Evil's Conundrum

Early in Confessions, Augustine offers two conceptual frameworks for understanding evil.Footnote ² One account provides a psychological explanation, focusing on the will's excessive attachment to earthly goods in its anxious desire to secure a permanent mooring in the sea of time and circumstance. According to Augustine, evil arises when we seek to overcome our fundamental lack as mortal creatures by attaching ourselves to changeable goods in excess of their quality and being. We confuse mutable for immutable goods, drawn as we are to objects of beauty that are finite and contingent in our restless quest for enduring happiness. In the process, we elevate the value of temporal goods to a status they neither deserve nor can sustain. Augustine understands that such desires are sinful because they are disordered. They fail to draw the correct measure in our commerce with the world and leave us unhappy and unsatisfied. Indeed, such pursuits of happiness are doomed to fail given that we have tethered our hopes to goods that are fated to decay.Footnote ³ Our desires will remain unquenched and our sense of internal order will remain off-kilter insofar as we fail to draw delight and direction from God as the Supreme Good. Confused about the qualitative difference between eternity and time, between unchanging and changing goods, we attach our loves to gifts of death.Footnote ⁴ In these terms Augustine concludes the first book of Confessions, after recounting his years of infancy and early youth: “In this lay my sin, that not in [God] was I seeking pleasures, distinctions, and truth, but in myself and in the rest of [God's] creatures, and so I fell headlong into pains, confusions, and errors.”Footnote ⁵

This picture of desire provides Augustine a psychological explanation for why humans commit wrongdoing, an explanation that seeks to defend divine justice against Manichaean criticisms of Christian beliefs. According to Augustine, humanity, not God, is to be held responsible for evil's existence in the world. Evil arises not from God's creation but from a will that turns away from God “and lapses into fornication”—an image that Augustine uses in Confessions to describe our defection from the Supreme Good in the quest to find happiness in more immediate and tangible realities.Footnote ⁶ Desirous for security, anxious about mortality, we attach ourselves to temporal goods as if they were everlasting. We thereby turn the world into a theater of idols.

Augustine famously complicates this psychological account with his story of the pears in Book 2 of Confessions. As an adolescent he conspired with friends to steal a neighbor's pears, a seemingly trivial act of vandalismFootnote ⁷ to which Augustine attaches great significance. He wonders what could have motivated him to steal given that he had plenty of better pears immediately available to him. His answer only darkens the picture of evil that he has offered to that point in Confessions. He stole them for the sake of stealing itself. “There was no motive for my malice except malice,”Footnote ⁸ Augustine admits, adding, “I feasted on the sin, nothing else.”Footnote ⁹ Other vices make motivational sense insofar as we seek out beauty in those acts, however counterfeit that beauty might be. But there was no beauty in stealing the pears—no good, the desire for which can explain the boys' theft. He asks, “To do what was wrong simply because it was wrong—could I have found pleasure in that?”Footnote ¹⁰ His answer connects the act to a metaphysical nullity: “From that theft I found nothing to love.” Not even the “shadowy beauty with which vice allures us” can explain his theft.Footnote ¹¹ To the idea that he loved not the theft but the camaraderie of those with whom he conspired, he sticks to this same point: The “gang-mentality too was a nothing.”Footnote ¹² In that “unfriendly form of friendship,” he confesses, “I was greedy for another's loss without any desire on my part to gain anything or to settle a score.”Footnote ¹³ It was deprivation—the privation of a good—and nothing more that drove Augustine and his friends to thievery. Explanations for such an action are wanting, as there was no substantive end to which the act could be aimed as a basis for moving the will.Footnote ¹⁴ Augustine rather aspired to divine-like sovereignty and freedom, uncreated and non-contingent—independent of any rational end to which his conduct might give account. He sought arbitrary liberty, liberty whose exercise was his alone to authorize. A narrative about what seems like a minor sin thus provides a conceptual window into evil's deeper mystery. For Augustine, the ground of arbitrary, unmotivated evil in the will is a surd, dark and inaccessible, mute and irrational.Footnote ¹⁵ It is approachable by way of querying and approximation but it finally defies human categories of psychological understanding.Footnote ¹⁶

It is tempting to conclude that Augustine is either confused or equivocal about the relation between evil and human agency because he seems not to care about resolving the tensions between his explanatory and non-reductive accounts. The tension consists in an account of evil as motivated, prompted, and (improperly) ordered toward a finite good, on the one hand, and an account of evil as spontaneous, radically and arbitrarily free, and sui generis, on the other. Understood within the sweep of Confessions, however, the pear scene works less to overturn Augustine's psychological explanation than to segue into his second main account of evil, his ontological account, which he introduces in Book 3. Understood ontologically, evil is a deficiency, a diminishment of good. Here we detect resonances between the ontology of evil and Augustine's non-reductive claim that the theft of pears and the gang-mentality of his friends were each “a nothing.” When we philosophize about evil in relation to “that which is” rather than in relation to human agency or “reasons for action,” Augustine avows, we are to conceive of it in terms of the diminishment of being.

