Augustine Our Contemporary : Examining the Self in Past and Present [1 ed.] 9780268103477, 9780268103453

Citation preview

Augustine Our Contemporary

Au gust in e Our Co nte mpora ry Examining the Self in Past and Present

Edited by

Willemien Otten and

S u s a n E . Sc h r e i n e r

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress​.nd​.edu Copyright © 2018 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Otten, Willemien, editor. Title: Augustine our contemporary : examining the self in past and present / edited by Willemien Otten and Susan E. Schreiner. Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017055860 (print) | LCCN 2018005245 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268103477 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268103484 (epub) | ISBN 9780268103453 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430. Classification: LCC BR65.A9 (ebook) | LCC BR65.A9 A875 2018 (print) | DDC 270.2092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055860 Ó This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper). This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

Contents



Introduction: Augustine Our Contemporary Susan E. Schreiner

one

Augustine Our Contemporary: The Overdetermined, Incomprehensible Self David W. Tracy

27

Semper agens/semper quietus: Notes on the History of an Augustinian Theme Bernard McGinn

75

two

three

f our

five



si x





se v en

1

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-­Love Vincent Carraud

105

The Open Self: Augustine and the Early Medieval Ethics of Order Willemien Otten

135

Teachers Without and Within Adriaan T. Peperzak

165

Luther and Augustine on Romans 9 David C. Steinmetz

185

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito 199 Jean-­Luc Marion

vi  Contents ei g ht

N ine

ten

ele v en

twelv e

thirteen

The Augustinian Strain of Piety: Theology and Autobiography in American History W. Clark Gilpin

233

The Saint and the Humanities William Schweiker

249

The Source of Temptation Franklin I. Gamwell

267

Augustine and Political Theology Jean Bethke Elshtain

293

Cor ad cor loquitur: Augustine’s Influence on Heidegger and Lonergan Fred Lawrence

315



Ruins and Time Françoise Meltzer

365



Notes on Contributors 389

Index 395

Introduction Augustine Our Contemporary

susan e. schreiner

The above title, taken from the opening chapter of this book, by David Tracy, encapsulates the overarching theme of the volume. The authors have interpreted the word “our” in terms of both historical and contemporary thought. Just as seminal thinkers throughout the centuries have turned for guidance to St. Augustine, so, too, have modern authors found him to be their contemporary. In Augustine they encounter a theologian who, from out of the distant past, continues to speak to them as they wrestle with the very issues that Augustine placed at the center of Western thought. David Tracy is no exception. It is not an overstatement to say that from 1969 to 2007 Tracy’s tenure at the University of Chicago Divinity School constituted the “Tracy era.” Throughout this period, Tracy provided leadership in the study of Christian theology and its relationship to history, philosophy, literature, and ethics. Hence it is fitting that the 1

2  Susan E. Schreiner

authors of the chapters in this book include scholars from all these areas. The broad and synthetic range of Tracy’s knowledge has always astounded his colleagues and peers. Moreover, Tracy exemplified the interdisciplinary approach that he knew theology required. His teaching, research, and writings continue to guide and inform the intellectual projects of those who still wander these halls. Although he has retired, David’s presence is still profoundly influential. For all that he taught us, we are grateful, and, therefore, we thank him with this volume. However, these chapters do not analyze David Tracy’s own writings. Despite his impact on the work of both the Divinity School and the wider world of scholarship, David staunchly refused to allow his colleagues to celebrate his retirement with a conference devoted to his own work. Anxious not to let him just pack up his books and leave the school, the faculty continually asked, “What can we do in honor of your retirement?” He insistently dodged the question. Finally, however, Tracy conceded that we could arrange a conference to commemorate his retirement on one condition; namely, that the conference be about St. Augustine. By making this decision, he both affirmed the importance of Augustine in his own theology and upheld the long-­standing conviction held by the Divinity School that contemporary theology must grow out of, and be in conversation with, the history of the Christian tradition. In his insistence that the conference focus on Augustine and his interpreters, Tracy thereby opposed the ever-­present danger of a “presentism” that would isolate the theology of our age from those traditions that gave it life. The present always seems so urgent to contemporary thinkers. More so than in any other era, the present now bears down on us from every image, newspaper, and screen, and it is increasingly difficult to break the power of its grip. By maintaining the importance of St. Augustine, David once again acted as our teacher. Devoted to historical and contemporary readings of Augustine, this conference demonstrated the need to bring the past to bear upon the present. David showed us that it is our responsibility to question the past and to allow the past to question us. And so we held a very successful conference, which we felt to be so meaningful that we decided it was worthwhile to publish the results. Our hope is that this volume will demonstrate that thinkers ranging from Augustine’s immediate successors to Lonergan and Tracy worked by turning back to the Augustinian legacy. In short,

Introduction  3

Tracy was right: Augustine has always been a contemporary of the Western tradition. Since all of our authors are writing on some aspect of Augustine, it might be useful to jump ahead for a moment to the essay by David Steinmetz. Steinmetz makes clear that the term “Augustinian” has always been problematic. As he argues, every theologian in the West was to some extent Augustinian. Contemporary historians have tried to study the extent of Augustinianism in three fundamental ways. One method concentrates on the theological environment in which a theologian reads Augustine and the tradition of interpretation characteristic of the religious community to which he or she belongs. Another method is one in which one focuses on one author’s use of Augustine. A third approach consists of comparing Augustine’s teaching on a given subject with the way that subject is treated by a later thinker. As Steinmetz warns, appealing to Augustine is not the same as being Augustinian in the strictest sense. Various thinkers adapted Augustine’s thought in order to solve the current issues with which they were struggling. Because our authors are primarily using the third methodology, we are able to provide a trajectory that traces the ways in which an Augustinian theme recurred, and was transformed, by later thinkers. In the course of this book, we will find topics that David Tracy’s chapter analyzes and that evoke further discussion—­namely, such topics as nature and grace, sin and redemption, the possibility of knowledge, and the significance of tragedy. Most importantly, we will see that the voices from history as well as those from our own day address Tracy’s question about the self. We find discussions about the nature of the self, the capabilities and limitations of the self, and the place of the self in relation to God and the cosmos. By using both the historical and later interpretations, we have consciously resisted the presentism that is the constant temptation of contemporary thinkers. We have attempted, rather, to demonstrate the necessity of bringing the past to bear on the present. In so doing, we give examples from various genres and from different historical eras. Of course not all elements of Augustine’s work appealed to every writer or every generation. It may be possible to identify some of the primary concerns of an age by discerning what writers chose to emphasize within the Augustinian tradition. If this supposition is correct, the following chapters may be revealing of our own era as well. This becomes

4  Susan E. Schreiner

particularly clear when we perceive that one central issue continually resurfaces: the concern with the self. What can the self (or soul) accomplish? Is the self free or unfree? What can we know, and what is beyond our comprehension? What is the place of the self in the universe? What is the self seeking? Throughout we will find a deep, and perhaps anxious, interest in the volitional and intellectual capacities of the human self and its understanding of, and place in, the world. Since Tracy’s work set the agenda for the conference and this volume, it is fitting to open the volume with his essay “Augustine Our Contemporary: The Overdetermined, Incomprehensible Self.” Tracy begins analyzing many of these issues by exploring the development of Augustine’s view of the self throughout the course of Christian theology. As he states, Augustine’s understanding of the self is most famous for his emphasis on the turn toward interiority. With this emphasis on interiority Augustine used several paradigms to construct what Tracy calls the “overdetermined self.” The paradigm of “nature-­grace” enables us to see how “intelligence-­in-­act” is driven by love. Tracy explains that Augustine believed that popular religion should also become a philosophical religion. For the philosophically mature Augustine, “the mind—­through its exercise of attentive intelligence-­in-­act—­was capable of producing both a genuine scientia of bodily, sensuous things, as well as a sapientia, or wisdom, about the first principles of reason in the divine ideas.” At its limit, the mind could come to an inadequate but real and partial understanding of God as the Incomprehensible One. Furthermore, philosophy continued to bear on the truths of the faith: “Faith must always seek understanding of itself, its intellectual internal and external coherence.” As Tracy argues, “Faith released a new knowledge and a new powerful desire to know always more—­redirecting, enriching but never abandoning the employment of all the usual forms of reason. Fides quaerens intellectum.” However, the “Augustinian intellectualist self ” should never lead us to downplay the important role of will or love. Tracy elucidates the relationship between the intellect and love by showing that, for Augustine, “Love, like faith and hope, drives understanding. Fides quaerens intellectum is simultaneously Amor quaerens intellectum.” He continues: “Nevertheless, another reality—­ sin—­ enters this Augustinian interweaving of intelligence and love to darken, wound, and becloud knowledge as it twists the will from its natural desire to love the

Introduction  5

Good into something defined by false loves.” At this point the paradigm of “sin-­grace” emerges as definitive of the sinful self, a self that Augustine defined as a convalescent who was being healed by grace over time. Tracy explains that the classical Protestant reformers were attracted to the sin-­grace paradigm at the expense of that of nature and grace. Finding that the central formulation of Augustine’s view of the self was found in the anti-­Pelagian works, both Luther and Calvin emphasized the “radicality of the sin-­natured self,” which included the bondage of the will and the self-­delusion of the intellect. Tracy concludes by introducing a third paradigm, which he draws from Greek tragedy. As he states, “In addition to (not in replacement of!) employing the nature-­grace paradigm for understanding intelligence and will and the sin-­grace paradigm for understanding the depth of sin, I propose a tragedy-­grace paradigm to complete Augustine’s rich polyphonic and conflictual (in a single word, overdetermined) understanding of the ultimately incomprehensible reality, the human self.” Tracy develops this innovative paradigm in order to demonstrate that Augustine’s tragic sensibility is both intensified and transformed by God’s grace. In sum, Tracy develops an understanding of the self that is “comprehensible only as an overdetermined self—­dazzlingly intelligent and loving, constituted by will as energy, will as choice—­as well as a graced, sinful and tragic self.” These themes regarding the nature of the self, interiority, the role of reason, sin, will, grace, and love continue to find expression in the chapters that follow Tracy’s. In his chapter, “Semper agens/semper quietus: Notes on the History of an Augustinian Theme,” Bernard McGinn focuses on the discussion of the divine names in the first five books of the Confessions. In these sections Augustine is struggling with the question of how the human being can properly address God. In order to talk with or about God correctly, we must somehow know the truth about God. How much can the human mind understand about God such that it is calling on the true God and not some false or fictitious divinity? To “name” God requires us to learn the true nature of the divine and to ask whether human language can ever express this truth. McGinn concentrates on the attributes that conclude Augustine’s “hymn of praise”—­namely, with the invocation of the phrase “semper agens/semper quietus.” According to McGinn’s analysis, this phrase is the central theme by which Augustine expresses the simultaneous insufficiency and the necessity of speaking about God. Moreover, as

6  Susan E. Schreiner

McGinn argues, this problem of knowing and naming the true God persisted throughout the medieval tradition but reemerged with full force in the vernacular mysticism of the thirteenth century. The problem persists today. As McGinn eloquently states, “We, like Augustine, have to discover the truth about the God we address, or at least as much as necessary to enable us to direct our faltering speech to the real God and not some counterfeit (aliud enim pro alio potest invocare nesciens).” Vincent Carraud analyzes a different phrase of Augustine found in the Confessions: “Pondus meum amor meus.” His chapter, with that phrase as its title, returns us to the theme of interiority by turning to the relationship between love and the self. By studying the meaning of this phrase, Carraud asks a central question: “What does theology have to gain by thinking of its foremost object, love, as a weight?” He pursues this issue by an exploration that leads to the ultimate question: Is self-­love a real possibility for the self in Augustine’s thought? Carraud begins by explaining the concept of a “weight” [pondus] as derived from the “philosophical vulgate” of Augustine’s time. Adopting the tradition that stemmed from Aristotle, Augustine assumes the teleological concept of “natural place.” He shows that “the development in Augustine is that he, in contrast [to Cicero], subsumes under the single concept of pondus the two opposing impulses upward and downward.” In Augustine, weight does not mean “downward” but, rather, includes both heaviness and lightness. Carraud then argues that, owing to the paradox found in scripture rather than in widespread physical doctrines, Augustine’s idea of the “neutrality of weight” becomes the model of a twofold love—­namely, both gravitas [heaviness] and levitas [lightness]. Tracing Augustine’s innovative use of pondus and ordo, Carraud demonstrates that the physical concept of weight has been transformed and acquired “essential neutrality.” According to Carraud, what Augustine gains by linking love to the physical model of weight is a way of thinking about love as immanent and interior. This also means that love is “a (natural) law inseparable from the self.” Equally important, the physical model of weight allowed Augustine to think about the interiorization of movement according to the “law of love.” With this law of love, Augustine radically refuses all models of exteriority; order is also immanent. As he states, “Moreover, the love of God is my natural trajectory, and the divine law is not exterior.”

Introduction  7

The “physics of love” allows us to understand the identity that Carraud emphasizes throughout his chapter: “My weight is my love; my love is your gift” (Carraud’s emphasis). Moreover, order and weight are synonymous. Weight makes a body move toward its own place, which is inevitably different from its initial place. Movement itself signifies disorder; its completion is its end or rest, which is the “establishment or reestablishment of order.” As a weight, love must move to its proper place, which is the “rest in God.” As Augustine says, “Our rest is our place.” Carraud asks, “If, then, love is that which causes displacement and creates order, the thing that displaces me and orders me, how could I conceive that I am, in myself, my own proper place? How would my self-­love move me toward myself, and, consequently, how would this be love?” In Augustine’s theology, self-­love cannot be a principle because love is “constitutionally and fundamentally a displacement teleologically directed toward another place.” Carraud powerfully concludes: “Self-­directed love contradicts the very essence of love.” Willemien Otten’s chapter, “The Open Self: Augustine and the Early Medieval Ethics of Order,” continues themes about ordo and the self by examining early medieval thought as a combined intellectual-­moral project called the “open self.” This is a self deeply influenced by the Augustinian legacy, especially as it relates to ideas of self and creation. Otten questions why the therapeutic approach made famous centuries later by Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire did not recur after Augustine until the twelfth century. Augustine’s idea of the exercitatio mentis as preparation of the soul for its ascent to God seemed to be ideally suited to further therapeutic development. However, we do not find this reemergence of a kind of psychological introspection until Abelard’s interest in ethics, which bears the therapeutic subtitle Know Thyself. Returning to the early Middle Ages from an Abelardian perspective, Otten argues that early medieval thought did not lack an interest in ethics, but this interest was implicit because it was intertwined with, and overshadowed by, cosmological contemplation. The move after Augustine was as much an outward one—­toward the study of creation and the universe, as attested in the thought of Johannes Scottus E ­ riugena’s Periphyseon—­ as an inward one, as evidenced in Anselm’s Proslogion. Nonetheless, as Otten explains, “The greatest divergence separating various groups of early medieval authors concerns precisely the meaning of

8  Susan E. Schreiner

the self.” Whereas Augustine and Anselm “can be grouped together as advocating a view of the self that is somehow centered and introspective, for authors like Eriugena or the Chartrians the inward view of the self retreats before an outward view of cosmic nature.” Otten proceeds, however, to show how complex this grouping becomes when analyzing the relationships among Augustine, Anselm, and Eriugena. She makes clear how the divergence regarding the meaning of the self concerned the relationships among God, the cosmos, and the self. Otten begins by explaining how the “tropological” or “cogitative” turn in the early Middle Ages cultivated an “open transparent self.” This tropological turn, inaugurated by Augustine, is the “joint task of biblical hermeneutics and cosmological study” by means of which prescholastic thinkers reflected on the universe and reached out to God. They did so, however, without “taking the needs of the human self as their explicit point of departure.” Otten goes on to explain the crucial importance of the sense of order and balance in early medieval discourse. By appreciating their importance, “It literally makes no difference whether we are dealing with the Platonic notion of cosmic reditus in Eriugena or with Anselm’s intimate, prayerful plea to God to reform his defiled soul in the opening chapter of his Proslogion, as the nature of their divergence, that is, of the soul or self from God in Anselm and of cosmic nature from God in Eriugena, is from an early medieval perspective a mere optical illusion. God, self, and cosmos must inevitably come together, because they jointly constitute the fixed regimen of divine order that constitutes the early medieval paradigm and whose rhythm spurs on and pulsates in early medieval reflection.” The reason Otten wants to speak of an “ethics” of order is that “inherent in the notion of order that is assumed, God and the cosmos are related in such a way that humans remain able to make responsible choices.” Through the ages authors have been free to use their own hermeneutical strategies to add moral depth to their texts. These choices are therefore “best seen as choices of an open self.” Their morality is mostly implicit because the purpose of these texts was not to give us a sinful human before an omnipotent God but rather “to facilitate traffic and thus continue the conversation.” Seen from this perspective, Otten concludes: “Directed by recta ratio, all that early medieval texts strive to do is to maintain traffic control as they try to assign both God and the soul their proper place in the universe.”

Introduction  9

Throughout her essay, Otten demonstrates how the early medieval reading of Augustine constructively linked the rational and affective/spiri­ tual dimensions of Augustine’s thought. She is thereby able to show that there was “a layered, more complex notion of confession, opening up into the self as much as into the universe.” This twofold perspective of early medieval thought is the kind of therapeutic message with which Augustine colored the outlook of the early Middle Ages as an ethics of order. Otten concludes, “The larger development of his thought notwithstanding, it seems to have mattered very little to Augustine whether he connected God, self, and cosmos via a Platonic and cosmological program, as in his early Soliloquies or De Ordine; integrated them in the two halves of his prayerful Confessions; or erected new parameters for their convergence in the semiotic On Christian Doctrine. Since it was not in selective but in mixed form that Augustine was transmitted to the early Middle Ages, understandably, early medieval authors accordingly came to see this mix as the essence of his message.” Her analysis serves as advice to enrich the field of Augustinian studies by reading Augustine not just as the (post) modern author foreshadowing the discovery of the self but also as the author in whom world and self are found completely intertwined. Thus Otten has shown that the early Middle Ages adopted Augustine’s exercitatio mentis to create an “ethics of order.” Ethical and peda­ gogical themes that stress order and the mind find further expression in the chapter by Adriaan Peperzak, “Teachers Without and Within.” Peperzak shows the process of Augustine’s transformation of Plato and then proceeds to compare Augustine and Bonaventure, with particular attention to the influence of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Like McGinn, Peperzak is interested in the relationship between language and truth, but he is not discussing human language. Now we are dealing with an analysis of God’s language when speaking to human beings. Peperzak shows that Augustine elevates the “cosmic metaphor of light” by giving it the power of an “intersubjective and educational metaphor for evoking a divine speaking that generates human words of truth.” Moreover, Peperzak shows that the decisive element in Augustine’s transformation of the Platonic and Plotinian God creates a place for Christ as the unique mediator. For Augustine, the incarnate Word of God as the Light of the World is necessary for human beings to be convinced of the truth. As Peperzak argues, “Here stands the decisive difference

10  Susan E. Schreiner

between Augustine and non-­Christian Platonists: this—­not Plotinus’s Nous—­is the mediator, a divine man, incarnate Word of God and Light of the world, whom humans need in order to be convinced by the truth. His presence in our search is the light in which we are allowed to think and ‘see.’ Without being in touch with the Logos, there is no human truth.” Peperzak further shows that although Bonaventure’s framework is profoundly Augustinian, he also employs the works of Aristotle, as is apparent in Bonaventure’s explanation of how humans attain true knowledge of creation. Bonaventure agrees with Augustine that the search for truth must be based on faith: “Ultimately Christ is the only teacher, because he is the only originary principle and cause of both faith and reason.” However, Bonaventure also accepts the Augustinian device of fides quaerens intellectum, which requires rational inquiry to understand the hidden meanings and coherence of revealed truth. Nonetheless, theological and philosophical reflection cannot be the ultimate goal. Contemplation integrates rational insight with affective dispositions and virtuous behavior. Although Bonaventure appeals to Augustine’s writings about Christ as “God’s Word and the one exemplary origin in which all eternal truths, ideas, essences, and laws form one creative ars aeterna,” he warns against an exclusive emphasis on divine illumination. God is “neither the only nor the complete principle of human knowledge.” While we discover truth in the light granted by the Word of God, that light itself cannot become the object of our conceptual grasp or unmediated speculation. The light “in which we ‘see,’ ‘think,’ and ‘speak’ the truth about beings cannot be comprehended or seen, because it is too much, too super-­abundant, too blinding for a finite intellect.” According to Peperzak, Bonaventure agrees with Augustine that the human “soul is connected to the eternal laws, because the extreme edge of the active intellect and the highest part of its reason is somehow in touch with that [divine] light.” However, he agrees with Aristotle that our knowledge, including knowledge of universals, presupposes and requires sensibility, memory, and experience. Peperzak concludes by reflecting on the role of teachers. Christ, of course, is the “inner teacher,” but “Christ has not come to abolish the authority of teachers.” As the “third level” beyond reason, contemplation is where a good theologian “must be at home.” In fact, for Bonaventure, “contemplation is a pars pro toto for a holy life, as seen from the perspective of its truthfulness.” Peperzak concludes by saying, “When we realize

Introduction  11

that the Word of God is present in such constellations as the Power and Wisdom without which no worthwhile truth emerges,” exemplary teachers “appear as images of God’s own internal communication” and as messengers who “re-­present the Word that, before all beginnings, is spoken by God and, from the beginning of space and time, echoes in every search for authentic truth.” Augustine was also a teacher of Martin Luther, who claimed Augustine’s authority as often as possible. In David Steinmetz’s chapter we find the question of how much Augustine taught Luther. It is worth noting that, once again, the issue revolves around how Augustine and Luther understood the human being as the self who stands before God. Repeatedly Luther asked how the self, as sinner, can stand before a holy God. Steinmetz approaches this question by comparing Augustine’s interpretation of Romans 9 with that of Luther. This biblical chapter, which has been troublesome for exegetes throughout the centuries, has also raised significant and difficult questions for thinkers about divine justice, faith, and predestination. Steinmetz shows Luther reading Augustine in terms of the questions that haunted sixteenth-­century exegetes and laypeople alike. Could Augustine’s interpretation help Luther solve questions that were so hotly contested in the Protestant Reformation and, indeed, by all parties in the sixteenth century? We learn that despite all his admiration for Augustine, Luther found that Augustine’s exegesis of Romans 9 only posed further theological and pastoral problems. Therefore, as Luther wrestled with these pressing questions, Augustine provided very little help. As Steinmetz explains, “While Augustine worries about free will and the justice of God, Luther devotes his attention to the certitude of salvation and the understandable fears of the spiritually weak.” With Martin Luther, we find ourselves in a world very different from that of the eras studied by Otten and Peperzak. In Steinmetz’s chapter we have moved into that century that was so closely linked to the late Middle Ages but also saw the emergence of modernity. The quest for certitude did not end with Luther or any of the debates of the sixteenth century. It only deepened, as is clear in the chapter by Jean-­Luc Marion. In this chapter we return to questions about how the self can find and know the truth. Otten has shown that, if read from the early medieval perspective, the Augustinian cogito “injects God and

12  Susan E. Schreiner

humanity into a wider cosmic world whose givenness . . . both invites and demands constant reflection.” This reflection of cogitation draws the divine integrally into the “sphere of self and cosmos while making it gain deeper meaning through the repetition implied by the exercitatio mentis.” The concern with cogitation and the cogito recurs in Marion’s chapter, but in a very different context and with very different content. This chapter, “Saint Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito,” brings us into modernity and demonstrates the modern concern with the self by comparing Augustine’s cogito with that of Descartes. Marion begins by showing that several of Augustine’s statements have led scholars to equate Augustine’s argument with Descartes’s argument in Discourse on Method, a comparison that began in Descartes’s own lifetime. For example, Mersenne cited a text from The City of God: “I do not at all fear the arguments of the Academics when they say, What if you are mistaken? For if I am mistaken, I exist. He who does not exist clearly cannot be mistaken; and so, if I am mistaken, then, by the same token, I am.” Marion draws our attention to De Trinitate X.10.14: “At least even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he is doubting; if he doubts, he understands he is doubting; if he doubts, he has a will to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks, if he doubts, he knows he does not know; if he doubts, he judges he ought not to give a hasty assent.” Do not these parallels make it obvious that Augustine had already articulated the Cartesian argument of the cogito? Marion proceeds to explain why Augustine would have been unable to make Descartes’s argument. The difference lies in Augustine’s awareness of the essential insufficiency of the ego in itself and its consequent need for transcendence. However, for Descartes the experience of doubt “attests the certitude of the act of thought in such a way that the ego finds its essence in the res cogitans.” Marion emphasizes the following: “This opposition cannot be concealed. The two arguments connect thinking and being. However, in one case it is a matter of beginning with the ego in order to deduce existence from it, even God’s existence, as from a first principle different from this same God, while in the other case, it is a matter of making the mens certain through the doubt and its contradiction, in order to seek its condition of possibility beyond it, namely life.” Why could Augustine not succeed in assuring the ego of its existence or assigning to the ego the cogitation as an essence (res cogitans)? Augustine

Introduction  13

lacked neither the cogitatio nor the esse. According to Marion, what is missing in Augustine is the ego itself, and as a result Augustine refused to conclude that the ego could be known through itself. At this point Marion discusses a problem posed by Augustine that will recur in subsequent chapters of this book. For Augustine, the cogito reveals that “I am a quaestio mihi,” that is, a problem to myself. Analyzing various passages in the Confessions, Marion demonstrates that “the more the certitude of existence allows the mind to enter into its being, the more the endless crossing of this field leaves it inaccessible to itself, unknown, impenetrable, as an abyss.” Furthermore, Augustine’s understanding of memoria demonstrates the inaccessibility of the ego. The act of remembering provides no transition between “the fact of myself and my nature, my essence, and my ipseity.” Once again, the certitude of existence grants no access to one’s essence. By analyzing Augustine’s discussions about the fact of forgetting, Marion comes to the central concept of the “immemorial.” He explains that for Augustine memory ultimately concerns the remembrance of that “which never was, either present to me, or represented—­the immemorial.” Rather than a faculty for restoring the past by re-­presentation, memory is the “memoria of forgetting, of the forgetting of forgetting, and ultimately of the immemorial.” This brings about the necessity of transcendence. If memoria goes beyond what the cogitatio and the mens can comprehend, “then I have to think beyond my own thought to finally think me myself.” Unable to grasp the totality of what he is, “I must think me by thinking beyond myself.” It is this “beyond” that holds the key to Augustine’s lack of “ego.” The prayer with Monica at Ostia proves this self-­transcendence because the soul surpasses itself by “no longer thinking itself.” No longer inquiring about its essence, the mind is freed from itself and will become what it loves. As Marion argues, the only way “from the self (qua existence) toward the self (qua essence) is for the mens to rejoin the immemorial through a thought that transcends itself.” But how do we know and love that beatitude that we have never experienced? Is the happy or blessed life found in the memory? This desire cannot occur through theoretical knowledge. Therefore, Marion explains, “We know the desire for the happy life without any acquaintance with it or understanding of it, because it inhabits us as an immemorial.”

14  Susan E. Schreiner

Summarizing the necessity of self-­transcendence, Marion concludes by saying, “I am” in this desire, “in what I neither have nor am.” Clark Gilpin’s chapter moves us into the nineteenth century. Gilpin seeks to identify the “Augustinian strain of piety” in the literary culture of New England Puritanism. He demonstrates that the spirituality of this period tried to provide theological meaning to one’s life within the wider sphere of divine providence. Gilpin finds the Puritan strain of piety to be an extension of the “retrospective piety” of Augustine’s Confessions. Puritan ministers urged their congregations to examine their past lives for evidence of God’s providence. This retrospective spirituality then enabled the Puritans to discern a unifying purpose for their lives and thereby to conceive theology as a practical wisdom about the coherence of life over time. We see here the difficulty of understanding the self and placing it within a world that was supposed to be governed by God. However, Gilpin goes on to argue that by the nineteenth century this retrospective providential view of life became increasingly uncertain. He concludes by discussing Moby Dick. His study of this literary masterpiece provides further evidence that Melville retains a retrospective narrative but also opens up the possibility of a theologically resonant approach to tragedy. The interest in the self continues in this book, and William Schwei­ ker is no exception, particularly in his focus on the role of the mind, the importance of teaching, and the learning of the humanities. However, by drawing on Augustine’s thought in his chapter, “The Saint and the Humanities,” Schweiker also addresses the ethical concerns about teaching. For him, the question is whether the teaching and learning of the humanities should have an ethical dimension. When reading Schweiker’s chapter, we should again remember Otten’s discussion of the tropological turn that connected scriptural exegesis with moral-­intellectual persuasion. Recalling the resulting early medieval “ethics of order” allows us to read Schweiker’s urgent questions from an important historical perspective. His questions also address the concerns evident in Peperzak’s examination of the search for authentic truth in Augustine and Bonaventure. Turning to Augustine and contemporary teachers, Schweiker asks, “Can we still speak meaningfully of the soul’s journey as part of education, and what role, if any, does the interpretation of texts, including sacred texts, play in this journey?” Schweiker explores this issue through an analysis of Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine and argues that this text

Introduction  15

provides a picture of education that is fundamentally an Augustinian paideia. In his analysis of this enduring Augustinian volume, Schweiker emphasizes the place of scriptural exegesis, which is “the third step in the ascent of the mind” and “inscribes a pedagogy of reading within the context of spiritual paideia.” Schweiker proceeds to challenge the reader to consider whether this Augustinian paideia can be useful today. Humanistic reflection, he says, “must focus strictly on the products of human labor within the domain of language as a system generative of meaning and does so with respect to methods of inquiry that enable analysis, criticism, and insight without any assumption of or claim to the moral or spiritual rectitude of the scholar.” In contrast, Augustine believed that there are moral and spiritual demands “on the knower.” The spiritual paideia of the text opens to wider forms of inquiry but focuses on the spiritual condition of the exegete. Schweiker is acutely aware that to see moral and spiritual conditions as necessary for knowing is “profoundly at odds with contemporary sensibilities.” The influence of experimental and scientific thought results in the conviction that the method of inquiry rather than the rectitude of the mind or heart guarantees true knowledge. He therefore carefully responds to various “criteriological,” epistemic, and semantic criticisms of Augustine’s understanding of education and concludes by claiming that Augustine can, indeed, be a resource for contemporary teaching and learning. By appropriating the “dynamics of productive communicability, and so the love and life” that are at the core of Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, we need to see that the pedagogy of our text can be “read as a movement into a fuller, richer, more productive life” under norms that increase life, the love for God, and the love for others. According to Schweiker, Augustine’s conception of paideia proposes that the humanities should see the “ascent of the mind” in terms of a movement into a deeper and more complex life, a life that “will enact a form of transcendence and freedom.” The concern with the nature of the self is also the focus of Franklin Gamwell’s chapter, “The Source of Temptation.” Most of our authors have concentrated on the nature of the self in terms of the mind and of the problem but also the necessity of knowledge. Continuing the ethical aspects of Augustine’s thought, Gamwell also pursues the internal self-­ examination, but he does so by exploring the volitional aspect of the self in terms of the “sources of sin.” Comparing Augustine with Reinhold

16  Susan E. Schreiner

Niebuhr, Gamwell argues that both thinkers perceived the human will as the cause of sin “in the strict sense.” However, Gamwell asks a further question that both Augustine and Niebuhr struggled to answer. In Augustine’s words, “What is the source of this movement by which the will turns away from the unchangeable good toward a changeable good?” How does one explain how temptation relates to the act of sin? Concentrating on Augustine’s treatise On the Freedom of the Will, Gamwell analyzes three possibilities offered by Augustine to explain the source of sin—­namely, attributing the temptation to the Creator, to Adam’s sin, or to the allure of inferior things. Gamwell shows that none of these solutions explains why the temptation to sin could have been so persuasive to Adam (or Lucifer). Because Niebuhr did not accept these answers, he formulated an explication of sin that, although dependent on Augustine, was fundamentally different. Gamwell explains how, for Niebuhr, “sin posits itself.” He agrees with Augustine that “the flawed suggestion of another human (or one’s own past) could not be a force of evil absent a flaw in the present self.” This defect must be in the will and not necessitated by our nature. Since temptation is an evil, God cannot be the cause. Consequently, “each moment of decision must be complicit in the force of evil.” As Niebuhr says, “Man could not be tempted if he had not already sinned.” Having rejected Augustine’s “chronology,” Niebuhr poses an existentialist understanding of the Christian faith and insists that temptation results logically from the sinner’s prior sin. Consequently, the source of sin is not temporal but existential. The occasion for sin is “existentialist anxiety,” which is the “internality of finite self-­awareness.” Niebuhr, therefore, effects “an existential transformation of Augustine” and agrees with Kierkegaard that “sin posits itself.” Nonetheless, Gamwell believes that Niebuhr recognized that his account was self-­contradictory. Searching for rational consistency, “Niebuhr in effect throws up his hands” because he finds no resource in logical rules to help him understand the nature of sin. Since the answers to the question regarding the “sources of sin” in both Augustine and Niebuhr are defective, Gamwell offers a third account that avoids self-­contradiction and incoherence. Following Niebuhr’s existentialist approach, he argues that the source of sin is human fragmentariness. For Gamwell fragmentariness can explain both the turn toward the self and the social character

Introduction  17

of temptation. Understanding the sources of temptation without recourse to seeing it as a penalty for Adam’s original sin or as a mysterious defect of the will, Gamwell concludes: “The fragmentariness and social character of human consciousness are sufficient to offer a rational account of, in Niebuhr’s term, ‘the facts of human wrong-­doing.’ ” The nature of the self is the entry point for Jean Bethke Elshtain’s chapter, “Augustine and Political Theology.” Elshtain explains that to grasp Augustine’s political theory, the reader must join his theological anthropology to his discussions about the civic life. In her attempt to determine the nature of Augustine’s political theology, Elshtain stresses two main points. First, she is determined to negate the view that Augustine was a Christian “realist” who saw government and the civic life only as remedies for sin. Second, she makes clear that Augustine’s political thought is characterized by a complex duality of both the positive and the negative, a duality that is clear in his views of the self, knowledge, language, society, war, and peace. This duality fundamentally centers on the constant alternative forces of unity and division. Elshtain begins by examining “Augustine’s complex ruminations on the nature of selfhood.” After discussing the themes of love, desire, embodiment, the mind, the will, and Adam’s “foundational sin,” Elshtain concludes that for Augustine, the human being is “at once social and ‘quarrelsome.’” In short, she recognizes that sin is central to his thought but does not eliminate the possibilities inherent in social existence. In fact, she says, “Sociality lies at the basis of Augustine’s understanding of the nature of human societies.” Analyzing Augustine’s view of the mind and human knowledge leads Elshtain to Augustine’s theory of language. As she explains, “Augustine’s powerful theological anthropology compels attention to the ways in which human beings created in God’s image communicate.” For Augustine, language reflects “the ways in which the self is riven by sin” and how human societies “bear the stain of sin.” Still, we are “driven to communicate by our sociality”; we are “both limited and enabled by the conventions of language.” Although we are fallen and sinful, we are also still made in the image of God and defined by human relationality, which requires language. Sin does not obviate the fact that we are all “called to membership [in society] based on a naturalistic sociality and basic morality available to all rational creatures.” Illustrating the complex duality charac­teristic of Augustine’s thought, Elshtain shows that civic life

18  Susan E. Schreiner

is a “kind of unity in plurality” that “pushes toward harmony,” while “the sin of division, with its origins in pride and willfulness, drives us apart.” According to Elshtain, it is the “love of friendship” that lies at the root of Augustine’s “practical philosophy.” The need for “relationality” explains the fullness of Augustine’s view of the political realm. As she argues, “All of Augustine’s central categories, including war and peace, are in the form of a relation of some sort or another.” The bonds of affection are fundamental and tie human beings together. Nonetheless, these bonds are stained by sin and the division inherent in the plurality of languages. Therefore, “In light of the confusion and confounding of human languages, it is sometimes difficult to repair this fundamental sociality.” And yet, Elshtain explains, because we yearn for this restoration, we create civic order as a primary requisite for human existence. Elshtain refuses to see this desire for civic life as simply a constraint of human sin. Civic life also expresses our need for sociality and fellowship, as well as “our capacity for a diffuse caritas.” Thus, “if language divides us, . . . it can also draw us together insofar as we acknowledge a common humanity.” For Augustine, “a people gathered together in a civic order is a gathering or multitude of rational beings united in fellowship by sharing a common love of the same things.” Granting this definition of society, Elshtain asks what Augustine saw as the good toward which civic life tends: “how do we identify a polity in which the disorder of dominance by the libido dominandi pertains by contrast to a polity in which a well-­ ordered social life, a world in which ordinary peace (tranquillitas ordinis) pertains that permits the moral formation of citizens in households and in commonwealths to go forward?” Here again Elshtain makes clear the dual character of human nature and human society: “It is the interplay of caritas and cupiditas that is critical, as well as whether one or the other prevails at a given point in time, whether within the very being of a single person or within the life of a civic order.” The theme of the two cities enables Augustine to trace the “choreography of human relations.” Sin has created divisions within the self, between selves, and between nations and cultures. Although there is “darkness” in the life of human society, one must not withdraw from worldly responsibilities in order to ensure temporal peace. Participating in societal life, the Christian seeks to tame occasions for the reign of cupiditas and to maximize the space in which caritas can operate. According to Elshtain,

Introduction  19

Augustine saw that there were two rules within human reach that were essential in establishing the space for the operation of caritas—­namely, do no harm to anyone and help everyone whenever possible. Elshtain ends her analysis by addressing the subjects of war and peace. Although war is the ultimate example of the lust for domination in human sinfulness, there are, nevertheless, just and necessary wars. Elshtain explains that Augustine recognized the need for security amid hostile attacks, a fear or “shadow” that cannot be eliminated. The just ruler wages a justifiable war of necessity against unwarranted aggression or to rescue the innocent from destruction. The motivation for such a just war must be love for the neighbor and a desire for a more authentic peace. She explains that it is “because of our intrinsic sociality and under the requirement to do no harm and to help whenever we can that war is occasionally justifiable.” Elshtain concludes by insisting that Augustine must be rescued from those who see him as an example of a political realism that ignores his insistence on the “great virtue of hope and the call to enact projects of caritas.” This misinterpretation of Augustine ignores his understanding of our innate sociality, relationality, and desire for a peace that is not based on dominion. Therefore, she argues, Augustine should “never be enlisted on behalf of the deprecators of humankind.” Concern about the self and the nature of its existence in the world are continued in Frederick Lawrence’s chapter, “Cor ad cor loquitur: Augustine’s Influence on Heidegger and Lonergan.” In his analysis we return to epistemological issues of understanding, insight, and knowledge of the truth that have recurred throughout these chapters. He begins by examining the influence of Book X of the Confessions on Heidegger’s Phenomenology of the Religious Life and The Lectures on Aristotle. According to Lawrence, one of the first things that Heidegger gleaned from Augustine’s Confessions was that “the same reality that Augustine referred to by the term nosse was what he intended by the term Dasein, the only being that questions Being as its presence or thereness (Da) in differentiation from being,” an insight that corresponds to Lonergan’s luminosity of consciousness. Heidegger realized that “the self is constituted as Augustine’s inquietum cor.” In Lawrence’s reading, Heidegger “radicalized Husserl’s notion of intentionality by reinterpreting in terms of the concrete factical human being’s experience of inquietude.” Augustine enabled Heidegger to overcome Husserl’s impoverished notion of consciousness as perception by

20  Susan E. Schreiner

turning to the meaning of the “restless heart.” As Lawrence explains, “Of the Augustinian motifs from the tenth book of the Confessions that Heidegger incorporated into his hermeneutic analysis of the factical life of ­Dasein, none is more significant than that of becoming a question to oneself.” Heidegger appropriated Augustine’s understanding of the self ’s becoming a burden to oneself because of “the overwhelming conditions leading to one’s being defluxus in multum, or diverted by the multiplicity of various ‘meaningful’ possibilities.” The dispersion into manifold distractions makes us so attached to the world that one “becomes inaccessible to oneself: the self becomes absent to itself and lost in the objective surroundings that are the sources of its delectatio.” Relying on chapters 58–­64, Heidegger came to understand how the self is objectified and how one’s delectatio becomes “absorbed by one’s own self-­importance as the goal of living.” As Lawrence explains, “When the soul pursues its inclination into every and any possibility that attracts it, factical life cannot attain self-­knowledge or proper self-­possession, because it is fixated on the multiplicity of diverse worldly objects considered meaningful inasmuch as they are the sources of worldly pleasures, and obsessively dictate one’s existential orientation.” Lawrence moves on to Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle and thereby resumes his focus on the “unrest about of one’s own life.” Instead of Augustine’s concern with beatitudo, the central problem is now the “this-­worldly experience of death.” Lawrence demonstrates how Heidegger’s analysis of Ruinanz represents a consolidation of that which he gained from his interpretation of Augustine. Heidegger’s concept of ruinance goes to the heart of the human malaise. However, now the burden of concupiscence that weighed down Augustine and made him a question to himself is displaced by the existential categories of life and by seeing philosophical analysis as a movement that counters ruinance in recovering and pursuing the essential questionability of Dasein. Language about restlessness gives way to that of “care,” a care that is inevitably deflected into the inauthentic concern of Besorgnis, which is characterized by self-­ centeredness. Lawrence shows how Heidegger traced a trajectory of caring as it enacted “the tendency toward falling as the How of its facing death by not facing it.” Nonetheless, there remains a countermovement, a “maintaining oneself in genuine questioning.” Lawrence then turns to Augustine’s influence on Lonergan, an influence gained through the study of Thomas Aquinas. In his analysis we find

Introduction  21

two themes that have become very familiar to the reader. Like Heidegger, Lonergan related Augustine’s “inability to cure himself of his incontinentia to the defluxio in multum.” Consequently, Lonergan increasingly began to stress the role of delectatio. Like Heidegger and many other of our authors, Lonergan was also preoccupied with the question of knowledge in the act of understanding. In his examination of Lonergan’s developing views on knowledge and judgment, Lawrence explicates how Lonergan learned from Augustine that, as the eternal light, God is the foundation of our knowing. In terms that recall the chapter by Peperzak, Lawrence states that in a profoundly Augustinian insight, Lonergan understood that “the knowledge of truth is not to be accounted for by any vision or contact or confrontation with the other, however lofty or sublime. The ultimate ground of our knowing is indeed God, the eternal Light; but the proximate reason that we know is within us. It is the light of our own intelligences, and by it we can know . . . [for the very intellectual light that is in us is nothing other than a participated similitude of the uncreated light].” After tracing Lonergan’s development in Verbum and Insight, Lawrence turns to De Verbo Incarnato. He argues that one of the lasting influences of Augustine is evident in the changes Lonergan made to his Thomist analysis fidei. Lonergan abandoned the “standpoint from which the mind or intellect takes precedence over the will and knowledge takes precedence over love.” Lawrence demonstrates that through a “decidedly Augustinian orientation” Lonergan came to acknowledge fully the role of feeling as the power of conscious living, the actuation of the human affective capacities and the effective orientation of the human being. This appreciation of feelings enabled Lonergan to appropriate Augustine’s idea of delectatio and to recognize the dominant role of love. Recalling the chapter by Carraud, we see that Lonergan recovered Augustine’s teaching that “pondus meum amor meus, eo feror, quocumque feror” (Conf. XIII.9.10). Faith becomes “the knowledge born of religious love.” Grasping the primacy of love, Lonergan expounded an understanding of religious conversion in terms of “God’s gift of his love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that is in us (Rom. 5:5), of falling in love with God, and of being in love with God.” Lawrence contends that these Augustinian insights led Lonergan to articulate the relationship between faith and reason. Within the sphere of

22  Susan E. Schreiner

God’s love and revealed truths that are unattainable by the light of human reason alone, the assent of belief can take place only because of the lumen fidei, which is now understood as the “pressure of God’s love upon human intelligence.” Finally, moving from theological doctrine to theology as the collaborative enterprise of fides quaerens intellectum, Lonergan’s life-­long project of bringing history into theology “integrated Augustine’s hermeneutics of love.” Lawrence’s chapter makes clear an important distinction between the influence of Augustine on Heidegger and that on Lonergan. Although the motifs of Augustine remain explicit, after his interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger maintained that the factical life remains a completely profane affair. Lonergan’s desire to understand fully the meaning of fides quaerens led to a coherent view of the relationship of love and knowledge, faith and reason, theology and philosophy. In coming to that view, he became “more Augustinian.” “Bringing history into theology” inevitably involves us with the issue of time. Few topics interested Augustine more than temporality and the nature of human life within time. Therefore, the perfect ending to this book is Françoise Meltzer’s chapter, “Ruins and Time.” This chapter focuses on the fascination with the contemplation of ruins, especially by the romantics. Meltzer begins by explaining that the romantic view revolves around two considerations: (1) the long passage of time and the ensuing slow erosion that together produced the ruins and (2) the rapidity and transitory nature of human life, of which the ruins are the reminders. The profound awareness of tempus fugit permeates the many writers whom she studies. However, Meltzer digs deeper in order to uncover the ways in which this theme led to questions about subjectivity, the inaccessibility of the transcendental, and the fragile notion of God, all of which culminated in the limits of human knowledge. In her astute analysis of figures from Kant to Derrida, Meltzer shows that, “until the Enlightenment, or at least until the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century, there are no seismic changes with respect to a knowing, reliable (if mysterious) God in the European Christian tradition.” In order to illustrate this seismic change, Meltzer poses Augustine as a counterpoint to the problems that preoccupied the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the romantics, problems bequeathed to us today. As she initially explains, “Reading the romantics with their thoughts on ruins alongside a text by Augustine, for whom God is real, undeniable,

Introduction  23

and omnipotent, can help to highlight the crisis that pervades the romantic gaze.” Concentrating on Book XI of the Confessions, Meltzer emphasizes that for Augustine that which was unknown was the mind of God. Returning once again to Peperzak’s theme, we find in Meltzer’s chapter the importance of Augustine’s idea of God as a teacher. Meltzer explains that Augustine knew that God was his teacher, although God reveals only what he wants to teach; nonetheless, God is the truth, which is unalterable. As Augustine wrote, “Who is our teacher except the reliable truth? . . . He teaches us so that we may know; for he is the Beginning.” However, Augustine’s understanding of knowledge belongs to a world very different from the modern and postmodern eras. Pointing to the centrality of Kant’s philosophy, which informed the perspective of the romantics, Meltzer shows that Kant’s legacy played a crucial role in altering the idea of subjectivity and in “fraying the belief in the adaequatio rei et intellectus that has always been assumed.” Kant’s analysis resulted in shifting the objective to the subjective, thereby raising questions about the limits of human knowledge. The contrast with Augustine is made clear. According to Meltzer, “With (German) romanticism in the wake of Kant, meditation is no longer a question of interrogating an undoubted, if mysterious absolute (Augustine); it is rather the question of how the transcendental, debarred from human knowledge except through intuition . . . affects the concept of the individual, or the subject contemplating the world and, it follows, subjectivity itself.” Except for fleeting flashes of recognition, the absolute is segregated from the phenomenal realm. What, then, is “really real” underneath the façade of phenomena? As Meltzer argues, “The melancholy that ensues as a result of what I am calling segregation from the absolute, is both inevitable and ubiquitous in the texts of the romantics; it is a melancholy born of epistemological anxiety.” Meltzer continues to analyze the way ruins bring temporality and the transitory to the fore as she discusses a variety of thinkers, including Chateaubriand, du Bellay, and Diderot. Reflecting on the “sweet melancholy” provoked by ruins, Diderot wrote, “A torrent drags each and every nation into the depths of a common abyss. I, myself, I resolve to make a solitary stand at the edge and resist the current flowing past me.” Meltzer is careful to explain that the “I” to which Diderot referred is a concept of individuality that stems from the Enlightenment. The diminishment of the subject,

24  Susan E. Schreiner

or the “suspension of the I,” refers to the modern conception of the individual as conceived by the Enlightenment. This individual confronts his or her mortality and insignificance in the face of “time’s immensity.” Thus she explains that, although a celebrated notion, the “I” becomes increasingly insignificant as it totters on the edge of Diderot’s “common abyss.” In Meltzer’s words, “Ubi sunt already begins to change into ubi sum,” a theme that will continue to resonate throughout the romantics. Just as the modern sense of the “I” is a development of the Enlightenment, so, too, is the belief that science would lead to the truth, which meant that reason would allow the individual to think for himself or herself. Reason and logic would be the instruments for human growth. However, this optimism about reason and science threw “the subject back into the mind” but “without the stable categories that undergird Descartes’s philosophical move to begin with doubting ‘everything.’ ” Since science professed to open the doors of knowledge, “the place for the transcendent, or the divine is almost necessarily confined to the individual mind.” Meltzer’s chapter forces us to ask where these developments in thinking about the modern subject and human knowledge leave us today. Turning to postmodernity, Meltzer shows how Derrida concluded that the ruin was neither a spectacle nor a theme “nor something in front of us.” As Derrida wrote, “Ruin is, rather, this memory open like an eye, or like a hole in a bone socket that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all.” Still, Meltzer says, Derrida exhibits “nostalgia.” The inability to see “anything of the all” returns us to the romantics, for whom fragments remain, and some sort of totality haunts, a memory of “an all” that (as Hegel points out) is only superficially belied by the view, among the ruins, “of change at large.” The romantics had turned “to nature for help, not God.” For Meltzer, this turn by the romantics reflected an increasingly “fragile notion of God.” As Meltzer says, “The old faith as it was must be reverenced, but it is also now to be buried with the other gods who have lost their believers.” In Meltzer’s reading, “The ruin, as the romantics conceive of it, is between two inaccessible realms, of which it is neither: the idea of an unchanging eternity (like Augustine’s God), and that of the erosion that is human time.” Therefore, nostalgia for unity remains. But, as Meltzer reminds us, Walter Benjamin warned us to resist this nostalgia for unity

Introduction  25

or totality. In so doing he cautioned against the temptation to believe that we can profess to surpass time and history. Meltzer poignantly concludes: “We can admire and indeed envy Augustine’s conviction that he will be restored, in death, . . . that in God there is no time, and that God will rebuild the ruin that is Augustine’s being.” For Augustine, unity was the ideal. Nonetheless, Benjamin’s resistance and warning may be the only hope for extricating ourselves from that romantic insistence on “overcoming lack” and seeing in the fragment or ruin a promise, or memory of wholeness. Although this volume greatly informs us about Augustine and the influence of his thought throughout the centuries, the chapters in it can also hold up a mirror from which we can gain insight into ourselves and our age. In short, these studies reveal just how much Augustine remains “our contemporary.” The novelist and screenwriter Nic Pizzolato wrote, “Some people, no matter where they look, see themselves.” In these chapters we see ourselves but with the benefit of historical distance provided by the historical readings of Augustine. At this point it is important to note that the authors of the chapters in this book were not asked to write about any particular aspect of Augustine’s thought. They were free to analyze any aspect of his writings that interested them. And yet these chapters repeatedly focus on the nature of the self. Various elements of the self are analyzed, including the will, sin, the mind, the ability to love and to find knowledge about God and the self. The ethical dimensions of these topics are also of concern to these aspects of the self, including the ethical dimensions of teaching and learning as well as the responsibility of the self in society. Finally, we also find discussions about the place of the self in the cosmos and the political world, as well as in providence and temporality. Why did this unintended unity emerge? Numerous books attest to the current interest in the self, with Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) perhaps holding pride of place. The topics undertaken by our authors also reflect this contemporary preoccupation with the self, and this may well be because today the self has become decentered and destabilized. But we must not think that we are unique. Marion’s essay can remind us that, like Augustine, we are saying, “I am a quaestio mihi.” But our difficulty is quite different from that of Augustine’s day. In

26  Susan E. Schreiner

comparison to the prevailing ideas of that time, the self is now no longer within a unified worldview with faith in a transcendent God and no longer securely attached to society, the cosmos, and God. In fact, the self seems to be disoriented in the world. Meltzer’s chapter leaves us with the recognition that we live among fragments, even fragments of the self. In his book A Usable Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), William Bouwsma includes a chapter called “Anxiety and the Formation of the Early Modern Culture.” He explains that when one lives at the end of an age, or between ages, a human being experiences the inevitable a­ nxiety that stems from “the inability of an inherited culture to invest experience with meaning.” Many readers will find this descriptive of our own age. However, this volume offers us a challenge. The inherited tradition reveals how distant we are from Augustine and his past interpreters. And yet, like those in the past, we can turn back to Augustine and the Augustinian tradition in order to find resources with which to explore our own deeply profound and troubling concerns. David Tracy was right: Only by knowing our intellectual past can we think responsibly in the present.

one

Augustine Our Contemporary The Overdetermined, Incomprehensible Self

d av i d w . t r a c y

There are three explicit elements in Augustine’s account of the self ’s interiority: first, intelligence-­in-­act; second, will as both basic energy-­love and free choice; and third, sin, which can becloud the intelligence and entrap the will. There is also a fourth element in the self that is not explicit in Augustine but often haunts his texts: tragedy, that is, some mysterious inherited necessity causing intense suffering. Together these four elements constitute Augustine’s unique model of an overdetermined self. The first two elements, intelligence and will, are best interpreted through the traditional Catholic nature-­grace paradigm. The third element, sin, is best read through the classical Reformed sin-­grace paradigm. The fourth element, tragedy, can now be read through what deserves the name “tragedy-­grace paradigm.” Sometimes the four elements clash with, or even fragment, each other. Sometimes they tentatively harmonize. There is finally a unified self in Augustine but never a permanently stable self: cor 27

28  David W. Tracy

inquietum. Precisely through his troubled, restless complexity, Augustine, more than any other ancient Western Christian thinker on the self, remains our contemporary. Part of Augustine’s genius was to understand the head and the heart together, never apart. It is necessary first to distinguish each element on its own, however, before one can realize that Augustine’s self is penultimately overdetermined and ultimately incomprehensible (i.e., theologically as the imago dei of the Incomprehensible God).1

Au g u s t i n i a n I n t e l l e c t ua l I n t e r i o r i t y: The Journey Within

Augustine, concerned throughout his life with the relation of transient time to eternity, usually preferred temporal metaphors. Surprisingly, however, he chose principally spatial metaphors for understanding our inwardness, our interiority. We can move upward (to God) only by moving within. When we move within we find an inner cavelike, in fact abysslike, space. Eventually we will find, if we travel (temporal) that inner route (spatial) rightly, that we are not alone in our own private space. For Augustine, every self is a unique individual self, but not a private self. In modern terms, there is no purely autonomous self, although, as Paul Tillich sharply formulated it, for the Christian there is a theonomous (not heteronomous) self. Each self, for Augustine, is unique, and its very uniqueness is constituted by relationships through intellect and love to all others and, above all, to God through Christ in the Spirit. Especially in the Confessions, Augustine believed that he displayed the self discovering through its most inner point—­the acies mundi—­the eternal, changeless Truth. More accurately, for Augustine it is not so much that we discover God in ourselves as that we find ourselves in God. We are in God with others. Once again, Augustine here prefers spatial metaphors even to describe our temporal, transient selves, grounded in the timeless, eternal God. Augustine probably learned the philosophical-­theological potentialities of the journey inward from Plotinus as well as Porphyry. As early as De libero arbitrio (2,7.7–­2,15.35),2 Augustine follows Plotinus’s advice of moving within himself: classically, he describes the inward journey in the first nine books of the Confessions.3 Largely through spatial and temporal metaphors and rhetorical tropes as much as through rhetorical topical

Augustine Our Contemporary   29

arguments, Augustine confesses God (confessio as testimony-­witness in prayer) while also confessing his graced and sinful journey to God; then he confesses to himself and to his readers (especially, but not solely, his fellow Christian readers). Augustine keeps moving within until he arrives at the reflections on time in Book X and the theological speculations on creation and the created order in Books XI, XII, and XIII. Only later in his life, in the more serene sea of contemplation in the final books of De Trinitate, does the restless Augustinian inward-­directed soul come to full contemplative loving peace and joy by proposing that we search within our own deepest graced inwardness—­memory, understanding, and will-­ love—­as grounded in the Trinity of infinite intelligence and infinite love: Father, Son, and Spirit. In the splendidly serene Plotinus as well as in the more anxious Porphyry, the intellectually and morally purified soul on its “journey within” leaves what Augustine, too, will call the “region of dissimilarity” for the highest region available to the self under its own powers, the realm of nous, pure intelligence-­in-­act. There the soul must wait for the ultimate possibility (not necessity—­it may not happen) for the magnetlike radiant other-­power of ultimate reality, the one-­good, to draw the self home. In the realm of nous, the intellectually purified contemplative soul rests and struggles no more. In its earlier rigorous intellectual and moral exercises of purification, the soul has struggled to reach the realm Aristotle describes as contemplation. For Aristotle, although not for Plato, thought thinking itself is the ultimate reality as the source and goal of all reality. For Plotinus, in the realm of nous, the soul, Odysseuslike, reaches its own natural home. But the Plotinian self ’s truest home is the ultimate reality beyond nous and beyond being (Plato)—­the realm of the one and the good from which all reality radiates, emanates—­to which the self ’s entire ascent of accelerating intellectual and moral purification is directed and by which the self is magnetically drawn ever upward. Plotinus brilliantly unites Plato’s “the good beyond being” of the Republic to the one of the Parmenides to become the Plotinian one-­good as our final end, just as it is our source. The contemplative, indeed mystical, Plotinian experience of the good is one that, Porphyry informs us, Plotinus himself experienced only four times during his years with Porphry.4 Plotinus’s mystical experience of the one-­good is necessarily transient, yet it does permanently affect the soul-­self with a sense of lasting

30  David W. Tracy

peace, joy, and serenity. Eventually the Plotinian one emanates-­radiates (i.e., impersonally) the soul back to the realm of nous to begin its return descent through all the lower levels of reality, only to begin to ascend anew. Plato was taken, in the Republic, to a vision of the good beyond being and, in the Symposium, to the appearance—­suddenly—­of the beautiful itself. Aristotle, in the view of most Platonists, never reached Plato’s good beyond being and beyond intelligence. For all post-­Plotinus Platonists (later named Neo-­Platonists), Plotinus, like Plato, had been gifted with the contemplative-­mystical vision of the one-­good. Platonists added theurgy and sacred texts, even magic, to Plotinus’s more austere inward journey. Clearly the Plotinian inner journey appealed to Augustine, recently philo­ sophically Platonist and newly baptized. Now a Christian, Augustine began his Plotinuslike journey within. The self Augustine found in his inner journey within was very different from the Plotinian self. Above all, Augustine in his inner graced journey moved within to discover not the emanating generous (but unintelligent and unloving) impersonal Good but rather the all-­intelligent, all-­loving, creating, sustaining, redeeming God of the Bible—­the God disclosed, in Paul as in Augustine, only in and through Christ (“I no longer live but Christ lives in me”; Galatians 2:20). In De Trinitate, the true destiny of Augustine’s graced intellectual and loving self can be described not only with the ancient idea of the self as microcosm but also with the biblical idea of the self as “imago dei.” The human being as divine imago was probably first experienced by Augustine in a mystical and uniquely dialogical vision he shared with Monica at Ostia. The Augustinian “drive” from rhetoric, dialectic, and dialogue as the preparatory routes to the highest experience of intelligence-­in-­ act—­contemplation—­was initiated in his Cassiciacum dialogues. Shortly before that time of “otium” (leisure with friendship and dialogue), Augustine’s Christian Platonist contemplative spirit had been released when he first heard the allegorizing sermons of Ambrose. Ambrose’s Origenist sermons freed Augustine from despising many biblical texts as too vulgar in their literal sense. Christian Platonists at Milan, especially the bishop, Ambrose, showed Augustine how an allegorical exegesis of the Bible could reveal meditative and contemplative readings of the scriptures to complement the properly literal-­historical sense of the texts. Full contemplative intensity came later for Augustine—­at its highest in De Trinitate. Indeed, the amazing accomplishment of De Trinitate,

Augustine Our Contemporary   31

theologically the most profound of Augustine’s texts, is that its doctrinally Christian5—­that is, Trinitarian, Christological, and Pneumatological—­ interpretation was originally inspired by his introspective reading of Paul alongside his interiorized journey-­within reading of Plotinus from the time of his two conversions: his intellectual conversion (God is pure spirit, not matter), occasioned by reading some books of the Platonists (probably Latin translations of parts of both Plotinus and Porphyry), and his Christian conversion proper, leading up to his baptism (along with his son, Adeodatus) by Ambrose (387). Augustinian contemplation is a profound experience of the participation of the soul’s memory, understanding, and will in God’s Trinitarian, very own tripersonal Godhead.

T h e S e l f a s Awa k e : I n t e l l i g e n c e - ­i n - ­A c t

Late in his life Augustine received a letter from a recently converted Christian young man with an intellectual dilemma that he hoped the then internationally famous Christian thinker, Bishop Augustine of Hippo, might resolve. This youthful intellectual—­bright, honest, with all the idealism of youth—­informed Augustine that he had spent most of his intellectual life reading the philosophers. He was close to giving up in skeptical despair before God’s grace caught him up into the truth, that is, Christian faith. Hence his question to Augustine: Now, on the other side of faith, should he give up philosophy altogether? Does it bear any further use? Perhaps he expected that the famous Catholic bishop, the greatest living defender of the faith, would encourage his desire to abandon argument and philosophy altogether for faith alone. This expectation was to be sharply disappointed. The old bishop wrote back a resounding “No.” Augustine wrote his young correspondent words that Plotinus or, for that matter, Kant, could well have written: Intellectum valde ama.6 Faith was, of course, the revelation of the final truth for Augustine. However, faith must always seek understanding of itself, its intellectual internal and external coherence; faith as reasonable trust must always be ready to give reasons for its hope to itself and to outside critics. Faith released a new knowledge and a new powerful desire to know always more—­redirecting, enriching, but never abandoning the employment of all the usual forms of reason. Fides quaerens intellectum.

32  David W. Tracy

Popular religion, for Augustine, should also become a philosophical religion. Like Origen before him, Augustine believed that the truths revealed by faith made Christianity the true philosophical religion: philosophy for all people, not only for a philosophical elite. For Christian thinkers, popular religion and philosophic religion were not contraries but rather partners in the same community, grounded in faith. Augustine’s earlier, more purely philosophical religion (seen in the dialogues) gradually yielded to a Christian theology that was orthodox, daring, and, at times, erroneous (e.g., on double predestination). At still other times (e.g., in the debates on the origin of the soul), Augustine, after great efforts and with characteristic intellectual honesty, decided not to decide.7 Since the groundbreaking work of Pierre Hadot on the role of spiritual exercises in all ancient philosophy,8 it is clear that no one can understand Augustine’s diverse uses of reason without realizing that for Augustine, as for all his philosophical and theological contemporaries, intellectual exercises like mathematics (especially numbers, for Augustine) and di­alectics are not only intellectual exercises (as for most moderns) but also spiritual exercises. This Augustine learned, both intellectually and spiritually, from “some books of the Platonists.” Through enacting Platonic dialectic, dialogue, and contemplation, Augustine learned several important intellectualist truths that he never abandoned: God is pure spirit; intellect is spirit, not matter; the soul is embodied, but as soul (i.e., spirit), it is as accurate to say “ensouled body” as “embodied soul.” As the later, more Aristotelian scholastics would say, one must learn to distinguish but not separate soul and body, matter and form, mind and the senses. Above all, the theologian must learn the singular philosophical insight of the intellectualist Platonists on the purely spiritual nature of God and the soul—­an insight not shared by materialist Stoics, Epicureans, and skeptics, or even by some Christian theologians (e.g., Tertullian). Augustine’s reading of the books of “some Platonists” has rightly been described as an “intellectual conversion,”9 a crucial component in his explicitly Christian conversion (“Tolle, lege”) in the garden at Milan. Through the Platonists, Augustine now grasped that his former Manichean-­and Stoic-­influenced materialist understanding of God and the soul was erroneous. The shift in Augustine’s new Plotinist understanding of the soul-­ mind led him to hold that the true power of the intellect reaches beyond

Augustine Our Contemporary   33

the senses and matter to the purely intelligible world of mathematics, dialectic, metaphysics, and theology. Mind [mens], as intelligence-­in-­act, is able through its various reasoning processes to understand the intelligible forms of sensuous, bodily, spatial, and temporal realities, as well as the ideas or forms of such purely intelligible realities, as forms or ideas of the mind itself and to attain, in its highest moments of graced contemplation, some understanding of the supreme Forms or Ideas, which are, Christianly construed, Ideas in the mind of God. For the philosophically mature Augustine, the mind—­through its exercises of attentive intelligence-­in-­act—­was capable of producing both a genuine scientia of bodily, sensuous things, and a sapientia, or wisdom, about the first principles of reason in the divine ideas. At the limit, the mind, through its finite participation in divine infinite intelligence, could, through both apophatic and cataphatic analogous theological understanding, come to an always inadequate but real and partial understanding of God as the incomprehensible one—­incomprehensible as infinite intelligence-­in-­act and infinite love. Moreover, a theological understanding of God’s incomprehensibility can lead a Christian thinker to realize that the human being, by its very imago dei participation in the incomprehensible loving God, is itself, in its own finite way, also incomprehensible, as manifested in its distinctive and amazing human powers of intelligence and love. Completely unlike the infinite God, however, finite human intelligence and love as finite can become, through sin (original and personal), as we shall see later, also negatively incomprehensible—­a smoldering abyss of self-­enclosed and self-­deluding egocentricity. Both the depth of Augustine’s philosophical and theological acuity (e.g., on the nature of memoria)10 and the range of the forms of intellect that he mastered are amazing. Throughout his life, Augustine engaged in argument in both rhetorical and dialectical forms: in dialogue with friends; in fierce polemical arguments when he thought them appropriate (perhaps too often); and above all in the contemplative intelligence-­in-­act embedded in Augustine’s Plotinuslike journey within. Like Plotinus or, for that matter, like Gautama Buddha (whose very name means Awakened One), Augustine understands intelligence-­in-­act as an awakening. Augustine helps his readers to be attentive, to awaken from our customary everyday slumbers and self-­occlusion. Reason, for Augustine, is an always awakening intelligence-­in-­act.

34  David W. Tracy

This Augustinian intellectualist self should not lead one to downplay the important role of will or love. The desire for the Good drives the desire to know, not the reverse. Without abandoning his intellectualism, Augustine also never lost his artist’s instinct for being able to think through image and metaphor as well, nor did he lose his erotic, passionate instinct for the cognitive role of affect, feeling, emotion, will. At heart Augustine was a rhetorician—­indeed, the best Latin rhetorician of his day, and the best rhetorical theologian of any day. Gregory of Nazianzus, his contemporary and another major rhetorical theologian, was his only Greek rival as a rhetorical theologian. Even the wisely allegorical sermons and treatises of Ambrose, even the sermons of the golden-­mouthed John Chrysostom, and finally even Gregory Nazianzen’s brilliant rhetorical and lyrical theological élan were no match for the many-­sided, protean Augustine. Augustine’s native talent for rhetoric, combined with his Latin literary education, trained him to possess a second self—­an artistic-­rhetorical-­ poetic self. Well educated in a Roman literary rhetorical education, although mostly self-­taught in philosophy, Augustine, the former professor of rhetoric, never abandoned his call, even after his intellectualist Platonic discovery of a purely intelligible world available to reason not through rhetoric, but only through mathematics, dialectics, metaphysics, and contemplation. There are, to be sure, better dialectical and theoretical theologians than Augustine (e.g., the ever-­lucid Thomas Aquinas). There are greater contemplative theologians than Augustine, especially in the Greek tradition (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor). However, no other rhetorical theologian, however accomplished—­Gregory of Nazianzus, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, John Henry Newman—­can capture such sudden, unexpected moments of lightning brilliance in metaphor and irony, in image and concept, in narrative and theory. Most of Augustine’s arguments (save a few more strictly metaphysical arguments on God) are, in both the Ciceronian and Aristotelian senses, usually topical arguments in rhetoric and dialectic: that is, as Aristotle clearly states, arguments on contingent matters, which might be other than they are, not necessary ones. Some postmodern thinkers ( Julia Kristeva, Jean-­François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida), with characteristic postmodern emphasis on the rhetoric of the tropes rather than on their topics, highlight just how radically rhetorical Augustine often is—­tropically, not only

Augustine Our Contemporary   35

topically. Like those of the postmoderns, Augustine’s tropes often control his topics, not the reverse. Augustine—­like Plato himself far more than later Platonists, such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Newman, and Simone Weil—­was that rarity: a major philosopher-­theologian expert in analyzing and developing abstract concepts (e.g., for Augustine, time, will, memory, creation, sin, grace) who was also a major artist. Augustine, like Plato and unlike most philosophers and theologians, was more like the great philosophical artists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Lucretius, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, Donne, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Eliot), who could think not only through concepts but also through images (carthago-­sartago, the “cave” of memory, the “abyss” of the will, the “weight” of love). Augustine often enacted his arguments narratively, for example, through the Vergilian musical rhythms that served as an undertow in the Confessions or the outbursts of lyricism in his wondrous commentaries on the Psalms, through the sustained Roman gravitas of The City of God, through the almost baroque contemplative leaps of De Trinitate, through all the registers of the Latin language with Tacitean lucidity and precision—­the Ciceronian rolling thunder of his cumulative sentences, his proto-­romantic restless sensibility breaking through his impeccable late–­antique Latin prose. Save for his polemical works, content in Augustine always finds itself only in and through form. As the natural and trained rhetorician, Augustine was language-­ intoxicated.11 He swam in all the major linguistic streams: metaphor and irony; metonymy, narrative, paradox, didacticism; rhetoric, dialectic, di­alogue. Augustine never stopped believing that intelligence-­in-­act is one of our greatest gifts and must never be disparaged.12 Only intelligence-­in-­act can be trusted to awaken us and keep us awake. Intelligence in all its forms, for Augustine, acknowledges that all is grace, including its own stunning powers and its greatest power—­its ability to acknowledge its own ­limits, not through its flaws but through its very strength. Intellectum valde ama.

T h e S e l f a s W i l l a n d Lov e : W i l l a s E n e rg y, Will as Free Choice

Augustine is the first philosopher to elaborate a full-­fledged concept of will as central for understanding the self.13 And yet there is no systematic definition of will in this unique philosopher of will. In fact, Augustine

36  David W. Tracy

uses “will” [voluntas, arbitrium] in different ways. Faithful to his own restless will, as described in the Confessions, Augustine’s plural understandings of will are differently articulated depending on context: will as free choice and consent, free will, will as energy, the will’s basic energy as love, the two wills or loves at war in history as in each of us (caritas and cupiditas). Many discussions of Augustine’s concepts of the will have been distracted by trying to render into a single coherent statement his different, sometimes conflicting, reflections on “free will,” from his early work De libero arbitrio to his later bleak understanding of the “bondage of the will.” In The Retractions, Augustine strongly maintained that Pelagius and Julian of Eclanum had no right to appeal to his early discussion of free will as evidence against his later reflections on the bondage of the will.14 Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the old Augustine insisted that he still held to his earlier De libero arbitrio affirmation of free will. In fact, however, Pelagius and Julian were not without a point. It is unclear how, exactly, Augustine could render other than roughly and paradoxically coherent his earlier strong insistence on the freedom of the will and his later equally strong position on the bondage of the will. At the same time, Julian’s polemic against Augustine failed to understand Augustine’s deeper philosophical and theological reflections on the energy of reality itself as will and that universal energy as ultimately “will as divine love.” Moreover, Augustine understood “the will” to possess a conflictual, abysmal dimension that Pelagius’s and Julian’s untroubled, easily unified, strongly moralistic notion of the self did not, perhaps could not, grasp. Jane Austen would have dismissed the view of the passionate, conflicted self in the Brontë sisters as so much romantic nonsense; Nabokov never could accept Dostoevsky’s irredeemably conflictual self. American ego psychologists never seem to be within shouting distance of understanding Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of Freud’s radical uncovering of an always already split self as the deepest truth about the self that the early Freud discovered with his terrifying doctrine of the unconscious, an abysmal truth that the ego psychologists domesticated into the ego. John Dewey never understood why some of his fellow liberal theorists found Reinhold Niebuhr’s similarly politically liberal but bleaker Augustinian, City of God–­inflected portrait of both self and history in The Nature and Destiny of Man, volumes 1 and 2, far more realistic than Dewey’s own more benign secular view of self and history alike; hence

Augustine Our Contemporary   37

the ironic paradox of “atheists for Niebuhr.” As William James observed in The Varieties of Religious Experience, the healthy-­minded souls and the sick souls are destined to misunderstand one another. A modern analogy: In psychoanalytic terms, there is no unconscious for Pelagius, whereas the will as the unconscious force driving us forward for good and ill is omnipresent in Augustine. Simultaneously, the unconscious for Freud, as the will for Augustine, is a realm of depth: For Augustine, the embodied will is the space of the many unconscious affects, feelings, emotions, and desires constituted both by the will itself as the energy-­ power of love (eros and agape)15 and the constant to-­and-­fro of its own restless and ambivalent will. The primal will in Augustine, like the unconscious in Freud, is fully alive, manifesting a fascinans et tremendum power-­ energy underlying and driving the conscious will. It is not impossible to affirm both the conscious freedom of the will and the unconscious bondage of the will, although their multiple interactions, like the interaction of the superego, ego, and id in the later Freud, are so intertwined as to need some adjective like Freud’s fine adjectival choice—­“overdetermined”—­to describe our motives. “Overdetermined,” indeed, is also the most accurate adjective I know to describe Augustine’s self as abyss. One of Augustine’s sharpest portraits is his picture of the unstoppable power of the will: “Pondus meum, amor meus” (Confessions XIII.9, 10)—­my weight is my love; my desire, my affects, emotions, feelings, and moods; my unconscious, preconscious, and conscious will is my weight—­a weight that can draw me up like a flame or hurl me down like a gravity-­laden falling rock. Love-­will is the affective weight that pulls me to itself, often against my conscious will and intention. When “in” love we simultaneously feel liberated, more alive, more intelligent, and in bondage to the beloved object. As Lady Caroline Lamb is supposed to have cried out in the moment she first saw Lord Byron across a filled reception-­hall: “That face is my fate.” Indeed it was, with disastrous results for both Lady Caro­ line and Byron. Augustine, unlike Pelagius and other moralists, would not have been surprised. The will as affects, moods, and choices (rational and irrational) can become so habitual as to become a second nature: a habitual evil (vice) or a habitual good (virtue). As Aristotle sharply pointed out, it is as difficult for a habitually good person of virtue to do evil as for a habitually evil person to do good.

38  David W. Tracy

We live in boxes within boxes within boxes where the outermost box—­choice as freedom of the will—­is actual enough but fragile and is often hostage to our vices-­habits-­addictions (our second nature) and to the fundamental and largely preconscious, even unconscious, powers of desire, more than we want to believe. Most of us are relatively helpless in freeing ourselves from authentic addictions (drugs, alcohol, smoking, etc.) on our own. Addictions literally take over the self. Addictions are the exact negative opposite of Paul’s great cry of liberation, “No longer I but Christ lives in me!” (Gal. 2:20). At the same time, for Augustine, God’s grace lives in the ever-­flowing grace of the human desire for the Good. Even at our most perverse other-­denying, other-­destructive, and self-­destructive moments, we can suddenly have experiences, times out of time, that serve as epiphanic “hints and guesses” (Eliot) of the Good or God drawing us unconsciously forward. Even more than Plato in the Symposium, Augustine dramatically portrayed the power of beloved objects to attract us like a magnet: the beautiful fleshly bodies of others, the spirit-­filled intellects of beautiful souls, the night sky, the north African sun, the harvest thick in the fields, the gentle sea breezes from the Mediterranean on a summer’s day in Hippo become a sudden, violent storm, the apophatic emptiness of the desert, the fecundity of the rainy season. More realistically than Plotinus, the more body-­conscious and affect-­laden Augustine demonstrated over and over just how strongly our five basic loves—­for God, neighbor, self, mind, body—­have allowed us to experience the desire for the Good deep within us and driving us as God’s own magnetlike grace in us, of which we may remain unconscious. Authentic loves, desires, and affections leap upward like a flame to agapic wisdom. The thrill of beauty in the arts—­music especially, for Augustine—­frees us to experience, however transiently, the beautiful as goodness and truth. Augustine, so alive to his own and others’ shifting moods, affects, and will, was, in one way, a kind of romantic avant la lettre. He was, for example, so disturbed to discover music’s power over him that he briefly considered banning it. For Augustine, the deepest reality in us is the affect-­laden will-­desire for the Good, which ultimately, as divine providence, determines all reality despite all the swerves of chance, fate, and fortune. Finally, nature-­grace is deeper and more powerful than sin-­grace, joy than sorrow, peace than conflict, yes than no.

Augustine Our Contemporary   39

For Augustine, the will for the Good is, as much as for Dante, the most powerful force in our lives and in the cosmos itself. Above all, will as love is the most basic energy in human reality, as it is in reality itself, because love is the very reality of God in Godself: God is Love (see Augustine’s commentary on the first letter of John).16 Even understanding is driven by love; love’s affections contain understanding. The desire for the Good (will-­love) drives what Bernard Lonergan called the pure, detached, unrestricted, disinterested desire to know. Affections, for Augustine, are not some pleasant addition to or distraction from understanding. Like Heidegger (whose early work up to and including Sein und Zeit was deeply influenced by Augustine),17 Augustine held—­contrary to many Platonists—­that affects, morals, and feelings bore cognitive value. For Augustine, intellectual attention must always be paid to our affects, our feelings, our desires—­in a word, our will. The will, with or without conscious choice, cannot but keep on willing. Love, like faith and hope, drives understanding. Fides quaerens intellectum is simultaneously Amor quaerens intellectum, as some medieval Augustinians made explicit: ­Gregory the Great in Amor ipse notitia est and William of St. Thierry in Amor ipse, intellectus est. In Augustine the intelligent, conscious, deliberative will is by nature free in its choices. Therefore, the will in its freedom of choice does not merely choose but consents to its choice. And yet rumbling, sometimes thundering beneath all choice, sometimes suddenly flashing out of nowhere, the unconscious will wills. The will wills. The will cannot but will. The will as preconscious desire and unconscious sheer energy cannot stop willing. In Augustine we can best understand the ultimately Real less by reflecting on the external cosmos than by turning inward into a tremendum et fascinans discovery of the abyss of the self, where eventually we find the will in all its conflictual complexity willing: “The human being is a vast deep. . . . The hairs of our heads are easier by far to number than are our feelings and the movements of the heart” (Confessions IV.14, 22). Unfortunately, Augustine knew only partly the highly original readings of his more optimistic Greek contemporary, Gregory of Nyssa, for whom the self ’s will is a stretching out (epectasis) in never-­ending loving contemplation and reaching toward God. Via epectasis, Gregory daringly affirms, the will continues even after this life (we experience not

40  David W. Tracy

eternal rest, therefore, but eternal epectasis). If Augustine had known Gregory’s brilliant notion of the contemplative will as always/already epectasis stretching out forever in even more epectasis,18 one wonders if this uniquely Nyssan reading might have given Augustine a way to interpret his ineradicable restlessness—­as a constant stretching out of mind and will-­love for more of God’s infinite gift-­grace of love? Restlessness is, to be sure, often negative but can also be a positive affect. Augustine’s account of will, however, did not include Gregory of Nyssa’s epectasis or, for that matter, the more positive reading of the will adopted by most Greek Christians (with a few exceptions, such as Macarius). At the same time, Augustine’s portrait of the will, unlike that in so many modern accounts of the will (above all, Nietzsche’s), is, like that of the Greeks, always purposeful. For Augustine, even in choosing the wrong object of love, a person still purposively wills the good. The contrast between will in Augustine and Nietzsche clarifies both. Nietzsche’s will is a driving, endless energy, a power without beginning, without end, without purpose. Will, for Augustine, is likewise, before and beyond intelligence, the driving energy of all reality, but Augustine’s will is fully purposeful as the love that, for the Christian, is the source and end of all reality. Nietzsche, the most influential philosopher of the will in modernity, in his various artistic enactments of will as Will to Power, found it impossible not to attack violently Augustine’s radically opposed Christian notion of will as love. For both thinkers, will as pure energy is reality; for both, will is power; but that power, for Augustine, is not the purposeless energy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche or the Liebestod of Wagner and other romantics, but the engifted, gracious, other-­driven and other-­ directed “love of God and love of neighbor” that in De doctrina christiana Augustine dares to make the working canon (perhaps the canon within the canon) for interpreting all scripture. Not surprisingly, almost all Nietzsche’s references to Augustine are negative. And yet, given that Augustine was Nietzsche’s unwelcome predecessor on the centrality of will as the energy driving all reality, Nietzsche might have written of Augustine what he wrote about one of the most authentic heirs of the Augustinian model of the self in the modern period, Blaise Pascal: “Whatever else be true, Pascal is in all our blood.” More than any thinker on the will prior to Pascal, Augustine, the first major philosopher of will,

Augustine Our Contemporary   41

is in the blood of all of us, philosophers and theologians alike, whether we affirm or reject his portrait of the will. In Western Christianity itself, Augustine’s interpretation of the will as love had profound consequences. Recall only the most famous heirs of Augustine’s interpretation: Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, the Victorines, all love mystics; Bonaventure (“bonum diffusivum sui”), Dante (“L’amor che muove il sole et l’altre stelle”), the Love-­saturated Teresa of Avila, who called the Confessions her second scripture; John Donne (“Lord, lest thou enslave me I can ne’er be free, nor chaste unless thou ravish me”); Pascal (“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas”); George Herbert (in his classic poems on love); Søren Kierkegaard (in Works of Love); Simone Weil (in her agapic mystical experience occasioned by reading George Herbert’s poem “Love”); and Pope Benedict XVI (in his first and last encyclical, Deus Est Caritas). The list of Augustinians writing on love could easily be extended. In fact, the Augustinian synthesis on love as caritas has served as the now familiar Western Christian Catholic caritas synthesis, wherein agape transforms but does not reject eros. More than any other theologian, Augustine so defines the classical Christian understanding on love that Anders Nygren’s brilliant but wrongheaded 1930 attack on Augustine’s caritas synthesis19 occasioned critical responses from almost every major theologian of two generations, whatever their other differences: Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, William Temple, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, ­Bernard Lonergan, and Werner Jeanrond, as well as several philosophers, including Max Scheler, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Ricoeur. Intelligence-­in-­act and will-­as-­love: these two realities are so interwoven in Augustine that they can be distinguished but never separated. Nevertheless, another reality—­sin—­enters this Augustinian interweaving of intelligence and love to darken, wound, and becloud knowledge as it twists the will from its natural desire to love the Good into something defined by false loves. Sin, both personal and original, invades and at times overwhelms the convalescent Augustinian self. The will becomes not only weak and fragile (as the will always was for Augustine) but sinful. In the “region of dissimilarity,” the will as love becomes twisted almost beyond recognition as it is distorted more and more by unending false desires become unbreakable addictions.20 Even before the Pelagian controversy, Augustine began to fear that something was awry about the

42  David W. Tracy

self, however intelligent, however loving. Reading Paul, in what came to be known as the Augustinian “introspective” manner, Augustine believed that Paul confirmed his own fears in words that seemed to be directly addressed to him: “The good that I would do, that I do not; the evil I would not do, that I do” (Rom. 7:19). Without Augustine’s ever abandoning the nature-­grace model (the intelligent-­loving self described thus far), another Augustinian element in the self surfaced more and more: a self not just positively constituted by its love for neighbor and through its love for God, and thereby also by a love for one’s authentic loving self, but a self now sinking, as in quicksand, into an inescapable solidarity-­in-­sin with others—­the self finding a very crowded company as it sinks, the massa peccati.

T h e S i n - ­Sat u r at e d S e l f : S i n a n d G r ac e i n Au g u s t i n e

As scholars of early modernity have argued, the sixteenth century was profoundly influenced by Augustine both in the Renaissance (e.g., in Petrarch, Ficino, Erasmus, Montaigne, Shakespeare) and in the Protes­ tant and Catholic Reformations. That conflict-­ridden century (“early modernity”) should be read not only as a fierce conflict of interpretations of how to read Scripture properly but also as an equally intense conflict about how to read Augustine rightly: Is Augustine on the self best understood through the Renaissance (both Catholic and secular) paradigm of nature-­grace in continuity with the medievals? Or is he better understood through the sixteenth-­century Protestant Reformers and the seventeenth-­century Jansenist paradigm of sin-­grace? Both paradigms can justly appeal to important texts of Augustine. In the Confessions, for example, the primary paradigm is nature-­grace (or graced human nature as intelligence-­in-­act and will-­love). Confession, for Augustine, is principally testimony and praise to God for all his gifts (intelligence, love, friendship, learning, etc.) and only secondarily confession of Augustine’s own sins to God as well as to the community, to himself, and to any reader of the text. In sum, the theocentric priority21 in Augustine’s Confessions is the exact opposite of the anthropocentric, indeed egocentric, model initiated in Rousseau’s Confessions. Sin-­grace often interrupts the nature-­grace continuities of Augustine’s narrative: “The enemy held my

Augustine Our Contemporary   43

will; and of it he made a chain and bound me. Because my will was perverse it changed to lust, and lust yielded to become habit, and habit not resisted became necessity. They were like links hanging one of another—­ which is why I have called it a chain—­and their hard bondage held me bound hand and foot” (Confessions VIII.5, 10). This is the Augustine who attracted Martin Luther in his even more radical sin-­grace reading of the bondage of the will. The paradigm of nature-­grace for most medieval and high Renaissance thinkers and artists before the more sin-­grace infused works of the later Michelangelo (the Last Judgment, the unfinished sculptures) illuminated the continuities they found between our nature as intelligence-­in-­ act and affective loving will as both eros-­love and God’s agapic grace (e.g., in Marsilio Ficino, in Raphael and the early Michelangelo). Indeed, as Karl Rahner well observed, the graced nature of intelligence-­in-­act and will-­as-­love is our concrete actuality; what we often call “nature” is merely a helpful abstraction (a “remainder concept,” in Rahner’s phrase). The classical Protestant Reformers, however, especially that explosive religious and theological genius Martin Luther, as well as the more humanist, more systematic, but hardly less radical John Calvin, rejected the traditional medieval and contemporary Renaissance humanist paradigm of nature-­ grace for understanding the human situation and for reading Augustine himself in favor of the sin-­grace paradigm, which alone could probe the radicality of the sin-­saturated self (bondage for the will, self-­delusion for the intellect). Both Luther and Calvin believed Augustine’s anti-­Pelagian texts on the sinful self were the central formulation of Augustine’s model of the self as well as the most accurate reading of our state since St. Paul himself in Romans and Galatians. For Luther, and even more for Calvin, the intellect was a very useful tool for logical analysis, for formulating arguments against opponents, and (for Calvin and also Melanchthon) for a theological ordering of the principal theological topoi into a coherent Lutheran and Reformed systematic theology. On strictly theological, that is, existentially salvific, matters, however, reason was powerless. Luther held that on strictly theological matters, “the whore reason” (especially Aristotle) was useless. Analogously, on the will, Martin Luther, in his famous polemic against the Catholic Reformer and humanist Desiderius Erasmus, violently insisted on the total bondage of the will against Erasmus’s all too sanguine defense of free will.

44  David W. Tracy

Paradoxically, the more humanistically (logically and rhetorically) educated John Calvin went even further than Luther by claiming that, however useful reason clearly was for many purposes, unaided philosophi­ cal reason, especially in its Scholastic (“sophistical”) versions, was useless on questions of understanding the nature and attributes of God. Indeed, Calvin once stated that, on these matters, reason was nothing other than “a factory for making idols.” Even more radically than Calvin himself, the later seventeenth-­century Reformed theologians at the Synod of Dort denounced Arminius’s defense of free will and proclaimed their own doctrine of the total depravity of the will, double predestination, and irresistible grace as central beliefs of the Reformed (or Calvinist) tradition. It should be emphasized, however, that Calvin himself was not necessarily a Calvinist. In fact, Calvin’s own principal theological emphasis, despite his affirmation of the “terrible decree” of double predestination, was not the same as that of the Synod of Dort but was a theological portrait of God as gracious and loving sovereign Father,22 even given the mystery of the “terrible decree,” which was to be not understood but held in faith. Augustine’s own understanding of the sin-­saturated self deepened with the years. As early as 397, Augustine analyzed the weak and sin-­ inflected will in his responses to the questions of Simplicianus. A sense of the will’s actual bondage became far more radicalized in his later anti-­ Pelagian writings. Originally, Augustine responded nonpolemically to Pelagius’s lucid, if rather complacent, analysis of the will, its freedom, and its all too facile ability to be reformed through moral effort. Modern “moral rearmament” is a Pelagian banner. Pelagius was an impressive moral reformer.23 He believed the self had a weak will that needed grace, of course, but above all, moral strengthening through moral self-­ discipline aided by grace. Augustine and Pelagius never met personally. Unfortunately, Augustine was away at a conference of bishops when Pelagius tried to visit him on his way to Jerusalem. Pelagius and Augustine did, however, correspond and did read each other’s work. Their first correspondence shows a polite, restrained dialogical disagreement that only later became a disastrous polemical fight to the death. Pelagius, an empiri­ cal and British moral reformer, was a favorite of Christian aristocratic circles in Rome. Augustine, on the contrary, was neither principally a moral reformer nor a favorite of Roman aristocratic circles. Augustine was a passionate Latin African beyond the moral horizon of these circles.24 He

Augustine Our Contemporary   45

was a radically religious and theological genius who would have no truck with Pelagius’s position, which inevitably seemed to him at best naïve, at worst perverse and heretical. Why, Augustine pointedly demanded of Pelagius, did the Church baptize infants if there is no original sin? In reading Pelagius’s responses to Augustine, one cannot avoid the impression that Pelagius never really grasped what—­or whom—­he was dealing with: an Augustine whose portrait of a sinful self was so conflicted that, once examined by a journey within, sin revealed abyss upon abyss in the self wherein an ineradicably conflicted, self-­trapped ego could never be saved—­or even diagnosed properly—­by any Pelagian moral self-­reform. As Peter Brown well observed, Pelagius and many other contemporaries of Augustine were as shocked by and uncomprehending of Augustine’s unnerving vision of a seething, untamable conflicted self as Sigmund Freud’s contemporary Viennese psychologists and moral reformers were by Freud’s discovery of an unconscious,25 which shattered their much easier psychologies of the self and its discontents as so many toys. In the last years of his long life, Augustine had to deal not with the very decent, well-­mannered, polite if evasive moral reformist Pelagius, but with a new generation of far more fierce Pelagians. Julian of Eclanum, a young south Italian aristocratic bishop, was a brilliant dialectician and committed Pelagian moralist.26 He was an admirable ethical Christian; for one example, Julian contributed most of his personal wealth to the poor of Sicily. In many ways, Julian, like Pelagius in an earlier generation, was a moral Christian reformer of a familiar type that still exists. What Julian preached was Christian moral reform as outlined by Pelagius. What Julian preached against was—­Augustine. Even more than Pelagius himself, Julian of Eclanum found repulsive Augustine’s depiction of a human being as so ridden with sin that no combination of “just enough” grace and “just enough” moral self-­discipline would solve the problem. As in many polemical exchanges, the increasingly violent polemics between Julian and Augustine displaced any hope of dialogical argument. Neither Augustine nor Julian was at his best in these bitter, brittle exchanges. Julian, a first-­rate dialectician, used his argumentative skills very well, but he also made some mean-­spirited ad hominem attacks on the elderly Augustine—­telling Augustine, for example, to go back to his Punic donkeys as “the Punic Aristotle” and leave civilized Christians at peace. Julian’s ultimate insult, however, was not ethnic but deeply

46  David W. Tracy

theological: Over and over, Julian tormented Augustine with the unnerving charge that the old Augustine was no longer a Christian but had returned to his Manicheanism through his relentlessly pessimistic reading of the human condition, especially of human sexuality. For Julian, the strange Augustinian reading of original sin transmitted through the sexual intercourse of our parents sounded all too like a Manichean detestation of flesh, sex, and, at the limit, matter itself. Julian was not without a point, but it was not one that Augustine would ever grant. Augustine did not need his extreme views on sexuality to defend his complex, overdetermined theological view of the human condition. But he would not retreat. The tragedy expanded: The more Julian attacked Augustine for excessive statements on our sin-­saturated, guilt-­ridden, concupiscent self, the more Augustine responded through ever more excessive statements, not (as his admirers like myself still wish he had done) by moderating some of his judgments while maintaining his basic vision of the overdetermined will. Julian’s combination of dialectical skill and ad hominem insults provoked the now elderly and exhausted Augustine into a fury, at times almost a frenzy, as he flailed out at Julian, never once moderating even some of his in fact extreme and unnecessary positions but instead making them yet more radical and provocative.27 Did Augustine need to insist upon double predestination? Did he need his humanly repulsive teaching that infants who died without baptism are damned? Did he need to declare that his position on original sin in humankind can be demonstrated by the (masculinist) observation that in the sexual act, man [sic] loses reason, the characteristic that distinguishes him from all the other animals (since a man cannot control his erections as Adam apparently did before the fall), and becomes merely another animal bereft of reason’s control of the passions? Did he need to hold that original sin was transmitted sexually? And yet these famous late outbursts were not the only moments of his later life. Indeed, when one reads the recently discovered letters and sermons of Augustine,28 one can easily agree with Peter Brown that the elderly Augustine was not just the shrill anti-­Pelagian polemicist of legend, or even the angry old bishop Peter Brown himself had earlier portrayed. In fact, to his pluralistic congregation at Hippo, Augustine was always deeply pastoral—­compassionate yet just; strong but gentle; above all, pastorally understanding of human fragility and the human, all too

Augustine Our Contemporary   47

human, need for consolation. As refugees poured into Hippo for the last twenty years of Augustine’s life after the Vandal seizure of Rome (410 CE) and as the barbarian armies advanced mercilessly across North Africa ever closer to Hippo at the very end of his life, the pastor-­bishop Augustine did all he could to comfort and to protect his people. The people of Hippo were justly terrified of the future. The old Augustine (who died as the barbarians were laying siege to Hippo) refused to leave his people for safety elsewhere as some other North African bishops did. Whatever else was true of the old Augustine, he never lacked courage—­physical or moral. The old Augustine remained at the end as he was at the beginning of his bishopric: sometimes stern but always compassionate for all his parishioners, especially for the poor and the marginalized. Concurrently, the late Augustine remained a fierce polemicist, especially against Julian of Eclanum. As Augustine’s earlier unfortunate, atypical appeal to coercion against the Donatists and the accelerating bitterness of his fierce exchanges with Julian demonstrated, Augustine was altogether too uncompromising a person ever to be sentimentalized in his old age as anything remotely like a sweet old man. Fierce polemicist he remained. At the same time, Augustine was too good a pastor in his unflagging pastoral activity for his people to have his last days remembered only for his slash-­and-­burn, take-­no-­prisoners polemical exchanges with Julian. Not only did Augustine develop an overdetermined model of the self; he was himself an overdetermined character. Taken as a whole—­early, middle, and late—­Augustine is something like a character out of Dostoevsky. Over the years Augustine seemed unconsciously to display the polyphonic voices and multiple selves of all the Karamazovs—­Ivan, Dimitri, Alyosha, and even at times the repulsive father Karamazov.29 Augustine, like Dostoevsky, forces his attentive readers into facing several ordinarily unacknowledged, because undesirable, actualities about the self. A deep part of the incomprehensible self for Augustine is an abyss that many may prefer not to notice or even to hear about. In an analogous manner, Virginia Woolf elicits what can happen to non-­ Russian readers when they first read the great unnerving Russian novels.30 We feel we are entering an unknown and disturbing world. Our familiar landmarks, indeed the very floor beneath us, seem to give way. Tectonic shifts occur in our increasingly unsteady psyches. We no longer know

48  David W. Tracy

ourselves. We are no longer just fragile; we are fractured. We are now besieged not just by the strictly philosophical “limit questions” of modern Western thought (Kant et al.) but also by what the Russians name “the accursed questions”—­the unavoidable, perhaps unanswerable, questions that most human beings experience in some period of their lives, especially in the boundary situations of life (profound anxiety; a sense of ­no-­thing, of absurdity that can suddenly descend on us; our fierce grief at the illness and death of those we love; our confused fear at our own illness, our dying, our encroaching death [Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich]; our intractable guilt; our ennui, which is poisonous; an honest sense of powerlessness). “Who am I?” “Is my life or any life worth living?” “How can God exist when there is so much suffering?” “Whence evil?” Virginia Woolf wisely remarked that neither Dickens nor the Brontës, splendid as they are, prepared us for the altogether strange, disturbing world of the Russian novel. Woolf is surely correct: We can never be quite the same again after reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekov. Nor can Christians ever be quite the same after reading Augustine on the conflicted, overdetermined self. One may ultimately reject Augustine’s view of the self. Many thinkers do, just as many (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov) reject the extremity of Dostoevsky’s vision of the conflicted, twisted self. But after such revelations, what peace? Rejection of Augustine’s view is fully possible, but the full, complex, conflicted, ambivalent, unnerving power of Augustine’s portrait of our overdetermined selves—­both highly intelligent and deluded, both loving and hate-­filled, both sinful and tragic—­haunts most of Augustine’s careful readers. Did Augustine allow nature-­grace to yield to sin-­grace as the paradigm by which to understand the self? I think not; but the readings of Luther, Calvin, Jansen, and others do articulate realities that cannot be set aside or ignored in Augustine’s texts on the self. If a tornado is headed this way, it does not help to hope it is a refreshing wind. Another Augustinian, Søren Kierkegaard, rightly argued that one can understand what a Christian means by sin as a fundamental disorientation of the self (not sins as moral faults) only if one first understands what a Christian means by grace. Augustinian sin is not a collection of moral faults, as in Pelagius’s thought; it is a twisted disorientation of the whole self. Sin for Augustine is not a temporary state of moral weakness but a state of being: a full-­fledged perverse, addictive disorientation of the self. If the human situation were less conflicted and overdetermined

Augustine Our Contemporary   49

than Augustine argues it is, Pelagius’s austere moralism might well suffice. Moral reforms, like better, more rigorous arguments, should always be welcome. But neither arguments nor moral reform is sufficient when dealing with or even diagnosing the deepest, most twisted, unconscious actuality of the self. For such actualities, one needs a hermeneutics of suspicion, including that of the greatest Christian hermeneute of suspicion, Augustine of Hippo.31 In the analogous philosophical language of contemporary critical theory (e.g., that of Jürgen Habermas), the Augustinian notion of sin is a description not of conscious error but of an unconscious, systemically functioning distortion in the self. The self-­deluded (not merely erroneous) self ’s liberation cannot be achieved through any self-­healing of intellect (better arguments) or will (moral self-­reform). As the Japanese Pure-­Land Buddhists insist, our situation is such that only some other-­ power—­for the Christian, God’s grace—­can free us. A psychotic is not liberated by further rational argument or by further dialogue with family and friends. A psychotic needs, as we say, professional help. It matters relatively little whether our self-­delusions are caused through actions of our recent selves or, as is more likely, through some childhood or youthful trauma, genetic condition, or even life itself (sunt lacrimae rerum; Vergil, The Aeneid). Critical theorists can spot systemic distortions in an individual (classical psychoanalytic theory) or, at the limit, in whole cultures (ideology-­critique, genealogical analysis, feminist theories, queer theories). Sexism, racism, classism, elitism, Euro-­ centrism, homophobia, and so on are more likely to be unconscious systemic distortions than conscious errors. Critical theories have been forged to find ways (unlike traditional theories) not only to understand the self but also to help emancipate it from its unconscious systemic distortions. Like secular critical theories, Augustine’s theological model of the self can accurately be called a theological critical theory. His paradigm of grace-­sin helps one to understand aspects of the self that the nature-­ grace paradigm on its own does not. It is impoverishing for nature-­grace theologians to ignore Augustine’s sin-­grace paradigm, his uniquely theological critical theory, even if, like myself, these theologians believe that the nature-­grace paradigm is the foundational model of the Christian self within which the sin-­grace paradigm must somehow—­probably dialectically—­be incorporated. But theologians of the nature-­grace paradigm

50  David W. Tracy

ignore the fury and power of sin in the self and in all history—­foolishly, and, at the limit, fatally. Pelagius, I repeat, was an admirable moralist. Julian was a brilliant dialectician. However, moralism and argument alike regrettably evaporate once exposed to a deep and conflictual vision of sin-­ evil such as that proposed by the old Augustine even amid his polemical fury and bizarre exaggerations.

