### THE CHRISTIAN ASCENT: AUGUSTINE #### I. OMNIPOTENCE AND THE SIN OF PRIDE The contemplative ascent set itself a goal: to retain the energy and beauty of erotic love while ridding it of three grave defects: its partiality or uneven focus, its excessive neediness and dependency, and its connection with anger and revenge. All three versions of the ascent appeared to achieve this goal, purifying love through the joy of understanding. And yet the claim to have rendered the lover godlike and self-sufficient, no longer needy, introduced grave problems, both for the love itself and for related social concerns. A lover who repudiates bondage to human need is ill-placed to assess properly the needs of other humans, or to see the importance of coming to their aid; thus it is no surprise that all three Platonic thinkers repudiate compassion as something contaminated by bondage to worldly objects. Nor will a lover whose original aim involves the possession or incorporation of the good be likely, so long as he or she retains and even fulfills that aim, to appreciate the worth of political reciprocity, or of respect for the dignity and separateness of others. And a lover who focuses on objects as sources of good and well-being will be unlikely to love them in all their full particularity. I have suggested that these three defects in Platonic love all derive from what I have called a pathological narcissism, but what, from our present perspective, we might call the vice of pride, the idea that one can and should achieve godlike omnipotence, removing all passivity and need. This project, which animates both Plato and Spinoza, is plausibly said by Proust to be based on infantile projects of possessing and incorporating the loved parental object, projects that, if not renounced in favor of other aims, render the lover solipsistic and incomplete as a lover of real human beings. We turn now to the Christian rewriting of the ascent of love, which focuses its criticism of Plato on just this point. The Greek philosophical tradition is seen to be in the grip of the sin of pride, the false belief that human beings can by their own efforts make themselves godlike. Our ascending lover should certainly get rid of many impurities and flaws, including the primary ones that the Platonists attempt to cure. But in the process she must attempt to retain and deepen her sense of inadequacy and incompleteness, thinking of this very state, and its recognition, as conditions of her salvation. #### II. HUNGER AND THIRST We hear sighs of longing and groans of profound desolation. We hear love songs composed in anguish, as the singer’s heart strains upward in desire. We hear of a hunger that cannot be satisfied, of a thirst that torments, of the taste of a lover’s body that kindles inexpressible longing. We hear of an opening that longs for penetration, of a burning fire that ignites the body and the heart. All of these are images of profound erotic passion. And all of these are images of Christian love. Christian love both ascends and descends, both purifying the will and recovering a receptivity and vulnerability that the Platonist ascent had surmounted. In the process, the emotions, seen as acknowledgments of neediness and a lack of self-sufficiency, are restored to a place of value in the good human life. For while it is good to ascend, removing sin from the heart, it is also good to acknowledge one’s deep need for sources of good outside oneself, and therefore not to ascend beyond the condition of imperfect humanity. In these chapters I shall investigate this double movement of ascent and descent, focusing on two thinkers who use, and transform, the traditional image of love’s ascent: Augustine and Dante. Throughout his career, Augustine repeatedly contrasts two types of love: human or earthly love, and Christian love, whose core is the love of God.[^1] He repudiates the one and urges us, disdaining it, to cultivate the other. Repeatedly he speaks of the progress of the soul as an ascent of love and desire from the earthly to the heavenly, an ascent that strips away and leaves behind the merely human in love. This rejection of ordinary human passion is nowhere more vividly expressed than in the Confessions, where Augustine movingly recalls his own intense delight in earthly love, portraying this delight, with contrition, as a deviation from the true love and the true passion. Thus he repudiates the example of Dido and her consuming love for Aeneas: > I was forced to memorize the wanderings of some person called Aeneas, while I was unaware of my own wanderings, and to weep for the death of Dido, who killed herself for love, when meanwhile, in my most wretched condition, I endured with dry eyes the fact that I myself, in these matters, was dying from you, God, my life. For what is more wretched than a wretch who does not pity his own self, and weeps for the death of Dido, which was caused by love of Aeneas, but does not weep for his own death, which was caused by not loving you, God?[^2] Augustine’s identification with pagan erôs was no mere schoolboy exercise; it was a paradigm that shaped his sense of his identity as a desiring subject. That paradigm is here dismissed with scorn, as a form of both sin and self-avoidance. And yet, as even this passage of denial suggests, the Confessions is itself a deeply erotic work, a work filled with expressions of erotic tension and erotic longing. God is addressed throughout in language that Dido might well have used to Aeneas: “my beauty,” “most beautiful one,” “my life,” “my light,” “my sweetness.” The central metaphors of the work express passionate longing and receptivity: images of hunger, of thirst, of an emptiness that desires to be filled. We encounter passages like this one: > You blew fragrantly upon me, and I drew in the breath; and I pant for you. I tasted you and I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I burned for your peace. (X.27) And this one: > Let me leave them outside, breathing into the dust and filling their eyes with earth, and let me enter into my chamber and sing love songs to you, groaning inexpressible groans in my long wandering, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart stretching upward in longing. (XII. 16) This is not language that the Stoic or Spinozistic wise man would use, extirpating the passions. Nor is it the language of any form of the contemplative ascent. For while the ascending lover in that tradition is still a desiring subject, she lacks this lover’s deep vulnerability to external influence, a vulnerability that paints the world in non-Platonic colors, locating the most urgent good things outside the self rather than within. In short, we are brought back, it seems, to the world of the emotions, seen, as Spinoza has urged us to see them, as recognitions of our necessary passivity and neediness in a world that we do not control. In some manner Christian love has reopened the space within which fear, and anxiety, and grief, and intense delight, and even anger, all have their full force. And correct love promises no departure from these other emotions – if anything, it requires their intensification. In short, correct love is very much like the old erotic love. Dante – quoting Virgil’s Dido – will say of his own passionate response when Beatrice appears before him in her chariot, “I recognize the signs of the old passion” (“Conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma” [Purg. XXX.48 – see Chapter 12]). Something is the same here, however much is different. Something is preserved, however much is repudiated. I shall now try to trace the “signs of the old passion” in Augustine and, in the next chapter, in Dante, both of whom explicitly set themselves the task of rewriting and correcting the pagan ascent of love. For each there are deep psychological links between earthly and heavenly love; for each it is important to argue that the good Christian life is more volatile and erotic than the Platonic tradition has wished love to be. They represent different points of view within the Christian tradition, and I shall be investigating their differences, as well as their shared ideas. I cannot hope to do justice to the whole thought of either about love, since both have careers of great internal complexity. In the case of Dante, I shall focus on the Commedia. In the case of Augustine, I shall focus on several works written just after his conversion, and then on a transitional period leading up to the Confessions. I shall allude more briefly to some later arguments in The City of God. #### III. THE PLATONIC LADDER AND RATIONAL SELF-SUFFICIENCY Augustine is a disciple as well as a critic of the Platonist ascent. Profoundly influenced by Neoplatonic versions of the Symposium’s ladder of love,[^3] he uses these ideas, early in his career, as positive paradigms for the Christian life that can easily be recast in Christian terms. I shall argue that in early works such as De quantitate animae and De Genesi contra Manicheos, Augustine endorses a Platonist characterization of the contrast between earthly love and perfected love, holding up the contemplative self-sufficiency of the philosopher as a goal both available to and good for the faithful Christian in this life. The good Christian life becomes, as it goes on, a life progressively emptied of erotic longing and tension. Later, however, Augustine comes to think this view of ascent unacceptable: the goal it promises is both unavailable and inappropriate. In the Confessions he advances a picture of ascent (or ascent combined with descent) that gives a more substantial and more positive role to certain ingredients of ordinary human love.