Augustine and Social Justice 9781498509183, 9781498509176

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Augustine and Social Justice

Augustine in Conversation: Tradition and Innovation Series Editors: John Doody and Kim Paffenroth This series produces edited volumes that explore Augustine’s relationship to a particular discipline or field of study. This “relationship” is considered in several different ways: some contributors consider Augustine’s practice of the particular discipline in question; some consider his subsequent influence on the field of study; and others consider how Augustine himself has become an object of study by their discipline. Such variety adds breadth and new perspectives—innovation—to our ongoing conversation with Augustine on topics of lasting import to him and us, while using Augustine as our conversation partner lends focus and a common thread—tradition—to our disparate fields and interests. Titles in Series Augustine and Politics Edited by John Doody, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth Augustine and Literature Edited by Robert P. Kennedy, Kim Paffenroth, and John Doody Augustine and History Edited by Christopher T. Daly, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth Augustine and Liberal Education Edited by Kim Paffenroth and Kevin L. Hughes Augustine and World Religions Edited by Brian Brown, John A. Doody, and Kim Paffenroth Augustine and Philosophy Edited by Phillip Cary, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth Augustine and Apocalyptic Edited by John Doody, Kari Kloos, and Kim Paffenroth Augustine and Social Justice Edited by Teresa Delgado, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth

Augustine and Social Justice

Edited by Teresa Delgado, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Augustine and social justice / edited by Teresa Delgado, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth. p. cm. — (Augustine in conversation: tradition and innovation) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4985-0917-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4985-0918-3 (ebook) 1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. 2. Social justice—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Delgado, Teresa, 1966- editor. BR65.A9A8445 2015 261.8092—dc23 2014041115 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to Mary T. Clark (1913–2014)

Contents

Preface: Love, Friendship, and Mary T. Clark Siobhan Nash-Marshall

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Introduction Teresa Delgado and Kim Paffenroth

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Part I: Introductory and General Discussions 1 Augustine on Justice Mary T. Clark 2 The Pursuit of Social Justice: Some Augustinian Sources of Caution Mark Doorley 3 The Philosophical Tenets and Content of Augustine’s Social Doctrine Sergey Trostyanskiy

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Part II: Economic Justice 4 Altruism or Holy Economy: Ambrose and Augustine’s Care for the Poor Todd E. French 5 The Consumer’s Restless Heart J. Burton Fulmer 6 Eudaimonism and Dispossession: Augustine on Almsgiving Jennifer A. Herdt 7 Augustine and Political Economy R. J. Hernández-Díaz

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Part III: Politics, Power, and War 8 Augustine and Slavery: Freedom for the Free Aaron D. Conley 9 Breaking from the Dominance of Power and Order in Augustine’s Ethic of War María Teresa Dávila 10 Augustinian Realism and the Morality of War: An Exchange Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski 11 Anarchism, Original Sin and the Decentralization of Power: A Neo-Augustinian Synthesis George M. Schmidt

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Part IV: Justice, Love, and Community 12 Common Ruins of Love: Augustine and the Politics of Mourning John Kiess 13 Augustine and Social Justice in Calvin’s Biblical Commentaries Matthew J. Pereira 14 Friendship and Moral Formation: Implications for Restorative Justice Sarah Stewart-Kroeker 15 Augustine, Families, and Social Justice Darlene Fozard Weaver

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Editors and Contributors

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Preface Love, Friendship, and Mary T. Clark Siobhan Nash-Marshall

In her last public lecture, which she delivered without notes at Manhattanville College’s celebration of her one hundredth birthday last October, Mary T. Clark spoke of five things: the inherent value of each human person, love, friendship, God, and community. Love, she suggested, requires respect for the truth: the recognition of the uniqueness of each person. For love entails the “continual desire to know what will bring joy to the other,” and one cannot recognize what will bring joy to a unique individual unless one knows the uniqueness of that individual. One cannot know the uniqueness of that individual without respecting the truth. Love, she suggested, requires obedience. Love, she suggested, is the heart of both the true human community, and of human happiness. The freest sort of love, she said, is the “love that comes from a friend,” and that love is community. “Community [is] a relationship.” The human community, she continued, mirrors the Divine community. “In the Trinity as each [Person is]” God . . . And there we find a community, a relationship,” in which “uniqueness which cannot be erased.” It is, she said, “the same in the world where people are working with colleagues, faculty working with one another, and married people relating to each.” By belonging to a community, loving and being loved by friends, she continued, people “receive their happiness.” “And that,” she concluded, “is the secret of the restless heart, the heart that Augustine spoke of, ‘that you have made it for yourself, Oh Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.’ . . . that restless heart is somewhat assuaged by friendship in the human world.” ix

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Those who knew Mary T. Clark and saw her give her lecture could not but admire how she strove and had striven to do what is most difficult for every thinker: to live a life which is coherent with the principles that one both knows to be true and teaches. Her last lecture was a personal message to each member of the audience which showed that she embodied precisely what she so eloquently described in the lecture: “I want to express my thanks to you for your presence here. It’s your presence here that gives me the greatest celebration of my 100 years. I actually value what you are and what you bring to life from your . . . unique human reality. . . . I value you as friends.” Those who knew the work of Mary T. Clark could not but recognize in this lecture all of the themes nearest and dearest to her heart. They saw her insistence that one must never forsake the truth. They saw her own love of true obedience. They saw her concern and love for the community of thinkers and students to which she had devoted so much of her life, Manhattanville College. They saw her love of Augustine. They saw her love of God. Those who will read her article anthologized in this volume will recognize in her lecture her instance that justice is an “order within man.” They will recognize her claim that “by rooting justice in the love of God and man, Augustine unites all men in a society,” and her deduction therefrom that: “This love entails for each one the responsibility of providing the material, social, cultural, moral conditions which are needed to bring the men about them to full human development.” They will recognize her statement that: “What Augustine did was to . . . reveal the foundation of justice in God’s eternal law, and thereby make clear its transcendent power to release the citizen from slavish subordination to the State.” I, who was standing at her side when she delivered her lecture, recognized the gift she was giving me personally in that lecture. Sister Clark knew that my favorite passage in her works concerned the fact that true human love and community mirrors the love and community in the Trinity: “From the plurality of persons, there proceeds that search for unity with all the movement and mediation required for that reconciliation of differences which advances mankind to ever higher levels of effort and accomplishment. Such is spiritual or personal life, a search and an ascent.” 1 She made sure, that day, also to show me that she remembered. She brought me great joy. NOTE 1. Mary T. Clark, Augustinian Personalism (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1970) p. 21.

Introduction Teresa Delgado and Kim Paffenroth

It would be more than an understatement to say the theology and philosophy of Augustine of Hippo have garnered wide appeal since his episcopate in fifth-century North Africa. Volumes upon volumes have been written about his life; his writings have been the basis of inquiry and analysis by theologians and philosophers alike, in and out of the Christian Church. He is claimed as an authoritative source by those who, in our contemporary moment, seek to justify war, as well as by those who use civil disobedience under the mantle, “an unjust law is no law at all.” Even during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Augustine’s theology—via the more contemporary Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr—was claimed by opposite ends of the political spectrum, from liberal Democrat Barack Obama to neoconservative Republican Dick Cheney. And yet, the major social justice issues of our time—from conflict and war, to slavery and human trafficking, to interpersonal violence and political sovereignty—find an engaging interlocutor and robust source of wisdom in the writings of Augustine. By no means does this make the task of interpreting his thought for our time and purposes any easier. On the contrary, those across the theological and political spectrum point to Augustine for evidence in support of their assertions; and the breadth of his contribution to Christian theology and ethics is expansive enough to contain it all. The contributors in this volume demonstrate the wide diversity of thought and interpretation on the theme of social justice through an Augustinian lens. We begin our investigation with several essays that offer more general analyses related to social justice, starting with a reprint of Mary T. Clark’s classic essay on “Augustine on Justice.” Clark skillfully and gracefully dispels “ambiguity” about the virtue and its place among other Christian virtues, showing how justice is ultimately grounded in love. xi

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Mark Doorley next mines the work of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder to suggest reasons for caution as Christians engage in political activism. A proper recognition of the purpose of discipleship and a proper humility will make more likely an activism fueled by the quintessential Christian orientation of “enemy love” without falling into the temptation to think that building the Kingdom of God in our time is the real work of the believer. Augustine’s reflections on justice, on political power and on conscience suggest an approach to political engagement as Christians that promise to surprise the modern reader. Yoder’s emphasis on the sovereignty of God and the role of the Church today will also surprise the modern Christian for whom a Christian state is as familiar as the air we breathe. The purpose of this argument is not to suggest that Christians stay out of politics, but only remember to engage the political process as Christians. Sergey Trostyanskiy ends our first section with his examination of justice in Augustine, showing how several intermingling themes related to social ethics, political philosophy, eschatology, and soteriology run through Augustine’s De civitate Dei. But the key notions of Augustine’s social doctrine are undoubtedly ius and most particularly iustitia. This essay aims to elucidate the basic tenets of Augustine’s social thought and to unveil the philosophical underpinnings of his theory, with special attention to the place of justice in Augustine’s social doctrine. Our second grouping of essays focuses on economic justice in Augustine’s works. Todd E. French begins by examining Augustine’s inherited tradition of care for the poor that is particularly challenging to an educated, late Roman rhetor turned bishop. Jesus had called on those with economic means to care for the “least of these” because they were representatives of him. The ascetics had interpreted this as a call to mimicry and identification, but Ambrose and Augustine reinterpret these sayings socially and theologically. By adding their unique understandings of how the community was to engage—and utilize—the poor according to God’s providence, they envision a different goal for the late antique Christian community. This essay explores the progression from Jesus’s words, through the ascetics and on to the ascetic leaning bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries. In conjunction with this exploration, this essay examines the contemporary and ancient themes of altruism, assessing whether such notions are a fruitful direction of inquiry and how they relate to interested giving. It argues that the ascetical aspects of the holy economy, which influenced Ambrose and subsequently Augustine, approximate a more empathetic while less altruistic form of Christian social justice. These early monastic figures achieved an empathy that later church leaders would struggle to embody and preach to their communities. Augustine ultimately calls on familial imagery to capitalize on a tradition of care for the poor that is communally enacted by both the wealthy and the ascetics,

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bringing together two groups that were essential for the Christian Church’s success. J. Burton Fulmer explores Augustine’s theology of love and its implications for identity development in consumer society. While some contemporary theologians have criticized Augustine for limiting the church’s capacity for social criticism, this essay contends that Augustine’s analysis of sin and charity can be employed to critique any society in which individuals are defined by competition and consumption. According to Augustine, sin leads people to seek their own pleasure in countless external pursuits and results in a loss of freedom and a loss of self. Consumerism pursues the same goals and results in the same losses. Augustine offers an alternative vision of how identity develops. The human will only becomes one with itself and with God through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The love that this indwelling inspires is the true source of freedom, which is, in Augustine’s theology, not a matter of limitless choices, but of being able to pursue the good. His depiction of pride and love present a vision of a world in which the common good is pursued and notions of private ownership are destroyed. In this manner, Augustine’s theology offers a compelling critique of and a radical alternative to a consumer society. Jennifer A. Herdt’s essay looks at Christian almsgiving in the later Roman Empire, and how it is often viewed as a practice that instrumentalized the poor for the sake of spiritual benefit to the giver. This raises important questions: Does Augustine’s concern for the giving of alms really represent a concern for social justice at all? Can an ethics centered on the agent’s state of character make adequate room for responding to the needs of others because of those others and their needs, rather than because doing so is in some way good for the responder? If giving alms solidifies one’s virtue and stores up treasure in heaven, does that mean that one cannot at the same time be responding to the neighbor’s needs for the sake of the neighbor? This essay places Augustine’s discourse on almsgiving in a broader context that allows us to see that it is in learning to love God for God’s own sake that we first become able to love others properly for their own sakes, in relation to God and God’s love for them. Part of this involves seeing that there are claims that others, or the needs of others, make on us that we are bound to recognize, or blameworthy for not responding to or recognizing. Hence, the essay seeks to show, Augustine does have a notion of the demands of justice, and not simply of the virtue of justice as a disposition perfective of its possessor. Concluding this section, Rodolfo J. Hernández-Díaz presents the problems of poverty, inequality, and environmental injustice—disquieting features of the current global political economy. In light of these problems, the question arises: what are the elements of a just political-economic order? This essay argues that Augustine outlines first principles that contribute to contemporary discussions on the ethics of the political economy. Specifical-

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ly, Augustine reorients the political economy by emphasizing the will (voluntas) rather than the intellect (rationis) as the groundwork for peace and justice. Central to Augustine’s thought about right choice is the conviction that human capacity to make moral decisions is severely limited. For Augustine, the human will, rather than a rational calculus, form the basis for a just society. Ultimately, Augustine’s emphasis challenges contemporary rationalist theories which exaggerate the ability of human reason to create a just political economy. Our third section considers issues related to politics, power, and war. Aaron D. Conley notes how institutionalized forms of slavery are as prevalent for us today as they were for Augustine. As moral theologians, ethicists and historians think back on the history of slavery, much hope has been placed on Augustine’s Letter 10* of the Divjak Letters. In this correspondence to Alypius, Augustine explains the tragedy of Galatian slave merchants who were ensnaring free men, women, and children and shipping them as slaves to other parts of the Empire. Augustine asks the traveling Alypius to find up to date laws in Rome that prohibit and punish such activity. Yet despite his efforts to deal justly with an egregious injustice and end this particular form of slavery, Augustine fails to challenge institutionalized slavery more broadly. This failure is due to two primary factors. First, Augustine moralizes or spiritualizes slavery. He adopts the language of the Apostle Paul claiming that all people are slaves to sin and must submit to their master in heaven. Second, Augustine’s social location implicates him as a person of privilege whose family kept slaves for generations. This social location as a slave-owner restricts his ability to see or at least empathize with the moral depravity to own actual slaves. Thus, at no point in Letter 10* or any of his other writings does he call into question the role of institutionalized slavery within the balance of social equilibrium or even church order. Next, Maria Teresa Dávila shows how contemporary articulations of just war theory in the Christian tradition owe much to St. Augustine’s reflections on the topic during his own time. However, as in other areas of Augustine’s theology, a privileging of order and power is contained in just war theory, a slant that owes its origins to Augustine’s equating civil authority and order with Divine authority. Among democratic nations and current efforts to limit the use of force to international consensus, this begs the question of what constitutes “right authority,” “right intention,” and “just cause.” This essay argues that Latino/a theology presents a vision of life in community that can shed new light on how we interpret these criteria in the just war tradition, releasing the hold of civil authority on the use of force, by privileging the perspective of the suffering and the everydayness of communities in crisis. We move on to a record of a discussion from the fall of 2013 between Edmund Santurri of St. Olaf College and William Werpehowski of Georgetown University, discussing Werpehowski’s provocative reflections on Au-

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gustinian “realism” and the morality of war. Werpehowski sets forth his proposals, and Santurri responds with some theoretical alternatives. The essay ranges over a variety of topics, for example, the meaning of Augustinian realism, its rootedness in Augustine’s theology, its relation to Christian justwar theory and the distinctive theological “realisms” of Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, empirical versus normative realism, moral principles and optimal consequences, the problem of “dirty hands,” Abraham Lincoln’s comportment in the Civil War, killing in war and “moral grief,” the psychological possibility of moral restraint in war, and the possible tension in Augustine between a concern for moral limits on war and the commendation of holy war. By relying heavily on the work of Augustine of Hippo, George M. Schmidt shows that the doctrine of original sin leads to a deep suspicion of authority, especially earthly authority. This essay calls for the pursuit of two tasks simultaneously: the sketching of the critical dimensions of Augustine’s political realism, which focuses on undoing the realist implications for the centralization of power; and the description of the positive agential qualities of love for forming free associations. Far from being a framework for authoritarian regimes, Augustine’s thoroughly low anthropology should be read as an argument against any supposed legitimation of the rule of one over another. This essay, therefore, demonstrates the anarchistic implications of Augustine’s political realism. The essays in our final section connect love and community with the theme of justice. John Kiess begins by tracing how Augustine’s well-known discussions of bereavement in the Confessions have left many critics with the impression that he regards grief as one of those fundamentally flawed human passions that must be expunged as the pilgrim ascends towards the eternal. This fuels the familiar worry that he is too otherworldly to be concerned about worldly loss or injustice. Recent years, however, have witnessed an important reassessment of the role of the emotions in Augustine’s thought, yielding a far richer picture of his views on grief than his critics have allowed. Building upon this work, this essay argues that Augustine not only envisions a role for grief in contexts of individual sin and bereavement, but also in response to acts of political violence and wider social injustices. Focusing on his response to the sack of Rome in his sermons and the City of God, Kiess shows how the capacity to grieve violations of bodily integrity and other harms provides a crucial lens for understanding both his critique of Roman society and his own constructive vision of citizenship. If Rome’s history reveals a pattern of disavowing loss and repressing grief to sustain illusions of glory and invulnerability, Augustine imagines a politics born from the acknowledgment of loss, one that sees the suffering of others as public wounds that claim an entire society’s response. As they commingle with citizens of the earthly city, members of the city of God witness not only

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to the finitude that limits all political projects, but also the ongoing necessity of repair, a mode of citizenship that seeks to transform common ruins into common objects of love. The final section of the essay considers the possible lessons Augustine’s insights offer contemporary efforts to address the legacy of violence in deeply divided societies. Matthew J. Pereira next evaluates John Calvin’s appropriation of Augustine’s theology as it relates to Calvin’s theology of social justice, which shaped ecclesiastical and civil life in sixteenth-century Geneva. There have only been a select number of studies devoted to comparing Calvin and Augustine’s theologies of social justice. In one of the notable assessments, it has been argued that Calvin and Augustine’s understandings of social justice were incompatible with one another. This essay offers an alternative reading, which demonstrates that Calvin’s approach to Augustine is more nuanced than has been suggested in recent assessments. Calvin’s reading of Augustine within his biblical commentaries, especially when it comes to the issue of social justice, is occasional, unsystematic and layered. On the one hand, Calvin rejects points within Augustine’s various writings; then, on the other hand, he affirms Augustine in ways that support the formation of his own doctrine of social justice. He did not read Augustine’s theology on justice in a linear or monolithic manner. Rather, Calvin understands Augustine to be a fellow biblical interpreter, who also wrestles with the Scriptures. Calvin’s relationship with Augustine is a rather complicated one, characterized by respect and discerning engagement. Augustine shapes Calvin’s theology of social justice in an episodic, uneven, unpredictable but ultimately constructive manner within the biblical commentaries. This essay contributes to the greater understanding of Augustine’s influence upon Calvin’s theology by attending to the theme of social justice within his biblical commentaries, which to date, has been largely left unexplored in the scholarship that examines Calvin’s reception of Augustine. Sarah Stewart-Kroeker’s essay explores Augustine’s views on the discipline and reformation of the wrong-doer in dialogue with restorative justice. Augustine is fundamentally concerned with the healing of the wrong-doer and the restoration of the wrong-doer to harmonious communal relationship through morally formative friendship. In this regard, she traces a convergent interest with restorative justice principles through a discussion of solitary confinement in the criminal justice system and the Circles of Support and Accountability program. Augustine also, however, assumes a basic retributive judiciary justice structure. He intercedes as an ecclesial authority and in the name of Christ-like love and justice within this framework. The healing to which he aims is not only earthly but also eschatological. In this regard, there are important distinctions between the social-political frameworks envisioned by Augustine and restorative justice and their corresponding aims. This essay examines how far the resonance between Augustine and restora-

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tive justice in concern with the wrong-doer’s healing and restoration might extend. Completing our collection, Darlene Fozard Weaver’s essay considers Augustine’s contributions to reflection on social justice and families. It schematizes issues of justice in terms of justice in families, justice toward families, and families’ debt of justice toward others. Drawing chiefly on the City of God, the essay enlists major themes from Augustine’s theology in service to the schema. Augustine views families as a natural institution while also enriching current thinking about families as culturally constructed. His theology challenges liberal conceptions that erode support for families and informs thinking about the role of government and our expectations of political solutions for problems that families face. Augustine’s contention that human communities are constituted by a common love, his understanding of sin and grace, and his insight into the character of Christian existence in the two cities all appear as fruitful resources for reflection on families and social justice. Given Augustine’s stature and legacy within the Christian tradition, it comes as no surprise that the gravitas of Augustine’s theology and ethics would be sought by those wishing to pursue social justice. We should be cautioned by the fact that, given our twenty-first-century sensibilities, Augustine does not always say what we want to hear. On the issue of human rights, the status of women, the place of slaves, to name a few points of contention, his theology and ethics fall short of our contemporary notions of equality and freedom. On the topic of conflict and war, Augustine is ambiguous at best in relation to the use of violence. And justice, true and perfect, belongs exclusively to the city of God in heaven, an eschatalogical vision which can only be glimpsed, a telos which can only be approached. Augustine’s thought, as reflected in the corpus of his writings, provides ample opportunity for reflection, inspiration and challenge along that human journey toward social justice, imperfect as it might be on this earth.

Part I

Introductory and General Discussions

Chapter One

Augustine on Justice Mary T. Clark

Ambiguity surrounds the ordinary notion of justice. Some seem to think that justice is the ground floor of the edifice of virtues, with charity an upper story. Others believe that when justice prevails universally, there will be no room for charity. Still others look upon their donations to fellowmen who are in dire need of food and shelter as works of charity in the sense of liberality. The importance of understanding justice is indisputable. Since the social order is impossible without justice, any ambiguity surrounding this virtue interferes not only with truth with which philosophers are formally concerned, but with that universal concern—peace, which follows only upon the order established by justice. Justice, according to Augustine, is one of the four main forms of loving God. 1 From the other cardinal virtues, which are referred to in the Old Testament (Wisdom VIII, 1, 4, 7), he distinguishes it by emphasizing “right relationship.” Rightly related to God, man is properly related within himself and to the external world of people and things. Not only does justice produce harmony within man, peace among men, but like the other moral virtues, its value lies in preparing us for the vision of God. This vision begins now with an understanding of what we believe. To the just man belongs this understanding. This distinctive view of justice as order within man redounding to social order was retained by Augustine until the end of his life. Writing much later in the City of God, and defining justice in a way that can be found in any ethics text: “Its task is to see that to each is given what belongs to each,” Augustine nevertheless says that this public order of just transactions among men is impossible unless there are just men, rightly related to God by an interior order. Justice begins within. There must be “the right order within man himself.” 2 The struggle for this internal order is always far from fin3

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ished, but until justice reigns, man’s happiness cannot be complete. Augustine advises that the subjection of man to God which originates personal integration begins in the mind. He tells us that the man “with God in his thoughts,” 3 is the man who is becoming just. This Augustinian emphasis upon personal order as the preliminary to social order is constantly recurring. If a man has no order within himself, “then there is certainly no justice in an assembly made up of such men. As a result, there is slacking that mutual recognition of rights which makes a mere mob into a ‘people,’ a people whose commonweal is a commonwealth.” 4 But neither should we miss the key to this personal order, namely, an attitude of subjection to God which serves as the model for the order which should exist between the soul and the body, between reason and the irrational powers. Only when this order prevails in man, can he act justly to others. Justice obliges that God be loved by man not according to God’s value but according to man’s capacity. Although God can never be loved as much as He deserves to be loved, he can be “loved wholly” and “by the whole man.” 5 To give God the just measure of love is to love without measure. It is but just on God’s part, we come to see, that He should sum up all His requests of man in a commandment of love. For love is the one thing that is so much one’s own that circumstances and people cannot interfere with the giving of it. Augustine reminds us that while “no other creature can separate us from the love of God,” a creature can separate us, none other than one’s self. 6 Nor does the love of God in any way eliminate a love for oneself. If to love is to wish good to another, then man’s love for his highest good is the perfect form of self-love. As this love grows, egoism and cupidity decrease. This kind of love for self is the recommended norm for loving others. Augustine says that you do not love your “neighbor as yourself” unless you try to draw him to that good which you are yourself pursuing. By rooting justice in the love of God and man, Augustine unites all men into a society. Accordingly, in the Augustinian outlook, man is a social animal by reason of his moral exigency. The society formed with God as the common object of love is a just society because men who are rightly related to God will enjoy personal harmony and social peace. This love entails for each one the responsibility of providing the material, social, cultural, moral conditions which are needed to bring the men about them to full human development. Devotion to the common good is the sacred obligation flowing most immediately from God’s command to love one’s neighbor. This common good is the direct object of social peace. Is not Augustine teaching this when he says: “From this precept [of brotherly love] proceed the duties of human society?” 7 And he adds that failure in this field is very, very easy. It is noteworthy that in his directions about how to proceed along the difficult path of social justice, the providing of all men with what is needed

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for human and spiritual fulfilment, Augustine refers primarily to the interior: “. . . the first thing to aim at is, that we should be benevolent, cherishing no malice nor evil design against another.” 8 This justice, as the virtue which is the manifestation of the sincerity of brotherly love, does not remain within the one who loves. It is grounded in the objective social order of external goods. At times there is a tendency to think that whereas physical injury to another is an injustice, a failure to extend a helping hand is only, as they phrase it, a failure in charity to which I was not obligated. But Augustine unites these two acts and regards them both as failures in justice and failures in charity: “. . . a man may sin against another in two ways, either by injuring him or by not helping him when it is in his power.” 9 In fact, failure to love one’s neighbor sufficiently, refusal to put oneself to inconvenience and unwillingness to suffer in order to assist him is called by Augustine “criminal,” a word generally descriptive of unjust acts of major proportions. This lack of charity to a neighbor is considered by him to be an assault against God. 10 Augustine’s conception of society as the union of all those who love God as their common good does not eliminate the need for many different political states, but by its emphasis upon the removal of all frontiers which separate men from one another the world over, it calls for the developed nations to assist the underdeveloped nations as a social duty flowing from the law of brotherly love. American aid to foreign countries as a technique in the forwarding of foreign diplomacy has been vocally scorned by some foreign students in the United States who openly question whether their countries would receive any help at all if Communism did not exist as a threat. We can see that admitting the existence of God is neither a theoretical nor a private matter. The acknowledgment of God’s existence brings with it the necessity of obedience to His laws as made known either by studying the dynamisms of human nature or by listening to Divine Revelation. Such laws are universal and bind men together in a society which transcends any individual state. Today nations are more conscious of their role as political parts of a world-wide community seeking the one common good of human fulfillment by using all the benefits and blessings of modern civilization. If obedience to the eternal law of God is the mark of the rightly related man, the just man, this same obedience will characterize the just State. The so-called TenCommandment-morality is more indispensable than some moderns have tried to make it. It is worth noting that all sins against the Ten Commandments are acts of injustice: the first three are violations of the virtue of religion—love for God; the fourth is a violation of the virtue of piety—love for parents; and all the others violate the law of love for neighbor. Even this negative view of the last six commandments forcibly brings home that Augustine was in deep harmony with the mind of God when he defined the virtue of justice as a function of the law of love—the giving to God and to

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men the response that is due to them, first, in accordance with their rights, and secondly in accordance with one’s liberality. Because Augustine set aside Cicero’s definition of a people as essentially concerned with justice as a definition too restricted to apply to existing states, and said that “It is possible to define a ‘people’ not as Cicero does but as ‘a multitude of reasonable beings voluntarily associated in the pursuit of common interests,’” 11 some historians have too hastily concluded that justice is not relevant to the second definition. Justice remains the norm for evaluating the true success of any State. What Augustine did was to rescue justice from identification with the law or “just” of the individual nation, reveal the foundation of justice in God’s eternal law, and thereby make clear its transcendent power to realize the citizen from slavish subordination to the State. Above the State and its laws there is an Absolute to which rulers and citizens cannot rightly be opposed. Hence no citizen need obey an unjust law. The appeal is not merely to the subjective conscience but to the objective law of God as readable in human nature and as revealed in the Ten Commandments. Morality is politically relevant. Augustine declares: “The fact is that God’s command that He alone receive sacrifices and who, therefore, are devoid of the rational and religious control of soul over body, and of reason over sinful appetite must be lacking in true justice.” 12 Few of us would agree that Augustine’s second definition of a commonwealth which allows decadent Rome to be called one, namely, an association of rational beings united by a common love, 13 aptly specifies a State; in fact, it could be used to cover any club or social organization. Most of us would go along with Cicero in holding that a State is properly “a multitude bound together by a mutual recognition of rights and mutual cooperation for the common good.” But would all who agree with this definition today also agree that the justice it specifies is rooted in respect for the rights of God? This, I submit, is the Augustinian contribution to our understanding of Justice. One way to appreciate the need of respect for the rights of God is to look at States where no such respect exists. Augustine reminds us that “here neither the individuals nor the whole community, ‘the people’ live by that faith of the just which works through that charity which loves God as He should be loved and one’s neighbor as oneself—where this kind of justice is lacking, I maintain, there does not exist . . .” 14 a commonwealth seeing the common good. Far more than he is generally credited with, Augustine appreciated the necessary role of government in the making of peace within man and among men. Far too often his name for sovereignty as “organized brigandage” 15 is referred to in isolation from the context wherein he shows the contribution to the common good that can be made—not by rulers who are Christian, but by Christian rulers who are just. 16 And if the practice of justice is, as we have seen, a matter of keeping the law of God, this just practice, Augustine teach-

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es, is binding in charity. 17 It is for this reason, and not because of any intolerance that he thinks Christians should make the best rulers, the best citizens. Such men, however, must not be Christian in name only; they must be stamped with the authentic sign of “charity.” In fact, Augustine would seem to be urging his fellow-Christians to enter public service not for private gain but for the public good when he says: “Therefore, let those who say that the teaching of Christ is opposed to the welfare of the State produce such provincial administrators, such husbands, such wives, such parents, such sons, such masters, such slaves, such kings, such judges, and finally such taxpayers and collectors of the public revenue as Christian teaching requires them to be, and then let them dare to say that this teaching is opposed to the welfare of the State, or, rather, let them even hesitate to admit that it is the greatest safety of the State, if it is observed.” 18 Augustine would want Christians to cooperate in all ventures of mutual interest to men as men. The temporal peace established by good government assists Christians to work more fruitfully for their goal, and Christians should actively pursue “along with other human beings a common platform in regard to all that concerns our purely human life and does not interfere with faith and worship.” 19 Augustine realizes that “the aims of human civilization are good” and this attitude of cooperation in cultural and civic affairs, while it represents a departure from the Plotinian advocacy of a life given almost solely to contemplation, agrees completely with the Christian vocation in this world, a world indeed made good by God, a world capable of becoming better at the hands of man. In view of the foregoing evidence, Augustine did not condemn the State as such, but only as unjust State. What he emphatically condemned was the divorce of morality from politics because such a divorce defeats the very purposes of government. 20 Therefore, when H.G. Wells 21 sees the Augustinian world as an organized kingdom of heaven; when John Bowle 22 considers the City of God the origin of medieval political theory; when R. H. Murray 23 would make of the will power for Augustine merely a weapon of the Church, we can only think that they have allowed their judgments of this fifth century writer to become too encrusted with later history. To hold, as Augustine does, that the State with good Christians as rulers and citizens is the best State, is not to erase the distinction between the temporal city and the eternal city. The evidence is all on the side of Augustinian exhortations to Christians to promote the efficacy of temporal power. The disagreement about how Augustine really regarded the State is exemplified in the two contradictory statements of George Sabine and Christopher Dawson. Sabine state that Augustine thought that only Christian states were true commonwealths, 24 whereas Dawson concludes that the consideration of history leads Augustine “. . . to reject the political idealism of the philosophers and dispute Cicero’s thesis that the State rests essentially on justice.” 25 Now in rejecting Cicero’s first definition of the State, Augustine is not denying the need for

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justice if a State is to achieve its true goal. He is simply saying that, contrary to the thinking of the philosophers, men can organize themselves in pursuit of material goals, and seek a temporal peace. Augustine afterwards shows that to attain even this kind of peace, a certain “order” is needed. Such order cannot be achieved without justice. The philosophers, however, were unrealistic—not in their highlighting of the indispensable role of justice in society, but in naively believing that men without love for one another can rise to justice. As a realist, Augustine was acutely aware that men naturally tend to shade things in their own favor. To make this extreme tendency for self-preference serve the interests of society, something more than the precept to “give to others what is their due” is needed. As long as the other remains other, justice—which is only supposed to be possible between two persons—is the virtue that, theoretically, is called for to insure “equality,” but, practically speaking, in view of man’s great ability to see what is his own due, the true satisfaction of the rights of the other will only be achieved when that other is by love identified with oneself. Love, then, is the indispensable basis for the realization of justice. For this viewpoint on justice, Augustine bases himself not upon the idealism of the philosophers, not upon the might-politics of the later Roman empire, but upon the Pauline doctrine of charity as a social duty. To the Romans (XIII, 8–10) St. Paul clarifies the way to justice, which is the way to personal and social order, and so to peace: Owe no man anything except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the Law. For “Thou shalt not commit adultery; Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt not steal; Thou shalt not covet,” and if there be any other commandment it is summed up in this saying—“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Love does no evil to a neighbor. Love therefore is the fulfillment of the law.

What, then, are we doing—identifying or confusing love with justice, for did we not previously note that the Ten Commandments prohibit injustice? No, this is no confusion of distinct virtues. Justice is still justice, and love is love. But the union of man with his neighbor which is love’s fruit enables man to love his neighbor as himself and thereby to shade things in favor of his neighbor, to recognize what I really due to this neighbor. Only thus can our native astigmatism, looking at things in relation to ourselves, a certain effect of original sin, be corrected. Paul and Augustine are not then saying that love is justice but that love is the fulfillment of justice. It is once again a case of Christian realism. And therefore Sabine, in representing Augustine as saying that there is no true commonwealth that is not Christian, is concealing this nuance just described which characterizes Augustine’s approach to justice and the State. There can indeed be established a State which seeks a temporal

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peace, but this State will not survive unless justice prevails. And where there is no love for neighbor, justice cannot prevail, and no State can long endure. Thus in forsaking Plato’s high thoughts about the nature of the State, Augustine does not repudiate the Platonic vision of truth when he turns to Christian thought for the realization of the meaning of Justice. As earlier in the Confessions, he once told us that the Platonists saw what happiness was but were unable to provide the way, so now he is telling us that the Platonists appreciate the truth that peace must rest on justice—but Christ, in showing that justice is only fulfilled though love, has once again become the Way. We can conclude, therefore, that social injustice is first and foremost a work of love, whereby that which is due to another person is given. Respect for the rights of the human person is secured in two particular forms: by fair transactions between individuals and by the State’s proportional distribution of benefits to citizens according to their social role. Respect for the rights of all is secured in a general form by individual actions on the part of both rulers and subjects to assure each citizen the social conditions necessary for a full human life in this world and the next. This general justice on the part of all is best called social justice, distinguished as it is from the two forms of particular justice by having as its direct object the common good. Social justice helps to realize in each person the specific perfection of humanity, while the two forms of particular justice are directly concerned with an equality and proportion between citizens, being only indirectly ordered to the common good. Those who tend to think of justice as some foundation upon which the virtue of charity may or may not arise are unconsciously confusing charity with liberality. Justice is indeed prior to liberality, but not to charity. Those who think that with the progress of justice, charity can be eliminated are unconsciously identifying charity with what is commonly associated with it—the material gift which expresses the love of the giver. Yet all gifts derive their human value from the love which prompts them not from the material expression. Love, moreover, is more directly a relationship between two persons than is justice which is only realized when there is added some relationship to an exterior object. Those who tend to call the contribution made to another’s basic need by someone better off a work of charity or liberality need to be reminded that the social function of private property in this case obliges them to a work that is directed toward the common good, and therefore a work of social justice, which obliges in charity. Since love is naturally a free act, there is a tendency to think of it as something untouched by obligation. By firmly grounding justice upon the motivation of love, however, Augustine teaches us that all the commandments of God require of us that which is most our own. And that is why the

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New Law is one of Love. “And Love is the fulfillment of the Law.” (Romans XIII, 10.) NOTES This essay originally appeared in Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes 9 (1963) 87–94; reprinted here with permission. The original had to be retyped, which was ably and generously done by Ms. Danielle Sargent, a student at Iona College. The editors thank her for this work. 1. Augustine, Morals of the Catholic Church, I, 15, 25, B. A. I, 129–176. 2. Augustine, City of God, XIX, 4. B. A. 37–68. 3. Ibid., XIX, 24–25. B. A. 37, 164. 4. Ibid., XIX I, 12, 21, p. 170. 5. Augustine, Morals of the Catholic Church, I, 8, 13. B. A. I, p. 154. 6. Ibid., I, 26, 49, p. 210. 7. Ibid., I, 26, 49, p. 210. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., I, 26, 50, p. 210. 10. Ibid., I, 33, 73. B. A. I. p. 244. 11. Augustine, City of God, XIX, 24. B. A. 37, p. 164. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., XIX, 23, p, 160–162. 15. Ibid., IV, 4. 16. Ibid., V, 24, B. A. 33, p. 748–750. 17. Ibid., XVII, 4. 18. Augustine, Ep. 138 to Marcellinus, 15 (412). 19. Augustine, City of God, VIII, 19; cf. VI, 2. 20. Augustine, City of God, VI, 2–20. 21. H. G. Wells, Outline of History, New York, Garden City Publishing Company, 1931, p. 555. 22. John Bowle, Western Political Thought, New York, Oxford University Press, 1948, p. 138. 23. R. H. Murray, The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present, New York, Appleton, 1930, p. 41. 24. George H. Sabine, A. History of Political Theory, New York, Henry Holt Co., 1956, p. 192. 25. Christopher Dawson, “St. Augustine and His Age,” in Monument to St. Augustine M. C. D’Arcy, etc., London, Sheed & Ward, 1930, p. 62.Typed by Sargent, Danielle M. (2014)

Chapter Two

The Pursuit of Social Justice Some Augustinian Sources of Caution Mark Doorley

We live in a country that prides itself on the separation of church and state; however, what “separation” means is not always clear. A foreigner might mistake us as a country with something like a state religion. The dominance of religion on talk radio, the open religious talk of some of our current and aspiring politicians, and the unambiguous religious interpretations offered in public media might honestly confuse a visitor to our land. The principle of separation of church and state is not the topic of this essay, however. Instead, this essay will explore the extent to which Christians, of whatever political persuasion, make use of the power of the state to advance their vision of the gospel message. Rather than suggesting a Rawlsian approach to politics, where religiously informed views have no place in the public square, this essay seeks to examine the wisdom of reliance on the power of the state to advance one’s religiously informed account of justice. The presidential election of 2012 offers us a perfect example. During this election cycle, citizens deliberated, often in a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations, about whom would be best suited as chief executive of the United States. 1 Into that flurry entered people of faith, casting their lots with this or that political party, as somehow capturing more completely than the other the values of one’s religious tradition. Christianity, by far, was the tradition claimed by many as that which would lead the nation toward a more just and moral future. One of the more conspicuous examples was the “Nuns on the Bus” tour, sponsored by the social justice lobby, Network. 2 Sr. Simone Campbell and her stalwart friends traveled by bus through the more contested states, such as Michigan and Ohio, offering resounding criticism of the budget put forward by Representative Paul Ryan. While at no point did 11

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Network endorse a political candidate for President, their scathing criticism of the ideas of the Republican Vice Presidential candidate clearly sent a message about the unacceptability of that party’s policy proposals which, in their view, did not embody core Christian values. Not to be outdone by the nuns on the bus, the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, agreed to offer a benediction (or blessing) at the end of the Republican National Convention in August 2012. The Cardinal and his public relations office went to great pains to explain that the Republicans had invited him; he was quite open to offering a prayer at the Democratic National Convention should he be invited. As it turns out, he delivered the benediction at the Democratic convention as well. However, in the time between invitations, there was plenty of second-guessing of Cardinal Dolan’s decision to be part of any convention, lest seeming to offer approval of one or the other. Whether criticism of Dolan has any merit, the fact of his convention attendance and role, 3 as a religious leader injecting himself into overtly political activity, deserves some reflection regarding how wise or unwise such political involvement can be. This essay will borrow from the work of Augustine and John Howard Yoder to discern the wise from the unwise. Augustine is, arguably, the first Christian thinker to articulate a political theology that can assist in navigating the limits of wisdom for Christians, or people of any faith, in political activism. John Howard Yoder, an Anabaptist who spent his scholarly career at the Roman Catholic Notre Dame University, offers a sharp contrast to the “realist” Augustine but a contrast that rests on familiar Augustinian insights about the nature of fallen human existence and the priority of relationship to God over relationship to others. Another reason to engage Yoder’s work is his deep skepticism about the “Constantinian turn” by which Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Augustine lived in the midst of this turn and his work offers competing interpretations of its value. Yoder, on the other hand, is unequivocal in his skepticism. His understanding of the Church and discipleship are a helpful contrast to Augustine’s relatively ambiguous reception of Christianity’s status as the religion of the empire. By exploring the work of these two thinkers, ancient and contemporary, we will discover, much to the chagrin of many for whom social justice and the political process are primary foci, that the faithful and wise Christian is the one who trusts in God, first, to make all things well. Further, the faithful and wise Christian is the one whose attitude toward the struggle for social justice is rooted in humility and repentance for one’s failings. I’ve noted some examples of people (Sr. Simone, Paul Ryan, Cardinal Dolan) engaged in the political process of 2012 in ways that may be considered problematic, but the genuine motivation for their engagement should be granted at the very least. Each could be said to be committed to social justice, to the pursuit of the common good. This common good is the “sum total of

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those conditions of social living that make it possible for individuals and groups to have ready access to their fulfillment,” as articulated by Pope John XIII in his 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra. It recognizes that justice, “the giving to each what is his [sic] due,” is possible only when the conditions of society are such that giving to each is possible. What is a person’s due can be said to be a right, the respect of which she can demand of others. Thus, we cannot affirm a person’s right to work if the economic conditions are such that the possibility of work is nonexistent. We cannot affirm a person’s right to education if that education, if available, is of dubious quality and incapable of preparing a person for twenty-first century economic realities. Those who enter into the fray of politics may very well be motivated by a desire to advance an understanding of the common good which is reflective of the fundamental values of their religious faith. In other words, the motivations of Sr. Simone Campbell and Archbishop Timothy Dolan are laudable; each wants to see fulfilled a vision of a just society rooted in their religious faith. What must be considered, however, is the degree to which such motivation might lead to an engagement with state power that undermines the very gospel message animating the engagement. INSIGHTS FROM AUGUSTINE A reading of Augustine offers three key insights to the topic of this essay: on the nature of social justice in the Christian life; on the nature of political power; and on the priority of conscience. All three will provide the tools with which to discern a wiser attitude toward political activism. To this end, the work of Mary T. Clark, R.S.C.J., particularly her article (included in this volume) entitled “Augustine on Justice,” illumines Augustine’s thinking. Augustine affirms that justice is about seeing that “to each is given what belongs to each.” However, the Augustinian twist is that such justice is not possible without “just men, rightly related to God by an interior order.” 4 This interior order is identified in the City of God: “the soul is subordinated to God, and the body to the soul, and thus both body and soul are subordinated to God” (CG, XIX, 4). The subordination of the soul to God is a unity of knowledge of God’s will and a willingness to fulfill that will. It begins on earth but it is never finished on earth. Augustine affirms that happiness is not possible without justice—the giving to each what is his due—but this justice is impossible without the internal ordering of the human being to God. 5 Social justice, the realization of a common good, begins with an internal realignment of the human being from what is not God toward an orientation to what is God. As Augustine knew so well, human beings tend to interpret reality solely in terms of the self. The antidote to this selfish orientation is the grace of God which effects the re-orientation from self to God. Social justice

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is premised on the inner work that each person must do to perfect one’s soul. This perfection is always elusive which prompts, for Augustine, an attitude of repentance and humility, a recognition of what is still lacking both in one’s own interior reality as well as in the social relations of the world around us. One must love God not as God deserves to be loved but as one has the capacity to love God. 6 That is, God must be the subject of one’s complete devotion, not shared with some other subject. Richard Rohr speaks to this in a set of reflections he wrote on the liturgical scriptural readings for Advent. He says that the “kingdom of God supersedes and far surpasses all kingdoms of the self and society or personal reward.” 7 Quoting Matthew 6:24 Rohr reminds the Christian that one cannot serve two masters; when God must compete for a person’s love of a person, then love is divided. Therefore, the just order of the interior life—a condition for social justice—cannot be achieved. If one loves God as one ought, and the soul is subordinate to God as it ought to be, then the demands of the self—oriented toward material goods, honor, power, and pleasure—find their proper place in one’s life. These desires do not disappear, nor should they, but they are displaced from the center of the self. Conflicts between human beings are premised on satisfying self-serving demands and the desire for more material goods, honor, power, or pleasure. When these desires recede from being the primary motivators of human action, Augustine posits that social justice will be realized. Why should love of God, the primacy of God in human desiring, lead to social justice? There are two great commandments in the New Testament: love of God and love of neighbor as one’s self. Is there any higher realization of love of self than to love with all one’s heart one’s supreme Good, namely God? “People who are rightly related to God will enjoy personal harmony and social peace.” 8 Augustine goes on to call “criminal” a failure to love one’s neighbor sufficiently by refusing to inconvenience oneself or by an unwillingness to suffer in order to assist others. 9 Augustine used the pulpit to teach his people the demands of Christian love of neighbor or discipleship. In his homilies on the first letter of St. John, we find powerful affirmations of the centrality of love in the Christian life. In the fifth homily Augustine comments on John’s claim that he who does not love his brother is not of God. 10 At least the first seven of these homilies are preached in the context of the Donatist controversy in Northern Africa, a conflict about authority in the church. The Donatists rejected the seeming partnership of the Roman Church with the Roman Empire after the declaration of Theodosius made Christianity the official religion. On the contrary, Donatists believed martyrdom was the primary manifestation of Christian discipleship; by cooperating with the empire, the Roman Church was rejecting this tenet of faith. 11 This explains why Augustine goes to great lengths to distinguish between true love and its imposter. It is not sufficient to say that

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one loves one’s neighbor; it is not sufficient to say “Lord, Lord!” (Mt. 7:21) One distinguishes between true love and its imposter by the actions of those who say they love. Listen to Augustine: Your brother is hungry, in want; maybe he is in trouble, hard pressed by some creditor. He has not what he needs, you have. He is your brother, he and you were purchased together, one price was paid for both of you, both were redeemed by the blood of Christ. Is there pity in you for him, if you have this world’s goods? Do you ask, What concern is it of mine? Am I to give money to save him from inconvenience? If that is the answer your heart gives you, the love of the Father dwells not in you; and if the love of the Father dwells not in you, you are not born of God. How can you boast of being a Christian? You have the name and not the deeds. If the word goes with the name, call you pagan who will, you prove yourself Christian by your deeds. For if your deeds prove not your Christianity, then though all may call you Christian, the name without the reality can avail you nothing. “He that hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowls of compassion from him, how can the love of God dwell in him?” And then it goes on: “Little children, let us not love in word only and in tongue, but in work and in truth.” 12

Is it possible to love in action but not love in one’s heart? To do so would lack the order that is required for justice, namely subordination to God in one’s mind and will. However, it is also very difficult to evaluate the authenticity of one’s love of God since only the individual, in the silence of her heart, can affirm she is subordinate to God as her supreme Good. Augustine’s solution is to attend to the action of those who say they love their neighbor, particularly when those actions are contrary to the self-interest of the agent. The self-interests reflected here are oriented toward worldly goods rather than toward the eternal good. In fact, the proof of one’s orientation is clarified when one’s actions seem to mitigate one’s own material self-interest. Can one affirm love of God and neighbor as oneself if not engaged in creating, furthering, and supporting the common good which realizes social justice in community? As Jesus pointed out to his disciples, loving your friends is what the pagans do; Christians love their enemies (Cf. Matthew 5:47). Common sense tells us to love our neighbor, as that is in our selfinterest. Jesus commands us to love the enemy, particularly when it is not in our self-interest. 13 What difference does it make in the end whether one acts as if they love as God loves, or if they act from an authentic motivation to love as God loves? The same result would be achieved, theoretically: a just society in which each member receives what is his or her due. 14 For Augustine, there are two reasons to pursue a society in which people love their neighbor because they love their God: first, the potentially coercive power of the state; and second, the primary importance of human conscience

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for one’s salvation. To address the first reason, Linda Raeder offers an Augustinian case for limited government, claiming that Augustine rejects the classical Greek and Roman accounts of politics as the most refined of human activities. For Augustine, the state and its values pale in comparison to the glory of God, to whom the human being is first and foremost called to obedience. In addition, Augustine accuses the political authority of coercion when it pursues an end other than the establishment of law and the administration of justice. 15 When political power is used to pursue some particular account of the good, the threat of punishment (i.e., imprisonment, death) coerces people to do what they would not do otherwise. For Augustine, legitimate political authority rests on people’s desire for peace and security even if at the cost of satisfying their desires. The potentially coercive quality of political authority moved Augustine to share the following anecdote: For it was a witty and a truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, “What is your idea, 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 do it with a might navy, you’re called the emperor.” (CoG, IV, 4)

Although he had a dim view of the state, Augustine recognized its utmost importance given the fallen nature of humanity. With the fall, human beings became unable, on their own, to orient themselves to God as their supreme good, and so they find themselves oriented toward anything understood as a good. Since these goods are limited, the competition for them gives rise to conflict. Yet, peace is the one thing all people desire (CoG, XIX, 12). Political authority is the prudent answer to keep human beings in check in the chaotic state of a fallen world. Coercive political rule is a “necessary evil,” 16 because it preserves the wellbeing of all members of society. “Because men are prone to depravity and sin, political coercion is indispensable to the social order.” 17 Coercive political power has its place in a fallen world, a place justified by rampant sinfulness and injustice characteristic of humanity after the fall. Political power is not fundamentally coercive, however; there is a political art practiced in the City of God, Augustine suggests, in that citizens are traveling together in this world on their way toward eternal peace. The common good must be pursued and political power is the appropriate means by which this is accomplished. The difference between political power per se and political power exercised in a fallen world, is the difference between just, ordered citizens oriented to God as the supreme Good, and unjust, disordered citizens (and political leaders) oriented toward conditional and temporal goods of this world. The disordered citizens of the City of Man need a

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coercive power to hold in check the imperious demands of the self which lead to conflict. In the City of Man, even the Christian can exercise non-coercive political power, rooted in the love of neighbor and one’s subordination to the will of God, which moves the Christian to act toward one’s neighbor as God has acted toward oneself. Who is the neighbor? In the Gospel of Luke, we hear the story of the Good Samaritan as the answer Jesus gives to the lawyer who sought to justify himself in Jesus’s eyes. Although the great double commandment, to love oneself and one’s neighbor, is cited by Jesus, the story of the Good Samaritan focuses our attention on the identity of the neighbor as a reflection of ourselves. Rather than ask who the neighbor is, the better question, according to Jesus, is “who am I as a neighbor to those in need?” 18 As God relates to me as a good neighbor, reaching out to me when I am in need, I must be available to others in need. Exercised by the Christian, power ought to be utilized with the purpose of meeting the needs of the suffering ones. 19 Not only is the coercive power of the state a problem for Augustine, although necessary given our current fallen state, the ordering of society around an account of the common good has the potential to undermine the freedom of individual conscience. Augustine asserted a just person will not only treat his neighbor justly but be dedicated to the creation of a just society, as the two go hand in hand. The most important aspect of treating our neighbor justly is supporting her efforts, in intellect and in will, to orient toward her supreme Good, which is God. Meeting the material needs of our neighbor, or obtaining sustainable economic, social and political systems is not sufficient justice. Justice is only fully realized when the individual, in intellect and in will, is subordinate to God. For Augustine, the human being is incapable of realizing this subordination on his or her own power without God’s grace. Since God’s grace is a free and unmerited gift, it is not amenable to any kind of coercion, least of all the coercion of the state. In addition, the subordination of one’s intellect and will to God, made possible by grace, is realized only in the interiority of the soul of the human being. It is not realized by a repetition of similar acts or by simply knowing what the law is. 20 While these externalities can set the proper conditions for the law, they cannot substitute for the inner acceptance of God’s grace which grounds conversion. 21 Raeder comments on the implications of Augustine’s view on grace for the inculcation of virtue. One classical conception of politics is that the legislator considered the moral perfection of the citizen. This account of politics—as the art of organizing common life for the purpose of human flourishing—rests on the premise that human beings are naturally oriented toward what is truly good for them but need some encouragement, provided by political authority. For Augustine, the primary problem for human beings is not behavior; it is a spiritual, even ontological, problem and political

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coercion cannot reach the level of spirit and ontology. 22 The real problem, the disoriented love of the self, is beyond the power of the state to effect. The state can set the conditions to make conversion more likely, but since grace is a gift—unmerited and unforeseen—the possibility of conversion is never more than probable. In the end, conversion is a private event, beyond coercion, cajoling, or occurring on command. As Raeder points out, this Augustinian insight may be the root of a very contemporary idea, namely the privacy and sanctity of conscience. 23 Only within the inner realm of one’s soul, alone with oneself and God, can a human being experience the reorienting of one’s love toward God. In his fifth sermon on I John, Augustine comments on the obscurity of one’s conscience, saying, “Let each man turn to his own heart, and if there he finds charity towards his brothers, let him be sure that he has passed from death to life. His place already is on the right hand; he need not be concerned that his glory is at present hidden.” 24 Only the person in his heart knows whether he loves God as God ought to be loved. The reader may be led to understand this inner sanctuary as closed off from others, calling into question a love of neighbor that is anything more than a projection of one’s self onto the other. But the one who loves the neighbor does so with an awareness of one’s own incompleteness and need. The neighbor who loves the suffering other is also in need of love in her own suffering. While this awareness of the need for God’s loving action in one’s life is deeply personal, loving God moves one to embrace the other as God has embraced us. Since political authority is exercised upon human behavior, it is prone to mistake since evidence of a person’s inner life is ambiguous. On this issue, Augustine reflects on the difficulty for judges to know whether a sentence is appropriate (CoG, 19, 6). For example, he points out that torture may be used, yet the punishment may not yield the desired result. A judge must render a sentence, and should do so with deep awareness of the flawed character of this necessary evil. But what happens to the person in the court of law is nothing compared to what happens in the inner sanctuary of one’s conscience when one stands before God. This is not to say that torture is morally justifiable; however, what occurs in the court of human justice pales in comparison to what happens in one’s conscience before God’s judgment. For Augustine, only our heart can determine whether we love our neighbor. In the sixth homily on I John, Augustine emphasizes this claim: The true lover of his brother is he who before God assures his own heart, wherein God alone sees, who puts to his heart the question whether what he does is indeed for love of the brethren. . . . You stand before God: ask your own heart, look at what you have done and what was your purpose in it—your salvation or the empty praise of men. . . . Our confidence then is not in the sight of men, but where God himself sees, in the heart. 25

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There is a space within the human heart where humanity meets God, where grace works for the reorientation of human desire toward God or conversion. The question remains whether power can be used to create the conditions for increasing the potential for conversion. However, a coercive use of power is out of the question for two reasons: it is ineffective and it would not be legitimate to use coercive power for that end. The use of coercive power to bring about an internal reorientation of the human heart may be effective at insuring obedience, but it is ineffective in achieving that internal re-orientation emphasized by Augustine. It is also illegitimate because it is contrary to the testimony of the gospel account of Jesus’s invitation to those he encountered. A non-coercive power is needed to open the heart of the individual, not by manipulation or deceit, but by attraction or by exercising fidelity to God’s will. 26 INSIGHTS FROM JOHN HOWARD YODER The examination of Augustine illumined three principles that provide some guidance for navigating how and when religious values engage the political realm: 1. justice is rooted in the love of God and neighbor; 2. political authority is often coercive; and 3. love of God and neighbor is realized within the sanctuary of the human heart. These three principles suggest the pursuit of social justice is a work of love. The primary work of love, and thus of social justice, is not the particular distribution of material or social goods, but conversion in those we love, which can never be sought with coercive authority. In addition, these principles suggest only the individual knows whether she stands before God as subordinate. Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder provides us two additional principles of interest. The first concerns a philosophy of history rooted in the testimony of scripture, while the second examines the function of the church today. An exploration of these will help discern the extent to which Christians make use of the power of the state to advance their vision of the gospel message, the main concern of this essay. In The Politics of Jesus, Yoder makes the case for the relevance of Jesus’s life and death for any understanding of social ethics and justice. He traces the gospel account as well as the apostolic witness of Paul to demonstrate that Jesus was a political figure in first-century Palestine. The early Christians recognized this by calling Jesus “Lord” and “Christ.” Each of these terms was loaded with political significance; the former was the title reserved to Caesar, while the latter was reserved for the longed-for King of Israel. Identifying Jesus as either was unmistakably political. Palestinian Christians of the first century were referring to their crucified master as Lord and Christ,

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sending a clear message to both Romans and Jews about the significance of Jesus’s life, death and proclaimed resurrection. Yoder makes the case, here and in other texts, that the early Christians were continuing the example set them by a crucified Jesus. For Christians, the cross stands as a central rejection of the idea that coercive power must be exercised in the pursuit of justice. In Yoder’s view, Jesus’s execution was the penultimate injustice, but Jesus preferred to give himself over to the power of the day, praying for and forgiving those who put him to death. 27 The love 28 of Jesus on the cross seeks neither political outcome nor social justice; Jesus is willing to suffer death in obedience. But Yoder is quick to point out that death on the cross was not a defeat; in God’s hands, it became resurrection and new life. The apparent impotence of love before the powers of the world is laid bare as a deception. Love is triumphant against the powers of sin and death, but this triumph is rooted in God’s actions, in God’s fidelity to those who are faithful to him. Thus, Jesus exercises power: the power of fidelity to God’s providence, rather than a commitment to a particular account of the end of history. Yoder espouses a philosophy of history rooted deeply in the providence of God. Based on his reading of scripture, Yoder makes the case—displayed most clearly in a recent book based on his work, Jesus for President—that God is the master of history, not human beings. One of the complaints God (Yahweh) registers against Israel is that Israel wanted a king to lord over and protect them, and advance their interests. In their desire for a king, the Israelites rejected the first commandment which says there shall be only one God before them. They also rejected a relationship of trust in the providence of God, in spite of the evidence of God’s covenantal promise throughout their history. The result of this turn from God’s providence to that of a king was devastating, culminating in the Babylonian exile. Yoder argues that fidelity to God includes trusting God’s ways, even when we cannot understand them. Here is where Augustine and Yoder seem to share common cause. Where Augustine identifies the propensity of human beings to prefer self to God, Yoder would challenge those who think their motives are pure, when in fact they are parochial. Whereas Augustine might have epistemological concerns about our ability to know the good, Yoder’s concern is that our desire to know the good, and to do what we can to ensure its attainment, can often be a cover for our desire to control the reins of history. To control the reins of history is an ambitious goal. People of good will who want abuse to cease, or desire a less violent world, or want to ensure every child gets a decent education, will work very diligently toward those goals. However, both Augustine and Yoder suggest we are mistaken to say those efforts alone distinguish a Christian, who should be known by their fidelity to the example of Jesus: motivated by love of God and neighbor. Both Augustine and Yoder seem to warn against a human desire to wrest

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control of history away from God. They caution against becoming too easily convinced we are doing God’s will in pursuing particular agendas that seek justice for those who are oppressed. Augustine and Yoder, each in his own way, ask whether Christian discipleship demonstrates fidelity to the example of Jesus, particularly on the cross. The pursuit of justice may revert to the use of coercive power to accomplish one’s goal. 29 Jesus’s way was to love unconditionally, not the use of coercive power. Given this suggestion that Christian discipleship ought not to be blindly directed toward activism and the pursuit of social justice in history, what then is the Church to do? The church has been a vanguard of social justice issues, from slavery and economic justice, to healthcare and peace. Have those efforts been in vain and without worth? Is the church to step back into the isolation of its churches and monasteries, allowing the world to move as it will? Yoder is quick to reject a pietist move in response to this criticism. The question for him is not what the church should do, but what the church should be. As he points out in his critique of Christian revolutionaries, “[it] is not that it is too revolutionary but rather that it is just a new edition of the same old pattern of seeking in the name of God to make history come out right instead of seeking in the train of Christ only to be servant.” 30 The church is to be a servant; it is to live faithfully the example that Jesus set of deep engagement with the people of his time. Jesus engaged in countercultural practices for his time, which included allowing women to sit at his feet as he taught, allowing his disciples to violate the Sabbath in order to eat, touching lepers and healing on the Sabbath. Again, the cross serves to clarify the distinctiveness of Christian discipleship. In the face of injustice, pain, isolation and persecution, the faithful response is enemy love, a powerful corrective to the coercive power of the state. 31 This is what Yoder claims the church must be in its life today: a society of those already living the new way of the Kingdom of God, the way of enemy love. The view that the Christian church and not the state stands in the middle of God’s rule over the world is not only a statement of faith; it is also historical fact. Schools and hospitals, honesty and a work ethic are achievements of Christianity; it is not the state that brought these about. Just as the church of the Middle Ages developed schools and hospitals, so also Christians today can and should be pioneers in the carrying out of ministries that the state, for lack of ideas or interest, is not well-equipped (e.g., voluntary services, nonviolent conflict resolution, humane treatment of those with mental illnesses). And if Christians have a responsibility in terms of general welfare services (which should not be left to the state alone), this is even more true with respect to the central mandate of the Christian church, “to proclaim the virtues of the One who called them into light.” In fact, in terms of its service to the state and to the general welfare, the church serves most effectively and in its own most essential and irreplaceable way when it seriously goes about the business of

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The church’s role is to be a community of people animated by love of neighbor, most especially the enemy, and engaged in activities that make manifest the Kingdom of God inaugurated in the life and death of Jesus. That life and death is characterized most clearly by Jesus’s faithful obedience to the point of death: obedience to a God whose ways are beyond our understanding but hopeful in the promise of God to be faithful to those who love him. POLITICS AND THE CHRISTIAN This essay began with a question about the wisdom of Christians, leaders or non-leaders, engaging in political partisanship in order to advance the realization of values that they identify as core Christian values. Turning to the work of Augustine and John Howard Yoder aimed to provide some guidance to navigate this question. We gather from Augustine that the goal of all work for social justice must be to win the hearts of others for God. It is not sufficient to secure, for example, food, shelter or healthcare for those in need. The Christian is not a social worker nor a philanthropist but one who aims for the conversion of his neighbor. From Augustine’s account, justice clearly begins with the right ordering of the individual, body and soul, to God. There can be no true social justice without the righteousness of the individual soul, characterized by obedience of the body to the soul, and of the soul to God. The Christian must always be attentive to the soul of his neighbor in procuring for that neighbor the goods of the body. Contemporary Christian social justice movements seem to be occupied with procuring the goods of the body, without much attention to the good of the soul. In her criticism of the Paul Ryan budget, Sr. Campbell made no reference to the justice of the souls of those she claimed would be adversely impacted by the proposed budget. Why not? Clearly it is not because Sr. Campbell did not care for the souls of these people. It seems more reasonable to think that the absence of talk about “soul” justice is that the Christian church tradition on which Sr. Campbell is grounded construes the primary Christian responsibility as the work for social justice, to secure the common good, and ensure all people have ready access to their own fulfillment. It is easier to talk about food, employment, peace and respect for human rights than it is to call on all people—oppressors and oppressed—to examine their souls. Augustine reminds us that human dignity requires more than food, employment and healthcare; it requires the nurture of the soul. 33 A further point suggests itself: the exercise of coercive political power will do little to effect change of hearts. If Augustine is correct that conversion

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is the result of God’s grace—an unmerited gift—it is difficult to understand how political coercion can secure conversion. In fact, it seems that pursuing political victory, securing new and different legislation or policy, serves to deflect attention from the true source of a just society: just individuals. Much energy is expended to elect particular individuals, or to influence legislation, that it is tempting to think this is the way to bring the kingdom of God closer to hand. Giving in to that temptation would miss the point of Jesus’s life and death. The Kingdom of God is at hand, already but not yet, inaugurated through the life and death of Jesus, centered on love. His example is not one of political coercion, or lobbying for legislative change, or ensuring one’s intellectual partners sit on the Supreme Court. Jesus’s example is one of fidelity to God’s providential hand in history by loving one’s neighbor, even one’s enemy. The church’s role is not to be focused on lobbying Congress or receiving an invitation to a political party’s convention, but to be an exemplar of the kingdom inaugurated by the suffering servant. The Christian lobbyist (on K Street, the radio, or in the episcopacy) is not the best exemplar of Christian discipleship. The desire to shape political forces so that they favor a particular outcome is analogous to the violation of the first commandment where Israel calls for a king. They wanted to be like other nations, but they were unique: they had Yahweh to care for them. The desire to be like other nations was a rejection of the sovereignty of God in history, as is the desire to move legislation and social policy in some particular direction. This desire places trust in the political process more than in God’s providence. It would be quite reasonable for a reader to think that this essay overreaches in identifying the considerable lobbying efforts of Christian churches with idolatry. Surely, such a reader might wonder, these are good people, motivated by a desire for the safety, health and respect of God’s children. This essay does not dispute the good intentions of those involved in trying to make the world a better place. It does dispute whether those good intentions meet the measure of the Gospel imperative: to love God and to love one’s neighbor. While granting the love of neighbor as the motivating force behind many attempts to move history in a more just direction, we might ask whether this love of neighbor flows from the love of God, with God as the apex of our desire. Is God really the subject of our love if our actions suggest that we need to give God some help, reserving the right to “dabble a bit” to make sure things work out well? More specifically, should a Christian engage in the use of political power to enact laws and policies that enshrine Christian values? The evidence from Augustine and Yoder leans toward a negative answer to these questions if we collapse power into politics and governmental action. As stated earlier, a classical conception of politics, a legacy inherited by Augustine, recognizes the sphere of politics as much broader than the ma-

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chinery of government, including the social organizations that exists outside the family: faith communities, voluntary associations focused on the wellbeing of community life, etc. Yoder and Augustine suggest that political activism—as in legislative lobbying to turn particular Christian virtues into law—is not the proper place for the Christian to engage in politics. In fact, they suggest this manner of addressing the Christian’s role vis-à-vis the state is not the most helpful way to present the relationship. Rather than concerning oneself with whether particular values are realized in the legislative order, the Christian, and by extension the Church, should be concerned with being faithful to the power exercised by Jesus on the cross: fidelity to God’s providence. 34 Instead of the coercive use of political power in one’s attempt to be faithful to the love of neighbor mandated by the gospel, perhaps the Christian community ought to model Jesus’s example of servant-love, of enemy-love. Why not simply engage in the practices that embody Christian values, rather than influencing the state to act on Christian principles? What might result from a situation in which Christian communities strove for fidelity to the example of Jesus? We might find ourselves much closer to a situation where there would be no need for a “Nuns on the Bus” tour or a benediction at a political party’s convention. While Augustine’s theology has been the source of much of this analysis, its conclusion seems to contradict Augustine’s practice as a bishop. He repeatedly appealed to political leaders in order to pursue particular ends: to secure life for condemned prisoners or release for slaves. The clearest example of Augustine’s appeal to coercive power was his request to the Roman Empire to put down the Donatists by violence. One might justify Augustine’s move based on the Donatist association with a group perpetrating great acts of violence against innocent people and rebelling against the Roman colonizers. 35 Although Augustine seemed to regret this decision, he found himself in an untenable position. While conversion cannot be coerced, the safety of the people is imperative. It is well beyond the purview of this essay to tackle but one thread of the many contradictory lines within Augustine’s thought. 36 However, it remains true that for Augustine conversion cannot be coerced; one ought not to use the coercive power of the state to “save souls.” Although the intention of the response to the Donatists was not to save their souls but to maintain peace, the violent response does not seem a faithful testimony to “enemy love.” This contradiction of Augustine’s theory and practice might offer insight into yet another of his teachings, providing wise counsel to those engaged in the work of social justice and political activism: it is not about perfection, but about repentance. 37 The quest for social justice, if centered on Christian discipleship, must be rooted in a love of God and of neighbor. Losing sight of this can lead to the use of coercive political acts as the way to love our neighbor. Despite the temptation, coercive power is not a faithful reflection of the gospel message. While angered by the harm done

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our sisters and brothers, or frustrated at the snail’s pace of reform, or bewildered by the hardheartedness of those in power, Christians need only return to the touchstone of discipleship, the cross, to rededicate themselves, in community, to living in obedience to the God of history. The Gospel of Luke (23:24) offers additional guidance on the repeated occasion of human failure even in the most sincere and authentic efforts to bring about social justice: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk. 23:24). NOTES 1. I am indebted to the feedback of my colleagues at Villanova University who read and discussed this essay in its early stages, as well as provided written feedback on the themes: Peter Wicks, James Wetzel, Brett Wilmot, and Mark Wilson. 2. For more on the Network Lobby, visit http://www.networklobby.org/ where material on the “Nuns on the Bus” tour is also available. Also, visit this Washington Post blog for a taste of the media’s assessment of this phenomenon, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guestvoices/post/nuns-on-the-bus-leader-power-to-the-people---below-the-poverty-line/2012/11/04/ f676c3f2–26c7–11e2–b2a0–ae18d6159439_blog.html 3. See http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/cardinal-timothy-dolan-gives-prolife-prayer-at-dnc/ for a perspective on Cardinal Dolan’s Democratic National Convention benediction. 4. Clark, Mary T., R.S.C.J., “Augustine on Justice,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes (9: 87–94, 1963) 87. Accessed on January 2, 2013 at http://www.patristique.org/sites/patristique. org/IMG/pdf/63_ix_1_2_05.pdf 5. cf. Clark 88. 6. Ibid. 7. Rohr, Richard, O.F.M. Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2008) 14. 8. Clark 88. 9. Clark 89. 10. See commentary, Augustine: Later Works. Selected and translated by John Burnaby (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955) 298. 11. There are political and economic issues involved in the Donatist controversy, rooted in the colonizing activity of the Roman Empire in North Africa; see Augustine: Later Works, 250–258. 12. Augustine: Later Works, 301–302; quotes in this selection are from I John 3: 17–18. 13. cf. Yoder, John Howard. John Howard Yoder: Spiritual Writings. Edited by Paul Marens & Jenny Howell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011) 143. 14. In an essay entitled “Warcraft and the Fragility of Virtue,” delivered originally at the American Academy of Religion Annual Conference on November 22, 1986, G. Scott Davis, arguing in the tradition of Aristotelian virtue ethics, makes the case that virtue is not so much about individual actions, as it is about the “building of a life.” It is not about following rules, as much as it is about choosing with a view to the integrity of one’s life, and the capacity to be proud of what one is making. The difference between acting in accord with justice as opposed to acting from justice is the difference between following rules and building up one’s life as a lover of God. 15. See Raeder, Linda C. “Augustine and the Case for Limited Government.” National Institute for the Humanities, 16: 2, 2003, 94–106. 16. Raeder 96. 17. Ibid. 18. I am grateful to James Wetzel for this insight into this gospel text. 19. As will be suggested later, this account of the Christian acting politically in the City of Man suggests that the state is not the only locus of political power, harkening back to a classical

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conception of politics as coincident with the life of the city, rather than merely the operations of the state. 20. What seems to be rejected, at least in part, by Augustine is Aristotle’s account of virtue ethics and Plato’s idea that the morally worthwhile life rests on one’ s knowledge of the good. 21. Augustine’s own “tolle lege” experience is a perfect example that outer conditions can set the conditions for conversion but do not constitute it. 22. Raeder 103. 23. Ibid. 104 24. Augustine: Later Works, 300. 25. Ibid., 303–305. 26. When justifying the use of state force against the Donatists, Augustine is not motivated primarily by a desire to convert the Donatists, but by a desire to secure the temporal peace that the Donatists threaten. I thank Peter Wicks for clarifying this point. 27. cf. Yoder 35–36. 28. Yoder uses the term “agape” in reference to the love of Jesus but I've changed this to “love” for consistency with its use throughout the essay. 29. Religiously oriented perspectives on the justice issues of the day are quite good at the exercise of power through the media. The stories about the “Nuns on the Bus” tour were very effectively planted in the press by the organization Faith in Public Life. They seemed to influence The New York Times story about the 2013 March for Life in the direction of a call for gun control. See http://www.faithinpubliclife.org/newsroom/press/catholic-leaders-challenge%E2%80%9Cpro-life%E2%80%9D-lawmakers-on-gun-violence-nra-ties/; as well as The New York Times coverage modeled on the press release: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/us/ politics/catholics-raise-issue-of-guns-amid-call-to-end-abortion.html?_r=0. There is nothing unusual about Faith in Public Life's attempts to control the narrative in these ways. Survival in contemporary politics seems to require engaging in fundamentally manipulative activities with regard to the media, justified in the name of producing a laudable outcome. My concern is whether this use of manipulation in pursuit of desired outcomes is an attempt to steer history. I am indebted to Peter Wicks for this insight and example. 30. Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical. Michael G. Cartwright, ed. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1998) 95. 31. One need only think of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, to name a few, who chose to respond to violence with non-violence, with love, to have a sense of how powerful “enemy love” can be. The temptation is to view non-violence as simply another technique in the attempt to control history’s outcome. 32. Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsibility. Translated by Timothy J. Geddart (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2003) 44–45. 33. One can make a similar point about Archbishop Timothy Dolan who champions the cause of the unborn and is hostile to current healthcare legislation. The goal seems to be the pursuit of policy change, not necessarily change of hearts. 34. See Davis, G. Scott. “Warcraft and the Fragility of Virtue,” Soundings 70 (1987) 475–494, for a similar discussion on the ethics of war. Often “necessity” is offered as the justification for an act of war; one can imagine the Christian activist appealing to “necessity” to engage in manipulative practices. With regard to necessity in war, Davis suggests the wrong question is being asked. Rather than wonder what necessity demands, why not wonder what fidelity to one’s character, one’s life as a whole, demands? A similar shift regarding Christian activism may be called for. 35. See Augustine: Later Works for more on this by John Burnaby, p. 251 ff. 36. Augustine offers a rationale for just war, that is, the just use of violence. In light of the way Jesus accepted death non-violently, much work would have to be done to clarify the relationship between Augustine and Yoder. 37. See “Justice, Order and Peace: A Reading of Augustine’s City of God, Book IXI, in the Light of His Conversion Experience,” Karin Heller, Whitworth University. Presented at a conference on the Cardinal Virtues, Viterbo University, La Crosse, WI, April 13, 2007.

Chapter Three

The Philosophical Tenets and Content of Augustine’s Social Doctrine Sergey Trostyanskiy

Through Augustine’s De civitate Dei (CD) run several intermingling themes related to social ethics, political philosophy, eschatology, and soteriology. But the key notions of Augustine’s social doctrine are undoubtedly ius and most particularly iustitia. This essay aims to elucidate the foundational tenets of Augustine’s social thought and unveil the philosophical underpinnings of his theory. It gives special attention to the place of justice in Augustine’s social doctrine. THE CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHICAL MATRIX OF AUGUSTINE’S THOUGHT Beginning with the philosophical underpinnings of Augustine’s CD will help us understand the major premises of his thought. Particularly constitutive for his thought are Cicero’s Republic and the Laws, and yet Augustine’s philosophical commitment was formed predominantly within the intellectual horizon of Neo-Platonism and not that of the academy of the time of Cicero. He gave particular attention in CD to the curriculum of post-Plotinian philosophical development with its emphasis on the commentaries on Plato’s Timaeus. 1 The content of this late Platonic dialogue pertains to the issues of demiurgic activity associated with the ordering of things, giving them a degree of intelligibility and beauty, regarding their nature, modes of “coming-to-be” and so on. These themes mark Augustine’s discourse and more accurately represent its foundational philosophical tenets. Augustine follows an exposition of the subject by the commentaries on the Timaeus. 2 Here the concepts of order and ordering are crucial. We learn 27

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from the commentators that there exists an order of things of this world (i.e., of sensible particulars) ordained by God. Commentators attributed the task of ordering to the Intellect (i.e., the second-god) who organized and beautified things that originally existed in discord, and created the κόσμος, an organized beautiful body endowed with the soul and intellect. And so, “things” before they are given a form are not even things but rather a shapeless extended multitude. The Intellect (i.e., Nous or Logos) performs the ordering and beautification (διακοσμεῖν) of what later “comes-to-be” the universe he crafts (δημιοῦργειν); he is therefore its διακεκοσμηκώς (orderer) and δημιουργός (maker). 3 The Intellect replaces the ugliness of an unorganized extended multitude with the beauty and order of the Intellectual realm according to an intelligible pattern. The order given by the Intellect to sensible particulars is thus a harmonious and beautiful “image” of the intellectual realm. Though Augustine did not completely internalize this origin of the sensible universe since it presupposes an existing unordered multitude, receiving its form and order through the hypostatic intellect, he nevertheless appropriated the base concept of ordering from the commentators. For instance, in Plotinus’ discourse the origin and order of being is understood from the perspective of its hypostatic structure or nature, which also corresponds with the order of the soul, namely that of its phases. So it is in Augustine: “God Himself . . . is the creator of all natures, so also is He the bestower of all powers” (CD V, 9) 4 and “ordainer of all natures” (CD XIX, 13). It is the second hypostasis of the Trinity, or the Logos who is the δημιουργός, the maker of the κόσμος. Yet notably Augustine does not assume an existing multitude as the “matter” or “receptacle” for the Demiurgos. The key notion in this context is order. Augustine defines order as “the distribution, which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place” (CD XIX, 13). He tells us that there is an order of things established by God. 5 It consists of natures (i.e., things created by God) properly allocated in the schema of beings in which each nature has its own place or position. Hence, the notion of “place” allotted by God to a particular “nature” is of a primary importance here. This established order is often depicted as both harmonious (in that various voices complement each other) and necessarily hierarchical. A perfect harmony or concordia of natures manifests order (CD XIX, 16). Such order is from God, whereas lack of order is from God’s enemies. Hence, things of this world relate to each other either harmoniously or in a manner of discord. Order and harmony are thus interrelated. Augustine at times uses expressions like “well-ordered concord” (CD XIX, 13). Overall, Augustine’s conception of order is indebted significantly to post-Plotinian philosophical development. Augustine also understands order as the integrity of the whole with its parts (CD XIX, 13); it has a structural dimension. Here he elaborates on Neo-

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Platonist mereological thought and argues that there exists a unified whole, 6 a complex being which integrates and provides a general principle of coherence to its various parts hierarchically organized. The “position” of the part within this existing whole matters as does that it is a unity and not a “total” or a “sum.” The main implication of Augustine’s concept of order is that a wrong “position” of the part affects the whole and distorts it. Thus, the universe is an ordered unity that is the whole of its parts; and the position of parts within it makes a difference for the being of the whole, or the unified and beautified cosmos. What is the place or “position” of a human being in this grand schema? How does a human being affect this order? According to Plotinus, “nature in its entirety is grounded in virtue” (Ennead I, 2.1), meaning self-subsistent ideas of justice, wisdom, righteousness, and so forth. Their imprints in the world of sensible particulars make this world just, beautiful, and full of other virtues. They are, therefore, the foundations of the established order. Yet, virtue also belongs to the soul and human virtues constitute our likeness to God. As we learn from Plotinus, virtue is also classified as a harmony or natural concordance among the phases of the Soul, and vice as a discord in the soul. 7 Γὰρ συναρμοσθέντα μὲν κατὰ φύσιν τὰ μέρη τῆς ψυχῆς πρὸς ἄλληλα ἀρετή ἐστι (Ennead III, 6. 2). A harmony or discord of the phases is premised upon the “position” (i.e., proper or improper) of each phase within the whole. Thus the higher phases of the soul command the lower ones in order to sustain the hierarchy of phases as it was established from the beginning; this hierarchy presents a harmonious order of the phases of the soul. So it is that virtuous human beings always look up to the intellect in order to understand the intelligible patterns and manifest them in their intentions and actions. By contrast, our perverted orientation to the lower kinds, such as matter or sensual impulses, is representative of sin and vice. Such an orientation normally arises out of ignorance and demonstrates one’s lack of cognitive development. Augustine endorses the ancient conception of virtue. He defines it as the “art of conducting life” (CD XIX, 3) in which “conducting” stands for “ordering.” We learn from Augustine that: true virtue is this: to subordinate all the good things that it makes use of, and all that it does in making good use of good and evil things, and also itself, to that end where our peace shall be so excellent and so great that it cannot be improved or increased. (CD XIX, 10)

Hence, everything temporal should be subordinated to the eternal and everlasting in order to sustain the harmony of the whole. In another place Augustine argues for the cognitive aspect of the human soul, and that “as to virtue itself . . . [it is] not among the primary wants of nature, since it is a later

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addition ushered in by instruction” (CD XIX, 4). He presents the human as a complex entity which unfolds itself gradually and reaches its state of perfection with education and the acquisition of virtues. In this case the role of intellect is crucial; yet, it does not arise as an immediate manifestation of human corporeality, but is acquired more through the labor of intellect. An important aspect of Neo-Platonist theodicy (or justification for God), that is, the presentation of evil and a privation of good, was formative for Augustine’s thought. As Plotinus argued, “[e]vil cannot have place among Beings or in the Beyond-Being; these are good” (Ennead I, 8. 3). Evil in this case can signify both an unqualified non-being and an imperfect manifestation of the Good, the latter case indicating an image of goodness, which is too removed from its archetype and no longer resembles it. But in both cases evil is something that does not belong to “nature” or “authentic existence.” Hence, evil is not nature, its being is privative, that is, the privation of goodness; it does not have its own place in the schema of being; it is not a thing, does not subsist on its own. Plotinus argued that in the Gnostic discourse evil is a thing among other things, and is thus classified as being capable of subsisting on its own. Yet, this amounts to a mere fallacy of reification; hence, he argued, in the Gnostic discourse evil is really a reified concept. 8 The notion of evil, therefore, does not pertain to the issue of being; it is not a metaphysical notion but a concept whose origin is purely phenomenological, having to do with our epistemological incapacity to grasp the wholeness of being—with the result that we are ignorant and incapable of apprehending the grand schema as it was ordained by the supreme Intellect. Because our palpable faculties of understanding fail to see the true order of things, we may erroneously attribute self-subsistence to that which is not self-subsistent. This was the mistake of the Gnostics. Yet, on a psychological level, the order of the faculties of the soul and of human dispositions or orientations, by being perverted, leads a human being astray from virtue and harmony. This, says Augustine, is the origin of evil as a phenomenal reality. This is sin, namely an attachment to the lower realities, a disposition that perverts the natural order of the soul’s faculties and dispositions. Evil of soul (Augustine’s particular concern) is thus the wrong orientation of a human being in which the lower orders and disposes the higher. We also learn from Augustine that there is only one “thing” that may distort the pre-ordained order that is “will” (or human and angelic deliberation). Because God is the creator of all natures but not the creator of all wills since “wicked wills are not from him, being contrary to nature, which is from Him” (CD XII, 3), human and angelic agencies are responsible for evil will, or mala voluntas, and distort the order of things. It is a human and angelic vice.