T h e Fo u rt h E l e m e n t: T h e I m p l i c i t ly T r ag i c S e l f i n Au g u s t i n e

All the elements outlined earlier are necessary for any adequate interpretation of the self in Augustine. However, there is another element in Augustine, an element admittedly more implicit than explicit, a matter of his unthematized but ever-­present sensibility—­in more Augustinian language, a matter of affect, mood, and sensibility. This further element—­a tragic sensibility—­was the implied but not explicit element Augustine needed to complete his model of the self and to correct some of his misfirings in blaming all evil and suffering on human beings. In addition to (not in replacement of!) employing the nature-­grace para­digm for understanding intelligence and will and the sin-­grace paradigm for understanding the depth of sin, I propose a tragedy-­grace paradigm to complete Augustine’s rich polyphonic and conflictual (in a single word, overdetermined) understanding of that ultimately incomprehensible reality, the human self. Through the three paradigms the human self is viewed as penultimately overdetermined; that very overdetermination, moreover, leads one to the threshold of the self ’s understanding of itself as much as, at that limit, it evokes the ultimate incomprehensibility of the self: the self ’s participation, even divinization, in the incomprehensibility of God’s self. The Augustinian self is ultimately a mystery to itself; to understand that mystery as mystery, an interpreter needs help from all four paradigms. One reason that an interpreter needs the addition of a tragedy-­grace paradigm to understand the Augustinian self fully is this: as important as the issue of radical evil is for understanding humankind after the horrors of the last century, as well as the massive global suffering of whole peoples and classes in this century, evil alone is not the only topic that needs theological attention.32

Augustine Our Contemporary   51

Human beings, other animals, and Earth itself are afflicted even more by suffering than by outright evil-­sin; much of that enormous suffering has been caused by human evil, indeed sin, but much of it has not been thus caused. Sometimes evil just happens: volcano eruptions, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, the inexplicable suffering and death of infants and children, even ordinary adult illness, death—­all these so-­called “natural” evils cause enormous suffering to human beings, as to all sentient beings. These realities are named natural evils only because we do not cause them; nature does. But they so affect us with suffering that we name them natu­ ral evils but not sins. We call them “evils” in the same way we call some undesirable (to us) plants “weeds” only because we do not want them in our gardens. Natural evils would be better named natural afflictions, that is, intense sufferings caused not by sin or by God but by nature itself. Nature impersonally and indifferently follows its own inexorable laws. Alternatively, as human-­caused climate change now so afflicts us, nature has been so interfered with by human beings that some recent floods, forest fires, and even hurricanes bear all the marks of human evil-­sin. Nature is experienced by us as, on the one hand, wondrous and awesome, and, on the other hand, as brutal, even seemingly cruel and indifferent toward us. Most natural afflictions and sufferings, however, cannot be accorded either to God as “acts of God” or to human sin. Augustine, more than any other ancient thinker, uncovered the uncanny human tendency to evil as well as the stark actuality of evil and sin in history and ourselves. This actuality is obvious to all but the inextricably Pollyannaish. A tragic consciousness uncovers sin (e.g., the vile murders of a brother’s children at the bloody origin of the house of Atreus). However, a tragic consciousness is more concerned to uncover the enormous suffering caused less by personal sin than by some mysterious necessity—­fate, fortune, chance, providence. Personal sin may be a subsidiary but is not the principal cause of such overwhelming suffering and excessive punishment as that of Oedipus, Orestes, Phaedra, Cassandra, Pentheus, et al. Much of the enormous suffering in human existence seems deeply inappropriate, at times even obscene, to blame on human evil (e.g., the terrifying earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011; the fate of Jesus, Lear, Cordelia, and Desdemona). Suffering, even more than evil-­sin, demands philosophical and theological attention today, at a time when not only do increasing natural “evils” or

52  David W. Tracy

afflictions cause so much suffering, but also massive global suffering so abounds through the tragic—­that is, largely unintended—­injustice opera­ tive in many social, economic, and political structures.33 Most contemporary Christian thinkers (including Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ricoeur, and Joseph Ratzinger—­ perhaps the three most prominent Augustinian thinkers of the last century) have been reluctant, as was Augustine, to use the categories of tragedy to rethink what a demythologized Augustinian “original sin” might mean for a contemporary understanding of the self. However, after so many modern and postmodern rereadings of the philosophical import of the ancient Greek tragedies, why not take tragedy more seriously—more exactly, the paradigm of tragedy-­grace—to help explicate a sensibility recurring in most of the texts of Augustine, and then use that tragedy-­grace paradigm not, of course, to replace the sin-­grace paradigm but to partly correct and complement it? Evil and sin are intractably real, causing overwhelming suffering; so is tragic necessity (fate, chance, fortune) and its attendant suffering. Augustine avoided the category “tragedy,” despite what clearly seems to have been his own tragic sensibility, because he rejected the notion of a fate not controlled by an omnipotent God. There is also the historical fact (fate): Augustine (like most of his contemporaries) probably did not know the texts of Aeschylus or Sophocles. However, Augustine knew and loved Vergil very well indeed and Homer indirectly well enough: Homer, the father of the ancient tragic form about which Aeschylus reportedly said that he and all later tragedians lived merely on the crumbs dropped from that bounteous Homeric table. As Simone Weil brilliantly wrote in one of the classic essays of the twentieth century, The Iliad, or Poem of Force,34 Homer was the first Greek thinker to enact as the true hero of tragedy the actuality of force, that force of life itself with which every human being, victor or victim of the back-­and-­forth shifts of history or the vagaries of nature, must one day deal. Unlike Weil, with her extreme anti-­Roman viewpoint, Augustine knew that Vergil’s Aeneid was a truly worthy successor of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Vergil continued Homer’s tale with the tale of the escaped Trojan, Aeneas, wandering purposefully toward the new Troy, Rome. The Aeneid is not simply a triumphal epic for Augustus Caesar.35 To be sure, it is partially that. Far more, however, the Aeneid is the greatest tragic lament in Western literature; it displays the terrible tragic price to be paid by both victors (Aeneas-­Rome)

Augustine Our Contemporary   53

and victims (Dido-­Catharge). Vergil incarnates the authentic Greek, now also Roman, tragic vision: suffering comes not just from our own evil actions but also from some strange necessity in reality itself: “Sunt lacrimae rerum.” Augustine himself knew this Vergilian truth well, as witnessed by a Vergilian tonality in the Confessions, in the City of God, and in his commentaries on the psalms of lamentation. Fate was a dangerous category for Augustine’s purposes since, for the tragedians, fate and chance (unlike providence, a biblical and Stoic category that Augustine accepts) is not controlled by the gods, even by the high god Zeus. Augustine, as a Christian, believed that only a doctrine of divine providence was an appropriate theological category for describing what happens to us whether we will it or not, since all reality (even fate, if such there be) is ultimately controlled providentially by the all-­powerful, all-­knowing, all-­loving God. Augustine, therefore, rejects the category of fate. In Greek tragedy after all, the gods, even Zeus, are very powerful but not all-­powerful; they do not control fate. Zeus is not Yahweh. Yahweh, for Augustine, is all-­powerful or is not God (Deus sine Deo). Nevertheless, Augustine presents something like a Christian tragic sensibility with the categories of providence and predestination, not fate. What might this mean? Why otherwise did Augustine so love Vergil, whose tragic lament is embedded in the very rhythms and many of the images of the Confessions, if he lacked a tragic sensibility attuned to Vergil? One example: In the Confessions, Augustine is troubled that he had been so moved as a student whenever he read Vergil’s account of Dido’s tragic suffering when Aeneas cruelly abandoned her on the shores of North Africa.36 In retrospect, the now Christian Augustine feared that his youthful vicarious experience of dramatic and poetic lament for a “merely” fictional character may have been wrong. And yet—­and yet Augustine himself echoed this very same Vergilian tragic lament when he confessed his own guilt for first deceiving and then cruelly abandoning his mother Monica on the same Carthaginian shore where Aeneas had abandoned Dido. That Vergilian tragic lament spoke to Augustine’s own sensibility toward his action as not just a sin but a necessity demanded at the time, that is, a tragic necessity. Augustine’s sensibility, in my judgment, was unmistakably a tragic one focused not only on sin but also on a tragic necessity: Thus his own initial attraction to the Manicheans and their ineradicable sense of our tragic fate;

54  David W. Tracy

thus his own increasingly dark vision of the human condition exploding in full force in his late anti-­Pelagian writings. Augustine’s reading of original sin does insist on the guilt of its inheritors, but it also suggests something very like a tragic necessity wreaking itself on all human beings. What kind of tragic vision was Augustine’s? Vergilian, certainly, and biblical as well, deeply influenced by his two favorite biblical works, the Psalms—­ especially, of course, the poignant tones of the Psalms of Lamentation—­ and the epistles of Paul, with his sense of the paradoxical reality that we can understand the truth of God only through Jesus Christ and him Crucified, the sinless but divinely tragically fated Jesus the Christ. Even if one attends only to the classical tragedies of the ancient Greeks—­that is, to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—­it is impossible to claim that any single definition can apply to all Greek tragedies. In fact, most philosophical definitions of tragedy are generalizations from one preferred tragedy: Oedipus Rex for Aristotle and Freud; Aeschylus’s The Oresteia for Nietzsche and Arendt; Sophocles’ Antigone for Hegel and Lacan; Euripides’ Hippolytus for Seneca and Racine; Homer’s Iliad for Simone Weil. In post-­Kantian German philosophy, tragedy became a major issue for philosophers—­from Goethe, Schiller, Friedrich and August Schlegel, and Novalis to Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, as well as, in contemporary philosophy, Scheler, Heidegger, Adorno, Jaspers, Benjamin, Gadamer, and Arendt. The German philosophical world was shaken by Greek tragedy in a way analogous to the way the medieval theological paradigm of nature-­grace was shaken by the new sin-­grace emphasis of the Reformation. Most of these German philosophers so taken with tragedy were Lutheran in heritage. Indeed, as Friedrich Nietzsche, himself the descendant of three generations of Lutheran pastors, once ironically noted: “German philosophy was born in Lutheran parsonages.” Not only the Latins but also the Greek Christian theologians, with the possible exception of Gregory of Nazianzus, found little to no theological interest in the ancient Greek tragedies. No Greek Christian Father (again except possibly Nazianzen) found that Greek tragedy, unlike Greek philosophy, was either a resource for or a challenge to their contemplative theologies. Like the early Augustine of the Dialogues of Cassiciacum and Thagaste, the Greek theologians were far more optimistic about the self, especially

Augustine Our Contemporary   55

the self ’s intuitive understanding and its contemplation, as well as the self ’s freedom of will. As Jaroslav Pelikan argued, the Greek theologians, surrounded by an ever-­darkening Hellenistic culture where fate reigned supreme, emphasized freedom of the will to fight cultural fatalism.37 The major situational problem for the Greek theologians contemporary to Augustine, therefore, was the opposite to that for Augustine; he faced the Pelagians, for whom an overbelief in the freedom of a relatively unimpeded will denied the Christian belief in inherited sin (which the Greeks never denied but which they believed was a more weakened and wounded will than Augustine’s more radical picture claimed). The Pelagians also denied the tragic sense of the ancient tragedians and the Roman Stoics (for example, Marcus Aurelius). The nature-­grace paradigm, with its relative optimism on the self, flourished in Eastern Christian thought. Indeed, a relatively optimistic account of the freedom of the will continued in Orthodox theology until the modern Russian theologians (especially Soloviev and Bulgakov) developed their speculative theologies of history, which, faithful to the tragic character of Russian history, included undeniably tragic, not only sinful, elements. Although the Russian Orthodox Vladimir Lossky articu­ lated a deeply impressive apophatic theology, neither he nor his Greek successors (both the nonapophatic John Zizioulas and the apophatic Christos Yannaras) took to heart any Augustinian—­for that matter, any Dostoevskean—­portrait of an irretrievably split self.38 Indeed, Lossky and his successors rejected both Augustine and Dostoevsky. On the contrary, Sergius Bulgakov—­influenced by Dostoevsky and, even more, by his own sense of the seemingly unending tragic disruptions of Russian history, culminating in his own experience of exile and the even worse fate of his theological colleague Pavel Florensky in the violently anti-­Christian Bolshevik Revolution—­understood tragedy theologically. The exiled Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev also created a Christian tragic and apocalyptic philosophy of religion.39 Scholars over the past thirty years have frequently analyzed the role of socioeconomic-­political factors informing the peculiar religious intensity and haunting tragic sense of late antique North African Christians—­ Tertullian, Cyprian, Tyconius, and Augustine, the Donatists and Catholics alike. That passionate, tragic North African sensibility never disturbed the more contemplative Christian Alexandria or Cappadocia or

56  David W. Tracy

Constantinople. The difference between North African and Greek theology is analogous to that between modern British analytical philosophy and modern German philosophy. In the latter case, as noted earlier, most German philosophers found themselves philosophically challenged by ancient tragedy. Even the later Kant, by the time of the Third Critique, discovered that the philosophical problem of freedom and necessity had become far more complex and existential than he had hoped it might prove to be in the first two Critiques. The categories of the sublime and symbol disclose an openness to the modern tragic sense (a favorite post-­ Kant romantic trope). Even more of a sense of radical evil invaded Kant’s late thought. In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, for example, Kant’s newly articulated sense of radical evil disturbed but did not displace his rationalism.40 However, more than Kant admitted, his own late sense of the problem of radical evil effectively unhinged the limits within which both religion and tragedy were earlier supposed to live. The terror in the French Revolution (which Kant, unlike Fichte, still defended) influenced the more sober tone, occasionally touched by a genuine histori­ cal tragic sense, in Kant’s brilliant late essays on history, especially “On the Impossibility of All Attempted Philosophical Theodicies” (1791). Neither Goethe nor Schiller nor the early romantics (Friedrich and August Schlegel and Novalis) needed lessons on the importance of tragedy for understanding the human situation philosophically. They were all philosophers and tragedians, either in drama or in reflection. For example, August Schlegel insisted on the philosophical importance of Shakespeare’s tragedies before any English philosopher had noticed. The major philosophical breakthrough on the relationship of tragedy and philosophy, however, was accomplished by Hegel.41 He was the first philosopher for whom the fact that reason had a history was a major issue for reason itself. Hegel’s contextual-­historical turn in philosophy likewise meant that the blatant tragedies of history (a “slaughterbench” as Hegel described it) must be taken into account by philosophy. The deepest history—­the history of Geist itself—­must transform all prior philosophical, religious, and artistic understandings of the self, as of all reality, in order to form new dialectical models of the self. For Hegel, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, the philosopher as philosopher must trace the history of the major forms of art, religion, and philosophy. For this new historicized philosophy or philosophical history, one of the most important historical, aesthetic,

Augustine Our Contemporary   57

moral, religious, and implicitly philosophical forms, Hegel argued, was Greek tragedy. In consequence, post-­Kant German philosophical understandings of tragedy became both more capacious and more challenging than Kant’s more tentative steps. Post-­Hegelian and post-­Nietzschean philosophers up to Benjamin, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Arendt, although curiously not Habermas, have found it important to correlate their philosophy criti­cally with one or another Greek tragic vision. It is distinctive of most modern German idealist and postidealist existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutical German philosophers to take classical Greek tragedy, as well as that of such modern tragedians as Shakespeare and Calderon, Goethe and Schiller, with critical philosophical seriousness. Additionally, Walter Benjamin rediscovered the uniqueness and import of the formerly overlooked seventeenth-­century German Lutheran baroque form of tragedy, Trauerspiel.42 In the contemporary period, some major Russian (Berdyaev), Polish (Kolakowski), and Iberian philosophers (both the Basque Miguel de Unamuno and the Castilian Ortega y Gasset) took tragedy with full philo­ sophical seriousness.43 The Iberian philosophers, faithful to the uniquely Iberian Catholic baroque tragic sensibility as seen in Calderon, were the principal Western philosophers besides the Germans to make tragedy a major philosophical issue. In the mid-­twentieth century, some French philosophers (Sartre, Camus) wrote philosophical tragic dramas; since that earlier existentialist period, however, French philosophers have been largely silent on tragic themes, especially in the more aleatory French postmodern thought, in which chance, not fate, is a predominant category. In Anglophone philosophy, only a few analytical philosophers (Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell) have made tragedy a philosophically important concern. In the culture of the United States, the secularized Calvinism deeply formed by the earlier Calvinist culture of explicit predestination, for example, in Jonathan Edwards, became fate in the tragic novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and later in those of Henry James, William Faulkner, and others, but did not much affect most American philosophers, who have remained Emersonian in their nontragic sensibilities. Ironically, modern Christian theologians have paid less attention to tragedy than have the philosophers. In fact, most modern theologians

58  David W. Tracy

have accorded very little attention to tragedy as a form that might help inform, reform, and transform, and in turn be transformed by, one or another theological vision of salvation. To be sure, Christianity ultimately offers a nontragic vision (indeed, as Dante insisted, Christianity is theologically a commedia). However, the hopeful Christian resurrection vision of peace and joy is grounded in the primordial Gospel passion narratives: the tragic reality of horrifying suffering (indeed affliction) of Jesus in Gethsemane, his capture, torture, and crucifixion—­the most disgraceful and painful of deaths for the lowest of criminals of the ancient Roman world. Paul’s dialectical paradoxical theology speaks: Christians believe only in the God revealed in “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). When one recalls that the central Christian symbol is the cross (so unlike the serene symbol of the sitting, peaceful Buddha), one must ask, Why did the first theologians and their successors, so wise in their use of Greek philosophy to help them think through Christianity as a philosophical religion, at the same time ignore the great potential of Greek tragedies in helping to articulate a Christian theology of the cross and a theology of suffering? Fortunately, some modern theological voices did break the puzzling silence on the possible import of the classical Greek tragic visions for a religion grounded in the crucified one: those of Søren Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, Karl Barth, Sergei Bulgakov, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Donald MacKinnon, Jon Sobrino, James Gustafson, Lawrence Bouchard, Wendy Farley, and a few others. The huge majority of theologians, however, have turned solely to philosophy and never to tragedy to help articulate the fuller complexities of Christian self-­understanding. Here is a thought-­experiment: What if early Greek theologians from Justin Martyr (second through third century) through Dionysius the Areopagite (probably sixth century) had taken the Greek tragedies as seriously as they took Greek philosophy? Greek Orthodox theology would not have had to wait for the modern Russian Orthodox theologians, as well as the theologically informed novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky44 and the religious philosopher of tragedy Nicholas Berdyaev, to learn how fruitful sustained attention to Greek tragedy can be for Christian theology. Theology can also illuminate and be illuminated by the tragic (not only sinful) elements in many biblical stories—­the stories of Hagar and Ishmael, Saul, David, Solomon, even Moses. A complex, conflictual

Augustine Our Contemporary   59

story of tragic necessity also skulks along in the biblical prophets’ terror-­ ridden responses to the divine unhinging calls to prophesy in Isaiah, Jere­ miah, Ezekiel. Classical prophets seem to be both exceptionally graced and exceptionally tragic figures—­note, for example, the lamentations of Jeremiah; the fate of John the Baptist; the cries of Montanus, Maximilla, and Priscilla; the terrified initial resistance to his prophetic call by Mohammed. Furthermore, does Greek tragedy not have affinities with the laments in the book of Lamentations, including the daring lamentations toward God in Godself, still a far more prominent tradition in Judaism than in Christianity? That strange biblical book Ecclesiastes (“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity”) could have been written by Euripides. Job’s terrifying cry beyond lamenting against divine injustice in the book of Job bears all the power of the decimated Theban cry of injustice at the revolting actions of the god Dionysius in the Bacchae. In the New Testament, the unnerving gospel of Mark displays strong elements of tragedy where only the mad and the demons seem to understand the divine power of this strange, doomed apocalyptic prophet. Jesus’s resurrection, to be sure, is affirmed in Mark as in the other gospels. At the same time, in Mark alone, the original ending of the gospel is strange and incomplete: the women at the tomb flee, weeping and confused, while the male disciples have absented themselves altogether. Even the more sanguine Luke will change geography itself to ensure that the narrative carries Luke’s Jesus to the city of Jerusalem and his divinely predestined fate. In the gospel of Matthew, an increasingly sober, even tragic, sense of inevitability takes over the narrative as it unfolds, always relating word and action, Jesuanic discourse and the crowd’s disheartening, constant misunderstandings and rejections until the final discourse, Matthew 25, before the passion itself begins. Matthew leads his readers from the most optimistic Christian discourse ever written (the incomparable Sermon on the Mount, a call to a fully Christian life, which, as Tolstoy bitterly observed, no Christian church has ever dared to live), to the deeply moving, still demanding, almost desperate cry of Matthew 25 (the Magna Carta of all liberation theologies)—­if you will do nothing else, at least listen and live the most important Jesuanic call of all, the call to pay attention above all to the outcasts, the rejected, the forgotten: Feed the poor, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned. In sum, wake

60  David W. Tracy

up to fight the suffering and injustice all around you. As Augustine himself would later write in De doctrina Christiana, the sole hermeneutical key to the whole Scripture is “love of God and love of neighbor.” The whole Christian Bible ends, after all, with the apocalyptic-­tragic cries of the persecuted Christian community in Asia Minor in the book of Revelation. Greek tragedy could have been helpful to aid the earliest theologians in their sometimes unsteady readings of central aspects of these biblical texts and many others—­the Exodus, the Babylonian Exile, the two destructions of the Temple—­as surely as Greek mysticism and the Greek philosophy of eros helped Philo, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa in their enriching readings of the Song of Songs and the gospel and letters of John. The Jewish theologian Philo and the Christian theologian Gregory of Nyssa created Platonically influenced mystical readings of Moses. Could not their brilliant contemplative and mystical treatises on Moses’s ascent of Mt. Sinai have been well complemented by a second, different, reading—­one more influenced by Greek tragedy on the descent of an elated Moses down Mt. Sinai with the Decalogue only to find an unwelcoming, ungrateful people worshipping a golden calf? The full story of Moses bears triumph and joy but also unmistakably tragic components: Moses’s murder of an Egyptian official; God’s near murder of Moses himself; Moses’s unending, even tragic, difficulties with his people, whose relentless complaints sometimes burst forth in fierce fury at their leader; and, above all, the fact that Moses (like the later Martin Luther King Jr.) was a prophet destined never to reach the promised land himself. Here is a second thought experiment, this time for Latin theology. What if the passionate and often pessimistic North African Latin theologians had developed a Christian theological vision with the aid of a tragedy-­grace paradigm,45 together with Augustine’s unique rendering of the nature-­grace paradigm on intelligence and will-­love, as well as the sin-­grace paradigm on the abyss of sin? Vergil, the Iliad, and the many suggestive biblical passages cited earlier were available, even if Aeschylus and Sophocles apparently were not, although it is possible (not probable) that Euripides may have been through Seneca. If Augustine had allowed himself to incorporate his own innate tragic sense into his theology as well as he articulated his joyful contemplative orientation with the aid of Platonist philosophy and his unique and North African sense of unconscious and conscious sin, he might well have added an explicitly tragic

Augustine Our Contemporary   61

element to his complex model of the self. As the more pastoral Augustine sometimes hints in his letters and sermons, some human situations may be described more accurately as tragic than as sinful. Augustine, the pastor of his beleaguered people, never insinuates (like some contemporary Christian fundamentalist preachers) that floods or storms, earthquakes or barbarian invasions, are the people’s fault. An Augustine-­influenced Christian theological transformation of Greek, Latin, and biblical tragic senses happened much later: first, in early modernity, in great Christian tragic artists such as Calderon, Milton, Racine, and Corneille and in philosophers such as Pascal, and, in later modernity, in such Christian thinkers as Péguy, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, and T. S. Eliot. Christian artists more than Christian theologians have sensed that tragedy can illuminate the Christian paradoxical human situation to the point at which a paradigm of tragedy-­grace should be added to nature-­grace and sin-­grace. Indeed, most modern theologians, as much as the earliest theologians, have kept their distance from tragedy. Jonathan Edwards is the outstanding eighteenth-­century exception. Kierkegaard and Newman are the major nineteenth-­century Christian exceptions. Theologians have too often and too facilely contented themselves with easy declarations that Christianity is “beyond tragedy.” That is indeed true (as attested by the resurrection), but it is crucial for what Jesus Christ endured before the resurrection to be understood and not to be lost. Christianity, after all, is, as I have said before, a religion whose foundational narrative is the passion narrative and whose foundational symbol is the cross. When a theology moves beyond philosophy, it does so only by passing through philosophy. So, too, should any theological move beyond tragedy be only through tragedy, not around it. Analogously, the only powerful forms of postmodern thought are those that have seriously gone through modernity rather than, as is sometimes the case, used postmodernity as an excuse to return with unearned ease to premodernity. Theologians should be as willing to go through the raging river of tragedy as they have been willing to go through the “fiery brook” of philosophy and critical theory. A few Christian theologians have so dared: outstanding is the late Anglican theologian Donald MacKinnon, who writes: There is a sense in which Christian theology may be much more than it realizes the victim of the victory won in the person of Plato by the

62  David W. Tracy

philosophers over the poets, and in particular the tragedians. It is true that Aristotle sought to modify the significance of this victory; but he failed to reverse it. . . . I wish to ask the question whether in fact the theme of the work of Christ may not receive effective theological treatment when it is represented as tragedy. This I say remembering the supreme significance of the resurrection, but also continually recalling the extent to which in popular apologetic understanding the resurrection has been deformed through its representation as in effect a descent from the Cross, given greater dramatic effect by a thirty-­six-­ hour postponement.46 Original or inherited sin for Augustine served as the surest explanation of the mystery of iniquity—­the mystery that always most tortured him. But against Augustine’s official teaching, why could this inherited necessity not be read as a tragic inheritance, not personal sin (which should always involve personal consent)? It is plausible to say, with Augustine or not, that there is some mysterious inherited evil in which we all participate and through which we all must suffer, even though we are not personally responsible for the origins of this mysterious inheritance. Augustine’s penetrating sense of some strange and powerful inherited evil afflicting humanity can, however, also be read, contra Augustine, as an inherited necessary, tragic evil but not as original sin. Inherited evil, along with an inevitable inclination toward evil, is not as such (i.e., before one acts upon it) sinful. That inevitable aspect of our situation is better described as tragic, not sinful. This Augustine would not allow. Since God cannot be responsible for causing (as distinct from permitting) evil, he concluded, in effect, that human beings must be responsible for all evil. This Augustinian conclusion is probative only if no third possibility is given (tertium non datur). But tertium datur. A sense of tragic necessity is that third possibility: an element, as noted earlier, that is present in the Bible alongside powerful biblical portraits of sin. There is an intellectually skeptical and existentially dark side to Augustine, where sin and tragic necessity seem to exist uneasily side by side. Perhaps, left to himself, Augustine might have become, as Ronald Knox ironically observed about Pascal, a radical pessimist, a tragedian of hopelessness, not hope. Augustine might have become the village atheist.47 But grace caught Augustine and he became and remained for life a

Augustine Our Contemporary   63

hope-­ful, often joyful and contemplatively peaceful, Christian to the end; but, like Pascal, Augustine also never fully lost his other, tragic, sensibility. Augustine was a Christian convalescent; he was never fully healed, never a serene and joyful mystic in the manner of Dionysius the Areopagite. As for Greek tragedy itself, in spite of many modern misunderstandings that tragedy characteristically ends without hope, the fact is that among the Greek tragedies that have survived, about half end in a “hopeless” mood and half end with hope. Despite common linguistic usage, “tragic” does not mean “hopeless.” Augustine may have been able, therefore, to strengthen, not weaken, his Christian hope, his incarnational theology of the cross and resurrection and his nonapocalyptic eschatology if he had allowed himself to include a tragic element in his model of the intelligent, loving, willing, sinful, and tragic self. One can further clarify the implicit tragic aspects in Augustine’s portrait of the self by comparing his vision of the self to certain aspects of those of the three classical Greek tragedians whose texts (tragically!) Augustine did not know. Clarification through contrast is always a promising intellectual exercise. Who among the ancients, other than Euripides,48 is more penetrating than Augustine on how our affects and passions can so becloud and take over our minds that we reach the point of impenetrable self-­delusion? Euripides, the child of the Athenian intellectual revolution of the Sophists and Socrates, believed that reason does indeed enlighten and liberate human beings from superstition and obscurantism. But Euripides was no optimistic rationalist: Reason, even philo­sophical reason, can at times turn human beings into self-­satisfied, arrogant monsters programmed for a tragic fall. Intelligence, Euripides thought, can rarely suppress or even deflect the passions away from blindness and self-­delusion. In The Bacchae,49 Euripides’ greatest work, Pentheus, the young rationalist, the self-­satisfied king of Thebes, bearing all the hubris of youth, is driven by the orgiastic god Dionysius, the god at once of ecstatic joy and revolting cruelty, to insanity and self-­destruction. Dionysius cruelly manipulates Pentheus’s vanity and his deeply repressed and confused erotic passions. Euripides, like Augustine, believed that the passions can so disorient our intellects that even our positive eros can shift suddenly into a pathway of tragic self-­destruction. So it is in Euripides’ Hippolytus with Phaedra’s inappropriate but irresistible tragic erotic love for her unknowing stepson, who has his own repressions to afflict him.

64  David W. Tracy

The Euripidean tragic strain in Augustine shows itself in Augustine’s brilliant (and very non-­Platonist) focus on the passions—­how passion can easily dislocate, even destroy, reason (pondus meum, amor meus). A Euripidean tragic strain is alive in Augustine in his penetrating observations on the power of feeling, emotion, affect, and mood over our best intentions and most brilliant thoughts. Still, Augustine’s tragic view of the human situation is ultimately less comparable to that of Euripides than are those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Augustine’s awesome vision of the power of inherited original sin possesses a more Aeschylean gravitas than any Euripidean lament over disordering passions. Aeschylus, like Augustine, possessed an innate sense that evil can be inherited as a result of some aboriginal ancestral crime. For Augustine himself this inheritance was original sin. That sin included humanity’s tragic solidarity in a universal and inescapable inherited—­that is, original, at the origin—­ancestral sin, for which Adam’s and Eve’s descendants are somehow also to be held responsible and guilty. All humankind is now in the house of Atreus. In the last play of the Oresteia, Aeschylus dramatizes the hope that through their dialectical and dialogical reasoning on justice, human beings, by using reason in the polis—­if they act with the aid of the Olympian gods, especially Athena, goddess of wisdom—­can hope to understand justice enough to found a court of law and thereby break the unending cycle of revenge in the doomed house of Atreus. In the final play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, The Eumenides, human beings, with the inestimable aid of the Olympian gods, may persuade the gods of blood, earth, and family—­the Furies—­to partake of the new tentative order of justice. This hope, moreover, for law as justice, not revenge, is a solid one for Aeschylus. This hope is theologically grounded:50 Zeus is ultimately just. Human beings will therefore discover a tragic, not philosophical, wisdom: Despite all appearances to the contrary, Zeus is just; life, in consequence, despite its evils, its injustices, its sufferings, is meaningful and hopeful. We learn this Aeschylean wisdom, however, only through tragic suffering “drop by drop even in sleep.” Profound suffering purifies both mind and heart to be open to receive tragic wisdom. This classical Aeschylean tragic wisdom can be found in Augustine, whose tragic wisdom was of course theologically transformed by his Christian vision into Christian agapic wisdom through suffering, a process of which the cross reminds all Christians.

Augustine Our Contemporary   65

Neither dolorism nor fatalism accurately invokes either the Aeschylean or the Augustinian tragic theology of suffering. Aeschylus thought that the story of the house of Atreus needed three plays to enact its truth dramatically, not, as Sophocles and Euripides believed, a single play. For Augustine, the foundational Christian story of suffering and unlimited hope is the story in the four gospels, not one, the story of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ through whom one understands that God is the infinite love and intelligence, infinite justice and mercy. The traumas described by Aeschylus and Augustine are radically different, yet both include a similar sense of tragic necessity (Orestes in the Oresteia, Jesus in the synoptic gospels) and a wisdom through suffering in the gospel of John and the letters of Paul. Despite their radical differences, the stories of the Bible can, at times, be illuminated in classical Aeschylean terms—­as those exceptional Augus­tini­ ans, John Milton and Jean Racine, demonstrated. Unsurprising is the fact that two of the greatest Christian tragic dramatists, the revisionary Puritan, John Milton, and the revisionary Jansenist, Jean Racine, were both Augustinian. Almost despite himself, Augustine communicates a Christian tragic sensibility to careful readers—­although more, it seems, to Christian artists than to Christian theologians and philosophers. Both Euripidean and Aeschylean tragic notes, therefore, can be found in Augustine’s implicitly tragic Christian vision. However, there is also something peculiarly Sophoclean in Augustine’s overdetermined model of the self. Augustine could have written his own (to be sure, Christianly transformed) version of Sophocles’ greatest ode: his ode to humankind as deinos,51 that is, as a paradoxical wonder shining in intelligence and joyful strength while at the same time sharply damaged and twisted. Deinos is a Sophoclean word for the abyss of wonder that is the human self. Oedipus is both highly intelligent and self-­ deluded: both well-­ intentioned toward others (his entire city, for whose sake he is willing to die) and ineradicably egocentric, both innocent and responsible. Sophocles implies that not only Oedipus but every human being is a deinos. Some human beings, like Oedipus, refuse to live according to the human measure (the Sophoclean heroes, daimones). Oedipus must know the truth about his origins, whatever the horrendous consequences. No one—­prophet, wife, the warning chorus—­can stop him before it is too late. It was always too late for Oedipus. He must know. Sophoclean daimonic heroes52 are mortals who cannot but go beyond the mortal human

66  David W. Tracy

measure into a realm closer to that of the immortal gods. The heroes are no longer “human, all too human.” They are daimons. Antigone, too, refuses the human measure. She “lives for love, not for hatred.”53 She lives by the code of the gods for justice, not the reasonable political code of the city. It matters not at all to Antigone that the ruler of her polis, Creon, has threatened death to anyone who disobeys his decree that Antigone’s brother, a traitor to the city, will not be buried and, therefore, will be disgraced in death as in life. Antigone will not—­cannot—­ obey this unjust law. Antigone lives for love through justice—­the ancient justice, that of the gods. She is fully prepared to go to her death in obedience to another, higher law—­the ancient law of the gods that one must bury one’s own. Antigone is not in any simple sense an obviously good person like Shakespeare’s Cordelia. Rather, Antigone, like Oedipus and all Sophoclean heroes, has obvious flaws: her unattractive stubbornness, which lies within her admirable and unrelenting sense of justice. Antigone treats her weaker sister Ismene cruelly, with unwarranted contempt; she ignores the feelings of her fiancé, Haemon. And yet Hegel was right to call Antigone the most beautifully (i.e., morally admirable) figure in our literature. As a daimonic hero who must live beyond the finite measure, Antigone could not but live as she did no matter what the consequences, just as Oedipus could not continue living until he knew the terrible truth of his own origins no matter what the consequences. All Sophoclean heroes are mortals who, faithful to their daimonic natures, must go beyond the human limit, beyond the finite measure appropriate for humanity. Sophocles seems to believe that the best human hope of understanding human beings in the universe is to turn away from stories of ordinary mortals and to turn to the uncanny stories of those larger-­than-­life figures, the daimonic heroes. Only by attending to the unnerving stories of these daimonic heroes, Sophocles seems to hold, can human beings hope to find some glimpse into the “accursed” questions. Is Zeus ultimately just? Is human life—­finite, measured, and mortal—­ ultimately meaningful? Or is it all finally absurd? Sophocles believed we cannot learn enough by telling the stories of ordinary mortals, even exceptional ones like the characters of Aeschylus and Euripides. Only the stories of the Sophoclean daemonic heroes—­inevitably tragic because of their irresistible drive to go beyond the human measure—­may give us some clue to our place in the universe.

Augustine Our Contemporary   67

Unlike Aeschylus, Sophocles is not entirely sure that Zeus is just. In some tragedies Sophocles enacts a hope that Zeus is just. In other trage­ dies, he clearly does not. After displaying an unrelenting drama of horror and injustice, the Trachiniae concludes with the uncanny, seemingly hopeless line “There is nothing here that is not Zeus.”54 Oedipus Tyrranus ends without hope, but Oedipus at Colonus ends with great hope in the form of tragic wisdom, with the suffering hero, Oedipus, becoming an official daimon to be honored at his new shrine at Colonus (the shrine where Sophocles was priest for the cultic rituals). Unlike Euripi­ des, Sophocles does clearly believe in the gods and, in some but not all of his plays, believes they are just. As a deeply committed Christian, Augustine always had graced hope. And yet the self of Augustine is in some ways very like a Sophoclean deinos (so intelligent, so strange) and sometimes like a Sophoclean daimon. As we have seen, in the first place Augustine’s self is as intelligent as Augustine himself so clearly was: in discursive rhetorical arguments, in dialogues, in meditation and speculation, and finally in divinizing contemplation with moments of profound intuitive vision. In the second place, as we have also seen, Augustine’s self is always active in affect, emotions, will, love. The self of Augustine is deinos. In the third place, Augustine’s self also finds itself unable to escape its own self-­created prison, its God-­denying, other-­rejecting, intelligent and loving, self-­ destructive ego (later named by Martin Luther curvatus in se). In other words, Augustine’s fully positive, intelligent, and loving “nature-­grace” self is simultaneously a self darkened in intelligence, twisted in will, ever restless and mood-­shifting, addicted to its own sins and poisoned by some evil fatelike inherited necessity. Both Augustine’s nature-­grace paradigm and his sin-­grace paradigm are fundamental for understanding the complex Augustinian self. Augustine’s self bears not only all the characteristics of Sophocles’ human being as deinos but also bears, at its extreme limit, the excessive character of a daimon (both saint and sinner; Luther’s simul iustus et peccator). Human beings are capable of the extremes of good (note the importance, for Augustine, of the story of the daimonic saint, Anthony, as a Sophoclean herolike monk in the desert—­a choice of life clearly beyond the human measure) and evil (as in his own Iagolike love of evil for evil’s sake in his famous youthful theft of pears without reason).

68  David W. Tracy

Contrary to his explicit theological intentions, Augustine does in fact implicitly render tragedy, as Milton and Racine did explicitly centuries later, i.e., not only a nature-­grace version of the self, not only a sin-­ grace version, but also a Christian tragic version. If Augustine had known Greek tragedy, he would, of course, have theologically transformed the Euripidean, Sophoclean, and Aeschylean tragic elements, as did Calderon, Milton, Racine, Eliot, and other Christian tragedians, into a distinctly Christian tragic vision, just as he had earlier transformed Platonist philosophy into a Christian contemplative theology. In my judgment, the Latins, unlike the Greeks, produced no great tragedians save the incomparable Vergil and the tragedian manqué, Augustine of Hippo. Seneca, usually cited as the greatest Latin tragedian, hardly qualifies: Seneca dramatizes a violent, sensationalized, somewhat Euripidean vision without the precarious tragic balance that Euripides always maintained in his best plays and Seneca almost never did. By contrast, Augustine’s vision—­at once resolutely and explicitly Christian—­is also implicitly tragic. And yet something else—­something stranger—­may likewise be the case. Perhaps Augustinian theology, almost alone among ancient Christian theologies and almost alone among modern theologies, was also a theology betraying those few traces of ancient Greek tragedy still alive in Augustine’s day of theatrical decadence. Perhaps. At any rate, the authentic greatness of Augustine’s complex theological model of the self is that it included both the nature-­grace and the sin-­grace paradigms to understand dimensions of the self. In its overdetermined and ultimately incomprehensible way, Augustine’s model of the self is also open to a tragedy-­grace paradigm to understand its full complexity. Augustine’s understanding of the self is an uncanny one: a self ultimately (i.e., theologically) an incomprehensible imago dei of the incomprehensible Trinitarian God in Godself. And yet that same self is penultimately comprehensible only as an overdetermined self—­dazzlingly intelligent and loving, constituted by will as energy and will as choice—­as well as a graced, sinful, and tragic self. The history of the reception of Augustine has usually consisted in highlighting one or at most two of these four major elements as the master-­key to Augustine’s understanding of the self. This will no longer serve. It is time to rethink the complete Augustinian overdetermined portrait of the self. Partial, indeed partisan, readings, however valuable in their historical context and however insightful they remain for grasping

Augustine Our Contemporary   69

one or the other central element in the self of Augustine, do not satisfy. For all their brilliance and permanent value, the classical readings of Augustine on the self are not adequate interpretations of the multiple, sometimes conflicting, insights on the self uniquely enacted in our history by Augustine of Hippo. Sui generis is a phrase that seems invented to describe Augustine: our contemporary, with his unmatchable portrait of the self—­penultimately overdetermined and ultimately incomprehensible.

Not e s 1.  On the imago dei Augustine is original: He shifts the theological understanding of the imago from the Greek emphasis on Christ alone as the imago to a Trinitarian imago (i.e., to the Father through Christ in the Spirit). As Trinitarian, the imago in humans becomes memory-­understanding-­will (love). It is, therefore, not accurate to describe and criticize Augustine’s imago as a psychological analogy. It is a theological, that is, Trinitarian, analogy that yields triads, especially memory-­ understanding-­will (love) in human beings. See The Trinity [De Trinitate], trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), esp. 298–­303 and 383–­ 88. On the christomorphic character of Augustine’s Trinitarian theocentrism, see David Tracy, “Augustine’s Christomorphic Theocentrism,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George Demacopoulos (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008). 2.  De libero arbitrio libri tres, ed. William M. Green, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 74, Sancti Aureli Augustini Opera (Vindobonae, Austria: Hoelder-­Pichler-­Tempsky, 1956). 3. For the Confessions I use the fine three-­volume text and commentary by James J. O’Donnell (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1992). Volume 1 is the text and introduction; this volume will be cited parenthetically below. For an English translation, see The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 4.  Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of his Books,” in Plotinus, trans. A. H. Armstrong, 7 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 1:71. 5. For the importance of the Nicene doctrine, see Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 142–­71. 6.  Epistle 120, in S. Aurelii Augustini Hipponiensis episcopi Epistulae, ed. Alois Goldbacher, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 34, S. Aureli Augustini Operum (Vindobonae, Austria: F. Tempsky, 1895), 2:704–­22. 7. Augustine, De anima et eius origine libri quattuor, ed. Karl Franz Urba and Joseph Zycha, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 60, Sancti Aureli Augustini Opera (Vindobonae, Austria: F. Tempsky, 1913), 303–­419.

70  David W. Tracy 8.  Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995). 9.  This does not mean, pace Alfaric et al., that Augustine’s real conversion was to Platonism, as Augustine makes clear in the Confessions. This important intellectual conversion needed prayer, scripture reading, and baptism in order to become a full Christian conversion. Amid the vast literature on the topic of Augustine and Platonism, see Robert Crouse, “Paucis Mutatis Verbis: St. Augustine’s Platonism,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 37–­50, and Giovanni Reale, Aurelio Agostino: Natura del Bene (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1995). 10. Garry Wills, St. Augustine (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), 88–­97. 11.  See Philip Burton, Language in the Confessions of Augustine (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007). 12.  This pervasive interiority can be seen as early as the dialogue of Augustine on reason itself. See Soliloquiorum libri duo, ed. Wolfgang Hörmann, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 89, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Opera (Vindobonae: Hoelder-­Pichler-­Tempsky, 1986), 3–­98. 13.  Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 14.  Saint Augustine, The Retractions, trans. Mary Inez Bogan, Fathers of the Church Series 60 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968). 15. For references see my essay “The Divided Consciousness of Augustine on Eros,” in Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, ed. Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 16. Augustine, “Homily VII,” Homilies on the First Letter of John, in Saint Augustine: Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Soliloquies, trans. H. Browne, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-­Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church 7 (Grand Rapids, MI: T & T Clark and W. B. Eerdmans, 1986), esp. 501–­8. 17. Martin Heidegger, “Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus,” in Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, Gesamtausgabe F II, 60.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1995), 160–­299. 18.  A modern interpreter can see, following Jean Daniélou’s classic analysis of epectasis, that epectasis is very like the notion of spiritual exercise described by Pierre Hadot. 19.  Anders Nygren, Eros and Agape, trans. Philip Watson (London: SPCK, 1982), 136; John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine; the Hulsean Lectures for 1938 (London: Wipf and Stock, 2007); and idem, “The ‘Retractationes’ of St. Augustine: Self-­criticism or Apologia?,” in Augustinus Magister: Congrès

Augustine Our Contemporary   71 internationale augustinien, Paris, 21–­24 September 1954, 3 vols. (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1954–­55), 1:85–­92. 20. See Gerald Bonner, Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), for a persuasive reading and the myriad relevant references. 21.  See Tracy, “Augustine’s Christomorphic Theocentrism.” 22.  David Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and John Calvin: Writings on Pastoral Piety, trans. and ed. Elsie Anne McKee, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 2001). 23. Gerald Bonner, Augustine and Modern Research on Pelagianism, Saint Augustine Lecture Series: Saint Augustine and the Augustinian Tradition (Villanova, PA: Augustinian Institute of Villanova University, 1972); repr. in idem, God’s Decree and Man’s Destiny: Studies on the Thought of Augustine of Hippo (London: Variorum Studies, 1987). 24.  The tone of Augustine’s initial criticisms of Pelagius does not demonstrate the violent polemics that eventually took over, especially when Julian of Eclanum entered the controversy. For Augustine on Pelagius himself, see “Against Two Letters of the Pelagians,” “On Grace and Free Will,” and “On Rebuke and Grace” in Saint Augustine: Anti-­Pelagian Writings, trans. Peter Holmes, Robert Ernest Wallis, and Benjamin B. Warfield, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-­Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1971), 374–­492. 25.  Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 368. 26. For a recent defense of Julian, see Josef Lössl, Julian von Aeclanum: Studien zu seinem Leben, seinem Werk, seiner Lehre und ihrer Überlieferung, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 60 (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 27.  This increasingly polemical stance against Julian of Eclanum begins in two letters against the Pelagians and lasts until the very end of the unfinished work against Pelagius in Opus Imperfectum. See “The Spirit and the Letter,” “Nature and Grace,” and “The Deeds of Pelagius,” in Answer to the Pelagians, trans. Roland J. Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century 23 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), 150–­202, 225–­75, 336–­81. 28.  On the importance of the recently discovered sermons (by François Dolbeau) and letters (by Johannes Divjak) for reinterpreting the pastoral, nonpolemical character of Augustine in his later years, see “Epilogue,” in Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 440–­513. 29. For Mikhail Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, see “Dostoevsky’s Poetics,” in Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 238–­52. 30. Virginia Woolf, “The Russian View,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1912–­ 1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 341–­44.

72  David W. Tracy 31. For the concept of a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” see “Interpretation as Exercise of Suspicion,” in Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 32–­36. 32.  See G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 33.  See my essay “Incarnation and Suffering: On Rereading Augustine,” in Godhead Here in Hiding: Incarnation and the History of Human Suffering, ed. Terrence Merrigan and Frederik Glorieux, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 234 (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2012). 34.  Simone Weil, The Iliad, or Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy, pamphlet 91 (New York: Politics, 1946), 3–­30; reprinted as “The Iliad, Poem of Force,” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 1977), 153–­83. 35.  See W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 36.  Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 81. 37.  Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–­1700), The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 216–­52. 38. See the consistently negative appraisals of Augustine in John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladi­mir Seminary Press, 1985), and in Cristos Yannaras, Person and Eros, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007). 39.  Nicholas Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (London: SCM Press, 1935), and The Beginning and the End, trans. R. M. French, originally An Essay in Eschatological Metaphysics (London: G. Bles, 1952). 40.  Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960). 41.  Miguel de Beistegui, “Hegel, or The Tragedy of Thinking,” in Philosophy and Tragedy, ed. Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 2000), 11–­56. See also other essays in Philosophy and Tragedy. The other major German philosophical reading of tragedy is, of course, that of Friedrich Nietzsche. 42.  Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). 43.  Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover Publications, 1954). 44.  See Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011). 45. There is a need for a full study of Augustine on fate and necessity, for example, in The City of God, in his criticism of Cicero in Book V, chapters 8, 9, and 10; and in his polemical response, in Book II, chapters 9, 10, and 11, to Julian of

Augustine Our Contemporary   73 Eclanum, who had accused Augustine of still remaining—­in his “Against Two Letters of the Pelagians”—­Manichean and fatalistic. See The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), 188–­96, 394–­95. 46.  Donald M. MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1968), 100. 47.  Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XII and XVIII Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 202. 48.  See, for example, Euripides, Electra, trans. Emily Townsend Vermeule, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 4:397–­454. 49. Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, 4:543–­608. 50.  See Aeschylus, The Eumenides, trans. Richard Lattimore, in The Complete Greek Tragedies,1:166–­71, esp. lines 881–­1047. 51. See Antigone, in Sophocles, with an English translation by F. Storr, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956). The ode referring to deinos in Antigone, spoken by the Chorus, begins with “πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινóτερον πέλει” [Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man], lines 332–­40. 52.  This is my own reading of the controverted issue of the exact meaning of Sophocles’ notion of the hero as daimon. 53.  “My nature is for mutual love, not hate,” Antigone, in Sophocles, line 523. 54. Sophocles, Women of Tracchis, trans. Michael Jameson, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, 2:325, lines 1277–­78: “. . . and there is / nothing here which is not Zeus.”

two

Semper agens/semper quietus Notes on the History of an Augustinian Theme

bernard mcginn

Au g u s t i n e o n S e m p e r ag e n s/ s e m p e r q u i e t u s

Ancient literature reveals no precedent for the opening chapters of Augustine’s Confessiones. Instead of a dedicatory epistle or an introduction explaining the purpose of the book, Augustine abruptly presents us with an impassioned plea to God, almost embarrassing in its revelation of his desires, his failings, and his puzzlement over how to know God and how best to praise him. (Such addresses to God in the second person are found in 381 of the 453 paragraphs that make up the Confessiones.)1 A careful reading of even the first chapter, however, reveals that we are dealing with something that is as much a conversation as an address, because the words that Augustine directs to God, even when he is wondering how to talk to him, are God’s own words to humans found in scripture. The opening phrase, “Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde,” is a quotation 75

76  Bernard McGinn

from a line of praise found in three psalms (Pss. 47:2, 95:4, and 144:3), and the fifteen or sixteen lines of the first chapter alone contain six further biblical quotations or reminiscences.2 Our initial reticence about listening in on this private conversation is part of Augustine’s strategy for providing us a pedagogical model by highlighting the “testimony of sin” [testimonium peccati] that is the necessary prerequisite for the “testimony of praise” [testimonium laudis]—­the task of every believer. This is the problem the bishop poses at the outset.3 Augustine, furthermore, presents his quandary as ours—­from the perspective not of one who knows the answer but of one who knows the way to the answer that will only be fully given when we attain perfect rest in heaven. The goal of heavenly repose is adumbrated at the beginning of the prayer in the most famous phrase from these chapters, “You have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you” [Quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te], as well as toward the end of chapter 5 in a passage that opens with the plea, “Who will allow me to find rest in you?” [Quis mihi dabit adquiscere in te?] and closes with the difficult text, “Do not hide your face from me: that I may die, lest I die, so that I may behold it” [Noli abscondere a me faciem tuam: moriar, ne moriar, ut eam videam]. In 1945, in the wake of World War II, Romano Guardini published a short commentary on Confessiones 1.1–­5 under the title Anfang (i.e., Beginning) in which he says, “The Confessiones begin with five chapters which scarcely have a parallel in literature.”4 These five chapters (1.1.1–­ 1.5.6) do more than merely set the stage for the story of Augustine’s life, beginning with his infancy (1.6.7): They are an image of how the reader is meant to appropriate in his or her life what Augustine learned from talking with God about the purpose of his own existence.5 In order to conduct this conversation, we, like Augustine, have to discover the truth about the God we address, or at least as much as is necessary to enable us to direct our faltering speech to the real God and not some counterfeit (aliud enim pro alio potest invocare nesciens). The problem of finding the proper way to address God is a key issue throughout the Confessiones. Hence, the teaching about the divine nature set out in the first five chapters, though presented as a meditation on God’s word given through the mouth of the preacher and the prayer of the believer, rather than as a theological exposition, is crucial to a correct reading of the book. In this

Semper agens/semper quietus  77

opening meditation-­conversation Augustine encapsulates what he has learned about God thus far on his journey through life, a voyage both intellectual and affective. Intellectually, Augustine had had to overcome his Manichean view of God as a mass of physical light extended throughout the universe, a corporeal reality in conflict with the physical body of darkness and evil.6 Through the help of the libri platonici, as he explains in Book 7, he came to realize the superiority of incorporeal reality, or light, to all corporeal nature, and even to attain a partial vision of the Supreme Light and Truth, that is, the immutable reality of God. In the visionary account (or accounts) in Book 7, Augustine quotes Exodus 3:14 (ego sum qui sum) in the first report (7.10.16), and in the second he tells us that he came “to ‘that which is’ in a flash of trembling glance” [pervenit ad id quod est in ictu trepidantis aspectus] (7.17.23).7 Augustine certainly held that Being (esse and even ipsum esse) was among the names that can be properly used of God, but we should beware of thinking that Augustine gave Being the kind of priority among the divine names that Thomas Aquinas did, just as we should not neglect the powerful, if unsystematic, apophatic aspect of his theology.8 The intellectual conversion recounted in Book 7 of the Confessiones, however, was not sufficient to save the sinner who had wandered far from God, as the bishop explains in 7.20.26. Augustine was now firmly rooted in truth, telling God, “I was certain that you are and you are infinite, . . . , you who are always the same as what you are, and not something other or in another fashion by way of any part or movement, and also that all things come from you solely by the most firm evidence that they exist.”9 But Augustine could not enjoy, or have the fruition, of this knowledge, nor could he address God in a correct way, because of his own sinfulness, his pride, and especially his ignorance of the need to turn to the Incarnate Word for help. Only Christ’s grace poured out in his heart could effect the conversion that would enable him “to discern and distinguish the difference between presumption and confession” [Discernerem atque distinguerem quid interest inter praesumptionem et confessionem].10 In David Tracy’s trenchant formulation: “Only by naming Jesus of Nazareth . . . the Christ can we name God. . . . In Augustinian christology, the Form Christ gathers all other forms to name God. . . . Augustine’s theology is theocentric through and through. At the same time, Augustine’s theocentrism is constituted in and through his emphatic

78  Bernard McGinn

christomorphism.”11 The conversion of the heart through the grace of Christ described in Book 8 was essential for the creation of the proper inquiry about how to know and praise God that Augustine later set forth in the first chapters of Book 1. These five chapters, while often analyzed, continue to produce new insights into Augustine’s thinking. The first chapter confronts the problem of the relation between knowing and praising: “Grant me, Lord, to know and understand which is first, to call upon you or to praise you, and to know you or to call upon you” [Da mihi, domine, scire et intellegere utrum sit prius invocare te an laudare te, et scire te prius sit an invocare te]. The answer to the conundrum is given in terms of the hard-­won message gained through Augustine’s pilgrimage back to God, set forth in Books 4–­9. God must first be known before he can be properly invoked (invocare), sought (quaerere/requirere), and found through praise (invenire/ laudare), but proper knowledge of God is not gained through our own personal effort. Only the faith that comes through the Word made flesh and the ministry of the preacher enables us to speak to God in a proper fashion: “Lord, my faith calls upon you, the faith you gave me and inspired in me through the enfleshment of your Son and the ministry of your preacher.”12 Given that faith alone allows us to address God correctly, chapters 2 and 3 of the opening of the Confessiones turn to the issue of location: Where is the God whom we are addressing? In a long series of questions Augustine explores the problem of the mode of God’s presence as the supreme spiritual being who is both in all things as their deepest reality and yet beyond them in his transcendence, concluding with the rhetorical query, “Or are you everywhere in a total way and yet nothing can totally take hold of you?” [An ubique totus es et res nulla te totum capit?]13 Augustine is now in a position to direct a real invocation to God in the form of an address that is also a summary of his understanding of the divine nature.14 Chapter 4 may initially seem like an exercise in philosophical inquiry (the platonici would have agreed with much of what the bishop says), but once again Augustine corrects such a view by beginning with Scripture, the words of Psalm 17:32: “Who are you therefore, my God? Who, I ask, except the Lord God? For who is Lord save the Lord, or who is God save our God?” What follows is one of the bishop’s most remarkable texts on God: a short treatise de divinis nominibus.15 (The text is given in the appendix at the end of this chapter.) In a quasi-­hymnic and

Semper agens/semper quietus  79

liturgical fashion, making much use of antithetical parallelism, Augustine provides the reader with a list of fifty-­two predicates or names of God, expressed not in the third person but, as befits the nature of the Confessiones, in the vocative. As Werner Simon has shown, these are not really philosophical terms but are for the most part taken from Scripture, especially from the Psalms.16 Augustine begins with ten predicates in five pairs ascribed to God on the basis of what Scott MacDonald has called the principle of supre­m­ acy, that is, that God must be spoken of as the highest in any category of thinking.17 The attributes appear as a quasi-­doxology, and, indeed, they later formed the basis for an early medieval liturgical prayer. The group begins with terms that are more or less synonymous—­summe, optime/ potentissime, omnipotentissime—­but moves on to pairs that express different, even antithetical, aspects of the divine nature—­misericordissime et iustissime/secretissime et praesentissime/pulcherrime et fortissime.18 Some of these predicates, such as omnipotentissime, are grammatically incorrect but are demanded by the supremacy of God’s nature.19 Augustine follows this first list of attributes with two longer lists of dual attributes, mostly paradoxical or antithetical. The first collection has six members. God is praised as stabilis et incomprehensibilis unmoving and incomprehensible immutabilis, mutans omnia unchanging and changing all  things numquam novus, numquam vetus never new, never old innovans omnia et in vetustatem renewing all things20 and drawing   perducens superbos et nesciunt  back the proud into decay and they know it not21 semper agens, semper quietus always in action, always at rest colligens et non egens gathering together and not   needing [anything] At this point Augustine introduces a break by inserting two clauses listing three nonantithetical attributes, each intended to express God’s loving care for all things (portans et implens et protegens/creans et nutriens et perficiens). Then he closes his minitreatise with a new series of twelve dual predicates, mostly antithetical and drawn from the biblical accounts

80  Bernard McGinn

of God’s dealings with his people during the time of the Old and New Laws.22 Finally, the hymn of praise at the end of chapter 4 closes with the invocation of a central theme in the bishop’s theology necessary for understanding all speech about God, what has been called the sermo fallibilis, that is, the simultaneous insufficiency and necessity of speaking about God.23 “What have we said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness; or what does anyone say when he speaks of you? Yet woe to those who keep silent about you, though even those who say much are [really] mute.”24 Chapter 5, containing two paragraphs, closes the beginning of Book 1 by investigating our personal appropriation of the doctrine of God set out in chapter 4. Augustine first returns to the kind of tortured questions seen in chapters 1 and 2 as he struggles to discern what God means to him personally and what he means to God. The answer depends on God: “Tell me by way of your merciful acts (Ps. 106:8), Lord my God, what you are to me. Say to my soul, ‘I am your salvation’ ” (Ps. 34:3). Now that God is clearly understood as the God who saves, Augustine can conclude with the plea of the constricted and sinful soul to be enlarged and made whole through God’s forgiveness, utilizing, once again, the language of the Psalms (Pss. 18:13–­14, 26:12, and 129:3). At the end the bishop gives everything over to God’s hands, admitting that he cannot contend with God, “who is the Truth”: “I do not deceive myself lest my iniquity lie to itself.” The eruption of antithetical pairs of attributes for God in chapter 4 is provocative. Why did Augustine make this move?25 The supremacy principle of language about God does not seem to demand it, but further insight into the nature of God’s existence may provide a clue. In his early treatise De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus manichaeorum Augustine had recognized that nothing is contrary to God except nothing itself, that is, nonbeing.26 Therefore, attributes that seem antithetical if applied to created beings may not be so when ascribed to God.27 From early on Augustine insisted that God must be immutable,28 but mutability means changing—­gaining and losing something—­not lack of activity. Therefore, God can be immutabilis, but as mutans omnia. Furthermore, Augustine’s continuing meditations on God’s absolute simplicity—­God is what he has—­meant that everything that could be ascribed to God was really one, or identical, with the divine nature.29 Therefore, although creatures

Semper agens/semper quietus  81

may be active (agens) at one time and at rest (quietus) at another, passing from one state to the other, or even simultaneously active with respect to some condition while at rest with respect to another, God, in the supremacy of his nature, is always, simply and immutably, semper agens/ semper quietus.30 While this antithesis is not verbally present in the biblical text, it seems clear that it has a scriptural root in Augustine’s ongoing meditations on God’s continuing creative action and the rest (requies) ascribed to him on the seventh day in Genesis 2:2.31 This particular antithesis was important enough to Augustine that he returned to it again, significantly in the prayer that concludes the Confessiones in book 13.35.50–­38.53.32 Here the bishop brings out the anthropological significance of the formula semper agens/semper quietus. If the opening prayer of the Confessiones is a petition for the knowledge of God needed to call upon him and praise him in this life, the closing prayer has as its central theme a plea for final peace. “Lord God,” it begins, “give us peace (you who have given us all things), the peace of rest, the peace of the Sabbath, peace without evening.”33 All creation (ordo pulcherrimus rerum) has a morning and an evening, but the seventh day, as described in Genesis 2:2–­3, is without evening since it represents “the everlasting permanence” [permansio sempiterna] of heaven. God’s figurative rest on the seventh day after the work of the six days (although he worked in complete repose, Augustine says), is a promise that, just as he performs good works in us during our lives, so, too, will he rest in us during the sabbath of eternal life. In Augustine’s words: “Then you will rest in us in the same way as you now are at work in us, and that rest of yours will exist through us just as these works of yours now happen through us. Lord, you are always at work and always at rest [semper operaris et semper requiescis], nor do you see at some time, nor move at some time, nor rest at some time, although you still make temporal acts of seeing, the times themselves, and the peace after time.”34 The final paragraph of the prayer, and indeed the whole Confessiones, is a meditation on the difference between our seeing and God’s seeing, and our temporal acting (both good and evil) and God’s eternal fixedness in goodness. “You, the Good, are in need of no good, always at rest, because you yourself are your own rest” [Tu autem bonum nullo indigens bono semper quietus es, quoniam tua quies tu ipse es]. No creature, human or angel,

82  Bernard McGinn

can explain this to another, Augustine says, but we can ask God to open the mystery to us. These two appearances of the formula semper agens/semper quietus at the beginning and the end of the Confessiones argue that the paradox of the simultaneity of divine action and rest and how we come to share in it was significant for Augustine. One might think of the issue as essentially philosophical, but a third appearance of the formula underlines the exegetical roots of the bishop’s thought on God’s active rest and restful activity already hinted at in the reference to the seventh day of Genesis in Confessiones 13. In the seventeenth tractate of his In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus Augustine comments on the words of Jesus from John 5:17: “My Father is still working, and I too am working.” How, Augustine asks, can we square this statement of God’s continuing activity with his rest on the seventh day? Just as at the end of the Confessiones Augustine insists that both statements are true, but difficult to explain: “Who, my brothers, can explain in words how God works while at rest and is at rest while working [et quietus operetur et operans quiescat]? I beg you that while you are on your journey you put this issue off. This seeing seeks God’s temple, seeks the holy place. Support your neighbor and walk ahead. You will see him there where the words of men are not needed.”35 Augustine then goes on to give a Christological interpretation of God’s rest on the seventh day. His reticence to say more about the paradox of semper agens/semper quietus here may reflect the pastoral context of the sermons on John.

Lat e r A p p e a r a n c e s o f t h e T h e m e o f S e m p e r a g e n s /s e m p e r q u i e t u s

Augustine was not the only Christian thinker to wrestle with the paradox of a God who is always both active and at rest. The bishop’s writings were not on the radar screen of the mysterious Eastern Christian writer who called himself “Dionysius” and who lived about two generations after Augustine’s death, though the respective heritages of the two thinkers were to intertwine in later centuries. While the bishop’s formula semper agens/semper quietus expresses God’s being as beyond the antitheses found in creation, the dialectical understanding of God’s active rest

Semper agens/semper quietus  83

(which might be expressed as semper agens quia semper quietus), as well as its limits, played a role in the Dionysian corpus. Augustine, to be sure, possessed what Vladimir Lossky termed “elements of a negative theology.”36 He always insisted that God surpassed all human knowledge, as both ineffabilis and incomprehensibilis,37 and we should not forget that it was Augustine who coined the term docta ignorantia.38 Nonetheless, in the words of Olivier du Roy, there is “no trace in Augustine of an apophatic theology of God as non-­being.”39 ­No-­thingness, for Augustine, as noted earlier, is always a defective and privative term, not a supereminent one. This is the root of the difference between Augustine and Dionysius on their respective understandings of how God is both active and at rest. The core of the Dionysian doctrine of God differs from Augustine’s in its greater willingness to “break the vessels,” that is, to use and then discard all forms of predication, even the highest, in attempting to express the divine mystery. In On Divine Names [De divinis nominibus] 7.3 Dionysius summarizes this strategy by saying: “God is all things in all things and he is nothing among things. He is known from all things and he is known to no one from anything.”40 At one and the same time omninominabilis and innominabilis,41 God becomes something like the sport of language while always refusing to play the game. In the ninth chapter of On Divine Names, dealing primarily with the positive names applied to God, Dionysius, like Augustine in Confessiones 1.4, considers antithetical denominations, in this case four: greatness and smallness, sameness and difference, similarity and dissimilarity, and finally rest and motion.42 He expounds on the fourth antithesis at greater length than Augustine: “What do the theologians [biblical authors] mean when they assert that the unstirring God moves and goes out into everything? . . . This motion of his does not . . . signify a change of place, a variation, an alternation, a turning, a movement in space. . . . What is signified, rather, is that God brings everything into being, that he sustains them, that he exercises all power of providence over them, that he is present to all of them, . . . and that from him, providing for everything, arise countless processions and activities.”43 The key to Dionysius’s ascription of rest and motion to God is to recognize that the antithetical terms agens and quiescens are cataphatic, or positive terms, words based on the language that we draw from our own experience of the world to help us on the path to union with God. Such

84  Bernard McGinn

positive predications, whether taken alone or as antitheses, can never be adequate language for addressing the hidden divine nature in itself. In this realm only negative terms (mutually cancelling negations in the case of antitheses) are operative. An earlier text in On Divine Names 5.10 (825B) makes this clear: “He is at rest and astir, is neither resting nor stirring, and has neither source, nor middle, nor end” [Et stans et movens, et neque stans neque motus, neque principium vel finem vel medium habens].44 Dionysius goes on with the kind of statement foreign to Augustine: “He is in nothing. He is no thing.” The same message is repeated in the last chapter of the Mystical Theology [De mystica theologia], where Dionysius mounts a hypernegative assault on all God-­talk, including the statement that the divine nature “is not immovable, moving, or at rest.”45 So, we might ask, is there any significance to using these antitheses about God if they mean nothing for real knowledge of the divine nature? Dionysius’s answer, I believe, can best be found in a passage from On Divine Names 4.7 (704C): “There is rest for everything and movement for everything,” he says, “and these come from that which, transcending rest and movement, establishes each being according to an appropriate principle and gives each the movement suitable to it.”46 Thus the paradox of rest and motion tells us about the dependence of created beings on God, not about God’s self. Oddly enough, despite the somewhat different views of God held by Augustine and Dionysius, this turn toward creation for a solution of the paradox is reminiscent of Augustine’s anthropological use of the semper agens/semper quietus formula at the end of the Confessiones. Today we are conscious of the differences between the Augustinian and the Dionysian traditions in Western theology. In the Middle Ages, however, both Fathers were potent authorities whose diverse expressions were seen as masking a deep inner agreement and harmony. Therefore, we should not be surprised that the Augustinian and Dionysian understandings of semper agens/semper quietus were capable of intermingling in creative ways. An examination of a few medieval authors on God’s active resting and restful activity will reveal some examples of the interaction of the Augustinian and Dionysian heritages, as well as some strictly Augustinian uses. Augustine’s Confessiones pervaded the Middle Ages. Important aspects of this heritage have been well studied, notably in the classic work of Pierre Courcelle,47 but the full story is perhaps too large to be

Semper agens/semper quietus  85

exhaustively analyzed. Different sections of the book were naturally more often cited and used than others. The first five chapters of Book 1 were fairly well known, though the formula semper agens/semper quietus was not as popular as might be imagined. It did achieve importance, however, in one late medieval mystical tradition. In the two centuries after Augustine’s death in 430, passages from the first five chapters of Book 1 appeared in a number of works, such as the Eucharisticum de vita sua, an autobiographical work of Ennodius of Pavia (written after 511), and in the contemporary Excerpta ex operibus Sancti Augustini of Eugippius, an abbot of Castellum Luculanum near Naples.48 In his comment on Psalm 67 in the Explanatio Psalmorum, Cassiodorus (d. ca. 583) uses one of the dual predicates ascribed to God in 1.4.4: “As Father Augustine said of Him: ‘You change the seasons, but you do not change your designs.’ ”49 A long passage from Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iob (20.32.63) dealing with the problem of scriptural texts that ascribe human activities to God seems to reflect the pope’s familiarity with the dual attributes of Confessiones 1.4.4, since four of the five phrases that Gregory discusses also occur on Augustine’s list.50 Finally, Isidore of Seville, in his dogmatic summary, the Sententiae, also cites several passages from the first five chapters, but without notice of Augustine’s charac­terization of God as semper agens/semper quietus.51 The efforts of the ninth-­century Irish thinker John Scottus Eriugena to make an analysis of the entire genus naturae, comprising both the things that are and the things that are not, led him to create a profound “machination” of the agreement of the Greek and Latin Fathers. (Consensum machinari, that is, “devising an agreement” was his slogan.)52 Eriugena’s extensive knowledge of Augustine, coupled with his translation and utilization of the Dionysian corpus and its dialectical formulae of God as neither moving nor at rest, might lead us to expect that he would have made extensive use of the paradox of how God is at rest in his activity and supremely active in repose. This is not the case, although Eriugena’s Periphyseon contains some important reflections that touch on the paradox of restful activity in a tangential manner. Eriugena does not even cite the opening chapters from the Confessiones, and his version of Dionysian apophaticism gives less attention to the language of divine motion and rest than did Dionysius himself. This lacuna can best be explained as a result of Eriugena’s efforts, laid out in the first book

86  Bernard McGinn

of Periphyseon, to deny the adequacy of all the categories of Aristotelian logic, both substance and accidents, as proper language about God.53 For Eriugena, “God is neither moved nor defined,”54 though he does admit that “the motion of all things both begins and moves and comes to an end [in Him], although he himself neither moves himself, nor is moved by himself or by another.”55 Eriugena’s rigorous exclusion of the primal categories of motus and status from God is not merely a philosophical issue.56 A lengthy part of his discussion of God-­talk in Book 1 involves the problem of how to interpret biblical language about God: the same issue that exercised Augustine, Dionysius, and Gregory. Specifically, if the categories of acting and suffering (agendi et patiendi) cannot be properly predicated of God,57 how are we to understand biblical passages about God’s action, love, and desire? Eriugena’s answer is given in terms of the priority of the negative hermeneutics advanced by Dionysius—­all positive scriptural predications about God are ultimately metaphorical. “If then,” he says, “these verbs . . . are no longer properly predicated of God, but metaphorically, . . . then in very truth God neither acts nor is acted upon, neither moves nor is moved, neither loves nor is loved.”58 In line with this Dionysian dialectical God-­language, biblical texts about God’s rest and action could have been employed by Eriugena to illuminate how the motion and rest of creation, the second and third species of natura, serve to manifest what can be known of the God who creates (the first species), as well as the hidden God of the fourth species. Eriugena does not, however, explicitly utilize this form of language. His famous list, in the third book of Periphyseon, of nineteen dialectically paired terms to describe the meaning of theophany, that is, the relation between nature as knowable in its procession out from its hidden source and yet still unknowable in its origin and goal does not, perhaps surprisingly, mention motion and rest. The list begins with the characterization of theophany as non apparentis apparitio, that is, “the appearing of the not-­appearing,” a predication that involves a double negation: God’s negation of divine nonappearing by the act of flowing out into the world of appearance and the negation of all appearing in its return to the divine nonappearing. A dialectical logic of this type might have been extended to include a phrase such as immobilitatis motio, or, perhaps better, quietationis actio, but such is not found in the Irishman’s listing, though he hints at the possibility of such extensions at the end of his list when he says,

Semper agens/semper quietus  87

“and the other things that are both thought and perceived by the intellect alone and cannot be retained within the recesses of the memory and that escape the mind’s high point.”59 Augustine’s writings played a significant role in the theological revi­ vals of the twelfth century, both in the world of monastic theology and in the new scholasticism. The Confessiones were probably more influential among the monks, especially the Cistercians, who were often closer to the bishop of Hippo in their mode of doing theology.60 Bernard of Clairvaux’s description of the mysterious coming and going of the Word in his soul in Sermo super Cantica Canticorum 74.5 may owe something to Augustine’s pondering of how God is both in and yet beyond the world in Confessiones 1.2.2, though, as is his custom, Bernard does not give a direct quotation.61 The fourth book of the treatise De anima, often ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor but possibly a Cistercian product, cites Confessiones 1.4.4 verbatim at the beginning of the second chapter of its fourth book, including the formula semper agens/semper quietus.62 The first five chapters of Book 1 of the Confessiones also influenced the treatise De triplici genere contemplationis of the Scottish monk Adam (d. ca. 1213), who was first a Premonstratensian and later a Carthusian. Adam’s three forms of contemplation embrace a “consideration of God in himself as incomprehensible,” one of God in the wicked as terrible, and a final consideration of God in the elect as lovable. In describing the first form of contemplation, Adam creates a kind of meditation on Augustine’s opening chapters of the Confessiones, without engaging in direct quotation.63 Augustine’s Confessiones were well known to the scholastics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although Courcelle provides some references to major scholastic writers, such as Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Eckhart,64 much more might be discovered by a detailed search of indexes and references. Eckhart appears to be one of the few schoolmen who paid much attention to the opening chapters. He was particularly struck by the text about the restless heart’s being able to rest only in God, citing it at least eight times both in his Latin works and in his vernacular sermons.65 One unusual passage has the Dominican acting as a textual critic, presenting his own view of the difficult text at the end of Confessiones 1.4.4.66 Eckhart explored the logic of dialectical predications of the divine nature with great originality across his writings, especially through the Dionysian category of similis/dissimilis and his own favorite paradox of the

88  Bernard McGinn

mutual implications of distinctio/indistinctio. A passage in his Expositio in Sapientiam briefly touches on divine mobility as necessarily implicating immobility. Commenting on Wisdom 7:24 (Omnibus enim mobilibus mobilior est sapientia), Eckhart explains that what is more mobile than anything else is so in the sense that it is also immobile, moving all other things.67 The background here is Boethius’s passage from the De consolatione philosophiae about God as “remaining stable but giving all things motion” [stabilis manens dat cuncta movere],68 not Augustine’s s­ emper agens/ semper quietus, but the two motifs have obvious links. Finally, in his Expositio in Iohannem Eckhart even cited three of the antitheses from the last group in Confessiones 1.1.4,69 but not the antithesis of God as always acting and always at rest.70 It was in the new vernacular forms of mysticism that flourished from the thirteenth century onward that the theme of God’s restful action and active rest emerged as significant. Vernacular theologians, especially the Flemish mystics who emphasized the motif, rarely quoted authorities or gave explicit citations. We need not think that reading Augustine was always the direct source of their fascination with God as semper agens/ semper quietus, nor should we rule this out, even in the case of supposedly “illiterate” women mystics. Augustine’s authority certainly played a role in legitimizing this paradoxical view of God, and the negative elements in Flemish mysticism, directly or indirectly dependent on the corpus Dionysiacum, interacted with Augustinian elements in ways that have not yet been adequately investigated. The earliest Flemish mystical author, Beatrice of Nazareth (1200–­ 68), was born into a middle-­class family and educated by beguines before she became a Cistercian nun. From about 1215 to 1235 she kept a mystical journal, only parts of which survive through the Latin vita composed by her confessor.71 Beatrice also left a brief vernacular text, the Seven manieren van minne [Seven Modes of Love], an account of the power of ecstatic love.72 Among the key themes of this work is the paradox of minne, that is, the way in which the overwhelming force of divine love, as the fifth manner puts it, is “what most afflicts and torments the soul, is that which most heals and assuages it; what gives the soul its deepest wounds brings to it best relief.”73 In the sixth manner, Beatrice says, “the soul is all love, and love rules in the soul, mighty and powerful, working and resting [werkende ende rustende], doing and not doing, and all

Semper agens/semper quietus  89

which is in the soul and comes to the soul is according to love’s will.”74 Love’s power continues to grow in the soul to the point where she no longer fears “angel or saint or God himself in all she does or abandons, in all its working and resting [in werkene ofte in rastene].” Beatrice continues, “And now the soul feels indeed that love is within it, as mighty and as active when the body is at rest as when it performs mighty deeds.”75 In this text Augustine’s view of God as always active and at rest has been adopted to express the dynamic nature of divine love, the love that has totally conquered the beguine. As the victim of divine minne, Beatrice has now reached a state of active rest and restless activity. The similarity with Augustine might seem stretched or accidental were it not for the fact that Beatrice explicitly cites a Latin passage from Augustine’s Ostia experience from Book 9 of the Confessiones at the end of her treatise.76 We have evidence that Augustine was read by other contemporary Cistercian nuns.77 Beatrice’s notion of love as the coincidence of rest and action was developed by her successors among the mystics of the Low Countries. The beguine Hadewijch, whose prose and poetry appear to date from around the time of Beatrice’s death in 1268, provides the next example. Hadewijch was undeniably learned and felt a particular affinity to St. Augustine. In one of her visions she describes attaining union with the saint, who appears to her in the guise of an eagle, the symbol of contemplation.78 Hadewijch’s dynamic view of God shows a definite Augustinian influence. Her teaching about the inner life of the Trinity, the ceaseless flowing out of the three persons in active love and the flowing back into modeless enjoyment (ghebruken), is an early but convincing utilization of a Trinitarian understanding of the Augustinian semper agens/semper quietus formula, one that may be said to have become a characteristic of the late medieval mysticism of the Low Countries. In Letter 22 Hadewijch summarizes how the divine nature as minne is always both active and at rest. Describing four paradoxes regarding God’s nature, Hadewijch states, “The fourth is that God is outside all, but entirely encircled [omgrepen]. He is outside all because he rests in nothing but in the tempestuous nature of his profusely overflowing flood, which flows back and forth over all. This is what is said in the Song of Songs: Oleum effusum, that is, ‘Your name is as oil poured out’ (Song 1:2).”79 God’s rest and activity are always an expression of Trinitarian love for Hadewijch. For example,

90  Bernard McGinn

in Letter 17, speaking of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit in generosity and the hiddenness of the Father who performs no outward work, she roots these properties in the nature of the Godhead itself. “This pouring out and keeping back,” Hadewijch says, “are the pure divinity and the entire nature of Love.”80 Seeing God’s simultaneous repose and activity in terms of Trinitarian love may have roots in the twelfth-­century treatise on the Trinity of another close reader of Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, but the late medieval Flemish mystics gave it a heightened role in their mystical theology.81 The best proof of the central role of semper agens/semper quietus in Flemish mysticism can be found in its major author, Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–­1381). Although the first half of Ruusbroec’s adult life was spent as a secular canon of the church of St. Gudule in Brussels, in the 1340s he and two friends retreated to the forest outside the city, the “Groenendaal” [Green Valley], to live as hermits.82 Their somewhat irregular ecclesiastical position ended when the community adopted the Augustinian Rule in 1350, so for the latter part of his life Ruusbroec was an Augustinian canon. Ruusbroec wrote only in the vernacular and therefore rarely bothered citing authorities. His masterpiece, Die geestelike brulocht [The Spiritual Espousals], never mentions an explicit source, and only once in all his writings does he name Augustine.83 Ruusbroec scholars, however, have been at pains to demonstrate the canon’s knowledge of the Dionysian corpus, Bonaventure, Hadewijch, and twelfth-­century Cistercians and Victorines. There can be no doubt that he was also deeply informed by Augustine.84 In the context of this chapter, however, Ruusbroec’s mysticism is looked at only as an example of the interaction of Augustinian and Dionysian views of how God combines activity and rest. The core of Ruusbroec’s view of the divine nature is his theology of God as essential love (weselijcke minne), the dynamic center of all things in which the total repose of the divine essence and the constant activity of the three persons are perfectly one in a superessential manner beyond comprehension. Because humans are made in the image and likeness of God, however, they, too, can share in the divine restful activity through partaking of what Ruusbroec calls the “common life” [ghemeyne leven], which can be better rendered as the “generously loving life.” This teaching is a fusion of the Augustinian and Dionysian traditions on divine rest and motion.

Semper agens/semper quietus  91

Ruusbroec’s emphasis on the active-­restful Trinitarian God is evident throughout his writings. In his earliest work, Dat rijcke der ghelieven [The Kingdom of Lovers], a long treatment of the triune God sets out the essentials of the dynamic flowing out and flowing back [regyratio] of the divine nature. Ruusbroec distinguishes two senses of unity in God.85 The first is the union of the divine nature [natuere], where God is ever fruitful in flowing out and flowing back. Here the Son is born from the Father, and the Holy Spirit springs forth from the mutual loving gaze of Father and Son. The second movement is where, through the love that is the Holy Spirit, the three persons “flow back into that unity out of which the Father without cease is giving birth” (lines 1620–­21). This regyratio back and forth from the divine nature, however, is based upon a deeper unity—­“the enjoyable blessedness of God” [de ghebrukeleke salicheit gods; line 1632], which “lies in modelessness and in the condition of the persons having flowed forth according to personal property into the modeless being of God” (lines 1632–­33). In one of his last works, Vanden XII Beghinen [The Twelve Beguines], Ruusbroec provides an even clearer expression of the coincidence of action and rest in God: “Thus you are to mark and understand: the lofty essence of the threeness of God is eternally empty, without activity, and immovable according to essential being. But the nature of the Persons is fruitful, eternally active as to the mode of the Persons.”86 The heart of Ruusbroec’s mysticism is his invitation to his readers to share in the coincidence of rest and motion in God, ceaselessly going out in the performance of good works and also always returning into the inner divine life to partake of its rest and enjoyment. As the treatise Van seven Trappen [The Seven Rungs] puts it, “The Spirit of God breathes us forth for loving and for working virtues and he breathes us back into him for resting and enjoying, and this is eternal life.”87 Ruusbroec suggests that this outward-­inward motion need not be seen as successive and oscillating in this life, but that it can, at least on some level, be realized at one and the same time. This is to be, as was later said of Ignatius Loyola, in contemplatione activus. Ruusbroec’s treatment of the God who resides in inner rest while always at the same time flowing out in ceaseless activity as a Trinity of persons was utilized by later mystics of the Low Countries and made available to non-­D utch audiences through the translations of the

92  Bernard McGinn

Groenendaal canon into Latin, as well as through the works of his disciples, such as Denis the Carthusian (d. 1471) and the Franciscan Henry Herp (d. 1477), key links between late medieval mysticism and early modernity. For all these mystics, as Paul Mommaers puts it, “God is at one and the same time repose and activity, Essence and Persons. . . . Repose is not only the ‘perfection’ of activity, activity is just as much the ‘perfection’ of repose.”88 In other words, semper agens/semper quietus. It also appears in the last great representative of the Dutch mystical tradition, the once widely read text known as Die grote evangelische peerle [The Great Evangelical Pearl].89 This work, later translated into Latin, French, and German, was written by an anonymous woman in the first third of the sixteenth century. The Pearl author was just as insistent as Beatrice, Hadewijch, and Ruusbroec had been that God must be both semper agens and semper quietus. In chapter 4 of Book 3, the Peerle provides a summary of this essential theme of Flemish mysticism when God says to the soul: “You should join enjoyment and activity, just as I am always working and immovably at rest.”90 We may ask in closing what difference it might make today to think of God as semper agens/semper quietus. Is this not just another historically outmoded conception of God? But one can wonder if there really are many (or any?) new ways of speaking about God, despite modern changes in language, preconceptions, and perspectives. Naming God has always been a difficult task, as David Tracy, perhaps more than any other contemporary theologian, has shown us. We, like Augustine and his successors, are subject to the pretensions of our language and its historical contextualizations. Our attempts at naming God seem always to be overcome, but the task of theology is to rise from each failure, willing to try again. In this we might take heart from one of the modern masters of apophatic thought, Samuel Beckett, who said: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”91

Appendix: The Structure of the Divine Na m e s i n C o n f e ss i o n e s 1.1.4

The following is the full text of the passage analyzed earlier. The letters in parentheses—­(a), (b), etc.—­indicate the scriptural sources for the

Semper agens/semper quietus  93

predicates or names of God that Augustine lists. The distinctions between the four groups have been explained earlier. Group I 1. summe, optime 2. potentissime, omnipotentissime (a) 3. misericordissime et iustissime (b) 4. secretissime et praesentissime 5. pulcherrime et fortissime

highest, best most powerful, most omnipotent most merciful and most just most hidden and most present most beautiful and most strong

Group II 1. stabilis et incomprehensibilis unmoving and incomprehensible 2. immutablis, mutans omnia unchanging, changing all things 3. numquam novus, numquam vetus never new, never old 4. innovans omnia et in vetustatem renewing all things and drawing   perducens superbos et nesciunt (c)  the proud back to decrepitude and they know it not 5. semper agens, semper quietus always in action, always at rest 6. conligens (d) et non egens gathering together and not   needing [anything] Group III 1. portans et implens (e) et protegens supporting and filling and  protecting 2. creans et nutriens et perficiens creating and nourishing and  completing Group IV 1. quaerens, cum nihil desit tibi seeking, though nothing is lacking   to You 2. amas nec aestuas You love and You are not agitated 3. zelas (f ) et securus es You are jealous and You are  undisturbed 4. paenitet te (g) et non dolet You repent and do not grieve 5. irasceris (h) et tranquillus es You are angry and are at peace 6. opera mutas (i) nec mutas You change your works but not  consilium (j)   your plan

94  Bernard McGinn

7. recipis quod invenis et You take back what You find and   numquam amisisti   have never lost 8. numquam inops et gaudes lucris never in need and rejoicing in   what You gain 9. numquam avarus et usuras exigis never greedy and [still] demanding  interest 10. supererogatur tibi ut debeas (k), Overpayment is made to You so   et quis habet quicquam non   You may be a debtor, yet who   tuum? (l)   has anything that is not yours? 11. reddis debita, nulli debens You pay debts though in debt to   no one 12. donas debita (m), nihil perdens You cancel debts without losing  anything (a) Job 8:5, etc.; (b) Ps. 114:5; (c) Job 9:5; (d) Ps. 146:2; (e) Jer. 23:24; (f ) Ps. 78:5; (g) Gen. 6:6; (h) Ps. 105:10; (i) Ps. 101:27; (j) Ps. 32:11; (k) Luke 10:35; (l) 1 Cor. 4:7; (m) Matt. 18:32.

Not e s 1.  This figure is given by James J. O’Donnell in Augustine’s Confessions, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 2:10. O’Donnell has valuable notes on Conf. 1.1.1–­1.5.6 in 2:8–­32. I will cite O’Donnell’s edition throughout, using my own translations. See also the edition, commentary, and notes in the Bibliothèque Augustinienne: Oeuvres de Saint Augustin, vols. 13–­14: Les Confessions (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1962), where notes to the opening prayer can be found in 13:647–­56. 2. On the use of the Psalms in the Confessiones, the fundamental work is G. N. Knauer, Psalmenzitate in Augustins Konfessionen (Göttingen: Ruprecht and Vandenhoeck, 1955). The six further biblical passages used in 1.1.1 are (1) “magna virtus tua et sapientiae tuae non est numerus,” Ps. 146:5; (2) “quia superbis resistet,” Prov. 3:34 (VL); (3) “invocare te an laudare te,” a reminiscence of Ps. 104:1; (4) “quomodo autem invocabunt in quem non crediderunt,” Rom. 10:13–­14; (5) “et laudabunt dominum qui requirunt eum,” Ps. 21:27; and (6) “quaerentes eum inveniunt eum,” a reminiscence of Matt. 7:7. 3.  The words confessio/confiteor do not appear until 1.6.9, but the theme of confessio peccati/confessio laudis is clear even in the opening paragraph.

Semper agens/semper quietus  95 4.  Romano Guardini, Anfang: Eine Interpretation der fünf ersten Kapiteln von Augustins Bekenntnissen (Kolmar: Alsatia, 1945), 9: “Die Confessiones beginnt mit fünf Kapiteln, welche in Literatur wohl kaum ihresgleichen haben.” Cf. 5–­6. 5.  Almost all commentators on the Confessiones have something to say about chapters 1.1–­5.6. Guardini seems unique in devoting a whole book to them. 6.  See, e.g., Conf. 4.16.31, 5.10.19, 7.1.1, and 7.5.7. 7. For Augustine’s use of Exodus 3:14, see Emilie Zum Brunn, St. Augustine: Being and Nothingness (New York: Paragon House, 1988), appendix (97–­119). 8. The case against an Augustinian version of the “Metaphysics of Exodus” has been well argued by Jean-­Luc Marion in “Idipsum: The Name of God according to Augustine,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 167–­89. Marion demonstrates (see 174–­83) that the biblical term idipsum (see Pss. 4:9 and 121:3), often used of God by Augustine (e.g., Conf. 9.4.11, 9.10.24, and 12.7.7), is an apophatic and tautological term referring to God as “the self-­same” and should not be interpreted as meaning that God is “being itself.” On Augustine’s apophaticism, see Vladimir Lossky, “Les éléments de ‘Théologie négative’ dans la pensée de saint Augustin,” in Augustinus Magister, 3 vols. (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1954), 1:575–­81, and Deirdre Carabine, “Negative Theology in the Thought of Saint Augustine,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 59 (1992): 5–­22. 9.  Conf. 7.20.26 (O’Donnell, 86): “Certus esse te et infinitum esse . . . , qui semper idem ipse esses, ex nulla parte nulloque motu alter aut aliter, cetera vero ex te esse omnia, hoc solo firmissimo documento quia sunt.” 10.  On the need for conversion to Christ, who is Wisdom, in order to attain saving knowledge of God, see Zum Brunn, St. Augustine: Being and Nothingness, 99–­101. In later works Augustine expressed the difference between intellectual knowledge of divine being and saving knowledge in terms of the complementarity of Exodus 3:14 (“Ego sum qui sum”) and Exodus 3:15 (“Dominus Deus patrum vestrorum”). See, e.g., Sermo 7.1, 5 and 7, and In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus 2.4 (cf. Zum Brunn, St. Augustine: Being and Nothingness, 114–­15). 11. David Tracy, “Augustine’s Christomorphic Theocentrism,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, 273. 12.  Conf. 1.1.1 (O’Donnell, 3): “Invocate te, domine, fides mea, quam dedisti mihi, quam inspirasti mihi per humanitatem filii tui, per minsterium praedicatoris tui.” There is some question about the identity of the praedicator here. It is certainly not Ambrose, but it could be Paul, or a generic preacher of the word, or even Christ himself as the preacher par excellence. For a general view of Augustine’s Christology, see Basil Studer, The Grace of Christ and the Grace of God in Augustine of Hippo: Christocentrism or Theocentrism? (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997). 13.  Augustine’s teaching on God’s presence has been exhaustively studied by Stanislaus J. Grabowski in The All-­Present God: A Study in St. Augustine (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1954).

96  Bernard McGinn 14.  The term deus occurs about 55,000 times in Augustine’s writings. A starting place for investigating Augustine’s view of the divine nature is Goulven Madec, “Deus,” in the Augustinus-­Lexikon, vol. 2, columns 313–­65 (Basel: Schwabe, 1996–­ 2002), which treats God in the Conf. in columns 333–­37. There is an expanded version of this article in G. Madec, Le Dieu d’Augustin (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1998). 15. Guardini has a sensitive treatment of the whole of chapter 4 in Anfang, 44–­ 59, but the best study of Conf. 1.4.4 is Werner Simon’s “Von Gott Reden. Beobachtungen und Bemerkungen zu Augustins Confessiones I,4,” Wissenschaft und Weisheit 45 (1982): 130–­57. Simon (132–­35) emphasizes that by using the Psalmist’s expressions “deus meus” and “dominus meus” Augustine distances himself from any philosophical endeavor to “define” God. Guardini, in Anfang, 37–­38 and 45–­47, notes that the use of these biblical terms points to the Creator God who does not depend on what he makes and cannot be known by humans, but reveals himself as “ego sum qui sum” (Exod. 3:14). Marion, however, in “Idipsum,” 168–­70, observes that the name Being is absent from the list. 16.  Simon, in “Von Gott Reden,” 135–­36, analyzes the general structure of the eighteen adjectival, fifteen participial, and nineteen verbal predicates and provides a detailed discussion of their biblical and nonbiblical roots (137–­47). On 152–­54 he gives a detailed account of the literary structure of the final five pairs of predicates. As Simon shows (146–­47), even the philosophical terms used in chapter 4 are given a new meaning by their location within the biblically inspired invocation. It would be interesting to compare this hymn to God with similar passages in the later Augustine, such as De civitate dei 7.30. 17.  Scott MacDonald, “The Divine Nature,” in Augustine’s Confessions: Critical Essays, ed. William E. Mann (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 85–­105, esp. 93–­96. MacDonald notes De libero arbitrio 1.2.5 (CCSL 29: 213) as a clear statement of the principle of supremacy: “Optime namque de Deo existimare verissimum et pietatis exordium, nec quisquam de illo optime existimat, qui non eum omnipotentem, atque et nulla particula commutabilem credit.” 18.  It would be interesting to compare this first list of ten attributes with the later discussion of twelve divine attributes in De Trinitate 15.5.8–­15.6.9. Guardini, in Anfang, 48, makes the following comment on the last pair: “Gottes Stärke ist schön bis zum Ende, und seine Schönheit ist Macht. Die Einheit drückt sich im Begriff der Herrlichkeit aus, die ihrerseits mit dem Herrentum zusammenhängt.” 19.  On the use of superlatives and hypersuperlatives, see Simon, “Von Gott Reden,” 147–­48. 20.  Ws. 7:27. 21.  Job 9:5 VL. 22.  More space would be required to give an analysis of this rich section. There is a good discussion in Guardini’s Anfang, 51–­58.

Semper agens/semper quietus  97 23.  On the importance of the sermo fallibilis, see Peter H. Van Ness, Sermo fallibilis: Self-­Referential Language and the Augustinian Tradition (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1983). 24.  Conf. 1.4.4 (O’Donnell, 4): “Et quid diximus, deus meus, vita mea, dulcedo mea sancta, aut quid dicit aliquis, cum de te dicit? Et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt.” The final phrase is difficult and has elicited various translations. For a discussion, see O’Donnell, who in 2: 26–­28 takes the passage, correctly, I believe, as a critique of the Manicheans. The final phrase may be a distant reflection of the attack on idols in Bar. 6:7 as having tongues but remaining mute (“Nam ipsa lingua ipsorum polita a fabro ipsa etiam inaurata et inargentata falsa sunt et non possunt loqui”). For a summary of the significance of this return to the theme of incomprehensibility, see Simon, “Von Gott Reden,” 154–­57. 25. For comments on these dual sets of attributes, see Simon, “Von Gott Reden,” 135–­44; and Isabelle Bochet, Saint Augustin et le désir de Dieu (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1982), 185–­86. 26.  De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus manichaeorum 2.1.1 (CSEL 90: 88–­89); cf. Conf. 12.11.11. Unlike dialectical Neo-­Platonic thinkers, Augustine never uses nihil as a transcendental predicate; nothingness for him is always the privation of good and reality (e.g., Conf. 3.7.12). 27. In Conf. 4.16.28 Augustine admits how mistaken he had been to think that Aristotle’s categories applied to the divine nature. 28.  On God’s immutability, see, e.g., De natura boni contra manichaeos 19 and 24; De civitate dei 8.6, 12.12; De Trinitate 3.3.21, 5.2.2; and Enarrationes in Psalmos 89.2–­5, 15; as well as 134.6. In De civitate dei 8.6 Augustine summarized as follows: “Omnia derivantur a Deo, qui vere est, quia incommutabiliter est.” Zum Brunn, in St. Augustine: Being and Nothingness, 104–­6 and 111–­12 shows that Augustine understood Exodus 3:14 primarily in terms of immutability. On mutability and immutability, see also James F. Anderson, St. Augustine and Being: A Metaphysical Essay (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), chap. 2. 29.  Divine simplicity, found throughout Augustine’s works, seems to receive growing emphasis in later works, such as the De Trinitate (e.g., 6.1.6 and 15.4.22) and the De civitate dei (e.g., 11.10). 30.  A helpful text for understanding this logic is found in De Trinitate 5.1.2 (CCSL 50:207): “Ut sic intelligimus Deum, si possumus, quantum possumus: sine qualitate bonum, sine quantitate magnum, sine indigentia creatorem, sine situ praesidentem, sine habitu omnia continentem, sine loco ubique totum, tempore sempiternum, sine ulla sui mutatione mutabilia facientem, nihilque patientem.” On motion as ascribed to God, see the discussions under “Extrinsic Operation” and “Movement” in Grabowski, The All-­Present God, 140–­55, which references the “semper agens/semper quietus” formula on 141. (Grabowski also discusses Conf. 1.2–­3 on 116, 124–­25, and 148.)

