavellian solitude, cf. Judith E. Tonning, “Acknowledging a Hidden God: A Theological Critique of Stanley Cavell on Scepticism,” The Heythrop Journal 48, no. 3 (2007): 398. 19 20

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commits the goodness of creation – one’s own goodness and that of others – to God alone in silence. Such is the drama of Ostia.22 At Ostia, Augustine and Monica see that they are distinct from God. God does not reveal that he is separate from creation like actors on a stage, who represent their separation from one another across their dramatic separation from their audience. God does not represent himself at all in the vision of Ostia. He simply shows that he is good alone. That is all. And Augustine and Monica, in seeing him, see that they are not good as God alone is good. They are good because their solitude is different from God’s. And that solitude was revealed through their separation from one another. Precisely because God reveals himself to both Augustine and Monica alone, he reveals himself to both of them together but without the mediation of either one: “[H]e alone would speak not through them [i.e., through any created thing] but through himself” [loquatur ipse solus non per ea sed per se ipsum] (conf. IX.x (25), Chadwick modified). In the vision, God does not address himself to Augustine through Monica or to Monica through Augustine. Instead, God speaks to them both alone. In the vision, God reveals that he reveals himself to each of them alone. Together, their solitude holds. In fact, it is what expresses their communion with one another – and with God – through flesh that is always separate and separating. Their vision does not eliminate that separation. It confirms it, invites them to acknowledge it, and reassures them that it – and their recognition of it – is a cause for joy. It is good for them to be alone. They see and confess that together in the light of their common good. By doing so, they accept their parting. Both semantically and etymologically, the word separation implies division: the creation of parts from a whole. For example, when we talk about two adults separating, we typically mean that they are splitting up, breaking off a prior intimacy that had linked them together as a unit. To say that we are separate from one another suggests that we differ as parts in some whole to which we refer. And, as humans, we are separate. My body is different from yours and yours from mine – yet,

22

Our solitude is not the same as our individuality. The very etymology of the word individual evokes an atomic resistance to further division: as if what really defined us were the part of us that refused to be further parted. Augustine, by contrast, hints that our solitude occasions the work of parting. We are constantly parting and being parted, and this manifests our singularity as creatures. I am grateful to Ian Clausen for pressing me to make this distinction.

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together, we make up parts of larger corporate identities: companies, communities, states, churches, and more. However, although we are parts parted, our separations point toward a unity that is not a whole. Something (as we saw in Chapter 1) that is more than a composition of wills. Something (as we saw in Chapter 3) that is more than a composite of bodies and souls. Think of it as our spiritual unity: our uncomposed communion. Here, at this level of unity beyond addition or subtraction – to which the work of parting points – we are no longer separate. We are together. But we are also – still – distinct. (Indeed, if our spirits simply melded indistinctly, “our” spiritual union would annihilate whatever it joins.) It is at this level of connection that I use the image of being “together alone.” Our separation points to our solitude. Our aloneness. But our solitude is also different from our separateness. Indeed, these are as different as soul is from body. Etymologically, alone means all one. It suggests that I am simple. At home with myself. One. Not defined in terms of something else. And yet, each of us is all one, together. The life animating different bodies is different – but not separate in the same way that the bodies are. I call this difference solitude. Living in my body, I am alone, but not separate from the life of others. Sacrifice teaches that difference. It shows us that parting – life in the body – reveals a life that is not separate from others’ lives. Although my body is separate from theirs, our separation communicates something about the solitude we share in a life that is not separate. This is a life we have to offer – but not to call our own. Detachment is the discipline that recognizes as much. And sacrifice is the act that embodies such a life. The Augustinian insight that our solitude links us together and that our community leaves us alone is strikingly played out in the offering at Ostia. But it is not an insight limited to this particular moment in the Augustinian corpus. The dialogue that Augustine records with his son as The Teacher gets across the same idea.23 In The Teacher, the subject is language: or, more precisely, how we use words to educate. Strangely, as Augustine observes and his son recaps, we can teach each other – but 23

Phillip Cary has rightly linked the vision at Ostia to Augustine’s theory of education in De Magistro, cf. Cary, Outward Signs, 183–91. Augustine and Monica show one another God simply by referring one another to him who speaks within. They remind one another that they are alone before God. (And they are, finally, never elsewhere.) This does not, as Cary worries, isolate Augustine and Monica. Rather, it acknowledges the terms on which they have always been linked together in the flesh as mother and son.

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we cannot learn from one another.24 We can only elicit from the solitude of another’s interiority a recollection of the thing we are trying to communicate.25 The learning is a work that happens in solitude. Instruction comes from an inner teacher: divine wisdom speaking in each human soul. That wisdom is mysteriously occasioned by our dialogue with each other but not imparted by it.26 As in The Teacher, so too, at Ostia. Monica and Augustine were teaching each other. But what they had to learn about the eternal significance of their life’s offering would come only from within. It was to be an insight born in conversation and arriving in deepest solitude. It would be the communication of divine wisdom, speaking to them in the flesh through the work of parting and reminding them that this work is good. Here, the Augustinian drama differs most markedly from Cavell’s picture. For Cavell, drama – both tragedy and comedy – teaches us that we are separate. But this separation is a fact of our existence. It is simply who we are. It is neither good nor bad. It simply is: “The point of my presence at these events [i.e., at the theater] is to join in confirming this separateness. Confirming it as neither a blessing nor a curse, but a fact, the fact of having one life – not one rather than two, but this one rather than any other. I cannot confirm it alone. Rather, it is the nature of this tragedy [i.e., King Lear] that its actors have to confirm their separateness alone, through isolation, the denial of others. What is purged is my difference from others, in everything but separateness.”27 Tragedy has the power to disabuse those who see it of the illusion that they might make solitude good by imposing it upon others. This would mean acting on the assumption that one can “go it alone” – and that this is good – and that it would be good for others to do likewise – and that it is bad when others impose their presence, their obligations, their demands that I make sacrifices upon my solitude. (To live by the illusion that our solitude is a handy tool for protecting us from others, Cavell suggests, turns solitude into a curse. It means living out one’s skepticism by imagining that it is only good for me to be alone.) Tragedy, if we will attend to it, would have us see this for what it is – but not just see it: it would have us acknowledge it. And to acknowledge an illusion is to quit living by it. This is what Cavell means

Augustine, “The Teacher (De Magistro),” in Saint Augustine’s Childhood: Confessiones Book One, trans. Gary Wills (New York: Viking, 2001), 19. 25 Ibid., 45. 26 Ibid., 38, 40, 46. 27 Ibid. Cf. ibid., 113. 24

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by stopping.28 (To stop is to let our theatricalizing come to a close. Or give up on the temptation to always be scoping out the nearest exit.) For Augustine, human beings need a body in which to make this acknowledgment – flesh that will unify us in recognition that we are alone and that it is good for us to be so together. (This is what was missing from Girard’s and Jay’s account of self-knowledge: the flesh in which to confess it.) Cavell does not deny the flesh that binds us together in acknowledgment. But he mourns its loss.29 This is the significance of his assumption that contemporary culture lacks a viable ecclesiology; that theater can no longer assume an audience; that politics can no longer gather a people. We have forgotten the flesh in which to make the acknowledgment of the tragedy of our situation. (I take this to be what Cavell grieves in the final subsection of the Lear essay, which was originally written as a meditation on the American situation during the Vietnam War.30) Unlike Girard, Cavell thinks that humans need flesh in which to acknowledge their separation from one another and to see that such separation is neither a good nor an evil that we have made for ourselves. But in the absence of that flesh, Cavell’s task will be that of grieving a parting for which he – and we – cannot account.31 Augustine shares Cavell’s commitment to grieve. But Augustine’s mourning – his sense of how humans ought to face up to the experience of parting – is framed differently.32 It means something else, signifies Cf. ibid., 307. In this respect, tragedy has something to say for drama as a whole: “Comedy is fun because it can purge us of the unnatural and of the merely natural by laughing at us and singing to us and dancing for us, and by making us laugh and sing and dance. The tragedy is that comedy has its limits. This is part of the sadness within comedy; the emptiness after a long laugh. Join hands here as we may, one of the hands is mine and the other is yours,” ibid., 313. Even comedy, in the end, has its tragic guise (but not, necessarily, the converse). 30 Ibid., 318–25. 31 William Desmond broaches the issue of tragedy to ask how one’s relationship to others or to God changes the terms of this unaccountable loss: “Can the human other be the measure? But what if the human other is less a measure than also in the scales, also in the balance? The other whose destiny is in the balance may not be able to give us the balance and ballast suggested by the weight of that other, God. You still do not like the question? Very well, it is the question of the extremity of loss, or of being at a loss, that the tragic communicates to us: something in excess of the measure of finite recuperation is communicated in tragic loss. If no human can be the source of the recovery, and if all we have is the human, does loss then have the last word? And what becomes of such a loss, if there is nothing at all of finding or being found?” Desmond, “A Second Primavera,” 154. 32 Espen Dahl observes: “Being destined to relations across separation is a burden that is apt to be hard to bear,” Dahl, “Finitude and Original Sin,” 509. Augustine and Cavell, however, seem to see the value of shouldering this burden differently. 28

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something other than Cavell takes it to. Augustine regards the task of acknowledgment, and the confession of its failures, to be oriented by shared flesh that makes good on our separation by showing us that our separation had always been good: not only a limit or a fact of the human condition, which we may be cursed or blessed to make of what we will, but an offering of generosity that grieves the passing of our flesh in the confidence that such parting will be remembered and acknowledged in God’s flesh, which collectively embodies our singularity and makes it good.33 In short, Augustine would offer the sorrow of our solitude as sacrifice: an offering that faces parting by recognizing a good beyond our apparent losses and gains. This means that our solitude, our separation, our aloneness – that, all, is good. It is the communication of our flesh and the recognition that our flesh is God’s. Economic life communicates that offering in the separation humans share: the flesh that joins us together and leaves us alone in the keeping of our common good.34

Augustine suggests how his own enriched understanding of incarnation changed his understanding of grief. He does this through the tacit contrast provided in conf. between his response to the passing of Monica and his reactions to the loss of a close friend as a young adult, cf. conf. IV.iv (7)–vii (12). When Augustine mourned Monica, he did so as an exercise in parting. He let go of his mother as an eloquent expression of his love for her – a love he had come to see embodied in the sacrificial flesh of Jesus. It was seeing his flesh as hers in Christ’s that enabled him to let his mother go. By contrast, in grieving his young friend, Augustine’s mourning had expressed a refusal to accept their parting. He must go on living, he figured, so that his friend might continue to live on, somehow, in him, cf. conf. IV.vi (11). He imagined himself as the condition for his friend’s life after death (an idea whose unselfcritical echo in the conf. he would later censure, cf. Augustine, Revisions (Retractationes), trans. Boniface Ramsey, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2010), II.vi (33)). His refusal to accept the work of parting in the case of his friend was premised on a misunderstanding of the solitude and community of their lives. His grief echoed a defective attachment, which had seen his friend’s insuperable solitude as a threat to their relationship instead of as an essential condition of it, cf. James Wetzel, “Trappings of Woe: Augustine’s Confession of Grief,” in Parting Knowledge: Essays after Augustine (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 69–71; Rowan Williams, “Augustinian Love,” in On Augustine (London, Oxford, New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016), 193–4. I am grateful to Greg Wiebe for encouraging me to formulate this point. 34 Cf. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 119. 33

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Offering All: Augustine, Thoreau, Cavell, and the Discovery of Detachment Augustine thinks that the Catholic Church embodies the contemplative life by giving its members the flesh of Christ in which to offer sacrifice.35 In civ. Dei 10.5–6, Augustine defines sacrifice in three distinct ways.36 The interrelationship between them suggests how Augustine imagines Christ’s relationship to the Church and the Church’s relationship to those who do not identify themselves as members of Christ’s ecclesial body. Augustine first defines sacrifice as misericordia – openheartedness37 – the willingness to join ourselves to others in the midst of all their experiences, whether these bring suffering or joy: “Openheartedness is the true sacrifice” [misericordia verum sacrificium est] (civ. Dei 10.5, my trans.).38