Here, too, Manichaean ideas provide a foil. When recalling his discussions with the Manichees about the origin of evil, Augustine notes that his efforts were frustrated by a picture of a deity that was “confined to a material form with hair and nails.”Footnote ¹⁷ Tellingly, Augustine adds that a worldview “restricted to seeing material shapes with my eyes and imaginary forms in my mind”Footnote ¹⁸ left him with “no inkling of what there could be in us which would give grounds for saying that we are made in the image of God.”Footnote ¹⁹ More to the point, the idea of an anthropomorphic god offered no room for notions of immateriality and infinity, “present everywhere, as a spirit is, and as God is,” as found in Platonic and Christian philosophy. A metaphysic understood as including immateriality and infinity enabled Augustine to conceive of evil not as some part of creation or as some substance that a material deity once fashioned. Rather, Augustine came to define evil as an absence, a privatio boni. He writes: “Evil is nothing but the diminishment of good to the point where nothing at all is left.”Footnote ²⁰

How to harmonize these two accounts of evil, the psychological and the onto-logical, is not obvious. Augustine's psychological view seems not to track his ontological view; excess and deficiency describe altogether different manifestations of evil in the world. In general, his psychological experience of desire seems disconnected from his philosophical theory of being—no small problem for a memoir that seeks to make sense of history and experience in light of the reasons behind them.Footnote ²¹ Regarding the topic of evil, this detachment borders on alienation. We are presented with metaphors that identify evil affections according to opposite extremes: inordinate love that is, at the same time, a kind of vacancy. In The City of God, Augustine speaks to this point when he describes Adam's defection from God as “like trying to see darkness or to hear silence.”Footnote ²² Hence evil's conundrum: Can we coherently say that we indeed love darkness and silence in our excessive attachment to light and sound, to color and melody? Augustine himself articulates this question when he asks, “Who can observe things that are lacking?”Footnote ²³

I want to explore this conundrumFootnote ²⁴ not in the abstract but as it helps to launch inquiry into Augustine's understanding of desire, friendship, and alterity in Confessions. I do so not out of an idiosyncratic interest but because Augustine himself invites us down this path by turning from his discussions of evil in Confessions 1–3 to the story of the death of an unnamed childhood friend in Book 4. Augustine narrates his feelings in response to this death as if he wants us not to untangle the inner tensions of the conundrum of evil but to grasp its potential to speak in religious and philosophical terms about friendship, moral psychology, and the epistemic aspects of virtue. During this phase of his life, Augustine's world was populated by idols, created by an anthropocentric imaginary, and driven by self-love known as cupiditas.Footnote ²⁵ Reflections on death and friendship resume in response to a second significant death, that of Monica, narrated in Book 9. Here Augustine revisits love and the affections within a theocentric imaginary, one that leads him to re-poetize friendship and to grieve in ways that express an altogether different emotional repertoire. At this later point in his life, he mourns in ways that are iconic rather than idolatrous, motivated by a love of neighbor informed by caritas. An iconic, theocentric imaginary enables him to perceive mutable goods neither as temptations to excess nor as vessels of nullity but as disclosively real and truly other.

In what follows I will show how Augustine's conundrum of evil exposes the intertwining of psychological and ontological aspects of the materialist relation to the world and the narcissistic orientation to his friends that chracterized his late adolescence and early adult life. For Augustine, narcissism and idolatry are two sides of the same coin, forged together by the self as the reference point for conceiving of both God and neighbor. What is basic about such loves is that, as forms of projection, they cannot point beyond themselves to something more, only to something less.

But Augustine will leave us with more than a judgment about how not to love in Confessions. He will contrast the worldview he possessed as a Manichean with his ability, informed by a Platonized Christianity, to perceive mutable goods iconically. When viewed in this way, sensible phenomena point beyond themselves to enduring principles that secure temporal reality's objectivity and alterity, making that reality available to us independently of our desire to grasp it for confidence and control. Anticipating a theme of Iris Murdoch, Augustinian ethics emphasizes the importance of seeing reality as it is rather than as one wishes.Footnote ²⁶ As I will show, in Confessions Augustine represents caritas, iconicity, and heterology as mutually supportive facets of mind and will. In a universe viewed iconically rather than idolatrously, mutable goods point beyond their surface beauty to objective values according to which they find meaning and provide order and direction to human affections. Desires can thereby become indexed against an order of things that is independent of human wishes and constructions. This order of things can serve to determine whether our desires, inexorably arising from the soul, are indeed desirable.

Noting that Augustine acquires what Donald Evans calls a different “onlook” Footnote ²⁷ can help us understand Augustine's conversion from cupiditas to caritas. According to Evans, an onlook is a matter of looking “on x as y.”Footnote ²⁸ Having an onlook differs from having an opinion or abstract conceptualization of x; an onlook entails more than having a “perspective” on x. Onlooks rather involve us by way of feeling, posture, commitment, vision, and intentionality. Evans proposes five features of an onlook: 1) it is “commissive,” reflecting a policy or an expression of intention; 2) it is autobiographical, involving the self both behaviorally and attitudinally; 3) it is expressive of feelings, which are logically connected to the words and ideas that shape an onlook; 4) it involves a posture toward the world—it is not neutral or detached; and 5) it has a “verdictive” component, such that looking “on x as y” means “placing x within a structure, organization, or scheme.”Footnote ²⁹ For Evans, the commissive and verdictive aspects of an onlook are especially important. “In saying ‘I look on x as y,’” he writes, “I commit myself to a policy of behavior and thought, and I register my decision that x is appropriately described as y; my utterance combines an undertaking with a judgment… . One undertakes to do certain things, viewing them or interpreting them in a certain way.”Footnote ³⁰

Augustine's conversion meant acquiring an onlook that saw the world in a way that was freed from his narcissistic tendency to assimilate it to himself—as if the world could be conceived (like a material deity) in his own image. In his early years, Augustine's relation to the world is self-referring in a pejorative sense. Caritas brings in its wake an onlook toward the world in its alterity and, with that, its independent goodness. That gift of otherness, along with its ethical implications, is made plain in Augustine's recollection of Monica's death in Book 9, for which the death of his childhood friend serves as clear contrast in Confessions’ narrative.

