Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin 1009383787, 9781009383783

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin Augustine of Hippo is a key figure in the history of Christianity and has had a profound impact on the course of western moral and political thought. Katherine Chambers here explores an important topic in Augustinian studies by offering a systematic account of the meaning that Augustine gave to the notions of virtue, vice, and sin. Countering the view that he broke with classical eudaimonism, she demonstrates that Augustine’s moral thought builds on the dominant approach to ethics in classical ‘pagan’ antiquity. A critical appraisal of this tradition reveals that Augustine remained faithful to the eudaimonist approach to ethics. Chambers also refutes the view that Augustine was a political pessimist or realist, showing that it is based upon a misunderstanding of Augustine’s ideas about the virtue of justice. Providing a coherent account of key features in Augustine’s ethics, her study invites a new and fresh evaluation of his influence on western moral and political thought. Katherine Chambers has taught in universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. She is currently a lecturer in history and religious studies at the University of New England, Australia.

Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

KATHERINE CHAMBERS University of New England, Australia

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Penang Road, #-/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press & Assessment  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 & Assessment. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment 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.

Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

ix

 

Introducing the Issues Political Virtues?

 



Political Vices?



 

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition

 

 

The Life in Accordance with Nature Self-Love and Neighbour-Love

 



The Nature of Sin





Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride

  

Bibliography Index

v

Acknowledgements

This book took fourteen years to write. I owe an enormous “thank you” to my family for their patience. They have suffered and celebrated with me, believed in me, and cheered me on. Without them, this book could not have been written. It is dedicated to them: Pam and Ross Chambers François Abigail, Christian, and Elsa

“O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.” (Psalm :)

vii

A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

There is no shortage of excellent English translations of Augustine’s texts. I have usually followed existing translations, preferring to use the most literal, even if this means using an older translation with more archaic language. When using the translations of Augustine’s works found in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church series (ed. Philip Schaff ) I have updated some pronouns such as “thou.” I have also consistently changed “righteous” and “righteousness” (Latin, iustus and iustitia) to “just” and “justice.” This is to allow for a clearer philosophical and philological analysis of the text. I have followed the format for abbreviating the titles of Augustine’s writings found in Allan Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ), pp. xxxv–xlii. B. Vita Bapt. C. Acad. C. Ep. Pel. C. Faust. C. Jul. C. Jul. Imp. Civ. Dei Conf. Cont.

De Beata Vita (On the Happy Life) De Baptismo (On Baptism) Contra Academicos (Against the Skeptics) Contra Duas Epistulas Pelagianorum (Against Two Letters of the Pelagians) Contra Faustum Manicheum (Against Faustus, a Manichee) Contra Julianum (Against Julian) Contra Julianum Opus Imperfectum (Against Julian, an Unfinished Book) De Civitate Dei (The City of God) Confessiones (Confessions) De Continentia (On Continence) ix

x

A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

Div. Qu. Doc. Chr. En. Ps. Ench. Ep. Ep. Jo. Ex. Gal. Ex. Prop. Rm.

Gn. Litt. Gn. Adv. Man. Gr. et Lib. Arb. Gr. et Pecc. Or. Jo. Ev. Tr. Lib. Arb. Mend. Mor.

Mus. Nat. et Gr. Nupt. et Conc. Pecc. Mer.

Perf. Just. Quant. S.

De Diversis Quaestionibus Octaginta Tribus (EightyThree Different Questions) De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine) Enarrationes in Psalmos (Expositions of the Psalms) Enchiridion ad Laurentium de Fide, Spe et Caritate (A Handbook on Faith, Hope and Love) Epistulae (Letters) In Epistulam Joannis ad Parthos Tractatus (Tractates on the First Letter of John) Expositio Epistulae ad Galatas (Commentary on the Letter to the Galatians) Expositio quarandam propositionum ex epistula Apostoli ad Romanos (Commentary on Statements in the Letter to the Romans) De Genesi ad Litteram (On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis) De Genesi Adversus Manicheos (On Genesis, against the Manicheans) De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio (On Grace and Free Will) De Gratia Christi et De Peccato Originali (On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin) In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus (Tractates on the Gospel of John) De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Will) Contra Mendacium (Against Lying) De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae et De Moribus Manicheorum (The Catholic Way of Life and the Manichean Way of Life) De Musica (On Music) De Natura et Gratia (On Nature and Grace) De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia (On Marriage and Concupiscence) De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione et de Baptismo Parvulorum (On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism) De Perfectione Justitiae Hominis (On the Perfection of Human Righteousness) De Animae Quantitate (On the Magnitude of the Soul) Sermones (Sermons)

A Note on Translations and Abbreviations S. Dom. Mon. Simpl. Sol. Spir. et Litt. Trin. Util. Cred. Vera Rel.

xi

De Sermone Domini in Monte (On the Lord’s Sermon the Mount) Ad Simplicianum (To Simplicianus) Soliloquia (Soliloquies) De spiritu et Littera (On the Spirit and the Letter) De Trinitate (On the Trinity) De Utilitate Credendi (On the Advantage of Believing) De Vera Religione (On True Religion)

  Ad Simplicianum

Confessiones Contra Academicos

Contra Duas Epistulas Pelagianorum Contra Faustum Manicheum Contra Julianum

Contra Julianum Opus Imperfectum Contra Mendacium De Animae Quantitate

Miscellany of Questions in Response to Simplician in Selected Writings on Grace and Pelagianism, trans. Roland Teske (New York: New City Press, ) Confessions, trans. J. G. Pilkington (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) Saint Augustine: The Happy Life and Answer to Skeptics and Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil and Soliloquies, trans. Denis Kavanagh (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, ) Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, and revised by Benjamin B. Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) Against Faustus, a Manichee, trans. Richard Stothert (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) Against Julian, trans. Matthew Schumacher (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, ) Against Julian, an Unfinished Book, trans. Roland Teske (New York: New City Press, ) Against Lying, trans. H. Browne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) Saint Augustine: The Immortality of the Soul; The Magnitude of the Soul; On Music; The Advantage of Believing; On Faith in Things

xii

A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

De Baptismo

De Beata Vita

De Civitate Dei De Continentia De Diversis Quaestionibus Octaginta Tribus De Doctrina Christiana De Genesi ad Litteram

De Gratia Christi et De Peccato Originali De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio

De Libero Arbitrio

De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae De Musica

Unseen, trans. John McMahon (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, ) The Seven Books of Augustin, Bishop of Hippo, On Baptism, against the Donatists, trans. Rev. J. R. King (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) Saint Augustine: The Happy Life and Answer to Skeptics and Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil and Soliloquies, trans. Ludwig Schopp (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, ) The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On Continence, trans. C. L. Cornish (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) Eighty-Three Different Questions, trans. David Mosher (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, ) On Christian Doctrine, trans. James Shaw (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis, and the Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, ) On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, and revised by Benjamin B. Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On Grace and Free Will , trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, and revised by Benjamin B. Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On Free Will in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. J. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, ) Of the Morals of the Catholic Church, trans. Richard Stothert (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) Saint Augustine: The Immortality of the Soul; The Magnitude of the Soul; On Music; The Advantage of Believing; On Faith in Things

A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

De Natura et Gratia

De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia

De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione et de Baptismo Parvulorum De Perfectione Justitiae Hominis De Sermone Domini in Monte De Spiritu et Littera

De Trinitate De Utilitate Credendi De Vera Religione

Enarrationes in Psalmos Enchiridion ad Laurentium de Fide, Spe et Caritate

xiii

Unseen, trans. Robert Catesby Taliaferro (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, ) On Nature and Grace, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, and revised by Benjamin B. Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On Marriage and Concupiscence, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, and revised by Benjamin B. Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, and revised by Benjamin B. Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On the Perfection of Human Righteousness, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, and revised by Benjamin B. Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On the Lord’s Sermon the Mount, trans. William Findlay (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On the Spirit and the Letter, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, and revised by Benjamin B. WarfieldF (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On the Trinity, trans. Arthur West Haddan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On the Advantage of Believing, trans. C. L. Cornish (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) On True Religion in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. J. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, ) Expositions of the Psalms (vols. –), trans. Maria Boulding (New York: New City Press, –) A Handbook on Faith, Hope and Love, trans. J. F. Shaw (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, )

xiv

A Note on Translations and Abbreviations

Epistulae Expositio Epistulae ad Galatas

Expositio quarandam propositionum ex epistula Apostoli ad Romanos FCNT

In Epistulam Joannis ad Parthos Tractatus In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus NPNF

Sermones Soliloquia

WSA

Letters (vols. –), trans. Roland Teske (New York: New City Press, –) Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians: Introduction, Text, Translation and Notes, trans. Eric Plumer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) Augustine on Romans: Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans, Unfinished Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. Paula Fredriksen Landes (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, ) The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, –) Tractates on the First Letter of John, trans. H. Browne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) Tractates on the Gospel of John, trans. John Gibb (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, –) Sermons (vols. –), trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, –) Soliloquies in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. J. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, ) The Works of St. Augustine, a Translation for the st Century (New York: New City Press, –)

 Introducing the Issues

The aim of this study is to arrive at an understanding of the meaning that Augustine gave to the ideas of virtue, vice, and sin, ideas which lie at the very heart of his thought and which are key to understanding the contribution that he made, not only to moral thought but also to political and social thought and to Christian doctrine itself. My study is timely because over the last two or three decades, there has been a growing interest in ‘virtue’ ethics as an important and distinctive approach to moral philosophy. I seek to provide insights into the historical development of this normative approach, in particular, to shed light on the crucial transition between classical ‘pagan’ Greek and Roman ideas of virtue and vice, and Christian ideas of virtue and vice. There have been many distinguished contributions on the subject of Augustine’s ethics; in what follows I acknowledge the assistance that these writings have provided me and seek to weave the insights found in these works together with my own insights derived from a fresh reading of important passages in Augustine’s writings. The resulting synthesis offers original insights on a topic about which there has been too little clarity, namely, what Augustine meant by the key notions of virtue and sin. My belief is that clarifying this will add in a significant way to the existing scholarship on Augustine’s ethics. A study focused upon the meaning that Augustine gave to the ideas of virtue and sin is long overdue. More than eighty years ago, Joseph Wang Tche’ang-Tche began his monograph Saint Augustin et les vertus des païens by emphasising that any study of Augustine’s moral philosophy needed to begin by investigating the meaning that he assigned to the term





Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

“virtue.” Wang noted that the notion of virtue was fundamental for understanding Augustine’s thought, and criticised those who ignored the need to investigate its precise meaning and who thereby were in danger of offering explanations of his moral thought which had “nothing Augustinian” about them. I will return to what Wang had to say about virtue below. His warning that we cannot assume that we necessarily know what Augustine meant by the ideas of virtue and sin, and the related ideas of “good deeds” and “bad deeds,” and their many cognates, is the starting point for the present study. In what follows, I begin with the assumption that these are all notions which require careful investigation to establish their frame of reference for Augustine, much as we would investigate the meaning of any other important idea in his writings. Given the centrality of virtue and sin in his thought, the absence of a study dedicated to his understanding of these ideas is a significant lacuna in the extensive scholarship on Augustine and his legacy. While my main purpose in what follows is to remedy this, I also have two further aims. An additional reason for undertaking this study lies in the possibility that Augustine’s moral thought in some way broke with the moral traditions of Greece and Rome. Augustine claimed to see shortcomings in the moral traditions that he had inherited from classical antiquity, and to have improved upon them, and these claims deserve to be investigated. Establishing whether and in what sense his moral thought was innovative is an important purpose of the present study. Augustine’s moral thought is of inherent interest for a further reason. He was clear that to be a Christian was to be virtuous; the acquisition of Christian faith was the moment of acquiring virtue. Hence, his understanding of virtue offers an insight into how he understood the nature of Christian conversion and the meaning of the Christian life. What did he see in Christian faith which made the presence of virtue in the Christian believer inevitable? What was virtue that it was inseparable from Christian faith? In claiming that virtue was found only among Christians, and that it was necessarily found among them, Augustine also declared that virtue could not be a human achievement but must be given by divine grace. How did he explain this claim? Augustine is one of the most influential figures in western Christianity, and, as such, his  

Joseph Wang Tche’ang-Tche, Saint Augustin et les vertus des païens (Paris: Études de Théologie Historique, ). Ibid., p. .

Introducing the Issues



understanding of what it meant to be a Christian merits being made the focus of critical study. Exploring his moral thought is a key means to do this, and this is the third main purpose for undertaking the present study. Thus, this study has three principal aims: to offer a systematic account of Augustine’s ideas of virtue and sin, to explain in what sense his understanding of these ideas broke with the non-Christian moral philosophies that preceded it, and to understand Augustine’s claim that to possess Christian faith was to be virtuous. While these are my main aims, this study also seeks to achieve one more thing. Current assessments of Augustine’s social and political thought are closely tied to a certain interpretation of his moral thought. Hence, by offering an in-depth analysis of his views on virtue and sin, this study also offers a critical evaluation of the current understanding of his social and political thought. In numerous studies of his political outlook, his conviction that human beings were incorrigible sinners until they were assisted by grace is read as leading him to reject the idea that non-Christians could achieve social and political justice. In examining what Augustine meant by sin and virtue, including the virtue of justice, the following assesses whether or not such a reading of his views on politics and society is in fact correct. Augustine discussed the virtuous and the sinful in nearly every work which he wrote, from his sermons and letters, which frequently deal with moral themes, to his formal treatises, including his anti-heretical writings, his works of exegesis, and his major works on the Trinity and the City of God. Given the impossibility of dealing adequately with all these writings in the course of one monograph, any work such as mine needs to make choices about how to navigate this sea. One choice which scholars sometimes make is to package his work chronologically, dealing with either his early writings, his writings from mid-career, or his later thought. Another choice is to study a discrete set of writings which spans his whole career, such as his sermons or letters. I am not satisfied with the utility of either of these approaches when it comes to exploring such a major theme in his thought as the nature of virtue and sin. Both approaches run the risk of missing important statements about virtue and sin which would help to clarify allusions found elsewhere in his writings. Instead, my approach has been threefold. First, I make use of writings known to contain 

A number of these studies are discussed in more detail below. See also Katherine Chambers, “Augustine on Justice: A Reconsideration of City of God, Book ,” Political Theology  (): –, for a discussion of those scholars who have found this view in City of God, Book .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

explorations of themes of central relevance to this topic, such as On the Happy Life, The Catholic Way of Life, Confessions, On the Spirit and the Letter, On Christian Doctrine, and The City of God. Second, I have been guided to texts, or passages from texts, by discussions in the scholarship on Augustine’s moral and political thought. I have not depended on these secondary writings for my understanding of Augustine’s thought, but I have used them to ensure that I have not overlooked important passages. Third, I have used Augustine’s discussion of certain biblical passages (such as  Corinthians : and Philippians :–) as a guide, exploring his comments on these passages wherever they occur in his writings. Augustine’s writings are copious, and I certainly do not claim to have found every passage which could be usefully discussed in relation to my theme; nonetheless, I have endeavoured to be as comprehensive as possible.

   In some well-known passages, Augustine defined virtue as a kind of love: this love had as its central characteristic the fact that the Christian God was loved. In a number of other passages, he identified sin with another kind of love, namely, carnal concupiscence, which he associated with the love of temporal things. He also indicated that people sinned in loving 



In De Moribus Ecclesiae, ., Augustine wrote, “I would not define virtue in any other way than as the highest love [summum amorem] of God.. . . Now since this love, as I have said, is not of things in general, but rather love of God . . .” (the Gallaghers’ translation reads “the perfect love of God,” but I prefer the more literal “the highest love of God”). In Letter , at ., he declared, “And yet even in this life there is no virtue but to love what one should love.” In Letter , at  and , he stated, quoting from  Timothy :, “For love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned, is the great and true virtue, for it is the goal of the commandment.. . . And to summarize in a general and brief statement the notion that I have of virtue, insofar as it pertains to living well, virtue is the love by which one loves what should be loved.” Teske’s translation reads “love . . . is a great and true virtue,” but I have followed J. G. Cunningham’s translation here, which I think is more consistent with the second statement that “virtue is the love by which one loves what should be loved.” Finally, in De Civitate Dei, ., he wrote, “it seems to me that a brief and true definition of virtue is the order of love (ordo amoris)” (I have changed Bettenson’s “rightly ordered love” to the more literal “the order of love”). For example, he writes in De Perfectione Justitiae, ., “Concupiscence, that is, the sin dwelling in our flesh.” This quote comes from Jesse Couenhoven, “Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin,” Augustinian Studies . (): – at . Other passages discussed by Couenhoven (pp. –) include De Nuptia et Concupiscentia .., Ad Simplicianum .. and De Perfectione Justitiae, . and ., Contra Julianum Opus Imperfectum .. See also Jesse Couenhoven, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ:

Introducing the Issues



themselves to the contempt of God. Among modern scholars, these statements about virtue and sin have been interpreted in two different ways. I will begin by outlining the first of these interpretations, before turning to discuss the scholarship in which this interpretation is found, sometimes only implicitly; then I will discuss the alternative approach. To date, the most influential interpretation of Augustine’s view of virtue is the one that informs accounts of his social and political thought. This reading accepts that he defined virtue as loving God, and then finds that by defining virtue in this way, he implicitly identified it with doing the things that God wanted us to do in all areas of our lives. According to this interpretation, Augustine’s view was that until we loved God we would often lack a reason to do the actions that God wanted us to do and also often lack the knowledge of what these actions were. God wanted us to do things like give money to the poor, minister to the sick, preach the Christian gospel, and serve others in numerous other ways. This interpretation concludes that only people who were virtuous through loving God would be regular doers of these actions. In this way, this view considers that, for Augustine, while virtue was a matter of our loves, it was also, in effect, a matter of our actions: it was only through loving the Christian God that we would be inspired to be consistent doers of the actions that God required of us. These studies also argue that Augustine considered that what God wanted us to do was often hard to decipher and that this also helps to explain the importance that he placed on love for God as virtue. According to this view, Augustine held that human ignorance of God’s will meant that we required the written moral teachings found in the Bible; in addition, since explicit rules for conduct might prove an insufficient guide to God’s will in some situations, we could only be sure of doing God’s will in everything by totally surrendering ourselves to loving God and hence being guided by God in all our actions.





Agency, Necessity and Culpability in Augustinian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. Civ. Dei ., “We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self.” Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), has laid particular stress on the idea that Augustine thought that fallen human beings were often ignorant of what God wanted them to do in their social and political lives and consequently dependent on God’s direct guidance to conduct themselves appropriately in these spheres.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Thus, even though the above interpretation notes that Augustine defined virtue in terms of love, it nonetheless considers that he looked upon actions as implicitly a part of the meaning of virtue. In particular, it considers that, for Augustine, the presence or absence of love for God in itself determined the kind of actions that we did. The result is that this reading finds that he could have defined virtue equally well in terms of what we did – he defined being virtuous as loving God, but, according to this reading, he could equally well have defined it as being a consistent doer of sociable, other-oriented actions and of all those other things which, in any given situation, God wanted us to do. This reading of Augustine’s moral thought explains his understanding of sin, or vice, along similar lines. It finds that he defined all sin as an excessive love for the self, and then interprets this sinful self-love in a certain way. In particular, loving ourselves excessively is understood as entailing a failure to do the things that God wanted us to do: God set down rules for our conduct, including the requirement that we looked after our neighbours’ physical and spiritual welfare (“love your neighbour as yourself”), and, moreover, God offered to guide our behaviour at all times, but sinners gave to themselves the love that was owed to God and hence they flouted God’s rules and refused to seek God’s guidance. Instead, their self-love led them to seek to advance their own temporal interests, whether in pursuing physical pleasures, material riches, political power, or popular renown at all costs and by any means. In this way, this reading likewise holds that Augustine understood sin as having unambiguous implications for our actions: it recognises that Augustine defined sin in terms of love, but holds that he understood this love in such a way as to mean that he saw being a sinner as just as much a matter of our actions as of our loves. In particular, being a sinner is taken to refer to being the kind of person who did not choose to seek God’s guidance for one’s conduct and normally did not choose to act sociably towards other people. Instead, being a sinner is understood to mean having a tendency towards doing all those things which God did not want us to do, including things which harmed others, such as seizing more than one’s fair share of earthly goods and oppressing and tyrannising anyone weaker than oneself. Thus, this interpretation of Augustine’s understanding of virtue and sin finds that, while he defined virtue and sin in terms of differing loves, these terms also, in effect, described the fact that we either did or failed to do the things that God wanted us to do. For this reason, this interpretation has been particularly influential in shaping twentieth- and

Introducing the Issues



twenty-first-century accounts of Augustine’s social and political thought. For example, this view of virtue and sin can be found in Herbert Deane’s classic study, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (). Deane takes Augustine’s understanding of “sin” to equate to socially destructive selfishness or egoism: “the fraternity and concord natural to human society have been shattered by the egoism of sinful men.” He notes that Augustine distinguished “sin” from “sins”: for Deane, the former described something fundamental about a person’s character, namely, their arrogant egoism; the latter described actions which were condemned by God. In this way, Deane finds that, in Augustine’s eyes, sin in the form of egoism produced in sinners a tendency to commit “sins” – a sinful person was possessed by an overweening self-regard (“each man, from the moment he is born, is infected with the original sin of pride and the blasphemous desire to place himself at the center of the universe”), and this attitude led to a desire to acquire for oneself power over everyone else and more than one’s fair share of earthly goods: “once the nature of man has been corrupted by sin each man seeks to gain possessions and wealth at the expense of others and each seeks to gain mastery over others.” “To the citizens of the earthly city, however, wealth, fame and power are the highest goods, and they will do anything necessary to obtain them.” Hence, Deane observes, “in the earthly city . . . there is constant conflict and strife, not only against the good but among the wicked themselves, since each man and each group seeks a larger share of material goods than the others and each strives for mastery and power over the rest.” Deane’s work concludes by finding that Augustine was a political realist. This reading of Augustine as a political realist or political pessimist has become standard in histories of political thought.

   

Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. .    Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Reinhold Niebuhr, “Augustine’s Political Realism,” in Robert McAfee Brown, ed., The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ; first published in ), states that realism means taking into account “the factors of self-interest and power,” and so having no “illusions about social realities” (p. ). “Augustine was, by general consent, the first great ‘realist’ in Western history” (p. ). Mikka Ruokanen, The Theology of Social Life in Augustine’s “De civitate Dei” (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ), notes that this reading of Augustine as a political realist dates from the middle decades of the twentieth century (pp.  and –).



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

In particular, Augustine is taken as repudiating classical humanism’s positive evaluation of human beings’ natural capacity to choose sociable conduct, and replacing this political idealism with his political realism or pessimism. For example, one of the most influential texts in this field – Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought () – maintains that the foundations of modern political thought lie partly in the early quattrocento humanists’ recovery of this classical idealism and their consequent rejection of Augustine’s assumptions about the inability of human beings to acquire the political or civic virtues except with the assistance of grace. Skinner claims that the Renaissance humanists rejected “the entire Augustinian picture of human nature.” St Augustine had explicitly laid it down in The City of God that the idea of pursuing virtus, or total human excellence, was based on a presumptuous and mistaken view of what a man can hope to achieve by his own efforts. He himself argued that, if ever a mortal ruler succeeds in governing virtuously, such a triumph can never be ascribed to his own powers but “only to the grace of God.”

Skinner holds that the recovery of the optimistic ancient belief in the unaided human ability to act sociably and promote the common good “represents an almost Pelagian departure from the prevailing assumptions of Augustinian Christianity.” Behind the conclusions of Skinner lies the work of Deane, and also of Robert Markus, whose study, from , of Augustine’s theology of society is one of the most influential statements of the view that Augustine’s moral pessimism equated to a social and political pessimism.19 Markus finds that from the s, Augustine came to see that his theology, especially his conception of fallen humanity’s helpless enslavement to sin (“the endemic liability to sin”; “Augustine’s sombre vision of the nasty brutishness of man in his fallen condition”), entailed a rejection of a sense of humanity’s progress through history towards perfection. For Markus, Augustine realised that human beings would always remain sinful, and hence that the laws and policies which they devised to shape their social lives would always be inadequate to create a truly just society. Even the coercive measures taken by governments to eliminate our anti-social actions

   

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume : The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .  Ibid., p. , quoting from Civ. Dei .. Ibid., p. . Robert Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).  Ibid., pp.  and . Ibid., p. .



Introducing the Issues

and impose concord upon us would have only a limited degree of success: our social and political lives would remain deeply imperfect; at best, government could eliminate some, but not all, social ills. The condition of man consequent on Adam’s fall does not allow for the achievement of the harmony and order in which alone man can find rest. Tension, strife and disorder are endemic in this realm. There can be no resolution, except eschatologically. Human society is irredeemably rooted in this tension-ridden and disordered saeculum. It was this radically “tragic” character of existence for which ancient philosophy, in Augustine’s view, could find no room.

Markus emphasises that this viewpoint was the product of a development in Augustine’s thinking about society: his initial views held more in common with the idealism of ancient Greek and Roman political thought, namely, “that politics was a matter first of discerning the lineaments of the right ordering of society in the natural world, and then embodying this discovered order in social arrangements.” For Markus, as Augustine’s thought developed, he came to the view that this right ordering escaped both human beings’ ability to discern and their ability to implement and held instead that the achievement of the right order in social affairs lay in the next life, not in this one. Hence Augustine came to conceive the function of the state as restricted to performing the valuable but limited task of “securing some precarious order, some minimal cohesion, in a situation inherently tending to chaos.” Thus, Markus saw Augustine’s mature view of political life as rejecting the optimism of classical antiquity. For Greek and Roman political thinkers, life in the polis was understood as promoting virtue. This is the ancient Greek idea of paideia: the cultivation of ideal citizens who uphold the values of the polis. In contrast, for Augustine, according to Markus’s reading, government simply acted as a bulwark, holding in check to some degree our competitiveness and lust for power: at best, we were forced through the threat of punishment into maintaining a kind of imperfect and temporary peace with our fellow citizens. The view of Augustine as a political pessimist remains the consensus among modern commentators on his political and social thought. Recent interpreters of Augustine, however, have been particularly interested in the question of the extent to which he thought that Christians could free themselves from the sinfulness engulfing the rest of humanity and accomplish the deeds that God wanted them to accomplish, thereby having an



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

impact on their societies for the good. This issue is explored especially in the work of Robert Dodaro. Dodaro has developed the insight that Augustine considered that sinners’ inability to shape their social and political lives in conformity with justice was the product as much of “ignorance” as of “weakness”: “In Augustine’s view, all these philosophies [Pelagian, Stoic, Manichean, Platonist, Donatist and “ancient and contemporary political culture”] hold that, in principle, the human soul is able to know what is required for the just life, even without divine assistance.” Dodaro sees Augustine as arguing, in contrast, that Christian piety was an essential characteristic of the good political leader because people were only relieved of their ignorance of what constituted a truly just thing to do in a given situation through this piety: the Christian graces of faith, hope, and love alone allowed public officials to grow in the knowledge of the nature of what judgements and decisions ought to be made in the social and political spheres. Hence, Christians were able to administer their states differently to non-Christians, aligning their decisions more closely with God’s will for the conduct of human affairs, because they were guided by faith, hope, and love. Thus, Dodaro argues that what Augustine offers in his letters to public officials “is a set of religious practices through which Christian statesmen undergo transformation through a deepening of their love of God that results in a gradual deepening of their political wisdom.” As a result, Dodaro’s work has encouraged scholars to attribute a guarded political optimism to Augustine – he is read as being deeply pessimistic about the actions of those outside grace, but guardedly optimistic about the ability of Christians, aided by grace, to bring about social and political improvements in their societies. For example, Bruno writes that an “Augustinian” political theory necessarily tempers pessimism with a recognition of “the positive effects that Christians can have in public office”; “Christian virtue is necessary to produce the limited good that is possible in human society.”

 

 

Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. Dodaro, “Ecclesia and Res Publica: How Augustinian Are Neo-Augustinian Politics?,” in Lieven Boeve, Mathijs Lamberigts, and Maarten Wisse, eds., Augustine and Postmodern Thought: A New Alliance against Modernity? (Leuven: Peeters Press, ), pp. –. Michael Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. .

Introducing the Issues



While modern studies of Augustine’s social and political thought remain divided over the question of the extent to which his pessimism was alleviated by the role he gave to Christians as promoters of social and political justice, they share a common understanding of his moral thought. Although they do not offer an explicit definition of the meaning of virtue and sin for Augustine, they operate with the common assumption that, for him, the virtuous life was distinguished from the vicious life by reference not just to people’s loves but also to their actions, including their conduct in the social and political spheres. Hence, these accounts read his comments on virtue and sin as having a straightforward relevance to his thinking about the conditions for creating the ideal polis. For this reading, things like giving to the poor, telling the truth, and, in more general terms, giving others their due of social and political goods would be consistently found only among those who possessed virtue, understood as love for God. Likewise, this reading finds that people who were sinful because they loved temporal things and loved the self excessively would inevitably fill their lives with those actions which God did not want – things like stealing, murdering, lying, committing adultery, and, in general terms, failing to give others their due of social and political goods. Hence, these studies conclude that Augustine viewed those societies which he labelled as vicious and sinful – pagan Rome, the earthly city – as characterised by a failure to progress towards the ideal form of social and political life. Such an assumption about the meaning of virtue and sin for Augustine might seem to be invited, given Augustine’s language of two, contrasting cities – the earthly city and the heavenly one. Yet all assumptions need to be interrogated: Augustine identified two cities, and two citizenships, but did he see these as inevitably distinguished from each other by two standards for social and political life? What if his understanding of virtue and sin, good deeds and bad deeds, really had no straightforward translation into the political and social spheres? He himself wrote of virtue and sin as different loves, and held that the two cities were distinguished from each other by their differing loves; he maintained that they had different



Peter Iver Kaufman, Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), thinks that the depth of Augustine’s political pessimism cannot be over-stated: for Kaufman, Augustine preached the spiritual dangers of committing oneself to orchestrating meaningful political reform (pp. –); “personal righteousness” was rarely compatible with “political practice” (p. ).



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

rulers and different destinies. These things in themselves sufficed to distinguish the two cities – hence, the mere fact that he wrote of two cities does not, in itself, provide evidence in favour of the view that he thought of these cities as differing from each other in their standards for the conduct of social and political affairs. Thus, while the above interpretation has proved to be the most influential reading of Augustine’s notions of virtue and sin, it has not gone unchallenged. In particular, the openness to the possibility of a different reading of Augustine’s moral thought is characteristic of studies which investigate his discussion of the virtue of pagans. These studies do not assume that Augustine viewed all pagans as inevitably driven by selfish motives simply because he concluded that they loved themselves at the expense of loving the true God. They are open to the possibility that, for him, the virtuous and the vicious or sinful were not necessarily distinguished from each other by their actions at all; instead, they suggest that the only necessary difference that he saw between virtuous people and sinners was their different loves. Recent studies of Augustine’s idea of pagan virtue have made use of the insights found in the work of Wang Tch’ang-Tche. For Wang, Augustine had no doubt that pagans could lead lives in which outwardly or materially their deeds were no different to those of Christians: like Christians, their loves could lead them regularly to promote other people’s welfare, to tell the truth, to be faithful to their spouses, to give others their due of social and political goods, and to do all those other actions which were desired by God. Pagans could do these actions, and yet they would remain sinners on account of their sinful loves, whereas when Christians did these same actions, they were virtuous through their virtuous love for God. For Wang, the fact that Augustine allowed that pagans could possess a kind of virtue, although they would never possess “true” virtue, supported the conclusion that Augustine understood the lives of pagans







See, for example, Letter , to Marcellinus, at ., where Augustine stated that the distinctive features of the heavenly city were that “[its] king is truth, [its] law is love and [its] limit is eternity.” Joseph Wang Tche’ang-Tche, Saint Augustin et les vertus des païens (Paris: Études de Théologie Historique, ), especially “Les fausses vertus, positivement mensongères ou simplement décevantes.” Ibid., p. : The action of a pagan would be “viciée par des intentions moins pures.” “Nous sommes loin de ceux qui réduisent l’attitude morale à des actes materiellement accomplis, sans en examiner les rapports avec la finalité suprême de l’agent.”

Introducing the Issues



and Christians as inevitably distinguished only by their loves. In particular, Wang’s view was that in attributing a kind of virtue to pagans, Augustine accepted that pagans and other non-Christians could share with Christians a disposition to do the right kind of social and political actions, but, if so, this disposition would be founded upon loves which stopped short of being right – all non-Christians would always fail to love the true God, and in this sense, they would always be sinners, but they could nonetheless love in such a way as to ensure that they were consistently sociable and other-oriented in their actions. In that case, they could be said to possess a kind of virtue – a “false” virtue – because, while they would always act for lesser loves, these loves could be of a nature to lead them always to do the right kind of deeds. In this limited sense, their loves would resemble the Christian love for the true God, and hence it was possible to describe these loves as “false” virtues. Yet these loves were actually sins: “false” virtues were really vices, although vices with some resemblance to true virtue. The only true virtue was love for the true God; consequently, all pagans were sinners because they all loved things which were not the true God. Nonetheless, some among them loved in such a way as to ensure that they always did the actions that God wanted us to do – these loves were still sins, but they could also be called false virtues. Wang Tche’ang-Tche’s study remains an important reference point for recent studies of Augustine on pagan virtue. These studies thus propose an alternative reading of Augustine’s moral thought in which loves alone, rather than loves and actions, are at the heart of his distinction between virtue and sin. According to this alternative reading, people who gave all their goods to feed the poor, or were faithful to their spouses, or who sacrificed their lives for others, were sinners if in doing this they lacked

  

Ibid., p. : “L’élément matériel de ces actes a beau cöincider avec celui des actes de vraie vertus, il ne sert en rien à l’acquisition du souverain Bien.” Ibid., pp. –. Terence Irwin, “Splendid Vices? Augustine For and Against Pagan Virtues,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology . (): –; Terence Irwin, “Augustine,” in The Development of Ethics, Volume : From Socrates to the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Michael Moriarty, “Augustine on Pagan Virtue,” in Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). See also Bonnie Kent, “Augustine’s Ethics,” in E. Stump and N. Kretzmann, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –; John Marenbon, “Augustine,” in Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ).

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

love for the Christian God. Love for God was virtue, and all other loves were sins; hence to do good – to do something virtuous – did not refer simply to doing an action which God wanted us to do, but rather to doing one of these actions while having virtue, in the form of love for the true God, present in one’s soul. Thus, there are currently two very different ways of interpreting Augustine’s notions of virtue and sin, leading to two very different interpretations of his social and political thought. One sees Augustine as breaking with pre-Christian Roman and Greek political thinkers who thought that it was possible to educate people to be good citizens. Instead, he is read as maintaining that the path to good citizenship lay through Christian conversion, with political and social virtue the gifts of grace, rather than the results of human effort. This reading understands him as interpreting the Christian teaching that fallen human beings were always sinners in the absence of grace as meaning that people could not be reliable doers of socially and politically just actions outside the Christian faith. Non-Christians would normally displease God, not only at the level of their loves but also at the level of their actions. Christians were uniquely placed to lead their societies in the direction of social and political justice. The alternative reading finds that Augustine’s Christian convictions did not lead him to formulate a new social and political message. It holds that his moral thought did not have a transparent political meaning – what he condemned morally was not necessarily behaviour which was damnable politically or socially. Hence, it finds that Augustine could accept that pagan cities would not necessarily differ from Christian ones in terms of the ‘outward’ lives that their citizens led: in both, people could distribute material resources fairly, and treat others in a sociable, otherregarding way – both could do all the actions that God wanted people to do and hence both could achieve the ideal polis. For this reading, while Augustine held that non-Christians were morally ignorant, all that he held that they were necessarily ignorant of was the moral requirement to love the Christian God – they were not ignorant of what they must do to shape their societies in accordance with the highest standards of social and political justice because doing these actions was not, in itself, to be virtuous. Rather, this reading finds that, for Augustine, such social and political achievements never had any value for eternal life until they were combined with love for the true God, since it was only through being combined with this love that they became truly virtuous. Which of these two readings of Augustine on the nature of virtue and sin is the correct one? In order to decide between these alternatives, we

Introducing the Issues



need new insights into Augustine’s moral thought. This is because both interpretations leave certain things unexplained. The first account assumes that Augustine thought that people would generally have no motive to do the actions that God wanted them to do until they were moved by love for God; it also assumes that, for him, many of these actions would be hidden from us until we loved, and were guided by, God. Yet it is not clear why Augustine would have thought either of these things. Why should the proper ordering of human affairs be hidden from human beings? Why should love for God be the only thing that could reliably move us to respect this order in human affairs? Arguably, in attributing these views to Augustine, this account has made a further assumption: namely, that, for Augustine, the actions that God wanted us to do – the things that constituted the ‘outward’ dimension of our lives – were morally good in themselves. In other words, this account has assumed that he looked on an action such as giving to the poor not simply as an action which God wanted people to do, but as itself an example of something virtuous. This account notes that Augustine defined virtue and sin as different loves, but in assuming that only people who were virtuous through loving God would do the actions that God wanted, this account has arguably assumed that Augustine regarded these actions as themselves examples of virtue. But what evidence is there that Augustine thought that actions themselves were virtuous things? The first account either needs to find evidence that Augustine regarded not just love but actions, too, as in themselves virtuous; or it needs to find some other explanation for its claim that Augustine considered that people who failed to love God would necessarily often be ignorant of the actions that God wanted them to do, and often be reluctant to do these actions when they were known. The second account claims, in contrast, that people who failed to love God, and so loved something else in the place of God, could nonetheless know about which actions God wanted them to do and be moved to do these actions. Yet this account also lacks an explanation of why Augustine would have thought that this was the case. In short, both accounts find that, for Augustine, when we loved certain things we would be consistent doers of certain actions, but neither has produced a satisfactory explanation of why Augustine thought that this was so. Finding an explanation of Augustine’s thinking on this issue requires, first, that we discover what Augustine thought was involved in ‘loving’ something – that is, we need to discover what he meant by ‘love,’ and hence what he thought it meant to love God, to love the self and



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

neighbour, and to love temporal things. Second, we also need to understand how he thought people came to identify correctly the actions that God wanted people to do: if he thought that this was something which people could only know, or only know completely, through a direct communication from God, then this would suggest that he thought that Christians alone were able to do these actions. Alternatively, if he thought that it was possible for everyone to identify these actions correctly through the exercise of reason, then, provided that he understood the love that was sin in such a way as to allow that it was possible to love with this love and yet be moved to do these actions, this finding would support the conclusion that he saw no obstacle to non-Christians consistently doing the actions that were desired by God. That is, this would support the conclusion that he did not think that being virtuous, understood as loving God, was, in effect, equivalent to doing the actions that God wanted people to do, since it would mean that he allowed that these actions could be found consistently in the lives of sinners too. At the same time, neither of the above interpretations offers an explanation of why Augustine chose to define virtue and sin in terms of our loves. Without an explanation of this, our understanding of Augustine’s notions of virtue and sin will remain incomplete, even after we have explained the connection that he saw between loves and actions. Hence this study is concerned to establish this as well – namely, why exactly Augustine thought of virtue and sin as loves.

   My study argues that to answer these questions we need to have a better understanding of the framework within which Augustine developed his account of the nature of virtue and sin. I propose that the key to acquiring this better understanding lies in grasping his relationship to the ancient moral tradition of eudaimonism. Eudaimonism is a promising avenue to explore in looking for a way to understand Augustine’s ethics because Augustine framed some at least of his moral reflections in explicitly eudaimonist terms. This observation is valuable as a counterweight to the idea that as a Christian moralist, Augustine’s moral reflections must have had an entirely different basis to that of pagan moral philosophy. On the contrary, Augustine’s writings bear witness to his engagement with non-Christian moralists, particularly the Stoics, Cicero, and the Platonists, all of whom were working in the eudaimonist tradition.

Introducing the Issues



The eudaimonist account of virtue and sin has many similarities with the second interpretation outlined above – the one found in studies of Augustine’s notion of pagan virtue – but it goes further than this interpretation in offering a definition of love and an explanation of the connection between our loves and our actions. Eudaimonism identifies virtue and vice as different loves, and firmly distinguishes virtue from our actions, while also explaining why people whose love was vice were able to know about and do the same actions as the virtuous. In addition, eudaimonism offers an explanation of why virtue and vice are correctly conceived of as different loves. This indicates that an inquiry into Augustine’s view of eudaimonism is a promising avenue to pursue in seeking to understand which of the above two interpretations of his notions of virtue and sin is the correct one. Hence my study asks how much his account of virtue and sin owed to the eudaimonist tradition and, in particular, whether his thought is best understood as a development within this tradition, or as involving a break from it, or possibly a complete rejection of it. Assessing Augustine’s debt to eudaimonism is a matter not only of understanding Augustine’s own thought but of understanding ancient eudaimonism as well. Hence, the rest of this chapter focuses on giving an outline of the Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism as Augustine understood it.

, ,  “” In the early twentieth century, Anders Nygren recognised Augustine as working within the eudaimonist tradition, but argued that, by basing his notion of love on eudaimonism’s eros, Augustine had made use of a notion of love which was incompatible with Christianity. Instead of eros, Nygren proposed that one of Christianity’s key ethical teachings was the need to model our love on God’s selfless agape-love – he charged that Augustine, under the influence of Platonism, had failed to have a sufficient grasp of the Bible’s teaching about agape. Nygren thought of agape-love as a selfless love: it was the unconditional and self-sacrificial love that God extended to humanity. He held 

Anders Nygren, Eros and Agape, trans. Philip Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, ). See “The Caritas-Synthesis: Augustine’s Position in the History of Religion.” An important early critical response to Nygren’s work is John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (; reprint Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, ).



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

that eros-love, in contrast, was inherently egocentric. For Nygren, Augustine’s idea of virtue as caritas gave insufficient emphasis to the New Testament’s teaching about agape and instead was based principally on the self-centred eros-love of eudaimonism. Consequently, for him, Augustine had overlooked a central pillar of the Christian approach to ethics. In fact, Nygren held that Augustine was responsible for a centurieslong failure among Christian thinkers to distinguish adequately the Christian notion of love from that found in pagan moral philosophy. In recent years, there are two scholars who have engaged closely with the question of Augustine’s debt to eudaimonism: Oliver O’Donovan and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Both scholars conclude, contrary to Nygren, that Augustine broke with the ancient tradition of eudaimonism. What follows first considers O’Donovan’s arguments and then turns to consider Wolterstorff’s. In part in reaction to Nygren, O’Donovan has argued that Augustine departed in a major way from the eudaimonism of the classical tradition. While O’Donovan does not contest the importance of eros-love for Augustine, he finds that Augustine’s version of eros did not place his moral thought in as much tension with the selfless love praised in the New Testament as Nygren supposed. Instead, O’Donovan argues that Augustine’s version of eros for God allowed him to avoid the sort of egocentricity which was present in classical, pagan eudaimonism. Thus, O’Donovan’s view is that Augustine was not a thorough-going eudaimonist in the classical tradition, but rather rejected the eudaimonism that he encountered in pre-Christian sources and offered something new instead: for O’Donovan, Augustine made use of some of the language of eudaimonism and of its idea of eros-love for God, but actually had a substantially different basis for his definition of the moral life. In particular, the difference between Augustine and classical eudaimonists, for O’Donovan, lies in their different ways of understanding what is involved in eros-love for God. For O’Donovan, Augustine held that there was no beginning to our love for God – there was no point at which we chose to start loving God. This was because everyone, in some way,  



 Nygren, Eros and Agape, pp. , , ,  and . Ibid., p. . Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, ); Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ). See also Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Augustine’s Rejection of Eudaimonism,” in James Wetzel, ed., Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love, p. .



Introducing the Issues

naturally loved God; God was the end towards which we were all drawn by our very natures. Hence, no one selected God as their goal; rather, God was the natural goal of human nature and so God was the goal that we all sought, all along, from our very births. To be virtuous, people must explicitly name God as their goal, that is, they must have an “explicit love of God.” O’Donovan holds that this is where a “realist” account of God as our goal elides into a “positivist” account, since to love God explicitly involved identifying God with “the transcendent God of Christianity.” Even though to be virtuous we must explicitly “posit” the Christian God as our goal, nonetheless, according to O’Donovan’s reading, Augustine held that the Christian God was the implicit goal even of the vicious. Thus, for Augustine, “man’s goal is an objective reality which the subject has not chosen for himself and his orientation to which is a necessity of his creation.” We did not choose to make God our goal; rather, God simply was our goal: everyone, in one way or another, explicitly or implicitly, had as their goal to possess God. In other words, for Augustine, a person’s love does not take a new direction or acquire a new object when they become a Christian; rather, becoming a Christian means correctly identifying what it was that we were loving all along. O’Donovan concludes that, as a result, there was an important way in which Augustine’s version of eros avoided egocentrism, and this was overlooked by Nygren. According to O’Donovan’s reading, Augustine held that in aiming for God, no human being was seeking to gratify their own ego; that is, having God as our goal was not the result of our own choice, and so it was not the result of simply consulting our own inclinations. Rather, God was the goal given us in our human nature: in loving God we were moved by a love which was not chosen by us and from which we could not free ourselves because it was part of our very nature. In contrast, O’Donovan finds that the tradition of eudaimonism which Augustine encountered in classical authors held that human beings had no natural goal; instead, for classical eudaimonists, everyone chose for themself what to aim for. O’Donovan considers that this was the core of the egocentrism of the eudaimonism of the Stoics and Platonists. At the heart of their eudaimonism was a notion of love which was fundamentally selfcentred because they considered that people selected their own goals – they said to themselves that X or Y was desirable for its own sake and so sought X or Y as their end: “every object of desire [is] posited by the  

Ibid., “Cosmic Love,” pp. –. Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

subject as desireable for himself.” Hence, according to this understanding of eudaimonism, classical eudaimonists considered that people simply exercised their own unconstrained choices in deciding what to love: for classical eudaimonists, we were simply gratifying our egos in having God as our goal. While, for Augustine, having God as our goal was not a human choice at all, but simply a fact about human nature, for the Platonists, for whom God was also the goal, having God as our goal was something which we willed for ourselves, and so, at base, we simply sought to please ourselves in seeking God. Thus, O’Donovan concludes that the notion of love espoused by classical eudaimonism was “positive” love – positive love refers to positing one’s goal “where one will[s].” A person might posit God as “the end of one’s joy” or might posit some other end; in either case, our love was self-centred in having reference only to our own preferences. In contrast, O’Donovan maintains that Augustine rejected positive love and instead embraced the notion of “cosmic” love. Cosmic love understands that an objective order of love exists, with God as the final end of all human desiring, and hence cosmic love does not have the self’s individual choices at its centre and so avoids the kind of self-centredness at the heart of classical eudaimonism. Thus, for O’Donovan, Augustine did not remain within the classical tradition of eudaimonism, as expressed particularly by the Stoics and the Platonists, but broke with it in a significant way by finding that human beings’ love for God was given to them by their human nature itself: everyone was driven by the love for God, even though most people failed to name God as their explicit goal. At the same time, O’Donovan recognises that the notion of cosmic love brings with it the problem of “immanence.” For O’Donovan, Augustine understood human beings as naturally drawn back to God as the source of their being, the centre towards which all their desires were moving. This involved an idea of God as immanent rather than truly transcendent (“the force which draws these moving galaxies of souls is immanent to them, a kind of dynamic nostalgia rather than a transcendent summons”). In this way, O’Donovan’s view is that, for Augustine, the virtuous have their lives oriented towards the objective of knowing the Christian God; the lives of the vicious are also directed to this end, although they will not   

 Ibid., p. . Ibid., p.  Ibid., p. , quoting from De Doctrina Christiana ..  Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .



Ibid., p. .



Introducing the Issues

be aware of this since what sets the virtuous apart from the vicious is an explicit awareness that it is the Christian God whom they are seeking. O’Donovan also accepts that, on one level, this drive to attain one’s end could be construed as self-centred; but he argues that, on another level, given that this drive is ineradicably part of human nature, it makes little sense to view it in these terms: if our end is something which it is given us in our very natures to seek, then seeking this end cannot be identified as an egoistic thing to do since we have no choice at all in this matter. Rather, for O’Donovan, the egoism inherent in classical eudaimonism lies in the element of choice which remains part of its account of the happy life: in classical eudaimonism, while people have no choice but to seek happiness, yet they must choose to give a particular meaning to this goal; because eudaimonism understands people as seeking a goal which is, in this sense, determined by themselves (“posited” by them rather than given in their nature), O’Donovan finds that a kind of egoism remains at its heart. O’Donovan’s account of Augustine’s ethics notes that Augustine departed from classical eudaimonism in one further way. O’Donovan considers that classical eudaimonism was monist: there was one end for human action – one thing of value which it was right for human beings to seek; this one thing was encompassed by the idea of the “supreme good.” Human happiness consisted in having the supreme good; while the summum bonum might consist of a number of things, it was still a unitary concept, so that human life had one end; there was one valuable thing, namely, whatever we posited as constituting our happiness. For O’Donovan, Augustine shared classical eudaimonism’s monist theory of the good: he defined the supreme good as God and embraced the idea that the supreme good was “the only true end of all human action” – the end of our action was to know God. Yet he also departed from classical eudaimonism in finding that there were certain things, such as the neighbour’s welfare, which it was right for human beings to pursue even though these were not included in the content of the supreme good. O’Donovan’s view is that classical eudaimonism also viewed the neighbour’s welfare as something which we ought to seek, but it reached this conclusion by including the neighbour’s welfare within its concept of the supreme good, so that the welfare of one’s neighbours became a good. Classical eudaimonism was able to do this, however, only because it



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., pp. –.



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., pp. –.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

located happiness in this life – it had a “historical” conception of the supreme good: the happy life, as defined by eudaimonists like Cicero, included the society of other people in the here and now (“Reasons could be adduced to show that a historical supreme good would have to include a social life. Classical moralists argued that life without friends was insupportable”). But, for Augustine, the happy life was found at the end of history, in eternal life with God: the welfare of other people, at least in this earthly life, was not part of Augustine’s picture of happiness. Consequently, O’Donovan finds that Augustine was not able to view the neighbour’s earthly welfare as included within the supreme good. O’Donovan’s view that eudaimonism had a monist account of the good, and that this account was shared by Augustine, in turn, leads him to conclude that Augustine was unable to view the neighbour’s earthly welfare as a good. O’Donovan finds, however, that this did not prevent Augustine from viewing the welfare of our neighbours as something which we ought to seek. This is because he finds that Augustine’s ethical reflection was largely “cast in a deontological form”: for Augustine, the things that we ought to do during our earthly lives were mostly not to be discovered through a theory of the good; instead, O’Donovan argues, Augustine’s view was that to know what we ought to do, we generally needed to heed “the voice of authority” (“the merciful selfcommunication of God”), which was found in the Bible. The biblical command of love-for-neighbour indicated that one’s neighbour’s welfare was something which we must strive to promote throughout our earthly lives; through viewing this biblical command as the source for their knowledge of what they must do, Christians learned that they must seek the well-being of their neighbours. Other teachings in the Bible revealed what this welfare consisted in, so that Christians were able to learn in more detail what actions they ought to do. Hence, through viewing the teachings of the Bible as authoritatively instructing us as to the nature of right and wrong, Christians learned that human beings must seek the earthly well-being of their neighbours even though this strictly formed no part of the Christian concept of the good (which Augustine understood as located in a heavenly afterlife). In this way, O’Donovan considers that Augustine broke with classical eudaimonism in two ways. First, Augustine broke with it by identifying  

Ibid., p. . See also p. , Stoic eudaimonism was “an apology for social responsibility.”  Ibid., pp.  and –. Ibid., p. .

Introducing the Issues



the goal given in human nature, not as something subjective, which human beings must posit for themselves, but as something objective – every human being, in fact the whole universe, was drawn to the Christian God as the “source and goal of being”; this objectivity in Augustine’s account of the goal of human life means that the charge of selfcentredness cannot be brought against him. Second, for O’Donovan, Augustine broke with classical eudaimonism because he did not find everything which we ought to pursue summed up by the concept of the supreme good; instead, for Augustine, we discovered what our duties were towards other people by turning to the authoritative teachings of the Bible. Turning now to Wolterstorff’s account, Wolterstorff agrees with O’Donovan that Augustine broke in important ways with the classical tradition of eudaimonism; however, his understanding of the nature of this break differs from that of O’Donovan. For O’Donovan, Augustine’s account of the good accepted classical eudaimonism’s monism: everything of value was contained in the idea of the supreme good; for Christians, the supreme good – in the enjoyment of which we lived happily – was God. Hence, when Christians cared for their neighbours’ welfare, they did not do so because they saw this welfare as part of the supreme good, but because they heeded the biblical command of neighbour-love and discovered in the Bible the many different things involved in caring for other people. For Wolterstorff, however, Augustine was led by the Bible’s command that we “love our neighbour as ourselves” to reject classical eudaimonism’s monism. Wolterstorff argues that Augustine found in this biblical command both a command to regard the neighbour’s welfare as a good, and a condemnation of those who failed to regard their neighbours’ welfare as a good in its own right, separate to the supreme good. That is, Wolterstorff proposes that, for Augustine, this command condemned classical eudaimonism because it demanded that we set aside considerations of our own eudaimonia as our reason for regarding our neighbour’s welfare as a good. The monism of classical eudaimonism held that the well-being of our neighbour could possess value only through regarding their welfare as part of the happy life: this was to include the neighbour’s welfare within our conception of the supreme good. The supreme good was living happily; if we chose a picture of the happy life  

Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .



Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, p. .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

which included other people’s welfare, then we would regard their welfare as a good – but this was to regard their welfare not as a good in its own right but rather as receiving its worth only in relation to what we chose to think of as the happy life. In contrast, Wolterstorff argues that Augustine read the Bible as insisting that human beings have worth in their own right: their welfare was a good, but it was not subsumed into the notion of the supreme good; it had inherent worth separately to the notion of the supreme good. Wolterstorff notes that if human beings can judge things to be good, even though they do not regard them as part of the supreme good, then this exposes the monism of classical eudaimonism to a new charge of egoism. For Wolterstorff, the biblical command to love one’s neighbour as oneself reveals that human beings can act for an end other than their own happiness; in doing so, this command identifies acting for the sake of one’s own happiness as a choice – we can choose to set aside considerations of our own happiness in promoting our neighbours’ welfare, or we can choose to make the thought of our own happiness our reason for promoting our neighbours’ welfare. The result will be the same in terms of our actions; moreover, in both cases, we will have made our neighbour’s welfare our end. Nonetheless, despite these similarities, there will be a self-centredness present in the choice to view my neighbour’s welfare as part of my supreme good which is not present in viewing my neighbour’s welfare as a good in its own right: in the former case, I will have chosen to seek other people’s well-being from a consideration of my own happiness, because I have chosen to believe that their happiness or wellbeing matters for my own; in the latter case, I will have chosen to seek their welfare without any thought for my own happiness. Consequently, Wolterstorff argues that the biblical command to “love one’s neighbour as oneself” establishes that the monism of classical eudaimonism makes classical eudaimonism self-centred: the biblical command demands that self-love be placed on the same plane as neighbourlove, and this means that we must pursue the neighbour’s welfare as a good, while refraining from looking upon it as part of our supreme good. This understanding of the self-centredness of classical eudaimonism, although it differs from that formulated by O’Donovan, nonetheless still depends on O’Donovan’s view that classical eudaimonism offered a positivist account of happiness. For Wolterstorff, it is through choosing



Ibid., p. .



Ibid., pp.  and .

Introducing the Issues



to view other people as having worth only in relation to one’s own happiness that a classical eudaimonist is self-centred. Wolterstorff’s view is that it is possible for us to view other people as having worth in their own right – since the Bible commands us to do precisely this; hence the choice to relate their happiness to my own – to see their welfare as mattering only because it matters to my happiness – is self-centred. It is not selfish, in the traditional sense of selfishness, but it is nonetheless focused upon myself. Hence, Wolterstorff’s account lays stress, like O’Donovan’s, on the element of choice, or selection of ends, in classical eudaimonists’ formulation of the nature of eudaimonia. Thus, for Wolterstorff, Augustine’s view was that, with the command of neighbour-love and the example of the Good Samaritan, the Bible instructed Christians to value, as a good in its own right, the well-being of every human being: we were to value our neighbour’s welfare, not through reckoning it as something necessary for our own happiness, but through seeing it as having inherent worth. In this way, Wolterstorff gives Augustine’s ethics a somewhat different basis to that given it by O’Donovan. For O’Donovan, Augustine held that when Christians sought to promote others’ welfare, they did so because they understood God as commanding them to do these things. For Wolterstorff, in contrast, Augustine thought that when Christians sought to promote others’ welfare, they did so, first and foremost, because they valued this welfare: God certainly told Christians to promote this welfare but God also told them that this welfare was a good and hence something which they ought to value. That is, Christians promoted others’ welfare because they believed that God wanted them to look on others’ welfare as an end in itself – as something worth seeking in its own right. Christians were to tell themselves, “God pronounced his creation good. We must do so as well.” As part of God’s good creation, even mutable things were “genuine life-goods.” Wolterstorff’s view is that this account of Augustine’s ethics better accommodates Augustine’s acceptance of grief. If O’Donovan is correct in finding that, for Augustine, Christians sought to promote others’ welfare simply because they understood God as commanding them to do so, then it would follow that, for Augustine, Christians had no reason to grieve when they failed to achieve what they sought to achieve. Augustine’s view would be that, while Christians would always seek to  

  Ibid., pp.  and . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., pp.  and . Ibid., “Augustine’s Break with Eudaimonism,” pp. ff.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

promote the welfare of their neighbours, in accordance with the divine commandments, if they proved unable to protect others from harm, they would not be led to sorrow over their suffering; to grieve over something always implies that we invested that thing with a level of worth – we experience sorrow when we think that something good has been lost. Wolterstorff’s point here is that investing anything with any level of worth leads us to experience grief at its loss; the possibility that grief might be an emotion which we experience only upon the loss of things which we see as necessary for happiness is not considered by Wolterstorff. Thus, Wolterstorff’s view is that Augustine considered that human beings would grieve over the loss even of mutable things: his view is that, for Augustine, sorrowing over the loss of mutable things was inescapable for human beings and that this was as it should be. Since to grieve over something indicates that we value it, it follows from this that Augustine must have believed that God wanted Christians to look on even mutable things as goods. As noted already, Wolterstorff finds that Augustine considered that the command to “love others as we love ourselves” meant that Christians were not to look on these things as part of the supreme good – they were not to suppose that these things were needed for happiness; rather, this command meant that Christians were to regard these things as having worth in their own right – for Augustine, our view ought to be that, while transient things like our neighbours’ temporal health played no part in our happiness, yet these were ends which were genuinely worth seeking, so that their loss was genuinely a source of grief for us. As noted already, Wolterstorff’s view is that classical eudaimonism was able to look on mutable things like human beings’ health as goods only by viewing them as part of the supreme good; for Wolterstorff, classical eudaimonism had a monist account of the good – it could only give value to things by finding a place for them in an account of happiness. At the same time, Wolterstorff acknowledges that eudaimonism is not prima facie committed to this monist account of the good; instead, his point is that, historically, this was the theory of the good which was adopted by ancient eudaimonists. His view is that, given that the eudaimonist tradition that Augustine encountered in his readings of the Stoics and Platonists had this monist account of the good, Augustine’s reasons for rejecting it must have come from outside this tradition, through his encounter with the teachings of Christianity.



Ibid., pp. –.



Ibid., p. .

Introducing the Issues



In making this argument, Wolterstorff recognises that Stoicism might not seem, on face value, to offer a monist account of the good; that is, he recognises that the Stoics seemingly anticipated Augustine’s rejection of monism. This is because the Stoics identified certain mutable things, like the health of our bodies, as “preferred indifferents.” With the idea that these things were “indifferent,” the Stoics expressed the notion that these things had no importance for happiness – they were not the supreme good. Yet with the idea that these things were “preferred,” the Stoics indicated that these things were nonetheless worth seeking – they had value (they were goods), even though they contributed nothing to our happiness. Hence, Stoicism seems to offer a challenge to Wolterstorff’s thesis that Augustine broke with the classical eudaimonist tradition through rejecting a monist account of the good. This is because it would seem that the Stoics themselves were not monist; in writing of the worth of mutable things, Augustine would therefore appear to be simply making use of a Stoic idea. Wolterstorff argues, however, that this was not so: Augustine did not make use of the Stoic account in this respect, because, Wolterstorff argues, the Stoics had no coherent account of the value of the things that they called preferred indifferents. Wolterstorff’s criticism of the Stoics in this regard turns on his particular understanding of their conception of the happy life. He argues that the Stoics viewed the happy life as the life of mental tranquillity – that is, the life free from emotions. This view of the happy life allowed the Stoics to classify mutable things like bodily health as “indifferent” to human happiness: their view was that the happy life consisted in a certain state of mind, not a certain state of body, so that Stoic sages considered that they, and other people, were able to be happy regardless of the condition of their bodies. Yet, Wolterstorff points out, the view of the happy life as the mentally tranquil life also meant that it was impossible for the Stoics to define things like bodily health (my own or that of my neighbour) as “preferred,” that is, as things which had value in their own right. As we have seen, Wolterstorff argues that to view anything as a good – to see value in anything – meant making oneself vulnerable to the emotion of grief at its loss. Consequently, Wolterstorff finds, the Stoics were debarred by their own definition of the happy life as the tranquil life from regarding any mutable thing as preferred: they could not look upon any of these things as good  

 Ibid., pp. ff. Ibid., pp. ff. Ibid., pp.  and ff.



Ibid., p. .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

because to do so would be to make a life of mental tranquillity (a life free from grief ) an impossibility. Hence, he concludes, Augustine must have found grounds to define mutable things as goods outside Stoicism, with the result that, in looking on these things as goods, Augustine must have broken with the classical tradition in eudaimonism. O’Donovan and Wolterstorff are the main scholars in recent years to address the issue of Augustine’s relationship to eudaimonism. For this reason, when seeking to understand the influence of eudaimonism upon Augustine’s ethics, their interpretations must necessarily be the starting point. As the above will have made clear, O’Donovan’s and Wolterstorff’s views rest upon particular readings of classical eudaimonism as well as upon particular readings of Augustine. Hence, before beginning my analysis of Augustine’s thought, it will be helpful first to explore whether or not their readings of classical eudaimonism are accurate ones. Whereas O’Donovan claims that it was Augustine’s unique insight that “man’s goal is an objective reality which the subject has not chosen for himself and his orientation to which is a necessity of his creation,” I argue on the contrary that this was an insight shared by all the thinkers whom Augustine encountered in the eudaimonist tradition. “Happiness” (eudaimonia) in eudaimonism was defined objectively as whatever final goal was given human beings in their nature. Eudaimonism was concerned with identifying, through the study of human nature, exactly what this fundamental goal was. O’Donovan overlooks this and so he mistakenly sees Augustine as departing from classical eudaimonism by giving an “objective” account of human being’s goal; on the contrary, Augustine encountered this objective account in his classical sources themselves. Thus, in my reading, classical eudaimonism and Augustine’s own thought are actually in agreement with each other on the issue that O’Donovan sees as setting them apart. Hence, I find that, in this regard, Augustine’s ethics remained firmly within the tradition of classical eudaimonism, and that classical eudaimonism itself did not fall into the trap of egocentricity first identified by Nygren and further described by O’Donovan. As will be seen, I also find that neither classical eudaimonism nor Augustine was monist in its account of the good. They both shared the insight that things had inherent worth independently of the supreme good. Consequently, I find that there was nothing necessarily “deontological” about Augustine’s account of ethics: in common with classical



Ibid., p. .

Introducing the Issues



eudaimonists, he was able to argue that reason itself placed upon us a moral obligation to pursue the neighbour’s welfare. I also find that Augustine was in agreement with classical eudaimonism on the issues that Wolterstorff sees as setting them apart. In particular, I find that Wolterstorff incorrectly characterises the Stoic understanding of the happy life as the life of mental tranquillity. On the contrary, for the Stoics, and for Augustine as well, the happy life – eudaimonia – was the life lived in complete agreement with human nature. This definition of the happy life allowed both the Stoics and Augustine to give a place to the emotions in eudaimonia: when we lived fully in accordance with our nature, we would experience emotions, but only those emotions which were themselves in complete accordance with our human nature. Hence, the only emotions which were bad in themselves – that is, which had no place in the happy life – were the emotions that were inappropriate to us as human beings; every other affective response had a place in the happy life. It is important to be aware that studies of Stoicism are beset by the problem of finding an adequate English translation for the Stoic idea of pathē, normally translated as passions. More specifically, the pathē were bad passions, since the Stoics also recognised good passions, the eupatheiai. The passions, whether good or bad, were strong emotions, but the bad passions were defined as disturbances or perturbations – they were things which disturbed our peace of mind. In other words, the pathē were passions which were not in accordance with our human nature; mental peace or tranquillity referred to having a mind in its natural state, which meant a mind free from those passions which were defined as unnatural. Hence, when we lived the happy life – defined as the life that fully accorded with human nature – the only emotions from which we would necessarily be free were the pathē. Thus, in eudaimonism, the passions were the strong emotions that arose from our thoughts about the things that we needed for happiness; for the Stoics, these passions were never appropriately felt in relation to anything mutable – that is, in relation to any of the preferred indifferents – since these things were, by definition, unnecessary for happiness. It has  



See note  below. Margaret R. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), pp. –. Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, p.  (pathē were disobedient to reason). Marcia Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, Volume : Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature (Leiden: Brill, ), p. , the bad passions are “anti-natural.”

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

been noted that the Stoics identified four passions (joy, desire, fear, and grief), while insisting that only joy, desire, and fear could be found as both pathē and eupatheiai; there was no good passion of grief, but only a bad one. This was because the Stoics understood grief as the strong emotion that we felt when we believed that we had lost something essential to our happiness. The Stoic view was that, when our thoughts about happiness were completely correct, we would never experience grief precisely because to have completely correct thoughts about happiness was to be happy: for the Stoics, we needed only to have completely correct thoughts about the life in complete accordance with human nature to live that life. Hence, the virtuous – the sage – would never experience the passion of grief since to be a sage was to have everything needed for happiness; yet the vicious, or foolish, would experience grief, and they would also experience joy, desire, and fear as bad passions. Each of these bad passions was felt through viewing some mutable thing as needed for happiness: the bad kind of fear was the fear that we felt when we believed that we might inadvertently lose, or fail to attain, some temporal thing which we viewed as necessary for happiness, while to rejoice in the possession of some mutable thing as though it were happy-making or to desire it as though it would make us happy were the bad kinds of joy and desire – the ones that were out of accordance with the natural state of our minds. Hence, for the Stoics, it was through misunderstanding the nature of human happiness – that is, through misunderstanding what was involved in living fully in accordance with human nature – that we experienced these bad passions. In particular, it was through regarding something external to us in the sensible world – some mutable thing – as needed for human happiness that we experienced grief and experienced fear, joy, and desire as pathē. Fear, joy, and desire were part of both the happy and unhappy life; hence, the distinctive thing about the unhappy life, for the Stoics, was the experience of grief. The Stoics were intent on giving an account of the passions that were necessarily present or absent from the life in full accordance with human nature. They were not concerned to describe what other emotions might be present in that life, since their view was that it was the intrusion of the bad passions, the pathē, which brought our affective lives out of accordance with human nature. Thus, for them, our emotions in relation to the



Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, p. .

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preferred indifferents would always be correct – they would always accord with our nature – provided that we continued to view them as indifferent to our happiness; so long as we did this, we would look upon them as preferred – that is, as goods in themselves, but as unnecessary for happiness; consequently, our emotions for them would never become passions, but this was entirely compatible with finding that we would have feelings for them (‘indifferent’ did not mean that we felt nothing for them). The exact nature of these feelings was arguably uninteresting to the Stoics, since their point was that, while our view of the happy life was correct, these feelings would always be in accordance with the natural state of our minds. In this way, the Stoics were able to give a coherent defence of their notion of ‘preferred indifferents’ – they were able to defend the idea that even mutable things possessed a level of inherent worth, while also arguing that this worth was distinct from the worth possessed by the supreme good (the thing that brought our lives fully into accordance with human nature). Their view that we would never experience grief in relation to these things, while ever we continued to look upon them as indifferent to our happiness, did not involve them in a contradiction, since they defined grief as the strong emotion that we felt when we lost, not any good, but the thing that we looked upon as our supreme good – the thing that we thought of as making us happy. Hence, while I agree with Wolterstorff that Augustine did look upon mutable things as goods, I do not agree that this involved a break with Stoicism: the Stoic theory of the good was not monist, since they were able to give a coherent account of the worth of mutable things, and Augustine’s theory of the good was not monist either. Wolterstorff argues, however, that Augustine’s view was that we would experience grief even in relation to those things which we regarded as preferred indifferents, meaning, in relation to those things which we regarded as good but unnecessary for happiness. If this is correct, then arguably this would have involved Augustine re-defining grief as something which was not always a passion, since we have seen that the passions were, by definition, the emotions that were experienced only in relation to those things which we regarded as needed for living happily; by definition, we did not experience passion in relation to those things which we regarded as goods, but as unnecessary for happiness.



Ibid., p. .

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

A weakness in Wolterstorff’s account is that it is not clear what reason Augustine could have had to give this new meaning to grief. In what follows I find that Augustine did not claim that grief could be something which was not a passion. This is because I find that Wolterstorff is incorrect in his view that, for Augustine, human beings inescapably experienced grief through caring about and losing mutable things. On the contrary, in those passages in which Augustine discussed the grief that everyone, including the virtuous, necessarily felt in the course of this earthly life, I find that he claimed that this grief sprang not from the fact that we had valued and lost some mutable thing, but rather from the fact that we had valued some immutable thing which, in the conditions of temporal existence, we could never secure to ourselves; we grieved when this thing definitively escaped our possession because we rightly regarded it as needed for happiness. Thus, Augustine was able to reach the conclusion that everyone would experience grief because his picture of eudaimonia, or the fully natural life, did not entirely agree with that of the Stoics, or any other classical eudaimonist. I find, however, that Augustine’s picture of eudaimonia remained consistent with classical eudaimonist principles, even while it was innovative, with the result that I do not view him as breaking with the ancient tradition in eudaimonism. This chapter concludes by giving an account of ancient eudaimonism in order to provide a basis for analysing Augustine’s relationship to this tradition in the chapters that follow.

  Eudaimonism was the dominant tradition in ancient moral philosophy and Augustine would have encountered it in all his reading. Thus, his understanding of it could have come from many sources: through Cicero’s Hortensius he had access to Aristotelian understandings of the happy life (the now lost Protrepticus); he had access to Stoic thought through Marcus Varro’s On Philosophy, which is now lost, and probably through





Julia Annas, “Ancient Eudaimonism and Modern Morality,” in Christopher Bobonich, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Michael W. Tkacz, “St. Augustine’s Appropriation and Transformation of Aristotelian eudaimonia,” in Jon Miller, ed., The Reception of Aristotle’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .

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other Stoic doxographies which are also lost; and his understanding of the eudaimonism of the Platonists came through his own reading, in Latin translation, of the Neoplatonist works of Plotinus and Porphyry. Augustine himself gave an account of his intellectual influences in Confessions, and this also establishes that he was familiar with the Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism. He did not describe himself as ever tempted to become a Stoic; rather, it was Cicero who was important to him as a very young man, and through Cicero, he explained that he was led to accept the Manichean approach to morals for a long period in his twenties. Later, it was the Neoplatonists whose approach impressed him most among all non-Christian thinkers. Nonetheless, despite the fact that he was more directly engaged with later thinkers in the eudaimonist tradition, he was knowledgeable about the Stoics and about the way that these later thinkers had modified or disagreed with the Stoic approach. In this way, Augustine would have been aware of a number of different approaches among eudaimonists, but this does not mean that classical eudaimonism would have appeared to him as something incoherent or contested. Rather, I think that he would have understood the work of later thinkers, in particular, Cicero and the Neoplatonists, as building upon and improving the work of the Stoics. He would have been aware of them as, in a sense, the end products of a tradition which stretched back to the Stoics and beyond, but which had also been modified through the centuries and which contained new insights. The idea of this eudaimonist tradition in moral thought involves the idea that all eudaimonist approaches shared certain principles in common and that it was an evolving understanding of the proper application of these principles that drove changes within the tradition. Thus, in what follows, I attempt to give an account of what these underlying eudaimonist principles or insights were. Eudaimonism used the terms “virtue” and “vice” in a distinctive way. It understood virtue and vice or sin as the human contributions – the contributions of our wills – to achieving the happy life or to keeping us in 





Sarah Catherine Byers, Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp.  and . He might have been typical of his generation in this regard. Tad Brennan, “The Stoic Theory of Virtue,” in Lorraine Besser-Jones and Michael Slote, eds., The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics (London: Routledge, ). Brennan notes: “by the fourth century, very few still identified as Stoics. But Stoic ethical treatises continued to be read by non-Stoics” (p. ).  Conf. .. Ibid., ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

unhappiness. More specifically, in the Stoic-Platonic tradition, virtue was that voluntary thing which guaranteed happiness to human beings, while vice was the voluntary thing that kept us miserable. Hence eudaimonism held that to establish what virtue and vice were, we needed to inquire into the conditions of human happiness: we needed to discover what distinguished the wills of people who were imprisoned in a miserable existence from the wills of people who were happy (or who were certain to become happy). In this way, eudaimonism held that we would arrive at the correct understanding of virtue when we had correctly understood the nature of human happiness: in eudaimonism, virtue and happiness were so intimately connected that all we needed to know in order to know the nature of virtue was what it meant to be happy. But what does it mean to be happy? The difficulty of reaching agreement about this has been seen as a key problem with eudaimonism. O’Donovan suggests that ancient eudaimonists’ claims about human happiness were really just expressions of their own preferences – some chose to understand human happiness as one thing, and others as another thing; there was no possibility of giving a realist or objective account of human happiness, and so ancient thinkers gave a positivist account – they posited the happy life wherever they willed. On the contrary, ancient eudaimonists offered a realist account of happiness and virtue. In eudaimonism, happiness, eudaimonia, was a term with a specific meaning. Eudaimonists claimed that everyone identified happiness as the goal, but they held that in saying this people were saying something very specific: they found that everyone agreed in regarding happiness as their ultimate goal, but they took this as evidence that there was an ultimate goal which was common to us all, meaning a fundamental goal which was given us in our human nature, and so this was what we were all referring to when we talked about happiness. In other words, ancient eudaimonists found that our talk about happiness was evidence that human life was oriented to a common end: there was a single end which moved us all – the ultimate goal of human life. Consequently, eudaimonists focused their inquiry on identifying what this goal was. That is, in starting with the claim “everyone desires to be happy” they understood themselves as starting with the claim “everyone has a common goal”: their starting point was the idea that human life was oriented towards a common objective, which we were all seeking all the 

Julia Annas, “Virtue and Happiness,” Social Philosophy and Policy . (): –, at –.

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time and which, in one way or another, explained everything which we did or desired. Their assumption was that, since this goal was given in human nature, it could be identified objectively through the study of human nature. To identify what this universal goal was, eudaimonists found that they needed a clear picture of human nature. Since they noted that human beings and animals had certain things in common, they began by looking at the lives of animals and noting that they were shaped from birth by particular concerns and interests. They then sought to identify the underlying desire that unified and explained these various concerns and interests. For some eudaimonists, animal behaviour was merely inspired by the desire for pleasure or for self-preservation. The Stoics, however, considered that “pleasure” and “self-preservation” were both inadequate explanations of animal behaviour: they held that the desire for pleasure or self-preservation simply did not account for the wide variety of behaviour manifested by animals. Instead, the Stoics concluded that everything which animals did could be explained by the desire to live in accordance with that animal’s unique nature: in everything which they did, animals showed their awareness of the particular kind of animal that they were; they showed that they had grasped “the ends for which [they had] been framed by nature.” In short, for the Stoics, the underlying drive which explained all the particular concerns and interests of an animal was the drive to live as it was fitted to live. Thus, the Stoics held that every animal possessed “an orientation towards appropriate function . . . [a] disposition to carry out the kinds of activities implicit in its physical constitution.” By showing that animals’ goal was to live in a manner appropriate to their natures, and then by studying the behaviour of human beings from a young age, the Stoics aimed to show that this was the basic drive of human beings too, namely, not simply for pleasure or even for selfpreservation, but to live as it was appropriate to human beings to live. 

  

Brad Inwood, “Reason, Rationalization and Happiness in Seneca,” in Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. : “the finis or telos of human beings is called happiness.” For example, Seneca (Letter .–) states that every animal, including human beings, was seeking “the goal of its own nature.” Discussed by Inwood, p. . Jacob Klein, “The Stoic Argument from Oikeiösis,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy  (): –, at –.   Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Inwood, “Reason, Rationalization and Happiness”: “The happy life was a life in accordance with nature” (p. ). See also Brad Inwood, “Stoicism,” in David Furley, ed., The Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume : From Aristotle to Augustine (London:

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

In short, for the Stoics, human beings naturally desired not just to live but to live fully in accordance with their nature: they shared with animals the inborn goal of leading a life in which they performed the functions inherent in their natures and lived in every way as befitted their human constitution. Thus, the Stoics held that the goal to which everyone was drawn at all times was the goal of living fully in accordance with human nature: our common, fundamental goal (“happiness”) was the life that accorded completely with our nature as human beings. They did not require people to posit this as the meaning of happiness – they did not think that we had a choice about whether or not to desire as our goal the life according to nature. Rather, the Stoics held that this was human beings’ fundamental drive from birth and throughout their lives – they held that the desire to live the fully human life was our most basic goal, inborn in us and ineradicable from us, shaping and explaining every aspect of our lives. This was the state for which all human beings were yearning all the time – a yearning which they did not learn, but which was given in their human nature itself. Thus, the Stoic tradition of eudaimonism offered a realist, not a positivist, account of happiness and virtue. The question investigated by eudaimonists in asking, “What does it mean to be happy?” was “What fundamental goal drives all human beings?,” to which the Stoics answered, “The desire to live fully in accordance with human nature.” Other thinkers who followed in the Stoic tradition of eudaimonism, including Cicero and the Neoplatonists, did not necessarily agree with the Stoics about what the life fully in accordance with human nature consisted in, and hence they reached different views about the nature of virtue. Nonetheless, despite disagreeing among themselves about the identity of this life, they agreed about how to establish its identity: the nature of this life was established by studying human nature itself – its limitations and unique capacities, as well as its natural desires. Having identified what the fully human life looked like, these thinkers agreed that this would inform us of what we must do to ensure that we lived this life, and hence reveal the nature of virtue.

Routledge, ): “in their ethics the Stoics claimed that the key to human fulfilment lay in living a life according to nature” (p. ). See also p.  where Inwood quotes from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers ., “Zeno, first, in his book On the Nature of Man, said that the goal was to live in agreement with nature, which is to live according to virtue.” Brad Inwood, Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. , has a summary of Stoic conceptions of the goal of life.

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This was the tradition of eudaimonism to which Augustine was heir through the writings of the Stoics, Cicero, and the Neoplatonists; for brevity’s sake, I will call this the Stoic-Platonic tradition of eudaimonism. It gave an objective account of the goal driving human beings; hence, it did not fall into the trap of positivism and egoism outlined by O’Donovan and Wolterstorff. Human beings understood that they were seeking happiness at all times – that is, they understood that their nature had a fundamental goal. Hence, the question was, what was this fundamental goal which, in one way or another, explained all human desires and shaped the whole of human life? The Stoic-Platonic tradition maintained that it had established that this goal was to live the fully human life, and hence this tradition set out to identify everything involved in living this life. The Stoics and Platonists agreed that identifying everything involved in living the fully human life would in turn reveal the nature of virtue, since they understood virtue as ensuring that our lives would fully conform to our natures. Thus, the thinkers in this tradition shared certain common conclusions about the identity of virtue because they agreed about certain features of the fully natural life. They agreed that there were, evidently, many ways in which human beings already lived a human life: we necessarily lived within the limitations of our natures; certain capacities were natural to us and these underwent a natural development in the course of our lives; moreover, we all experienced natural desires. In all these things, we were clearly all already living as human beings. Nonetheless, these thinkers also agreed that there were a number of ways in which we did not necessarily live in accordance with our natures. The first of these concerned the rational life. The Stoic-Platonic approach held that a comparison between humans and other animals established that what distinguished human beings from all other animals was the possession of reason. Hence, the fully human life must necessarily be the fully rational life. Living in complete accordance with our human nature required that we lived in complete accordance with the dictates of reason. Consequently, it was necessary to establish what these dictates were and to scrutinise our lives to identify the ways in which we failed to conform to the teachings of reason.  

Here, I follow Byers, in Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation, who writes of a “Stoic-Platonic synthesis.” Inwood, “Stoicism”: “It follows for the Stoics that one of the principal jobs of ethics, as a branch of philosophy, is the working out of what reason dictates” (p. ).

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

The Stoic doctrine of oikeiösis played a central role in explaining how the life that human beings learned to live when they heeded the dictates of reason differed from, but was related to, the life that they began leading from birth. It explained, for example, how the natural concern that we had for our own health and well-being, and for the health and well-being of those near to us, became the rational concern for the health and wellbeing of the whole of humanity. The Stoics began by noting that from their youngest years, prior to coming under the influence of reason, human beings sought and upheld the welfare of those in their immediate circle – without any teaching, they sought to promote the well-being of the small society of their family and friends. The observation that these things were naturally pursued by us allowed the Stoics to conclude that mutable things like the health of the body (one’s own or others’) had intrinsic value: for the Stoics, the things that we naturally sought were necessarily good things – things of value – since a good, quite simply, was whatever a human being naturally sought for its own sake (and not as a means to something else). Hence, mutable things like good physical health had value since it was evident that everyone sought these things as an end in themselves: everyone would prefer to have these things (for themselves and those close to them), rather than to lack them. Thus, the Stoics noted that human beings naturally sought these things for themselves and their friends, and naturally sought them as ends and not means, with the result that these things were goods. They also held that we learned from reason to seek these things for the whole of humanity. When we reached adulthood, the point of rational maturity, we learned from our reason that our family and friends were in essence no different to the rest of humanity. We saw that to value the health of our family and friends in its own right, and yet not to value other people’s health and well-being in the same way, when everyone else shared the same needs and vulnerabilities as those closest to us, was not in accordance with reason. In other words, reason confirmed that not only our own health and welfare but the health and welfare of every human being was a good. 



Klein, “The Stoic Argument”; Tad Brennan, “Oikeiösis and Others,” in The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties and Fate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Sara Magrin, “Nature and Utopia in Epictetus’ Theory of Oikeiösis,” Phronesis  (): –. See Jacob Klein, “Making Sense of Stoic Indifferents,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy  (): –; I. G. Kidd, “The Relation of Stoic Intermediates to the Summum Bonum, with Reference to Change in the Stoa,” Classical Quarterly  (): –.