[^4] In the Platonist tradition, Augustine found an account of love’s ascent that emphasized the self-sufficiency of the intellect, as it moves from stage to stage, and the complete self-sufficiency of the lover, when he or she reaches the final stage. At the top of the ladder, the philosopher, contemplating the fine and good, is free from all neediness and dependency, both internal and external. The object of his contemplation is eternal and unchanging; it never varies in quality or relation. The person who contemplates it is therefore entirely secure – nothing that happens in the world can alter or diminish his happy activity. At the same time, the philosophical lover is internally stable, minimally dependent on internal passions that might distract him from contemplation. His intellect, which contemplates the eternal forms, becomes increasingly like what it contemplates, pure and unvarying, impassive and hard. Its activities, completely transparent to the lover, yield accounts embodying truth and true excellence. He is the one lover who has gotten beyond the tension of erotic longing, since he has found an object that satisfies his longing to “be with” the beloved always. In Plotinus’ version of the Symposium ascent, the one that most influenced Augustine,[^5] it becomes clear that even the lover’s mortality is no impediment to the full perfection of his bliss. For the acts of the perfected intellect do not take place in time at all (Enn.1.5); thus the lover’s bliss does not depend on time for increase or completion. Longer is not better; or rather, there really is no ‘longer’ when one is dealing with contemplation. Plotinus states unambiguously that the person who pursues a philosophical ascent correctly can achieve in this life a complete and self-sufficient state, beyond all seeking: > What then is the good for him? He is what he has, his own good . . . The person in this state does not seek for anything else; for what could he seek? Certainly not anything worse, and he has the best with him. The person who has a life like this has all he needs in life. (1.4.4, cf. 1.6.9) Such a person, ceasing to need, ceases to be erotic. In many ways, Augustine sets himself in the Platonist ascent tradition. Repeatedly, he uses the metaphor of ascent to speak of the Christian development of love and desire. He sometimes enumerates the stages of this ascent in a manner that shows the influence of the Platonist texts that moved him. Repeatedly, too, he speaks of the disdain for earthly love that is so much stressed by Plato as a product of ascent. And he seems to endorse the central structural principle used by Plato to explain how love can move upward: the fundamental kinship of all fine things. In two early works, however,[^6] Augustine goes beyond these general Platonist commitments – which persist in some form throughout his career. Here he embraces a more thoroughgoing Platonism, defending the life of contemplative self-sufficiency as a valuable and available Christian ideal. The complex philosophical dialogue De Quantitate Animae ends with an account of the ascent of the soul from vegetative and sensory life to contemplative perfection. The ascent has seven stages (7off.). The soul progresses to each new stage by freeing itself from impediments to contemplation. Intellect and will are the propelling forces in its movement. The first three stages bring the human being to ordinary adulthood. On top of the nutritive and vegetative life with which he is born, he quickly develops the use of his perceptual faculties and, later, the arts and abilities of reason. Only at stage four does he begin to reject any of the influences and activities of earlier stages. Here, Augustine says, is where true goodness begins (73). In stages four, five, and six, the soul gradually detaches itself from the influences of the body and the senses. From the painful struggle against worldly distraction that characterizes stage four,[^7] it moves, by intellectual effort and strength of will, to the purity of stage five, as the soul “holds itself most joyfully in itself” (74). At this point the soul has a conception of its own power; at this point, then, it can turn itself outward, in stage six, to contemplation of truth (75). It now may advance, in stage seven, to the perfection of contemplation. As the soul advances, its confidence grows, soon excluding all anxiety and uncertainty. At stage four the soul still feels some fear of death, though a fear tempered by the thought of divine Providence. By stage five, however, the soul advances toward contemplation “with a huge and unbelievable confidence.”[^8] In stage six, the soul’s desire for truth is described as “most perfect,” “best,” “most correct” (75). Nowhere after the conflict of stage four is there any serious opposition to the movement of the rational will, which has now been “freed,” “purified,” “cured.” Indeed, by stage six we are told that intellect itself has “purified itself and freed itself from all desire and corruption of mortal things” (75).[^9] At the last stage the ascent is completed in the perfection of philosophical self-sufficiency, a state which, Augustine assures us, has been attained by outstanding people in this life: > We have now arrived at the vision and contemplation of truth, which is the seventh and final step. Nor is it a step any longer, but a kind of stopping place to which these steps lead up. What its joys are, what the full enjoyment of the highest and true good is like, what serenity and eternity is in the air -how can I describe all this? It has been described by certain great and incomparable souls, insofar as they thought it ought to be described, souls whom we believe to have seen these things, and to be seeing them still. (76) In De Genesi contra Manichaeos, Augustine depicts a similar process of ascent. The soul travels, again, through seven stages. The stages are now mapped onto the seven days of the Creation, a procedure that produces some changes in their order and content. The nature of the final stage, however, emerges with particular clarity. After six “days” of action and motion, there is a stopping place, a “day” of rest. Purified from all sin and bodily distraction, “having spiritual fruits, that is, good reflections (cogitationes) by virtue of the stability of his mind,” the human being can now have a rest and a peace that are truly comparable to God’s peace: the peace of perfection, null disturbance, and clear sight: “After the very good works of these (so to speak) six days, let the human being hope for perpetual rest, and let him understand what it means to say, ‘On the seventh day God rested from all his works’ “ (I.25). In these two passages, Augustine takes over all of the essentials of the Platonist ascent tradition, with minor modifications, as a description of an available and good Christian life. As soon as the person weans himself from the influence of the temporal and the sensible, he achieves a remarkable independence. Intellect propels itself continuously upward, interested only in its own self-sufficient activity. It generates its own motion, waiting for nothing, receptive to nothing. (Even the receptivity of faith, not mentioned at all in De quantitate, figures in De Genesi only as the early precondition for the beginning of intellectual activity, in stage one. Once intellect takes over, it no longer plays a role.) Because of this extraordinary freedom from circumstance, the soul’s aim is completely fulfilled. Ascent and motion cease in consequence. The seventh step is no step at all, but the quiet dwelling place (mansio) at the top of the steps. The seventh “day” is no “day” of action at all, but a “day of rest,” in which the soul exists outside of change. Breathing the air of eternity, the previously aspiring human being knows what it means to say that God rested from his labors. And, as the Platonic ascent would have it, he is godlike in his rest, he takes the place of God in God’s own story. #### IV. INCOMPLETENESS AND THE UNCERTAINTY OF GRACE As we can see already, this “air” of serenity and eternity is not the air that Augustine is breathing in the Confessions. Nor is the Platonist goal endorsed in that work as one appropriate for a Christian life. From the Confessions itself, and from a roughly contemporary work, the Ad Simplicianum de diversis quaestionibus (A.D. 396), we can elicit Augustine’s reasons for turning from the Platonist picture. Augustine’s criticisms of Platonism fall into two categories. He argues, first, that the Platonist goal is not attainable in this life; second, that it is not, in any case, a good or appropriate Christian aim.