Developing these claims and the connections between cupiditas, idolatry, and narcissism will require several steps. That discussion will prepare us to see how Augustine triangulates caritas, iconicity, and heterology as graced dispositions of the mind and will—as describing what it means to love one's neighbor “in God.” These ideas will also generate insights about vision, friendship, and virtue to which I will direct our attention. Augustine's grievous responses to the deaths of his friends provide a window into his more general understanding of what counts as real and how the virtuous mind and will recondition his onlook toward the world and his understanding of the self–other relationship. That is to say, his moments of grief point to different modes of feeling and friendship as well as to an epistemology of the real, the latter of which is often construed reductively in Augustinian ethics. I will seek to nuance that account before concluding. To explore those points, let us turn to Augustine's account of love, loss, and grief as he first describes them in Confessions.

Cupiditas, Idolatry, and Narcissism

Augustine initially describes his unnamed friend in Book 4 not in terms of particularities or peculiarities that mark him off as a distinct individual but in terms of the two friends’ similarities. Indeed, the fact that Augustine fails to mention his friend's name—a signifier of individuation—is telling. De-particularized, the young man's res lacks a signum. The two men mirror each other in body, age, and outlook; what was important for Augustine was his friend's likeness, not his difference. The two shared the fact that they were “intellectually astray,” agreeing about matters of superstition and myth on the basis of Augustine's persuasive rendering of Manichean ideas. But their friendship, while including a measure of unity and affection, fell short of “true friendship,” in which people are bound fast in charity.Footnote ³¹ Here we see echoes of Augustine's earlier concerns about an “unfriendly form of friendship” of the sort that he mentioned in Book 2. What appears to make such bonding possible in Augustine's mind during this stage of his life is mimesis—the apparent identity of difference, the mutuality of self-imaging.

Indeed, the two young men's similarity is intense; their friendship is less a bonding of two distinct persons than an absorption of two souls into one, a reduction of identity—both personal and numerical. Augustine writes: “I felt that my soul and his had been but one soul in two bodies.”Footnote ³¹ Their relationship mimics in reverse the idea of Christ as two natures in one person; theirs is an inverted Christology, a parody of loss and exaltation. Equally important, the two friends are starkly co-dependent. “My soul could not bear to be without him,” Augustine writes; at his friend's bedside, “I did not leave him, so closely we were dependent on each other.”Footnote ³³ Augustine “shrank from life with loathing,” because the idea of his friend's death left him with the unendurable consequence of being “only half alive.”Footnote ³⁴ For these reasons, the idea of difference—and, with that, objectivity and individuation—left Augustine deeply addled. When confronted by his friend's apparent embrace of Christianity after being baptized in a state of unconsciousness, Augustine felt “aghast and troubled” by his friend's “new found independence.”Footnote ³⁵ Augustine deferred telling his friend his true thoughts about his baptism on the premise that “once he was in normal health again I would be able to do what I liked with him.”Footnote ³⁶

Augustine's grief at the passing of his friend was considerable. “I was beset by misery and bereft of my joy,” he writes. “I was miserable, and miserable too is everyone whose mind is chained by friendship with mortal things, and is torn apart by their loss, and then becomes aware of that misery that it was even before it lost them.”Footnote ³⁷ His grief's lack of order smacks of the inordinate value he attached to earthbound goods. But exactly what Augustine grieved and how his grief arose from a wider repertoire of emotions are not obvious. Plainly, it was not the loss of the friend that distressed him. His grief was diffuse and self-indulgent. He confesses that it was not out of hope that his friend would “come back” that he mourned. It was rather the tide of emotion itself on which Augustine centered his being. “Weeping alone brought me solace,” he writes; sorrow substituted for his friend “as the only comfort of my soul.”Footnote ³⁸ He experienced a loss of self in his sadness, a profound sense of despair. “I wept bitterly and found repose in the bitterness,” he admits.Footnote ³⁹ A species of cupiditas, Augustine's grief had himself as his object.

Augustine's mourning became melancholia, driven not (as Freud would have it) by internalized self-reproach but by obsessive narcissism and myopia. On Freud's account, mourning is a feeling of sadness and distress upon the experience of loss. Freudian melancholia is more: It is a pathological expression of mourning—the internalization of dejection such that the grieving person experiences a radical, punishing loss of self-esteem. “The distinguishing mental features of melancholia,” Freud writes, “are a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Freudian melancholics believe that they deserve the grievous state they are in. They blame the victim—themselves. But Augustine does not blame himself for his friend's death. Rather, he experienced his friend's death passively, as if death had visited him. That feature of Augustine's response mirrored the Manichean god in whom he believed—a deity whose goodness was, in the words of Peter Brown, “singularly passive and ineffective.”Footnote ⁴¹

Augustine's dejection prompted a new level of self-examination, crucial to his narrative's forward movement. In the wake of his friend's death, he writes, “I had become a great enigma to myself, and I questioned my soul, demanding why it was so sorrowful and why it so disquieted me.”Footnote ⁴² He found one answer in his psychological account of evil, focusing as it does on excessive attachments to earthbound loves. It was his friend “whom I loved as though he would never die, and still more amazed that I could go on living myself when he was dead—I who had been like another self to him.”Footnote ⁴³ So he exclaims: “Woe to the madness that thinks to cherish human beings as though more than human!”Footnote ⁴⁴

