Instruction and Encouragement

Augustine knew the power of philosophical exhortation.Footnote ³⁰ It was Cicero's exhortation to philosophy, the Hortensius, that first “fired [his] passion for the pursuit of wisdom.”Footnote ³¹ After turning to philosophia, Augustine became especially enamored by the Neoplatonists, whose philosophy he found largely compatible with the Christian tradition.Footnote ³² Although he eventually distances himself from Neoplatonic emphases on the sufficiency of reason and the corruption of the body, he maintains aspects of his Platonic inheritance, arguing as late as City of God that “no one has come closer to [Christianity] than the Platonists.”Footnote ³³ Importantly, this Platonic tradition includes distinct appreciation for philosophy as a way of life, what Augustine sometimes describes as the “art of living.”Footnote ³⁴ Neoplatonists employed a variety of exercises—including oral commentaries on texts, dialogues between teacher and pupil, and practices of “attention”—to teach new ideas and exhort practitioners to traverse an “itinerary” intended to purify their souls and enable their “ascent” toward the divine.Footnote ³⁵ Augustine incorporates this Neoplatonic way of life into his Christian vision of ascent.Footnote ³⁶

Less recognized is Augustine's appropriation of Stoic ideas and rhetorical practices. Many interpreters—including Arendt, Rawls, Niebuhr, and Nussbaum, an accomplished scholar of Hellenistic thought—reduce Augustine's classical influences to his Neoplatonism and neglect how he adapts insights from Cicero, Seneca, and other Stoics to develop his moral and theological vision. In a recent book, Sarah Byers offers a detailed account of Augustine's “Stoic-Platonic synthesis,” highlighting how he integrates Stoicism and Platonism into his Christian account of perception and moral motivation.Footnote ³⁷ In particular, Byers argues, Augustine combines the Platonic notion that love motivates action with a Stoic account of how objects are loved under certain descriptions or perceptions, particularly as “beautiful,” “useful,” or “good.”Footnote ³⁸ To encourage these perceptions, Augustine adapts Stoic rhetorical strategies and “cognitive therapies” to transform vision and redirect desire.Footnote ³⁹ Byers is especially attentive to Augustine's use of “encouragement” or “exhortation” (exhortatio), a Stoic addition to the list of classical rhetorical forms.Footnote ⁴⁰ Augustine often relies on exhortation to “arouse the will” of his audiences.Footnote ⁴¹

Augustine's use of exhortation reflects his early education. It is notable that Augustine first read Cicero's exhortation to philosophy while studying rhetoric,Footnote ⁴² which points to an aspect of late antiquity often ignored by many political interpreters: Augustine was steeped in a rhetorical culture where learning and practicing the art of rhetoric were an essential part of the curriculum.Footnote ⁴³ Before he became a pastor and theologian, Augustine was an accomplished student of rhetoric, winning oratorical contests as a teenager and eventually emerging as the “ablest student in the school of rhetoric” at Carthage.Footnote ⁴⁴ He went on to teach rhetoric in Thagaste, Carthage, and Rome before being appointed the emperor's professor of rhetoric in Milan. Although he eventually abandoned his prestigious post, he often employed the rhetorical devices he had perfected early in his career.Footnote ⁴⁵ In debates with religious dissenters, councils with Catholic bishops, letters to Roman officials, and sermons to Christian congregations, he exercised the arts of rhetoric with great frequency and skill. Ultimately, he knew that “one who tries to speak not only wisely but eloquently will be more useful if he can do both.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Augustine's defense of rhetoric's moral purposes reflects his understanding of human nature and its two primary defects: ignorance (ignorantia) and weakness (infirmitas).Footnote ⁴⁷ After the Fall, Augustine believed that human beings lack both the capacity to know fully what is good and the settled will to do it. As a result, moral education must address both human needs: “On every question relating to moral life there is need not only for instruction (doctrina) but also for encouragement (exhortatio). With the instruction we will know what we ought to do, and with the encouragement we will be motivated to do what we know we ought to do.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In his own teaching, Augustine practiced both instruction and encouragement and counseled others to do the same.