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Augustine argues that human (and angelic) will is not determined by anything. It follows that the evil will does not have an efficient cause (CD XII, 6), that is some sort of nature that exists and makes a human being act in a certain way, such as being bound by an existing causal chain. Evil will is thus “made out of nothing” (Ibid.), it initiates new causal chains which distort the order of nature. They pervert the “position” of the parts within the unity of the whole as God ordained it. Hence, the defection of the will is sin and evil (these two terms are thus identical since evil is not a “thing” on its own but is a perverted disposition of the soul, or sin), because it is contrary to the order of nature, and an abandonment of that which has supreme being, for that which has less (CD, XIX, 8). Augustine located the origin of perversion in superbia, or pride, which is a perverse imitation of God. It distorts God’s order so as to impose its own “unjust” order (CD, XIX, 12). Here Augustine’s thought comes close to Plotinus’ conception of τόλμα, that is, an act of self-assertion, a deliberation to separation, and the will to subsist independently. Hence, “ἀπχὴ μὲν οὖν αὐταῖς τοῦ κακοῦ ἡ τόλμα” (Ennead V, 1. 1). On the other hand, a classical conception of the body as the source of sin and evil is operative here. Augustine speaks of incarnate conditions as the source of disorder and perversion. Thus, a human being, even in the pursuit of virtue, “is yet, ‘pressed down by the corruptible body’; so long as it is in this mortal (i.e., incarnate) condition, it has not perfect authority over vice . . .” (CD XIX, 27). Augustine presents the bodily condition as the cause of vice and hence evil. Though Augustine uses a citation from Wisdom ix. 15 (perhaps to make his thought correspond to Biblical tradition), the concept here is purely classical. We also learn from Augustine that “nature” is always good; it is a reflection of divine goodness. Hence, Augustine argues, “not even the nature of the devil himself is evil, so far as it is nature; but perversity makes evil . . . he did not remain in the tranquility of order, yet did not thereby flee from the power of the ordainer” (CD XIX, 13). The origin and essence of evil is thus privative. The CD and Confessions perfectly manifest this stream of thought. 9 Yet this classification of evil essentially denies the biblical message, which takes the reality of evil very seriously. Augustine was indeed well aware of the incapacity of the classical definition of evil to fully express the essence of its Christian understanding. Even so, he endorsed a classical understanding of the subject but with certain qualifications. According to the classical ethical matrix, the final end of all rational creatures is the Good. 10 Augustine speaks of the Highest Good (Cicero’s Summum Bonum) of all rational creatures, of their final end, and not unexpectedly locates it in the Christian Triune God. 11 God, he says, is the source of all being and the ultimate object of desire for all rational creatures. Thus the unification with this object of desire is the ultimate, though perhaps unattainable, end for human beings. Augustine neither thinks of virtue as the

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Highest Good nor even as a means to attain the Highest Good. He argues that virtues and virtuous behavior have only a limited role in the attainment of the Good. Virtue is a result of God’s grace operative in a particular human being but is not itself the source of goodness. Augustine argues that what is desired for its own sake in the context of social life is neither virtue, nor pleasure, nor a combination of both, but rather peace. Thus, “[w]e might say, therefore, of peace, as we have said of the eternal life, that it is the end of all our good” (CD XIX, 11). According to Augustine, peace is the Summum Bonum and the final end of social life. What is peace? How do we attain this peace? Is it a sort of pleasure properly qualified? Augustine defines peace as an ordered proportionment, repose or agreement of the parts within the whole order of things. He argues that peace holds things together because it is has order and structural hierarchy. Thus, [t]he peace of the body, therefore, is an ordered proportionment of its components . . . the peace of the irrational soul is an ordered repose of the appetites; the peace of the rational soul is the ordered agreement of knowledge and action . . . peace between mortal man and God is an ordered obedience in the faith under an everlasting law; peace between men is an ordered agreement of mind . . . the peace of all things is a tranquility of order. (CD XIX, 13)

Peace, therefore, is a harmonious order of the components of a complex whole and the foundation of their coherence. The application of peace also concerns the structure of human beings (i.e., body, soul, their faculties, etc.), the relationship between a human being and God, and the relationship between human beings. Hence, we may observe that Augustine’s definition of peace replicates that of virtue. Augustine argues that the removal of peace/ virtue is accompanied by the feeling of pain and the acquisition of peace/ virtue is supplemented by joy. 12 Hence, peace is well correlated with pleasure and the lack of peace with pain. This feeling of pain is also the result of punishment of the sinner, as on a larger social scale the pain caused by social discord is also punishment. For instance, slavery, not being part of social order, is nevertheless a necessary punishment for the sinner. Thus, “the condition of slavery is justly imposed on the sinner” (CD XIX, 15). The same concept is applied to the sinful victims of wars and is classified as “just” since it constitutes the condition of punishment of the sinners. Hence, sin brings about slavery and war. For that reason “slavery as a punishment is also ordained by that [divine] law” (Ibid.). The same is said of war itself. All pain or evil is thus the result of sin. Augustine is not much concerned with what today we would call “social justice.” He simply thinks of social inequality as the result of sin and as a sort of punishment. Because this results from perverted volition and action, on the part of the sinner and of his predecessors, there is again a sort of soterio-

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logical or redemptive argument involved. After all, “social evil,” among other manifestations of evil, is not completely evil but also good, at least “from the point of view of the cosmos as a whole.” 13 As we learn from the ancients, any societal structure is rooted either in the pattern of “nature” and hence replicates an order established by God, or is founded upon some type of agreement or social convention, or represents a combination of both. Augustine insists that human society is not established upon the pattern of nature but has its sole origin in human convention in regard to an object they love (CD XV, 22). The objects of love of the policy makers and the general public to a certain degree lay out the foundation of societal structures. Hence, no “nature” seems to be involved. Since the origin of society is conventional, it does not follow the order of nature. Hence, it is always somehow perverted. Yet, the ultimate end of rational creatures is God, and the intelligible pattern introduced by God to the society of human beings is rooted in nature and hence is part of the order and eternal law of God. Human beings in their social endeavor strive to bring order and beauty of the intelligible realm into their social life. And they fail. Why? Augustine speaks of a perverted order of love in order to substantiate his arguments on social structure. This perverted love, or amor sui, is identical to, or rooted in, pride. It is really Plotinus’ τόλμα that here underlies Augustine’s argument on social structure. Therefore, perverted human “intentionality” is the more immediate foundational pillar of society. We can conclude that Augustine inherited from the classical tradition one of the patterns of thought characteristic for CD. This pattern gives a special role to the Intellect in ordering the universe and giving it its general form and coherence in accordance with the intelligible pattern. This relates to the physical constitution of the cosmos and, perhaps, its social amalgamation. The cosmos is a unified whole organized in a structured way; hence, the role or “position” of the part of this whole makes a difference for the being of the whole. This classical pattern of thought is premised upon the concept of virtue (which again has multiple dimensions including those of the physical and social realms). Virtues of the soul and virtuous behavior of a human being make the foundations of a well-organized society. However, a particular society can be also formed upon a social convention. In this case, the foundation of societal structures is not necessarily “nature” but more immediately human “intentionality” or “community of wills” which does not necessarily follow nature and can thus be perverted. Hence, it may not be virtuous but rather take “self-interest” or “pride” or any number of vices as its foundation and structural pillar.

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THE BIBLICAL MATRIX AND AUGUSTINE’S ESCHATOLOGY Though Augustine endorses the classical philosophical tradition, and though it constitutes some foundational premises of his thought, this tradition was not the only tenet of Augustine’s social doctrine. Another leitmotif dominating his discourse is that of biblical eschatology. This approach revolves around the ideas of fall, corruption, and the subsequent restoration of humanity at the moment of eschaton, the final summation of all things under the judgment of God. This stream of thought is established upon the apocalyptic literature, in particular the book of Revelation. The political powers, dominions and principalities represent the forces of evil, and the Church of Christ which consists of the martyrs, confessors, and other faithful, represents the power of God. Here, we have a rigid juxtaposition of two principalities and their members—those who belong to God and those who are excluded from God’s presence and will never join the celestial parade. They temporarily coexist in earthly history; yet, at the moment of transition from the historical to the a-temporal—that is at the point of eschaton—the final judgment of Christ will separate them forever. This eschatological matrix found its systematic analysis and elucidation in Tyconius, a Donatist theologian of the late fourth to early fifth century. 14 His Commentary on the book of Apocalypse 15 and his Book of Rules 16 established the conceptual pillars upon which North African apocalyptic theology and exegesis operated since. Augustine inherited this matrix from Tyconius and further elaborated on the subject. It finds its most explicit account in the CD where Augustine juxtaposed two metaphysical realms: the city of God (civitas Dei), represented by the un-fallen angels and the saints, and the “earthly” city (civitas terrena) or “city of man” represented by the fallen angels and earthly human beings. Yet, it is quite clear that the civitas terrena transcends the boundaries of the phenomenal realm, and membership in this invisible civitas is a matter of moral choice. It follows that the phenomenal societal realm (which can also be named as civitas terrene) is not identical to the civitas terrena proper and represents the place where both “cities” temporarily co-exist (CD XI ff). Hence, the structure of reality according to Augustine’s biblical matrix appears more complex than that of the classical one. It now consists of two invisible “cities” and the “in-between” social realm in which they overlap. Yet this “in-between” phenomenal realm functions not as a mediating link but as a space in which both cities somehow temporarily co-exist without intermingling. In the context of biblical thought the notions of order and ordering have a limited place. Though we learn about the ways in which God ordained the world, we cannot contemplate this order since it was subverted long before human beings left the stage of complete innocence. Hence, it has not been

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realized in the history of human society. The cosmic catastrophe associated with the fall of angels and human beings completely perverted certain aspects of the structure of this realm (though not its physical constitution). Hence, the concept of order is of a marginal significance here. It refers to the reality associated with the restoration of primordial order. Until the ἀποκατάστασις the notion of order is ephemeral, “coming-to-be” and “ceasing-to-exist” immediately (CD XIX, 13). Again, its significance here is rather eschatological. Its existence requires a direct interference of God, his Judgment, and the separation of the good from the evil. In the Book of Revelation, the idea of millenarianism gives us a hint of the possibility of God’s order in this realm. Yet, Augustine did not follow a literalist pattern of scriptural interpretation (characteristic for certain church fathers) but rather took the allegorical method of Tyconius 17 to accentuate an unbridgeable gap between the temporal and eschatological realities. 18 Therefore, he concluded, such order cannot be achieved in this temporal realm. According to this matrix, a harmonious state of existence in Paradise at the very earliest stages of human history had become a subject of hope without any possibility of re-attainment. Paradise no longer has a place in actual historical reality but had become an ideal so far removed from the actual state of affairs 19 that we can only contemplate it intellectually. The structure of wholes and parts and the “position” of each part within the whole originally ordained schema had been so subverted that no reasonable mereology can be established above what is left of it. What is left of this order does not give us any hope of such harmonious co-existence. The role of virtues in this eschatological schema is also marginal. Instead of virtues and their role in the schema of being, we learn about the notions of divine law and human obedience in the Bible. Virtues do not represent any blueprint of the divine realm. Hence, justice, wisdom, and so on, are not thought of as some kind of self-subsisting intellectual entities in which humans participate. Their role is limited to habitual social norms and precepts. In this matrix, faith is placed above virtue and is made into its necessary and sufficient condition. Thus, Augustine says: “the very virtues that it [the soul] thinks to possess, and by means of which it rules the body and the vices in order to obtain or keep any object whatsoever, if it does not subordinate them to God, are themselves vices rather than virtues” (CD XIX, 25). Referring to the Stoics, Augustine refutes those who think that “virtues are true and honorable when they are made subject to themselves and are sought for no further end” (Ibid.), since as such they are instead vices. The reason for such judgment is the incapacity of a human being to be good or just by following conventional precepts. Being good or just requires God’s grace. Therefore, the notions of justice and wisdom here do not entertain the classical conceptual content.

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It follows that “true justice (i.e., human obedience to divine law and God’s grace operating in a human being), has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ” (CD II, 21). An “apparent justice,” on the other hand, is a mere precept and the rule of conduct according to the human law. Thus, two sets of human states and dispositions associated with human excellence are at times designated by the same name; yet, they are merely homonyms, with one unambiguously subordinated to the other. Here goodness or good deeds stand first for human obedience to divine commandments and commands. The compliance with norms and precepts introduced by human legislators (i.e., civic virtue) can supplement good deeds and work in accord with them, yet at times, may appear irreconcilable. For instance, the sacrifice of Isaac is a good deed that emerges as a result of divine command (CD I, 21). Yet, from the standpoint of the moral precepts of the city of man, it may not appear virtuous unless, Augustine may say, committed by the prince or a man of power, the one excluded from the necessity of following the precepts (since the source of law is not the subject of law). Overall, Augustine concludes that though virtue “claims the highest place among human goods” its activity is rather a “perpetual war with vices” (XIX 4). This matrix is more dualistic than we might expect. Here evil is not a mere phenomenal reality of human, perhaps, collective consciousness (characterized by its limited epistemological power). It is rather a real power, which manifests itself in an existing society, a reality with an unambiguous self-sustenance. This biblical image of evil is far from being of a purely privative origin. Moreover, its power is so explicitly real in this realm of created things that no question of its privative origin comes about in the scope of biblical studies. The origin of the earthly city is conventional and is set upon perversions and evil dispositions. Hence, the community of will in a society does not indicate a harmonious order. This comes as no surprise once we learn from Augustine who the founder of this city actually was. It follows that it is set upon the community of wills of the fallen creatures (both angelic and human) which cannot and will not follow the pattern of nature or an intelligible model of God. And yet, the original goodness of nature of all beings is such that its imprint always remains in the soul (CD X, 29). Thus even an evil communion of wills, according to Augustine, in a sense replicates this harmony, though in as perverted a form as it can be. We see that classical eudemonism is almost totally absent from this matrix. Happiness for human beings is here synonymous with living under God’s law and having hope in God’s promises. Augustine usually contemplates the notion of peace as some sort of foundation of pseudo-happiness, real happiness pointing to the (restored and healed) world under the principality of the Risen Lord. On the other hand, peace of “this world,” which is

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the ultimate end of human beings on earth, is not that of the tranquility of an unattainable order of God’s grace and eternal bliss, but the inner calm of a soul living under the divine commandments. Even so, the reality of this world is such that peace of this kind is rarely attained: it is a luxury rather than a day-to-day reality. Thus, temporal social peace is apparently a mere illusion. On the other hand, even in its ephemeral state, it is a valuable resource, which can be used to sustain this temporal existence (CD XIX, 14). Finally, for Augustine, the spiritual foundation of this earthly city is the worship of the demons. It finds its perfect manifestation in the acts of propitiation of the Roman gods (classified by Augustine as demons), which are “so wanton, so impure, so immodest, so wicked, so filthy . . . so detestable and alien from every religious feeling, these fabulous and ensnaring accounts of the criminal actions of the gods” (CD II, 27), that Roman people learn from their childhood the pattern of these actors. Such “gods” drive virtues away from one’s soul. Augustine notes in this regard that such a spiritual foundation necessarily marks the state of existence of human beings who populate this city. According to this matrix, nothing positive can be said about such earthly existence. It is indeed misery and suffering because it exists under the domain of the powers and principalities whose membership is unequivocally attributed to the civitas terrena proper, and the role of the civitas Dei in the earthly life is marginal; it is the civitas peregrinans on earth. All good is associated with hope and eschatological expectations (CD XV, 18). This apocalyptic pattern of thought came out of political struggle of both Jews and early Christian communities with the Roman Empire which represented the most vivid manifestation of evil and was regarded as orchestrated by the Satan himself through his agents, the earthly princes and emperors. Earthly existence, therefore, is marked by an imperial domination whose origin is evil, and so it has a very distinctive historical foundation. Augustine clearly positions political authority within the city of man. He gives an account of its “terrestrial” origin as exemplified by the city of Rome. He argues that a perverted faith in the cults of demons and emperors initially conditioned the status of such a city (CD VIII, 18ff.). Augustine’s historical review of the city of man gives us a general schema that can be applied to any of the other historical powers (such as Babylon, Egypt, and so on). Augustine’s account of Rome makes for grim reading. According to the account, the nation that was soon to become “The Romans,” came from Asia Minor to the peninsula (Apennines) where there was little space. They clashed with and slaughtered the locals to create enough space to accommodate their needs. The founding fathers of the City, therefore, were never peaceful. Their very birth was the result of fornication committed by their mother, a supposedly chaste vestal priestess. It was thus not unexpected that at a certain point they fell into even greater competition among themselves

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and, being driven by pride and vainglory, tried to compete against each other. 20 The story of the rise of Rome firmly places it within the corrupt civitas terrena. Augustine classifies all such imperial powers in which there is no true piety and justice as “great robberies” (CD IV, 4). Hence, in a world of this kind there is neither justice nor bliss but only an expansion of misery and suffering. Augustine clearly did not think of the Christian rulers as being capable of subverting this pattern and substantively altering its trajectory. This was quite contrary to the case of Eusebius of Caesarea who built his political theology (as Paul did in his epistles) upon the notion of the fundamental goodness of civil authorities, and their divinely ordained power, and especially looked to the Christian emperors as the originators of peace, social justice, and the defenders of Christian virtues in a larger political realm. 21 Augustine’s and Eusebius’s concepts represent two diverging paradigms of political theology of Christians at this time, a tension that remains in Christian political thought even up to the present day. In western Christian thought Augustine’s matrix is still often applied to more contemporary historical events. In Christian thought influenced by the Byzantine imperial experience, however, the notion of an imperial power directed by evangelical principles, serving as the sustainer of justice, rights, and virtues is also very much a theological current. The Eastern Church still aspires to this matrix in its political theology and has always regarded the apocalyptic thought presented in the book of Revelation with deep suspicion. 22 Where does internal Church authority fit into this pattern of analysis? When civil authorities fail to command properly and with justice, due to their intrinsic corruption (since Augustine says they succumb to all possible vices), would it not follow that the Church itself is the domain that should command the field of governance and thus represent the kingdom of Christ on earth? We might imagine, in this context, how easily the idea of theocracy could have entered western Christian political theology; namely the idea that church should be situated above all civil authorities, so as to represent a mirror image of the Eastern ideal of the High-Priest King, the Tsar or Christian Emperor as the governing head of both church and state. Interestingly enough (considering he was himself a bishop) Augustine’s discourse does not provide us with any trace of such conceptions. We can conclude that Augustine inherited this pattern of thought characteristic in the De civitate Dei from Biblical eschatology by means of his reading of Tyconius. Here the notions of order and a harmonious state of existence have a marginal role as far as the reality of this world is concerned. This is no surprise as Augustine situates such a “real world” within the dominion of the fallen angels and sinners. The impossibility of instantiating the divinely pre-ordained order is clearly accentuated by Augustine. The positive role of virtues and the leavening effects of virtuous behavior are also relatively insignificant in this pattern of thought; even though at times they

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are assigned a subsidiary role. Augustine approaches the “nature” of virtues as being that of precepts of the human law of co-habitation. Moreover, certain groups of people seem to be excluded from the necessity of following these precepts. The reality of evil is very much accentuated; evil is presented as a real power, which spiritually dominates everything in the societal realm of the earthly “city.” Therefore, its social and political structure is such that any member of the other city, namely the City of God, is simply a stranger in this realm. He or she is destined to maintain obedience to God while living in the domain of evil. Such a pattern of thought has a very different origin and conceptual content to anything we find in a classical matrix. Even so, it is also intuitively clear to the reader of the CD that in this grand intellectual project of the late Augustine both patterns of thought have their proper place and to a degree co-exist. Their synthesis defines the uniqueness of the book, and also explains the tensions one can detect throughout. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that a similar tension can also be detected in the later scholarship. CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARSHIP AND THE “SCHOOLS” OF INTERPRETATION M. Ruokanen offers an intelligent and lucid exposition of the existing tension in regard to Augustine’s social thought in his Theology of Social Life in Augustine’s De civitate Dei. Ruokanen argues that there exist two distinct schools of interpretation of the content of CD; namely, the “traditional school” whose origins go as far back as medieval literature, and the “modern” school whose roots can be traced to early twentieth-century AngloAmerican scholarship and mid-twentieth-century German thought. They, in a sense, represent the two diverging patterns of interpretation of Augustine’s masterpiece, which at times appear incompatible. Ruokanen delineates between these schools and marks the unique features of each school in the following way. He argues that the former “school” “understands Augustine’s concept of civitas,” in terms of concrete immanent reality: civitas Dei, the city of God, is identified with the church and civitas terrena, the earthly or terrestrial city, with naturally good or neutral social or political bodies.” 23 One offshoot of the “traditional school’s” interpretation of civitas is the absence of the eschatological tension clearly present in Augustine’s treatise. The means of dissolving the eschatological aspect of Augustine’s thought is found in the notion of natural moral law (which links the two cities). This law is intrinsic to natural life and hence can be apprehended universally by the rational faculty. By implication, this law can be implemented in the life of any particular human being, wherever they may be. Moreover, the laws of the state reflect or manifest this same natural moral law. It follows that there

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is a continuity between the two cities which allows for the reality of the city of God even in the terrestrial realm. In this context some scholars, Ruokanen argues, saw “the terrestrial city as the material which is formed by the city of God; the good but yet imperfect mode of human social life is perfected by God’s revelation and grace.” 24 By implication, “the secular state constitutes a naturally good institution” 25 and political authority is understood as being founded upon the solid pillars of “the just order of nature given in the creation.” 26 The possibility of instantiating the ordained schema of law is therefore affirmed. The mereological foundation of such thought seems to allow for harmony or a proper position of the parts and whole within the given schema of beings. Hence: a lower entity is subjected to the higher . . . political authority and the state are seen either as a part of the genuine order of the original creation or at least as a divine ordination for the maintenance of life after the Fall. In both cases the state is based on justice, constituted in the harmonious order of God’s creation and perceived through reason. 27

In this context Ruokanen rightly inferred that, according to this school, Augustine’s thought is “in harmony with classical philosophical social thought: a just political state makes a virtuous life possible; the good of the individual presupposes a rightly organized political society.” 28 Thus, Augustine’s social thought corresponds well enough with that of Plato, Cicero, and others, since it is established upon the notion of “objective absolute justice.” 29 Importantly, the church is understood as “the embodiment of civitas Dei on earth.” 30 So much for the classical reading. The “modern” interpreters, on the other hand, have noted that Augustine was at odds with Cicero’s definition of political society and purged the notion of justice from it. Yet, “[a] crucial turning point in the history of the interpretation of the CD is the rediscovery of the eschatological character of Augustine’s doctrine of the civitates.” 31 Among many ramifications of this rediscovery was the one that denied a “positive relation between the earthly city, represented by political societies, and the heavenly city . . .” wrote F.E. Cranz, 32 who argued that even Christianized Rome is still a Babylon (i.e., the city of man). Hence, the link between Augustine and classical thought was loosened even to the extent of being completely dissolved. The power of reason to comprehend “the ground of justice” 33 was questioned and the role of the natural order was marginalized. Justice, in turn, was understood as a “transcendental concept” 34 which cannot lay the foundation for earthly societal structures. Finally, the notion of sin was presented as the key term to decipher the nature of coercive social power. Ruokanen defended the “modern” interpretation of Augustine’s social thought, arguing that “Augustine is a biblical theologian whose interest is in

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salvation history, in the theological analysis of our existence in the world.” 35 Ruokanen contrasted the biblical approach of Augustine with the classical, proposing that Cicero’s humanism could not constitute the tenets of Augustine’s social doctrine since it was fundamentally incapable of recognizing the existence of original sin. He argued that the main theoretical concepts of Augustine (peace, justice, right, etc.) are eschatological concepts, which point to a reality that far transcends this phenomenal realm and leads in the direction of the eschaton. Hence such principles do not represent the reality of this earthly city and cannot be validated in this realm. AUGUSTINE’S CONCEPT OF IUSTITIA AND ITS INSTANTIATION IN SOCIALEM VITAM This analysis of contemporary scholarly views on the subject at stake delineates certain points of contention in the academy of our era. Yet, a question remains regarding Augustine’s concept of justice and its philosophical underpinnings: Does not Augustine’s thought show us an unequivocal synthesis (or at least a compromise) of both strains of thought? The social thought of Cicero was surely formative for the development of Augustine’s social theory. Indeed, many themes of the CD came from, or were directly inspired by, Cicero. Augustine, for example, carefully analyzed the main themes of the Republic (among other works he read of Cicero) 36 and aimed at discerning its content and separating its true elements from its fallacious premises. The key notion of Cicero’s grand project was justice. This notion constituted the conceptual pillar of Cicero’s social thought. What is justice? Can a particular society be just or at least imperfectly manifest justice? Cicero’s concept of justice was indebted to classical thought. He apprehended justice through the notion of the universal law of nature, which included both physical and ethical constitution of the universe (Rep. I, 27). He defined law as “the highest reason inherent in nature” (Laws I, 18). This law is ordained by God who is its sole “author, proposer, and interpreter” (Rep. III, 33). This law is divine and eternal and all human legislation should be in accord with this law in so far as the human capacity of reasoning allows for apprehending and hence crafting this eternal law into the rule of conduct for the citizens of the state. He argued that justice is an element of the law of nature, in other words is a “real, not merely a putative” thing (Ibid. III, 18). Justice is not a merely political phenomenon of a contingent origin; its necessity is due to the very structure of reality, namely nature as God established it. Thus, the origin of justice “must be derived from law” (Laws I, 19) since “law is a force of nature, the intelligence and reason of a wise man, and the criterion of justice and injustice” (Ibid.). We find various manifestations of

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justice in the life of human beings and in societal structures. What is justice then? Cicero defined justice as the assignment to every man his due according to the long lasting distributive conception of justice originated centuries earlier. This definition presents justice as a mind-independent entity, as an element of the schema of being ordained by God, 37 responsible for the proportional distribution of parts within the unified whole of the cosmos. Yet, justice also constitutes an element of the rationality of man implanted in him by God. It is thus a virtue, a human excellence, instantiated in a particular individual. Cicero thought of virtues or moral excellences as “nothing other than the completion and perfection of nature” (Ibid. I, 25). He argued that justice is the foundation of all virtues and is always “sought for itself” (Ibid. I, 48), and never for a prize. Hence the life of a just man is the ultimate good of human beings since it follows the law of nature (Ibid. I, 56). 38 Augustine endorsed and internalized Cicero’s conception of justice. Yet, he made a very significant amendment to Cicero’s concept of political society. Cicero’s social and political reality was formed by and within the historical circumstances of the Roman Empire. The key term of social thought at the time was not unexpectedly “republic” since the political structure of the empire at the time was classified in such terms. Augustine notably provides the reader with an analysis of Cicero’s concept of “republic,” a political society founded upon the notion of justice. He pointed out that according to Cicero “[The republic] cannot be governed without the most absolute justice” (CD II, 21) . . .” nor even continue to exist” (Ibid.). Augustine noted that Scipio, the main interlocutor of Cicero’s Republic, gave “his own brief definition of a republic, such that it is the weal of the people.” Thus “[Scipio] defines “the people” as being not every assemblage or mob, but an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests” (Ibid.). From this definition of republic it follows that: a republic, or “weal of the people” then exists only when it is well and justly governed, whether by a monarch, or an aristocracy, or by the whole people. But when the monarch is unjust . . . or the aristocrats are unjust . . . or the people themselves are unjust . . . then the republic is not only blemished . . . but by legitimate deduction from those definitions, it altogether ceases to be. For it could not be the people’s weal when a tyrant factiously lorded it over the state; neither would the people be any longer a people if it were unjust, since it would no longer answer the definition of a people—“an assembly associated by a common acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests.” (Ibid.)

Here Augustine notes that according to the definitions provided “Rome was never a republic because true justice had never a place in it” (Ibid.). Hence,

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Augustine demolishes Cicero’s political theology by exposing the false implication within it. Augustine in this context takes on the theme of the Republic of Cicero and, using an old fable, argues that: “Justice being taken away, then, what are the kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?” (CD IV, 5). Augustine continues by saying that the Roman Empire, “by subduing many nations had already grown great and an object of universal dread” (CD IV, 5). Rome, he argued, has been a latrocinium, an assembly of brigands, since the time of its inception. Augustine proceeds by analyzing the formation and historical trajectory of Rome to substantiate his thesis. He extends this thought to all imperial powers and concludes the imperial structure of the Romans cannot accommodate the ideal of orderly organized society in which a proper place is assigned to each member of the civitas. The members of such a society, having been stripped of their “peopleness” by the unjust principalities, and having been incapable of pursuing their well-being, are no longer a people but an assembly of brigands. Thus, the political imperial realm is totally deprived of justice. It follows that the core of Cicero’s concept of justice may be true but certain inferences associated with it are fallacious (for instance, the inference that Rome is a republic according to the definition of republic provided). How did Augustine understand justice? Augustine’s definition of justice in the CD runs as follows: “[w]hat of justice, whose function is to assign to each man his due, whereby there is located in man himself a certain right order of nature, so that soul is subordinated to God, and flesh to soul, and therefore both soul and flesh to God?” (CD XIX, 4) Here Augustine rehearses the ancient definition found also in Cicero. The connecting link between justice and order is also of a classical origin and can as well be detected in Cicero’s treatises. Augustine’s discourse at this point demonstrates that justice is immanent; its imperfect existence is due to the lust of flesh, and other moral failings (CD XIX, 4). Yet, the presence of justice in this realm is nevertheless affirmed. Weaknesses of human epistemological capacities, which prevent human beings from structuring their actions according to the laws and from finding their proper “positions” within the schema of beings ordained by God, may be overcome by God’s grace (i.e., by God’s external help). It follows that there is a degree of likeness between “true” justice and the justice present in our realm, and also that “true” justice can be realized even though with a certain degree of imperfection in this realm sooner or later (perhaps with the help of God’s grace). A sense of justice implanted in human beings and manifested by human conscience perfectly substantiates this argument. Yet, Augustine also notes that “the fact is, true justice has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ . . .” (CD IV, 5), that is, in the City of God. Therefore, according to the “modern” school of inter-

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pretation, the concept of justice used by Augustine in this context is transcendental and the manifestation of such justice in the phenomenal realm is utterly impossible. It points to the reality of the eschaton and to the city whose ruler is God himself. What does it mean to say that justice is not present (or cannot be present) in this realm (one that is totally dominated by the imperial power), or, at least, that it is not present in the political realm, that it transcends this realm (and is thus a transcendental ideal)? I began with an assumption that Augustine had a unitary conception of justice in mind, that is, the one propagated by Cicero. And yet, as P. Curbelié in La Justice dans ‘La cité de Dieu’ rightly notes the word of iustitia designates a number of diverging conceptions within De civitate Dei pointing to quite heterogeneous realities, of which two are of primary significance. The first concept, found in Cicero among others, is of classical origin, which Curbelié calls legal (juridique). According to this concept “[t]he just man is one who is endowed with the moral virtue of justice.” 39 Hence, justice is virtue of a particular kind. Yet, the second meaning of the word operative in the CD has a different conceptual content. It “can be designated as religious: we then distinguish, following Saint Paul, between the man of the Old Testament, who tries to stay loyal to the Law, and the man of the New Testament, who allows himself to be led by the Spirit which inhabits him.” 40 Therefore, according to this concept the just man is one who obeys God’s commands given to him by divine Law or Spirit. Here the notions of divine command and human obedience determine the content of the word “justice.” It appears that the biblical concept of justice, which is established upon the notion of God’s command and human obedience, can hardly be reconciled with the classical one. Indeed, the justice of God—witnessed by God’s command to slaughter Isaac or to commit a massacre on the Amalekites, or to be merciful in other instances—is far beyond the limitations of human understanding. Certain commands simply appear inconceivable to human beings (as a group) and some commands are directed exclusively to particular individuals. In both cases, the application of divine commandments and the possibility for the commands to function as moral precepts for all people is out of the question. This conception of justice shares the name only with the classical one without being isomorphic to it. This understanding of justice can rarely be attained in the phenomenal realm; hence, the possibility of its realization is not denied but allotted a very limited sphere of application (i.e., to the prophets and other human beings who have some sort of direct contact with God). But, if we look at the divine commandment from the perspective of law, we can also discern a certain appeal to their universal application. The law of God cannot be contingent upon certain occurrences or non-occurrences. It cannot have a limited sphere of application and be for some and not for others. It is communicated to humanity in an unconditional form. It demands

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an absolute obedience and is not presented as a matter of moral choice but rather as duty. It is an imperative that demands an absolute compliance with what is sanctioned or proscribed. Hence, it is one and the same law which is ordained for all. The Ten Commandments, for instance, represent such law. Perhaps at this point we may distinguish between the commandments with more and less universal application, the former extending their domain to the whole humanity while the latter aiming at particular individuals wellpleasing to God. Important in this context, however, is the fact that in the scope of the biblical-eschatological matrix the very possibility of fulfilling the commandments (i.e., of being “just”) is questioned; such a possibility firstly directs our minds toward the realm of the eschaton. Its applicability in the phenomenal realm is implausible (since this realm is a predominant jurisdiction of Satan who is “the king of this world”). According to Augustine, we have at least two ways of apprehending justice: transcendent and immanent. These two concepts of justice are perhaps not incompatible, yet they certainly have different origins and contents, one being indebted to classical thought and the other arising from the biblical-eschatological matrix. What is the rationale behind the compromise of conflicting models in Augustine’s thought? How should we understand the notion of justice and its application in the world? Does not his bifurcating thought show some cognitive gaps in the theory? My conjecture regarding the aporiai posited that Augustine the rhetorician, persuading “the many” in the truth of Christian religion, was quite flexible in choosing the means of persuasion. Indeed, in this endeavor he followed the trail of many other theologians of his time, picking and choosing categorical taxonomies accepted by both pagan and Christian contemporaries and utilizing them according to the proposed goal and context. This method allowed Augustine to construct a very subtle discourse on the subject at stake wherein diverging patterns of thought contributed various building blocks, that is, arguments and conceptions, to the theory. Therefore, Augustine’s social thought represents an amalgamation of heterogeneous conceptions fused together rhetorically. Augustine’s social theory was deeply formative for the Latin Church and for western thought in general. However, the degree of influence exercised by his City of God, and the exact meaning of that program it contains, is far from clear cut. As a result, the reception of Augustine’s doctrine has been quite peculiar and, at times, divergent. Nevertheless, what is clear to the reader is the co-existence of two (or more) patterns of thought in Augustine’s discourse: the classical and the biblical-eschatological. At times, they seem to balance each other, creating a philosophical synthesis remarkable in its uniqueness; yet, they equally can appear irreconcilable. This tension may prevent modern scholars from offering an all-embracing interpretation of

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Augustine’s social doctrine and disavow any attempt to introduce an account that can be mutually endorsed among them. We have also seen, roughly speaking, two main schools of interpretation marking the scholarly horizon of the twentieth century: one tending toward the analysis of Augustine which incorporates a good deal of classical thought (already present in the CD), with the other offering a biblical/eschatological interpretation. Yet, in their pure form, these interpretations could not fully explain the content of Augustine’s thought since we can find some elements of both in Augustine’s text according to two operative paradigms of his thought. In the CD, the biblical matrix at times seems to be functional and placed above the classical one, while at other times the relationship is reversed. Augustine’s concept of justice and its manifestation in the political realm starts with sustained critique of Cicero’s conception of civitas and its political structure and proceeds with a more general account which combines both the classical conception of justice as virtue and the biblical conception of justice as the obedience to God’s laws. The question of whether justice can be realized is critical to our understanding of Augustine’s social doctrine. Is justice a transcendental-eschatological idea or not? Is there a link between divine and human justice, or do these types of justice have any resemblance? These questions have more than one legitimate answer. Augustine, therefore, has left many unresolved issues, and his legacy remains one that continues to generate conclusions beyond his originating theories. NOTES 1. Augustine quotes the Timaeus in CD VII, 11 and compares it with the Genesis arguing that Plato’s statements resemble those of the Genesis (and hence, suggesting that Plato approached the Christian doctrine as near as it was possible for the philosophers). He also lists Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus as the authorities on the subject at stake thus fully disclosing his sources all at once. 2. See John M. Dillon, edited with trans. Iamblichi Chalcidensis in Platonis Dialogos Commentariorum Fragmenta (Westbury: The Prometheus Trust, 2009), and Sarah Klitenic Wear, The Teachings of Syrianus on Plato’s Timeaus and Parmenides (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 3. Stephen Menn, Plato on God as Nous (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 2–3. 4. Here I used William Chase Greene’s translation (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1960) exclusively for book XIX and Markus Dods’ translation (New York: The Modern Library, 1993) for all other books. 5. CD XIX, 15. 6. Here mereology stands for the science of parts and wholes. 7. Ἆρ´ οὖν λέγοντες ἀρετὴν ἁρμονίαν εἶναι, ἀναρμοστίαν δὲ τὴν κακίαν, λέγοιμεν ἂν δόξαν δοκοῦσαν τοῖς παλαιοῖς καί τι πρὸς τὸ ζητούμενον οὐ μικρὸν ὁ λόγος ἀνύσειεν (Plotinus, Ennead III, trans., A.H. Armstrong [Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1967], 6. 2). 8. Cf. Lloyd P. Gerson, Plotinus (London & New York Routledge, 1994), 191ff., and J.M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 194ff. 9. Augustine, Confessions, trans., W. Watts (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1912), Book III, 7.

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10. Cicero, De re Publica, De Legibus, trans., C.W. Keyes (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1928), 508e ff. 11. (CD X, 3) “He is the fountain of our happiness, He the end of all our desires.” 12. Thus, “this very pain is evidence of the good that was taken. . . . And since both righteousness and salvation are good, and the loss of any good is cause of grief rather than joy . . .” (CD XIX, 13). Yet, he also notes that it is only because of some good that is left in the sinner that he can feel pain caused by this loss. 13. Glenn R. Morrow and John M Dillon, trans. Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 963 ff., 311, Cf. Plotinus, Ennead IV. trans., A.H. Armstrong (London: Harvard University Press, 1984). 14. K.B. Steinhauser, The Apocalypse Commentary of Tyconius: A History of its Reception and Influence (New York: Peter Lang, 1987). 15. F. Lo-Bue, The Turin Fragments of Tyconius’ Commentary on Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 16. William S. Babcock, trans., Tyconius: the Book of Rules (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). Cf. Pamela Bright, The Book of Rules of Tyconius: its Purpose and Inner Logic (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 17. As we learn from Gennadius, Tyconius “expounded the Apocalypse of John entire, regarding noting in it in a carnal sense, but all in a spiritual sense”; hence, he argues, “he doubts that there will be a reign of the righteous on earth . . .” (De vir Illustr, trans., Philip Schaff in A Select Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers Vol. III [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983], supplement ChXVIII, 389). 18. For an excellent investigation of the difference between temporal and eschatological see McGuckin’s “The Book of Revelation and Orthodox Eschatology: The Theodrama of Judgment” in The Last Things: Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Eschatology (Cambridge, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). 19. Or, following Kant’s jargon, it represents a “concept of an individual object which is completely determined through the mere idea” (Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans., N.K. Smith [Blunt Press, 2008], II, 3, 1) and has no connection to a concrete referent. 20. Thus, we learn from Augustine that “[o]f Romulus, a flattering legend tells us that he was assumed into heaven. But certain Roman historians relate that he was torn in pieces by the senate for his ferocity . . .” (CD III, 15); cf. CD XV. 5. 21. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, v. II, book 10, trans., J.E.L. Oulton (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1932). 22. See, for example: McGuckin, “The Book of Revelation and Orthodox Eschatology”, 113–134. 23. Miikka Ruokanen, Theology of Social Life in Augustine’s De civitate Dei (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993),10. 24. Ibid.,11. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid.,12. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid.,13. 31. Ibid.,15. 32. F.E. Cranz, “The Development of Augustine’s Ideas on Society before the Donatist Controversy” in Augustine; a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by R.A. Markus (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1972), 336–403. 33. Ruokanen, Theology of Social Life, 17. 34. Ibid.,18. 35. Ibid., 153. 36. The presence of the themes from the Laws and On Duties in particular should be emphasized in this context. For instance the key conceptions of natural moral law and justice are fully delineated by Cicero in the Laws and the notion of just war comes straight from the On Duties. Thought Augustine does not seem to mention these treatises in the CD their presence

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can be easily detected the presence of certain conceptual content of Cicero’s thought internalized by Augustine. 37. Indeed, this conception has legal implications; yet, its origin is clearly metaphysical. 38. Cicero’s understanding of virtue was indeed very much indebted to that of the Stoics. Hence it is not unexpected to find in Cicero an identification of virtue with sumum bonum. 39. « l’homme juste est celui qui est doué de la vertu morale de justice » Philippe Curbelié, La Justice dans La Cité de Dieu (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes, 2004),18. 40. « Un second sens peut être désigné comme religieux: on distingue alors, à la suite de saint Paul, l’homme juste de l’Ancien Testament, qui cherche à rester à la Loi, de celui du Nouveau Testament, qui se laisse conduire par l’Esprit qui habite en lui. » Ibid.

Part II

Economic Justice

Chapter Four

Altruism or Holy Economy Ambrose and Augustine’s Care for the Poor Todd E. French

When Jesus states, “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you,” he signals to the modern reader what may be called the root of altruism in the gospels. This injunction to think about how one would want to be treated and then consider the “other” in context and act accordingly, effectively putting oneself in another’s shoes, is perhaps the closest thing to altruism we might imagine: caring for another outside of one’s selfish concerns. One might quickly add that these concerns are somewhat self-oriented in that they are based upon what we experience, and that any truly altruistic model fails the test of self-interest on some level. The concept of altruism becomes a convenient tool for exegesis of many of Jesus’s sayings as one realizes that “not casting the first stone,” or “selling all they have and giving to the poor,” or “caring for the least of these,” can all be understood clearly as calls to altruistic action. 1 Unfortunately, the modern reader is saddled with worldviews and social realities that are very different from the epoch of early Christianity and they make it duly hard to see actions that were world renouncing and holiness driven as examples of altruism. This essay will begin by examining the legacy of interest in the poor that the earliest Christians bequeathed to the ascetics. With the rise of Christianity in the empire, we witness a progression of theologies that bring us to Augustine, a bishop who was deeply concerned for the poor, but intent on including them in the broader conceptualizing of the Church’s boundaries of community. At the same time, Augustine was committed to nurturing an ideology that was inclusive of the wealthier spectrum of Christians in his parish. In looking for the lines of development between the ascetics and Augustine, this 51

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essay will examine the middle ground that Ambrose embodies between asceticism and church hierarchy. 2 The question of whether or not the social justice-styled actions that are present bespeak altruism or some other personal or social motive will be posed. We will point out a subtle shift in theological language regarding the community that Augustine employs in his preaching on issues surrounding the poor, and posit that he ushers in a theological ethic that hybridized the single-minded identification of the ascetic, with the notion of family and community. This new ethic of inclusion and sympathetic action for the poor will be juxtaposed to the mimetically driven ascetic of the late third century. Although salvation—and not poverty—was the ascetic’s ultimate goal, he achieves a proximity to those poor people with whom Christ identifies that is difficult for later “altruistic” givers to fathom. Our examination of these two prominent bishops in late antiquity will lend us insight into an interesting middle ground between the ascetic and the burgeoning power of the organized church. It is useful to delineate what contemporary notions of altruism are, and whether they match late antique thoughts and practices. The concept of altruism should be further divided into the subcategories of giving. Modern anthropology draws a distinction between interested and disinterested giving along the lines of whether the gift is reciprocated as in the form of a contract or some sort of immediate giving back, and non-reciprocal as in the case of the “Indian Gift” in which Parry shows that the gift can “embody the sins of the donor, whom it rids of evil by transferring the dangerous and demeaning burden of death and impurity to the recipient.” 3 Parry explains that the gift, as explored by Marcel Mauss, was the combination of interest and disinterest and the “ideology of the gift, and conversely the whole idea of ‘economic self-interest,’ are our invention.” 4 Thus the question becomes whether there was even a conception of interested giving as opposed to disinterested in our fourth- and fifth-century context. With this in mind, we might split the term altruism into three sub-terms. Pure altruism will be that form of caring for others that is totally self-uninterested. General altruism will be characterized by mutual interest. And finally, veiled altruism will be those actions that are covert measures for self-interested advancement. As mentioned above, one might reason that pure altruism does not exist, and even if it did, it is extremely easy to undermine the claim on various levels relating to the ego, religion and society. Indeed, given the nature of altruism, for one to even claim pure altruism would be a destabilizing counter claim. General altruism is seen on every level of societal interaction and is characterized by innate reciprocity. This category is very broad and will contain many of those acts that would seem like pure altruism on the surface. Activities such as almsgiving fall into this category since they both provide for the poor, and in the same stroke assure heaven, forgive sin, bring

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praise, ease the conscience, or some other combination of these for the almoner. A distinction should be noted here between immediate and eschatological reciprocity. Veiled altruism is easily exemplified in a modern scenario of benefaction for publicity. Corporations realizing, or perhaps not realizing, they have done social harm, use portions of their profits to fund prominent, public works. Their name is proudly announced which repairs their image and provides distraction through advertising. The theme of social control, whether corporate or not, is not a new one. We can trace it back to Augustine with ease, when he asserts that one’s soul who “thinks it has gained much when it can also rule over its associates, who are other men,” is wrapped up in a love that “is better called hate.” 5 The connection between Ambrose and Augustine is complicated. Augustine is a rough contemporary, but lives on another thirty-three years after Ambrose’s death. Ambrose is often considered “little more than the bishop who ‘converted’ Augustine to Catholicism in 38 6–7.” 6 His legacy, however, is one that stands with the most prominent social organizers of his time. If you take up and read, tolle lege, the first book of Ambrose’s De Officiis, written in around 388 C.E., few pages pass before you are plodding through an argument about how wealth relates to the Christian life. 7 Ambrose explains the philosophers’ struggle to articulate what their duties (Officia) are, eventually claiming that they are derived from the “need to do what is ‘honourable’” in comparison with the need to do what is “beneficial.” 8 Deciphering what is “seemly” versus “advantageous” in life appears to be the primary concern of the philosophers. Ambrose deems opportunities and resources of wealth as “more of a burden to have . . . than a loss to give them away.” 9 Ambrose is eager to show how the duties of the Christian are different from those of the philosopher. 10 Like any discipline, duties of social justice can be “improved by the performance of its own particular and special exercises.” 11 Ambrose begins his treatment of these duties with the examples Jesus gives in the “Greatest Commandment” in Mark 12 and the “Rich Young Ruler” in Matthew 19. The duty he alludes to in these passages is heeding the call to be perfect and like the sun, “shed its rays on the good and the evil alike,” making “the whole earth grow rich with rain and dew, with no distinction at all.” 12 The communally focused aspects of this justice shine through clearly in his treatment of duty. 13 Ambrose explains, “What a splendid thing, then, justice is. Born for others rather than for itself, justice aids the community and strengthens the fellowship that exists between us.” 14 The man who lives according to justice “will never refuse to fulfill his duties towards them. He will assume other people’s dangers as his own.” 15 For Ambrose, there is an identification with the poor that hearkens back to those days of ascetic mimesis. The problems of the poor are met as if they were one’s own struggles.

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Ambrose then turns his conversation toward the importance of mercy. This virtue is upheld in the highest esteem since it allows the human a perfect imitation of the perfect Father. 16 What is particularly interesting about mercy is that it can be implemented in numerous ways. Mercy is essential in expiatory salvation models, in loving one’s neighbor, in forgiveness between fellow humans, and most importantly, in the care for the poor. Ambrose states clearly that it is in relation to the poor that mercy has pride of place, primum: 17 Nothing commends the Christian soul so much as mercy. First and foremost, it must be shown towards the poor: you should treat nature’s produce as a common possession; it is all the fruit of the ground, brought forth for the benefit of all alike. You should give what you can to a person who is poor, and offer assistance to one who is by nature your brother and your fellow. You give just a coin or two: he receives life. You pass on mere money: he considers it his fortune. It is only cash (denarius) to you, but it is wealth (census) to him. 18

The relationship between rich and poor is imbued with economic meaning through a language of recompense that is as natural for Ambrose as it is offputting for the contemporary reader. Would someone only care for the poor because it gained them salvation? Or were Christians called to some higher form of altruism? Was the injunction to not let one’s right hand know what one’s left hand was doing translatable from social comportment in the street and circus, to this quiet sanctity of Christian duty that Ambrose embraces? For example, would the beauty of giving to the poor lose its luster when couched in compensatory rendering of some economy of salvation between God and humanity? These questions only serve to reveal how distant our world has become from the Late Antique social structure in which Ambrose operated with ease. Social movements were certainly developing in curious ways regarding wealth and the church. On the one hand we can point to the burgeoning interest in the ascetic ideal. Both men and women were somehow finding the inspiration to rid themselves of their wealth. 19 For proof of this we can point to the vitae of numerous significant saints that were crafted in this era. 20 Ambrose also embodies this ideal to a certain extent, divesting himself of all his property through a gift to the Church of Milan. 21 Augustine would do the same for his proto-monastic, otion-oriented community in Thagaste, but likely only after every other claim from his brother and the town council of Thagaste could be sorted. 22 Brown notes that “gifts to the church tended to be spoken of, in a pious formula, as if they were gifts ‘to the poor of the church.’” 23 This was not, however, an identification with the poor in reality, so much as in discourse. They were eager to reject the desire for wealth, more than the wealth itself. 24 To this end, it is likely that many received an annuity from the revenues of their given estates. 25

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The ruptures in the economy that ascetics sometimes caused by selling off estates, were not simple acts of mercy. They were an exchange of one type of power for another. The treasures of earth were finite, but they could be easily employed in purchasing those things which “neither moth nor rust consumes.” 26 The precise assignment of power in the Roman world to the ascetic, however, was more complicated than this economy of holiness. It was the removal of oneself from the worldly economy that held so much imaginative power in the late antique mind. With waning desire in food, sex, luxury, sleep, and other common human interests, the patronage system fell flat, deflated of its sustaining interests. We see this throughout early Christian ascetic lives, and on through to the late middle ages. 27 In the years leading up to Ambrose and Augustine, a serious critique rings out from the Roman aristocracy concerning the rise in ascetic renunciation of wealth. The critique, perfectly couched in scriptural care for the poor, asks how truly could the ascetic embody the love of the poor if he lived a life completely removed from any income generating economies? The answer, which for the ascetic was to identify with the poor, has to be reworked for the Milanese audience to which Ambrose speaks. Angered over the support system that was destroyed in the pagan religious establishments, Libanius challenges the activities of uncontrollable monks in his correspondence with the emperor: I forbear to mention the numbers they have murdered in their riotings in utter disregard of the name they share, in case such incidents be described as due to overhasty action: but your expulsion of people who by their personal care provided relief for poverty among old men and women and fatherless children, the majority of them suffering from severe physical handicaps—is not this murder? Isn’t it execution? Isn’t this sentencing them to death, and to a death worse than ever, by starvation? For when their means of support have gone, this is surely the fate in store for them. 28

Though clearly vitriolic, Libanius’ comments bring up an important aspect of this wanton holiness seeking. Often attaining sanctity, or supposed sanctity, took precedence over any other command or precept. As Libanius states in Oration XXX, “And if they (the monks) prate to me of the teachings of the scriptures that they profess to obey, I will counter them with the despicable acts they have committed.” 29 Indeed the question was already being asked by the likes of Libanius: How can someone who has been told to love his neighbor as himself engage in such selfish acts of reckless “piety”? The answer is simple; the movement was fixated on an apocalyptically oriented worldview in which the struggle each day was the struggle against Satan and his powers. These were not times of quiet sanctity; these were holy wars, centered on the sin of Adam, the hope of a coming kingdom, and constant self-assessment for readiness to do battle. 30 Paul Veyne notes with regard to

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asceticism that, “The person who gives his goods to the poor in order to flee from the world is less concerned to help his neighbor than to rid himself of obstacles to his own salvation.” 31 The battle was engaged on two fronts, against Satan, and against those things that stood in the way to God. Far from deep caring and selfless giving for the indigent, these ascetics were engaged in the heady battle for sanctity. This goes a long way in explaining ascetic actions, which at times blatantly disregard family, friends, and community. It also comes close to explaining why, if an ascetic was concerned to help the poor, as was evidenced by the practice of collecting alms only to re-gift them, several stories exist of monks abandoning the wealth of their former lives instead of redistributing it. 32 This generation of monk did not care for the poor as much as he cared for his sanctity with God. This is far from pure altruism and possibly closer to veiled altruism. Alms to others are simply a means of keeping oneself from gluttony. 33 Doran notes that a particularly famous—although anonymous—ascetic, the Man of God, does nothing extraordinary except be a poor person and this is precisely what makes him extraordinary in this genre. 34 Although the Man of God is an extraordinary story compared to the other healing, high-flying acts of the ascetics, it still falls disappointingly close to the others when it comes to motive. It is fun to read this story as a challenge to empire, or as a reverse Cinderella story highlighting solidarity with the poor, but this is likely pretty far from the reality of the situation. Disturbing, and far more likely, is the notion that the ascetic was vying for position as the lowest in order to gain favor and secure the hidden sanctity that was so valued. The lore surrounding such stories—the lack of sleep, food, and shelter; utter disregard for worldly pleasures; as well as sustained anonymity in these hagiographies—all point toward regard for fame rather than hiddenness. A cynical scholar might even say, the lower the better, as long as you have a hagiographer or church custodian to tell your story brilliantly, and a God to reward you in the end. I am not saying these individuals did not achieve their goals, or that they were not worthy goals, only that the concept of altruism is hardly present in their contemplation of motive. There was care for the other because it was linked to holiness with God, not because the other was worthy of being cared for. This could hardly be viewed as the first form of social justice. That said, this identification with the poor certainly carried an empathy that later church patriarchs, residing in palaces surrounded by gardens, would struggle to embody. If Ambrose and Augustine faced critiques, like that of Libanius, about how the ascetic was functioning in society, their style of church leadership and sermons concerning the topic would count as a calculated response. Ambrose, in giving his wealth to the church and subsequently doling it out, had given the strongest answer possible to this outside criticism. Not only could he engage in ascetic practice, living a life of poverty on paper, but he

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could also dole out the funds that his family had left him in a manner that attempted to care for the poor in society. This influence would carry over into Augustine’s thinking, if with some nuance regarding how the poor functioned in the church. Augustine seems to be more persuaded by the notion that poverty existed because God had ordained it so for the purposes of education, whereas Ambrose believed that his actions were helping to “roll back a little the creeping injustice that had numbed human society for so many centuries.” 35 There is no doubt that the church was left in an interesting position, with much wealth and the lingering question of whether it was supposed to have such wealth. 36 Brown notes that the care for the poor helped to ameliorate this tension. 37 In a richly textured section of Ambrose’s letter 75A, Contra Auxentium, we get a further description from Ambrose of how the rich and poor are related to the business of the church. It is important to note that this section is a rather power-focused, direct response to the emperor regarding church funds. After acknowledging that the emperor could seize the estates of the church should he want that, Ambrose explains that the contributions of the people are “amply sufficient for the poor.” 38 He then goes on to explain: I have riches of my own. The poor of Christ are my riches. This is a treasure that I know how to amass. I only wish that they may always charge me with expending gold on the poor. But if their charge is that I look to the poor as a bodyguard, I will not repudiate it. 39 I even vaunt it. I do indeed use them as a bodyguard, but my defence lies in their prayers. Though blind and lame, weak and old, they are stronger than vigorous warriors. The fact is that gifts to the poor put God under an obligation to us, for it is written: He who is generous to the poor, lends to the Lord. 40

While the concept of the poor as the riches of the wealthy was certainly a common theme in early Christianity, this tune had rarely been played from such heights of political and social power. 41 Perhaps the pressure on the church to sort this issue of poverty and wealth was growing palpable. On the other end of the empire, John Chrysostom, a rough contemporary of Ambrose, was preaching a similar message regarding wealth and poverty. His position as patriarch of the imperial seat at Constantinople certainly paralleled, if not surpassed Ambrose’s own powerful position. St. John Chrysostom used these themes with great profundity in his homilies on repentance and almsgiving. With the identification of Christ as “the poor,” the understanding of duty to the less fortunate quickly shifted. No longer could one accept those poor as the ones who would always be with them, as Jesus says. 42 Rather, the poor became the ticket to heaven for Chrysostom. He explains, “Heaven is a business and an enterprise, and we are negligent. Give bread and seize paradise. Give small things and grasp great ones. Give mortal things and take firm hold of immortal ones. Give

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corruptible things and capture incorruptible ones.” 43 This style of preaching was inevitably effective as it was focused on the gain of the giver, not on the one who needed the gift. Chrysostom exemplifies the gift exchange that is so important for understanding altruism in early Christianity. 44 The individual giver, as exemplified in early Christianity, is someone who realizes that they need something they don’t have, and can procure it through the means of something they do have. A common example of this is the wealthy individual who realizes the poor have a sanctity and proximity to Christ that a wealthy person cannot attain. The poor were expected to pray for and or pave the way for the benefactor once in heaven. 45 The relationship becomes a symbiosis of sorts as both realize their need for the other. 46 The poor need sustenance, and the rich need spiritual favors. The Shepherd of Hermas, an early secondcentury text, explains: The rich man has much wealth, but he is poor as touching the Lord, being busied about his riches, and his intercession and confession towards the Lord is very small, and that which he has is weak and small, and has no other power. But when the rich man rests upon the poor, and gives him what he needs, he believes that what he does to the poor man can find a reward with God, because the poor is rich in intercession and confession, and his intercession has great power with God. 47

The symbiotic nature of this relationship is interesting, but hardly approximating pure or even general altruism. Both are interested in gaining, by means of the other, those things they need. We should be careful not to conflate the varying nature of Christian asceticism in this period, especially as it relates to the spectrum of examples ranging from Paulinus of Nola to those less prominent saints of the Syrian hinterland. With the Roman border running near Edessa, and the onset of a “Christian” Empire from Constantine, the stage was set for a division in Eastern and Western Christianity. 48 As Wolfgang Hage explains, “The Christians in Persia felt obliged to prove to their King that the Christian religion was not at all identical with the Church of the Roman enemy.” 49 Some ascetics made their way from the wealth of the West toward less confusing parts of the empire in the East. 50 The call of the desert—broadly construed—that perfect ideological space for withdrawal, anachoresis, 51 was most appealing for its ability to remove the “stuff” that caused acquisitive desires. This could be in the desert of Egypt, or the desert of the Syrian hills. Along the spectrum from nameless monks, we arrive at figures like Ambrose, who certainly could access his wealth, even if it was not still “his.” Maintenance of social power while jettisoning personal wealth was either a game pronouncing paramount personal strength, or a game of personal deception. Ambrose played the game well.

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The rise of the Christian Empire signaled an important shift in social relations between the society and the poor. Euergetism was now being embodied by the bishop as a new patron of all society from the emperor right down to that lowest fringe of society. 52 Jonathan Parry points toward Mauss’s notion that the separation of the individual from those things he or she possessed was largely affected by the rise of laws in the West from a “Christian” Emperor. 53 As the importance of otherworldly thinking becomes the norm in the West, the dissociation of goods and individuals becomes standardized. 54 Parry explains: The more radical the opposition between this world and a world free from suffering to come, the more inevitable is the development of a contemptus mundi which culminates in the institution of renunciation, but of which the charitable gift—as a kind of lay exercise in asceticism—is also often an expression. In abandoning its millenarian expectations in favour of an eschatology of heaven and hell, the early Christian Church widened the chasm between this world and the Kingdom of God, and thereby enormously boosted both the spirit of asceticism and a preoccupation with charitable “good works.” 55

Though Parry believes Christianity’s notion that all humans are created in God’s image points toward the growth of purely disinterested giving, it does not remove a constant theme of eschatological reciprocity. 56 A further complication is the notion of identification of Christ with the poor. 57 If indeed the poor are Christ embodied, then, though still eschatological in nature, there is a rebirth of interestedness. One gives to the poor (Christ) for both immediate and otherworldly reciprocation. 58 In his preface to Paul Veyne’s Bread and Circuses, Oswyn Murray cites Mauss who is well-known for his essay, “The Gift.” Murray explains that an essential aspect of the success of the polis was what Mauss called “noble expenditure,” which “united rich and poor in an alternative to the class struggle.” 59 Gauging gargantuan works like G. E. M. de Ste. Croix’s Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, one wonders if there was always a struggle between the rich and poor, and moreover, whether that struggle always fell into class-like categories. 60 It would seem there was a clear delineation of the “rich” and the “poor” according to Jesus’s comments concerning the rich young ruler. Nonetheless, the rich and poor have always been closely associated. Whether in symbiosis like the “elm and the vine,” or in a basic understanding that as far as wealth goes, someone cannot have a large amount unless there is someone who has a small amount to both help grow it and serve to compare it. 61 Euergetism was a particular type of symbiosis that caused what seemed like a closeness between the rich and poor, or at least a reliance. 62 Euergetism and asceticism have a common thread; euergetism’s goal is to go beyond the expected into real lavishness and overabundance. Asceti-

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cism’s goal is to go beyond the expected into a lavishness of sanctity, not just living a human life for God, but living like the angels. Veyne notes: Inequality results in a focalization effect, a deceptive epiphenomenon. When even a small fraction of the total income of an entire society is concentrated on a particular objective, whether this be decorative monuments or nuclear weapons, the results seem gigantic on the individual scale, even if the society in question is a poor peasant society. This gigantism is misleading. It is much less costly to build what archaeologists and tourists call a high culture, rich in monuments, than to feed a population more or less adequately. Everything depends on the possessing class, which controls the surplus and decides what is to be done with it. 63

It is interesting to think about the remarkable and arresting acts of Symeon Stylites and Alexander Akoimetos in this light. Rather than a quiet fixing of the problem, they take part in larger scale social critique and mockery. There is no doubt they did not have the means to fix the problems of society, but their actions stand as splendiferous monuments. With regard to Augustine and Ambrose, their actions could be taken two ways: Either Ambrose is a challenge to these types of monumental activities through his bequeathal of property and his identification with the poor of his society, or he falls right in line with them. In a sense Ambrose is the ultimate in monumental splendor. He has a limited effect on solving the issue of poverty in society, but because his stories and actions are so moving, his ecclesiastical monument stands long after his death. Although ascetic activities and euergetism are related, some scholars have cautioned the equating of social movements such as almsgiving with euergetism. Veyne points out that although people have tried to see Christian almsgiving as an extension of euergetism, this is “a false continuity.” 64 It seems, however, that it certainly played a role in the setting up of a social mindset that was conducive to transition. As Brown comments in Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, the Christian bishops “presented their actions as a response to the needs of an entire category of persons (the poor) on whose behalf they claimed to speak. . . . Step by step, they soaked significant areas of late antique society in the novel and distinctive dye of a notion of ‘love of the poor.’” 65 Certainly there was continuity, even if only of a type of mold in which new substances fill old confines. Structures and powerwielders gained admiration, whether for themselves or their great benefactor, God, by aiding those who had less. Indeed in a sense, it is sometimes hard not to see the similarities between characters like Lawrence of Rome, who brought forth the Christian poor when the treasures of the church were demanded, and eurgetés who gloried in helping their treasury of less fortunate citizens. 66 Although there is a sense of solidarity expressed by Ambrose of Milan about the poor when he explains, “And so they are, real treasures, for

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Christ lives in them, and faith lives in them,” there is also a sort of pride associated with this type of aid-giving that problematizes any desire firmly to recognize altruism in these actions. 67 In Bread and Circuses Veyne posits three themes of euergetism: voluntary, ob honorem, and “memory.” 68 Voluntary is simply the “tendency men [and women] have to display themselves, to realize all their potentialities.” 69 Ob honorem deals with the economics of politics, and “memory” is centered on those aspects of one’s life after he or she is gone. 70 These three often conflate and are difficult to parse out of a pseudo-selfless act of giving. All three are focused on the self and have little to do with altruism. However, all three serve to help the community in some fashion. This is precisely the point where confusion in altruism becomes a problem. How does one account for a good deed without seeing the problems of complicity that begat the need for a good deed, or more directly, how can one call something altruism when it is centered on gain for the self? Ambrose articulates two different relationships that dictate the giver’s actions. He explains: In return for your help, he confers more upon you than you do upon him, for he owes you his salvation. If you clothe the naked, you put a robe of righteousness on yourself. If you take a stranger under your roof, or if you help somebody in need, such a person brings you the friendship of the Saints and the tabernacles that are eternal. That is surely no bad return—you sew bodily seeds and you reap spiritual fruits! . . . No one is more truly happy than the one who gives thought to the needs of the poor and the hardship of the weak and helpless. On the day of judgment, he will receive salvation from the Lord: the Lord will owe it to him for the mercy he has shown. 71

For most readers, the notion that God would owe a human being salvation, or even enter into a covenant with humanity at all, is a strange one. For all the covenantal language of the Old and New Testaments, God ultimately does what God wants, hardening hearts and tormenting servants to prove his point—as in the case of Job. Ambrose utilizes the story of Job in this section as an exemplary model of care for the poor. 72 He asks, “Do you marvel at the judgment the Lord passed on holy Job? You should marvel, instead, at the man’s virtue, in that he could say . . . ‘No stranger was ever left outside: my door was open to everyone who came.’” 73 The fourth-century Christian mind saw justice as a duty of the Christian, and one that fit nicely within the construct of Roman patronage relationships. If I do for you, you will do for me. This model is all the more compelling when one considers that Christ had identified the Son of Man, who would come in judgment, with the poor when he stated, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” 74

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Augustine engages with Job in a similar way. He highlights Job’s ability to overcome his own attachment to his riches and offers it as a model for his community. He explains in a section on Possession of Riches: Having lost all his riches and been reduced suddenly to extreme poverty, Job kept his soul so undisturbed and fixed upon God as to show that earthly things were not important in his sight, but that he was greater than they and God greater than he. If the men of our day could be of such mind, we would not have to be so insistently forbidden in the New Testament to possess these goods in order to reach perfection. For to possess such things without clinging to them is much more praiseworthy than not to possess at all. 75

It appears that for Augustine, the model is one in which disinterest holds sway. The Christian should be focused not on this world but the next. It is almost as if Augustine’s model hybridizes earlier notions of asceticism and the bishop’s care for the poor. He suggests a life in which one cares not for wealth and possessions, but is less concerned to correct the immediate world. His is a notion that could identify as otherworldly, like the earliest ascetics, who Libanius would critique as ignoring social issues, as well as this-worldly in its attention to care for the poor and continual guarding against avarice. Augustine brings together those who carry extreme views on wealth, with those who are more moderate in their estimation of how the individual should relate to the world. A perfect example of this comes from his joining of these two groups in critique of the Manichaeans. In a section challenging the exclusive nature of Manichaeism, he states: In the Catholic Church, there are great numbers of the faithful who do not use worldly goods; there are others who use them as though not using them. . . . For how many men of wealth, how many rural householders, and merchants, and soldiers, how many civic leaders, and even senators, persons of both sexes, suffered for the true faith and religion, giving up all those vain and temporal goods which they used but were not enslaved to, thus proving to unbelievers that they possessed these goods and were not possessed by them. 76

Augustine’s community of faith melds those who renounce with those who possess, but are not possessed by their goods. The model is one that would allow for a much larger swath of society. By combining the ascetic and lay Christian in their disinterest in wealth, Augustine moved past the struggles in which Ambrose was so deeply mired. The church was big enough to house both ideologically under this canopy of faith. In a later section, Augustine treats the issue of whether those baptized individuals should refrain from bearing children and holding wealth. He quotes Paul from 1 Cor. 6:11, where he speaks of those who are sanctified and justified. To this he adds, “Surely, no one would venture to understand

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by the washed and sanctified anyone but the faithful and those who have renounced this world.” 77 The bringing together of the ascetic and the faithful under the category of sanctified holds major import for Augustine in his delineation of how the Christian church should comport itself regarding wealth. It is no longer a question of which, but of how. One could partake in sanctity through either avenue. This combination of the renouncer and faithful does not, however, undermine the model of identification of Christ with the poor, or even the translation of wealth through the poor to some sort of treasure in heaven. The notion is slightly transformed from the base, transactional model of Ambrose to a care for the poor as another one of your children, a fellow inheritor of your blessings. Augustine explains, “You have treasures—no matter what—buried underground; when you leave the house you do not take them with you. You came here to hear a sermon, to reap some spiritual wealth, but your thoughts are with the temporal; well, have you brought it with you? At this very moment you cannot see it.” 78 Augustine plays on the fears of his congregation, when he asks whether they can trust their servants, and whether that wealth will still be there when they return. It is at this point that Augustine transitions to the trust in Christ over and above the trust in temporal wealth, finally admonishing, “He by whom all things were made has built mansions for all of us, and lest we should lose our goods on earth he would have them go before us there. If you store them on earth, tell me for whom you gather them. You have children, you answer. Number one more among them; let one portion be Christ’s.” 79 By asking the congregation to put their wealth in the hands of the poor, Augustine is reaffirming the scriptural model of storing up wealth in heaven. 80 What is particularly interesting here is that the call is not for one to forget one’s familial ties and seek Christ entirely in the care of the poor. Augustine simply asks that Christ be among those inheritors of a Christian’s wealth, thereby securing a mansion above. Augustine glosses the notion of poverty in Christ with the acknowledgment that Christ came from God down to his lowly position in humanity. While acknowledging Christ’s identification with the poor in the final judgment, he theologizes the relationship along the lines of the incarnation. Augustine works with the question of poverty in society at a level that at times seems to surpass the social ethic of our own day. In a fascinating passage concerning the rich, Augustine connects the rich person’s creation of wealth with the robbing of one’s fellow citizen. This is a step that is continually debated in contemporary circles regarding social justice. Does one’s ability to make wealth require another to lose wealth, or is it possible to acquire wealth without being complicit in the creation of poverty? For Augustine, the answer is straightforward. One who accrues wealth is robbing others of that wealth. 81 In a sermon on the Psalms, he explains to the wealthy in his congregation:

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It seems that by gathering wealth, one is inevitably engaging in practices that shield others from gaining it, or worse it seems, stealing it from the poor. This may also be understood as the hoarding of wealth, which distances the poor from that economic fluidity which would provide for their existence. Regardless of the reading, the condemnation is on the wealthy for their role in separating the poor from economic stability. Augustine further examines the issue from the perspective of one who might claim they are storing it for their children, making “a plea of fatherly love.” 83 Connecting the issue with the question of how time operates in the human life, Augustine presses his congregation to think about the uncertainty of life in which they exist. In a time when “every girl who lived to childbearing age would have had to produce about five children to keep the population constant,” the certainty of the life of one’s children was an obvious question. 84 Augustine explores this uncertainty by reminding the congregation of their mortality, stating, “You who store and they whom you store for are doomed to pass away; or rather (for ‘doomed to pass’ implies some permanence now), you and they are already passing.” 85 He goes on to reiterate, “You store for children who may never be born or never inherit; your treasure is stored, but not in its rightful place.” 86 Augustine is critiquing the stability that one foolishly hopes for in wealth. We can hear a tinge of the realist coming through in his assessment of the surrounding world. Even those worldly structures—like the walls of Rome—which humanity thought would never be shaken, were on the verge of toppling. 87 This did not, ultimately, undermine God’s providence, but simply called on humanity to adjust their perspective regarding what was truly stable. In a related section, Augustine tackles the broader question of how one should use their wealth, and to what the misuse of wealth equates. He explains again, “failure to share his surplus with the needy is like to theft.” 88 The theft is taking a harvest for which one sowed with little effort. For Augustine, God provides all, and in this provision all humans can reap, if they share generously. This notion is related to the concept of forgiveness in the passage Augustine quotes from Luke 6:3 7–38, where it states, “Give, and it shall be given to you; forgive, and you shall be forgiven.” 89 Someone who does not forgive cannot be forgiven while someone who does not give, should not expect to receive goods. The complicated model is a theological development on the normal models of exchange in which the poor serve as

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Christ, with whom a Christian might identify. For Augustine, all Christians, rich and poor, are a part of the same broadened economy of wealth and holiness. He concludes this section by saying, “Gratuitously this alms is given; by being given away it is increased; and it is not consumed except when it is not shared. Therefore, let those enmities which have lasted even to this day be broken up and ended. Let them be ended lest they end you; let them be no longer held lest they hold you; let them be destroyed by the Redeemer lest they destroy you, the retainer.” 90 In this sense, wealth operates beyond the everyday exchange, condemning some as thieves, protecting others by investing in heaven, and finally bringing the top and bottom of the society together in a smoothly running economy ordained by God. 91 In conclusion, Ambrose seems to represent the more ancient notion that humans were engaged in an economy of holiness that had the possibility of helping the poor in society. It was the Christian duty to engage in this economy, at times taking on the identity of the poor—as seen in asceticism—and at other times entering into a covenant with God through the poor in order to gain proximity to God and ultimately salvation. After all, it was those who cared for the Son of Man, in the poor, who would be recognized by him in the judgment. Augustine, who was deeply concerned with the question of how God’s will was being worked out in the world, seemed to take the next step in his role as bishop. If the poor were always going to be with them, then God had clearly meant for them to play this role. The answer to why some gained this lot and not another more agreeable station in life was something only God could answer. It would be hard to argue that Ambrose’s concern for the poor did not translate some emphasis to Augustine. Whereas Ambrose saw them as God’s mediating body for salvation through physical exchange, Augustine saw them as God’s mediating example of theological truths at work in society. God was going to provide the necessary lessons to his people, regardless of what the church did to reverse them. If God wanted a person or community poor, it was certainly for a reason, and to meddle with this was tantamount to mistrusting God’s will. With that said, there was still a call from Augustine to take seriously the necessity of caring for the poor. They were an integral part of the community of God. They were to be cared for like one’s own children. This bringing in of the poor to the status of an inheriting family member, represents Augustine’s joining of concern with empathy. While the Christian may not identify with the poor by becoming impoverished, he or she could associate and relate with the poor by acknowledging them as part of their own immediate family as well as that broader family of God. If we consider Augustine’s own trajectory from his “little pyramid” in Thagaste—as Brown cleverly puts it—to the larger pyramids of cities like Milan, we are remiss not to acknowledge the influence that a figure like Romanianus had on his life. 92 As Augustine’s patron, he provided a means

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for the young scholar, inviting him into his house and family. 93 When Augustine later preaches to his churches about those with means, we should not be surprised to hear language that mimicked the Roman social order of patronage. Those with wealth should take into their families the poor, treating them like their own sons and daughters and providing a leg up. If we accept the development of the bishop as a new sort of patron in late Roman society, the comparison becomes all the more vivid. This notion of helping out the less fortunate might be coupled with a new vision Augustine had for a community that was so beautifully inspired by God, that issues of wealth would simply fall away. 94 In the end, we may ask if Augustine’s developments betray a struggle with how the church was to hold both ascetics and wealthy laypersons. Do his teachings mark a further shift in the late antique church away from personal identification with the poor? Had the church moved from empathy to sympathy for their lot in life? There is little question that Augustine’s church cared for those who had less, but how that translated theologically was another question. Ambrose’s community was going to care for the poor regardless of whether the emperor interfered with their funding estates. Augustine was going to care for the intellectual structure of the church, regardless of whether that solved issues of poverty in society. 95 In our modern age one must ask on what scale altruism exists, and if it exists at all. Society now “cares” for the other in so blatant a way that it is hard not to see the motives underlying exchange. In fact, far from hiding motives, givers to the poor may be found giving business cards directing the poor to their church. Whole campaigns to care for the poor are undertaken with the goal of membership growth. A new sensibility of disregard for hidden motives has burgeoned. No longer is one ashamed to say their gifts are linked to personal impetus. Gifts are now veiled only subconsciously by the guise of care for another’s eternal soul. Waving the flag of altruism, international aid committees, faith-based aid organizations and countless other entities have slowly transformed themselves into huge corporations, who traffic in philanthropy much like the eurgetés of the Roman Empire. Have we found our way back to that world of exchange and interested giving that was so natural in early Christianity? It is interesting to ask which movement came closer to altruism, the ascetics who were unfocused on the other; their successors—like Ambrose— who were focused on the direct economies of salvation through giving; or Augustine, who melds the focus on sanctity with a community that encompassed both rich and poor? Is it possible that the ascetics, in their identification with the poor, are most altruistic? With the loss of exchange between the almsgiver’s wealth and the alms-receiver’s holiness, the reciprocal possibility is effectively removed and resultantly one sees a less selfish care for the other. What early

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ascetics had that begins to wane in the move from the desert to Northern Italy, is a real empathy and identification with those poor that Christ calls “the least of these.” Although the care of the poor was not the goal of their askesis, they achieved a closeness, a hiddenness, a strangeness that was closer to the character of the “poor Christ” than any later doer-of-good could achieve. We can witness this transition along a spectrum of change wherein Ambrose still identifies with the poor, but Augustine simply cares for them as part of the family. The early ascetics, though not as focused on altruism, do bequeath an important legacy of identification with and care for the poor in society that is hard to match with contemporary soup kitchens and food pantries. 96 Though focused primarily on sanctity with God, and resultantly taking part in a selfcentered program of holiness, these ascetics render an astounding tableau of solidarity. Ambrose and Augustine embody the next step of the church’s relation to the poor, raising again the question of what it means to care for the least of these. NOTES 1. On the notion of Jesus as firmly a part of his community and thus pointing toward a nuanced interpretation of the gospels see Paul Veyne, Oswyn Murray, and Brian Pearce, Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism (London: A. Lane, the Penguin Press, 1990), 21. 2. I will make the distinction here between the desert ascetic who lived in abject poverty, and the monk whose community had allowed for dissociation from wealth. These are very different notions. 3. Jonathan Parry, “The Gift, the Indian Gift and the ‘Indian Gift,’” Man 21, no. 3 (September 1, 1986): 459. Also on wealth carrying evil or curses, see Leontius, “A Supplement to the Life of John the Almsgiver, our saintly father and Archbishop of Alexandria,” in Elizabeth Dawes and Norman Hepburn Baynes, eds., Three Byzantine Saints: Contemporary Biographies Translated from the Greek (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1948) 216–18. 4. Parry, The Gift, 458. 5. Augustine and D. W Robertson, On Christian Doctrine (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958) 20. 6. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) 121. 7. Augustine claims to have heard this command concerning the bible in his conversion. This essay will argue that Augustine had taken up the works of Ambrose with comparable interest. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 7.12.29. 8. Ambrose, De Officiis, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 1.27.9. 9. Ambrose, De Officiis, 1:1.28.9. 10. While the duties may be different the power of the offices was not. As Brown notes, Ambrose was “still bathed in the aura of a senatorial governorship,” when he took on the role of Bishop Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 123. 11. Ambrose, De Officiis, 1:1.33.10. 12. This “perfect” duty, Ambrose relates with the Greek term Katorthoma. 13. Ambrose was using Cicero’s model of Devincire, or “to cement” for his explanation of how the church would bind together. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 129–30. 14. Ambrose, De Officiis, 1:1.28.136, p. 196; Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 128.

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15. Ambrose, De Officiis, 1:1.28.136, p. 196; Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 128. 16. Ambrose, De Officiis, 1:1.38.9. 17. Ambrose, De Officiis, 1:1.38.9. 18. Ambrose, De Officiis, 1:1.38.9. 19. J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Ambrose and John Chrysostom: Clerics Between Desert and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 64. 20. We might look to the Life of Antony, or perhaps The Life of Melania the Younger. Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg (New York: Paulist Press, 1980); Gerontius, The Life of Melania, the Younger: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, trans. Elizabeth Clark (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1984). 21. His brother Satyrus also likely intended for his share to go to the church by not marrying or making a will. Liebeschuetz, Ambrose and John Chrysostom, 65, fn. 29. See also Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 69. 22. Brown notes that this was likely only after his brother’s death. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 169, 171. 23. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 169. 24. This concept is particularly poignant in looking back to the golden age of Roman Respublica. Brown notes that Augustine’s perspective of this period was one which highlighted the poverty of the individual and the richness of the republic. This raises the question, however, of just what Augustine envisioned in his worldview. Was it a monastery like the one he had founded at Hippo? It is unclear whether the notion of a church that operated at that level was only attainable in the mystical dreams, like the one he and Monica shared. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 179, for the mystical experience at Ostia, see 166. 25. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 169. 26. Matt. 6:21 NRSV 27. For an excellent treatment of this in the Roman world, see James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-century Pagan World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). For an equally impressive treatment of the topic in the context of food studies, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed (New York: Routledge, 2013) 245–264; Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 28. Libanius and A. F Norman, Selected Works (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), Oration XXX, p. 119. 29. Libanius, Oration, XXX, 121. 30. For comments on the sin of Adam in this context, see AbouZayd, Ihidayutha, 74–86. 31. Veyne, Bread and Circuses, 33. 32. Here we might point to a figure like the Man of God of Edessa, who flees his wealthy family to live the life of poverty. See Robert Doran, Stewards of the Poor: The Man of God, Rabbula, and Hiba in Fifth-century Edessa (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2006). 33. Indeed as Doran notes, the amount of food the Man of God allows himself to eat would have been on the high end compared to someone like Symeon Stylites who wouldn’t eat for days at a time. The Man of God ingests a sizeable loaf, 15 ounces, and three ounces of vegetables. See Doran, Stewards of the Poor, 6. 34. Doran, Stewards of the Poor, 34. 35. This was linked to the notion of some “golden age,” the prefigured society. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 133. 36. This question is perhaps best answered by strong figures like Ambrose, who effectively shielded the wealth of the church from imperial interests, as in the case of his helping the bishop of Pavia, who would have certainly succumbed to the pressure of the officials. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 128. 37. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992) 94. 38. Ambrose and J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Ambrose of Milan: Political Letters and Speeches (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2005) 75A, 33, pp. 158–159.

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39. In the conflict leading up to such claims of his using the poor, Ambrose is accused of mobilizing crowds of poor to his advantage in protecting the church from usage in housing Arian troops. There is no doubt that this precedence was taken from Lawrence of Rome. For a great summary of Ambrose’s situation, see Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 126. 40. Liebeschuetz points out the play on words for “treasury” aerarios, is identifiable with the aerarium or treasury, and the aerarii, or citizens of low class. Ambrose and Liebeschuetz, Ambrose of Milan, 75A, 33, pp. 158–159, and fn. 10, p. 158. 41. The elm and the vine story is related in the Shepherd of Hermas, and is extremely influential on early Christian notions of wealth. See “The Shepherd of Hermas,” in The Apostolic Fathers (Loeb Classical Library, 2 4–25) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press/London: W. Heinemann, 1976) SIM. II. 1–10. pp. 143–147. 42. Matt. 26:11. 43. John Chrysostom, On Repentance and Almsgiving (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998) 32. 44. This exchange, also known as reciprocity, is a feature of many major religions. On the masking of altruism by religious bodies, James R Ozinga, Altruism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999) 57–74. 45. Another important example of this is found in St. Cyprian’s letters. In letter sixty-two, Cyprian explains his desire to send money to help ransom those who had been captured and imprisoned. He mobilizes one hundred thousand sesterces for their help and sends it on with promise of more help if needed. Cyprian explains, “I have appended below the names of the individual contributors so that in your prayers you may be mindful of our brothers and sisters who have so promptly and willingly undertaken this very necessary work. May you thus ensure that they may never fail to do such works of mercy, repaying them for their good works in your sacrifices and devotions.” Thus reciprocity is propagated in the early church. Cyprian and G. W Clarke, The Letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage Volume 3 (New York; Ramsey, NJ: Newman Press, 1986) 97. On reciprocity in monasticism see Ilana Friedrich-Silber, Virtuosity, Charisma, and Social Order: a Comparative Sociological Study of Monasticism in Theravada Buddhism and Medieval Catholicism (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 145–72. 46. Ambrose of Milan takes this even further, commenting in De officiis that “The man who commands more power than his neighbour should not assert his rights in any way; the man who enjoys more money than his neighbour should not try to get his hands on any more (for whether rich or poor, his neighbor and he are one in Christ.” He also encourages “sharing in others’ misfortunes . . . helping as much as we can, and sometimes more than we can.” This Western concept of the poor in solidarity with the rich is an interesting juxtaposition. See Ambrose, De officiis, vol. I, trans. Ivor J. Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 2.124, trans. 337 and 2.136, trans. 343. 47. “The Shepherd of Hermas,” SIM. II. 5, p. 145. 48. For an excellent history of the city of Edessa and its political and theological stances see J. B Segal, Edessa “the Blessed City” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) 62–109. 49. Wolfgang Hage, Syriac Christianity in the East (Kerala, India: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 1988) 10. 50. A compelling example of this is the Man of God of Edessa, who flees on a ship to Edessa from his senatorial family in the West. See Doran, Stewards of the Poor. Clearly, a saint who left Roman wealth to live among the poor in the East held great import for the hearers. Challenging the “established Church in the West with its dangerous ‘political theology’” was in line with hagiographies that portrayed a hidden sanctity, disconnected from empire and rule. Hage, Syriac Christianity, 11. 51. Where we get the term “anchorite.” 52. Brown points out that the bishop was a “lover of the poor,” and that the poor emphasized the breadth of influence the bishop had, “‘bracketing,’ as it were, the whole urban community . . . as an all-embracing ‘people of God.’” Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, 91, 94. 53. Parry, The Gift, 468.

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54. Parry notes the convenient nature of this for the reversal of the practice of burying one’s treasure alongside of their person in the missionary activities among Germanic tribes. See Parry, The Gift, 468. 55. Parry, The Gift, 468. 56. Parry, The Gift, 468. 57. As in Leontius’ supplement on St. John the Almsgiver where John says, “Give him twelve nomismata, for perchance it is my Christ and He is making trial of me.” See Leontius, “A Supplement,” 216. 58. A wonderful example of immediate reciprocity, though filtered through God, is when St. John the Almsgiver requests that a victim of robbery be given fifteen pounds of gold. His men only gave five pounds and resultantly a woman set to give fifteen hundred pounds to John, only gives five. See Leontius, “A Supplement,” 21 8–19. 59. Oswynn Murray in preface to Paul Veyne, Bread and Circuses, XX. 60. G. E. M De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 61. See “The Shepherd of Hermas,” SIM. II. 1–10. pp. 143–147. 62. Ambrose denounces euergetistic activities aimed at outdoing the reputations of predecessors as “utterly pointless” in its lack of moderation and wastefulness. See Ambrose, De officiis, vol. I, 2.109, trans. 329. 63. Veyne, Bread and Circuses, 56. 64. Veyne, Bread and Circuses, 30. 65. Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership, 9. 66. Ambrose, De officiis, vol. I, 2.14 0–41, trans. 347. 67. Ambrose, De officiis, vol. I, 2.140, trans. 347. 68. Veyne, Bread and Circuses, 18. 69. Veyne, Bread and Circuses, 18. 70. Veyne notes this might ultimately come under the guise of the first two. See, Veyne, Bread and Circuses, 18. 71. De Officis, 1.39.XI 72. We are reminded in this usage of Job, of Ambrose’s affectionate use of scriptural themes for dramatic effect. Brown notes that Ambrose embodies Elijah when he denounces the wealthy landowners of Milan as if they were the contemporary robbers of Naboth’s vineyard, and that “when Ambrose seemed to strive for reality what he actually strove for was drama.” Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 139–40. See also Vincent R. Vasey, The Social Ideas in the Works of St. Ambrose: A Study on De Nabuthe (Roma: Institutum Patristicum “Augustinianum,” 1982). 73. De Officis, 1.39.XI. Baskin notes, “Job offered Ambrose the opportunity to preach the insurmountable impediment of wealth to salvation, and the glorious spiritual treasure awaiting the steadfast sufferer.” J. R. Baskin, “Job as Moral Exemplar in Ambrose,” Vigiliae Christianae 35.3 (September 1, 1981) 223. 74. NRSV Matt. 25:40. 75. PL 32.1329, I, 23,42. Peter C. Phan, Social Thought (Wilmington, DE: M. Glazier, 1984) 203–204. 76. PL 32. 1342, I, 35, 77. Phan, Social Thought, 204. 77. PL 32. 1342, I, 35, 78. Phan, Social Thought, 205. 78. CCL 38, Exposition on Psalms 39:7. Phan, Social Thought, 224. 79. CCL 38, Exposition on Psalms 39:7. Phan, Social Thought, 225. 80. Perhaps the most illustrative story of this is from the Acts of Thomas, where he builds a mansion for King Gundaphoros in heaven instead of on earth by giving away his wealth to the poor. Acts of Thomas, 26. See Albertus Frederik Johannes Klijn, trans., The Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text, and Commentary, 2nd rev. ed (Leiden: Brill, 2003) 75ff. 81. We find a similar notion explored in other Christian vitae. An excellent example is the story of Thomas of Armenia, who redistributes his inheritance in order to correct for his father’s unjust accrual from the poor. He states, “to me what will come from it except hell and eternal torment, since neither has all this been amassed by justice or by righteousness, but by

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plundering and cheating the poor?” See John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, trans. E. W. Brooks, Patrologia Orientalis 82 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 21, PO 17:286. 82. CCL 38, Exposition of Ps. 39:7. Phan, Social Thought, 221. 83. CCL 38, Exposition of Ps. 39:7. Phan, Social Thought, 222. 84. Elizabeth A. Clark, “Antifamilial Tendencies in Ancient Christianity,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5.3 (1995) 371. 85. CCL 38, Exposition of Ps. 39:7. Phan, Social Thought, 222. 86. CCL 38, Exposition of Ps. 39:7. Phan, Social Thought, 222. 87. Augustine witnesses the “unfolding of a crisis of empire, from the Gothic sack of Rome in 410 onward, that was more drastic than Ambrose and any members of his generation could ever have imagined.” Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 148. 88. PL 38.1041, Sermon 206, 2. Phan, Social Thought, 226. 89. PL 38.1041, Sermon 206, 2. Phan, Social Thought, 226. 90. PL 38.1041, Sermon 206, 2. Phan, Social Thought, 227. 91. This bringing together of rich and poor, or in other terms, a shielding of the wealthy from the angry guise of the poor/plebs, is far more difficult to trace in Ambrose, according to Brown. See Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 142. 92. His role is later supplanted by his “new” wife. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 151, 162. 93. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 153. 94. As Augustine hoped that Romanianus’s rival would give up his lawsuit in favor of this desire for the beauty of God. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 166. 95. Brown notes that Augustine preached on almsgiving, but otherwise had “little to say about the poor.” Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 154. 96. For a very interesting examination of charity in the contemporary United States and its relation to the history of caring for the poor through church related food distribution, see Janet Poppendieck, Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement (New York: Viking, 1998).