From this confession Augustine turns in Book 4 to a discussion of beauty, about which he also wrote a non-extant treatise. “What is it that entices and attracts us to the things we love?” he asks. He answers that we are drawn to objects of beauty, understood as having beauty in themselves and in their relations to other things: “In material objects there was both a quality inherent in the whole—beauty—and a different quality that was seemly in something that was harmoniously adapted to something else, as a part of the body to the whole, or a sandal to the foot.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet despite his ability to conceptualize a formal reality—the fact of harmony in relationships—Augustine could not grasp incorporeal reality as such; he “looked instead toward shapes and colors and distended mass.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Given his experience of peace as concord and vice as discord, he came to the conclusion that unity was the supreme good and “in disintegration some indefinable substance of irrational life was to be found, which was the essence of supreme evil.”Footnote ⁴⁷ His conception of the deity, in turn, remained within an anthropocentric imaginary, unable to reckon with ideas in terms other than human. He thus addresses God, saying: “I was prepared even to think you changeable rather than to admit that I was not what you are… . I persisted in walking after things that had no existence either in you or in me or in any creature, ideas not created for me by your truth but invented in material shape by my own vanity.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Augustine's onlook toward sensible reality as described in Book 4 was idolatrous, understanding that term in more than the familiar sense of elevating temporal realities to the status of eternal goods. The notion of an idol also bespeaks an epistemology, a way of seeing. As Jean-Luc Marion writes, “The gaze makes the idol, not the idol the gaze.”Footnote ⁴⁹ More specifically, as Margaret R. Miles observes, throughout his work Augustine presents us with two epistemologies regarding sensible reality, one that accepts sensible things as they present themselves to him, another that refuses to take their reality as given and looks beyond their surface appearance to probe their “structure, their essence, and the source of their existence.”Footnote ⁵⁰ That is to say, with Augustine, as with Plato, everything depends on the terms according to which we receive and interrogate sensible reality. For Augustine, Miles notes, “a sensible object can be either a distraction or an indispensible starting point. Nothing about the object determines whether it will act as one or the other.”Footnote ⁵¹ At the heart of the distinction between an idolatrous epistemology and an iconic one is whether one accepts surface beauty as sufficient or whether one questions it to discern more enduring principles underlying it. “The idol absorbs the gaze, dazzling it and saturating it with the visible, ravishing it,” Miles writes.Footnote ⁵² It thereby contracts rather than expands the idolater's range and depth of vision. An idol is a res without an objective signum. The icon, in contrast, “summons the gaze to surpass itself by never freezing on the visible, since the visible only presents itself here in view of the invisible.”Footnote ⁵³ In this way, the icon makes sensible reality available on terms that are not established by the observer's own desires or interests. In Book 10 of Confessions, Augustine illustrates how the iconic imagination works:

Augustine asks these questions on certain epistemological assumptions. He presumes to determine the significance of sensible reality not by jettisoning that reality but by interrogating it and thereby discerning more fundamental facts about it. In this case, sensible reality discloses a difference between creation and creator, a fundamental distinction according to which the former points to how the latter creates and sustains that which is.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such are the illuminations of the iconic epistemology whereby the mind is summoned by sense perception to surpass itself.

Augustine's discourse on beauty, desire, and the imagination in Book 4 reminds us that his theological ethics includes an aesthetic. That discourse, moreover, is connected to his preceding recollections regarding the death of his unnamed friend. Overwrought with despair, he admits to finding no repose in God “because when I thought about you [God], you did not seem to be anything solid or firm. For what I thought of was not you at all; an empty fantasy and my own error were my god.”Footnote ⁵⁶ And so Augustine was unable to see the world as manifesting anything, as having any beauty. The world was empty of potential for hierophany. Full of his own desires, Augustine saw not presence but absence, a privation of that for which he looked. “My eyes sought [my beloved] everywhere,” he writes, “but he was missing; I hated all things because they held him not, and could no more say to me, ‘Look, here he comes!’ as they had been wont to do in this lifetime when he had been away.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Within a universe populated only by decaying goods, sensible reality becomes dark and incommunicative. Augustine thus confesses his first reaction to his friend's passing: “Black grief closed over my heart and wherever I looked I saw only death.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Taken as a whole, Augustine's memory of friendship and death draws on both sides of evil's conundrum to illustrate the motivations lying behind his friendship along with the visual and emotional poverty to which it led. That is to say, his affection was marked by both excess and deficiency. Augustine is saying that these two concepts of evil, far from being opposite extremes, reinforce each other. Loving too much, according to Augustine, is not to love at all. On that basis Augustine can say that evil's dual manifestation indeed illumines rather than obscures his experience.

It is nonetheless tempting to think that Augustine's narrative of death and grief hews to only one side of evil's conundrum regarding this “unfriendly form of friendship.” James Wetzel offers one such reading in his commentary on Book 4 of Confessions. On the one hand, Wetzel rightly observes that in Book 4 Augustine describes “having done his level best to love a mortal human being as if he were immortal and presumably divine.” But to this point Wetzel adds: “The result is not that Augustine loved something of lesser value in place of something greater, but that he lost touch with the man he was loving and so had no way to take in the magnitude of his loss.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Eric Gregory repeats this idea when he writes that Augustine confesses “not that he loved too much, but that he did not really love (either the world or God) at all.”Footnote ⁶⁰ But these remarks fly in the face of Augustine's frank admission that he had loved his friend “as though he would never die”—cherishing “human beings as though more than human!”Footnote ⁶¹ The contrast that Wetzel and Gregory present between loving a lesser value in place of something greater, and losing touch with one's beloved, is a false one.

