The Augustinian person

4. Humanitas

        H U M A N I TA S ;In Sources of the Self Charles Taylor reclaims an Augustinian conception of the structure of morality.1 Both the similarities and the differences between Augustine and Taylor on this matter provide a useful approach to the problems of Augustine’s ethics. Taylor proposes a hierarchy of three kinds of good: first, standards of propriety that differ from one culture to another (the privileges of a warrior, for example ; the duties of a wife or a son); then the norms (courage; the wrongness of murder) with which people everywhere, ordinarily, successfully make some moral sense of experience—Taylor eventually calls these “life goods”; and finally norms of the highest order: the principles with reference to which, and as a result of which, all other goods are good. Taylor calls these “hypergoods,” and in other contexts “constitutive goods” (divine wisdom, for example, or the principle that every being should reach its full potential). In its general conceptual structure this resembles Augustine’s account of morality in book  of the treatise On Free Will (De lib. arb. ..–..). First, Augustine argues that there are cultural variations in human morality, which he here describes in exclusively political terms. The choice between democracy and monarchy is not a matter of straight principle but of prudence. Democracy, for example, is a just form of government provided that people in large numbers are not in the habit of selling their votes. Second, this argument nevertheless implies an immovable basis: that selling one’s vote is invari-  . Taylor, –. ably wrong. In Augustine’s example this is the controlling norm; the wrongness will therefore not change to rightness in other circumstances . (It should be noted that he has said—or rather Evodius in the dialogue has said, and Augustine does not contest—that a good law can be enacted by a bad man. This distinguishes between the intention and the externals of an act; the law concerned can still be good, but its enacting would have been a fully good act only if the intention had been good.) Thus, in this early text at least, Augustine balances natural law—practical rules as built into nature—with what is sometimes called “natural right”—principles of virtue as built into nature and not tied to any specific practical rules.2 He does not choose one at the expense of the other: actions in one class are sometimes right and sometimes wrong; actions in the other are always right or always wrong. Third, such ineradicable practical norms, and the whole human moral life, depend, says Augustine, on supreme reason: the principle determining the rightness of action, the eternal source of moral awareness. By this one knows, beyond argument, what is good and beautiful and what is not (De lib. arb. ..). This is essentially what Taylor calls a “constitutive good.” Augustine does not detail its content here, but, as Taylor himself points out, Augustine’s moral theology as a whole asserts that there is one ultimate, constitutive human good, and this is (un-Platonically) God—divine charity.3 It is on the question of the ultimate singleness of the constitutive good that Taylor and Augustine part company. Taylor agrees that a constitutive good is real, not merely an invention of the mind, but his position is that there are more than one and that they are inconsistent with one another—indeed, often necessarily in conflict, though each indestructible.4 (He typically thinks of religious principles, as opposed to deep-seated desires for natural self-fulfilment.) Augustine’s  ⁄   . For the suggestion that in Aristotle, for example, there is such a disjunction (“right,” but not “law”) see, e.g., Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), –. . Taylor, . . Ibid., –. position is that in the divine agape even the most deeply conflicting human loves are consummated and subsumed.5 As we have noticed, he sees concupiscence, when fully actuated, as the essence of sin and death precisely because it is disorder at the basis of the soul’s attitude —distorted love (e.g., De gr. et lib. arb. .; Conf. ..).6 Human motivations are all approximations (though some of them immensely remote) to the summative divine motivation. Hence, the master principle of Augustine’s moral theology is his notion of charity, which may be provisionally defined as an ordered love whose motivation , whether working as a final or an efficient cause, is divine. It has on...