Chapter Five

The Consumer’s Restless Heart J. Burton Fulmer

While some contemporary theologians criticize Augustine for supporting hierarchy and hegemony, condemning the body and sex, and in other ways limiting the church’s capacity for social criticism, I contend that Augustine’s analysis of sin and charity can be employed to critique any society in which individuals are defined by competition and consumption. I hope to show that Augustine is not vulnerable to the kinds of attacks to which he is often subjected, but that he can instead be marshaled on behalf of the very kinds of liberative theologies that his critics often seek to develop. Augustine’s theology of desire and love offers a basis for the criticism of consumerism and offers an alternative vision of identity. In a consumer society, people are bombarded with messages seeking (with some success) to convince them that fulfillment is found in accumulating goods and that freedom is found in choosing between the countless products available. According to Augustine, sin leads people to seek their own pleasure in countless external pursuits and results in a loss of freedom and a loss of self. In pride, consumers want something of their own independently of God, and ultimately, in their imitation of seemingly self-sufficient models, they want to be responsible for their own being like God. While some might criticize people caught up in the consumerist ethos as materialistic and egocentric self-lovers, Augustine would see them as self-haters for they love themselves unjustly. True identity comes through God’s grace. Human freedom develops not by choosing among countless options but by submission to God. God’s will is not thereby imposed from the outside upon the person for the person must choose God’s will in love; of course, grace is given and not chosen, but grace itself is the love of God, and thus the one who has received grace chooses the good in love. Through this love, the 73

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person is able to be truly free for the first time and is recreated by God— made into what the person is meant to be. In what follows, I will explicate Augustine’s understanding of pride as the root of all sin and show that consumerism thrives by promoting and exploiting pride. Through pride, consumers lose their identities and their freedom. Through grace, identity and freedom are given. The Christian then follows Christ who is the perfect model of humility and thus the perfect alternative to the models of consumer society. Before turning to Augustine’s theology, however, I will briefly discuss identity and freedom as they are promoted by consumerism. CONSUMERISM Perhaps it may be helpful to begin by discussing the ambiguous term “consumerism” and look at a few of the ways that that to which it refers is already being criticized. Webster’s New World Dictionary offers three definitions. Two refer to an area too limited: political goals (the protection of consumers) and economic theory (that continual increases in consumption are sound economically). The third is too broad: the consumption of goods and services. More helpfully, a historian of consumerism defines the term as “a society in which many people formulate their goals in life partly through acquiring goods that they clearly do not need for subsistence or for traditional display. They become enmeshed in the process of acquisition—shopping—and take some of their identity from a procession of new items that they buy and exhibit.” 1 For the purposes of this essay, “consumerism” refers to an ethos supporting the notion that consumption of greater quantities and more expensive goods leads to greater happiness, that freedom is found in the choices between products available to consumers, that making purchases is the means of exercising and developing that freedom, and that acquiring goods or obtaining the means to acquire them gives one greater worth. More effort and money have gone into advertising than “into any other campaign to change social consciousness. The story that advertising tells is that the way to be happy, to find satisfaction—and the path to political freedom, as well— is through the consumption of material objects. And the major motivating force for social change throughout the world today is this belief that happiness comes from the market.” 2 This omnipresent propaganda machine has undoubtedly succeeded. Even James Twitchell, who offers a qualified defense of consumerism, admits: “If you want to understand the potency of American consumer culture, ask any group of teenagers what democracy means to them. You will hear an extraordinary response. Democracy is the right to buy anything you want.” 3

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In recent years, criticisms of consumerism have themselves come under attack, largely for failing to recognize how consumers might be able to express their identities through consumption and how they might be able to subvert the system even as they participate in it. It is argued that buying and ownership offer perhaps the only means of achieving any legitimate form of control in a capitalist, consumerist culture. 4 For their apparent failure to recognize this fact, the critics of consumerism are charged with being elitist. The freedom that consumerism offers is lauded: “[T]he consumer’s moment of choice is an empowered moment. If money is power in capitalism, then buying, particularly if the act is voluntary, is an empowering moment for those whom the economic system otherwise subordinates. And any one single act of buying necessarily involves multiple acts of rejection—many commodities are rejected for every one chosen, and rejecting the offerings of the system constitutes adopting a controlling relationship to it.” Consumers can use certain “tricks” to gain “tactical victories” over the system. 5 Are these not, however, at best hollow victories? While one may be rejecting many products in favor of another, it is unclear how such choosing leads to any real self-development, but the gain it represents for the market is quite obvious. Yet many scholarly commentators support the view suggested by advertisers themselves: the consumer is radically free among a world of limitless choices. Consumer choices are people’s first choices and the most important for realizing ambitions. 6 On a feminist model, shopping has been defended as freedom “from the work involved in working and loving under patriarchy.” 7 Consumerism is praised as “the arena in which sovereign individuals express their freedom.” 8 Twitchell writes: “The process of consumption, therefore, is creative and even emancipating.” He observes that the church has been surpassed in importance by the market and notes that the latter is “far more equitable and democratic.” Unlike the minister who speaks from on high, “the dominant conversation is now between consumers and their goods, from aisle to aisle.” 9 This analysis seems to ignore the rather obvious fact that big business does speak from on high, and it fails to explain what consumers and their goods have to discuss. It is interesting to note that in Twitchell’s understanding consumers and goods seem to be peers—equally powerful, free, intelligent, and eloquent. The fact that the poor are shut out of these “conversations” and from the supposed freedom offered in consumerism is another difficulty with this pro-consumerism position. 10 More central to my argument than the question of consumer manipulation is the question of how freedom is defined. Christian freedom involves the understanding and capacity to live out one’s own best life—paradoxically, by submitting to God’s will for one’s life. In consumer society freedom is individual choice. 11 When Khrushchev and Nixon looked at kitchen appliances in an American trade exhibition in Moscow, Nixon suggested that America was superior not so much for having better products but greater choice of

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products. The Cold War evidently was a struggle to retain the American consumer’s choices. Freedom did not mean political freedom or freedom from want but the freedom of consumer choice. Choosing has itself become a value and consumerism’s “metavalue.” 12 Important life decisions like marriage partners, careers, and even religion are seen as matters of choice. 13 Baudrillard describes the precarious freedoms created through product differentiation and the “freedom” to select randomly objects meant to distinguish individuals. 14 He writes: “[T]he consumer is sovereign in a jungle of ugliness where the freedom of choice is imposed on him.” 15 While consumerism provides limitless products from which to choose, consumerism itself is not subject to choice. Dependency on the market is ensured when all people are consumers who must turn to market logic simply in order to carry on with the business of daily life. Consumers can “refuse their allegiance to any one of the infinite choices on display—except the choice of choosing between them, that is. The roads to self-identity, to a place in society, to life lived in a form recognizable as that of meaningful living, all require daily visits to the market place.” 16 Individual consumption is, therefore, obligatory; increases in the number and variety of goods do not yield increased freedom, but merely “the pluralisation of inconsequential choice,” which in fact forces consumers to spend more time sifting through all the nearly identical goods for sale, and thereby ultimately negates freedom. The fact that “making choices has become a requirement ought to be reason enough not to equate freedom of choice with freedom.” 17 Rodney Clapp suggests that because freedom is understood as choice, people fail to question whether their choices have any real significance. 18 He says that both the ancient Christian tradition and Pope John Paul II argue that a “negative freedom, a merely formal freedom of choice,” cannot be equated with the highest good, but, Clapp claims, consumerism “posits just such freedom of choice as its highest good.” 19 Much has been written about the ambiguous relation between consumerism and identity. Vincent Miller notes that consumers are not always motivated by desire for products but sometimes by “the need to form and communicate an identity in a dynamic and competitive social setting.” 20 While I agree that consumption is used as a means of trying to form and communicate identity or to deal with confusions about social status, I believe that is precisely the problem, for such a strategy cannot succeed. In consumer society, people are made to correspond to a system of goods. Individuals struggle to maintain any coherent sense of identity when the ways in which their needs are met become increasingly fragmented by the constant differentiation of products. 21 Something analogous to this fragmentation resulting in identity dispersal appears in several striking images in Augustine’s Confessions, 22 as he discusses the effect of sin. A contemporary writer offers an image that could not have occurred to Augustine: “Of the vast majority of

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things we buy, we say: ‘Easy come, easy go.’ They are discarded as perfunctorily as they are acquired. This is an awful waste of resources, but it also means that we are unattached, adrift, like an astronaut whose tubes and wires have been cut.” 23 Consumerism sells not only products, or even identity expression, but also human transformation. Miller says that consumer culture, in which communal sources of identity have been eroded, encourages people “to invest in commodity-based self-enhancements.” He describes the “reason-why” approach to advertising: “[I]nstead of describing the qualities and virtues of the product being sold, they conjured visions of the ways in which the product could transform the consumer’s life.” 24 This strategy depends upon making the consumer feel, not better about herself through this transformation, but worse through the belief in the need for transformation: “Ads suggest that one can become the perfect person in the ad if we only use the right kind of shampoo or deodorant, use the right toilet cleaner or drive the right car.” These ads portray perfection in order to show us how we fall short. “Thus, the major objectives of advertising are to make the person feel she is not a unified being, a complete entity unto herself, but instead a work in progress made up of separate parts, each in need of continual improvement.” The consumer becomes caught up in a vicious cycle, constantly seeing herself as a work in process in continual need of improvement, aiming ultimately at perfection. The desire to change oneself eventually comes to be an end in itself. The vanity of being constantly obsessed with one’s image is not the product of self-love but a form of self-hatred. Purchases made in hopes of transformation are doomed to fail and result only in increasing self-doubt. 25 If one were to compare this emphasis on transformation and perfection to Christian life, one might describe it as consumerist sanctification; but in Christian sanctification, change is not an end in itself. For Augustine, rest in God is the ultimate goal. Augustine is also well aware of the way in which what appears in human terms to be self-love can in fact be a form of selfhatred, in that it works towards the individual’s destruction. AUGUSTINE AND PRIDE Pride is most fundamentally a choice of self over God. According to John Cavadini, Augustine defines pride as “apostasy, the desertion of God” and as “love of self as an alternative to God.” 26 God created good and evil angels with the same nature. Their difference arises out of their wills and desires. The good angels continued to choose and desire the good of God, which is common to all, whereas the evil angels chose themselves and delighted in their own power, as if they were God. 27 Angels are blessed through participation in the divine, but the devil, swollen with pride, fell away from this

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blessedness by rejecting any participation and turning to himself. 28 Because the devil loved his own power, his perverse self-love separated him from all holy companionship—not just from God, but also from the good angels. 29 The private enjoyment of his own power, which was his desire and the source of his fall, is thus also his punishment. In contemplating the divine, the mind may become aware of itself. While it is best for the mind to forget itself in love for God, the mind can take pleasure in itself, wanting to enjoy its own power. This perverse imitation of God is the first sin. 30 No creature can successfully become God, but a creature can imitate God. Augustine speaks of the proud spirits who long to be worshipped in God’s stead. 31 Pride is the devil’s motive for rejecting the blessed angelic life. 32 When human beings sin, they sin in imitation of the devil, not Adam. 33 The devil is a false mediator. He does not elevate people but rather bars their way to all that is higher by inspiring in them the same pride and malignant desires that were his downfall. He appeals to the proud because he is immune to death, and he teaches them to “scoff at the death of Christ.” 34 Any mediator between God and humanity must have something in common with humanity. Satan shares in sin, whereas Christ shares mortal flesh, which the devil prides himself on being without. 35 He is a more appealing mediator to sinful people because he, like them, loves power, not justice. 36 That which attracts their pride, however, is not the same attribute through which he serves as their mediator and model. Human beings come to be like the devil not by sharing in his freedom from death or his incorporeality, but by living according to the “rule of self.” 37 The devil, who is himself puffed up with pride, puffs up human beings with false philosophy and holds them in his subjection through “swollen self-esteem.” 38 Consumerism generates mediators like the devil—ones who attract human pride with their power but who inspire imitation in ways that do not yield real power. Satan, according to Augustine, tempted Adam and Eve with proud roles because they were already proud. 39 According to Augustine, Eve believed the devil’s assertion that God’s jealousy was holding them back from something good only because there was already “in her mind that love of her own independent authority and a certain proud over-confidence in herself, of which she had to be convicted and then humbled by that very temptation.” 40 They are convicted through the commandment not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The forbidden fruit is not itself evil, as “‘evil’ is merely a name for the privation of good.” 41 Likewise, I do not wish to suggest that consumer products are evil in themselves, but consumerism encourages buyers to love these goods inappropriately. Like the devil, Adam and Eve wanted something of their own, independently from God, and it was this desire that constituted their pride. R. A. Markus suggests that privacy is key to this concept for pride is “taking pleasure in God’s good things, but as if one had proprietary rights to them.”

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Pride is then most basically the “desire for privacy at the expense of sharing.” 42 Augustine uses this language in The Trinity: “What happens is that the soul, loving its own power, slides away from the whole which is common to all into the part which is its own private property.” If the soul merely remained obedient and subservient to God, it could enjoy the entire universe, but “by the apostasy of pride which is called the beginning of sin it strives to grab something more than the whole and to govern it by its own laws; and because there is nothing more than the whole it is thrust back into anxiety over a part, and so by being greedy for more it gets less. That is why greed is called the root of all evils.” 43 By claiming something as its own, the soul loses all that it shared, which was, in fact, all of creation. 44 Augustine makes the social component of this privacy argument more explicit when he describes the two loves. The holy one is social and takes thought for the common good. The unclean one is private and tries to control that which is common for its own good. 45 Augustine claims that the unchangeable, divine good is public and common to all, but just as the serpent tempts Eve, so does carnal desire tempt each human to enjoy things as private goods. 46 Augustine describes people who claim to be the sole cause and owner of their goodness but whose goodness is a gift to be shared. 47 The mind is commanded to know itself so that it might live according to its nature. Instead its desires are twisted, so that when it sees some inner beauty in God, rather than delighting in this beauty, it longs to possess it exclusively, and it desires, not to be like God by having been made by God in God’s image, but to be like God in so far as God depends on nothing for God’s existence. 48 The mind turns away from God and finds no satisfaction in itself or anything else for it descends farther from God who alone can satisfy it. It loses the security it might have had resting in God because it knows it can easily lose what it has. 49 According to Patout Burns, after the devil tempted Adam and Eve to “prefer their own power and goodness to that of God,” their minds “turned from God to self. Thus humans attempted to attain divine autonomy, to possess their happiness as only God can, independently of any other nature.” 50 Pride originates in someone obsessed with gaining liberty “from God’s exclusive proprietary rights.” 51 Like the devil, Adam and Eve desire to shine with their own light rather than merely reflecting God’s light, but the consequence of turning from God is not luminosity but darkness. Burns explains that the “created intellect comes to an understanding, both of the divine reality and of the created world, through an interior illumination received from the Word of God, the eternal Truth. . . . Because this kind of knowledge never becomes the ‘possession’ of the created mind, it is maintained by submission to God, by focusing attention on the divine Light.” 52 The failure to submit is of course the sin of pride. Augustine says that the original evil is to regard oneself as one’s own light and to turn away from the true light that

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would make one into a light if one would set one’s heart on it. 53 The mind that, trying to live by its own lights, turns from the divine Light is in darkness. Of course consumerism is all about exclusive private possession, and its models tempt consumers by telling them that they too can shine with their own light (if only they consume the right product) just as the serpent tempts Adam and Eve (if only they consume the forbidden fruit). The sin of pride is not just wanting something of one’s own but more specifically is wanting to be responsible for one’s own being—that is, wanting to be God. Augustine says that Adam was conquered by Satan because, though only man, he wanted to be God. 54 In pride, the soul prefers “imitating God to serving God.” 55 The serpent’s promise that Adam and Eve would become like gods shows that they “were persuaded to sin through pride.” Satan’s temptation succeeded because Adam and Eve did in fact long to be like God, and so they lost what they had been given by trying to take what they had not been given (the capability of ruling themselves and generating their own happiness independently of God). 56 Advertising promotes this sense of self-causation, self-satisfaction, and self-rule by suggesting that the consumer can make herself happy through her purchases and the imitation of the seemingly self-satisfied model. The evil soul desires “to claim as due to itself, that which is properly due to God only.” It longs to rule over others— over what is lower and even what is equal—though in its arrogance, it refuses to submit to what is higher, even to the Most High. 57 Bill McKibben describes the message of television and consumerism in a similar way: “You are the most important thing on earth. . . . [A]ll things orbit your desires.” 58 PRIDE AND IDENTITY The prideful choosing of self over God is a fall not only from God but also from self. All sin is falsehood for through it people pursue happiness in ways that make it impossible to attain. They sin to promote their welfare, but it results in their misfortune. Well-being can only come from God, not from oneself. 59 Augustine claims that all sin “is contrary to nature,” 60 and so the origin of evil is to be found, not in some evil nature, but in free-will. 61 The proud fall into disorder through the disordered valuing of self above God. Augustine’s diagnosis of disordered desire applies to consumerism. Clapp writes: “Augustine would surely consider our consumer compulsions a symptom of disordered desire, of the sort of desire that should be directed only to God instead of to God’s creatures. This is theologically a serious matter indeed, since such disordered desire can verge on, if not become outright, idolatry.” 62 Kenneth Paul Wesche observes that infinite desire for consumer goods is misplaced desire for God. 63 This disorder of desires leads to non-existence because creatures exist only in so far as they attain agree-

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ment. God is simple and thus exists by Godself, but composite beings merely imitate simplicity through the agreement of their parts. 64 Humans decide to sin through free choice but then lose that choice to invincible habit. These habits war against the soul. 65 Augustine describes his own bondage to sin by which his will was held in chains: “By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity. By these links, as it were, connected one to another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint.” 66 He confesses that he has made his own chains 67 and says that he was unaware of God’s wrath against him, deafened as he was “by the clanking chain of my mortal condition, the penalty of pride.” Sinners are unable to do many of the things they wish as they are disobedient even to themselves for their minds and their flesh do not submit to their own wills. 68 The punishment of sin is in fact itself disobedience. Augustine finds himself unable to do what he wills, because he is “stuck fast in the glue of [his] pleasure.” 69 Stuck fast to each of the myriad objects of pleasure, the slave to sin is torn in many directions. Augustine says that people get stuck to the things they love “with the glue of care” so that when the mind turns back toward itself, it drags these other things with it, and “it gives something of its own substance to their formation.” 70 One leaves a bit of oneself with every object desired, and thus the result of many desires, such as those of consumers, is a split consciousness. 71 Augustine was “in conflict with [himself] and was dissociated from [himself].” 72 This conflict is only heightened when one retains some desire to do the good, 73 for then one is not only drawn toward the object of each illicit desire, but also pulled away from them by the desire not to sin. Augustine was thus “embattled against” himself and had become a problem to himself. 74 Vincent Miller argues that consumer seduction channels insatiable human desire into “the endless seeking of fulfillments in more objects.” He warns: “The constant arousal of new desire short-circuits the lessons that could be learned from the disappointments with particular acts of consumption.” In addition, seduction makes “desiring pleasurable in itself. Unlike Augustine, we do not experience restlessness, inquies, as a discomfort, as a spur to change the way we live our lives. Rather we consider it a source of pleasure.” 75 This analysis seems to overlook the underlying desires of people to be like their models and to be self-caused. These desires go perpetually unfulfilled in consumerism and thus do cause discomfort (even if it is unconscious, as in Kierkegaard’s first form of despair). 76 Though consumerism may offer the most elaborate system of distractions ever produced, it cannot turn restlessness into a source of comfort. Augustine poetically and prayerfully sums up the notion of division against oneself: “I was tossed about and spilt, scattered and boiled dry in my fornications. And you were silent. How slow I was to find my joy! At that time you said nothing, and I traveled much further away from you into more and more sterile things

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productive of unhappiness in my self-pity, incapable of rest in my exhaustion.” 77 Here he is like the consumer who is pulled in as many directions as there are products and who must settle for an illusion of identity called “brand loyalty.” 78 Split and scattered, the self is dispersed and spread thin between all of its desires, leaving itself little strength or integrity. Sinners forsake “God to love themselves, and then are driven out of themselves to love what is outside themselves.” Augustine advises: “Stay in yourself, if you can. Why go outside? Has money really made you rich, you lover of money? As soon as you began to love things outside yourself, you lost yourself.” The effort to found oneself on some external good leads to one’s dissolution. When one’s love reaches beyond the self to what is outside, one begins to disintegrate in dissipation and to squander one’s powers. 79 The effort to accumulate and consume products deprives the self of integrity and strength. Here one’s loves are spread abroad among things. Responding to this line of reasoning, some critics charge Augustine with rejecting plurality. Catherine Keller represents this criticism when she says that in Augustine the only solution to distraction is separation. She claims that Augustine is unable to distinguish between fragmentation resulting from “the separative ego” and complex plurality and that he chooses “only between ‘tumultuous varieties’ and ‘the One.’” 80 Despite Keller’s claim, Augustine does not ignore the complex plurality but rather insists that the individual approach it through the love of God. One cannot treat God as just another item in the plurality of things; instead, one must love God first and love the complexity only through this love of God. Rather than loving things for their own sake, one should love God. Mathewes writes: “Contrary to popular suspicions, Augustine’s project is not world-denying but world-affirming; furthermore, the Augustinian proposal can help us resist the sort of reductionistically materialistic vision so powerful today, because it acknowledges that our ends transcend any worldly satisfaction, but are vectored by our loves in this world toward a transcendent God beyond.” Mathewes says that for Augustine, the problem lies not with the world but with inordinate human love for the world. 81 According to Augustine, anyone who fails to love God cannot really love herself either. Though self-love is innate, a person who does not love God can be said to hate herself because she acts against her own self-interest. 82 The disorder of sin lies in loving as an end in itself what should be loved as a means to a higher end. 83 Through grace, sins are forgiven and one is infused by a spirit of charity that makes fulfilling the law pleasant. Grace here has the opposite effect of sin, which makes violating the law sweet. Human beings naturally want to do what gives pleasure, but sin distorts the will by giving greater pleasure in lesser goods. 84 Augustine accuses the Manicheans of acting out of pride or a kind of pharisaic adherence to ascetic rules instead of love, which is the proper motive for Christian action. 85 Given the

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fact that evil is disorder and disagreement among the parts of a being, it follows that love must be the only legitimate motive for action. To do something for any other reason is to be divided. One is called to love the good in oneself but not to defend oneself and one’s autonomy over against God. To do so is contradictory for to struggle against God in this way is, in fact, to struggle against oneself. Augustine suggests that pride is a self-love that alienates one from the source of happiness and is thus in truth a form of self-hatred rather than self-love. Deluded by this self-hatred, people become unable to imagine any other source for their identities than the honors and goods that they have accumulated. 86 In seeking to claim responsibility for and possession of one’s own identity and goodness, one engages in a perverse imitation of God that leads not to greater power but to dissipation and diminution. 87 Augustine pleads with God: “May I not be my own life. On my own resources I lived evilly. To myself I was death. In you I am recovering life.” 88 Consumerism gives people the illusion of self-sufficiency and encourages them to see themselves in terms of goods accumulated and achievements accomplished. It seeks to make identity dependent upon these things and thus destroys true freedom and identity. All these penalties of pride—darkness, disorder, and loss of being—can be simply expressed as separation from God. It is both the sin and the penalty. Pride is the choosing of self over God, but the consequent disorder makes reversing that decision far more difficult than the decision itself. Augustine explains: “But when in my arrogance I rose against you and ran up against the Lord ‘under the thick boss of my shield’ (Job 15: 26), even those inferior things came on top of me and pressed me down, and there was never any relaxation or breathing space. As I gazed at them, they attacked me on all sides in massive heaps. As I thought about them, the very images of physical objects formed an obstacle to my return. . . . My swelling conceit separated me from you.” 89 Consumers too lack breathing space, surrounded as they are by heaps of inferior things blocking intimacy with God. Consumers are scattered among those many possessions that in turn possess their owners. SALVATION FROM PRIDE Just as Augustine’s focus on desires makes his theology relatable to consumerism, so too does the importance he places on models. Satan (and consumer models) is the model of pride. Humans needed a counter-model of humility. Christ’s humility is found first and foremost in the Incarnation itself. Burns writes: “Augustine found the counter to pride in the humility of Christ in the incarnation. More than any of the works of Christ’s life and ministry, the very taking of humanity by the Word of God itself reversed the pretensions of human sin. It demonstrated the divine humility which is at

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once the antithesis to and the remedy for the human self-assertion which divides persons from God and sets them against each other.” 90 To offer a model for humanity, which had turned from God, Christ emptied himself, “not by changing his divinity but by taking on our changeability.” 91 The remedy to pride comes through God humbling Godself by descending into humanity and showing grace to people who through pride seek to lift themselves up. 92 Cavadini claims that the “self-willed humiliation of God” served to shake the human imagination and reorder human affections. 93 The Incarnation is an example of humility for humanity and a demonstration of divine love. This humble act of love is “a medicine to heal the tumor of our pride and a high sacrament to break the chains of sin.” Christ chose to appear in mortal flesh and even to die so that proud people would not be induced to worship proud spirits because of their immortality. Christ, shunning proud displays, might have overpowered the devil but instead chose justice. As human, he could die, but if he had not also been divine, people would have believed that he was defeated and not that he chose to die. 94 The Incarnation reveals the greatness of God’s mercy and the great chasm between human pride and the ways of God. 95 MacQueen points out the contrast here between Augustine and pagan philosophy as Augustine argues that pagan morality cannot conceive of “humility as a standard of perfection” because without divine aid the human intellect cannot “apprehend or appreciate the condescension of the Divine love as the Incarnation was one day to reveal it.” 96 God’s willingness to lower Godself for humanity challenges humanity’s pride. While human beings might be too proud to imitate a lowly man like Jesus, they are surely not too noble to “imitate the lowly God.” Christ was made low as an example of humility. Humans are not, thereby, asked to set aside their humanity and become brutes. God became human and asks only that humans recognize their own humanity. Humility is nothing more than self-knowledge. 97 Humans are asked to recall their position below God, not to lower themselves to the level of beasts. Unlike the models presented in advertisements that stoke human pride, here then is the true model for human beings. Like the devil, Christ offers himself as a model, but rather than a model of pride he serves “as a pattern of humility for our imitation.” 98 Augustine elaborates on this contrast: “Just as the devil in his pride brought proud-thinking man down to death, so Christ in his humility brought obedient man back to life. The devil grew high and mighty, he fell, and pulled down man who consented to him; the Christ came humble and lowly, he rose, and raised up man who believed in him.” Christ lets himself be tempted by the devil so as to serve as a mediator for overcoming the devil’s temptations. 99 Human beings cannot rightly compare themselves to their Creator and so require a mediator. People are children of the devil not by birth or creation but by imitation, and so they need a counter model. 100

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In conquering human pride, Christ leads humanity out of its darkness. Augustine says that human beings should be “enraptured with [Christ’s] brightness.” 101 People are to “copy the example of this divine image, the Son, and not draw away from God.” All people are the image of God, though not born of the Father like Christ. People are illuminated with divine light, whereas Christ is the light that illuminates. Christ is a model without models. 102 God sometimes holds back knowledge or joy so the saints may recall that it is from God alone that they receive the light that illumines their darkness for no one “is illuminated except with that Light of the truth, which is God.” 103 By sharing in the unchanging divine light, “the reasonable soul is in a certain sense inflamed, and becomes itself a created and reflected luminary.” 104 Christ restores to humanity its reflected brilliance by conquering pride, which turned from the source of light. If pride is the root of sin, humility must be the foundation of righteousness. 105 No reasoning however subtle could overcome the darkness into which humanity had fallen. But because God became human and taught humanity through Christ’s words and deeds, human beings have been awakened and are able now to return to their native light. 106 Christ performs miracles but tells his listeners to follow him, not because he performs great deeds, but on the contrary because he is “meek and lowly of heart (Mt. 11:28).” Through Christ, humility is made more acceptable because he could have avoided humiliation if he had chosen to. 107 Through this act, Christ shows that only God rules without pride. 108 Human beings should, therefore, put all their pride in the cross. They should not be ashamed of the humiliation that God chose to suffer on their behalf. 109 Through this humility, true identity and true human nature damaged by pride are restored. In consumerism’s worship of the individual, the self is actually undermined. God does not heal completely in this life, however, so that the saints might not become complacent in or proud of their goodness. God uses all things for the good of those who love the Lord so that even their going astray will serve their good by leading them to return to God in greater humility and wisdom. When God leaves humanity to itself, it loses its way and even its very breath, which was indeed its pride. In repentance, one confesses one’s weakness and acknowledges that without God one would fall back into the dust from which one was created. 110 Through sinful pride, humanity lost its freedom, and its weakness stands in need of divine grace. In order to heal this pride, God insures that no one may glory in the divine presence. 111 To spare the saints from pride in their goodness, God does not give mortals assurance of their salvation. Augustine states that “the trembling of humility is better than the confidence of pride.” The saints are to work with fear and trembling for if they do not fear God, God will take away the grace that supports them. 112 Presumption in this time of trial is inappropriate. Without human doubt, a sense of security and confidence could lead to pride. 113 Consumer-

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ism, on the other hand, “would make the radical gift of grace into a commodity that, once possessed, will guarantee health and wealth.” 114 It sells the illusion of eternal youth, promotes pride and selfishness, and encourages the belief that consumers can be self-sufficient like their models. To avoid sinful pride, human beings must confess that they receive all good things from God. Augustine advises: “Let no man therefore boast of that which he seems to possess, as if he had not received it.” 115 If one dared to list one’s merits before God, one would merely be enumerating gifts received from God. 116 God does not show mercy to those who know God or are righteous, but so that they may know God and become righteous. This economy does not lead to pride, which comes when one has too much confidence in oneself. 117 The weak are given power through grace, and this “dependence on grace produces awareness of one’s own weakness.” 118 To return to God, one must deny oneself, and this means ceasing to rely on oneself and realizing that one is human and therefore dependent upon God for all one’s goodness. All evil comes from one’s will, however, and so one must abandon everything of one’s own in recognition of the fact that one has been one’s “own undoing.” 119 Here one does not need to sacrifice oneself in order to be humble; rather, one’s self is restored only though humility. Grace then not only provides unmerited forgiveness for prideful sin, but also offers a cure for sinful pride itself. The proud do not know this grace for they seek to establish their own righteousness rather than subjecting themselves to Christ. 120 The gift of grace is charity, through which one is enabled to love as one should, free from proud self-love. One who is in darkness cannot see the light, but even ordinary vision allows one to see a fellow human being, and if such a one loved one’s fellow human beings with charity, then this one would also see God for God is charity. But the one who does not love the other cannot love God for such a one is in darkness and lacks the light and love that is God. 121 If one envies another, one cannot love, for charity and envy cannot exist together. 122 Charity must love something, and when it loves itself, it must love itself in loving another. 123 Here charity is shown to be the true opposite of pride for it is in pride that human beings love themselves as ends, whereas charity only loves itself in loving another, and ultimately that other must be the one through whom charity itself and all other goods come. Charity thus shows itself opposed to consumerism, which always promises a purely self-directed love and is based on appeals to envy. Consumerism teaches that the individual does not need grace or charity but merely the right products to be saved. This “solution” promotes pride and leads to more frustration and more identity problems. Grace, on the other hand, restores human nature to its created glory and allows human beings to know and accept their selves and their proper place in creation.

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FREEDOM AND IDENTITY THROUGH GRACE Through grace, freedom is restored. Augustine claims that the choice of the will is “genuinely free only when it is not subservient to faults and sins. God gave it that true freedom,” and only God can restore it once it is lost. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve could not do everything, but they could, Augustine claims, do whatever they wished for the simple reason that they did not want to do anything that they could not do. 124 In this analysis, Augustine anticipates what Camus calls Nietzsche’s paradoxical definition of freedom—the “total acceptance of total necessity.” 125 One need not be free to do everything in order to have unbounded freedom so long as one does not desire to do what one cannot do. The person who works out her freedom in God wills only what God wills and thus is most free. Like the Nietzschean hero, she has learned to accept necessity, but the means of this acceptance and this freedom is not amor fati, but amor Dei. In this way, one is freed from the endless pursuit of the next consumer good or status symbol, which always promises to be the product that finally satisfies and makes one complete. Augustine’s suggestion that Christians should will only what God wills is seen by some critics as an endorsement of hierarchy and a valorization of subservience. Nancy Victorin-Vangerud claims that in the traditional patriarchal pneumatology, the Spirit does not inspire fiery tongues but conforms “docile and useful persons, just like himself, to the authority of the Father.” 126 Augustine would take issue with this understanding of the Trinity. He argues, for example, that when Christ glorifies His Father, Christ does not thereby indicate division in the Trinity for the Trinity is inseparable; rather Christ is offering human beings an example of proper humility. 127 Furthermore, it is Augustine’s claim that any notion of freedom juxtaposed to the supposed docility described by Victorin-Vangerud is in fact nothing but slavery, and that this so-called docility is in fact precisely the means by which the individual gains her true freedom and becomes herself. Subservience to God does not lead inexorably toward worldly, political subservience but is instead the latter’s antidote. When the slave is in subordination to her master or the child is in subordination to her parents or the wife is in subordination to her husband, this usually means that the subordinated one is forced to act against her will. The Christian tradition has taught that so-called “subordination” to God is, on the contrary, precisely what enables one to do one’s own will. Thus Augustine argues that rather than making void the freedom of choice, grace instead establishes freedom of choice. 128 Though critics see a loss of human freedom and autonomy in subservience to God, Augustine argues that the fact of one’s being “unable to delight in sin does not entail” a corresponding loss of free will. On the contrary, the will becomes “freer in that it is freed from a delight in sin and immovably fixed in a delight in not sinning.” 129 Augustine’s view here is at odds with the

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philosophy of the market. For Augustine, greater freedom is found not in manifold indifferent choices subject to whim but in a fixed desire and a clear understanding of what is best. God cannot sin, but this does not mean that God has no free will. Rather, God has the greatest freedom. Grace heals the will so that one delights most in the highest good. 130 In this case, choice is no longer the issue. One does what delights one the most, but through grace, the source of one’s delight changes. One is then free to do the good as one was not before grace began its work. This cannot be the result of one’s own efforts for “[i]f those things delight us which serve our advancement towards God, that is due not to our own whim or industry or meritorious works, but to the inspiration of God and to the grace which [God] bestows.” 131 This does not mean that free choice is cancelled out by grace. No one can do the good without deliberately choosing it and loving what is chosen in free will. 132 When one obeys the law without grace, one acts from fear of punishment, not from the love of righteousness. Thus the good that is in the action is absent from the will. God knows that the person would have preferred to violate the law or, more accurately, would have preferred that there be no law so as to be able to commit the evil deed with impunity. 133 Thus even when one does the good, one is not doing it rightly if one is acting against one’s will. 134 The sin is imputed to one who wants to sin even if the deed is not carried out, “since conscience is held guilty by reason of the consent.” 135 While this may seem like an extremely severe extension of the law, it is in fact just the logical result of Augustine’s strong emphasis on the will and on love rather than on the external actions that may or may not correspond to the will and its loves. If the law is “kept from the fear of punishment and not from the love of righteousness, it is servilely kept, not freely, and therefore it is not kept at all. For no fruit is good which does not grow from the root of love.” 136 Given that evil is disorder and disagreement in a being, 137 it follows that love must be the only legitimate motive for action. To do something for any other reason is to be divided and is thus evil. In discussing Augustine, Keller says that “love, for a patriarchal metaphysic incapable of connection, boils down to fear of destruction,” 138 but in fact this is just the opposite of Augustine’s anthropology and love ethic in which love, not fear, is the only legitimate motive for good action. The love given through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit frees one from the law while freeing one truly to obey the law for the first time. Through the Holy Spirit, one loves God and all else through God. Augustine says: “[W]e need not let that question worry us about how much love we should expend on our brother, how much on God. On our brother as much as on ourselves; and we love ourselves all the more, the more we love God. So with one and the same charity we love God and neighbor; but God on God’s account, ourselves and neighbor also on God’s account.” 139 It seems clear that the loves of consumerism are not and perhaps cannot be loved on God’s account,

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and thus are not adequate objects of love. What would it mean to love a status symbol on God’s account? This criterion is not meant to be a law, however, commanding one to love certain things in a given order or not to love other things. One cannot love a status symbol on God’s account not because there is something inherently evil about the object but rather because its being a status symbol implies something about how and why it is loved. The proper ordering of one’s loves is the natural result of the proper love for God. Once one has Christ’s grace, one is no longer under the yoke of the law because one fulfills the law in love. In other words, one does not need the law to tell one what to do; one does what one desires and that is God’s will, for “charity is the fulfillment of the law.” 140 “Thus,” Augustine says, “a short and simple precept will be given you once for all: Love, and do what you will.” 141 In this love, which comes through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God recreates the individual and enables the individual to share in the divine joy. The only authentic happy life comes through worshipping God, setting one’s joy on God, and recognizing that one is grounded in God, and despite many advertisers’ claims to the contrary, Augustine insists that this is the happy life, and there is no other. 142 Augustine hopes to find his stability and solidity in God for it is God’s truth that “imparts form” to him. 143 Though the soul is responsible for the evil in it, God must initiate the movement of formation, whether in making the soul that did not exist or in recreating it “when it had perished through its fall.” 144 The soul loses its proper existence in the fall; it is divided and, as it were, possessed by countless objects of desire, but God recreates what God has created so that it might be good and rest in the good as it was created to do. Praising God is the desire of the human being. God stirs people to take pleasure in praising God because, Augustine says, “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” 145 Of course restlessness is perhaps the most important attribute of the good consumer. Consumers are never satisfied with their goods and never content in themselves. Through God’s grace, the human will is made not only free, but also whole. With God as the true object of love, the human will is made free from anxiety because it is purified and seeks but a single destination. Augustine describes being torn to pieces by his thoughts and desires “until that day when, purified and molten by the fire of [God’s] love, [he flowed] together to merge into [God].” 146 Through the love of sin, the human will is attracted by a myriad of pleasures so that, pulled in many directions, it becomes shattered; through grace, the human will becomes one with itself and with God. Augustine says that God gathered him together from the state of disintegration, dispersal, and distortion and reshaped him and strengthened him. 147 God is the only good that brings happiness to a rational creature. God is the only unchanging good for though the things God has made are good, they are

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made out of nothing and so subject to change. 148 Thus, God alone is safe refuge. Augustine prays: “I can find no safe place for my soul except in you. There my dispersed aspirations are gathered together, and from you no part of me will depart.” 149 When Christ claims that his waters quench eternally, he means that whoever drinks of his water will return to the inner spring and thus have no more need to seek rain externally. 150 A product that quenches eternally means death for consumerism, which instead strives to generate ever new longings and dissatisfaction. CONCLUSION Augustine’s notion of charity and the freedom from the bondage to sin that it brings present a sharp contrast to and an implicit judgment of consumer society. Even the goal of rest is itself antithetical to a society based on competition and consumption. According to Augustine, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit properly orders one’s loves, and so when one acts out of this love, one is not divided at all. Rather, through compassion, one grows in one’s relation with others and with the Holy Spirit and thus with oneself. In consumer society, persons are often trained to think of themselves as isolated individuals whose engagements with the world are composed largely of competition and consumption. One attempts not so much to develop identity as to prove one’s identity through beating out other individuals in endless competition. Clapp calls advanced capitalism “a kind of cultus” and contrasts it with Christianity: “So if Christianity, as a cultus, sees self-control as a virtue, capitalism understands it as a vice called sales-resistance. If Christianity would promote patience, consumer capitalism would promote instant gratification. For peace and joy, this way of life substitutes deified dissatisfaction—forming a character that is never content with an existing experience (or product or service), but must always ache for the newer and the improved.” 151 I would add that if Christianity promotes love of neighbor, consumerism promotes competition with the neighbor. The Christian who lives in the United States in the early part of the twenty-first century will find it impossible to extricate herself from consumerism entirely. However, she will not take any of her economic decisions or the sum of these decisions to constitute her identity. She will imitate Christ, desiring what he desires. She will not condemn herself in the name of some consumer model but will ask forgiveness from her model, whom she imitates not so that she may become God but because she loves God. She will not compare herself to others or her belongings to their belongings. She will merely note that they share the same humanity, and thus she should share the things she happens to have. When she prays, “Give us this day our daily bread,” she will understand that if she has a loaf of bread in her kitchen, God

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has already answered this prayer for her and her neighbors and that it is her economic responsibility to distribute the gift. Indeed, responsibility may be too weak a word for if she prayed sincerely, how can she even feel that she has a choice whether to share or not when God has given her the capacity to fulfill her own prayer? The miracle of the loaves and fishes is repeated constantly, but rather than first sharing the riches of this miracle, people under the sway of consumerism begin by gathering their surplus into baskets. Augustine writes of the mere beginning of charity: If thou art not yet equal to the dying for thy brother, be thou even now equal to the giving of thy means to thy brother. Even now let charity smite thy bowels, that not of vainglory thou shouldest do it, but of the innermost marrow of mercy; that thou consider him, now in want. For if thy superfluities thou canst not give to thy brother, canst thou lay down thy life for thy brother? There lies thy money in thy bosom, which thieves may take from thee; and though thieves do not take it, by dying thou wilt leave it, even if it leave not thee while living: what wilt thou do with it? Thy brother hungers, he is in necessity: belike he is in suspense, is distressed by his creditor: he is thy brother, alike ye are bought, one is the price paid for you, ye are both redeemed by the blood of Christ. 152

NOTES The present essay has much in common with my previous article, “Augustine’s Theology as a Solution to the Problem of Identity in Consumer Society,” Augustinian Studies 37.1 (2006) 111–129. 1. Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (London: Routledge, 2001) ix. 2. Jean Kilbourne, Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising (New York: Free Press, 1999) 75. 3. James Twitchell, “Two Cheers for Materialism,” in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Juliet Schor and Douglas B. Holt (New York: New Press, 2000) 283. 4. Judith Williamson, Consuming Passions: The Dynamic of Popular Culture (London: Marion Boyars, 1985) 231. 5. John Fiske, “Shopping for Pleasure: Malls, Power, and Resistance,” in The Consumer Society Reader, 316, 321. 6. Thomas Hine, I Want That!: How We All Became Shoppers (New York: HarperCollins, 2002) 84–85. 7. John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989) 42. 8. Conrad Lodziak, The Myth of Consumerism (London: Pluto Press, 2002) 21. 9. Twitchell, Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) 47–49. 10. Zygmunt Bauman explains that poverty in a culture that associates consuming with freedom is especially crippling. See Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (New York: Open University Press, 2005) 59. 11. Bartholomew, “Christ and Consumerism,” Christ and Consumerism: An Introduction,” in Christ and Consumerism: Critical Reflections on the Spirit of Our Age, ed. Craig G. Bartholomew and Thorsten Moritz (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000) 8.

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12. Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 58. D. Stephen Long writes of the way capitalist society defines morality in terms of value preference. See Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (London: Routledge, 2000) 224. 13. Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984) 155. 14. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) 11. 15. Jean Baudrillard, “Consuming Society,” in Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, ed. Lawrence B. Glickman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) 42. 16. Zygmunt Bauman, “Is There a Postmodern Sociology?” Theory, Culture & Society 5 (1988) 221–22; Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 26. 17. Lodziak, 91, 81–82. 18. Clapp, Border Crossings: Christian Trespasses on Popular Culture and Public Affairs (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2000) 145. 19. Clapp, “Introduction: Consumption & the Modern Ethos,” in The Consuming Passion: Christianity & the Consumer Culture, ed. Rodney Clapp (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998) 13. 20. Vincent Jude Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004) 115. 21. Fiske, “Shopping for Pleasure,” 319. 22. For example, see Conf. 2.2.2 and 8.10.22. 23. Frithjof Bergmann, “Ecology and New Work: Excess Consumption and the Job System,” in The Consumer Society Reader, 500. 24. Miller, 54, 87. 25. Vickie Rutledge Shields with Dawn Heinecken, Measuring Up: How Advertising Affects Self-Image (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) 79–81. 26. John C. Cavidini, “Pride,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999) 680. 27. Augustine, (civ. Dei) City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984) 12.1. First references to primary materials will be given in full. Subsequent references will give only the Latin abbreviation of the title. 28. Augustine, (Gen. litt.) The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Brooklyn: New City Press, 2002) 4.24.41. 29. Ibid., 11.15.19. 30. Augustine, (lib. arb.) On Free Will, trans. John Burleigh, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. John H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953) 3.25.76. 31. Augustine, (Trin.) The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991) 4.14.19. 32. William E. Mann, “Augustine on Evil and Original Sin,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 46. 33. Augustine, (pecc. mer.) On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, trans. Peter Holmes, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 5, St. Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1980) 1.9.9. 34. Trin. 4.12.15, 4.13.18. 35. Augustine, (conf.) Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 10.42.67. 36. Trin. 13.13.17. 37. civ. Dei 14.3. 38. Trin. 4.10.13. 39. Augustine, (s.) Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990–97) 197.1. 40. Gen. litt. 11.30.39. 41. civ. Dei 11.22. For Augustine, no object is evil, but human comportment toward the object can be. Charles Mathewes summarizes Augustine’s distinction between uti (use) and frui

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(enjoy): “To enjoy something is to value it in itself, for itself; to use something is to value it for its instrumental value for another end. . . . The contrast between ‘enjoy’ and ‘use’ does not distinguish what should be loved from what should not be loved; it is rather a contrast in how one should value things.” See “On Using the World,” in Having: Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life, ed. William Schweiker and Charles Mathewes (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2004) 202. 42. R. A. Markus, “De ciutate dei: Pride and the Common Good,” in Collectanea Augustiniana: Augustine—“Second Founder of the Faith,” ed. Joseph C. Schnaubelt and Frederick Van Fleteren (New York: Peter Lang, 1990) 250. Gordon McConville writes: “We do not, strictly, possess anything. All things are the Lord’s. This implies that ‘things’ are not evil in and of themselves, but that they can become so when treated as personal possessions or commodities for exclusively private use.” See “The Old Testament and the Enjoyment of Wealth,” in Christ and Consumerism: Critical Reflections on the Spirit of Our Age, ed. Craig G. Bartholomew and Thorsten Moritz (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000) 78. 43. Trin. 12.9.14. 44. Gen. litt. 11.15.19. 45. Ibid., 11.15.20. 46. Trin. 12.12.17. 47. conf. 10.39.64. 48. Martin E. Marty sees just such a desire in consumerism. See “Equipoise,” in Consuming Desires: Consumption, Culture, and the Pursuit of Happiness, ed. Roger Rosenblatt (Washington: Island Press, 1999) 187. 49. Trin. 10.5.7. 50. J. Patout Burns, “Augustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil,” in The Ethics of St. Augustine, ed. William S. Babcock (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991) 77. 51. D. J. MacQueen, “Contemptus Dei: St Augustine on the disorder of Pride in Society, and its Remedies,” in Recherches Augustiniennes, vol. 9 (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1973) 247. 52. Burns, 71. 53. civ. Dei 14.13. 54. Trin. 13.18.23. 55. Augustine, (mus.) On Music, trans. R. Catesby Taliaferro (Annapolis: The St. John’s Bookstore, 1939) 6.13.40. 56. Augustine, (Gn. adv. Man.) On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, trans. Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Brooklyn: New City Press, 2002) 2.15.22. 57. Augustine, (doc. Chr.) On Christian Doctrine, trans. J. F. Shaw, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 2, St. Augustine’s: “The City of God” and “Christian Doctrine,” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) 1.23. 58. Bill McKibben, “Consuming Nature,” in Consuming Desires: Consumption, Culture, and the Pursuit of Happiness, ed. Roger Rosenblatt (Washington: Island Press, 1999) 90–91. 59. civ. Dei 14.27, 14.4. 60. Augustine, (spir. et litt.) A Treatise on the Spirit and the Letter, trans. Peter Holmes, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 5, St. Augustine: Anti-Pelagian Writings (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) 27.47. 61. Augustine, (c. Faust.) Reply to Faustus the Manichæan, trans. Richard Stothert, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 4, St. Augustine: The Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the Donatists (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) 22.22. 62. Clapp, Border Crossings, 146. 63. Kenneth Paul Wesche, “ΘЕΩΣΙΣ in Freedom & Love: The Patristic Vision,” in The Consuming Passion: Christianity & the Consumer Culture, ed. Rodney Clapp (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998) 128. 64. Augustine, (mor.) On the Morals of the Manichæans, trans. Richard Stothert, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 4, St. Augustine: The Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the Donatists (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) 6.8.

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65. Augustine, (c. Fort.) Acts or Disputation against Fortunatus the Manichæan, trans. Albert Newman, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 4, St. Augustine: The Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the Donatist s (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) 2.22. 66. conf. 8.5.10. 67. Ibid., 3.8.16 68. civ. Dei 14.15. 69. conf. 6.12.22. 70. Trin. 10.5.7. 71. Mathewes also notes the connection between Augustine’s understanding of desire and the desire embodied in consumerism (200). 72. conf. 8.10.22. 73. Paul Weithman, “Augustine’s Political Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 236. 74. conf. 8.5.11, 10.33.50. 75. Miller, 128. 76. See Sickness Unto Death. 77. conf. 2.2.2. 78. Alan Storkey comments on the fracturing of identity in consumer society: “The psalmist’s ‘Unite my heart to fear thy Name’ becomes ‘Scatter my identity by buying.’” See “PostModernism Is Consumption,” in Christ and Consumerism: Critical Reflections on the Spirit of Our Age, ed. Craig G. Bartholomew and Thorsten Moritz (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000) 115. 79. s. 96.2. 80. Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986) 165. 81. Mathewes, 201–203. 82. Trin. 14.14.18. 83. c. Faust. 22.78. 84. Augustine, (Simpl.) To Simplican—On Various Questions, trans. John Burleigh, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. John H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953) 1.1.6–9. 85. mor. 14.35. 86. Cavidini, 682. 87. J. F. Procopé, “Initium omnis peccati superbia,” in Studia Patristica, vol. 22, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1989) 316. 88. conf. 12.10.10. 89. Ibid., 7.7.11. 90. Burns, 82. 91. Trin. 7.3.55. 92. pecc. mer. 2.17.27. 93. Cavidini, 682. 94. Trin. 8.5.7, 13.18.23, 13.17.22, 13.14.18. 95. Augustine, (ord.) Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil, trans. Robert P. Russell (New York: Cosmopolitan Science & Art Service, 1942) 2.5.16. 96. MacQueen, 280. 97. Augustine, (Jo. ev. tr.) The Homilies or Tractates on the Gospel of John, trans. John Gibb (1–37) and James Innes, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 7, St. Augustine: Homilies on the Gospel of John; Homilies on the First Epistle of John (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986) 25.16. 98. lib. arb. 3.25.76. 99. Trin. 4.10.13, 4.13.17. 100. Jo. ev. tr. 42.10. 101. lib. arb. 3.25.76. 102. Trin. 7.3.55. 103. pecc. mer. 2.19.32, 1.25.37. 104. spir. et litt. 7.11.

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105. Procopé, 320. 106. Augustine, (c. Acad.) Against the Academics, trans. John O’Meara (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1951) 3.19.42. 107. Trin. 8.7.11, 13.14.18. 108. conf. 10.36.59. 109. s. 160.7. 110. Augustine, (en. Ps.) Expositions on the Psalms, trans. J. E. Tweed, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 8, St. Augustine: Expositions on the Psalms (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989) 104.41. 111. Augustine, (corrept.) A Treatise on Rebuke and Grace, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 5, St. Augustine: Anti-Pelagian Writings (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) 12.37. 112. en. Ps. 104.43. 113. corrept. 13.40. 114. Robert Webber and Rodney Clapp, People of the Truth: A Christian Challenge to Contemporary Culture (Harrisburg: Morehouse, 1993) 31. 115. spir. et litt. 29.50. 116. conf. 9.13.34. 117. spir. et litt. 7.11. 118. conf. 10.3.4. 119. s. 96.2. 120. civ. Dei 21.24. 121. Trin. 8.8.12. 122. Augustine, (ep. Jo.) Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, trans. H. Browne, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 7, St. Augustine: Homilies on the Gospel of John; Homilies on the First Epistle of John (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986) 5. 123. Trin. 8.8.12. 124. civ. Dei 14.11, 14.15. 125. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956) 72. 126. Nancy M. Victorin-Vangerud, The Raging Hearth: Spirit in the Household of God (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000) 140. 127. Augustine, (ep.) Letters, trans. J. G. Cunningham, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 1, “The Confessions” and Letters of St. Augustine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) 194.3.12. 128. spir. et litt. 30.52. 129. civ. Dei 22.30. 130. Simpl. 1.1.6–9. 131. Ibid., 1.2.21. 132. Augustine, (c. litt. Pet.) Answer to Letters of Petilian, Bishop of Cirta, trans. J. R. King, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 4, St. Augustine: The Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the Donatists (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) 2.84.184. 133. spir. et litt. 8.13. 134. conf. 1.12.19. 135. Gn. adv. Man. 2.14.21. 136. spir. et litt. 14.26. 137. mor. 8.11. 138. Keller, 168. 139. Trin. 8.8.12. 140. Simpl. 1.1.17. 141. ep. Jo. 7.8. 142. conf. 10.22.32. 143. Ibid., 11.30.40. 144. civ. Dei 13.15. 145. conf. 1.1.1.

96 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

J. Burton Fulmer conf. 11.29.39. Ibid., 2.1.1, 12.16.23. civ. Dei 12.1. conf. 10.40.65. Gen. adv. Man. 2.5.6. Clapp, Border Crossings, 94–95. ep. Jo. 5.12.

Chapter Six

Eudaimonism and Dispossession Augustine on Almsgiving Jennifer A. Herdt

Boniface Ramsey’s 1982 article, “Almsgiving in the Latin Church,” has become something of a touchstone for discussions of the place of giving to the poor in Augustine’s thought. 1 Ramsey, examining almsgiving as the practice was understood in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, lodged a powerful critique. Practices of almsgiving, he charged, depersonalized and instrumentalized the poor. Those giving alms understood themselves to be giving to Christ and thereby atoning for their sins. Almsgiving, Ramsey wrote, “is characterized less as a work whose motivation is the alleviation of social ills than as a profoundly spiritual exercise . . . its thrust is rather heavily donor-centered: it confers benefits on the giver in the form of the remission of sin; it places him in a mysterious relationship to Christ, makes Christ his debtor, opens heaven to him, and earns him the prayers of the poor.” 2 The poor were effectively swallowed up in Christ, not seen as having any individual personality. And the poor were essentially used as a means for the sanctification of the donor; an apparently outer-directed act was in its meaning essentially inner-directed. Ramsey notes that Augustine pays some heed to the ways in which this instrumentalization can corrupt, acknowledging that it would be cruel to wish others to be miserable so that one has an opportunity to be merciful. 3 But such acknowledgments are swamped by the overwhelming logic of almsgiving as a spiritual practice, in which Augustine was seemingly just as fully caught up as his contemporaries. Peter Brown has noted that “Augustine spoke of almsgiving as something as impersonal as stockbroking—as a judicious transfer of capital from this unsafe world to the next.” 4 At the end of the fourth century, Brown argues, Christ’s advice to the rich young man 97

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became the primary lens through which almsgiving was construed: “go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Matt. 19:21, NRSV). 5 If this is indeed the case, it raises important questions concerning Augustine’s tendency to focus on the state of the giver’s soul, and hence more generally concerning the virtue-centered, eudaimonistic character of his ethics. 6 Does Augustine’s concern for the giving of alms really represent a concern for social justice at all? Can an ethics centered on the agent’s state of character make adequate room for responding to the needs of others because of those others and their needs, rather than because doing so is in some way good for the responder? If giving alms solidifies one’s virtue and stores up treasure in heaven, does that mean that one cannot at the same time be responding to the neighbor’s needs for the sake of the neighbor? Augustine holds, I will argue, that we are ultimately called to love God for God’s own sake, not for our own sake, that is, to love God because God is good, not because God is good for us. It is indeed good for us to love God, but we don’t love God well until we love God because God is good as such. In learning to love God for God’s own sake, we first become able to love others properly for their own sakes, in relation to God and God’s love for them. Part of this involves seeing that there are claims that others or the needs of others make on us that we are bound to recognize, or blameworthy for not responding to or recognizing. Hence, Augustine does have a notion of the demands of justice, and not simply of the virtue of justice as a disposition perfective of its possessor. MULTIPLE MEANINGS Part of what makes it difficult to bring Augustine’s understanding of almsgiving into focus is that his conception of what almsgiving does, what it accomplishes, is so complex and multilayered. We can identify many distinct themes in Augustine’s discussions of almsgiving. 7 I want briefly to enumerate six, bringing out the distinctive features of each before placing them in broader contexts that allow us to begin to unify them. What emerges is a set of concerns very different from those depicted by Ramsey. 1. Almsgiving is seen as a way for the giver to store up treasure in heaven. Almsgiving, Augustine insists, is a profitable enterprise; a path to gain, not loss: Let them be rich in good works, let them be easy givers. . . . Let them share, let them take some notice of their fellow mortals. Let them share, let them store up for themselves a good foundation for the future. . . . I am teaching them how to make a profit, when I point out ‘Let them store up for themselves.’ I’m not telling them to do this so that they can lose it; I’m showing them where to

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transfer the account. . . . So true life is to be laid hold of, our investments are to be transferred to the place of true life, so that we may find there what we give here. 8

So you can’t take it with you—but really you can, insists Augustine. The worldly wealth that would otherwise be lost when a person dies is wealth that can be stored up in the place of true, eternal life. And the way to transfer this wealth to heaven is by giving it away to the poor. Wealth given to the poor benefits the giver for eternity. Against those who insist they need to husband their wealth in order to pass it down to their children, Augustine insists that “the place where you have stored it is unsafe. You want to act in the best interests of your avarice; very well, see whether what I advise does not consort well even with your avarice.” 9 2. Almsgiving expiates sin. This can of course be seen as a further unpacking of the theme of treasures in heaven, articulating further a mechanism for the transfer of wealth. It can also be independently developed. Here, following Luke 6:37–38, giving and forgiving are seen as tightly linked. Forgiving others and giving to others are two ways of being kind. 10 At the same time, Augustine speaks of these acts of kindness as possessing wings that allow prayers for the giver’s own forgiveness to rise to heaven and be heard. Do as much as you can, do it with what you can, do it cheerfully, and confidently send out your prayer. It will have two wings, twin acts of kindness. What do I mean by twin acts of kindness? Forgive, and you shall be forgiven; give, and you shall be given (Lk. 6:37–38). One act of kindness is the one that is done with the heart, when you forgive your brother a sin; the other act of kindness is the one that is done with your substance, when you offer bread to the poor man. Do them both, or your prayer may be left without one wing. 11

Augustine’s image is particularly lyrical, but the conception itself, like that of treasure in heaven, is a commonplace of patristic discourse, found in Origen, Cyprian, Clement of Rome, and others. 12 3. To give alms to the poor is to give to Christ. The foundational text was that of the judgment of the nations in Matthew 25, where the righteous are told, “Come, you that are blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Mt. 25:34–36, NRSV). So all that is done to the poor is interpreted as having been done to and for Christ. Instead of emphasizing human equality, the equality of those born weak and destined to die, regardless of whatever distinctions of material wealth intervene, here Augustine stresses the need to recognize Christ hidden

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in the poor. Christ enthroned in glory does not need human gifts, but we are nevertheless able to give gifts to Christ insofar as Christ is present in the poor: “fear Christ up above, recognize him down below. Have Christ up above lavishing bounty, recognize him here needing charity. Here he’s poor, there he’s rich.” 13 4. Almsgiving is also seen as an activity that serves to cultivate the virtues of mercy and justice. Instead of a quid pro quo that earns forgiveness or a mechanism that transfers wealth, here almsgiving is characterized as a practice that transforms the character of the giver. When focused on this theme, Augustine will insist that it is not the external act of giving to the poor that is itself transformative. Rather, such donations build up virtues of mercy and justice when they are expressions of the love of God and of neighbor. “Love the Lord God with your whole heart, and your whole soul, and your whole mind; love your neighbor as yourself (Mk. 12:30–31; Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18); and then you have given alms first to your soul, in your conscience. But if you pass over this kind of alms, give what you like, donate as much as you like; take off from your produce not a tenth but a half; give nine parts, and leave yourself a pauper. Let your soul be fed, or it will die of hunger. Give it bread.” 14 So the wealthy must learn to recognize their own souls as beggars, and feed them first, in order then to be able properly to give alms to others. Only in a soul rightly ordered to God and neighbor can almsgiving express and further cultivate the virtues. 5. A focus on the state of the giver’s soul counsels givers to place the priority on their own virtues, on the poverty of their own soul. Here the need of the other seems to disappear. But another frequent refrain in Augustine’s sermons underscores the need of the other. Recognizing human tendencies to amplify one’s own need and pain while downplaying that of others, he emphasizes basic human equality. “How can you have the face to ask your God for something if you don’t take any notice of your equal? . . . I’m not asking what you are like in your clothes, but what you were like when you were born. You were both naked, both feeble, both beginning a miserable life, and so both crying.” 15 Instead of giving alms in a way that underscores human inequality, the wealth of the giver and the need of the recipient, Christians are charged to recognize a fundamental equality of human dependence on God. “ . . . Look, you are full, the poor person is empty. Consider your origins; you were both born naked. So you too were born naked. You found many things here; did you bring anything at all with you? . . . Just think, I mean, whoever of you are rich: However much you may have, you are God’s beggar. 16 6. Almsgiving builds and displays the unity of the church. Rich and poor alike are expected to give alms; almsgiving is thus not a way in which the rich assert that they are more fully members of the church than are the poor. 17 Given the example of the widow’s mite, quantitative differences are

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irrelevant. Moreover, even the poorest of the poor are capable of showing mercy, that complementary form of giving. The giving of the wealthy meets the material needs of the poor. It also literally builds the material presence of the church, its bricks and mortar. Any funds given to the church were symbolically interpreted as given to the poor, even if they were used for other purposes, such as building. By paying for the building of churches, the wealthy provide the spaces within which the unity of the church, and the congregation’s shared praise of God, can be physically evident. Meanwhile, the forgiveness shown by the poor reconciles conflicts and heals cracks in the unity of the church. Clearly, almsgiving not only carried heavy symbolic weight, it was also subject to a widely varied range of interpretations. They are interconnected, but they also differ significantly from one another; to give with the intention of building up for oneself treasure in heaven is a distinct preoccupation from giving in order to build up the unity of the church. Are some of these meanings more central than others? Does one offer the interpretive key to all the rest? Or are they simply disparate layers of meaning, drawn upon as occasion and text suggest? Boniface Ramsey’s interpretation gives us one alternative: it all comes down to the individual’s pursuit of her own spiritual welfare. It is for this reason that I seek to give to Christ, for the reward promised to those who do. And whatever concern for my needy fellow creatures or for the upbuilding of the church my almsgiving may seem to show, it is instrumental to my enterprise of storing up for myself treasures in heaven. This reduction to spiritual self-interest has a certain plausibility about it, but I suspect that this has more to do with the ways in which crudely utilitarian forms of thinking so deeply inform our consciousness than it does with Augustine’s theology of almsgiving. I want to suggest that we reframe the discussion by placing it successively within two contexts: the social context of the late fourth century Roman empire, and the rhetorical context of the sermon. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT Augustine’s treatment of wealth and poverty was moderately conservative. Unlike radical Christian voices who called the wealthy to utter dispossession as the only proper response to Jesus’s counsel to the rich young ruler (Matthew 19:16–22), Augustine emphasized giving on the part of rich and poor alike, together with the wise use of wealth. Ambrose in the 380s had drawn on the imaginative world of the Hebrew prophets to insist that the poor had a just claim on the rich; almsgiving was not simply a matter of the largesse of the wealthy, but the correction of prior injustices. “The poor did not face the rich,” writes Peter Brown, “as beggars asking for alms. Rather, in the manner of an ancient Near Eastern society, the poor came before the powerful in

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search of justice.” 18 Augustine agrees that the poor are fundamentally plaintiffs, not beggars, that it is unjust for them to be deprived even of the means of subsistence. But he is not interested in scrutinizing the origins of wealth to adjudicate its guilt or innocence. Nor does he issue a blanket call for the wealthy to give up all that they have for the poor. Against those who do so, he urges instead a responsibility to care for the temporal well-being of one’s near and dear. It is not that he failed to feel the pull of the ideal of total dispossession. In the community he formed with his friends at Thagaste, there were no private possessions and all wealth was pooled. And while this community certainly resembled rather closely pagan philosophical communities that pooled wealth for the sake of establishing self-sufficient independence, Augustine and his friends understood what they were doing as a repetition of the community of property established by the first Christians as reported in Acts. But the Thagaste community was not formed for the sake of passing wealth along to the poor. 19 And Augustine’s letters reveal how far he was from establishing total dispossession as an ideal. Most of the wealthy are simply not free to follow Christ’s counsel to the rich young ruler: they must care for parents and other dependents. 20 To be sure, they must also give alms. But they ought to be concerned more with fulfilling their varied obligations, to family as well as to the poor, than with dramatic displays of their own spiritual commitment. Wealth was not evil; it could be used for good. If Augustine’s call to give alms was not a radical demand for dispossession, it was also not simply the traditional Roman notion of civic euergetism. Alms were understood as given to the poor, and even if to Christ, to Christ specifically as poor; alms were not given for the glory of the city, as in pagan euergetism. As noted above, everything given to the church was symbolically coded as a gift for the poor, even if it went, as much Christian giving in North Africa did, to the building of churches. 21 Since pagan euergetism often funded public edifices, the two could look the same. But in addition to insisting that the object of giving was the poor, not the city, Augustine also marked the difference of Christian charity by emphasizing that the amount of giving was fundamentally unimportant and that both rich and poor could and should give, a possibility opened up by the association between giving and forgiving already noted. Moreover, Augustine cast aspersions on pagan euergetism by treating the funding of spectacles and idolatry as the paradigm of pagan giving. He thereby obscured the areas in which pagan and Christian giving were least easy to distinguish from one another: funds given to erect buildings for public use. Pagan giving was, to Augustine, a form of selfglorification that fed vice and idolatry; Christian giving responded to needs that underscored equal human vulnerability and nurtured the unity of the church. In the context of the early fifth century, with civil war and barbarian invasions rocking the Empire, Augustine sensed that the radical ethic of

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dispossession would have further destabilized the church. Brown argues that “Augustine’s justification of wealth came at the right time. . . . Solidarity was at a premium.” 22 The key, for Augustine, was not to eliminate economic inequality, but rather to dismantle the pride of the rich. It was pride, he held, that above all else disrupted community. “Get rid of pride,” he preached, “and riches will do no harm.” 23 Pride was grounded in distinctions that separated; Augustine preached forms of identification that unified. The exchange between rich and poor was not just material but spiritual; Christian works of mercy were a form of spiritual exchange: “by the communion of persons the Church (and the world) was seen as made in the image and likeness of God who has made himself known in Jesus Christ.” 24 Almsgiving was thus grasped as a sacrament that made Christ known in the world. Earlier Augustine had focused on his monastery as the embodiment of Christian unity. By the early fifth century, he was able to see the spiritual exchanges of almsgiving as a foretaste of the unity of loving souls to be reached in heaven. 25 Attending to the social context of Augustine’s teaching on almsgiving brings into focus key features elided by Ramsey’s account. On Ramsey’s analysis, the meaning of almsgiving is finally individual; activity ostensibly directed to the poor and their needs is all instrumentalized to the sanctification and eternal bliss of the agent. But Augustine’s concern for the unity of the church is not instrumental; it is an anticipation of the end of loving communion in the divine life. But then why does Augustine so often speak of almsgiving as expiating one’s sins, as storing up treasure for oneself in heaven, as a means of private sanctification? Do such themes simply reflect the prevalent discourse of the day, themes inherited from other Christian preachers and unreflectively employed by Augustine despite the fact that they stand in tension with his own basic understanding of almsgiving? No; these themes are employed quite intentionally. In order to understand why we must turn to the rhetorical context of the sermon. THE RHETORICAL CONTEXT Augustine’s discussions of almsgiving are confined almost wholly to his sermons and letters, where it is an insistent theme. 26 It is important, therefore, in trying to make sense of Augustine’s understanding of almsgiving, to reflect on almsgiving precisely as preached. Augustine’s sermons are the site of a pedagogy of Christian formation. The audience of any sermon is far from homogeneous. Still, in addition to the fact that a sermon is preached to some particular audience in some place and time, with features that distinguish it from other audiences, a sermon typically also constructs its audience, addresses itself to those in some particular life situation: to sinners, perhaps,

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or to those suffering; to the wealthy, or to the poor; to the confident, or to the doubting. While Augustine addressed each sermon to some such real and constructed audience, his sermons do not treat this audience as a static reality. Rather, the sermon is an opportunity to take the hearer from one way of thinking and living to another, to transform their understanding of the Christian life and of their own lives, to assist them to live out their vocation as citizens of the heavenly city. This transformation is gradual; it must meet hearers where they are, and cannot hope to catapult them from immaturity to a mature faith. What people are able to hear depends on their own current frame of reference; it is by meeting them there, and transforming some feature of that frame, that it is possible to engage them in practices that will enable them to hear something more and be further transformed. Nor is this simply a process of cognitive transformation; it is also a transformation of desire; one comes to perceive new things as good, as worthy of pursuit. This suggests that we might bring the varied meanings of almsgiving into focus by arraying them on a pedagogical continuum. Crass economic metaphors are employed as a point of initial engagement, for an audience that finds this way of thinking intuitive, but this is just the beginning. So someone who seeks to accumulate treasure on earth may grasp the attractions of an imperishable heavenly treasure. Someone well aware that “you can’t take it with you,” but intent on guarding the welfare of loved ones by providing them with a sizable inheritance, may come to a broadened understanding of who those loved ones are. Someone intent on personal sanctification may come to grasp that genuine mercy and justice are focused on the neighbor, not on self. The overall pedagogy is of the love of God and neighbor in which the heavenly city is anticipated and, ultimately, realized. Joseph Clair has recently argued that Augustine’s social and political ethics are defined throughout by his employment of the Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis or appropriation, transformed along Peripatetic lines in later Roman Stoicism. 27 Oikeiosis turns out to be an immensely fruitful interpretive lens, which sheds further light on the precise pedagogical shape of Augustine’s preaching on almsgiving. At its root, oikeiosis has to do with the use of external goods (for the Stoics, technically preferred indifferents) to serve the needs of one’s nature. Since both animal and human natures are sociable, oikeiosis also speaks to the relationship between self-preservation and care for others. 28 According to the Stoics, there is a natural tendency on the part of human beings for self-love to become increasingly expansive, or, better, for ever-larger circles of relationship to be drawn into the domain of our selflove. We begin by seeking self-preservation, but we naturally come to care for family and friends and are capable of coming similarly to care for fellowcitizens and ultimately for all fellow-human beings. What is oikeion is what is naturally appropriate or suitable for oneself but also what is akin to or related to oneself. Hence we come by a process of oikeiosis to see all of

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humankind as our kind, as kin. 29 Friendship for oneself is extended in concentric circles outward into the love of all. Several aspects of Augustine’s treatment of almsgiving fall immediately into place. When, for instance, Augustine offers advice to those seeking the safest investments, assuring them that what he counsels consorts well with their avarice, he is meeting them at the inner circle of self-preservation. His aim is to make himself intelligible to them in terms of the goods they understand and care about, while transforming their understanding of what it is they really need to do in order to preserve themselves. 30 Those he urges to give to the poor versus saving up for their descendants he is meeting at the next circle, of self-love instinctively expanded to include kin. Here he works to reframe saving as taking from the poor what in justice should go to them; basic sustenance for the poor should take precedence over luxury for the near and dear. We cannot be a good friend to our children by failing utterly in friendship to the poor; such saving is a squandering, a poisoning of our familial affection. So we can see how Augustine encounters his audience as stuck at various points along the expanding concentric circles of oikeoisis, and seeks to move them gradually outward. Augustine’s adaptation of oikeiosis also helps us to make sense of his emphasis on common humanity. In order to be capable of friendship with the poor, it is not enough simply to see their wretchedness, their need; we must come to recognize them as essentially like ourselves. We must lose our sense of our own wealth as something that meaningfully distinguishes or separates us from them. Hence Augustine emphasizes our common nakedness at birth, our common weakness at death, our common sinfulness, everything that relativizes the significance of what separates us and thus dams up the flow of our affection, our responsiveness to their need. 31 The Stoics distinguished between the process of oikeoisis insofar as it is driven by instincts of self-preservation and procreation, and shared with other animals, and higher-level oikeoisis, proper to rational creatures, who grasp what is owed to those who share a common human nature. 32 Through reason, the Stoics argued, we are capable of recognizing that there is no good justification for preferring ourselves to others; all human beings have a share in divine reason. This does not mean, however, that special relationships fall by the wayside: “we cannot cut out the close and traditional kinship relationships for the sake of humanity at large.” 33 Reason confirms natural affection’s focus on care for self, kin, and friends, even as it corrects forms of this affection that preclude recognition of universal humanity. Much the same sense that a host of duties to the near and dear are to be affirmed alongside attention to universal humanity is reflected in Augustine’s advice to Christians concerning the disposition of wealth; those with outstanding family responsibilities are urged to fulfill them, and chided for seeking to sell all

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their property to give it to the poor; those without such family duties are urged, in contrast, to do the latter without delay. 34 Oikeoisis thus offers an illuminating lens for ordering the various meanings of almsgiving in accord with the proper ordering of our loves, the ordo amoris. But Augustine’s employment of oikeiosis is decisively inflected by his understanding of the love of God, as we learn to love self and neighbor properly only in loving God, and then in loving all else in relation to God. While the Stoics regarded higher-level oikeiosis as driven by reason, Cicero’s De finibus represented the Peripatetic Antiochus as holding in contrast that higher oikeiosis was rooted in affection, and Augustine followed Antiochus in this respect. 35 Augustine’s transformation of Stoic oikeiosis goes beyond Antiochus, however. For Augustine, the outer ring of affection is not humankind or even the universe as such, but love for God, which transforms all of these concentric circles of love. For Augustine, the shift from reason to affection underscored the receptive and dependent character of the process of oikeoisis. Even if reason can grasp the duties I owe to others on the basis of our common humanity, my affections must be transformed before self-love can be so expanded, and I am not master of my affections. Genuine friendship with others, as opposed to the limited expansion of the instinct of selfpreservation, is made possible only through grace. And Augustine’s sermons can participate in this graced transformation. It is this that allows Augustine’s emphasis on sin to come into focus. Augustine certainly shared the widespread Christian assumption of his day that almsgiving could expiate sin. But against many of his contemporaries, Augustine insisted that almsgiving was not a way to merit forgiveness for any and all sins. 36 It was thus not a way of asserting one’s own control over the economy of grace. He did, as we have seen, speak of giving alms to one’s own soul, cultivating mercy and justice as a prerequisite for giving alms to others. 37 We should be concerned about the state of our own soul, because if our own soul is in disorder we cannot be a friend to others: “no one who gives alms to a Christian really gives alms to a fellow Christian unless he loves Christ in that person.” 38 And he emphasized that all are sinful; all need to participate in the exchange of works of mercy (giving and forgiving) that expiate sin and re-weave relationship, and all are in need of the grace that enables us to love Christ in one another and so to show genuine mercy toward one another. Augustine preached, as Peter Brown has it, “a somber democracy of sin.” 39 Sin equalizes us before God and one another; it reminds the wealthy of their common humanity with the poor. Mindfulness of sin offered a crucial corrective to Pelagianism’s perfectionism, “a sanction for that insidious pride which ruptures community.” 40 And because forgiving as well as almsgiving, small as much as large amounts, could serve equally as acts of mercy, loving Christ in one another, the wealthy were prevented from using their wealth to

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buy for themselves yet another form of exceptionalism. All are dependent on God, in an economy that cannot be manipulated because it is love that is given all around. Augustine thus transforms almsgiving from a force disruptive of unity to one formative of unity. A democracy of sin, yes—but was it somber? It could certainly be sober in its estimate of human sinfulness. But Augustine was not just interested in encouraging his hearers to wallow in their wretchedness, becoming unable to love either others or oneself. Rather, to recognize sin, and of its presence in rich and poor alike, was a step on the journey of being freed to love both self and neighbor rightly. To give alms for the remission of sins was a concrete reminder that almsgiving was not a way of declaring the giver’s greatness; it was a remedy for pride, that greatest impediment to unity. As Robert Dodaro notes, “true pardon and reconciliation, both of which are essential to social justice, can only be produced between individuals who continually recognise themselves as sinners in need of God’s pardon.” 41 Rich and poor can be reconciled only when each recognizes the other as equally dependent on the gift of God’s forgiveness. I noted that Augustine regarded oikeiosis as culminating not in the love of humankind or of the universe, but in love for God, in a way that transformed all of the expanding concentric circles of love. If oikeoisis is governed by affection rather than by reason, does this mean that the decisive Stoic shift from an expanding self-love and instinct of self-preservation to a rational grasp that no good reason exists for privileging myself over others does not take place? Does saying that I learn to love self and others rightly only by way of love of God, the perfect Good, mean that I love God finally just because God is good to or for me? After all, Augustine assumes with his pagan neighbors that happiness is our final end, that for the sake of which we do all that we do. 42 To be sure, Augustine stretched pagan eudaemonism by denying that it is something that I can achieve for myself, a matter of the character of my own activity. For Augustine, eudaimonia is not possible within the confines of this life and it is something that I must receive, rather than achieve. We are not made happy as our subjective desires are fulfilled; rather, we are made capable of happiness insofar as our desire is transformed, often painfully, into desire for what is truly, objectively good—God. We must be transformed into creatures capable of the loving relationship with God in which we find our happiness. But did Augustine really agree that my own happiness is the source of all of my reasons for acting, that in all that I do, I am acting for the sake of my own good, of what is good for me? This distorts what it means for Augustine to regard God as the culmination of the process of oikeiosis. To be sure, in loving God, and all things in relation to God, we are made happy, and only so can we be made happy. Yet if I love God only as that which makes me

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happy, if my own happiness is the source of my reason for loving, I am not loving God for God’s own sake: Love him, and love him freely, for nothing. You see, if you love him on account of something else, you aren’t loving him at all. You mustn’t want him for the sake of anything else, but whatever you want you must love for his sake, so that everything else may be referred to love of him, not so that he may be referred to other loves, but that he may be preferred to other loves. Love him, love him freely, for nothing. 43

The process is not simply one of an expanded self-love. Rather, it is a process of transformation in which one comes increasingly to know what—whom— one is loving in a way that decisively changes oneself and one’s loves. A key element of this transformation involves grasping God as common good (not private good)—as the good that can be loved by, shared by all, without competition or exclusion. 44 Augustine vividly contrasts this with sexual human desire exclusively to enjoy the beloved: “I don’t want to be the only one magnifying the Lord, I don’t want to be his only lover, I don’t want to embrace him all by myself. It is not as though there will be no room for any others to put their hands, if I am embracing him. God’s wisdom is so wide that all souls can embrace and enjoy her.” 45 On the one hand, Augustine affirms the erotic quality of the human desire for God. We do not in some detached way merely perceive and affirm God’s goodness; we fall in love with it. On the other hand, to grasp God as Goodness itself is to grasp how ludicrous it is to desire God for myself in competition with others, and indeed to desire God for myself as such. Sin, as Robert Markus writes, is seen by Augustine “as a withdrawal into a ‘privacy’ which is a deprivation”; “by it all community is fatally ruptured: man’s community with God, community with his fellow-men, with his own self.” 46 At the outset, it may be the case that my private happiness is the source of all of my reasons for acting, but along the way I discover that I can love myself truly only by loving God. And I do not love God if I turn away from the higher and more excellent good to myself, or if I refer God to myself. Hence, it is better to say that God, rather than my own happiness, is my true final end, that worth choosing for its own sake, and for the sake of which everything else that is choiceworthy is made to be such. For my own happiness is choiceworthy—not simply something that I naturally and necessarily desire, but something that I properly recognize as to be sought—only insofar as it is the realization of God’s purposes for this corner of creation.

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CONCLUSION In loving God well, we learn how to love ourselves well, and this in turn teaches us how to love our neighbors well. Both our neighbors and ourselves are finally to be loved not on our own account, in relation to our own untransformed desires and priorities, but on account of God. 47 It is not simply that we must recognize the fellow humanity of the other as making a demand on us, not simply that we grasp a claim of justice here. We must, to be sure, but Augustine is concerned as well with how we become creatures capable of responding to this demand, with how our affections become re-ordered to the love of neighbor. They do so by way of the love of God. Stoic reason allows us to grasp that we are simply one among many. To be self-conscious is to be conscious of oneself as an organism directed towards its own flourishing, but it is by the same token the capacity “to know that there exists a view from the eyes of others, whose perspective is not that of the living being which we ourselves are.” 48 But this brings with it two new possibilities. The first is that of pursuing what is good for oneself in a newly intentional and self-conscious way, curvatus in se. The other is to pursue what is good in itself. Reason alone is not enough to determine us to the second of these possibilities. We must fall in love with God. Loving God, we love all of creation in relation to God, rather than in relation to our own private desires. 49 Christ, writes Augustine, “wants his disciples to be one in him, because they cannot be one in themselves, split as they are from each other by clashing wills and desires, and the uncleanness of their sins; so they are cleansed by the mediator that they may be one in him, not only by virtue of the same nature whereby all of them from the ranks of mortal men are made equal to the angels, but even more by virtue of one and the same wholly harmonious will reaching out in concert to the same ultimate happiness, and fused somehow into one spirit in the furnace of charity.” 50 Desire for happiness is not denied, but it comes into its own as a desire for union with God that is intrinsically social, freeing us from self-enclosure and for unity. In this life, then, transformed by the love of God, we seek not to have what we happen to want, but to want rightly, to want what is good, to want in accordance with God’s will. 51 The poor, then, are very far from being a mere means to sanctification for Augustine. To be sure, Augustine does not think that meeting the needs of the poor is sufficient to make almsgiving good: “If I don’t have love, if I spend generously on the poor, if I come forward to confess the name of Christ to the point of shedding my blood, to the point of going to the stake, well these things can be done out of love of glory, and they are vain.” 52 Such acts are not wholly vain, of course, if a hungry belly is filled, but they are vain in a more ultimate sense because in the absence of love they are actions performed out of inwardly curving self-love. They are vain not because they

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have failed to sanctify the agent, but because they have failed to build relationship. Almsgiving for Augustine does not, then, have a heavily donorcentered thrust; indeed, Augustine insists that we need to learn how to love ourselves so that we can be trusted to love others: So make progress in this regard. Love the Lord, and in so doing learn how to love yourselves, so that when by loving the Lord you genuinely love yourselves, you may have no hesitations about loving your neighbors as yourselves. I mean, when I don’t find someone loving himself, how can I entrust him with a neighbor to love as himself? 53

We need to learn to love ourselves in relation to God, rather than our own grasping, competitive desires. Only then can we properly love our neighbors. When those who have material wealth give from that wealth in response to the needs of their neighbors in want, and those who have been wronged forgive, both are working to overcome the clashing wills and desires that divide one from another; both are growing in neighbor-love. Did Augustine care about social justice? Certainly, he cared about justice, as the proper order of all things in relation to God. He held that the rich were blame-worthy for failing to meet the basic needs of the poor in their communities. He did not seek to eliminate wealth, or all economic inequality. But he did advocate an institutional response, not simply an individual one: alms were given to the church, and the church became the key social institution responding to both poverty and illness. He did not set individual and institutional responses over against one another, but regarded them as necessarily operating in concert. For Augustine, it is disunity, not inequality, that most impedes justice. Where disparities of wealth disrupt unity, where they feed pride, where they incline some to fail to recognize and respond to the common humanity of others, they are a problem. His eudaimonism does not to legitimate the pursuit of one’s own private happiness or a preoccupation with one’s own sanctity. Rather, his concern is with how we can learn to love God as final good and only thus learn how to love both ourselves and our neighbors properly, as fellow children of God, needy and dependent. No merely structural remedy can effectively address economic injustices in the absence of such a capacity to recognize and identify with the neighbor. NOTES 1. Boniface Ramsey, “Almsgiving in the Latin Church: The Late Fourth and Early Fifth Centuries,” Theological Studies 43 (1982) 226–259. In response, see Allan Fitzgerald, “Almsgiving in the Works of Saint Augustine,” in Signum Pietatis: Festgabe für Cornelius Petrus Mayer, ed. Adolar Zumkeller (Würzburg: Augustinus Verlag, 1989) 445–459; Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 29–30; Joseph Clair, “Discerning the Good in the Letters and Sermons of Augustine” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, September 2013) 118.

