On Ethics, Politics and Psychology in the Twenty-First Century

John M. Rist

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501307508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The Reading Augustine series presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars. John Rist takes the reader through Augustine's ethics, the arguments he made and how he arrived at them, and shows how this moral philosophy remains vital for us today. Rist identifies Augustine's challenge to all ideas of moral autonomy, concentrating especially on his understanding of humility as an honest appraisal of our moral state. He looks at thinkers who accept parts of Augustine's evaluation of the human condition but lapse into bleakness and pessimism since for them God has disappeared. In the concluding parts of the book, Rist suggests how a developed version of Augustine's original vision can be applied to the complexities of modern life while also laying out, on the other hand, what our moral universe would look like without Augustine's contribution to it.

1

The Foundations of
Augustine’s Moral
Empiricism: Truth,
Love and Sin

Thomas Aquinas began his masterwork of philosophical and biblical theology by offering a set of proofs for the existence of God. There is nothing like that in Augustine, though more informal arguments for God’s existence are to be found in his writings. In the most famous of these he observes that his proof is fragile (HR, 2.15.39), depending as it does on the Neoplatonic claim that if something can be shown to be ‘higher’ than the human mind, it must exist in God’s mind, and that since truth is higher than the human mind, God must exist.

We cannot account for this difference between Augustine and Aquinas merely by noting that Augustine had no need to prove God’s existence since atheists in our modern sense of the word were all but unknown in antiquity, the word being normally applied not to someone who denied the existence of a god or gods, but to someone who held that gods have no interest in the affairs of mortals, being too blessed to be bothered with them: that is, an ancient ‘atheist’ was normally a denier of divine providence, not of the existence of divinity. Augustine tells us in the Confessions (6.5.7; 7.7.11) that he was never seriously troubled by the thought of God’s non-existence; what matters is not God’s existence but his nature.

Anselm, who was Aquinas’s predecessor in raising the spectre of the modern-style atheist, wants to confirm the Psalmist’s view that he is a fool, even though his arguments and concerns too are less about proving that God must exist than about showing what sort of being a providential God infinitely removed from ourselves must be. Indeed, although in offering his Five Ways to demonstrate God’s existence Aquinas appears to follow in what he supposed to be Anselm’s footsteps, both of them still lived in a world where self-styled atheists remained all but unknown. Then why did Aquinas feel the necessity to offer arguments for God’s existence, let alone start his major treatise with them? Perhaps because some of his Muslim predecessors had done something similar, though that merely pushes the question a stage further back to why did they offer arguments for the existence of God (rather than of just one God), and why did Aquinas decide to follow suit, thus adopting a methodology very different from that of Augustine, his main Christian source apart from the Scriptures? Perhaps being a tidy, system-building man with a university job he wanted to start from the foundations of his physical, moral and spiritual universe, before proceeding to build on those foundations.

Augustine was not a tidy man with a university job – nor does he write like one; nor did he have any particular desire to construct hopefully watertight philosophical systems, though he was willing to learn from the more systematic thinking of others, whether pagans like Plotinus or Christians like Origen. He seems also to have thought that metaphysical mistakes, not least disbelief in God, are rooted less in bad thinking than in special pleading evoked by morally perverse desires (JG, 106.17.4; Ps, 53 (52) 2, etc.) inhibiting our recognition of the obvious and impelling a rationalizing construction of a world in which our own behaviour can be justified, or at least not condemned. In that he may have had a point: we learn to rationalize almost as soon as we learn to think, and since hard thinking is troublesome, rationalizing may seem more useful, certainly more attractive, especially if it allays pangs of conscience and licenses us to do ‘as we like’ – or to feel justified if we do what other people, with good reason, don’t like. The habit goes back to Adam and Eve who, humanly enough, wanted to excuse themselves: not me, Gov.! Fallen angels may seem – especially to poets – more heroic; they have no one else to incriminate.

If Augustine does not begin with God, what is his starting point? Usually, something that has come to puzzle him: Why do people – Manichaeans – think there are two principles in the universe, a good and a bad? Why do others – Pelagians – suppose that in this life we can be perfect? Why do others – Sceptics – think that I cannot be sure that I exist? Why do we suppose that some pleasures are illicit? Why do we suppose there some things we ought to do, or at least ought to want to do? Answers to such questions may lead to belief in God, but the questions themselves could occur to anyone, believer or unbeliever, learned or illiterate, introvert or extrovert, genius or fool. They ‘occur’: we ‘bump into’ them as we fill in (or fill out) our lives. When we bump into them, we cannot but reflect on them, however minimally and however much we try to ignore them or make assumptions based on other people’s views on them.