Nowhere is this more evident than in book 4 of On Christian Teaching.Footnote ⁴⁹ Modeling the book partly on Cicero's rhetorical writings, Augustine appropriates the classical art of rhetoric to educate Christian orators in the spirit that Cicero had instructed Roman senators.Footnote ⁵⁰ In particular, Augustine adapts Cicero's dictum that an orator should speak so as to “instruct, delight, and move” his audience.Footnote ⁵¹ While Augustine insists that “instruction” (doctrina) is “a matter of necessity,”Footnote ⁵² he recognizes that knowing what is right does not ensure that people will do it: “when one is giving instruction about something that must be acted on, and one's aim is to produce this action, it is futile to persuade people of the truth of what is being said, and futile to give delight by the style one uses, if the learning process does not result in action.”Footnote ⁵³ Good teachers must learn to delight and motivate their audiences: “A hearer must be delighted so that he can be gripped and made to listen, and moved so that he can be impelled to action.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Augustine connects these three purposes of rhetoric—instructing, delighting, and motivating—to Cicero's three rhetorical styles: the restrained, mixed, and grand. While all three styles aim at “persuasion,” each serves a different pedagogical purpose: “The eloquent speaker will be one who can treat small matters in a restrained style in order to instruct, intermediate matters in a mixed style in order to delight, and important matters in a grand style in order to move an audience.”Footnote ⁵⁵ While Augustine holds that all matters regarding the Christian life are “important” and thus merit the “grand style,” he recognizes that the grand style does not fit every purpose.Footnote ⁵⁶ When attempting to present “facts,” analyze a “difficult and complicated matter,” or solve “knotty problems,” the restrained style is most fitting: it produces the clarity and precision needed to analyze “factual evidence” and avoid rhetorical flights of emotion.Footnote ⁵⁷ On its own, however, the restrained style is insufficient:

The mixed and grand styles serve these functions. The appealing ornament of the mixed style helps to secure the attention of the audience, especially when “censuring or praising something,” while the affectively charged rhetoric of the grand style is effective for arousing emotion and “moving minds to action.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Augustine's defense of all three styles highlights his complex pedagogical practices and the need to understand his political teachings in light of the style in which they appear. Yet when many political theorists read or teach Augustine, they tend to focus narrowly on City of God, especially book 19, which they excise from its context in the larger work.Footnote ⁶⁰ They seldom read On Christian Teaching, which is typically perceived as a theological treatise. When they do, they tend to focus, with Arendt and Nussbaum, on book 1, where Augustine offers a brief exposition of Christian doctrine and introduces his controversial formulation of the “order of love.” Rarely do they consider his teaching on interpretation or rhetoric in books 2–4.

Such an approach is at odds with recent trends in the history of political thought. In the last few decades, scholars have made interpretative innovations by attending to the rhetorical culture of prominent thinkers. By considering not only what an author is saying but also what an author is doing in saying it, they have shown how influential political philosophers unite both “wisdom” and “eloquence” to persuade audiences, “arguing in such a way that our hearers are not only instructed in the virtues but incited to the performances of virtuous acts.”Footnote ⁶¹ By attending to the connection between “reason” and “rhetoric,” these scholars have offered novel accounts of canonical thinkers such as Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes.Footnote ⁶² However, with a few notable exceptions,Footnote ⁶³ political theorists have not yet applied the same sensitivity to Augustine.

In her dissertation on Augustine, for example, Hannah Arendt advances a “purely philosophical” interpretation, adopting a stance of “intentional detachment” that eschews the rhetorical and “dogmatic elements” of Augustine's texts, along with the historical “evolutions” that shaped his development.Footnote ⁶⁴ Niebuhr focuses only on Augustine's attitudes and utterances, weaving together passages from treatises, sermons, and commentaries without considering their historical context or rhetorical effect.Footnote ⁶⁵ Herbert Deane situates Augustine's ideas within specific historical contexts but largely ignores their rhetorical and pedagogical contexts, assembling quotations from letters, sermons, and treatises without recognizing how their rhetorical styles or purposes shape their meaning. As his title suggests, Deane is more interested in the “political and social ideas of St. Augustine” than his implicit pedagogical practices.Footnote ⁶⁶

Perhaps most surprising is Martha Nussbaum's neglect of Augustine's rhetorical forms. Nussbaum devotes an entire book to Hellenistic philosophy as a “therapy of desire,” arguing that these texts can be fully understood only when interpreters are sensitive to their literary genres and the pedagogical purposes they serve.Footnote ⁶⁷ Since Nussbaum confines her study to a period between the late fourth century BCE and the first two centuries CE, it would be unfair to criticize her for neglecting a fifth-century thinker like Augustine. But she does not simply neglect Augustine's account; she actively sets her account against it. Contrasting her “therapeutic” model to the Platonic approach, she suggests that Augustine's Christian Platonism relies on a rationalistic and dualistic deductivism that is incongruous with the more indirect and immanent forms of Hellenistic philosophy she prefers.Footnote ⁶⁸ By focusing on Augustine's abstract ideas and doctrines, Nussbaum neglects the possibility that Augustine may also be practicing a form of therapeutic philosophy.