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This insight that the welfare of everyone was something of inherent value, in turn, motivated us to seek to provide for and protect every human being, inasmuch as this lay within our power. We were not motivated to pursue their welfare because we viewed their welfare as part of the supreme good, or as the means to our happiness; rather, we were motivated to pursue their welfare because we viewed it as a good – as something which it was fitting for us, as human beings, to pursue and to pursue for its own sake. The supreme good referred to that thing in having which we would be happy; valuing the welfare of every human being was something which we would do in the happy life (since it accorded with our nature), but we will see that the Stoics did not view actually achieving my own or others’ welfare as something which was necessary for happiness. Hence, they viewed human welfare as a good, but not part of the supreme good. In short, for the Stoics, the fully natural life was the fully rational life, and valuing the health and well-being, not just of those near to us but even of those who were only distantly connected to us, was in accordance with reason, with the result that pursuing their welfare for its own sake was likewise in accordance with reason. The above might suggest that in the Stoic-Platonic tradition of eudaimonism, being virtuous was one and the same thing as valuing the welfare of everyone and so treating every other human being in this otheroriented, sociable way. In fact, this tradition was clear that this was not enough for virtue: doing this brought people closer to leading the fully natural life, but it was insufficient to guarantee that their lives were fully in accordance with human nature. Hence, doing this was not what it meant to be virtuous; people could do this and yet remain vicious. For the Stoics and Platonists, learning from reason to value as a good in its own right the welfare of all human beings was only the first step 

Matthew Sharpe, “Stoic Virtue Ethics,” in Stan van Hooft, ed., The Handbook of Virtue Ethics (London: Routledge, ), p. : “Yet the aim of Stoic virtue ethics, like Aristotle’s before it, is not simply that one should externally do what is right”; “right action is not the highest end for the Stoics” (p. ); “the only truly good thing was the knowledge that all external things were indifferent to us . . . This knowledge was virtue” (p. ). Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. : “Simply making the right selection [doing the right action] does not constitute virtue, although it is essential for it. The virtuous man thinks of his action as being right and in accordance with Nature’s will. He thinks of himself as doing the action because man was made for acting thus.” Colish, The Stoic Tradition: “virtue and vice, for the Stoa, are not a collection of deeds . . . On the basis of this view, the Stoics achieve a radical internalizing of ethics. Although virtue ought to express itself in outward acts, ethics deals primarily with inner motivations” (p. ).

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

towards achieving the life that was fully in accordance with our natures. We also needed to pursue others’ welfare in a way which itself accorded with human nature. We naturally sought the well-being of ourselves, and of those close to us, and we learnt from reason to seek this for all human beings; but, to accord with our nature, our pursuit of these things needed to be governed by reason. Reason told us that, as human beings, certain things lay within our powers and certain things did not. In particular, reason told us that human beings exercised only an imperfect control over mutable, temporal things, including human health. As something beyond the complete control of our human nature, mutable things like our physical welfare were necessarily things which human beings could fail to acquire, or lose once they had acquired them; hence, the possession of these things was not something demanded by the life in full accordance with human nature – as things which escaped our full control, we could live in complete accordance with our nature as human beings even while lacking these things. As noted already, this meant that, while the Stoics and Platonists viewed certain mutable, or temporal things, like human health, as goods, they did not view them as the supreme good. Instead, they understood them as ‘preferred indifferents’ – things which it was in accordance with human nature to pursue as ends in themselves, but things which were not necessary for living the fully natural life. Importantly, the above considerations allowed eudaimonists to conclude that certain thoughts would be present in our minds when we lived in complete accordance with human nature. In particular, living in complete agreement with human nature involved thinking that, while everyone’s temporal well-being was of inherent worth, it was not a good which we needed to have in order to live happily (it was not the supreme good). This did not change the fact that we would seek these things, but it ensured that we would not seek them in an inappropriate way. In short, in addition to seeing temporal things as having inherent worth, the fully natural life would also be characterised by the thought that none of these things was actually necessary for living the life that we were all striving to live. Consequently, while we would continue to regard these things as goods – and so strive to attain them – we would not view having them as a condition for achieving our fundamental goal of living fully in accordance with human nature. The same line of reasoning established further characteristics of the fully natural life. In particular, it established that when we lived fully in 

Sharpe, “Stoic Virtue Ethics”: “external things are neither necessary nor sufficient for happiness” (p. ).

Introducing the Issues



accordance with human nature, we would have whatever thing or things it was natural for us to have: whatever this thing might be, it would be something which was within the power of every human being to have; hence, it would not be anything mutable or temporal. Moreover, it established that to be sure of having this thing, we needed only to will to have it, since this thing, whatever it was, was something which was fully within the power of a human being to have. Consequently, the Stoic-Platonic tradition concluded that living fully in accordance with human nature involved a number of things: as a first step, it involved learning from reason to look upon the welfare of everyone as a good in its own right, and so seeking this for its own sake; in addition to this, it also involved learning from reason to seek this welfare correctly through recognising that, as a temporal thing, we did not need to have it in order to live in accordance with human nature; and, furthermore, it involved correctly identifying what it was that, as human beings, it was natural for us to have – this thing was called the supreme or highest good and it would not be any mutable (temporal) thing. Finally, living the fully natural life necessarily involved actually having this thing or things: we would live in complete accordance with human nature in the possession of the highest good, meaning that the highest good must be something which, in willing to have it, we would be sure of having it. Virtue was that thing which guaranteed that we would live in complete accordance with human nature, and, moreover, virtue was always a matter of our wills. This led the Stoic-Platonic tradition to the conclusion that virtue was simply a matter of thinking correctly about the identity of the supreme, or highest, good. When we thought correctly about the identity of the highest good, our lives would have all the above characteristics: we would correctly identify what it was natural for human beings to have (since this was the highest good); we would be sure to think correctly about the value of mutable things (since we would understand them as goods, but not the highest good); and, finally, thinking correctly about the identity of the highest good would mean that we would will to possess this thing: since the highest good, by definition, was something which we would be sure to possess simply by willing to have it, simply willing to have this thing would ensure that it would be ours. Consequently, the meaning of virtue was to think correctly about the identity of humanity’s highest good: in thinking correctly about the identity of the highest good, our wills would be in a state to ensure that we lived the fully human life. Likewise, this tradition found that vice referred to thinking of anything temporal or mutable as needed for happiness, since thinking in this way in



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

itself trapped us in the unhappy life. Mutable things were not things which were needed for the fully natural life and so to think of them as such was a thought which had no place in the fully natural life, with the result that while we thought in this way, we failed to live in complete accordance with human nature. In addition, the Stoic-Platonic tradition found that thinking of something as the highest good involved experiencing a certain emotion for that thing: this was the emotion of eros, or passionate love. Eros was the strong emotion that we experienced for whatever we thought of as needed for happiness. Consequently, this tradition found that vice involved eros for mutable (temporal) things, while virtue involved eros for the true highest good. The above discussion of the Stoic-Platonic tradition of eudaimonism establishes that this tradition has the potential to illuminate many of the moral claims made by Augustine. In particular, his claim that virtue was a kind of love becomes explicable when his thought is placed within the framework of this tradition in eudaimonism, as does his view that all sinners loved temporal things. Moreover, this tradition offers an explanation of the connection between our loves and our actions: it explains why, when we loved certain things, we would be sure to do certain actions, and why, when we loved certain other things, we would be unwilling to do these actions – something which accounts of Augustine’s moral thought have hitherto failed to explain adequately. Consequently, my study seeks to understand whether or not Augustine accepted these insights from the Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism and so developed his account of virtue and sin within this tradition. Chapters  and  ask whether or not Augustine thought that virtuous people and sinners were necessarily distinguished from each other by reference to their social and political lives. These chapters find that he did not think that this was the case, and so I find that current accounts of his social and political thought are mistaken and must be rejected. This finding is consistent with the conclusion that Augustine was working within the Stoic-Platonic tradition of eudaimonism, since this tradition likewise maintained that vicious people could lead lives full of sociable actions and do all the other actions that the virtuous also did. Chapters



Frisbee Sheffield, “Love and the City: Eros and Philia in Plato’s Laws,” in Laura Candiotto and Olivier Renault, eds., Emotions in Plato (Leiden: Brill, ), p. . Christopher Gill, “Stoic Erôs – Is There Such a Thing?,” in Ed Sanders, Chiara Thumiger, Chris Carey, and Nick J. Lowe, eds., Erôs in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

Introducing the Issues



– provide further evidence that Augustine was working within this tradition of eudaimonism. These chapters show that, for him, Christianity was true eudaimonism: for him, the Stoics and Platonists, and other non-Christian moralists, correctly understood eudaimonist principles, but had failed to understand these principles well enough to see the flaws in their own application of them. Christianity alone contained the complete understanding and correct application of these principles and so Christianity alone succeeded in being thoroughly eudaimonist. Chapter  addresses the important topic of Augustine’s understanding of self-love and neighbour-love, showing that he understood these ideas from within the framework of eudaimonism as well. Chapters  and  focus on his understanding of the nature of sin, showing that his ideas of original sin and personal sin also make sense from within eudaimonism. Thus, my conclusion in this study is that Augustine did indeed share the above insights with the Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism, with the result that I do not agree with O’Donovan’s and Wolterstorff’s views that Augustine broke with classical eudaimonism. I find that he remained within this tradition, but he nonetheless developed new insights which he believed were consistent with, and required by, the principles that the Stoics and Platonists defended. I find that these insights led him to his distinctive claims that Christians alone were virtuous, and that they were virtuous through grace. In what follows, I find that what is remarkable about Augustine’s thought is that he found a place within the ancient eudaimonist tradition for all of Christianity’s most distinctive claims. My view is that Augustine was convinced that all of Christianity, including its understanding of virtue and sin and its doctrine of divine grace, made sense within the framework bequeathed to him by pagan philosophers. This challenges the view that, in the history of thought, Christianity has always been perceived as necessarily something ‘interruptive’ or as something which marks an absolute break with antiquity. For Augustine, Christianity was about continuity and fulfilment; it did not reject pre-existing systems of thought; it did not offer a new basis for ethical judgements. Rather, for



Milbank claims that Christianity should be seen as interruptive (“My case is that one needs to emphasize more strongly the interruptive character of Christianity, and therefore its difference from both modernity and antiquity,” p. ). Milbank believes that Augustine agrees with him. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, ).

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Augustine, reason was an accurate and complete guide to what God required of us in our treatment of other human beings; and, moreover, reason led us to the brink of Christian conversion through telling us when we were mistaken about the identity of the true God. Thus, for him, Christianity was inseparable from what he judged to be the ancient world’s best philosophy: Augustine worked within this philosophy to make sense of the meaning of Christianity.



Thus, I locate my work in the tradition of writings on Augustine’s moral thought that have attempted to appreciate more fully his debt to ancient philosophy. Sarah Catherine Byers () is a prominent recent contribution to this field. I am particularly indebted to Byers’ careful explanation of the presence of Stoic and Platonic themes in Augustine’s account of moral motivation: I do not attempt to rival her outstanding study of the integration of specific Stoic and Platonic ideas and terminology in Augustine’s moral psychology. What my work offers instead is an explanation of how this Stoic-Platonic synthesis gave Augustine his particular definitions of virtue and vice, or sin. This does not form part of Byers’ study and so in making this the focus of my work, I am offering something new. Another important recent study of Augustine’s engagement with ancient moral philosophy is Brian Harding’s Augustine and Roman Virtue (London: Continuum, ). It will be evident by now that I agree with Harding’s conclusion that “The City of God can and should be positioned within an ongoing tradition of Latin reflection of virtue and happiness rather than as something foreign to, and entirely opposed to, that tradition” (p. ). However, it will also become evident, particularly in Chapter , that I disagree with Harding’s understanding of Augustine on the libido dominandi and, more generally, that I disagree with his analysis of Augustine’s “immanent critique” of ancient Roman ethics.

 Political Virtues?

This chapter begins my investigation of Augustine’s relationship to the Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism. This tradition accepted that, while the lives of the virtuous would always contain certain actions, nonetheless, the same actions could be found consistently among the vicious too. Virtue and vice were a matter of our loves, and hence of our inner lives and not our outer lives. For eudaimonists, the fact of these different loves did not mean that the vicious inevitably loved things which would pull them towards behaving differently to the virtuous. Hence, the same actions could be found among the vicious as were found among the virtuous. This chapter asks whether Augustine agreed that there were no necessary outward differences between the lives of the vicious and the virtuous. Answering this question requires investigating whether he thought in terms of political virtues. It has been proposed that Augustine did think in terms of political virtues: in particular, that he divided virtue into the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love and the political virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. Since vicious people, by definition, did not possess any virtues, or at least any true virtues, if Augustine thought in terms of political virtues (and thought that these were examples of “true” virtue) then this would mean that he thought that the lives of the virtuous and the vicious were distinguished from each other at the social and political level. 

This view is found particularly in the work of Robert Dodaro. See, for example, Robert Dodaro, “Political and Theological Virtues in Augustine, Letter  to Macedonius,” Augustiniana  (): –.





Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

The most prominent proponent of the view that Augustine understood justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude not simply as virtues but as specifically “political” (or “civic”) virtues is Robert Dodaro. He has argued that Augustine held that only Christians possessed true political virtue. As evidence of this, he points to Augustine’s view that faith, hope, and love needed to be present in a person in order for that person to possess “true” justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. Reading “true” justice as a political virtue, Dodaro finds that Augustine tied the presence in people of the true political virtues to the possession of Christian faith. Hence, Dodaro’s view is that, for Augustine, the lives of Christians and non-Christians were distinguished from each other at the level of their social and political actions. If Dodaro is correct in his view that, for Augustine, justice was a political virtue, then this would suggest that, unlike the Stoics and Platonists, Augustine did not understand virtue as simply a matter of our loves: it would suggest, instead, that he viewed actions as part of the meaning of virtue. For this reason, the following asks: Did Augustine think of “justice” as a “political” virtue?

   Augustine wrote of the quartet of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude in a number of places. He clearly considered that the idea of virtue could be usefully divided into these four different virtues. In these passages, however, he did not make any explicit reference to a distinction between political and theological virtues, but rather identified each of these virtues with a particular way of loving God. Thus, Augustine began by explaining that a particular love for God was virtue: writing in , he stated: “I would not define virtue in any other way than as the highest love [summum amorem] of God.” Later in this work, he continued that “to live rightly is nothing other than to love 



Other writings in which Dodaro explores this idea include Robert Dodaro, “Augustine on the Statesman and the Two Cities,” in Mark Vessey, ed., A Companion to Augustine (London: Blackwell, ), pp. –; “Ecclesia and Res Publica: How Augustinian Are Neo-Augustinian Politics?,” in Lieven Boeve, Mathijs Lamberigts, and Maarten Wisse, eds., Augustine and Postmodern Thought: A New Alliance against Modernity? (Leuven: Peeters Press, ), pp. –; and “Augustine’s Secular City,” in Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, eds., Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. Mor. ...

Political Virtues?



God with one’s whole heart, with one’s whole soul, and with one’s whole mind.” He then explained that this love was present when we loved God justly, prudently, temperately and bravely. In other words, justice, prudence, and so on referred to different ways of loving God: his view was that being virtuous referred to loving God in all these ways. He resumed this theme many years later, c., when writing to Macedonius: And yet even in this life there is no virtue but to love what one should love. To choose it is prudence; to be turned away from it by no difficulties is courage; to be turned away from it by no enticement is temperance; to be turned away from it by no pride is justice. But what should we choose that we should especially love except that than which we find nothing better? This is God.

In these passages, rather than making the possession of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude dependent on possessing the correct love for God, Augustine instead made the correct love for God the result of having these four things: when we loved God justly, prudently, temperately, and courageously, then we loved God as He should be loved, and so we were virtuous. These passages began with the view that virtue was a particular way of loving (loving what one should as one should) and then explained how possessing justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude was really one and the same as having the love that was virtue, since each described a dimension of the correct love for God. It follows that these passages do not suggest that, for Augustine, the definitive thing about being just, and so on, was that we conducted our social and political lives in a certain way. On the contrary, these passages indicate that, for him, these four virtues were to be identified not with any feature of our social and political lives but with the fact that we loved the true God as He should be loved. In the above passages, Augustine indicated that justice referred to loving God justly. In another place, however, he simply identified justice with the love of God: “[to] have the love of God to such a degree of perfection that nothing can be added to it – for this is the most true, most complete, and most perfect justice.” This passage implied that justice was love for God, so that to say that someone was just was simply to say that

 



 Ibid., ... Ibid., ... Letter , to Macedonius, . (New City Press, trans. Roland Teske). See also Letter , to Jerome, at : “And to summarize in a general and brief statement the notion that I have of virtue, insofar as it pertains to living well, virtue is the love by which one loves what should be loved” (New City Press, trans. Roland Teske). Nat. et Gr.,  ().



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

they loved God. If that person thought that being just and loving God were one and the same thing, then this would mean that they looked on justice itself as a theological virtue – the “righteousness” of some English translations of these passages. In this way, these passages imply that, for Augustine, the four cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude simply had no political or social dimension at all. Each was simply a matter of our love for God – either identical to this love or a dimension of this love.

    Yet Augustine’s comments elsewhere did not simply identify justice with love for God. As will be seen, he indicated that he did see a social and political dimension to justice: he defined justice as “giving to each his or her due” and thereby indicated that the just always gave other human beings their due of social and political goods. However, this does not in itself establish that he viewed justice as a political virtue: if he viewed justice as a political virtue, then this would mean that he thought that only someone who possessed justice gave other humans their due of social and political goods. But this conclusion does not necessarily follow from the fact that he saw a social and political dimension to justice, since, as we have already noted, he saw other dimensions to justice as well: he saw justice as a matter of loving God justly, or, in other words, of giving God His due of love. This leaves open the possibility that, for him, someone who merely gave other humans their due would lack justice if they failed to give God His due. If this was Augustine’s view, then the result would be that he did not regard justice as a political virtue, since, for him, the finding that someone lacked justice would not necessarily tell us anything about that person’s social or political behaviour – it could tell us simply that that person lacked love for God. 

 

Alistair McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, Volume : Beginnings to  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), points out that this theological meaning was the meaning that Lactantius gave to justice when he declared that “justice is nothing other than the pious and religious worship of the one God” (Diviniae Institutiones V, vii, , quoted by McGrath, p. ). McGrath comments, very relevantly, that “This definition could be interpreted as an extension of the Ciceronian understanding of iustitia as ‘rendering to each his due’ to include man’s proper obligation to God, whose chief part is worship” (p. ). Letter , to Macedonius, . and Civ. Dei .. This is my argument in Katherine Chambers, “Augustine on Justice: A Reconsideration of City of God, Book ,” Political Theology  (): –.

Political Virtues?



To discover whether or not this was how he viewed the virtue of justice, it is helpful to consider his comments on the virtue of chastity. In On Marriage and Concupiscence, Augustine asked about whether nonChristians could possess the true virtue of chastity (pudicitia). His response involved offering the following definition of this virtue: “How can the body be in any true sense said to be chaste, when the soul itself is committing fornication against the true God?. . . There is, then, no true chastity, whether conjugal, or vidual, or virginal, except that which devotes itself to true faith.” This description of chastity took being chaste to mean not committing any kind of fornication whatsoever, not even the kind of fornication that was committed not by the body but by the soul. On the basis of this definition, Augustine found that to possess the virtue of chastity required us to be faithful to the true God: anyone who fornicated in any way whatsoever was not truly chaste; hence, he declared, no unbeliever possessed chastity since they were all guilty of fornicating against God. Augustine underlined that merely fornicating against God was enough to deprive a person of chastity. He accepted that non-Christians could refrain from fornication with other human beings – they could live faithfully with their spouses or even abstain from sex altogether – but nonetheless such people, simply because of their lack of faith in Christ, were not “truly called chaste”: “God forbid, then, that a man be truly called chaste who observes connubial fidelity to his wife from any other motive than devotion to the true God.” When our souls “fornicated” against the true God we simply were not truly chaste, no matter how we conducted our relationships with other human beings. Our infidelity to the true God meant that our fidelity to our spouses did not count as chastity. The pagan virgin or the faithfully married heretic acted unchastely towards the true God, and so, despite the fact that their actions towards other human beings did not involve fornication, they were altogether lacking in what it meant truly to be chaste. This definition of chastity helps to illuminate Augustine’s definition of justice in City of God, Book , Chapter . Here, he defined justice specifically as “giving to each his or her due.” This definition of justice allowed him to conclude that pagan Rome had never, and could never, possess justice, since it would always fail to give to the true God His due of worship: “Justice is that virtue which gives everyone his due. Where,



Nupt. et Conc. ..



Ibid., ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

then, is the justice of man, when he deserts the true God and yields himself to impure demons? Is this to give everyone his due?” Augustine maintained that the gods of the pagans were not gods but demons. Here, he claimed that people who worshipped demons were not just because this was to give to demons the worship that was due to God. Defining justice as “giving to each his due” entailed that anyone who failed in any way to bestow on another their “due” lacked justice. Hence, all non-Christians failed to be just because they all necessarily failed to give God his due – they failed to give God the service of worship which was owed to him as the one true God. Augustine was clear in his discussion of the virtue of chastity that conducting ourselves appropriately towards other human beings was not enough to make us chaste: we needed, in addition, to conduct ourselves appropriately towards the one true God. Arguably, the same thought informed his discussion of justice here: namely, that it was never enough merely to give other human beings their due – in order to be just we must, in addition, give God His due. Hence, in these passages, Augustine did not understand either the virtue of chastity or the virtue of justice as simply a matter of our conduct towards other human beings. Instead, he made these virtues describe something about both our inner lives and our outer lives: the chaste were those who inwardly were faithful to the true God and outwardly were faithful to their spouses; the just were those who inwardly gave God His due of worship and outwardly gave other human beings their due as well. This meant that, for Augustine, while justice had a political and social dimension, it was not reducible to its political and social dimension because it had a religious dimension as well. Since justice had these two dimensions, it followed that it was the combination of giving other people their due with giving God His due which made a person just. This was to make the one term, ‘justice,’ cover both the political and the theological, with the result that this term could be applied only to those people who gave to each their due in both these spheres. Consequently, this was actually to de-politicise justice, since this definition of justice allowed for the possibility that a person could scrupulously give other people their due of social and political goods, and yet lack justice, through failing to give God His due of worship. Thus, Augustine’s definition of justice as giving to each their due is evidence that he did not see justice as a social or political virtue.



Civ. Dei ..

Political Virtues?



The implication of this definition was that stating that someone lacked ‘justice’ did not necessarily say anything about that person’s social and political conduct, any more than stating that someone lacked ‘chastity’ said anything about that person’s sexual conduct. Putting together Augustine’s understanding of justice as love for God, with his definition of justice as giving to each their due, we can say that, for Augustine, a just person was a person who loved the true God, and so gave the true God His due of worship, while also giving other human beings their due, including their due of social and political goods. His declaration that justice was love for God can be understood as a statement about the most important feature of justice: justice required that we loved the true God because the unjust could join the just in giving other human beings their due of social and political goods – all that necessarily set apart the lives of the just and the unjust was the presence or absence of love for the true God and the worship of God which this entailed. Thus, the above suggests that Augustine did not look on justice as a political virtue: those without this virtue would not necessarily be distinguishable from those with this virtue by reference to their social and political actions. Nonetheless, Augustine made comments in connection with some of the above statements which require further explanation before it can be concluded that, for him, justice was not a political virtue. In On the Catholic Way of Life, he stated that “justice is love serving God alone and, therefore, ruling well those things subject to man.” This implied that our love must serve only God in order to rule all else well. If by “ruling well” Augustine meant some aspect of rulers’ treatment of their citizens, then this would amount to defining justice as a political virtue: it would amount to saying that, for example, citizens would only be given a fair distribution of resources, or protected from all political evils, by people who loved God. Although Augustine undeniably thought that loving God was part of justice, if he thought that these political actions could only be found where love for God was present, then this would amount to defining justice as a political virtue: the distinctive ‘interior’ dimension to justice (loving and worshipping God) would be matched by an equally distinctive ‘exterior’ dimension to justice (the correct conduct towards human beings in the political sphere): not only

 

In Letter , to Jerome, Augustine asked, “And by what is He worshipped but by love?” (at .). On the connection between love and worship, see Chapter . Mor. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

would the just do both these things, but each of these things would be done only by the just. But this is not the only way of reading this comment. The issue here is whether, when Augustine wrote of “ruling well,” he had in mind simply giving other people their due of social and political goods. There is nothing here, however, to indicate that this was Augustine’s definition of “ruling well”: he might have meant this, or he might have meant that people ruled “well” who ruled while loving the true God. The question of what he saw as making any instance of government ‘good’ is not resolved by this passage, although given that earlier in this passage he had defined virtue as love for God, this points to the conclusion that he defined good government, quite simply, as government in which love for God was present. Rulers who ruled well would always give their citizens their due of social and political goods, but the distinctive feature of their rule would not be that they did this, but rather that they loved the true God. Therefore, rulers who gave their citizens their due of social and political goods without loving the true God would not rule “well.” Thus, his definition of virtue points to the conclusion that, for him, it was the presence of love for, and service to, the true God which marked any instance of government as good; rulers who ruled well would also distribute resources fairly, and in other respects give their citizens their “due,” but this same conduct could be also be found among those who did not rule “well.” Augustine made similar comments in City of God, Book . For example, he stated that a person’s “just control” or “right and faithful” command over the body, and the reason’s “just control” or “right and faithful” command over the vices, were both dependent upon worshipping the true God. Without this worship, a person could control the body, and the reason could control the vices, but not “justly” or “rightly.” This indicates that for him there would be something which was itself vicious about non-Christians’ government of their bodies and their vices. Again, the question is what Augustine meant by the idea of a “just control” over the vices or the body. Perhaps he meant here that nonChristians were unable fully to control themselves, so that they would be unable to exercise the necessary self-control to treat other human beings as they should. This would be to give a political meaning to the idea of



Civ. Dei . and .. I have modified Dods’ translation to make it more literal.

Political Virtues?



“just control” and so this would amount to defining justice as a political virtue: only those who worshipped the true God fully commanded their bodies and vices, and hence only these people were able to distribute material and other resources fairly among their fellow human beings. Again, however, this is not the only way of reading what he said here. Alternatively, he might have meant that the viciousness of pagans’ rulership of their bodies and vices lay simply in the fact that they exercised this rule while failing to give God His due of worship. Earlier in Chapter , as discussed above, he had defined justice as involving the worship of the true God; hence, we would expect him to claim that any act on our part, even our acts of self-government, which failed to involve this worship of God must be vicious or unjust. Consequently, his comments here do not establish that he thought of pagans, unlike Christians, as necessarily unable to control themselves in their interactions with other people. Instead, they can be taken as pointing simply to an inner difference between pagans and Christians: Christian self-government was “just” or “right” because it included service to the true God, while the same self-government among nonChristians was vicious. Augustine was clear that the most significant component of justice was love for God: justice could be defined simply as this love, and the absence of this love, entailing as it did the absence of due worship of the true God, was enough to disqualify a person from being just. He was equally clear that just people treated their fellow human beings in a certain way, “giving them their due”: his message was that these two things together made up the unique character of justice – giving to God His due and giving to other people their due. The above has found that this does not amount to defining justice as a political virtue. If he thought of justice as a political virtue, then this would involve him claiming, in addition, that only people who loved God and so gave to God His due also gave to other human beings their due. Some of Augustine’s statements could be read as supporting this view, but these statements are also open to a different reading, whereby what made any act of rulership just or good was the fact that it was accomplished by a person who loved and worshipped the true God. I have argued that, given the context of these statements, this is more likely to have been Augustine’s meaning. Hence, we have so far not discovered any grounds for supposing that justice, for Augustine, was a political virtue. On the contrary, we have discovered good grounds for concluding that he did not look on justice as this kind of virtue at all.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

     We can find further evidence for Augustine’s understanding of the nature of justice in his discussion of the idea of “human” justice, which he also called a person’s “own” justice. On the whole, as we have seen, Augustine preferred to deny outright that non-Christians could ever be just or, indeed, virtuous in any way, but he also conceded in some places that there was a sense in which non-Christians could possess a kind of virtue or justice. In these places, he always emphasised that non-Christians could never be truly just or truly virtuous. Nonetheless, he allowed that a human justice, or their own virtue, could be found among them. Thus, in City of God he wrote of the virtue that could be found among pagan Romans, distinguishing it from the true virtue that was found only among the citizens of the heavenly city. His well-known statement in Book , Chapter , to the effect that “no justice” could be ascribed to anyone who failed to worship the true God thus needs to be read in the light of those passages in his writings which attributed a kind of virtue to non-Christians. When he stated that no justice could be found among pagans, what he arguably meant was that no true justice could be found among them. In other words, he was using true justice and justice interchangeably here. Thus, a little later in Book  he stated that “true justice” was not to be found among the ungodly; while in his earlier discussion of this issue in Book , he had also used the term “true justice.” It is important to recognise that the justice that Augustine denied could be found among non-Christians was true justice because it is only by recognising this that we can reconcile his comments in Book , Chapter , with his comments elsewhere to the effect that pagans and other non-Christians could possess a kind of justice. He developed this idea that there were two kinds of justice, one of which was found only among the worshippers of the true God and the other of which could be found only among non-Christians, particularly with reference to Romans : (“For, being ignorant of the justice of God, and wishing to establish their own justice, they are not subject to the justice of God”). He referred to the second kind of justice as a person’s “own justice,” the justice “which man works for himself,” or as human justice (iustitia hominis),  

Civ. Dei ., ., ., and .. In Civ. Dei ., Augustine writes of the virtue of the Roman hero Regulus (also .). Ibid., . and ..

Political Virtues?

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while he referred to the other kind of justice as true justice, God’s justice, or the justice given by God. For example, Tractate  on the Gospel of John (John :-), from , used Romans : to explain the sense in which Jesus called himself the “bread which came down from heaven.” Here, he held that, because “Christ is for us justice” (after  Cor. :), to hunger after justice (Matt. :) was to hunger after the bread from heaven. This led him to acknowledge that, just as there were two kinds of bread (ordinary bread and the bread which comes from heaven), so there were two kinds of justice: human justice and God’s justice. In particular, he held that Jewish people possessed a kind of justice, which led them to believe that they fulfilled God’s law, when in fact they did not fulfil that law because, unassisted by grace, they lacked the love given by the Spirit (Rom. : and :). Hence, this human justice was not the justice bestowed by God which was, by implication, the only true justice, that is, the only justice which actually fulfilled the law. Commenting on John :– in Tractate , also from , he associated God’s justice with faith and human justice with works. The justice of the Jewish people was a justice of works, not of faith: it was “their own” justice, not God’s justice. Blind to the fact that they lacked the true justice that God alone bestowed, they stumbled, failing to perceive that faith in Christ was necessary for true justice: instead, they remained elated at the thought that they themselves, without God’s help, had achieved what they mistook for true justice. Likewise, in Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, he wrote of the Jewish people as “observing the law carnally” and presuming on their own justice “which is of the law – that is, where only the letter commands, and the Spirit does not fulfil.” Quoting Galatians :, he noted that justice was not by the law, since if it was, then “Christ has died in vain.” In these passages, Augustine acknowledged that there was a sense in which justice could be attributed to people who lacked faith in Christ, because there was a sense in which they “observed” the moral law: they observed the moral law “carnally” or “by works.” This justice, however, was inferior to that justice which was bestowed by God upon those with faith in Christ. At the same time, he held that fulfilling the law carnally or by works really meant that the law was not fulfilled, since the law was actually only fulfilled by the Spirit. Thus, people who observed the law carnally really possessed nothing more than a human justice, “a justice



Jo. Ev. Tr. ..



Ibid., ..



C. Ep. Pel. ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

wrought of their own strength.” Other people, however, were just with the justice bestowed by God: these people were the ones who actually fulfilled God’s law and who were in this sense truly just. This justice came through faith whereby people received the Spirit’s gift of love, which was the fulfilling of the law. Thus, for Augustine, there were two kinds of justice and two kinds of virtue: first, there was the justice and virtue which could be found in the absence of faith in Christ, and hence which could be present among pagans and Jews; and second, there was the justice and virtue which were bestowed by God on those who placed their faith in Christ – these were true justice and true virtue. In the case of pagan or Jewish justice, this justice was really sin, since without faith in Christ, all was sin: people were emphatically not made truly just by possessing merely human justice; hence, they remained sinners even while they possessed this justice. Nonetheless, there was some resemblance between this sin and the true version of justice which was found only among Christians – it was for this reason that this sin was described as a kind of justice. The question is, in what ways did Augustine think human justice resembled true justice? What was the source of the similarity, and what made them distinct? We have already seen how Augustine defined true justice. This was the justice possessed by Christians alone: it was the justice whereby we gave to each their due, including giving to the true God His due of worship. In other words, the chief characteristic of true justice was love for God. People who were just in this sense also gave their fellow human beings their due, including their due of social and political goods, but these actions towards other human beings were not in themselves enough to make a person truly just – for true justice to be present, these actions needed to be coupled with loving and worshipping the true God. Nonetheless, Augustine stated that pagans and Jews were capable of achieving a human justice which resembled true justice in some way. Given all the above findings, the best construction to place on Augustine’s notion of merely human justice was that it resembled the true justice of Christians because this human justice involved giving to other human beings their due of social, political, economic, and other goods. Truly just people did these deeds too, but they always coupled doing these deeds with loving and worshipping the true God: doing these two things 

Augustine also discussed Romans : in his Enarrationes in Psalmos. See Exposition of Psalm  at ; First Exposition of Psalm  at ; First Exposition of Psalm , Sermon , at  and .

Political Virtues?

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together constituted true justice. Hence, when pagans and Jews did these deeds, their lives would resemble those of the truly just, albeit only outwardly, at the level of their treatment of other human beings; but of course their lives differed from those of the truly just inwardly, at the level of what they loved and worshipped. As will be seen, there is good evidence to support this reading of Augustine’s notion of human justice. Before turning to this evidence, however, it needs to be noted that this is not how others have read Augustine’s notion of human justice. As discussed above, one reading of Augustine’s statement that justice referred to loving God justly “and therefore ruling all else well” finds that here Augustine made achieving justice in the social and political spheres dependent on loving God, thereby understanding true justice as a political virtue. In agreement with this reading, it has also been proposed that by human justice, Augustine had in mind an inferior version of justice understood as a political virtue: the truly just gave other human beings their due of material resources and other social and political goods, while the humanly just either tried but failed to do this or managed to do this only sometimes. Human justice was thus not quite the same thing as injustice, but it still fell far below the standard for our social and political lives required for true justice. For example, for Herbert Deane, Augustine held that all those who were unredeemed by faith in Christ had only a deeply imperfect grasp of what actually constituted the fair treatment of other human beings in a social and political sense: this was genuinely understood only under the influence of divine grace, and only perfectly in heaven; hence, on earth, especially among unbelievers, political and social affairs merely possessed a trace or vestige of justice, meaning a trace or vestige of what it meant genuinely to give other human beings their due of political and social goods. A similar interpretation of Augustine’s two notions of justice is found in the work of Ernst Fortin, who sees the City of God as a work directed against political idealism and utopianism. For Fortin, the message of City of God is that a world in which everyone always does the actions that God requires of them in their political and social lives is not possible here on earth, but nonetheless, Christians should struggle to bring God’s standards to bear on the social and political institutions of  

Herbert Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. . Ernst Fortin, Political Idealism and Christianity in the Thought of St. Augustine (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, ), p. .

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the societies in which they find themselves, while recognising that there are limits to what they can hope for in terms of reform. Thus, Fortin notices that Augustine distinguished between the justice attainable here on earth and the perfect justice to be found in heaven, but he assumes that, for Augustine, justice in each case was primarily a matter of human beings’ social and political arrangements: on earth, these would have at best a low level of conformity to God’s requirements, although Christians should attempt to bring their societies as close as possible into line with the perfect arrangements which would be enjoyed in heaven. More recently, Dodaro has argued that Augustine understood merely human justice – the justice that could be found among pagans and other non-Christians – as the justice possessed by people when they wanted to treat other human beings with fairness, and so build societies in which people were given their due, but did not know what this would actually involve. Thus, Dodaro reads Augustine as attributing this justice or virtue to pagans and other non-Christians on the basis of their “desire to live justly”: some pagans, for example, in the history of Rome, had demonstrated a desire to achieve the highest standards in their social and political lives; they failed to accomplish this, however, because their lack of faith in Christ left them ignorant of “what justice clearly requires in particular circumstances,” but their desire to give other people their due of social and political goods received recognition from God, and hence Augustine found it possible to write of a kind of justice among these pagans. All these accounts of Augustine’s idea of human justice are based upon the assumption that Augustine understood true justice as a political virtue. Yet none of the evidence examined above establishes decisively that this was how he viewed true justice. On the contrary, the above has found good grounds for concluding that this was not at all how he viewed true justice. Even Augustine’s comment about loving God and ruling all 

  

Ibid., pp. –. See also Ernst Fortin, “Justice as the Foundation of the Political Community: Augustine and His Pagan Models,” in Christopher Horn, ed., Augustinus: De civitate Dei (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), pp. –, at p. : “the weakness of a human nature wounded by sin and the frequent intractability of human affairs are such as to require that the principles of Christian morality be diluted or softened if they are to retain their effectiveness. What we end up with in most cases is a kind of ‘lesser justice,’ better suited to the conditions of this life.” Fortin, Political Idealism, pp. –. Robert Dodaro, “Justice and the Limits of the Soul,” in Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .  Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , , and .

Political Virtues?

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else well is susceptible to an alternative interpretation which does not support the idea that he viewed true justice as a political virtue. Hence, it is not possible to be sure that he intended his notion of “human” justice to be read in the way proposed by these scholars. We need to discover whether he made comments to the effect that people who were just with a merely human justice conducted their social and political lives differently to those who were truly just. Alternatively, if he suggested that outwardly all these people’s lives were the same, then we can conclude that the only difference between the humanly just and the truly just lay inwardly, in their loves.

 :– The above noted that many of Augustine’s comments on the idea of human justice occurred when he discussed Romans :; but there was another biblical passage which raised the issue of human justice, and in an even more direct way. In Philippians :–, Paul explicitly described himself as having “justice” prior to his conversion to Christianity and contrasted this justice with the justice that he now possessed having come to faith in Christ. Prior to his conversion, Paul wrote that he had possessed “the justice that is in the law” and “my own justice which is of the law”; having come to believe in Christ, he now possessed the justice “which is through the faith of Christ, the justice which is of God by faith.” Augustine recognised that Philippians :– invited a discussion of the difference between human justice, which he also called here “deceitful” justice, and the justice that “man has from God” which was justice “in the Spirit.” He clarified that the justice that humans had “from God by the Spirit of grace” was “true justice.” Thus, Augustine read Philippians :– as describing how Paul had been humanly just prior to his conversion to Christianity, and had acquired true justice upon coming to believe in Christ. In exploring the meaning of the justice that Paul had possessed prior to becoming a Christian, Augustine discussed Philippians :– in conjunction with Luke :, which described two early believers in Christ, namely, the priest Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth, as “just [iusti] before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances [iustificationibus] of 

C. Ep. Pel. ..



Ibid., ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the Lord without reproach [sine querella].” He saw that Paul had said of his pre-conversion self that he was “without reproach [sine querella], according to the justice [secundum iustitiam] which is in the law [quae in lege est],” while Luke said something similar of Christ’s followers, Zechariah and Elizabeth – in particular, Luke said that they had been just and obedient to God’s commandments “without reproach.” Thus, in On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, Augustine held that Philippians : and Luke : both used the same terminology to describe the justice of a believer and the justice of an unbeliever. What has been said in praise of Zechariah and Elizabeth that is not found in the Apostle’s words about himself, before he believed in Christ? After all, he said that he was without reproach according to the justice which is in the law.. . . But the words of scripture about Zechariah and his wife, “in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord,” were briefly summed up by Paul as “in the law.”

Hence, there was nothing in the way that Paul had described his preconversion justice to set it apart from the Christian justice of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Paul the unbeliever was described as walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord just like Zechariah and Elizabeth: Zechariah and Elizabeth, who possessed faith in Christ, had achieved “justice” in their earthly lives through grace; but, likewise, preconversion Paul, the persecutor of the Church, had attained to “justice,” without grace. At the same time, Augustine accepted that, while the same terms were used, they must mean different things. Thus, he was clear that Paul, in Philippians :, was not making a claim to which the evangelist Luke would have objected. Whatever Paul meant by attributing justice and complete obedience to God’s law to himself before his conversion, Augustine affirmed that he should be understood to agree that his justice and obedience were entirely distinct from those of Zechariah and Elizabeth, or any other of Christ’s true followers. Indeed, he held that this much was clear from what Paul next stated in Philippians :–. Augustine continued by quoting at length from this passage, focusing particularly on verse , where Paul distinguished between “my own justice from the law” and the justice “which comes through faith in Christ, a justice that comes from God in faith.” Here, Paul himself explained that there was one justice which could be possessed by those without faith, and another which was given by God to those with faith. 

Pecc. Mer. ..

Political Virtues?

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These two kinds of justice were distinct from the perfect justice that Christ alone possessed, but which was promised to the faithful in the next life (Augustine thus noted that Paul himself admitted that, having received the gift of faith, “he is not yet perfect in the full justice [perfectum in plentitudine iustitiae] which he longs to attain in Christ, but that he still deliberately struggles on and, while forgetting the past, is stretched out to what lies ahead”). Thus, Paul’s statements in Philippians : helpfully clarified that his justice before his conversion was distinct from the justice that he, and Zechariah and Elizabeth, possessed upon converting to Christianity. This implied that the sense in which he had lived in complete conformity to God’s law before his conversion was likewise distinct from the sense in which he lived in complete conformity to it upon his conversion. Yet the references to the law in Philippians :– and Luke : did not in any way offer a means of clarifying wherein lay the difference between these various ways of being just and totally obedient to the divine law. On the contrary, they only served to complicate the matter because, while Paul claimed that his pre-conversion justice had come “from the law,” he did not indicate explicitly in what sense his post-conversion justice also came from the law. Yet Augustine remained convinced that Luke : indicated that a person’s justice after conversion also came from a total obedience to the law. Augustine’s discussion of Philippians :– in On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins did not offer much further clarification of how these two kinds of justice differed from each other: upon believing in Christ, Paul acquired a new kind of justice and a new kind of complete obedience to God’s law, but exactly how did this differ from what he had possessed before? In his comments on Luke :, however, he indicated that what distinguished Zechariah and Elizabeth’s justice from that of preconversion Paul was the fact that there was no “pretence” in their justice: “because whatever justice they had was not a matter of pretence before human beings [ad homines simulatum], it said, ‘before God’ [ante deum].” Zechariah and Elizabeth had faith and so they were said not merely to be “just” but to be “just before God,” while Paul, without faith, was simply said to be “just.” In other words, since he was not just before God, his justice was a matter of pretence before human beings. Paul’s justice was a matter of pretence because he was one thing in the eyes of



Ibid., ..



Ibid., ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

human beings, and another thing in the eyes of God. In this sense, his justice was a dissimulation, in that it existed only according to human perceptions: the reality of justice was absent. These claims might be taken to confirm the view of Dodaro and others that the difference between human justice – or the justice of unbelievers – and true justice (the reality of justice found in faithful Christians like Zechariah and Elizabeth) lay in the social and political deeds accomplished by those who possessed each kind of justice. That is, these claims might be taken to mean that human beings observed Paul behaving in a certain way socially and politically, and thereby concluded that he was just, when in fact the standard that God required of our social and political behaviour was quite different, so that in God’s eyes, Paul was not just. If this were the case, however, then Augustine would have indicated that Zechariah and Elizabeth’s outward lives were quite distinct from the outward life led by Paul while he remained Jewish, since he was clear that Zechariah and Elizabeth were truly just. His message would have been that Zechariah and Elizabeth conducted their social and political lives to a different standard; onlookers might not know that they lived according to the true standard, but they would nonetheless observe that they lived according to a different social and political standard to that of Paul. In other words, if Dodaro, Deane, and others are correct in their way of reading the distinction that Augustine drew between human justice and true justice, then we would expect Augustine to make some claim here to the effect that while Paul the unbeliever appeared as just in the eyes of other human beings, Zechariah and Elizabeth appeared as unjust in human eyes because their outward conduct did not match human expectations of what it meant to deal fairly with others. God would know them to be just, but human beings would judge them to be unjust. In fact, Augustine did not make any claim like that here. On the contrary, with the above statement, he indicated that Zechariah and Elizabeth also appeared as just to human eyes: he stated that there was no “pretence” in their justice because as they appeared to human eyes, so they appeared to God. They seemed just to human beings and they were just before God; in contrast, Paul merely seemed just to human beings, while actually being unjust in God’s eyes. Thus, Augustine’s discussion of the differences between Paul, on the one hand, and Zechariah and Elizabeth, on the other, does not suggest that, for him, human judgements as to how the truly just would behave outwardly, that is, in their social and political lives, were unreliable.

Political Virtues?

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Rather, his message here was that human judgements erred, not in misjudging the things that were perceptible to human eyes but in mistakenly supposing that what they witnessed with their eyes was a sure guide to what took place within an individual, and hence to the kind of justice that an individual possessed. Human beings would be good judges of who was truly just if true justice was merely a matter of our social and political deeds. In fact, true justice required more than these deeds, since it required that people were not only just outwardly but also just inwardly, at the level of their loves and beliefs, which were things perceptible only to God. When Augustine discussed Philippians :– elsewhere, he reiterated the idea that the justice that Paul possessed prior to his conversion was simply justice before human beings, while the justice that Zechariah and Elizabeth possessed, as faithful Christians, was both justice before human beings and justice in God’s sight. Thus, towards the very end of On the Grace of Christ, he revisited the example of Zechariah and Elizabeth, again coupling Luke : with Philippians :. He explained that Zechariah and Elizabeth were said to be “just” and “without reproach” because they demonstrated “a certain way of life, which is among human beings worthy of approval and praise, and which no human being could justly call in question for the purpose of laying accusation or censure.” Of course, what was far more important in their case was the fact that God knew that this way of life which was without reproach among human beings was combined with other things, perceptible only by God, so that “as they appeared to men, so were they known in the sight of God”: “Which [way of life] Zechariah and Elizabeth are said to have maintained in the sight of God, for no other reason than that they, by walking therein, never deceived people by any dissimulation.” They not only walked, like Paul the unbeliever, in a way of life which all humans judged to be just, but their faith ensured that they possessed something else which made them really just, that is, just before God. Hence, there was no deception in their outward way of life: it was a true guide to their actual status in God’s eyes. By implication, in Paul’s case, his outward appearance of justice deceived people into thinking that he possessed true justice, meaning justice in God’s eyes: his outward life offered grounds for supposing that he was just, but Paul’s outward life deceived people; it was a dissimulation, since he lacked the inner thing that made him truly just.



Gr. et Pecc. Or., Chapter .



Ibid., Chapter .

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

In one of his anti-Pelagian sermons, from  or later, commenting on Philippians :–, he explicitly stated that human beings would attribute justice to someone who gave other human beings their due of social and political goods, while God, in contrast, looked deep within and asked about a person’s interior state. Using Exodus : (Rom. : and :), he again explained what Paul meant when he described himself as possessing justice in the law, without reproach: He meant without the reproach of men. There is, you see, a kind of justice which a person can fulfil, so that no other human can complain about that person. It says, after all, “Do not covet what belongs to another” (Exodus :). If you, though, don’t grab what belongs to another there will be no reproach or complaint against you from men. So sometimes you covet, and don’t grab. But God’s judgement hangs over you, because you covet: you are guilty under the law – but only in the eyes of the lawgiver.. . . So this is what he says fulfilling the law is: that is, not coveting.

Paul the unbeliever was just in a way which invited no reproach from other human beings because he gave other people their due of social and political goods. Nonetheless, he was not just in a way which meant that God had nothing with which to reproach him. God’s law prohibited evil desire (“coveting”). Human beings would judge people as just according to their outward lives – they would view people as just, for example, if they did not take what was owed to another. Yet God would judge otherwise, since God had a window onto the state of people’s desires and knew when people breached the moral law at the level of their desires. Augustine returned to a discussion of Philippians : when he wrote Against Two Letters of the Pelagians. Here, he turned to Philippians : in order to argue that the justice that Paul attributed to himself while he was without faith, nonetheless involved him in sin: nor let us be disturbed by what he wrote to the Philippians: “According to justice which is in the law, one who is without reproach.” For he could be within in evil affections a transgressor of the law, and yet fulfil the open works of the law.. . . And knowing himself to have been such in these internal affections, before the grace of God which is through Jesus Christ our Lord, the apostle elsewhere





Sermo . This sermon is discussed by Anthony Dupont, Gratia in Augustine’s Sermones Ad Populum during the Pelagian Controversy: Do Different Contexts Furnish Different Insights? (Leiden: Brill, ), pp. –. Dupont dates it from  or later. Sermo .–.

Political Virtues?

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confesses this very plainly [Augustine here quotes Paul in Eph. : and Titus :].

Paul’s affections were evil and yet he fulfilled “the open works of the law,” that is, his outward life conformed to the standards for our outward conduct set forth in the law of God and for this reason he was said to possess the “justice which is in the law.” Nonetheless, he sinned and his sin lay not in any aspect of his outward life but in his affections: he sinned “within,” at the level of his desires. Consequently, he was not truly just. In this way, we can see from Augustine’s discussion of human justice and true justice in relation to Philippians :– and Luke : that it is a mistake to suppose that his distinction between two kinds of justice – human justice and true justice – corresponded to a distinction between two different standards for social and political life. Rather, for Augustine, the justice found among Christians was true justice because only among Christians would everyone be given their due, both God and human beings – God His due of love and worship, and human beings their due of material resources and other goods. The justice attainable by nonChristians, in contrast, was a merely human justice, a justice from the law or a justice of works, because although non-Christians who were humanly just would give all other human beings their due of social and political goods, and thereby live outwardly in the same way as Christians, they would never obey the law “inwardly” because they would never give God what was owed to Him.

  Augustine generally wrote of justice, true justice, or human justice; he never used the terminology “political justice” or “social justice.” Nonetheless, he occasionally wrote of “civic virtues.” He explained that these were the virtues that served to “establish, increase and preserve” the earthly city. Arguably, these virtues corresponded to what we mean by social and political virtues – they referred to giving other people their due of social and political goods. In other words, Augustine limited the idea of “civic virtue” to describing our outward actions: it merely described the fact that we gave other human beings their due of social and political goods, but it was not a term which was also used to describe people’s inner lives – Augustine had the term “justice,” whether “human justice” 

C. Ep. Pel. ..



Letter , to Marcellinus, at ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

or “true justice,” to describe both our inner and outer lives. It follows that “justice,” for Augustine, was not an example of a civic virtue: people who were humanly just and truly just both possessed civic virtue, but identifying someone as humanly just or truly just always said something more about that person than that they possessed civic virtue, since, as we have seen, both “human justice” and “true justice” described our loves as well as our outward lives. Importantly, Augustine did not write in terms of “true” civic virtues; that is, he did not suggest that Christians possessed the “true” version of these virtues, while non-Christians possessed them in another form. On the contrary, he stated explicitly that civic virtue was not true virtue even though it “resembles” true virtue. He asked Julian, his Pelagian opponent: Do you envisage such a place for men who have shown a Babylonian love for their earthly fatherland, serving demons or human glory by civic virtue, which is not true [virtue] but resembles true [virtue] – for the Fabricii, the Reguli, the Fabii, the Scipios, the Camilii, and others like them.. . . You ask: “Will those, then, in whom there was true justice be in everlasting damnation?” Words beyond impudence! There was no true justice in them, as I declared, because functions (officia) should not be weighed by the mere acts, but by their ends.

These Roman heroes had civic virtue, but they did not thereby possess true virtue: true virtue, including true justice, was not a matter of what we did, but the end for which we did it; civic virtue resembled true virtue in its “acts,” but the distinguishing feature of true virtue was its “ends.” In particular, “true virtues in men serve God . . . Whatever good is done by man, yet is not done for the purpose for which true wisdom commands it be done, may seem good from its function, but, because the end is not right, it is sin.” Elsewhere, he stated that pagan Romans had possessed civic virtues but “without true religion,” while Christians possessed these virtues too and evidently possessed true religion as well. Thus, he explained that God had rewarded the Romans for their civic virtues, but with a merely temporal reward because they lacked true religion; in contrast, when true religion was present in addition to the civic virtues, then people would be given a heavenly reward. For in that way God showed, in the most wealthy and renowned empire of the Romans, the great value of civic virtues, even without the true religion, in order



C. Jul. ...



Ibid., ...



Political Virtues?

that it might be understood that, with this religion added, human beings become citizens of another city, whose king is truth, whose law is love and whose limit is eternity.

True religion made a person who possessed the civic virtues truly just, with the result that that person was a citizen of heaven. A person who possessed the civic virtues without believing in, and loving, the true God remained humanly just and was rewarded with nothing more than a temporal reward.

  : This message, namely, that the only necessary difference between Christians and non-Christians lay on the inside, at the level of what they loved and worshipped, can be found in other places in Augustine’s writings. He explored this idea particularly in relation to  Corinthians :: “If I distribute all my goods to the poor, if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not charity, it profits me nothing.” He discussed this passage in his sermons on the Gospel and Letters of John, where he used it to highlight the fact that outwardly two actions could be the same, but the presence of charity in one would make it good and the absence of charity from another would make it a sin. Thus, commenting on  John :–:, he noted that, while the lives of Christians and non-Christians could be outwardly identical, Christians and non-Christians would always be inspired by very different loves. “‘If I distribute all my goods to the poor, if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not charity, it profits me nothing.’ Is it possible for a man to do this without charity? It is.” This led him to discuss Paul’s command that each man must “prove his own work” (Gal. :): Augustine explained that this meant that we must prove that our works flowed from charity. Writing with respect to John :, he noted that “love” was the only distinctive thing about Jesus’s disciples: [As] if He said, other gifts of mine are possessed in common with you by those who are not mine – not only nature, life, perception, reason, . . . [but also] the bestowing of their goods upon the poor, and the giving of their body to the flames: but because destitute of charity, they only tinkle like cymbals; they are nothing, and by nothing are they profited.  

Letter , to Marcellinus, at .. Jo. Ev. Tr. ..



Ep. Jo., Homily ..



Ibid.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

The actions of the ungodly were able to be outwardly identical to those of the godly; the only thing that necessarily separated them was the presence or absence of charitable love. He noted that pride in particular could inspire exactly the same works as charity: inspired by pride, people fed the poor, clothed the naked, observed fasts, and buried the dead. The challenge was not to do different things in our outward lives, but rather to convert our hearts so that caritas was present in us. [S]ee what great works pride does. Lay it up in your hearts, how much alike, how much as it were upon a par, are the works it does and the works of charity. Charity feeds the hungry and so does pride: charity, that God may be praised; pride that itself may be praised.. . . All good works which charity wishes to do and does; pride drives at the same.. . . In the works we see no difference.. . . Return to your own conscience, question it.. . . Is lust rooted there? A show may be made of good deeds, truly good works there cannot be. Is charity rooted there? Have no fear, nothing evil can come of that.

Augustine declared in this passage, “In the works we see no difference,” meaning that there was no difference in the outward shape of these works. Yet he clarified that this was not to say that people who acted from the wrong kind of love actually performed truly good or virtuous works: “a show may be made of good deeds, truly good works there cannot be.” In other words, observing the show of people’s outward lives would not allow anyone to distinguish doers of good works from doers of sinful ones. By the idea of a show of good works, he did not mean that people acted for appearance’s sake; rather, he meant that the observable part of our life, namely, its outward features, was never a sure guide to its invisible, inner dimension. The status of an action as genuinely virtuous entirely depended upon this inner dimension: hence, a work which only seemed good was one where there was no fault in its outward dimension, but inwardly love for God was lacking. In the same vein, at the end of Against Faustus, Augustine addressed Faustus’ challenge that, unlike the Manicheans who strove for a rigorously ascetic life, the lives that Augustine described Christian believers as leading did not necessarily differ from the lives of non-believers. Augustine replied that our lives or actions ought to be judged by the ultimate ends to which they were directed, and this was all that necessarily marked out Christian believers from non-believers. Believers’ lives were genuinely different from those of non-believers, but this difference lay not



Ep. Jo., Homily ..



See also Ep. Jo. . (commenting on  John :–).

Political Virtues?



necessarily in any outward thing, but in what was known only to God and to each individual conscience, namely, in the underlying qualities possessed by believers (“faith, hope and love”). Thus, we can see that, for Augustine, justice was not a political virtue. True justice was the justice that Christians alone possessed, and when describing this justice Augustine was clear that it had two parts: it was a matter of giving God what was owed to Him and of giving human beings what was owed to them too. He was clear that love for the true God could never be found among those who failed to give to each human being their due, but he was equally clear that it was possible to give other human beings their due in the absence of love for the true God. People who did these deeds consistently, but who failed to love God, would possess “human justice.” Human justice was not a social or political virtue either, since if it were, then this would mean that people who lacked this justice necessarily failed to do these deeds; yet, clearly, the truly just likewise did these same deeds. Consequently, Augustine did not look on either human justice or true justice as the equivalent of our notion of “political justice.” Both described the same characteristics of our outward lives, but both described more than this, since both described our loves as well.

       Given that Augustine thought that the virtuous and the vicious could accomplish the same actions, like feeding the poor and sacrificing oneself for others, and, in general terms, giving others their due of social, political, and economic goods, it makes sense that he considered that none of these things was good in itself, but only good as a result of the presence of Christian faith. He expressed this thought in the following passage from Against Lying: Those works, namely of men, which are not sins in themselves (quae non sunt per se ipsa peccata), are now good, now evil, according as their causes (causas) are good or evil; as to give food to a poor man is a good work, if it be done because of pity with right faith (cum recta fide); as to lie with a wife, when it is done for the sake of generation, if it be done with faith to beget subjects for regeneration. These and the like works according to their causes are good or evil, because the selfsame, if they have evil causes are turned into sins; as, if for boasting’s sake a poor man is fed; or for lasciviousness a man lies with his wife; or children are begotten, not that they may be nurtured for God, but for the devil. 

Contra Faustum ..



Contra Mendacium, .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

The only thing that necessarily distinguished the just from the unjust was the respective “causes” present in their actions, not the outward dimension of these actions. To be virtuous was not to give to the poor or to sacrifice one’s life for others, but rather to do these things from “right faith,” that is, while loving and worshipping the true God. Since vicious people could also give to the poor or sacrifice themselves for others, these things must be morally neutral – neither good nor bad in themselves, but good or bad only from a consideration of what a person loved, that is, what they set as their final end. Here, Augustine suggested some examples of “evil causes”: “boasting,” sexual lust, or the desire to conceive children to raise them outside the Christian faith. The opening sentence of this passage indicated a further evil cause: it was evil to give to the poor from pity from a faith which was not right. This last evil cause shows that there need be nothing necessarily anti-social or selfish about our motives in order for them to be evil – it was enough that right faith was absent. In the absence of right faith, we would not love the true God, and an action such as giving to the poor must be done with this love present in a person’s heart in order for that action to be virtuous. Implicit in the above passage is the idea that, for Augustine, our actions were more than their outward, observable parts; instead, all actions had an inner dimension as well. Moreover, the above makes clear that, for Augustine, this inner dimension did not correspond simply to what we might call our ‘motives.’ We might give to the poor from the motive of pity, but, Augustine implied, a motive like pity was itself a morally neutral thing. To assess the moral status of an action, we needed to know not simply about its motive but, more generally, about the ‘cause’ present in this action – we were moved by pity, but was our faith also right? We were moved by the desire to have children, but did we also intend to raise them in the Christian faith? Hence, by the idea of an action’s cause, Augustine meant more than its motive. This conclusion is supported by Byers’ finding that Augustine understood the will (voluntas) as the “cause” present in an action – a voluntary action would always have my will as its cause. The idea of the will as the cause present in a voluntary action, in turn, allowed Augustine to explain how our loves determined the moral character of our actions. Augustine tied the moral character of a person’s will 

Sarah Byers, Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. : quoting from Civ. Dei ., “Human wills are the causes of human deeds.”

Political Virtues?



intimately to the moral character of a person’s love, finding that our will and our love were virtually one and the same thing, so that where our love was sin, our will would be sinful, and where our love was virtue, our will would be virtuous: “rightly directed will is good love and wrongly directed will is bad love.” Every voluntary action involved a “cause” or, in other words, a “will,” and in this sense had an inner dimension as well as an outer one. Giving to the poor (or simply deciding to give to the poor) was the outer dimension of an action; the inner dimension would include our motive, such as “from pity” or “for the sake of boasting”; but the motive did not exhaust this inner dimension, since the idea of a cause or will involved more than the motive. In particular, the cause or will indicated what we loved – that is, it indicated what we set ourselves as our ultimate goal or end. Hence, “right faith” could be present as part of the causa or voluntas: in the absence of right faith, our motive might stay the same, but we would have an evil cause, or a wrongly directed will, indicating the presence in a person of a love which was sinful. With right faith, we would have a rightly directed will, indicating the presence of the love that was virtue. While giving money to the poor would be morally neutral, and a motive like “pity” would be morally neutral too, yet our wills were never morally neutral; hence, the same outward thing, motivated by the same sentiment of pity, could be part of a virtuous or a sinful action. In the above passage from Against Lying, Augustine expressed the view that every sociable thing was morally neutral, becoming part of a good or bad action depending on the moral character of the cause or will which was also part of this action. Unfortunately, however, he did not develop a distinct terminology to convey this idea that all sociable things were morally neutral in themselves. Instead, he used the idea that things could simply appear to be good deeds to indicate that the outward part of an action did not necessarily have a moral status when it was considered on its own. For example, in one of the passages quoted above, after stating that virtuous people and sinners alike fed the hungry and clothed the naked, he indicated that the work of feeding the hungry or clothing the naked was not in itself a “truly good work” – instead, it counted as a truly good work only through a consideration of a person’s love: “Is lust rooted there? A show may be made of good deeds, truly good works there cannot be. Is charity rooted there? Have no fear, nothing evil can come of



Civ. Dei ., quoted by Byers, Perception, p. .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

that.” Where there was “lust,” that is, the love that was sin, feeding the poor had nothing more than the appearance of being good – it outwardly resembled a good work, while inwardly lacking the necessary love to make it good; it was only when charity was added to something like feeding the poor that it became part of a truly good action. In the same way, Augustine stated elsewhere: Let no one count his works before faith as good. For they seem to me to be like great efforts and a very fast race off the track; because when there was no faith, there was no good work, for it is intention which makes a work good, and it is faith which directs the intention. Do not pay attention so much to what a man does, but to what he has in view as he does it, to which he directs with the greatest skill all his effort.

Here, again, he refused to use the term “good” of the observable part of an action; rather, he reserved this term for our actions when considered not only in their outer dimension but in their inner dimension as well – it was our intention, that is, the end that we set for ourselves (hence, what we loved) which “makes a work good.” Thus, underlying this claim was his acknowledgement that the lives of the virtuous and vicious could be identical in their outward or visible aspect; we needed to look within, at the intention present in a deed, to know if a given deed was virtuous. In another place, he stated that “where there is no love, no good work is imputed, nor is there any good work, rightly so called; because ‘whatsoever is not of faith is sin’ (Rom. :) and ‘faith works by love’ (Gal. :).” Faith and love needed to be added to something to make it part of a good work; by implication, the same thing accomplished without faith and love was part of a sin. In these passages, Augustine withheld the term “good work” from anything which was not “truly good” – thereby indicating that he was writing about a class of things which were not themselves sinful, but which were not themselves good either. In other words, he used the idea of good works to indicate that he was writing about things which were, in themselves, morally neutral – becoming (part of ) a good action through the addition of faith and love. This was the way that Augustine most commonly used the term “good work” in his writings: How many appear to be engaged in good works outside the Church? How many even among pagans feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome guests, visit the

 

Ep. Jo., Homily .. Gr. et Pecc. Or., .



En. Ps., Exposition  of Psalm , at .

Political Virtues?



sick, console prisoners? How many are there who do all this? It looks as though the turtledove is hatching chicks, but she has not found herself a nest. How many [of these works] are carried out by great numbers of heretics, but not in the Church – carried out by heretics who do not put their squabs in the nest? Their little ones will be trodden on and crushed. They will not survive or be kept safe.

Here, he wrote of things like feeding the poor and clothing the naked as merely having the appearance of good works when accomplished outside the Church. He was clear that the lack of faith of the people who did these things meant that their actions (their “young”) were “crushed” – in other words, feeding the poor, and so on, was a morally neutral thing, which became part of a good or bad action, depending on the presence or absence of Christian faith. When heretics or pagans fed the poor, and so on, this outward thing became part of a sinful action, through the absence of right faith, and hence became part of an action which deserved to be “crushed.” So did Augustine think that all our actions were morally neutral in their outward dimension? The above has found that he looked on the outward dimension of any deed which the virtuous did as morally neutral, since exactly the same outward things could be done by the vicious. That is, for him, every outward thing which was sociable or other-oriented or desired by God was actually a morally neutral thing which became part of a sinful or virtuous action only when considered in the light of what we loved. But what about those outward things which he thought could never be found among the virtuous? In the passage from Against Lying quoted at the beginning of this section, Augustine explained that the outward dimension of all our voluntary actions was of two kinds: they were either morally neutral (“now good, now evil, according as their causes are good or evil”), or they were “sins in themselves.” He explained that by sins in themselves he had in mind things like theft: “Who is there that would say, That we may have to give to the poor, let us commit thefts upon the rich: or Let us sell false witness, especially if innocent men are not hurt thereby, but rather guilty men are rescued from the judges who would condemn them?” Things like theft and forgery were always sinful: they were not morally neutral things which would be part of a sinful or virtuous action depending on the love present in a person; rather, they were always sins. Thus he concluded the above passage by finding that these things were “clearly sins”: when these things formed part of an action, the action in question was a sin and it was 

En. Ps., Exposition of Psalm , at .



Contra Mendacium .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

completely unnecessary to examine its “cause” to establish its status as sinful: “Those things which are clearly sins, are upon no plea of a good cause, with no seeming good end, no alleged good intention, to be done.. . . Who is there that will say, that upon good causes they may be done, so as either to be no sins, or what is more absurd, just sins?” In this section of Against Lying, he introduced the term “sins in themselves” (per se ipsa peccata) and distinguished sins in themselves from things which were morally neutral, that is, from things which became part of a good or bad action depending on the moral character of their cause (and hence depending on what a person loved). It is important to clarify what Augustine was saying in declaring that things like murder or theft or lying were sins in themselves. He was clear elsewhere that things like murder, lying, theft, or adultery were things which could only ever be present among those whose loves were sinful so that people who did these things always acted with a sinful love. But in declaring that these things were “sins in themselves,” Augustine was saying something more. He was saying that whoever committed murder or theft, and so on, sinned twice over. All actions which, in their outward dimension, were anti-social and other-harming were always inspired by a sinful love (they were inspired by carnal concupiscence – the love of something temporal) and so they were always sinful actions; yet in this section of Against Lying Augustine found that the outward dimension of these actions was also something sinful – he found that all unsociable things, whether lying, murder, theft, and so on, were themselves sins: whenever they occurred, they would always be part of a sinful action but, in addition, they were themselves sinful. In other words, his view was that any outward thing which could only ever be part of a sinful action (i.e., which could only ever be found among those who loved something temporal) was itself a sinful thing: for Augustine, this included anti-social actions, but also sexual sins like adultery. Hence, people who committed murder were actually guilty of two sins: they were guilty of the evil thing called murder and they were also guilty of doing a “sinful action,” that is, of doing something while loving sinfully. Arguably, his position here arose from his dissatisfaction with the Stoic view that all sins were equal, a view which he explicitly rejected in a number of places. The view that all sins were equal implied that a   

 Ibid., . Conf. . and De Libero Arbitrio ..–.. This is discussed further in Chapter  and Chapter . Spir. et Litt. ; C. Jul. ..; and Letter , to Jerome, at ..

Political Virtues?



murderer and someone who, while having a sinful love, gave all their money to the poor were equally sinful: they both did a sinful action, that is, an action which had an evil cause because love for the true God was lacking. Augustine’s notion of “sins in themselves,” however, allowed him to find that a murderer was the more sinful of the two since a murderer sinned twice over. This allowed him to find, in turn, that murderers would receive a harsher punishment from God than nonChristians who donated all their money to feed the poor. Both were sinners, but they were not equally sinful: in giving money to the poor, the non-Christian sinned only once, in having a sinful cause present in their action, that is, in acting without right faith and hence without love for the true God. In contrast, murderers sinned both in having an evil will or cause and in the sin of murder itself. This allowed Augustine to find that God would not inflict the same punishment on everyone – everyone who lacked Christian faith would be punished as a sinner, but sinners would not all be punished with the same severity. Murderers would certainly be punished more severely than non-believers who had led lives which, considered in their outward dimension, were entirely blameless. The only sinful thing about these non-believers’ actions was the loves that were present in them, but murderers were doubly sinful, since they sinned not only in their deed’s inner dimension (in the sinful love that necessarily inspired murder) but in their deed’s outer dimension as well. Thus, non-Christians who gave to the poor from pity always acted sinfully, but this was a matter of their loves, and not of any other aspect of this action. Nonetheless, Augustine indicated that giving to the poor from pity, and so on, was not a virtuous thing, but merely a morally neutral thing, and hence that it in no way earned an eternal reward. As Augustine implied in the passage from Against Lying, the outward dimension of all our actions was either morally neutral or a sin in itself. These were the only two possibilities: there was no possibility that the outward dimension of an action could be virtuous. Rather, all those outward things which God wanted us to do were merely morally neutral things – the virtuous would always do these things, but the vicious could do them too, hence they were “now good, now evil, according as their causes are good or evil.” Consequently, when non-Christians led lives full of these outward things, they were sinners, albeit not as sinful as they would be if their



Spir. et Litt. .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

lives involved anti-social, other-harming, or ‘lustful’ things which were sins in themselves. Augustine stated this position powerfully in the following passage from Against Two Letters of the Pelagians. Here, he explained that we could not necessarily know whether or not a person was vicious merely by observing the external things about their life; a moral judgement passed upon us on this basis might err because the lives of non-Christians could potentially be more replete with other-oriented, sociable, chaste things than the lives of Christians, yet non-Christians were always sinners, accomplishing nothing virtuous. Our faith – that is, the catholic faith – distinguishes the just from the unjust not by the law of works, but by that of faith, because the just by faith lives. By which distinction it results that the man who leads his life without murder, without theft, without false-witness, without coveting other men’s goods, giving due honour to his parents, chaste even to continence from all carnal intercourse whatever, even conjugal, most liberal in alms-giving, most patient of injuries; who not only does not deprive another of his goods, but does not even ask again for what has been taken away from himself; or who has even sold all his own property and appropriated it to the poor, and possesses nothing which belongs to him as his own; – with such a character as this, laudable as it seems to be, if he has not a true and catholic faith in God, must yet depart from this life to condemnation.

Here, Augustine described how an unbeliever – a heretic or pagan – might exceed a catholic Christian in liberality in alms-giving and numerous other sociable things as well as in exercising self-control over their sexual desires. Yet none of these things amounted to a good work, since “everything which is not of faith is sin” (Rom. :): the presence or absence of right faith alone determined whether these outward things were part of a good or bad action since these things in themselves were morally neutral. When right faith was added to them, however, then they became the outward dimension of a good deed – outwardly, they remained the same, but the inward presence of right faith transformed their moral status; without right faith, they were the outward dimension of a sinful action and so they deserved an eternal punishment. Thus, for Augustine, non-Christians were not all liars, thieves, adulterers, or murderers; they could feed the poor, be faithful to their spouses, refrain from lying, theft, and murder; they could lead lives full of otherserving, sociable things and do everything which the virtuous did. Moreover, they could share the same motives as the virtuous for doing these things – things like pity or the desire to have children. Yet in doing 

C. Ep. Pel. ..

Political Virtues?



all these things they would act sinfully. In these cases, ‘sinful’ did not describe the outward part of their actions; rather, ‘sinful’ simply said something very particular about the inward dimension of their actions – it indicated that their faith was not right, meaning that they did not love the true God, which meant, in turn, that the “cause” (or will) that was part of these voluntary actions was sinful. For Augustine, all actions in which the cause was sinful were sinful actions, and all actions in which the cause was good were good actions; hence, non-Christians always acted sinfully. Before closing this chapter, it is important to turn to some passages in Augustine’s writings which are often adduced as evidence that he thought, on the contrary, that to lack faith in Christ was to have a tendency to do unsociable things – that is, to fail to give others their due of social and political goods. The above findings invite us to read these passages with fresh eyes. In City of God Book , Chapter , he famously declared that, in the absence of justice, kingdoms were no different to robber bands: “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?” Through supposing that “justice,” for Augustine, was a political virtue, scholars have read this passage as his declaration that non-Christian kingdoms were full of anti-social actions. This reading assumes that, for him, robbers treated each other anti-socially, with the result that his message here was that non-Christian kingdoms, which lacked justice – or more specifically, which lacked true justice – were likewise full of unsociable actions: both robber bands and pagan kingdoms lacked justice, understood as a political virtue. Now that it is established, however, that Augustine did not view justice as a political virtue, an alternative reading of this passage presents itself. Far from suggesting that robber bands lacked the capacity to distribute goods fairly among their members, Augustine can now be understood as saying in this passage that this was all that they were capable of doing: internally, robber bands were ruled and organised according to the principle of giving to each of the bands’ members their “due” – a fair share of the goods that had been pillaged. Thus, the passage quoted above  

Civ. Dei .. Fortin, “Justice as the Foundation,” p. , sees Augustine’s discussion of Alexander and the robber bands in Book , Chapter , as expressing “the same grim judgement regarding the possibility of human justice”: “kingdoms are nothing but robber bands . . . save for the magnitude of the crimes involved and the impunity with which they are committed.”



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

continued: “The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy (pacto societatis); the booty is divided by the law agreed on.” In other words, there was honour among thieves. Yet this internally equitable arrangement stood in sharp contrast to the abjectly unjust object of all their activities – to seize the possessions of those outside their little society. Superficially, Alexander’s empire appeared different to a robber band because there was no robbing of those outside its borders. Yet Augustine declared here that Alexander’s empire and all non-Christian kingdoms were no different to robberies: like robber bands, they were able to give to their members their due of social and political goods; but, like robber bands, they were incapable of directing these activities to the appropriate end – this end was the love and worship of the true God. Any society which lacked this objective was necessarily unjust simply because to give our fellow human beings their due, but to fail to give God His due, was to be unjust. Hence, if we judged things according to what ultimately mattered – what determined our ultimate destiny – Alexander’s great empire was no different to a robber band. Both lacked justice because the key characteristic of justice was not that we distributed goods within our society equitably, nor was its key characteristic that we did not rob those outside our circle of confederates; rather, the key characteristic of justice was that we loved God and hence had God as the end of everything which we did. In a later passage in City of God, Augustine famously declared that “there is nothing so unsocial by vice, so social by nature (tam discordiosum vitio, tam sociale natura), as humankind.” This passage has also been read as meaning that, for Augustine, sinfulness always resulted in unsociability. Yet the idea that we were social by nature and unsociable by vice was a claim which any Stoic or Platonist would have agreed with: human nature fitted us for sociability and hence unsociable conduct sprang from a failure to conform our outward lives to the demands of our nature (i.e., to the dictates of reason), which in turn sprang from vice, in the form of the love for something temporal. Yet living in full conformity with nature required more of us than sociability – it demanded that we loved in accordance with our nature as well; in the Stoic-Platonic tradition, loving in accordance with our nature was virtue. Hence the idea that we were “unsocial by vice, and social by nature,” while



Civ. Dei ..



Civ. Dei ..

Political Virtues?



consistent with the view that unsociable conduct was always in itself a sin, did not entail that vice necessarily resulted in unsociable conduct: when we were unsociable, it was always “by vice,” but we could be sociable “by vice” as well. In other words, while this statement indicated that our nature was sociable, it did not state that we were only ever social “by virtue.” Hence, this comment can be understood as supporting the view that sociability could be found among the vicious; the vicious could succeed in living sociably because their vice could be a matter not of their outward lives but simply of their inner lives – namely, their love for something which was not the true God. Finally, there is the question of Augustine’s preference for seeing Christians in temporal government. He expressed this preference, for example, in Letter . Here he wrote of Christianity as providing the best foundation for the welfare of a state, a statement which could be read as meaning that he saw Christians as better able than non-Christians to live together sociably. Yet this passage does not need to be read in this way: it is susceptible to another interpretation which harmonises it with his acceptance elsewhere that non-Christian societies could live according to the same standards for social and political life as Christian ones. Instead, by the idea that a Christian state alone was “perfectly established and preserved,” Augustine arguably had in mind something more than its temporal welfare – the Christian state was perfectly established because it alone would last beyond this life, into eternity. That is, the bond and concord among Christians was the strongest bond of all because it would last forever. In short, in praising Christian government, Augustine does not need to be read as declaring that Christian government was politically and socially better than non-Christian government. This claim would conflict with his recognition elsewhere that non-Christians could do all the same sociable things as Christians. Instead, his praise of Christian government was arguably the result of his pastoral concerns – Christian rulers were the defenders, promoters, and exemplars of true religion; as such, they were best placed to establish on earth a society of Christians which would endure forever.



Letter , to Volusianus, at .: “for no state (civitas) is perfectly established and preserved otherwise than on the foundation and by the bond of faith and of firm concord, when the highest and truest common good, namely, God, is loved by all, and men love each other in Him without dissimulation because they love one another for His sake from whom they cannot disguise the real character of their love.”



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

This chapter has addressed the question of whether Augustine viewed the virtue of justice as a political virtue. It has found that he did not. If he considered that justice was a political virtue, then this would mean that, for him, the people who possessed justice in its true form (Christians) would necessarily live according to a higher social and political standard than people who possessed this justice in an inferior form. On the contrary, Augustine’s view was that non-Christians, who altogether lacked true justice, could live according to the highest social and political standards too. For him, whether people were just with merely human justice – the justice that could be found among pagans, Jews, and other nonChristians – or just with true justice, the same actions would characterise their visible lives: outwardly the lives of non-Christians who were humanly just would be exactly the same as those of Christians – they would feed the hungry, care for the sick, protect others from harm, and do all the outward things that God required of us. The difference between human justice and true justice lay simply in the loves present in each – to say that a person lacked true justice was not necessarily to say anything about the shape of that person’s outward life, but only to say that they failed to love the true God. At the same time, Augustine was able to reach this understanding of human justice and true justice, and still maintain that Christians alone accomplished good deeds (or truly good deeds), while everyone else sinned in everything which they did, because he looked upon giving other human beings their due of social, economic, and political goods; or living chastely with our spouses; or exercising other forms of sexual self-control; and so on as morally neutral things, meaning that they were worthy neither of an eternal punishment nor of an eternal reward. Instead, he held that these things would become part of a sinful action or of a good action according to whether people loved the true God or something else instead. Hence, a person who was humanly just was actually a sinner in all that they did, since, by definition, that person always lacked love for God. This person would be less sinful than someone who lacked even human justice, since people who were just with human justice never did anything which was a sin in itself (they never murdered, stole, lied, committed adultery, or did any of those outward things which the virtuous would never do); nonetheless, all the actions of the humanly just were sinful, as lacking in love for the true God. In this sense, human justice, describing as it did the fact that a person’s love was sinful, described the fact that a person sinned: for this reason, people who were humanly just shared a common destiny of eternal punishment with the unjust.

Political Virtues?



In this way, with his notion of human justice, Augustine indicated that non-Christians would have both the knowledge and the motivation to lead lives which were, outwardly, identical to the lives of Christians, who alone were truly just. Non-Christians would not know of the moral requirement to love and worship the Christian God; they would sin in giving the love that was owed to God to other things; but their lives could be filled with the same morally neutral outward deeds as the lives of Christians; and when this happened Augustine described their lives as humanly just. If we accept that Augustine developed his account of virtue and sin from within the eudaimonist ethical tradition, then this conclusion should not surprise us. Things such as murder, theft, lying, and adultery sprang from the sinful love of what was temporal – that is, the sinful love of some material or sensual thing. Eudaimonism thus found that to do any of these things was to act sinfully. This explains Augustine’s view that non-Christians would know that they sinned in doing any of these things and his view that they would always have a reason to seek to avoid doing any of these things.

 Political Vices?

As the previous chapter concluded, Augustine’s view was that nonChristians could lead lives which were outwardly identical to the lives of Christians: in attaining nothing more than a human justice, nonChristians remained sinners, but their sin lay in their loves, and not in their outward lives. This conclusion challenges the view that Augustine saw certain ‘political vices’ as inevitably found among non-Christians. If he did not make possessing ‘political virtue’ dependent on possessing faith in Christ, then it follows that he did not make possessing ‘political vice’ the inevitable result of the absence of this faith in Christ. Yet scholars of Augustine’s social and political thought point to his description of the vices typical of the earthly city – the love of material possessions, the love of human glory, and the love of temporal domination – to argue that he saw this city as politically and socially vicious. These loves are all seemingly loves



John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, ): Augustine considered that what bound Roman society together was not social justice, but “the pursuit of individual dominium, honour and glory” (p. ). This Roman ethic of individualism (“Augustine here rightly detects a fundamental individualism at work in the heroic ideals of antiquity,” p. ) opposed the truly social ethic of Christianity. For Milbank, Augustine’s argument in City of God was that forgiveness, love for other human beings, and peace were uniquely espoused by Christians and hence formed a unique Christian ethic (as opposed to the violence and individualism of pagan ethics). Dodaro also sees Augustine as identifying Roman values as socially divisive. Robert Dodaro, “Augustine’s Secular City,” in Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, eds., Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner (London: Routledge, ), pp. –: “the examples of heroic virtue amplify within the soul the rhetoric of glory which permeates the empire . . . They thereby fuel the political



Political Vices?



which motivate anti-social, other-harming behaviour; hence, in attributing these loves to the earthly city, Augustine’s message would seem to have been that no one in this city could ever be humanly just. According to this interpretation, Augustine’s view was that, driven by the belief that they needed wealth, or human glory, or temporal domination in order to be happy, non-Christians would be led to do anti-social things; they would be led to think that it was only by doing these things that they could achieve happiness. Yet we have seen, on the contrary, that Augustine did think that human justice was attainable among the citizens of the earthly city; consequently, his view could not have been that the loves that were found in the earthly city inevitably led people to do things which were sinful. He held that these loves were themselves sins, and that all the actions of those who loved in this way were sinful actions through the presence in them of one of these sinful loves. However, given that his view was that it was possible for the citizens of the earthly city to be humanly just, he must have thought that the sinful loves which were typical of the earthly city were all loves which were compatible with leading lives full of morally neutral things, rather than things which were sins in themselves. This chapter looks in detail at Augustine’s discussion of the love of human glory, the love of domination over other human beings, and the love of material possessions. It finds that he thought that people could love with these loves and yet treat others fairly, protect them from harm, and in every other respect conduct themselves towards others in accordance with the highest social and political standards. Hence, this chapter offers further evidence that Augustine agreed with the Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism that there were no necessary differences between the virtuous and the vicious, other than their different loves.