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2. Boniface Ramsey, “Almsgiving in the Latin Church: The Late Fourth and Early Fifth Centuriest,” Theological Studies 43 (1982) 252. 3. Ramsey, “Almsgiving,” 254; enarr in Ps.126 [125] 14. 4. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, new ed. 2000) 193. 5. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) 84. 6. I have discussed the special character of Augustine’s eudaimonism in Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) ch. 2. 7. On the many meanings of Christian almsgiving in the fourth and fifth centuries, with special emphasis on almsgiving as an exchange of gifts among rich and poor, see Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire, 176–220. 8. Augustine, Sermones (: s.) 61.11, Sermons III, trans. Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, ed. John Rotelle (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991). All citations of Augustine’s sermons in the present essay are from this translation, unless otherwise noted. 9. Augustine, Ennarrationes in Psalmos (= en. Ps.) 8. 11–12, Expositions of the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, III/15 (1–32), ed. John Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000). All citations of en. Ps. in the present essay are from this translation. See also s. 9.20. 10. Fitzgerald, “Almsgiving,” 459. 11. s. 58.11. 12. Fitzgerald, “Almsgiving,” 451. 13. s. 123.4. 14. s. 106.4. See also s. 21.8, 32.21, 36.7–8. 15. s. 61.8. 16. s. 123.5. 17. See Fitzgerald, “Almsgiving,” 459. 18. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 79. 19. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 168. 20. Augustine, Epistulae (= ep.) 262. 21. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 40–42. 22. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 378. 23. s. 37.4. 24. Fitzgerald, “Almsgiving,” 459. 25. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 348. 26. This theoretical lacuna would not have been perceived as such; as Brown notes, wealth and poverty were not seen as topics to be systematically explored, Through the Eye of a Needle, 55. 27. Joseph Clair, “Discerning the Good.” See also Kevin Hughes, “Local Politics: The Political Place of the Household in Augustine’s City of God,” in Augustine and Politics, ed. John Doody, Kevin Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005) 148–149. 28. Gretchen Reydams-Schils, The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) ch. 2, “From Self-Sufficiency to Human Bonding, 53. 29. Baltzly, Dirk, “Stoicism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/stoicism/. 30. See Clair, “Discerning the Good,” 132 ff. 31. s. 33A.3, 123.5, 259.5. 32. Reydams-Schils, Roman Stoics, helpfully notes that this is not a distinction between egoistic and altruistic impulses or orientations; both lower and higher oikeiosis involve care for both self and other. In higher oikeiosis both are transformed by reason’s grasp of instinctive social impulses, 55–56. 33. Reydams-Schils, Roman Stoics, 77. 34. Ep. 262.

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35. De finibus 5; Clair, “Discerning the Good,” 50. Reydams-Schils has gathered ample evidence to show that the Roman Stoics generally speaking left room for reason-governed social affections. The sage must not allow social ties to impede his pursuit of virtue, and must be prepared to cope with the frailty and mortality of the beloved, but it is rational to be sociable; “the affective disposition and inclination are intrinsic to reason itself,” Reydams-Schils, Roman Stoics, 75. 36. Fitzgerald, Almsgiving, 451. 37. s. 106.4. 38. Augustine, De civitate dei (= de civ.) 21.27, City of God, ed. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). All citations of de. civ. in the present essay are from this translation. 39. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 364. 40. Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 55. 41. “Augustine’s Secular City,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 42. de civ. 10.1 43. s. 72.17. WSA Sermons III/11, 74) 44. De libero arbitrio (= de lib.) 2.7.19 (CCL 29, 250). 45. enarr. Ps. 33(2).6. 46. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 51. 47. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana (= doct. chr.) I.41–42. 48. Robert Spaemann, Happiness and Benevolence, trans. Jeremiah Alberg (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2000) 82. 49. I do not want here to rehearse the entire debate over use and enjoyment in relation to the neighbor. We cannot simply claim that Augustine moved away from the language of use in relation to the neighbor, because he did not. But recent scholarship has gone a long way toward enabling us to retrieve Augustine’s understanding of use, which has so very little overlap with our own understanding of instrumental means. Kevin Corrigan has helpfully clarified the way in which use and enjoyment are relationships appropriate to different modes of being; “fruition is a direct relation of being itself and this is why Augustine insists that, strictu sensu, fruition is only and properly of God,” “Love of God, Love of Self, and Love of Neighbor: Augustine’s Critical Dialogue with Platonism,” Augustinian Studies 34:1 (2003) 102. Raymond Canning’s discussion, meanwhile, has illuminated the way in which to use the neighbor is to love the neighbor in relation to God: “in the sphere of love for neighbour, to love the common good (res communis), and not a private good (res private), means to love in another that which is related to God, and not that which is related to oneself (illud quod ad deum pertinent, not illud quod ad se pertinent),” “St. Augustine’s Vocabulary of the Common Good and the Place of Love for Neighbour,” in Studia Patristica 33, ed. Elizabeth Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters, 1997) 53. 50. Augustine, De trinitate (= trin.) 4.12, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/5 (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1991). All citations of trin. in the present essay are from this translation. 51. trin. 13.9. 52. s. 90.6. 53. s. 90.6.

Chapter Seven

Augustine and Political Economy R. J. Hernández-Díaz

The current global political economy is driven by exponential growth in human population and widening inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunities. The first of these drivers threatens the planet’s capacity to sustain human life even as the second creates human societies organized in ever more intolerable configurations of deprivation for the vast majority. The kind of global political economy emerging today is a result of following a political economic development strategy of market-oriented competition across all levels. 1 Nation-states, and increasingly multi-national corporations, have competed against one another to acquire as many resources as fast as possible for the benefit of their own citizens or stakeholders through the domination and exploitation of others. As the influence of the European powers waned in the late twentieth century, the United States rose to prominence in the long succession of nation-state led competition of growth, the result which hastens ecological devastation. Now in the early twenty-first century, other countries, notably China and India, are poised to take the lead. The same technological advances that have enabled truly astonishing increases in productivity and made economic growth possible are also threatening the fragile ecosystem and exacerbating the increasing inequality. But the global financial meltdown of 2008–2009 sounded a clarion call to action. No longer can nation-states or corporations compete as they once did for ever-decreasing resources. A new era of global cooperation rather than competition— sustainability rather than growth—must prevail if human population is to be maintained and equality of opportunities is to prevail. 2 Can ancient wisdom contribute to this project of cooperation and sustainability? In terms of scope and depth of insight at the intersection of theology and politics, there may be no better thinker of late antiquity than Augustine of Hippo. Even those with little interest in his metaphysical claims recognize 113

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Augustine’s capabilities as a careful and capable thinker. He has been the subject of study of serious political philosophers, ethicists, and theologians. What insights can be gleaned from the study of the life and writings of this African bishop of the fourth and fifth centuries for contemporary discussions on the ethics of the political economy? The chief concern of this essay is not to understand Augustine himself but to reflect on an insight of Augustinian moral theory and its consequences for contemporary ethical debates on the political economy. No doubt some will find objectionable this “fast and loose” treatment of Augustine. 3 To those critics I respond that others have undertaken the work to study Augustine’s ideas in and of themselves with little or no attention to contemporary relevance. 4 This essay argues that Augustine provides a holistic basis for rethinking the political economy, one which takes seriously human psychology and theology. Specifically, Augustine reorients the basis of human society by emphasizing the will (voluntas) rather than the intellect (rationis), and contends that the exercise of power is a necessary but limited corrective for establishing a just peace. 5 Ultimately, Augustine’s views challenge contemporary rationalist theories of the political economy, which exaggerate the ability of human reason to create a just political economic order. ACCESSING AUGUSTINIAN VIEWS OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY In thinking and writing about Augustine and the political economy, one must contend with the widespread assumption that Augustine has little to say directly about the political economy as such, either its inner working or its mechanics. Augustine was an exegete, a theologian, a priest, and a bishop. He was not primarily a political thinker of the likes of Cicero or Plato, despite his attention to the political tradition of Rome in City of God. 6 It is also often assumed that he had little to say about economics. For example, Schumpeter incorrectly claimed that Augustine never addressed economics at all. 7 Taken as a whole, the political economy involves the inseparability of economics (resource mobilization, wealth creation) and politics (authority, power, and control). In short, the political economy is concerned with the nature and exercise of power within the material context in which human beings live. 8 And on the subject of the intersection of just uses of power in human societies and on human nature, Augustine had a great deal to say. Understood this way, Augustine is one of the most significant figures in the history of political-economic thought. Augustine, perhaps more than any other early Christian thinker, applied the Christian doctrine of sin and the fallenness of humanity to political-economic and ethical beliefs of late antiquity. 9 In doing so he provided the western world with a new kind of political-

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economic thought based on a fallen anthropology, of humanity wholly in need of divine grace. Augustine’s understanding of political economic authority as a divine remedy for human sinfulness is one of his primary contributions to political economic thought. Given Augustine’s low anthropology, he is sometimes read as being pessimistic about the possibility of a political economy organized justly. Yet, the prevalent interpretation that in Augustine’s view political-economic structures and institutions will collapse upon themselves, compromised by one form of egocentricsm (self-love or love of glory) or another, breaks down upon closer scrutiny. Is every earthly form of politics and economics doomed to failure? Must a good political economy be deferred to the end of time, the heavenly city? If not, what are the elements of a just political economy? Questions of this kind, examined below, are as pertinent now as they were in late antiquity. It may be, given the fallen state of the human condition, that Augustine’s reflections on the political economy, of nature, and of the exercise of power, are especially relevant in an era in which Enlightenment ideals about human nature have come under attack. A number of difficulties arise from interpreting Augustine on the political economy. The first is the problem of selection. Augustine was perhaps the most prolific Latin author of antiquity. 10 An incomplete list of his books numbers more than ninety, along with hundreds of sermons, letters, and retractions. 11 Study of any aspect of his thought is, thus, necessarily selective. The richest source of Augustine’s political economic material in his corpus is found in City of God. Yet, City of God is not the singular or even most complete repository of his thinking on the issues addressed therein. 12 The second problem is related to the first: given the overwhelming amount of primary material, there is a temptation to truncate Augustine’s thought along disciplinary lines. Interpreters who grapple with Augustine’s political economic thought tend to do so without reference to his theology, or study his theology without reference to his political-economics. This truncation suits a modern compartmentalization of topics, but is ill suited to Augustine’s own thinking, since his political economic views flow seamlessly from his theology. Anyone who truncates Augustine’s thinking at some point and attempts to systematize it does violence to this sophisticated thinker. 13 These two problems lead to a principle of interpretation of Augustine’s political-economic thought: it must necessarily be selective, but it should not be compartmentalized or read in truncated ways common to modern academic disciplines. In addition to this overall interpretive principle, three other elements must be taken into account in accessing Augustinian thinking on the political-economy: the sack of Rome, the symbolism of Augustine’s writings, and the distance between the contemporary context and Augustine’s context.

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The Sack of Rome Augustine’s political views are profoundly shaped by the sack of Rome in 410 CE. 14 Many had hoped, in the time of Theodosius I (d. 395), that the Church and Rome could rule together as twin sovereigns, each with special authority of God. Just fifteen years after the death of Theodosius, that optimism was shaken by the invasion of Alaric. Though it was a capture of a Christian city by a Christian invader (the Visigoth king Alaric was an Arian), the invasion went against the providential role many late ancient Christians envisioned for Rome. For almost eight hundred years, the city of Rome had stood, inviolate, under pagan rule. But after coming under the control of Christian emperors, the city is met with invasion. Augustine reports that pagans were demanding of Christians: “what benefits has it [the coming of Christ] been to the human race?” 15 On Augustine’s own account, he writes City of God primarily as response to such questions, to wrestle with the rise and fall of earthly kingdoms as part of God’s providential work. 16 His political economic thought must be understood as rising from under the shadow of a once exalted and now fallen Rome. Symbolism and Metaphor A second element important to interpreting Augustine’s view of the political economy is his use of biblical symbols and metaphors. His symbolism is expressed in his response to changing needs as part of his ecclesial and ministerial duties. Augustine writes as a Christian apologist against the Manicheans, Arians, Donatists, and Pelagians, as an Episcopal council to Roman official, and in his other roles. He addresses issues that arise as part of his life and ministry through a reinterpretation of his own life events and of those confronting him through the lens of sacred history. For Augustine, to think of the Church is to think about Christ. Steeped in the symbolic method of the interpretation of scripture, he thinks and writes in analogies to biblical imagery and metaphors. 17 Contextual Distance It can be argued that the political and economic realities of the late fourth and early fifth centuries are so far removed from those of the early twenty-first century that comparison is nearly impossible. At least four major difficulties present themselves in undertaking the task of bringing Augustine’s thought into our context. First, communication in the fifth century between officials and merchants was measured in weeks, months, or even seasons. 18 Today, it is measured in seconds, minutes, or hours. Given these differences in the speed and caliber of communications, can Augustine have any relevance? Second, Augustine did not have to contend with large-scale business organ-

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izations known as corporations. These organizations, today considered legal persons, often have resources greater than those of small nation-states and act with impunity in defiance of international laws. Where do these massive engines of economy and politics fit into Augustine’s schema of ecclesial and civil affairs? Global integration is a third problem. The Empire of Rome faced the complexity of the peoples, languages, and cultures of the Mediterranean. The contemporary political economy must contend with the linguistic and cultural complexities of the entire world. Fourth, the strict division of secular and sacred prevalent in contemporary discourse functioned quite differently in Augustine’s day. In the world in which Augustine lived, property could be taken away from members of society charged with heresy, and much of the power to oversee the power of Rome was delegated to local bishops. The familiar distinctions between church and state do not apply. Despite these considerable contextual difficulties, discussion can proceed by identifying the key factors that Augustine considered as crucial elements for building a just political economy. These can form the basis of more complete comparison at a later time. BUILDING A JUST POLITICAL ECONOMY Earthly City, Heavenly City: Clarifying Terminology Although Augustine did not draw his own views on the political economy into a coherent whole, his framework of the two cities, established in the City of God, provides access into his political economic thought. Augustine describes the two cities as characterized by the love of self (the civitas terrena or the Earthly City) and the love of God (the civitas Dei or City of God). 19 The City of God is marked by divine unity, love, and peace. The Earthly City is “divided against itself” since within it, all follow their own interests leading to the oppression by the strong. 20 The earthly and heavenly cities originate in the Genesis narrative of Cain and Abel. Cain, the firstborn of human parents belonged to the earthly city, while Abel belonged to the city of God. 21 Envious, Cain slays Abel, is cast out, and builds the first city (Gen. 4:17). Fratricide leads to the foundation of the earthly city. This becomes for Augustine the archetypal crime of earthly governments, including Rome, since Remus was slain by his brother Romulus. 22 Here is Augustine’s tendency to see sacred history repeated in world history. 23 The quarrel between Romulus and Remus, the envious rivalry between Cain and Abel, illustrate for Augustine the enmity that exists between the two cities. Although Augustine sometimes speaks of the city of God as the Church, he does have a facile dualism in mind. The framework of two cities as a narrative of Church and State, Heaven and Earth, Time and Eternity does not represent well Augustine’s views. Because there is no clear compartmental-

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ization between Augustine’s theology and his political thought, the distinction between the two cities must be understood in part as eschatological. Another biblical metaphor furthers this point regarding Augustine’s two cities framework: the wheat and the weeds. 24 For Augustine, the wheat and weeds grow together. Augustine claimed that the earthly Church was a mixed body, with weeds growing among the wheat. Conversely, earthly kingdoms have wheat growing among the weeds. The two cities exist side-by-side, interwoven together until the time of the final harvest. 25 If the two cities are so co-mingled, how are they to be distinguished at all? In using the expression “Earthly City,” Augustine adapts the metaphors and biblical symbols that earlier writers such as Tyconius had applied to the “civitas diaboli” (satanic city). 26 Tyconius also believed in a mixed church, but contrasted Christ’s body with Satan’s body. This schema was too Manichean for Augustine, portraying two independent principles, one pure evil, the other perfect good. Instead of contrasting the City of God with the Satanic City, Augustine speaks about the Earthly City, made possible by Adam’s fall and constituted as a society in Cain’s foundation of a city, as mentioned above. Augustine does not completely condemn the Earthly City; he even finds good in it, in its own ways. As an example, he cites the desire for war, which is at its base the quest for a different kind of peace. 27 What then was Rome? The opposite of the city of God? Augustine does not make such a claim, since Christians were involved in the workings of Rome. 28 Yet, in Augustine’s view, Rome never was nor could become the perfect representation of the divine, just order. A real Rome must not be mistaken for the ideal Earthly City. Against the imperial apologist Sallust, who claims that “justice and goodness prevailed among them as much by nature as by law,” Augustine responds sarcastically: “I take it, then, that [raping women, engaging in wars, and banishing their own because they are of the wrong bloodline are] instance[s] of this justice as goodness.” 29 Augustine argues that the Roman commonwealth was built and sustained through violent and shameful acts perpetuated against her own people and through war against neighboring nations. 30 Because of its many injustices, Rome was never worthy of the loyalty of its patriotic citizens, much less worthy to be instruments of God on earth. Three Meanings of Justice In order to discuss the elements of building a just political economy, one needs to understand how Augustine uses the term. Taken as a whole, Augustine’s corpus uses the word “justice” (iustitia) in three ways. 31 The first, from Roman philosophy, understands justice as a habit of the soul. The second stems from the New Testament and Latin patristics, which equates love with the virtue of the love of neighbor. The third follows the sense of righteous-

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ness (dikaiosune), defined as right standing before God, found especially in the Pauline epistles. 32 In his Republic, Cicero had staged a conversation with himself and Scipio on the necessity of justice for the creation of a republic or commonwealth. Contrary to the maxim that a commonwealth “cannot be governed without injustice,” Cicero argues that justice plays a constitutive role in a republic, but laments that justice has not flourished in Rome since ancient days. Augustine riffs on Cicero’s dialogue and does him one better: he questions whether such a commonwealth ever existed since “true justice” cannot exist except if founded and ruled by Christ. 33 What then is “true justice” in the context of the Earthly City? Under the circumstances of the political economy of the Earthly City, Augustine defines justice as a proper order which allows one to love one’s neighbors and God in a manner exemplified in Christ and prescribed by divine law. 34 Will, Not Intellect; Love, Not Justice What holds the political economy together, in Augustine’s view? Cicero, along with many of his contemporaries, argued that a shared sense of justice (iuris consensu) holds society (politi civitas) together. 35 People are united through intellectual ascent about what is just (ius). Augustine disagrees. According to Augustine, human beings are not moved by abstract ideas like justice. Instead, they are moved by what he calls “loves.” 36 Augustine distinguishes between two types of love: “use” and “enjoyment.” Enjoyment involves loving something for its own sake; use involves love for the sake of something else. 37 For Augustine, what makes society possible is agreement, an act of the will, on the love of good things. A communal act of will, not agreement on a theory of justice, allows those with widely disparate views to co-mingle in the Earthly City. In arguing that the will, not strictly the intellect, forms the basis of society, Augustine reorients classical thought. This reorientation of the will as the basis for society has enormous consequences for ethical theories on political economy. In modern moral theories, to behave morally is to behave in accordance with right reason. A great deal of confidence is placed on the rational faculty. Rational calculus characteristic of modern ethical theory, of Mill’s utilitarianism (or consequentialism more broadly), Kantian obligations, or even pragmatism resides far from the moral ecology Augustine presupposed. For Augustine, following the “rule of reason” cannot yield a moral behavior because of the inability of the voluntas to make sound judgments. Central to Augustine’s thought about moral choice and right action is a conviction that human capacity to make moral decisions is severely limited. Human beings are not possessed of the ability to access knowledge of the good, or even desire it, as Plato and the Platonic tradition supposed. 38 For Augustine, human beings cannot choose to live and act justly. Human beings are weakened and in a mutilated state after the Fall. 39

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Given Augustine’s dim view of human nature, how can human beings be commanded to love? What faculty is capable of responding to such a command? Only God’s grace allows human beings to do good, Augustine argues; God’s grace corrects and maintains human will. It enables the love of God which underpins all virtuous acts. 40 It is the choice to participate in divine love, a choice enabled only by grace that allows humanity to live out the command of neighbor-love. Political economic theories based on human intellect can never yield a just society. God’s Incarnational Joining in Human Political Economy Augustine’s picture of political economy is one in which human and divine interplay is on display. Yet, the often repeated view that Augustine understands social realities as a dialectic between the conflicting forces of the City of God and the Earthly City fails to capture the importance Augustine places on human will and eschatology. Society is not merely divided against itself; every human being also has a divided will. 41 Even citizens of the City of God, destined to spend eternity with God, are responsible for the conflicts of earthly life. Thus, on Earth, all things are “subject to change, overthrow and destruction.” 42 Empires rise and fall; some have lasted far longer than Rome. 43 In heaven, social relationships are governed with perfect harmony and true justice. But the timeless eschatological hope for the perfection of the political economy is anticipated in the here and now. God’s incarnational joining with humanity points towards an embodied fulfillment of the eschatological future in which both the internal and external conflict cease. Augustine points to unlettered monks who live grounded in the double commandment of love of God and neighbor as an example of this eschatological community in the present. 44 For Augustine, monks become the primary speakers and models of the eschatological reality. 45 POWER IN POLITICAL-ECONOMIC REALMS Augustine’s attitudes towards the nature and exercise of power in the political-economic realms can be examined through his writings in relation to heretics, counsels on intercession, advice for military commanders, and the status of the metaphoric Babylon. While it is extremely difficult to derive general principles from all of these activities for the reasons discussed earlier, this section provides some principles particular to circumstances that Augustine addresses directly. Augustine’s early ministry as bishop was defined in large part by conflict with the Donatists. Early on, Augustine’s posturing was reconciliatory, calling more than once for talks and councils. 46 When the long habit of feuds between Donatists and Catholics constrained attempts to confront and debate

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their differing perspectives, Augustine called for restraint in rulings against them, especially with respect to the death penalty. In letter after letter addressed to Marcellinus, Augustine calls for mercy in the treatment of heretics and schismatics. 47 Augustine deploys a number of warrants for the policy of clemency, including allowing others to see Marcellinus’ good works, tempering the rigors of justice with God and neighborly love, and allowing the men a chance for later repentance. Augustine desires to stop the violent acts of the heretics and to bring peace to the African churches, and is willing to use the coercion of Roman law to do so. Simultaneously, he sought to restrain imperial authorities and inquisitors from excesses. The principle underlying Augustine’s counsel is a nuanced justification of power as far as necessary to end the violence and restore peace. 48 Augustine’s view about the exercise of power in the political-economy can also be seen in his advice to military commanders about Christian conduct in war. In particular, he was eager to engage Boniface, a Christian official who arrived in Africa in 417 as commander (count) of Roman forces charged with keeping the so-called barbarians in check. Augustine wrote to him in 418 arguing that war should be waged only when necessary for peace; violence should be kept to a minimum, and mercy should be observed towards the enemy, thus precluding the death penalty. 49 After his initial campaigns in Africa, Boniface desired to retire to a quiet, monastic life. Augustine advised against it, arguing that he could better serve the Church through his continued efforts on the front 50; he suggested that political power could be a godly vocation if its purpose is to protect peace. 51 Boniface would ultimately disappoint Augustine, but his experience demonstrates that Augustine did not take a purely negative view of exercise of power in the earthly realms. Power to establish temporal peace can hold the world’s evil at bay. Advice about the exercise of power can also be seen in Augustine’s exchange with Macedonius, vicar of Africa, about the intercession of bishops on behalf of condemned persons. 52 Macedonius asks: should one continue to intercede on behalf of criminals who show little sign of repentance, obstinately fixated on a sin without repenting, and go on to commit the sin again? In response, Augustine congratulates Macedonius on his concern for “public welfare,” and then answers: it is not the evil consequences of the intercession (that results, for example, in a criminal being pardoned) but the good intentions that are charged to the intercessor. 53 The first principle derivable from this response is the concern of ecclesial officials for the public welfare as an expression of their religious duties. Ecclesial concern for social welfare, not a sectarian separatism, will contribute to cooperation and a sustainable political economy. Augustine encourages Marcedonius to continue to win “men’s love for the word of truth” by seeking their repentance. 54 Repentance, however, is

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mere pretense, Augustine observes, unless it is accompanied by restitution. The norm, then, is restitution: the restoration to the rightful owner of what has been taken. This has radical implications for contemporary political economy since it is by deceit, theft, and genocide that the colonial powers (whether ancient Rome or modern nation-states) obtain the land on which the indigenous people of the world live, as one example. Restitution in the contemporary context would require a whole-sale redistribution of land and compensation to conquered indigenous people. 55 Babylon Subject To Higher Authority Augustine understands order to be part of God’s providential work in the world. Parents govern their children, just as earthly nations govern their citizens. 56 Augustine makes the case that Christians are part of this hierarchical order, rendering service and paying taxes to the earthly kingdoms. Given his predilection for using scriptural metaphors and allusions, it is not surprising that he draws on the New Testament as the basis for his argument. 57 He distills a basic organizing principle for social ordering characterized by unequal power relationships from this text: servants should obey their earthly masters (Ep. 6:5, 6). They should serve even unjust and ungodly masters since, he argues, Christ commands to “serve as I serve.” Christ has not freed people “from being servants,” but from being bad servants. 58 Does this suggest that Augustine affirms the political status quo? Or is it instead a form of resistance? As evidenced, Augustine is not baptizing the order of things. The order of Augustine’s day, in which the ungodly often had power over the righteous, is believed to be temporary. Here, Augustine alludes to the gospel pericope of the last judgment: there will be a time in which all shall stand before Christ and be separated into sheep and goats, and there will be “many slaves among the sheep, and many masters among the goats.” 59 The citizens of the City of God are commanded to endure their Babylonian masters, but only until the earthy city passes away. 60 The warrant for obedience to earthly masters is obedience to the heavenly master. When the two are in conflict, Christians should disobey their earthly masters. For instance, Augustine instructs Christian soldiers serving an infidel Emperor commanded to deploy to the battlefield to obey; those ordered to worship idols should refuse. 61 Augustine’s principle follows that of the Apostle Paul (expressed in Romans): submit to earthly power except when their orders conflict with divine commands. 62 Babylon, a metaphor for the Earthly City, is subject to a higher authority. But how are Christians to negotiate the powers of the ancient political economy? It is one thing to say “refuse to worship idols,” but what if work for the master constitutes an act of idolatry? What does Augustine advise Christians who must live by the waters of Babylon?

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The relationship between master and slave is especially significant for understanding Augustine’s political economic thought. Through that metaphor, Augustine is describing the authority that some exercise over others: husbands, proconsuls, kings, etc. It is important to recognize that, according to Augustine, God intended human beings to exercise dominion only over irrational beings. 63 Augustine quotes Genesis 1:26 as evidence: Adam is given dominion over animals. Had original sin not been committed, the political economy would look much different. Human groups would need direction and guidance, but of a parental variety. After original sin, the human tendency to quarrel and conflict with each other is too strong, requiring exercise of force. The political authority of patriarchs and kings manifests as domination of a few human beings over others. For Augustine, only the coercive powers of political authority can restrain the human tendency towards conflict. For Augustine, political authority of the master-slave variety is born out of a need to contain the quarrelsome nature that results from human sinfulness. 64 CONCLUSION Augustine’s political economic thought does not fit neatly into established categories of contemporary inquiry. His interest is not in the organization of political economic institutions per se, but in the exercise of power and human nature. In a sense, he is interested in first principles that can be applied to political economic thought. In Augustine’s view, the common origin of human beings in the fall of Adam and Eve explains the “quarrelsome perversion,” the seemingly endless capacity for violence and conflict. 65 Nevertheless, human beings are social creatures who continue to long for the unity and peace of the City of God. Thus, the conflict of the Earthly City and City of God are embodied in every human will, divided against itself. Establishing true justice in the political economy requires a turning away (metanoia) from human nature such that the human being would have an enduring disposition to love God and one another. Because of the disorder of human “loves,” the perfection of harmony and justice of the City of God is not possible on earth. Yet, God has joined humanity in embodying that eschatological hope through the incarnation. The practice and exercise of power in the political and economic realms should be governed by the characteristics of the City of God. Augustine, in the execution of his ministerial duties, specifies what the practice of power should look like. First, ecclesial and government officials should exercise mercy and restraint for heretics and schismatics. In a contemporary context, one can say that mercy and restraint should be practiced towards criminals who have violated the most sacred communal trusts. In Augustine’s schema,

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even murderers, rapists, and child molesters do not deserve the death penalty, for example. Second, political and military leaders should use violence only when its purpose is to protect the peace and even then, one must practice mercy towards one’s enemy. There should no shaming of prisoners, no indiscriminate bombing of communities to intimidate enemy combatants. Third, ecclesial officials should intervene on behalf of the condemned for the purposes of promoting social welfare, which includes calling for restitution. Augustine would not endorse a “three strikes” policy: all offenders should be given the opportunity for repentance. Also, political leaders should be held accountable for past systemic and institutional injustice. Because of the distorted loves and conflicts among human beings, governments must use or threaten the use of force to impose peace. The authority of those who wield power ultimately comes from God and the first duty of those under authority is to obey. Although the purpose of the political economy is a divine remedy for sin, ordained political economies sometimes run amuck. In those instances, it is the responsibility of servants to disobey. Perhaps Augustine’s most interesting contribution to contemporary political economy is the insight that human will, rather than a rational calculus, can form the basis of communal justice and peace. Because humans are weak and corrupted, rationality and human nature drive human beings apart when these should bring humans together. By seeking divine love, and receiving divine grace, we have the possibility of attaining a pale reflection of the City of God. God’s grace enables human beings to love and persist in loving. Only through the transformation of love does it become possible to conceive of and achieve an ethical political economy. NOTES 1. For a compelling, if episodic, account of the consequences of market-oriented development focused on the United States, see Richard D. Wolff, Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2010). 2. A number of thinkers have called for cooperation rather than competition in the face of awareness of global interdependence and the fear of crisis. For one such account see Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006), 96–97, 100. 3. This essay is necessarily selective in its use of primary sources. It focuses mainly on De Civitate Dei, Enarrationes in Psalmos, as well as some of Augustine’s Letters to political and clerical officials. It attempts to do so with an eye towards Augustinian political economic thought expressed in other parts of his corpus. The references in this essay draw from the English translations of these primary sources found in Augustine and R. W. Dyson, The City of God against the Pagans, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Augustine, Henry Paolucci, and Dino Bigongiari, The Political Writings of St. Augustine, Gateway ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1996). 4. Hebert A. Deane exhibits disdain for what he calls the “smugness of contemporaneity,” the distasteful practice of judging ancient thinkers by modern standards, and makes no attempt to apply Augustine’s ideas to contemporary debates. See Herbert Andrew Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), xi. While I am

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sympathetic to Dean’s concerns, I attempt to make explicit what he intentionally leaves implicit. 5. Augustine speaks of voluntas and rationis as the parts of the soul (partes animum) in De Trinitate (12.7.10; 12.12.17; 10.8.11), as cited in Sarah Byers, “The Meaning of Voluntas in Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 37, no. 2 (2006): 119. How do voluntas and rationis differ exactly? I leave it to others to undertake a study of the usage of each phrase in the Augustinian corpus. What concerns us here is the consequence of understanding voluntas as conceptually distinct category from rationis. 6. In the text, I refer to Augustine’s writings by their English titles and by their Latin titles in the notes. 7. Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 72. Among other topics, Augustine discusses a theory of utility consumption in De Civitate Dei, XI, 16. 8. Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Pinter Publishers, 1988), 18. 9. Miles Hollingworth, Pilgrim City: St Augustine of Hippo and His Innovation in Political Thought (London; New York: T & T Clark, 2010), vii. 10. He was so prolific that it would take many months if not years to read his whole corpus, let alone systematize its breadth. Many Augustinian scholars make a similar point. For one such comment, see Clemens Weidmann, “Augustine’s Works in Circulation,” in A Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey and Shelley Reid, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 431. 11. Scholars even discover “new” letters from time to time. For example, the Divjak letters, found along with along with other sermons in the late 1970s, were cause for biographer Peter Brown to amend his views on Augustine. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 12. Gerard J. P. O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press; Clarendon Press, 1999), 265. 13. Calvin held De Civitate Dei as a fixed doctrine. An understandable position, given that Calvin was steeped in an Augustinian worldview, shared his low anthropology, and himself attempted a more comprehensive systematization in his Institutes. Gary Wills refers to Calvin’s “exalted view” of Augustine as “an understandable misunderstanding,” in Garry Wills, Saint Augustine: A Life, A Penguin Life (New York: Viking, 1999), iii. 14. An important date since De Civitate Dei was written late in Augustine’s life. 15. Enarrationes in Psalmos, CXXXVI, 9. 16. Retractiones, II, 43. 17. Augustine’s view of the past and envisioning of the future are steeped in this symbolism and metaphor. For example, Confessiones are littered with references to threes and sevens. This can be seen even in the shape given to the books themselves. The final three books of Confessiones form a sort of trinity: Time and Eternity, reflection on creation in Genesis, and discussion of the trinity. See Augustine and Henry Chadwick, Confessions, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 18. For example, when the monsoons came to the Mediterranean, North Africa was cut-off from the northern part of the Empire. 19. De Civitate Dei, XIV, 28. 20. De Civitate Dei, XVIII, 2. 21. De Civitate Dei, XV, 1. 22. De Civitate Dei, XV, 5. 23. Augustine, like many of his contemporaries, considered the story of Romulus and Remus to be an historical account of the founding of Rome. 24. Or, as it is more often rendered, the wheat and the chaff (Matt. 3:11–12). 25. De Civitate Dei, XX, 9. 26. Liber regularum, cited in J. van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of His Doctrine of the Two Cities, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae (Leiden; New York: E.J. Brill, 1991), 269. 27. De Civitate Dei, XIV, 1; XIX, 12.

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28. For example, there were just officials like Marcellinus and patrons like Melania and Pinian, as biographer Gary Wills points out. Wills, Saint Augustine: A Life: 115. 29. De Civitate Dei, II, 17. 30. Most of book II of the De Civitate Dei Augustine enumerates the violent and oppressive measures that were part and parcel of Rome’s empire building. 31. The taxonomy I use here was developed by Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4. 32. Interestingly, this is the meaning of justice Augustine uses in his dialogue with Cicero near the beginning of De Civitate Dei, II, 21. 33. De Civitate Dei, II, 21. 34. Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine: 5. 35. Cicero, Rep, I, 39. 36. Paul Weithman, “Augustine’s Political Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 235. 37. De Doctrina Christiana. I, 31. Augustine also makes this argument in Confessiones. 38. John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 154. 39. De Perfectione Hominis Iustitiae, 2.4; 3.5–6 40. Rist, Augustine: 168. 41. Augustine writes at length about the divided will in Confessiones. 42. De Civitate Dei, IV, 2. 43. Augustine specifically cites Justinus’ account of the history of the Assyrians as having endured for 1,240 years. De Civitate Dei, IV, 6. 44. De Doctrina Christiana, 1.38.42. 45. Edward Morgan, The Incarnation of the Word: The Theology of Language of Augustine of Hippo, T&T Clark Theology (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 57–58. 46. Augustine wrote twin treatises on the Donatists around 400, Contra epistulam Parmeniani (the Donatist bishop of Carthage) and De baptismo contra Donatistas. 47. Letters, CXXXIII, 1–3 and CXXXIX, 1–2. 48. John von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 222–23. 49. Letters, CLXXXIX. 50. Letters, CCXX, 1–12. 51. Letters, CXX, 3, 7. 52. Letters, XLII. 53. Letters, CLIII. 54. Letters, CLIII. 55. This point is germane in other contexts as well. In second-century North Africa, Tertullian fought against wider legal, cultural, political, and economic hegemony of empire. See Aaron Conley, We Are Who We Think We Were: Christian History and Christian Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013). 56. Sermons, LXII, 8. 57. In Enarrationes in Psalmos, CXVIII, xxxi, 1 he cites several passages including: “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Matt. 22:21); “Pay to all what is due them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due” (Rom 13:7). 58. Enarrationes in Psalmos, CXXIV, 7–8. 59. Enarrationes in Psalmos, CXXIV (Lat), 7–8. 60. That is why “we pray, they kingdom come” in Enarr in Ps., LXI (Lat), 6, 8. 61. Enarrationes in Psalmos, CXXIV (Lat), 7–8. 62. Sermons, LXII, 13. 63. De Civitate Dei, XIX, 15. 64. Weithman, “Augustine’s Political Philosophy,” 239.

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Part III

Politics, Power, and War

Chapter Eight

Augustine and Slavery Freedom for the Free Aaron D. Conley

INTRODUCTION A slave is someone who is forced to work without pay under the threat of violence and who is unable to walk away. 1 There are reportedly 21–30 million people under direct conditions of slavery. These numbers represent findings on five continents, the highest numbers of which are found in South Asia and the Pacific Islands. Africa and South America have the next highest number of slaves while North America, Australia and Eurasia (Western and Eastern Europe and Russia) have up to 500,000 slaves per continent. Slavery as a system of domination has pervaded human history for as long as we have historical documentation of civilization. Civilizations that depend upon forced labor for their political and economic viability are known as slave societies. The United States is a slave society as slavery has its roots within racial, political, economic and religious assumptions and institutions dating to European colonial expansions of the fifteenth century. It finally encountered legal prohibitions on January 1, 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law, although England had already abolished institutionalized slavery in its chattel forms as early as 1833. Despite legislations, chattel-inspired slavery continued in black-market forms for over a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Many white farmers in the southern states continued to use and trade blacks as slave labor under the threat of violence. 2 Similarly, “chain gangs” or using incarcerated men as forced labor, became common between 1863 and World War II and even was revived in the Alabama prison system as recently as 1995. 3 Slavery is deeply imbedded in the collective memory of 131

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the United States and continues its existence under different names. Yet despite efforts at transformation away from slave societies it is hard to find a government today that actively identifies and works to end slavery in its modern day clothes. 4 With the terrors of slavery becoming more visible before us today, many scholars of late antique and medieval Christianity have turned again to Augustine to better understand Christian struggles with empire, accommodation and sin more generally. Augustine lived and wrote within the larger Roman Empire, which was another slave society. A relatively recent discovery of a series of letters from Augustine has renewed interest in slavery and the Roman Empire. These letters are known as the Divjak Letters and are named for the French scholar who unearthed them in a monastery library in southern France. All of these letters are dated within the last decade of Augustine’s life and provide a unique portal into some of the day-to-day concerns of an aged bishop. Particularly germane to the present analysis, Letter 10* discusses Augustine’s views on and work against the slave trade that was, as he states, emptying North Africa of its human population. 5 As a result of the Divjak Letters, more textured and complex examinations are replacing the older and more authoritarian depictions of an aged Augustine. These visions no doubt follow from the honest recasting by Peter Brown when he included some key insights of this letter in his updated edition of Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (2000). Brown offers an expanded epilogue in the new edition in which he details his own scholarly transformation to an understanding of Augustine as someone entwined in the work of social justice until the very end of his life. Without a doubt, Augustine’s Letter 10* provides remarkable insight into his own activities as well as into the institution of slavery and the practice of slave trade that fueled Roman economies. And it is certain that all the Divjak letters attest to how Augustine held fast to his responsibilities as a bishop by caring for the daily concerns and well being of fellow Christians in his See. But Augustine’s magnanimity as a pioneer for social justice is far from selfevident. This essay asks several questions of Augustine and his views on slavery in response to Letter 10* and his other writings. Could it be that the stealing of North Africans to be slaves in other parts of the Empire was the last straw for Augustine and the reason that he could no longer keep silent about this issue? Or did Augustine speak out because the reputation and financial burden of caring for the needs of the freed slaves was too great for his parish to bear? In what follows, a socio-rhetorical reading of Augustine will expose a tropics of discourse within his texts consistent with our current intoxication as a slave society. 6 This essay critically engages factors of Augustine’s social location that contribute to his rhetoric and influence him in ways that he (and indeed other free people of his day) may be unaware. But more than simply

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being a historical investigation, I am interested in parallel questions, such as: Why can there be a selective moral condemnation for the enslavement of some people but not others? How do the cycles of justification for the status quo evade even the most learned figures? Why does there tend to be a minority of voices advocating for the minorities who are engulfed by larger systems of human trafficking? Examining these questions with respect to Augustine has the potential to illumine similar blind spots in our own wellmeaning actions to address slavery in the twenty-first century. A historical examination of slavery is the primary focus of this essay, but its secondary task and implications are to ask modern readers to consider their response to slavery today. SLAVERY AS A METAPHOR FOR SIN In Letter 24* of the Divjak letters, Augustine seeks advice from Eustochius, a Christian layperson and legal expert concerning the legal obligations of enslavement. Eustochius’ responses are apparently unclear to Augustine in the light of changing circumstances, so Augustine asks Eustochius several clarifying questions. I therefore ask you, whose love is most sincere, that you would graciously instruct me as to what directive we should follow regarding those who are born of a free woman and a slave. For I know that those born from a female slave and of a free man are slaves. Also what about those whose fathers sell their work for a definite number of years? I ask whether, if the fathers who sold this labor have died, they should be forced to fill out the same number of years or whether they are set free by the death of those who sold them or rather in some sense rented them out, because they begin to be, as it is said, legally dependent. I also ask whether free fathers can sell their children into perpetual slavery and whether mothers can sell at least the work of their children. 7

Augustine asks these and other questions not out of a concern for the wellbeing of slaves per se, but out of a concern for the rights of free Christians who court slavery in some fashion. Invoking Titus 2:9, he justifies Christian authority to require slaves to obey their masters, but then upholds, “we cannot impose the yoke of slavery upon free persons.” 8 Here, “the yoke of slavery” refers directly to the concrete conditions of slavery consistent with the definition provided above. The ethos of this letter’s concern for free citizens over and against acceptably enslaved ones is in continuity with Augustine’s other and more wellknown writings. In The City of God, for example, Augustine rejects the Aristotelian precept that forced slavery is a natural condition of human existence. The dominant Greco-Roman view supported the notion that some people were slaves by virtue (or lack thereof) of birth. 9 Instead, Augustine

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states that “slavery is the result of sin. . . . It is a name, therefore, introduced by sin and not by nature.” 10 Even though theologically speaking sin enters humanity by birth through Adam, it is neither natural to the created state of humans before the Fall (i.e., our true nature), nor indicative of who Christians are after they are “born” into Christ—the second Adam. Descriptively he goes on to say that slavery is often found in conditions of war where subjugated people are carried off as servants of their captors instead of being killed in battle. In another treatise Augustine reiterates his belief that slavery is an unnatural condition resulting from inequity, adversity, and war. 11 If these three conditions point to sin as the chief culprit for the condition of slavery, Letter 10* unveils Augustine’s practical efforts to rely upon the State for keeping sin in check. But as we shall see below, his calls to liberate the captives extends only as far as to include free persons unlucky enough to fall into the hands of Galatian slave merchants. Had Augustine only severed the link between nature and slavery by introducing the concept of sin and, by extension, distance from God, the story of slavery in late antique North Africa might have been different. Instead, Augustine reasoned, as did many Christians in this time period, that only a world without sin would be a world without slavery. 12 Thus, while not natural, slavery is inevitable and unavoidable. With this logic in view, slavery becomes a powerful metaphor (or metaphor of the elite, i.e., of writers who were not enslaved) to explain theological relationships between faithful Christians and God. In his commentary on Psalms 71, for example, Augustine calls all actual slaves to serve their masters in an effort to free their enslaved hearts. 13 A theological point follows the anthropological one; the next few lines directly link the image of the actual slave with all humanity who is born within the theological condition of slavery imparted by Adam’s sin. Protracting the condition to all humanity, Augustine states, “You have fallen from a high place, O man, disobedient slave.” 14 By implication, just as all flesh suffers under Adam, Christ may free all hearts. As a metaphor, slavery finds its justifications for Augustine within the normal, albeit not natural, fabric of Roman society. In his exposition on morality within the church, he applies the metaphor of slavery to the willful following of heretical teachers. He proclaims, “Whoever gives considerate attention to the utterances of this [heretical] man, will learn from every one of them what value is to be attached to those things which men try to keep in their power, and in so doing are themselves brought by passion into bondage, so that they become the slaves of mortal things, while seeking ignorantly to be their masters.” 15 Here Augustine uses the language of slaves and masters in an effort to prove a larger point about false allegiances. Presumably, Christians who are supposed to be free from fallen forms of theological slavery willingly reenter into the conditions of bondage when they stray from the normative teachings of the church. Augustine’s play of language, albeit

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for him rooted in a real theological condition of sin-bondage, distances the term “slave” from any concrete economic and political circumstance. Actual forced slavery is a mute issue; here slavery is almost voluntary. Further, by metaphorically extending slavery into a universal human condition and a condition that even Christians who have been freed by the second Adam should fear, Augustine does not have to deal with slavery as a socio-political system of domination. Thus watered down, the reality of slavery begins to lose its insidious moral depravity and it maintains its social normativity. Falling in step with the normative practices of slavery in the late Roman Empire, Augustine follows the Apostle Paul in calling for those who are slaves to be obediently submissive to their masters. 16 In the same text on the morality of the church, Augustine speaks to God saying, “Thou teachest servants to cleave to their masters from delight in their task rather than from the necessity of their position.” 17 Speaking directly about actual enslaved individuals, he invokes God and reiterates a divine command for them to embrace their social position. This statement comes on the heels of a discussion on love in which wives are implored to serve their husbands and children their parents. Such justification of social stratifications within the status quo reveals in Augustine’s work a discursive complacency with slavery as it was imbedded within the wider context of the Roman Empire. LETTER 10* With this discursive context in place, a single letter of Augustine to his friend Alypius may reveal a more pragmatic response to slavery. Peter Brown adds an essay entitled “New Evidence” at the end of the revised edition of his now famous biography. Here Brown reenergizes his perspective on Augustine’s later years in light of the discoveries of the Divjak letters and the Dolbeau sermons, a grouping of pastoral addresses dated fifteen years prior to the Divjak letters. He adds this essay as a postscript in part because, as he states, the original biography was written as a biography rather than as a technical historical treatise. But the supplement reveals a biographer who himself has advanced in age and now finds sympathies with the elderly Augustine that were previously hidden by Brown’s youthfulness. Brown reflects that his original presentation of Augustine’s later writings was of “an unintelligent slogging match,” and of an old man whose “love has grown cold.” 18 More than anything, the Divjak letters changed Brown’s mind. “In them,” he states, “we are brought up against a very different, more attractive, because so poignantly painstaking, side of the old man.” Brown continues, “they show Augustine as acting always, if with a constant sigh of resignation, as the loyal colleague of his fellow-bishops, when they struggled with endless

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cases of violence and the abuse of power among the clergy, the landowners and the Imperial administrators.” 19 The Divjak letters never made it into the more authoritative compilations of Augustine’s work after his death. Brown notes that Augustine himself had begun the process of organizing his letters a few years before 430 as he was working with Possidius to secure his written legacy. Other lists trumped Possidius’ compilation even though he names many writings that were left out of what became the authoritative corpus. Occassionally the Divjak letters, along with various compilations of sermons resurfaced in different monasteries within France, but never received a circulation deserving of their author. Peter Brown’s honest confession about how he has had to rethink Augustine the Bishop after having read these letters and sermons attests to their importance. Brown particularly holds Letter 10* in high regard for revealing an aged Augustine whose work as a bishop was never done. Brown acknowledges that Augustine was constrained to work entirely within the existing legal structures, especially as “well placed protectors of the merchants” sued a group of his parishioners for damages for freeing some 120 slaves. 20 Augustine, then, sent this letter likely in hopes that it would make its way to the Emperor. Yet a detailed socio-rhetorical examination of the letter reveals that Augustine does nothing to challenge or to disrupt the overall violence of slavery as a system of domination. Letter 10* is a piece of correspondence of modest length addressed to Augustine’s life-long friend Alypius. According to the letter, Alypius was in Italy and had been there for some time. The occasion for this letter seems to be twofold. First, Augustine expresses his desire to reunite with his friend after a prolonged absence. He mentions that other Christian brothers and bishops are beginning to return from their travels to the northern continent, but that he has received word that Alypius will remain away. It is plausible to assume that Alypius was away from Thagaste on ecclesial business since Augustine bemoans the fact that Alypius won’t be returning with other Christian bishops. In the twenty-first century with our efficiencies in transportation and communication we may miss the contextual significance of the collective homecoming of fifth-century Mediterranean travelers. For those traveling by ship, departures and returns depended upon favorable winds and currents. Someone traveling from North Africa to Italy and back again could be waylaid for an entire winter as they awaited safe passage over the sea. These delays also resulted in massive information “black-outs” in Hippo that were remedied only by the passage of time. 21 Augustine also mentions at the beginning of this letter that he had already responded to a letter Alypius had sent to him previously. Augustine expresses his surprise that in that letter Alypius had neglected to mention important details about a different bishop implicated in Pelagian and Caelestian heresies.

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Once Augustine dispenses with the pleasantries of greeting and old business matters he moves directly on to his primary issue for writing. He explains, “There is in Africa such a great multitude of men who are commonly called slave merchants that they seem to be draining this land to a large extent of its human population by transferring those whom they buy—almost all of them free men—to the provinces overseas.” 22 Augustine outlines the travesty occurring out in the open: these “traders” take not only men, but also women and children, by force from their homes and line them up at the port of Hippo to board ships and never be seen again. He belabors the point that the majority of these stolen people are free persons who are taken by force and are not legally sold by their parents or from the slave classes of individuals with guided regulations under Roman jurisprudence. These slaves board ships and are taken to estates in Italy and southern Gaul within the boundaries of the Empire. Without communication and access to their local networks of support, these citizen slaves found themselves totally and irrevocably cut off from their former lives. Augustine’s plea to Alypius centers around a request. Augustine has in his possession a copy of a Roman law prohibiting the sale of slaves on the open market. In the code strict punishments are threatened to any persons caught selling slaves, including, it seems, slaves of any form (presumably so long as they are Romans, however). Punishments could include seizure of all the merchant’s assets including those not gained in human trafficking, bodily torture, and expulsion from the boundaries of the Empire. Augustine remarks that these punishments may be too severe, because flogging (for example) often contributed directly to the death of the perpetrator. Perhaps thinking pastorally or pragmatically, but certainly in favor of the perpetrators, Augustine sought to deal more mercifully with the accused in hopes that they would repent and return to civilization as changed individuals. Or it could have been that the pervasiveness of the trade was so great and that such large numbers of people were profiting on multiple different levels from the slave economy that soon Africa might indeed be emptied of its inhabitants. Whatever his reasons for wanting a more up-to-date edict, he implores Alypius to make use of his proximity to the centers of the Empire by finding legal precedent that still condemns slavery but offers less severe punishments to slave merchants. Slavery in the late ancient Mediterranean world was as much about economic prosperity as it was about power and control of individuals. Military victory established the primary conditions in which an invading tribal group would carry off Roman citizens into bondage. These slaves were incorporated into the slave societies of the invading groups, thus contributing to that group’s social and economic structures. Even if, hypothetically, Rome categorically rejected all forms of slavery and slave labor in the name of justice, it wouldn’t vitiate the threat and pervasiveness of slavery beyond the borders of the empire. The threat and therefore reality of slavery would continue. As

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it stood, Romans conquered other peoples and absorbed survivors into their social and economic watersheds. That the fifth-century slave market could be so lucrative in North Africa, and therefore tolerated to the point of normativity, attests to differences between imperial centers versus its margins. In North Africa, Augustine claims that human trafficking for internal economic gains was not only widely known, but also shamelessly conducted as a viable enterprise. Folks residing closer to the geographic centers of the Empire were not faced with the realities that people on the borders of the Empire experienced regularly. The social and geographic distances between centers and margins likely gave rise to rumor. Augustine’s Letter 10* attests to the truth of so-called rumors that Africa was being emptied of its populations by these slave traders. It seems peculiar at the very least that Augustine would go to such lengths to introduce Alypius to these rumors and realities. Alypius was, after all, the bishop of Thagaste just a stone’s throw to the east of Hippo. And even if Africa was not being “emptied,” the scale of industry would be cause for public spectacle. Common people surely could not help but notice long lines of subdued slaves awaiting transport or boarding ships. Augustine hardly needed to convince his close friend that slavery was so pronounced a practice and that North Africa in particular was experiencing its injustices with particular severity. Why, then, does Augustine write a letter infused with the full force of his rhetorical prowess? Augustine wields his rhetorical pen (technically, his rhetorical dictation) in a letter addressed to Alypius, but writes in such a way as to indicate that his letter was intended for a much wider audience—an audience unfamiliar with the daily struggles of those on the margins. With great rhetorical acumen, Augustine spends the remainder of this letter defining the extent of the North African slave trade and imploring the wider audience of the letter to help him find equitable solutions and reestablish stability in North Africa. He garners support from legal experts by asking Alypius to search for a more current legal statute, as described above. Sending along a copy he had in his possession of an older law prohibiting human trafficking, Augustine requests new law codes that are more germane to his present circumstance. It also seems evident that Augustine wanted to appeal to those in the center of the Empire who had pride and sensitivity for Rome’s claims to justice for its citizens. Augustine expresses much fervor at the end of the letter by indicting the traffickers as Galatians while being careful to differentiate them—who may have claims to the rights of Roman citizenship, although this detail remains unmentioned—from invading barbarians. One might expect barbarians to act without regard for Roman sensibilities, but certainly not from people with direct ties to the Empire! Finally, two pieces of evidence suggest that Letter 10* also may have been written with an ecclesial audience in mind. First, Augustine expresses

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the shock he experienced when he learned that a member of his own congregation was involved in luring people to the slave ships. By mentioning this, presumably Augustine thought that other bishops and church officials in Italy who read his letter might awaken to the pervasiveness of the slave raiding enterprises. If folks in Augustine’s own congregation are failing to see the lines between economic advantage and sinful human exploitation, then the reality of the problem is sure to match its rumors. Second, Augustine’s detailed account of his own parishioners’ efforts to free a large sum of captives also demonstrates his appeal to an ecclesial audience. Risking their own lives, a group of Christians planned, implemented, and succeeded in rescuing some 120 persons from the docked slave ships. When placed beside the first story of a congregant known to be collaborating with the traffickers, this grand story of emancipation redeems the honor of Augustine’s church and projects a beacon of hope out of the dismal situation. Any clergy person with zeal for the purity of the Church likely would side with Augustine and move to action. COMPLICITY AND EMANCIPATION Despite the fresh air now blowing onto Augustine’s later life thanks to the Divjak letters, Augustine is far from being the poster-child for the social justice work of dismantling the institution of slavery. Since Augustine does not challenge the wider practices of slavery in the late ancient Roman Empire, certain questions remain. What restricts Augustine from seeing slavery as antithetical to Christian moral visions and wider human flourishing? Why does he want to end the metaphorical applications of slavery—slaves to sin—more than the actual practice of enslaving of human beings? Two general possibilities are worthy of consideration before turning our attention to the new evidence found in the Divjak letter. First, Augustine has not fully extracted himself from the Aristotelian position that slavery resulted from natural differences between people. To be sure, ascribing the conditions of slavery to the morality of sin instead of to something inherent in what it means to be human opens much room for challenging slavery as an injustice against God’s original creation. Yet Augustine fails to make this move and often adopts an argument from nature by presenting sin as a natural result of the Fall. Trevor Dennis points out several important implications of this theological posturing: only the body can be enslaved and not the soul, masters and slaves enjoy equal status before God, slavery provided a beneficial remedy for sin, and while not original to the divine plan, humans established slavery because they are sinful. 23 As a result of these arguments, early Christian writers including Augustine tolerated the institution of slavery even within the walls of the church because to abandon it “would fatally destabi-

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lize society.” 24 In the end, Augustine never calls for the abolition of slavery and according to Augnet.org, an extensive online resource of the Order of Saint Augustine, he does the least of any other early church leader to denounce its abuses. 25 As Peter Garnsey concludes of Augustine’s legacy to subsequent generations, “Sin had issued in slavery, but slavery was not itself a sin. [Consequently, t]he medieval church was unable to shake off this heavy legacy.” 26 A second consideration for Augustine’s failure to destabilize slavery in his late ancient North African context is because of his own experiences with the benefits enslaved peoples brought to his upbringing. While not entirely determinative of all his views, Augustine’s social location cannot be ignored. His family upbringing included household, field, and pedagogic slaves, which likely played into his ability to justify the merits of the status quo. Augustine’s father had a small estate and made use of slaves to work his vineyards. When young, Augustine went to a secondary school in a neighboring town with his own personal slave, or pedagogue. At the end of Book 1 of Confessions, for example, Augustine mentions his attempts to evade his pedagogue, his teachers, and his parents because of his “passion for frivolous spectacles.” 27 Henry Chadwick translates paedagogum here as “slave” in continuity with the Greco-Roman convention of wealthier families designating one of their trusted slaves to assist in the upbringing of their children. As far back as ancient Athens, the practice of a young man receiving a pedagogue was a rite of passage demarcating independence from the direct hand of one’s father as a young man entered school. The pedagogue is not a teacher, but more of a guardian who accompanies the boy in public, training him in rules of etiquette, and even disciplining him when necessary. 28 It is likely that in trying to evade authority figures in pursuit of his own interests, the young Augustine resented his pedagogue just as he did his father for the “terrors” of punishments that this person levied against him. 29 One further example from Confessions of Augustine’s experience with household slaves occurs in Book 9. Here Augustine reflects on the memory of his mother by recounting the story of his mother’s struggle to deal with her penchant for wine. Had it not been for the family’s household slave, or “maidservant” as Chadwick translates the Latin famulae, Monica might not have found the strength to return to health. 30 Augustine describes their famula in the most positive terms. She had cared for his father when he was a baby, had high moral standards, and was “held in great honour by her masters (dominis).” When training her master’s daughters she administered “correction” in “discreet prudence.” And Augustine recalls from his mother’s experiences with her that the famula “restrained the greedy appetite of a tender age, and brought the girls’ thirst to respectable moderation, so that they should not later hanker after anything they ought not to touch.” In Augustine’s recollection this nameless household slave woman serves as the

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perfect example of a Christian whose bondage to God and virtue eclipses her bondage in the concrete physical world. For Augustine, the family “maidservant” serves his memory by becoming the model par excellence for Christian renunciation and prudence. The spirit she demonstrates becomes the model Monica will follow in her own Christian journey to become a servant of the Lord and is replicated a third time in Augustine’s own life. In this section Augustine linguistically equates the servitude of the two women. In an attitude of prayer he intentionally refers to his mother as famula tua (your servant) using the same word for servant that he uses to refer to their family’s slave. In the overlapping conversion narrative, the “maidservant” serves Monica’s soul by attesting to virtue. Monica was caught in the desires of the flesh; she was a theological or metaphorical slave to earthly desire even as her “maidservant” patiently bore witness to the true orientation of desire in the face of actual slavery. This equivocation of famula likely is used to establish a similar mirror between Monica and Augustine as he reflects on his conversion in the garden. 31 In retrospect Monica was Augustine’s steady bulwark in the reorientation of his desires. Thus, just as his mother’s famula is a worthy slave in the sight of her physical masters, and just as Monica is a worthy slave in the sight of her Lord, so too does Augustine participate in this chain of equivalence. Even if only in a moral sense, enslavement is a universal condition. But since one’s moral or spiritual health is more important than one’s physical condition, Augustine finds justification for condemning only the higher forms of slavery. By implication he finds no justification in his own life experience to alter the socio-political structures of slavery. In Letter 10* Augustine does not draw upon metaphorical slavery as a universal moral condition, perhaps because he thinks such justification is not directly relevant to either Alypius or the wider audience who may read his letter. Augustine’s plea is one of abolition and he implores his long-distance friend to assist in finding more effective ways within the present legal system to stop the Galatian slave merchants. As external invading Visigoths threaten Roman stability externally on the fringes of the Empire, societal equilibrium finds its internal threat in the morally depraved business of selling free persons. Yet laudable and necessary as Augustine’s efforts are to petition Rome for help, Augustine fails to challenge the institution of slavery, only advocating against the unlawful treatment of free citizens. Augustine draws the letter to a close with a heroic story of some of his congregants who helped rescue a host of captured individuals from the slave ship they were in line to board. These are the same parishioners facing lawsuits for damages by the slave traders. Admitting he was away during the rescue operation, he notes that only five or six of the almost one hundred and twenty people “had been [legally] sold by their parents.” 32 Comparing the low number of legally

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traded slaves with the rest of the group is Augustine’s way of emphasizing the tragedy of the situation for those lured or taken violently by the traders. He continues with pointed rhetorical pathos, “Hardly anyone, however, could refrain from tears at hearing the various conditions under which the rest fell into the hands of the Galatian trappers and raiders.” 33 Tears apparently did not come for those five or six “legitimate” slaves for their freedom was accidental and presumably collateral that Augustine regretted. Instead, tears are shed upon hearing the stories of violence and deceit that almost robbed these free persons of their social privileges. Thus, here the great injustice Augustine fights against is the illegal rather than the legal forms of slavery in the late ancient Roman world. It is much easier from our modern side of history to ask of Augustine why he would conform his letter and indeed his work against this slave trade to the dictates of Roman law. Slavery was, after all, acceptable under certain legal and socially normative frameworks just as it had been for a host of slave-based societies before his own time. Augustine also grew up in a family who owned several slaves and he often wrote about slavery as a universal theological condition. All humans are enslaved by something and one hopes that Christians are virtuous enough to submit to serving God instead of the desires of the flesh. Letter 10* reveals an elderly bishop who sought to end a grave injustice unfolding before his very eyes. And unjust it certainly was! Augustine summons his resolve to find a fitting solution to end the illegal trafficking of free persons and to punish those involved in ways appropriate to the times. Not known for going straight to the authorities and realizing that his knowledge of legal statutes concerning slavery was lacking, he implores Alypius to help him find examples of recent legislation. As Yvonne Zimmerman writes, “[f]or Augustine, the value of the political realm was its instrumental ability to restrain the worse kinds of evil.” 34 Indeed, what was happening in these North African provinces under violence and deception, and in the service of the wider Roman economy, was certainly deplorable. Augustine stood with his congregation and extended what hospitality they could even in the face of their consequences. Yet Letter 10* also harmonizes with Augustine’s other written views on slavery. His concern in this letter is not for the abolition of slavery in general, nor does he concern himself to challenge the institution of slavery on moral and theological grounds. The form of slavery he works to dismantle in the letter relates only to free citizens who have been taken into bondage and who will be cut off totally from any hope of manumission as a result. For those people sold into slavery on legal grounds, their obligation according to Augustine is to learn to submit and do well by their masters as unto God.

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NOTES 1. Kevin Bales, “How to Combat Modern Slavery,” filmed 2010. TED video, 18:28. Posted March 29, 2010. http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_bales_how_to_combat_modern_ slavery.html . 2. See Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name (New York: Anchor Books, 2009). 3. See Tessa M. Gorman, “Back on the Chain Gang: Why the Eighth Amendment and the History of Slavery Proscribe the Resurgence of Chain Gangs,” California Law Review 85, no. 2 (1997): 441–478. 4. Starting in 2001, the Bush administration targeted sex slavery in an attempt to address a growing social injustice, their efforts led to only a handful of actual convictions of slave traffickers. What is more, this administration’s targeting of sex trade, while indeed a horrific existence for mainly women and girls whose gender already excludes them from so many social privileges, wholly ignored the many other faces and forms of human trafficking. See Benjamin E. Skinner, “A World Enslaved,” in Foreign Policy (February 18, 2008). Online: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2008/02/19/a_world_enslaved 5. The “*” distinguishes the Divjak numbered letters from the numbers attributed to the conventional compilation of letters found in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 88, ed. J. Divjak (Vienna: Tempsky 1981); and Bibliothéque Augustinienne 46B. Lettres 1*29*, ed. J. Divjak with various commentaries (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987). The English translations quoted here are taken from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. II.4. Letters 211–270, 1*-29* (Epistulae). ed. Boniface Ramsey, translation and notes by Roland Teske, S.J. (New York: New City Press, 2005), pp. 262–266, and noted thus: Ep. 10*.1, with the paragraph number following the Divjak notation. 6. I employ in this investigation elements of Robbins’ socio-rhetorical hermeneutic. See Vernon Robbins, The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse: Rhetoric, Society and Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1996). “Tropics of discourse” is a direct reference to Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). This title refers to the self-reflexive awareness of the movement of language as it moves back and forth between text and interpretation, discourse and concrete material reality, and all sites of linguistic communications. It is within the tropics of discourse that we render the unfamiliar familiar and find “the existential continuity between error and truth, ignorance and understanding, or to put it another way, imagination and thought” (21). 7. Ep. 24*.1. 8. Ep. 24*.1. 9. Aristotle, Politics, I.iii-vii. trans. T. A. Sinclair, revised and re-presented by Trevor J. Saunders (New York: Penguin Books, 1992). 10. Augustine, Civ. 19.15 [NPNF]. 11. Quaest in Hept. I.153. 12. Chris L. de Wet, “Sin as Slavery and/or Slavery as Sin? On the Relationship Between Slavery and Christian Hamartiology in Late Ancient Christianity,” Religion and Theology 17 (2010): 27. 13. En. in ps. 71.2. 14. En. in ps. 71.26. 15. De mor. eccl. cath. I.23.46. 16. Not every Christian in late antiquity remained silent about the institutionalization of slavery within Roman society. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, asserted that all forms of slavery were morally wrong, and therefore must be rooted out of the life of the church. Most scholars begin with Gregory’s Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes 335.5, and 335.11. See also Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine. The W.B. Stanford Memorial Lectures (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 243; and Kimberly Flint-Hamilton, “Gregory of Nyssa and the Culture of Oppression,” Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University (2010), 26–36. 17. De mor. eccl. cath. I.30.63.

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18. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, a New Edition with an Epilogue (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 466 and note accrediting the “slogging match” phrase to John Burnaby. 19. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 466. 20. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 470. 21. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 463. 22. Ep. 10*.2. 23. Trevor Dennis, “Man Beyond Price: Gregory of Nyssa and Slavery,” in Heaven and Earth: Essex Essays in Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Peter J. Wexler, 134. 24. Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, 84, 134. 25. “Slavery—01–04,” http://augnet.org/default.asp?ipageid=429. Accessed March 4, 2014. 26. Garnsey, 241. 27. All English references here are found in Conf. I.19.30, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press: 1996), 166–167. All Latin references to Augustine’s Confessions are taken from James J. O’Donnell, The Confessions of Augustine: An Electronic Edition, http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/conf/ (Oxford University Press, 1992), accessed March 5, 2014. 28. William Stearns Davis, A Day in Old Athens (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1910), 64–65. 29. Conf. I. 9.15. 30. Conf. IX.8.17. “Health” here refers to Monica’s spiritual well-being. 31. M. M. O’Farrell, Recherches augustiniennes 10 (Etudes augustiniennes: 1975), 29–30. 32. Ep. 10*.7. 33. Ep. 10*.7. 34. Yvonne C. Zimmerman, Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85.

Chapter Nine

Breaking from the Dominance of Power and Order in Augustine’s Ethic of War María Teresa Dávila

The calculations involved in applying the just war theory tend to leave little room for the particular narratives of those most affected by the decision to use force as a last resort in resolving a conflict or responding to a threat. In the Augustinian tradition, thinking on just war privileges a narrative of power and order present elsewhere in Augustine’s thought. However, as a living tradition, just war thinking grows and evolves to adapt to new challenges as we seek relevant ways to apply its essential moral demand to restrain the use of force and protect the innocent. This essay is an experiment in such an effort at adaptation, trying to read or shape the just war tradition through some of the key insights developed in Latino/a theology. The result is a clear challenge to the privileging of the narrative of power and order, which encourages an attitude of calculated distance from the victims of our military engagement. It aims toward an acknowledgment of a multiplicity of equally—if not more—valid narratives from those on the ground, those trying to live their everyday lives despite fear and conflict, encouraging the application of just war theory within a framework of accompaniment and solidarity rather than distance and isolation. The recent example of possible U.S. involvement in the conflict in Syria illustrates this process of shifting attention from grand narratives of the dominant paradigms of power and order as applied to international diplomacy, to particular narratives of suffering and lo cotidiano 1 of target populations. During the last weeks of the summer of 2013 the world looked on as the possibility of a U.S. tactical strike against key Syrian targets was being considered. Evidence that chemical weapons had been used in the Syrian 145

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conflict, raging since 2011, pressed the international community to make a decisive move once a critical “red line” had been crossed. 2 Videos showing convulsing children and rows of those allegedly killed from the attacks tugged at our emotions, making it difficult for the public, especially citizens of the country most likely to strike, to determine what a just and lawful course of action looked like. During those intense weeks, while United Nations inspectors were examining the facts, trying to determine whether weapons had been used at all and which party or parties might have deployed them, 3 we Christian ethicists did our best to use the resources of the tradition to shed light on the moral weight of various possible responses. 4 As an ethics professor at a Christian seminary, I felt the need to present tools for analyzing the question of the use of force in response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria. I was particularly committed to presenting an analysis drawn from the Christian tradition to our alumni/ae and other constituents, many of them trying to prepare sermons or discussion sessions in their churches that would address the urgency of the moment. 5 I thought it important to lift up just war criteria, realism, and pacifism as three traditions within Christianity that have historically played a role in helping the faithful navigate the ethics of violent conflict among the human family. While I tried not to favor any one tradition, I highlighted just war theory as pushing global authorities to consider other ways to address the conflict, restraining the urge to resort to violence, and engaging the imagination, allowing us to entertain alternatives about life in community and conflict resolution previously not considered. One particular narrative, however, seriously challenged assumptions I had about the usefulness of just war theory in this situation. Trappist nuns in Aleppo, Syria, shared in a letter their understanding of what was happening around them, vividly describing the scenes of everyday life on the verge of a potential strike: We look at the people around us, our day workers who are all here as if suspended, stunned: “They’ve decided to attack us.” Today we went to Tartous . . . we felt the anger, the helplessness, the inability to formulate a sense to all this: the people trying their best to work and to live normally. You see the farmers watering their land, parents buying notebooks for the schools that are about to begin, unknowing children asking for a toy or an ice cream . . . you see the poor, so many of them, trying to scrape together a few coins. The streets are full of the “inner” refugees of Syria, who have come from all over to the only area left that is still relatively livable. . . . You see the beauty of these hills, the smile on people’s faces, the good-natured gaze of a boy who is about to join the army and gives us the two or three peanuts he has in his pocket as a token of “togetherness”. . . . And then you remember that they have decided to bomb us tomorrow. . . . Just like that. Because “it’s time to do something,” as it is worded in the statements of the important men, who will

Breaking from the Dominance of Power and Order in Augustine’s Ethic of War 147 be sipping their tea tomorrow as they watch TV to see how effective their humanitarian intervention will be. . . . Will they make us breathe the toxic gases of the depots they hit, tomorrow, so as to punish us for the gases we have already breathed in? 6

The letter from the Trappist nuns focuses on the juxtaposition of everyday life amidst intense civil conflict and the possibility of a violent attack from a superpower. The nuns mournfully point out that in the midst of this “everydayness” it is nearly impossible to guarantee that no innocent blood will be spilled from any so-called tactical strike against critical targets as a warning against any further use of chemical weapons. For the nuns, “there is something wrong, and it is something very serious . . . because the consequences will be wrought on the lives of an entire population . . . it is in the blood that fills our streets, our eyes, our hearts.” 7 Just war theory is meant to provide a set of criteria to evaluate the moral dimensions of any given conflict. While it may seemingly be applicable universally, in the Augustinian tradition it is dependent on privileging a narrative of power and order that Augustine himself inherits from neo-Platonism and the Pax Romana which framed his known universe. 8 This narrative of power and order stands in contrast to the particular narrative of everyday life and vulnerability among those directly affected by conflict and violence, wherever they are situated. Is there any room in just war theory to entertain considerations such as those raised in the letter of the Trappist nuns? This essay attempts to bring together just war theory in the Augustinian tradition with insights of Latina/o theology, itself a young discipline spanning the last forty or so years. Are there particular ethical insights and perspectives from Latina/o theology that can open new avenues for reflection regarding the ethics of the use of force in the Christian tradition? The particular foci and methodologies of Latina/o theology challenge and expand contemporary thinking about the just war tradition: from justice with respect to the rights of nations, to justice framed by the rights of peoples. It encourages us to consider new methodologies that could propel new directions of conversation for the application of just war tradition to contemporary situations. The conversation I’m suggesting follows three parts. First, I present a brief discussion on Augustine’s development of the criteria of right authority and right intention within his ethics of the use of force. While it is true that Augustine’s ideas on just war and the use of force are deeply embedded in his rich theological reading of the created world in relation with a loving and all good creator God, I limit this survey to how right intention and right authority hinge on his vision of the role of the state and an anthropology ordered toward love of God, both key in understanding the narrative of power and order shaping his ethics of war. Second, I discuss key concepts

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from Latino/a theology and ethics. Though there is as yet no direct development of an ethic of the use of force in Latino/a theology, its methodology and key insights can interrupt the dominant narrative of power and order we have inherited in the Augustinian tradition. The last section of the essay focuses on interruptions to this dominant narrative through insights from Latino/a theology, with particular attention to how the everyday lives of all are affected by these decisions. As a Latina, Puerto Rican ethicist, it is important that I note my stake in this matter. Rather than being an ethicist committed to Latina/o theology and seeking to lift up its relevance for ethical reflection, I consider myself an ethicist committed to the just war tradition as a resource to prevent the use of force, but in dire need of considerable adaptation to new ways of understanding the human family. The exercise of reading the just war tradition through Latina/o eyes is one way to expand the dynamism of the rich tradition of just war thinking in Christian ethics. RIGHT AUTHORITY, RIGHT INTENTION, AND THE PRIMACY OF POWER AND ORDER The concern of this essay is the blind spot created when a hierarchical understanding of society and creation shapes right authority and right intention as it does for Augustine. While such a short discussion of Augustine’s development of these criteria does not do justice to the fullness of his influence on just war thought, it suffices for the particular conversation initiated by this essay between traditional just war thinking and Latino/a theology. For Augustine the morality of killing depends on the moral psychology, affections, and motivations of the one doing the killing, as his ethics center on the right ordering of the person toward God. Therefore, the morality of the use of force looks at the effects of war on the soldier doing the killing, rather than taking into consideration how this affects those on the receiving end of the violence. Augustine sees “defense of self” as inordinate self-love whereas “defense of state” or nation he sees as the defense of a good (a well-ordered society) that has been gifted to the faithful to aid in the pilgrimage to the Heavenly City. 9 The key to understanding Augustine’s position is not a moral theory of duty, in which the right is prior to the good, but a broader, teleological ethical theory and moral psychology with a focal concern for psychic and social order. . . . When we privilege ourselves and our temporal needs, we are prone, anxiously and apprehensively to overreach. For Augustine, boundaries are both metaphysical and moral. 10

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Reading Augustine’s moral psychology in this way brings deeper meaning to one of his key statements on the morality of war, What is it about war that is to be blamed? Is it that those who will die someday are killed so that those who will conquer might dominate in peace? This is the complaint of the timid, not of the religious. The desire for harming, the cruelty for revenge, the restless and implacable mind, the savageness of revolting, the lust for dominating, and similar things—these are what are justly blamed in wars. 11

Again, the emphasis is on the inner attitude of the soldier participating in war, with little consideration for how the harm done to those on the receiving end of the violence affects or influences the moral fabric of an entire society. Augustine’s views on the justice of war owe significantly to three sources: Cicero’s ethics, the writings of Ambrose, and the philosophy of statecraft inherent in the Roman empire that was the political and sociocultural staging for Augustine’s Christian faith and thought. 12 The privileging of power and order in the Augustinian just war tradition finds its roots in this particular lineage in Christian thought, one that is divorced from the strictly pacifist propositions of the early church fathers. 13 Augustine’s thought morally privileges a soldier’s obedience to a higher authority, whether the authority of God (as in the biblical examples of Moses and King David), or the right authority of the state. 14 Temporal authority forms part of Augustine’s understanding of a “divinely appointed hierarchy into which Man [sic] is ordered in various gradations of responsibility.” 15 Mattox explains that, for Augustine, the king’s authority and power “is from God alone,” even when orders to kill are issued unjustly. 16 Therefore, kings must be obeyed in every case that is not in direct contravention to the will of God. And even then, the subject must be willing to suffer the wrath of the king in response to disobedience; for it is God who has made the king ruler over the subject. 17

Augustine’s development of the just war criterion of right authority is embedded in the narrative of power and order, not because it demands that war be under the command of state authority, but because he relates this authority to God, in a hierarchy that privileges the established order and the leadership entrusted with its care and protection. The established order is God’s gift for humans to organize in society for the correct ordering of its citizens. Therefore, Augustine the Christian philosopher achieves a full synthesis of the Roman and Christian values associated with war in a way that recognizes war as a legitimate instrument of national policy which, although inferior to the perfect

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ideals of Christianity, is one which Christians cannot altogether avoid and with which they must in some sense make peace. 18

Mattox continues, Augustine held, with many of the early Church Fathers, that pax Romana was a divinely instituted state of affairs emplaced specifically for the purpose of ensuring the promulgation of the Christian faith. What is more, given the choice between order and chaos, Augustine the neo-Platonist certainly would opt for the status quo . . . 19

Augustine’s emphasis on God’s authority over creation and God’s absolute power as grounding existence leads him to consider wars first as within God’s plan and authority; second, as a tool for the correction of humanity when it has gone astray; third, to preserve the moral order; and fourth, to punish moral offenses. The relation of right authority to divine authority in Augustine is also related to his reading of right intention as a requirement of a just war. While peace must be the ultimate objective of war, this follows Augustine’s sense of a hierarchical order in which each part of nature is ordered toward the highest good in God: “The peace of the body is the ordered proportion of its parts. . . . The peace of the body and the soul is the ordered life and wellbeing of a living thing. The peace between a mortal man and God is an ordered obedience in faith, under the eternal law.” 20 While earthly peace is for the use of the heavenly realm, it represents a good of human society as it journeys to the Kingdom of God. Augustine’s discussion of peace in The City of God is nuanced, acknowledging that while peace and order are the goals of every being and every community in creation, there are manifestations of peace that pale in comparison to heavenly peace and its perfect justice, such as peace among thieves or evildoers. 21 Still, “the peace of all things is the tranquility of order,” 22 and order in Augustine follows the hierarchical authority that has the household obedient to its head, the head of households obedient to the king, and the king obedient to God. The privileging of order ensconced in particular nation states or in a particular empire represents the privileging of a narrative of dominant power when considering the moral use of force. The just war criteria of right authority and right intention become a “top down” hierarchical reading of society and human relations, a trend that continues to this day, as evidenced in the discussion on pre-emptive war with Iraq during the spring of 2003. David DeCosse, in his essay “Authority, Lies and War: Democracy and the Development of Just War Theory,” argues for an expanded or re-assessed sense of right authority in light of the evidence that the U.S. government’s case for going to war against Iraq misused data and presented misinformation to the public in order to justify its case. 23 Engaging just war criteria with theologi-

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cal insights from marginalized communities might be one way to present such a reassessment. The privileging of a narrative of hierarchical order and power, inherited from Augustine, and divorced from the pacifist strands in early Christian thought on the use of force, strips citizens in modern democracies of their ability to participate in the systems that make key decisions regarding military action. The criteria of right authority and right intention presuppose deference to civil authority, which is complicated in an era where deception is used to garner support for war. DeCosse argues that legitimate authority, then, should yield to a more inclusive sense of power, to include the citizenry intent on transparency and truth. 24 The final section of this essay proposes that decentralizing the narrative of power and order leads to seeking facts beyond our own narratives, to include facts on the ground with the people with whom we quarrel, embedded in the daily living of all. LATINO/A THEOLOGY: INSIGHTS FROM AN EMERGING TRADITION By its very nature Latina/o theology is a reflection of the cultural, spiritual, religious, and social life of a people who will soon represent one of the largest segments of the U.S. population and a significant slice of the Christian church population in the United States. 25 While paying attention to Latina/o theology and its relevance for ethical reflection is a demographic necessity, it is also a methodological necessity. At its core, the biggest contribution made by Latina/o theology is its epistemological insights that will grant Christian ethics new avenues for reflection. Latino/a theology should not be understood as a monolithic body of literature that can be applied wholesale to all members of the Latina/o community. 26 Many perspectives contribute to this tradition, marked by agreement on some basic principles while exploring a myriad of topics that seek to represent the experiences of a very diverse population. Therefore, the task of articulating the application of a Latina/o ethic to contemporary themes in Christian ethics is both monumental and troublesome. Grounded in and inheriting the preferential option for the poor as developed in Latin America, Latino/a theology reflects on experiences of marginalization and oppression particular to the U.S. context. From this reflection, basic insights arise that are helpful for expanding the conversation with the criteria of the just war tradition: lo cotidiano, mestizaje, acompañamiento, and nosotros. To appropriately engage with Latina/o theology we must combine history, statistics, social movements, and theological insights with the everyday experiences that mark one of the largest movements of people in recent history. Latina/o theology speaks to the reality that, by the year 2050, one out

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of every four persons living in the United States will be immigrant Hispanic or of Hispanic origin. 27 This reality encompasses the lengthy history of conquest, colonialism, border disputes, and movements of peoples in the past five hundred years of history in the Americas. Latina/o theology represents the daring step of a few Hispanic theologians who in the past forty years have tried to ‘conceptualize, verbalize and communicate’ in theological and ethical terms the reality of a significant portion of the U.S. population. Further demographic shifts indicate that currently almost one out of every two Catholics in the United States is of Hispanic descent, a demographic and ecclesial reality that is becoming more present in other mainline denominations, especially in independent and Pentecostal churches. The task of understanding Latina/o theology and articulating Latina/o ethics, then, is the task of relevant theology for a rapidly changing U.S. context. One of the greatest strengths of Latino/a theology has been its emphasis on methodology. A significant part of its efforts has gone to developing an epistemological approach for exploring the experience of the Latino community in the United States. The methodology employed by Latina/o theologians taps into its heritage from Latin American liberation theology in its attention to praxis and the life of the poor. Lo cotidiano—the daily living of the people in its fullness (in the family, spiritually, economically, politically, socially, and culturally)—becomes the main focus of reflection. Lo cotidiano is Latino/a theology’s unique expression of the option for the poor as the incarnational principle of Divine love. 28 The epistemological turn toward observing and, more importantly, sharing in the daily living, surviving, struggling, and thriving of Latino people presents a wide stage from which to launch theological projects altogether different from Latin American liberation theology while maintaining a continuum with it through the centrality of the preferential option for the poor. 29 The use of a methodology grounded in the preferential option for the poor, uniquely applied as a “preferential option for culture,” 30 and attentive to the “everydayness” of life in the margins in the United States, has yielded a spectrum of theological categories and insights unique to Latina/o theology while at the same time sustaining classic insights from Christian theology. The following three present the most promise for engaging the just war tradition: • Lo cotidiano: attention to daily experiences of living in the margins that highlight a people’s approach to challenges, oppression, invisibility, and poverty through their cultural and religious strengths 31; • Mestizaje: a category that examines historical, theological, anthropological, and ethical implications of the history of violence and conquest that thrust the Latino/a identity into being 32 and

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• Acompañamiento and Dignidad: alternative visions of humanity that focus on an anthropology of being, and more specifically being with rather than making, that present the human being as a participant in networks and relationships of love and care involving family and neighborhood, and that honor the privileged place of these networks in Hispanic culture and its role in sustaining and magnifying our God-given dignity. 33 Lo cotidiano is typically translated as “daily life” or “daily living.” Lo cotidiano is a blend of the ordinary and the extraordinary of life as a gift from God. It is an epistemological turn to give the life of the poor and marginalized, as lived by the poor and marginalized, a privileged place in theology. When attention is paid to lo cotidiano among Latinas/os in the United States a particular picture of joys and sorrows, achievements and struggles begins to emerge. The everyday or ordinary for many immigrants and other people in the margins in the United States and globally includes suffering persecution, being branded aliens, constantly living on the borders or having borders imposed on them, and undergoing colonization and conquest again and again. Methodologically, lo cotidiano can be considered a magnifying glass, a tool through which to engage in the lives of the people we seek to speak from or for, and with whom we wish to struggle for liberation. It is a principle of participation and incarnation in the life of the people for whom we claim to speak. Through participation and sharing in the joys and sorrows of life in the margins in the United States, lo cotidiano allows Latina/o theologians to highlight the plight of a daily existence marked by unjust detention and deportation, separation of families, language barriers, “day laboring” and low wages, the threat of immigration raids, lack of access to educational opportunities, and discrimination in housing and employment. As an expression of the incarnational principle of Divine love it promotes witnessing daily experiences of struggle and death as well as sharing in experiences of salvation and hope, celebration, spirit, and accompaniment along life’s journey. In Galilean Journey, Virgilio Elizondo presents mestizaje in its historical and racial context, its political and cultural consequences, and its theological significance for Latina/o theology. His discussion begins with the violence originated by the events of 1492: 1492 launched an era of violence such as the world had not known before. Violence itself was not new to the world but the extent and depth of the dehumanization stemming from 1492 was, and remains without parallel. 34

The encounter between the European, native, and African peoples that resulted from the conquest of the Americas was dominated by the European understanding of superiority in the eyes of history and the eyes of God.