Recently, scholars in philosophy, theology, and religious studies have elevated the rhetorical and pedagogical functions of Augustine's theological and philosophical texts, focusing on the Confessions,Footnote ⁶⁹ Cassiciacum dialogues,Footnote ⁷⁰ sermons,Footnote ⁷¹ letters,Footnote ⁷² and even “systematic” treatises such as On the Trinity.Footnote ⁷³ These scholars have shown convincingly that Augustine appropriates classical therapies to educate his Christian audiences, but they do not usually attend to more “political” passages in City of God.Footnote ⁷⁴

A handful of interpreters in political theory have been more sensitive. Andrew Murphy, for example, analyzes Augustine's use of the “rhetoric of Roman decline” in City of God, while Thomas W. Smith highlights the book's “pedagogical and hortatory dimension,” showing how Augustine seeks to redirect readers’ love away from human glory toward the glory of God.Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, John von Heyking highlights how Augustine employs an “antipolitical rhetoric” to tame Romans’ “lust for domination” and a “dialectic of excess over excess” to “form the inordinate passions into ordinate love.”Footnote ⁷⁶ These interpreters helpfully illuminate how Augustine's rhetorical and pedagogical purposes shape his political thought. In what follows, I aim to extend this approach in novel ways to illuminate key passages in City of God and complicate the “pessimism” they seem to commend.

Between Good and Evil

This rhetorical influence becomes clear in a close reading of City of God 22.22–24, a set of chapters situated within Augustine's final book on “the eternal blessedness of the City of God.”Footnote ⁹⁷ In book 22, Augustine explains God's creation, will, and promises of blessedness for the saints (22.1–3), defends the bodily resurrection, Christ's resurrection, and the possibility of miracles (22.4–11, 26–28), addresses questions about what kinds of bodies and bodily features will be resurrected (22.12–21), and presents a vision of the final felicity of the heavenly city (22.29–30). Within this context, Augustine's account of earthly goods and evils in 22.22–24 serves to contrast the miseries of earthly existence with the peace of the heavenly city and point readers to signs of God's goodness and grace.Footnote ⁹⁸

A quick glance at 22.22–23 reveals why interpreters cite this passage as evidence of Augustine's pessimism. In book 22, Augustine provides a lengthy list of the “many great evils” that accompany this “life under condemnation”:

Augustine goes on to lament the “fear and distress [that] accompany widowhood and mourning, injury and condemnation, the deceptions and lies of men, false accusations, and all the violent crimes and wicked deeds of others.” In addition to moral evils arising from human sin, he also bemoans the “innumerable other evils” that “threaten our bodies from without,” from “tempest, rain and flood” to “the opening up of chasms in the earth,” from the “poisons” in plants and the attacks of “wild creatures” to diseases “so numerous that all the books of the physicians cannot contain them.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ If this was not enough to capture the “condition of misery common to us all,” he extends his litany of evils into the next chapter, describing the darkness, suspicion, and sin that reign even among the most righteous.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Ultimately, Augustine's verdict seems clear: “This is a state of life so miserable that it is like a hell on earth.”Footnote ¹⁰² Taken in isolation, it is hard to find a more powerful expression of Augustine's pessimism.

This is how many political realists interpret the passage.Footnote ¹⁰³ Deane alludes to Augustine's description of life as a “hell upon earth” four times, invoking the passage to compare Augustine's view of human nature with that of Hobbes.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Deane's most extensive use appears in his chapter “The Psychology of Fallen Man,” where he repeatedly cites book 22.22 to sketch “Augustine's grimly pessimistic picture of the evils and sufferings that inevitably mark the lives of men as they live, work, struggle, and die in the world.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Alternating between books 19 and 22, Deane sees both as evidence of Augustine's singular focus on sin: “His picture of man's life on this earth is a somber one; life is indeed a hell on earth, filled with suffering, sorrow, disappointment, strife, and bitterness, and ended by death.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ “Pessimistic realism,” Deane concludes, is the attitude that Augustine endorses.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