     Augustine considered that the citizens of the earthly city looked for happiness on earth and that many looked for it in material possessions. The love of material possessions might seem to be a love which necessarily fantasies and ambitions of ruling elites.. . . For Augustine, the spiritual liberation that the soul requires in order to govern the city justly consists in a freedom from such interdependent rhetorics [rhetorics of “self-mastery and imperial glory”], because true pardon and reconciliation, both of which are essential to social justice, can only be produced between individuals who continually recognise themselves as sinners in need of God’s pardon.”



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

implicated people in vicious behaviour. Hence, the question arises of whether or not Augustine thought that there could be anything at all which could ensure that lovers of material possessions did nothing sinful, but always conducted themselves appropriately towards other people. In what follows, I find that Augustine’s view was that, no matter what material possessions we loved, if we believed in a God who invariably inflicted temporal punishments on the wicked, while blessing the virtuous with material rewards, then we would be led by our very love of material things to observe the moral law. He illustrated this with the case of Jewish believers. Augustine considered that all Jewish believers set their sights on attaining this-worldly goals, but he also held that they scrupulously fulfilled the moral law, at least as this law touched upon their outward lives: loving material possessions, but fearing the wrath of God, they adhered strictly to the demands that the moral law placed upon their conduct, while inevitably violating it, unbeknownst to them, at the level of their loves. Augustine, in a manner typical of his time, identified the Jewish people with the ‘flesh.’ For him, the Jewish people had looked for their happiness on earth, rather than in heaven in the knowledge of God: theirs had been a fleshly, not a spiritual, faith. Hence, he held that the characteristic sin of the Jews was the love of material prosperity. Yet Augustine also held that the Jewish people had feared God: they had understood God as the giver, and guarantor, of earthly blessings, and also as the one who would exact temporal punishments for transgressions of the moral law. In particular, according to Augustine, the Jews looked on God as the one who would bestow material rewards on the just, and deny these rewards to sinners. Writing with reference to Romans :, “The spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again,” he explained: “Most clearly Paul distinguishes between the periods of the two testaments, the one pertaining to fear, the new to love.. . . For on account of this fear, they who lived under the law and not grace lived their whole lives in the spirit of slavery.” Shortly before this statement, he had explained that the “wisdom of the flesh” (after Rom. :) referred to “seeking worldly goods and fearing worldly evils”: “wherefore rightly the 



Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). For his identification of the Jewish people with the flesh, see “The Redemption of the Flesh,” pp. –. Ex. Prop. Rm., Proposition . See also Div. Qu., Question ., “‘For those who live after the flesh have a taste for the things of the flesh’ (Rom :), i.e. they hunger after fleshly or carnal goods as the highest goods.”



Political Vices?

Apostle names it the ‘wisdom of the flesh’ when man seeks these lesser, transient goods and fears to lose what must be lost some day.” Likewise on Galatians :, “For the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh,” he held that, living at the stage “under the law,” when the law was known, but there was as yet no grace to enable obedience, people sought to fulfil the moral law, not from a love for justice, but because they wanted the law “to serve [them] in procuring earthly things.” Love was freedom, while fear was slavery. Yet, importantly, Jewish believers’ slavery was slavery to the moral law: their fear made them the slaves of the law – they wanted justice to serve them in procuring earthly things. That is, they saw obedience to the moral law as the means of earning God’s favour in this life, manifested in the bestowal of earthly blessings, while disobedience would earn them temporal retribution. Yet their love was always for these temporal rewards, and not for justice itself, and hence their obedience was not given freely, but given slavishly under the coercion of fear. Nonetheless, while criticising the Jewish people’s motives, Augustine accepted that there was a sense in which they did obey the moral law: they obeyed it ‘outwardly’ at the level of their deeds, while disobeying it inwardly, at the level of their loves. Thus, as discussed in the previous chapter with reference to Philippians :, he explained that the justice that Paul had possessed as a Jewish believer was a justice of outward obedience to the law, stemming from fear: [Do not] let us be disturbed by what he wrote to the Philippians: “According to justice which is in the law, one who is without reproach.” For he could be within in evil affections a transgressor of the law, and yet fulfil the open works of the law, either by the fear of men or of God Himself; but by the terror of punishment, not by love and delight in justice. For it is one thing to do good with the will of doing good, and another thing to be so inclined by the will to do evil, that one would actually do it if it could be allowed without punishment. For thus assuredly he is sinning within in his will itself, who abstains from sin not by will but by fear.

Augustine’s argument in this passage was that people who kept the law’s precepts through fear of divine punishment must love not God, nor the law, but something which God could take from them. Consequently, although these people obeyed the law, the fact that they loved something other than the law meant that they would have preferred to be able to



Ex. Prop. Rm., Proposition .



Ex. Gal. ..



C. Ep. Pel. ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

gain what they loved without needing to obey the law. Thus, prior to his conversion, Paul had possessed “the will to do evil”: he had wanted to gain his temporal goals without needing to meet his moral obligations; nonetheless, he had accepted that attaining his temporal loves was dependent upon remaining in God’s favour. Hence, he had sought to live in total obedience to the moral law; his fear had led him to be a reliable doer of “the open works of the law.” That is, he did “good,” albeit not with a genuine will of doing good, but rather with a secret longing to do precisely the opposite of what he did. Yet, of course, this love of earthly things and the will for disobedience to which it gave rise were themselves sins, with the result that Paul had remained a sinner – he had remained a violator of the moral law – even as he had conformed his outward conduct to the precepts of the law. Thus, in the passage quoted earlier from his commentary on Galatians, Augustine explained that the Jewish people had remained “under the law”: life under the law was characterised by the desire to obey the moral law, coupled with the constant failure to obey it. In other words, the Jewish people’s obedience to the moral law was not a true obedience; rather, their obedience was simply a matter of their outward deeds. Since Augustine considered that sin was a matter not only of our deeds but also of our loves, he held that, in avoiding sin merely in what they did outwardly, Jewish believers had not avoided sinning. Thus, in the following passage, he wrote of Jewish believers “doing what the law commanded” while nonetheless being found guilty by God because of their “unlawful” desire. For whoever did even what the law commanded, without the assistance of the Spirit of grace, acted through fear of punishment, not from love of justice, and hence in the sight of God that was not in the will, which in the sight of men appeared in the work; and such doers of the law were held rather guilty of that which God knew they would have preferred to commit, if only it had been possible with impunity. He calls, however, “the circumcision of the heart” the will that is pure from all unlawful desire; which comes not from the letter, inculcating and threatening, but from the Spirit, assisting and healing.

To escape from guilt at the level of our deeds was not necessarily to escape from all guilt: those who avoided sin in their outward lives, while loving something temporal, did not escape all guilt, since when the law was “servilely kept . . . it is not kept at all.” The love of temporal things,



Spir. et Litt. .



Ibid., .

Political Vices?



which Augustine considered kept Jewish believers slavishly obeying the moral law from the fear of being denied these temporal things by God, itself constituted these people’s disobedience. For Augustine, the moral law forbade us from locating our happiness in the possession of any earthly thing; hence the Jewish people, while avoiding sin in their outward deeds, yet did nothing good, since they sinned at the level of their loves. the Jews . . . were driven to fulfil [the works of the law] by fear – not the fear that ‘is pure and endures forever’ (Ps. : (:)), but that which made them fear for their own present lives. It was for this reason that they fulfilled certain works of the law that are counted among the sacraments. They absolutely could not, however, fulfil the works having to do with good morals, for these can be fulfilled only by love. Not to kill another human being in order not to be killed oneself, does not fulfil the command of justice; what does fulfil it is not to kill another human being because it is unjust, even if one could get away with it not only with other people but even with God.

When Jewish believers refrained from killing unjustly, he held that they did so, ultimately, because they were too attached to their earthly lives and feared to lose these lives as a punishment for their unjust actions. They refrained not from a love of justice but from a love of this life, and so their deed was not a good deed at all, but a sin. Thus, elsewhere, he wrote of the fear of punishment keeping the “flame of concupiscence” in check (“transcend[ing] the pleasure of lust”), so that a person did not follow its promptings. Yet this concupiscence itself was a transgression of the law. In this way, Augustine accepted that faithful Jewish believers obeyed the moral law in the sense that they avoided all the ‘outward’ deeds that the moral law condemned as sinful, convinced that this amounted to a complete obedience to the moral law, and hence that it would secure for them the temporal rewards that they desired. But he also insisted that these same people always disobeyed the moral law at the level of their loves because they had feared, rather than loved, God and had been motivated at all times by this fear of God and the sinful love of the things of this world.

 



See Div. Qu. . and Ex. Prop. Rm., Proposition : “When therefore people feared rather than loved justice, the law was not fulfilled.” Ex. Gal. . Spir. et Litt. : “the fear which is forced to have in its work the thing which is lawful” and Nat. et Gr. : “For that man is under the law, who, from fear of the punishment which the law threatens, and not from any love for justice, obliges himself to abstain from the work of sin.” Spir. et Litt. .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Augustine found that God had rewarded the Jewish people’s ‘human’ justice with an earthly reward. God had given them an earthly Jerusalem, as God had promised that He would, but this was actually God’s way of punishing them in the long term. In being given this reward, they were led to believe that their lives were entirely pleasing to God; and so they were prevented from examining themselves to see what was present in them which was not pleasing to God. Hence, they continued in their sin, and so they stored up for themselves an eternal punishment after death. In this way, Augustine took the contrast that Paul drew between the ‘flesh’ and the ‘spirit,’ ‘fear’ and ‘love,’ to mean that the Jewish religion combined the love of earthly blessings with the fear that God would punish their sinfulness by denying them the temporal things that they loved. His message was that, fearing to incur God’s wrath because they believed that God would punish sinners with temporal hardships, and believing that God would reward virtue with temporal blessings, faithful Jewish believers consistently avoided sin as regarded their deeds, thereby earning (nothing more than) a temporal reward, while inevitably sinning at the level of their loves, and so losing the eternal reward.

    Jewish believers located their happiness in having temporal things, meaning that they loved these things in the sense of eros, but Augustine held that this love did not lead them to neglect their obligations to other people or to do any of the outward things prohibited by the moral law. Possibly, however, he thought that among other non-Christian groups, the love of temporal things would inevitably have these consequences, if it was granted that these groups did not share the Jewish beliefs about God. On the contrary, Augustine’s position was that, among other nonChristian groups, the love of temporal things did not inevitably leave people liable to do anti-social things. Arguably, the background to his thinking here was provided by the Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism with its view that vicious people were able to learn from reason that everyone’s temporal welfare was a good (meaning, something which it was natural for human beings to seek for its own sake), and likewise to apply their reason to discover all the other ‘outward’ actions that they must avoid in order to live in complete accordance with human nature. 

Div. Qu. . and ..

Political Vices?



Some sinners might be pulled in two directions – wanting to seek others’ temporal welfare, but having loves which were not compatible with always doing so; other sinners, however, might find a way of reconciling their sinful loves with their desire to do all the actions that the life fully in accordance with human nature demanded of them, and consequently they would lead lives full of these things. This was not the same as the Jewish motive of fear, since, in this latter case, these people would not have a will (held in check by fear) to do otherwise than they did; rather, these deeds would be chosen and accomplished freely as matching both what these people desired for their outward lives and their loves. So what sinful loves did Augustine see as reconcilable with the desire to do only sociable things and all the other (morally neutral) things which would fill the lives of the virtuous? One of the sinful loves that Augustine viewed as typical of pagan Rome was the love of temporal glory. It has been claimed that he saw this love as necessarily an anti-social love: glory has been called an individualistic, ‘heroic’ ideal, which threw people into competition with each other, and meant that they could not admit their faults and seek forgiveness for wrongdoing. If glory was understood by Augustine simply as ‘popular acclaim’ – winning the praise of as many people as possible – then it follows that he must have viewed the love of glory as always carrying within it the potential to inspire people to sin: after all, the majority of the populace might be impressed by the cruel or unfair treatment of minorities; they might fail to disapprove of sexual or other conduct which was sinful; or, at best, they might care only for the appearance of virtue, thus encouraging people to sin in secret and to refuse to confess their past misdeeds. Hence, we need to investigate whether or not Augustine equated the love of glory to the love of popular acclaim. Augustine considered that it was sinful to locate one’s happiness in the possession of temporal glory; to do so was to give to glory the love that was owed to God. But did Augustine see the sinful love of one’s own glory as always leading people to commit sins, or did he see it as one of those vicious loves which could be reconciled with valuing others’ temporal welfare and conducting one’s outward life to the highest moral standards? He dedicated City of God, Book , to an exploration of pagan Rome’s love of glory. Importantly, in this work, he accepted that the love of human glory could take different forms: among some Romans it



The view of Milbank and Dodaro. See note  above.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

corresponded to the love of popular approval, but among others, it referred to loving the praise of one’s own conscience or loving the praise of people who judged well. In both these latter cases, what people sought was praise for conforming their outward lives to the highest moral standards: that is, they sought praise for being virtuous – not just virtuous in the public eye, but virtuous in every part of their lives. In these cases, these people’s understanding of virtue was necessarily flawed but it was flawed in only one respect: they mistakenly supposed that there was no sin in loving this glory; outwardly, their lives were no different to the lives of those who were truly virtuous in loving the Christian God. In other words, these lovers of glory were humanly just: they had accurately identified the actions that were compatible with living in accordance with the highest moral standards; and they had reconciled their love for glory with their desire to do only these actions by finding all such actions glorious and loving only the glory that they would receive for doing these deeds. In City of God, Book , Augustine adopted the narrative of late Republican writers like Sallust who attributed the decline in morals among the Romans, which they believed was evidenced by the civil wars, to the Roman love for wealth. Earlier, men had sought to win glory and advancement by ruling well (by Virgil’s arts of good government), but later they had sought to win these by any means because they saw glory and advancement as a way to enrich themselves: “these men of base character . . . did not seek after honours and glory by these arts, but by treachery and deceit.” Augustine noted that men had initially sought to prove their merit, but once they became greedy for wealth they resorted to trickery; quoting Sallust again, “the good man strives to overtake [glory, honour and power] by the true way.” And what is meant by seeking the attainment of glory, honour, and power by good arts, is to seek them by virtue, and not by deceitful intrigue; for the good and the ignoble man alike desire these things, but the good man strives to overtake them by the true way. The way is virtue, along which he presses as to the goal of





C. Tornau, “Does Augustine Accept Pagan Virtue? The Place of Book  in the Argument of the City of God,” Studia Patristica  (): –. Tornau notes that City of God, Book , Chapter , is basically a commentary on Sallust’s Catiline’s War (p. ). Tornau also draws attention to the comparison between Caesar and Cato in Book , but I disagree with Tornau’s view that Augustine intends a strong condemnation of Caesar (“Augustine’s criticism of Caesar is very severe,” p. ). Civ. Dei ..

Political Vices?



possession – namely, to glory, honour, and power. Now that this was a sentiment engrained in the Roman mind, is indicated even by the temples of their gods; for they built in very close proximity the temples of Virtue and Honour, worshipping as gods the gifts of God. Hence we can understand what they who were good thought to be the end of virtue, and to what they ultimately referred it, namely, to honour; for, as to the bad, they had no virtue though they desired honour, and strove to possess it by fraud and deceit.

Most Romans had originally prized virtue and rewarded it with honour, glory, and high position. Hence, they had erected their temples to virtue and honour. Yet by the time of the civil wars, there were two types of men among the Romans: those who looked upon virtue alone as deserving of glory and advancement, and those who adopted the mere appearance of virtue, but actually used trickery to gain these ends, because their overall aim was to increase their personal wealth. What distinguished these two types of men was the value each placed on acting virtuously: both knew that the possession of virtue was not in fact a prerequisite for receiving glory and advancement, since the mere appearance of virtue was sufficient to win these; yet the first type genuinely prized being virtuous while the second did not. Both wanted honour, glory, and power, but the first valued these only when they were won by virtuous actions, while the second did not. Following Sallust, Augustine offered a comparison of Cato and Caesar, whom Sallust named as two men of “eminent virtue” (ingenti virtute) among the Romans. The contrast between these two men did not lie in the fact that one valued virtue and the other did not; rather, both were examples of men who sought honour, glory, and power through the possession of virtue – that is, who strove for these things “by the true way.” Nonetheless, Augustine concurred with Sallust’s judgement that Cato deserved higher praise than Caesar, because Cato made his aim not honour and glory in the eyes of others but, rather, honour and glory in his own eyes. While both aimed to achieve human glory, and both aimed to achieve it through virtuous actions, Caesar aimed at being honoured by other people, while Cato aimed at the most private kind of renown, namely, his personal praise of himself. Augustine noted that Cato’s approach, namely, to value the testimony of his own conscience over the testimony of other people, was characteristic of virtuous people, since virtue “is content with no human judgment save that of one’s own conscience,” quoting from Paul’s remark in 

Civ. Dei ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

 Corinthians :: “this is our glory: the testimony of our conscience.” This was the difference between Caesar and Cato: Cato did his virtuous actions because he wanted to think well of himself – he sought glory on the private stage of his own conscience – while Caesar did his virtuous actions in order to have others think well of him – and hence he sought glory on the public stage. Again, Augustine did not declare that these different approaches led Cato and Caesar to act differently: both were men of “eminent virtue.” They differed only as to the ends that they chose for their actions – being glorious in his own eyes for one, and being glorious in the eyes of other people for the other – but nonetheless they both adopted the same means, namely, acting in the right way, that is, doing what was virtuous. In other words, they agreed that only virtue was deserving of glory and honour, and so sought these things not by trickery and deceit, but through the possession of virtuous qualities. In the terminology that Augustine used elsewhere, these men were humanly just. Thus, Augustine concluded this section with a reflection on the relationship between the virtue of these Romans and what it really meant to be virtuous. He found that, while these men sought glory, power, and honour by being virtuous, this established that they were not truly virtuous. That glory, honour, and power, therefore, which they desired for themselves, and to which the good sought to attain by good arts – virtue ought not to follow these things, but these things ought to follow virtue (non debet sequi virtus, sed ipsa virtutem). For there is no true virtue except that which is directed towards that end in which is the highest and ultimate good of man. Wherefore even the honours which Cato sought he ought not to have sought, but the city ought to have conferred them on him unsolicited, on account of his virtue.

What difference did Augustine see between the virtue of Cato and Caesar and true virtue? Here, he explained that true virtue had the highest good as its end: in other words, true virtue was a matter of our loves – specifically, loving the true God; it was a matter of recognising God as our highest good and hence as our “end.” Consequently, the virtue of Cato and Caesar was merely a matter of outward actions: their mistake lay not in what they did, but rather in the end that they set themselves; they did the right actions but their goal was honour and glory, not God; and it was

 

Civ. Dei .. See also Galatians :, “Let each man test his own work; and thus he will have his glory in himself, not in another.” Civ. Dei ..

Political Vices?



this goal which meant that, in doing these actions, they fell short of true virtue. Augustine here explained, more particularly, that virtue which set honour and glory as its end was not true virtue because honour and glory ought to follow upon the possession of virtue, and not precede it. This might seem a confusing conclusion to draw: after all, in setting as their goal the honour and glory that were bestowed for virtue, Cato and Caesar presumably thought that they were making these things follow virtue. In fact, Augustine’s message here was that, while supposing that they received honour and glory for the possession of virtue, these men actually counted themselves as honourable and glorious first, and then concluded, on this basis, that they possessed virtue. Hence, they made virtue follow after honour and glory, which established that theirs was not true virtue. He reached this conclusion because he observed that each man reckoned virtue to lie in doing the right actions for the sake of being glorious either in his own eyes or in the eyes of other men. For example, Cato asked himself whether or not he had accomplished his publicspirited actions for no other reason than because he wanted to glory privately in himself for doing this. If his answer was ‘yes,’ then he reckoned himself virtuous. But Augustine found that this made virtue follow upon glory and honour, rather than precede them: glorying in his own sociable, other-oriented conduct, he reckoned himself virtuous. Augustine supposed that the Romans would entirely agree with him that true virtue must come first, with honour and glory given in response to virtue; for this reason, his message was that, by the Romans’ own admission, they were not truly virtuous. He held that it was only by having God as our end that we made honour and glory follow after virtue, instead of preceding it. The truly virtuous, who had God as their end, were only rightly satisfied in their consciences if they understood themselves to have acted not to glory privately in themselves, but with God as their goal. This made the glory we took in ourselves (following Gal. :, “Let each man test his own work; thus he will have glory in himself”) the result of our virtue. Our conscience judged us virtuous for having acted with love for God, and only then did we glory in ourselves. In Cato’s case, however, he viewed virtue as synonymous with acting in a self-sacrificing, public-spirited way for the sake of the glory bestowed by his own conscience, so that glorying in himself became the grounds upon which he judged himself to be virtuous. At the same time, however, Augustine found that “of the two great Romans of that time, Cato was he whose virtue was by far the nearest to



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the true idea of virtue.” This was because there was one sense in which Cato, unlike Caesar, made glory the consequence of virtue, rather than virtue the consequence of glory. Cato did not primarily seek glory or honour in the form of public acclaim, although he viewed public acclaim as desirable if attaining it did not conflict with being virtuous. Thus, he sought first and foremost what he understood as virtue, namely, to act rightly for the sake of satisfying his own conscience. In this sense, he considered virtue as preceding any glory or honour which a city might choose to bestow on him. Cato aimed first to be virtuous, and only wanted to receive public acknowledgement in response to his virtue. This brought him closer to the true ideal of virtue – since it meant that there was a sense in which he considered that virtue must precede glory. Caesar, in contrast, made virtue synonymous with acting in a publicspirited way for the sake of the praise and glory that he received from others. Hence, for Caesar, virtue always followed upon glory, while for Cato, virtue followed upon glory in one sense (since it followed upon privately glorying in oneself ), but in another sense, he looked on glory (meaning, in this case, public glory) as the consequence of virtue. Hence, his idea of virtue was nearer than Caesar’s to the true idea of virtue. In this way, we can see that Augustine’s comments on the virtue of Cato and Caesar in Book  entirely agreed with what he said elsewhere about human justice: there was a sense in which Cato and Caesar could be called virtuous, if they were judged only according to their outward lives, since these lives in no way differed from the lives of the truly virtuous. Yet theirs was never true virtue, but rather vice, since they acted at all times from the sinful love of temporal glory, rather than from love for the true God. Thus, Augustine summed up the example offered by men like Cato and Caesar in Cato’s own words: the best Romans demonstrated “industry at home, just government (iustum imperium) outside their borders, a mind free in deliberation, addicted neither to crime nor to lust.” He concurred with Sallust, however, that the majority of Romans had possessed qualities like these only at certain moments in Rome’s history, namely, at those times when an external danger had threatened Rome itself with conquest. At all other times, the majority of Rome’s ruling class had behaved dishonourably towards the people of Rome, seeking to enslave them. Later, people came to seek wealth above all, and to view glory, honour, and power as merely the means to acquire a fortune: this



Civ. Dei ..

Political Vices?



led them to aim at glory and honour, not by doing what was right, but by “intrigue.” Nonetheless, Cato, along with a handful of other leading Romans, demonstrated that, if the love of power was combined with the love of glory and honour, and if it was not overshadowed by a love of wealth, then it was compatible with acting rightly: But the great things which were then achieved were accomplished through the administration of a few men, who were good in their own way. And by the wisdom and forethought of these few good men, which first enabled the republic to endure these evils and mitigated them, it waxed greater and greater.. . . Wherefore even the praises of Cato are only applicable to a few; for only a few were possessed of that virtue which leads men to pursue after glory, honour, and power by the true way, – that is, by virtue itself.

Cato loved glory, honour, and power, but he did so in a way which ensured that he did what was right. Moreover, he came close to true virtue because he did what was right for the sake of glorying in himself, that is, for the sake of satisfying his own conscience, rather than seeking public approval as his highest goal. Too few Romans shared in Cato’s conception of what was virtuous; yet, nonetheless, it was not an unachievable ideal among them. Cato’s love of glory evidently left him invulnerable to any desire to do sinful things, since he wanted only to do what was right and sought praise first and foremost from his own conscience. Did Caesar’s love for glory likewise leave him invulnerable to wanting to do anything sinful? Augustine was clear that, unlike Cato, Caesar set as his goal public, rather than purely private, glory. Nonetheless, Augustine was also clear that, among those Romans who loved public praise, there were those who had always sought it by virtue – that is, by doing the same kind of things as Cato. In other words, among the Romans, there were three types of lovers of glory: those who simply sought to be glorified by as many people as possible, those exceptional men like Cato who austerely sought to be glorified by their own consciences for doing what was right, and those who likewise sought glory only for doing what was right, but who loved the praise of others, not simply of their own consciences. Augustine referred to this latter group in Chapter , where he noted that “they who desire the true glory even of human praise strive not to displease those who judge well (dant operam bene iudicantibus non displicere).”  

Civ. Dei .. Civ. Dei .. I have modified the translation of Marcus Dods which reads instead: “strive not to displease those who judge well of them.” I do not think “of them” is implied



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

For there are many good moral qualities, of which many are competent judges (de quibus multi bene iudicant), although they are not possessed by many; and by those good moral qualities those men press on to glory, power and domination, of whom Sallust says, “But they press on by the true way.”

In other words, some Romans who sought others’ praise sought only the praise given to them by those who judged well or competently of moral qualities: they wanted to be renowned through the ages for doing virtuous actions – for their prowess in just wars, their generosity, their protection of the vulnerable and service to the public good, and so on. These people were satisfied with something far less than widespread praise for their actions: rather than seeking popularity, they sought the approbation of clear-sighted judges, that is, of others (however few these might be) who shared their high opinion of doing what was right. Augustine noted at the end of Chapter  that the Romans looked on winning renown as a kind of immortality. This observation also supports the idea that he did not view all Romans simply as slavishly seeking to be crowd-pleasers. The fact that he described the Romans as looking on glory as a kind of immortality suggests that he saw some at least of them as rising above the changeable currents of popular opinion, and instead setting their sights simply on winning the praise of those of their posterity who would share their high regard for virtuous deeds. Arguably, Augustine classed Julius Caesar among this group of lovers of glory. As noted already, he described him, along with Cato, as a man of “eminent virtue.” Hence, he looked on Caesar’s love of glory as leading him, like Cato, to do what was right, even when such actions were not popular. Thus, while he accepted that Caesar had sought to conquer other people, he did not state definitively whether or not these conquests were

 

by the Latin – “of them” implies that the judges in question are not impartial judges of actions, but instead choose to think well of these people whatever their actions. My translation agrees with other translations: the Fathers of the Church translation (by Demetrius Zema and Gerald Walsh) reads “are careful not to offend men of sound judgement”; the New City Press translation (by William Babcock) reads “will take care not to displease people of sound judgement”; Bettenson’s translation reads “are anxious for the good opinion of enlightened judges”; finally, Dyson translates this as “will nonetheless take care not to displease men of good judgement.” Civ. Dei .. Julius Caesar was not reviled as a tyrant in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but rather regarded in a reasonably favourable light as the founder of the Roman Empire. See the entry on “Julius Caesar, reception of,” by W. Jeffrey Tatum, in the online Oxford Classical Dictionary: https://doi.org/./acrefore/... Published online  February .

Political Vices?



immoral. He was clear that the Roman Empire had been providentially ordained by God and brought some good to the nations that were conquered. In this sense, he did not condemn the Romans’ expansionist policies; on the contrary, he held that their empire had come into being for a good purpose, namely, to “overcome the grievous evils which existed among other nations.” Augustine did not discuss in this place the rights and wrongs of waging warfare and in particular whether or not the Romans’ intervention in the affairs of other nations through war was justified. He noted that Caesar and others like him wanted to wage war, but this did not amount to the claim that they would have chosen to wage war in all circumstances, even when the waging of war would have been unjust. Now, among the praises which he pronounces on Caesar he put this, that he wished for a great empire, an army and a new war, that he might have a sphere where his genius and virtue might shine forth. Thus it was ever the prayer of men great in virtue (virorum virtute magnorum), that Bellona would excite miserable nations to war . . . so that there might be the occasion for the display of their virtue (virtus eorum).

Thus, he did not claim that Caesar cared not at all about the justice of the wars that he waged. Both Caesar and Cato sought honour and glory through virtue – they were mistaken about the true nature of virtue, since true virtue had the true God as its end; but they were not mistaken about the actions that the truly virtuous accomplished. As he noted in Chapter , men like Caesar and Cato had one vice, namely, their love of praise: for this one vice, they suppressed a multitude of other vices. Thus, Augustine was clear that the love of glory was a sin, but he did not declare that it necessarily left people vulnerable to doing things which were sinful. On the contrary, he outlined the circumstances in which it led people reliably to serve others’ interests first and foremost, regardless of private gains or losses. He held that in the case of Cato and of other men besides, including Caesar, the love for praise and glory guaranteed the performance of actions which would be judged to be good if they were considered only in their outward dimension. For these men, the doing of these actions was valued, alongside the winning of glory: they sought to win glory not by any means, but through doing these deeds. That is, these Romans wanted to be glorious, not in the forum of popular opinion, but

 

Civ. Dei .. Civ. Dei .. Augustine discussed the question of just wars in Civ. Dei ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

either on the private stage of their own conscience (Cato) or among those who judged correctly down the ages (Caesar) – that is, among those who shared their high opinion of doing what was right. Thus, in Chapters –, Augustine described the many deeds of public service accomplished by Roman statesmen and heroes for the sake of glory. their good arts, – that is, their virtues, – by which they sought to attain so great glory. For as to those who seem to do some good that they may receive glory from men.. . . So also these despised their own private affairs for the sake of the republic, and for its treasury resisted avarice, consulted for the good of their country with a spirit of freedom, addicted neither to what their laws pronounced to be crime nor to lust. By all these acts, as by the true way, they pressed forward to honours, power, and glory; they were honoured among almost all nations; they imposed the laws of their empire upon many nations; and at this day, both in literature and history, they are glorious among almost all nations.

These Romans valued acting well and saw nothing wrong with acting well for the sake of glory: consequently, in acting well they had as their objective the winning of glory. This vitiated all their actions, without changing the fact that these actions, considered in their outward dimension, were not things which were sins in themselves, but rather the morally neutral actions which the truly virtuous would likewise accomplish. Augustine found that God rewarded the Romans with an earthly empire while they cherished these actions, even though they failed to see that making praise and glory their objectives made everything which they did sinful. A final puzzle remains in Augustine’s quotation from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations in Chapter . This quotation has been read as meaning that Augustine, following Cicero, attributed to all Romans not simply a love of glory, but specifically, the love of popular approval, an interpretation which rests on a particular way of understanding the Latin phrase quae apud quosque inprobantur. Dods translates this phrase as: “those pursuits are always neglected which are generally discredited.”  

Civ. Dei .. Civ. Dei . (quoting from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations ..). Bettenson has a similar translation: “all pursuits lose lustre when they fall from general favour.” The basis for this translation may lie in J. E. King’s translation of the Tusculan Disputations: “Public esteem is the nurse of the arts, and all men are fired to application by fame, whilst those pursuits which meet with general disapproval, always lie neglected.” Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (Loeb Classical Library), trans. J. E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). Dodaro also takes this passage to be a reference to

Political Vices?



This translation implies that Augustine understood Cicero to admit that he and his fellow Romans always acted from a desire for general, or popular, approval: they always sought to win the favour of the majority – the general populace. In fact, apud quosque simply has the sense of “by everyone”: that is, those pursuits are neglected which are discredited by everyone. This is how Douglas’ modern translation of the Tusculan Disputations renders it (“What everybody disapproves of always lies neglected”), and other translators of City of God similarly omit any reference to the idea of “general” favour. In other words, what Augustine arguably understood Cicero to be saying in this passage was simply that, while people made glory their end, things which no one regarded as glorious would be accomplished by no one. That is, in order for lovers of praise to do anything, they needed to see doing those actions as bestowing praise on them. Read in this way, this passage becomes compatible with what Augustine said elsewhere in Book  about Cato and Caesar: the Romans acted for the sake of glory and honour, but not necessarily for the sake of the greatest possible praise from the greatest number of people. Rather, some among them at least, while being nourished by the love of glory and honour, did not make popular approval their end, but rather sought glory and honour for doing what was right, even if this met with the approval of no one besides themselves, or met with the approval only of the handful of other people who agreed with them in valuing these actions. This interpretation is supported by what Augustine wrote in Chapter . Having concluded Chapter  with this quotation from Cicero, the main purport of which was arguably simply that, in Cicero’s



popular support: “[Augustine] charges that [Cicero’s] counsel implicitly directs political leaders to act only in such a way as to win popular support, without regard for what is good or true.” Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, .., trans. by A. E. Douglas (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ). Thus, the New City Press edition of City of God (trans. W. Babcock) has “but things which people hold in low esteem always lie neglected”; the Fathers of the Church edition (trans. Demetrius Zema and Gerald Walsh) has “while nothing is attempted where no men give approval”; and Dyson’s translation reads “whereas men always neglect those things which are held in low esteem.” See also C. D. Yonge’s translation of the Tusculan Disputations (from ): “Honour nourishes art, and glory is the spur with all to studies; while those studies are always neglected in every nation which are looked upon disparagingly” (New York: Harper & Bros., ).



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

view, people would only ever do what they considered to be glorious, Augustine argued in Chapter  that Christians were the exceptions to this rule. Christians accomplished actions which they did not consider glorious since Christians did not think that any of their actions bestowed glory on them. Thus, he insisted that someone was “liker to God” the purer they were from any expectation of praise – in other words, human beings were more like God the less they regarded themselves as praiseworthy. For the purer one is from this defilement, the liker is he to God; and, though this vice be not thoroughly eradicated from his heart – for it does not cease to tempt even the minds of those who are making good progress in virtue – at any rate, let the desire of glory be surpassed by the love of justice so that, if there be seen anywhere “lying neglected what everyone disapproves of,” if they are good, if they are right, even the love of human praise may blush and yield to the love of truth.

People who were caught up in acting only with a view to winning human glory would never become Christians because Christians acted not from the love of human glory at all, but rather from the love of justice and truth: hence, Augustine quoted John :, “How can you believe who look for glory from one another, and do not seek the glory which is from God alone?” In Chapter , Augustine recognised that Christians too would be tempted to find the thought of human glory attractive; they would be tempted to view themselves as worthy of praise. His point in this chapter was that Christians alone had the means to say ‘no’ to such a temptation and so fully give to justice, truth, and God Himself the love that was due to them. They had the means of doing this because they knew from the outset that absolutely nothing which they did made them deserving of glory. They acted without any expectation of being glorious either in their own eyes or in the eyes of others. He offered the apostles as the foremost example of those who were proof against any expectation that they should be praised. Their disregard for popular praise allowed them to preach their message even though it was met with deep hostility everywhere: “Their master had taught the apostles not to be good for the sake of human glory, saying, ‘Take heed that you do not your justice before men to be seen of them, or otherwise you shall not have a reward from your Father who is in heaven’ (Mt. :).” Yet Cato could equally well have preached an unpopular 

Civ. Dei ..



Civ. Dei ..



Civ. Dei ..

Political Vices?



message, as could all those Romans whose highest goal was glory in the eyes of competent judges, as opposed to glory in the eyes of the general populace. Thus, Augustine’s point in this chapter was not that Christians alone could brave unpopularity for the sake of what was right; rather, his point was that the apostles, having shown that popular praise was not their object in acting, revealed that they were not motivated by any desire for praise at all and refused to accept any praises which they were given. The apostles refused to receive any praise at all for their worthy actions because they knew that this praise was owed not to themselves but to God: And when, as they did and spoke divine things, and lived divine lives, conquering, as it were, hard hearts and introducing into them the peace of justice, great glory followed them in the church of Christ, they did not rest in that as in the end of their virtue, but, referring that glory itself to the glory of God, by whose grace they were what they were, they sought to kindle, also by that same flame, the minds of those for whose good they consulted, to the love of Him, by whom they could be made to be what they themselves were.

In Chapter , Augustine had stated that glory must be the consequence of virtue, not precede virtue. He had quoted Paul’s references to glorying in ourselves, through the witness of our own conscience. Here, however, Augustine made plain that Christians proceeded to direct any glory which they received, whether from other people or from their own consciences, onwards to God, since they understood that they owed their virtue itself to God. Christians simply did not regard themselves as worthy of praise in any sense because they believed that whatever worthiness they possessed was God’s gift to them, and not their own achievement; hence, what praise they received they put to good purpose by directing it to God. Thus, while pagan Romans could agree with Christians that glory was to be received only for the accomplishment of good actions, the fact that pagan Romans viewed themselves as worthy of glory would always set them apart from Christians. Christians considered that the achievement of virtue was glorious, but they saw God as the one who made them virtuous and hence held that God alone was deserving of this glory. All of this meant that Christians alone were truly virtuous, while non-Christians had a virtue which consisted merely of their outward lives; they entirely lacked the true virtue which was love for the true God. In this way, Augustine’s discussion of the love of glory in City of God, Book , did not involve him suggesting that the Romans’ love of glory



Civ. Dei ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

inevitably left them vulnerable to committing any of those actions which were sins in themselves. At first glance, it might seem that Augustine was critical of the love of glory precisely for this reason, that is, because he was convinced that, at best, if popular opinion favoured doing sociable actions, or chaste actions, or any of those other actions which filled the lives of the truly virtuous, then the love of glory would nonetheless leave people vulnerable to sinning privately, while denying their sins in public, in order to present a virtuous image to the general populace; while, at worst, if the general populace turned against these actions, then the love of glory would drive people to sin openly. If he viewed the love of glory in this light, then this would mean that he regarded it as a social and political vice. On the contrary, Augustine did not think that all lovers of glory loved popular approval – that is, he did not think that to love glory was necessarily to care about one’s popular image. Thus, in Cato, he offered the example of a pagan whose love for human glory took the form of a love for the private approval of his conscience, while in Caesar and other Romans who strove for glory, honour, and power in the right way, the love for glory took the form of a longing for the praise of people who shared their view that only good deeds were glorious. All these pagans wanted to be renowned for doing what was right because they themselves valued doing these actions; they had reconciled their concern to do good deeds with their love of glory by caring only for the glory that was bestowed for doing good deeds. Since their concern was not merely to appear in others’ eyes as the doers of good deeds, but genuinely to be doers of these deeds, their love of glory would not lead them to be reluctant to confess their sins publicly or reluctant to seek public forgiveness for their wrongdoing. On the contrary, they would understand that, since the confession of one’s sins and the seeking of forgiveness were themselves good deeds, doing these things was actually glorious. Yet, for Augustine, we would always sin at the level of our loves whenever we acted for the sake of glory – so that to seek forgiveness for the sake of glory was actually to sin. Nonetheless, in discussing the Roman love of glory, Augustine accepted that the love of glory could reliably inspire people to conform their actions to the highest moral standards; hence, it follows that, for him, the love of glory was not a political or social vice.

    Besides the love of glory, the other temporal love that Augustine particularly associated with the earthly city was the love of domination. Even

Political Vices?



more so than the love of glory, the love of domination would seem to be something which is obviously a political vice, precisely because ‘domination’ would seem itself to be something politically vicious. Yet this is an assumption which needs to be scrutinised: we need to ask about the meaning that Augustine gave to the notion of ‘domination’ in order to see whether or not he thought of domination as necessarily a vicious thing. In City of God, Book , Chapter , Augustine stated that there was a difference between those who simply desired to dominate and those who desired both domination and the glory that was bestowed by “those who judge well.” It is worth quoting the passage as a whole: There is assuredly a difference between the desire of human glory and the desire of domination; for, though he who has an overweening delight in human glory will be also very prone to aspire earnestly after domination, nevertheless they who desire the true glory even of human praise strive not to displease those who judge well. For there are many good moral qualities, of which many are competent judges, although they are not possessed by many; and by those good moral qualities those men press on to glory and power or domination, of whom Sallust says, But they press on by the true way. But whosoever, without possessing that desire of glory which makes one fear to displease those who judge well, desires domination and power, very often seeks to obtain what he loves by the most open crimes . . . he who is a despiser of glory, but is greedy of domination, exceeds the beasts in the vices of cruelty and luxuriousness.

In this passage, Augustine indicated that the love of domination did not necessarily lead to politically vicious conduct; people could love to dominate and yet refrain from acts of cruelty and tyranny. Augustine was not speaking here of Christians, since Christians loved neither glory nor domination; instead, he indicated that he had in mind those Romans whom we have discussed above, namely, men like Cato and Julius Caesar who sought not popular glory, but the glory bestowed for doing the right thing – whether this glory was bestowed by their own





The idea that, for Augustine, ‘domination’ is always something sinful arguably informs Harding’s analysis (Brian Harding, Augustine and Roman Virtue [London: Continuum, ]). For example, p. ; see also p. , where Harding equates domination to “brutality” and “aggression.” Harding suggests that the difference between Roman civic virtue and Roman civic vice, for Augustine, simply lies in the objects of this brutality: virtue refers to brutality directed towards foreign nations, while vice refers to brutality directed towards one’s own people (pp. –). I argue in what follows that Augustine did not look on domination as necessarily a vicious thing. Despite this disagreement, I have found Harding’s work helpful in identifying Augustine’s deep engagement with the writings of Roman historians and moralists. Civ. Dei ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

consciences or by the “competent judges” who shared their high esteem for virtuous deeds. Thus, in this passage, Augustine indicated that domination itself was not necessarily a vicious thing: when we dominated other human beings, we could do so in the right way or in the wrong way. Romans whose love of glory led them to conduct their (outward) lives according to the highest moral standards would love, and exercise, only the right or legitimate kind of domination; in contrast, Romans, like the emperor Nero, who despised glory but loved domination would dominate in the wrong way, by openly vicious conduct. In other words, Augustine’s view was that certain forms of domination were morally neutral things – people who possessed true virtue would dominate in these ways, but so would people who possessed the ‘human’ version of virtue, like Cato and Caesar. He held that other forms of domination were sins in themselves – these were the abuses of power found among tyrants like Nero. When we loved to dominate, but also loved the glory bestowed upon us for conducting ourselves according to the highest moral standards, then we would reconcile these two loves by loving only the legitimate kind of domination. In contrast, if we cared not at all for earning praise through our good conduct, then we would love the sinful form of domination. Again, this conclusion is supported by the eudaimonist view that everyone, no matter what they might love, could learn from reason to value the welfare of everyone else as an end in itself, with the result that everyone was able to learn that sociable, other-serving actions were the only ones that had a place in the fully natural life: as soon as people grasped this, then they would all have a reason to do only these things, since the fully natural life was the life that all human beings (whether they were vicious or virtuous) were seeking to lead all the time. Hence, people might love temporal domination and, as a result, be vicious, and yet seek only the kind of temporal domination which was not sinful, but rather morally neutral: they could love to dominate and yet their desire for happiness would lead them to limit themselves to seeking only the kind of temporal domination which was fully compatible with leading otheroriented, sociable, politically ‘right’ lives. Augustine discussed the legitimate kinds of domination in a number of places. For example, he held that there was no sin in the domination of men over women or adults over children. Commenting on Genesis :, he observed: “For the natural order among humans is that women serve men, and children their parents, since this is justice, that the weaker in reason serve the stronger. Therefore, this is clearly justice in domination

Political Vices?



and servitude that those who excel in reason, should excel in domination.” In other words, whether or not a given instance of domination was sinful depended upon who dominated and who was dominated. When men dominated women, or parents dominated children, what made domination something which was not a sin was the fact that the one doing the dominating was naturally superior in reason to the one dominated or ruled. To “dominate” another in this context meant to control or command their actions; domination existed wherever one person’s will was submitted to that of another. Consequently, domination did not always take the form of threats or physical force, since a person might willingly submit to the rule of another. This allowed Augustine to find that domination had existed before the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Thus, commenting on Genesis :, he wrote: For it is not proper to believe that before [Eve’s] sin woman was made in another way than that man would dominate over her, and she would be to him as a servant. But it can be rightly taken that this servitude [is] meant [by Gen. :], which is of a certain condition rather than of love, so that this kind of servitude may also be found [to] have arisen as a punishment for sin, [just as] afterwards men began to be the servants of men.

Genesis : implied that the man had dominated the woman only after she sinned, as part of her punishment. Despite this, Augustine insisted that Adam had dominated Eve before the Fall because he was convinced that the domination of men over women had been present from Creation, since women were created naturally inferior in reason to men. Hence, he read Genesis : as simply describing an alteration in the nature of the woman’s “servitude” to the man after the Fall – after the Fall, her servitude was the ordinary servitude of slaves (“of a certain condition”), but before the Fall her servitude had been one “of love.” By this idea of a servitude of love Augustine arguably meant that, before her sin, Eve herself had recognised Adam as her natural superior and so had chosen to bend her will to his will for her. Hence, her obedience had not been the product of threats or physical force, but rather the product of her own recognition of his natural superiority. That is, prior to her sin, she herself had willed to will only what Adam willed for her, with the result that there had never been a conflict between her own will and that of Adam;

 

Quaestiones in Heptateuchum VII, Book , Question . Gn. Litt., Book , , .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

hence, Augustine could find that their relationship had really been one of mutual service, as implied by the commandment in Galatians :, “Serve one another (invicem) through love (charitatem)” (which Augustine quoted at the end of the above passage). The sense in which women’s servitude was now the ordinary servitude of slaves will be discussed further below; implicitly, this meant that, as a punishment for Eve’s sin, women now experienced a servitude which not only related to their natural inferiority to men, but touched parts of their lives in which no such natural inferiority existed. It was in this sense that their servitude was now a punishment; but we will see that, as a punishment ordained by God, Augustine also regarded this kind of domination as legitimate. For Augustine, the woman had been the man’s natural inferior even in the state of innocence; likewise, if children had been born to Adam and Eve in that state, then, prior to adulthood, these would also have been naturally inferior to their parents. This remained the case after the Fall. Hence, there was nothing sinful in the exercise of domination within the family: parents rightly ruled over their children because of this natural inferiority. Augustine found that domination would also exist in heaven, thus underlining that domination itself was not something sinful, but became a sin only when the natural order was violated (with the exception of the punitive kinds of domination which were ordained by God). Arguably, in the next life, there would no longer be any need for women to experience men’s domination (or children the domination of adults) because all possibility of sinning would be removed from human nature in heaven. Nonetheless, Augustine found that domination would continue in other ways, since in heaven the body, as a spiritual body, would be in a state of perfect submission to the soul, and the reason itself would perfectly rule over the other, inferior parts of the soul. Since Augustine thought that there was no sin in dominating over natural inferiors, it follows that he did not consider that the love of dominating over natural inferiors, even during this earthly life, was a political vice. He viewed this love as a vice, since he viewed all love for temporal things, including the temporal domination of inferiors, as a vice, but he did not view this love as a political vice because he considered that 

Lib. Arb. ..: “whatever it is that puts man above the beasts, mind or spirit (perhaps it is best called by both names, for we find both in the divine Scriptures), whatever it is called, if it dominates and rules the other parts of which man is composed, then a man is most perfectly ordered.” See also Civ. Dei . and Contra Faustum ..

Political Vices?



there was nothing politically or socially undesirable about exercising power over one’s natural inferiors. Whatever a person did in ruling a person who was naturally inferior was, in a social or political sense, an appropriate thing. Hence, men’s conduct in controlling their wives was sanctioned in his eyes – meaning that it was a morally neutral thing, which would become part of a virtuous action if right faith and love for God were present. Men might misguidedly love the exercise of this power over their wives, but the exercise of this power was not itself a sin – for Augustine, it did not involve the mistreatment of their wives in any way. There was one further kind of domination which Augustine held was not sinful. This was the domination of masters over their slaves, which, as mentioned already, included some of the powers which men now exercised over their wives as women’s punishment for the Fall. Augustine was emphatic that no man was the natural inferior of any other man; hence no man was a slave “by nature”; nonetheless, he found that God had ordained the condition of slavery as part of the “deserts of sin,” with the result that after the Fall men did not sin in possessing slaves. Thus, in City of God, Book , Chapter , he observed that servitude did not exist naturally among men: “But by nature, as God first created us, no one is the slave either of man or of sin.” God’s plan in creating men was that servitude or domination should not exist among them; for this reason, he created them as rational beings. As rational beings, men were made to dominate what was irrational: “[God] did not intend that His rational creature, who was made in His image, should have dominion over anything but the irrational creation.” Nonetheless, the enslavement of one man by another was permitted by God as a punishment for sin: “Witness that man of God, Daniel, who, when he was in captivity, confessed to God his own sins and the sins of his people, and declared with pious grief that these were the cause of the captivity.” The first cause, then, of slavery is sin, which brings man under the dominion of his fellow – that which does not happen save by the judgment of God, with whom is no injustice, and who knows how to award fit punishments to every variety of offence.

As noted above, Augustine also held that womankind’s punishment for the Fall took the form of a new kind of servitude: unlike men’s slavery, women were naturally the slaves of men, so that the woman had been rightly dominated by the man in the state of innocence. This natural 

Civ. Dei ..



Civ. Dei ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

servitude, however, was only in respect of women’s inferiority in reason; it did not touch upon any area of women’s lives in which there was no natural inferiority. After the Fall, however, women were subjected to a new kind of slavery – the slavery “of a certain condition,” meaning a slavery which did not arise from their natural inferiority, but rather which was now imposed upon them by God as a punishment. Kim Power has established that Augustine developed the notion of ‘slave-wives,’ ancillae, to describe the sense in which all women were now punitively subjected to men. The punitive thing about women’s (new) servitude to men, and about men’s servitude to other men, was that it was not natural – it did not relate to an inequality in reason. After the Fall, slavery arose among men as a punishment for men’s personal sins – masters were able to govern every area of their slaves’ lives, despite the fact that no natural inequality existed between masters and slaves, and it was this violation of the natural order which made the experience of slavery a punishment. Women could also be subjected to this kind of slavery for their personal sins; however, all women were also subjected to another kind of slavery, not for their personal sins, but simply for Eve’s sin: within the family, men now legitimately ruled every area of their womenfolk’s lives, without limiting their power to the powers that Adam had naturally possessed over Eve. Again, it was the fact that this new kind of domination was a violation of the natural order which made it a punishment for women. Augustine was clear that to love this domination over men or over women was a sin: he found that it was better to be a slave of another man than a slave of this love. Yet having slaves was something permitted by God now that sin had entered the world; hence, while loving having slaves was a sin, as the love for something temporal, the domination involved in slavery was not itself a sin – there was nothing, in Augustine’s eyes, socially or politically unacceptable in the institution of slavery. Hence, once again, provided men confined themselves to exercising this permitted form of power, they would be doing what God permitted them to do. People could sin in loving being temporal masters, but being a temporal master was not something vicious. Thus, we can see that, for Augustine, there were a number of kinds of domination which were not sinful in themselves and hence which would 



Kim Power, Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women (New York: Continuum, ), argues that Augustine saw women as the ancillae of their husbands, unlike Roman thinkers (pp. –). See Augustine’s commentary on Gen. :, quoted above (Gn. Litt., Book , , ).

Political Vices?



not lead people, even when these forms of domination were loved, to treat others in inappropriate ways. People who loved to dominate others could reconcile this love with their concern to lead sinless lives by loving only these legitimate kinds of domination. Men might love to rule their wives, parents their children, and masters their slaves, but this would not lead them to oppress or tyrannise these people, if they simply loved the exercise of legitimate power. Nonetheless, Augustine certainly did not regard all forms of temporal domination as legitimate: the above has discussed examples of permitted forms of domination, but there were many forms of domination which he considered were not permitted. In particular, Augustine considered that it was a sin to dominate over free men: he held that it was not permitted to enslave people who were not legally sold into slavery or born into servitude. His view was that God’s justice in allowing some men to become slaves, and others masters, was not open to human scrutiny: slavery was always in response to personal sins, but some masters might be greater sinners than their slaves – as noted above, his view was that masters were particularly liable to the sin of loving to dominate. All sin would be punished, sometimes in this life through slavery or some other means, and sometimes in the next, but the choice was God’s, not human beings’. Slaves should gratefully accept their punishment in this life, confident that it came from God and confident that it was as a way of avoiding a greater penalty in the next life; but the institution of slavery should not be abused by human beings – the difference between the enslaved and the manumitted or the free should be respected. Thus, for Augustine, not all forms of domination were legitimate; some were sinful. Yet, as noted already, people who loved temporal domination would not necessarily love the sinful form of temporal domination: their love for the right kind of glory, which reflected their concern to lead a sinless life, could lead them to withhold their love from forms of domination which were incompatible with leading this life. Yet, since it was a sin to regard anything temporal as needed for happiness, it would always be a sin to love even the legitimate kinds of temporal domination. Augustine held that, with the exception of slavery, all other forms of domination over a natural equal were sinful. This poses the puzzle of how 

Aaron D. Conley, “Augustine and Slavery: Freedom for the Free,” in Teresa Delgado, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth, eds., Augustine and Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, ). Conley discusses in particular Augustine’s Letter * (from the Divjak collection of letters).



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

he regarded kingship as a legitimate kind of domination. As we have seen, in City of God, Book , Augustine indicated that not all kings were tyrants; even non-Christian rulers could exercise political power in the right way, provided these men, like Cato and Caesar, combined their love for domination with a love for the right kind of glory. But if it was never right to dominate a natural equal, how could kingly power ever be legitimate? Augustine explained in the following passage that to dominate equals was a sin: “[the soul] thinks it has attained something very great if it is able to dominate over its companions (sociis), that is, other men . . . when it aspires to lord it even over those who are by nature its equals (pares) – that is, men – this is utterly intolerable pride.” Men were each other’s equals in reason. Hence, it was a sin for a man to make another man subject to him, with the sole exception of the institution of slavery. The sinful love of ruling one’s natural equals was thus exemplified in the desire of men to dominate other free men. This might be taken to mean that Augustine regarded all political authority – all kingship – as something politically vicious since it might be supposed that kingship, for him, was nothing other than the exercise of power by one man over another man, his natural equal. Yet Augustine’s understanding of kingship does not need to be read in quite these terms. Rather, there is scope for interpreting his comments on kingly domination, particularly in City of God, Book , Chapter , as meaning that men legitimately exercised power over the vice both in themselves and in other men, since to exercise power over vice was to dominate not something equal but something inferior. As noted already, his message was that domination among men was ordained by God because of sin. By this, he arguably meant that God chose to punish some sinners by making them slaves, thereby making them subject to other men in every way, and that God permitted men to rule over the lives of free men only with respect to their sins. This reading is supported by a passage in which Augustine recognised that the rule of masters over their slaves was different to the rule of kings over their subjects. To the modern eye, it might seem that both kinds of rule must actually be the same, that is, that kings were really masters and subjects were really slaves – a view which might seem to be confirmed by the fact that Augustine described the rule of kings as “domination” and in



Doc. Chr. ...

Political Vices?



at least one place wrote of a nation being in “servitude” to a king. On the contrary, Augustine quoted with approval a passage from Cicero’s De Republica which held that these two kinds of domination were not the same thing. [Cicero] says a little later: “We should recognize different kinds of commanding and serving (imperandi et serviendi). The soul is said to command the body; it is also said to command lust. It commands the body as a king commands his subjects or a parent his children. It commands lust as a master commands a slave, since it coerces and breaks it. Kings, emperors, magistrates, fathers, peoples rule their subjects and associates as the soul rules the body. Masters harass their slaves as the best part of the soul, which is wisdom, harasses the vicious and weak parts of the same soul, such as lusts, anger, and the other disturbing forces.”

The purport of this passage was not that kingship was the only legitimate kind of rule, while mastery over slaves was always sinful. Rather, the message of this passage was that both forms of rule were sinless, and yet they were different, despite the fact that the vocabulary of “servitude” could be used of both. Kings ruled subjects as the soul ruled the body: the body was not broken by the soul’s rule of it – it was not diminished or impaired in any way. In other words, kingly rule did not impede subjects from living as they were fitted by nature to live. In contrast, masters ruled slaves as the best part of the soul (wisdom) ruled its vicious parts: wisdom broke and harassed the vices – they were not able to thrive under the rule of wisdom. We have seen that, for Augustine, slavery was a just punishment for sin: hence, the experience of slaves – the kind of rule that they experienced – was necessarily one which diminished them and prevented them from living in accordance with nature, otherwise slavery would not be a punishment. Assuming that Augustine thought that masters were to treat their slaves well, he was nonetheless clear that he regarded slavery as a punishment. Arguably, this was because his view was that masters governed every area of their slaves’ lives, even those areas in which their slaves did nothing sinful – to rule one’s equals in reason in this way was to punish them. That is, for Augustine, the difference between masters and kings lay in the fact that, while masters governed the whole of their slaves’ 



Civ. Dei .. In Civ. Dei ., he referred to God’s instruction to Adam in Genesis :, “dominate over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky . . . and all the reptiles that crawl on the earth.” He used this passage to discuss how it was that men now dominated, not only over the animals but also over other men, “as kings.” In Civ. Dei ., discussing the difference between a king and a tyrant, he was clear that both “dominated” – in other words, both ruled, but one did not sin in ruling and the other did. C. Iul. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

lives, kings governed only that part of their subjects’ lives in which sin was present. Kingly power was power over men’s vices, while masters’ power was power over the entirety of their slaves’ existence. Hence, arguably, Augustine did see a legitimate role for political power, provided this power was not understood as ordained by God to be arbitrary or unlimited, but rather as ordained by God to be power over people’s vices. In short, for Augustine, kingly power would not be sinful if it was directed at governing sin; kingly power was intended by God to be used against sinners since it was only in respect of his sins that a man was inferior to another man. When men did not sin, however, they were equals, and so, in these circumstances, it would be a sin for other men, even kings or emperors, to exercise power over them. Thus, arguably, Augustine looked on kingly power as another kind of legitimate domination, with the result that men who loved this power would not thereby be led to do anything politically vicious. After the Fall, there was a place for political power, although the love of political rule would always be a sin; yet kings and other lords did not sin in exercising this power, provided they saw their jurisdiction as restricted to power over other men’s vices. This finding makes sense of Augustine’s claims in City of God, Book , Chapter , where he accepted that men who loved political domination would not thereby inevitably be led to oppress and tyrannise others since they could love kingly power and yet, through their love for the right kind of glory, confine themselves to loving only the legitimate form of kingly power. Not all kings were tyrants – and this held true for non-Christian rulers too: there were Neros among pagan emperors, but there were also pagan emperors who strove for domination “by the right way,” that is, who confined their exercise of political power to what was legitimate. This view, namely, that men could dominate other men (their natural equals because equal in reason) without sinning because they ruled only over their subjects’ vices is also found in Augustine’s discussion of the idea of the just war. He was clear that the Roman empire involved the domination of subject peoples: the nations conquered by Rome and included within the empire were subjugated to Rome’s rule. Yet calling this rule ‘domination’ did not indicate that this rule was unjust; rather, what mattered was whether or not the nations subjected were inferior in justice to Rome itself. If so, then Rome’s subjugation of them would be  

Civ. Dei .. Civ. Dei .: “For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars.” See also Letter , ., quoted in John Langan, “The Elements

Political Vices?



a just form of domination. By implication, it would be just because justice in political rule referred to governing vice. Augustine’s view was that, while there were legitimate kinds of domination, all domination over one’s natural equals was a sin. As we have seen, this did not lead him to regard all forms of political domination as sinful, since he held that so long as political rulers dominated their subjects’ vices, they dominated what was naturally inferior; thus, there were kings who were tyrants and there were also kings whose rule was not sinful. The question remains, however, of whether or not he viewed all domination over one’s natural equals as necessarily a politically, or socially, vicious thing to do. Dominating over one’s “peers” was a vicious action, but was it necessarily a socially or politically vicious action? The answer to this question is that he distinguished different examples of the sin of dominating over one’s peers, not all of which were socially or politically vicious because not all of which involved people doing something in the political or social sphere. In other words, he recognised that power was not always social or political power – there were ways of exercising power over one’s equals outside the social and political spheres; as the domination of an equal, this conduct would always be sinful, but dominating in this way had no necessary impact upon social and political life at all. In particular, Augustine distinguished between “commanding” another person and “persuading” that person. In the following passage from On Music, he wrote of not only dominating others through commanding them but also dominating others through persuading them. But that appetite of the soul is to have under it other souls; not of beasts as conceded by divine law, but rational ones, that is, your neighbours, fellows and companions under the same law. But the proud soul desires to operate on them . . . such is the state of sin that souls are allowed to act upon souls moving them by signifying by one or the other body, or by natural signs as look or nod, or by conventional signs as words. For they act with signs by commanding or persuading, and if there is any other way besides command and persuasion, souls act with or upon souls. But by rights it has come about those souls wishing to be over others command their own parts and bodies with difficulty and pain, in part being foolish in themselves, in part, oppressed by mortal members.

Arguably, to “command” another was to exercise social or political power over them: it was to direct their will and hence to determine their



of St. Augustine’s Just War Theory,” The Journal of Religious Ethics  (): –, at . De Musica .().



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

actions; this happened either when we threatened people or when people obeyed our commandments without the need for threats because they recognised us as their natural superiors. In other words, “commanding” was domination as something political or social. Hence, to dominate another through “persuasion” was something distinct from political or social domination. Arguably, the difference was that persuading other people was a matter not of directing their wills but of directing their intellects. Intellectual domination, as domination over the intellect, rather than domination over another’s will, was a matter of controlling not what people did but what they thought. It referred to domination through argument, that is, through persuading other people to believe that what we said was true was true. In other words, intellectual domination described the power typically exercised by teachers over their students whenever they taught them anything. Augustine claimed in the above passage that to use persuasion when dealing with another rational soul was a sin – the sin of having one’s equal ‘under’ one’s power. Since in other places he recognised the importance of the teacher, I take his notion of sinful “persuasion” here to mean not any and every instance of persuading another, but rather those cases of persuasion in which teachers were not the intellectual superiors of their students at all, but rather were their peers. This would happen when teachers were no more knowledgeable about a given subject than their students: if what teachers said was true was not true, then teachers ceased to be the superiors of their pupils, and so their teaching involved exercising power not over an inferior but over an equal, with the result that, in these instances, their teaching involved them in sin, namely, the sin of persuading (intellectually dominating) an equal. Augustine referred to this notion of intellectual domination particularly in relation to heresy: he accused heretics of attempting to dominate other people. In this context, he explicitly used the term “domination” and clearly used it to refer to intellectual domination; equally clearly, in these cases, he had in mind the sinful form of intellectual domination (intellectual domination over one’s peers), since, by definition, heretics did not possess the truth, although they believed that they did. Thus, arguably, Augustine viewed the exercise of power by a teacher as compatible with virtue only when there was an inequality in knowledge between the teacher and the student, that is, when the teacher had some



Letter  at .; Sermon  at ; Div. qu. .; en. Ps. Exposition  of Ps. ..

Political Vices?



genuine insight into the truth to share with a student: when teachers taught what they were ignorant of, then they intellectually dominated not an inferior but an equal, and so they sinned. Elsewhere, Augustine noted that not every teacher was necessarily wise, and hence that the act of submitting ourselves to be taught by another always involved the risk that the one teaching us was no more learned about a given topic than we were. All we could do was to “have recourse to the teachings of those who [are] in all probability wise.” Augustine encountered many teachers whom he later came to identify as false teachers: for example, the Manicheans, the Stoics, and Platonists, all of whom sincerely believed that they knew the truth and all of whom sought to offer adequate evidence to support their claims. But, for Augustine, each of these schools of thought failed to provide the rational proofs that they maintained would establish their claims as true. Hence, when they persuaded others to agree with them, they dominated intellectually over rational souls – they claimed that reason established that what they said was true, but this was not the case. For Augustine, their claims could be shown to be based upon a flawed application of reason, and hence each failed to teach the truth, but rather led rational souls to believe what was false. Consequently, all these people provided examples of what it meant to dominate intellectually over those whom one supposed were one’s inferiors, but who were actually one’s equals. As we have seen through the course of this chapter and the previous one, Augustine accepted that the harm done through false teaching could remain purely spiritual. People could be led to believe in false gods and so they could be turned from the path leading to Christian faith; this was incalculable harm, but for Augustine, this did not necessarily alter people’s ‘outward’ conduct since he was clear that false beliefs about God were compatible with possessing human justice – followers of false religions could never be truly virtuous, but they could conduct their outward lives in accordance with the same high standards as the truly virtuous. Consequently, Augustine did not understand the sin of intellectually dominating over one’s equals as necessarily leading to vicious social or political behaviour. Intellectual domination was a sin when it was an assault on reason and the truth, but this sin did not necessarily have a political or social dimension at all. All these false teachers might believe that they possessed virtue, but in every case, they would fail to be virtuous



Mor. Ecc. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

through their failure to have the Christian God as the object of their love; that is, their false teaching could reside precisely in their claim to know what virtue really was – a claim which would be false, not because they necessarily espoused mistaken notions about the kind of actions that virtuous people accomplished, but rather because they failed to know that virtue referred to loving the Christian God. As noted already, we can make sense of Augustine’s claims here by finding that he agreed with the Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism that reason was an accurate guide to the actions that were found among the virtuous. Since, for Augustine, the actions that were accomplished by the virtuous were not themselves virtuous, but rather morally neutral, it followed that vicious people could know about and do these actions too. Nonetheless, for Augustine, reason was not able to discover the meaning of virtue itself, with the result that the Stoics and Platonists were necessarily false teachers: they claimed that reason was also an accurate guide to virtue itself, but Augustine found that this was not so. He held that the love that was virtue was love for the Christian God, whose identity as humanity’s true highest good was known not through reason but through grace. This did not involve Augustine claiming that the teachings of reason could ever be false; rather, it involved him claiming that reason could do nothing more than teach that virtue resided in loving the true God – reason was unable to identify who the true God was, and, for this reason, it was unable to teach the true meaning of virtue. This chapter has scrutinised what Augustine had to say about the loves that he regarded as typical of the earthly city – the love of material prosperity, the love of temporal glory, and the love of temporal domination – to discover whether or not he thought that loving these things inevitably made a person politically vicious. It needs to be emphasised that if Augustine did find that non-Christians were all in some sense politically vicious, then this would contradict what he had to say about “human” justice and so throw into question the consistency of his thinking about vice and virtue. The above has found that Augustine was not inconsistent in his thinking about vice and virtue; rather, he recognised that the love of temporal things, including temporal glory and temporal domination, while always a sin, was compatible with possessing human justice. In Augustine’s eyes, Paul before he converted had been just with a human justice, but yet he



See Chapter .

Political Vices?



had feared God rather than loved Him and obeyed God’s commandments merely from a love of something temporal. Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger had loved temporal glory; however, the glory that they had loved was not popular renown, but the glory that was given to them for their other-serving, sociable actions. They were representative of Romans who understood these actions as desirable in their own right and who had consequently sought to satisfy their love of glory in the glory of treating others according to the highest moral standards. These Romans were mistaken about the nature of true virtue, but nonetheless their love of glory led them to lead lives which were outwardly identical to the lives of the virtuous. Hence, Augustine described them as possessing a kind of virtue, meaning that they had possessed a virtue of ‘outward’ deeds and not the true virtue of loving God. In the same way, the above has shown that Augustine did not understand the love of temporal domination as a political vice. In particular, his view was that the love of domination, when combined with the love of glory found among Rome’s exemplary citizens, would avoid conduct which was socially or politically vicious. People who loved both glory and domination would love not any domination but rather the legitimate kind of domination, whether this was the legitimate lordship of masters over slaves, of men over their households (their wives and children), of kings over their subjects’ vices, or of imperial nations over nations which were inferior in justice. These people sinned in loving something temporal, and yet the domination that they exercised was not itself something sinful. Alternatively, even when the domination that was loved was something outside the natural order, so that the domination in question was itself a sin, even then, those who loved this domination were not necessarily implicated in doing things which were socially or politically vicious. When kings sought to exercise command over areas of their subjects’ lives which were free from sin, then they sinned – this was political oppression, and as such it was always something politically vicious. Yet the sin of dominating an equal could take other forms. In particular, it could take the form of an intellectual, rather than a political, oppression or tyranny – but these intellectual oppressors could promote the right kind of conduct among their followers, while sinning in teaching them false things about God. In this way, we can see that Augustine’s understanding of the loves that were typical of the earthly city was too broad to lead him to depict the earthly city as necessarily a hell of anti-social nastiness and brutishness. Such a reading assumes that Augustine equated the love of temporal



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

domination or of temporal glory to a tendency to competitive, violent, and ‘egotistical’ behaviour rather than cooperative and other-oriented behaviour. The above has shown, however, that this was certainly not the case – such an interpretation rests on a too narrow reading of what Augustine meant by each of these loves. In short, Augustine was not concerned to find a sense in which non-Christians were necessarily sinners at the level of their outward deeds because his picture of sin was bigger than this. For him, all the members of the earthly city were sinners, but people could sin purely at the level of their loves; that is, they could sin simply in loving something temporal, even though this might never lead them to conduct themselves towards other people in a vicious way.

 Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue

This chapter begins to explore the ways in which Augustine’s definitions of virtue and vice agreed with those of the Stoics and Neoplatonists, and the ways in which his definitions disagreed with theirs. It asks in particular about his grounds for disagreeing with their understanding of virtue and vice: Did Augustine criticise Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that there was something fundamentally flawed about the eudaimonist approach to ethics? Or did he criticise them because he thought that they had insufficiently understood eudaimonism itself? All ancient eudaimonists started with the assumption that there was a fundamental goal present in human nature which human beings called “happiness.” This goal was the same for everyone, no matter a person’s age, gender, individual circumstances, or any other distinctive trait. Everyone had the same goal, and the nature of this goal could be discovered through rational investigation. Through applying our reason to the study of human nature we could overturn our mistaken notions about what it was we were really seeking and discover the true identity of our fundamental goal. Thus, for ancient eudaimonists, to say that everyone desires to be happy was to say both that we all shared the same goal and that we all formed some conception, however mistaken, of what this goal really was. In addition, to say that everyone desires to be happy was also to say that in seeking anything at all, we always considered how this objective related to our conception of what our fundamental goal was. Eudaimonists accepted that we might have goals or ends other than happiness; they accepted that it was possible to seek things for their own sakes even though we did not think of these things as contributing to our happiness: 



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

we could view things as goods – as having worth in their own right – even while viewing possessing these things as having no importance for living happily. Nevertheless, they held that the goal of happiness provided the impetus for everything which we did: we might view X or Y as a good – as something with intrinsic worth – even though we did not regard this object as needed for happiness; but our explanation of why we viewed X or Y in this light would always be that doing so was part of what it meant to live the happy life. In eudaimonism, things received value – they became ‘goods’ – precisely through being things which were sought for their own sake by those who lived happily. Hence, eudaimonism was not monist in its account of the good: it did not view happiness as the only good; it was able to identify many goods, through identifying many things which would be pursued as ends in themselves by the happy, while nonetheless making the pursuit of happiness the fundamental explanation of everything which we did. In eudaimonism, ethical inquiry began with the claim that everyone desires to be happy; eudaimonism held that if we discovered the nature of human beings’ fundamental goal, then we would also discover what virtue was and what vice or sin was. In a number of places, Augustine also asserted that everyone desires to be happy: he stated that human beings shared a fundamental goal, which they called “happiness” (beatitudo) and that everything which we did and desired could be explained in terms of our search for happiness. “Since it is true that all men will to be happy, and that they seek for this one thing with the most ardent love, and on account of this seek everything which they do seek . . ..” In making this assertion, he implied that ethical inquiry began by seeking to understand the nature of human happiness. This could be taken as evidence that he thought that pagan philosophers were able to discover the meaning of virtue and vice. Augustine insisted, on the contrary, that pagans were ignorant of what it truly meant to be virtuous: after the Fall, humanity was afflicted not only with moral weakness but also with moral ignorance. For example, in On Nature and Grace, he proclaimed: “For if natural capacity (possibilitas naturalis), by help of  

Trin. ... See also B. Vita .; Mor. .; and Enchiridion  (). See Johannes Brachtendorf, “Augustine on the Glory and the Limits of Philosophy,” in Phillip Cary, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth, eds., Augustine and Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, ), p. : “Augustine believes that without the grace of God that comes from faith in Jesus Christ, human beings can indeed recognize what the good is, but do not have the strength to do good. Here philosophy hits its limit. For Augustine, philosophy is able to instruct, but not to convert us to a life of virtue.”

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue



free will is in itself sufficient both for discovering how one ought to live, and also for living well, then ’Christ died in vain’ (Galatians :).” Similarly, in City of God, Book , he maintained that pagan philosophers, although making great discoveries in ethics, were yet unable to uncover the nature of virtue and hence unable to guide people to the happy life. In the same vein, in Spirit and Letter, Augustine stated that “the law of God” was partially, although not completely, blotted out by the Fall, meaning that it remained in part inaccessible to reason (“the law of God which had not been wholly blotted out by injustice”). These passages are good evidence that Augustine did not think that ancient philosophers were able fully to grasp the meaning of virtue. We have seen that Augustine defined virtue as a matter of loving the true God. This makes sense of his claim about pagans’ inevitable moral ignorance: pagans might suppose that they knew what virtue was, through supposing that they knew who the true God was, but, for Augustine, the true God was the Christian God, with the result that pagans were necessarily mistaken in their thoughts about the true deity’s identity. Even if they defined virtue as love for the true God, their failure to know who the true God was meant that they remained ignorant of the meaning of virtue. Thus, Augustine maintained that the Stoics and Platonists, along with all other non-Christians, were not virtuous and did not know what virtue was. The question explored in this chapter and the following one is how close he thought non-Christians could come to the correct understanding of virtue and vice, and how close he thought eudaimonism itself came. Did he think that eudaimonism could make sense of the claim that the Christian God was the true God, the one whom we must love in order to be virtuous, or did he think that this idea necessarily lay beyond eudaimonism? When he found that the Stoics and Platonists were ignorant of the true meaning of virtue, did he think that eudaimonism was to blame for their ignorance? Or did he think that the problem was that these thinkers, and indeed all non-Christians, had a poor understanding of eudaimonism?

     Eudaimonists started with the observation that from our earliest years, prior to any teaching, our behaviour indicated that we experienced 

Nat. et. Gr. ..



Civ. Dei ..



Spir. et. Litt. ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

certain desires in common, and hence that desiring these things was part of the common nature of babies and young children. In our youngest years, we had not come under the influence of any teachers. The desires that we experienced must therefore be desires which arose in some way from the fundamental goal given in our nature. Moreover, since eudaimonists held that all human beings, whether they were babies, young adults, or older adults, had the same fundamental goal, they agreed that examining the desires that were common to babies and young children would be directly relevant to understanding the goal shared by all human beings. Thus, eudaimonists asked about what underlying goal was consistent with desiring the things that children universally desired. The distinctive answer of the Stoic-Platonic tradition was that the only goal that was consistent with desiring the things that all children desired in common was the goal simply of living in every way as it was natural for human beings to live. This led the Stoics and Platonists to conclude that the fundamental goal of human nature was simply to do, have, and desire all the things, and only the things, that it was natural for us to do, have, and desire: human beings had as their end the life that fully accorded with human nature. There is evidence that Augustine accepted this analysis and so shared the Stoic-Platonic reading of human beings’ fundamental goal. Thus, in the early chapters of City of God, Book , he accepted that the desires manifested by us while we were young could not be reduced simply to the desire for pleasure or self-preservation. He followed Varro in finding that all human beings began life longing for the “primary objects of nature.” there are four things which men desire, as it were by nature without a teacher, without the help of any instruction, without industry or the art of living which is called virtue . . . : either pleasure . . . or repose, . . . or both these, which Epicurus calls by the one name, pleasure; or the primary objects of nature (prima naturae) which comprehend the things already named and other things, either bodily, such as health, and safety, and integrity of the members, or of the mind, such as the greater and less mental gifts that are found in men.

He next reported that Varro reasoned that these four objects were really one, on the grounds that pleasure and repose were both among the prima naturae: “since both they, and many other things besides, are



See Chapter , notes  and .



Civ. Dei ..

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue



comprehended in the primary objects of nature.” Augustine agreed that everyone desired these things from their youngest years and hence desired these things without being taught – that is, he agreed that everyone desired these things naturally: human beings naturally desired the prima naturae, which included not just pleasure and the preservation of their own lives, but everything pertaining to their welfare and the development of the body and mind. In Confessions, Augustine likewise gave an account of the things that he had desired as a baby and a child. He found that, as a young child, he had demonstrated a concern not just for the preservation of his own life and for pleasure, but also for friendship, for the truth, and for the exercise of his mental faculties like memory and speech. For I existed even then; I lived, and felt, and was solicitous about my own wellbeing, – a trace of that most mysterious unity from whence I had my being; I kept watch by my inner sense over the wholeness of my senses, and in these insignificant pursuits, and also in my thoughts on things insignificant, I learnt to take pleasure in truth. I was averse to being deceived, I had a vigorous memory, was provided with the power of speech, was softened by friendship, shunned sorrow, meanness, ignorance. In such a being what was not wonderful and praiseworthy? But all these are gifts of my God; I did not give them to myself; and they are good, and I am all these things.

Prior to any teaching, the youthful Augustine had a care not only for his own body and person but also for friendship, for the truth, and for the exercise and development of his mental faculties. The implication was that Augustine was not alone in having these desires: these were desires which all children experienced. In these passages, Augustine accepted, in agreement with the StoicPlatonic tradition, that human beings manifested in common these complex desires from their earliest years – desires which could not simply be accounted for by positing pleasure or self-preservation as our goal. Babies and children had not been taught to desire any of these things; rather, these were all things which they desired naturally. What goal in their nature was compatible with all these different desires? In posing the question in the same terms as the Stoic-Platonic tradition posed it, Augustine arguably offered the same answer as this tradition: namely, that the only goal that was consistent with all these diverse desires was simply to live fully in accordance with human nature. When we desired friendship, or to know the truth, or to experience pleasure or repose, we 

Civ. Dei ..



Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

desired these things simply because it was natural for us to desire these things; these desires were present in us because our whole being was directed at attaining the life in complete accordance with human nature. That is, whatever we naturally desired we desired for no other reason than because our fundamental goal was to have every part of our lives conform to human nature.

’    In eudaimonism, the inquiry into the meaning of the fundamental goal present in human nature was driven by the conviction that correctly identifying this universal goal was an essential step towards understanding the meaning of virtue and vice. As we have seen, Augustine accepted the eudaimonist claim that everyone desires to be happy; this points to the conclusion that he shared the eudaimonist view that ethical inquiry was a matter of understanding what it was to be happy: to understand this – to know what human beings were fundamentally trying to achieve – led us to the correct understanding of virtue and vice, or sin. The above found grounds for concluding that Augustine shared the Stoic-Platonic understanding of the nature of our fundamental goal: this goal was the life that fully accorded with human nature. This suggests that, for him, the meaning of virtue and vice would emerge from understanding what it was to live in complete accordance with our nature. In other words, we would expect his definitions of virtue and vice to be meaningful in the light of his analysis of our ultimate goal – the fully natural life that everyone was trying to lead. Hence, the following aims to establish whether or not this was so: Did Augustine think that his definitions of virtue and vice emerged from correctly understanding what it was to live in complete accordance with our nature as human beings? The first step towards establishing whether this was so lies in a more detailed examination of his definitions of virtue and sin. Augustine defined virtue in a number of places. In On the Catholic Way of Life, he wrote: “I hold virtue to be nothing else than the highest love [summum amorem] of God.. . . The object of this love is not anything, but God.” He did not explain why virtue consisted not in any love for God, but only in the “highest” love; nonetheless, in this passage he echoed this language in calling God “the highest good, the 

Mor. .. See also ., “If virtue is said [to be] this, the most right affection of our mind itself.”

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue



highest wisdom and the highest harmony.” This tied virtue as loving God with the highest love to God’s identity as the highest good. In writing of the “highest love of God” he also echoed Jesus’ statement in Matthew :, itself a quotation from Deuteronomy :, that God was to be loved “with all your heart and soul and mind,” a passage which he repeated elsewhere in On the Catholic Way of Life. In another place in this work, he connected the “end of goods” which Christ prescribed to us with “the end to which [Christ] orders us to tend with the highest love (summo amore),” following this statement again with Christ’s command in Matthew :. This again tied identifying God as this finis bonorum to this command to love God with the highest love. Writing many years later, in Letter  (from  or ), he declared: “And yet even in this life there is no virtue but to love what one should love.. . . But what should we choose that we should especially (praecipue) love except that than which we find nothing better? This is God.” Virtue referred to loving everything which we should and this involved loving God especially. This definition of virtue did not necessarily conflict with his earlier definition in On the Catholic Way of Life which only mentioned love for God: arguably, his point was that where God was loved highest or especially, everything which should be loved would be loved as well. Hence, virtue could be defined as the highest love of God, or as loving everything which we should while loving God especially. Thus, in Letter , he tied loving God especially with thinking that there was nothing “better” than God, which recalls his similar comment in On the Catholic Way of Life which linked virtue as the “highest love” of God with identifying God as the highest good. Writing about a year after this, in Letter , at ., he stated, quoting from  Timothy :, “‘For love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned, is the great and true virtue, for it is the goal of the commandment’ . . . virtue is the love by which one loves what should be loved.” He followed this claim by noting that the law was kept by loving God and other people (“the fulfilling of the law is that love   



Mor. ., ., and ., “Let us then as many as have in view to reach eternal life love God with all the heart, with all the soul, with all the mind.” Mor. .. See also Mor. .: “For if God is man’s highest good, which you cannot deny, it clearly follows, since to seek the highest good is to live well, that to live well is nothing else but to love God with all the heart, with all the soul, with all the mind.. . . This is the one perfection of man, by which alone he can succeed in attaining to the sincerity of truth.” Letter , at ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

wherewith we love God and our neighbour”). In other words, virtue referred to loving God and loving every human being as well. In On the Catholic Way of Life, he had mentioned only God as the object of the love that was virtue; here he introduced the neighbour as well. Indeed, following Paul in Romans :, he stated that there was a sense in which love for neighbour was itself the “fulfilling of the law,” meaning that virtue could be understood simply as love for neighbour. In suggesting that virtue referred to loving the neighbour, however, Augustine was not offering an alternative to his definition of virtue as love for God. Rather, his message here was that the love that was virtue would have other objects besides God (a point which he also made in Letter ), but that, at least in the case of the neighbour, these other objects would be loved only when God was loved. Hence, virtue could be defined as love for neighbour, or as love for God. More precisely, Augustine specified in Letter  that virtue referred to love for the true God; thus, he went on to explain that where the true God was loved, and only where the true God was loved, the neighbour would be loved too; hence, virtue was loving the true God, and this was one and the same as loving the neighbour. Thus, he continued with Paul’s statement in Romans : that “love works no ill to his neighbour” and then indicated that, while we might work no ill to others in terms of their physical welfare, if we worked ill to them in terms of their spiritual welfare, then we did not love them. To care for another’s spiritual welfare required the presence of love for the true God: “no one, however, loves his neighbour who does not out of his love for God do all in his power to bring his neighbour also, whom he loves as himself, to love God.” Thus, since love did no ill to another’s spiritual well-being, in order for neighbour-love to be present in us, love for the true deity must also be present in us. Indeed, making use of the second love command of “loving one’s neighbour as oneself,” Augustine implied here that virtue could be understood as love for the self: if loving our neighbour ensured that we worked no ill to the neighbour, including spiritual ill, then love for the self likewise ensured that we worked no ill to the self. But our spiritual wellbeing consisted in loving the true deity; hence, we did harm to ourselves, which meant that we did not love ourselves, while we failed to love the true God, and when we loved the true God, we loved ourselves. Thus, in Letter , virtue referred to loving “what should be loved,” and this meant loving the true God, which in turn meant that we loved



Letter , at ..

