Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine 3030193322, 978-3030193324

Table of contents :
Dedication......Page 6
Series Editors’ Preface......Page 7
Preface......Page 9
Biblical Quotations......Page 12
Contents......Page 13
Abbreviations......Page 14
List of Figures......Page 18
The Anthropological Analogy......Page 19
Tertium Quid?......Page 23
Outline of the Book......Page 31
Chapter 2: The Goodness of All That Is......Page 34
Goodness......Page 35
God Is One......Page 39
Unity, Peace and Hierarchy......Page 46
Chapter 3: The Prideful Soul and the Pagan City......Page 53
Pride and Perversion......Page 54
Pelagianism and Power......Page 68
The Earthly City......Page 73
Chapter 4: The Unself and the Pilgrim City......Page 85
Will and Love......Page 86
Grace and Conversion......Page 94
The Pilgrim City......Page 107
Chapter 5: The Saint and the City of God......Page 118
Mind......Page 119
Body......Page 131
The City of God......Page 137
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Distension, Attention, Extension, Intention......Page 145
Distentio......Page 146
Attentio et Extentio......Page 148
Intentio......Page 152
Bibliography......Page 156
Index......Page 168

Citation preview

RECOVERING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine be n hol l a n d

Recovering Political Philosophy Series Editors Timothy W. Burns Baylor University Waco, TX, USA Thomas L. Pangle University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX, USA

Postmodernism’s challenge to the possibility of a rational foundation for and guidance of our political lives has provoked a searching re-­examination of the works of past political philosophers. The re-examination seeks to recover the ancient or classical grounding for civic reason and to clarify the strengths and weaknesses of modern philosophic rationalism. This series responds to this ferment by making available outstanding new scholarship in the history of political philosophy, scholarship that is inspired by the rediscovery of the diverse rhetorical strategies employed by political philosophers. The series features interpretive studies attentive to historical context and language, and to the ways in which censorship and didactic concern impelled prudent thinkers, in widely diverse cultural conditions, to employ manifold strategies of writing, strategies that allowed them to aim at different audiences with various degrees of openness to unconventional thinking. Recovering Political Philosophy emphasizes the close reading of ancient, medieval, early modern and late modern works that illuminate the human condition by attempting to answer its deepest, enduring questions, and that have (in the modern periods) laid the foundations for contemporary political, social, and economic life. The editors encourage manuscripts from both established and emerging scholars who focus on the careful study of texts, either through analysis of a single work or through thematic study of a problem or question in a number of works. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14517

Ben Holland

Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine

Ben Holland School of Politics and International Relations University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK

ISSN 2524-7166     ISSN 2524-7174 (electronic) Recovering Political Philosophy ISBN 978-3-030-19332-4    ISBN 978-3-030-19333-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19333-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Hulton Archive / Handout This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Gary

Series Editors’ Preface

Palgrave’s Recovering Political Philosophy series was founded with an eye to postmodernism’s challenge to the possibility of a rational foundation for and guidance of our political lives. This invigorating challenge has provoked a searching re-examination of classic texts, not only of political philosophers, but of poets, artists, theologians, scientists, and other thinkers who may not be regarded conventionally as political theorists. The series publishes studies that endeavor to take up this re-examination and thereby help to recover the classical grounding for civic reason, as well as studies that clarify the strengths and the weaknesses of modern philosophic rationalism. The interpretative studies in the series are particularly attentive to historical context and language, and to the ways in which both censorial persecution and didactic concerns have impelled prudent thinkers, in widely diverse cultural conditions, to employ manifold strategies of writing— strategies that allowed them to aim at different audiences with various degrees of openness to unconventional thinking. The series offers close readings of ancient, medieval, early modern and late modern works that illuminate the human condition by attempting to answer its deepest, enduring questions, and that have (in the modern periods) laid the foundations for contemporary political, social, and economic life. Ben Holland’s Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine is the first book in this series to explore the political thought of St. Augustine. Holland argues that Augustine develops not two but three analogies between the human self and the city: the Earthly City, ordered by self-­ love; the (hitherto neglected) Pilgrim City (or the Church), ordered by divided but improving love; and the City of God, ordered by wholehearted vii

viii 

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

love of others and of God. Holland first offers an overview of Augustine’s Christian ontology—particularly the dependence of all beings on God and their unity, peace, and hierarchy—as a preparation for understanding his anthropological and political theories. These theories are then spelled out, beginning with an elaboration of Augustine’s teaching concerning the fall of Adam as a proud failure to depend on God, the punishment for which is more of the same: the self’s bent, restless concupiscence and futile desire for earthly dominion and self-possession. The Earthly City, in its pretense of conformity to natural order and control, is the sad result. The Pilgrim City, by contrast, is characterized by human selves who use their free will to lovingly pursue genuine goods—to pursue above all, through divine grace, God. In the account of this city, argues Holland, is found the Augustinian republic, in its truest form. Finally, the self-as-saint comes into view in the social state of the City of God, or heavenly city, where the human mind is entirely caught up in contemplation of God, and all saved souls, together with their resurrected bodies, are finally joined together as the mystical body of Christ, in a return to the original, properly ordered peace of the universe. Waco, TX Austin, TX 

Timothy W. Burns Thomas L. Pangle

Preface

This book has a major thematic continuity with my last (and first), The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities (Cambridge University Press, 2017). There, I took as my theme the parallels between person and state that were developed in a good deal of political theory in early modern Europe—most interestingly and influentially by Thomas Hobbes and then Samuel Pufendorf. Here, I explore much the same analogy but in the earlier period of late antiquity, focusing on the writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo. I chose to write on what I call Augustine’s ‘anthropological analogy’ in part because it became clear to me that it had received scant attention. There was a gap, I decided, and I thought that I might be well-placed to attempt to fill it. So much for why I determined on writing the book: an academic has to write, and this seemed like the right project at the right time. But what really motivated me to come to Augustine, however, wasn’t so much the writing but the reading that I wanted to do. I didn’t know much about Augustine, but I knew that he has sometimes been credited (inaccurately, as it turns out) with inventing the concept of the human will, even an entirely new conception of human personhood, and having spent a lot of time working on the intellectual history of will and personhood I resolved that I couldn’t remain quite so ignorant for much longer. Furthermore, the self/city analogy is a favourite topic, but I’m fascinated in a more general way by the metaphors and analogies by which human beings have attempted to make sense of the world for themselves and for others, metaphors and analogies which have histories of their own, but which are so rarely taken up as topics in their own right by historians of ideas. And I knew that one ix

x 

PREFACE

of the things that Augustine is sometimes said to be at least partly responsible for is an ‘analogical’ conception of being. I wanted to know more. Finally, I have a strong interest in the theological imagination, and the fundamental challenges posed by a theological attitude to both historical and political thinking. Who better to read? And I’m so pleased that I did. For the very thin reason that Augustine goes much further back than the seventeenth century, the present book is more ‘historical’ than the previous one. But that is a pretty attenuated sense of the historical. For the most part, this is a different kind of book, not really intellectual history at all as I had come to understand and even practise it. It has too little to say about Augustine’s historical context for that. It says hardly anything about his contemporaries and about the pressing questions that they were asking and answering. I don’t have the necessary skills to do that kind of work on Augustine’s context. Nor is it philosophy, as I am not especially interesting in investigating the coherence, truth or falsity of what Augustine had to say. I have simply tried to reconstruct some of Augustine’s arguments, to connect things together, to map out the mind of the man as far as I was able to in order to bring into clearer relief the analogy between self and city than had been done hitherto, and to understand this in terms of the wider context of his own thinking on various of the many issues on which he wrote. I’ve written the book relatively quickly and very much at the outer edges of my own understanding of the material, never feeling completely in control of it or my own words about it. My own intentions have been somewhat overtaken by the product itself, and I have sensed it in a strange way speaking back (normally to tell me that something or other isn’t working). This has, if nothing else, taught me one or two things about authorial intentions. More than that, it has been an enjoyable little book to write—much more gratifying in many ways than co-authoring something with previous incarnations of oneself, as Catharine MacKinnon appositely characterised the process of working on a text over a long gestation period in the preface to her Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. About two-thirds of the book was drafted during a period of research leave granted to me during the first semester of the 2017–18 academic year. My first thanks must go to my friends and colleagues in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, many of whom certainly shouldered other burdens in order graciously to afford their workmate that precious time to read, think and write—activities which seem increasingly impossible to do properly in the day-to-day hurly-burly of academia. My colleagues also indulged me on two occasions

 PREFACE 

xi

when I presented to them parts of the text, and I’m grateful for their questions, suggestions and friendly criticisms. I feel very fortunate for other reasons to have ended up writing this book at this particular university. Owing in large part to John Milbank’s continued presence as Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics, Augustine sometimes seems to be in the air that one breathes on campus, and that has often kept me interested and energised. Perhaps my greatest debt of gratitude is to someone whom I have never met. The Hallward Library is exceptionally well-stocked with books on Augustine by virtue of the fact that the late Robert A. Markus purchased and donated new copies of so many of these texts to the University, even long after he retired from his post as Professor of Medieval History. I doubt that I could measure the impact that his generosity, institutional loyalty and commitment to the future of learning and scholarship has had on my writing. At Palgrave Macmillan, I would like to thank Michelle Chen and John Stegner for their enthusiasm and efficiency. Two anonymous reviewers went far beyond the call of duty in providing comprehensive, challenging and constructive criticism of an earlier draft of the text. They enabled me to produce a better book than I could ever have written on my own— although of course its present disorders, deficiencies and perversions are all my own fault, as Augustine would have insisted. I am obliged to Timothy W.  Burns and Thomas L.  Pangle for admitting this book into their series. Philippa Jevons prepared the index, for which I am most appreciative. I would like to thank Cecilia Lawrence and David Richards for allowing me to include in this book reproductions of their original artworks. My best friend Matthew Richards organised the latter. For that, for helping to get me interested in Iris Murdoch and for much else besides, it is appropriate to record a message of thanks to him here. It is a pleasure to dedicate this book, which is more about love than I imagined it would be when I began it, with love, to my husband, Gary Smith. Nottingham, UK

Ben Holland

Conventions

Translations I have greatly benefitted from the many English translations of a variety of Augustine’s texts. These have been made by several hands in a range of contexts, each translator having his or her own policies and peculiarities. Please note that I have sometimes silently altered quoted passages in the text to ensure consistency. My procedure has been: a. To capitalise all pronouns referring to God; b. To capitalise the initial letters of the English translations of the names of the eschatological cities (i.e. the Earthly City, the City of Man, the Heavenly City, the City of God); c. Consistently to capitalise ‘Trinity’; d. To anglicise any American-English spellings; e. To modify punctuation so that it accords with the conventions adopted for the text as a whole (e.g. using single quotation marks, placing full stops outside quotation marks, generally avoiding the use of the serial comma); f. To use ‘-ise’ rather than ‘-ize’ spellings; g. To use ‘judgment’ rather than ‘judgement’.

Biblical Quotations My own biblical quotations are from the New International Version. When quoting Augustine’s own frequent biblical references, however, I have left the scriptural part of the quotation as I have found it. xiii

Contents

1 Introduction: St. Augustine of Nottingham  1 2 The Goodness of All That Is 17 3 The Prideful Soul and the Pagan City 37 4 The Unself and the Pilgrim City 69 5 The Saint and the City of God103 6 Conclusion: Distension, Attention, Extension, Intention131 Bibliography143 Index155

xv

Abbreviations

In order to ease referencing, citations to Augustine’s own works appear parenthetically in the text itself. The following abbreviations are used. In each case I also list the English translation of which I have made use. Dates in square brackets indicate the year(s) of composition. Where occasionally I made use of or reference to an alternative translation, these are mentioned in the footnotes and full bibliographical information for that edition is provided in the Bibliography. The texts listed below are not inventoried there for a second time. Bapt. c. Don. C. Duas. Pel. C. Iul C. Sec. Man. Civ. Dei

De baptismo contra Donatistas [400–401] On Baptism against the Donatists, trans. J. R. King (London: Aeterna Press, 2014) Contra duas epistolas Pelagianorum [ca. 420] ‘Answer to the Two Letters of the Pelagians’, in Answer to the Pelagians, vol. 2, trans. Roland J. Teske (New York: New City Press, 1998) Contra Iulianum [ca. 421] Against Julian, trans. Matthew A. Schumacher (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1957) Contra Secundinum Mancichaeum [ca. 404] ‘Answer to Secundinus, a Manichean’, in The Manichean Debate, trans. Roland Teske (New York: New City Press, 2006) De civitate Dei contra paganos [413–427] Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972)

xvii

xviii 

ABBREVIATIONS

Conf. Cons. ev. Cor. Don. Div. qu. Doc. Chr. En. Ps. Ench. Ep. Ep.* Ex. ep. Rom.

Fid. rer. Gn. adv. Man.

Confessiones [397–401] Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) De consensu evangeliorum [405] The Harmony of the Gospels, trans. S. D. F. Salmond (New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1888) De correctione Donatistarum [ca. 417] ‘A Treatise concerning the Correction of the Donatists’, trans. J. R. King, in The Writings Against the Manicheans and Against the Donatists, ed. Philip Schaff (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus [388–395] ‘Miscellany of Eighty-Three Questions’, in Responses to Miscellaneous Questions, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: New City Press, 2008) De doctrina Christiana [ca. 395 and 426] Teaching Christianity, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1996) Enarrationes in Psalmos [392-ca. 418] Expositions of the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, 6 vols. (New York: New City Press, 2000–04) Enchiridion [ca. 419–422] Manual to Laurentius concerning Faith, Hope and Charity, trans. Ernest Evans (London: SPCK, 1953) Epistulae [386–430] Letters, trans. Wilfrid Parsons, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1951–56) Epistulae [ca. 415–430] Letters, trans. Robert B. Eno (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989) [These are translations of letters discovered by Johannes Divjak in 1969] Expositio quarundam propositionum ex Epistula Apostoli ad Romanos [394–395] Augustine on Romans: Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans and Unfinished Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. Paula Frederiksen Landes (New York: Society of Biblical Literature, 1982) De fide rerum quae non videntur [ca. 420–425] ‘Faith in the Unseen’, trans. Michael G. Campbell, in On Christian Belief, ed. Michael Fiedrowicz (New York: New City Press, 2005) De Genesi adversus Manichaeos [ca. 388–90] ‘On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees’, in On Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 2002)

 ABBREVIATIONS 

Gn. litt. Gr. Chr. Jo. ep. tr. Jo. ev. tr. Lib. arb. Mag. Mor. Mus. Nat. bon. Nat. grac. Pecc. mer.

xix

De Genesi ad litteram [ca. 400–414] ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’, in On Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 2002) De gratia Christi et de peccato originali [418] The Grace of Christ and Original Sin, in Answer to the Pelagians, vol 1, trans. Roland J. Teske (New York: New City Press, 1997) Tractatus in epistulam Johannis ad Parthos [407] Homilies on the First Epistle of John, trans. Daniel E. Doyle and Thomas Martin (New York: New City Press, 2008) In Johannis evangelium tractatus [ca. 408–420] Tractates on the Gospel of John, trans. John W. Rettig, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988–95) De libero arbitrio [387–396] ‘On the Free Choice of the Will’, in On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, trans. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) De magistro [389] ‘The Teacher’ in The Teacher; The Free Choice of the Will; Grace and Free Will, trans. Robert P. Russell (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968) De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum [388] The Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life, trans. Donald A. Gallagher and Idella J. Gallagher (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1966) De musica [ca. 387] On Music, trans. Ludwig Schopp (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1947) De natura boni contra Manichaeos [399] ‘The Nature of the Good’, in The Manichean Debate, ed. Roland Teske (New York: New City Press, 2006) De natura et gratia, contra Pelagium [415] ‘Nature and Grace’, in Answer to the Pelagians vol. 1, trans. Roland J. Teske (New York: New City Press, 1997) De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum [411–412] ‘On the Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins and the Baptism of Little Ones’, in Answer to the Pelagians, vol. 1, trans. Roland J. Teske (New York: New City Press, 1997)

xx 

ABBREVIATIONS

S. Dom. mon. Serm. Simpl. Trin. Ver. rel.

De sermone Domini in monte [393] Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, trans. Denis J. Kavanagh (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010) Sermones Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill, 11 vols. (New York: New City Press, 1990–97) Ad Simplicianum [396] ‘Miscellany of Questions in Response to Simplician’, in Responses to Miscellaneous Questions, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: New City Press, 2008) De Trinitate [399-ca.420] The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991) De vera religione [390] ‘True Religion’, trans. Edmund Hill, in On Christian Belief, ed. Michael Fiedrowicz (New York: New City Press, 2005)

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1

Icon of St. Augustine of Hippo by Cecilia Lawrence (2015) 9 Saint Augustine and the Devil by Michael Pacher (ca. 1471–75) 33 Garden of Eden by David Richards (1986) 42 Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne (ca. 1645–ca. 1650)87 Fig. 5.1 La Gloria by Titian (1554) 109 Fig. 6.1 St Augustin by Pietro di Giovanni D’Ambrogio (ca. 1435–ca. 1440)137

xxi

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: St. Augustine of Nottingham

The Anthropological Analogy In Book ii of his Confessions, written shortly after his accession to the bishopric at Hippo Regius in present-day Algeria, Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) recounts an episode from his youth. The dramatic, almost histrionic, terms of his reminiscence seem overwrought in relation to the incident itself, in which a teenager and his friends divested an unlovely tree of its crop of fruit and fed the profits of their enterprise to a herd of swine. There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither colour nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our usual pestilential way) we had continued our game in the streets [described earlier, at Conf. ii.3.8, as the ‘streets of Babylon’]. We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. (Conf. ii.4.9)

Augustine spends an entire chapter of his spiritual autobiography turning over this event, inquiring into his motives (‘Wretch that I was, what did I love in you, my act of theft, that crime which I did at night in the sixteenth year of my life?’), his intentions (‘What fruit had I, wretched boy, in these things which I now blush to recall …?’), and how he might make restitution (‘What shall I render to the Lord?’) (Conf. ii.6.12–16). ‘I went astray

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Holland, Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Recovering Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19333-1_1

1

2 

B. HOLLAND

from You, my God, far from Your unmoved stability. I became to myself a region of destitution’ (Conf. ii.10.18). Why does Augustine interrogate the affair at such length, with such intense scrutiny, and in terms so self-flagellating? It has been suggested that one of the reasons that he does so is because his recollection of the event is in fact a parable, pointing allegorically or metaphorically beyond the event itself to several significant biblical themes.1 First, there is original sin. Augustine only ever describes the purloined fruit of the tree as poma, the same generic word used in the Vulgate to refer to the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. He trains his penetrating gaze, moreover, entirely on a single tree. Like Adam, Augustine sinned not because of ‘any lust of the flesh’, but because of ‘a loving concern for mutual friendship’, which directed him away from his telos in God (Gn. litt. xi.49). Second, there is redemption. As Augustine was called by his comrades at the fruit tree to sin, a decade or so later he will understand an overheard children’s (or harvesters’) singsong chant as instructing him to set to reading the Bible, which he will do under a fig tree, the biblical symbol for security (1 Kings 4:25), and at which moment he will make a decision to be baptised as a Christian.2 Here, then, is one elaborate analogy in the writings of St. Augustine. But it is certainly not the only one. Augustine’s writings are saturated by analogy. Often and significantly, analogical relations in Augustine point to real proportions between different aspects of creation. He maintained, for example that the six stages of the history of mankind reflect the six days of creation (Jo. ev. tr. ix.6.1–3). And it was Augustine who posited that the four liberal arts constituted an ascending ladder of knowledge via measurement, from geometry (measuring inert and inorganic spaces), through music (which measured the relationship between the soul and the body) and then astronomy (the movements of heavenly bodies moved by the 1  Philip Burton, Language in the Confessions of Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 112–132; Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 409–418; John Freccero, ‘Autobiography and Narrative’, in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, eds. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 22–28; Garry Wills, Saint Augustine (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), 10–15. 2  For the possibility that Tolle, lege could have meant not ‘Pick up and read’ but ‘Pick up and sort’ i.e. organise the fruit of the harvest, see James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, vol. 3: Commentary, Books 8–13 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 63.

1  INTRODUCTION: ST. AUGUSTINE OF NOTTINGHAM 

3

World Soul), to arithmetic (which was the science of measurement in itself ) (Mus. vi.1.1).3 Augustine would surely have agreed with an important contemporary theologian that ‘when we see things as like each other in terms of their differences, we are sensing the involvement of the finite with the infinite’.4 The present book concerns itself with a specific analogy developed by Augustine, namely the analogy of the self and the city, or what more loosely (certainly with respect to the part of the pair designating political community) we could describe as the analogy between the soul and the state, the person and the polis.5 After Plato, Augustine’s was the next canonical elaboration of this analogy, which would go on in one form to nourish the body politic of the Middle Ages, and in another to help breathe life into the personality of the state from the early modern period.6 Chiara Bottici uses the term ‘domestic analogy’ to cover such comparisons between individual and city as have appeared in the history of political philosophy.7 I have found that I need another term, however, because, in the first place, the domestic-analogy notion was coined to describe the presumption that relations between states are patterned on the relations between individuals, and, in the second, it better fits those arguments in the history of political thought which read off the implications of 3  For Augustine on the World-Soul, see Roland J. Teske, ‘The World-Soul and Time in Augustine’, in his To Know God and the Soul: Essays on the Thought of St. Augustine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). 4  John Milbank, ‘The Double Glory, or Paradox Versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek’, in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 171. 5  Unlike ‘city’, which is Augustine’s word, self is not a properly Augustinian concept. He writes of interior homo, animus, mens, or in terms of reflexive pronouns such as ego ipse sum or ‘myself’, but never of ‘the self’. This is in large part because, as we shall see, human selfhood for Augustine is properly to be interpreted not as something stable or essential but as a gift dependent entirely on God. There is no word in modern English which will really do. Nonetheless, we need some concept with which to work, and, as John Christman argues, ‘reference to selves seems to avoid at least some of the connotations’ that terms such as person, individual, human being, agent, subject, ‘I’, and so on, have. John Christman, The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 7. 6  Plato, Republic, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 435b-c; for the narrative, see Ben Holland, The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 7  Chiara Bottici, Men and States: Rethinking the Domestic Analogy in a Global Age, trans. Karen Whittle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

4 

B. HOLLAND

­ atriarchal, paternal or conjugal relationships for the organisation of politp ical power.8 I therefore use the term ‘anthropological analogy’ as a shorthand for the analogy between self and city. Technically, in an analogy A is said to stand to B as C stands to D. C and D may be the same (‘God is to me as my father is to me’). Analogy is a cousin of metaphor (A is B), but more complicated, comparing two complex entities rather than a complex to a simple one. That is why Kant could argue that analogy ‘does not mean, as the word is commonly taken, an imperfect similarity of two things, but a perfect similarity of relations between quite dissimilar things’.9 Analogy is also a cousin of simile (A is like B), metonymy (A refers to B and B is commonly associated with A, as when ‘Downing Street’ is used to mean ‘the British government’), synecdoche (A refers to B and is a component of B, as when ‘London’ is used to mean ‘the United Kingdom’, or ‘government’ is used to mean ‘state’) and allegory (B is taken to represent an unmentioned A).10 The strict distinctions between metaphor and its cousins notwithstanding, all are grounded in the idea that A can be pictured as B, so that, in Augustine’s own words, metaphorical or analogical reasoning comprehends all forms of thinking in which ‘one thing is understood from another’ (Trin. xv.9.15).11 These are not mere rhetorical tropes or figures of speech but together run through all human thought and language.12 Their function is 8  For the former: Hedley Bull, ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, eds. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966) and Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For the latter, see especially Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 9  Quoted in Harald Wydra, Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 35. 10  Ted Cohen, Thinking of Others: On the Talent of Metaphor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 10. 11  For further justification of the proposition that the distinction between metaphor and analogy need not be defended too robustly, see Rieke Schäfer, ‘Historicizing Strong Metaphors: A Challenge for Conceptual History’, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 7 (2012), 28–51, at 31. 12  This is not the place to defend such a claim. The point is to my mind established decisively in a body of interesting literature, e.g. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Zoltan Kovecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Beate Hempe (ed.), Metaphor: Embodied Cognition and Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

1  INTRODUCTION: ST. AUGUSTINE OF NOTTINGHAM 

5

to represent but also to ‘persuade others to accept our representations’.13 ‘Everywhere there are things standing for other things’, writes James Alexander, ‘and it is all we can do to make sense of the sense we make in politics’.14 Augustine’s anthropological analogy is a chapter in one of the greatest stories ever told, a story about how we came to represent the world to ourselves as being constituted in a particular way, and to persuade ourselves of the soundness of that representation. Nobody should be in any doubt about how the analogy between the state and the individual has become practically a dead metaphor, meaning that it pervasively and almost subconsciously reinforces both vernacular and scholarly discourses about politics.15

Tertium Quid? Augustine’s anthropological analogy has been adverted to many times in passing,16 but to my knowledge only Patricia L. MacKinnon has studied the soul-state analogy in Augustine in any detail.17 MacKinnon demonstrates that for Augustine ‘the relations internal to the individual soul are 13  Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, The Mightie Frame: Epochal Change and the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1. 14  James Alexander, ‘A Genealogy of Political Theory: A Polemic’, Contemporary Political Theory, online early: 28th November 2018. 15  On the vernacular, see e.g. Andreas Musolff, Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 93–132; on the scholarly, see e.g. Sean Fleming, ‘Moral Agents and Legal Persons: The Ethics and Law of State Responsibility’, International Theory, 9 (2017), 466–489. 16  E.g. John Neville Figgis, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s City of God (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1921), 39; Karl Vossler, Medieval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and his Times, trans. William Cranston Lawton (New York: Ungar, 1929), 235; Thomas Merton, ‘Introduction’, in Augustine: The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1950) xi–xii; Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 314; Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56; Robert Dodaro, ‘Ecclesia and Res Publica: How Augustinian are Neo-Augustinian Politics?’, in Bibliotecha Ephemeridium Theologicarum Lovaniensum, vol. 219, eds. Lieven Boove, Mathijs Lamberigts and Maarten Wisse (Leuven: Peeters); and especially Johannes van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of his Doctrine of the Two Cities (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 281–283, and Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 10, 20, 47. 17  Patricia L.  MacKinnon, ‘Augustine’s City of God: The Divided Self/The Divided Civitas’, in The City of God: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Dorothy F. Donnelly (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 319–352.

6 

B. HOLLAND

the index and determining factor of the form of polity’, and thus that the state for Augustine is analogous to the soul, the soul writ in more expansive proportion.18 She confines her analysis, though, to Augustine’s anthropological analogy inasmuch as this bears on what he designated the civitas terrena or Earthly City in his self-described magnum opus, The City of God against the Pagans. This, however, is only one of Augustine’s eschatological cities, the other being the civitas Dei or City of God, to which MacKinnon’s chapter does not attend. What is more, the author of City of God is also the author of The Trinity, a man who sees threes everywhere he looks, politics included. In this book, I revisit the analogy between self and state in Augustine in order to bring into relief its tripartite character. I tackle Augustine’s thought in this way in part because I think that an analogical approach will help to illuminate what continues to remain somewhat in penumbra, namely the middle ground between the Earthly City and the City of God. A city, Augustine said, is a society ordered by love, and thus any actual civitas might range from a nuclear family to ‘everything that binds a particular public [or] people together’, and which ‘approaches what we mean by culture’.19 But the civitates that provide the focus for Augustine in the City of God are the cities into which it will be seen that all humankind has been divided at the end of time, the eschaton. The Earthly City is ‘created by self-love reaching the point of contempt of God’, while the Heavenly City is ordered ‘by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self’ (Civ. Dei xiv.28). There are two radically opposed ways of interpreting Augustine on the two radically opposed eschatological cities, each of which happens to have been put most influentially by a scholar who concluded his academic career at the University of Nottingham (hence my title for this introductory section).20 According to Robert A. Markus, an intellectual historian of late antiquity, Augustine’s two cities are eschatological in the sense that, from the perspective of God’s eternity,  MacKinnon, ‘Divided Self’, 321.  Paul J. Griffiths, ‘Secularity and the Saeculum’, in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. James Wetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 33–54, at 39–41. 20  Previous analyses which take Markus and Milbank as representing opposite poles of interpreting the secular in Augustine include: Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 89–112; Michael Hollerich, ‘John Milbank, Augustine, and the “Secular”’, in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God, eds. Mark Vessey, Karla Pollmann and Allan Fitzgerald (Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999); and especially Michael J. S. Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 119–160, and thereafter passim. 18 19

1  INTRODUCTION: ST. AUGUSTINE OF NOTTINGHAM 

7

they are absolutely distinct as the city of the damned and the city of the saved. From the human perspective of historical time, however, they are imperceptible, as only God knows for sure who, in hoc saeculo, numbers among the elect and who not. As Augustine put it, ‘these two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgment’ (Civ. Dei i.35). Thus, according to Markus, the eschatological cities are invisible in historical time: All we can know [he reports] is that the two cities are always present in any historical society; but we can never—except in the light of a biblical revelation in the unique strand of ‘sacred history’—identify the locus of either … here and now the two cities between them are, quite simply, what the saeculum is. It is neither a third thing somewhere between them,21 nor is it, except eschatologically, resolvable into its two constituents.22

On this reading of Augustine, the secular, while it may not be a third thing, is nonetheless ‘the area of indeterminacy between the two cities’.23 Secular history—the history of all human societies—exists ‘in the region where the two cities overlap’.24 Augustine describes Jerusalem, the Holy City of the Old Testament, as ‘a kind of shadow and prophetic image of this [Heavenly] City … in virtue of its pointing to that other City, not as being the express likeness of the reality which is yet to be’ (Civ. Dei xv.2), and it is as such a sign of the City of God that the Church, according to Markus’s interpretation of Augustine, must function in the here and now. In so far as it is not actualised as signum, the Church is a res: as such, its mission is to be formless, merging into the human historical and cultural context in which it exists, to be ‘lost’ in and identified with the ‘world’. In so far as it is actualising itself as signum, the whole of the Church’s essential being is concentrated in its business of becoming visible as a sign.25 21  Here Markus was responding to Henri-Irénée Marrou, ‘Civitas Dei, Civitas Terrena: Num Tertium Quid?’, in Studia Patristica, eds. K. Aland and F. L. Cross (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1957), who first proposed that a tertium quid between the eschatological cities could be called the saeculum, but for whom it named a time during which a person’s loves are divided between those characterising each city, so that ‘the border between the cities of good and evil passes for each of us inside his own heart’ (350). 22  R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 101–102. 23  Ibid., 64; emphasis mine. 24  Ibid., 98; emphasis mine. 25  Ibid., 185.

8 

B. HOLLAND

The Church, then, points towards but is itself in no way the Heavenly City. John Milbank, a theologian, describes this as ‘almost totally erroneous’ and ‘obviously nonsensical’.26 Markus’s neutral saeculum, in which the eschatological cities are invisible, is, Milbank thinks, evidence of Markus’s capitulation to a liberalism that would have been unfathomable to the Bishop of Hippo. For, once upon a time, there was no ‘secular’. And the secular was not latent, waiting to fill more space with the steam of the ‘purely human’, when the pressure of the sacred was relaxed. Instead, there was a single community of Christendom … The saeculum, in the medieval period, was not a space, a domain, but a time— the interval between Fall and eschaton where coercive justice, private property and impaired natural reason must make shift to cope with the unredeemed effects of sinful humanity. The secular as a domain had to be instituted or imagined, both in theory and practice.27

Markus’s error is in not realising that, for Augustine, the ‘logic of Christianity involves the claim that the “interruption” of history by Christ and his bride, the Church, is the most fundamental of events, interpreting all other social events’, and that it is ‘able to interpret other social formations because it compares them with its own new social practice’.28 Decisive for Milbank’s reading is Augustine’s claim, at one point in his baggy monster of a book, that the Church is ‘the Heavenly City—or rather that part of it which is on pilgrimage in this condition of mortality, and which lives on the basis of faith’ (Civ. Dei xiv.17).29 The eschatological cities are absolutely visible during the saeculum, according to Milbank’s Augustine, the Heavenly City as the Church, ‘a historical community bound together by the historical transmission of signs’, and the Earthly City as everything else, ‘quite simply a realm of sin’, for (as Milbank pungently puts it) ‘the ends sought by the civitas terrena are not merely limited, finite goods, they are those finite goods regarded without “referral” to the infinite good, and, in consequence, unconditionally bad ends’.30 Thus Milbank finds in Augustine textual support for his own contention that the ‘Church  John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 400, 407.  Ibid., 9. 28  Ibid., 388. 29  It is probably in virtue of this formulation that scholars ‘have been so little able to reach agreement as to just what the City of God is’: F. Edward Cranz, ‘De Civitate Dei, xv, 2, and Augustine’s Idea of the Christian Society’, in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 404. 30  Milbank, Social Theory, 406. 26 27

1  INTRODUCTION: ST. AUGUSTINE OF NOTTINGHAM 

9

Fig. 1.1  Icon of St. Augustine of Hippo by Cecilia Lawrence (2015)

itself, as the realised Heavenly City, is the telos of the salvific process’,31 ‘not primarily a means of salvation, but rather a goal of salvation’.32 The Church, according to Milbank in ‘critical Augustinian’ mode, is that community ‘inaugurated by the Incarnation and the hypostatic descent of the Spirit on earth’, and the gospels must be read in as ‘the story of the (re)foundation of a new city, a new kind of community’ in which Jesus figures ‘simply as the founder, the beginning, the first of many’ (Fig. 1.1).33  Ibid., 403; and the equation at 405: ‘the ecclesia, the City of God’.  John Milbank, ‘An Essay against Secular Order’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 15 (1987), 199–224, at 204. 33  John Milbank, ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-Two Responses to Unasked Questions’, Modern Theology, 7 (1991), 225–237, at 232; John Milbank, ‘The Name of Jesus: Incarnation, Atonement and Ecclesiology’, Modern Theology, 7 (1991), 311–333, at 317. 31 32

10 

B. HOLLAND

Markus, then, finds a space that is no thing-in-itself between the two eschatological cities, and that space is the saeculum; while for Milbank there is no middle term at all between earthly sin and churchly/heavenly salvation, the ‘secular’ being nothing but a totalising narrative promising peace through the violent exclusion of differences, as opposed to the Church, uniting differences in love. Each commentator has brought his own interpretation of Augustine on the secular to bear on contemporary ‘secular’ politics in drastically divergent ways. For Markus, Augustine anticipates what John Rawls much later called political liberalism34: Augustine’s attack on the ‘sacral’ conception of the Empire liberated the Roman state, and by implication, all politics, from the direct hegemony of the sacred. Society became intrinsically ‘secular’ in the sense that it is not as such committed to any particular ultimate loyalty. It is the sphere in which different individuals with different beliefs and loyalties pursue their common objectives in so far as they coincide. His ‘secularisation’ of the realm of politics implies a pluralistic, religiously neutral civil community … Augustinian theology should at least undermine Christian opposition to an open, pluralist, secular society.35

By contrast, for Milbank Augustine is the thinker who provides the greatest impetus to a post-liberal political programme. This means many things, but fundamentally it rues the rise of the secular and demands in response the politicisation of the Church and the reorientation of culture towards a politically-guiding and religiously-motivated conception of the good.36 It is difficult, however, to square the historical St. Augustine with either of these historical-intellectual and political readings. Markus, for example, finds it difficult to reconcile his own interpretation of Augustine’s writings with certain facts about the bishop’s life, such as his opposition to re-­ baptising schismatics into the Church, which would have been a pointless opposition in an eschatologically neutral age where God was just ‘one

 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).  Markus, Saeculum, 173. Markus’s most sustained analysis of the relationship between political liberalism and religion is his Christianity and the Secular (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). His own (very polite) reply to Milbank is at 41–48. 36  See especially John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016). 34 35

1  INTRODUCTION: ST. AUGUSTINE OF NOTTINGHAM 

11

lobbyist among many’.37 Furthermore, as Milbank seems to have realised of late, his version of the patron saint of theologians is hard to put together with the Augustine who considered Rome—the pagan polis against which so much of the first ten Books of The City of God is directed—as playing a providential role in world history—and even of Babylon as providing in some sense a space for the flourishing of the pious (Civ. Dei ii.29).38 Part of the problem, I want to suggest, is that both appraisals of Augustine are Manichaean in their different ways. In neither case is there a tertium quid between the Earthly and Heavenly cities: it is a space, invisible to the human eye, in which Earthly and Heavenly Cities commingle (Markus), or there is no space at all (Milbank). No room is made for a third thing which might begin to make some sense of what Augustine says about the relations between psychology, politics and time. Augustine wrote explicitly about the two cities and only the two cities. This is understandably a major organisational point in the secondary literature. One introductory survey, for example, has it that the eschatological cities are ‘utterly distinct’, ‘poles apart’, and that ‘the difference is on a truly apocalyptic scale’.39 Another, dated but more colourful, has it that ‘Augustine’s mind was destined to remain to the last radically dualistic. Like all mighty souls he knew not the zone of greyness. His eyes saw but the boundless sapphire of Heaven or the awesome glow of Hell’.40 Given that the City of God will materialise at the end of History, we cannot imagine that the opposition in Augustine is ever intended as one to be 37  James Wetzel, ‘Splendid Vices and Secular Virtues: Variations on Milbank’s Augustine’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 32 (2004), 271–300, at 274. See also Peter Iver Kaufman, ‘Christian Realism and Augustinian(?) Liberalism’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 38 (2010), 699–724, at 712; and William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality, 2nd edn. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 38  The recognition comes in John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 228–236. Several commentators have remarked, rightly in my view, that Milbank’s situating of the Kingdom in the Church is ‘rather utopian’, his ecclesiology ‘so high that the Church looks down upon the world from Heaven itself’, and therefore highly implausible in itself and as a reading of Augustine on the Church. N. Vorster, ‘A Critical Assessment of John Milbank’s Christology’, Acta Theologica, 32 (2012), 277–298, at 294; and David J. Dunn, ‘Radical Sophiology: Fr. Sergej Bulgakov and John Milbank on Augustine’, Studies in East European Thought, 64 (2012), 227–249, at 233. 39  Henry Chadwick, Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 100. 40  Giovanni Papini, Saint Augustine, trans. Mary Prichard Agnetti (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930), 265.