And as we thus reflect, we also ‘bump into’ recurrent explanatory principles. Many of us will share some of the principles prominent in the mind of Augustine, probably for the simple reason that, being like him human, we can do no other. So if we ask where Augustine starts, we are also asking what principles he notes in reflecting on those questions that regularly puzzled him. And we find that constantly he reverts to three particular themes in various guises: truth, love and sin. He will be surprised to find that many of our contemporaries disparage reflection on the last of these as obscurantism. When he thinks about these themes, he is both looking at the world – looking, that is, at what his experiences tell him is going on ‘out there’ – and trying to sort out his experience in the light of whatever learning he has at his disposal or can access. The experience itself – with the empirically acquired data – comes first, and philosophical or theological explanations or constructions may follow. Inability to find such explanations or constructions empirically may push him to accept views of philosophers or philosophical theologians who offer a further dimension of reality through which to ‘come to terms’ with his own experiences and better understand those of others.

Since I intend in the present book to update Augustine’s moral and spiritual universe, it will reveal how his understanding of truth, love and sin works itself out in the contemporary human sphere. Although truth will govern his wider reflections – as explanations of the universe as a whole – he will for now introduce such larger questions only insofar as they impinge on or follow from more immediately moral, political and spiritual concerns. He will start by explaining where he finds in the world and in himself the three themes – truth, love and sin – that reveal the parameters of his moral universe and will eventually lead him beyond it. With such a foundation, I can have him intervene as student and critic of twenty-first-century moral, political and spiritual thinking.

But why moral, political and spiritual – and Augustine could add aesthetic – when the title of the present chapter speaks only of his moral empiricism? The answer is that for Augustine there is little difference between the moral and the spiritual. We are reminded that there is no word in Latin which translates our concept of ‘moral’, and thus for Augustine both ‘moral’ and ‘spiritual’ relate to how one lives – ‘moral’ presumably referring primarily to basic behaviour – but both requiring God’s grace. And insofar as ‘aesthetic’ refers to what is beautiful or fine, that too is part of the same agglomerate. Our word ‘aesthetics’ – with its corresponding subject -matter – was coined in the eighteenth century; in ancient times aesthetics was part of ethics (or vice versa). Augustine will note that that observation is true not only of Christian but also of pagan thinkers.

Such preliminaries cleared away, Augustine can turn to his account of truth, leaving aside, at least for the moment, his identification of Truth with Christ and remaining within the more secular-seeming domain that is appropriate to his first steps into our twenty-first century. But as we recognized in the Introduction, unlike most Christian thinkers of his day, Augustine was not a Greek-speaking but a Latin-speaking bishop who read most of his Greek philosophy through Latin sources or through translations into Latin. That his culture was Latin, and typically so, meant that in tandem with his professional knowledge of Cicero as the master of oratory, he was familiar with Cicero, the reporter of philosophical themes more or less unknown to Greek-speaking bishops: in particular of debates between Stoics and Sceptics about the possibility of knowledge. What he learned of Scepticism from Cicero coloured Augustine’s thought throughout his life, but perhaps even more basic was his first enthusiasm for philosophy, aroused by a reading of Cicero’s now largely lost Hortensius, a text based on an earlier work of Aristotle’s urging its readers to think philosophically and to enjoy doing so.

All the major pagan philosophical schools (except obviously the Sceptics, but including Augustine’s favoured Platonists) had a ‘thick’ account of knowledge; that is, they thought of knowledge in much the same way as do many of our contemporaries insofar as they want to link it with certainty. Augustine learned not only not to share that view, but to find it unnecessary in the search for truth, as well as contrary to ordinary human experience. For there are but few ‘facts’ about reality which we can ‘know’ indubitably: such are truths of logic as that either p or not-p must be the case (AS, 3.10.23), or of mathematics, or of what we think we sense (3.11.26), or arguably of our own existence. We can ‘know’ nothing of the past, whether our own or more general history. Although we can know we exist, we have only limited knowledge of what we are like, or of what we will be tomorrow (S, 340A.8) – that is, how we will behave tomorrow – for our ‘hearts are an abyss’ (Ps, 42 (43).13); we are a great deep (C, 4.14.22). Above all, we do not know or understand our own motives, since we are divided.