Eugene Schlesinger points out the structural centrality of sacrifice within Augustine’s thought: it clarifies the relationship between his Christology, ecclesiology, and soteriology, cf. Schlesinger, “The Sacrificial Ecclesiology of City of God 10.” His article also includes a helpful note summarizing the key secondary literature on Augustine and sacrifice, cf. ibid., 138, n. 4. 36 For a helpful discussion of genealogical precedents to Augustine’s thinking about sacrifice, cf. Gerald Bonner, “The Doctrine of Sacrifice: Augustine and the Latin Patristic Tradition,” in Sacrifice and Redemption: Durham Essays in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 37 Misericordia literally means poor heartedness. It is often translated as mercy or compassion. I have rendered it as openheartedness to emphasize that the poverty expressed through misericordia is not so much deprivation as open and ready availability to meet another’s condition with an attentive heart. 38 Intriguingly, Georges Bataille has suggested that “[s]acrifice destroys that which it consecrates. … Consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate,” Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, 1: Consumption, 58 (emphasis original). Bataille claims that beings who are alone overcome their separation through the destructive assimilation of sacrifice. Through sacrifice, I am consumed, and thereby cease to be separate from the divine, with which I want to reestablish communication: “In his strange myths, in his cruel rites, man is in search of a lost intimacy from the first,” ibid., 57 (emphasis original). Later, Bataille adds: “A sacrifice can only posit a sacred thing. The sacred thing externalizes intimacy: It makes visible on the outside that which is really within. This is why self-consciousness demands finally that, in connection with intimacy, nothing further can occur. … [A] point must be uncovered where dry lucidity coincides with a sense of the sacred. This implies the reduction of the sacred world to the component most purely opposed to things, its reduction to pure intimacy. This comes down in fact, as in the experience of the mystics, to intellectual contemplation, ‘without shape or form,’ as against the seductive appearances of ‘visions,’ divinities and myths,” ibid., 189 (emphasis original). Bataille ends the book thus: “More open, the mind discerns, instead of an antiquated teleology, the truth that silence alone does not betray,” ibid., 190. Bataille’s silence I see as showing something about Augustine’s and Monica’s encounter with their divine end at Ostia. From an Augustinian perspective, there is much to 35

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Augustine quickly adds a second, somewhat different, definition: “[T]he true sacrifice is offered in every act which is designed to unite us to God in a holy fellowship, every act, that is, which is related to that final good which makes possible our true felicity” [proinde verum s­ acrificium est omne opus, quo agitur, ut sancta societate inhaereamus deo, ­relatum scilicet ad illum finem boni, quo veraciter beati esse possimus] (civ. Dei 10.6, Bettenson modified). But would it not follow necessarily that every act of one’s life is sacrifice? For what act is not “related to that final good which makes possible our true felicity”? As Augustine notes in conf. 10: “Although one could choose his joy in this way and another in that, all have one goal which they strive to attain, namely, to have joy” (conf. X.xxi (31), Outler). And ultimately that joy is only in God. Therefore, given the first definition of sacrifice, how can humans really act without openheartedness if this sacrificial gesture is what intends our well-being (as the second definition claims)? How can we fail to seek a connection with our true good in everything we do? And if our true good lies in sacrificial connection with others, it might seem that we could not but be openhearted toward those whose flesh is linked with our own. And yet we frequently fail to do just that. And, indeed, many of us seldom seem to recognize our lives as sacrifice. So Augustine hastens to add: “Whence even openheartedness itself – which aids a human being – is not sacrifice if it is not done through God” [unde et ipsa misericordia, qua homini subvenitur, si non propter deum fit, non est sacrificium] (civ. Dei 10.6, my trans.). And yet this (apparent) caveat raises perplexing questions. Imagine that it were really possible to be openhearted without offering sacrifice. Since Augustine stipulates that every act linking us to God

commend Bataille’s images of contemplative sacrifice. Sacrificial openheartedness is a way in which beings who are alone communicate with one another. (Maybe it is the only way in which solitary beings communicate while fully acknowledging their solitude.) Moreover, for Augustine, it is through being assimilated into the flesh of Christ that one is empowered to communicate attentively with others – to bear one’s solitude from one’s neighbor honestly and lovingly. However, for Augustine, we do not acknowledge God as separate from ourselves (even as the condition for overcoming such separation). We acknowledge ourselves as separate from others, yes, and even from God; but it does not follow – and we do not acknowledge – that God is separate from us. Sacrifice is the means by which separate creatures confess that they have never been separated from their common good. And, indeed, that offering alone makes creatures’ ineluctable solitude good. Contrary to Bataille, sacrifice is not an achievement. It is the acknowledgment of a sacred intimacy that one has always been offered.

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as our good is sacrifice, openheartedness without sacrifice would fail to make us better because it would fail to draw us toward our good end. But how could such attention be any good at all – either for oneself or for others? How could we even imagine – as in Augustine’s first definition – that openheartedness simply is sacrifice? Given Augustine’s understanding of the connection between love of God and neighbor, how could a gesture of openheartedness fail to bring one’s neighbor closer to what is good? Indeed, what kind of aid could possibly assist another human being without bringing both the one who aids and the one who is aided closer to “that final good which makes possible our true felicity”? Would such help really, in fact, be openheartedness at all? The problem is not, strictly speaking, that people succeed in being openhearted but fail to sacrifice. (In that case, openheartedness would not be true sacrifice at all – as Augustine’s original definition claims.) Rather, sometimes they show openhearted attention and devotion without acknowledging the significance of what they are doing. People sometimes sacrifice without recognizing it. To let one’s heart be opened unreflectively or prayerlessly means making an offering while failing to admit what one is doing – or being able to say why. Self-knowledge – and thus self – are alienated from the openheartedness that offers. We become estranged from ourselves. To show openheartedness through God [propter Deum] is to refer oneself to God through one’s attention and devotion to what is God’s. Thus, in civ. Dei 10.3, Augustine had glossed Christ’s love command, directed to God and neighbor, by noting: “For, that people might be intelligent in their self-love, there was appointed for them an end to which they might refer all their actions, that they might be blessed” [ut enim homo se diligere nosset, constitutus est ei finis, quo referret omnia quae ageret, ut beatus esset] (Dods modified). What is this end? After all God is not constituted [constitutus est … finis] for the sake of human worship or devotion. God does not need sacrifice – any more than God needs acknowledgment (cf. civ. Dei 10.5). However, humans share in God’s goodness when they acknowledge the good, whether they recognize that this acknowledgment is their good or not. Paradoxically, however, the end that mediates human beatitude is not exactly an end – at least not an end we must wait to arrive at. It is the recognition of an end that is always right here and now in the midst of all our means. We are always at the end. God is too close to our means for them to point elsewhere or to fail – always and everywhere – to be

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arriving now at their end.39 But does seeing the means in the end and the end in the means cancel the significance of both? Would the identification of means and end render the journey meaningless? Perhaps the end can dwell within the sacrificial means while still calling them to point beyond themselves. Perhaps the co-inherence of means and end bear witness to eternity’s distension in time – “where a word has both a beginning and an ending” (conf. IX.x (24), Chadwick modified; cf. conf. XI.xxix (39)). So goes the recognition constituted for us as the reference point of our actions. To attain bliss is to have learned how fully to acknowledge one’s end. Now. To have made a full acknowledgment of that end is to have arrived, already, at union with the good that one acknowledges. And one attains such an end with those whose flesh has been linked to one’s own through the parting gestures of openhearted attention. Christ offers us flesh in which to remember that life is an offering. And that means learning to let go of the assumption that we can truly be openhearted without making a real sacrifice (or offer a true sacrifice 39

Some commentators have seen Augustine’s contrast between soteriological means and end as the key for understanding how he differentiates Christianity from Platonism, cf. e.g., Brian Dobell, Augustine’s Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 209. As Augustine himself frames it: Platonists catch sight of God as the divine end of human action; but they do not recognize the way to that end, which can only be provided by Christ, cf. conf. VII.21 (27). However, if – as I am suggesting – true sacrifice refers human exchanges to God by continually acknowledging the divine end in and through the created means of life, such a contrast can only be provisional. Sarah Stewart-Kroeker has perceptively observed that, on Augustine’s own terms, the means and end to God are so implicated in one another that Augustine’s framing has an inherent dialectical instability, Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 19–21. StewartKroeker concludes that the Platonists, ultimately, must appreciate neither the means nor the end of salvation: they see, but do not dwell in God, ibid., 37 ff. This reading is insightful – but, perhaps, still partial. The dialectical instability goes deeper. It is true, as she suggests, that if the Platonists have only the end and not the means, they must have neither the means nor the end. But, in another sense – if they have the end – they must have both the end and the means. How parse these two different senses? Perhaps by appealing to the logic of acknowledgment and its refusal. The Platonists do dwell in their vision of God – they have the both means and the end of human beatitude – but they fail to acknowledge the place in which they, and their vision, dwells: namely, Christ’s ecclesial flesh. They belong to the church, but do not offer the sacrifice of ecclesial recognition. Therefore, they do not fully appreciate the sacrificial ligature between means and end in Christ’s embodiment of God. They do not need a new homeland, where they can be united with God. They need to recognize the one in which they already dwell.

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without cultivating openhearted attention and devotion).40 When we acknowledge our common good, we acknowledge the sacrificial significance of the flesh we share.41 But what is so singular about Christ’s flesh? For Augustine, Christ alone has the body through which to offer us ours because “sacrifice is a ‘divine matter’ [sacrificium res divina est] in the phrase of the old Latin authors, even if it is performed or offered by humans” (civ. Dei 10.6, Bettenson modified). Here, a remark of Stanley Cavell’s affords a striking angle from which to consider Augustine’s logic: “I am not this piece of flesh (though perhaps Falstaff was his); I am not in this flesh (though perhaps Christ was in his, but then his body was also bread); nor am I my flesh and blood (though somebody else is); nor am I of my flesh (though I hope somebody is). I am flesh.”42 To borrow the terms set by Cavell: what Augustine realized in the garden of conversion was that he would be flesh only in Christ’s. Christ was not in his flesh (in-carnate) because his divinity kept him at a distance from what we cannot fail to claim for ourselves. Christ was in his flesh because his body was also bread – which is to say: because his body was the means for others to put on flesh and live. Cavell goes on: “Being human is aspiring to being human. Since it is not aspiring to be the only human, it is an aspiration on behalf of others Marcel Neusch has perceptively criticized Girard for thinking that sacrifice necessarily represents a refusal of love: “What Christianity holds together as inseparable elements – namely, sacrifice and openheartedness – Girard separates as if they were incompatible with one another. He only holds onto openheartedness, since he regards sacrifice as violence continued under a different guise,” Marcel Neusch, “Une Conception Chrétienne du Sacrifice: Le Modèle de Saint Augustin,” in Le Sacrifice dans les Religions (Paris: Beauchesne, 1994), 122 (my trans.). Neusch goes on to canvas Augustine’s account of sacrifice in civ. Dei 10 as an alternative to Girard’s approach. Neusch’s analysis hinges on a heuristic distinction between two different dimensions of sacrifice: existential and ritual. He concludes by suggesting that inter-religious engagement in the spirit of Augustine’s theology might start by recognizing the existential reality of sacrifice in other religions – and then move to conversation about the cultic, sacramental, and Christological expression of sacrifice, cf. ibid., 138. However, for Augustine, imagining that the “existential” dimension of sacrifice is separable from its ecclesial economy amounts to thinking that we can discern sacrifice – where it happens, what it looks like – without a body in which to do so. 41 Eugene Schlesinger has observed, “No aspect of ecclesial existence is left off. Everything the church does can be understood as a sacrifice undertaken in union with Christ’s one sacrifice, and, hence, as a step in the journey of salvation, a participation in the movement whereby humanity returns to God in Christ,” Schlesinger, “The Sacrificial Ecclesiology of City of God 10,” 154–5. The mystery lies in how the church’s offering of itself returns all humanity to God. 42 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 398. 40