Augustine makes plain that his excessive attachment was driven by a desire to see his own image, to address his own needs on the premise that he and his friend were alike. That tendency drew from his habit of homologizing reality to himself, of projecting an anthropomorphic account of power and sovereignty onto the cosmos. As a consequence, he loved his friend as a private possession rather than as someone whose goodness could be shared. Here, echoes of the narrative of theft in Book 2 can be heard: Augustine first understood his friendship as something to be stolen and privately kept, depriving others of a basic goodness. In his desires as in his metaphysics, Augustine used himself as his reference point. As he wants to make plain throughout Confessions, how we love is a matter of the wider frameworks that shape the imagination.

Augustine's youthful friendship had its own inner poverty, the inability to embrace another who was independent and beyond his control. Indeed, it is not clear that Augustine lost touch with his friend because it is not clear that his friend was ever available to him as something other than created in his own likeness. Here, Wetzel is correct to say that Augustine's failure to love his friend in God “left his friend to be the creature of Augustine's fears and desires.”Footnote ⁶² Augustine's point is that loving too much and loving not at all are paradoxically one and the same. He underscores that idea by confessing in Book 2 that he was left thinking not about how his beloved's passing meant the loss of someone who had an independent set of interests and promise but about what his friend's death meant for his self-absorbed concerns about his own inescapable mortality. He admits to being “amazed that I could go on living myself when he was dead—I who had been like another self to him.”Footnote ⁶³ Equally important, Augustine experiences his friend's death as the taking of a possession that he had previously stolen for himself. Echoing the pear scene, he reports that he was as much the object as the subject of theft: “I believe that the more that I loved him, the more I hated death, which had taken him from me; I hated it as a hideous enemy, and feared it, and pictured it as ready to devour all human beings, since it had been able to make away with him.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Loving the Neighbor “in God”

Earlier I stated that Book 4 of Confessions stands in clear contrast with Book 9, in which Augustine recounts his feelings in response to the death of his mother, Monica. Book 9 tells us of the deaths of several friends: Monica, Verecundus, Nebridius, and his son, Adeodatus. Notably, Monica is named only once in Confessions, a signification that Augustine reserves for his prayers at the conclusion of this book.Footnote ⁶⁵ We can only speculate as to why Augustine refrains from reflecting at length on his friendships—a crucially important feature of his lifeFootnote ⁶⁶ —until they cease. Starkly, strangely, Augustine frequently associates friendship with death. Perhaps friendship represents the most intimate kind of temporal good whose passing reveals the power of time over earthbound things—the subject of Augustine's probing philosophical analysis in Book 11 of Confessions. Perhaps friendship is too easily underwritten by eros, a love that becomes extinguished in its satisfaction.Footnote ⁶⁷ Perhaps, in a Heideggerian fashion, friendship is part of Augustine's being-in-the-world, only to be reflected upon when it is disrupted or taken away. Whatever might explain the association, it is impossible to ignore how death shadows intimate friendships throughout Augustine's memoir.

In Book 9, Augustine, Monica, his brother, his friend Alypius, and others retire to a villa in Cassiciacum to live together. Their ideal was to form a community of Christian celibates. At this point in his life, Augustine slowly removes himself from his work as a rhetorician, after which time he is baptized, thereby redeeming his mother's prayers and patience. He tells of how his mother was a subservient wife, dutiful and capable of correction about matters of continence. Indeed, he goes to great lengths to describe her ordinariness and her sinfulness, a point to which I will soon return.

In Ostia, before their planned departure for Africa, they experience a shared epiphany, the third and climactic vision in the book. The hierophany they experienced is prompted by their shared reflection about the communion of saints. They then launch their sojourn by discussing the great pleasures of eternal life as opposed to earthly existence. Augustine writes:

Theirs is not a vision of the sort that Augustine describes in Book 7 of Confessions. There, Augustine ascends in Plotinian fashion from the experience of sensible objects to experiencing the condition of reflection itself, attaining “That Which Is in the flash of one tremulous glance.”Footnote ⁶⁹ That epiphany was solitary and intellectual, and it brought no informational content. Equally important, Augustine was unable to hold fast to what he had attained, drawn back as he was to sensible experience by time and habit. Nor is the Ostian vision like Augustine's conversion epiphany in Book 8, which was mediated by the verbal communication of the word of God and included theological content but was mediated to him alone, in solitude. With Monica, Augustine's experience has less to do with light or hearing than with relative silence. And, of course, in this instance Augustine is not alone: He embarks on a journey with a fellow traveler. Together they imagine the tumult of human flesh, earthly life, human dreams, and the soul all falling silent, along with “every tongue, and every sign, and whatever is subject to transience.” In that silence, he writes, “if anyone listens, all these things will tell him, ‘We did not make ourselves, he made us who abides forever.’”Footnote ⁷⁰ Augustine and Monica are informed that they are dependent, not self-originating; they are finite beings, not Being itself. There is a qualitative distinction between Creator and creation, between time and eternity.