98  Bernard McGinn 31.  On the relation between biblical texts and semper agens/semper quietus, see Simon, “Von Gott Reden,” 141 and 144. 32. Commentary on this prayer is far less extensive than that given to the opening invocation, but see, e.g., O’Donnell, Confessions 3:418–­21, and Knauer, Psalmenzitate, 156–­58. 33.  Conf. 13.35.50 (O’Donnell, 204): “Domine deus, pacem da nobis (omnia enim praestitisti nobis), pacem quietis, pacem sabbati, pacem sine vespera.” 34.  Conf. 13.37.52 (O’Donnell, 205): “Etiam tunc enim sic requiesceres in nobis, quemadmodum nunc operaris in nobis, et ita erit illa requies tua per nos, quemadmodum sunt ista opera tua per nos. Tu autem, domine, semper operaris et semper requiescis, nec vides ad tempus nec moveris ad tempus nec quiescis ad tempus, et tamen facis et visiones temporales et ipsa tempora et quietem ex tempore.” Augustine also discusses how God works in us and rests in us in De Genesi ad litteram 4.8.15–­9.16 and 4.10.20. 35.  In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus 17.14 (CCSL 36:177.16–­ 21): “Quis, inquam, fratres mei, explicet uerbis quomodo Deus et quietus operatur, et operans quiescat? Obsecro uos, ut hoc uobis proficientibus differatis; uisio enim ista templum Dei quaerit, sanctum locum quaerit; portate proximum et ambulate; ibi enim uidebitis, ubi uerba hominum non quaeratis.” Augustine also discusses John 5:38 and the problem of God’s resting and working in De Genesi ad litteram 4.11.21–­ 12.23, though without using the fomula semper agens/semper quietus. 36.  Lossky, “Les élements de ‘Théologie négative.’ ” 37.  On God’s ineffability, see, e.g., De Genesi contra manichaeos 1.8.14; De doctrina christiana 1.6.6; In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus 13.5; Enarratio in Psalmum 85.12; De Trinitate 15.27.50; and Sermo 117.15. On God’s incomprehensibility, see, e.g., Sermo 52.6.16; Sermo 117.3.5; De Trinitate 5.1, 7.4, 15.2; and esp. In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus 23.9–­10. 38. Ep. 130.15.28 (PL 33:505): “Est ergo in nobis quaedam, ut ita dicam, docta ignorantia, et docta spiritu Dei, qui adjuvat infirmitatem nostram.” See also the famous and oft-­cited text from De ordine 2.16.44 (PL 32:1015): “Non dico de summo illo Deo, qui scitur melius nesciendo.” Cf. De Trinitate 8.2.3. 39.  Olivier du Roy, L’Intelligence de la foi en Trinité selon Saint Augustin (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1966), 187. 40. For the critical edition of the Dionysian writings, see the Corpus Dionysiacum, ed. A. M. Ritter, G. Heil, and B. R. Suchla, 2 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990–­92). I cite by chapter and section, providing the standard column locations taken from the edition in PG 3. This text is from De divinis nominibus [On Divine Names] 7.3 (872A), using the English version of Colm Luibheid, Pseudo-­Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 109. Medieval authors read the Dionysian writings in several Latin versions, which are collected in Philippe Chevallier’s Dionysiaca, 2 vols. (Paris: Desclée, 1937). The two most popular translations were the ninth-­century version of Eriugena (E) and the

Semper agens/semper quietus  99 twelfth-­century translation of John Sarrazenus (S). Their renderings of this text are almost identical: “Et non est quid existentium, neque in quodam existentium cognoscitur, et in omnibus omnia est, et in nullo nullum [Sarrazenus: nihil], et ex omnibus in omnibus cognoscitur.” 41. This formulation does not occur verbally in Augustine, but, as Marion points out (“Idipsum,”167–­68), Augustine makes the equivalent point in a number of places (e.g., in In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus 13.5). 42. These four sets of antitheses appear to be taken from Dionysius’s major Neoplatonic source, Proclus; see H. D. Saffrey, “Theology as Science (3rd–­6th Centuries),” in Studia Patristica, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 29:338–­39. 43.  On Divine Names 9.9 (916C; trans., 118–­19). 44.  Ibid., 5.10 (825B; trans., 103). For the Latin text (the same in E and S), see Dionysiaca 1:365–­66. God is also said to be without movement in On Divine Names 1.5 (593C). 45.  Mystical Theology 5 (1048A; trans., 141). Dionysiaca 1:598: “neque stat neque movetur neque silentium ducit” [Sarrazenus: agit]. The final Greek phrase (“oute hêsuchian agei”) was rendered by Ambrogio Traversari in the fifteenth century as “neque agit quietem.” 46.  On Divine Names 4.7 (704C; trans., 78). On Divine Names 11.4 (952C–­D) speaks of the inward peace given to all things in motion by the “Divine Peace of the universe which keeps everything firmly in its own place” (trans., 123). 47.  Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire: Antécédents et Posterité (Paris: Études Augustiennes, 1963). 48.  On these writers and their use of Augustine, see ibid., 214–­20. Courcelle notes (255, n. 2) that Eugippus may have been the source (though it could also have come directly from Augustine) of the use of Conf. 1.4.4 in a liturgical prayer of the seventh or eighth century. 49. Cassiodorus, Explanatio Psalmorum 67.6 (CCSL 97:588). 50. Gregorius Magnus, Moralia in Iob 20.32.63 (CCSL 143B:1048–­ 50). Gregory’s five scriptural predicates are zelus (Exod. 34:14); ira (Num. 32:13, etc.); paenitentia (Gen. 6:6–­7 and 1 Kings 15:11); misericordia (Ps. 85:15); and praescientia (Rom. 8:29). See Courcelle, Les Confessions, 227. 51.  Isidore of Seville, Sententiae 1.2.1 (CCSL 111:8–­9) cites Conf. 1.2.2, and Sententiae 1.1.4 (CCSL 111:7–­8) quotes Conf. 1.4.4; cf. Courcelle, Les Confessions, 235–­36. 52. For Eriugena’s overall strategy, see Giulio D’Onofrio, “The Concordia of Augustine and Dionysius: Toward a Hermeneutic of the Disagreement of Patristic Sources in John the Scot’s Periphyseon,” in Eriugena East and West, ed. Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 115–­40. See also Goulven Madec, “Jean Scot et ses auteurs,” in Jean Scot Écrivain, ed. G.-­H. Allard (Montreal: Bellarmin; Paris: Vrin, 1986), 143–­86;

100  Bernard McGinn as well as the essays by Goulven Madec, Brian Stock, and John J. O’Meara in Eriugena: Studien zu seinen Quellen, ed. Werner Beierwaltes (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1980). 53. Eriugena’s treatment of the ten categories in relation to God-­language takes up most of the last part of Book 1 of Periphyseon. The best edition of Eriugena’s masterwork is that of Eduard Jeauneau, Iohannis Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon, 5 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996–­2003; CCCM 161–­65). Jeauneau’s edition continues to make use of the column numbers from the edition in PL 122, which I use here as the most convenient way of referencing Periphyseon. The discussion of the categories stretches over 463A–­83C. 54.  Periphyseon 1 (468D). 55.  Ibid. (468C). 56.  See the long discussion in Periphyseon 1 beginning at 469B. 57.  Periphyseon 1 (504A). 58.  Ibid. (504B); cf. 512C–­13A. 59. This passage on the dialectical predicates can be found in Periphyseon 3 (633AB): “Omne enim quod intelligitur et sentitur nihil aliud est nisi non apparentis apparitio, occulti manifestatio, negati affirmatio, incomprehensibilis comprehensio, ineffabilis fatus, inaccessibilis accessus, inintelligibilis intellectus, incorporalis corpus, superessentialis essentia, informis forma, immensurabilis mensura, carentis pondere pondus, spiritualis incrassatio, invisibilis visibilitas, illocalis localitas, carentis tempore temporalitas, infiniti diffinitio, incircumscripti circumscriptio, et caetera quae puro intellectu et cogitantur et perspiciuntur et quae memoriae sinibus capi nesciunt et mentis aciem fugiunt.” On this text as a key to Eriugena’s dialectical thought, see James McEvoy, “Biblical and Platonic Measure in John Scottus Eriugena,” in Eriugena East and West, 153–­77; and Werner Beierwaltes, “Negati Affirmatio, or the World as Metaphor: A Foundation for Medieval Aesthetics from the Writings of John Scotus Eriugena,” Dionysius 1 (1977): 127–­59. 60. Courcelle, Les Confessions, chap. 3, “Confessions et contemplation au temps d’Ailred de Rievaulx” (265–­305). 61.  Bernard’s famous text on the coming and going of the Word in his soul is Sermo super Cantica Canticorum 74.4–­7, in Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia, ed. Jean Leclercq et al., 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–­77), 2:241–­44. 62.  De anima IV.2 (PL 177:171CD). This chapter, titled “Quomodo Deus immotus in se manens det cuncta moveri, cunctaque aut agat, aut coagat,” begins with a long quotation of Conf. 1.1.4 and then adds further materials. 63.  Adam of Dryburgh, De triplici genere contemplationis 1.1 (PL 198: 795–­98); see Courcelle, Les Confessions, 287–­90. 64. Courcelle, Les Confessions, 307–­27. 65.  Eckhart’s writings are cited according to the critical edition, Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936–­). The collection is in two parts, Die deutschen Werke (DW) and Die lateinischen Werke (LW)

Semper agens/semper quietus  101 and is cited by volume, page, and paragraph number, using standard abbreviations for the various works. The indexes to Eckhart’s works are not yet complete, so a full count of his references is not possible, but the noted “inquietum est cor nostrum” passage is cited in the following at least: In Ex. n. 158 (LW 2:140); In Sap. n. 282 (LW 2:615); In Ioh. nn. 130, 201, 561, and 704 (LW 3:112, 169, 487–­88, 618). The text is also cited in Sermo XXVII.1, n. 240 (LW 4:246), and in the German works in Pr. 20a (DW 1:327). 66.  At the end of Conf. 1.4.4 the accepted reading in modern editions is “Aut quid dicit aliquis cum de te dicit? Et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt.” Eckhart, however, claims that what Augustine really said was “Cum dicit aliquis cum de te non dicit?,” defending this reading by an appeal to the following clause (see In Ioh. n. 277 [LW 3:233]). 67.  Eckhart, In Sap. n. 132 (LW 2: 469–­70). Eckhart offers several readings of Wisdom 7:24 in nn. 125–­33 (LW 2:463–­72). 68. Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, met. III.9 (CSEL 67:73). 69.  Eckhart, In Ioh. n. 570 (LW 3:498). 70.  Eckhart also refers to the passages at the end of Conf. 1.5.5 (“moriar, ne moriar, ut eam videam”) several times; e.g., Sermo XLVII.1, n. 486 (LW 4:401), and Pr. 45 (DW 2:365). The opening passage of 1.5.5 (“quis mihi dabit requiescere in te”) is cited by In Ioh. n. 202 (LW 3:170). 71. For an introduction to Beatrice of Nazareth, see Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–­1350) (New York: Herder-­Crossroad, 1998), 166–­74. 72.  The Flemish text was edited by Léonce Reypens and Joseph Van Mierlo: Beatrijs Van Nazareth: Seven Manieren van Minne (Leuven: S.V. de Vlaamsche Boekenhalle, 1926). There are several translations. Here I use that of Edmund Colledge, Medieval Netherlands Religious Literature (London: Heinemann, 1965), 19–­29. There is also a Latin version, a free adaptation found in the vita, which is available and translated by Roger de Ganck in The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, 1200–­ 1268 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 288–­331. 73.  Reypens/Van Mierlo ed., 23.77–­80 (trans., 24). 74. Ibid., 25.31–­34 (trans., 25): “Si es minne ende minne rengnert in hare geweldelike [regnerende] ende mogendeleke, werkende ende rustende, doende ende latende van buten ende binnen na haren wille.” 75.  Ibid., 27:52–­61 (trans., 25). 76.  Ibid., 38:158–­63 (trans., 29): “Augustijn seget: ‘Qui in te intrat, [intrat] in gaudium domini sui et cetera,’ dat es o here die in-­gheet in di hi geet in die bliscap sijns heren ende hine sal heme niet ontsien, maer hi sal him hebben alre best in den alre besten.” This passage is taken from Conf. 9.10.25 (O’Donnell, 114). 77.  E.g., the vita of Ida Lewis (d. ca. 1273) speaks of how reading Augustine’s De Trinitate gave her so much joy in the Trinity that she feared insanity (AA.SS. Oct. 13:122.52ff.).

102  Bernard McGinn 78.  Hadewijch’s vision of Augustine is found in her Vision 11. See the translation of Mother Columba Hart in Hadewijch: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), where the text can be found on 290–­91. 79.  Hadewijch: Brieven, ed. Joseph Van Mierlo, S.J., 2 vols. (Antwerp: N V. Standard, 1947), letter 22 (1:198.251–­56): “Dat vierde es dat god buten al es ende al omgrepen. Hi es buten al: want hine rustet in ghene dince dan in die druusteghe nature siere vloyender vloedegher vloede, die al omme ende al overvloyen. Dat eerste datmen seghet inden cantiken: Oleum effusum et cetera” (trans. Hart, 99 adapted). The four paradoxes of Letter 22 are taken from a hymn ascribed to both Hildebert of Lavardin and Abelard: “Super cuncta, subter cuncta; / Extra cuncta, intra cuncta; / Extra cuncta, nec exclusus; / Intra cuncta, nec inclusus; / Super cuncta, nec elatus; / Subter cuncta, nec substratus” (PL 171:1411). On the Trinitarian theology of Letter 22, see McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 212–­13. 80.  Letter 17 in Brieven (1:140.21–­23): “Dit vte gheuen ende dit op houden: dit es pure godheit ende gheheele nature van Minnen” (trans. Hart, 82). 81.  On these texts from Hadewijch and their possible source in Richard, see Roger De Ganck, Beatrice of Nazareth in Her Context, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991) 3:554–­56. De Ganck cites the following passage from Richard’s De Trinitate (PL 198:99A): “Dicatur itaque illa divinitatis unda et summi amoris affluentia, in alio [i.e., the Father] tamen effluens nec infusa, in alio [the Son] tam effluens quam infusa, in tertio [the Holy Spirit] non effluens sed solum infusa, cum sit tamen in omnibus una et eadem unda.” 82.  On Ruusbroec’s life and writings, see Geert Warnar, Ruusbroec: Literature and Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007). For his teaching on the divine nature, see Rik Van Nieuwenhove, Jan van Ruusbroec: Mystical Theologian of the Trinity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), chap. 3. Ruusbroec’s writings are now available in a new critical edition, Jan Van Ruusbroec: Opera Omnia, 10 vols., ed. Guido de Baere et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981–­2006). I use this edition, citing section and line number of the text and volume and page of the edition. 83.  Augustine is explicitly named in Ruusbroec’s Van den geesteliken tabernakel [The Spiritual Tabernacle], Part 5, lines 2737–­40 (Opera Omnia 6: 867), but the quotation has not been identified. In addition, the new edition identifies a direct citation from Augustine in the treatise titled Van seven Trappen [The Seven Rungs] (Opera Omnia 9: 125). 84.  Although the explicit references are sparse, there are many Augustinian themes and texts implicitly cited or utilized by Ruusbroec. To give only one example, the typology of three kinds of visions found in Brulocht b 549–­58 (Opera Omnia 3:347–­49) is based on Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram 12. 85.  Rijcke IV.1597–­1639 (Opera Omnia 4:305–­9). 86.  Vanden XII Beghinen 2b 38–­41 (Opera Omnia 7A:155). Cf. Van seven Trappen VII, 1068–­72 (Opera Omnia 9:211).

Semper agens/semper quietus  103 87.  Van seven Trappen VII, 1120–­23 (Opera Omnia 9:215–­17). 88.  Paul Mommaers, “Bulletin d’histoire de la spiritualité: L’École néerlandaise,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 49 (1973): 474–­75. 89. For an introduction, see Bernard McGinn, “A Forgotten Classic of Late Medieval Women’s Mysticism: The Evangelical Pearl,” Archa Verbi 5 (2008): 97–­121. 90.  Die grote evangelische peerle . . . (Antwerp: Henrick Petersen, 1537), III.4, ll. 10843–­44 in the electronic form based on the copy in the Plantin-­Moretus Museum in Antwerp and kindly provided to me by Dirk Boone: “so wordy beide gebruyckende ende werkende.” See also “ic altijt wercke ende onbewegelic rust.” 91.  “Worstward Ho,” in Nohow On, . . . Three Novels, by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1996), 89.

three

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-­Love v i n c e n t c a r rau d

It has been claimed that St. Augustine “was the first to offer the elements of a Christian doctrine of love.”1 Whatever one makes of this priority given to Augustine among the Church Fathers or however one comes down in debates about the forms of Neo-­Platonism he might have known,2 many studies have sought to reconstruct the Augustinian doctrine of love, whether they are terminological—­beginning from the threefold vocabulary of dilectio, caritas, amor3—­or theological, and whether they are general4 or particular, such as the studies focusing on the commandment of love5 or on Augustine’s Commentary on the First Letter of Saint John.6 My subject in this chapter is neither what is commonly called the Augustinian doctrine of love, nor even the concept of love as such.7 My goal is more precise. I deal with a single Augustinian formulation, namely, the famous expression in Book XIII of the Confessions: pondus meum amor meus. If one translates this formula according to the context, 105

106  Vincent Carraud

as most translators accurately do, as “my weight is my love,” we immediately grasp that the notion of weight is neither a metaphor8 nor a simple comparison, like Augustine’s expressions comparing love to the grip of the hand or to the “foot of the soul,”9 but is rather a conceptual model for thinking about love. Love is for me like a weight, not a weight that I would carry (munus, burden, or sarcina, baggage), but my own weight. But what might it mean for a doctrine of love to think of love as a weight? Indeed, this notion of love as a weight undoubtedly contrasts with an image that has become predominant in the history of spirituality. Weight and heaviness have come to represent sin, while lightness and elevation represent grace. Sin weighs us down; grace lifts us up. It is perhaps enough to consider the title of the posthumous book by Simone Weil, which encapsulates the opposition between the two concepts: Gravity and Grace.10 At the very least, Augustine’s formulation has become paradoxical for us. The aim of this study is only to take it seriously. Yet to take Augustine’s formulation seriously requires one to think in terms of position or place. For the concept of weight is situated in a theory of natural movement, which itself can be explained, in the field of ancient science, only by recourse to a principle of finality (or teleology) operating in differentiated, anisomorphic space. Weight moves a body from one place to another, and it does so naturally until the body reaches, in that differentiated space, its natural place (locus). The final end for a movement owing to weight, as for every movement (movement being an imperfect act),11 is rest. To conceive of love as St. Augustine does requires in the first place a basis in physics. In light of a physics constructed from principles of force and place, the usual questions concerning the objects of love and the typology of loves that it allows (Are there good and bad loves? Does one inevitably love the good?) seem to lose their immediate relevance. If love is a weight, the question comes to turn on the physical problem of displacement. The movement that displacement produces will be fulfilled in its end (telos), which is rest (quies): “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.”12 In other words, my heart is in movement until it comes to a halt in you. Neither metaphorical nor prima facie spiritual, this inaugural thesis of the Confessions merits being read first of all in terms of physics, because the God who is rest is foremost a place.13 The next question follows naturally from this: What does theology have to gain by thinking of its foremost object, love, as a weight?

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   107

Before answering this question, we should take stock of the inverse formulation, also present in St. Augustine: not “my weight is my love,” but “my love is my weight.” According to this second formulation the weight itself is conceived of as love, and, accordingly, the psychology of love operates as a model in the field of physics. My hypothesis is that the originality and the strength of the first thesis (love as weight) within the Christian tradition are taken over by a very broad concept of love that is primary in organizing Augustine’s cosmology (weight as love). This twofold explanation will make it possible to question a notion that is usually held to be central, even fundamental, to Augustine’s thought:14 the notion of self-­love. What becomes of self-­love when love is not governed so much by the question of its objects (self, neighbor, God, pleasures, and so on) as by ideas of place and displacement?15 In the field of modern philosophy, we have acquired a habit, supposedly Cartesian, of setting out with a consideration of the self and only then examining the singular love that has the self as its object.16 Does not Augustine urge us to adopt the opposite approach, namely, to start by conceiving of love before admitting the idea of self-­love? Can one from that point conceive a notion of love in which the very essence of love would forbid self-­love—­ not because self-­love would ultimately be denounced as evil but because it would be revealed to be in itself impossible? Can the idea itself of self-­ love be made itself self-­contradictory?

W e i g h t a s Lov e Universal Love

Augustine treats the idea of love as weight in exemplary fashion in a late text, Book XI of De civitate Dei, written around 413–­14. In chapter 26 he approaches a consideration of love from the triad of being-­knowledge-­ love: “For we exist, and we know that we exist, and we take delight in our existence and our knowledge of it.”17 Beginning from this triad, he refutes certain arguments of the Academics with what has usually been described as an Augustinian cogito.18 Yet this cogito expands in light of the love by which I love both being and knowledge in a kind of intensification of certitude that is proper to love: “And when I love these two

108  Vincent Carraud

things, I add my love to them as a third thing, no smaller in esteem than the things that I know. Nor am I mistaken in saying that I love, for I am not mistaken in knowing that I love the things that I love. Even if those things were false, it would still be true that I loved false things.”19 There is a truth in love that remains independent of the truth of the objects that are loved. In chapter 28 of De civitate Dei—­the critical passage here—­ Augustine introduces love for the same reason as he introduces being and knowledge. The triad, which elsewhere serves as an image of the divine Trinity,20 is approached here in a purely psychological and anthropological way. The passage opens with a reminder that being and knowledge are loved and that they are loved in us. Since the universe has a hierarchical constitution according to which the human being is the summit of visible creation, this love of being and of knowledge in us finds a similarity, albeit distant, in all creatures inferior to humankind. While Augustine says he has treated this sufficiently, he has not yet described the love itself and, in particular, has not investigated whether this love is itself loved.21 This is indeed the case he argues: This love is loved.22 Evidence of it is in the fact that in those who are loved with the most rectitude, that is, with the most justice, this love is even more loved. But more (magis) in relation to what? The more that human beings who are loved with rectitude are the objects of such a right love, the more the love that is in them is loved. But by whom? In fact, the subject is the same in both cases: Those who are loved with rectitude are loved by others who admire them, and these others are the same ones who love the love found in the former. Moreover, good men experience this love themselves, as well as love for the good. They are not content only to know what the good is; they also love it. Thus here we can identify what we can call the reflexivity of love: Love is loved. This proof of love’s reflexivity leads Augustine to move from love of someone else’s love to love of one’s own love. It is indeed possible for one and the same person to love the love that is in himself. Augustine’s question is: Why should we not have the feeling of loving in ourselves the love that makes us love whatever good we love? While positing the reflexivity of love within the same subject or individual, he seems to limit it, here at least, to loving the love of what should be loved. For we also harbor within us a wicked love, the love “of that which should not be loved.” The person who loves his good love—­the love “of what should be loved”—­despises

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   109

his wicked love. This twofold love can explain why our love of the love in us is more riddled with problems than our love of a good man’s love. For the presence of the second love (the love of the love in ourselves) can mask our love of the first love (the love of what should be loved). Thus we can probably more readily appreciate the proof for the reflexivity of love in us when it rests on the feeling of hating certain loves in ourselves, since this hate is accompanied by a love of the opposite love.23 The question posed by St. Augustine (Why would we not feel in ourselves love for the very love that makes us love all the good that we do love?) emerges from the observation that we harbor within ourselves opposing loves and that love of love is not identical with the love of some thing, since the love of love discriminates among our loves. This question equally arises because not all people are aware of having this kind of reflexive love for their direct loves.24 Chapter 28 of De civitate Dei XI thus insists on the fact that reflexive love discriminates among original loves. Augustine depends on an acknowledged fact, which we can think of subsequently as a conflict of wills, in order to draw from it an argument in support of his thesis about the reflexivity of love. Having established this point, Augustine can develop analogies for this love in all creation. From this point on, Augustine confines himself to a strict physical-­ cosmological perspective through which the concept of love will allow him to think about weight and, in this way, about local motion. In the same chapter of De civitate Dei, Augustine continues: For if we were cattle, we should love the carnal and sensual life, and this would be our sufficient good; and when it was well with us in respect of it, we should see nothing else. Again, if we were trees we could not, of course, be moved by the senses to love anything; but we should seem to desire, as it were, that by which we might become more abundantly and bountifully fruitful. If we were stones or waves or wind or flames or anything of that kind, we should, indeed, be without both sensation and life, but we should still not lack a kind of desire for our own proper place and order. For the weight of bodies is, as it were, their love, whether carried downwards by gravity or upwards by their lightness. For the body is carried by its weight wherever it is carried, just as the soul is carried by its love.25

110  Vincent Carraud

St. Augustine envisages three situations in which we are put in the place of inferior creatures: animals, plants, and inanimate beings. Descending the ladder of beings, from what is closest to humanity to what is farthest from it, this process of imaginary identification, substituting humanity for other creatures, makes it possible to think more concretely about what takes the place of love in them. The good of animals is limited to carnal life, organic life and the desires that come from it and that necessarily relate to the satisfaction of their natural desires (self-­preservation, reproduction, nourishment). These are sufficient goods for animals, who are satisfied once they have obtained them. This is what we would do “if we were animals.”26 The case of plants takes us to a level of desire that can no longer properly be called love, because it no longer corresponds to a “sensible movement,” but rather to a “tendency.” Taking up a tradition of ancient philosophy that sees finality (teleology) at work in all nature, Augustine does not hesitate to speak of desire or of tendency even in beings that are not endowed with knowledge or movement. Like Aristotle, he admits that the end (telos) is the good of each thing. Wheresoever a plant tends is thus its proper good: nourishment supplied by more fertile soils (which the roots try to reach) and fecundity in the production of fruits or even in reproduction. The case is similar for inert beings that nevertheless are endowed with natural movement: Having “neither sensation nor life,” they preserve, nevertheless, a “certain tendency” toward their proper place and order. The Neutrality of Weight

Augustine’s use of the teaching of places and tendencies is imprecise enough that we could simply consider it to be derived from the philosophical vulgate of his time: the theory of differentiated or anisomorphic space in which a teleological movement operates. By referring to the Aristotelian doctrine of proper places,27 I propose not to identify the direct source for Augustine’s thought (although, aside from Aris­totle’s Categories, we can quite probably exclude from his reading Aristotle’s other writings)28 but rather to measure what is indirectly derived from it and to underline several significant differences. Aristotle based his thought on a cosmology with two principles: first, heaviness and lightness (which are unequally distributed among the four

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   111

elements: earth, water, air, and fire), and, second, the order of the sublunar world, whose center is the center of the earth (the bottom, toward which the heavy and everything in which heaviness predominates tend, including the earth, according to a centripetal, linear movement)29 and whose high point is the sphere of the moon, or the heavens more generally (toward which everything in which lightness predominates tends, especially fire, according to a centrifugal, linear movement).30 Aristotle clarifies his definitions of light and heavy in De caelo I, 3, where he explains that heaviness (to baru) tends toward the center, while lightness (to kouphon) moves away from it, and in Book IV, chapters 4–­5 and 8, where he examines relative versus absolute heaviness and lightness (pros ti baru, pros ti kouphon).31 Yet, for Aristotle, fire has no weight (no “heaviness”) and earth no “lightness.” Elemental fire is purely light; elemental earth is purely heavy.32 In other words, it seems that Aristotle never developed a single concept of weight (and expressed it in a single word) in order to consider both the tendency of fire to ascend and that of earth to descend. Other than natural movement itself, he did not discover a concept common to heaviness as well as to lightness. With greater plausibility we can invoke a passage from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations,33 which Augustine knew and cited frequently.34 But still in Cicero, the two pairs nutus/pondus and gravitas/pondus seem to be pairs of synonyms, with weight (pondus or gravitas) always pulling down. To my knowledge, Cicero does not have a properly physical concept that might unify upward and downward movement.35 The criti­ cal development in Augustine is that he, in contrast, subsumes under the single concept of pondus the two opposing impulses upward and downward.36 Denis O’Brien has suggested that Iamblichus37 could have been Augustine’s source for a theory of gravity with a twofold meaning, embracing both heaviness and lightness.38 Whatever the source, what matters for grasping the stakes of submitting weight to the model of love is the “neutrality” of weight, a term that designates at the same time the upward impulse for light bodies and the downward impulse for heavy bodies. Whereas Aristotle and Cicero made use of two words, in Augustine pondus ceases to designate only movement toward the ground, applying instead to the directionality of a body toward its proper place, whatever it may be. Weight does not necessarily move downward: “Weight is like a force within each thing that seems to make

112  Vincent Carraud

it strain toward its proper place” [Pondus enim est impetus quidam cujusque rei, velut conantis ad locum suum].39 Therefore, pondus should not be identified with gravitas.40 The pondus of De civitate Dei includes at the same time both gravitas and levitas, so weight is twofold (pondera gemina sunt).41 The Light Burden

Remarkably, this bidirectionality of weight (which I weigh) can also apply to weight that I carry (which I weigh onto myself ). This second kind of weight is expressed by the words onus (load) or sarcina (baggage or soldier’s kit). Authorized by the gospel paradox in which Christ’s burden is light, Augustine does not hesitate to use the words in a paradoxical way. In fact, the biblical verse is perhaps the real source of Augustine’s dualism of weight: “Iugum meum suave est, et onus meum leve” (Matt. 11:28, Vg). When Augustine quotes this verse, he uses the rendering sarcina in place of the Vulgate’s onus (Greek phortion), as in his exposition of Psalm 59:8: “My burden is light. Every other burden oppresses you and feels heavy, but Christ’s burden lifts you up; any other burden is a crushing weight, but Christ’s burden has wings.”42 The “baggage” of Christ raises insofar as it is raised. Hence it brings forth wings, making us like birds: “Think of it this way: suppose you tried to relieve a bird of its load by removing its wings. The more you lightened its load, the more surely would it be kept on the ground. This creature you wanted to relieve lies there immobilized; it cannot fly, because you have taken its burden away from it. Give it back the burden, and off it flies. Christ’s burden is like that.”43 The Confessions interprets the sarcina Christi as a hendiadys: by interiorizing it, Christ himself is the baggage which he puts on. Christ fills me, and in doing so lightens me with his weight. Thus we read in Confessions X, xxviii, 39: “You lift up [the substantive corresponding to subelevare would be pondus] the person whom you fill. But for the present, because I am not full of you, I am a burden [onus, exterior weight] to myself.”44 Letter 55, to Januarius, to which I will return below, similarly contrasts the verb aggravare (“to weigh down”) with pondus sincerum (natural weight), which causes something to move to its proper place. In contrast to things that come from the body,45 the weight that

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   113

is proper to the soul does not weigh down.46 Thus things that do weigh down actually constitute an obstacle to natural weight (“ut sincerum pondus impediant”). The neutrality of Augustine’s concept of weight thus strikes me as owing more to the scriptural paradox of the light burden than to the widespread physical doctrine in which it naturally takes a place. Weight and Order

Weight therefore indicates, first of all, a directionality.47 For Thomas Aquinas, remaining strictly Augustinian in this, order and weight are often synonymous.48 When in the Summa Theologiae he defines pondus by saying that “the tendency of a thing pulls a thing toward its acts and its end, consequently the weight pulls the thing itself toward rest and stability,”49 he is directly quoting his De Genesi ad litteram IV, iii, 7 (“pondus omnem rem ad quietem et stabilitatem trahit”).50 As there is no weight in God, since he is measure without measure, number without number, weight without weight (“pondus sine pondere”),51 Augustine could rightly replace pondus with ordo when citing Wisdom 11:21: “Omnia in mensura, et numero, et pondere disposuisti.”52 Pondus, like ordo, determines the finality (telos) of all things.53 If we keep in mind the model of love to think about weight, the comparison of weight with love legitimates Augustine’s innovation in the Latin terms—­what we might call a “neosemantism”—­an innovation, moreover, that allows him to use a univocal concept of weight for all the natural vertical displacements of bodies. The central point of the argument is this: Owing to the basic univocality of love as a universal tendency, the physical concept of weight is in turn transformed and acquires an essential neutrality. To return to our passage from De civitate Dei, Augustine proceeds to offer a clarification of the comparison. Heavy bodies are animated, by virtue of their weight, by a force or impulse that is like a love for them. Light bodies have, as it were, a love for what is high, and heavy bodies a love for what is low. The body’s weight bears the body away toward its natural place, just as the soul is borne away by its own love. Where does this analogy lead us? It seems to assert that the body is borne away by its own weight, in whatever direction, as the soul is borne away by its tendency,

114  Vincent Carraud

that is, its love, in a manner that is as entirely passive as it is entirely spontaneous. The soul’s love serves as a model for the tendency of all living things and even for the weight of inert bodies. We are dealing, in effect, with a psychological interpretation of the movement of inert bodies. But does Augustine mean to limit his scope to this analogy, or does he want to signal a contrast as well? For if the soul is quite borne away by its love, it can contain, unlike other creatures, opposing loves. There are heavy bodies and light bodies, but the soul can house two loves with opposing directionalities, without its being, so to speak, in itself, heavy or light (good or bad).54 In addition, the soul has the ability to choose the love that prevails in it. Indeed, the driving force of love is the direct love that bears on things that should be or should not be loved, but it depends itself on the reflexive love that consents, or refuses to consent, to this love. This text can be interpreted, then, according to the basic opposition between the freedom of human love and the natural tendencies that move the other creatures.55 But this Augustinian doctrine, which is expounded in the beginning of Book III of De libero arbitrio, is not formulated here. Rather, in De civitate Dei the important point is to postulate that the soul is carried by love and that there is a natural place for bodies, as there is for the soul.56 Every creature naturally possesses a tendency that carries it toward its good, or at least toward its place in the order of the universe. This conclusion at once implies a process of generalization giving the analogy its full validity (all creatures, even inert ones, are like the human soul) and opens the possibility of an internal opposition in the analogy (the love of the soul, being reflexive, intends the love for another kind of good). But the critical point here is that the soul’s love serves as a model for the tendency of all bodies. When weight is thought of as love, a psychological model makes it possible to explain the cosmos and to conceptualize the natural tendency at work in the cosmos. It is the love of the soul that supplies the principle of the analogy on which the weight of bodies is modeled. To be sure, De civitate Dei is remarkable not only for its originality in Augustine’s corpus but even more for the apparently new usage that he imposes on the concept of pondus. Now we must take into consideration this model’s inverse,57 which appears in a passage of the Confessions in which the two terms of the analogy are exchanged.58

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   115 Lov e a s W e i g h t The Immanence of Love

In Book XIII, chapter 9, of the Confessions, we read the following: A body by its weight tends to move towards its proper place. The weight’s movement is not necessarily downwards, but to its appropriate location: fire tends to move upwards, a stone downwards. They are acted on by their respective weights; they seek their own place. Oil poured under water is drawn up to the surface on top of the water. Water poured on top of oil sinks below the oil. They are acted on by their respective densities, they seek their own place. Things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ­ordered position, they are at rest. My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.59 Situating love in a system of places60 allows Augustine to conceive of love as displacement. By doing this, he clarifies his original use of pondus. Weight does not refer exclusively to downward movement (“pondus non ad ima tantum est”). Rather, weight is that which leads something to its own place (“locum suum”), to the place proper to it. Yet the proper place is the end of the movement, in the double sense of “end,” where it signifies both completion and teleology: “Our rest is our place (Requies nostra locus noster).”61 Rest is the establishment or reestablishment of order. Weight initiates order, and it orders toward rest. “Disordered” bodies (which we probably must render minus ordinata)62 are in movement, and unrest is an absence of order, the unfinished activity of weight: “Minus ordinata inquieta sunt.” In contrast, so long as bodies are in their place, that is, completely ordered, they will be at rest: “Ordinantur et quiescunt.” For Augustine it was a question of discovering the agent that orders and moves so as to conduct something to its proper place. For bodies, this is weight. For me, it is love. Love moves me. (In this light, we can understand Augustine’s comparison of love to the foot of the soul.)63 Only from this point can we attempt to identify, on one hand, what must be understood by weight or love and, on the other hand, what constitutes rest. God is my rest, my proper place, because he is, first of all, absolute rest,

116  Vincent Carraud

the only one who is absolutely without movement. It is a paradoxical, though essential, cosmic-­theological point, which I will not elaborate here, that God made creation though he himself remained at rest (quietus).64 As a matter of weight, that is, of love, two elements present themselves in this passage from Book XIII of the Confessions: voluntas bona and donum tuum. I will not treat in greater detail Augustine’s theory of will so as to define the conditions that can make my weight a voluntary weight.65 But, concerning donum tuum (your gift), that gift of God which, according to Acts 2:38,66 designates the Holy Spirit, one final observation is necessary: If my weight is my love, still my love is your gift. At the beginning of this study I asked, What does theology gain by thinking of its first object—­love—­according to a physical model of weight? The answer now takes clearer shape. What it gains is a way of thinking about the immanence of love. To conceive of love as weight is to conceive of it as immanent, as interior. It is, moreover, to conceive of it as a (natural) law, inseparable from myself.67 The model of weight makes it possible for Augustine to represent the passivity of love, its spontaneity, its permanence, even its naturalness, so to speak. For weight is not a movement under constraint (he can thus maintain the total identification of love and will), nor is it less for that a permanent and inseparable movement from which no creature can escape: “There is no one who does not love.”68 Weight makes it possible to think about the interiorization of the movement, and so to think about the interiorization of finality, that is, of the law. To conceive of the law of love as the impulse of weight amounts to conceiving of the divine law as a vector on the model of a linear trajectory that is both immanent and unceasing. Thus in Augustine we find the most radical refusal of models of exteriority that words, texts, or other authorities representing a purely descriptive other supply. Earlier on, I insisted on the synonymy of pondus and ordo. Order is immanent. This means not only that grace is without constraint but that it does not reach me from the outside.69 Moreover, the love of God is my natural trajectory, and the divine law is not exterior. Through his physics of love, Augustine gives himself the means to take seriously the inscription of the divine law in the heart: “I shall give my law in their hearts, and I shall write it in their minds” ( Jer. 31:33; cf. Heb. 8:10 and 10:16).70 In a similar vein, Augustine also comments on Romans 5:5 (“Charitas Dei diffusa est in cordibus

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   117

nostris”) in De spiritu et littera: “There the finger of God worked upon the tables of stone: here upon the hearts of men. So there the law was set outside men . . . here it was given within them.”71 Thus we can understand the remarkable identity that I emphasized just above: My weight is my love; my love is your gift. Whether or not the Holy Spirit is the gift of God (your gift)72 in no way prevents me from experiencing the gift as love, and indeed as mine: your gift is my weight. The interpretations of Confessions XIII with the greatest authority insist with good reason on its Trinitarian structure and on the role of the Holy Spirit,73 who “bears us upwards” [dono tuo accendimur et sursum ferimur]. This is right. But before insisting on the sursum, the rising movement of the Spirit’s fire, before insisting too hastily on Augustine’s pneumatology, let us keep in mind the most crucial element: the immanence of grace. Imitating the Fall of Bodies

To conclude, I turn to Augustine’s latter-­day interpreters in the seventeenth century, the century whose texts I chiefly study. Contrary to a famous formula, repeated too often, the seventeenth century is not in all respects “the century of St. Augustine.”74 Far from it, in fact. With regard to the point that concerns us, the seventeenth century was not very Augustinian at all, including the Jansenists and even Jansen himself, for whom gravity represented sin rather than love and grace.75 But one author at least turns out to be, on this point, authentically Augustinian, even if he did not at all claim to be systematically Augustinian. For Descartes’s literary correspondent Mersenne, the Augustinian argument preserves all its figurative relevance, even if the science it presupposes is obsolete. I quote the corollary, or moral, of the eighth Theological Question, “What is the line of direction that is made use of in mechanics?,” whose answer is “This line passes through the center of the world and through the center of everything’s gravity.” According to Mersenne, we must take into consideration that there is no better means to attain God other than by imitating the fall of heavy objects, the center of gravity of which never goes beyond the line of direction that leads them straight to the universe’s center; then, in accordance with Augustine’s fine expression amor meus, pondus meum, the heart, or human will, will, like

118  Vincent Carraud

the center of gravity, take the same path to God, as long as our passions which set the will in motion keep themselves united always to the law of God, which is the true line of direction for all our ­actions. In this way, we need only keep to this line in order to arrive at the center of our rest, towards which we are pushed along by all kinds of considera­ tions, just as a stone’s center of gravity is pushed towards the earth’s center by all the elements that surround it. But if we set up an obstacle in the aforesaid line—­for example, if we put a pin or a needle firmly in place in that line—­it is impossible for the stone to descend, though it be as heavy as the entire earth. In such wise, it is impossible for us to reach God if we substitute some kind of obstacle in the place of his law, and of his holy will, which alone is the sovereign rule of all our wills.76 There is no need to dwell on this wonderful notion of sin conceived as a point, or a pin, that is enough to stop a stone’s fall, even were the stone as heavy as the entire earth. One can imagine impediments, obstacles, forces of resistance, deviations, combinations, and products of forces (for example, between the weight of love or grace and that of other forces). We can stop the movement of weight, but it is impossible to modify its nature, impossible to modify its trajectory, which is immanent and continuous. In like fashion, we can neither annihilate the immanence of love nor change its trajectory. Contradictory Self-­Love

Through the model of weight I have explained here, St. Augustine offers a doctrine about the interiority of grace (i.e., the immanence of the law of love) and about its unfailing directionality. By asserting that such a trajectory is inscribed in the self, he posits that my self and my love are insepa­ rably linked in the same way that a body and its weight are inseparably linked. Yet weight makes the body tend toward its own place, which is inevitably different from the initial place. The immanent trajectory of love inevitably takes me outside myself, toward another place where I will find rest, indeed toward that place of actual rest that is identified as God. To love—­which is to move toward God—­is to have weight. And the weight that is exerted in the center of gravity can only tend in the right direction, can only tend toward its own place, which is not itself but is outside itself.

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   119

A body’s weight does not tend toward the center of the body but obviously tends outside of it. The immanence of the trajectory of weight is inevitably accompanied by the exteriority of the proper place toward which it makes the body tend. If, then, love is that which causes displacement and creates order, the thing that displaces me and orders me, how could I conceive that I am, in myself, my own proper place? How would my self-­love move me toward myself, and, consequently, how would this be love? This does not make any sense. This is why the texts that are usually cited concerning amor sui as prima hominis perditio always insist on the inevitable slip from self-­love to love of external things. Self-­love is, by its constitution, unstable.77 Thus we are led to understand that love, in its principle, cannot be self-­love. Self-­directed love contradicts the very essence of love. Of course we find in Augustine many texts about self-­love, whose role I do not wish to overlook or underestimate.78 Nevertheless, we would go amiss to see in self-­love a principle, because love is constitutionally and fundamentally a displacement teleologically directed toward another place. This is the critical point I have wanted to emphasize.79 To love does not mean to love oneself. Self-­love is not a starting point for an analysis of love. We would go wrong, it seems to me, to make St. Augustine a “moral philoso­pher” in the sense of early modern moral philosophers. The position that I have advanced here is that the reflexivity of love as elaborated in De civitate Dei (the love of love) and the essence of love evoked in the Confessions (as displacement toward another place due to an internal force) perhaps make it impossible for love to be reflexive in another sense, a sense that was destined for a cumbersome afterlife, in short, that of self-­love. Despite the predominant traditional interpretation, more moral than theological, of his works, it is less the case that St. Augustine simply scorned self-­love, posited as a principle, than that he exposed its inevitable contradiction. Translated from the French by Adrian N. Guiu, Thomas Levergood, and Jeremy C. Thompson

Not e s 1.  Aimé Solignac, in Confessions, ed. M. Skutella, trans. E. Tréhorel et G. Bouissou, Bibliothèque Augustinienne [hereafter, BA] (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer,

120  Vincent Carraud 1962), 14:618, n. 28. For the Confessions I have also consulted the edition of Jacques Fontaine et al. of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Confessioni, ed. M. Simonetti, trans. G. Chiarini, 5 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1992–­97), as well as that of James J. O’Donnell, Confessions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). For Augustinian works not included in the Bibliothèque Augustinienne, I refer to the Vivès edition of the Maurists, Oeuvres complètes de saint Augustin, trans. Joseph-­Maxence Péronne, Pierre-­ Félix Écalle, Charles Vincent, Jean-­Pierre Charpentier, and H. Barreau, 34 vols. (Paris: Vivès, 1869–­78). 2.  See Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions de saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire: Antécédents et postérité (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1963), vol. 1, chap. 1, “L’influence des ‘libri platonicorum.’ ” 3.  De civitate Dei XIV, vii, 2 (BA 35, 372), justifies Scripture’s identification in using these three terms, which are, furthermore, distinguished in questions 35 and 36 of De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII (BA 10, 100–­110). On Augustine’s terminology of love, see especially Hélène Pétré, Caritas: Étude sur le vocabulaire latin de la charité chrétienne (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1948), chap. 3, 90–­ 96; Paul Agaësse, “Introduction,” in Commentaire de la Première épître de saint Jean, Sources chrétiennes 75 (Paris: Cerf, 1961); and the note of Gustave Bardy on Book XIV of De civitate Dei, at BA 35, 529–­32. 4.  See, for instance, Fulbert Cayré, Les sources de l’amour divin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1933); Gustave Combès, La charité d’après saint Augustin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1934); J. Brechtken, Augustinus Doctor Caritatis: Sein Liebes­ be­griff im Widerspruch von Eigennutz und selbstloser Güte im Rahmen der antiken Glückseligkeits-­Ethik (Meisenheim am Glan, Germany: Hain, 1975). For a synthesis, see the entry by Tarsicius J. van Bavel, “Love,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 509–­16. In his classic study, Anders Nygren passed over in silence the Augustinian identification of eros and agapè in De civitate Dei XIV, vii, 2; see Éros et Agapè: La notion chrétienne de l’amour et ses transformations, trans. Pierre Jundt, 3 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1944–­1952), vol. 2, chap. 2. 5. Gunnar Hultgren, Le commandement d’amour chez Augustin: Interprétation philosophique et théologique d’après les écrits de la période 386–­400 (Paris: Vrin, 1939). 6.  Agaësse, “Introduction,” 31–­102; Dany Dideberg, Saint Augustin et la première épître de saint Jean: Une théologie de l’agapè (Paris: Beauchesne, 1975). 7. See Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (Berlin: Springer, 1929; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 2006), trans. Anne-­Sophie Astrup as Le concept d’amour chez saint Augustin: Essai d’interprétation philosophique (Paris: Rivages, 1996). 8. The claim that “weight” is a metaphor (a metaphor of little weight!) is unfortunately common among commentators; for a recent example, see Robert J. O’Connell, Soundings in Augustine’s Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 41.

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   121 9. See Sermo 125, 7: “Think of ordinary human love; think of it as the hand of the soul. If it’s holding one thing, it can’t hold another. To be able to hold something it’s given, it must let go of what it is already holding. What I’m saying is, and mark that I’m saying it plainly: if you love the world, you cannot love God; you’ve got your hand full. God says to you, ‘Here, hold what I’m giving you.’ You are reluctant to let go of what you were holding already; you cannot receive what is being offered you. . . . What does it mean not to love what you possess in this world? Don’t let it grip your hand which should be gripping God.” [Intendite amorem hominis; sic putate quasi manum animae. Si aliquid tenet, tenere aliud non potest. Ut autem possit tenere quod datur, dimittat quod tenet. Hoc dico, videte quia aperte dico: Qui amat saeculum, amare Deum non potest, occupatam habet manum. Dicit illi Deus: Tene quod do. Non vult dimittere quod tenebat: non potest acquipere quod offertur. . . . Quid est: Noli amare quod possides in hoc saeculo? Non teneat manum tuam, unde tenendus est Deus]. Vivès edition, 17:243–­44. Sermons (94A–­147A) on the New Testament, trans. Edmund Hill, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/4 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1992), 258. Among the numerous texts that contrast the empty soul and the full soul (full of God, of self, of worldly objects, etc.), this passage is enough to keep one from imagining the soul as a kind of container, like a vase. St. Augustine is thinking much more of the hand’s grip. One cannot say, then, as Aimé Solignac has (see n. 1), that this rigorous comparison is simply a “metaphorical expression.” The comparison of love to the foot has another valence; see later. 10.  Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, ed. Gustave Thibon (Paris: Plon, 1947). 11.  See Aristotle, Physics III, 2, 201 b 31: “Motion is thought to be a sort of actuality, but incomplete” [hè te kinèsis energeia men tis einai dokei, atelès de]. Translation by Jonathan Barnes in The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 1: 344. See also Metaphysics 6, 1048 b 28; De Anima II, 5, 417 a 16, etc. 12.  Confessions I, i, 1 (BA 13, 272): Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te. Translation by Henry Chadwick in Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3. 13.  Confessions I, ii, 2 and iii, 3 (BA 13, 274–­78). 14.  It remains central even if we pose it as a problem: See Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-­Love in St. Augustine (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), who scarcely acknowledges, however, the texts with which I am concerned, mentioning them only in passing on pp. 20–­21. 15.  Can conversion itself be conceived not as a return or rotation (“to turn oneself toward”) but as a linear movement? 16. But it is worth observing that Descartes replaces the question of self-­ love (the usual term of contemporary moral philosophers) with the question of self-­regard. See Jean-­Luc Marion, “Le cogito s’affecte-­t-­il?,” Questions cartésiennes I (Paris: PUF, 1991), chap. 5, esp. 172–­87; André Pessel, “Descartes et la passion de

122  Vincent Carraud la générosité,” in Le partage des passions, ed. Étienne Tassin and Patrice Vermeren (Paris: Répliques Contemporaines, 1992), 129–­37; and Mariana Nowersztern, “Ne pas être sujet? Similitudo Dei: La liberté et son usage, des Méditations aux Passions de l’âme,” Les Etudes philosophiques 1 (2011): 71–­83. 17.  De civitate Dei, XI, xxxvi (BA 35, 112): “Nam et sumus et nos esse novimus et id esse ac nosse diligimus.” Translation by R. W. Dyson, The City of God against the Pagans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 484. Augustine gives another formulation of this triad at Confessions XIII, xi, 12, immediately after a passage I comment on below. He immediately posits the limits of Trinitarian analogies: “I wish that human disputants would reflect on the triad within their own selves. These three aspects of the self are very different from the Trinity, but I may make the observation that on this triad they could well exercise their minds and examine the problem, thereby becoming aware how far distant they are from it. The three aspects I mean are being, knowing, willing.” [Vellem, ut haec tria cogitarent homines in se ipsis. Longe aliud sunt ista tria quam illa Trinitas, sed dico, ubi se exerceant et probent et sentiant, quam longe sunt. Dico autem haec tria: esse, nosse, velle.] (BA 14, 442, trans. Chadwick, 279). 18.  De civitate Dei, XI, xxxvi (BA 35, 114, trans. Dyson, 484): “For if I am mistaken, I exist. He who does not exist clearly cannot be mistaken; and so, if I am mistaken, then, by the same token, I exist” [Si enim fallor, sum. Nam qui non est, utique nec falli potest; ac per hoc sum, si fallor]. 19.  De civitate Dei, XI, xxxvi (BA 35, 112, trans. Dyson, 484): “Eaque duo cum amo, eundem quoque amorem quiddam tertium nec inparis aestimationis eis quas novi rebus adiungo. Neque enim fallor amare me, cum in his quae amo non fallar; quamquam etsi illa falsa essent, falsa me amare verum esset.” 20.  This text is located in a Trinitarian passage of Book XI, which sums up the doctrine from De Trinitate (approximately contemporary with it). Augustine recalled that this image of the Trinity had been recognized by the Platonists, who deduced from it the tripartition of philosophy into physics, logic, and ethics (XI, xxv). Despite this, it is not a matter here of identifying, as in De Trinitate, being and knowledge with God, or even of applying to them Trinitarian parallels. Augustine does not elaborate further here on the type of credit that knowledge constitutes for love (in the case of love, knowing is enough in order to possess). See question 35 of De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII (BA 10, 100–­102). 21.  De civitate Dei XI, xxviii (BA 35, 120, trans. Dyson, 487): “We have said as much as the scope of this work seems to require concerning these things: that is, concerning our existence and our knowledge of it, and how much they are loved by us, and how some semblance of them is found even in the other things which are below us, though with a difference” [De duobus illis, essentia scilicet et notitia, quantum amentur in nobis, et quem ad modum etiam in ceteris rebus, quae infra sunt, eorum reperiatur, etsi differens, quaedam tamen similitudo, quantum suscepti huius operis ratio visa est postulare, satis diximus].

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   123 22.  Ibid.: “But we have not yet spoken of the love with which they are loved, to consider whether this love is itself loved. It is loved, however; and the proof lies in this: that, when men are rightly loved, what is loved in them is love itself. For it is not he who knows what is good who is justly called a good man, but he who loves it” [De amore autem, quo amantur, utrum et ipse amor ametur, non dictum est. Amatur autem; et hinc probamus, quod in hominibus, qui rectius amantur, ipse magis amatur. Neque enim vir bonus merito dicitur qui scit quod bonum est, sed qui diligit]. 23.  Ibid.: “Why, then, do we not see that we love in ourselves the very love with which we love whatever good we love? For there is also a love by which that is loved which ought not to be loved; and this is a love which a man hates in himself if he loves that by which he loves what ought to be loved” [Cur ergo et in nobis ipsis non et ipsum amorem nos amare sentimus, quo amamus quidquid boni amamus? Est enim et amor, quo amatur et quod amandum non est, et istum amorem odit in se, qui illum diligit, quo id amatur quod amandum est]. 24.  Augustine does not say here that we love all our loves, since, if we have two opposed loves, we can love but one of them. He is saying no more than that we love only our love of what should be loved, since he is not referring here to the love of a wrong love. Augustine is content with distinguishing a first-­order love, which bears on things that can be divided between what should and should not be loved, and a second-­order love, which accepts or refuses the first love. Free will is situated at this second level, since the first loves are the soul’s unmediated movements, which are more moved than they are movers. For this key point (though not dealt with here), and the theory of assent that it implies, see in particular Book VII of the Confessions and Book III of De libero arbitrio. 25.  De civitate Dei XI, xxviii (BA 35, 122, trans. Dyson, 487): “Si enim pecora essemus, carnalem vitam et quod secundum sensum eius est amaremus idque esset sufficiens bonum nostrum et secundum hoc, cum esset nobis bene, nihil aliud quaereremus. Item si arbores essemus, nihil quidem sentiente motu amare possemus, verum tamen id quasi adpetere videremur, quo feracius essemus uberiusque fructuosae. Si essemus lapides aut fluctus aut ventus aut flamma vel quid huius modi, sine ullo quidem sensu atque vita, non tamen nobis deesset quasi quidam nostrorum locorum atque ordinis adpetitus. Nam velut amores corporum momenta sunt ponderum, sive deorsum gravitate sive sursum levitate nitantur. Ita enim corpus pondere, sicut animus amore fertur, quocumque fertur.” 26.  Augustine is not investigating here the carnal life of man, as animal, and still less the exclusively carnal life—­according to the old man or the law of sin (to use the Pauline formula)—­that some people can lead. In contrast, it is possible to read that, since we are not animals, this life is not ours, and that neither are these goods sufficient goods nor are they “what should be loved,” at least at first. The argument does not mean so much to oppose humanity to other creatures—­as if to say that, if humanity were content with the goods pursued by these creatures, it would not live in conformity to its nature and would give preference to “what should not be

124  Vincent Carraud loved”—­as to show how love, which makes humanity advance toward healing (end of first paragraph of chap. 28, BA 35, 120), is the particular case of a universal principle at work in all creation. 27.  As it seems to me, Augustine’s insistence on the theory of natural place makes it impossible to consider his doctrine of weight as platonic. If the double experiment imagined at Timaeus 62–­63 (the two parts of fire and of earth forcibly balanced in the air) allows Plato to define the concepts of heavy (and thus, of low) and of light (and thus, of high), the tendency which brings a body to move is explained only as a path toward all the bodies that it is like (pros to suggenes hodos) and consequently as a separation from the bodies which it is unlike (anomoion). 28. The passages from De civitate Dei (for example, XXII, xi, 2, concerning the four or five elements) that relate positions held by the Peripatetics or passages from Confessions XII on first matter have so little relation to the teaching of Aristotle himself that Pierre Duhem could conclude that Augustine was utterly unaware of Aristotelian physical theory; see Le système du monde (Paris: Librairie scientifique Hermann, 1913; repr. 1954), 2:410, 431–­438. 29.  On the coincidence of the center of the earth and the center of the world and on the immobility of the earth, see De caelo, II, 14, 296 b. 30. See Physics IV 4, 211 a. 31.  See also Physics IV, 8, 214 b12–­16; V, 6, 230 a19; VIII, 4, 255 a28ff. On “heavy and light,” see Duhem, Le système du monde, 1:205–­10; Friedrich Solmsen, Aristotle’s System of the Physical World: A Comparison with His Predecessors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), chap. 13, 275–­86 (especially the opposition to Timaeus 63e). For a clear presentation of Aristotle’s analysis of movement, see Lambros Couloubaritsis, L’avènement de la science physique: Essai sur la Physique d’Aristote (Brussels: Ousia, 1980), chap. 5. For the antecedents and the context of Aristotle’s theories, see also Denis O’Brien, Theories of Weight in the Ancient World: Four Essays on Democritus, Plato and Aristotle; A Study in the Development of Ideas (Paris: Les Belles Lettres; Leiden: Brill, 1981) (only the first two volumes, concerning Democritus and Plato, have appeared). 32.  The (purely) heavy body is a body that has the pure potential of occupying the center of the world; the (purely) light body is one that has the pure potential of occupying the place adjacent to the sphere of the moon. On the definition of particular matter by its capacity to occupy such and such natural place (an act for which this matter has the potential), see Duhem, Le système du monde, 1:205–­10. 33.  Tusculan Disputations, 2nd ed., ed. Jules Humbert (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960, I, 17, 40: “Furthermore we do not doubt that the nature of the four elements from which all things are begotten is such that, as though their laws of gravity were mutually apportioned and divided, the earthy and the moist are carried perpendicularly into land and sea by their own tendency and weight, while the two remaining parts, one fiery, the other airy, precisely as the two first-­mentioned are carried into the centre of the universe (the kentron of the mathematicians) by heaviness and weight,

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   125 so the last two on the contrary fly vertically upward into the heavenly region, whether this be due to an upward tendency inherent in their nature, or because bodies naturally lighter are driven away from heavier bodies” [Eam porro naturam esse quattuor omnia gignentium corporum, ut, quasi partita habent inter se ac divisa momenta, terrena et humida suopte nutu et suo pondere ad pares angulos in terram et in mare ferantur, reliquae duae partes, una ignea, altera animalis, ut illae superiores in medium locum mundi gravitate ferantur et pondere, sic hae rursus rectis lineis in coelestem locum subvolent, sive ipsa natura superiora adpetente, sive quod a gravioribus leviora natura repellantur]. Translation by J. E. King in Tusculan Disputations, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 47–­49. See also V, 24, 69. We note that the pair gravitas/pondus, which takes over for the pair nutus/pondus, does not seem to indicate that the two words cannot be synonyms. 34.  On Augustine’s reading of the Tusculan Disputations, see Maurice Testard, Saint Augustin et Cicéron, 2 vols. (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1958), 2:133–­34 (tableau des références) and 1:210 and 215 (who judges, however, the quotations to be of secondary interest, at least in connection to the De republica and the Hortensius). 35.  See the Stoics, esp. SVF, I, 27, 31–­28, 4; II, 162, 14–­23; 175, 16–­35; 177, 35–­37; 195, 7–­10. 36. From this point of view, Malebranche will turn out to be Augustine’s heir, at least at the level of the letter, since he does not hesitate to use “weight” for both grace and sin (the latter also conceived of as a counterweight to grace). See Méditations sur l’humilité et la pénitence, VIe et VIIIe considérations, in Oeuvres Complètes [OCM] XVII-­1 (Paris: Vrin, 1958–­84), 400–­401 and 406: “Le plaisir est donc comme le poids de l’âme; il la fait pencher peu à peu, et il l’entraîne enfin vers l’objet qui le cause ou qui semble le causer. . . . Nous recevons le poids de la gâce, cette délectation victorieuse qui passe tout sentiment . . . , et qui nous attire à Dieu nonobstant même le poids incommode de nos passions et des plaisirs des sens. . . . Un enfant d’Adam, quelque saint et juste qu’on le veuille supposer, sent toujours un poids qui le porte vers la terre, et qui contrebalance l’effort que le poids de la grâce fait sur son esprit. Or comme le poids de la grâce ne dépend pas de nous, et que ce poids agit d’autant plus que le poids de la concupiscence est plus léger, il est visible que tout homme est dans une obligation très étroite de diminuer ce dernier poids.” 37.  De Mysteriis and perhaps the commentary on the Categories, according to Simplicius, Cat. 128, 32–­35; see O’Donnell, Confessions, 3:356–­59. 38. “Pondus meum amor meus. Saint Augustin et Jamblique,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 198, 4 (1981): 423–­28, and Studia patristica 16 (1985): 524–­27, followed by Robert J. O’Connell, Imagination and Metaphysics in St. Augustine (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1986), 16f. As none of the texts cited here is really compelling, I am inclined to think that the possible philosophical origin of the duality of Augustine’s pondus comes from the ambivalence of hodos in Timaeus 63 e4. 39.  Commentary on Psalm 29, n. 2, 10 (Vivès edition, 11:825–­26). The whole passage is as follows: “There are two kinds of weights. Weight is like a force within

126  Vincent Carraud each thing that seems to make it strain toward its proper place. This is what I mean by ‘weight.’ You are carrying a stone in your hand. You feel its weight; it presses on your hand because it is seeking its appropriate place. Do you want to see what it is looking for? Take your hand away; it plummets to the earth, it comes to rest on the ground. It has reached the goal it was tending toward, it has found the place proper to it. In that case ‘weight’ was something like a spontaneous movement, without life, without sensation. There are other things which seek their own place by pushing upward. If you pour water onto oil, it pushes downward by its own weight, for it is seeking its proper place, seeking to be set in order. It is contrary to order for water to be on top of oil, so until the proper order is established there is uneasy movement, and then it takes up its position” [Pondera gemina sunt. Pondus enim est impetus quidam cujusque rei, velut conantis ad locum suum: hoc est pondus. Fers lapidem manu, pateris pondus; premit manum tuum, quia locum suum quaerit. Et vis videre quid quaerat ? Subtrahe manum, venit ad terram, quiescit in terra: pervenit quo tendebat, invenit locum suum. Pondus ergo illud motus erat quasi spontaneus, sine anima, sine sensu. Sunt alia quae sursum versus petunt locum. Namque si aquam mittas super oleum, pondere suo in ima tendit. Locum enim suum quaerit, ordinari quaerit: quia praeter ordinem est aqua super oleum. Donec ergo veniat ad ordinem suum, inquietus motus est, donec teneat locum suum]. Translation by Maria Boulding in Expositions of the Psalms 1–­32, in The Works of Saint Augustine III/15, 309. 40.  Similarly, Letter 55 (Vivès edition, 4:468) says that the natural (sincerum) weight of the soul makes it rise, like oil in other liquids. 41. For the formulation pondera gemina sunt, see Commentary on Psalm 29, n. 2, 10 (Vivès edition, 11:825). There is nothing surprising, then, in the fact that pondus is also used to represent sin, though less frequently, as, for instance, in Confessions VII, xvii, 23 (BA 13, 626, trans. Chadwick, 127): “But I was not stable in the enjoyment of my God. I was caught up to you by your beauty and quickly torn away from you by my weight. With a groan I crashed into inferior things. This weight was my sexual (carnalis) habit” [Non stabam frui Deo meo, sed rapiebar ad te decore tuo moxque diripiebar abs te pondere meo et ruebam in ista cum gemitu; et pondus hoc consuetudo carnalis]. If Augustine’s language is rich and dense, it is never bound to systematization. This experience of fundamental instability leads Augustine to cite Wisdom 9: 15 (see below). 42. Vivès edition, 13:10: Sarcina mea levis est. Alia sarcina premit et aggravat te; Christi autem sarcina subelevat te; alia sarcina pondus habet, Christi sarcina pennas habet. Translation by Maria Boulding in Expositions of the Psalms 51–­72, in The Works of Saint Augustine III/17, 186. On this text see Jean-­Luc Marion, who in Au lieu de soi: L’approche de saint Augustin (Paris: PUF, 2008), p. 215, cites parallel passages, and from whom I borrow the expression “baggage that I impose.” It can be observed, moreover, that the same concept of sarcina/onus gives rise to two contrasting verbs, gravare and tollere: “Shoulders are differentiated among themselves

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   127 by the fact that some are weighed down by a load of sins, while others bear the burden of Christ” [Dividuntur humeri, ut alios gravent peccata sua, alii tollant sarcinam Christi]. They are raised in this way by the baggage of Christ. 43.  Ibid.: “Nam et avi si pennas detrahas, quasi onus tollis; et quo magis onus abstulisti, eo magis in terra remanebit. Quam exonerare voluisti, jacet; non volat, quia tulisti onus: redeat onus, et volat. Talis est Christi sarcina.” 44.  BA 14, 208, trans. Chadwick, 202: “Quoniam quem tu imples, subelevas eum, quoniam tui plenus non sum, oneri mihi sum.” 45. On Wisdom 9:15 (“Corpus enim quod corrumpitur aggravat animam, et terrena inhabitatio deprimit sensum multa cogitantem”), which Augustine cites (only once) in Confessions VII, xvii, 23 (BA 13, 626), and on its interpretation by Achard of St. Victor, see Éclaircissement XVIII (“Autour de Sagesse, IX, 15: Un condensé de spiritualité augustinienne”), by Emmanuel Martineau, in his edition and translation of Achard of St. Victor, De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum (Saint-­ Lambert-­des-­Bois: Authentica, 1997),  251–­53. 46.  Letter 55, 10, 18 (Vivès, 4:468): “And many things delight us through the body, but there is no eternal rest in them, nor even a long rest, and for this reason they rather soil the soul and weigh it down so that they impede its pure weight by which it is carried to higher things” [Et multa quidem per corpus delectant, sed non est in eis aeterna requies, nec saltem diuturna; et propterea magis sordidant animam, et aggravant potius, ut sincerum ejus pondus, quo in superna fertur, impediant]. Translation by Roland Teske in Letters 1–­99, in The Works of Saint Augustine II/1, 225. See further below. 47.  On weight and order, see Anne-­Isabelle Bouton Touboulic, L’ordre caché: La notion d’ordre chez saint Augustin (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2004), 148s. 48.  On order and weight, see the analogy of De Trinitate VI, x, 12 (BA 15, 498): Every work of divine art implies a certain order, like weights and the position of bodies, and loves and the pleasures of souls. See also De Trinitate, VIII, ii, 3. 49.  Summa theologiae, Ia p., q. 5, a. 5, obj. 1 and concl.: “Inclinatio ad suos actus suumque finem, ac proinde hoc pondus rem ipsam ad suam quietem et stabilitatem trahere.” 50. The whole passage is as follows (BA 48, 289–­90, trans. Hill, 246: “But insofar as measure sets a limit to everything, and number gives everything its specific form, and weight draws everything to rest and stability, he is the original, true and unique measure which defines for all things their bounds, the number which forms all things, the weight which guides all things” [Secundum id vero, quod mensura omni rei modum praefigit et numerus omni rei speciem praebet et pondus omnem rem ad quietem ac stabilitatem trahit, ille primitus et veraciter et singulariter ista est, qui terminat omnia et format omnia et ordinat omnia]. 51.  Ad Orosium: “Ipse est pondus sine pondere, a quo est omne pondus.” See, too, De Genesi ad litteram IV, iv, 8 (BA 48, 290–­92).

128  Vincent Carraud 52.  See Werner Beierwaltes, “Augustins Interpretation von Sapientia 11, 21,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 15 (1969): 51–­61, and Anne-­Marie la Bonnardière, Biblia augustiniana: AT. Le Livre de la Sagesse (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1970), 90–­98. The same obviously follows for the triad modus/species/ordo. See, for example, De Genesi contra manichaeos, I, 16, 26. On Augustinian triads (as envisaged before 391), see above all Olivier Du Roy, L’intelligence de la Trinité selon saint Augustin (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1966), 279–­97, 380–­88 and 421–­24. See also note 18 (by P. Agaësse and A. Solignac) in BA 48, 635–­39: “La mesure donne à l’être sa détermination. . . . Le nombre donne à l’être sa species. . . . Le poids établit l’être dans son ordre propre: C’est le mouvement tendanciel qui oriente l’être vers sa fin, et donc vers son repos et sa stabilité.” 53.  On the relationship of weight, that of leaves as of water, to order (nihil fieri sine causa), see De ordine I, iv, 11 (BA 4, 320), along with my commentary on this passage in Causa sive ratio: La raison de la cause, de Suarez à Leibniz (Paris: PUF, 2002), 56–­57. 54.  Nothing authorizes us to make of heavy and light, which are principles of movement for inert bodies, the image of the two loves, that toward which one should move and that toward which one should not move—­and still less to identify them, as if the light, which leads upward, were the good love and the heavy the wrong. Heavy and light are axiologically neutral. 55. On this duality see Georges de Plinval, “Mouvement imposé ou mouvement spontané? Le feror augustinien,” Revue d’Études Augustiniennes 5 (1959): 13–­19. 56.  The passage goes on to develop this point by showing that we have to recognize in ourselves the image of the Trinity, which has made everything with order and made it possible for us to see in ourselves that our proper end is God himself (XI, xxviii, BA 35, 122–­24). 57.  What I indicate as inversion does not seem to strike O’Donnell in Confessions, 3:358: “Most impressively apposite [and not ‘opposite’!] to many themes of conf. is civ. 11, 28!” 58.  However, there are a certain number of texts in which the comparison of love and weight appears, always in the sense of the analogy in the Confessions, in which it is weight that makes it possible to think love, with the example of oil and water. Besides the passages already cited, let us note the following references: • De Musica VI, 11, 29 (BA 7, 424): “For delight is a kind of weight in the soul. Therefore delight orders the soul” [Delectatio quippe quasi pondus est animae. Delectatio ergo ordinat animam]. Translation by R. C. Taliaferro in On Music (Annapolis: St. John’s Bookstore, 1939), 177. • Epistle 55, to Januarius, 10, 18 (Vivès edition, 4:468): “Nor do bodies seek anything by their weights but what souls seek by their loves [i.e., rest]. For, just as a body strives to move by its weight, either upward or downard, until

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   129 it comes and rests in the place toward which it was striving—­the weight of oil, of course, if released in the air, pushes downward, but in water rises upward—­so souls strive toward those things that they love in order that they may rest in them when they arrive. And many things delight us through the body, but there is not eternal rest in them, nor even a long rest, and for this reason they rather soil the soul and weigh it down so that they impede its pure weight by which it is carried to higher things” [Nec aliquid appetunt etiam ipsa corpora ponderibus suis, nisi quod animae amoribus suis. Nam sicut corpus tamdiu nititur pondere, sive deorsum versus, sive sursum versus, donec ad locum quo nititur veniens conquiescat; pondus quippe olei si dimittatur in aere, deorsum; si autem sub aquis, sursum nititur; sic animae ad ea quae amant propterea nituntur, ut perveniendo requiescant. Et multa quidem per corpus delectant, sed non est in eis aeterna requies, nec saltem diuturna; et propterea magis sordidant animam, et aggravant potius, ut sincerum ejus pondus, quo in superna fertur, impediant]. Translation by Roland Teske in Letters 1–­99, in The Works of Saint Augustine II/1, 225–­26. • In Iohannis Evangelium tractatus VI, 20 (BA 71, 390): “For just as olive oil is held down by no liquid but it bursts through all other liquids, springs up, and stands at the top, so too, love cannot be held down at the bottom, but it has to rise up to the top” [Quomodo enim oleum a nullo humore premitur, sed disruptis omnibus exsilit et supereminet, sic et caritas non potest premi in ima; necesse est ut ad superna emicet]. Translation by John Rettig in Tractates on the Gospel of John 1–­10, in Fathers of the Church 78 (Washington, DC: Catho­ lic University of America Press, 1988), 148. Sermo 93, iv, 5 (Vivès edition, 17:75) explains that oil preeminently represents charity in that it floats above all other liquids, whereas in En. In Ps. LI, 10 (Vivès edition, 12:520) Augustine defines the unjust person as one who wants to raise the water above the oil (“levare aquam super oleum”) but will instead be submerged in it. • Ep. 157, ii, 9 (Vivès edition, 5:389): “The mind is, of course, carried by its love as if by a weight wherever it is carried” [Animus quippe velut pondere, amore fertur quocumque fertur]. Translation by Roland Teske in Letters 156–­ 210, in The Works of Saint Augustine II/3, 21. 59.  §10 (BA 14, 440, trans. Chadwick, 278): “Corpus pondere suo nititur ad locum suum. Pondus non ad ima tantum est, sed ad locum suum. Ignis sursum tendit, deorsum lapis. Ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt. Oleum infra aquam fusum super aquam attollitur, aqua supra oleum fusa infra oleum demergitur: ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt, minus ordinata inquieta sunt: ordinantur et quiescunt. Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror.” 60.  All the same, these places would not be local ones. Herein is the entire relevance of the analogy: “To whom can I communicate this? How can I speak about it? For it is not about literal places where we sink down and rise up. What is there more

130  Vincent Carraud by way of likeness and what more by way of unlikeness? It means our tendencies and our loves.” [Cui dicam? Quomodo dicam? Neque enim loca sunt, quibus mergimur et emergimus. Quid similius et quid dissimilius? Affectus sunt, amores sunt] (XIII, vii, 8, trans. Chadwick [adjusted], 277). 61. XIII, ix, 10 (BA 14, 438, trans. Chadwick, 278). 62. Arnaud d’Andilly translated the passage as follows: “Toutes les choses qui sont tirées de leur ordre sont agitées et inquiètes, et ne trouvent leur repos que lorsqu’elles rentrent dans l’ordre.” 63. Commenting on Ps. 9:16 at Enarrationes in psalmos 9, 15, Augustine writes: “The foot of the soul is properly understood as love. . . . Love moves a thing in the direction toward which it tends. . . . The foot of sinners, that is their love” [Pes animae recte intelligitur amor. . . . Amore enim movetur tanquam ad locum, quo tendit. . . . Pes ergo peccatorum, id est amor] (Vivès edition, 11:688, trans. Boulding, 1:150). Working from the word “foot” in the psalm verse, Augustine explores the idea that the foot becomes immobile when it is caught in a trap. He then compares love to a foot. In short, the soul’s foot represents love only insofar as it is the instrument of movement. The comparison is thus secondary in relation to the model of weight. It does not confirm less what I called above the neutrality of weight because it evokes here horizontal movement. 64. XIII, 36, 51 (trans. Chadwick, 304): “After your ‘very good’ works, which you made while remaining yourself in repose, you ‘rested the seventh day.’ This utterance in your book foretells for us that after our works which, because they are your gift to us, are very good, we also may rest in you for that sabbath of eternal life” [Id, quod tu post opera tua bona valde, quamvis ea quietus feceris, requievisti septimo die, hoc praeloquatur nobis vox libri tui, quod et nos post opera nostra ideo “bona valde,” quia tu nobis ea donasti, sabbato vitae aeternae requiescamus in te]. See further Bernard McGinn’s chapter in this volume. 65.  On this point see especially De libero arbitrio III, i, 2 (BA 6, 326). On the conjunction of will and delight, see the interpretation that Augustine, commenting on John 6:44 (“Nemo venit ad me nisi quem Pater adtraxerit”), gives to the famous verse from Vergil (Bucolics 2, 65) at In Ioh., 26:4 (BA 72 490–­49): “Do not think that you are drawn unwillingly; the mind is drawn also by love. . . . Moreover, if it was allowed to a poet to say, ‘His own pleasure draws each man,’ not need but pleasure, not obligation but delight, how much more forcefully ought we to say that a man is drawn to Christ who delights in truth, delights in happines, delights in justice, delights in eternal life—­and all this is Christ?” [Noli te cogitare invitum trahi: Trahitur animus et amore. . . . Porro si poetae dicere licuit: “Trahit sua quemque voluptas,” non necessitas, sed voluptas, non obligatio, sed delectatio, quanto fortius nos dicere debemus trahi hominem ad Christum, qui delectatur Veritate, delectatur Beatitudine, delectatur Iustitia, delectatur sempiterna Vita, quod totum Christus est]. Translation by John Rettig in Tractates on the Gospel of John 11–­27, in Fathers of the Church 79 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 262. On the

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   131 “narrow relationship” of love and will, or rather, on love as “intense will,” see Étienne Gilson, Introduction à l’étude de saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1942; 1982), 170–­84; Isabelle Bochet, Saint Augustin et le désir de Dieu (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1982), 104; and now, Jean-­Luc Marion, Au lieu de soi, chap. 6, §§ 41–­42. Jean-­Luc Marion shows how Augustine effects a real reduction of loves so as to posit its fundamental univocity (the single nature of love beyond the diversity of its modes and objects). As we see, the present purpose is but to try to illuminate, from the model of weight, the univocity described there as an immanent constant. 66.  “Petrus vero ad illos paenitentiam inquit agite et baptizetur unusquisque vestrum in nomine Iesu Christi in remissionem peccatorum vestrorum et accipietis donum Sancti Spiritus.” Cf. Confessions XIII, ix, 10 (trans. Chadwick, 278): “Why is it exclusively of him [the Holy Spirit] as if there were a place where he then was, though it is not a place. Of him alone it is said that he is your ‘gift’ ” [Cur de illo (Spiritus Sanctus) tantum dictum est quasi locus, ubi esset, qui non est locus, de quo solo dictum est, quod sit donum tuum?]. 67.  Cf. Rom. 8:35–­39: “Quis ergo nos separabit a caritate Christi ? . . . Certus sum quia . . . neque creatura alia poterit nos separare a caritate Dei.” If nothing can separate me from charity, it is because charity is inscribed in me, is immanent in me as my own weight is. The immanence of love makes separation impossible. For Augustine, “a caritate Dei” is both a subjective and an objective genitive; see Olivier du Roy, L’intelligence de la foi en la Trinité selon saint Augustin (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1966), 221. 68.  Sermo 34, i, 2 (Vivès edition, 16:166; my translation): “Nemo est qui non amet.” See also Enarratio in Psalmos 121, 1: “Every kind of love has its own energy, and in the soul of a lover love cannot be idle; it must lead somewhere” [Habet tamen omnis amor vim suam nec potest vacare amor in anima amantis; necesse est ducat]. Translation by Maria Boulding in Expositions of the Psalms 121–­150, in The Works of Saint Augustine III/20), 14. On the universality of love in human acts, see Karl Jaspers, Augustinus (Munich, 1976), 51. But, as we have seen, this universality extends much further than to human acts, to nothing less, in fact, than all creatures. 69.  Meditatio IV rests on this scrupulously Augustinian point (AT VII, 57, 27–­58, 5). 70.  “Dando leges meas in cordibus eorum, et in mentibus eorum superscribam eas.” Descartes recalls the passage from Hebrews in his Letter to Mersenne, dated April 15, 1630: “C’est Dieu qui a établi ces lois en la nature. . . . Elles sont toutes mentibus nostris ingenitae, ainsi qu’un roi imprimerait ses lois dans le cœur de tous ses sujets, s’il en avait aussi bien le pouvoir” (AT I, 145). 71.  De spiritu et littera 17, 29: “Ibi in tabulis lapideis digitus Dei operatus est, hic in cordibus hominum. Ibi ergo lex extrinsecus posita est . . . , hic intrinsecus data est.” [There (on Sinai) the finger of God worked upon tables of stone: here (in the new law) upon the hearts of men. So there the law was set outside men . . . here it was given within them.] Translation by John Burnaby in Augustine: Later Works,

132  Vincent Carraud Library of Christian Classics 8 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955), 217. See also chap. 21 (Lex scripta in cordibus), which quotes Jeremiah 31:33 and again contrasts the external and internal gift of the law (forinsecus/intrinsecus; Vivès edition, 30:151 and 157). 72.  On the Spirit as at once donum and datum, see the remarkable Augustinian synthesis of Peter Lombard, Sententiae, L. I, dist. xviii (Grottaferrata, Italy: Collegii S. Bonaventurae Ad Claras Aquas, 1971), I, II, 152–­59. 73.  After Fulbert Cayré, “Le sens et l’unité des Confessions de saint Augustin,” Année Théologique Augustinienne 13 (1953): 13–­32, and O’Donnell, Confessions, 3; see also the clarification by Christof Müller in “Der Geist als pondus der Hinkehr und Rückkehr zu Gott” and “Die eschatologische Ruhe als Zielpunkt der Heimkehr,” in Die Confessiones des Augustinus von Hippo: Einführung und Interpretationen zu den dreizehn Büchern, ed. Nobert Fischer und Cornelius Mayer (Freiburg-­Basel-­ Wien: Herder, 2004), 632–­47. 74.  The formula belongs to Jean Dagens, from the Congrès International des Études Françaises in 1951; it is cited by Philippe Sellier in his introduction to the journal volume Le siècle de saint Augustin, XVII e siècle 135, no. 2 (1982): 99. 75. Jansen, in the foreword to his De interioris hominis reformatione oratio . . . , Discours de la réformation de l’homme intérieur, translated into French by Arnauld d’Andilly Paris, 1644, ed. 1675), 6–­7, contrasts with Augustine’s model of weight that of the gardening stake that straightens the tree: “Ainsi que les arbres que l’on plie avec grand effort, se remettent avec d’autant plus de violence dans leur état naturel, aussitôt que la main qui les tenait les laisse aller: de même, en un sens contraire, depuis que la nature humaine a été corrompue, et comme courbée par le péché, elle ne peut plus être redressée que par une force extrême; et aussitôt qu’on la laisse à elle-­même, et qu’on l’abandonne, elle se précipite par son propre poids dans le vice de son origine.” 76.  Questions inouïes, ed. André Pessel (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 239; see André Pessel, “Mersenne, la pesanteur et Descartes,” in Le Discours et sa méthode, ed. Nicolas Grimaldi and Jean-­Luc Marion (Paris: PUF, 1987), 163–­85. 77.  See, e.g., Sermo 96, 2 (Vivès edition, 17:88): “And do those who love themselves really have confidence in themselves? They begin, you see, by foresaking God to love themselves, and then are driven out of themselves to love what is outside themselves; so that this same apostle, after saying, ‘People will be lovers of self,’ very precisely goes on immediately to add, ‘lovers of money.’ Now, you can see that you are outside yourself. You have begun to love yourself. Stay in yourself, if you can” [Et numquid qui amat se, fidit in se? Incipit enim deserto Deo amare se, et ad ea diligenda quae sunt extra se, pellitur a se: usque adeo ut cum dixisset idem Apostolus: Erunt homines se ipsos amantes, continuo subjiceret, amatores pecuniae (2 Tim. 3, 2). Iam vides quia foris es. Amare te coepisti; sta in te, si potes]. Translation, with modification, of Edmund Hill in Sermons 94A–­147A, in The Works of Saint Augustine III/4, 31.

Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love   133 78.  See, in particular, Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-­Love in St. Augustine. It would remain to define what “self ” means in Augustinian self-­love. It is not certain that there is an Augustinian concept of the ego. One will not confuse it, in any case, with the distinctive feature, the pecularity, etc. See also Jean-­Luc Marion, Au lieu de soi, chap. 6, and my Invention du moi (Paris: PUF, 2009). 79.  This is why it seems to me that one should not accord too much to the famous division that organizes the two cities, in De civitate Dei, XIV, xxviii (BA 35, 464, trans. Dyson): “Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self ” [Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, caelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui; Deux amours ont donc fait deux cités]. In fact, it is worth noting on the one hand that it is by loving God that self-­love can be just and, as Pascal says, “well-­ordered,” while self-­love without love of God turns into self-­hate (on this point see Jean-­Luc Marion, Au lieu de soi, §42). In addition this text aims not at developing a doctrine of self-­love, a fortiori of the self, but at recapitulating the established components of the concept of city.

four

The Open Self Augustine and the Early Medieval Ethics of Order

willemien otten

I n t ro d u c t i o n : T h e T h e r a p y o f D e s i r e and the Desire for Ther apy

When I first encountered Martha Nussbaum’s classic study The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics in 1994, the book immediately hit a nerve.1 This has been the case more often with her literary-­ philosophical works, such as Love’s Knowledge or The Fragility of Goodness,2 as Nussbaum’s peculiar sleight of hand in bending the rules of the philosophical trade often makes for an insightful contribution to the mechanics of that trade. Still, the intuitive impact of The Therapy of Desire proved especially strong, as I recognized the same combination, if not overlap, of knowledge and self-­knowledge in my own work on the early Middle Ages. Provoked by Nussbaum to pursue my diagnostic study of that era, I found myself especially envious of the successful association with which she 135

136  Willemien Otten

managed to make a difficult, even hermetic field suddenly resonate with contemporary, even postmodern, interests that seemed at first sight to go against her scholarly discipline. For the book’s success, at least to the extent that I could detect it at the time, was related in part to the interest in self-­ help books so prevalent today. This interest was—­and still is—­so overwhelming that not even an Oliver Sacks could quench people’s thirst for therapy at the same rate that he could churn out interesting case studies about them. Nussbaum’s book seemed to benefit from the subtle yet effective contrast it drew—­whether or not consciously—­between the “therapy of desire” as a theme driving late ancient thought and the overpowering “desire for therapy” that appears to drive contemporary popular culture. Having sensitized me to the intricate interplay between the past and the present of Western culture, Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire has remained a helpful companion as I try to zoom in on the distinctiveness of early medieval thought.3 Its reading reveals how the successful uncovering of the message of the past relies in part on whether our own culture can be made conducive to its reception. Ultimately it is our present culture’s deep desire for therapy, as I have tentatively concluded, that aided Nussbaum in making some less-­known philosophers long considered second-­tier luminaries to Plato and Aristotle suddenly remarkably relevant. But is there no catch involved—­as I continue my analysis of Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire in light of my early medieval project—­in capitalizing on the fortuitous chemistry between one’s chosen topic and its contemporary resonance? Seen from my perspective as an intellectual historian, there lurks the methodological danger that one will end up begging the question. Abstracting from Nussbaum’s case for a moment, let us imagine the following scenario: One observes a trend in contemporary Western society and draws a parallel with a past historical period, whereafter one decodes the thought of that period through association with its contemporary manifestation. As long as one’s aim is to use historical parallel for the purpose of elucidating a contemporary problem, this procedure may be well and good, but how does one prevent historical inquiry from becoming so overshadowed by present-­day resonances that it provides a reputable pedigree to current questionable trends? While a Gadamerian fusion of intellectual horizons may benefit the deeper historical analysis of particular themes or topics—­one may think here of “the body” or of “alternative Christianities”—­and in this way can lead to

The Open Self   137

exciting new results, a lack of hermeneutical precision risks obstructing rather than furthering the progress of historical inquiry. A productive example of such a fusion of horizons is Margaret Miles’s Plotinus on Body and Beauty, in which Miles restyles the Neo-­ Platonic philosopher as a thinker of the body as much as of the soul, while there are visible contours of what is potentially a counterproductive case in Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities, as the author’s interest in Gnostic texts seems proportionate to his critical rejection of institutional Christianity.4 Bringing thus the problem of hermeneutical blurring to bear on Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire, one begins to fathom how difficult it is to untie what Hellenistic philosophers attempted to express historically (the therapy of desire) from the contemporary trends with which they resonate (the desire for therapy). But if historical reception and contemporary resonance are so closely intertwined, what role is left in the end for the alterity of history? Such questions may be further pursued in pertinent debates about Hellenistic philosophy. The broader historiographical point at issue for me, rather, is to what extent the notion of a therapy of desire can be further nuanced and enriched by bringing it in conversation with Pierre Hadot’s “philosophy as a way of life” or Michel Foucault’s “care of the self ” or “techniques du soi.”5 Nussbaum herself appears merely to telescope Hadot’s and Foucault’s approaches, suggesting a contrast between the cultural-­historical approach of these interpreters and her own approach to Stoicism taken as a professional philosophical analysis centered on the dignity of human reason. This immediately raises the question of where the dignity of human reason is historically located, both in terms of the Stoicism she studies and in terms of her own philosophical convictions. Irrespective of whether Nussbaum does justice to Hadot and Foucault, my fear is that her view is ultimately based on an imprecise distinction between (variable) culture and (stable) philosophy that is both too schematic and too anachronistic to withstand criticism.6

N u s s bau m , Au g u s t i n e , a n d t h e Ea r ly M i d d l e Ag e s

As already indicated, my ulterior reason for putting these and other questions to Nussbaum’s study is to find a better entry point into the

138  Willemien Otten

intellectual thought of the early Middle Ages. Rather than on Hellenistic philosophy and the period of (late) antiquity, my research has focused on the period immediately following it, stretching roughly from Augustine in the fourth century to Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard in the twelfth. In an interesting twist, reflective of a prejudice that has colored post-­Enlightenment historiography more widely, the thought of most thinkers in this era, if not labeled outright as Christian Platonism,7 is generally perceived as theological rather than philosophical.8 These and other characterizations have led scholars to see this period as an age of exegesis rather than of Christian thought per se, especially since it was followed by the more rationally sophisticated era of Scholasticism. Be that as it may, I have been consistently fascinated by the period’s rich and unique blend of scriptural, moral, spiritual, and literary inquiry. Rather than displaying a lack of reason, it always seemed to me as if pre-­Scholastic authors typically put forth their views of God, self, and the universe in an integrative and, for lack of a better term, theologizing, fashion. However, my reason for drawing on Nussbaum for my own project has deeper roots than the historiographical interplay of past and present or a conflicting philosophical comparison between two consecutive cultural epochs. What is ultimately at stake for me is whether, and if so how, one can pass intellectual judgment on the achievement of a culture under examination. What is it, in other words, that makes a culture worthy of our admiration, and on what grounds do we make such decisions? Specifically, how do we measure what counts and what is discounted when evaluating the culture of a past historical period? And how do we even make such judgments without the aid of a clear analogy between past and present? From reading her Therapy of Desire it appears that Nussbaum does not have a very high opinion of Christianity’s potential for creative thought. She generally overlooks its influence, discussing Augustine’s ethics in passing as belonging merely in the religious, as opposed to the scientific, Platonic camp.9 Her dismissive characterization represents an older but still familiar historical judgment that sees the general shift from Greco-­Roman to Christian culture in late antiquity as accompanied by a steep intellectual decline of sorts, if not itself expressive of one.10 While in her later Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions Nussbaum pays explicit attention to Augustine, whom she there regards as both a disciple

The Open Self   139

and a critic of the Platonic ascent, her judgment remains invariably negative, as she considers his primary philosophical accomplishment to be the devaluation of worldly suffering.11 While there is ample precedent for Nussbaum’s viewpoints both inside and outside the orbit of Augustine studies, that is, to see Augustine as a Platonist or an incorrigible pessimist, what I consider more problematic about them is the undifferentiated combination underlying her view of Christian culture. Close to dismissing Christianity’s intellectual aspirations outright, Nussbaum perceives them not just as derivative (of Platonic thought) but as morally homogeneous and intellectually unidirectional. Her pejorative view of Christian thought as lacking cultural complexity and sophistication can only help us so far, therefore, if we want to explain why early medieval culture after Augustine fell into neglect. After all, there is reason to believe that she deems Augustine’s philosophical contribution as itself overvalued. It may be obvious at this point that in my view the problem of cultural valuation and assessment cannot be solved without embracing a more complex notion of cultural transmission and development, for which we may well turn to Hadot and Foucault. The former has been especially eloquent in espousing the position that Western thought received its problems, themes, and symbols “in the form that was given to them either by Hellenistic thought, or by the adaptation of this thought to the Roman world, or by the encounter between Hellenism and Christianity.”12 Consequently, Hadot prefers “contamination” to influence (or lack thereof ) as the operative term for analyzing cultural change. He describes “the process according to which paganism or Christianity were [sic] led to adopt the ideas or the behaviors characteristic of their [sic] adversary” as allowing them to evoke and project a subtle web of interrelated strands of thought. As an instantiation of such a Hadotlike process of contamination in the Middle Ages, even if Hadot is not credited as the architect here, one may take Talal Asad’s analysis of Christian asceticism as mani­ fest in the sacramental teaching of Hugh of St. Victor or the Cistercian monasticism of Bernard of Clairvaux. Rather than reducing askesis to a sacrifice of the self, which is how Foucault—­in a move that predates Nussbaum’s anti-­Christian bias to some extent—­sets up the discipline involved in medieval Christian culture by way of contrast with the ancient care of the self, Asad regards medieval asceticism as a bending

140  Willemien Otten

of desire toward discipline and humility through a process that is largely voluntary and interpersonal.13 Despite its shortcomings, Nussbaum’s keen sensitivity to the moral implications of Hellenistic philosophy has caused her book to remain a useful guide for me, as I continue to want to bare the hidden fault lines of early medieval thought in terms of a “thick” mutation of cultural patterns rather than a straightforward cultural transition. I have always had a strong sense, for example, that the fact that the early medieval soul tends to contemplate God and the cosmos in tandem reflects a kind of moral commitment, thereby qualifying the notion of a distant divinity, whether seen as Platonic goodness or as the Christian-­Stoic nunc stans. Pre-­Scholastic texts seem almost universally to demand a dynamic partnership of all three (soul, cosmos, God) as a precondition for intellectual conversation, even if the nature of their Christian discourse makes these texts rather different from late antique therapeutic practice. For whereas the latter implies an active spiritual process, involving self-­medication and a role for the patient as part of the cure, pre-­Scholastic texts exhibit a stance that seems not just more passive but also remarkably “unselfconscious,” as if blotting out any sense of an intruding self, so that in the end even the moniker “contemplation” may be a devotional misnomer. Eager to discover what drove early medieval authors to develop their particular moral-­intellectual attitude, I am especially curious to understand why Christian authors after Augustine, who reflects the practice of late antique philosophy to no small degree,14 even if imperfectly by Nussbaum’s standards, chose by and large not to go down the path of introspection. When approaching Hellenistic philosophy and early medieval thought as consecutive, “uncontaminated” cultures, one is inclined to regard the Christian God of mercy as ideally suited for such a “therapeutic” turn. And yet this is not borne out by the textual evidence. If we use Nussbaum’s analysis as a measuring rod, the receptive and seemingly dispassionate attitude of later Christian thinkers like Eriugena and Anselm is almost impossible to fathom, inasmuch as they do not engage overt therapeutic strategies. Approaching Hellenistic philosophy and early medieval thought as overlapping stages in a broader, Hadotlike process of cultural transmogrification and spiritual osmosis, however, we may well reach a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of both eras. For one thing, such an approach permits us to see them as jointly anchored

The Open Self   141

in the paradigmatic practice of exercitatio mentis, with which Augustine was so deeply concerned.15 While we may thus turn Augustine into a close ally of Hellenistic philosophy, as his Cassiciacum works show him moving his own soul closer to God, the difference from his early medieval Christian successors will loom only larger insofar as the latter betray an almost casual negligence toward the cultivation of moral leadership or the spiritual appropriation of the ideas discussed by them. It is as if early medieval theological thought, marked by distance and disinterest rather than community and compassion, only rarely rises above the didactic. In this chapter I defend the thesis that the affective distance and spiritual decentering of the self that permeates early medieval theological thought is not to be mistaken for a symptom of the period’s cultural decline but reflects instead a deeply Augustinian dynamic. Augustine’s works, I argue, are the key that can help us unlock the important yet mysterious cultural transition from early Christianity to the Middle Ages as one that hinges in part on the interrelatedness of knowledge and self-­knowledge.

T h e T ro p o lo g i ca l T u r n o f t h e Ea r ly M i d d l e Ag e s

Given Augustine’s association of sinfulness with sickness and conversion with convalescence, a diagnostic model that resurfaces about a century later in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, it remains an intriguing puzzle why the early Middle Ages did not develop the penchant for introspection, present in mature form in Augustine’s Confessions, further in the direction of the therapy of desire. Since the cultural decline following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire would only have intensified the cry for reform and reorientation, such a development would seem merely reasonable. And yet it is not until the twelfth century that the concept of interiority comes to occupy the important place that is commonly associated with medieval contemplation.16 Part of the reason for this development, I argue, derives from the oeuvre of Augustine himself. His use of medical metaphors in the Christological sphere and his novel sense of conversion as convalescence aside,17 it seems as if Augustine was ultimately less interested in the precise diagnostics of healing (of both his own and others’ selves) than he was in coaxing and persuading his readers

142  Willemien Otten

through a combination of logic, eloquence, and moral persuasion. Consequently, his cultural and rhetorical effect—­immediate and long-­term—­ came to outlast his pastoral influence. Given Hadot’s concept of cultural contamination, moreover, it is indeed likely that the fraught and dispassionate early medieval attitude toward the self reflects certain Augustinian complexities and tensions that gained cultural traction once filtered through the prism of exercitatio mentis as a collective mentality rather than an individual mindset. A key element of Augustinian exercitatio mentis as it impacted early medieval culture lies in Augustine’s programmatic integration of the technical study of the liberal arts with the meditative art of biblical exegesis, propounded especially in De doctrina Christiana. In my view the effect of this fusion for early medieval thought has so far been greatly underestimated.18 As a result of the unique simultaneity of mastering the arts and engaging in exegetical meditation, an early medieval attitude emerged that was both reflective and discursive, thereby connecting Gregory the Great not just with Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux but also with Eriugena and Peter Abelard. Remaining remarkably unselfconscious, however, this early medieval attitude is seemingly at odds with the inward self of Augustine’s Confessions, whose enchantment so lures our contemporary religious imagination. In further agreement with Hadot’s notion of cultural contamination, we should emphasize that Augustine’s own intellectual position, while robustly Christian, is neither a reaction to Roman culture nor a condemnation of it, as if his conversion single-­handedly sealed that culture’s fate. While obviously Christian, his position was fully of a piece with ancient culture,19 even if it would bend it in an altogether new direction. Due to the complexity of the process of cultural osmosis, however, to which Augustine was subject, it also allows for readings from different historical perspectives, which is what I am attempting here. The early medieval reading of Augustine that I want to retrieve obviously differs from the historical analyses that are the hallmark of various Augustine biographies. More problematic perhaps than the shift of direction implied by my approach, as we switch from cause to effect so to speak, that is, from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, is the fact that the early medieval reading of Augustine deemphasizes the centrality of love (caritas) that, together with the aforementioned attention to interiority, so informs many an Augustine interpretation.20 And yet there is

The Open Self   143

precedent for placing Augustine at some distance from his conventional reception as theological architect of the Western tradition with its heavy emphasis, if not on love and self-­knowledge, then certainly on sinful self-­ awareness. Following a hint by H.-­I. Marrou, with faint echoes in Peter Brown, we may see Augustine as representing the end of antiquity as well as foreshadowing also, if not laying out, the “outillage mental ” of the Middle Ages, with the latter seen not in terms of loss or deficiency but as its own cultural project.21 More recently Robert Markus has advocated a similar position, although on rather different grounds, as he argues in The End of Ancient Christianity that the early medieval worldview can be comprehended only on the basis of a proper understanding of Augustine’s theological development on sin and grace.22 Thus the tradition of Augustine scholar­ship gives sufficient reason to try to understand him in close connection with the cultural outlook that would dominate the future of his age. Based on these and other arguments, I want to qualify the intellectual attitude of the pre-­Scholastic early Middle Ages here not as contemplative but as tropological or cogitative, in an attempt to foreground its characteristic coinherence of scriptural exegesis and moral-­intellectual persuasion. It needs no further comment that I consider the inclusive nature of this outlook as uniquely Augustinian. As a result of this tropological turn, I further argue, early medieval theology never developed an explicit ethical or therapeutic interest comparable to the Hellenistic philosophy of late antiquity (which was continued in the theurgical setting of later Neoplatonism) or absorbed the budding interest in urban lay ethics pursued by Ambrose in his De officiis.23 One has to wait until the twelfth century before Christian thought becomes truly engaged in independent ethical reflection, for both clerics and laypeople, and when it does, it has a hard time coming out from under its Augustinian spell. A good example of both the new ethical trend and the difficulty entailed in embracing it is Peter Abelard’s Ethica. While in it the author treads new moral ground, the old meditative paradigm has not completely lost its grip, as the work’s surprising subtitle is Scito teipsum (Know thyself ).24 But if this early medieval, tropological mindset inaugurated by Augustine—­even though Boethius and Gregory the Great breathe simi­ lar air—­is not therapeutic in the Hellenistic sense, and characterizing it

144  Willemien Otten

as exercitatio mentis only sketches its contours, what is its meaning?25 In what follows I try to answer this question by working my way historically backward. Starting with a section on Abelard’s ethics and the change back to ethics—a Christian first—that he initiates, I next unpack how textual evidence from the period between Augustine and Abelard contains differentiated levels of discourse even if it collapses them all onto a single plane of cogitation. The goal of my analysis is to disclose how early medieval cogitation is held together by an underlying sense of order (ordo) in which ethics, epistemology, and exegesis are found loosely, that is, nondoctrinally, but closely interwoven. It is this underlying order that gave early medieval thought not only its structure but also its meaning. Realizing this is of great help in explaining why the early Middle Ages see the Augustinian exercitatio mentis burgeon into a self-­reflexive web of cogitatio rather than contracting to a focused cogito. I thus hope to reveal that the Augustinian cogito not only need not be read in connection with Cartesian argument26 but can also gain powerful new, if no less relevant, meaning when read against the background of early medieval cogitation.