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as well. Then we might say that being human is aspiring to being seen as human.”43 Christ (of all people) did not aspire to be the only one who lived in his flesh. He aspired to be the one who allows us to acknowledge ourselves – in and through one another – as human. And we make this acknowledgment by offering sacrifice to God in him – the good one who makes us human by giving us his flesh. To be seen as human is to be seen as those who see the good in one another and live accordingly. And that means seeing one another in (and as) Christ’s flesh.44 Indeed, Cavell himself will propose: “But we are as capable of knowing our individuality, or accepting the individuality of another, as we are of becoming Christ for one another”45 – though he is not particularly sanguine about our ability to do such a thing. And yet, if God had not become human, then neither would humans have whatever flesh is to acknowledge their good. And we do acknowledge our good – the good of our solitude in communion. This is Augustine’s confession – not Cavell’s. But could it not follow from Cavell’s insights? For Augustine, sacrifice is a divine thing because only God can acknowledge God. Crucially, however, this includes the possibility that others – God’s creation – may acknowledge God in God. These observations account for Augustine’s remark near the conclusion of conf. 13: “We see all these things, and they are very good, because you see them thus in us – you who have given us your Spirit, by which we may see them so and love you in them” (conf. XIII.xxxiv (49), Outler modified). Therefore, only God’s Spirit in us can be openhearted propter deum. We

Ibid., 399. These remarks suggest why it is misleading, when reading Augustine, to presume that Christ is embodied by the Church in anything other than his flesh, as Phillip Cary contends: “Rather, the proper conclusion to draw, I think, is that whether or not [Augustine] is a sacramental realist makes no great difference, because his sacramental piety is centered on Christ’s spiritual Body rather than his flesh,” Cary, Outward Signs, 246. On Cary’s reading of Augustine, Christ’s flesh becomes an impotent figure of his “spiritual body,” which is the church. On the contrary, however, I would suggest that Augustine is a sacramental realist precisely because he identifies Christ’s flesh as the church’s. And Christ has no other body. Following Cavell’s remarks, I would say that the church is Christ’s flesh just as Christ is his flesh: namely, by being in it. 45 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 93. For reasons discussed above (cf. 264, n. 264) I would rather talk about singularity than individuality in a context like this. But I take it that Cavell is not referring here to a recognition of atomistic personality. I am grateful for reference to the quote – and for an excellent discussion of it – in Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology, 161–2. 43 44

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see God by God when his goodness in us affords the sight by which we recognize that we have been created to offer the sacrifice of acknowledgment. God is the only way toward God.46 Since sacrifice acknowledges the good – and since God alone acknowledges the good – only God can offer sacrifice. Initially, this would seem to leave the economy of mortal life bereft of the possibility of acknowledging its good – but this is only because mortal flesh has forgotten its life fulfilled – and thus foregone the flesh in which it might have learned to live in God. However, by becoming incarnate, God embodies the acknowledgment of the good in the mortal economy to which our flesh is bound. God alone enables humans to offer sacrifice in divine flesh. Thus, for Augustine, Christ alone acknowledges the good; and other humans acknowledge their good only in his. (Even the angels, one must imagine, offer the sacrifice of their beatitude through the mortal flesh of Christ.) The incarnation is, therefore, the sacrifice of God.47 The crucifixion acknowledges

Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity says that God acknowledges God like the mind acknowledges itself – memory, reason, and will – by acknowledging its good. Perhaps, the mind, ultimately, does not know itself otherwise than as an image of its God (even if it often fails to recognize that it only sees itself thus). For a reflection on how Augustine’s account of the image of God involves the mind in the very reality which it is imaging: namely, the contemplation of God, cf. Rowan Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De Trinitate,” in Collectanea Augustiniana: Mélanges T. van Bavel, ed. B. Bruning et al. (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 1990). 47 Eric Gregory notes, “Within the symbolic world of Augustinian theology, the humble dispossession necessary to be good takes its cue from an event of dispossession that animates Augustine’s theological semiotics. Thus Christology is both the form and substance of Augustinian theology. To put it bluntly, Book 10 of the City of God is the basic text for Augustinian politics: the heart of Augustine’s account of the true worship of the crucified God and the charitable service of neighbor in collective ­c aritas. Augustine’s God, however, tends to be absent from political Augustinianism,” Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 379. I would suggest that “the humble dispossession necessary to be good” is an initial approximation to what Augustine really means by ­sacrifice. However, Augustine would not affirm that Christ dispossesses his divinity – or its power (as some kenotic theologians have been inclined to imagine) – through the sacrifice of incarnation. The incarnation marks, rather, the displacement of collective human ignorance and arrogance, which occludes the acknowledgment of God alone as good. I share Gregory’s commitment to the focal importance of Christology for characterizing an Augustinian account of public life. Nevertheless, following Augustine’s logic in civ. Dei 10, I see sacrifice linking Christology and ecclesiology more closely than Gregory seems ready to admit, cf. ibid., 129–32, 143. Cf. Jonathan Tran’s remarks about Eric Gregory and allied thinkers in “Assessing the Augustinian Democrats,” Journal of Religious Ethics 46, no. 3 (September 1, 2018): 521–47. 46

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humanity’s refused flesh in Christ’s. The resurrection recollects human flesh only in God’s incorruptible body.48 Civ. Dei 10.6 summarizes the Christological significance of Augustine’s conversion: “Thus humans themselves, consecrated in the name of God, and vowed to God, are a sacrifice [sacrificium] insofar as they die to the world [mundo moritur] that they may live to God [deo vivat]. For this is a part of that openheartedness [misericordiam] which all show themselves; as it is written, ‘Attend receptively [miserere] to your soul by pleasing God’ [Rom 6:13]” (Dods modified). Through his conversion, Augustine consented to devote his life to God as a sacrifice. His commitment traded lust for genuine openheartedness. By coming to accept his mortal end in Christ’s acknowledgment of his Father, Augustine had been liberated from the fear of death: “It was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled” (conf. VIII.xii (29), Chadwick). A newfound confidence came when Augustine recognized that consenting to his death would free him to “live for God.”49 Dying to the world does not mean leaving

For an ambitious exploration of the various ways in which divine sacrifice has been represented in different religious traditions, cf. Kimberley Christine Patton, Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The constructive hermeneutical proposal the book makes is self-­consciously Hegelian, ibid., 171–8. (Indeed, given this background – and the explicit links between Hegel’s thought and Christian theology – the treatment here given to sacrifice in Christianity is disappointingly scanty, ibid., 239–7.) One worry that Augustine might have had about a Hegelian account of the God who offers sacrifice is that such a picture turns materiality into a condition of divine reality. In other words, it declines to confess matter as the manifestation of God’s creativity to invite acknowledgment from something that could never know itself as God. For a reading of the link between acknowledgment and materiality in conf., cf. Nunziato, “Created to Confess.” William Desmond gives some canny reflections on why the logic of acknowledgment in Cavell prevents Cavell from being tempted by Hegel, cf. Desmond, “A Second Primavera,” 147. 49 Augustine retells the crucial conversion that Ponticianus had related to him: “Thus he [i.e., one of Ponticianus’ two colleagues] spoke; and, disturbed by the desire to bring forth new life [turbidus parturitione novae vitae], he turned his eyes again onto the page and continued reading; he was inwardly changed, as you did see, and the world dropped away from his mind,” conf. VIII.vi (15) (Outler modified). The second colleague would follow, just as Augustine’s friend Alypius followed him in his conversion. Later, Augustine describes the “birth pains” of his own conversion thus: “But my madness with myself was part of the process of recovering health, and in the agony of death I was coming to life,” [sed tantum insaniebam salubriter et moriebar vitaliter] conf. VIII.viii (19) (Chadwick). Similarly, he characterizes his soul shrinking 48

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it behind. It means returning to it in God. It means making the partings of one’s life into a sacrifice of acknowledging others through God [propter deum]. As discussed in Chapter 3, sacrifice parts body from soul so that the soul may understand itself more clearly through the offering of its body’s instruction. Augustine explores this linkage by appealing to Romans 12:1–2 (lines proximate to the passage that had inspired his conversion). Thus, Augustine notes, “Our body, too, is a sacrifice [sacrificium] when we chasten it by temperance, if we do so as we ought, for God’s sake [propter deum facimus] … Exhorting to this sacrifice, the apostle [Paul] says, ‘I beseech you, therefore, brother and sisters, by the mercy of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice [ut exhibeatis corpora vestra hostiam vivam], holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service’” (civ. Dei 10.6, Dods modified). When Augustine converted, one hallmark of his transformation was, of course, a newfound commitment to sexual temperance. Conversely, the tempered body instructs the soul in the self it has to offer: “If, then, the body, which, being inferior, the soul uses as a servant or instrument, is a sacrifice when it is used rightly, and with reference to God, how much more does the soul itself become a sacrifice when it offers itself to God, in order that, being inflamed by the fire of His love, it may receive of His beauty and become pleasing to Him, losing the shape of earthly desire, and being remoulded in the image of permanent loveliness?” [si ergo corpus, quo inferiore tamquam famulo vel tamquam instrumento utitur anima, cum eius bonus et rectus usus ad deum refertur, sacrificium est: quanto magis anima ipsa cum se refert ad deum, ut igne amoris eius accensa formam concupiscentiae saecularis amittat ei que tamquam incommutabili formae subdita reformetur, hinc ei placens, quod ex eius pulchritudine acceperit, fit sacrificium] (civ. Dei 10.6, Dods). Imagining the body as the soul’s “servant” [inferiore … famulo] or “tool” [instrumento] need not turn the body into a neglected stepchild of the spirit. Rather, Augustine suggests that when the soul chastens its body, it offers itself in sacrifice through its body. The soul gets transformed by acknowledging its separation from its body in order to take responsibility for it. The body serves as the back from conversion as if doing so were a survival mechanism: “The arguments were exhausted, and all had been refuted. The only thing left to it was a mute trembling, and as if it were facing death it was terrified of being restrained from the treadmill of habit by which it suffered ‘sickness unto death,’” [quo tabescebat in mortem] conf. VIII.vii (18) (Chadwick). Even more pointedly, he adds: “I hesitated to die to death and to live to life,” [hesitans mori morti et vitae vivere] conf. VIII.xi (25) (Outler).