12 

B. HOLLAND

overcome dialectically, as the product of a struggle of opposites. But this does not mean that there might not be a via media that, while not eschatological in itself, is crucial to a proper understanding of his text. I believe that there is. Implicitly, there is a third city in Augustine. As James Wetzel has highlighted: Augustine needs two cities—one eternally debased and the other eternally blessed—to set up a polarity between good and evil. The city that has to work its way between the poles is a tertium quid. At any given time, some of its members may be more Heaven-bound and some more Hell-bent, but no one of them, while in time, is ever wholly identifiable with either destiny. Augustine speaks of two cities being on pilgrimage, civitas terrena and civitas Dei, and he pits the love that characterizes the one against the love that characterizes the other. To be consistent, he would have to say that there is only one city on pilgrimage, the secular city, and that its love is unresolved.41

My claim in this short book is that, just as there is an analogy in the self for each of the eschatological cities, so there is an analogy between the self and the third city. Wetzel is not the first to point out the dim but necessary existence of a third city in Augustine, and I will follow Peter Brown in denominating it the civitas peregrina, or Pilgrim City.42 The Latin word peregrinus translates as ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’. The vast majority of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire during its first couple of centuries were peregrini, resident aliens who were free subjects but not themselves citizens of Rome. Concepts often have embedded within them descriptive and prescriptive conceptions of time,43 and the concept of pilgrim in the world of ancient Rome—as a person traversing civic terrain, journeying on, eyes on the horizon, present in but not properly a part of the community—was shot through with a durational temporality, on which Markus trades in his treatment of the pilgrimage of the Church throughout the saeculum, and Milbank in his conception of the Church as an ­eschatological community perduring since the  Wetzel, ‘Splendid Vices’, 276.  Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 313–329. See also Miles Hollingworth, The Pilgrim City: St Augustine of Hippo and his Innovation in Political Thought (London: T&T Clark, 2010) (although Hollingworth’s Pilgrim City, like Brown’s, is Augustine’s Heavenly City on pilgrimage during the saeculum). 43  Kimberly Hutchings, Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); and Alexander Blake Ewing, Ideology, Language and the Politics of Time (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2017). 41 42

1  INTRODUCTION: ST. AUGUSTINE OF NOTTINGHAM 

13

coming of Christ. There is another t­emporality, however, built into the ­concept of pilgrimage as it figured on biblical terrain. Peregrinus was the Latin translation of proselytos from the Koine Greek of the Septuagint, where the stranger or sojourner it described was also a ‘newcomer’ to Israel, that is, a convert to Judaism.44 Pilgrim, proselyte and convert are synonyms.45 Yet the temporality of conversion is suggestively distinctive. Conversion, in the first place, involves a telescoped temporality, a watershed before and beyond which times are as chalk and cheese. It also, though, implies a process of change, spatially better described by a threshold or limen, separating two spaces which are hard parsed in practice.46 The temporalities of convert and pilgrim are relevant in different ways to understanding the character of the Pilgrim City.

Outline of the Book The argument proceeds as follows. Chap. 2 provides some necessary background for an understanding of Augustine’s anthropological and political theories. We moderns are likely to misunderstand him unless we are clear about Augustine’s Christian ontology. The chapter deals with his account of the participation of Creation in God, which is to say the continued dependence of all things on God. Part and parcel of this is Augustine’s view that all things that exist are good, and this chapter also elaborates on this theme by unpacking the concept of goodness. One aspect of goodness is unity, for all being, according to Augustine, is good, and every distinct being must have some degree of unity in order to be what it is. A related aspect of goodness is peace, Augustine’s word for the internal and external ontological unity of things, the sine qua non of every kind of being, according to which everything is only a being to the extent that it is in at least imperfect peace with itself. A third related concept is hierarchy: all Creation is good, but there is a hierarchy of goods, of superior and inferior things, indicating how different things ought to be used or enjoyed. Augustine’s language with respect to psychology and politics is likely to mislead the contemporary reader unfamiliar with the outlines of his vision 44  On Jewish conversion before the rise of Christianity, see especially Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 45  For this synonymousness in the history of Christianity, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 65. 46  On liminality in relation to the sacred, see Wydra, Politics and the Sacred, esp. 23–26.

14 

B. HOLLAND

of the universe and the terminology in which he expresses it. This is what this chapter aims to supply. Chapter 3 establishes Augustine’s first anthropological analogy, between the defective self and the Earthly City. Adam in the Book of Genesis is the prototype of this kind of self, and the first part of the chapter provides an overview of Augustine’s account of Adam’s original sin and its consequences for his descendants. Adam’s primal sin was pride, his perverse desire to be autonomous, under his own power. This threw a spanner in the good works of Creation, according to Augustine, by causing a deficiency in Creation, for God had created all things to participate in Himself, to enjoy their dependence on the source of all being. It was only right, then, that Adam and his descendants, already in his loins when he committed the original sin, as Hebrews 7:10 authoritatively had it, should suffer a self-inflicted penalty for that sin. This assertion of self, Augustine maintains, was punished by the self’s inability now to attend to the hierarchy of goods in the right order, as different goods drag the agent in different directions, as its needs are never satisfied, and as people try to dominate their peers, to use them for their own ends. Not only this, but all the while this self celebrates as the loftiest ideal of human nature a conception of agency as what I call desireless self-possession. This sick soul finds its analogue in the Earthly City, which is also self-divided, tortured by an insatiable desire for glory, and which justifies its sovereignty in terms of the subordination of desire to reason when in fact it trades on excessive desires in contradiction of reason. Chapter 4 describes Augustine’s second anthropological analogy, between the Christian convert and the Pilgrim City. It supplies, first, an account of Augustine’s conception of genuine free will, which responds to two imperatives: to show in what sense human beings retain free will given that original sin has so denatured our primal freedom; and to provide an alternative to the psychology of Pelagianism, a Christian doctrine Augustine regarded rather as diabolical, an emanation of pride itself. According to Augustine, will and love are the same thing, and real freedom is a matter of shifting the weights in one’s soul so that they direct a person to more appropriate objects of attention and affection. Augustine’s description of his own conversion to Christianity and his persistence in faith thereafter relies on this same analysis of will and love as equivalent, and thus his substitute theory of free will is integral to his conception of how fallen Creation can begin to return to its original goodness. This chapter is the linchpin of my argument, as Book viii is the linchpin of

1  INTRODUCTION: ST. AUGUSTINE OF NOTTINGHAM 

15

Augustine’s testimony of his own conversion, the Confessions. For just as that crucial book recounts Augustine’s own conversion from sin to sanctification, so in the analogue of the civitas peregrina a relation of the redemptive forces of earthly social and political life can be found, as the decisive step towards assembling the City of God. The community of the converted—the Pilgrim City, or the Church—is a body of people, whose loving attention to God is structured and disciplined liturgically and which is also the sign of the love and power of God, from which it draws its energy and raison d’être. It is in the course of the discussion of the Pilgrim City that the chapter advances a new interpretation of Augustine’s principle contribution to political theory, his account of the res publica. Chapter 5 discusses Augustine’s third anthropological analogy, between the self that is a saint and the communion of saints in Heaven, the City of God. It first examines another Augustinian analogy, his most famous and celebrated, namely the ‘psychological analogy’ between the human mind—or as Rowan Williams has insisted, the mind of the saint—and the Holy Trinity that is God. It moves from mind to body, to the body of the saint, understood as the corporate body of the Church, as previously examined in Chap. 4—but here we take up Augustine’s argument that the Church is the body of Christ, mediating between the elect on earth and God the Father. Finally, the chapter takes up the third anthropological analogy between the saved soul and soteriological city in terms of Augustine’s Trinitarian account of human mental agency and his vision of resurrection bodies. Finally, by way of conclusion to the book, Chap. 6 examines the relationship between two key terms of art in Augustine’s repertoire, namely peace and tension. Peace is, for Augustine, the original condition of the cosmos, to which it will return at the end of days. It is always in some kind of relation to some modification of the concept of tension. This might be distension, which is unnatural, unstable and divisive: the state of the self in the Earthly City. It might be attention, which is a tension towards some other object, the first step on the journey of a leading out from the self that begins to close the door on distension, associated by Augustine with conversion. It might be also extension, the stretching out of the self through faith in an object that cannot yet be seen, an enlargement of the soul, associated with pilgrimage. Finally, it might be intention, when things are ‘in tension’ with each other, which for Augustine is not meant pejoratively but rather denotes that everything has assumed its rightful place, that the balance between things proper to peace has been restored. It describes, of course, the condition of the saint and of the City of God.

CHAPTER 2

The Goodness of All That Is

Perhaps the best-known representation of Augustine in popular culture is Bob Dylan’s ballad ‘I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine’, from his 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Augustine is there depicted ‘Alive with fiery breath’, tearing through his quarters ‘in the utmost misery’, imploring people, in ‘a voice without restraint’, to hear his ‘sad complaint’, but in the end all for nothing, searching, as he was ‘for the very souls/Whom already have been sold’.1 Here, then, is the late Augustine, the ‘man whose energy has burnt itself out, whose love has grown cold’.2 Here he is, old and ornery, the inspiration for the curmudgeonly, compassionless Father Paneloux in Albert Camus’s The Plague. He is, of course, by now the man who defended such an ungenerous version of the doctrine of predestination, and with such doggedness, that it darkened his whole outlook on everything.3 Augustine, to be sure, insisted with increasing urgency on the pervasiveness of sin in our corrupted human nature. Yet this is only half the 1  Bob Dylan, ‘I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine’, in his Lyrics, 1962–1985 (London: HarperCollins, 1985), 379. 2  John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), 231. 3  On Augustine’s strong embrace of a theology of predestination in his seventies, see especially Phillip Cary, Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 99–126. For Augustine’s life and times, still unrivalled is Brown, Augustine. See also Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions and Confessions (London: Penguin, 2015), an enjoyable and instructive account of his life until his baptism;

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Holland, Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Recovering Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19333-1_2

17

18 

B. HOLLAND

story. Augustine never retreated from his affirmation, since the time of his intellectual conversion to Christianity, of the inherent goodness of all that God created. To emphasise the dark dimension of his thought but not the light makes Augustine look quite modern, perhaps like Hobbes or Nietzsche. It may be common and even interesting as an interpretation, especially among scholars in the discipline of political studies; but it is not very Augustinian. The next chapter begins to address the anthropological analogy in the thought of Augustine, from the point at which sin creeps into the world. In this short chapter, however, I do some necessary groundwork by focusing on his staunch avowal of the goodness of Creation. The first part of the chapter deals in general terms with the goodness of what God has created according to Augustine. It then proceeds to a section on the specification of what that goodness looks like in the case of the archetype of goodness, namely God. In a third section, the discussion focuses on the respects in which Augustine deduces the goodness of Creation by way of analogy to God’s goodness, attending especially to the concepts of unity, peace and hierarchy. This chapter, in short, supplies an overview of Augustine’s ontology, from start to finish of his philosophical and theological career.

Goodness At the age of nineteen, around 372 or 373, Augustine became a convert to Manichaeism. First preached by the prophet Mani in third-century Persia, this was an eccentric form of Gnosticism, whose central tenet was a radical cosmological dualism. According to the Manichees, the world is an arena wherein the force of goodness does battle against the equal and opposite force of evil. Both potencies are material, but goodness is a corporeal light, whereas evil is a physical darkness. The Kingdom of Light is associated with the God of the New Testament, while the Kingdom of Darkness is associated with the God of the Old Testament, ‘the author of evil and responsible for such moral enormities as the whoring, polygamy, lying, and killing by the patriarchs and the prophets’.4 As Augustine many years later reported Manichaean doctrine: and James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), a sometimes iconoclastic account of Augustine’s life, focusing on his post-baptismal years. 4  Frederick H. Russell, ‘“Only Something Good Can be Evil”: The Genesis of Augustine’s Secular Ambivalence’, Theological Studies 51 (1990), 698–716, at 700.

2  THE GOODNESS OF ALL THAT IS 

19

They believe … that God was compelled to the creation of the vast structure of this universe by the utter necessity of repelling the evil which fought against Him, that He has to mingle the nature of His creating, which was good, with the evil, which is to be suppressed and overcome, and that this good nature was thus so foully polluted, so savagely taken captive and oppressed that it was only with the greatest toil that He can cleanse it and set it free. And even then He cannot rescue all of it, and the part which cannot be purified from that defilement is to serve as the prison to enclose the Enemy after his overthrow. (Civ. Dei xi.22)

Human beings, in the eyes of Manichaeism, are bodies in whose stygian matter sparks of light or goodness have come to be enshrouded, the battleground of the two gods. Salvation can only be achieved through a regime of extreme asceticism designed to shatter the caliginous power imprisoning the particles of light, so that they may return to the otherworld of luminosity. Augustine gave up on Manichaeism after a disillusioning encounter with the bishop Faustus in 383 (Conf. v.6.10–11). He had been attracted to the sect first and foremost because it provided an explanation for the existence of evil: the good god was not omnipotent, but rather locked in a perpetual confrontation with a foe as formidable as he. Manichaeism no longer providing the solution to his intellectual problem, Augustine decided that he could in fact dispense with the solution because it was premised on an unsatisfactory representation of the problem. He now arrived at an enduring commitment that he would carry with him to the last: that all that exists is in fact good. Augustine now affirmed that the one God created everything from nothing, and that everything He has created is good. Let us take these points in turn. Augustine explains in the Confessions that God’s works are made out of nothing by You, not from You, not from some matter not of Your making or previously existing, but from matter created by You together with its form—that is, simultaneously. For You gave form to its formlessness with no interval of time between. The matter of Heaven and Earth is one thing, the beauty of Heaven and Earth is another. You made the matter from absolutely nothing, but the beauty of the world from formless matter—and both simultaneously so that the form followed the matter without any pause or delay. (Conf. xiii.33.48)

20 

B. HOLLAND

The universe is created entirely from nihil, from nothingness, from non-­ being.5 With his creatio de nihilo formula rather than the more conventional creatio ex nihilo, Augustine seems to want to stress that the act of Creation inaugurates time and space themselves, including of course all matter and form that exist only in time and space. He thereby makes it clear that God does not make the universe out of non-being, as if that non-­ being in some sense pre-existed Creation. God creates de nihilo in a further sense, namely that His will to create has, according to Augustine, no cause: After all, if God’s will has a cause, there is something that is there before God’s will and takes precedence over it, which it is impious to believe. So, then, if anyone says, ‘Why did God make Heaven and Earth?’ … is to be given this answer: ‘Because He wished to’. It is God’s will, you see, that is the cause of Heaven and Earth, and that is why God’s will is greater than Heaven and Earth. Anyone who goes on to say, ‘Why did He wish to make Heaven and Earth?’ is looking for something greater than God’s will is; but nothing greater can be found. (Gn. adv. Man. i.2.4)

Every cause is superior to its effects, and nothing is superior to God’s will, which precludes God’s will from having any cause.6 All that we can validly sustain, writes Augustine, is that God created because He so willed. The second point to unpack is Augustine’s declaration that all that subsists is good. This is the case, he first insists, inasmuch as ‘good’ is a relative term, and nothing created can be said to be perfect. Even God cannot create anything equal to Himself because created things are brought into being from nothing, which means that such things all carry the weight of a certain ‘becomingness’, a changeableness, and only the unchanging and unchangeable is perfect. ‘That which truly is is that which unchangeably abides’ (Conf. vii.11.17). As he puts it at the outset of one of his anti-­ Manichaean works: The highest good, than which there is none higher, is God, and for this reason He is the immutable good and therefore truly eternal and truly immortal. All other good things are made only by Him but are not made of 5  See William Maker, ‘Augustine on Evil: The Dilemma of the Philosophers’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 15 (1984), 149–160. 6  William E. Mann, ‘Augustine on Evil and Original Sin’, in his God, Belief, and Perplexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 80.

2  THE GOODNESS OF ALL THAT IS 

21

Him. For that which is of Him is what He is, but those things which have been made by Him are not what He is. And for this reason, He alone is immutable, while all the things that He has made are mutable because He has made then from nothing (Nat. bon. §1; see also C. Sec. Man. §8).

Furthermore, he argues that God would not in any case generate anything as good as Himself even if He could, because He ‘is just, [and] He did not make the things which He made from nothing equal to that which He begot of Himself’ (Nat. bon. §1). It would be unjust for that which came from nothing to be the equal of Him Who has existed eternally and is the cause of the existence of all other things. Creation, therefore, is merely good because it lacks the perfection of the Creator. Nonetheless, it is still good. In the first place, ‘no nature can be made except by the highest and true God’ (Nat. bon. §1). Augustine takes it as read that God is good, indeed the supreme good, and being brought into existence by this supreme good, everything, whatsoever its rank of being, cannot be anything but good, because God only does good. Every being, as he puts it in the Confessions, has been fashioned out of the ‘fullness of Your goodness’ (Conf. xiii.2.2). The goodness of Creation is an entirely natural and logical consequence of the creative activity of the superlatively good God. God would not create something if He did not already know that it was good (Civ. Dei xi.21). What is more, Augustine argued that creatures participate in God, meaning that their existence and goodness continue to depend on God.7 God is the one good in itself and in the highest sense, that is, by its own nature and essence and not by participation in some other good. And there is another good that is good by participation, deriving its good from the supreme good which, however, continues to be itself and loses nothing. This good, as we have said before, is a creature. (Mor. ii.4.6)

Everything that exists, Augustine tells us, is therefore good insofar as it exists. I will leave until the next section of this chapter a discussion of his arguments about why some creatures are better than others, and to Chap. 3 an account of how, according to Augustine, evil works its way into the Creation made by God to be wholly good. To conclude this section, 7  See James F.  Anderson, St. Augustine and Being: A Metaphysical Essay (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965); and David Vincent Meconi, ‘St. Augustine’s Early Theory of Participation’, Augustinian Studies 27 (1996), 81–98.

22 

B. HOLLAND

however, I want simply to point to some aspects, from the side of goodness, of Augustinian theodicy. Augustine argues that, from a God’s-eyeview, some evils may in fact be contributing to the overall goodness of the whole. It is likely, moreover, that such goodness will only be appreciable from a diachronic rather than a synchronic perspective. For ‘all temporal things have been positioned in this order of things in such a way that future things could not succeed past ones unless they were to cease to exist, so that the whole beauty of the ages is fully accomplished in their kind’ (Lib. arb. iii.15.42). Beauty, as Carol Harrison has shown, is the aesthetic aspect of goodness in Augustine’s handling of both concepts.8

God Is One This is a book about a particular analogy in the writings of St. Augustine, the analogy of self and city. As I pointed out in Chap. 1, Augustine’s is a worldview thoroughly saturated by analogy. His conception of the universe, though, is motivated by an even more thoroughgoing analogical framework. For Augustine posited the theological notion of the ‘analogy of being’ as opposed to the ‘univocity of being’. We may say ‘God exists’ and ‘Humankind exists’, but, to Augustine’s mind, when we do so we must not countenance the thought that we are thereby invoking a univocal, one-size-fits-all concept of being. When we say ‘God exists’ and ‘Humankind exists’, we must instead understand that we are saying that humankind’s existence is only analogous, in some way, to that of God. The same is true of goodness.9 In a late text on the Book of Genesis, Augustine wrote that the ‘manner in which it is differs totally from that in which these things are that have been made’ (Gn. litt. v.16.34). All ‘the things God has made’, he wrote in his earlier and avowedly anti-Manichaean tract on the same scriptural text, are ‘very good [Gn. 1:31]; but they are not good in the same way that God is good’ (Gn. adv. Man. i.2.4). Humankind’s existence and goodness can tell us something about the existence and goodness of God, but we fall into error to suppose that God exists in the sense that He exists only to a higher degree or that He is purely better than 8  Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 9  See Humphrey Palmer, Analogy: A Study of Qualification and Argument in Theology (London: Macmillan, 1973). For more on Augustine as a critic of univocity, see Paul Rigby, The Theology of Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Cambridge University Press), 214.

2  THE GOODNESS OF ALL THAT IS 

23

us, whether that be according to some absolute quality of existence or goodness or otherwise to concepts of existence and goodness in which all their multivalent meanings are affirmed in one voice. As we have already noted, Creation’s existence is dependent, whereas God’s existence is not, so that neither dependence nor independence can be viewed as constitutive of the concept of existence—and yet we do not speak falsely to use the concept of existence with respect to God and to the universe that He has created, even though the concept is being used to describe two different orders of reality. Similarly, the universe is good because God has made it; but He has alienated nothing of Himself in order to create, so the goodness of God and the goodness of Creation cannot be the same thing, even though goodness is properly ascribed to both God and Creation. God exists and is good in a different manner to that in which we exist and are good, but not in such a different manner that reasoning by analogy will not elevate us somewhere nearer to the correct conception of His existence and goodness. Augustine’s analogical ontology, according to which creaturely goodness must look like godly goodness without in fact really being of the same order— the idea of likeness in difference that we first approached in Chap. 1—is key to understanding his conception of the worldly good. The good of Creation in some sense approximates the highest good, even as it differs from it so radically. Creation bears a likeness or similitude of God.10 Created things are the ‘feeble imitations’ of the ‘primal beauties’, of the Creator Himself (Ver. rel. xlix.95). As Augustine’s doctrinal touchstone, St. Paul, had it, ‘since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities— His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made’ (Rom. 1:20). What, for Augustine, is the goodness of God? And what are its likenesses, its analogues, in Creation? Augustine’s answer to the first question is that God’s existence and goodness ultimately come down to His utter completeness. In terms unfitting for God because they are our merely analogical terms, temporally God is ­eternal, ontologically He is one, spatio-temporally He is immutable, and epistemologically He is truth. I shall leave it to the next section of the present chapter to examine Augustine’s response to the second question, and for the remainder of this concern myself with his response to the first.

10  Mary T. Clark, ‘Image Doctrine’, in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allen D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 441.

24 

B. HOLLAND

As we have seen, Augustine considers that changeableness signifies the presence of absence, of being coupled with non-being, and therefore of incompleteness. Anything which alters, which is born and dies, which waxes and wanes, ‘absolutely of whatever excellence, if it is changeable, does not have true being; for true being is not there where non-being also is. For whatever can be changed, when it has changed, is not what it was; if not what it was, a kind of death has occurred there. Something there which was has been completely taken away and is not’ (Jo. ev. tr. xxxviii.10.2 translation modified). Only God, then, exists eternally and immutably, and an understanding of ‘what always exists in the same way [and] does not undergo any change’ thereby ‘understands God’ (Div. qu. 54.1). As Augustine would put the point in his longest single work, the Expositions of the Psalms: What is Being-Itself? That which always exists unchangingly, which is not now one thing, now another. What is Being-Itself, Absolute Being, the Selfsame? That Which Is. What is That Which Is? The eternal, for anything that is constantly changing does not truly exist, because it does not abide—not that it is entirely non-existent, but it does not exist in the highest sense. And what is That Which Is if not He Who, when He wished to give Moses His mission, said to him, I Am Who I Am (Ex. 3:14)? (En. Ps. 121.5)

God’s completeness, moreover, is something which we must try to comprehend in its ontological as well as its temporal dimension. A created, mutable thing, maintains Augustine, is never complete. Such beings, he wrote to a nobleman acquaintance: are necessarily composed of numberless parts, some here and some there; however large or however small the substance may be, it occupies an amount of space, and it fills that space without being entire in any part of it. Consequently, it is a characteristic of corporeal substances alone to be condensed and rarefied, contracted and expanded, divided into small bits and enlarged into a great mass. (Ep. 137)

‘No physical object’, he writes elsewhere, ‘is truly and simply one’ (Lib. arb. ii.8.22). By contrast, divine being and goodness is simple. What is meant by ‘simple’, Augustine argues in the City of God, ‘is that its being is identical with its attributes’, ‘that is cannot lose any attribute it possesses, that there is no difference between what it is and what it has’ (Civ. Dei

2  THE GOODNESS OF ALL THAT IS 

25

xi.10). Even an incorruptible thing, such as the body promised to the saints in Heaven at the end of time, is not simple in the way that God is simple, for ‘although incorruptibility is a quality inseparable from an incorruptible body, the substance in virtue of which it is called a body is other than the quality from which it derives the epithet incorruptible’ (ibid.). In the case of God, however, ‘there is no difference between substance and quality’ (ibid.). He is not divisible, but pure being, entirely present all at once. ‘For a person is described as good, and a field as good, and a house as good, and an animal as good, and a tree as good, and a body as good, and a soul as good; and every time you said “good” you added something. But there is a simple good, sheer Goodness-Itself, in virtue of which all things are good, the Good itself from which all good things derive their goodness’ (En. Ps. 26.8). That one pure goodness is God; and in virtue of His simplicity, He just is His goodness; He is what He has. Finally, God is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—a Truth which thereby excludes ‘nothing’. Augustine has a more difficult task at hand to show that not only is God truth but also that God-as-truth is eternal, immutable and entire. He wrestled for some time with this issue, as he records in the Confessions, although there he hides most of his working out. ‘I asked myself’, he writes,

why I approved of the beauty of bodies, whether celestial or terrestrial, and what justification I had for giving an unqualified judgment on mutable things, saying ‘This ought to be thus, and this ought not to be thus’. In the course of this inquiry why I made such value judgments as I was making, I found the unchangeable and authentic eternity of truth to transcend my mutable mind. (Conf. vii.17.23)

Thankfully, other early texts document his mental processes for us. Augustine first has to establish that truth is transcendent, that it is superior to Creation. A key text is True Religion. Augustine argues therein for a distinction between the human cognitive faculties of knowing, or acquiring knowledge, and judgment. The difference is that knowing depends on seeing that ‘something is or is not such-and-such’, while judgment adds ‘something to signify that it could be otherwise, as when we say “it ought to be such-and-such” … or “it will have to be such-and-such”, the way craftsmen do with the things they make’ (Ver. rel. xxx.58). Knowing, then, requires the recognition that something is the way that it is, while judg-

26 

B. HOLLAND

ment involves drawing comparisons and proffering evaluations. Judgment, according to Augustine, is the most elevated human faculty, higher than cognition. For it’s the easiest thing in the world to see that the one making a judgment outclasses the thing on which the judgment is made. But the rational life, as well as making judgments about the objects of sense, also does so about the senses themselves. Why does an oar in the water have to look bent, though it is in fact straight, and why does it have to be perceived by the eyes like that? I mean, the eyes can send back that message but cannot in any way make that judgment on it. Thus, it is clear that, just as the sensitive life outclasses the body, so does the rational life outclass them both. (Ver. rel. xxix.53)

The judge is superior to that which he judges, and because the faculty of judgment itself is superior to the physical senses and the cognition of the physical world through the mediation of those senses, then ‘that leaves no nature of a higher class’ in all Creation (Ver. rel. xxx.54). If there is a God who transcends the universe, He will have to transcend human judgment, which is its zenith. It is crucial, therefore, that Augustine argues that this most excellent of human faculties comes up against a boundary, which is truth. Judgments, he continues to write, often compare a state of affairs not to some other state of affairs but rather to standards or rules ‘in some art or discipline or wisdom’, and those judgments which we recognise as the most skilful or free of shortcoming (integre, the importance of which word for Augustine only really becomes apparent when spelled out in the original language, for reasons that we shall see later) recognise a limit (ibid.). Comparison or appraisal, in these circumstances, is between the state of affairs and the standard or rule. In aesthetics, in morals, in mathematics, as Augustine thinks, judgments compare and evaluate states of affairs to standards of beauty, goodness and number, which present themselves in their objectivity to the mind. ‘And so the soul, being well aware that it does not judge the looks and motions of bodies by the standard of itself, must at the same time acknowledge that, just as its own nature excels the nature it makes judgments on, so too is it excelled itself by the nature according to which it makes such judgments and in which it is in no way competent to make judgments itself’ (Ver. rel. xxxi.57). This nature is none other than the truth, to which reason can only assent. For if the truth were judgment’s inferior, he writes in On the Free Choice of Will:

2  THE GOODNESS OF ALL THAT IS 

27

we would make judgments about it rather than in accordance with it, the way we make judgments about physical objects because they are lower than us—we often say not only that they are so or not so, but that they ought to be so or not so. So too with our minds: we know not only that the mind is so, but that it ought to be so. We make judgments about physical objects in this fashion when we say that something is less bright than it ought to be, or less square, and so on, and about minds when we say that one is less well-­ disposed than it ought to be, or less gentle, or less forceful, as we are wont to do by reason. We make these judgments in accordance with the inner rules of truth that we discern in common. When anyone says that eternal things are more valuable than temporal things, or seven and three are ten, no one says that it ought to be so; he simply knows that it is so. (Lib. arb. ii.12.34)

Reasoning to the truth is not, then, a matter of construction but of breaking through. The flourishing truth-seeker is ‘not an inspector making corrections but merely a discoverer taking delight in his discovery’ (ibid.). Judgments at these natural limits, ‘the intellectual cognisance of eternal things’ and thus the mind’s union with eternal reasons, the older Augustine will describe as sapientia or wisdom (Trin. xii.15.25). As the younger man puts it in True Religion, judgment ‘does not make such things but finds them. So, then, before they are found they abide in themselves, and when they are found they make us new again’ (Ver. rel. xxxix.73). Finally, as Samantha E. Thompson phrases it, in a formidable article to which this whole section is acutely indebted, ‘reason not only refers to the truth, but defers to it’.11 Truth transcends Creation and is therefore to be identified, in some sense, with the Creator.12 We still need to know, though, how this truth is immutable, eternal and without parts, the same thing as God in other respects than its transcendence of Creation. Augustine thinks that it is obvious that truth is unchangeable. The truth, he says, ‘neither increases when we see more of it nor decreases when we see less, but instead it is intact and uncorrupted’ (Lib. arb. ii.12.34). It does not change but is the standard of standards. Our changeable minds are not equal to the truth, which in its unchangeability is the yardstick of our changeable minds. ‘For we say that a mind understands less than it ought to, or that it understands just as much as it 11  Samantha E. Thompson, ‘What Goodness Is: Order as Imitation of Unity in Augustine’, The Review of Metaphysics, 65 (2012), 525–553, at 538. 12  This remains a constant theme of Augustine’s work. See, e.g., Trin. ix.6.11.

28 

B. HOLLAND

ought to. Furthermore, the closer a mind is able to approach the unchangeable truth and hold fast to it, the more it ought to understand’ (ibid.). Truth exists just as surely as anything else that exists. It is a ‘common public property’, ‘sensed by all who sense it without destroying or transforming it’, common and present to all who think (Lib. arb. ii.7.19–ii.8.20). The mention of the present in the text just quoted is important. Truth is also to be identified with God’s eternity, according to Augustine. God’s simplicity means that for Him there is no past and future, just an eternal present. ‘Analyse changes in things; you will find, it was and it will be. Think about God; you will find, He is, where He was and He will be cannot be’ (Jo. ev. tr. xxxviii.10.3). The same is said of the truth, for ‘in the truth which abides I do not find past and future, but only the present’ (ibid.). The truth has always been and will always be the truth, so that it has no past and no future in any meaningful sense. Finally, truth is simple. Augustine argues that the truths of mathematics, the ‘intelligible structure and truth of number’, are the prime examples of publicly available truths, ‘present to all reasoning beings’ (Lib. arb. ii.8.20). Mathematics is all ultimately grounded on the basic unit of one. Any given number, he maintains, ‘is so called from how many times it includes one. For instance, if it includes one twice it is called “two” and if three times “three”; if it includes one ten times it is called “ten”’ (Lib. arb. ii.8.22). And yet how do we perceive one? Not, he says, through the senses, for all corporeal objects, no matter how minuscule, have ‘innumerable parts’, and each ‘surely has a right and a left side, a top and a bottom, a near and far side, a middle and two ends’, such that no physical object, nothing that we might detect with our physical senses, ‘is truly and simply one’ (ibid.). It must be the case, then, that we perceive one in the truth itself, ‘the inner light—a truth the bodily senses do not know’ (Lib. arb. ii.8.23). In True Religion, Augustine further argues that human beings take pleasure from beautiful things, and that things become more beautiful the nearer that they approximate to oneness or unity. A symmetrical building is more beautiful than an unsymmetrical one because ‘the parts are like each other and are being restored by being linked together in some way to one single harmony’ (Ver. rel. xxxii.59). The architect, operating with a generous budget, will try to build as beautiful and therefore integral an edifice as he can; and yet he will appreciate that ‘this very Unity, which these things are found to be reaching out to’, can never be achieved, the end result always lying ‘prostrate far, far below her’, scarcely more than a caricature (Ver. rel.

2  THE GOODNESS OF ALL THAT IS 

29

xxxii.60). Again, the architect cannot see the unity towards which she aims in any physical thing in the world, for ‘not even the most beautiful of bodies, necessarily occupying space with one part here, another there’, attains it (ibid.). Rather, the standard applied is perceptible only to the mind, which, as the highest good in Creation, alone identifies ‘the unchanging nature which is above the rational soul with God’, ‘that unchanging Truth which is rightly said to be the law of all arts and crafts, itself the art of the almighty Craftsman’ (Ver. rel. xxxi.57). God is Being, Goodness and Truth, and all these are One.

Unity, Peace and Hierarchy God’s manner of existing and being good, Augustine insists, provides signposts to help us navigate to an understanding of how creaturely and changeable things exist and are good. God is one, and to be to the upmost degree, as in God, ‘is nothing but to be one’ (Mor. ii.6.8). And so, he argues, ‘to the extent that a thing acquires unity, to that extent it has being’ (ibid.). Every being must have some kind of unity, some approximation of the oneness of God, in order to be what it is. Just as ‘things are true insofar as they are’, so things ‘are insofar as they are like the original One’ (Ver. rel. xxxvi.66). For Augustine this means that non-simple creatures must ‘imitate unity’ (Mor. ii.6.8). It is in fact a corollary of his doctrine of the participation of Creation in God that created things strive in any case to imitate God’s unity. It will certainly always wind up being the case that creatures ‘do not fully realise that the One which it is agreed they imitate’, that ‘the Beginning towards whose likeness we are inclined by nature to approve of things straining’, is in fact an unreachable end (Ver. rel. xxxvi.66). Yet all creatures are in some sense one, although it is clear that oneness in the case of created beings is actually a sliding scale, the different grades of which mark out the distance between the true unity of God and the variable levels of unity of created things. In The Catholic and Manichean Ways of Life, Augustine argues that a created and therefore non-simple being imitates unity to the extent that its parts are harmoniously ordered: Those things which tend towards being, tend towards order, and, in attaining order, they attain being, so far as it can be attained by creatures. Order reduces whatever it orders to a certain harmony … Unity brings about the harmony and uniformity by which composite things have their measure of

30 

B. HOLLAND

being. Simple things exist in themselves because they are one, but those which are not simple imitate unity through the harmony of their parts, and, in the measure that they achieve this harmony, they exist. (Mor. ii.6.8)

Order, as he will later define it in the City of God, is ‘that arrangement of things equal and unequal in a pattern which assigns to each its proper position’ (Civ. Dei xix.13). According to the Book of Wisdom 11:20, God has arranged all things by measure, number and weight, so these are the keywords for coming to grasp Augustine’s concept of order.13 Measure means that each individual thing belongs to a particular kind of species, genus, family or class, allowing us to conceive, in short, of something being ‘in its own kind’ (Mor. ii.2.2). Number refers to size, shape and proportion. Weight concerns a thing’s relationship with all other things in the created universe, its place in the great chain of being. It concerns static and dynamic relations, including a mutable thing’s ‘ordered motions’ (Civ. Dei viii.6). All of these related concepts—order, harmony, pattern, arrangement by measure, number and weight—are therefore part of the analogical picture according to which Creation exhibits a likeness of Creator, approaching His unity: And how are these identical with Him? God, after all, is neither measure nor number nor weight, nor all of them together. Or rather, as we ordinarily understand measure in the things we measure, and number in the things we number and count, and weight in the things that we weigh, no, God is not these things; but insofar as measure sets a limit to everything, and number gives everything its specific form, and weight draws everything to rest and stability, He is the original, true and unique measure which defines for all things their bounds, the number which forms all things, the weight which guides all things; so are we to understand that by the words You have arranged all things in measure and number and weight nothing else was being said but ‘You have arranged all things in Yourself ’? (Gn. litt. iv.3.7)

Such order and unity as Creation presents, then, participate in the perfect unity that is God. 13  See Carol Harrison, ‘Measure, Number and Weight in Saint Augustine’s Aesthetics’, Augustinianum, 28 (1988), 591–602; and Chad Tyler Gerber, The Spirit of Augustine’s Early Theology: Contextualizing Augustine’s Pneumatology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 156–162.

2  THE GOODNESS OF ALL THAT IS 

31

We have had occasion to observe above that Augustine uses the term integre in one context bearing on creaturely ascent towards God, namely in respect of skill in judgment. He also uses the broader concept of integritas to express the idea of order or harmony of parts to each other and to the whole, and of order or harmony as intimations of unity. For instance, he writes that ‘no particular thing attains to the integral completeness of its nature unless it is preserved safe and sound in its own kind of being’ (Ver. rel. xviii.36), and Peter King’s translation of On the Free Choice of the Will wisely renders integritas simply as ‘completeness’ (Lib. arb. iii.14.41). Another word that Augustine uses to denote the same concept is pax, or peace. Peace is one of the most crucial words in Augustine’s lexicon, and we shall have much more to say about it in Chap. 3 and thereafter. Here it will be sufficient to note that the word ‘peace’ often does the same work as ‘order’ or ‘harmony’. He writes in True Religion that the human body ‘gets a kind of peace from its shape’, which is of course participating in the Unity ‘from Whom all peace is derived and Who is shaped unforged, and of all shapes the most shapely’ (Ver. rel. xi.21). In a passage of the City of God in which Augustine again waxes lyrical about the human body, ‘the arrangement of the bodily organs, and the health that comes from their harmony’, he goes on to announce that God ‘has not abandoned even the inner parts of the smallest and lowliest creature, or the bird’s feather’, and that ‘He has not left them without a harmony of their constituent parts, a kind of peace’ (Civ. Dei v.11). Peace allows a created being simply to be a being, for nothing that exists does not have some kind of unity. A final and critical point that needs to be made about the existence and goodness of Creation in Augustine’s eyes is that it is hierarchical.14 To exist at all, in his terms, is to be somewhat good, somewhat true, somewhat one. All things that are, then, are good, true and integral, albeit it in a qualified way. Augustine argues, furthermore, that some of these things are better than others. He speaks of superior and inferior things, and there is a danger that, to our modern ears, we understand him to be implying that inferior things are degraded, perhaps worthless, to be shunned if they cannot be transformed, for they are simply good for nothing. This is not, though, what he means at all. Inferior goods are in a sense lower goods, but they are emphatically good all the same. This needs to be borne in mind when thinking through Augustine’s account of the hierarchy of 14  See especially Adrian Pabst, Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), especially 83–92.

32 

B. HOLLAND

created goods, which has at least four interrelated dimensions. The first and most straightforward way in which he regards some things as superior to other things is that God has bestowed on some of them measure, number and weight to a higher degree than others, so that they better imitate God’s unity. ‘For it is certainly the case’, he writes most straightforwardly in The Nature of the Good, ‘that all things are better to the extent that they are more limited, formed and ordered. But they are less good to the extent that they are less limited, less formed and ordered’ (Nat. bon. §3). A second manner bears on the extent to which created substances participate in God. We had occasion above to remark on Augustine’s elevation of creatures possessing judgment over those which do not, because judgment allows the one who exercises it to reason to the One Truth that is God. He thinks that it is obvious that reasoning creatures are better than animals which live according to the dictates of the physical senses that are unable to evaluate themselves. And is equally clear to him that such animals are better than creatures that merely live, such as plants, and that these are better than corporeal beings which merely exist, unable to live, sense or judge, such as stones. Things are better, then, to the extent to which a creature participates in God’s life, vision and intelligence. This is why Augustine can even argue that a rational spirit, even when corrupted by an evil will, is better than an uncorrupted non-rational spirit. And any spirit, even when corrupted, is better than any uncorrupted body. For a nature that, when it is present to a body, gives it life is better than the nature to which life is given. But however corrupt may be the spirit of life that has been made, it can give life to the body, and, for this reason, even when it has been corrupted it is better than an uncorrupted body. (Nat. bon. §5)

Or in the more vivid example of On the Free Choice of the Will, a despicable inebriate is still better than the glass of fine wine in his hand (Lib. arb. iii.5.15) (Fig. 2.1). Thirdly, the hierarchical order of superiority and inferiority corresponds to the service of inferior to superior for the ultimate sake of service to God. There is a threefold hierarchy of bodies, souls and God, and Augustine does not hesitate to affirm that in this hierarchy the inferior properly serves the superior (Ep. 18.2). All things, ‘in their own sphere and in their own nature’, and ‘in their position in the splendour of the providential order’, are good, and inferior things, in serving those superior

2  THE GOODNESS OF ALL THAT IS 

33

Fig. 2.1  Saint Augustine and the Devil by Michael Pacher (ca. 1471–75)

to them on the scale of value, reveal their goodness (Civ. Dei xi.22). ‘Even poisons, which are disastrous when improperly used, are turned into wholesome medicines by their proper application’ (ibid.). Another threefold hierarchy relevant to the same general point that Augustine develops is between material, mental and spiritual goods. As a class, material objects are of course good, but they can be used wrongly and are not absolutely indispensable for serving God. The ‘eye in the body is a good thing’, he writes, ‘even though its loss does not prevent one from living rightly’ (Lib. arb. ii.18.49). Spiritual goods are such as ‘the virtues of the mind’, necessary for living properly and incapable of being misused.