[^10] Augustine’s Platonist works insisted that the perfected life has been lived by actual human beings. The ascent involves a difficult struggle, but the struggle can be won. By the time of the Confessions, however, Augustine is no longer sanguine about this possibility. The desires and activities of our fleshly existence, to which we are strongly bound by both habit and memory, are a heavier load than the Platonist tradition believes. The Platonist, who speaks of casting off the burdens of the body, underestimates the tightness of the link between soul and body, the extent of the pressures that drive even the most zealous soul back to its old habits. Augustine’s deep grief at his mother’s death, for example – which he could not assuage even by the most earnest prayer – “impressed on my memory by this one piece of evidence the strength of the chains of habit, even against a mind that is no longer fed on deceiving words” (Conf. IX.12). One can never correct oneself fully enough, watch one’s impulses carefully enough. The power of sexual desire, the distractions of worldly cares, so mar his efforts to contemplate that he now concludes that Platonist bliss is entirely unavailable to a human being in this life. He mourns the loss of this high hope: > At some moments you admit me into a feeling that is very unlike my usual state. If it were perfectly accomplished in me it would be I know not what -but it never shall be in this life. The painful weights drag me down again to things here. I am reabsorbed in my habits. I am held fast, and I weep a great deal, but still I am very much held fast. Such is the power of the burden of custom. Here I am able to stay, but unwilling; there I will to be, but I am not able. I am wretched on account of both places. However much A may try to sever her connection to M and to their bodily pleasure, the habits of that love and the desire that power it will seize her unawares, impeding her progress. There is another reason why the ascent cannot take place as the Platonist depicts it: Plato has omitted a crucial causal factor, which is not within the individual’s own control. In Confessions VIII, Augustine tells us that the central defect of the Platonist books is their failure to mention grace and to depict the ascending soul as waiting, always, for grace. “No man says there, ‘Shall not my soul wait upon God, seeing that from him cometh my salvation?’ “ (VIII.21). Augustine retrojects these criticisms to the time preceding his conversion; but, as his early postconversion works show, they did not dawn on him until somewhat later. The crucial turning point seems to have been in the account of grace he gives to Simplicianus. Simplicianus has asked Augustine to explicate a verse from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “It is not in the power of the one who wills, nor of the one who runs, but in the power of God, who has pity” (IX. 16: “neque volentis neque currentis sed miserentis est Dei”). Interpreting the verse, Augustine argues that the human being cannot hope by his own will and effort to be adequate for his own salvation. His own activity – both external (running) and internal (willing) – always proves insufficient. Or to put it more precisely, his own effort is insufficient for the right sort of internal and external activity. Right willing itself, he now insists, depends upon desire for a good object; and desire itself is a response of delight and love that is summoned up in us by an external call and is not perfectly ours to control. Unless something “happens our way” (“occurat”) which delights and moves the soul’s faculty of desire in the appropriate manner, the will can in no way be moved. “But that this something should happen our way, is not in the power of the human being” (Ad Simplic. I.Qu 2.22). We can be moved to faith and appropriate effort only by being struck in such a way that our will is correctly set in motion. “But who embraces in his soul something that gives him no delight? And who has it in his power to determine that that which can delight him should happen his way, or to determine that it should delight him when it does happen his way?” (I.Qu 2.21). Different people are moved and touched in different ways, by different sorts of external calls (14); desire’s responses are idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and not transparent to reason. God’s call may come to us in such a way that it moves us, or it may not. He may choose to move us to delight and love (for He always can do this), or He may allow our hearts to remain cold (16). This may seem unfair; but these are the ways of God’s secret justice, which we cannot hope to understand. As Paul has written, “He pities those he wishes, and He hardens those he wishes” (“quem vult obdurat”). And there is no reliable relationship between the character of our human efforts and the likelihood of being called in the requisite way. As Brown writes, “Augustine now moves in a world of ‘love at first sight,’ of chance encounters, and, just as important, of sudden, equally inexplicable patches of deadness.”[^11] Thus A, as Augustine’s Christian, ascending not through the pure and active intellect, but through the complex psychology of receptivity and love, is deeply at the mercy of contingency, in two ways. She must depend for ascent not on her own self-control but on aspects of her personality that she neither governs nor fully understands. And these responsive elements in her personality depend, in turn, for their happy activation, on the mysterious ways of God’s call. She cannot count on a stable perfection. Such progress as she does make is not made primarily through her own effort. The future, as Brown’s chapter title puts it, is “lost.” Her story is one of unending longing, of bewilderment and unstable motion. God is indeed eternal, perfect, and just, whereas the objects of earthly love are inconstant, mutable, and liable to moral error. But the inscrutability of that justice and the seeming arbitrariness of that perfection make A’s subjective experience as a Christian lover very much like her old love. Does Augustine still think of the Platonist ascent as good for Christian humans, yet sadly unavailable? Or does his new moral psychology lead, at the same time, to the creation of a new Christian norm? I think that the second is clearly the right option: the Platonist ladder is an altogether inappropriate path for the good Christian soul. It is in this line of argument that we find the really deep contribution of Augustine to the ascent tradition we are following. Let us return to the difficulties for Platonism that come from the power and significance of memory. It is clearly Augustine’s view that we cannot free ourselves altogether from psychological continuity with our past through memory and habit. We are bound indissolubly to the parts of ourselves that cause moral trouble by their undependability, their independence of control by reason. Above all, in Confessions, our sexuality serves Augustine as an example of the ungovernable from which we can never sever ourselves, for it exerts its influence even in our dreams (X.30). The Platonist project, then, is doomed. But I believe it is just as clearly Augustine’s view that we ought not dissociate ourselves from our past in the way that the Platonist urges. Certainly we can and must combat the sinful urges that are fed by a certain sort of memory. But memory is also crucial to a person’s sense of identity and continuity in time. A really successful dissociation of the self from memory would be a total loss of the self – and thus of all the activities to which a sense of one’s own identity is important. “I cannot comprehend the power of my memory,” Augustine writes, “since I cannot even call myself myself apart from it” (X.16). But this means that without memory, which with its links to sin makes perfection impossible, the soul cannot progress at all. The search for goodness, self-knowledge, and knowledge of God that the Confessions movingly records presupposes, throughout, Augustine’s own sense of himself as a continuous temporal being. This temporal history may be a non-necessary property of his soul; it is still crucial to his salvation. Self-knowledge, insofar as he achieves it, is said to be a “fruit” of confession, that is, of an activity that centrally involves the drawing forth of his past through memory. His search for God, he explicitly declares, must be carried out “in the fields and broad meadows of memory, where there are treasure chests of innumerable images brought in from things of all sorts experienced by the senses” (X.8). Memory is a capricious faculty. It does not always obey the will, nor is its material always available for deliberate inspection. But Augustine cannot have its fruits without its difficulties and darkness. To cut it away, as the Platonist ascent urges, would be to forfeit the sense of self, therefore to cease to aspire and to love: > I do these things within, in the vast court of my memory. For there I have at my disposal the sky, the earth, the sea, along with everything that I have been able to experience in them – and, in addition, all the things I have forgotten. There I myself happen upon myself (mihi occurro). And I recollect what, when, and where I did something, and how, when I did it, I was affected. (X.8) The Platonist, in cutting away from A all susceptibility to contingent occurrences, cuts away the susceptibility to