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Mestizaje, the racial and cultural mixing of these three peoples and their cultures, is the product of historic and systemic violence. Other Latina/o theologians capture the tragic and complex identity of mestizaje to explore more positive dimensions in Hispanic identity, recovering in the painful and violent history of mestizaje the birth pangs of future life and a new and more just society. A positive reading of mestizaje stems from the diversity and inclusiveness embodied within it. Some Latina/o theologians sustain that the negative historical implications of mestizaje can be reconciled in the space where a new people, a new spirit, a new culture, would offer the gift of a radically positive self-identity. 35 The ethic of acompañamiento or accompaniment, as developed by Roberto Goizueta, considers the everyday reality of marginalization not as an academic project limited to describing this reality but as a practice of walking with and sharing in both suffering and celebration. In Caminemos con Jesús, Goizueta takes the Good Friday processions of the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, the story of Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe, and other expressions of popular religion among Latinas/os, to ground a relational understanding of the marginalized and oppressed person who finds her or his source of dignity in the different forms of accompaniment present among Latinos/as. In the case of the Good Friday procession, accompanying Jesus on the way to the cross becomes a source of solidarity: being with Jesus and Mary at a time of unjust suffering is a way of participating in mutual relationships of solidarity that share in one’s suffering. 36 For Goizueta, Latino religiosity, which is at the core of self-identity for Latino communities, is defined by a praxis of interpersonal relationships of liberation evident in acompañamiento. The liberative element views interpersonal activity as an end in itself and not as an instrumental tool for personal benefit. 37 In Dignidad: Ethics Through Hispanic Eyes, Ismael García develops what he believes is at the center of Christian ethics as lived out by the Hispanic communities in the United States: an “ethics of recognition and care.” 38 He does this by examining the implications for ethics of the Latina/o communitarian identity: Moral rationality is intertwined with at least three elements: (1) our communally induced feelings and shared understandings of what is right and good, of what is wrong and bad; (2) the habitual and traditional ways our communities organize our day to day practices and institutionalize our understanding of the good and right, bad and wrong; and finally (3) traditional cultural practices and abiding religious convictions which, even if we cannot prove them true or false to the uninitiated, still enable us to confess in a clear and intelligible way that which constitutes the ultimate ground of our moral commitments. 39

García emphasizes the social nature of all morality, especially the way Latina ethics “acknowledges the inclination to be concerned for others” and

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is marked with “the disposition of having other regard.” 40 Dignidad in Latina/o ethics is the source for an ethic of recognition and care because it reflects the two sides of acknowledging the image of God in all, both upholding the dignity inherent in every human being including the self, and denouncing the places where human dignity comes under threat or attack. For García, an ethic of recognition and care accomplishes two important priorities of Latino/a people: it acknowledges the principles and rights that guide interactions among individuals in any society while at the same time expanding the liberal vision of rights and responsibilities beyond the individualistic parameters of human interaction set by U.S. civil society. 41 According to García, expanding “rights talk” in civil society would incorporate the Latino/a sense of community and interconnectedness of humanity and would allow for group rights alongside individual rights so that cultural and ethnic values could flourish. At the same time, García wants to safeguard ethics from a provincial or tribal understanding of community that often spirals into embedded mutual relationships among one’s own while sustaining a heavy mistrust of outsiders. For this reason he is intent on holding on to the principles of human rights and dignity that imbue each stranger or outsider with a voice in determining their vision of the good. In this way he recognizes both the marginalization and oppression experienced by Latinos/as as outsiders from the dominant group, as well as the potential for Latinos/as themselves to be suspicious of engaging other cultural and social groups in a space of mutual understanding, cooperation, and equality. 42 Finally, an ethic of recognition and care expands traditional notions of justice beyond giving each person his or her due. Justice within a Hispanic ethic of care combines the passion of emotional ties with others in the community with the “dispassionate thought that extends principles of autonomy to people from other groups.” 43 According to García, limiting justice to that which is due the individual tends to support the status quo and ignore the needs or concerns of a group. Justice cannot be concerned simply with equal opportunity but must also be concerned with the outcome for all members of society; it is more than simply a political concept about rights and duties. Justice in Latina/o ethics is balanced with compassion, love, and care as part of the character development of the moral person. According to these two insights of dignidad and acompañamiento, there can be no acknowledgment of the dignity of the human being without an understanding of the relational nature of the person. Therefore, as García suggests, human dignity for Latinas/os moves beyond the common liberal language of human rights into the realm of solidarity or acompañamiento. The relational understanding of human nature leads to the realization that solidarity is an integral part of human dignity. But this solidarity must be willing to be outraged: daring to keep human dignity in tension with sorrow,

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shame, and indignation toward the unjust suffering that encompasses the cotidiano (daily living) of the majority of the world’s people and is an affront to human dignity. BREAKING WITH THE PRIVILEGED NARRATIVE OF POWER AND ORDER IN JUST WAR THINKING An oft-quoted statement by a senior advisor to President G. W. Bush represents an extreme expression of how power and order are privileged in statecraft, particularly when considering the use of force: We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. 44

Richard Miller suggests that cultivating the civic virtues of “dispositions of self-restraint, critical self analysis, and openness to deliberate publicly about moral matters in a context of cultural pluralism” is a requirement of an expanded notion of right authority where an informed society is involved in the complex reality(ies) affecting decisions on the use of force. 45 In particular, he urges that “self-knowledge, including one’s own personal and social memories, must be tested by the principle of reality. . . . In our self-reflexive acts, we must ask ourselves whether our own self-interpretation is grounded in reality or fabricated with an eye toward self-justification.” 46 Latino/a theology, grounded in the experience of marginalized people offer opportunities for the development of the critical civic virtues Miller argues might effectively expand notions of right authority and right intention beyond the privileged narrative of power and order. They provide a corrective to the presumption of power and order authorized by “empire” as noted in the comment by Bush’s senior advisor. The categories of lo cotidiano, attention to the daily experiences of suffering and struggle of a people, and acompañamiento or accompaniment highlight where present unjust suffering demands a response from the international community. How do we determine the duties of the international community when diplomatic means have failed to protect particular groups of people? What is the threshold in numbers of lives lost for declaring that genocide or ethnic cleansing is actually taking place? For example, lo cotidiano highlights the experience of women in every region beset by violence. Graphic accounts of sexual and other bodily violence on women, as well as women’s successful efforts at peace negotiations and cooperation, often do not appear in regular news outlets. And yet they need to be part of our considerations.

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Right authority in a Post-Cold War world no longer resides with autonomous nation states alone. The shape of our globalized human experience demands that regional bodies of states or international associations and coalitions rather than individual nations lead military action. In its efforts to legitimize action against Iraq in 2003, the U.S. government undertook the difficult task of trying to convince the United Nations of a case for military involvement in Iraq as well as building up a “coalition of the willing,” to ensure that a representative and broad coalition of states would back the enterprise. Considering the historic and current privileging of power and order in the criterion of right authority for the use of force, this process represented an act of international bullying and coercion. 47 Alternatively, just war criteria constructed within the context of the rights of people raises important questions. What is the authority imbued in the people themselves for legitimate self-defense or in seeking restoration of wrongs? Reading the criteria of right intention and right authority through the lens of Latina/o ethics, more specifically lo cotidiano, mestizaje, and dignidad, does not represent a proposal for anarchic “authority of the people” to direct violence toward whomever they feel has grieved them through oppressive or even violent state actions. More nuanced and complex understanding of how people—whether isolated from states or in agreement with certain civil authorities—develop their own sense of authority regarding when/how to use violence as a last resort can be illustrated through the use of these rubrics. I can best describe this anecdotally. In the winter of 2002/2003, the global community was witnessing the tail end of an intifada uprising in Gaza along with the everyday developments of a case for war against Iraq. In conversation with a Lebanese colleague I asked what the rationale for terrorism was—what was it about the region that led to constant flare-ups of violence with little hope for resolution. His response struck a chord with me as someone deeply immersed in liberation and Latina/o theology with experiences of marginalization, displacement, oppression, the border, and poverty as locus for theological and ethical reflection. He asked, “can you imagine an entire life lived in a refugee camp? Can you imagine the sense of dislocation, being considered a nonperson, of having arbitrary borders placed on you? Add to this the constant demonization of you and your people as well as the demonization among your own of those outside the gates or those you think are responsible for your condition.” I could imagine all that he was describing. The displacement of peoples, whether voluntary or as a result of unjust persecution, is one of the strongest psycho-social influences among Hispanic immigrants in the United States. The historical experiences of mestizaje—systemic violence at the political, ethnic, religious, and cultural levels—helped me understand what my colleague was articulating. Attention to the everyday should highlight to us that the experience of an increasing segment of the world’s population is one of

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displacement and refugee identity. How do we incorporate this reality into broad discussions of just cause and right authority? How is right authority affected by the demands of different populations? Since large segments of the global community protested against the Iraq war in the days leading up to its start, what authority do the people possess? Does the assumption that all power resides in civil authority thwart the people’s ability to influence or shape the defense of the common good? Both DeCosse and Miller argue that dialogue and trust, as essential elements of democracy, are significantly eroded when manipulation and coercion or power form the center of political decision making, particularly with respect to the use of force. 48 As Miller suggests, “The need to produce a justification for war thus calls forth the disposition to deliberate, to place one’s views within a larger dialogical context when assessing proper terms and course of military action.” 49 Because everyone is responsible for the common good in democratic societies, everyone has the duty to reflect on reasons to go to war, to scrutinize political power, and even to resist power, therefore interrupting the dominant narrative of power and order we have inherited from Augustine through the ages. Considering right intention through the lenses of mestizaje, lo cotidiano, acompañamiento, and dignidad also serves to question or interrupt dominant assumptions about what should be the end goals of the use of force. The presumption of just war criteria is the limited use of force to limit or end violence being done on one’s or a neighboring population. When there is a failed state, as was Somalia in 1993, that risks the stability of an entire region with a potential for spiraling into unceasing violence for entire populations, or when there is great humanitarian damage that can only be dealt with militarily, the criterion of right intention tends to lose its focus. In the case of Somalia in 1993, the original goals were to bring stability back to the region, but this proved entirely impossible under the conditions on the ground as well as an inappropriate goal with the limited number of troops committed to that effort. There was a clear failure in determining the needs of the people, in understanding lo cotidiano for the people of Somalia—and we can add to this list Haiti and Rwanda. In each case “mission creep” changed the objectives that would measure the operation’s success such that there was no peace or end in sight. This was also the case in Iraq: the original measures for success continued to change even after the capture of Saddam Hussein and after much evidence that we had failed to understand what success would mean for the U.S. and the Iraqi people. We failed to understand lo cotidiano of their mestizo identities, the different factions, traditions, sects, and peoples who have for centuries interacted in that region and would expect varied outcomes from U.S. military intervention. So whose vision of success do we use to determine what peace looks like? While the violence may cease at some point, is there a lasting peace? The same questions need to be asked of the situation in Israel and Palestine. Often

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the most successful projects for common ground in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have been efforts by women’s cooperatives where Palestinian and Israeli women accompany each other in daily acts of solidarity, in suffering or celebration, that uphold a shared sense of human worth and dignity grounded in the interdependent nature of their destinies as women and human beings. A complex or mestizo understanding of peace as right intention and the daily experiences on both sides suggest the following common goals: an end to the condition of Palestinians being refugees in their own land; and the ability of Israelis to live without the threat of terrorist violence and with the freedom to exist without question. These are goals that uphold and promote the dignity of all parties involved while at the same time placing that dignity in a web of communal relationships between neighboring states. Are these goals achievable through the use of force? Or asked differently, how can we best use the capabilities of armed forces to reach these goals? Lo cotidiano and mestizaje, acompañamiento and dignidad can be tools for an honest engagement with the realities of war considered in the just war tradition. They ask “what is the everydayness of life in Baghdad, in Kabul, in the West Bank, in Tibet, in Darfur?” An exercise in lo cotidiano is not only descriptive—which is by itself an important contribution—but it is also a praxis of accompaniment, of experiencing the reality of the other even if for a brief moment, of an honest understanding of suffering and hope. Lo cotidiano as an incarnational principle highlights different dimensions as yet unexplored in the ethics of the use of force by bringing in narratives of people’s most sincere hopes and aspirations—often born of extreme suffering—to interrupt narratives of power, domination, and order established by civil authority alone. Ethical reflection must adequately embolden churches to address critically a variety of realities, highlighting lo cotidiano for victims of war and for soldiers alike. The Christian community is called to present alternatives to the use of force in ways that promote a better understanding of the realities of different groups, challenging and breaking with the dominant narrative of power and order we have inherited from Augustine’s ethic of war. NOTES 1. Day to day living, or everyday lives. 2. “Syria chemical arms: ‘Global Red Line Crossed’—Kerry,” BBC News Europe (Sept. 8, 2013), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24008768, accessed 1/29/2014. 3. Molly Hunter, Dana Hughes, “Syria Strike Delayed as UN Inspectors Weigh Chemical Weapons Evidence,” Good Morning America (Aug. 31, 2013), http://abcnews.go.com/ International/syria-strike-threat-delayed-inspectors-weigh-chemical-weapons/story?id= 20125257, accessed 1/29/2014. Salma Abdelaziz, Jala Gorani, Ana Bickford, “U.N. Confirms Use of Chemical Weapons in Syria,” CNN (Dec. 12, 2014), http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/12/world/meast/syria-civil-war/, accessed 1/29/2014.

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4. Resources produced by ethicists in blogs, journals, and other online sources during these weeks are extensive. A sample of these include: Drew Christiansen, “Rescuing Syria,” America (Aug. 28, 2013), http://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/rescuing-syria?utm_ source=Campaign+Created+2013%2F08%2F31%2C+12%3A54+PM&utm_campaign= summer2013&utm_medium=socialshare; Maryanne Cusimano-Love, “Just War in Syria?,” Huffington Post (Aug. 29, 2013), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maryann-cusimano-lovephd/just-war-in-syria_b_3836159.html?utm_source=Campaign+Created+ 2013%2F08%2F31%2C+12%3A54+PM&utm_campaign=summer2013&utm_medium= socialshare; Matthew Shadle, “Should Christians Support Intervention in Syria? No. On Being (Aug. 29, 2013), http://faithstreet.wpengine.com/2013/08/29/should-christians-supportintervention-in-syria-no; Yonat Shimron, “The Ethics of a Syrian Military Intervention: The Experts Respond,” Religion News Service – U.S. Catholic (c.2013), http://www.uscatholic.org/ news/201308/ethics-syrian-military-intervention-experts-respond-27748?utm_source= Campaign+Created+2013%2F08%2F31%2C+12%3A54+PM&utm_campaign=summer2013& utm_medium=socialshare, all accessed 1/31/2014. 5. María Teresa Dávila, “How Shall People of Faith Consider a Possible U.S. Intervention in Syria?” (Aug. 30, 2013), http://www.ants.edu/news/detail/bearing-witness-on-the-brink-ofwar/, accessed 1/29/2014. 6. The Trappist Nuns from Azeir, Syria, “Letter of August 29, 2013,” quoted in “A Letter from Trappist Nuns in Syria: ‘Blood Fills our Streets, Our Eyes, Our Hearts,’” by Alessandra Nucci, The Catholic World Report (September 1, 2013), http://www.catholicworldreport.com/ Blog/2538/a_letter_from_trappist_nuns_in_syria_blood_fills_our_streets_our_eyes_our_heart. aspx#.UuwFtXewKnb, accessed 1/31/2014. 7. Ibid. 8. John Mark Mattox, Saint Augustine and the Theory of Just War (London, UK: Continuum Books, 2006), 52. 9. Ibid., 10. 10. Ibid., 13; italics mine. 11. St. Augustine, Against Faustus the Manichean, XXII.74, in Augustine, Political Writings, translated by Michael W. Tkacz and Douglas Kries, edited by Tkacz and Kries (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 1994), 221. More common translations of this passage read somewhat differently (differences italicized): “What is the evil in war? Is it the death of some who will soon die, in any case, that others may live in peaceful subjection? This is mere cowardly dislike, not a religious feeling. The real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust for power, and such like . . .” Translated by Richard Stothert. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 4, edited by Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/140622.htm , accessed 2/3/2014. 12. Mattox, Chapter 2: The Historical and Philosophical Landscape. 13. Ibid., 19, 22. 14. Augustine, Against Faustus the Manichean, XXII. 69–80. 15. Mattox, 150. 16. Ibid., 151, quoting from Augustine, Against the Manicheans, 32. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 39. 19. Ibid., 52. 20. Augustine, City of God, Chapter 13, trans. by Tkacz and Kries, 153–154. 21. Ibid., Chapter 12, 150–151. 22. Ibid., Chapter 13, 154. 23. David DeCosse, “Authority, Lies, and War: Democracy and the Development of Just War Theory,” Theological Studies (2006: 67), 379: “The use of deception to justify war points toward the need for Catholic thought on war and peace to develop in a direction that highlights democratic citizen’s rights and responsibilities in wartime.” 24. DeCosse, 386.

Breaking from the Dominance of Power and Order in Augustine’s Ethic of War 161 25. Wesley Grambert-Michaelson, “Commentary: The Hidden Immigration Impact on American Churches,” On Faith by Faith Street (Sept. 23, 2013), http://www.faithstreet.com/ onfaith/2013/09/23/commentary-the-hidden-immigration-impact-on-american-churches/ 20355, accessed 2/2/2014; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life & Pew Hispanic Center, Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (2007), 2, http://www. pewforum.org/files/2007/04/hispanics-religion-07–final-mar08.pdf, accessed 2/2/2014. 26. María Teresa Dávila, “Catholic Hispanic Theology in the U.S.: Dimensiones de la Opción Preferencial por los Pobres en el Norte,” Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings (2008), Vol. 63: 28–48. 27. Jeffrey Passel and Debra Kohn, “U.S. Population Projections: 2005–2050,” Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project (February 11, 2008), http://www.pewhispanic.org/2008/02/11/ us-population-projections-2005–2050/, accessed 2/15/2014. 28. María Teresa Dávila, “The Role of the Social Sciences in Catholic Social Thought: The Incarnational Principle of the Preferential Option for the Poor and Being Able to ‘See’ in the Rubric ‘See, Judge, Act.’” Journal of Catholic Social Thought. Vol. 9 No. 2 (Summer 2012): 229–244. 29. Espín, Ibid., 121: “Only that theology that seriously takes into account the impact of culture, gender and social position, and which methodologically acknowledges and incorporates the real, daily life situations of Latinos/as, can claim to be Latino/a.” Specific works on the centrality of the option for the poor in Latina/o theology include María Pilar Aquino, “Theological Method in U.S. Latino/a Theology: Toward an Intercultural Theology for the Third Millennium,” in From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology, edited by Orlando Espín and Miguel Díaz (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 6–48; Virgilio Elizondo, Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise, revised and expanded (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000); Roberto Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1995); Justo González, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1990); Carmen Marie Nanko, “Justice Crosses the Border: The Preferential Option for the Poor in the United States,” in A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, edited by María Pilar Aquino, Daisy Machado and Jeanette Rodríguez (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), 177–203. 30. Aquino, 3. 31. As epistemological lens and theological guide, most Latina/o theologians use lo cotidiano in our work. Its full development can be found in Ada María Isasi Díaz’ Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the 21st Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), and in her subsequent work, especially “Lo cotidiano: A Key Element of Mujerista Theology,” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, 10 no 1 (August 2002), 5–17. 32. Central to Latina/o theology, mestizaje was most prominently developed in the theology of Virgilio Elizondo in Galilean Journey, and in The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet (Bloomington, IN: Meyer-Stone Books, 1988). 33. Roberto Goizueta, “Nosotros: Toward a U.S. Hispanic Anthropology,” Listening, 27 (Winter 1992), 55–69; and Ismael García, Dignidad: Ethics Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997). 34. Elizondo, Galilean Journey, 8. 35. Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “A New Mestizaje/Mulatez: Reconceptualizing Difference,” in A Dream Unfinished: Theological Reflections on America From the Margins, edited by Eleazar Fernández and Fernando Segovia (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 206: “The insistence in Hispanic/Latina theology, including mujerista theology, on seeing and using mestizaje/mulatez as a positive element and proposing it as an ethical choice is indicative of our preoccupation with understanding and dealing with difference.” 36. Goizueta, 32–41. 37. Ibid., 108–109, 128. 38. Ismael García, Dignidad: Ethics Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 28. 39. Ibid., 15. 40. Ibid.

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41. Ibid., 44, 50. For García there is no individual morality or universal ethics. Morality is incarnated in the values, practices and conceptions of the “good” a group may have and, to understand it, we have to understand how a community lives on a day-to-day basis. 42. Ibid., 58–59. 43. Ibid., 63. 44. Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” The New York Times Magazine (Oct. 17, 2004), http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH. html?_r=0 , accessed 2/15/2014. 45. Miller, 6. 46. Ibid., 26. 47. Sarah Anderson, Phyllis Bennis, John Cavanagh, Coalition of the Willing or Coalition of the Coerced? How the Bush Administration Influences Allies in its War on Iraq (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, February 2003), 10: “A closer look at the list reveals that many members of this so-called “Coalition of the Willing” are extremely vulnerable to U.S. pressure, and have likely succumbed because of either military or economic interests.” 48. DeCosse, 391; Miller, 23–26. 49. Miller, 23.

Chapter Ten

Augustinian Realism and the Morality of War An Exchange Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski

Hello Ed, I’m thinking of writing an essay about war and “Augustinian realism.” The thesis has emerged slowly. Its genesis was 9/11—the very day. Did I ever tell you the story? I followed the awful unfolding watching TV and listening to radio at work. Not really interested or able to do much else, I wrote an email to Gil Meilaender at Valparaiso after lunch: “This is a sad, sad day. I feel sorry for the whole world.” Recalling disagreements we’ve had over the years, I added, “I realize that you may not find this to be the most appropriate kind of response.” Gil fired back promptly that, while not inappropriate, what I wrote was insufficient. “Just remember Reinhold Niebuhr’s distinction between the equality of sin and the inequality of guilt. Certainly we have a considerable inequality of guilt in this case.” The next day I rejoined that, “I think our little conversation gets at something important about the differences between H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr on these matters. More to come, maybe.” There was nothing more to come, but I have continued to return to the exchange for what’s now been more than a decade. It seems to me that the Niebuhrs teach distinct lessons about the meaning of “Christian political realism” that protect one another from distortion at the same time as they advance our understanding of the theological and spiritual roots of “just war” theory and practice. Interestingly enough, each theologian appears to work with and adapt insights from Augustine. 163

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“I feel sorry for the whole world,” captures something important in H. Richard Niebuhr’s sensibility about responding to war in a world ruled by God. And I don’t have to tell you that “the equality of sin and the inequality of guilt” comes right out of Reinhold’s greatest work. 1 As for Augustine? Were I to write something, I would pitch it as a reflection on my favorite passage of his on warfare. But the wise man, they say, will wage just wars. Surely, if he remembers that he is a human being, he will rather lament the fact that he is faced with the necessity of waging just wars. . . . For it is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging wars; and this injustice is assuredly to be deplored by a human being, since it is the injustice of human beings, even though no necessity for war should arise from it. And so everyone who reflects with sorrow on such grievous evils, in all their horror and cruelty, must acknowledge the misery of them. And yet a man who experiences such evils, or even thinks about them, without heartfelt grief, is assuredly in a far more pitiable condition, if he thinks himself happy simply because he has lost all human feeling. 2

That’s the gist. What say you? *** Bill, Good to hear. You hadn’t told me about the exchange with Gil. Interesting and complex, as is your idea about Augustine, just war, and the Niebuhr brothers. Oddly enough I’ve been thinking about “Augustinian realism” a bit myself lately and have wondered whether Augustine is a genuine “realist” at all despite claims that he is by people like R. Niebuhr or Herbert Deane—that is, if by “realism” one means a kind of healthy skepticism about the ideal aspirations of political regimes. 3 Certainly in that sense he sounds “realistic” when he talks about just wars as he does in the text you cite from the City of God. But that text is one piece in a polemic against “pagan” philosophical systems claiming that genuine happiness is possible in this life, a polemic that forms part of his general defense of Christianity against the charge that the Roman Empire became unhappy because it became Christian. He tends to be less “realistic,” it seems to me, when he talks about the Christian political regimes themselves (e.g., Theodosius). 4 In these contexts, Augustine seems more a “propagandist” than a “realist.” But you’re obviously thinking along different lines about the Niebuhr brothers as Augustinian realists. Tell me more. ***

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Ed, Your remarks about Augustine’s “realism” giving way to propaganda in the case of Christian political regimes are a needed reminder for me. I tracked down what Peter Brown had to say: “Augustine’s summary of the virtues of a Christian prince, and his portraits of Constantine and Theodosius, are, in themselves, some of the most shoddy passages of the City of God,” “especially the sketchy and superficial panegyric,” on the latter! 5 So thanks, and please lay out more of your thinking about this. Since you asked: I have two senses of “realism” in mind, one for each brother. Reinhold Niebuhr defines it as “the disposition to take into account all factors in a social and political situation which offer resistance to established norms, particularly the factors of self-interest and power.” 6 In these terms, he cites Augustine as being “by general consent, the first great ‘realist’ in western history.” 7 Niebuhr’s social analysis very often had to do, in line with your own statement, with keeping in play the “factors” that bring our moral “idealism” up short. To ignore them risks “unrealistic” and morally dangerous projects and practices fueled by sentimentality, naivete, “liberal” or “Enlightenment” “progressivism,” self-righteousness, self-deception, complacency, etc. History is characterized by self-interested conflicts over power, and the pursuit of justice and peace among peoples requires that these forces “must be harnessed and beguiled rather than eliminated.” 8 Augustine, as Reinhold reads him, realized that excessive self-love or pride, along with the desire to acquire dominating power, threatened all human communities. It cannot simply be removed from a fallen human race that builds an earthly city on the foundation of fratricide—as Cain with Abel and Romulus with Remus and on and on. The use of power or coercive force, and even the use of violence, is part and parcel of political life to curb inordinate self-assertion on the part of individuals and groups, however much moral ideals and fellow feeling might also find a place in struggles for justice. While sharing some of these tenets, H. Richard positioned them in a context that stressed an ever-present divine providence, and a vision of the Christian life as a “permanent revolution” of mind and heart through repentance and conversion for the sake of faithfulness to God and the universal community of being under God. This is a “realism” about God’s reality and our relation to Him that brings to Christian political ethics conceptions of “judgment,” “correction,” and “transformation.” It may be a stretch, but I find in H. Richard an adaptation of Augustine’s providential, “punitive” account of war in Against Faustus that serves the former’s appeal to repentance and conversion. Needless to say, I view just war theory as an expression of “Christian political realism.” Based on a commitment to justice in history, in which the use of coercive force amidst self-interested conflict is ineliminable, the theo-

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ry offers a framework of practical deliberation about how to “harness” and “beguile” such force for moral purposes. “Just war” is above all “limited war” (I know you know all this), contained by a “just cause” pursued with “right intention” and waged out of “competent authority” to defend the common good of the nation and community of nations. It must promise a “reasonable hope of success” in rectifying the injustice specified by “just cause,” be waged as a “last resort,” and should not do more harm than the good it seeks (“proportionality”). Wars are to be waged with means that protect noncombatants from direct attack and in any event limit destructiveness to well-tailored military objectives that destroy as little as necessary. And as Augustine knew, too, wars are always and only waged for the end of peace; it’s a requirement built into “right intention.” Just war theory takes seriously the realities of social conflict while reining in the will to power in its commitment to justice, limited war, and with strictures rejecting self-righteousness on the side of the “just” and the propensity to demonize the “unjust” enemy. 9 Now cut to 9/11 and my correspondence with Gil. “I feel sorry for the whole world.” A horrendous attack on innocent life spurs me to ask, as H. Richard always asked in his ethics, “What is going on?” My words presume the entire world’s fallenness, with its provincial loyalties and the inhumanity these engender. There is a need for a permanent revolution of mind and heart toward a broader loyalty fitting for faithfulness to God and God’s cause. That need applies across the board. I wasn’t excusing, let alone justifying murder. The comment perhaps implied an inquiry into causes, but not excuses. It may also have carried worries about how the suffering of innocent victims on American soil could give rise to a chilling reassertion of partial, self-righteous loyalties that exact, through war, ever more innocent suffering. My remark sparked Meilaender’s retort, however, because its “realism” about our miserable state and future peril was either, for him, not realistic enough or, if it encouraged a hand-wringing, appeasing quietism, not realistic at all. “Remember that there is an inequality of guilt in this case.” Reinhold Niebuhr was careful to say that guilt, the consequences of sin in creating injustice, appears often to fall on those who wield the greater political economic power; but he was not less driven to denounce the wicked arrogance and destructiveness of the “weak.” In the case of the terrorism of 9/11, Gil is saying that unjust violence demands a just response, even if through the violence of war. He was not calling for indiscriminate acts of vengeance. He would only countenance a limited war if war was necessary. But the very ascriptions of “innocence” and “guilt” may themselves invite self-righteousness and demonization, just as a sense of our universal need for repentance and transformation may prompt an unseemly avoidance of the need to make relative judgments in history regarding the moral assertion of power and unjust power. Do you get what I’m trying to say? An appeal to the universal need for contrition and reform, lest more inhumanity visit inhu-

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manity, risks losing sight of the realistic need for just response that names injustice and answers it with force. An appeal to just response with violent force risks in turn a defensive, black-and-white line-up of the righteous and the wicked that the call to contrition intends to thwart. Without ever explicitly engaging the specific criteria of just war theory, both theologians may be read to contribute to a deeper understanding of its conditions and meaning— indeed, of its “spirituality,” of how the theory is rooted in and inspired by a kind of lived vision of and relation to the world in light of the relation to God. I am interested in explicating that spirituality as it takes its theological bearings from the two brothers and, behind them, Augustine. Set me straight, pal. *** Bill, Thanks. I don’t know that you need to be set straight or, if so, that I’m the one to do the setting. But let’s see if I’m understanding things correctly. Your general view seems to be this: However tendentious and “unrealistic” Augustine might have been in his pious glorification of Christian political regimes, a genuine realism emerges from his deep anthropology, which casts the entire world as fallen and all of humanity as marked by a lust for domination (libido dominandi). Given this “realistic” appraisal, human beings need to be protected from each other, sometimes with military violence—thus the possibility of just wars and pacifism’s lack of realism. At the same time, in the initiation and waging of a just war, the libido dominandi is an ever-present danger even for those on the side of justice. Consequently some sort of moral check is required to insure that those in the relative right (sin’s being universal) don’t lose their moral way. Just-war theory with its jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria helps to corral the lust for domination by establishing moral limits on war’s initiation and conduct. Reinhold Niebuhr presumably signs on to all of this. H. Richard Niebuhr adds something else yet derived also from Augustine, namely, the idea that God providentially operates within the world transforming it via a process of agent judgment, repentance and conversion, a process active in wartime. This last general claim states a “realism” about the “reality” of God’s governance of the world. Therefore, it is always appropriate for the Christian to ask “What is going on?” or perhaps “How is God’s redemptive transformation of the world showing itself here and now, in this war, or on 9/11, in its violence and in the reaction to that violence?” Thus the appropriateness of the questions you pose in your exchange with Gil. Have I gotten you right? Correct me if I haven’t. For the moment, let’s assume that I do have you right. There are a number of issues, then, that come to my mind at least. Here is one. I’m unsure about

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how your view comports with Reinhold Niebuhr’s own critique of just-war theory in Nature and Destiny of Man. Reinhold, you’ll recall, was especially critical of the theory’s expression in Roman Catholic natural law, which, according to him, presumed an excessively high level of confidence in justwar judgments given the formidable impediments of human finitude, historical complexity, and sinful self-deception: “[E]ven a war which is judged by neutral opinion to be wholly defensive cannot be waged with completely good conscience because the situations out of which wars arise are charged with memories of previous acts of aggression on the part of those now in defense.” 10 Now I happen to think that Reinhold’s criticism here is a bit overstated since proponents of just-war theory need not deny ambiguities and difficulties in application, and Reinhold, himself, allows that judgments of relative guilt are necessary. But even as one acknowledges that in some sense Augustine was a just-war theorist, I wonder whether Augustinian anthropology doesn’t up the ante here and heighten attention to the way that just-war theory may abstract from the reality of war by projecting an impossibly ideal vision of what war can be and by obscuring from view what war is in fact given the libido dominandi and other forms of prideful self-assertion. In this account, war is not a game played by clear rules transparently adjudicated by referees with penalties neutrally applied for infractions. Rather war is an awful reality saturated with sin, and any insistence that you can live through that reality cleanly by adhering absolutely to just-war principles may be a sign of the very prideful self-righteousness that an Augustinian theology (at least in your rendering) purports to expose. I am reminded here of Abraham Lincoln’s artfully veiled threat through presidential edict to execute Confederate prisoners of war (themselves found guilty of no war crimes) in retaliation against the Confederate policy of summary execution of black Union prisoners of war or white leaders of black companies. The purpose of the threat of reprisal was to get the Confederacy to discontinue the abominable practice. Just-war theorists today likely would argue no execution of innocent prisoners of war and no threats of same, period. But then they would face Frederick Douglass’s complaint that we bear moral responsibility for the projected outcome of our omissions, that a refusal to threaten what Lincoln threatened gives aid and comfort to a grossly discriminatory policy in the conduct of war. 11 Given complexities such as these, Reinhold Niebuhr himself tended toward a rough consequentialism in the moral evaluation of the means of war, knowing full well that this consequentialism committed him to allowing sometimes what he regarded as the doing of evil for the sake of good. Thus his openness to the use of the atomic bomb against Japanese civilians in World War II in order to end that war and very likely “save the lives of thousands of American soldiers who would otherwise have perished on the beaches of Japan.” 12 For Niebuhr use of the atomic bomb in these circum-

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stances “was the quintessential revelation of ‘how much evil we must do in order to do good,’ of how much guilt accrues even to those who have ‘defeated tyranny.’” 13 Absolute adherence to the just-war principle of noncombatant immunity under those circumstances on grounds that one never does evil that good may come, Reinhold likely would have argued, obscures the guilt incurred for the innocent lives lost as a result of the refusal. Here just war theory, Reinhold might have said, serves as a morally prideful cover of sinful reality. Now whatever one makes of Reinhold’s judgments here (and I have some qualms about them myself), how do those judgments comport with your assimilation of his normative ethic to Augustinian realism and to just-war thinking? I have many other things to say, but enough for the moment. *** (Werpehowski): You have me right by and large. Thanks for your care, clarity, and questions. Your reply to Niebuhr’s specific critique of just war theory on natural law grounds is on the mark. I agree with you. We are also on the same page about how our human, all too human embrace of the theory may distance us from the reality of war. Augustine’s analysis of the human condition “ups the ante” as you describe. That “favorite passage” of mine from Augustine moves in this direction, no? We may wage just wars, but we wage them, unless we have lost all human feeling, with horror. In the same vein, anything that reduces that horror and therefore our ambivalence, including this or that formulation of just war theory and/or the uncritical confidence with which we “apply” it, is, on Augustinian terms, “unrealistic.” As for Niebuhr’s consequentialism, I wonder whether that, too, may abstract from the reality of war and serve as “a morally prideful cover of sinful reality” because it tracks wartime practices that ultimately admit of no limits whatsoever, especially in relation to attacks on noncombatant lives. We may be left with what our mentor Paul Ramsey might have called, “total war, with tears.” Insisting on unexceptionable moral limits, like the immunity of noncombatants from direct attack (or of captured soldiers from being murdered or even threatened with murder), does not or need not of itself remove our horror or enhance our self-righteousness. It can, of course; but I wonder whether the consequentialist temptation is greater because it can work hand in hand with our sinful proclivity in wartime to love our “just causes” and enjoy the “way of life” we defend too much. We may cherish them so totally that we are willing to defend them by any means we deem “necessary.” The Augustinian realism I’m reaching for includes the themes in Reinhold that you describe, including the “self-correcting” implications of acknowledging in wartime, not only the “inequality of guilt,” but also the “equality of sin.” I

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want to add in the fuller account a kind of redemptive dimension that I see at work in H. Richard, one that I think goes with but “works over” themes we find in Augustine. If what I’m up to amounts to a “spirituality” underlying just war theory, then the theory and its practical uses will have to be critically ordered to it. At the moment, that’s the best answer to your last question I can come up with. By the way, how do you understand “Augustinian realism?” I ask keeping in mind the “healthy skepticism” you wrote about earlier. *** (Santurri): I take your point about the dangers of Reinhold’s consequentialism. I suppose he might reply—regarding conflict between adherence to cherished principles and prevention of tragic consequences—that it is at least mistaken to assume you can always find refuge from moral guilt in choosing adherence to principles. In illustration consider again my earlier example. It’s been suggested that Frederick Douglass may have been impatient with Lincoln for waiting too long in issuing the Order of Retaliation to prevent Confederate summary execution of black soldiers. 14 If so, the impatience would have reflected Douglass’s conviction that Lincoln had an obligation to protect black union soldiers by threat of reprisal, an obligation rooted presumably in (a) a duty to keep faith with black soldiers who risked and gave their lives for the Union cause; (b) egalitarian commitments to combat racism; (c) a sense that the normative force of POW protections depends on mutual or reciprocal adherence; and (d) predictions that the abominable Confederate practice would continue unless the South was threatened with action in kind. Of course, Lincoln did issue the Order of Retaliation (though he expressed grave moral reservations about hanging innocent Confederate soldiers in reprisal), and the Confederate outrages seemed to stop shortly after he issued the Order (though the reason for the cessation isn’t entirely clear). Maybe Lincoln shouldn’t have issued the Order, but even so, Reinhold might have said, there would have been residual moral guilt in the president’s refusal to do so knowing that atrocities against black soldiers would continue as a likely result. What would Augustine say? Certainly he would have seen a kind of tragedy in Lincoln’s plight, yet another occasion for lament over the profound misery endemic to fallen existence, and that sense of tragedy presumably would have some connection to what you are calling the “spirituality” of just war theory. At the same time, I also see here a major difference between Reinhold and Augustine. I believe the latter would not have been inclined to speak in R. Niebuhrian fashion of inevitable guilt in situations like Lincoln’s. Whatever an Augustinian just-war “spirituality” amounts to, it would not involve the conviction that wartime confronts agents with situa-

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tions in which moral wrongdoing is inevitable; it would not involve the agent’s experience of inevitable guilt in those situations. This brings me to the last question you pose as a kind of afterthought but which, of course, is really central and something I’ve been evading until now: How precisely do I understand “Augustinian realism”? Again, whether Augustine was less a “realist” than a “propagandist” who spared Christian regimes the pain of his “realistic” deconstructions is an issue that for me hovers over our discussion, but we can set that matter aside and assume, at least for the sake of our exchange, that an Augustinian realism, however understood in detail, theorizes about the conditions of an across-the-board fallen humanity. Now here I think it’s useful to distinguish between two kinds of “realism” about international political life often differentiated in contemporary political-theoretical discussions and ask how the distinction might apply to Augustine. First, there is empirical political realism, which holds that international collectivities or their agents in fact are motivated predominantly by self-interest, power, reputation, or some other narrowly conceived social or political good and that it is unrealistic to assume such collectivities or agents can be motivated in any decisive way by the highest moral ideals. Second, there is normative political realism, which holds that international collectivities or their agents ought to be prudent and thus ought to be prepared to compromise the highest moral principles in the face of practical realities. 15 In some versions of normative realism, for example, Reinhold’s Christian realism, the position demands virtually paradoxical expression, for instance, that statesmen charged with the defense of nations are morally required to violate cherished moral principles or abandon the highest moral ideals given certain practical exigencies. In other words, political agents, in this version of normative realism, must “dirty their hands” morally speaking in order to achieve some good sanctioned by morality itself. Now it seems to me that Augustine may be something of an empirical realist (though not unequivocally so) but that he is not at all a normative realist—especially if one has in mind the “dirty hands” variety. This last exclusion is significant given the tendency of some recent commentators to parse “Augustinian realism” in terms of its putatively recognizing “the problem of dirty hands” where agents are required to do evil for the sake of good. 16 A locus classicus of this reading, of course, is Augustine’s infamous meditation on the plight of the judge who must torture persons he knows may be innocent to secure information essential to the common good or condemn the innocent based on false testimony extracted through torture. 17 However, Augustine isn’t saying there that the judge is residually wrong, albeit morally justified overall, in torturing the innocent or effecting erroneous condemnation. He assumes that the judge’s hands are clean, that what the judge does is morally warranted without qualification (hard as that may be for modern Augustinians to acknowledge). Here I think John Parrish’s reading is largely on the right

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track—though I would take issue with his claim that Augustine “solves the problem of dirty hands” by rendering any “external act” permissible if performed with the right intentions since, as Parish himself admits, Augustine believed there were some absolute prohibitions whose violation could not be justified with good intentions. 18 At any rate, Augustine’s point in this meditation, again, is not to mark the judge’s “dirty hands” in actions morally warranted all things considered but to underscore just how miserable is a world in which judges must torture or condemn persons who may be innocent—ergo, the implausibility of pagan optimism about the possibility of happiness in this world. To put the general point in a way that highlights the contrast with Reinhold’s Christian realism, Augustine doesn’t say here and would never say that political functionaries in exercising the duties of office leave Christian love or the ethic of Jesus behind, thereby incurring residual moral guilt. Quite the contrary, the functionary’s use of coercion or violence to meet “the claims of human society” 19 is for Augustine an expression of Christian love entirely consistent with the ethic of Jesus. Whatever Augustinian realism means, then, it does not mean that the fallen world is constituted by the tragedy of genuine moral dilemmas—that is, situations where agents inevitably do something morally wrong no matter what they do. But to leave the matter at that is to offer an unfinished picture of Augustinian realism. For while Augustine’s responsible judges, statesmen and soldiers are clear of moral wrongdoing in the appropriate use of coercion and violence in this fallen world, they are nonetheless complicit, as all human beings are, in the fashioning of a world in which such coercion and violence are made necessary. The complicity is a function of the species’ connection with Adam in his prideful rebellion. For that rebellion we are all guilty and rightfully punished with the unhappiness that saturates this fallen world. Here we can only pray with Augustine’s judge: “Deliver me from my necessities.” 20 I can imagine Lincoln’s praying that prayer in deciding to issue the Order of Retaliation. And I can imagine the prayer captures some essential dimension of what you call the “spirituality” of just-war theory. Bill, there’s a lot more to be said about Augustinian realism. But perhaps enough for now. *** (Werpehowski): To address your first and your last point: Yes, there is the difference you cite between Reinhold and Augustine on whether or not wartime, or political life generally, “confronts agents with situations in which moral wrongdoing is inevitable.” My Augustinian account “would not involve the agent’s experience of inevitable guilt in those situations;” however, it would take stock of humanity’s complicity “in the fashioning of a world” where “coercion and violence are made necessary.” I’m not sure what notion

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of “guilt” you are employing in your statement of the second claim, and the meaning of “punishment” needs to be parsed, at least by me down the line, in a way appropriate to Augustine and his use of the idea in his writings about war. In any case, for me “the equality of sin” does not reach to your “inevitable guilt” in the sense of moral blameworthiness. The truth in “I feel sorry for the whole world.” does not either, though it does mean to capture something of complicit involvement in a fallen world. Your remarks lead me to reflect on a related issue having to do with the “moral injury” that soldiers suffer in wartime—a disintegration of moral selfidentity and burdening of conscience given what they have done and experienced. My colleague Mark Wilson is working on this. He highlights a passage from Tim O’Brien’s literary memoir of the Vietnam War. I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail to My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present. 21

Using your last observations as a frame (and I am indebted to Mark and to you here), I understand this experience of “guilt” to point to a warrior’s sense of responsibility for the suffering and deaths of one’s fellows, enemies or not, that does not presuppose moral culpability. That sense ties in with a morally fitting solidarity that one brings to the scene of human tragedy. It’s not only solidarity as a sinner in and with a fallen world. There is also a more positive disposition of moral accountability to and for others. Wilson identifies the response, the response-ability, as “moral grief,” and he draws from—guess who?—Augustine on grieving over the ills of war as a source! You have addressed something similar in your book in terms of “moral regret.” 22 Yes? My Augustinian reading of H. Richard comes into play at this point. I haven’t said a whole lot about that so far, have I? Ah, well. Before signing off, I should say that your argument that Augustine is not, like Reinhold, a “normative realist,” is spot on. The former is an “empirical realist,” although, as you note, “not unequivocally.” He can’t be one “unequivocally” because Augustine views the political world as corrigible to commending and enacting, however ambiguously and unsurely, moral and religious values and aspirations. As a Bishop he writes to magistrates against the death penalty because it comports badly with enabling repentance. 23 Just wars, too, as he conceived of them, involved rightly opposing injustice. Still, Augustine remains an empirical realist, and most basically because he thought that political societies could never be genuinely just without ordering their loves and conceptions of right relation between citizens to God.

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The consequences for Augustine’s normative account of politics need not drive him all the way to Hobbes’s version of empirical realism (which I have always associated with psychological egoism, that is, that human beings are naturally selfish and can not act otherwise). As others have shown, 24 “peoples” for Augustine are constituted by agreements about the specific objects of their love and thus about the goods necessary for mortal life. The “earthly peace” which polities may attain and which members of the earthly and heavenly cities, ever commingled, use for vastly different purposes will yield better or worse forms of “social justice” beyond exclusively self-interested arrangements—“better or worse” depending on the quality of the loves that bind. *** (Santurri): We are agreed that Augustine is not a proleptic Hobbesian and this for all the reasons you state, pace Herbert Deane’s association of the two perspectives in one tradition of political realism. 25 But some other points in reaction to your last comments. You register uncertainty about the meaning of “guilt” and “punishment” when I say that in Augustinian realism “we are all guilty and rightfully punished with the unhappiness that saturates this fallen world” for our complicity in Adam’s prideful rebellion. I’m not saying anything all that profound here, just that Augustine is pretty clear throughout that pain and sin in this fallen world are punishment for the sin of Adam. For Augustine we are all “guilty” with Adam in his original disobedience. So the agony of the judge who prays for deliverance from his necessities is an agony he deserves in virtue of the species connection with Adam. 26 Thus, while Augustine’s judge, or his statesman, or his soldier does not incur moral guilt for specific employments of coercion and violence serving the common good, that judge, statesman or soldier is, in virtue of connection with Adam’s original sin, responsible for the excruciatingly unhappy circumstances that mark those employments and rightly suffers those circumstances as punishment. In that sense the judge’s misery marks the judge’s guilt. I take it that Augustinian realism, at least in Augustine’s prototypical formulation, is bound up with this narrative of original sin. I also take it that one challenge of the modern Augustinian is to determine whether an Augustinian realism can be preserved without further mystification once the Adamic story is demythologized, a demythologization required, I presume, by the modern conviction that things like sin, guilt and responsibility are not literally disseminated to subsequent generations. Pace Augustine, we can no longer take seriously the claim that Adam passed his sin on to the rest of us through sexual intercourse. 27 It seems you’re attempting just such a critical retrieval of Augustinian realism with your notion of responsibility without specific moral culpability

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in a given instance, a notion glossed with O’Brien’s responsibility through presence and Wilson’s “moral grief.” On the face of things, these offer compelling accounts of wartime experience. But I worry slightly about the danger of giving normative status to what in fact may be pathological experiences however routine and understandable those experiences in wartime are. I also worry about trading Augustinian mystifications of corporate responsibility and solidarity in guilt for mystifications in another idiom. I suppose my worries are Pelagian of a sort. I want to see ascriptions of responsibility for bad things tied in some way to individual instances of dereliction, however remotely connected to the bad things in question. So the soldier who feels a “burden of responsibility and grief” or “guilt” in being present to a dying soldier he hasn’t killed has to tie this feeling to some individual moral failure at least largely connected—for example, he chose to fight in a war that he sensed was immoral; he should have refused to go, and he knows this deep down; or the horror he now witnesses reminds him of his own unnecessary brutality in another context. Of course, the Augustinian will frame all of this with an anthropological account insisting that all human beings are in fact derelict in this way—and this is part of what we mean by the fallen condition of humanity. The trick here is how to say this last without compromising ascriptions of full responsibility. All the Pelagian questions arise at this point. If all humans are in fact derelict in this way, can they be otherwise? And if they cannot be otherwise, can they be held responsible, etc., and so forth. These are large issues, needless to say. I also wonder a bit about your connecting the experience of the soldier described by Tim O’Brien and the “grieving over the ills of war” described by Augustine in City of God XIX, 7 as well as your bringing both under a single rubric of “moral grief.” O’Brien’s soldier describes the guilt he feels and his sense of responsibility for the death of the fallen enemy he didn’t kill. Augustine describes what he regards as an appropriate sense of sorrow over the horrors of war. Admittedly, for Augustine, among the horrors rightly lamented are the injustices that give rise even to just war, and thus it does seem reasonable to conclude that in commending sorrow over war’s horrors he is commending a kind of moral grief. But in this text, at any rate, Augustine doesn’t seem to be saying that the wise man should feel guilt or responsibility for the horrors of war lamented, just that the horrors should be lamented or regretted. Of course, one might say reasonably that a person who didn’t so lament was morally deficient, but that’s a different point. In any event, it seems to me that there are different kinds of “moral grief” being depicted by O’Brien and Augustine in that text. I’m prepared to hear that there are other moments in Augustine that are closer to O’Brien—though I can’t think of any right now. But you also say that your “Augustinian reading of H. Richard Niebuhr comes into play at this point” and that you “haven’t said a whole lot about

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that take so far.” Agreed on this last—so maybe now is the time for a turn in that direction. *** (Werpehowski): I am not disposed to disagree with anything you last wrote; rather, I’ll say a word on behalf of a kind of inquiry into the character of the moral life that your remarks could be taken to reject. Here’s Augustine: [F]or the reason I have mentioned, (though it may be that there are other and weightier reasons that are hidden from us) man was created as one individual; but he was not left alone. For the human race is, more than any other species, at once social by nature and quarrelsome by perversion. We are warned to guard against the emergence of this fault, or to remedy it once it has appeared, by remembering that first parent of ours, who was created by God as one individual with this intention: that from that one individual a multitude might be propagated, and that this fact should teach mankind to preserve a harmonious unity in plurality. 28

The beginning of the quotation refers to an earlier passage where he says that the origin of the race in one man was intended by God “more emphatically” to commend human unity and “the bonds of sympathy,” in that human beings may see that they “are bound together not merely by likeness in nature but also by the feeling of kinship.” 29 The “hidden reason,” I suppose, refers to the fitness of the restoration of harmony for fallen humanity in one man also, the second Adam, Jesus Christ. You may think I am not only papering over Augustinian mystifications, but also multiplying them. Here I am, relying in a new way on the literal creation story in Genesis! No. I am interpreting Augustine to indicate that inscribed in our creaturely being, if you will, is an inclination to unity and concord with all human beings that is akin to “the feeling of kinship.” This tendency to creaturely solidarity implies an awareness of individual responsibilities to, and not only for, one another that include, but are not limited to, specific deeds for which we are or are not culpable. The awareness may powerfully manifest itself or otherwise come into play in situations in which we find ourselves where bad things happen beyond our control. O’Brien’s expressions of “guilt” and self-blame seem odd, misplaced. “He did nothing wrong.” I’ll stipulate for the sake of argument that in his case there were no distantly related “derelictions.” He was “merely” “present.” Why is that such a problem for him? I want to hold out for investigation and reflection about our individual responsibilities that truthfully emerge, in wartime and other deeply tragic circumstances but not only there, simply in virtue of our involvement as human agents and patients in what is going on. 30 “I did nothing ‘wrong.’ But I am involved, and hence caught up in this arena

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of dealing out death and suffering on a horrific scale. This dead man, this human fellow—brother?—in this time and place calls me to give an account of myself, and to him, and I am bound to answer.” The answer may lead to calling oneself and one’s moral integrity into question, and in a way that could, eventually, damage one terribly. It may lead to critically reassessing or recasting, even if not finally rejecting, one’s involvement. It may make way for renewed, sharpened attention to caring for others as one can. The answer may be “I have to do something,” say, to shroud the dead man, not because we find him repugnant, but because it is unseemly and degrading that he, even an “enemy,” be open to the gaze of others. *** (Santurri): Thanks. I don’t see my last set of remarks as rejecting what you are proposing here now. I had thought that in your earlier citation of O’Brien you were affirming the soldier’s self-ascription of “guilt” through mere “presence” and connecting that in some fashion to an Augustinian account of human solidarity in guilt via Adam’s original sin. But here I see that you are distancing yourself from that position and projecting instead an Augustinian vision of a divinely established human solidarity rooted in common descent from Adam. Because all human beings are one family as Adam’s progeny, O’Brien’s soldier, in witnessing the gruesome dying of this man who is both enemy and Adamic brother, questions himself as participant in a collective process that issues in such horrific results. That self-questioning might move in any number of directions: moral pain, moral grief, moral regret, moral conversion, moral repair. An Augustinian just-war spirituality, in your rendering, will be especially attentive to such phenomenological trajectories. Agreed. But I’m still waiting eagerly for your “Augustinian take” on the other Niebuhr brother—H. Richard. How about it? *** (Werpehowski): Ok, Ed, here we go. I mentioned that Against Faustus is my point of departure. There Augustine claims that the “real evils in war” are “love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust for power and such like.” And “it is generally to punish these things, when force is required to inflict the punishment, that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men undertake wars.” 31 “Punishment” divinely considered is the just and merciful correction that humbles the proud and prompts them to repent and turn from their selfish idolatrous loves toward the good. Perhaps in tension with the above, Augus-

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tine also writes of the power and mystery of God’s providence. The reasons for the distribution of God’s judgments and mercies in war may be unknown to us, but are nonetheless just. The “measures and numbers and weights by which the Creator . . . arranges all things are concealed from our view” 32 So, Augustine asks, who really knows “about the value of what human beings do and suffer” in wartime? 33 H. Richard engages and re-visions these themes. Moving in reverse order: He conceives Christian moral agency to be a response to “what is going on” in the providential counsel of God, who would judge and destroy all the narrow, idolatrous causes that occupy human history. At the same time “Christ is God’s word to us that God is faithful and true, that he does not desire the death of the sinner, that he is leading his kingdom to victory over all evil.” 34 The Christian is called to discern God’s action in all actions upon him or her, and to respond to all such actions in a manner fitting to this divine action. 35 In their response the faithful are involved in that “permanent revolution” which turns away from tribal gods and turns to and for all beings “with reverence, for all are friends in the friendship of the one to whom we are reconciled in faith.” 36 Augustine’s idea of corrective punishment finds expression in Richard’s claim that in war we suffer the judgment of God, who is “the rock against which we beat in vain, that which bruises and overwhelms us when we seek to impose our wishes, contrary to his, upon him. . . . That structure of the universe, that will of God, does bring war and depression upon us when we bring it upon ourselves, for we live in the kind of world which visits our iniquities upon us and our children, no matter how much we pray and desire that it be otherwise.” 37 The divine judgment is redemptive, meaning to chasten and change, transform, and redirect us. It beckons to repentance by having us reckon with the suffering of the innocent. “Wars are crucifixions. It is not the mighty, the guides and leaders of nations and churches, who suffer most in them, but the humble, little people who have had little to do with the framing of great policies.” 38 God’s judgment in war extends to all of its contending groups and forces. “When Isaiah saw that Assyria was the rod of God’s anger whereby Israel was chastised he also saw that Assyria was wrong before God and that the axe had no right to boast of itself ‘against him that heweth therewith.’” 39 Hence faithful response can never mean justification of either the enemy or the self, but only a humble recognition that in one’s fallenness one is nevertheless held up by a graciousness that does not brook but destroys our inevitably constricted standards of judgment by the mercy of God. At first glance this looks like a big departure from Augustine, but in light of his recognition of the mystery of providence, is it? And if it is, how much? What do you think so far? Thanks.

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*** (Santurri): Good to see finally the “other” Niebuhr brother in the mix, a rich concoction indeed. But I have to say that I am a bit surprised by the role H. Richard is playing in your Augustinian account of war. I had expected to see a different kind of connection, and what I am seeing prompts some questions. First, what I had expected to see. The point of departure would have been the end of Christ and Culture where Richard identifies Augustine, with some reservations, as a “Christ-transforming-culture” or “conversionist” type of Christian social thinker. In this type, Christ neither opposes culture, nor merges with it, nor stands above it, nor relates paradoxically to it. Rather for the “conversionist” and thus for the Augustinian, Christ transforms and elevates a cultural convention and created human nature corrupted by sin. Accordingly, in the ethical domain, “the moral virtues men develop in their perverse cultures are not supplanted by new graces, but are converted by love.” 40 As you know, Paul Ramsey later ran with this H-R Niebuhrian theme when he advocated generally the idea of love’s transforming justice 41 and applied the idea in his Christian ethical assessment of war. Augustine figured prominently in that assessment with his rejection of violence in selfdefense as incompatible with Christian charity and with his limitation of violent defense to defense of the innocent neighbor. 42 Thus, in Ramsey’s “Christ-transforming-culture” reading, Augustine offered, at least by implication, a normative account of war that transformed and elevated a culturally available just-war theory, which presumably had permitted wars in self-defense. Other things could be said here about an H. R. Niebuhrian-inspired, Augustinian vision of love’s transforming or elevating or converting or redeeming culturally legitimated or naturally warranted just-war traditions and theories, but my larger point here is that I expected you would continue this normative trajectory and am surprised not to see as much. Instead you take H. Richard’s “war essays” as a point of departure (reasonably enough) and forge links with Augustine’s Against Faustus. Your mediating construct is a reading of war as divine providential judgment and correction of sin. But it seems to me that the character and tone of these two providential accounts are very different. Augustine’s principal emphasis in Against Faustus is to depict just wars as implementing God’s justice in their punishing and correcting the unjust (though I grant your point that Augustine qualifies the position with his observation that we cannot know precisely how God’s justice, in all its particular detail, is manifest in war). For H. Richard, in those powerful war essays, bellicose history is a kind of baptismal unfolding, a dying and rising of selves brought on by the tragedy of war and the human recognition, via cruciform reflection, of complicity in that tragedy. In war, that is, the innocent are crucified; all agents and observers of

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the war, whether they are on the side of “justice” or not, can realize their complicity in that crucifixion, repent of that complicity and be transformed thereby. God, then, judges and corrects centrally by this process and less, if at all, by the punishment of the unjust in a just war. Indeed, it is striking that in those war essays H. Richard typically marshals his theological observations in support of a radical critique of the kind of assessments just-war theorists make, and his critique is focused in part on what he sees as just-war theory’s misguided presumption that it can clearly ascertain guilt to punish it. 43 Here H Richard sounds less like Augustine and more like brother Reinhold (recall our earlier exchange about Reinhold’s critique of just-war theory). Toward the end of your last set of remarks you do acknowledge some (apparent?) tension between Augustine and H. Richard on just-war theory’s claims to retributive justice, though you also seem to question the significance of the tension for your position. In any event, I may be seeing the difference between the Against Faustus Augustine and the “war essay” H. Richard Niebuhr on this matter as more profound than you do. To return to 9/ 11 and to paint admittedly with very broad strokes, I’m prompted to say that the sensibility of the Against Faustus Augustine leads naturally to something like Jean Bethke Elshtain’s response to 9/11 in her controversial Just War Against Terror. 44 The central issue for her was the “inequality of guilt,” the fidelity to moral absolutes, the avoidance of relativism, the insufficiency of an unqualified pacifism and the moral necessity of punishing the horrific injustice of Al Qaeda terrorism. Alternatively, the sensibility of the “war essay” H. Richard Niebuhr leads naturally to something like Rowan Williams’ response to 9/11 in his equally controversial Writing in the Dust. The central issue for Williams was the formidable complexity of moral assessments and understanding “the cross of Jesus” as “not a magnified sign of our own suffering,” but “the mark of God’s work in and through the deepest vulnerability.” 45 Indeed, in many respects I see your initial conversation with Gil on 9/11 as mapping that debate and the “debate” between Augustine and H. Richard. To express proportionately: Augustine/H. Richard=Elshtain/Williams=Meilaender/Werpehowski.

But I fear that I’m missing something crucial, and you mentioned that there was “more” in your account. So give me the more or show me what I’m missing or both. *** (Werpehowski): You think you were surprised! The kind of “conversionist” reading you present is how I usually relate Augustine to H. Richard. Ramsey meant to advance the relation. The prob-

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lem is that when Augustine explicitly writes about war, the themes you present hardly jump out, at least not to me. Indeed, nothing near a systematic “just war theory” emerges, however much I agree with the common wisdom that he is a “father” of it in the West given a number of important “elements” in his thought. 46 From him you have claims that wars may need to be fought in a fallen world to defend justice, for a “just cause” identified by a “legitimate authority” and waged with a “right intention,” that is, the end of peace. 47 In addition to these “jus ad bellum” norms, Augustine stresses that warriors must be “peaceful in warring,” and that has led contemporary thinkers to reflect on norms having to do with “jus in bello,” or just conduct in war. 48 As you say, Augustine appears to reject for Christians resistance in self-defense, but to permit resistance to defend the innocent neighbor under unjust assault. The American Roman Catholic Bishops go so far as to name that “Augustinian insight” the “central premise” of just war theory, 49 and Ramsey “runs” with that insight to defend the rule that in the conduct of war noncombatants are immune from direct attack; for what justifies war (defense of the innocent) must also limit it (no assaults on the innocent can be consistent with defending them). 50 Again, I see these as “elements” found in “bits and pieces” 51 of Augustine’s writing. I am picking up on another of these and trying to draw a line from it to H. Richard Niebuhr. “[T]he children, wives, and mothers, humble obedient soldiers, peasants on the land, who in the tragedy of war are made an offering for sin” 52 stand present to us in their vicarious suffering. “All agents and observers of the war,” as you say, may “realize their complicity.” “Just wars” presuppose that Christians (and others) waging it may partake in a real conversion to God and His cause of universal concord and right order by His merciful grace. Conversion means abandoning moralistic judgments that isolate or privilege or justify ourselves or our allies. It requires disinterested attention to “what duty we have to perform in view of what we have done amiss and in view of what God is doing.” 53 Wars go forward if they must as a miserable necessity, without “selfdefensiveness, all self-aggrandizement, all thinking in terms of self as central.” 54 With this may emerge renewed responsibility for the innocent upon whose backs have fallen the self-imprisoning, self-defensive evils of nations and other collectives. In sum, “to carry on war under the judgment of God is to carry it on as those who repent of their self-centeredness and who now try to forget about themselves while they concentrate on the deliverance of their neighbors.” 55 Yet how different Against Faustus appears, since H. Richard explicitly attacks just war theory as a narrowly “retributive” account. What is Augustine’s treatise if it is not “punitive,” and hence “retributive?” Here’s my response.

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The “punitive” account is critically distinct from retributive “self-defense” and all its egocentric dangers. Punishment for Augustine has as its primary warrant “the repentance and conversion of the transgressor.” 56 Wars “will be waged in a spirit of benevolence; their aim will be to serve the defeated more easily by securing a peaceful society that is pious and just. . . . For the good would even wage war with mercy, were it possible, with the aim of taming unrestrained passions and destroying vices that ought . . . to be uprooted or suppressed.” 57 So wartime punishment is corrective and steers clear of self-defense. Against Faustus, however, seems to present this scenario in the way of the (unambiguously?) just correcting, and not selfishly, the (unambiguously?) guilty. Hence not everyone involved in war in the face of innocent suffering is “complicit” and called to reform. If we take the City of God as central to Augustine’s view of political societies, that position misses the mark on his own terms. To paraphrase Paul Ramsey, who sought to “correct” him on a related issue, if Augustine believed that there was always only one side that can be regarded as under God’s judgment, requiring the “punishment” of correction in the wars in which a Christian will find himself responsibly engaged, then he should not have believed this. 58 Why? Augustine holds that all peoples short of the City of God fail to be just. Their particular loves and the earthly peace they strive for are disordered because they are not ordered to God. Accordingly, all nations will overreach, loving what is “theirs” idolatrously. They “desire the permanent enjoyment” of their common life, and thus “are resolved that this too shall not pass away.” 59 Each Niebuhr uses Augustinian “elements” for his respective account of responsible political agency. The cruciform shape of the reality of war is unique to H. Richard, and it contributes both a wide view about the causes of conflict and war and a redemptive edge that pushes in hope to the sources of just and authentic peace. Reinhold’s use of Augustine to defend the political relevance of the Reformation doctrine of “justification by faith” is unique to him (more on the latter later, I hope), and that contributes a decisive resolve to identify and combat grave injustice with armed force when that is morally required. I see Jean Elshtain to be more representative of Reinhold’s vision and Rowan Williams more representative of his brother’s. Each Niebuhr, shaped by Augustine, roughly alludes to the other’s position while articulating his own. Reinhold “gets it” about the equality of sin. Richard “gets it” that wars are sometimes a moral necessity. What I am trying to “get” or “get at” is how each position may enrich and, as I wrote earlier, correct possible excesses or deficiencies in the other.

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*** (Santurri): I think your reading of the Niebuhr brothers as complements to each other in a largely unified vision of war is convincing (though I have a harder time seeing Elshtain and Williams as analogous complements to each other). As to the unified vision itself, I find it normatively attractive, and more than anything else I’m reminded, again, of Lincoln by it—especially the Lincoln of the Second Inaugural, this president who could issue the Order of Retaliation or wage “hard war” against the South and at the same time acknowledge northern as well as southern complicity in the evils that gave rise to the belligerency in the first place. 60 But to cut to the Augustinian chase, and somewhat telegraphically: (1) In my mind, the strongest connection you draw between this Niebuhrian/Lincolnian vision of war and Augustine’s is in noting the latter’s insistence that all historical political regimes fall short of the City of God. As Lincoln might have put the point, “the Almighty has his own purposes” beyond those of the parties in a belligerency. 61 Recognizing as much should induce the kind of humility and reservation about ultimate moral judgment in war that the Niebuhrs typically commend and that you seem to be commending qua Augustinian realism. (2) But, as you suggest, there are different “elements” of Augustine, different “bits and pieces,” on the morality of war, and the elements one finds in Against Faustus overall, I think, are not easily assimilated into the normative vision you associate with the Niebuhr brothers. There Augustine combats Faustus’s objections to the Old Testament rooted in Manichaean pacifistic reservations about the wars of Moses. Augustine’s response is that war is not intrinsically evil, that it is fully legitimate if commanded by God. While, as you suggested earlier, Augustine does acknowledge a measure of uncertainty about how God’s justice plays out in particular wars, the general tone of his response in this text is not one of modesty and humility in moral judgment about war or reflective of a sense of universal complicity in war’s evils. Rather his tone is that of holy-warrior or crusader confidence in basic moral assessments. Moses is justified unequivocally in his wars by divine command, and he’s justified in the necessary means employed, no matter how cruel on their face, precisely because he was, as you suggest, the instrument of God’s punishing injustice. “It is, therefore, malicious to blame Moses for waging war since he ought to be blamed less if he waged war on his own accord than if he were not to do so.” 62 Admittedly you separate your own position from this crusading dimension in Against Faustus by noting Ramsey’s corrective of Augustine on the possibility of unambiguous guilt and innocence in war, a corrective rooted, ironically, in Augustinian principle itself. But now it seems there are many Augustines on war. All of this makes me wonder about the precise normative status of “Augustine” in your

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Christian realism about war. I surmise that for you the controlling Augustinian insight in your realism derives from Augustine’s account of sin’s universality and the consequent distancing of all political-moral perspectives from the ultimate normative perspective of the City of God. This distancing generates a critical principle that sometimes might be employed, interestingly enough, in criticism of Augustine himself on certain particular issues. Nicely done! (3) You do try to retrieve one moment of critical realism from Against Faustus in proposing that Augustine’s “punitive account” of war’s legitimation is “critical of . . . ‘self-defense’ and all its dangerous egocentric perils.” I grant that in principle an exclusively punitive rationale for war would preclude justifications from self-defense, and I grant the independent point that appeals to self-defense do carry the “egocentric perils” you identify. But punitive accounts of war’s legitimation carry their own distinctively crusading perils. As Reinhold often suggested, the cruelty of the crusader is unsurpassed and can lead to the most horrific of injustices. And as the legal philosopher Moshe Halbertal has said just recently, the spirit of self-sacrifice is sometimes complicit in an evil greater than egoism: Misguided self-transcendence is morally more problematic and lethal than a disproportionate attachment to self-interest. In line with a long philosophical tradition, I think that self-transcendence does constitute the moral act. But from that fact itself, self-sacrifice also derives its corrupting force. Misdirected self-transcendence falsely simulates a noble moral act. . . . The religious sensitivity to such a phenomenon is the reason why misguided self-transcendence constitutes the ultimate sin of idolatry. Idolatry, in this sense, is the utmost surrender to a cause that is not worthy of the corresponding sacrifice. 63

May there be something Augustinian about Halbertal’s observations too? Alas, not quite as “telegraphic” as I had originally envisioned. Sorry. *** (Werpehowski): The appeal to Lincoln reminds me of Reinhold’s discussions of his Second Inaugural Address. 64 There are also resonances between that speech and what H. Richard says about how war humbles all, “winners” and “losers,” under God’s judgment. Also, one might see a “twist” in Lincoln’s view of “corrective justice” that stalks the very crusading tendencies you bring to light with your attention to Halbertal’s “misguided self-transcendence.” Much to ponder, but not now. I see your worries about my tracking a line from Against Faustus. But I concur that Augustine’s theology of the two cities saves Augustine some, both for my interpretation of him and from himself, that is, from his own unilateral, retributive vision of war in the anti-Manichean tract. There are

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“many Augustines” on war (including the “Augustines” who both risk and refuse an idolatrous “misguided self-transcendence!). The “elements” are open-ended and disparate; different inclusions, exclusions, combinations and emphases will yield different moral accounts. 65 I hope that I am not being unfaithful to the Bishop of Hippo; but I suppose I think there are more than a few ways not unreasonably to keep faith. The “Augustinian realism” underlying these reflections on the Niebuhrs and a “just war spirituality” is first, as you note, the universality of sin and the “distance” afforded by his two cities theology. There is, second, a vivid sense of living really in a world where God providentially preserves, corrects, directs, and eschatologically surpasses and completes social existence in time. To repeat, Augustine writes that earthly polities are founded on fratricide. Accordingly, Romulus slays Remus. He also says that Romulus founded Rome as a refuge for criminals, so “the remission of sins, the promise which recruits the citizens for the Eternal Country, finds a kind of shadowy resemblance in that refuge.” 66 Human values like justice and mercy and peace that realize, even if only by a “shadowy resemblance,” authentic human relations well ordered to God may and should be pursued responsibly in political life, even if by way of war among sinful parties. Reinhold interpreted this possibility through the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith, which “in the realm of justice means that we will not regard the [self-interested] pressures and counter-pressures, the tensions, the overt and covert conflicts by which justice is achieved and maintained, as normative in the absolute sense; but neither will we ease our conscience by seeking to escape our involvement in them.” 67 God is redemptively at work, moreover, even in war to turn us—all of us—away from ourselves and toward those values and bonds that honor, ambiguously but still meaningfully, our Highest Good and the community He graciously governs. H. Richard signals this when he writes that Augustine’s “conversionist” “elements” would prompt Christians to “look forward with hope to the realization of the great eschatological possibility, demonstrated and promised in the incarnate Christ—the redemption of the created and corrupted human world and the transformation of mankind in all its cultural activity . . . the redirection of all man’s work among temporal things into an activity glorifying God.” 68 We acknowledge grave injustice wrought by the “inequality of guilt” and seek to rectify it for the end of a more just peace. So we will wage “just wars.” We will lament the necessity, sorrowing for the injustice and with it for the whole world that, in its selfish partiality, defensiveness, and plain pathetic smallness, makes wars necessary while seeming ever to live in its shadow. And we will by God’s grace live and act in response to His corrective judgment and merciful offer to glorify Him in service and sacrifice for a common human life worthy of Him and, in and for His glory, ourselves.

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*** (Santurri): I now have a better sense of what you mean by “Augustinian realism” and “just-war spirituality.” I have just three observations in final response, the first, specific and exegetical, the second and third, more general and far-reaching. First, I’ve always read the Reinhold “justification by faith” text you cite (along with the following sentence that you don’t cite—see below) as affirming the “dirty hands” position that we agreed earlier could not be part of any realism associated with Augustine. In my reading of the Niebuhr text, he criticizes, at least implicitly, a sectarian withdrawal from political life as incurring moral guilt since such withdrawal abandons a Christian responsibility to the world, but he also acknowledges that political engagement inevitably brings moral guilt with it. So moral guilt is unavoidable since even those who withdraw from the world get their hands dirty in sinning by omission. “We will know that we cannot purge ourselves of the sin and guilt in which we are involved by the moral ambiguities of politics without also disavowing responsibility for the creative possibilities of justice.” 69 But the message of justification by faith is the message that salvation doesn’t depend on moral perfection. For Niebuhr, to insist on a morally clean way out of this predicament is to deny the need for justification by faith, and such denial is presumably an expression of prideful self-righteousness. Thus “justification by faith in the realm of justice means” in some sense an affirmation of genuine moral dilemmas where the agent does something at least residually wrong no matter what he or she does. 70 As you know, apart from the question of how such a view meshes with Augustine, I have argued that acknowledging the existence of moral dilemmas in that sense poses major problems for the Christian doctrine of God since such dilemmas signify either incoherence in the divine will or some other deficiency in God’s nature. I do think you can preserve your larger point as well as fidelity to the doctrine of justification by faith without affirming genuine moral dilemmas, but here just see my Perplexity. 71 Second, as you noted in your earlier remarks, for Augustine the real evil in war is “love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust for power and such like.” But war for Augustine can and must be “waged” without this evil—“in a spirit of benevolence,” as you quote him, or “with a sort of kind harshness,” as he also says in the same letter you cite. 72 In other words, for Augustine one can and must love the enemy one kills, and all of this has prompted me to wonder just how “realistic” this view is as psychology of war. For example, military social-psychologist Dave Grossman has argued recently that human beings harbor such a natural aversion to killing other humans that learning to kill in warfare requires a soldier’s cultivating, through relentless training in depersonalization

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or demonization, either a brutal indifference toward or an implacable hatred of the enemy. Grossman also suggests that this radical transformation of personality typically comes at great psychic cost to the agent, including perhaps the “moral injury” you referred to earlier. 73 But whatever the score on that last matter, how do we assess the “realism” of Augustinian dicta to love the enemy in wartime given Grossman’s psychological observations? 74 The third response is related to the second. As my thoughts unfold in this exchange, I find myself worrying more and more about the crusader temptation. We noted how Augustine, himself, succumbs to the temptation, whatever his sense of political limits in the final analysis. And I’m inclined to think now that a certain kind of “realism” about war counsels special vigilance on this matter. Indeed, Reinhold once said that “all wars are religious wars, whether fought in the name of historic creeds or not” since “[m]en do not fight for causes until they are ‘religiously’ devoted to them; which means not until the cause seems to them the center of their universe of meaning.” 75 That may be to overstate the point; but Niebuhr’s claims about the inevitable religiosity of war should raise the question in anyone’s mind whether the “reality” of war is indeed reasonably subject to the kinds of moral constraints and reservations that he, himself, seems to commend in certain moments and that certainly are a centerpiece of your Augustinian realism. Interestingly enough, the case of Lincoln is again instructive as you hint in your last message. Indeed, it is sometimes said that when Lincoln changed the goal of the Civil War from simple preservation of the Union to Union preservation plus emancipation, he transformed the belligerency from a morally limited enterprise to a crusading total war, whatever theological tentativeness he might have expressed about the war in the Second Inaugural. Robert Kagan’s remarks in his book Dangerous Nation are representative: Lincoln recognized perhaps better than anyone the problems inherent in such a crusade. . . . But Lincoln did not let theological doubt deter him. Uncertainty about God’s intentions did not absolve men and leaders from deciding to go to war, and he was prepared to press forward and let God decide who was right, on the battlefield. The ideological nature of the conflict [as a war for emancipation rather than simply preserving the union] . . . helped determine the brutal, horrific manner of the struggle. When the war became ideological, it also became a “total” war waged not only between combatants but between and against peoples. . . . [Sherman] understood that the South was fighting for a way of life and that the people of the South would not surrender until they concluded that the loss of their civilization was preferable to the horrors of war. Therefore the North must “make the war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” Grant and Sherman did make the war terrible, with Lincoln’s full support. . . . If God willed that the war must continue . . . then Lincoln would devastate the South and its people. . . . The Union’s conduct of the Civil War

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Kagan’s is not an uncontroversial interpretation of Lincoln or the Civil War. But neither is his reading obviously implausible. 77 At any rate, his account strikes perhaps another kind of “realistic” note about the tension between an ideal discourse of humility in the prosecution of war (such as one finds in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural) and the real practice of wars, especially those motivated by supremely just causes. Do we have here another variation on Augustinian realism? But, no, that would be to multiply Augustines beyond the point of endurance! Bill, this has been an enormously stimulating exchange. I hope it has been as fruitful for you as it has been for me. *** (Werpehowski): What? We’re done? I was just getting started! Seriously, the exchange has been terrific, thanks. Now I’m thinking it might be useful to share these ideas—all of them— with a wider audience. *** (Santurri): That’s not a bad idea. NOTES In the fall of 2013 ethicists Edmund Santurri of St. Olaf College and William Werpehowski of Georgetown University discussed at a distance Werpehowski’s provocative reflections on Augustinian realism and the morality of war. Werpehowski set forth his proposals, and Santurri responded with some theoretical alternatives. This is a record of that discussion. William Werpehwoski is grateful to have received the support of the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Professorship in Catholic Theology at Georgetown University. 1. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1: Human Nature (New York: Scribner’s, 1964) 219–227. 2. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 1984) XIX, 7, pp. 861–862. 3. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Augustine’s Political Realism,” in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses, ed. Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986) 123–141; Herbert A. Deane, The Social and Political Ideas of St. Augustine (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1963). 4. The City of God V, 26, pp. 221–224. 5. P. R. L. Brown, “Political Society,” in Augustine: A Collection of critical Essays, ed. R.A. Markus (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972) 319, 332.

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6. Larry Rasmussen, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991) 120. 7. Ibid., 122. 8. Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice, ed. D.B. Robertson (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1957) 59. 9. For a representative and influential statement of just war theory, see the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1983) esp. par. 80–110. 10. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1: Human Nature, 283; also 284. 11. James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2007) 213–215. 12. Unpublished Letter of Reinhold Niebuhr to James Conant, Mar. 12, 1946. Quoted in Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography with a New Introduction and Afterword (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996) 225. 13. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 225. The quotation within the quotation is an extract from Niebuhr’s letter to Conant. See note 12. 14. Oakes, The Radical and the Republican, 213. 15. Edmund N. Santurri, “Global Justice After the Fall: Christian Realism and the “Law of Peoples,” Journal of Religious Ethics 33.4 (Dec 2005) 783–784. 16. For instances see Herbert A. Deane, The Political Ideas of St. Augustine, 166–168, 241; Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 223; John M. Rist, Real Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 133; Peter Iver Kaufman, “Christian Realism and Augustinian (?) Liberalism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 38.4 (Dec 2010) 701 and note 1. Eric Gregory’s reconstructed Augustinianism is equivocal on the issue. On the one hand, Gregory distances his Augustinianism from “dirty hands.” On the other hand, he remains “open to the possibility of tragic dilemmas internal to a Christian ethics of love.” Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) 28, 183, 368. 17. The City of God XIX, 6, pp. 859–861. 18. John M. Parrish, Paradoxes of Political Ethics: From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 97–100. 19. The City of God XIX, 6, p. 860. 20. The City of God XIX, 6, p. 861. 21. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Mariner Books, 2009) 7. See Mark A. Wilson, “Moral Grief and Reflective Virtue,” in Virtue and the Moral Life, ed. Kathryn Geterk Soltis and William Werpehowski (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, forthcoming). 22. Edmund N. Santurri, Perplexity in the Moral Life (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1987) 206–209. 23. Augustine, “Letter 133” and “Letter 134” in Augustine: Political Writings, ed. E.M. Atkins and R.J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 61–66. 24. E. G., Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1961) 15–33. 25. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine, 234–237. 26. Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love, ed. Henry Paolucci, trans. J. F. Shaw (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1961) 30–34. 27. The City of God XIII, 14, p. 523. 28. The City of God XII 28, p. 508. 29. Ibid., XII 22, p. 502. 30. See Wilson, “Moral Grief and Reflective Virtue.” 31. Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII 74, at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/140622.htm 32. Ibid., XXII, 78. 33. John Langan, “The Elements of St. Augustine’s Just War Theory,” in The Ethics of St. Augustine, ed. William S. Babcock (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991) 172.

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34. H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989) 97. 35. See William Werpehowski, American Protestant Ethics and the Legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002) 24–26. 36. H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1960) 126. 37. H. Richard Niebuhr, “A Communication: The Only Way Into the Kingdom of God,” in War in the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard B. Miller (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992) 20. 38. H. Richard Niebuhr, “War as the Judgment of God,” in War in the Twentieth Century, 51. This discussion of Niebuhr owes a great deal to Richard B. Miller, Interpretations of Conflict (Chicgo and London: University of Chicago Presss, 1991) 128–143. 39. Niebuhr, “War as the Judgment of God,” 51. 40. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951) 214. 41. Paul Ramsey, Nine Modern Moralists (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962) 2–8. 42. Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, 15–39. 43. H. Richard Niebuhr, “War as Crucifixion” in War in the Twentieth Century, 64–65. 44. Just War Against Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2003). 45. Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002) 73. 46. Langan, “The Elements of St. Augustine’s Just War Theory,” 174–178. 47. See the excerpts from Augustine collected in War and Christian Ethics, ed. Robert F. Holmes (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005) 61–83. 48. E.G., James Turner Johnson, Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999) 210–213. 49. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace, par. 81–82. 50. Paul Ramsey, The Essential Paul Ramsey, ed. William Werpehowski and Stephen D. Crocco (New Haven and London: Yale Univerrsity Press, 1994) 60–64. 51. Daniel M Bell, Jr., Just War as Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009) 28. 52. Niebuhr, “War as the Judgment of God,” 51. 53. Ibid., 53. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 54. 56. “Introduction,” in Augustine: Political Writings, xxii. 57. Augustine, “Letter 138,” in Augustine: Political Writings, 38. 58. Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, 28–29. 59. Ibid., 31. 60. On the Civil War as “hard war,” see Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians 1861–1865 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 61. Cf. James Gustafson, “‘The Almighty Has His Own Purposes’” in An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004) 96–109. 62. Against Faustus the Manichaean Book XXII, 78 in Augustine: Political Writings, trans. Michael W. Tkacz and Douglas Kries (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) 225–226. Indeed, Augustine is even more pointed elsewhere in his commentary on Joshua 11:14: “One should not at all think it a horrible cruelty that Joshua did not leave anyone alive in those cities that fell to him, for God himself had ordered this. However, whoever for this reason thinks that God himself must be cruel and does not wish to believe then that the true God was the author of the Old Testament judges as perversely about the works of God as he does about the sins of human beings. Such people do not know what each person ought to suffer. Consequently, they think it a great evil when that which is about to fall is thrown down and when mortals die” (Questions on Joshua 16, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament IV: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1–2 Samuel, ed. John R. Franke [Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 2005] 67). 63. Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012) 78. 64. E. G., Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) 172–173.

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65. Langan, “The Elements of S. Augustine’s Just War Theory,” 187. 66. Augustine, The City of God, V 17, 207. Cf. Gilbert Meilaender, The Way That Leads There (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006) 81. 67. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Desitny of Man, Vol. 2: Human Destiny (New York: Scribner’s, 1964) 284. 68. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 215. 69. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Desitny of Man, Vol. 2: Human Destiny (New York: Scribner’s, 1964) 284. 70. Ibid. 71. Santurri, Perplexity in the Moral Life, 168, 191–200. 72. Augustine, “Letter 138,” in Augustine: Political Writings, 38. 73. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995). 74. Cf. Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011) 61–67. 75. Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013) 233–234. 76. Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (New York: Vintage, 2006) 268–269. 77. For a similar view see Harry S. Stout, Beyond the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006) 189.