C lo s i n g i n o n t h e S e l f : A b e l a r d i a n E t h i c s a n d t h e E n d o f t h e T ro p o lo g i ca l T u r n

Abelard is not among the medieval authors typically associated with medieval Neo-­Platonism. But just as there is considerably more Augustinianism in Abelard than one would suspect,27 there is likewise more Platonism. This is mostly the result of a continuous tradition of Platonic lore, stretching roughly from late antiquity (Chalcidius, Macrobius) to the twelfth century. Its presence colors many early medieval discussions, as it jointly touches on the nature of the divine and the perceived in­ade­ quacy of human language. The twelfth century is the era in which it is most influential, and Abelard is among its most crucial representatives, since he is a witness not just to its presence but also to its eventual disappearance. He frequently taps into Platonic material in his theological works when discussing the problems of the Trinity. The identification of the World Soul with the Holy Spirit is an important example in this respect,28 as is the idea that theological language revolves around approximations of the divine rather than the representation of reality.29 Similar

The Open Self   145

ideas can be found in the Chartrian cosmology of Thierry of Chartres or William of Conches.30 And yet, when Abelard writes his Ethics he is not engaging his Platonic heritage as much as drawing on an age-­long tradition of monastic spirituality and reflection. For, contrary to what one might have expected, it is the tropological rather than the therapeutical mentality that informs the introspective subtitle of this work: Know Thyself. While in and of itself this subtitle might reveal Abelard to be interested in some kind of self-­searching, there is quite a difference between doing so for reasons of self-­knowledge in a therapeutic setting (as Nussbaum’s Hellenistic philosophers did) and doing so out of the desire to scrutinize human intentionality. Abelard is evidently interested in the latter, as is well known from other works in which he likewise assesses human motives, such as his Dialogue between a Jew, a Philosopher and a Christian, which explores various eudemonistic ideals ( Jewish, philosophical, Christian). This makes the question of why he pushes the theme of self-­knowledge in his Ethics all the more pressing.31 It may be that Abelard found the dialogue form useful in teaching, his main trade, but less suitable to baring his own soul. And yet, precisely on that point, there appears to be a great difference from Augustine, for to what extent is Abelard ever capable of really baring his soul?32 One way to get at the difference between Augustinian and Abelardian introspection may be to take a closer look at the changed notion of “confession.” In Augustine, as is well known, confession indicates first of all praise of God, as in the Confessions’ opening lines: “You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised (Ps. 47:2): great is your power and your wisdom is immeasurable” (Ps. 146:5). Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you, a human being “bearing his mortality with him” (2 Cor. 4:10), carrying with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you “resist the proud” (1 Pet. 5:5). Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.33 In Abelard’s Ethics, by contrast, the notion of confession seems to have contracted to the confession of sins only.34 Abelard comments that there

146  Willemien Otten

are three things that are necessary for a sinner to be reconciled to God: repentance, confession, and satisfaction.35 In what represents a significant turning point in medieval ethical development, as the individual becomes detached from the protective fold of the Church, Abelard goes so far as to allow for the omission of confession altogether. Quoting Ambrose’s Commentary on Luke, he argues that in the case of St. Peter, who betrayed the Lord, the apostle’s very tears made any oral confession redundant, which is why it is not related in Scripture: However, it should be known that sometimes by a wholesome dispensation confession can be avoided, as we believe was true of Peter, whose tears over his denial we know, although we do not read of other satisfaction or of confession. Whence Ambrose on Luke says of this very denial by Peter and of his weeping: “I do not find what he said; I find that he wept. I read of his tears; I do not read of his satisfaction. Tears wipe away a wrong which it is disgraceful to confess with one’s voice and weeping guarantees pardon and shame. Tears declare the fault without dread, they confess without prejudice and shame. Tears do not request pardon but deserve it. I find why Peter was silent, namely lest by asking for pardon so soon he should offend more.”36 It is hard not to associate the biblical Peter here with Peter Abelard himself, whom St. Bernard once derided as the author of a new gospel by that name, or to miss the remarkable personal overtones of St. Peter’s lamentation as applying to Abelard’s authorial self. Even more remarkable, however, is the changed nature of confession, whose role in Abelard shifts not just from an institutional requirement to an individual need but also from an important building block in a larger cosmic framework integrating God and the self to an issue at the individual’s personal discretion. As a result, the former integration of church and universe hangs in the balance, dependent as it henceforth is on the individual’s own assent and actualization, with the possibility of his surreptitious exclusion always looming.37 What we encounter here in Abelard marks, in my view, the beginning of a change toward a deontological ethical stance, with room built in for social circumstance and individual variation. Yet what makes him such a fascinating author—­and here the work’s subtitle is acutely relevant—­is

The Open Self   147

that at the same time that Abelard launches into a more scientific, Scholastic direction, we are also witness to his remarkable failure to push things further in that same direction. It is as if the former tropological hold on the self is too strong to simply surrender to the fresh look of philo­sophical therapy or personal self-­betterment.38 While Abelard’s Ethics does not crest in a Scholastic ethical manual, then, it also does not offer us the kind of self-­knowledge that we would today recognize as Augustinian introspection. Instead Abelard seems to lay down exemplary rules for the individual to use to scrutinize his or her mind, almost as if the self of any one person could be exchanged for that of another. This kind of formulaic (rather than formal) introspection reminds us of the way in which early medieval authors, starting with Augustine’s famous analysis in Book I of The City of God 39 and continuing until and beyond Abelard, were accustomed to identifying suicide with homicide. A similar attitude underlies Bernard Silvestris’s contemporary poem Mathematicus.40 We must therefore conclude that for Abelard ethics, even when presented in a more introspective and deontological guise, coincides in the end with a meditative moral epistemology, whereby it little differs whether this epistemology concerns knowledge of self or knowledge of others. True self-­reflection, of the kind that coincides with a desire for therapy in Nussbaum’s sense, does not enter into the equation. From the perspective of Christian theology it is tempting to circumvent problems here by simply referring all knowledge back to its fount, that is, the divine Trinity, with the argument that for medieval thinkers all knowledge naturally culminates in knowledge of God, and personal self-­ knowledge does not carry the same weight. A more bewildering historical problem for our post-­Enlightenment and postmodern age, however, is that we do not really know what knowledge of God entailed for someone like Abelard. Although on the surface the goal of medieval Christian culture is to reach (and teach) knowledge of the triune God, and this goal generally differentiates medieval thinkers from Nussbaum’s Hellenistic philosophers, what remains an open question is whether in the case of Abelard’s Ethics this stated goal indeed provides the answer to his incipient introspective explorations or whether it is what brought on the drive for introspection in the first place. This is precisely the ambiguity that I see inherent in the tropological turn of the early Middle Ages. If anything, early medieval thought seems premised on the idea that God and

148  Willemien Otten

the soul are somehow joined in a mutual embrace that falls neither under the desire for therapy nor under the therapy of desire because in it desire and therapy have so converged that they are locked in a kind of circular embrace and ambulation.

Towa r d a R e t ro s p e c t i v e Pa r a d i g m f o r t h e Ea r ly M i d d l e Ag e s : T h e O p e n S e l f

What, then, constitutes the moral paradigm of early medieval culture prior to Abelard? The thought of the period, while indeed of a theologizing nature, is typically characterized by scholars as either monastic or Platonic. Yet such scholars rarely comment on the connection between these two traditions, being content instead with their uneasy coexistence. The question of the intriguing relationship among Augustine, John Scottus Eriugena, and Anselm may serve as an illustration. While there are various ties between Augustine and Anselm, these are usually taken to represent two distinct diachronic traditions. There is the matter of a shared affective vocabulary, on the one hand, which is Augustinian and monastic and comes out especially in Anselm’s prayers, and there is the epistemological device of illumination, on the other, which is roughly Platonic and seems to be found in the Proslogion, although the latter observation is not unproblematic.41 But aside from such standard claims, there have been few attempts at a structural exploration of their precise interrelatedness. Ties between Augustine and Eriugena are altogether more formally portrayed. Augustine is among Eriugena’s most quoted authorities, which accords with his general Platonic mindset, but scholarly consensus has it that Eriugena’s interest lies rather with the Platonism of Eastern theology.42 A difficulty here is that, since Eriugena was keenly aware of the divergence of his Eastern and Western sources, he took precautions to safeguard their seamless integration. With Augustine and Pseudo-­ Dionysius never contradicting each other in his main work, the Periphyseon,43 it is not easy to prove, and it may not even be true, that Eriugena prefers East to West.44 Ties between Eriugena and Anselm, finally, have to my knowledge not been explored,45 although it would probably not be difficult to achieve scholarly agreement on their shared Platonic outlook. Such agreement

The Open Self   149

would make the case for a material connection between them even stronger perhaps than such a connection between Augustine and Anselm. I am thinking here especially of the relationship between the subtle phrasing and the asymptotic probing of Anselm’s ontological/grammatical argument in the Proslogion and Eriugena’s experimental dialectic of kataphatic and apophatic theology in the Periphyseon, especially when applied to nothingness/nihil as a divine superlative. While similarities and parallels between various key early medieval theologians thus seem to abound—­and others like that between Boethius and Alan of Lille could be added to the mix here—­the early medieval period as a whole remains characterized in abstract and schematic categories (e.g., Platonic versus monastic) and is underinvestigated as to what constitutes its own intellectual culture, even if that culture is admittedly diffuse. Interestingly, the greatest divergence separating various groups of early medieval authors concerns precisely the meaning of the self. Whereas Augustine and Anselm can be grouped together as advocating a view of the self that is somehow centered and introspective, for authors like Eriugena or the Chartrians the inward view of the self retreats before an outward view of cosmic nature. It is at this point that I want to revisit the extraordinary success of Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire. For is it not possible that the tropological turn of the early Middle Ages has not yet been appreciated to its full extent because it has somehow fallen victim to its own success story, namely the success story of Western spirituality? For a case can be made that Jean Leclercq’s Love of Learning and the Desire for God has served as a kind of spiritual alternative to, and even forerunner of, the therapeutic key with which Nussbaum unlocked the secrets of Hellenistic philosophy.46 If we look back to the early medieval period from Abelard’s twelfth-­century position, understanding him as striving indeed for a deeper, more personal sense of ethical scrutiny—­however exemplary and imperfect—­it seems that Leclercq has highlighted the experiential quality of early medieval spirituality at the expense of attention to its rhetorical framework.47 Pushing this analysis even further, one may argue that the focus on spirituality has caused the embeddedness of early medieval thought, what Burcht Pranger in Bakhtinian terms has called the monastic chronotope,48 to become artificially severed from the cosmic order in which the monastery and the self were once jointly nested.

150  Willemien Otten

The aim of my analysis here is not just to affirm the need to see things in proportion, although that is essential for an integral appreciation of early medieval discourse, but to give proper acknowledgment to the overriding sense of order and balance that this discourse steadfastly implies and without the understanding of which it cannot be fully grasped. It literally makes no difference whether we are dealing with the Platonic notion of cosmic reditus in Eriugena or with Anselm’s intimate, prayerful plea to God to reform his defiled soul in the opening chapter of his Proslogion, as the nature of their divergence, that is, of the soul or self from God in Anselm and of cosmic nature from God in Eriugena, is from an early medieval perspective a mere optical illusion.49 God, self, and cosmos must inevitably come together because they jointly constitute the fixed regimen of divine order that constitutes the early medieval paradigm and whose rhythm spurs on and pulsates in early medieval reflection. Originating in Augustine’s notion of confession, where God, self, and cosmos are united but no longer animated by his patristic drive to protect creation from the void that preceded it or the evil that threatens it, early medieval discourse instead engages the three main actors in what appears to be a self-­propelling conversation. The prime characteristic of the early medieval conversation is thus that it is always about “itself ” rather than about the human self, who is just one of its participants, or about God, or nature, and that it is conducted wholesale rather than spread out over fragmented quaestiones that gained currency in and especially after the twelfth century. Why I prefer to speak of a tropological or cogitative rather than a therapeutic turn for this period is because it is through the joint task of biblical hermeneutics and cosmological study that pre-­Scholastic thinkers both reflect on the universe and reach out to God, never once taking the needs of the human self as their explicit point of departure. Why I speak of an early medieval “ethics” of order here is that, inherent in the notion of order that is assumed, God and the cosmos are related in such a way that humans remain able to make responsible choices. The innovative character of Abelard’s Ethics as an ethics of self should not blind us to the fact that he merely makes explicit what was present all along. Early medieval discourse is not as static as it is often imagined, inasmuch as authors are free to employ their own hermeneutical strategies to add moral depth to their texts. Such interpretive choices, made under the aegis of what is an unmistakably holistic worldview, are perhaps

The Open Self   151

best seen as the choices of an open self, with the monastery and the world serving as dynamic extensions of, rather than fixed loci for, the “I” that is at work in these texts. Their morality is mostly implicit, for, rather than presenting us with a sinful human before an omnipotent God, the moral purpose of these texts is simply to facilitate traffic and thus continue the conversation. Directed by recta ratio, all that early medieval texts strive to do is to maintain traffic control as they try to assign both God and the soul their proper place in the universe. Although early medieval thinkers see the fusion of creation and Creator mostly as a long-­term goal, placing it at the eschatological horizon, the notion of an “ethics of order” suggests that human beings are in this life called actively to think about their lives in such a way that the forces of evil will be held at bay. While early medieval authors may dispel evil through prayer, as exemplified in the penitential theory of monastic spirituality, on a deeper level they seem to rather want to integrate evil as part of a larger theological fabric of thought in which the boundaries between self and cosmos are fluid.50 Reflecting an interesting eschatological push and pull, early medieval authors strive to educate themselves through a fine mix of imagining the presence of evil while thereby banishing it at the same time. While on the deepest philosophical level there may well be a therapeutic aspect to their dealing with Angst, early medieval discourse does not center on the patient’s self-­medicating by mobilizing the forces of desire or, more noteworthy in the context of Christian spirituality, by ratcheting up the power of love. Given its ordered nature, early medieval rhetorical discourse, however amorphous and unwieldy it may appear, is in the end a product of the author’s rhetorical making and hence eventually under his control. Thus could occur what I consider to be one of the most significant features of the early medieval ethics of order, namely, that the remedy for sin and the antidote for the taedium of life collapse so as no longer to be distinguishable. A striking example surfaces in a passage from the final book of Eriugena’s Periphyseon, where we find him promoting the study of creation as pedagogy, a preparation for achieving the final reditus of God and the cosmos: “For in this manner of spiritual medicine God wanted to call back his image (i.e., man) both into itself and to Him, so that fatigued and trained by the tedium of mutable things, it would desire to contemplate the stability of immutable and eternal things, would ardently

152  Willemien Otten

hunger for the incommutable forms of true things so as to rest in their beauty without any variety.”51 While from a Platonic angle this passage may indicate a trite spiritual ascent, that is not what is most distinctive about it. God, the self, and the cosmos have come to hold each other so tightly here that ultimately it is not clear who is embracing whom.52 This precisely marks the complexity of the early medieval ethics of order, leading to its misperception as stagnant: given that the order encroaches on the final goal of the conversation in a manner that is as surreptitious as it is imperious, reaching the end goal of the conversation, that is, God, has become almost redundant.

T h e O p e n S e l f a n d Au g u s t i n e ’ s C o g i to

To come back now to the Augustinian cogito:53 It has been alternately understood as foreshadowing the Cartesian moment of anthropological concentration, where life hinges on the human mind instead of on God’s, or, formulated more recently by Jean-­Luc Marion, as precisely critical of any attempt by the intellect to move away from God, inasmuch as this results in inauthentic existence. The early medieval reading I propose here has the advantage of forcing out the dilemma of God versus self by bending the argument back to the broader dynamics of the open and embedded self. Not unlike the way that the well-­known opening sentence of Eriugena’s Periphyseon (“Often as I ponder and investigate, to the best of my ability, with ever greater care the fact that the first and foremost division of all things that can either be grasped by the mind or transcends its grasp is into things that are and things that are not, a general name for all these things suggests itself which is physis in Greek or natura in Latin”)54 contains in nuce his entire study plan of natura as including the divine and guided by reason, I consider the Augustinian cogito a similar rallying cry, namely, to enter on the path of cogitation, wherever it may lead. Seen in this light, the prime function of Augustine’s cogito, far removed from a rationalistic confession, is that it sets the dynamics of (early medieval) theologizing in unconditional motion, linking the soul to God as well as God to the soul, without a clear sense of direction as to the grounds on which or at whose initiative such connection occurs.

The Open Self   153

Reading the Augustinian cogito against the background of the open early medieval self leads us away from the argument’s content, foregrounding instead the issues of authorial ownership, both of the universe as created by God and of the human texts by which the conversation among God, self, and the universe is continued. In what seems to mark a fine line between conversation and competition in the architectural dynamics of the human and the divine minds, it is rhetorical agility and playfulness rather than doctrinal mettle that inform the early medieval reading of Augustine’s cogito. To sum up: Instead of revolving around any specific philosophical or (traditional) theological content, it is my contention that the Augustinian cogito, read from an early medieval perspective, injects God and humanity into a wider cosmic world whose givenness (not to be confused with contingency) both invites and demands constant reflection. The resulting cogitation is not aimed at forcing the reflexive subject to reorient itself properly to the divine, as if a tool for devotion, but rather reveals a loose enough structure to allow the conversation to draw the divine integrally into the spheres of self and cosmos, all the while making the self gain deeper meaning through the repetition implied by exercitatio mentis.

C o n c lu s i o n : T h e Ea r ly M e d i e va l E t h i c s o f O r d e r a s a n Au g u s t i n i a n C o n s t r u c t

It is well known that when the archerudite Jerome in the fourth century decided to withdraw to the Palestinian desert to lead an ascetic life, the need to part with his books was his greatest obstacle. In a famous dream he externalized his self-­doubt by presenting us with contrasting views of himself. “You lie. You are not a Christian, you are a Ciceronian,” was the divine verdict summarily passed on him, that is, according to the letter he wrote to Eustochium, a virgin who was herself contemplating an ascetic future and wanted to benefit from his advice.55 Jerome’s psychologically charged dream, in which he was visited by the devil, and the fact that he shared it in correspondence with a prospective ascetic—it can all easily qualify as a kind of Christian therapy of desire, as Jerome learns to bridle his scholastic desires through a strategy of spiritual sublimation. But even

154  Willemien Otten

if Jerome’s letter falls into this category, it is neither therapeutic in the way of Hellenistic philosophy nor cogitative in an early medieval sense. On the heels of Jerome, the standard early medieval treatment for such questions of desire seems to have been through the use of narrative rather than the exercise of philosophy. Not surprisingly, Jerome is also the author of the first Latin saint’s life, namely, the Life of St. Paul—­not the apostle, but a fictive forerunner of Antony in the desert—­as he wanted to claim the birth of asceticism for the Latin West rather than the Greek East. This kind of ascetic literature has clear moral overtones, as picked up astutely by Edith Wyschogrod’s Saints and Postmodernism.56 Instead of dismissing saints’ lives as samples of casual storytelling, Wyschogrod argues that they deserve to be scrutinized anew as persistent and programmatic calls to moral action. They are perhaps not self-­help books—­ although in Benedict’s recommendation of Cassian as monastic reading57 this function lurks just beneath the surface, inasmuch as Cassian’s mini-­ narratives in his Collationes operate on the interchangeability of saint and self 58—­but they certainly are help books. They allow medieval readers to model the kind of Christian life they want to lead on their favorite saint, as if thereby inculcating a kind of collective saintliness. By contrast, what I have argued here is that the more obvious kind of self-­help texts that one finds in the early Middle Ages, including monastic prayers, are perhaps not so introspective and therapeutic after all. That they are regarded as such is understandable enough, especially given the aspect of Christian devotion, which, set against the backdrop of a post-­ Enlightenment secular world, makes them spiritual delights to be cherished as representations of a larger spiritual reality now forever lost. But just as seventeenth-­century Dutch still-­life paintings do not necessarily give an accurate portrait of the average seventeenth-­century Dutch household, adding much by way of the painter’s technique and personal vision, in the same way one ought not to read the monastic/cosmic texts of the early Middle Ages too quickly as capturing the general spirituality of the age. It is not just that they are genre pieces but that the genre to which they belong has been too narrowly defined. As a result of the overwhelming success of Leclercq’s Love of Learning and Desire for God, continued in a way in Bernard McGinn’s marvelous series Classics of Western Spirituality, other avenues of research than the diachronic tradition of Christian spirituality have been left unexplored.

The Open Self   155

But what does it benefit us to point to the tropological turn, and its cultivation of an open and transparent self, as typical of the early medieval ethical mindset? If we suppose that something along the lines of what Nussbaum discusses in her Therapy of Desire lurks in the background of Christianity’s textual formation, even if it was never played out in the same philosophical categories, it is important first of all to widen the scope of the debate to allow for the integration of more diffuse kinds of (self-­)knowledge, typical of an era where self-­knowledge was never the prime goal. Following Hadot’s notion of knowledge as a way of life, it is clear that we should add exegesis, theology, and the liberal arts to reason and philosophy as the hodgepodge ingredients of early medieval thought in action. From a historical perspective, furthermore, I have been particularly interested in this chapter in bringing out that the early medieval ethics of order, which the tropological turn put firmly in place, begins with Augustine. To that end I want to advocate the need to study Augustine not just in terms of his intellectual sources or the inner consistency of his thought but also from the angle of his immediate successors and what they took from him. In my view, the yield of reading the early medieval Augustine is becoming sensitized to the moral-­intellectual fiber of Augustine’s thought as constructively linking the rational and the affective/spiritual dimensions of his thought, which have mostly been seen as separate. To become open to different resonances of the Augustinian cogito than the Cartesian or anti-­Cartesian dilemma, as I showed earlier, is but one concrete result. As an illustrative thought experiment, although I cannot expand on it here, one might look differently at Anselm’s proof for the existence of God.59 A keen sensitivity to its Augustinian impulse baptizes it as early medieval while setting it fundamentally apart from later medieval examples. Rather than seeing all proofs for the existence of God as outdated rational exercises, for which Kant declared Anselm’s ontological proof the archetypal model,60 one might regard Anselm’s proof as a paradigm all unto itself, a case of early medieval cogitation in complete synchronization with “itself.” Once unfolded, Anselm’s single argument that God is “that than which no greater can be thought” rolls out into the perfect art of arts, not just because in it different levels of language are found intricately collapsed, that is, the language of grammar as nested in that of

156  Willemien Otten

prayer, but because in the end they are reabsorbed into the single navel of the divine, so to speak, as a self-­enclosed call to jumpstart reflection and make it more efficient. In perfect harmony with the “it” of early medieval discourse, Anselm’s argument does not distinguish between human and divine authorship, as the proof seemed a miracle at the time even to its human author.61 Regarded as the most successful proof to this day, his is remarkably the only one for which authorial attribution in an Enlightenment manner seems well nigh impossible. Rather than looking at Augustine from the perspective of spiritual biography, as from an ascetic Neo-­Platonic thinker he grows into a mature Christian thinker, a difference often marked by the contrast between the dialogical Soliloquies and the intimately autobiographical Confessions, by reasoning back from the early medieval Augustine we may well get a better understanding of the integral connection between these two works. The same holds true for the connection between the first ten and the last three books of the Confessions. A layered, more complex notion of confession, opening up into the self as much as into the universe and allowing the first and last books to be integrally connected—­that is the kind of therapeutic message with which Augustine colored the outlook of the early Middle Ages as an ethics of order. The larger development of his thought notwithstanding, it seems to have mattered very little to Augustine whether he connected God, self, and cosmos via a Platonic and cosmological program, as in his early Soliloquies or De ordine; integrated them in the two halves of his prayerful Confessions; or erected new parameters for their convergence in the semiotic On Christian Doctrine. Since it was not in selective but in mixed form that Augustine was transmitted to the early Middle Ages, understandably early medieval authors would come to see this mix as the essence of his message. It never failed to spark their conversation. It is important to realize that early medieval conversation was neither conducted in a vacuum nor moving forward aimlessly. Rather, it is as if early medieval authors seized on a deeply eschatological notion of time as running alongside but distinct from the historical time reflecting humanity’s alienation from God, that is, the Augustinian distentio animi so familiar to us today. Their ultimate aim in this was to see if Augustine’s confession of the unity of God and self would hold even when projected on the large canvas of cosmic nature, whose holistic scope was no

The Open Self   157

less redemptive because it is sempiternal and near-­infinite. In fact, to make confession in the very breadth of natural creation was even more appealing to them, as the cosmos offers only more room for conversation. It is only by carrying out such conversation that creation, including the human creature, could slowly make its way back to the origin from which all things began and to which all things will return: God as both Creator and (Trinitarian) Confessee.62 Let me end with a quotation from Confessions 13.34.49 that captures the spirit pervading the early medieval ethics of order. It does so by dwelling not just on the eternity before time but on eternity as the speculum temporis, the mirror of time, which is the only fitting lens through which to contemplate dynamic reality itself: We have also considered the reasons for the symbolism in the fact that you willed created things to be made in a particular order or to be recorded in a particular order. And because particular things are good and all of them together very good, we have seen in your Word, in your unique Son, “heaven and earth,” the head and body of the Church (Col. 1:18), in a predestination which is before all time and has no morning and evening. . . . All these things we see, and they are very good, because you see them in us, having given us the Spirit by which we see them and love you in them.63

Not e s 1.  Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994; updated edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 2.  Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986; updated edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3.  I have done so with relation to Augustine in my chapter “The Reception of Augustine in the Early Middle Ages: Presence, Absence, Reverence and Other Modes of Appropriation (c.700–­c.1200),” in The Oxford Guide to the Reception of Augustine, ed. K. Pollmann (editor in chief ) and W. Otten (editor) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1.23–­39. 4.  Margaret Miles, Plotinus on Body and Beauty: Society, Philosophy, and Religion in Third-­Century Rome (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999); Bart D. Ehrman, Lost

158  Willemien Otten Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: Harper One, 2007), and The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Harper One, 1996). 5.  Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. M. Chase, ed. and intro. by Arnold Davidson (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995), esp. 1–­45; Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. R. Hurley (1986; New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1988), 37–­68. 6. Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 353–­54. 7.  On the various connotations of Christian Platonism, see my chapter “Platonism,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Julia Lamm (Oxford, UK: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013), 56–­73. 8.  This is all the more odd given that the difference between theology and philosophy is commonly regarded as a twelfth-­century development. 9.  See Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 18–­19. 10.  See, for this view, Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise and the Fall of Reason (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 11.  See Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 527–­56. In another galvanizing interchange between contemporary and past cultures, it seems as if Nussbaum’s rejection of original sin in Augustine and the equality of sin and wickedness that it implies is enhanced by her dislike of Hannah Arendt’s move to substitute Jewish virtue ethics with an embrace of the Augustinian position. Cf. H. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. and with an interpretive essay by J. V. Scott and J. C. Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). On p. 552 Nussbaum quotes from Love and Saint Augustine, 95–­97. 12.  See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 2. 13.  See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 125–­ 67 (reference to Foucault on p. 140). There are no explicit references to Hadot, although I would see Asad’s approach as generally closer to Hadot than to Foucault. For a different view of Hugh’s sacramentalism, see W. Otten, “Between Praise and Appraisal: Medieval Guidelines for the Assessment of Augustine’s Intellectual Legacy,” Augustinian Studies 43, no. 1 (2012): 1–­18. 14.  Peter Brown certainly uses the term “therapy” with regard to Augustine’s Confessions. See P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo (London: Faber and Faber, 1967): “The writing of the Confessions was an act of therapy” (p. 165), specified on p. 181 as the therapy of self-­examination. 15. On exercitatio mentis in Augustine, see H.-­I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (1958; Paris: Boccard, 1983), 299–­327.

The Open Self   159 16.  On interiority in the twelfth century, see Ineke van’t Spijker, Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). On p. 4 she makes an explicit connection with the ancient tradition. 17. For Augustine’s conversion as a state of convalescence, a continued dependence on treatment by “confession,” see Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 177. On the motif of Christus medicus in Augustine, see, e.g., Rudolph Arbesmann O.S.A., “The Concept of Christus Medicus in St. Augustine,” Traditio 10 (1954): 1–­28, and Thomas F. Martin, O.S.A., “Paul the Patient: Christus Medicus and the Stimulus Carnis (2 Cor. 12:7): A Consideration of Augustine’s Medicinal Christology,” Augustinian Studies 32 (2001): 219–­56. Augustine made use of this motif, especially in his preaching. 18.  Early medieval theology has been mostly studied as an exegetical tradition with little intellectual power of its own, as is clear in the following statement from H. de Lubac, S.J., in Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1, trans. M. Sebanc (1959; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 27: “As a result, theological science and the explication of Scripture cannot but be one and the same thing. In its most profound and far-­reaching sense this estimation of the situation remains true even to our own day. But in its stricter and more immediate sense, this idea flourished right to the eve of the thirteenth century.” 19. For a theoretical position on this problem, see my “Does the Canon Need Converting? A Meditation on Augustine’s Soliloquies, Eriugena’s Periphyseon, and the Dialogue with the Religious Past,” in How the West Was Won: Essays on Literary Imagination, the Canon, and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger, ed. W. Otten, A. Vanderjagt, and H. de Vries (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 195–­223. For a concrete approach to Augustine, in this case with a comparison to Cicero, see James Wetzel, Augustine: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Continuum, 2010), 11–­43 (chap. 1: “Death and the Delineation of Soul”). 20. For an argument that Augustine’s rhetorical and intellectual persuasion involves love in an integrated way, see Jean-­Luc Marion, Au lieu de soi: L’approche de Saint Augustin (Paris: PUF, 2008), 205–­60 (chap. 4) and 315–­87 (chap. 6). See also the reference in n. 24 for Marion’s exchange of love for thought in his Augustinian criticism of the Cartesian cogito. 21. See H.-­ I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 663–­ 77 (Retractatio). Marrou does not state in so many words that Augustine was the first medieval author, but he distances himself explicitly from earlier judgments of Augustine as a man of the dying and declining culture of late antiquity, viewing him as ready to launch something new. 22. See R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 45–­83 on Augustine’s defense of Christian mediocrity against Pelagian perfectionism. 23.  On Ambrosian ethics, see M. L. Colish, Ambrose’s Patriarchs: Ethics for the Common Man (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Of course

160  Willemien Otten this is not to say that ethical lay interest disappears; see, e.g., the handbook by Dhuoda, translated by Carol Neel as A Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for her Son (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). 24.  See D. E. Luscombe, ed., Peter Abelard’s Ethics (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1971). The most recent critical edition is by Rainer M. Ilger, ed., Scito te ipsum, CCCM 190 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). 25. For a fuller discussion of these contours, see my “Religion as Exercitatio Mentis: A Case for Theology as a Humanist Discipline,” in Christian Humanism: Essays Offered to Arjo Vanderjagt on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Z. R. W. M. von Martels and A. MacDonald (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 59–­73. 26.  Or gainsaying it, as Marion does in Au lieu de soi, 89–­148. 27.  See W. Otten, “Broken Mirrors: Abelard’s Theory of Language in Relation to the Augustinian Tradition of Redeemed Speech,” in Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish, ed. C. J. Nederman, N. van Deusen, and E. A. Matter, Disputatio 21 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 69–­87. 28.  Abelard’s Platonism is more complex and diffuse than previously thought, as he uses both the God-­Mind-­Soul triad and the God-­Archetype-­Matter triad to explain the World Soul’s relationship to the Holy Spirit. See Lesley Ann Dyer, “Veiled Platonic Triads in Abelard’s Theologia “Summi boni,” in Rethinking Abelard, ed. B. S. Hellemans (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 29.  On Abelard and his use of language, see Jean Jolivet, Arts du language et théologie chez Abélard (Paris: Vrin, 1969). See also my From Paradise to Paradigm: A Study of Twelfth-­Century Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 129–­81. That Abelard has a more unstable view of language goes back in part to his indebtedness to Boethius (rather than Augustine), for, like Boethius, he regards language as a matter of human convention rather than seeing it as a poor reflection of divinely endowed, and thereby fixed, essence. 30.  See my From Paradise to Paradigm, 44–­128. 31. On Abelard’s approach to ethics with relation to the theme of self-­ knowledge, see ibid., 182–­214. 32.  On Abelard’s capacity for self-­knowledge, see W. Otten, “The Bible and the Self in Medieval Autobiography: Otloh of St. Emmeram (1010–­1070) and Peter Abelard (1079–­1142),” in The Whole and Divided Self: The Bible and Theological Anthropology, ed. John McCarthy and David Aune (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 130–­57. 33.  Confessiones 1.1.1, ed. L. Verheijen, CCSL 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), 1: “Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde: magna virtus tua, et sapientiae tuae non est numerus. Et laudare te vult homo, aliqua portio creaturae tuae, et homo circumferens mortalitatem suam, circumferens testimonium peccati sui et testimonium, quia superbis resistis: et tamen laudare te vult homo, aliqua portio creaturae tuae. Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum,

The Open Self   161 donec requiescat in te.” The translation is taken from H. Chadwick, Saint Augustine: Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3. 34. For extensive commentary on this episode, see W. Otten, “In Conscience’s Court: Abelard’s Ethics as a Science of the Self,” in Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century, ed. I. P. Becjzy and R. G. Newhauser (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 53–­74. 35.  See Abelard, Scito te ipsum 1.51.2, CCCM 190: 51: “Tria itaque sunt in reconciliatione peccatoris ad deum necessaria: penitentia scilicet, confessio, satisfactio.” 36.  See Abelard, Scito te ipsum 1.67.1–­3, CCCM 190: 67: “Sciendum tamen nonnumquam salubri dispensacione confessionem uitari posse, sicut de Petro credimus, cuius lacrimas de negacione sua nouimus, satisfactionem uero aliam uel confessionem non legimus. Vnde et Ambrosius SUPER LUCAM [10:88 WO] de hac ipsa Petri negacione ac fletu eius: ‘Non inuenio, quid dixerit, inuenio quod fleuerit. Lacrimas eius lego, satisfactionem non lego. Lauant lacrime delictum, quod voce pudor est confiteri, et uenie fletus consulunt et uerecundie. Lacrime sine horrore culpam locuntur, since offensione uerecundiae confitentur. Lacrime ueniam non postulant et merentur. Inuenio, cur tacuerit Petrus, ne tam cito uenie petitio plus offenderet’ ” (trans. Luscombe, 101). 37.  Hence Abelard’s fear that his fate was not the will of God but the product of fortune. See Otten, “The Bible and the Self in Medieval Autobiography.” 38.  On the monastic overtones of Abelard’s ethics, see also M. B. Pranger, “Medieval Ethics and the Illusion of Interiority: Augustine, Anselm, Abelard,” in Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century, ed. Becjzy and Newhauser, 13–­32. 39. See Augustine, De civitate Dei 1.17–­27, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, CCSL 47 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), 18–­28. 40.  See A. Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol. 2: The Curse on Self-­Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 101–­21 (for Augustine), 200–­203 (for Abelard). On Abelard, who gives Augustine’s position in his discussion of suicide in Sic et Non 155 (ed. B. Boyer and R. McKeon [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976–­77], 518–­22), see pp. 200–­203. On the complex case of the Mathematicus, where the poem’s protagonist seems to opt for suicide in the end to avoid having to kill his own father, see Otten, From Paradise to Paradigm, 241–­55. 41.  See on this Lydia Schumacher, Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2011). 42.  See the various contributions in the conference volume Eriugena: East and West; Papers of the Eighth International Symposium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies, Chicago and Notre Dame, October 18–­20, 1991 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), esp. John Meyendorff ’s “Remarks on Eastern Patristic Thought in John Scottus Eriugena,” 51–­68. 43. G. d’Onofrio, “The Concordia of Augustine and Dionysius: Towards a Hermeneutic of the Disagreement of Patristic Sources in John the Scot’s Periphyseon,” in Eriugena: East and West, ed. McGinn and Otten, 115–­40, and W. Otten,

162  Willemien Otten “Eriugena and the Concept of Eastern versus Western Patristic Influence,” Studia Patristica 38 (Louvain: Peeters, 1993), 217–­24. 44.  This is the position I have espoused since writing my “Eriugena’s Periphyseon: A Carolingian Contribution to the Theological Tradition,” in Eriugena: East and West, ed. McGinn and Otten, 69–­93. 45. Giles E. M. Gasper, Anselm of Canterbury and His Theological Inheritance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), focuses mainly on Greek sources, mentioning (pp. 170–­ 71) only that Anselm probably knew Eriugena’s translation of Dionysius. 46.  See Jean Leclercq, O.S.B., The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. C. Misrahi (1961; New York: Fordham University Press, 1988). This study is one of the most powerful and popular introductions to the early medieval intellectual world. Its focus on spirituality and monastic life, while including the educational component, blocks out references to the world of nature and creation. 47.  In all fairness, it should be made clear that Leclercq does make allowance for liturgical conventions and situates the self inside the monastic sphere and arts curriculum, but his focus throughout remains on the lived Christian experience. 48.  See Pranger, “Medieval Ethics and the Illusion of Interiority,” 24–­25. 49. This is not unlike what Pranger in the above article calls the illusion of “inner” and “outer”; see ibid., 13–­32 et passim. 50.  Anselm’s notion of justice in his Cur Deus Homo may serve as a powerful example, for it applies both to the human self and to the cosmos as a whole, thereby strengthening the need for satisfaction. See, for instance, Cur Deus homo 1.15, in Opera omnia, vol. 2, ed. F. S. Schmitt (Rome, 1940), 73: “Quae cum vult quod debet, deum honorat; non quia illi aliquid confert, sed quia sponte se eius voluntati et dispositioni subdit, et in rerum universitate ordinem suum et eiusdem universitatis pulchritudinem, quantum in ipsa est, servat. Cum vero non vult quod debet, deum, quantum ad illam pertinet, inhonorat, quoniam non se sponte subdit illius dispositioni, et universitatis ordinem et pulchritudinem, quantum in se est, perturbat, licet potestatem aut dignitatem dei nullatenus laedat aut decoloret.” 51.  Periphyseon (PP) 5.959B, ed. E. Jeauneau, CCCM 165 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 139, ll. 4486–­92: “Eo enim modo spiritualis medicinae imaginem suam deus uoluit et in se ipsam et ad se ipsum reuocare, ut rerum mutabilium taedio fatigata et exercitata immutabilium aeternorumque stabilitatem contemplari desideraret, ardenterque uerorum incommutabiles species appeteret, in quarum absque ulla uarietate pulchritudine quiesceret.” 52.  On this passage see also my “The Parallelism of Nature and Scripture: Reflections on Eriugena’s Incarnational Exegesis,” in Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, the Bible and Hermeneutics, ed. G. van Riel, C. Steel, and J. McEvoy, Proceedings of the Ninth International Colloquium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies Held at Leuven and Louvain-­la-­Neuve, June 7–­10, 1995 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996), 81–­102, at p. 86.

The Open Self   163 53.  There are various versions of Augustine’s cogito. One may refer to Soliloquia 2.1.1, De beata vita 2.7, De libero arbitrio 2.3.7, De civitate Dei 11.26, and De Trinitate 10.10.14; 16. On Eriugena’s own cogito or intelligo me esse in Periphyseon 1.490B and 4.776B (not the opening phrase), see Brian Stock, “Intelligo me esse: Eriugena’s Cogito,” in Jean Scot Erigene et l’histoire de la philosophie, ed. R. Roques, Laon, July 7–­12, 1975 (Paris: CNRS, 1977), 327–­35. 54. See Iohannis Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon 1.441A, ed. E. Jeauneau (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996) CCCM 161: 3: “Saepe mihi cogitanti diligentiusque quantum uires suppetunt inquirenti rerum omnium quae uel animo percipi possunt uel intentionem eius superant primam summamque diuisionem esse in ea quae sunt et in ea quae non sunt horum omnium generale uocabulum occurrit quod graece ΦϒCIC, latine uero natura uocitatur.” 55. See Epistula 22.30 in S. Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae Pars I: Epistulae I–­LXX, ed. I. Hilberg, CSEL 54 (Vienna: Tempsky 1996), 189–­91, at 190, l. 12: Mentiris: Ciceronianus es, non Christianus. For a translation of this letter, see Ph. Schaff and H. Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-­Nicene Fathers: Second Series, vol. 6: Jerome: Letters and Select Works (1893; repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 22–­40. For this episode, see pp. 35–­36. 56.  See E. Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 57. See Regula Benedicti 42.3 and esp. 73.5, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981), 242 and 296. 58.  On Cassian, see my “Ideals of Community in Late Antiquity: John Cassian and Gregory the Great on Communicating Sanctity,” in Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Papers from “Verbal and Pictorial Imaging: Representing and Accessing Experience of the Invisible: 400–­1000” (Utrecht, 11–­ 13 December 2003), ed. G. de Nie, K. F. Morrison, H. L. Kessler, and M. Mostert, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 13 (Turnhout: Peeters, 2005), 121–­39. 59.  See esp. Anselm, Proslogion 2–­5, in Opera omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, vol. 1 (Rome, 1938–­), 102–­4. 60. See Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 21–­39. Kant sees Anselm’s argument as the ground of all possible theology, as it tries to establish the necessity of a highest being from mere concepts. He regards the cosmological and physicotheological proofs reducible to the ontological proof, which, because of its transcendental nature, fails to offer scientific knowledge that God exists. 61.  See Anselm, Proslogion, in Opera omnia, ed. Schmitt, 1, prooemium, p. 93: “Coepi mecum quaerere, si forte posset inveniri unum argumentum.” See also Eadmer, Vita sancti Anselmi 1.19, ed. and trans. R. W. Southern (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), 30: “Et ecce quadam nocte inter nocturnas vigilias Dei gratia illuxit in corde ejus, et res [the proof ] patuit intellectui ejus, immensoque gaudio et jubilatione replevit omnia intima ejus” [Then suddenly one night during matins the

164  Willemien Otten grace of God illuminated his heart, the whole matter became clear to his mind, and a great joy and exultation filled his inmost being] (trans. Southern, p. 30). 62. I have tried to bring out the contrast between early and late medieval conversation by contrasting Eriugena and Eckhart in W. Otten, “Le language de l’union mystique: Le désir et le corps dans l’oeuvre de Jean Scot Érigène et de Maître Eckhart,” Érigène: Les études philosophiques 113 (2013/1): 121–­41. 63. See Conf. 13.34.49, ed. Verheijen, CCSL 27, 271–­72: “Inspeximus etiam, propter quorum figurationem ista uel tali ordine fieri uel tali ordine scribi uoluisti, et uidimus, quia bona sunt singula et omnia bona ualde, in uerbo tuo, in unico tuo, caelum et terram, caput et corpus ecclesiae, in praedestinatione ante omnia tempora sine mane et uespera. . . . Haec omnia uidemus et bona sunt ualde, quoniam tu ea uides in nobis, qui spiritum, quo ea uideremus et in eis te amaremus, dedisti nobis” (trans. Chadwick, 303–­4).

five

Teachers Without and Within a d r i a a n t. p e p e r z a k

We owe everything to our teachers, but to whom do they owe what they know? And to what or whom do we owe the fact that we have been learning from them and still can? In his early De Magistro St. Augustine briefly states one of the most difficult and profound lessons about teaching and learning, to which he remained faithful in all his further work: We have only one teacher, who is in heaven. As we read in Matthew 23:10: “Magister vester unus est, Christus” [You have only one teacher, Christ].1 In order to understand this daring thesis, I first sketch a brief outline of Augustine’s conception of the learning process insofar as this involves us in a series of experiences with regard to truth. While doing so, I look back to some observations of Plato about learning in order to see how Augustine integrates some of Plato’s motifs into his own biblical context. To show how Augustine’s transformations of these motifs are retrieved eight hundred years later, at the height of medieval theology, I then turn to Bonaventure and his way of answering a few questions that stayed alive after Augustine. Within the allotted space it is not possible 165

166  Adriaan T. Peperzak

to present a complete phenomenology of their and our experiences with learning and teaching, but a reminder of the main stages might suffice for friends of Augustine and the Augustinian or—­more generally—­the Platonic tradition. Since the overall horizon within which one thinks is so decisive for all experience, description, and thought, one must be forgiven for emphasizing once more that the sophia philosophy loves cannot be the fruit of a merely scientific or theoretical—­ and in this sense abstract, emotionless, anti-­ subjective, “objective,” and anonymous—­approach. With Plato, Bonaventure, Pascal, and other giants of thought, Augustine reminds us time and again of the widest concrete and existential framework of our quest for truth by insisting that authentic philosophy is motivated by no other desire than that of perfect bliss: “Nulla est homini causa philosophandi nisi ut beatus sit” [The only incentive to philosophy is bliss].2 This implies that the value of knowledge—­and of the truth to which it opens the heart—­has very little to do with the satisfaction of our curiosity but instead depends on its integration into the overall wisdom (sapientia) of a well-­ordered life. The insights of such a life are rooted in a personal and communal history whose practical and emotional adventures have generated a well-­attuned attitude with a climate and a “music” of its own. Not only perspicacity and good taste, but also—­and more so—­an ethical and religious involvement, force us to develop appropriate manners of coping with the harsh and puzzling realities of our universe. They test the accuracy of our perceptive, imaginative, and conceptual perspectives and probe our willingness to prefer the very truth over imitations that seem more convenient. By reminding us of the religious and moral conditions of authentic discovery and research, that is, by implying that an adequate epistemology presupposes an authentic ethics, Augustine teaches us that true learning in the end—­and therefore also from the beginning—­is oriented toward the most serious, that is, the deepest and conclusive, form of truth, a truth wiser and stronger than all merely theoretical conquests. Thus he prolongs the Platonic heritage of philosophia as a quest for wisdom. At the same time, however, he maintains that it, as such, cannot reach its goal—­beatitude—­unless it finds its center, source, and outcome in Christ, whom Paul calls “the Power [dynamis, virtus] and Wisdom [sophia, sapientia] of God.”3

Teachers Without and Within   167 Learning

How does the search for truth begin? By initiation—­or rather by being seduced. Augustine uses the word “admonitio” to indicate the necessity of being drawn into a personal seeking of the truth by someone other, who already has experienced how important such seeking is. Someone, a teacher, must awaken me to discover the desirability of wisdom, show me a way, and encourage me to get engaged in the search. But if wisdom is one of the names of a fortunate life (vita beata) and if the desire for a fortunate life is inherent to being human, isn’t the desire for wisdom then constitutive of human existence as such? The search for wisdom thus seems to be inevitable. It is important to distinguish the admonition that triggers my decision to seek truth from the body of knowledge that, after my entrance into the realm of discovery, is handed on to me. Without being awakened and instructed, nobody would be able to assimilate parts of the culture accumulated in the course of history. We would not pursue the difficult work of learning if no one showed us the relevance of education. Admonition is an exhortative mode of addressing. As with all modes of addressing—­urging, instructing, summoning, commanding, and so on—­its relevance does not primarily lie in the content it communicates. The content of my addressing someone can be almost nothing, for example, when I direct my “Hello!” or “Hi!” to you. It is essential, however, that the addressor reach out and affect—­or “do” something to—­someone else, who thereby undergoes a certain change. When someone recruits me for participation in the ongoing search for truth, this endeavor can be distinguished from the teaching through which I am immersed in the content of a heritage I want to acquire. As soon as I have accepted an invitation to participate in the search for knowledge, new provocations are going to keep me alert and actively engaged. A teacher’s words not only affect the students; they also urge them to respond. Speaking to someone is always a provocation, even if the person reacts by walking away or falling silent. Answering in the form of a question or comment is the beginning of a dialogue, however. And dialogue is an ideal structure for the exchange between teachers and students if both parties are concerned about truth.

168  Adriaan T. Peperzak

Various levels and stations can be distinguished in such an exchange. Students are confronted not only with their teacher’s explanations, but at the same time with the realities and interpretations to which the teacher turns their attention. The students confront the teacher’s interpretation of the phenomena that are at stake with the phenomena of which they have their own experience. Their responses to the teacher’s affirmations develop a scale of reactions that run from repetition, paraphrase, and imitation to transformation, taking over the initiative, and experimental renovation. If, after a solid initiation, I must go on without a teacher, I continue the dialogue within the inner space and time of a “voiceless dialogue of the soul within itself,” as Socrates called it.4 But in all phases of the learning process, I remain involved in a complex and growing network of relations: relations to one or more teachers and, via these, to their teachers’ teachers and authorities; relations to the linguistic, cultural, intellectual, and scholarly traditions available; relations to other students and researchers who pursue similar objectives; and, above all, relations to my own interiority, where the words and thoughts of all those others not only echo, but also urge me to take a position toward their suggestions. All these relations together form a huge constellation of communication and multiple exchanges, but however much I can and must learn from them, in the end it is my own responsibility to determine my position with regard to the phenomena and the interpretations that are proposed to me. Until that moment, I keep a critical distance while asking myself whether my teachers’ views indeed fit the realities that are experienced by me as well as by them. Perhaps my experience is different from theirs, or perhaps their arguments show holes that still must be filled; they may have overlooked facts that shatter the coherence of their theories, or their descriptions and arguments may be inaccurate.

Beliefs and Timeless Truths

With regard to many subjects, I must realize that I am not able to correct my teachers because their erudition is more extended and their insights are more mature than mine. If I have valid reasons to recognize them as authorities, I will be inclined to believe what they say, because I do not yet have enough experience or background knowledge to “see” the truth

Teachers Without and Within   169

or untruth of their explanations. But will I ever have enough experience and thinking power to have a personal insight into all that is relevant? And what about my teachers? Mustn’t they likewise rely on a great deal of belief instead of “seeing” how things are? Insight is not belief, but rather a kind of mental seeing: an accurate, distinct, determinate view or sight that has depth and coherence. It contains more than impressions or spatiotemporal descriptions, because we want also to know what is “beneath” the surface, how things and events are structured, why they are as they are, why they exist at all, how they hang together in the universe, and, above all, what the meaning or meanings are of the universe and our lives in it. Insight thus presupposes that we discover invisible realities or elements of the reality, such as principles, structures, causes, or conditions that do not immediately appear, although their hidden but powerful reality is obvious when we think about the phenomena. Many of those principles and rules resist the question of when they began to exist because they are universally valid, independent of time and space. Without their power, however, nothing in time and space would be intelligible. Reason affirms their necessary and “a priori” existence—­“behind” the veil of truth, to use a dangerous metaphor. Dangerous because the metaphor has too often been misunderstood as a formula for two different worlds: a sensible world and a suprasensible, purely spiritual or “ideal,” one behind the phenomenal one, a Hinterwelt (or “backworld”), as Nietzsche would say. However, neither a merely visible or sensible, nor an invisible, merely rational, world would be a world—­ and certainly not our world, of which the ideal reality is as much a component as its sensuous sensibility. Augustine calls the rational principles—­a priori rules, original concepts, and intuitions—­“eternal truths” [veritates aeternae] because they seem to exist in a timeless or supratemporal mode of reality. We do not discover them as things or appearances but discover them only by reflection upon our spontaneous or customary dealing with them in behavior or thought. They are not remembered as events or revelations in any past, but we know them as already inscribed in our mind since the beginning. They form an a priori grid that enables us to make sense of the phenome­ nal universe, which otherwise would offer us only chaotic obscurity. Augustine’s eternal truths form a rational constellation of regulating structures that always already have been ruling our search for insight

170  Adriaan T. Peperzak

because they have been inscribed into the nature of all that exists, primarily into the human mind. They exist “from the beginning.” As timelessly pre-­given principles, they shed a certain light on all the impressions and perceptions that, in the course of experienced time, enter human (self-­) consciousness. Even if we are not aware of these principles, they are the nonacquired and unbegun conditions of a basic intelligibility without which the universe and human existence itself remain completely incomprehensible. They become explicit when we become aware of their organizing force, and we learn from them—­in other words, they enlighten or illuminate the mind—­when we discover the rational order of the universe.

Ideas

Let us return to the student in dialogue and competition with his teachers. We have arrived at the point where he is left to himself, confronted with the truth claims he has heard or read and with the rules and principles that are inscribed in his own mind. Within his own interiority he finds no other informant, teacher, revealer, or authority than his own experience, the information he has appropriated, and the a priori principles that serve him as criteria for his deliberations and decisions concerning truth and untruth. From Augustine’s faithful perspective, the student thus is confronted with the eternal truths. However, instead of “eternal truths” Augustine also uses the Platonic name “ideas.” To show how, on this point, Augustine interprets and Christianizes Plato’s heritage, I insert here a brief interlude on Plato’s ideas and the way in which Augustine retrieves them in a short text, De Ideis.5 To sum up Plato’s conception of the ideas, the following statements, which, I think, would seem acceptable to Augustine, must suffice.6 According to Plato, the full truth of our cosmos cannot be “seen” if we do not open up our mind to the ideas [ideai or eide¯] that shine in all things and persons. Ideas are not mysterious entities or mental atoms that float around in the air or above the world in some phantasmic heaven. On the contrary, the eidos (idea or ousia) of each entity constitutes its truth and the destiny of its being; it includes the full, ideal, and perfect realization to which each entity naturally is directed by its essential arche¯

Teachers Without and Within   171

or “beginning.” All ideas together form one coherent, well-­ordered, and beautiful cosmos whose components imply one another and their whole; but in fact, our universe is only an inadequate realization of its ideal project or master plan, because human deficiency is responsible for the obscurity and corruption that have spread throughout history. We are not able to fully detect the ideal splendor of the universe unless both the phenomena on which we focus and the purified framework of our mind are enlightened by a higher light, which is the light of truth itself. This higher light flows from a source that reveals the genuine truth about the luminous essence of all that exists. As the source of essence and truth, the source itself is neither an essence, nor an idea or ideal, nor an entity whose existence can be compared to any cosmic or human existence, nor—­properly speaking—­an instance of temporal or eternal beings or truths. Through the gift of its light, it makes everything shine while delivering the human mind from its obscurities. Thus it conditions all of truth. Augustine and his followers identify the source of all light as the Truth itself (veritas ipsa), but Plato calls it the Good, and many philosophers after him have found this a less inadequate name than all other names. Much has been written about the Platonism of St. Augustine. The different, strongly biblical, framework in which he integrates the Platonic heritage makes him unrecognizable as a legitimate heir, but when we read the beautiful passages in which Augustine invokes the light that human minds need in order to arrive at truths, we recognize Socrates’ reference to the Good that grants such light not only to human eyes but also to the being of all other beings, which thus becomes luminous and true for illuminated minds. Is the light that Plato’s Agathon grants the same kind of light as the one invoked by St. Augustine? Is the Good an arche¯ (princi­ pium) in the same sense as the principium (“beginning”) in which God created heaven and earth? Let’s ask Augustine how he understands the ideas before he tells us how he thinks about the Good. In De Ideis, written eight hundred years after Plato’s dialogues, Augustine understands the ideas as the fundamental forms (“principales formae”), which, not being formed themselves, form all beings that make up the universe. Augustine also calls them “rationes.” They are the stable, unchanging, immutable, and eternally identical “reasons” or “forms” that determine the nature or essence of all that exists and moves. Augustine

172  Adriaan T. Peperzak

seems to use “ideae” as a synonym for the eternal truths, which also encompass the essential or natural laws and structures mentioned above, but he does not use the expression veritates aeternae in his fragment On the Ideas. The difference between Augustine and the Platonists shows when we ask where the ideas are to be found. Augustine agrees with Plato and Plotinus that the ideae or rationes are wholly intelligible and that they can be reached by a rational soul if this soul is pure, but he insists on the fact that the primary and most proper “location” of the ideas is in the Creator’s intelligence. Ideas are primarily the creative thoughts of God according to which the universe is shaped, regulated, “formed.” Together they compose the divine truth, the rational plan of which the created reality is a realization. In other words, the ensemble of the ideas constitutes the immutable, eternal, ideal, and luminous heart of all that is. Since they are intelligible, the ideas are accessible through the human intellect, but only purified, “healthy, sincere, and serene” souls can discover the most genuine, divine truth of all created things—­the truth that determines their original design and destiny. Only such souls reach a vision that is truly beatific. On the Ideas ends with the remark that only very few persons are pure enough to reach such a beatific vision.7 Augustine does not seem bothered by the question of how a human soul can enjoy immediate contact with the Creator’s own intelligence, but, as he often does, he states that the desired vision presupposes a superhuman illumination and “illustration.” Nor does Augustine here underline that the ideas, insofar as they are “seen” or “thought” by God, cannot display the multiplicity of the manifold creatures and truths generated in human minds. How could even the purest soul on earth intuit the absolute simplicity of the ideal universe in God?

T h e Lo g o s a n d E t e r n a l T r u t h

While commenting on the crucial role St. Augustine ascribes to the ideas as eternal truths in the creation of the universe and the illumination of the human mind, I have said that they exist “from the beginning.” The ideas (or rationes) are enclosed in God’s Intelligence, and it is this creative Intelligence that radiates into the human mind when it attempts to decipher the rationality of all that happens to exist, including the searching

Teachers Without and Within   173

mind itself and its desire to imitate and, if possible, participate in God’s creative thought. However, by presenting God’s thought as a kind of blueprint for creation—­a sort of originary onto-­logic—­we miss the proper sense of God’s all-­encompassing and absolutely simple Truth. Aristotle’s or Kant’s ensemble of fundamental categories may have the character of a metaphysical pattern or an a priori grid, and Plotinus’s Spirit (Nous) may think its own diversification, but the Logos through which God, according to the Bible, creates the universe is fundamentally different. If the eternal truths—­or, rather, if the total, undivided and noncomposed, simple Truth itself—­exist in God from the beginning (“in principio”), Augustine understands this “beginning” not as the earliest moment or the first period of time but instead as the principium (arche¯, principle, and beginning) that timelessly supports, founds, rules, dominates, and illuminates what, even “before” the beginning of time itself and independent of all time and space, is timelessly or eternally born in and out of God. The Truth of all truths, the first beginning, which itself is not one of the many truths, is God’s own, wholly spiritual and divine “Word” (Verbum, Logos). It is this—­invisible and inaudible—­Verbum mentis of God that Augustine recognizes when he reads the word principium not only in the first sentence of Genesis but also in the first sentence of John’s gospel: “In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram” [In the origin (or, as the Septuagint has it, in the arche¯), God created heaven and earth], and “In principio erat apud Deum et Deus erat verbum” [In the origin (arche¯) was the word (ho logos), and the word (kai ho logos) was with (or toward) God (pros ton theon), and the word was God (kai theos e¯n ho logos)].” Resuming what has been said about our innate awareness of the eternal truths, we now must reformulate this awareness as a pre-­experiential acquaintance with the divine Logos (or Word, Thought, divine Truth itself ). The beginning and the source of all the light that illuminates the creation, including all the minds that turn to it for insight, is the Word of God, in which all of it began. Another remark is also necessary to prevent or amend the mischaracterization of the originary Truth as a mere grid of a priori categories or (onto-­)logical forms and structures. The Word in which God expresses His intelligence of all ideas and laws is not a passive text but instead the divinely living Word that God addresses to us, independent of our coming to be. “God spoke and it was” (Gen. 1:3, etc.), but God’s speaking surpasses all

174  Adriaan T. Peperzak

history and eternity. The Logos itself is incessantly addressed to all humans, and those who are eagerly open to its provocations receive illumination. As Victor Warnach and Werner Beierwaltes have argued,8 “the doctrine of illumination” commonly attributed to Augustine is, at the same time, a metaphysics of the original language as the spoken word that brings realities and possibilities to existence in the light. In-­lumination is speaking to or into human interlocutors; it is an in-­speaking, and in-­ speaking is the in-­spiration of mental words. Augustine uses the cosmic metaphor of light—­which fits well in an early Greek and Platonic cosmology—­but he elevates it by giving it the power of an intersubjective and educational metaphor for evoking a divine speaking that generates human words of truth. The first, unique, immutable, and eternal Word (Verbum Dei) is not only the beginning, in and through which God creates heaven and earth, but also the divine wisdom of the Logos—­preface and pro-­phatic fore-­word—­that grants appropriate “words” to those who seek truth with sincerity. Augustine’s transformation of the Platonic and Plotinian God makes way for a unique mediator, Christ, who, as incarnate Word, in which God lovingly knows God, participates in the multiplicity and dispersion of the human universe. Here stands the decisive difference between Augustine and all non-­Christian Platonists: This—­not Plotinus’s Nous—­is the mediator, a divine man, incarnate Word of God and Light of the world, whom humans need in order to be convinced by truth. His presence in our search is the light in which we are allowed to think and “see.” Without being in touch with the Logos, there is no human truth. The Wisdom of God, having become a participant in human history, must speak to human minds before they can affirm the truth about the phenomena in which the Creator left his traces. Christ’s speaking is, however, a silent one; it precedes and transcends all sounds. Indeed, it does not allow itself to be imprisoned in any particularity of language, style, or culture. The Logos of God precedes all eloquence and reaches all civilizations, because it is the foundation of the universe. As universal pre-­or protolanguage without words, it can be heard by all who genuinely love the truth. They try to translate it in their many idioms according to the inspiration that is granted to them by the Spirit. Often Augustine seems to suggest that our being aware of the eternal truths coincides with an immediate and intuitive contact with the

Teachers Without and Within   175

all-­encompassing and divine wisdom of God. Our verbum mentis, the affirmation of a true insight that has not yet found an adequate formulation, is conditioned by the wordless speaking of the Verbum Dei to and in our mind. But does an immediate intuition of God’s own Wisdom (or Word or Light) not unduly divinize the human speaker? The danger of “ontologism” in Augustine’s “doctrine” of illumination has been discussed without end. However, it is clear to everyone, and certainly to St. Augustine, that a multiplicity of timelessly valid principles [aeternae veritates], as we find them in our mind, does not constitute an immediate intuition—­“seeing” or “insight”—­that captures the absolute simplicity of God’s Word. Augustine himself and his followers have tried to unify the multiplicity of the time-­transcending elements involved in all truths by assembling them as components of one ars aeterna, which they understood as a kind of divine blueprint for the creation of the universe, but even such a blueprint represents only the totality of created beings. Since a totality is composed of parts and links, however, all totalities are finite. Even the most encompassing totality of all other totalities remains a finite metaphor for God’s all-­encompassing superabundance; it cannot express God’s unique and absolute simplicity. Neither can we think of God as the supreme being or the summit of all summits within an all-­encompassing horizon, because this would mean that God is one—­albeit the highest one—­of many beings gathered in one supertotality. Instead of being incomparably transcendent, God would then be the greatest but still comparable and finite. But how, then, can we speak about God at all? I will come back to this question; but since we have been asked to extend our reflection on the relevance of Augustine’s work to other works or traditions, at this point I introduce someone who, eight hundred years later, is perhaps the most Augustinian of all theologians and philosophers: St. Bonaventure.

B o n av e n t u r e ’ s U n u s Es t M ag i s t e r V e s t e r , C h r i s t u s

Because the preceding pages were triggered by Augustine’s De Magistro, a most appropriate follow-­up is found in Bonaventure’s sermon on the Scripture verse that inspired Augustine in that dialogue: “Unus est magister vester, Christus” [You have only one teacher, Christ; Matt. 23:10].9

176  Adriaan T. Peperzak

Some scholars think that Bonaventure directed this address to his colleagues and students as an inaugural address, when he began his professorship at the University of Paris, whereas others place it later, in the period of the controversy about Averroism; in any case, Bonaventure presents here his understanding of Christ as the supreme teacher of truth, who therefore also is the supreme model of any university professor, especially in theology and philosophy. The horizon within which Bonaventure presents his address is Augustinian. He neither tries nor wants to be original or revolutionary—­at the end of his speech he even warns against proud disagreements with the theological tradition—­but he systematizes a common heritage while using the tools of his century and the refinements of his university education. His philosophical skills are more refined than those of Augustine, and his attention to methodical devices is more developed. Bonaventure is a master of distinctions, and his synthetic genius is astounding. New elements in his work are, of course, the works of Aristotle and Dionysius, but what he learned from them is well integrated into his loyal retrieval of the Augustinian tradition. As for the overall framework within which he thinks and rethinks, meditates, and contemplates, he profoundly agrees with St. Augustine that any search for truth fails if it is not firmly based on faith. Ultimately Christ is the only teacher, because he is the only originary principle and cause of both faith and reason. Reason cannot reach real wisdom if it is not rooted in and guided by faith in God’s revelation. We are therefore dependent on the authority of words that can be trusted as coming from God. They are trustworthy insofar as they are inspired by the Holy Spirit, who is sent by the Father and the Son not only into the minds of prophets and apostles but also into pure hearts that welcome those words. Revelation as inspiration occurs through Christ’s entering human minds and enabling them to understand the prophetic words addressed to them. As incarnate Word of God, Christ reveals the truth through a double advent: in spirit [in mente] and in flesh [in carne]. He is the principle and originary cause of all knowledge that faith provides to the faithful and the source of wisdom for those who grow in it by obedience and contemplation. Faith thus determines the stable stance we need to discover truth. It must continue to orient and guide us during all reflection (nn. 1–­5). But Bonaventure also accepts the Augustinian device

Teachers Without and Within   177

of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding); for rational inquiry is needed to understand the hidden meanings and coherence of the revealed truth. Theological and philosophical reflection cannot be the end, however. Rational insight must “sink in” and mature by being integrated into affective dispositions and virtuous behavior. “Contemplation” is therefore the third level in which a good theologian must be at home. In fact, contemplation is a pars pro toto for a holy life, as seen from the perspective of its truthfulness. In Bonaventure’s sermon, his outlining of a contemplative program takes the most space because it assures the final synthesis of genuine faith (nn. 1–­5) with well-­conducted study (nn. 6–­10)—­a synthesis that all thinking Christians should reach and practice (nn. 11–­27). In his explanation of the claim that Christ is the unique model for all teachers, not only on the basic level of faith but also on that of rational inquiry, Bonaventure begins by quoting Aristotle’s definition of episte¯me¯ (or—­as medieval thinkers unanimously translate it—­scientia) from a Latin translation of the Analytica Posteriora (71b 10–­12): “We know something [pragma, res] when we know the cause [aitia, causa] of its being [causam, propter quam res est] and know that that thing cannot be otherwise than it is [impossibile est aliter se habere]. Scientia [“science” in the broad, premodern sense of this word] seeks to clarify not only why things or events—­or, in general, beings—­exist and are as they are, but also whether it is necessary that they be as they are. These questions presuppose, of course, that one first get to know what and how the studied things are, but the quoted definition emphasizes the question “Why?” Since causality and necessity play such a central role in scientia, Bonaventure—­out of loyalty to Aristotle—­points out that a rigorous science cannot stop at realities that are changing or dependent on other changing or dependent realities. In order to really and fundamentally know certain beings, we must continue asking “Why?” until we discover a cause that no longer forces us to ask what it depends on or what the cause of its changes is. Only then will we discover a satisfactory answer to our question as to why—­“in the end” or “originarily”—­those amazing beings that made us think exist as they are. In agreement with Augustine, but also encouraged and strengthened by Aristotle’s logic, Bonaventure states that true knowledge of the created

178  Adriaan T. Peperzak

universe is not possible without reference to the immutable cause or principle of all that is. To know what is, we must know it in its relation to God as the creating cause beyond all dependent causes. At this point Bonaventure quotes not only a series of scriptural texts (n. 7), but also quite a number of rather long passages from Augustine (n. 8) about God as the origin of all beings, who knows them perfectly before they even exist. Comparing the being they received by being created and the being they have in the human mind that knows them with the original and exemplary being they have in God’s knowledge, Bonaventure concludes that God’s knowledge is truest and therefore the perfect model for our knowledge of all beings. Appealing to Augustine’s writings about Christ as God’s Word and as the one exemplary origin in which all eternal truths, ideas, essences, and laws form one creative ars aeterna, he then can state that human knowledge is true insofar as it is illuminated by the presence of Christ’s divine knowledge of all beings (n. 7). A second argument is needed, however. Not only the studied reality (the knowable, scibile), but also the knowing subject (sciens) must be free from volatility in order to obtain certainty about the knowable (n. 9). However, our mind is not enlightened enough by its own intellect alone to conquer unshakable certainty about the most profound and difficult, but also the most needed, truths. The eternal light of God’s own thought must illuminate our dim and fickle mind to give it access to the true reality of our study objects. Both the knowable and our own approach to it need an absolutely trustable foundation, one that has been revealed in Scripture: Christ, the incarnate Word of God, which shines in our mind. Thanks to the light of this original Truth, in which we distinguish and recompose the created order, we are enabled to overcome our doubts by the pursuit of accurate scholarship. The abundance of scriptural and Augustinian passages that Bonaventure quotes to support his argument suggests that he especially targets the resistance or reticence of certain philosophers among his audience. When he, in the second part of his address, returns to the rational integration of faith, he compares the roles of those great non-­ Christian teachers, Plato and Aristotle, to that of St. Augustine (n. 18). The context of this comparison is set by Augustine’s statement that

Teachers Without and Within   179

“God is the cause of being, the reason of understanding, and the order of living.”10 Bonaventure warns his audience against an exaggeration to which an overly exclusive emphasis on divine illumination could lead: God is neither the only nor the complete principle of human knowledge. With Aristotle we must firmly maintain that, in this life, we can see God not face to face but only as mirrored in sensibly experienced phenomena through the mediation of memory, imagination, and the cooperation of our passive and active intellect. Illumination is not the same as intuition. We discover truth thanks to and in the light that the Word of God grants us, but that light itself cannot become an object of conceptual grasp or unmediated speculation. Underlining our dependence on sensibility, Bonaventure certainly agrees with Augustine that the human “soul is connected to the eternal laws, because the extreme edge of the active intellect and the highest part of its reason is somehow in touch with that [divine] light (Unus est magister vester, n. 18)” [aliquo modo illud lumen attingit secundum supremam aciem intellectus agentis], but he agrees with Aristotle that our knowledge, including our knowledge of universals, presupposes sensibility, memory, and experience. He therefore approves “the Philosopher’s” criticism of Plato’s exclusive insistence on the ideas. Bonaventure protests against Plato’s linking all certain knowledge to the realm of immaterial ideas alone because it expresses contempt for the world of our senses; but he does not side with Aristotle’s rejection of the ideas. Aristotle is mistaken about the “eternal reasons” because his rejection confines him to the created world without allowing him access to the Creator; but he is great in science (scientia). Plato, however, is great because he shows the way of wisdom (sapientia). Although Bonaventure has adopted the custom of calling Aristotle “the Philosopher” [Philosophus], here he restricts the meaning of this name by stating: “Among the philosophers, apparently the language of wisdom has been given to Plato, whereas Aristotle received the language of science. To Augustine, however, the Holy Spirit gave both sapientia and scientia, because he is the major interpreter of the entire Scripture. He is surpassed however by Moses and by Paul, who rightly declares that he does not know anything else than Christ (1 Cor. 2:2). The wisest doctor and perfect teacher, however, is Jesus Christ.”

180  Adriaan T. Peperzak T e ac h i n g Go d

I conclude with an example of Bonaventure’s own way of teaching. In his Itinerarium mentis in Deum11 he guides the reader from sensible perception of the world to the summit of contemplation, where the soul learns how to speak with God. A paraphrase of some remarks that are found in the fifth and sixth chapters of the Itinerarium can also serve as the beginning of an answer to the question that I left unanswered when I asked above, “How can we speak about God at all?” In chapter 5 of his travel guide, Bonaventure follows Augustine and many other predecessors while commenting on the name that God, according to Exodus 3:14, revealed to Moses: “I am who am [Ego sum qui sum]. . . . Speak thus to the children of Israel: Qui est [He who is] has sent me to you.” Bonaventure accepts Qui est as God’s first name—­God is being itself (ipsum esse)—­but he adds that the best first name, which demands another, even higher, perspective is “the good itself ” [ipsum bonum; V, 2]. When we ask and analyze what being (esse) means, we arrive at the conclusion that all thinking about whatever subject is dominated by the perspective of its being something that is—­this or that, such or so. Nothing falls outside it; all kinds of merely possible or potential, limited, dependent, partially negated, or not-­quite being refer to the one essence of full and absolute being. “Being [esse] is therefore what primarily falls under the intellect” (V, 3). Thinking about things is concentration on being. Trying to think through the meaning of “being” in its purest form, as not diminished or contaminated by any lack of fully being, we necessarily come to see it as completely and absolutely eternal, simple, actual, perfect, and one, that is, as esse divinum, the godly “mode of ” being, which is not a mode at all. Bonaventure accumulates a series of superlatives to point at the unique, pure, absolute Alpha and Omega, which is the end and the beginning, the infinite perfection of all that is and can be thought. This, God’s own being, must be thought as the light and the word in which all other beings are thought when the truth about them is sought. However, the light itself, in which we “see,” think, and “speak” the truth about beings, cannot be comprehended or seen because it is too much, too super-­abundant, too blinding for a finite intellect. To clarify our impotence, Bonaventure quotes Aristotle’s well-­known comparison of our intellect with the eyes of a bat: “As a bat’s eye relates to the light, so

Teachers Without and Within   181

the eye of our mind relates to the most manifest [realities] of nature.”12 And he comments: “This is the case because our eye, accustomed as it is to the darkness of all beings . . . , has the impression that it does not see anything when it sees the light of the supreme esse itself. However, it does not understand that it is exactly this densest of all darknesses that is the illumination of our mind” (V, 4). God’s being (esse) is the light in which we see all beings and their (finite) modes of being (as complicated and contaminated by limits, deficiencies, and imperfections), but we are blind with regard to the light itself because of its superabundance. All the superlatives Bonaventure uses to evoke the absolute being that we must think, but can neither comprehend nor directly intuit, must be understood as pointers to the radically and absolutely different “form of ” being—­extra omne genus [outside of every kind]—­a “form” that is neither a mode nor a form but the infinity itself that hides and reveals itself in the blinding light that is not “visible” but conditions and makes “visible.” As such, God’s being does not belong to the totality of comparable or superlative beings that we know. Insofar as we, through experience and study, are familiar with forms and modes of being encountered within the universe, we know “being” as essentially finite. Thus it remains a clumsy metaphor for evoking God, not a clear and distinct icon or idea, although it might be the best metaphor within the horizon of talking about God. It is the light—­or the word—­of this infinite and incomprehensible God that enlightens the human search for truth, despite its hiding and keeping silent behind the back of our enlightened concentration on the phenomena. However, the best name for God, whose word prefaces and speaks in us before we can utter any truth, is different from being. It is the name good, if we understand this as a synonym of diffusivum sui, overflowing or giving itself in generosity. Although one could show that “being” includes all that is valuable, good, and worthy, and although being is implied in good because “it is certainly better to be than not to be” (VI, 2), by naming God good we adopt another, less inappropriate attitude toward God than by naming God absolutely being. Bonaventure distinguishes these two attitudes and the different perspectives they imply as (1) visio or consideratio essentialium (consideration of essentials; VI, 1–­2), a view that investigates the essence or nature of all beings, and (2) contemplatio emanationum (contemplation of emanations), a form of contemplation that

182  Adriaan T. Peperzak

elevates the intellect’s eye so that it looks up to the internal outflowing and communication of God’s Trinity as it is reflected in the history of the universe, from its creation “in the beginning” [in principio] through the appearance of the divine man Jesus Christ, who is the center of the universe, until the eschatological peace at the end of time. Although, in the sixth chapter of his travel guide, Bonaventure does not explicitly connect God’s internal and external communication with Augustine’s and his own theology of the “Word” as Verbum Dei and verbum mentis, it seems natural to make this connection in a meditation on teaching and learning, insofar as they refer to the only master of truth who, “in the end” and “from the beginning,” counts. If to be good is to give, grant, generate, and—­in unsurpassable performance—­to communicate one’s entire being to the beloved, it is somewhat understandable, if still extremely surprising and worthy of adoration, that God communicates the divine essence in speaking the Word, which, thanks to this speaking, exists as equally divine; and it is equally surprising and deserving of adoration that the mutual (but asymmetric) and shared love that distinguishes and unites the speaker and the spoken word constitutes a third hypostasis within the absolute simplicity of one unique divinity. Since the essence of the three hypostases is one and the same shared Godhead, their difference can be not essential but only communicational. As far as the Word of God is concerned, we might try to understand this distinction between the divine or absolute essence and the divine or absolute communication by comparing it to the distinction with which I began this chapter: the distinction between admonition and teaching as forms of addressing and the content or program that is handed on by them. What distinguishes the Word of God from God the Speaker is not to be found in the divine esse or essence, which is identical in both, but rather in the addressing generosity, which—­as radically different and infinitely surpassing but metaphorically somewhat comparable to our distinction between speaking to and speaking about—­generates the one to whom the speaking of the speaker is addressed. A similar but again radically different relation can be seen in the speaking that “in the beginning”—­that is, through the Word of God—­ creates the universe: “God spoke . . . and it was.” And then again, we might see a further parallel in the speaking of God’s verbum that pre-­faces and

Teachers Without and Within   183

pre-­dicts our own truth finding. By guiding the endeavors of our teachers toward their proper end, Truth itself—­the veritas ipsa and ars aeterna of God’s Word—­seems not only to exteriorize the generation of the Word in the bosom of God (who is as much the Speaker as the Origin, the Mother, or the Father) but also to interiorize the creation, of which the Word is the Beginning, into the intercommunicative life of the Trinity. Christ has not come to abolish the authority of teachers who continue the prophetic, kerygmatic, and intellectual traditions that save us from barbarism. The communicative constellations that form around exemplary teachers, who admonish their students to enter into thoughtful research and dialogue, are admirable. When we realize that the Word of God is present in such constellations as the Power and Wisdom without which no worthwhile truth emerges, such teachers appear as images of God’s own internal communication. Not only do they propagate the treasures of a common heritage; what counts even more is that they lovingly give what they have and are to anyone who desires truth. If the unifying distinction between speaking to persons and speaking about essences can metaphorically clarify the communication of God within and without, a certain coherence or “convenience” might support Augustine’s and Bonaventure’s interpretation of Christ as the unique teacher whose messengers re-­present the Word that, before all beginnings, is spoken by God and, from the beginning of space and time, echoes in every search for authentic truth.

Not e s 1. Cf. De Magistro n. 46, freely quoted here as follows: We now have begun not only to believe but also to understand “how true it is what Scripture on divine authority states, scil., that we should not call anyone on the earth our teacher, because the only teacher of all is in heaven” [quam vere scriptum est auctoritate divina, ne nobis quemquam magistrum dicamus in terris, quod unus omnium magister in caelis sit]. All serious editions of Augustine’s works have the same text and numbering; the reader may consult De Magistro in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 29, ed. W. M. Green (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970). 2.  De Civitate Dei XIX, 1, 3. Emphasis here and elsewhere mine. The reader may consult Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 47–­48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955). 3.  1 Cor. 1:24, often quoted by Augustine.

184  Adriaan T. Peperzak 4.  Sophist 263 E, cf. 264 A. 5. Figuring as Question 46 among Augustine’s collection of fragments, De diversis questionibus LXXXIII. The reader may consult Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 44A, ed. Almut Mutzenbecher (Turnhout: Brepols, 1975). Cf. the excellent analyses by Aimé Solignac, “Analyse et sources de la question ‘De Ideis,’ ” in Augustinus Magister: Communications (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1954), 307–­15, and Jean Pépin, “Augustin, Quaestio ‘De Ideis’: Les affinités plotiniennes,” in From Athens to Chartres: Neoplatonism and Medieval Thought, ed. Haijo Jan Westra (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 117–­34. Although Augustine constantly refers to Plato when he retrieves elements of the post-­Platonic tradition, most often his sources are not Plato himself, whose works he did not possess, but instead Plotinus, Porphyry, or other Platonists. 6.  My justification for these statements can be found in A.Th. Peperzak, Platonic Transformations: With and after Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); see the index. 7. Since De Ideis mentions perfect love (charitas) as a condition of these persons’ purity, it is clear that beatitudo presupposes holiness. 8.  Cf. Victor Warnach, “Erleuchtung und Einsprechung bei Augustinus,” in Augustinus Magister, 429–­49, and Werner Beierwaltes, “Zu Augustins ‘Metaphysik der Sprache,’ ” in Augustinian Studies 2 (1971): 175–­95. 9.  Doctoris Seraphici S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, 10 vols. (Quaracchi, Italy: Collegium Sancti Bonaventurae, 1882–­1902), 5:567–­74; I refer to passages of this work parenthetically through the numbers the editors added to the text. For extensive analyses, see Goulven Madec, Saint Bonaventure: Le Christ Maître (Paris: Vrin, 1990); Renato Russo, La metodologia del Sapere (Grottaferrata, Italy: Ad Claras Aquas, 1982 [with a new critical edition of Bonaventure’s text]), and Silvano Buscaroli, “Autorità, verbo e ‘concretezza’ in un sermone Bonaventuriano,” in Bonaventura 1274–­1974, ed. Jacques Guy Bougerol, 5 vols. (Grottaferrata: Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1972–­74), 2:79–­101. 10.  De Civitate Dei VIII, 4, as quoted in Unus est magister vester, n. 17. In n. 18 Bonaventure opposes Aristotle’s exclusive confidence in scientia, as supported by sensus, memoria, and experience, and his negligence of the ideas, to Plato’s sapientia, as based on the ideas alone, while praising Augustine, who combines sapientia with scientia. 11.  I refer to this work parenthetically through the numbers of chapters and sections, as printed in Opera Omnia V, 295–­313, for example V, 2 (section 2 of chapter 5). 12.  Metaphysics 993b 9–­11.

six

Luther and Augustine on Romans 9 d av i d c . s t e i n m e t z

The relationship of Luther to St. Augustine is a far more complicated question to resolve than one might anticipate. No one doubts for a moment that Luther was profoundly influenced by Augustine (even if historians like Nygren1 and Saarnivaara2 prefer to stress topics like charity and imputation, on which they differed) or that Luther regarded Augustine as the one Father really worth intense study. His own knowledge of Augustine, as Adolf Hamel has shown,3 grew almost geometrically in the period from 1513 to 1518, the period in which Luther struggled to interpret the Psalter and the writings of St. Paul. The difficulty with labeling Luther an Augustinian is that every theologian in the West is to some extent an Augustinian, even though their common commitment to St. Augustine does not prevent them from differing profoundly with one another. How does Luther’s Augustinianism differ from the various Augustinian theologies of the middle ages? In what sense is it appropriate to call Luther an Augustinian theologian?

185

186  David C. Steinmetz

There are three ways to approach this question. One way is simply to compare the teaching of Augustine on a given topic with the teaching of Luther. When we compare them this way we find, for example, that Luther is not interested in Augustine’s theory of knowledge (few theologians of Luther’s generation would have been!) but is fascinated with Augustine’s theory of grace. That does not mean that Luther sees sin and grace altogether from Augustine’s point of view. Augustine regards love rather than faith as the central principle of justification and even accepts a role for human merit in the process of salvation. Augustine would not have known quite what to make of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone with its stress on the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the believing sinner. Still, they do agree about the doctrine of predestination and the absolute priority of grace in redemption. The difficulty with this approach to the relationship between Luther and Augustine is that it compares our knowledge of Luther with our knowledge of Augustine without raising the prior historical question of Luther’s knowledge of Augustine. There is always the possibility that Luther may not agree with Augustine on some point, not because he rejected Augustine’s position but because he was unacquainted with it. Furthermore, what seems an eccentric interpretation of Augustine by Luther may in fact reflect a common misreading of Augustine by Luther’s contemporaries and thus give us no insight into the peculiar workings of Luther’s mind. A second approach focuses on the theological environment in which Luther read Augustine and the angle of vision or tradition of interpretation characteristic of the religious community to which Luther belonged. H. A. Oberman has suggested that knowledge of the Augustinian order is a crucial ingredient for understanding Luther’s relationship to Augustine.4 The Augustinian order claimed to have been founded by St. Augustine as the Franciscan order had been founded by St. Francis, a claim that had no foundation in fact but nevertheless had important historical consequences for the character and vision of the order. The Augustinians became the textual critics of the later middle ages, concerned with better editions of St. Augustine and more accurate citation of authorities. The order was also home for one of the more remarkable theologians of the fourteenth century, Gregory of Rimini, known for his fidelity to some of the more unpopular ideas of Augustine on sin and grace. According to

Luther and Augustine on Romans 9   187

Oberman’s reconstruction, there is an Augustinian theological tradition within the Augustinian order, formed by Gregory of Rimini and mediated to Luther by John Staupitz, a tradition that is re-­formed by Luther into the new theology of the Protestant movement. What this theory implies, and what its weaknesses are, I have discussed elsewhere in detail.5 Suffice it to say here that in my judgment Gregory is not a theologian whom Luther reads at the earliest stages of his development, that Staupitz is no disciple of Gregory, that the most important books young Luther reads are not by Austin friars, and that Luther shows from the very beginning an astonishing independence of all his teachers, even the most Augustinian. Even Staupitz seems to be less a mediator of theological ideas to Luther than a skilled counselor who enabled Luther to face what he feared and resolve for himself his acute theological anxieties. A third approach attempts to skirt the problems inherent in the first two by concentrating on Luther’s own use of Augustine, particularly in his early biblical commentaries. This is the approach recommended by Leif Grane,6 who applied it to Luther’s lectures on Romans 1–­8, and it is the approach I want to follow in this chapter. By focusing on Luther’s actual use of Augustine we are able to accompany Luther into his theological workshop and gain insight into his exegetical method. I have chosen Romans 9:10–­29, a passage on which Augustine comments several times during his life and on which he changes his mind substantially. The issues discussed here are important to Luther as well, who must select among the varying interpretations given by Augustine as he attempts to understand the Pauline text.

I

The earliest exegesis of Romans 9 that we have from Augustine is the Expositio quarundam propositionum ex epistola ad Romanos,7 written while Augustine was still a presbyter in Hippo Regius. It was written, therefore, at about the same time as Augustine’s great work against the Mani­ chaeans, the De libero arbitrio. The Manichaeans explained the existence of evil by pointing to a cosmic clash between Light and Darkness. Bits of Light had been trapped by Darkness and could now be found in the

188  David C. Steinmetz

souls of the elect. The process of redemption was the process of extracting Light from Darkness and reestablishing the proper boundaries between them. This dualistic scheme identified evil with the material world and offered redemption to a small group of the elect who, completely by accident, had become receptacles for particles of Light. Augustine attacked this deterministic worldview and argued that evil had its origins in the free will of the rational creation. Augustine in 394 is keen, therefore, to stress human free will and to avoid any suggestion that human beings are helpless pawns in the hands of a blind destiny. His first exegesis of Romans 9 reflects these concerns. The problem for Augustine is that Romans 9:10–­29 seems to suggest that human beings are in the hands of a destiny over which they have no control and which does not operate according to the ordinary rules of fair play. The problem that troubles St. Paul is the unbelief of Israel, its rejection of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Does the unbelief of Israel invalidate the promises and covenants of God to Abraham and his descendants? The answer, of course, is no, because the boundaries of the true Israel are not determined by physical descent alone. God is sovereign and free and may constitute his chosen people any way he pleases. If he chooses to set aside Jews and make Gentiles children of Abraham by faith, that is his sovereign prerogative. It is the will of God, and only the will of God, and nothing beyond or beside the will of God that defines the true Israel. Indeed, this electing purpose is already evident in the Old Testament when God chooses Isaac over Ishmael and Jacob over Esau. Moreover, the God of Isaac and Jacob not only shows mercy to whomever he wills; he even confirms the reprobates like Pharaoh in their stubbornness and disobedience. Paul supports his argument with a string of texts, including the unsettling words from Malachi (1:1–­2): “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” Augustine moves swiftly in his exegesis to dampen any suggestion that Paul intended to undercut the freedom of the will when he appealed to the example of Jacob and Esau. The election of Jacob over Esau is based on foreknowledge, not foreknowledge of their good and bad deeds but foreknowledge of their faith.8 The process of the justification of the sinner begins with a divine calling or vocatio, an initiative that lies wholly with God and cannot be merited by any human activity.9 However, the response to this calling—­namely, faith—­lies wholly within the power of

Luther and Augustine on Romans 9   189

the free will of the sinner.10 God elects believers to justification because of the merit of their faith.11 This justification consists primarily in the reception of the Holy Spirit.12 The justified sinner now performs works of love because of the activity of the Holy Spirit and the cooperation of the human free will.13 Without the presence of the Spirit and its gifts, particularly the gift of love, there would be no impulse to do good; without human free will, there would be no morally good works or perseverance in the new life of love.14 Through perseverance in good works, human beings merit eternal life.15 “God never predestined anyone unless he foreknew that he would believe and follow his calling.”16 Augustine has some reason to feel satisfied with himself. In his Expositio he has preserved the initiative of God, absolutely with respect to calling and relatively in the gift of the Holy Spirit, while maintaining the freedom of the human will. What looks like an arbitrary exercise of sove­reign power—­namely, the choice of Jacob over Esau or the destruction of Pharaoh—­is capable of a rational and morally satisfying explanation. God preferred Jacob because he foreknew Jacob’s positive response to the divine call that would be offered to him. By the same token, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was a just penalty for his obstinate unbelief. In both cases, it is the faith that lies in the power of human free will that is determinative. In the Retractationes or revision written years later, Augustine indicates that he has three problems with his early exegesis of Romans 9: (1) he did not make clear that election is a grace that cannot be merited by any human activity, even the act of faith; (2) he did not indicate that faith is a gift of God given by the same Spirit that empowers ­believers to do good works; and (3) he did not distinguish sufficiently between the call of God that is directed toward the whole human race and the special call, the vocatio secundum propositum dei, that is extended only to the elect.17 If faith is not a purely human act, but a human act that is also a divine gift, then the explanation that God preferred Jacob because of his fore­knowledge of the merit of Jacob’s entirely free act of faith becomes ­untenable. Election cannot be a passive response to human activity if the faith with which Jacob believes is itself a gift. Augustine’s decisive break with his early exegesis of Romans 9 comes in his De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, written around 397 and directed to Simplician, who succeeded Ambrose as the bishop of Milan.18

190  David C. Steinmetz

The shift follows the lines suggested in the later Retractationes. Augustine can no longer regard the faith that responds to the call of God as simply an act of human free will. God must attract and empower the will to believe, even though the human will is not set aside or bypassed in the act of believing. After a prolonged consideration of the case of Jacob and Esau, Augustine now comes to the conclusion that election by foreknowledge is election by works, even if one calls the work faith.19 It is inconceivable that St. Paul, who wrote the epistle to the Romans to undercut human confidence in good works, could ever have intended to reach election based upon them.20 The problem, therefore, as Augustine sees it, is not that faith is a gift of God but that this gift is not given equally to all human beings. Does the reason for the unequal distribution of the gift of faith lie in the human free will? Are some people more willing to hear and believe the gospel than others?21 Attractive as this solution seems, it will not do. What human beings share equally is an unresponsiveness to the gospel. The human family participates equally in an inheritance of sin and disobedience. The predicament is universal and absolute and admits of no exception. Both Jacob and Esau deserve divine judgment and condemnation. Both belong to the massa peccati.22 One must distinguish, therefore, not between degrees of receptivity on the part of human beings but between kinds of calling on the part of God. While the gospel is directed toward the salvation of the whole human race, one must distinguish between effectual and ineffectual calling.23 Recipients of the effectual call hear and obey it; recipients of the ineffectual call either remain indifferent to it (Esau) or are confirmed in their obstinate rebellion against God (Pharaoh). If anyone protests that this distinction in calling is inherently unfair, Augustine appeals to a higher hidden justice that transcends human notions of right and wrong but bears some analogy to them.24 At any rate, if God did not elect Jacob to justification apart from all consideration of merit, whether of faith or of works, then both Jacob and Esau would be lost, and no one would be saved.25 Without election, the predicament of Esau is not improved; the situation of Jacob is merely worsened. There are brief discussions of Romans 9 in many of Augustine’s anti-­ Pelagian writings, particularly De spiritu et littera, Epistula 186 ad Paulinum, Epistula 194 ad Sixtum, Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum, De gratia

Luther and Augustine on Romans 9   191

et libero arbitrio, De correptione et gratia, De praedestinatione sanctorum, De dono perseverantiae, and Opus imperfectum contra Iulianum.26 While these writings add some points, particularly on the question of perseverance, the main themes of Augustine’s mature exegesis have already been set in the letter to Simplician. In the Enchiridion, written around 421, Augustine returns to the question of God’s justice and argues that while Jacob is the recipient of a wholly gratuitous mercy, Esau has meted out to him the punishment that is justly his.27 Both belonged to the massa perditionis, and it was only the call of God that separated Jacob from it. All this is familiar from the letter to Simplician, including the pastoral observation that election teaches the faithful to praise God rather than to glory in their own works.

II

Of the fourteen works by Augustine that discuss Romans 9, Luther cites seven in the course of his exposition of the whole epistle. He does not cite, however, De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum at all and only begins to use the Expositio in his gloss on Romans 5:5. The sole writing by Augustine that Luther cites in his exposition of Romans 9:10–­ 29 is the Enchiridion 98–­99. Indeed, in the interpretation of this section Luther turns to Erasmus and Faber Stapulensis more often than to Augustine. Nevertheless, important elements of Augustine’s mature exegesis of Paul are repeated by Luther in his treatment of the text. Luther agrees with Augustine that the election of Jacob over Esau is based neither on inheritance nor on merit of any kind. Both Jacob and Esau are evil because of original sin, and both belong by birth to the mass of perdition.28 Goodness is the result of God’s election, not its precondition. Predestination teaches believers humility; it teaches them that they are not able to justify themselves by the exercise of their free will.29 Grace raises believers up “before and beyond” the exercise of human volition.30 While Luther presupposes the Pauline exegesis of the older Augustine, his exegesis introduces a number of themes not found in Augustine’s interpretation of Paul. For example, the idea that human virtue is a product of divine election and reckoning is used to attack Aristotle’s notion

192  David C. Steinmetz

that the habit of virtue is attained through the repetition of morally good deeds.31 Paul interpreted with the assistance of Augustine stands as a warning against the fascination of scholastic theologians with Aristotelian philosophy.32 Similarly, while Augustine appeals to the hidden higher justice of God (as exemplified by the parable of the workers in the vineyard), Luther is satisfied to make the bold declaration that “there is no other reason for his justice and there can be no other than his will.”33 Since God’s will is by definition the highest good, man and woman ought to stretch every nerve to see it done and not worry whether it conforms to customary notions of right and wrong. Even reprobation cannot be evil if it is willed by God. Human beings regard the will of God as evil only because they cannot manage it.34 In short, Luther interprets the theme of divine sovereignty in what appears to be a rather Occamistic fashion: good is good because God wills it. The meaning of that goodness cannot be discovered in advance by human reason; it can only be experienced by the faithful who resign themselves to it. “If one wills what God wills, even if this means to be damned and rejected, one has no evil. Then one wills what God wills and patience enables one to bear it.”35 Luther’s pastoral concerns color his exegesis and are not exactly the same as Augustine’s. Augustine had worried, both before and after his letter to Simplician, about the role of the human free will and about the psychological impetus that moves the will to faith or morally good deeds. Luther, on the other hand, seems willing to state Augustine’s conclusions without embracing Augustine’s psychology: “A man owes his ability to will and to run, not to his own power, but to the mercy of God who gave him this power to will and to run.”36 He can even refer to human beings as “instruments of God” and compare them to an ax in the hand of a cutter (an analogy that he draws from Isaiah 10).37 An axe in the hand of a cutter is not an image that does justice to Augustine’s rather more subtle description of the activity of grace on human volition. Luther does, however, want to make the pastoral point that human willing and running are not in vain when they are God’s work in a man or woman.38 The pastoral problem that seems uppermost in Luther’s mind is the problem of the certitude of salvation. He touches on it several times. In the scholium on 9:15, remarking on the underlying Hebrew text (Exod. 33:19) “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,” Luther notes

Luther and Augustine on Romans 9   193

that the Hebrew is “indefinitely put. It speaks of mercy more in terms of a chance without specific reference to predestination.”39 The mode of expression seems to Luther to imply that God wants to discourage people from speculating about predestination, their own or their neighbor’s.40 At the end of the scholium on 9:16, he returns to this problem. He indicates that predestination is a question that should be reserved for the “strong and perfect,” since the discussion of this mystery is “theology in the best sense of the term.”41 He claims that he would not have brought the subject up at all, except the order of his lectures on Paul compelled him to do so.42 While predestination is “very strong wine” and “solid food” for the spiritually advanced, Luther confesses that he is a babe in Christ who needs milk. “Let him who is as I am do likewise. The wounds of Christ, ‘the clefts in the rock,’ are safe enough for us.”43 Luther’s reference to the wounds of Christ is a reference to pastoral advice, which Luther elsewhere claims he first received from John Staupitz. To look to the wounds of Christ is to contemplate the Savior who was crucified for the sins of the world—­more particularly, for the sins of Martin Luther and the other “babes in Christ” who are distressed by the merest thought of the mystery of election and reprobation. It is the redemptive love of God directed toward sinners and revealed in history through the crucified Savior on which the weak should fix their attention. In the scholium on 9:19–­20, Luther tries to console anxious Christians who find the question about the justice and fairness of God naturally springing to their lips and who are terrified that they have committed blasphemy by entertaining such doubts. God is not “impatient or cruel,” particularly to those timid souls who are “under the overwhelming power of an assault” upon their faith.44 The point for Luther is that the very anxi­ety that the believer suffers is itself the strongest evidence that no blasphemy has occurred: “If a man is filled with fear and trembling because he has uttered a blasphemy, this is a sign that he did not really want to do it and that he did it innocently. This dread of evil is an evident sign that one has a good heart. Hence the best cure for such thoughts is not to be concerned about them.”45 In the scholium on 9:17, Luther returns to the Augustinian theme that links the doctrine of predestination with humility. After a lengthy discussion of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German words for power, Luther offers two interpretations of what Paul means by referring to the

194  David C. Steinmetz

demonstration of the power of God in the career of Pharaoh.46 The first interpretation is tropological. God demonstrated his power in Pharaoh in order to show the elect their weakness.47 By reducing their power to nothing through the far greater power of Pharaoh, God taught the elect not to glory in their own strength. Liberation from bondage in Egypt was due to the power of God alone. In this interpretation, power is linked to salvation through the humiliation of the elect. A second interpretation, however, which seems more probable to Luther, links the power of God to the destruction of the reprobate.48 Jacob is made good not because of his ancestry or merit but because God is merciful to him. Similarly, Pharaoh is not made good because God is not merciful to him. This interpretation links 9:17 (“that I might demonstrate in you my power”) to 9:18 (“He has mercy on whom he will, and whom he wills he hardens”) and demonstrates more clearly that the will of God lies behind both election and reprobation. While Luther may prefer not to talk about predestination at all, he is also unwilling to soften the doctrine by equating election with foreknowledge, even if one means by “foreknowledge” the foreknowledge of faith. Luther is not drawn to the position of Augustine in the Expositio, though he knows it, but stays with the position of Augustine in the Enchiridion,49 however much he may fear that Augustine’s mature position is too strong a drink for the immature theological palate.