an occurrence that is central to growth and knowledge: the one in which a person “happens across” himself. The use of the vocabulary of the Ad Simplicianum is no accident. Human development is irreformably a matter of happening. An adequate view of moral growth must be built on this psychological reality. The Platonist might attempt to counter this objection. Surely, he could say, we can allow ourselves to retain, in memory, enough connectedness with our past to ground the sense of self and of personal continuity, without retaining the sinful memories that vex our contemplative efforts. As for these, if we can rid ourselves of them, we certainly ought to do so; and we need not fear that in so doing we will be lost to ourselves. Augustine would probably deny this as a psychological claim. For, to judge from what he sees fit to remember and record in the Confessions, so much of his history is taken up with sin that very little basis for his sense of personal continuity would survive if the memory of all that were erased. Indeed, he believes that the normal course of every human life, from infancy onward, is thoroughly steeped in sin. But even were he to concede to the opponent this point about connectedness, he has a further argument that would suffice to take him to his anti-Platonist conclusion. This argument concerns the connection between memory and responsibility. In Augustine’s view, every deed one has ever committed is a deed for which one is going to be judged by God. The Christian, therefore, in order to be maximally prepared for this judgment and maximally able to make an adequate confession, must be not less mindful of his past than another, but more mindful, not less concerned with what his bodily self has done, but more concerned. He must cultivate a very keen sense of his own continuity and unity. He must dredge up the past, rather than severing himself from it. To use the words in which Nietzsche perceptively analyzes the operations of the Christian “bad conscience,” he must, working on himself, “breed an animal with the right to make promises.”[^12] The work of self-recollection and self-scrutiny carried out in the Confessions would seem both unproductive and risky to a Platonist; to a Christian it is of the deepest importance. On the other side, the Platonist curriculum of progressive dissociation from the bodily self and progressive identification with the pure intellect would seem to the Christian the creation of a fiction about the self that impedes true self-knowledge and appropriate responsibility.[^13] To live with these fruits of memory, however, is to live, as well, with all of its hazards. When you explore the meaning of your past, you cannot guarantee, nor does Augustine think you can, that the power of the past will not surprise you. The Christian can only, then, take the risks and confess continually. Furthermore, and most important of all, this world of chance encounters is the only world in which a Christian can live in the correct relation to God. The Platonist goal of godlike self-sufficiency is now seen by Augustine as a form of deep impiety. To pursue such a goal is to commit the sin of pride, which is based on the belief that one can live according to oneself and under one’s own control. The Ad Simplicianum makes it clear that a recognition of the uncertainty of grace and of God’s decisive power over our internal, as well as external, lives was an essential part of being a good Christian. Openness, waiting, longing, groaning become forms of worship and acknowledgment. If you are a human being, the sort of being who does not suffice for its own salvation, it is a deep sin to live and think as if you were sufficient. As Augustine later writes in The City of God, “What is pride but a craving for perverse elevation? For it is perverse elevation to forsake the ground in which the mind ought to be rooted and to become, and to be, grounded in oneself” (XIV. 13). Love, we might say, should not ascend too high, or prop its ladder on the wrong sort of ground. If we now look ahead to the more systematic theoretical development Augustine gives these issues in The City of God, we find that the entirety of the ancient ethical project, with human flourishing in this world as its central goal, is denounced as infected by pride: > But those who have supposed that the ultimate good and evil are to be found in the present life ... all these persons have sought, with a surprising vanity, to be happy in this life and to get happiness by their own efforts . . . Those philosophers . . . strive to manufacture for themselves in this life an utterly counterfeit flourishing by drawing on a virtue whose fraudulence matches its arrogance. (XIX.4) But this means that the emotions, defined in the Stoic-Spinozistic way as recognitions of our bondage to the external, reenter the best life as forms of human excellence and appropriate rationality. For it is appropriate to acknowledge the truth; and emotions are acknowledgments of the truth of our profound neediness. The Stoics who taught the extirpation of passion are now repudiated as “interested in words more than in truth” (XIV.9). The City of God has a different standard of public and private rationality: > Among us Christians, on the other hand, in accordance with the Holy Scriptures and their healthy doctrine, the citizens of the holy City of God, living in accordance with God in the pilgrimage of this present life, fear and passionately desire, grieve and rejoice,[^14] and because their love is right, all these emotions of theirs are right. (XIV.9) The difference is made by the rightness of the object of the Christian’s love and fear and joy. Augustine does not disagree with the Stoics that it is inappropriate to have emotions about earthly events and persons, seen as needed by the self. The other world is the object of this longing: “They fear eternal punishment, they passionately desire eternal life. They grieve because they are still groaning within themselves, waiting for the redemption of their bodies; they rejoice in hope because ‘there shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory.’” (XIV.9) After enumerating other proper occasions for Christian emotion -both self-regarding and on behalf of others whose salvation the Christian desires – Augustine proves his point by going carefully through the careers, first of Paul, then of Jesus, and demonstrating with ample citations the range of emotions that were exemplified in their virtuous lives. He insists that Christ’s emotions were not feigned, but genuine, since he was really human and really suffering in a human body. When, then, we read of his anger and grief, we must not doctor the reports -we must take them to heart, as paradigms for ourselves (XIV.9). And we must conclude from this example that even though emotions may at times mislead us, no good life would be possible without them. To those who argue that the good Christian may have caritas or dilectio (translating the Greek agapê) but not amor, Augustine replies with extensive textual argument, showing that the emotion of Peter toward Christ is described by both Peter and Christ as amor, and that both words can be used of appropriate, as well as inappropriate, emotions (XIV.7).[^15] As for those who exalt the apatheia of the Stoic wise man, they are doubly foolish. For “if apatheia is that condition in which no fear frightens and no grief pains, it must be avoided in this life if we wish to live rightly, that is, according to God.” And, furthermore, “if apatheia is defined as that condition in which no emotion at all can touch the soul, who would not consider this stupor worse than any of the vices?” (XIV.9) The example of Christ indicates that it is not always wrong to have emotions about earthly people and events. The Christian, however, following Christ, will not view attachments to others as deep personal needs. The deep need of all is for salvation, and appropriate emotions ultimately have that focus. Thus Christ suffered and grieved because he was still in the body and in the world; he longed for the perfection of Heaven. Even his pity for humans (as we shall see at greater length in the following section) focuses on the impediments to their salvation. It is real pity, because Christ (and, following him, the good Christian) really loves human beings and views their moral blindness as a really painful diminution of his life (see also IX.5). On the other hand, the pity focuses at all times on the distance of humans from the perfected condition: it does not treat life’s reversals and pains as bad in and of themselves. In short, the difference between the City of God and the earthly city lies not in the presence of strong emotions, but in the emotions’ choice of objects. And in a sense the diseased, swollen earthly city is closer to God, because more passionate, more willing to turn outward and to search for an adequate object, than the torpid city of the Stoic wise man, wrapped in its own fatal pride. Such people, “not roused or stirred, not swayed or inclined by any emotion at all, rather lose all humanity than attain true tranquillity. For the fact that something is tough does not make it right, and the fact that something is inert does not make it healthy.”