A decontextualized, disproportionate emphasis on evil in 22.22–23, however, ignores important contextual and structural features of this passage. Consider its relation to the next chapter. After cataloging earthly evils in 22.22–23, Augustine goes on to offer a long litany of earthly goods in 22.24, celebrating how God has “filled the whole of His creation with many good things of all kinds.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He points to the “visible forms of beauty which we behold” and praises the “wondrous nature” of human beings, who possess “a certain spark of that reason in respect of which [they were] made in the image of God,” which even in their miserable condition “has not been wholly quenched.” He extols God's many gifts to humanity, from “reason” and “intelligence” to the “virtues” and the “arts,” from the delights of music and poetry to the “wonderful spectacles” of the theater, from the “colour and fragrance of the flowers” to the “manifold and varied beauty of the sky and earth and sea.” Even the body receives Augustine's lavish praise: “how clearly does the providence of our great Creator appear even in the body itself!” For Augustine, goodness is so abundant that it surpasses our ability to describe it: “Who could give a complete account of all these things? … If I had chosen to deal with each one of them in turn—to unfold each of them, as it were, and discuss in detail what I have indicated only broadly—what a time it would take!”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Rather than simply indicting earthly evil, the final book of City of God offers a soaring testament to creation's goodness.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Some political interpreters do not acknowledge this overflowing affirmation of goodness.Footnote ¹¹¹ Others are more careful, acknowledging Augustine's affirmation in 22.24 but only in passing, as if it were window dressing for a more fundamental account of evil. Deane, for example, cites Augustine's description of the “rich and countless blessings” in 22.24 to suggest that “even in the depths of the misery of human life in this world, God has not completely abandoned the fallen human race.”Footnote ¹¹² Eventually, he declares that “Augustine's pessimism and despair are not ultimate”: “the sorrow and pain of earthly life, when seen in their proper context, are the means by which the ultimate triumph of good is being accomplished.”Footnote ¹¹³ Given these claims, one cannot accuse Deane of neglecting Augustine's theological superstructure, but in other places, Deane seems to excise 22.22–23 from its context to support his emphasis on Augustine's “grim realism.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Since Deane's account has been so influential in political theory, a closer look at his reconstruction can illuminate assumptions that frequently plague realist accounts of Augustine.

First, consider Deane's emphasis. In “The Psychology of Fallen Man,” Deane includes a few paragraphs that affirm God's goodness or providence, but the majority of the chapter, as its title indicates, focuses on Augustine's portrait of “fallen man.” Most tellingly, Deane's concluding chapter attends exclusively to Augustine's “pessimistic realism” and “one-eyed” vision of “man in his fallen condition as completely vitiated by sin.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Given this emphasis, it is no surprise that Deane focuses narrowly on one piece of a more complex mosaic. Like other realists, Deane assumes that the description of life as a “hell on earth” reflects Augustine's fundamental judgment of earthly matters and hence political ones.

Realists are right to recognize Augustine's awareness of evil. This is one of the distinct advantages of his political thought: Augustine punctures the illusions that disguise the ignorance, weakness, and self-interest that often arise in human affairs. Yet focusing exclusively or disproportionately on evil downplays Augustine's consistent attempts to contextualize evil within a larger frame of goodness.Footnote ¹¹⁶ By fixating solely on the realities of earthly evil, realists risk obscuring the realities of earthly goodness and making pessimism a filter through which they interpret the rest of Augustine's political thought. We must resist this temptation. While we can follow Shklar in recruiting Augustine to give “injustice its due,”Footnote ¹¹⁷ we should also follow Augustine in insisting that “both good and evil are given their due.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ A more capacious realism recognizes, as Augustine does in 22.24, that “in this river or torrent of the human race … both elements run side by side.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

The problem with Augustinian pessimism, however, is not simply its disproportionate emphasis. Augustine's claim that good and evil run “side by side” also points to a rhetorical feature of 22.22–24 often missed by interpreters who focus solely on Augustine's explicit ideas and utterances. His juxtaposition of good and evil reflects distinctly pedagogical purposes.

Augustine suggests as much in book 11. There, he describes how God uses evil to reveal the good, “adorning the course of the ages like a most beautiful poem set off with antitheses.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The former professor of rhetoric then explains the functions of these “antitheses,” which he describes as one of “the most elegant figures of speech.” Although “not a usual feature of our vocabulary,” he observes, “Latin speech, and, indeed, the languages of all nations, make use of the same ornaments of style.” Footnote ¹²¹ Cicero, for example, describes antithesis as a device where “things inconsistent are placed side by side, and things contrasted are paired,” and includes it “among the chief features that give our speeches distinction.”Footnote ¹²² Ultimately, Augustine suggests such oppositions can be employed rhetorically to help illuminate the goodness in the world: “Just as the opposition of contraries bestows beauty upon language, then, so is the beauty of this world enhanced by the opposition of contraries, composed, as it were, by an eloquence not of words, but of things.”Footnote ¹²³

Augustine's appropriation of this ancient rhetorical device casts new light on book 22. By putting good and evil “side by side,” Augustine performs the same rhetorical technique that he endorses in book 11. In both content and form, Augustine offers “a most beautiful poem set off with antitheses.” Rather than simply cataloging sins to emphasize the prevalence of evil, he also accentuates evils to enhance our awareness of goodness. As he writes in On Order, “This clashing of contraries, which we love so much in rhetoric, gives body to the overall beauty of the universe.”Footnote ¹²⁴

Why do many political theorists miss this aspect of book 22? Focusing primarily on book 19 and other “political” passages, many theorists do not consider the entirety of City of God, particularly book 11, a more “theological” book that focuses on God's work of creation. As a result, they miss clues that hint at Augustine's later rhetorical purposes.

