Augustine Today (review)

This sixteenth and final volume in the Encounter Series has its origins in a conference held at the Union Club in New York on 27–28 October 1988 to mark, one year after the event, the 1600th anniversary of the baptism of St Augustine of Hippo. The conference brought together twenty eminent scholars resident in North America to consider “the question of the meaning of Augustine’s thought for the Christian faith in the modern world” (111). The two-day discussion, the story of which is engagingly told by John R. Muether (111–56), was framed by a set of four papers dealing with various aspects of love in Augustine. These papers—by William S. Babcock, Ernest L. Fortin, Robert J. O’Connell, and Eugene TeSelle—are reproduced in Augustine Today.

William S. Babcock’s basic contention, in his paper “Cupiditas and Caritas: The Early Augustine on Love and Fulfillment” (which would have benefited from closer proofreading, particularly in the Latin), is that Augustine discriminates between loves by distinguishing their objects. “. . . Augustine converted the question of happiness into a question of two loves—two loves differentiated, not first in the lover, but first by the loved . . .” (33). Cupiditas refers to the “love of things that can be lost” (10), whilst caritas stands for the love which knows and enjoys the eternal—God, who alone cannot be taken away (33). Both caritas and cupiditas, however, count as amor (32; see also note 30 which summarises the argument for designating cupiditas as amor) because both fulfill Augustine’s definition that to love something means “precisely to love it for itself” (propter se) (9). The opposition between the two loves extends beyond their objects to the social order to which each of them gives rise. Cupiditas sets person against person; but caritas “in seeking and attaining the eternal, also unites persons in the common bond of a love shared without threat or envy . . .” (31). Babcock, however, explicitly distinguishes “this shared love of the eternal from the love of neighbor” (30, note 28), provoking the conference participants to bring into the foreground the question of what happens to neighbor-love in the light of Augustine’s discussion of human fulfillment (113–23). I would have questioned whether a shared love for God, along with its social implications, may be validly discounted as a form of neighbor-love in Augustine. Ernest L. Fortin, in the second part of his paper, would appear to agree that it should not (46–47).

In the first part of “Augustine and the Hermeneutics of Love: Some Preliminary Considerations,” Fortin offers a series of general remarks on the way in which Augustine “[attributed] to God the ideas that the Bible seems to deny him” (59), and, in so doing, came to dominate the intellectual scene for more than a thousand years with “a new mode of knowledge, based on love and incommensurable with anything to which the philosophical tradition was accustomed” (36). Only of the truth of divine revelation—rerum diuinarum atque salubrium scientia (De Doctrina Christiana, IV.5, 7)—can it be said that it is, “in one and the same act, both theoretical and practical” (42), “a truth whose object cannot be grasped unless it is also loved” (45). On this basis, Fortin contrasts the ineffectualness and divisiveness of the pagan philosophers’ elitism, arrogance, and noble lying, with the intrinsic persuasiveness of the one divine truth which, even as known by the brilliant Augustine, “is not something other that what every Christian knows or should know” (45). In the discussion of Fortin’s paper, sparks flew over this matter of Augustine’s moral superiority to the pagans, with a particularly sharp reaction being drawn to Fortin’s pointed claim that “there’s no commitment to the neighbor on their [the pagans’] part” (129).

Robert J. O’Connell’s “Sexuality in Saint Augustine” presents itself as an educated common sense reading of the Confessions in an attempt to answer the following questions: “What was...