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue



others and loved ourselves. This definition of virtue might seem to be irreconcilable with his definition of virtue as loving God highest, or loving what we should while loving God especially. I suggest, however, that if we understand Augustine as using “love” in a different sense in each case, then this opens up the possibility of reconciling these two different definitions of virtue. We will explore below what reasons there might be for understanding Augustine as giving two different meanings to the idea of love. We will also look at the evidence that he thought that the “highest love” for God was somehow always present when the true God was loved, and vice versa. Augustine’s comments in Letter  can be helpfully compared with his comments on self-love and neighbour-love in Letter . Here, he stated that “there is no other love by which one loves himself but that by which he loves God” and “in loving God” we loved ourselves. He also associated neighbour-love with attempting to bring the neighbour to worship God. Both these claims make sense in the light of his claim in Letter  that there was no love for self or neighbour in the absence of love for the true God because loving God was the only way to care for one’s own and the neighbour’s spiritual well-being, and love worked no ill to the beloved. At the same time, in Letter , he indicated that people who failed to love the true God could nonetheless love the self and neighbour, but this was a love which “should rather be said” to be hatred. He implied here that one meaning of love was to look upon something as a good. For one who loves himself in another way should rather be said to hate himself. He, of course, becomes unjust and is deprived of the light of justice when he turns away from the better and higher good, for, even if he turns from it toward himself, he certainly turns toward lower and lesser goods. The words of scripture are realized in him: “But he who loves injustice hates his own soul (Ps. :).”

To turn away from regarding God as the “better and higher good” to regarding oneself as this good was to love oneself in one sense (through regarding oneself as a good), but to hate oneself in another sense because it was to love injustice, and this was to hate one’s own soul. That is, to love unjustly – to regard lesser goods as the higher good – was to fail to love God especially, or highest; this was arguably to work ill to oneself in a spiritual sense, which, in turn, established that there was a sense in



Letter , at ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

which we did not love but rather hated ourselves – since love, used in another sense, did no ill to what was loved. Thus, Augustine’s comments in Letter , especially when read in the light of his comments in Letter , suggest that he gave two different meanings to “love”: love for self and neighbour was, in one sense, possible in the absence of love for God and, in another sense, impossible (a point which he also made in Letter ). One meaning of love referred to thinking of something as a good – it was in this sense that love for self and neighbour was possible in the absence of love for God; the other meaning of love was associated with promoting someone’s welfare, not just in a material sense, but in a spiritual sense as well – and it was in this sense that love for self and neighbour was impossible in the absence of love for the true God since in the absence of this love we always did spiritual ill to ourselves and neighbours. This proposal about the two different meanings that Augustine gave to love, in turn, is helpful for understanding his definition of virtue as the order of love. This was the final definition of virtue which he offered. In De Civitate Dei, he wrote that “it seems to me that a brief and true definition of virtue is the order of love (ordo amoris).” Similarly, a passage from On Christian Teaching opened with a statement which connected virtue with the order of love: “That man lives in a holy and just way who is a sound judge (integer aestimator) of things. He it is who has an ordered love (ordinatum dilectionem).” The idea of virtue as the order of love echoed his definition of virtue as loving everything which we should while loving God highest or especially: if loving God highest meant placing God first among the things that we loved, and if doing this ensured that we also loved everything else which was deserving of love and loved these things correctly too, then virtue as the order of love meant the same thing as virtue as the highest love for God. Augustine said something a little earlier in this passage from City of God which supports this reading, and also supports the reading that, for him, the highest love for God was present whenever we loved the true God, and vice versa. Thus, just prior to defining virtue as the order of love, he stated: “But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if He Himself is loved and not another thing in His stead, He cannot be evilly loved.” He went on to imply that where the true God was loved, there would be order in our loves. In other words, vicious people did not love the true



Cov. Dei .



Doc. Chr. ...

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Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue

God, which meant that their love was disordered. Moreover, here he indicated that love for the true God ensured that God was loved as he should be loved – in other words, where the true God was loved, God would be loved highest. The “order of love” arguably referred to love as thinking of something as a good: we loved things correctly when we did not mistake lesser goods for higher goods (Letter ), that is, when our thoughts about the respective goodness of things were correct. Thus, he implied that vicious people could have the correct objects of their love – they could love other people and love the self (although they would not love the true God), but vicious people would love these things incorrectly (“inordinately”). This sense of virtue as involving a “ranking” among our loves is found in other places in his writings. For example, he wrote elsewhere that love for God ought to “have first place” (praecessit) among all our loves: “In one city love of God has been given first place, in the other, love of self.” Likewise, when he discussed the idea of “ordered love” in On Christian Teaching, he indicated that it meant that we were to give the right amount of love to each thing, which would mean loving God “more” than anything else. He it is who has an ordered love (ordinatum dilectionem) so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more which ought to be loved equally.

This passage from On Christian Teaching insisted that virtue required not only correctly identifying the objects that we should love, but also bestowing on those objects the correct amount of love: by implication, God was to be loved most, and other things were to be loved less than God, but still with their due of love. We bestowed on things the correct amount of love by being “a sound judge (integer aestimator) of things.” Again, this makes sense if one meaning of love, for Augustine, was to think of something as a good: making correct judgements about the relative goodness of things meant to love those things in an ordered way – it meant to give each thing its due of love – and this was only possible where God was loved highest. The above has proposed that Augustine gave two meanings to the notion of “love” and that one of these meanings was to think of something as a good; virtue, defined in terms of this love, referred to loving 

Civ. Dei ..



Civ. Dei .. Trans. by Bettenson.



Doc. Chr. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

God highest or, in other words, thinking of God as the highest good, which would mean in turn that we thought correctly about the respective goodness of everything else. This proposal helps us to make sense of the fact that Augustine sometimes wrote of virtue not in terms of love at all but in terms of our thoughts or reason. His definition of virtue in terms of love dates from , the date of On the Catholic Way of Life. We have seen that he repeated this definition, in one form or another, in his later writings, so that we can conclude that this was his consistent understanding of virtue. However, in his early works, he also defined virtue in terms of our thoughts. In Soliloquies, for example, he claimed that “virtue is correct and perfect reason.” In On the Magnitude of the Soul, he defined virtue as “a certain equality of life in complete agreement with reason.” Likewise, in On the Advantage of Believing, he stated that “right reason is virtue itself,” while in Question  of Eighty-Three Questions, he wrote of “the perfect reason of man, which is called virtue.” Augustine’s references to virtue as right reason occurred in his early works; he did not return to this definition of virtue in his later writings, but rather defined virtue instead as a matter of our loves, which could be taken to mean that the view of virtue as right reason was one which he came to reject in favour of the Bible’s language of love. Yet we have seen that there was no necessary incompatibility between these two ways of defining virtue once it is realised that one meaning which he gave to love was to think of something as a good; in that case, to love something correctly was to have correct thoughts about its level of goodness: when our reason was correct – when we judged correctly about everything’s goodness – we would also love correctly. Consequently, virtue as right reason was one and the same thing as virtue as the highest love for God. This also suggests that Augustine held that it was only in understanding God as the Christian God that we would judge correctly of God’s goodness. This would allow the finding that, for him, both kinds of love were present whenever the reason was ‘right’: the highest love for God and love for the true God. Thus, while the fact that Augustine most often wrote of virtue in terms of love in his later writings no doubt indicated a new preference for using the language that was found in the Bible, yet these





Augustine’s understanding of virtue as right reason is echoed in a quotation from Cicero, which Augustine himself quoted in Question  (Div. Qu.): “virtue is the habit of the soul that accords with the way of nature and with reason.” This whole question is taken almost unaltered from Cicero, De Inventione ..–..    Sol. ... Quant. (). Util. Cred. .. Div. Qu. .

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue



two ways of describing virtue (as a matter of our reason or a matter of our loves) were arguably consistent with each other and hence his choice of language does not need to be read as evidence of a change in his understanding of the nature of virtue. Augustine defined virtue in a number of different ways in the course of his career, and this might seem to point to inconsistencies in his thinking about virtue. The above has suggested a way to reconcile these different definitions of virtue. I have proposed that when Augustine wrote of virtue as the highest love for God, or as loving God especially, he used the idea of love to refer to our thoughts about a thing’s level of goodness, so that virtue referred to thinking of God as having the highest level of goodness – a conclusion which is supported by the fact that in these places he also referred to God as the highest good, or as that thing than which there was nothing better. This conclusion in turn helps to make sense of Augustine’s alternative definitions of virtue as the order of love and as right reason: it suggests that for him virtue referred to thinking correctly about everything’s respective level of worth or goodness and that this happened only when we thought of God as the highest good. In other places, Augustine described virtue primarily as a matter of having the correct objects of our love, rather as a matter of loving things with the right amount of love. I have proposed that here he was using love in a different sense. This other kind of love was the love that “worked no ill” to the self or neighbour. This love was not reducible to doing no harm or ill, however, because God (whom no one could harm) could be the object of this love too; that is, whatever this love was, it must have the true God as its object in order to have the self and neighbour as its object as well. We will see below that love, in this second sense, referred to eros, the passion that we felt for something when we thought of it as present in the happy life. Augustine implied that where the true God was loved, there would also be the highest love for God, which adds strength to the conclusion that, for him, virtue as the highest love for God and virtue as love for the true God were not irreconcilably different definitions of virtue. Somehow, he saw these two different ways of thinking about virtue as compatible with each other; we need to explore more deeply what he meant by each in order to discover how he thought this was so.

’    Augustine held that human beings always loved something, and they were always either sinful or virtuous in loving what they loved (“everyone lives,

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

either well or badly, from his love”). The previous section found that, for Augustine, sinners did not love the true God, or love God highest, and that they might love false deities instead. He also indicated that sinners loved inordinately and that there was a sense in which they failed to love the self and failed to love other people. In addition to these comments about sin, there are numerous places in his writings where he defined vice or sin as loving anything temporal. This finding adds strength to the conclusion that Augustine gave two different meanings to “love”: as will be seen below, he had no objection to directing love at temporal things, if love was understood as valuing something in its own right – that is, he was clear that there were such things as temporal goods. Sin, in this sense, involved loving temporal things inordinately – loving them with the incorrect amount of love. Yet in other places, he condemned all love for temporal things – he implied that love should be given only to what was eternal. The fact that he both condemned and condoned love for temporal things indicates that he gave two different meanings to the concept of love. He implied that all sinners sinned in both senses: they sinned in loving temporal things – we will see that love in this sense meant eros; and they sinned in incorrectly evaluating the worth of temporal things – which was to love them inordinately. In some passages, Augustine referred to both ways of sinning in the one sentence: he both condemned the love of temporal things and condemned the incorrect love of them. For example, in On Free Will, Evodius concluded that “all sins” took the form of a “turning to things which are changeable and uncertain” and that “it is the mark of a perverse and disordered mind to pursue them to the point of becoming subject to them.” now we may give our minds to consider whether doing evil is anything else than to neglect eternal things . . . and to pursue, as if they were great and wonderful, temporal things which are perceived by the body, the lowest part of human nature, and can never be possessed with complete certainty.

Here, he implied that sin took the form of the pursuit of temporal things in the place of eternal things, while also implying that it was the way of pursuing them (“as if they were great and wonderful”) which was at fault. Elsewhere, he was more explicit that sin consisted simply in having anything temporal as the object of our love. Thus, he identified sinfulness 

C. Faust. ..



Lib. Arb. ...



Lib. Arb. ...

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue



with loving the body – with earthliness, carnality, transience, and corruptibility all characteristic of this. In contrast, the things that we ought to love were “spiritual and intelligible goods.” We sinned in loving “corporeal things” in contrast to loving “spiritual things.” “We sin by loving corporeal things, because by justice we are required and by nature we are able to love spiritual things, and when we do this we are, in our kind, the best and the happiest.” In On the Catholic Way of Life, he quoted  Timothy :, “the root of all evils is cupiditas” and called cupiditas “this sin of the soul,” explaining that Adam’s sin was cupiditas. For, as the apostle says, “The root of all evils is covetousness; which some having followed, have made shipwreck of the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows” ( Tim. :). And this sin of the soul is quite plainly, to those rightly understanding, set forth in the Old Testament in the transgression of Adam in Paradise.

Elsewhere, he explained that cupidity meant chasing “after things inferior” to the soul, and he also defined it as “the love of getting and holding onto temporal things.” Here, sin was a matter of what we loved, and not of how we loved it: it was sinful to love temporal things – there was no mention of the sin of loving them inordinately; sin was the love of the temporal, and, by implication, virtue was the love of the eternal or spiritual. Similarly, in On Christian Doctrine, Book , he wrote of the sin of “being entangled in the love of this world – i.e. of temporal things,” and wrote of the “fatal joy in transitory things.” In contrast, virtue involved fixing our “affection on things eternal.” In these passages, Augustine implied that all sin could be understood as a matter of our loves, yet we have also seen that he understood certain actions as sins – he wrote of murder, theft, or adultery, for example, as sinful things in themselves. Arguably, his reasoning in suggesting that all sin could be appropriately understood in terms of our loves was based upon the insight that whoever did one of those actions which were sins in themselves would be inspired to do this sinful thing by the love of what

 

 

  Vera rel. . and .. De Duabus Animabus .. Mor. .–. Div. Qu. ., “there is a base love by means of which the soul chases after things inferior to itself, and this love is more properly called covetousness (cupiditas), that is to say, ‘the root of all evils’ ( Tim. :).” Div. Qu. ., “covetousness (cupiditas) being the love of getting and holding onto temporal things.” Doc. Chr. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

was temporal. Thus, he explained in Confessions that murder and all actions like it were always inspired by the love of inferior (temporal) things: When, therefore, we inquire why a crime was committed, we do not believe it, unless it appear that there might have been the wish to obtain some of those which we designated inferior things, or else a fear of losing them.. . . A man has murdered another; what was his motive? He desired his wife or his estate; or would steal to support himself; or he was afraid of losing something of the kind by him; or, being injured, he was burning to be revenged.

Sins in themselves were only ever accomplished through the love of something temporal. At the same time, he did not claim that every temporal love would inspire us to do these sinful things. In the previous chapter, we have seen examples of temporal things which he accepted would not inspire these actions. Nonetheless, he held that even people who never committed one of these sinful things – people whose actions were always ‘innocent,’ morally neutral things – would nonetheless be sinners if they loved what was temporal. Whatever other things sinners might do or not do, all sinners would love something temporal, even people like the Stoics and Platonists who (as we will see) themselves condemned the love for temporal things as a sin. Augustine found numerous quotations from the Bible which he interpreted as defining sin in terms of love for temporal things, including  Timothy : and :, as well as  John : (“If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him”), just as he had interpreted the Bible’s love-commandments as defining virtue in terms of love. In particular, he believed that Paul clearly taught that sin referred to the love of carnal or temporal things, while virtue referred to the love of spiritual things. He found this terminology for vice or sin in Paul’s opposition between what was “carnal” and what was “spiritual,” for example, in Romans :, “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that you should obey the desires (concupiscentiis) thereof.” He wrote, on the one hand, of loving or desiring what was “temporal” and “carnal,” and, on the other, of loving and desiring what was “spiritual” and “eternal,” lest the mind be drawn to sin by the delight of temporal things ... “For those who live after the flesh have a taste for the things of the flesh” (Rom :), i.e., they hunger after fleshy or carnal goods as the highest goods.. . . However, when the 

Conf. ...



Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue

soul begins to desire spiritual goods and to despise temporal, then the flesh’s way of thinking ceases and there is no resistance to spirit.

Here, Augustine identified virtue with despising the temporal and loving the spiritual instead. He made a similar comment in On the Catholic Way of Life: “God then alone is to be loved; and all this world, that is, all sensible things, are to be despised.” Yet in the above passage, he also named carnal, or temporal, things, as “goods” and implied that it was our way of loving them that was at fault. As suggested above, this makes sense provided that we understand Augustine as giving two different meanings to the idea of love: love, used in one sense, ought never to be directed to temporal things, but love, used in the sense of reckoning something as of inherent worth, could appropriately have temporal things as its object – in this latter case, however, these things ought not to be loved “highest” through reckoning them as the “highest goods.” The above has argued that when Augustine condemned all love for temporal things and condemned the incorrect love for them he was not contradicting himself, but rather using love in two different senses. We have seen that further evidence in support of this is found in the fact that, in one and the same passage, he was able both to condemn as sinful all love directed at temporal things – inciting people, instead, to despise the temporal – and to condemn a particular way of loving them, namely, loving them as though they were eternal things, or as though they were the highest good. This observation helps to make sense of the fact that in his discussions of virtue he sometimes indicated that temporal things were among the things that we “should love”: his meaning was that, while temporal things were the appropriate objects of one kind of love, they were never the appropriate objects of another kind of love. Thus, when writing of virtue as the order of love in City of God, he explained: And thus beauty, which is indeed God’s handiwork, but only a temporal, carnal, and lower kind of good, is not fitly loved in preference to God, the eternal, spiritual, and unchangeable good. When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing. For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately.

Here, he did not condemn the love for temporal, lower goods, but condemned loving these things in preference to loving the eternal God, 

Div. Qu. .. See also Ex. Gal. .–.



Mor. ..



Civ. Dei ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the unchangeable good. This was to have disorder in our loves. Thus, understood in one sense, sin was disorder in our loves – we sinned not in what we loved but in how we loved it; understood in another sense, however, sin was having the incorrect object of our love, namely, loving the temporal which entailed neglecting to love the true, eternal God. Augustine defined virtue as the highest love for God, or love for the true God, which was ordered love for everything else. Sin or vice could be a matter of what we did (“sins in themselves”) or of what we loved; but, whereas some people might avoid sinning in terms of what they did, all sinners would sin at the level of their loves. Just as virtue involved two different kinds of love, so sin involved two different kinds of love: all sinners would love something temporal and, consequently, fail to love the true, eternal God; all sinners would also have disordered love, meaning that they would love temporal things incorrectly. These two ways of sinning were always found together: when we loved something temporal in the place of the true God, we loved it highest, as though it were the highest good; and this was also to love it inappropriately. Hence, sin was love (defined in one sense) for what was temporal; and sin was the incorrect amount of love (defined in another sense) for what was temporal.

, ,     So far we have found that Augustine’s definitions of virtue and vice agreed with each other, but were not entirely self-explanatory. Important questions remain: Why was love for the true God always present where the highest love for God was present, and vice versa? Why did sinners always sin both in loving temporal things and in loving them inordinately? In particular, what were the two kinds of love that formed the core of Augustine’s definitions both of virtue and sin? The following turns to Stoic-Platonic eudaimonism to see whether we can find there a discussion of virtue and vice which will illuminate Augustine’s definitions of these ideas. I begin by focusing on the Stoic account, before turning to Platonism in the next chapter. As discussed already, Stoicism found that the universal goal of human beings (“happiness”) was the life that fully accorded with human nature. The Stoics held that discovering the nature of this universal goal would reveal to us the nature of virtue and vice. They maintained that this was so because they began with a particular definition of the kind of things that virtue and vice were. In Stoic eudaimonism, it was assumed that virtue and vice were voluntary things – they were a matter of our wills: broadly,

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue



virtue was defined as the contribution of our wills to arriving at our ultimate goal (the life in complete conformity with nature); while vice was defined as whatever we did to keep ourselves from attaining this goal. Yet since this goal was something which we always wanted to achieve, what we lacked, strictly, was not the will to achieve it, but rather the knowledge of everything involved in achieving it. More precisely, it was an inadequate understanding of everything involved in achieving this goal which resulted in our wills being in a state which kept us from achieving it; when our understanding was correct, our wills would necessarily be correct too: to know in full what virtue was (to know what kind of will we needed to have in order to live the happy life) was necessarily to have this will and so to be virtuous. Moreover, a virtuous will in itself ensured that we would be happy. This was because there could be no obstacle in our natures which prevented us from living the fully natural life; consequently, living this life must be something which was completely within the power of our wills. Hence, our happiness or unhappiness depended directly on the state of our wills. To be virtuous – to have a will which was correct – was to be sure of being happy; while to be vicious – to have a will which was incorrect – was to be in a state of misery. Thus, at heart, our happiness or unhappiness was a matter of whether or not we were virtuous or vicious; and whether we were virtuous or vicious was a matter of whether or not we had the correct understanding of virtue and vice. To discover the identity of virtue, the Stoics began with the finding that living the fully natural life did not require us to possess anything temporal or mutable – that is, anything external to the mind in the sensual world (wealth, bodily health, physical comforts, political power, human praise, etc.). Since these were things which lay beyond the full control of our human powers, living in accordance with our nature did not require us to exercise full control over them: we could live this life and possess external things, but losing these things would not mean that we stopped living the fully natural life; hence, these temporal things were not themselves features of the fully natural life. Since, when we lived completely in accordance with human nature, we would have correct thoughts about the features of that life, it followed that living in complete conformity with human nature required us to stop thinking of temporal things as a part of that life – we needed to stop imagining that we needed any external, mutable thing in order to be happy. 

Tad Brennan, The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties and Fate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –, and William Stephens, “How Must I View the Use of



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Once we realised that the life that we were trying to lead was the life in complete agreement with human nature, and also realised that temporal things were not among the things that featured in that life, we would cease to have any eros for temporal things. Eros was love, but love defined as a passion: it was the special kind of emotion that we felt for whatever we regarded as a feature of the happy life. For the Stoics, our individual passions (desire, joy, fear, and grief ) arose from our thoughts about the features of the happy life. Arguably, eros could be used as the umbrella term for these passions; we experienced eros as different passions, depending on how we were situated in relation to the objects that we thought of as constituting our happiness: eros was the desire that we felt for the things that we thought of as making us happy, while these things were absent; and the joy that we felt in the possession of these things, once we had them. According to the same line of reasoning, eros was the fear that we felt when we possessed the things that we thought of as making us happy, but anticipated the possibility of losing them; and the grief that we felt when we had lost whatever we thought of as happy-making. A common criticism which modern scholarship makes of eudaimonism is that eros-love is an acquisitive, self-interested love, which is incompatible with valuing things for their own sakes or in a disinterested way. This interpretation of eros holds that it refers to love for things not for their own sakes, but because we want to be happy – hence, loving these objects means viewing them not as ends but as the means to achieving our goal of happiness. This view of eros, however, involves a confused use of the notion of ‘ends’ and ‘means’: if happiness is our end, then whatever we view as constituting happiness will likewise be our end; ‘means’ will refer to the things that we think will assist us on our journey to acquire these things, but everything which we think of as featuring in the happy life will be something which we look upon as among our ‘ends’. Moreover, in eudaimonism, we do not choose what we have as our ultimate goal; rather, human nature has one goal, and eudaimonism gives this the name of ‘happiness.’ Hence, we simply have no choice but to desire to be happy, and since this is our ruling desire, we will always consider how anything relates to achieving this goal. Consequently, it makes little sense to see eros as a self-interested love. Rather, in eudaimonism, the objects of eros



Externals?,” in Stoic Ethics: Epictetus and Happiness as Freedom (London: Bloomsbury, ). Margaret R. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), pp. –.

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue



will always be things which we value for their own sakes, through seeing them as featuring in the happy life, and eros itself will not be a selffocused love – rather, it is the love that is present in our nature at all times and to which we cannot help but relate everything which we do. Given this definition of eros as the love that we have for whatever we view as among our ultimate ‘ends’ – or, in other words, for whatever we view as constituting happiness – the Stoics found that we would experience eros-love for temporal things whenever we imagined that happiness consisted in having these things. Temporal things were not in fact features of the happy life, since living in complete agreement with human nature did not require us to have any of these things; hence, in the happy life, we would not experience eros for temporal things. This led to the conclusion that eros for temporal things, as the state of our wills which kept us from living in complete accordance with human nature, was the meaning of vice or sin. Eros for temporal things was a vice, but it did not follow from this that all love for temporal things was vicious. Eros arose from our thoughts about the features of the happy life – it was the passion that we felt for everything which we looked upon as our ultimate goal. Yet, as we have seen, the Stoics also thought that it was possible to have other goals besides the ultimate goal of happiness: these goals were the ‘preferred indifferents’ – namely, temporal things which we looked upon as worthwhile in their own right and yet as things which were unimportant for happiness. In particular, under the guidance of reason, we learned that the temporal welfare of every human being was a preferred indifferent: through reason, we discovered that it was in accordance with reason to seek everyone’s temporal welfare for its own sake. Since the fully natural life was the fully rational life, whatever was rational was likewise something natural. Thus, through reason, we discovered that seeking everyone’s temporal welfare for its own sake was something which was compatible with leading the fully natural life. Discovering that this was so was one and the same as discovering that the temporal welfare of every human being was a good. This was because a good in Stoicism was anything which it was in accordance with human nature to seek as an end in its own right rather than as a means to something else. 

See Jacob Klein, “Making Sense of Stoic Indifferents,” in Brad Inwood, ed., Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy  (): –. I. G. Kidd, “The Relation of Stoic Intermediates to the summum bonum, with Reference to Change in the Stoa,” Classical Quarterly  (): –.

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Hence, the Stoics looked on human welfare as a good; they saw it as having value in its own right, and this meant that they also looked upon human welfare as the object of a kind of love. Their message was that, while temporal things ought never to be the objects of eros-love, there was another kind of love which was rightly directed at temporal things. This was love as philia. Philia was not love as a passion; it was not love as any kind of emotion. Rather, philia was love defined as esteeming or valuing something. Reason told us to look on the welfare of every human being as a good and this was to have philia for that thing, since looking on something as a good was to esteem or value that thing in its own right, as something of inherent worth. At the same time, the Stoics accepted that there was an order, or ranking, among the objects of our philia-love. In particular, they held that, while there were many goods, there was only one supreme or highest good. All other goods were preferred indifferents, meaning that possessing these things did not make us happy; the highest good alone was happy-making. In other words, among all goods, only the highest good was a feature of the happy life: it was the one thing in having which we would become happy. Hence, identifying something not just as a good but as the highest good not only meant having the highest philia or esteem for it; it also meant feeling eros for it. The idea of the highest good followed from the principle that there was no state in between happiness and unhappiness. We must be either happy or unhappy; hence there must be one thing which, once we possessed it, made our lives happy ones (ones which completely conformed to human nature); we were either happy in having the highest good or unhappy in its absence. Thus, in Stoicism, the highest good, the thing in having which we became happy, was the object of our highest philia-love and also of our eros-love: anything which we identified as a good was the object of our philia-love, but only the highest good was the object of our highest philia and of our passionate eros-love. Thus, the Stoic tradition in eudaimonism concluded that, in order to live fully in accordance with nature, people must withdraw their eros-love from everything in the temporal realm, meaning everything external to the mind in the sensible world. Instead, we must have eros only for what was actually a feature of the fully natural life – in particular, we must have 

Philia is most commonly understood as the love involved in friendship, but it can have non-human objects, as in philosophia. For philia as friendship, see Anne Banateanu, La theorie stoicienne de l’amitie: essai de reconstruction (Fribourg: Editions Universitaire Fribourg, ).

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eros for humanity’s true highest good. At the same time, we have seen that the Stoics held that one feature of this life would be philia for the temporal welfare of every human being, and another feature would be the thought that nothing temporal was needed for happiness. Consequently, in the happy life, we would think this, namely, that while human beings’ temporal welfare was a good, neither it nor any other temporal thing was necessary for happiness; that is, we would think that, while their welfare was a good, no temporal thing was the highest good. Realising that this thought was a feature of the happy life made this thought itself the object of our eros-love, since we felt eros for all the features of the happy life. Moreover, when we felt eros for this thought, then we would withhold eros from temporal things in conformity with our nature. Furthermore, while human beings loved this thought, they could never fail to possess it. The result was that the Stoics concluded that simply regarding the thought that nothing temporal was needed for happiness as a feature of the happy life ensured that our lives completely conformed to human nature, so that regarding this thought in this way – experiencing eros for it – was itself virtue. When we thought that human beings’ temporal welfare was a good, that is, something which it was natural for us to seek for its own sake, but that it was not natural to desire their welfare, or any temporal thing, as though it was needed for happiness, and also viewed this thought as a feature of the happy life, then our whole lives would be in complete conformity with human nature; that is, we would be both virtuous and happy. This meant that, for the Stoics, to have eros for the thought that temporal things were goods but not the highest good was itself the highest good; in experiencing eros for this thought we were happy; that is, eros for this thought was virtue; hence, virtue was the highest good. The above is a reconstruction of the Stoic argument, but there is good evidence that this was what Augustine understood the Stoics as arguing. Thus, he explained that the identity of the highest good, summum bonum, stood at the heart of ancient ethical inquiry: “The remaining part of philosophy is morals, or what is called by the Greeks ἠθική (“Ethics”) which enquires concerning the summum bonum.” He also explained that the Stoics identified the highest good with the mind and its thoughts. For example, he noted that, for the Stoics, happiness was entirely within



Civ. Dei . (see also .).

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the mind’s control (within one’s “own virtue”); and he noted that for Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, the happy life lay in possessing the “virtue of the mind (in virtute animi),” as opposed to Epicurus’ view of the happy life as the life of “physical pleasure (in corpore voluptate).” In another place, he held that a paraphrase of Psalm : was appropriate for the Stoics: not “Happy the people who have the Lord as their God,” but “Happy the people who have virtue of the mind (virtus animi).” Elsewhere, he attributed to them the view “that the good of man, in which he would be happy, consists solely in virtue of the mind (in animi . . . virtute)” and stated that they “place man’s highest good in the mind (in animo).” With the notion of “virtue of the mind,” Augustine was arguably referencing the Stoic idea that happiness was simply a matter of identifying as our highest good the correct attitude towards all temporal things: when this way of thinking was the only object of our eros-love, then we would be happy; we would live fully in accordance with our human nature. At the same time, while Augustine understood the Stoics as claiming that “virtue of the mind” was the highest good, he completely rejected this conclusion: he did not think that this was the highest good and so he did not think that in thinking this the Stoics were virtuous. Instead, as we have seen, he considered that virtue was a matter of loving God. Thus, his message was that the thought that nothing temporal was needed for happiness was not happy-making – his view was that, while this insight was correct, it did not bring our lives fully into conformity with human nature; rather, we lived in complete agreement with human nature only when we loved and possessed the Christian God, meaning that, for him, the Christian God was the highest good. Before exploring Augustine’s reasons for disagreeing with the Stoics, the following looks at how the above account of Stoic ethics nonetheless helps us to understand Augustine’s definitions of virtue and vice.

   As we have seen, the notion of the highest good played an important part in Augustine’s definitions of virtue; we have also seen that he knew that inquiry into the identity and nature of the highest good stood at the heart of eudaimonism. Importantly, Augustine defined the nature of the highest  

 Trin. ..: “ut quasi propria virtute possent.” Trin. ...   Letter .. Civ. Dei .. Civ. Dei ..

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good in terms which agreed with eudaimonism. Thus, he indicated that the highest good was that thing in having which we would be happy; for this reason, he defined the highest good as “happy-making” – it was “beatifying” (beatificum). “For one who asks how to come to the happy life asks, of course, for nothing else but where the ultimate good is, that is, where the highest good of a human being resides, not according to a wrong or rash opinion but according to certain and unshakeable truth.” Likewise, in City of God, he defined the highest good as the thing “by which a person is able to become happy.” He stated that, for this reason, it was also known as the final good: “that which is called the final good is that at which, when one has arrived, he is happy.” He explained, further, that the happy life was had in loving and having the highest good – in attaining it, we required nothing more to achieve happiness. Thus, he wrote that the highest good was that which, when we “enjoyed” it, we were happy. He summed up the relationship between the highest good and happiness by, once again, calling the highest good “happy-making.” In another place, he referred to “the end of the human good – where the happy life dwells,” and elsewhere, he stated, “He is happy indeed who enjoys the highest good.” In On the Catholic Way of Life, he sometimes substituted the term “best thing” for “highest good.” Here, he tied the enjoyment of what is “best” (optimum) to happiness. I find then a fourth case in which the happy life exists – when that which is man’s best thing is both loved and possessed. For what do we call enjoyment but having at hand the objects of love? And no one can be happy who does not enjoy what is man’s best thing, nor is there anyone who enjoys this who is not happy. We must then have at hand our best thing, if we think of living happily.

For Augustine, God was the highest good. It was in having God, which he explained meant fully knowing God, that we would live the happy life. For this reason, God was beatifying – God was the one in having whom we would be happy: “Our best thing which we must hasten to arrive at in  

   

 Epistula  at .. Epistula , .. Civ. Dei ., “quo fieri homo beatus potest.” See also Civ. Dei ., “the end of the good itself is that which makes [a person] happy” and “the highest good by which a man becomes happy.”    Civ. Dei .. Civ. Dei .. Ibid. Contra Academicos . (). Lib. Arb. ... Mor. . “for if happiness consists in the enjoyment of a good than which there is nothing better, which we call the best thing.” Mor. ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

preference to all other things is nothing else than God.” “Accordingly we say that there is no unchangeable good but the one, true, blessed God . . . for so completely is He [His creatures’] good, that without Him they cannot but be wretched.” In this way, we can explain the important place given by Augustine to the notion of the highest good in his discussions of virtue and sin by reference to eudaimonism. Like the Stoics, Augustine accepted that discovering the nature of the happy life, and hence the nature of virtue and vice, was primarily a matter of inquiring into the true identity of the highest good. For him, as for ancient eudaimonists, this inquiry stood at the heart of ethics: to love and have the highest good was to be happy.

   When discussing Augustine’s definitions of virtue and sin, the above noted that Augustine used love in two different senses. We have seen that the Stoics also gave two meanings to love. One meaning which Augustine gave to love was to think of something as a good – we have seen that this was equivalent to the ancient idea of philia. To think of something as the highest good was to love it in the sense of philia – it was to have the highest philia for it. The other meaning of love found in ancient eudaimonism was eros. Eros was love as passion, where passions were the feelings associated with our thoughts about the happy life. Thus, we always felt eros for whatever we identified as the highest good: whatever this thing was, it would always be the object not only of philia but also of eros. Normally, we experienced eros as desire, but we will see that Augustine also held that in the happy life we would experience eros as joy: eros was the experience of wanting something because we thought we would be happy in having it, and the experience of having the thing that we thought of as happy-making. The idea that Augustine understood love, including love for God, as eros was discussed influentially in the early twentieth century by Anders Nygren. It is now well accepted that one of the meanings that Augustine gave to love was eros. At the same time, many commentators have  



 Mor. . Civ. Dei .. Anders Nygren, Eros and Agape, trans. Philip Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, ). The original Swedish work (Eros och Agape) was published in two parts, in  and . See Part Two, “The Caritas-Synthesis,” pp. –. Burnaby agrees that eros was one of the meanings, although not the only meaning, that Augustine gave to the human love for God (John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue



noted that Augustine had no consistent Latin terminology for “love,” but used a number of different Latin terms interchangeably. Augustine’s use of “love” to mean “eros” is no exception: the terms he used for eros included amor/amare and also diligere, caritas, libido, concupiscentia, and cupiditas. Given the many terms for love in Augustine’s Latin, it is not the terminology that he used, but the context in which he used it, including the accompanying imagery, which is the key to identifying the places in which he understood love as eros. For example, Augustine indicated that he used love to mean eros when he wrote of love using the imagery of attraction (pursuit or movement): “love is a kind of motion, and since there is no motion except it be toward something, when we seek what ought to be loved we are looking for something to which this motion ought to direct us.” In the same vein, in On Christian Doctrine he wrote of love as the “motion of the mind.” Another way of putting this was that love was following after something, or seeking it: “we follow after God by loving Him.” Love as seeking or following after something was love as desire. As the following passage from On True Religion indicates, love, understood as eros, was the desire that we experienced for that thing in the possession of which we believed that we would be happy: “so, without knowing it, they love temporal things and hope for blessedness therefrom. Whether he will or no, a man is necessarily a slave to the things by means of which he seeks to be happy. He follows them whithersoever they lead.” When people regarded the possession of some temporal thing as needed for happiness, they loved that thing. This was love as eros, that is, as the passion that people felt for that thing in possessing which they believed they would be happy.

 

Religion of St. Augustine [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, ], p. ). This is also the view of Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, ), pp.  and . See also Sarah Catherine Byers, Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –, for more texts from Augustine which support the idea of love as eros. See Kyle P. Hubbard, “Augustine on Human Love for God: Agape, Eros, or Philia,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly . (): –: Hubbard does not dispute that eros is one of the meanings that Augustine gave to love for God (p. ). T. J. van Bavel, “Love,” in Allan Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ), p. .    Div. Qu. (). Doc. Chr. ... Mor. .. Vera Rel. ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

He also indicated that love meant eros when he wrote of love as pursuing something “for its own sake” (propter se ipsum). For example, he explained that “to love is nothing other than to seek something for its own sake.” This passage can be coupled with his statement in City of God that the highest good was that which we sought “not for the sake of something else but for its own sake.” To seek anything at all for its own sake was to regard it as a good, which we have seen was one meaning which Augustine gave to love, but there was also a sense in which the very pursuit of something for its own sake could be defined as love for that thing. If pursuing something for its own sake meant pursuing it as our ultimate goal, then, since Augustine accepted that our ultimate goal was the happy life, one meaning of pursuing something propter se ipsum was to pursue that thing because we pictured having it as part of our happiness – this was to desire it passionately or, in other words, to have eros for it. Finally, for Augustine, love in the sense of eros involved the imagery of “fruition” – frui and fruendum, normally translated as “enjoyment.” Augustine explained that “enjoying” something referred to possessing it, but in a special way, namely, possessing something and being made happy by its possession. Hence, Augustine specified that we must be careful about what we sought to enjoy – we must seek to enjoy only that which truly was a feature of the happy life, meaning only that thing (or those things) which we would actually have in the happy life. Joy (gaudium) was the passion that accompanied enjoyment (fruitio): when we possessed the object for which we felt eros, we would feel joy. Thus, he explained that we could love something in its absence, and also love something when we possessed it: the love in each case was eros, the feeling which sprang from thinking of something as a feature of the happy life. Thus, eros was not only desire but also joy: “Therefore a love which strains after the possession of the loved object is desire; and the love which possesses and enjoys that object is joy.” In this sense, joy, like desire, could be a good or bad passion; that is, it could be one which was in accordance or out of accordance with our nature, depending on whether the object for which we felt eros was truly one which had a place in the happy life. In one of the above passages, Augustine implied that eros for temporal things was a sin, in agreement with the Stoics: he was critical of all those   

 Div. Qu. (). Civ. Dei . Doc. Chr. .., “those things which are objects of enjoyment make us happy.” Civ. Dei ..

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue

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who “love temporal things and hope for blessedness therefrom.” This suggests that in those passages in which Augustine stated that the virtuous would despise temporal things, while sinners would love them, he was using love in the sense of eros. As noted already, the Stoics explained why eros for temporal things was always a sin: we needed nothing temporal in order to live in complete agreement with human nature; eros for temporal things was therefore a passion which was out of accordance with our nature. In other words, the problem, for Augustine as for the Stoics, was not seeking temporal things, or even seeking them for their own sakes (as goods), but rather desiring them as though possessing them would make us happy. This was eros-love. Hence, the sin of loving temporal things was the sin of having eros for them. Thus, we can also conclude that love as eros was also one of the meanings that Augustine gave to the love that was virtue: as we have seen, he defined virtue as love for the true God; in other words, virtue was eros for the true God, since the true God was the highest good, the one in loving and having whom we would live the happy life. In this way, Augustine reserved the highest praises for the Platonists among all nonChristians, because he found that they shared with Christianity the insight that God was the highest good: “But the true and highest good, according to Plato, is God, and therefore he would call him a philosopher who loves God; for philosophy is directed to the obtaining of the happy life, and he who loves God is happy in the enjoyment of God.” The Platonists thought of God as the highest good, and this meant that there was a sense in which God was the object of their eros-love, but Augustine did not consider that this made them virtuous because he held that to be virtuous, we must have the true God as the object of eros-love. Virtue was not eros for God, but eros for the true God; for Augustine, this meant that we must think that happiness lay in knowing the Christian God. The above noted that, for Augustine, there was a sense in which it was only when we had love for the true God that we would have love for the self and neighbour. Given that he defined love for the true God as eros, it follows that he must have had eros in mind here as well: when we experienced eros for the true God, then we would also experience eros for self and neighbour. We can also deduce that this meant that when we had eros for the true God, we would experience eros for self and neighbour, but not for them as temporal things, since eros for temporal things



Civ. Dei ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

was always a sin. Hence, one form of eros for self and neighbour (eros for them as temporal things?) involved doing them harm, and hence was better said to be hatred; another avoided all harm to them (eros for them as eternal things?) and so was properly called love (since love worked no ill to the beloved). We will return to these ideas in Chapter .

  “ ”  In eudaimonism, the other meaning of love was to think of something as a good, which was the same as thinking of something as having worth or value: in eudaimonism, love understood as esteeming something – seeing value or worth in it – was called philia. We have seen that Augustine also used love to mean philia: God, as the highest good, deserved the highest love; temporal things, as lesser goods, deserved lesser love. In each case, love referred to our level of esteem for that thing; we loved something more or loved it less according to the degree of worth, or goodness, that we saw in it. The fact that when we thought of something as the highest good we experienced both philia for that thing and also eros for it arguably complicated Augustine’s vocabulary for love. Philia was not love as desire, but because philia and eros were often both experienced for the same object (the thing that we named as the highest good), the result was that terms for love which implied the presence of desire – libido, concupiscentia, cupiditas – were used in these cases to describe the presence of philia as well. In particular, sinful libido or cupiditas for temporal things referred to esteeming them as the highest good (philia) and so having passionate desire (eros) for them. Thus, the fact that Augustine used words which implied “desire” for the love that was sin should not be taken to mean that he did not have philia-love in mind here as well. By the early s (when he came to write against the Pelagians), his preferred term for the love that was sin was concupiscentia. Thus, in his unfinished work against the Pelagian Julian, which he was still working on at his death, Augustine accused Julian of denying that “desire (concupiscentiam) is sin” and replied that Paul “most clearly showed that it is sin when he said the words I quoted: ‘I would not have known sin except through the law’ (Romans :). And if 

Timo Nisula, Augustine and the Functions of Concupiscence (Leiden: Brill, ), p. , finds that while Augustine used libido, cupiditas, and concupiscentia interchangeably, in his anti-Pelagian writings his preference was for the term concupiscentia.

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we asked, ‘What sin?’ he said, ‘For I would not have known desire (concupiscentiam) unless the law said, ‘Do not be concupiscent’ (non concupisces).’” Thus, he claimed that “You shall love” was the “general precept” and it was matched by the “general prohibition” of “You shall not covet (non concupisces)”: the importance of this precept was underlined by the fact that Paul singled it out in Romans :. Augustine had a similar message in On the Spirit and the Letter: “The apostle, indeed, purposely selected this general precept, in which he embraced everything, as if this were the voice of the law, prohibiting us from all sin, when he says, ‘Do not covet’; for there is no sin committed except by concupiscence; so that the law which prohibits this is a good and praiseworthy law.” In the instruction against coveting, Paul had prohibited “all sin.” Concupiscence was both a sin in itself, prohibited by the moral law, and the cause of all other sins. “There is of course nothing said figuratively which is not to be accepted in its plain sense, when it is said, ‘Do not covet’; but this is a very plain and salutary precept, and any man who shall fulfil it will have no sin at all.” Where there was no concupiscentia, there was no sin at all: remove this love from us, and we would sin neither at the level of our loves nor at the level of our actions. We have seen that, for Augustine, people could sin in loving by having the incorrect object for their eros-love or by having too much (or too little) philia-love for something, and that both these sins were always found together because when we thought of something temporal as the highest good, we sinned in loving that thing too much (philia) and in having the incorrect object for eros. Thus, the one word, concupiscentia, arguably described both these kinds of love; for this reason, Augustine concluded that “do not be concupiscent” was the general prohibition; obedience to this prohibition removed all sin. Thus Augustine did not have a distinctive word for philia, but we have seen that he associated this love with the language of evaluation – to have a preference, or to form an estimate of something, involved loving it in this sense. The following finds that he also associated this love with the distinctive imagery of “cleaving” to something. He associated loving with cleaving in a number of passages. For example, in On the Catholic Way of Life, he connected loving something with cleaving to it, using Psalm :, “It is good for me to cleave to God.”  

C. Jul. Imp. .. Quoted by Jesse Couenhoven, “St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin,” Augustinian Studies  (): –, at .   Perf. Just., .. Spir. et Litt. .. Ibid.

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

For is Paul alone in saying that we should be joined to God so that there should be nothing between to separate us? Does not the prophet say the same most aptly and concisely in the words, “It is good for me to cleave (adhaerere) to God?” Does not this one word “cleave” express all that the apostle says at length about love? And do not the words, It is good, point to the apostle’s statement, “All things issue in good to them that love God”?

When we cleaved to God we loved God, and vice versa – Psalm : stated that “it is good for me to cleave to God,” and Augustine matched this psalm to Paul’s statement of “All things issue in good to them that love God.” Thus, “It is good for me to cleave to God” could be paraphrased as “It is good for me to love God.” Cleaving to something meant being bound to it; Augustine indicated that we were bound to God by our love. Other places in which he connected “cleaving” with love include his statement in On the Catholic Way of Life that we cleaved (in this case, haerere) to God “only by affection, desire and love” and his explanation in On Christian Doctrine that “to enjoy a thing is to cleave (inhaerere) to it for its own sake with love.” Elsewhere, he wrote of love as the glue that glued us to God. “My soul has been glued on behind You.” Look at this person consumed with desire, look how thirsty he is, and how firmly he sticks (haeret) to God!. . . Where are we to find the strong glue? The glue is love (caritas). Have caritas in you, and it will glue your soul into place, following God.

“Cleaving to” something, whether adhaerere or inhaerere, meant clinging to it – adhering to it. Nonetheless, Augustine did not equate cleaving to God with possessing God. He explained that God was possessed by being known, but he was clear that we cleaved to God not by knowing Him but by loving Him. Hence, being “stuck on” to God was not the same thing as “having” God. At the same time, cleaving to something was also distinct from desiring to possess that thing as our goal and so it was distinct from eros. We could have eros only for that thing in the possession of which we believed we would live happily – that is, our eros was always tied to our thoughts about what we would possess in the happy life. Yet Augustine accepted that it was appropriate for us to love and cleave to objects in this life, that is, to things which would not be found in the next, happy life.

 

 Mor. .. Mor. .. En. Ps.  (verse ) at .



Doc. Chr. ...

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Thus, when writing of the love that ought to be present among human beings in On the Catholic Way of Life, he wrote that servants ought “to cleave” (adhaerere) to their masters; and in his writings on marriage, in particular, he quoted Genesis :, “A man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife,” connecting it with love via Ephesians :, “Husbands love your wives.” The fact that things which belonged to this (unhappy) life were things which we could appropriately cleave to with love indicated that this love was not about eros, the desire that we had to possess something because we viewed it as needed for happiness. Instead, Augustine indicated that the love whereby we cleaved to things referred to thinking about a given object as a praiseworthy thing, meaning that he indicated that this love was philia. His message was that, while there would be no mastery and slavery, and no marriage, in the happy life, nonetheless, these relationships were appropriate to this life, and so they were, in this sense, praiseworthy things: hence, slaves ought to cleave to their masters, and husbands to their wives. On the one hand, there was a sense in which husbands were bound to their wives, and slaves to their masters, regardless of whether or not they loved them; yet this was merely cleaving “from the necessity of their position.” Cleaving with love, in contrast, was present when they found some delight in the role that they played with respect to this other person – that is, when they recognised this role as a good thing and so delighted in it. Augustine’s explanation of what it meant to cleave by love continued in his commentary on Psalm  with the example of the love that fans had for a favourite charioteer. Fans of a charioteer loved him and this meant that they cleaved to him. The bond between them lay in their thoughts about him; they attached themselves to him– they glued themselves on to him – by thinking of him as an outstanding charioteer and so deserving of praise. Thus “cleaving” was the bond that was formed when we loved someone in the sense of esteeming them as praiseworthy; it sprang from

  



Mor. .. De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia ., ., and .; Contra Duas Epistolas Pelagianorum .. Augustine found that Jesus’ answer to the Sadduccees (Mt. :) that there would be no marriage in heaven indicated that there would be no sexual desire, desire for children, or procreation in the happy life either. See City of God . and .–. Mor. .: “You teach servants to cleave to their masters from delight in their task rather than from the necessity of their position.”

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

love understood as an evaluation of a person or thing as good and therefore deserving of our praises. But for me to cleave (adhaerere) to God is a good thing.. . . To put in God my hope. And by doing what here will you put in God your hope? What will be your business, but to praise Him whom you love, and to make others to be fellowlovers of Him with you? Lo, if you should love a charioteer, would you not carry along other men to love him with you? A lover of a charioteer wherever he goes does speak of him, in order that as well as he others also may love him.

Fans loved a charioteer – they thought of him as a good charioteer and so praised him, and this bound them to him; slaves ought to love their masters, and husbands their wives – that is, they ought to think of their masters as masters, or their wives as wives, as praiseworthy things, and so praise, honour, and esteem them in these roles, and in this sense bind themselves to them. Likewise, this was a love which we owed to God: we owed God our praise and esteem: “What will be your business, but to praise Him whom you love.” Thus, elsewhere, he wrote that those who loved someone, whether a charioteer, or a hunter, or God Himself, magnified that person with praises. In other places, he tied loving God to praising, worshipping, and glorifying Him. not that He Himself may be glorified by these honours, but that we may be stirred up to worship and cleave (cohaerendum) to Him, being inflamed by His love, which is our advantage rather than His? And what is meant by “To Him be glory” but to Him be chief and perfect and wide-spread praise? For as the praise improves and extends, so the love and affection increase in fervour.

To love God was to think of God as praiseworthy and so to praise Him; hence this was to love God in a different sense to love as desiring God as our end. At the same time, while praise, worship, and acts of devotion were extended to God by those who loved Him, Augustine noted that this could be done in the absence of love for God too, just as the praises of a charioteer could be empty praises. Thus, as with every action, what mattered was the spirit in which it was done – praise could be given insincerely, with the aim only of flattering. Nonetheless, if the

   

See O’Donovan’s description of “rational love” in his The Problem of Self-Love, p. : “Love is neither ‘appetite’ nor ‘movement’ but estimation, appreciation and approval.” En. Ps.  (verse ) at . En. Ps., Exposition  of Psalm  (verse ) at ; and De Catechizandis Rudibus, ..   Civ. Dei .. Mor. .. Civ. Dei ..

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presence of praise was not a sure guide to the presence of philia, its absence always indicated the absence of this love. Those who were not moved to praise God certainly did not have love for Him in the sense of thinking of Him as praiseworthy, and so they did not cleave to Him, just as those who neglected to praise a charioteer were not his fans. This was because love, in the sense of philia, referred precisely to our esteem for God: to have philia-love for God, and hence to cleave to Him, was to think of Him as praiseworthy and so to praise Him. Believing in the praises that we gave someone, then, constituted what it meant to love them in this sense. We had the appropriate philia for God, and cleaved to Him, when we believed God to be deserving of our “chief” praise – that is, when we believed God to be the highest good – and so praised Him accordingly. The idea of love as esteeming something as praiseworthy and therefore “cleaving” to it arguably informed Augustine’s claim at the start of Soliloquies that “everything (omne) capable of loving loves [God] knowingly or unknowingly.” O’Donovan proposes that Augustine was using love here in the sense of eros, that is, in the sense of desiring something as our ultimate goal, and so concludes that, for Augustine, everything in creation was moving towards God as its goal (an idea which, as O’Donovan notes, brings with it the problem of an “immanent teleology”). I propose that a better reading is that here, Augustine was using love in the sense of philia: all of creation praised God in one way or another, knowingly or unknowingly. Since philia-love for something could exist in the absence of eros-love for that thing, the whole of creation could love God, in the sense of cleaving to Him through praise, but without having eros-love for God. The idea that the whole of creation praised God was one which Augustine expressed elsewhere. For example, he explained in his commentary on Psalm , “Never have things in heaven held their peace in the praises of their Creator, never have things on earth ceased to praise God.” Everything praised God, and so everything loved God – this was love as esteem, that is, love as philia, not love as eros: the goodness of creation glorified God the Creator. Christians extended both praise (philia) and desire (eros) to the true God, but every human being, along with every part of creation, could be understood to extend praises to God: the worth of our own human nature was a

 

 Sol. ... O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love, pp. ,  n. , and . En. Ps.  (verse ) at .

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

testament to the worth of the Creator so that, unknowingly, everyone extended philia to the true God. This was distinct from the knowing praise and desire for God which was virtue; virtue was a matter of the highest philia for God, which was present when we thought of the true God as the highest good, that is, when we had the true God as the object of our eros-love. The above examination of the ideas of the highest good, eros, and philia offers support for the conclusion that Augustine thought that his definitions of virtue and vice made sense within the eudaimonist tradition. In particular, Augustine knew that Stoicism understood virtue and vice as different loves (both philia and eros), and defined sin as eros-love for what was temporal or, in other words, as disorder in our philia-loves whereby something temporal was given the highest praises through being regarded as the highest good. The above has found that he made use of these same ideas in formulating his own definitions of virtue and vice. We are not yet in a position to conclude, however, that Augustine thought that his way of defining virtue and vice was completely compatible with eudaimonism. Before we can conclude that this was so, we need to examine his criticisms of the Stoics and the Platonists. Hence, the next section asks: In criticising the Stoics, did Augustine criticise them for being eudaimonists or for being poor eudaimonists? Did he offer an ‘external’ critique of Stoicism, through making use of ideas which had no place in eudaimonism, or an ‘internal’ one, through faulting the way that the Stoics applied the insights of eudaimonism?

   :    Augustine did not agree with the Stoic definition of the highest good as “virtue of the mind,” with the result that he maintained that the Stoics were neither virtuous nor had the correct understanding of virtue. This criticism of the Stoics was something which Augustine understood himself as sharing with other thinkers, including Cicero and the Platonists. The fact that these other thinkers were themselves working in the eudaimonist tradition encourages the conclusion that, for Augustine, the Stoics’ problem was not that they were eudaimonists, but rather that they were poor eudaimonists: Augustine joined Cicero and the Platonists in finding that eudaimonism itself pointed to the flaw in the Stoics’ account. He indicated that he had first encountered the critique of Stoicism in Cicero’s Hortensius. He described in Confessions how his reading of Cicero’s Hortensius at the age of nineteen had decisively shaped his

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intellectual development as a young man. He explained that in this book he encountered “an exhortation to philosophy” and that this led him “with an incredible warmth of heart” to aspire towards attaining “the immortality of wisdom.” Importantly, in retrospect, he understood this as the moment at which he had begun his return to God – his reading of Cicero had set his feet upon the right path. “I was delighted with that exhortation, in so far only as I was thereby stimulated, and enkindled, and inflamed to love, seek, and obtain, hold and embrace, not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, whatever it were.” If this exhortation is understood as an exhortation to eros for philosophy, then it was something which was conspicuously absent from the Stoics with their view that the only eros-love that had a place in the fully human life was the love of the mind’s correct attitude toward temporal things. In contrast, Augustine found Cicero declaring in Hortensius that the desire for wisdom itself – the knowledge of the world outside the mind – was something for which human beings were fitted to experience eros. The Stoic view gave no place to this love of philosophy since it found that the only thing that human beings fittingly experienced eros for was the mind’s correct attitude towards temporal things. Eros for this correct attitude was not eros for philosophy. How did Cicero make this case against the Stoics? The Hortensius is now mostly lost, but its argument with regard to wisdom and Stoicism can be reconstructed on the basis of Augustine’s earliest completed work, the De Beata Vita, in which Augustine offered his own version of a key argument in the Hortensius. The argument of Cicero in the Hortensius was presented in the following way by Augustine. In claiming that eros for temporal things

 

 Conf. ..–. Ibid. Although Cicero’s Hortensius now exists only in fragments, it is likely that it was based upon Aristotle’s Protrepticus (also fragmentary) which contains a defence of the idea that all human beings desire knowledge and this is the reason for the practice of philosophy. See Michael W. Tkacz, “St Augustine’s Appropriation and Transformation of Aristotelian eudaimonia,” in Jon Miller, ed., The Reception of Aristotle’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. See also William Altman, The Revival of Platonism in Cicero’s Late Philosophy: Platonis aemulus and the Invention of Cicero (London: Lexington Books, ): “Thanks to the fragmentary nature of the Hortensius, we are in some doubt as to how Cicero turned the example of the wealthy Orata to philosophy’s advantage, but I would suggest that Augustine’s Monnica provides the best clue: [Orata] was not in misery (miseria) because he was in need (egestas) of more (amplius) but because his fear of losing what he had proved that what he really lacked was wisdom (sapientia)” (p. ).

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

was not natural to human beings, the Stoics had supposed that every human being was capable of perceiving that temporal things were not the kind of things which human beings could have complete control over. Supposing that all human beings were capable of recognising this, so that the thought of temporal things as the highest good was something which all human beings were capable of rejecting, the Stoics concluded that thinking in this way about temporal things had no place in human nature: rather, it was a thought which could be eradicated from human beings, even though every human being, from their earliest years, regarded something temporal as indispensable for happiness. This in turn allowed them to be consistent in their finding that thinking of temporal things as the highest good had no place in the life in accordance with human nature. In response to this claim, however, Augustine followed Cicero in introducing the problem of the healthy, wealthy fool. He introduced this problem through the figure of Orata, who allowed Augustine to pose the question, What if someone chose to be a fool? In particular, what if someone chose to remain as ignorant as possible about the sensible world around them? This person might never know about human beings’ inability to possess temporal things securely and instead might believe that they themself could have complete control over material possessions and health, enjoying them for just as long as they wanted. This scenario was not inherently improbable, if we imagined that this wilfully foolish person possessed enormous wealth and good health so that they had never personally experienced thwarted desires or want. In that case, the knowledge that external goods like health and wealth were transient and ultimately outside human control might never be forced upon that person. The result would be that it would not be evident to this person that temporal things like these were not the highest good: the Stoics supposed that everyone was capable of rejecting the thought of something temporal as the highest good – they supposed that living in accordance with our nature involved rejecting this thought. But, on the contrary, healthy, wealthy fools could be taken to be incapable of rejecting it: it was possible that a healthy, wealthy person who chose to remain ignorant would think that the fully natural life was the life in which human beings enjoyed perfect health and enormous wealth. This was not a trivial point; on the contrary, it caught the Stoics in a serious contradiction. Their line of reasoning established that there was no place in the fully natural life for the thought that having temporal things formed part of that life. They observed that human nature was not capable of controlling temporal things perfectly, which meant that human

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beings were capable of losing them or failing to possess them. This in turn meant that we would live in accordance with our nature even when we lost these things or failed to get hold of them. It followed from this that temporal things could not be features of the fully natural life: we did not need to have anything temporal to live in complete agreement with our nature. This led to the conclusion that when we lived in complete agreement with our nature we would not think of temporal things as needed for happiness. Yet if this thought had no place in human nature, it must be the case that every human being was capable of rejecting this thought. The example of the healthy, wealthy fool, however, established that this was not the case. People who chose to be foolish, and who possessed great wealth and perfect health, would not necessarily know about the fact that every material possession, and health itself, was an insecure, transient thing, with the result that they might think of these things as happymaking. In On the Happy Life, Augustine illustrated this objection to Stoicism with the story of Orata. Sergius Orata was a wealthy man mentioned in Cicero’s Hortensius and it seems that in these passages from On the Happy Life Augustine was drawing directly on this work of Cicero’s. He explained that Orata possessed abundant wealth and good health. Nonetheless, Orata found that he was not happy. “Immensely rich in estates, and exceptionally blessed with most charming friends, he had in abundance whatever his heart desired, and all these goods in the interest of his physical well-being. In a word, all his undertakings and his every wish were crowned with success.” Licentius noted that his unhappiness consisted in his fear of losing all the good things that he possessed and Augustine agreed: Licentius, you see that the brilliancy of his own mind impeded this man, exceptionally favoured by fortune, from enjoying a happy life. Through the greater sharpness of his mind he gained a deeper realization of the contingency of his possessions. Therefore he was bent down by fear.

Orata considered that his wealth was indispensable to happiness, and yet he also admitted that he still lacked something for happiness. He knew that he was unhappy because he experienced fear, and his fears arose from the sharpness of his intellect which made him know full well that all wealth and health, as temporal things, were transient. The example of 

B. Vita, ..



B. Vita, ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Sergius Orata shone a spotlight on the flaw in the Stoics’ account because it showed that the Stoics had no arguments to persuade Orata to reject his love for temporal things; on the contrary, it would be as rational for Orata to seek to become foolish as to seek to be free of his temporal loves. If he could persuade himself to forget what he had learned about the insecurity and transience of everything in the sensible world, then he would regard himself as a completely happy man. He would lose all his fear and so he would suppose that he was living the happy life. Thus, this was a true dilemma for the Stoics. They had established that the life fully in accordance with human nature was the life in which people rejected all thought of temporal things as happy-making. They had also established that every human being must be able to reject this thought, since rejecting this thought accorded with our natures, and, by definition, we were able to do whatever accorded with our natures. But they had no way of showing that someone who chose to be foolish would reject this thought. There was only one escape from this dilemma. This lay in concluding that the choice of folly was itself something which had no place in human nature. In other words, the dilemma posed by Orata could only be resolved by finding that desire for knowledge about the world external to the mind was a natural desire: if that were so, then we would not live the fully natural life while this desire for knowledge was not present in us, with the result that anyone who chose to remain foolish would not be living in complete accordance with human nature. Augustine indicated this by concluding that Orata would continue in misery if he opted to go on having eros for temporal things while foolishly telling himself that none of these things could ever be lost to him. “Of course, he would have been more miserable if he had been quite without fear for those unsteady and changeable things which he regarded as good.” Hence, the Stoics’ own insights forced them to conclude that desire for knowledge was natural – meaning a desire which must be present in us in order for us to live the fully natural life. But if the Stoics accepted that human beings naturally desired to possess knowledge, as they needed to do in order to establish that all human beings were able to reject the thought of something temporal as needed for happiness, then they would be forced to concede that they themselves had misidentified the highest good: it was not possible for them to claim that the highest good was eros



B. Vita, ..

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for the correct attitude towards all temporal things (“virtue of the mind”) while also finding that something else entirely, namely, the desire for knowledge, must also be present in us in the happy life. Philosophy was philia for wisdom: it referred to viewing wisdom as a good, or, in other words, seeking to be wise for its own sake. If the desire for wisdom was present in the happy life, then it must be the object of eros. The example of Orata thus served to establish Cicero’s view that eros for philosophy was part of human nature; moreover, it forced the Stoics to concede that this was so, by their own arguments, and so it forced them, in effect, to concede that they were incorrect to identify the highest good with the mind’s rejection of all love for temporal things. We can see now why Augustine’s reading of Cicero’s Hortensius was such a watershed in his intellectual development. Cicero exposed the Stoics as incorrect in their identification of the highest good with the mind’s rejection of all eros-love for temporal things. There was no scope for the love of philosophy in loving this thought – yet, as the example of Orata established, eudaimonism demanded the conclusion that human beings naturally desired to be wise.

       Cicero did not rest with this criticism of the Stoics. He offered his own account of the identity of the highest good, proposing that the highest good was philosophia itself – philia for wisdom. We have seen that philia referred to thinking of something as a good in its own right and that this referred to telling ourselves that this thing was worth seeking, in its absence, for its own sake. Hence if philia for wisdom was the highest good, then this meant that, while we lacked knowledge, the search for knowledge would be something which formed part of the life in accordance with nature, with the result that philosophy itself would become the object of eros. Cicero argued that when we had eros for the pursuit of wisdom then we would not regard any temporal thing as needed for happiness (since we would reject eros for temporal things as being inconsistent with eros for the pursuit of wisdom) and we would not do anything which we were unfitted by nature to do (on the grounds that all unsociable actions sprang from eros for temporal things). From this it followed that philosophia was itself the highest good – when we dedicated ourselves to the pursuit of wisdom, we would live in complete accordance with our nature. Hence, it would seem that the only modification to the Stoics’ line of reasoning which needed to be made lay in the finding that

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the philia for wisdom was actually humanity’s highest good – when we named the pursuit of knowledge as our highest good, so that we felt eros for it, we would be virtuous and happy. In reaching this conclusion, Cicero’s message was that human beings were fitted to have eros for the pursuit of wisdom because they were not fitted to be wise. If being wise formed part of human nature, then we would not live in complete agreement with our natures until we actually attained wisdom. As a sceptic, Cicero considered that it was not humanly possible to know anything – perfect certainty would always elude human beings; hence the happy life, as the life fully in accordance with human nature, must consist simply in the quest for knowledge, not in its attainment. Consequently, Cicero concluded that the search for wisdom, rather than wisdom itself, was the highest good: it was in pursuing wisdom that we attained the fully human life; virtue referred to thinking of philosophia (as opposed to sophia itself ) as the highest good. Augustine put some of Cicero’s arguments into Licentius’s mouth in Against the Sceptics. Licentius declared that the quest for wisdom freed people from all thought of temporal things as the highest goods (“inordinate desires”) and made them “happy.” Licentius: . . . He is happy, because, to the utmost of his power, he is extricating himself from the entanglements of the body and devoting himself to sheer introspection; because he is not allowing himself to be torn asunder by inordinate desires, but is always tranquilly directing his mind toward itself and toward God; and because he is doing all this in order to make a thoroughly good use of reason at the present time.

Licentius’ position, and Cicero’s too as Augustine understood it, was that dedicating ourselves to the pursuit of wisdom was to live completely in harmony with human nature and so to be happy. Human beings were not able to find the truth, but they were able to devote themselves to the pursuit of the truth; doing this was in accordance our nature and in accordance with rejecting eros-love for temporal things; hence, sceptics like Cicero concluded that the pursuit of the truth was the highest good. Yet Augustine was clear in Confessions that, although he accepted that philia for wisdom was part of human nature, he was not satisfied with 



On Cicero’s scepticism, see Charles Brittain’s introduction to his translation of Cicero, On Academic Scepticism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, ); p. xxxix for Augustine’s knowledge of it; and Raphael Woolf, Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic (Abingdon: Routledge, ). C. Acad. ...

Augustine’s Definitions of Virtue

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Cicero’s conclusion that the highest good (the thing that was happymaking, so that when we possessed it, we would be happy) was this philosophia. In Confessions, he recounted how, upon reading the Hortensius and becoming convinced that human beings were lovers of knowledge, he turned not to the philosophical school of which Cicero was a member – the sceptics or ‘Academics’ – but rather to the Manicheans, who claimed that human beings could actually possess the truth. He explained that when he had first read Cicero, he had been reluctant to embrace the conclusion that human nature was incapable of reaching the truth. Instead, he chose to explore the possibility that human beings were capable of attaining wisdom: if human beings could attain wisdom, then this would mean that the highest good must be wisdom itself – if it accorded with our natures to know the truth, then we would not live fully in accordance with our natures until we knew the truth; merely pursuing the truth, without possessing it, would fall short of living the life that we were intended by nature to lead. He was clear, however, that at this point in his early adulthood he had no answer to the sceptics; nonetheless, he wanted to discover whether complete certainty was attainable. In the next chapter, we will see that, ultimately, his reply to the sceptics rested upon his encounter with the Neoplatonists who taught him that knowledge of the highest truth was something which human beings were fitted to have; the life in full accordance with human nature was one in which we not only valued wisdom as a good in its own right but also possessed wisdom, meaning that it was wisdom itself, and not philosophy, which was the correct object of eros (and of our highest philia). This chapter has sought to identify the points of agreement between Augustine’s ethical thought and Stoicism, and also his grounds for rejecting Stoicism, in order better to understand the relationship between his thought and eudaimonism. It would be easy to assume that, as a Christian, his way of defining virtue and vice could not have been wholly compatible with eudaimonism: it would be easy to assume that his study of the Bible must, at some point, have led him on a path away from eudaimonism so that his understanding of virtue and vice must have been influenced by biblical ideas which had no equivalents in eudaimonism. In particular, if we assume that the biblical account of ethics is not eudaimonistic or not susceptible to being read in a eudaimonistic way, then the assumption that Augustine’s ethics must have departed from

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Conf. ...

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

eudaimonism easily follows. In this chapter, however, we have not found any points of conflict between the eudaimonist account of virtue and vice, and Augustine’s account. Augustine not only understood virtue and sin as a matter of our loves but understood love as eros and philia; he claimed that God was the highest good and claimed that sin was eros-love for temporal things or disorder in our philia-love for them. These were eudaimonist ideas. Moreover, when he came to explain why the Stoic account of virtue and vice was flawed, he claimed not that eudaimonism itself was flawed but rather that the Stoics themselves were poor eudaimonists. The next chapter continues to explore these issues and to seek a better understanding of his definitions of virtue and vice. It does this through exploring the points of agreement and disagreement between his ethical thought and that of the Platonists.

 Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition

This chapter seeks to understand the relationship between Augustine’s moral thought and that of Neoplatonism. Augustine saw pagan philosophy as culminating in Platonism – in particular, the Neoplatonist books that he read in Milan. This chapter finds that, for him, Christianity was the best version of eudaimonism; Christianity was true eudaimonism. Yet, while Platonism was a flawed version of eudaimonism, it came closer to being correct than the other non-Christian versions of eudaimonism with which Augustine was familiar. Consequently, before exploring Augustine’s criticisms of Platonism in more detail, this chapter seeks to trace the way in which he defended the specifically Neoplatonic tradition in eudaimonism. Looking at his understanding of Platonism leads to a study of his account of his own conversion in Book  of Confessions. In what follows, I reject the distinction that is generally drawn in discussions of Augustine’s conversion between his ‘intellectual’ conversion in Book  and his ‘moral’ conversion in Book . Instead, I find that there was





Civ. Dei .: “the Platonic philosophers, who have recognized the true God as the author of all things, the source of the light of truth, and the bountiful bestower of all happiness.” See also ., “These philosophers, then, whom we see not undeservedly exalted above the rest in fame and glory . . .” See, for example, Serge Lancel, Saint Augustine (trans. Antonia Nevill, London: SCM Press, ), chapters  and . Paula Fredriksen, “The Confessions as Autobiography,” in Mark Vessey, ed., A Companion to Augustine (Oxford: Blackwell, ), p. : “By the end of Book , his intellectual conversion is complete. But, still, Augustine lingers as a catechumen, unwilling and unable to bring himself to full initiation into the church.” Carl Vaught, Encounters with God in Augustine’s “Confessions”: Books VII–IX (Albany: State





Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

only one conversion moment – the moment in the garden in Milan at the end of Book . I show that Augustine’s eudaimonist understanding of virtue led him to maintain that to be a Christian was to be virtuous: Christians alone were virtuous and every Christian was virtuous, with the result that his intellectual and moral conversion coincided in this climactic moment in the garden.

    In Confessions, Augustine described himself as driven by the desire for wisdom from the time of his youthful reading of Cicero to his conversion to Christianity and beyond. In this chapter, I argue that the explanation of why the quest for wisdom preoccupied him throughout his adult life lies in the fact that he was an adherent of eudaimonism. He explained that he had begun his quest for wisdom under the influence of Cicero. Cicero was a representative of the eudaimonist tradition in ethics, and so we can suppose that it was Augustine’s own acceptance of eudaimonism at this time which made Cicero such an important influence over him as a young man: either Augustine was persuaded to follow the eudaimonist approach to ethics through reading Cicero or, as seems more likely, his earlier formation in the Roman education system had already introduced him to eudaimonism. In the latter case, reading Cicero would not have led Augustine to question the correctness of the eudaimonist approach to ethics; as we have seen, Cicero found flaws in the Stoics’ approach, but he did so while remaining a eudaimonist. The previous chapter found that Cicero’s message to the young Augustine was that eudaimonism demanded the finding that human beings naturally had eros for philosophy, and hence that Stoicism was a flawed version of eudaimonism. Since as a sceptic or academic, Cicero considered that the truth was of such a nature as to be unattainable by human beings, he found that we would live in complete accordance with



University of New York Press, ), p. : “At the beginning of Book VIII, Augustine tells us that his intellectual conversion is complete, but that the volitional transformation that reorients his life has not yet occurred . . . he must move from a mystical encounter with the Father to an existential response to the Son.” A dissenting voice is that of Colin Starnes, Augustine’s Conversion: A Guide to the Argument of Confessions I–IX (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, ). Starnes’ interpretation rests on the idea that there is a difference between Augustine’s intellectual acceptance of the idea that Jesus was the Incarnate Word and his belief in this idea (pp. –). Conf. ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



human nature simply by telling ourselves that it was natural for us to seek to be wise. This meant that virtue, for Cicero, consisted in eros-love for the search for wisdom – we would live the fully natural life (we would be happy) simply in thinking of philosophia as the highest good. Having read the Hortensius, Augustine described himself in Confessions as facing a choice. He could choose to adopt the Ciceronian version of eudaimonism, with its particular definitions of virtue, the fully natural life, and the highest good; alternatively, he could choose to believe that wisdom was actually attainable by human beings, a claim which he associated, at this time, particularly with the Manicheans. The Manicheans offered him not the sceptics’ endless quest for wisdom but the discovery of the truth itself (“Still they cried, ‘Truth, Truth,’ and spoke much about it to me”). Hence, while Cicero offered him one version of eudaimonism, he arguably understood the Manicheans as offering him another: he could choose to accept Cicero’s view that the search for wisdom was happy-making or, in following the Manicheans, he could choose to regard wisdom itself as the highest good. Augustine explained that, from the start, he had discounted a third possibility – this was the possibility of becoming a Christian. The style of the Christian Scriptures did not meet Augustine’s expectations of what was involved in the pursuit of wisdom. To be a Christian therefore did not seem to him either to be wise or to pursue wisdom; hence, he had no qualms about discarding the option of becoming a Christian. Nonetheless, the Christian upbringing of his earliest years continued to influence him in one way: it meant that he still “deeply treasured” the name of Christ. Augustine offered this as an explanation of his choice to follow the Manicheans: the Manicheans’ understanding of God involved Christian elements; in particular, they made use of the New Testament, although their exegesis of it was very different to that of Catholic Christianity. In this way, Manicheanism offered him an intellectualised reading of the Christian scriptures which better corresponded to what he thought of as the pursuit of wisdom; moreover, it promised to lead him to wisdom. Hence, the Manicheans offered him the hope not only that his search for wisdom would actually culminate in being wise but also that in being wise, he would know Christ. Augustine described how, attracted by their talk of Christ, he decided to trust the Manicheans. As suggested already, his decision to follow the  

Conf. ... Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Conf. ...

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Manicheans is not evidence that he had any doubts about the eudaimonist approach to ethics; rather, he was able to make sense of Manicheanism in eudaimonist terms. The Manicheans told him that it was in accordance with human nature to attain the highest truth. As a eudaimonist, he understood himself as seeking happiness, which eudaimonism explained as the life in complete accordance with human nature. He chose to trust the Manichean claim that human beings were able to reach the truth, and he understood this as one and the same as the claim that the truth itself, rather than the pursuit of the truth, was human beings’ highest good, so that it was in loving (in the sense of eros) and having the truth that he would live the fully natural life, which was happiness. The Manicheans promised to make him wise through bringing him to know the true God. Augustine explained that he had encountered in Manicheanism a particular picture of who God was. Like the Stoics, the Manicheans offered a materialist account of reality, including God, but unlike the Stoics, the Manicheans also distinguished radically between the flesh and the spirit. They held that God was spirit, but also held that spirit was itself something material and sensible. In Confessions, he explained how, prior to reading the books of the Platonists, he had lacked all notion of the deity as a transcendent, immaterial reality. Instead, following the Manicheans, he had identified God as a corporeal mass, finding analogies with the celestial bodies of the Sun and the Moon. He had stayed with the Manicheans as an auditor for nine years, hoping to arrive at the knowledge of God, as they promised; while in many ways his time as a Manichean had been intellectually disappointing, he had found it satisfactory in one respect. The Manicheans offered him an explanation of the problem of evil which fitted their understanding of God as corporeal, although it required them to sacrifice the idea of God as the omnipotent creator of everything. For the Manicheans, God was good and the creator of everything which was good, but the forces of evil had won a victory, although not a complete victory, over God, invading God’s good creation, so that now goodness and evil were mixed together in the world and within human beings (“[the Manicheans] liked



 

Jason David BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichean Dilemma, Volume : Conversion and Apostasy, – CE (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), pp.  and , “spirit merely represented a less tangible modality of material reality.” Conf. ... Conf. ..– and BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichean Dilemma, pp. –. Conf. ..– and ..–.

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition

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better to think that your substance did suffer evil than that their own did commit it”). Thus, the Manicheans thought of God as corporeal, and as good and the creator of what was good, but they did not think of God as creating everything or as omnipotent. In addition, as we have seen, they thought of God as knowable by human beings; in particular, they proclaimed that their own teachings brought people to know God (“O Truth, Truth! how inwardly even then did the marrow of my soul pant after You, when they frequently, and in a multiplicity of ways, and in numerous and huge books, sounded out Your name to me”). Arguably, this claim was tied to their conception of God as corporeal: their view that God was part of the world of matter allowed them to claim that the powers of the human mind sufficed to reach the knowledge of God. If God was part of the material world, not something beyond it, then, since the human mind possessed powers which made it capable of acquiring knowledge of the world of matter, it followed that these same powers must make it capable of acquiring the knowledge of God. The Manicheans were able to point to passages in the New Testament to support their understanding of God, but they were forced to reject the whole of the Old Testament as well as the literal understanding of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the second person of the Trinity in Jesus Christ, an idea which they understood as impiously claiming that God had chosen to become part of the evil, fleshy substance. While Augustine was at first persuaded by their arguments against Catholic Christianity, after nine years, he found that many of their claims did not hold up to critical scrutiny: their answers seemed to him to be weak and fanciful, whether they were compared with the answers of philosophers or with the claims of the Catholic Church. Having become disillusioned with the Manicheans, Augustine described himself as ready to seek God in Christianity (“From this, however, being led to prefer the Catholic doctrine . . .”). This did not mean that he had rejected eudaimonism. On the contrary, his interest in Christianity arose from his quest to know God, a quest which he  



 Conf. ... Ibid. Jason David BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichean Dilemma, Volume : Making a “Catholic” Self, – CE (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), pp. –; Julien Ries, “Jésus Sauveur dans la controverse anti-manichéenne de saint Augustin,” in Johannes Oort, Gregor Wurst, and Otto Wermelinger, eds., Augustine and Manichaeism in the Latin West (Leiden: Brill, ), pp. –.  Conf. .. and ..–. Conf. ...

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

understood as demanded by eudaimonism. He now believed that this quest would find fulfilment in knowing the Christian God. He indicated that it was his belief in divine providence which led him to trust that Christianity provided the true picture of God. He noted that the Bible was held in high regard throughout the world: this suggested to him that God himself had had a role in the spread of the Bible, which suggested in turn that God’s intention was to be sought through this text. Nonetheless, this did not mean that he thought of himself as having become a Christian. Augustine described himself at this stage as having found reasonable grounds to trust that the Bible taught the truth: at this point, he looked on the Bible as an authoritative teacher – under its guidance, he hoped to reach a position where he could affirm that its teachings about God were true. Reaching this position, however, first required an explanation of what these teachings meant. Hence, he now needed to make sense of Christian claims about God and, especially, of Christianity’s most distinctive teaching about the deity, namely, that the second person of the Trinity had become human and died for sinners. Thus, Augustine described how his new trust in the Bible – his decision to believe that it contained the true picture of God – led him to seek for an explanation of the nature of God which made sense of the Bible’s teachings. He explained that the first assistance he found was from Platonism. He knew that Christians taught that God was good, the creator of everything, and omnipotent; the existence of evil had seemed to pose an insuperable difficulty to accepting these three claims about God; the Manicheans had explained evil, but only at the expense of rejecting the latter two claims. Yet Augustine now learned that the Platonists also taught these three things about God, while also offering an explanation of evil: they were able to do this because they taught that God was not corporeal at all but, rather, beyond the material world. He described at the beginning of Book  how, now that he could no longer embrace the Manichean explanation of evil (“certain of the untruthfulness of what these asserted, whom I shunned with my whole heart”), the fact that he still thought of God as corporeal left him without a way of accounting for evil. The problem with thinking of God in materialist terms, while also asserting God’s goodness, omnipotence, and identity as the one creator of everything, was that it made the



Conf. ..–.



Conf. ...



Conf. .. and ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition

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problem of evil insoluble. If God made everything, and was present throughout creation, but was not evil and did not make evil, then how could evil exist? “Where, then, is evil, and whence, and how crept it in hither?. . . Whence, therefore, is it, seeing that God, who is good, has made all these things good?” He experienced this as a true crisis, a “tumult of my soul.” Resolving this crisis required a new way of understanding God, and he found this in Platonism. He was given some books by the Platonists to read and these books introduced him to a new conception of God as incorporeal. This picture of God allowed a resolution to the problem of evil because it involved the claim that God and creation were not the same thing. God was good, omnipotent, and the creator of everything which existed, but was totally distinct from creation. This distinction was seen in the fact that God alone was incorruptible, while everything else was corruptible. God did not create evil, but created everything good; since everything in existence was a substance, this meant that evil was not a substance. At the same time, because every created thing was necessarily a corruptible thing, every created thing had the capacity to become less good; hence, evil was the absence of goodness – evil in anything was simply a diminution of that thing’s created goodness (“that evil, then, which I sought whence it was, is not any substance; for were it a substance, it would be good”). Thus, the Platonist books described God as beyond the corporeal world, and this in turn allowed Augustine to make sense of Christianity’s claims about God as good, omnipotent, and the creator of everything.

   :    Reading the Platonists’ books introduced him to the idea of an incorporeal substance. The question was, how could an incorporeal substance become known to the human mind whose way of thinking depended on the study of the sensible world? In other words, how could he know a transcendent, incorporeal God? The Platonists claimed that the truth was beyond anything in the material world and consequently beyond the powers of the human mind to discern for itself. Yet, in opposition to the sceptics, they maintained that the truth could be known. Augustine learned that they reached this position because they held that while the  

Conf. ... Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Conf. ...