Chapter Eleven

Anarchism, Original Sin and the Decentralization of Power A Neo-Augustinian Synthesis George M. Schmidt

In this essay, I seek to overturn two extreme alternatives to liberalism— atheistic anarchism (high anthropology) and authoritarianism (low anthropology)—by pointing out a third alternative, namely, theistic anarchism, a political position saturated in the doctrine of original sin. By relying heavily on the work of Augustine of Hippo, and enlisting the insights of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism, I hope to show that the doctrine of original sin does not lead one to commit to the centralization of power, but rather to a deep suspicion of authority, especially earthly authority. If Augustine and Niebuhr’s story of original sin counts as the deconstructive prong to this twopronged essay, Augustine’s account of love and self-love, which was thoroughly rejected by Niebuhr as “too realistic,” will offer the constructive prong that subtly argues for non-hierarchical free associations. 1 More simply put, this essay calls for the pursuit of two tasks simultaneously: (1) the sketching of the critical dimensions of Augustine’s political realism, which focuses on undoing the realist implications for the centralization of power; and (2) the description of the positive agential qualities of love for forming free associations. Far from being a framework for authoritarian regimes, Augustine’s thoroughly low anthropology should be read as an argument against any supposed legitimation of the rule of one over another. In this essay, therefore, I will attempt to demonstrate the anarchistic implications of Augustine’s political realism. To this end, the work of Carl Schmitt, the on-and-off Nazi and perhaps the leading jurist during the Weimar Republic, provides the framework for 193

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the aforementioned alternatives to liberalism. Schmitt explains that every “political idea in one way or another takes a position on the ‘nature’ of man and presupposes that he is either ‘by nature good’ or ‘by nature evil.’” 2 The horizon of the political is always made plain by the activities of our essential nature. As such, every deliberate conception of the political is shackled to this horizon, which is defined by its two extreme alternatives to liberalism: atheistic anarchism (high anthropology) and authoritarianism (low anthropology). For Schmitt, the atheistic anarchist believes in the essential goodness of humanity, a heart that is ultimately noble and originally unspoiled. “All evil,” Schmitt writes describing the atheistic anarchist position, “is the result of theological thought and its derivatives, including all ideas concerning authority, state, and government.” 3 By contrast, the authoritarian, exemplified for Schmitt by Donoso Cortés and de Maistre, observes “a doctrine of the absolute sinfulness and depravity of human nature.” 4 Because humanity is essentially defective, the hard rule of authority is necessary to save human beings from themselves. This tension between a high and low anthropology is not isolated to the early twentieth century. In relatively recent times, Augustine’s political realism has become associated with various political positions, from Liberal Protestants to Neoconservatives. It is, however, Augustine’s influence on the social theology of Reinhold Niebuhr that matters for this essay. A thinker who is employed by disparate groups to the same degree as Augustine, Niebuhr is claimed by James Cone’s black liberation theology, the neoconservative pundit David Brooks, and Alcoholics Anonymous (quoting his “Serenity Prayer” as mantra). Even President Obama called Niebuhr his “favorite philosopher.” 5 Niebuhr certainly does get around. His appeal reflects the recognition that even the most noble and unspoiled heart can be corrupted by human depravity, a sentiment voiced by Mikhail Bakunin when he stated, “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.” 6 A turn to Augustine’s writings is instructive here because they are, like everything else, contextual. Struggling with the daily reality of being a bishop where sacral order was political order, Augustine’s concerns were often both immediate and practical. In their introduction to a collection of correspondences between Augustine and various officials and friends, Atkins and Dodaro warn us against removing this “busy bishop” from his north African context, writing: As a bishop, he struggled with the daily reality of political life in a society in which “church” and “state” had never been, and could not conceivably be, disentangled. In this context, “justice” referred not to the rise and fall of empires, but to the decision whether to punish or to pardon a Donatist thug who had beaten up one of his priests. “War” was not merely a theological

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construct: an instrument of divine wrath or divine education. It was happening in the next province, where one of Augustine’s old acquaintances was responsible for warding off the barbarian raiders. “Civic power” may have been embodied symbolically in the emperor in distant Rome, but here in north Africa it was men like Augustine’s correspondent Apringius who made the decisions that mattered. 7

Because of the coupling of this highly contextual dimension of Augustine’s work along with its seemingly eternal scope, future political theorists often participate in anachronistic understandings or what John McGuckin calls “neo-Augustinian syntheses.” 8 Rather than being the product of “any careful exegesis of the originals,” argues McGuckin, the works of thinkers like Aquinas and Niebuhr have torn Augustine’s political theory from the context upon which it relied. However, while one should be careful not to stray too far from the boundaries of Augustine’s context, which informs any understanding of him, for that same reason it is important to remember that any modern understanding of Augustine is subject to anachronism. Brent Nongbri, in his work Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, addresses the torpor that can come about when we fear the charge of anachronism. He writes, All of our concepts are modern and hence anachronistic when applied to the ancient world. The problem is that we so often suffer from a lack of awareness that we are being anachronistic. Informed and strategic deployment of anachronism, on the other hand, can have unexpected and thought-provoking results. 9

Even though the works of Reinhold Niebuhr do not offer a faithful interpretation of Augustine formed from meticulous historical analysis, I refuse a wholesale jettison of such work. In truth, figures like Augustine have become social products that have complex and often problematic genealogies. 10 With that said, my own contribution to a “neo-Augustinian synthesis” comes by way of Niebuhr’s “Christian realism,” itself another synthesis, and a position that James Cone rightly critiqued for not only being “a source of Niebuhr’s radicalism but also of his conservatism.” 11 Niebuhr, in Cone’s approximation, had the sophistication to observe and comment upon black suffering but “lacked the ‘heart to feel’ it as his own.” 12 The logic of Christian realism demands “practical” approaches to real world issues, which, for the Christian realist, never reached perfection. For this reason (if we are to give a principled explanation, instead of pointing to the more likely racist influences working through Niebuhr), rather than seriously challenge racial injustice, time and again, Niebuhr would call for a slow erosion of racial prejudice. “Although he did believe that African Americans could achieve proximate justice without the help of liberal whites,” writes Cone, “he did

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not choose to be among those to support actively and passionately the black struggle for justice.” 13 Niebuhr’s refusal to confront seriously racism in the United States illustrates the pitfalls that might exist within Christian realism itself. Despite his criticisms of Niebuhr, Cone finds a great deal of resonance with Niebuhr’s exposition of Augustine’s low anthropology. As a people whose bodies throughout the years have occupied and added to that, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “pile of debris” called “progress,” black people do not as easily fall prey to the enlightenment notion concerning the goodness of human nature, particularly the nature of white oppressors: “Having experienced the brutality of human pride, they [black people] will speak less of human goodness. . . .” 14 Cone’s linking of systemic oppression with “human pride,” a theological code for “original sin,” (a link that will be important later for anarchism’s appropriation of original sin) illustrates Niebuhr’s influence upon his work. While the work of James Cone implicitly, and indeed at times, explicitly, reflects the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, it was not until 1953 that Niebuhr referenced Augustine’s influence upon his own work in an essay entitled, “Augustine’s Political Realism.” In fact, it might best be described as the theoretical foundation of Moral Man and Immoral Society in its more raw and exposed form. Originally delivered as the Frances Carroll Memorial Lecture at Columbia University, “Augustine’s Political Realism” is Niebuhr’s major letter of gratitude to the African saint. In point of fact, a few years later Niebuhr would remark on the debt he owed Augustine in his intellectual development, even though a rigorous study of Augustine came rather late in his own career. Even so, Niebuhr begins his essay on Augustine’s political realism, as usual, by the establishment of oppositions. Political and moral realism, as opposed to idealism, “denotes the disposition to take all factors in a social and political situation, which offer resistance to established norms, into account, particularly the factors of self-interest and power.” 15 By contrast, idealism is “characterized by loyalty to moral norms and ideals, rather than self-interest, whether individual or collective.” 16 One might well imagine the caricatured anarchist with her simple slogans that appear as hard and fast principles presenting some sort of simple idealism, for example, “people not profit,” in such a camp. It is important to remember, however, that this is only caricature. More to the point, idealism, in particular, denotes a disposition that takes moral pretensions at “face value.” In this sense, the “real” in realism is the very real demands of self-interest upon the human psyche. Anarchism is the practical response to such realist positions. For the realist, strictly speaking, within the scope of human activity and psychology, selfinterest is king.

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Unlike the classical philosophers who, in Niebuhr’s estimation, broke the self into various parts (primarily the mind and the body), Augustine maintained the integrity of the self by uniting mind and body. The classical age erred further for Niebuhr by locating evil outside of the self. And it is precisely in this sense that he names Augustine “the first great ‘realist,’” primarily because he identified the “seat of evil . . . in the self.” 17 In this sense, interestingly, Augustine’s conception of human nature correlates with his explanation of evil. The source of evil can be named as “excessive love of self, sometimes also defined as pride or superbia.” 18 Rather than a primordial instinct that can be eventually managed through mental discipline and will one day be conquered through the inevitable progress of human society, evil is located squarely in the self. Niebuhr referred to this evil metaphorically while Augustine was remarking, perhaps more literally, upon the doctrine of original sin. Indeed, Niebuhr was eloquent when symbolically interpreting such notions into more secular terminology (a major reason for the philosopher Morton White to speak satirically of “Atheists for Niebuhr”), and so he would come to write that the modern correlation of the doctrine of original sin was what he called “egocentricity,” “a tendency of the self to make itself its own end or even make itself the false center of whatever community it inhabits, which sows confusion into human community.” 19 Instead of externalizing evil outside of the human soul, Augustine locates evil deep within the human psyche, which ultimately pervades all areas of society. Significantly, because of this utter saturation, certain foundational structures that once grounded the decision-making process—reason, objectivity, knowledge—lose their neutral status. That is to say, power injects the selfinterest of the powerful into objects that we once held to be impartial. For this reason, the immanent domain of history becomes nothing more than power politics. On the one hand, for the post-structuralist, this is a depressing picture: “An awareness of the relativity of perspectives threatens to lock society into a cycle of cynicism and fanaticism: a cynicism born of despair over the limits of truth, matched by a fanaticism bent on denying those limits. . . .” 20 On the other hand, for the anarchist, it is a picture that can aid the oppressed in uncovering the supposedly neutral elements of society that are, in reality, maintaining structures of domination. Because the substructure of human interaction is power, objectivity becomes illusory. There is no objective position in society; everyone stands within her own pocket of interest, which is constantly interpolated and mediated by power. Reason, facts, morality, and even religion stand interceded by power and interest: “The facts are created by the disproportions of power which exists in a given social system. The justifications are usually dictated by the desire of the men of power to hide the nakedness of greed, and by the inclination of society itself to veil the brutal facts of human life from it-

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self.” 21 A careful reading of Niebuhr reveals a slight reductionist tone; concepts of justice and morality are reduced to interests, especially in groups. So as to not entirely fall prey to Thrasymachus’s “justice,” the anarchist cannot speak of justice in an ambiguous or universal sense, but must ask “justice for whom?” “Hegemony” becomes the unspoken presupposition in Niebuhr’s work as he lays out Augustine’s description of the civitas terrena. Here we begin to see the major condemnation of the centralization of power in Augustine, which Niebuhr could not entirely stomach, and perhaps less importantly reveals Niebuhr as the “consistent cold warrior” arming America with his neoliberal hermeneutic. 22 In fact, Niebuhr found Augustine’s realism to be “excessive” and “indiscriminate”; he wrote that, “its indiscriminate character is apparent by his failure to recognize the difference between legitimate and illegitimate, between ordinate and inordinate subordination of man to man.” 23 What becomes so appealing here for the purposes of this essay is the condemnation of Augustine’s political disposition that ever so gently leans toward an anarchist mood. While anarchism, of course, has many definitions, there is, nevertheless, a thread running through almost every manifestation of anarchism—the basic assumption and disposition that every system of domination and subordination is illegitimate until proven otherwise. The burden of proof falls heavily upon authority. In this sense, every claim of, “ordinate subordination of man to man” (to use Niebuhr’s language) has a heavy burden of proof to endure, one which rarely can be met. 24 Even though Niebuhr argues, “without some form of such subordination the institutions of civilization could not exist,” the anarchist operating within the Augustinian tradition rightly responds, “whose civilization?” 25 While Niebuhr may admonish Augustine’s “indiscriminate character” regarding power, anarchists find this thread of realism quite bracing. In one of the more famous examples, the book Pirates and Emperors: Old and New International Terrorism in the Real World, Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist and anarcho-syndicalist, uses Augustine’s realism in the City of God, specifically the famous “pirate’s maxim,” a story that sheds light on the nature of centralized power. In the fourth chapter of book four—a chapter that precedes a description of the gladiator revolts as divinely assisted— Augustine gives an account of a pirate who is captured and subsequently brought before Alexander the Great. When asked why he is “infesting the sea,” the pirate boldly responds, “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.” 26 This widely cited passage blurs distinctions that Augustine’s audience would have thought incontrovertible. The supposedly safe, moral, and principled distinction between rulers and criminals, which would have been accounted in a normative discourse, is critically reexamined. For Chomsky’s anarchist purposes, the realism exhibited in this anecdote sheds light on the usage of the concept of international

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terrorism by the so-called West, and “reaches to the heart of the frenzy over selected incidents of terrorism currently being orchestrated, with supreme cynicism, as a cover for Western violence.” 27 Briefly put, Chomsky proposes that terrorism is merely an equivocation used by Western powers to divide their own mass use of violence from the smaller scale uses of violence that are often called “terrorism.” To be sure, Chomsky’s Pirate and Emperors is merely one illustration of an anarchist’s deliberate use of Augustine’s political realism. With this work behind us, let us review the deconstructive turns present in Augustine’s low anthropology and the ways in which these turns buttress an anarchist position. Remember, for the purposes of this essay, we must keep close at hand Schmitt’s argument that a low anthropology necessitates the organization of society around authoritarian models. However, due to a rather obvious implication of the doctrine of original sin, Augustine reminds us that even the sovereign himself is prey to original sin: “They saw the dangers of anarchy in the egotism of the citizens but failed to perceive the dangers of tyranny in the selfishness of the ruler. . . .” 28 This reminds us of the quote by Bakunin above, remarking on the need for a non-hierarchical, decentralized power structure that prevents human wickedness from coagulating into what the “pirate’s maxim” might call an emperor. With this in mind, Augustine’s political realism suggests somewhat modest objectives. McGuckin writes, “[Augustine’s political realism] defines all politics and all social engineering as by definition the setting up of the least harmful compromises.” 29 Because idealist solutions are necessarily unattainable on earth, “all that remains for human society is to draw up for itself a plan of communal living that hems in excessive wickedness, and tries to appeal to the common level of the aspirations of the multitude.” 30 A conditional peace is an everyday material concern that more or less selfish people can agree on. Augustine writes, “. . . even robbers, to ensure greater efficiency and security in their assaults on the peace of the rest of mankind, desire to preserve peace with their associates.” 31 If a band of robbers can be united through self-interested aspirations, Augustine asserts, effective political alliances can similarly establish a workable concord, cohesiveness, and sustainable order. Augustine calls his readers to acknowledge and take into account the fallen nature of humanity that necessarily infects any attempt at fulfilling some specific universal norm, “. . . for the notion of justice commonly put forward by some misguided thinkers, that it is ‘the interest of the strongest,’ they hold this to be a false conception.” 32 In a very sophisticated exposition on war and peace, Augustine demonstrates how man is so odd a being that in order to follow his own self-interests he must make claims to universal standards: For even the wicked when they go to war do so to defend the peace [a peace that suits their own ends]. . . . Thus pride is a perverted imitation of God. For

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In this sense, earthly peace is necessarily unjust, especially when it involves domination to provide that peace. God is the only guarantor of a just peace, and such a peace exists outside of time. THE DYNAMICS OF LOVE AND FREE ASSOCIATION IN THE CIVITAS TERRENA Rather than being anti-Schmitt, an anarchism based in Augustinian political theology is post-Schmitt due to its more positive and constructive, rather than critical or negative, emphasis. That is, a neo-Augustinian political theology seeks to find a way through Schmitt. For this reason, I will expose some of the more subtle implications within Augustine’s constructive project. It is of course important to keep in mind that Augustine developed most of his political theory in the “local domain, and understanding the pressing and intimate nature of that part of Augustine’s office as Bishop-magistrate will help us understand the peculiar nature of such local ‘adjudication’ experience that grows in his mind into principles of how humans work, need governance, and how the Church should be involved in this.” 34 As a proper historian, McGuckin makes the vital point that Augustine should be located in his proper time and space in order for his voice to be understood most accurately. Even so, this should not lead us to ask what Adorno would call the patronizing question, namely, “what is still valid in Augustine?” According to Adorno such a question is unreflectively arrogant by assuming the perspective of a sovereign assigning “the dead person his place, thereby in some sense elevating oneself above him.” 35 Instead, Adorno advises that when dealing with a serious thinker we should ask how our predicament appears in their eyes, or more to the point, through their eyes. Deleuze conceived the history of philosophy in a similar spirit, writing, “I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.” 36 I approach this section in a similar fashion. To many historians the following would be Augustine’s illegitimate child, a mutant offspring that may not even merit his name. However, much like Adeodatus, Augustine’s own “natural son” born of “sin” with an unnamed woman, this work is undeniably his. 37 With that said, having laid out the actively negative dimensions of Augustine’s anthropology, the following section will describe how Augustine imagines society to operate within the Fall itself. Undoubtedly, the political landscape of the civitas terrena is a product of the Fall. “Absent the fall,” writes J. Joyce Schuld, “there would be no need for a political safeguarding

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of communal order [political structures] since all members of society would have the same fundamental love, namely, God.” 38 In this sense, the biblical creation account suggests God’s intended order. It is important to note that no perfect formation of a heavenly union is possible on earth; only the least of the worst is possible. In this sense, everything is in process. While most certainly not an ever-perfecting process, Augustine assures us that history does have a telos, one toward the kingdom of God. Law itself is never canonized as the word of God. Indeed, law primarily reflects the human desires and ambitions thereby exist far beneath the standard for which God has called humanity to aspire. Augustine suggests that formal law always implies a location between the just and the unjust as a way to adapt to humanity’s fallen nature. And it is the duty of the citizen of the civitas dei to live by the higher laws of love and justice, never ultimately conforming to the laws of the civitas terrena. It is rightly ordered love that seeks justice, which orders the Augustinian anarchist operating within the civitas terrena. While love that has become stagnant in superbia does not allow a circular form of love that takes part in the love of God, love that flows away from the self and through God performs concrete deeds of mercy. Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society agrees that it is the individual acting upon herself (not the individual ruler acting upon others) who is able to objectively transcend and take part in this love even though collections of individuals cannot. This sense of love begins to suggest an overarching anarchist tendency in Augustine. In one of his more obvious anarchist passages, Augustine writes: He [God] did not wish the rational being, made in his own image, to have dominion over any but irrational creatures, not man over man, but man over beasts. Hence, the first just men were set up as shepherds of flocks, rather than as kings of men, so that in this way also God might convey the message of what was required by the order of nature. . . . 39

Here we have Augustine speaking in his most anarchist voice, reproaching the “desert of the sinner,” which is the civitas terrena. The civitas terrena, therefore, is the functioning of punishment that comes after the Fall. Even more frighteningly, slavery, as ultimately a product of superbia, becomes a divine punishment for a variety of offenses of the sinners. 40 Simply put and in all its horror, slavery, for Augustine, is divinely sanctioned. Where does this leave those who wish to develop from Augustine an anarchistic realism? Rather than a strict dismissal or rejection of Augustine, it is important to think with Augustine, against Augustine, and to use his insights to strengthen liberative efforts. For this reason, it might be important to take a step back and remember what Augustine imagines the political project to be. As detailed in the previous section, Augustine suggests that

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political organizing should be directed at the least harmful of all the invariably harmful options. In contrast to the “Eastern Christian world,” which presumed “God’s righteous king . . . was the earthly lord that the heavenly Lord had selected to rule as his agentive power on earth,” the West favored Augustine’s approach which observed the sin that guided earthly rulers. 41 For the purpose of limiting this human evil, Augustine argued for a decentralization of power (or at least the most decentralized system he could conceive of at the time), namely, a “confederation of nation-states.” 42 If we are to usher this reasoning to its end, we will find that the realistic telos which Augustine seeks in devising practical solutions to humanity’s sinful nature is, to quote Chomsky again, “a federated, decentralized system of free associations” that incorporates “economic as well as other social institutions. . . .” 43 Therefore, rather than succumb to the utter depravity of the civitas terrena, we might hear in Augustine a strategy that points to a more practical and realist solution. More specifically, by taking the implications of Augustine’s call for limiting rulers’ power, we might better observe the realism that defines much of Augustine’s political theology. This very somber view of the human condition does not demand political inactivity. Rather it suggests the proper way to go about political ordering, even though they may be somewhat limited objectives. McGuckin writes, “It [Augustine’s political realism] defines all politics and all social engineering as by definition the setting up of the least harmful compromises.” 44 Because idealist solutions are necessarily unattainable on earth, “all that remains for human society is to draw up for itself a plan of communal living that hems in excessive wickedness, and tries to appeal to the common level of the aspirations of the multitude.” 45 Against this background we should be able to come to a basic material demand with which more or less evil people can agree. Here it is important to recall Augustine’s robbers. If we can agree that a band of robbers can be united despite their own moral failings, can we not imagine similar political alliances organized along anarchistic lines for the purpose of curbing humanity’s will to dominate one another? NOTES 1. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: The Scribner Press, 1953), 129. 2. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 56. 3. Schmitt, 56–57. 4. Schmitt, 57. 5. David Brooks, “Obama, Gospel and Verse,” New York Times, April 26, 2007. 6. Quoted in Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 25–26. 7. Augustine of Hippo, Augustine: Political Writings. ed. E.M. Atkins and R.J. Dodaro (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press Publishing Company, 2001), xi.

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8. John McGuckin, The Ascent of Christian Law: Patristic and Byzantine Formulations of a New Civilization (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 128. 9. Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 158. 10. In fact, one might argue that Niebuhr’s work entails a Lacanian sublimation of Augustine’s work, which ultimately de-familiarizes Augustine, bringing out his strange quality. 11. James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 48. 12. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 41. 13. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 48. 14. James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 92. 15. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 123. 16. Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 123. 17. Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 124. 18. Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 125. 19. Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 125. 20. Dennis McCann, Christian Realism and Liberation Theology: Practical Theologies in Creative Conflict (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books: 1981), 97. 21. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 8. 22. Stone, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1972), 172. 23. Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 129. 24. Harry Kreisler, Interview with Noam Chomsky. Conversations with History: Activism, Anarchism, and Power, March 22, 2002. 25. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 129. 26. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London, England: Penguin Books, 1984), 139. 27. Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors: Old and New International Terrorism in the Real World (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003), 1986 preface, vii. 28. Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems, 127. 29. John McGuckin, “Augustine of Hippo: Architect of Western Christianity’s Political Theology” in Judaic and Christian Visions of the Social Order: Describing, Analyzing and Comparing Systems of the Formative Age, ed. J Neusner & M Chilton (UPA Press. Winter 2011), 10. 30. McGuckin, “Augustine of Hippo: Architect of Western Christianity’s Political Theology,” 10. 31. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, 866. 32. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, 882. 33. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, 868. 34. McGuckin, The Ascent of Christian Law, 150–151. 35. Theodor W. Adorno, Three Studies on Hegel, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), 2. 36. As quoted in the translator’s introduction of Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), x. Originally from Deleuze, “I Have Nothing to Admit,” trans. Janis Forman, Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus 2, 3, (1977), p.12 37. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2008), 163. 38. J. Joyce. Schuld, Foucault and Augustine: Reconsidering Power and Love (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 161. 39. Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London, England: Penguin Books, 1984), 874. 40. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, 874–875. 41. McGuckin. The Ascent of Christian Law, 149. 42. McGuckin. The Ascent of Christian Law, 149.

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43. Chomsky, Noam, and Michel Foucault. Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (New York: The New Press, 2006), 38. 44. McGuckin, “Augustine of Hippo: Architect of Western Christianity’s Political Theology,” 10. 45. McGuckin, “Augustine of Hippo: Architect of Western Christianity’s Political Theology,” 10.

Part IV

Justice, Love, and Community

Chapter Twelve

Common Ruins of Love Augustine and the Politics of Mourning John Kiess

“These things should make us weep” (ep. 111.2). 1 So Augustine responds to a letter he received from a priest named Victorianus in late 409 describing a wave of violence that had recently swept across the Mediterranean world. 2 “You asked me to discuss certain things at great length in my reply; but such calamities as you narrate claim rather many groans and tears (gemitus et fletus) than prolix treatises” (111.1). Augustine notes that his own county of Hippo has not been spared, referring to recent attacks by Donatist clergy and Circumcelliones in nearby churches. He addresses a number of the injustices that have accompanied these attacks, ranging from loss of life and property to captivity and rape. He counsels Victorianus, “cease not to intercede with groanings on their behalf before God, and to seek, so far as your power and His providence permits you, to do for them whatever can be done, and to give them whatever consolation can be given, as time and opportunity be granted” (111.7). The exchange eerily anticipates many of the same afflictions that victims would suffer ten months later during the sack of Rome. “Tidings of dreadful events have reached our ear,” Augustine preached not long after the attack, “accounts of defeat, conflagration, pillage, murder, tortures. It is true, we have heard about these outrages. We have deplored all of them; often we have wept (saepe flevimus); and we have hardly been able to console ourselves” (de urbis excidio 2.3). 3 If Augustine’s response does not reach quite the fevered pitch as that of Jerome, who famously likened the sack of Rome to the whole world perishing, 4 it is hardly one of Stoic detachment. Consistent with his response to Victorianus, it betrays the sensibility of one for whom bodily integrity and political community represent genuine human 207

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goods, the loss of which merits our grief, indeed, our tears. Later, towards the end of Book 1 of the City of God, Augustine will make a point of criticizing Roman refugees in Carthage for precisely their failure to grieve: “When, by all accounts, nations in the East were bewailing (plangentibus) your catastrophe, when the greatest cities in the farthest parts of the earth were keeping days of public grief (publicum luctum) and mourning, you were asking the way to the theatres, and going in, making full houses, in fact, behaving in a much more crazy fashion than before” (1.33). 5 Such emphatic exhortations to grief may seem surprising coming from someone known to express misgivings about mourning in the face of loss. Readers of the Confessions will recall his many tortured descriptions of grief, from his weeping over the death of his unnamed friend to his unsuccessful struggle to fight back tears upon the death of his mother. The ambivalence and even shame that hovers over Augustine’s recollection of such scenes has left many critics with the impression that he regards grief as one of those fundamentally flawed human passions that must be expunged as the pilgrim ascends towards the eternal. 6 Nicholas Wolterstorff detects in such scenes a mentality “which is profoundly foreign to us,” one committed to the view that “even to feel grief upon the death of a friend or one’s mother is to have been guilty of too much worldly affection.” 7 Martha Nussbaum takes such a view to entail particularly troubling political consequences: “Augustinian love is committed to denying the importance of the worldly losses and injustices to which my neighbor may attach importance, in order to assert the primacy of the need for God and the potential for grace. . . . Death is irrelevant, real suffering in this world is irrelevant, all that is relevant is coming into God’s presence.” 8 In recent years, a number of scholars have reassessed the role of the emotions in Augustine’s thought, yielding a far richer picture of his views on grief than his critics allow. Responding specifically to Wolterstorff’s criticisms, Paul Helm has argued that Augustine’s underlying concern in the Confessions is not whether to indulge or withhold one’s grief, but whether in grieving one “distorts and overbalances human love for the creature” at the expense of one’s relationship with the Creator. 9 The question, as always for Augustine, is how we order our loves, and how to grieve in a way that acknowledges the value of the created order without losing sight of its finite character or our dependency upon God. Echoing this, Paul Griffiths argues that whereas Augustine’s tears function as a form of self-enclosure in the case of the death of his unnamed friend, sustaining the illusion of his selfsufficiency, he has learned by the time of his mother’s death to address his tears to God, rightly perceiving the role of grief in the formation of moral judgment and the life of prayer. 10 For Augustine, Griffiths observes, “Weeping is an appropriate, perhaps the most appropriate, response to an accurate, fully Christian, discernment of what things are like for us. . . . In weeping, as

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in confessing, we show that we understand what we are and what the world is. Not to weep would be to show that we misconstrue both.” 11 With an appreciation for this more constructive role for grief, Josef Lössl has made a compelling case for reading the Confessions as a “consolation of philosophy,” one which borrows many consolatory motifs from the likes of Cicero and Seneca and employs them for explicitly Christian purposes. 12 James Wetzel has also drawn attention to these connections, but places more emphasis on the way Augustine differs from his philosophical forebears, particularly those Stoics who frame virtue in opposition to grief. 13 For Augustine, Wetzel argues, rightly ordered grief is one important expression of virtue, a form of moral recognition that perceives the value of the created order and the lamentable effects of sin in our own lives and the lives of others. In contexts of bereavement, grief is the acknowledgment that death is one of those effects, one that does not leave the virtue of survivors unaffected. “It takes an Augustine,” Wetzel writes, “to want to focus philosophy there, on the agony of virtue itself.” 14 If Augustine not only accepts the role of grief in the life of virtue, but actively encourages it, what might he be suggesting by extending the role of grief beyond individual sin and bereavement to acts of political violence and wider social injustices, as he appears to be doing in his response to Victorianus and the sack of Rome? It is this question that I want to pursue in this essay. Building upon the work of those who have sought to demonstrate the importance of the affections for Augustine’s political ethics, 15 I want to consider how grief plays into Augustine’s broader vision of political community and how it shapes the way he thinks about what it means to be a citizen, both of earthly political societies such as Rome and the eternal city of God that mingles among them. In the first part of the essay, I begin by exploring the link that Augustine makes between the failure of refugees in Carthage to grieve the sack of Rome and their addiction to theater, connecting this to his broader critique of Roman society and pagan worship. As I hope to show, Augustine’s review of the various moral and political disasters that Rome has suffered throughout its history reveals a society whose craving for spectacle and love of glory leave it fundamentally alienated from reality and incapable of acknowledging loss. This incapacity to grieve sustains the myth of eternal Rome even in the face of Rome’s destruction, preventing Roman citizens from coming to the truth about the fragile character of their city and the need for social and political reform. In the second part of the essay, I explore Augustine’s own response to the sack of Rome and how it offers an alternative way of understanding the relationship between grief and politics. Drawing upon the work of Sarah Byers and Melanie Webb, I argue that by extending the consolatory tradition to such injustices as theft, rape, and captivity, Augustine challenges those

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Roman conventions that exclude certain forms of loss from the public domain, calling for a more robust collective response to such injustices. Emphasizing how the wounds of political violence often cut across the division of Christian and pagan, Augustine suggests that this is a task jointly shared by the earthly and heavenly cities. In mourning losses previously deemed ungrievable, citizens of the city of God remind earthly political societies of their frailty, but also offer them a vision of a shared future in which common ruins might become common objects of love. It is my hope that such an exploration contributes to our understanding of how the affections, particularly the emotion of grief, shape Augustine’s commitment to social justice. Such an exploration also offers potential lessons for those working outside Augustine studies, especially those actively seeking to assist deeply divided societies to confront the legacy of political violence and other injustices. In the essay’s final section, I consider what Augustine’s views on grief might have to offer such efforts. ROMAN MELANCHOLIA As a way of beginning, I want to return to Augustine’s observation at the end of Book 1 of the City of God that when other nations were mourning the sack of Rome, refugees in Carthage ran for the theaters instead. The impulse to avoid or deflect one’s grief through the spectacle of the theater is one Augustine knew well. In the Confessions, he informs us that he was once a devotee of the same Carthaginian stage and took pleasure in “being moved to grief at the sight of sad tragic events on stage” (3.2.2). Looking back, he sees this was merely an attempt to distract himself from what was truly worth grieving, his own dying soul. Such artificial grief not only enabled him to wallow in self-pity, but as Eric Gregory points out, it also trained him in a specific kind of grief that remains passive in the face of suffering. 16 Augustine asks himself, “how real is the mercy evoked by fictional dramas? The listener is not moved to offer help, but merely invited to feel sorrow; and the more intensely he feels it the more highly he rates the actor in the play” (3.2.2). Real sorrow, real mercy, Augustine realizes in hindsight, takes no pleasure in the pain of others, but seeks to relieve it. Augustine observes many of the same patterns in the aftermath of the sack of Rome. The refugees in Carthage deflect any grief for what they and others have experienced towards the fictional drama of the stage. Their selfpity takes the form of the question, “Why in Christian times does Rome suffer such disasters?” To even ask such a question, Augustine argues, requires denying the many disasters that Rome has suffered throughout its history. It suggests a deeper pattern of disavowing loss. Clearly the theater has provided one outlet for avoiding such grief, but part of Augustine’s

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agenda in the City of God is to demonstrate how diversionary spectacle in Rome extends far beyond the theater. He notes that the theater was instituted by the gods (de civ. 1.32), pointing to the role it plays in the broader cult of pagan worship. As Jennifer Herdt observes, “Augustine is rehearsing what is by his time a standard Christian trope, which assimilates a wide range of public performances under the category of ‘spectacle’: athletic competitions, executions in the arena and amphitheater, gladiatorial contests, military reenactments, and comedies, tragedies, and mimes in the theater.” 17 Alongside the more formal temple rites and festivals, these various pagan spectacles exposed citizens to vicious models of behavior “cloaked with divine authority.” 18 In the theater of Roman society, citizens were trained to be spectators of the broader drama of the empire, more prepared to grieve over fantasies than the concrete suffering of others. No stage was more important in this drama than the battlefield. Augustine notes that the gods served as “patrons” over Rome’s wars and “put up with the violence involved in their chosen amusements, like spectators in the amphitheatre” (3.14). Indeed, like the Romans who cried aloud at the theater but did not actively respond, the gods remain “unmoved” by what they see, routinely abandoning cities to destruction. Augustine acknowledges that the Romans have a stake in distinguishing war from the arena, noting that while no Roman spectator would stand to watch a gladiator contest between father and son, they do not hesitate to go to war with their kindred. But such a distinction, Augustine argues, is artificial: Did it make a difference that there was no arena, and that broader battlefields were filled with the bodies, not of two gladiators, but of multitudes belonging to two peoples? Did it matter that those struggles were encircled, not by an amphitheatre, but by the whole world? Did it matter that they furnished an ungodly spectacle both to those then alive, and, for as long as their fame is handed down, to their posterity also? (3.14)

In truth, Rome’s wars are as much a theatrical production as its other spectacles. They are performances meant to be seen and heard by as wide an audience as possible, not just one’s contemporaries but all of human history. Like the theater, they rely upon the projection of illusion, disguising the naked lust for domination in the “deceptive veils” of glory, honor, and victory. Spellbound by these illusions, Roman citizens are blinded to their human cost, unable to perceive those who suffer or respond to their needs. This is the central theme of Augustine’s discussion of Rome’s war with her “mother city,” Alba (3.14). As Augustine explains, both sides suffered heavy casualties and eventually agreed to settle the outcome through single combat between two sets of brothers: the Horatii, fighting on behalf of the Romans, and the Curiatii on behalf of the Albans (the echoes of the gladiator arena are not lost on Augustine). After two Horatii are killed, the remaining

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brother manages to defeat the three Curiatii, winning the war for Rome. Augustine informs us that the sister of one of the victorious Horatii was betrothed to one of the defeated Curiatii. She “bursts into tears” when she sees “the arms of her betrothed borne home as spoils by her victorious brother” (3.14). Witnessing this, her brother immediately strikes her down. “In my view,” Augustine writes, “this one woman had more feeling than the whole population of Rome. She grieved for the man to whom she kept her plighted troth; maybe she also grieved for the brother who had slain the man to whom he had promised his sister. It seems to me that she was not to be blamed for her tears” (3.14). On the contrary, by Rome’s own standards, she should be praised: In Virgil, the “pious Aeneas” laments over an enemy whom he destroyed by his own hand, and he is to be praised for mourning. Did not Marcellus mourn with tears for the city of Syracuse, when he recalled that all its pride and glory had recently fallen into sudden ruin at his hands, a thought which led him to contemplate the common condition of humanity? Surely we may demand from human feeling that it should not be thought a crime in a woman if she weeps for a betrothed whom her brother has slain, when men are praised for weeping over enemies whom they themselves have vanquished? (3.14)

The woman’s grief, like that of Aeneas and Marcellus, is to be praised because it casts the war in its true light, revealing her loss to be her brother’s loss, Alba’s loss to be Rome’s loss. Her tears cut through the imagined division of the communities and recall their deeper, common identity. They summon Rome back from spectacle to reality. This practice of disavowing loss and expelling grief is a motif that Augustine traces throughout Roman history. He observes it at Rome’s very origins, when Romulus slays Remus and “the whole community took no heed of it” (3.6). He observes it again in Rome’s abduction of the Sabine women and the subsequent war it waged against their fathers: “The wives dared not weep for slaughtered fathers, for fear of offending their victorious husbands” (3.13). Even when Apollo’s statue at Cumae is said to weep over Rome’s coming destruction of Greece, the Roman soothsayers do not hesitate to propose hurling it into the sea (3.11). To argue that it is only in Christian times that Rome suffers disasters requires denying all the many catastrophes that it has experienced throughout its history: the horrors of the Punic Wars, the destruction of whole cities such as Troy and Saguntum, the sack of Rome by Gaul, various floods and famines, and many others. The most recent sack of Rome is but the latest in a string of repressed memories and unacknowledged losses. 19 At the bottom of such denial is the belief that although individuals may die, Rome itself is eternal. This is the central fantasy that the spectacle of war

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is meant to sustain. Augustine notes that its mythic origins lie in the words of Jupiter from Virgil’s Aeneid: To them no bounds of empire I assign Nor term of years to their immortal line (serm. 105.10) 20

He quotes Cicero’s more politically palatable version from De Republica: a community must be constituted with a view to its eternal continuance. And so death is never natural to a commonwealth, as it is to a man. For a man death is not only inevitable but very often even desirable; whereas when a city is destroyed, wiped out, extinguished, it is (to compare small with great) as if the whole of this world should collapse and perish. (3.23; de civ. 22.6)

Augustine explains the role that war plays in sustaining Cicero’s vision of the eternal city: “It is certain, therefore, that he wished a city to take up arms in defense of that safety which ensures its continuance as a city in this world, as he says, for eternity” (22.6). Here theater and war intersect in a sacrificial rite that keeps alive the illusion of a city that never dies. Augustine detects the lingering influence of this myth in the way his critics respond to the sack of Rome. In one of his sermons following the sack, he preaches, “For these bitternesses, for these tribulations, dost thou murmur and say, ‘See, all things are perishing in Christian times.’ What complaint is this! God hath not promised that these things shall not perish. . . . They who have promised this to earthly kingdoms have not been guided by truth, but have lied through flattery” (serm. 105.8, 10). In another sermon, he adds, “Did not thy Lord tell thee, the world shall be laid waste? Did not thy Lord tell thee, the world shall fail?” (serm. 81.8). Earthly cities may long outlast their mortal makers, but they too are finite. With Cicero surely not far from his mind, Augustine writes: Man himself, the city’s ornament, man himself, the city’s inhabitant, ruler, governor, comes on this condition that he may go, is born on this condition that he may die, entered into the world on this condition that he may pass away; “Heaven and earth shall pass away”: what wonder then if some time or other there should be an end of a single city? And yet peradventure the city’s end is not come now; yet some time or other come it will. (81.9)

In their more honest moments, even Rome’s best citizens admit this. Augustine suspects that if we pulled Virgil aside, he would confess that he was simply selling words to the Romans. When Virgil speaks in his own voice in the Georgics, Augustine observes, he foretells of “Th’impending ruin of the Roman state” (105.10). Moreover, despite his emphasis upon everlasting cities, Cicero himself concedes that Rome ceased to be a commonwealth long ago, “not through any misfortune, but through our own misdemeanors” (de civ. 2.21).

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Still captive to the fantasy of roma aeterna, however, the Roman refugees in Carthage grieve the fall of their city as if it were an eternal object, as if it were an entity not subject to ruin. They confuse the finite with the infinite, the creaturely with the Creator. They project upon Rome attributes and expectations that are only properly predicated of the one eternal city, the City of God, a city sustained on earth not through self-defense but by faith (22.6). Here we can see Augustine extending to the political realm the lessons he learned from the death of his unnamed friend in the Confessions. Looking back on that episode, Augustine writes, “Woe to the madness which thinks to cherish human beings as though more than human!” (4.7.12); “for how had that sorrow been able so easily to pierce my inmost being, if not because I had poured out my soul into the sand by loving a man doomed to death as though he were never to die?” (4.8.13). The Romans grieve their city in a similar way. Unable to think about Rome in any other terms than the eternal, they do not know how to inhabit their city once its inherent frailty is laid bare. Their grief leads to the same kind of despair that Augustine experienced, one born from a basic denial of death and the refusal to accept the limits of the human condition. Ironically, it is Augustine, the one who emphasizes that all earthly cities will eventually perish, who holds out hope that the end of Rome is not yet: “Perhaps Rome is nor perishing; perhaps she is only scourged, not utterly destroyed; perhaps she is chastened, not brought to nought” (serm. 81.9). In another sermon, he adds, “Let us not then faint, my Brethren: an end there will be to all earthly kingdoms. If that end be now, God knoweth. For peradventure it is not yet, and we, through some infirmity, or mercifulness, or misery, are wishing that it may not be yet” (serm. 105.11). Augustine’s hope for Rome is rooted, paradoxically, in his appreciation of its mortality, in his awareness that it is in the nature of earthly cities to experience periodic decay and ruin. Such ruin need not be taken as a sign of a city’s end. It can be seen as a reflection of its fragility, a sign of its need for continual repair and renewal. Membership in the City of God does not encourage an otherworldly flight or abandonment of such cities, but the opposite: it guards against the despair that sees in fragility an end rather than an ongoing condition. It provides the necessary perspective to see earthly cities for what they are: time-bound communities that require care if they are to endure. 21 It is because Augustine knows that no earthly city is immune to loss that he can return to Rome’s ruins with the expectation that the end is not yet. It is what leads him to believe that there can be another way of responding to Rome’s destruction.

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THE POLITICS OF MOURNING In his discussion of the opening book of the City of God, Garry Wills notes that Augustine begins his “systematic undermining of classical culture’s claims by doing his own little raid on that culture’s prizes.” 22 Specifically, he appropriates the Greco-Roman philosophical genre of the consolatio: “Augustine composes a poignant consolatio for those who were killed, displaced, robbed, or raped in the fall of the ancient city.” 23 Wills emphasizes the particularly Stoic character of Augustine’s appropriation: “He uses the form’s stoic commonplaces—death is common, natural, inevitable, a thing we all must share, must undergo at some time, so no time is better or worse for it. He takes the pagan dictum that what happens to the body is not important, only the mind is precious, and gives it a Christian turn: women raped in Rome’s fall do not lose their chastity.” 24 Wills rightfully frames Book 1 as a consolatio, extending to the City of God recent attempts to read Augustine’s work within the consolatory tradition of Late Antiquity. 25 But Augustine is doing more than giving a Stoic genre a Christian turn. In fact, he challenges many of the Stoic assumptions that underpin it. Here it is helpful to consider Book 1 in light of Augustine’s later critique of Stoicism in 9.4–5 and 14.8–9. 26 In these books, Augustine points out that the Stoics regard grief as one of the four emotional disturbances or passions (perturbationes) that should be avoided. The others include desire, joy, and fear. The Stoic wise man will only feel those emotions (eupatheiai) that conform to right reason. These include “will instead of desire, gladness instead of joy, caution instead of fear” (de civ. 14.8). There is no Stoic equivalent for grief. Augustine explains the reasoning: “grief is occasioned by evil which has already happened; and since [the Stoics] think that no evil can happen to a wise man, they have asserted that there can be no corresponding emotion in a wise man’s mind” (14.8). Why can no evil happen to the wise man? First, given that “sin is not for him a possible contingency,” there is no sin that will “bring him grief in the enduring or the feeling of it” (14.8). Second, the Stoics do not consider such things as material possessions or bodily integrity to be authentic goods, the loss of which would be considered an evil and thus something worth grieving: “the Stoics refuse to give the name ‘goods’ to what they call material and external ‘advantages.’ According to them there is no ‘good’ for man except virtue, meaning the art of the good life, which exists only in the soul” (9.4). Given that the wise man cannot lose this good, he will never have occasion for grief. “What they are saying then comes to this—that only a wise man can have will, gladness, and caution, while a fool can only experience desire, joy, fear, and grief” (14.8). Augustine counters by arguing that surely it is the fool who thinks we can ever reach a state completely free of sin. “If we say that there is no sin in us,”

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Augustine cites 1 John 1:8, “we are fooling ourselves, and we are remote from the truth” (14.9). For Augustine, we will never lack occasions to grieve our sins. Nor will we lack occasions to grieve the sins of others: “Besides this, it is not only on their own account that the citizens are moved by these feelings; they also feel them on account of those whose liberation they desire, while they fear that they may perish; they feel pain if they do perish, and feel gladness if they are set free” (14.9). As Sarah Byers notes, Augustine thinks the Stoics are fundamentally inconsistent on this score: while they are concerned with their own virtue, they give no reason for their lack of concern for the virtue of others. 27 That the sage “never does anything wrong,” Byers observes, “is irrelevant to the question of grief over others’ moral failures.” 28 “Augustine thinks the Stoics are trying to avoid pain caused by involvement with others. . . . They have a fear of intimacy, because of the vulnerability to pain that it brings.” 29 As for the loss of material advantages, Augustine argues that the Stoics’ own actions testify against them. He cites the story of the Stoic philosopher in Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights who is tossed about a ship on a stormy sea and is overcome with fear. When the storm subsides, the philosopher defends himself by suggesting that what matters is not whether we feel such emotions but whether we consent to them. Augustine draws a different conclusion: “For, to be sure, if the philosopher in the anecdote had attached no importance to all that he felt he was going to lose in the shipwreck, including his life, and his material existence, he would not have dreaded the danger to the point of betraying his fear by turning pale” (de civ. 9.4). Augustine makes a similar point in 19.4 when he suggests that if the Stoics do not regard the loss of material advantages as grievous, then why would they consider suicide a rational means of responding to the miseries of this life? 30 When pressed, even the Stoics have to admit that material advantages are goods, and thus grievable. For Augustine, weeping at the loss of such goods is an expression of rightly ordered emotion and sound moral judgment. He notes how Jesus himself “shed tears when he was about to awaken Lazarus” and that “his soul was grieved” at the approach of his passion (14.9). Augustine goes on to name a number of other losses that are worthy of our grief. On the death of friends, he observes, “For if their life brought us the consoling delights of friendship, how could it be that their death should bring us no sadness? Anyone who forbids such sadness must forbid, if he can, all friendly conversation, must lay a ban on all friendly feeling or put a stop to it, must with a ruthless insensibility break the ties of all human relationships” (19.8). It is the moral recognition of the value of friendship that makes us respond to betrayal with “grievous anguish” (19.5). He adds that the news that our friends may have suffered “famine, war, disease, or captivity” justly “ravages our hearts” with “a burning sorrow” (19.8). Yet it is not just the suffering of

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our friends that warrants our grief. Augustine speaks of the torture of innocent suspects as “something to be bewailed, and, if it were possible, washed away by floods of tears” (19.6). 31 Having already spoken at length about the importance of mourning Rome’s calamitous civil wars, he further insists that even those who wage just wars will not lack occasions for grief: Surely, if he remembers that he is a human being, he will rather lament the fact that he is faced with the necessity of waging just wars; for if they were not just, he would not have to engage in them, and consequently there would be no wars for a wise man. . . . And so everyone who reflects with sorrow on such grievous evils, in all their horror and cruelty, must acknowledge the misery of them. And yet a man who experiences such evils, or even thinks about them, without heartfelt grief, is assuredly in a far more pitiable condition, if he thinks himself happy simply because he has lost all human feeling. (19.7)

In concluding his critique of the Stoics, Augustine writes, “To be indignant with the sinner with a view to his correction, to feel sorrow for the afflicted with a view to his release from suffering, to be afraid for one in danger so as to prevent his death—those are emotions which, as far as I can see, no sane judgment could reprove” (9.5). Returning to Book 1, we see that Augustine’s consolatio begins not with a Stoic dismissal of loss, but an acknowledgment that the death, captivity, torture, theft, and other harms suffered during the sack of Rome are “temporal evils” (1.8) and “calamities” (1.9) that merit consolation. As Melanie Webb points out, the literary genre of consolatio typically extended only to the themes of exile and bereavement. 32 In applying this genre to a wider range of harms, Webb claims that Augustine is contesting those cultural conventions that prematurely circumscribe grievable loss within a limited class of injuries. Nowhere is Augustine more subversive of such boundaries, Webb argues, than in the case of rape. From the theaters in Carthage, Augustine’s critics hurl insults at women who were raped, calling their chastity into question. They turn the occasion of their suffering into a juridical examination: “our adversaries imagine themselves to be charging Christians with a great crime” (1.16). It becomes clear from Augustine’s discussion of the most famous rape in Roman history, the rape of Lucretia and her subsequent suicide, that Roman society is accustomed to placing the burden of proof upon victims. Describing Lucretia’s position, he writes, “If she remained alive she would be thought to have enjoyed suffering the violence that she had suffered when she lived. Hence, she judged that she must use self-punishment to exhibit the state of her mind to the eyes of men to whom she could not show her conscience” (1.19, Dyson). Augustine wonders if the posthumous praise that the Romans lavish upon Lucretia does not in fact hide its inhospitality to her suffering and failure to create living space through which she might have worked through

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her grief. Rather than an occasion for praise, her suicide testifies once more to a society incapable of acknowledging loss. In Webb’s words, her death “reflects the infirmity, not the virtue, of her society’s notion of shame.” 33 Augustine condemns such inhumane truth procedures and argues that those who were raped during the sack have nothing to prove: “Within themselves, indeed, by the testimony of their own conscience, they have the glory of chastity. Moreover, they have it in the sight of God, and they require nothing more” (1.19, Dyson). But this is not an occasion for argument, Augustine insists. He writes, “Here we are not so much concerned to answer the attacks of those outside as to administer consolation to those within our fellowship” (1.16). Webb explains the significance of this shift: “No philosopher prior to Augustine had ever taken note of rape as an occasion warranting consolation, for example, as an experience that occasions grief and requires encouragement and support in order that the survivor might continue to live with the dignity that characterized her life prior to the loss.” 34 To extend consolation to rape unmasks Rome’s propriety as a form of exclusion. It challenges a social order that fails to provide a path forward for victims of such violence. Webb continues: Due to the exemplary traditions preceding and surrounding Augustine and his audience, his consolation cannot simply be an exhortation to rape-survivors to re-orient themselves within a society that regards them with shaming suspicion. It must also be an admonition to civil leaders to re-orient society toward rape-survivors as dignified women without requiring “proof” of innocence. Augustine initiates his project of social criticism through the genre of consolation. 35

Here the political implications of Augustine’s emphasis on grief come into sharper view. In mourning situations of rape and other instances of loss, he is challenging the boundaries that would exclude such crimes from the domain of public grievability. He is not simply marking such violations as losses that affect individuals or particular groups, but registering them as collective losses, offenses that diminish the entire political community. They are public wounds, making a claim upon the wider society to respond. Throughout Book 1, Augustine repeatedly draws attention to the fact that Christian and pagan alike suffered the same afflictions. Members of both communities were taken into captivity, lost possessions, and were deprived burial, among other injuries. In this sense, the sack of Rome was a “universal catastrophe,” one in which good and evil were “afflicted equally” (1.9). Both communities also experienced the same mercies, as Christians and pagans found sanctuary in the shrines of the martyrs and the basilicas of the apostles (1.1). This image of two communities mixed together, sharing blessing and woe, stays with Augustine, as it becomes the basis for the way he conceives

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the relation between the two cities. At the end of Book 1, he writes, “In truth, those two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgment” (1.35). 36 Augustine will later explain in Book 19 that the two cities commingle because they share the same needs of this common mortal life. 37 Defined by two different loves and two different destinies, they nonetheless pursue the same earthly peace as they sojourn together. In Book 1, Augustine is focused upon another dimension of this commingling: the shared challenge of picking up the pieces when this earthly peace is shattered. In the aftermath of the sack of Rome, both communities bear the same scars. They share the same ruins. As in the case of their common mortal needs, they distinguish themselves by how they respond. If citizens of the earthly city respond through strategies of disavowal—abandoning ruins for the theaters, privatizing collective loss by projecting it upon their enemies, reviving illusions of immortality and invulnerability—citizens of the heavenly city respond by grieving these losses as their own. They return to the ruins in the expectation that the end is not yet. They “sympathize with the suffering,” “bear the weak,” and allow their “hospitality and good works to abound” (serm. 81.9). Where the earthly city sees victims, the pilgrim city sees signs of enduring agency. Those who have lost possessions still possess riches (de civ. 1.10); those who have been taken into captivity do not lack the presence of God (1.10); and those who have been raped retain their chastity and dignity (1.17). As it sojourns alongside the earthly city in the ruins of Rome, the City of God helps Roman society come to the truth about its fragility, while also challenging it to see in this fragility the basis of a shared future. It points this society to its common ruins, in the hope that such ruins might become common objects of love. The theme of common objects of love, of course, plays a central role in Augustine’s famous discussion of how best to define and evaluate political societies in Book 19. 38 Having determined that only the City of God can truly satisfy Cicero’s definition of a people as a multitude “united in association by a common sense of right and community of interest” (19.21), 39 Augustine advances a second, seemingly more relaxed definition. He defines a people as “a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love” (19.24). Scholars have long divided over how to interpret this shift, with some concluding that he is offering a more “realist” account of political society while others argue that he is only extending the critical force of the preceding discussion. 40 While I cannot do adequate justice to this debate here, two points are relevant for our discussion. First, in framing the question of political society in terms of the objects of our love, Augustine is directing our attention to the inherently social dimension of our affections. As Eric Gregory observes, “one of the great achievements of Augustine’s City of God was its capacity to frame moral anthropology as social philosophy.” 41 By loving, we are inevitably drawn into the

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world and into particular communities, irrespective of the moral quality of the objects we choose. 42 The earthly city, united by its agreement to love self and glory, is no less a people than the city of God, united by its agreement to love God and neighbor. The same principle applies to specific societies such as Rome, Greece, or Assyria (19.24). This does not mean, however, that Augustine is indifferent to the objects that such societies choose to love. This connects to the second point. His revised definition provides a basis for making moral discriminations between different political communities: “the better the objects of this agreement, the better the people; the worse the objects of this love, the worse the people” (19.24). When we analyze Rome through the lens of its loves, we see that its desire for glory and lust for domination end up providing a superficial form of social cohesion and security, which as we have observed, eventually unravels under the weight of luxury, avarice, discord, and civil war. The love for glory in turn blinds such a society to the losses it inflicts upon others and prevents it from tending the wounds of its own people. It fails to discern the proper objects of its love. Here we come back to the political consequences of its failure to grieve. Unable to mourn, it cannot perceive those losses it shares in common; it cannot see the particular wounds that demand its collective response. It chooses the wrong objects, and in the process, a less public, less common life. The society that grieves, however, is the society that can perceive what has been lost. In mourning, it comes to discover those objects that are worthy of its love. By making the wounds of victims its common concern, such a society becomes more genuinely public. It becomes a better people. In considering why Augustine opts for this revised definition, it may be helpful to recall Cicero’s observation, mentioned above, that Rome ceased to be a people when it fell into a state of moral ruin. This conclusion follows naturally from his definition of a commonwealth, which requires the presence of “a sound and just government” (2.21) in order for a people to be a people at all. Yet his conclusion also betrays a deeper sense of despair. On his idealist conception of a commonwealth, politics becomes a matter of all or nothing: either a government observes justice or it ceases to exist. There is no in between, no room for self-examination, re-assessment, or social change. Cicero can acknowledge political failure, but he cannot envision politics as a sphere in which a people might actually work through it. He cannot reconcile the idea of citizenship with grief. Augustine’s revised definition may be more “realist” in that it concedes that all earthly political communities will fall short of true justice, but it shares nothing of Cicero’s despair. It sees political community as an ongoing project in time. This opens the possibility of social criticism and the potential for reform. 43 Hence Augustine’s message in the aftermath of the sack of Rome is not doom, but “Awake!” “Choose now which course to follow, so that you may receive men’s praise without illusion” (2.29). Rome has within its own history moral

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exemplars who have chosen better objects, individuals who have made its losses the objects of their devotion, none greater than the Horatian woman who mourned her betrothed across the battle lines of kin and country. Rome also has, journeying alongside it, the City of God, whose love of God and neighbor raises different objects to its attention. It offers Rome’s victims, its shattered lives and broken institutions, as objects worthy of its love. It helps Rome to see that its security and cohesion rest not in denying loss or chasing a phantom immortality, but in acknowledging its fragility, binding its wounds, and repairing its ruins. AUGUSTINIAN LESSONS FOR TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE In this essay, we have explored how Augustine’s views on grief shape his critique of Roman society and his constructive vision of political community. Far from denying the importance of worldly loss, Augustine seeks to overcome precisely those strategies of disavowal that would elide the legacy of injustice and foreclose the possibility of mourning it. The capacity to grieve is for him an essential marker of virtuous citizenship, what enables a society to recognize its deepest wounds, identify modes of repair, and come to a fuller realization of those goods that are truly worth loving. In concluding, it is worth considering what lessons Augustine’s views on the politics of mourning might offer those responding to the legacy of political violence today. Recent years have seen an extraordinary surge of interest and activism around the question of how deeply divided societies should deal with the past, which has generated a number of innovative transitional justice mechanisms in conflict zones across the world. 44 Whether through truth commissions, ad hoc criminal tribunals, reparations, or other instruments, states and civil society groups have sought to combat precisely the kind of official amnesia and denial that so troubled Augustine. Rare now is the peacebuilding strategy that fails to include some measure aimed at acknowledging past abuses and providing survivors with a forum for expressing their grievances. At the same time, such initiatives have not been without their critics. Several observers have drawn attention to the strategic role these mechanisms play in the broader process of nation-building and express concern that the needs of victims are often subordinated to the wider ends of state relegitimation. While not discounting the important success of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Richard Wilson has questioned the discourse of “national healing” that surrounded it, arguing that this not only exaggerated what the commission could accomplish, but subtly pressured victims to sacrifice their legal rights in the process. 45 This in turn prevented a more searching examination of the deeper structural reforms that

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post-apartheid South African society required. Countries that have opted for a more retributive approach have faced their own struggles. Charges of “victor’s justice” have been raised against the costly International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which, as many critics have pointed out, has focused almost exclusively upon offenses committed by Hutu perpetrators and neglected crimes committed by the Tutsi forces currently in power. The recently established International Criminal Court has sought to apply a more even standard in other conflicts, but thus far has succeeded only in prosecuting leaders of rebel movements and proven unable to hold state actors accountable. More broadly, critics express the concern that transitional justice mechanisms are increasingly applied as a one-size-fits-all template across conflicts, ignoring the particularities of different settings and minimizing the importance of local actors, especially those groups representing the needs of survivors. Thus many have pushed for a more victim-based, human rightscentered approach to transitional justice, one that combats cultures of impunity through a stricter enforcement of the rule of law. In responding to the violence of his own day, Augustine also directed his society’s attention to the needs of victims. He too sought to expose the ways that such needs were often sacrificed in the name of the “republic.” Yet at the same time, Augustine remained invested in the basic question of what kind of people will emerge from the ruins of political devastation, and here his work may offer its most important contribution to contemporary conversations about transitional justice. An emphasis upon due process and the rights of the individual helps to correct a narrow focus upon statebuilding, but it can risk abandoning prematurely the broader question of what social bonds shall tie these individuals together. Augustine’s account suggests that our very capacity to meet the needs of victims depends upon a deeper conversation about what goods a society will hold in common. This requires taking stock of those ruins that everyone shares and which each citizen has a stake in repairing: those ravaged public places and broken civic institutions that transcend faction and upon which all depend for their livelihood. It entails coming to see how the effects of individual injuries are not self-contained, but rupture the deeper relationships and bonds of trust that are a precondition for everyone’s flourishing. What Augustine points us to are the boundaries by which we grieve, and the importance of expanding these boundaries beyond our own communities to those from whom we have been alienated, seeing in their suffering a cause for our grief, in their loss a whole society’s loss. In agreeing to make these wounds the object of their collective concern, a multitude becomes a people again. The contours of a shared future become visible. In focusing our attention on how a society grieves, Augustine brings us back to the role of the affections. As Daniel Philpott argues, building lasting cultures of peace entails constructing strong legal frameworks and institu-

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tions, but it also involves transforming dispositions and cultivating virtues. 46 While truth commissions and criminal tribunals play an important role in effecting such change, Philpott points to the no less important role of civil society, particularly churches and other religious groups. “Though civil society organizations lack the official imprimatur to carry out practices such as punishment, reparations, or building just institutions, they are often better equipped than states for practices that involve the transformation of emotions and attitudes.” 47 He highlights how they mediate local acts of forgiveness, help reintegrate offenders, and offer support for those dealing with trauma and other effects of violence. Through these and other practices, they address the emotional impact of conflict and help motivate a deeper commitment to peace. In a similar vein, Fiona Ross has argued that while truth commissions offer a valuable public forum for testimony and healing, we should not overlook the importance of those forms of grieving that take place at local levels. 48 After the commission hearings have ended, the long-term task of picking up the shattered pieces of ordinary life remains. For Ross, we work through our grief as we re-enter our homes and workplaces and attempt to reweave the torn fabric of our relationships with spouses, children, co-workers, and neighbors. Such grieving may not always be spoken aloud, but it performs the slow work of reconstituting the moral boundaries that violence has disrupted. It is upon such moral labor, Ross suggests, that the broader social order depends. Seen from this light, the work of mourning is not limited to a transitional period in the life of the state, but is an ongoing task that falls to every citizen. Such is the spirit of Augustine’s own understanding of the relationship between grief and citizenship. To share in the sorrow of the bereaved, to comfort those who have suffered bodily injury, to offer hospitality to the dispossessed—for Augustine, these are the concrete acts through which we learn to become citizens. In mourning, he suggests, we take ownership for our society’s injustices and assume responsibility for remedying them; through our tears, we measure the worth of those goods that we have lost and signal our commitment to restoring them. The life of citizenship offers the common context, the shared time in which we work through our losses and learn to unite our wills around a fragile common world that requires our love if it is to endure. NOTES 1. Plangenda sunt haec, non miranda, et exclamandum ad Deum, ut non secundum merita nostra. sed secundum misericordiam suam a tantis malis liberet nos—“These things should make us weep, but not wonder; and we ought to cry unto God that not for our merit, but according to His mercy, He may deliver us from so great evils” (ep. 111.2, translated by J.G. Cunningham, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, 433–436).

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2. See Gerard O’Daly’s helpful discussion of Augustine’s correspondence with Victorianus in Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 31–32. Melanie Webb also draws attention to the importance of this correspondence, exploring its import for Augustine’s views on rape. See her “Rape and the testimonium conscientiae in City of God I.19,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the North American Patristics Society, Chicago, IL, May 24, 2013. 3. PL 40, 718, cited in Rudolph Arbesmann, O.S.A, “The Idea of Rome in the Sermons of St. Augustine,” Augustiniana 4 (1954) 324. For a full English translation, see “The sacking of the city of Rome,” in Robert Dodaro, ed. Augustine: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 205–214. 4. In the preface to his commentary on Ezekiel, St. Jerome writes, “But when the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city, ‘I became dumb and humbled myself, and kept silence from good words, but my grief broke out afresh, my heart glowed within me, and while I meditated the fire was kindled’ (Ps. 39.2–3).” 5. St. Augustine, City of God (London: Penguin Books, 2003 [427]), trans. Henry Bettenson. All translations below are from Bettenson, unless otherwise noted. 6. See, among others, William Werpehowski, “Weeping at the Death of Dido: Sorrow, Virtue, and Augustine’s Confessions,” Journal of Religious Ethics 19:1 (1991) 175–191. 7. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” in Augustine’s Confessions: Critical Essays, ed. William E. Mann (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) 108. 8. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 552. Nussbaum is drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s critique of Augustine in her doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Love in St. Augustine, eds. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1929]). 9. Paul Helm, “Augustine’s Griefs,” in Augustine’s Confessions: Critical Essays, 148. For a similar reading, see Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) 31. 10. Paul J. Griffiths, “Tears and Weeping: An Augustinian View,” in Faith, Rationality, and the Passions, ed. Sarah Coakley (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2012) 19–28. 11. Griffiths, “Tears and Weeping,” 25. 12. Josef Lössl, “Augustine’s Confessions as a Consolation of Philosophy,” in “In Search of Truth”: Augustine, Manichaeism and other Gnosticism, eds. Jacob Albert van den Berg et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011) 166. See also “Continuity and Transformation of Ancient Consolation in Augustine of Hippo,” in Greek and Roman Consolations: Eight Studies of a Tradition and its Afterlife, ed. Han Baltussen (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2013) 153–175. 13. James Wetzel, Augustine: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2010) 11–43. 14. Wetzel, Guide for the Perplexed, 21. 15. See, among others, Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Jennifer Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Joshua Hordern, Political Affections: Civic Participation and Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 16. See Gregory’s discussion of this scene in Politics and the Order of Love, 282–283. See also Jennifer Herdt, “The theater of the virtues: Augustine’s critique of pagan mimesis,” in James Wetzel, ed. Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 111–129. This extends her discussion of Augustine’s critique of theater in Putting on Virtue, 61–66. 17. Herdt, “Theater of the Virtues,” 112. 18. Herdt, “Theater of the Virtues,” 113. 19. Robert Dodaro calls attention to the way Augustine critiques Rome for its repression of “dangerous memories.” See “Eloquent Lies, Just Wars and the Politics of Persuasion: Reading Augustine’s City of God in a ‘Postmodern’ World,” Augustinian Studies 25 (1994) 77–138. See also Jonathan Tran’s discussion of Augustine and political memory in, “The Sorrow and the Exile: Trinity, Memory, and Return,” in The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory: Time and Eternity in the Far Country (London: Wiley-Blackwell 2010) 94–119.

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20. Unless otherwise noted, excerpts from Augustine’s sermons here and below come from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6, trans. R. G. MacMullen. 21. See Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987) 55–72. 22. Garry Wills, Saint Augustine (New York: Penguin, 1999) 114. 23. Wills, Saint Augustine, 114. 24. Wills, Saint Augustine, 114. 25. See notes 12 and 13 above. For more background on the ancient consolatory tradition, see Donovan J. Ochs, Consolatory Rhetoric: Grief, Symbol, and Ritual in the Greco-Roman Era (Columbia, SC: University of South Caroline Press, 1993); Thorsten Fögen, ed. Tears in the Graeco-Roman World (New York: Walter de Gruyter Press, 2009); Han Baltussen, ed. Greek and Roman Consolations: Eight Studies of a Tradition and Its Afterlife (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2013), and Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). 26. In what follows I draw upon Wetzel’s discussion of Augustine and the Stoics in Augustine: Guide for the Perplexed, 11–43; Sarah Byers, “The Psychology of Compassion: Stoicism in City of God 9.5,” in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. James Wetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 130–148; and Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 287–291. 27. Byers, “The Psychology of Compassion,” 138 28. Byers, “The Psychology of Compassion,” 138. 29. Byers, “The Psychology of Compassion,” 139. 30. Augustine writes, “I am astounded at the effrontery of the Stoics in their contention that those ills are not ills at all, when they admit that if they should be so great that a wise man cannot or ought not to endure them, he is forced to put himself to death and to depart from this life” (19.4). 31. As a further example of the difference between Augustine and the Stoics on this score, Byers points to his discussion of human trafficking in a letter written in 428 (ep.10*). She observes, “The difference between Augustine and the Stoics very clearly lies in Augustine’s statement that the trafficking of free people is a real ‘evil that has befallen Africa,’ one meriting grief: on hearing about the misfortunes of these people, ‘hardly one of us could restrain his tears’” (Byers, 142). 32. Melanie Webb, “‘On Lucretia who slew herself’: Rape and Consolation in Augustine’s De ciuitate dei,” Augustinian Studies 44:1 (2013) 55. 33. Webb, “‘On Lucretia who slew herself,’” 43. 34. Webb, “‘On Lucretia who slew herself,’” 57. 35. Webb, “‘On Lucretia who slew herself,’” 57. 36. He echoes the point in Book 11, observing that the two cites are “interwoven in this present transitory world, and mingled with one another” (11.1). 37. He writes, “Thus both kinds of men and both kinds of households alike make use of the things essential for this mortal life; but each has its own very different end in making use of them” (19.17). 38. See Oliver O’Donovan’s helpful discussion in Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2002). See also his essay, “The Political Thought of City of God 19,” in Bonds of Imperfection (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing 2004) 48–72. 39. As Augustine explains, Cicero, through the voice of Scipio, defines a commonwealth as the “weal of the people” and a people as a multitude “united in association by a common sense of right and community of interest” (19.21). On his view, “where there is no true justice there can be no right,” and where there is no right, there can be no agreement on right. Following the logic through, without agreement on right, there can be no people, and without a people, there can be no weal of the people, and thus no commonwealth. If justice assigns everyone his due and Rome takes its citizens away from worship of the true God, then Rome from its inception has failed to give God his due and has never been just, and thus has never been a commonwealth.

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40. See Gregory’s summary of this debate in Politics and the Order of Love, 50–52. Robert Markus offers the most well-known realist reading in Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). For examples of the opposing view, see Williams, “Politics and the Soul” and Gregory Lee, “Republics and their Loves: Rereading City of God 19,” Modern Theology 27:4 (October 2011) 553–581. 41. Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 50. 42. Oliver O’Donovan observes, “For Augustine the love that forms communities is undetermined with respect to its object, and so also undetermined with respect to its moral quality” (Common Objects of Love, 22). 43. Gregory draws attention to the way this revised definition informs contemporary Augustinian social criticism: “Taking up Augustine’s invitation to view a ‘people’ in terms of their objects of love, Augustinian liberals have engaged in immanent criticism of a variety of social practices and institutions that jeopardize the dignity of the human person and the goals of justice and peace.” See Politics and the Order of Love, 51. 44. In this vast literature, Daniel Philpott’s Just and Unjust Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) stands out. See also his edited volume, with Gerard F. Powers, Strategies of Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The politics of mourning has been an area of growing interest in recent political theory as well. Particularly helpful for my thinking in this essay has been David McIvor, “Bringing Ourselves to Grief: Judith Butler and the Politics of Mourning,” Political Theory 40:4 (2012) 409–436. 45. See Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor (New York: Owl Books, 1997) 164–190. 46. Philpott, Just and Unjust Peace, 82–88. 47. Philpott, Just and Unjust Peace, 11. 48. Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (London: Pluto Press, 2002). See also Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) esp. 205–221.

Chapter Thirteen

Augustine and Social Justice in Calvin’s Biblical Commentaries Matthew J. Pereira

CALVIN AS A STUDENT OF AUGUSTINE AND THE CHURCH FATHERS John Calvin was a student of Augustine and the Church Fathers. 1 From the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) onward, Calvin declared that the Protestant Reformers had faithfully proclaimed the ancient witness of the Church Fathers. 2 In claiming the continuity with the past, Calvin was countering the frequent charge that Protestantism represented a novel religion. In his response to these accusations of ingenuity, Calvin portrayed the Reformers as master interpreters of the Church Fathers. In an erudite letter addressed to Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, Calvin declared that the Protestant Reformers were better acquainted with the Church Fathers than their Catholic counterparts. 3 Furthermore, in the Reply to Sadoleto, Calvin asserted that the Scriptures remained outside the realm of human judgment, 4 and thus were privileged over tradition, 5 but he also gave due honor to the Church Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils. 6 In his Reply to Sadoleto and throughout his lifetime, Calvin challenged the authority of the Catholic Church by declaring that the Protestant Reformers stood in greater agreement with late antiquity than their rivals. 7 Calvin’s knowledge of the Church Fathers was wide ranging. In his Reply to Sadoleto, Calvin mentioned John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea of the Eastern tradition, then Cyrpian, Ambrose and Augustine of the Western tradition. Calvin often referenced the Church Fathers within his doctrinal treatises, biblical commentaries and other writings (e.g., his letters). He cites Augustine more frequently than any other Church 227

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Father. 8 On this point, Calvin is well within the normative patterns of the reception of the Church Fathers. Augustine emerged as the eminent Church Father of the Western Church by the sixteenth century. Calvin believed that the Protestant Reformation represented a repristinating of Augustine’s theology. On occasion, Calvin understood his theology to be a mere paraphrasing of Augustine’s teachings. 9 This present essay contributes to the theme of this volume, Augustine and social justice, by addressing one of the lacunas within the appraisals of Calvin’s reception of Augustine. This assessment reexamines Calvin’s employment of Augustine in the construction of a Reformed theology of social justice. In this study, the term social justice will be used in reference to interrelated teachings and practices that promoted a righteous, fair and equitable society, both in the church, in the public or civic square, and within personal lives. Calvin’s interpretation and appropriation of Augustine’s writings was complex, which means it remains a difficult task to make outright conclusions when it comes to the question of influence. Calvin’s method in the citation and the interpretation of the Church Fathers has been examined in a number of valuable scholarly contributions. 10 One prevailing conclusion from these studies is that in the sixteenth century, many of the frequent citations and the references to the writings of Augustine were often incomplete and deformed. 11 Calvin is an exception to this rule inasmuch as he aimed at exactitude when referencing Augustine. 12 Calvin’s frequent appeals to Augustine should not be taken as irrefutable evidence that demonstrate he read these works in their entirety. Furthermore, Calvin’s citation of Augustine does not always lead to real influence. 13 Calvin cited Augustine for a variety of reasons, only one being that he had enjoyed a firsthand reading of these sources. In the Institutes and his other dogmatic treatises, Calvin frequently appealed to the Church Fathers to assert authority. 14 Calvin’s numerous citations give the impression of one who enjoyed immediate access and firsthand familiarity with these writings. However, Calvin engaged to some degree in rhetorical misdirection, for he did not always have access to the actual writings of the Church Fathers that he cited with full confidence. In accord with the Christian humanist tradition, Calvin believed that the writings of the Church Fathers should be read within their entirety rather than as excerpts, collated into collections of topical anthologies. 15 However, Calvin did not always enjoy direct access to the writings of the Church Fathers. In the early stages of his pastoral career, Calvin would often cite from Augustine without any mention of the title of the respective work, whereas later, when he acquired more of the original writings, he began to note the treatises from which the quotations were excerpted. After his final return to the pastorate in Geneva (1541), Calvin frequently cited the specific writings of Augustine when he referenced his teachings. 16

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AUGUSTINE AND CALVIN ON SOCIAL JUSTICE Several scholarly contributions have explored Augustine’s influence upon the theology of Calvin. There are strong correlations between the theologies of Calvin and Augustine, such as their equally fervent defense of the sovereignty of God and the doctrine of predestination. 17 A number of scholars have assessed the common ground shared between Calvin and Augustine. However, there are still under-evaluated theological concerns that warrant further investigation. There remains little analysis of Calvin’s theological appropriation of Augustine in the formation of a Reformed theology of social justice. Of course, there have been several valuable studies on Calvin’s social ethics. 18 For the most part, these assessments gesture towards some influence, but the general sentiment is that Calvin developed his social ethics without much direct guidance from Augustine’s teachings. Indeed, Calvin draws from the teachings of Augustine with less frequency than normal when it comes to his discussions on social justice in the public square. One explanation for this lack of engagement may be that Augustine rarely addressed social equity in any direct way within his writings, although his teachings on law and justice do relate to this issue. Augustine primarily located true justice (iustitia) in the City of God; however, he admits space for the temporal justice that acts as a vestige of the former (true) justice in the earthly city. 19 There are tensions in Augustine’s understanding of social justice, for he believes that the eternal and true justice parallels the earthbound forms of justice, but it (i.e., true justice) also transcends them (i.e., earthly modes of justice). 20 Calvin may have avoided directly taking on Augustine’s teachings on social justice because of these unresolved tensions. Calvin, after all, did not perceive or maintain the ambiguities between the heavenly and the secular modalities of justice—at least, not to the degree or extent witnessed within Augustine’s writings. Nicholas Wolterstorff offers one of the few focused comparisons of Augustine and Calvin’s theologies of social justice. Wolterstorff argues that Calvin had broken from Augustine when it came to the issue of social justice. In his careful assessment, Wolterstorff provocatively describes Calvin’s theology of divine grief—and by extension, social justice—as anti-Augustinian in its orientation. He asserts that Augustine created a sharp distinction between eternal and temporal justice; thereafter he concludes that this dichotomy stood in stark opposition to Calvin’s worldview. In a moment of provocation, Wolterstorff declares that “to understand Calvin’s theology of the tears of the social victim and to appreciate its boldness, we must discern his anti-Stoical and anti-Augustinian view of the place of grief in human existence.” 21 Wolterstorff moves from the issue of human grief to social justice, where at every point, he accentuates differences between Calvin and Augustine’s theologies of social justice. He contends that Calvin’s understanding of

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the imago Dei was central to his theology of social relations. Calvin believed that each human being mirrors God; therefore, each one of us should delight in this deep kinship with one another. In light of Calvin’s theology of the imago Dei, Wolterstorff concludes that there stands a strong corollary between human and divine suffering: To inflict injury on a fellow human being is to wound God himself, it is to cause God himself to suffer. Behind and beneath the social misery of our world is the suffering of God. If we truly believed that, suggests Calvin, we would be much more reluctant than we are to participate in the victimizing of the poor and the oppressed and the assaulted of the world. To pursue justice is to relieve God’s suffering. 22

Wolterstorff interprets Calvin’s theology of social justice as one grounded in the suffering of God. This claim, in its own right, is a provocative one that warrants further investigation. It is not entirely clear as to how far one could insert theopaschism into Calvin’s theological program. There is often a balancing act whenever any theologian reflects upon the central mystery of divine suffering. Calvin’s understanding of divine suffering warrants further scholarly attention, but this issue goes beyond the scope of this study. 23 Wolterstorff contrasts Augustine’s Neoplatonic understanding of God as the Absolute One, who is removed from earthly societies and their concerns, to Calvin’s model of social justice, which depicts a loving God who grieves the injustices in this world. Wolterstorff argues that Augustine was far too influenced by Greek notions of divine impassibility and apatheia, which thus caused him to focus less on suffering in the present moment and more on the soul’s divine ascent. 24 Wolterstorff concludes that Augustine perceived this material world as useful, inasmuch as it aided humanity upwards towards God. 25 Augustine was this escapist who desired nothing more than to leave this world for the heavenly abode, whereas Bruce Gordon asserts that Calvin always turned his attention to justice in the temporal community. 26 This study challenges, or at the very least, nuances Wolterstorff’s conclusions. An analysis of Calvin’s biblical commentaries illustrates affinities between the Reformer and Augustine’s theology of social justice. Wolterstorff rightly emphasizes that Calvin’s theology of social justice demands that individuals fully participate in the civic and ecclesiastical spheres. In agreement with Wolterstorff’s conclusions, Douglass Ottati asserts that “the particular worldview put forward by Calvin and others insists that we participate in civil society.” 27 Calvin believed that a just society would never be fully attained here on earth because of human corruption; nonetheless, civic institutions and agents were called upon to build a just social order, albeit in a partial and incomplete form. The perfect and just society always remained unrealized, even though one always aspired towards it. Calvin called Christians to engage and transform social structures more so than Augustine ever

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had done during his career as a bishop. However, in spite of the claims of Wolterstorff, Calvin’s notion of divine grief—and by consequence, social justice—were not entirely anti-Augustinian. On the topic of social justice, Calvin’s orientation towards Augustine was far more complex than Wolterstorff’s account has borne out. Calvin believed that Augustine’s theology of divine mercy stood in agreement with his own. He never saw Augustine as the archenemy of social justice. Augustine’s legacy underwent a thorough process of refinement and distillation throughout the medieval ages and into the European Reformation. Augustine was held in sacred memory within the Latin Church, but his teachings were debated and recast from one generation to the next of theological commentators. Augustine was not once and for all the same theologian for each generation. Calvin’s reception of Augustine’s teachings reflected the broader patterns within the Protestant tradition, which entailed the acceptance, rejection, and adaptation of his teachings. Calvin’s reception of Augustine was reflective of this Western tradition, which honored the Church Father without wholly accepting his teachings. Wolterstorff has failed properly to appreciate Calvin as a virtuoso, who did not reject Augustine’s reflections on social justice and divine grief, but rather carefully gleaned from his teachings in order to press them into service for the Genevan community. AUGUSTINE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN CALVIN’S BIBLICAL COMMENTARIES This present study focuses on Calvin’s appropriation and interpretation of Augustine in his (i.e., Calvin’s) biblical commentaries. The focus of this present assessment is on those issues related to social justice in a broadly construed manner. Calvin wrote commentaries on almost every book of the Bible. 28 In his biblical commentaries, more so than his theological or doctrinal treatises, he quotes from the Church Fathers in order to disagree with them (rather than to employ them as sources of authority). 29 In keeping with Christian humanism, Calvin returned to the original biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek. Calvin also returned to the ancient sources—that is, the Church Fathers—who had interpreted the Scriptures. He believed that the Church Fathers stood in agreement with Protestant theological commitments, which were grounded in the Scriptures. Of course, Calvin made the Scriptures normative for Christian doctrine over and against the Church Fathers. He agreed that the Church Fathers’ teachings often conformed to the biblical witness. In his Reply to Sadoleto, Calvin alluded to the perceived failings of the Catholic Church, which included a departure and perversion of the Church Fathers and the Scriptures. Calvin understood his mission as a leading Protestant to rescue the Church Fathers and the Scriptures from what he

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saw as the misrepresentations of the Catholic Church. In his biblical commentaries, Calvin engaged in this task of reclaiming the Church Fathers and Scriptures, which included the establishment of a Gospel-centered social ethic. By the time Calvin published his first biblical commentary (i.e., his Commentary on Romans in 1540), some notable contemporaries (e.g., Philip Melanchthon, Heinrich Bullinger, and Martin Bucer) had already produced their own contributions. Calvin worked out his interpretation of the Scriptures in conversation with his contemporaries and the patristic tradition. Calvin understood himself to be within a broader tradition of biblical interpretation that reached back to Origen and up to his fellow Protestant Reformers. 30 In his biblical commentaries, Calvin often turned to Augustine as a kindred spirit who had also dared to wrestle with the Scriptures. CALVIN’S INTERPRETATION OF AUGUSTINE ON THEMES RELATED TO SOCIAL JUSTICE This assessment of Calvin’s appropriation and interpretation of Augustine begins with points where the two theologians stand in contrast to one another. Thereafter, there will be a reevaluation of the positive correlations between Augustine and Calvin’s concepts of social justice as it is articulated in the biblical commentaries. Calvin was neither formulaic nor doctrinaire when it came to the reception of Augustine. There were notable doctrinal issues, where Calvin stood in close to perfect agreement with Augustine (e.g., the doctrine of predestination), but most often there was a wrestling with the teachings of Augustine. The relationship was complicated. Calvin never engaged Augustine in a systematic way. He did not obsess over always being consistent when it came to his reception of Augustine’s teachings. Calvin’s interpretation of Augustine’s claims on many issues, including those related to a theology of social justice, were returned to repeatedly in an ongoing process of engagement. CALVIN’S REJECTION OF AUGUSTINE’S NEO-PLATONISM Calvin frequently disagreed with Augustine’s interpretation of the Scriptures. There are many cases throughout Calvin’s biblical commentaries where he criticizes Augustine’s conclusions. 31 This brief assessment of a couple excerpts, both culled from Calvin’s Commentary on the Gospel according to John, 32 illustrates the Reformer’s skepticism towards Augustine’s affinity with the Greek philosophical tradition and his allegorical reading of Scriptures. Calvin questioned Augustine’s interpretation of the Gospel according to John at several points, one being in the Johannine prologue, where it declares, “In the beginning was the Speech (Sermo), and the Speech was with

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God, and the Speech was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” 33 Calvin wondered why Latin biblical commentators rendered the Greek word logos as the “Word,” when it should clearly be translated as “the Speech (Sermo).” 34 Thereafter, he offered a few comments on the clause “And without him was not any thing made that was made.” 35 At this point in his commentary, Calvin asserts, “Augustine, who is excessively addicted to the philosophy of Plato, is carried along, according to custom, to the doctrine of ideas; that before God made the world, he had the form of the whole building conceived in his mind; and so the life of those things which did not exist was in Christ, because the creation of the world was appointed in him. But how widely different this is from the intention of the Evangelist we shall immediately see.” 36 In his reflections upon the biblical passage, “In him (i.e., the Sermo) was life,” Calvin asserts that this emphasis on “the Speech” revealed that God is the active creator and preserver of all that exists throughout the cosmos. 37 This living God, who is active Speech, opposes the Platonic Absolute One and the doctrine of ideas. God speaks (Deus dixit) is an axiom that asserts God is active within this world. Calvin was weary of Greek philosophical influences, which shaped Augustine’s outlook and biblical interpretation, because these theories hindered a proper understanding of the biblical God. Calvin feared that Augustine was beguiled by Neo-Platonic philosophy, which led him to place the “Speech of God” into the mind of God (i.e., ideas or forms of the Absolute One), which does not represent the Gospel declaration of Emmanuel (God With Us). Calvin believed that the Speech of God was not cloistered within the mind of the Absolute One as an Idea or a Form. Rather, for Calvin, the Speech of God dwelt amongst us and lived in the flesh here on earth, to suffer and die on a cross for the salvation of humanity. In addition to the Neo-Platonic influences upon Augustine, Calvin questioned his tendency towards the allegorical interpretation of the Bible. In another excerpt from the commentary on the Gospel according to John, Calvin considers the biblical passage where the Jews wrestled with the identity of Jesus. In their tense exchange, the Jews responded to Jesus, “Do we not say well, that thou are a Samaritan, and hast a devil (Jn. 8:48).” 38 Jesus answered the Jews by passing over the first charge but refuting the second, where he is called demonic. 39 Augustine and Calvin arrived at different conclusions as to why Jesus did not respond to being called a Samaritan. Calvin complained that Augustine’s interpretation of the meaning of the term “Samaritan” was an instance where he “flies to allegory (Augustinus ad allegoriam confugit).” In his interpretation, Augustine asserted that, “Christ did not refuse to be called a Samaritan, because he is a true guardian of his flock.” Thus, Augustine holds to an allegorical interpretation of the term Samaritan. In contrasts, Calvin argues that, “Christ’s intention appears to me

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to have been different; for since the two reproaches cast upon him the same object, by refuting the one, he refutes the other; and, indeed, if the matter be duly considered, they insulted him more grievously by calling him a Samaritan than by calling him a demoniac.” 40 Augustine concludes that Jesus passed over being identified as a Samaritan because it was a true statement on the spiritual level. Calvin insisted on a more literal reading of the biblical text. He concluded that Jesus’s refutation of being called a demoniac included being identified as a Samaritan. Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the above biblical passage was not so problematic outside of Calvin’s own condemnation. Indeed, allegorical interpretation was an acceptable, even the preferred way, to read the Scriptures amongst the Church Fathers. Augustine showed more restraint than other ancient biblical commentators (e.g., Origen of Alexandria), but nonetheless, he concluded that the Christian interpreters should move beyond the letter and into the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures whenever the plain sense of the text failed to increase the life of faith, hope, and charity. 41 Augustine stood squarely within the mainstream tradition of biblical interpretation, which had come before him, and was thereafter expanded upon by the medieval church, reaching its culmination with the Quadriga. 42 Calvin broke from of this tradition of biblical interpretation, which had reached back to Origen, Augustine, then up to Thomas Aquinas and the emergence of the medieval universities, which all affirmed the allegorical readings of the Scriptures. Calvin distinguished the simple or plain sense of the biblical text from the allegorical reading of the Scriptures. He almost always viewed the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures with suspicion. 43 Of course, the line between an allegorical and a literal reading of Scripture was not always clearly demarcated. On occasion, Calvin arrived at a conclusion that he assumed was based on the literal sense of the text, whereas prior to his studies, other commentators arrived at the same meaning of the biblical text through an allegorical reading of that very passage. 44 On principle, Calvin rejected the practice of allegorical interpretation, but in practice, he could reach the same conclusions as those who employed the allegorical method. Thus, as David Steinmetz argued, it may be more reasonable to assert that Calvin held to a “principled reduction of ‘spiritual’ readings of the text rather than a total and unconditional rejection of them.” 45 The above examples, both borrowed from Calvin’s commentary on the Gospel according to John, lend support to Wolterstorff’s bifurcation of Augustine and Calvin. 46 Calvin’s emphasis on the “Speech of God” as the active creator and preserver of the world stands in contrast to Augustine’s Neo-Platonic theory of creation, which emphasized the world of ideas. The Neo-Platonic notion of ideas fails to recognize that the “Speech of God” is ever present and active in this world. God does not merely think about creation; rather, God participates in the created order through the Incarnate

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One, who is the Divine Speech here on earth. Augustine’s theology, which is buttressed by the Neo-Platonic philosophical system, as Wolterstorff concluded, separates God from this material world, which in turn, has significant implications for the development of a theology of social justice. If God is completely detached from the act of sustaining the created order, then it is assumed that there will be less emphasis on a genuine Christian engagement with this world. The goal of Christian life will quite naturally shift towards the soul’s ascent towards the Absolute One, who is always transcendent and detached from this material world. In the second passage above, also from the commentary on the Gospel according to John, Calvin criticized Augustine for his flights of allegory. Both of these biblical interpretations support Wolterstorff’s thesis, which maintains that Calvin’s theology of social justice was rooted in the active God, who suffered alongside humanity, where conversely, Augustine’s theology lacked a commitment to divine mercy and social justice because he overemphasized divine transcendence. In the above two excerpts, both extracted from his Commentary on the Gospel according to John, Calvin holds Augustine in contempt due to his leaning upon the Greek philosophical tradition and the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures. Calvin believed that Augustine’s Neo-Platonism had distorted the Gospel, which declares that God acts in this world as Divine Speech. Calvin criticized Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures as a flight away from the concrete witness of the Speech of God. In his biblical commentaries, Calvin often denounced Augustine’s Neo-Platonism, which (according to Calvin) colored his interpretation of the Bible. On occasion, Calvin caricatured Augustine as a Neo-Platonic theologian, who was baptized in the Christian waters, but never entirely cleansed of the grime of philosophy. However, at other points in his biblical commentaries, Calvin recognized that Augustine’s approach to the Greek philosophical tradition was more nuanced than his rhetoric pretends it to be. Calvin often counted Augustine as an ally, who spoke up against the errors of Hellenistic philosophy. He recognized that Augustine’s use of the Greek philosophers was complex. Augustine’s approach to Hellenistic philosophy was strategic and fluid. Therefore, at one moment, Calvin could couple Augustine and the Neo-Platonic tradition into a cohesive whole (that he derided), then at the next moment, he set Augustine up as an opponent of Greek philosophy. CALVIN AND AUGUSTINE ON DIVINE MERCY (AGAINST STOICISM) The remainder of this assessment will set out to demonstrate that Calvin used Augustine in a constructive way that shaped his theology of social justice. He never used Augustine in a systematic manner, but he certainly discovered a

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kindred theologian of justice and mercy in the master teacher. In his biblical commentaries, Calvin often agreed with Augustine’s conclusions on issues related to social justice. 47 The following assessment focuses on three concerns, each related to social justice, that is divine mercy, civil and social reform and church leadership. In each of these spheres, Calvin turns to Augustine in order to support his theology of social justice. Calvin discovers in Augustine a theologian who affirmed that God is merciful. Calvin finds in Augustine a theologian who calls for a just civil society and demands that the pastors embody humility and equity. Calvin took Augustine’s teachings and rearticulated them in order to interpret the Scriptures in a manner that supported his mission, which was to cultivate a godly, just and righteous community in Geneva and by extension, throughout the Protestant European world. In his Commentary on Romans (1540), Calvin reflected upon those condemned sinners, whom the Apostle Paul clumped together within the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. 48 Paul called these wayward persons the “Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parent, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful.” 49 In his discussion of this biblical passage, Calvin narrowed his focus down to souls who live “without their natural affection (affectu humanitatis carentes)” towards God, without a “sense of mercy (sine misericordiae sensu).” 50 Calvin asserted that these rebellious souls, who now live “Without the feelings of humanity are they who have put off the first affections of nature towards their own relations.” 51 At this point in his commentary, Calvin cites from Augustine’s reflections in order to support his own interpretation of the passage. Calvin asserts, “As he (i.e., Augustine) mentions the want of mercy as an evidence of human nature being depraved, Augustine, in arguing against the Stoics, concludes, that mercy is a Christian virtue.” 52 Calvin believed that Augustine asserted mercy as a virtue of the Christian faith, which in turn placed him in opposition against the fatalism of the Stoics. Wolterstorff claimed that Calvin’s theology of social justice was in direct contestation with Augustine and Stoicism, but here, Calvin himself discovered in Augustine a theologian of divine mercy, who recognizes that mercy is a virtue of the Christian life. In addition to a theology of divine mercy, Calvin returns to Augustine in his biblical commentaries when he addresses issues related to civil reform and social welfare. Furthermore, in Augustine, Calvin has found a Christian theologian who is “against the Stoics (adversus Stoicos).”