[^16] (XIV.9) Ascent must take place within the context of our humanity, not by attempting, out of pride, to depart from it. #### V. THE VIRTUE OF LONGING We are now prepared to understand what we find in the Confessions: a love of God characterized not by a neat intellectual progression toward contemplative purity, but by a pervasive sense of longing, incompleteness, and passivity. This love has more in common with the Platonic picture of ordinary love than with its reformed version. The metaphor of ascent still appears, but rarely. In its place we tend to find the image of a journey that goes on and on – especially a journey deep into the inner spaces of the mind. We even find images of a descent of the soul into itself, with proper humility. Instead of exaltation, we find poverty and lowness, dust and ashes (e.g., X.28, 1.6); instead of the fullness of the Platonist soul, emptiness and barrenness (e.g., X.28, II. 10); instead of the ease with which that soul, once purified, turns to contemplation, we find toil and labor (e.g., X.39, X.16, X.40); instead of safety, danger (X.35, 39); instead of light, darkness and obscurity, fog and mist (II.2, X.5). Instead of purity and health, we find sickness, hunger, and thirst; God is invoked as “my intimate doctor” (X.3, II. 10; X.27, 28, 43). Augustine plainly views himself as continually in danger. He stresses his openness to external happenings, depicting himself as a container (I.2, 3) that stands open to receive what God will choose to pour in (I.2, 5). Nor does he feel confident that his own internal processes are fully under his own control. In his own aspiration he exemplifies the very difficulties about grace that he describes theoretically in the Ad Simplicianum. For he prays that God should present Himself to him, happen his way, in such a manner that his soul may be moved by love and delight: > Hear, Lord, my prayer. Let my soul not fall short under your discipline . . . so that you might become sweeter to me than all enticements that I used to follow, and so that I might love you most firmly and embrace your hand with all the strength of my heart. (I.15)[^17] Through prayer, Augustine can make a powerful effort to become responsive to the right, and only the right, stimuli. But this effort does not guarantee success. The final aim of this earthly lover, like that of his Platonist counterpart, is a complete union with the beloved object, in which all desire and emotion will at last be stilled. But this goal is now seen to be both impossible and inappropriate to this life: > When I shall be united to you in every part of myself, there will be for me no more sorrow or toil, and my life will be alive, in every way full of you. But now . . . since I am not yet full of you, I am a burden to myself. My joys, which ought to be lamented, contend against my sorrows, concerning which I ought to rejoice. And which way the victory will go, I do not know. (X.28) The first part of the passage points to the unattainability of the lover’s aim while human life continues. The equally important second half insists that the sorrow arising from unattainability is precisely what the Christian ought to value for himself in this life, the pride of a human joy just what he should avoid.[^18] What is appropriate to this life is not erotic union, but erotic longing, distance, incompleteness. The wanderings of Aeneas have been rejected in favor of wanderings even more painful and laborious; and Augustine resembles Dido more than he does the somewhat Stoic Aeneas, whose journey was prompted by pietas rather than by love. The subjectivity of the two states has great similarity; the moral difference, which is huge, is made by the difference in their objects. A now wants to know where we are with our account of the continuity and discontinuity between human and divine love. If she takes the Christian path rather than the one the Platonists map out for her, where will she find herself? One way to let her know will be to tell her a love story, and to let her see whose story it seems to be. Imagine, then, we tell her, that you have for many years been deeply involved in a passionate relationship that has brought you neither stable satisfaction nor a quiet conscience. You have felt yourself to be the slave of forces beyond your control, both external and internal. You feel that your entire life is out of order. (She will have no trouble telling herself this, for all this is in fact her story.) For the sake of living and living well, you feel that you ought to turn away from the person whom you have loved, blinding yourself to that person’s beauty and power, closing yourself to the deep influence that your response to this beauty exercises over imagination and action. You see that to succeed in this you must not merely avoid the immediate stimulus of that person’s physical presence; you must also close off his access to your feelings through habit and memory, and the memory of habit, and the habit of remembering. While you are struggling with these things, with uneven success, you are suddenly struck – briefly and obscurely, in an uncertain, momentary encounter – by another person. You feel strangely moved. You see your own responses only dimly: you cannot even begin to describe what has happened. You are exhilarated; you have a sense of motion toward something, a vague, undefinable hope. And yet you feel hopelessly far from whatever it is you want from this person, far even from being able to say what it is you want. After all, you know almost nothing about the object of this longing. You can barely give him a name. All you can do is to learn from others about who he is and what he has done. And this increases both your interest and your sense of distance. You feel convinced that this hope is the hope of a better and more fruitful life, if you could only allow yourself to be touched by it deeply enough to change. You want to respond. You also want to want to respond. But at the same time, of necessity, you continue on with the old life, since that is where your life is lived. You easily become reabsorbed in your old relationship; and when you are reabsorbed you find that you do not even want to care about anything or anyone else. The power of habit and the memory of your own previous actions and feelings, stand between you and any change. You know that what must happen now is that the new person must approach you and call to you. And you must respond. But you know that you cannot guarantee your own response. He must call to you in just the right way, so that you will respond. You hope that you will be such, and that the call will be such, that your life will change; but you do not control this. You want it to happen, but you do not control happenings. What is more, you do not even see or become aware of all that is happening. You know that much of the drama is being played out in depths of memory that are not fully accessible to consciousness. You do not, however, want to sever yourself from memory and its power. For your history, as the person who has those memories and has loved that powerful love, is constitutive of whatever you are and bring to anything new in life. If the new lover does not call to and move that, it is not you that he calls and moves. So you go about, feeling sick a great deal of the time, and powerless, and ugly;[^19] feeling thirsty, and dark, and endangered. Whether you will be united with the person and life that you long to want, or whether the power of habit and the obtuseness of desire will hold you where you are – this is, to you, the most mysterious matter in the world. You feel like a child lost in a dark wood.[^20] And yet it is not that you long for a life without these pains and risks, a life lived in your own power. For you obscurely judge that this contest full of bewilderment and exposure, motion and tension, is the only way to deal, humanly, with these human questions. The drama of Christian love in Augustine is something like this human love story. It is similar both in structure and in subjective experience. But we can now take one further step, following the lead of the anti-Stoic arguments of The City of God. Human love and Christian love, human emotion and Christian emotion, are not merely two similar stories. They are two parts of the same story. There is only one faculty of love and desire in the human being; the only way a human being changes in her love is to redirect that same love toward a new object. It is the same love that loves Dido and loves God. The change from earthly love to heavenly love is not, then, for Augustine, simply like my story of the person who changes lovers. It is one example of that story. And whether your life story plays out that example of change or some other – this, we already know, is not up to you. So much depends on how you are called, and how you like it when and if you are. So, we might finally say, whether your life is the human story of a change from M to N, or whether the N who happens your way and calls and moves you is in fact God – all this is a part of the drama of human love and a matter of inscrutable mystery. But to live in that mystery and that openness of expectation is (if, in God’s judgment, it turns out to be so) the good life for a