34 

B. HOLLAND

‘For no one’, Augustine maintains, perhaps not very persuasively, ‘uses prudence or courage or moderateness for evil’ (Lib. arb. ii.18.50).15 In between these are certain ‘intermediate goods’, which are the human mental goods of will, reason and memory. These are in a sense spiritual, as well as being necessary for serving God; but they are also capable of being wielded for wrong (Lib. arb. ii.19.50–52). Fourthly, the hierarchy of inferior and superior goods is ordered according to a social logic. Spiritual goods, Augustine argues, can be possessed in common without being divided up—everyone can have them all, or as much as they could possibly want. Here, with respect to spiritual goods such as wisdom, we possess something that all can enjoy equally in common. It has no restrictions or defects. It welcomes all its lovers who are not envious of each other. It is common to all and faithful to each … All hold fast to it and all touch the selfsame thing. Its food is not divided into portions; you drink nothing from it that I cannot drink. For you do not change anything from its commonness into something private of yours, but rather you take something from it and yet it remains intact for me. When you draw in its breath, I do not wait for you to exhale for me then to draw breath from it. No part of it ever becomes the property of anyone. On the contrary, it is common as a whole to all at once. (Lib. arb. ii.14.37)

Things are better, then, to the extent that they are capable of being shared without division. Such things seem to partake of the oneness of God, as well as resounding with His eternality and unchangeability. By contrast, material things can only be shared by division or wholly possessed by exclusion. In social terms, they advance the interest of the private over that of the common. They may, of course, be used in such a way that they ‘refer’ to God, so that we have two major tiers in the hierarchy—private and common—and yet the extent to which private goods are enjoyed so as to serve God determines their place in the broader hierarchy. We shall 15  I am thinking here of Susan Sontag’s provocative reflection, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001, that courage is ‘a morally neutral virtue’, and that ‘whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards’. Susan Sontag, ‘Tuesday, and After’, The New Yorker, 24th September 2001, https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2001/09/24/tuesday-and-after-talk-of-the-town.

2  THE GOODNESS OF ALL THAT IS 

35

see in Chap. 3 just how important is the root of the word ‘private’ for Augustine’s conception of how the very good universe nonetheless experiences its own diminution. This chapter has addressed itself to three questions: (1) Why does Augustine consider that everything that exists is good? (2) What can be said of God’s goodness? And (3) what does the answer to the second question tell us, by way of analogy, about what goodness in the created universe consists in? In summary: (1) Creation is good because it has been made by the supreme Artificer, Who cannot do anything but good. Moreover, it exists in such a way that it is dependent on God, participating thereby in His goodness. (2) God’s existence and goodness are interchangeable terms, and each is also synonymous with God’s unity and completeness, for God is eternal, unchangeable, the whole truth; in short, One. (3) Goodness in the created universe involves the imitation of God’s unity, and this is what Augustine variously calls order, harmony, integrity or peace. All being is good, and every being must have some kind of unity in order to be what it is, which is why peace is an ontologically necessary feature of all being. The goodness of Creation is also hierarchical, with inferior things properly serving superior ones, so that all Creation can in turn properly serve the Creator. Augustine’s anti-Manichaean convictions, and the ontology of goodness, unity and hierarchy that he worked out for himself in combatting them, remained essential aspects of his intellectual project for the rest of his life. In the next chapter, we turn to his account of how evil comes to be a part of the created universe, as the first step in elucidating his different self/city analogies. The view of things inevitably darkens; it will be too easy to forget Augustine’s conviction that all that exists is good, and his modern readers who have forgotten it, it might be argued, can perfectly well blame the Bishop of Hippo himself in his late predestinarian mode. And yet, even as Augustine’s targets changed, he did in fact always remain an anti-Manichaean, and I think that he would have said ‘Amen’ if he could have heard Louis Armstrong’s famous paean not only to the bright blessed day but also the dark sacred night. All that is is good: that is the Augustinian baseline in psychology as in politics.

CHAPTER 3

The Prideful Soul and the Pagan City

We saw in Chap. 2 that Augustine, early on in his writing career, began to develop a distinction between the private (privata) and the common (communia). On the one hand, private and common are ways of qualifying particular things. All things are good and all good things are goods. Common goods, Augustine maintained, are superior to private goods because they can be shared without division or exclusion. On the other hand, private and common are ways of qualifying the good itself, or at least the analogical good of Creation. ‘Private’ qualifies the good by subtracting from it. The private will go on to become a crucial concept in Augustine’s thought. It develops into the core concept about how sin and suffering get into the created universe. Private, privation, pride—these words all overlap in significant respects in Augustine’s view of things. The early distinction between the common and the private becomes the basis for the most important contrast in Augustine’s thought, that between love of God and love of self. The first part of the chapter explores the theme of the two loves, and also shows how, according to Augustine, the very good Creation comes to be infected by sin, so that love of self in exclusion of love of God is possible at all. The second section turns to Augustine’s characterisation of the self that is tainted by sin and the deformations which result. In the third part of the chapter, the city that is analogous to this sinful self is presented.

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Holland, Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Recovering Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19333-1_3

37

38 

B. HOLLAND

Pride and Perversion How did evil take root in God’s very good Creation? Augustine’s response to this problem came in three parts, first by pointing to the possibility of evil in the nature of Creation, second by connecting the deficit of Creation to human sin, and third by arguing that the original sin was pride. First, then, Augustine’s answer appealed to his doctrine of creation. We had occasion to note in Chap. 2 that, when discussing Creation, Augustine tended to opt for a formulation of the doctrine as creatio de nihilo (‘creation from nothing’) rather than the more conventional creatio ex nihilo (‘creation out of nothing’). There is another reason, in addition to those mentioned earlier, as to why Augustine prefers the ‘from’ formulation. The ‘substantial, or existential, connotations of de nihilo’, writes Matthew Drever, ‘seem to denote a continual coming from nothingness (de) rather than a leaving of nothingness (ex) and therefore a movement that is the constant precondition’ of the universe’s existence, so that it is in the nature of Creation that its ‘identity [is] continually formed from a dynamic that reaches back to the nihil roots of its origin’.1 This is a crucial point for grasping Augustine’s analysis of evil. All things that exist are good, and badness or evil cannot be an essence or thing, as it was for his Manichaean opponents, ‘for if it were a substance, it would be good’ (Conf. vii.12.18). Evil has no essential reality. ‘For You’, he writes in the Confessions, ‘evil does not exist at all, and not only for You but for Your created universe, because there is nothing outside it that could break in and destroy the order that You have imposed upon it’ (Conf. vii.13.19). Instead, evil has to be understood as privative, a privation, and therefore as a kind of absence or lack. It is a ‘corruption’ of otherwise good substance (ibid.), ‘the corruption of changeable being’.2 It is the liability, furthermore, of all created things, that they have a natural tendency towards corruption. And this is not because anything is inherently corrupt, but because all things are inherently corruptible in virtue of the fact that they were made from nothing, from non-being. Corruption is the deprivation of goodness, as an intrinsically evanescent substance trends back towards the nothingness from which it came.3 1  Matthew Drever, Image, Identity, and the Forming of the Augustinian Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 61. 2  J.  Patout Burns, ‘Augustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 16 (1988), 9–27, at 11. 3  See the helpful discussion in F. B. A. Asiedu, ‘Augustine’s Christian-Platonist Account of Goodness: A Reconsideration’, The Heythrop Journal, 43 (2002), 328–343.

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

39

Creation from nothing, then, makes evil possible, but it is not what makes it actual. The source of evil in the world, according to Augustine, was the will of the first man, Adam. As something made, Adam’s will was corruptible. ‘Consequently, although the will derives its existence, as a nature, from its creation by God, its falling away from its true being is due to its creation from nothing’ (Civ. Dei xiv.13). Adam’s will, rather than anything else in Creation, first succumbed to corruption, and it was the source of all other corruptions in nature thereafter. More specifically, Adam’s will introduced sin into the world. Sin is defined not as an evil as such but as the abandonment of good for worse things, and the making ‘bad use of a good thing’ (Nat. bon. §36). Adam’s createdness, being entirely good, offers no ground for explaining why the original sin happened. Adam’s will to sin, says Augustine with rhetorical flourish, was not the efficient cause of his sin but the deficient cause of it (Civ. Dei xii.7). It was the first and foremost example of a thing not being what it was created to be but instead failing to be what it was created to be. Why did it come to be so? ‘If I were to reply to your question that I do not know’, says Augustine, ‘perhaps you will then be the sadder, but I will at least have replied truthfully. What is nothing cannot be known’ (Lib. arb. ii.20.54). One cannot hope to find in its source an explanation of the primal sin, he argued in an enchanting phrase, because that would be tantamount to ‘trying to see darkness or to hear silence’ (Civ. Dei xii.7). As unsatisfying as this may be, Augustine had good reason to couch the matter in these terms. As Jesse Couenhoven explains, ‘falling back into nothing occurred … against the odds, and the fact that we cannot explain why it occurred is fitting, since the more sense we can make of the Fall, the less disturbing and worrisome—and the more logical and acceptable—it might seem. For Augustine the Fall is a surd, and appropriately so’.4 It simply cannot be explained, and yet it happened. Augustine prefers to answer the how question rather than the why question in regard to the Fall.5 God, of course ‘created man aright’; as we saw in Chap. 2, He could have done nothing else (Civ. Dei xiii.14). In Eden, Adam’s passionate responses to the world ‘did not exist in their perverted state. For then they were not set in motion, in defiance of a right will’ 4  Jesse Couenhoven, ‘Augustine’s Rejection of the Free-Will Defence: An Overview of the Late Augustine’s Theodicy’, Religious Studies, 43 (2007), 279–298, at 269. 5  For this helpful distinction, see Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012), xxvii–xxviii.

40 

B. HOLLAND

(Civ.  Dei xiv.19). Adam obeyed the source of all goodness, God, such ­ bedience being nothing more than a tranquil desire for the good that he o correctly judged best in all circumstances. Thus, living in fellowship with God and with the woman derived from him, Eve, he experienced himself as completely integrated in the great chain of being as well as entirely integrated as one created being in himself. He was able to do all that he desired to do and he had no desire to do what he could not. Moreover, that desire was completely integral, not divided up between the spiritual, the rational, the emotional, the physical, and so on. Augustine goes into some detail, ‘unintentionally comical’ as one of his biographers rightly notes, on the subject of the nature of the erections that Adam would have had in Paradise, the upshot of which is that he would have been able to move his penis in much the same way that I can move my finger or my mouth (Civ. Dei xiv.24): at will, without carnal lust, ‘not activated by the turbulent heat of passion but brought into service by deliberate use of power when the need arose’ (Civ. Dei xiv.26).6 (In Chap. 6, Augustine’s reasons for discussing male genital tumescence in connection with pride are made a little clearer.) It could not have been the case, he maintained, that Adam was tempted to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and that he lapsed following initial resistance, because this would be to assume a soul divided between desires, and such a possibility is ruled out by Adam’s archetypal righteousness. ‘Never let us suppose … that before all sin there existed such a sin, committed in respect of that tree, which the Lord spoke of in respect of a woman, when he said, “If anyone looks at a woman with the eyes of lust, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart” [Matt. 5:28]’ (Civ. Dei xiv.10). Rather, the particular sin that took Adam down was pride (superbia). He knew that as a creature his well-being and happiness depended upon his fellowship with God, Whose goodness transcends all created things, and by Whom he had been created for such fellowship. The peace and beatitude that Adam most desired would come only as he found rest in Him (Conf. i.1.1). But Adam ‘adandon[ed] the basis on which the mind should be firmly fixed’ (Civ. Dei xiv.13). He asserted his independence, all the while knowing and feeling (these two states were not yet separate in him) that in so doing he was turning towards something less good than the supreme goodness of God. He asserted himself against God by ‘a longing for a perverse kind of exaltation’, the exaltation of being in one’s own power, and the name for that is pride (Civ. Dei xiv.13). Pride is the name of the perversion ‘in the soul which perversely loves its own power’ to the contempt of a 6

 O’Donnell, Augustine, 270.

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

41

power which is higher and more just (Civ. Dei xii.8). As Augustine puts it in The Trinity, pride is the sin whereby ‘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’ (Trin. xii.8.14). Or as Jennifer Herdt puts it so well, it is that ‘fundamental disorder which orders all things to self’.7 Pride, on Augustine’s account, is more than just the name of a particular perversion. It is in fact the font of all perversion, ‘the beginning of all sin’ (Gn. litt. xi.19). It is the origin of all disorder in human affairs. ‘Perversion’, he wrote in one of his tracts against the Manichees, ‘is the contrary of order’. For ‘order brings about being, disruption of order non-being; and this is what we call perversion and corruption’ (Mor. ii.6.8). Pride orders all things to self and thereby sows disorder. It is ‘private’, as Augustine’s rumination on the etymology of that term indicates. It marks a turning in on oneself, and it is lordly, meaning both a turning away from God and sociability with our own kind towards an aloof self-isolation and also the will to master others, a turning away from loving-kindness. Pride disturbs inner and outer peace through this dual process of turning the agent in on himself and away from others. The image to which Augustine so frequently appeals and which captures the equation of perversion and disorder is knottiness and entanglement. Knots, as Gillian Evans explains, form because when the good has been abandoned and the will has moved off course by a falling away (a defectus) or a turning away (an aversio) it will career crazily about, lost, without a sense of direction, and tie itself in knots … The curve in things which is initiated by a divergence from the straight becomes a twist and then a kink and then a knot, and finally a hopeless tangle, as it moves further and further away from the straightness of the good.8

In ordaining all things to self in contempt of God, pride, according to Augustine, is a violation of peace, and therefore of the ordered hierarchy of goods. There is nothing wrong with putting oneself above external things, because the soul is in fact to be loved more than bodily goods, and bodily goods are rightly used by the soul when they are ‘referred’ to God. But when they are enjoyed for their own sake rather than in order to serve the supreme good of God, then the ordered hierarchy of things has been debased. Pride therefore does violence to what Augustine calls the hierarchy of ordered love (ordo amoris), which in an early work he defines 7  Jennifer Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 49. 8  G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 4.

42 

B. HOLLAND

Fig. 3.1  Garden of Eden by David Richards (1986)

c­apaciously as ‘an objective and impartial evaluation of things; to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what is to be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally’ (Doc. Chr. i.27.28).9 By fostering the turning in upon oneself and the ordering of the world to oneself, to the exclusion of God as supreme good, pride becomes the principle of social and cosmic disorder (Fig. 3.1).  ‘Ordered love’ is the main theme of Miikka Ruokanen, Theology of Social Life in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1993). 9

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

43

It is pride, then, that first disrupted the otherwise good order of things in the universe. Much of Augustine’s argument in Books xiii and especially xiv of the City of God is anticipated in miniature in his second Genesis commentary, where he contrasted pride with charity (caritas) in terms of their respective associations with two kinds of love, love of self and love of God and one’s neighbour. Pride ‘aims at pre-eminence’ but ‘its ruinous self-love removes it from what is common to what is its own property’, whereas ‘charity does not seek her own’ (Gn. litt. xi.19). These two loves—of which one is holy, the other unclean, one social, the other private, one taking thought for the common good because of the companionship in the upper regions, the other putting even what is common at its own disposal because of its lordly arrogance; one of them God’s subject, the other his rival, one of them calm, the other turbulent, one peaceable, the other rebellious; one of them setting more store by the truth than by the praises of those who stray from it, the other greedy for praise by whatever means, one friendly, the other jealous, one of them wanting for its neighbour what it wants for itself, the other wanting to subject its neighbour to itself; one of them exercising authority over its neighbour for its neighbour’s good, the other for its own. (Gn. litt. xi.20)

These two loves, Augustine wrote in the same passage, have ‘distinguished the two cities, one of the just, the other of the wicked’. This can serve as a conspectus of the book into which he would go on to pour fifteen years of labour. To summarise the argument so far, Augustine argues that only ‘a nature created out of nothing could have been distorted by a fault’, because only such a nature would be able to stoop to follow its own inclination towards nothingness. It was not inevitable that this would happen, but it did ­happen, and it happened in the Garden of Eden on account of Adam’s inexplicably defective will: [M]an did not fall away to the extent of losing all being; but when he had turned himself towards himself his being was less real than when he adhered to Him who exists in a supreme degree. And so, to abandon God and to exist in oneself, that is to please oneself, is not immediately to lose all being; but it is to come nearer to nothingness. (Civ. Dei xiv.13)

Following his sin, God punished Adam—or more accurately, Adam had to suffer a self-inflicted punishment befitting of the sin. And Augustine

44 

B. HOLLAND

insisted, in the most contestable—and probably the most contemptible— step of his argument that, not only was Adam’s punishment just, but that it is also just that all Adam’s human heirs also be punished for Adam’s sin.10 Adam ‘merited eternal evil, in that he destroyed in himself a good that might have been eternal’. But consequently, ‘the whole of mankind is a condemned lump; for he who committed the first sin was punished, and along with him all the stock which had its roots in him’ (Civ. Dei xxi.13). Here we come to Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. It is true that Augustine did not invent the doctrine from scratch. Some of the Church Fathers, such as Theophilus of Antioch (d. ca. 183–185), Justin Martyr (100–165) and Irenaeus of Lyon (ca. 130–ca. 202), had argued that Adam’s sin weakened his progeny, but contemporaries of Augustine such as John Chrysostom (ca. 349–407) generally held that it was Adam’s original example which either acted as an inspiration to further sins or else to chasten those who otherwise would have sinned.11 The predominant argument among other North African theologians, including the likes of Tertullian (ca. 155–240), Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–ca. 215) and Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 296–373), was that mankind is simply constitutively sinful, that it would have been impossible for Adam to have lived a sinless life, and that salvation ‘was more than the restoration of what has been lost in the first Adam’, having more to do with ‘what had been achieved by the second Adam (ho deuteros Adam), the bridging of the gap between created and uncreated nature and the possibility of man’s divinisation, not by nature but by adoption, through imitatio Christi’.12 By contrast, Augustine argued that, because all of Adam’s heirs were in his loins, we all in some sense participated in his original sin (Pecc. mer. iii.7.14); and, furthermore, that the nature that we have inherited is not only Adam’s propensity to sin, but, in a major departure from the tradition, his nature as it became in the wake of his sin, namely permanently deformed13:  E.g. Christopher Kirwan, Augustine (London: Routledge), 140 (describing Augustine’s argument as ‘ridiculous’); John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 126–128. 11  Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 102. 12  Vassilios Paipais, ‘First Image Revisited: Human Nature, Original Sin and International Relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 22 (2019), 364–388, at 371. 13  Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2002), 54. 10

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

45

Man was willingly perverted and justly condemned, and so begot perverted and condemned offspring. For we were all in that one man, seeing that we all were that one man who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him before the first sin. We did not yet possess forms individually created and assigned to us for us to live in them as individuals; but there already existed the seminal nature from which we were to be begotten. And of course, when this was vitiated through sin, and bound with death’s fetters in its just condemnation, man could not be born of many in any other condition. (Civ. Dei xiii.14)

Elaine Pagels argues that Augustine’s severe attitude on original sin is probably in fact owed to a misunderstanding of the relevant Scripture, Romans 5:12: ‘Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned’. The Greek text of St. Paul makes clear that death comes upon all people because all sin. (I say more about this consequence of sin below.) The monolingual Augustine, though, reading the passage in Latin, fathoms that the text is saying that all people sinned through Adam.14 What is more, Augustine mixes up two categories that Greek thought had always insisted were separate, namely physis and nomos, nature and convention, or biology and law. Augustine has it that Adam’s original sin is propagated biologically to all his heirs, and that we inherit its consequences in a juridical mode, so that we can all be punished for that sin.15 The only human being to be conceived without semen, and therefore bearing no legal guilt for original sin, according to Augustine, will of course be Jesus Christ, the second Adam. Nonetheless, the first Adam’s ‘apostasy of pride’ (Trin. xii.8.14) was an assertion of his own will against what he knew and felt to be good, including himself. So, in the first place, as biological consequence and as a judicial penalty, Adam cracked apart. He would thereafter live ‘a life of harsh and pitiable slavery, instead of the freedom he so ardently desired, a slavery under him with whom he entered into agreement in his sinning’ by consenting to his prideful act (Civ. Dei xiv.15). In other words, his punishment for his assertion of self-will would be servitude, not to another but to himself. He would be his own tyrant and tormentor. Specifically, he would find his reason dominated by his will, his will controlled by his pas Pagels, Adam, Eve, 109.  J. Stephen Duffy, ‘Our Heart of Darkness: Original Sin Revisited’, Theological Studies, 49 (1988), 597–622, at 607. 14 15

46 

B. HOLLAND

sions, and those entirely ordered upon physical existence rather than spiritual reality. This important point needs to be unpacked. God created man, but man was unique among God’s creatures: a spiritual and intellectual being made in God’s image, which, unlike the angels, also incorporates the dust of the earth (Gn. litt. ii.8.17–18). Human beings alone unite two metaphysical orders of being in one nature. It was God’s intention when He created Adam, Augustine argues, that this duality not be experienced as a duality, and that the integration of body and soul in one nature be ever to the glory of mankind and its Creator. After the Fall, however, the duality came to haunt Adam. In his prelapsarian condition, Adam’s will was responsible for directing his vision to objects of attention, ‘whether upward to the intelligible world and through it, in an ecstatic touch, to the One, or downward, to the physical world which lies furthest from the source of being’.16 In this state, his will could be relied upon to ensure a smooth assimilation of the spiritual, psychical and physical in his lived experience, and this all served God and the good. Augustine explained, especially in the work of his most concerned with psychology, Books x and xi of The Trinity, that the integrity of Adam’s existence was very much a function of his will. The will directs the soul to objects of attention and affection. ‘The will was already there before sight occurred, and it applied the sense to the body to be formed from it by observing it’ (Trin. xi.5.9). In turn, the soul takes the shape of or is ‘conformed to’ these same objects (Trin. x.6.8). After the Fall, God withdrew from Adam His grace, that gift of God that enabled Adam to preserve his will in goodness, and which united creature with Creator. Left to his own devices, now east of Eden, Adam’s actions could no longer, for Augustine, be anything but a deprivation of the good. It was his will which, in the primal sin, turned towards himself, preferring the lower to the higher, and his will which would continue to be accountable for Adam’s ongoing dereliction. It was ever the case that human nature dealt with the bodily dimension of its existence by a division of the will’s attention, but this was a division that was never experienced as a division. Now it was experienced as a series of divisions of attention, so out of control that they became a source of anguish. First, the will itself had become divided. Adam’s descendants know, as he came 16  Margaret R. Miles, ‘Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions’, Journal of Religion, 63 (1983), 125–142, at 136.

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

47

to know after his disobedience, what it feels like to will against oneself. Adam had memories of judgments under grace, but he was defeated at every turn when he attempted to reach back into his old life and bring such judgments and accustomed behaviours to bear in the present context. He was now ‘at odds with himself’ (Civ. Dei xiv.15). As Augustine, acutely understanding himself as one of Adam’s heirs, put it in Book vii of the Confessions: When I willed or did not will something, I was utterly certain that none other than myself was willing or not willing. That there lay the cause of my sin I was now coming to recognise. I saw that when I acted against my wishes, I was passive rather than active; and this condition I judged to be not guilt but a punishment. (Conf. vii.3.5)

Second, this divided will feels to Adam and his progeny like a divide between the spiritual and physical orders of his being. His will commands but his flesh rebels; his will commands but his body does something else. And this is a fitting punishment for his pride: To put it briefly: in the punishment for that sin the retribution for disobedience is simply disobedience itself. For man’s wretchedness is nothing but his own disobedience to himself, so that because he would not do what he could, he now wills to do what he cannot. … For who can list all the multitude of things that a man wishes to do and cannot, while he is disobedient to himself, that is, while his very mind and even his own lower element, his flesh, do not submit to his will? (Civ. Dei xiv.15)

This ‘lust in defiance of the will’ (Civ. Dei xiv.23) betokens his final punishment, namely death. Adam was now, says Augustine, ‘doomed, against his will, to die in body’ (Civ. Dei xv.15). As Peter Brown writes, death was for Augustine ‘the most bitter sign of human frailty’ precisely because it ‘frustrated the soul’s deepest wish, which was to live at peace with its beloved, the body’.17 The fallen condition itself, in the meantime, is a condition of being ‘in death’, because of the eternal conflict between will and passion, soul and body, ‘a state in which [a person] is neither living (which is the state before death) or dead (which is after death) but dying’ unceasingly (Civ. Dei xiii.11). It is necessary to stress, nonetheless, that 17  Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 405.

48 

B. HOLLAND

the conflict between soul and flesh experienced by Adam and all of us after the Fall is part of his and our punishment, in Augustine’s eyes, and not in fact caused by some solid partition between soul and body. The initial source of disturbance for Adam emanated, after all, from the soul, in Adam’s will to disobey in virtue of his pride. What Adam thereafter suffers as the defiance of the soul by the body, as Augustine argues in chapter 15 of Book xiv of the City of God, is a punishment for the disobedience of the soul to itself, now experienced punitively as a diremption between the two ontological dimensions of his being. Third, we experience this division as a further withering of the miserable remainder of our spiritual existence. The soul takes on the shape of the objects of its attention, and in the fallen state the objects chosen tend to erode the imago Dei in which God created us. Margaret Miles is a sure guide to this aspect of Augustine’s thought. ‘Augustine’s “soul”’, she writes, is primarily a partially centred energy, initially barely distinguishable from its cosmic, physical and spiritual environment, which comes to be cumulatively distinguished and defined by the objects of its attention. For such an object-­ orientated or intentional entity, the pressing problem of human existence is not relationship, the building of bridges between separate entities, but differentiation, the construction of a centre which defines itself and determines the direction of its investment of energy.18

After the Fall, as Miles says, the source of good in the universe is not immediately available, and the soul which goes in search of the good so that it may find rest ‘does not recognise itself without a constant supply of [those] objects’ that it hopes, inchoately, might substitute for the good.19 The objects of physical desire are real goods, but inferior goods. They ought to be used in such as a way that properly subordinates them to the soul’s ultimate desire to come to the enjoyment of God, the supreme Good. Yet this becomes an almost impossible task. Human beings have a tendency to imitate each other’s desires for limited physical goods, leading to an endless contest over those objects.20 The goods to which postlapsarian humankind will be predisposed are also those over which they may exercise some power and which will fleetingly satisfy some physical desire. In Augustine’s words:  Miles, ‘Vision’, 129–130.  Ibid., 128. 20  See Wydra, Politics and the Sacred, 53–62, developing René Girard’s concept of ‘mimetic desire’. 18 19

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

49

And by the very logic of our condition, according to which we have become mortal and carnal, it is easier and almost more familiar to deal with visible than with intelligible things, even though the former are outside and the latter within us, the former sensed with the senses of the body and the latter understood with the mind, while we conscious selves are not perceptible by the senses, not bodies that is, but only intelligible, because we are life. And yet, as I have said, we have grown so used to bodies, and our interest slips back and throws itself out into them in such a strangely persistent manner, that when it is withdrawn from the uncertainties of bodies to be fixed with a much more assured and stable knowledge [or attention: intentio] on things of the spirit, it runs away again to those things and seeks to take its ease in the place where it caught its disease. (Trin. xi.1.1)

Division is thus felt as a weakening in the nonmaterial aspect of our being. Fourth, physical desires are apt to harden into habits (Augustine’s word for habit is consuetudo) and even behavioural addictions.21 They become, in a phrase of Aristotle’s adopted by Augustine, ‘second nature’ (Mus. vi.19).22 Habit, as Hannah Arendt put it, ‘is what puts sin in control of life’.23 The tyranny of the past over the present to the exclusion of the future is a fitting punishment for the original sin. Habituated life has now bound itself over to the past, which the will constantly recreates even in spite of itself. In Book viii of the Confessions Augustine appears as ‘what twentieth-century [and twenty-first] people might call a sex addict’24: I sighed after such freedom, but was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice. The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain for me to hold me a prisoner. 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 chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint. (Conf. viii.5.10)

21  See especially the study by John G. Prendiville, ‘The Development of the Idea of Habit in the Thought of Saint Augustine’, Traditio, 28 (1972), 29–99. 22  ‘Second nature’ is Aristotle’s phrase, in Categories, 2a–13, his best-known work in the Roman world. See: Jorge J. E. Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1984), 11–16; and Michael Griffin, Aristotle’s Categories in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 23  Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, trans. Joanne Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 82. 24  Margaret R. Miles, Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 38 (and also see 70).

50 

B. HOLLAND

In ancient Rome, addiction was in fact the name of the sentence to slavery passed down on someone who was unable to repay a debt, so here Augustine connects the irredeemable sin of pride to punishment in the form of the will’s servitude to concupiscence, its base appetites.25 Again, Augustine is combining the biological with the legal and beginning to effect the transformation of the meaning of a word (see also Ver. rel. xxxviii.69–71). Addiction is bad enough when one is in thrall to it, but it is made worse by the self-division of one who wants desperately to be without it but who seems powerless to change course.26 Again, self-­ fragmentation appears as the sentence for the crime of original sin: The new will I felt stirring in me, a will to give You free worship, and enjoy what I yearned for, my God, my only reliable happiness, could not break away from the will made strong by long dominance. Two wills were mine, old and new, of the flesh, of the spirit, each warring on the other, and between their dissonances was my soul disintegrating. (ibid.)

Fifth, the sin of pride further distorts the divine image in the soul when people try, in conceit and curiosity,27 to fashion a spiritual identity for themselves both by venturing outside the soul into the physical world (Conf. vi.8.13) and by means of the manipulation of mental images over which they exercise some control by imagination and thought. But such practices, although largely intellectual or cognitive, are all the same ‘a fanciful sort of fornication’ (ibid.), the illicit reproduction of material images, which does violence to true spirituality. God created mankind to be distributed between spiritual, intellectual and physical planes without uncomfortable tension, and this distortion is felt, yet again, as a form of dissonance. One way of describing these divisions in the self which afflict humankind after the Fall would be to say that they are a disturbance of peace. This is how Augustine himself puts it. It is easy to lose sight of the significance of this way of couching the issue in our era, where peace is often conceived as a kind of intermediate good, a conditio sine qua non for human flourishing, rather than as constitutive of that flourishing. Such was not the case for  Adam Alter, Irresistible: Why You are Addicted to Technology and How to Set Yourself Free (London: Vintage, 2017), 29. 26  For a recent Augustinian treatment of habit, see James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016). 27  For a good discussion of Augustine’s evolving critique of curiosity, see Joseph Torchia, Restless Mind: Curiositas & the Scope of Inquiry in St. Augustine’s Psychology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2013). 25

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

51

Augustine, however. Peace, according to him, as we have seen, is the highest good, the good that transcends all other goods but putting all other goods in order. Milbank makes the important observation that ‘Christianity has traditionally seen peace as the comprehensive eschatological goal, and not as the name of a virtue’.28 Peace for Augustine is ‘ordered harmony’ (Civ. Dei xix.13), the principle that puts all Creation in its rightful relation to the Creator; and pride, the soul’s love of its own power manifested as a desire to order all things to self, is peace’s fundamental disruption. In the City of God Book xix chapter 13, Augustine specifies an ascending hierarchy of nine modes of peace, from the peace of a body with itself, through the peace of body and soul together and peace of a human being with God, to peace of human beings with each other in God. As Peter Burnell points out: Pax, the word Augustine uses, is always in the category of relation. Where this word is used, one cannot be understood to be simply at peace; one has to be at peace with someone. (Hence the verb pacisci, ‘to strike a bargain’.) Even the bottommost mode of it, that of a single body, Augustine describes as the peace of its parts with each other—an instance of proper, orderly relatedness, as are all other modes of peace listed here. To be solipsistic, therefore, he regards as inhuman—a voluntary rejection of the most fundamental desire there is. It finally amounts to rejecting God.29

Pride disturbs the peace by working divisions in the soul, in the ways we have noted above. As well as rupture, though, pride is responsible for a kind of subtraction until the solution is zero. ‘He who in his pride’, Augustine writes, ‘had pleased himself was by God’s justice handed over to himself’ (Civ. Dei xiv.15). In being handed over to himself, Adam was put in the power of an entity decayed, defected and in deficit, indeed deposited in ‘a region of destitution’ (Conf. ii.10.18). James Wetzel expresses so well the purport of this. Pride relies upon excessive dependence on competition for self-definition; it opposes the self that is one’s own against all other selves, without ever defining an alternative principle of selfhood. Eventually the disposition must fold before this paradox: if I am to recognise some self as a self to be opposed, I must first know what self I am; but I cannot come to know what self I am except as a self to be opposed.30  Milbank, Social Theory, 418.  Peter Burnell, The Augustinian Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 138. 30  James Wetzel, ‘Prodigal Heart: Augustine’s Theology of the Emotions’, in his Parting Knowledge: Essays after Augustine (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 81–96, at 94. 28 29

52 

B. HOLLAND

Soon enough, any self loses its authority, so that one’s own self is no longer conveyed in its actions even by its own motives. This situation has two consequences. First, the desires that characterise fallen life answer no real needs of the agent, who now cannot know his own self in order to discern its requirements. Such desires ‘are therefore, in principle, endless; they are as insatiable as the lust whose character they replicate’.31 Their character is a further reason for men’s enslavement to their instinctual cravings. Second, the all-consuming self-love of pride disturbs the peace of human sociality by turning the agent away from his or her natural relationships with others and with God. Adam’s descendant, the proud self that loves its own power, has, according to Augustine, lost its sense of self. It knows itself only as something in opposition to and competition with other such selves. It seeks power without remainder and without reference to anyone or anything else, an inversion of the sociability for which God created us. Augustine’s umbrella term for such desires is cupiditas or cupidity, which denotes both the mind’s forgetfulness of its own dependence on what is higher and the restless quest to coerce and manipulate one’s neighbours so that they may reinforce one’s phantasiai of power and thereby one’s self-love. In particular, he points to the cupiditas (or libido) dominandi, or lust for domination over others, which we in our pride exercise.

Pelagianism and Power As we shall see in the next section, Augustine considered that pride, the original sin, lay behind the so-called glories and virtues of ancient Roman history. But it was not only ancient history—what one might call the empirical workings out of the inheritance of Adam’s sin—that he assaulted in the City of God, but also its mental workings out, in ancient philosophy and thence theology. This he attacked the more vigorously, because he believed that it posed the greatest risk to Christianity. If the historical outworking of pride was in a desire to dominate and possess others, then its philosophicotheological outworking was in the consecration of an impossible anthropology, which advocated a desireless self-possession as the human telos. From 405, and especially after the Council of Carthage in 412, Augustine was embroiled in the so-called Pelagian controversy, perhaps 31  E.  J. Hundert, ‘Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self’, Political Theory, 20 (1992), 86–104, at 92.

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

53

the most significant doctrinal debate in Church history. Pelagius (ca. 360–418) was an ascetic from the British Isles who, like Augustine, made his way to Rome, but, unlike Augustine, remained there as a layman working as an advisor to Christian members of the governing class until he fled in the wake of the barbarian invasion. Pelagius’s ideas about the self Augustine considered as emanating from the worst excesses of pagan philosophy, and especially from Stoicism. The ‘real issue’ of the Pelagian controversy was original sin.32 Pelagius denied original sin. Adam’s sin, he contended, in no way marked his descendants. Neither did newly born human beings inherit the fault itself or its consequences. Each individual was born in primal innocence, and when she or he eventually died this was merely a natural fact of human life rather than one aspect of the punishment of Adam’s pride. The fundamental crevasse between Augustine and Pelagius on original sin turned on their very different accounts of God’s grace. Pelagius understood grace as threefold. First, and crucially, grace consists in the gift of free will and the power of human beings to do good through their own capacity to determine their own actions. It was because [Pelagius argued] God wished to bestow on the rational creature the gift of doing good of his own free will and the capacity to exercise free choice, by implanting in man the possibility of choosing either alternative, that He made it his peculiar right to be what he wanted to be, so that with his capacity for good and evil he could do either quite naturally and then bend his will in the other direction too.33

It was inconceivable to Pelagius that ‘the Lord of Justice’ who created man in His image would not wish ‘man to be free to act and not [be] under compulsion’.34 Second, the natural faculty of will which is ours by grace is, according to Pelagius, illuminated by means of law through the revelation in the Old Testament and Jesus’s teachings as elaborated in the New. ‘For God helps us,’ he [i.e. Pelagius, quoted by Augustine] says, ‘through His teaching and revelation, in opening the eyes of our heart, in disclosing to us what is to come, so that we are not absorbed with what is present, in 32  John Ferguson, Pelagius: A Historical and Theological Study (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1956), 184. 33  Pelagius, ‘To Demetrias’, in The Letters of Pelagius and his Followers, ed. B. R. Rees (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1991), 38. 34  Ibid., 37.

54 

B. HOLLAND

exposing the snares of the devil, in enlightening us by the manifold and ­ineffable gift of His heavenly grace’ … This, then [Augustine rebukes], is what it means to locate God’s grace in the law and teaching. (Gr. Chr. i.7.8)

Third, grace also takes the form of atonement in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the sake of the baptised. ‘Just as through Adam sin came at a time when it did not yet exist’, says Pelagius, ‘so in the same way through Christ righteousness was recovered at a time when it survived in almost no one’.35 All of this meant, according to Pelagius, that it was, in this final analysis, within a person’s power to live a sinless life. A little social history is essential here to help to put in perspective some of Pelagius’s commitments, for although his writings may create the impression of a forgiving and tolerant proto-liberal individualism, this would be to read them without an eye to context. Pelagius worked in the service of the late Roman aristocracy, at a time when, as Peter Brown showed half a century ago in a path-breaking paper, aristocratic life was characterised by ‘the efforts of groups of men and women to live a life, to create values for themselves, different from the conventional, the second rate, the unthinking life of their fellows’, their fellows being a rising middle class.36 Pelagius’s teachings ‘appealed directly to a powerful centrifugal tendency in the aristocracy of Rome—a tendency to scatter, to form a pattern of little groups, each striving to be an élite, each anxious to rise above their neighbours and their rivals’.37 Pelagius counselled perfection38: its possibility, for all were not linked in a ‘chain of death’ from Adam, and each person had a will free to choose the good revealed in the Law; and its necessity, for individual salvation, certainly, but more than that for the Church, the membership of which set whole groups apart from wider society.39 The man ‘who has recovered his natural capacity to act, inside the Christian Church, is discontinuous with any “natural” man outside the Church’—this puritanical idea suited the worldview of a snobbish coterie. Thus, to Julian of Eclanum (ca. 386–ca. 455), the principal Pelagian lightning rod of Augustine’s tempestuous polemics, Adam was 35  Pelagius, Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistles to the Romans, trans. Theodore de Bruyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 92. 36  Peter Brown, ‘Pelagius and his Supporters: Aims and Environment’, in his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), at 184. 37  Ibid., 189. 38  Pelagias, ‘Demetrias’, 46. 39  ‘Chain of death’ is Augustine’s phrase at Pecc. mer. i.17.