III

If we compare the exegesis of Romans 9:10–­29 by Luther with the vari­ ous interpretations of that passage by Augustine, as we have done in this chapter, we will find that certain conclusions rather naturally suggest themselves to us. 1. Neither Augustine nor Luther is particularly concerned about the problem that is uppermost in Paul’s mind. Paul wants to know whether the unbelief of Israel has invalidated the covenant that God concluded with her. What place in the history of salvation remains for Israel, especially in view of the new and astonishingly successful mission to the Gentiles? Has Israel been permanently set aside in favor of a New Israel composed of Gentiles and a remnant of the Old Israel? Paul’s reflections

Luther and Augustine on Romans 9   195

about Jacob and Esau are set in that context rather than in the context of the salvation of the elect from the mass of perdition that is fallen humanity. That is not to say that the question is altogether neglected in the commentaries we have read. Luther, for example, spends a great deal of time in chapter 11 discussing the place of the Jews in the economy of salvation and even castigates the anti-­Semitic theologians of Cologne who attacked Reuchlin in the Pfefferkorn affair.50 But the immediate context for his exegesis of Romans 9 is the universal context of the predicament of the human race before God rather than the more particular context of the relationship of Israel and the Church. In that approach to the text he is following lines already suggested by Augustine. 2. While Luther knows both the young anti-­Manichaean Augustine and the old anti-­Pelagian Augustine and makes use of exegetical writings from all periods of Augustine’s life, he clearly prefers the old Augustine to the young in his exegesis of Romans 9. Luther does not talk about effectual and ineffectual calling (the so-­called vocatio congrua et incongrua) or worry about some role for free will in the psychology of faith. He embraces the most severe statement of Augustine’s position on predestination (a position from which Augustine himself at times attempted to retreat) and states it as a conclusion that is indisputable. The will of God is the cause of both election and reprobation. All human beings belong to the mass of perdition because of original sin. Jacob cannot merit his election but is an object of inexplicable mercy from God. All of these Augustinian ideas are so firmly embedded in Luther’s mind that Luther does not seem to notice that St. Paul never mentions a massa perditionis or massa peccati. Augustine has encapsulated for Luther the substance, if not the exact language, of Pauline teaching. One cannot regard Luther as merely a conventional Augustinian on these points, since the vast majority of medieval theologians tend to stress more than Luther does the justice of God in reprobation and to bring that doctrine into greater harmony with human notions of fair play. Where Luther is dependent on Augustine, he is dependent on the old anti-­Pelagian Augustine, who knows that the will must be healed before it can ever come to faith or serve God. 3. Having said all that, it is astonishing how little of the rest of Luther’s exegesis of Romans 9 comes from the comments on that text by Augustine. St. Paul as read through the lenses provided by Augustine creates certain acute theological and pastoral problems for Luther,

196  David C. Steinmetz

but Augustine himself plays a very little role in the resolution of those problems. One can detect in Luther’s exegesis the explicit help of Erasmus and Faber and the implicit help of Biel and Staupitz. But the mixture of ideas is Luther’s and reflects his own personal relationship to the text and his own experience of the anxieties that the text creates. While Augustine worries about free will and the justice of God, Luther devotes his attention to certitude of salvation and the understandable fears of the spiritually weak. At the same time, very few of the young Luther’s most characteristic theological themes—­the strange and proper work of God, the hiddenness of God underneath a contrary appearance, or the contrast of a theology of the cross with a theology of glory—­find expression in this section of his exegesis. When confronted with the doctrine of election, one stands in “fear and trembling” before an “abyss of horror and despair.”51 Only when the eyes of the heart are purged by meditating on the wounds of Christ can one confront the mystery without terror. It is this immediate pastoral response to the text that marks Luther’s exegesis off from Augustine’s.

Not e s This chapter was originally published as the following: David C. Steinmetz, “Luther and Augustine on Romans 9,” in Luther in Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 12–­22. 1.  Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 681–­741. 2.  Uuras Saarnivaara, Luther Discovers the Gospel (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1951), 3–­18. 3.  Adolf Hamel, Der junge Luther und Augustin, 2 vols. (Gütersloh, 1934–­35). 4.  Heiko A. Oberman, “Headwaters of the Reformation: Initia Lutheri—­Initia Reformationis,” in Luther and the Dawn of the Modern Era, edited by H. A. Oberman (Leiden, 1974), 40–­88. 5.  David C. Steinmetz, Luther and Staupitz: An Essay in the Intellectual Origins of the Protestant Reformation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980), 3–­34. 6.  Leif Grane, Modus Loquendi Theologicus: Luthers Kampf um die Erneuerung der Theologie (1515–­1518) (Leiden, 1975), 11–­62. 7. The critical edition of Expositio quarundum propositionum ex epistola ad Romanos is found in Sancti Aureli Augustini Opera, Sec. 4, Pars 1 CSEL 54, edited by Johannes Divjak (Vienna, 1971), 3–­52.

Luther and Augustine on Romans 9   197 8.  Expositio 52 (60). 9. Ibid. 10.  Ibid. 52 (60), 53 (61). 11.  Ibid. 52 (60). 12. Ibid. 13.  Ibid. 52 (60), 54 (62). 14.  Ibid. 51 (60). 15.  Ibid. 47 (5). 16. Ibid. 17.  Retractationes I.23 (22).2–­4, in Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 12, edited by Gustave Bardy (Paris, 1950), 412–­18. 18.  De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, Quaestio II, in Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 10, edited by G. Bardy et al. (Paris, 1952), 442–­509. 19.  Ibid. II.3–­5. 20.  Ibid. II.2. 21.  Ibid. II.10. 22.  Ibid. II.19. 23.  Ibid. II.13 24.  Ibid. II.16. 25.  Ibid. II.22. 26. For a brief discussion of these shorter works, see A. F. N. Lekkerkerker, Römer 7 und Römer 9 bei Augustin (Amsterdam, 1942), 131–­37. 27.  Enchiridion sive de Fide, Spe, et Charitate, XXV. 98–­99, in Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 9, edited by J. Rivière (Paris, 1947), 274–­83. 28.  WA 56.396.6. 29.  WA 56.405.8. 30.  WA 56.405.11. 31.  WA 56.394.28. 32.  WA 56.305.4. 33.  WA 56.396.14. Translated by Wilhelm Pauck, ed., in Luther: Lectures on Romans, Library of Christian Classics 15 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961). 34.  WA 56.397.1. 35.  WA 56.397.2. Translated by Pauck. 36.  WA 56.398.11. Translated by Pauck. 37.  WA 56.399.8. Translated by Pauck. 38.  WA 56.399.25. 39.  WA 56.397.14. Translated by Pauck. 40.  WA 56.397.17. 41.  WA 56.400.5. Translated by Pauck. 42.  WA 56.400.4. 43.  WA 56.400.8. Translated by Pauck. 44.  WA 56.401.7. Translated by Pauck.

198  David C. Steinmetz 45.  WA 56.401.16. Translated by Pauck. 46.  WA 56.402.25. 47.  WA 56.404.1. 48.  WA 56.404.9. 49.  WA 56.404.21. 50. For an important recent treatment of Martin Luther and the Jews, see Heiko A. Oberman, Wurzeln des Antisemitismus (Berlin, 1981), 125–­83; now available in English translation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). 51.  WA 56.400.1. Translated by Pauck.

seven

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito j e a n - ­l u c m a r i o n

T h e S e m b l a n c e o f a C o g i to

In the confessio, the ego finds its place. It becomes itself as it responds to a call through praise (of the holiness of God) and, in an inseparable way, through admission (of the faults that make an attempt to withstand the holiness of God). Must we then conclude that I am able to gain access to myself? We cannot let the question slip away, because the Soliloquies have placed the ego opposite God as the entirety of what wisdom desires to know: Augustine: I desire to know [what] the soul and God [are]. Reason: Nothing more? Augustine: Absolutely nothing at all.1

199

200  Jean-Luc Marion

The difficulty consists less in knowing the two terms of the desire than in understanding their relation. How can I know myself if this involves first knowing God? Augustine does not guarantee that I can, for that matter, but he requests it through prayer: Augustine: Our power is [God] himself. Reason: Pray then as briefly and as perfectly as you can. . . .  God, always the same, let me know me, let me know you. Augustine: This is my prayer.2 But one prayer does not suffice to ensure knowledge of oneself by oneself. To achieve that, one needs a strict conceptual argument, which means an argument comparable to what since Descartes we have understood by the term cogito: “I think, therefore I am.” One needs to know a “truth . . . firm and sure”3 in that, through thought, it allows access from oneself to oneself: It is enough for me to exercise my thought to enter the place of my self. The parallel with St. Augustine seems inevitable, as seemed already evident to many during Descartes’s lifetime. Already in 1637, according to the testimony of Descartes himself, his friend and correspondent Mersenne had connected the argument from the Discourse on Method with a text from The City of God: “I do not at all fear the arguments of the Academics when they say, What if you are mistaken? For if I am mistaken, I exist. He who does not exist clearly cannot be mistaken; and so, if I am mistaken, then, by the same token, I am.”4 Above all, upon publication of the Meditations in 1641, Arnauld (whose Augustinian erudition can hardly be questioned) confirmed the parallel, this time based on a passage from De Libero Arbitrio: “So, in order to start from what is clearest, I ask you first: Do you yourself exist? Are you perhaps afraid that you may be mistaken, when asked this question? If you did not exist, you could not possibly be mistaken.”5 The power of the comparison with Augustine seems so compelling to Arnaud, who meanwhile had become a convinced Cartesian, that he does not miss the opportunity to confirm it during his second correspondence with Descartes in 1648, now with a citation from De Trinitate: “The mind knows itself even when it is looking for itself, as we have shown above. . . . When mind knows itself it knows its substance, and when it is certain of itself it is certain of its substance. . . . Nor is it in the least certain whether it is air or fire or any kind of body or anything

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  201

appertaining to body. Therefore it is not any of these things. The whole point of its being commanded to know itself comes to this: It should be certain that it is none of the things about which it is uncertain, and it should be certain that it is that alone which alone it is certain that it is.”6 To these similarities one could add others. In particular, the short version of the argument, which Descartes draws directly from doubt, without going through the cogitatio (in the formula “ ‘I am doubting, therefore I exist,’ or what amounts to the same thing, ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ ”),7 offers a rather exact echo of the certitude of doubt itself in other Augustinian texts: “At least, even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he is doubting; if he doubts, he understands he is doubting; if he doubts, he has a will to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows he does not know; if he doubts, he judges he ought not to give a hasty assent.”8 Confronted with such similarities, must one not admit along with the majority of interpreters that St. Augustine already produces (at least in a still somewhat blurred outline) the Cartesian argument of the cogito? Does Descartes not seem the first, moreover, to validate this high patronage, with “very great satisfaction”?9 And nevertheless, one should doubt that St. Augustine anticipates the Cartesian cogito, and doubt it for at least two reasons—­while in the end a third and more important reason will emerge. One will notice from the start that St. Augustine does not reach the ego by certifying its being through the exercise of its cogitatio, but by certifying its life through the practice of doubting it: Can you, I ask, tell us one of the things that you know? I can, he says. If it does not bother you, I say, put something forward. And since he was in doubt, I ask him: Do you not know at least that you live? I know it, he says. You know therefore that you have life, since no one can live unless through life. This I know, he says.10 As for Descartes, doubt gives way here before the evidence that it denies and affirms at the same time. But in Augustine, it is a question of the

202  Jean-Luc Marion

evidence of life, or, more precisely, of the life in me, different from me, but without which I would neither be, nor be me.11 Thus several differences between St. Augustine and Descartes appear. First, certitude does not so much concern being as it does life; secondly, it relies less on the institution of the cogitatio as the essence of the res cogitans than on the performative contradiction of a living doubt. What do these differences have in common? The second difference shows that, if for Descartes the experience of doubt attests the certitude of the act of thought in such a way that the ego finds its essence in the res cogitans, for St. Augustine, by contrast, the doubt does not assure the mind of any essence but assigns it to life, which is unshakable but also uncontrollable. And yet it is precisely life that determines the first difference as well. For Descartes, the certitude attains the esse, more precisely the esse as first of all mine, in the first person, sum. There is an indisputable, unshakable being (étant), and it is precisely I, ego. For St. Augustine, by contrast, the certitude attains life, which I am not myself first and foremost, as I am only through it. For the crucial point is that no living thing is its own life. Every living being lives through the life that it neither is, nor possesses, and hence not through itself. No one lives by himself. St. Augustine said this literally: “No one can live unless through life.”12 What is proper to a living being is the fact that it does not possess its own life but remains its tenant. Living means living provisionally because by a proxy—­by virtue of the proxy that life grants the living being. In this sense, if it proves certain that I live, I do not possess the certitude of living except in the precise instant of my present life, without any guarantee of living again the following instant, precisely because the instant literally is not. Thus I am certain that I live, without ever being certain that ‘I am’ qua living. Living means the certainty of not having the certainty of continuing to live, or rather having the certainty of not living through oneself—­living gives only the certainty of dying. Only the Living par excellence lives from itself.13 Once this has been seen, these two differences actually amount to only one. At the point where Descartes succeeds in appropriating the ego to himself (his thought self-­assuring him in his being as res cogitans), St. Augustine assigns the mens to its life (through the contradiction of the doubt) only in order to expose it to this very life; and yet this life, by definition, does not belong to me as mine. The same act of the cogitatio thus provokes

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  203

two opposed results: in one case the appropriation of the ego to oneself, in the other the inadequacy of the mens to itself. There is a second reason to doubt that St. Augustine anticipates the Cartesian cogito. Contrary to the supposed evidence for the parallel, and over and against the prestige of such an authority, Descartes himself noted the difference without ambiguity. “I am obliged to you for drawing my attention to the passage of St. Augustine relevant to my I am thinking, therefore I exist. I went to the library of this town [Leiden] to read it, and I do indeed find that he does use it to prove the certainty of our existence. He goes on to show that there is a certain likeness of the Trinity in us, in that we exist, we know that we exist, and we love the existence and the knowledge we have. I, on the other hand, use the argument to show that this I [moi] that is thinking is an immaterial substance with no bodily element. These are two very different things” (emphasis mine).14 Even if Descartes himself also eventually recognizes in the res cogitans “some image of the Trinity,”15 it remains indisputable that he will first establish it as a res intellectualis and intelligens16 in order to find in it a principle that will now be first and will precede even the knowledge of God: “I took the being or existence of this thought as my first principle, and from it I deduced very clearly the following principles. There is a God.”17 Of course, in the two arguments it is indeed a matter of connecting thinking and being, no longer as it concerns God (as for the tradition following Aristotle), but now also as it concerns the finite mind, later called the subject. However, in one case it is a matter of beginning with the ego in order to deduce existence from it, even God’s existence, as from a first principle different from this same God, while in the other case, it is a matter of making the mens certain through the doubt and its contradiction, in order to seek its condition of possibility beyond it, namely life. This opposition cannot be concealed. It is played out between the appropriation of oneself by the equivalence of thought with being (essence as much as existence) and the deappropriation of self from living, that is, living from a life other than itself. Two philosophers, at least, have seen it perfectly. First Blondel: “Is there a contradiction more serious than the one that consists in finding his [St. Augustine’s] influence in the Cartesian cogito? . . . St. Augustine would never have dreamed of erecting his thought in ‘rock,’ of asserting himself as absolute and in the absolute, of making the mind as we know it an isolable and sufficient substance.”18 And of course

204  Jean-Luc Marion

Heidegger: “The wine of Augustine’s thought has drowned in the water [verwässert] Descartes poured on it. Certainty of oneself and having-­one-­ self [Sich-­selbst-­Haben] in the Augustinian sense is something completely different from the evidence of the cogito in Descartes.”19 Now that this basic opposition under the guise of a single argument has been established, we must measure its scope and understand its stakes.

The Anonymit y of the Ego

One point seems thus attained. Nowhere does St. Augustine succeed in assuring the ego of its existence—­nor does he even attempt to, as Descartes will—­or in assigning to it the cogitatio for an essence (res cogitans). Why this pulling back before what seems to us today a logical corollary? Was he missing something that prevented him from reaching this point? He was evidently not missing the cogitatio, since the first definitively fixed conceptual usage can be traced back to him, incidentally, through a somewhat unclear etymology: “When these three [memory, sight, and will] are coagitated into a unity the result is called cogitatio.”20 Nor was he missing the esse, since he shows clearly that the mind is certain only of what alone it is certain to be: “Certa sit, quod solum esse se certa est.”21 What is St. Augustine missing, or what could he have been missing, that he cannot write ego cogito, ergo sum, as does Descartes?22 If he is missing neither the cogitatio nor the esse, he can be missing only the ego itself. St. Augustine is missing the ego, at least in the Cartesian sense of “that ego, that I know” (ego ille, quem novi),23 since he knows it only as a question, and a question about an unknown essence: “Who am I and what am I?”24 And the reason for this twofold questioning is self-­evident. For him, the access to being (or rather to life) through the cogitatio precisely does not allow access to myself and above all does not allow me to identify myself as an essence. In other words, the fact that my access to my being through my thought is unquestionably obvious does not imply in the least that I have in this being through thought access to myself under the figure of an ego known through itself. St. Augustine perfectly grasps the argument that connects thought to being. He even inaugurates it and will impose it on his posterity (Descartes included). But he refuses to let this same argument produce and sanction in the least the ego that could be known through

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  205

itself. He denies, or rather affirms by noticing, that when I think and whatever I am (or think that I am), I still do not take possession of myself as an ego who would say I,25 or who would claim to be an I, and thus would know its own essence. But then what does certitude teach me that I am, insofar as I think? It teaches me that, in thinking, I am placed at a distance from myself and have become other than me (moi); that nonetheless I do not come into possession of any self (moi), which could exactly and truly claim to be by saying I; that the more I think (and the more I am in thinking), the more I am ignorant of who I am and the more I am alienated from myself. In a word, the access to my being through my thought, far from appropriating me to myself for Descartes, for St. Augustine exiles me outside myself. I have no other ego than my division with my self (moi). I am thus paradoxically the one who, in thinking, knows that he is not himself (nor his own), does not know his essence, and can never say (say to himself, or claim), in all rigor, me. St. Augustine has described this exile often and clearly, showing thereby that the supposed cogito reveals that I am a quaestio mihi, a question to myself—­that I am myself as this question. The first time he experiences himself as having become a great question to himself—­“I had become to myself a vast problem”26—­is upon the death of a friend. This childhood friend had shared his life and his interests until the moment he fell into decline. While in the throes of death, moribund and unconscious, the friend received baptism; but, as a remission began to occur, far from renouncing what one might call this involuntary baptism, as Augustine had hoped, he laid a strong claim to it, and in the end died baptized. Why does this mourning, more than pain about another, provoke an unintelligibility to oneself? Without doubt, because in Augustine’s words the friend, “half of my own soul” [dimidium animae meae], kept a part of me that death amputated from me, so that I am horrified at a life that I do not want to live in half.27 But there is undoubtedly more. The half-­life that the death of my friend leaves me had in fact already escaped me before his death, because while in the throes of death he had, through baptism, changed lives, receiving it this time from the Immortal himself. Hence this life slipped away from me, too, and not only from a life (namely my friend’s) that remained absolutely foreign. While the death of a friend deprived me of my own life, his new life did so even more. This

206  Jean-Luc Marion

slipping away from myself outside myself (for it is precisely the self [moi] that lets life slip away) leaves me without my self (moi), as one might lose one’s voice. And this is not only a matter of some provisional state, which would be the result of a passing event like a simple crisis. It is a matter of a trial as rehearsed as temptation, or rather the five modes of temptation, which, by adding upon themselves and constantly interfering with me, define the permanent state of my condition. If “I am a weight to myself ” (oneri mihi sum), this is a result of the fact that “ ‘human life on earth is a trial’ (Psalm 30:10), in which there is no respite.”28 St. Augustine analyzes in detail at least two cases of exile that they signal, and of the quaestio mihi, the question to myself that they repeat. First comes the concupiscence of the flesh, that is, sexual desire. Henceforth (now converted and a bishop, writing the Confessions) I have been able to resist this without difficulty, Augustine argues, for as long as I stay awake the temptation lacks force (mihi vigilanti carentes viribus). In other words, as long as I stay myself, being and thinking (being because thinking) as a true child of the cogito, sexual temptations stay ineffective, even if the images they elicit remain vivid, “still live in my memory.”29 As soon as I go to sleep, however, not only do I welcome them without putting up any resistance, but sometimes I let myself go to the point of taking real pleasure in them (non solum usque ad delectationem, sed etiam usque ad consensionem). Thus at the very moment these images become weaker because they offer nothing real (dormienti falsa . . . vigilanti vera),30 the erotic dreams, though involuntary, do not drive me to act in such a way that I am not who I am, precisely because I am certain in thinking that I am (when dreaming, because I think). The assumed cogito thus alienates me from myself by leaving me to my existence without securing an essence for me: “During this time of sleep surely it is not my true self, Lord my God? Yet how great a difference between myself at the time when I am asleep and myself when I return to the waking state.”31 This difference, if it manifests itself in time, is not defined temporally; or it refers to a splitting of the ego rendered temporal, which means after the fact. For this splitting arises in general as soon as the ego (in this case the mind, animus), attempts to self-­determine by itself: “The mind commands the body and it is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and it meets resistance. . . . The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it. What

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  207

causes this monstrosity?”32 The monster (monstrum, or, put differently, the extraordinary phenomenon that demonstrates [demonstrare]), consists precisely in the fact that the mind that resists the mind that commands it is not other, or different, but remains one and the same mind, mind alone: in other words, a mind that does not command itself, even to itself. What does this defiance of the command mean if not that this mind has no control of itself and is incapable of taking charge, in other words, of being of one mind. The assumed ego shows itself by demonstrating the contradiction within it of equality with oneself. From the outset, A is not A, I am not myself. It is not only erotic dreams that demonstrate the supposed cogito as a monstrum (or, for that matter, simple examples of temptations connected to the sense of touch). And indeed, we find Augustine repeating the demonstration in nearly the same terms in a temptation connected to the sense of hearing. As is well known, St. Augustine had discovered the grandeur of the Christian faith, for the first time, in fact, in Milan while listening on the one hand to the sermons of St. Ambrose showing him the spiritual sense of the Scriptures and on the other hand to the liturgical chants, especially those that introduced him to praying the Psalms. This experience, which was of course musical (and thus of importance for the author of De musica), had primarily a powerful spiritual effect on him, namely of entering into the prayer of the community of believers and becoming an actor in the liturgical mysteries.33 An ambiguity soon emerges, however. Does the emotion that arises while he is singing these hymns come from what these songs say by way of praise to God (moveor non cantu, sed rebus quae cantantur), or only from the songs themselves in their strictly musical beauty? Augustine had come to suspect that, on the contrary, “the music moves me more than the subject of the song.”34 This is not the exaggerated scruple of a beautiful soul but a very real and very disquieting suspicion. I differ so much from myself that I lose all knowledge of me (moi), not only in the experience of my failures (erotic desire, weakness of will), but even in the experience of my highest exaltations (in this case, my participation in liturgical prayer). Even in what has all the semblance of pure joy, I mistake myself, I do not know what I am really doing, I do not understand myself, in any case, no more than I do in my erotic dreams. The purported heights of “religious experience” therefore change none of this: “I have become a problem to myself.”35 Even when it

208  Jean-Luc Marion

prays, the ego differs from its self (moi), or rather it differs from itself and therefore appropriates no self (moi). This carelessly named “Augustinian cogito”36 thus leaves the ego in exile between its existence as certain and its essence as unknown. The unknowing of man of himself cannot be overcome by a more precise inquiry or by a deeper interiority. Rather, the opposite is true. The more the certitude of existence allows the mind to enter into its being, the more the endless crossing of this field leaves it inaccessible to itself, unknown, impenetrable, as an abyss: “Man is a vast abyss.”37 St. Augustine can say without incoherence both that “man himself is unknown [to] himself ” and that “nothing could be more present to it than itself,”38 because the certitude of existence implies no more knowledge of the essence than knowing that I am tells me who I am—­or if my ego even consists in being. The assumed cogito does introduce me into being but leaves me there as an unknown essence, knowing of itself without knowing itself. “What are we to say then? That the mind knows itself in part and does not know itself in part? . . . I am not saying ‘It knows the whole [entirely]’ but ‘What it knows, the whole of it knows.’ ”39 What the certitude of my existence offers me is therefore summarized in the knowledge of my anonymity. I am, therefore I remain what I am, but without essence, without identity, without even a name. I am, but just enough to prove that I am not myself, or rather that this existence that I am is not me; or that this existence, which leaves me without an essence, does not give me any access to myself, tangles me up in it and keeps me away from myself. Being (l’être) holds me, but only to hold me back from reaching this self, which can neither say itself nor give itself as a being (en étant). St. Augustine thus describes well in advance what we have learned to recognize under the title of the anonymity of being.40

The Dimensions of Memoria

Such confinement of me outside self nevertheless appears so paradoxical that one may want to look for a supplementary argument that confirms it. This argument is presented by the case of memoria, provided that we do not fall back too quickly on what metaphysics habitually understands by this term. In fact, from the outset St. Augustine radicalizes its meaning:

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  209

Memoria does not designate one faculty of the mind among others; it is this mind itself and absorbs it, so to speak: “We call memory itself the mind,” and later, “It is I who remember, I who am mind.”41 And indeed, not only do I have a memory, but I am identical with my memory (unlike other faculties), since “hidden there is whatever we think about . . . deposited and placed on reserve.”42 To the point that consciousness or at least the thought of oneself is accomplished in the memory of oneself: “[The mind] still knows itself by being somehow its own memory of itself,” in other words: “The mind always remembers itself.”43 Must one not conclude that the permanent possibility of a memoria sui compensates, so to speak, for the impossibility of the cognitio sui (cogitatio sui) by restoring the ego’s access to itself, to the self ? But here it is a matter only of a semblance. In fact, understood as memoria sui, memory not only fails to give the ego access to itself but also renders manifest the impossibility in principle of any such access. “Great is the power of memory, an awe inspiring mystery, my God, a power of profound and infinite multiplicity. And this is mind, this is I myself. What then am I, my God? What is my nature?”44 The aporia of my ego is here very precisely that my own nature (my quid, my quiddity, in other words, my essence) leaves me radically inaccessible, and all the more so since the fact of my mind (my existence) imposes itself without dispute. Memoria lets me test myself under so many forms only to convince me of my inadequacy to myself: “This power of memory is great, very great, my God. It is a vast and infinite profundity. . . . But I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself, so that we have to ask what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp? Surely that cannot be external to itself; it must be within the mind.”45 Memoria accomplishes and summarizes definitively within it the inaccessibility of the ego ille that I am. Remembering, even oneself, means that there is no possible transition between the fact of myself and my nature, my essence, and my ipseity. One should not be surprised by this, for despite what one might expect, memoria is characterized by two paradoxical properties: On the one hand, it includes infinitely more than my cogitatio can conceive, while on the other hand it finally leads to not remembering. This holds true to such a degree that memoria sometimes even seems to offer a place to the truth least accessible to my thought: myself. Indeed,

210  Jean-Luc Marion

St. Augustine introduces on occasion a very paradoxical concept of self-­ memory. In particular, this occurs when he must confront the formidable contradiction between two equally rational requirements. On the one hand, one can love only what one knows. On the other hand, each of us loves (and desires) the beatitude that he has never experienced and consequently does not know. Why is it that we can, in the case of our beatitude, love by desire that of which we do not have even the slightest idea? How can we name an unconscious knowledge of what memoria knows, in other words, without knowing what it knows? There is one more hypothesis that is conceivable, though it seems like an oxymoron: “Perhaps, then, the mind sees some excellent end, that is, its own security and happiness, through some obscure memory which has not deserted it on its travels to far countries.”46 But this hypothesis reinforces the difficulty more than it resolves it. For how does one explain the memory in me that I have never had, of what I have never known? How does one explain that I keep my beatitude in my memory, without having a properly complete and exhaustive memory of myself ? In short, how could the memory of my beatitude continue without an equivalent memory of itself, of the self ?47 Or would one have to admit that memoria deploys itself safely beyond the limits of the self? In that case the anonymity of the ego would take on a new figure. I am an effectively certain existence, but without any access to my essence, or my ipseity; and this crisis can last my lifetime, because it finds its place (and its claim dismissed [non-­lieu]) in my memoria: I can continue to love what I do not know and thus endure my existence without an essence, because what I do not know, my quaedam memoria occulta, both preserves for me and hides from me. And, since I am my memoria, I therefore become hidden to myself.

The Immemorial

The question of memoria as such only now begins to arise, now that it appears as what hides me from myself, or, more precisely, as what in me takes control of the essence that eludes me—­mine. Because the retreat of the mind and its secret (abditum mentis)48 pushes back even further, it does not merely remind me of what I may have forgotten but occasionally also of the fact of forgetting itself.

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  211

Remembering a thing lost actually makes me find it, but most of all it snatches it from forgetting. Memory finds me the forgotten thing by also making me forget my own forgetting; memory and forgetting work in inverse proportion, of course, the one gaining from what the other loses. However, one also finds another situation in which I remember having forgotten yet without remembering what I have forgotten. Forgetting, indeed, could not become an ordeal for the mind if it were not still present to it, if it were itself to disappear in forgetting. Because if forgetting lets itself forget, it would absolutely no longer concern the mind, which precisely would have forgotten it. In order to experience forgetting, therefore, one must not have forgotten it, as one might forget a thing. Forgetting is, in fact, not something, but a possible modality for any thing. And in order not to forget forgetting, therefore, it must be retained by memory itself: “Memory retains forgetfulness” [Memoria retinetur oblivio]. In other words, “When I remember forgetfulness, both memory and forgetfulness are present.”49 The choice of memory is no longer limited to either recovering the forgotten by annulling the forgetting or to losing the trace to the point of forgetting forgetting, as there is a third possibility: maintaining the memory of forgetting as such. But this is a contradiction, and a double one. Not only must memoria take charge of its opposite, but above all it must also renounce bringing anything to consciousness. Indeed, in the case of forgetting qua forgetting, memoria manages the forgetting without anything forgotten, and this forgotten(ness) offers nothing it can make into a memory. But if memoria does not remember nothing(ness), strictly speaking, why even call it a memory? Or else must one go to the point of saying that memory bears on what I can no longer be aware of, thus on the unconscious?50 Undoubtedly not, if only because the concept of the “unconscious” presupposes that of the “conscious,” which itself can appear only on the basis of the ego ille of Descartes51 and therefore is in strict contradiction with what St. Augustine thinks under the title ego (or mens). It seems more appropriate to retain the ultimate paradox of memoria. It maintains the memory of what it can nevertheless by definition not remember—­forgetting, the immemorable par excellence.52 Memoria thus concerns the immemorable, or, more moderately, what Levinas made thematic under the title the immemorial. It is not a matter of “weakness of memory” but of what “reminiscence could not retrieve,” of a final

212  Jean-Luc Marion

“irretrievable,” because “it was never present” and will always remain “a past that bypasses the present,” which will never become present again because it never has been, by virtue of an “antecedence prior to every representable antecedence.”53 Memoria, in its extreme development achieved by St. Augustine, no longer concerns what was present to my mind in the past and could become so again in the future—­in the literal sense of the re-­presentable as re-­presentable. It concerns what in me remains inaccessible to me, uncontrollable (what I have forgotten, my forgetting of what I have forgotten, and even my forgetting of this forgetting itself ), and which, despite or because of this, governs me thoroughly. Indeed, this is the issue. Without memoria, I am not, but with it, which by definition I do not understand, I do not understand myself—­I have no presence to myself, and I forget me. The aporia of the ego itself, taken in the anonymity without ipseity of its existence, henceforth finds its title and its place, a memoria precisely of the immemorial. The ego’s aporia to itself (the quaestio magna mihi) culminates in the aporia of memoria, which should be understood not as a faculty for restoring suspended representations but as the experience of the immemorial. Hence the observation “I have become for myself a soil which is a cause of difficulty and much sweat (Genesis 3:17).”54 The citation refers to the land in which Adam and Eve were exiled after they had been driven out of the original paradise; but, in the context, this exile becomes an interior exile. I become for myself the very place of my exile outside me, not simply because the innermost in me, memoria, can just as well not recall me as it can recall me (memory oversees forgetting, which implies the forgetting of forgetting itself ), but also because it ultimately concerns the remembrance of that which never was either present to me or represented—­the immemorial. I therefore inhabit a place, myself, where I never find me, where I am not at home, where I am not I: Exiled from the inside, I am not there where I am. I am without an I, and lagging behind me. Memoria thus leads to forgetting, and this radical forgetting manifests the facticity of the ego: “What we are—­and what we have been is always contained in this—­lies in some way behind us, forgotten. Expecting our own can-­be to come from things, we have forgotten the factical Dasein in its having-­been.”55 This indication from Heidegger enables us to read the following analysis of Augustine in all its force: “It is I who remember, I who am mind. It is hardly surprising if what I am not is

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  213

distant from me. But what is nearer to me than myself? Indeed the power of my memory is something I do not understand when without it I cannot speak about myself.”56 I cannot conceive of myself otherwise than by the contradiction of memoria, the incomprehension of what comprehends me most intimately, which is exposed in the contradiction of its unthinkable (empty) object, the memory of forgetting. I cannot remember, in the literal sense, forgetting, because it blots out what it takes away (the forgotten); nor can I say that I forget it, since I know perfectly well that I have forgotten, even if I have thereby forgotten what I have forgotten. “Yet in some way, though incomprehensible and inexplicable, I am certain that I remember forgetfulness itself, and yet forgetfulness destroys what we remember.”57 The interpretation of memory as no longer the faculty for restoring the past in a re-­presentation, but as the memoria of forgetting, of the forgetting of forgetting, and ultimately of the immemorial, finally makes clear that, if this memoria defines me to the point that my mind (animus, mens, cogitatio) cannot be conceived and experienced without it, and if this memoria proves to be a “profound and infinite multiplicity . . . diversity of life, multiform, utterly immeasurable,”58 one must not only face the astonishment (“This question moves me to great astonishment. Amazement grips me.”)59 and dread (“an awe inspiring mystery, profound and infinite multiplicity”)60 but must, above all, draw from it the following strange but ineluctable conclusion: If memoria, which contains the secret of my mind (abditum mentis), goes beyond what my cogitatio and my mens comprehend, I have to think beyond my own thought in order finally to think me myself. “I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself?”61 If so, I must think me by thinking beyond myself.

W h at D e s i r e T h i n k s

Memoria thereby renders any self-­consciousness by definition aporetic, because it demonstrates that the mens loses its path toward itself in the immemorial. The mens knows from now on that it extends far beyond what it will ever know of itself. But the aporia contains more than a prohibition. It already offers a way out. For if memoria forces the mens to

214  Jean-Luc Marion

surpass itself endlessly toward its own withdrawal, one must admit that the mens can surpass itself. It would be up to the ego to transgress its being, or rather its life: “Who is he who is higher than the highest element in my soul? Through my soul I will ascend to him. I will rise above the force by which I am bonded.”62 Or “I will transcend even this my power which is called memory.”63 But how does one transcend one’s own strength? If it is not an absurdity, is self-­transcendence not reducible to a rhetorical hyperbole with no conceptual bearing, if not to a mystical exaltation? In the case of St. Augustine, we are not dealing here with a simple hypothesis, but with a disposition of the mens that he already practiced during his last and final prayer with Monica in Ostia. At a certain point, even if not at the last, it may be that “the soul itself is no longer making a sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking itself.”64 Three points should be noted here. First, even if the mens does not think itself, it still thinks, which already allows it to ensure its existence; in fact, the argument of the cogito does not absolutely require that I think myself but rather that I think something in general, indeed anything. Second, we notice that in not thinking itself, the mens no longer inquires about its essence and does not turn the existential privilege of the cogitatio over to the search for the essence of cognition; in brief, it is freed from itself. Finally, we note that the mens becomes what it knows because it loves it and wants to identify with it, so if the mens thinks an other than itself, possibly supra caput eius, that is what it will become, since that is what it will love. In brief, as soon as the mens frees itself enough to think by thinking something other than itself, it can overstep its own (non-­) essence and, by thinking an other, become other than self. Let us insist once again that, for St. Augustine, this involves a practice, a deed, and an act, as the story of the vision at Ostia attests: “Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection toward heaven itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporeal objects and the heaven itself, where sun and moon and stars shed light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works, and we entered into our own minds. We moved up beyond them so as to attain to the region of inexhaustible abundance.”65 I am because I think, but not because I think myself. And, as memoria prohibits me from thinking myself and refers me to the immemorial, all that is left for me is to think over the mode of such a referral beyond myself.

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  215

Hence the question takes the form of a clear paradox. If the mens, which certainly exists as it thinks, nevertheless cannot think itself in its essence because it exceeds itself under the title of memoria, how can it reach its ipseity? The only way from the self (qua existence) toward the self (qua essence) is for the mens to rejoin the immemorial through a thought that transcends itself. The contradiction seems obvious, and it is. The intrinsic finitude of thought cannot transcend itself without deluding itself or dissolving—­at least if the immemorial must attain itself by thought, of course, and by a thought exerting an intentionality that I would deploy from me in the direction of this immemorial, as if it were aiming at an objective, an object or a being (étant) of the world. And yet the immemorial has nothing to do with an objective, an object, or a being, and no more belongs to the world than to space. Without an object, the immemorial not only eludes our thought as finite but also, in fact, eludes all thought as intentional. It remains the case that thought, when it does not understand what it would like to aim at, can at least still think itself from what it cannot understand, but who understands it? Such thought is exerted as desire. Desire indeed enjoys a privilege that intentionality knows nothing about. I can neither aim at desire nor attain it by making up my mind for myself; I can at least at times attain it, desire it, or rather, leave it to be desired. For, contrary to appearances, desire does not arise primarily from me in order then to seek its object but rather is exerted in, or rather upon, me, weighs on me, and invades me, even though I neither understand nor possess its supposed object, or rather precisely because I do not possess it, do not attain it, and do not even understand it. Desire compels me on its own initiative and never on mine; I cannot decide to desire, even though desire makes me decide to do everything I can to fulfill it. And desire compels me not because I understand it and would have authority over it but, on the contrary, because it compels respect in me from the height of its authority, which most of the time I do not truly know. And likewise my desire is very often born of and lives from my inability to know or understand its nonobject, which compels me all the more, precisely in that it compels me constantly to think about it, even when I do not understand it. St. Augustine carried out this operation brilliantly because he was able to see and locate a desire so unconditioned that every interlocutor without exception would recognize his own. He borrows its formulation

216  Jean-Luc Marion

from Cicero: “Wishing to begin his dialogue Hortensius from an absolutely certain starting point that no one could hesitate about, he said, We all certainly want to be happy.”66 Since according to his repeated and earnest declarations this reading played a decisive role in St. Augustine’s discovery of God, one can infer that this discovery consisted for him first of all in the awareness within him of an unconditioned desire for beatitude, as the Confessions seem to attest: “Is not the happy life that which all desire, which indeed no one fails to desire? . . . Therefore it is known to everyone. If they could be asked if they want to be happy, without hesitation they would answer with one voice that they so wish. That would not be the case unless the thing itself, to which this term refers, was held in the memory.”67 In fact, the earliest texts that follow St. Augustine’s conversion, describe its moments, and prepare for the recapitulation brought about in the Confessions already rely heavily on this radical argument. He begins with an entire treatise devoted to the blessed life, written in an undoubtedly conscious echo of Seneca’s text: “Beatos esse nos volumus, inquam. / Vix hoc effunderam, occurrerunt una voce consentientes.”68 It is indeed a consensus: It is actually not possible to doubt the will in all people to live happily. One should even doubt that it is possible for even one man to want to continue living without the slightest hope of any possibility of ever experiencing something like the blessed life. The desire for beatitude does not amount to some optional alternative that would be added to the desire to live. The connection between the will to live and the desire for beatitude proves to be an analytic a priori. One now understands better why St. Augustine had substituted life for being. Being cannot go beyond itself and precisely for this reason leaves the mens (mind) to wander between the existence of which being assures it and the essence that it wrests from it, to the point that, caught in this double bind, beatitude appears not only unattainable but even out of the question. It is not self-­evident that being and therefore all beings must also be good, because good no more pertains than goodness to what being allows one to say about beings. So much so that in order to evoke a “τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα” [idea of the good], Plato must assume it beyond essence (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας).69 On the contrary, since life implies of itself that the living then can both receive it and lose it, and thus that the living live in the intrinsic incompleteness of an opening, life displays itself within the horizon of desire. As an opening from elsewhere, life does not possess itself any more

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  217

than it defines itself: It receives itself and loses itself. Thus it desires itself, allows itself to be desired, and offers itself as desirable in the figure of the happy life. Being allows or prohibits the being of being without either promising or ensuring anything more than a presence permanent for a certain time (so I can imagine myself possessing it and effectuating it for as long and as often as I want). Life (precisely because I do not possess it but receive it from somewhere else) gives itself only on the condition that I receive it at every moment, thus unceasingly and without limit, in such a way that I desire it also and necessarily as happy. Being gives only being (because it does not actually give it), while life can give only life, and thus is the happy giver (because it can give only itself ). When life is substituted for being, it is thus already a matter of beatitude, intrinsic to desire and thus ignored by being, which neither desires nor can desire. There is yet more. The strength of the argument as a desire for vita beata within all people is above all that this universal acquiescence occurs without any theoretical knowledge—­through a concept or representation by the mens—­of what the vita beata implies or in what it consists. On the contrary, the desire for beatitude appears so certain that no certain theory of what it desires supports or precedes it. This contradiction between the (certain) desire and its (uncertain) object constitutes the very heart of the argument: So what, then? Are we to say that even though living happily is nothing but living a life of conscious virtue, yet a man who does not want this still wants to live happily? This seems to be pure nonsense; it amounts to saying, “Even the man who does not want to live happily wants to live happily.” Who can listen to such a contradiction in terms, or who can endure it? And yet necessity drives us to it if it is true both that everyone wants to live happily and that not everyone wants to live in the only way that it is possible to live happily.70 The argument drawn from the universality of the desire for beatitude seems contradicted by the fact that the means of attaining it, the virtuous life, is more often than not rejected by the very ones who still claim loudly and strongly to want happiness. Yet one must uphold the truth of both terms of this contradiction: The end remains true, though the refusal of the means no longer imposes itself without contest. But to be precise,

218  Jean-Luc Marion

this is not a contradiction at all because it follows from a conflict at least one of whose terms has no theoretical status. The universal desire for beatitude is not based on any manner of theoretical knowledge about the nature of beatitude, of which no one has the least experience. The refusal to live according to virtue (in utilitarianism, cynicism, egoism, skepticism, etc.) rests on arguments only when it needs them. As for desire, it makes do with its theoretical nullity because it deploys itself as desire. Theoretical contradiction fails to affect it, since it is exercised according to a strictly erotic certitude that needs only to desire, but not to theorize or to know the desired object. The principle of desire thus contradicts theoretical contradiction indeed, because on the basis of a paradox—­ and an erotic paradox—­ it disregards every theoretical presupposition. Therefore desire indeed knows and thinks the vita beata (in fact, it alone achieves this), but it does so without having any theoretical representation of it, or even the least need of one. In fact, to the one who desires it, beatitude appears not within the field of the cogitatio, of the mens, and thus of understanding, but in that of memoria. The question is “whether the happy life is in the memory.” The response follows: “That would not be the case unless the thing itself, to which this term refers, was held in the memory.”71 We know the desire for the happy life without any acquaintance with it or any understanding of it, because it inhabits us as an immemorial, the most near and the most distant, insofar as it makes itself through us desiring. I am, not according to an essence but in my desire, that is to say, in what I neither have nor am. Translated by Karl Hefty

Not e s 1.  Soliloquia I, 2, 7 (CSEL 89: p. 11, ll. 15–­17): Augustinus: Deum et animam scire cupio. Ratio: Nihil ne plus? Aug.: Nihil omnino. For a translation, see Soliloquies, trans. John Rotelle and Kim Paffenroth (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000). 2.  Soliloquia II, 1, 1 (CSEL 89: p. 45, ll. 9–­11):

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  219 Augustinus: Potestas nostra ipse est. Ratio: Itaque ora brevissime ac perfectissime, quantum potes. Aug.: Deus semper idem, noverim me, noverim te. Oratum est. St. Bernard of Clairvaux will reverse the formula: “All the meditation of a spiritual man is contained in this assuredly double consideration. Ultimately, it was a saint who said: ‘Make me know you, make me know myself.’ This is a brief prayer, but one of a believer. For this is true philosophy and these two kinds of knowledge are absolutely necessary for clear thought; and if the first brings fear and humility to mind, the other brings hope and charity.” [In hac nimirum duplici consideratione spiritualis viri meditatio tota versatur. Orans denique sanctus quidam ‘Deus, inquit, noverim te, noverim me.’ Brevis oratio, sed fidelis. Haec enim est vera philosophica et utraque cognitio prorsus necessaria ad solutum: ex priore siquidem timor concipitur et humilitas, ex posteriore spes et caritas.] Sermo de divinis, V, 5, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais, 6:1 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1970), 104. 3.  Discourse on the Method, AT VI, 32, 19; The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), hereafter “Cottingham, vol. 1,” 127. 4.  De Civitate Dei XI, 26 (CCSL 48: p. 345, ll. 17–­19): “Nulla . . . Academicorum argumenta formido dicentium: ‘Quid si falleris?’ Si enim fallor, sum. Nam qui non est, utique nec falli potest; ac per hoc sum, si fallor.” See The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 484. The passage continues: “And since, if I am mistaken, it is certain that I exist, how can I be mistaken in supposing that I exist? Since, therefore, I would have to exist even if I were mistaken, it is beyond doubt that I am not mistaken in knowing that I exist” [Quia ergo sum si fallor, quo modo esse me fallor, quando certum est me esse, si fallor? Quia igitur essem qui fallerer, etiamsi fallerer, procul dubio in eo, quod me novi esse, non fallor]. Curiously, the first letter of Mersenne has been lost, but Descartes confirms it in three letters in response: “Some time ago, you drew my attention to a passage from St. Augustine concerning my I am thinking therefore I exist, and I think you have asked me about it again since then. It is in Book Eleven, chapter 26, of De Civitate Dei.” To Mersenne, December 1640, AT III, 261, 1–­3; The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), hereafter, “Cottingham, vol. 3,” 161, referring to “the letter in which you quote the passage from St. Augustine,” November 15, 1638, AT II, 435, 19–­20, Cottingham, vol. 3, 129, namely “the passage from St. Augustine,” received on May 25, 1637, AT I, 376, 19–­20. Even E. Gilson accepted the rapprochement: “We undoubtedly will never know how far Descartes was affected, directly or indirectly, by St. Augustine or by the Augustinian tradition, and it would be unwise, moreover, to ignore what the Cartesian Cogito includes of the original; but the kinship of the doctrines is evident in the detail of the texts, even without pushing the comparison.” My translation, from Introduction à l’étude de saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1928), 55.

220  Jean-Luc Marion 5.  De Libero Arbitrio II, 3, 7 (CCSL 29: p. 239, ll. 6–­9): “Quare prius abs te quaero, ut de manifestissimis capiamus exordium, utrum tu ipse sis. An fortasse metuis ne in hac interrogatione fallaris, cum utique si non esses, falli omnino non posses?” See The Problem of Free Choice, trans. Mark Pontifex (Westminster: Newman, 1955), 80. Cited by Arnaud in Fourth Set of Objections, AT VII, 197, 23–­198, 11, which comments at 197, 26–­27: “Our distinguished author has laid down as the basis for his entire philosophy exactly the same principle as that laid down by St. Augustine—­a man of the sharpest intellect and a remarkable thinker, not only on theological topics but also on philosophical ones” [V. C. (Descartes) idem pro totius suae philosophiae principio statuisse, quod statuit D. Augustinus, acerrimi vir ingenii, nec in Theologia modo, sed etiam in Philosophicis rebus plane mirandus]. See The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), hereafter, “Cottingham, vol. 2,” 139. 6.  De Trinitate X, 10, 16 (CCSL 50/1: pp. 328–­29, ll. 61–­71): “Mentem nosse se etiam cum quaerit se, sicut iam ostendimus. . . . Dum se mens se novit, substantiam suam novit, et cum de se certa est, de substantia sua certa est. . . . Nec omnino certa est, utrum aer, an ignis sit, an aliquod corpus, vel aliquid corporis. Non est igitur aliquid eorum: Totumque illud quod se iubetur ut noverit, ad hoc pertinet ut certa sit non se esse aliquid eorum de quibus incerta est, idque solum esse se certa sit, quod solum esse se certa est.” See The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), 297. This time the rapprochement no longer concerns the demonstration of the existence of the ego (in AT VII, 25, 5–­13, which returns to De Civitate Dei, XI, 26), but the definition of its essence (AT VII, 26, 24–­28, 22), which also avoids the hypothesis that it would be corpus, aer, or ignis (27, 19–­21). Arnaud comments, in To Descartes, June 3, 1648, in AT V, 186, 9–­13: “What you have said concerning the distinction between mind and body seems to me certain, clear, lucid, and divine, and as nothing is older than the truth, I noticed not without great pleasure that St. Augustine discussed it in almost the same terms in nearly all of Book X of the De Trinitate, but especially in Chapter 10” [Quae de mentis a corpore distinctione disseruisti, certa, clara, perspicua, divina mihi videntur, atque, ut veritate nihil antiquius, eadem fere a S. Augustino, toto pene libro X De Trin., sed maxime capitulo 10, luculenter esse disputata non sine magna voluptate percipi]. 7.  The Search for Truth, AT X, 523, 24–­25 (Cottingham, vol. 2, 417): “Dubito ergo sum, vel quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum.” Or, in a slightly more developed form, at ibid., 515, 15–­22 (Cottingham, vol. 2, 409ff.): You cannot deny that you have such doubts; rather it is certain that you have them, so certain in fact that you cannot doubt your doubting. Therefore it is also true that you who are doubting exist; this is so true that you can no longer have any doubts about it. I quite agree with you on that point, because, if I did not exist, I would not be able to doubt.

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  221 You exist, therefore, and you know that you exist, and you know this just because you are doubting. [Quando quidem itaque dubitare te negare nequis, et e contrario certum est te dubitare, et quidem adeo certum, ut de eo dubitare non possis: verum etiam est te, qui dubitas, esse, hocque ita etiam verum est, ut non magis de eo dubitare possis. Assentior hic equidem tibi, quia, si non essem, non possem dubitare. Es igitur, et te esse scis, et hoc exinde, quia dubitas, scis.] 8.  De Trinitate X, 10, 14 (CCSL 50/1: pp. 327–­28, ll. 39–­43, trans. Hill, 296): “Quandoquidem etiam si dubitat, vivit; si dubitat, unde dubitet meminit; si dubitat, dubitare se intellegit; si dubitat, certus esse vult; si dubitat, cogitat; si dubitat, scit se nescire; si dubitat, iudicat non se temere consentire oportere.” 9.  To Mesland, May 2, 1644 (AT IV, 113, 12–­21, Cottingham, vol. 3, 232): “I am grateful to you for pointing out the places in St. Augustine which can be used to give authority to my views. Some other friends of mine had already done so, and I am pleased that my thoughts agree with those of such a great and holy man. For I am not the kind of person who wants his views to appear novel; on the contrary, I make my views conform with those of others so far as truth permits me.” Yet, in the Fourth Set of Replies (AT VII, 219, 6–­10, Cottingham, vol. 2, 154), Descartes prefers not to argue from this authority, instead letting “rationes meae” emerge on their own. On this intractable group of issues, see the classic works of G. Rodis-­Lewis, “Augustinisme et cartésianisme,” Etudes Augustiniennes, 1955, reprinted in L’anthropologie cartésienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990); H. Gouhier, Cartésianisme et Augustinisme au XVI e siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1978); and, despite certain lacunae, Z. Janowski, Index augustino-­cartésien: Textes et commentaire (Paris: Vrin, 2000), which includes a good recapitulation of the history of the problem, reprinted and developed as Augustinian-­Cartesian Index: Texts and Commentary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). 10.  De Beata Vita II, 7 (CCSL 29: pp. 68–­70, ll. 5–­10): Potesne nobis dicere aliquid eorum, quae nosti? Possum, inquit. Nisi molestum est, inquam, profer aliquid. Et cum dubitaret: Scisne, inquam, saltem te vivere? Scio, inquit Scis ergo habere te vitam, siquidem vivere nemo nisi vita potest. Et hoc, inquit, scio. See ‘De Beata Vita’: A Translation with Introduction and Commentary, trans. Ruth A. Brown (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1944). 11.  Which is developed at De Trinitate XV, 12, 21 (CCSL 50/2: pp. 490–­91, ll. 9–­32, trans. Hill, 412): “What is there left that we know as surely as we know that

222  Jean-Luc Marion we are alive? . . . because it is quite certain that even a man who is being deceived is alive. . . . But the man who is certain of his knowledge that he is alive is not saying on the strength of it ‘I know I am awake,’ but ‘I know I am alive.’ It is impossible in this particular point of knowledge to be deceived by dreams, because even sleeping and seeing things in dreams is proper to someone who is alive. . . . Let a thousand kinds of illusion be objected against the man who says ‘I know I am alive’; none of them will worry him, since even the man who suffers from an illusion is alive” [Quantum rerum remanet quod ita sciamus, sicut nos vivere scimus? . . . quoniam certum est etiam eum qui fallitur vivere. . . . Sed qui certus est de vitae suae scientia, non in ea dicit ‘Scio me vigilare,’ sed ‘Scio me vivere’: sive ergo dormiat, sive vigilet, vivit. Nec in ea scientia per somnia falli potest. Mille itaque fallacium visorum genera obiciantur ei qui dicit ‘Scio me vivere’: nihil eorum timebit quando et qui fallitur vivit]. See also “Si dubitat, vivit” (and the full context of De Trinitate X, 10, 14, cited above, n. 7), as well as Enchiridion VII, 20 (CCSL 46: p. 61, ll. 33–­37): “They [certain philosophers] say they do not know what they cannot not know. Because no one is permitted not to know that he lives, for if he were not living, he could not even not know anything; in fact, it is not only knowing, but also not knowing that requires a living” [Immo nescire se dicunt, quod nescire non possunt. Neque enim quisquam sinitur nescire se vivere, quandoquidem si non vivit, non potest aliquid vel nescire: quoniam non solum scire, verum etiam nescire, viventis est]. For a translation see The Augustine Catechism: The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999). 12.  De Beata Vita II, 7 (CCSL 29: p. 68, l. 9): “Vivere nemo nisi vita potest.” And at Confessions X, 20, 29, in Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 196, hereafter “Chadwick”: “For my body derives life from my soul, and my soul derives life from you” [Vivit enim corpus meum de anima mea et vivit anima mea de te. Quomodo quaero vitam beatam? Quia non est mihi]. 13.  On this central point we refer to the powerful analysis of Michel Henry: “No livings are possible except within Life,” such that “the ego comes into itself only in the coming into self of absolute Life and in the process of its eternal self-­ generation.” Life therefore does not possess itself, but receives itself as a gift: “This gift is that of Life—­the extraordinary gift through which a person who by himself would be nothing (particularly not any self ), instead, comes into himself in life . . . as a living and as a Self.” See C’est moi la Vérité: Pour une philosophie du christianisme (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 139, 190, and 178, trans. Susan Emanuel as I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 109, 150, 141. 14.  To Colvius, December 14, 1640, AT III, 247, 1–­248, 11, Cottingham, vol. 3, 159. And, in conclusion: “In itself it is such a simple and natural thing to infer that one exists from the fact that one is doubting that it could have occurred to any writer. But I am very glad to find myself in agreement with St. Augustine, if only to hush the little minds who have tried to find fault with the principle” (248,

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  223 1–­7). Elsewhere (Seventh Set of Objections with Replies, AT VII, 551, 9–­12, Cottingham, vol. 2, 376) Descartes emphasizes that the banality of the principle (“hoc tritum: Cogito, ergo sum—­the cliché ‘I am thinking, I exist’ ”) has no need to hide its power, because “I demonstrated the existence of God and many other things from this starting point” [ex his et Dei existentiam et reliqua multa demontrarim]. See also the remark that St. Augustine “. . . does not seem to make the same use of it that I do” (To Mersenne, May 25, 1630, AT I, 376, 20–­21). 15. For example, in AT VII, 51, 15–­52, 9 and 56, 26–­57, 25, Cottingham, vol. 2, 35, 36, 39, 40. I have attempted to bring out this paradox in Questions Cartésiennes II, ch. I, §6 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 36–­43, and On the Ego and God: Further Cartesian Questions, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 16.  Meditations V and VI, respectively, AT VII, 71, 7, and 78, 25, Cottingham, vol. 2, 49, 54. 17.  Preface to the Principes de la Philosophie (French translation of the Principia Philosophiae), AT IXB, 10, Cottingham, vol. 1, 184). Pascal, who sees the gap clearly, here takes the side of Descartes (as he nearly always does in philosophical matters) by insisting on the “difference between writing a word at random, without engaging in a longer and more extended reflection, and noticing in this word a series of remarkable consequences, which prove the distinction between material and spiritual natures, and making it a firm principle supported by an entire metaphysics, as Descartes claimed to do.” See De l’art de persuader, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. L. Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 358. On this rather complex position of Pascal, which in one sense is opposed to St. Augustine and ranked alongside Descartes, see V. Carraud, “Le véritable auteur du cogito: Traits d’anti-­augustinisme,” in Pascal: Des connaissances naturelles à l’étude de l’homme (Paris: Vrin, 2007), II, 1, 65ff. 18.  “Le quinzième centenaire de la mort de saint Augustine (28 août 430),” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 4 (1930), reprinted in Dialogue avec les philosophes (Paris: Aubier, 1966), 165. 19.  Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA 60 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995), 298; The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Mathias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosett-­Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 226, insisting, of course, on the relation of the mens to the Trinity according to De Trinitate XI. 20.  De Trinitate XI, 3, 6 (CCSL 50/1: p. 340, ll. 2–­3, trans. Hill, 308): “Quae tria cum in unum coguntur, ab ipso coactu cogitatio dicitur.” Varro’s formula at De lingua latina VI, 43, “Cogitare a cogitando dictum: Mens plura in unim cogit, unde eligere possit” (see edition of P. Flobert [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985], 22), also finds an echo in Confessions, X, 11, 18: “cogitando quasi colligere—­by thinking we, as it were, gather together.” See Confessions VII, 1, 1; De Trinitate X, 5, 7, and XIV, 6, 8. 21.  “It should be certain that it is that alone which alone it is certain that it is.” De Trinitate, X, 10, 16 (Hill, 297). As it concerns the mens, that the esse is ultimately

224  Jean-Luc Marion understood from life and not from substantia obviously does not prohibit it from intervening explicitly in the argument. 22. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy I, §7, AT VIII, 7 (Cottingham, vol. 1, 194–­95). 23.  Descartes, AT VII, 27, 30 (Cottingham, vol. 2, 18). The complete text, “I know that I exist; the question is, what is that I that I know?” [Novi me existere; quaero quis sim ego ille quem novi; translated with changes], indicates that it is a matter of securing the essence of the ego, now that its existence has been gained (and indeed will follow the res cogitans and the explication of its modes, 28, 20–­23). We note also the recourse to ille (as at 25, 14, Cottingham, vol. 2, 17, “quisnam ego ille, qui jam necessario sum—­what that I is that now necessarily exists” and, at 49, 13–­ 14 “ego ille, qui jam sum—­that I who now exist,” Cottingham, vol. 2, 33, which one must translate “that I, who I am,” as Luynes also has done once at AT IX–­1, 21, 41: “I seek what I am, what I recognized me to be”) to designate the ego (in place of the more expected ego ipse, myself, as at VII, 51, 22ff.). On the primacy of the formula “ego sum, ego existo” (from Meditatio II, AT VII, 25, 12), which omits precisely the cogitatio in what one always somewhat hastily calls “the cogito,” see my analyses in Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), II, §16, 370 ff., and Questions Cartésiennes II, I, 1, §3–­4, 12ff. (trans. Gschwandtner, in On the Ego and God, 8). 24.  Confessions IX, 1, 1 (Chadwick, 155): “Quis ego et qualis ego?” 25. Leibniz, A New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances and of the Union of the Soul and Body (1695), ed. Gerhart, Philosophischen Schriften, IV, 473 and 482, in G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 138, 142. On this point, see my study Sur le Prisme métaphysique de Descartes (Paris: PUF, 1986, 1st ed., 2004, 2nd ed.), chap. 3, §1, “La deduction égologique de la substance,” 161ff., translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky as On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 128 ff. 26.  Confessions IV, 4, 9 (Chadwick, 57): “Factus eram mihi magna quaestio.” 27.  IV, 6, 11: “nolebam dimidius vivere.” 28.  Confessions, X, 28, 39 (Chadwick, 202): “Temptatio est vita humana super terram sine interstitio.” The citation comes from Job 7:1, but the Vulgate renders this as “Militia est vita hominis super terram.” The addition of “sine interstitio” itself comes from St. Augustine, confirming the interpretation that Heidegger gives of this verse: The temptatio defines the existential condition of Dasein. 29.  Confessions X, 30, 41 (Chadwick, 203): “adhuc vivunt in memoria mea.” 30.  And this is the very reason that is at issue; see X, 30, 41 (Chadwick, 203): “Where then is reason which, when wide awake, resists such suggestive thoughts, and would remain unmoved if the actual reality were to be presented to it?” [Ubi est ratio, qua talibus suggestionibus resistit vigilans et, si res ipsae ingerantur, inconcussus manet?]. For Descartes, ratio does not vary because it is one with the univocal

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  225 power of the cogitatio, in such a way that the esse of the ego sum remains invariable and the same, whether I am dreaming or awake. See “Does Thought Dream?,” in Questiones Cartésiennes (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1991), chap. 1, 7ff., translated as Cartesian Questions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1ff. For Augustine, who never envisages an ego reduced without remainder to the existing cogitatio but considers all humana vita, the ego (mens) even while it continues to dream, because it continues to think while dreaming, undergoes, in terms of sexual temptation (in fact, in terms of the facticity of a Stimmung), a considerable variation indeed. The cogitatio manifests in its very permanence not only that I always am, but above all that I am no longer myself, that I am altered into an other me, who is no longer the ego. 31. X, 30, 41 (Chadwick, 203): “Numquid tunc ego non sum, Domine, Deus meus? Et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momentum, quo hinc ad soporem transeo vel huc inde retranseo!” On this distance between the self and itself, see Heidegger’s analysis in Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA 60, §13 b), 212ff. (trans. Gosett-­Ferencei, 157–­58, cited in n. 19). This gap between us and ourselves (and our word, our speech), which distinguishes us from God, also renders possible by derivation the gap in communication with the other. See De fide et Symbolo III, 4, 1 (CSEL 41, 7): “Now there is a great difference between our mind and our words, by which we undertake to extend the mind. . . . For to what else do we direct our efforts, then, if not to put our own mind, if it can be done at all, into the mind of the hearer, that it may be known and ascertained; so that we indeed may remain in our selves, and not retreat from ourselves, and yet at the same time put forward a mark of such kind that a knowledge of us may take place in an other.” [Inter animum autem nostrum et verba nostra, quibus eundem animum ostendere conamur, plurimum distat. . . . Quid enim aliud molimur, nisi animum ipsum nostrum, si fieri potest, cognoscendum et perspiciendum animo auditoris inferre? Ut in nobis quidem ipsi maneamus nec recedamus a nobis, et tamen tale indicium, quo fiat in altero nostra notitia, proferamus.] 32.  Confessions VIII, 9, 21 (Chadwick, 147): “Imperat animus corpori et paretur statim: imperat animus sibi, et resistitur. . . . Imperat animus, ut velit animus, nec alter est nec facit tamen. Unde hoc monstrum?” As I have shown in Au lieu de soi: L’approche de Saint Augustin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), chap. 4, the impossibility of the will to will itself constitutes the essential result, which founds the impossibility of converting oneself. Every splitting of the self flows from this experience, divided by its powerlessness to master what is most intimate in it, the will—­whose ultimate foundation modern metaphysics, at least since Descartes (AT VII, 57, 15–­58, 14, Cottingham, vol. 2, 40), has persisted to build on quicksand. 33. See Confessions IX, 7, 15 (Chadwick, 165). 34.  Ibid. X, 33, 50 (Chadwick, 208): “Me amplius cantus, quam res quae canitur, moveat.” One finds elsewhere a critique of those who sing with a full voice at church, with the same conviction they take to the circus, to the market, and even to

226  Jean-Luc Marion debauched parties. See Enarrationes in Psalmos 30, 2, 2, 2 and 48, 2, 10 (CCSL 38: 203 and 573–­74), translated by Maria Boulding as Expositions of the Psalms (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), 1:335 and 2:377–­78. 35. X, 33, 50 (Chadwick, 208): “Mihi quaestio factus sum.” 36.  It is regrettable that this expediency of language, which still spreads a basic misinterpretation, finds followers even among the best-­intentioned commentators. Because the Cartesians of the seventeenth century have had a significant posterity, from P. de Labriolle, J.-­F. Thonnard, and J. Agaësse to M. A. Vannier, “Les anticipations du cogito chez St. Augustin,” inSan Augustin: Homenaje al Professor Jaime Garcià Alvarez en su 65 Anniversario, ed. R. Laycano (Madrid: Editorial Revista Augustiniana, 1997); G. B. Matthews, Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); and E. Bermon, Le cogito dans la pensée de saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 2001). 37.  IV, 14, 22 (Chadwick, 66): “Grande profundum est ipse homo.” 38. Respectively, De Ordine I, 1, 3 (CCSL 29: p. 90, ll. 50–­51), following but modifying On Order, trans. Silvano Borruso (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007), 5: “Homo sibi ipse est incognitus,” and De Trinitate X, 3, 5 (CCSL 50/1: p. 317, ll. 12–­13, trans. Hill, 290): “[Mens] se ipse nihil sibi posit esse praesentius.” See also “as if the mind were not able to be in mind?” [quasi posit mens in mente non esse, X, 4, 6]; “What is so present to mind as the mind itself?” [Quid tam menti adest, quam ipsa mens?, X, 7, 10]; “What after all can be as much in the mind as mind?” [Quid enim tam in mente quam mens est?, X, 8, 11]). 39.  De Trinitate X, 4, 6 (CCSL 50/1: p. 318, ll. 46–­49, trans. Hill, p. 291): “Quid ergo dicemus? An quod ex parte [mens] se novit, ex parte non novit? . . . Non dico: ‘Totum scit,’ sed: ‘Quod scit tota scit.’ ” 40.  If, in Levinas’s terms, “consciousness is a rupture of the anonymous vigilance of the there is [il y a], thus a . . . true reversal within anonymous being” (Le temps et l’autre [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991], 31), there will be precisely no Augustinian consciousness, at least in the sense of self-­consciousness. 41. Respectively, Confessions X, 14, 21 (Chadwick, 191): “Animus est ipsa memoria,” and X, 16, 2 (Chadwick, 193): “Ego sum qui memini, ego animus.” See X, 14, 21: “We call mind the memory itself ” [Ipsam memoriam vocantes animum]. J. F. Lyotard says rightly of the memory that “it is the mind itself,” in La confession d’Augustin (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 70, translated by Richard Beardsworth as The Confession of Augustine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 46, 47. 42.  Confessions X, 7, 12 (Chadwick, 185): “ibi reconditum est quicquid etiam cogitamus.” See Heidegger: “The memoria is certainly nothing outside of consciousness but is consciousness itself ” (Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA 60,186; trans. Gosett-­Ferencei, 136). And also R. Teske: “In memory Augustine also encounters himself and recalls himself,” in “Augustine’s Philosophy of Memory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, trans. E. Stump and N. Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 151.

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  227 43. Respectively, De Trinitate XIV, 6, 8 (CCSL 50/2: p. 432, ll. 33–­34): “Tamen [mens] noverit se tamquam ipsa sibi sit memoria sui,” and ibid., 7, 9 (CCSL 50/2: p. 432, l. 55): “Mentem semper sui meminisse.” 44.  Confessions X, 17, 26 (Chadwick, 194): “Magna vis est memoriae, nescio quid horrendum, Deus meus, profunda et infinita multiplicitas; et hoc animus est, et hoc ego ipse sum. Quid ergo sum, Deus meus? Quae natura sum?” 45. X, 8, 15 (Chadwick, 187): “Magna ista vis est memoriae, magna nimis, Deus meus, penetrale amplum et infinitum. . . . Nec ego ipse capio totum, quod sum. Ergo animus ad habendum se ipsum angustus est, ut ubi sit quod sui non capit? Numquid extra ipsum et non in ipso?” 46.  De Trinitate X, 3, 5 CCSL 50/1: p. 317, ll. 23–­25, Hill, 291: “An aliquem finem optimum, id est securitatem et beatitudinem suam, videt per quandam occultam memoriam quae in longuinqua eam progressam non deseruit.” 47.  See ibid.: “Sed cur memoria beatitudinis suae potuit, et memoria sui cum ea perdurare non potuit?” 48.  De Trinitate XIV, 7, 9 (CCSL 50/2: p. 433, l. 19, trans. Hill, 377). 49.  Confessions X, 16, 24 (Chadwick, 193): “Cum vero memini oblivionem, et memoria praesto est et oblivio.” The same analysis continues at X, 20, 29, which distinguishes clearly among the forgetting of what one still retains in the mind, the forgetting of what the mind has lost but knows it has lost something, and the forgetting that is itself totally forgotten. A. Solignac finds “excessively subtle problems” and reproaches him for “contriving to materialize forgetting, to consider it as a thing.” Bibliothèque augustinienne (BA) 16 (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1991), 563ff. We note, however, that not only did Heidegger recognize that “the characteristic of forgetting is that it forgets itself. It is implicit in the ecstatic nature of forgetting that it not only forgets the forgotten but forgets the forgetting itself.” Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 24 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1975), §20, 411; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 290. But it could be that St. Augustine here frees himself in advance from this dichotomy between (involuntary) material memory and (voluntary) intellectual memory, which in Descartes, for example (but in others, too), makes the very concept of memory disappear by rendering unintelligible its facticity and its ambivalence (for remembering and for not remembering) and thus the contingency of the mens. 50. P. Agaësse suggests a “knowledge in some way preconscious or at least non-reflexive” (BA 16, op. cit., 606), but E. Gilson does not hesitate over the word: “The only modern psychological terms that would be equivalent to Augustine’s memoria are unconscious or subconscious (Introduction à l’étude de saint Augustin, 194). L. Cilleruelo attributes a content to memoria “oscuro, implicito, impreso, arcano, habitual, inconsciente” (“La ‘memoria Dei’ segun San Agustin,” in Augustinus Magister I (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1954), 5; see “¿Por qué ‘memoria Dei’?,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 4, no. 10 (1964), and “Pro memoria Dei,” Revue des Études

228  Jean-Luc Marion Augustiniennes 12 (1966). For G. Madec’s reservations, see Revue des Études Augustiniennes 4, no. 9 (1963), then Saint Augustin et la philosophie, 87ff. 51.  Conscientia does not appear in the Meditations, but in the Third Set of Replies we find this: “There are other acts which we call ‘acts of thought,’ such as understanding, willing, imagining, having sensory perceptions, and so on: these all fall under the common concept of thought or perception or consciousness” [Sunt deinde alii actus, quos vocamus cogitativos, ut intelligere, velle, imaginari, sentire, etc., qui omnes sub ratione communi cogitationis, sive perceptionis, sive conscientiae conveniunt], AT VII, 176, 16–­19, Cottingham, vol. 2, 124. But above all we see conscius in the Second Set of Replies, AT VII, 160, 8, 14, etc. See also Principia Philosophiae I, §9: “By the term ‘thought,’ I understand everything which we are aware of as happening within us, in so far as we have awareness of it” [Cogitationis nomine, intelligo illa omnia, quae nobis consciis in nobis fiunt, quatenus eorum in nobis conscientia est], AT VIII–­1, 7, Cotthingham, vol. 1, 195, and, in French: “You inquire about the principle by which I claim to know that the idea I have of something is not an idea made inadequate by an abstraction of my intellect. I derive this principle purely from my own thought or awareness” [Pour ce qui est du principe par lequel il me semble connaître que l’idée que j’ai de quelque chose non redditur a me inadaequata per abstractionem intellectus, je ne le tire que de ma propre pensée ou conscience], To Gibieuf, January 1642, AT III, 474, 9–­12, Cotthingham, vol. 3, 201. The traditional attribution of the invention of consciousness to Coste’s translation of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 28 (still maintained by E. Balibar in “L’invention européenne de la conscience,” in John Locke: Identité et différence [Paris: Seuil, 1998]) must be reconsidered. See G. Olivo’s development of the issue in Descartes et l’essence de la vérité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 320, n. 2, following G. Rodis-­Lewis, Le problème de l’inconscient et le cartésianisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 39 and L’oeuvre de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 240. 52.  According to the excellent formulation by J.-­F. Lyotard in La confession d’Augustin, p. 53, translated by Beardsworth as The Confession of Augustine, 33, as cited in n. 41. 53. Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-­delà de l’essence (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1974, 1st ed.), respectively, 49, 33, 48 (and 66), 112, 13, and 157, translated by Alphonso Lingis as Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1981), 38, 26, 38 (and 51), 88, 11, and 122. This Heidegger also does not contradict: “The forgetting is not nothing, nor is it just a failure to remember, it is rather a ‘positive’ ecstatic mode of one’s having-­been,” in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), §68, 339, originally Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1963). 54.  Confessions X, 16, 25 (Chadwick, 193): “Factus sum mihi ‘terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii.’” 55.  Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 20, §20, 411.

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  229 56.  Confessions X, 16, 25 (Chadwick, 193): “Ego sum qui memini, ego animus. Non ita mirum, si a me longe est quidquid ego non sum. Quid propinquius me ipso mihi? Et ecce memoriae meae vis non comprehenditur a me, cum ipsum me non dicam praeter illam.” 57.  Ibid.: “Et tamen quocumque modo, licet sit modus iste incomprehensibilis et inexplicabilis, etiam ipsam oblivionem meminisse me certus sum, qua id quod meminerimus obruitur.” 58. X, 17, 26 (Chadwick, 194): “profunda et infinita multiplicitas . . . varia, multimoda vita et immensa.” 59. X, 8, 15 (Chadwick, 187): “Multa mihi super hoc oboritur admiratio, stupor apprehendit me.” 60. X, 17, 26 (Chadwick, 194): “nescio quid horrendum . . . profunda et infinita multiplicitas.” 61. X, 8, 15 (Chadwick, 187): “Nec ego ipse capio totum, quod sum. Ego animus ad habendum se ipsum angustus est.” 62. X, 7, 11 (Chadwick, 185): “Quis est ille super caput animae meae? Per ipsam animam meam ascendam ad illum. Transibo vim meam.” 63. X, 17, 26 (Chadwick, 194): “Transibo et hanc vim meam, quae memoria vocatur.” 64.  IX, 10, 25 (Chadwick, 171ff.): “et ipsa anima sileat et transeat se non se cogitando.” 65.  IX, 10, 24 (Chadwick, 171): “Erigentes nos ardiore affectu in id ipsum coelum, unde sol et luna et stellae lucent super terram, et adhuc ascendebamus interius cogitando et loquendo et mirando opera tua, et venimus in mentes nostras et transcendimus eas, ut attingeremus regionem ubertatis indeficientis.” On this transcendence by passing through all things, here including the self, see In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 20, 12 (CCSL 36: p. 210, ll. 1–­39): “Think about the body; it is mortal, earthy, fragile, corruptible. Leave it aside. But is it just the flesh that is subject to time? . . . Pass beyond them [celestial bodies] too. ‘And how,’ you will ask, ‘am I to pass beyond the heavenly bodies when I am walking about on earth?’ ‘You pass beyond them with the mind, not with the flesh. But leave them aside too.’ . . . Without doubt the spirit, by which you thought about all these things, is better than all these things you have thought about. So the mind then is spirit, not body; pass beyond this too. . . . The spirit therefore is something great. But how am I saying ‘is’? Go beyond it too. Because, although it is better than every kind of body, the spirit too is subject to change. . . . Go beyond your spirit too. Pour your soul over yourself, so as to touch God” [Cogita corpus; mortale est, terrenum est, fragile est, corruptibile est; abice! Sed forte caro temporalis est? . . . Transi et ipsa! Et quomodo, inquies, transeo caelestia corpora, cum ambulo in terra? Non carne transis, sed mente. Abice et ipsa! . . . Sine dubio melior est animus quo ista omnia cogitasti, quam ista omnia quae cogitasti. Animus ergo iste spiritus est, non corpus: transi et ipsum! . . . Magna ergo res est animus. Sed quomodo dico, est? Transi et ipsum! Quia et ipse animus

230  Jean-Luc Marion mutabilis est, quamvis melior sit omni corpore. . . . Transi ergo et animum tuum! Effunde super te animam tuam ut contingas Deum]. Translated by Edmund Hill in Homilies on the Gospel of John (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), 368, 369. And likewise, Enarrationes in Psalmos 41, 8 (CCSL 38: pp. 465–­66, ll. 13–­19): “I sought my God in visible, material creatures, and I did not find him. I sought the substance of him in myself . . . and did not find him there either; so I have become aware that my God is some reality above the soul” [Quaero ego Deum meum in omni corpore, sive terrestri, sive caelesti, et non invenio; quaero substantiam eius in anima mea . . . . , et non invenio; Ibi enim domus Dei mei, super animam meam]. See Expositions of the Psalms 33–­50, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), 245, 246. 66.  De Trinitate XIII, 4, 7 (CCSL 50/2, pp. 390–­91, ll. 33–­36, trans. Hill, p. 348): “Cum vellet in Hortensio dialogo ab aliqua re certa de qua nullus ambigeret sumere suae disputationis exordium, ‘Beati certe,’ inquit, ‘Omnes esse volumus.’ ” The loss of the Hortensius text means, paradoxically, that we know the authority on which St. Augustine here relies only from his citation, which has become Fragment 28 in J. C. von Orelli, M. T. Ciceronis opera quae supersunt omnia (Zurich: 1861), vol. 4, 982. Of course Cicero had formulated this principle in other texts. See, for example, Academica I, 5, 21–­26, 22, Loeb Classical Library 19 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 430ff.; De natura deorum I, 20, 53; and Tusculanes V, 10, 28. See also M. Testard, Saint Augustin et Cicéron (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1958), in particular, vol. 1, 19–­39, and Michel P. Foley, “Cicero, Augustine and the Philosophical Roots of the Cassiciacum Dialogues,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 45 (1999). Seneca followed in De vita beata, I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 99: “To live happily, my brother Gallio, is the desire of all men, but their minds are blinded to the clear vision of just what it is that makes life happy” [Vivere, Gallio frater, omnes beate volunt, sed ad pervidendum, quid sit quod beatam vitam efficiat, caligant]. The theme goes back clearly to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics I, 1, 1, 1094a: “Every art and every investigation, and likewise every practical pursuit or undertaking, seems to aim at some good” [Πᾶσα τέχνη καὶ πᾶσα μέθοδος, ὁμοίως δὲ πρᾶξίς τε καὶ προαίρεσις ἀγαθοῦ τινός ἐφίεται δοκεῖ], translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934; revised edition, 1990), 3, and Plato, Euthydemus, 278e: “There could hardly be a man who would not wish to do well” [τὶς γὰρ οὐ βοὺλεται εὗ πρὰττειν], translated by John M. Cooper in Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). On this tradition, see R. Holte, Béatitude et sagesse: Saint Augustin et le problème de la fin de l’homme dans la philosophie ancienne (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1962), esp. XVII–­XVIII. So much so that philosophy itself is redefined as exclusively the pursuit of beatitude in De Civitate Dei XIX, 1 (CCSL 48: p. 659, ll. 120–­25, trans. Dyson, 912, 913): “For man indeed has no purpose in practicing philosophy apart from the attainment of happiness. But that which makes him happy is none other than the Supreme Good. The only purpose of the practice of philosophy, therefore, is the Supreme

St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego cogito  231 Good” [Quando quidem nulla est homini causa philosophandi nisi ut beatus sit; quod autem beatum facit, ipse est finis boni; nulla est igitur causa philosophandi, nisi finis boni: Quam ob rem quae nullum boni finem sectatur, nulla philosophiae secta dicenda est]. 67.  Confessions X, 20, 29 (Chadwick, 196): “Nonne ipsa est vita beata, quam omnes volunt et omnino qui nolit nemo est? . . . Nota est igitur omnibus, qui una voce se interrogari possent, utrum beati esse vellent, sine ulla dubitatione velle responderent. Quod non fieret, nisi res ipsa, cujus nomen est, eorum memoria teneretur.” 68.  De Beata Vita II, 10, 4 (CCSL 29: p. 70, ll. 85–­87). “To be happy, this is what we want, I say. No sooner did I say it than they all with one voice admit it.” 69.  The Republic, in Complete Works, VI, 508e, 509b (cited in n. 66). 70.  De Trinitate XIII, 4, 7 (CCSL 50/2: p. 391, ll. 36–­44, trans. Hill, 348): “Quid igitur? An dicendum est etiamsi nihil sit aliud beate vivere quam secundum virtutem animi vivere, tamen et qui hoc non vult beate vult vivere? Nimis quidem hoc videtur absurdum. Tale est enim ac si dicamus: ‘Et qui non vult beate vivere beate vult vivere.’ Istam repugnantiam quis audiat, quis ferat? Et tamen ad hanc contrudit necessitas, si et omnes beate velle vivere verum est, et non omnes sic volunt vivere quomodo solum vivitur beate.” 71.  Confessions X, 20, 29 (Chadwick, 196): “utrum in memoria sit beata vita. . . . Quod non fieret, nisi res ipsa, cuius hoc nomen est, eorum memoria teneretur.”

eight

The Augustinian Strain of Piety Theology and Autobiography in American History

w. c l a r k g i l p i n

More than a half-­century ago, historian of American literature Perry Miller began his magisterial two-­volume work The New England Mind with a chapter titled “The Augustinian Strain of Piety.” On closer inspection, when Miller said, “Augustinian,” he really had only one book in mind: the Confessions. Miller’s argument—­to state it in its baldest form—­ was that the New England Puritans had made a crucial contribution to the subsequent larger project of American culture and that this contribution was best understood as a series of variations on the autobiographic representation of the soul’s search for God. The Puritan “frame of mind” that had proven so influential for subsequent representations of American personal and national identity had its “arch-­exemplar” in Augustine of Hippo. “There survive hundreds of Puritan diaries and thousands of Puritan sermons,” Miller observed, “but we can read the inward meaning of them all in the Confessions.”1 233

234  W. Clark Gilpin

In what follows, my purpose is not to appraise Miller’s project as a whole; two full generations of scholars have powerfully challenged and reconfigured many dimensions of his work. Instead, I bring Miller’s characterization of “the Augustinian frame of piety” into conversation with a central feature of recent theological reflection by David Tracy: the metaphor of the fragment. I build this conversation around Miller’s implicit privileging of the literary genre of autobiography and illustrate my argument through autobiographies, ranging from John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) to W. E. B. DuBois’s Dusk of Dawn (1940) and Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness (1952). In these highly varied representations of the self, from Puritan spiritual autobiographies to American autobiographies of the twentieth century, I observe a persistent tendency to represent the self as a fragment, and I reflect on the theological implications of this self-­representation. Had all of my illustrative types read the Confessions? Probably not. But, as David Tracy has taught us, classic texts are classics in no small measure because they seep out from between their bindings into the wider cultural discourse, where they shape perception and presupposition in ways that are, shall we say, “unfootnoted.” Frederick Douglass, for instance, who holds the distinction of having written his autobiography on four separate occasions (1845, 1855, 1881, and 1893), trained his grand oratorical p ­ owers through repeated reading of The Columbian Orator (1797), a collection of brief extracts from classic orations, sermons, and speeches that stretched from the Roman Republic to the American Revolution. As apho­risms summarizing “what everybody knows,” as illustrations of gender or class relations, as implicit scripts that influence the ways we interpret our lives, classic texts percolate like the waters of a vast aquifer through the sedimentary layers of cultural knowledge. So I want to grant Perry Miller the working hypothesis that the Confessions shaped a “strain of piety” in American history that extended far beyond those whom we would count as students of the text and even beyond the boundaries of Christianity.

Au g u s t i n i a n P i e t y

In Miller’s recounting of America’s “Augustinian strain of piety,” an urgent, restless sense of the human predicament had indelibly marked the

The Augustinian Strain of Piety   235

New England mind, and he traced the origins of this existential restlessness to Augustine, who was “driven by his insatiable quest for satisfactions that nothing of this earth was ever able to supply him.” Augustine hungered after truth but constantly deceived himself into pursuing what proved to be fantasies and illusions. Twelve hundred years later, Thomas Hooker preached a Puritan version of this predicament of self-­deception to the colonists of Hartford, Connecticut. “The soul was made for an end” in communion with God, Hooker announced, and “this impression remains still upon the soul.” But sin had blinded and deluded human judgment so that it utterly mistook the true good and pursued other, perishable things instead. Consequently, the soul remained “restless and unsatisfied” in all merely earthly possessions and attainments, because “it hath not that for which it was made.” The conundrum was not only that sin had diverted humans from their own proper destiny in the order of creation. Equally fundamental to the Puritan interpretation of the human predicament was the idea that “God, the force, the power, the life of the universe, must remain to men hidden, unknowable, and unpredictable.” As Miller summarized this frame of mind: “The Augustinian strain of piety flows from man’s desire to transcend his imperfect self, to open channels for the influx of an energy which pervades the world, but with which he himself is inadequately supplied. It takes flight from the realization that the natural man, standing alone in the universe, is not only minute and insignificant, but completely out of touch with both justice and beauty.” Urged on by their quest for an ultimately unknowable destiny and by their fears that they were self-­deceived in this effort, the Puritans drew from seemingly “inexhaustible inkwells” to write histories, sermons, catechisms, journals, and autobiographies that explored the pilgrimage of human life across a landscape of deceptive signposts toward a goal constantly receding beyond the horizon of human sight.2

T h e A rt o f T e l l i n g a n U n f i n i s h e d S to ry

Clearly, this nagging sensation, that “I” am in constant danger of living my life so as utterly to miss the mark toward which I aim lays the ground for dramatic narratives in which all manner of desire, arrogance, and violence imperil would-­be heroes and heroines. Hence, it comes as

236  W. Clark Gilpin

no surprise that, from Perry Miller’s time to our own, literary ­scholars including Ian Watt, Paul Hunter, and Michael McKeon have placed spiri­tual auto­biographies of the seventeenth century among the crucial cultural contexts of the eighteenth-­century novel. But one feature links the Confessions and modern autobiography while distinguishing both from novels, drama, and other imaginative literature. Autobiography is, by definition, incomplete; the author does not cease to exist when the final period is put on the page. The composition of one’s own life is necessarily a tale without an ending. Autobiography is not obituary. So much is this the case that in seventeenth-­century England, when one experimenter with personal narrative later changed his mind and allegiances, it was his enemies who published his earlier autobiographic declarations. Autobiography, by its inescapable incompleteness, differs not simply from obituary; it also differs from the classic literary forms of fiction and nonfiction. In classic fiction, the novel or the drama has a plot that reaches a climax; in nonfiction, the hypothesis is demonstrated and the argument resolved. In Shakespeare’s comedies, the mistaken identities are all cleared up in the final act and the confusion they caused is set in order. But in creating the story of yourself, until the story is over, how will you know that your present self-­understanding is not yet another case of mistaken identity? One might, of course, suggest that this inevitable incompleteness of any story we might tell about our individual lives is the most obvious example of what David Tracy calls the fragment. This suggestion seems to me to be entirely inadequate. There are at least two reasons for this inadequacy, one having to do with personal narrative and the other with cultural narrative. By specifying my reasons for resisting simple identification of the unfinished character of life with its fragmentary character, I aim to clarify how use of the theological metaphor of the fragment may illuminate some crucial features of autobiography in American history. First, with respect to personal narrative, one of the striking features of numerous modern autobiographies, including those strongly inflected by Christian theology, is the extraordinarily confident portrait of a whole or unified self toward which the narrative moves. A leading interpreter of religious autobiography, John Barbour, has aptly summarized this feature: “The classic religious autobiography speaks to those readers whose faith and hope lies in stability of character and to those whose optimism

The Augustinian Strain of Piety   237

depends on the possibility of basic transformations of character. Such an autobiography appeals strongly to the Western religious consciousness—­to our deep desire for a finally complete self, based on the ideal of the unified self and the idea of the soul.” But Barbour goes on to observe that, when narratives accentuate the unified self or the transformative process that leads to its unification, they are appealing precisely to “our modern anxieties about the self, and to our awareness of the realities of character change, role-­playing, and self-­deception.” Indeed, Barbour argues that these “modern anxieties” had been most searchingly explored in Augustine’s Confessions, which accentuated the problem of the self ’s unity and the limits of self-­knowledge. “Self-­knowledge is always uncertain for Augustine,” Barbour states, “for finally only God truly knows the self.”3 Barbour’s observations resonate, of course, with Perry Miller’s earlier identification of the existential dynamic that propelled the New England mind—­the urgent search by a sinful humanity for its destiny in an unknowable God. In this “Augustinian” view, some clear concept of the unified self is by no means the given starting point or enduring core of human identity. Hence, beyond the incompleteness or unfinished quality of personal life, the writer who takes up the task of narrating a self confronts a further and much more dangerous open-­endedness to autobiography: the relentless threat of illusion or self-­deception. It is this set of existential ambiguities within personhood that the metaphor of the fragment addresses. Second, with respect to the fragment and cultural narrative, Tracy has accentuated the eclipse of the grand narrative of Western civilization. “To understand our cultural situation rightly,” he proposes, “one must expand the cultural horizons, including the philosophical and religious horizons, of the contemporary Western discussion beyond a Western sense of centeredness and a Western sense of its own pluralism toward a new global sense of polycentrism.” This polycentric situation not only rela­tivizes the Western narrative but also fractures its internal coherence and thereby opens spaces for the reemergence of newly creative elements from the Western past as “explosions of once-­forgotten, marginalized, and repressed realities.” In Tracy’s estimation the new cultural situation dramatically challenges the modern Western drive toward philosophical and institutional systems of “totality,” and it is in this sense that “fragments are our spiritual situation.”4 In sum, the continuity and direction of cultural history are as thoroughly problematic as the continuity and

238  W. Clark Gilpin

direction of the self, and analogous difficulties arise in both cases not simply from the fact that both are unfinished narratives but also from the more intractable questions posed by misleading narratives of unity. The issues at stake are clarified by an exchange between Tracy and Jacques Derrida, appended to Tracy’s essay “Fragments,” from which I have just quoted. Derrida opened the discussion by objecting that “the figure of a fragment implies a broken whole” and therefore inescapably conveys hints of “the memory of totality, the desire to reconstitute the system and the totality.” Tracy responded that theological uses of the metaphor of the fragment, for example, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, did not presuppose totality but drew instead from eschatological images of God, “which perhaps must remain un-­nameable, but certain aspects of which may be seen in the fragments.” These alternative interpretations press us to ask whether the meaning of the fragment derives from its (covert) evocation of a total system into which it fits or, instead, from the way that attention to the fragment itself disrupts the regime of the totalizing system. Tracy’s analysis of the contemporary cultural situation nicely complements Thomas Couser’s identification of a prominent feature of American autobiography, which Couser terms its “prophetic mode”: “Prophetic autobiography flourishes in times of crisis—­when change threatens communal values or when historical developments demand new modes of interpretation. It requires of the autobiographer a sense of his implication in the crisis and a theology or metaphysic capable of comprehending it. . . . His prophetic stance is matched by his sense of the community’s need for it and perhaps balanced by his recognition that the vision is theirs as much as it is his.”5 As the remainder of this chapter illustrates, the history of American autobiography offers numerous examples of life-­writing that focused on that intersection between personal narrative and cultural narrative, which intersection is the distinctive domain of “the prophetic mode.” Where some autobiographies prophesied the recovery of a lost unity or confidently announced progress toward it, others evinced the influence of “the Augustinian strain of piety” and insisted instead on the ambiguous and uncentered character of all human existence, both personal and collective. It is when the art of telling an unfinished story takes this latter direction that the metaphor of the fragment comes into its own.

The Augustinian Strain of Piety   239 T h e R e t ro s p e c t i v e R e co g n i t i o n o f T r a n s c e n d e n c e

Augustine’s Confessions exerted an especially powerful influence on autobiography in the modern history of Christianity through the interconnections and tensions between two perspectives from which the Confessions gave an account of Augustine’s life. From one perspective, Augustine represented the understanding he had of events while they were occurring. But a storyteller is not a journalist, reporting a story as it unfolds. Augustine, a man in his early forties, had returned from Milan to North Africa and sat at his writing desk as a Christian bishop. The events about which he wrote had all occurred at least ten years earlier. As Augustine recounted past events, emotions, and moments of moral dilemma, he was also appraising them from a second perspective, in light of his present knowledge. Reading the Confessions is like putting a DVD into a Blu-­ray player and watching an entire movie with the director’s commentary on. Through this double layer of representation, Augustine presented himself as recognizing the purpose and presence of God retrospectively by looking back over the course of his life in order to discern its divinely directed tendency, a tendency altogether invisible at the time the events were occurring. In no small measure, the art of the Confessions hinged on Augustine’s capacity to create vivid contrasts between these two points of view and thereby to accentuate the way in which the direction of his life and the presence of God came to be seen only retrospectively. Thus Augustine tells us that, looking back on his life, he realized that God had been present throughout, when he was stealing pears, when he was sneaking away from his mother Monica in order to sail to Rome, or when he was inconsolable in his grief over the death of a friend. A vivid illustration of these interlocking features of the Confessions is Augustine’s account of his admiration for the Roman orator Hiereus, whom he desperately desired to emulate: “I erred through swollen pride, and I was blown about by every wind, and You steered my course for me too hiddenly. And I know now and with sure confidence confess to You that I loved the man more for the love of those who praised him than for the qualities for which he was praised.”6 A life that, at the time, seemed to twist aimlessly with the shift of prevailing winds now retrospectively disclosed a secret hand at the tiller.

240  W. Clark Gilpin

Especially noticeable in this vignette and many others within the Confessions is a dual representation of God both as the one recognized only retrospectively and as the subject being directly addressed in prayer. To a considerable extent, the writer of this retrospective narrative, in the present moment of writing, presented the process of composition as a solitary dialogue with God. Augustine the storyteller sits at his desk in the presence of this God, “who is Truth Itself.” The storyteller does not simply recall events for his own meditation or recount them for the edification of his human readers but also—­even primarily—­tells them to the “Truth Itself,” the Creator of the Universe, God. As Augustine explained, this confession was both an admission of fault to God and a praise of God. The God whose presence was recognized only in memory had become an actively present subject: “For I find nothing concerning Thee but what I have remembered.”7 And yet the vignette of Hiereus contained a word of caution to its human audience concerning the theatricality of representing the self through “rhetorical forms conveying ostensibly private dialogues with God.”8 Augustine the orator warned his readers about oratory, calling attention to the gulf that separated the crowds who “praised” the orator Hiereus while captured by the winds of current celebrity from the person who sought through humble confession to “praise” God. The inescapable ambiguity of the present, in which God steers “too hiddenly” for our clear apprehension, made Augustine apprehensive about all human claims to present knowledge of the divine purpose. In the Confessions he presented to the audience a dramatized self, together with the warning that emulation imperils the soul. In descriptions such as this, I propose, we see the sort of literary space within which autobiography may accentuate the fragment. The fragment names the contrastive experience of an event that claims attention not only for its apparent randomness, its discontinuity with everyday life, or its threat of deception, but also for its enigmatic suggestion that it conveys a surfeit of meaning. This existential chiaroscuro became a crucial signal of transcendence within America’s Augustinian strain of piety. Just as Augustine looked back over his life in order to recognize what had been unrecognized at the time—­the divine presence—­so also were the core spiritual disciplines of the New England Puritans retrospective. Spiritual practices—­including especially the literary spiritual practices of writing journals, diaries, and autobiographies—­scoured the memories of days and

The Augustinian Strain of Piety   241

years for those episodes that seemed to exceed and overflow their obvious significance and thus to portend some more extensive meaning and broader pattern of connections. But how would one perceive a fragment to be a fragment unless a mental image was already present of the total system from which it came? And, in that case, the entire theory of fragments seems to fall to Derrida’s objection that it is a thinly veiled appeal to the authority of totalizing regimes. Before returning to this question at the conclusion of this chapter, I want to describe, with a minimum of interpretation, a few specific examples from American autobiographies.