human being. #### VI. THE MERELY PROVISIONAL WORLD It should be clear by now why I regard Augustine’s account of the Christian ascent as a major philosophical achievement and a decisive progress beyond the Platonic accounts: because it situates ascent within humanity and renounces the wish to depart from our human condition. I have suggested that any attempt to reform human love so as to make it more compatible with general social aims must criticize the wish of the infantile lover for possession and control, fashioning, within the ascent, a new wish and a new aim. This Augustine does, in the process recapturing much of our humanity that the Platonists have cast aside. Does Augustine’s ascent solve the three problems the Platonists claimed to solve? It would appear that it does solve the problem of unevenness or partiality. In loving God, A also loves the entire world of God’s creation. In loving God in humanity, she really does see all human beings as equal; and the Christian idea that all human beings are equal in the sight of God has certainly been among the foundational ideas in moving society toward equal concern for the deprived, the poor, and the different. As Augustine writes in the Homilies on the First Epistle of John, “You ought to wish all men to be your equals . . . He is your brother, alike you are bought; one is the price paid for you and you are both redeemed by the blood of Christ.” Excessive neediness, as well, is cast aside, since A relies on an object that can never fail her, however inscrutable its operations may be. About revenge and anger there is surely, however, room for doubt. In relying on God’s justice and God’s mercy, and in fashioning her emotions after that norm, A will not extirpate all anger, and indeed she will retain a desire to take revenge upon God’s enemies. It was not without reason that Nietzsche stressed the vengeful elements in Christianity. Although it was surely hasty of him to conclude that these elements reveal the essential goal of Christian ethics to be revenge by the weak against the strong, and thus revenge on the very conditions of human life itself, nonetheless there is a disturbing emphasis on anger in Augustine, which might make us reconsider his attack on Stoic apatheia. Spinoza, following the Stoics, believes a central goal of the ascent of love to be the transcendence of anger and hatred, which poison human relations. His ideas of religious toleration seem a distinct advance over many of the Christian views they criticize. We can agree with Augustine in thinking that at least some occasions for anger will remain in the best life – anger, for example, against various types of harm and injustice – without being convinced that he has circumscribed this passion sufficiently, where social relations are concerned. So much of Augustine’s literary output expresses anger -against heretics, pagans, unbelievers, Jews. Anger and hatred based on the mere fact that someone follows a different religious conception, or even none at all – these are elements of Augustinian Christianity with which modern Christians have to wrestle, in fashioning a Christianity that can join with other religions in a pluralistic society. And certainly Augustine is no friend to such a pluralist politics: he pursues, instead, a politics of anger and retribution based on the dominance of the one true doctrine – in a dogmatic way that frequently seems in deep tension with his own admissions of the uncertainty and the mystery at the heart of human life. But instead of pursuing this line further – and we will certainly return to it in subsequent chapters – let us now examine the three areas of social life in which the Platonist ascent seemed to have its greatest difficulties, asking whether Augustine’s reformulation avoids those difficulties. At this point, it is inevitable that what I say will take a stand on religious matters on which readers will differ. Even to assess the Augustinian project from the point of view of an ideal of social relations that contains no explicit religious commitment is a project that the committed Christian may view as not quite the right way to go about things. And of course there will be found in any group of readers many varieties of Christian belief, and of other forms of religious and secular moral commitment, that will influence their response to what is said. To put my cards on the table, then, what I shall say henceforth is said from the point of view of someone who has converted from Christianity to Judaism, and whose undertanding of Judaism gives the moral sphere considerable autonomy and centrality, seeing the concern of God for man as essentially moral and political, focused on this-worldly concerns and actions, and intelligible from the point of view of a this-worldly use of intelligence.[^21] It is in order to investigate the relationship between Judaism and the Christian ascent that I have chosen to focus upon Mahler in Chapter 14, and I shall have more to say about these matters at that time. I shall now address my three questions, though in a different order. 1\. Individuality. In loving God, Augustine emphasizes, one loves each and every human being – not only the good parts but also the flaws and faults, and not only as stepping stones to one’s own artwork but in themselves. At the same time, it is a little unclear what role is left in The Confessions for loving real-life individual people. For what one loves above all in them is the presence of God and the hope of salvation. As Hannah Arendt puts it well in Love and Saint Augustine,”[T]he lover reaches beyond the beloved to God in whom alone both his existence and his love have meaning . . . The Christian can thus love all people because each one is only an occasion, and that occasion can be everyone.” (96) There is therefore a question about the extent to which the individual is really loved as such, as either a separate life or a qualitatively particular life. I postpone that question here, however, since it will be a major theme of my discussion of Dante in Chapter 12. 2\. Reciprocity. Does this love acknowledge the importance of reciprocity, and a respect for human agency, both in the love relationship and in other social relationships that may be affected by it? It would be impossible to answer this fully without an extensive account of other works of Augustine’s; but, confining ourselves to the texts we have discussed, there are certainly questions in this area, because there are questions about precisely what the lover’s attitude toward fellow humans is to be. Augustine portrays the ascending Christian as radically isolated in her confessional zeal, retreating from the world to be alone with God. There is some question as to how this confessing lover can be said to have a neighbor at all. I have said that there is a recognition of human equality, and this seems clear. But the equality that the solitary lover perceives in her acts of confession is an equality of abjectness, sinfulness, and need. In our common descent from Adam, that is to say, in our original sinfulness, is the foundation of our fellowship: in the Confessions, fellow citizens are companions in fate, participants in a situation of mortality (X.4.6). “The whole world was guilty from Adam,” Augustine writes in a later text, Against Julian the Pelagian. And in The City of God (1.9), again, our fellowship is to be found in our wickedness as members of the world of sin. It is this thought of peril that, according to Augustine, impels us toward our neighbor (Comm. on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians 56). The doctrine of original sin will be assessed in different ways by different readers, in keeping with their religious and experiential views. To me, as expressed here, it is a doctrine that diminishes the force of this-worldly moral distinctions based on this-worldly conduct and acts. It seems wrong to equate all humans in their sinfulness, and wrong to base social relations on a recognition of equal sinfulness. There is, I think, too much abjectness in this, too much unwillingness to grant that a human being may in fact become, and be, good, and that there is all the world of difference between the evil and the good. This entails a related failure to acknowledge individuality: each is treated as sinful, even before each has had a chance to live a life. The idea that in Adam we all sin is surely intended to compromise the idea that our engagements and choices in this world are at the core of who we are. One can appreciate the problem by thinking about Hannah Arendt’s fascinating study of Augustine, Love in St. Augustine, written in Germany in 1929. In this work, Arendt writes sympathetically about precisely this element in Augustine – the sense of equal wickedness and evil – seeing it as an appealing foundation for a community of equals. But in hindsight this seems an especially perverse and unfortunate view to be taking, especially when one considers that she is taking up this view as a substitute for Jewish views about virtue and human reciprocity. In the Jewish conception – as I think also to a great extent in later Thomistic Christian conceptions[^22] – the human being is perfectly capable of being good, and the dignity of moral agency is the appropriate foundation for community. All persons respect one another’s agency, and one of the ways that they do this is to blame the bad and praise the good, making a very sharp distinction, for example, between Arendt and those who persecute her. Augustine’s own view of grace, not the only possible view surely, and one that attaches far less value to our earthly performances than most others, allows too little room for this dignity of agency. It therefore yields an inadequate foundation for political reciprocity. Augustine makes us a community of abject and rather helpless beings, victims of our inheritance, a community in which Arendt is not crucially different from those who will try to destroy her. Dante will attempt to show that it is possible to retain the Augustinian emphasis on receptivity and emotion while still building in far more respect for this-worldly moral choices. 