"Love is the Hand of the Soul": The Grammar of Continence in Augustine's Doctrine of Christian Love

Scholars have been recognizing that Augustine’s attention to “concupiscence” grew from a complex analysis of the sources of all human behavior. The same pattern of analysis should extend to Augustinian “continence,” which Augustine presented as key to the righting of all human relationships. Continence shapes the deep grammar of all Augustine wrote about Christian love. Love is the hand of the soul, Augustine once said. For false and problematic loves, Augustine consistently used verbs whereby people acquire the objects of their love through operations of grasping, which close in upon and control those objects. In contrast, loves that are right and true open wide the “hand of the soul” in an act of clinging to God, to Christ, to the truth, and to wisdom—none of which one can control or manipulate. Love for friends and neighbors also is properly a love that clings rather than grasps.

In recent years scholars have increasingly recognized that Augustine’s close attention to “concupiscence” grew not from a crude preoccupation with sexuality but from a complex analysis of the sources of all human behavior—of social as well as sexual behavior, of lust for power as well as lust for pleasure. Gerald I. Bonner’s 1962 article on “Libido and Concupiscentia in St. Augustine” was pivotal in this regard. Bonner argued that “Augustine’s teaching on sexual concupiscence” should not be studied “in isolation from his doctrine of the lust for power.” ¹ To continue giving “preponderant” attention to sexual concupiscence alone would perpetuate a “deplorable” tendency to wink respectfully at other forms of “will to power and domination,” or perhaps even baptize these. ² More recently, Peter Brown has offered a general definition of Augustinian concupiscence. He has called it a shadowy “drive to control, to appropriate, and to turn to one’s private ends, all the good things that had been created by God to be accepted with gratitude and shared with others”; for Augustine, concupiscence “lay at the root of the inescapable misery that afflicted [humanity].” ³

It is time to extend to continence the same pattern of analysis that recognizes concupiscence as a general phenomenon capable of twisting all human relationships. In other words, it is time to apply the same analysis to that which begins to correct concupiscence. It is time to pursue Augustine’s suggestion that continence is key not just to dealing with errant sexuality, but is key to the righting of all human relationships. Augustine did not always make this explicit, and so a central task of this article will be to discern how a grammar of continence shaped his teachings on love, even when he did not explicate that grammar.

If the grammar of Augustinian continence has gone unnoticed, there are at least three reasons: first, grammars usually go unnoticed, for their purpose is not to call attention to themselves but rather to enable people to speak of many other things in intricately consistent ways. What Augustine took for granted can sometimes be more important than what he made explicit. The notion of a grammar helps us identify his background assumptions and organizing categories of thought, which may well have been more stable than were any of the explicit theological formulae that he continued revising throughout his career, precisely because they were less self-conscious. ⁴

Second, specifically sexual continence has distracted many readers and kept them from noticing the pervasive role of what Augustine once called “higher continence” ⁵ in his theory and practice of Christian love. When Augustine spoke of continence he did often seem to have narrowly sexual continence in mind; ⁶ and even when he spoke of continent love for God in a broader, more general sense, he often employed sexual metaphors. ⁷ Certainly his own conviction that to become a Christian would require him, at least, to become celibate has left readers with an example of Augustinian continence that readily eclipses all others. ⁸ But we will do best to discern the meaning of both sexual and general continence in...