Textual selectivity, however, is not the only explanation. Deane, whose textual breadth is unmatched, explicitly cites 11.18 to illuminate Augustine's “aesthetic argument” about why God allows evil in the world.Footnote ¹²⁵ Yet Deane does not recognize that Augustine himself may be employing the very same technique in 22.22–24. Focused on Augustine's explicit political ideas rather than his implicit rhetorical practices, Deane takes Augustine's claims at face value and largely reduces them to their propositional content, neglecting the possibility that Augustine is using excessive rhetoric for moral purposes.

Many political interpreters share this methodological habit. Reading City of God as a systematic treatise written in the restrained style, they tend to take Augustine's declarations as neutral descriptions of reality. If Augustine devotes two chapters to the “grave evils” of our “miserable” condition, that must mean he has a bleak picture of earthly affairs. The assumption that such statements are literal representations of Augustine's views licenses interpreters to abstract passages from their literary context and assemble them into an overarching political “theory.” If each statement is a “restrained” description of reality, its relation to other passages is less relevant; it can be extracted without losing its meaning. This approach enables interpreters to take Augustine's description of the world as a “hell on earth” and present it as evidence of his “grim realism.”

If, however, Augustine is practicing philosophy as a way of life and using rhetoric to delight and move his audience, it is a mistake to interpret City of God solely in the restrained style. While certain passages suggest more analytical aims, the aim of book 22 is not merely to inform readers but to transform them, to redirect their loves and hopes toward the heavenly city. Rather than offering a neutral description of good and evil simply to instruct, Augustine uses excessive rhetoric in the mixed and grand styles to convey the significance of good and evil and motivate readers to pursue the good. By leading his audience through these oppositions, Augustine helps his readers become agents capable of recognizing—and enduring—good and evil. In this way, the experience of moving through the text itself becomes a “spiritual exercise,”Footnote ¹²⁶ a moral itinerary that functions not to promote pessimism but to cultivate the virtue of hope.

Augustine's Virtue of Hope

To see how 22.22–24 functions to cultivate hope, a brief sketch of the virtue is instructive. Augustine's most systematic treatments are scattered throughout theological treatises and sermons rarely read by political theorists. Elsewhere, I recover these neglected texts to explicate Augustine's complex account of hope and its implications for politics.Footnote ¹²⁷ Here, I show how several basic features suggest a new interpretation of 22.22–24.

In the Enchiridion and several sermons, Augustine analyzes hope by considering its relations to faith and love. Faith supplies the ground of hope, “the conviction of things not seen.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Faith provides the epistemic evidence needed to warrant a belief that an object of hope is possible to attain, for “what is there that we can hope for without believing in it?”Footnote ¹²⁹ Yet faith is idle or inert without desire to prompt movement toward an object. Hope provides this movement, supplementing faith with affective and volitional movement toward a future good and supplying resolve in the face of difficulties or delays.Footnote ¹³⁰

For this movement, hope relies on love. For Augustine, love is the basic spring of human action, the “weight” that carries our soul toward what we desire.Footnote ¹³¹ As the fundamental affection of the will, love provides hope with its motivational force: “you can't even hope for anything that you don't love. Love, you see, kindles hope, hope shines through love.”Footnote ¹³² Hope thus reflects a love for goods perceived to be future, possible, but not yet possessed.Footnote ¹³³

For Augustine, hope is both an affection and a virtue. Since affections depend on love, the moral quality of affections reflects the quality of the love: “these feelings are bad if the love is bad, and good if it is good.”Footnote ¹³⁴ A virtue, by contrast, is always good since it is ordered toward the proper goods in the right way.Footnote ¹³⁵ If affections of hope are to be good, then, they must be ordered by a corresponding virtue. A virtue of hope is the disposition that guides, directs, and orders the affection of hope toward proper objects in the right ways.

For Augustine, the ultimate objects of hope are eternal goods, primarily union with God. Yet in the Enchiridion and several sermons and letters, he acknowledges that temporal goods may also be proper objects of hope, as long as these objects are properly ordered.Footnote ¹³⁶ Thus, if virtue consists in “rightly ordered love”Footnote ¹³⁷ and hope depends fundamentally on love, Augustine's virtue of hope consists in rightly ordered hope.Footnote ¹³⁸