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CALVIN AND AUGUSTINE ON CIVIL REFORM AND SOCIAL WELFARE Calvin believed that the civil magistrates were a part of the social order ordained by God. In every edition of his Institutes (1536–1559), Calvin concluded with a section devoted to a theological analysis of the role of civil government. Calvin’s emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between the Church and the State differs from Augustine’s binary, where he posited the City of God and the City of Man as disparate entities. On the practical level, Augustine was less interested in the developing of a comprehensive system of social justice, although he preached against inequalities. Calvin sought to establish what John Knox has famously called the “perfect School of Christ” within Geneva. 53 In spite of Knox’s depiction, Calvin recognized that Christian society was broken and in constant battle against sin on both the individual and societal level. 54 Therefore, the perfect community was never to be realized here on earth, but nonetheless, Christians were compelled to cultivate a more just society. In full view of this tension between the “now and the not yet” of realized and eschatological justice, Calvin supported institutions and structures that promoted the just welfare of the godly community. Calvin’s commitments fit within a continuum of broader movements in European Protestantism. As the head pastor of Geneva, Calvin called for education reforms, he fought for social justice and he encouraged the maintenance of hospitals. 55 In 1559, he established the Genevan Academy, which would flourish into an institute for higher learning. 56 In addition to the Genevan Academy, Calvin participated in the rejuvenation of the already existent social institutions. If there was any novelty in Calvin’s programs of social justice, then it is where he advanced a stronger interplay between Church and State. Calvin’s innovation is located at those points where he fortified the positive relationship between Church and State. On occasion, in his biblical commentaries, Calvin addressed the relations between these two power structures. Furthermore, in his commentaries, Calvin turned to the witness of Augustine in support of his theology of social justice, especially when he argued that the Church and State should work together in order to create a godly society. Augustine divided the City of God from the City of Man. He doubted that the City of Man could act as an agent in the transformation of society. In contrast to Augustine’s disposition, Calvin imagined a symbiotic relationship between the Church and the State. Differences between Augustine and Calvin’s theory of social justice may be partially explained by taking into account their varied understandings of the partnership between the political and spiritual spheres. Calvin believed that the civil magistrates shared in the correction of the wayward. Thus, Calvin interpreted the “compel them to come in” passage (Luke 14:23) as part of the Gospel message, for in this

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command “Christ declares that he would rake together all the offscourings of the world.” 57 The civil authorities shared in the responsibilities to correct the wayward. In his call for robust civil engagement, Calvin debated against Peter Rideman (a Hutterite) and the Anabaptists. 58 Calvin knew the Anabaptists as enemies of the civil state who were antagonistic towards the promotion of a just earthly society, grounded in reciprocity between pastors and civil magistrates. In his campaigns for a unified society, one where civil and religious powers faithfully co-existed, Calvin turned his fury against the Anabaptists (not Augustine) as a threat to his plans for the establishment of a godly and just community. In his biblical commentaries, Calvin repeatedly appropriates Augustine’s teachings in support of his biblical theology of social justice. In his Commentary on First Corinthians, Calvin reflected upon the role and place of lawsuits within a just society. He notes that most ancient theologians had not addressed the issue of litigation, which was raised by the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the church at Corinth. Calvin finds an exception in Augustine, who “bestowed more pains” and comes “nearer the mark” than other commentators on the role of litigation in a just society. 59 In conversation with Augustine, Calvin distinguishes between magistrates and individuals within the just society. Calvin asserts that God ordained the magistrate’s vengeance as a form of discipline to correct and restore wrongdoers in the city of Geneva. Calvin understood that the City of God and the City of Man each had specific arenas of influence, but he also recognized that these authorities worked together to promote civic justice and ecclesiastical discipline. 60 Calvin often recasts (rather than rejects) Augustine’s teachings on social justice. In his Commentary on the Gospel according to Matthew, Calvin returned to Augustine when he comes to the “eye for an eye” passage, where Jesus instructed his followers, “Do not resist evil: but whoever shall inflict a blow on the right cheek, turn to him the other also: And to him who wishes to enter into a lawsuit with thee, and to take away thy coat, allow him thy cloak also: And whoever shall constrain thee to go one mile, go with him two.” 61 Calvin noted that Julian interpreted this biblical passage to slander the doctrine of Christ. Calvin asserted that this passage had been interpreted in a way that suggests the “eye for an eye” theology had “entirely overturned the laws of a country, and its civil courts.” 62 Furthermore, he pointed out that the practice of “an eye for eye” leads to a type of vigilante justice, which renders the court system as unnecessary. Calvin believed that the civil courts played an important role in the promotion of social justice. At this point in the biblical commentary, Calvin turned to Augustine, who employed “much skill and judgment in showing, that design of Christ was merely to train the minds of believers to moderation and justice, that they might not, on receiving one or two offenses, fail or lose courage.” 63 Calvin affirmed Augustine, where he contends “that this (i.e., eye for an eye) does not lay down a rule for outward

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actions” if properly understood. 64 Calvin recalls how Christ restrained the people from taking revenge, although one has the right to protect their wellbeing and property. Thereafter, Calvin concludes that, “Without exercising revenge, the words of Christ do not prevent him from turning aside gently and inoffensively to avoid the threatened attack.” 65 Calvin discovered in Augustine a theologian who interpreted an “eye for an eye” in a way that allowed social justice to take place in the civil courts rather than to be determined by individual acts of vengeance. In spite of the City of God and City of Man paradigm, Calvin found support in Augustine for a cooperative relationship between the pastorate and the civil magistrates. In the Harmony of the Evangelists, Calvin referenced Augustine when exploring the relationship between money, equity and social justice. Calvin’s understanding of wealth was contoured by Augustine’s interpretation of Jesus’s warning to the rich. In interpreting Jesus’s words “woe to the rich,” Calvin asserted Augustine “finely illustrated” that riches were not in themselves a hindrance to the children of God, whence he gives Lazarus as an example of one received into the bosom of the rich Abraham. 66 Calvin concludes that the rich are not excluded from heaven so long as they avoid becoming snares to themselves. Calvin does not reduce the accumulation of riches to an act of social injustice, however, he warned against entrapments that come with the attainment of wealth. On a wide range of themes related to social justice in the public square, whether it was on the issue of litigation, or vigilante justice and the civil courts, or on the accumulation of wealth, Calvin often engaged Augustine for clarification and the amplification of the Scriptures. In addition to the civil arena, Calvin often turned to Augustine as a theological interlocutor when addressing the issue of justice in the church. CALVIN AND AUGUSTINE ON JUSTICE IN THE CHURCH LEADERSHIP In his biblical commentaries, Calvin explored the relationship between justice and the role of church leadership. Calvin wrote his commentaries for the edification of the pastors that would have either heard the orations in person or read the manuscripts at a later date. In the sixteenth century European Protestant landscape, pastors were an integral part of the fabric within the social life of the cities. The pastors played an important role in establishing communities that bonded together in hopes of ensuring justice and equity. Calvin focused on the role of the pastorate in the formation of this just society. The pastor was Christ’s representative here on earth; therefore, he was charged with doing justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly before the Lord. On several occasions within his biblical commentaries, Calvin

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returned to the wisdom of Augustine in order to support his pastoral theology, which in short, was built upon a commitment to establishing a fair and equitable society. The office of the pastorate was charged with the promotion of justice within and beyond the walls of the church. There was always a struggle in the pastoral fight for a most fair and godly society. In collaboration with Augustine’s insights, Calvin addressed these difficult challenges throughout his biblical commentaries. Calvin’s discussion on the role of the pastorate in the promotion of justice is largely located in his commentaries on the Pastoral Epistles (i.e., 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus). In his translation of the key terms of the Epistle to Titus, Calvin asserts that the Church leaders must devote themselves to kindness (φιλάγαθον). 67 Calvin explains that he translated φιλάγαθον as “devoted to kindness” (rather than “a lover of good things,” which is how Erasmus translated it), because he believed that Paul intended to contrast the term with “covetousness and niggardliness.” 68 The pastor devoted to kindness would cultivate humility and patience within themselves as an exemplary model for the godly community. Humility and patience are key attributes of the church leader devoted to kindness. On this particular point, Calvin drew from Augustine who himself cited from Cyprian of Carthage who declared, “Let him be as patient to learn as skillful to teach.” 69 Calvin explained that the bishop or the pastor will never teach well, who is not also ready to learn. Church leadership must not think too highly of their skills or else it will cause great injury to the church. 70 The pastor is assigned with the task of preaching the Gospel. In this role, the pastor is called upon to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ to the congregation. The skilled preacher is erudite in their oratory and teaching of the Gospel, but in addition to developing the keen ability to speak, they must also learn how to be listen and learn. It is in the act of listening and learning from the congregation that the pastor develops the ability to preach back into the lives of the congregation. Calvin’s reading of Augustine supports his theology of justice and church discipline. As he turned to the “I am the good shepherd” passage, from the Gospel according to John, Calvin notes that, “The remark of Augustine is exceedingly just, that this passage informs us what we ought to desire, what we ought to avoid, and what we ought to endure, in the government of the Church. Nothing is more desirable than that good and diligent shepherds should govern the Church. Christ declares that he is the good shepherd, who keeps his Church safe and sound, first, by himself, and, next, by his agents.” 71 Here, Calvin agrees with Augustine’s pastoral theology, which asserts that the pastor is the agent of Christ here on earth, and as such, the pastor assumes the role of the good shepherd. The title “good shepherd” raises some important questions related to social justice within the life of the congregation. There needs to be a clearer understanding of what “good” and “shepherd” mean within the context of Calvin’s pastoral theology. Calvin’s

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understanding of the pastor as the good shepherd is contoured by his reception of Augustine. The good shepherd protects the congregation from harm. In this particular instance in the “I am the good shepherd” passage, Calvin wholeheartedly affirmed Augustine’s spiritual interpretation of the biblical text. The Good Shepherd does not only signify Christ, as the text plainly testifies, but also, it is a metaphor for the pastorate. Perhaps this interpretive move verges towards a typological rather than an allegorical approach, but at any rate, it shows that Calvin was not entirely consistent in his evaluations of Augustine’s biblical exegesis. On the one hand, in the excerpt above (where Augustine equated the Samaritan to Jesus Christ), Calvin claimed that this conclusion was a flight into allegory. Then, on the other hand, here in this excerpt, where Augustine equates the Good Shepherd to the pastorate (when in fact, it is a clear reference to Jesus within the biblical text), Calvin is unreserved in his approval of the analogy. Calvin was a fluid interpreter of Augustine throughout his lifetime, indeed, even within the same publication he is not beholden to any set system for interpreting his mentor. Both of these conclusions, one for and then one against Augustine’s spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures, are derived from his Commentary on the Gospel according to John. Throughout his biblical commentaries, Calvin demonstrated an openness to Augustine’s spiritual readings of Scripture. In his reflections on Jesus’s instructions to listen to the scribes, Calvin affirmed Augustine’s conclusion, which asserted that as long as the scribes taught the Law of God from the chair of Moses in accord with the simplicity of the Law, then the sheep ought to hear the voice of the Shepherd by them, as by those hired hands. 72 Calvin condemned Augustine at one point within his commentaries on a particular issue only then at some other point to laud the same (or at least the similar) thing that he had previously disapproved. This observation is not meant to be entirely pejorative, as if to suggest Calvin was too inconsistent; rather, the fluidity evident in his appropriation of Augustine reveals a certain mastery, which refuses to be constrained by a systematic approach. In dialogue with Augustine, Calvin explored some of the complexities that surrounded what it meant for the pastor to be a “good shepherd.” He learned from Augustine as he explored the issue of compulsion within the church. He wrestled with whether it is just to compel the wayward back into the church. Calvin and Augustine both believed that faith and salvation were divine gifts from God. No one could be compelled (by a civil power) to believe in God in order to effect salvation. The role of the pastor was not to coerce people into faith; however, the church played an important role in the disciplining of the congregation. Calvin turned to Augustine in order to support a theory whereby Church and State should work together in order to discipline the estranged. He affirmed that the pastor represented the agent of Christ, or the good shepherd, then he added, “At the same time, I do not disapprove of the use which Augustine frequently made of this passage

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against the Donatists, to prove that godly princes may lawfully issue edicts, for compelling obstinate and rebellious persons to worship the true God, and to maintain the unity of the faith; for, though faith is voluntary, yet we see that such methods are useful for subduing the obstinacy of those who will not yield until they are compelled.” 73 Calvin affirmed Augustine’s ruling because it was consistent with divine mercy and justice for those who have lost their way; he did not intend for the coercion of those unbelieving souls into a saving faith. The pastor, who is the good shepherd and agent of Christ, is charged with the responsibility to enforce church discipline. It is the responsibility of the pastor to promote unity within the church body. Calvin approved of Augustine’s employment of the “good shepherd” passage to support the role of the secular authorities in the discipline of the wayward Christians. The disciplining of the rebellious is an act of kindness towards them. In his reflections on the “Good Shepherd” passage, Calvin interpreted God’s threats to compel those who have fallen away back into the fold as displays of “the wonderful goodness of God (mira Dei bonitas).” 74 Political and ecclesiastical powers promoted social justice through disciplining the wayward. It is good and just to constrain those who have fallen off the path to salvation. The doctrine of predestination never led Calvin or Augustine to conclude that church leadership was released from their divine responsibilities towards the obstinate members of the congregation. After all, it is never entirely clear from this side of eternity, as to who belongs in the elect of the Church (i.e., Invisible Church) and who only appears to be a part of the community of the elect (i.e. Visible Church), thus the pastoral charge was always to work towards the salvation of all souls. A REASSESSMENT OF CALVIN’S APPROPRIATION OF AUGUSTINE’S THEOLOGY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE This reassessment of Calvin’s appropriation and amplification of Augustine in his biblical commentaries demonstrates that the two stalwarts of the Latin West shared much common ground when it came to a biblical theology of social justice. Calvin’s literary corpus contains evidence that demonstrates Calvin was not always entirely in agreement with Augustine on many issues including his theology of social justice. However, Wolterstorff overstates his argument on many occasions, for example, where he concludes, “Augustine it will be remembered, said that we should struggle to eliminate all attachments to things such as the disappearance or alteration of these things would cause us grief. Calvin’s position was profoundly different. We should not try to alter our created nature, we should honor it.” 75 The above assertion should be qualified. It should state that Calvin and Augustine were “similar” and

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“different,” perhaps profoundly so, in their theologies of social justice. Calvin’s reception and interpretation of Augustine was marked with rejection, acceptance, clarification and amplifications. Calvin was a self-proclaimed Augustinian theologian. However, Calvin was not a slave to Augustine or any of the Church Fathers. In his Reply to Sadoleto, Calvin argued that he and his fellow Protestant Reformers stood more in agreement with the Church Fathers than the Catholic Church. He argued that the Protestants were faithful to the Church Fathers. This faithfulness to the Church Fathers should not be confused with a slavish obedience to their interpretations or teachings. To be faithful, in Calvin’s sense of the word, meant to weigh heavily with deep discernment the witness of the Church Fathers. Calvin learned much from Augustine, but he also called him into question, and in doing so, he revealed his utmost respect for his teacher. In his seminal work on Calvin, Alexandre Ganoczy asserted that Calvin worked through his theological commitments and biblical interpretations within a hermeneutical circle. 76 Ganoczy noted that Calvin sharpened his theology throughout the various editions of the Institutes, which in turn, would inform his interpretation of the Scriptures in the biblical commentaries. At the same time, Calvin’s biblical interpretation shaped his theological commitments in his Institutes. In other words, there is no way to fully discern what came first at any point in this hermeneutical circle: it could be theology or it could be biblical interpretation, depending on the entry point. Christian theology and Scripture informed one another throughout Calvin’s explorations into doctrine, faith and practice. Ganoczy’s hermeneutical circle may be applied to Calvin’s interpretation of the Church Fathers and the Scriptures. Calvin believed that he rightly judged the Church Fathers through the witness of the Scriptures. The Scriptures were the standard by which Calvin assumed he weighed the orthodoxy of the Church Fathers. However, Calvin also read the Scriptures in the light of the Church Fathers. The Church Fathers informed Calvin’s biblical interpretation. Augustine’s doctrine of predestination is a supreme example of a patristic authority shaping Calvin’s interpretation of the Scriptures. Calvin’s teaching on social justice is grounded in his interpretation of the Scriptures, but he also relied upon the witness of the Church Fathers, amongst them, the foremost being Augustine. In spite of Wolterstorff’s conclusions, which asserted that Calvin was anti-Augustinian when it came to his teachings on divine grief and social justice, this reevaluation has argued Calvin was ambidextrous in his use of Augustine in relation to cultivating a justice, mercy, and life in society and in the church. Augustine advanced the discourse on justice in the fifth century, but there was more to be done in both theory and practice, which was undertaken by the likes of Aquinas in the thirteenth century and then most exceptionally by Calvin in the sixteenth century. 77 Calvin’s slanted approach to Augustine is emblematic of the sec-

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ond generation of Protestant Reformers, who had forged their own reading and interpretation of Augustine that broke away from their Scholastic antecedents. 78 In summation, there are points of agreement and disagreement between Augustine and Calvin on the issue of social justice as it has been broadly defined in this study. 79 However, for the most part, Calvin understood himself as belonging to part of that hermeneutical tradition which had elaborated upon Augustine’s theology of divine mercy and social justice in both theoretical and practical ways. NOTES 1. For an accessible and valuable overview of Calvin’s relationship to the Church Fathers, see Anthony N.S. Lane, John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999). Also, for further discussion on Calvin and the Protestant Reformer’s reception of the Church Fathers, see Luchesius Smits, Saint Augustin dans l’oeuvre de Jean Calvin (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1957); C. Boyer, “Jean Calvin et Saint Augustin,” Augustinian Studies 3 (1972) 15–34; J.M.J. Lange van Ravenswaay, Augustinus totus noster: Das Augustinverst ä ndnis bei Johannes Calvin (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: Göttingen, 1990); Johannes Van Oort, “John Calvin and the Church Fathers,” The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Dorota Backus (Leiden: Brill, 1997) 661–700; Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd edition (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); 167–181; J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) 39–41. 2. In the preface to his 1536 Institutes (addressed to King Francis I), Calvin attacks the Catholic charge of novelty by asserting that the Reformers have more in common with the patristic authorities than the Catholic Church. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536 Edition, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 5; OS 1. 25. 3. Calvin wrote this letter to Sadoleto per the request of the Genevans, who were being coerced by Cardinal Sadoleto to return within the Catholic fold. See John Calvin & Jacopo Sadoleto, A Reformation Debate: Sadoleto’s Letter to the Genevans and Calvin’s Reply, ed. John C. Olin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 4. Calvin’s position reflects the notion of sola scriptura, which placed the Scriptures as the ultimate source for Christian life and doctrine. The emphasis on the Scriptures was not an innovation of the Protestant Reformers, rather as McGrath asserts, “At this point, as at so many others, the Reformation must be regarded as a continuation of existing dialogs and debates within the ample girth of late medieval theology” (A. McGrath, Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 145). 5. In his now dated study, Harkness asserted what remains the standard assessment, where he asserts, “More consistently than any other Reformation leader, Calvin taught that the Bible was the sole authority in matters of faith and conduct. He drew at length upon the pronouncements of the early church fathers—so far as their views harmonized with his own. He drew upon the Schoolmen more extensively than one who was attacking their church so vigorously and scornfully was willing to admit. But above all else he drew upon the Bible (or upon his interpretation of the Bible) for his system of doctrine and system of morals.” See Georgia Harkness, John Calvin: The Man and His Ethics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1931) 66. 6. In regards to Calvin’s understanding of the hierarchal relationship between the Church Fathers and the Scriptures, he explained to Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, “For although we hold that the Word of God alone lies beyond the sphere of our judgment, and that Fathers and Councils are of authority only in so far as they accord with the rule of the Word, we still give to

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Councils and Fathers such rank and honor as it is meet for them to hold, under Christ” (J. Calvin, A Reformation Debate, 86). 7. In his defense of Genevan Protestantism, Calvin asserts, “You know, Sadoleto, and if you venture to deny, I will make it palpable to all that you knew, yet cunningly and craftily disguised the fact, not only that our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours, but that all we have attempted has been to renew that ancient form of the Church, which, at first sullied and distorted by illiterate men of indifferent character, was afterward flagitiously mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman Pontiff and his faction” (J. Calvin, A Reformation Debate, 56). 8. For example of the prevalence of Augustine in writings of Calvin, in his 1559 Institutes, he includes eight hundred direct quotations from patristic sources, with approximately half of these being from the writings of Augustine. See J. Van Oort, “John Calvin and the Church Fathers,” 682–84. 9. In his discussion on God’s foreknowledge and the way humanity receives grace, Calvin declared, “If I wanted to weave a whole volume from Augustine, I could readily show my readers that I need no other language than his. But I do not want to burden them with wordiness” (John Calvin, Institutes [1559], III.xxii.8; Corpus Reformatorum [Calvin] 8.266). 10. For a valuable discussion on Calvin’s method of citation and interpretation of Augustine, see L. Smits, Saint Augustin dans l’oeuvre de Jean Calvin, v. 1., 237–53. 11. The inexactitude in citing Augustine is the case with most authors except the Christian humanists, as Smits asserts, “Les références aux écrits de saint Augustin dans la littérature non humaniste du XVIe siècle sont rares, généralement incompletes, voir même déformées” (L. Smits, Saint Augustin dans l’oeuvre de Jean Calvin, v. 1., 237). 12. “De tout ce qui précède nous pouvons conclure que Calvin prenait soin de l’exactitude de ses références. . . . Nous pouvons donc, dans l’ensemble, faire confiance à l’exactitude de Calvin” (L. Smits, Saint Augustin dans l’oeuvre de Jean Calvin, v. 1., 242–243). 13. On the issue of influence and frequent citations, Lane cautions, “Seeking parallels between Calvin and earlier writers is a precarious way of establishing influence and dependence. This remains true even where Calvin cites an author repeatedly and obviously has a profound knowledge of their writings” (A. Lane, John Calvin, 9). 14. A. Lane, John Calvin, 3. 15. Steinmetz asserts, “Calvin accepted the medieval notion that the early Christian writers serve as important, though not inerrant, guides into the meaning of the Scripture. But he agreed with the humanist scholars who argued that these early writers should, whenever possible, be read in their entirety—preferably in new critical education—rather than in brief quotations removed from their original context and organized by topic” (David Steinmetz, “John Calvin as an interpreter of the Bible,” in Calvin and the Bible, ed. Donald K McKim [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006] 282–291, 288). 16. Thus, for example, in the 1539 Institutes, Calvin cited the name of Augustine alone (without a title of a work) in 25 percent of the cases, whereas in the 1543 Institutes, Calvin cites Augustine’s name alone only 15 percent of the time. See L. Smits, Saint Augustin dans l’oeuvre de Jean Calvin, v. 1., p. 238. 17. In accord with the scholarly consensus, Harkness asserts, “Calvin’s conception of the sovereignty of God is essentially Augustinian, though with more consistency than Augustine’s warmly human, mystical nature would permit” (G. Harkness, John Calvin, 69). 18. For valuable studies (in ascending chronological order) on Calvin and social ethics, see Robert Kingdon, “Social Welfare in Calvin’s Geneva,” American Historical Review 76 (Feb. 1971) 50–69; Guenther H. Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997); Paul Helm, Calvin’s Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 347–88; Jeannine E. Olson, “Calvin and Social-Ethical Issues,” The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 153–172. 19. G. Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics, 25–27. 20. In his contest against Julian of Eclanum, Augustine asserts that divine justice is inscrutable. Augustine asserts a radical break between divine aequitas and human understanding of justice. For further discussion, see Alister E. McGrath, “Divine Justice and Divine Equity in the

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Controversy Between Augustine and Julian of Eclanum,” Downside Review 101 (Oct. 1983) 312–19. 21. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Wounds of God: Calvin’s Theology of Social Injustice,” The Reformed Journal (June, 1987) 14–22: 18. 22. N. Wolterstorff, “The Wounds of God,” 16. 23. Wolterstorff gestures towards there being a greater conversation to be explored in regards to theopaschism in Calvin’s theology. After asserting that humanity is ”grounded in the vulnerability of God’s love for us his icons,” Wolterstorff explains, “Though I do not propose to develop it here it is worth noting that this theme of the wounding of God is also given a specifically christological and sacramental development in Calvin” (N. Wolterstorff, “The Wounds of God,” 20). 24. Wolterstorff returns to this thesis throughout his article, by way of example, he asserts, “What, then, is the line of thought that led Calvin to such an extraordinarily bold theology of social injustice? We may begin, perhaps, with his opposition to the Augustinian position on the place of grief in human life—to that modified Stoicism according to which we are to pursue the elimination of all grief by struggling to love God and God alone, in the meanwhile grieving over nothing else than our own failure and that of our fellows to accomplish this project” (N. Wolterstorff, “The Wounds of God,” 17). 25. Wolterstorff declares, “The point is clear Augustine saw the things of the world almost exclusively as the works of God, hence he urges us to look away from them to their maker. They are to be seen as benefit only so far as they are useful for our continued existence and for our approach to God. Pervasive in Calvin, by contrast, is the insistence that we are to see the things of the world not only as God’s work but as God’s gifts to us” (N. Wolterstorff, “The Wounds of God,” 18). 26. Gordon’s assessment of Calvin’s (not Augustine’s) theory of social justice shares much in common with Wolterstorff. Gordon asserts, “Calvin’s mind always turned to the community, and he never privileged the salvation of individuals—even punishment of one person was to heal the whole body. Individual vocations serve the larger community, and social, commercial and legal bonds must be preserved with justice and equity” (Bruce Gordon, Calvin [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009] 277). 27. Douglass F. Ottati, “What Reformed Theology in a Calvinist Key Brings to Conversations about Justice,” Political Theology 10.3 (2009) 447–469: 467. 28. For Calvin’s biblical commentaries and his sermons, see volumes 23–55 in the Corpus Reformatorum. There are forty-five volumes of Calvin’s biblical commentaries in English translation. Of these, thirty are of the Old Testament writings, and fifteen are on the New Testament. These are located in the series published by the Calvin Translation Society. 29. A. Lane, John Calvin, 3–4. 30. For a fine discussion on Calvin as a biblical interpreter, see D. Steinmetz, “John Calvin as an interpreter of the Bible,” 282–291. 31. The translations of Calvin’s biblical commentaries within this study are derived from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (Grand Rapids, MI | http://www.ccel.org). From here onward, the biblical commentary, followed by CCEL, then the page number, then (when deemed necessary) followed by the biblical chapter and verse(s) in parentheses. There are many examples where Calvin objects Augustine’s biblical interpretations with his biblical commentaries, see J. Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel according to John, CCEL, 57 (2:24); 67 (3:7); 74 (3:21); 102 (4:44); 188 (8:6); 213 (8:56); Gospel according to the Romans, CCEL, 114 (5:5); 127 (5:20); Psalms, vol. 1, CCEL, 342 (31:19). 32. For the Latin text of Calvin’s Commentary on the Gospel according to John, see John Calvin, Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia 47. In Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 75, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss (Brunswig: C.A. Schwetske/Appelhans & Pfenningstorff, 1899). The Corpus Reformatorum contains the writings (totaling 101 volumes) of Philip Melanchthon (CR 1–28), John Calvin (CR 29–87) and Huldrych Zwingli (CR 88–101). From here onward, the Corpus Reformatorum will be notated as CR, followed by the respective volume, and then page number after the comma.

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33. “In principio erat Sermo, et Sermo erat apud Deum, et ille Sermo erat Deus. Hi erat in principio apud Deum. Omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil, quod est” (John 1:1–3, in J. Calvin, CR 75, 1). 34. “Miror quid Latinos moverit, ut ton logon transferrent Verbum: sic enim vertendum potius fuisset to rhema. Verum ut demus aliquid probabile sequutos esse, negari tamen non potest, quin sermo longe melius conveniat.” J. Calvin, CR 75, 3. 35. “Et sine ipso factum est nihil, quo factum est” (J. Calvin, CR 75, 1 [Jn. 1:3b]). 36. J. Calvin, CR 75, 4. Translation borrowed from J. Calvin, Commentary on John, CCEL, 15. 37. “In ipso vita erat. Hactenus docuit, per sermonem Dei creata fuisse omnia. Nunc eorum quae creata fuerant, conservationem similiter illi attribuit: ac si diceret, non subitam modo eius virtutem, quae mox transierit, apparuisse in mundi creatione” (J. Calvin, CR 75, 5; Commentary on John, CCEL, 15–16). 38. “Responderunt ergo Iudaei, et dixerunt illi: Nonne bene dicimus nos, quod Samaritanus es tu et daemonium habes?” (J. Calvin, CR 75, 209; Commentary on John, CCEL, 208 [Jn. 8:48]). 39. “Respondit Iesus: Ego daemonium non habeo, sed honoro patrem meum, et vos contumelia me affecistis” (J. Calvin, CR 75, 209; Commentary on John, CCEL, 208 [Jn. 8:49]). 40. “Quum enim eodem spectarent duo probra quibus impetitus fuerat, sub uno utrumque refellit: imo si quis rite expendat, magis eum gravabant Samaritanum vocando quam daemoniacum” (J. Calvin, CR 75, 211; Commentary on John, CCEL, 209). 41. D. Steinmetz, “John Calvin as an interpreter of the Bible,” 284. 42. The Quadriga is the fourfold sense of biblical interpretation, which asserts that the Scriptures can be read in four ways: literal, allegorical, tropological (the moral and ethical life) and anagogical (eschatological, that is what is hoped for). For further discussion, see A. McGrath, Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 148–50. 43. In regards to Calvin’s approach to biblical interpretation, Steinmetz asserts, “Calvin did not devote much, if any, attention to the traditional distinction between letter and spirit. He did, of course, distinguish what he called the ‘simple’ or ‘natural’ sense of the text from allegorical readings, almost all of which he regarded as inadequate” (D. Steinmetz, “John Calvin as an interpreter of the Bible,” 283). 44. D. Steinmetz, “John Calvin as an interpreter of the Bible,” 285. 45. D. Steinmetz, “John Calvin as an interpreter of the Bible,” 285. 46. Furthermore, Wolterstorff provides much support for his position within his essay. It is not that his conclusions lack research and significant support, for he certainly makes a strong case, but what is needed is a more balanced appreciation of Calvin’s reception of Augustine. 47. For example, see J. Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel according to John, CCEL, 79 (Jn. 3:34). 48. For the full Latin text of Calvin’s Commentary on Romans, see CR 77. 49. J. Calvin, CR 77, 26; Translation borrowed from Commentary on Romans, tr. John Owen, accessed in CCEL, 40 (Rom. 1:30–31). 50. J. Calvin, CR 77, 26 (Rom. 1:31). 51. “Sine affectu humanitatis, qui primos quoque naturae sensus erga suos exuerunt” (J. Calvin, CR 77, 30; translation borrowed from J. Owen, Commentary on Romans, CCEL, 44). 52. “Quia misericordiae defectum inter signa depravatae humanae naturae point: hinc colligit Augustinus, adversus Stoicos, misercodiam esse virtutem christianam” (J. Calvin, CR 77, 30; translation borrowed from J. Owen, Commentary on Romans, CCEL, 44). 53. For a valuable discussion of Calvin and Knox’s notion of Geneva as a perfect School of Christ, see B. Gordon, Calvin, 276–303. 54. In commenting on Knox’s description of the “Perfecte Schoole of Christe,” Gordon argues, “The very suggestion mocked Calvin’s view that the life of the church, and of individual Christians, is measured in a daily struggle against sin in which there is much failure.” B. Gordon, Calvin, 276. 55. For a fuller discussion of Calvin’s social reforms in Geneva, see R. Kingdon, “Social Welfare in Calvin’s Geneva,” 50–69.

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56. The Academy was the one institution that Calvin had established from its beginnings. See William G. Naphy, “Calvin’s Geneva,” The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 25–37, 30. 57. “Quibus verbis significat Christus, Deum potius corrasurum omnes mundi quisquilias quam ut ingratos ad mensam suam in posterum admittat” (J. Calvin, CR 73, 183; translation borrowed from William Pringle, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, vol. 2, CCEL, 106 [Luke 14:23]). 58. Calvin contrasted his understanding of the relationship between the Church and the State with Peter Rideman, a Hutterite, who in 1545, published his treatise Account of Our Religion, Doctrine and Faith. In his assessment, Ottati notes that, “Rideman’s understanding of Christian faithfulness, which in some respects seems a precursor of what Stanley Hauerwas and others say today, stressed the church as a holy community of disciples who obey Christ’s reign, hold all possessions in common, and participate in civil society only in a restricted way” (D. F. Ottati, “What Reformed Theology in a Calvinist Key Brings to Conversations about Justice,” 449). Also, see Peter Rideman, An Account of Our Religion, Doctrine and Faith Given by Peter Rideman of the Brothers Whom Men Call Hutterians (Rifton: Plough Publishing House, 1970). 59. “Augustinus plus diligentiae impendit quam reliqui, et propius ad scopum accessit” (J. Calvin, CR 77, 391; Commentary on First Corinthians, CCEL, 125 [1 Cor. 6:7]). 60. In regards to Calvin’s understanding of the relationship between Church and State, Benedict asserts, “The referral of wrongdoers to the secular magistrates for punishment reflected Calvin’s view that, while the temporal and spiritual government were separate domains with their own jurisdictions, the two kingdoms were nonetheless conjoined. He and his fellow ministers sought to establish a close working relation with the city government, so that civic justice reinforced ecclesiastical discipline, and they could turn to the magistrates for support when their authority was challenged” (Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002], 97–98). 61. J. Calvin, CR 73, 183; translation borrowed from William Pringle, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, vol. 1, CCEL, 196 (Matt. 5:38–41). 62. “Insulse Iulainus et similes calumniati sunt doctrinam Christi, quasi leges et iudicia funditus everteret” (J. Calvin, CR 73, 184; Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 1, CCEL, 197 [Matt. 5:39]). 63. J. Calvin, CR 73, 184; translation borrowed from W. Pringle, Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 1, CCEL, 197. 64. “Et verum est quod dicit Augustinus, non poni legem operibus externis, si modo dextre intelligas” (J. Calvin, CR 73, 184; Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 1, CCEL, 197). 65. “Sed ubi sine vindicta potest quispiam se et sua protegere ab iniuriis, non impediunt verba Christi, quin placide et sine noxa irruentem vim declinet” (J. Calvin, CR 73, 184; translation borrowed from W. Pringle, Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 1, CCEL, 197). 66. “Eleganter Augustinus, qui ut divitias filiis Dei per se non esse impedimento ostendat, Lazarum pauperem in sinum divitis Abrahae receptum fuisse admonet” (J. Calvin, CR 73, translation borrowed from W. Pringle, Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 1, CCEL,178 [Lk. 6:24]). 67. For Calvin’s biblical commentary on Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, see J. Calvin, CR 80; translation borrowed from W. Pringle, Commentary on Timothy, Titus and Philemon, CCEL, 243. 68. J. Calvin, CR 80, 411; translation borrowed from W. Pringle, Commentary on Timothy, Titus and Philemon, CCEL, 243. 69. “Celebratur ab Augustino Cyrpriani sententia, tam patienter discat, quam scienter doceat” (J. Calvin, CR 80, 411; Commentary on Timothy, Titus and Philemon, CCEL, 243). 70. J. Calvin, CR 80, 411; Commentary on Timothy, Titus and Philemon, CCEL, 243. 71. “Porro verissimum est quod Augustinus monet, proponi hic quid in ecclesiae regimine expetendum, quid fugiendum, et quid tolerandum sit. Nihil magis optabile quam ut a probis et studiosis pastoribus regatur ecclesia” (J. Calvin, CR 75, 241; slightly altered translation borrowed from W. Pringle, Commentary on John, CCEL, 240 [Jn. 10:11]). 72. “Scite enim Augustinus et apposite ad Christi mentem scribas super cathedram Mosis sedendo legem Dei docuisse exponit: ideoque oves debuisse vocem pastoris per ipsos audire,

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tamquam per mercenarios” (J. Calvin, CR 73, 622–23; Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 3, CCEL, 45 [Matt. 23.2]). 73. J. Calvin, CR 73, tr. W. Pringle, Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 2, 106 (Lk. 14:23). 74. J. Calvin, CR 73, Harmony of the Evangelists, vol. 2, 106 (Lk. 14:23). 75. N. Wolterstorff, “The Wounds of God,” 20. 76. Alexandre Ganoczy, The Young Calvin, tr. David Foxgrover and Wade Provo, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1988). For further comment on Ganoczy’s theory of a hermeneutical circle within Calvin’s theological developments and biblical interpretation, see D. Steinmetz, “John Calvin as an interpreter of the Bible,” 291. 77. In agreement with many evaluations, Ottati asserts, “In addition, we may note that Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Francisco Suarez—theologians all—did much to advance discussions about justice and war in the West” (D. F. Ottati, “What Reformed Theology in a Calvinist Key Brings to Conversations about Justice,” 448). 78. A. Lane, John Calvin, 47–49. 79. Modern interpretations are often divided on where the similarities and differences lie within Augustine and Calvin’s notions of equity and justice. On the one hand, it has been argued from the Confessions, where Augustine holds difference between “true inward justice” and “customs,” that he did not envision any legitimate connection between earthly and divine justice. This observation leads some to conclude that Augustine was disinterested in social justice. However, on the other hand, Helm has argued from this same passage in the Confessions, that Augustine stands in continuity with his successors (Aquinas and Calvin) who also recognized that there is difference between divine justice and earthly customs (laws). See P. Helm, Calvin’s Ideas, 360–61. Also, see Augustine, Confessions III.viii (13), tr. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 44.

Chapter Fourteen

Friendship and Moral Formation Implications for Restorative Justice Sarah Stewart-Kroeker

In his role as bishop, Augustine regularly intercedes on behalf of criminals or wrong-doers in matters related to actions committed against or within the Christian church. In many cases, he pleads for greater leniency for the wrong-doers and argues against retributive punishment. In one notable exchange with Nectarius, he argues for punishment where his interlocutor is reluctant to administer it. All of these intercessions are issued against the backdrop of his reflections on the nature of discipline—its aims, its purposes, its execution. For Augustine, discipline is fundamentally concerned with the health and reform of the wrong-doer. He thus both distinguishes between and joins together various elements of his thought on discipline: punishment (supplicium) and correction (correctionis) or healing (curare); the obligations of civil authority (necessitate regendae tuendaeque rei publicae) and the Christian duty to intercede for the sake of mercy (misericordia) and love (caritas). Augustine emphasizes the importance for justice of considering how a wrong-doer might best be afforded the opportunity to reform and how such reform might be encouraged and conducted should they wish. His emphasis on restoring the wrong-doer to health (salutem) and into relationship in a community resonates with the aims of restorative justice. Central to his understanding of how such restoration is possible is the moral formation that happens through friendship. In this essay, I will explore the resources and implications of Augustine’s thought on discipline and reform for restorative justice. I will examine in particular the practice of solitary confinement in the American criminal justice system and the Circles of Support and Accountability program that assists sex offenders in re-integrating into society after their prison terms. I use Augustine’s emphasis on the restoration of the 251

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wrong-doer through morally formative friendship as a model for addressing the relationship between the wrong-doer and a society often fearful of him or her. It must be noted that restorative justice is a rather large umbrella within which many initiatives fall. Howard Zehr, a prominent founder of the restorative justice movement in the United States, defines restorative justice as an understanding of crime as a violation of people and relationships, and a response to crime that aims at restoring broken relationships and seeks healing for those involved. 1 My task here is not to undertake a comprehensive study of the principles of restorative justice, but specifically to examine the role of human fellowship and the formation of supportive relationships as a central aspect of addressing the harms inflicted by wrong-doing. My focus in this essay is primarily on addressing the restoration of the wrong-doer to health and to community. My treatment here does not extend to the restoration of the sufferer of wrong-doing 2 or to the significant work of restorative justice in carrying out victim-offender mediation and reconciliation. Alongside Augustine, I ponder the challenges, implications, and some of the logistics involved in aiming at the healing of the wrong-doer and their restoration of society. This is not to say that Augustine’s understanding of justice coheres straightforwardly with that of restorative justice. Indeed, Augustine assumes a basic retributive judiciary justice structure, 3 in which the state adjudicates crime and administers punishment. 4 As bishop, however, he intercedes in this structure in order to temper this strictly retributive model with caritas. 5 For Augustine, justice is a form of love and thus is characterized by the right and harmonious relationship of human beings with one another and with God. 6 In his intercessions he seeks to expand the judiciary imagination of his interlocutors who occupy positions of civic authority to consider the work of justice not only in terms of “just desserts” but also in terms of the healing of the wrong-doer, the demands of Christ-like love, and the possibilities for restoration implied in Christian fellowship. 7 To this end Augustine employs a supplementary form of reasoning about justice—a restorative reasoning— in relation to the assumed retributive framework of the judiciary system. This restorative reasoning incorporates into the administration of justice the loving discernment of the particular needs and relationships at play in a given situation in order to seek a more profound resolution than a merely retributive or judiciary framework offers. Augustine’s ecclesial and eschatological grounding also introduces important distinctions from the restorative justice framework. For Augustine, the temporal restoration of the wrong-doer and the broken relationships of neighbor-love aims at an eternal and eschatological restoration of the sinner to God and the communion of saints. Given that he interacts as an ecclesial authority in matters governed by public and civic authorities, however, he also recognizes that his concerns are not wholly

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shared. The proximate temporal restoration of the wrong-doer to society and the ultimate eternal healing of his/her soul for eschatological restoration to God and the communion of saints are connected yet distinct enough in Augustine’s thought to allow a shared goal of earthly peace. My task in this essay is to trace both the resonant convergence between Augustine and restorative justice in terms of the emphasis on healing and the restoration of relationship alongside the distinctions that separate them along ecclesial and eschatological lines. ON DISCIPLINE A dominant theme in Augustine’s intercessory letters is the plea to refrain from retaliatory punishment. Discipline, he claims, “should always be done without hating the person, without returning him evil for evil, without a burning desire to harm him.” 8 Rather, discipline must consider two things: restraining evil action and reforming the sinner. He concedes that the second aim cannot be accomplished by the judge. Only the sinner may undertake the repentant reformative task of healing, by the grace of God. But even the first aim of discipline—restraining evil action—is still a form of medicine by which a person may be made better. 9 Furthermore, in administering punishments, one should consider the interests of the wrong-doer and so far as possible aim to aid them toward the right path. 10 Augustine thus opposes retaliatory punishment to healing and advocates for merciful gentleness, 11 but at the same time he does not want “to prevent the suppression of a villain’s freedom to offend,” 12 a more modest aim. In his exchange with Nectarius, who hesitates to impose any punitive measures at all in the case at hand (a violent riot at Calama in which a church is burned and a Christian killed), Augustine urges him to exert some corrective measures so as to diminish the wrong-doers’ capacity for evil, to take away the “means with which to live badly.” 13 This is an argument in favor of suppressing the “freedom to offend.” He also, however, sees this as a form of surgery: “Why are you afraid of wielding a scalpel to their audacious behaviour? Otherwise it will be nourished and strengthened by your leniency which is so destructive [impunitate perniciosa].” 14 Leniency in this case is not merciful, Augustine claims. Failure to apply punitive and corrective measures allows these wrong-doers to act unchecked; this is destructive not only to their potential future victims, but also to themselves. Punishment suppresses their ability to commit wrong-doing, but also corrects their audacity. It communicates that they have indeed done wrong and it holds them accountable for this wrong-doing. Perhaps because Nectarius (unlike some of Augustine’s other interlocutors) is reticent to apply any disciplinary measures, Augustine seems to make

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the medical argument in order to soften his argument for administering punishment. He claims, “I am not calling for a penalty, but protecting them from incurring a penalty.” 15 This is a rather slippery claim, for he is calling for a penalty (heavy fines), albeit one that he considers will protect against further and more severe penalties both civil and spiritual. He makes a similar claim even more forcefully in his letter 133 to Marcellinus: “It is true that it is also described as condemnation [damnatio]; but surely everyone realizes that it should be called a kindness [beneficium] and not punishment [supplicium] when you refuse to give reckless violence its freedom, without withdrawing the medicine of repentance [paenitendi medicina].” 16 This argument reflects the degree to which he associates discipline with healing, whether it be leniency or punishment. Discipline serves as a restraint upon wrongdoing, but also as a medicinal corrective and an encouragement to more full-fledged healing and reform. Punitive disciplinary measures administered correctly— that is, toward healing—are a “kindness” insofar as they (are meant to) make the wrong-doer better. By contrast to his correspondence with Nectarius on the value of punishment, Augustine’s correspondence with Macedonius concerns the value of merciful leniency. 17 In response to Macedonius’s skepticism regarding merciful intercession, Augustine emphasizes the duty of love and mercy exemplified by Christ (e.g., in the case of the stoning of the adulteress). He also invokes the necessity of seeking the reform of sinners in this life lest they be lost in the next. He portrays a reciprocal relationship between strictness and gentleness: “For both chastisement and pardon [plectendo et ignoscendo] have a place in the successful reform of human life [uita hominum corrigatur].” 18 Punishment and mercy each have their role; the one does not invalidate the other. Furthermore, this tension is not incompatible with the law. However, there is certainly much value in restraining human foolhardiness by the threat of law [metu legum humana], both so that the innocent can live in security among the unscrupulous, and also for the unscrupulous themselves, that as long as fear of punishment might limit their opportunities [formidato supplicio frenatur facultas], then appeals to God might heal their wills [sanetur uoluntas]. However, the bishops’ practice of intercession does not contradict this ordering of human affairs. Far from it. . . . The more just it is to punish sinners, the more welcome are the favours bestowed by those who intercede for them or spare them. 19

The restraint of the law thus accomplishes three things. It safeguards the innocent; it constrains the commission of at least certain sins; and it contributes to an environment in which the more holistic healing of the sinner (requiring not only fear of punishment but desire for divine justice) may take place. Neither lawful punishment nor intercession for reprieve from the full application of the law is incompatible with justice. There is at work a certain

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distinction, as well as possible cooperation, between law and justice. Augustine clearly sees these acts of leniency as compatible with justice, even if offering such leniency means wrong-doers are not punished in full accordance with the law. But law, insofar as it keeps a peaceful order in society, may also enforce the just constraint and correction of wrong-doers in accordance with the loving discipline Augustine advocates. Augustine therefore sees this sort of restorative discipline both operating in cooperation with and in distinction from the law. There are three central elements at play in Augustine’s thought on response to wrong-doing, which may all advance the healing reform of the wrong-doer: the constraint of evil, corrective punishment, and merciful leniency. These elements share a certain compatibility and may all serve the ultimate aim of healing, but they are also distinct. For example, the constraint of the “freedom to offend” and the corrective punishment of offenses may indeed contribute to the wrong-doer’s reform, either in themselves by protecting the wrong-doer from committing a grave moral sin or even further by prompting a more holistic movement towards spiritual repentance. In the absence of such reform, however, constraint and correction may be simply required by law to preserve the peace and order of civil society for the sake of innocents. On the other hand, Augustine argues repeatedly in favor of intercessions of mercy and pleas for leniency as gestures of Christian love and gentleness which belong both to Christian duty in itself (as modeled by Christ) and to the aim of healing reform. He clearly associates the healing of the sinner with this sort of loving mercy as well as constraint and correction. Or perhaps more accurately, he thinks that love may require leniency and constraint or correction. Augustine does not offer any kind of “rule” for how love is to discern when punishment or intercession is due. Right response to wrong-doing— which is restorative—cannot be determined in advance according to an objective or schematic system of crime and punishment. Rather, it must be achieved through a process of discernment and reasoning. Augustine thus simply offers examples of such discernment and reasoning. Augustine also constitutes such an example himself in his varying epistolary recommendations regarding the administration of justice. Administering justice does not merely involve determining the just punishment for the crime in terms of the length or severity that corresponds to the act. Administering justice involves discerning the nature of the violation in terms of the needs of the wrongdoers and the community impacted, as well as the path that will best encourage movement toward healing and reform. Evidently in the differing cases that occasion his letters, he judges different responses and remedies to be just in this more holistic sense. Just as he argues it is not mercy but cruelty not to punish a child who plays with poisonous snakes, so it may be necessary to punish a wrong-doer who commits a toxic sin. 20 On the other hand, just as

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Christ intercedes on behalf of the adulteress to spare her the lawful punishment for her crime, so Christians are called to intercede on behalf of others: “In short, the Lord himself interceded with the men to save the adulteress from stoning, and by doing so he advocated the duty of intercession to us.” 21 I call this Augustine’s “restorative reasoning.” Loving response to wrongdoing is not parsed according to certain acts per se but according to the appropriate acts in relation to the particular wrong-doer and the wrong-doing in question. In all cases, however, love aims at the bettering of the wrongdoer: “we ought to love the bad precisely so that they will not be bad, just as we love the sick not so they remain sick, but so they will be cured [ut sanentur].” 22 The task of love, then, is to discern what acts of love are due. This includes discerning the course one thinks might lead to such a cure. This is a demanding position. With love and not merely law as the guide of discipline, the execution of response to wrong-doing is a much more complex endeavor—as evidenced in Augustine’s own letters, which vary in their recommendations, and by his own reflections on the difficulty of the task. 23 Does this constitute a troubling means-end reasoning in which the aims of love justify the use of any apparent means toward healing? Are there any checks on the measures to which one might appeal in this endeavor? And how does this healing of the wrong-doer take place—what actions does such an aim demand of the one who undertakes this higher aim? I will proceed first to discuss the first two questions, and then the third. Augustine’s reasoning is indeed a kind of means-end logic: the end is to love justly. This includes seeking to restore wrong-doers to health. The means—whether gentleness or punishment—may differ depending on what the administrator of discipline deems conducive to this end. But this does not render it, for that reason, a reasoning according to which the end justifies any means. For Augustine, there must be a continuity between the means and the end: a corrupt means is incompatible with a just end, just as any response to wrong-doing administered corruptly will corrupt the end of justice. But these are slightly different statements: the first regards the nature of the means (if it is corrupt, so too will be the end), and the second regards the nature of its administration (if it is done corruptly, it will corrupt the end). Both of these claims stand for Augustine. But they are distinct considerations. The administration of justice regards the subject (the judge) and the object (the judgment). The judge must determine a just judgment and administer it justly. Both the judgment and its administration must be oriented toward addressing the healing of the one upon whom judgment is passed and the wrong-doing the judgment addresses, which in turn requires consideration of its context within the community. In other words, both 1) the judge’s acts; and 2) the judge’s intents must be ordered toward the just and loving end of healing the wrong-doer and the wrong-doing committed.

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The second claim, regarding intent and administration, is clearer than the first from what has already been discussed. The same action—leniency— may be done either lovingly or cruelly, depending on the context and the intent of the action: “The spirit in which one person spares another makes a great difference. Sometimes indeed it is mercy that prompts punishment, and cruelty that prompts leniency.” 24 Leniency, if done out of cruelty or laxity, leads not to the loving restoration of the sinner but to their destruction. Augustine frequently uses the example of the father’s discipline of his son towards this example: failure to correct his son when he does something dangerous or wrong will either endanger him or lead him to grow up sinful, thus destroying his character. Either way, the father does the son wrong. The misuse of leniency (just as of punishment) may lead to destruction. The first claim—that a corrupt means is incompatible with a just end—is a more ambiguous and difficult claim to make about Augustine, for his emphasis is so firmly focused on the intent of an action (specifically, in the case of discipline, toward remedy). Intent plays a significant role in defining the nature of action as cruel or merciful. Augustine defends this as the defining criterion for undertaking an action, even if the consequences of an action are different from the intended result. I do not believe that such evil consequences [of intercession] ought to be taken into consideration by us when we intercede with you, but only the good effects [illa bona] which are the aim and object of our action: setting an example of gentleness in order to win love for the word of truth; and enabling those who are freed from temporary death to live so as to avoid everlasting death (from which they will never be freed). 25

Augustine strikingly rejects the consideration of possible evil consequences in the deliberation about one’s response. Only the aims of love and liberation guide the discernment of discipline. But nevertheless, this does not lead to the conclusion that an evil means may be justified by intent to bring about a good end. Evil means and good ends are incompatible. I draw on De mendacio to illustrate the point. In this text on lying, Augustine puts the question about means and ends bluntly: is a lie permissible if it is done to save a life? His answer is no, for a lie is an iniquity and it kills the soul; one ought to fear bodily death less than spiritual death. It is perverse to claim that one should incur spiritual death in order to save one from bodily death. The purity of the body and the purity of the mind stand together, Augustine claims. One cannot tell a lie in order to safeguard the purity of the body without in fact undermining that end, for that corruption will taint the purity of the body. Similarly, one may not commit any sin knowingly in order to secure some apparently good end. The central question regarding the permissibility of lying, Augustine says, is whether a lie is an iniquity. 26 If it is, the matter is settled: it cannot be “used” even for a desir-

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able end, for no end is more desirable than eternal life. There are limits on the actions that may be pursued toward a good end. In the subject at hand regarding the healing of wrong-doers, the same argument applies: What sense does it make if in order to secure the eternal life of another (their spiritual reform and healing), one sickens oneself, perhaps thereby undermining one’s own salvation? Thus it is clear that for Augustine the end does not justify the means such that considerations of the nature of means in themselves become entirely relative. The action taken toward the aim of just restoration must cohere with that end; it cannot be unjust in itself. It is possible, of course, for a person to be mistaken about the nature of their means. But doing evil, whether out of ignorance, out of a rationalized logic, or out of a malicious intent, does not excuse wrong-doing, though it will make some difference in the judgment of the severity of the wrong. 27 In other words, there is a distinction between the potential evil consequences of an action that authentically aims at good but is foiled by the vicissitudes of circumstances beyond the actor’s control, and the evil consequences of an action that is evil even if the actor claims to aim in some (necessarily mistaken) way at good. The key distinction in the second instance is that the aiming at the good is necessarily mistaken; for someone to undertake an evil action “for good,” that “good” must be flawed somehow, either by ignorance, false logic, or simply deceit (in which case the “good” aimed at is a deliberate falsehood). This implies that for Augustine there must be certain checks upon the nature of actions that may be undertaken toward the end of healing sinners, though he does not delineate these concretely. Iniquities—whatever he might consider these to be in the context of criminal justice—may not be committed with the aim of reforming the sinner. This is significant for appropriating Augustine’s framework, if not all the specificities of his opinions on just discipline. 28 Within Augustine’s framework iniquities are not legitimate or justifiable means even towards supposedly good ends. Within the scope of permissible actions intent defines the moral quality of the action—whether punitive or merciful—as just and loving or lax and cruel. This is consistent with my claim about Augustine’s understanding of loving discipline as requiring “restorative reasoning.” Restoration is not accomplished according to an objective set of rules, but must be undertaken through a process of discernment. This discernment is not entirely openended in that iniquities may be justified according to this reasoning. Nevertheless, even the bounds of permissible action require discursive demonstration. Augustine does not simply proclaim lying to be an iniquity but conducts a reasoned argument for why it is; he demonstrates this sort of discursive discernment of justice and its limits. This gives the reader a warrant for conducting the same sort of discursive reasoning regarding the content of

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Augustine’s conclusions regarding the bounds or appropriate limits for just disciplinary means. It also provides the reader with a model for conducting such reasoning regarding the current practices of the contemporary justice system (as I will do, regarding solitary confinement), as well as the particular path of addressing a wrong-doer and his/her wrong-doing in context. Such restorative reasoning emerges from and corresponds to a socially-rooted attentiveness to forming healing relationships with the power to transform both parties involved. Augustine’s model of morally formative fellowship thus provides the active complement to his restorative reasoning about justice. FORMATIVE FELLOWSHIP Now to consider how it is that the healing of wrong-doers is actually undertaken, beyond the initial question of whether to administer punitive correction or merciful leniency. For Augustine, the central feature in the healing of wrong-doers is fellowship: fellowship with sinners seeking fellowship with God. Of course, for Augustine fellowship with God in Christ is essential to the ultimate purification and redemption of the sinner. 29 In this regard, his soteriology and eschatology pervade his understanding of healing, moral formation, and the fellowship by which it is accomplished. I will discuss the implications of Augustine’s eschatological orientation for his understanding of earthly and civil action towards restorative justice in the final section. But my focus in this section is on Augustine’s description of how fellowship amongst human beings on earth has a formative quality that may foster a movement toward the healing. Certainly for Augustine, the salvific fellowship that restores a wrong-doer unto righteousness must draw the wrong-doer in to the fellowship of the church. But the initial fellowship upon which basis a wrong-doer might be so drawn is simply the fellowship amongst human neighbors, the love that one extends to another and thus binds them in relationship. Augustine thinks that believers must extend such love to all human beings, for all human beings are earthly neighbors and additionally one does not know which will be heavenly neighbors as well. 30 Love has a formative and transformative power, therefore Augustine instructs his readers to “Love your enemies in such a way that you wish them to be brothers; love your enemies in such a way that they are brought into your fellowship.” 31 This model of fellowship as formative and restorative offers resources for considering contemporary approaches to both disciplinary and rehabilitative measures, a point I will develop in the next section. For Augustine, taking action on behalf of a wrong-doer creates fellowship: “Therefore if you take action against the crime in order to liberate the human being, you bind yourself to him in a fellowship of humanity [humanitatis societate deuinctus] rather than injustice.” 32 All are sinners; merciful

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intercession is eminently demonstrative of this for it implicitly acknowledges one’s own sinfulness. “Who among thee is without sin?” Christ asks, when he intercedes on behalf of the adulteress. 33 Human intercession on behalf of others “does not bind us in fellowship with them in their crimes. We intercede even for villains, if not as villains ourselves, still as sinners acting on behalf of sinners, and also, I think—please take this as truthful rather than insulting—with those who are sinners themselves.” 34 Thus intercession is an act that “sinners [do] for each other on their own behalf. As scripture says: Confess your sins to one another, and pray for yourselves [Jas. 5.16].” 35 This kind of fellowship amongst sinners—not in crime but in fallen humanity—is a source of compassion and mutual support. Intercession, confession, and prayer are connected for Augustine because in a sense they all acknowledge the pervasive sinfulness of human life on earth and yet seek healing within it. Confession and prayer are practices that surrender sin unto another and to God. These are practices that reflect and create a fellowship of trust and faith. This context is critical for healing. 36 Within this fellowship of humanity marked by practices of intercession, confession, and prayer, the restorative formation of a sinner may occur. For Augustine, imitation is a critical component of this formation. First, one must be exposed to goodness, to see it done; then, one must come to desire it for oneself. Augustine writes that “all good works love to be set in the light, not for the sake of human glory, but (as the Lord says) so that they may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven. That is why it was not enough for the apostle to warn us to preserve gentleness [mansuetudinem]; we were also to make this known to everyone.” 37 Gentleness and good works should be made known and “set in the light.” This is not only because such works glorify God but because they have an impact upon those who see them. For this reason, he says, there are leaders within the body of Christ “by whose authority believers are cut clean away from the error of the heathen and of a whole range of heterodox opinions, and are brought over into that society which is Christ’s body.” 38 These leaders “are the people who teach correctly and live in accordance with what they teach, the people who do what scripture says, Let your deeds shine before men and women in such a way that they bless your Father who is in heaven (Mt. 5:16).” Like the good works that must be “set in the light” these leaders let their “deeds shine before men and women.” By letting their deeds shine, “The integrity of these people makes a profound impact on others, who believe in the God who speaks and works through them. They separate themselves from the world to which they were once conformed and cross over to join the members of the Church.” 39 Augustine observes that the integrity of some may inspire others—but in order to do so it must draw them to desire their fellowship. This possibility of inspiration is simply a feature of human sociality and the influence that people wield upon one another:

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People talk to each other and catch fire with enthusiasm, and all the separate flames unite into a single flame. This one flame that springs up from the conversation of many people who enkindle one another seizes them all and sweeps them along to the holy place. 40

Human interests, desires, enthusiasms are contagious—they inspire response in others. This works in both directions, as Augustine well knows. This sort of social contagion may spread vicious as well as virtuous desires. Take his example from Confessiones of his friend Alypius being swept along by his companions to the gladiatorial arena. Though Alypius goes insisting he will keep his eyes shut, he is nevertheless unable to resist the great roar of the crowd in response to the games and develops an obsession with such spectacles. 41 This phenomenon of social contagion has implications for considering the structure of a response to wrong-doing that seeks the restoration of the wrong-doer. Just as good forms of fellowship aid in this aim so too bad forms of fellowship hinder this aim. The risk of social contagion also however poses challenges to creating constructively formative fellowship. As I shall discuss in the example of CoSA, volunteers working with high-risk sex offenders require resources and support in order to accomplish their aims. Morally formative relationships therefore must have a grounding that enables those that seek to restore a wrong-doer to resist the possible temptations that the relationship with the wrong-doer may yield to them. Articulating this possibility must be done carefully, however; the imagery of contagion risks fuelling fearful and isolating responses to wrong-doers rather than supportive and compassionate ones. Indeed, it is precisely the concern about such social contagion that fuels the use of solitary confinement of prisoners as a penitentiary tool. The corrective, however, to bad forms of fellowship is not isolation (which simply incapacitates the prisoner for social fellowship) but good forms of fellowship. Thus it is important for Augustine that sinners and wrong-doers experience the beneficence of good works, that they are inspired by the enthusiasm of rightly-ordered desire, and that they have exemplars. Human beings are mimetic creatures—but the point about exemplariness is not simply that wrong-doers need a copy upon which to model themselves, but that they need a relationship with another. The “catching fire” that may take place amongst human beings is a function of shared social life; it is a response to conversation, mutual presence, and common activity. Indeed, an example of goodness will be of little use to a wrong-doer whose desires are disordered and thus does not desire goodness. A copy or a model for imitation is only beneficial once a certain desire or enthusiasm has already been kindled. The kindling of desire is rooted in attraction. People catch fire from one another because they are drawn to the other. Thus there must be a shared social context, there must be a spirit of enthusiasm—a flame—present that

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may then attract people to it. Augustine describes this as an attraction to a party: Yet it was while he marveled at the members of that company in the tent that he was led to God’s house. He was drawn toward a kind of sweetness [dulcedinem], an inward, secret pleasure [interiorem . . . et occultam uoluptatem] that cannot be described, as though some musical instrument were sounding delightfully from God’s house. As he still walked about in the tent he could hear this inner music; he was drawn to its sweet tones, following its melodies and distancing himself from the din of flesh and blood, until he found his way even to the house of God. . . . When people celebrate in this world with their various forms of indulgence, they usually set up musical instruments outside their houses, or assemble singers there, or provide some kind of music which enhances the pleasure of the guests and entices them to immoderate behavior. If we are passing by and happen to hear it, we say, “What’s going on?” And they tell us that it’s some kind of party. “It’s a birthday party,” they say, or “There’s a wedding reception.” . . . In God’s home there is an everlasting party. . . . From that eternal, unfading festival melodious and delightful sound reaches the ears of the heart, but only if the world’s din does not drown it. The sweet strains of that celebration are wafted into the ears of one who walks in the tent and ponders the wonderful works of God in the redemption of believers, and they drag the deer toward the springs of water. 42

It may be a sensual pleasure that entices the passerby—the sound of music— but the sound of celebration itself also attracts. The “festival melodious and delightful sound” of the “everlasting party” may lead one to want to know what’s happening and perhaps elicit a desire to join in. This desire is inspired by the delight suggested by the celebration; God’s party is joyous! For Augustine, then, the beginning of formation and of healing lies in attraction to delight. There must be something appealing about this fellowship that one might desire to join it. But this fellowship is not only one of celebration and festivity. It is also founded on bearing one another’s burdens. It is also a practice of toil, of sacrifice, and of solidarity in suffering. This too may be appealing and attractive to the passerby, albeit in a different kind of way. Both forms of attraction are relevant and may appeal to passers-by in varying circumstances. Thus for Augustine, the fellowship into which he seeks to draw others in love is not only a delightful joyous one but a compassionate one: The law of Christ is love [caritas], and love is not fulfilled except we bear one another’s burdens. “Bearing,” [sufferentes] [the apostle] says, “one another in love [dilectione], desiring to protect the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” When you were weak, your neighbor carried you; you are healthy [sanus], bear your neighbor. 43

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This reciprocal bearing of burdens for Augustine involves not only lending aid and sharing resources but also forgiving others: Suppose someone has injured you and asks pardon: if you do not forgive that person [si non dimittis], you are not carrying the burden [onus] of your brother or sister; but if you do forgive, you are carrying your weak companion. Then if it happens that you yourself, weak human that you are, fall into some infirmity, it will be your neighbor’s turn to carry you, as you did him. 44

As this passage makes clear, part of the task of fellowship and of burdensharing is to carry a weak, sick neighbor—to aid them in their illness and to seek their healing. Part of this healing is to offer forgiveness. 45 Confession, prayer, and forgiveness are thus central practices that address wounding, weakness, and sickness. Delight, enthusiasm, and celebration are practices that attract the passer-by who may be otherwise drawn to the din of worldly revelry. It is clear that for Augustine the practices that intercede in the life of the wrong-doer in order to create fellowship are particularly reparative. While restraint and lawful correction may serve the aims of healing in their limited ways, intercession and fellowship are more substantively restorative practices. The practices of fellowship are demonstrative and imitative (letting good deeds shine that they may be made known), celebratory (to share enthusiasm, to catch one another’s flames), and intercessory (to confess, to pray, to forgive). All of these contribute to the formative restoration to health of the wrong-doer. From this brief treatment it is evident that human relationships are central to the process of healing. In order to seek the restoration of the wrong-doer unto health, one must befriend them; one must bind oneself to them in a fellowship of love. In its direct response to a crime, this love may require punishment or leniency, but in either case it requires a demonstration of love and the formation of a relationship within which the wrong-doer may then have the opportunity for movement towards reform. I turn then at last to the implications of this model for restorative justice. It should be clear that Augustine’s response to wrong-doing aims at restoration: both the restoration of the wrong-doer unto health and the restoration of relationships broken by wrong-doing within a human society. How does such an account interact with contemporary concerns and the contemporary realities of the justice system? IMPLICATIONS FOR RESTORATIVE JUSTICE A central feature of Augustine’s model as I have demonstrated is the importance of human fellowship. Social relationships—specifically, ones that encourage a better way of life—are critical to the restoration of a wrong-doer

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into human community. Two points of connection to contemporary concerns follow from this perspective regarding both 1) the means; and 2) the administration or carrying out of just discipline. In the first place, the Augustinian perspective may speak to the destructiveness of solitary confinement as a disciplinary tool (a widespread if increasingly criticized practice in the American criminal justice system). 46 In the second place, it supports models of restorative justice that emphasize the creation of supportive relationships and communities around wrong-doers. I begin with the issue of solitude and exclusion. Augustine’s understanding of healing clearly problematizes approaches to wrong-doing that enforce isolation or exclusion. While he acknowledges that there may be circumstances under which certain exclusions are appropriate (such as refusing to administer the Eucharist to the unrepentant), he predominantly emphasizes the importance of fellowship even with enemies. The early American penitentiaries were generally systems of rigid solitary confinement. This form of discipline was associated, as the name suggests, with penitence. Deviance required isolation from nefarious influences; thus solitary confinement was seen as a therapeutic and rehabilitative tool toward reform. 47 As was discovered, however, isolation achieved quite the opposite effect and the practice was largely abandoned by the end of the nineteenth century. Despite these lessons from history as well as the recent literature attesting to the ineffectual and harmful nature of solitary confinement as a punitive and correctional measure, 48 the use of solitary confinement in the United States has risen dramatically since the early 1970s with the advent of “control unit” prisons, also known as “supermax” prisons. According to Craig Haney, a University of California Santa Cruz psychology professor who conducted a rare study of prisoners held in solitary confinement, “The conditions of confinement are far too severe to serve any kind of penological purpose.” 49 Indeed, he found that solitary confinement frequently led not only to forms of psychosis and other psychological trauma but contributed to “irrational anger,” which he found in almost ninety percent of the population he studied. 50 Harvard psychiatrist Stuart Grassian reports that, among other psychiatric effects, almost half the prisoners he studied experienced “primitive aggressive ruminations.” These include “fantasies of revenge, torture, and mutilation of the prison guards” as well as loss of impulse control resulting in random violence. 51 The psychiatric effects of confinement are consistent, distinct, dramatic, and severe, most closely resembling a delirium. 52 Persons with underlying psychiatric or neurological disorders, chaotic emotional lives, poor impulse control, or a history of trauma are particularly susceptible to severe harm under conditions of isolation. Yet these are precisely those most likely to be confined in isolation; thus the cruel—and eminently destructive—counter-logic of the criminal justice system.

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The destructiveness of isolation is not limited to those with such existing difficulties, however. Grassian notes that many even previously “stable” personalities will suffer permanent harm as a result of confinement, “most commonly manifested by a continued intolerance of social interaction, a handicap which often prevents the inmate from successfully readjusting to the broader social environment of general population in prison and, perhaps more significantly, often severely impairs the inmate’s capacity to reintegrate into the broader community upon release from imprisonment.” 53 Confinement, then, is not only harmful on a fundamental level (Grassian describes it as “strikingly toxic to mental functioning”), 54 but it directly impedes the prisoner’s reentry to the general prison population as well as to civil society. If the aim of solitary confinement is to restrain and subdue (let alone rehabilitate) disruptive or violent prisoners, it is largely counter-productive. Augustine’s reflections on discipline reflect a commitment to the central role of sociality and fellowship in the rehabilitation of the wrong-doer; these cohere remarkably well with the modern research on the issue. Addressing crime with even a basic aim at rehabilitation or at minimum the prevention of escalating violence and dysfunction clearly supports the maintenance of social interaction in prison life. The broader aim at the restoration of a wrongdoer to healthful human community requires the formation of particular forms of reparative social interaction. A contemporary model for such reparative fellowship aimed at addressing wrong-doing and the restoration of the wrong-doer to society may be found in the restorative justice movement. Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA), a program based on restorative justice principles, provides an illustrative example. CoSA is a community-based initiative that forms small groups of trained volunteers to support and hold accountable high-risk sexual offenders in re-entering society. Circles provide support ranging from assistance with practical tasks like filling out job and housing applications to providing a network of emotional support. Circles meet regularly in informal non-administrative settings with the core member to develop the relationships of trust upon which the support and accountability rest. Given that high risk offenders are often “extremely socially isolated,” exacerbating the “likelihood of reoffending,” part of the aim of this social support is to model “prosocial relationships” 55 and to assist the core member in developing “prosocial strategies and solutions to everyday problems and concerns.” 56 Circles are also called to challenge the core member in rationalizing or minimizing behaviors and to celebrate successes. Such circles are, in effect, given the demanding task of enacting the loving discipline and morally formative friendship that Augustine describes. CoSA began in Hamilton, Ontario in 1994 as a community-led response to the release of a repeat, high-risk sexual offender. 57 Hostile and anxious community response to the release prompted Mennonite pastor Harry Nigh

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voluntarily to form what came to be known as a circle of support and accountability. CoSA has since spread across Canada, England, and the United States. Emerging evidence supports the anecdotal accounts that the circles have been remarkably helpful. The most obvious empirical data regard recidivism rates, which are 83 percent reduced amongst CoSA participations. 58 However, recidivism rates are only one small aspect of a much more complex—and largely unquantifiable—approach to addressing offenses. At its heart, CoSA provides fellowship to those who might otherwise be isolated or reviled. It seeks to make change both in the core member’s life and in the life of the community by essentially befriending a person who might lack friends and the resources friendship offers: aid, advice, a listening ear, compassion, accountability for one’s actions not in an abstract or merely formal legal sense but in a personal sense. CoSA, in other words, provides a model of and a way into a communal way of life. It seeks to re-shape the lives of wrongdoers as they re-enter society and simultaneously to re-shape the life of their community to integrate those it might otherwise simply fear and loathe. This is a model of moral formation through friendship, through the bonds of human relationship. It is a model of love, love for the marginal and love for the enemy, and it is a model that seeks to form its participants (offenders and community members) for a better life together. 59 As such, CoSA is a model of the sort of Augustinian approach to loving discipline I have described above. It seeks to love the enemy, to make them a friend, it calls for practicing both mercy and correction, and it seeks in so doing to restore community and form a better life. It rests upon a certain model of demonstration and imitation: circle members model and assist the core member in developing “pro-social” relationships and skills. It also calls for the circle members to bear the burdens of the core member alongside them. It rests upon the foundation of attracting the core member to a new life and assisting in shaping him/her for that life. Insofar as many of the circles are Christian faith-based initiatives, the vision for that better life is shaped by Christ to an extent. EARTHLY AND ESCHATOLOGICAL AIMS This is not to deny that there is an important distinction between the practices of formation that restore a person to life in secular civil society and the sort of healing reform that restores a person to eternal life with God and the heavenly society of saints. Augustine’s eschatological emphasis does not translate smoothly to contemporary society in terms of envisioning the relationship between the aims of moral formation for Christian life and restorative justice within civil society. In Western secular cultures, state-sponsored programs cannot proselytize; thus a program like CoSA does not seek in any

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explicit way to turn the core member to God. CoSA does not (at least not directly) aim at restoring the wrong-doer to fellowship with God, which is a central aim of Augustinian moral formation and which for him is integral to the healing he desires for wrong-doers. This need not imply, however, that no conjunction of earthly and heavenly or civil and faith-based initiatives in response to wrong-doing in human communities may exist—on either the Augustinian or the secular side of the discussion. Earthly and heavenly aims may run parallel to an extent and enable a certain “cooperation” between political society and the church. 60 Members of the church are also citizens of the polis and they share certain proximate aims. As CoSA demonstrates, community-led faith-based initiatives (as CoSA was in its inception, and remains in Canada) may contribute to civil society’s interests in maintaining peace, preventing or reducing crime, and rehabilitating offenders for life in society. Their practices of fellowship, support, and accountability—which so closely cohere with the Augustinian model of neighbor-love for wrong-doers—are not only acceptable but widely praised as a public service to civil society and an enhancement to the criminal justice system. It is perhaps telling nevertheless that such an approach originated as an alternative to a much different public response from civil society and to fill the void of support for social reintegration upon exiting the criminal justice system. 61 As an alternative, however, it has ultimately been enthusiastically welcomed. 62 This is not necessarily problematic on Augustine’s terms. Augustine names several aims of intercession. First of all, “we ought to love the bad precisely so that they will not be bad, just as we love the sick not so they remain sick, but so they will be cured.” 63 Secondly and thirdly, the aims of intercession are: “setting an example of gentleness in order to win love for the word of truth; and enabling those who are freed from temporary death to live so as to avoid everlasting death (from which they will never be freed).” 64 An initiative like CoSA contributes to all of these aims, albeit in ways Augustine would certainly deem incomplete. Furthermore, although Augustine’s action on behalf of wrong-doers is firmly rooted in his soteriological and eschatological beliefs, it is not restricted to those within the church. There is a place for Christian intercessions in the affairs of civil society and the judiciary criminal justice system, 65 so long as believers do not capitulate their identities to potentially compromising influences. Here I must pause to acknowledge that there are in fact three “spheres” at play in this discussion of the Augustinian convergence with restorative justice. There is the sphere of the judiciary and criminal justice system administered by the state, there is civil society, and there is the ecclesial community. The restorative justice movement (which I will reiterate enfolds a broad array of initiatives) may or may not involve itself in the judiciary and criminal justice system directly. Its primary concern—as opposed to the retributive

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justice model—is with wrongs committed and reparations made in the context of civil society. Restorative justice focuses on the people and the relationships at stake. Retributive justice, by contrast, considers acts and laws. Augustine considers the ecclesial body to have a role in interacting on both of these levels. He assumes a framework of justice that operates on a judiciary state-administered level. He also assumes that the administration of justice by the state has important ramifications for civil society and the ecclesial community. He assumes, indeed, that all of these spheres are to a certain extent interconnected in the temporal realm. Thus as an ecclesial authority he seeks to intercede in both judicial and civil spheres. This intercession may be confrontational as when he seeks to alter or temper the administration of justice, or it may be cooperative in that he observes common interests and aims (e.g., in maintaining an earthly peace) to which both parties may contribute. I have largely focused my efforts here on describing how an Augustinian model of restorative discipline and formative fellowship may converge or cooperate with the aims and interests of restorative justice. The discussion of Augustine, law, and the judicial or criminal justice system at greater length awaits another essay. Questions remain as to how to conceive of the cooperation possible between Augustine’s aims, given their eschatological cast, and the aims of restorative justice, which primarily concern civil society. 66 Restoring a wrong-doer to the human earthly community in the manner of CoSA is not at odds with the possibility of restoring them to the heavenly community (indeed it may be integral to such a possibility), should they desire such restoration. For Augustine, the temporal and proximate restoration of the wrong-doer to human earthly community is ordered to their eternal and ultimate restoration to the heavenly community. 67 This does not, however, diminish the relative value of that temporal and proximate restoration, but it remains to be determined just how valuable such a restoration is, if its scope is limited to earthly civil rather than heavenly ecclesial spheres. For Augustine, of course, if the restoration of the wrong-doer is merely temporal, its value is significantly curtailed by the prospect of eternal death. Nevertheless, he recognizes that there may be shared aims in the temporal realm between civil and ecclesial bodies that are worth pursuing in a cooperative manner, even if their aims are not identical insofar as they are oriented toward distinct ends. 68 How is the earthly citizen’s cooperation to be conceived in this picture? It is clear that the heavenly citizen pursues proximate earthly ends from the transformative vantage of their final end. It is clear that some of these proximate aims will be shared with the earthly citizen. But what is the nature of the earthly citizen’s participation in those shared aims? Do they in fact cooperate in pursuing transformed proximate aims, on some level? Or do they cooperate in pursuing merely those shared elements of the proximate aim

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that pertain to the mortal, temporal condition? Can those proximate aims pertaining to the mortal, temporal condition be isolated from their transformation by the heavenly end if earthly and heavenly citizens pursue them cooperatively? Augustine describes a cooperation between earthly and heavenly citizens in maintaining an earthly peace, which the earthly city and the heavenly city both “use,” and the healing love that Christians extend in anticipation of a heavenly peace. For Augustine, just as the domestic peace of the household contributes to the peace of the city at large, the earthly peace contributes to the heavenly peace by preserving a harmony in the “things relevant to this [mortal] condition.” 69 Indeed, “both kinds of men [of the earthly and the heavenly cities] and both kinds of households alike make use of the things essential for this mortal life; but each has its own very different end in making use of them.” 70 The earthly city aims at an earthly peace and limits its ambitions to a harmony that allows for the material benefits that such a peace affords the mortal life. But the heavenly city also uses and contributes to this peace through its obedience to its laws. It does so both for the benefits that such an earthly harmony affords the mortal condition its members share and for the support it provides to the pilgrims in their course towards a heavenly harmony—and in their appeals to those not yet on pilgrimage. Recalling an earlier section of this essay, the law that restrains human “foolhardiness” through fear (as opposed to through love of justice, the higher source of obedience), serves both the earthly and the heavenly communities. It allows the innocent to live in peace and it restrains the wrong-doing of the unscrupulous. This latter is a benefit to the unjust in itself and it opens opportunities for their wills to be healed, such that they come to desire to restrain wrong-doing out of love for justice, rather than fear alone. Peace affords greater opportunities for morally formative friendships to develop in a way that conditions of conflict, chaos, and violence hinder. Thus both earthly and heavenly cities desire and contribute to earthly peace, but with different ends. The question of their cooperation on the justly loving restoration and healing of the wrong-doer is potentially more complex. Certainly from the heavenly-ecclesial vantage, the practices of intercession in civil matters of justice may cooperate with the earthly city as they do with the earthly peace. In other words, the earthly city may seek to restore dangerous persons or behaviors to a level of stability conducive to preserving temporal stability and prosperity, while the heavenly city seeks to restore them to both earthly and heavenly well-being. Their means of accomplishing these aims may converge to some extent. In this case, earthly citizens may seek reform for the sake of earthly peace and heavenly citizens may cooperate in this aim while also seeking the possibility of healing reform in a greater sense, even if their usefulness to the earthly city is not perceived in these terms. 71

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But a more complex possibility emerges from the transformative nature of the heavenly end, though Augustine himself never articulates such a possibility explicitly. The practice of justice for the heavenly citizen on earth cannot be restricted to its relevance for the human mortal condition; justice, as a form of love ordered by the love of God, necessarily has a heavenly referent. Furthermore, the activities that contribute to maintaining the earthly peace include the administration of discipline, which for Augustine involves the practices of justice. This complicates the picture of cooperation. When earthly citizens cooperate with heavenly citizens in seeking not merely to assign each their due according to the law, but to heal and restore them, they may cooperate—in some sense—in pursuing a justice transformed by love. It would, no doubt, be a rare and sporadic occurrence. Its possibility authorizes no grand narratives of progress or Christian triumphalism. And yet the articulation of such a possibility is important. If the earthly citizen cooperates with the heavenly citizen in the restoration of the wrong-doer, even if they only share the proximate aim of earthly restoration, the nature and manner of this proximate restoration will be transformed on the heavenly citizen’s part by their heavenly end. That is, their understanding of what restoration requires (even to the earthly community) will be inflected by their understanding of what true healing is. Thus when earthly citizens share and participate in the pursuit of proximate aims transformed by the heavenly citizen’s ordering of those same aims to an eternal end, even if they conceive of that proximate aim from a different vantage point, they cooperate—incompletely, parabolically—in this transformed proximate aim. Note that their cooperation still concerns proximate aims. The final end remains un-shared. Thus earthly citizens do not fully share the transformed proximate aim, for they do not pursue them as transformed, but there is nevertheless a cooperation in the pursuit of proximate aims that exceeds the possibilities of merely earthly, temporal, and proximate realm on its own. This does not change the earthly citizens’ fate, unless they are themselves transformed. From Augustine’s perspective if one does not seek to draw a wrong-doer into the fellowship of Christ, in the end one has not done them much good at all, or at least the good one does is significantly limited. 72 Ultimately, Christian friendship seeks to form people for restoration to the heavenly community. This does not, however, restrict its activities exclusively to the ecclesial realm, as Augustine’s own actions in his role as bishop demonstrate. Nor does it render those activities “strictly” eschatological in nature (if such a thing can be conceived): although he aims at and hopes for ultimate healing, Augustine’s intercessions seek to enact concrete, temporal changes that will make valuable, reparative differences in the lives of human beings and their earthly communities. Earthly politics may be infused in real

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and anticipatory ways by the grace of the heavenly end, while maintaining a distinction between civil and ecclesial realms and earthly and heavenly ends. The aims of Christian love and the aims of restorative justice may converge harmoniously, if with ends to an important extent distinct. Augustine’s reflections on the role of friendship in the morally formative response to wrong-doing and the administration of discipline toward healing cohere with the communal, relational, and rehabilitative emphasis of restorative justice. Augustine demonstrates a form of “restorative reasoning” when he reflects upon the administration of justice—that is, a reasoning that is primarily concerned with the restoration of the wrong-doer and that thus attends to particular people, communities, and relationships in a nuanced way. Augustine provides a theological ethic of friendship as central to the correction and reform of the wrong-doer, which coheres with the damning evidence against solitary confinement as a disciplinary tool and with the success of community and relationship-based programs of support exemplified by CoSA. Augustine’s understanding of the common ground that the earthly and heavenly communities share articulates how Christian love in its soteriological and eschatological orientation may nevertheless intercede in and contribute to the disciplinary systems of civil society, and at the same time reveal a different way of life, thereby remaining true to the heavenly end toward which the church orders its earthly action. Thus may the aims of healing the sinner’s soul and the rehabilitation of the criminal run parallel to a degree. In so doing, a faith-based initiative may illuminate an alternative form of relationship with a wrong-doer to an otherwise hostile civil society, transforming both parties. This is a vision of the morally formative power of friendship, and it answers the cry of the wayward soul, the isolated prisoner, the reintegrating offender, and the fearful community. NOTES 1. See Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice 3rd ed. (Scottsdale: Herald Press, 2005). 2. On this topic, I note as a potential resource the forthcoming dissertation of my colleague Melanie Webb of Princeton Theological Seminary that develops an Augustinian model of responding to the trauma of rape victims. 3. As he writes in De civitate dei the task of justice is “to assign to each his due [sua cuique tribuere].” civ. dei. XIX.4, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 1972). 4. For example, “It’s only bad people who vent their rage on bad people. The obligations of authority [potestatis necessitas] are another matter. Because the judge is frequently compelled to unsheathe the sword, and he would prefer not to strike. As far as he is concerned, you see, he was willing to pass a sentence short of bloodshed; but perhaps he didn’t want law and order [publicam disciplinam] to be undermined. It was the concern of his profession [professionem], of his authority [potestatem], of his duty [necessitatem].” Sermones 302.16, from The Works of St. Augustine Vol. III/8, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle, Electronic Edition (Charlottesville: InteLex, 2001).