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

55

the meagre ‘harmless tenant of a peasant plot’, and there was practically no continuity between the first human being and his descendants baptised in the Church.40 But as well as condescension and aloofness, the environment of Pelagius’s working life was also typified by a sense of crisis. In light of the Germanic invasions of the Western empire and then the gut-­ wrenching experience of the sack of Rome in 410, the empire’s governing class was suffering a crisis of confidence and a very real loss of control. Pelagius’s emphasis on the self-control of the free will no doubt spoke reassuringly and didactically to this situation.41 Pelagianism, then, is in large part a response to the prejudices, self-­ representations and apprehensions of the social milieu in which it took root. Augustine, preaching on the North African fringes of the Roman Empire to poorer and more provincial congregations, would surely have felt imaginatively and sympathetically remote from it, and this helps us to comprehend some of his antagonism towards Pelagius and the Pelagians. But just as Augustine considered that Roman history was another chapter in the story of pride that began with the Fall, so did he regard Pelagianism as part of the same story. Well-ordered love will be the watchword of the City of God. In the City of Man, by contrast, pride has bent love’s natural outflowing inwards, so that it has become a love which only serves the self and to which all human relationships are subservient. In those regions of the Earthly City populated by Pelagius and his epigones, according to Augustine, the libido dominandi turns even further inwards, as the self attempts to possess and dominate the self. The self-love of which this is a cankerous growth fools itself that it is no love at all. Augustine’s anthropology will be explored in greater detail in Chap. 4. For now, it will suffice to say, in the first place, that he deemed Pelagius’s concept of the free will utterly erroneous. The basis of Pelagius’s ideas  Quoted in Brown, ‘Pelagius’, 197.  Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 108. James J. O’Donnell provides a contrasting interpretation of the social histories of Pelagianism and of Augustine’s Maghreb. For him, Pelagius’s theology appealed less to elite sympathies within Rome and more to Roman elitism towards the proconsular empire. Pelagius’s theology resembles nothing so much as Rome’s view of its imperium, a ‘power that acts rationally and fairly, aloof from the world, benevolently disposed to it, certainly malleable now and then to prayers, but fundamentally distant’, ruling not ‘by personal relationship but by rule of law’. By contrast, according to O’Donnell, Augustine saw in Jesus a God who cared profoundly about His personal relationships with those at far remove from the centre of worldly power. O’Donnell, Augustine, 275–276. 40 41

56 

B. HOLLAND

about free will originated with the Stoics, according to whom an action is ‘up to’ (eph’ hemin) the agent when the will, as the choosing faculty separate from reason and from appetite, is ‘subject to no master’ (adespoton) and can choose its course out of various objects proposed by either reason or appetite. To be sure, as Michael Frede has shown, the Stoic notion of free will was not quite as radically libertarian as the above sentence might imply. The will, for the Stoics, secures an agent’s freedom because it and only it chooses for the good, meaning with regard for the agent’s true interests as shown by reason, or for the bad, meaning in line with false beliefs or inappropriate attachments as dictated by the appetites. The Stoics invented the concept of the free will in order that they could ­provide an account of how a person has ‘the ability to act on [his or her] own initiative, as opposed to being compelled’ either by reason or by passion.42 However, the Stoics also argued that the will which assented to passional impressions had already in effect been enslaved, and that only the person whose will always chose the wise and reasonable course of action, thereby fulfilling their human nature, could be said to be free. The will is only really free if it pursues the good, if it is ‘free to make the right choices’, such that it is ‘an ability to make choices that are responsive to how things are’.43 To Augustine’s mind, such a conception of the free will was impossible. For if the will is a power of choice independent, in the final analysis, of love, whether that love be for good or the abandonment of the good, then no action could ever be fully explicable in terms of its impulses. The agent’s choice of purposes would have to be added into the explanation, and because this choice is necessarily ‘free-floating’, then such an account would always be incomplete.44 For the Stoics, the will is a solely voluntative faculty, whereas for Augustine, as we shall see, it is primarily a desiderative one. The will’s consent to its choices, in the Stoic account, is the end of the story—a story as self-referential as the nouveau roman. A second reason that Augustine took issue with the Pelagian account of free will was its picture of freedom as being fundamentally a matter of self-­ possession. Thus, the lust for domination again reared its head in the form of autonomy understood as self-control, and as a manifestation of the 42  Michael Frede, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 68. 43  Ibid., 85 and 87; emphasis mine. 44  James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 8.

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

57

cupiditas dominandi it also marked its advocates as guilty of pride. This ‘control [of the passions] entails coercion and struggle, and the situation does not represent a state of health in accordance with nature, but an enfeebled condition arising from guilt’ (Civ. Dei xiv.19). As Jean Elshtain puts it, it is ‘to be a self only in relation as a master to a slave, or as a slave who would be a master’.45 This account was another Stoic legacy to Pelagian theology. Epictetus, for instance, had it in his early second-­ century Discourses that ‘there is nothing more easily prevailed upon than a human soul. You have but to will a thing, and it has happened, the reform has been made; as, on the other hand, you have but to drop into a doze and all is lost’.46 It is will as a faculty of choice that saves the agent from being determined either by the laws of nature, lawlike reason or lawless passion (although, in the final analysis, to determine oneself in accordance with lawlike reason just is freedom for the Stoics). Pelagius argued that the power to determine oneself by free will is how mankind resembles God and comes to have dominion over all other creaturely things. ‘Man alone was able to recognise the maker of all things and to serve God by using those same faculties which enables him to hold sway over the rest’.47 In Augustine’s eyes, however, this concept of the will as an autarkic and desireless power of the agent over him- or herself was not only extravagantly incorrect but just another manifestation of pride: yet another aversio to nothingness, a privileging of ‘the indeterminacy of choice over the determination of love’, and thereby a favouring of ‘the nothing from which we are made over the plenitude of infinite determination Who makes’.48 Little wonder, then, that it was, according to Augustine, a view of the economy of human freedom shared only by some of the most exclusionary, arrogant and self-aggrandising inhabitants of the civitas terrena.

The Earthly City We come now to Augustine’s first anthropological analogy, between the self as described above and the Earthly City. As mentioned in Chap. 1, Augustine followed in the footsteps of Plato. In the Republic, Plato argues  Elsthain, Limits of Politics, 93.  Epictetus, Discourses, vol. 2: Books 3–4, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), iv.9. 47  Pelagius, ‘Demetrias’, 37. 48  Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 129. 45 46

58 

B. HOLLAND

that the psyche has three parts: reason (logos), spirit (thymos, which is the part of the soul responsible for action motivated by desires of repulsion, such as anger) and appetite (epithymia, by which part of the soul we experience desires of attraction, such as hunger). In a ‘just’ soul, each part performs its own function and all work together harmoniously. We can rightly predicate justice of the soul when its activities are so ordered, according to Plato, because we know what justice is in the state, and we can see that soul and state are similar. The psyche is analogous to the polis, which is also just if statesmen governed by reason undertake their task of ruling and work together with properly functioning guardians and ­warriors, who protect the city by repulsing enemies, and the merchant class, which should provide for its material needs.49 Plato sets out the analogical procedure of discerning the target domain (to use the rather un-Platonic social science jargon) in sharper focus by extrapolating from the source domain thus: The enquiry we are undertaking is not a simple matter. If you ask me, it requires sharp eyesight. And since we are not clever people, I think we should conduct our search in the same sort of way as we would if our eyesight were not very good, and we were told to read some small writing from a bit of a distance away, and then one of us realised that a larger copy of the same writing, apparently, was to be found somewhere else, on some larger surface. We would regard it as a stroke of luck, I think, to be able to read the large letters first, and then turn our attention to the small ones, to see if they really did say the same thing.50

Plato discovers the form of justice in the soul by reading it first in the larger letters of the city. When Augustine came to broach the topic of the anthropological analogy, he also approached it in terms of letters and proportions. ‘Let us set before our mind’s eye two men; for the individual man is, like a single letter in a statement, an element, as it were, out of which community or realm is built up, however vast its territorial 49  Plato, Republic, 435b–c. Plato’s anthropological analogy continues to be taken seriously. See, for example: Bernard Williams, ‘The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato’s Republic’, in his The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and W.  G. Runciman, Great Books, Bad Arguments: Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 21–29. 50  Ibid., 368c–d.

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

59

­possessions’ (Civ. Dei iv.3). These two individuals will be the prototypes of the eschatological cities. As in the case of fallen self, Augustine attributes the dereliction of the Earthly City to the wickedness of pride. Its founder was Cain, who exhibited all the contortions from the good associated with that sin. His offering of fruits of the soil to God was not accepted, according to Augustine, since it represented a withholding of himself from the gift that he sacrificed, unlike his brother Abel’s forgoing of ‘fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock’ (Gen. 4:3–4). Thus did Cain first exhibit that self-­ love and turning in upon himself that corresponds to pride. Then he slew Abel out of a ‘diabolical envy that the wicked feel for the good simply because they are good’ (Civ. Dei xv.5). Again, envy is rooted in pride, where love of self eclipses love of neighbour. Later on came the ancient city of Babylon, founded by the giant Nimrod, who terrorised people through violence and intimidation motivated by the libido dominandi. He of course raised a tower, a ‘highway to Heaven’ in a famous phrase, to bypass the Lord. Here was a symbol of impious pride seeking a perverse grandeur and loving its own power. ‘But what could the empty presumption of man have achieved, no matter how vast the structure it contrived, whatever the height to which that building towered into the sky in its challenge to God?’ (Civ. Dei xvi.4). Babylon went on to become the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the most imperious of the ancient empires before Rome, an ‘ungodly city [which] exercised predominant power’ (Civ. Dei xvi.17). Pride’s ordering of all things to self in contempt of God finds its prime example in that region of the civitas terrena, on Augustine’s telling, in Israel. Between the Fall and the promulgation of the Mosaic Law, moral insensitivity reigned. People of course sinned, but they did so unawares. After Moses brought down the Decalogue from Mount Sinai, the fact of sin and the reasons for its prohibition became clear (Simpl. i.1.4). God favoured the Hebrews with this special revelation, but, in their pride, they elevated self-righteousness above truth, and continued after the advent of the Christ to assert the exclusive claim of Israel as the Chosen People (En. Ps. 138.8). By far most of Augustine’s attention is lavished not on what sacred history records as happening in one corner of the Roman Empire but rather in the heart of it. Centuries after the Earthly City is founded in fratricide, the second Babylon images the archetype. Pride reached a higher pitch in the handmaidens of ‘secular’ history, Romulus and Remus. As D.  J.

60 

B. HOLLAND

MacQueen has pointed out, Augustine’s repeated use of the word condere, meaning ‘to create’, in reference to the founding of Rome suggests a prideful attempt on the part of the brothers to imitate God.51 In addition, each co-founder wanted to be sole sovereign of the new city, in order that he would receive all the glory and possess all the power. ‘Both sought the glory of establishing the Roman state’, chronicled Augustine, ‘but a joint foundation would not bring to each the glory that a single founder would enjoy. Anyone whose aim was to glory in the exercise of power would obviously enjoy less power if his sovereignty were diminished by a living partner’ (Civ. Dei xv.5). And so the sin of pride led on, as in the case of Cain and Abel, to murder; ‘and what would have been kept smaller and better by innocence grew through crime into something bigger and worse’ (ibid.). Augustine has a special term to denominate the lust for domination wrapped up in sovereignty, namely ‘pride of place’ or principandi superbia, which impels people to seek command. It is an end but also a means to end, a means to the end of glory, for which of course the prideful thirst. ‘What else was there for them to love save glory? For through glory, they desired to have a kind of life after death on the lips of those who praised them’ (Civ. Dei v.14). Cato, Sallust and, above all, Cicero— all are held to have espoused the ‘pernicious doctrine’ that ‘the desire for human praise and glory’ is a virtue because it drives people to ‘admirable achievements’ (Civ. Dei v.13). These supposedly glorious feats always depend, however, on identifying someone or something to be defeated; there can be no virtue without antagonism. Of the Romans to whose accomplishments the historians and rhetoricians paid tribute, Augustine wrote: They were passionately devoted to glory; it was for this that they desired to live, for this that they did not hesitate to die … They felt it would be shameful for their country to be enslaved, but glorious for her to have dominion and empire; and so they set their hearts first on making her free, then on making her sovereign … It was this greed for praise, this passion for glory, that gave rise to those marvellous achievements, which were, no doubt, praiseworthy and glorious in men’s estimation. (Civ. Dei v.12)

51  D. J. MacQueen, ‘Contemptus Dei: St Augustine on the Disorder of Pride in Society, and its Remedies’, Recherches Augustiniennes, 9 (1973), 227–293, at 268.

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

61

Although glory is the end—or one of the ends—of the mode of ­mastery we call sovereignty, it is by no means an achievable goal, because it is as unquenchable as all the deranged desires that characterise the City of Man. Sulla’s victory over Gaius Marius, for example, ‘increased his glory less than it advanced his ambition’, and its ‘effect was to remove all restraint from his appetite for conquest’ (Civ. Dei xiv.2). This story of folie de grandeur did not end there, and it is worth quoting Augustine in extenso on this point: The brutal Civil Wars, more bitter, on the admission of their own authors, than any wars against foreign enemies—those Civil Wars which, in the ­general judgment, brought on the republic not merely calamity but utter destruction—broke out long before the coming of Christ. A causal chain of criminal enormity carried the process on from the Marian and Sullan wars to the wars of Sentorius and Catiline (the former one of Sulla’s proscribed, the latter one of his protégés), on to the war of Lepidus and Catulus (one of whom wishes to annul the acts of Sulla, the other to preserve them), on to the wars of Pompey and Caesar (Pompey had been a partisan of Sulla, whose power he equalled, and even surpassed; Caesar found Pompey’s power insufferable—because he did not wield it—but after the defeat and death of Pompey he transcended it); and then we come to another Caesar, afterwards called Augustus. And it was in the reign of Augustus that Christ was born. Augustus himself carried on many wars, against many enemies, during which many eminent men perished. (Civ. Dei iii.30)

There is an important reason for quoting all of the above. It makes clear that Augustine did not simply depict the exercise of power by one individual or a group thereof over all others as being a matter of interpersonal relations—although it was that too—but above all he rendered it a matter of the division of the civitas terrena against itself. It is critical to Augustine’s analogical framework that the history of the Earthly City be narrated as a history of self-division, of the City of Man at odds with itself in much the same way that each man in the saeculum is divided against himself. Augustine’s ‘state’ is certainly more relational than it is territorial or institutional or any of the other usual descriptors of statehood.52 But it also has a kind of personality. That is to say, in this context, both that it has its own 52  Paul Weithman, ‘Augustine’s Political Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, eds. David Vincent Meconi and Eleonore Stump, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

62 

B. HOLLAND

identity, continuous over time, and that the form of this identity corresponds in the way of its interior organisation in crucial respects to that of the individual person who is the citizen of the Earthly City. Sovereignty is not merely a matter of domination by one person over others but of a perpetual and deepening division in the state itself. And as the quotation above makes clear, sovereignty and war are two grades of a single continuum registering the disturbance of peace. ‘The Earthly City is generally divided against itself by litigation, by wars, by battles, by the pursuit of victories that bring death with them or at best are doomed to death’ (Civ. Dei xv.4). It is at war with itself just as the individual human being is at war with himself. Every individual member of the city may want peace, and indeed ‘war is waged by or within persons who are in some sense natural beings—for they could have no kind of existence without some kind of peace as the condition of their being’ (Civ. Dei xix.13). There will be approximations of the peace in Paradise much of the time, consisting in an ‘ordered harmony about the giving and obeying of orders’, when each accepts their station (Civ. Dei xix.14). The trouble is, though, that each person generally wants peace on his own terms, desiring ‘the present peace to be exchanged for one that suits their wishes’ (Civ. Dei xix.12). Thus does war go on without end. This is a punishment for the first sin. ‘For if a soul’, writes Augustine, ‘does not serve God it cannot with any kind of justice command the body, nor can a man’s reason control the vicious elements in the soul. And if there is no justice in such a man, there can be no sort of doubt that there is no justice in a gathering which consists of such men’ (Civ. Dei xix.21). Just as the war of wills in the individual is experienced as a struggle between flesh and spirit to the detriment of the latter, so the cycle of war is most fundamentally about ‘the collapse not of material but of moral defences’ (Civ. Dei ii.2). War is inevitable between parts of the civitas terrena just as the battle of flesh and spirit or the war of two wills is inevitable in a man marred by Adam’s fall towards nothingness. All of the above speaks to the analogy between the city and the self in respect of the traits of fallen mankind elaborated in the first part of this chapter. The second part of the chapter, it will be recalled, described one consequence of pride that, in Augustine’s eyes, manifested itself in Stoic philosophy and Pelagian theology, according to which autonomy is a form of self-sufficiency and self-possession, secured by a free will separate from reason and desire. This conjectured self is conjured by Cicero, heir to the Stoics, in his own anthropological analogy, in which the theme of self-­ control over the passions is pronounced, and in which there is also a strong

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

63

implication that the mastery of the self will not be a widely distributed capacity. The quotation from On the Commonwealth, part of which appears in the City of God xix.21,53 is in fact only preserved in full in Augustine’s Against Julian: ‘Do we not see’, [Cicero] says, ‘that, to each thing which is best, dominion is given by nature herself, to the greatest advantage of the least things? Why does God command man; the soul, the body; reason, lust, anger, and the other vicious forces in the soul?’ He says a little later: ‘We should recognise different kinds of commanding and serving. The soul is said to command the body as a king commands his subjects or a parent his children. It commands lust as a master commands a slave, since it coerces and breaks it. Kings, emperors, magistrates, fathers, peoples rule their subjects and associates as the soul rules the body. Masters harass their slaves as the best part of the soul, which is wisdom, harasses the vicious and weak parts of the same soul, such as lusts, anger, and the other disturbing forces’. (C. Iul. iv.12.61)

Augustine was happy to concur with Cicero that the anthropological analogy served as justification of the authority of political rulers in the Earthly City. His point, though, was that Cicero’s analogy was built on a mistaken and dangerous conception of human personality; inasmuch as it buttressed the City of Man it only served to reveal its delinquency. In Book xiv of the City of God, Augustine wrote that the ‘fact is that the soul may appear to rule the body and the reason to govern the vicious elements in the most praiseworthy fashion; and yet if the soul and reason do not serve God as God Himself has commanded that He should be served, then they do not in any way exercise the right kind of rule over the body and vicious propensities’ (Civ. Dei xix.25). This is as clear as any textual evidence that we are likely to find that Augustine had Cicero and the passage on the anthropological analogy in On the Commonwealth in his sights in his wholesale critique in that Book of Stoic and Pelagian conceptions of selfhood.54 Augustine’s explanation as to why the Ciceronian depiction of the proper functioning of the moral faculties misfires is developed along 53  See the editorial commentary in Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, trans. James E. G. Zetzel, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 73. 54  Augustine is often read as being a relatively friendly critic of Cicero. See, for example, the recent article by Veronica Roberts, ‘Augustine’s Ciceronian Response to the Ciceronian Patriot’, Perspectives on Political Science, 45 (2016), 113–124. I tend to see him as being much more disapproving.

64 

B. HOLLAND

several dimensions. First, this attempt to be one’s own person, in one’s own power, completely independent of others, was perversely to attempt to imitate God (Conf. ii.6.14). Second, this stress on self-sufficiency in Stoicism and Pelagianism was regarded as a virtue; and ‘although the virtues are reckoned by some people to be genuine and honourable when they are related only to themselves, and are sought for no other end, even then they are puffed up and proud, and so are to be accounted vices rather than virtues’ (Civ. Dei xix.25). This is so in two ways. On the one hand, if a person wills to act in accordance with reason rather than emotion, it might be the case that she does so for the sake of her own good opinion of herself (Civ. Dei v.13). On the other, she is most likely to act with rectitude for the sake of being held in the high esteem of other people, and thus for the sake of honour and glory. For instance, Augustine’s explanation (likely to strike the modern reader as an egregious instance of victim-­blaming) for the suicide of the noblewoman Lucretia after she was raped was that she took her own life not because ‘of the high value she set on chastity’, as commonly maintained, but because, ‘excessively eager for honour, she was afraid that she should be thought, if she lived, to have willingly endured what, when she lived, she had violently suffered’, meaning that she would be unable to ‘display her pure conscience to the world’ (Civ. Dei i.19). Similarly, the statesman and fellow traveller of Stoicism, Cato the Younger, committed suicide, says Augustine, in order to diminish the glory that Caesar would have won by pardoning him for desertion (Civ. Dei i.23). Third, self-control in Stoicism was part of a wider eudaimonistic ethical framework that Augustine considered flawed. According to the Stoics, being in one’s own power, and especially exercising complete charge over one’s emotions, was precisely the necessary condition for happiness and human flourishing. Pagan thinkers who wished ‘to be happy here on earth and to achieve bliss by their own efforts’ were, though, in Augustine’s view, culpable of ‘amazing folly’ (Civ. Dei xix.4). This was so for many reasons: because as sons of Adam we could never hope to achieve true happiness in this life (ibid.); because all our positive agency is a divine gift and so not really in our power anyway; and because we ought to embrace our dependence on the eternal and immutable God rather than remain stuck in the fantasy that our happiness depends on our independence. Fourth, and for reasons expounded in the previous section of this chapter, the Stoic/Pelagian hypothesis about human free agency is chimerical and impossible. We can all pray for continence, but in the fallen condition we certainly cannot hope to attain it. For ‘what is its activity in this world

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

65

but unceasing warfare with vices, and those not external vices but internal, not other people’s vices but our own, our very own?’ (Civ. Dei xix.4). Fifth, the Ciceronian point about the soul ruling the body, the higher principle exercising control over the lower, is built on a mistaken ontology. In our properly natural condition, according to Augustine, body and soul were mutually to care for each other, and there was no question of one lording it over the other. Even in our fallen state, according to Augustine, those episodes that we experience as bodily passions are really communications, howsoever faltering, from the world to the soul via the body. For Augustine it is the soul, anatomises Etienne Gilson, ‘which acts and keeps constant watch in each organ of the body’ so that the ‘material passion which the body undergoes is, then, a call directed towards the soul by the body, rather than an action exercised on the soul by the body’.55 The soul does not need to fight back against the body, as Cicero imagines; and the human being that he imagines as being so divided licenses a conception of the anthropological analogy which only exacerbates human divisions. Sixth and most importantly for our purposes, the analogy between self and city in Cicero appeals to ‘nature’, to the inherent order of things, and not only did Augustine consider that humankind had been irretrievably denatured by the primal sin, but he also held that Cicero’s anthropological analogy in fact served to reinforce that point, and to demonstrate beyond doubt that there is no natural self whose form is likewise taken by the city. Some context is necessary here in respect of the concept of person. The word ‘persona’ was originally a theatrical term, denoting the mask worn by an actor in ancient theatre. There would probably have been only two actors onstage, and the mask thus served to clarify which role the actor had now assumed. The mask also operated as a projection device for the actor’s voice: hence the etymology of the word, combining ‘through’ (per) and ‘sound’ (sona).56 Soon enough, however, the word ‘persona’ came to mean ‘character’ or ‘role’ rather than naming the mask itself. Stoicism is responsible for bringing the concept of person in this sense into ethics. Acting as one ought was, for the Stoics, relative to the station in which an individual had been placed, and a theatrical analogy thus worked 55  Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch (New York: Random House, 1960), 63. 56  Marcel Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self’, in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, eds. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 17.

66 

B. HOLLAND

well.57 ‘Remember that you are an actor in a play’, said Epictetus. If the playwright ‘wants you to play the beggar, play even this part skilfully, or a cripple, or a public official, or a private citizen. What is yours is to play the assigned part [persona] well. But to choose it belongs to someone else’.58 ‘If you undertake some role beyond your capacity’, he warned, you ­‘disgrace yourself by taking it’.59 Note the appeal to the actor who stands behind the role he plays. In rising to the challenge of depicting the character onstage, the actor had at his disposal as a resource from which to inhabit the role he was now to play only his other roles in life, and what he had to do was to find a way to take up the roles he found offstage and give them a new form onstage.60 Thus, according to the Stoics, the self is rooted in certain natural capacities but more fundamentally is shaped by the various societal roles that those capacities fit the individual to undertake and the interaction between these. The Stoic view of the self was also Cicero’s. Cicero, of course, was a very public man: an orator, a lawyer and a statesman, for a time consul of the Roman Republic, at the helm of the ship of state. As E. J. Hundert elegantly observes, he ‘maintained that the self was composed in the process of composing a public reputation’, and he ‘famously boasted that he had taken lessons from Roscius, the greatest actor of his time, to learn how to become “Cicero”, the public figure’.61 Cicero’s self was formed by a negotiation between his personae, something about which he wrote often in the abstract, such as his discussion in On Duties about a judge trying a case involving one of his friends, who must be vigilant that ‘he lays aside the role [persona] of a friend when he takes on that of a judge’.62 If the ideal individual in the Stoic tradition was one who exercised complete control over his or her emotions, then the ideal public individual was one who not only governed those feelings but could also command the passions of the people. ‘Who then’, Cicero has the orator Crassus ask, ‘is the man who gives people a thrill? Whom do they stare at in amazement when 57  Michael Frede, ‘A Notion of a Person in Epictetus’, in The Philosophy of Epictetus, eds. Theodore Scaltsas and Andrew S. Mason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 58  Epictetus, The Handbook (The Encheiridion), trans. Nicholas P.  White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), xvii. 59  Ibid., xxxvii. 60  Aldo Tassi, ‘Person as the Mask of Being’, Philosophy Today, 37 (1993), 201–210. 61  Hundert, ‘Divided Self’, 94. 62  Cicero, On Duties, trans. M.  T. Griffin and E.  M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), iii.43.

3  THE PRIDEFUL SOUL AND THE PAGAN CITY 

67

he speaks? Who is interrupted by applause? Who is thought to be, so to say, a god among men?’63 The answer is the public figure whose style is ‘ornate’, a word which itself invokes the concept of ornatus, widely used to translate the Greek concept of kosmos, so that Cicero thereby implies a connection between cosmic order, linguistic beauty and political power.64 In On the Orator, Cicero lays out a variety of techniques by which a political luminary might manipulate the passions of his constituents while all the time giving the appearance of not himself being under the sway of any such sentiments—techniques, for example, to allow the audience to discover the ‘correct’ emotional response even though this is not performed by the speaker.65 Augustine would have none of this. It exposed Cicero’s anthropological analogy as a sham. For earthly government was not being shown to operate as some higher principle—mind or soul—keeping base feelings in check; rather, it roused and manipulated them. Moreover, Cicero shows that there was only one kind of self to which the city could be analogised, namely the prideful self, doing everything he could for the sake of his own honour and glory. The higher up the political hierarchy that this self climbs, the more personae must he be able to play and the more skilfully, but only for the sake of his earthly power and pride. Cicero had conflated his own self with his personae, and attempted to lend a ‘natural’ gloss to this by a grand appeal to the genius of the universe in his evocation of the cosmos; Augustine saw instead mere dissembling. Cicero was a hypocrite, literally an actor, the crowd of performances only feeding his pride. ‘Hypocrites have not in their heart also that which they hold forth before the eyes of men’, Augustine cannonaded in his Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount. ‘For hypocrites are pretenders. It is as though they were assuming a character, as is done on the stage’. The hypocrite ‘assumes the character of a righteous man. He does not sustain that character, because he regards human praise as his whole reward. Even pretenders can receive this reward, as long as they are deceiving those to whom they appear righteous and are

63  Cicero, On the Orator: Book 3, trans. H. Rackam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), iii.53. 64  Raymond DiLorenzo, ‘The Critique of Socrates in Cicero’s De oratore: Ornatus and the Nature of Wisdom’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 11 (1978), 247–261. 65  Per Fjelstad, ‘Restraint and Emotion in Cicero’s De oratore’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 36 (2003), 39–47, at 41.

68 

B. HOLLAND

receiving praise from them’ (S. Dom. mon. ii.2.5). This might almost have been written about Cicero.66 This chapter has tried to establish Augustine’s first anthropological analogy. Adam is the origin and prototype of the first kind of self surveyed by Augustine. Adam’s original sin was pride, the desire and exhilaration of being in his own power rather than enjoying the dependence on God for which he had been created and which would have been for him a state of beautiful and sublime peace. The self-inflicted punishment for pride is a deforming of the self along different axes bearing on desire, power and possession: the self’s fragmentation, dispersal and dissolution between the various objects of attention; the torture of the insatiability of its desires; and its unsocial desires to dominate others. The proud self, moreover, puts on a pedestal a conception of human power as being at its best when characterised by a kind of desireless self-possession. Likewise, the Earthly City, Augustine maintains, is divided against itself, pursues war and conquest interminably, and sovereignty over it, howsoever it may be dressed up as being about natural order and control, is in fact a denaturing, puffed up performance. Luckily, this is not the end of the story, and Augustine does not abandon all of humankind to the City of Man.

66  For a contemporary critique of Cicero along quite Augustinian lines, see C. E. W. Steele, Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). But c.f. Gary A. Remer, Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

CHAPTER 4

The Unself and the Pilgrim City

‘The world smiles on us with many things, things of beauty, power, ­variety’. So says Augustine in one of his many sermons (Serm. 158.7). This does not sound like something that would come out of the same mouth as that which pronounced upon humanity’s condemnable condition and the parcelling up on the world into sovereignties taking their shape from that human-sized disarray.1 But Augustine found so much to wonder at in creation even as it horrified him. Witness, for example, how he marvelled at new human life—‘You have endowed it with senses. You have co-­ordinated the limbs. You have adorned it with a beautiful form’—while at the same time being so perturbed by the new born baby’s ‘fierce competitiveness’, as he flailed ‘to attempt to strike them [his parents] and to do as much injury as possible’ (Conf. i.7.11–12). Quicklime—‘when it is quenched, it is kindled!’—astounds him, even as its mysterious powers—the way ‘it takes fire into itself from the fire’, growing ‘white by the action of fire which makes other things dirty’—are cause for terror (Civ. Dei xxi.5). There are two sides to Augustine’s ontology of Creation: that which stresses the goodness of all that exists, and that which stresses corruption and privation. Admittedly, Augustine makes it too easy for us to notice the gulf that separates the Earthly from the Heavenly City. He does not make it easy enough for us to see that while paganism and Pelagianism represent the  Indeed, this late sermon, dating from 417, is all about the pretty disquieting theme of predestination. 1

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Holland, Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Recovering Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19333-1_4

69

70 

B. HOLLAND

form of the Earthly City, there are better ways of being in the world, so that the profiles of person and polis in the saeculum do not coincide in every respect with the overlapping contours of pagan, Pelagian and imperium. There are those whose love in hoc saeculo is not entirely resolved between love of God and love in contempt of God. So much human life is often strung along the spectrum between the beautiful and the bad, and the middling good in between can be called the better. What shall be decisive for the argument I make here is that the exemplar of the middling good for Augustine is the Christian convert, the pilgrim on his or her way to the Heavenly City. This will seem to many like a strange argument. Is not the pilgrim the person who has already passed through the point at which he has become a citizen of the Heavenly City, at least in the eyes of God? Robert Markus argued that from a God’s-eye perspective this was certainly the case, although in the saeculum citizens of the Earthly and Heavenly Cities are invisible to human eyes. John Milbank also holds that there are only two types of citizenship, but for him the saeculum exists only in a line of theory and practice first conjured up only during the thirteenth century in the bewildered imagination of John Duns Scotus. In this chapter, I seek to show that there is a third paradigm of the human personality and its citizenship in Augustine’s writings. I also demonstrate that this model has an analogue in a third city, the Pilgrim City. The first part of the chapter picks up on Augustine’s critique of Pelagianism as elaborated in Chap. 3, setting out more fully than I could there Augustine’s alternative theory of psychological motivation, in which the concept of love is central. The second part of the chapter is concerned with Augustine’s own narrative of his conversion to Christianity, according to which he, Augustine, turns away from pride by means of a process involving the reorientation of his love by means of an alteration in the objects of his attention. The third section shows up the consonances connecting the convert or pilgrim with the Pilgrim City, which is the second anthropological analogy.

Will and Love Augustine’s pilgrim is constructed in large part on the basis of an anti-­ Pelagian theory of will. According to the Pelagians and their predecessors, the Stoics, as we saw in Chap. 3, free will is a power to choose between different ends or different means to an end, and it is separate from and

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

71

irreducible to both reason and emotion. It is the free faculty of the will that ­prevents an agent from being determined by the truth or goodness of the objects of the agent’s cognition or the passions that are inevitably aroused under varying circumstances (although, as we saw, for the Stoics only the individual who chooses in accordance with reason is truly free). The young Augustine of the treatise On the Free Choice of the Will, whom we had several occasions to invoke in Chap. 2, may actually have held a similar conception. When he proclaims that ‘nothing is so much in our power as the will itself’, this might almost have come straight from the quill of Epictetus (Lib. arb. iii.3.7). It has even been argued that ‘of all the traits of the “will” in Augustine, there is not a single one that is not found earlier in the Stoics’.2 Whether or not this is true of the early Augustine, it is quite clear that he had by the time of the composition of the Confessions certainly renounced such a conception of the will, if he had ever adopted it in the first place.3 His rival account of willing is fundamental to his conception of the shape of the human life on pilgrimage to the Heavenly City in this world. We saw in the previous chapter that Augustine objected to the Pelagian conception of the power of free will because it made of the will a motiveless power of picking between unmotivated preferences, a mysterious and therefore mythical power over incomprehensible choices. (On the Stoic view which is the Pelagian’s immediate predecessor, the will’s choices are motivated by its preferences, either by the good as cognised by reason in the case of the wise agent, or by partial passions in the case of the unwise; but what made the difference between the two kinds of will was still mysterious.) It also implied a personal sovereignty over our decisions that put a limit to God’s agency and the pride-produced dominium of matters temporal. I will say more in the second section of the chapter about Augustine’s second set of complaints about Pelagianism. Here, the focus will be on his alternative conception of willing to the conception of willing as a power of the soul separate from reason and appetite. Carol Harrison has summarised Augustine’s new conception of the will thus: ‘the will is synonymous with love; to will is not just to rationally 2  R. A. Gauthier, Aristote: L’éthique a Nicomaque I, vol. 1: Introduction (Louvain: Peeters, 1970), 259. 3  For a contrary and revisionist perspective, see Carol Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology: An Argument for Continuity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 198–237.