While explicating Augustine's complex conception of “right order” is beyond the scope of this article, one feature is most relevant for us: Augustine characterizes right order by identifying corresponding forms of disorder, particularly vices of perversion and privation.Footnote ¹³⁹ This connection highlights a distinctive feature of Augustinian hope: the virtue of hope avoids corresponding vices of perversion and privation, namely presumption and despair.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Presumption is the perversion of hope, a rashness that characterizes those who “hope in the wrong way.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ The presumptuous person hopes “too much” for future goods that are not possible or appropriate, or without an awareness of the risks involved.Footnote ¹⁴² Presumption characterizes those whose hope is blind, false, or excessive. Despair, by contrast, reflects not excess but deficiency, the privation of hope. Those who despair withdraw from goods that are possible to attain and therefore fail to endure or overcome obstacles that inhibit their pursuit.Footnote ¹⁴³ For Augustine, both presumption and despair reflect a distorted vision about the possibility of an object and therefore lead to recklessness or premature rest: one either presumes one will attain an object without any additional effort or despairs of attaining it at all.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The virtue of hope resists these vices of perversion and privation.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

For Augustine, properly ordering one's hope and avoiding vices of presumption and despair cannot be reduced to applying an abstract formula.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The virtue of hope also requires the cooperation of prudence, the virtue of practical reasoning that helps us to distinguish “things to be pursued and avoided”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ and take “precautions against pitfalls.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In particular, Augustine identifies prudence as a form of love, namely, “love that wisely separates those things by which it is helped from those by which it is impeded.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Since hope depends on love, the virtue of hope requires prudence to guide its pursuit of temporal and eternal goods and avoid the pitfalls of presumption and despair.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Between Presumption and Despair

With this basic conception in view, I now want to suggest that City of God 22.22–24 functions to cultivate the virtue of hope and help readers resist its opposing vices. If virtuous hope depends on faith, love, and prudence, then reordering hope requires reorienting readers’ faith and love and cultivating their capacity for prudence.

Augustine's first aim in 22.22–24 is transforming his readers’ faith, which he identifies with a kind of vision.Footnote ¹⁵¹ While a complete vision of God will be the faithful's possession in eternity, he acknowledges that human beings can experience a partial vision in this life: “Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”Footnote ¹⁵² In order to redirect his readers’ hopes, Augustine must correct their vision, helping them see traces of the divine, even if through a glass darkly. The problem is that our vision remains distorted, our beliefs disordered.Footnote ¹⁵³ In particular, Augustine believes we are tempted to see earthly goods as the ultimate source of happiness, casting them under false descriptions and thereby failing to recognize their dependence on God or acknowledge our tendencies toward pride and domination.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Acting under false perceptions, we grasp at these temporal goods for selfish purposes, loving and hoping for finite goods too much or in the wrong ways. Our loves and hope become disordered, and vice ensues. For Augustine, then, the first step in reordering love and hope is changing what we believe and how we see. For this purpose, he uses vivid and excessive rhetoric, offering negative descriptions of earthly goods to pierce illusions that the world is an unadulterated source of goodness. By highlighting how cherished earthly goods and relationships are fleeting and flawed, he enables readers to see these goods in new ways and develop more realistic views of their social and political world.

Changing beliefs about good and evil, however, is not enough to transform the character of Augustine's readers. Instruction alone is insufficient; readers also need encouragement. This points to a second purpose of book 22: Augustine uses excessive rhetoric to reorder his readers’ loves.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Since human beings are tempted to love earthly goods too much or grasp them for their own purposes, Footnote ¹⁵⁶ part of his purpose in City of God is to diagnose the effects of excessive self-love and highlight how pride fuels a “lust for domination.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Augustine insists that ordering one's love to God can help to prevent such domination,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ and in book 22, he uses antitheses to facilitate this reordering. By censuring the “grave evils” of this “hell on earth,” Augustine attempts to change his readers’ vision of earthly goods and thereby disrupt their excessive love of them, and by praising the abundant goodness of the heavenly city, he attempts to expand their vision and reorder their loves to God. His “pessimistic” descriptions are not necessarily indicative of a metaphysical belief that earthly goods have no value, but of a psychological recognition that human beings are tempted to give earthly goods too much value or love them in the wrong ways.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Augustine's rhetorical undervaluation thus attempts to chasten moral overvaluation. “I am not saying that you should have no loves,” he preaches. “I simply want your loves to be properly ordered.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Some critics may worry that ordering one's loves to God only affirms the otherworldly dualism they find so troubling. Augustine, however, does not conceive of the City of God as an entirely transcendent realm, as many critics assume.Footnote ¹⁶¹ He constantly notes how pilgrims participate in the heavenly city “even now, albeit in a far different and far inferior way.”Footnote ¹⁶² Human beings can be “citizens” of the heavenly city during their sojourn on earth.Footnote ¹⁶³ Augustine develops this inaugurated, or partially realized, eschatology most explicitly in book 20, but it is also apparent in book 22, where he locates goodness not only in heaven but on earth, within God's creation. He celebrates the “visible forms of beauty which we behold” and the “manifold and varied beauty of sky and earth and sea,” and significantly, he does not limit these goods either to nature or God's original creation.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ While he emphasizes God's grace, he also describes the goodness that is mediated through human agency. He praises the “many arts invented and exercised by human ingenuity,” the “achievements of human industry in devising clothing and shelter,” and “achievements in pottery, painting, and sculpture.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ While Augustine does not mention explicitly political goods in 22.24—his account of “civic peace” and the goods of the “commonwealth” appears in book 19—many of the goods he catalogs are, as Todd Breyfogle notes, “the work not of single individuals but of persons in societas.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Moreover, many of these communal achievements—progress in “agriculture and navigation,” the “wonderful spectacles” of the theater, and the “ornaments of oratory”—originated as distinctively pagan contributions.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Augustine even goes so far as to praise “the great ingenuity displayed by philosophers and heretics in defending even errors and false doctrines.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Rather than encouraging otherworldliness, Augustine alerts readers to the goods that exist as part of God's larger order.