3\. Compassion. It is of course plain that Augustine’s account restores compassion, along with other emotions, to a place of centrality in the earthly life. Human beings are to relate to one another as needy and incomplete, and recognizing the need of another should give rise to Christian love. However, we sense that the reasons for Augustinian compassion are not exactly the same as the reasons that recommended compassion in Part II, as a foundation for some valuable types of political action. In Part II, I argued that the good social agent should care when people are hungry, when they mourn, when they are persecuted – and should, in her compassion, see the remediation of those bad states of affairs as an urgent task of earthly politics. This is of course exactly how compassion functions in many parts of the Christian tradition, not least in the social doctrine of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, with its scathing attacks on inequality and its admirable concern for the eradication of hunger, persecution, and other ills of earthly life. Is this, however, the focus of compassion in Augustine? I believe not. Our sense of incompleteness is focused insistently on our sinfulness, and on our remoteness from God. What we see with compassion in our neighbors is this same sinfulness, this same need for God’s grace. This means that Augustinian love is committed to denying the importance of the worldly losses and injustices to which my neighbor may attach importance, in order to assert the primacy of the need for God and the potential for grace. As Hannah Arendt put the situation very concisely: > Just as I do not love the self I made in belonging to the world, I also do not love my neighbor in the concrete and worldly encounter with him. Rather, I love . . . something in him, that is, the very thing which, of himself, he is not. “For you love in him not what he is, but what you wish that he may be.” This not only preserves the isolation of the lover who is concerned about even those nearest to him only insofar as he loves God in them. It also means that for the neighbor as well love is merely a call to isolation, a summons into God’s presence . . . Death is irrelevant to this love, because every beloved is only an occasion to love God. The same source is loved in each individual human being. No individual means anything in comparison with this identical source. If this is a correct account of Augustine – and with some tentativeness I shall endorse it – it shows why we have reason to be alarmed at the insistent otherworldly direction of this longing. Death is irrelevant, real suffering in this world is irrelevant, all that is relevant is coming into God’s presence. To see how problematic this doctrine of love is, we have only, again, to consider Arendt, writing this from her 1929 situation. She takes from Augustine a lesson that may well have calmed her, but one that could not have been useful in directing her actions and speeches in the world in which she found herself. In the view she would have absorbed from her own Jewish tradition, both God and man are to care intensely about each earthly instance of injustice and wrongful death, directing compassion altogether toward the theater of history and not at all toward the shadowy and uncertain realm that may or may not lie outside it. As a follower of Augustine, Arendt learns that the griefs and pains of anti-Semitism, wrongful death, and hatred are not in the scheme of things really relevant – because those who hunger and thirst shall be filled by God, those who mourn shall see God. Whereas Judaism would have taught her that God’s sphere of concern is this life, that all of our moral achievements take place in this life, if at all, and that those achievements thus have enormous weight, her reading of Augustine tells her that all of these acts and relations pale before something of far greater significance. As she herself concludes, “This indirectness breaks up social relations by turning them into provisional ones.” Nietzsche claimed that this attitude toward this-worldly virtue would inspire lassitude. Longing for the other world puts people to sleep in this world. The virtues of a merely provisional social world are “soporific virtues,” because the focus on the beyond discourages risk taking and enterprise here and now. The aim of slipping off into beatitude distracts moral attention from the goal of making this world a good world, and encourages a focus on one’s own moral safety that does not bode well for earthly justice. “Blessed are the sleepy ones,” concludes Zarathustra – “because they shall soon drop off.”[^23] He is hasty, once again, when he indicts the entirety of the Christian tradition for this failing. But he is not wrong about something that is real in Augustine – and unpleasantly linked, perhaps, with Augustine’s deep interest in the political control of the church, which sometimes requires docile, obedient – we might even say sleepy – subjects. Why does Augustine believe that there is a radical and original equality of all human beings in sin? For this is not a universal Christian belief. Many Christian views – including Dante’s, as we shall see – give this-worldly striving a central place in salvation. Why does Augustine direct longing away from this-worldly virtue, invoking our boundless and equal sinfulness? Once again, this is a complicated question, to which we can give only a partial and incomplete answer. The primary ingredient in human sinfulness, for Augustine, is our disobedience to divine authority; another closely, and complexly, related ingredient is the nature of our this-worldly sexual longing. In his account of the Fall in The City of God XIV, Augustine makes it plain that disobedience is the central issue: sexuality was present in the Garden before the Fall, and was part of our original good human nature. Sexuality was good because it was obedient: we were able to use our organs the way we now use gardening tools, at the direction of the will (XIV. 10). The unpredictable and ungovernable character of human sexuality as we now experience it is the fitting punishment for our original sin of disobedience: "the return for disobedience was nothing other than disobedience" (XIV.15). Our bodies now elude our control, just as we eluded God's: > At times, without intention, the body stirs on its own, insistent. At other times, it leaves a straining lover in the lurch, and while desire sizzles in the imagination, it is frozen in the flesh; so that, strange to say, even when procreation is not at issue, just self-indulgence, desire cannot even rally to desire's help - the force that normally wrestles against reason's control is pitted against itself, and an aroused imagination gets no reciprocal arousal from the flesh. (XIV. 17, trans. Wills) This lack of control over ourselves makes us, fittingly, ashamed. The original inhabitants of the Garden were not ashamed of their genital activities, because they used their parts obediently, and at the discretion of the will. It is when sexuality is bound up with disobedience, uncon-trol, and ungovernability that a shame falls upon human beings that renders them all equally low. They are "confounded by the disobedience of their flesh... Thus modesty, prompted by shame, covered that which was disobediently aroused by desire against a will condemned for disobedience."