T h e F r ag m e n t: T h r e e Au tob i o g r a p h i c S t r at e g i e s A New Word from the Ancient Word

In 1739 the New England minister Jonathan Edwards composed a brief “Personal Narrative” in which he gave a synoptic account of his religious conversion, apparently at the request of a young student preparing for the ministry. Edwards composed the narrative by making use of writings he had compiled as spiritual exercises since he was a teenager: a diary, journals and notebooks, a long list of “resolutions” about his conduct, and several complementary devotional writings. All of these spiritual exercises—­ written and bodily—­were rigorously retrospective and exhibited a kind of calculus of the ebbs and flows in his piety. Edwards’s diary thus maintained a record of his interior disposition for later evaluation, and his resolutions represented formal commitments to interior transformation, which he measured for increase or diminishment at the end of every week, month, and year. These retrospective literary self-­assessments would eventually find full expression in the “Personal Narrative.” In addition to this rather computational approach to spirituality, the “Personal Narrative” also recounted moments of discontinuity that provoked fresh perception. The pivot of the narrative was Edwards’s account of the “inward, sweet delight in God” that enveloped him as he meditated over a passage of Scripture, 1 Timothy, 1:17: “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever, Amen.” As Edwards read these words, he writes, “There came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of

242  W. Clark Gilpin

the divine being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before.” In the aftermath of this transformation, while contemplating Christ and the divine glory, he found “a calm, sweet abstraction of soul from all the concerns o[f ] this world; and a kind of vision, or fixed ideas and imaginations, of being alone in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ, and wrapt and swallowed up in God.”9 This experience of a suddenly new perception, provoked by a single passage of Scripture, had numerous antecedents in the Puritan spiritual autobiographies of the seventeenth century. Most famous among these was John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), which reported several occasions when biblical verses had entered Bunyan’s mind as if in the form of direct speech. On one such occasion, Bunyan remembered himself “troubled and tossed and afflicted” by the recognition of his own wickedness. Whereas a scriptural text imparted a “new sense” of God’s glory to Jonathan Edwards, for John Bunyan, Luke 22: 31 resounded with a threatening, if somewhat enigmatic parallel to a biblical figure: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you.” Bunyan recalled in Grace Abounding that sometimes this specific verse “would sound so loud within me, yea, and as it were call so strongly after me, that once above all the rest, I turned my head over my shoulder, thinking verily that some man had behind me called to me, being at a great distance.”10 Bunyan’s vivid recollection provides an apt summary of generations of Puritan and evangelical narratives about the role of Scripture in the conversion experience. Bunyan remembered being literally turned around by a single sentence directly addressed to him from “a great distance.” A text was existentially appropriated as authoritative and thereby imparted what Edwards had called a “new sense” or perception of the world. The Expansive Meaning of a Single Event

Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1952), owed its overall structure—­moving from “Searching” to “Natural Happiness” to “Love Is the Measure”—­more to Thomas Aquinas than to Augustine. Nonetheless, Day began her autobiography not only with reference to the Confessions but also with the “hard” practice of actually “going to confession.” She concluded these introductory paragraphs of confession by declaring

The Augustinian Strain of Piety   243

“I can write only of myself, what I know of myself, and I pray with St. Augustine, ‘Lord, that I may know myself, in order to know Thee.’ ”11 For Day, the route to self-­knowledge had passed through specific episodes in her life that evoked for her a new sense of her incorporation into the universal human community. Two of these beautifully composed episodes must suffice. In the first, Day is persuaded by friends to travel to Washington to picket the White House on behalf of advocates of women’s suffrage who, while “serving jail sentences had been given very brutal treatment.” Refusing to desist in their picketing, Day and her compatriots were themselves sentenced to thirty days in jail, and the group determined to go on a hunger strike. During her jail sentence, “I lost all feeling of my own identity,” Day recalled: I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin. That I would be free after thirty days meant nothing to me. I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty. The mother who had murdered her child, the drug addict—­who were the mad and the sane? . . . When I first wrote of these experiences I wrote even more strongly of my identification with those around me. I was that mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had borne the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own breast every abomination. Is this exaggeration?12 Day’s sense of solidarity had overflowed her common cause with the suffragists, her compassion for the victim, and her identity as a woman and intertwined her very person with the full extent of human sin. In the second episode, Dorothy Day is once again on the picket line, this time in Boston in August 1927, to protest against the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti: “The day they died, the papers had headlines as large as those which proclaimed the outbreak of war. All the nation mourned. All the nation, I mean, that is made up of the poor, the worker, the trade unionist—­those who felt most keenly the sense of solidarity—­that very sense of solidarity which made me gradually

244  W. Clark Gilpin

understand the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ whereby we are the members one of another.”13 Once again, specific events that were part of Day’s commitment to particular social causes opened out into a recognition of wider patterns of social connection, but this time they culminated in a new sense of Christian teaching about Christ’s mystical body as representative of universal human solidarity. Witness to a Generation

In a third autobiographic strategy, the autobiographer looks back across the course of his or her individual life and identifies the ways in which this particular life represented the critical choices and dilemmas of a generation. The text, in effect, invites the reader to reflect with the writer on the central choices with which their era has confronted them. Frequently these generational strategies take on the tone of spiritual advice with which Bunyan had written. In Sixty Years with the Bible, for instance, the liberal Baptist theologian William Newton Clarke recounted his own intellectual evolution “from the old view of the Bible to the new.” It had occurred to him, Clarke wrote in 1909, that he had lived through “the crisis of the Nineteenth Century” with respect to the historical study of the Bible and “that if I were to tell the story of my own life in the single character of a student, lover, and user of the Bible, exhibiting the mental processes through which the change in my own attitude toward the Bible has come to pass,” this spiritual autobiography “might be an enlightening and encouraging thing to many a perplexed and anxious soul.”14 This generational strategy challenges those historians who draw a sharp contrast between autobiography and the “collective time” of histori­ cal narrative, based on the argument that “the time of individual experience is both arbitrary and concrete, determined by the accident of the narrator’s birth: it is unrelated to the larger watersheds of shared experience.”15 Increasingly in modern Christian autobiography, writers have employed the framing device of being the witness to a generation precisely in order to overcome this dichotomy between autobiography and history and to dramatize the diverse, publicly consequential choices that have constituted a collection of individuals as a single “generation.” As the liberal Protestant Harry Emerson Fosdick explained in The Living of These Days (1956), “my real struggle concerned the intellectual credibility

The Augustinian Strain of Piety   245

of Christian faith. . . . The story of that struggle, while I tell it as intimately mine, is not alone autobiography but history, for through that same kind of conflict went multitudes of youths in my generation, some emerging as fundamentalists, others as liberals, and others as agnostics and unbelievers. That was the choice in those days.”16 W. E. B. DuBois put a brilliant spin on this generational frame in his 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn. His life coincided, he declared, with the dominance of the globe by “white Europe,” and he was enfolded in this European civilization, integrally a part of it and yet “one of its rejected parts”—­at once “imprisoned” and “exalted.” Within this epoch of European dominance, DuBois identified the “central problem” as race and announced his autobiographic purpose by declaring, “I seem to see a way of elucidating the inner meaning and significance of that race problem by explaining it in terms of the one human life that I know best,” namely, his own. He looked back and concluded that he had had scant influence on his social environment. Instead, he portrayed himself as swirling “round and round with the Zeitgeist, waving my pen,” hoping that his exhortations might influence the few who would listen: “Thus very evidently to me and to others I did little to create my day or greatly change it; but I did exemplify it and thus for all time my life is significant for all lives of men.”17 Dusk of Dawn thus seems a classic instance of the self as fragment, deriving its significant and exemplary power from the fact that it was a “part” rejected by the hegemonic narrative. To underscore his point, DuBois did not identify Dusk of Dawn as his autobiography but, instead, as an “essay toward an autobiography of a race concept.” I earlier offered a definition in which the fragment names the contrastive experience of an event that claims attention not only for its apparent randomness, its discontinuity with everyday life, or its threat of deception but also for its enigmatic suggestion that it conveys a surfeit of meaning. The possibility for such contrastive experiences depends on several culturally mediated religious presuppositions, especially the interlocking set of ideas that Perry Miller identified with “the Augustinian strain of piety.” Unless autobiographers and their readers assume that life inescapably entails both the quest for an ultimately unknowable destiny and the ever-­present danger of self-­deception in this journey, it is difficult to imagine how experiences can be represented as fragments. Further, since

246  W. Clark Gilpin

the fragment derives hope from situations of ambiguity and hiddenness, it also aligns the autobiographer with the retrospective recognition of divine purposes that so strongly characterizes the Confessions. The passage of time casts a different light on events and reshapes their meaning, often in ironic ways. Events that, at the time, seemed random, aimless, or discontinuous may only later take on the quality of the fragment and be represented as such in autobiography. Having said all this, John Barbour is surely correct to emphasize the powerful pull exerted by the ideal of “the unified self.” Hence, fragments also frequently take on the meaning attributed to them by Jacques Derrida: components that fit in a certain place within a total system. I have sketched, all too briefly, three autobiographic strategies in which the self is shaped as a fragment. In one, a single verse of Scripture redefines the self by converting it—­turning it around and opening to it a fresh perception or “new sense” of transcendence, of the self, and of the social world. In another, a life passes through a single episode like a prism and finds itself opening into a variegated pattern of connections. In the third, what Couser called the “prophetic mode” of American autobiography, a single life becomes representative of the defining collective struggle of an age and embodies a suggestion for the struggle’s resolution. For any particular autobiographer, these strategies may represent the episode as a fragment either in the sense employed by Tracy or in the sense used by Derrida. The ambiguities and possibilities for self-­deception involved in choosing either alternative suggest, perhaps, the wisdom of “the Augustinian strain of piety.”

Not e s 1.  Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 1:4–­5. 2. Ibid., 3, 10, 8–­9, with the quotations from Thomas Hooker appearing on p. 3. 3.  John D. Barbour, “Character and Characterization in Religious Autobiography,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55 (1987): 324, 317. 4.  David Tracy, “Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Times,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 171–­73. For a conversation that usefully

The Augustinian Strain of Piety   247 locates “the fragment” within Tracy’s larger project, see Lois Malcolm, “The Impossible God: An Interview with David Tracy,” Christian Century 119 (February 13–­20, 2002): 24–­30. 5. G. Thomas Couser, American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 3. 6. Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943), 4.14. 7.  Ibid., 10.24. 8. For his incisive discussion of questions of audience I am indebted to Lyell Asher, “The Dangerous Fruit of Augustine’s Confessions,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66 (1998): 227–­55, quotation from 232. 9.  Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 16: Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998): 792–­93. 10. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, ed. Roger Sharrock (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 30, 32. 11.  Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (New York: Harper and Row, 1952), 9–­11. 12.  Ibid., 72–­78. 13.  Ibid., 145–­47. 14.  William Newton Clarke, Sixty Years with the Bible: A Record of Experience (New York: Scribner, 1909), 3–­9. 15.  Jeremy Popkin, “Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 727. 16.  Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Living of These Days: An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), 53–­54. 17.  W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), vii–­viii, 3–­4.

nine

The Saint and the Humanities william schweiker

In what follows I want to engage the thought of the great St. Augustine in ways consistent with the hermeneutical style of reflection of David Tracy and others, as well as to pick up on the theme of how we are to conceive of education in the most capacious sense of the word.1 My hope is not only to shed some light on Augustine’s own thought but, much more, to draw resources from the saint for challenges that now confront us in our global and religiously pluralistic age.

Au g u s t i n e a n d E d u cat i o n

The title of this chapter, “The Saint and the Humanities,” might appear to be a contradiction in terms. There is the image of Augustine as a grisly old bishop and hater of sexuality.2 What would he have to do with the humanities other than to serve as fodder for criticism? While there has been recent work on the place of “saints” or exemplars within moral 249

250  William Schweiker

philosophy and theological ethics, it is not at all clear that saintliness has anything to do with the humanities.3 We know the damage that can be done when cultural forms, human aspirations, and humanistic disciplines are shackled to some moralistic or religious agenda. The worry increases when Augustine writes in De Doctrina Christiana [On Christian Teaching], “I contemplate the saints more pleasantly when I envisage them as the teeth of the Church.”4 A popular criticism of religious outlooks is that a vision of transcendence—­an idea captured in the image of the saint—­ mutilates real human goods by aiming at a transhuman good. Religious convictions can evoke fanatic allegiance—­the teeth, as it were—­that destroys social life. From the perspective of these worries about bishops and saints, what is needed is a vision of human transcendence restricted to inner-­worldly aims and purposes.5 The worries just noted pose the basic question I want to address in this chapter, the argument of which unfolds at the intersection of theology and the philosophy of education: Can we still speak meaningfully of the soul’s journey as part of education, and what role, if any, does the interpretation of texts, including sacred texts, play in this journey? Augustine, as will be seen, insisted on both ideas, and that might be the problem for current thought. It is not clear any more that reading has anything to do with the formation of the soul—­or, as it should probably be put, with character and moral identity. Yet if one recalls that Augustine’s magisterial De Doctrina Christiana helped to set the course of medieval education even while it portrayed, along with his other texts, the proper formation of Christian life, things begin to look a little different. What is more, the current interest in “spiritual exercises” owes something to ancient conceptions of paideia that Augustine transformed in powerful ways. In what follows, the first step is to explore Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana as a picture of education through interpretation, a specific kind of paideia. The tactic is to examine how that paideia is interwoven with some distinctions Augustine thinks are crucial to an account of knowing through interpretation. The second step isolates lines of criticism around those distinctions, and then a third move formulates responses to them. The final step of reflection offers constructive thoughts that arise from engaging Augustine and the critics. The conclusion comes to focus on education aimed at the increase of life through the interpretation of cultural forms.6

The Saint and the Humanities   251 Pa i d e i a i n O n C h r i s t i a n D o c t r i n e

Augustine wrote De Doctrina Christiana in two bits and at different times. He started the work c. 396 CE, about the time he became Bishop of Hippo. It was not until 427 CE that he returned to it, amid writing his Retractiones, in order to finish Book III, as well as to compose the entirety of Book IV. The text provides, as Peter Brown rightly observed, “a singularly comprehensive explanation of why allegory should be necessary in the first place.” The reason is, of course, the Fall. “For the Fall,” Brown continues, “has been, among other things, a fall from direct knowledge into indirect knowledge through signs.”7 While Adam and Eve had direct knowledge of God prior to their fateful sin, their fall—­their turning from God and cleaving to what is not-­God—­means that all knowledge, especially knowledge of the divine, is mediated by signs. The Fall poses the primal problem of the distinction between reality and illusion (and of the perspective within which this distinction can rightly be drawn) but indicates two other interrelated issues. Can the truth be known via what is, literally speaking, not true—­that is, can we use language or any form of sign that, literally speaking, is not what it signifies, in order to signify something? Relatedly, how are we to understand the “sacred signs,” the sacraments of the Church? Addressing these questions is important in Augustine’s text even if they do not constitute the central matter. The central claim of the work is, of course, that the Christian life can and ought to be formed around love (caritas) under the norm of the double love command, in contrast to cupidity, which is “a motion of the soul” toward enjoyment of one’s self “for the sake of something other than God” (III, x).8 The operative power of the right formation of the Christian life is not the human will alone but also divine grace. These ideas about love and divine power operative in linguistic forms pose philosophical and theological questions: How, if at all, can language communicate knowledge of God? What does it mean to say that God’s grace and not human will alone is at the core of education? We can turn to the text and sort through some distinctions Augustine uses to answer those questions. Book I of On Christian Doctrine draws crucial distinctions between things and signs, as well as between what is to be used and what is to be enjoyed. God is a thing, the highest and most perfect. At a crucial point,

252  William Schweiker

Augustine even contends that one can only think about God “without absurdity who thinks of Him as life itself ” (I, viii). More precisely, God is immutable life. What can and must be enjoyed for itself is, then, the Triune God, “something than which there is nothing better or more sublime” (I, vii). God does not signify anything else, but the divine can be signified by signs. What does this mean? The distinction between signs and things poses a hermeneutical problem. And yet on this point everything else rests. Put as a question: From what perspective is the distinction between things and signs drawn? If it is drawn from the perspective of “things,” the mind can grasp something outside of signification and, most importantly, some apprehension of God as the highest thing. If the distinction is observed from within “signs,” it is not at all clear how the human mind ever grasps “things.” Augustine, of course, believes that matters are not so complex. The distinction between thing and sign is actually a pragmatic one, an issue of language use. “Strictly speaking,” he writes, “I have here called a ‘thing’ that which is not used to signify something else. . . . From this may be understood what we call ‘signs’; they are things used to signify something else” (I, ii). Even if we grant a pragmatics of meaning, how can finite and mutable human beings after the Fall and bound to the world of signs ever rightly know and speak of God and thus draw the distinction upon which the treatise rests? While Augustine insists on the possibility of a “pure internal eye” that might know God without aid, he also confesses, with other Christians, that God has made “Himself congruous with such infirmity as ours,” and this is through the Word made flesh. Augustine also concludes that “a man supported by faith, hope, and charity, with an unshaken hold upon them, does not need the Scriptures except for the instruction of others” (I, xxxviii). There are, then, two reasons to turn to Scripture and to signs. First, God has condescended to our condition to communicate to those lacking a “pure internal eye” because of the Fall, so that we can distinguish between thing and sign and thus discover God. Books I–­III are thus, and unsurprisingly, about the way of discovery. Second, one turns to signs, in Book IV, for the sake of teaching others about the Christian witness. Given the divine being as life itself, God’s condescension to our condition, and also human finitude and fault, hermeneutics rather than unmedi­ated seeing is needed to discover Christian truth and to teach it to others. The

The Saint and the Humanities   253

treatise unfolds through an analysis of thing versus sign, and yet that distinction is unknowable without God’s communication or a pure internal eye. And, if we press further, it is clear that the focus on interpretation entails two related but distinct pedagogies important for Augustine’s contribution to the humanities. Books II and III of On Christian Doctrine treat signs: unknown signs in Book II, ambiguous signs in Book III. The argument is set within a specific account of the ascent of the mind to God, which deepens the argument of Book I. Early in Book II, Augustine outlines a seven-­step journey toward God, which, to name just a few of the steps, arises from fear and moves through piety and onward to mercy and finally wisdom, the apex mentis (cf. II, vii). This account of the ascent of the mind has a long pedigree, of course. It reaches back to Plato’s Symposium, and after Augustine it is found in thinkers like Bonaventure, in his Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum, and nowadays in the works of Iris Murdoch.9 Rather than tracing this lineage and the differences among thinkers who advance it, important for our present purposes is the fact that “Scripture” is the third step, just after fear and piety and before fortitude. “Reading” and education with respect to “signs” is set, then, within the more intense journey of the mind to its good under the rule of faith and also within the double love command as the sum of the Christian life. Wisdom is attained only after the sixth step, rooted in the love of one’s enemy, where one “cleanses that eye through which God may be seen, insofar as He can be seen by those who die to the world as much as they are able” (II, vii). There are moral and spiritual demands on the capacity to know God, and those demands, as noted below, are profoundly at odds with contemporary sensibilities. The placement of exegesis as the third step in the ascent of the mind inscribes a pedagogy of reading within the context of spiritual paideia. That account of Christian reading could leave little, if any, room for other, nonspiritual and nonscriptural, forms of reasoning or learning. For some theologians and religious thinkers, for example, so-­called Radical Orthodoxy and advocates of “scriptural reasoning,” an interpretation of De Doctrina Christiana focused on spiritual pedagogy places the Church or the religious community firmly in control of hermeneutical questions.10 The meaning of human doings is thereby to be inscribed into the world of Scripture. Conversely, for some philosophical advocates of

254  William Schweiker

spiritual disciplines, Augustine rightly continues the Platonic quest for the vision of the “Unconditioned,” but now, sadly, with the burden of reading Scripture. Neither of these interpretations grasps Augustine’s position. For Augustine there is, in fact, an ascent of the mind that can forgo the journey in and through Scripture, but that is possible if and only if God should choose to communicate immediately to an individual. Because of the Fall, most people most of the time have indirect knowledge through signs. A crucial spiritual discipline is therefore the interpretation of Scripture, first to discover Christian truth and then to teach it. Yet a reading that wants to enfold all claims within the walls of the Church is equally untrue to this text. In Book II, xviii, Augustine writes that “every good and true Christian should understand that wherever he may find truth, it is his Lord’s.” In fact, there are two interlocking pedagogies in the text. One is the paideia of the spiritual ascent. Yet there is also a pedagogy that includes other forms of knowledge. It is this second, wider pedagogy, as we can call it, that opens Augustine’s argument to humanistic concerns. It rests on the simple but important observation, as Peter Brown notes, that “culture was the product of society: it was a natural extension of the fact of language.”11 Augustine, in fact, secularizes and demythologizes the “pagan” arts and thereby legitimates their use within Christian pedagogy. The wider strategy of education is signaled in a couple of ways. First, in Book IV Augustine disavows the need to treat rules of rhetoric for the teaching of the faith, and yet he endorses Christians’ learning the rhetori­ cal art if they are able. The faculty of eloquence, he notes, is spiritually indifferent, and so what matters is the end to which it is put. Second, in both Books II and III, Augustine realizes that in order to come to know unknown signs and to be able to distinguish between literal and figurative signs, and so to clarify ambiguous ones, the exegete needs to have knowledge not only of Hebrew and the biblical history, but also of “pagan arts,” as well as mathematics, the sciences, and other forms of knowledge. He writes that the Christian “should not avoid music because of the superstition of the profane” or “think that we ought not to learn literature because Mercury is said to be the inventor.”12 Again, and importantly, “wherever [one] may find truth, it is the Lord’s” (II, xviii). Christian paideia and the ascent of the mind take up and reclaim the whole compass of arts and learning in the ancient world and apply them to the interpretation

The Saint and the Humanities   255

of Scripture. One interprets Scripture as a spiritual discipline, but this requires engaging other kinds of knowledge in order to gain the hermeneutical tools needed for right reading. Matters are a bit more complex, however, and actually return the reader, albeit in a different form, to the quandary of thing versus sign found in Book I. Augustine needs a distinction between God and idol in order to demystify pagan appeals to the origin of the arts with their gods, like Mercury, and also to ensure that what truth is found is from the God as revealed both in Scripture and to the “cleansed eye.” It is not surprising, then, that immediately after asserting in Book II the ubiquity of truth as God’s truth, the distinction between God and idol is drawn. This is the strategy of the Christian secularizing of the arts. Augustine writes that “there are two kinds of doctrine which are of force in the mores of the pagans.” There are ones instituted by human beings and other doctrines supposedly “divinely ordained” (II, xix). Superstition is “whatever has been instituted by men concerning the making and worshiping of idols, or concerning the worshiping of any creature or any part of any creature as though it were God” (II, xx). The criteriological problem of distinguishing between God and idol mirrors the conundrum of the distinction between thing and sign. Who can distinguish without error an idol from the living God? Just as God is the condition for the very possibility of drawing the line between thing and sign, so, too, is he here. “For it is brought about,” Augustine notes, “as if by a secret judgment of God that men who desire evil things are subjected to illusions and deception as the reward for their desires” (II, xxiii). The focus has shifted from the cleansed eye, the condition for valid knowing explored in Book I, to the cleansed eye, the proper love and desire of the truth in order to distinguish between God and idol. The interpretation of Scripture—­one more fully sees—­is a necessary if not sufficient step on the journey of the ascent of the mind and must communicate not only the discovery of God but also, and more crucially, the love of God against evil desires and thus servitude to idols. Little wonder, then, that caritas is the meaning of Scripture and that valid interpretation must unfold under the double love command. The philosophical distinction between thing and sign that is basic to Augustine’s conception of language and the theological distinction about God and idol are linked. The account of education through reading is thoroughly

256  William Schweiker

humanistic and religious as well, and, importantly, it is advanced on theological grounds. We are now back in a new form to the opening question that prompted this inquiry. What, if anything, does Augustine’s account of Christian paideia have to contribute to current reflection? A second step of inquiry is needed in order to isolate the core problems facing anyone who wants to retrieve some of Augustine’s insights.

C r i t i c i s m s o f Au g u s t i n e

There are widespread criticisms of the kind of pedagogy just isolated in Augustine’s text; the criticisms can be noted briefly. One line of criticism, grounded ultimately in the Kantian critique of reason but given many different expressions, argues that human knowledge is limited to the products of human imagination and labor, to things of human making.13 Cast in Augustine’s terms, all we can know are things created and instituted by human beings, and therefore either the distinction between God and idol has no meaning at all—­and is not pertinent to humanistic inquiry—­or the distinction is a human judgment and not drawn through God’s communication of grace. Appeals to extrahuman meanings supposedly found in Scripture are simply beyond human comprehension qua the structure of human understanding. This is so precisely because we have no way of knowing meanings other than within the domain of human making and doing. Let us call this the epistemic criticism. A second criticism of Augustine’s position arises from a claim about language as a system of signs, one made popular by structuralist theories of language and deconstructionists, like Jacques Derrida and others.14 The argument is that semantic innovation, the creation of meaning, is from within language itself and thus one cannot and need not appeal to what is “outside the text” in order to understand its meaning. The distinction between thing and sign is within the semiotic code and merely isolates a mechanism for the production of meaning. Even more, Augustine’s account relies on a kind of “logocentrism,” to use Derrida’s term, not just because of claims about Christ as the Word of God or even about Scripture as divine word, but much more because it assumes one can attain a standpoint outside of the text and reading. Language is, on Derrida’s

The Saint and the Humanities   257

account, a matrix of deferral and difference among words within which there is no control over the production of meaning. Language itself, not human language users, as the first criticism held, or God, per Augustine’s claim, creates meaning. Call this the semantic criticism. The two criticisms noted are widely held in the current academy. They share the assumption that one cannot engage in the exercise of interpretation for the purpose of discovering what is beneath or beyond or before symbolic forms. At best, we can take a detour of interpretation, as Paul Ricoeur nicely called it, in and through symbols, metaphors, and narratives to grasp the intentionality projected by a text.15 Yet Augustine’s pedagogy requires the distinction between thing and sign and, more importantly, the God versus idol distinction. This fact, then, opens the third criticism, one briefly noted before. For Augustine there are moral and spiritual demands on the capacity to know truthfully, designated by the rule of faith, the love commands, and the idea of the cleansed eye. The spiritual paideia of the text, while open to wider forms of inquiry, actually focuses on the spiritual condition of the exegete. The idea that there are moral and even spiritual conditions for knowing is profoundly at odds with contemporary sensibilities. As some current neohumanist thinkers like the late Tzvetan Todorov have contended, an account of human transcendence must be in terms of inner-­worldly flourishing—­a care and respect for other human beings—­and not religiously aimed.16 Nourished in experimental and scientific thought, a method of inquiry rather than the rectitude of the mind or heart is the guarantee of true knowledge. As Hans-­Georg Gadamer noted years ago, the triumph of method in modernity meant an effacement of understanding as a fusion of horizons between the work’s world and the interpreter’s.17 From the perspective of current thought, Augustine’s argument seems to entail a false moralism or the attempt to impose Christian convictions on others with no grounds other than appealing to revelation or Church authority. We can call this criticism “criteriological” and note that it intersects with the epistemic and semantic criticisms. Taken as a bundle, these three criticisms suggest that humanistic reflection on cultural artifacts and history must focus strictly on the products of human labor within the domain of language as a system generative of meaning and must do so with respect to methods of inquiry that enable analysis, criticism, and insight without any assumption of or claim to the

258  William Schweiker

moral or spiritual rectitude of the scholar. Of course debates can unfold under all of these heads, as they certainly have. For some thinkers the point about human meaning-making necessarily entails the incommensurability and untranslatability among cultures and cultural artifacts since, per definition, different cultures—­or classes or genders—­make different meanings. Yet for others it is possible hermeneutically to cross cultural horizons.18 There are, as everyone knows, heated debates about the nature of language and communication. And the question of method and criteria is always contested. We cannot enter these debates now. Nevertheless, the convictions driving the three criticisms permeate humanistic inquiry. What, then, about Augustine? Does he have anything to contribute to current humanistic inquiry other than being a historical figure to study and deconstruct or a hearty defender of the faith within the authoritative embrace of the Church? In order to formulate a response to the critics, we must return to a point previously noted and explore it further.

Pa i d e i a a n d S e l f - ­R e f l e c t i o n

Notice that the first two criticisms, the epistemic and semantic ones, focus on the impossibility of sustaining the thing versus sign—­as well as the God versus idol—­distinction seemingly at the core of Augustine’s thought. The third criteriological criticism insists that, whatever account of language or text one adopts, an adequate theory must be methodological in nature and not about the moral or spiritual condition of the interpreter.19 After pondering the text and the critics, it dawned on me that Augustine makes a point at the opening of Book I that precedes, logically and substantively, the distinction between thing versus sign, as well as God versus idol. Indeed, the point invigorates thinking about what thing and sign share despite their specific difference in terms of the pragmatics of signification. Augustine starts the text with the worry that he will not be able to carry through the “great and arduous work.” Yet he also confesses that he has received much from God and that it is not to be feared that God “will cease giving me more when I have begun to use what He has already given me.” Then he makes a striking point: “Everything which does not decrease on being given away is not properly owned when it is owned and not given” (I, i). Love, for instance, is not rightly possessed

The Saint and the Humanities   259

if it is not also given to others, and our love does not decrease with its giving. The same would be true of thought and language use. There are some things whose mode of being entails communication and does not decrease in sharing. Of course “gift” and “givenness” are popular ideas nowadays.20 The debate is usually over whether something can be given in a way that breaks the logic of reciprocity, the “economic relation,” as it is called. Yet in this text Augustine seems to be interested not in sheer givenness or the logic of exchange but rather in a phenomenon that does not decrease through use, and therefore he demarcates a proper relation to it as further productive of communication. Other thinkers have noted this same wonderful phenomenon. Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and various promoters of philosophies of love have done so, but they have not, as Augustine does, linked this dynamic with the divine life. Holding to the divine graciousness, Augustine is certain that he “shall not only suffer no poverty of ideas but shall rejoice in wonderful abundance” (I, i). Only with this claim in hand does Augustine make his distinction between thing and sign and, in Book II, between God and idol. Mindful of this claim about a modality of being in communication, the main example being divine inspiration, two questions arise in response to the critics: First, does this phenomenon help us grasp something about human meaning-­making that can usefully contribute to the current discussion, and, second, can the point be sustained without appeal to the divine? On the first point Augustine advances thinking about the scope of human knowledge and also the dynamics of language. He is claiming that semantic productivity links signs with things. Of course he wants to be sure that there are things we are to “enjoy” and others to “use” and not to confuse these. But his claim is that humanly made signs and things—­like words—­when rightly used, enact the same dynamic of ongoing creativity as the divine life itself, the highest thing. They do not decrease in being through use. This is why, I take it, the idea of God as “life itself ” is pivotal within the text and why to think of God otherwise is an absurdity. By inference, then, signs, when used to communicate more and more meaning, are likewise “living,” animated from within by a dynamic analogous to the divine being, a life that communicates itself without loss. In response to what I have called the epistemic criticism, Augustine is noting that the very increase in knowing through linguistic use

260  William Schweiker

is testimony to a vitality of communication presupposed by and not reducible to the act of making signs. The human mind is not limited to the products of its making because language use is creative and expands the world of meaning and therefore also the mind. The same point would hold for the semantic criticism. The salient distinction is not inside or outside of language or the difference between signifiers but rather is the phenomenon of something whose being is in sharing and communicating: divine inspiration, love, and also human acts of speaking and listening. There is an expansion of the universe of meaning whose outer reach, we might say, is reality illuminated with divine love. The structure of the text naturally moves, then, from discovery to teaching and thereby enacts this creativity, the vitality of meaning, in communication. This brings us to the second question: Can this account of the creation of meaning through communication be sustained without God? Some contemporary critics think not. In Pure Presences, George Steiner argues that “any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that is, any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling, is, in the final analysis, under-­written by the assumption of God’s presence.”21 Steiner is correct on Augustinian grounds to insist that because God is, human meaning and communication are possible. Yet what he misses, in my judgment, is precisely the spiritual paideia that Augustine was keen to explore. The presence of God qua presence is for Augustine necessary but not sufficient to explain the creation of meaning. And that is because God is only rightly enjoyed as the supreme object of love and, further, human life communicates itself not simply through language but in the love of neighbor. Signification must translate into works of love. This explains the need for the double love command within the account of discovering and teaching Christian truth. Stated otherwise, the modality of God’s presence as animating and creative force within the semantic productivity of language use presupposes and yet also instigates a spiritual journey characterized by love of God and neighbor. On reaching this conclusion, and so amending a sympathetic reader like Steiner, we land in the final criteriological criticism. That is to say, perhaps the reason the saint and the bishop no longer seems to have

The Saint and the Humanities   261

anything to say to the humanities is precisely that his position entails a paideia, a vision of education as human transformation. In an age of science, and also an age that is rightly worried about ideological and authori­ tarian strategies that form human subjects through mechanisms of power and subjugation, as Michel Foucault taught us, the program delineated in De Doctrina Christiana seems dangerous indeed.22 Further, current advocates of “spiritual disciplines,” like Pierre Hadot, wish to retain the freedom of self-­formation. The formation of human existence by agents other than the self—­like the living God—­is rejected, as far as I can tell, even if Augustine and others insisted on this point.23 The root question, I submit, is whether truth and indifference can coexist, whether a method of inquiry or even specific practices can attain knowledge in the absence of a desire to know. To be sure, much modern thought—­especially in the natural and social sciences—­has made this claim. But it is, I think, difficult to sustain within the humanities. Humanistic inquiry is necessarily self-­reflexive; it includes within itself the one who is engaged in the inquiry. Many current philosophers of science now make the same point. This is why Augustine insisted that the ascent to wisdom entails the transformation of self through its loves, the cleansing of the internal eye. As Robert E. Cushman noted, one cannot “wish to know God without acknowledging God, to have a God without trusting God.”24 It is precisely the reorientation of the will that is needed. The sagacity of Augustine’s argument is that he realized how inquirers are at different stages of ascent and thus need different tools for learning and, further, that the criterion for inquiry is both the love of the ultimate object of thought and source of meaning, God, and the love of self and other in relation to that reality. What checks fanatic and authoritarian pedagogy is not a procedure or “method” but rather a moral norm and a disposition. This twofold criterion exposes the distinctiveness of humanistic inquiry in an Augustinian view and also its profound vulnerability to abuse and distortion. It is not at all clear that these responses to the epistemic, semantic, and criteriological criticisms are sufficient to answer Augustine’s critics. They are enough, however, to show that his position is not without points connecting them to contemporary concerns. If that is the case, I can conclude with some constructive thoughts.

262  William Schweiker C o n t e m p o r a ry Po s s i b i l i t i e s f o r Au g u s t i n i a n Pa i d e i a

Assuming that my account of De Doctrina Christiana and the responses to Augustine’s critics I have formulated on his behalf make some sense, a final move is possible. This step of reflection requires exploiting even further the idea noted earlier, that is, on the relation between the Highest Good, immutability, and God as “Life Itself,” which, to my knowledge, Augustine does not himself develop extensively in relation to his spiritual pedagogy. He focused on the ascent of the mind to the apex mentis, a transcendence of the mind beyond itself into God. On his account the immutability of God is fundamental. Augustine did not focus his analysis of ascent on the insight that God is “life itself.” Given worries about the fickleness of the human heart and the transience of finite life, it is the eternal unchangeability of the divine life that fixates Augustine’s mind. It alone is adequate to signify God as highest and most perfect, such that those predicates (highest; most perfect) draw their import from what is signified by immutability as the object of ultimate human enjoyment. This is so, I assume, because he seeks to assert that God is unchangeable even in communicating the divine life and grace in creation and redemption. The aim of education is therefore also immutability, an eternal rest in God. It is not obvious to me that immutability as such defines the highest good for the present age—­and again, as David Tracy put it, that highest good cannot name itself—­in which planetary life is endangered and the lives of so many people are bound to ignorance, poverty, oppression, and vacuous cultural practices.25 That is why I have tried to show that the dynamics of productive communicability, and so love and life, are at the core of Augustine’s text. We need to shift the emphasis away from immutability and toward life. The specific difference between God and finite life is that the divine life is the animating dynamic of creation and creativity and thus the condition for significance, whereas human life, as finite, fallen, and fickle, seeks, for good and ill, creative power through practices of signification, through culture. Seen in this way, the pedagogy of our text can be read as a movement into fuller, richer, more productive life—­a movement made possible by the dynamics of communication and under norms that are meant to increase life, the love for God, and the love for others. Further, this movement signals a kind of transcendence that is not an escape from the world or defined only by our relations to others.

The Saint and the Humanities   263

It overcomes the “death of the soul,” as Augustine calls it. This transcendence frees the mind from “a miserable servitude of the spirit in this habit of taking signs for things, so that one is not able to raise the eye of the mind above things that are corporeal and created to drink in eternal light” (III, v). Education is then to enlighten, enliven, and liberate; it is to discover the truth and to animate a life freed from servitude to illusion. The aim of learning is a fullness of life and thus cannot entail the denial or mutilation of finite existence. It involves, rather, a specific way of being in the world—­a way that communicates deeper and richer life to others. One recalls, in this light, Irenaeus’s dictum that “the glory of God is man fully alive” [gloria enim Dei vivens homo].26 That dictum is consistent with the trajectory of Augustine’s thought. Does it make any sense in our time to propose for the humanities this revision in an Augustinian conception of paideia—­a revision that sees the ascent of the mind in terms of a movement into deeper and more complex life? That will be debated, I suppose. Yet I am suggesting that we see the task and aim of the humanities in terms of what enlightens and enlivens human existence in and through the interpretation and critique of the various and complex means of signification that cultures and whole civilizations have developed. Perhaps some will come to see in that study a way beyond servitude to illusion and invidious ideologies and also the discovery of the vitality, the life, that is their own fullest being. Some might even be prompted to name this dynamic life God. Who knows? And should that “naming” of God take place, the complexity of the pedagogic journey will begin anew and life will be further increased. The humanities, I conclude, need both to engage the various forms of inquiry and human knowledge, natural and social, necessary to make sense of practices of signification and to aim at the increase of life in all of its forms through knowledge acquired and created. In this use of intelligence, the humanities will enact a form of transcendence and freedom that even a saint could recognize and endorse.

Not e s 1.  I am thankful to Wendy Olmsted for helpful comments on the lines of my argument.

264  William Schweiker 2. For a fine recent study see James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). One should also see, of course, Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 3. See, for example, Michael Andrew Flescher, Heroes, Saints and Ordinary Morality (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003). 4. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (New York: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1958), 37. 5.  One of the most trenchant arguments is Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). For a counterargument that worries about “exclusive humanism,” see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 6. My argument is further developed in my essay “Humanizing Religion,” Journal of Religion 90 (2009): 214–­35, and in David E. Klemm and William Schwei­ ker, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2008). 7. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 261. 8. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine. All further references to this text are given in the text by book followed by section number. 9.  Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Allen Lane Penguin, 1992). See also the essays in Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker, eds., Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). David Tracy contributed a crucial essay to this collection. 10. For an overview, see James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-­secular Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2004). See also Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 11. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 265. 12. In current theology the objection countered by Augustine is, oddly, the position of thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas who insist that Christians should not read the works of “pagans.” See his “Murdochian Muddles: Can We Get Through Them If God Does Not Exist?” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, 190–­208. 13. See Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 14.  Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 15. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 16.  Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 17.  Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1998).

The Saint and the Humanities   265 18.  As Edward W. Said has put it, a humanist must “cultivate the sense of multiple worlds and complex interacting traditions, that inevitable combination . . . of belonging and detachment, reception and resistance.” Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 11. 19.  The examples of this criticism would seem to include, ironically, even Hans-­ Georg Gadamer’s complaint about method, since he assumed, in a way that Augustine would not, that an interpreter’s horizon is, in principle, always open to what is disclosed in the act of interpretation. For Gadamer humanistic inquiry apparently remains neutral about the moral and spiritual condition of the reader. This is a point at which Tracy’s work in hermeneutics departs from Gadamer, despite the importance of Gadamer to his work. See, for instance, Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutics, Religion and Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), and David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987). 20. The literature is massive in scope. For examples see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Hall (New York: Norton, 1991); Jean-­Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005); and Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. D. Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 21. George Steiner, Pure Presence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3. 22. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980). 23.  Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. M. Case, ed. with intro. by A. I. Davidson (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995). 24.  Robert E. Cushman, “Faith and Reason in the Thought of St. Augustine,” in idem., Faith Seeking Understanding: Essays Theological and Critical (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), 13. 25.  See David Tracy, On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Book, 1995). 26.  See Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 4.34.7.

ten

The Source of Temptation franklin i. gamwell

Reinhold Niebuhr’s Gifford Lectures begin: “Man has always been his own most vexing problem.”1 In the directly succeeding paragraphs, the problem discussed is theological, that is, the question of how human existence in general or as such is properly explicated. But the work as a whole leaves no doubt that Niebuhr also has in mind an existential ­problem. Humans are their own deepest predicament because they live at fault, as sinners. “The Christian view of human nature is involved in the paradox of claiming a higher stature for man and of taking a more serious view of his evil than any other anthropology.”2 Moreover, the work as a whole gives every reason to combine the theological and existential meanings: Explicating the problem of sin in human life is the most vexing theological problem, even if the divine response to sin is our most important existential condition and thus the point of theology. In his own way, Augustine, to whom Niebuhr avows a great debt, might well have agreed.

267

268  Franklin I. Gamwell Au g u s t i n e : T h ro u g h A da m to t h e D e v i l

My discussion here is concerned with what Augustine, in On Free Choice of the Will [De libero arbitrio], called the source or sources of sin—­and, further, of sin in what he there calls the strict sense: “We use the word ‘sin’ not only for what is really sin in the strict sense, which involves actions performed knowingly and by free will, but also for the necessary result of the punishment of sin in the strict sense.”3 Here “free will” means the capacity to decide among alternatives such that actualizing one alternative rather than another has no cause other than the decision. Sin performed by free will is distinguished, then, from sin as the penalty all humans subsequent to Adam suffer for his sin in the strict sense. Toward the end of On Free Choice of the Will, written after his move to Hippo, Augustine is already working on the solidarity of all human beings in Adam. “Indeed, all sinful souls have been afflicted with these two punishments: ignorance and difficulty. . . . When someone acts wrongly out of ignorance, or cannot do what he rightly wills to do, his actions are called sins because they have their origin in that first sin, which was committed by free will. The later sins are the just results of that first sin” (Lib. arb. 3.19, trans. 107). Still, Augustine continues, this would give cause for complaint only “if there were no Victor over error and inordinate desire. But in fact there is one who is present everywhere” (107), and “in the midst of their ignorance and difficulty, he leaves them the free will” (Lib. arb. 3.20, trans. 110) to “turn back to God so that he might overcome the penalty that had been imposed for turning from God” (trans. 108). In the course of the Pelagian controversy, Augustine’s most radical statements on the matter denied even free will in this sense. Since all good things come from God, even the decision of faith that sets one on the way is God’s gift, and absent grace, we are free to choose only how, not whether, to sin. At the same time, he is sensible of the paradox in this radical formulation and, we may note, allows in The Spirit and the Letter that faith as consent to grace, in distinction from righteousness, “must be in our power,” even if dependent on God’s calling “through the inducement of impressions which we experience.”4 In any event, I seek here to discuss sin in whatever respect it occurs by free will of the sinner. On my accounting, Augustine was right to say in the earlier work, “Defect would not be worthy of condemnation unless it were voluntary” (Lib. arb. 3.15, trans. 100), and thus “the will is the cause

The Source of Temptation   269

of sin” (Lib. arb. 3.17, trans. 104). Absent that assertion, as far as I can see, one cannot protect what Augustine himself always sought to assert as fully as he insisted on God’s goodness, namely, the sinner’s responsibility for sin. I will also abstract from any complications introduced by Augustine’s Christology, specifically, the idea that faith in God is possible only in or through Christ in a sense that requires conscious relation to Jesus. To the best of my reasoning, it is senseless to call all humans sinners in the strict sense unless it is also true that “one is present everywhere” who makes faith in God an open alternative. But I will not argue that point further and, in discussing Augustine, will simply attend to free choice of the will whenever faith in God is possible or, to use Augustine’s terms, whenever embracing what is eternal and unchangeable or embracing what is temporal and changeable as if it could secure true happiness are both alternatives for decision. Given this focus for discussion, On Free Choice of the Will is an appropriate conversation partner. Clarity within this focus is served by marking the distinctive freedom involved in this decision. Many have noted the difference Augustine articulates between free choice, on the one hand, and true or genuine freedom, on the other, where the latter is present only when or insofar as free choice embraces what is eternal and unchangeable—­a distinction found also in Paul and, in a different way, in Kant. But there is another distinction present or clearly implied in On Free Choice of the Will between what I will call primal freedom, on the one hand, and specific freedom, on the other. The freedom to turn toward or away from God, the primal movement of the will, is simultaneously expressed or embodied in whatever choice one makes among the specific actions or purposes possible for a given individual in a given time and place—­specific alternatives that will vary depending on the individual and the circumstances in question. Moreover, the exercise of primal freedom is all-­important because it sets the terms in which the specific alternatives available are evaluated and specific freedom thus exercised; in other words, the former is expressed or embodied in the latter. Together, then, these two aspects of the one decision constitute a distinctively human activity, and I will call this self-­creation the exercise of original freedom or the decision for a self-­understanding. A single exercise of original freedom is complex because it includes the primal movement of the will and its expression or embodiment in some or other specific decision.

270  Franklin I. Gamwell

Even were it not anachronistic, calling Augustine an existentialist would be false because, if for no other reason, it ignores his cosmology and his sweeping chronicle of human events. Still, his view of original freedom is similar to the existential condition Paul Tillich calls the freedom “we ourselves” are,5 at least in the following respect: The primal fact of human action, embodied in whatever occurs specifically, is a movement of the will for which there are two fundamental alternatives, toward or away from God, and in which one elects an understanding of one’s ultimate good or significance. In this respect, on my reading, Augustine asserts in his own context that humans live by way of decision between these fundamental alternatives, whereby, to use more contemporary terms, we decide to be authentic or inauthentic. Implied but not spelled out by the apostle Paul, says Alasdair MacIntyre, freedom in this primal sense was first articulated by Augustine.6 Be that as it may, I intend sin in the strict sense—­as does Augustine, at least in his earlier work—­to mean an exercise of original freedom. Confusion might be avoided by noting that this decision need not be taken explicitly, in the sense that consciousness is centered on it. Indeed, I am inclined to think that our turn toward or away from God always occurs implicitly in human life, in the background or dim recesses of our awareness, although it is not necessary to defend that view here. With these preliminary comments as the setting, I can state in Augustine’s words the question about sin I wish to discuss: “What is the source of this movement by which the will turns away from the unchangeable good toward a changeable good?” (Lib. arb. 2.20, trans. 69). In On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine returns repeatedly, in one way or another, to this question—­and it becomes apparent that “source” has another meaning besides “cause.” Augustine is decisive in showing that movement of the will “belongs to the will alone, and that it is voluntary and therefore [if evil] blameworthy” (Lib. arb. 3.1, trans. 72). Still, the question about “source” recurs, and the closing pages of this work make apparent that it asks not only about the cause of sin but also about temptation. What prompts or tempts the will to turn away from God? That Augustine is troubled by this question becomes clear when, in those later pages, he identifies “two sources of sin: one’s own spontaneous thought, and someone else’s persuasion.” In either case, he continues, sin is voluntary; “just as no one sins unwillingly by his own thought, so no one yields to the evil

The Source of Temptation   271

prompting of another unless his own will consents” (Lib. arb. 3.10, trans. 91; emphasis in original). In order to keep the question clear, I will henceforth speak of the source of temptation. This question recurs, I believe, because Augustine is so thoroughly a theist. An exercise of original freedom includes an awareness of God, the embrace of whom alone is happiness rather than misery, true good rather than emptiness. Absent something that makes the changeable good tempting, the turn to God would be a ready movement of the will because the alternative has no credence. A drowning person to whom a rope is thrown may have the choice to refuse it, but that alternative is, as it were, not a live option; it is, rather, a mere theoretical possibility, an absurdity summarily dismissed as the person decides to be saved. Unless the sinful alternative is for some reason attractive or alluring, it could not compete for election, and the free will marking human nature would not be sufficient to account for sin. Making this point might be aided by underscoring that original freedom as the cause of sin is moral freedom, which means the capacity to decide for the immoral even while one knows which alternative is right. This is, on my accounting, one meaning of “ought implies can.” Commonly taken to assert that a prescribed act must be among the alternatives for choice, the dictum also means that a prescription is senseless if the person in question does not know what she or he is obligated to decide and thus cannot decide rightly because or for the reason that she or he ought to do so. As immoral, original freedom decides for a false commitment or self-­understanding knowing it to be false, and in that sense, the turn away from God is duplicitous. One tells a lie to oneself, and an intellectual being has no reason to do so unless the wrong alternative is provocative, appears with some appeal, is tempting. On my reading, Kant denies that some object or telos to be pursued can define moral worth in order to protect the significance of temptation for human decision. Were there such an object, he writes, “it would destroy every concept of duty and fill its place with a merely mechani­ cal play of refined inclinations.”7 As defining moral worth, the object or telos to be pursued would have to be both desired and constitutive of practical reason as such; but a desire by which all rational creatures are constituted would be controlling (quite apart from the fact that, for Kant, rational beings are not necessarily marked by desire, which may be

272  Franklin I. Gamwell

peculiarly human). All other desires would be impotent as competitors, and the choice, while still perhaps a choice, would be nonetheless a mere “mechanical play of refined inclinations.” It follows, Kant holds, that duty and thus moral freedom are not properly conceived unless the moral law is independent of desire, defined solely by the formal universality of reason, and this law becomes a categorical imperative because we are not only rational but also sensuous. Characterized also by desires, the human will “stands between its a priori principle, which is formal, and its a posteriori spring, which is material.”8 In other words, we are tempted. Whether Kant’s proposal solves the problem might itself be doubted. That a rational being, aware of the moral law, is tempted by her or his desires appears to be stipulated rather than explained—­and we might ask why human obedience to the categorical imperative is not a mere “mechanical play of reason.” As far as I can see, moreover, the price Kant pays for separating moral worth from desire is a formal law in the sense that has no material implications and is thus an empty law, providing no distinction between moral and immoral alternatives. For Augustine, in any event, there is no such separation. Free choice of the will decides between our authentic desire for unchangeable good and our inauthentic desire for changeable good as if it could provide true happiness, so that Kant’s reference to a “mechanical play” serves to restate the question: Given our true desire, what makes the desire for temporal things competi­ tive? What is the source of temptation in the sinful will? Absent another answer and given his concept of God, Augustine could attribute temptation only to the Creator, so that God, although not the cause of sin, is the cause of temptation. Naturally this is unacceptable, because temptation to sin is not a good, and only good can come from God. But Augustine does have another answer, at least for all of Adam’s descendants: Temptation belongs to the penalty for Adam’s sin. On this account, we are born with inordinate desire and thus find changeable goods alluring—­not because cupidity belongs to our created nature but, rather, as Augustine puts it in one formulation, because “it was not right for his [Adam’s] offspring to be better than he was himself ” (Lib. arb. 3.20, trans. 108). Let us here repeat that temptation is one thing, and sin is another. To desire inordinately is not sin unless one acts on the desire, and yielding to desire remains, at least in Augustine’s earlier work, the free choice of the will. Hence, the penalty we suffer in this respect does

The Source of Temptation   273

not contradict or remove our responsibility. Still, this proposal, while it explains the allure of evil in all those descended from the first man, leaves the question with respect to Adam himself. Why was he tempted to turn away from God? Augustine has another ready reply: The serpent suggested that Adam’s freedom “succumb to the allure of those inferior things” (Lib. arb. 3.25, trans. 121). To be sure, this response appears only to displace the question, since one may then ask, as Augustine does, about the devil: “But from what source did the devil himself receive the suggestion to desire the impiety by which he fell from heaven?” (121–­22). But Augustine is again ready with this answer: There are, recall, “two sources of sin: one’s own spontaneous thought, and someone else’s persuasion” (Lib. arb. 3.10, trans. 91). The first “originates in the things that are present to the attention of the mind or the senses of the body.” As it contemplates “the highest wisdom,” Augustine continues, “the changeable soul also looks upon itself and somehow enters its own mind.” Thereby, “the soul realizes that it is not the same as God, and yet that it is something that, next to God, can be pleasing” (Lib. arb. 3.25, trans. 122), and this spontaneous awareness of self prompted the devil to pride. As far as I can see, this answer begs the question. We may and should grant that human freedom requires awareness of self and, thereby, the possibility of willing “to enjoy . . . [oneself ] in a perverse imitation of God” (122). But the devil, Augustine adds, saw itself as “something that, next to God, can be pleasing”—­and why, aware that “contemplation of the highest wisdom” alone is blessed (122), the self would ever find itself instead of God pleasing is precisely the question in view when one asks for the source of temptation for the devil. Indeed, I suspect that Augustine himself is sensible of his non sequitur. He may be more candid earlier in the work when he writes: “Perhaps you are going to ask what is the source of this movement by which the will turns away” from God. “If I told you that I don’t know, you might be disappointed; but that would be the truth. For one cannot know that which is nothing” (Lib. arb. 2.20, trans. 69). Thereby, Augustine anticipates his formulation in The City of God: “ ‘Evil’ is merely a name for the privation of good,”9 because whatever has being or is substance is, just insofar, God’s creation and, therefore, good. Hence, sin has no efficient cause but, rather, a “deficient” cause10—­and, we might add, temptation has a “deficient” source. Since it is evil, that source is

274  Franklin I. Gamwell .

finally something that cannot be known. With that resolution, however, the question of temptation remains begged. Still, one might think, a prompting for the devil’s sin is not needed. Having traced temptation back through Adam to the devil, one might simply insist that free will is, after all, free to choose. All one needs is a single demonic decision, and among the many angels, that one choice can be asserted simply as a fact—­after which the temptation of Adam and, through him, the presence of temptation throughout the human adventure is explained. But even allowing the devil as mere fact, we cannot also allow the entire account without a return to Adam and to the second source of temptation, namely, “someone else’s persuasion.” Attention to the devil’s suggestion is not only pertinent to an assessment of Augustine but also will be, as I hope to show, important in our subsequent discussion of Niebuhr. “In the Garden of Eden,” Augustine writes, “the commandment of God was seen among superior things; the suggestion of the serpent was seen among inferior things. Man had no control over what the Lord commanded or over what the serpent suggested. But . . . he was indeed free not to succumb to the allure of those inferior things” (Lib. arb. 3.25, trans. 121). Notice how, again, the question of temptation is answered by stipulation. Why did Adam, whose created nature as yet suffered no penalty, find the serpent’s suggestion alluring?11 Aware that God’s commandment presents the only good and thus true happiness, would not Adam have seen this suggestion as transparently absurd and thus not a live option? The point here is this: That another seeks to persuade one’s original decision does not itself constitute temptation unless the suggestion is received with persuasive power. A second someone on the shore proposing that the drowning person refuse the rope might be heard but would, as it were, be dismissed without a hearing, and the allure of inferior things cannot itself be explained by the fact of a suggestion. As Augustine himself writes in another context: “If a flawed nature approaches a nature that has no flaw and attempts to corrupt it, it does not approach it as an equal; the flawed nature is weaker precisely because it is flawed” (Lib. arb. 3.14, trans. 98). How, then, can attempted persuasion be tempting unless the one to be persuaded is already flawed, that is, unless she or he is somehow complicit in the effect, whereby she or he entertains the suggestion with persuasive power or finds it attractive?

The Source of Temptation   275

To be sure, Augustine speaks of the flawed nature as weaker when speaking of those who are created equal. “Nothing can be corrupted by its equal” unless it, too, is flawed (98; emphasis added). “But if a stronger nature corrupts a weaker,” it may “happen through a flaw in the more powerful nature, if that nature is so much superior that it remains more powerful even when it has become flawed” (98). Perhaps, then, the serpent’s success with Adam was consequent on the devil’s superiority, notwithstanding its fall, as an angel. Nonetheless, it follows that no human suggestion could have persuasive power unless its recipient is complicit. If that complicity is explained for all subsequent humans through their inheritance from Adam, Augustine also requires his cosmology, inclusive of the devil (as mere fact), in order to explain how the first man could be tempted. Both conditions are rejected by the now classic account formulated by Reinhold Niebuhr. Indeed, Niebuhr’s insistence that Adam is not a historical person and that Augustine’s cosmology is no longer credible implies convictions that are modern and likely irreversible—­such that Niebuhr might well be included in the liberal theological tradition that is often said to have been initiated by Schleiermacher. In any event, Niebuhr’s explication of sin, however dependent on Augustine, also becomes something significantly different.

R e i n h o l d N i e b u h r : S i n Po s i t s I t s e l f

Although calling Augustine an existentialist is false, this is not the case with Niebuhr, at least with respect to his explication of original sin in The Nature and Destiny of Man. That discussion, unsurpassed in modern theology, seeks to describe how every decision of human life is an exercise of original freedom in which a “rebellion against God” occurs.12 Self-­conscious freedom, Niebuhr writes, “forces us to relate our action in the last resort to totality conceived as a realm of meaning.”13 Rebellion against God is the decision for a misconception of our total context or the ground of our ultimate worth, because “totality conceived as a realm of meaning” is one way in which Niebuhr formulates the divine ground of all things. Thereby, Niebuhr also asserts, with Augustine, that whatever has being somehow belongs to God or is God’s creation and thus is insofar good. As with Augustine’s Christology, I will here abstract from

276  Franklin I. Gamwell

complications introduced by Niebuhr’s account of revelation, on which the reality of God is generally revealed in common human experience and the character of God is specially revealed through particular historical events, decisively in Jesus as the Christ. As far as I can see, the occurrence of sin as Niebuhr describes it depends on a general revelation of God’s character as the center of ultimate meaning—­because Niebuhr asserts the strict universality of sin in a sense that requires trust in God as a universal alternative for decision. For present purposes, however, I will simply assume the presence of this alternative. The complication from which we should not abstract is Niebuhr’s clarity about the difference between existential and explicit consciousness. If he sometimes calls the former unconscious, the discussion as a whole makes apparent that he means “not explicitly conscious.” For Niebuhr, as for Augustine, our specific purposes, chosen among alternatives a given situation presents, express or embody a primal decision, and, for Niebuhr, the latter is not, at least not typically, taken explicitly. “The experience of God,” Niebuhr writes, “is . . . an overtone implied in all experience. The soul which reaches the outermost rim of its own consciousness, must also come in contact with God, for He impinges upon that consciousness” (127). The rebellion against God occurs in the same dim background of consciousness. “Sin is . . . both unconscious and conscious. The degree of conscious choice may vary in specific instances of course. Yet even the more conscious choices do not come completely into the category of conscious perversity” (250). The exercise of freedom he describes is the more plausible by virtue of its existential or implicit character, and, among other things, this allows Niebuhr to explicate how self-­deception is typically an aspect of our sinful self-­understanding: An implicit lie to oneself includes an exclusion from explicit consciousness, so that we explicitly understand ourselves to serve more righteous ends (see 204, n. 2). The occasion for sin, Niebuhr explains, is existential anxiety. Acknowledging his debt to Heidegger, Niebuhr sometimes speaks of anxiety as nothing other than the internality of finite self-­awareness. As the occasion for duplicity, however, anxiety has a more precise character. It “is the internal description of the state of temptation” (182) and is present because a false interpretation of one’s ultimate meaning “is suggested to man by a force of evil which precedes his own sin” (181). Thus, when Niebuhr says, “Anxiety is the inevitable concomitant of the

The Source of Temptation   277

paradox of freedom and finiteness” (182), he means, on my understanding, that temptation to sin is universal. Absent the suggestion, finite self-­ consciousness would be only what Niebuhr, citing Kierkegaard, calls “the dizziness of freedom” (252), the awareness that decision concerns nothing less than how totality as a realm of meaning and thus one’s ultimate worth are defined, but this dizziness would not be troubling because one is simultaneously aware of the God who assures ultimate meaning and in whom one may trust. “Suggested by a [prior] force of evil” reminds us of the devil in Augustine’s Garden of Eden. For Niebuhr, however, the Genesis story is a “myth” (179) describing the situation of every human in every decision. Adam is “representative man” (261). Niebuhr is, as mentioned earlier, a modern theologian, for whom history cannot have the character it had for Augustine, and Genesis cannot be the literal description Augustine could take it to be, and this is to repeat that Niebuhr’s account is, in the relevant sense, existentialist. On my reading, moreover, the term “force of evil” (emphasis added) expresses Niebuhr’s recognition that the false interpretation is tempting. The force is the presence of persuasive power. Indeed, this is why the suggestion makes one anxious. One is attracted to a self-­ understanding that is, one is simultaneously aware, false, and it is, therefore, experienced as a threat to one’s ultimate meaning. Having rejected Augustine’s literal appeal to Adam, in which the penalty paid by all others for Adam’s fall is inordinate desire, Niebuhr must turn elsewhere to explain why humans are tempted. The alternative he proposes can be explicated if we pursue the sense in which a force of evil precedes the sin. To first appearances, the priority here might seem temporal. Each human in each moment of decision is tempted because she or he inherits from the larger human setting the sinful self-­understandings or false interpretations carried in the culture, embodied in institutions and associations, and, perhaps, actualized in her or his own past deeds—­ which then become lures for duplicity in the present. Let us call this the social character of temptation. Whatever its importance, it is not, for Niebuhr, a sufficient accounting because it does not explain why duplici­ tous suggestions from the past bear persuasive power. This is, we may recall, the point previously made in discussing how, for Augustine, Adam was tempted by the devil. That another human seeks to persuade one’s original decision does not itself explain why the false interpretation is

278  Franklin I. Gamwell

received with persuasive power, since the new decision is simultaneously aware that only trust in God offers ultimate meaning and thus, absent something further, would see the suggestion as transparently absurd. For Niebuhr, then, the priority marking the “force of evil” as tempting is not temporal but, rather, itself existential—­by which I mean prior in constituting the moment of decision. This becomes apparent when he calls the temptation a “mystery” and offers as its best description Kierke­ gaard’s “statement that sin posits itself ” (181). Niebuhr does not mean a socially prior sin, the wrongdoing of others or a prior fault in the course of one’s own life. Nothing about priority in that sense would be relevantly mysterious.14 To the contrary, present sin posits, as he also says, a “defect” or a “bias toward sin” in the present exercise of original freedom itself. Insofar, he agrees with Augustine: The flawed suggestion of another human (or one’s own past) could not be a force of evil absent a flaw in the present self. But this defect, Niebuhr holds, must be in the will, that is, cannot be a fate suffered or a necessity of our created nature. Because temptation is an evil, God cannot be responsible for it, and it follows, Niebuhr holds, that each moment of decision must be complicit in the force of evil. The will as it decides is already at fault and thus entertains its alternatives in a defective way. “Man,” he writes, “could not be tempted if he had not already sinned” (251).15 Sin posits itself. As far as I can see, Niebuhr’s existentialist account is, given his theistic understanding, driven to this assertion. Clarity about it, in any event, reveals at least one reason why he famously insists that sin is inevitable, notwithstanding his equally firm insistence on the sinner’s responsibility. Because temptation itself requires a defective or sinful will, it is inevitable that one will yield to the temptation, even while one is responsible for that duplicity because both temptation and inevitable sin are consequent on an existentially prior sin. “Sin is natural for man in the sense that it is universal,” he writes, “but not in the sense that it is necessary” (242). To be sure, Niebuhr is also known for endorsing the aphorism that original sin is the one empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith, and this may suggest that he intends with the term “universal” a statistical universality. To the contrary, however, he means strict universality, precisely because temptation, as he says, “lies . . . in the human situation itself ” (251) and already implicates the self ’s fault. In a sense, perhaps, one might still speak of empirical evidence verifying the inevitability of

The Source of Temptation   279

sin, since only a defective will can be tempted, and thus sin would not be empirically pervasive unless it were inevitable, inescapable precisely because the will is defective. But if Niebuhr’s explication effects an existentialist transformation of Augustine, it is also incredible. “Sin posits itself,” in Niebuhr’s sense, says that every moment of human decision decides prior to its decision, and since the prior decision was sinful, it posits another decision prior to itself, and the exercise of original freedom becomes an infinite regress of duplicitous decisions. One original decision cannot itself be many such decisions, much less an endless series thereof, and Niebuhr’s distinction between what is inevitable and what is necessary is empty because his account of original sin is incoherent. If the will is inevitably defective, this can only be a fate, which Niebuhr, in order to protect the goodness of God, attributes to our use of the very freedom so fated. In his own way, then, he asserts the radical view formulated by the later Augustine: We are free to choose only how, not whether, to sin. Calling the will’s defect a mystery does nothing to change the matter, and Niebuhr’s reference to faith in God as an “ideal possibility” (182–­83) within the human situation is simply an attempt to have it both ways. Indeed, nothing more fully confirms that Niebuhr intends what I have read him to say than his candid recognition that his account is self-­ contradictory: “It expresses a relation between fate and freedom which cannot be fully rationalized, unless the paradox be accepted as a rational understanding of the limits of rationality and as an expression of faith that a rationally irresolvable contradiction may point to a truth which logic cannot contain” (262). He himself is immediately troubled by this conclusion: “Formally there can be of course no conflict between logic and truth. The laws of logic are reason’s guard against chaos in the realm of truth. They eliminate contradictory assertions” (262–­63). When he then attempts to reconcile the conclusion with this affirmation of rational consistency, Niebuhr in effect throws up his hands. “There is no resource in logical rules to help us understand complex phenomena, exhibiting characteristics which seem to require that they be placed in contradictory categories of reason. Loyalty to all the facts may require a provisional defiance of logic, lest complexity in the facts of experience be denied for the sake of a premature logical consistency” (263, emphasis added). But phenomena cannot exhibit characteristics that merely seem to require

280  Franklin I. Gamwell

contradictory categories of reason unless one can show why what appears to be provisional and premature is not finally the case. In other words, Niebuhr’s assertion that his understanding of sin is not a final defiance of logic cannot be true unless the account finally is not the “rationally irresolvable contradiction” that, as Niebuhr concedes, it is.

A n ot h e r Acco u n t: H u m a n F r ag m e n ta r i n e s s

The validity of Christian belief in God is challenged if the explication of human fault is finally inconsistent. Self-­contradiction in theological anthropology calls into question the credibility of theism. But there is, I am persuaded, another accounting that avoids incoherence. Here, I will assume that Niebuhr rightly rejects Augustine’s cosmology, at least insofar as it includes explanatory appeal to a devil, and Augustine’s chronology of human events, at least insofar as it appeals to the solidarity of all humans in the penalty for Adam’s sin. I will assume, in other words, that Niebuhr is right to pursue an existentialist explication of sin. For present purposes, I also stipulate that totality is a realm of meaning to which original freedom relates authentically or duplicitously in deciding for a self-­understanding, so that everything, insofar as it is, is good, and evil is privative. It then follows that all human understanding, whether its object is something actual or something possible, occurs with a feeling or sense of worth. To be conscious of something is to sense it having some value, better or worse. Everything understood is somehow within the divine totality and insofar good, although one may also sense privation or nega­ tive worth through comparing what is with what might have been or comparing one possibility with others. Given that context, an alternative to both Augustine and Niebuhr may be approached through two citations from Niebuhr’s discussion. Consider this first citation: “Man knows more than the immediate natural situation in which he stands and he constantly seeks to understand his immediate situation in terms of a total situation. Yet he is unable to define the total human situation without colouring his definition with finite perspectives drawn from his immediate situation” (182). I will not pause to pursue what, for Niebuhr, this description means or entails. Taken solely on its own, the citation is puzzling for the following reason: In one sense,

The Source of Temptation   281

we humans must be truly aware of totality, because a sinner’s responsibility would be erased were she or he unable to understand the total situ­ ation in the sense required for original freedom to decide against God. But we finite creatures, Niebuhr here says, are unable to define the total situ­ation. In what sense, then, is this latter the case? Clarity is aided, I believe, by the second citation, drawn from a discussion in which Niebuhr seeks to show how self-­centeredness prevents obedience to the “law of love”: “There is no simple possibility . . . of a perfect coherence of love so that the man in China or America would affirm the interest of the man in America or China as much as he affirms his own. The human imagination is too limited to see and understand the interests of the other as ­vividly as those of the self ” (296). This second citation explicates by way of illustration the fragmentary character of our consciousness, noting that a person’s capacity to understand or appreciate the specific possibilities of other individuals is far more limited than her or his capacity to imagine possibilities of her or his own future. These facts are, I assume, noncontroversial. A person typically remembers her or his own past activities and anticipates her or his own future in a measure that dramatically exceeds the capacity of one individual to appreciate the actual or potential activities of another. More generally, a human’s awareness is inescapably fragmentary, understanding details of the past and more specific possibilities of the future in a manner that is highly partial and largely circumscribed within a proximate temporal and spatial environment. With this comment on fragmentariness, we may revisit the first citation: A human is “unable to define the total human situation without colouring his definition with finite perspectives drawn from his immediate situation.” Because we must understand God truly in the sense required for original decision, the definition we are unable to give must transcend the fragmentariness of human consciousness and thus be a fully concrete appreciation of totality. In the latter, everything actual would be fully appreciated as actual, and all possibilities would be appreciated with whatever specificity and probability obtain. All things would enter consciousness with full vividness, the kind of definition possible only to God. What we require, in other words, is a distinction between (1) the divine character or the character of totality, human relation to which defines authenticity in any possible situation and in terms of which we ought to

282  Franklin I. Gamwell

understand our immediate situation, and (2) totality in all of its concrete detail.16 With respect to the former, we humans can define the total situation because we decide for or against God. With respect to totality in all of its concrete detail, however, any human’s approach to understanding can only “colour” the definition “with finite perspectives drawn from his immediate situation.” Let us focus, then, on alternatives for human decision, possible ends or states of affairs one might pursue, some of which are more specific and others more general, and among which choice is to occur. Because totality is a realm of meaning, consciousness of these possibilities, as all understanding, occurs with a feeling or sense of worth, positive or negative. Allowing that humans can be mistaken about what is truly good and truly evil, we can reestablish contact with Augustine by saying that possible futures we take to be good are insofar objects of desire, and those we take to be evil are insofar objects of aversion. Whether worth is sensed as positive or negative, in any event, the feeling of it is stronger or more intense, other things equal, the more vividly a possibility is entertained, that is, the more our fragmentary consciousness understands or imagines in detail the realization of a given alternative for purpose. Were this not the case, seeking to realize some possibilities and to prevent the realization of others would be worthless, since realization is full actualization or making fully concrete. In other words, totality as a realm of meaning is fully concrete. For instance, the mere thought of a yellow rose one might retrieve from the garden, in the sense that one conceives of “yellow” and “rose” as universals that might be exemplified, is one thing; imagining the color and fragrance one would experience as being similar to past experiences is something else—­and, other things equal, makes the prospect more attractive. The mere thought that one could have a serious automobile accident is quite different from a vivid understanding of the trauma to oneself and others it would inflict, and, other things equal, the latter is more likely to prevent reckless driving. An eloquent and detailed portrayal of the debasement imposed by racism is typically more effective than more abstract descriptions in keeping those of us who practice it sensible of our complicity. As the last of these examples suggests, the difference they all illustrate is similar in principle to a distinction generally between artistic expressions and philosophical or scientific formulations; the former have,

The Source of Temptation   283

other things equal, a greater capacity to represent possibilities in a manner that attracts or repels. To restate the principal point, our sense of worth is stronger or more intense, other things equal, the more concretely a possibility is appreciated. Thus, alternatives for purpose to which desire is attached may differ with respect to the intensity with which one entertains them because one appreciates them concretely in differing measure. I may, for instance, affirm abstractly that my own satisfaction and that of my neighbor are equally good, but I may feel the worth of my own more intensely because “the human imagination is too limited to see and understand the interests of the other as vividly as those of the self ” (296). Moreover, the sense of positive worth with which an alternative is entertained may be called its persuasive power, so that pursuit of my own satisfaction has, other things equal, greater persuasive power than pursuit of my neighbor’s—­and, thereby, I am tempted to believe that my own future is inherently more important as I interact with her or him. Recall, now, the distinction between primal freedom and specific freedom in which a decision for or against God is simultaneously expressed or embodied in a specific choice among the alternatives for purpose possible in one’s given situation. Because this is one complex decision, every choice among specific possible ends implicates a decision about totality as a realm of meaning. Thus, when the greater concreteness with which I appreciate my own future tempts me to give it undue regard, it must also tempt me to duplicity. In other words, the intensity with which specific alternatives are desired will be included in the persuasive power of alternatives for primal freedom. This returns us to the question Augustine solves by appeal to Adam and Niebuhr solves by the mystery of a defective will: If original freedom is aware of God, how could a false interpretation of one’s situation or false self-­understanding be tempting? The answer, I believe, is this: The sense of worth attached to trust in God may not be significantly strong or, to say the same, the divine calling present “as an overtone” may not be experienced with significant persuasive power. In fact, God’s character constituting totality as a realm of meaning defines terms for assessing worth that are indifferent to how concretely we do or do not see the interests of self and others or, more generally, how concretely we appreciate specific possible ends. As the principle or purpose for authenticity as

284  Franklin I. Gamwell

such, in other words, the divine calling is maximally general or abstract. Thus, a duplicitous alternative for self-­understanding may be tempting because, at some level of specificity, its evaluation of alternative ends is sensed more intensely than is the chance for integrity. The point is illustrated most clearly, perhaps, when a sinful alternative tempts someone to a specific purpose at odds with her or his moral responsibility. For instance, I am tempted to a self-­understanding expressed in selfish deception and manipulation of other people or through complicity in larger structures of injustice because I sense more strongly the worth to be gained in my own future than the worth that will be sacrificed in the lives of those whom this choice mistreats. But duplicity does not require a specific end different from the one in which authenticity is expressed. I may be morally obligated to assist my neighbor in some specific way and still be tempted to do so. The greater sense of worth with which I appreciate certain future possibilities may still invade my original freedom, so that I act for this specific purpose because, for instance, the recipient will be indebted to me, and I will benefit in the longer run. This is the reason for saying that a sinful self-­understanding is tempting because we sense its evaluation more intensely “at some level of specificity.” Having previously distinguished between decision for or against God and its expression in a specific purpose, we should add that specific purposes can include various levels of specificity. One chooses a specific phrase in order to complete a given speech in order to help elect a given candidate in order to maximize what one sees as the common good for one’s country, and one’s conception of the common good for one’s country implicates an understanding of totality as a realm of meaning. At some level of specificity, the purpose in which duplicity is expressed may coincide with the expression of trust in God, but the former diverges from the latter in some wider context. There, the evaluation is “coloured” by the differences with which possibilities are concretely appreciated. I may have made the right choice among the candidates for Congress but did so in terms of an understanding of the common good biased toward the greater advantage of some part of the country to which I belong. Accordingly, the inference from some morally good specific purpose to an authentic exercise of original freedom is always uncertain. At least in this respect, a person typically cannot know her or his own deepest motivations.

The Source of Temptation   285

In giving this account, we must recognize that one’s original awareness of God carries a sense of truth, and thus the chance for authenticity is always more persuasive in the following respect: It is free from the sense of internal dissonance or self-­contradiction—­or, with Niebuhr, free from the anxiety—­with which every false alternative is entertained. Still, this singular advantage may have to compete with the greater intensity marking false interpretations by virtue of the greater concreteness with which their specific alternatives for purpose are, at some level of specificity, appreciated. We can be tempted when our fragmentary capacity to feel the worth of future possibilities gives persuasive power to possible self-­understandings in which the future we appreciate more concretely is given inordinate worth. In contrast, such differences in our concrete awareness are irrelevant to trust in the divine good, and this alternative may not be present with significant persuasive power. Hence, there is nothing absurd in saying that duplicitous alternatives are rivals to our primal awareness of God. Resolving the problem of temptation by way of human fragmentariness also explains why sin so widely appears as the turn toward self or self-­centeredness. Just because a person typically anticipates her or his own future far more concretely than the future of any other individual, duplicitous alternatives in which special worth is attributed to one’s own life as an individual are, other things equal, likely to have the greatest persuasive power. Another merit of this resolution is that we may now fully credit the social character of temptation. What gives the evil suggestions of another or others persuasive power is, again, the fragmentariness of our awareness. If possible futures are, other things equal, sensed more intensely insofar as they are more concretely understood, so proposals regarding our alternatives have, other things equal, greater persuasive power when we value their authors positively and relate to them more concretely—­and, thereby, receive those invitations with a more vivid sense of worth. Given a person’s especially detailed relation to her or his own past, suggestions from her or his previous duplicity may be especially persuasive. But other individuals who are prominent in our experience may also have, other things equal, the capacity to suggest, intentionally or not, tempting evaluations. The proposals of certain people or simply the kind of purposes they elect may be entertained with greater persuasive power

286  Franklin I. Gamwell

for our own choices—­because these are people whom we evaluate positively and with whom we are more intimate. Moreover, the same may be true of institutional and cultural patterns with which we are more concretely familiar by virtue of their regular exemplification in our experience, in distinction from alternatives that are experienced only as objects of thought. Human fault is socially reinforcing. The social character of temptation will be more effective, other things equal, when the suggestions one receives commend alternatives that already have the advantage derived from the individual’s more concrete understanding of future possibilities—­as, for instance, when indi­vidu­ als or communal orders commend inordinate importance for one’s own nation or race or parochial way of life or family. Persuasion will be especially effective, then, when it commends giving special worth to the self. If, for instance, the other individuals or institutionalized patterns more significant to me exemplify certain general forms of undue self-­assertion, the temptation to my own similar self-­assertion will be the more forceful. This suggests that social reinforcement also shapes the content of self-­ assertion—­what it is about one’s future to which one is tempted to give excessive importance. Whether one is most attracted to maximizing one’s own sexual pleasure, financial status, prestige, participation in a privileged class, or domination over others may be consequent on the suggestive power of cultural and social context. Both Augustine and Niebuhr, each in his own way, say or appear to say that self-­assertion or undue love of self is the form of sin and thus the form of temptation, at least in the sense that any temptations seeming to be otherwise are still in some distorted way the lure of pride. To pursue briefly one application of the point, Niebuhr is well known for his discussion of “immoral society” and, specifically, for his analysis of why groups and especially nations become the false gods of “group pride” (208). One might wonder whether duplicitous self-­ understandings in which the importance of some group centers totality as a realm of meaning could require or, at least, allow differing forms of sin among members of the group. Assuming that the society is unjust, perhaps oppressors, on the one hand, and oppressed, on the other, exemplify the “collective egoism” (212) in differing ways—­such that pride is a more appropriate characterization of the former than of the latter. But Niebuhr generalizes over all members of the community by calling the group’s pretension a pretension each

The Source of Temptation   287

“individual makes for [her or his own] . . . self-­aggrandizement” (212) and, thereby, harmonizes his insight into group pride with his Augustinian assertion that pride is the form of all sin, even if sometimes expressed in a distorted way. A longer discussion is needed to assess this assertion. But it cannot be redeemed, I judge, unless its meaning somehow includes the following fact: Because the singular capacity to envision one’s own future can be given a distinct content by social persuasion, it follows that negative evaluations of the self can also be learned. Self-­abasement is a duplicitous self-­understanding to which individuals are tempted because they have learned to attach a negative sense of worth to the future they most concretely appreciate and, therefore, desire a future in which they will be oppressed or exploited. This evaluation acquires persuasive power because taught through potent experiences of condemnation or threat by the culture or the institutional setting or by prominent individuals in one’s own life, that is, by a social context valued positively and more concretely inherited. At the same time, as far as I can see, self-­abasement differs from self-­assertion in this respect: Temptation to the former has to be taught. Humans do not attach a negative sense of worth to the vivid sense of their own possibilities without the false interpretations suggested by important others, including the larger human context. In contrast, the temptation to undue self-­importance is, as it were, natural. Unless specifically prevented by learning, this temptation will be intense because given with the fragmentariness of human understanding itself and the dramatically heightened appreciation of one’s own past and future—­and that is why self-­assertion is the most apparent form of sin. In sum, we can explicate the consistency between our original awareness of God and the source of temptation and, at the same time, the pervasiveness of human fault without recourse to a penalty for Adam’s sin or a mysterious defect of the will. The fragmentariness and social character of human consciousness are sufficient to offer a rational account of, in Niebuhr’s term, the “facts of human wrong-­doing” (248). Still, nothing that has been said explains those facts, if “explains” means giving an account of sin independent of the exercise of freedom. What has been explained is temptation, but however powerful the persuasion attached to false interpretations, no human activity is sinful unless it chooses a duplicitous self-­understanding and, therefore, is responsible for its fault.

288  Franklin I. Gamwell

Temptation is one thing, and sin is another. In the sense that decision has no explanation, there is, perhaps, “mystery” in the fact of sin. But it is not temptation that is mysterious, and there is no need to say, with Niebuhr, that a human “could not be tempted if he had not already sinned” (251). To the contrary, temptation can be explained without contradicting the freedom of distinctively human existence to decide for or against the divine good.

C o n c lu s i o n

Given this understanding of the facts of human wrongdoing, it follows that socially and culturally persuasive power may also be used to weaken temptations. On my accounting, this possibility defines the proper function of religion in human life. Because our decisions for or against trust in God are, on my view, taken implicitly, we may seek to influence ourselves through specific activities designed to increase the vividness of our authentic alternative. In these activities, we focus on concepts and symbols that re-­present explicitly our true understanding of totality as a realm of meaning, thereby seeking to cultivate or persuade our own implicit decisions accordingly. Thus, religious expressions tend to assume a highly figurative form, including symbolic practices, because they have a function analogous to artistic expression, namely, to represent possibilities in a way that heightens sensibility. But an adequate account of religion requires another discussion. If the one pursued here is convincing, the important question remaining is why neither Augustine nor Niebuhr explains the sources of temptation in terms of human fragmentariness. As far as I can see, both hold that theism, as they understand it, prevents this accounting: The fragmentary character of human consciousness is a mark of our finitude; as a consequence, temptation and thus an evil would be caused by God as Creator, and this conclusion contradicts the divine perfection. But this reasoning is compelling to Augustine and Niebuhr, on my reading, only because both also hold that theism means divine omnipotence in the sense that creation as such is caused by a completely eternal totality; that is, divine agency is the cause of there being a world at all. The complete goodness

The Source of Temptation   289

of God then implies that creation would be without evil absent the fault of lesser agencies, angelic or human. If both accounts are incredible, this is one good reason for theology to reassess the classical view of God and entertain the neoclassical alternative, of which Charles Hartshorne provides the most developed statement:17 Omnipotence can only mean the greatest conceivable power one being can have, given that there must be other beings with some power. Accordingly, the world as such, in distinction from any individual within it, has necessary existence along with God, and God as the necessary and thus perfect individual is the eminently temporal one who constitutes again and again the totality of all nondivine individuals, those whose nondivine character entails their fragmentariness. Indeed, only this neoclassical understanding of God, as far as I can see, permits a consistent distinction between the character of God as constituting totality, of which all humans are truly aware, and the concrete totality God constitutes again and again, which humans can only fragmentarily understand or appreciate. Insofar as it derives from this necessary fragmentariness, temptation is no one’s fault, that is, not caused by anything other than the necessity of God and of the world, when both become the content of self-­consciousness. In this respect, life with temptation to duplicity is the only life we could possibly be given when we are also given life for which the goodness of God gives rest to the restless heart and assures everlasting worth.

Not e s 1. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941–­43), 1:1. 2.  Ibid., 1:18. 3. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 18; see De libero arbitrio, ed. W. M. Green, CCSL 29 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970). In this section, I will reference this text parenthetically by Latin book and chapter number, followed by the page number of the translation. 4.  Augustine, “The Spirit and the Letter,” in Augustine: Later Works, ed. John Burnaby (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955), 238, 244. 5.  Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 62.

290  Franklin I. Gamwell 6. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 155–­58. 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-­Merrill Educational Publishing, 1956), 40–­41. 8.  Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Thomas K. Abbott (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-­ Merrill Educational Publishing, 1949), 18 (emphasis in original). 9. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 1984), 454. 10.  Ibid., 480. 11.  I grant that Augustine is here explicating his statement, “only something that is seen can incite the will to act” (121); that is, he intends to explain why turning away from God is an alternative. Still, there is more at stake precisely because the serpent’s suggestion not only offers sin as an alternative but also presents the allure of inferior things, just as the devil’s awareness of self includes presenting impiety as pleasing. 12. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1:279. Henceforth I will reference this text parenthetically by page number alone. 13.  Reinhold Niebuhr, “Religion and Action,” in Science and Man, ed. Ruth Nada Anshen (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), 44. 14.  An account of temptation as caused by socially prior sin might imply the temporal mystery of how temptation got started in the human adventure itself. But that cannot be the sense of mystery Niebuhr has in mind because he would thereby be led back to Adam in a historical sense, that is, Adam as standing for a (mysterious) historical beginning, in contrast to Niebuhr’s explication of Adam as “representative man” (261). 15. I recognize that Niebuhr sometimes speaks as if humans are tempted because anxiety as the occasion for sin follows from being both finite and free and thus is necessary to self-­awareness. So, for instance, he writes: “The temptation to sin lies . . . in the human situation itself. The situation is that man as spirit transcends the temporal and natural process in which he is involved and also transcends himself. . . . Since he is involved in the contingencies and necessities of the natural process on the one hand, and since, on the other, he stands outside of them and foresees their caprices and perils, he is anxious” (251). As my explication has sought to express, however, I take his considered position to be more circumspectly formulated in the following: “The situation of finiteness and freedom in which man stands becomes a source of temptation only when it is falsely interpreted. This false interpretation is not purely the product of the human imagination. It is suggested to man by a force of evil which precedes his own sin. Perhaps the best description or definition of this mystery is the statement that sin posits itself ” (180–­81). Temptation cannot be necessary to self-­awareness, Niebuhr believes, because God as Creator would thereby be the cause of an evil. Thus, “the temptation to sin lies . . . in the

The Source of Temptation   291 human situation itself ” only if that situation is understood to include the mysterious “bias toward sin,” so that self-­awareness foresees the “caprices and perils” of “the natural process” through the “defect of the will.” 16.  On my reading of Niebuhr, his understanding of the divine ground does not permit this distinction because, for him, God is a completely eternal reality. God has no character other than complete concreteness or actuality. Accordingly, one cannot speak of God except by way of negation or by way of symbolic or mythological statement. Every existential understanding of God is, then, an understanding of totality “coloured” by “finite perspectives drawn from . . . [one’s] immediate situation,” and the logic of Niebuhr’s position makes sin necessary because fragmentary consciousness cannot have a true understanding of its authentic alternative for original freedom. 17. See Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948).

eleven

Augustine and Political Theology j e a n b e t h k e e l s h ta i n

The fate of St. Augustine in the world of political theory has been mixed. He is a thinker of great discursive power who favors powerful narration over deductive systematic thinking. What is “political” about his theology must, for the most part, be teased out. He never penned a specific treatise on the subject. Despite this, it is fair to say that more words have been spilled trying to figure out what an Augustinian political theory or theology is, or might be, than on the tomes of other, more explicit, political thinkers. There are particular features of St. Augustine’s work that make him a tough nut to crack. From the time of his conversion to Catholic Christianity in 386 to his death as Bishop of Hippo in 430, Augustine wrote some 117 books. He touches on all the central themes of Christian theology and Christian life: the nature of God and human persons, the problem of evil, free will and determinism, war and human aggression, the bases of social life and political order, church doctrine, Christian vocations; the list is nigh endless. Although a number of his works follow an argumentative line of thought in the manner most often favored by those who write political 293

294  Jean Bethke Elshtain

treatises, especially given the distinctly juridical or legalistic cast of so much modern political theory and political theology, more often he paints bold strokes on an expansive canvas. His enterprise is at once theological, philosophical, political, historical, cultural, and rhetorical. His works are characterized by an extraordinarily rich surface as well as vast depth, making it difficult to get a handle on them if one’s own purposes are not so ambitious. He traffics in what we generally call “universals,” but he is also a nuanced “particularist” and historicist. Given this towering enterprise, it is unsurprising that attempts have been made to reduce Augustine to manageable size. To that end he has been tagged a political realist and canonized as the theological grandfather of a school of thought called “Christian realism” but, as well, of a tradition of so-­called political realism that includes Machiavelli and Hobbes. For thinkers in the latter tradition, who are not theological thinkers, Augustine, if he is read at all, is read primarily in and through excerpts from his works that most favorably comport with this “political realism.” To this end, his Confessions are ignored and Book XIX of his masterwork, The City of God (1,091 pages in the Penguin Classics unabridged version) is reproduced with certain bits highlighted. Perhaps one reads a chunk from Book I, chapter 1, on “the city of this world, a city which aims at dominion, which holds nations in enslavement, but is itself dominated by that very lust of domination.”1 Book II, chapter 21, is helpful on Augustine’s alternative to Cicero’s judgment (according to Scipio) on the Roman commonwealth. Book XV, chapter 1, traces lines of descent of the “two cities, speaking allegorically.” As already noted, Book XIX, chapter 14, is mined for a few precepts about the interests government should serve, while chapter 15 makes an argument against slavery “by nature.” Chapter 21, in which Scipio’s definition of a commonwealth as advanced by Cicero makes a second appearance, also seems pertinent. Chapter 7 of Book XIX is culled as the argument for the justification of war. Perhaps—­just perhaps—­excerpts are drawn from chapters 14, 15, and 16 in order to demonstrate Augustine’s insistence that there is a connection between the peace and good of the household in relation to the city. This section, plus his scathing comment that what pirates do with one boat, Romans do with a navy, although the one is called brigandage and the other Empire, provides the student with her quick intake of what I have called “Augustine Lite.” The upshot is a diminished Augustine,

Augustine and Political Theology   295

numbered among the pessimists and charged with being among those who stress human cruelty and violence with a concomitant need for order, coercion, punishment, and occasional war. Recognizing the inadequacy of this “normalized” Augustine does not mean one has an easy task if one’s purpose is to be fair to Augustine’s complexity regarding the enterprise of political theory in mind. This is true in part for the reasons noted above concerning Augustine’s way of writing and arguing. But even more pertinent is a political theorist’s or theologian’s sense of his or her task. If one construes that task as a way of putting together anthropological presuppositions (what those of us trained as political theorists called “theories of human nature” until a contemporary school of thought decided there was no such thing), claims about the political and social order in light of those presuppositions, the role of political theology in relating to these interrelated tasks, and the perils and possibilities inherent in any political activity or order, Augustine’s expansiveness is, indeed, welcome. If one’s aims are narrower or more modest, Augustine’s expansiveness is a frustration. I begin from the point of view that his expansiveness is welcome. What follows is a way of highlighting key points of theoretical demarcation in Augustine’s work that are rich with implications for political theory and accounts of contemporary welfare. I should make clear what will be obvious to any reader of Augustine, namely, that I can only scratch the surface of things in a single essay.

Au g u s t i n e o n t h e S e l f

In his wonderful biography of St. Augustine, the noted historian of late antiquity Peter Brown claims that Augustine has “come as near to us . . . as the vast gulf that separates a modern man from the culture and religion of the later empire can allow.”2 How is this so? One reason lies in Augustine’s complex ruminations on the nature of selfhood. This is a theme close to our own preoccupations. Augustine anticipated postmodern strategies in dethroning the Cartesian subject even before that subject got erected. For Augustine, the mind can never be transparent to itself; we are never wholly in control of our thoughts; our bodies are essential, not contingent, to who we are and how we think; and we know that we exist not because “I think, therefore, I am,” but rather because “I doubt,

296  Jean Bethke Elshtain

therefore, I know I exist.” Only a subject who is a self that can reflect on its own self can doubt.3 His Confessions is a story of a human being who has become a question to himself.4 The story begins with an infant. In this respect Augustine is unlike the many thinkers who, over the years, have begun with adults. In politi­ cal theory the image of adults signing social contracts pertains, as if human beings spring full blown from the head of John Locke! Augustine, however, starts with natality and intimates a developmental account featuring a fragile, dependent creature who is by no means a tabula rasa but, rather, a being at once social and “quarrelsome.” Each child enters a world whose Creator declared it good. Each child enters the world as the heir of Adam’s foundational sin. Each child, therefore, is in need of God’s grace and forgiveness. All human beings are driven by hunger and desire, and they experience frustration at their inability to express themselves fully and decisively such that others are prompted to respond. Becoming an adult does not mean jettisoning such drives. These drives are key ingredients of our natures and our ability to understand. Rather, becoming an adult is about forming and shaping our passions in light of certain presuppositions about human beings, human willing, and our faltering attempts to will and to act rightly. Augustine’s awareness of the sheer messiness of human existence lies at the heart of the withering critical fire he directs at Stoic apatheia. For the mind to be in a state “in which the mind cannot be touched by any emotion whatsoever, who would not judge this insensitivity to be the worst of all moral defects?”5 We begin as, and we remain, beings who love, who yearn, who grieve, who experience frustration. The most important point here is Augustine’s insistence that thought can never be purged of the emotions and that the thinking self expresses complex emotional thought. Thinking, including that mode of thinking called philosophic, cannot and should not pretend that there is a clean separation between emotion and reason; rather, these are interlaced and mutually constitute one another. Augustine argues that certain philosophies abstract from, or offer unreal assessments of, our human condition by taking insufficient account of embodiment and should be rejected for that reason. The body is epistemologically significant, a source of delight, of travail, of knowledge of good and evil. The body is the mode through which we connect to the world and through which the world discloses itself. Mind is embodied;

Augustine and Political Theology   297

body is thought. The heart of Augustine’s case against the Pelagians also lies here because of their overestimation of the human control of the will, of voluntas. In the words of philosopher James Wetzel, “Pelagius seemed in the end to deny that there were ever significant obstacles to living the good life, once reason had illuminated its nature, [thus] he stood in more obvious continuity with the philosophical tradition than Augustine, who came to disparage the worldly wisdom of pagan philosophy for its overconfidence.”6 We must not be arrogant, but we can come to know certain truths. There are warranted beliefs, but we can approach these only through complex indirection and through love [caritas], a formed desire and the name given to a “good” of a kind that spills over the boundaries of the self and reaches out to others and to the source of love, God. We may not be able to verify most of what we believe—­as we cannot be everywhere, see everything, experience everything—­but our believing is not a flying leap into the darkness. Given the fact that all human beings are creatures attempting to express desire (whether ordered or disordered) and that they must do so through language, our words are open to misunderstanding and to multiple ambiguous interpretations by other similarly desiring creatures. This suggests a theory of language, and Augustine offers one that influenced, among others, Ludwig Wittgenstein. What captures the interest of such desiring creatures? For one thing, it is our selves that we desire. Because we are driven by desire and yearning, we search for enjoyment, delectatio, including pleasures of the intellect. Indeed, we acquire self-­knowledge by trying our “strength in answering, not in word but in deed, what may be called the interrogation of temptation.”7 We come to self-­knowledge through our interaction with the world. We make mistakes—­proving that we exist—­and we carry on having learned something from the very clumsiness of our deed-­doing. However, it is never easy for the mind to unlock things. As beings circumscribed by the boundaries of time and space, we require certain fundamental categories in order to see the world at all.8 Otherwise all would be flux. In addition to time and space, we require a form that incorporates reason and the will; that is, so to speak, up to our complexity. Augustine finds this form in the Trinity, a principle that works through complex relational analogies involving similarities and dissimilarities, things seen and unseen, at one and the same time.9 We are

298  Jean Bethke Elshtain

capable of forming concepts about things we have seen and things we have not seen. We imagine many things to be, in part because we know what it means to have, or to bear, the “trace” of an image. We believe many things to exist—­rightly so—­that are not personally known to us. Augustine writes: And in fact when I wish to speak of Carthage, I seek for what to say within myself, and find an image of Carthage within myself; but I received this through the body, that is, through the sense of the body, since I was present there in the body, and have seen and perceived it with my senses, and have retained it in my memory, that I might find the word about it within myself whenever I might wish to utter it. For its image in my mind is its word, not the sound of the three syllables when Carthage [Car-­tha-­go] is named, or even when that name is silently thought of during some period of time, but the word that I see in my mind when I utter this word of three syllables with my voice, or even before I utter it. . . . So, too, when I wish to speak of Alexandria, which I have never seen, an image of it is also present within me.10 Augustine uses the metaphor of fabrication, of making things, in order to drive home this point: “A worker makes a chest. At first, he has the chest in his skill-­knowledge: for if he did not have it in his skill-­knowledge, how could it be brought forth by making? But the chest as it is in his skill-­ knowledge is not the chest as it appears to our eyes. In skill-­knowledge it exists invisibly, in the work it will exist visibly.”11 When we gaze upon things in the mind, through a complex word-­name-­image nexus, we are not untrammeled in this imagining.12 There is an available repertoire. It is linguistic, historic, contingent, time-­bound. It is caught within the confines and limits of our embodiment. So although naming and imagining is “wonderful,” it is also constrained. We cannot imagine just anything. If, as Wittgenstein says, a lion could speak and we could not understand him, so we can say that if a giraffe could imagine, we could not recognize the imagining.13 We are not nibbling off treetops and gazing across the savannah from a great height! This leads directly to Augustine’s theory on language and the constraints imposed on us by language. As the language users among God’s creatures par excellence, we constantly bump up against opacity and

Augustine and Political Theology   299

constraint. In Book XIX, chapter 7, of The City of God, Augustine muses about the ways in which all humans are divided by linguistic differences. These differences make it very hard for us to understand one another: The diversity of languages separates man from man. For if two men meet and are forced by some compelling reason not to pass on but to stay in company, then if neither knows the other’s language, it is easier for dumb animals, even of different kinds, to associate together than these men, although both are human beings. For when men cannot communicate their thoughts to each other, simply because of difference of language, all the similarity of their common human nature is of no avail to unite them in fellowship. So true is this that a man would be more cheerful with his dog for company than with a foreigner. I shall be told that the Imperial City has been at pains to impose on conquered peoples not only her yoke but her language also, as a bond of peace and fellowship, so that there should be no lack of interpreters but even a profusion of them. True, but think of the cost of this achievement! Consider the scare of those wars, with all the slaughter of human beings, all the human blood that was shed!14 Here Augustine moves from the murkiness of language, which divides us despite our common human nature, to the imposition of a language on diverse peoples but at a truly terrible price. We find, then, a drawing together of notions of human nature, language, and its centrality in constituting us as living creatures; the complexity of a search for fellowship; and a pithy critique of the enforced homogeneity of empire. Augustine’s powerful theological anthropology compels attention to the ways in which human beings, created in God’s image, communicate. Unsurprisingly, given original sin, language necessarily reflects our division—­the ways in which the self is riven by sin, the ways, too, in which human societies bear the stain of sin and sinfulness. Human beings can achieve only what Augustine calls “creature’s knowledge.” Full knowledge is not available to human knowers, no matter how brilliant and learned they are. We are both limited and enabled by the conventions of language.15 No one can jump out of his or her linguistic skin. We are obliged to bow to “normal usage” if we hope to communicate at all, and we are driven to communicate by our sociality, a sociality that goes all the

300  Jean Bethke Elshtain

way down. This sociality lies at the basis of Augustine’s understanding of the nature of human societies.