Augustine's celebration of goodness points to a third pedagogical purpose most relevant for us: by reorienting faith and love, Augustine is attempting to reorder readers’ hope and help them resist temptations toward presumption and despair. By vividly describing the evils that afflict earthly life, his account in 22.22–23 helps his audience develop the prudence needed to recognize possible pitfalls and discourages them from placing their hopes only in temporal goods. Indeed, in 22.24, Augustine explicitly lists “prudence” as one of the “virtues … by which a man is equipped to resist errors and the other vices implanted in him, and to conquer them by fixing his desires upon nothing but the Supreme and Immutable Good.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Augustine's catalog of evils thus serves to cultivate prudence and chasten perverse hope, warning readers against presuming earthly life will provide ultimate satisfaction. Yet Augustine also recognizes that chastening presumption risks leaving readers in a debilitating despair, causing them to dwell only upon the evil they see. His catalog of goods in 22.24 thus seeks to dispel this despair by unfolding the abundant goodness in the world. The experience of reading the text sets his readers on a journey through the oppositions of presumption and despair that attempts to cultivate the virtue of hope.

The rhetorical structure of 22.22–24 reinforces this pedagogical effect. Trained in the rhetorical technique of arranging a text (dispositio),Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Augustine is sensitive to how ordering an argument can shape readers’ attitudes and emotions. He explicitly offers reasons for his ordering of books 21 and 22: given what readers are likely to find credible or incredible about heaven or hell, he structures the discussion in a way that is sensitive to their current level of belief while attempting to take them beyond it.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The same pedagogical sensitivity emerges in 22.22–24. Knowing that readers may be tempted to despair, he offers a spiritual exercise that acknowledges these temptations while also supplying grounds for hope. In this way, 22.22–24 enacts what Kenneth Burke describes in a different context as a “structure of encouragement”: “Suppose, that, gnarled as I am, I did not consider it enough simply to seek payment for my gnarledness, the establishment of communion through evils held in common? Suppose I would also erect a structure of encouragement, for all of us? How should I go about it, in the sequence of imagery, not merely to bring us most poignantly into hell, but also out again?”Footnote ¹⁷² In 22.22–24, Augustine supplies a similar “structure of encouragement.” By taking readers into a “hell on earth,” he alerts them to the presence of evils and thus deflates their presumptuous fantasies about the world and their own self-sufficiency. Yet he does not establish communion with readers simply by emphasizing the evils they hold in common. While he takes readers into hell in 22.22–23, he brings them out again in 22.24, helping them see the abundant goodness in the world as a ground for hope. Through this sequence of imagery—into hell and out again—Augustine offers an itinerary meant both to instruct and encourage.

This analysis of Augustine's “structure of encouragement” highlights a new reading of 22.22–24 and points to the dangers of abstracting other books in City of God from their larger literary and rhetorical contexts. Consider book 19, another text frequently cited as evidence of Augustine's pessimism. There, Augustine identifies the “great mass of evils” that accompany social and political life (19.5–9), laments the realities of war and peace (19.11–13), and concludes with a vivid description of the “everlasting misery” that the wicked will experience in hell (19.28). If interpreters focus exclusively on book 19, as many political theorists do, readers are likely to see Augustine as a dour pessimist: both its substance and structure tempt despair. But if book 19 is interpreted within its larger context in City of God, it becomes clear that Augustine takes his reader through hell in book 19 but also out into the “felicity” of heaven in book 22.Footnote ¹⁷³