Here, as in the passage from Book 10 noted above, Augustine expresses an iconic epistemology. Sensible reality points beyond itself to its permanent structure and its source of origination. Equally important, it communicates content. Their vision is christological and sacramental, wherein they encounter the Logos through whom they believe creation is made and structured. Within such a framework, earthly goods have relative value and death itself is not to be feared. Soon we are told that Monica herself neither despaired over her imminent death nor worried about the whereabouts of her burial. Addressing God, Augustine writes of Monica: “[She] desired only to be remembered at your altar, where she had served you with never a day's absence. From that altar, as she knew, the holy Victim is made available to us, he through whom the record of debt that stood against us is annulled… . To the sacrament of that ransom-price your handmaid made fast her soul with the bonds of faith.”Footnote ⁷¹

After Monica's death, Augustine reports that he does not weep at her funeral, but he does weep later, and he brings the narrative portion of Confessions to an end by expressing anxiety about whether his grief is excessive or inappropriate. “I found comfort in weeping before you about her and for her, about myself and for myself,” he writes.Footnote ⁷² At that critical juncture he asks publicly to confess and begs his readers not to judge him harshly for his grief surrounding her passing. But whether excessive or not, Augustine's grief is clearly not the feeling of despair of the sort he experienced with the passing of his unnamed friend. His grief draws on an altogether different emotional repertoire, focusing on Monica's future life rather than on his own fated mortality.Footnote ⁷³ “Let no one wrench her away from your protection,” Augustine implores in his prayers after her passing.Footnote ⁷⁴

Equally important, in describing her life, Augustine sees Monica not only as a devout and obedient Christian but also as a sinner like himself in need of mercy and forgiveness—in her ordinariness as well as in her saintliness. Once again we find him homologizing reality to himself, but this time the likeness is mediated by theological concepts of sin and reconciliation rather than the terms of this-worldly agreements such as he enjoyed with his unnamed friend. Like his boyhood friendship, Augustine's relationship with his mother was one of intense bonding, a cleaving of two into one. But his attachment to Monica is not cast in terms of having “one soul in two bodies.” He rather describes the bonding as between two distinct persons. “For there had been but one life,” he writes of his relationship with Monica, “woven out of mine and hers.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Augustine's grief and subsequent prayer are presented to the reader as public matters. His account presumes an iconic epistemology that allows for a gaze that moves beyond mere appearances—private appearances—to a more expansive and potentially inclusive vision. Moreover, such an epistemology has moral and interpersonal implications. Monica was not a victim to the theft wrought by death, someone kept from him and others as fate's private possession. Indeed, Augustine openly pleads with his readers to pray for her salvation. In his grief Augustine mourns not for himself, nor about himself, but on her behalf. That the epiphany in Ostia is prompted by a reflection about the communion of saints seems hardly accidental. He prays for God to forgive her and accept her into the eternal community. In other words, Augustine mourns for her hopefully and charitably, with an eye to her independent interests. His grief has been re-ordered, structured in ways that reflect a turn from vice to virtue—from cupiditas to caritas—enabling him to mourn and love his mother for her own sake. He is able to see Monica as other, independent of his own projections and points of self-reference.

Augustine's response to his mother's death enables us to grasp how caritas, iconicity, and heterology are triangulated into an altogether new onlook in Confessions. As Kim Paffenroth observes, all Augustine's friendships in Book 9 of Confessions demonstrate that he “has learned to have earthly loves that lead to and include God, rather than distract from knowledge or love of him.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Paffenroth's remark recalls a comment Augustine makes while reflecting on the death of his boyhood friend: “Blessed is he who loves you, and loves his friend in you”Footnote ⁷⁷ —loving in a way that he admits he could not do as a youth. But exactly what it means to love a neighbor “in God” is seldom clear in Augustine's work. I propose that thinking in terms of an onlook that triangulates caritas, iconicity, and heterology provides an important clue. Together these ideas structure Augustine's graced dispositions of mind and will.

Metaphysically, Augustine views sensible reality within a Platonized Christianity as pointing beyond itself and as structured by a timeless principle that has been rendered available to humanity through reason and revelation. Epistemologically, that fact provides a framework that enables him to grasp reality in its own right, independently of his anxious wishes or projections. Normatively, knowledge of these facts, empowered by grace, turns the mind and will away from themselves to others’ needs and interests, however ordinary or extraordinary. Monica's death, the crescendo of the narrative portion of Confessions, thereby provides a clear contrast to the “unfriendly form of friendship” interpreted by way of evil's conundrum in Book 4.

Friendship: From Having to Being

Augustine's ethics of heterology—love of the other for her own sake—is part of a broader project of seeing the world in a way that is freed from an anthropocentric imaginary. He stands with Iris Murdoch who writes, “it is a task to come to see the world as it is.”Footnote ⁷⁸ But for Augustine, “to see the world as it is” requires an onlook that is both a gift and a task. It is a task insofar as it requires a reorientation of human tendencies and dispositions. It is a gift insofar as it arises from the mind and will transformed by grace.

One outcome of Augustine's conversion from cupiditas to caritas is the ability to experience friendship in a radically altered way: the conversion from having a friend to being a friend. In Book 4, Augustine anguishes over the friend he lost, an experience conditioned by the idea of friendship as a possession. In that context, death is a thief, stealing what it can in a seemingly heedless and arbitrary way. In Book 9, Augustine's grief over his mother's passing is conditioned not by the thought of possession but by what it means to be a friend to her in her final days and in her death. He changes from experiencing friendship passively to experiencing it actively. Put another way, Augustine's friendship with Monica was a matter of being rather than having, to recall a distinction from Gabriel Marcel's phenomenology.Footnote ⁷⁹ For Marcel, being and having point to two different ways in which we relate to other things and persons. Having pertains to things or persons that are external to me—possessions that I can lose or dispose of or use instrumentally.Footnote ⁸⁰ Being corresponds to relationships that exist on different terms. In relationships of being, the encounter with another is not one of externality but of mutuality, a matter of participation. With being, as opposed to having, one makes another's ends one's own. Relationships of being are embodied, constitutive of who one is. They thus differ from relationships in which we proceed “on a level where … the contrast between within and without retains a meaning.”Footnote ⁸¹ Strikingly, Augustine describes his relationship with Monica, as I noted earlier, in precisely such embodied terms: “For there had been but one life, woven out of mine and hers.”Footnote ⁸²