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soul’s instrument just insofar as it also becomes the soul’s instructor. The soul’s openhearted responsibility for its body transforms the soul into the likeness of its unchanging God once it recognizes its body as Christ’s. At this point in civ. Dei 10.6, Augustine’s thinking reaches a crescendo. He proposes a third and final definition of sacrifice. Then he refers that definition to the Church. This last definition coordinates openheartedness (his first approach to sacrifice) and union with one’s end (his second) into a comprehensive account: “So then, the true sacrifices are acts of openheartedness, whether towards ourselves or towards our neighbours, when they are directed towards God [cum igitur vera sacrificia opera sint misericordiae sive in nos ipsos sive in proximos, quae referuntur ad deum]; and acts of openheartedness [opera … misericordiae] are intended to free us from misery and thus to bring us to happiness – which is only attained by that good of which it has been said, ‘As for me, my true good is to cling to God’” (civ. Dei 10.6, Bettenson modified).50 This synoptic

50

There is debate among commentators about the relationship between the truth of the sacrifice that Augustine has in mind in these chapters and its visibility; cf. e.g., Guy de Broglie, “La Notion Augustinienne du Sacrifice ‘Invisible’ et ‘Vrai’,” Recherches de science religieuse 48 (1960): esp. 136–7. Roland J. Teske helpfully summarizes the rationale behind de Broglie’s perplexity: if Augustine imagines true sacrifice as invisible, does it follow that the truth of Christ’s sacrifice – especially as represented in the Eucharistic offering – is compromised by its visibility? Cf. Roland J. Teske, “The Definition of Sacrifice in De Civitate Dei,” in Nova Doctrina Vetusque: Essays on Early Christianity in Honor of Fredric W. Schlatter, S.J., ed. Douglas Kries and Catherine Brown Tkacz (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 155–6; 163, n. 25. Though de Broglie does not develop the implications of his motivating concern at great length, his worry points toward a number of important questions about the communicativity of sacrifice. Is the truth of sacrifice a private religious intention that the sacrificial cultus merely externalizes? If not, how is the “external” sacrifice related to the “inner” one? On the other hand, if the external sacrifice is true, does that render interior disposition irrelevant? Could sacrifice fail to express the acknowledgment of the one who makes it? Perhaps Stanley Cavell’s remarks about Wittgenstein’s private language argument provide a clue for recognizing the misleading terms on which the dilemma is posed: “So the fantasy of a private language, underlying the wish to deny the publicness of language, turns out, so far, to be a fantasy, or fear, either of inexpressiveness, one in which I am not merely unknown, but in which I am powerless to make myself known; or one in which what I express is beyond my control.” A few pages later Cavell adds (still developing an idea of Wittgensteinian provenance), “The human body is the best picture of the human soul – not, I feel like adding, primarily because it represents the soul but because it expresses it,” Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, 351, 356. To imagine that the truth of sacrifice is merely internal is to imagine that sacrifice is incapable of expression: the external manifestation never expresses the true sacrifice. Conversely, imagining that sacrificial truth is external means thinking that sacrifice is indistinguishable from its representation – which is to say, that nothing is actually expressed: sacrifice would simply be the appearance of an expression. Neither of these

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account suggests a striking insight, developed over the subsequent lines. The church has the responsibility of referring all works of attention and devotion – wherever and by whomever these are offered – to God. Such reference makes an open acknowledgment, borne in the flesh, that God acknowledges his own goodness by opening the divine heart and life to creatures. And God expresses God’s own offering through the openheartedness that creatures show one another, as they draw each other into a widening network of attention and care. God offers such acknowledgment through his own flesh, the body of Christ offered for all. That body expands out, through and beyond the church, to take on universal proportions and to draw all things into the economy of sacrifice. Misericordia, Augustine says, frees us from misery [a miseria liberemur]: and that includes – especially – fear in the face of death. To learn how to open our hearts to our own flesh and that of others teaches the human soul that its immortality is not a matter of sheer survival or endless growth. It is a matter of learning how to acknowledge the good in the mortal economies to which our experience of immortality is bound. What “immediately follows” [profecto efficitur] (Bettenson), Augustine tells us, from his synoptic definition of sacrifice is this: [T]he whole redeemed city, that is to say, the congregation or community of the saints, is offered to God as a universal sacrifice through the great High Priest, who offered himself to God in his passion for us, that we might be members of this glorious head, according to the form of a servant. For it was this form he offered, in this He was offered, because it is according to it He is Mediator, in this He is our Priest, in this the Sacrifice [ut tota ipsa redempta civitas, hoc est congregatio societas que sanctorum, universale sacrificium offeratur deo per sacerdotem magnum, qui etiam se ipsum obtulit in passione pro nobis, ut tanti capitis corpus essemus, secundum formam servi. hanc enim obtulit, in hac oblatus est, quia secundum hanc mediator est, in hac sacerdos, in hac sacrificium est]. (civ. Dei 10.6, Bettenson modified)51 alternatives helpfully articulates the Augustinian picture, which might better be summarized by observing that Christ’s sacrifice can fail to express our own acknowledgment, but only because we refuse, or are incapable, of recognizing his flesh as our own – not because we are confusing inner truths with outer. For a discussion of the “inside” and “outside” of Augustinian sacrifice, which links them together by drawing on the logic of sacrament, cf. Arthur F. Krueger, Synthesis of Sacrifice according to Saint Augustine: A Study of the Sacramentality of Sacrifice (Mundelein, IL: Seminary of St. Mary of the Lake, 1950), 5–48, 64–7, 127–32. 51 In his remark at the close of civ. Dei 18, Augustine echoes the same thought: “However, that one, which is the heavenly [city] sojourning on earth, does not make false gods. Rather, by the true God she is made; to him she is made a true sacrifice,” [illa autem, quae caelestis peregrinatur in terra, falsos deos non facit, sed a vero deo ipsa fit, cuius verum sacrificium ipsa sit] 18.54 (my trans.).

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The city of God is a universal sacrifice. In itself, it simply offers all things to God in recognition. That amounts to the full measure of its significance and the fulfillment of its corporate life. Sacrifice is what God’s city is. And sacrifice is what it does. Through Christ, the entire city of God – mortal and immortal, wayfaring and everlastingly centered – offers itself to God in acknowledgment. That offering is true sacrifice. By opening their hearts to all, the members of the church embody Christ’s offering in the economy that sustains mortal life.52 And, as they allow their hearts to dilate, those who belong to the church acknowledge the significance of openheartedness wherever it is shown – even in the lives of those who do not see themselves embodying Christ or his sacrifice. That requires recognizing the flesh of Christ in others who do not see it for themselves. Christ offers humans a body in which to die. And that frees the whole human family to live well by offering a universal sacrifice. This sacrifice returns us to the flesh that embodies our life fulfilled by teaching us how to bid it farewell. Christ returns us to our body by teaching us how to say goodbye: “Do this in memory of me.” And the Church’s instruction is simply its life before its end: [W]e ourselves are the total sacrifice. … This is the sacrifice of Christians, who are ‘many, making up one body in Christ.’ This is the sacrifice which the Church continually celebrates in the sacrament of the altar, a sacrament well-known to the faithful where it is shown to the Church that she herself is offered in the offering that she offers [totum sacrificium nos ipsi sumus … hoc est sacrificium christianorum: multi unum corpus in christo. quod etiam sacramento altaris fidelibus noto frequentat ecclesia, ubi ei demonstratur, quod in ea re, quam offert, ipsa offeratur]. (civ. Dei 10.6, Bettenson modified)

The Eucharistic life embodies the discipline of memento mori. Those who celebrate it learn to see Christ’s body as their own. Therefore, they also come to see Christ’s separation from his body as their own. Christ’s offering affords humans the time and the place in which to let go. His acknowledgment of the common good in the face of death and parting becomes that of others – as does his incorruptible body. In Jesus Christ, the suffering and death of mortal flesh and blood becomes a sacrament

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Roland J. Teske observes: “Because Augustine stressed the reality of the unity between Christ the head and his members, he saw every act of mercy performed by a member of the whole Christ as part of that universal sacrifice, the great act of mercy offered by Christ to reconcile us to the Father,” Roland J. Teske, “The Definition of Sacrifice in De Civitate Dei,” 160.

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that communicates incorruptible flesh. Such flesh has learned to pray that it be only God’s. Only as God’s is it incorruptible. Resurrection makes that prayer the consummate self-expression of the immortal soul who offers itself through its flesh’s end. The Eucharist thereby teaches those who celebrate it that their mortal bodies – like Christ’s – are not a defection from incorruptible flesh. They are its (strange) manifestation in hope. Thus, it is from one’s incorruptible flesh that one is parted when one dies in Christ: just as Jesus was parted from the incorruptible flesh he gave to others when he offered up his spirit on the cross. And it is to the sacrifice of that incorruptible flesh that one’s soul is joined by the resurrection; just as was Jesus’.53 Much later, in civ. Dei 19, Augustine revisits the link between the Church’s offering and the Eucharist. There he emphasizes that sacrifice is wholly incapable of conferring anything upon God. Sacrifice provides God nothing. God does not profit from our flesh (as if he were reclaiming his possession from its stewards). But then Augustine adds, “And yet it is we ourselves – we, his City – who are his best, his most glorious sacrifice, of which thing we celebrate the mystery in our oblations, familiar to the faithful, as we have maintained in previous books” (civ. Dei 19.23, Bettenson modified). Our offering offers God no flesh he lacks. But it makes flesh good as God alone is good. God’s city takes on Christ’s flesh – and, thereby, recognizes its common good – at the altar where it learns the art of dying. Cavell has recently suggested, in the penultimate entry of a book of his own leave-taking, that “I am being impressed by the effort, however awkward, to conceive words that can well be said in the face of the dying.”54 He is discussing a scene near the end of a specific film (Only Angels Have Wings) – but he is, of course, also referring to his own experience of trying to conceive such words. He goes on to note: “(Blanchot is one who asserts explicitly that living is dying, recognizing I must suppose that all our words are said in the face of the dying. I have My reading of Augustine develops certain implications of the idea of Christ’s mystical body – an image seminally present in Augustine’s thought. However, this image had a long and complex development after the fifth century, with significant consequences for theology and politics. For a theological version of this story, cf. Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages – Historical Survey, trans. Gemma Simmonds with Richard Price and Christopher Stephens (London: SCM, 2006). For the now classic historical vantage point, cf. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 54 Cavell, Little Did I Know, 545. 53

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forgotten who said: ‘We pass people everyday who are dying and we fail to say hello.’) It is a failure I keep expecting of philosophy to correct.”55 Our failures even to bid our own dying flesh hello deprive us of the body even in which to die. We lose ourselves, thus, isolated and lonely. Here, Cavell’s own expectation of philosophy echoes the ancient aspiration of teaching humans how to greet their bodies – and those of others – with openheartedness by learning how to let them go. But philosophy only corrects this failure to extend a gesture of attention and recognition insofar as it refers us back to the economy of sacrifice. That economy gives us the flesh in which to recognize one another’s. Much earlier in his own career, Cavell had framed this philosophical task of memento mori in the literary terms set by one of his favorite philosophers: Henry David Thoreau. Cavell had claimed, when describing the purpose of Thoreau’s time in the wilderness: “That was the point of the experiment; not to learn that life at Walden was marvelous, but to learn to leave it. … One earns one’s life in spending it; only so does one save it. This is the riddle, or you may say the paradox, the book proposes.”56 If Cavell is right about this “riddle” at the heart of Walden (and I think he is), then Thoreau’s portrait of the cultivator, par excellence, with which he concludes his chapter on farming, is a thumbnail selfportrait: “The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.”57 The passage seems to adapt Christ’s “lilies of the field” (cf. Matt. 6:25–34; Luke 12:22–34) to the flora and fauna of a northern climate. And, in the process, Thoreau reinterprets Christ’s invitation to trust God. Thoreau imagines, we might say, the economic manifestation of what Augustine would call living by faith. Faith sees in the vowed first fruits the promise of a sacrificial universe. Thoreau here makes explicit what had only been implied by Augustine’s account of Ostia: the first fruits are inextricably bound to the “last fruits.” Nothing is left unoffered. To sacrifice both last and first fruits “in [one’s] mind” is not a symbolic alternative to offering them in reality. Rather, Thoreau suggests here the offering of acknowledgment. One acknowledges “in one’s mind” what is already true of one’s livelihood – of everything that Ibid., 545–6. Senses of Walden, 45. 57 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2006), 181. 55 56

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anyone has to exchange for other goods in an economy: that nothing is not sacrifice. The ingenious creativity of the husbandman turns out to be an offering. Paradoxically, the genuine cultivator – or “true husbandman” – is fruitful just because she releases the claim to her own fruitfulness, just because she offers up the fruit of her labor, first and last. And she offers what she never owned. The claim to ownership is not the cultivator’s to renounce. It is only hers to relinquish – to let go of – precisely because it had never been hers to hang onto in the first place. But seeing that and owning up to that, that is a gesture of acknowledgment. It is a gesture that accepts life and its good things with gratitude and handles them with constant openheartedness. In that gesture lies the sacrificial fruitfulness of the true cultivator.58 It is the offering in one’s mind as also the offering of one’s mind: one’s acknowledgment. And, perhaps, that acknowledgment is all the members of an economy have to communicate with one another through exchanging the good things that support their life together in the first place – the life that gives our economy itself an inner life.59 For Thoreau, life, itself, is sacrifice. Not a renunciation or a deprivation – but an offering. Sacrifice is not simply how we survive. It is the deep rhythm of living. It is the detached fecundity of an open heart. It is what people do when their lives get transmuted into prayer. And, with