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

truth was incorporeal and so could not be reached by human reasoning, nonetheless, it was like a light shining into human minds: when we knew anything, we knew it not as the result of the reason’s own exertions, but rather because the reason was illuminated from outside by the truth itself. Hence, the Platonists’ books contained a picture of God which was utterly different to that of the Manicheans: for the Platonists, God was not only good, but also the omnipotent creator of everything, who utterly transcended the material world and was completely separate to creation; and, consequently, while God was knowable, God was only known through his own self-disclosure – all knowledge of the truth came from the truth itself. The Platonist books thus allowed Augustine to make sense of a further Christian teaching about God, namely, the idea of God’s three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Although the Platonists used different names for these entities, he found that they thought in terms of them when they distinguished Being or Truth itself from the Word or Wisdom, and from a person’s “participation” in wisdom. Thus, Augustine explained that in reading the Platonist books, he had come to hear the equivalent of the Christian teaching about the second person of the Trinity as the Word or Wisdom, the true light which “lights every man,” and of the third person of the Trinity which remained in people “that they may be wise”: “that of [Christ’s] fullness souls receive that they may be blessed, and that by participation of the wisdom remaining in them, they are renewed that they may be wise.” In other words, he found that Christianity, like Platonism, taught that God was beyond the grasp of our own reason, and yet through Christ, or Wisdom, the human reason could know God; this happened through the Holy Spirit, through whom people were renewed so that they could become wise. For him, Platonism, although lacking the names for each person, offered the same teaching: You proclaim the Father and his Son, whom you call the Father’s intellect or mind, and between these a third, by whom we suppose you mean the Holy Spirit, and in your own fashion you call these three Gods. In this, though your expressions are inaccurate, you do in some sort, and as through a veil, see what we should strive towards.

Thus, he accepted that the Platonists had an understanding, although an imperfect one, of the idea of divine grace:



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Civ. Dei .. See also ., ., and ..

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition

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Yet you [Porphyry] believe in grace, for you say it is granted to few to reach God by virtue of intelligence. For you do not say, “Few have thought fit or have wished,” but, “It has been granted to few,” – distinctly acknowledging God’s grace, not man’s sufficiency. Consider only the fact that Cicero most clearly shows in many ways that Plato located the highest good and the causes of things and the trustworthiness of reason in wisdom, not human wisdom but clearly the divine wisdom by which human wisdom is kindled.

For the Platonists, the knowledge of God came from God; God enlightened us – our own minds were insufficient to reach God; we needed God to kindle human wisdom. Hence, the Platonists, and now Augustine (providentially guided by them to a better understanding of the Christian teaching about God), had an understanding of the idea of divine grace as well as a Trinitarian understanding of God as wisdom, the giver of wisdom, and that which dwelled in people to make them wise. As a eudaimonist, Augustine had turned to Christianity in the hope that Christian teaching would make him wise – his hope was that Christianity would lead him to know the true God. He found, however, that both Christianity and Platonism declared that it was impossible to teach people to know God. The Manicheans had claimed to be able to teach him this, but he learned that the concept of God shared by Christianity and Platonism precluded them from claiming this power. Instead, the message of Christianity and Platonism was that knowing the truth was a divine gift. Arguably, he was also aware that this claim made better sense from a eudaimonist perspective, so that he now saw Platonism, and Christianity, as a better version of eudaimonism than Manicheanism. From a eudaimonist perspective, the problem with Manicheanism was that it was unable to give a coherent account of the meaning of virtue. He understood Manicheanism as explaining that the highest good was wisdom; this claim entailed that, in the fully natural life, we would not only love the truth, we would also possess the truth. But what was virtue? In eudaimonism, virtue was a matter of our wills and was the thing that ensured that we would live the happy life. Being virtuous meant being sure of attaining happiness – that is, being sure that our lives would fully conform to human nature. Manicheanism, however, demanded two things of the human will, but did not claim that either brought any guarantee of happiness. In Manicheanism, human beings needed to think of wisdom as the highest good (they needed to have 

Civ. Dei ..



Letter , ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

eros-love for wisdom), and they needed also to acquire wisdom for themselves. For the Manicheans, we could love wisdom, but without acquiring it for ourselves, we would not be happy; eros-love for wisdom, then, was not virtue, since it did not in itself ensure that we would acquire wisdom. Yet exercising our intellectual faculties in the search for God did not bring with it this assurance either: people who searched for God could find, in their individual cases, that their intellects did not suffice in the limited lifespan allotted them to reach the knowledge of the divine. This had been one of Augustine’s complaints against the Manicheans: he had entrusted himself to them for nine years, but had not progressed to the wisdom that they claimed to be able to teach him. In other words, his disillusionment with Manicheanism stemmed in part from the realisation that, while the Manicheans claimed that it was possible for the human intellect to reach God, they could not assure any individual person that their intellectual efforts would suffice to reach this goal. Thus, Augustine found that, while the Manicheans had seemed to give him the promise of reaching God, they could not give him this promise at all; on the contrary, after nine years, it seemed altogether likely to him that his intellectual exertions would continue to prove inadequate. The result was that the Manicheans had no coherent picture of virtue: they could not point to anything in the human will which brought with it the guarantee of attaining the happiness of knowing the highest truth. Platonism and Christianity avoided this dilemma. They were able to give a coherent account of virtue because they did not claim that human beings acquired wisdom for themselves. Instead, they found that the love of wisdom in itself ensured that we would receive wisdom, thereby defining eros-love for wisdom as virtue. They held that, while God was utterly beyond the capacity of our minds to reach, God graciously gave Himself to be known to those whose minds were prepared to know Him by thinking of the happy life as the life in which He was known. Hence, to acquire wisdom, we needed only to love it – to ensure that we would one day know God, we needed only to think of knowing God as happymaking, so that God became the object of our eros-love. Hence, in Platonism and Christianity, eros for the true God was virtue. Thus, when Augustine came later to write against the Manicheans, it was their conviction that wisdom was attainable through human teaching that he particularly attacked. His message to them was that God was not



Conf. ..–.

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



only “light itself”; God was also the source of enlightenment: “He is light itself; we get enlightenment from Him.” “For [the mind] becomes like God to the extent vouchsafed by its subjection of itself to Him for information and enlightenment.” God was the wisdom that made people wise – the light that enlightened; human beings did not make themselves wise; they were not their own lights. The Manicheans taught, on the contrary, that human beings enlightened themselves. In contrast, Augustine advised them that knowing God was the reward of virtue, not the consequence of human teaching: “So eternal life is the knowledge of the truth. See, then, how perverse and preposterous is the character of those who think that their teaching of the knowledge of God will make us perfect, when this is the reward of those already perfect!” The knowledge of the truth was acquired through being virtuous, and not through human effort. Thus, he emphasised in writing against the Manicheans that reason could not see God on its own, “but when we come to divine things, this faculty turns away; it cannot behold; it pants, and gasps, and burns with desire; it falls back from the light of truth.” This was how he understood Paul’s statement in  Corinthians :: “that he who sees may not so glory as if he had not received not only what he sees, but also that he can see (for what has he which he has not received?).” Thus, in his praises of God at the start of Soliloquies, he declared that God was not only wisdom, but the giver of wisdom: “The wisdom, in, by and through whom all are wise who are wise.” While he had been a Manichean he had shared their mistaken assumption that God was corporeal and hence that human beings enlightened themselves, rather than receiving enlightenment from God. Hence, despite having eros-love for the truth, his notion of the truth had been false in certain respects: he had conceived of the truth as something to which human beings were able to guide themselves. Consequently, his conception of the truth – the object of his eros-love – had been a mistaken one and so he had actually failed to direct his eros-love to what was true: as a follower of the Manicheans, he had thought of God as wisdom and light, but not as the wisdom that made people wise and the light that enlightened. The result was that while he had been a Manichean, he had not been   

   Mor. .. Mor. .. Mor. .. Mor. .. Conf. .. Sol. ... See also ..: “Wisdom will not show herself to you unless you burn for her alone.”



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

virtuous (according to the eudaimonist understanding of virtue as love for the true God) and he had not known what virtue was. In contrast, the Platonist books described God as beyond the corporeal world and hence beyond the power of our minds to grasp through their own efforts; yet they also described God as knowable – they held that God was knowable through God’s own action: all knowledge of God came from God. Augustine found that the Bible’s teachings about God’s three persons described God in similar terms. These findings did not challenge his commitment to eudaimonism, since, as we have seen, the argument could be made that eudaimonism itself required these findings: to give a coherent account of virtue, eudaimonism needed to think of God as beyond the power of our minds to reach, but as bestowing the knowledge of Himself on those who thought of knowing God as happiness. The Platonists were eudaimonists; in holding that all knowledge of God came from God they were maintaining something which was consistent with eudaimonist principles and which made better sense in eudaimonist terms than the Manichean alternative. Hence, Augustine now understood that the quest for wisdom required him to have eros, not for the Manichean God but for God understood in these terms. That is, he now understood that virtue meant loving this God, so that it was in loving this God that he would be assured of reaching the happy life. This required him to affirm that the picture of God that he found in Platonism and Christianity was true, so that this God, and not some other mistaken idea of God, was the object of his eroslove. Yet this was precisely what he could not do without an act of God: only God could lead him to know God in these terms since knowing God involved knowing God as the one to give this knowledge of Himself. Consequently, he described in Confessions how, having read the Platonist books, he now sought to be enlightened by God (“And being thence warned to return to myself, I entered into my inward self, You leading me on; and I was able to do it, for You were become my helper”). He outlined in Book  the path by which he now came to know God as the giver of the knowledge of Himself: an understanding of visible things allowed the mind to understand itself as distinct from the corporeal world; the mind next discerned its different faculties, including its “reasoning faculty.” The mind was then confronted with the limits of its reason: it found that it knew things to be true without knowing how it



Conf. ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



knew this. As the result of finding itself certain about things with a certainty which did not derive from reason itself, it knew that it was infused with light from outside itself (“it might find out that light by which it was besprinkled, when, without all doubting, it cried out, ‘that the unchangeable was to be preferred before the changeable’”); that is, it reached the insight that truth itself enlightened the mind, which entailed the conception of God described by the Platonists. The result was that a person knew that the Platonists’ understanding of God was true: a person knew that God existed and that He was incorporeal, Being itself, the form of all Truth, and the giver of wisdom – a person was given a glimpse of “that which is.” In these passages, Augustine was seemingly concerned with epistemology and not with moral philosophy at all. Yet once it is realised that virtue, for him, in agreement with eudaimonism, required the mind to think true thoughts about God so that it identified the true God as the one in knowing whom was happiness, then it becomes plain that Book  was concerned with describing the steps by which Augustine drew nearer not only to knowing the true God but also to being virtuous. This was the knowledge that Augustine had acquired about God at the end of Book . Augustine was clear that he remained weak, as yet unfit to rest in the contemplation of God, despite having received the knowledge that God was incorporeal and so on. Remaining fixed in the contemplation of God was the seventh degree of the soul’s ascent and it corresponded to the happy life. No one could reach this level who had not yet begun to think of the true God as the highest good – and this was Augustine’s problem at the end of Book  and the reason why he did not rest in the knowledge of God: as yet his conception of God was still mistaken in certain respects; he embraced what the Platonists had to say, and he found that what he learned from them about God fitted with Christianity’s claims about God’s omnipotence, goodness, and so on, while also providing an explanation of evil, but, in reality, unknown to both himself and the Platonists, this picture of God was incorrect in certain ways. The result was that, at the end of Book , Augustine had not even reached the soul’s fourth degree – he was not virtuous because he did not have the true God as the object of his eros-love. As a result, he was unable to defeat his conflicting thoughts about the identity of the highest good – he continued to think about ‘inferior’ things,  

Conf. ... See also the account in Doc. Chr. ... Quant. ().



Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

things of the sensual world, as needed for happiness and found himself helplessly in the grip of these thoughts (“I was not yet one who could cleave to You”). True virtue would be able to defeat these thoughts; hence, the fact that these thoughts remained in him indicated that he was not yet truly virtuous – he did not yet love the true God. We will return to this below. At the same time, while Augustine now knew that what the Platonists said about God as the giver of wisdom was true, this did not mean that he was a Platonist – he remained focused on understanding Christian teachings about God, not on joining the Platonists. This was because he saw that there was a disparity between the Platonists’ teachings about God and their religious practices, which he regarded as idol-worship: “I had come unto You from among the Gentiles, and I strained after that gold which you willed Your people to take from Egypt, seeing that wheresoever it was it was Yours.” He took the “gold” of the Platonists’ teachings about God, “but I set not my mind on those idols of Egypt,” meaning their worship of many gods. He elaborated this criticism of the Platonists in On True Religion: he accused them of deliberately embracing the cult of many gods, despite the fact that their own insights established that there was only one God, in order to be able to continue to participate in the religious cults of the Greek and Roman Empires. He contrasted the unity in pagan religion which resulted from accepting the worship of many gods, but which involved pagan philosophers betraying their own understanding of the one true God, with the disunity and schism among Christians, which he depicted as the regrettable but necessary consequence of Christians’ determined insistence on the reality of only one God. Thus, Augustine was clear that he had never been a Platonist: in reading the Platonist books, his aim had been to understand better the teachings about God which he had found in the Bible. He found that these books in many respects illuminated these teachings, but that the Bible also contained ideas about God which were not found among the Platonists. Augustine’s next task was to understand these uniquely Christian teachings.

   :    At the end of Book , Augustine described himself as sharing the Platonists’ picture of God – he thought of God as Triune, the wisdom 

Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Vera Rel. ..

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



who made people wise, and as the good, omnipotent creator of all that existed. For the Platonists, God gave wisdom (the happiness of knowing Him) to all those who thought of wisdom as happiness and who conceived of wisdom in such a way as to understand that the human mind could not reach wisdom on its own, but needed to be enlightened by wisdom itself. The Platonists held that to affirm these things as true was to have the true God as the object of one’s eros-love, and so to be virtuous. Being virtuous meant that we would then be able to conquer all other, contrary thoughts about what was necessary for happiness, and, once we had done this, our minds would be readied to receive the perfect knowledge of God, and to remain unchangeably in this knowledge, which was happiness. As noted above, Augustine was clear that the Platonists failed to be faithful to their own understanding of God by joining in the polytheism of traditional Roman and Greek religion. While at the time this might have been his main objection to Platonism, having become a Christian, he was able to see that, even if the Platonists had resisted the pressure to participate in these traditional cults, their picture of God would still have been flawed. This was why Augustine both praised the Platonists so highly and yet regarded them as unable to attain happiness: he described them as residing on a mountain top from which they could see the happy life, “the land of peace,” without knowing the way to reach it. This was one and the same as saying that, while they correctly understood God as the highest good, and correctly defined virtue as eros for the true God, they did not in fact contemplate God nor were their minds prepared to do so, since they did not yet have a sufficient grasp of who the true God was. Hence, they were neither virtuous nor in possession of the complete definition of virtue – they believed that they knew who the true God was, and so believed that they loved the true God, with the result that they believed that they knew what virtue was and believed that they were virtuous, when this was not so. As noted already, Augustine described himself, upon leaving the Manicheans, as willing to accept everything which Christianity said about God. He described how, having found that the Platonists’ books illumined many Christian teachings about God, he had been led by God to know God in the terms described by the Platonists so that he was now convinced that this picture of God was the truth. Nevertheless, at the end



Conf. ..–..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

of Book  he was in a state of confusion: he believed that the Platonists had taught him to have the true God as the object of his eros-love; hence, he supposed that he ought now to be virtuous; but yet he found that this was not the case, since he remained weak – he remained troubled by alternative ways of conceiving the happy life, and, more importantly, he remained completely unable to conquer these thoughts. In particular, he found himself still agreeing that sexual pleasure was needed for happiness. Since a virtuous person – a person who loved with the love that was virtue – would be able to conquer any conflicting thoughts about the nature of happiness which presented themselves to their mind, Augustine was left with the conviction that he was not yet virtuous, but without an understanding of the sense in which his love for God fell short of virtue. Writing with hindsight, he indicated that the distinctive teaching of Christianity – the teaching that set it apart from Platonism – was the teaching that, through Christ, God saved sinners: Christianity taught that God took sinners, made them virtuous, and then gave them the reward of virtue, which was happiness. Augustine identified this as the distinctive teaching of Christianity at the end of Book , where he contrasted the teachings of Platonism and Christianity. Christianity firmly insisted, in its core teaching that God saved sinners, that human beings could not make themselves virtuous, but possessed virtue only as the result of grace; Christianity taught that we would not be virtuous (and so saved) until we looked upon virtue not as our own achievement but as God’s gift. Thus, Augustine maintained that the teachings that were found in Christianity but which were absent from Platonism all centred on the idea that God saved people, not only in giving them the reward of knowing Him, but also in making them virtuous, whereby they deserved this reward (“But that ‘in due time Christ died for the ungodly’ (Rom. :) and that You spared not Your only Son but delivered Him up for us all, is not there [in the Platonist books]”). What shall “wretched man” do? “Who shall deliver him from the body of this death,” but Your grace only, “through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. :, ) . . . in whom the Prince of this world found nothing worthy of death, yet killed he Him, and the handwriting which was contrary to us was blotted out? This those [Platonist] writings contain not.. . . No man sings there, “Shall not my soul be subject unto God? For of Him comes my salvation, for He is my God and my salvation, my defender, I shall not be further moved (Ps. :–).”



Conf. ..–.



Conf. ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



Christianity taught that Christ’s death was for the ungodly; in dying, Christ saved the “wretched” – Christ saved people who were dead through sin; Christ “blotted out” the record of our sins; hence, Christianity’s unique message was “From [God] comes my salvation.” In other words, Christians believed that Christ had died for sinners with the result that they believed that God saved people not only by bestowing wisdom on the virtuous but also by bestowing virtue itself. Thus, at the end of Book , Augustine was not yet a Christian because his picture of God did not yet correspond to everything which Christianity taught about God. He failed at this stage to embrace the Christian teaching that God saved sinners, and as a result he remained a sinner since being virtuous required him to embrace this idea – that is, to embrace the idea that virtue was not his own work but God’s work in him. Thus, he admitted that at this stage he had missed the meaning of Christ’s incarnation – he could not comprehend the teaching that Christ had become human and died for sinners. This did not mean that he found the notion of the incarnation (God becoming human) itself a stumbling block; rather, it was the meaning of the incarnation that he could not comprehend. Defining virtue in such a way that it could be acquired by human effort, and hence assuming that he had acquired virtue for himself, he simply did not understand why God had needed to become human and die. He heard this message without understanding what this message taught, namely, that human beings could not make themselves virtuous and were not virtuous while they supposed that they could. The incarnation was a mystery which he simply could not penetrate: “But what mystery there was in, ‘the Word was made flesh’ (John :), I could not even imagine.” Instead, his later self accused his younger self of being, at this stage, “puffed up” with the thought that he had about God as the giver of wisdom – this puffed him up because he assumed that, in thinking of God in this way, he was virtuous and virtuous through his own efforts. but the incarnation of the unchangeable Son of God, whereby we are saved, and are enabled to reach the things we believe, or in part understand, this is what you [Porphyry] refuse to recognize. You see in a fashion, although at a distance, although with filmy eye, the country in which we should abide; but the way to it you know not.

Thus, at the end of Book , he was not a Christian because at this stage he understood only those Christian teachings about God which had their 

Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Civ. Dei .. See also ., ., and ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

counterpart in Platonism. He was not a Christian, yet this was not because he did not want to be a Christian but rather because he simply could not comprehend what he must affirm as true in order to be a Christian. He found Christianity’s central message incomprehensible. As we have seen, he was able to understand other aspects of Christian doctrine: for example, its teaching that God was Triune: “by the united testimony of Your whole creation [I] had found You, our Creator, and Your Word with You, and together with You and the Holy Ghost, one God, by whom You created all things.” He could also see that, in its teaching about the incarnation and saving death of the Son, Christianity’s teachings differed from those of Platonism. It was the meaning of this teaching that escaped him. He found that Christianity shared the Platonists’ message that happiness resided in knowing God and that this knowledge was itself God’s gift. Hence, it seemed to him that he already thought correctly about God – that is, that he understood God correctly so that he loved the true God. From this, he supposed that he was virtuous; yet, unlike the Platonists, he was prevented from resting complacently in the belief that he was virtuous by the fact that Christianity contained a further teaching which he did not yet understand, namely, the teaching that God had become human and died for sinners. Christianity proclaimed this message, but he did not understand it. Nonetheless, because he was convinced that Christianity contained the true account of God, he realised that he must understand and embrace this idea in order to be virtuous. Hence, these thoughts about God as saving sinners sunk into his heart, although they remained incomprehensible to him. Consequently, what he sought at the beginning of Book  was to be “more steadfast” (stabilior) in God: he was certain that in knowing God he would be happy, and that God was the giver of this knowledge, and certain that Christianity had the best claim to be the true religion – the true guide to the life fully in accordance with human nature – but he was not ready for baptism because Christianity’s central teaching remained a mystery to him. Consequently, his thoughts about God stopped short of being all that they should be. “There is yet another kind of impious men, who ‘when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful’ (Rom. :). Into this also had I fallen; but Your right hand held me up, and bore me away, and You placed me where I might recover.” He had



Conf. ...



Conf. ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



made the same comment of the Platonists in Book , Chapter , and hence it is more likely that these comments were directed at them rather than the Manicheans. His point was not only that the Platonists, in joining in the traditional cults, betrayed their belief in one God, but also that they were complacent in their confidence that the object of their love was the true God, when they failed to glorify God as the giver of virtue. The Christian teaching of the incarnation and saving death of Jesus disrupted any such confidence, but the Platonists did not know of this teaching, and hence there was nothing to shake them in their conviction that they were virtuous. Augustine, in contrast, had heard of this teaching and wanted to understand it; hence, unlike the Platonists, he was in a place where he “might recover.” At the same time, Augustine indicated that he had one further advantage, when compared with the Platonists. The Platonists were unaware that they remained sinners through failing to love the true God; they did not know in what sense a sinful love remained in them, undefeated by their love for God (below, I argue that this sinful love was the sin of pride). Augustine, however, was providentially fully aware that he persisted in a sinful love. He explained elsewhere that habitual ways of thinking about the happy life remained with a person, even after conversion, as he described in Soliloquies, when his thoughts had wandered to thinking longingly about sexual embraces. Nonetheless, he found that there was this difference in him while he remained a non-Christian: prior to becoming a Christian, he could not in any way defeat his habitual idea that sexual pleasure was needed for happiness, whereas upon becoming a Christian he found that this thought was one which he could defeat. When a person received virtue (the fourth grade in the soul’s ascent), they would progress to a more perfect virtue through rejecting the other ways of thinking about the highest good which remained present in their mind – that is, our love for God would grow as it overcame these other loves. Hence, the fact that Augustine could in no way defeat his other thoughts about the happy life indicated to him that he was not yet virtuous: if he had arrived at virtue then he would be strong to overcome these other loves; the fact that he remained weak told him that he did not possess virtue. In particular, he saw that if he really thought of God as the highest good, then he ought to be able to rid himself of his attachment to the idea



Quant. ().



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

of marriage. If he really regarded God as the highest good, then the only importance which he could attach to marriage would be as a means to raise Christian children or to give him the financial security that he needed to serve God in the world. For the person who looked upon the true God as happy-making, marriage had no other value; hence, he realised that, if the true God was the object of his eros-love, and if he did not want children and did not want to engage in worldly affairs, then he ought to be able to “make himself a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” Instead, he found that marriage mattered to him for the sake of sexual pleasure (“but still very tenaciously was I held by [the love of] a woman”). He was not ready to turn his back on marriage, and yet he could not approach marriage in the correct spirit, to use it for permitted purposes. This indicated that there remained something amiss in his way of thinking about God, since the thought that his happiness would be completely provided for in knowing God could not lessen the grip that the idea of sexual pleasure as happy-making had on him. When he asked Simplicianus to help him, Simplicianus’ response was simply to tell him the story of Victorinus. In telling this story, Augustine later realised that Simplicianus’ purpose was “to exhort me to the humility of Christ, hidden from the wise and revealed to little ones.” Simplicianus knew that to be virtuous, Augustine needed the humility that lay in understanding virtue as a gift from God. He offered Victorinus as an example to Augustine because Victorinus, like Augustine, had studied the Platonists to aid him in his understanding of Christian teachings about God. Having done so, Victorinus considered himself already a Christian. Simplicianus, however, insisted that he was not a Christian until he was willing to attend church. Victorinus refused to do this because he found that this demanded too great a sacrifice from him: as a prominent figure in Roman society, attending church would make him ridiculous and reviled in the public eye. Nonetheless, he became convinced that his refusal to confess Christ publicly indicated that he fell short of virtue (he “appeared to himself guilty of a great fault”); he became convinced that his inability to conquer his love of public esteem indicated that he was not yet virtuous. He believed that he reckoned the true God as happy-making – and so he supposed that he must be virtuous, but his inability to overcome his thoughts that public esteem was needed



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Conf. ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



for happiness indicated that he was not yet virtuous. It indicated that the object of his eros-love was not the true God. In this sense, Victorinus’ case exactly answered Augustine’s. Augustine recognised that he had two ways of thinking about the highest good, one new and one old – his new thought, which was derived from the teachings of the Platonists, and confirmed in the Bible, was that knowing God, identified as the giver of wisdom, was happiness, while his customary way of thinking was that sexual pleasure was needed for happiness. Thus, like Victorinus, Augustine had two conflicting thoughts about the highest good, neither of which was strong enough to conquer the other. He was certain that when he attained the prefect knowledge of God he would be happy: “Nor had I now any longer my wonted excuse, that as yet I hesitated to be above the world and serve You, because my perception of the truth was uncertain: for now it was certain.” He supposed that the God whom he sought to know – the God who was the object of his eros-love – was the true God; hence, he thought of himself as virtuous, and so expected to be able to reject the thought, when it stole into his mind, that sexual pleasures were indispensable for happiness. He did not realise that, while he relied upon himself to be virtuous, there was something lacking in his understanding of who the true God was: “Thus did my two wills, one old and the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contend within me; and by their discord they unstrung my soul.” Thus, in Book , Chapter , he described how his mind commanded imperfectly, “sustained by truth, pressed down by custom.” On the one hand, he could not perceive for himself in what way he needed further healing: he was unaware of what was lacking in his thoughts about God, and he sincerely believed that he knew who the true God was. Yet, on the other hand, he also knew that he stopped short of this because the thought of God as the highest good remained so weak in him that he was unable to reject the love of sexual pleasure. In other words, he knew that he was not yet virtuous, although he could not explain in exactly what way he fell short of virtue. He compared this to being in a state of drowsy wakefulness, as opposed to being fully awake. In this ‘semi-awake’ state, he told himself that the happy life was knowing God and yet found himself still agreeing that he could find happiness through sexual pleasure. He realised what he  

Conf. ... Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

needed to do in order to wake up fully – that is, in order to shake himself free of the thought of sexual pleasures as happy-making. Having found this impossible to accomplish himself, he realised that he must ask God to help him to do this: “‘O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death but Your grace only, through Jesus Christ our Lord?’” Yet his love for sexual pleasure left him wanting to remain as he was; his very love for this pleasure lulled him into inaction, “sweetly burdened,” so that he did not make this request. He was both displeased and pleased to continue in his drowsy state – that is, he was both pleased and displeased to continue with these two conflicting thoughts about the happy life. He saw that he must ask God to help him to do what he found he could not do; nonetheless, his love for sexual pleasure meant that he could not bring himself to ask God to help him conquer this love. Hence, before he could articulate this request, he needed something more. In particular, he needed to be brought to a state of fear and shame on account of his lack of virtue. In Victorinus’ case, it had been fear which had precipitated his conversion; in Augustine’s case, it was fear mixed with shame (“those lashes of fear and shame”) which finally provoked him to seek God’s help. The catalyst was hearing of Pontitianus’ friends who had easily rejected sexual pleasure and worldly standing in favour of the monastic life. Hearing of them meant that he not only accepted that he was not yet virtuous, because his love for God could not conquer his love for sexual pleasure, but felt an extreme shame at his lack of virtue. He felt utterly humiliated and disgusted by his own inability to do as they had done and experienced this as a “great strife”: “But You, O Lord, . . . did set me face to face with myself, that I might behold how foul I was.. . . Thus was I inwardly consumed and mightily confounded with a horrible shame, while Pontitianus was relating these things.” In Chapter , Augustine again described how powerless his thoughts of God as the highest good were to defeat his thoughts about sexual pleasure as the highest good: “the worse, whereto I had been habituated, prevailed more with me than the better, which I had not tried.” These habitual ways carried the memory of pleasures previously experienced, while the promise of the happiness of living in the perfect knowledge of God was beyond his experience. The powerlessness of his thought that knowing God was happiness to defeat his rival thoughts about happiness alerted him to the fact that,  

Conf. ... Conf. ..–.



 Conf. ... Conf. ...  Conf. ...



Conf. ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



somehow, he still lacked virtue. Finally, with the story of Pontitianus’ friends, his shame at his lack of virtue had become strong enough so that in retreating into the garden in Milan with Alypius, he reminded himself of the course that he needed to take, namely, to ask God to cure him: he told himself, “Why do you stand in your own strength and so stand not? Cast yourself upon Him; fear not, He will not withdraw that you should fall; cast yourself upon Him without fear, He will receive you and heal you.” Shortly after this, he managed to form this request, addressing God with the question, “Why not now? Why is there not this hour an end to my uncleanness?” Making this request did not mark the moment at which he became virtuous and a Christian – rather, this was the act of trusting God which preceded Christian conversion (although Augustine was clear in Confessions that the very act of trusting God in this way was one to which he had been led by God). This was an act of faith, but it was not the same as Christian faith: he made this request while still an unbeliever – that is, while he did not yet affirm God’s identity as the one who saved sinners. At this point, he simply turned to God in the hope that he would be saved by Him. In other words, he made this request without yet being virtuous: with this request, he asked for virtue; he asked God to supply what was lacking in his understanding of who God was. Having prayed to God for virtue, he read in Romans :– the message that his happiness would be completely provided for by putting on Christ and that nothing “fleshly” could make him happy. All at once, he found that the idea that the happy life was knowing God was now present in him in a new way – he knew this because he found that it now conquered his habitual thought of sexual pleasure as happiness. He had requested God’s help to defeat this habit and he now found that the thought that sexual pleasure was needed for happiness was defeated; it was defeated by the thought that God was all that was needed for happiness – a thought which he had previously experienced as powerless and now experienced as all-conquering. Hence, he concluded that his request to God for help had been answered by the gift of virtue. He knew that he was now virtuous since the thought of happiness as knowing God now defeated the thought of sexual pleasure as needed for happiness, but knowing that he was now virtuous involved accepting that virtue came from God and hence embracing a new understanding of who God was, so that he also embraced a new understanding of virtue as eros



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

for this God. That is, he now realised that to be virtuous was not merely to think of the happy life as the life in which God was known, but to have this thought present in his mind as the result of an action on God’s part, so that he now thought of God as the giver of virtue. Augustine trusted God to give him virtue and found that God gave him virtue: wrestling with his sin of loving sexual pleasure, and crying out to God for help, he found that all other loves ceased to hold any power over him. In other words, in response to his prayer, he found that his thought that to know God was to be happy was present in his mind in a new way: before, this thought had been powerless to defeat his other ways of thinking about happiness; now he experienced this thought as defeating all his other ways of conceiving the happy life, and he attributed this to an action on God’s part – he had asked God to help him and so he understood the result to be God’s work. Hence recognising himself as virtuous involved recognising his virtue as the gift of God, which in turn meant a new understanding of who God was, and hence a new conception of virtue: in arriving at virtue, he now knew that virtue referred to eros-love for the God who revealed Himself as the true God in giving Himself as the object of our eros-love; that is, he now knew that the true God was the God who saved sinners – the God who gave virtue. This meant that, for Augustine, the complete knowledge of virtue was given to us only by God: it did not come from the Bible or from Christian teachers, and it did not come from our own reason. Knowing in full what virtue was meant knowing who God was – in particular, it meant knowing God not only as the one to give us wisdom but as the one to give Himself as the object of our eros-love, which was to give us virtue. Until God gave us eros-love for Himself, the one to whom we directed our eroslove would not be the true God, so that we would neither be virtuous nor have the complete knowledge of virtue. Thus, Augustine emphasised not only that virtue was grace but also that the knowledge of virtue was grace, specifying that the Bible, whether the Old or New Testament, was insufficient to inform us in full of the meaning of virtue. 

The message that the divinely given written moral law (the “letter”) failed to teach the full meaning of virtue was a main theme in On the Spirit and the Letter. The letter of the law was the law written on tablets, meaning the law written in the Bible. Augustine was clear that this “letter,” which did not give life, but merely killed in revealing sinfulness, included not just the Old Testament laws, but also the teachings found in the New Testament (Spir. et Litt. . and .). In other words, the Bible revealed to people their sinfulness, but left them ignorant of justice. Instead, the knowledge of justice was given by the Spirit, and this knowledge was given at the point at which people became

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



The result was that at this moment he became a Christian – aided by the Platonists, he had already come to think of God with nearly all the characteristics that the Bible described Him as having; he had addressed his prayers to Christ, but until this moment he did not fully know who Christ was. In receiving virtue from Christ, he now realised that, added to everything else which he knew about God, he now knew God as the one to bestow virtue. Consequently, he was a Christian – he affirmed as true the uniquely Christian message that people remained sinners until God gave them virtue. He both recognised himself as virtuous and also realised that being virtuous meant to have the thought that knowing God was happiness present in his mind not as the result of his own action but as the result of God’s action. In other words, he was now a Christian because he now attributed both the possession of virtue and the complete knowledge of virtue to grace: he understood and embraced the key Christian teaching that Christ had needed to become incarnate and die because fallen human beings could neither know nor acquire virtue for themselves, but needed God to bestow these things on them. In the garden in Milan, he came to understand God as humanity’s one and only saviour, ceasing to attribute any role in his salvation to himself. Thus, in the garden in Milan, he finally “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” and now stood on the “rule of faith,” corresponding to the “wooden rule” of Monica’s vision of his conversion. At the same time, we have seen that Augustine derived his understanding of virtue as love for the true God from the eudaimonist tradition. He was searching for God because eudaimonism told him that God was the highest good – it told him that it was in fully knowing God that he would live in complete accordance with human nature. In other words, he was concerned to have the true God as the object of his love because eudaimonism told him that this was the state of our wills which ensured that we would achieve the goal to which our whole being was directed, namely, the life in complete accordance with human nature. He discovered that Christianity and Platonism disagreed about the true God’s identity – he discovered that Christianity taught that the true God was the one to give eros-love for Himself, a teaching which was absent



Christians and so received the Spirit’s gift of justice itself. Thus, he quoted Romans :–, explaining that this meant that, without grace, people remained “ignorant of” God’s justice (Spir. et Litt. .).  Conf. ..–. Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

from Platonism; but this discovery did not in itself pose a challenge to eudaimonism. On the contrary, we will see that the definition of virtue as something given by God was a definition which eudaimonism itself demanded. In other words, in receiving virtue from God, he came to understand that Platonism, through supposing virtue to be a human achievement, was a flawed version of eudaimonism, while Christianity, through teaching that God gave virtue, was the correct version of eudaimonism. We have seen that eudaimonism demanded the Platonist teaching that all knowledge of God must come from God; this, in turn, allowed eudaimonism to define virtue as eros-love for the true God. Thus, eudaimonism held that we did not know God while our thoughts about God came from ourselves or from other human beings – we might find grounds (as Augustine did in Book  of Confessions) for trusting the Bible and Christian teachers; we might find reasons to trust the teachers of a philosophical school. Yet in both cases, to learn about God by these means was not to know who God was; in both cases, these teachers might correctly teach that God was the giver of the truth – yet affirming that this was true, by definition, required an act of God in our lives. In other words, any human teacher who possessed the truth would tell us that the truth was of such a nature that, while our minds could possess the truth, the truth could not be taught to us. We have seen that Augustine found this message in Platonism, and also held that this message was shared by Christianity in its teachings that Christ was wisdom and that through the Holy Spirit we participated in Christ that “[we] may be wise.” Once the truth bestowed upon us the knowledge that the truth was known only through itself, then we would know that we were mistaken about the truth to the extent that we relied upon ourselves, or other human teachers, for any part of this knowledge. That is, once a person’s intellect received from God this knowledge about God, then they were in a position to realise that to claim any knowledge of God independently of God was to attribute to oneself powers which were God’s alone, which was, in this respect, to have a mistaken picture of God. Arguably, Augustine came to see this as the flaw in the Platonists’ eudaimonism. The Platonists thought of virtue as a human achievement – they thought that human beings first directed their eros-love to the true God and then were led by God to know Him. But to claim that the truth was the object of one’s eros-love, while also maintaining that the truth was given to those who were virtuous through loving the truth, was to claim to possess the

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



truth prior to receiving it. We were not virtuous until the object of our eros-love was the truth, but to have the truth was to affirm that no one had the truth through authority, but only through the truth itself. In other words, the Platonists correctly conceived of the truth as known only through itself; and this meant that they were mistaken in regarding virtue as their own achievement. Rather, since we needed to have the truth in order to have the truth as the object of our love, it followed that virtue must be given to human beings by God: people were virtuous only when God gave Himself as the object of their eros-love; they were virtuous only when they received from God love for God. Being virtuous did not require us to know the full truth – the perfect knowledge of God was the reward of virtue – but being virtuous required us to have some knowledge of God, and all knowledge of God must come from God. Hence, when we loved with the love that was virtue – when our eros-love had the true God as its object – this was only through God’s act; whomever we loved prior to this act of God was not the true God, since the truth, by definition, was known by human beings not through their own powers but through God’s. In this way, I argue that Augustine was able to make sense of his experience in the garden in Milan in eudaimonist terms. He was able to find that eudaimonism itself defended the claim that Christians alone knew and loved the true God. He did not need eudaimonism to convince him of the truth of Christianity; on the contrary, he held that the knowledge of the identity of the true God came from God. Nonetheless, the above has argued that, for him, being a Christian did not involve any rejection of eudaimonism; rather, for him, being a eudaimonist involved the rejection of every picture of God except that found in Christianity.

    We have seen that eudaimonism defined virtue as eros-love for the true God, and held that when the true God was the object of eros, we would also give God all the philia-love that was owed to him, as well as having an ordered philia-love for everything else. In this section, I seek to show that Augustine likewise held that it was only upon becoming a Christian that his philia-love was correct: he received from God the highest philialove for Him, something which only God could give, and correct philia for everything else; in receiving this, he was virtuous and a Christian. While he lacked this love, he had committed sin at the level of his loves because he had sinned in loving himself too much. The following argues



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

that this sin was the sin of pride – the sin of all those who sought the happiness of fully knowing God, while lacking the knowledge of God not only as the giver of wisdom but also as the giver of virtue. Throughout Books  and  of Confessions, Augustine accused himself, prior to becoming a Christian, of being proud. For example, he explained that he had turned to the Manicheans, rather than to the Catholic Church, because he was proud. This was a retrospective criticism which he levelled at the Manicheans; at the time of joining them, he had not thought of himself as guilty of the sin of pride. Augustine also retrospectively criticised himself for being proud at the time of leaving the Manicheans (“I lifted myself proudly against You . . . and through my own swelling was I separated from You”) and criticised the Platonists for their pride (“But such as are puffed up with the elation of would-be sublime learning, do not hear Him saying, ‘Learn of me; for I am meek and humble (humilis) in heart’ (Mt. :)”). For him, his search for God prior to his Christian conversion had involved incorrect thoughts about God’s identity, and it had also involved sin in the form of pride. His journey to Christianity involved a process whereby he became less proud, although it was only on becoming a Christian that he was freed of all pride in becoming humble. We have seen that, in agreement with eudaimonism, Augustine defined sin as eros for anything temporal and as disordered philia. As a sin, pride must therefore be characterised by these errors at the level of our loves. The following explores the sense in which Augustine thought that the sin of pride involved disordered philia (while Chapter  considers how eros for temporal things was present among the proud). I suggest that, for him, one way of understanding pride was to understand the proud as praising themselves or human nature too much, through over-estimating human beings’ capabilities. The proud attributed to themselves powers which were, in fact, God’s alone, with the result that they had too much philia for themselves and too little for God; hence, it was in having mistaken thoughts about who the true God was that we were proud. Consequently, Christians alone were free of the sin of pride; pride was the sin that characterised all those who sought God without having received from God the knowledge that He gave both wisdom and virtue. Augustine linked pride and self-praise in the following passages: “What is it to be humble? To take not praise unto himself. Who would  

Conf. ... See also Conf. .., “proudly raving.” Conf. ..–.



Conf. ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



himself be praised, is proud: who is not proud, is humble.” And “pride: this sin arises when any man has too much confidence in himself, and makes himself the chief end of living.” Pride was inflated self-praise; it was to be too confident in one’s own powers. God was the chief end of living – the highest good. Pride was conceiving of oneself in terms which ought to be reserved for God, so that one pictured oneself in God’s place. The result was that one’s picture of God was incorrect. Hence, when people were proud, they did not love what should be loved: their eros was turned away from the true God (“And yet even in this life there is no virtue but to love what one should love.. . . [T]o be turned away from it by no pride is justice”). Likewise, when people were proud, their love was disordered: they praised themselves too much, meaning that they had too much philia for themselves. Thus, Augustine wrote of the sin of loving oneself too much, which occurred when we thought of the mind as “more than as it is” or thought of the mind as equal to God. This was arguably the sin of pride: “Again, if [the mind] loves itself more than as it is – as if, for instance, it loves itself as much as God is to be loved, whereas the mind is incomparably less than God – here also it sins exceedingly, and its love of self (amorem sui) is not perfect.” In this way, Augustine’s view was that the sin of pride arose when we ascribed to ourselves attributes or powers which belonged to God and not to human beings. Hence, in accusing the Manicheans and Platonists of being proud, he accused them of doing this. The above exploration of the intellectual errors of the Manicheans and Platonists allows us to explain his accusation that each was proud, which was one and the same as the accusation that each lacked the correct philia for God. The Manicheans were proud in thinking that they could gain the knowledge of God by their own intellectual efforts; but Augustine found that we knew God through God’s power, not through our own. The Platonists were less proud than the Manicheans, since they knew that God was the giver of wisdom, but nonetheless they remained proud in regarding virtue as their own achievement: Augustine found that virtue was also God’s gift and not something which we achieved for ourselves. Thus, Augustine confessed at the end of Book  that, while his pride had been reduced through the Platonists’ teachings, yet he had remained proud while he failed to grasp Christ, the humble one – that is, while he had failed to grasp that virtue came through Christ’s saving death  

 En. Ps.  (verse ) at . Spir. et Litt. .. See also Letter , ..  Letter , .. Trin. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

(“For I did not grasp my God Jesus – I, though humbled, grasped not the humble One; nor did I know what lesson that infirmity of His would teach us”). While we were proud, we did not praise God as we should; it was only in knowing Christ as the saviour that our praise for God was correct, so that virtue, understood as praising God as we should, was a gift of God. Augustine emphasised that pride was only overcome in recognising God as the giver of virtue when he held that what distinguished Christians from non-Christians was that, for Christians, the praise of God centred on Easter; among Christians alone, thoughts about God’s praiseworthiness centred on God’s saving work. Thus, in On Nature and Grace, he warned against focusing praise for God on God as the creator of a good creation, at the expense of praising God as the physician who saved our sick natures. Augustine also demonstrated what this meant in practice in Soliloquies and Confessions, which both opened with prayers praising God. In Soliloquies, after acknowledging God as the creator and the father of truth, wisdom, life, and so on, through whom every blessing was experienced, he concluded by describing God’s redeeming work, “who recalls us to the Way, brings us to the Door and causes it to be opened to them that knock; who gives the Bread of Life.” In the same way, the praise of God in Confessions concluded with the recognition of God as the saviour, quoting Psalms :, “Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.” When our praise for God was too little, then we would err, either in praising ourselves too much or, alternatively, in praising ourselves too little. Thus, Augustine considered that the Stoics’ purely materialist account of reality involved a failure to praise both God and human nature sufficiently: the scala naturae that the Stoics recognised failed to conceive of God as utterly separate from creation and hence utterly above creation, but it also failed to recognise that human beings contained, in their higher reason, something which was capable of coming into contact with this transcendent reality. The Stoics, in reckoning “virtue of the mind” as the highest good, were incorrect in their conception both of the highest good and of virtue, so that they lacked virtue, understood as eros for the true highest good; but they also failed to give God His due of praise, so that   

  Conf. ... En. Ps.  (verse ) at . Nat. et Gr. .. Sol. .. Conf. ... See also Conf. .., “For from thee, O God, come all good things and from my God comes the whole of my salvation.”

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



they lacked virtue understood as ordered philia – they praised matter too much in identifying it with the deity, and the deity too little in identifying it with matter, and – while they correctly conceived human beings’ temporal welfare as a good – yet they failed to give human nature its due of praise because they reckoned the mind itself as a purely material thing. Their materialism, in effect, led them to assign to the mind and to God Himself the lower level of praise which was owed to the body: For if one loves himself less than as he is – as for example, suppose that the mind of a man only loves itself as much as the body of a man ought to be loved, whereas the mind is more than the body – then it sins, and its love is not perfect. But it sins more perversely and wrongly still, when it loves the body as much as God is to be loved.

The Stoics insufficiently distinguished between God, mind, and body – this was not only an intellectual failure but also a failure at the level of their loves. It was, in short, part of their sinfulness. Likewise, the Manicheans’ incorrect understanding of God led them to praise God too little, but in this case, as we have seen, the result was that they praised themselves too much (in supposing that wisdom was a human achievement). A further outcome of this was that they praised part of material reality too little through supposing it to be evil. Thus, Augustine described how, while he had shared the Manichean view of God, he had been unable to value creation properly: “there was no wholeness in them whom anything of Your creation displeased and thus there was none in me, when many things which You made displeased me.” The Manicheans distinguished between that part of material reality which was good and praiseworthy through being particles of the divine nature, and that part of material reality which was contemptible through being part of the evil substance. Augustine found that the whole of creation was good; evil was not a substance, but non-being. Hence, everything which existed was worthy of a degree of praise as something good. Thus, the conception of God as the creator of everything in existence, which Christianity and Platonism shared, allowed Augustine to have a new evaluation of the praiseworthiness of every part of creation. Understanding God as separate from creation also ensured that we tempered our praise for creation. Everything in existence received its “being” from God; when we found beauty in the sensible world, we needed to remember that all visible beauty derived from God, the one 

Trin. ...



Trin. ...



Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

beautiful thing (“You I invoke, O God, . . . the Good and the Beautiful, in, by and through whom all good and beautiful things have these qualities”). This allowed us not only to rank visible beauty “lowest” but also to see that what was praiseworthy even in visible beauty derived from God so that our praises of it were praises which were really owed to God. Happiness was knowing God, as the form of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; if we supposed that we had found the ‘form’ of Goodness or Beauty in any created thing, then we located our happiness in contemplating that thing, rather than in contemplating God. Thus, sinning at the level of our philia-love coincided with sinning at the level of our eros-love: we praised some created thing as the form of Beauty and so on (praise which was owed to God), and we understood the happy life as “knowing” this thing and so made it our highest good (when God was the summum bonum). In this way, understanding God as the source of all existence meant that we ranked all of creation correctly, so that the right amount of praise could be assigned to each thing. Augustine stated as an incontrovertible truth that the unchangeable was to be preferred to the changeable. Thus, understanding God as absolute being, the great “I am,” allowed him to rank all creation according to its nearness to God’s absolute or unchanging being. Finding that everything which existed, and was distinct from God, was praiseworthy did not give people a licence to bestow their praises however they might choose. Rather, everything was to be given its strict portion of philia-love. The scale of praiseworthiness found in the order of nature reflected the capacity of every created thing to become an unchangeable thing, with pure matter ranked lowest, and those beings, namely, angels, which lacked a mortal, corruptible body ranked highest. Human beings were ranked lower than the good angels (although above the bad angels) because everything was ranked according to its likeness to God as absolute Being – the evil angels had lost all possibility of becoming an incorruptible thing, but human beings, in their higher reason, possessed this capacity: they possessed the capacity to know God and hence to be placed beyond all possibility of change and corruption. Thus, all created things, including human beings, claimed their due of esteem or philia.

  

 Sol. ... Contra Epistolam Manichaei (). Conf. ... See also Conf. ..: “things above were better than those below.”  Conf. ... Civ. Dei ..

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



Nothing created was absolute being, since even an intelligent being was a mutable thing; nonetheless, the rational mind possessed the greatest nearness to absolute being, since it possessed the capacity to come into contact with God and so to be held forever (unchangeably) in the contemplation of God. For this reason, Augustine maintained that “so far as the merits of the divinely instituted natures are concerned, there is nothing in creatures more excellent than the rational mind.” For the same reason, within human beings, the soul was to be ranked above the body, and below God (“there is in man himself a certain just order of nature, so that the soul is subjected to God, and the flesh to the soul, and consequently both soul and flesh to God”), and within the soul, the higher reason, which had the capacity to know God, was to be ranked above the lower, discursive part of the reason. Hence, human beings were worthy objects of our philia-love: as rational beings who were also corporeal, they possessed a certain goodness and so were worthy of a level of esteem. In particular, they were worthy of more philia than pure matter, but less than pure spirit. The love that was virtue required us to esteem human souls more than bodies, and God more than human souls, our own and those of other people. Virtue referred to the order of love, and so sin was disorder in our loves – and this meant ranking things as praiseworthy in a way which failed to correspond to the order of nature, which ranked things according to their nearness to God, who, as eternal Being, was incorporeal, immutable, and incorruptible. Understanding God in this way established the superiority of the soul to corporeal things, including the human body, and, within the soul, of contemplative reason to rational action. The first step to having correct thoughts about the goodness of everything was thus to understand God as absolute Being and the Form of Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful. This picture of God was one shared by Christianity and Platonism. Yet, despite sharing this picture, and so correctly understanding the place of created things on the scale of nature, the Platonists lacked virtue because their philia-love remained disordered in other respects. In particular, their love was disordered because they were proud: they praised human nature too much in supposing that virtue was a human achievement, and, correspondingly, they failed to praise   

Contra Julianum ... Quoted by Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, ), p. .   Civ. Dei .. Contra Faustum .. Doc. Chr. ... Civ. Dei ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

God sufficiently (and failed to know the true God) since they failed to recognise Him as the giver of virtue: in their case, the mind “loves itself more than as it is . . . it loves itself as much as God is to be loved,” with the result that their “love of self” was not “perfect” – they praised themselves with praises which were owed to God. Hence, it was Christians alone who had virtue understood as ordered philia-love, since, while they shared all Platonism’s teachings about the correct ranking of created things, they held in check their praise for themselves while extending to God His due of praise, through knowing that they had received virtue from God.

    Were we to make the whole of human nature the object of our philia-love, or only praise some part of it? As noted above, our temporal bodies were part of God’s good creation, and hence they received their due of praise. Yet, within human beings, our nature had been in part corrupted by the Fall; consequently, Augustine explained that we were to limit our philia to what was rational in our nature, and that this was one and the same thing as loving the image of God. The image of God had been partly lost at the Fall but a small remnant of this image remained in everyone: “impiety had not quite abolished” the image of God in any human being, “for there had remained undoubtedly that which the soul of man cannot be except it be rational.” The image of God remained in everyone: in most people it was never anything more than a small remnant, but it began to be restored in those who had faith in Christ because our reason was restored in knowing the truth. Thus, the image of God was found in every human being, even after the Fall, because it was identical to reason; the fact that it was found in everyone led Augustine to conclude that the image of God was our real essence or “real self” (sibi ipse). His reasoning here drew on the idea that there were two bonds which were shared by everyone on earth: human beings were bound together, during their earthly lives, by their common fallen nature and, in addition, by the small speck of the ‘first’ nature which had survived the Fall – the remains of the image of God. Yet, importantly, there was also a sense in which the image of God was more universal – more common – to human beings than the fallen nature.  

 Trin. ... Spir. et Litt. .. Vera. Rel. ..



Spir. et Litt. ..

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



This was because the image of God was shared not only with other human beings on earth but also with the ‘new’ humanity in heaven. In this sense, the image of God was the more universal bond, not because it was shared with more people on earth, but rather because it alone was shared not only with everyone on earth but also with those beyond this fallen, earthly life. Hence, the image of God was our true human essence – the one common trait that united all human beings who ever lived. Here, Augustine brought in his imagery of what was “private” (privatam rem) in contrast to what was “common,” with an allusion to the Kingdom of God. We can see now that the real contrast that Augustine had in mind here was between the earthly city as a private realm, cut off from communion with the hosts of heaven – loving its private earthly domain and ignoring the commonwealth in which human beings on earth were united with the citizens of heaven. Among the residents of heaven, the fallen ‘second’ nature was completely erased: hence, while there were two universal bonds binding together everyone on earth, only one of these also bound us here on earth with the saints in heaven. Indeed, the ‘speck’ of the image of God would presumably remain imprinted even on the natures of the damned in hell since this was part of their human nature. In this sense, our real humanity lay not in our fallen nature but in the image of God, however small a part of us it might be: this was the one thing which dwellers on earth shared with all those who had departed this life. Hence, if we mistook our fallen nature for our true humanity, and praised this as though it was common and universal, then our love would be disordered: we would praise what was partial and private as though it was the essence of humanity, and this was to have disorder in our philialove. When we praised human nature, we were to praise it as rational – we were to praise nothing in it which did not partake of reason: this was to make the image of God – the one thing that was essential to our humanness – the object of philia.

    Thus, at the end of Book , Augustine finally came to possess virtue. In other words, he finally came to love God as God should be loved: he ceased to bestow on himself any of the love that was owed to God (he ceased to be proud) and instead loved God with all the philia-love that 

Vera Rel. ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

God was owed because he now knew God as doing everything to save him; this meant that he finally had the true God as the object of his eroslove. Consequently, he was virtuous: he thought of the true God as the highest good and had correct thoughts about everything else’s goodness. Yet when Augustine described in Confessions what had happened to him in the garden in Milan, he described it as the moment at which he had received the specific virtue of continence. Book  concludes, “For You did so convert me to Yourself, that I sought neither a wife, nor any other of this world’s hopes – standing in that rule of faith in which You, so many years before, had showed me to [Monica] in a vision.” Augustine had received virtue in the garden in Milan, yet he described himself as having received one specific virtue there. Why was this? It might be tempting to suppose that by attributing the virtue of continence to himself in the garden in Milan, Augustine meant simply that he loved God and so was ‘continent’ where being continent meant exercising self-control over his sexual conduct. Yet we have seen that Augustine looked upon all such outward things as morally neutral, with the result that he did not look on merely exercising sexual self-control as the meaning of continence, understood as a virtue. This is supported by his observation in Confessions that some people, among them his friend Alypius, exercised the appropriate self-control over their sexual actions even while they remained non-Christians. Before his conversion, Alypius had been voluntarily celibate (“For he himself was so chaste in this matter that it was wonderful”). Yet Alypius, like Augustine and like every other non-Christian, had been vicious and sinful in every respect prior to coming to believe in Christ. In short, while Alypius as a non-Christian accomplished all the outward things that were associated with the virtue of continence, he did not truly possess this virtue, since he did not possess any true virtue at all. This points to the conclusion that, for Augustine, true continence, like true justice (and indeed like every other virtue in its true form), was not actually a matter of our actions (although certain actions would always accompany this virtue), but rather a matter of our loves. Yet if all virtue was simply a matter of loving God as we should, then this might seem to entail that Augustine had no way of differentiating among the virtues – that is, it might seem to entail that every virtue, for him, was simply loving God as God should be loved so that all the virtues were the same. Could



Conf. ...



Conf. ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



Augustine define virtue in this way and yet differentiate among the virtues? The finding that all true virtue was a matter of loving God is compatible with the finding that there were different virtues if we suppose that, for Augustine, each virtue referred to a particular absence from our loves as well as to the presence of the highest love for God. The virtue of continence was not merely the absence of a love for sexual pleasure; rather, it was this absence caused by the presence of love for God. When Augustine began living continently, he meant that he had begun to do actions in which the love for the true God was present instead of the love for sexual pleasure. That is, his continent actions consisted of the presence of love for the true God and the absence of love for sexual pleasure. A person might cease to love sexual pleasure without coming to love God – since the love for some other temporal thing could simply replace the love of sexual pleasure (as was the case with Alypius, prior to his conversion: he did not love sexual pleasure but loved other kinds of temporal pleasure instead). In that case, a person would not possess the virtue of continence, because that person would not love God, but they would nonetheless restrain their sexual behaviour in an appropriate way: that person would act outwardly in exactly the same way as people acted who possessed the virtue of continence, while lacking that virtue. Thus, continent actions (or just actions or patient actions, etc.) would always have a particular, outward dimension: we would never describe giving money to the poor as part of a continent action since doing this outward thing did not require us to be free of the love for sexual pleasure. A person could love sexual pleasure and yet give money to the poor. Rather, living in voluntary celibacy was best described as part of a continent action since doing this outward deed indicated that a person had ceased to love sexual pleasure. Yet the action in question would remain a sinful one, and not a continent one at all, if love for God was absent from it. In this way, Augustine’s view was that upon becoming a Christian, everybody began to love God as God should be loved and so became virtuous, but in any given situation virtue would take on a particular shape. Virtue was this love for God and yet the virtues were distinguishable from each other because each virtue also involved the absence of the love for some specific temporal thing. When we loved God and gave to the 

Augustine was clear in Letter  that, while virtue was love, nonetheless, it made sense to think in terms of different virtues. See Letter  at . and .–.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

poor, we would act justly; when we loved God and remained celibate, we would act continently. The outward dimension of our deed remained a morally neutral thing: giving to the poor was not itself a just act and abstaining from sex was not itself a continent act. Rather, this outward act was a guide to what was absent from our loves, although it could not guarantee that love for the true God was present. The virtue of justice referred to loving God instead of loving having more than one’s due; the virtue of continence referred to loving God instead of loving sexual pleasure. Hence, Augustine acquired virtue upon coming to love God with all the love that was owed to God, and he acquired the specific virtue of continence since this love for God conquered his love for sexual pleasure. More precisely, this love for God conquered a specific instance of his love for sexual pleasure – Augustine accepted that even after his conversion his love for sexual pleasure continued in him, in other, unknown ways, each of which would need to be conquered by his love for God, in order for the virtue of continence to grow in him. Growing in the virtue of continence meant having love for God conquer more and more examples of his love for sexual pleasure. Acquiring other virtues, and growing in these, would involve this love for God conquering whatever other examples of temporal loves might remain in him; since love for God was virtue, love for God would progressively conquer these other temporal loves, and so Christians would grow in virtue, even though, as Augustine later affirmed, throughout their lifetimes, there would always remain examples of temporal loves for them to conquer.

  ’   In this chapter, I have argued that Augustine thought that the Platonists’ sin was their view of virtue as a human achievement; this was the sin of pride, or excessive philia for the self (and the failure to have eros for the true God). The above has found that, for Augustine, reason itself established that virtue must be a divine gift: reason established this in establishing that all knowledge of God must come from God, with the result that it was impossible for unaided human beings to direct their eros-love to the true God. Instead, having eros for the true God must itself be a divine gift: we did not love the true God, but loved a false notion of God instead, until God made Himself known to us in giving Himself as the object of this love. Hence, virtue (understood as eros for the true God) was necessarily a divine gift.

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



This finding supports the conclusion that Augustine’s earliest Christian thought stood in fundamental continuity with his later thought and, in particular, that his thinking on grace and virtue was always opposed to that of the Pelagians. The Pelagians, like the Platonists and many other ancient moralists, considered that human beings achieved virtue for themselves. The above has argued, however, that from the time of his conversion, Augustine understood Christianity as opposing this view. I have argued that Augustine’s Christian conversion involved the realisation that human beings could not make themselves virtuous but must receive virtue from God, coupled with the realisation that this teaching, namely, that Christ saved sinners, stood at the heart of Christianity. My case for claiming that this view of virtue was one which Augustine embraced in  CE, the time of his conversion in the garden in Milan, rests on the finding that this view of virtue emerged from the eudaimonist tradition. If we accept that Augustine was working within this moral tradition prior to becoming a Christian, then we need to understand the relationship between this tradition and his Christian conversion. The above has offered an understanding of this relationship in proposing that his conversion coincided with his realisation that eudaimonism required us to view virtue as a divine gift, a view which he discovered was absent from Platonism but present in Christianity. Yet it has long been argued that certain passages in Augustine’s earliest Christian writings were actually Pelagian in tenor because, unlike his mature works, they contained the assumption that virtue was not a divine gift at all, but rather a human achievement. Hence, in this concluding section, I will briefly outline an alternative reading of these passages which agrees with my findings above. The starting point for an understanding of these early passages needs to be the fact that Augustine himself identified an important change in his moral thought as occurring just prior to writing the Confessions. He explained that, before  





The argument that “the defining features of [Augustine’s] mature theology” were in place already in  is made by Carol Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology: An Argument for Continuity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). This is the idea of Augustine’s “Lost Future” seen in P. Brown’s Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, ; first published in ), p. : in Lib. Arb. “Augustine was, on paper, more Pelagian than Pelagius.” Brown points out that Pelagius himself quoted from Lib. Arb. in support of his views (reported by Augustine in Nat. et Gr. .). See also J. Patout Burns, The Development of Augustine’s Doctrine of Operative Grace (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, ). Retractationes, .: “I indeed labored in defense of the free choice of the human will: but the grace of God conquered . . .”



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

(when he wrote to Simplicianus), he had held that human beings must do something to single themselves out for God’s gift of virtue; after this point, however, he held that every step on the path to virtue (which coincided with Christian conversion) was overseen by God; this new insight prompted him to write Confessions with its many declarations that every step he had taken towards Christianity was one which God had led him to take: even in the Garden of Milan when he had asked Christ to make him virtuous, he indicated that God had led him to make this request, with the result that he had done absolutely nothing to single himself out for the gift of virtue. He had done nothing at all to win God’s favour; all was grace. He developed his new position through an exegesis of Romans :–, where Paul explained that God had chosen to favour Jacob over his twin brother Esau from the time of their conception, even though at this point there was simply nothing to distinguish between them. Augustine now concluded, contrary to the position that he had held at the time of his own conversion, that even the act of asking for God’s help was God’s work in us, and not our own work. He had never regarded the request for help as itself a virtue; nonetheless, he had previously been troubled by the question of why God chose some people to receive virtue and not others: evidently, everyone was vicious prior to receiving virtue from God, meaning that everyone was devoid of all merit, so what made God choose some people for this gift? His first answer had been that some people distinguished themselves from the rest of humanity by choosing to trust Christ for the gift of virtue. This did not ‘earn’ them the gift of virtue, quite simply because virtue alone was meritorious and nothing could earn grace, but God was pleased with this action and chose to regard it as sufficient grounds in itself to favour some people with the gift of virtue and deny it to others. That is, people’s choice to rely on Christ set them apart and gave God grounds for favouring them with the gift of virtue whereby they were saved. The view that people chose to single themselves out for God’s favour was thus the view which he rejected in his reply to Simplicanus and in writing Confessions. By implication, this was the view of conversion

 

Simpl. .–. See Ex Prop. Rm. Prop. : “by his free will man has a means to believe in the Liberator and to receive grace so that, with the liberating assistance of him who gives it, he might cease to sin” and Prop. : “Belief is our work, but good deeds are his who gives the Holy spirit to believers.”

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



which he himself had held at the time of his own conversion, and thus the view found in his earliest Christian writings. That is, I argue that these early writings contain the view not that we made ourselves virtuous but rather that, in asking for God’s help, we pleased God and thereby singled ourselves out from among other sinners for the gift of virtue. Augustine later came to affirm that all was grace; but at the time of his own conversion, he had believed that becoming virtuous and a Christian depended in this small way on a free choice of the will. Evidence in support of the above interpretation can be found in Book  of On Free Will – that is, in precisely the book where Augustine is thought to have been at his most ‘Pelagian.’ Here, he introduced the idea that, while we were all sinners, nonetheless, every one of us could make a choice which would in turn lead to us becoming virtuous. In particular, he declared that it was open to everyone to choose to have a “good will,” that is, “a will to live rightly and honourably and to reach the highest wisdom.” “For what is so completely within the power of the will as the will itself?” Importantly, Augustine next explained that this good will was not itself virtue; rather, the love of this good will was virtue. To love this good will was also to have a good will: virtue was the love of the good will for itself. Thus, he went on to define each virtue – prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice – as each a form of the love of the good will. In this way, his message here was that we were able to have virtue – we were able “to live rightly and honourably” – simply by willing to have it – that is, by willing to have a good will: “In order to attain it, he has to do nothing but will it.” This could be read as Augustine’s declaration that being virtuous was a human achievement and not a divine gift, but an alternative reading is possible. Even in this work, he had earlier written of the soul’s mastery by sin: he explained that the soul was “dominated by lust.” This observation, coupled with the fact that in the above passage, he was careful to draw a distinction between willing to be virtuous and actually being virtuous, encourages the conclusion that here he did not intend to attribute the acquisition of virtue directly to an act of the will itself, but rather indirectly to an act of our will. His message was that, in order to have a good will (understood as virtue) what we needed to do was to will to have

 

Lib. Arb. ... Lib. Arb. ..–.



Lib. Arb. ... Lib. Arb. ...





Lib. Arb. ... Lib. Arb. ...





Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

one – but this claim leaves scope for the possibility that it was God who gave us the good will, in response to our decision to will to have one; that is, it leaves scope for the finding that our contribution was not the acquisition of virtue for ourselves, but rather willing to be virtuous. When we willed to be virtuous, God would give us virtue. In other words, in these passages from On Free Will, he arguably offered a summary of the position that he held until , namely, that in order to receive the divine gift of virtue (in order to become a Christian), we needed only to choose to trust God for this gift: when he affirmed here that a good will was had simply by willing to have it, he arguably meant that virtue was had simply by wanting to be virtuous, where wanting to be virtuous involved asking God to give virtue to us. Thus, his message was that we were at all times free to “seek to live rightly and honourably” because we were at all times free to turn to God with the request to make us virtuous. At the time of his conversion in , he was clear that we undoubtedly contributed something to the process whereby we became virtuous and Christian – this was his position all the way up to . In these passages from On Free Will, he wrote of the human contribution as a sincere desire to be virtuous. Clearly, while we wanted to be virtuous, we were not yet virtuous. Hence, rather than making the radical claim that virtue was our own achievement and not God’s gift – a view which stands in stark contrast to his later position, and to the view of Christian conversion which I have argued emerged from his engagement with eudaimonism – he can be taken as making a claim in his early writings which was compatible with the position that he maintained in other writings prior to . This claim was that, while we did not make ourselves virtuous, nonetheless, we singled ourselves out for this grace, by doing something which pleased God so that, in this sense, we made ourselves eligible for the divine gift of virtue. Willing to live rightly was not exactly the same thing as actually living rightly: there was more to being virtuous than merely desiring to be virtuous. Nonetheless, we singled ourselves out by choosing to want to be virtuous, and God chose to respond to this by giving us virtue. Thus, Augustine next had to argue carefully in this section from On Free Will that there was a sense in which not everyone wanted to be virtuous, despite the fact that everyone wanted to be happy. People



Lib. Arb. ...



Lib. Arb. ...

Augustine’s Place within the Eudaimonist Tradition



were unhappy, despite wanting to be happy; and people were vicious, despite wanting to be virtuous. If we were vicious, then this was not because we did not want to be virtuous, but rather because we did not want virtue in the correct way. Wanting to be virtuous in the specific sense of having a “good will” meant wanting virtue in such a way that a person asked for God’s assistance in attaining virtue; everyone desired to be virtuous, but only those people whose desire for virtue led them to rely upon God, rather than themselves, for the attainment of virtue would be given the virtue that they desired. When Augustine came to write the Confessions over a decade later, he had revised this position: he had reviewed his own conversion experience and concluded that he had misunderstood it – what he had taken, at the time, to be his free choice in requesting God to make him virtuous, he now saw as God’s act: God had led him to request this grace, so that this request itself was grace. Thus, I argue that it is possible to reconcile Augustine’s statements about virtue and the will in his early work On Free Will with the finding that he had always viewed virtue as a divine gift. This in turn supports the conclusion of this chapter that Augustine was working within the eudaimonist tradition prior to becoming a Christian and that, at the time of his conversion (as well as in the decades that followed), he made sense of his Christian conversion from within this tradition. Thus, this chapter has explored the importance of eudaimonism for an understanding of Augustine’s conversion to Christianity. Augustine was clear that at a certain point in his pre-Christian life, he came to believe that the Bible contained the correct picture of God; he came to believe that God wanted to be found through the Bible. His search for God was a search inspired by the eudaimonist conviction that it was in knowing God that we would live the fully natural life; eudaimonism told him that virtue was love for the true God – he turned to the Bible as a guide to who the true God was. Thus, it is not clear what Augustine might have done had he found in the Bible teachings which stood contrary to eudaimonism. In fact, this point does not arise because what Augustine found in the Bible were teachings which he believed agreed with eudaimonism. Thus, he found that eudaimonism supported the Bible’s claim that it contained the true picture of God, and he found the Bible’s teachings as comprehensible within the eudaimonist tradition. Consequently, for him, the problem with the Neoplatonists, and indeed with all other non-Christian thinkers in the eudaimonist tradition, was not that they were eudaimonists but rather that they had a poor understanding of eudaimonism.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Christianity, in contrast, was true to eudaimonism. The result was that he believed that in being a Christian, he was virtuous, and vice versa: in being virtuous, he was a Christian. In making this claim, his definition of virtue (eros-love for the Christian God; philia-love for God as the saviour of sinners) was one which he believed made sense in both eudaimonism and Christianity.

 The Life in Accordance with Nature

This chapter turns to one final criticism which Augustine made of the Stoics and Platonists. With this criticism, he argued that eudaimonism was compatible with the view that when we lived fully in accordance with human nature we would have other things besides God. In making this argument, namely, that the highest good was not the only thing that we would have in the happy life, he knew that he was departing in a major way from the conclusions of the Stoics and Platonists, but he believed that eudaimonism itself required him to make this departure. Hence, he saw this as yet another way in which Christianity was true to eudaimonism, while the accounts of the Stoics and Platonists were flawed in their application of eudaimonist principles. This chapter explores this further criticism of the Stoics and Platonists and, in doing so, examines Augustine’s distinction between ‘use’ and ‘enjoyment’ (uti and frui). Augustine’s distinction between ‘using’ and ‘enjoying’ a thing or person has been understood as the same as the distinction between ‘means’ and ‘ends’: it has been supposed that, for him, to use something is to instrumentalise it – to make it the means to achieving some end. 

For a discussion of the historiography of these two terms in studies of Augustine’s ethics, see Raymond Canning, “Uti/frui,” in Allan D. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ), pp. –. Oliver O’Donovan, “Usus and Fruitio in Augustine, De doctrina christiana I,” Journal of Theological Studies  (): –, thinks that Augustine initially offered an instrumentalised reading of neighbour-love; for O’Donovan, Augustine later revised this view. Other scholars do not agree that Augustine’s uti was always instrumental in the strict sense. William Riordan O’Connor, “The Uti/Frui Distinction in Augustine’s Ethics,” Augustinian Studies  (): –, at : “instrumental values need not be purely instrumental,” but also





Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

For Augustine, the true end of human life is God, with the result that he has been understood to say, with his language of ‘use’ and ‘enjoyment,’ that we are to treat our lives on earth, including our interactions with other human beings, as the means to reach God, a claim which informed Nygren’s charge of egocentrism against Augustine’s ethics. In what follows, I find that Augustine did not understand ‘use’ in this narrow way at all: for him, ‘using’ something was a matter of relating it to an end, but not necessarily as a ‘means’; that is, the relationship in question was not necessarily an instrumental one. Instead, for him, things which were for use could be ends in themselves – they could be genuine goods. In that case, ‘use’ described not an instrumental but a subordinate relationship – we ‘used’ a thing when we told ourselves that this thing was not the highest good, but was nonetheless a good – that is, something which human beings fittingly pursued as an end in itself. In other words, the uti/frui distinction corresponded to eudaimonism’s distinction between preferred indifferents and the summum bonum – this distinction described the way that we related our pursuit of lesser goods to our pursuit of the highest good. In eudaimonism, pursuing these lesser goods was never the means to attain the highest good (since, by definition, we were assured of having the summum bonum simply by willing to have it); hence there was never any question of an instrumentalised relationship between the two. Rather, we were to pursue lesser goods as ends in themselves, while always recognising that the possession of these goods would not make us happy. This, in essence, was what it meant to ‘use’ these goods – namely, to perceive correctly that, while each was worthwhile in its own right, none of them was the summum bonum. As we will see, Augustine accepted this language of uti/frui while stretching it to encompass objects,



p. : “That [Augustine] advocates a definitely instrumental attitude toward temporal goods cannot be denied.” In contrast, Walter Hannam, “Ad illud ubi permanendum est: The Metaphysics of St Augustine’s usus-fruitio Distinction in Relation to Love of Neighbour,” Studia Patristica  (): –, does not agree that usus always has an instrumental meaning. Anthony Dupont, “To Use or Enjoy humans? ‘Uti’ and ‘frui’ in Augustine,” Studia Patristica  (): –, finds that, while caritas is not instrumentalist or selfish, libido/cupiditas is (p. ). Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, “Resisting Idolatry and Instrumentalisation in Loving the Neighbour: The Significance of the Pilgrimage Motif for Augustine’s Usus–Fruitio Distinction,” Studies in Christian Ethics . (): –, is critical of O’Donovan: I agree with Stewart-Kroeker that the imagery of a homecoming journey in De Doctrina Christiana does not involve the instrumentalisation of the neighbour or of temporal life. O’Connor, “The Uti/Frui Distinction,” p. , for Nygren’s charge of egocentrism against Augustine.

The Life in Accordance with Nature



besides the highest good, which he considered to be appropriate objects of eros-love. Again, this was not a question of means/ends but rather a question of the proper relationship among things which were all ‘ends’: while there were many appropriate objects of eros, there was only one highest good – there was only one thing which was happy-making. All the objects of our natural eros-love would be present in the happy life, but we would live the happy life and have these things only in loving and having God, our summum bonum: recognising this was the meaning of ‘using’ these things. In this chapter, I also address Wolterstorff’s claim that, for Augustine, the loss of mutable (temporal) things ought to be a source of grief for us. Wolterstorff correctly notes that this view had no place in eudaimonism, so that if Augustine espoused it, then this must mark a departure from eudaimonism. I agree with Wolterstorff that Augustine considered that grief was a passion which the virtuous would experience during their earthly lives, as well as the vicious, but I find, contra Wolterstorff, that Augustine considered that this claim was fully compatible with the eudaimonist approach to ethics. This is because I reject Wolterstorff’s view that, for Augustine, the virtuous would grieve over mutable (temporal) things; on the contrary, I find that Augustine’s position was that the grief that the virtuous experienced was caused by the absence of immutable (eternal) things: throughout our lives, there were certain things which we naturally wanted to have forever (e.g., bodily health for ourselves and others, as well as friendship) – that is, we wanted these things not just as mutable realities but as immutable ones. Moreover, we wanted these things as ends in themselves; we viewed them as worthwhile in their own right. Through wishing that these things would be ours forever, these things necessarily formed part of our picture of the happy life: we wanted these things for their own sakes, and we also wanted them to be without end, with the result that we pictured ourselves as having these things when we lived happily. The result was that these immutable things were necessarily the objects of our natural eros-love: in other words, we 

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), “Augustine’s Break with Eudaimonism.” Byers, in Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), also concludes (pp. –) that Augustine “mov[ed] beyond Stoicism” in finding that “[the] wise person has emotions about a wider range of things than the Stoic sage does: about temporal goods as well as virtues.” As will be seen in what follows, I find that Augustine did not think that wise (virtuous) people had emotions about temporal goods – he did not move beyond Stoicism in this respect.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

naturally felt passionate desire for these things, and also the passions of fear and grief in relation to them. Hence, I find that Augustine’s discussion of grief remained consistent with eudaimonism: he agreed that grief was a passion, meaning that it was a form of eros, the emotion that had as its object things as we believed they would be in the happy life. As temporal beings, nothing could be ours forever and so we experienced fear at the prospect of losing whatever we wanted to be always with us (our friends and families) and we experienced grief when they were gone; but we felt these passions precisely because what we wanted was not something temporal but rather something removed from all possibility of change and decay. The longing to have these immutable things was part of our human nature – hence, it was not egoistical (since we had no choice in the matter), and it was not vicious. Rather, Augustine implied that what was vicious (what was out of accordance with nature) was the Stoics’ attempts to deny themselves the experience of this natural eros-love.

        ? It has been argued that Augustine followed the Greek philosophers in finding that contemplating the truth was the whole happiness of human beings. On the contrary, Augustine self-consciously departed from the view of the happy life as involving nothing besides loving and knowing the truth. He believed that eudaimonist principles themselves forced the conclusion that human beings naturally had eros-love for things other than the truth, which meant that the love for these things, as well as these things themselves, would be found in the fully natural (‘happy’) life. The Stoic-Platonic tradition was clear that everything which we, as human beings, naturally loved would be present when we lived fully in accordance with human nature: this was because in the fully natural life we would have only correct thoughts about the features of this life. Because when we loved something, in the sense of eros, we thought of it as a feature of the fully natural life, it followed that not only would every love 

Werner Beierwaltes, “Regio Beatitudinis”: Augustine’s Conception of Happiness (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, ). For example, he holds that Augustine shared the Greek and Roman idea that “happiness is founded upon seeing, or conceiving” (pp. –). Beierwaltes does not suggest that happiness consists in anything else for Augustine. For Aristotle, “The highest activity of human existence is contemplative thought, which fulfils itself in the beholding of truth” (pp. –) and this is “the complete happiness of man” (pp.  and ff.).

The Life in Accordance with Nature



which was natural to us be present in us when our lives completely conformed to our natures, but the objects of these loves themselves would actually be present when we lived this live. For the Stoics and Platonists, the highest good was all that we would have when we lived in complete accordance with human nature. Augustine, in contrast, maintained that there were many things which would be ours when we lived in happiness: since eros referred to thinking of something as present in the happy life, and hence to the passionate desire or passionate joy which we felt for this thing, it follows that, for Augustine, everything which we would actually possess in the happy life was the natural object of our eros-love. Augustine indicated that the happy life involved having many things, besides God. For instance, he held that our happiness would involve possessing the body in an immortal and incorruptible state: “It is not, then, necessary to the happiness of the soul that it be detached from a body of any kind whatever, but that it receive an incorruptible body.” Elsewhere, he held that “no one is to be said not to desire the safety and health of his body.” We could not help wanting this for our bodies – it was part of human nature to want unceasing bodily health, and to want it for its own sake: hence, the happy life must be one in which we enjoyed this perfect health. Augustine also found that the happy life was the life in which we enjoyed a perfect fellowship with other people (“bound in strictest concord”). This perfect fellowship had a number of dimensions. For instance, our happiness involved the absence of all fear that our friends would ever be taken from us by death and the absence of all anxiety about the possibility of misfortune befalling a friend. Moreover, in the happy life, there would be no possibility of treachery, pretended friendship, or differences of language. Since after the resurrection, the City of God would no longer be divided between its pilgrim citizens on earth and the saints and angels in heaven, the happy life would involve the elect enjoying forever the society of all the other elect and of the angels as well. In short, in the happy life, we would have a life of perpetual repose (a perpetual Sabbath), loveliness, eternal delight, true glory, and true   

 Civ. Dei .. See also Civ. Dei . and Letter , at .. Doc. Chr. ...   Civ. Dei .. Civ. Dei .. Civ. Dei . and .. Civ. Dei . and ., “the society of the saints, of holy angels as well as holy men, ‘that God may be all in all’ ( Cor. :).”

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

honour, in which there would be “no deformity” in the resurrected body, as well as “no infirmity, no languor, no corruption – nothing of any kind which would ill become that kingdom in which the children of the resurrection and of the promise shall be equal to the angels of God, if not in body and age, at least in happiness.” These were all features of the happy life, and, as such, loving and having them was part of what it meant to live fully in accordance with human nature. In other words, these things were all the natural objects of human beings’ eros-love, with the result that, during our earthly lives, it was fitting for us to experience a passionate desire for all these things, while in heaven, we would experience a passionate joy in the possession of them.

’      :    In finding that human happiness involved possessing all these things, Augustine knew that he departed from eudaimonism’s consensus view that the highest good was the only thing possessed in the happy life. Yet he considered that eudaimonism itself required this finding. He held that the Stoic-Platonic tradition was flawed in its application of eudaimonist principles when it concluded that the fully natural life involved possessing nothing besides the highest good. He developed this criticism particularly in regard to what this tradition had to say about pain. As discussed in Chapter , the Stoic-Platonic tradition considered that, from birth, human beings wanted all kinds of things and that they wanted these things not in order to attain something else, but for their own sakes. Augustine followed Varro in calling these the “primary objects of nature” and listed as examples such things as pleasure and repose, health, friendship, knowledge, and the exercise of our physical and mental faculties: we were born wanting to have all these things, and wanting to have them, not as a means to anything else but as ends in themselves; moreover, our concern to have these things was ineradicable from us – hence, to seek these things was part of human nature. The question was: What exactly did we seek in seeking these things? In particular, was our search focused simply on attaining mutable things – things which belonged to this temporal life? Or were immutable things included among the objects that we sought, so that we wanted to have 

Civ. Dei ..



Civ. Dei ..



Civ. Dei . and ..

The Life in Accordance with Nature



things which could not be ours while we existed as mortal, temporal beings? At first glance, the answer might seem to be that in seeking pleasure and repose, health and friendship, and so on, what we wanted, necessarily, was not only the mutable, temporal version of these things but also the immutable version: we wanted to be healthy in this moment, and to be healthy always; likewise, we wanted not only to be free from pain right now, but also to be permanently free from pain, and so on: in each case, it would seem that our concern reached beyond the present moment to include what was perfect and ever-enduring. The Stoics replied, however, that although everyone might unthinkingly wish for the “primary objects of nature” as permanent, immutable things, this did not prove that human beings naturally wished for what was immutable. For the wish for immutable health, friendship, and so on to be one which was natural to us, it must be one which was ineradicable from us, meaning one which no appeal to reason could ever remove from us. The Stoics believed that it was possible to appeal to reason to convince people to stop wanting friendship, bodily health, and so on as something everlasting, and instead to want these things simply as mutable things; this, in turn, allowed them to conclude that wanting the immutable version of these things was not part of human nature. The Stoics’ message was that, while everyone was born wanting the primary objects of nature, and continued to seek to have these things, as ends in themselves, throughout their lives, and while we were all born wanting the temporal version of these things, and would likewise go on wanting this throughout our lives, yet we had a choice about whether or not we also sought to have the perfect and permanent version. In particular, since we all wished to live the happy life, and since it could be shown that the happy life was the life in complete accordance with human nature, we must ensure that we wanted to have only the objects that it accorded with our human nature to want to have, and that we sought these things in a way which itself accorded with human nature. The Stoics argued that it did not accord with our nature as human beings to seek the primary objects of nature as permanent, perfect realities since, as temporal creatures, we were not fitted to possess these things in this form. We ourselves were by nature limited, temporal beings – while our minds had the capacity to become something eternal in reaching the truth (a point made by the Platonists), it was not natural for permanent things to belong to our bodies simply because our bodily existence could never be anything but a temporal one.