72 

B. HOLLAND

deliberate and choose to act, rather it is to love something and to be moved to act on the basis of that love’.4 As Augustine himself puts it, the emotions are all forms of love, and all acts of love ‘are nothing more than acts of will’ (Civ. Dei xix.6). A ‘righteous will, then, is a good love; and a perverted will is an evil love’ (Civ. Dei xix.7). Acts of will are acts of love, acts of desire towards an object. This goes some way, according to Augustine, to solving some of the Pelagian problems. First, everything that human beings do is driven by their loves, so there is no problem here with respect to unmotivated or mysteriously motivated choices. The voluntative and the desiderative will always coincide. Second, the agent can claim no absolute control, nor possession, nor sovereignty over these loves. They do not belong to the person. Love is, on Augustine’s understanding, always relational. When a human being attends to some object and attraction increases, the relationship between the agent’s attention and the energies in the agent to which that object gives rise is what Augustine calls love. To will is to be moved to act on the basis of the relation between the attentive agent and an attractive object. It will be helpful for getting a clearer idea about what Augustine means by love and the will to turn to a twentieth-century Augustinian (but atheistic, often to her own regret) philosopher, Iris Murdoch.5 According to Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good, the secular analogue of original sin is ‘the fact that so much human conduct is moved by mechanical energy of an egocentric kind’, so that the task of moral philosophy should be the discussion of a technique for the ‘defeat’ of the ‘enemy’, the ‘fat relentless ego’.6 The ‘centre’ of the fat relentless ego is ‘the notion of the will as the creator of value’. 4  Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 93. An especially detailed elaboration of the same point is to be found in Paul Crittenden, Reason, Will and Emotion: Defending the Greek Tradition against Triune Consciousness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 141–156, which is also very good on pointing out the contrasts with Stoicism. 5  Murdoch is usually classed as a Platonist in respect of her ‘internalist’ moral theory. But as Maria Antonaccio has argued, she would be much better viewed as an Augustinian, for weakness of the will—a central crisis of moral experience for Murdoch as for Augustine—is an ‘intellectual conundrum’ for Platonism. Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 147–153, at 148. Antonaccio’s reading of Augustine is taken entirely from Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and therefore if anything exaggerates such differences between Augustine and Murdoch as there are. She says of Augustine, for example, that ‘his notion of the will is strong enough to assume a relative independence from moral vision’ (151), which, as we shall see, is simply not the case. 6  Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 52.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

73

Values which were previously inscribed in the heavens and guaranteed by God collapse into the human will. There is no transcendent reality. The idea of the good remains indefinable and empty so that human choice may fill it. The sovereign moral concept is freedom, or possibly courage in a sense which identifies it with freedom, will, power. This concept inhabits a quite separate top level of human activity since it is the guarantor of the secondary values created by choice. Act, choice, decision, responsibility, independence are emphasised in this philosophy of puritanical origin and apparent austerity.7

Man has become the measure of all things and each person’s will in its autonomy the measure of justice and virtue. But this abstraction from all objects leads only to ‘personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one’, and which encourages us to fabricate ‘an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world’.8 Her Pelagian target established and the eroded theological impetus to her project quite evident, Murdoch launches upon her alternative.9 Anything, she writes, ‘which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue’.10 The strategy she describes in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals by the term ‘unselfing’.11 Although it sounds like it, this is not a strategy of ‘self-­ naughting’ or self-negation as advocated by Augustine’s semi-Pelagian contemporary John Cassian (ca. 360–ca. 435), according to whom cenobites must relentlessly look within and exercise their wills by denying the intrusion of the phantasiai thrown up by the soul.12 Rather,13 the key to  Ibid., 80–81.  Ibid., 59, 84. 9  For critical and sympathetic discussions of Murdoch and theology, see respectively Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 68–88; and Maria Antonaccio, A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 105–173. 10  Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 84. 11  Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 17. 12  See Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 181–189; Richard J. Goodrich, Contextualizing Cassian: Aristocrats, Asceticism, and Reformation in Fifth-Century Gaul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and especially Brian Stock, The Integrated Self: Augustine, the Bible, and Ancient Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 19–31, which anatomises the important variances between Cassian and Augustine on the cultivation of an ‘integrated self’. 13  Simone Weil rather than Augustine himself was the inspiration for Murdoch’s secular Augustinianism. ‘We live in a world of unreality and dreams’, wrote Weil. ‘To give up our imaginary position as the centre, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative 7 8

74 

B. HOLLAND

the Murdochian strategy is attention, ‘the effort to counteract such states of illusion’ not by internal examination and self-denial but by means of a ‘just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’ outside oneself, ‘a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation’.14 Attention is the name for the direction of an agent’s loving efforts to see reality. Love itself is generated in the interaction between agent and object, in the effort of loving attention and the energies generated by the object in its otherness, or, as Murdoch puts it, in ‘the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’, in ‘the imaginative recognition of … otherness’.15 Murdoch’s vision vocabulary risks giving rise to the misunderstanding that attention is uniquely a matter of seeing reality, but the ‘metaphor of vision’ is just that.16 As Christopher Cordner points out, ‘Murdochian attention is not seeing something about another—seeing her more truly because one has come to register more truths about her. It is, instead, an orientation to her’—an orientation involving the ‘disarming of our emotional defences’ and ‘becoming present’ to the other.17 Loving attention, then, militates against the cupiditas dominandi because it ‘invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence’: Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 98. ‘The attitude that brings about salvation is not like any form of activity … It is the waiting or attentive and faithful immobility which lasts indefinitely’ (ibid., 128). ‘Where is the energy to be found for an act which has nothing to counterbalance it? The energy has to come from elsewhere’: Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 10. One could go on multiplying Augustinian quotations from Weil, a more properly religious thinker than Murdoch. However, it is to her atheistic epigone that I turn to help explicate Augustine, because Weil combines an Augustinian emphasis on attention with an extreme asceticism which much better approaches the kind of religious sensibility of the Cassianites. So: ‘We must reply to the absence of God, who is Love, by our own absence and love’: Weil, Notebooks, vol. 2, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 404. And: ‘we possess nothing in the world … except the power to say “I”. That is what we have to give to God—in other words, to destroy’ (Gravity, 23). And so on. Murdoch in fact expresses a much more authentically Augustinian ethics of unselfing through attention. On the relationship between Weil and Murdoch, I have learned much from Gabriele Griffin, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 1989). 14  Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 37, 34, 40. 15  Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good’, in her Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 215–216. 16  Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 22. 17  Christopher Cordner, ‘Lessons of Murdochian Attention’, Sophia, 55 (2016), 197–213, at 208–209.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

75

the selfish dream of the consciousness’, and thereby ‘real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self’.18 Murdoch also argues that it is through a practice of loving attention that we can achieve real freedom. First, this open orientation to reality amounts to ‘freedom from fantasy’, that ‘proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images’ that blights the human condition.19 Second, the freedom appropriate to human beings, a freedom more befitting of us than the illusive self-government of the will, involves immersion in traditions, and such immersion depends on attention: If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.20

In Matthew Crawford’s luminous gloss on this passage, he points out that the ‘fixation on autonomy clouds our understanding of such development because the skills one exercises in an impressive human performance are built up through submission’, and yet the ‘ecologies of attention’ accumulated through such deference to Murdoch’s authoritative structures allow us to acquire ‘the ability to act in settings that would otherwise be ­mystifying’—and that, for him as well as for Murdoch, is freedom.21 Third, according to Murdoch, the myth of the faculty of free will in morality, ‘the sudden jumping of the isolated will in and out of an impersonal logical complex’, ought to be put to rest, because ‘if I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at’.22 The morally right action will flow from just and loving attention, in the sense that ‘attending as presence-to, waiting-on, and acknowledging of another’ is a kind of obedience to the ethical strictures that are joined to adequate attention in a context requiring moral action.23  Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 85–86, 65.  Ibid., 66–67. 20  Ibid., 89. 21  Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction (London: Penguin), 127. 22  Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 23, 40. 23  Cordner, ‘Lessons’, 212. 18 19

76 

B. HOLLAND

I have dwelt on Murdoch at some length because hers is the profoundest contemporary Augustinian meditation on love and its connection with moving ourselves to action of which I am aware. Murdoch is concerned to dethrone the will as the focus of the discipline of moral philosophy and crown love in its place, whereas Augustine argues that will and love are mutually substitutable terms, as long as will is understood as love in the Murdochian mode rather than being grasped as Pelagian will. Augustine uses many words for love—most of all amor, dilectio and caritas—but he tends to use them interchangeably, and the multivalent ‘love’ incorporates and exceeds all these particular usages. From the human side, love is an ‘arresting vision’, ‘neither “appetite” nor “movement” but estimation, appreciation, and approval’.24 Augustine writes quite explicitly of the ‘attention of the mind’25 as being a function of the power of will or love that ‘holds our sense [of sight] on the thing we are seeing’, so that the object can become not only an object of sensation but also something perceived, and, in perception, loved (Trin. xi.2.2). Love, says Augustine, ‘has eyes’ (Jo. ep. tr. vii.10). But, of course, love is not only or primarily on the side of the agent; love is properly a relationship between lover and beloved. Will or love is, again to quote Arendt on Augustine, ‘the most successful coupling agent’, which through attention unites our sense organs with the outside world and ‘then drags, as it were, this outside world into ourselves’ without, though, seeking to possess or alter it.26 When a person attends to some object and that attention is rewarded by new energies, then that relationship between subject and object is will or love. Augustine uses another important metaphor for will or love. They are said to be the weight of the soul. ‘A body by its weight tends to move towards its proper place’, Augustine argues, as we have already seen in Chap. 2: The weight’s movement is not necessarily downwards, but to its appropriate position: fire tends to move upwards, a stone downwards. They are acted on by their respective weights; they seek their own place … They are acted on 24  Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 254. 25  Here I have opted for Stephen McKenna’s translation, in On the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), of intentio mentis over Hill’s ‘conscious intention’, which is less accurate. 26  Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 100–102.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

77

by their respective densities, they seek their own place. Things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ordered position, they are at rest. My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me. By Your gift we are set on fire and carried upwards: we grow red hot and ascend. We climb ‘the ascent in our heart’ [Ps. 83.6] and sing ‘the song of steps’ [Ps. 119.1]. (Conf. xiii.9.10; emphasis mine)

In the City of God, the ‘specific gravity of a body’ is said to be ‘in a manner, its love’, and so a ‘material body is borne along by its weight in a particular direction, as a soul is by its love’ (Civ. Dei xi.28). And the equation of love and will in terms of the metaphor of weight comes out clearly in The Trinity, wherein ‘the will’, which ‘applies the appetite for seeing or thinking to the achievement of rest in the things from which sight [is] formed’ is said to be ‘like weight’ (Trin. xi.11.18). The categorisation of will or love as the weight of the soul is critical in Augustine, because it helps to show up the alternative in his thinking to the Pelagian conception of willing. For a person’s orientation to the world is not a matter of willpower, on the Augustinian view, not a matter of isolated moments during which the power of choice asserts itself in the face of the internal and external causes that press on the agent. Rather, changes in a person’s orientation to the world arise from the transfer of weight in the soul between the objects competing for the agent’s love. Murdoch again lets us see this clearly. ‘Man is not a combination of an impersonal rational thinker and a personal will’, she writes. ‘He is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accordance with what he sees, and who has some continual slight control over the direction and focus of his vision’.27 Yet this ‘choice’ should not be understood in Pelagian terms as a power of an indifferent will to choose between alternatives. ‘Where strong emotions of sexual love, or of hatred, resentment or jealousy are concerned, “pure will” can usually achieve little’.28 Willpower will not change our orientation. We might be able to exercise some self-control for a time, but this is likely to be merely a form of what contemporary addiction recovery programmes call white-knuckling. ‘It is small use’, writes Murdoch, ‘telling oneself “Stop being in love, stop feeling resentment, be just”’.

 Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 40.  Ibid., 55.

27 28

78 

B. HOLLAND

What is needed [she argues to the contrary] is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source … Deliberately falling out of love is not a jump of the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing … Human beings are naturally ‘attached’ and when an attachment seems painful or bad it is most readily displaced by another attachment, which an attempt at attention can encourage.29

This is entirely Augustinian. Human beings are formed by their loves. At any given time, there will be various objects vying for a person’s love. Freedom, on this view, is not a matter of moving oneself to action on the basis of unfettered choice, but of attending to the right things by turning one’s back on the wrong things. That is to say, it is not about fiats of will, but about surrendering certain desires and thereby necessarily surrendering to certain others. The first form of surrender is a negative rather than a positive choice of something; and it is emotional, a letting-go of one thing so that the balance of weights in the soul is shifted. Since the Fall, ‘our spoiled nature sinks readily and promptly, as it were, by its own weight’ (Civ. Dei xxii.22). When an agent’s will or love is getting better, however, desires which tend towards selfishness or nothingness will be surrendered so that desires for the good will begin to form the agent’s personality. Only through surrender of the bad can the good stand a chance of success. As Martha Nussbaum succinctly puts it, for Augustine ‘the only way a human being changes in her love is to redirect that love towards a new object’.30 It will be recalled that Pelagius made free will a function of God’s grace. Augustine has so far presented an alternative account of freedom that does not require the pride-inducing concept of the free will. Desires for the good, though, are not natural; they are gifts of grace. The next section turns to the subject of grace in order to complete Augustine’s picture of freedom, conversion and sanctification.

Grace and Conversion So far, we have seen how Augustine identifies will and love, and suggests that the process of shifting from a less good to a better love is a matter of refocusing one’s attention on something worthier and becoming energised  Ibid., 55–56.  Martha C.  Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 547. 29 30

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

79

by that new something. We have also seen that this refocusing is compatible with a certain account of freedom. The issue now to be addressed is how this account of free will is compatible with Augustine’s conception of grace, according to which any affinity for the good on the part of human beings in the fallen condition must have been made possible by God. It has been said that ‘one of Augustine’s failings was that he was apt to read off lessons from his own experience and erect them into principles equally applicable to all mankind’.31 To be sure, Augustine narrates his life story and the part played in it by grace as something of an allegory relevant to all mankind. But to endorse the view just quoted would also amount to a denial of the fact that Augustine regarded his own life as mirroring others and acquiring meaning through its congruencies with exemplars. The exemplar most relevant to Augustine’s construction of freedom and grace was St. Paul. It was in the course of revising his understanding of a passage in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans that Augustine hit upon his own new conception of the healing power of God’s grace. Grace, Augustine tells us, is the source of how some created things ‘change for the better and in so doing tend towards being. They are not said to be perverted by the change, but rather reverted or converted, for perversion is the opposite of a setting in order’ (Mor. ii.6.8). In this life, sanctification allows a human being entry into the next, and eventually, at the eschaton, into the City of God. Grace is the source of one’s return to the state of innocence from which Adam plunged. In hoc temporum cursu, grace enables those people chosen by God to become better than downright defected. Yet the saint will still suffer under the burden of inherited guilt. The mark of saintliness will be a certain attitude to that inheritance and a capacity, with God’s help, to reorientate his or her desires towards more creditable objects of attention and affection. A person can become better under grace but by no means perfect. The passage in question is the following: We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For 31  Christopher Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 235.

80 

B. HOLLAND

I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom. 7:14–25; emphasis mine)

Paul was generally read here as speaking in the person of another, namely the corporate person of the Jewish nation.32 The Law has been propagated to it, so that its people know that they sin when they do; but in the fallen condition and without the mediation of Christ’s salvific death they can do nothing else. This was the interpretation of early Christian authorities, and of Pelagius.33 Augustine, however, reads these as the words of a saint, the very epitome of Christian virtue, here admitting that he, Paul, continues to endure concupiscence even whilst enjoying the gift of God’s grace.34 This is a revelation. Augustine sees Paul in himself, and himself in Paul. We need to return to Augustine’s discussion of habit in Book viii of the Confessions. By the end of the previous Book, Augustine’s intellect had become convinced of the truth of Christian doctrine. This was a conversion of his intellect, and it also generated new desires in his heart. ‘I was astonished’, he realised, ‘to find that already I loved You, not a phantom surrogate for You’ (Conf. vii.16.23). This new knowledge and new love, though, are not sufficient for setting him on an entirely new chapter in life. Augustine, in the manner of Paul, continues to do what he wants not to do, and instead he does what he now hates. ‘I was caught up to You by Your beauty and quickly torn away from You by my weight. With a groan I crashed into inferior things. This weight was my sexual habit’ (ibid.). Thus, Book viii opens with Augustine pondering over the forces that 32  On the prosopological dimensions of Paul’s writings, see Matthew W.  Bates, The Hermeneutics of Apostolic Proclamation: The Center of Paul’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012). 33  Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 84–87. 34  See esp. Peter Gorday, Principles of Patristic Exegesis: Romans 9–11  in Origen, John Chrysostom and Augustine (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983).

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

81

continued to hold him back. The problem, he swiftly concludes, did not concern any inadequate integration of his new knowledge with his life. ‘All doubt had been taken from me that there is indestructible substance from which comes all substance. My desire was not to be more certain of You but to be more stable in You’ (Conf. viii.1.1). Knowledge itself, he recognises, is not sufficient to remould a self’s shape. ‘And now I had discovered the good pearl. To buy it I had to sell all that I had; and I hesitated’ (Conf. viii.1.2). The problem, then, must be the root of this hesitation; and the problem was habit, old loves woven into the fabric of his life and lingering powerfully into the present. Augustine identifies within himself two wills. There was his ‘new will, which was beginning to be within [him] a will to serve You freely and to enjoy You’ (Conf. viii.5.10). This new will—this new love—was not, however, ‘yet strong enough to conquer my older will, which had the strength of old habit. So my two wills, one old, the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual, were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of all concentration’ (ibid.). Augustine identifies in himself those afflictions which we saw in Chap. 3 he considers to be the punishment for original sin. He is a man divided, a slave to his habits. He is thereby divided against himself, a slave only to himself, which he experiences, in the manner of Adam, as the servitude of the spirit to the body. ‘I was responsible for the fact that habit had become so embattled against me; for it was with my consent that I came to the place in which I did not want to be. Who has the right to object if a just penalty pursues a sinner?’ (Conf. viii.5.11). Violence of habit is the ‘law of sin’, ‘by which even the unwilling mind is dragged down and held, as it deserves to be, since by its own choice it slipped into the habit’ (Conf. viii.5.12). Whatever choices first attended the behaviours which became compulsions, as a ‘son of Adam’ it was inevitable that he would eventually fall into self-division in any case, ‘resulting from a more freely chosen sin’, Adam’s primal sin of pride (Conf. viii.10.22). Augustine also experiences his habits (we may surmise from a passage in The Trinity) as the conquest by fantasy over reality: Yet such is the force of love that when the mind has been thinking about things with love for a long time and has got stuck to them with the glue of care, it drags them along with itself even when it returns after a fashion to thinking about itself. Now these things are bodies which it has fallen in love with outside itself through the senses of the flesh and got involved with through a kind of long familiarity. But it cannot bring these bodies

82 

B. HOLLAND

t­ hemselves back inside within it into the region, so to say, of its non-bodily nature; so it wraps up their images and clutches them to itself, images made in itself out of itself (Trin. x.5.7)

Modern biologists, psychologists and anthropologists of habit have been able to isolate several of the interactions between the human brain and a person’s environment that can lead to addiction. Whether substances or behaviours, certain stimulants cause several regions of the brain to release the chemical dopamine. Dopamine then attaches to several receptors in other areas of the brain, producing an intense flush of pleasure. When an agent learns to use a particular drug or behaviour as a salve for psychological troubles, then addictions can ensue, as she or he comes to depend on the experience of dopamine release associated with that drug or behaviour. ‘The exposure must occur in a context where the person finds the experience pleasant and/or useful and must be deliberately repeated until the brain shifts its processing of the experience from deliberate and intentional to automatic and habitual’.35 Addiction thus ‘grows out of an individual’s routinized subjective response to something that has special meaning for him—something, anything, that he finds so safe and reassuring that he cannot be without it’.36 Addictions become more debilitating over time, as the brain produces increasingly less dopamine because of feedback from other regions of the brain suggesting that such flooding must be an error, and the addict struggles to cope with the declining levels. Certain neural pathways now firmly in place, an addict may well come intensely to dislike the initially euphoric experience of a substance or behaviour but crave it all the same. A hardened gambling addict may fervidly despise her behaviour, but whilst she has money left to play with she is powerless to give up her seat at the slot machine until she has ‘zeroed out’ or played ‘to extinction’—until, that is, she can put to rest the nagging obligation to make a decision about whether to go on or stop by the decision being made for her by the loss of all funds.37 She no longer plays for the dopamine highs first spurred on by winning; she plays to lose and 35  Maia Szalavitz, ‘Most of Us Still Don’t Get it: Addiction is a Learning Disorder’, Pacific Standard, 4th August 2014, https://psmag.com/social-justice/us-still-dont-get-addictionlearning-disorder-87431. 36  Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, Love and Addiction (Watertown, MA: Broadrow Publications, 2015), 3. 37  Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 210–237.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

83

for the peace of mind that loss temporarily brings, even as her world ­crumbles about her. Rats which have undergone operations to remove the dopamine-synthesising nerve cells of their brains remain addicts of sugary water even as they are unable to take any pleasure from drinking it.38 Augustine, of course, knew none of the science or social science.39 But he had his finger firmly on something important, namely the insight that his compulsions were disordered and misdirected loves, and that they remained wants even when they were no longer likes.40 He felt a paralysis of his will as it was weighed down by past desires now grown bitter but still present to the will as wants, and hardwired by habituation into the structure of his life, incorrigible and interminable. ‘The thoughts’, he wrote, ‘with which I meditated about You were like the efforts of those who would like to get up but are overcome by deep sleep and sink back again. No one wants to be asleep all the time, and the sane judgment of everyone judges it better to be awake. Yet often a man defers shaking off sleep when his limbs are heavy with slumber. Although displeased with himself he is glad to take a bit longer, even when the time to get up has arrived’ (Conf. viii.5.12). He felt himself sometimes to be moved by the will he wanted but more often to remain static in virtue of the will he wanted to be without.41 ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet’, he had once prayed, all the while ‘afraid You might hear my prayer quickly, and that You might too rapidly heal me of the disease of lust which I preferred to satisfy rather than suppress’ (Conf. viii.7.17). Augustine could not be clearer that the contest in his soul is not between reason and appetite, to be refereed by 38  Berridge, Kent C., ‘Brain Studies Can Advance Psychological Understanding’, in The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, eds. Andrew S. Fox, Regina C. Lapate, Alexander J. Shackman and Richard J. Davidson, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 39  It should be said that much of the science and social science assigns many positive functions to habit. See, e.g., Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 97–128. 40  Patrick Anselme and Mike J. F. Robinson, ‘“Wanting”, “Liking”, and their Relation to Consciousness’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, 42 (2015), 123–140. 41  This is a reformulation of Harry G. Frankfurt’s definition of a person as ‘being capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are’, so that ‘the desire by which he is moved is either the will he wants or a will he wants to be without’. Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1971), 5–20, at 7 and 14. For discussion of Augustine on the will in light of Frankfurt’s proposal about persons, see Eleonore Stump, ‘Augustine on Free Will’, in Cambridge Companion to Augustine.

84 

B. HOLLAND

some faculty of choice called will. Rather, the contest is in the faculty of will itself, beckoned as it is by different loves. Reason and ordered desire have lined up against past desires, but Augustine is powerless to reconstitute himself as whole, because those past states of desire, in memory, continue to motivate him, intellectually discredited though they may be. It is necessary to quote Augustine at length on this point: The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it is so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind, and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it. What causes this monstrosity and why does this happen? Mind commands, I say, that it should will, and would not give the command if it did not will, yet does not perform what it commands. The willing is not wholehearted, so the command is not wholehearted. The strength of the command lies in the strength of the will, and the degree to which the command is not performed lies in the degree to which the will is not engaged. For it is the will that commands the will to exist, and it commands not another will but itself. So the will that commands is incomplete, and therefore what it commands does not happen. If it were complete, it would not need to command the will to exist, since it would exist already. Therefore, there is no monstrous split between willing and not willing. We are dealing with a morbid condition of the mind which, when it is lifted up by the truth, does not unreservedly rise to it but is weighed down by habit. So there are two wills. Neither of them is complete, and what is present in the one is lacking to the other. (Conf. viii.9.21)

Augustine talks of duae voluntates, but he must be taken to mean the desiring faculty of one individual. The ‘self which willed to serve [God] was identical to the self which was unwilling. It was I. I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling. So I was in conflict with myself and was dissociated from myself’ (Conf. viii.10.22). The two partials wills sum to an integer of one, but they repulse each other, so that his will is not integral. Reason has offered up all it can to him, and its biddings have all been accepted, but they are ranged against wants unappealing but rooted deep in the soul, against which their combined force he seems helpless. ‘Ingrained evil had more hold over me than unaccustomed good’ (Conf. viii.11.25). What accusations against myself did I not bring? With what verbal rods did I not scourge my soul so that it would follow me in my attempt to go after You! But my soul hung back. It refused, and had no excuse to offer.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

85

The arguments were exhausted, and all had been refuted. The only thing left to it was a mute trembling, and as if it were facing death it was terrified of being restrained from the treadmill of habit by which it suffered sickness unto death. (Conf. viii.7.18)

But Augustine does convert to Christianity. What happens, and what does it have to do with the will and with grace? Augustine does not attempt to overcome his habits by willpower. He would have agreed with Murdoch that one does not give up an object of love, and especially a hardwired infatuation, by an emotionless faculty of choice, or even by a programme of ascesis.42 Rather, his elevation arises through a process of unselfing. First, it dawns on Augustine that he is completely powerless, when faced by his cleaved will, to mend his lascivious self by way of his own inner resources. ‘Why are you relying on yourself’, he asks himself, ‘only to find yourself unreliable?’ (Conf. viii.12.29). Second, firmly seized of his own insufficiency, he is humbled. He feels small, broken and i­nsignificant. At the outset of Book viii Augustine visits his former mentor Simplicianus, who recounts for him the tale of the conversion to Christianity of Gaius Marius Victorinus, ‘at one time rhetor in the city of Rome’, ‘extremely learned and most expert in all the liberal disciplines’ (Conf. viii.2.3). He was also an idol worshipper, and proud to assume the mantle of ‘Babylonish dignity’. However, Victorinus began to feel an ‘emptiness’ inside himself, and that emptiness he interpreted as evidence of a presence outside himself which in his pride he could not contemplate and accept. Humbled, Victorinus was ready to open himself to God and to be baptised into the Church (Conf. viii.2.4). A little later, Augustine is visited by a compatriot named Ponticianus, who once held ‘high office at the court’, but whom, it now transpires, is a convert to the true faith. Ponticianus also narrates the conversion story of a friend, formerly in the employ of the special branch, who was violently filled with ‘sobering shame’ when he himself read about the conversion of St. Anthony the Great, so that he ‘experienced a conversion inwardly where You alone could see’, in virtue of which he turned his back on his secular post and instead fixed his heart on Heaven (Conf. viii.6.15). These anecdotes chasten Augustine, who turns to his companion Alypius and cries out: 42  For more on Augustine’s attitude towards asceticism, see George Lawless, ‘Augustine’s Decentring of Asceticism’, in Augustine and his Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, eds. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000).

86 

B. HOLLAND

What is wrong with us? What is this that you have heard? Uneducated people are rising up and capturing Heaven, and we with our high culture without any heart—see where we roll in the mud of flesh and blood. Is it because they are ahead of us and we are ashamed to follow? Do we feel no shame at making not even an attempt to follow? (Conf. viii.8.19)

Third, then, now defenceless and humiliated, Augustine is ready to enter into a state of self-forgetfulness. Convinced that only a power greater than himself can bring him peace, he gives up the battle of self with self. This is an absolutely critical point in Augustine’s account of his conversion. He does not attempt to conquer his habits; rather, he turns his back on them. To be sure, his ‘old loves’ continued to suggest ‘disgraceful things’. The ‘overwhelming force of habit was saying to me, “Do you think you can live without them?”’ But by this point, Augustine has turned his back. ‘I was listening to them with much less than half my attention. They were not frankly confronting me face to face on the road, but as it were whispering behind my back, as if they were furtively tugging at me as I was going away’ (Conf. viii.11.26). For a time, Augustine has closed off a set of possibilities. As he admits, he was for a while left in a ‘state of ­suspense’ (Conf. viii.11.25). This is necessary, though, for his conversion. William James expresses the upshot of the strategy: ‘To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind’.43 Much better to disregard than tussle with such feelings (Fig. 4.1). His attention towards his compulsions now out of mind, something occurs. This is the fourth step. The weights in Augustine’s heart are rebalanced. By this point he has been praying for some time, petitioning the God of his intellect also to become the God of his heart. Yet as Murdoch writes, ‘prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love’.44 Through prayer, Augustine has been gradually reforming his desires. Now overthrown in his enterprise to revolutionise himself by moral grooming and preening, he ceases to inspect himself so relentlessly. He can forget himself for a while, and all that ails him. As C. S. Lewis memorably said, true humility is not thinking less of oneself but thinking of oneself less. Through humility and self-forgetfulness, Augustine now naturally assumes a posture of openness to the world outside himself. 43  William James, ‘The Gospel of Relaxation’, in The Heart of William James, ed. Robert Richardson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 132. 44  Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 55.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

87

Fig. 4.1  Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne (ca. 1645–ca. 1650)

He is all ears, all attention. The ‘very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking about itself’ (Conf. ix.10.25). His own energies can now focus on God, and these energies can be further and reciprocally charged in the process of this loving attention. He has, finally and momentously, found peace, and ‘a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart’ (Conf. viii.12.29). He has found that God can do for him what he could not do for himself. Defeated and shamed, Augustine raises the white flag, and when he does his attention is redirected away from himself, and the weight of his love forces him over to the side of God. In Robert J.  O’Connell’s words, ‘the ultimate act of willing involved in

88 

B. HOLLAND

Augustine’s description of conversion … resemble[s] nothing more than a cessatio, a cessation of all human efforts of willing in a more positive sense of that term, in favour of a yielding, a total surrender, to God’s drawing attraction’.45 Yet again, however, Murdoch captures the Augustinian ethic better than any academic commentary, this time in one of her novels, The Unicorn, in a discussion of the character Effingham Cooper: Something had been withdrawn, had slipped away from him in the moment of his attention and that something was simply himself … What was left was everything else, all that was not himself, that object which he had never before seen and upon which he now gazed with the passion of a lover … Since he was mortal he was nothing and since he was nothing all that was not himself was filled to the brim with being and it was from this that the light streamed. This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love that was the same as death. He looked, and knew with a clarity which was one with the increasing light, that with the death of the self the world becomes quite automatically the object of a perfect love.46

Replace ‘world’ with its Creator in this secular Augustinianism and we have an Augustinianism precisely as Augustine himself would have approved. Augustine’s understanding of God’s grace was directly impacted by his own experience of conversion. There are several stable aspects of his doctrine of grace. After God withdrew from Adam His grace, Augustine believed, Adam’s successors were unable to do anything that did not lead to a diminution of goodness in the world, unless God chose to bestow grace upon them singly. When He did this, it was not in virtue of any desert on the part of the particular individual. No person merited the grace that conducted him or her towards salvation, and therefore there was no injustice on God’s part in granting it on His own whim. In light of his own experience of conversion, however, Augustine came to comprehend two traits of grace in respect of its working on and with human beings in securing redemption and sanctification. First, conversion does not, contra the Pelagians, clean up a person’s soul so that it delineates a dirty ‘before’ from a sparkling ‘after’ (before the rust begins to set in again). The converted soul carries with it the detritus of the past. Second and relatedly, conversion does not mark the moment when God condescends to grant 45  Robert J.  O’Connell, Images of Conversion in Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 239. 46  Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 167.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

89

grace and intervene in a person’s life for the first time. Rather, God was there all along, and so was grace, to which facts conversion is a testament. Let us take these points in turn. Paul, it will be remembered, confessed to feeling unable to do that which he wished to do, and instead he did that which he hated. He did not say that this described his condition before he received grace, so that it no longer applied in the stage under grace (gradus sub gratia). What he said—at least on Augustine’s idiosyncratic reading—was that the same divisions still afflicted him, but that he was confident that God had chosen to save him through the mediation of His son Jesus’s atoning death. Augustine added to this the thought that, under grace, ‘even though certain fleshly desires fight against our spirit when we are in this life, to lead us into sin, nonetheless our spirit resists them because it is fixed in the grace and love of God, and ceases to sin. For we sin not by having this perverse desire but by consenting to it’ (Ex. ep. Rom. 13–18:8–9). Old habits do not simply stop bothering the individual sub gratia, but with his loves in order, in James Wetzel’s evocative phrase, ‘the legacy of our perverse past expresses itself only as the annoying static of defeated desire’.47 As Wetzel also argues, this move involves Augustine in some interpretative acrobatics. For Paul wrote that he could not perform (in the Latin of the Vulgate, perficere, which has the past participle perfectus, simply meaning ‘completed’) the good that he was willing to do, even with grace on his side. The Apostle (in translation) uses the intensified perficere rather than the more common facere here, and Augustine takes him to be saying that he cannot complete these good things, to the highest degree.48 For ‘the good is incomplete [imperfectum] when one has concupiscence, even if one does not consent to concupiscence in order to do an evil action’ (C. duas Pel. i.10.19). Thus, Augustine does not impugn the apostle’s virtue. The really significant point, however, is that division remains at the heart of the converted life. The convert has been given through grace the capacity to order his or her loves and direct his or her will to the good, but it remains an incomplete will, its integrity disrupted by all the grime and scoria of the past. It ‘is grace that sees to it that there is no surrender [to cupiditas] and that a person’s mind is fortified against desire’—but it does not remove those past desires in the present (Simpl. i.1.9). ‘The past can come very close’, writes Peter Brown. Its ‘powerful and complex emotions have only recently passed away; we can still feel  James Wetzel, Limits of Virtue, 146.  Ibid., 171.

47 48

90 

B. HOLLAND

their contours through the thin layer of new feeling that has grown over them’.49 The graced life approximates to a sort of serenity, but it is no state of perfect peace. Christian life, to quote Brown again, is in Augustine’s eyes a ‘life-long convalescence’, for ‘neither baptism nor the experience of conversion could break the monotonous continuity’ of human life.50 This was one respect in which Augustine’s doctrine of grace contradicted what W.  H. C.  Frend first characterised as the ‘Christianity of discontinuity’.51 It disrupts it in a second way as well. According to Augustine, a person must be graced even before conversion. He could not accept, with Pelagius, that God offered grace to some people, which they were free to accept or reject. St. Paul, after all, had written: ‘For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?’ (1 Cor. 4:7). Augustine, by the time he had come to write the Confessions, interpreted this to mean that even the will or love or beginning of faith which a person brings to their own conversion must have been given to them by God. Because an individual can achieve nothing good on their own without grace, this logically entails that the individual who converts must have been graced even before their loves began to be realigned. ‘Late have I loved You, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved You … You were with me, and I was not with You’ (Conf. x.27.38). Writing to his friend Firmus, who was reluctant to be baptised, around 428, Augustine advises: Do not wait ‘until He wills it’, as if you would offend Him if you willed it earlier, inasmuch as you can will it only when He is actively helping you at that moment in the future when He should actually help you. Indeed, His mercy has gone before so that you may will it, but when you shall will it, it will indeed be you who are willing it. (Ep.∗ 2.7)

For some people, who never have any feeling for the good, life is genuinely without grace and the real freedom that comes with it. The barest delight in the good is, though, a gift of grace, according to Augustine.52  Brown, Augustine, 157.  Brown, ‘Pelagius’, 200. 51  W.  H. C.  Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 402. 52   James Wetzel, ‘The Alleged Importance of Free Choice: Augustine on Liberum Arbitrium’, in his Parting Knowledge, 52. 49 50

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

91

It is proof of a life to which grace has been offered, even if that grace has not yet been accepted by the individual. What is required for salvation is the kind of effort to reorientate one’s loves as Augustine has described, as well as to pray, as Markus nicely puts it, ‘to be able to live as a question in God’s sight’.53 One must desire to love God and be loved by Him, whatever the darkness within oneself. ‘What you desire, however, you don’t see yet. But by desiring you are made large enough, so that, when there comes what you should see, you may be filled’ (Jo. ep. tr. iv.6).

The Pilgrim City Grace, according to Augustine, heals self-division over a lifetime when a person redirects their love to God. The social and political implications of Augustine’s thinking about grace become apparent in his theory of justice. For justice is how a divisive political society is healed from the effects of sin, just as God’s grace heals the riven soul from the effects of original sin. Injustice (iniustitia) first enters the scene in the City of God when Adam and Eve disobey God’s command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge (Civ. Dei xiv.12). From almost the beginning, then, sin is tied not only to a deformation of self but also to a deformation of community and justice. God’s command served to remind our first parents that they were only to enjoy the benefit of selfhood in terms of its relation to God. ‘God’s instructions demanded obedience’, intoned Augustine, ‘and obedience is in a way the mother and guardian of all the other virtues in a rational creature, seeing that the rational creature has been made so that it is to man’s advantage to be in subjection to God’ (ibid.). Rather than hearing the divine Word, Adam and his wife listened to the Devil, and became like him ‘by living by the rule of self’ (Civ. Dei xiv.3). Justice, in a context where God has withdrawn from Creation and each person is the ultimate object of his or her own love, then takes on a new meaning, according to Augustine. It becomes in a sense privatised, about no more than shared interests and utility, and a matter of calculation or proportion.54 Hence, when Cicero defines justice, it is said to be ‘rendering to each his due’, and  Markus, Saeculum, 124.  The classical ‘privatisation’ of justice in fact appears all the more ‘communal’ when the terms in which it was discussed are put into English. We are accustomed to thinking of ‘interests’ first as personal, and only secondarily as shared; where in fact the Latin interesse, incorporating ‘between’ and ‘beings’, has an interpersonal dimension built into it. 53 54

92 

B. HOLLAND

when he defined the community of the people (populus) this was understood as an ‘assemblage of some size’, associated (depending on the choice of translation) by agreement on what is just or a common sense of right, as well as by a ‘community of interest’.55 Augustine, however, picks up on St. Paul’s revision of the classical definition of justice in Romans 13:8: ‘Let no debt remain outstanding’—owe no one anything—‘except the continuing debt to love one another’.56 As Milbank summarises, ‘love itself is always a matter of distributive justice’ on this Pauline view.57 The New Testament in effect points out that, for those favoured by God’s grace, justice has again become a matter of loving God and neighbour correctly—as Augustine says, justice has become synonymous with love or caritas (Nat. grac. lxx.84). We must give to God and to our neighbour the love which is their due. This is political for at least four reasons, according to Augustine. First, through Christ’s atoning death those on whom God has chosen to bestow his grace are now subject to a justice which preceded the Fall and from which the classical conception is an impure derivative. Second, justice is about hierarchy, about order, about ‘rightly ordered love’ (Civ. Dei xv.22). Only God can be loved for His own sake, and all things must be loved for the sake of God. ‘We must’, Augustine convolutes, ‘observe the right order even in our love for the very love with which we love what is deserving of love’ (ibid.). Third, we must love our neighbours so as to enable them to live justly too. Fourth, justice is, on Augustine’s definition, ‘love serving God alone and, therefore, ruling well those things subject to man’—justice involves an element of rule (Mor. i.15.25).58 It is in light of his adoption of the Pauline conception of justice that Augustine sets to on a methodical rethinking of Cicero’s notion of the political society in which justice is relevant, the res publica, and which he will again leverage in a new anthropological analogy. First, then, comes Augustine’s parsing of Cicero’s definition of the republic or c­ ommonwealth. 55  Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), iii.38; and Cicero, Commonwealth, i.39a respectively. 56  See the discussion of St. Paul’s transformation of classical accounts of justice in Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 146–163. 57  Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 120. 58  For a recent overview of Augustine’s conception of justice, see Kolawole Chabi, ‘Augustine on Justice: Theory and Praxis’, Igwebuike: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities, 1 (2015), 69–86.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

93

Several of the Latin terms have to be allowed to stand in order to spot the connections between this passage and Augustine’s wider oeuvre, on which identifying the anthropological analogy depends. A partial translation thus reads: By populum he [Cicero] did not mean any and every gathering of a crowd of men, but a gathering united by agreement as to what is just [or common sense of right] and by a common pursuit of interest. He reminded his audience of the value of a clear definition in an argument; and from the definitions which he had advanced already he inferred that a rem publicam, that is, the res of a populus, came into being where it was soundly and justly governed, whether power rests with a king alone, or with an aristocracy, or with the populus as a whole.59 Suppose now, he continued, that the king is unjust (and he called him a tyrant, as did the Greeks), or the nobles are unjust (and their mutual agreement he called a faction), or the people itself is unjust (he could find no current description for such a people except to call it, also, a tyrant)—then the res publica is no longer merely corrupt, but, as the chain of reasoning from the foregoing definitions make plain, ceases to exist at all; for there is no res of a populus, he said, if it is in the hands of a tyrant or faction, nor is the populus itself a populus any longer if it is unjust, for in that case it fails to satisfy the definition of a people, viz. a multitude of men united by agreement as to what is just [or common sense of right] and by a common pursuit of interest. (Civ. Dei ii.21)

Two of Augustine’s concepts—rei/res/rem and populus—require further explanation before they are transmuted into the modern vernacular. It is easier to take them in reverse order. In line with a Pauline definition of justice, Augustine maintains that a populus is ‘the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love’ (Civ. Dei xix.24). Shared interests have dropped out of the picture, and agreement on what is just has been rephrased so as explicitly to include love as the measure of justice. In addition, as Jeremy duQuesnay Adams showed exhaustively some time ago in a classic study, Augustine uses populus to denote ‘exclusively a gathering of attentive persons’, persons attending together to some object or objects of attraction.60 Common 59  Notice that for Cicero—and for Augustine—‘republic’ and ‘monarchy’ are not opposite terms. See also Paul J.  Cornish, ‘Augustine’s Contribution to the Republican Tradition’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9 (2010), 133–148. 60  Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, The Populus of Augustine and Jerome: A Study in the Patristic Sense of Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 25.

94 

B. HOLLAND

focus and attention becomes a sine qua non for a group of persons to become a populus. The usual rendition of populus as ‘people’ will not, therefore, quite suit, and we should keep it in its Latin form in order to mark it as a term of art in the Augustinian lexicon. The second term, res, means at its most basic ‘thing’. This could, in the Latin world, depending on the context, mean ‘substance’, and therefore also substance in the sense of ‘wealth’, which played into the old and now rather obsolete translation of res publica as ‘commonwealth’. Augustine, though, insists that it is the noun which modifies the adjective. A populus becomes a res publica when the populus has a res. This is somewhat lost in translation. The nominative res, genitive rei and accusative rem are usually all rendered in English translations of the City of God by ‘weal’ (as by Bettenson, and by the translation partnership of Walsh, Zema, Monahan and Honan, in fact in any number of renderings).61 ‘Weal’ itself has something of an archaic ring to it, and can itself refer variously, as I have said already, to wealth or prosperity, but also to well-being, or happiness, or property, or mere interests; it was probably either of the latter two possibilities that Cicero meant.62 That any of these, however, should transform a populus into a res publica is evidently not what Augustine strongly implies in the passage quoted above, and the standard translations mislead on this crucial point. A res, as Augustine dissects Cicero’s theory, appears at base to be a form of just government when applied to a populus. We can bracket the ‘just’ part of the formulation, because, as has often been noted, the main thrust of Augustine’s critique of Cicero’s definition of res publica is to argue that Cicero got things the wrong way around: that iustitia is not based on ius, as Cicero argued, but that ius must arise from iustitia.63 Augustine, though, still wants to appropriate for his own purposes Cicero’s concept of res publica, now understood as a compound of attentive persons and directing power. About that appropriation, we can say this much immediately, then: res publica, even before we have reached a thorough understanding of it as a compound term, simply does not seem to be obviously commensurate with either ‘republic’ or ‘commonwealth’ in Augustine’s handling of it, so it will be best to carry on referring to it in 61  Augustine, City of God, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, Grace Monahan and Daniel J. Honan (New York: Doubleday, 1949). 62  Dyson translates res publica as ‘property of a people’ in Augustine, City of God, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 63  See, e.g., Alister E.  McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 52.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

95

the Latin, to mark out its incongruity with the accustomed terms of political discourse. Augustine’s account of res publica as a composite entity, a combination of attentive public and res, I want to suggest, should put us in mind of some of the other aspects of his wide-ranging thought, in particular his theories of epistemology, semantics and his ecclesiology. Reading his political theory in the context of his broader concerns takes us closer to an understanding of the hierarchy of res publicae. First, epistemology, which we have already had occasion to discuss in Chap. 2. Augustine, it will be recalled, argued that wisdom (sapientia) is the ascent of the mind to abiding truth. Truly wise judgment marks the frontier of human understanding. In The Trinity, he writes, however, that even in wisdom the changeable mind can only apprehend unchangeable truth as the ‘­ transitory thought of a non-transitory thing’ (Trin. xii.13.23). The mutable mind moves on and non-transitory things are lost to sight. Truth, nonetheless, leaves in memory images or signs (signa) of itself, though the mind can only ever return to this truth—the res or thing itself—by the mediation of some visual, conceptual or linguistic image. ‘The non-bodily and unchanging idea of a square body, for example, may abide for ever the same; but a man’s thought does not abide in it in the same way, if that is to say he could ever attain to it without a spatial image’ (ibid.) Second, we must mention his semantic theory, on which I can only touch here. Augustine’s theory of language also works a division between res and signum, between thing and sign, signified and signifier. There are objects in the world that are clearly things, foremost among them the truths that abide; and even signs themselves can be considered as things, as marks on paper or as sounds produced by the vibrations of the vocal cords and the use of tongue, palate, teeth and lips. Things, however, can, according to Augustine, only be made meaningful through the signs that signify them. ‘Nothing has yet been found’, he maintained, ‘that can be made known of itself, except for speaking, which, in addition to other things, also signifies itself. But, since even this is also a sign, there is as yet absolutely no evidence to show that anything can be taught the use of without signs’ (Mag. x.30). A sign, then, is ‘a thing, which besides the impression in conveys to the senses, also has the effect of making something else come to mind: as when we see a spoor, we think of the animal whose spoor it is; or when we see smoke, we know there is fire underneath’ (Doc. Chr. ii.1.1). Signification makes meaning possible and communicable.