Au g u s t i n e o n Soc i a l L i f e

Human beings are, as I just noted, social all the way down. Created in the image of God, we are defined by human relationality. The self is not and cannot be free-­standing. Social life is full of ills and yet to be cherished. Among social forms, civic life is not simply what sin has brought into the world but what emerges, in part, given our capacity for love and our use of reason, as well as (alas) a pervasive lust for domination attendant upon human affairs. “The philosophers hold the view that the life of the wise man should be social, and in this we support them heartily,” Augustine writes. Indeed the city of God, which is Augustine’s way of characterizing that pilgrim band of Christians during their earthly sojourn in and through a community of reconciliation and fellowship that presages the heavenly kingdom, could never have had “its first start . . . if the life of the saints were not social.”16 All human beings, without exception, are citizens of the earthly kingdom, the city of Man, and even in this fallen condition there is a kind of “natural likeness” that forges bonds between us. These “bonds of peace” do not suffice to prevent wars, dissensions, cruelty, and misery of all kinds, but we are nonetheless called to membership based on a naturalistic sociality and basic morality available to all rational creatures. A kind of unity in plurality pushes toward harmony, but the sin of division, with its origins in pride and willfulness, drives us apart. Yet it is love of friendship that lies at the root of what might be called Augustine’s “practical philosophy,” his history, ethics, and social and political theology.17 Pinioned between alienation and affection, human beings, those “cracked pots,” are caught in the tragedy of alienation but glued by love. Since our sociality is given, the question for Augustine is not “Should we be social, or should we trust enough to love?” but, rather, “What shall I love, and how shall I love it?”18 His complex ethical theory follows and can only be touched upon here, but it must be noted that political life is one form that human social and ethical life assumes. We are always in society, and we always seek the consolation of others. Society, for Augustine, is a species of friendship, and friendship is a moral

Augustine and Political Theology   301

union in and through which human beings strive for a shared good. All of Augustine’s central categories, including war and peace, are in the form of a relation of some sort or another. And the more we are united at all levels in a bond of peace, the closer we come to achieving that good at which we aim and that God intends. For Augustine, neighborliness and reciprocity emerge from ties that bind, beginning with familial bonds and extending outward from these particular relations; the filaments of affection must not stop at the portal to the domus. Augustine writes, “The aim was that one man should not combine many relationships in his one self, but that those connections should be separated and spread among individuals, and that in this way they should help to bind social life more effectively by involving in their plurality a plurality of persons.”19 The social tie is “not confined to a small group” but extends “more widely to a large number with the multiplying links of kinship.”20 The importance of plurality, of the many emerging from a unique one—­for God began with the singular—­cannot be underestimated in Augustine’s work. It is his way of putting into a single frame human uniqueness and individuality with sociality and plurality. Bonds of affection tied human beings from the start. Bonds of kinship and affection bound them further. These relationships became dispersed, finally encompassing the entire globe: e pluribus unum. In light of the confusion and confounding of human languages, it is sometimes difficult to repair this fundamental sociality, but we yearn for it and seek it in and through the social forms we create: thus civic order, a primary requisite for human existence. This civic order is a normative good, although, contra Aristotle, what we routinely call “the state” does not fulfill or complete our natures; rather, it expresses them and may do so in ways deadly or in ways less cruel. Here it is important to note that, for Augustine, no human being has natural dominion over any other. There is no slavery by nature. We are by nature social, but that does not dictate any particular form of social order. Nor does Augustine analogize from the authority of fathers in households to political rule. Classical patriarchal theory holds that rule by fathers is at once natural and political, that a natural right translates into political authority and legitimation. For Augustine, however, political authority is different from familial authority. To the extent that one is subject to a ruler, one is subject to him in status only and not by nature.

302  Jean Bethke Elshtain

There are temporal goods that are worthy, among which peace is first and foremost. So human civic life is not simply a remedy for sin—­with order and coercion needed to constrain our wickedness—­but an expression of our sociality, our desire for fellowship, our capacity for a diffuse caritas. It follows that Cicero’s definition of a res publica, as refracted through the writings of Scipio, is wanting. For Cicero civic order is an associ­ ation based on common agreement concerning right and on shared interests.21 For Augustine this is insufficient. He argues that a people gathered together in a civic order is a gathering or multitude of rational beings united in fellowship by sharing a common love of the same things.22 Using this definition, not only do we define what a society is, but we can also assess what it is that people hold dear: What sort of society is this? It is worth noting at this juncture that a debate in current Augustinian scholarship concerns precisely how one should rank the good of political society for Augustine. The traditional, and overly simple, claim that civic order is simply a remedy for sin has been effectively challenged.23 Now the question seems to be just how important to Augustine’s thought overall is the good at which civic life tends and how much this derives from and can be achieved through the exercise of human voluntary activity. The dangers inherent within earthly political life are manifest, the fruits of a pride that seeks domination over others and glories only in the self or the “empire.” The goods to be attained through civic life are sketchier but begin with Augustine’s basic rule of thumb for human earthly life, namely, that we should do no harm and help whenever we can (a requisite of neighbor love).24 If language divides us, it can also draw us together insofar as we acknowledge a common humanity. Augustine’s critique of the political life of the late Roman Empire was not so much an assault on the edifice of any ordering of corporate life as an acknowledgment that public life had never attained a genuine res publica. This, at least, is an argument made by Rowan Williams. A commonwealth is an identifiable social unit. But beyond this obvious fact, how do we distinguish a polity in which the disorder of dominance by the libido dominandi obtains from a polity marked by a well-­ordered social life and an ordinary peace (tranquil­litas ordinis) that encourages the moral formation of citizens in households and in commonwealths? 25 A true form of corporate life is “purposive,” Williams argues, “existing so as to nurture a particular kind of human life:

Augustine and Political Theology   303

in both [family and polis], authority is determined in relation to a specific goal.”26 There are authentic political values, those of civic order, fairness, and the safeguarding of soulcraft; all are under God’s providence and dauntingly complex for Christians, that pilgrim people, who cannot by definition simply absorb and reflect the norms and understanding of what is worthy of the surroundings in which they find themselves outside of the body of Christ, the ecclesia. Christians are not to hunker down in the church, but to approach the world with a loving worldliness borne out of a recognition of the world’s many blessings and the responsibility of human beings to honor and to sustain those blessings as best they can in and through those social institutions they create to sustain human life. Against the many criticisms of Augustine that charge him with having replaced a public ethic with a “private” and apolitical ethic of caritas, Williams insists, correctly, that Augustine’s condemnation of “public” life in the classical world is, consistently, that it is not public enough, that it is incapable of grounding a stable sense of commonality because of its pervasive implicit elitism, its divisiveness, its lack of a common human project; and . . . that the member of the city of God is committed ex professo to exercising power when called upon to do so, and, in responding to such a call, does not move from a “church” to a “state” sphere of activity, but continues in the practice of nurturing souls already learned in more limited settings.27 It is the interplay of caritas and cupiditas that is critical, as well as whether one or the other prevails at a given point in time, whether within the very being of a single person or within the life of a civic order. Augustine would tame the occasions for the reign of cupiditas and the activation of the libido dominandi, or lust to dominate, and maximize the space within which caritas operates.28 For a lust to dominate taints and perverts all human relations, from family to city. Similarly, a decent love, a concern for the well-­being of all in the household or in the city, strengthens the delicate filaments of peace. The sin that mars the earthly city is the story of arbitrary power or the ever-­present possibility of such power. By contrast, the basis for a more just order is fueled by love. The theme of the

304  Jean Bethke Elshtain

two cities is the metaphor that enables Augustine to trace the choreography of human relations. Every human community is plagued by a “poverty stricken kind of power . . . a kind of scramble . . . for lost dominions and . . . honors,” but there are simultaneously present the life-­forgiving and gentler aspects of loving concern, mutuality, and domestic and civic peace.29 There are two fundamentally different attitudes evinced within human social life and enacted by human beings. One attitude is a powerful feeling of the fullness of life. A human being will not be denuded if he or she gives, or makes a gift of, the self to others. One’s dependence on others is not a diminution but an enrichment of the self. The other attitude springs from cramped and cribbed selfishness, resentment, penury of spirit. The way one reaches out or down to others from these different attitudes is strikingly distinct. From a spirit of resentment and contempt, one condescends toward the other; one is hostile to life itself. But from that fellow feeling in our hearts for the misery of others, we come to their help by coming together with them. Authentic compassion (the working out of caritas) eradicates contempt and distance. However, this working out can never achieve anything like perfection in the realm of earthly time and history (the saeculum).

T h e Two C i t i e s

In Robert Markus’s book Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, widely acknowledged as one of the most important attempts to unpack and to situate Augustine as civic and political theorist, he argues that Augustine aimed for a number of complex things with his characteri­ zation of the two cities.30 One was to sort out the story of all earthly cities.31 Augustine, he argues, provides an account of the earthly city (civitas terrena) from Assyria through Rome and shows the ways in which even the cherished goal of peace all too often ends in conquest and domination, hence in no real peace at all.32 The fullness of peace is reserved for the heavenly city (civitas dei) and its eternal peace. In this way Augustine creates barriers to the absolutizing and sacralizing of any political arrangement. His repudiation of the theology underwriting the notion of an imperium Christianum lies in part in his worry that any identification of the city of God with an earthly order invites sacralization of human

Augustine and Political Theology   305

arrangements and a dangerous idolatry. At the same time, earthly institutions have a real claim on us, and our membership in a polity is not reducible to misery and punishment. Augustine begins with a presumption of the priority of peace over war, and he repudiates all stories of mythical human beginnings that presume disorder and war as our primordial condition. The earthly city derives from our turning away from love and its source (God) toward willfulness and a “poverty stricken kind of power.”33 Because earthly potestas is tied to the temptations inherent to that form of power we call dominion, there can be no such thing as an earthly sacral society or state. Augustine begins his unpacking of “the origins and ends of the two cities” in The City of God, Part II, Book XI. The poverty-­stricken kind of power is here referenced, and human beings are likened to the fallen angels who have turned away from God. In Book XII Augustine continues the theme of “turning away,” tying the two cities to ordered or disordered wills and desires. With Book XIV we get the disobedience of the first man, leading not to death everlasting, as would have been the case without God’s grace, but to division within the self, between self and other, between nations and cultures. But whatever the culture or nation, none is whole until completed and perfected; each is marked by the divisions Augustine here calls “the standard of the flesh” by contrast to “the standard of the spirit.”34 This is a screed not against the body but against the abuse of the body under the rule of the flesh. With Book XI he writes of “two classes” or “two cities, speaking allegorically,” a warning to any who would conflate specific earthly configurations with his dominant metaphor. It is an allegorical representation of a great mystery. The clean and the unclean come together within the framework of the Church, within the boundaries of human communities.35 But the city of God is turned toward God’s will, with which it hopes to be in accord; the city of man is turned according to man’s standards and designs. Given that there is a “darkness that attends the life of human society,” few should sit comfortably on “the judge’s bench,” but sit there the judge must, “for the claims of human society constrain him and draw him to this duty; and it is unthinkable to him that he should shirk it.”36 One must not shirk worldly responsibilities, because temporal peace is a good, whether it is the peace of the body, fellowship with one’s own kind, or the provision of food, clothing, and cars. Amid the shadows that

306  Jean Bethke Elshtain

hover over us, there are two rules within our reach that we should follow: “first, to do no harm to anyone and, secondly, to help everyone whenever possible.”37 The most just human civic arrangements are those that afford the widest scope to doing no harm and to fellowship and mutuality. If mutuality, even of the earthly imperfect sort, is to be attained, there must be a compromise between human wills and the earthly city must find a way to forge bonds of peace. This she finds very difficult by definition given the distortions of the lust to dominate. By contrast, the heavenly city on earthly pilgrimage is better able to forge peace by calling out “citizens from all nations and so collects a society of aliens, speaking all languages.” She, the civitas dei, does not do this by annulling or abolishing earthly differences but even through maintaining them so “long as God can be worshipped.”38 The life of the saint, the life of the citizen, is a social life. There must be a balance in our attention to earthly affairs. A person ought not “to be so leisured as to take no thought in that leisure for the interest of his neighbor, nor so active as to feel no need for the contemplation of God.” If we are to “promote the well-­being of common people,” we must love God and love our neighbor, and the one helps to underscore and to animate the other.39 In his reconsideration of Book XIX of Augustine’s great masterwork, Oliver O’Donovan argues that Augustine reformulated something like the traditional concept of society and morality in new terms that would give due recognition both to the reality of the moral order that makes social existence possible and to its fundamentally flawed character. Augustine embarks on the radical but not revolutionary policy of characterizing all politics in terms of moral disorder, which itself provides an explanation of their political order, since, in Augustine’s firmly Platonic view, disorder is nothing but a failure in the underlying moral order. . . . A vice, in other words, is a perversion of virtue; it is a disorder that is predatory on some order.40 Refusing to grant a free-­standing originary status to disorder or to sin is not only one of the ways that Augustine argued against the Manicheans; it remains a radically provocative account that bears profound political implications for our understanding of political evil and evil-­doers, a theme I consider in the concluding section below.41 Here it is important to note that whatever Augustine’s acquiescence to the received social arrangements of his time, he left as a permanent legacy a condemnation of that lust for dominion that distorts the human

Augustine and Political Theology   307

personality, marriage, the family, and all other human social relations, including civic life and membership. Augustine is scathing in his denunciation of arrogant pridefulness and unstinting in his praise of the works of service, neighborliness, and a love that simultaneously judges and succors. (He refers to judging because we must distinguish good from evil, selfishness from kindness, and so on.) Love and justice are intertwined, on earth and in heaven. Yet the world is filled with horrors, including war. How does Augustine square his regretful justification of a certain sort of war with his call to love and peace? It is to this theme that we now turn.

Au g u s t i n e o n Wa r a n d P e ac e

A full treatment of this theme would require an assessment of Augustine’s complex theodicy. That is beyond the scope of this chapter. But a brief discussion is needed in order to grasp Augustine’s theology of war and peace. Augustine acknowledges the seductive allure of evil. He famously tells the story of a youthful prank of stealing pears that was done not from hunger but from pleasure in the deed itself and in the fellowship with others who took part in the deed. It took Augustine many years, including a sustained detour through Manichaeism, before he rejected decisively metaphysical dualism and repudiated any claim that evil is a self-­sustaining, generative principle of opposition to the good. The Manicheans had located evil in creation itself as the work of a demonic demiurge; thus the body was, by definition, tainted. But for Augustine, creation is good. The body is good, not polluted. At any given point in time, it is what we do with the body and what we do to creation that either does or does not mark our bodies with the stain of sin, wickedness, and cruelty.42 Augustine’s famous articulation of human free will enters at this juncture, a concept Hannah Arendt credits with being an original contribution by Augustine. We can choose to do wrong and often do, for we are marked from the beginning with the trace of originary disobedience.43 The choice of evil is in and of itself “an impressive proof that the nature is good.”44 Evil is a falling away from the good, and we are the agents of this falling away, not because the body is corrupt but because we can defile it. There is no such thing as evil “by nature.” Evil is the turning of a l­imited creature from God to himself and, hence, to an absolutizing of his own

308  Jean Bethke Elshtain

flawed will. This turning away may become habitual, a kind of second nature.45 In this way Augustine gives evil its due without giving it the day. “Evil” is the name we give to a class of acts and putative motives. The fruits of this turning away include a hatred of finitude and a fateful thirst for what might be called a kind of anti-­creation: in short, a lust to destroy. War is a species of that destruction; hence, war is always a tragedy even “when just.” But if war is primus inter pares an example of human sinfulness and a turning from the good, how can it possibly be justified under any circumstances? It works like this. Augustine begins by deconstructing the Roman peace as a false claim to peace. Instead of achieving and maintaining peace, Rome conquered and was herself conquered by her own lust to dominate others: “Think of all the battles fought, all the blood that was poured out, so that almost all the nations of Italy, by whose help the Roman Empire wielded that overwhelming power, should be subjugated as if they were barbarous savages.”46 Rome was driven by a lust for vengeance and cruelty, and these triumphed under the cherished name of peace. The Empire became a kingdom without justice, and this is little more than a criminal gang on a grand scale. Here Augustine famously repeats the story of the rejoinder given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great when Alexander queried him about his motive in infesting the sea: “And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, ‘The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate; because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor.’”47 Augustine even suggests that the Romans should have erected a monument to the foreign “other” and called her “Aliena” because they made such good use of her by proclaiming that all their wars were defensive; it was therefore necessary to conjure up an implacable foreign foe in order to justify these ravages. For Rome, peace became just another name for dominium. If the ravages of war are, in part, a punishment for sin, human beings sin, often savagely, in enacting that punishment. Primarily, however, Augustine emphasizes the freely chosen nature of war and assigns responsibility to those who engage in it. Augustine argues that if one reflects on the terrible slaughter of war carried out for wicked motives and to unworthy ends, one will determine to wage only limited, justifiable wars even as one laments the fact that, given injustice, they must be waged.48 There are occasional real wars of

Augustine and Political Theology   309

defense. The wise ruler and polity take up arms only with great reluctance and penitence.49 Given Augustine’s account of limited justifiability for wars fought only for certain motives, he is frequently lodged as the grandfather of just-­war thinking. (Others, of course, rank him as a forbearer of political realism. There is no reason he cannot be both, depending on what one understands by “realism” and “just war,” respectively.) Augustine appreciates what modern international relations theorists call the “security dilemma.” People never possess a kingdom “so securely as not to fear subjugation by their enemies; in fact, such is the instability of human affairs that no people has ever been allowed such a degree of tranquility as to remove all dread of hostile attacks on their life in this world. That place which is promised as a dwelling of such peace and security is eternal, and is reserved for eternal beings, in ‘the mother, the Jerusalem which is free.’ ”50 One must simply live with this shadow, a penumbra of fear and worry on this earth. But one must not give oneself over to it, not without overweening justification. When one capitulates to this fear, one gets horrible wars of destruction, including social and civic wars.51 And, given the mimetic quality of instantiations of destruction, each war invites another. Each war breeds discontents and resentments that invite a tendency to even the score. By contrast, the just ruler wages only a justifiable war of necessity, whether against unwarranted aggression and attack or to rescue the innocent from certain destruction.52 The motivation must be neighbor love and a desire for a more authentic peace. This is a grudging endorsement of a lesser evil, and war is named never as a normative good, only as a tragic necessity. It must be noted that rescuing the self alone is not a justification for violence; it is better to suffer wrong than to commit it.53 But our sociality imbeds certain requirements of neighbor love, most powerfully and poignantly in the case of the ruler who bears the responsibility for the well-­being of a people. It is, then, because of our intrinsic sociality and under the requirement to do no harm and to help whenever we can that war is occasionally justifiable. Augustine’s reasoning here falls within the domain of accounts of comparative justice, and his argument, which is not a fully fleshed-­out systematic theory of war so much as a theological account of war, involves the occasional violation of a fundamental principle—­do not kill unjustly, or murder—­in the name of an overriding good. It is important to observe that a close reading of Augustine’s account

310  Jean Bethke Elshtain

shows that one must lament even justifiable wars and reflect on them, not with vainglory but with great sorrow. Not to look back with grief marks one as pitiable and contemptible. There are no victory parades in Augustine’s world, for however just the cause, war stirs up temptations to ravish and to devour, often in order to ensure peace.54 Just war, for Augustine, is a cautionary tale, not an incautious and reckless call to arms. For peace is so great a good that “no word ever falls more gratefully upon the ear, nothing is desired with greater longing, in fact, nothing better can be found.” Peace is “delightful” and “dear to the heart of all mankind.”55

Au g u s t i n e C o n c lu d e d

The vast mountain of Augustinian scholarship keeps growing. It long ago surpassed a book version of Mt. Everest, so much so that no single scholar or group of scholars could master it all. This is true of Augustine’s work alone. Peter Brown claims that Isidore of Seville once “wrote that if anyone told you he had read all the works of Augustine, he was a liar.”56 One always has the sense with Augustine that one has but scratched the surface. Indeed, his works have not yet been translated entirely into English. That project is now underway, and there are some eighteen volumes of his homilies alone that have made their way into translation.57 Much of the new scholarship on Augustine remarks, often with a sense of criti­cal wonderment, on just how “contemporary” he is given the collapse of political utopianism, by which I mean attempts to order politics and social life under an overarching Weltanschauung that begins, as any such attempt must, with a flawed anthropology about human malleability and even perfectibility. We recognize, looking back, the mounds of bodies on which so many political projects rest, including the creation of the nation-­state system we took for granted for over three centuries and now observe to be fraying around the edges. The teleology of historical progress is no longer believable, although a version of it is still touted by votaries of technological progress or genetic engineering that may yet “perfect” the human race. The presumably solid underpinnings of the self gave way in the twentieth century under the onslaught of Nietzsche and Freud. Cultural anthropology taught lessons of cultural contingencies. Contemporary students of rhetoric have

Augustine and Political Theology   311

rediscovered the ways in which all of our political and social life and thought must be cast in available rhetorical form. None of this would have surprised Augustine. What would sadden him is the human propensity to substitute one extreme for another, such as a too thorough-­going account of disembodied reason giving way to a too thorough-­going account of reason’s demise. Importantly, one must rescue Augustine from those who would appropriate him to a version of political “realism” that downplays his insistence on the great virtue of hope and the call to enact projects of caritas.58 That does not mean that he should be called to service on behalf of “markets and democracy.” It does mean that he can never be enlisted on behalf of the deprecators of humankind.

Not e s 1.  St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), 5. Hereafter references will be abbreviated DCD (De civitate Dei). I borrow prose for this characterization from my Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). 2.  Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 181. 3.  DCD, Book XI, chap. 26, 460. 4. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-­Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961). 5. DCD, Book XIV, chap. 9, 565. Whether Augustine offers an adequate account of Stoic philosophy is, of course, a separate question. Whatever one’s position on that issue, the most important point here is Augustine’s insistence that thought can never be purged of emotions. 6.  James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 15. 7.  DCD, Book XVI, chap. 32, 693–­94. 8.  See Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 12. 9.  I cannot unpack the complexities of Augustine’s analogical reasoning here. The interested reader is advised to turn to the key text itself: The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna, Fathers of the Church 45 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992). 10.  The Trinity, Book VIII, chap. 6, 257. 11.  Augustine, “First Homily on the Gospel of St. John,” in Select Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 278.

312  Jean Bethke Elshtain 12.  Ibid., 279–­80. 13.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford, UK: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 235, §327. 14.  DCD, Book XIX, chap. 7, 861. 15. Ibid. 16.  DCD, Book XIX, chap. 6, 860. Augustine describes a city that comes to be seen to have included the unfallen angels all along. 17.  An interesting entry on the nigh-­infinite secondary works on Augustine on this theme is Donald X. Burt, Friendship and Society: An Introduction to Augustine’s Practical Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). 18.  Ibid., 5. 19.  DCD, Book XV, chap. 16, 623. 20.  Ibid., 624. 21.  DCD, Book XIX, chap. 21, 881–­82. 22.  Ibid., chap. 24, 890. 23.  See, for example, Burt, Friendship and Society (as in n. 12). 24.  DCD, Book XIX, chap. 14, 873, and chap. 24, 890–­91. For these two rules, see below. 25.  Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of The City of God,” Milltown Studies 19, no. 20 (1987): 55–­72. 26.  Ibid., 64. 27.  Ibid., 68. The reference is to Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the depoliticizing thrust of Christianity in her classic The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 28. For the following, see Augustine’s analysis of love at DCD, Book XIV, chap. 7, 556–­58. 29.  DCD, Book XI, chap. 1, 429. 30.  Robert Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). See esp. 45–­46. 31.  See, e.g., ibid., 18. 32.  DCD, Book XV, chap. 4, 599–­600. 33.  DCD, Book XI, chap. 1, 429. 34.  DCD, Book XIV, chap. 1, 547. 35.  DCD, Book XV, chap. 27, 648. 36.  DCD, Book XIX, chap. 6, 860. 37.  Ibid., chap. 14, 873. This section of the chapter parallels rather closely my discussion in Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). 38.  DCD, Book XIX, chap. 18, 878. 39.  Ibid., chap. 20, 880. Interestingly, we now have empirical evidence that those who are regular churchgoers and participants are more deeply involved in

Augustine and Political Theology   313 serving their neighbors and in being trustworthy and reliable than are those who are not thus involved. [Editor’s note: It is unclear precisely what empirical evidence Prof. Elshtain had in mind here, but some cautious support for this claim may be found in the study by Saroglou, Vassilis, et al., “Prosocial Behavior and Religion: New Evidence Based on Projective Measures and Peer Rating,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44 no. 3 (September 2005): 323–­48. For a discussion of this idea, which tries to disentangle the various strands of the ever-­elusive concepts “religion” and ”empathy,” the reader may also consult Christopher Bradley, “The Interconnection between Religious Fundamentalism, Spirituality, and the Four Dimensions of Empathy,” Review of Religious Research 51 no. 2 (December 2009): 201–­19.] 40.  Oliver O’Donovan, “Augustine’s City of God XIX and Western Political Thought,” Dionysius 11 (1987): 89–­110, at 102. See also John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (London: Blackwell, 1990). 41.  See, for example, my discussion of Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann in Augustine and the Limits of Politics. 42.  DCD, Book XIV, chap. 12, 571. 43.  Ibid., chap. 13, 571. 44.  DCD, Book XI, chap. 17, 448. 45.  DCD, Book XIV, chap. 13, 571–­72. 46.  The key Augustinian discussion of war is, of course, found in DCD, Book XIX. But his deconstruction of the Roman Pax occupies all of Part I, Books I–­X. See, for example, DCD, Book IV, chap. 15. The citations in this section are internal to my discussion of Augustine in Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987), here at 130. 47.  DCD, Book IV, chap. 4, 139. 48.  See my Women and War, 131. 49.  See DCD, Book XIX, chap. 7, 862. 50.  DCD, Book XVII, chap. 13, 743–­44. 51.  See DCD, Book XIX, chap. 7, 861. 52. Ibid. 53.  DCD, Book XIX, chap. 8, 862–­63. 54.  Ibid., chap. 12, 866. 55.  Ibid., chap. 11, 866. 56. P. R. L. Brown, “Political Society,” in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. Markus (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1972), 311. 57.  See the website for The Works of Saint Augustine, publication of which was started by New City Press in 1990: www​.newcitypress​.com​/augustine​-­­series​/the​ -­­works​-­­of​-­­saint​-­­augustine​.html. The translations are divided into books, letters, and homilies. 58. For such a rescue attempt, see Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

t w e lv e

Cor ad cor loquitur Augustine’s Influence on Heidegger and Lonergan

f r e d l aw r e n c e

In the first nine books of his Confessions, Augustine’s recollection of his peregrinatio as a gradual movement from youthful hedonism (Book II) to his conversion to God (Book VIII) and vision with his mother Monica at Ostia (Book IX) reveals a divinely orchestrated reading of key books in diverse communities of friends—­the Manichaeans (Book III); Cicero’s Hortensius, the academic skeptics, and Aristotle’s Categories (Book IV); St. Ambrose (Book V); Alypius, Nebridius, and the new community of friendly readers (Book VI); the libri platonicorum and the Pauline writings (Book VII), and finally the Bible, read by a hermeneutics of love enabled by his conversion (Book VIII). My topic is the influence of Augustine on Martin Heidegger and Bernard Lonergan—­a philosopher haunted by theology and a theologian best known, when known at all, for his work in philosophy. I regard these two figures, along with Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Karl Barth, 315

316  Fred Lawrence

Leo Strauss, and Paul Ricoeur, as leaders of the twentieth-­century hermeneutic revolution, which is the reorigination and Aufhebung of Augustine’s hermeneutics of love in the face of the hermeneutics of suspicion that dominated the modern age. Augustine taught Heidegger and Lonergan to link serious reading with something like a conversion, although each of them understood that revolution in concrete personal living differently.

Ma rt i n H e i d e g g e r Early Development

Here I want to examine Heidegger’s retrieval of Augustine’s Confessions.1 I believe that Leo Strauss was right when he told his friend Franz Rosenzweig “that, in comparison with Heidegger, Weber appeared to me as an ‘orphan child’ in regard to precision and probing and competence.”2 Hans-­Georg Gadamer shared this estimation. Although Strauss considered Heidegger to be the greatest exponent of Nietzsche in our time, to the extent that this is true, it is only part of the story. After the publication of Heidegger’s early Freiburg and Marburg lectures, Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren followed earlier leads of scholars like Otto Pöggeler, Karl Lehmann, Thomas Sheehan, and others to spell out Heidegger’s dependence on Christianity. Gadamer and Karl Löwith, Strauss’s student colleagues in those early years, both stressed what Fergus Kerr phrased as follows: “Heidegger’s attitude to Christian theology, hostile at one level, overtly and explicitly so, attributing the monstrous invention of the transcendental subject to Christian theology, is also proprietorial, indeed exploitative of and even parasitical upon Christian theology.”3 This Christian theology turns out to be at least as crucial as, if not more than, the influence of Nietzsche on Heidegger. Martin Heidegger (1889–­1976) was educated in Germany under the auspices of what Joseph Komonchak has found to be the post-­1815 social construction of the Catholic Church in reaction to the traumas brought about by the rise of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century and of the critical-­historical method in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, combined with the political collapse of the Holy Roman Empire at the time of the Reformation,

Cor ad cor loquitur  317

together with the repercussions of the French Revolution, by means of a “Romanized control of meaning.” Heidegger described himself after being a seminarian in 1909 as “particularly agitated over the question of the relation between the word of Holy Scripture and theological speculative thinking.”4 This eventually led him in 1919 to declare to his friend and sponsor, Fr. Engelbert Krebs, that he no longer believed either in das System der Katholizismus or in Scholasticism’s carapace of conceptualist metaphysics, which had been devised to bolster the rampant ahistorical orthodoxy.5 In 1911 Heidegger began to study mathematics and then philosophy, where his real questions were. By 1916 Husserl could say that Heidegger was no longer a Roman Catholic but still considered himself a Christian. Heidegger’s pivotal encounter with Augustine took place during the years 1919–­27, after his break from “the system of Catholicism.” Heidegger’s biographers Hugo Ott and Rüdiger Safranski6 support Nicholas Boyle’s statement that “in the aftermath of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Church the air of the second-­rate, rightly or wrongly, still hung about Catholic institutions, and ambition in the end meant more to the young Heidegger than faith. By going over to a nominal Lutheranism, he secured a position at the heart of the intellectual establishment of the Weimar Republic.”7 But this is only partially true. His reading of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Dilthey, and Franz Overbeck gave Heidegger experientially based and intellectually motivated questions about the Church and its teachings. In 1919, in a letter to Engelbert Krebs, he made the oft-­quoted statement that “epistemological insights, groping toward a theory of historical knowing, . . . [have] made the system of Catholicism problematic and untenable—­but not Christianity and metaphysics, yet these at least in a new sense.” What became problematic for him was not Christianity as such, but the Roman Catholic version of it he himself experienced.8 Gadamer recounts that Heidegger questioned “whether there is not a more adequate self-­understanding than what is offered by contemporary theology. . . . The theology that he had learned, which was largely based on Aristotelian metaphysics, did not at all match up with the real motives of Greek thinking, and had to have only made more acute for him the coming-­to-­grips (die Auseinandersetzung) with that thinking.”9 Heidegger’s complaint against Scholastic theology was twofold: first, much of what purported to be speech about God was not really about

318  Fred Lawrence

God at all but just a scandal to the intellectually honest and meaningless to those for whom God was dead; second, the abuses Aristotle’s philosophy suffered as the handmaiden of Scholastic theology repelled him. So he devoted himself to philosophy in the form of dismantling pseudophilosophy. Estranged from the Catholic Church, Heidegger searched for a way to remain a Christian, even if not an officially Catholic one, and he explored the nondogmatic evangelical Christianity that Husserl told him he had found. More recently scholars have stressed how indebted Sein und Zeit’s terminology and framework are to Book X of Augustine’s Confessions. Kisiel and van Buren emphasized the role played by Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretation (during the semester immediately following the Augustine lectures) in expunging the context and connotations of Christian revelation from what Heidegger had learned in studying Augustine. Following the lead of Jacques Taminiaux, Jean-­François Courtine, and Jean Greisch, among others, Christian Sommer’s Heidegger, Luther, Augustine expanded on the profound influence upon Heidegger of Luther’s rejection of the theologia gloriae (roughly equivalent to what has been called the standard Roman Catholic interpretation of Romans 1:20 in terms of natural theology) in favor of what one can learn only at the foot of the cross and express in a theologia crucis (including both the accusatio sui that reveals our sinfulness and guilt and the promise of salvation vouchsafed by God in virtue of Christ’s death on the cross). Besides showing the effect of his reading of Luther on Heidegger’s interpretations of both Paul and Augustine in his 1919/20 lectures on the phenomenology of religious life,10 Christian Sommer reconstructed the complementarity between what Heidegger had gleaned from Augustine and his understanding of Aristotle.11 This tendency to downplay the contrast between the Augustine analysis and the reading of Aristotle is supported by Benjamin D. Crowe in Heidegger’s Religious Origins, which stresses the continuous significance of the religious dimension exemplified by the Augustine course throughout Heidegger’s life.12 Among senior scholars, Karl Cardinal Lehmann, who had been an intimate friend of both Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar and whose two-­volume doctoral dissertation, Vom Ursprung und Sinn der Seinsfrage im Denken Martin Heideggers, has recently been republished,13 has always reinforced Gadamer’s insistence that the religious dimension in Heidegger’s thought possesses an irreducible ambiguity.14

Cor ad cor loquitur  319

Gadamer’s description of Heidegger’s 1927 Marburg lecture on philosophy and theology encapsulates Heidegger’s attitude toward theology: “After evoking the Christian skepticism of Franz Overbeck, he said it was the true task of theology, to which it must again find its way back, to seek the word which is capable of calling to faith and keeping in faith.”15 Heidegger’s question was how to appropriate a faith that had become meaningless. Convinced that “[the self-­understanding of philosophy] . . . can only be attained by the act of philosophizing itself, not by scientific proofs and definitions, i.e., not by integration into a universal, objectively formed material framework,”16 he decided to leave a system in which philosophy was domesticated in the service of dogmatic theology. As befitted one who was no longer a believer, Heidegger held that “philosophical research is and remains atheism,”17 for, he claimed, “only then is [philosophy] honest . . . before God.”18 Heidegger used methodo­ logical atheism to face the challenge of intellektuelle Redlichkeit (intellectual probity) that Nietzsche posed to twentieth-­century theology. The motive for this methodological atheism was a passionate search for both authentic God-­talk and authentic philosophy—­the latter for the sake of the former. Heidegger and Husserl

The late Thomas Prufer wrote that Heidegger commented in 1927 on the draft of Edmund Husserl’s summary of transcendental p ­ henomenology for the Encyclopedia Britannica19 that “transcendental constitution is a central possibility of the existence of the factical self.” Husserl had said that “the pure I can be posited as an object [ist gegenständlich setzbar] by the self-­same pure I.”20 The pure ego resulted from the quest for what is first, necessary, and without presuppositions, which Husserl intended to attain by disengaging it from the factical human knower in its mode of original and adequate self-­givenness. In his marginal note to Husserl’s summary, Heidegger put the question “What is the mode of being ­[Seinsart] of the absolute ego: In what sense is it the same as the factical I, in what sense is it not the same?”21 What is the evidential warrant for this positing of the “pure I” in transcendental subjectivity’s self-­constituting? Perhaps self-­servingly, Heidegger always portrayed his mentor as making the self-­objectification of transcendental subjectivity the ultimate

320  Fred Lawrence

procedure in his phenomenology of perception. Nevertheless, by thematizing transcendental subjectivity’s essential temporality, Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time consciousness did break the confines of his earlier egology’s procedure of completely disengaging transcendental subjectivity from the world.22 This seems never to have been properly acknowledged by Heidegger. Instead, as Gadamer, who was so impressed by Heidegger’s early Aristotle seminars, realized in retrospect, Heidegger used Aristotle to distance himself from Husserl. In light of the early lectures on Paul and Augustine, it is now evident that the ground and orientation for Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretation was prepared by his analysis of the Confessions. Heidegger decided to concentrate on Confessions, Book X, Augustine’s account of why he was making his confession; in it Augustine asks the question of God, gives a lengthy analysis of memory, and lays bare his present state by meditating on 1 John 2:16: “because everything there is in the world—­the disordered desires [concupiscentiae] of the flesh, disordered desires [concupiscentiae] of the eyes, pride in possession [ambitio vitae]—­is not from the Father but is from the world.”23 This is the source of Heidegger’s insights that enabled him to appropriate Aristotle in his unique way, and then to transform the rather misleading psychological tone of Husserl’s account, in which the ego is split into retentional and protentional phases within the same stream so that the ego becomes so dispersed and distended that it can never be exhaustively objectified by means of a hermeneutics of facticity. Dasein was analyzed as thrown, inauthentic, and fallen, making it impossible for it to catch up with itself as disengaged from the world. It would not be utterly mistaken to say that we have Augustine to thank for Heidegger’s ontological thematization of Dasein as the worldly ek-­stasis toward Sein (to be), which is also veiled and withdrawn in a much more extreme manner than ever envisaged by Husserl. Heidegger radicalized Husserl’s notion of intentionality by reinterpreting it in terms of the concrete factical human being’s experience of inquietudo. Heidegger and Augustine The Method of Heidegger’s Phenomenological Appropriation of Augustine

Heidegger sought to purge his philosophical foundations of any residual Cartesianism in Husserl’s phenomenology. He regularly characterized

Cor ad cor loquitur  321

“pure perception” as involving the alienated, disembodied subject’s “taking a look at what’s ‘out there.’ ” Heidegger considered Husserl’s use of the term intentionality biased because it indicated that he thought of consciousness as perception—­a view that, while it contains some truth, does not accurately cover all of Husserl’s actual position (as noted above with regard to the phenomenology of inner time consciousness). Nevertheless, he resolutely set about freeing himself from consciousness as a matter of “taking a look at what’s ‘in here.’ ” In the course of relocating acts of visual perception in the context of the “buzzing, blooming confusion” actually verifiable within a more radical appropriation of presence-­to-­self as presence-­to-­the-­world, Heidegger found in Augustine’s text what he needed to overcome this impoverished notion of consciousness as perception, namely, the restless heart. Heidegger was driven by intellectual probity to undertake his lecture course on Book X of The Confessions in the third part of his course on the phenomenology of religious life. He had already broken through to what he called “facticity” as “the manner of being of our Dasein”24 by attending to the primal Christian experience of grace in earlier parts of the lectures, gathered under the title “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” (including lectures on Paul’s Letters to the Galatians and to the Thessalonians, besides the part on Augustine). Heidegger was struck by the experience of what the Catholic tradition calls operative and cooperative grace. In operative grace, the human will is moved and not moving, while God alone moves us by moving our wills; in cooperative grace, the human will is both moved by God and moves itself. This is the heart of the “primal Christian experience.” As Heidegger conceded, “It is almost hopeless to enter into such an operative context. The Christian possesses the awareness that this facticity cannot be gained out of his/her own power, but derives from God—­the phenomenon of operative grace.”25 Heidegger could not speak about what he thought he had no direct experience of, so he refrained from either dogmatic or theological interpretation; he was mordantly critical of prevalent superficial historical treatments or pious meditations. He decided to “point the way towards a phenomenological understanding” of the experience of grace26 by using the technique of “formal indication” to disclose not the content of the experience of grace but the “primordial ‘how’ ” by which the phenomenon is experienced, leaving “its performative or operative character free.”27

322  Fred Lawrence

His technique of formal indication (die formale Anzeige) discarded the distantiating attitude that yielded the abstractions or definitions for which Husserl had such a penchant. For Heidegger, “the point of departure of the path to philosophy is the factical life experience.”28 These lectures on the phenomenology of religion are located on the threshold of what came to be known as “the hermeneutics of facticity,” by which philosophy engages the human historical quest for meaning in life in all its concreteness and amplitude. In speaking about phenomenology in the course on Aristotle that immediately followed the Augustine course, Heidegger said, “There are no definitions in the usual sense and in philosophy in general there are no definitions of this kind.”29 Heidegger explains what his revolutionary approach intended to give an account of as follows: Each experience—­as experiencing, and what is experienced—­can “be taken in the phenomenon,” that is to say, one can ask after the following: 1. The original “what” that is experienced therein (content). 2. The original “how” in which it is experienced (relation). 3. The original “how” in which the relational meaning is enacted (enactment). But these three directions of meaning [Sinn] (content-­, relational-­, enactment-­meaning) do not simply coexist. “Phenomenon” is the totality of meaning [Sinn] in these three directions. “Phenomenology” is an explication of this totality of meaning; it gives the “logos” of the phenomena, “logos” in the sense of verbum internum (not in the sense of logicalization).30 Let me give a possible interpretation of this passage. First, it seems to me probable that Heidegger is applying pre-­modern ideas of Aristotle: (a) knowledge is by identity, so that the act of experiencing and what is experienced are intentionally united; the self as knower in act is the known; and (b) human beings have insight (noein) only into phantasm, so that questions make possible the understanding of one’s experience as sensed or imaginatively represented, what Heidegger calls the

Cor ad cor loquitur  323

“phenomenon.” The insight grasps the intelligibility in the phantasm, where “intelligibility” means a relationship that causes the experienced phenomenon to be this and not that type of thing. Once one has the insight, the act of understanding can pivot upon its own attainment to formulate the intelligibility apprehended in a more—­or, in most cases, less—­abstract manner. (c) To say with Heidegger that “philosophical concepts . . . are vacillating, vague, manifold, and fluctuating”31 can be construed as heeding Aristotle’s admonition not to seek any greater exactitude (akribeia) than is afforded by the subject matter under investigation. As a science of lived experience, therefore, phenomenology does not proceed to further degrees of abstraction (whether mathematical or metaphysical) but rather explicates the concreteness of meaning as experienced in all its lack of clarity—­and perhaps even ambiguity—­in contradistinction to logically clear and distinct ideas. Second, normally our explicit awareness is directed only to contents while either neglecting or prescinding from the dimension of Voll­ zug: the act, enactment, performance, operation by which contents are apprehended, judged, decided upon. However, the gravamen of formal indication is to shift one’s foreground attention from the content of an experience and to focus on its enactment. Third, in contrast to Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger’s phenomenology investigates facticity. Its quest for understanding is hermeneutical. The intelligibility immanent in the Vollzug of human living’s “how”-­character is originally apprehended and enacted dramatically; the operation, performance, or enactment constitutes the coming-­to-­be of the drama of human existence itself. At the beginning of the “Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion” Heidegger explicates this complex structure of human existence in his interpretation of Paul on the parousia: The knowledge relevant to Paul’s meaning, he tells us, is a “knowledge [that] must be one’s own, for Paul refers the Thessalonians back to themselves and to the knowledge that they have as having-­come-­to-­be.”32 Facticity is precisely this ongoing human performance of anticipating the future in light of the past or of recalling the past in order to live in the future. Basically, this is Verstehen or interpretation, described by Rowan Williams as “interweaving a text (words and actions, words and actions) with our human project, acquiring a partner, a pole of difference that refuses to allow our ‘project’ to return

324  Fred Lawrence

endlessly upon itself, as if it were indeed generated from a well of interiority, ‘self-­consciousness.’  ”33 The Christian experience of redemption occurs within a drama by which (paraphrasing Austin Farrer) we are talked into talk by those who talk at us, so that by the time we are aware of our independence, we are what others have made us. “How many persons, how many conditions,” Farrer exclaims, “have made us what we are; and in making us so, may have undone us.”34 In his Aristotle course Heidegger stated: “The genuine foundation of philosophy is the radical existential grasp and the precipitation in time of questionability; to call oneself and one’s life and one’s decisive performances into question is the basic concept of every, and even of the most radical, illumination.”35 In the words of Hans-­Helmuth Gander, Heidegger in part learned this notion of philosophy from Christianity. He claimed that the “most profound historical paradigm for this noteworthy process of shifting the center of gravity back to factical life and the lifeworld back into the self-­world and the world of inward experience is given in the emergence of Christianity.”36 The specific conceptuality for Heidegger’s phenomenology, from the Aristotle course until Sein und Zeit (1927, henceforth SZ) first emerged in his treatment of Augustine’s Confessions, Book X, where the Bishop of Hippo reflected critically on the anamnetic experiment carried out in Books I–­IX. Heidegger insisted, “Christian religiousness lives temporally.” The first nine books exhibited primal Christian experience as an epitome of concrete factical human life. Despite certain Neo-­Platonist defects, Augustine’s articulation of the experience of redemption through grace in Christian terms made available the fundamental structures of the hermeneutics of facticity that appear again in SZ in secular garb. Augustine’s hermeneutic analysis of the “I am” in Confessions X makes clear that the act of existence proper to the human being as a unity, an identity, and a whole is neither primordially accessible nor imaginable nor correctly conceivable in the mode of an object of perception.37 Heidegger writes: “Die Selbstgewissheit und das Sich-­selbst-­haben im Sinne Augustins ist etwas ganz anderes als die cartesische Evidenz des cogito.”38 With incisive clarity, Heidegger realized that Augustine’s terms esse, nosse, and velle could not be encompassed in terms of the truncated metaphysics and rational psychology of the Scholastics, which rendered them experientially inaccessible and so dogmatic in the pejorative sense. Nor could

Cor ad cor loquitur  325

they be reduced into the frame provided by the dominant modern notion of consciousness figured as perception or ocular vision.39 Heidegger understood that for Augustine the human ego’s esse (act of existing) is enacted by a preconceptual, pre-­reflective nosse, which is the performative self-­awareness concomitant with human agency, and an amare, which is the primary orientation or connaturality of the will’s desire for the good.40 Heidegger applied the scholastic tags actus exercitus/actus signatus to retrieve the innate, performative reflexivity proper to human presence-­to-­ self-­in-­the-­world that endows human beings with conscientia.41 For Heidegger, the same reality Augustine referred to by the term nosse was what he intended by the term Dasein, the only being that questions Being as its presence or thereness (Da) in differentiation from being. This also corresponds with Lonergan on the luminosity of consciousness.42 So both Heidegger and Lonergan use the word “consciousness” in a non-­Cartesian, non-­Kantian way. Similarly, Augustine distinguished animus from anima to denote the conscious subject: human presence-­to-­self-­in-­the-­world. Next, Heidegger realized that the self is constituted as Augustine’s inquietum cor. The Grund-­situation and -­erfahrung of philosophy is the restlessness (Beunruhigung) of human presence-­to-­self-­in-­the-­world. The persistent concern (Bekümmerung) of factual lived experience is philosophy’s point of departure and return: “In all experience as curare [concern], the basic tendency of delectatio (uti-­frui) [delight (use-­enjoyment)], a curare characterized in different ways, is co-­present; thus co-­present is always a certain appetite, a striving for something (formal—­otherwise ambiguous, dangerous).”43 In SZ it is called “care” or “concern” (Sorge). Initially and for the most part, being concerned is conscious and operative (in actu exercito) and not objectively known.44 It is Vollzugssinn, the originative meaning immanent in what I do, perform, suffer—­what I encounter in my depression and elation, but not as an object of perception.45 David Burrell’s description of Augustine’s anamnetic experiment, in which “things that matter” gradually came to light for him, captures what was so engaging about Augustine for Heidegger: This phrase [“things that matter”] describes those subjects of inquiry which are presupposed to any inquiry, those topics toward which we cannot help but be positioned whether we have taken a position or not. Hence, understanding cannot escape self-­understanding, and taking

326  Fred Lawrence

a position often involves disengaging oneself from the position in which he already stands. To say that Augustine succeeds in dramatizing metaphysics is another way of noting how he firmly subordinates conceptualization to living, schema to use, understanding to judgment, and judgment to action. For if “to be” is “to be related,” any affirmation of what I am includes an assessment of what I must become.46 Heidegger’s Appropriation of Confessions X

Augustine writes: When at last I cling to you with my whole being there will be no more anguish or labor for me, and my life will be alive indeed, because filled with you. But now it is very different. Anyone whom you fill you also uplift, but I am not full of you, and so I am a burden to myself. Joys over which I ought to weep do battle with sorrows that should be matter for joy, and I know not which will be victorious. But I also see griefs that are evil at war in me with joys that are good, and I know not which will win the day. This is agony, Lord, have pity on me! It is agony! See, I do not hide my wounds; you are the physician and I am sick; you are merciful, I in need of mercy. Is not human life on earth a time of testing [tentatio]? (X 28.39)47 This passage, which expresses the gist of Heidegger’s interpretation, follows immediately the prayer “Late have I loved you.” It marks the conclusion of Augustine’s discourse on his ascent through the “broad plains and vaults and caves of my memory” and comes just before the discourse on the descent of the self as wounded by the concupiscences down to the mystery of the humiliation of the Word Incarnate. Pamela Bright suggests that these two discourses form the left-­and right-­hand panels of a triptych whose central panel is the discussion of “the true happiness.”48 At the center, then, stands what for Augustine is the telos of human restlessness and caring (curare): God, which is to say, the beata vita (the happy or blessed life). If we care about or seek God or beatitudo (happiness), we must somehow know about what we seek. Here again Heidegger makes the point that Augustine acknowledges that we know about the beata vita not in the reified mode of an object of perception but rather in the mode of “a unique Bezugssinn (relational intention), in such a way

Cor ad cor loquitur  327

indeed, as to be decisive for Vollzug (enactment, performance, operation).”49 As he writes: “Nimirum habemus eam nescio quomodo” (X 20.29).50 And yet Augustine often falls back from persisting in the questing and questioning of concrete factical life into a reifying way of speaking about “having beatitudo” that Heidegger labels “axiologizing” in reaction against Max Scheler’s construal. This refers to a certain rank ordering of goods or values that Heidegger says is due to the contamination of evangelical meanings by “Greek thought” or to the “Catholic” betrayal that typically consisted in the less than worthy business of “making compromises.”51 Ultimately, the reification consists in reducing the fundamental performative meaning (Vollzugssinn) into a content. Heidegger also objects that Augustine’s teaching about frui in relation to the summum bonum as an incommutabilis et ineffabilis pulchritudo amounts to no more than an aesthetic reduction of meaning. “With this,” he says, “a basic aspect of the medieval object of theology (and of the history of ideas in general) has been designated: It is the specifically Greek view. The ‘fruitio Dei [enjoyment of God]’ is a decisive concept in medieval theology; this basic motif led to the formation of medieval mysticism.”52 Nevertheless, Heidegger sees that Augustine actually also deconstructs Plotinus,53 sounding the perfectly right note: “Vitam . . . beatam habemus in notitia ideoque amamus et tamen adipisci eam volumus, ut beati simus” (X 21.30).54 For Augustine, what constitutes the beata vita is joy in the truth—­experienced vividly in our desire not to be deceived and in our spontaneous desire not to make a mistake or fall into error. We could not have these experiences “nisi esset aliqua notitia eius in memoria eorum” (X 23.33).55 We have this performative notion of God, beata vita in memoria, which is not just a concept drawn from a conventional faculty psychology for Augustine,56 because, although it is the capacity to remember, it also connotes consciousness tout court as generating and either “minding” or forgetting the constitutive meaning by which we save or damn ourselves. This is why, in the first panel of the triptych on the traversing of memory, Augustine retrieves himself as memor of God.57 In chapters 1–­5, which discuss his motives for writing the Confessions, he meditates on the correlation between knowledge of God and knowledge of self and on confiteri as the means to such knowledge. Chapter 6 switches from the theme of knowing God to that of loving God. The question “But what am I loving

328  Fred Lawrence

when I love you?” impels Augustine’s inward ascent to his origin through the exploration of his memory. Heidegger refers to Augustine’s statement that “so great is the faculty of memory, so great the power of life in a person whose life is tending toward death” (X 17.26) and adds, “I am myself memoria.” In other words, the meanings and truths constitutive of our very selves make our memory what it is, and so Augustine can say, “Ibi mihi et ipse occurro” (X 8.14): “And there I come to meet myself.” Memory is the place both of self-­awareness and of personal identity. In this vein, and as a function of a hermeneutics of facticity transforming Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology into a universal phenomenological ontology, Heidegger understood Augustine’s contrast of the two modes of human concern for life rightly understood—­as a detached, noble appreciation of beauty and goodness (frui) on the one hand, or as utilitarian exploitation (uti) on the other—­to parallel precisely the central problem of either gaining access to performative meaning or missing it through the misguided attempt to objectify it. Of the Augustinian motifs from the tenth book of the Confessions that Heidegger incorporated into his hermeneutic analysis of the factical life of Dasein, none is more significant than that of becoming a question to oneself (mihi quaestio factus sum [X 33.50]). This is the primal expression of the care or concern arising from human beings’ inquietudo. Robert McMahon tells us the background of Augustine’s cor inquietum implicit in the phrase quia fecisti nos ad te: “The Latin Bible renders the act as God’s creating humans ‘toward [his] image’ rather than ‘in’ it. According to this understanding, Christ alone is the image of God and human beings are made ‘toward’ that image. But Augustine’s ‘toward thyself ’ also implies an innate inclination in human nature: by our very nature we are drawn toward God. . . . Hence, the Augustinian heart has both an incompleteness, for it is ‘restless,’ and a directionality, toward God.”58 In his Aristotle course, Heidegger interprets the inquietudo of concrete human factical life in terms of privation, of lack. In its nothingness, life is ever insecure. It is a condition of Zerrissenheit, Zwiespältigkeit, discord, conflict between spirit and flesh. As a question for oneself, the human being determines its life through care, “care for ‘its daily bread,’ ” as Heidegger puts it.59 Its conduct (Verhalten) is oriented in relation to the surrounding world (Umwelt), to other people (Mitwelt), and to itself (Selbstwelt).

Cor ad cor loquitur  329

Heidegger appreciates Augustine’s teaching about the human being’s drawnness to God as explaining “why,” in McMahon’s words, “the human heart is ‘restless’ amidst all the goods of the created world. So many things please, but none of them, finally, satisfies.”60 Heidegger emphasizes with Augustine how life is shot through with temptation (tentatio). Concern is lived out in the tension between desires and fears: “We have slid away into dispersion; for anyone who loves something else along with you, but does not love it for your sake, loves less” (X 29.40). In principle one might adhere to God with one’s whole self, put everything radically onto him—­“all relations of life, the whole facticity permeated by you, enacted in such a way that all enactment is enacted before you.”61 Or one might live the alternative possibility, failing to do this. Hence, the focus on the theme of becoming a burden to oneself (oneri mihi sum [X 28.39])—­the overwhelming conditions leading to one’s being defluxus in multum, or diverted by the multiplicity of various “meaningful” possibilities. As Augustine put it, “I will try now to give an account of my disintegrated self, for when I turned away from you, the one God, and pursued a multitude of things, I went to pieces” (II 1.1). Chapter 40 sums up the ascent through the reconnaissance of his memory, and chapter 41 lays open the ills of Augustine’s soul that separate him from God. Then the third panel of the triptych displays the disordered desires or concupiscences—­the basic forms of temptation at the root of the soul’s sickness—­that keep the soul from the continence required for the beata vita. Without self-­control, according to Augustine, “by reason of the struggle of flesh against the spirit and spirit against flesh, [people] fall back on what their strength permits, and make do with that” (X 23.33). Heidegger comments, “They fall back on what is in their power to do, what is at their disposal in the moment, what is easily attainable for them of the surrounding-­worldly and other significances of the world and of the self. (Formally indicated: the beata vita as such, . . . is one. It really concerns the individual, how he appropriates it. There is one true one.”62 Chapters 41–­51 of the meditation on amor saeculi treat the lust of the flesh (this meditation surveys the dangers arising from each of the external senses); chapters 52–­57 are about the lust of the eyes (concentrating on curiositas, the desire for frivolous and superficial knowledge). Heidegger remarks how the concupiscentia carnis et oculorum as forms of dispersing life into manifold “meaningful” distractions make one so

330  Fred Lawrence

attached to the world that one’s self becomes inaccessible to oneself: the self becomes absent to itself and lost in the objectified surroundings that are the sources of its delectatio. Chapters 58–­64 examine the pride of life (ambitio vitae) by which Heidegger says the self is objectified, and one’s delectatio becomes absorbed by one’s own self-­importance as the goal of living. At the end of Augustine’s meditation on his pride and love of praise for his own sake rather than God’s, he prays to God as “the Truth” about the way he is constantly “dragged down by my weight of woe, sucked back into everyday things and held fast in them; grievously I lament, but just as grievously I am held. Such is the strength of the burden of habit!”63 (X 40.65). He then puts his finger on what he cannot overcome by himself: “You are the Truth, sovereign over all. I did not want to lose you, but in my greed I thought to possess falsehood along with you, just as no one wants to tell lies in such a way that he loses his own sense of what is true. That was why I lost you, for you did not consent to be possessed in consort with a lie” (X 41.66). In his Aristotle lectures Heidegger synthesized factical life as a kind of movedness: “The movedness [Bewegtheit] of factical life can be provisionally interpreted and described as unrest. The ‘how’ of this unrest, in its fullness as a phenomenon, determines facticity.” (His elaboration refers to that great modern Augustinian, Pascal.)64 Under the headings “The Cate­ gories of the Relationality of Life” and “The Categories of Movement: Relucence and Prestruction,”65 Heidegger explains the threefold structure of tentatio or molestia: inclination (Neigung), distance/loss of distance (Abstand), and self-­incarceration or sealing oneself off (Abriegelung). Inclination exerts a pressure or weight upon the human being, as a sort of dispersing undertow that has the double effect of a prestructuring defluere (Zerstreuung, Zwiespältigkeit [self-­dispersing]) and relucent molestia that never allows the dispersion to cease. Distance makes possible the Vorhabe required for the project of being oneself. Inclination incites the abolition of the distance. The mutual reinforcement of loss of distance and inclination cause being oneself, achieving one’s proper good, or authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) to be obnubilated, repressed, and diffused. Augustine’s account of his nocturnal emissions shows what is meant by this when he tells us that he did not actively do willingly what to his regret was done

Cor ad cor loquitur  331

passively in him: “For the very distance between sleeping and waking is obvious enough to convince us that we did not really do the disgraceful thing, even though we are sorry that it was in some sense done in us” (X 30.41). The defluere or scattering into multifariousness deepens one’s condition of dissolution, eruere, or thrownness. The ongoing weight of molestia bears down upon, oppresses, and threatens life. When the soul pursues its inclinations into every and any possibility that attracts it, factical life cannot attain self-­knowledge or proper self-­possession because it is fixated on the multiplicity of diverse worldly objects considered meaningful inasmuch as they are the sources of worldly pleasures and obsessively dictate one’s existential orientation. However, having to acknowledge this about oneself is too painful to bear, so one has recourse to the masking strategy (Larvanz) of self-­ deception that Heidegger calls self-­incarceration, sequestration, or sealing oneself off (Abriegelung). As Alasdair MacIntyre put the matter, “Were we to want to resort to introspection in search of self-­knowledge, what we would encounter and be deceived by is the self ’s self-­serving presentation of itself to itself, a presentation designed to sustain an image of the self as well-­ordered, free from fundamental conflict, troubled perhaps by occasional akratic difficulties, but for the most part entitled to approval both by itself and others.”66 Augustine states the genesis of this falsehood as follows: “People love the truth in such a way that those who love something else wish to regard what they love as truth and, since they would not want to be deceived, are unwilling to be convinced that they are wrong. They are thus led into hatred of truth for the sake of that very thing which they love under the guise of truth. They love truth when it enlightens them, but hate it when it reveals them” (X 23, 34). The depth of the wound in Augustine’s soul—­his inability to attain the integrity of the “truth of existence” that would go hand in hand with the continence that had so eluded him—­compels him to ask, “Whom could I find to reconcile me to you?” He turns to Christ, the verax mediator—­the one who at the crucial turning points of his autobiographical narrative ultimately converted him by the delectatio victrix of unconditional love and forgiveness—­because he realized that by itself philosophical assensus is insufficient; only the humiliating self-­sacrifice of the human Word of God could redeem and heal him (X 42–­43).67

332  Fred Lawrence Heidegger and Aristotle

The next semester Heidegger reappropriated Aristotle, freeing the Stagirite’s thought from its bondage as the ancilla theologiae. Resuming the Christian and Augustinian focus of unrest about one’s own life,68 as was to be the case in SZ, Heidegger turned the central problematic into the this-­worldly experience of death instead of the Augustinian concern for beati­tudo. After Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle,69 and although the motifs from the Augustine encounter are still explicit, factical life remains a completely profane affair. This is the case both in the course “Phenomenological Interpretations” and in the 1922 report (a manuscript Heidegger wrote for Paul Natorp in preparation for his move from Freiburg to teach at Marburg), which bears the same title with the suggestive subtitle “Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation.”70 The Aristotle course, exploited by Heidegger to initiate students into phenomenological research, also lays the foundations for a reform of the German university. A powerful analysis of what he calls Ruinanz, which is the explication of Dasein’s built-­in existentials that make for inauthenticity (in the sense of the inclination, loss of distance, and masking of self-­ deception summarized above), it represents both a consolidation and a trimming of what Heidegger gained from his Augustine interpretation. The influence on him of Paul, Augustine, and Luther is unmistakable in Heidegger’s meditative exegesis of Nicomachean Ethics II, 5 (1106b 28–­ 34), especially of the single passage quoted from Aristotle in the lectures: “Again, it is possible to fail [harmartanein] in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans conjectured, and good [agathon] to that of the limited), while to act rightly [kathortoun] occurs in one way only [monachos]. (Hence the one is easy, the other difficult: It is easy to miss the mark, hard to hit it.) And for this reason it is characteristic of vice [tes kakias] to have excess [huperbole] or defect [elleipsis], and of virtue [tes d’aretes] to hold to a mean [mesotes].”71 Just by being human, people have a penchant for “missing the mark” by either excess or defect because they cannot help taking the “easy” course of action. Unable to face the difficult burden of factical human living, they have their caring twisted into the kinds of inauthenticity signaled by the concupiscences that make human life a temptation. Heidegger’s conception of ruinance goes to the heart of the malaise by explaining that the “whereto” of ruinance is annihilation

Cor ad cor loquitur  333

or death, and the inauthenticity of death is Dasein’s way of backing away from that stark fact, even as it hastens the process of dissolution and corruption.72 In the Aristotle interpretation, however, the burdensome concupiscences that weighed on Augustine and made him a question to himself become displaced by existential categories of life and by a portrayal of philosophical analysis as a movement countering ruinance in recovering and persistently pursuing the essential questionability of Dasein. In the Natorp Report Heidegger applied his analysis of the ontology of Dasein’s facticity as inescapably fallen to the hermeneutic situation for reading Aristotle. Philological and philosophical scholarship under the auspices of proponents of the philosophy of value, of Lebensphilosophie, of historicism, or of the prevailing ideals of science he considered as diverse ways of “missing the mark” [hamartanein, Verfehlen]. But Heidegger’s indication of the hermeneutical situation for reading Aristotle was more than just a critique of prevalent scholarship; it was an exposé of the foundational conditions in the being of any Dasein for enacting the interpretation of any text. The language of restlessness and concern (Beunruhigung, Bekümmerung) began to give way in his analysis to that of care (Sorge). Here again, though, Dasein’s straightforward care (curare) is inevitably deflected into the inauthentic concern of Besorgnis, which in self-­centeredness and circumspection coolly and objectively observes circumstances in relation to one’s self-­regarding passions to calculate “what’s in” any situation or text “for me,” and, if necessary, strategically to manipulate anything either useful or threatening to one’s own advantage.73 In both the lecture course and the Natorp Report, Heidegger traces a trajectory of caring as it enacts the tendency toward falling as the How of its facing death by not facing it. But he also uncovers a reverse tendency: “The Being of life in itself, which is accessible within facticity itself, is of such a kind that it becomes visible and reachable only by way of the detour through the countermovement against falling care. This countermovement, as life’s worrying about not being lost, is the way in which the possible and apprehended authentic Being of life temporalizes [zeitigt] itself. Let this Being which is accessible in factical life and to factical life as the being of factical life itself be called Existenz.”74 In the lecture course Heidegger had insisted, “A counter-­ruinant movedness is one of the actualizations of philosophical interpretation, and indeed it is actualized in the appropriation of the mode of access to questionability.”75 This entails “the constant struggle of factical, philosophical

334  Fred Lawrence

interpretation against its own factical ruinance, a struggle that accompanies the process of the actualization of philosophizing. This means . . . maintaining oneself in genuine questioning.”76 This will entail so promoting the tendency of ruinance toward nothingness that the questioning of it and its reversal by philosophy are thereby evoked or provoked. “Phenomenological interpretation . . . manifests by its very essence a ‘counter’-­ movedness.”77 Philosophy has to attain a fixed point or existential sojourn from which to undertake its interpretation of facticity, a “sojourn before the possibility of leaping into the work of worried decision.”78 This is roughly equivalent to what Augustine articulated as the shift from diffusion into multiplicity to continence. “In this decisive hoping,” Heidegger writes, “the genuine effort at continentia is alive, an effort which does not reach its end. . . . ‘Containment,’ pulling back from defluxio, standing against it full of mistrust.”79 As Heidegger expressed it in the Natorp Report, “The ‘against’ (as the ‘not’) expresses a primordial achievement which is constitutive of Being. With respect to its constitutive sense, negation has primordial primacy over position. And this is because the Being-­character of the human being is factically determined through a falling [Fallen], through that world-­laden tendency [Hang].”80 In the Natorp Report, and with respect to the task of interpretation as a function of philosophy’s counterruinance movement generally, the conceptuality of the philosophy and theology sedimented in one’s factical living has to be dismantled by a destructive interpretation insofar as it, too, is an expression of the loss of distance and the sealing of oneself off from authenticity. Heidegger regarded Aristotle as the fountainhead of the philosophical tradition. Just as he helped us recover the freshness and down-­to-­earth character of Greek thinking, Aristotle also became derailed by the desire for inauthentic security into flawed ideas about taking our bearings and achieving our fulfillment by the theoretic contemplation of what is highest and best. Of Aristotle’s flaw, Heidegger wrote: Aristotle thus secures the sense of philosophy through the interpretation of a factical movement of care with respect to its ultimate tendency. These purely observational dealings, however, prove to be such a kind that, in their That-­with-­respect-­to-­which, they no longer see that very life itself in which they are. But insofar as these dealings as pure understanding, are life-­temporalizing, they are that through their very movement. Pure understanding has its concrete possibility

Cor ad cor loquitur  335

of being actualized in Being-­free from the concerns of the routine-­ directive dealings; this possibility of being actualized is the How within which life, in view of one of its basic tendencies, takes-­a-­ pause. Theorein is the purest movement which life has available to it. Because of this, it is something “god-­like.” But for Aristotle the idea of the god-­like did not arise in the explication of something objective which was made accessible in a basic religious experience; the theion is rather the expression for the highest Being-­character which arises in the ontological radicalization of the idea of being-­that-­is-­ moved [Idee des Bewegtseienden]. The theion is noesis noeseos only because such beholding, with regard to its Being-­character (i.e., with regard to its movement), suffices most purely for the idea of Being-­moved [Idee des Bewegtseins] as such. This being must be pure beholding, i.e., free from every emotional relation to its That-­with-­respect-­to-­which. The “god-­like” cannot be envious, not because it is absolute goodness and love, but rather because in its Being as pure movement it can neither hate nor love.81 Therefore, Heidegger elaborated a program of destructive interpretations of Aristotle’s physics, psychology, ontology, logic, and ethics that was largely carried out by the time he finished Sein und Zeit. What is missing from the Aristotle interpretation that lay at the heart of the explication of Augustine’s analysis of the hindrances to self-­ knowledge? The guiding question of Book X was this: “Quid autem amo, cum te amo?”82 In the Aristotle interpretation, the question of love in general is not explicit except in the specific form of friendship, which excludes friendship between such unequals as human beings and God. The practically wise person’s decisions about means in relation to a final end, the highest good, and the theoretically wise person’s contemplation of what is highest and best take the place of the love of God.

B e r n a r d Lo n e rg a n Augustine’s Influence on the Early Lonergan

The relationship of Lonergan (1904–­84) to Augustine is more complicated and more stretched out over time than that of Heidegger. Although,

336  Fred Lawrence

like Heidegger, Lonergan entered the Society of Jesus (in the eastern Canadian Jesuit Province) at a young age, after having been notably brilliant in his earlier school years, he never left the society or “fell away” from Catholic belief and practice.83 Under the Jesuit tutelage of the day, he did not at first flourish; his superiors seemed not to react to his questions, either about theology or about the regulations of his order, with understanding or kindness. Yet he had a religious experience, and he submitted obediently to the orders of his superiors, was ordained, and eventually was sent to do advanced studies. He tells us that his early questions had to do with knowing—­W hat are we doing when we are knowing?—­and methodology. To resolve them, he read assiduously such works as Introduction to Logic by H. W. B. Joseph, an Oxford don who followed John Stuart Mill; Plato’s early dialogues; The Doctrine of Plato’s Ideas by J. A. Stewart, who was trained in the Marburg School; J. H. Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent; and Augustine’s dialogues written at Cassiciacum. In his “Editor’s Preface” to the Collected Works edition of Verbum, Frederick E. Crowe tells us that Lonergan reacted against the dominance of universal concepts during his philosophy studies at Heythrop College (1926–­29). Of those Cassiciacum dialogues Lonergan remarked that Augustine “was talking about intelligere all the time.” Indeed, Lonergan had all but displaced universals from their central role in knowledge in one of his earliest essays for Heythrop’s student journal, “The Form of Mathe­ matical Inference.”84 Although Newman influenced him enormously,85 it was Plato as interpreted by Stewart who first led him to understand the importance of understanding: “You get to the equation of the circle just by understanding.” As he put it in a question session at Boston College: Aristotle and Thomas held that you abstracted from phantasm the eidos, the species, the idea. And my first clue into the idea was when I was reading a book by an Oxford don by the name of J. A. Stewart . . . on Plato’s doctrine of ideas. And he explained the doctrine of ideas by contending that for Plato an idea was something like the Cartesian formula for a circle, i.e. (x2 + y2) = r2, and that exemplified the act of understanding for me. And the idea was getting what’s behind the formula for the circle. So you have to have something in between the concept and the datum or phantasm. That is the sort of thing that you can’t hold and be a naïve realist.86

Cor ad cor loquitur  337

Mathews cites Stewart’s comment: “The Idea of the circle, as defined by its equation in the general form, is not itself properly speaking a curve. . . . Such an equation, like the ideal number, is at once many, as synthesizing an indefinite plurality of positions, and one, as synthesizing them in accord with a definite law.”87 He thus realized the untenable nature of the naïve realist view that understanding and knowledge occur chiefly in the act of perception, so that the concept is a mere impoverished replica of what is seen, heard, tasted, and touched, and the judgment is only a rubber-­stamping of what perception already knows. Key Augustinian Doctrines in Grace and Freedom

Meanwhile, Lonergan was instructed to take his doctorate in theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. In writing his dissertation on St. Thomas’s thought on operative grace, Lonergan discovered a key idea for his future practice of interpretation. As Augustine tells us in the Confessions, the reader is supposed to understand the meaning of the author as the author himself understood it. Lonergan always said that when an author repeats the same opinion on some issue throughout his life, it is hard to determine just what he or she meant. However, when authors are brilliant minds at work who keep on learning and changing their minds and, on a set of interrelated issues, explain why they have changed their positions, one has a much better chance of understanding these authors as they understood themselves. Lonergan often told students in retrospect that any major change in Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of grace was signaled as by the waving of a red flag by a quotation from Augustine’s anti-­Pelagian writings. This held true for Thomas on the relationship between grace and free will—­ and especially on grace—­from the time of his Commentary on the Sentences to the time of the second part of Part II of the Summa theologiae. Here we can note Augustine’s influence in two ways. First, after pointing out in the chapter titled “Historical Background” that Augustine’s responses to the Pelagians and the exaggerated Augustinians were essentially dogmatic in nature, Lonergan went on to say: It cannot be denied that the disjunction of freedom from justice and liberation from sin is speculative in nature and intention. However abrupt, brief, and paradoxical, it does aim at explaining; and similarly, throughout Augustine’s many writings on grace, there is not only

338  Fred Lawrence

positive theology but also such a penetration of thought and understanding that one must affirm the development of speculative theology to have already begun. But, while we think this to be true, we also are inclined to assert that the most legitimate commentary on this initial speculation, the commentary most free from the endless vices of anachronism, is simply the history of subsequent speculation.88 Augustine’s quest for an intelligentia fidei framed both the dogmatic positions of the Council of Orange and the later development of the theoretical understanding of the dogmas up to the time of Thomas Aquinas. It remains that Aquinas’s synthesis relocated distinctions first made by Augustine within a theology that embraced theorems on the supernatural, on divine transcendence, on God’s universal premotion, on free will, and on grace as both operative and cooperative in both its habitual and actual dimensions. The grandeur of the synthesis was demonstrated ad oculos in the subdivision of Augustine’s position into Erasmus’s one-­sided emphasis on human liberty and Luther’s one-­sided stress on the bondage of the will and the need for God’s grace.89 A key Augustinian teaching appropriated by Lonergan with the help of Aquinas relates to Augustine’s inability to cure himself of his incontinentia because of the defluxio in multum. Thus he stressed the role of delectatio in the Confessions, an Augustinian teaching that would exert its full force on Lonergan only in a much later phase of his development. As Lonergan wrote in his study of gratia operans, In the De veritate, however, one finds a very pertinent quotation from St Augustine’s De gratia et libero arbitrio. The Pelagians admitted that grace was necessary for the forgiveness of past sin; what they wanted to maintain was that grace was not necessary for the avoidance of ­future sins. It was on this score that St Augustine took them to task, citing the Our Father, which asks not only dimitte debita nostra, but also ne nos inferas in tentationem. Accordingly, there is no use trying to make out that non posse non peccare merely means that grace is necessary for sins to be forgiven.90 The philosophical issue here is “relative fixity in evil.” For the theology of grace to explain the import of this phenomenon, Aquinas had

Cor ad cor loquitur  339

to bring together into intelligible unity developments not yet available to Augustine: “the distinction between the natural and supernatural orders, the difference between Adam’s state and our own, and the necessity of divine motions supplementing infused habits.”91 This also implies the integration of Aristotle’s theory of habits into Aquinas’s theology of grace. From the perspective of this speculative synthesis, the consequence of Augustine’s point is “the philosophic doctrine that dispositions and habits of will constitute a very real limitation on human freedom. The human will does not swing back to a perfect equilibrium of indifference with every tick of the clock; its past operations determine its present orientation; and though this orientation has not the absolute fixity of angels and demons, still it is characterized by the relative fixity of psychological continuity. It can be changed, but such change always requires a cause.”92 Without Augustine, Lonergan’s retrieval of Aquinas on the moral impotence due to sin would have been inconceivable. How Augustine Influenced Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas

After Lonergan’s early reading of the Cassiciacum dialogues, Augustine’s influence on him was mediated mainly through Thomas Aquinas. In the autobiographical “Insight Revisited,” Lonergan recounted that long before his explicit interest in Trinitarian theology, while he was studying theology at the Gregorian University, one of the most important influences on him came from conversations he had with an Athenian fellow student, Stephanos Stephanu: It was through Stephanu by some process of osmosis, rather than through struggling through the five great Cahiers, that I learnt to speak of human knowledge as not intuitive but discursive with the decisive component in judgment. This view was confirmed by my familiarity with Augustine’s key notion, veritas, and the whole was rounded out by Bernard Leeming’s course on the Incarnate Word, which convinced me that there could not be a hypostatic union without a real distinction between essence and existence. This, of course, was all the more acceptable, since Aquinas’ esse corresponded to Augustine’s veritas and both harmonized with Maréchal’s view of judgment.93

340  Fred Lawrence

Lonergan had never been content with the fourteenth-­century Scholastic opinion that truth depends on “the validity of an intuition of what exists and is present,” because it did not agree with his own experience of coming to know. It had little or nothing to do with the veritas that had been so crucial for Augustine, whose reading of the libri platonicorum and contact with Ambrose of Milan helped him to realize that there is more to mind or consciousness than the senses or sense intuition. In his radically changed self-­understanding, truth is more a matter of understanding whether there are warrants for judgment than of the conformity of perception to things. This is why Lonergan could say that his “familiarity with Augustine’s key notion, veritas” confirmed Maréchal on the centrality of judgment. A paper he wrote in Rome on Newman has one of Lonergan’s earliest articulations of his realization that a hypothesis “is an act of understanding, an idea that has to be evident in the object. Thus, there is an intelligible relation between the hypothesis and the facts; . . . Certitude is therefore an assent to an idea, to a theory, as the sole possible explanation of the facts.”94 Lonergan was becoming increasingly clear about the relation between direct insight that gives rise to the hypothesis and the reflective understanding that grounds judgment. In a meditation on both the second book of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (II, 2, 89b 36–­90a 34) and Aquinas’s commentary (In Aristotelis libros Posteriorum analyticorum, 2, lect. 1),95 Lonergan demonstrated how to apprehend the distinct meaning of the essence of a thing. As he said in a later interview,96 to grasp the meaning of Thomas’s real distinction between essence and existence we must begin by answering Aristotle’s “What is it?” question. We do this by changing the “What” to a “Why” and then changing “What is a human being?” to “Why are these flesh and bones a human being?” Note that both questions are questions for understanding. To answer the “What” question, insight must grasp the intelligibility of the form in what is sensed or imagined. To answer the “Why” question, one has to understand the substantial form of the reality in accord with what Lonergan called “Aristotelian essentialism.” But the intelligibility (e.g., the answers to the questions “What is a man?” and “Why are these flesh and bones a human being?” or again “What is refraction?” and “Why does light refract?”) in both cases is the same. However, to grasp the truth of the answer we have understood, we have to ask another kind of question altogether.

Cor ad cor loquitur  341

Lonergan understood that Augustine’s veritas as existing in a mind corresponds to what Thomas meant by esse. Augustine motivated Thomas to go beyond what Aristotle ever made explicit. Similarly, Lonergan grasped that judgment does not answer the “What” and “Why” [Quid sit] questions, by which we intend to understand the form, the essence, the nature, or the common matter of a reality. Judgments respond to “Is it so” [An sit] questions, which are about the existence or occurrence of a thing or a property. Although Lonergan emphasized propositional truth in a way that Heidegger did not, he never held a naïve-­realistic interpretation of cognition or of the so-­called “correspondence theory” of the truth. He was convinced that performatively Augustine’s position was similar to his own. An early 1930s Roman course at the Gregorian University on the Trinitarian processions of the Word and Love in God was based on Aquinas’s treatise in the Summa, questions 27–­44, and used Louis Billot’s De Deo Uno et Trino as the textbook for the course. Lonergan later criticized Billot’s remark “that we get the Trinitarian procession far more clearly in the imagination than in the intellect—­missing the whole point of the Trinitarian processions.”97 His own historical study of the verbum in Aquinas, in conjunction with his Montreal and Toronto courses on the Trinity for Jesuit theologates, revealed “the difference between Billot and Aquinas on intellectual procession, namely, neglect of what is peculiar to rational creatures.”98 In his mature treatise on the Trinity in the Summa theologiae, Thomas took up the hypothesis of intelligible emanations, which Augustine originated in order to avoid any possibility of an Arian interpretation of the Stoic comparison based on the words people utter outwardly and the inward reasoning the words express. Indeed, in De Trinitate Books IX and XV Augustine discovered the first analogy for the processions of Word and Spirit in God that is completely spiritual in the sense of not entailing matter or potency. He had uncovered “a third verbum that was neither the verbum prolatum of human speech nor the verbum insitum of man’s native rationality but an intermediate verbum intus prolatum.”99 Not only would the analogical intelligibility adopted by Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology be of lasting significance for Lonergan, but so would the method by which Augustine made his breakthrough: “As Augustine’s discovery was part and parcel of his own mind’s knowledge of itself, so he begged his readers to look within themselves and there to discover

342  Fred Lawrence

the speech of spirit within spirit, an inner verbum prior to any use of language, yet distinct both from the mind itself and from its memory or its present apprehension of objects.”100 In contrast to the Scholastic interpreters prevalent during both his and Heidegger’s tutelage, like Thomas Aquinas himself, Lonergan learned from Augustine that we uncover the finite analogue for the emanatio intelligibilis in God by understanding the process in ourselves by which understanding and conceiving occur. Thomas Aquinas put the point in these words: “The human soul understands itself through its act of understanding, which is its proper act, perfectly demonstrating its power and its nature.”101 Lonergan’s commentary on a key passage in De Trinitate XV, xii, 22, sets forth the salience of Augustine’s argument: In this passage, then, the Augustinian verbum is a nonlinguistic utterance of truth. It differs from expression in any language, for it is linguae nullius [belongs to no language]. It is not primitive but derived: gignitur, exoritur, nascitur [is generated, arises, is born]. This total dependence is, not blind or automatic, but conscious and cognitive: quod scimus loquimur; de visione scientiae visio cogitationis exoritur; qui quod loquitur [we speak what we know; the vision of thought arises from the vision of knowledge; who speaks what is]. Finally, this total dependence as conscious and known is the essential point. It makes no difference whether the verbum has its ground in memory or in ­recently acquired knowledge. What counts is its truth, its correspondence with things as known: verbum simillimum rei notae; imago eius; verbum verum de re vera, nihil de suo habens, sed totum de illa scientia de qua nascitur; dum tamen verbum sit verum, id est, de notis rebus exortum [a word most like the reality known; its image, a true word about a true reality (thing), having nothing from itself, but wholly from that knowledge from which it is born; while nevertheless the word is true, that is, arisen from matters already known].102 Thomas Aquinas made use of Aristotle’s metaphysical categories to express Augustine’s analogy for his theology of the Trinity by distinguishing clearly and explicitly within human cognition between (1) the movement from potency into act, when the act of understanding interrupts questioning with the insight that apprehends the answer in the phantasm,

Cor ad cor loquitur  343

and (2) the procession of act from act when understanding is perfected in the utterance of the inner word.103 This kind of causality is unique to the spiritual order: The word proceeds because of understanding, where, as Gadamer paraphrased it, “the emergence of thought is not a process of change [motus], not a transition from potentiality into act, but an emergence ut actus ex actu.”104 On the basis of Verbum’s exploration of an enormous range of Aquinas’s texts, Lonergan elucidated Thomas’s important distinction between an “apprehensive” and a “formative” abstraction: The principal efficient cause of apprehensive abstraction is agent ­intellect; the instrumental efficient cause is the illuminated phantasm; hence not only is the impression of the species qua a passio but also the consequent second act, intelligere is a pati; again the procession of species qua and intelligere from agent intellect and phantasm is a processio operati; but . . . the procession of intelligere from species qua [within the actuated possible intellect (FL)] is processio operationis. Now f­ormative abstraction proceeds from apprehensive abstraction just as apprehensive abstraction proceeds from agent intellect and phantasm; hence its procession is processio operati; and, as the ground of this procession, intelligere is named dicere. However, the procession of the formative abstraction has a special property; it is an emanatio intelligibilis, an activity of rational consciousness, the production of a product because and inasmuch as the sufficiency of the sufficient grounds for the product are known. Just as we affirm existence because and inasmuch as we know the sufficiency of the sufficient grounds for affirming it, so also we mean and define essences because and inasmuch as we understand them.105 A further important point is that Lonergan’s interpretation of the verbum in Aquinas reveals clearly that the epistemology implicit in Aristotle’s metaphysical account of knowledge by identity is incomplete because it offers no adequate account of why the perfection of knowledge by identity (of both the sense in act and the sensible in act, and also of the intelligence in act and the intelligible in act) is knowledge of the other. To go beyond Aristotle on this issue, Aquinas transformed Augustine’s metaphorical explanation of the vision of eternal truth that

344  Fred Lawrence

justifies rational reflection’s knowledge of the truth. Lonergan showed that in order to do justice to the meaning of Augustine’s metaphor, Aquinas eliminated the vestiges of what he then regarded as Platonism from Augustine’s account—­“secundum autem positionem Platonis, intelligere fit per contactum intellectus ad rem intelligibilem” [however, according to the position of Plato, understanding occurs through the intellect’s contact with the intelligible reality].106 In “Reflection and Judgment,” on the verbum complexum, Lonergan explains that judgment as componens vel dividens possesses two aspects: (1) synthesis, wherein ratio is developing, discursive understanding, and (2) positing the mental synthesis, which entails knowledge of the correspondence between mental and real compositio (but not on the naïve realist account of correspondence). For Thomas, judgment comes to a head when it attains assent. To be rational, assent is produced by or results from a resolutio in principia (reduction to principles): “Human reasoning . . . in the way of judgment returns to first principles, to the things already discovered which it examines.”107 How are we to understand the meaning of the puzzling phrase resolutio in principia? Instead of interpreting the phrase in the solely logical terms of coherently drawing conclusions from first premises, Lonergan noted that Aquinas focuses on reflective understanding as grounding the judgment of reality. “Human reasoning, because it is a certain change, progresses from the understanding of some things, namely, of things natu­rally known by the investigation of reason, as if it were a kind of immutable principle; and it also terminates at understanding inasmuch as we judge about things that are discovered by reasoning by means of natu­ rally known principles.”108 Referring to the work of Julien Peghaire,109 Lonergan tells us that the expression, “ ‘ratio terminatur ad intellectum’ . . . also refers to the fact that reason is understanding in process.” Reasoning here is the reflective act of understanding. As Lonergan writes: We may infer that the reflective activity of reason returning from the synthesis of intelligibilities to its origin in sense and in naturally known principles terminates in a reflective act of understanding, in a single synthetic apprehension of all the motives for judgment, whether intellectual or sensitive, in a grasp of their sufficiency as ­motives and so of the necessity of passing judgment or assenting. For

Cor ad cor loquitur  345

no less than the first type of inner word, the second proceeds from an intelligere.110 No less than the procession of the first type, the procession of the second is an emanatio intelligibilis.111 In a profoundly Augustinian insight, Lonergan grasped that for Aquinas one knows by what one is. The knowledge of truth is not to be accounted for by any vision or contact or confrontation with the other, however lofty and sublime. The ultimate ground of our knowing is indeed God, the eternal Light, but the proximate reason that we know is within us. It is the light of our own intelligences, and by it we can know “ipsum enim lumen intellectuale quod est in nobis, nihil est aliud quam quaedam participata similitudo luminis increati” [for the very intellectual light that is in us is nothing other than a participated similitude of the uncreated light].112 Human beings can proceed from the identity of the sensible with the act of sensation to “valid concepts of essence” and from the identity of the intelligible with the act of understanding to “true affirmations of existence, because such procession is in virtue of our intellectual light, which is a participation of eternal Light.”113 Human beings answer the question “Quid sit? ” by a direct act of understanding that grasps in the phantasm the intelligibility of the reality queried. They answer the question “An sit? ” only by a reflective act of understanding, which attains the truth because the intellect reflects upon itself: “The intellect knows truth in accord with the fact that it reflects upon itself.”114 In reflecting upon itself, “the intellectual soul knows its own intellectual light, not as an object, but as what makes the species of the thing known intelligible in act.” Aquinas explains in De malo, q. 16, a. 12 c., that human intellect is perfected by both intelligible species and by intellectual light: the species enables us to apprehend the intelligibilities or quiddities (the quod quid est) of things; the intellectual light enables us to assess and judge our simple apprehensions.115 This is Lonergan’s interpretation of Aquinas’s teaching: “Inasmuch as the act of understanding grasps its own conditions as the understanding of this sort of thing, it abstracts from the irrelevant and expresses itself in a definition of essence. But inasmuch as the act of understanding grasps its own transcendence-­ in-­immanence, its quality of intellectual light as a participation of the divine and uncreated Light, it expresses itself in judgment, in a positing of truth, in the affirmation or negation of reality.”116

346  Fred Lawrence

In conceiving the analogy of intelligible emanations in God, Lonergan notes the importance of Aquinas’s rather Neo-­Platonic-­sounding principle “The more perfectly something proceeds, the more it is one with that from which it proceeds.”117 In all other, less perfect, kinds of production or causality, the product remains external to the act of production. In the intelligible emanation of the word as understood from understanding as uttering it, “the word at this unique spiritual level of being originates not partially but wholly [totaliter] in the intellect.”118 It is both a processio operati and a processio intelligibilis. This dimension of the intelligible emanation is significant for theology since there is no production or efficient causality in God. Only this precise kind of procession—­the processio intelligibilis as a processio operati—­offers an appropriate analogy for the divine procession of the one whom the Nicene creed proclaims natum non factum, which, in technical terms is to say, the Word in God proceeds as act from act per modum processionis operati. His close study of the verbum motivated Lonergan to make fully explicit the heart of Augustine’s teaching on the inner light: “In the measure one grasps the character and implication of the act by which intellectual light reflects by intellectual light upon intellectual light to understand itself and pronounce upon its validity, in that measure one grasps one of the two outstanding analogies to the procession of an infinite Word from an infinite Understanding.”119 Lonergan believed these matters pertaining to Thomas Aquinas’s account of verbum both as definition and as judgment were expressed in Thomas Aquinas’s theology of the Trinity in terms of Aristotle’s metaphysics of the soul, but they were both discovered by and grounded in an Augustinian phenomenology of the subject. The Influence of Augustine on the Mature Lonergan Augustine’s Influence on Insight

Insight brought the Augustinian phenomenology of the subject into the modern world marked by the rise of modern science and of modern historical science. Lonergan boldly stated in Insight that “the question of human knowledge is not whether it exists but what precisely are its two diverse forms and what are the relations between them.”120 This boldness of approach yields a startling result:

Cor ad cor loquitur  347

[The appropriation of one’s own rational self-­consciousness] is a necessary beginning. For unless one breaks the duality in one’s knowing, one doubts that understanding correctly is knowing. Under the pressure of that doubt, either one will sink into the bog of a knowing that is without understanding, or else one will cling to understanding but sacrifice knowing on the altar of an immanentism, an idealism, a relativism. From the horns of that dilemma one escapes only through the discovery (and one has not made it yet if one has no clear memory of its startling strangeness) that there are two quite different realisms, that there is an incoherent realism, half animal and half human, that poses as a half-­way house between materialism and idealism and, on the other hand, that there is an intelligent and reasonable realism between which and materialism the half-­way house is idealism.121 We have already spoken of the way Augustine aided Lonergan both to discriminate between sense knowing and intellectual knowing and to understand how intellectual knowing involves both direct understanding and definition, as well as reflective understanding (that grasps the sufficiency [or insufficiency] of the evidence in order to affirm a possibly relevant understanding to be actually the case) and judgment. The separation of realisms cited above involves a position on knowing and a correlative position on the reality known: Knowing involves asking and answering questions for understanding and judgment; and the reality known is not an instance of the “already-­out-­there-­now real” made accessible by “taking a good look.” Insight makes modern science’s discovery “that the objects of inquiry need not be imaginable entities moving through imaginable processes in an imaginable space-­time” equivalent to the breakthrough of Augustine referred to when Lonergan declared that “St. Augustine of Hippo narrates that it took him years to make the discovery that the name, real, might have a different connotation from the name, body.”122 Thus the indirect but immense influence of Augustine on Insight surpasses his influence on Aquinas’s thought on the verbum, which Insight is transposing into the context of the twentieth century! In 2001, Natalino Spaccapelo, co-­editor-­in-­chief of the Italian edition of Lonergan’s Collected Works, pointed out a further Augustinian

348  Fred Lawrence

influence on Insight, which he elaborated in detail in an outline paralleling texts from Augustine’s Confessions with passages from Insight.123 Think of the remarkable structural parallel between Augustine’s outward-­ inward-­upward movement in Book VII (repeated in Books IX and X) and Insight’s “arduous exploratory journey through the many fields in which men succeed in knowing or attempt the task but fail.”124 In the introduction to Insight Lonergan explains that Insight had to be written from a moving viewpoint by showing how understanding the implications of Gödel’s theorem excludes the possibility of writing a book using the more geometrico of Spinoza’s Ethics. Lonergan goes beyond Gödel’s theorem “not in the direction of greater abstractness, and not to greater concreteness on the side of the object . . . but to greater concreteness on the side of the subject.” He then tells us that the outward direction characteristic of the lower125 context of the successive fields (i.e., mathematics; the context of mathematicized events understood through the classical, statistical, and genetic methods of the natural sciences; the world of common sense, of things as graspable only from an explanatory viewpoint, and of reflective understanding and judgment) treated in the book is related to the higher context of Gödel’s theorem as regards the procedure of scrutinizing the operations performed in each lower context. This brings the reader inward, into the third context of interiority: “the immanently and recurrently operative structure of the noesis or intentio intendens or pensée pensante [that will] always be one and the same.”126 So Insight constructed a differentiated parallel to Augustine’s movement from reflection on things in the external world to the world of interiority. Later on in Insight, Lonergan faces the questions that “might be ignored if knowing were not understanding or if understanding were compatible with the obscurantism that arbitrarily brushes questions aside,” questions such as “Can man know more than the intelligibility immanent in the world of possible experience? If he can, how can he conceive it? If he can conceive it, how can he affirm it? If he can affirm it, how can he reconcile that affirmation with the evil that tortures too many human bodies, darkens too many human minds, hardens too many hearts?”127 Doesn’t this parallel the ascent of Augustine, who, once he has moved from outside inward, moves from inwardness upward?

Cor ad cor loquitur  349 Augustine’s Influence in the Post- ­Insight Years: Lonergan’s Kehre

Thomas Aquinas, Lonergan realized, had seen that there is no basic difference between Augustine’s restless heart and Aristotle’s human mind as an abyss128—­potens omnia facere et fieri. In Verbum Lonergan had written, “For Augustine our hearts are restless until they rest in God; for Aquinas, not our hearts, but first and most our minds are restless until they rest in seeing him.”129 On the way to Method in Theology, Lonergan said that while Insight had pursued the kind of intentionality analysis proper to a phenomenology of the subject,130 it had failed to purge itself of the ontological point of view with its faculty psychology. Insight thematized the data of consciousness not in the descriptive terms and relations of Augustine but in an explanatory manner; still under Aquinas’s tutelage, Lonergan still could not help expressing himself in terms of a faculty psychology not properly accessible to conscious experience. Faculty psychology compels one to a choice between the primacy of the intellectual faculty and that of the will. For an Aristotelian such as Aquinas, the will is defined as an intellectual appetite, and the intellect has the clear priority. This primacy entails the dictum nihil amatum nisi prius cognitum131 as a notorious corollary. During the years after the writing of Insight (1953), including his thirteen-­year Roman sojourn and his lung operation (1966), Lonergan underwent a reversal in the course of which he both abandoned the last vestiges of faculty psychology and discarded that adage. In his book ad usum auditorum for the Gregorian course De Verbo Incarnato, we have evidence of Augustine’s lasting influence in the way Lonergan integrated key teachings of Augustine into Theses 15–­17 on the redemption. For example, his discussion of the seventeenth thesis, on the law of the cross, quotes Augustine’s Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love: “For the Almighty God who . . . has supreme power over all things, being supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among his works, if he were not so omnipotent and good that he can bring good even out of evil.” And again, “For he judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”132 Beginning from this premise, Lonergan transformed the classical misunderstanding of the redemption’s dimension of satisfaction, which subordinated God’s loving mercy to his justice, and corrected the standard misunderstanding

350  Fred Lawrence

of God’s wrath or retribution as demanding to be appeased by the suffering and death of his Son: Therefore God preferred the law of the cross rather than that evil not be permitted to exist. And so he preferred that his own Son not be spared but would hand him over for us. And in this we arrive at the point of seeing that the mystery of divine wisdom and of divine charity are one. By the same token we reach the point of seeing that the divine severity that decreed the disjunction, either satisfaction or punishment (S[umma] T[heologiae] III, q. 47, a. 3 ad 1m), while seeing that the mercy is more abundant (ST III, q 46, a. 1 ad 3m) which gave his only Son for us (and with him, all things) so that he might make satisfaction for us, and through us, and with us.133 Does not Lonergan’s theology here correspond almost completely to the effect upon Augustine the sinner that he attributes in the Confessions specifically to the Word Incarnate and his sacrificial love, forgiveness, and healing—­a topic about which Heidegger kept silent, as far as I know? Similarly, in his analogical understanding of the communicative effect of Christ’s satisfaction for human sin, Lonergan invokes the passage on the mediation of divine friendship in De Trinitate XI, 15: “The Son did not love us while the Father held us in wrath; rather, both love us equally in the one Spirit.”134 The motive for the redemption is always God’s love. In Augustine’s words: “I observe that the Father loved us not merely before the Son died for us, but before he founded the world, as the apostle bears witness: As he chose us in him before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4). Nor does the Father’s not sparing him mean that the Son was handed over for us against his will, because of him too it is said, Who loved me and handed himself over for me (Gal. 2:20). Thus the Father and the Son and the Spirit of them both work all things together and equally and in concord.”135 The next reversal in Lonergan’s thinking regards the change he made to his fundamentally Thomist analysis fidei,136 which sets forth the steps in the appropriation of the Christian faith, where “faith” is understood classically as “belief,” in which the emphasis is placed on a person’s assent to revealed truth based on prior judgments of value enabled by the grace of the lumen fidei. It took Lonergan some time to face the implications

Cor ad cor loquitur  351

of abandoning that standpoint from which the mind or intellect takes precedence over the will and knowing takes precedence over love. In the process, his study of two phenomenologists with a decidedly Augustinian orientation, Max Scheler (especially in the interpretation of Manfred Frings) and Dietrich von Hildebrand, helped him to acknowledge the role of feelings as “the mass and momentum and power of [human] conscious living, the actuation of [human] affective capacities, dispositions, habits, the effective orientation of [human] living.”137 In Lonergan’s new understanding, feelings as intentional responses to value are irreducible to the attainment proper to judgments of fact. This opened the way for him to appropriate Augustine on delectatio (enjoyment, jouissance, and joy in contrast to fun) and to recognize fully how love plays the determinative role in personal orientation and authenticity.138 By doing so, he thereby recovered Augustine’s radical teaching that “pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror” (Confessions XIII 9.10). Thus, whereas he earlier had spoken of the Christian form of religious conversion (which ironically had been central in Grace and Freedom) in terms of judgments of credentity and credibility leading up to a decision to assent to Christian beliefs,139 once he grasped the primacy of love, he expressly expounded religious conversion in terms of “God’s gift of his love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that is in us” (Rom. 5:5), of falling in love with God, and of being in love with God.140 This precise methodological recognition of the pivotal role of love, of conversion, and especially of religious conversion led Lonergan to the set of insights that enabled him to articulate the intelligibility of the relationship between Jerusalem and Athens or faith and reason in the most satisfactory manner with which I am familiar. First, it enabled him to distinguish between faith and belief.141 Faith becomes “the knowledge born of religious love,” “the eyes of being in love with God.”142 In a religious context, it is the knowledge—­largely affective—­born of religious love attained in virtue of the gift of religious conversion. It is the same as Pascal’s “reasons of the heart.” What his analysis fidei called faith becomes belief, which, for the religiously converted, generally occurs in the context of faith, which is constituted in turn by the affective and cognitive effects of being in love with God.143 Outside the horizon of being in love with God, belief means a person’s reasonable and responsible assent to truths that he or she has not been able to personally verify

352  Fred Lawrence

by his or her own immanently generated acts of experience, understanding, and judgment.144 Within the horizon of the gift of God’s love and in the case of revealed truths unattainable by the light of reason alone, this assent can be performed only because of the grace of the lumen fidei, now more clearly understood as the pressure of God’s love upon human intelligence. Second, with this distinction Lonergan erupted into the exploration of the two concrete vectors of human development: There is development from below upwards, from experience to growing understanding, from growing understanding to balanced judgment, from balanced judgment to fruitful courses of action, and from fruitful courses of action to the new situations that call forth further understanding, profounder judgment, richer courses of action. But there also is development from above downwards. There is the transformation of falling in love: the domestic love of the family; the human love of one’s tribe, one’s city, one’s country, mankind; the divine love that orientates man in his cosmos and expresses itself in his worship. Where hatred only sees evil, loves reveals value. At once it commands commitment and joyfully carries it out, no matter what the sacrifice involved. Where hatred reinforces bias, love dissolves it, whether it be the bias of unconscious motivation, the bias of individual or group egoism, or the bias of omnicompetent, short-­sighted common sense. Where hatred plods around in ever narrower circles, love breaks the bonds of psychological and social determinisms with the conviction of faith and the power of hope.145 Together, these two developmental vectors disclose the ontological structure of the hermeneutic circle. Prior to all our actions and sufferings, there is the way of heritage moving from above downward, operating through love’s influence on our decisions, judgments, understandings, and experiential perceptions. Earlier Lonergan’s devotion to intellectual probity and his distress with the flaccid character of modern Scholasticism had caused him to emphasize the way from below upward at the expense of the other way, from above downward. But he benefited from Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy that emphasized the side of the hermeneutic circle rele­ gated to oblivion by the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice”

Cor ad cor loquitur  353

and, with the recognition of the inevitability of intellectual development’s proceeding in a rhythm of believing to understand and understanding to believe, rationalism was routed. In response to the way of heritage, then, there is the way of achievement, working from below upward, from experiencing through insight and formulation, critical understanding and judgment, to evaluation, decision, commitment, and love.146 In accord with the exigencies of the integral hermeneutic circle, Lonergan argued that philosophy is able to be comprehensive in its reflection on the human condition only if it is grounded (knowingly or not) upon religious being-­in-­love with God. The more comprehensive it becomes in its fidelity to the ongoing enactment of the integral hermeneutic circle, philosophy cannot avoid facing the theological issues of good and evil, sin and redemption, as well as the offer of grace and its rejection. This brings with it the realization that what Insight championed as the “appropriation of one’s own rational self-­consciousness” is really an “intellectual conversion,”147 and that normally intellectual conversion demands a prior, distinct, moral conversion from satisfactions to true values or the good,148 and this, in turn, usually is made possible—­Augustine’s point that Heidegger dropped, at least for a time—­only by a prior religious conversion,149 which Christians believe is caused by the gift of God’s love (the operative grace of conversion,150 along with the infusion of the habit of sanctifying grace). It follows that for Lonergan the meaning of the Catholic doctrine of God’s universal salvific will entails that the invisible mission of the Holy Spirit is to all human beings and occurs, as he always insisted, propter Christum, but does not require explicit knowledge of Christ. This transforms the context and purpose of interreligious dialogue.151 Finally, moving from Lonergan’s theological doctrine to theology as the collaborative enterprise of fides quaerens intellectum, his lifelong project of bringing history into theology integrated Augustine’s hermeneutics of love, which was sketched in Books XII and XIII of the Confessions and expounded at length in De doctrina christiana and De Trinitate. For Lonergan, of course, the more differentiated theology becomes, the more it needs the help of philosophy for explanatory analogies that “open a window” on the mysteries of faith,152 and the more it will have to differentiate the traditional theological enterprise of lectio, disputatio, and praedicatio into an ongoing, functionally specialized collaboration.153

354  Fred Lawrence

In conclusion, I hope I have succeeded in making somewhat clear to you my interpretation of what Lonergan told me (and others, surely) during his later years at Boston College: “As I get older I am becoming more Augustinian.” A devoted reader of Eric Voegelin—­“He works like me, he works on texts”—­he fully endorsed Augustine’s teaching in his Enarratio in psalmum 64 (65), often cited by Voegelin to the effect that, in its lovely compactness, it expresses a complete philosophy (and theology) of history: Incipit exire qui incipit amare. Exeunt enim multi latenter, et exeuntium pedes sunt cordis affectus; exeunt autem de Babylonia. ——— [He begins to leave who begins to love. Many the leaving who know it not, for the feet of those leaving are the affections of the heart: and yet, they are leaving Babylon.]