The fact of embodiment suggests that Augustine's onlook undergoes a dramatic transformation from one in which God and world are seen in anthropomorphic and bodily terms to one in which to be embodied rather means to be related-in-difference. Augustine is thereby enabled to love temporal goods that exist across a range of differentiated possibilities.Footnote ⁸³ To love is to share something fundamental to one's being in a way that respects difference. Augustine can thus distinguish himself from his mother not by keeping part of his life secret or by running from her as he had rebelliously done in his youth. With his relationship reframed and thus reconstituted, he achieves distance from her in terms of ontology, not volition.Footnote ⁸⁴ He poeticizes Monica by situating her within a new set of relationships, describing her as a member of the “brethren” under God rather than as his mother and as a “fellow-citizen” in the “eternal Jerusalem.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In that context, Augustine asks God not to allow death to steal Monica but to preserve her for those willing to pray for her and remember her.Footnote ⁸⁶ All of this reflects how his focus has shifted from what he putatively gained from friendship to what he can offer it.

Augustine's reflections upon the death of Monica suggest that he understands friendship's flow of giving and receiving in a new way. However much Augustine's intersubjectivity emphasizes mutuality and reciprocity, it remains the case that he represents true friendship—embodied friendship—as more a matter of giving than yearning to receive. To be a friend on Augustine's description requires unconditional self-giving and availability. In this way, he reveals features of love that serve as the anti-type to evil's conundrum: Desire can be appropriately attached to the goods of another when it is freed to see those goods on their own life-giving terms.

Moving across the sweep of Confessions, we should now see that Augustine leaves us with stark alternatives when it comes to friendship and the emotions. We are presented with the idea of self-centered and idolatrous love which is no true love at all, both too much and not enough. The alternative to that love is Christian love of the neighbor “in God,” in which an encounter with the beloved triangulates caritas, iconicity, and heterology. The corrective to narcissism for Augustine resides in an onlook toward the world shaped by Platonized Christianity and empowered by graced excellences.

That fact seems to provide little by way of hope or direction for non-Christians or non-Platonic Christians when it comes to an ethics of friendship and love. For non-Augustinians, to see the world as it is may be more of a task than a gift of any sort. But Augustine may leave his readers with more general, workable ideas about friendship and love if we step back from the particulars of Confessions. His key insight is that the apparent love of another can be fraught with immediacy and, with that, a lack of differentiation and respect for the beloved as an individual with claims of her own. True friendship requires a framework for interpreting the meaning of one's love on terms that are meaningful to the lover as well as the beloved. What Augustine finds in Platonic Christianity is an instance of what, he suggests, we all need in order to have true love: a horizon within which we contextualize our loves and acquire the ability to value our friends on terms that they can esteem. That is to say, Augustine believes that in order to befriend another we must understand what friendship is as a prior condition. We cannot grasp friendship inductively or intuitively, building up a general account of friendship based on serial relationships that we acquire over time; we need a wider onlook according to which we are able to perceive what a particular friendship signifies.Footnote ⁸⁷ Such an onlook performs work that is not unlike that of a moral rule: As action-guiding, it helps the agent set the future.Footnote ⁸⁸ If one's onlook is to enable us to grasp the otherness of our friends, moreover, it cannot be conceived in our own image. That is to say, our experience of any particular friend requires the mediation of an interpretive framework according to which that relationship makes sense on terms other than those we concoct for our own advantage.

Grief and Virtue

Augustine's two accounts of grief in Confessions should remind us of the great importance of grief as a concept in moral psychology among classical writers in the West. It should also instruct us (more importantly, at least from Augustine's point of view) that there are ways of mourning that can be either morally undesirable or commendable. Mourning need not devolve into melancholia of a Freudian sort. Rather, grief can be marked by either virtue or vice. This presupposes the idea that, for Augustine, emotions are not merely raw feelings, akin to itches or throbs. Emotions are instead moral responses, registering what we value through the passions. Our feelings thus presuppose objects that, when properly perceived, prevent us from being self-indulgent or from attaching ourselves inordinately to them. Augustine writes: “In general, as a man's will is attracted to or repelled in accordance with the varied character of different objects which are pursued or shunned, so it changes and turns into feelings of various kinds.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Emotions express an interpretation of an event, the embrace or loss of an objective good. Ideally, dejection is the expression of a properly ordered appreciation, for we would not feel a loss were we not previously attached to something genuinely valuable that has now ceased to be.