This reading is supported by Augustine's own description of City of God’s structure.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ In the Retractions and his letter to Firmus, Augustine divides his “huge work”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ into two volumes with five parts.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The first volume—books 1–10—consists of two parts: books 1–5 argue “against those who claim that the worship clearly not of gods but of demons contributes to the happiness of this life,” while books 6–10 challenge “those who think that either such gods or many gods of any sort whatever should be worshiped by sacred rites and sacrifices on account of the life that will exist after death.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ While the first ten books “refute the vanities of non-believers,” the last twelve books constitute Augustine's more constructive attempt to “demonstrate and defend our religion.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Augustine divides this second volume symmetrically into three equal parts: books 11–14 focus on the “origin of the two cities,” books 15–18 describe their “growth or progress,” and books 19–22 analyze their “destined ends.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Strikingly, then, although book 19 appears near the end of City of God, it actually constitutes the first book of the section dealing with the “proper ends of these two cities.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Augustine begins with a vivid description of the evils of the earthly city in book 19 before concluding with a soaring account of earthly and heavenly goods in book 22. As a whole, City of God enacts the structure of encouragement that we find in microcosm in 22.22–24.

Political theorists who fixate on Augustine's “pessimism” neglect this structure of encouragement. Some even invert the order altogether. When Deane briefly acknowledges Augustine's affirmation of goodness in 22.24, he immediately returns to the realities of evil, reversing the order we find in Augustine.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Deane ultimately concludes his book by highlighting the advantages of Augustinian pessimism.Footnote ¹⁸² Similarly, both Niebuhr and Shklar stress how Augustine's realism deflates political optimism, concluding their account in a way that chastens presumption but also risks tempting despair.Footnote ¹⁸³ Rather than being faithful to Augustine's structure of encouragement, they tend to plug bits of Augustine into their own structure of discouragement.

This tendency reflects the limitations of the simple binary between “optimism” and “pessimism” so influential in Augustinian studies.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ By emphasizing Augustine's diagnosis of evil, realists rightly argue that Augustine is no optimist. But because they often equate hope with optimism and limit their options to either optimism or pessimism, they see no other alternative but to describe him as a “pessimist.” This description obscures Augustine's complex account of hope as the virtue between presumption and despair.

Some scholars recognize the limits of the binary.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ A few attempt to categorize Augustinians either as “pessimistic optimists” or “optimistic pessimists,”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ while others distinguish Augustine's position with some sort of qualifier, describing his position, for example, as “courageous optimism.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Still others try to escape the dichotomy by arguing that Augustine's “realistic, pessimistic analysis of human nature” is qualified by an “ultimate optimism” in God's providence.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Yet even this attribution of otherworldly “optimism” does not accord with Augustine's warnings against presumption.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Augustine explicitly cautions individuals not to presume they will become members of the heavenly city; to assume certain salvation is itself an expression of pride.

Ultimately, the opposition between optimism and pessimism is anachronistic and conceptually confining. “Pessimism” and “optimism” are modern concepts, originating with Leibniz and Voltaire in the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Their application to Augustine emerges largely in the work of Niebuhr and Deane. While their emphasis on “pessimism” may have been an appropriate response to the utopian ideologies advanced amid the horrors of the mid-twentieth century, it neither exhausts the conceptual possibilities nor accurately reflects Augustine's own views.Footnote ¹⁹¹ A more accurate rendering would abandon this binary and adopt the more nuanced triad of presumption, hope, and despair, which offers conceptual resources for recognizing a posture that avoids both extremes.Footnote ¹⁹²

Presumption is the vice that concerns Augustinian realists. In preferring “pessimism,” realists seek to chasten the “optimism” they see as presumption and advance a more realistic account of politics that attends to the presence of evil, injustice, and self-interest. Undoubtedly, when optimism becomes a universal disposition or attitude applied in every circumstance—the expectation or certainty that something good will always come about—realists are right: optimism can morph into the vice of presumption, assuming more certainty than the facts warrant. Yet pessimism has the tendency to collapse in the opposite direction, sliding into a habitual despair that assumes no good can come. Paradoxically, this vice of despair also reflects a kind of presumption: by presuming something bad will inevitably happen, pessimists exhibit a certainty about the future not warranted by reality. By minimizing the realities of goodness, pessimists downplay the possibility that goodness can emerge when possibilities seem dim.

By registering temptations that surround hope on both sides, the Augustine I have brought into view exposes the binary between optimism and pessimism as too simplistic. Unlike optimism, Augustine's virtue of hope does not gloss over dark and unpleasant realities. To do so would encourage the vice of presumption, not the virtue of hope. But neither does Augustine's account license a debilitating despair. Although we may see through a glass darkly, darkness does not overwhelm our vision. As 22.22–24 affirms, we can see grounds for hope even when we experience our condition as a “hell on earth.”