96 

B. HOLLAND

We move from epistemology and language to ecclesiology in terms of the res/signum distinction in part because, as Markus puts it, Augustine’s ‘definition of sacramentum in terms of signum became classical’.64 Just as there can be no communication without signs, the sacraments are integral to the communion of the Church—but more than that, the confession of one’s faith within the Church that comes together around the sacraments is essential to salvation. The etymological root of ‘confession’—con and fateri—points to ‘an act of speech that seeks its completion in another’s acknowledgement’;65 and what makes the considerable prayer the Confessions worthwhile, Augustine avers, is that ‘I am making this confession not only before You with a secret exaltation and fear and with a secret grief touched by hope, but in the ears of believing sons of men, sharers in my joy, conjoined with me in mortality, my fellow citizens and pilgrims, some who have gone before, some who follow after, and some who are my companions in this life’ (Conf. x.4.6). Confession, after all, does not occur only in the ambone but also during mass, in the ears of the body of the faithful, in preparation for the Eucharist, the sacrament of communion, through which sign the community gives testimony to its shared desire to be at one with God. Augustine focuses especially on the sacrament of baptism, because he reads in John’s Gospel (3:5) that ‘Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit”’, and it became his firm conviction that the ‘sacrament of baptism is one thing, the conversion of the heart another; but that man’s salvation is made complete through the two together’ (Bapt. c. Don. iv.25.33). Salvation has its internal and external aspects, and these relate as res and signum/sacramentum. It is only for the res that the signum exists, but nonetheless the res is only accessible through the signum. While not everybody who is in the Church will be saved—only God grants the grace that lets a person be a convert and persevere in faith—membership in the Church through baptism is a precondition of redemption. Augustine defines the Church sacramentally: by ‘the obligation of sacraments, very few in number’, he writes, ‘the society of His new people [populus] was 64  Robert Markus, ‘St. Augustine on Signs’, Phronesis 2 (1957), 60–83, at 60 = chapter 14 of his Sacred and Secular (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994). 65  James Wetzel, ‘Wittgenstein’s Augustine: The Inauguration of the Later Philosophy’, in his Parting Knowledge, 227. And see also Robert McMahon, Augustine’s Prayerful Ascent: An Essay on the Literary Form of the Confessions (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 4.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

97

fastened together’ (Ep. 54.1.1).66 The res that the sacraments attempt to communicate through the ministers of the Church is God’s reality, His love, His power, His will. Augustine points to this in particular in his long discussions of the sacrament of baptism. ‘He would baptise in this way, namely, that He would keep for Himself the power and would transfer it to no one of His ministers’, Augustine argued, and ‘through this power, which Christ kept for Himself alone and transmitted to none of His ministers, although He deigned to baptise through His ministers, through this abides the unity of the Church’ (Jo. ev. tr. v.6.1). The ‘power [of baptism] would not pass from Him to another even though the other confers it’ (Jo. ev. tr. v.7.1). And again: ‘He Himself, and not yet Himself; He Himself by power, they by their ministry. They performed a service in baptising; the power of baptising remained in Christ’ (Jo. ev. tr. v.18.3). And this power is described explicitly as love or caritas: ‘This is the sacrament of anointing, its invisible power itself being the invisible anointing that is the Holy Spirit. The unseen anointing is that charity which, in whomever it is, will be like a root [rem] to him, and despite the burning sun, it cannot dry up’ (Jo. ep. tr. iii.12). Where a person is baptised, but God has not elected to save them, ‘they possess the outward sign of the Church, but they do not possess the actual reality [rem] itself within the Church of which that is the outward sign, and therefore they eat and drink damnation to themselves’ (Cor. Don. xi.50).67 And again: the Church ‘has in her midst some who are united with her in participation in the sacraments, but will not join with her in the eternal destiny of the saints. Some of these are hidden; some of them are well known, for they do not hesitate to murmur against the God, Whose sacramental sign they bear’ (Civ. Dei i.35). We can thus descry in Augustine’s writings the general shape of a res-­ signum relation, according to which signum (or sacramentum) signals or symbolises res understood as an underlying reality that is itself a kind of truth, power or love. In this wider interpretative frame, it makes little sense to say that the res of a populus in Augustine’s definition of the res publica is the ‘weal’ of a ‘people’. A populus is a group of people, but ‘people’ in this respect is always qualified by the requirement that they are 66  The point still has not been made better than by John H. S. Burleigh, The City of God: A Study of St. Augustine’s Philosophy (London: Nisbet & Co., 1949), 153–184. 67   A particularly detailed account of Augustine’s maturing ecclesiology is David C. Alexander, Augustine’s Early Theology of the Church: Emergence and Implications (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

98 

B. HOLLAND

attending collectively to the same object or objects of attraction. A populus exists in virtue of specific shared practices that bind it together and help to bring into focus this object or these objects. Its res—its reality, its root, its power—is the object of love to which the practices refer and direct the multitude, the object of attraction the shape of which (to recall Augustine’s theory of vision) an attentive populus approximates ever more as a kind of facsimile the more it attends. We have a res publica, therefore, as long as the object to which the populus directs its loving attention is the object that they believe it to be. Injustice is the consequence of a mismatch between the subject’s desires and the object’s love-generating energies. Thus, even the pagan and unjust Roman Empire is, according to Augustine, a res publica. ‘The Roman populus is a populus and its res is indubitably a res publica’ (Romanus populus populus est et res eius sine dubitatione res publica) because, however disordered and miscalibrated the loves of the prideful Roman populus may be, the gathering of individuals is not disabused about the reality or power which is the object of their allied affection. Some populi love better and others worse things, and ‘the better the objects of its agreement [of its love], the better the populus’ (Civ. Dei xix.24) and the better the res publica. Augustine’s Pilgrim City is properly the Church: a gathering of converts, jointly paying loving attention to God through prayer, ritual, liturgies and sacraments that affectively and viscerally train the desires of its members—Murdoch’s ‘authoritative structures’. These are the new habits of the converted in their relations with each other, a new set of what psychologists call automaticities, which through ‘frequent and consistent pairing’ can replace the old.68 As William T. Cavanaugh puts this point: ‘Liturgy and sacraments are disciplines of bodies and souls which help form people into the habits, or virtues, necessary to perform the Gospel imperative to take up one’s cross and follow Christ’.69 Talal Asad observes of Christian disciplines that ‘the technology of the self, which lies at the heart of the combat for chastity, is itself dependent on the institutional resources of organised community life’, so that in some sense ‘the body … identified as the arena for that continuous labour of inspecting and testing’ is the body

68  John A.  Bargh and Tanya L.  Chartrand, ‘The Unbearable Automaticity of Being’, American Psychologist, 54 (1999), 462–479. 69  William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 58.

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

99

of the Church as a whole.70 Through grace, the membership of the Church has formed the best—the most just—kind of earthly res publica, according to Augustine, for its res is none other than the truth, will, power and love of God, which the Church makes visible as body and signum. Whilst the populus of a state such as Rome, through its joining together of individuals in mutual agreement on those objects intended to supply its people glory, represents to itself an image of itself as glorious, only the Church interprets itself as transcending itself through representation or signification, as representative of something beyond itself.71 It communicates the power of God, for ‘all things with symbolic meaning are seen as in some way acting the part of the things they symbolise’ (Civ. Dei xviii.48). Yet this best of terrestrial communities, the Church, remains imperfect through division. First, not every member of the visible Church will have been chosen by God for citizenship of the Heavenly City: as visible communion, the Church is a ‘mixed body’ (corpum permixtum) until such time as God deigns to separate the wheat from the tares (Civ. Dei xviii.49). Second, even its saintly members are, like Paul and Augustine, imperfect still with God’s grace, struggling daily with temptation and sometimes being caught short, and living ‘under pardon’ until they die (Civ. Dei x.22). Just as individuals must try to become better by turning their backs on their negative desires, at the level of sociality justice itself ‘is nevertheless only such as to consist in the forgiveness of sins rather than in the perfection of virtues’: The evidence for this is in the prayer of the whole City of God on pilgrimage in the world, which, as we know, cries out to God through the lips of all its members: ‘Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors’ [Matt. 6:12]. And this prayer is not effective for those whose ‘faith, without works, is dead’ [Jas. 2:17] but only for those whose ‘faith is put into action through love’ [Gal. 5:6]. (Civ. Dei xix.27). 70  Talal Asad, ‘Note on Body Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual’, Economy and Society, 12 (1983), 287–327, at 313–314. ‘Technologies of the self’, according to Foucault, are those techniques ‘which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’: Michael Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H.  Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (London: Tavistock, 1988), 18. 71  John von Heyking, ‘A Headless Body Politic? Augustine’s Understanding of a Populus and its Representation’, History of Political Thought, 20 (1999), 549–574, at 552.

100 

B. HOLLAND

Milbank expresses the upshot of this better than anyone else. Given, he writes, the persistence of the sin of others (as well as our own sinfulness, which we cannot all at once overcome, but [which] remains alien to our better desires) there is only one way to respond to them which would not itself be sinful and domineering, and that is to anticipate Heaven, and act as if the sin was [sic] not there, by offering reconciliation … the only thing really like heavenly virtue is our constant attempt to compensate for, substitute for, even short-cut this total absence of virtue, by not taking offence, assuming the guilt of others, doing what they should have done, beyond the bounds of any given ‘responsibility’.72

Hating the sin but forgiving the sinner—that Augustinian imperative—is the social equivalent, and therefore the equivalent at the level of the Pilgrim City, of surrendering one’s own sinful habits in order to begin to rehabituate oneself to the good in the process of selective attention. Mutual atonement and forgiveness are the currency of the civitas peregrina, the community of those who are reconciled by shedding sin and blame in the always unequal economy of clemency (for the effects of sin can still never be overtaken). This constant exchange of ‘sacrifices’ and claims, however, produces the invigorating vascular circulation within the body of the city. Creation de nihilo necessarily entails that being is receiving, and only through reiterated acts of self-surrender do human beings both build each other up and make it possible to get themselves back.73 This chapter has set out Augustine’s second anthropological analogy, between the Christian convert and the Pilgrim City. It first provided an account of Augustine’s conception of a theory of free will appropriate, in his eyes, to a Christian anthropology, according to which will and love are equivalent. It then showed how becoming a better person is, for Augustine, a matter of shifting one’s attention to better objects and becoming energised by them, for in this joint enterprise between lover and beloved is love itself generated. Christian conversion is a further matter of refocusing one’s attention on God and coming to be energised by Him—which presupposes that God has granted His grace to the seeker. The Pilgrim City, which Augustine says is the Church, is likewise a community of people  Milbank, Social Theory, 411.   See especially John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 44–60. 72 73

4  THE UNSELF AND THE PILGRIM CITY 

101

paying loving attention to God, which loving attention is structured and disciplined by the sacraments that are the signs of the love and power of God. The chapter advanced a new interpretation of Augustine’s definition of the republic, according to which it is a group of people attending together to the same object, of which it is corporately the sign, and drawing its power from that object. Although sufficiently capacious a definition to be able to incorporate any kind of political society, its highest ­manifestation is the Pilgrim City, or the Church, which draws its own energies from God. The Church, and not Babel, is the highway to Heaven.

CHAPTER 5

The Saint and the City of God

So far in this book, we have surveyed two kinds of ‘self’ to be found in the thought of Augustine, corresponding analogically to two cities. The first self, treated in Chap. 3, and to continue with the theme of res and signum, is the ‘prideful soul which has reified itself as the ultimate res for which even God has become a signifier’.1 Its civic analogue is the civitas terrena: proud, pompous, fake. The second self, discussed in Chap. 4, and continuing to quote from John C. Cavadini, is a self aware not of ‘a self’ but of a struggle, a brokenness, a gift, a process of healing, a resistance to healing, an emptiness, a reference that impels one not to concentrate on oneself, in the end, but on that to which one’s self-awareness propels one, to God. Someone who is properly self-aware is aware of a transformation, a re-configuring, a re-creation of an identity from nothing, of a becoming better, and not of a stable object that endures as a private space or object.2

Its analogue is the civitas peregrina, the community of the faithful in the Church, a society of the imperfect but penitent, an attentive assembly of persons doing their best to be unselves.

1  John C. Cavadini, ‘The Darkest Enigma: Reconsidering the Self in Augustine’s Thought’, Augustinian Studies, 38 (2007), 119–132, at 127. 2  Ibid., 123.

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Holland, Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Recovering Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19333-1_5

103

104 

B. HOLLAND

The subject of Chap. 5 is the self that most resembles or images God. This is still a human self, but it is a humanity thrice transfigured: by Christ’s historical atonement for sin; by His incorporation of the faithful into His body; and by the endurance of the life of the saints in Heaven, or the City of God. There will be such a perfect reciprocity between these individual saints and the whole of Heaven, according to Augustine, that each individual will mirror the whole, and the whole will mirror each of these individual selves, and all together will be the definitive image of God. The self of Chap. 3 is a twisted and inverted image of God, whilst the self of Chap. 4 is a darkened and bleary one, tainted by sin but becoming better. The self elaborated in this chapter, however, is the sainted self, the nearest thing to an image of the Deity in Creation. The first section of the chapter discusses mind and the analogy to the Trinity as detailed in the thought of Augustine—often described as his ‘psychological analogy’. In the second section, the discussion turns to the topic of the body of the saint. The third section elaborates on Augustine’s third anthropological analogy, between the saint and the City of God.

Mind Christians profess belief in a God Who is three really distinct persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They worship, that is to say, a God in Whom reside real distinctions between these three divine personae. At the same time, they affirm that these persons are also essentially identical—identical in one simple divine essence. This does not mean that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are each one third of God, adding up to the unity that is the one God; in that case, the Godhead itself would constitute a kind of fourth person. It means, rather, that the Son is identical to the Father and to the Holy Spirit, so that God the Son Who took on flesh at the Incarnation is identical to the Father and the Spirit, neither of Whom did. It also means that each one of these divine persons is also the whole Trinity. How is God three persons, each distinct from the others, yet at the same time identical to each other and to the Trinity itself? This doctrine of the equality and unity of the divine persons is the deepest mystery of the Christian faith. Anyone who wishes to investigate it, in the meantime, must walk a tightrope and avoid falling into the trap of committing one of at least three heresies: tritheism, or the belief that there are three gods; subordinationism, the belief that the Son and Spirit are subordinate to the Father; and

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

105

Patripassianism or modalism, the belief that Father, Son and Spirit are three different aspects or modes of the one God.3 This was the conundrum that absorbed Augustine over the many years during which he composed the fifteen books of his The Trinity. One of the numerous strategies that he adopted in that text, especially in Books ix-xi, was to seek to approach an understanding of the Holy Trinity by means of analogical reasoning. After all, another North African theologian and the first to write of God in Latin as Trinitas, Tertullian, had appealed to various analogies: a root, a tree and its fruit; the sun, its rays and the ray’s apex; a water source, the river flowing from it, and the tributary emerging from the river. Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–ca. 395) proposed instead one torch lighting another which in turn gives that same light to a third.4 Augustine concluded Book viii of The Trinity by arguing against those who maintained that the correct jumping-off point for grasping the nature of God was to inquire, instead but still analogically, into the nature of the political ‘powers which rule the world or parts of the world’, for ‘they are trying to go by an outer route and forsaking their own inwardness, where God is present more inwardly still’ (Trin. viii.7.11), in the sense that all Creation, as we saw in Chap. 2, depends on God for its existence and goodness. Instead, he announced, a superior place from which to begin such an investigation was with trying to understand not power but love, for as the First Epistle of John proclaims, ‘God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God’ (1 Jn. 4:16). Love, after all, is triadic. To his doubting reader Augustine insists that ‘you do see a trinity if you see charity’ (Trin. viii.8.12). He provides the reader with three different ‘drafts’ of an analogy between love, in some aspect, and the Trinity, in order of refinement, in order to illuminate the latter. The first draft is developed at the outset of Book ix. ‘When I who 3  As an aside, we should note that Augustine’s critics, often Eastern Orthodox, have long accused him of siding with modalism and emphasising the unity of the one God over the three persons. Recently, e.g. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder & Herder, 1997), 16–17; John D.  Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 40; John D.  Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: T & T Clark, 2006), 33. But see Drayton C. Benner., ‘Augustine and Karl Rahner on the Relationship between the Immanent Trinity and the Economic Trinity’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9 (2007), 24–38, at 29: ‘it is simply a historical phenomenon that Sabellius’s [modalist] followers had largely disappeared by Augustine’s day; Augustine argued against the positions that were most prevalent in his day’. 4  Philip W. Butin, The Trinity (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 2001), 21 and 34.

106 

B. HOLLAND

am engaged on this search love something’, he says, ‘there are three: I myself, what I love, and love itself’ (Trin. ix.2.2). Augustine decides, however, that this can only be a preliminary draft of a trio understandable to us and which also allows us to ascend to a firmer knowledge of God. This is because the lover-love-beloved trio is insufficiently Trinitarian in the sense that the three terms are all quite different ‘somethings’ in a way that does not track the identity of the divine persons or their unity (Trin. ix.2.3). More importantly, Christians believe that the Son is begotten of the Father, while the lover does not beget the beloved (Trin. ix.12.17–18). Augustine quickly moves on, then, to a ‘second draft’ of a suitable analogy for the Trinity, building on the imperatives better to capture its three-­ in-­oneness and the identity between these three ‘somethings’. He turns inwards to identify three facts about himself about which he cannot be deceived. These verities are that he exists, that he knows that he exists, and that he is glad of this knowledge and this existence.5 His proof is elaborated in the greatest detail in Book xi of the City of God: They say, ‘Suppose you are mistaken?’ I reply, ‘If I am mistaken, I exist.’ Then since my being mistaken proves that I exist, how can I be mistaken in thinking that I exist, seeing that my mistake establishes my existence? Since therefore I must exist in order to be mistaken, then even if I am mistaken, there can be no doubt that I am not mistaken in my knowledge that I exist. It follows that I am not mistaken in knowing what I know. For just as I know that I exist, I know that I know. And when I am glad of those two facts, I can add the fact of that gladness to the things I know, as a fact of equal worth. For I am not mistaken about the fact of my gladness, since I am not mistaken about the things which I love. Even if they were illusory, it would still be a fact that I love the illusions. For how could I be rightly blamed and forbidden to love illusions, if it were an illusion that I loved them? But since in fact their truth is established, who can doubt that, when they are loved, that love is an established truth? (Civ. Dei xi.26; see also Conf. xiii.11.12).

There is, therefore, an incontrovertible and mutually referential trinity of existence, knowledge and love that can properly be ascribed to the 5  Here Augustine may have been developing an analogy originally put forward by Victorinus, whose own conversion experience served as an exemplar for Augustine (as described in Chap. 4). See Mary T. Clark, ‘Augustine the Christian Thinker’, in From Augustine to Eriugena: Essays on Neoplatonism and Christianity in Honor of John O’Meara, eds. John A. Richmond and F. X. Martin (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991).

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

107

c­ reatures made in God’s image. Augustine thought that this helped by analogy to perceive the Trinity more clearly, for God is the pinnacle of existence, knowledge and love. He is being, the Being of all being, and from ‘Him derives every mode of being, every species, every order, all measure, number and weight’, for ‘He is the source of all that exists in nature, whatever its kind, whatever its value, and of the seeds of forms, and of the forms of seeds’ (Civ. Dei v.11). He is also truth, the Truth of all truth, the light in and through which we see every form in the darkness of Creation. And as we have seen, God is love. God is thus being, truth and love, ‘Whose eternity is true, Whose truth is eternal, Whose love is eternal and true, Who is a Trinity of eternity, truth and love, without confusion or separation’ (Civ. Dei xi.28). According to some commentators, the second image-exemplar relationship is more interesting for its anticipation of Cartesian methods and philosophy of mind than for any light that it might shine on the mystery of the Trinity.6 It is a necessary step on the road, however, to Augustine’s ‘final draft’ of an analogy for the Trinity in Book x of The Trinity. Existence, truth and love have put Augustine in mind of his own formation in classical rhetoric. ‘There are also three things’, he writes, ‘looked for in any artist: natural ability, training, and the use to which he puts them. Those are needed for any real achievement; and his ability is judged by his talent, his training by his knowledge, his use of them by the enjoyment of the fruits of his labours’ (Civ. Dei xi.25). This is the Protagorean triad in which, according to Cicero in On the Orator, rhetoric consists: talent (ingenium or dispositio), learning (doctrina) and practice (usus).7 Here Augustine finds an echo of his second draft of the Trinity, for natural aptitude finds a parallel in existence, learning or knowledge in truth, and enjoyment in love. There is thus a kind of natural reinforcement by certain criteria of goodness of some facts about the Trinitarian self and God, a confirmation, if one were needed, of the goodness of the facts established

6  J. A. Mourant, ‘The Cogitos: Augustinian and Cartesian’, Augustinian Studies, 10 (1979), 27–42. See also: Gareth B.  Matthews, Thought’s Ego in Descartes and Augustine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 7  Cicero, On the Orator: Books 1–2, trans. E.  W. Sutton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), i.17.79. C.f. Simon Harrison, Augustine’s Way into the Will: The Theological and Philosophical Significance of De Libero Arbitrio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 131–150.

108 

B. HOLLAND

and simultaneously a validation by the facts of the Trinity of the appropriateness of these rhetorical gauges of the good. This matters inasmuch as the rhetorical benchmarks play, as we shall see, a decisive role in corroborating Augustine’s final draft of an analogy for the Trinity, which is to mind rather than, as in the second draft, to life. First, the mind, he maintains, is constituted as a triad, with three predominant mental activities. Cicero’s On Invention is key here, for in that work he divided prudencia or wisdom ‘into these three parts: memory, understanding, and foresight’ (Trin. xiv.11.14).8 As neatly as these faculties mapped onto past, present and future time respectively, Augustine disagreed with Cicero that providence could be regarded as a human capacity. (Yet another example of Ciceronian arrogance!) The Ciceronian schema he reconfigured as memory, understanding and will. Each of us, held Augustine, has a consciousness of our past experiences and a sense of the identity of the individual which has faced and been formed by these experiences. That is to say, we remember. We each face the world in front of us now and make some kind of sense of it, which is to say that we understand. And we take a stance on the world and orientate ourselves in it according to our passionate responses to it, which is to say, in Augustine’s terms, that we will. Here, then, is a mental threesome (Fig. 5.1). The persons of the Holy Trinity are distinct, and yet they are also identical to each other and to the whole Trinity. In a compressed discussion at the end of Book x of The Trinity, Augustine argued that the psychological analogy aids us in clarifying this enigmatic Trinitarian ontology. Memory, understanding and will are, he said, the capacities that we are interested in cultivating and assessing in students as they progress through what Cicero called the studia humanitatis. A child’s disposition is judged in relation to how firmly he remembers, how acutely he understands and how keenly he applies himself. His learning is evaluated in respect of the character of what he remembers, understands and loves. His practice is appraised in terms of ‘the use he will now makes of what the memory and understanding hold, whether it refers them to something else or whether it takes delight in them as ends in themselves’, for to ‘use something is to put it at the will’s disposal, [while] to enjoy it is to use it with an actual, not merely anticipated joy’ (Trin. x.11.17). Each of these faculties of remembering, understanding and willing, this reflection on the psychological conditions 8  The relevant passage can be found in Cicero, On Invention, trans. H.  M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), ii.53.160.

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

Fig. 5.1  La Gloria by Titian (1554)

109

110 

B. HOLLAND

of rhetorical facility shows, contains the others. Perhaps the most i­ mportant paragraph in The Trinity is x.11.18, which needs to be quoted (almost) in full: These three, then, memory, understanding and will, are not three lives but one life, nor three minds but one mind. So it follows of course that they are not three substances but one substance. When memory is called life, and mind, and substance, it is called so with reference to itself; but when it is called memory it is called so with reference to another. I can say the same about understanding and will: both understanding and will are so called with reference to another; but each of them is life and mind and being with reference to itself. For this reason, these three are one in that they are one life, one mind, one being; and whatever else they are called together with reference to self, they are called it in the singular, not in the plural. But they are three in that they have reference to each other. And if they were not equal, not only each to the other but also each to them all together, they would not of course contain each other. In fact, though they are not only each contained by each, they are all contained by each as well. After all, I remember that I have memory and understanding and will, and I understand that I understand and will and remember, and I will that I will and remember and understand. I remember my whole memory and understanding and will together. If there is any of my memory that I do not remember, then it is not in my memory. But nothing is more in the memory than the memory itself. Therefore, I remember the whole of it. Again, whatever I understand I know that I understand, and I know that I will whatever I will; and whatever I know I remember. So I remember my whole understanding and my whole will. Likewise, when I understand these three I understand the whole of them together. For the only understandable things I do not understand are the ones I am ignorant of. But what I am ignorant of I neither remember nor will … Therefore, whatever understandable thing I remember and will I also understand in consequence. My will also contains my whole understanding and my whole memory while I use the whole of what I understand and remember. Therefore, since they are each and all and wholly contained by each, they are each and all equal to each and all, and each and all equal to all of them together, and these three are one, one life, one mind, one being.

This is Augustine’s final draft of an analogy for the Trinity. It is stunningly brilliant, but it is a draft all the same. The hesitation here is necessary because Augustine considered that even this third and final analogy would still stop some way short of allowing us to raise our sights so as to see God

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

111

face to face. For example, ‘while in this image of the Trinity these three are not one man but belong to one man, it is not likewise the case that in that supreme Trinity of which it is the image that these three belong to one God: they are one God and they are three persons, not one’ (Trin. xv.23.43). As Lewis Ayres points out, ‘one of Augustine’s central concerns here is to analyse the dynamics of fallen self-knowing and hence of analogical practice itself’.9 Augustine would certainly have agreed with Coleridge who, when writing on the body politic image, pointed out that ‘no simile runs on all four legs’.10 On all fours it might not stand, but Augustine nonetheless teased out the threefold likeness between mind and Trinity. Through these insights about the mind, Augustine can say, firstly, that it becomes possible to see how the three Trinitarian persons are each the entire Trinity, how each one might contain all the others. Secondly, although each person is the Trinity, it becomes clear how the three together are one. Thirdly, we can see how the persons are equal to each other, and need to be so. Fourthly, the real distinctions between the personae of the divine Trinity can be demonstrated in terms of relation rather than substance, through their referral to each other. Fifthly, this remains the case even though the persons of the Trinity, as with the mental faculties, do appear to take on different functions in the divine economy. Augustine pushed the psychological analogy for the Holy Trinity further, along the lines suggested by this last important point, arguing that it was a tool for elucidating Scripture, and thereby providing biblical warrant for his interpretation of the Trinity. The key scriptural text in this regard was the Prologue of John’s Gospel, which opens with the famously murky proclamation that ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made’ (Jn. 1:1–3). The original Greek for ‘Word’ here was Logos, or Verbum in the Latin translation. The same chapter continues a little later: ‘The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth’ (Jn. 1:14). It is clear, then, that this Word, Logos or Verbum that became flesh was Jesus 9  Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 276. 10  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of Each’, in his On Politics and Society, ed. John Morrow (London: Macmillan, 1990), 198.

112 

B. HOLLAND

Christ, and therefore that the Word is the second person of the Trinity, the Son. Precisely how the Word was both God and with God at the same time is by no means as pellucid. Augustine’s approach is again to employ his psychological analogy. The faculty of memory, he maintained, holds all the knowledge that we have ever attained. ‘All these things’, he said, ‘that the human consciousness knows by perceiving them through itself or through the senses of its body or through the testimony of others, it holds onto, where they are stacked away in the treasury of memory’ (Trin. xv.12.22). This knowledge in memory is dispositional, insofar as it exists and we are able to think with it, although we might not be thinking with it at a given moment in time.11 However, when we will to train the gaze of the mind’s eye on some precise part of the knowledge stored in memory, that same portion of knowledge is born as what Augustine called a ‘word which we utter in the heart’ (Trin. xv.10.19). Such a mental utterance is, like its parent in the memory, ‘a word before any sound, before any thought of sound’, and ‘the seeing which is thought springs direct from the seeing which is knowledge, and it is a word of no language, a true word from a true thing, having nothing from itself, but everything from that knowledge from which it is born’ (Trin. xv.12.22). Critically, the mental word and the knowledge in the memory from which it came are identical, except for one difference, which is that the word is ‘formed’ while the knowledge has only a disposition to be formed (Trin. xv.10.19). This pre-linguistic word deserves more properly to be called a word than does a spoken word, for the ‘word which makes a sign outside is the sign of the word which lights up inside’, the word ‘that is uttered by the mouth of the flesh’ being really no more than ‘the sound of a word’ (Trin. xv.11.20). This picture of the generation of knowledge from memory informs Augustine’s Trinitarian theology. The Father is the Father because He has generated a Son, which is identical to Him except that the Son is begotten. The Son is the Son because He has been generated, but He is otherwise identical to the Father. The Father is divinely simple, meaning that what is His ‘knowledge is also His wisdom, and what is His wisdom is also His being’, and ‘it is not one thing to be wise, another to be’ (Trin. 11  On memory as dispositional belief or knowledge, see Scott M.  Williams, ‘Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and John Duns Scotus: On the Theology of the Father’s Intellectual Generation of the Word’, Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales’, 77 (2010), 35–81, at 40.

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

113

xv.13.22). Thus ‘the Word of God, the only-begotten Son of the Father, like the Father and equal to Him in all things, God from God, light from light, wisdom from wisdom, being from being, is exactly and absolutely what the Father is, and yet is not the Father because this one is Son, that one Father’ (Trin. xv.14.23). Just as the mental faculties each contain the others, so does

the Father know all things in Himself, [and] know them in the Son; but in Himself as knowing Himself, in the Son as knowing His Word which is about all these things that are in Himself. Likewise, the Son too knows all things in Himself, that is to say as things that are born from the things that the Father knows in Himself, and He knows them in the Father as the things from which are born all the things that He as Son knows in Himself. Therefore, the Father and Son know each other, the one by begetting, the other by being born. (Trin. xv.14.23)

We have not yet mentioned the analogue for the third mental faculty of will. We have seen, though, that will is required for the mental gaze on the stores of memory that generate knowledge; and it is indeed the case that the Holy Spirit was with Father and Son from the beginning. It is will— which, as we saw in Chap. 4, is synonymous with love or charity—in which Augustine identifies a special mental parallel in the Trinity. ‘Just then as we distinctively call the only Word of God by the name of wisdom, although the Holy Spirit and the Father are also wisdom in a general sense, so the Spirit is distinctively called by the term charity, although both Father and Son are charity in a general sense’ (Trin. xv.17.31). The Holy Spirit is love in this special sense, because it consists and persists in the gift or bond of mutual love of Father for Son and Son for Father; but God is love, and so love is only a tag for this third person. After all, ‘this image made by the Trinity and altered for the worse by its own fault [the reference is obviously to Adam and his progeny] is not so to be compared to that Trinity that it is reckoned similar to it in every respect’ (Trin. xv.20.39). Different and yet the same, one and yet three—these paradoxes about the persons of the Trinity are what Augustine thought he could approach a comprehension of by means, howsoever imperfect, of his psychological analogy. At the risk of overstressing the differences between the divine persons, on the one hand, and the similarities between God and the image of God, on the other, Table 5.1 summarises the psychological analogy:

114 

B. HOLLAND

Table 5.1  The psychological analogy for the Holy Trinity God

Human being

FATHER Memory, disposition, act MEMORIA Memory SON Logos, Word, wisdom INTELLECTUS Understanding, knowledge HOLY SPIRIT Will, love, gift, bond AMOR Will, love, communion

It is useful to highlight the differentiation between the divine persons, as Milbank has argued, inasmuch as it brings into relief some of the critical functions of Augustine’s Trinitarianism on the anthropological plain. Against the Pelagians and their Stoic forebears, he abolishes the pecking order of reason, will and passion. That is to say, ‘reason no longer controls power but is itself the infinite manifestation of power’; love is rendered ‘as the measure of reason itself ’; and reason only orders insofar as ‘it is also powerful and effective, and also rightfully desiring’.12 Stoics and Pelagians alike had defined reason as practical, earthly, rationality; will as power, the power of the soul’s control over itself; and passion as perturbations of the soul, the four most basic of which were desire (cupiditas), fear (timor), joy (laetitia) and sorrow (tristitia). For Augustine, by contrast, power is only manifested through reason, which is now contemplative reason; and will is not power at all, understood as control, but love, which unites the affections under a single principle according to which they are not to be externally mastered but put in order for the good. Christian pilgrims in this world ‘feel fear and desire, pain and gladness in conformity with the holy Scriptures and sound doctrine; and because their love is right, all these feelings are right in them’ (Civ. Dei xiv.9). Augustine’s second draft of the Trinity leads into the third in another way, inasmuch as the second gestures towards the condition of pilgrimage, while the third gestures towards citizenship in the City of God proper. Commenting on Augustine’s second draft of the Trinity—existence, self-­knowledge and love—Michael Hanby maintains that even this analogy points the way to a properly Christological understanding of ourselves. ‘For us’, he argues, ‘to exist, to know, is to desire happiness. For us, to desire happiness is not yet to be fully happy. Still the mind could not seek what it does not in some sense already know, though, 12  John Milbank, ‘Sacred Triads: Augustine and the Indo-European Soul’, Modern Theology 13 (1997), 451–474, at 462, 463, 467.

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

115

paradoxically, the mind could also not know this happiness unless it sought it. Self-certainty is close to being assimilated to the eros of faith and hope’.13 As self-­knowledge comes to be associated with faith, ‘so too does the sapientia [wisdom] in which we know ourselves come to be identified with a word remembered in time’.14 On this Augustinian picture, holding out for God in hope, faith and doxa is a form of participation in God for the wayfarer. The third draft of the Trinity—the psychological analogy—is closer still to imaging God. It would be more accurate to say, with Rowan Williams, that ‘the image of God in us, properly so called, is not “the mind” in and of itself … but the mind of the saint’.15 The mind only exists as acting in relation to something else. God’s image in us is realised, then, when the three moments of human mental agency—memory, understanding and love—have only God as their object. The mind ‘may remember, understand, and love itself, according to its nature, and yet be without sapientia, the knowledge of divine matters: it will in fact, in such a case, not know or love itself truthfully if it is a self-contained object to itself ’.16 To remember, know and love ourselves properly, according to Augustine, means to remember, know and love ourselves as remembered, known and loved by God. When under grace’s leading, directed towards our return to our source in God, the image of God in us shines forth—‘a remembering which is primitively the remembrance of God, an intelligence which is primitively the understanding of God and a will which is primitively the loving of God’.17 The imago Dei is not a mirror of the mind of God in human beings, but the transparency of the mind to its source, the mind caught up in contemplation of God, ‘aware of itself before God, opening its intelligence to God, directed in love towards God’.18 The self that images the Trinity, then, is a self transcended.

 Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 169.  Ibid. 15  Rowan Williams, ‘The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in Augustine’s Trinitarian Thought’, in his On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 167. 16  Rowan Williams, ‘Sapientia: Wisdom and the Trinitarian Relations’, in his On Augustine, 173–174. 17  Rowan Williams, ‘Augustinian Love’ in his On Augustine, 195. 18  Rowan Williams, ‘Augustine on Christ and the Trinity: An Overview’, in his On Augustine, 136. 13 14

116 

B. HOLLAND

Body In order to reach the Heavenly City, a human being, according to Augustine, must image the Trinity mentally. In some of the terms around conversion surveyed in Chap. 4, for this to happen one must humble oneself, no longer asserting one’s will but instead, and paradoxically, enabling oneself to receive oneself through the self-giving loving of God. As Drever points out, for Augustine ‘this act of self-surrender is also the act that empowers and glorifies the self because it again allows the divine image to form within the self’.19 Entry to the City of God, however, is not merely a mental matter; matter matters as well. That is to say, embodiment is crucial. This might sound a little odd. Augustine has often been associated with the tradition in Christianity, exemplified above all by St. Paul, of denigrating bodies, and especially sarx or ‘the flesh’. I have already quoted in Chap. 4 from Romans 7:25: ‘For in my inner being [nous, so better translated as ‘mind’] I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?’ Similarly, the author of the First Epistle of Peter speaks of ‘fleshly desires’ that war against the soul (1 Pet. 2:11), and 1 John has it that ‘everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world’ (1 Jn. 2:16). Augustine himself, in his own portrayal of the dichotomous identities of the Earthly and Heavenly Cities, says that there is ‘one city of men who choose to live by the standard of the flesh, another of those who choose to live by the standard of the spirit’ (Civ. Dei xiv.1). His biographer, Peter Brown, has written that, after Paul, ‘the notion of “the flesh” suffused the body with disturbing associations: somehow as “flesh”, the body’s weaknesses and temptations echoed a state of helplessness, even of rebellion against God, that was larger than the body itself’.20 This is, arguably, too strong. In the first place, as we saw in Chap. 3, the Pauline notion that the flesh is at war with the spirit is the consequence of a divided will and therefore primarily mental. It frequently figures as a metaphor for that conflict, the flesh adopted as a synecdoche, representing 19  Matthew Drever, ‘Loving God In and Through the Self: Trinitarian Love in St. Augustine’, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78 (2017), 7–22, at 15. 20  Brown, Body and Society, 48.