Viewing grief as potentially virtuous seems odd, of course, given our tendency to understand virtue in positive terms, as ennobling or self-enhancing. We typically associate the virtues with a good and genuinely happy life. But that fact should not prevent us from seeing how responses to loss and disconnection can also be expressions of moral excellence. Virtue, Aristotle would remind us, means feeling pleasure and pain in the right manner. Schooled in the virtues, we should feel “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way,” as he says of strong and noble character.Footnote ⁹⁰

Casting similar ideas in Christian terms, Augustine writes: “Citizens of the Holy City of God, as they live by God's standards in the pilgrimage of this present life, 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.”Footnote ⁹¹

All of this is to say that grief, like other emotions, is conditioned by the order of love that underlies it. Augustine's sadness as recalled in Books 4 and 9 tells him something about how he orders his loves. He understands desires and affections as depending on how an agent is ordered—either toward oneself or God. As Augustine writes in The City of God:

The desirability of our desires is a function of our deeper loves. Augustine thus concludes: “Consequently, these feelings are bad, if the love is bad, and good if the love is good.”Footnote ⁹³

Moreover, and equally important, Augustine's account of virtue tells us something about the complexity of desire and freedom in the moral life. Here evil's conundrum in Confessions provides an instructive counter-point. Books 1–3 teach us that vice combines inordinate desire with arbitrary freedom—freedom that aspires to be God-like, uncreated and non-contingent. Vice is thus both excessive and empty, as I noted earlier. Virtue contrasts in a parallel, two-fold sense: Desirable desires are ordered by charity, which, in turn, enables the self to choose in ways that are free from an image of the self as uncreated. All of this is made possible by the infusion of charity spread across the heart—a Pauline notion that courses throughout much of Augustine's work. In The Spirit and the Letter, Augustine writes about the proper and improper motives of moral action with this compound idea regarding desire and freedom in mind: “And if the commandment be done through fear of penalty and not through love of righteousness, it is done in the temper of servitude not freedom—and therefore it is not done at all. For there is no good fruit which does not rise from the root of charity. The man in whom is the faith that works through love, begins to delight in the law of God after the inward man, and that delight is a gift not of the letter but of the spirit.”Footnote ⁹⁴ For Augustine, proper action is carried out in a way that is free from the self's worries about its own welfare, free from fear of failing or falling short. As well, it is done with affections that are themselves shaped by charity, enabling one to delight in the Good for its own sake.

With that more general account in mind, we can say that, for Augustine, charitable grief—dolor informed by caritas—is grief that is free from anxiety about the self's own mortality and contingency, grief that is capable of imagining in loving terms what is fitting to another who has died. Virtuous grief thus re-poeticizes death, viewing it not as a finis but as having a telos, beyond the appearances of mutability and mortality.

Augustinian Realism Revisited

If I am correct about how caritas, iconicity, and heterology triangulate in Augustine's ethics of love and friendship, then it is necessary to rethink what is commonly meant by the notion of “Augustinian realism.” As influentially defined by Reinhold Niebuhr, realism in the Augustinian tradition typically positions itself between various forms of idealism, on the one hand, and cynicism, on the other. Realism for Niebuhr aspires toward aims that soberly reckon with facts about human will-to-power, sloth, and fallibility while refusing to accept such facts as the final word about what can and should be imaginatively explored in the exercise of human responsibility. As Niebuhr puts it in “Augustine's Political Realism,”

“Realism” as it has come to be known in theological ethics requires normative reasoning to reckon with certain indisputable facts about social life that reveal the limits of our will and understanding along with our dependence on and vulnerability to powers that lie beyond our control. Augustine's account of human nature, Niebuhr avowed, underwrites that line of thinking.

The core feature of Augustinian realism understood in this way is its commitment to accounting, especially accounting with the conditions of finitude within which human action occurs. Describing Niebuhr's brand of realism, Robin Lovin writes: “Realism implies recognition of the limits of purely moral solutions to political problems and calls for attention to the realities that shape social, political, and economic conflicts.”Footnote ⁹⁶ On that account, the realist must be responsive to certain incorrigible facts about history and human proclivities along the way toward developing social criticism. Such facts embarrass those who aspire, optimistically, to utopian ideals of love, social harmony, and equality. Failures in social criticism to account for what Niebuhr understood as moral recalcitrance disqualify such criticism from passing as plausibly realistic. Realism on this description counsels against this-worldly moral perfectionism.

Augustinian realism of the iconic variety I have described differs from the political realism made famous by Niebuhr. Iconic realism need not deny that human action occurs within conditions of finitude to which social critics and activists must account. It puts limits on the human desire to conceive of reality by way of a narcissistic and anthropocentric imaginary. But iconic realism identifies the practical limits of human thought and action not as a condition for being realistic but as a consequence. Iconic realism insists that knowledge of the conditions of finitude is mediated by onlooks that presuppose and express epistemic and volitional dispositions that situate human desire and action within a broader, theocentric framework. Augustinian moral and social criticism thus requires habits of interpretation as much as it does accounting.Footnote ⁹⁷ For Augustine, the task of interpretation was assisted by Platonic philosophy and its understanding of the relationship between sensible reality and its underlying, permanent structure.

For the iconic realist, what presents itself as real must indeed include a proper reckoning with human limitations, but not only those that frustrate moral perfectionism. The real is first and foremost a matter of what becomes available, donatively, through proper disclosure. As I noted earlier, for the iconic realist, gaining knowledge of reality is a gift as well as a task. Regarding matters of this essay—friendship and intimate relationships—the real thus frees the iconic realist from forming relationships driven by anxious needs and imperious attachments. That is to say, iconic realism makes possible the disclosure of the other on terms over which we have neither sovereignty nor control.Footnote ⁹⁸ Understood in that way, iconic realism is as much about freeing us to grasp what is possible as it is attentive to binding us to the constraints within which our imaginations should do their work. Augustine's iconic realism thus enables a manner of being-in-the-world according to which we may love on terms that are attuned to the neighbor in her alterity. It enables us to be available to others, experienced as gifts that we are thereby open to receive.