Discerning the Good in the Letters and Sermons of Augustine by Joseph Clair (review)

Finding a gap in the ever-proliferating scholarly literature on Augustine is no easy task, but by concentrating on the conception of the good in Augustine’s letters and sermons, Joseph Clair has done just that. Clair’s intention, however, extends beyond attending to neglected texts. He demonstrates how Augustine’s understanding of God as the highest good does not obliterate but instead reorients our valuation of temporal goods. Augustine’s occasional writings, even more than his theological treatises, reveal how his ethical thinking orders temporal goods as central to the happy life, oriented ultimately to God as the highest good.

Clair begins the book by situating Augustine in the context of ancient Greek and Roman ethical theory. Like the Greek and Roman thinkers who preceded him, Augustine conceived of ethics most fundamentally as answering the question of what happiness consists in. The first chapter of the book examines this background, placing Augustine in conversation with the Stoic-Peripatetic debate over whether virtue alone is sufficient for the happy life, or whether certain external goods are required as well. The Stoics believed virtue to be sufficient, such that the good person can be happy “even while being tortured on the rack” (23). Following Aristotle, the Peripatetics affirmed the basic human intuition that in addition to virtue the happy life requires a set of external goods, such as health, wealth, physical beauty, and so on. Thinking of ethical theory along these lines, Augustine contends that certain temporal goods are part of the happy life, but in doing so he completely reframes the debate. Acknowledging that in death the external goods we have acquired are lost, Augustine recommends that we “prefer” eternal goods to temporal goods, and “refer” temporal goods to God, the highest good (36). In so doing, we are able to experience eternal goods in this life, enjoying a forestate of a kind of happiness that we cannot lose, even in death.

Clair unpacks these ideas in subsequent chapters that treat three areas of moral concern in Augustine’s letters and sermons: (1) household goods (marriage and family), (2) public goods (public office and civic virtue), and (3) private goods (wealth). In each case, Clair explicates Augustine’s view with careful attention to how it develops in response to actual persons struggling with questions of marriage and celibacy, responsibility for public office, and stewardship of wealth. In these everyday contexts, as well as in selections from his sermons, Augustine’s moral thought comes to life.

In the final chapter, Clair discusses Augustine’s conception of how these temporal goods are framed by eternal goods. Here we find that for Augustine, the happy life consists not only in virtue, or even in virtue plus a set of temporal goods; instead, the happy life also requires “imperishable forms of many of the temporal goods—namely, the intrinsic temporal goods of health and friendship” (132). Friendship and health (understood as a kind of friendship “between body and soul”) are eternal goods which will be enjoyed in the world to come, but which can also be enjoyed now. They are forestates of a kind of external good that endures. In desiring friendship, for example, we love a good that lasts beyond our death, when all other external goods of this life have been lost.

This book is carefully written, exceptionally learned, and convincingly argued. It provides a helpful entry-point for those who are new to Augustinian studies, while also advancing the scholarly conversation on Augustine’s ethical theory. Anyone interested in Augustine’s thought and influence on the history of religious ethics would greatly benefit from this text.