The Unity of Love for God and Neighbor in St. Augustine (review)

In the acknowledgements Raymond Canning mentions that this volume is the product of fifteen years of work on the topic of the relation between love of God and love of neighbor in St. Augustine. The first five of the seven chapters did, in fact, appear in issues of Augustiniana between 1982 and 1987 and have been reprinted in this volume with only slight modifications. Chapter One appeared in 32 (1982), 5–41; chapters two and three in 33 (1983), 5–57 and 165–231; chapter four in 34 (1984), 5–52; chapter five in 36 (1986), 161–239. Chapters six and seven have, as far as I could discover, not been previously published. The careful and detailed scholarship manifested throughout the volume readily explains the long time it took to complete this meticulous study which presents a comprehensive and quite balanced view of a much debated aspect of Augustine’s thought.

Chapter One explores how Augustine distinguished love of God from love of neighbor. To take into account the development of Augustine’s thought over his long career as an author, Canning divides the texts he examines into those written before 395, those written during his early years as a bishop, and those written after 412 during the Pelagian controversy. Since Augustine at times speaks of human beings moving from love of neighbor to love of God, the second chapter explores the nature of this move, largely through an examination of various images Augustine used for viewing love of neighbor in relation to love of God, for example, as a step, as a cradle, as a wash to prepare the eye of the mind for contemplation, or as wings for rising up to God. The author argues against the view that Augustine saw love of neighbor merely as a preparatory stage on the way to love of God and insists that even the early Augustine saw love of neighbor as much more than this. The third chapter examines the difficult question of whether, according to Augustine, to love one’s neighbor is “to use” or “to enjoy” the neighbor, explores the many interpretations of “uti” and “frui,” and defends Augustine’s speaking of love of neighbor as “use,” while carefully unfolding the various nuances and subtleties of the question. Canning’s fourth chapter explores Augustine’s view of the self-love which scripture proposed as a model of our love for the neighbor. He argues against both Luther’s and Nygren’s understanding of the role that Augustine assigned to self-love in coming to a love of God and of neighbor and provides strong evidence against the view that for Augustine even love of God is ultimately self-seeking.

In chapter five Canning examines how Augustine speaks of and describes the neighbor one is to love; he groups the texts under four headings: the neighbor as soul, as every person, as Christ, and as one’s enemy. Though Canning correctly sees that in some texts prior to 396 Augustine views the neighbor as the soul alone, so that even in these early texts love for neighbor reaches beyond blood relationships, he does not, I think, sufficiently emphasize the difference between some of the early works in which a strong Platonic view of human beings dominated his thought and his later views which were tempered by his fuller understanding of the demands of the Christian faith.

The sixth chapter turns to a synthetic rather than an analytic approach and attempts quite successfully to sum up the whole theme. Canning’s treatment of Augustine’s inversion of the Johannine “God is love” so that he explicitly refers to love as God is especially well done. The final chapter examines one of Augustine’s favorite scriptural passages, the judgment scene in Matthew 25, where Jesus identifies himself with those in need.

Because the author has gathered and analyzed so many texts on the relation between the love...