In her groundbreaking book, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, Kathryn Tanner makes the following claim: “While we are created by God to be productive of our lives in this way – to make ourselves over with God’s help into God’s image – we are not necessarily called in any other respect to be productive, that is, to produce anything else. There is no reason to think, as the anthropology of production typical of capitalism (and its Marxist critique) does, that we can produce ourselves only by producing other things,” Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 207. But, taking a cue from Thoreau, perhaps we do not produce our lives at all – whether in the image of God or otherwise; whether in the form of capital or otherwise; whether through the production of things for exchange or otherwise. Our lives are not a product. They cannot be held as such. Products (whether actualized as such or not) are possible wholes: potentially finished products. But our lives are never that – not even in death. They are offerings that we cultivate – like Thoreau’s “true husbandman.” And we can make these offerings through exchanging the things that we produce. But we offer more in the exchange than the product. We offer ourselves. 59 Cavell says that Thoreau “show[s] that our facts and ideas of economy are uneconomical, that they do not meet but avoid true need, that they are as unjust and impoverishing within each soul as they are throughout the soul’s society,” Cavell, Senses of Walden, 90. When I talk about economy itself having interiority (or, rather, communicating its members’ interiority), which may or may not be acknowledged, I am trying to articulate what I think Cavell evokes by the phrase “the soul’s society.” 58

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or without our conscious awareness or participation, perhaps (Thoreau suggests) our lives are a constant alchemy of prayer: like candles, burning and burning up. “We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire,”60 T. S. Eliot says. Whether our lives are a sacrifice is not the question. The only question is how we will experience the fire, not whether we will burn. There are different kinds of combustion. A life can be aflame with love. Or it can be consumed by private resentment and public despair. The difference between fire – or fire – is acknowledgment. We can see the sacrificial significance of our lives and join our vision to the offering that illuminates it. That is recognition. Or we can see the sacrificial significance of our lives – and resist until we, and our resistance, are consumed. That is resignation. To cite Eliot again: “The only hope, or else despair/ Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre – To be redeemed from fire by fire.”61 Maybe that is the choice of a lifetime. Or perhaps (more precisely) it is the choice of how each of us will make a living. Cavell emphasizes the exaggerated literality of Walden.62 I would emphasize that what Thoreau literalizes in Walden is the economy of sacrifice. He exemplifies membership in an economy as one who knows himself and knows his place and knows the significance of that place that he shares with others. It is very easy (too easy) to read Walden as the story of Thoreau’s rejection of the society to which he belonged.63 (As if shirking the demands of his economy – as much as possible – could deliver a better life than responding to them.) But such a reading simply reconfirms the terms of the problem that the book intends to unsettle. Thoreau himself gives his readers abundant notice of this, ample cause to read him otherwise. He entitles Chapter 1 of Walden “Economy.”64 Eliot, Four Quartets, 57. Ibid. 62 Cavell claims, “Among written works of art, only of poetry had we expected a commitment to total and transparent meaning, every mark bearing its brunt. The literary ambition of Walden is to shoulder the commitment in prose,” Senses of Walden, 31. 63 For a recent landmark biography helping to push back against this perennial misunderstanding of Thoreau, cf. Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 64 Cavell notes, “The opening visions of captivity and despair in Walden are traced full length in the language of the first chapter, the longest, which establishes the underlying vocabulary of the book as a whole. ‘Economy’ turns into a nightmare maze of terms about money and possessions and work, each turning toward and joining the others. … It is a brutal mocking of our sense of values, by forcing a finger of the vocabulary of the New Testament (hence of our understanding of it) down our throats. … What we call the Protestant Ethic, the use of worldly loss and gain to symbolize heavenly standing, appears in Walden as some last suffocation of the soul,” Senses of Walden, 88–9. 60

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But then, its content seems simply like a lesson in denying its subject matter. Thoreau tells us about acquiring modest initial venture capital (an ax to fell trees for his cabin) and then comments, “It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise.”65 And we construe the prospect of “begin[ning] without borrowing” as if it were Thoreau’s initial (ultimately impractical) aspiration – rather than the illusory economic presupposition of the culture that he criticizes in the subsequent clause. It is easy to sense that Thoreau is making jokes at his readers’ expense. But there is something serious under the wit: “I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.”66 When Thoreau gives painstakingly scrupulous “spreadsheets” detailing his economic interactions with his neighbors, we yawn and wonder why he cannot simply get on with what he really has to say.67 Even the building material of his home was, in part, the purchased, demolished, and reconstructed home of someone else.68 In spite of all these telling signs – and others – it is still tempting to think about Walden’s economic context as a necessary, but undesirable, background that Thoreau would just as soon dispense with, if only he could. On such a reading, Thoreau’s occasional forays into economics can only – at best – undermine his primary project at Walden (ostensibly, to achieve an autonomous solitude, difficult to tell apart from selfindulgent isolation69). At worst, Thoreau’s lingering entanglements with an ever-encroaching economy must demonstrate his effort’s incoherence

Thoreau, Walden, 42. Ibid., 30. Cavell cites the passage in Cavell, Senses of Walden, 90. 67 Cf. e.g., Thoreau, Walden, 50, 58, 62–4, 177. Cavell suggests that “[i]t cannot, I think, be denied that Walden sometimes seems an enormously long and boring book” and then adds, “I understand this response to Walden to be a boredom not of emptiness but of prolonged urgency,” Senses of Walden, 20. If Cavell is right, then Thoreau’s “spreadsheets” sustain Walden’s note of rhetorical urgency rather than providing a relief from it. Indeed, Cavell also remarks, “This is what those lists of numbers, calibrated to the half cent, mean in Walden. They of course are parodies of America’s methods of evaluation; and they are emblems of what the writer wants from writing, as he keeps insisting in calling his book an account. As everywhere else, he undertakes to make the word good. A true mathematical reckoning of the sort he shows requires that every line be a mark of honesty, that the lines be complete, omitting no expense or income, and that there be no mistake in the computation,” ibid., 30. 68 Thoreau, Walden, 44–6. 69 Cf. Thoreau’s own response to such allegations from his contemporaries in ibid., 77–84. 65 66

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and his own self-deluded smugness. But, as Cavell convincingly argues, this is not the best reading of Walden. I have already claimed that Thoreau literalizes the economy of sacrifice. He does so by acknowledging a community that celebrates the solitude of its members. I mean (following Cavell’s clues) that Thoreau acknowledges a state of affairs in which he finds himself – but which he finds mostly unacknowledged among his neighbors. Thoreau is no more alone than those around him. But he recognizes his solitude – he gives it articulate expression – as his neighbors cannot or will not do. He thereby is alone as they are not: not because he is somewhere that they are not. (Not because he is at Walden and they are not.) Rather, because he acknowledges what they do not. (This is what going to Walden does.) He literalizes the condition of those around him by recognizing his solitude as theirs, too. He says what their lives only represent in abstract figures. Thoreau is thereby separate from his neighbors as they are not – and cannot be – separate from one another or from him. In this sense, Thoreau is alone as those around him are not. Cavell has something like this in mind when he remarks: “The drift of Walden is not that we should go off and be alone; the drift is that we are alone, and that we are never alone – not in the highest and not in the lowest sense. In the highest sense, we will know a good neighborhood when we can live there; and in the lowest, ‘Consider the girls in a factory – never alone, hardly in their dreams’ (V, 13).”70 Walden leaves unresolved the question of whether Thoreau’s readers – those to whom he would offer the prospect of neighboring him – will accept their alienated separation from him and from one another or not. To take up the challenge of neighboring him would mean (paradoxically) seeing that we are alone just as Thoreau is and acknowledging that solitude as the token joining us together in one economy. Thoreau invites us to see that his neighborhood – which he calls Walden – is a good neighborhood and that we who read Walden can live there. (Or, more precisely, that we already do: all that remains is for us to acknowledge the economy we already share.) Thoreau’s shadowy image of isolation (cited in the passage just quoted from Cavell) is pointedly economic – like a fragment from a s­ weatshop nightmare by Marx or Dickens: girls in a factory who never have respite from their brutally enforced collaboration. The image evokes ­marginalized members of an economy working for interminable hours at inadequate

70

Cavell, Senses of Walden, 80 (emphasis original).

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pay in order to make goods for others: never silent, never still, never alone. They live in an economy that has colonized even their dreams. However, Thoreau is less worried about the extraction of surplus value than he is about the evacuation of a space for acknowledging the value of economic community by its members. It is not simply one’s energy, one’s life that is denied by reducing it to the dimensions of a productive commodity. It is one’s solitude, one’s interiority. The fact that one is separate – existentially distinct from others yet connected with them through this difference – and that whatever value is to be communicated in economic community lies in that difference: it is this that refuses to be acknowledged in the factory. Thoreau’s alternative to the horrifying inhumanity of the sweatshop is not a mystical solipsism, tacitly colluding with the powers of economic oppression by ignoring them. But it is not revolution either. For Thoreau, the extraction of surplus value (for instance) would be less a cause and more a symptom of our refusal to acknowledge our true condition. The deeper source of economic oppression lies in the denial that we are alone – and that it is good thus – and that we are responsible for and to our common well-being. By denying the fact that we are alone – and that we belong together – the factory threatens to leave us not merely alone but alienated from one another. Not just separate, but ignored, refused, neglected, exploited. This is what it means to never be alone. For Thoreau, even dreams of revolution cannot rouse workers from such isolation. Thoreau’s neighbors think that economy stands between them and solitude. Thoreau reminds them that economy merely expresses the solitude that commits them to one another’s well-being (if it commits them to anything). He thereby acknowledges what is true for them, which they cannot say is true for them, by saying what is true for him. In doing so, Thoreau says and sees that it is good to live together in economic community. And he says so by seeing such acknowledgment as an offering. Sherry Turkle’s influential book Alone Together trades on this crucial distinction between solitude – being alone and recognizing that it is good to be so – and loneliness – being alone because we have cut ourselves off from one another.71 Indeed, the title of Turkle’s book bears a double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to our digital isolation in the midst of other people: how, by promising greater togetherness, technology

71

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Expanded, Revised ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

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often delivers more loneliness. It insulates us from the risks and rewards of technologically unmediated relationship. Sometimes we prefer it. But Turkle raises the question of whether this form of parting is the offering we really want to make. We are alone – increasingly cut off from interpersonal relationship – by our very desire to be together virtually. But, on the other hand, the title of Turkle’s book refers to a more lifegiving possibility – indeed, one that she sources from Thoreau. Her book concludes with an invitation to find a new way of being alone together. Consider a remark near its end: “My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy – about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude – the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise, you will only know how to be lonely. In raising a daughter in the digital age, I have thought of this very often.”72 Turkle calls for relearning how to connect with each other as those who know what it means to be alone: like Thoreau. Indeed, although Turkle’s book focuses on the personal face of technology – how it shapes friendships, families, and other relationships – her prognosis suggests some of the ways that technology is changing our economic culture, too. By accentuating the power we have to inoculate ourselves against the joys and disappointments of direct contact with our exchange partners, we often settle for scale and efficiency, rather than deeper relationship. Turkle reminds us that our technology both distracts and shields us from the passionate mindfulness of our own singularity in community. The economy of sacrifice returns us to that difficult self-knowledge. Where, then, is the community that regards economic life as sacrifice, and offers that life as sacrifice by so regarding it? I do not imagine (nor do I imagine that Thoreau imagined) that he, himself, constituted the economy that he acknowledged – and invited others to acknowledge. Whence, then, the common flesh that articulates, through sacrifice, our shared solitude as our only mode of commitment to one another? Is Thoreau’s recognition a universal offering? (Is Cavell’s?) Cavell’s ecclesiology simply goes by the name America. (It, too, is a mystical body. And Cavell learned this, in part, from Thoreau and Emerson.) I am not claiming that Cavell, or others, could not imagine America as a universal

72

Ibid., 288.