I must gather myself together, Augustine tells us in the Confessions (2.1.1), for the dispersal of my affections ‘tore me apart when I turned away from you, the only Unity, and lost myself in multiplicity’, for (as so often happens), ‘It is I who willed it, and I who did not – the same I’ (C, 8.10.22). For Augustine this last reflection is morally basic, not least because it reminds us that we have memories of certain truths which we now see only through a glass darkly: of happiness (HR, 2.9.26), of goodness and human nature (T, 8.3-4; 13.1.2), of the just law which, as Paul had said, is impressed on the human heart (T, 14.15.21) and even of God who may ‘illuminate’ what we think.

It does not matter whether we have knowledge of past events because we can get on very well if we can find reliable and authoritative witnesses to historicity. Thus (and in the absence of DNA testing – and in each case if he has no reason to doubt their veracity) Augustine knows from his mother who his father is, and he can check with midwives or other relevant witnesses who his mother is (UB, 12.26). With historical events more generally we place the same reliance on intelligible and informed authorities. Certainly, if we have only one source of information and that source is confused, it is not reliable; but if it is coherent and especially if its testimony is supported by that of others, it would be irrational not to accept it.

In such cases scepticism is the irrational option; we have no reason – to use Augustine’s own example – to deny that Cicero executed the Catilinarian conspirators in 63 B.C. (UB, 11.25): though ‘Not only do I not know it, but I am quite certain I do not know it’. Similarly, we have no reason to deny that Hitler died in 1945, though no one now living saw him dead and the location of whatever remains of his body is unknown (thanks to Stalin). Beliefs in religion are essentially no different: we believe the account of the life of Jesus which the Scriptures which the Church has accepted describe, and the continuing Church bears witness to their veracity.

And as in the case of Jesus, Augustine never makes the mistake of supposing that because we ‘know’ a number of useful facts about a person or object or event, we know all about them in the sense that we have fully ‘captured’ their essential being. That sort of claim is what his account of confirmed belief is intended to reject. In treating of such belief he thinks ‘Stoically’ of assenting – thus to believe is to think with assent (PRS, 2.5) – but he declines to follow the Stoics (and some modern post-Fregeans) in thinking or assuming that all knowledge is propositional, and that what we ‘know’ is just whatever propositions we are entitled to assent to. He would have more sympathy with Saul Kripke’s ‘rigid designator’: that is, we ‘capture’ enough truth about the thing to which we refer to be able to speak intelligibly about it in specific (and linguistically shared) contexts.

There is further an experiential, first-hand knowledge of a type Augustine would have learned to recognize from the Platonists – had he needed philosophical teachers to tell him what is a matter of non-philosophical common sense. When, according to Plato or Plotinus, we recognize the Good, we are not assenting to a proposition that there is a Good (though we may do that as well); we are accepting that we can ‘see’ it, that in some way we are acquainted with it. We also know that however many true propositions we can formulate about it, we shall precisely not be able to ‘capture’ it. Nor is it only in the case of metaphysical items like the Good that we meet and ‘recognize’ only relevant characteristics. Augustine knows who his friend Alypius is, but, eschewing reductionism, he would never suppose that – although various propositions are true or false about Alypius – the man himself could be broken down into a set of qualities each of which could be described propositionally. Yes, Alypius lived in North Africa and not in Australia. Perhaps he was partly Berber, but he was certainly not Aborigine. Yet, however many true propositions can be well formed about Alypius (or anyone else), they can never be exhaustive.

There is an unusual but notable corollary to Augustine’s account of ‘cognitive’ experience, that is, his version of knowledge by ‘acquaintance’: a darker sort of limited but debased ‘acquaintance’ with – even ‘love’ of – objects, or of persons treated as objects. Thus we can be acquainted with human beings as vulnerable and exploitable:

We ought not to love human beings in the sense in which one hears gourmets say ‘I love thrushes’. Why not? Because the gourmet loves to kill and consume. When he says that he loves thrushes, he loves them so that they may not exist, so that he may destroy them….We should obviously not love human beings as things to be consumed. (JE, 8.5)

Augustine regards his awareness of the significance of the first-person experience of human individuals as peculiarly Christian, but he knows that his philosophical account of it is greatly influenced by Platonism. He connects it to the distinction between knowledge and understanding, or between learning and wisdom. Greeks since the time of Heraclitus – that is, well before Plato – knew that much learning does not add up to good sense, while Augustine’s Latin distinguishes between scientia (knowledge) and sapientia (wisdom) – words often invoked by his interpreters as terms of art. His account of ‘understanding’ is careful to note that the illumination of God gives us the ability to do much more than ‘parrot’ bits of information (C 10.7.11).