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Realising this would lead people to turn their search away from what could never be theirs: they would tell themselves that by nature they were fitted to have not everlasting health, or everlasting friendship, but merely the temporal (impermanent, non-lasting) health and friendship which accorded with their temporal bodily state. In addition, the Stoics and Platonists held that realising this would ensure that our search for these mutable things itself remained in accordance with our natures. We have seen that, in eudaimonism, to love something, in the sense of eros, referred to thinking of that thing as a feature of the fully natural life. In telling ourselves that, because we were temporal beings, we were fitted by nature to seek nothing more than the mutable, temporal version of the primary objects of nature, we were in effect telling ourselves that we could live completely as human beings while lacking any of these things. What was temporal escaped our full control precisely because, by nature, our bodies were also governed by temporality; hence, in recognising ourselves as beings which existed in limited, temporal bodies we also recognised that we could lose or lack any external, temporal thing while still living fully in accordance with our nature. Thus, in finding that it was natural for us to seek the primary objects of nature as temporal things, the Stoics also found that we would live in complete agreement with nature only when we did not have eros for them, but simply sought them as “preferred indifferents” or “with reservation” – that is, as things which did not matter for our happiness. We have seen that, contra Wolterstorff’s view of Stoicism, Stoic eudaimonism did not involve itself in a contradiction in seeing genuine value in mutable things: for the Stoics, while bodily health (our own and that of others) was something which could, and inevitably would, be lost, it was nonetheless a preferred indifferent – its possession was unnecessary for our happiness, and yet it was something which happy people (people who lived in complete accordance with human nature) valued, not as a means to anything else, but for its own sake. Hence, in Stoicism, mutable things like human health were genuine goods – they had intrinsic value – even though they were not the supreme good. This also meant that, in Stoicism, 

Matthew Sharpe, “Stoic Virtue Ethics,” in Stan van Hooft, ed., The Handbook of Virtue Ethics (London: Routledge, ), p. : “the Stoics place a premium on a specific inner attitude of reserve . . . in explaining the nature of virtue.” See also Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. – and –, who discusses the Stoic view that external things were to be pursued with reservation because only what was in accordance with nature (i.e., with reason or the divine will) was to be pursued without reservation.

The Life in Accordance with Nature



while we recognised this difference between temporal goods and the supreme good, our pursuit of these temporal goods would remain in accordance with our nature, so that pursuing these things could never cause us fear or grief. Stoicism defined fear and grief as passions – meaning as the emotions that were experienced only in relation to what we thought of as needed for happiness: specifically, fear was the passion that we felt when we thought we might lose something which we believed we must possess in order to live happily; while grief was the passion that we felt when we had lost this thing. Consequently, once we accepted our status as temporal beings, and so confined ourselves to seeking the temporal version of the prima naturae, we would never fear their loss or grieve when they were lost since we would never see them as needed for happiness. In other words, if we fully reconciled ourselves to our temporal existence, then, despite valuing this temporal existence as something worthwhile in its own right, we would never experience fear or grief. It is worth reiterating that the Stoics’ view was that human beings wanted temporal goods, like bodily health, not just for themselves but for other people as well, and that this concern for others’ temporal welfare was present in all of us from our earliest years: prior to any teaching or rational reflection, we all sought these good things for those near to us – that is, for our families and friends. The Stoics’ message was that we all experienced this concern for the welfare of others from our earliest years and that this concern was natural to us because it was ineradicable from us, but nonetheless we must not allow it to become eros. The role of reason was thus to teach us to extend this concern to the whole of humanity, so that we sought everyone’s material well-being, and also to prevent our search for these things from becoming eros by reminding us that as temporal beings we could have only what was temporal – or, in other words, by reminding us that nothing could belong to human bodies which was not fleeting and subject to change. For the Stoics, the result would be that our attitude towards the prima naturae would be one which accorded with living in complete agreement with human nature. In this way, we can see that the Stoics made a good case for their claim that, while we naturally wanted health, beauty, friendship, honour, and glory, for both ourselves and others, and wanted these things for their own sakes, we must fix our thoughts on the temporal versions of these things while also withholding our eros-love from them. Augustine would have erred in not taking this claim seriously; and he did take it seriously. In response, we will see that he raised two objections. The first of these objections consisted in the observation that it was simply impossible to



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

stop wanting the perfect, permanent (immutable) version of the primary objects of nature: there was no one who would not prefer to be permanently free from pain, as opposed to being temporarily free from pain, or to be healthy both in the present and forever after. For Augustine, this was a matter of fact: we simply had no choice about this – even when we recognised ourselves as temporal beings, we all continued to want to transcend our temporality. We were born wanting this and no amount of reasoning would convince people to confine their longings to the temporal goods that were all that they could actually have as temporal beings; instead, we all wanted health and life for forever, and we all wished this for our friends and family as well. This desire for neverending health and life was ineradicable from human beings; hence it was natural to them, with the result that, rather than being something contrary to reason, it must be a desire which was compatible with right reason: human beings were rational animals; hence, when their desires accorded with their nature, they accorded with reason. Second, he observed that, given that we all naturally sought not merely the temporal version of friendship and bodily health but the permanent, unchanging version, it followed that in pursuing the latter we experienced eros. When we sought something permanent and unchanging, we told ourselves that once we possessed this thing, we would have it forever; this was to experience eros for it, since it was to think of it as present in the happy life. Eros was the love that we felt for everything which we considered to be part of the happy life – that is, the fully natural life which was the goal of our existence. Thus, while Augustine agreed with the Stoics that, as temporal beings, we could never have any of these things (“For when, where, how, in this life can these primary objects of nature be possessed so that they may not be assailed by unforeseen accidents?”), he also held that the Stoics were incorrect to suppose that this observation was capable of preventing us from seeking the primary objects of nature as immutable things. Since permanent, unchanging realities must necessarily be the objects of eros, it followed that everyone naturally experienced eros for these things even though in our temporal existence we could never have them. He expressed his conviction that human beings naturally had eros-love for health, friendship, and so on – meaning, his conviction that what we naturally wanted in wanting these things was their permanent, immutable



Civ. Dei ..

The Life in Accordance with Nature



versions – particularly in reaction to the Stoic view that people could be happy in the midst of pain. As we have seen, the Stoics held that, since suffering pain was something to which temporal human bodies were susceptible, living in accordance with our nature meant accepting that this was so, and so not thinking that the life in complete accordance with human nature was one in which we would be completely invulnerable to pain. Augustine, however, objected that, in regard to freedom from pain, the Stoics were simply splitting hairs in drawing the distinction between goods (in this case, things which we thought of as features of the happy life) and advantages (things which we desired as ends in themselves, but did not regard as necessary for happiness): “the Stoics are pleasing themselves merely with a novel phraseology.” “For the Stoics decline to apply the term ‘goods’ to external and bodily advantages, because they reckon that the only good is virtue, the art of living well, and this exists only in the mind.” The view that informed this criticism, as already mentioned, was the view that to have a preference for something permanent and everlasting was to look upon that thing as a feature of the happy life, with the result that, in this case, the distinction between goods and advantages was meaningless. For Augustine, we all naturally wanted external, bodily advantages like health and friendship to be ours permanently, meaning that we naturally loved these things in the sense of eros. This did not involve disdaining the merely temporal version of these things – Augustine’s message here was not that there were no temporal advantages (temporal things which were desirable for their own sakes); rather, his message was that regarding any permanent, unchanging thing as an advantage (something worth seeking for its own sake) was the same thing as regarding it as a good (something which we would have in the happy life). For the Stoics, there was only one good, which was virtue; but, for Augustine, this claim involved the claim that human beings were capable of turning away from the search for other permanent, immutable things, which he claimed was simply not the case: we remained ineradicably attached to the health of the body, conceived of as something unchanging and permanent. He also made this point in On the Trinity. Here, he insisted that people could not be happy either while they suffered in the body or while they



Civ. Dei ..



Ibid.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

experienced freedom from pain which they knew was transitory. Since permanent freedom from pain was something which we naturally willed to have, and willed to have for its own sake, it followed that we naturally loved this freedom, in the sense of eros, with the result that living happily necessarily involved being permanently free from pain. Augustine concluded that people who did endure their sufferings well were not “truly happy, but bravely miserable”: “For he is not on that account not miserable, because he would be more so if he also bore misery impatiently.” These people were not happy because they did not truly live in the state that they preferred to live in – where, having a preference, in this case, involved eros-love, because the thing that they preferred was something permanent and unchanging. In every case, our true preference was for a permanent immunity to pain and suffering; hence, this was what we all loved – this was what we all included in our picture of happiness. It is worth reiterating that, in raising these objections to the claims of the Stoics and Platonists, Augustine was not criticising eudaimonism itself; rather, he simply rejected, as factually incorrect, the Stoics and Platonists’ view that people were able to stop desiring the prima naturae as immutable realities. As the above makes clear, he considered that his position – namely, that we could never stop wanting these things as immutable realities – was a position which was compatible with eudaimonism, so that eudaimonism itself demanded the conclusion that the prima naturae were naturally the objects of our eros-love. This meant that he also considered that eudaimonism demanded the conclusion that, as the natural objects of eros, living the fully natural life would actually involve possessing these things: eudaimonist principles required us to find that we would only live in complete accordance with our human nature when we were placed beyond all possibility of suffering and death.

, ,   These findings informed Augustine’s discussion of the passion of grief. He found that grief must necessarily be something which the virtuous experienced, as well as the vicious, because we naturally sought, as worthwhile in its own right, other people’s unending companionship and their unending physical health and well-being; in other words, we  

Trin. ..: “Who wills to suffer troubles in order that he may endure them manfully, although he both wills and is able to endure them if he does suffer them?” Ibid.

The Life in Accordance with Nature



naturally felt eros for these things. This was distinct from viewing something mutable (like the temporal health of others’ bodies) as of intrinsic value; we would also view their temporal health as intrinsically valuable, but in doing so we continued to want their unending health. The result was that, in the death of family and friends, no one could escape grieving passionately: we wanted family and friends to be with us always, and always in good health, and thereby fixed our eros-love on their health and companionship. When we lost something for which we felt eros as passionate desire, our eros turned into the passion of grief. Thus, when Augustine reflected upon the grief that he had experienced, before his conversion, at the death of his friend, he attributed this grief to the fact that he had loved “one who must die as if he were never to die”: he had wanted his friend’s never-ending companionship, when this was an impossibility for temporal bodies. Augustine did not claim here that he had sinned in loving his friend in this way – this was a natural love, which was inescapably part of human nature. Nonetheless, he found that he had sinned in failing to think of the happy life as the life in which the Christian God was known, with the result that he had failed to love his friend “in” God. We will see that this was the sense in which his love for his friend had been a sinful love: he had not sinned in wanting to have his friend with him always, but he had sinned in failing to understand that he would only have his friend with him forever in knowing the Christian God; he had sought to enjoy his friend’s unending companionship, but not to enjoy it in knowing God. In what follows, we will see that, for Augustine, this was a sin because it was disorder in our eros-loves. Thus, Augustine’s position, contrary to that of the Stoics, was that fear and grief were not passions which only the vicious would experience; the virtuous would experience them too. Nonetheless, paradoxically, fear and grief were natural to us only while we failed to live in complete accordance with human nature: this was because, when we lived in complete accordance with human nature, we would necessarily possess all the things that we naturally loved, beyond any possibility of losing them, so that fear and grief would be alien to us. Hence, for Augustine, fear and grief were passions which the virtuous and the vicious alike would experience while they lived a temporal existence, but when, at  

  Conf. ... Conf. ... Civ. Dei .–. See Augustine’s comments about God and the good angels’ complete freedom from all negative emotions (including grief and compassion, understood as a species of grief ): Civ. Dei ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the resurrection, the virtuous received an incorruptible, immortal body, they would be forever free of these passions. In short, Augustine’s message was that if we could fully reckon with other people as mortal, temporal things, then we would not love them, in the sense of eros; we would be reconciled to their loss – we would not experience grief at their deaths. It was the impossibility of wanting a merely temporal existence for them which meant that we grieved when they died: we wanted their companionship passionately, through wanting never to lose it. Hence this passionate desire turned to grief when they were taken from us. As noted already, this passionate desire was natural to us – no one had a choice about loving in this way. Augustine held that people who claimed to be free of this love, and hence free of grief, were “inhuman” – he saw them as denying their human nature. In becoming human, Christ had chosen to experience grief because it was “a true human emotion” – it was not a disease or vicious passion; rather, when we grieved over others’ deaths this was an emotion which was in accordance with “the guidance of right reason.” Hence, Augustine’s message to the Stoics was that if they managed to experience no grief or fear, then they would have managed to “lose all humanity” – something which was of course incompatible with the Stoics’ analysis of the ineradicable goal of human life, namely, to live in every way in accordance with one’s human nature. In recognising grief as an emotion in accordance with human nature, Augustine also recognised compassion (or pity, misericordia) as a natural emotion. This is because he defined compassion as a species of grief – it was sorrow at another’s suffering. We all naturally wanted others to enjoy not just life, but good health and well-being forever; reason taught us to want this, not just for our family and friends but for the whole of humanity. Hence, Augustine maintained that the virtuous and the vicious alike would experience the emotion of compassion: while ever we felt eros-love for another’s well-being, we would feel misericordia at their suffering. In other words, Augustine’s discussion of compassion in no way suggested that this was an emotion experienced by Christians alone: on the contrary, he cited Cicero’s praise for the emotion of compassion, and also cited the Stoics against themselves in finding that some Stoics agreed that the wise would experience compassion. In finding that compassion



Civ. Dei ..



Civ. Dei ..



Ibid.



Civ. Dei ..



Ibid.

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

could be found among Christians and non-Christians alike, he was clear that compassion was not a virtue and that the acts to which compassion moved us were not virtuous either; rather (as we noted in Chapter ), he viewed pity as a morally neutral emotion; we needed to add eros-love for the true God (right faith) to misericordia in order for this emotion, and the acts that it prompted, to be part of a virtuous action. While Augustine found that Christians, like everyone else, would experience fear and grief (including compassion) while they lived as temporal beings, he also found that Christians – in correctly identifying the supreme good as the Christian God – were lifted up by hope even in the midst of grief, because they believed in a future life in which they would have the permanent companionship and perfect health of their loved ones, so that they did “not grieve as others do who have no hope” ( Thess. :). Thus, Augustine described the grief that he had felt, prior to his conversion, at his friend’s death as a grief in which there was no hope. Christians and non-Christians grieved, but the grief of nonChristians (if they did not believe in an afterlife) was a despairing grief: despairing grief involved the thought that what we had lost could never be restored to us. No one could live long in despair: the result was that, if we did not believe in an afterlife in which we would be reunited with friends and enjoy immortality with them, then we must force ourselves to cease to love them, in the sense of eros. Yet wanting to have friends was natural – we all wanted to have friends and wanted to have them with us always; hence, ceasing to have eros for the dead simply meant that we replaced them in our thoughts by new friends. Thus, Augustine described himself in Confessions as finding consolation in gradually forgetting his dead friend and finding new friends among the living: he could not continue to love the one who had died, since he had no hope of ever being reunited with him; instead, to overcome his despairing grief, he had to forget him and find others to replace him. In contrast, Christians’ grief was a hopeful grief. Christians loved their friends in God, with the result that the loss of their friends neither led them to despair nor led them, beyond despair, to cease to count those who had died as among their friends, while there remained the hope of being reunited with them. In other words, through believing in an afterlife, Christians continued to have eros-love for people who had died:



See Letter .



Conf. ..–..



Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Christians loved the true God as the highest good and understood that, in the future life in which they had God, they would have their friends with them forever as well. Hence, while they experienced the passion of grief, like everyone else, yet their grief was a lighter one, because of the presence in it of hope; it was a grief which was compatible with continuing to love (in the sense of eros) those whom they had lost. Thus, Augustine agreed completely with the Stoic-Platonic diagnosis of human beings, while they lived the temporal life, as incapable of possessing perfect, invulnerable health or total immunity to pain, or any other bodily thing in a form which would endure forever: in this life, our bodies were perishable things, and so these things could never be ours. Yet for Augustine, this established definitively that the Stoics and Platonists were incorrect in their respective understandings of humanity’s highest good, so that they had not succeeded in defining virtue correctly, and it also established that they were incorrect to conclude that the happy life could be achieved in this temporal life. The possession of the prima naturae as permanent realities was naturally sought by everyone, with the result that these things were the natural objects of eros – we wanted to have the prima naturae forever, meaning that we wanted to have them in the happy life. Hence these things must be ours when we lived in complete accordance with human nature since in that life we would have everything for which we naturally experienced eros. The result was that, whatever the true highest good was, it must be something which, when we enjoyed it, involved the enjoyment of all these things as well. The Stoics and Platonists’ notions of the supreme good (whether “virtue of the mind” or the Platonists’ God) did not involve the possession of any of these things; consequently, their notions of the supreme good were incorrect – what they named as “happy-making” was not happy-making. At the same time, in finding this flaw in Stoicism and Platonism, Augustine presented himself with a challenge. He now needed to show that it was in having the Christian God, and only in having the Christian God, that we would enjoy everything which human beings naturally longed to enjoy – not only the knowledge of the true God, but perfect, everlasting bodily health and immunity to pain, endless peace and repose, and friendships which would always endure.

“     ” Augustine was clear that God was the highest good. This claim involved the claim that happiness lay in having God. Thus, in On the Happy Life

The Life in Accordance with Nature



he stated simply that “happy is he who has God.” In On the Catholic Way of Life, he wrote that “to reach God is happiness itself” and in On the Trinity, “We are happy from Him, and through Him, and in Him.” In Confessions, he declared that “to rejoice in You . . . is the only happy life” and in his letter to Macedonius (Letter ), he quoted Psalms :, “Happy are the people who have the Lord as their God.” In this way, he was clear that to have God was happiness, and explained that by “having” God he meant “knowing” God: the happy life was the life in which we knew God. Thus, he asked, “what else is it to live happily but to possess an eternal object through knowing it?” In Soliloquies, he explained, “I invoke thee, O God, . . . to see whom is true possession (quem videre, hoc est quod habere)” and later he indicated that reason “achieving its end” in the vision of God “is the happy life.” “Seeing” or “knowing” God was distinct from believing in God’s existence, or believing true things about God. Augustine associated knowing God with  Corinthians :, where Paul drew a distinction between our dim and imperfect view of God in the present, and the future in which God would be seen “face-to-face.” Knowing God referred to a state in which the mind was in “contact” with God and was “illuminated and occupied” by him: “we reach Him, not by becoming entirely what He is, but in nearness to Him, and in wonderful and immaterial contact with Him, and in being inwardly illuminated and occupied by His truth and holiness.” Augustine held that when the mind knew God, the mind itself underwent a change. In knowing God, the soul shared in God’s eternity, or changelessness (“what else but God is that eternal object which affects the soul with eternity?”). In this state, the mind was simply incapable of ever abandoning the thought of God as the highest good: not only was it secure in this thought, but it now shared in God’s unchangeability and so it was completely impossible for it to cease to think in this way. Virtue referred to thinking about the true God as the highest good, and perfect virtue referred to having this thought permanently and immovably fixed in the soul. This state corresponded to the achievement of happiness because in knowing God, we would be happy and it was the

   

B. Vita, .. Mor. .. See also ., “God then remains, in following after whom we live well, and in reaching whom we live both well and happily.”    Trin. ... Conf. ... Letter , .. Div. Qu. ..    Sol. ... Sol. ... Mor. .. Div. Qu. ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

contemplation of God which made the mind an eternal thing. The soul became eternal through loving this eternal object, “since that which is loved necessarily affects with itself that which loves.” So through loving this eternal object the soul lived eternally, and “strictly speaking, it is eternal life which is the happy life. However, what else but God is that eternal object which affects the soul with eternity?” When the higher reason knew God, then all its thoughts about God would become stable and immutable, including the thought of God as the highest good. In this respect, it would be an eternal thing, like God, because to be eternal was precisely to be changeless and unchangeable. This was the perfection of virtue: the journey to perfect virtue culminated in the mind fully knowing God, and thereby becoming perfectly virtuous because it shared in God’s immutability and so was fixed forever in its thought of God as happy-making. Thus, Augustine also described eternal life, and wisdom as well, as the highest good. Eternal life did not mean living forever, since the wicked would also live forever: they would live to suffer an endless punishment. Rather, eternal life referred to the state of the soul in which it shared in God’s immutability. Through knowing God, the soul became eternal – that part of it which contemplated God became an immutable, or an eternal, thing. The highest good was that which, when we possessed it, made us happy – God was the highest good, in knowing whom (“possessing” whom) we were happy; but knowing God was one and the same thing as the soul (our “life”) becoming eternal in the sense of an unchangeable thing, and so the highest good could equally well be defined as the soul in this eternal state – when we possessed the soul in this eternal state (when we possessed eternal life), we would live happily since we would know God. Likewise, the highest good could be defined as wisdom: God was the truth in knowing whom we would be happy, and hence knowing the truth, which was the meaning of wisdom, was happymaking. In this way, Augustine was clear that God was the highest good – God was that object in having which we would live in complete accordance with human nature. In knowing God, our soul would become an eternal

 

  Letter , .. Div. Qu. .. Ibid. Civ. Dei ., ., and .; Sol. ..; Letter , .; Div. Qu. . Lib. Arb. ..: “the chief good is recognised to be truth and is possessed when truth is possessed, and truth is wisdom, in wisdom let us discern the chief good and possess it and enjoy it.”

The Life in Accordance with Nature



thing, fixed forever in the thought of the true God as the highest good – that is, its virtue would be brought to perfection. This was wisdom, and it was also the soul’s eternity – hence, wisdom or eternal life could also be identified as the highest good, since loving God was the same as loving these two things –to have both these things was to have God and to have God was to have both these things.

“      ” Thus, for Augustine, God was the highest good, in the complete knowledge of whom we would live the happy life and be perfectly virtuous. Yet he also accepted that there were other features of the fully human life besides having God: living in complete accordance with human nature involved having everything which we naturally loved – not only the truth, but also bodies which could never die or decay or experience pain, a perfect understanding with other people, friendships which would never end, and so on. How could he maintain both that God was the highest good, in having whom we would be happy, and also that all these other things would be present in the happy life too? The answer to this is, arguably, that Augustine thought that the notion of the highest good could be legitimately expanded to mean that thing among all our natural loves which, when we possessed it, ensured that we possessed all the other features of the happy life too. Having the highest good made us happy – but it made us happy in this expanded sense: it was itself a feature of the happy life, and it was also the one feature in having which we would have all the others; furthermore, we could have none of the other features of the happy life until we possessed the highest good. Thus, in identifying God as the highest good his message was not only that human beings were fitted for the contemplation of God, so that the fully human life was necessarily one in which God was known fully, but also that every other thing which human nature was also fitted to have would be had only in fully knowing God. Human beings naturally loved the health of their bodies, and they naturally loved friendship too, among other things. They naturally wanted these things not merely as temporal things – things which could be lost to them – but rather as permanent, unchanging realities. For Augustine, God was the highest good because we would have all these things only in having God. He found the message that all our loves found their satisfaction in knowing God powerfully stated in  Cor. :, “so that God may be all in all.”



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

“I shall be their God, and they will be my people” (Lev. :): Did he not mean “I shall be their satisfaction; I shall be all that men honourably desire: life and health and nourishment and plenty and glory and honour and peace and all good things?” This too is the right interpretation of the saying of the apostle, “that God may be all in all” ( Cor. :).

God was not all in all in the sense that God was all that we would possess in the happy life; rather, God was all in all in the sense that in having God we would have all the things that we naturally loved in the sense of eros. In other words, all these things – all the other features of the happy life – would be ours only in knowing God. In particular, Augustine explained that the perfect health of the body was dependent on knowing God because the body’s possession of its “best state” depended upon the soul being in its best state – when the soul became an eternal thing in the contemplation of God, our bodies would be changed too: they would become immortal things, invulnerable to pain and illness. “Now if we ask what is the chief good of the body, reason obliges us to admit that it is that by means of which the body comes to be in its best state.. . . The chief good of the body, then, is . . . simply the soul.” When the soul was in its best state – when it was brought to perfection – then God ordained that the body would likewise be in its best state. This teaching was contained in the Christian teaching of the bodily resurrection. The soul was in its perfect state when it was perfectly virtuous; perfect virtue, however, was one and the same thing as contemplating God, which could also be called the happiness of the mind. Hence, the happiness of the body depended upon the happiness of the mind. We would possess our bodies in a state in which they could never suffer pain or death or be corrupted in any way when we fully knew God, and only then, because the perfect health of our bodies depended upon the perfect health of the soul, and knowing God was the perfect health of the soul. Augustine held that perfect fellowship was another feature of the happy life, and, again, he understood this perfect fellowship as enjoyed in knowing God and only in knowing God. We have seen that, for him, perfect friendship depended, partly, on human beings possessing the  

 Civ. Dei .. Mor. .. Letter , at .. See also Doc. Chr. .., “the immortality and incorruptibility of the body spring out of the health of the soul. Now the health of the soul is to cling steadfastly to the better part, that is, to the unchangeable God.” Lib. Arb. .., “For as the soul is the whole life of the body, so is God the happy life of the soul.” See also Mor. ..

The Life in Accordance with Nature



perfect health of the body, since in that condition, no friend could ever be lost to us. Perfect fellowship also depended upon the perfect health of the soul more directly, since, when our own souls and those of everyone else as well were perfectly healthy, there would be no possibility of being deceived about other people’s regard for us so that a perfect understanding would exist among us all. More importantly, Augustine held that perfect fellowship required a perfect sharing in what was loved. In the happy life, there would be fellowship among everyone, but the basis for this would be the fact that all enjoyed God, “for this is the one good which has room for all to pursue it along with you.” He held that truth and wisdom, as distinct from any material possession, had the special characteristic of being things which were always possessed in common and never parcelled out in portions to each person: we did not each possess our share of truth and wisdom; rather, these things, in being possessed, were not apportioned to each but possessed wholly by everyone. That is, in being possessed, wisdom was not divided – hence, wisdom really was the “common” good and the fellowship formed by those who knew God was, in this sense, a perfect fellowship. Thus, he explained that “truth and wisdom are common to all”: truth and wisdom “we can all enjoy equally and in common” and “from that common store you can convert nothing into your private possession. What you take remains unharmed for me to take also.” Augustine’s contrast between what was “private” and what was “common” is sometimes read politically as meaning that the citizens of the earthly city selfishly concerned themselves only with their own (private) interests, while the heavenly city alone pursued the common, or public, good of all. On the contrary, in depicting the earthly city as possessing what it loved “privately” while the heavenly city possessed what it loved in common, Augustine’s message was not at all that the earthly city thereby necessarily fell into an unfair distribution of political and social goods. Rather, his point was precisely that political and social goods could only ever be possessed privately: people could possess their fair ‘share’ of these goods but even a perfectly fair distribution of them would involve private possession: each would be given their due. In contrast, in the heavenly city, people were united in the possession of  

Mor. .. See also Doc. Chr. .., “the fellowship of the love of God,” and Civ. Dei ..  Lib. Arb. .. Lib. Arb. ... See also Lib. Arb. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the highest good – the one good which was possessed indivisibly by each: everyone would “have” God, but God would not be divided – there would be no private possession of God. For this reason, Augustine concluded that the happiness of a perfect fellowship with other people was possible only in knowing God: in the next life, there would be a “perfectly ordered and completely harmonious society in the enjoyment of God and of one another in God.” Again, this was not a conclusion which reflected negatively upon what could be achieved politically and socially in the earthly city: the earthly city could achieve order and harmony in the fair distribution of political and social goods; yet it would always lack the perfect union enjoyed by people who possessed the object of their love in common, that is, who were united and not divided in possessing what they loved. People were brought together by having God in common, rather than divided by each having their fair share of the goods of this world, and Augustine considered that this was a more perfect kind of union than any which could ever be found on earth. In addition, Augustine found that in knowing God, people would possess an inner peace. There would be perfect unity among human beings, and a perfect unity within each person. In particular, the idea that the resurrected body would be a new body – a “spiritual” body – allowed him to find that the happy life would also be the life in which the body was transformed in such a way that it no longer warred against the spirit. In finding that the happy life would be the life in which there was perfect peace between the body and the spirit, and that in this life, through sharing in indivisible wisdom, there would also be a perfect fellowship among the elect and between the elect and the angels, Augustine found that “peace” (concordia) could equally well be called the highest good. Possessing God was one and the same as possessing this peace, so that in possessing peace, we would live fully in accordance with human nature: 

 

This is how I think his comments in The Literal Commentary on Genesis .. need to be read. He used the language of politics to say something unpolitical about the differences between the earthly and heavenly cities – their difference lay in the vice of the one and the virtue of the other, but the earthly city could also be described as rebellious and seeking what was its “own” or what was private, while the heavenly city could be described as peaceable, and seeking the “good” of the neighbour (seeking to bring others to know the true God), and seeking what was common. Civ. Dei .. Doc. Chr. .., “after the resurrection, the body, having become wholly subject to the spirit, will live in perfect peace to all eternity.” Civ. Dei ., “the flesh shall then be spiritual and subject to the spirit, but still flesh, not spirit.”

The Life in Accordance with Nature



“thus we may say of peace as we have said of eternal life, that it is the end of our good.” The highest good made people happy; in its possession, people were happy. The highest good was itself a feature of the happy life, yet the happy life involved other things besides the highest good; nonetheless, every feature of the happy life would be possessed only in possessing God, the highest good. In this sense, God was all in all for happiness and the satisfaction of all the loves that were natural to us, so that in knowing God and only in knowing God would we live the fully natural life. In this way, Augustine distinguished between people who, in their earthly lives, were miserable with no prospect of ever being happy, and people who, in their earthly lives, possessed happiness in hope. The Stoics and Platonists, as well as all other non-Christians, belonged to the first group: they naturally sought to have everlasting health, friendship, beauty, honour, and glory, but their notion of the highest good carried with it no prospect of ever possessing these things. Christians, in contrast, were those who were happy in hope during their lives on earth. “Happiness in hope” referred to the fact that, while they did not live the happy life while they remained temporal beings – since living this life while a temporal being was impossible – nonetheless, they were assured of one day living this life: they looked forward with assurance to a life of happiness when they had passed beyond temporal life to eternal life. The idea of happiness in hope was intended to indicate that this prospect of happiness in the future made a difference in the present: in one sense, this temporal life was necessarily a miserable life – it was not the happy life in which we would love and possess everything which we naturally loved; yet, in another sense, Christians during their earthly lives were set apart from the rest of wretched humanity in having happiness in hope – they alone understood the highest good in such a way as to bring with it the guarantee of one day having everything which human beings naturally loved, and so they were buoyed by hope during the course of their earthly lives, with the result that, as we have seen, their grief and fear were eased. Thus, his message was that Christian faith (“piety”) “eases the troubles of this life.”

   :   “ ’ ” The Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism, in finding that the whole of human happiness consisted simply in possessing the highest good, was 

Civ. Dei ..



Conf. ..; Letter , ..



Letter , ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

clear that there was only one thing which we needed to have to be happy, namely, whatever truly was humanity’s highest good. Augustine, in contrast, insisted that eudaimonist principles themselves established that we would have other things in the happy life besides the highest good: human beings must identify the true God as the highest good, thereby having eros for the Christian God, but, since we naturally sought for their own sakes the perfect, incorruptible health of the body and perfect, permanent friendship with other people, it followed that we had a natural eros for health and friendship (our own and others’) as well. This meant that these things were features of the happy life, but possessing them depended upon possessing God, since only then would we transcend temporal life. We have seen that Augustine insisted that there was a correct “order” in our philia-love: when we praised God as he ought to be praised, then, and only then, would we bestow the right amount of praise on everything else. The above suggests that he held that there was a correct “order” in our eros-love too – we had a natural eros-love for these things, but our eros-love for them would not be virtuous until we recognised that we would possess them only in possessing God. The Christian teaching about the bodily resurrection and the heavenly afterlife, which we would have only when we knew God, explained how this was so. Arguably, this was Augustine’s message in the passages in which he wrote of loving things “in” God or “for God’s sake.” Human beings, whether they were virtuous or vicious, naturally had eros-love for many things – all human beings desired to possess these things as part of their conception of the happy life – but only the virtuous loved these things for God’s sake: only they affirmed that these things would be possessed only in possessing God. Thus, in Confessions, Augustine explained that we only loved God as much as we ought to when everything else which we naturally loved was loved for God’s sake (“He loves you less who loves anything together with you which he loves not for your sake”). Loving God as much as we ought to required us to understand God as the highest good, so that we had the highest philia for God as well as eros for the true God, and this in turn meant that we realised that the other natural objects of our eros-love were not themselves the highest good: we would realise that, while we would have these things in the happy life, our presence in the happy life did not depend on any of these things, but purely on



Conf. ... He also wrote about seeking things “in” God, Conf. ...

The Life in Accordance with Nature

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possessing God. Thus, in another place, he described the highest good, or “end of goods,” as the focus of all our desires: “Therefore it is called the end, because we wish other things on account of it, but itself only for its own sake.” In other words, to love God as much as we should (as the highest good) involved loving other things, but for God’s sake – it involved realising that all the other things which we naturally loved would be had only in having God. Augustine also wrote of directing all our loves into the channel of our love for God. He explained that the idea of loving God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mt. :–) referred to the fact that, “whatever else may suggest itself to us as an object worthy of love is to be borne into the same channel in which the whole current of our affection flows.” This was the channel of love for God, “which suffers no stream to be drawn off from itself by whose diversion its own volume would be diminished.” Arguably, all our love flowed into our love for God when we loved everything else for God’s sake – that is, when we recognised that the many things that we naturally loved would be ours only when we lived in the complete knowledge of God, in having whom we would live the resurrected life in perfect companionship with the elect and the angels. Hence, only those who looked upon the Christian God as the highest good succeeded in loving the true God and channelling their love for everything else into their love for God.

“ ”  “ ” The Stoics and Platonists concluded that people were able to stop preferring the permanent, immutable version of the prima naturae, and instead seek only the temporal version. Augustine’s view, on the contrary, was that the pursuit of these perfect, permanent realities was ineradicably present in human nature so that the prima naturae were the objects of everyone’s eros-love. While the vicious would love these things too, only the virtuous had an ordered eros-love for them since only the virtuous recognised that these things would be had only in having God – that is, only the virtuous loved all these other things for God’s sake. This definition of virtue led Augustine to adopt what might seem, at first glance, to be an unusual vocabulary to describe the natural objects of human love, other than God: he held that everything which human beings 

Civ. Dei ..



Doc. Chr. ...



Ibid.

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

naturally loved which was not God was “for use,” while God alone was “for enjoyment.” The idea of “using” something might be taken to mean employing it as the means to achieve some end – that is, it might be taken to mean instrumentalising something – in which case, Augustine’s position would seem to be that friendship, or bodily health, was not to be valued in its own right, but rather used as the means to arrive at the enjoyment of God. However, we can see now that there is a difficulty with this reading of the idea of “use.” After all, people did not look upon things like everlasting health or friendship as the means to anything; rather, they looked on having these things as ends in themselves. These were all things which human beings naturally desired as goods – they sought them as worthwhile in their own right; moreover, they felt eros for them, because they pictured these things as present in the happy life. In short, these things were “for use,” but they were ends, not means, which indicates that, for Augustine, not everything which was used was used as a means. Augustine specified that this was so when he defined “use” in broad terms as meaning to “refer” something to something else. All creation needed to be “referred” to the enjoyment of our fitting end and so the whole of creation was for use (“therefore everything which is made is made for man’s use”). the term honourable more appropriately and usually means “that which is sought for its own sake” (propter se ipsum) and the term useful, “that which is directed to something else” (ad aliud aliquid referendum est) . . . we are said to enjoy that from which we derive pleasure. We use that which we order toward something (referimus ad id) else from which we expect to derive pleasure.. . . Now honourable things are to be enjoyed, but useful things are to be used.

We used anything when we referred it (directed or ordered it) to another thing, even if we also looked on the thing that we used as itself an end. Not all the things that we looked upon as “ends” were for use, since something was “enjoyed,” as distinct from “used,” if it was never referred to another end, but only ever sought for its own sake. In finding that everything which was made was for use, meaning that God alone was for enjoyment, Augustine found that all the immutable realities that we  

Div. Qu. . Ibid. See Cicero’s De Officiis .., “as the Stoics hold, everything that the earth produces is created for man’s use; and as men, too, are born for the sake of men.” Cicero’s De Officiis discusses the honourable and the useful. See also Doc. Chr. ..: “For to enjoy is to cleave to something with love for its own sake. But to use, is to refer what has come your way, to obtaining that which you love, if however it is to be loved.” Here, I have made use of Raymond Canning’s translation, in “Uti/frui,” at p. .

The Life in Accordance with Nature

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would possess in heaven when we knew God – health, friendship, repose, pleasure, and so on – were for use. The above finding that, for Augustine, these immutable realities were to be sought for God’s sake or in God now allows us to make sense of the distinction that he saw between use and enjoyment. We sought something for God’s sake when we realised that we would have it only in having God; arguably, this was to “refer” the possession of this thing to our possession of God. In other words, to use one of these immutable things was to recognise that we would only have it in having God: there were many other objects of our natural eros-love besides God, but to “use” these things was to seek them in having God. This was still to seek these things as ends in themselves, yet it also meant that, in seeking these things as our end, there was a sense in which God would be the real end that we sought: we used friendship or bodily health when we understood that God was the end of all our seeking because it was only in having Him that we would have all the other things that formed part of our picture of happiness. We desired God for His own sake, and desired all these other things for their own sakes as well; yet we also referred all these things to the possession of God, so that we used them, and sought God alone for enjoyment. Thus, with this idea of directing or referring these other things to God, Augustine was again saying that there must be order in our eros-loves. Virtue involved ordering all our loves to the enjoyment of God; this required us to understand that everything which we aimed for as part of our ultimate end would be ours only when God was ours, that is, only when we fully knew God. At the same time, Augustine’s recognition that things like permanent health and permanent friendship were necessarily sought by us, not only as ends rather than means but also as part of our picture of the happy life, allowed him to find a special sense in which these things were also objects of enjoyment. We enjoyed something when we loved it (in the sense of eros) and possessed it; hence all these things were objects of enjoyment “in God” (frui . . . in Deo). Thus, he was able to mix this terminology of “use” and “enjoyment” with respect to these things – that is, with respect to everything, besides God, which we would possess in heaven – precisely because he saw these things as things which were fittingly loved by us, in the sense of eros, and yet as things which we loved correctly only when we



Doc. Chr. ..–...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

loved them for the sake of God. To seek something as part of our ultimate end was to seek it for enjoyment, while to seek something for the sake of something else was to use it. We loved these things correctly when we sought their enjoyment in God; equally, we loved these things correctly when we used them – that is, when we referred our love for them to our love for God through telling ourselves that they would be ours only when God was ours. Hence all these things were both for use and for enjoyment: they were for enjoyment in God because we would have them only when we had God; with the result that they were also for use – we were to refer these things to our desire for God because we must recognise that God was the true highest good, in having whom we would have all the other objects of our natural eros-love.

“”   Augustine derived this language of “use” and “enjoyment” from the eudaimonist tradition. In particular, the Stoic-Platonic tradition made use of the terminology of “use” to describe the correct way of thinking about temporal things, and Augustine likewise employed this terminology in this context as well. As noted above, he found that every created thing was for use. This meant that, for him, it was not only the immutable things that we would have in heaven which were for use, but mutable things were for use as well. Human beings naturally desired a great many mutable, or temporal, things – namely, all the things that we longed for in their perfect, enduring form (health, friendship, pleasure, peace, and so on) we naturally desired in their temporal form too. Moreover, we did not desire any of these temporal things as means but rather as ends in themselves. We correctly understood them as goods, and to understand anything as a good was to seek it not as a means to something else but rather as worthwhile in its own right. Thus, in Confessions, he identified a wide variety of temporal things which human beings naturally wanted and wanted as goods, that is, as ends in themselves: There is a kind of beauty in all bodies, and in gold, and silver, and all things; and in bodily contact sympathy is powerful, and each other sense has its proper adaptation of body. Temporal honour has also its glory [suum decus], and the 

For this mixed terminology see Trin. ...

The Life in Accordance with Nature

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power of command, and of overcoming; whence proceeds also the desire for revenge. And yet to acquire all these, we must not depart from You, O Lord, nor deviate from Your law. The life which we live here has also its peculiar attractiveness, through a certain measure of comeliness of its own [decoris sui], and harmony with all things here below. The friendships of men also are endeared by a sweet bond, in the oneness of many souls.

All these temporal things were goods, albeit extrema bona – only goods of the lowest kind, and Augustine implied that our desire for these things was a natural one. He did not seek to deny that everyone would prefer to have temporal health rather than temporal illness, or temporal beauty rather than temporal ugliness; these desires were naturally present in us and hence human beings did not sin in making these temporal things, rather than their opposites, their goal, and employing other temporal things as the means to obtain these ends. He was clear in this passage that we must not deviate from other ethical considerations in pursuing these things – in particular, we must not have eros for these temporal things, and we must seek for everyone else the good things that we sought for ourselves; nonetheless, his message in this passage was that all these temporal things were goods so that they could be sought as ends in themselves in a fitting way by human beings. In acknowledging that things like temporal health or temporal friendship were goods, and that they were correctly sought as ends, while other temporal things were correctly used as means to obtain them, the message of Augustine was not at all that these temporal goods were things for “enjoyment.” Rather, Augustine held that these things were always simply “for use.” Again, this was not “use” in the ordinary, instrumental sense of the term: Augustine was clear, as noted above, that these were temporal goods, meaning things which we regarded as ends, not as means. We used other temporal things as the means to obtain these temporal goods and this in itself demonstrated that we viewed these temporal goods as ends. Nonetheless, despite the fact that we correctly regarded temporal health or temporal pleasure as ends, that is, as things which had value in their own right, there remained a sense in which these temporal goods were themselves to be used by us, although not used in the sense of being made a means. As noted already, “to use” something for Augustine, as for eudaimonists, meant, in the most general sense, to refer something to something else: his message was that we used temporal goods when we “referred” 

Conf. ...



Ibid.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

them to the highest good. Since these things were ends, not means, arguably what he meant by referring these things to the highest good was simply that, in pursuing these things as ends in themselves, we were nonetheless to recognise them as merely inferior goods. That is, “use” did not mean employing these things in order to gain the highest good; rather, “use” simply meant recognising that temporal goods were not the highest good – this was to refer or relate these things to the highest good, that is, to identify correctly their place in the scale of goodness relative to superior goods and, in particular, relative to what was the summum bonum. Thus, seeking temporal goods “for use” did not refer to instrumentalising these things: we were not to regard them as the means to obtain anything else, and particularly not as the means to obtain the highest good. Temporal health, temporal friendship, temporal peace, and so on were not in any way things which assisted us to the attainment of the highest good. This was a conclusion which Augustine shared with the Stoics and Platonists: we did not need to have anything temporal to attain the highest good because the highest good, by definition, was that which, when we loved it, we would be sure to have it; we were certain to possess it simply in loving it. Nonetheless, in loving the true highest good we would also, necessarily, have a certain attitude towards all temporal goods: we would see them as desirable in their own right, but we would not think that our happiness lay in having them – we would not imagine that they were the highest good, since the true highest good was not a temporal thing. Hence, we used these things when we recognised that, although they had value in their own right, as things worth seeking for their own sakes, nonetheless, none of them formed part of our ultimate goal, since nothing temporal was needed for happiness. Augustine stated in On Christian Teaching that the best analogy that he could think of to illustrate the distinction between use and enjoyment was that of a homecoming journey. He described how, when we found that we were unhappy in a foreign land and decided to journey home, the



Doc. Chr. .. and also .., where Augustine states that we are to use the temporal order, “not with such love and delight as if it were a good to rest in, but with a transient feeling rather, such as we have towards the road, or carriages, or other things that are merely means. Perhaps some other comparison can be found that will more suitably express the idea that we are to love the things by which we are borne only for the sake of that towards which we are borne.” Here the vehicles conveying us are called “means” but Augustine’s message is that they rightly evoke positive feelings in us – they are not mere tools for us, but a source of delight, but for the delight that we take in them to be correct, it must remain a delight which relates to the greater delight that we take in our home.

The Life in Accordance with Nature

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landscape around us, and even the carriage or ship itself which bore us home, became agreeable – these things became pleasant to us on our homeward journey: they were pleasant to us through their connection to our ultimate goal which was our home. Our affection now alighted on the landscape around us, and on the pleasures of the homeward journey, but this was only because our affection also moved beyond these things to have its focus on our destination: we took pleasure in the things that formed part of our journey home precisely because we loved our home. We saw that all these things now had reference to our home, and hence they became a source of pleasure to us. He held that this helped us to understand the kind of desire that we ought to have for everything which was desirable in its own right and yet not our highest good. All our desires ought to be related to love for God, just as the pleasures taken in the homeward journey were all related to the pleasure that we took in home. It would be topsy-turvy if, instead of understanding that we would have true beauty only when we knew God, we thought that possessing temporal beauty secured us in the possession of the permanent, perfect, incorruptible beauty that we were all born loving and which we would have only in having God; the same confused way of thinking led people to look on the landscape on the journey home, or the motion of the carriage which bore them home, as what was truly pleasant, as opposed to being rightly seen as agreeable only with reference to the pleasure that we took in home. Thus, if we identified God as the highest good, then this would not involve us somehow denying our natural longing for temporal beauty, temporal friendship, and so on, any more than it would involve us somehow denying our natural longing for the perfect, permanent versions of these things. Rather, identifying God as the highest good would ensure that our natural pursuit of these temporal goods neither became an unnatural eros-love for them nor remained disordered in being referred to something which was not human beings’ true highest good. Hence, Augustine concluded, “For in this lay my sin, that not in Him, but in His creatures – myself and the rest – I sought for pleasures, honours, and truths, falling thereby into sorrows, troubles, and errors.” His sin did not lie in seeking pleasures, honours, and truths, and it did not even lie in seeking these things in created things; rather, his sin lay in the way that he sought these things in their temporal form: instead of identifying God as



Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the highest good, and thereby recognising that God “preserved” all these things for him in a form which could never perish or be lost, he had identified the created, temporal version of these things as the highest good, so that he located the happy life in having these temporal goods. Temporal honours and pleasures were worth seeking: but in order to avoid our pursuit of them becoming a sin, we must recognise that none of these things would be ours when we lived the happy life. That is, we must recognise that these things were only ever for use, not for enjoyment; we must see that they were not our highest good, in having which we would live the happy life, but merely inferior goods. This recognition alone, however, did not make us virtuous. Instead, to be virtuous, we needed the further recognition that the Christian God was the true highest good, and hence the true end to which all these other ends must be referred. This did not mean that we would pursue these temporal goods as a means to anything, but rather that we would pursue them with our minds firmly fixed on what ultimately mattered, so that our search was always referred onwards to God. This was how our natural pursuit of these temporal ends became compatible with possessing virtue, understood as order in our eros-loves, that is, as loving the true God and consequently pursuing everything else which we naturally pursued, and loving everything else which we naturally loved, for God’s sake. This chapter has explored an additional criticism which Augustine made of the Stoics and the Platonists. He agreed with their message about the impossibility of living in complete accordance with human nature while we had eros-love for anything temporal. Nonetheless, he firmly disagreed with their claim that human beings could live fully in accordance with human nature in the temporal conditions of this life. The Stoics and Platonists refused to accept that human beings naturally sought perfect and permanent physical health, complete security from all pain, everlasting friendship, perfect understanding among human beings, complete and never-ending repose, and so on. Instead, they considered that we could confine our pursuit to the temporal versions of these things, so that we would be fully reconciled to the prospect of losing all these things, with the result that we could live happily while our lives remained temporal ones. Augustine insisted, however, that this simply was not so: we all continued to want what was permanent and everlasting, even after acknowledging that we could not have these things while we existed as temporal beings. Thus, he departed from the Stoics and Platonists in his conclusion that in the life fully in accordance with human nature – the happy life – we

The Life in Accordance with Nature



would possess other things besides the highest good, and he likewise departed from them in finding that emotions like fear and grief would be found among the virtuous as well as the vicious. Yet he also held that the proper understanding of eudaimonist principles required these conclusions. Eudaimonism held that we must have all the things that we naturally loved, in the sense of eros, in order to live fully in accordance with human nature, which was to live happily. To seek to have anything beyond change or loss was to have eros for that thing, since it was to think of it as ours when we reached our goal of happiness. Hence, Augustine concluded that eudaimonism itself led to the conclusion that, to live in complete accordance with human nature, human beings must have all the immutable, imperishable things which they naturally wanted to have.

 Self-Love and Neighbour-Love

This chapter concerns the issue of eros-love for self and neighbour: Did Augustine think that there was a sense in which we ourselves, and other people, could be the objects of eros-love? Chapters  and  discussed the sense in which God, self, and other human beings would be the objects of love understood as philia – this was love as thinking of something as praiseworthy. This chapter explores the question of whether Augustine thought of the self and neighbour as the objects of love in the sense of eros. It finds that he did think of self and neighbour as the objects of eroslove among both the virtuous and the vicious. In finding that other people were the objects of eros-love, both among the virtuous and the vicious, this chapter also addresses the question of whether, for Augustine (and other eudaimonists) love-of-neighbour was a selfish, instrumentalising love. In this chapter, I find that eros for our neighbours was not a selfcentred love – it did not instrumentalise others by making them the ‘means’ to our happiness. Rather, I find that, for Augustine, eros-love for the neighbour, whether this love was sinful or virtuous, was a form of benevolence. Exploring these issues involves taking up a thread from earlier chapters where it was noted that Augustine condemned all eros-love for temporal things. The following finds that, for him, when the eros-love that we had for ourselves, and other people, was a sin, it was because we loved ourselves and others as temporal things – this was the sin of carnal concupiscentia, eros-love for something temporal. Loving the self and other people as temporal things meant loving them as they were in this life, not as they would be in the next life, when the human soul became an immutable (eternal) thing through fully knowing the eternal God, which 

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



was the perfection of virtue. Non-Christians believed that they loved themselves, and other people, in their ‘best’ state; they believed that they sought to have themselves and others as they would be when they possessed the true highest good. In this sense, they believed that they loved themselves and other people virtuously (‘for the sake of’ the true highest good). In fact, for Augustine, the failure of any but Christians to conceive correctly of the happy life as the life in which we would know the Christian God meant that the selves that were loved by non-Christians were not selves which were in their immutable, happy state at all, but selves which remained temporal things. This allowed him to find that the self-love and neighbour-love of non-Christians was always the sinful love of what was temporal. In this way, I find that Augustine’s understanding of sinful self-love and sinful neighbour-love made sense within the eudaimonist tradition. It fitted with his view that sinners could do everything in their power to promote the temporal welfare of the rest of humanity and that they could seek what they believed to be the spiritual good of others too; yet in doing all this they would remain sinners, loving neither themselves nor others as they should, through failing to love the true God.

, -,  - In a number of places, Augustine explained that the love that was virtue had as its object not only God, but also the self and other people: “a man finds three things he has to love – God, himself, and his neighbour – and a man who loves God does not err in loving himself.” In On Christian Doctrine, he offered a variation on this idea by finding that there were four things which were rightly loved: “first, that which is above us; second, ourselves; third, that which is on a level (iuxta) with us; fourth, that which is beneath us.” He explained that by that which was above us, he meant God; by “ourselves” he meant our souls and by that which was beneath us he meant our bodies; while by that which was level with us, he meant our neighbours (meaning all other human beings). He speculated that angels were also to be loved, as among those things which were either above us or counted among our “neighbours.” Augustine was clear that the Bible itself described virtue as love for God, love for self, and love for neighbour. He found that this 

Civ. Dei ..



Doc. Chr. ...



Doc. Chr. ..–.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

understanding of the nature of virtue was present not only in the love commandments of the Jewish scriptures and the gospels (Dt. : and Lev. :, and Mt. :–, Lk. : and Mk. :–), but also in Paul’s declaration that “love” was the fulfilment of the law. Thus, he followed Paul (see Rm. :–, Gal. :, and  Tim. :) in finding that to love God and neighbour was to obey not simply two discrete commandments, but the whole of the law. In short, he was convinced that the whole of the law had been “consummated” in the love commandments. The law was summed up in the love commandments found in the Jewish Scriptures and named by Jesus as the greatest and second greatest of all the commandments, on which hung “all the law and the prophets”: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Love was the “fulfilment” of the law: the two love commandments, which identified God, self, and neighbour as the objects of love, summed up the whole law, while sin was summarised in the commandment against carnal “concupiscence,” the eros-love of what was temporal. The general prohibition condemned eros for temporal things, Non concupisces, and the general precept commanded the love of God, self, and neighbour.

, -,  - Virtue referred to love for God, self, and other people; while another kind of love, namely, carnal concupiscence, was sinful. We have seen that carnal concupiscence always involved eros for temporal things: the virtuous had eros for the true God, and the vicious had eros for what was temporal. Yet what about love for self and neighbour? Were these the objects of eros-love, and if so, could they be loved in this way by the vicious as well as the virtuous? The first step here is to discover whether Augustine thought that self and neighbour could be loved by the vicious as well as the virtuous; and the second step is to discover whether he thought that love of self and neighbour could be understood not just as philia for them but also as eros. 

  

See, for example, Spir. et Litt. ., ., ., and .; Nat. et Gr. . and .; Perf. Just. . and .; Gr. et Pecc. Or. ..; and Gr. et Lib. Arb. . and .. Perf. Just. .. See Spir. et Litt. .; Perf. Just. . and .; and Gr. et Lib. Arb. .. Perf. Just. ..

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love

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Augustine was clear that the vicious did love themselves, and also that they were able to love their neighbours – his point being that their love for self and neighbour would be different to that found among the virtuous. If love-for-self is understood as ‘selfishness,’ then it might come as no surprise that Augustine thought that vicious people always loved themselves. After all, ‘sinfulness’ might seem to be almost synonymous with ‘selfishness.’ Such a conclusion is especially easy to reach if we read the second love commandment, “Love your neighbour as yourself,” as really a commandment to ‘love your neighbour,’ that is, to stop loving oneself exclusively and instead direct one’s love to other people as well. ‘Loving one’s neighbour as oneself’ would then define a self-love which was not selfish, since it made space for neighbour-love as well; while self-love understood as a sin would refer to a love for the self in which there was no room for neighbour-love at all. Yet we will see that Augustine’s view was that love for other people was also found among sinners – that is, that it was also found among those whose love for themselves was sin. Hence, selfishness was not what Augustine had in mind when he wrote of self-love among the vicious. Vicious people loved themselves, but they could also love other people, and love them as they loved themselves. This point deserves emphasising because, just as it might seem that sinfulness must always involve selfishness, so it might seem that, in Augustine’s eyes, neighbour-love must be a uniquely Christian thing. As such, it would be found only among the virtuous – the idea of a sinful love for others would seem to be impossible. As will be seen, Augustine was clear that neighbour-love was found among Christians and non-Christians alike – among Christians, it formed part of virtue, while among non-Christians, it was sin. The virtuous loved themselves, but so did sinners; the virtuous also loved others, but sinners could likewise love other people. Augustine referred to this sinful love for others in the following passage, where he called it amor carnalis. Here, his message was that the love that had other human beings as its object, whether this love was part of virtue or a sin, was not the same as the love that we had for a favourite dish – love in the latter sense was compatible with killing and consuming the object loved, but this was never the meaning of love for another human being, even if the love in question was sinful “carnal” love. All love, whether that which is called carnal, which is wont to be called not “dilectio” but “amor”: (for the word “dilectio” is wont to be used of better things, and to be understood of better things) yet all love, dear brethren, has a

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

certain benevolence [benevolentiam quondam habet] to those who are loved. For we ought not so to love, nor are we able so to love, (whether “diligere” or “amare”: for this latter word the Lord used when He said, ‘”Petra, amas me?” “Peter, do you love me?”) we ought not so to love men, as we hear gluttons say, I love thrushes (turdos).. . . Are men to be so loved as to be consumed? But there is a certain friendliness of benevolence, by which we desire at some time or other to do good to those whom we love.

Augustine was clear in this passage that he was discussing neighbourlove in general – he was discussing both the neighbour-love that was carnal (meaning the neighbour-love that was a sin) and the neighbourlove that was “better,” which was the love that Christ had wanted Peter to give him. He did not accuse sinners of loving their fellow human beings in order to kill and consume them (although there were perhaps undertones here of the idea that sinners did, all unbeknownst to themselves, love both themselves and other people to their destruction). Rather, in accepting that there were two ways of loving other people, neither of which was identical to a glutton’s love for a favourite dish, he accepted that there was a sinful way of loving others, and a virtuous way, both of which involved benevolence. Likewise, in another passage, Augustine contrasted sinful cupiditas for the self and neighbour with virtuous caritas: “by cupidity I mean that affection of the mind which aims at enjoying one’s self and one’s neighbour, and other corporeal things, without reference to God.” Cupiditas, the love that was sin, had as its objects not just the self, but other people too, as well as “other corporeal things.” It was the absence of any love for God which ensured that our self-love and our neighbour-love were sinful cupiditas and not caritas. Thus, he said in the same passage, “I mean by love (caritas) that motion of the mind for the enjoyment of God for His own sake, and the enjoyment of one’s self and one’s neighbour for God’s sake.” This was the way in which love for self and neighbour became part of caritas, the love that was virtue, namely, when we loved self and neighbour for God’s sake, which meant loving God alone for His own sake. Hence, love for one’s neighbour was not uniquely found among the virtuous; rather, loving one’s neighbour with reference to God (“for God’s sake”) was what was unique to them. Sinners were capable of loving other people, but they never loved them for God’s sake. The idea that we could sin in loving other people was embedded in Augustine’s discussion of the second love commandment. He did not 

Ep. Jo., Tractate  ( John :–), at .



Doc. Chr. ...



Ibid.

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love

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consider “loving one’s neighbour as oneself” to be simply a commandment to love one’s neighbours; rather, he read this commandment as concerned with directing the right kind of love at other people. Hence, he did not think that neighbour-love was a uniquely Christian thing; rather, his message was that only Christians loved their neighbours in the correct way: “but when the mind loves God, and by consequence, as has been said, remembers and understands Him, then it is rightly enjoined also to love its neighbour as itself; for it has now come to love itself rightly and not perversely, when it loves God.” Non-Christians could love their neighbours too and they could love their neighbours as they loved themselves. The problem was that, through failing to love God, they would not love themselves rightly, and so would not love their neighbours rightly either. Thus, Augustine expressed “qualms” about praising people who loved their neighbours as themselves until he had established that their self-love was itself correct – that is, until he had established that it was part of the love that was virtue. This recalls his comments about love as philia. When he defined loving human beings, both oneself and other people, as thinking of them as praiseworthy, he did not accuse non-Christians of failing to find other human beings praiseworthy; rather, his message was that they praised human beings, both themselves and other people, either too much or too little. Giving human beings their exact due of praise was something which Christians alone did. In this way, he did not see the second love commandment as applauding every situation in which we gave to our neighbours the same love that we gave to ourselves; rather, he understood it as commending the right love directed at self and neighbour: we must not extend cupiditas, also known as carnal concupiscentia, to ourselves and other people; rather, our love must be caritas. It was not enough to have the self and other people as the objects of love; virtue required that they were the objects of caritas, the love that was virtue. Thus, implicitly, in distinguishing a correct love for others from an incorrect one, Augustine did not view the duty of love for others as a duty which was learned from the biblical injunction alone – as already noted, he thought the biblical injunction was concerned not with commanding love for others per se, but rather with commanding the correct love for  

Trin. ... See also Civ. Dei ., “He who resolves to love God, and to love his neighbour as himself, not according to man, but according to God.” Sermon .–.

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

others. The duty of love for others was one which the vicious could understand and obey: hence, loving others as we loved ourselves was a duty taught by reason; yet Christians alone, through grace, not only loved others as they loved themselves, but also knew what it was to love themselves correctly and so loved others correctly as well. How might reason teach us to love others as we loved ourselves? We have seen that eudaimonism provided Augustine with an explanation of this. Beginning with the claim that everyone understood the happy life as the life in complete accordance with human nature, the Stoics were able to argue that, since human nature was rational, everyone must agree that the happy life was necessarily the life in complete accordance with reason. Following the demands of reason involved doing many things; nonetheless, one of the most straightforward and easy to understand demands of reason – and hence one which could be followed by people even while they remained vicious and foolish – was the demand that, inasmuch as this was possible, we treated the whole of humanity in the same way in which we treated our friends and family. Since we naturally extended to our friends and families the love that we had for ourselves (as noted already, Augustine viewed friendship as natural to human beings), shaping our lives in accordance with the demands of reason, which was part of our quest for happiness, would lead us to extend this same love to the whole of humanity. Hence, we should not be surprised to find Augustine embracing the idea that vicious people could also love the rest of humanity with the same love that they gave to themselves. This conclusion was one which was reached in a straightforward way from the teachings of the Stoic-Platonic tradition in eudaimonism, and not one which he had any reason to find objectionable. In fact, he implied that there was not a single person, however vicious, whose love extended no further than themself. He accepted the fact of friendship among the virtuous and vicious alike and indicated that friendship, amicitia, involved love (amor) for others. Nonetheless, caritas, the love that was virtue, by definition was never found among the vicious: the vicious were unable to fulfil either love commandment because fulfilling the commandment about neighbourlove was dependent upon fulfilling the commandment to love God with the “whole heart, soul and mind.” That is, virtue referred to loving God 

In Div. Qu.  at , he quoted Cicero’s definition of friendship (De Inventione ..–.): “friendship is the will (voluntas) of good things for another whom one loves.”

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



“highest” or “especially” (which meant loving the true God) and, as a result, loving the self correctly, and, because the virtuous, like the vicious, understood that they must extend the same love to everyone else as they extended to themselves, loving neighbours correctly too. The following finds that, for Augustine, this correct love for self and neighbour referred not just to the right amount of philia-love but also to the love for self and neighbour which was part of “ordered” eros-love: loving self and neighbour correctly involved having eros-love for them for God’s sake, that is, loving them as they would actually be in the happy life, when they possessed the true highest good. Hence, while ever we failed to identify correctly humanity’s true highest good, we would fail to have the correct eros-love for ourselves and others: we would fail to love them as those who fully knew the true God, and hence we would fail to love them as the eternal things that they would be in the happy life; instead, unbeknown to us, we would love them as temporal things – meaning that our love for them would be carnal concupiscence, the love that was sinful.

     Augustine held that there was a correct and an incorrect way of loving oneself and other people. Chapters  and  discussed how, when ‘to love’ was understood as meaning ‘to think of something as worthy of praise,’ we could love ourselves and others incorrectly, by esteeming human beings too highly or too lowly. The correct philia for self and others was found only among Christians, whose belief in God as saviour ensured that they gave human nature exactly the correct amount of praise. As stated already, the aim of this chapter is to explore the possibility that Augustine also understood ourselves and others as the objects of eros. Before turning to this possibility, however, this chapter examines the suggestion that Augustine understood self-love and neighbour-love not as eros-love at all but rather as benevolence, namely, as “wishing well to self and neighbour.” 

John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, ): “As soon as Augustine begins to describe the working of the love of neighbour, he wants the idea and the word ‘benevolence.’ He either does not see or sees no need to remark that if love of self and love of neighbour means wishing well to self and neighbour, the word ‘love’ is being used in a sense different to that which he has given it in the first commandment . . . in the chapters which follow [in De Mor. Eccl.] the love of man for man is expressed simply as active benevolence” (p. ). See also Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock,

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Augustine defined love for God as eros but there remains the question of whether he defined loving ourselves and our neighbours as eros too – where eros-love referred to the passions that arose from viewing something as a feature of the happy life. One difficulty here is the puzzle of what it could mean to include the self or neighbour as part of one’s vision of happiness. This difficulty has seemed insurmountable and so scholars have proposed that eros was not the meaning that Augustine gave to ‘love’ when it had self or neighbour as its object. Instead, it has been proposed that by self-love and neighbour-love, Augustine had in mind ‘benevolence.’ As we have seen, writing on  John :–, Augustine declared that when we loved other people, whether sinfully or virtuously, we were benevolent towards them. He simply took it for granted that this was the case both among those whose neighbour-love was “carnal” or concupiscent, and those whose neighbour-love was dilectio or caritas: “all love [between human beings] has a certain benevolence to those who are loved.” Hence, in Augustine’s eyes, benevolence was always present whenever love for self and neighbour was present; and this raises the question of whether or not he regarded this love simply as one and the same thing as benevolence. Benevolence means “well-wishing,” that is, wanting good things for ourselves and for others (“wishing well to self and neighbour”); in other words, sincerely desiring that we ourselves, and other people as well, should prosper. It is important to note that this means that benevolence is a matter of what we want for other people, and not, strictly, a matter of what we do for them: wishing that others would prosper is not one and the same thing as the practical steps taken to provide for them; wanting good for others is not the same as doing, or seeking to do, good to them. Augustine acknowledged this distinction when he recognised that we could do good to others without wishing them well. Thus, as discussed already, he was clear that a person could give to the poor, not from any genuine concern for the welfare of the poor but merely “from boasting.” For Augustine, actions whereby we sought to provide for others’ temporal needs were never a sure indication of our inner attitudes:





): “the love which [man] has for himself is benevolent love” (p. ), and “Benevolent Love” (pp. –). This is emphasised by both Burnaby, Amor Dei, p. , and O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love. O’Donovan states, “The love which man has for God is cosmic love, the attraction of the creature toward the supreme good; the love which he has for himself is benevolent love” (p. ).  Burnaby, Amor Dei, p. . Contra Mendacium, .

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love

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we could find it expedient to give other people our assistance and yet have no genuine interest in their welfare at all. Hence, distributing all our goods to the poor, and even sacrificing our lives for others, were not in themselves evidence that we regarded them with benevolence: we were benevolent when we were moved by a genuine concern for their welfare, and, by implication, we lacked benevolence when we made achieving their welfare simply a means to obtaining some benefit for ourselves. Hence, he was clear that all kinds of charitable deeds could be found in the absence of either benevolence or neighbour-love (setting aside the question temporarily of whether he regarded these two things as one and the same). For instance, while it has been suggested that “in practical terms” Augustine equated neighbour-love to evangelism, he was clear, on the contrary, that people could seek to convert others to Christianity without either being benevolent towards them or loving them. He followed the apostle Paul in explicitly acknowledging that this was so. Thus, he quoted Paul’s comment in Philippians :–, “Some indeed preach Christ even from envy and strife, and some also from goodwill (bonam voluntatem): the former preach Christ from selfish ambition, but not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my chains; but the latter out of love.” This passage could be read as equating “well-wishing” to love, but it cannot be read as equating these two things to Christian evangelism. Augustine realised that even when we sought to do spiritual good to others, by converting them to Christianity, we might not regard them with either benevolence or love, but be moved purely from ambition or envy instead. He was always clear that a wide variety of motives could inspire people to promote others’ physical and spiritual welfare; since he held that these things could be done in the absence of love and benevolence, he was clear that love and benevolence were not, in practice, the same as doing these things. Nonetheless, he was also clear that neighbour-love necessarily led to these charitable deeds. While doing actions aimed at promoting others’ welfare was not one and the same thing as loving them or being benevolent to them, love and benevolence could not be present in the absence of these actions: we certainly did not wish others well or love them if we





O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love: “when he elaborates the content of neighbourlove, Augustine does not give much prominence to the natural needs of body or soul which we may suppose the neighbour to have. In practical terms, love of the neighbour is evangelism” (p. ). En. Ps.  (). and Sermon  ( Ben.) on the New Testament, . and ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

neglected to seek their physical and spiritual well-being when the opportunity arose. Thus, he insisted that when we loved other people, we sought to promote their welfare whenever we could. This is particularly evident in his discussion of the second love commandment in On the Catholic Way of Life. Here, Augustine was clear that obedience to this commandment was accompanied by acts of charity: those who loved their neighbours as themselves were active in caring for their neighbours’ bodily needs, providing them with “food and drink, clothing and shelter, and every means of covering and protection to guard their bodies against injuries and mishaps from without as well as from within.” If we loved our neighbours as ourselves, then we also actively cared for their spiritual needs: “He, then, who loves his neighbour endeavours all he can to procure his safety in body and in soul.” In short, love for other people was not present if we did not seek to assist them in these ways, whether their needs were physical or spiritual: in being benevolent to others, meaning, in wishing others well (which was either the same thing as loving them, or present whenever neighbour-love was present), we took every opportunity of doing good to them, whether this was good in a physical or a spiritual sense. Thus, while Augustine did not regard doing charitable actions as one and the same thing as being benevolent towards others or loving others, nonetheless, he held that these charitable actions (well-doing as distinct from well-wishing) were always present where benevolence and neighbour-love were found. This was the thrust of his insistence, with reference to  John :–, the passage quoted above, that loving other people was always distinct from the love that we might have for food. The love between human beings, whether it was sinful “carnal” love or part of the love that was virtue, was not like a glutton’s love for food – gluttons literally consumed the object of their love. In contrast, love for others always had a certain benevolence towards them, and, consequently, since benevolence led to actions aimed at promoting others’ welfare, all neighbour-love was marked by acts of kindness and mercy when the occasion demanded these actions. That is, sinful neighbour-love and virtuous neighbour-love were alike marked by benevolence and, consequently, when the occasion arose, by acts aimed at promoting others’ bodily and spiritual well-being. Augustine also clarified in his comments on  John :– that benevolence referred both to wishing that others would have the good



Mor. ..



Mor. ..

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



things that they lacked and to wishing that they would continue to have the good things that they already enjoyed. The test of our benevolence was not whether or not we actually sought to promote others’ well-being, but whether or not we were willing to do this should the occasion or opportunity arise: if people already enjoyed good things, then we could still be benevolent towards them, even though there was no opportunity to promote their well-being, by desiring that they would continue in prosperity. This explains his comment elsewhere that we should seek to “benefit” those near us and be benevolent to everyone else. On the one hand, he was clear that we were to extend benevolence to everyone – those near us as well as those far removed from us. “Benefitting” those near us did not entail the absence of benevolence – as we have seen, well-doing, in the absence of well-wishing, was not a praiseworthy thing. Rather, his point in drawing this distinction between well-doing and well-wishing was simply to acknowledge that, since it lay beyond the scope of our powers actually to do good to the vast majority of human beings, only a tiny portion of humanity could ever be the objects of our aid – for the rest, it was enough that we wished all their needs to be met, even though in practical terms there was nothing which we could actually do to bring this about. “Such a man, so long as he is in this life, uses his friend to repay favours received, his enemy to cultivate patience, anyone at all in order to exercise beneficence (ad beneficientiam), and all men as objects of benevolence (ad benevolentiam). Though he does not love temporal things, he uses them rightly himself.” The previous chapter discussed why Augustine regarded temporal friendship as “for use”: here, he implied that all temporal relationships were for use – we were not to imagine that human happiness consisted in the proper arrangement of this temporal life, that is, in repaying favours to friends, cultivating patience with respect to enemies, and being beneficent to those whom we could reach with our charitable actions. These things were all proper and correct, but they were temporal things, found only in this unhappy life. Instead, we were to refer all the goods of this life to things as they would be in the happy life: if we did this, then, while we would continue to seek these temporal goods, and seek them for their own sakes as intrinsically worthwhile things, we would not seek them for  

Ep. Jo., Tractate  ( John :–), at . Vera rel. .. Discussed by O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love, pp.  and  n. . See also Vera rel. ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

enjoyment; we would see them as relative to this life, and distinct from the fully natural life which we would lead only in knowing God, when our friends would have no need of our favour, no one would need our aid, and we would have no enemies to be patient with. In this way, Augustine was clear that neighbour-love, among both the vicious and the virtuous, could not be found in the absence of benevolence. Benevolence here meant a sincere wish that others would prosper or continue to prosper, a wish which evidently inspired charitable actions towards those who were in need, although these charitable actions could also be inspired by things other than benevolence. Does this mean that Augustine thought that neighbour-love simply was benevolence? In fact, none of the above passages establishes that this was the case. Augustine indicated that neighbour-love could never be found without benevolence, but this is not in itself proof that he held that neighbour-love was one and the same thing as benevolence.

 -   Was love for the self and for others simply benevolence? Alternatively, could this love be eros, the desire for the self and other human beings which arose from our conception of the happy life? In fact, benevolence and eros have more in common than it might first appear. Admittedly, it would be easy to view these two things as opposites – for example, by interpreting benevolence as a disinterested love, and eros-love as a selfcentred one (loving others for the sake of one’s own happiness) – but in eudaimonism, eros-love for others did not involve a self-interested ‘instrumentalisation’ of others. Aspects of this question have already been addressed in previous chapters. It has been noted that, for eudaimonists, reason revealed that it was in accordance with human nature to seek the well-being of others, for its own sake, as an end in itself: hence, we were able to value this well-being as worthwhile in its own right, despite knowing that it did not add in any way to our happiness. Our aim was to live the fully natural life (which was also the life in complete accordance with reason), and this led us to value and pursue the things that people who lived this life valued; hence, our pursuit of happiness led us to look upon our neighbours’ well-being as something of value in its own right. In addition, it is important to realise that, in eudaimonism, seeking our neighbour’s happiness was a further dimension of pursuing their welfare, since we thought of happiness as a person’s ultimate well-being – their ‘best’ state; consequently, reason taught us to wish for our

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



neighbour’s happiness for its own sake – it taught us to look upon their happiness as something worth seeking even though it did not enhance our own happiness in any way. At the same time, in eudaimonism, the pursuit of others’ happiness was always eros because eros referred to seeking something as a feature of the happy life, and in wanting others’ happiness, we necessarily thought of them as present with us in the happy life. As noted already, this did not involve instrumentalising their happiness as the means to our own: in eudaimonism, happiness was dependent only on the possession of the highest good. In having eros for others, we pictured them with us in happiness, but we also knew that our happiness was simply a matter of possessing the summum bonum: we wanted them to possess the summum bonum too, but if they failed to possess it, we knew that this did not impede us from having it ourselves. Thus, we sought their happiness, so that we had eros for them, but we sought this for its own sake, that is, without making their happiness in any way a condition of our own. In this way, in eudaimonism, eros for others was a disinterested love; we wanted others’ happiness for its own sake, as a good in itself, and not as something which was good for us or which served our own happiness. As suggested already, benevolence or well-wishing (towards ourselves or others) refers to wishing that we ourselves and others would have good things – that is, wanting good for ourselves and others; but another way of putting this is that benevolence refers to willing that we ourselves, and other people too, would be in a good state. In eudaimonism, people’s best state is, by definition, the happy life, with the result that in eudaimonism one meaning of being benevolent is to wish for our own and for others’ happiness. Benevolence does not have its focus purely on happiness, since we are benevolent when we want to bestow on ourselves and others any good, including goods which are not part of the happy life; nonetheless, wanting ourselves and our neighbours to be happy is a form of benevolence. In other words, in eudaimonism, eros is a form of benevolence – a wishing others well – where others’ happiness is valued intrinsically, as worth pursuing in its own right. Thus, in what follows, I propose that, for Augustine, eros was a particular kind of benevolence. To love ourselves, in the sense of eros, was to desire to have ourselves in what we believed to be the best state for a human being, and to love another was to desire to have this person in this best state too. This was eros, not because we reckoned their happiness as necessary for our own, but because, as noted already, in reaching their ‘best’ state, people had reached the happy life and, by definition, eros was



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the desire that we felt for everything which we conceived of as present in the happy life. Everyone always had eros-love for themselves because everyone necessarily thought of themselves, in a given condition, as featuring in the happy life – our desire for our own happiness meant that we always desired to have the selves that we believed we would be in the happy life; having eros-love for others meant thinking of them as living happily as well – and this meant wanting them to have the selves that we believed they would be in the happy life too. Augustine held that God could be, and indeed should be, the object of eros-love. Given that he often discussed love for self and neighbour in the same passages in which he discussed eros-love for God, this encourages the conclusion that he viewed self and neighbour as the objects of eroslove as well. We have already seen that he understood the sin of carnal concupiscence as the sin of eros-love for temporal things – hence the fact that he stated that self and neighbour could be the objects of carnal concupiscence or cupiditas also points to the conclusion that he looked upon self-love and neighbour-love as a kind of eros-love. Noting that Augustine saw loving others as always involving being benevolent towards them actually lends support to this conclusion, given that benevolence itself can be understood as desiring to have others in a good state, with the result that eros (desiring to have others in the happy state) can be understood as a particular kind of benevolence. Hence, the following looks for further evidence that Augustine understood the self and others as the objects of eros-love, and also further investigates the question of what he might have meant by the eros-love for self and neighbours which formed part of the love that was virtue.

 -    Augustine identified the earthly city’s great sin in two ways: its sin was carnal concupiscentia, the love for temporal things, and its sin lay in its love for the self – only Christians’ self-love formed part of virtue; everyone else’s self-love was sin. We have seen that he did not understand the selflove that was sin as selfishness, since he understood that people could love 

He referred to this sinful self-love in Civ. Dei .: “We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self.” He also found the idea of a sinful self-love in  Tim. :, “for men shall be lovers of their own selves,” and  Cor. :, “charity does not seek her own.” See Civ Dei . and Gn. Litt. ...

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



themselves sinfully and yet extend the same love to other people as well, and so we are left with the puzzle of how he defined the self-love of all non-Christians as a sin. The following proposes that these two definitions of sin came together in the claim that all non-Christians necessarily had eros-love for themselves but as temporal things, so that their self-love was always the sin of carnal concupsicentia. Augustine declared that “no man hates himself,” following Ephesians :, “No one ever hated his own flesh”; rather, we all loved ourselves, “for that he does love himself, and does desire to do good to himself, nobody but a fool would doubt”; “seeing, then, that there is no need of a command that every man should love himself and his own body – seeing that is that we love ourselves . . . through a law of nature which has never been violated, and which is common to us with the beasts”: “for however far a man may fall away from the truth, he still continues to love himself and to love his own body.” Arguably, by the natural love for our bodies which Augustine attributed to all of us in these passages, he meant eros-love for our bodies: we have seen that loving our bodies with this love referred to wanting to possess them in perfect and permanent health (their best state), where the pursuit of this was necessarily eros since in wanting to have bodily health permanently, we necessarily wanted to have this in the happy life. Augustine added in On Christian Doctrine that every human being also had a natural love for their “self.” The “self” here was another word for the soul: his message was that human beings naturally loved both their bodies and their souls. If our natural love for our bodies referred to eroslove for them, then, arguably, this idea of a natural love for our selves or souls likewise referred to eros-love for them: we sought to have our bodies in a perfect, unchanging state of health, and likewise we sought to have our souls in a perfect, unchanging state of health. In other words, our selflove was eros – in seeking our soul’s perfect health, we necessarily had eros for our soul since we sought it as it would be in the happy life. Elsewhere, Augustine identified self-love with the “desire to do good” to oneself: in other words, with being benevolent towards oneself. Yet he also indicated that by the benevolence that was the equivalent of selflove, he did not mean any and every kind of benevolence. Thus, he also stated, “But what is [it] to love one’s self, except to want to help one’s self to the enjoyment of self?” This suggests that benevolence, when it  

Doc. Chr. ... Doc. Chr. ...

 

Doc. Chr. ... Doc. Chr. ...

 

Doc. Chr. ... Trin. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

meant love for the self, referred to wanting the self to be in its best state. This state was one in which it “enjoyed the self” – that is, one in which it possessed itself as it would be in the happy life. In other words, benevolence, as love for the self, meant wanting to have ourselves as we would be in the happy life, with the result that love for the self was eros. What might the best state of the soul consist in? Our vision of ourselves in the happy life could be summed up in our vision of ourselves as selves which possessed and perfectly loved human beings’ true highest good. We all naturally wanted to possess this self as part of our vision of the happy life and so this was what was meant by natural eros-love for the self. Human beings naturally loved their bodies’ perfect health, but still took care of their bodies’ temporal health. Did Augustine think that something similar happened in the case of the soul, namely, that, while we naturally loved our soul’s best state, we also naturally sought its temporal good? While Augustine held that the body could have temporal health, as distinct from perfect and permanent health, he did not consider that there was such a thing as the temporal health of the soul. Rather, his message was that the soul remained unhealthy while it remained a temporal thing: the soul was either unhealthy and temporal, or healthy and immutable. In this sense, there was no distinction between its good state and its best state – since what was good for the soul, and best for the soul, was to cease to be a temporal thing. In the happy life, in perfectly loving and knowing God, the soul would altogether cease to be a temporal thing, but even in this life, it ceased to be a temporal thing inasmuch as it possessed virtue, that is, inasmuch as it turned to God and so was “converted to something unchangeable.” Thus, Augustine did not write of perfect virtue giving perfection to the soul, but simply of virtue as giving perfection to the soul: “no one will question that virtue gives perfection to the soul” – literally, that virtue makes the soul “best” (animam faciat optimam). “For a man is in his best state when his whole life is a journey towards the unchangeable life, and his affections are entirely fixed upon that.” By implication, there was a sense in which we had already begun to possess ourselves as we would be in the happy life once we had begun to be virtuous. The best state of the soul – its perfection – was simply to be a permanent thing; but virtue was stability and permanence and so our souls had begun to be in this best state even in this life in possessing virtue.



Doc. Chr. ...



Mor. ...



Doc. Chr. ...

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



Nonetheless, our souls would remain temporal things to the degree that we fell short of perfect virtue. The goal was to have a soul from which all temporality had been removed: on one level, virtue involved our minds having contact with the truth and so in having virtue our minds had a share in the truth’s immutability; but, on another level, the virtuous soul was still subject to change because it had not yet arrived at the perfection of its virtue because it had not yet arrived at the complete knowledge of the truth. Thus, he noted that in this (unhappy) life, bodies and souls were alike changeable and inconstant things. “Aug. – do men and peoples belong to that class of things which cannot perish or change but are altogether eternal? Or are they mutable and subject to time’s changes? Evodius – Who can doubt that this class of things is mutable and liable to the changes of time?” The soul fell short of the full knowledge of, and perfect love for, God while it remained mutable. Thus, Augustine noted that the very fact that the soul could pass from folly to wisdom proved that it was changeable, the point being that while it was changeable, it was foolish. Stability and wisdom – the knowledge of the truth – were things which the soul, in being virtuous, possessed in this life, but just as virtue was not perfect virtue, in the same way mutability and foolishness continued to exist in the virtuous soul: human beings “find nothing in themselves that is not subject to change.” Prior to acquiring perfect wisdom, that is, the complete knowledge of the truth which would be accompanied by the perfect love for the true highest good, the soul was a changeable thing precisely to the extent to which it remained foolish. Hence, in loving ourselves, in the sense of eros, we made it our goal to have our selves as immutable (eternal) things, or, in other words, to have the selves that would be ours in the happy life: on one level, this meant making our goal the selves that were perfectly virtuous and possessed of the complete knowledge of the truth; but, on another level, this meant making our goal simply virtue and knowledge. The virtue and knowledge that we found in ourselves in this life were rightly things which we loved, in the sense of eros, since virtue and knowledge would be present in our souls in the happy life; nonetheless, this was not a static love for our selves, but rather a dynamic love; we sought to have selves which were more and more stable – more permanent and immutable: we sought the perfection of our virtue.