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5. For example, “We call Christian rulers happy if they rule with justice . . . if they are slow to punish, but ready to pardon; if they take vengeance on wrong because of the necessity to direct and protect the state [pro necessitate regendae tuendaeque rei publicae], and not to satisfy their personal animosity; if they grant pardon not to allow impunity to wrong-doing but in the hope of amendment [correctionis] of the wrong-doer; if, when they are obliged to take severe decisions, as must often happen, they compensate this with the gentleness of their mercy [misericordiae lenitate] and the generosity of their benefits [beneficiorum largitate]” (civ. dei. V.24). 6. See De moribus ecclesiae catholicae I.15.25. 7. See ep. 95.3. 8. ep. 104.8 All letter translations from Political Writings, ed. E.M. Atkins and R.J. Dodaro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9. “For it would be possible for someone to show extreme hostility to a person he strongly dislikes, by neglecting to set him on the right path [emendationem]. Alternatively, he might impose some painful restraint upon someone he loves greatly and thus make him a better person” (ep. 104.8). 10. “On the other hand, [pardoning someone’s sin] should be done without failing to consult his interests, to look ahead, and to restrain him from evil [compescat malis]” (ep. 104.8). 11. “Do not indulge a thirst to revenge the horrors inflicted by sinners, but rather apply a willingness to heal the wounds of sinners [uulneribus curandi]” (ep. 133.2). 12. ep. 133.1. 13. ep. 104.5. 14. ep. 104.5. 15. ep. 104.6: non est hoc inrogare supplicium sed ab excipiendo supplicio communire. 16. ep. 133.1. 17. As Dodaro notes, this exchange of letters between Augustine and Macedonius “begins with a request by Augustine to Macedonius for clemency on behalf of an individual facing the death penalty. In his initial reply, Macedonius, who is a Christian, expresses puzzlement that bishops in general consider it a religious duty to intercede for clemency on behalf of persons facing the death penalty.” Macedonius is concerned that mercy “can easily be mistaken for leniency, thereby compromising justice” (Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine [Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004] 206). See ep. 152.2–3. Augustine thus responds to Macedonius explaining the value of merciful intercession. 18. ep. 153.19. 19. ep. 153.16. 20. ep. 153.17. 21. ep. 153.11. 22. ep. 153.14. 23. He expresses the fumbling, uncertain, and fear-inspiring nature of the task most poignantly in a letter to Paulinus and Therasia: “On the subject of punishing or refraining from punishment, what am I to say? It is our desire that when we decide whether or not to punish people, in either case it should contribute wholly to their [health] [Latin: salutem]. These are indeed deep and obscure matters: what limit ought to be set to punishment with regard to both the nature and extent of the guilt, and also the strength of spirit the wrongdoers possess? What ought each one to suffer? What ought he to avoid, not just in case he doesn’t progress, but even in case he regresses? Again, I don’t know whether more people are reformed than slip into worse ways through fear of impending punishment (when they fear it coming from human beings, that is). What do we do when, as often happens, punishing someone will lead to his destruction, but leaving him unpunished will lead to someone else being destroyed? In all this I confess my sins and my ignorance every day. . . . How all this makes us tremble, my dear Paulinus, holy man of God! What trembling, what darkness!” (ep. 95.3). 24. ep. 153.17. 25. ep. 153.18. 26. mend. 9 from The Fathers of the Church 16 trans. Sister Mary Sarah Muldowney, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (New York: 1952). 27. mend. 3.

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28. For example, Augustine frequently uses the example of a father’s beating of his child as a loving corrective to illustrate how the absence of correction may be cruel. We might approve the reflection that leniency may be cruel and punishment may be loving without approving the beating of children as a legitimate disciplinary tool. In other words, the contemporary disciplinary toolbox may have distinct contents from Augustine’s, but the guiding framework for understanding its proper use may still offer relevant insights. 29. “Those who become good do so by God’s spirit; our nature is created with the potential to receive it, through its own will. In order for us to be good, we have to receive it and possess what is given us by God, whose goodness depends on himself” (ep. 153.12). 30. en. Ps. 25.2.2 from The Works of Saint Augustine Vol.III/15, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle, Electronic Edition (Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2001). 31. ep. Io. tr. 1.9 from The Works of Saint Augustine Vol. I/14, trans. Boniface Ramsey, ed. Daniel E. Doyle and Thomas Martin, Electronic Edition (Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2001). 32. ep. 153.3. 33. John 8:2–11. 34. ep. 153.15. 35. ep. 153.10. 36. This is also I think critical to any understanding of a victim-offender mediation or reconciliation that might be resourced from Augustine, though a consideration of this is beyond the scope of this article. 37. ep. 133.2. 38. en. Ps. 3.7. 39. en. Ps. 3.7. 40. en. Ps. 121.2. 41. conf. VI.viii.13. 42. en. Ps. 41.9. 43. Io. eu. tr. 17.9. My translation. 44. en. Ps. 129.4. 45. Here too would be an opening for a rich but complicated discussion of victim-offender dialogue and reconciliation. Suffice to say that while Augustine certainly understands forgiveness to be a feature of Christian love and restorative healing, such a discussion would require significant unpacking with regards to victim-offender relationships. Here I bracket the question of victim-offender relationships to discuss in more general terms the possibility of morally formative fellowship with the wrong-doer. 46. As Atul Gawande asks in his 2009 New Yorker article, “Hellhole,” “If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?” (Atul Gawande, “Hellhole,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_ gawande ) 47. Stuart Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement,” Journal of Law and Policy 22 (2006) 325–380, p. 340; http://law.wustl.edu/journal/22/p325grassian.pdf . 48. In the past half-century numerous further studies, reports, and first-hand accounts have attested to the profoundly destructive effects of isolation on human beings. These effects are well documented. See Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement” for a summary. 49. Sadie Dingfelder, “Psychologist testifies on the risks of solitary confinement,” American Pyschiatric Association 43, No. 9 (October 2012), http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/10/ solitary.aspx. 50. Gawande, “Hellhole.” 51. Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects,” 336. 52. Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects,” 337–38. 53. Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects,” 333. 54. Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects,” 354. 55. Sarah Armstrong, Yulia Chistyakova, Simon Mackenzie and Margaret Malloch, “Circles of Support and Accountability: Consideration of the Feasibility of Pilots in Scotland,”

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Report for the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, May 2008, p. 5, http://www. sccjr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/circles.pdf , http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2012/10/circles.pdf hereafter cited as SCCJR Report. 56. The website of CoSA Ottawa; http://cosa-ottawa.ca. 57. SCCJR Report, p. 20. 58. Robin J. Wilson, Franca Cortoni and Andrew J. McWhinnie, “Circles of Support and Accountability: A Canadian National Replication of Outcome Findings,” Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment 21.4 (December 2009) 412–430. 59. The qualitative self-evaluations submitted by participants in an English CoSA and surveys conducted in communities in which there is a CoSA project show promising results both in terms of the benefits to core members and to community members. SCCJR Report, p. 75. 60. John von Heyking argues that they have a relationship of “interdependence”: John von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001) 210. I think he overstates the case insofar as the political city, on his account, seems to have its own independent center of value and moral authority in relation to the church. For Augustine, there is only one source of value and moral authority. At the same time, he recognizes a distinct, relative value and authority in the civil realm insofar as it is ordered to the true source of value and authority. Thus von Heyking’s points that political society and the church have distinct roles (to an extent), that there is a relationship between them (though I characterize it as cooperative rather than interdependent), and that the value of political society is not “merely instrumental” (as I note below, foonote 70) cohere with my argument even as I argue—in line with Robert Dodaro—that Augustine thinks that the ecclesial, heavenly aims must transform the civil and political. 61. The Canadian CoSA, by contrast to, for example, the British which are more integrated into the criminal justice system, focus on those offenders who have been deemed too high risk for earlier release under supervision and therefore exit the prison system at the “absolute endpoint of their custodial sentence, without any supervision or support at all.” SCCJR Report, p. 20. 62. The faith-based nature of the initiative has not prevented the widespread acclaim of the program by the Correctional Service of Canada. Indeed, CoSA has been funded jointly by the Mennonite Central Committee and Canadian Correctional Services. At a Public Safety conference in response to a question about how to reduce the rate of repeat offenses, “respected human rights lawyer Lawrence Greenspon, Edmonton and Toronto police detectives Wil Tonowski and Wendy Leaver, former Ottawa Police Chief Vince Bevan, Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) staff, and others praised the CoSA program for its long track record of effectiveness.” From the website for Correctional Service Canada; http://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/text/pblct/ lt-en/2006/31–3/7–eng.shtml As the Correctional Service website notes on the information page regarding CoSA, “From these two acts, which mirrored the “radical hospitality” espoused by the Christian Gospels, sprang what has since become a world-renowned project embraced by faith and non-faith groups alike.” The interests of civil society and the faith-based initiative rooted in Christian love thus coincide here to an extent. 63. ep. 153.14. 64. ep. 153.18. 65. As exemplified in Augustine’s letters to Nectarius. Though the occasion prompting the correspondence regards pagan-Christian conflict, the subject of their letters is the administration of judicial penalties for the pagans and appropriate discipline in the civil realm for their actions. Augustine articulates his position according to both an “earthly” and a “heavenly” logic. He does not hesitate to discuss sin, virtue, and salvation but he also appeals to the practical aims of the earthly city at a law-abiding peace—leniency, he argues, will not achieve the effect of restraining further violence. 66. It is too simple to frame this in terms of a straight contrast—as the CoSA example demonstrates—for many of the restorative justice initiatives are indeed faith-based and may well share Augustine’s eschatological aims. Nevertheless, I consider that in general the restorative justice movement is not a missionary movement: it aims to intercede in the administration of justice in civil society. Even if those intercessions may be rooted in faith commitments, this is distinct from Augustine’s intercessions, which draw explicitly on his ecclesial authority and

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his soteriological, eschatological aims in making his arguments regarding the administration of justice in judiciary and civil realms. 67. As Dodaro remarks, Augustine “suggests that the conception of the civic virtues which [Christian statesmen] practise in the earthly city should undergo change as a result of their anticipation of the fulfillment of these same virtues in the heavenly city” (Dodaro, Just Society, 206). Indeed, the “heavenly virtues” of faith and hope “transform the way in which civic virtues like fortitude and justice are understood in the earthly city” (Dodaro, Just Society, 208). This does not imply a “takeover” of the civil realm by the ecclesial such that ecclesial aims supplant civil ones—but it does imply that pursuing civil and earthly aims from an ecclesial and heavenly-ordered perspective has a real influence on the nature and manner of the pursuit. The heavenly citizen, by ordering their earthly aims in relation to their heavenly end, elevates those earthly aims and transforms the manner of their pursuit (by tempering discipline with mercy, justice with love, and so on). Thus earthly citizens and heavenly citizens will conceive of and pursue proximate political aims from different vantages. There are both shared and un-shared elements in their pursuit of proximate political aims. This is not simply a matter of “adding” heavenly aims to earthly ones. Heavenly aims are not merely additional to a complete set of proximate aims that stand alone as good in themselves. The only good in itself, according to the heavenly vantage, is God. Neither, however, do ecclesial aims exhaust civil ones. There is a genuine but relative goodness in the proximate aims of civil realm, however, it is at best incomplete and at worst warped when pursued as if it were final or in relation to the wrong final end. Thus an element of the heavenly citizen’s participation in the pursuit of proximate earthly aims entails that they pursue those aims in accordance with the transformation implied by the final heavenly end. 68. Just as the transformation of civic virtue by the anticipation of its heavenly fulfillment does not imply a “takeover” of the earthly political realm by the church, neither does it imply a separation of the ecclesial body from civil society so radical that cooperation along certain shared interests or aims is impossible or inconceivable. It does imply that a believer cannot divorce their civil and ecclesial, earthly and heavenly identities. 69. civ. dei XIX.16 trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 1972). 70. civ. dei XIX.17. The language of “use” may suggest that the heavenly city has a “merely instrumental” relationship to the earthly city. Certainly for Augustine, their relationship to the final end is not equal; as von Heyking notes, “[e]cclesiastical ends surpass political ends because the Church administers the sacraments for loving God, and its universality teaches human beings that their final end transcends their political end” (Von Heyking, Politics as Longing, 210). Political ends may also simply be falsely conceived or wrongly directed if they are not ordered to the true final end. But as von Heyking remarks (p. 211, 216), the surpassing of the earthly city’s end by the heavenly city’s as expressed here by “use” does not imply a “merely instrumental” relationship. As I argue in the context of the neighbor-love debate, use regards the right ordering of the temporal and earthly realm in relation to the eternal and heavenly realm, between which there is an important continuity. See Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, “Resisting Idolatry and Instrumentalisation in Loving the Neighbor: The Significance of the Pilgrimage Motif for Augustine’s Usus-Fruitio Distinction,” Studies in Christian Ethics 27:2 (May 2014). 71. Recall this citation: “However, there is certainly much value in restraining human foolhardiness by the threat of law, both so that the innocent can live in security among the unscrupulous, and also for the unscrupulous themselves, that as long as fear of punishment might limit their opportunities, then appeals to God might heal their wills. However, the bishops’ practice of intercession does not contradict this ordering of human affairs” (ep. 153.16). 72. “Moreover, there is no space to reform character except in this life. After that, each person will have whatever he has won for himself here. That is why we are forced to intercede for the guilty, out of love for the human race. For otherwise punishment will end this life for them, and once it is ended, they will not be able to bring their punishment to an end” (ep. 153.3).

Chapter Fifteen

Augustine, Families, and Social Justice Darlene Fozard Weaver

What do families have to do with social justice? The realm of justice arguably applies to public arenas and pursuits, to the protections of rights and interests, and the regulation of contractual and commercial relationships. Family life, by contrast, could be characterized as a private domain, one in which the assertion of rights and pursuit of individual interests give way to shared resources, burdens, and joys, where generous caregiving and ready acceptance of sacrifice trump self-interest. Familial relationships, some may argue, are bonds of love, not contracts or commutative exchanges. Granting the difference between familial ties and contracts, the above picture of family life is nonetheless idealized. It ignores the very real issues of justice that families must negotiate. It also depends upon a false dichotomy between public and private. Even if we use a preliminary and un-nuanced definition of justice like “rendering to each his or her due,” we can readily acknowledge that families confront decisions regarding the allocation of resources, responsibilities, burdens, privileges, power, and opportunities. Families are too often sites of manipulation, self-interest, and violence. Families also are social units that exercise agency in political, economic, and cultural life. The choices that families make impact others for better or worse. For these reasons families are an appropriate topic for inquiry into social justice. We might still ask what Augustine could contribute to our reflection. In recent years scholarship on Augustine and political theology has burgeoned. 1 There is likewise a growing body of literature on Augustine, human freedom, and responsibility. 2 There has not been a similarly robust retrieval of Augustine for scholarship on sex, marriage, and family. 3 It remains popular to criticize Augustine for his attitudes toward sex. His suspicion of sexual pleasure and his insistence that even in the context of marriage sex ought to aim at procreation run counter to twenty-first-century sensibilities. The his277

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torical and cultural differences between Augustine’s context and ours could understandably prompt many to conclude that his thought has limited value for reflection on contemporary Western families. This essay argues that Augustine can assist us in thinking about three inter-related dimensions of social justice with regard to families: justice within families, justice toward families, and whether families owe a debt of justice toward others. It engages resources in Augustine’s theology for insight into the complex dynamics—social, psychological, economic, moral, and spiritual—that enmesh families into larger social orders. Augustine understands families as part of the order of creation established by God and as a people characterized by a common love. This two-fold understanding challenges some prevailing cultural attitudes regarding the significance of kinship, the purposes and functions of families, their membership, and their relation to society and the Church. Understood from the vantage point of an Augustinian theological ethics, family life is part of God’s good creation yet marred by sin. By grace families can become a community patterned after and participating in the Heavenly City. Grace orders human love so that it does justice to the beloved, transforming relations within families. Finally, Augustine funds reflection on what it might mean for social institutions to treat families justly and how families might relate justly to their larger society. KEY CONCEPTS: FAMILIES AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Both family and social justice are contested terms. By clarifying the way each term is used here we can identify some issues at stake and better frame our engagement with Augustine. Families and “The” Family Even a cursory historical study of families suggests that talk of “the” family is problematic insofar as it suggests there is a historically and culturally constant form and meaning for family life. The structure, membership, and meaning of families change throughout history and vary across cultures. This essay will tend to use the language of “families” to reflect the plural forms that families take and the continually evolving meaning of family. Nevertheless, we can still usefully refer to “the” family as an abstraction that helps us conceptualize three important dimensions of families and family life: the family is a natural institution, a basic social unit, and a cultural construct. Biological kinship is a basic dimension of human experience. It is true that families include members who are not biologically related, but the formation of family bonds through marriage and adoption does not eradicate the prior biological relationship persons have with their genetic kin. 4 All cultures

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recognize and grapple with the significance of kinship networks, even if the meaning, boundaries, and relative importance of family bonds vary from culture to culture. As a “natural institution,” families refer to the fact of biological kinship and its roots in heterosexual unions. Strictly biologically speaking, and notwithstanding the rapid growth of assisted reproductive technologies, families overwhelmingly come into being through heterosexual coitus. Communities have particular interests in regulating sexual relations through formal mechanisms like marriage laws and informally through cultural norms. Families as a natural institution and families as a basic social unit are therefore deeply linked. The family is a vital social institution. Families organize human reproduction. They meet a wide range of psychosocial and developmental human needs. Families establish members in networks that are crucial to social identity. They are a primary unit through which cultures are communicated and sustained and through which basic material needs are met. Both secular and religious perspectives on family affirm its place as a primary social unit. Recognizing that the family is a vital social institution raises questions, without settling them, about how families are or should be related to other institutions and to larger levels of social organization like the state. As we have already begun to consider, the family is also a cultural construct. Family structures and dynamics vary cross-culturally and historically. Consider differences regarding the ways families do or do not share domiciles, how marriage is understood and practiced (e.g., to consolidate power and property versus companionate models of marriage), or how parent-child relationships are conceptualized and lived. Families as a natural institution are “given” in the form of biological kinship, but the perceived importance of genetic ties, the structures for recognizing them and according rights and responsibilities in light of them are not. Familial roles differ culturally and historically as well. Notions of childhood that the contemporary West take for granted, for instance, developed partly in response to the family’s shift from economic production to consumption. Attitudes regarding childbearing outside of marriage are changing. Our expectations concerning what good parenting looks like or how adult children discharge filial obligations to their parents were not Augustine’s, even if Monica’s anxious solicitude on behalf of her son, as recounted in the Confessions, is at times reminiscent of today’s so-called “helicopter parenting.” 5 Put simply, there are, have been, and will continue to be many ways of being family. The fact that the family is a cultural construct subject to change indicates that we must bring charitable but critical reflection to bear whenever someone claims that the family is in crisis. Is the entry of women into the full-time workforce a sign and cause of family demise or a condition for greater equality in families and society at large? What some consider crisis others view as progress. Nonetheless, some objective indicators can inform evalua-

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tion of particular changes. Rising rates of fatherlessness, for example, have demonstrably negative effects on children. We must understand the factors that erode contact between fathers and children before championing particular responses. In other words, simply because families differ and continually change, it does not follow that particular manifestations of family form and function are all morally equal. The challenge is to balance acceptance of diversity with moral critique of unjust family forms. Theological conceptions of family are ingredients in cultural constructions. They are resources, among others, tools for enculturation (for better or worse) by warranting particular family forms, practices, and interpretations. They are also resources for moral critiques of those cultural constructs. The task of theological ethics is to retrieve, interpret, and apply the best insights of religious traditions to develop moral critiques and viable moral responses to complex challenges. A theological perspective informs and orients our understanding of the purposes and functions of family, the normative significance of biological kinship and embodied family life, and of voluntary commitment to care for genetic “others.” It influences how we understand the proper relations between family and other social institutions. Families in the contemporary West enjoy a certain measure of independence and self-determination. They can be valorized but also underestimated in terms of their importance for the public good. Too inflated a sense of the family’s worth can devalue single life and constrict extra-family commitments to justice. It can also blind us to injustice within families. Assigning the family too little worth means we may miss the public service families provide, insufficiently commit ourselves to promoting their well-being, and fail to appreciate families as agents of moral change. Social Justice There are many ways to parse justice into types or forms. Distributive justice, for example, concerns the allocation of material resources and goods like food, shelter, education, health care, as well as social goods such as public order, bodily security, freedom of speech and worship, privacy, and access to due process. 6 Commutative justice pertains to relationships between persons and, in our post-Citizens United world wherein corporations are legally regarded as persons, between persons and corporate organizations. 7 Restorative justice is an approach to retributive justice (justice with regard to offenses or wrongdoing) that considers the range of harm that criminal behavior effects and seeks responses that heal both victims and offenders and repairs injured social relations. 8 Other types of justice could certainly be identified. The notion of social justice is relatively recent as compared to other concepts of justice. The terminology of “social justice” emerged in the mid to

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late nineteenth century. Social philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick began to use the term as they grappled with political and economic changes. The language of social justice also appeared in Catholic commentary on social issues. While the terminology of social justice is modern the concept has roots in ancient philosophical and religious traditions. My understanding of social justice in this essay is informed by Catholic social thought (CST). Catholic social thought refers to a large and ongoing body of reflection on social issues developed by the teaching magisterium of the Catholic Church and by Catholic theologians who engage, apply, critique, and expand that work through their own scholarship. 9 Catholic social thought presumes a particular anthropology, a particular understanding of the nature and role of government, and a set of normative commitments. With regard to anthropology, CST affirms the inherent dignity and basic equality of persons as a unity of body and soul created to be in authentic relationships with God, other persons, and creation itself. The person is fallen in sin but redeemed and empowered by grace. In CST the government is tasked with defending human dignity and supporting the various conditions (economic, political, cultural) that comprise the common good, that is, the conditions necessary for all human beings to seek the fulfillment of human potential and live in a manner consistent with their dignity. Importantly, the common good contrasts individualistic pursuit of the good life as well as a utilitarian concept of the greatest good for the greatest number. Because the common good correlates with human dignity, and because the dignity of human persons can only be realized in right relationship with God, others, and creation, the common good affirms the interdependence of creaturely flourishing. My good cannot be fully realized at your expense or apart from right relationship with non-human creation. To my mind, social justice involves and exceeds other particular forms of justice like distributive or restorative justice. Social justice provides an architectonic form that can help us integrate forms of justice in mutually enriching and corrective ways. It presumes a set of normative commitments that orient and inform the generic notion of justice as “rendering to each his or her due.” Social justice is teleological as well as deontological. It designates a state of affairs worth pursuing as well as a normative standard that governs our choices, behavior, relations, and organizations. It is a critical idea that illumines the gap between what is and what ought to be, and provides a vantage point from which we can assess the adequacy and shortcomings of particular phenomena like rates of homelessness or illiteracy, policies affecting incarcerated or immigrant populations, and gaps in educational attainment or earning power between Caucasian and minority populations or between women and men. Process and not only outcomes matter when it comes to social justice. Because social justice includes binding commitments to human dignity and

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the common good, it entails certain constraints on human behavior. We cannot seek to improve outcomes for some through measures that directly violate the dignity of others. Moreover, there are moral differences among types of social action. Episodic acts of charity are not equal to relationships of solidarity. Not only are they less effective in creating justice, by treating the poor or marginalized as passive recipients rather than fellow agents, acts of charity do not enact justice as do relationships of solidarity. Process is also important when it comes to social justice because the work of realizing justice will never be complete in this life. Human beings are finite and fallen creatures. We may hope in and enjoy a foretaste of the kingdom of God, but that kingdom cannot be fully realized on earth. Social justice is controversial. Some authors reject the notion as a threat to individual liberty. Social justice sounds “collectivist” or “socialist.” However, Catholic conceptions of social justice have developed in tandem with Catholic critiques of forms of collectivism. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, generally regarded as the encyclical that launched the modern magisterial body of Catholic Social Teaching, criticizes both capitalism and collectivism as threats to human dignity. Even when social justice is a common goal and a shared moral commitment, people can disagree deeply over the concrete ways to enact it. Access to health care is part of social justice, but what approach to delivering health care would be effective and itself just? How do we improve public education, engage in trade with other countries, respond to civil conflicts around the globe, and curb climate change? These challenges are complex and cannot be addressed on a single front. Sincere people of good will disagree over concrete measures. My goal here is not to offer a definitive response to critics of social justice but to clarify the sense of social justice operative in the following engagement with Augustine around justice issues that involve families. Before we turn to justice in families, justice toward families, and the family’s debt of justice toward others, one final word of clarification is in order. Contemporary Western understandings of families are not Augustine’s, nor is the account of social justice outlined here. Our approach is to identify Augustinian insights that illumine the character of social justice in, toward, and enacted by families, bearing in mind that our current cultural perspectives on families tend to downplay the relevance of justice in families (even while paying lip service to more egalitarian relationships between parents), promote liberal assumptions about families and civil society that hinder the well-being of families, and typically ignore the question whether families are themselves agents of social justice.

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JUSTICE IN FAMILIES Justice within particular families encompasses a wide range of issues. Consider the importance of power and influence in family life. Power operates in and also shapes parental authority, authority between spouses or partners and among siblings, and the authority wielded by other adults such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. Power underlies family dynamics regarding participation. Who is expected to be present at family events and whose absence is resented, forgiven, or even desired? Who is consulted in decisionmaking? How do family traditions defer to the particular preferences of some family members? How are differences of opinion handled? Are there explicit or implied spheres of authority, such that one person governs a family’s social calendar and someone else has the final say regarding home maintenance? Is one parent understood to have better insight into handling the children’s education? Power and influence are negotiated in familial approaches to discipline. Accordingly, individual family members experience different forms and degrees of vulnerability. The vulnerability may be more temporal—decreasing or increasing as children mature and elder parents decline—or more structural—as in the vulnerability of a stay-at-home parent who foregoes ongoing education or professional development and whose economic dependence on his or her spouse is disproportionate. Augustine’s thinking about families may not appear a promising resource. After all, he operates with a patriarchal understanding of families as headed by a paterfamilias who exercises complete authority over the family. Violence against one’s wife and children were culturally accepted. However, Augustine can enrich reflection on social justice in families on several counts. First, his theological framework assists us in perceiving families as complex psychosocial communities characterized, for better or worse, by a common form of love. Second, his understanding of sin as the will to dominate others and his realism about sin’s prevalence assist us in thinking about the scope of justice in the family and the connections between injustice and larger sinful dynamics. Finally, Augustine’s understanding of grace as ordering our loves and overcoming the will to dominate others helps us transcend a dichotomy of love versus justice and perceive that Christian love does justice. To begin, then, Augustine understands families both as a natural institution and as a psychosocial community characterized by a common form of love. Kinship bonds are part of the created order. Augustine, as is well known, morally criticizes sexual relations and the pleasure that accompanies them, but he also argues that reproduction itself is not a product of the fall (CD, XIV 26). In her study of Augustine on marriage, virginity, and ecclesiology, Jana Bennett skillfully points out that Augustine—against his contem-

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poraries—considered marriage part of the creation in Eden rather than a postlapsarian “fix.” 10 God’s command to Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply means that families are part of God’s created order. Much more could be said about Augustine and marriage specifically, especially regarding gender and sexuality, but our present concern is to note that although the family is naturally part of God’s creation, Augustine also recognizes that families have a certain plasticity. His own autobiography is a conversion story, and the transformation of persons is an important theme in his work. Insofar as families are psychosocial communities that reflect the character of the cities they inhabit (i.e., the loves that animate their communities) their character will go the way of their loves. Indeed, the City of God schematizes competing value orientations: “Let us say that a ‘people’ is an assembled multitude of rational creatures bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love. In this case, if we are to discover the character of any people, we have only to examine what it loves” (CD, XIX 24). Augustine uses the rubric of two cities to offer a theology of history that is also an analysis of humanity as both fallen in sin and redeemed by grace. The two cities are founded on two loves, love of self and love of God (CD, XIV 28). They designate sociopolitical and psychological states. Families (or households, since in Augustine’s time the paterfamilias oversaw not only kin relations but others tied to his household like slaves and boarders) will be microcosms of the two cities depending on whether they are founded on love for self or love for God. 11 As Kevin Hughes observes, “the household is not a private sphere, different in kind from the world of politics.” 12 Our second point is that Augustine’s understanding of sin assists us in thinking about the scope of justice in the family. Augustine is a realist regarding the imperfection of families. In the City of God he argues that social life is vexed by many ills, including the “secret treachery of people within the same family” (CD, XIX 5). For Augustine, sin designates disordered love: love for the wrong things or love for the right things but in the wrong way. The particular feature of disordered love is its acquisitive or dominating character. Sinful love is unjust love. By it an agent disposes him or herself in relation to the beloved in a manner that does not do justice to the reality of the beloved. As is well known, Augustine saw the instrumentalizing tendencies of sin at work in the dynamics of sexual desire, but he also described the libido dominandi at work in manifold ways, including the problematic and finite “peace” that could be obtained in the household through dominating measures to bend others to one’s will (CD, XIX 14). The scope of sin cannot be captured in a picture of individuals bound together with each wanting to get their own way. It is broader and deeper than that. Augustine’s understanding of sin, particularly as developed in his anti-Pelagian texts, captures the disorienting and distorting effects of sin in the very depths of human agency and in the heart of human social dynamics.

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Sin is a radically communicable pathology that affects basic human capacities to know, will, and act. 13 Accordingly, injustice in families is a persistent and pervasive challenge that cannot be overcome by human power alone. Our final point concerns the effects of grace in transforming love so that justice obtains within families. For Augustine, in families animated by love for God and enabled by divine grace, authority becomes a pattern of service. Love links Augustine’s account of grace and his understanding of families as microcosms of the cities they inhabit: “A man’s household, then, ought to be the beginning, or a little part, of the city. . . . From this, it appears clearly enough that domestic peace has reference to civic peace: that is, that the ordered concord of domestic rule and obedience has reference to the ordered concord of civic rule and obedience. Thus, it is fitting that the father of a family should draw his own precepts from the law of the city, and rule his household in such a way that it is brought into harmony with the city’s peace” (CD, XIX 16). Says Augustine, “In the household of the just man . . . who ‘lives by faith’ and who is still a pilgrim on his way to that Heavenly City, even those who command are the servants of those whom they seem to command. For it is not out of desire for mastery that they command; rather, they do so from a dutiful concern for others: not out of pride in ruling, but because they love mercy” (CD, XIX 14). No doubt the language of command and ruling will sound off-putting for some readers who are concerned about justice within families. It is important to bear in mind that for Augustine the themes of ruling, obedience, and authority only make sense within his overarching view of creation and in light of the centrality of love in his theological anthropology. Augustine understands the orders of creation in terms of hierarchy, to be sure. 14 His account of love astutely conveys much of what can be problematic with a highly hierarchical worldview; insofar as Augustine understands pernicious forms of love as self-serving attempts to dominate the object of one’s love, he perceives the tempting warrants that a hierarchical worldview provides. Augustine specifies familial power relationships in terms of loving service that does justice precisely because it is patterned after God’s providential care for creation: “For commands are given by those who care for the rest—by husband to wife, parents to children, and masters to servants. And those who are cared for obey: women obey their husbands, children their parents, and servants their masters” (CD, XIX 14, emphasis mine). Again, granting the need to parse and rebut aspects of Augustine’s attitudes toward gender, the point is that relationships energized and enabled by grace are characterized by charity and peace that come from living in the order of love. In On the Morals of the Catholic Church Augustine also specifies the order of love in terms of the cardinal virtues. Appealing to the virtues assists reflection on justice within families because doing so reminds us that justice in families is not due to family structure itself—as if rectitude were a given in

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families—but to conversion. Love for God orders the heart so that the virtues simply specify this love. On Augustine’s account, temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved—God (MCC, 19–21). In this way the Christian family is not consumed by acquisitive love for earthly creatures, including fellow family members, things, or pleasures. In the freedom of temperate love one readily loves the neighbor in God. Fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the beloved; fortitude thus moves Christians to sacrifice for the sake of God and neighbor (MCC, 22–23). Justice is love serving only the beloved and therefore ruling rightly (MCC, 24). For Augustine one’s love for God moves one to love what God loves, so that just as love for neighbor is united to love for God, justice toward our neighbors, including our most intimate kin, is united to the justice we owe to God. Finally, prudence is love distinguishing between what hinders and helps it (MCC, 24). Prudence helps us to tailor love so that we do justice to the particular others in our families. Strict equality cannot rule in a community with such varied members and seasons. Sometimes one family member or another requires more resources. Prerogatives, duties, and methods of discipline can justly vary from child to child depending upon circumstances and their temperaments. Love does justice to these variations. That’s not to suggest that each family member’s needs are always compatible with everyone else’s, or promoting the good of the whole. Families are not immune from tragic conflicts. But grace enables them to meet conflicts in faith, hope, and love. By virtue of being the primary social unit and in keeping with the profoundly psychosocial character of families, the family has a formative function as a school of justice. Augustine helps us to understand this function. For him the family of faith is where we begin to discharge our duty to love our neighbors. One “must care for his own household; for the order of nature and of human society itself gives him readier access to them, and greater opportunity of caring for them” (CD, XIX 14). Crucially, however, justice in families refers beyond particular families. The patterns of relation Augustine describes do not make a kind of closed circuit through which grace flows and in which it is contained. Augustine’s own life makes clear that in the lives of the faithful love permits us to cherish our family members in God thereby transcending (without abrogating or denigrating) earthly kinship for the eternal kinship all the faithful share in Christ. His vision with Monica at Ostia exemplifies what Augustine elsewhere writes of familial bonds among the faithful: “For this peace is a perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and of one another in God” (CD, XIX 17). 15

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JUSTICE TOWARD FAMILIES What would it mean for the larger society to exhibit justice toward families? Many aspects of political, economic, and cultural life impact families in positive and negative ways. In order to thrive families require access to resources. Living wages, safe working places, quality education, health care, affordable childcare, recreational and cultural opportunities, political participation, opportunities to build financial security, public safety, clean air and water, and nutritious food are only some of the goods and opportunities families need. The notion of social justice we are employing here indicates that creating and sustaining these conditions is a human moral obligation grounded in respect for human dignity and the correlative moral commitment to the common good. How we create these conditions is less clear. Private and public structures mediate human agency, and our interests, values, and needs conflict. Generally speaking, on what grounds may we claim that individuals and communities owe justice to families? How do we understand the role of government or Church in discharging this need? What moral commitments should govern attempts to treat families justly? If, as we stipulated above, respect for human dignity is part of social justice, normative commitments to creating and sustaining the resources and opportunities enumerated above are warranted on the grounds of that dignity without needing special reference to or concern for families, except as a derivative consideration. However, since families are a basic social unit and their well-being is integral to the well-being of society, there are pragmatic as well as moral reasons to consider justice toward families. Several features of our contemporary Western culture make justice toward families necessary and immensely challenging. Paradoxically, families are both idealized and denigrated. We see idealization of families in the rhetoric surrounding motherhood, in the stylized depictions of families marketed to us (consider ads for Disney or Hallmark or Pottery Barn Kids), and reflected in the curated images and posts we share on social media. The idealization of family life is not new, but it does inhibit honest and constructive consideration of the injustice that arises in even the healthiest and best families. 16 The rise of anti-family attitudes and erosion of public support for families is also a problem. In 1998 economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett and African American studies scholar and philosopher Cornel West co-authored the book, The War Against Parents. 17 The book argues that parents must labor in a culture that denigrates the work they do and withholds or erodes material and structural supports that would strengthen family life, such as the dearth of family leave time in the United States as compared to other industrialized countries or the portrayal of bungling parents in popular culture. Fast forward to 2014 and we find mounting evidence to support Hewlett’s and West’s contention in the rise of child-free airline flights, vacation pack-

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ages, restaurants, and public spaces. Moreover, the liberal emphasis on individualism which we have inherited from the Enlightenment and the totalizing tendencies of capitalism include and encourage anti-family suppositions. Consider the charge that workplace policies that are supportive of families unfairly penalize childless employees (or, presumably, employees whose own parents/grandparents/siblings/aunts/uncles/cousins make no claims on them that cannot be met afterhours). 18 In a capitalist economy the ideal worker is one freed from such claims, ever available for the demands of work. Augustine’s theology helps us to perceive these suppositions and provides an alternative vantage point for thinking about our life together and our various engagements in familial, ecclesial, and civic communities. Whereas liberalism views the person principally as an individual, Augustine sees human beings as irreducibly social, as made for communion. Liberalism operates with faith in human capacities to apply reason in objective (value-free) deliberation and thereby achieve progress. By contrast, Augustine recognizes the evaluative character of human reason, the profoundly distorting effects of sin on our capacities for knowing, loving, and acting, and the prideful reliance on human powers to achieve the good. Augustine helps us to see that we expect too much of ourselves and of our life together while simultaneously settling for too little. As Christian families cultivate a manner of life that counters both the idealization and the denigration of families and resists the formative power of liberal individualism and capitalism, they enact a certain measure of justice toward other families. They can also participate in and otherwise support efforts by ecclesial and other voluntary organizations to promote social justice in general and family friendly polices more particularly. Let us consider briefly the role of government in ensuring families are treated justly. Augustine does not operate with a notion of the “state,” rather he reflects on the character of political authority. Political authority is essentially remedial, established by God in response to human sinfulness. Political authorities use forms of coercion to create a relative peace that enables human beings to live together (CD, XIX 17). As Augustine makes clear in the City of God, the prospects for peace achieved by and in civil society are limited indeed. Government can play a constructive role in alleviating poverty, for example, but that is also the duty of Christians, a duty that cannot be transferred wholesale to the state. Government reflects human desire for communion as well as our proclivities for self-interested domination. As Charles Mathewes notes: Christians will “use” politics for more than simply negotiating public perplexities and cultivating the common good. Beyond those aims, they will use political engagement . . . to unsettle and disrupt routinized patterns of behav-

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ior. . . . Properly undertaken, public engagement can be a struggle for conversion, conversion of one’s loves and the loves of one’s interlocutor, without ceasing to be genuinely political—without, that is, luring our interest and attention away from the immediately immanent concerns of the matter directly at hand. 19

We can compare Augustine’s theology and the perspective of Catholic social thought that informs our concept of social justice. Consider this characteristic statement on the role of civil government from Pacem in terris: It is also demanded by the common good that civil authorities should make earnest efforts to bring about a situation in which individual citizens can easily exercise their rights and fulfill their duties as well. For experience has taught us that, unless these authorities take suitable action with regard to economic, political and cultural matters, inequalities between the citizens tend to become more and more widespread, especially in the modern world, and as a result human rights are rendered totally ineffective and the fulfillment of duties is compromised (no. 60).

Augustine would not deny that civil government should promote conditions conducive to the common good. However, Catholic social thought is patient of greater optimism regarding civil government than Augustine is. For Augustine civil government will reflect the moral character of its underlying loyalties and loves. Hence in the City of God Augustine argues that Rome contained the seeds of its self-destruction. Founded on a misdirected love, its “success” will inevitably be incomplete, transitory, and conflicted. CST also recognizes the limitations of civil government, although passages endorsing the positive role government can play stand out since contemporary CST is responding to glaring economic disparity and couched in larger critiques of unbridled capitalism more than critiquing the threat of totalitarianism. This emphasis is all the more observable in the pontificate of Pope Francis. 20 In any case, while the state will be a significant agent in the distribution of advantages and disadvantages, “a range of social institutions and practices together influence the shares of resources available to different people.” 21 Given the multiple corporate bodies—public and private, civic, commercial, and charitable—that work to support human dignity and the common good generally and/or families more particularly, it makes sense to reflect upon the normative commitments that should orient and inform these efforts. What normative commitments should govern attempts to fashion a life together that is (among other things) just towards families? We have already noted that the notion of social justice used here contains within it commitments to respect human dignity and promote the common good. These commitments will normatively constrain our actions (i.e., rule out certain choices or behaviors) and will positively require others. Given the constructive role

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public and private organizations can play, commitments to participation and subsidiarity are appropriate. Subsidiarity favors self-determination and local governance as an expression of human dignity. 22 There is no denying that debates between liberal and conservative political entities over the proper role of the government are utterly dysfunctional, but they do reflect an inexhaustible tension between respect for individuals and promotion of a common good, as well as the ongoing challenge of applying the principle of subsidiarity. Augustine sustains critique in both directions and persistently reminds us of the limited powers of individual and corporate human agents. Additional normative commitments would also surely include faith, hope, and love. Faith names the grounding convictions by which we live; faith in God as disclosed in Jesus Christ enables us to resist the temptations posed by sin and manifest in our individual and civic tendencies toward sinful domination of others. Inasmuch as Christians hope in God and not in their own powers or the powers of civil institutions, hope disposes them to endure the tensions and limitations that come with living in the two cities at once. Finally, love moves them to relate to God and neighbors in a fashion that does justice. FAMILIES’ DEBT OF JUSTICE TOWARD OTHERS Families owe a debt of justice toward others. Families form and influence individual moral agents, for example, by shaping the moral sensibilities and capacities of children. Moreover, family units are themselves corporate agents; they enact choices and exercise power. Family members collectively impact their communities, the natural environment, the economy, and the various voluntary associations they engage. Their choices regarding housing, civic participation, leisure time, religious and moral commitments, and traditions affect others. The account of social justice we are employing here requires families to exercise their collective agency in a manner that enacts justice toward others. This debt of justice is discharged by being a school of justice in which family members are morally formed. Augustine viewed family and friendships as a sort of “divine lottery” by which God gives particular neighbors to us. 23 In our care for those who are close to us, we discharge the commandment to love our neighbor. It is not possible given human finitude to love every neighbor, so the notion of a divine lottery can warrant human preferences to care for those already entrusted to us. I would add, moreover, that inasmuch as child-rearing is socially productive labor, the welcoming and education of children are the means by which persons can contribute to the debt of justice they owe others. However, families don’t fully discharge their debt in this way. We would underestimate human selfishness and the proble-

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matic forms partiality can take if we failed to heed the reproach offered in Matthew 5:43–48, wherein Jesus makes clear that children of the Father are those who extend their love beyond their circle of family and friends. Augustine helps us to see this notion of love extended toward neighbor in at least three ways. First, Augustine argues that love for neighbor must accompany love for God. Indeed, the former is a “sort of cradle” for the latter (MCC, 26). On occasion Augustine writes of love for neighbor as a pathway to love for God, echoing the progress of love that Plato outlines in the Symposium. 24 Even so, love for neighbor is derived from love for God; it is a normative duty grounded in the love we owe to God. 25 To do justice to our neighbors is inseparable from the love we owe in justice to God. Christian love for neighbor, says Augustine, is exercised through both non-maleficence and benevolence—we fail to love our neighbors when we injure them and when we fail to help them (MCC, 26). To appreciate the importance of Augustine’s account of love for considering the family’s debt of justice to others, think about its implications for the contemporary Western family as an economic unit. Augustine’s account of rightly ordered loves challenges the consumerism of contemporary Western culture. Augustine can enrich attempts to articulate what it means for families to enact social justice in the ordinary decisions they make regarding their patterns of consumption. Says Augustine: “A household of men who live by faith looks forward to the blessings which are promised as eternal in the life to come; and such men make use of earthly and temporal things like pilgrims: they are not captivated by them, nor are they deflected by them from their progress towards God” (CD, XIX 17). The counter-cultural character of Christian families will appear in a manner of life that contrasts the acquisitive tendencies of larger society. “Set in the context of Augustine’s theological vision in the City of God, traditional teaching on the household will take on a new sense and create the possibility not just for formation but for resistance.” 26 Augustine’s thought, then, is rich enough to indicate multiple modes by which families do justice to others, ranging from active beneficence to counter-cultural forms of resistance. Second, for Augustine the church, not family, is the primary locus of Christian identity. In baptism we are reborn into an ecclesial family that supersedes our family of origin, “because Christ has reconfigured the means by which family is made.” 27 There are biblical warrants supporting this idea of ecclesial family such as Matt. 10:34–36 28 and 12:46–50. 29 Moreover, as Jana Bennett argues, Augustine understands marriage and virginity in reference to each other in light of the relationship between Christ and the Church. 30 Correlating marriage and virginity is an important reminder that Christian faith profoundly challenges the necessity of family as a locus of identity. This feature of Augustine’s thought provides an important resource for countering familial narcissism and tribalism. Augustine’s insight informs

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us that families are a microcosm of the city, the community of common love, which claims their loyalty. While families remain an important circle of society, biological kinship itself is relativized. Familial relations and household structures facilitate care for neighbors without exhausting it. By relativizing biological kinship and family boundaries Christian faith challenges families to consider welcoming non-genetic kin into their families and, short of that, to consider seriously others’ claims vis-à-vis those of one’s family. The point is not to neglect family members in favor of others but to interrogate the preference typically exercised on their behalf, and to order family identity to ecclesial identity. Third, Christians must live in both cities at once, and there are significant practical implications that follow. Even as the church and world exist at odds, the church has the task of overcoming the dichotomy in witness and service to the world. The literature on Augustine, political theology, and citizenship is enormous, and there simply is not space here to consider the nuances of Augustine’s thought or the range of interpretations available. With regard to the claim that families owe a debt of justice to others, a few brief things about Christian existence in the two cities can be offered. Charity moves us to action. Augustine’s insight is that human communities—families, cities, empires, the Church—are sociopolitical realities constituted by common loves and, in justice, rightly ordered to love for God. Love for God will energize and orient all other human relationships, indexing human communities to one another in charity. Eric Gregory makes a similar point by using the image of concentric circles to describe the expansive scope of Christian love. 31 Having said this, it is important to note that Augustine recognizes a limit to our moral responsibility. If we abrogate to ourselves the responsibility for saving the world we manifest the sin of pride. The Christian inhabits a conflicted temporal space during her earthly pilgrimage; this conflict is only fully resolved eschatologically. Heirs of Augustine like Reinhold Niebuhr develop this dimension of Augustine’s theology in ways that assert a distinction between justice and love, while others hold them together in a more intimate tension. 32 Recalling a point made earlier—that Augustine’s thought is patient of multiple modes of Christian action in the work of justice—we cannot resolve the tension that characterizes Christian life through prideful and presumptuous attempts to save the world or through forms of sectarianism. Families must endeavor to inhabit the two cities in an ongoing cycle of confession and action. To the extent we can only reduce and not altogether eradicate our complicity in, say, economic systems that undermine the welfare of certain families, Christian families will (also) discharge their debt of justice to others through penitence and prayer.

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CONCLUSION This essay considers resources in Augustine’s theology that fund reflection on social justice and families. It has argued that key aspects of Augustine’s thought are helpful for responding to problematic features in prevailing cultural attitudes regarding families and justice. We also saw that adequate moral reflection on families and social justice must inhabit several tensions that unavoidably attend the subject matter, tensions that Augustine’s theology illuminates. Families are both natural and culturally constructed. Social justice is consonant with both self-determination and the common good. Family bonds are good yet should be transcended in solidarity with non-kin. Christian families should engage the world without presuming to save it. Finally, justice in, towards, and enacted by families are distinctive but interrelated challenges. Much more remains to be said regarding families and social justice, but as we have seen here Augustine’s theology provides critical and constructive insights to frame future inquiry. NOTES 1. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1995); Charles Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2010); Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: an Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008); Augustine and Politics, John Doody, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth, eds. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005); James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 2. Jesse Couenhoven, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Sin, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Alistair I. McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3. For exceptions see Jana Marguerite Bennett, Water is Thicker than Blood: An Augustinian Theology of Marriage and Singleness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Kevin L. Hughes, “Local Politics: The Political Place of the Household in Augustine’s City of God,” in Doody, et al., Augustine and Politics, 145–64. 4. To be clear I am not suggesting that biological ties are more important or real than voluntary commitments to establish family relations, only observing that even in the case of, say, anonymous gamete donors who are forever unknown to a child, the fact of a genetic kinship remains. 5. Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 6. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971); Norman Daniels, Just Health Care (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); National Catholic Conference of Bishops, Economic Justice for All: A Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (Washington, DC: Office of Publishing and Promotion Services, 1986). 7. See Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. 8. See, for example, Katherine Getek Soltis, “The Christian Virtue of Justice and the U.S. Prison,” Journal of Catholic Social Thought 8.1 (2001): 37–56. 9. Some Catholic thinkers want to distinguish Catholic Social Teaching, by which they mean the magisterial documents authored by popes and bishops as an exercise of their teaching

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office—from Catholic Social Thought, the larger body of inquiry that includes the work of theologians, clerical, religious, and lay. Rather than wade into these arguments here I simply use the latter rubric. A brief and helpful orientation to Catholic Social Thought is William J. Byron S. J., “Framing the Principles of Catholic Social Thought,” Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice 3.1 (September, 1999): 7–14. 10. Jana Marguerite Bennett, Water is Thicker than Blood: An Augustinian Theology of Marriage and Singleness (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2008), 57–60. 11. Augustine rails against self-love, by which he means the libido dominandi. His theology promotes a notion of rightly ordered self-love as consistent with love for God. Gerald W. Schlabach, Augustine and Self-Denying Love (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2001); Darlene Fozard Weaver, Self Love and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 12. Hughes, “Local Politics,” 149. 13. See McFadyen and Couenhoven. 14. Bennett argues that Augustine is more egalitarian than we think. There isn’t time or space here to engage work on Augustine and feminism at any length, but I agree with Bennett’s argument that Augustinian theology can inform work on marriage that emphasizes the importance of gender equality. 15. See Confessions, IX. 16. See Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992) and The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Amy Laura Hall, Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008); Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 17. Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West, The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America’s Beleaguered Moms and Dads (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 18. Amanda Marcotte, “Family-Friendly Workplaces are Great, Unless You Don’t Have Kids,” Slate, available at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/06/21/family_friendly_ workplaces_are_great_unless_you_re_childless.html . 19. Mathewes, 297. 20. Pope Francis, Evagelii Gaudium (2013), available at: http://w2.vatican.va/content/ francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_ evangelii-gaudium.html (last accessed August 28, 2014). 21. David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 22. Subsidiarity doesn’t excuse governmental intervention to address social ills; it simply articulates a preference for problem-solving that will prioritize the role of local communities and engage higher levels of organizations when lower levels are insufficient to the task at hand. 23. Gilbert Meilaender, Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1981), 20. 24. For a treatment of love of neighbor and love for God in Augustine see Raymond Canning, The Unity of Love for God and Neighbor in Augustine (Heverlee-Leuven: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1993). 25. Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-love in St. Augustine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 116. 26. Hughes, “Local Politics,” 148. 27. Bennett, 119. 28. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (NRSV). 29. While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here

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are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (NRSV). 30. See Bennett, especially chapter 4. 31. Gregory, 356. 32. See, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1952).

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Index

9/11, 163, 166, 167, 180 Abel, 117, 165 acompañamiento, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Adam, 55, 78, 79–80, 134 advertising, 53, 74, 77, 80 Africa, 121, 131, 137, 196, 221; North, xi, 14, 34, 102, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 194, 195 Against Faustus, 165, 177, 179–180, 182, 183–184 aid, 5, 61, 66, 84 almsgiving, 52, 56, 57, 60, 97–110; spiritual practice of, 97; as treasure in heaven, 98–99, 104 altruism, 51–53, 54, 58, 61, 66–67; general, 52, 58; pure, 52, 58; veiled, 52 Ambrose, 52, 53–54, 55–57, 66–67, 101, 149, 227; giving wealth away, 56 Anabaptists, 12, 19, 238 anarchist realism, 201 angel, 30, 34, 35, 36, 38, 60, 77, 78 Aquinas, Thomas, 195, 234, 243 ascetics, 51, 52, 53, 54–56, 58, 59–60, 62, 65, 66–67, 82; critiques of, 55–56; as identification with the poor, 51, 53, 56, 63, 65; pure, 56, 58; in relation with faith, 62, 63, 65; veiled, 56, 58 atheistic anarchism, 193–194 atom bomb, 168

Augustine, 55; attitude toward sex, 277; Cicero’s influence on, 40–43, 44, 46, 209; Confessions, 9, 31, 76, 140, 208–209, 210, 214, 261, 279; Doctrine of Predestination, 229, 232, 242, 243; Divjak letters, 132, 133–134, 135–139, 141; Dolbeau sermons, 135; ethics of, 98; Gospel according to John, 230, 235, 240–241; on justice, 3; moral theory of, 114, 119; morality of killing, 148–149; personal experiences with slavery, 140–141; Plato’s influence on, 9, 27, 28, 29, 30, 40, 114, 119, 147, 150, 230, 233, 234, 235, 291; Plotinian influence on, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31; realism and, 164, 165, 166; relationship with Calvin, 232, 235; sermons of, 103–104; on slavery, 133–135, 136, 137–142, 201; social justice and, 22, 98; view of state, 16; on war, 164, 165 authoritarianism, 193–194, 196, 199 The Bible, 35, 231, 233; Genesis , 117, 123, 176; John Calvin’s commentary of, 231–235, 236, 238, 239–240; Romans , 8, 10, 122; symbolism, 116, 117–118 body, 22, 31, 32, 73, 139, 150, 197, 215, 257; to God, 13, 22, 32, 35; soul and, 4, 6, 13, 28, 150 313

314

Index

Bowle, John, 6 Brown, Peter, 54, 57, 60, 65, 97, 101, 103, 106, 132, 135–136, 165 Byers, Sarah, 209, 216 Cain, 117–118, 165 Calvin, John, 227; Commentary on Romans, 232, 236; on grief, 229, 231, 242; Harmony of the Evangelists , 239; Institutes of Christian Religion, 227, 228, 236, 243; relationship with Augustine, 232, 235; Reply to Sadoleto, 227–228, 231, 243; on service, 231; on social justice, 236 Campbell, Simone, 11, 13, 22 capitalism, 75, 90, 282, 288, 289 The Catholic Church, 57, 62, 116, 117, 242, 243, 281, 291; challenging the, 227, 231; community of, 22; duty of, 53, 251; relationship with the State, 237–238, 241; unity of, 100–101, 103 Cavadini, John, 77, 84 charity, 3, 5, 6–8, 9, 18, 73, 82, 89, 91, 100, 234, 282, 285, 292; Christian, 102, 179; failures of, 5; grace and, 86; social duty of, 8, 90; treating humans with, 86, 88 Cheney, Dick, xi China, 113 Chomsky, Noam, 198, 199, 202 Christ, Jesus, 15, 17, 19–22, 23, 24, 43, 51, 53, 57, 59, 101, 103, 118, 154, 172, 176, 216, 233, 234, 238, 239, 240, 241, 290, 291; giving to, 97, 99, 101, 106; identification with the poor, 59, 67; invasion and, 116; justice and, 84, 119; love and, 262; as a political figure, 19 Christianity, 11, 12, 14, 15, 21, 51, 57, 58, 59, 66, 132, 146, 164; in politics, 24; realism and, 193, 195; values of, 22, 90, 150; wisdom of, 22 Chrysostom, John, 57–58, 227 Church Fathers, 35, 149, 150, 227–228, 231–232, 234, 243 Cicero, 6, 27, 31, 40, 41–43, 106, 114, 119, 149, 209, 213, 219, 220 Circles of Support Accountability program, 251, 265–267 City of God, 3, 6, 13, 16, 27, 34, 37, 38–40, 43, 44, 45, 114, 115, 116, 117–118,

120, 122, 123–124, 133, 150, 164, 165, 175, 182, 183, 198, 201, 208, 209, 210, 211, 214–215, 219–221, 229, 237–238, 239, 243, 284, 288–289, 291 City of Man, 16–17, 34, 36, 37, 40, 237–238, 239 civil authority, 16, 151, 157, 158, 159, 251 civitas terrena. See Earthly City Clair, Joseph, 104 Clark, Mary T., ix–x, 13 communion, 5, 36, 103, 288 community, ix, x, 5, 6, 15, 22, 24–25, 52, 53, 54, 55, 61, 62, 65–66, 102, 108, 120, 146, 150, 155, 156, 159, 165, 166, 185, 197, 207, 212, 213, 218, 220, 221, 237, 240, 251, 252, 255, 256, 264, 265, 267, 270, 271, 278, 283, 286 condemnation, 64, 133, 171, 198, 234, 254 Cone, James, 194, 195–196 conscience, 6, 13, 15, 17, 18, 43, 53, 88, 100, 168, 173, 185, 217, 218 consumerism, 73–77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 86, 88, 90, 91, 291 Contra Auxentium, 57 corporations, 66, 113, 116, 117 correction, 101, 150, 165, 177, 179, 182, 217, 237, 251, 255, 263, 264, 266, 271 cosmos, 28, 29, 33, 35, 42, 233 Cranz, F. E., 40 creation of the world, 233, 234–235 criminal, 5, 14, 121, 123, 185, 198, 251, 271, 280 criminal justice system, American, 251, 258, 264, 267, 268 cynicism, 197, 199 Dawson, Christopher, 6 De Civitas Dei. See City of God DeCosse, David, 150–151, 158 Demiurgos, 28 Democratic National Convention, 12 Dennis, Trevor, 139 desire, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 23, 31, 54, 55, 58, 61, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 107, 108, 109, 110, 178, 182, 201, 215, 216, 240, 261, 288; disordered, 80, 81, 82; of the flesh, 141, 142, 284 devil. See Satan

Index dignidad. See acompañamiento discipline, 197, 238, 240, 241, 242, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256–257, 258, 264, 265, 266, 268, 270, 283 disorder, 16, 31, 80, 82–83, 88, 106, 123, 182, 261, 284 divine: authority, 150; good, 31, 79; law, 32, 35, 41, 44; love, 119, 120, 152, 153; reason, 105; unity, 117 Divine Revelations , 5 Dodaro, Robert, 107, 194 Dolan, Timothy, 12, 13 Donatists, 14, 24, 120, 207, 242 Earthly City, 34, 37, 38, 39, 117, 118, 119, 120, 198, 200–201, 202, 229 Earthly rulers, 202 Eastern Church, 38 ecological devastation, 113 Ecumenical Councils, 227 education, 13, 20, 30, 57, 153, 195, 280, 281, 282, 283, 287, 290; reform, 237, 240 egocentrism, 52, 73, 115, 182, 184, 197 Elizondo, Virgilio, 153 equality, 8, 9; of giving, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103; as a result of sin, 237; of sin, 106–107; social, 237, 240 eschaton, 34, 35, 41, 44, 45 established order, 149 euergetism, 59, 60; civic, 36, 102; pagan, 102, 107, 218 Eusebius, 38 Eustochius, Saint, 133 Evangelist, 233 evil, 5, 29, 30, 31, 32, 39, 78, 79, 197, 202; restraining of, 253, 258 faith, 6, 32, 35, 235, 241, 243 family, 52, 277–293 financial meltdown, global, 113 forgiveness, 25, 53, 54, 64, 86, 90, 99, 100, 101, 106, 107, 223, 263 fratricide, 117, 165, 185 freedom, 73, 74–76, 78, 83, 85, 87, 90, 142, 159, 253, 277; to offend, 253, 255 Friedrich, Nietzsche, 87 Ganoczy, Alexandre, 243

315

Garcia, Ismael, 154–155 Garnsey, Peter, 140 God, 28, 31, 33, 259; assault against, 5; authority of, 149; dependence on, 107; eternal law of, 6; existence of, 5, 150; grace of, 17, 35–36, 37, 43, 73, 82, 84, 86, 87–89, 285; human commitment to, 43; image of, 79, 230; imago Dei , 79, 230; imitating Him, 80; intended order of, 201; loving Him, 3, 4–5, 14, 22, 24; obedience to, 19, 22, 25, 35, 38, 44, 79, 98, 100, 106, 107–109; and the poor, 57; rights of, 6; sovereignty of, 229; speech of, 233, 234–235; submitting to His will, 13, 65, 75; subservient to, 79; Supreme Good of, 14, 15, 16, 17 Goizueta, Roberto, 154 Good, 15, 17, 31 good, 16, 29, 30, 31; common, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12–13, 15, 17, 22, 79, 108, 158, 171, 174; divine, 31; public, 6 Good Samaritan, 17, 233–234, 241 Gordan, Bruce, 230 gospel, 13, 19, 22, 23, 24, 51, 122, 232, 233, 240; Luke, 17, 25, 99, 237; Mark, 53; Matthew, 53, 98, 99; message of, 11, 13, 19, 237; Paul, 119 government, 6, 23, 117, 194, 220, 237, 281, 287, 288, 289, 290; limited, 16; use of force, 124 greed, 79, 140, 197 happiness, 9, 36, 79, 80, 89, 107–108, 109, 110, 164, 172; greater, 74; and justice, 4, 13 harmony, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 40, 120, 123, 176, 269, 285; perfect, 28; as a virtue, 29; with God, 5; within man, 3, 4, 14 healing, 21, 56, 221, 223, 251–253, 254–256, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 266, 269, 270–271 health, 23, 86, 140, 141, 251, 252, 256, 262, 263, 265, 287 healthcare, 21, 22, 280, 282, 287 heaven, 6, 52, 97–98, 103, 150, 239, 260, 268–269, 278, 285; as a business, 57; union of, 201 Hebrew: language, 231; prophet, 101 high anthropology. See atheistic anarchism

316

Index

hierarchy, 29, 32, 52, 149, 150–151 humanity, 9, 19, 44, 45, 54, 61, 83–85, 114, 115, 120, 123, 134, 150, 153, 155, 167, 172, 199, 212, 230, 233, 235, 236; common, 78, 90, 105–106, 109, 110, 259, 260; fallen, 16, 171, 176, 201, 259 humans, 33; authentic existence of, 30; cooperation of, 113; desire for good, 16; dignity of, 22, 155, 159, 219, 287, 290; disposition of, 30; existing independently, 31, 78; fallen nature of, 16, 36, 40, 119, 134, 200, 201; lack of capacity to make moral decisions, 119; lust for domination, 167; mirroring God, 230; nature of, 5; population growth of, 113; as rational creatures, 31, 32, 33, 201; relationship with God, 252; relationship of, 104–106; rights of, 6; salvation of, 41, 52, 54, 233, 241; self-preservation of, 104, 105; selfish actions of, 13, 51, 73; value of, ix; wholeness of being, 30 humility, 12, 14, 74, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 183, 188, 236, 240 identity, 73–74, 76–77, 83, 86, 90, 173, 212, 279, 291, 292 idolatry, 23, 80, 102, 122, 177, 178, 184 India, 113 Indian gift, 52 inequality, 60, 100, 113; economic, 103, 110; of guilt, 163, 164, 166, 169, 180, 185; social, 32 inheritance, 103, 104 injustice, 5, 9, 16, 20, 57, 164, 166, 167, 175, 209, 210, 221, 223, 259; racial, 195 Intellect, 28, 30, 33 intellect, 17, 29, 30, 114 international diplomacy, 5, 145, 157, 222 Iraq war, 150, 157–159 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 157, 158 ius, 27 Jews, 20, 37, 233 just war theory, 145–148, 149, 150–151, 163, 165–166, 167–169, 172, 181 justice, 100, 118, 119, 290; anarchist, 198; Christian ruler, 6; civic, 238; conditions

of, 13; deserving, 13; failure of, 5; and happiness, 4, 13; human, 3, 17, 42; internal, 3; iustitia, 27, 44, 118, 229; Latina/o, 155; and love, 9, 51; as loving God, x, 3, 4, 236; and the Old Testament, 3; as “order within man”, x, 3, 8; as peace, 3; as prerequisite for almsgiving, 98, 106; restorative, 251–253, 271; in society, 15, 238 Kant, 119 kin, 105, 230, 278–279, 283, 292 kindness, 99, 239, 240, 242, 254 Knox, John, 237 Latin Church, 45, 97, 231 Latina/o theology, 147–148, 151–155, 156 law, 44, 201, 254–255; divine, 32; of God, 241; of nature, 41–42; unjust, 6 Libanius, 55–56, 62 liberalism, 193, 194, 288 liberality, 6, 9 lo cotidiano , 145, 151, 152, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159 lobbying, 23 low anthropology. See authoritarianism love, ix, x, 4, 193; brotherly, 5; caritas, 251, 252, 262; common, 6; and duty, 254; enjoyment, 119; of God, 14–15, 18, 82, 117, 119, 120, 201, 292; and justice, 8; and objects, 33; perverted, 31, 32, 33; use of, 119; your enemy, 15, 22, 23, 24; your neighbor, 4, 5, 6, 14, 17, 18, 54, 55, 100, 104, 109, 110, 118–119, 252 Man of God, 56 Manhattanville College, ix, x market oriented competition, 113 Markus, Robert, 78, 108 Mater et Magistra , 13 material need, 3, 17, 29, 36, 73, 74, 77, 81, 101, 104, 279 Mattox, 149–150 Mauss, Marcel, 52, 59 McGuckin, John, 195, 199, 200, 202 Meilaender, Gil, 163, 166, 180 mercy, 55, 97, 100, 103, 104, 106, 201, 251; divine, 231, 234, 236, 242, 244;

Index misericordia , 236, 251 mestizaje, 151, 152, 153–154, 157, 158, 159 Mill, John, 119, 281 Miller, Richard, 156, 158 Miller, Vincent, 76, 77, 81 moral realism, 196, 198 morality, 6, 84, 134, 135, 139, 154, 197, 198; political, 6; of war, 149, 163–188 motivation, 9, 12, 13, 15, 148 mourning, 207–210, 212, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223 Murray, R. H., 6 nation, 5, 113; authority of, 149, 157; commonwealth, 4, 6, 8, 119, 213, 220; developed, 5; underdeveloped, 5 nature, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 115, 293; of man, 194 Network, 11 New Testament, 14, 44, 61, 62, 118, 122 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 163–164, 165, 166, 168, 170, 173, 178, 182 Niebuhr, Reinhold, xi, 163, 165, 166, 168–169, 193, 194, 195–197, 198 Nongbri, Brent, 195 nosotros , 151 Notre Dame University, 12 “Nuns on the Bus” tour, 11, 24 Obama, Barack, xi, 194 obedience, 5, 16, 22, 32, 44–45, 122, 135, 149, 150, 177, 243, 269 obligation to family, 102, 105, 152 oikeiosis , 104–106, 107 Old Testament, 44, 61, 183; Wisdom, 3 Oration XXX, 55 order,: natural, 35; “order within man”, x, 3; personal order, 4; unjust, 31 original sin, 8, 41, 123, 174, 177, 193, 196, 199 pain, 21, 32, 100, 171, 174, 177, 210, 216, 238 Parry, Jonathan, 52, 59 pastor, 236, 237, 238, 239–242 Pax Romana , 147, 150 peace, 16, 32, 36, 150, 166, 185, 222, 223, 269, 285, 288; body, 150; civic, 6, 285;

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conditional, 199; desire for, 16; earthly, 174, 182, 219, 253, 268, 269–270, 284; just, 3, 114, 182, 185, 200; social, 4, 182, 255, 267; soul, 150; temporal, 8, 9, 37; within man, 6; warriors and, 181, 199 Pelagianism, 106 persuasion, 11, 31, 101, 104 Plato, 9, 27, 40, 114, 119, 233, 291 Plotinian, 6, 27, 28 politics, 6, 17, 186, 199, 202, 220, 270, 284; authority of, 16; Christian, 23, 164, 288; economic order of, 61, 114, 114–116, 117, 120; organizing, 17, 202; power and, 13, 16, 114, 156, 197; poor and, 57; realism and, 8, 163, 165, 196, 202; rooted in love, 17; states and, 5; theology and, 11, 12, 113 poor, 56, 100–101, 109; functioning within church, 56–57; giving to, 52, 54, 97, 99, 105, 109; identification with, 51, 53, 56; relationship with rich, 54, 57–58, 59; social power, 57 Pope John XIII, 13 poverty, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63, 66, 100, 101, 110, 152, 157, 288 power, 55, 171, 177; coercive, 15, 16, 19, 22–23, 24, 40; just, 114 prayer, 12, 57, 91, 97, 99, 141, 172, 208, 260, 263, 292 presidential election, 11 pride, 31, 33, 37, 73–74, 77–78, 79, 83, 85, 197, 199, 201; of the rich, 103 privacy, 18, 79, 80, 108, 280 Protestant Reformers, 227–229, 231, 232, 237, 239, 243, 244 providence, 20, 23, 24, 64, 165, 178, 207 prudence, 140, 141, 286 Psalms, 63, 134 punishment, 16, 18, 78, 251, 253–254; corrective, 178, 182, 253, 255, 261; of sin, 32, 81, 174; retributive, 181, 182, 251, 252, 253 Ramsey, Boniface, 97, 98, 101, 103 rationis. See intellect Rawls, John, 11 reason, 105, 109, 119

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Index

redemption, 32, 185, 262; of wrong-doer, 251, 253–254, 255, 265–271 repentance, 12, 14, 24, 57, 85, 121, 124, 166, 167, 173, 178, 182, 254, 255 Republic, 27, 41, 42, 43, 119 Republican National Convention (2012), 12 Rideman, Peter, 238 righteousness, 22, 29, 86, 88, 119, 165, 166, 168, 169, 186, 259 Rome, 6, 8, 12, 37–38, 40, 42–43, 99, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 132, 134, 137, 138, 141, 149, 164, 211–214, 218–221; sack of, 115–116, 207, 209, 210, 212 Ruokanen, Miikka, 39, 40 Ryan, Paul, 11, 22 Sabine, George, 6, 8 Sadoleto, Jacopo, 227 salutem. See health Satan, 31, 37, 56, 77–80, 83, 118; worshipping, 37 Schmitt, Carl, 193, 194, 199, 200 Schuld, Joyce J., 200 Schumpeter, Joseph, 114 Scipio, 42, 119 Scriptures, 55, 227, 231, 232, 234, 236, 239, 241, 243 self-hatred, 77, 83 self-love, 77, 82–83, 104–106, 107, 108–110, 115, 117, 148, 193 sensual desire, 29, 43, 79, 108 separation of Church and State, 11 sex offender, 251 shepherd, 201, 240–242 The Shepherd of Hermas, 58 sin, 5, 16, 30, 31, 32, 40, 73, 76, 78, 99, 106–107, 260, 284; atoning for, 97; social inequality resulting from, 32; in society, 131, 132 slavery, 32, 123, 131–132, 133–135; in Africa, 137, 138; economy and, 131, 132, 137–138; as a metaphor for Christians, 134–135, 139, 141; questions of morality and, 133, 139; as a result of sin, 134, 140 social harm, 53 social justice, 5, 9, 22, 32, 53, 235, 280–282; Christian life, 13

social life, 32 social order, 4, 8, 32, 66, 122, 148, 218, 230, 278; ordained by God, 28, 31, 33, 34, 42, 237 society, 4, 6, 9, 11, 33, 36, 119, 197; civil, 238; interest of, 8; and religion, 11, 13 unjust, 6 solitary confinement, 251 Somalia, 158 soul, 13, 14, 22, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 43, 53, 98, 100, 103, 139, 150, 235, 253; divine unrest of, 230 spiritual fulfillment, 5 Steinmetz, David, 234 Stoics, 35, 104, 105, 106, 109, 207–209, 216–217, 236 suffering, 17, 18, 23, 37, 38, 59, 64, 145, 154, 155, 159, 166, 173, 178, 180, 181, 182, 210, 211, 216, 217, 219, 222, 230, 262 superbia. See pride supplicium. See punishment Syria, 58, 145–147 technological advancement, 113 Ten Commandments, 6, 8, 45 terrorism, 157, 166, 180, 199 theistic anarchism, 193, 196, 198 transcendence, 32, 40–41, 45; divine, 235; self, 184 Trinity, ix, x, 28, 79, 87 Twitchell, James, 74, 75 utilitarianism, 101, 119, 281 Valparaiso, 163 vengeance, 166, 238, 239 Veyne, Paul, 55, 59, 60, 61 vice, 29, 31, 38, 102 Victorianus, 207 virtue, 29, 30, 31–32, 33, 98; cardinal, 3, 285 voluntas. See will war, 32, 134, 149, 150, 164, 199; to defend peace, 199; holy, 55; reactions to, 164; in a world ruled by God, 164

Index wealth, 54, 55, 56, 63–65, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106; Christian life and, 51, 53, 54; good of, 101 Webb, Melanie, 209, 217, 218 Wells, H. G., 6 White, Morton, 197 will, 30, 114, 119 wisdom, 11, 12, 22, 29, 35, 85, 108, 113, 181, 215

319

Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 208, 229–231, 234, 236, 242, 243 women, 156, 158, 159, 279, 281, 285 Yoder, John Howard, 12, 19–22, 23, 24 Zehr, Howard, 252

About the Editors and Contributors

Editors Teresa Delgado is director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program and associate professor of religious studies at Iona College (New Rochelle, NY). She received her doctorate in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in 2005, under the guidance of womanist theologian Dr. Delores S. Williams. Her interests and scholarship are interdisciplinary, utilizing the experience of women, particularly Latinas, to articulate a constructive theological vision, grounded in and critical of Latino culture and the Roman Catholic theological tradition. Her publications include, “Dead in the Water . . . Again,” in Theological Perspectives for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Public Intellectuals for the Twenty-first Century, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Rosemary Carbine and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); “A Delicate Dance: Utilizing and Challenging the Sexual Doctrine of the Catholic Church in Support of LGBTIQ Persons” in More Than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church, vol. 1: Voices of Our Times, ed. Christine Firer Hinze and J. Patrick Hornbeck II (Fordham University Press, 2014); “This is My Body: Theological Anthropology Latina/mente,” in Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology: Shoulder to Shoulder, Susan Abraham and Elena Procario-Foley, eds. (Augsburg Fortress, 2009); “Freedom is Our Own: Towards a Puerto Rican Theology of Identity, Suffering and Hope,” in Creating Ourselves: African Americans and Latinos/as, Popular Culture, and Religious Expression. Benjamín Valentín and Anthony Pinn, eds. (Duke University Press, 2009); and “Prophesy Freedom: Puerto Rican Women’s Literature as a Source for Latina Feminist Theology,” in A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice. María Pilar Aquino, Daisy Machado and Jeanette Rodríguez, eds. (University of Texas Press, 2002). She is currently working on a manuscript 321

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About the Editors and Contributors

entitled, “Loving Sex: Envisioning a Relevant Catholic Sexual Ethic,” through a grant from the Louisville Institute. Teresa serves as President of the Board of Directors for WESPAC Foundation, the leading force in Westchester County for peace and justice work for four decades. She also serves on the Steering Committee of the Hispanic Theological Initiative, a leading resource for Hispanic/Latino graduate education in theology/religion. She lives in Mount Vernon, NY with her husband of twenty-five years, their four children and two dogs. John Doody is professor of philosophy and Robert M. Birmingham Chair in Humanities at Villanova University. He is also Director of the Villanova Center for Liberal Education. Kim Paffenroth is professor of religious studies at Iona College and the Interim Director of the Iona College Honors Program. He has written extensively on Augustine, the Bible, and on the interface between Christian belief and popular culture. In the last category, he produced Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (Baylor, 2006), which won the Bram Stoker Award and led Dr. Paffenroth to write several popular zombie novels. Contributors Mary T. Clark was professor emerita of philosophy at Manhattanville College. She has published widely on Augustine and has also been an active civil rights advocate. Aaron D. Conley currently is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Regis University. He earned his Ph.D. in Religion and Social Change in 2011 from the Iliff School of Theology and the University of Denver. His research focuses in the areas of Christian social ethics, early Christian history, and the interpretations and applications that unite the two. Aaron has published essays and presented papers on law enforcement ethics, memory and its role in liberation theology, as well as on Christian pacifism in patristic and contemporary literature. His first book is entitled, We Are Who We Think We Were: Christian History and Christian Ethics, published by Fortress Press in 2013. He is now working on two additional book projects. The first is a historical survey of Christian social ethics and the second is an inquiry into the legalization of marijuana and the questions this poses for faith communities. María Teresa Dávila is assistant professor of Christian ethics at Andover Newton Theological School. She teaches and publishes in the areas of the option for the poor, the use of the social sciences in Christian ethics, the ethics of the use of force, and immigration, race and class issues in U.S. civil

About the Editors and Contributors

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society. Her current research interest studies activism and public witness among leaders from diverse communities of faith. Mark J. Doorley earned a M.Div. from the Washington Theological Union in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College in 1994. He has published two books: The Place of the Heart in Lonergan’s Ethics (UPA, 1996) and In Deference to the Other: Lonergan and Contemporary Continental Thought, edited with James Kanaris (SUNY, 2005). At Villanova since 1996, Doorley currently serves as the Director of the Ethics Program in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. The program encourages the interdisciplinary study of ethics, drawing on both the philosophical and Christian traditions. The main responsibility of the program is to administer the required introductory ethics course, taken by all Business and Liberal Arts & Sciences students; students can also pursue a concentration or a minor in ethics. Doorley has worked with the College of Engineering on ethics across the curriculum issues and sits on the board of the Center for Church Management and Business Ethics in the Villanova School of Business. Todd French is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Rollins College. He holds a Ph.D. in the History of Christianity from Columbia University, a Th.M. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, where his interest in social justice was first inspired. His fields of teaching and research include Early Christianity, Byzantine Hagiography, and Syriac literature. J. Burton Fulmer is associate professor in the Religion and Philosophy Department and director of the Masters of Arts in Catholic Studies program at Christian Brothers University. He has previously published articles on Augustine, Anselm, and Sartre. His dissertation develops a theological approach to identity and freedom in contrast to those promoted by consumerism, drawing on the works of Augustine, Kierkegaard, and René Girard. He is currently working on a constructive systematic theology that analyzes the divine-human encounter using trauma theory. Jennifer A. Herdt is the Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. She is the author of Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and has served as guest editor for special issues of the Journal of Religious Ethics and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Her articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including the Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, Soundings, Studies in Christian Ethics, and the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. In 2013 she delivered the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary on Christian eudaimonism and divine command morality. An ongoing pro-

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About the Editors and Contributors

ject on ethical formation, Bildung, and the Bildungsroman, is supported by a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has been the recipient of a Carey Senior Fellowship at the Erasmus Institute (2004–2005), a postdoctoral fellowship from the Center for Philosophy of Religion (1998–1999), a Mellon Graduate Prize Fellowship from the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University (1992), and a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (1989). She has served on the board of directors of the Society of Christian Ethics and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Religious Ethics. R. J. Hernández-Díaz teaches medieval Christianity and religious ethics, among other things, at the Iliff School of Theology. He has published several journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia and dictionary entries. His current research and writing focuses on religious and ethical perspectives on the political economy. John Kiess is assistant professor of theology at Loyola University Maryland. He received his Ph.D in theology and ethics from Duke University in 2011. As a George J. Mitchell Scholar, he earned his MA in Comparative Ethnic Conflict from Queen’s University Belfast and M.Phil in Theology from Cambridge University. He is the author of Hannah Arendt and Theology (T& T Clark) and has published articles in Modern Theology, The Christian Century, and other journals. Matthew J. Pereira is a visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. One of his primary areas of interest is the reception and interpretation of Augustine from the sixth century up to the sixteenth century. Two of his recent publications address issues related to the reception and interpretation of Augustine of Hippo: “From Augustine to the Scythian Monks: Social Memory and the Doctrine of Predestination” (Studia Patristica LXX [Peeters, 2013]), and “Augustine, Pelagius and the Southern Gallic Tradition: The Faustus of Riez’s De gratia Dei” (in Grace for Grace: After Augustine and Pelagius: An Early Medieval Debate On Grace [CUA Press, 2014]). Siobhan Nash-Marshall is professor of philosophy and the Mary T. Clark Chair of Christian Philosophy at Manhattanville College, where she is also chair of the philosophy department. She holds Ph.D.s from Fordham University and the Università Cattolica di Milano, as well as a L.M. from the Università di Padova and a B.A. from New York University. Her specializations are metaphysics, epistemology, and medieval philosophy. The author of many books, her most recent publications include “Evil, Pain, and the Problem of Properties” (2013) in Aquinas and Maritain on Evil: Mystery and Metaphysics; “Lies, Damned Lies, and Genocide” in Metaphilosophy (2013); “Levi, Arslan, and Responses to Genocide,” in Scrittori del Novecento e

About the Editors and Contributors

325

Mistero Cristiano (2013); “Boethius’s Influence on Theology and Metaphysics through the Sixteenth Century” in Brill Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages (2012); “Bugie, maledette bugie e genocidio,” in Vita e Pensiero (2012); “Saint Anselm and the Problem of Evil, or on Freeing Evil from the Problem of Evil,” (2012) in International Philosophical Quarterly. In November 2013, in response to the events in the Middle East, she co-founded the Christians in Need USA Foundation. Edmund N. Santurri is professor of religion and philosophy and former director of the Ethical Issues and Normative Perspectives Program at St. Olaf College. He is the author of Perplexity in the Moral Life (University Press of Virginia, 1987 [reprinted with Wipf & Stock in 2010]) and co-editor (with William Werpehowski) of The Love Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy (Georgetown University Press, 1992 [reprinted with Wipf & Stock in 2009]). His published essays include “Rawlsian Liberalism, Moral Truth and Augustinian Politics” in the Journal of Peace and Justice Studies. Most recently, he wrote the “Introduction” to the reissue of Reinhold Niebuhr’s An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (Westminster John Knox, 2013). George Schmidt is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. He is a community organizer, activist and self-described anarchoChristian. His scholarship primarily focuses on corporate personhood and the construction of a genealogy of corporate power from a theological perspective. Sarah Stewart-Kroeker is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia, appointed in 2014. She earned her doctorate in Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2014, her M.A. in Theology from Yale Divinity School in 2009, and her B.A. in Religious Studies from McMaster University in 2007. She is the recipient of several awards, including the postdoctoral research fellowship and doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has published articles on Augustine in Studia Patristica and Studies in Christian Ethics. Sarah’s teaching and research interests include the history of Christian thought, moral theology and Christian ethics, religion and politics, and late antique thought. Sergey Trostyanskiy received his Ph.D. in Church History from Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York. His scholarly interests include a wide range of topics associated with the early church, the primary emphasis being made on the great controversies of the fourth to eighth centuries and on the theology of the ecumenical councils. He approaches the themes of the early church from the perspective of the shared intellectual history of both religious and secular groups. Currently, he is a Research

326

About the Editors and Contributors

Fellow at the Sophia Institute of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox Studies in New York. Darlene Fozard Weaver, Ph.D., is director of the Center for the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University. She previously served as director of the Theology Institute and Associate Professor of Theology at Villanova University, and Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. Weaver is the author of The Acting Person and Christian Moral Life (Georgetown University Press, 2011), Self Love and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and co-editor and contributor to The Ethics Embryo Adoption and the Catholic Tradition: Moral Arguments, Economic Reality, and Social Analysis (2007). Her work has been supported by the Center of Theological Inquiry, the Louisville Institute, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. Weaver is currently working on a book on ethics and moral psychology, and a series of articles addressing parental relinquishment laws, fathers’ rights, and sex education. William Werpehowski holds the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Chair in Catholic Theology at Georgetown University. He is the author of Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth (Ashgate Publishing, 2014), and American Protestant Ethics and the Legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr (Georgetown University Press, 2002). His published essays include “Weeping at the Death of Dido: Sorrow, Virtue, and Augustine’s Confessions” in the Journal of Religious Ethics, and “A Tale of Two Presumptions: The Development of Roman Catholic Just War Theory,” in Linda Hogan, ed., Applied Ethics in a World Church (Orbis, 2008).