In the Platonic tradition right back to Plato himself – especially to the Republic – we learn of a special kind of knowledge available to morally, spiritually and intellectually trained and focused individuals: knowledge, that is, of the Form of the Good. The nature of that Good may be expanded and our understanding of it further developed (though Plato himself could hardly have expanded it in a Christian direction since he views it as more or less impersonal). Be that as it may, according to any sort of platonizing theory it is impossible to know the Good – we might better say ‘understand’, or ‘comprehend’ (at least something of) the Good – without also loving the Good, and so desiring urgently to have it in mind whenever we are acting as specifically human agents. For the Good is productive of itself: such that if you love it, you want to share it as something valuable and admirable within the society in which you live. Insofar as you know it, you will love it, not by inference but in the very experience of knowing it:

Give me a man who yearns, give me a man who is hungry, give me a man travelling in the desert, who is thirsty and sighing for the spring of the eternal country. Give me that sort of man; he knows what I mean. But if I talk to a cold man, he does not know what I am talking about. (JG, 26.4)

Plato’s view of such sharing – itself shared by Augustine – is immensely plausible, as well as informative about the nature of goodness itself: If I see a beautiful work of art, or watch a beautiful sunset, and if someone says to me, ‘Would you want your family and friends – or any wider group – to see these things?’ I would reply (that is, if I loved them or even merely respected them), ‘Well, of course I would’. Hence, in the Platonic tradition, to which at least thus far Augustine subscribes, to love something in the ‘best’ or ‘strictest’ sense of the word ‘love’ entails wanting to share whatever is lovable with others (insofar as it is good for them and for yourself to do so). The caveat is important: Augustine explained in HR (1.3.6) that he had no time for ‘wife-swapping’, doubtless believing that here the golden rule does not apply since its application would do no good to any of the parties involved. Of course, in the case of Beauty itself, which is God, as distinct from mere earthly beauties, the inspiration and consequent generosity are unbounded:

We have that which we can all enjoy equally and in common. In her there is no straitness, no deficiency. All the lovers she receives are altogether free of jealousy of one another; she is shared by all in common and chaste to each. None says to another: ‘Stand back that I too may approach’ or ‘Take your hands off that I may embrace her too’. All cleave to the same thing. Her food is not divided individually and you do not drink anything that I cannot drink too. From that common store you can convert nothing to your private possession. (HR, 2.14.37)

In the pagan Platonic tradition envy had always been a curiously ungodly characteristic. In complementary vein, and in the same tradition, it is impossible to love fully without having some more or less explicit comprehension of what it is that one loves. Indeed, Augustine thinks (as does Plato) that we are born with just such an implicit desire and comprehension that human viciousness and sophistry will seek to extirpate. His mother Monnica is depicted in The Happy Life and elsewhere as a simple soul whose underlying goodness has remained uncorrupted. Indeed, without a certain residue of such basic goodness, we should be left only with various lusts such as Plato attributes to his ‘tyrannical man’. That lust, which Augustine summarizes as the ‘lust for domination’, is to control and manipulate not only the bodies but also, diabolically (CG 4.4; On Music 6.13.41), the minds and even the souls of other people. Augustine, of course, is far from intending to imply that we should decline to instruct other people; instruction properly is neither manipulation nor domination, albeit sophists may present it as such, even by urging that the immature should be left uninstructed so as to be ‘free’ to work things out for themselves. We shall return to such ‘freedom’ and Augustine’s criticism of it later, especially in Chapters 3 and 8, merely noticing here that those who object (for example) to parents ‘imposing’ a religion on their children show no such concern about imposing their own language, and therefore, to no insignificant degree, their cultural habits and ideological preferences.

Augustine has already moved from the first of his principles – truth – to the second, which appears inseparable from it: that is, to love. But his account of love, though, as we have seen, expressed, in its philosophical formulations, in Platonic language, is again proposed as a Christian adaptation and cor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgement
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: What’s a One-Time Bishop of Hippo Got to Do with the Third Millennium?
• 1. The Foundations of Augustine’s Moral Empiricism: Truth, Love and Sin
• 2. ‘Scientific’ Philosophy and First-Person Confession
• 3. Against Autonomy: ‘Ought’ and ‘Can’
• 4. The State: Persecution, War, Justice – and Regret
• 5. Against Political Panaceas
• 6. Utilitarians and Kantians: A Parallel Journey to Triviality?
• 7. Rights-Theory
• 8. The Inevitable Irrelevance of Most Contemporary Theology
• 9. Austin’s ‘Brag’: Conventional Relativism, Nihilism or the Catholic Tradition?
• Transcript of a Radio Interview with Bishop Austin Redivivus: 1 April 2016
• Further Reading
• Index
• Imprint