Lib. Arb. ...



Doc. Chr. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

“”  In the above passage, Augustine wrote of “enjoying” the self. Elsewhere, however, he insisted that the self was to be loved “for use” and not “for enjoyment.” In the previous chapter, we saw that Augustine held that the features of the happy life were loved both for use and for enjoyment. The selves that we believed we would be in the happy life were loved for use because we referred our possession of them to the possession of whatever we believed to be the highest good: we understood that we would have perfectly virtuous selves only in fully having the highest good. Our notion of the highest good might be a mistaken one, but, nonetheless, we all wanted to have the selves that had reached their best state through having the highest good; and in this sense we always directed or referred our self-love to our love for (what we believed to be) the highest good – and this was the meaning of loving ourselves for “use.” “Neither ought any one to have joy in himself, if you look at the matter clearly, because no one ought to love even himself for his own sake, but for the sake of Him who is the true object of enjoyment.” In other words, everyone was able to see that the object of our self-love ought to be the self that loved and possessed the true highest good. Hence, there was nothing virtuous about loving ourselves “for use” if our notion of the highest good was incorrect; the true highest good was the Christian God, hence we all ought to love ourselves “for the sake of Him who is the true object of enjoyment.” At the same time, while it was a sin to love the self for enjoyment, nonetheless, as noted already, Augustine also found that there remained a proper sense in which the self was for “enjoyment.” Since the self was one of the things that we would possess in the happy life, there was a sense in which the self was not only for use, but also for enjoyment: we regarded as an object of enjoyment whatever we thought we would love and have in the happy life, and the self was certainly something which we thought of in this way. Hence, the self who loved the Christian God, as the true highest good, was for both use and enjoyment: for use, because our love for the self must be referred to love for God, since it was only in having





Doc. Chr. .., “For we are commanded to love one another: but it is a question whether man is to be loved by man for his own sake, or for the sake of something else. If it is for his own sake, we enjoy him; if it is for the sake of something else, we use him. It seems to me, then, that he is to be loved for the sake of something else.” Doc. Chr. ...

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



God that we would have this self, and for enjoyment because this was the self that we would be in the happy life. Thus, the self was an object of enjoyment only when it possessed what truly was the highest good – meaning, when it had become an unchangeable (eternal) thing through becoming perfectly virtuous. For this reason, Augustine found, Paul wrote of enjoying oneself (and other people) “in the Lord.” We must understand that we would have ourselves and others as objects of enjoyment only when we and they had God. This meant, on one level, that we did not have ourselves or others as objects of enjoyment in this life; nonetheless, Augustine found that in this life we rightly felt a delight in ourselves and others as Christian believers: we took joy in other Christians in the Lord or used them with delight even in this life because, although the object of our love was ourselves and other people as we would be in the happy life, there was a sense in which in having ourselves and others as those who were virtuous and who had some knowledge of God, we had already begun to have ourselves and others as we would be in the happy life. Hence, the fact of other people’s virtue – the fact of their Christian faith – rightly brought us delight or joy. The memorable joy of Monica, Augustine’s mother, at the conversion of her son is a good illustration of this idea of finding joy in others “in the Lord” or using with delight. Christians experienced joy in this life when they witnessed another’s conversion. The conversion of another person brought joy or delight because, although this person was not yet, in every way, as they would be in the happy life, nonetheless, this person had begun to be in their best state. Since Christians had eros-love for people as they would truly be in the happy life – that is, since they sought to have others as people who perfectly loved and perfectly knew the true God – Christians enjoyed others in this life when they saw the beginnings of this love and knowledge in them. Yet this was to enjoy others in God – it was to have others as those who loved and had God; that is, it was to “use” them “with delight” – namely, to refer our love for them to our love for God, understanding that we had begun to have them in their best state only inasmuch as we and they had begun to have God. Thus, the soul, in a state of virtue, when it had become an eternal thing, was for both use and enjoyment – it was used because it was loved for the sake of the true God, and this meant that it was also enjoyed – we had begun to ‘have’ it as the immutable thing that it would be in the happy



Doc. Chr. ...



Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

life. The virtuous soul was for enjoyment, but the vicious soul – the soul while it remained a temporal (changeable) thing – was not for enjoyment. The sin of loving ourselves for “enjoyment” or for “our own sakes” was one and the same as the sin of loving ourselves as temporal things, that is, of being mistaken about the true identity of the highest good, so that the souls, or selves, that we sought to enjoy were not actually in their best state, but remained in a vicious state. This was to find our happiness “complete” in this life, rather than “to go on our way toward Him, in the enjoyment of whom we find our common happiness.” To enjoy a thing was to locate our happiness in having it; hence to enjoy ourselves while we remained changeable things was to enjoy ourselves while we remained imperfect and vicious (“with some defect”). “Now while we live in time, we must abstain and fast from all joy in time, for the sake of that eternity in which we wish to live; although by the passage of time we are taught this very lesson of despising time and seeking eternity.” Thus, as we have seen, Augustine not only wrote of the sin of loving the self for enjoyment or for its own sake; he also wrote of sinful carnallove for the self (cupiditas or concupiscentia): where there was no love for the true God, love for the self was sinful concupiscence – the love for something temporal. Our self-love was natural in the sense that everyone always sought to have their souls in their best state – that is, we always sought to have souls which had become happy things; but nonetheless, in loving the self, we either sinned or were virtuous because our self-love was either ordered to the true highest good or disordered because we had a false notion of the highest good; but when it was disordered, it was also the love for what was temporal. That is, we always loved a self which possessed and perfectly loved a particular understanding of the highest good, which we identified, correctly or incorrectly, as the true highest good. Since the soul only became an eternal thing in knowing the true God, the result was that human beings who had a false notion of the identity of the true highest good did not love their souls as eternal things – rather, what most of us actually loved, unbeknown to us, was our soul as an unhealthy, vicious, temporal thing. Augustine discussed this connection between loving God and having an eternal soul in a number of places. For example, when he addressed himself to the issue of “what ought to be loved” in Question , of his Eighty-Three Different Questions, he stated that loving something eternal



Doc. Chr. ...



Doc. Chr. ...



Doc. Chr. ...

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



“affects the soul with eternity.” In On Christian Doctrine, after having discussed the fact that “God is to be loved for His own sake, and our neighbour for God’s sake,” while our self-love “should have reference to God,” he emphasised that loving God meant loving what was eternal: “For in this frame of mind he extricates himself from every form of fatal joy in transitory things, and turning away from these, fixes his affection on things eternal, to wit, the unchangeable Trinity in unity.” Similarly, writing in  or , he praised Macedonius for his “love of eternity and of the truth.” The idea that loving the eternal God transformed the human soul into something eternal was a recurring theme in Augustine’s writings. In On True Religion, he held that the object beloved by a soul which had abandoned God was temporal: “It loves what, being matter, is less than life, and, on account of this very sin (propter ipsum peccatum), the beloved object becomes corruptible, is dissolved and lost to its lover, even as it, in loving a material thing, has abandoned God.” Our failure to love the true, eternal God meant that we loved not eternal “life” but temporal “life,” where life was used by Augustine as a synonym for “soul.” Further evidence for this view can be found in Letter . Here, Augustine described the change which the soul underwent when it loved God: clinging to God meant being “reformed by Him who is unchangeable.” The soul was a changeable – an “unstable” thing – “just in proportion as it clings less to God.” God was “perfect” “because He is immutable”: the soul that loved God underwent a change in order to gain in capacity “for perfect clinging to God,” that is, it underwent a change in order to become a thing which was itself unchangeable. In other places, Augustine explained that the soul that loved God became a spiritual thing. This drew on Paul’s contrast between the “natural” and the “spiritual” in  Corinthians :: “that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.” Augustine wrote that “each man is at first necessarily evil and fleshly after Adam . . . However, if he is reborn . . . he will afterwards be good and spiritual.” He also wrote of the soul that loved God as becoming “conformed” to God and separating itself from the world or as becoming a “participant” in “unchangeable truth.”

  

  Div. Qu. .. Doc. Chr. ... Letter  at ..   Vera Rel. .–.. Letter , at .. Civ. Dei ... Mor. .. and ..; Gn. Adv. Man. ..; Spir. et Litt. ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

The soul that loved God had begun to become an unchangeable thing itself; when it loved God perfectly, it would complete this journey. That is, while we imperfectly loved the true God, our souls had begun to be eternal – our love for God gave them a share in God’s immutability through having some contact with the truth. As discussed above, this helps to explain Augustine’s notion of “happiness in hope” and the delight or joy which Christians rightly took in themselves and other Christians in this life. Human beings were happy in hope while they did not love temporal things and instead loved and perceived the truth, if only in a small way: this was because they had begun to possess the highest good even in this life – they had begun to know God and so they had also begun to possess themselves as things which had a share in God’s eternity. This also meant that while they failed to love the true God, they remained temporal things. We all loved ourselves as those who loved the true highest good, but it was only in loving what actually was humanity’s true highest good that our souls began to be eternal things; hence while we failed to love the true God, unbeknown to ourselves, we loved ourselves as vicious and temporal things. In other words, while we failed to love God, our self-love was sinful carnal concupiscence.

     In loving ourselves, we either longed to possess ourselves in what was really our best state, or longed to possess ourselves in what was actually a sick state. This finding led Augustine to describe sinful concupiscentia for the self as “more correctly called hate,” quoting Psalm ():, “He who loves iniquity hates his own soul.” His message was that while we failed to identify the true God as the highest good, our self-love was more properly called self-hatred, because we sought to possess, as part of our conception of the happy life, a soul which was actually not in its best state, but rather diseased and temporal. Thus, elsewhere, he called this “loving yourself to your own destruction.” He explained that we could be said to hate ourselves in this case because in longing to possess ourselves as souls which did not actually know the true highest good we willed ourselves harm, albeit unknowingly. Loving ourselves meant wanting a soul in a healthy state; hence, to hate ourselves was to want a soul in an unhealthy state – it was to want  

Doc. Chr. ... Trin. ...



Sermon , at . See also Sermon , at .

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



our souls as sick and injured. On one level, no one ever hated themself, since everybody naturally wanted a soul in a healthy state. Yet, on another level, when we failed to love the true God, we made the object of our desire a soul in an unhealthy state, although we were unaware of this. In this sense, the self that we aimed to possess as part of our vision of happiness was the self that was sick and injured – and so, although we supposed that we aimed to possess our souls in their best state, what we actually sought to have was the self in its worst state. We were thus our own enemies: we willed ourselves harm, although we did not realise this. Thus, concupiscentia for the self was, in one sense, self-hatred; caritas for the self was the only self-love that was properly called self-love. This restrictive definition of self-love allowed Augustine to equate self-love (meaning caritas for the self ) to love for the true God. Thus, he concluded in a number of places that only the person who loved God, meaning, only the person who looked on the true God as the highest good, actually loved themself. Those who loved themselves necessarily loved the true God, since everyone who did not love the true God actually hated themselves. Augustine was able to make this claim precisely because he thought that self-love was found among all human beings. While the self or soul as we believed it would be in the happy life was naturally the object of everyone’s eros-love, yet we always had some definite picture of what this consisted in, beyond simply thinking that in this state the soul would possess and love the true highest good: we all named something as the highest good. Hence, our self-love was in this sense never morally neutral; yet when our self-love was vicious we could be said actually to hate ourselves since we made our goal a self which actually continued in its diseased and sinful state.

 -    The notion that all love for the self which did not love the true God could be said to be self-hatred allowed Augustine better to negotiate the biblical command to love other people as we loved ourselves. The idea of loving 

Letter , at ., and Civ. Dei ... O’Donovan, in The Problem of Self-Love, has identified many other passages (pp. – and ). For example, Letter .., “for this is indeed how we love ourselves, by loving God”; Sermon ., “You do not even love yourself rightly if your love of God can be diminished by turning away, even to yourself”; Sermon ., “This is your self-love: to love God with the whole of yourself!”



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

our neighbours as we loved ourselves left open the possibility that this command would be satisfied even when our love for ourselves was carnal concupiscentia, provided that we extended the same love to our neighbours. Augustine closed this possibility by reading the commandment as stating: first learn to love yourself, meaning, first learn to love yourself with the eros-love that was part of virtue, and then love others with this same love. “Loving oneself” was now identified with this correct self-love, so that the command to love one’s neighbours became the command to love them correctly too. Since incorrect self-love could be called selfhatred, incorrect neighbour-love could be called hatred too. Hence, Augustine could summarise this command as meaning: first love the true God, and only then will you also love your neighbours. No other thing, then, is chiefly to be regarded in this inquiry, which we make concerning the Trinity and concerning knowing God, except what is true love, nay, rather what is love. For that is to be called love (dilectio) which is true, otherwise it is cupidity (cupiditas); and so those who are cupidi are said improperly to love, just as they who love are said improperly to desire (cupere). But this is true love, that cleaving to the truth we may live justly, and so may despise all mortal things in comparison with the love of men, whereby we wish them to live justly.

If the soul that we sought for ourselves was the soul that perfectly knew and perfectly loved the true God, then we would seek this for others as well, so that we would love both ourselves and others as eternal things. Hence, desiring for the rest of humanity what we desired for ourselves was not enough for virtue, since we might inadvertently love our own souls in an unhealthy state. Instead, virtue required that we must desire that other people would have souls in which the perfect knowledge of and perfect love for the true God, as the true highest good, was present. Hence, it was only when we loved the true God that we would fulfil the second love-commandment, since it was only then that we would make the object of our other-directed eros-love the other who perfectly knew and loved the true God too. Let us, then, work with as much effort as we can so that those whom we love as we love ourselves may attain Him, if we know how to love ourselves in loving Him.. . . He ought, then, to love his neighbour as himself in order that by consoling him through beneficence, by teaching him through doctrine, or by restraining him through discipline, he may bring everyone he can to worship God, since he



Trin. ...



Self-Love and Neighbour-Love knows that on these the prophets depend.

two

commandments

the

whole

law

and

Reason taught us to seek other people’s temporal health. This meant that we would seek to promote others’ physical welfare during their earthly lives, although never at the expense of our pursuit of virtue for them. Reason also taught us to love other people’s perfect health – both bodily and spiritual health. Yet people who followed these teachings of reason would remain vicious if they failed to have the correct picture of the true identity of the highest good. Virtue lay neither in seeking others’ temporal bodily health nor in loving what we took to be their perfect health or best state; rather, virtue lay in loving their souls in what really was their best state. This meant that we wanted to have other people as those who joined us in perfectly knowing and perfectly loving the true God. We “urged” them to love this God too – we urged them to become Christians, while understanding that Christian conversion was not a human achievement, but rather God’s work. Thus, Augustine insisted that “no sinner is to be loved as a sinner; and every man is to be loved as a man for God’s sake.” To love another as a sinner was to love them in an unhealthy state – to love them as a lover of what was not actually the highest good; to love another for God’s sake was to love them in the best state for a human being, namely, as one who also knew and loved the Christian God, the true highest good: we had people in their best state only when we and they had the true God. Thus, in On True Religion, Augustine described how loving other people as eternal things meant hating temporal relationships. We were not to have eros-love for anything temporal, including the temporal bonds which tied us to other people. Temporal relationships were for use – we were not to rest in them, as though human happiness consisted in them, but rather, we should understand that they would not exist in the happy life. He ended this section with the declaration, “If we are ablaze with love for eternity, we shall hate temporal relationships.” We have now seen how hating temporal relationships in no way implied that we



 

Letter , .–. See also De Trin. .., “He therefore who loves men, ought to love them either because they are just (iustus) men or that they may be so”; Jo. Ev. Tr., Tractate ., “What did our Lord love in us? He loved God in us! Not that we had God, but that we might have him.” These passages came to my attention in O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love, pp.  and .   Doc. Chr. ..–. Doc. Chr. ... Vera Rel. .. Vera Rel. ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

failed to love other people or failed to seek their temporal welfare as a good in its own right. In the first place, Augustine considered that temporal relationships were correctly made objects of philia-love: family relationships all had value; they were goods, even though they were temporal goods. Second, we have seen that Augustine did not doubt that everyone wanted their friends and family to enjoy permanent good health and to live forever: hating temporal relationships did not mean that we hated the company or welfare of our friends; on the contrary, Augustine considered that everyone had an ineradicable eros-love for this. Finally, we have seen that, for Augustine, everyone who had eros for other people – who sought their permanent bodily health and sought their souls as happy things – also wanted to secure their temporal welfare. In short, while we withheld eros from temporal relationships because we realised that having others in their best state did not depend on anything temporal, yet this did not prevent us from understanding that others’ physical well-being, and the relationships suited to the temporal span of life, were goods, meaning, things worth seeking for their own sakes. In some places, Augustine contrasted loving the image of God in other people and loving them as sinful beings: we were to keep our eros-love on the image of God in other people – “that in him which belongs to God” – and withhold it from what “belongs to himself.” We have seen that the image of God referred to the reason; we were sinful while our reason failed to think of the true God as the highest good – that is, while our thoughts about the identity of the highest good were flawed. Hence, even if we believed that we loved the reason in other people – even if thought that what we sought for them was the perfection of their reason in the knowledge of the truth – while our notion of the highest good was incorrect, we did not succeed in making their reason the object of our eros-love. Instead, unknown to ourselves, we loved their sinful nature, and not the image of God: “we are called to perfect human nature as God made it before we sinned. We are recalled from love of what we have deserved by sinning.” We were recalled from having eros for human beings’ corrupt nature, “what we have deserved by sinning,” to the eroslove of what could be perfected in them and us, namely, the image of God. Thus, Augustine continued: “Whoever, then, loves in his neighbour anything but his real self does not love him as himself. Human nature is to be loved whether it be perfect or in the process of becoming perfect, but



Vera Rel. ..



See Chapter .



Vera Rel. ..

Self-Love and Neighbour-Love



without any condition of carnal relationship (carnali conditione).” To love our neighbour’s real self, we needed to love our own real self. We loved other human beings as eternal things when we loved them as belonging to God, which meant having eros-love for what really was eternal in them, namely, the image of God which was everyone’s real self and which remained present in a small way even in the greatest sinner. We had eros-love for them as carnal beings while our understanding of the identity of the highest good was flawed, so that, while we might think that we sought to perfect what was eternal in them (the image of God), we did not do this, through seeking for them what was not the truth. This chapter has explored the nature of the love that Augustine thought had as its object the self and other people’s selves or souls. It has found that, besides being objects of philia-love, Augustine held that the self and neighbour were also the objects of eros-love. Other scholars have proposed that Augustine equated self-love and neighbour-love to benevolence; and this has allowed them to find that neighbour-love for Augustine was a disinterested “well-wishing” towards other people, as distinct from eros, which has been distinguished from benevolence by understanding it as an instrumental way of loving other people (loving them only with reference to one’s own happiness). This chapter has found, instead, that, for Augustine, love for self and neighbour, whether virtue or vice, was eros and that eros was itself a kind of benevolence – in particular, it has found that, for Augustine, eros for other people referred to the disinterested pursuit of what one took to be the best state of their souls. In eudaimonism, eros-love always had as its object things as we believed they would be in the happy life. Hence, in eudaimonism, even though we knew that other people’s happiness was unimportant for our own happiness, nonetheless, we felt eros for them when we wanted their souls to be in the happy state. I have argued in this chapter that this eudaemonist reading of neighbour-love as eros makes the best sense of Augustine’s comments on neighbour-love. It makes sense of his use of cupiditas and concupiscentia to refer to neighbour-love, and it makes sense of the many places in which he wrote together of love for the Christian God, self, and neighbour, since he understood that loving the true God was love as eros. This reading of neighbour-love as eros also makes sense of the fact that he accepted that neighbour-love could be



Vera Rel. ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

found among the vicious, where it would be carnal concupiscentia. For Augustine, if our notion of the highest good was incorrect, then rather than seeking to enjoy others in God, we would seek to enjoy ourselves and others as temporal things, that is, as things which actually remained temporal (and vicious and miserable) through failing to love the true highest good. Thus, for Augustine, the only difference between the vicious love for self and neighbour, and the virtuous love for self and neighbour, lay in a person’s conception of the highest good. When our notion of the highest good was correct – when we had eros for the Christian God – then our eros for the self and neighbour would be part of the love that was virtue; but when our notion of the highest good was incorrect, then our eros for self and neighbour would be sinful – it would not be ordered to the Christian God, and hence it would be love for ourselves and others as temporal things. In short, in discussing the self-love and neighbour-love of Christians and non-Christians, Augustine’s message was not at all that loving one’s neighbour was a uniquely Christian accomplishment. Rather, his message was that Christians alone had caritas for their neighbours, since everyone else’s neighbour-love was cupiditas, a disinterested, benevolent love, but nonetheless a sinful love as the love for what was temporal. Hence, he did not attribute selfishness to all the citizens of the earthly city or deny that they could love the rest of humanity deeply and sincerely, with the same love with which they loved themselves. Instead, his account of the way that non-Christians sinned in loving themselves and in loving other people was tied to his eudaimonist understanding of the nature of virtue and sin. Sin was the love of temporal things, or, in other words, the failure to have eros-love for the true highest good, human beings’ true end. In contrast, virtue was the order of love; that is, virtue was eros-love for the Christian God, the true highest good, and eros-love for the self and other people as souls which really were in their best (eternal) state through perfectly knowing and perfectly loving the true God.

 The Nature of Sin

So far, this study has reached a number of conclusions about Augustine’s understanding of the nature of sin. We have seen that he held that all those who did not think of the Christian God as the highest good necessarily gave their eros-love to something temporal and that he held that eros-love for anything temporal was itself a sin. Chapter  explored his view that all non-Christians sinned by loving themselves and others as temporal things. In addition, we have also seen that, for Augustine, by failing to think of God as saviour, non-Christians sinned in loving themselves, and other human beings, too much or too little. If they loved themselves too much, then they were proud, meaning that they thought of virtue as a human achievement, rather than thinking of it as the gift of the divine saviour (itself a requirement for the possession of virtue). These findings establish that Augustine’s understanding of sin, or vice, was a complex one. He sought to identify the consequences of failing to be virtuous – both the inevitable consequences and the possible ones. When we were not virtuous, we were necessarily vicious, or sinful, but sin or vice could take many forms. The previous chapters have identified some of the things that Augustine regarded as sinful; the purpose of this chapter is to outline in a more systematic way his understanding of the nature of sin. This involves exploring an issue which has not been discussed in the previous chapters: namely, Augustine’s insistence that even when we were virtuous, we might also be sinful. This chapter argues, in common with previous chapters, that Augustine’s understanding of vice or sin made sense within the eudaimonist tradition.





Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

     Augustine understood carnal concupiscence as the eros-love of anything temporal. His message was that if we failed to think of the true God as the highest good, then not only might we love and worship a false god or gods, but the objects of our eros-love would also, inevitably, be temporal things. These temporal objects would always include our own souls, which we would love as temporal things while ever we failed to love the true God, and the souls of other people, which we would likewise love as temporal things; people who loved themselves and others as temporal things might love other temporal things besides these. In short, while we failed to love the true God, the one eternal thing, and hence the one thing in possessing which we ourselves became eternal, our eros-love would be carnal concupiscentia. Bestowing our eros-love on anything temporal was, by definition, to lack virtue, since we could not think of the Christian God as the highest good while we located our happiness in the possession of temporal things. These two ways of thinking about the happy life were simply opposed to each other: one recognised that the true God was the highest good, in possessing whom all our loves would be satisfied, and the other did not recognise this, since it involved loving things which simply could not be had in having God. To have God was to have eternal honour, pleasure, friendship, health, and other things besides, but it was never to have the temporal version of these things. Hence, those who looked upon God as the highest good did not have eros-love for anything temporal, and those who had eros-love for temporal things did not conceive of God as the highest good. The finding that eros-love for temporal things was itself a sin played a central role in Augustine’s explanation of the doctrine of original sin. This doctrine held that human beings were vicious from the very beginning of their lives, so that even newborn babies stood in need of the forgiveness of sin which God extended to everyone through baptism. This inborn vice or sin was called “original sin.” Original sin was not one and the same thing as Adam’s first, or primal, sin and neither was it simply ‘original guilt’: as Jesse Couenhoven has shown, the doctrine of original sin involved distinguishing between the first sin, committed in the Garden of Eden, and the sin present in us all from the start of our lives. This in turn involved 

Jesse Couenhoven, “St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin,” Augustinian Studies : (): –, at , “Primal Sin.”

The Nature of Sin



making a distinction between the start of our lives (which Augustine held happened in utero, at the point at which an unborn baby became vivified through the presence in it of the soul) and our existence in Adam. He held that all Adam’s descendants – every human being ever to exist – had been not alive, but nonetheless existent in Adam at the moment that he had committed his first sin. Since everyone had been present in Adam, everyone had sinned with Adam. For this reason, we all shared in Adam’s guilt for the first sin, and, consequently, we all justly shared in Adam’s punishment. Augustine found that the punishment for Adam’s first sin involved a number of different things, among them mortality, ignorance, and “weakness” or “difficulty.” In addition, he found that the punishment for Adam’s first sin took the form of original sin: as punishment for participating in Adam’s sin, every human being began life in a state of sin. Thus, as Couenhoven notes, Augustine described original sin as “sin that is itself also the punishment of sin.” The whole of humanity had somehow been present in Adam in the Garden and had sinned with Adam, with the result that everyone suffered the penalty for this first sin, and part of this penalty was that we were sinful or vicious from the very beginning of our lives. Augustine’s eudaimonist view that the love of temporal things was vice helped him to make sense of this idea that human beings had somehow sinned with Adam and so were all deserving of punishment even before they were born. His view was that we were all born loving temporal things and hence we were all born sinful. This, in turn, lent support to the idea that all had done something to deserve this punishment – being born sinful was the punishment for the sin of Adam, of which all were somehow guilty. Thus, eudaimonism lent support to the doctrine of original sin. It did so because it offered support for the view that human beings necessarily loved temporal things from birth: we were all carnally concupiscent from the very start of our lives, and carnal concupiscence – the love of temporal things – was itself a sin. In reaching the conclusion that human beings



 

See Nupt. et Conc. .. on the idea of offspring receiving “vitality” in the womb. See also John Bauerschmidt, “Abortion,” in Allan Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ), p. . Couenhoven, in “St. Augustine’s Doctrine,” calls this our “solidarity with Adam,” pp. –. C. Jul. Imp. .. See also C. Jul. Imp. .. Both these references are quoted by Couenhoven, “St. Augustine’s Doctrine,” p. .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

were carnally concupiscent at birth, Augustine reasoned that all human beings, even newborns, always had eros-love for something: this conclusion stemmed from his conviction that the desire for happiness was universal – all human beings wanted happiness, even newborn babies, and consequently, they all had eros-love for something since eros-love, arose from the thoughts that we had about the features of the happy life. Since eudaimonism accepted that the love that was virtue was something which human beings needed to acquire in the course of their lives, through the exercise of reason, it followed that the love that was present in everyone from birth was not caritas, but carnal concupiscentia. Thus, when Augustine tried to recollect his own earliest infancy, he accepted that sin had been present in it and that this sin had taken the form of eros-love for something temporal. He speculated that as an infant he had had too great a desire, either for temporal things which were beneficial to him, such as his nurse’s milk, or for temporal things which were harmful to him (in this case, too much of his nurse’s milk). In either case, as a baby, his sin lay in the eros-love that he had felt for something temporal. In this way, Augustine found that original sin, the “sin that is the punishment for sin,” was concupiscentia: merely loving with this love was sinful. In a phrase similar to that used above, in Against Julian, he called carnal concupiscence the “disobedience . . . given in retribution for the disobedience of the sinner.” No human being ‘began’ to love temporal things; rather, temporal things were the objects of our love from the very first moment that we loved anything, that is, from our very first moment of life. Hence, right from the beginning of our lives we were sinners. We would love different temporal things in the course of our lives, as Augustine illustrated with reference to his own life in Confessions, but we would always love something and this thing would always be temporal, unless we became Christians and received the divine gift of the love that was virtue. Thus, his claim that virtue was one kind of love had its counterpart in his claim that original sin, the sin present in us from infancy, was another kind of love. The new life started when people converted to Christianity

 

Conf. ... C. Jul. ... See also Civ. Dei .., “the retribution for disobedience is simply disobedience itself.”

The Nature of Sin



and were born again at baptism, loving with the love that was virtue; the old life had its commencement at our natural birth, and this was marked by our love for temporal things, the love that was vice. Carnal concupiscence was itself a sin, and Augustine considered that it implicated every human adult in the commission of further sins. Thus, he drew a distinction between original sin and personal sins, which he called “voluntary” sins. Babies and children before the age of reason were incapable of committing personal sins – they were guilty of no sin besides the original sin of having eros-love for temporal things. Upon reaching adulthood, however, all our voluntary actions possessed a moral character and they possessed this moral character in one of two ways: either they involved doing an outward deed which was itself morally neutral, in which case the voluntary action was virtuous or vicious depending upon whether our love was virtue or sin, or the voluntary action in question involved doing an outward deed which was a “sin in itself,” like murder, theft, or adultery – in that case, the action was doubly sinful: it was sinful both because our love was sinful and because the outward thing itself was sinful. Hence, Augustine’s view was that, from adulthood, the sin of loving temporal things caused us to act sinfully in one or other of these two ways. As discussed in Chapter , he used  Corinthians : to explain how we might give all our possessions to the poor or even sacrifice our lives for other people, but, if the love present in us when we did these things was the sinful love of temporal things, including the love of ourselves and other people as temporal things, then our action would be sinful, whereas the same outward deed performed by a person who loved the true God would be part of a virtuous action. By now, it should not be necessary to stress that Augustine thought that having eros for temporal things was compatible with doing all these morally neutral, outward deeds, such as giving away all our possessions to the needy or other acts of self-sacrifice. He did not think that the vicious love of temporal things led us inevitably to socially destructive conduct or to conduct which differed in any outward respect from the conduct of the virtuous. In particular, loving perishable things or things which were beyond our immediate powers of control made us vicious, but it did not necessarily make us doers of things which were sins in



See Div. Qu. .: the old man pursued “carnal and temporal goods” and the new one pursued “spiritual and eternal goods.”



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

themselves. Outwardly, the lives of the virtuous and vicious could be completely identical: this point deserves stressing because of the tendency among modern commentators to suppose that by ‘sinful actions’ Augustine meant outward things which could never be performed by the virtuous. On the contrary, for him, the outward aspect of our actions could be either sinful in itself or morally neutral, but our actions themselves would always be either sins or good deeds. A sinful action might involve doing some outward thing which was sinful in itself or something which was morally neutral: in the latter case, virtuous people would do the same outward thing since the action in question would be virtuous or sinful simply on account of the love present in it, and on no other account at all. As discussed already, his views in this respect were informed by the eudaimonist insight that human beings were ruled by the desire to live in complete accordance with human nature. As rational beings we were all capable of understanding that this was our goal and that living in accordance with human nature meant living in accordance with reason. Living in accordance with reason involved living socially, or, in other words, treating all other human beings with the same consideration with which we treated our nearest and dearest. This included giving to each human being their due of social and political goods. Hence, he did not suppose that those who had eros-love for temporal things – including the love of domination and the vicious self-love found among all sinners – would necessarily have a tendency to unsociable behaviour. On the contrary, he held that the desire for happiness provided everyone with a motive to seek others’ good as an end in itself, since reason taught all of us that the happy life was one in which we desired other people’s welfare in this way. Our temporal loves might conflict with, or complement, this rational preference for sociable conduct. If they complemented it, then sociable conduct would ensue; if they conflicted with it, then Augustine held that we might opt to act unsocially, or we might not – we would be forced to choose. He offered a detailed discussion of the factors influencing this choice with reference to his own youthful theft of pears (discussed in the next chapter). For present purposes, it has been established that loving temporal things, in Augustine’s eyes, was entirely compatible with freely choosing sociable behaviour. For him, carnal concupiscence was always a sin; loving with this love made all the actions that we accomplished sinful actions; but loving with this love could nonetheless lead us freely to choose to lead thoroughly sociable lives and to do all the other outward things that the virtuous also did.

The Nature of Sin



    Carnal concupiscence was original sin: all the unbaptised were guilty on account of this sin, even if they did not live to adulthood and so never added any other sins to this sin. Original sin – the sin of eros for temporal things – was forgiven everyone at baptism, along with all a person’s prebaptismal sins. Augustine explained that our sins were forgiven at baptism because of the presence in us of caritas: without this love even a baptised person remained guilty of carnal concupiscence and guilty of all their past, personal sins as well. He made this point particularly in relation to the Donatists and the issue of whether or not they needed to receive another baptism. Augustine accepted that the Donatists were heretics, and he knew that they had received baptism within the Donatist church, which raised the question of whether they ought to receive another baptism once they became Catholic Christians. Augustine found that they should not, but he also found that the Donatists, as heretics, had always lacked eros for the true God – in other words, they had always failed to think of the true God as the highest good, in having whom was all happiness. For this reason, he found that their sins remained unforgiven, despite the fact of their baptism. The Donatists’ baptism was Christ’s baptism, and so it did not need to be repeated, but it was “profitless” until they entered the Catholic Church and received “the laying on of hands.” This laying on of hands bestowed on them the divine gift of charity; and so now “they began to receive profit for the remission of sins and the sanctification of their lives from that sacrament, which, while without the pale of the Church, they possessed in vain.” In making this point, Augustine drew, once again, on  Corinthians :, with its claim that without caritas, everything was profitless: even the Donatists’ baptism had been profitless for the forgiveness of sins because they had lacked charity. Without this love, God simply did not forgive a person’s sins. A person received the Holy Spirit’s gift of caritas; God then forgave all the personal sins (the sinful actions) which that person had been guilty of prior to baptism and also forgave original sin, the sin of eros-love for temporal things. The guilt for all these sins, however, would “return upon” a person as soon as they ceased to love with caritas.  

  Bapt. ... Bapt. ... Ibid. See also Bapt. ... Bapt. .., “For that sins which have been remitted do return upon a man where there is no brotherly love is most clearly taught by our Lord.”



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

The remission of sins was extended to all who believed in Christ – the fact that Augustine saw caritas as the basis for this remission indicates that, for him, believing in Christ was really one and the same as thinking of the true God as the highest good and so loving with caritas. At baptism, a person received caritas, and caritas was virtue: to be virtuous was to think of the Christian God as the highest good, which meant to love the true God and to love self and neighbour correctly as well. At the same time, Augustine held that at baptism, God forgave, but did not remove, carnal concupiscence: carnal concupiscence remained in a person, but this did not make a person at once virtuous and vicious, because, in those who possessed caritas, carnal concupiscence was forgiven, meaning that it was no longer a sin (“although the law of sin remains with its concupiscence, the guilt thereof is done away through the grace of the sacrament”). In this way, Augustine maintained that baptised people continued to have eros-love for temporal things while being virtuous: they now loved eternal things as well as temporal ones, but carnal concupiscence was no longer a sin in them. Their eros-love for temporal things had been forgiven them and so was no longer a sin; nonetheless, it continued to exist alongside the love that was virtue. How did he think that these two incompatible loves could remain in one person? In particular, how could two contradictory thoughts about the nature of happiness exist together in one person at one and the same time? Augustine’s explanation of this drew on the ancient idea that the soul possessed more than one “part.” In common with many ancient philosophers (he cited Varro as an authority), he regarded the human soul as divided into two main parts, that part which human beings shared with animals and that part which was uniquely human. This latter part included the mind or reason, the possession of which made human beings ‘better’ than the animals. Augustine believed that this idea of the soul’s different parts was also found in the New Testament – for example, in Romans :, “With the mind I serve the law of God, but in flesh the law of sin.” Augustine held, further, that the highest part of the soul, the mind, was itself divided into different parts. He discussed these different parts or

 

 Pecc. Mer. ... See also ... Civ. Dei ... Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind (London: Duckworth, ), pp. –, discusses Augustine’s view of the ‘parts’ of the soul, a view he shared with other ancient philosophers. O’Daly, pp. –, finds that, exceptionally among ancient thinkers, Augustine divided the rational part of the soul into five grades.

The Nature of Sin

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grades in On the Magnitude of the Soul. In particular, the discursive or “active” reason was located at one level, while the higher or “contemplative” reason, with which we knew God, was located at a higher level. He made this point in Against Faustus: “so in the soul itself the reason is superior by the law of nature to the other parts which are found also in the beasts; and in reason itself, which is partly contemplation and partly action, contemplation is unquestionably the superior part. For in this (in hac enim) is the image of God.” This understanding of the soul allowed Augustine to find that carnal concupiscence remained in the baptised. His reasoning here, however, was complex. It involved a number of insights: first, that each part of the soul contributed something to completing our picture of the happy life – that is, that each part of the soul contributed something to shaping our loves. Yet it was not until our thoughts about happiness were shaped by our higher reason in addition to our soul’s other parts that we would form a picture of the happy life which was correct – that is, we would love only temporal things until we loved the true God. Finally, he held that these mistaken thoughts about happiness, formed while our higher, contemplative reason failed to influence our thinking about happiness, stayed with us as habits of thought even after we had formed the correct understanding of happiness. They found their home in our memories, where they continued to exist among our memories’ contents – hence, there was a sense in which we continued to have these thoughts. In this way, Christians would have two or more contradictory ways of thinking about happiness present in them at the same time: they would have the mistaken thoughts about happiness which had become habitual to them and which had their home in the memory, and they would also have their new thoughts about happiness, which had their home in the higher reason. In other words, they would always have old loves and new loves. This allowed Augustine to maintain that among Christians, carnal concupiscence persisted alongside caritas. It is important to emphasise that Augustine did not see this analysis of the different parts of the soul as entailing that human beings would

 

C. Faust. .. For Augustine’s understanding of memory, see O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, “Memory,” pp. –. O’Daly states that for Augustine, images or thoughts continue to exist in our memories – we can recall thoughts or images only because these continue to exist in the memory (see pp.  and ).



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

necessarily be confused in their thoughts. Moreover, as discussed already, he understood that different pictures of the happy life could be consistent with choosing the same course of outward conduct. For instance, with their “active” reason, human beings could reach the insight that the happy life was social – such an insight was of course correct, but it was not a complete insight into the nature of human happiness. A person could possess this insight but still have a mistaken notion of the happy life, since they might mistakenly suppose that the praises of other human beings, given for sociable conduct, were needed for happiness. If that person later came to the insight (common to Christians, Platonists, and Stoics alike) that nothing external to human beings in the world of the senses was needed for happiness, then they would form a new picture of the happy life, in which receiving others’ praises was no longer viewed as necessary. Yet the habit of loving human praise would remain with this person so that they would often have to contend against this habit. Yet upon coming to this new insight into the happy life, a person would not be faced with conflicting thoughts about what outward actions to do: both ways of thinking about happiness would lead a person to choose only sociable conduct – the question was whether or not this person would do these outward things while consenting to the thought that the human praises received for this sociable conduct were important for true happiness. The new way of thinking about happiness established that this was not so, but the habitual way of thinking about happiness remained in this person, tempting them to agree that the praise of others was needed for the happy life. Habits of thought could be broken, but this would take time and effort; moreover, as will be seen, Augustine held that people would never be fully free from their habits of thought about happiness during their earthly lives. The following explores these different claims in turn. Together, they allowed Augustine to defend his view that conflicting thoughts about happiness could exist in a person at one and the same time, with the result that caritas and carnal concupiscentia would always be present together in every Christian.

     Augustine described the parts of the soul in On the Magnitude of the Soul. He explained that the animal part of the soul consisted of the “soul’s power in the body” while its non-animal part consisted of the soul’s

The Nature of Sin



power “in itself” and “before God.” The soul’s inferior or animal part corresponded to the first and second degrees of the soul described in On the Magnitude of the Soul: this was the part of the soul which experienced physical sensations (pain or pleasure, etc.) and which, through these sensations, perceived the world external to the human body. It was also the part of the soul which dreamed (“the soul withdraws itself at certain intervals of time from these senses and . . . goes over the manifold and disconnected likenesses which it took in through the senses and all this is sleeping and dreaming”) and which sought the continuance of the human species (“it provides not only for the generation of offspring, but also for their care, protection and nourishment”). In other words, all those thoughts and experiences common to other animals took place in this part of the soul. Augustine did not underestimate the complexity of this part of the soul. He was clear, for example, that a kind of memory belonged to it (“For even the beasts and the birds have memory also, else would they not be able to find their holes or nests again”). Animals, unlike human beings, did not possess reason, but they nonetheless possessed non-rational thought processes. This included memory, whereby they formed habits or customs. Consequently, the animal part of the human soul likewise possessed this kind of memory and so could likewise become accustomed to certain things. Augustine also held that love belonged to this part of the soul as well: “Nor is it the case, since the mind alone can know, that thus it alone can love. For love is a kind of desire, and we see that desire is also present in other parts of the soul.” The lower or animal part of the soul contained thought processes, loves, and memories. Loving something, in the sense of eros, involved thinking that we must possess that thing in order to live happily; hence, this part of the soul likewise contained thoughts about the nature of human happiness. Indeed, Augustine held that everyone’s thoughts about happiness were shaped at first primarily by this animal  





Quant. .. Sarah Catherine Byers, Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –, finds that Augustine used the terms “inferior parts” and “vicious parts” interchangeably. Quant. .. Lib. Arb. .., “We see that we have many things in common not only with the beasts but also with plants and trees.. . . To seek bodily pleasures and to avoid pain is the whole endeavour of animal life.”  Conf. ... Div. Qu. ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

part of the soul: in particular, this was the part of the soul which shaped the view of the happy life found among babies and very young children. The animal part of the soul taught us to seek bodily pleasures and to avoid bodily pain, since this “is the whole endeavour of animal life.” Without the insights provided by reason, however, we interpreted our animal love of pleasure and hatred of pain as the love of temporal pleasure and hatred of temporal pain: that is, we sought the happy life in the pleasure, and freedom from pain, of our temporal bodies. Since babies and very young children were unable to exercise their reason, their thoughts about happiness always took this form: they were guided by the animal part of the soul in their thinking about happiness, and hence their picture of the happy life was necessarily incorrect. It was incorrect not because the thoughts about happiness naturally found in the animal part of the soul were themselves incorrect – Augustine firmly maintained that human happiness did indeed involve bodily pleasure and freedom from bodily pain; rather, children’s picture of the happy life was incorrect because the thoughts about happiness naturally found in the animal part of the soul remained incomplete. Even our animal soul provided us with some accurate guidance as to human happiness: with the animal part of the soul, we naturally desired the satisfaction of our bodily desires and so we were correct in thinking that the happy life was the life in which these desires were satisfied. Nonetheless, we needed the insight, which reason alone could provide, that no temporal thing could truly satisfy our bodily desires. Without this insight (reached by the active reason), we would seek to satisfy these desires with merely temporal things – temporal food, or temporal pleasure, and so on; without reason, we assumed that our animal love of pleasure, and so on, would be satisfied in temporal pleasures, and this became our whole picture of the happy life. Hence, while we were guided by this part of the soul alone in our thoughts about the nature of human happiness, we would be sinners: we would incorrectly conceive of human happiness as consisting in the possession of the health and pleasure of our temporal bodies, meaning that this would be what we loved. The part of the soul which was uniquely human corresponded to the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh degrees described in On the Magnitude of the Soul. Reason was located here, both the lower, active reason and the higher, contemplative reason. Augustine explained,  

Lib. Arb. ... On Augustine’s use of mens for the higher or best part of the soul, see O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, p. .

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however, that our uniquely human powers were not limited to our powers of reasoning. On the contrary, the uniquely human part of the soul possessed not only reason, but also the powers of “play and jest.” The third degree of the soul was where the soul’s uniquely human powers began. The lower, active reason belonged to the soul’s third degree since this was where we reasoned about earthly affairs and thereby produced all the uniquely human achievements in engineering, science, language, politics, and the arts. In other words, this part of the soul, which was shared by “the good and the wicked” alike, allowed human beings to bring order to temporal affairs, master the natural world, and create beautiful things. This part of the soul, however, also contained non-rational features such as our power of play. Augustine explained elsewhere that these nonrational, but uniquely human, features of the soul also included the love of praise and domination: “There are some things which do not seem to occur in animals yet they do not belong to the higher part of human nature, such as jesting and laughing. Whoever judges rightly of human nature will hold these to be human qualities certainly, but to belong to the lower part of man. Then there is love of praise and glory and ambition to dominate.” The human soul, unlike the animal soul, could laugh, seek praise, and desire to dominate. These were not qualities which would be found in the best part of the human soul (the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh degrees) but neither did they belong to its animal part. Augustine indicated in On the Magnitude of the Soul that these qualities were naturally found in the soul’s third degree, where active reason was also found and which was shared by the virtuous and vicious alike. Hence, once again, Augustine was clear that love (and presumably memory too) belonged to this intermediate level of the soul. We formed thoughts about the happy life with this level of the soul too, some but not necessarily all of which would be shaped by the active reason. The animal part of the soul naturally contained the love of bodily pleasure and freedom from pain, so that with this part of the soul, we naturally loved the health of our bodies; this next level of the soul contained the natural love of play, domination, and glory, meaning that this part of the soul contained the thought that these things were needed for human happiness. Again, these thoughts and loves were not in themselves incorrect; yet, without the guidance of reason, we would always seek these things in



Quant. ..



Ibid.



Lib. Arb. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

temporal things – we would seek happiness in temporal domination or temporal glory. That is, without the guidance of reason, our love for these things would be carnal concupiscence. As Augustine indicated when discussing his own childhood in Book  of Confessions, children rapidly came to use that part of the soul which was distinctively human; that is, they rapidly ascended to the soul’s third degree. Their thoughts about happiness, however, were not yet shaped by the active reason; nonetheless, they were shaped by other things present in this uniquely human part of the soul, such as the desire for play and for praise and for domination. In this way, children began to use the soul at its third degree, but this part of the soul was not fully available for use until we reached early adulthood, the age of reason, at which point we were able to employ the active reason as well in our thinking about the nature of human happiness. Again, when children pictured the happy life as involving play or praise, or even domination, they were not incorrect – we have seen that Augustine thought that there was a sense in which all these things, and the love of all these things, had a place in human happiness. Nonetheless, seeking to form a complete picture of happiness based only upon this partial insight, children necessarily formed a mistaken notion of the happy life – in particular, like the young Augustine, they thought that happiness resided in the temporal version of these things, in particular, in the praises of their parents or teachers, in entertaining literature, or in victory over their peers at games. The reason placed human beings above the animals, but the reason was itself divided into its active and contemplative parts. The active part of the reason, along with those non-rational but distinctively human features, like the love of praise and the love of play, was found at the soul’s third degree. Importantly, as Augustine emphasised in On the Magnitude of the Soul, virtue was not located in this part of the soul. Nonetheless, as Augustine indicated in Against Faustus, it was fitting (in accordance with our human nature and hence with human happiness) that the active reason ruled over both our animal love of pleasure, and so on, and our more developed love of domination, praise, or jest, “for when such desires are not subject to reason, they make us miserable.” The result of subjecting these desires to the active reason would be the correct ordering of our external affairs – our outward lives would conform to reason; yet this would not be, in itself, enough for virtue, since virtue required that  

Conf. ..–., .., and ... Lib. arb. ...



C. Faust. ..

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

our inward lives likewise conformed to the correct, rational order, and, as indicated in the passage from Against Faustus, this required, in addition, that the contemplative reason ruled over the active reason. When the active reason ruled over these lower parts, it would subject things like the love of pleasure or of domination to rational insights. Some of the rational insights which Augustine thought could be arrived at by the active reason have been discussed already: they included things like the insight that the happy life was social and the insight that nothing external to us in the temporal world was needed for happiness. When people reached these insights, they would see that their natural loves, whether of pleasure, praise, or domination, could never be satisfied in any transient or perishable thing. This was what was meant by the active reason ruling over these lower parts: people would stop thinking of the happy life as a matter of this kind of pleasure, praise, or domination; their active reason would teach them that such things had no contribution to make to human happiness. That is, like the Stoics and Platonists, their reason would affirm that nothing transient or perishable could possibly make them happy, but yet they would be no better than bravely miserable in the midst of pain and loss in this life since they would have no hope for a life in which they would have everything which they naturally loved, whether permanent freedom from bodily pain, or friendship which would never end, and so on. Thus, employing our active reason in our thinking about happiness was only a step towards the correct conception of the happy life: living in accordance with the active reason could not make us either virtuous or happy since, as Augustine showed in the case of the Stoics and Platonists, even when we realised that nothing external to us in the temporal world had a place in the happy life, we would necessarily continue to locate happiness in this temporal life, and we would necessarily continue to love ourselves and others as temporal things. At the third degree, the reason possessed many correct insights about what human beings needed for happiness, but human beings nonetheless gave assent to an incorrect picture of human happiness, and so their love remained carnal concupiscence. This would remain the case until the insights provided by the active reason were themselves governed by the insights provided by the higher, contemplative reason. Hence, when we used the powers of the soul only



C. Faust. ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

at its third degree, we could never love with the love that was virtue; we would always remain vicious in loving temporal things. The active reason would lead us to some important conclusions about the nature of human happiness, but the true conception of human happiness – which required the further insight that the Christian God was the highest good in fully knowing whom we would be happy – would always be hidden from it: as discussed already, Augustine’s view was that such an insight simply could not be reached by rational inquiry at all. In order for our picture of human happiness to be correct, the active reason’s conclusions about the nature of human happiness must themselves be supplemented by the contemplative reason; that is, we needed the additional insight, which was given to the higher reason only by grace, that the Christian God (the God who was the giver of virtue) was the true God. When our higher reason possessed the thought that the Christian God was the highest good, then our picture of the happy life would be correct: not only would we not seek happiness in anything external to us in the temporal world, but we would also now seek happiness in possessing the true God and so seek to possess both ourselves and others as eternal things. Thus, Augustine explained that virtue began at the soul’s fourth degree, and grew through its fifth, sixth, and seventh degrees, as described in On the Magnitude of the Soul. For this reason, he held that “moral goodness begins” only when the soul made use of its powers at the fourth degree. These degrees concerned the powers of the contemplative reason, the soul’s highest part; but evidently love was proper to this part of the soul as well (see Augustine’s comment that “the mind . . . can know .. [thus it] can love”): Augustine indicated in On the Magnitude of the Soul that it was with this part of the mind that people first began to love and know God. Hence, he was clear that only Christians made use of the highest powers of the soul. Non-Christians evidently possessed this highest part of the soul, but it provided them with no insights into the nature of human happiness, and so they did not love with this part of the soul at all: hence, they possessed no moral goodness, but were in every respect vicious. In this way, Augustine’s notion of the different parts of the soul allowed him to explain how it was that people could be mistaken in their



Quant. ..



Div. Qu. ..

The Nature of Sin

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thinking about happiness: happiness was the life in complete accordance with human nature and yet people could be confused about what this meant, while all the while having in their natures a guide which could lead them to the very brink of understanding correctly what was involved in being happy. The insight that the Christian God was the highest good was provided by grace alone; it was bestowed upon our higher reason by the Holy Spirit, and (as Augustine believed by the time he wrote the Confessions), God Himself would lead us to cry out to Him for help, to which God responded with the gift of the love that was virtue. Nonetheless, in leading us to this cry for help, God made use of the conclusions that we ourselves reached through the application of our active reason, when we applied it to understanding our human nature and the world around us. Applying our active reason would lead us to see that the happy life must be the life in which we did not suffer in the body in any way, or even fear bodily suffering, and it would also lead us to see that we would never enjoy such a state while we existed in our temporal bodies; likewise, our active reason would lead us to see that the happy life was social and that nothing external to the mind in the temporal world could make us happy. Furthermore, when we employed the active reason, we would be led by God to know Him as the giver of wisdom, and hence as incorporeal, and so on. Yet when our active reason possessed these insights but failed to know who the true God was, our conception of human happiness and virtue would remain incorrect. It was not enough for our thoughts about happiness to be governed by the active reason; these rational thoughts about happiness must themselves be governed by the contemplative reason in order for us to possess the true conception of the happy life. Our thoughts about happiness needed to be transformed by the insight that the God of Christianity was the highest good; only then would we know what virtue was and love with the love that was virtue. Before turning to the issue of how Augustine thought our mistaken thoughts about happiness became habits in our souls, it is important to conclude this section by looking in more detail at his description of the soul’s powers at its fourth degree, powers which he held were employed only by Christians. This is because, when describing the fourth degree of the soul in On the Magnitude of the Soul, Augustine described it in terms which could easily be taken as a description of our external, social lives. He stated, for example, that it was at the fourth degree, unique to Christians, that the soul dared “to esteem human society, to desire for another nothing that it would not wish for itself; to obey the authority

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

and the laws of wise men.” These statements might seem to conflict with what has been said above about the third degree of the soul as the stage at which human beings were able to organise their external lives in accordance with rational principles. In other words, these statements could be read as Augustine’s denial that non-Christians, who, by definition, possessed no moral goodness, could act sociably towards each other and obey fair laws in the regulation of their external conduct. In fact, I think these statements need to be read in the context of what Augustine said elsewhere about true sociability as involving fellowship based upon not our temporal natures, but the image of God: his view was that this alone allowed a truly universal human society to exist, since it alone allowed fellowship to exist between all the living and those who, having died on earth, now lived with God. In this sense, Christians alone “esteemed” human society, since only they saw themselves as fellowshipping with all the living, on earth and in heaven. In having a purely temporal basis for their relationships, non-Christians actually failed to esteem fellowship with the whole of humanity, since they separated themselves from those human beings who no longer shared their temporal natures: their view of human society was limited to the living on earth, when human society was actually a matter of both those who lived on earth and those who lived in heaven. Hence, Christians alone esteemed human society because they alone did not cut out of their vision of society that part of humanity which now lived with God. Non-Christians, in contrast, scorned human society because they scorned being in society with that part of humankind which lived not on earth, but in heaven. A similar construction can be put on Augustine’s claim that it was only at the soul’s fourth degree that we began to want for others what we wanted for ourselves. As discussed already, Augustine held that there was a sense in which human beings could desire to harm themselves: they did this when they were mistaken about the nature of true human happiness, so that, in seeking happiness, they actually sought what would make them miserable – this was to love ourselves incorrectly and, in this sense, to hate ourselves. Hence, he did not understand the command to desire for others nothing that we would not desire for ourselves as fulfilled merely by seeking for others what we sought for ourselves, but rather by seeking good things for ourselves and, hence, good things for others too. In other words, his position was arguably that obedience to this command



Quant. ..

The Nature of Sin



required us first to locate human happiness in the right place – not in the possession of merely temporal goods, or in virtue of the mind, or in the knowledge of false deities, but in the love and knowledge of the Christian God and hence in the possession of eternal things. While we sought happiness in the incorrect place, we would seek what was harmful to others, despite believing that we sought their true health. Consequently, we did not fulfil this command until we sought not some false conception of happiness for ourselves and others, but what truly constituted the happy life.

   How did this notion of the different parts of the soul allow Augustine to maintain that carnal concupiscence, the love of temporal things, persisted among the baptised? How was it possible for the soul to have an entirely correct notion of happiness and yet, at the same time, to continue to think incorrectly about happiness and so to love temporal things? How could these two contrary thoughts exist in one human being at the same time? Augustine’s explanation of how this was possible rested upon the idea that the loves formed by us while the soul remained at the third degree or lower became “habits.” He understood our habits as the non-rational thoughts that were lodged in our memories. In the same way that animals came to remember a particular tree or burrow as ‘home,’ human beings came to remember a particular temporal thing as featuring in the happy life. This was not because the possession of this thing had ever made them happy, but because the thought of this thing as happy-making had itself become lodged in their memory. In this context, Augustine explained that by “memory,” he meant, specifically, memory “in its role as the link with familiar situations.” Some things we chose to commit to memory – this ability to choose to remember things was found in the distinctively human part of the soul, associated with the exercise of our deliberative reason, and not in the nonrational part (the soul’s “third” degree); other things entered our memories in a different way – as witnessed by the fact that they became familiar to us, or habitual for us. In the same way that an animal came to think of a particular place as ‘home,’ human beings came to think, with



Quant. ..



Ibid.

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

the non-rational parts of the soul, of a particular temporal existence as ‘happy.’ An animal began thinking of a particular place as home and this thought then came to exist permanently in the animal’s memory; and in the same way, human beings began thinking of particular temporal things as constituting the happy life and this thought then came to exist permanently in their memories too. The conscious thoughts of an animal were not constantly about home; and in the same way, the conscious thoughts of a human being were not constantly about this vision of happiness. Nonetheless, these thoughts themselves were never absent from the soul, but fixed there. They were fixed there because they existed permanently in the memory. In this way, our thoughts about happiness became lodged in our memories, and hence permanently present in us. If we reached the age of reason, then, depending upon the extent to which we put our active reason to use in thinking about the nature of human happiness, we would reach conclusions about the happy life which conflicted with the vision of happiness formed while we remained pre-rational. This would lead us to form new pictures of the happy life, albeit ones which would remain incorrect until our higher, contemplative reason played its part in shaping our vision of happiness. Using our active reason, we would have a more accurate understanding of the nature of human happiness, but it would still remain incorrect, since it would remain uninformed by the insights of the higher reason. Thus, in the course of their lives, human beings might form a number of different visions of the happy life, using the lower parts of their souls, and hence have a number of competing thoughts in their memories about happiness. If, however, our souls ascended beyond the third degree to the fourth degree and higher, then our picture of the happy life would finally be correct – the insights of the active reason would be completed by the insights of the contemplative reason and so our thinking about happiness would be fully rational, and hence correct. In that case, a further, and quite different, vision of happiness would be fixed in us, but this time not

 

Conf. ... See the “second degree” described in De Quantitate Animae, ., “through habit, [the soul] becomes linked to the habitat and environment of the body, and from these it undergoes separation with reluctance as though they were parts of its body.” See also De Musica .., “this habit of the soul made with flesh, through carnal affection, in the Holy Scriptures is called flesh” and ..– and ...

The Nature of Sin

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in our memory but rather in our understanding (intelligentia), the locus of all rational thoughts. This was what happened when we became virtuous – that is, when we came to think of the true God as the highest good: we finally understood the nature of human happiness. Like our memories, the thoughts present in our understanding remained with us at all times, even when we were not consciously thinking about them: even though our conscious thoughts were not turned constantly to this vision of happiness, nonetheless, the vision of happiness in our understanding was always with us as a fixture of our souls. In this way, Augustine found that two or more, contrary visions of the happy life could exist at the same time in one person. When we became virtuous, our understanding now contained the thought of God as the highest good; that is, our vision of happiness was correct and our love was caritas, the love that was virtue; but in our memories there remained the thought of temporal things as needed for happiness – our false visions of happiness stayed with us in our memory, with the result that carnal concupiscence persisted in us as well. Augustine indicated that the presence of these carnal loves in the lower part of the soul prevented us from loving God with our whole souls: people were virtuous when their minds contained the thought that God was the highest good, but they would not be perfectly virtuous so long as other thoughts about the highest good persisted in their memory (“Nor is it the case, since the mind alone can know, that thus it alone can love.. . . Therefore the soul ought to love with its other parts as well this magnificent object which must be known by the mind”). Among Christians, the understanding contained the correct picture of human happiness, with the result that they loved with the love that was virtue; but the memory also contained incorrect pictures of human happiness, with the result that they also continued to love with the love that was vice. Perfect virtue, however, required agreement between the higher and lower parts of the soul in the love for God: the love for temporal things needed to be removed from us, and this corresponded to forming new habits of thought about the true nature of happiness, which would replace our incorrect habits of thought. In short, we needed to form new  



On memory, will, and understanding, see Trin. . Conf. ... See Byers, Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation, p. , “particular soul-powers and their associated organ systems are habitually used by this attitude, and hence the attitude is ‘in’ them.” Byers finds that Plotinus is Augustine’s source for this idea. Div. Qu. ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

memories to replace these old ones; each new habit of thought would correspond to a small increase in our love for God. Augustine had no doubt that this was a laborious process. For Augustine, this explained why, although a person began to love God upon becoming a Christian, their love for God was not yet perfect: we were required to love God with our whole soul, so our love for God would remain imperfect while any love for temporal things remained in the lower parts of the soul. Hence, love for God grew as these carnal loves were removed from this part of the soul and replaced with love for God – yet, because the habit, or memory, of thinking of temporal things as needed for happiness could never be entirely removed from our memories in this life (while our souls remained mutable things), the perfect love for God was impossible on earth. Nonetheless, while the Christian’s virtue would always be imperfect in this life, its imperfection did not make Christians guilty of sin. On the contrary, the presence of the love for temporal things in the lower part of the soul was forgiven in the baptised and so was not a sin anymore. As discussed already, Augustine held that it was forgiven precisely on account of the presence of caritas in the higher part of the soul; that is, it was forgiven on account of the thought of the true God as the highest good which was present in the understanding. Thus, Augustine’s position was that even when our understanding contained the thought that God was the highest good, so that we now loved with the love that was virtue, contrary thoughts about happiness would persist in the memory, meaning that some lingering love for the satisfaction of our temporal bodily desires would remain, or perhaps some lingering love for temporal praise or temporal domination. These false thoughts about happiness in the memory would persist beside the entirely different thoughts present in the soul’s understanding. Hence, Christians would love both temporal things and eternal things; they would have both caritas and carnal concupiscentia present in their souls.

“” Augustine considered that every Christian experienced what it was like to have conflicting thoughts about happiness present concurrently in the 

Ex. Gal. –, under grace carnal desires could be removed “in many respects” (ex multis partibus), although not in “every respect” (ex omni parte). See also De Nat. et Gr. ., Div. Q. ., and Ex. Prop. Rom. .

The Nature of Sin

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memory and the understanding. But while people could explore with their reason their rational thoughts about happiness, how did they explore the non-rational thoughts that were lodged in the memory? Augustine’s answer was that we found evidence in ourselves of these non-rational thoughts through the experience of “suggestions.” For Augustine, there was a sense in which our non-rational thoughts about happiness were hidden from us. Thus, in Confessions, he indicated that he needed his hidden loves to be revealed to him so that he could ask God to remove them and thereby have his love for God – his virtue – grow. In Confessions, he quoted Psalms :, “Cleanse me, O Lord, from my hidden sins,” and later, he quoted  Corinthians :, “no man knows what is in man, but the spirit of man which is in him,” adding, “yet is there somewhat in man which not even the spirit of man which is in him knows.” He explained that this ignorance of himself was ignorance of his own ability to resist temptations, “but for myself I know not what temptations I am able to resist, and what I am not able” – implicitly, this was ignorance of the temporal loves that remained in him, and made him vulnerable to being defeated by temptation. Later in Confessions, he declared, “I cannot measure my love, so that I may come to know how much there is yet wanting in me.” Our temporal loves were hidden from us in the sense that they were hidden from our reason: when Christians thought rationally about happiness, they would not encounter any of these non-rational thoughts about happiness (meaning, the thoughts whereby they located happiness in the possession of anything perishable or temporal), and yet this did not mean that these thoughts were absent from them. Augustine gave a good illustration of what this meant in Soliloquies, the dialogue that he wrote just after his conversion. In this dialogue, he imagined himself having a conversation with his own reason. He described his goal as to know God perfectly, and accepted that this goal included the goal of knowing himself perfectly: thus, his desire was to know nothing else besides “God and the soul.” He explained that he already loved God (he had declared this in his opening prayer at the beginning of Soliloquies) and so he was unable to understand why he had not progressed to the perfect knowledge of God. Reason questioned him carefully to establish whether there was anything  

  Conf. ... Conf. ... Conf. ... Sol. .. and .., “O God . . . let me know myself and you.” See also .., “Is there anything you love besides knowledge of yourself and of God?”

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

which he loved besides God, since, until he was free of every earthly love, he would not obtain the knowledge that he sought, but Augustine was sure that he did love only God. This made sense: with his reason, he was conscious of loving only eternal things – when his mind examined itself, it could not uncover any other thoughts about happiness. Reason, however, insisted that Augustine was still “hindered by [the] birdlime” of his affection for earthly things from rising to the knowledge of God: “When you achieve the condition of finding no delight at all in earthly things, in that moment, believe me, at that point of time, you will see what you desire.” The problem, for Augustine, lay in identifying what loves for earthly things lingered in the soul’s inferior parts – without knowing this, these loves could not be eliminated. He was initially certain that he had altogether ceased to love earthly things, but reason reminded him that the night before he had thought longingly of a woman’s caresses. Until this experience, Augustine had failed to know himself well enough to recognise that sexual pleasures still held some lingering attraction for him, albeit “far, far less than they were wont to do.” He had once loved sexual pleasures and this love continued to exist in him; that is, in his memory the image of sexual pleasures as happy-making lingered on. When thinking rationally about this matter, he had sincerely believed that he loved only eternal things; this was precisely because this was the love that was present in the higher part of the soul, corresponding to the thoughts about happiness present in his understanding. Yet the thoughts about happiness present in his memory had a means of presenting themselves to his consciousness on occasion: they occurred to him through his dreams and half-awake thoughts, and these indicated to him that he continued to love temporal things. When we experienced thoughts which stood opposed to the thoughts that were present in our understanding, the only possibility was that these thoughts originated somewhere else in our souls. Augustine found that the thought that satisfying his sexual desires was necessary for happiness suddenly stole upon him and he realised that he must still love this thing, although with his understanding he considered that only eternal things were needed for happiness: he continued to love eternal things, even while experiencing the thought of sexual pleasure as needed for happiness. Augustine made reference to this experience again in Book  of Confessions. He described how, having received the virtue of continence



Sol. ...



Sol. ..–.



Ibid.

The Nature of Sin

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from God (in the garden in Milan), he found that he was not yet perfectly continent: “But there still exist in my memory. . . the images of such things as my habits had fixed there; and these rush into my thoughts, though strengthless when I am awake.. . . Where, then, is the reason which when waking resists such suggestions (talibus suggestionibus)?” During sleep, or when our minds were weary – whenever our powers of reason were at their weakest – we became vulnerable to the “suggestions” of physical pleasures which originated in the memory. It was only then that people became aware of the temporal loves present in them: when our reason was weak or asleep then we could become aware of our other thoughts about the happy life. This happened in dreams or when we were very tired or under some strain. When he wrote Confessions, Augustine recognised God’s guiding hand in evidence in all this, just as he now saw that God had been leading him to cry out for assistance in the garden in Milan. God used various means, even people’s dreams, to alert them to the lingering presence of carnal concupiscence in the lower part of the soul; and in this way, God led people to cry out to him for healing, as Augustine did in this passage. Augustine was explicit here that all healing came from God; our souls could not free themselves of carnal concupiscence. God had given continence in the garden and God gave an ever greater continence in response to these requests for help which he himself led people to make. Thus Augustine addressed himself to God: “on no account leaving what You have begun in me, complete what is imperfect in me.” Augustine gave the technical term “suggestions” to these thoughts about the happy life in our memories which were in conflict with the thoughts about happiness in our understanding. When we were near sleep, or under some strain, an external stimulus or our memories themselves acting of their accord could bring to our consciousness the thoughts about the happy life which had been formed prior to our rational thinking about happiness and which remained in our memories. The term suggestio occurs in the above passage from Confessions and in many other places in his writings. Sarah Byers has shown that this was   

Conf. ... O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, discusses Augustine’s view of dreams and the way that they indicate a person’s moral character (p. ). Conf. ... Byers, Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation. Byers states that the term “suggestion” as Augustine used it is a “technical term for motivating impression” (p. ), where a “motivating impression” is a Stoic term. Byers concludes that “the evidence suggests that Augustine knew a doxography of Stoic action theory” (p. ).



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

a technical term derived from Stoic ethical theory and that Augustine was aware of this. Suggestions took the form of an imperative to do a certain action coupled with the thought that having a particular temporal thing would make us happy. Since suggestions involved the idea that a particular temporal thing was needed for happiness, they were evidence of the continued existence of love for this temporal thing in the lower part of the soul. Augustine offered the example of a person who was fasting “and on seeing food the appetite of the palate is stirred up.” This stirring up of the appetite was the suggestion – much like Augustine’s experience of the stirring up of his sexual appetite in Soliloquies and Confessions. The suggestion that he discussed in De Sermone Domini was caused by the sight of food – this was the external stimulus without which the suggestion would not have occurred, but the suggestion itself arose because that person’s memory already contained the thought of temporal food as needed for happiness. The sight of food provoked a memory – or, alternatively, the memory itself might act spontaneously during a moment of weakness – and a person suddenly found themself thinking of the happiness to be derived from satisfying one’s hunger. What is not revealed by this passage from De Sermone Domini is that, for Augustine, as for the Stoics, this suggestion always had a propositional content: Byers has carefully established this by a study of Augustine’s sermons. Thus, in this passage, when Augustine indicated that the sight of food gave rise to the suggestion of eating, he meant, more precisely, that the sight of food gave rise to an imperative to ‘eat’ and the proposition that being free from hunger was something which would make this person happy. A fasting person was tempted not simply by thinking about eating, but by thinking about eating as a means to obtain something which was thought of as making them happy, such as freedom from hunger. That person experienced the “suggestion” of eating the food in order to relieve hunger, which involved the thought that relieving hunger was necessary for happiness.



 

Byers, in Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation, notes that Augustine is unusually sophisticated when compared with other Latin writers like Jerome or Ambrose in that he clearly understood the term suggestio as a technical philosophical term (p. ). See S. Dom. Mon. .. and Lib. Arb. ... S. Dom. Mon. ... Byers, Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation, “the suggestion ‘shows’ us the attractive thing to be obtained” (p. ). “Augustine indicates that the thoughts suggested are sentential. There is, first of all, a sentence by which the perceiver thinks that doing the action will bring happiness” (p. ).

The Nature of Sin

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Augustine also held that these suggestions were like “doubts” which stole upon us occasionally, even though our understanding was convinced that something else entirely was worthy of our love. Byers has shown how the theme of doubt and temptation was an important one in Augustine’s sermons. She argues that Augustine drew here on another aspect of Stoic ethical theory, namely, the idea of preliminary passions. The Stoics accepted that virtuous people could momentarily experience emotions, like the fear of death, which were incompatible with their rational thoughts about happiness – these were a reflex reaction to an external stimulus, like the roar of a large animal or a violent wind at sea. Byers establishes that Augustine attributed preliminary passions to an imperfection in a person’s virtue; in other words, he attributed them to a temporal love which lingered in the lower part of the soul. A person’s understanding did not think of this temporal thing (e.g., the preservation of one’s temporal existence) as necessary for happiness; and yet their reaction to this external stimulus established that this temporal love must nonetheless be present in their soul – that is, that thoughts about happiness which conflicted with the thoughts about happiness found in the understanding must be present. Augustine’s thesis was that they were present in the memory. Augustine was clear that the experience of a suggestion was itself no sin: Eve had not sinned in hearing the serpent’s words. Nonetheless, when the suggestion arose not from a third party but from one’s own memory – whether acting alone or under the impulse of an external stimulus – then the suggestion alerted a person to the presence of carnal concupiscence in them. In the case of all Christians, however, carnal concupiscence had been forgiven at baptism, so that it was no longer a sin. Hence, in their case, the suggestion alerted them not to the presence of vice but to the presence of an imperfection in their virtue. For Augustine, divine providence allowed Christians to be placed in situations in which they were tempted in some way by a suggestion in order to make people aware of the existence of this imperfection in their love for eternal things – that is, in order to alert this person to the fact that their memory still contained the thought that this temporal thing was needed for happiness. Thus, divine providence allowed Augustine’s memory to suggest to him the sweetness of a woman’s embrace: “It was thus that that most hidden

 

Ibid., “Preliminary Passions,” pp. –. Ibid., p. .



Ibid., pp. –.

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

physician pointed out to you two things, namely: what you have escaped under his guidance, and what it is that remains yet to be healed.” In this way, Augustine sought to explain how carnal concupiscence remained in a person after baptism. Christians loved eternal things, since with their understanding they accepted that the true God was the highest good; nonetheless, the suggestions, doubts, and preliminary passions which they experienced proved that they continued, at the same time, to think that the possession of temporal things mattered for happiness. These thoughts did not originate in the understanding; hence, they must originate elsewhere in the soul, and Augustine’s view was that they originated in the memory. A Christian’s understanding contained one set of thoughts about the happy life, but their memory contained another, and contrary, set of thoughts. Hence, after baptism, the love for temporal things continued to be present in Christians, in the lower part of their souls, even though they now had the love for eternal things present in them too, in their soul’s higher part.

    Christians continued to love temporal things, even though with their understanding they thought of God as the highest good and so loved eternal things. Augustine indicated that it was because of the presence of caritas, the love that was virtue, that God forgave the continued presence of carnal concupiscence. Hence, while carnal concupiscence remained in the baptised, their caritas meant that its presence in them was not a sin anymore. The fact that the existence of carnal concupiscence was no longer a sin in the baptised might be taken to mean that Augustine regarded Christians as incapable of sinning. On the contrary, he was clear that the baptised could sin. This was because he held that sin could take other forms, besides the original sin of having carnal concupiscence present in the soul. In particular, as discussed already, Augustine considered that our actions could be sins: these sinful actions were our personal, or voluntary, sins. As will be seen, he defined a sinful action as any action which was accomplished by a person while their reason consented to the thought of some temporal thing as needed for happiness. A voluntary action was any action which involved our will, the “cause” present in our actions; the 

Sol. ...

The Nature of Sin

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moral character of our will determined the moral character of the action, and the moral character of our will was in turn determined by the reason: if the reason consented to an incorrect picture of the happy life, then the will was evil, while if, instead, the reason was governed by the understanding – which happened only among Christians since it was only among Christians that the understanding contained a picture of the happy life (a picture which was necessarily correct since it resided in the understanding) – then the will was good. Among non-Christians, who loved temporal things, the reason would always consent to an incorrect picture of human happiness, and so their wills would always be evil: in refusing to give consent to the suggestion that something temporal was needed for happiness, they would always give consent to some other picture of happiness as involving something temporal. In other words, because non-Christians always loved something temporal, their wills were always evil and so all their voluntary actions were necessarily sinful too. Among Christians, however, the suggestion that something temporal was needed for happiness would always be opposed by the thought that the happy life lay in knowing God, a thought which was present in the understanding. The reason, therefore, of Christians needed to withhold its consent from temporal suggestions – withholding its consent meant that the reason was governed instead by the thoughts about happiness found in the understanding. When this happened, the will was good, with the result that a virtuous action was accomplished. Hence, writing of how a sinful action (such as the decision to eat food during a fast) came to be accomplished, Augustine described the three things “which go to complete sin: suggestion, delight and consent. Suggestion takes places either by means of memory, or by means of the bodily senses.” When a person agreed with the proposition, found in a suggestion, that satisfying hunger was necessary for happiness, then a person ‘acted’: the action was the forming of the intention to eat food during a fast. Forming this intention was a sin, since it involved the reason consenting to the idea that some temporal thing was needed for happiness. Augustine held that carrying this decision out in the flesh would be a further sin, as he illustrated with reference to Jesus’ condemnation of adultery ‘in the heart’: “The lesser justice, therefore, is not to commit adultery by carnal connection; but the greater justice of the kingdom of God is not to commit adultery in the heart.”



S. Dom. Mon. ...



S. Dom. Mon. ...

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Mann suggests that Augustine here considered that adultery which remained ‘in the heart’ was as great a sin as adultery which, having occurred in the heart, also occurred ‘in the flesh.’ In fact, this is not the case. Augustine explained here that a “lesser justice” was attached to the person whose sin remained in the heart. He did not seek to trivialise this sin: to form the intention to commit adultery if the opportunity should arise was a sinful action – it was “fully to consent to lust, so that the forbidden appetite is not restrained, but satisfied if opportunity should be given.” This was to commit a kind of adultery, namely, “adultery in the heart.” Nonetheless, actually committing adultery – committing “adultery by carnal connection” – increased a person’s sinfulness: it was, in this sense, a further sinful action. Thus, in the case of the fasting person, forming the intention of eating food, if the opportunity should arise, was one sinful action; and eating the food, having formed this intention, was a further sinful action. The first sinful action was committed “in the heart” and the second was committed in the flesh. Adultery and breaking a fast were both things which were sinful in themselves. That is, they involved outward deeds – extra-marital sex, eating during a fast – which Augustine considered were morally wrong (meaning that he thought that they could only ever be accomplished by those who loved temporal things). Yet we have seen that, for Augustine, a sinful action did not need to involve one of these external deeds which was sinful in itself – we could act sinfully and yet do something outwardly which was morally neutral, like giving money to the poor. Recognising these two ways of acting sinfully, however, did not pose a problem for his analysis of how a sinful action came to be committed. His analysis was applicable to both cases: when we experienced the suggestion of some temporal thing as worthy of our love, and consented to that suggestion, then the decision that we took to do or refrain from doing some outward deed – whether to give or not to give all our money to the poor, or to have or refrain from extra-marital sex – was a sinful action. It was a sinful action because Augustine defined a sinful action as the decision to do some outward deed which was taken by a person whose reason said ‘yes’ to the thought that some temporal thing was needed for happiness.

 

William Mann, “Augustine’s Inner-Life Ethics,” in God, Belief and Perplexity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  S. Dom. Mon. ... S. Dom. Mon. ...

The Nature of Sin

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The mere presence of carnal concupiscence was, in every nonChristian, a sin; among Christians, this sin was forgiven, yet the presence of carnal concupiscence meant that it remained possible for Christians to sin in other ways: while ever they remained carnally concupiscent, they would experience suggestions of temporal things as needed for happiness. Receiving a suggestion was not a sin, but consenting to it was a sin – it was a personal sin, meaning, a sinful action, that is, a decision in which our reason said ‘yes’ to the thought of some temporal thing as happymaking. It might also result in a further sin, namely, doing the outward deed contemplated if this outward deed was itself a sin. We sinned when we consented to carnal concupiscence – the result of this would be that we formed the decision to do or not to do some outward deed; and we sinned further when, with our reason still agreeing with the proposition that some temporal thing was needed for happiness, we carried out our decision by performing the outward deed if this outward deed was itself sinful. To form the intention of eating during a fast was a sin, and, likewise, to form the intention of giving money to the poor for the sake of human praise was also a sin; indeed, it was a sin to form the intention of giving money to the poor while consenting to a picture of human happiness which contained anything temporal (even ourselves or others as temporal things). Moreover, it was a further sin to eat during a fast, although the outward act of giving money to the poor was not itself a further sin (rather, it was something morally neutral). Augustine wrote of the possibility of Christians falling back into sin by consenting to carnal concupiscence in numerous places. For example, in his commentary on Galatians, he explained that we must not give “so much as a nod of consent” to carnal concupiscence, as well as quoting Romans : which referred to those who do not “obey” the “desires” of the mortal body. In Enchiridion, he explained that in the third state, under grace, a person “lives in justice so far as he does not yield to evil lust, but conquers it by the love of holiness.” He applied Romans : to those under grace: “There is no condemnation if carnal desires exist, but only if one gives into them and sins.” “By not consenting, however, to it, he lives by faith, wherewith he also calls upon God to help him in his

 

 Ex. Gal. –. Ench. .. Ex. Prop. Rm. . See also , “Though his carnal desires still exist, he does not serve [them] by consenting for sinning [non servit consentiendo ad faciendum peccatum].” See also C. Ep. Pel. .. and Pecc. Mer. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

contest against sin.. . . For in this, that he yields no consent, he does good.” Christians remained vulnerable to accomplishing personal sins because carnal concupiscence remained in them – the thoughts about the happy life that they had formed prior to becoming Christians remained lodged in their memories, recurring to them as suggestions. The active reason was not itself a complete guide to the nature of human happiness, although it contained many insights into the nature of the happy life, including the insight that nothing external to the mind in the world of the senses was needed for happiness. While the active reason was not a complete guide to human happiness, everything which it taught about happiness was, by definition, correct. Following our active reason would therefore take us a long way towards the complete conception of human happiness, but, ultimately, God needed to act in order for the higher reason to contain the insight that the God of Christianity was the God in knowing whom we would be happy. When this happened our understanding itself would form a picture of the happy life – prior to this, our thoughts about the happy life were not fully shaped by the reason. In other words, when this happened, we would be virtuous – our reason would have correct thoughts about God as the highest good, and we would love God “highest” and love everything else for God’s sake. In all that we did, our active or lower reason must be subject to the contemplative or higher reason – meaning that the active reason must be guided by the picture of happiness found in the understanding so that it never gave its consent to carnal suggestions. To consent to one of these suggestions that something temporal was happy-making – to say ‘yes’ to a picture of the happy life which included the possession of something temporal – was to commit a personal sin.

      After baptism, people could sin by yielding their reason’s consent to the suggestions that arose from the carnal concupiscence still present in them. When our reason yielded consent to a suggestion, then we committed a sinful action, since this was the definition of a sinful action, namely, an action in which the reason said ‘yes’ to the thought of some temporal thing as needed for happiness. What did Augustine think happened to a 

Perf. Just. .. See also De Continentia .–; De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia ., ., ., and .; and Spir. et Litt. ..

The Nature of Sin



baptised person’s caritas when they gave consent to carnal concupiscentia? As noted already, Augustine held that the reason could not give consent to the suggestion of some temporal thing as needed for happiness while also holding on to the understanding that the happy life lay in possessing God. To say ‘yes’ to the eros-love of some temporal thing was to cease to have eros-love for God since it was simply not possible for a person to understand possessing God as all-in-all for happiness while also agreeing that the happy life involved possessing something temporal. Thus, if consent was given to carnal concupiscence, then this would indicate that a person no longer had eros-love for God. Hence, it might seem straightforward to conclude that, for Augustine, when a baptised person gave consent to carnal concupiscence, they ceased to be virtuous and returned instead to the pre-baptismal state in which the guilt for all past sins, forgiven at baptism, “returned” upon them, including the guilt for having carnal concupiscence present in the soul. In other words, it might seem straightforward to conclude that Augustine held that the moment that a Christian consented to carnal concupiscence, they ceased to be a Christian – meaning that this person ceased to think of the true God as being the highest good, which was one and the same as ceasing to believe in the God of Christianity. In fact, Augustine did not consider that this was necessarily the case. Instead, he found that there was a sense in which people could remain virtuous, even while yielding this consent to carnal concupiscence – that is, even while sinning. This was how Augustine reconciled the Bible’s statements about the impossibility of being sinless, coupled with its references to people as “just.” For example, he found that the epithet “just” was truly applicable to Job (following Job :) and yet he was “a sincere and humble confessor of his own sins.” Likewise, he found that Zacharias “was a man of eminent justice,” described as such in Philippians :, and yet Hebrews :– confirmed that he, like every high priest, save Christ, was required to make a daily sacrifice for both their own sins and those of the people. there are then on earth just men, there are great men, brave, prudent, chaste, patient, pious, merciful . . . If however, there is truth – nay, because there is truth – in these words, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” ( John :) and in these “In your sight shall no man living be justified” (Ps. :), they are not



Pecc. Mer. ...