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offering. But is it? Could it ever amount to that? Or is there a sacrificial community that their work implies – but leaves unacknowledged?73 Augustine will identify that community with the body of Christ. He will also identify a universal human community acknowledged through that body. Augustine famously stipulates at the beginning of civ. Dei: “[T]he redeemed family of the Lord Christ, and … the pilgrim city of King Christ … [should] bear in mind, that among her enemies lie hidden those who are destined to be fellow-citizens, that she may not think it a fruitless labour to bear what they inflict as enemies until they become confessors of the faith” (civ. Dei 1.35, Outler modified). The City of God construes the church as bearing witness to a work of sacrifice. It imagines the church bearing witness to those who do not recognize themselves as Christ’s – in the hope that they may yet come to recognize their common flesh with the whole human family. Moreover, Augustine insists that the church maintains this open hospitality to those who see themselves outside of it all the way to final judgment [ultimum iudicum] (cf. civ. Dei 1.35). In Dolbeau Sermon 26, the same spirit of humility appears. There, Augustine looks back to Platonists who had already died (especially Pythagoras – though Plotinus was likely not far from his mind) and keeps open the possibility that perhaps they had encountered the flesh of Christ by covert means: “But one must not say anything rashly [temere aliquid dicendum non est] about those who have not worshiped any idols, nor bound themselves over to Chaldean or magical rituals, in case perhaps it has escaped our notice how the savior, without whom nobody can be saved, has revealed himself to them in some manner or other [aliquo modo].”74 Augustine’s caution expresses more than a regulative Peter Dula deftly addresses the question: “[S]hould we read Cavell’s repeated references to Christ precisely as forms of acknowledgment, the only acknowledgment he is capable of?” Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology, 165, cf. 155–77. However, if ecclesiology is linked to Christology as Augustine’s account suggests, then Dula’s question is closely linked to Cavell’s ability (or inability) to acknowledge the church. I am sympathetic to Dula’s Cavellian plea for the recognition that communities are constituted – not compromised – by the solitude of their members, cf. ibid., 117–229, esp., 183–208. However, I would add that solitude constitutes the church through the recognition that our separation is good – the grace, in fact, of having been created with bodies – which maintains a scope of connection as wide as the human family (and indeed, ultimately, the cosmos) itself. Therefore, the ecclesiology that answers to the recognition of communal solitude must be a catholic one. 74 Augustine, “Sermon 198 (Dolbeau 26),” in Sermons III/11: Newly Discovered Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997). For the Latin text, cf. Augustine and François 73

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agnosticism about the soteriological fate of non-Christians. It entertains the strange and provocative idea that Christ revealed his body prior to his incarnation – and did so in ways that subsequent members of that body would not be able to identify as their own self-disclosure.75 Augustine clearly thought of himself offering the body of Christ to others as a priest: “I think upon the price of my redemption, and I eat and drink it, and distribute it. In my poverty I desire to be satisfied from it together with those who ‘eat and are satisfied’” (conf. X.xliii (70), Chadwick). But Augustine also speculates that those with whom he enjoys this sacrificial banquet might be linked to him in ways that he cannot imagine. Imagining that requires receptive humility and encourages courageous open-handedness.76 Here is a parting thought: perhaps Augustine’s thinking about the Church is so instructive because he does not merely claim to teach the Platonists (or others) something that they do not know – as if he might offer them something they could not reciprocate. Instead, he invites them to teach him the limits of a corporate form – a body – which he has yet to fully recognize as his own. He is learning the limits of his own body through the offerings of others – even as he offers them instruction along the same lines. And is this not what we teach and learn from one another through our daily business exchanges? Do they not show us the limits of our bodies? Not so much the boundaries of our biological units: rather, the points at which our collective provisioning of life in the body is incapable of meeting our desires. Or the moments at which survival, in its present form, becomes untenable on terms we can live with. Are we not continually encountering such limits in our exchanges with one another? Are we not always being shown that our lives are constant works

Dolbeau, “Vingt-six sermons au peuple d’Afrique,” in Etudes Augustiniennes, Antiquité, LLT-A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996). Similarly, in civ. Dei 18.47, Augustine observes that salvation was not confined to the Jewish people prior to Christ’s incarnation. He cites the biblical character Job as one example. Nevertheless, he insists there (as here) that such salvation could only have come from a disclosure of Christ. 75 In reflecting on the theology of religions, Kevin Hart expresses something in the spirit of Augustine’s thought when he muses, “How Christ saves all people, if he is to do so, is his concern; it exceeds all Christian teaching. We do not know the full extent or the exact complexion of the mystical body of Christ,” Kevin Hart, Kingdoms of God (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 275. 76 Cf. Aimé Solignac, “Le Salut des Païens d’après la Prédication d’Augustin,” in Augustin Predicateur (395–411): actes du Colloque international de Chantilly (5–7 Septembre 1996), ed. Goulven Madec (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1998); Feichtinger, “Nothing Rash Must Be Said.”

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of parting? That we have some now and some later, but never everything all at once? That we must let go of certain things in order to get others? That we must offer some things in order to be offered others by others? That the meeting of our desires is always provisional, partial, a neverto-be fulfilled process? Are not these ever-present reminders of economic life? Are they not pressures that elicit our sacrifices? These are the familiar questions of economizing – the standard ways of understanding sacrificial economy – to which we devote so much of our attention. Yet, what we have to learn from such limits – and sacrifices – where they point us, what they teach us about ourselves: these questions are far less familiar but, perhaps, far more important. Perhaps, in the end, the economy of sacrifice teaches us humility. The humility to see ourselves as we really are. The humility to see our economy as it really is. And the humility to devote ourselves and our economy to the service of our common good. Maybe that gesture alone concludes the business we have with one another.

Conclusion

From first to last, life is a work of parting. What began at the dawn of natural history with the division of the first protozoan continues in each human life at conception and birth. Cells divide. The child enters the world from its mother’s womb. The umbilical cord is cut. We learn what it means to be different from others: from family, from teachers, from friends. We change and grow. We slough and molt. The work of parting continues until death, that decisive moment of departure. These are the farewells of a lifetime. And in between the monumental occasions, we carry on the work of parting and call it business. We strike deals. We make exchanges. We give and take, buy and sell, teach and learn. Always we are parting: with things we care about, with people we love, with ideas we hold. And these everyday moments – no matter how insignificant – point us back to life itself. They remind us that our lives are wholly (and, maybe, holy) works of constant parting. Every day, our business poses the tacit question: Will we see our partings as losses or as offerings? Either way is always open to us. But Augustine’s vision of the economy of sacrifice suggests how the conditions of our exchange might look different if we took the second way. We are present in the bits and pieces of our lives: those results of the ongoing work of parting. But, for Augustine, we cannot hold together the fragments of a life as our life. We do not grasp ourselves (cf. conf. X.xvi (25)). We cannot see how the moments cohere. Or how we cohere. The only action that unites the parts is the work of parting, offered beyond all possibility of gain or loss. In that gesture, we find ourselves met by one whose unity burns in every splinter and joins our lives past 217

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every prospect of recall – of our recollection, or of any.1 So Augustine cries: “You are my eternal Father, but I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until that day when, purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow together into you” (conf. XI.xxix (39), Chadwick modified). We burn. Our lives are aflame. And in the burning, we part, split, and divide. We pass over. And through the separations, we find ourselves given over and given up. We lose our voice. But we find ourselves given up to one who speaks in us, through us, and to us with the voice of openheartedness and says that ours is simply to offer. Unity alone lies there. The journey toward seeing one’s life as an offering does not do away with one’s losses or gains. But it changes their significance wholesale by transforming the significance of ownership. Ownership is a claim that only runs so deep. It does not penetrate to the roots of what it means to be human. It defines us at neither our edges nor our center. We enter and leave the world with nothing. And even in the midst of life, we experience moments of beauty, belonging, and connection that remind us that we are not the same as what we have or lack. This truth gets half-acknowledged (and, hence, entirely distorted) when we treat business as a human pursuit lower than those – like art, sports, science, or music – which supposedly express our higher faculties. These higher activities, we tend to think, manifest who we really are or who we truly wish to be. And, although business enables such pursuits, it remains wholly subservient to them. But the economy of sacrifice undermines such habits of instrumental thinking. It is true: business does trade on ownership. Yet our business still carries the power to signify something deeper than the ownership conditions it assumes and perpetuates. Something rudimentary. Something primordial. Something that does lie at the root of who we are: the utter simplicity of a life, complicated only by its own unoriginality. Ownership can teach us the wisdom of loving and letting go. Herein lies the hidden spiritual power of business. Augustine’s perspective on the economy of sacrifice teaches us that ownership is not a mode of attachment. The things we own are not attached to us. And we are not attached to them. But parting with the illusion that ownership is attachment represents the work of a lifetime. Letting go of the illusory bonds tying us to what is ours means refusing For Augustine, God is not the whole who joins the parts of our lives together. God is “far superior” [longe melior] even to the whole of parting things, cf. conf. IV.xi (17).

1

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to imagine that our gains and losses define us – or that winning makes us who we are. Instead, it requires the recognition that our possessions are simply associated with us in order to enable the practical task of provisioning: taking care of ourselves and those we love. Learning detachment also teaches us something deep about our relationships. It trains us to let go of the twinned assumptions that we cannot be separate from one another and that separation cannot join us together. Parting with those assumptions connects us to each other’s open heart. And that openhearted unity is the wisdom of sacrificial economy. Luce Irigaray gives rhapsodic voice to the economic wisdom of sacrificial detachment in a meditation inspired by female Christian mystics: Everything is relentlessly immediate in this marriage of the unknowable, which can never be evaded once it has been experienced. In a deeper unity than the still, already, speculative unity that underlies the sense of these most wrenching contradictions. The bottom, the center, the most hidden, inner place, the heart of the crypt to which ‘God’ alone descends when he has renounced modes and attributes. For this most secret virginity of the ‘soul’ surrenders only to the one who also freely offers the self in all its nakedness. This most private chamber opens only to one who is indebted to no possession for potency. It is wedded only in the abolition of all power, all having, all being, that is founded elsewhere and otherwise than in this embrace of fire whose end is past conception. Each becomes the other in consumption, the nothing of the other in consummation. Each will not in fact have known the identity of the other, has thus lost selfidentity except for a hint of an imprint that each keeps in order the better to intertwine in a union already, finally, at hand.2

The ecstatic community of exchange Irigaray pictures here is an economy – but not one premised on ownership. It is the economy of sacrifice, which is realized through loving detachment. She pictures it in terms of erotic interplay, beyond the conditions of possession or dispossession. It is, if you like, the economy within. Our economy – but lived from the inside out. Neither the exchange nor its terms are claimed or owned, taken or given. They are only extended in a continually openhearted expression of rapture and delight. The gesture Irigaray imagines is an opening of love, desire, and recognition: “Now I know it/myself and by knowing, I love it/ myself and by loving, I desire it/myself. And if in the sight of the nails and the spear piercing the body of the Son I drink in a joy that no word can ever express, let no one conclude hastily that I take pleasure in his sufferings. But if the Word was made flesh in this way, and to this extent, it can

Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 196 (emphasis original).

