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