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

117

self-righteousness or ‘trust in oneself as being able to procure life … through one’s strength and accomplishment’.21 In the second place, the flesh is often metonymical of sexual desire rather than standing for embodiment as such, and that because, as Brown himself says of the early Christian desert Fathers, sexual fantasy came to be seen as revealing ‘the knot of unsurrendered privacy that lay at the heart of fallen man’, so that sexuality in turn became ‘an ideogram of the unopened heart’.22 Above all, however, it is too strong a claim because the Word became flesh; and salvation is only accomplished through our incorporation into the body of Christ. Even the saint is needful of this body. ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth’ (Jn. 1: 14). We have already had occasion to quote this critical passage from the Gospel of John, and it is important now to address Augustine’s interpretation of the Word’s becoming flesh through His embodiment in Jesus Christ. It is best to parse Augustine’s understanding of the Son’s mission by answering four questions in turn. First, why, according to Augustine, does the uncreated, eternal and unchangeable Trinity make Himself manifest in temporal, historical Creation? Second, why does the Father send the Son? Third, how is the Son sent? Fourth, how does He mediate between God and humanity in order to fulfil His mission? The short answer to the first question—why does God enter into ­history?—is that He does so in order to reconcile Himself with fallen humanity. God’s inmost life, or the ‘immanent’ Trinity, is revealed and communicated through an ‘economy’ of works ad extra, in the outer world, and after the Fall this economy is manifested in God’s decision to restore His loving relationship with defective humanity by redeeming it from its sins. He was by no means compelled to execute this, and human beings certainly did not merit it, but nonetheless God chose in love so to intervene in Creation through the person of Jesus Christ. Ronnie Rombs identifies a ‘paradox’ in Augustine’s thinking, whereby the word Christus occurs almost 19,000 times in Augustine’s writings, and the name Iesus on some 4500 occasions, and yet Augustine shows barely any interest in the 21  Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1952), 239. See also Robert Jewett, Paul’s Anthropological Terms: A Study of their Use in Conflict Settings (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 114. 22  Brown, Body and Society, 230.

118 

B. HOLLAND

‘technical metaphysical speculation about the Person of Christ’.23 In part this is for the technical reason that Augustine reserves the concept of person as a specialised term of art in Trinitarian theology. He does not say what the persons of the Holy Trinity are as persons: it simply is not the case, he thinks, that we can identity personhood with something by which one would then be able to point to what it is that makes the three persons three of whatever it is that they are. The ‘only reason’, he writes, ‘why we do not call these three together one person, as we call them one being and one God, but say three persons while we never say three Gods or three beings, is that we want to keep at least one word for signifying what we mean by Trinity’, and the term ‘person’ is what has come down to us (Trin. vii.6.11). For the most part, however, Augustine’s Christology is concerned with Christ’s work, and therefore with soteriology. ‘The answer to the question of whom Christ is’, says Basil Studer of Augustine’s Christological corpus, ‘always includes, more or less explicitly, his role in salvation’.24 The question of why the Father sends the Son requires a more nuanced answer. In the first place, Augustine maintains that God needed to send some Mediator—this is Paul’s term in his First Epistle to Timothy (1 Tim. 2,5)—because ‘all contraries are reduced to unity by some middle factor’ (Cons. ev. i.35.53). By means of our sin, Augustine argues, we have interposed between ourselves and God a ‘separating middle’ or medium, and ‘unless what is in the middle has been removed and what should be in the middle has been put there’, we cannot be reconciled to Him (Jo. ev. tr. xli.5.3). Christ offers atonement for our sins even though He is blameless, as ‘both the priest, Himself making the offering, and the oblation’ (Civ. Dei x.20). He bridges the gap between human beings and God. The Son of God ‘took up’ (Civ. Dei xxi.5) or ‘joined [Himself] to’ (Ep. 137.3.12) human nature, and it is in the nature of human beings to be corporeal. Through his Passion and death, He mediates between immortality and mortality. He ‘is not the Mediator in that He is the Word; for the Word, being pre-eminently immortal and blessed, is far removed from wretched mortals. He is the Mediator in that He is man’ (Civ. Dei ix.15).

23  Ronnie Rombs, ‘Augustine on Christ’, in T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology, eds. C. C. Pecknold and Tarmo Toom (London: T&T Clark, 2013), 36. 24  Basil Studer, The Grace of Christ and the Grace of God in Augustine of Hippo: Christocentrism or Theocentrism? (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 43.

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

119

Christ can mediate between God and mankind because two natures, divinity and humanity, are united in His singularity. After all, body and soul are two radically different kinds of entity, and yet they are united integrally in the human being (Jo. ev. tr. xix.15.2). The question remains, though: why does the Father send the Son? why does the divine economy require that it be these persons who assume these functions? Augustine’s answer comes in two parts. The first response appeals to his psychological analogy of the Trinity for an explanation. The Son is the Word of God. God’s speaking, therefore, is the Son Himself, Who spoke the word of the Father, without in any way changing or cheapening that word. As he put it in his Teaching Christianity: How did He come, if not by the Word becoming flesh and dwelling amongst us? It is something like when we talk; in order for that we have in mind to reach the minds of our hearers through their ears of flesh, the word which we have in our thoughts becomes a sound and is called speech. And yet this does not mean that our thought is turned into that sound, but while remaining undiminished in itself, it takes on the form of a spoken utterance by which to insert itself into the ears, without bearing the stigma of any change in itself. This is how the Word of God was not changed in the least, and yet became flesh, in order to dwell amongst us (Doc. Chr. i.13)

Second, the Father’s sending of the Son announces His own humility. As Augustine argued in a Christmas Day sermon, the eternal and all-­ powerful Logos of God is spoken through the flesh of an infant, in Latin infans, literally one who is unable to speak (Serm. 190.3). ‘By the nativity itself He made a salve by which the eyes of our heart may be wiped clean and we may be able to see His majesty through His lowliness’ (Jo. ev. tr. ii.16.1). The Son’s subordination to the Father, Augustine insists, is limited to His economic mission and is not proper to Him in respect of his immanent ‘procession’. Christ was only subordinate to the Father in His humanity, not in His divinity. ‘In that He is God, He and the Father are one, while in that He is man, the Father is greater than He’ (Ench. xxxv). Specifically, ‘in the form of a servant which He took He is the Father’s inferior; in the form of God in which He existed even before He took this other, He is the Father’s equal’ (Trin. i.7.14). None of this, according to

120 

B. HOLLAND

Augustine, does any violence to the fundamental unity of the Godhead.25 To be sure, the Son alone becomes incarnate, and the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in the Incarnation obviously involves the second person of the Trinity in a way that it does not involve the first or third. Nevertheless, in terms of our third question of how the Son is sent, Augustine is clear that the Incarnation is the work of the entire Trinity: The Son indeed, and not the Father, was born of the Virgin Mary; but this birth of the Son, not the Father, from the Virgin Mary was the work of both Father and Son. It was not indeed the Father, but the Son who suffered; yet the suffering of the Son was the work of both Father and Son. (Serm. 52.8)

To this list it could be added that the Father’s sending of the Spirit in the economic Trinity was also the work of both the Father and the Son. Our fourth question is addressed to the nature of Christ’s mediation, in which respect embodiment is vital. We have already noted that Christ, as said by Augustine, restores the relationship between God and man by putting on flesh. He makes intercession and atonement for our sins as priest and sacrifice. Here I want to say a little more about two other respects in which Jesus is Mediator, according to Augustine, and which bear on body. The first of these is that, as the divine Verbum uttered by God in the flesh, Jesus Christ discloses by making visible and audible the invisible and inaudible God. Human beings are unable to see and hear God, principally because of our very physical limitations. We ‘walk by faith and not by sight’ in this world (Cons. ev. iv.10.20). Augustine sometimes stresses the natural limitations that our embodiment places on our capacity to see God. ‘In the form of God in which He is equal to the Father, the Son, too, is invisible; but that He might be seen by men, He took the form of a servant, and made in the likeness of men, He was made visible’ and therefore also audible (Jo. ev. tr. liii.12.3). At other times, the stress is on sin, itself often stamped in physical imagery, as being the root cause of our inability to see God without the Mediator. So Augustine writes: ‘For He could not be found by those who had an unclean heart and who were unable to see the Word with the Father unless He took up what they were able to see, and thus they could be brought interiorly to 25  Augustine makes a similar kind of argument when he maintains elsewhere in The Trinity that man and woman are essentially identical and yet differ in respect of their work (Trin. xii.5.5–13.21). See David Vincent Meconi, ‘Gender and Imago Dei in Augustine’s De Trinitate vii’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 75 (2000), 47–62 for discussion.

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

121

that light’ (Div. qu. 73.2). Whatever the emphasis, the point is that Christ is Mediator in part because by means of His physicality He could present God as Someone visible and audible.26 Finally, the Son’s mediation between God and mankind is not, says Augustine, the achievement merely of one man’s lifetime of bridging an ontological gap and thereby revealing God and healing our relationship with Him through Christ’s sacrifice. Rather, Christ is also Mediator of the third person of the divine Trinity, the Holy Spirit, proceeding from Father and Son as ‘the common charity by which the Father and the Son love each other’ (Trin. xv.15.27). As we have had occasion to note, the saints image God inasmuch as their memories, intelligences and wills have God as their object. This is only made possible through participation in God’s love, which is gifted to us as the Holy Spirit, and mediated to us through Christ. Christ’s mediation of the Holy Spirit is achieved through the body of the Church. We noted in Chap. 4 that conversion is, to Augustine’s mind, a gift of grace that must lead the convert into the Church through the sacrament of baptism if she or he is to be saved. Our discussion in the previous chapter quoted Cavanaugh on the disciplinary and performative dimensions of the sacraments and liturgies when viewed from the perspective of the individual. He continues as follows: ‘In the contest over bodies, both individual and social, Christian resistance will depend on having a visible body, i.e. a counter discipline and a counter performance’.27 At a social level, the body that resists the maladies of corrupted Creation just is the Church. It was Paul who first described the Church as the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12). In Augustine’s eyes, this is no metaphor. The Word in union with human nature is certainly Christ; but ‘in some manner or other’ the ‘whole Christ’ (totus Christus) is ‘the fullness of the Church’ (Serm. 341.1), Christ and Church as head and body. Again: the ‘Church [is] the body of which He [Christ] is the head’ (Civ. Dei x.20). The words and actions of the Church are even posited by Augustine as the actions of Christ, for Christ is preached by Christ Himself when He is announced by the Church (Serm. 354.1). When at the Eucharist Christ’s believers consume the bread which has been transubstantiated into His flesh, they do so in remembrance of Him. This is, in the first place, a reminder of the Son, in the form He took as the historical Jesus. It also, as a sacrament 26  See esp. Michel René Barnes, ‘The Invisible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5:8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400’, Modern Theology, 19 (2003), 329–355. 27  Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 58.

122 

B. HOLLAND

dedicated to the Word that became flesh, is part and parcel of the Church’s function as sign of the truth in the eternal memory of the Father, which a changeable community can only represent to itself by means of images or signs. Also, however, and more essentially, the Eucharist is a re-membering of Christ’s body, of the body of He through Whose mediation the saints have been saved, for ‘if you receive them well, you are yourselves what you have received’ (Serm. 227). The Church, then, is the terrestrial signum of the one God but also a res inasmuch as it is the body through which corrupted bodies can be restored to the original goodness of Creation.28 The body of the incarnate Mediator is the ‘doorway to access the trinitarian life of God’.29 I argued in the first part of this chapter that the image of God in human nature is the mind of the saint. Oddly, it is the body of the saint, in the sense of the corporate body of the faithful in the Church, which comes even closer to God. The Church is the sign or sacramentum of God, in the sense explored in Chap. 4; but it is also in another, according to Augustine, the actual body of God.

The City of God The City of God is the communion of all unfallen and redeemed creatures living in ‘eternal bliss’ and enjoying the vision of the Holy Trinity (Civ. Dei xxii.1). It makes sense, in setting out Augustine’s third anthropological analogy, to take the corporeal aspects of the Heavenly City, as Augustine imagines them in Book xxii of the City of God, before those that correspond to mind. We have seen that the somatically relevant feature of sainthood is less the actual terrestrial body of the saint than the body of Jesus Christ in both of its incorporating and mediatorial functions. The City of God is likewise the (eternal) body of Christ, mediated by his earthly body as eternally resurrected. First, Christ is ‘king and founder’ of the City of God, and he is head to the body (Civ. Dei xvii.4). Second, it is a crucial characteristic of Christ’s mediation on behalf of the saved that He ‘rose in the flesh and with His flesh ascended into Heaven’ (Civ. Dei xxii.5). The image of God, Augustine believed, cannot be conformed to God without seeing Him (recall the discussion in Chap. 3 of Augustine’s theory that 28  A recent case for Paul’s decisive importance in the formulation of Augustine’s mature Christology of the Church is Bart van Egmond, Augustine’s Early Thought on the Redemptive Function of Divine Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 141–158. 29  Paige E. Hochschild, Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 219.

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

123

agents take the shape of the objects of their vision), and this is only made possible in virtue of the Son’s continual embodiment in the City of God. ‘For now’, wrote Paul, ‘we see only a reflection as in a mirror’ (1 Cor. 13:12); but, wrote John, ‘we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is’ (1 Jn. 3:2). In Augustine’s interpretation of these passages, ‘it is clear that the image of God will achieve its full likeness of Him [only] when it attains the full vision of Him’ (Trin. xiv.18.24). God’s Incarnation in Jesus, and the further fact, as Augustine sees it, that ‘the earthly body of Christ has been taken up into Heaven’ where it abides eternally (Civ. Dei xxii.5), is, therefore, indispensable to building a community of the saved. Augustine again contends, in the context of his discussion of this eschatological City, that embodiment is neither egregious nor epiphenomenal but elemental for those who will join God in Heaven. After all, souls and bodies both were created de nihilo (Trin. xii.12.8). Materiality and enfleshment are not necessarily repugnant to godliness. Heaven is, rather, populated by bodies that belong there because they conform to celestial goodness in the way proper for bodies so to conform. Resurrected bodies are ‘transcendent’, clarifies Virginia Burrus, not because they are ‘static or weightless’ but because they are ‘most embodied’.30 Of bodies in the City of God, Augustine posits that ‘all ugliness must disappear, all weakness, all sluggishness, all corruption, and anything else which is inconsistent with that Kingdom in which the sons of the resurrection and of the promise will be equal to the angels of God’ (Civ. Dei xxii.20).31 The citizens of the Kingdom ‘will be immortal’ (Civ. Dei xxii.1). Their souls will have become spirits, endlessly imparting life, and yet we must not allow ourselves to believe that they [the saints in Heaven] will be spirits; we must think of them as bodies having the substance of flesh, though never having to experience corruption or lethargy, being preserved from such a fate by the life-giving spirit. Then man will no longer be earthly, but heavenly, not because his body, made of earth, will not be the same, but because the heavenly gift will fit it for living in Heaven itself, not by a loss of its natural substance, but by a change in its quality. (Civ. Dei xiii.22) 30  Virginia Burrus, ‘Carnal Excess: Flesh at the Limits of Imagination’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 17 (2009), 247–265, at 256; emphasis suppressed. 31  Augustine’s vision of the City of God provides much grist for the mill of critical disability theology. For an interesting overview, see T. J. Gorringe, The Education of Desire: Towards a Theology of the Senses (London: SCM Press, 2001), 28–52.

124 

B. HOLLAND

Inevitably, Augustine must address the sexual dimension of bodily perfection. Resurrection bodies, he asserts, will not contribute their part to the life of sin marking out the Earthly City. There ‘will be no sexual lust’, and the sexual organs will ‘be part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder … but will arouse the praises of God for His wisdom and compassion, in that He not only created from nothing but freed from corruption that which He created’ (Civ. Dei xxii.17). The main point is a larger one, though. For Augustine, the sexual desires of bodies put on display the most privative part of human will, that part which is self-loving, involuting and dominating, the exercise of which only results in the fruitless hollowing out of an abyss leading further into a darkness more than night.32 Resurrection bodies, however, having none of these licentious proclivities, will also make transparent, through their bodies, their right and well-ordered desires. Because these desires are wholly good and in proper order, to see them in each other’s bodies is the same thing as seeing God ‘face to face’, in the Pauline language of the First Letter to the Corinthians (13,12). The saints will see God by peering on the inward reality of their peers’ souls, absolutely open to view, not at all private. This vision of God through each other will be indirect but nonetheless unadulterated, as they will see the love that other souls have for God.33 ‘We shall then see the physical bodies of the new Heaven and the new earth in such a fashion as to observe God in utter clarity and distinctness, seeing Him present everywhere and governing the whole material scheme of things by means of the bodies we shall then inhabit and the bodies we shall see wherever we turn our eyes’ (Civ. Dei xxii.29). The Heavenly City images the saint analogically in part because these souls that shine forth and embody it also image the Trinity in the sense explored in the first part of this chapter. For each saint in Heaven, God is wholly and consciously the object of his or her most cordial longings. Thus do the resurrected participate in God’s relation to God, a relation constituted by His singular and Trinitarian focus on His own intrinsic joy, which is in fact the active, other-directed and unmitigated presence of power, reason and love. That their love is corporately organised in the 32  I have filched this phrase from Michael Connelly, A Darkness More Than Night (London: Orion, 2000). Connelly acknowledges his own indebtedness for the germ of the formulation to Raymond Chandler, ‘Pearls are a Nuisance’, in The Chandler Collection, vol. 3 (London: Pan Books, 1984), 9. 33  For much more detail, see David G. Robertson, ‘Augustine and the Transcendent Vision of Other Souls’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 56 (2018), 413–427.

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

125

City, and thus that it is the life in common which becomes an image of the divine persons in relation, reinforces the analogy between saved self and soteriological City. Justice enters the picture in several ways. First, as Williams argues, justice reaches its apogee in the City of God because in that City self-seeking in any form has slipped away. ‘Justice itself is loving, since it wills the good of all, not only its own fruition’.34 Justice in this city is not a mere measure serving to balance competing private interests for maximum social utility, nor an abstract goal of the maximally beneficial distribution of things, but divine action seeking the other’s good. There will, though, be a sort of distributive justice, although the ‘sort of’ here is appropriate only because the perfect distributive justice in the City of God will make even the most wondrously attuned earthly system of distributive justice only ‘sort of’ deserving of that name. There ‘can be no doubt’, inscribes Augustine, that there will be ‘grades of honour and glory’ in the City, ‘appropriate to degrees of merit’ (Civ. Dei xxii.30). This is perfect inasmuch as such a hierarchy will track both God’s (inscrutable) intentions in distributing His grace as He has seen fit to do, and naturally Augustine considers it right that those most favoured will be at the top of the pyramid. It is also perfect since ‘no inferior will feel envy of his superior’: No one will wish to be what it has not been granted him to be; and yet he will be bound in the closest bond of peaceful harmony with one to whom it has been granted; just as in the body the finger does not wish to be the eye, since both members are included in the harmonious organisation of the whole body. And so although one will have a gift inferior to another, he will also have the compensatory gift of contentment with what he has. (Ibid.)

Moreover, the lower souls, stationed contentedly in their places, will still see—and share through seeing—God as He is loved more deeply in their superiors. The remark above about harmony should put us in mind of music, and indeed we get a clearer perspective on the City of God as Augustine views it if we situate his discussion of it in terms of his account of music. We had occasion to note at the opening of Chap. 1 that Augustine considered music to be the science that measured the relationship between the body and the soul, and in his dialogue On Music Augustine describes  Williams, ‘Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge’, 160.

34

126 

B. HOLLAND

the body as the musical ‘instrument’ of the soul, the means by which the soul communicates itself to others and without which it must be mute (Mus. vi.5.15). Throughout this work, Augustine strives to take in the complexion of the soul of which music acts as some kind of physical measure, and to go yet further behind the reality of the soul in order to explore the actuality of the Creation, of which the soul is the eminent emanation. In summary, music is said by Augustine to consist of intervals, notes and rhythmic patterns. Between them, these three elements map on to the spatio-temporalities of oblivion, creation and infinity/ eternity. Silences in music equate to nothingness, though they can themselves be incorporated into musical structures. In the end, the silences that mediate the articulation of notes and patterns must be counted as integral to musical form. Notes, for their part, are the finite points of music, in principle infinitely divisible as well as capable of being sounded infinitely. Yet a note cannot be cut down to silence, while one that was sounded infinitely would be homogeneous and totalising, not in its proper place as one of many differentia. Notes, then, equate to creation, suspended between the infinite and oblivion, and characterised by multiplicity. Rhythmic patterns, finally, are proportions that extend into series and thence potentially to infinity. They are also analogical, in the sense that there are relations between these proportions even as the length of their soundings may grow or diminish. Patterns, then, may proceed to infinity in addition to bespeaking of the analogical universe. Notes and souls, according to Augustine, are analogous. Souls can only be at peace when they instantiate the harmonious, that is, the good, the beautiful. Otherwise, life is jarring, discordant and unmelodious. As Catherine Pickstock puts it: For Augustine, creation exhibits a perfect order or beauty, albeit in its own restricted degree, and the nothingness intrinsic to creation on its own is a necessary part of this order. Indeed, it is when human creatures fail to confess this nothingness, when their lives in time are without pauses, that this order is denied and a greater nothingness of disharmony ensues.35

35  Catherine Pickstock, ‘Music: Soul, City and Cosmos after Augustine’, in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, eds. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), 247–248.

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

127

Disharmony further arises when the human creature seeks to be one, to be distinct, to be in its own power, to be alone the measure of itself: to be, in short, the kind of self scrutinised in Chap. 3. Yet, for Augustine, and again to quote Pickstock, ‘no finite position (point, line, surface, body) is ever perfectly instantiated, since every finite point already has some extension’, meaning that ‘nothing finite is ever equal to itself, nothing finite is ever perfectly one, nothing finite is ever perfectly exact or measured’.36 Instead, as we saw in Chap. 2, harmony is achieved when an individual is situated in his own proper place and time. This will also constitute freedom, for freedom in the City of God, as Augustine writes, ‘will be one and the same freedom in all, and indivisible in the separate individuals’, because otherwise freedom is resisted by other freedoms, which is disharmony (Civ. Dei xxii.30). Burnell writes that one of the characteristics of good citizenship, according to Augustine, is ‘its provision of the maximum range of relationships’.37 This is precisely what citizenship of the Heavenly City brings about. No individual is disposable or fungible in the Kingdom, understood in musical terms as an infinite, eternal series of rhythmical patterns, a ‘poem of the universe’ (Mus. vi.11.29).38 A series, after all, ceases to be a series if it is interrupted by some presence or absence that distorts its progression. Each unit is equally and indispensably vital to the integrity of the melodic sequence, but each component part is also defined just in relation to all the others. Once again, the thrust of Augustine’s vision has best been articulated by Milbank. The goal of the City of God, Milbank writes: is not collective glory, as if the City were itself a hero, any more than it is the production of heroic individuals. Instead, it really has no telos properly speaking, but continuously is the differential sequence which has the goal beyond goal of generating new relationships, which themselves situate and define ‘persons’ … [Augustine’s Christian ontology] implies both that the part belongs to the whole, and that each part transcends any imaginable whole, because the whole is only an infinite series which continues indefinitely towards an infinite and unfathomable God.39

 Ibid., 249.  Burnell, Augustinian Person, 167. 38  Poetry is treated by Augustine as a form of music in On Music. 39  Milbank, Social Theory, 405. 36 37

128 

B. HOLLAND

The eternal City of God, then, has the ‘goal beyond goal’ of engendering new relationships ad infinitum, new patterns in the series, which define persons as the properly social beings we were created to be. In respect of the analogy between the self and civic society that is the subject of this monograph, therefore, we have almost reached the point of consummation and, indeed, transcendence. The long story of the descent and redemption of the human self and city climaxes in a revelation of that City to which the self is analogous, but in the end the self that is analogous to the City of God is not self-standing or autonomous but unconditionally social. This is almost the end. It serves, though, to point out that the infinite series which is the City of God, as Augustine expresses it, is the second person of the Trinity, the Mediator, who ‘articulates His body and conveys this mediation as an endless series of new mediations which interpellates human “persons”’.40 The infinite God, the One, is not Himself, as Pickstock charmingly phrases it, ‘a true (univocal) unity but, on the contrary, coincides with the perfect harmonic relation in such a way that the divine Father is the communication of His unity to the perfect measure of His Son’.41 Human persons are fundamentally relational because their personhood is a gift of that perfectly relational Being in whose image they are made. In Augustine’s words, to revisit another theme of Chap. 2: But number also begins from one, and is beautiful in equality and likeness, and bound by order. And so, whoever confesses there is no nature of any kind, but desires unity, and tries as much as it can to be like itself, and holds its salvation as a proper order in place or time or weight of body, must confess all things whatever and of any size are made from one beginning through a form equal to it and like to the riches of His goodness, by which they are joined together in charity as one and one gift from One. (Mus. vi.17.56)

This chapter has discussed Augustine’s third anthropological analogy between the self that is a saint and the ultimately social state that is the City of God. It elaborated, in the first section, on Rowan Williams’s insight that the image of God in human nature, according to Augustine, is not the mind per se but the mind of the saint, showing how Augustine comes to an understanding of God as Holy Trinity by means of an analogy first  Ibid.  Pickstock, ‘Music’, 249.

40 41

5  THE SAINT AND THE CITY OF GOD 

129

to the human mind and thence to the human mind caught up entirely in contemplation of God. The focus of the second section was the body of the saint: not his or her physical body, but the body of Christ, in which the saints are joined through His mediation, as Son, between God the Father and humankind. The third part of the chapter was devoted to Augustine’s presentation of the City of God, the communion of saints in Heaven with God. It attempted to illuminate the parallels between the saved soul and the soteriological city in terms both of Augustine’s Trinitarian account of human mental agency and his vision of resurrection bodies. A concluding reflection on Augustine’s musicology, which he views as key to grasping the relationship between soul and body, served to demonstrate the analogical resonances throughout his philosophical, theological and social thought. The human being is put in its proper place, the place from which our first parents fell so long ago, during the First Age of Man, which inaugurated the discord that shall be brought to an end at the end of days.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Distension, Attention, Extension, Intention

Augustine describes peace as nothing less than ‘the final fulfilment of all our goods’, ‘so great a good that even in relation to the affairs of earth and of our mortal state no word ever falls more gratefully upon the ear, nothing is desired with greater longing, in fact, nothing better can be found’ (Civ. Dei xix.11). Peace is the alpha and omega of the created order, bringing all created things into harmony with themselves, with all other such things, and with God. Its opposite, says Peter Brown, is tension.1 It would be more accurate, though, to say that tension is peace’s counterpart. The obverse of peace is indeed a disharmonious tension between the parts of some whole, but an Augustinian peace can also be defined as a productive tension, where parts are ‘in tension’ with each other yet such tension constitutes an ordered adjustment of each thing to every other. There is no order without such tautness, such tensility; otherwise, there is mere limpness, flaccidness. Thus, the ‘peace of the body’ is said to be ‘a tempering of the component parts in duly ordered proportion’, while the ‘peace of the whole universe’, as we also had occasion to note in Chap. 2, is ‘the arrangement of things equal and unequal in a pattern which assigns to each its proper position’ (Civ. Dei xix.13). To use some terms synonymous or cognate with the verb tendere, a productive tension arises when things are stretched out along a continuum, when the stress of each of these

1

 Peter Brown, ‘Saint Augustine’, in his Religion and Society, 40.

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Holland, Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Recovering Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19333-1_6

131

132 

B. HOLLAND

things is in the right place, when each strikes the correct tone (tonos), when each is in the proper time or tense. Tension, then, in its varying degrees, is a fundamental aspect of Augustine’s ontology. In one or another modification it runs the gamut from the life of the damned in the Earthly City to the communion of the saints with the Holy Trinity in the City of God. By way of conclusion, then, we will survey the journey reported in this book in respect of tension.2

Distentio Distension comprehends the fundamental condition of the unsaved human being and of the City of Man. The word ‘distension’ is these days generally reserved to the field of medicine, where it describes abnormal enlargement or dilation. In Augustine’s use, distentio first describes the dynamic between the sin of pride and its self-punishment in the form of the diremption of the will and the consequent condition of constant distractedness, as surveyed especially in Chap. 3. To recall, distentio is experienced as a series of divisions, or tensions: between spirit and body; between the crowd of objects vying for our attention; between fear of death and the plain fact of our mortality; and between reflective desires and enslavement to hard-bitten compulsions. Augustine’s metaphors for this aspect of distentio, I now want to point out, are all thus of swelling and spilling, tumescence and detumescence, a repetitive and compulsive state associated with the peculiar emotional combination of restlessness and lassitude. Pride is pictured in terms of swelling, of being puffed up. The Latin verb that he uses, tumere, better captures the association both with the male erection and its tumorous unnaturalness. ‘My swelling [tumor] conceit separated me from You’, Augustine writes in the Confessions, and it was as though a ‘gross swelling on my face closed my eyes’ (Conf. vii.7.11). His definition of wickedness a little later is framed not only in terms of the knottiness of which we had the occasion to take note in Chap. 3, as ‘a perversity of the will twisted away from the highest substance’, but also as a ‘swelling [of the will] with external matter’ (Conf. vii.16.22). Swelling, 2  Wills, Saint Augustine, 95, contrasts distentio, extentio and intentio; Drever, Image, Identity, 91–94, contrasts distentio, attentio and extentio; Robin Lane Fox, Augustine, 550, contrasts distentio, attentio and intentio. I cannot, therefore, claim any originality in organising my discussion in terms of these various tensions, but I can at least puncture the Trinitarian pattern and instead bring all four concepts to bear.

6  CONCLUSION: DISTENSION, ATTENTION, EXTENSION, INTENTION 

133

however, leads inevitably to pouring over. ‘There was no strict discipline to keep me in check, which led to an unbridled dissoluteness in many different directions’ (Conf. ii.3.8). ‘I was tossed about and spilt, scattered and boiled dry in my fornications’ (Conf. ii.2.2). Augustine’s thesis about the straining, distracting and scattering effects of distentio is also exhibited in his more philosophical reflections on time. Suppose, he says, that I am about to sing a song that I know well: Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched [distenditur] two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to become the past. (Conf. xi.28.38)

And yet: If we can think of some bit of time which cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moments, that alone is what we can call ‘present’. And this time flies so quickly from future into past that it is an interval with no duration. If it has no duration, it is divisible into past and future. But the present occupies no space. (Conf. xi.15.20)

We can only know the past as a present memory, and we can only know the future as a present anticipation, says Augustine. There is nothing but the present – and yet there is no present. And the point of the philosophical paradoxes is again to show how unsettled we are in this time, in hoc saeculo, and how that stretching of consciousness between past and future adds up to making ‘life a distension in several directions’, so that ‘I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand’ (Conf. xi.29.39). Distentio, then, can be categorised as a kind of tug-of-war, and this is apt. For the civic analogon of the tension-ridden condition is the Earthly City, which in Markus’s words is nothing but a ‘tension of forces’, a confluence of puffed-up statesmen whose pent up energies seem always to be discharged and dispersed in war.3 It is dominated by the chief political symptoms of pride, the lust for domination and principandi superbia, the drive for sovereignty in the name of glory. Swollen pride is released only in 3

 Markus, Saeculum, 62.

134 

B. HOLLAND

bursts of killing. Human life is sacrificed to the false gods of honour and glory, and this is in bad faith. These are unquenchable thirsts, and they go on repetitively, compulsively, incessantly, perpetually, working their way out (for a time, but only for a time) in rivalries, campaigns and crusades.

Attentio et Extentio The tensions associated with the prideful soul and the pagan City are internal, tensions within. Those associated with the pilgrim and his or her City, by contrast, can be characterised as tensions towards and tensions away from something. First, tensions towards. We saw in Chap. 4 how Augustine’s own personal revolution, his own movement from aversio to conversio, required a reorientation of his attention. Augustine uses the word intentio to mean ‘attention’. As Rémi Brague points out, the ‘first meaning’ of intentio was in fact ‘attention’, for etymologically intentio derived from tendere in aliud, literally ‘stretching towards something else’, of which the later word ‘attention’ (from ad-tentio, ‘stretching towards’, ‘tension towards’ or ‘tending towards’) is a contracted synonym, made necessary as intentio went on to acquire its contemporary polysemy.4 Augustine’s conversion occurs when he turns his back, for a time, on his wants and finds that his attention then naturally enough shifts towards what had already, at the intellectual and affective levels, become his likes. The energies generated in the new relationship between lover and beloved are sufficient to motivate an upheaval in respect of his behaviour. Chapter 4 did not say enough, though, about faith, which in part Augustine defines by means of the concept of attention. Faith, according to Augustine, is attending to something which cannot yet be seen, but which necessarily prepares for the future vision (see especially Fid. rer.). It is a form of attention that primes ‘the faculty for seeing Him Whom you love’, and that ‘before you see Him’ (En. Ps. 99.5). Belief in God, as we have seen, was not enough to anchor Augustine’s conversion. Faith, rather, is key, and that is attention: that full-souled and full-bodied orientation, that letting fall all of the defences and opening up in order to become fully present to the other, what Andrea Nightingale has defined as the ‘capacity to direct and connect the soul to the beings and things that it attends to in the mode of 4  Rémi Brague, ‘Intention’, in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 503.

6  CONCLUSION: DISTENSION, ATTENTION, EXTENSION, INTENTION 

135

care’.5 Paul had recorded that faith expresses itself through love (Gal. 5:6), and it is in terms of that love-begetting and energising relationship between subject, object and attention that Augustine situates faith (e.g. Trin. xiii.2.5; xiii.10.24; xiii.13.20.26). There is no Augustinian conversion, therefore, without tension. Second, tension away from. For part of what it means to attend to what cannot yet be seen is to trust in it and wait hopefully for it. (The French verb attendre, ‘to wait’, better signposts the close relationship between attending towards and waiting on.) ‘The entire life of a good Christian’, writes Augustine of the earthly pilgrimage, ‘is a holy longing’ (Jo. ep. tr. iv.6). By withholding the vision, ‘God stretches our longing through delay’, he says, and ‘stretches our soul through desire, and makes it large enough by stretching it’ (ibid.). To wait, to attend, to love in faith, is to extend the soul so that something greater might be caught in its net. Love, says Murdoch in Augustinian mode, ‘is the tension between the imperfect soul and the magnetic perfection which is conceived of as lying beyond it’.6 It involves a consenting to distance. That faithful tension towards something else becomes much more explicitly a tension away (extentio) from self, and therefore a tension across the whole soul as it sustains that loving and patient hopefulness. This is also a tension directed upwards, towards God on high. Distentio is horizontal, a pulling between poles. Attentio and extentio are vertical. The extension of the soul in attending to God, says Augustine, readies it ‘to be filled’ by God’s abundance (Jo. ep. tr. iv.6). He contrasts the fruits of attention, in terms of such fulfilment, to those fetid fruits of distension. ‘When You are poured out upon us, You are not wasted on the ground. You raise us upright. You are not scattered but reassemble us. In filling all things, You fill them all with the whole of Yourself’ (Conf. i.3.3). Attention and extension help in the gathering, collecting and containing of self. In respect of the problematic of time, Augustine also confesses his sins, his tendencies towards nothingness, so that through these recollections he can collect himself from degeneracy. ‘It is from love of Your love that I make the act of recollection … You gathered me together from the state of disintegration in which I had been fruitlessly divided. I turned from unity in You to be lost in multiplicity’ (Conf. ii.1.1). By attending to God 5  Andrea Nightingale, ‘Augustine on Extending Oneself to God through Intention’, Augustinian Studies, 46 (2015), 185–209, at 187. 6  Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 103; emphasis mine.

136 

B. HOLLAND

and thus extending his soul, Augustine finds that his memory has been redeemed. He does not sin again by recalling his sins: ‘without any cupidity now I am mindful of cupidity long ago’ (Conf. x.14.21). Moreover, although time itself must remain for him a house of arcana, his memory is most acutely conscious of time in terms of ‘intervals’ (toni, also ‘tensions’) of time. Toni, as we saw in Chap. 5, are also musical intervals, associated by Augustine with the silences that mediate and structure all sound, making it audible and thereby meaningful. He thus ‘hears’ these silences, and sees that his confessions of his own deviations towards the otherwise-nothingness of himself show, as Williams puts it, that ‘real self-­ alienation … lies in the idea of a finite self-coincidence, a state of satisfied desire in which the awareness of incompletion [is] set aside’.7 Finally, Augustine discovers through his confessional journey that his memory is the record of a desire (love) to experience happiness in truth (knowledge), and thus that his testimony to God, this prayer, this act of attention (remembering Murdoch’s account of prayer), reveals an entity in the Trinitarian image of God, a centred self collected out of a dispersed one: Your right hand upheld me in my Lord, the Son of man who is Mediator between You the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things; so I might apprehend Him in Whom also I am apprehended, and leaving behind the old days I might be gathered to follow the One, forgetting the past and moving not towards those future things which are transitory but to the things which are before me, not stretched out [distensus] in distraction but extended in reach [extentus], not by being pulled apart [distentionem] but by attention [intentionem]. (Conf. xi.29.39)

Similarly, in his important Easter sermon (Serm. 255.6) on Philippians 3:13–14, Augustine gestures towards the dual operations of attentio and extentio as beginning to rescue the hopeful and faithful soul from the distension of earthly temporality. Paul’s own conversion, he there writes, involved his ‘forgetting what lies behind’ so that he was ‘extended to what lies ahead, in accordance with his attention’ (extentus secundum intentionem). In Janet Coleman’s words, ‘perfection in this life is none other than forgetting what went before in order that one may extend oneself, by means of a tension in one’s very own being, towards the next stage 7  Rowan Williams, ‘“A Question to Myself”: Time and Self-Awareness in the Confessions’, in his On Augustine, 10.

6  CONCLUSION: DISTENSION, ATTENTION, EXTENSION, INTENTION 

137

Fig. 6.1  St Augustin by Pietro di Giovanni D’Ambrogio (ca. 1435–ca. 1440)

upwards, that which is yet to come’.8 This is why Paul Ricoeur can very plausibly and powerfully argue that attentio is for Augustine fundamentally a ‘hope for the last things, to the very extent that the past that is to be forgotten is not the storehouse of memory but the emblem of the old Adam’ (Fig. 6.1).9 Faith restores a kind of peace to the human being who has it. The Pilgrim City is likewise defined by ‘the peace which is our special possession’, ‘a peace with God through faith’ (Civ. Dei xix.27). Its denizens of course do not ‘enjoy exemption from the deceptions of the demons and from their multifarious temptations’, but such temptations at least have the consequence of ‘leading them to seek, with more fervent longing, that 8  Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 107. 9  Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 27–28.

138 

B. HOLLAND

state of serenity where peace is utterly complete and assured’ (Civ. Dei xix.10). The Pilgrim City is the body of the faithful, its corporate identity defined by that shared tension towards the Trinity. The corporate dimension of faith is crucial. ‘In order that faith might work through love’, writes Augustine, ‘the charity of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. And He was given to us when Jesus was glorified in His resurrection’ (Trin. xiii.10.14). Faith, he thinks, ultimately requires our participation in the love of the Father who loves the Son in the Holy Spirit. In this life, such participation necessarily requires our incorporation into the body of the Church, the Pilgrim City, severed in several ways but practising with grace a constantly reiterated healing of itself.