Not e s 1.  This is not a new topic for me. See Frederick G. Lawrence, “The Problem of Eric Voegelin: Mystic Philosopher and Scientist,” in International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin, ed. Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffrey Price (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 10–­58. 2. Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: Essays and Lectures by Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28. 3. Fergus Kerr, “Heidegger’s Cosmogonical Myth,” in Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 47. 4. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 3rd ed. (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1965), 96. 5. Heidegger said later, “What the exciting years between 1910 and 1914 meant for me cannot be adequately expressed; I can only indicate it by a selective enumeration: the second significantly enlarged edition of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, the works of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky in translation, the awakening

Cor ad cor loquitur  355 interest in Hegel and Schelling, Rilke’s works and Trakl’s poems, Dilthey’s ‘Collected Writings’!” Heidegger, “Antrittsrede,” Jahresheft der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften (Winter 1957–­58): 20–­21. 6.  Hugo Ott, Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. A. Blunden (London: HarperCollins, 1993); Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1994), chaps. 1–­2. 7.  Nicholas Boyle, “The New Spirit of Germany,” Tablet (May 7, 2005): 4. 8.  Martin Heidegger, “Brief an Engelbert Krebs,” in Bernhard Casper, “Martin Heidegger und die Theologische Fakultät Freiburg 1909–­ 1923,” Freiburger Diözesan-­Archiv 100 (1980): 541. 9.  Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 145. 10.  See Christian Sommer, Heidegger, Aristotle, Luther: Les sources aristotéliciennes et néo-­testamentaires d’Être et Temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Epiméthée, 2005). Philippe Capelle’s earlier Philosophie et Théologie dans la Pensée de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, Philosophie et Théologie, 1998) had suggested the same network of influences. 11.  See Christian Sommer, “L’inquiétude de la vie facticielle: Le tournant aristotélicien de Heidegger (1921–­1922),” Les Études philosophiques 1 (2006): 1–­28. 12. See Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006). 13.  See Karl Lehmann, Vom Ursprung und Sinn der Seinsfrage im Denken Martin Heidegger: Versuch einer Ortsbestimmung, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Mainz and Freiburg: Publikation Bistum Mainz, 2006). 14.  See Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways. 15. Gadamer, “Marburger Theologie (1964),” in Heideggers Wege (Tubingen: Mohr, 1983), 29 (my translation). See Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 5–­31. 16. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, Gesamtausgabe 60, ed. Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly, and Claudius Strube (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 9; henceforth, PrL. 17.  Martin Heidegger, Prologomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Gesamtausgabe 20, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), 109–­10. 18.  In 1922, when Heidegger had been called to take a position at Marburg University, Paul Natorp passed to Hans-­Georg Gadamer a typescript of the first part of a longer work. This version was lost during World War II and recovered only in the 1980s. On the occasion of the centenary of Heidegger’s birth, this fragment, widely known as the Natorp Bericht—­and originally titled “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Ausarbeitung für die Marburger und die Göttinger Fakultät”—­was published with the title “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation,” in Dilthey Jahrbuch

356  Fred Lawrence für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 6 (1989): 235–­74 (edited by Hans-­Ulrich Lessing). Cited here is a quotation from Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Gesamtausgabe 61, ed. Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-­Oltmanns (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 246; in English, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), which stops at page 199 of the German text; henceforth the English edition is cited as PIA. Here is Heidegger’s fullest statement on philosophy as atheistic: “ ‘Atheistic’ not in the sense of a theory like materialism or anything similar. Any philosophy that in that which it is, understands itself, has to know, as the factical How of its life-­interpretation, precisely when in doing so it still has a presentiment of God, that, religiously speaking, the wrenching back of its life being performed by it, is a raising up of the hand against God. Only in this way does it maintain its honor, i.e., in accord with the possibility before God available to it as such; here, atheistic conveys holding oneself free from the misguided state of concernedness that merely discusses religiosity.” 19. In Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 12 (1950): 246–­76, at 274, discussed by Thomas Prufer in “Martin Heidegger: Dasein and the Ontological Status of the Speaker of Philosophical Discourse,” in Twentieth Century Thinkers, ed. John K. Ryan (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1965), 168–­69. See also the October 10, 1923, letter from Heidegger to Husserl in Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, Husserliana 9, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 601. This is cited in Rüdiger Bubner, Modern German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 23. 20.  Edmund Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch; Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Husserliana 4, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 101, cited by Prufer in “Martin Heidegger,” at 168. 21.  Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 12 (1950): 268, cited in Thomas Prufer, “A Protreptic: What Is Philosophy?,” in Studies in Philosophy, ed. John K. Ryan (Washington, DC, 1963), 16. 22.  Prufer (in “Martin Heidegger,” 168) argues that Husserl himself realized that the temporality of reflection made exhaustive self-­objectification impossible. On what Husserl himself did and how Heidegger misinterpreted him in this regard, see Thomas Prufer, “Husserl, Heidegger, Early and Late, and Aquinas,” in idem, Recapitulations: Essays in Philosophy, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 26 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 72–­90. 23.  My translation of the Greek New Testament passage. 24.  Martin Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), Gesamtausgabe 63, ed. Käte Bröcker-­Oltmanns (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 7. 25. Heidegger, PrL, 121. 26.  Ibid., 67.

Cor ad cor loquitur  357 27.  Ibid., 63. 28.  Ibid., 10. 29. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 18; PIA, 15. 30. Heidegger, PrL, 63–­64. 31.  Ibid., 1. 32.  Ibid., 103. 33.  Rowan Williams, “Suspicion of Suspicion: Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer,” in The Grammar of the Heart: New Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Richard H. Bell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 48. 34.  Austin Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited (London: Collins/Fontana, 1962), 114. 35. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 35. 36. Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/1920), Gesamtausgabe 58, ed. Hans-­Helmuth Gander (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992), 61. 37.  Ibid., 187–­88, 212–­14. 38. Heidegger, PrL, 298: “Self-­certainty and self-­possession in Augustine’s sense is something quite different from the Cartesian evidence of the ‘cogito.’ ” 39.  See Martin Heidegger, “Anhang II, 8. Das Sein der Selbst [Schlußstück der Vorlesung],” in PrL, 298–­99; English translation, Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of the Religious Life, trans. Matthia Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-­ Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 226–­27. Henceforth, when citing the translation PrL will be followed by a slash, /, with the pages of the E ­ nglish translation after it. 40.  See Heidegger, PrL, 298–­99. Cf. De civitate Dei, lib. XI, c. 26ff. Following the dogma of the Trinity, Augustine considers the human being. We find in ourselves an image of the highest Trinity, for (1) sumus: we are (esse), (2) we know about ourselves as such (nosse), and (3) we love the knowledge about our own being (amare). These are the determinations of the authentic being of the self. “In his autem tribus . . . nulla nos falsitas veri similis turbat.” [These are not confused by any falsity masquerading as truth.] These are not objects; rather, without the stormy play of the imagination, that which I know I love is most certain to me. Thus it is certain (1) that we love being, (2) that we love the nosse [knowing], (3) that we love the love itself in which we love (ipse amor quo amamus [the love itself by which we love]). 41. This usage has been further confirmed in Salvino Biolo’s exhaustive research into the meaning of the cognates of nosci/noscor in the opera omnia. See Salvino Biolo, S.J., L’Autocoscienza di S. Agostino, Analecta Gregoriana (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2000). One of Biolo’s chapters is titled “The Conscious Psychological Subject is the ‘Ego-­Mens’ as ‘memoria-­sui’ ” (80–­107). Independently of Heidegger, Biolo makes explicit what remained implicit in Heidegger’s pioneering 1921 Augustine interpretation. See Heidegger, “Anhang II, 8: Das Sein der Selbst [Schlußstück der Vorlesung],” PrL, 298–­99.

358  Fred Lawrence 42.  See Bernard Lonergan, “Metaphysics as Horizon,” in Collection, Collected Works of Lonergan 4, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 192: “We should learn that questioning not only is about being but is itself being, being in its Gelichtetheit, being in its openness to being, being that is realizing itself through inquiry to knowing that, through knowing, it may come to loving.” 43. Heidegger, PrL 222/165–­66. 44.  Hans-­Georg Gadamer, “Erinnerungen an Heideggers Anfänge,” Dilthey Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 4 (1986–­87): 21. 45.  Carl Friedrich Gethmann, “Philosophie als Vollzug und als Begriff: Heideggers Identitätsphilosophie des Lebens in der Vorlesung vom Wintersemester 1921/23 und ihr Verhältnis zu ‘Sein und Zeit,’ ” Dilthey Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 4 (1986–­87): 27–­53. 46. David B. Burrell, “Augustine: Understanding as a Personal Quest,” in idem, Exercises in Religious Understanding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 18. 47. See Augustine, Confessionum Libri XIII, ed. Lucas Verheijen, Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981). All references to the Confessions are given parenthetically. 48. See Pamela Bright, “Book Ten: The Self Seeking the God Who Creates and Heals,” in A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions, ed. Kim Paffenroth and Robert P. Kennedy (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 158–­59. 49. Heidegger, PrL, 193, n. 5. 50.  “Certainly we have the desire for it, but how I do not know.” 51. Heidegger, PrL, 259–­63, 265–­66. 52.  Ibid., 272. 53.  Ibid., 269–­70. 54.  “The happy life we already have in our awareness, and so we love it, and yet we want to acquire it in order to be happy.” 55.  “Unless there were some memory of it in their memory.” 56.  A faculty psychology is the result of a deduction of a metaphysical capacity, potency, or disposition that is not directly accessible to conscious experience and yet functions as the condition of the possibility of an act of perceiving, understanding, judging, deciding, or recalling that is consciously experienced. 57.  See Robert McMahon, Augustine’s Prayerful Ascent: An Essay on the Literary Form of the Confessions (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 128. 58. See Robert McMahon, “Augustine’s Confessions and Voegelin’s Philosophy,” Modern Age 48, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 37–­47. 59. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 90/PIA, 68. 60.  McMahon, “Augustine’s Confessions and Voegelin’s Philosophy,” 39.

Cor ad cor loquitur  359 61. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 249–­50/ PIA, 187. 62. Heidegger, PRL, 197. 63.  The translation, “Such is the strength of the burden of habit,” is adopted from Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991). 64. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 93/PIA, 70. 65.  Ibid., 75–­86/87–­97. 66.  I am grateful to Professor Thomas Hibbs for sharing with me an unpublished paper by Alasdair MacIntyre, “What Has Christianity to Say to the Moral Philosopher?,” John Coffin Memorial Lecture in Christian Ethics, University of London, May 21, 1998, p. 9. 67.  Heidegger also took up Augustine’s theme of chaste fear (timor castus) as opposed to servile fear (timor servilis). Of chaste fear Heidegger says, “It is the ‘selfly fear’ that is motivated in authentic hope, in the trust that is enlivened from out of itself. This fear forms itself within myself from out of the relation in which I experience the world, in connection with the life’s concern for authentic self-­experience.” Servile fear, in being dominated by the fear of punishment, turns God into an object of fear. The good form of fear, which experiences healthy pain or distress, is closer to the absence of pain proper to immortality than the stupor that feels no pain. “Genuine fear,” he says, “requires the possibility of fear.” It is not difficult to see how such thinking would lead eventually to the role in his thought played by the theme of the this-­worldly experience of death. Heidegger, PrL, 294–­97/222–­26. 68.  Theodore Kisiel, “Die Entstehung des Begriffsfeldes ‘Faktizität’ im Frühwerk Heideggers,” Dilthey Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 4 (1986–­87): 91–­120. 69. Thomas Sheehan, “Hermeneia and Apophansis: The Early Heidegger on Aristotle,” in Heidegger et l’idee de la phenomenologie, ed. F. Volpi et al., Phenomenologica 108 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1976), 252–­71. 70. Günther Neumann, editor of the Gesamtausgabe 62, says that the report is an elaboration for the philosophical faculties at Marburg and Göttingen, who were considering whether to call Heidegger. See Martin Heidegger, “Anhang III: ‘Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der Hermeneutischen Situation),’ ” in Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, Gesamtausgage 62, ed. Günther Neumann (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), 341–­575; English translation, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation by Martin Heidegger,” trans. Michael Bauer, Man and World 25 (1992): 355–­93, henceforth, “Anzeige,” followed by page number of the German/page number of the English translation, where appropriate. 71.  Heidegger, “Anzeige,” 108. 72. Heidegger, PrL, 215/159: “ ‘Ruina’ [decay], philosophically-­ Christian: passing away, perishing—­in view of immortality; the objective Greek-­theoretical

360  Fred Lawrence aspect of the concept of facticity: being-­dependent-­upon, urgency, which is present over against me and in me.” Compare “The ‘whereto’ of ruinance: nothingness,” in Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 143–­48/PIA, 106–­ 10; see Manfred Riedel, “Seinsverständnis und Sinn für das Tunliche: Der hermeneutische Weg zur praktischen Philosophie,” in idem, Hören auf die Sprache: Die akroamatische Dimension der Hermeneutik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 142–­43. 73.  Heidegger, “Anzeige,” 352–­53/360–­62. 74.  Ibid., 360–­61/366. 75. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 153/PIA, 113. 76.  Ibid., 153/113. 77.  Ibid., 132/99. 78. See Heidegger, Ontologie, 109 (n. 24 above); English translation, Ontology—­The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 84. 79. Heidegger, PrL, 205/152. 80.  Heidegger, “Anzeige,” 362/367. 81.  Heidegger, “Anzeige,” 389/386. 82.  “But what do I love, when I love you?” 83. For helpful ways into Lonergan’s early thought, see Richard M. Liddy’s study of the influences upon the early Lonergan, Transforming Light: Intellectual Conversion in the Early Lonergan (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Michael Glazier, 1993); William A. Mathews’s fascinating narrative Lonergan’s Quest: A Study of Desire in the Authoring of Insight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); and the more recent Mark D. Morelli monograph in the Lonergan Workshop Series, At the Threshold of the Halfway House: A Study of Bernard Lonergan’s Encounter with John Alexander Stewart (Chestnut Hill, MA: Lonergan Institute of Boston College, 2008). For a brief guide to the sweep of Lonergan’s career, see Frederick E. Crowe, Lonergan, Outstanding Christian Thinkers (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/ Michael Glazier, 1992). 84.  See Bernard Lonergan, Shorter Papers, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 20, ed. Robert C. Croken, Robert M. Doran, and H. Daniel Monsour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 3–­12. 85. Newman’s influence pervades Bernard Lonergan, “True Judgment and Science,” in idem, Shorter Papers, 34–­44. 86. Bernard Lonergan, transcript of Lonergan’s Docta Ignorantia session at Lonergan Workshop, Boston College, June 19, 1979, cited by Mathews in Lonergan’s Quest, 56. 87.  See J. A. Stewart, Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1909), 74, cited by Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest, 56. See, too, Bernard Lonergan, “Insight Revisited,” in idem, A Second Collection, ed. William F. J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 263–­78.

Cor ad cor loquitur  361 88.  See Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 1, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 7. 89.  Reinhart Hütter has recently made this point impressively in “St. Thomas on Grace and Free Will in the Initium Fidei: The Surpassing Augustinian Synthesis,” Nova et Vetera 5, no. 3 (2007): 521–­54. 90. Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, 51. 91.  Ibid., 55. 92.  Ibid., 55. 93.  See Lonergan, “Insight Revisited,” in idem, Second Collection, 265. 94. Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest, 72, citing “Essay for Keeler on Newman,” 33–­ 34. Only fragments of Lonergan’s “The Essay for Keeler on Newman,” which was a 30,000-­word typewritten essay, are extant at the Lonergan Research Institute Toronto Archives, A-­14–­237: pp. 7–­9, 13, 23, 24, 28, 32–­36. See Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest, 489, n. 13. 95.  See Lonergan’s fuller exegesis in “Verbum: Definition and Understanding,” in idem, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 2, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 26–­29. 96.  See Bernard Lonergan, Caring About Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Pierrot Lambert, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going (Montreal: Thomas More Institute Papers/82, 1982), 50. 97. Lonergan, Caring About Meaning, 103–­4. See also Lonergan, “Introduction: Subject and Soul,” in idem, Verbum, 3–­11 at 11, note 11. 98. Lonergan, Verbum, 13. 99.  Ibid., 6. 100.  Ibid., 6. 101.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 88, a. 2 ad 3m: “Anima humana intelligit seipsum per suum intelligere, quod est actus proprius eius, perfecte demonstrans virtutem eius et naturam.” For the Summa I use the Leonine edition: Opera Omnia, vols. 4–­12 (Rome: Ex Typographia Polyglotta, 1888–­1906). 102. Lonergan, Verbum, 7–­8. 103. Gadamer commented about this second distinct reality, that, according to Aquinas, in human beings “one word originates totaliter from another—­i.e., has its origin in the mind—­like the deduction of a conclusion from the premises (ut conclusio ex principiis).” See Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 2nd ed. (Tubingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1965), 400; English translation, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 423–­24, henceforth cited as WM and TM, respectively. 104. Gadamer, WM, 400–­401; TM, 424. 105. Lonergan, Verbum, 188.

362  Fred Lawrence 106.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 2, c. 98 ad fin. The Summa contra Gentiles is cited from the Leonine edition: Opera Omnia, vols. 13–­15 (Rome: Typis Riccardi Garroni, 1918–­30). 107.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 79, a. 8 c: “Ratiocinatio humana . . . in via judicii resolvendo redit ad prima principia, ad quae inventa examinat.” 108.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 79, a. 12 c: “Ratiocinatio humana, cum sit quidam motus, ab intellectu progreditur aliquorum, scilicet naturaliter notorum absque investigatione rationis, sicut a quodam principio immobili; et ad intellectum etiam terminatur, inquantum iudicamus per principia naturaliter nota de his quae ratiocinando inveniuntur.” 109. Julien Peghaire, Intellectus et Ratio selon s. Thomas d’Aquin (Ottawa: Institut d’études médiévales; Paris: Vrin, 1936), 161–­72. 110.  Here Lonergan adduces as warrants for this interpretation the following texts of Aquinas: De veritate, q. 3, a. 2 c.; q. 4, a. 2 c.; De potentia, q. 8, a. 1 c.; q. 9, a. 5 c.; Quaestiones quodlibetales, 5, a. 9 c.; Super Ioannem, c. 1, lect. 1. 111. Lonergan, Verbum, 77. 112.  Ibid., 85, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 15, a. 2 c. 113. Lonergan, Verbum, 85–­86. 114.  Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 1, a. 9 c.: “secundum hoc cognoscit veritatem intellectus quod supra se ipsum reflectitur.” 115.  See Thomas Aquinas, De malo, q. 16, a. 12 c. 116. Lonergan, Verbum, 94. 117.  Ibid., 206, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 4, 11, §§1–­7: “quanto perfectius procedit, tantum magis est unum eo a quo procedit.” 118.  See Gadamer, WM, 420/TM, 423. 119. Lonergan, Verbum, 98. 120.  See Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 3, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 12. 121. Lonergan, Insight, 22. 122.  Ibid., 15. 123.  So far as I know, this outline has not been published. 124. Lonergan, Insight, 12. 125.  “Lower” in the sense of supplying the data for the supervening reflective acts of understanding of one’s own acts of understanding as the “moving viewpoint” proceeds through the data in the distinct fields—­i.e., the acts of understanding that occur in the successive fields of intelligent endeavor introduced by Lonergan. 126.  Ibid., 19–­20. 127.  Ibid., 23. 128. Compare Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI, 7, 1141a34–­1141b2. This is also reflected in the twelfth thesis of Lonergan’s Christology course, that the human desire to know is ineffable, which is to say, ever oriented toward mystery. See

Cor ad cor loquitur  363 Bernard Lonergan, Thesis XII, De Verbo Incarnato, 3rd ed., published in fascicles ad usum auditorum (Rome: Gregorian University, 1964). 129. Lonergan, Verbum, 100. 130. Lonergan, “An Interview with Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J.,” ed. Philip McShane, in A Second Collection, 222–­23. 131. See Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 22. 132. See St. Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love, trans. J. F. Shaw, ed. Henry Paolucci (South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, 1961), 11, 33, cited by Bernard Lonergan in Thesis XVII, De Verbo Incarnato, 584. 133. Lonergan, De Verbo incarnato, 585. 134.  Ibid., 582; I quote here from an as yet unpublished translation by Charles Hefling. 135.  See Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John A. Rotelle (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), 355 (XIII, 11). 136.  See Lonergan’s posthumously published “Analysis of Faith,” method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 20 (2002): 125–­54. 137. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 65. 138.  Ibid., 33, 36, 105–­6, 122, 240, on the revolution caused by falling in love. 139. Thus, for instance, he would relate that the chief problem for Christian missionaries in Japan was to teach possible converts the principle of noncontradiction; or again, in relation to an earlier version of functional specialties, the third functional specialty, called history, established the Yeses and Noes of the councils; and the fourth, conversion, was a matter of willing to believe in accord with the councils. 140. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 105; see too, “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” in Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970, ed. Philip McShane (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972), 225–­27. This teaching represents, perhaps, a transposition of the teaching in Grace and Freedom that the effect of actual grace as operative (when the will is motus et non movens) regards a radical God-­given change in the person’s “will of the end,” which then becomes cooperative whenever the person wills means that are consonant with the new will of the end. 141. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 115–­18 on faith, 118–­24 on religious belief. 142. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 115. 143.  Ibid., 118–­24. 144.  Ibid., 41–­47. 145.  See Bernard Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” in A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 106. 146. Frederick E. Crowe, in “An Expansion of Lonergan’s Notion of Value,” in idem, Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. Michael Vertin (Washington, DC, 1989),

364  Fred Lawrence 344–­99, was the first to reflect on the significance of the two ways for the development of Lonergan’s thought. For a fuller treatment, see Muhigirwa F. Rusembuka, S.J., The Two Ways of Human Development According to B. Lonergan: Anticipation in Insight, Tesi Gregoriana, Serie Filosofìa 17 (Roma: Editrice Pontificia Gregoriana, 2001). 147.  See Bernard Lonergan, “Cognitional Structure,” in idem, Collection, 205–­ 21 at 219. 148.  Ibid., 240–­43. 149.  Ibid., 318, 338. 150.  See Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, 102–­3, on how Thomas understood operative grace as actual, as changing a person’s “will of the end,” which could not be changed by the person’s own knowing or willing; then actual grace becomes cooperative in every instance of willing means in accord with the new, supernatural, end. 151.  See Bernard Lonergan, “The Future of Theology,” in idem, Second Collection, 135–­63. 152.  Lonergan, “Foundations,” in idem, Method in Theology, 267–­93. 153.  Lonergan, “Functional Specialties,” in idem, Method in Theology, 125–­45.

thirteen

Ruins and Time f ra n  oi s e m e lt z e r Angusta est domus animae meae quo venias ad eam: dilatetur abs te. Ruinosa est: refice eam. —­Augustine, Confessions I.v.6

“All men,” writes Chateaubriand in Le génie du Christianisme, “have a secret attraction to ruins. This feeling comes from the fragility of our nature, and from a secret conformity between these destroyed monuments and the rapidity of our existence.”1 This passage, platitudinous as it is, has significance insofar as it marks the romantic view par excellence on ruins. It is a view that is trained on two considerations: on the one hand, the long passage of time and the ensuing slow erosion that together produce the ruins; on the other, the rapidity and transitoriness that distinguish human life, of which the ruins are the reminders. For the romantic, ruins are the synthesis of a paradox: They conflate the long durée of time with the transitory through a “secret conformity.” Ruins are the tangible demonstration that the end of all things is ineluctably accomplished by time. Whether it be great empires of which only rubble and fragments remain or the individual who, while contemplating ruins, is forced to face his or her own mortality and insignificance in the face of 365

366  Françoise Meltzer

time’s immensity—­ruins inspire meditation for the romantics and provoke what might be called an acute sense of the subject’s diminishment, the suspension of the I. This I is a modern conception; it is the individual as conceived by the Enlightenment. If ruins are inextricable from the concept of time in European romanticism, the Enlightenment had complicated and indeed helped to structure the romantic gaze on ruins. Kant’s first Critique (1781), after all, destabilizes the notion of time as a fixed, unquestionable concept. It will be recalled that Time and Space, for Kant, are categories of the mind without which human beings can imagine nothing. This does not mean, Kant adds, however, that Time and Space exist. The fundamental upheaval in thought that such a statement produces is not to be underestimated. My point is not that romantics view ruins with a copy of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft under one arm. Rather, the intellectual context is such, in the early part of the European nineteenth century, that Kant’s legacy has already played a significant role in altering the notion of subjectivity and in fraying the belief in the adaequatio rei et intellectus that has always been assumed. For Kant, outward objects are “in perfect harmony” with the categories of the mind—­but because those categories necessarily shape what is seen, not because there exists an equivalence between the mind and materiality. If Augustine could say to God, “And yet our knowledge is ignorance in comparison with yours” (Confessions XI.iv.6), Kant shifts the terrain: Human knowledge stems from sensory perception and categories of the understanding; and the latter both define and delimit the possibility of any transcendental knowledge. The transcendental efforts of pure reason “are all made in the sphere of the subjective, which is the real medium of all dialectical illusion.” It is indisputable, as nearly every scholar on the subject has noted, that the theory of the sublime takes particular hold with romanticism. Inspired by the clear impact of both Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) and Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) on the notion, the sublime is painted, described, and composed throughout the nineteenth century.2 Burke’s sublime is grounded in terror, but at a distance: “Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close.”3 In a similar manner, for Kant the sight of various natural wonders (mountain peaks, ravines) or instances of nature’s destructive power (hurricanes and volcanoes) becomes all the more attractive provided that the observer

Ruins and Time  367

is in a safe place (bei der Sicherheit, worin er sich weiss in the first example and wenn wir uns nur in Sicherheit befinden for the second).4 In a sense, one might say that viewing ancient ruins provides a certain “distance”—­ that of time, for example—­from calamity and that the viewer is indeed in a “safe place,” not having been present during, say, the explosion of Mount Vesuvius. In another sense, however, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, despite its claim that we are nonmaterial, transcendental beings, produces a different kind of terror: If any inferences leading beyond the limits of experience are fallacious and groundless, representation itself is subjective, and the perception of the material world is in some sense pleonastic of the mind. If in witnessing a hurricane our apprehension exceeds our comprehension, as Kant puts it in his third Critique, the result of the first Critique is that the individual mind orders the world and imposes meaning, but such meaning is reliable only as a production of the understanding. “For in and by cognition alone do I think anything,” writes Kant, limiting the Cartesian cogito even as he reminds us that any knowledge of noumena does not proceed upon empirical principle and can therefore be no more than speculative.5 It is Kant’s segregation, in the first Critique, of thought from experience and transcendental “truth” from appearance, that not only helps to motivate the response that was to be called “romanticism” (beginning in the German-­speaking states) but also informs the romantic gaze on ruins and their implications. The resulting shift from the objective to the subjective goes a long way toward explaining the romantic perspective, and it accounts as well (at least in part) for the ensuing romantic ennui. More perhaps than even the spectator of a sublime event, the post–­ First Critique generation is left with the message that his or her apprehension does indeed, and in all instances, exceed comprehension—­and in a manner that, unlike a frightening event provoking the sublime, will not abate. For we are referring here not to a storm or to a volcano (except perhaps in a metaphorical sense), but rather to a fundamental repositioning of the notion of the mind and its innate capacity. It is the first Critique that prepares the ground (indeed, shakes it) for the later focus on the sublime. The early German romantics try to absorb Kant’s first Critique. The resulting seismic response is well documented, including everything from suicides to Heinrich Kleist’s famous comment about feeling that he has

368  Françoise Meltzer

been born with green glasses (do we see green because things are really green, or because we’re wearing green glasses?) to Fichte’s attempt to “correct” Kant and to produce “steps” [Stufen] that may not attain noumena, but push us, Zenolike, endlessly in that direction. Hegel’s ineluctable move toward Geist will follow. Kant can to some extent be understood as the founder of romanticism in that his philosophy results in applying human consciousness to the physical world, with the resulting imbalance in the adaequatio, as noted. The inevitable outcome is best summarized at the end of the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard, who announces that subjectivity has become the only truth. In any case, the early German romantics create a literature and sensibility that spread, first to England, then tardily to France, which had labored under a Rousseauist romanticism that did not engage the philosophical concerns of the Germans. With (German) romanticism in the wake of Kant, meditation is no longer a question of interrogating an undoubted if mysterious absolute (Augustine); it is rather the question of how the transcendental, debarred from human knowledge except through intuition (Kant uses the same word, Intuition), affects the concept of the individual or the subject contemplating the world and, it follows, subjectivity itself. The absolute is thus segregated from the phenomenal realm except in fleeting flashes of recognition (reminiscent, one might add, of what Freud was later to delineate as the “gaps” that allow for the emergence of the unconscious). Fichte tried to overcome such segregation with the metaphor of a prism: the prism, he argued, refracts the single light of the divine into the phenomenal world. Phenomena thus appear splintered, fragmented, and colorful, but that is an illusion, since everything comes from one pure light that is the undivided absolute.6 The move to retain a divine totality in the phenomenal realm is evident and will have its political version in Fichte’s later (right-­ wing, nationalistic) Rede an die deutsche Nation. German romantic fairy tales, following the suspicion that appearances mask something more real, are all about some sort of epiphany that allows for access to a mysterious (and frequently supernatural) world underlying the apparent one. Pulling Mandrake roots, finding secret paths in the forest, dreaming, and upsetting apple carts, to name a few such events, trigger access to what is “really real” underneath the façades of phenomena. The melancholy that ensues as a result of what I am calling segregation from the absolute is both

Ruins and Time  369

inevitable and ubiquitous in the texts of the romantics; it is a melancholy born of epistemological anxiety. Chateaubriand writes of precisely such segregation as a problem specific to his era: “Moreover the metaphysics of our times differs from that of antiquity in that it separates, as much as is possible, the imagination from abstract perception. We have isolated the faculties of our understanding, reserving thought for such and such a matter, and reasoning for another, etc. The result is that our works are no longer unified and our mind, thus divided into chapters, offers the inconvenience of those histories in which each subject is treated separately.”7 Indeed, what a difference from the time of antiquity. For Augustine (about whom Chateaubriand is thinking, among others), when we are instructed by God, we are led to the “Truth immutable.” There we are restored “to the source whence we have our being” (Confessions XI.viii.10). It is this source from which the romantics feel they have been severed, even as they believe that source to exist. Such a severance leads not only to the separation of abstract thought from the imagination; it also leads to a cleavage between philosophy and literature. The great defect of the times, Chateaubriand will insist, is “to separate a bit too much abstract from literary studies. The first belong to the mind, the second to the heart. But we should be wary of cultivating the first to the exclusion of the second and of sacrificing the part that loves from that which reasons.”8 This sense of being exiled, of being forced to choose between the imagination and reason, is another way of explaining the malaise, Weltschmerz, or mal du siècle that was to pervade the nineteenth century, bringing in “dark clouds,” as Virginia Woolf puts it in Orlando, that were not to dissipate for at least a century and, I would add, may yet enclose us. The gaze upon ruins is one way to grasp this dark cloud that hangs above the romantics, because, to repeat, ruins elicit for them the problem of individual subjectivity, on the one hand, and the resulting implications for mortality and the search for an absolute (or “beyond”), on the other. Moreover, reading the romantics with their thoughts on ruins alongside a text by Augustine, for whom God is real, undeniable, and omnipotent, can help to highlight the crisis that pervades the romantic gaze. The point is not to engage in an ahistorical approach or (obviously) to assume that everything is somehow homogenous from the writings of Augustine up until the romantic era. Rather I want to situate ruin-­thinking as a major

370  Françoise Meltzer

site of anxious melancholy for the romantics and to do this while having occasional recourse to the famous Book XI of the Confessions, which ponders the nature of time. For ruins clearly engage nothing if not the concept of time, and the contrast between the romantics’ perspective and that of Augustine (obviously well before them, and in a different world altogether) can be useful, I hope—­by virtue of its very anachronism—­in bringing out what has shifted (as Foucault would say) in the romantic perspective on the loss of a permeating absolute. One might begin with the obvious: Ancient ruins have always inspired the contemplation of mortality. The Romans viewed Greek ruins with the predictable considerations on death and fallen empires.9 And yet there are nuances of contemplation, of which one can give a few examples at random. In the Renaissance, for example, ruins serve above all as a basis for reconstructing the past.10 After his visit to Rome in 1337, Petrarch writes to a friend on this “broken city.” But he does not describe the ruins themselves, limiting himself rather to imagining the precise location of this or that historical event. For Petrarch, ruins elicit a collective memory. Such a view is hardly surprising; as scholars of the Middle Ages have pointed out, the medieval subject (still the dominant view at the time of Petrarch) exists in a communitarian structure; she is a subject, in other words, defined by her relation to others in the community. Her I, as we would understand it today, exists in prayer. The individual emerges only in relation to God; with respect to others, she is a link in the social chain.11 Much of the fifteenth century measures and studies ruins with an eye to changing them into monuments; ruins are an occasion for comparing the distance between the present and ancient civilizations. In the sixteenth century, the topographer and engraver Etienne Dupérac produces an album of ancient Roman monuments in ruins, with imagined reconstructions. His famous depiction of the Diocletian Baths “before and after” is based on a perspective that proposes the reemergence of an empire and advances the fantasy of a political space in preparation for a new future. Dupérac is pragmatic; he shows the ruins of the ancient world in order to better build the future as represented by his era. For the poet Du Bellay (ca.1522–­60), gazing on ruins inspires visions of “pale spirits” and “dusty shadows” [pâles esprits and ombres poudreuses].

Ruins and Time  371

In a sonnet opening with these words, Du Bellay apostrophizes the dead and pities them. He asks the phantoms among the ruins: Do you not feel your pain increase When sometimes from these Roman slopes You contemplate the work of your hands to be nothing more than a powdery plain?12 For Du Bellay, those to be mourned are the poor phantoms wandering through the ruins. He is pensive but on the other bank of the River Styx. Here there is no question of the paltriness of the I. The poet pities the phantoms and imagines the sorrow of the dead in witnessing the great architecture produced by their own hands fallen into rubble and in seeing all of their culture and past slowly leveled, until the edifices become powdered dust. By a contagion of thought, the shades themselves become dust in Du Bellay—­a metonymy that marks the destruction both of being and of a civilization in pieces. The great event in the history of ruins in the West is, of course, the discovery of Pompeii, Stabiae, and Herculaneum in the early eighteenth century. Digs begin in 1748, and some fifteen years later Winckelmann’s famous texts on these are published: the Letter on the discoveries at Herculaneum (1762), and the Report on the same (1764). The Grand Tour reignites with renewed fervor, with the upper classes in France, England, and the German principalities (to name only the most obvious) traveling to Italy and Greece to admire the ancient ruins. The Grand Tour is the occasion for attaining a kind of melancholic rapture in front of the ruins. Indeed, the eighteenth century is obsessed with them; the great fad is to construct fake ones to put in one’s garden. There is, for example, the fake medieval castle of Löwenburg on the edge of the city of Kassel. The castle is built between 1793 and 1801 as a “romantic ruin.” In 1769 the duke of Chartres buys the plain of Monceau in what is now the eighth arrondissement in Paris and fills it with counterfeit ruins, including “crumbling” feudal and gothic structures and a temple to Mars. In his Salon de 1767, Diderot speaks of “the poetics of ruins” and emphasizes a thematic of sadness. Ruins leave us “in a sweet melancholy,” he writes. The philosopher resorts to the ubi sunt of the classical planctus

372  Françoise Meltzer

and declaims, “Where are the people that erected this monument? What became of them? In what an enormous, dark, mute depth my eyes wander! . . . Time stands still for those who admire. What a short time I’ve lived! How brief was my youth!” He continues in the same vein, “I see the marble of tombs crumble into powder, and I don’t want to die!” Diderot thus (somewhat breezily) emphasizes the smallness of the I—­an I based on individuality, that legacy of Enlightenment thought. But the individual is crushed before the immensity of ruins: “A torrent drags each and every nation into the depths of a common abyss; myself, I resolve to make a solitary stand at the edge and resist the current flowing past me”13 (199). The “I” [moi, moi seul], even as it strives to shore itself up rhetorically through repetition, is already annihilated by the ineluctability of death and the great empires that have perished. If vast empires crumble into the void, the individual, celebrated a notion as it may be, is all the more insignificant as it teeters on the edge of the “common abyss.”14 Ubi sunt already begins to change into ubi sum, a theme that will resonate throughout romanticism. This essay from Diderot’s Salon de 1767 contains his most explicit comments on ruins. The essay itself is a response to a work by the famous ruins painter Hubert Robert. In the essay Diderot complains that Robert doesn’t understand that ruins have their own poetics (ce genre a sa poétique); he has put too many people in his painting, whereas a single man “wandering in the obscurity, his arms crossed over his chest and his head bowed” would have been more effective. “Monsieur Robert,” he writes, addressing the painter directly, “you don’t yet know why ruins are so pleasing.” Diderot then evokes the usual tempus fugit conventionally inspired by ruins: “The ideas that ruins awaken in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures” (198) and so on. One can imagine that the famous portrait of Goethe by Tischbein, painted three years after Diderot’s death (1787), corresponds more closely with what the philosopher wanted in the representation of ruins. The budding melancholy of this near-­protoromanticism, despite its roots in Enlightenment culture, already requires solitude as the necessary staging for the contemplation of ruins. It is worth repeating that it is around the time of Diderot that the modern notion of the individual appears. Elaborated by the Enlightenment philosophers (of whom, of course, Diderot was one), this notion of individuality prepares the ground for the I, or the subject, as it is to

Ruins and Time  373

be understood in contemporary thought.15 With its belief in science as that which will open all doors and thus lead to the truth, the Enlightenment assumes that reason will permit the individual to disassociate from the collective, to think for himself, and to refuse to be told how to do so. We recall that for Kant (in “What Is Enlightenment,” 1784) thinking for oneself is the way out of human “immaturity” and can be attained with “freedom.” While the preacher must obey his religious rules, the cleric or scholar “who speaks through his writings to the public as such, i.e., the world—­enjoys in this public use of reason an unrestricted freedom to use his own rational capacities and to speak his own mind.”16 From this perspective, not only thinking for oneself, then, but also solitude, become privileged. Unexpectedly perhaps for the Enlightenment thinkers who hold up reason and logic as the hope for the growth of human thought, such an emphasis (as we have noted) throws the subject back into the mind—­but without the stable categories that undergird Descartes’s philo­ sophical move to begin with doubting “everything.” The philosophy of Fichte is perhaps the most obvious example of movement that is entirely cerebral. His Stufen are steps taken entirely by the mind. Diderot has already taken such freedom of thought to a scandalous extent with his 1749 “Letter on the Blind.” Written more than thirty years before Kant’s first Critique, the Diderot text argues for atheism and claims that morality is not universal but is dependent on individual sensibility. Reason here serves to demonstrate human ignorance, and thus the absurdity of holding to a seeable, real deity. The Indian, writes Diderot (quoting a presumptive Englishman he calls “Monsieur Saunderson”), believes that the world is held up by an elephant, and the elephant by a tortoise. How is such a view less provable than our own, asks Saunderson? The Englishman’s famous conclusion, among other passages, earned Diderot several months in prison: “Confess your ignorance, and drop the elephant and the tortoise.” Saunderson, meanwhile, dies at the end of his long ravings, which culminate in the cry “Oh thou God of Clark and Newton, have mercy on me!”17 Science and the notion of a divine are put into opposition such that one will necessarily preclude the thought systems of the other. We will see that Chateaubriand, for example, is specific on this point. One might say that the romantic concern with sentiment as the truthful manifestation of the soul is part of the interrogation of the limits of individuality and the parameters of the subject that characterize much

374  Françoise Meltzer

of the romantic project. Here, too, Kant’s rejection of speculative metaphysics (including his angry response to Fichte’s work) frequently produced an investigation of (indeed, often an obsession with) subjectivity. I may not know what I see, but I do know what I feel. The corollary to the emphasis on sentiment is an investigation of the possible new avenues to an absolute, or a realm beyond the here and now. If I can know nothing of the transcendental except how I imagine what I cannot know, and if I am, for example, a writer (a poet), what do I write about if not this uncertainty? Augustine seeks answers for everything from God, asking him not to “close off these things” but to grant knowledge of them and of Scripture. Hard labor will be his lot, continues Augustine, until God “opens up” the answers (Confessions XI.xxii.28). But in an era in which it is science that professes to open the doors of knowledge, the place for the transcendent, or the divine, is almost necessarily confined to the individual mind. As Chateaubriand notes with respect to knowledge, “We no longer live in the time when it sufficed to say: Believe and do not examine; we will examine in spite of ourselves.”18 Such “examination” is not like Augustine’s “thirst to know time,” for example, with God as teacher. For the romantics, by contrast, the cosmology of the divine has been altered, since the place, if not the existence of God, is no longer a doctrinal given, even within the Christian context. With the question of the existence of God rampant, if muzzled, in the early part of the nineteenth century, the budding science of psychology follows suit. The study of hallucinations becomes extremely popular, with psychologists of the day arguing that Socrates and Pascal, for example, are mentally deranged. Treading on dangerous ground for the time, several such “alienists” also held that saints—­St. Teresa and Joan of Arc are two specifically mentioned—­saw visions or heard voices not because of divine intervention but because they were mad.19 Science trumps the spiritual life here. Epiphany itself, in other words, is in this context often removed from the revelation of divinity; for the German romantics, once again, theophany becomes a vague hypostasis, an occasion for contemplating some sort of beyond that frequently rests upon the mysteries of nature and the spectator’s ensuing awe. Such feelings are actively sought after by the romantics—­as if the lack of a stable spiritual cosmology is compensated for by sentiment and the awe-­inspiring aspects of the sublime in nature. So, too, evil and the supernatural are frequently concealed

Ruins and Time  375

behind phenomena.20 The supernatural that infuses the German romantic fairy tale (witches, metempsychosis, parallel worlds, doubles, previous lives, motivating myths, and so on) are in large part responses to a divine that has been displaced into uncertainty and dispersed, as it were, by an oddly paganlike sensibility. As Friedrich Schlegel puts it, the sparks of the divine (Funkeln) are everywhere. Ruins inspire sentiment and generally metaphysical melancholy for most observers (even the measuring, history-­oriented Renaissance)—­ that is obvious. What the romantics add to ruin gazing, however, is an uneasy subjectivity of cognitive and certainly spiritual dimensions. It is a melan­choly that is as anxious as it is sad. The French Revolution, needless to say, is the political trauma that adds to the philosophical one. The poetry of the French romantic Lamartine, heavy as it is with unsurprising images, struggles to come to terms with the bloodbath that was the Revo­ lu­tion and the Terror, even as the poet attempts a return to his Roman Catholicism. Sitting on the Gulf of Naples in 1813, Lamartine allegorizes Melancholy as “meditating on the ruins” while gazing at “deserted temples.” Like the Roman Empire, France has fallen, ruled by “unworthy Caesars” (an explicit allusion to Napoleon Bonaparte), and the poet is sitting in the ruined temple of an absent god. All the great voices of antiquity that frequented this shore are now silent; the narrator hears only the sound of the water, or the “echo awakened from the surrounding debris.” The poem ends with a series of clichés, with the usual laments about the transitoriness of life; somewhat less obvious, perhaps, are Lamartine’s comments on life’s palimpsestic aspect: Thus everything changes, thus everything passes Thus do we ourselves pass Alas! without leaving any more trace Than this boat on which we slide Over this sea where all is erased.21 One is reminded here of the bitter epitaph that Keats requested for himself at the end of his life: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Despite the French poet’s annoying platitudes, the images make a clear distinction between meditation on lofty notions, on the one hand, and the deletion of the subject in the wake of time, on the other. Ruins disclose

376  Françoise Meltzer

the displacing of the divine: The god is absent from his temple, and the subject cannot rest assured of the prize of heavenly calling, as Augustine could (Confessions XI.xxix.39). I turn to Augustine again here as a way of getting at the extent to which the romantics see their worldview and their notion of an absolute fundamentally modified. For Augustine, it will be recalled, God is a teacher of any soul that dedicates itself to understanding. In Book XI of the Confessions he struggles to learn from God the explanation of time itself. God holds all of the answers: “Lord my God,” writes Augustine, “how deep is your profound mystery!” (Confessions XI.xxxi.41). There is no division in God (sine distinctione actionis tuae), whereas man is varied in his feelings and senses (variatur affectus sensusque distenditur). No need for Fichte’s prism here; the ways of God are a mystery, but the righteous soul sees God in all things and will end up flowing into God, “purged and molten in the fire” of his love (in te confluam purgatus et liquidus igne amoris tui). God is unchangeably eternal, the creator of minds; man is necessarily on the other side of eternity, burdened with measurements that lead to no understanding of time and with a knowledge that is by definition limited. This is, however, how it is meant to be: God knows both heaven and earth without any change in his knowledge; he is before time, and no creature is co-­eternal with him or beyond time, “Te ante omnia tempora aeternum creatorem omnium temporum, neque ulla tempora tibi esse coaeterna, nec ullam creaturam, etiamsi est aliqua supra tempora” (Confessions XI​.xxx​.40). The mind of man is too small and limited a thing; the mind of God is all. Such a view is, let us grant, reassuring. Until the Enlightenment, or at least until the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century, there are no seismic changes with respect to a knowing, reliable (if mysterious) God in the European Christian tradition. “Heal my eyes,” writes Augustine, “and let me rejoice with your light” (Confessions XI.xxxi.41), assuming that the “real” light is God rather than the light as seen by mortal eyes. This is an attitude that most Christians in Europe will find fairly normal until (once again) the seventeenth century.22 Diderot’s scandalous text on the blind manifests the upheaval that has already made its mark: Saunderson, we recall, invokes the “God of Clark and Newton” on his deathbed. He also tells Mr. Holmes, the minister who is at his bedside, “If you want me to believe in God, you have to make me touch him.”23 This is a play on the doubts of the apostle

Ruins and Time  377

Thomas, except that Saunderson is blind and so cannot, in any case, see, and, as he points out, must rely on touch. The text suggests that, like Tiresias, however, Saunderson sees more clearly than those who are sighted and believe in what he has neither seen nor touched. Moreover, Saunderson is impervious to the beauty of nature as proof of a divine Creator, since he cannot see that, either. Diderot’s text leaves the religious reader hanging: What is the proof, asks the text, for the existence of the God in whom you believe? The emphasis on vision as evidence is particularly pronounced in the texts of seventeenth-­century philosophers: Locke, Descartes, Leibniz, and Galileo, to name a few, work scientifically on the nature of the eye and the intake of phenomena. And, of course, ruin contemplation necessarily assumes the gaze. “What traveler,” asks Hegel in The Philosophy of History, “while strolling through the ruins of Carthage, of Palmyra, Persepolis, or Rome, has not been stimulated by reflections on the transience of kingdoms and men, and to sadness at the thought of a vigorous and rich life now departed?”24 What Hegel calls the “negative aspect” in considering ruins is here taken in with his gaze on them. But there will also be Spirit, which, greater still than the phoenix, will “rise rejuvenescent from the ashes of its previous form” and come forth “exalted, glorified, a purer spirit.”25 The argument for Spirit in Hegel, growing ever closer with each “successive phase,” is an invisible event-­to-­come; an event that, one can venture to say, is a needed promise because of the separation of noumena from phenomena that philosophy has already put into place. Seeing here obstructs believing—­that is, the phenomenal realm, for many of the German romantics, is like a Potemkin village that veils the truth. Hence the parallel realms that appear so frequently in fairy tales (E. T. A. Hoffmann being perhaps the greatest example).26 In what initially appears to be an anti-­romantic perspective, Derrida begins his Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-­Portrait and Other Ruins with the questioning of knowledge vested in the visual. There can be no pure visual experience in any form of contemplation, because vision is always structured by a certain blindness—­what he calls the hypothesis of sight, or the intuitive hypothesis (this is especially the case, adds Derrida, for the auto-­ portrait). The contemplation of ruins here, too, is grounded in the visual; it is (obviously) not a contemplation based on touch or the auditory. As such, contemplation has its blindness, its intuitive hypothesis in which the gaze

378  Françoise Meltzer

is always already somewhat predetermined. Indeed, Derrida will connect the visual directly to the ruin but by way of the blindness of the empty eye socket. The ruin is for him neither a spectacle, nor a theme, nor something in front of us, nor a love object; it is experience itself: “Ruin is, rather, this memory open like an eye, or like the hole in a bone socket that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all.”27 But in insisting that the ruin does not let one see “anything of the all,” Derrida nonetheless conjures up a nostalgia for an all of some sort. His book on the ruins of Athens is focused on a sentence that haunts Derrida throughout the text: “We owe ourselves to death” [Nous nous devons à la mort].28 Thus Derrida turns the eye/blindness equation around in ruin-­gazing: The empty eyes of death (the hole in a bone socket) stare out at us, and we are left blind, seeing without being shown “anything at all.” And yet the inability to see “anything of the all” returns us to the romantics: Fragments remain, and some sort of totality haunts, a memory of an all that (as Hegel points out) is only superficially belied by the view, among the ruins, “of change at large.”29 Derrida is not so far from the romantic perspective as his pensive text on the ruins of ancient Athens professes to be. Death becomes here a dark divinity of sorts, or at least an absolute that, much to Derrida’s apparent consternation, cannot be negotiated. Such concerns, however, do not plague the otherwise anxious romantics, for whom the contemplation of nature and ruins is, contra Derrida, precisely a spectacle, theme, something in front of us, a love object. For example, in Lamartine’s celebrated poem “Le lac,” a sort of breviary of French romanticism, the narrator sits in solitary sadness in front of the lake and mourns his lost love as he meditates on the view. The poem can be regarded, of course, as an unwitting caricature of romantic ennui, but its very predictability and assumptions are worth considering. The poet addresses time directly, and with bitterness: “Eternity, nothingness, past, dark chasms / What do you do with the days you engulf?”30 The poem is obsessed with time, and tempus fugit is a constant theme. The lexicon of the text is replete, as is that of the text of Augustine we have considered, with words of temporal measurement: night, day, dawn, evening, the hours, the year, moments, eternity, fugitive, eternal, the ocean of ages. But if the poet apostrophizes time, which (like the river) flows indifferent to the sentiments of man, it is to the sights in nature that he finally turns for help, not to God. Here again is the well-­known pagan move in

Ruins and Time  379

romanticism (“Ye Presences in Nature!” as Wordsworth puts it)—­a move that we might say looks to immanence given the near-­foreclosure of the transcendental. In another of Lamartine’s poems, “The Lizard,” the poet contemplates Roman ruins as he wanders around the Coliseum, a book of Tacitus in his hand. A lizard catches his eye, which “under these ruins replaces the great flow of peoples run dry.” Nature has her ironies, says the narrator, and those who were once equal to gods—­the consul, Caesar, pontiff, Augustus—­are eclipsed by the shadow of this “horrid reptile.” Tacitus with all of his genius, decides the narrator, mocks human arrogance less than does nature. The book falls out of the narrator’s hands.31 These and other such effusions famously abound in romanticism with respect to ruins and nature and to their connection with an increasingly fragile notion of God. There is Renan’s “Prayer on the Acropolis” (written in 1865, two years after his Life of Jesus), which describes his reve­lation before the ruins of Athens. It is a place, writes Renan, where perfection exists and manifests “the ideal crystallized in pentelic marble . . . a type of eternal beauty without local or national stain.” Renan begins to believe in miracles again, he says, and yet his prayer to Athena, which he is inspired to write down, ends thus: “An immense river of forgetfulness drags us into a nameless abyss. Oh abyss, you are the only God. . . . All is but symbol and dream here below.”32 Going far beyond Lamartine (the abyss has now become the only God), Renan adds, “Gods pass as do men, and it would not be good if they were eternal. The faith we once had must never be a chain. We have squared with that faith once we have carefully wrapped it in the purple shroud in which the dead gods are sleeping.” The old faith as it was must be reverenced, but it is also now to be buried with the other gods who have lost their believers. Every major romantic thinker in France, the German states, and England writes about the ruins, as if a landscape of the traces, heaps, and rubble of previous civilizations provides furniture for the installation of solitary thought. Artists and painters of the period generally not only follow suit but are frequently the forerunners of romantics’ ruin obsession and the malaise that undergirds it. The image, compared with writing, can present ruins and perhaps better signal the vague and abstract melancholy produced by confronting ruins. Piranesi’s drawings are among the best examples of what will become (with more or less success) the romantic depiction of a ruin-­scape.

380  Françoise Meltzer

The act of writing itself becomes, in the romantic project and particularly in the German context, self-­conscious and self-­reflexive. This is no doubt in part due to the puns and neologisms that characterize the philosophy of the period. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel all mirror the questions of knowledge in wordplay, beginning with the infamous Sein/Schein that appears (in differing ways) in all three philosophers. Such word work is also found in Friedrich Schlegel, the theoretician of the German romantics: Sympoesie, Scheinbild, and the use of the word “romantisch” itself, are merely a few examples. It is as if the play of words echoed the refractions of thought; an attempt to reinscribe the divine into the phenomenal world. Schlegel uses words such as the previously noted “sparks” [Funkeln] and “light” [Licht] to insist on the divine sprinkled on this side of what Fichte called the prism. Significantly, the language of the early German romantics is rife with words that indicate the inability to express: the prefix “un” abounds (in their English equivalents, words such as “indescribable,” “inexplicable,” “unknowable,” “inexpressible,” and “unheard of ” are rampant); there is frequent recourse to an unnamable “something” [etwas]; and there are constant analogies to suggest that which no language can say but can merely suggest through trope. One thinks, for example, of a sentence from Adalbert Stifter’s short story “Bergkristall.” Two children lost in the mountains come upon a cave. It is “blue, so blue, like nothing is in the world; a much deeper and more beautiful blue than the firmament; similar to a heavenly blue colored glass” [In der ganzen Höhlung aber war es blau, so blau, wie gar nichts in der Welt ist, viel tiefer und viel schöner blau als das Firmament, gleichsam wie himmelblau gefärbtes Glas].33 Language is here used to emphasize its incapacity to describe certain natural wonders and the experience of the sublime; the statement that the blue is like nothing in the world evokes, but does not in any way describe, some sort of beyond. An event of transcendental resonance is equally elusive in romantic texts. Heinrich von Ofterdingen’s famous dream within a dream of a blue flower is, in the German romantic tradition, perhaps the most obvious example. He stares at it with “unnamable tenderness,” but when he tries to get closer to it, the blue flower, Proteuslike, begins to change and disappears. One is reminded here of Freud’s notion of a dream’s navel: “the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.”34 Freud, after all, was well versed in the German romantic tradition—­and

Ruins and Time  381

continued many of its assumptions. While it is obviously the case that certain moments of the sublime, of the majesty of nature, and other such awe-­inspiring moments are ultimately indescribable, what is characteristic of the romantic project is insistence on pushing language to confess its own inadequacy—­as if the apophatic nature of what can only be depicted in the negative (un), could guide the viewer into “seeing” what is not otherwise comprehensible or describable. Ruins and their surroundings seem to produce a visual and even aural “image” of this notion of the indescribable. There is a mysterious disposition in man, writes Benjamin Constant, a religious sentiment that philosophy is incapable of expressing and of which ruins are both the inspiration and the visual analogy. Try to define, adds Constant as an example, “the wind moaning through ruins.”35 This is the ennui that philosophy can neither describe nor explain, for nineteenth-­century philosophy delimits the transcendental more than it acknowledges the desire it inspires. Contemporary writers, too, have noted that ruins generally defy description. The critic J. B. Vila, for one, asks by what linguistic mode ruins can be depicted. Always by an “as,” he concludes, for ruins can only be described “by a detour,” thus by analogy or comparison.36 Walter Benjamin says it outright: “Allegories are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things.”37 Ruins, that is, illustrate, just as the image suggests, that which cannot be described—­they are the symptoms of something like an erasure between knowledge and its phenomenal evidence. The ruin suggests a dialectic of inside/outside like, in Hegel, the hand of man, or it resembles Simmel’s notion of the handle of a vase as being both in the world of reality and in that of the pure idea. Ruins seem to elicit an unseen even as they are only visually assimilated by the mind. For his part, Freud will write that the mind itself cannot be visualized. His favorite analogy, not only for the practice of psychoanalysis but for the layers of memory in the mind, is precisely that of archeological digs among the ruins. In “Constructions in Analysis,” Freud writes that the “analysts’ work of construction, or, if it is preferred, reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice.”38 And he concludes, “Saxa loquuntur” [The rocks speak].39 Once again, Freud here shows his legacy to the romantics, his direct intellectual ancestors. It might be added that, given the anxiety that pervaded

382  Françoise Meltzer

nineteenth-­century thinkers, it is all the more understandable that Freud saw a need for the treatment that he was to invent: psychoanalysis, or the “talking cure.” What is unknown for Augustine is the mind of God (“our knowledge is ignorance in comparison with yours”; Confessions XI.iv.6); but God is his teacher, and though God reveals only what he chooses to teach to man, God is the truth, which is unalterable: “Who is our teacher except the reliable truth? . . . He teaches us so that we may know; for he is the Beginning, and he speaks to us” (Confessions XI.viii. 10). What the romantic texts demonstrate is that it is unclear what, exactly, is unknown and how it can be known, if at all. Certain in the belief that there is something beyond the here and now, romantic texts turn, as we have noted, to nature to express that conviction. The limits of human knowledge, and the power of a beyond of some sort, are continually evoked with allusions to chasms, grottos, abysses, voids, and a language that, while it can describe these, willfully falters when it attempts to explain what is evoked by them—­what Poe calls, with equal vagueness, “the glories beyond the grave.”40 If philosophy inspires an anxiety about the limits of knowledge, epistemology is equally impotent to explain such “glories” once it has begun to distance itself from theology, or from the religious tout court. We might say that for the romantics, ruins are the trace not only of once-­ great empires, not only of mortality, but also of a reverence that is at once felt and simultaneously not describable except by negation. Such a sentiment of reverence explains perhaps, in part, the frequent romantic nostalgia for Roman Catholicism as the original home of Christianity, the religion of (imagined) “unity” that, so many romantics believed, characterized the Middle Ages.41 The ruins of medieval castles serve as more than a backdrop for endless romantic paintings and texts; they are also reminders of a time when the culture is envisioned as having mirrored the religion and the religion as having provided a certain safe grounding (for lack of a better word) for questions on the limits of knowledge. While such is very much a retrospective, not to say extremely problematic, view on the part of the romantics, it does give a sense of the extent to which much of the romantic project is vested in nostalgia—­even if an unclear one. “Immer nach Hause” [Always homeward], says Heinrich von Ofterdingen, as if rendering literary Fichte’s Stufen leading to the “Absolute” or Hegel’s move toward Geist.42 When we speak of going home (nach Hause

Ruins and Time  383

gehen) writes Georg Simmel in his 1911 essay “The Ruin,” “we mean to characterize the peace whose mood surrounds the ruin.”43 Von Ofterdingen’s remark reveals as well a longing for unity, that nostalgia born of the inability to return (in the words of Augustine) to “the source from which our being comes,” a nostalgia that even the text of Derrida betrays. “The ruin,” writes Simmel, “is a cosmic tragedy. . . . Every ruin [is] an object infused with our nostalgia.” If we recall Friedrich Schlegel’s fascination with fragments, we can install ruins in this economy as well. Ruins are the traces of a once-­whole, the fragmented evidence of a crumbled unity. They engage as well the materiality of human edifices and nature’s return in triumph over them. Situated between the manmade and nature, between the outside (what is seen) and the inside (what is felt), between the present and the past (the present that will never be present again), ruins for the romantics elicit perhaps as well the very no man’s land of thought to which I have been alluding. Even as they show the passing of all things, mortality, and death, ruins also leave a trace of the dead past. They exist as both the fact of annihilation and the remainders of memory, with neither fully accomplished, since both annihilation and memory are only partial. The ruin, as the romantics conceive of it, is between two inaccessible realms, of which it is neither: the idea of an unchanging eternity (like Augustine’s God) and that of the erosion that is human time. As such, the ruin is emblematic of the situation in which the romantic is epistemologically and psychologically situated. This may account for the “secret attraction” to ruins of which Chateaubriand writes. It certainly accounts for Benjamin’s worry that the idea of the Beautiful in the ruin suggests a totality both dangerous and hypocritical. Simmel, with all of his insight and brilliance, seems nevertheless to perform Benjamin’s concern: What emerges from the ruin, explains Simmel, is “a new entirety,” which offers men a return to the “good mother” who is nature. A return, thus, to “home.”44 It is precisely this nostalgia for unity that leads Walter Benjamin to argue for a resistance to symbol (the romantic move par excellence) and a move to allegory. The symbol, for Benjamin, by its very economy, represents harmony and perfection and thus elicits totality through metonymy. The symbol for him passes itself off as a promise of eternal life and thus professes to surpass time and history. But the ruin, for Benjamin, seen allegorically, shows history inside a panorama. Thus viewed, history

384  Françoise Meltzer

“does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay.”45 The allegorical gaze, for Benjamin, is a way of seeing the history of the world not as a horizontal line but as broken and interrupted trajectories. The skull (common, Benjamin reminds us, in the staging of the Trauerspiel) shows “the subjugation [of man] to death.” For death is that which “digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature [Sein] and significance.”46 The ruin is the allegory of this perspective; it allows for escaping the false affirmation of the symbol. A ruin can, through the intervention of such a gaze, accomplish what Benjamin asks: that shock unveil history in time and “explode out of the continuum.” Benjamin’s skull, or death head, is thus more radical than the skull’s empty sockets in the Derrida text we considered. While Derrida’s protestations that the sockets do not show “anything of the all,” his denial becomes a kind of epistemological recusatio: it performs what it contests and thus, as if in spite of itself, joins the romantic perspective. Benjamin’s allegorical gaze may be the only hope for extricating ourselves from a pervasive romantic insistence on the necessity of overcoming lack and of seeing in the fragment—­and in the ruin—­the promise, or memory, of wholeness. We can admire and indeed envy Augustine’s conviction that he will be restored, in death, to the fire of God’s love, that in God there is no time, and that God will rebuild the ruin that is Augustine’s being. But the ruins—­both physical and mental—­left behind by the twentieth century in the West have left a legacy that disallows the notion of unity as an innocent one, as it no doubt must have been for Augustine. Flaubert was already onto the tragedy of seeking to rebuild ruins, to restore their physical (and thus, one imagines, cognitive) unity. “Few can guess how sad one must have been,” he notes, “to resuscitate Carthage!”47 But melancholy is not the only legacy of the romantics’ ruin-­ gazing; theirs is a perspective from which we have yet to escape and that Benjamin warned about. We would do well to heed him.

n ot e s 1.  The translations of the Confessions are taken from Saint Augustine, Confessions: A New Translation by Henry Chadwick (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,

Ruins and Time  385 1991). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are mine. René de Chateaubriand, “Des ruines en général,” chap. 3 in Le génie du Christianisme (Tours: Alfred Mame, 1877), 241. 2.  See also pseudo-­Longinus’s Peri Hypous, which Boileau translated (1674). Between 1791 and 1801, Schiller wrote three works on the sublime as well, which are basically commentaries on Kant. There has also been work resisting the usual emphasis on the sublime as a particularly romantic project. See, for example Pierre Hartmann, Du Sublime, de Boileau à Schiller (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1998). 3.  Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Idea of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Thomas McLean, 1823), 57. See also Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 4.  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft (Berlin, 1799), 116. 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Willey Book Co., 1899), 308. 6.  Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1954), 69. 7. Chateaubriand, Le génie du Christianisme, 206–­7. 8.  Ibid., 206. 9.  On the viewing of ruins in antiquity, see James Porter, “Ideals and Ruins: Pausanias, Longinus and the Second Sophistic,” in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, ed. S. Alcock, J. Cherry, and J. Elsner (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 63–­92. See also Jas Elsner, “From the Pyramids to Pausanias and Piglet: Monuments, Travel and Writing,” in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. Simon Goldhill and R. Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 224–­54. 10.  See, e.g., S. Forero-­Mendoza, Le Temps des ruines: Le goût des ruines et les formes de la conscience historique à la Renaissance (Seyssel: Champ Valon, 2002). 11. See Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 95ff. See also Louis Dumont, “A Modified View of Our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism,” in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steve Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 93–­122. 12. Joachim du Bellay, Les Antiquités de Rome (Paris: Société Littéraire de France, 1919), 15: Ne sentez-­vous pas augmenter votre peine Quand quelquefois de ces coteaux romains Vous contemplez l’ouvrage de vos mains N’être plus rien qu’une poudreuse plaine?

386  Françoise Meltzer 13.  Diderot on Art, vol. 2, trans. John Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 197–­99. For a discussion of Diderot on ruins and Robert’s paintings, see Anne Betty Weinshenker, “Diderot’s Use of the Ruin-­Image,” Diderot Studies 16 (1973): 309–­29. See also Roland Mortier, La poétique des ruines en France: Ses origins, ses variations de la Renaissance à Victor Hugo (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 92–­97. 14. On Diderot’s somewhat contorted views with respect to theism versus deism and his religious views in general, see Bernard Baertschi, “L’athéisme de Diderot,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 89, no. 3 (1991): 421–­49. 15.  I do not refer to the notion of “person” here, the modern version of which is established in John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government. Locke’s “person” is political and social, whereas the I of which I am speaking has to do with the consciousness of subjectivity. 16.  Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19. 17.  Denis Diderot, “Letter on the Blind,” in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, trans. Margaret Jourdain (Chicago: Open Court, 1916), 110, 114. 18.  Chateaubriand, “Des ruines en général,” 4. 19. On the madness of Socrates, see Louis Francisque Lélut, Du démon de Socrate, spécimen d’une application de la science (1836; Paris: Harmattan, 2000). On the madness of Pascal, see Lélut’s L’amulette de Pascal, pour servir à l’histoire des hallucinations (1846). Both of these works caused a scandal. Baillarger was also an expert on hallucinations and studied the connection between mania and melancholy. The alienist Brierre de Boismont was particularly interested in the proximity between religious ecstasy and hallucination. See, e.g., his monograph Des hallucinations (Paris: Ballière, 1845). I have given only the first part of a (very) long title. In general, for most alienists religious experience could more often than not be explained as mental disease. 20.  One thinks, for example, of Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert, in which an old woman turns out to be a witch as well as a young couple’s best (male) friend; Eichendorff ’s “Marmorbild,” wherein ancient statues come to life at night; Merimée’s “La Vénus de l’Ile,” with a motif much like Eichendorff ’s; the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Hawthorne (“Young Goodman Brown”); the literary gothic in general. Art itself is frequently depicted as a kind of sickness (the German romantics have a term for this, Kunstkrankheit) because it unleashes such power that the artist who produces a great work is often depicted as destroyed. The Berglinger episode in Wackenroder and Tieck’s Heart Outpourings of an Art Loving Friar is an example of such destruction, as is Mallarmé’s letter to his friend, Eugène Lefébure, in which the poet writes, “La Destruction fut ma Béatrice.” Letter dated May 27, 1867, to Eugène Lefébure, in Mallarmé, Correspondance: Lettres sur la poésie, ed. Bertrand Marshal (Paris: Gallimard, Folio Edition, 1995), 349. 21.  Alphonse de Lamartine, Premières Méditations Poétiques (Paris: Pagnerre, 1869), 242–­45.

Ruins and Time  387 Ainsi tout change, ainsi tout passé; Ainsi nous-­mêmes nous passons, Hélas! sans laisser plus de trace Que cette barque où nous glissons Sur cette mer où tout s’efface. 22.  It should be noted that Novalis, in his Hymns to the Night, also plays on the notion of the light of day as “false” and the divine light as the real light, glimpsed in the blackness of the night, when the surface of things dissolves and allows the divine to “shine” through. But this is not Augustine, for whom no epiphany is needed to understand the true vision of inner, as opposed to outer, eyes. The follower of Scripture requires no epiphany to understand this—­it is already in the Word, if read correctly. Novalis’s narrator, on the other hand, needs the epiphany that tears him from the bond to birth in order to understand this: “Und mit einemmale, riss das Band der Geburt” [And suddenly the bond to birth was torn]. Novalis: Werke und Briefe, ed. Alfred Kelletat (Munich: Winkler, 1968), 55. 23.  Diderot, “Letter on the Blind,” 109. 24. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, M.A. (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche, 1900), 83. 25. Ibid. 26. Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. J. Chandler, A. Davidson, and Harry D. Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 243–­74. 27.  J. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 69. 28.  J. Derrida, Athens: Still Remains, trans. Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Nass (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 1, 57–­61, et passim. 29. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 126. 30. Lamartine, Premières Méditations Poétiques, 187: Éternité, néant, passé, sombres abîmes, Que faites-­vous des jours que vous engloutissez​.xxx 31. Alphonse de Lamartine, Lamartine: Pages Choisies, ed. Arthur Wilson-­ Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 21. 32. Ernest Renan, “Prière sur l’acropole,” full text at www​ .lexilogos​ .com​ /document​/renan​/acropole​.htm. 33.  Adalbert Stifter, “Bergkristall,” in Brigitta und andere Erzählungen (Zurich: Manesse, 1967), 562. 34.  Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Specimen Dream,” from The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (henceforth SE), ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 4:111.

388  Françoise Meltzer 35.  Translation mine. The original reads: “le vent qui gémit à travers les ruines.” Benjamin Constant, Oeuvres Politiques de Benjamin Constant, introduction and annotations by Charles Louandre (Paris: Charpentier et Cie., 1874), 196. 36.  Javier Bassas Vila, “La description des ruines et le phénomène saturé: Penser les ruines à partir de Jean-­Luc Marion,” Protée 35, no. 2 (2007): 37–­43 at 42ff. 37. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York and London: Verso, 1977), 178. 38.  Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” in SE, 23:259 39.  Sigmund Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in SE, 3:192 40.  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” in Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Random House, 1984), 77; originally published in Sartain’s Union Magazine (October 1850). 41. For a full discussion of the idealization of the Middle Ages that characterizes many of the Frühromantike, see my “Unity under Christendom: German Romanticism’s Middle Ages,” Cadernos de Literatura Comparada 16 ( June 2007): 11–­33. 42.  Novalis, “Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” in Novalis: Werke und Briefe (Munich: Winkler, 1968), 283. 43. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 263. 44.  Ibid., 262. 45. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 178. 46.  Ibid., 166. 47. Gustav Flaubert, letter to Ernest Feydeau, November 29–­30, 1859, in Correspondence: Gustav Flaubert, ed. Giovanni Bonaccorso (Saint-­Genouph: Nizet, 2001), 3:59.

N ot e s o n C o n t r i bu to r s

Vincent Carraud is a professor of the history of modern philosophy at the University of Paris IV–­Sorbonne, where he is the director of the Centre d’Études Cartésiennes and also the director of the EA (Équipe d’Accueil) Métaphysique: Histoires, Transformations, actualité. Among his recent monographs are Pascal: Des connaissances naturelles à l’étude de l’homme (Paris: Vrin, 2007) and L’invention du moi (Paris: PUF, 2010). In 2010 he won the Grand Prix de Philosophie de l’Académie Française. Jean Bethke Elshtain was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School and the Department of Political Science and served on the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. Elshtain was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, a Guggenheim fellow, and a recipient of nine honorary degrees. Author of over twenty books and some five hundred essays, Professor Elshtain was a widely recognized “public intellectual.” She gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 2006, was appointed by President George W. Bush to the council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and also served twice on the President’s Council on Bioethics. Until her untimely death in 2013, Professor Elshtain lectured at universities around the world and was a regular voice in the public media on issues in politics, religion, war, and ethics. Franklin I. Gamwell is Shailer Mathews Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Religious Ethics, Theology, and Philosophy of Religion in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he also served as dean. His work has focused on the relation between philosophical

390  Notes on Contributors

theology and political theory, with attention especially to religious freedom in the United States. His most recent publications include Existence and the Good: Metaphysical Necessity in Morals and Politics (SUNY Press, 2011) and Religion among We the People: Conversations on Democracy and the Divine Good (SUNY Press, 2015). W. Clark Gilpin (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Margaret E. Burton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity and Theology in the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he served as dean from 1990 to 2000. He studies the history of modern Christianity, especially in relation to literature, and is currently writing about the letter from prison as a genre of religious literature in early modern England. His most recent book, Religion Around Emily Dickinson (Penn State University Press, 2014), employs Dickinson’s poetry as a lens through which to view the cultural work performed by religious thought, practice, and imagination in nineteenth-­century America. Fred Lawrence (B.A. in theology at the Gregorian University, 1963), studied in Freiburg and Heidelberg while completing his dissertation on the hermeneutic circle in Gadamer and Lonergan at the University of Basel in 1976. Since 1971 he has taught systematic theology at Boston College, teaching the theology of grace and of the Triune God and specializing in theology as hermeneutical and as political. The year 2017 marks the forty-­ fifth year that he has directed the annual Lonergan Workshop at Boston College. He recently published The Fragility of Consciousness: Faith, Reason, and the Human Good (University of Toronto Press, 2017). Jean-­Luc Marion is the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and a professor of the philosophy of religions and theology in the Divinity School and also a professor on the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and he holds the Dominique Dubarle chair at the Institut Catholique of Paris. He is also a professor emeritus of modern philosophy and metaphysics at the University of Paris IV–­ Sorbonne and a member of the Académie Française. Among his books are In the Self ’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. J. Kossky (Stanford University Press, 2012), God Without Being, trans. T. Carlson

Notes on Contributors   391

(University of Chicago Press, 1991), and The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (University of Chicago Press, 2007), The recent collection Jean-­Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, ed. Kevin Hart (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013) is a companion and guide to his major texts. In 2014 he delivered the Gifford Lectures on Givenness and Revelation, published under the same title in 2016 by Oxford University Press. Bernard McGinn is Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology and the History of Christianity in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he taught for thirty-­four years until his retirement in 2003. He is a past president of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies (SPES) as well as of the Medieval Academy of America. He has written extensively on the history of patristic and medieval theology, especially in the areas of apocalypticism, spirituality, and mysticism, and is currently completing his multivolume history of Western mysticism. Among his recent books is Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2014). Françoise Meltzer is Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she is also chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and a professor in the Divinity School in the philosophy of religions. Since 1982 she has been the co-­editor of the journal Critical Inquiry. Her work focuses on contemporary critical theory and nineteenth-­century French, German, and En­glish literatures. Meltzer’s books (all published by the University of Chicago Press) include Salome and the Dance of Writing (1987); The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis (1988); Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (1994); For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001); Saints: Faith without Borders (2011); and Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (2011). In 2007 she received the Ordre de Palmes Académiques from the French government. In 2015 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is presently finishing a book on ruins, specifically the ruins of Germany at the end of the Second World War. Willemien Otten (Ph.D., University of Amsterdam) is a professor of the theology and history of Christianity at the University of Chicago, where she serves in the Divinity School in the College and is an associate

392  Notes on Contributors

member of the Department of History. She is Director of the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion. Otten focuses on early Christian and medieval religious and intellectual culture, has a special interest in anthropology/humanism on the one hand and in nature and creation on the other. Most recently she edited, with editor-­in-­chief Karla Pollmann, the three-­volume Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (Oxford University Press, 2013) and, with Michael I. Allen, Eriugena and Creation (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2014). Otten was elected the international president of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies (SPES) in 2011. In 2016 she was awarded a Luce-­ ATS fellowship for her book project Natura Educans: The Psychology of Pantheism from Eriugena to Emerson, which she is currently finishing. Adriaan T. Peperzak is Arthur J. Schmitt Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He studied under Paul Ricoeur at the University of Paris and taught metaphysics and ethics at several universities in the Netherlands. He specializes in Hegel (having written Modern Freedom: Hegel’s Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001] and four other books) and in phenomenology, especially Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas (To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas [West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993; repr. 2005] and Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997]). Susan E. Schreiner (Ph.D., Duke University) is a professor of the history of Christianity and theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She studies the Early Modern Era, with special interest in the Reformation. She has written on Calvin’s view of nature and the history of the exegesis of Job. Her most recent work, Are You Alone Wise: Debates about Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2011), examines thinkers from William of Occam to Shakespeare. She is currently working on the problem of idolatry and on a book of essays that attempts to show how the Western Christian tradition should challenge modern assumptions. William Schweiker is the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago, where he

Notes on Contributors   393

serves in the Divinity School and in various programs of the College. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Theological ­Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), written with David E. Klemm, and also Dust That Breathes: Christian Faith and the New Humanisms (published online by Wiley Online Library, 2010), as well as many articles, and has edited nine volumes. Besides teaching at Chicago, Schweiker has been a guest professor at Uppsala University, where he received an honorary doctorate in 2014, and at the University of Heidelberg. He was a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer and has lectured at universities around the world. Between 2014 and 2017 he headed the Enhancing Life project in collaboration with the Universität Bochum (Günter Thomas), funded by the Templeton Foundation. David C. Steinmetz was Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Church History Emeritus at Duke University. Before his death in 2015, he was a leading scholar of the Reformation and had written numerous articles and books on late medieval and early modern Europe. His works include studies of late medieval theology; the theologies of Staupitz, Luther, and Calvin; and the history of exegesis in the sixteenth century. David W. Tracy, S.T.L, S.T.D., is Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Theology and the Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School and on the Committee on Social Thought. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has given lectures at more than fifty universities and colleges around the world, including some of the Gifford Lectures, which were established to promote and diffuse the study of natural theology. His publications include Blessed Rage for Order (University of Chicago Press, 1979), The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981), Plurality and Ambiguity (University of Chicago Press, 1987), and On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994). He is currently writing a book on God based on his Gifford lectures, while two volumes of essays are scheduled to appear from the University of Chicago Press. The present volume is published in his honor.

394  Notes on Contributors Additional Contributions

The translation of chapter 3 (Vincent Carraud) is by Adrian Guiu, Thomas Levergood, and Jeremy Thompson. Adrian Guiu (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2014) is a professor of religion at Wright College, Chicago; Thomas Levergood is executive director of the Lumen Christi Institute in Chicago; Jeremy Thompson (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2014) is an Alexander von Humboldt fellow in Germany (2018–19). The translation of chapter 6 ( Jean-Luc Marion) is by Karl Hefty (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2012), assistant professor of historical and systematic theology at St. Paul University in Ottawa, Canada. The index has been prepared by Daniel Owings, Ph.D. candidate in theology in the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Index

Abelard, Peter, 7, 138, 142–50 absence, 59, 115, 325–26, 375–76. See also hiddenness Adam, 16–17, 46, 64, 125n.36 affectus. See emotion allegory, 30, 34, 251, 305, 381–84 Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, 30–31, 34, 95n.12, 143, 146, 189, 207, 340 angels, 274–75, 339 anxiety, 4, 16, 23, 26, 48 epistemological, 367–69, 382 and Freud, 381 of Luther, 187, 192–94, 196 and melancholy, 370, 375 occasion for sin, 276–77, 285 about self, 237 apophasis, 33, 38, 55, 77, 83–85, 92, 95n.8, 149, 174, 180, 204–8, 380–82 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint Aristotle, 6, 9–10, 19–20, 22 attacked by Luther, 43, 191–92 Bonaventure’s use of, 176–80 on cosmology, 110–11 on God, 203 Heidegger on, 316–35 Lonergan on, 336–49 on the state, 301 versus Plato, 29–30

authority, 10–11 of Augustine in later tradition, 84, 88 checked by moral norm, 261 of Christ, 176 of Church, 257–58 of desire, 215 establishment of, through text-­ criticism, 186 political versus familial, 301, 303 of teachers, 168, 170 totalitarian, 241 baptism, 30–31, 45–46, 205 beatitude, 13, 166–67, 210, 216–18, 230n.66, 269–74, 326–30 blindness, 63, 180–81, 188, 217–18, 235, 342, 373, 376–78 body, 7, 106–19 abuse of, 305 of Christ, 244, 303 distinguished from the real, 347 Manichean notions of, 77, 307 and sensation, 273, 296–98 versus mind, 200–201, 206, 296–97 versus soul, 32 Bonaventure, 9–10, 14, 41, 87, 90, 165, 175–83, 253

396  Index Brown, Peter, 45, 46, 143, 158n.14, 159n.17, 251, 254, 295, 310 calling to election, 188–91, 195, 268 to God in prayer, 78 of heavenly city, universal, 306 necessary for learning, 167–68 to trust in God, 283–84, 319 Calvin, John, 5, 43–44, 48, 57 certainty, 11–14 of absolute, impossible, 374–75 God necessary for, 178 of God’s infinity, 77 and love, 107–8 of salvation, 192, 196 of self, impossible, 199–218, 237 Church authority of, 257–58 Christ’s mystical body, 243–44 control of symbolic meaning, 253–54 Heidegger’s estrangement from, 316–18 relation to Israel, 195 relation to state, 303–5 versus individual, 146 citation, 84–85, 88, 90, 111, 186, 191, 354 contemplation, 7, 10, 22–23, 29–35 and ascent to God, 87, 177, 180–82 balance with active life, 306 of Christ’s wounds, 193 and epectasis, 39–40 medieval, 87, 140–43, 151, 157 of ruins, 365–72, 377–79 of Scripture, 242 conversion, 31–32, 77–78, 141–42, 241–42, 315–16, 349–56

creation, 7, 10 and apophasis, 84 contemplation of, 29 and evil, 188, 288–89, 307 humankind summit of, 108 in interpretation of Genesis, 81–82 and Logos, 172–73, 182 as pedagogy, 151, 157 restlessness of, 116 cross, 58, 61–64, 196, 318, 349–50 culture, 14, 18, 26, 136–40, 142, 148–49 deceptive, 49, 277, 286–88 divided, 305 and education, 167 evaluation of, 138–39 impermanent, 371 interpretation of, 137, 140, 237–38 and meaning, 257–58, 262–63 curiosity, 166, 329 death, 20, 24–25 in Antigone, 66 of Augustine’s childhood friend, 205–6, 239 certainty of, 202 of Christ, 58, 318, 350 Heidegger on, 332–33 inexplicable evil, 48, 51 and ruins, 369–72, 378, 382–84 deception avoided by all, 327, 331 of idols, 255 of Monica, 53 Romantic fears of, 368–69 of self, 49, 63, 65, 80, 235, 237, 245–46, 276, 284, 331 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 24, 34, 238, 241, 246, 256, 377–78, 383–84

Index  397 Descartes, René, 12, 24, 117, 121n.16, 131n.70, 200–205, 211, 373, 377 desire, 13–14, 17–19 for beatitude, 166–67, 213–18 —impossible to doubt, 216 for completeness, 237–38 erotic, 60, 63, 206–7 evil, 255 for God, 199–200 God’s, exegetical problem, 86 for knowledge, 31, 34, 261 and natural order, 109–10 and temptation, 271–73, 277, 282–83 and therapy, 135–41, 147–55 and the will, 37–41, 297, 305 devil, 153, 242, 268–80 Dionysius. See Pseudo-­Dionysius distance, 242, 366–67 affective, 141, 304 critical, 168 and desire, 218 from God, 140 historical 25–26, 370 loss of, 330, 332, 334 from self, 205, 212–13, 225n.31 doubt, 12, 23–24 of Apostle Thomas, 376–77 Cartesian, 201–3, 295–96, 373 of God’s justice, 193 and happiness, 216 harmful, 193, 347 overcome by scholarship, 178 Edwards, Jonathan, 57, 61, 241–42, 247 emotion Aristotle’s god free from, 335 Lonergan’s view of, 351

in prayer 148, 207, 239 and reason, 155, 166, 177, 296 and social bond, 300–301 and the sublime, 366–67 and the will, 34, 37–40, 63–64 Enlightenment, 22–24, 138, 147, 154, 156, 352, 366, 372–73, 376 Eriugena, John Scottus, 7–8, 85–86, 140, 142, 148–52 eros. See desire eschatology, 63, 151, 156, 182, 238 exegesis, 8, 11, 14–15, 20, 60, 187–96 allegorical, 30 apophatic, 86 medieval, 138, 142–44, 155, 159n.18 and meditation, 142–44 and pedagogy, 253, 254, 257 tropological, 150 exile, 55, 60, 205–6, 208, 212, 369 existentialism, 16, 20, 199–218, 316–35 distinguished from Augustine, 270, 275 of Heidegger, 316–35 of Niebuhr, 275–80 and tragedy, 56–57, 62 faith, 4, 10–11, 21–22, 24 in authorities, 168–70, 350 as chain, 379 and education, 252–54 knowledge of God through, 78 and reason, 31–32, 176–78, 351, 353 and predestination, 44, 188–95, 268–69, 279 family, 64, 301–3, 307, 352

398  Index fear, 11, 19 chaste versus servile, 359n.67 of God, 59, 253 of judgment, 187, 193, 196 overcome by love, 89 of self-­deception, 235 of self-­reflection, 331 of subjugation, 309 and the sublime, 366–67 See also anxiety Foucault, Michel, 137, 139, 261, 370 fragment, 16–17, 24–26, 234–46, 280–89, 365, 368, 378, 383–84 freedom, 4, 11, 15–16, 35–44, 267–89, 337–39 Adam’s, 267–75 to choose evil, 307–8 dependent on super-­human force, 41, 49 development in Augustine’s thought on, 187–91, 195 intellectual, 263, 373 of love, 114 optimistic accounts of, 43, 55 pessimistic accounts of, 44, 56, 191–92 of self-­formation, 261 and solidarity, 243, Freud, Sigmund, 36–37, 45, 54, 310, 368, 380–82 friendship, 18, 30, 33, 205, 239, 300–304, 335, 350 Gadamer, Hans-­Georg, 54, 57, 136, 257, 259, 265n.19, 316–20, 343, 352 glory divine, 241–42, 263 human, 191, 194, 196, 310 grace, 4–5, 27–69, 296, 337–39 and conversion, 77–78, 268, 353

of election, 189, 191–92, 242 epistemological, 31, 33, 256, 350, 352 as lightness, 106, 116–18 operative and co-­operative, 321, 353 paideia as, 251, 262, versus nature, 35–42 versus sin, 42–50, 143, 186 versus tragedy, 50–69 Gregory of Nazianzus, 34, 54 Gregory of Nyssa, 34, 39, 40, 60 Gregory the Great, 39, 41, 85–86, 142–43 Hadot, Pierre, 32, 137, 139, 140, 142, 155, 158n.13, 261 Heidegger, Martin, 19–22, 39, 54, 204, 212, 224n.28, 227n.49, 276, 313–35, 341–42, 350, 353 hermeneutics, 8, 252–53 apophatic, 86 of facticity, 320, 322, 324, 328 of love, 315 of suspicion, 49, 72n.31, 316 See also exegesis hiddenness, 10 of God, 84, 86, 93 —the Father, 90 —God’s justice, 190, 192 —God’s providence, 235, 239–41, 246 —under a contrary, 196 of meaning, 177 of principles of reality, 169, 173 of self, 209–10 of truth, 368–69 idolatry, 44, 255–59, 304–5 image, 11, 17 artistic, 379 conceptual, 34–35, 181, 298

Index  399

of God, 28, 30, 33, 328 —communicative, 183, 299 —fragmentary, 238, 241 —social, 90, 300 —Trinitarian, 68, 69n.1, 108, 203 linguistic, 298, 342 of the sublime, 381 and temptation, 206

Jerome, Saint, 153–54 Jesus of Nazareth, 51, 54, 58–59, 61, 65, 77, 179, 182, 188, 269, 276 Julian of Eclanum, 36, 45–47, 50 Kant, Immanuel, 22–23, 31 on Anselm’s ontological proof, 155 on freedom, 269, 271–72 on fundamental categories, 173 German philosophy after, 54, 57 and Romanticism, 366–68, 373–74, 380 as tragic, 56–57 Kierkegaard, Søren, 16, 35, 41, 48, 54, 58, 61, 277, 278, 317, 368 knowledge, 166–68, 298, 322–35, 336–54 and conversion, 77 through faith, 31, 176 of God, 78, 81–86, 180–83, 327 God’s, 178–79 and love, 258–61 of self, 20, 135, 141–47, 200, 237, 243, 397, 331, 335, 341 —impossible, 204–8 through signs, 251–56 of universals, 168–75, 336–37 —impossible, 256–58, 366–68 language Augustine’s theory of, 17, 174, 251–56, 298

—criticism of, 256–58 distinguished from Verbum, 342 about God, 6, 9, 83–87, 100n.53, 381–82 source of disorder, 297–302 See also apophasis last things. See eschatology law, 6, 10 of the cross, 349–50 God author of, 173, 178–79 in Greek drama, 64, 66 of logic, 279 of love, 281 —analogous to physical law, 116–18 moral, 272, of nature, 51 light, 9–10, 21–22 of God, 376, 380, 387n.22 intellectual, 170–75, 178–89, 345–46 Manichean doctrine of, 77, 187–88 refracted in prism, 368 Luther, Martin, 5, 11, 43–44, 48, 60, 67, 185–96, 318, 332, 338 Manicheanism, 306 Augustine’s attraction to, 53–54, 77, 307 Augustine’s writing against, 188, 195 doctrines of, 77, 187–88 Julian of Eclanum accuses Augustine of, 46, 72n.45 memory, 12–13, 24–25 collective, 370 in Confessions, 320 constitutive of self, 208–18, 327–38 grounded in the Trinity, 29, 31 nostalgic, 238, 378, 384 revelatory of providence, 240

400  Index monasticism, 67, 87, 90, 139, 145, 148–51, 153–54, 186–87 Monica, Saint, 13, 30, 53, 214, 239, 315 mysticism, 6, 10, 29–30, 41, 60, 63, 84–85, 88–92, 327 narrative, 35, 154, 235–45, 257, 293, 331 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 16–17, 36–37, 52, 58, 267, 274–88 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 40, 54, 57, 169, 310, 316–19 Nygren, Anders, 41, 120n.4, 185 omnipotence, 8, 23, 52, 79, 93, 151, 188, 288–89, 349, 369 order, 6–9, 18 of creation, 110–113, 170–71, 178–79 goal of love, 109–10, 113–16, 119 imposed by human mind, 331, 367 justice as, 64 in medieval thought, 144, 149–52, 155–57 in passions, 64, 320 political, 300–306 Origen of Alexandria, 32, 34, 60 original sin, 17, 45–46, 52, 62, 64, 191, 195, 275, 279, 299 Ostia, Augustine’s vision at, 13, 30, 89, 214, 315. See also mysticism paganism, 139, 254–55, 297, 375, 378–79 Pascal, Blaise, 35, 40–41, 61–63, 166, 223n.17, 330, 351, 374 Paul, Apostle on free choice versus freedom, 269–70

Heidegger’s interpretation of, 318–23, 332 Protestant interpretation of, 43, 185–87, 191–96 source for introspection, 30–31, 42 as teacher, 179 as tragic 54, 58, 65 peace. See rest Pelagius, 36–37, 44–45, 48–50 Augustine’s writings against, 190, 195, 268, 337–38 —influence on Luther and Calvin, 43 Plato, 8–10 Augustine’s transformation of, 138–39, 174, 253–54 cosmic reditus, 150–51 doctrine of ideas, 170–72, 216 influence —on Abelard, 144, 160n.28 —on Augustine, 31–32, 34–35, 70n.9, 165, 306, 344 —on Eriugena, 148 and the libri platonici, 77–78, 315 and Neo-­Platonism, 105, 143 versus Aristotle, 29–30, 179 Plotinus, 9–10, 28–33, 137, 173–74, 327 practice, 14, 18 autobiography as spiritual, 240–45 caritas as, 300–301, 303 contemplative, 175–79 doubt as, 201 exercitatio mentis, 140–42, 144 learning as, 166 of psychoanalysis, 381 of signification, 262–63, 288 prayer, 8–9, 13 in the Confessions, 29, 76–77, 81, 214, 326

Index  401 for knowledge of God, 200 liturgical, 79, 207 medieval, 148–52, 370 preaching of Ambrose, 30, 207 of Augustine, 46, 67, 88 of Bonaventure, 175–77 as conduit for grace, 76, 78, 95n.12 See also rhetoric predestination, 11, 32, 44–46, 53, 57, 157, 185–96 pride, 18, 239 in disputations, 176 Euripides on, 63, Heidegger on, 320, 330 obstacle to conversion, 77 in one’s own group, 286–87 of Satan, 273 social disintegration a result of, 300, 302, 307 See also glory, human Protestantism, 5, 11, 42–44, 54, 185–87, 191–96 Pseudo-­Dionysius, 34, 58, 63, 82–86, 90, 148 punishment, 51, 191, 243, 268, 295, 305, 308, 349–50 Puritanism, 14, 233–35, 240–42 Redemption, 30, 156–57, 186, 188, 193, 262, 324, 331, 349–54 rest, 7, 17–20, 75–94, 106–19 in Heidegger’s interpretation of Augustine, 321 in Lonergan’s interpretation of Augustine, 349 in Neo-­Platonism, 29–30 as political, 299–310 after resurrection, 58

Romantic nostalgia for, 382–83 as telos, 37–40, 151–52, 182, 262 revelation, 10, 21–22, 23 appeals to, criticized, 257 through Christ alone, 58, 176 in history, 193, 275–76 human knowledge dependent on, 176–78, 180–81, 350–52 relation to philosophy, 31–32 rhetoric, 30, 34–35, 149, 151, 153, 239–40, 254, 310–11 Ricoeur, Paul, 41, 52, 257, 259, 316 Roman Catholicism, 42–43, 316–18, 321, 335–37, 375, 382 Ruinanz, Heideggerian, 332–35 sacrament, 139, 251. See also baptism; sign Satan. See devil Scholasticism compared to pre-­Scholastic thought, 138, 140, 143 Heidegger’s use of, 317–18, 324–25 Lonergan’s use of, 340, 342, 352 Luther’s critique of, 44, 191–92 reception of Augustine in, 87 science, 24, 261, 323, 333, 346–48, 373–74 ancient, 106, 117, 177, 179, 254 Scripture, 6, 8, 11, 14–15 and education, 165, 171–79, 251–56 multiple senses of, 30, 207 paradoxical, 85, 112–13 in prayer, 75–79, 241–42, 374 as tragedy, 53–54, 58–62, 65 See also exegesis self-­deception. See deception sign, 235, 251–63, 325, 327

402  Index silence. See apophasis society, 16–19, 300–304 disintegrated by sin, 250, 299, 370 as ethical context, 146–47, 244–46, 254 site of caritas, 300–304 source of temptation, 277–78, 285–89 temptation, 15–17, 267–89 caused by fear, 276–77, 329, 332 to power, 305, 310 to presentism, 3, 25 sexual, 206–7 source of self-­knowledge, 297, 307 Tillich, Paul, 28, 41, 270 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 20, 34, 77, 87, 113, 242, 337–49 totality, 13, 24–25 in early medieval thought, 150 God distinguished from, 181 God understood as, 78, 175, 368 human pretensions to, 237–28, 241, 246, 378, 383–84 of phenomena, 322, 368 as realm of meaning for human action, 275–77, 280–89 of self, unattainable 209–13, 246 tragedy, 5, 14, 27, 46, 48, 50–68, 300, 308–9, 383–84 transcendence, 12–15, 22–24, 26 of Christ’s speech, 174 criticized, 250, 257 through education, 262–63 of God, 78, 84, 175, 239–41, 338 of God’s justice, 190

of human knowledge, 345, 366–68, 374, 379–81 of nature, 152, 380 of self, 214–15, 235, 246, 281, 290n.15 transcendental subject, 316, 319–20, 328 Trinity analogy to human soul, 29–31, 68, 108, 203, 297, 357n.40 —qualified, 69n.1, 122n.17 immanent, 89–91, 183 Lonergan’s dependence on Augustine’s doctrine of, 339–46 as source and goal of knowledge, 147, 157, 181–82 unity divine, 91, 156 illusory, 24–25, 382–84 of self, 204, 237–38, 324 societal, 17–18, 300 virtue, 10, 19, 37, 91, 158n.11, 177, 191–92, 216–18, 306, 311 vocatio. See calling wisdom attained through suffering, 64–67 dependent on God, 172–83 goal of contemplative ascent, 253, 261, 273 and love, 38 practical, 14, 166–67 sapientia, distinct from scientia, 33, 183, 184n.10 worldly, despised, 350