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.