Intentio I have already touched upon ‘intention’ above. To be ‘in tension’, for Augustine, means for parts to be in a harmonious relationship—a balanced tension—to each other and to the whole. It means for everything to be in its place, in the right order. Intentio describes the tensile quality of a perfect and secure peace. This, of course, is the state in which the saints in Heaven find themselves. They are at peace with themselves. In that condition of ultimate peace: our nature will be healed by immortality and incorruption and will have no perverted elements, and nothing at all, in ourselves or any other, will be in conflict with any one of us. And so reason will not need to rule the vices, since there will be no vices, but God will hold sway over man, and the soul over the body, and in this state our delight and facility in obeying will be matched by our felicity in living and reigning. There, for each and every one, this state will be eternal, and its eternity will be assured; and for that reason the peace of this blessedness, or the blessedness of this peace, will be the Supreme Good. (Civ. Dei xix.27)

Part of what it means for things to be ‘in tension’ in this sense is that one freedom will not resist another. Citizens of the City of God will be perfectly free because their wills will have been liberated from the delight in sinning and now ‘immovably fixed in a delight of not sinning’, and this freedom ‘will be one and the same freedom in all, and indivisible in the separate individuals … Yet it will not forget its liberation, nor be ungrateful to its liberator’ (Civ. Dei xxii.30). This may be one reason why Augustine

6  CONCLUSION: DISTENSION, ATTENTION, EXTENSION, INTENTION 

139

always stresses the subtle difference between the exercise of freedom by the will as opposed to the freedom of the will.10 He prefers the former, which allows him to stress that a power to will remains in the purity of the love with which the saints are drawn single-mindedly to one object of attraction, the One, even though no other ‘choices’ can be motivated in that context.11 Temporal attentio and extentio are transcended in this final dispensation of beatitude and orderliness. Faith, after all, marked by the attention and extension of the soul, may be the ‘very best attribute’ of a person in hoc saeculo; but ‘it will certainly no longer exist when this sojourn abroad comes to an end’. For although it is necessary for gaining eternal things, ‘faith itself is temporal and finds a temporal dwelling in the hearts’ of those who trust in God, such that it ‘will be reckoned among things that are past and over and done with, not among things that are present and continue forever’ (Trin. xiv.2.3–4). As Basil Studer has shown in some detail, faith is for Augustine a ‘kind of historical knowledge’.12 The transfigured person in the Heavenly City, who sees the immaterial God in the hierarchically organised bodies of all other redeemed individuals, will thereby see, says Augustine, all things in proper tension and perfect congruence with each other. There will be a comprehensive, pure and unforced attention to God, but the overall form of loving attention will be structured by God’s own intentiones. Perishable, finite and subjective time will have become aeternitas: uncreated, immutable and objective. When things are finally sustained in the proper and eternal tension with each other, this regenerated state will be one of perfect peace. It is of course a state of regeneration because it will mark a return to the God Whom, Augustine maintained, Adam disobeyed in his prideful act of original sin. This tension, which will be experienced as no tension at all, thus has a sort of circular shape, subverting all latitudes and longitudes, all horizontals and verticals. It is luminously evoked by Oliver O’Donovan, arbitrating between interpretations of Augustine arguing that his theology is too anthropocentric, making too much room for creaturely creativity, over against others maintaining that it is too predestinarian: 10  Charles H. Kahn, ‘Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine’, in The Question of Eclecticism: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, eds. John Dillon and A. A. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 250. 11  Wetzel, Limits of Virtue, 198. 12  Basil Studer, ‘History and Faith in Augustine’s De Trinitate’, Augustinian Studies, 28 (1997), 7–50, at 49.

140 

B. HOLLAND

Augustine’s picture of the universe shows us One who is the source and goal of being, value, and activity, Himself in the centre of the universe and at rest; and it shows us the remainder of the universe in constant movement, which, while it may tend towards or away from the centre, is yet held in relation to it, so that all other beings lean, in a multiplicity of ways, towards the source and goal of being. But the force which draws these moving galaxies of souls is immanent to them, a kind of dynamic nostalgia rather than a transcendent summons from the centre. Such a summons, of course, is presupposed; but it is reflected by this responsive movement which is other than itself, so that there is a real reciprocity between Creator and creature.13

The City of God, when it is finally assembled at the Parousia, will, according to Augustine, put everything in proper tension with everything else. It will be harmonic and melodic. And part of what this will involve will be a mutuality between God and His creatures now gathered together to enjoy Him, a mutuality reflecting the movements of grace on the one side and desires for the good on the other. But there will also be the further reciprocity in which microcosm reflects macrocosm, inasmuch as each individual will be at perfect peace with herself as much as with all others. Each individual person will experience the integrity, the wholeness, the sense of being gathered together as a self, for which the circle is symbolic. Augustine’s classification of the spectrum from disorder to order in terms of various intensities of tension, along with tension’s own metonyms concerning gravitation and levitation, go to show just how metaphorically hued and imbued is his Weltanschauung. Metaphor and analogy are, for him, ontological issues, however, wrapped up in his analogical conception of the goodness of the created universe. Goodness and unity are fundamentally ontological issues. As we had cause to elaborate in Chap. 2, all being is good, and every particular being must, for Augustine, have some kind of unity in order to be what it is. That is why peace is ontologically necessary, a feature of all being to some extent. For without unity, which is a kind of internal ontological peace, things fall to pieces and cease to be what they are—like a house in ruins, which is no longer a house, or an army in a rout where it is every man for himself, which is no longer an army. This has been a book about a particular relationship between two important variables of his analogical universe, the self and the city. There is bound, in such a universe, to be an analogy between the (dis)unity of a 13  Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in Saint Augustine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 157.

6  CONCLUSION: DISTENSION, ATTENTION, EXTENSION, INTENTION 

141

person and the (dis)unity of a city. The root of that analogy is love, because love unites. The self who pursues inferior, external goods, which are many and diverse and pull a person in different directions, resembles nothing so much as the society which loves inferior goods incapable of being shared by division. Gangs of thieves are typically at each other’s throats, and greedy empires are destroyed by civil wars. Only the human being who attends to God in faith, hope and love will begin to be healed, just as the community that lovingly attends to the indivisible One together begins to take on the shape of the One and to become the sign of the One. In paying more attention than hitherto to the analogy between self and city in Augustine, I hope to have made a modest contribution to Augustine scholarship, and also to recovering a part of the long history of what I have called the anthropological analogy. Augustine was not the first writer to adopt the anthropological analogy, but of the early writers to do so he had by far the most commodious conception of selfhood, incorporating as it did the terrain of deprivation that is fallen man, on the one hand, to a genuine image of the Godhead, on the other. What a boon to political theory, then, for this towering intellect to have rendered the outlines and possibilities of civic society—of human relations of command, coordination and conversation—in correspondingly capacious terms.

Bibliography

Adams, Jeremy duQuesnay, The Populus of Augustine and Jerome: A Study in the Patristic Sense of Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). Alexander, David C., Augustine’s Early Theology of the Church: Emergence and Implications (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). Alexander, James, ‘A Genealogy of Political Theory: A Polemic’, Contemporary Political Theory, online early: 28th November 2018. Alter, Adam, Irresistible: Why You are Addicted to Technology and How to Set Yourself Free (London: Vintage, 2017). Anderson, James F., St. Augustine and Being: A Metaphysical Essay (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965). Anselme, Patrick, and Mike J.  F. Robinson, ‘“Wanting”, “Liking”, and their Relation to Consciousness’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, 42 (2015), 123–140. Antonaccio, Maria, A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Antonaccio, Maria, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Arendt, Hannah, Love and Saint Augustine, trans. Joanne Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing (New York: Harcourt, 1978). Asad, Talal, ‘Note on Body Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual’, Economy and Society, 12 (1983), 287–327. Asiedu, F.  B. A., ‘Augustine’s Christian-Platonist Account of Goodness: A Reconsideration’, The Heythrop Journal, 43 (2002), 328–343.

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Holland, Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Recovering Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19333-1

143

144 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Augustine, City of God, trans. Gerald G.  Walsh, Demetrius B.  Zema, Grace Monahan and Daniel J. Honan (New York: Doubleday, 1949). Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Ayres, Lewis, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Bargh, John A. and Tanya L. Chartrand, ‘The Unbearable Automaticity of Being’, American Psychologist, 54 (1999), 462–479. Barnes, Michel René, ‘The Invisible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5:8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400’, Modern Theology, 19 (2003), 329–355. Bates, Matthew W., The Hermeneutics of Apostolic Proclamation: The Center of Paul’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012). Benner, Drayton C., ‘Augustine and Karl Rahner on the Relationship between the Immanent Trinity and the Economic Trinity’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9 (2007), 24–38. Berridge, Kent C., ‘Brain Studies Can Advance Psychological Understanding’, in The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, eds. Andrew S. Fox, Regina C. Lapate, Alexander J. Shackman and Richard J. Davidson, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Bottici, Chiara, Men and States: Rethinking the Domestic Analogy in a Global Age, trans. Karen Whittle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Brague, Rémi, ‘Intention’, in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1967). Brown, Peter, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber & Faber, 1972). Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Bruno, Michael J.  S., Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). Bull, Hedley, ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, eds. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966). Bultmann, Rudolf, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1952). Burleigh, John H.  S., The City of God: A Study of St. Augustine’s Philosophy (London: Nisbet & Co., 1949). Burnaby, John, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938).

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

145

Burnell, Peter, The Augustinian Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005). Burns, J.  Patout, ‘Augustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 16 (1988), 9–27. Burrus, Virginia, ‘Carnal Excess: Flesh at the Limits of Imagination’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 17 (2009), 247–265. Burton, Philip, Language in the Confessions of Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Butin, Philip W., The Trinity (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 2001). Cary, Phillip, Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Cavadini, John C., ‘The Darkest Enigma: Reconsidering the Self in Augustine’s Thought’, Augustinian Studies, 38 (2007), 119–132. Cavanaugh, William T., Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Chabi, Kolawole, ‘Augustine on Justice: Theory and Praxis’, Igwebuike: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities, 1 (2015), 69–86. Chadwick, Henry, Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Chandler, Raymond, ‘Pearls are a Nuisance’, in The Chandler Collection, vol. 3 (London: Pan Books, 1984). Christman, John, The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Cicero, On Duties, trans. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Cicero, On Invention, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, trans. James E. G. Zetzel, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Cicero, On the Orator: Book 3, trans. H.  Rackam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942). Cicero, On the Orator: Books 1–2, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942). Clark, Christopher, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012). Clark, Mary T., ‘Augustine the Christian Thinker’, in From Augustine to Eriugena: Essays on Neoplatonism and Christianity in Honor of John O’Meara, eds. John A. Richmond and F. X. Martin (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991). Clark, Mary T., ‘Image Doctrine’, in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allen D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999).

146 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen, Ted, Thinking of Others: On the Talent of Metaphor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Coleman, Janet, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of Each’, in his On Politics and Society, ed. John Morrow (London: Macmillan, 1990). Connelly, Michael, A Darkness More Than Night (London: Orion, 2000). Connolly, William E., The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality, 2nd edn. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). Cordner, Christopher, ‘Lessons of Murdochian Attention’, Sophia, 55 (2016), 197–213. Cornish, Paul J., ‘Augustine’s Contribution to the Republican Tradition’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9 (2010), 133–148. Couenhoven, Jesse, ‘Augustine’s Rejection of the Free-Will Defence: An Overview of the Late Augustine’s Theodicy’, Religious Studies, 43 (2007), 279–98. Cranz, F. Edward, ‘De Civitate Dei, xv, 2, and Augustine’s Idea of the Christian Society’, in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus (New York: Anchor Books, 1972). Crawford, Matthew, The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction (London: Penguin). Crittenden, Paul, Reason, Will and Emotion: Defending the Greek Tradition against Triune Consciousness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Cumming, Robert Denoon, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). DiLorenzo, Raymond, ‘The Critique of Socrates in Cicero’s De oratore: Ornatus and the Nature of Wisdom’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 11 (1978), 247–61. Dodaro, Robert, ‘Ecclesia and Res Publica: How Augustinian are Neo-Augustinian Politics?’, in Bibliotecha Ephemeridium Theologicarum Lovaniensum, vol. 219, eds. Lieven Boove, Mathijs Lamberigts and Maarten Wisse (Leuven: Peeters). Dodaro, Robert, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Drever, Matthew, Image, Identity, and the Forming of the Augustinian Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Drever, Matthew, ‘Loving God In and Through the Self: Trinitarian Love in St. Augustine’, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78 (2017), 7–22. Duffy, J.  Stephen, ‘Our Heart of Darkness: Original Sin Revisited’, Theological Studies, 49 (1988), 597–622.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

147

Dunn, David J., ‘Radical Sophiology: Fr. Sergej Bulgakov and John Milbank on Augustine’, Studies in East European Thought, 64 (2012), 227–249. Dylan, Bob, ‘I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine’, in his Lyrics, 1962–1985 (London: HarperCollins, 1985). Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). Epictetus, Discourses, vol. 2: Books 3–4, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928). Epictetus, The Handbook (The Encheiridion), trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983). Evans, G. R., Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Ewing, Alexander Blake, Ideology, Language and the Politics of Time (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2017). Ferguson, John, Pelagius: A Historical and Theological Study (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1956). Figgis, John Neville, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s City of God (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1921). Fjelstad, Per, ‘Restraint and Emotion in Cicero’s De oratore’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 36 (2003), 39–47. Fleming, Sean, ‘Moral Agents and Legal Persons: The Ethics and Law of State Responsibility’, International Theory, 9 (2017), 466–489. Forsyth, Neil, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Foucault, Michel, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H.  Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (London: Tavistock, 1988). Frankfurt, Harry G., ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1971), 5–20. Freccero, John, ‘Autobiography and Narrative’, in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, eds. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). Frede, Michael, ‘A Notion of a Person in Epictetus’, in The Philosophy of Epictetus, eds. Theodore Scaltsas and Andrew S.  Mason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Frede, Michael, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Frend, W.  H. C., Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (New York: New  York University Press, 1964). Gauthier, R. A., Aristote: L’éthique a Nicomaque I, vol. 1: Introduction (Louvain: Peeters, 1970).

148 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gerber, Chad Tyler, The Spirit of Augustine’s Early Theology: Contextualizing Augustine’s Pneumatology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). Gilson, Etienne, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch (New York: Random House, 1960). Goodman, Martin, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Goodrich, Richard J., Contextualizing Cassian: Aristocrats, Asceticism, and Reformation in Fifth-Century Gaul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Gorday, Peter, Principles of Patristic Exegesis: Romans 9–11  in Origen, John Chrysostom and Augustine (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983). Gorringe, T. J., The Education of Desire: Towards a Theology of the Senses (London: SCM Press, 2001). Gracia, Jorge J. E., Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1984). Gregory, Eric, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Griffin, Gabriele, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 1989). Griffin, Michael, Aristotle’s Categories in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Griffiths, Paul J. ‘Secularity and the Saeculum’, in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. James Wetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Hanby, Michael, Augustine and Modernity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003). Harrison, Carol, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Harrison, Carol, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Harrison, Carol, ‘Measure, Number and Weight in Saint Augustine’s Aesthetics’, Augustinianum, 28 (1988), 591–602. Harrison, Carol, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology: An Argument for Continuity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Harrison, Simon, Augustine’s Way into the Will: The Theological and Philosophical Significance of De Libero Arbitrio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Hempe, Beate (ed.), Metaphor: Embodied Cognition and Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Herdt, Jennifer, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Heyking, John von, ‘A Headless Body Politic? Augustine’s Understanding of a Populus and its Representation’, History of Political Thought, 20 (1999), 549–574. Hochschild, Paige E., Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

149

Holland, Ben, The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hollerich, Michael, ‘John Milbank, Augustine, and the “Secular”’, in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God, eds. Mark Vessey, Karla Pollmann and Allan Fitzgerald (Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999). Hollingworth, Miles, The Pilgrim City: St Augustine of Hippo and his Innovation in Political Thought (London: T&T Clark, 2010). Hundert, E. J., ‘Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self’, Political Theory, 20 (1992), 86–104. Hutchings, Kimberly, Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). James, William, ‘The Gospel of Relaxation’, in The Heart of William James, ed. Robert Richardson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Jewett, Robert, Paul’s Anthropological Terms: A Study of their Use in Conflict Settings (Leiden: Brill, 1971). Kahn, Charles H., ‘Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine’, in The Question of Eclecticism: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, eds. John Dillon and A. A. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Kaufman, Peter Iver, ‘Christian Realism and Augustinian(?) Liberalism’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 38 (2010), 699–724. Kerr, Fergus, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). Kirwan, Christopher, Augustine (London: Routledge, 1989). Kovecses, Zoltan, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Lane Fox, Robin, Augustine: Conversions and Confessions (London: Penguin, 2015). Lawless, George, ‘Augustine’s Decentring of Asceticism’, in Augustine and his Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, eds. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000). MacCulloch, Diarmaid, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Allen Lane, 2009). MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). MacKinnon, Patricia L., ‘Augustine’s City of God: The Divided Self/The Divided Civitas’, in The City of God: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Dorothy F. Donnelly (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). MacQueen, D.  J., ‘Contemptus Dei: St Augustine on the Disorder of Pride in Society, and its Remedies’, Recherches Augustiniennes, 9 (1973), 227–293.

150 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Maker, William, ‘Augustine on Evil: The Dilemma of the Philosophers’, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, 15 (1984), 149–160. Mann, William E., ‘Augustine on Evil and Original Sin’, in his God, Belief, and Perplexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Markus, R. A., Christianity and the Secular (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). Markus, R. A., Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Markus, R. A., Sacred and Secular (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994). Markus, R. A., The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Marrou, Henri-Irénée, ‘Civitas Dei, Civitas Terrena: Num Tertium Quid?’, in Studia Patristica, eds. K. Aland and F. L. Cross (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1957). Matthews, Gareth B., Thought’s Ego in Descartes and Augustine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Mauss, Marcel, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self’, in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, eds. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). McGrath, Alister E., Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). McMahon, Robert, Augustine’s Prayerful Ascent: An Essay on the Literary Form of the Confessions (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989). Meconi, David Vincent, ‘Gender and Imago Dei in Augustine’s De Trinitate vii’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 75 (2000), 47–62. Meconi, David Vincent, ‘St. Augustine’s Early Theory of Participation’, Augustinian Studies 27 (1996), 81–98. Menn, Stephen, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Merton, Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Augustine: The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1950). Milbank, John, ‘An Essay against Secular Order’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 15 (1987), 199–224. Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Milbank, John, ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-­ Two Responses to Unasked Questions’, Modern Theology, 7 (1991a), 225–237. Milbank, John, ‘The Name of Jesus: Incarnation, Atonement and Ecclesiology’, Modern Theology, 7 (1991b), 311–333. Milbank, John, ‘Sacred Triads: Augustine and the Indo-European Soul’, Modern Theology 13 (1997), 451–474. Milbank, John, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003).

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

151

Milbank, John, ‘The Double Glory, or Paradox Versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek’, in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). Milbank, John, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Milbank, John and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016). Miles, Margaret R., ‘Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions’, Journal of Religion, 63 (1983), 125–142. Miles, Margaret R., Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Crossroad, 1992). Mourant, J. A., ‘The Cogitos: Augustinian and Cartesian’, Augustinian Studies, 10 (1979), 27–42. Murdoch, Iris, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997). Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992). Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). Murdoch, Iris, The Unicorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963). Musolff, Andreas, Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Nightingale, Andrea, ‘Augustine on Extending Oneself to God through Intention’, Augustinian Studies, 46 (2015), 185–209. Noë, Alva, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). Nussbaum, Martha C., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). O’Connell, Robert J., Images of Conversion in Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996). O’Daly, Gerald, Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). O’Donnell, James J., Augustine: A New Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). O’Donnell, James J., Augustine: Confessions, vol. 3: Commentary, Books 8–13 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). O’Donovan, Oliver, The Problem of Self-Love in Saint Augustine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). Onuf, Nicholas Greenwood, The Mightie Frame: Epochal Change and the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Pabst, Adrian, Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012). Pagels, Elaine, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).

152 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paipais, Vassilios, ‘First Image Revisited: Human Nature, Original Sin and International Relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 22 (2019), 364–388. Palmer, Humphrey, Analogy: A Study of Qualification and Argument in Theology (London: Macmillan, 1973). Papini, Giovanni, Saint Augustine, trans. Mary Prichard Agnetti (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930). Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Peele, Stanton and Archie Brodsky, Love and Addiction (Watertown, MA: Broadrow Publications, 2015). Pelagius, ‘To Demetrias’, in The Letters of Pelagius and his Followers, ed. B. R. Rees (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1991). Pelagius, Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistles to the Romans, trans. Theodore de Bruyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Pickstock, Catherine, ‘Music: Soul, City and Cosmos after Augustine’, in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, eds. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999). Prendiville, John G., ‘The Development of the Idea of Habit in the Thought of Saint Augustine’, Traditio, 28 (1972), 29–99. Rahner, Karl, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder & Herder, 1997). Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Remer, Gary A., Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Rigby, Paul, The Theology of Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Cambridge University Press). Rist, John M., Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Roberts, Veronica, ‘Augustine’s Ciceronian Response to the Ciceronian Patriot’, Perspectives on Political Science, 45 (2016), 113–124. Robertson, David G., ‘Augustine and the Transcendent Vision of Other Souls’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 56 (2018), 413–427. Rombs, Ronnie, ‘Augustine on Christ’, in T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology, eds. C. C. Pecknold and Tarmo Toom (London: T&T Clark, 2013). Runciman, W.  G., Great Books, Bad Arguments: Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Ruokanen, Miikka, Theology of Social Life in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1993).

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

153

Russell, Frederick H., ‘“Only Something Good Can be Evil”: The Genesis of Augustine’s Secular Ambivalence’, Theological Studies 51 (1990), 698–716. Schäfer, Rieke, ‘Historicizing Strong Metaphors: A Challenge for Conceptual History’, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 7 (2012), 28–51. Schüll, Natasha Dow, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Siedentop, Larry, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Smith, James K. A., You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016). Sontag, Susan, ‘Tuesday, and After’, The New  Yorker, 24th September 2001, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/24/tuesday-and-aftertalk-of-the-town. Stead, Christopher, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Steele, C.  E. W., Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Stock, Brian, The Integrated Self: Augustine, the Bible, and Ancient Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Studer, Basil, ‘History and Faith in Augustine’s De Trinitate’, Augustinian Studies, 28 (1997), 7–50. Studer, Basil, The Grace of Christ and the Grace of God in Augustine of Hippo: Christocentrism or Theocentrism? (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997). Stump, Eleonore, ‘Augustine on Free Will’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, eds. David Vincent Meconi and Eleonore Stump, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Suganami, Hidemi, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Szalavitz, Maia, ‘Most of Us Still Don’t Get it: Addiction is a Learning Disorder’, Pacific Standard, 4th August 2014, https://psmag.com/social-justice/usstill-dont-get-addiction-learning-disorder-87431. Tassi, Aldo, ‘Person as the Mask of Being’, Philosophy Today, 37 (1993), 201–210. Taylor, Charles, The Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Teske, Roland J., To Know God and the Soul: Essays on the Thought of St. Augustine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). Thompson, Samantha E., ‘What Goodness Is: Order as Imitation of Unity in Augustine’, The Review of Metaphysics, 65 (2012), 525–553. Torchia, Joseph, Restless Mind: Curiositas & the Scope of Inquiry in St. Augustine’s Psychology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2013). van Egmond, Bart, Augustine’s Early Thought on the Redemptive Function of Divine Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

154 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

van Oort, Johannes, Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of his Doctrine of the Two Cities (Leiden: Brill, 1991). Vorster, N., ‘A Critical Assessment of John Milbank’s Christology’, Acta Theologica, 32 (2012), 277–298. Vossler, Karl, Medieval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and his Times, trans. William Cranston Lawton (New York: Ungar, 1929). Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951). Weil, Simone, Notebooks, vol. 2, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951). Weil, Simone, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951). Weithman, Paul, ‘Augustine’s Political Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, eds. David Vincent Meconi and Eleonore Stump, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Wetzel, James, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Wetzel, James, ‘Splendid Vices and Secular Virtues: Variations on Milbank’s Augustine’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 32 (2004), 271–300. Wetzel, James, Parting Knowledge: Essays after Augustine (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013). Wiley, Tatha, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2002). Williams, Bernard, ‘The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato’s Republic’, in his The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Williams, Rowan, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Williams, Scott M., ‘Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and John Duns Scotus: On the Theology of the Father’s Intellectual Generation of the Word’, Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales’, 77 (2010), 35–81. Wills, Garry, Saint Augustine (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999). Wydra, Harald, Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Zizioulas, John D., Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985). Zizioulas, John D., Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: T & T Clark, 2006).

Index1

A Adam, 14, 39–40, 43–48, 68, 91 Adams, Jeremy duQuesnay, 93 Addiction, 49–50, 82–83 Alexander, James, 5 Analogy, 2–5 and Augustine’s ontology, 22–23 Anthony the Great, Saint, 85 Anthropological analogy, 3–6, 14–15, 58–59, 140–141 Ciceronian, 62–68 Platonic, 57–58 Antonaccio, Maria, 72n5 Architecture, 28–29 Arendt, Hannah, 49, 76 Aristocracy, late Roman, 54–55 Asad, Talal, 98–99 Athanasius of Alexandria, 44 Attention, 15, 74–76, 86–87, 134 and faith, 134–135 and the populus, 93–94 as waiting, 135

Augustine accused of modalism, 105n3 attitude to schismatics, 10–11 conversion of, 2, 80–88, 134–135 extrapolation from own experience, 79 Manichaean period, 18–19 in popular culture, 17–18 youthful theft of pears, 1–2 Ayres, Lewis, 111 B Babies, 69 Babylon, 11, 59 Baptism, 96, 97, 121 Beauty, 28–29 Benner, Drayton C., 105n3 Biblical teaching on baptism, 96 denigration of the body, 116 eschatological perception, 123

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Holland, Self and City in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Recovering Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19333-1

155

156 

INDEX

Biblical teaching (cont.) on God as love, 105 Pelagian view, 53–54 on the Word, 111–113 Bodies and embodiment, 116–117 in the Heavenly City, 123–124 of Jesus, 117, 120–123 Bottici, Chiara, 3 Brague, Rémi, 134 Brown, Peter, 12, 47, 54, 89–90, 116, 117, 131 Burnaby, John, 17n2 Burnell, Peter, 51, 127 Burrus, Virginia, 123 C Cain, 59 Camus, Albert The Plague, 17 Cato the Younger, 64 Cavadini, John C., 103 Cavanaugh, William T., 98, 121 Chadwick, Henry, 11n39 Change, 24, 79 Charity (caritas), 43 Christman, John, 3n5 Church, the, 15, 121–122 as the Heavenly City, 8–9, 11n38 as the Pilgrim City, 98–101 sacraments of, 96–97, 121–122 as signum of Heavenly City, 7–8 Cicero, 60, 62–63, 66–67, 107, 108 Augustinian critique of anthropological analogy, 63–68 on justice, 91–92 and the res publica, 92–95 Civitas (city), 6 Clement of Alexandria, 44 Coleman, Janet, 136–137 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 111 Common vs. private goods, 34–35, 37

Communication, theory of, 95 Confession, sacrament of, 96 Confessiones (Conf.) audience of, 96 on Augustine’s theft of pears, 1–2 on babies, 69 conception of the will, 71 on creation from nothing, 19, 38 on divided will, 47, 83–85 on effects of attention to God, 135–136 on habit and addiction, 49–50, 80–81, 84–86 on love as weight, 76–77 on others’ conversion stories, 85–86 on self-forgetfulness, 87 on sin as swelling, 132–133 on value judgments, 25 Connelly, Michael, 124n32 Contra Iulianum (C. Iul.) quoting Cicero, 63 Conversion, 13, 88–89, 100, 121 Converts (pilgrims), 12–13, 70, 89–90, 98–99, 114 Cordner, Christopher, 74 Corruption, 38 Couenhoven, Jesse, 39 Cranz, F. Edward, 8n29 Crawford, Matthew, 75 Creation goodness of, 13, 19–23, 35 from nothing (creatio de nihilo), 20, 38, 43, 100 special case of man, 46 Cupiditas (or libido) dominandi, 52, 55, 59, 74–75 Cupidity (cupiditas), 52 D De baptismo contra Donatistas (Bapt. c. Don.), 96

 INDEX 

De civitate Dei contra paganos (Civ. Dei), 6 on attributes of an artist, 107 on Christ and the Church, 121 on Christ as Mediator, 118 on Church as Heavenly City on pilgrimage, 8 on Civil War, 61–62 on corruption of the will, 39 as critiquing Cicero, 63 on desire for glory, 60–61 on eschatological cities, 6, 7 on the Fall, 39–41, 43, 91 on fallen condition, 47–48, 78 on goodness of creation, 31–33 on imperfection within the Church, 99 introduction of anthropological analogy, 58–59 on love as weight, 77 on Manichaeism, 19 on ordered love, 92, 114 on original sin, 44, 45 on peace, 51, 131, 137–138 on populus and the res publica, 93, 98 on proud ‘virtues,’ 64 on quicklime, 69 on resurrection bodies, 123–124 on the sanctified self, 138 on simplicity, 24–25 on trinity of existence, knowledge and love, 106–107 on the unsaved within the Church, 97 De correctione Donatistarum (Cor. Don.) on the unsaved within the Church, 97 De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus (Div. qu.) on invisibility of unmediated God, 120–121 De doctrina Christiana (Doc. Chr.) on hierarchy of ordered love, 41–42 on the Incarnation, 119 on signs, 95

157

De Genesi ad litteram (Gn. litt.) on measure, number and weight, 30 on the two loves, 43 De Genesi adversus Manichaeos (Gn. adv. Man.) on God’s will, 20 De libero arbitrio (Lib. arb.) on common goods, 34 on the Fall, 39 on hierarchy of goods, 32–34 integritas in, 31 on temporality and beauty, 22 on truth and judgment, 26–28 on truth of number, 28 on the will, 71 De Magistro (Mag.) on signs, 95 De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum (Mor.) on change for the better, 79 on God as highest good, 21 on justice, 92 on unity and order, 29–30 De musica (Mus.), 125–126, 128 De natura boni contra Manichaeos (Nat. bon.) on corruption and hierarchy, 32 on God as highest good, 20–21 De sermone Domini in monte (S. Dom. mon.) on hypocrites, 67–68 De Trinitate (Trin.) on attention of the mind, 76, 81–82 on faith, 139 on Father and Son, 112–113, 119 on the Holy Spirit, 113, 138 lover-love-beloved analogy, 105–106 on physical vs. spiritual goods, 49 psychological analogy, 108–110, 112 rejection of political analogies, 105 on Trinitarian personhood, 118 on the will, 46, 77 on wisdom and memory, 95

158 

INDEX

De vera religione (Ver. rel.) on beauty and unity, 28–29 on judgment, knowledge and truth, 25–27 on peace in the human body, 31 Distention (distentio), 15, 132–134 Domestic analogy, 3–4 Dopamine, 82–83 Drever, Matthew, 38, 116 Dylan, Bob ‘I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine,’ 17 E Earthly City (civitas terrena), 6, 14, 57–68 distention in, 133–134 ends of, 8 and Hebrew scripture, 59 and the ‘natural’ self, 65–66 power and conflict in, 61–62, 65 and Roman values, 59–61, 66–68 and Stoic/Pelagian self-sufficiency, 55, 62–64 Egocentrism, 72–73 Elshtain, Jean, 57 Enarrationes in Psalmos (En. Ps.) on Being-Itself, 24 Enchiridion (Ench.), 119 Epictetus, 57, 66 Epistulae (Ep.) on disunity in created things, 24 on sacraments, 97 Erections, prelapsarian, 40 Eucharist, 96, 121–122 Evans, Gillian, 41 Evil, 18–19, 38–39 Existence, 22–23, 29 Exposition quarundum propositionum ex Epistula Apostoli ad Romanos (Ex. ep. Rom) on sin and grace, 89 Extension (extensio), 15, 135

F Faith, 134–135, 137–139 Flesh (sarx), 116–117 Foucault, Michael, 99n70 Frankfurt, Harry G., 83n41 Frede, Michael, 56 Freedom, 75, 78, 127, 138–139 Free will, 14, 53–57, 75 Frend, W. H. C., 90 G Gambling addiction, 82–83 Gilson, Etienne, 65 Glory, desire for, 60–61 God, 105, 107 eternity of, 28 image of, 115 as relational, 128 simplicity of, 24–25 as the supreme good, 20–21, 23, 35 will of, 20 Good and evil, opposition of, 18–19 Goodness of Creation, 13, 19–23, 35 of God, 21, 23, 25, 35 middling good, 70 Grace, 46, 53–54, 79–80, 88–91 Gregory of Nyssa, 105 H Habit (consuetudo), 49–50, 80–85 means of breaking, 85, 86 Hanby, Michael, 114–115 Happiness, 114–115 eudaimonistic ethics, 64 Harrison, Carol, 22, 71–72 Heavenly City, 6, 104, 122–129, 138–140 analogy with self of the saint, 124–125 bodies in, 123–124 Church as, 8–9, 11n38

 INDEX 

foreshadowed in the saeculum, 7–8 justice in, 125 relational (‘musical’) structure, 125–128, 140 Herdt, Jennifer, 41 Hierarchy of goods, 13, 31–35, 41–42 in Heavenly City, 125 Holy Spirit, 113, 121, 138 Hundert, E. J., 66 Hypocrisy, 67–68 I Incorruptibility, 25 In Johannis evangelium tractatus (Jo. ev. tr.) on baptism, 97 on changeableness, 24 on immutability and eternity, 28 on the Incarnation, 119, 120 on need for Mediator, 118 Injustice, 98 Integre/integritas, 26, 31 prelapsarian, 40 Intention (intentio), 15, 134, 138–140 Irenaeus of Lyon, 44 Israel, 59 J James, William, 86 Jerusalem, 7 Jesus Christ, 45, 54, 117–122 and the City of God, 122–123 as the Son, 112–113, 119 as the Word, 111–112, 118–121 John Cassian, 73 John Chrysostom, 44 Judgment, 25–27, 32 Julian of Eclanum, 54–55 Justice (iustitia), 58, 91–92, 94 in the Earthly City, 62

159

in the Heavenly City, 125 in the Pilgrim City, 99–100 Justin Martyr, 44 K King, Peter, 31 Knot imagery, 41, 132 Knowledge, 25–26, 112–113 L Language, theory of, 95 Lewis, C. S., 86 Love analogy with the Trinity, 105–106 in the convert or pilgrim, 70 and faith, 135, 138 of God, 43, 115 and the Holy Spirit, 113, 138 justice as, 92 loving attention (Murdoch), 74–75 ordered, 41–42 of self, 43, 55, 59 and will, 56, 72, 76–78 Lucretia, 64 M MacKinnon, Patricia L., 5–6 MacQueen, D. J., 59–60 Manichaeism, 18–19 Markus, Robert A., 6–8, 10–11, 70, 91, 133 Marrou, Henri-Irénée, 7n21 Material goods, 33 Mathematics, 28 Measure, 30 Mediator, Jesus as, 118–121 Memory, 108–110, 115, 135–137 and word, 112 Mental goods, 34

160 

INDEX

Milbank, John, 3n4, 8–11, 51, 70, 92, 100, 114, 127 Miles, Margaret, 46n16, 48 Mind, 108–110, 115 Murdoch, Iris, 72–78, 86, 88, 135 Music, 125–126, 136 N Nativity, the, 119 Nature, 65 Nightingale, Andrea, 134–135 Nimrod, 59 Number, 30 Nussbaum, Martha, 78 O Obedience, 91 O’Connell, Robert J., 87–88 O’Donnell, James J., 40n6, 55n41 O’Donovan, Oliver, 139–140 Oratory, 66–67, 107 Order, 29–31, 35 in Roman oratory, 67 Ordered love, 41–42, 92 Original sin, 44–45, 53–54 P Pagels, Elaine, 45 Papini, Giovanni, 11n40 Participation in God, 13, 21, 29, 32, 115 Passions, 114 Paul, Saint and Augustine’s concept of grace, 79–80, 89, 90 on Christ and the Church, 121 conversion of, 136 on faith, 135 on the flesh, 116 on justice, 92

Peace (pax), 13, 31, 50–51, 140 in the Earthly City, 62 in the Pilgrim City, 137–138 pride and, 41, 52 tension and, 15, 131–132 Pelagianism, 14, 52–57, 64, 80, 114 and free will, 53, 55–57, 70–71 Peregrinus, 12–13 Perfection, 20–21, 136–137 in Pelagianism, 54 Person (persona), 65–66, 118 Perversion, 41 Philosophy, Greco-Roman, 52 eudaimonism, 64 Pickstock, Catherine, 126–128 Pilgrim City (civitas peregrina), 15, 98–101, 103, 134, 137–138 as implicit tertium quid, 11–12 terminology, 12–13 Plato Republic, 57–58 Political liberalism, 10 Populus, 92–94, 97–98 Prayer, 86 Prelapsarian state, 39–40, 46 Pride (superbia), 68 in apparent virtue, 64 Pelagian free will as, 55, 57 and power over others, 52 as primal sin, 14, 40–43, 68 scriptural examples, 59 as self-punishment, 50–52, 68 as swelling, 132–133 Pride of place (principandi superbia), 60, 133 Private, the, 34–35, 37, 41 privatised justice, 91 R Rawls, John, 10 Reason, 114

 INDEX 

Res, 94 and signum, 7–8, 95–98, 122 Res publica, 92–95, 97–98 Ricoeur, Paul, 137 Rombs, Ronnie, 117–118 Rome, 11, 59–61, 98 public life, 66–67 Romulus and Remus, 59–60 Russell, Frederick H., 18n4 S Sacraments, 96–97, 121–122 Saeculum, 7–10, 70 faith as belonging to, 139 Saints, 79, 115, 138–139 Self, 3n5, 65–68, 103–104 Self-division, 46–50, 61–62, 68, 81–86, 132 Self-love, 43, 55, 59 Self-possession, 14, 56–57, 62–65, 127 Sermones (Serm.) on Christ and the Church, 121–122 on goodness of Creation, 69 on the Incarnation, 120 Sexual desire, 117, 124 absence in Paradise, 40 Signum and res, 7–8, 95–98 Simplicity, 24–25, 28–29 Sin, 39, 89 in the Pilgrim City, 99–100 Sontag, Susan, 34n15 Soul, 48 and body, 65, 125–126 and music, 125–126 in Plato, 58 weight of, 76–77 Sovereignty, 60–62, 68 Spiritual goods, 33–34 Stead, Christopher, 79n31 Stoics elevation of reason, 114 free will, 56, 57, 62, 70–71

161

self and persona, 65–66 self-sufficiency as virtue, 64–65 Studer, Basil, 118, 139 Sulla, 61 T Tension, 15, 131–132 Tertullian, 44, 105 Theophilus of Antioch, 44 Thompson, Samantha E., 27 Time, 12–13, 22, 28, 133, 135–137 Tractatus in epistulam Johannis ad Parthos (Jo. ep. tr.) on love, 76 on sacrament of anointing, 97 Trinity, the, 104–115, 117–118, 121 analogy of existence, truth and love, 106–108, 114–115 analogy of lover, love and beloved, 105–106 psychological analogy, 108–113, 115 Truth, 25–29, 95 U Understanding, 108–110, 115 Unity, 13, 28–29, 35, 140–141 of the Godhead, 119–120, 128 Unselfing, 73–74, 85–88 V Victorinus, Gaius Marius, 85, 106n5 Virtue, 64 W War, 62 Weal, 94 Weight, 30, 80 of the soul, 76–77 Weil, Simone, 73n13

162 

INDEX

Wetzel, James, 12, 51–52, 89, 96n65 Will, 71–72 of Adam, 39, 45–47 as analogue of Holy Spirit, 113 as creator of value (Murdoch), 72–73 and habit, 49–50, 81–86 and love, 56, 72, 76–78

memory, understanding and, 108–110 Williams, Rowan, 115, 125, 128–129, 136 Wisdom (sapientia), 95, 112–113 Word, the (Logos/Verbum), 111–112, 117–121