[^24] Thus our separate and disobedient flesh is the consequence of our separate and disobedient will - and both become objects of a profound and equalizing shame. Augustine reads the myth of shame at our nakedness as a myth, ultimately, about the recalcitrance of the will, and about sexuality only inasmuch as it remains a central example and sign of the recalcitrance of the human will to divine authority. What he does not like about human life, in the end, is that we cannot stop thinking for ourselves, that we want to know good and evil for ourselves, and thus disobey a commandment that it would have been easy to obey. Our bodies reveal our uncontrolled character, in the way that they rebel against even our own commands. In consequence, we must cover ourselves in shame, and wait for a time when we will again be submissive to the authority of God. Augustine had apparently restored the emotions to a place of honor in the good life and with them, the needy and imperfect aspects of our humanity. He had condemned the pride with which the Platonist tradition denounces as shameful any imperfection, any humanness. And yet his own conception of Eden, and the sin that banished us from Eden, is based, in its own way, on primitive shame, as is his idea of love's ascent. For Augustine the disobedience of the will - and the sexuality that is its sign make us the human beings we know, so unlike those automata that procreated in the Garden, using their genitals like gardening tools. These creatures were sexual, but in a deep way nonerotic: they had no passionate attachment to pieces of the world; so long as they were good, they were not curious or striving. We might say that in our sense they were without emotion. It is thus a very basic fact about humanity - our need for objects, our keen hunger to know and to control the sources of good - that is original sin. And thus a basic aspect of our humanity becomes a fitting object of boundless shame; it is this very condition that renders us hopelessly alike so far as merit is concerned. The politics of Eden is this: be ashamed of your longing for objects, your curiosity to know them, and your very wish to originate independent actions. Be so ashamed that you see this as radical evil, and yield your will before the authority of the church. But also: be consoled, for this is a merely provisional world, and the actions you would like to undertake here do not matter greatly; all of your suffering will ultimately be made up by the transcendent beauty of coming into the presence of God. Let us now return one last time to Arendt. The idea that the independent will itself and sexuality itself, seen as a metaphor for the ungovernable will - are fundamentally evil in their separateness and their lack of docility is perhaps a consoling idea, in a world where real political engagement is enormously costly and uncertain of success. Thinking Augustinian thoughts of radical evil mitigates the suffering of having to obey evil powers in the world. It supplies the powerless with a project-coming into God's presence - that does not rely on their ability to will good action here and now. But again: the price that is paid is too high. The price is a profound shame - if not at all uncontrol, as with the Platonists, still, at a very fundamental element of our humanity our independence, our willfulness, our sexual and moral unpredictability. Instead of taking action as best we can, we had better cover ourselves, mourn, and wait. In the end, then, Augustine assails as the origin of evil the very root of a liberal politics. Fascist authority is not wrong just because it is the wrong authority, but because any such illiberal authority has the wrong relation to the human will. We find here the politics of shame again, in a new guise, now animated by a hatred not of weakness but of independent strength. Instead of Chapter 4's person of steel, the person who is dust and ashes. These two are less different than they at first appear: both normative pictures involve shame about human reality. Don't we have to like human action, even in its imperfection, if we are to figure out how to live decently in this world? Here again, then, in a very different way, ascent has carried the lover too far beyond the realm of worldly need, suffering, and injustice for her to be quick to fight for the neighbor's right, or to assuage the neighbor's pain. Injustice is real and not just provisional, hunger is real and not just provisional. A must recognize these facts as she ascends, or else her ascent will take her away from morality itself. --- [^1]: Not all Christian love is love of God: there may be human loves that are distinctively Christian. But these other loves are suffused by the love of God, and, as we shall see, their real object always is, in a way, God. So understanding Augustine's view of the love of God is our central task. On Augustine's doctrine of love, see Brown (1967), Arendt (1929, 1996), Di Giovanni (1964); on the spiritual journey of Christian life in general, see Gilson (1949); for a fine general account of Augustine's philosophy of mind, see O'Daly (1987); on his relationship to pagan culture, see Marrou (1938). For an interesting account of the role of desire in the Confessions, see Miles (1992), and for a fascinating account of the relationship of this work to Augustine's biography, see Wills (1999). [^2]: Confessions 1.13. All translations from Augustine are my own. Wills suggests, plausibily enough, that The Testimony is a better translation of the title, Confessiones, than Confessions: confiteor means to acknowledge or testify, not simply to confess in the narrow sense. I retain the traditional title for clarity's sake. [^3]: I do not take any stand on the vexed question of whether Augustine actually read Plotinus, or only heard of the views at second hand. This is irrelevant to my argument, since he clearly is familiar in a general way with the structure of the Platonist contemplative ascent. [^4]: My account of Augustine's development is close to that advanced in Brown (1967), a work for which I have much admiration. In many respects I am simply giving more elaboration and philosophical structure to the picture he has laid out. But I believe that he has not presented a complete picture of the arguments that lead Augustine to reject the Platonic ascent: see note 9 to this chapter. [^5]: Because we cannot be sure in what version Augustine encountered Plotinus (see note 3), it is all the less clear how, precisely, he interpreted various disputed points in Plotinus' complex and contested text. I reconstruct his Neoplatonism, simply, from his own doctrines in the works under discussion. [^6]: Both works are dated to 388 C.E.: they are thus among his earliest postconversion writings. [^7]: "... labor, et contra huius mundi molestias atque blanditias magnus acerrimusque con-flictus" (73). [^8]: "Ingenti quadam et incredibili fiducia pergit in Deum, id est, in ipsam contemplationem veritatis." One can see here how superficial the Christian modification to the Platonist conception has been: the name of God is explicated by a reference to the contemplation of truth. [^9]: "Ipsa cogitatio ab omni cupiditate ac faece rerum mortalium sese cohibuerit et eliqua-verit." Compare the reflexive verbs of Brunetto Latini in Dante's Hell - see Chapter 12. [^10]: Brown stresses the first group of arguments. Even his chapter title, "The Lost Future," implies that some goal, still desirable, is simply being found to be unavailable. But I believe that the second group of arguments has even greater importance. [^11]: Brown (1967), p. 155. [^12]: See Genealogy of Morals II. The extent of Nietzsche's sympathy with Augustine's project should not be underestimated: for Nietzsche, this "bad conscience," though unfortunately linked in the Christian tradition with hatred of this world and of the body, is also the "pregnancy" out of which all great creative achievement and all philosophy must grow. [^13]: Here there would appear to be an especially sharp critique of Plotinus, Ennead 1.6 (much indebted to Plato's Symposium), where self-knowledge is equated with knowledge of the good that you are. Once again, it may be disputed precisely how Plotinus understands the role of the bodily in the perception of beauty; but it is reasonable to suppose that Augustine understood Neoplatonic doctrine to urge a progressive separation of soul from bodily distraction. [^14]: "metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque": here Augustine succinctly lists the four well-known generic categories of passion in Stoic taxonomies, all of which the Stoic would seek to extirpate. (The taxonomy is arranged along two axes: a temporal axis [present/future] and a good/bad axis: see Nussbaum [1994], Chapter 10.) In XIV.8, Augustine has quoted Virgil's enumeration of the four categories: "Hine metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque" (Aen.6.278-9). His general aim in that chapter is to show that these emotions can belong (as can will, voluntas) to both good and bad alike. [^15]: The Latin amor and amare of Augustine's version of John 21 translate Greek philia and phileô; not surprisingly, Jesus did not ask Peter, "Do you have erős for me?" But since Augustine's version occludes the distinction between philia and erős, so too, in many ways, does his discussion. [^16]: "Non enim quia durum aliquid, ideo rectum, aut quia stupidum est, ideo sanum." [^17]: Cf. X.29: "O love, you who always burn and are never extinguished, divine love, my God, set me on fire." [^18]: Cf. also Epistles XXVII.I: he finds delight in his very longing. [^19]: Cf. Conf. X.27: "in ista formosa deformis inruebam." [^20]: Cf. Conf. X.4, 35. [^21]: See my "Judaism and the Love of Reason" (i999d). [^22]: This is complicated by the role of grace in the Thomistic conception, which is both disputed and various: see further in Chapter 12. [^23]: Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part I, "On the Virtuous." [^24]: City of God XIV. 17, "confusi inoboedientia carnis suae Quod itaque adversus damnatam culpa inoboedientiae voluntatem libido inoboedienter movebat, verecundia pudenter tegebat." See the excellent discussion of this passage in Wills (1999), pp. 130-36.