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only have been to make me (become) God in my jouissance, which can at last be recognized.”3 This love accepts the work of parting only to join the means of life to its end. Here and now and always. It acknowledges God in the flesh, as one’s flesh.4 This is the sacrificial yes: not the closure of self around itself, but the dilation of self into an offering that releases all claim to the self that is offered. And yet offers. This voice voices the self beyond gains and losses – yet in them, too. It bespeaks a quiet desire reminding us always and everywhere that ours is only to open the heart in attention and devotion. To delight. To love. Such is the open secret of our business with one another. To acknowledge one’s place in the economy of sacrifice is to make an offering of active openheartedness: having without holding and parting without losing. Active openheartedness aspires to elicit the same disposition from others. We respond to inspired offerings in order to offer our own inspiration to those who may, or may not, yet be in a position to respond. But we continue to offer in faith. Why? Because our economy is a universal sacrifice. There is a paradox at the heart of parting. We part with what had never been our own. In coming to see and acknowledge as much, we manifest what had always been the case. True sacrifice costs us nothing. It gains us nothing. When we learn to love and to let go – to love by letting go – we come to recognize that we had never really grasped what we are now releasing. We had always simply been letting it go. (Though, perhaps, we only come to know the love of it too late – if ever.) And, yet, the voicing of that very acknowledgment – the recognition that we have never had anything to offer – that offers something new. Something true. It alone is all we ever had to call our own. Even the power to consecrate the products of our creativity, the work of our hands, the labor of our hearts to the divine service of others: even that is offered up. In the end, even the offering we make is not our own. Ours is simply the love that voices as much. And that is as much as we ever had to offer.

Ibid., 200. Ibid., 201.

3 4

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Index

A acknowledgment of Christ’s body, 124, 125, 131, 139–42, 147, 149, 155, 156–59, 162–64, 167, 197, 199, 203, 204, 205, 214 of common good, 1–3, 5, 12, 13–20, 24, 25, 29, 30, 33–34, 45, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55–56, 57–58, 61, 62, 64–65, 68–70, 71, 72, 73–74, 80–82, 89, 92, 94, 96, 98–99, 100–3, 128, 139, 142, 146, 150, 151, 153, 158, 159–60, 164, 169, 171, 187, 189, 192, 193, 195–96, 197, 199, 204, 205, 206, 212, 216 as confession, 38, 39–40, 80–81, 99, 114, 192, 207–9 of death, 10, 25, 49, 68, 69, 72, 100, 102, 105, 110, 129, 132, 142, 180, 184, 201, 206 of detachment, 6, 9–10, 12, 155, 181, 190, 209, 219, 220 of economic community, 14, 37, 84, 145, 207, 212, 213, 216, 218, 220 of flesh, 69–70, 78, 80–81, 96, 101, 115, 118, 122, 129, 130, 131, 133–39, 152, 153, 155, 158–60, 167, 172, 192–93, 198, 202, 214, 215, 220 of God, 6, 73, 83–84, 89–93, 95, 104–5, 116, 133, 142, 155, 180–81, 185, 188, 195, 196, 197, 199–201, 204, 205, 220 of others, 14, 18, 21, 29–30, 31, 56, 58, 80, 81–85, 96, 143, 145–46, 171, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 195, 196, 199, 202, 205 of solitude, 7, 14, 30, 58, 101, 186, 187, 189, 195, 199, 211–12, 214

alienation, 30, 36, 57, 63, 119, 120, 136, 138, 163, 171, 173, 196, 211–12 Allen, Danielle, 24, 51–58 alone. See solitude altar, 120, 157, 182, 205, 206 angels, 89, 90–92, 172–73, 176, 200 attachment, 6, 7, 9, 98, 136–38, 144, 153, 169, 170–71, 193, 218 B Bataille, Georges, 42, 194–95 beatitude, 91, 104, 126–27, 128, 160, 172, 196, 197, 200 birth, 79, 88, 89, 175, 201 body of Christ, 14, 20, 81–85, 99, 119, 124–25, 128–29, 130–32, 138–39, 141–42, 151, 155, 159–60, 173, 188, 198–99, 203, 204, 205–6, 214, 215, 219 corporate, 24, 51, 69, 71, 78, 79–81, 85, 86, 95, 96, 98–99, 118–19, 167, 189–90, 214, 215 corruptible, 48, 83, 124, 127–28, 129, 136, 138–39, 163 dead, 88, 89, 180 demonic, 86, 88–92, 97, 157 divine, 89, 94, 128, 129, 157, 193, 200–1, 204 ecclesial, 14, 51, 94, 99, 128–29, 130–32, 141–42, 149, 153, 155, 156–59, 163, 164, 167, 194, 198, 204 eucharistic, 84–85, 135, 198–99, 205–6, 215 expressive, 15, 81–82, 163, 192–93, 203, 205–6, 207

230

Index

231

female, 83–84, 152 human, 68, 81, 93, 109 immortal, 86, 87, 90–92, 123–24 incorruptible, 99, 124, 127–28, 129, 138–39, 161, 174, 201, 205–6 male, 80, 83–84 mortal, 69, 83, 86, 87, 90, 96, 102, 104, 105–18, 120–23, 126–27, 129–30, 132, 141, 178–79, 207 mystical, 206, 213, 215 partial, 56, 190 resurrected, 89, 184, 188, 201, 205–6 sacrificial, 2–3, 13, 14, 70, 78–90, 93, 102, 118–19, 132, 139, 148, 150, 151, 155, 156, 167, 172, 173, 184, 188, 202–3 books (of the Platonists), 106, 132–33, 137, 139–42, 154, 156, 162, 167, 184 Brown, Peter, 21, 22, 23, 93, 151, 164, 166, 176 business, 2, 4, 27–29, 31–32, 35–37, 38–39, 64, 68, 70, 145–46, 171, 187, 215, 216, 217–18, 220

community, 3, 7, 11, 14–20, 24–26, 30, 45, 48, 49, 51–58, 65, 69, 73, 74, 75–76, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 87, 93, 97–99, 101, 141–42, 144–45, 146, 160, 161, 162, 163–69, 172, 175, 186–87, 190, 211, 212, 213–14 compassion. See openheartedness composition (of wills), 24, 50, 56, 58, 60, 64, 190 confession, 8, 72, 78, 81, 85, 99, 108, 114, 116, 122, 138, 139, 141, 148, 155, 158, 179, 180, 189, 192, 193, 195, 199, 201 contemplation, 21, 34–40, 42–45, 60, 85, 105, 111, 114, 115, 118, 156, 159, 161, 174, 180, 194, 200 conversation, 4, 19, 23, 25, 57–58, 64, 145–46, 177–78, 191, 202 conversion, 7, 104, 105, 132, 133, 134, 142, 147–54, 155, 156, 158–59, 162–66, 198, 201 creation, 26, 46, 95, 104, 116, 180–83, 185, 188–89, 199

C

D

Cavell, Stanley, 14–20, 23, 29–30, 31, 81, 82, 100, 114–15, 145, 146, 154, 175, 184–88, 191–93, 198–99, 201, 203, 206–7, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213 celibacy, 147, 151–52, 153–54 Christ (Jesus), 9–10, 14, 41, 69, 76–78, 81–82, 83–85, 93–94, 99, 119, 125, 128, 131, 132, 134–35, 138, 139–40, 142, 147–49, 153–60, 161–63, 166, 167, 173, 194, 197–99, 201, 203–6, 214–15 church, 20, 25, 40, 93–95, 97–98, 99, 101, 120, 141–42, 156, 157–59, 162, 163–65, 166, 167–69, 190, 194, 197, 198, 199, 203–6, 214–15 Cicero, 33, 105–8, 110–11, 112, 115–16, 118, 120 city earthly, 49, 50–51, 56, 58–61, 62–63, 64, 70, 102, 103 God’s, 51, 102, 125, 161, 176–77, 205, 206 heavenly, 48–49, 50, 58, 70, 172, 174, 176 like household, 49 wayfaring, 24, 48, 51, 58–61, 64–65, 103 communion, 18–20, 30, 69, 79, 87, 90, 95–96, 102, 172, 175, 183, 189, 190, 199

death, 8, 9–10, 13–14, 19, 22–23, 25, 49, 60, 62–63, 66–67, 68, 69–70, 71, 72, 80, 82–84, 85, 89, 90, 92–93, 96, 98–100, 102, 105–33, 135, 136, 138–39, 142, 151–52, 154, 156, 158, 160, 171, 172–73, 174–77, 178–80, 183, 184, 193, 201, 205–8, 217 democracy, 24, 51–57, 67 demons, 24, 61–62, 81, 86, 87–99, 157, 172 desire, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13–14, 20, 27–28, 30–34, 35, 37, 38, 45, 48, 50–51, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 72–77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 88, 93, 96–97, 99, 100–1, 109, 112, 116, 117, 118, 119, 124, 129, 142, 144–45, 146, 148, 149, 152, 157, 158, 167, 170, 171, 172, 181–82, 201, 202, 213, 215–16, 219–20 detachment, 3, 4, 7–8, 9, 17, 19, 21, 24, 26, 35, 56, 57, 124–25, 144, 149, 151–52, 153, 169, 170, 175, 190, 208, 219–20 drama, 29–30, 184–89, 191–92 E Ecdicia, 152–53 Eliot, T. S., 10–11, 209

232

Index

end bad, 104 divine, 7, 10, 45, 68, 112, 121, 133, 194, 197 economic, 12, 34, 67 good, 25, 64, 68, 70, 72, 103, 104–5, 122, 132, 160, 195–97 mortal, 10, 68, 70–72, 102–3, 108, 112, 115, 121, 122, 132, 160, 172, 174, 201, 205–6 partial, 66, 68 proximate, 2, 34–38, 42–43, 45, 46, 50, 52, 58, 60, 62, 113 of scapegoating, 76–77 ultimate, 7, 34–38, 42–43, 45, 46, 51, 58–59, 60–61, 63–64, 74, 219–20 eternity, 11, 49, 60, 68, 79–80, 91–92, 142, 174–79, 181, 184, 191, 197 evil, 13–14, 79, 95, 103–5, 121–22, 129–30, 133, 135, 139, 173, 186, 192 evil (necessary), 13, 25, 52, 55 exchange, 1–5, 7, 9–10, 11–12, 13, 20, 24, 25–26, 28–29, 30–33, 37, 41, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50–51, 57, 59–60, 63, 64, 65, 66–67, 70, 87, 90, 95–96, 142, 144, 145–46, 157, 163, 169, 170, 174, 184, 187, 197, 208, 213, 215, 217, 219 F faith, 10, 11, 38, 46, 48–51, 58, 60, 62–65, 102, 122, 123–24, 207, 220 fear (of death), 67–68, 103–5, 106, 109, 112, 130–31, 135, 139, 149, 201, 204 first fruits, 124, 174–77, 184, 185, 207 flesh assumed, 83, 137, 140–41 of Christ, 20, 84, 85, 99, 117, 124–25, 128, 132, 133–35, 136, 138–39, 140–42, 147, 149, 151, 153–56, 158–60, 167, 177, 193, 194, 197–99, 200–1, 204, 205, 206, 214, 219 desired, 101, 125, 136 divine, 114, 129, 133, 135, 136–37, 193, 200–1, 204, 220 erotic, 101, 149–52, 153–54, 159 eucharistic, 84, 136–37, 139 expansive, 69, 114–15, 124, 198–99, 204 expressive, 139, 163–64, 204, 207 immortal, 9, 127–28, 129, 139, 142, 172–73, 174, 184, 206 limited, 12–14, 19–20, 24, 62, 67, 85, 122 mortal, 68, 70, 82, 96, 105, 107–8, 114, 124, 137, 138, 142, 147, 154, 172–73, 178–79, 182, 184, 193, 200, 205, 207 sacrificial, 134, 139, 154, 189, 191, 193, 197–98, 200, 206

