Augustine and the Cure of Souls: Revising a Classical Ideal

Chapter 8: Therapy and Society

Chapter Eight Therapy and Society The art of God’s ineffable medicine turns even the foulness of human vices into something that has a beauty of its own. —Augustine, uera rel. 28.51 The Incarnate Word and Community Others have noted that although Augustine remains known for his forceful critique of a Roman Empire that had too often come to see its hegemony as eternal in duration, he never anticipated the extent to which classical institutions, especially those concerned with education, would decline soon after his death.1 The great irony of Augustine’s reception and transformation of classical traditions of philosophical therapy is that his sermons and treatises presuppose to a remarkable degree the very classicism that he endeavored to qualify. As he worried about how Christians could maintain a distinct identity while participating ever more deeply in Roman society, he self-consciously employed resources derived from the very culture from which he sought to distinguish the faithful. In this way, the more one appreciates the extent to which Augustine remained immersed in the vital traditions of antiquity, the more one sees that it is in his critique of Roman culture that his classical humanism is most evident— 198 a humanism that reclaimed precisely those elements of culture that he saw slipping into decadence.2 Perhaps this is not a surprising legacy of a man who taught that it was not the origin of cultural materials that was morally relevant, but the use to which they were put by the human heart. This peculiarity of Augustine’s work is nowhere more visible than in his use of classical rhetoric. Even as he inveighed against fundamental elements of Roman culture on a daily basis, he did so by reviving Cicero’s retrieval of classical philosophical rhetoric in opposition to pragmatic sophistry . Margaret Atkins has observed that by the early fifth century,“classical texts needed digesting to be of use” either to pagans or to Christians. Ironically ,“Cicero’s ideas took on new life” for Augustine in ways that they did not for many of Augustine’s pagan contemporaries.3 Cicero had explained to Augustine the origins of rhetoric in the following manner: There was a time when people wandered here and there in the fields like animals and lived on uncultivated food; they did nothing by the guidance of reason, but relied chiefly on their physical strength; there was as yet no institution of worship nor of social obligations; no one had yet seen lawful marriage, nor had anyone looked upon children known to be his own, nor had he accepted what usefulness just law had. And so, on account of error and ignorance, desire, the blind and rash mistress of the mind, exploited to its satisfaction physical strength, the most pernicious of accomplices.4 According to Cicero, human beings only came to differentiate themselves from the beasts when a great man harnessed the power of words to gather them together.5 “Through reason and eloquence” such an orator gave the human race what it needed to become civilized and no longer live like animals .6 Civilization came into existence through eloquent words, ordering what would otherwise be chaos. Cicero’s narrative advances the classical notion that human flourishing requires a certain formation of soul that gives it the capacity to order its instincts by words. Civilization is, as it were, a rhetorical achievement and rhetoric is a civilizing force. The orator is the hero who embodies this ideal and consequently excels other human beings as much as they do the animals.7 Stories of sophists such as Dio Chrysostom calming mutinous armies by the sheer power of persuasive speech were repeated because they personified the deepest aspirations and fears of a civilization. It is worth remembering that “citizens Therapy and Society 199 of the Roman Empire at its height, in the second century A.D., were born into a world with an average life expectancy of less than twenty-five years. Death fell savagely on the young. Those who survived remained at risk. Only four out of every hundred men, and fewer women, lived beyond the age of fifty.”8 The food available fluctuated perpetually between scarcity and famine.9 Human survival and flourishing were closely allied to the cultural mechanisms that made them possible. Cicero held that it was through the peculiarly human combination of reason and eloquence that “many cities have been founded...