Pecc. Mer. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

without sin; nor is there one among them so proud and foolish as not to think that the Lord’s Prayer is needful to him, by reason of his manifold sins.

He made the same point in On the Spirit and the Letter, insisting that “just” people nonetheless needed to pray for the forgiveness of sins, as instructed by Christ in giving the Lord’s Prayer. Everyone sinned and yet some people who sinned never left a state of justice. But how was a person just who gave consent to carnal concupiscence, that is, how was a person just who sinned? To explore this, we need to look in more detail at how Augustine characterised the lives of those whom he understood as remaining just, or virtuous, even while they sinned. In the above passages, he found that the key characteristic of their lives was that they continually acknowledged and repented of their sinfulness and turned to God to forgive them, as witnessed by the fact that they daily prayed the Lord’s Prayer, with its request for forgiveness. The implication is that, paradoxically, people remained virtuous even while they sinned if they acknowledged and repented of their sins as they sinned: if their lives were filled with a constant sorrow over their sinfulness and reliance on God for forgiveness, then they remained virtuous, despite sinning. Yet how did this attitude amount to virtue? I think that the clue to understanding Augustine’s argument here lies in his acceptance of the eudaimonist approach to ethics. As we have seen, he accepted the eudaemonist definition of virtue as thinking of the true God as the highest good. We have seen that, for Augustine, there were two dimensions to this idea: first, to think of God as the highest good meant to cleave to God by giving God His due of praise, which meant to think of God as saviour, that is, as the one to give us first virtue and then happiness; and, second, to think of God as the highest good also meant to understand that a person would have everything needed for happiness when they possessed God. These were the two senses in which God was “happy-making”: the first understood loving God as philia, and the second understood loving God as eros, the emotion that we felt for whatever we viewed as featuring in the happy life. We have seen that, for Augustine, if we had eros for the true God, the God of Christianity, then we would also always have the highest philia for God since we would give Him His due of praise: it was only when we recognised that the true God was the God who saved sinners (and hence 

Pecc. Mer. ...



Spir. et Litt. ..

The Nature of Sin



understood the Christian teaching about Christ), so that we praised God as doing everything to save us, that we would have the highest philia for God and also have the true God as the object of our eros-love. Yet the reverse was not the case: giving God His due of praise did not necessarily mean that we had eros for God: we could recognise God as saviour and yet fail to think of the happy life as the life in which we would know God. Augustine was clear that those people who sinned in consenting to carnal concupiscence – that is, who sinned in agreeing that some temporal thing was needed for happiness – had necessarily ceased to have eros-love for God: as discussed already, to say ‘yes’ to the suggestion of some temporal thing as needed for happiness was incompatible with continuing to think of the happy life as the life in which God was known. Yet saying ‘yes’ to this suggestion was not incompatible with continuing to love God in the sense of philia, that is, in the sense of giving Him His due of praise: we could consent to carnal concupiscence and yet continue to think of God as saviour. I suggest that this insight allowed Augustine to explain how virtue could be present in a sinner’s life: a person could consent to the suggestion of some temporal love, but continue to think of God as the saviour of sinners, the one through whose action the happy life would be attained. This would happen if that person both recognised that consenting to carnal concupiscence was a sin and had struggled to resist giving that consent: in that case, a person would recognise that they could not attain the happy life without Christ’s saving work which won the grace whereby God restored sinners to eros-love for Him and forgave them their sins. When we not only knew and repented of our own sinfulness even as we sinned, but, more importantly, gave God His due of praise by recognising ourselves as sinners and Him as saviour, then we would be inspired to pray the Lord’s Prayer. Augustine’s message was that such people loved God in the sense of relying upon God to save them, a love which was present in them even as they sinned and which led them regularly to say the Lord’s Prayer and to give alms. People who thought of God as saviour loved God in the sense of philia; that is, they cleaved to Him with due praise, even if, through giving their consent to the suggestion of some carnal love, they had ceased to have eros-love for God, and it was only these people in whose souls God restored eros-love for Himself and whose sins were forgiven. Thus, arguably, Augustine held that people could sin while still having caritas, understood in this case as the correct philia-love for God. Yet, even so, this does not in itself explain why he thought these people



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

remained virtuous. The Stoic-Platonic tradition understood virtue as having correct thoughts about the identity of the highest good; for Augustine, this meant that people who failed to have the Christian God as the object of their eros-love, and loved something temporal instead, did not have correct thoughts about the highest good – while they might have the correct philia-love for God, through praising Him as was His due (by understanding Him as doing everything to save them), virtue involved, in addition, understanding that the happy life was the life in which the Christian God was known. Yet in finding that if sinners humbly relied upon God for the restoration of their eros-love for Him and for the forgiveness of their sins, then they would remain virtuous even while they sinned, Augustine implied that virtue could consist simply in having the correct philia-love for God. Can this be reconciled with the understanding of virtue outlined above? Arguably, it can. We have seen that, for Augustine, as for the StoicPlatonic tradition of eudaimonism, the definition of virtue as having correct thoughts about the identity of the highest good was itself informed by the insight that virtue referred to whatever in our wills guaranteed that we would live fully in accordance with our human nature. I argue that this definition gave Augustine grounds for regarding loving God in the sense of philia, that is, in the sense of “cleaving” to Him with due praise, as sufficient for virtue. This is because Augustine held that God would not “impute” to people those sins which they committed while sorrowing over and humbly repenting of their sinfulness, as witnessed by their prayers and alms-giving. “We reply that long ago it was declared in opposition to the proud, ‘Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute (imputabit) sin’ (Ps. :). Now He does not impute it to those who say to Him in faith, ‘Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.’” If God did not impute these sins to these people, then this meant that there was nothing which would require cleansing before they could enter the happy life: the result would be that this attitude of humble acknowledgement of one’s sinfulness and reliance upon God for forgiveness in itself guaranteed that a person would live the happy life, and so it was possible to regard this attitude in itself as virtue. It is worth emphasising that regarding this attitude itself as virtue was only possible by making use of the eudaemonist understanding of virtue as whatever in our wills



Perf. Just. .. See also Perf. Just. . and ..

The Nature of Sin



ensured that we would enjoy the happy life. This attitude of humble repentance and confession of sins brought with it God’s gracious guarantee not to impute to us our sins; hence, the presence of this attitude in our wills formed our virtue, understood as the voluntary state which ensured our entrance to the happy life. Yet this attitude was none other than philia-love for the Christian God since it referred to recognising God as the saviour of sinners. In other words, if people consented to carnal concupiscence while still cleaving to God as the saviour, then God would restore them to eros-love for Him and refrain from imputing their sin to them, so that there remained nothing in them which needed to be cleansed or changed before they could commence to live the happy life. Hence, to love God in the sense of praising God as the saviour was to be virtuous, in accordance with eudaimonism’s most basic definition of virtue, since this love in itself guaranteed that we would one day enjoy the happy life – it guaranteed that we would be restored to eros-love for the true God, and so eventually come to know and love God perfectly, at which point we would be happy. I argue that this is the sense in which Augustine accepted that people could sin and yet remain virtuous. Augustine did not claim that the baptised sinned all the time, that is, that they always gave consent to carnal concupiscence. On the contrary, we have seen that he held that baptised people did have eros for the Christian God. In writing of sin among the baptised, Augustine simply recognised that this eros-love for God was not a constant in their lives: they fell from eros-love for God, then God restored them to this love, then they fell again, and so on – that is, sometimes they consented to carnal suggestions and sometimes they continued in eros-love for God. He recognised that this might be taken to mean that Christians flickered in and out of virtue, so that at any given moment they might be found to deserve eternal damnation. In fact, Augustine did not claim that people could fall in and out of virtue in this way, despite recognising that Christians frequently sinned in consenting to the thought that something temporal was needed for happiness. Instead, he found that Christians remained virtuous even when they sinned. He reached this conclusion by finding that, at those moments when people sinned through consenting to carnal concupiscence, they remained virtuous, provided they continued to love God in the sense of philia for Him as saviour. This involved finding that accepting the uniquely Christian message that God was the saviour of sinners – which involved recognising one’s sinfulness and relying on God to restore one to



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

eros-love for Him and to forgive one’s sins – in itself sufficed for virtue: cleaving to God as the saviour was virtue because doing this in itself ensured that we would one day know God and so live the happy life. Cleaving to God as saviour assured us of one day reaching the happy life because God Himself chose graciously not to impute to people the sins that they committed while humbly praying for forgiveness – that is, while humbly acknowledging their dependence on Him for salvation. Hence, sometimes people were virtuous through thinking of God as the highest good, in knowing whom they would be happy, and at other times, they sinned by failing to think of God in this way, but remained virtuous through continuing to give God the correct philia-love by recognising that, as sinners, they depended on Him for salvation. Thus, while Augustine was clear that Christians often gave consent to carnal concupiscence, he did not take this to mean that Christians were continually falling back into their pre-baptismal state, in which they lacked virtue and so faced eternal damnation. That is, he did not think that people were continually losing and regaining their Christian faith. Rather, he developed the notion that people could be at once virtuous and sinful – at once a Christian and yet fail in their eros-love for God – and he was able to do this because of his complex, eudaimonist understanding of the love that was virtue: the thought of God as saving sinners, which was the core of Christian belief, could remain in a person, even as they gave consent to the thought that something temporal was needed for happiness. This chapter has focused on two distinctive features of Augustine’s thought concerning the nature of sin: namely, his view that carnal concupiscence remained present in Christians, although the sin of being carnally concupiscent was forgiven them, and his view that Christians could be at once just and sinners. He held the first view because he held that, while all sins, including the original sin of carnal concupiscence, were forgiven at baptism on account of the divine gift of caritas, the human soul had different parts, each of which contained eros-loves and, correspondingly, each of which contained thoughts about what we would possess in the happy life. The lower part of the soul correctly identified things like bodily pleasure as features of the happy life, but, unguided by the higher part of the soul, incorrectly located happiness in the possession of the temporal version of these things. Consequently, the pictures of the happy life which were produced by the lower part of the soul while it was ungoverned by reason always involved the possession of something temporal – and these pictures of the happy life stayed with us as memories, even after we came to

The Nature of Sin



have a new vision of happiness. These memories or habits of thought about happiness were hidden from our rational thought processes, until they presented themselves to us in the form of “suggestions.” When this happened, the task of the reason was to refuse consent to these temporal suggestions, and thereby avoid committing a personal, or voluntary, sin. Yet among non-Christians – whose picture of the happy life always involved the possession of something temporal – refusing consent to one temporal suggestion involved giving consent to another: if non-Christians refused to give their consent to the suggestion that they must satisfy their hunger in order to be happy, they would do so only by giving their consent to another picture of the happy life which had a temporal dimension. In contrast, when Christians refused their consent to a temporal suggestion, their reason was governed by the picture of the happy life contained in the understanding, and this picture had nothing temporal about it at all. The Stoics or Platonists might refuse their consent to the suggestion that satisfying one’s hunger was needed for happiness, but in doing so they would say ‘yes’ to the thought of the happy life as possessing themselves as those who had “virtue of the mind” or knew a deity who was not the true God. For Augustine, this picture of the happy life was a temporal one because the self at the heart of it was temporal. In contrast, when a Christian refused consent to the suggestion that satisfying one’s hunger was needed for happiness, they did so through continuing in the correct conception of the happy life as the life in which the true, eternal God was loved and known, so that the self at the heart of this picture was an eternal one. Thus, when Christians gave their consent to a carnal suggestion, they would cease to think of the happy life as the life in which God was known – or, in other words, they would cease to have eros for the true God. Consenting to a carnal suggestion was a sin – a personal or voluntary sin. Yet when this happened, if these people remained Christians – that is, if they were sorry for their sins and sought forgiveness from God, as witnessed by sincerely praying the Lord’s prayer and giving alms – then God would refrain from imputing their sin to them and restore them to eros-love for Him. The result was that there was a sense in which these people would remain virtuous even while they sinned. While they would have sinned in giving their consent to a temporal love, thereby ceasing to have eros-love for God, nonetheless, in naming themselves as sinners and relying on God to do everything to save them, these people continued to recognise God as the saviour and in this sense continued to love God as was His due, in the sense of giving God the correct amount of philia-love.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

Augustine found that, when this happened, it was possible to understand these people as virtuous, relying upon the eudaimonist understanding of virtue as whatever in our wills ensured that we would live in happiness. This was the basic definition of virtue offered by eudaimonism, upon which it built its more complex definition of virtue as love for the true highest good, or loving everything as we should. With this basic definition of virtue, Augustine was able to make sense of the Bible’s descriptions of people as at once virtuous and sinful. The Christian God promised not to impute sins to people who humbly confessed their sins – who asked for forgiveness in daily praying the Lord’s Prayer, while forgiving others and giving alms; in other words, God did not impute sins to people who recognised themselves as sinners in need of a saviour. This allowed Augustine to find that, in these circumstances, philia-love for God as the saviour of sinners, which remained present in Christians even while they failed in their eros-love for God, constituted virtue. This philia-love was virtue because it ensured that people would one day attain the happy life: where this reliance on God to save one from sinfulness was found, God restored people to eros-love for Him, and refrained from imputing their sins to them, so that these people remained in a state in which they were assured of entering the happy life – they remained virtuous, even while they sinned.

 Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride

This chapter turns to Augustine’s distinction between venial sins and damnable sins, and to his idea that sin could be committed through weakness, ignorance, or pride. Discovering what he meant by these different ways of sinning is the final topic studied in this book. In what follows, I find that Augustine considered that the sins committed by Christians – the sins of those who remained virtuous (through continuing to have philia-love for God as the saviour of sinners) – were always venial sins and that venial sins were the sins that were committed through weakness or ignorance. I also find that, for him, damnable sins were the sins committed through pride and that these were never committed by the virtuous: only nonChristians sinned damnably and they did so through pride. When a baptised person sinned through pride, then this meant that they had ceased to have any love for God, so that they had ceased to be a Christian, returning to the pre-baptismal state and becoming deserving of eternal damnation. Thus, venial sins and damnable sins – sinning through weakness or ignorance, and sinning through pride – constituted an important distinction in Augustine’s thought, and this chapter aims to understand better what he considered was involved in these different ways of sinning.

    Augustine distinguished venial sins from damnable “crimes” in the following passage: He, however, is not absurdly said to walk blamelessly, not who is already perfect, but who is pressing on to this perfection without reprehension, free from damnable sins (criminibus damnabilibus), and at the same time not neglecting to 



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

cleanse by alms-giving such sins as are venial (peccata venialia). For the way in which we walk, that is, the road by which we reach perfection, is cleansed by clean prayer. That, however, is a clean prayer when we truly say, “Forgive us, as we ourselves forgive.”

He indicated here that it was only “venial” sins which were cleansed through daily prayer and alms-giving: God did not forgive “damnable” sins in this way. He drew a similar distinction when he distinguished between sins committed by those “who impiously and condemnably despise His precepts” and sins committed by those “obediently and piously pressing on in His precepts.” People could sin despite being pious and obedient to God’s teachings: these people prayed the Lord’s prayer and were cleansed of their sins by God Himself. In other words, these people remained virtuous through loving God as the saviour of sinners, despite giving their consent to carnal concupiscence and thereby sinning. While Augustine did not always call their sins “venial,” in distinguishing them from damnable sins, and identifying them as the sins committed by those who prayed the Lord’s Prayer, he indicated that these sins were one and the same as the sins that he elsewhere called venial. In another place, he again distinguished between those sins which were merely “sins” and those sins which were “crimes,” and stated that the former were committed from weakness: All these products of concupiscence, and the old guilt of concupiscence itself, are put away by the washing of baptism. And whatever that concupiscence now brings forth, if they are not those products which are called not only sins, but even crimes (crimina), are purified by that method of daily prayer when we say, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive,” and by the sincerity of alms-giving.

Venial sins, the sins committed in weakness, by those praying the Lord’s Prayer and giving alms – these were the sins that were found among the virtuous, that is, among those who prayed for forgiveness and gave alms, thereby confessing that their salvation depended entirely upon God. He explained elsewhere that venial sins also included sins committed after baptism in “human ignorance.” Again, he was clear that these were the sins committed by those who were daily cleansed by the Lord’s Prayer and by alms-giving: in other words, these were the sins found among those who continued in virtue through continuing to name God as their saviour, and hence whose sins were not imputed to them by God. Baptism, when a person received the love that was virtue, ensured the

 

 Perf. Just. .. Pecc. Mer. ... Nupt. et. Conc. ...



C. Ep. Pel. ..

Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride



remission of the sins that the baptised subsequently committed through weakness or ignorance. This was because the sins committed by the baptised in weakness or ignorance were venial sins – the sins committed by those who continued to pray the Lord’s Prayer and offer alms, that is, the sins committed by those who continued to have virtue in the form of philia-love for God as the saviour of sinners. Thus, in another place, he explained that these sins were the sins of the just. He stated that the just had their sins forgiven, identifying these sins as venial, and explaining them as the sins committed in ignorance or weakness: even just persons (iustos) not without good reason offer up this prayer: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” . . . Here, indeed, we have the daily incense, so to speak, of the Spirit, which is offered to God on the altar of the heart, which we are bidden “to lift up,” – implying that, even if we cannot live here without sin, we may yet die without sin, when in merciful forgiveness the venial sin (venia) is blotted out which is committed in ignorance or weakness.

People who prayed the Lord’s Prayer, asking for forgiveness, were just even though they sinned: by implication, their justice consisted in their continuing philia for God, that is, their continuing acknowledgement that God was the one and only saviour. This was justice because such people were guaranteed entry to the happy life: because of this love for God, God cleansed these people of their sins and restored them to eros-love for Him, with the result that, even though they sinned, nothing stood between them and the happy life. Yet the sins that were committed by people who continued to acknowledge God as the saviour – the sins that God blotted out – were sins which arose from ignorance or weakness; that is, they were sins which were venial.

   In Enchiridion, Augustine explained in more detail what he meant by sinning from weakness and sinning from ignorance. He indicated that we sinned from weakness when we committed a “known sin.” No one could consent to a carnal suggestion unknowingly; hence, sinning from weakness involved consenting to “the love of earthly things”: when this consent sprang from our human weakness, then the result was a venial sin. In the same vein, elsewhere he wrote of two kinds of sin, original sin and personal sin (“the sin added by the will”), and explained that personal sin 

Nat. et Gr. ..



Ench. ..



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

was itself of two kinds, namely, failing “to do what is just either from ignorance or knowingly.” Every human being was born weak and continued to be weak even after baptism: weakness was one of the penalties for the Fall and it was not healed by baptism. Weakness referred to the fact that human nature no longer had inherent within it the same strength that the first parents had possessed to refuse to give consent to the suggestion that something temporal was needed for happiness. That is, weakness referred to the struggle that Christians now experienced to resist carnal suggestions and continue in their eros-love for the true God. Christians would put up a struggle against consenting to carnal concupiscence, but sooner or later because of their inherited weakness, they would be defeated in this struggle. For Augustine, it was only Christians who sinned through weakness: as discussed already, he identified sinning through weakness as a venial sin, meaning a sin which was found only among Christians, or, in other words, only among those who continued in virtue through their correct philia for God which led them daily to pray the Lord’s Prayer. Sinning through weakness involved remaining virtuous in the sense of recognising one’s dependence on God for salvation – these people continued in the correct philia for God, but abandoned the thought of God as the one in knowing whom they would be happy, naming some temporal thing as needed for happiness instead. From this, it follows that, for him, weakness lay in the difficulty that people experienced in holding on to the thought that human happiness lay in knowing God. Augustine arguably offered an example of what it meant to sin through weakness in the figure of his mother Monica. He reserved the highest praise for his mother, regarding her as an exemplary Christian; yet he was clear that she was not without sin. In particular, he recounted in Confessions how she had persisted until near the end of her life in caring about the final resting place of her mortal remains: in so many ways, she had freed herself from having eros-love for her body’s temporal welfare, and yet this final eros-love for her temporal body persisted in her. She consented to it by accepting the idea that her happiness depended upon knowing that her temporal body would be buried beside her husband’s (“she had ever burned with anxiety respecting her burial-place, which she had provided and prepared for herself by the body of her husband”).



Civ. Dei ...



C. Ep. Pel. ...



Civ. Dei ..



Conf. ...

Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride



Monica was finally released from this sin only at the end of her life (“But when this uselessness [of wanting to be buried beside her husband] had, through the bounty of Your goodness, begun to be no longer in her heart ...”). There can be little doubt that Augustine viewed this sin in his mother as stemming from her human weakness: Augustine himself recognised it as “uselessness” (inanitas) and it is hard to imagine that Monica did not likewise name it as a sin and feel ashamed of it. She gave consent to carnal concupiscence, in the form of consenting to this eros-love for the resting place of her mortal remains, but can be taken to have struggled against giving this consent, and to have consented only from human weakness. Importantly, Augustine did not suggest that consenting to this love in any way involved her abandoning her Christian faith – that is, he was clear that although she sinned (and sinned knowingly) on those occasions when she failed to think that knowing God was all-in-all for happiness, yet she remained virtuous, because she continued in caritas for the true God, arguably, through continuing to recognise herself as a sinner, to pray the Lord’s Prayer, and to give alms, and hence to recognise God as saving her from her sin. Augustine accepted that even exemplary Christians like Monica sinned through weakness. This leads to the question of what impact he thought sinning through weakness had on a Christian’s outward life. At an inner level, to sin through weakness involved abandoning the thought that the happy life lay in knowing God by consenting to the suggestion that something temporal was needed for happiness; but what changes did he think this brought to a person’s outer life? The issue here is whether or not Augustine thought that sinning through weakness could ever lead people to do something which was a sin in itself – like murder, theft, or adultery, or any other anti-social, other-harming thing. In other words, did he think that Christians (the virtuous) could ever do these things – could these things be venial sins? Answering this question requires us to look further at the nature of venial sins by exploring Augustine’s notion of sinning through ignorance.

   Virtuous people could sin not only from weakness but also from ignorance. In Enchiridion, Augustine explained that we sinned from ignorance 

Ibid. See also Conf. ...

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

when we sinned unknowingly: more precisely, to sin from ignorance was to do something which was wrong, believing it to be right. He explained that, as a punishment for Adam’s deliberate sin, human beings were born without the complete knowledge of what was right: “It is just that he who, knowing what is right, does not do it should lose the capacity to know what is right.” At the same time, Augustine was clear that this ignorance of the moral law was not a complete ignorance, but was rather a partial ignorance. He stated that God’s image had not been completely erased by the Fall, with the result that “man, even in the ungodliness of his life, does, or knows, some things contained in the law,” referencing Romans :. What knowledge did he think fallen human beings had retained of the moral law, and what knowledge did he think they had lost? It has been proposed that Augustine thought that as one of the penalties for the Fall, human beings were largely ignorant of how to avoid sin in their interactions with other human beings, an ignorance which was relieved only by grace. Yet we have seen that this was not Augustine’s view at all: on the contrary, he accepted that non-Christians could achieve “human” justice and indicated that human justice differed from true justice not at the level of people’s actions, but only at the level of their loves. This involved Augustine accepting that through the exercise of unaided human reason people could know what social and political actions were sinful. In particular, it involved Augustine accepting that reason established that the fully human life was other-oriented and thoroughly sociable. As a result, he considered that the humanly just, like the truly just, knew and accomplished all the actions that God required of them in their treatment of other human beings – that is, he held that the humanly just, who were unassisted by grace, nonetheless knew which things were sins in themselves and which were morally neutral and, while failing to love the true God, nonetheless led lives full of the latter kind of deeds. Augustine accepted that human beings were morally ignorant after the Fall, while also accepting that, without grace, they were able to organise their societies according to the highest standards for social and political  

  C. Ep. Pel. ... Lib. Arb. ... Spir. et Litt. .. This is the position of Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) (discussed above in Chapter ), for example, pp. – and –. See also Dodaro’s entry on “Justice” in Allan Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, ), p. .

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life. We have seen that one way to make sense of these claims lies in the finding that, for him, our inborn ignorance after the Fall consisted simply in an ignorance of the identity of the true God, an ignorance which persisted until we were enlightened by grace: since virtue referred to loving the true God, being ignorant of the identity of the true God meant that we were ignorant of the full meaning of virtue. Yet Augustine did not consider that this ignorance prevented us from knowing about the standards that God wanted us to live by in the conduct of our social lives, since, as we have seen, his view was that these standards were accessible to unaided human reason. Nonetheless, it has been proposed that there was at least one area of social life in which Augustine thought that human beings continued to demonstrate moral ignorance, until they were assisted by grace. Robert Dodaro has argued that Augustine’s writings “concerning the just use of violence” demonstrate that, for him, human beings, without grace, were often ignorant of how to avoid sin in using or refraining from using violence towards other human beings. Hence, before looking further at Augustine’s idea of moral ignorance, this chapter turns to what Augustine had to say about the role of “ignorance” in cases concerning the just use of violence. Were these writings an anomaly in his otherwise clearly argued case that human ignorance consisted simply in ignorance about the identity of the true God, and not in ignorance about how to avoid sin in social and political life? In fact, if we look at what Augustine had to say about the just use of violence, we do not find him expressing doubts as to public officials’ ability to know their moral duties towards others. Certainly, these writings establish that he thought that no pagan public official knew the nature of justice – but this was only because Augustine was clear that all pagans, by definition, did not know that to be just was to love the Christian God. This did not entail, however, that he doubted the ability of pagan officials to know how to avoid sin in their social and political lives: he had no reason to doubt this quite simply because he did not think that avoiding sin in one’s social and political life made a person just. On the contrary, I think that Augustine was clear in these writings that unaided human reason was an accurate guide as to the moral obligations of public officials in the performance of their public duties: his view was that pagan public officials could avoid sin in the performance of their



Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society, p. .

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

public duties, although in all their actions, they would always sin at the level of their loves. This can be demonstrated with reference to Augustine’s well-known example of the magistrate in City of God, Book , Chapter . Augustine here lamented what was seen as the necessity of the use of torture in judicial proceedings: judges believed that they needed to make use of torture because they were “ignorant,” but Augustine was clear that this was not ignorance of the moral obligations of their office, but rather ignorance of the factual details in a given case. Consequently, witnesses were tortured to test their truthfulness and defendants were also tortured with the same aim. For Augustine, this amounted, in each case, to punishing people believed to be innocent, since the witnesses themselves were accused of no crime and the defendant, even if guilty, suffered in the infliction of torture, not for the crime of which they were accused, but simply in order to ascertain whether or not they were guilty of this crime. Augustine asked whether or not it was sinful to use torture in these circumstances, especially given that there was no guarantee of thereby finding out the truth of the matter. He acknowledged that some would maintain that it was not sinful to use torture: some would argue that the judge’s intention of doing their best to discover the facts of the case meant that it was not a sin to inflict this torture: “These numerous and important evils he does not consider sins; for the wise judge does these things, not with any intention of doing harm, but because his ignorance compels him, and because human society claims him as a judge.” Again, “ignorance” here was ignorance of the facts of the case, and not ignorance of what justice demanded in this situation, since justice evidently demanded that judges did their utmost to establish the truth before passing a judgement. Augustine here accepted that, given judges’ inevitable ignorance of the facts, they were morally obliged to do what they could to relieve this ignorance, but he called into question the idea that judges were obliged to do anything and everything to relieve this ignorance. We find an analogy in this regard in his discussion of the sin of theft in Against Lying: he was clear that people were not entitled to commit the sin of theft in order to fulfil some moral obligation (such as to feed the starving). In the same way, while judges were required to do their utmost to discover the facts of a case, yet, Augustine asked, did this include torturing witnesses or even torturing accused people (whom they as yet had no reason to doubt were  

This passage is mentioned in ibid., p.  n. . Contra Mendacium .



Civ. Dei ..

Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride



innocent)? If it was a sin to torture in these circumstances, then it could not be the case that judges were required to use torture to fulfil their moral obligation to do their best to convict only the guilty. Augustine noted that judges supposed that they did not sin in using torture, but he refrained from expressing complete agreement with this (“though we therefore acquit the judge of malice”). Hence, what we have here is an example of Augustine beginning to formulate a challenge to a moral norm in his society, and using reason to do so. By using the rational principle that it was always wrong to punish those whom one believed to be innocent, Augustine proposed that it might be wrong for judges to use torture. Evidently, he thought that this was a matter which needed to be debated further, but he need not be read as expressing doubts in this passage that human beings, through rational inquiry, could reach the correct view as to the sinfulness or otherwise of the use of torture in judicial proceedings. If human beings were often ignorant of the facts of a given case, then it followed that people must often be convicted of crimes of which they were innocent. Augustine evidently thought that this was a lamentable thing, but did he think that judges necessarily sinned in ignorantly convicting the innocent? If he did think this, then this might support Dodaro’s argument that, for Augustine, human ignorance inevitably led us to sin in our treatment of other people. On the contrary, Augustine was clear that judges were not guilty of a sin in mistakenly convicting innocent people: his message was that judges were obliged to do their best, within their human limitations (and within the moral law, which Augustine proposed condemned the use of torture), to convict only the guilty; but provided they did this, then even a serious miscarriage of justice was not a sin. Augustine explored this notion when discussing the supposed sin of the Jewish people in putting Christ to death. Among the Church Fathers, Augustine formulated the most influential account of the Jewish role in the crucifixion. Importantly, he maintained that the Jews had acted in

 

Civ. Dei .. Among the relevant passages in Augustine’s writings are his comments on Psalms :, :, and : (Enarrationes in Psalmos ., ., and .) and his comments on John :, :, :, and :– (In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus ., ., ., and .). Jeremy Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars,” Traditio  (): –. Cohen notes (p. ), with regard to the New Testament evidence, “While the passages referring to the ignorance of the Jews are numerous and explicit, those verses which conceivably allude to a wilful act of deicide are obliquely suggestive at most.” Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, ),



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

genuine ignorance: “blinded by the secret justice of God,” they had sincerely believed that they were punishing a guilty man; unconvinced that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of God, they had sincerely believed him to be guilty of blasphemy. Yet, although Augustine was clear that they had sinned in crucifying Jesus, he did not conclude that their sin lay in the fact that the person whom they punished was actually innocent. Rather, Augustine held that they had sinned because of the spirit in which they had carried through their role in this execution: they were convicted of the sins of envy, hatred, anger, and cruelty in demanding Christ’s death. Augustine suggested, for example, that they acted in anger at Christ’s claim to be God’s Son, from hatred, with “insane cruelty” and “excessive malice,” and with “envy” and “officious zeal.” Augustine was reluctant to concede that Christ had even deserved death according to Jewish law: he acknowledged that the Jews had understood Jesus to be a blasphemer, that is, one “who seduced them from their God,” but suggested that they ought to have been satisfied with the scourging that Pilate gave Christ, and not to have continued to demand his execution. For Augustine, the Jews had ignorantly condemned an innocent, but this itself was no sin, given that they acted in good faith, believing that Jesus’ guilt had been established. Rather, they had sinned in doing so maliciously, in a spirit of envy, spite, and over-zealousness which led them knowingly to demand an unfair penalty. Thus, Augustine acknowledged that human beings were inevitably ignorant of a great many facts about the world and that they had limited means available to them to remove this ignorance. Yet this factual ignorance was not the same as the moral ignorance that he saw as implicating people in sin. The mere fact that there was much that we did not know about other people’s lives did not mean that we would inevitably fail to know and fulfil our moral obligations towards these people; rather, the demands that the moral law placed upon us with regard to the use of violence recognised these human limitations and demanded of us only what was humanly possible. Hence, while Augustine identified moral

    

–; and Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press: ), pp. –. C. Faust. .; see also C. Faust. .. These passages are discussed by Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), pp. –. Jo. Ev. Tr. . (on John :), discussed by Cohen, Christ Killers, .  Jo. Ev. Tr. . (on John :). Jo. Ev. Tr. .– (on John :–).  Jo. Ev. Tr. . (on John :–). Jo. Ev. Tr. .. Jo. Ev. Tr. .- (on John .–).

Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride



ignorance as pervasive among fallen human beings, there is no reason to suppose that he viewed people as necessarily ignorant of how to avoid sin in their use of violence. Augustine’s discussion of the judicial use of torture points to the opposite conclusion, namely, that, for him, our moral obligations when it came to inflicting harm on others could be discovered through rational inquiry. Yet fulfilling these moral obligations did not make us virtuous: to be virtuous, we must avoid sin in outward things while also loving the true God; without this love, all our actions, even if they were morally neutral in their outward dimension, were sinful through the presence in them of a sinful love. Augustine was clear that, after the Fall, the human soul remained rational: enough of the image of God had remained in the fallen soul to ensure that it remained rational, “for there had remained undoubtedly that which the soul of man cannot be except it be rational.” Nonetheless, the Fall had partially erased God’s image from the soul. By this he meant, arguably, that, as a consequence of the Fall, the higher part of the reason no longer contained the thought that the Christian God was the highest good; yet, fallen human beings still had full use of the lower, active part of the reason – the part of the reason whose task was to guide temporal affairs. In this sense, while the knowledge that was virtue was erased from the soul, the knowledge of what was sinful in the outward ordering of our common human life remained in the soul. Human beings kept God’s image, in this sense, because the active part of the reason, without being restored by grace, remained capable of knowing what was sinful in their social and political lives, although this image had also been partially erased, in that the higher part of their reason had lost the knowledge that the Christian God was the true highest good – the knowledge that constituted virtue.

-  Thus, Augustine did not understand moral ignorance, one of the penalties for the Fall, as an ignorance of how to avoid sin in resorting to violence, or in conducting any other aspect of our social and political lives. Rather, he held that following the dictates of unaided human reason would lead us to organise our social and political lives as God wanted them to be organised. Instead, we have seen that, by our fallen moral ignorance, he 

Spir. et Litt. ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

meant our ignorance of the identity of the true God: Christians knew who the true God was, while non-Christians did not, so that they persisted in moral ignorance. Yet the complication here lies in the fact that, in attributing venial sins to moral ignorance, he indicated that moral ignorance could remain among Christians. What could he mean by this postbaptismal ignorance – that is, by a moral ignorance which not only was found among non-Christians, but also persisted among Christians? A clue to his answer to this question lies in some comments which he made in Against Faustus which drew a distinction between keeping “the seven [commandments] by which human society is preserved” and keeping the first three commandments, which all “relate to the love of God.” He indicated that non-Christians could keep the seven commandments from a variety of motives, including because they were “restrained by the natural principle of not doing to another what you would not have done to yourself,” yet the first three commandments – to have no other God than God, not to take God’s name in vain, and to keep the Sabbath – were necessarily observed only by Christians. In other words, here he indicated that, of the Ten Commandments, non-Christians were not ignorant of the last seven commandments, but they were necessarily ignorant of the first three commandments – they did not know about a moral obligation to worship and honour the Christian God. On one level, of course, there was a sense in which Christians necessarily knew these first three commandments – after all, Augustine was clear that the whole law was summed up in the double love commandment of love for the Christian God and love for oneself and one’s neighbours for God’s sake. Yet, on another level, given that Augustine was clear that a moral ignorance persisted in Christians as well, it makes good sense that he would see Christians as failing to know in full everything involved in fulfilling these first three commandments, which concerned our obligations towards God. After all, in this passage from Against Faustus, he was clear that ignorance of the first three commandments was the moral ignorance found among non-Christians: since moral ignorance persisted in some form among Christians as well, the implication is that even after conversion, people did not fully perceive everything involved in worshipping and honouring God. In short, Augustine’s discussion of the Ten Commandments suggests that, for him, the moral law regulated not only our inner lives (in



C. Faust. ..

Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride



demanding love for the true God), and not only our outward conduct towards other human beings, but also our outward conduct towards God. We have seen that he held that our social and political conduct – our obligations towards other human beings – fell under the scrutiny of the active reason: through the active reason we were able to discern what interpersonal behaviour was morally neutral (and hence compatible with being virtuous) and what was sinful in itself. He held that the active reason guided us in the knowledge of our social and political obligations, but, evidently, he did not think that the active reason guided us in the knowledge of our religious obligations – if he did think this, then it would make no sense for him to regard non-Christians as necessarily ignorant of these obligations. Human beings were obliged to offer to the true God fitting prayers and rituals, but the active reason on its own was inadequate to identify what these might be. Hence, arguably, this was the sense in which Augustine held that Christians could sin through ignorance: reason was no guide to what God wanted us to do in the religious dimension of our lives and yet acts of impiety were sinful even when committed in ignorance. Until God intervened in some way, Christians would remain ignorant of what expressions of piety God required of them. The result would be that they would sin through ignorantly offering to God religious ceremonies and other forms of worship which were not pleasing to God. This conclusion is confirmed by a passage in which Augustine noted that impieties and sacrileges were themselves sins – they were “faults which are committed not in contempt but in ignorance of religion (ignorantia religionis).” These things were distinct from things like adultery – which was a fault committed not in ignorance but in contempt of religion – but they were nonetheless sins. These impieties included things which were found only among non-Christians, such as the persecution of those who preached Christ, but they also included things which Christians themselves were liable to do. In short, this points to the conclusion that Augustine held that Christians sinned in ignorance when they ignorantly committed acts of impiety. Indeed, in his sermons and letters, he condemned numerous impious customs or beliefs commonly found among his flock, such as swearing by Christ’s name when making transactions in the marketplace, the wearing of amulets, the “impious ignorance” of supposing  

Letter , De Correctione Donatistarum, .. Sermon  at .



Sermon A at .



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

that Christ’s birth was determined by the stars, fasting on a Sunday, vegetarianism, and the impious thoughts that followed from trying to think of God as having a face and body. In another place, Augustine explained that it was sinful for Christians to pray prayers which expressed erroneous sentiments, even if, “in the simplicity of ignorance” people believed these prayers to be good prayers, suited to the use of Christians. Christians could rely on church custom for guidance as to the correct expressions of piety, but even church custom was not infallible, as Augustine illustrated in Confessions by recounting an episode in the life of his mother Monica. He explained that in the African churches, people were accustomed to bring to the shrines of saints “some provision of cakes, bread and wine.” In Milan, however, Ambrose had condemned this custom, mainly because it too closely resembled pagan customs. Hence, his mother, who had previously carried out this custom in good faith, believing it to be a properly pious action, learned from Ambrose to regard it as displeasing to God. Just as Augustine acknowledged that his mother, the exemplary Christian, had sinned from weakness (in placing importance on the temporal resting place of her mortal remains), arguably here he acknowledged that she had also sinned from ignorance. Monica had sinned in her manner of worship, in offering food and wine to the saints, but she had been ignorant that she was sinning: she had believed that what she was doing was right. Nonetheless, Augustine did not in any way imply that in sinning in ignorance, she had ceased to understand God as saviour, or even ceased to have eros-love for God, since sinning in this way did not involve consent to carnal concupiscence (see below). In other words, the implication was that, while she had certainly sinned in failing in her religious obligations, yet caritas remained in her: even if she was not aware of her specific sin, she was at least aware of the possibility of her ignorance – an awareness which, like her awareness of her weakness, arguably inspired her to pray daily the Lord’s Prayer so that God did not impute these sins to her. Unaided human reason could not discern the nature of our religious obligations: it could not teach us what ‘cultic’ acts were pleasing or displeasing to God. Hence, Christians could think, do, or say what they should not – they could sin through ignorance. Moreover, they could sin, not only in ignorantly committing impiety themselves, but by unwittingly  

Sermon  at . Letter  to Italica.



 Letter  to Casulanus. Letter  to Januarius.  Bapt. ... Conf. ...



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

leading others to commit the same impieties. “In that true beneficence in which the just man consults his neighbour’s welfare, things are sometimes done which are prejudicial, although it was thought that they would be advantageous.” We know that by “true beneficence” Augustine meant the actions taken by Christians out of a concern for the spiritual health of other people: merely to care for others’ temporal bodies, which had no place in the happy life, was not to care for their real welfare. Caring for their real welfare meant seeking to make them good Christians – it meant seeking that their lives would be free of sins. Christians knew what virtue consisted in, but they did not know all the ways in which they could slip into sin despite loving the true God. In particular, I argue, Augustine had in mind here Christians’ failure to know how to prevent others from slipping into impious practices, when they themselves were ignorant of their own impieties. Christians could encourage other Christians to do things, believing these things would be “advantageous” to them as true expressions of Christian faith, but, because their grasp of doctrine or understanding of the service of worship which was owed to God was imperfect, they would unintentionally lead others astray. Augustine expressed the same thought in On the Catholic Way of Life: And would that it were as easy to seek the good of our neighbour, or to avoid hurting him, as it is for one well trained and kind-hearted to love his neighbour! These things require more than mere good-will, and can be done only by a high degree of thoughtfulness and prudence, which belongs only to those to whom it is given by God, the source of all good.

This passage has also been read as Augustine lamenting the impossibility of knowing how to care for others’ physical welfare, but we have seen that Augustine did not think that the “good” of our neighbours truly resided in the temporal well-being of their bodies. All people who aspired to be virtuous would do whatever they could to provide for others’ physical well-being; to fail to do this was to sin. Yet virtue involved realising that the good of the temporal body was not the true human good. Rather, we cared for our neighbours’ good when we sought to make their lives free from sin. Seeking this for our neighbours, however, we often hurt them, through our own ignorance of sin: in particular, we led people into impious beliefs or actions through our own ignorance of the proper way to worship God. Hence, it was easier to love our 

Perf. Just. ..



Mor. ...

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

neighbours – to want them to reach the happiness of knowing and perfectly loving the Christian God – than to teach them all the pious thoughts and actions which were pleasing to God. Augustine stated in this passage that it was God alone who gave the knowledge of these things. This was a sentiment which he echoed in the following passage from On the Spirit and the Letter, where he indicated that it was either through reading the Bible or through the instruction of others who were themselves learned in the Bible’s teachings that we would come to a better understanding of our religious obligations towards God. In how many things we all of us offend, while we suppose that what we do is pleasant, or at all events, not unpleasing, to God whom we love; and afterwards, having (through the Scriptures, or else by being warned in some clear and certain way) learned what is not pleasing to Him, we pray to Him that He would forgive us on our repentance. The life of man is full of examples of this.

Augustine here lamented Christians’ frequent misdeeds in ignorance, but the actions that he had in mind here were, arguably, as in the other passages discussed above, not political or social actions, but religious actions, that is, the words and deeds which formed Christians’ public or private devotions and expressions of faith. Christians did not need to rely on the Scriptures to avoid sin in their social and political lives, since unaided reason was an accurate guide for them here; but they did need to rely on the Bible, or else to be “warned in some clear and certain way,” as Monica was warned by Ambrose, in order to avoid slipping ignorantly into forms of worship which displeased God. Thus, when Augustine wrote of Christians’ moral ignorance he arguably had in mind their ignorance of which actions of an exclusively religious nature were pleasing to God: he described Christians as sinning in ignorance in offering food to the saints (like Monica), or swearing by Christ’s name, or failing to observe the Sabbath properly, or slipping into doctrinal errors in praying or explaining their faith. While reason could guide people to a complete knowledge of how God wanted us to live with other human beings, unaided reason could not teach people what pious actions were pleasing to God. It was in this sense that human beings were dependent on God Himself to relieve their moral ignorance. Augustine was clear that impious actions were sins, even when done through ignorance, but in what sense, precisely, did he view them as sins? In particular, did he regard them as things which were sins in themselves 

Spir. et. Litt. ..

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

(like theft or murder)? It might be tempting to suppose that he did look on them as sinful in themselves, meaning that he considered that they received their sinful character not from the love with which they were performed, but rather from themselves – that is, simply in being outward deeds, accomplished intentionally, which displeased God. Yet one problem with this is that Augustine regarded sins in themselves as always involving consent to carnal concupiscence (i.e., to the suggestion that some temporal thing was needed for happiness) – yet he distinguished elsewhere between carnal concupiscence and ignorance: to sin in ignorance was one thing, and to sin in concupiscence was another: “concupiscence is worse than ignorance, because to sin in ignorance without concupiscence is lesser sin; but concupiscence without ignorance makes sin more serious.” Here, he indicated that it was possible to sin in ignorance yet without concupiscence. This suggests that he did not regard impious actions as things which were sinful in themselves since such things necessarily involved consenting to carnal concupiscence. Yet if the sins that were committed in ignorance – that is, the impious actions, like offering food to saints or expressing an erroneous sentiment in a prayer, that Christians did ignorantly – were a different kind of action to things like murder or theft, and yet were things which were always sins, then what kind of action were they? Christians who ignorantly committed these impieties did not do so from concupiscentia; hence, they continued to have eros-love for God present in the soul. This suggests that what Christians lacked when they committed an impious action was the proper amount of philia for God: they did not fail in their eros-love for God (they did not give their consent to the suggestion of some temporal love) but they did fall short in their philia for God – their praise and worship of God was not as it should be. This points to a solution to the difficulty of identifying how Augustine understood the kind of action involved in these impieties: it suggests that, for him, committing these impieties – that is, failing to praise and worship God as He should be praised and worshipped – was actually one and the same thing as failing in philia-love for God. In other words, these ‘outward’ acts of impiety were not actually separate things to this shortfall in philia; they were simply the visible manifestation of this failing. We did not love God as He should be loved when we did not give God the praise



C. Jul. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

and worship which were owed to Him: expressing incorrect sentiments in a prayer, offering food to the saints, failing to observe the Sabbath properly, wearing an amulet, or swearing by Christ’s name were not separate actions which we decided to do because our philia (our praiselove) for God was inadequate; rather, they were simply the visible evidence of our inadequate philia – they were the visible evidence of our failure to think correctly about the praise and worship that were owed to God. Hence these sins were neither sins in themselves nor morally neutral actions which became sins through the presence in a person of carnal concupiscence; rather, they were the outward signs that our philia-love for God was not what it should be: these impieties themselves were the measure of our shortfall in this love for God. Thus, for Augustine, even when people became Christians, they remained ignorant of the service of worship which they owed to God, until God intervened in some way, generally through the guidance offered in the Bible, to direct them towards truly pious actions. In this way, he did not regard ignorance as ignorance of what God required of us in the domestic, economic, social, or political sphere: non-Christians and Christians alike knew what they must do to fulfil these obligations; unaided human reason identified what these obligations were. People could do sinful actions through ignorance, but these were not those outward things which were sins in themselves, but rather actions of an exclusively religious nature: offering food to the saints (like Monica), or swearing by Christ’s name, or failing to observe the Sabbath properly, or slipping into doctrinal errors in praying. While the active reason guided people to a complete knowledge of how to live as God wanted us to live with other human beings, it could not teach people what pious actions were pleasing to God. It was in this sense that Christians remained dependent on God to relieve them of their moral ignorance. Nonetheless, in the case of Christians, since there remained a sense in which caritas continued to be present in the soul of these sinners – since they not only continued in eros-love for God, but also continued to think of God as saviour – they remained virtuous, despite this shortfall in their philia for God.

  Augustine explained that Christians could sin through weakness or ignorance, and when they did so the result would be a venial sin. If they sinned through weakness, then they would know that they sinned: we sinned

Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride



through weakness when we tried, but failed, to say ‘no’ to the suggestion of some temporal thing as needed for happiness. If people sinned through ignorance, however, they would sin but remain unawares that they did so: they would sin, believing that what they were doing was right. Hence, people did not consent to carnal concupiscence when they sinned in ignorance. We have seen that, for Augustine, sinning in ignorance did not involve doing something which was sinful in itself, but neither did it involve doing something which was morally neutral. Instead, sinning in ignorance did not, strictly, involve a separate outward action at all; rather, it was simply a shortfall in our love for God, albeit one which was accompanied by certain outward signs; our failure to worship God as we should, in one way or another, was one and the same thing as our failure to give God all the philia-love that was owed to Him. Since Augustine was clear that venial sins were the sins that resulted from either weakness or ignorance, this finding raises the possibility that this was how Augustine understood the nature of a “venial” sin in general: namely, that venial sins were principally failings at the level of our loves. This would mean that even when we sinned from weakness, in giving our consent to some carnal suggestion, the result would not be, strictly, some outward deed which was a sin in itself; instead, it would suggest that the sin consisted chiefly in the giving of this consent itself. Exploring this possibility involves looking further at what Augustine had to say about venial sins. Augustine thought that there were small sins and great sins. Thus, he wrote of “frightful deeds and crimes,” on the one hand, and “trifling faults (levioribus),” on the other, his point being that even trifling faults were sins. He held that a person committed a trifling fault by lending “an ear to a word which ought not to be listened to, or a tongue to a phrase which should not be uttered; . . . if he entertains a thought in his heart in such a way as to wish that an evil pleasure were a lawful one.” Elsewhere, he called these “slight sins” (levium peccatorum) and held that each person’s life contained a “crowd” of them. He explained, for example, that Abel, even though he was rightly called “just,” had undoubtedly committed small sins, such as laughing immoderately, or eating extravagantly, or wandering in his thoughts while praying: “sin often stole over [him] in very small matters, and when [he] was off



Spir. et Litt. ..



Nat. et Gr. ..

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

[his] guard.” As a result he was “both just and at the same time, not sinless.” In these passages, Augustine was evidently discussing venial sins and he was clear that they involved certain outward things: he accepted that a weak person, for example, might laugh immoderately or eat too much. He described these as “faults” – trifling ones, but faults nonetheless. These actions were evidently not morally neutral things, but the question is whether they were classifiable as sins in themselves. A weak person might burst out laughing or, like Monica, simply form the hope that her bones might rest with her husband – these were actions, but they were arguably spontaneous actions, which were not clearly distinguishable from giving consent to a carnal suggestion. Hence, arguably, laughing immoderately, and so on, was not strictly a separate thing to the giving of consent itself – in particular, in these cases, consenting to carnal concupiscence did not involve forming the decision to do some separate action; rather, each was simply a spontaneous manifestation of the fact that this consent had been given. In other words, venial sins, whether committed from weakness or in ignorance, were distinguishable from “damnable sins” precisely because committing venial sins did not involve forming the intention to do some outward deed at all, whether morally neutral or sinful in itself. Instead, venial sins remained primarily a matter of our loves, even though they might be accompanied by some spontaneous, visible indication that they had occurred, such as a laugh – that is, something which was not itself a separate, intentional action, but was rather just an external reflection of the fact that, through weakness, we had given consent to a carnal suggestion, or, through ignorance, our philia-love for God fell short of what it should be. This finding is important because it makes sense of Augustine’s insistence that venial sins were always different from damnable sins: as will be seen, his view was that damnable sins always involved giving consent to carnal concupiscence; yet he was also clear that, in the case of weakness, a venial sin also occurred through the giving of this consent. The above proposes that, for Augustine, even when consent was given to carnal concupiscence, venial sins were distinguishable from damnable ones because, when we sinned venially, we never did something which was a sin in itself, nor did we do something morally neutral. Sins in themselves (murder, adultery, theft, lying, etc.) and morally neutral actions (giving to the poor, sacrificing our lives for others) were all intentional actions, but



Ibid.

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in the case of a venial sin, the action resulting from the giving of consent was not an intentional thing at all, but simply a spontaneous, outward indication that consent had been given.

    Augustine explained in On Nature and Grace that personal sins arose from three possible things: weakness, ignorance, or pride. Let him seek diligently, and he will find in the law that the sin of pride is quite distinguished from all other sins. For many sins are committed through pride; but yet not all things which are wrongly done are done proudly – at any rate, not by the ignorant, not by the weak, and not, generally speaking, by the weeping and sorrowful.

Venial sins, the personal sins found among Christians, arose from weakness or ignorance; hence, this passage implied that damnable sins, the personal sins of non-Christians, were the sins committed through pride. That is, this passage, taken together with what Augustine had to say in the above passages about the nature of venial sins, implied that, for him, only non-Christians committed personal sins through pride, with the result that only they committed damnable sins. This did not mean that he thought that baptism ensured that a person would never commit a damnable sin; rather, it meant that a baptised person who committed one of these sins had necessarily ceased to believe in Christ. All trace of caritas, the love that was virtue, was absent from the soul of anybody who sinned through pride, even if caritas had once been present in that person’s soul, since the result was a damnable sin – a sin deserving of an eternal punishment. Damnable sins could be found only among non-Christians, but we have seen that Augustine accepted that the personal sins of non-Christians were of two kinds: they could sin in doing outward things which were morally neutral or they could sin in doing outward things which were sins in themselves. In the former case, the sin would consist simply in the presence of a sinful love in the doer of this outward thing (as when a person gave to the poor while loving something other than the true God); while in the latter case, the sin would be twofold – the sin would consist in 

Nat. et Gra. .. Jesse Couenhoven, “‘Not every wrong is done with pride’: Augustine’s Proto-Feminist Anti-Pelagianism,” Scottish Journal of Theology . (): –, drew my attention to this passage.



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

both the sinful love that was present in the person who did this thing and in the outward thing itself (murder, lying, theft, adultery, failing to give another their due of social and political goods, and so on), which was also a sin. Hence, damnable sins did not necessarily involve harming another in some way or failing in one’s social or political duties to others – we could give other human beings their ‘due’ of the goods of this world and yet sin damnably. Damnable sins could be of these two different kinds; nonetheless, Augustine was clear that all damnable sins were committed through pride. If all damnable sins were committed through pride, but pride could lead people to do such different things, then this raises the question of what factors Augustine thought determined which kind of damnable sin we committed: that is, what factors did he think determined that, in sinning damnably, we would do something which, in its outward dimension, was sinful in itself, and what factors determined that, in sinning damnably, we would do something which, outwardly, was morally neutral? What did Augustine think was at play when a person decided to do something like murder, or adultery, or theft, or any other ‘unsociable’ thing? The answer to this question lies in exploring further Augustine’s notion of “pride.” He held that pride was found only among non-Christians since, as discussed in Chapter , it referred to praising oneself too much. In other places, Augustine defined pride as “perversely imitating God” or loving “one’s own superiority” (amor excellentiae propriae). These definitions captured the sense in which it was in attributing to ourselves a role which belonged exclusively to God that we were proud. Christians were not proud because they understood God as doing everything to save them – that is, they thought of God as the one and only saviour; we became proud in attributing any part of this role to ourselves. Thus, Augustine defined pride as attributing to oneself all or part of God’s role in bringing people to the happy life. When people did this, they would sin through pride and so sin damnably: all their voluntary actions would be personal sins.  



Spir. et Litt. .. Lib. Arb. .., “If the mind, being immediately conscious of itself, takes pleasure in itself to the extent of perversely imitating God, wanting to enjoy its own power, the greater it wants to be the less it becomes.” See also .., “whence came the turning away, if not from the fact man, whose good God is, willed to be his own good and so to substitute himself for God.” Gn. Litt. ...

Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride



The following finds that Augustine thought that pride could take two different forms and that this explains his view that personal sins could take two very different forms as well, with some being socially destructive and others being highly sociable and other-oriented. Chapter  has already described how, for Augustine, some people were proud in reckoning themselves the authors of their own virtue – he indicated that such people would fail to give God the love that was owed him, and would always love something temporal (even if only themselves and other people as temporal things), but they would not commit any ‘outward’ thing which was a sin in itself. They prided themselves, precisely, on their virtue – their conception of virtue was necessarily mistaken, but they knew enough about virtue to know that the only things that could be found in the lives of the virtuous were morally neutral things, meaning, the sociable actions which alone were compatible with the happy life. The sinful loves of these people took different forms, but they shared in common the assumption that they were virtuous, and in assuming this, they were proud in regarding virtue as a human achievement. The Stoics and Platonists were proud in this sense. They understood that they could not be virtuous while they did anything which was sinful in itself. Hence, their avoidance of things like theft or murder formed part of their pride. This finding returns us to the question of how Augustine saw pride as implicating people in doing those things which were other-harming, unchaste, or socially destructive, that is, those things which were sins in themselves. People whose damnable sins took this form must be guilty of a different kind of pride. The key to understanding in what sense their pride differed from that of the Stoics or Platonists lies in understanding Augustine’s account of his youthful theft of pears.

       When he committed his famous theft of the pears at the age of sixteen, Augustine knew that he was doing an outward thing which was sinful in itself. That is, he knew full well that theft was something which was contrary to the life in accordance with human nature. We might suppose that the reason why Augustine did something like stealing which he recognised as sinful was simply that he lacked the desire to avoid sinning. 

Conf. ... Augustine is clear here that he knew theft to be a sin at the time when he committed theft (he knew this because the law against theft was “written on the human heart”).

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

That is, it might be supposed that he knew that what he did was sinful, but he did not care. In fact, Augustine found that it was more complicated than this. This was because he held that no one actually wanted to sin; knowing that something was sinful gave us a reason not to do it. He found this message in Romans :–: these verses emphasised that whenever the law was known, there was always a desire to obey it, even when people actually disobeyed the law: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.. . . So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.” Even without these verses, however, the view that no one wanted to sin was a claim made by eudaimonism: knowing that something was sinful gave us all a reason not to do it, because, in identifying something as sinful, reason showed us that this was not the kind of action which could be found among the happy (or among those who were assured of one day being happy). People did not want to do what they knew to be sinful, and yet, in stealing the pears, the young Augustine had done something which he knew at the time was a sin. He had known that he sinned, meaning that he had known that stealing was not something which could ever be found among those who were, or were sure to become, happy. Given that human beings desired at all times to be happy, Augustine’s knowledge that theft was a sin would seem to make his decision to steal an inexplicable one. He had a clear reason not to steal; but, at the same time, he had not acted under compulsion – somehow, despite wanting not to commit any sins, he had nonetheless chosen to commit theft while knowing it to be a sin. That is, he had acted in a way which he knew to be incompatible with human happiness, despite the fact that the desire for happiness was his fundamental desire. How was this possible? In what follows, I argue that Augustine’s explanation of his theft of the pears centred upon distinguishing a second sense in which people could be proud. As noted above, Augustine understood the general meaning of



Augustine found that this passage exactly described the situation of someone “under the law,” that is, someone who was not a Christian but who knew the moral law and yet did not obey it (Simpl., First Question ., “in this text it seems to me that the Apostle has put himself in the place of someone who is under the law, whose words he speaks in his own person”). Augustine’s understanding of Romans :– began a long evolution in the years around : see Frederick Van Fleteren, “Augustine’s Evolving Exegesis of Romans :– in Its Pauline Context,” Augustinian Studies . (): –, at p. . Importantly, even with this new interpretation of Romans , Augustine still continued to accept that, sub lege, people wanted to avoid sinning.

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pride as to attribute to oneself a role in the attainment of happiness. We could attribute this role to ourselves by seeing virtue as a human achievement, where virtue was understood as whatever guaranteed that we would live the happy life; but, for Augustine, this was not the only way in which we could view ourselves as the makers of our own happiness. In addition, we could also be proud in thinking that we could achieve happiness for ourselves, despite lacking virtue. Being proud in this way involved looking on happiness as our own creation; that is, it involved telling ourselves that we determined for ourselves what was or was not compatible with the life in complete accordance with human nature. If our pride took this form, then, while recognising that things like theft ordinarily meant that we had no prospect of happiness, we would tell ourselves that, exceptionally, theft was something which would lead us to happiness. Augustine scrutinised his decision to steal the pears in Chapters – of Book  of Confessions. He began by noting that whenever people did things which they knew to be sinful, they loved something in the world of the senses instead of loving God (“On account of all these, and such as these, is sin committed; while through an inordinate preference for these goods of a lower kind, the better and higher are neglected”). When we did something which was a sin in itself (murder, theft, lying, etc.), we did so because we loved some sensual thing and saw doing this deed as the means to attain what we loved. In other words, we gave our consent to a carnal suggestion: we said ‘yes’ to doing this thing as the means to attain some sensible thing which we viewed as needed for human happiness. Yet, he explained, when he came to think of his own decision to commit theft, what struck him initially was the absence of any motive for it. Instead, he did not remember seeking any sensual thing at all in his theft – in particular, the pears that he stole were unappetising and he did not want to eat them but gave them to the pigs (“and [we] carried away great loads, not to eat ourselves, but to fling to the very swine”). Rather than seeking to attain some lower, sensual thing, Augustine remembered his decision to commit theft as beginning with the thought that theft itself was lovely. He knew that theft was wrong and hence that it was, in this sense, unlovely and hateful; and yet he loved this sin. This was the subtext to his explanation of his theft of the pears (“It was foul, and I loved it. I loved to perish. I loved my own error (defectum) – not that for which



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

I erred (deficiebam), but the error itself”; “I plucked simply that I might steal . . . my sole gratification in them being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy”). By the idea of loving something sinful, Augustine understood himself as being paradoxical: arguably, by the idea of loving his sin he meant that he had esteemed it as something which a person who was happy, or who was assured of being happy, could do; he saw himself as both a thief and happy. That is, with his declaration that he had found theft pleasant, he meant, arguably, that, although he had known perfectly well that thieves could not be happy, he had also somehow managed to think of this theft as something which, exceptionally, in his own case, was compatible with happiness. With this analysis of his theft of the pears, Augustine implied that these two thoughts were present whenever anyone committed one of those things which was a sin in itself. Every adult who did one of these things knew it to be a sin but nonetheless managed to be pleased with the sin, simply as a sin. People looked on what they knew was incompatible with human happiness and yet told themselves that, exceptionally, they could do this thing and be happy. Without this thought, the natural human aversion to doing anything which was known to be a sin, and therefore incompatible with the happy life, would prevent people from committing things like theft or murder. He next indicated in more detail what was involved in telling oneself that a particular act of theft could lead to the happy life. He held that he had managed to think of theft both as a sin and as compatible with happiness on this occasion only by thinking of himself in an exalted way, that is, only by seeing himself as godlike (“Thus all perversely imitate You who separate themselves far from You and raise themselves up against You”). In other words, he pretended to himself to be liberated, on this occasion, from the normal constraints of his nature which dictated that no one who stole could be happy; he claimed an “omnipotence” for himself which belonged only to God. It was only in this way that he was able to find the very thought of doing a sinful thing a pleasing thought. Importantly, Augustine did not propose that he had lost sight of the principle that theft was a sin – he understood that, if he had found himself the victim of a theft, rather than the perpetrator, he would have had no



Ibid.



Conf. ...



Conf. ...



Ibid.

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trouble in pronouncing theft a sinful thing. Far from inventing a new moral law in which theft was no sin, he never lost sight of the sinfulness of theft. His point was rather that there was nothing consistent in what he did in stealing the pears: he chose to believe that, in this particular instance, something which he knew to be a sin could lead to happiness. Rather than shunning the act of theft, as he normally did, he had loved it. Augustine explained that the first step towards committing his theft of the pears lay in thinking of theft in this way. This thought was really a moment of pride because it was one and the same as thinking of himself as the author of his own nature and hence the author of his own happiness, when it was God who occupied this position. In thinking of himself as able to be happy and yet do something which, at all other times, he understood as incompatible with happiness, he had made ‘happiness’ something which he regarded as his own creation and hence claimed for himself a power which belonged to God. Thus, although Augustine did not refer directly to pride in his analysis of the theft of the pears, arguably ‘pride’ properly describes the selfaggrandisement that made his theft possible. He had hesitated to steal the pears while he thought that doing so was an act which, as sinful, necessarily excluded him from the happy life. When he came to think that something sinful could lead to the happy life, he heaped praises on himself as the one to determine what his happiness consisted in. Yet he knew that it was God who shaped human nature and thereby determined the conditions of human happiness – hence, in this one small act, Augustine claimed for himself God’s omnipotence as creator. He claimed to be the author of his own nature, able to determine in his own case what the life in accordance with his nature (the happy life) looked like. This was his pride, but how did it lead him to decide to commit the theft? The answer is that, once he had begun to think in this way, it was inevitable that he would commit the theft if he had an adequate motive for doing it: he had come to regard theft as something compatible with his happiness; hence, all he lacked now was a reason for committing the theft. Thus, his analysis of how he had come to steal the pears next returned to the thought that doing anything which was a sin in itself was motivated by the love of something in the sensual world. In other words, he next returned to the idea that committing a personal sin from pride always involved consenting to a carnal suggestion. He now claimed to be able to remember how such a carnal love was at play in his decision to steal the pears. He had not loved the thought of eating the pears – the pears themselves had been unripe and

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

unappetising – but he had loved something else which was perishable: in particular, he had elevated the regard of his companions to such an exalted state that he loved it (“alone I could not have done it. I loved, then, in it the companionship of my accomplices with whom I did it”; “O Friendship too unfriendly! You mysterious seducer of the soul”). We have seen that, for Augustine, friendship was the natural object of eros-love; no one could help wanting to have their friends with them always: hence, it was not a vice to have eros for the regard of others. Here, however, Augustine implied that we always had a choice about whom we regarded as friends: in particular, we must reject a friendship based upon shared sinfulness – by definition, such friendship was temporal; that is, by definition, this friendship was not the permanent, enduring thing that we would enjoy when we were happy. It was only a friendship based upon virtue which would be found among the happy. Thus, Augustine indicated that his sin had begun with the thought that he could steal and yet be happy – it had begun with his arrogance in seeing himself as the one to determine the conditions of his own happiness – but, by itself, this thought would not have led him to commit theft because human beings were moved to act only by their thoughts about what they needed to have in order to be happy. In other words, only eros could move us to act: in order to do anything at all, we must think of ourselves as gaining something for which we felt eros. Thus, Augustine explained here that it was his particular kind of pride, coupled with his friendship with other boys who were proud in the same way, which led him to steal. Friendship with sinners was necessarily a temporal friendship; hence, his theft had been motivated by a temporal love. His carnal concupiscence, in the form of his love of this temporal friendship, gave him a motive to commit theft because he saw that stealing would consolidate his friendship with these boys, and his pride had eliminated any motive which he would ordinarily have not to commit theft. Thinking of himself as able to sin and yet be happy – that is, thinking of himself as able to achieve happiness by doing something ordinarily incompatible with happiness, a thought which involved reckoning himself to be the godlike creator of his own nature – he now had no reason not to commit theft, and his choice to love companions who thought in the same way gave him a motive to commit it since by committing this theft he would gain their continuing regard. Thus, he was



Conf. ...



Conf. ...

Weakness, Ignorance, and Pride



clear that he would never have committed this theft but for his friends: “Yet alone I would not have done it – alone I could not at all have done it.” In contrast, with his companions joining in, he explained that he would have been ashamed to appear unwilling to do this deed. Hence, it was his desire to maintain his standing in the eyes of his fellow sinners, who shared his pride in looking upon themselves as able to steal and yet be happy, which had provided him with the motivation to steal the pears. In this way, he recognised that a psychologically persuasive analysis of his reasons for committing the theft required him to uncover two reasons in favour of taking this decision. First, his natural unwillingness, which he shared with all human beings, to do something which he knew to be sinful needed to be overcome; this natural unwillingness was overcome when we persuaded ourselves that, in this special case, we were unconstrained by human nature: we told ourselves that, exceptionally, doing something sinful could lead to happiness. This was pride, since it meant placing oneself in God’s place. When Augustine had told himself this, he had neutralised his natural reluctance to do anything known to be sinful: while he continued to regard theft as incompatible with happiness in the case of other people, he had made an exception of himself, by attributing to himself a god-like capacity to shape his nature and thereby determine the circumstances of his own happiness. Importantly, he had also made an exception of his companions, by viewing them as likewise capable of both committing theft and attaining happiness. This gave him his motive to steal, since he saw that his eros-love for companionship would find its satisfaction in companionship with these fellow-sinners, who conceived happiness in the same terms in which he conceived it. In other words, he imagined these boys with him in the happy life. This was a temporal motive, based upon the love of something temporal – even though he incorrectly imagined the friendship that he loved to be something imperishable (and hence something which he would have in the state of happiness). Having convinced himself that he could do something sinful and yet be happy, he was ready to steal if he thought that he stood to gain anything which he loved by it. Consequently, as soon as he saw that he would gain the esteem of his companions by stealing, his decision to steal was taken: he consented to carnal concupiscence through pride. The Stoics and Platonists were proud in thinking of themselves as the authors of their own virtue; here, Augustine was proud in a different



Ibid.

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

sense: he was proud in thinking of himself as able to attain happiness without being virtuous. Happiness referred to the life in accordance with human nature, and Augustine was proud in claiming for himself the power to determine what this life looked like. Rather than thinking of himself as the author of his virtue, he thought of himself as the author of his own nature itself. Yet this kind of pride shared with philosophical pride the notion that human beings were in some way the makers of their own happiness – for the Stoics and Platonists, we were instrumental in attaining our own happiness because, through making ourselves virtuous, we ensured that we would enter the happy life; but for Augustine in his theft of the pears (and all who were proud in this way), we were instrumental in attaining our own happiness because happiness itself was viewed as something which human beings determined for themselves. According to Augustine, God was in every sense the maker of human happiness, including being the one to make human nature and hence to determine the conditions in which human beings were happy. In convincing ourselves that doing one of those things which we knew to be sinful was compatible with happiness, we asserted a false freedom for ourselves from the natures that God had made. In this, the recognition of the sinfulness of the action in question was a crucial component of our pride. Thus, in his theft of the pears, Augustine sinned not through weakness or ignorance, but through pride: he knew that what he did was sinful, but did not struggle to resist doing it; rather, he embraced doing it, telling himself that, exceptionally, he could sin and yet be happy. At the same time, Augustine did not imply that there was anything inevitable about committing the sin of theft. In considering whether or not to join in the theft of the pears, he was at a kind of crossroads, but rather than facing a choice between being virtuous and being sinful, he faced a choice between two kinds of sin. Loving friendship did not make his act of theft inevitable: rather, he had been free to say ‘no’ to the suggestion of theft as a means to keep hold of the regard of these boys because he had been free to conclude that, while he had a natural eros-love for friendship, there could be no natural eros for the friendship of these companions – no happy person would be a friend to sinners. Yet if he had chosen not to commit the theft, then he would have been proud in self-consciously keeping to what he supposed to be the path of virtue – knowing theft to be a sin, and rejecting the thought that his natural eros for friendship could be satisfied in friendship with thieves, he would have incorrectly supposed that he was virtuous in refusing to steal: he would have supposed that he was virtuous in rejecting the thought that friendship with

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

thieves could be found among the happy. Yet this was also a kind of pride: it took the form of the praise that he gave himself for making himself virtuous: he would have been proud in thinking of himself as virtuous through his own efforts. The only escape from this kind of pride lay in Christianity, which involved the realisation that none of these things was enough for virtue since virtue consisted in eros for the true God, where the true God was necessarily the one to give virtue in giving eros for Himself. Thus, Augustine’s message in narrating the story of his youthful theft was not at all the message that actions which were sins in themselves were inevitable features of non-Christian societies. Rather, he was clear that his decision to steal arose precisely because he was not proud with the pride of the Stoics or Platonists, or others, who looked upon virtue as a human achievement. That is, he had become a thief in his sixteenth year because his moral education had not advanced even so far as the mistaken view of virtue espoused by these thinkers. He accepted that the Stoics and Platonists, as well as other non-Christians, despite being proud, nonetheless successfully avoided theft and other things which were sins in themselves. Had he possessed their notion of virtue – namely, their view that the highest good lay in thinking that nothing temporal was needed for happiness (the Stoics), or that the highest good was God (the Platonists), or even that the highest good was the praise of other people earned for refusing to steal and doing only sociable deeds instead – then he would not have sought to satisfy his desire for friendship by consorting with thieves. In other words, his theft arose because he had not, as yet, made any progress at all along the path to virtue which was found in the eudaimonist tradition. Hence, while Augustine was clear that he had never possessed virtue at any point prior to his conversion to Christianity, he was equally clear that theft was not inevitable among non-Christians. All non-Christians were capable of refraining from doing these actions and any other action which was a sin in itself since the sin of pride, common to all non-Christians, could take these two different forms. In short, Augustine implied that if he had possessed, in his sixteenth year, even the inadequate understanding of the nature of human happiness found among pagan moralists, then this would have prevented him from choosing to steal.

  ’  Augustine intended his account of his theft of the pears to have clear parallels with Adam and Eve’s first sin in the Garden of Eden. Hence, we



Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

can turn to his analysis of this sin to understand in more detail what he thought was the place of pride in his own transgression in stealing the pears. When Augustine explained the nature of Adam and Eve’s first sin in Paradise, he likewise insisted that Adam and Eve’s decision to take and eat the forbidden fruit had its origins in “a perverse kind of exaltation” of themselves. Adam and Eve, inexplicably, thought that they would be able to get away without any repercussions with doing something which they knew to be sinful in itself (eating the fruit that God had forbidden them to eat). That is, like Augustine, Adam had thought that he “might imitate an imperfect liberty by doing with impunity things which I was not allowed to do.” Adam had looked at the forbidden fruit and thought to himself that he could do what he knew to be sinful and yet be happy. Here, Augustine explicitly named this as being proud, “and what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation?” He added elsewhere that Eve’s first sin had been pride as well: “When would the woman have believed this assertion, . . . if there had not already been in her mind that love of her own independent authority and a certain proud overconfidence in herself?” And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes too pleased with itself. And it does so when it falls away from that unchangeable good which ought to please it more than itself. And therefore the holy Scriptures designate the proud by another name, “selfpleasers.”

Adam had exalted himself – abandoning God, regarding himself as his own light – by deciding that he could determine what was or was not compatible with his happiness. He knew that eating the forbidden fruit was itself a sin, and knowing this meant knowing that it could not lead to the happy life. Hence, Adam’s action in choosing to eat was only explicable if he had somehow come to regard what he knew to be a sin as something which, exceptionally, would not debar him from being happy. Like Augustine, Adam had exalted himself in thinking that he was the author of his own nature (“a kind of end to [him]self”), and hence the one to determine wherein his happiness lay. In other words, Adam had thought that he could commit this sin and yet act in a way which was not inappropriate to human nature. He had  

 Conf. ... Civ. Dei ...  Civ. Dei ... Ibid.



Gn. Litt. ...

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

come to regard himself as his own light – his own guide as to what was and was not in accordance with his nature. This was the sense in which he had abandoned God and come to “exist” in himself, pleasing himself: he had turned away from regarding God as the author of human nature, and hence of human happiness, and claimed this role, in this instance, for himself. In identifying Adam and Eve as proud, Augustine introduced a new dimension into the biblical account of the Fall. He claimed that the eating of the forbidden fruit was in a sense the second sin, and not the first sin at all – or, rather, he identified eating the fruit as the first “public” sin. But the first evil will, which preceded all man’s evil works, was rather a kind of falling away from the work of God to its own works. And therefore the works resulting were evil, since [they were] according to oneself, and not according to God; so that the will or the man himself, so far as his will is bad, was as it were the evil tree bringing forth evil fruit.

The outward sin of eating the fruit was preceded by the secret sin of pride. As with Augustine’s decision to steal the pears, the decision to eat the fruit was preceded by pride, whereby Adam came to think that he could do something known to be sinful and yet live in accordance with his nature – that is, that he could reshape his nature so that he, and not God, determined the circumstances of his happiness. Without this first secret sin of pride, the first public sin would never have occurred. In his accounts of Adam’s first sin, Augustine likewise emphasised the role played by Adam’s love for the friendship of a sinner (hence, temporal friendship), in this case, the friendship of Eve. Without this motivating temporal love, Adam’s decision to eat remained inexplicable. This was because his pride had opened up the possibility of eating the forbidden fruit, without making this decision to eat inevitable; instead, for Adam to decide to eat this fruit, a motive for eating it needed to present itself. Thus, as with Augustine’s theft of the pears, having become proud, Adam only lacked a motive to do something known to be sinful, and he found this in his love for Eve’s companionship: unwilling to be separated from Eve’s company now that Eve had sinned, Adam had a motive for joining her in sin by eating, and his pride removed the reason that he had had to refuse to eat. Hence, Adam had, first, become proud, and then given his consent to the suggestion of a temporal love: Eve had offered him the fruit, but Adam had been tempted not by the fruit per se but by 

Civ. Dei ..; see also ...



Civ. Dei ...

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Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin

what he heard implicit in her offer, namely, the suggestion that his eroslove for friendship could find its satisfaction in the enjoyment of her companionship. Eve had first eaten and then offered him the fruit; Adam had known that eating this fruit was a sin, and so he had known that Eve was a sinner: thus, in the offer of the fruit, he had ‘heard’ the carnal suggestion that his happiness lay in her company, the company of a sinner: they shared in the sin of pride, in imagining that they could determine the conditions of their own happiness, and so it seemed to Adam that his natural eros for friendship could be satisfied in Eve, since she shared his picture of happiness. This was a carnal suggestion since all eros for the friendship of sinners was necessarily eros for what was temporal. Thus, he would not have said ‘yes’ to this carnal suggestion unless he had first imagined a happiness for them both despite the punishment that he knew God had decreed for this sin. This was his pride, namely, daring to imagine human happiness as possible outside the terms of human nature which were set by God. Imagining that he could be happy and yet do something which he knew was sinful, he had chosen to give his consent to the carnal suggestion, thereby taking the decision to eat the forbidden fruit, which was the first public sin. Adam had fallen in being proud and he fell still further in saying ‘yes’ to the eros-love of what was temporal, namely, the companionship of Eve. In describing his youthful theft of pears and in describing Adam’s sin, Augustine wanted to reflect on the circumstances that led to sin among the rational – those who, with full command of their active reason, knew which actions were sins in themselves and which were morally neutral. In the case of Adam, there had been no pre-existing habits of temporal eros-loves to tempt him; and Augustine implied that in his own case, he had not formed any habits of temporal loves in his childhood which would have tempted him to steal the pears. Nonetheless, even in situations in which no such temporal loves (e.g., the love for food or for other sensual pleasures) pre-existed, human beings could still choose to do something which they knew was a sin in itself as a consequence of their inborn, ineradicable, and therefore natural eros-love for things like friendship. Having become proud in imagining a happiness for ourselves in doing something which we knew to be sinful, our natural love for friendship could motivate us actually to do this deed, if others were present with us who had likewise fallen into this kind of pride. This was because we would tell ourselves that these fellow-sinners would be our friends in (what we imagined to be) the happy life. In this way, Augustine was able

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to offer a psychologically astute explanation of the ‘fall’ among adults (people who had reached the age of reason) – meaning, the fall into the commission of one of those actions which was sinful in itself, even when there were no habits to predispose us to doing these things. Yet the possibility of this fall did not make this fall inevitable, since, as noted already, he accepted that even the moral education provided by nonChristian traditions in eudaimonism secured us against choosing to do things which were sins in themselves. This chapter has explored the distinction that Augustine drew between venial sins and damnable sins, and between sinning through weakness or ignorance and sinning through pride. He was clear that sin was present in everyone’s life, including the lives of Christians. He maintained that the great men of the Christian faith – Abel, Job, even Paul – had committed many venial sins; no Christian could hope to avoid these sins. Yet this did not leave him pessimistic about the prospects for social and political life on earth. He fully recognised the ineradicable sinfulness of human beings, and did not see conversion to Christianity as offering a cure for human weakness and moral ignorance. Nonetheless, he did not regard deeds of social and political injustice as inevitable in any human society – whether Christian or non-Christian. On the contrary, in his analysis of his youthful theft of pears, and in his account of Adam and Eve’s first sin, he offered a compelling and psychologically convincing explanation of how people came to do things which were sins in themselves, including otherharming, unsociable things, without depicting these actions as inevitable among sinners. His position in this regard was informed by his adherence to the eudaimonist tradition, a tradition which he saw as guiding even non-Christians to a depth of moral understanding sufficient to deter them from doing any of those things which were sins in themselves. Thus, an investigation of Augustine’s understanding of the nature of venial and damnable sins supports the conclusion reached by the rest of this study: namely, that Augustine made sense of the meaning of virtue and sin from within the eudaimonist tradition in ethics.

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Index

joy, , , , ,  pathē, – eudaimonism, –, –, –, –, –, –, –,  evangelism, 

Adam, –, – baptism, – benevolence, – Bible, the, , , , , ,  Byers, S., , , – Caesar, Julius, – carnal concupiscence, , , , –, , –, , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , , , , ,  Cato, the Younger,  cause (present in action), – Cicero, , , , –, –, – City of God, , , , , , , , , , ,  Confessions, , –, – Conversion, , , –  Corinthians :, – Couenhoven, J., – Deane, H., , ,  Dodaro, R., , , , ,  Donatists,  Earthly City, , , , ,  emotions, ,  eupatheiai, – grief, –, , –, –, , –

faith, ,  forgiveness, , , , , , , –, , ,  Fortin, E.,  Good Samaritan,  good works, , – grace, , , , , , , , ,  habits, , , , –, , –, ,  happiness/happy life, , , , , –, – happiness in hope, –,  Harding, B., ,  Heavenly City, , ,  highest good, –, , , , , , , –, – ignorance, – impiety, –, – Judaism, –, – just war, –





Index

justice, –, – human justice and true justice, –, – Lord’s Prayer, the, , , , ,  love, –, –, –,  agape, – eros, , –, –, –, –, – love of domination, – love of glory, – neighbour-love, , –, , , – philia, , –, –, – self-love, , , , , – Luke :, ,  Manicheanism, , –, – Mann, W.,  Markus, R., – memory, – mind, , , , –, , –, , –, , , , , , ,  Monica, –,  morally neutral things, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Nygren, A., – O’Donovan, O., –, , , ,  oikeiösis,  Orata, Sergius (Cicero’s Hortensius), – pain, –, , ,  Paul, the Apostle, – peace, – Philippians :-, – political thought, , , , –, – kingship, – political realism/pessimism, – preferred indifferents, , –, , , ,  rationality/reason, , , , – Romans :, 

Sallust,  Sceptics, – self-hatred, , – sin, , – consent, – damnable sins, –, – definitions of sin, – original sin, – personal sin, , –, , ,  pride, –, – sins in themselves, , –, , –, , – venial sins, –, – Skinner, Q.,  slavery, – slave-wives,  Stoic-Platonic tradition, , , , , –, , –, , , –,  Platonism, , , , –,  Stoicism/Stoics, –, , –, –, –, –,  suggestions, – temporal things, –, , , , –, –, – use and enjoyment, –, –, – Varro,  virtue, , – civic virtue, – definitions of virtue, – pagan virtue,  political virtue,  virtue in Augustine’s early writings, – virtue of chastity,  virtue of continence, – Wang, J., , – weakness, – will (voluntas), – Wolterstorff, N., –, , , – women, – Zechariah and Elizabeth, –