shared, 14–15, 18, 69–70, 101, 129–31, 152, 156, 159, 161, 167, 190, 192–93, 195, 197, 213–14 unacknowledged, 82, 92, 117, 119, 123–42, 150, 151, 154, 184, 192, 197, 205 food, 84, 134, 136–37, 139, 178 friends, 11, 25, 144–49, 169, 173, 193 fulfilled life. See beatitude G gift. See sacrifice, as gift Girard, René, 23, 71, 72–81, 84, 86, 95, 99, 192, 198 good common. See acknowledgment, of common good of death, 121–22, 126, 127–28, 129–30, 139, 142 divine, 9, 73, 103, 104–5, 142, 153, 159, 188–89, 196, 199, 203, 204, 206 greater, 1, 5, 12–13, 19, 56, 66, 95 private, 29, 33, 52–56, 57, 91, 93, 119 of solitude, 17, 19–20, 32, 101, 187, 188–89, 191, 193, 195, 199, 212, 214 and value, 29–32, 37, 39–43, 187 goods, 2, 5, 7, 9, 11–12, 24–25, 29, 30, 31, 33–34, 38, 47–48, 49–50, 52, 55, 57, 62–63, 70, 74, 85, 93, 95–96, 101, 109, 119, 153, 169, 171, 187, 207–8, 212 grief, 7, 8, 18–19, 78, 81, 82, 85, 87, 95, 119, 148–50, 154, 158, 174, 188, 192–93 growth, 13, 23–24, 27–28, 32–33, 62, 65, 66–67, 68, 71, 100, 101, 119, 134–35, 144–45, 158, 170–71, 204 H happy life. See beatitude heart, 4, 103–4, 139, 141, 150, 157, 158, 160, 174, 178, 196, 201, 204, 220 heaven, 9, 10, 91, 94, 106, 125, 128, 149, 172, 173, 174–76, 179–80, 181 Hermes (Trismegistus), 87, 88, 94–95 hope, 6, 8–11, 51, 65, 68, 123, 125, 130, 158, 173, 174, 206, 214 household, 12, 48–51, 152, 168 humility, 115, 134, 161–62, 164–66, 167, 200, 214–16 I idols, 72, 87, 89–90, 96, 214 illusion, 4, 55, 100, 101, 108, 124, 191, 218–19

Index incarnation. See body; flesh inner life. See interiority interiority, 8, 15–19, 22, 26, 32, 41, 45, 49, 120, 133, 139, 178, 187, 191, 204, 208, 212, 219 Irigaray, Luce, 71, 83, 219–20 isolation, 5, 15, 17–19, 29–33, 57, 68–69, 101, 107, 120, 131, 142, 148, 149–50, 168, 171, 186, 188, 190, 191, 207, 210, 211–12

233

knowledge and acknowledgment, 15, 16–17, 99, 100, 118, 123 mystical, 35 of self, 16–17, 77–78, 81, 84, 99, 106–7, 112–13, 115, 117, 118–19, 122, 148, 150, 175, 179–80, 184, 186, 192, 196, 213

martyrs, 119–20, 121, 130–32, 158 materiality, 45, 103–4, 116, 133, 138, 180–81, 201 meaning, 20, 35, 36, 38, 50, 59–60, 113, 154, 197, 209 media (of exchange), 2, 3, 7, 26, 30–31, 39, 40–43, 45, 47, 63, 65 memento mori. See memory, of death memory as corporate recollection, 9, 41, 81, 83, 85, 86–87, 99, 130, 131, 172, 182, 193, 205 of death, 23, 25, 83, 106, 110–11, 113, 114, 116, 120, 133, 135, 139, 156, 178, 179, 180, 205, 207 of God, 142, 180, 183 of life, 115–18 of parting, 135, 151–52, 153–54, 162, 197 of self, 4, 103, 107, 108, 200 Milbank, John, 6–10, 37, 43, 47, 73, 81, 99, 101, 184 mimesis, 72–78, 80, 81, 84, 99 money, 2, 11, 21, 32, 36, 39, 44–45, 63, 64 Monica, 151, 174–79, 181–86, 188–89, 190, 191, 193, 194 mourning. See grief

L

O

Lear (King), 29–30, 184–85, 186, 187, 191–92 limits, 12–14, 15, 18, 19–20, 24, 32–33, 48, 62, 65, 66–67, 80, 82, 96–97, 100, 120, 122, 124, 142, 193, 215–16 loneliness, 15, 18, 26, 31–32, 76, 101, 120, 124, 131, 150, 207, 212–13 loss, 1–2, 5, 6–7, 12–13, 19, 24–26, 33, 43, 52–57, 64, 67, 72, 78, 80–81, 82, 85, 87, 89, 93, 96–99, 100, 102, 118–19, 124, 130, 143, 144–45, 151, 157, 171, 187, 192, 193, 209, 217–18, 219, 220 love, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 17, 25, 26, 27, 60, 72, 109, 112, 116, 124–25, 129, 131, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 143, 146, 150, 154, 157, 158, 159–60, 167, 171, 172, 176, 182, 193, 196, 198, 199, 202, 209, 217–18, 219–20 lust, 93, 124–25, 150, 154, 158–59, 201

offering. See sacrifice, as offering openheartedness, 2–3, 7–8, 12, 13, 16, 17, 24, 25, 55, 57, 82, 98, 143, 150–51, 153, 157, 159–60, 175, 183, 194–98, 199, 201, 203–5, 207, 208, 218–20 Ostia, 25, 173–78, 181–86, 188–89, 190–91, 194, 207 ownership, 1–2, 4, 6–9, 10, 12, 16, 24, 26, 52, 53–55, 57, 72, 74, 79, 80, 86, 87–88, 89, 123–25, 131, 144–45, 148, 152, 157, 160, 168, 171, 200, 206, 208, 218–19

J Jay, Nancy, 23, 71, 78–81, 82–84, 86, 95, 99, 192 K

M Manicheans, 103–4, 166–67 marginal utility, 19, 25, 31, 144–45 marketplace, 21, 24, 26, 28, 32, 42, 48, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68, 85–86

P parting (work of). See work (of parting) parts body as having, 56, 113, 157, 163, 189–90 constituting whole, 50–51, 56–58, 65, 84, 86–87, 96, 98–99, 157, 167, 186, 189–90 as expressions of parting, 82, 113–14, 176–77, 217–18 reflecting partiality, 50–51, 54, 56–58, 93, 98–99 separation of, 110–11, 113, 189–90

234

Index

parts (cont.) spirit as not having, 65, 113–14, 157, 163, 190, 218 unacknowledged, 82, 84, 86–87, 96, 98–99 peace, 4, 35, 48, 50–52, 54, 58–61, 64–65, 66, 73, 75–76, 95, 109, 133, 168, 175, 178, 179, 180 Plato, 73, 74, 105, 106, 108–10, 111, 113, 115, 118, 120, 126–27, 180 Plotinus, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 118, 132, 140, 155, 156, 157, 163, 179–81, 183, 214 pluralism, 22, 23, 24, 39, 46, 59, 62–63, 85–86, 98, 156, 166 politics, 20, 21–23, 33–34, 48–49, 50, 51–59, 60, 67, 69, 71–72, 95, 102, 120, 156, 168, 192, 200, 206 polytheism, 46–47, 60–61, 156 Porphyry, 111, 132, 140, 156, 162, 167, 183 possession. See ownership prayer, 9, 49, 115, 158, 179, 196, 206, 208 property (claim to). See ownership protectionism, 67, 168 punishment, 92, 118–20, 121–25, 126–29, 131–32, 142 R receptivity, 10, 11, 165, 180, 181, 185, 201, 215 recognition. See acknowledgment religion, 5, 11, 17, 34, 45, 46–47, 63, 64, 75, 85, 91–92, 94–95, 96, 101, 119–20, 159, 160, 161, 166, 167, 198, 215 remembering. See memory renunciation, 1–2, 5, 12, 13, 21, 42, 43, 99, 147, 149, 152, 159, 165, 178, 208, 219 representation, 40–43, 77, 89, 90, 101, 118, 179, 184, 203 responsibility, 15, 19–20, 21, 58, 60, 108, 113, 116, 141, 145, 187, 202–3, 204, 212 rivalry, 72–73, 74, 75, 78, 81, 154, 159 S sacrament, 17, 19, 41, 70, 88–89, 93–94, 96, 123, 129, 156, 158, 199, 204, 205–6 sacred (the), 2, 75, 77, 194–95 sacrifice animal, 28, 172 for common good. See acknowledgment, of common good

as gift, 5–7, 8, 9–10, 41, 52, 54, 101, 145, 153, 156–57, 158 for greater good. See good, greater as making sacred, 3 manipulative, 24, 25, 96, 145, 171 as offering, 1–3, 4, 5–8, 19–20, 24, 25–26, 55, 56, 57, 65, 89, 145, 205, 217–20 as quid pro quo, 2, 52, 54, 56 of self, 8–9, 71, 158 universal, 14, 20, 26, 65, 93, 96, 98, 99, 128, 141–42, 162, 165–67, 169, 204–5, 214, 220 scapegoating, 75–79, 80–82, 86, 93, 96, 99 scarcity, 12–13 secularity, 34, 37, 39, 41, 44–45, 46–47, 51, 58–59, 63, 102, 120 sex, 97–98, 149–51, 152–55, 202 silence, 29, 78, 133, 154, 174, 178–89, 194, 212 skepticism, 15–18, 19, 31, 81, 185, 191 Socrates, 102, 106, 109, 112, 113, 115, 120 solidarity, 69, 82, 96, 98, 129, 131, 142, 144, 146, 148, 168–69, 187 solitude, 4–5, 14–20, 26, 30–32, 58, 101, 113, 128, 144, 171, 175, 183, 186–93, 194–95, 99, 210–13 Spirit (Holy), 78, 141, 176, 199 statues (animated), 86–90, 94, 96, 180 strangers, 11, 21, 36–37, 57–58, 81, 82, 85, 183, 196 survival, 12–13, 23, 25, 66–67, 68, 69, 71–72, 76, 78, 80–82, 83, 84, 87, 93, 96–97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 109–10, 118–19, 124, 144–45, 158, 168, 169, 187, 202, 204, 208, 215 sustainability, 13, 23, 24, 66–68, 70, 78, 80, 96, 98–99, 103, 145, 170, 171 T temple, 87, 88, 94, 156–57, 183 Thoreau, Henry David, 26, 207–14 tragedy, 14, 29, 55, 75, 109, 112, 185, 186–87, 191–92 Turkle, Sherry, 26, 212–13 U unity, 24, 26, 45, 56–57, 60–61, 62, 65, 68, 89, 93, 98, 102, 157, 163, 165, 166–67, 169, 183, 187, 190, 205, 217–19 unlikeness (place of), 133, 136, 163

Index

235

V

W

values, 2, 28–30, 31–32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 44–46, 47, 59, 60, 61–62, 102, 119, 156, 187, 209 Victorinus, 132, 162–66, 167 violence, 30, 52, 55, 57, 71, 72, 73, 75–78, 80, 81, 84, 89, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 130, 187, 198 virtue, 20, 99, 112, 130–31, 159–60, 161 vision as contemplative insight, 39, 43 of God, 10, 69, 132–39, 141–42, 156–57, 162, 181, 183, 187–89, 197 of sacrifice, 14, 209 of self, 9, 10, 139, 176–83, 184–86, 187–89

walls, 163–65, 167–69 Weber, Max, 24, 34–40, 42–47, 59, 60–63, 85, 187 Wetzel, James, 51, 125, 129, 133, 135, 137, 138, 150, 158, 159 Williams, Rowan, 7, 10, 49, 59, 102, 200 wisdom, 45, 82, 88, 109, 111–12, 115, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 155, 156, 162, 164, 165, 167, 174, 181, 182, 191, 218–19 work (of parting), 1–3, 6, 10, 12, 14, 19, 25, 26, 49, 55, 57, 58, 65, 93, 98–99, 129, 154, 166, 167, 170, 189, 190, 191, 214, 215–16, 217–18, 220