Augustine and Modernity

Michael Hanby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134452651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Augustine and Modernity is a fresh and challenging addition to current debates about the Augustinian origins of modern subjectivity and the Christian genesis of Western nihilism. It firmly rejects the dominant modern view that the modern Cartesian subject, as an archetype of Western nihilism, originates in Augustine's thought. Arguing that most contemporary interpretations misrepresent the complex philosophical relationship between Augustine and modern philosophy, particularly with regard to the work of Descartes, the book examines the much overlooked contribution of Stoicism to the genealogy of modernity, producing a scathing riposte to commonly-held versions of the 'continuity thesis'.
Michael Hanby identifies the modern concept of will that emerges in Descartes' work as the product of a notion of self more proper to Stoic theories of immanence than to Augustine's own rigorous understandings of the Trinity, creation, self and will. Though Augustine's encounter with Stoicism ultimately resulted in much of his teaching being transferred to Descartes and other modern thinkers in an adulterated form, Hanby draws critical attention to Augustine's own disillusionment with Stoicism and his interrogation of Stoic philosophy in the name of Christ and the Trinity. Representing a new school of theology willing to engage critically with other disciplines and to challenge their authority, Augustine and Modernity offers a comprehensive new interpretation of De Trinitate and of Augustinian concepts of will and soul. Revealing how much of what is now thought of as 'Augustinian' in fact has its genealogy in Stoic asceticism, it interprets the modern nihilistic Cartesian subject not as a logical consequence of a true Christian Trinitarian theology, but rather of its perversion and abandonment.

1
A Grim Paternity?

The alleged sins of the Father

Saint Augustine occupies a vexed place in modernity’s vexed self-understanding. At the root of this understanding, and the cultural economic and political institutions that embody and sustain it, is something called the “modern self.” This self is an abstraction, to be sure, one that glosses over both the philosophical difference in detail between its Cartesian, Lockean and Kantian versions and the sociological difference between Catholics, Muslims and liberals. But inasmuch as this abstraction is the counterpart to the equally abstract power that manages and regulates it, it remains analytically useful. This self, simultaneously mastering the universe and draining it of any intrinsic meaning, is understood by many who employ it, though by no means all, to be at the root of the banality and brutality that has so infected modern culture and rendered the modern soul empty.

According to a common story that we shall soon consider, Augustine is instrumental in giving birth to this self, notably in the res cogitans of René Descartes. Yet the stakes in this conclusion extend well beyond the historic importance of the Bishop of Hippo Regius. It has been suggested that Augustine, along with Saint Paul, invented Western Christianity.¹ The statement is a hyperbolic acknowledgment of Augustine’s obviously profound influence, but it does suggest something of what is at stake in this contemporary reappraisal. In its theological guise, the reassessment of Augustine is part and parcel of contemporary Christianity’s on-going self-assessment in the West (some would say its penance), and, to a certain extent, its crisis of confidence. In its philosophical and political guise, it is part of modern culture’s ongoing reassessment of Christianity, an extension perhaps of modernity’s constitutive counter-identification with Christianity and its perennial urge to police the Church. For many in the first camp, this endeavor offers Christianity the opportunity to liberate itself from a great litany of sins frequently traced back to Augustine—the instrumentalization of “nature,” a stifled sexuality, hatred of matter and the body, a soulless individualism, the oppression of women and even the Holocaust. Yet for others in this camp this reassessment also offers Western Christianity the opportunity to become the West that never was, to liberate itself from itself, either for a romanticized Christianity of the East or, more typically, for a less particularist version befitting the liberal “consensus” of secular democracies. For those in the latter camp, particularly those of Nietzschean persuasion, the fact that “the Augustinian ideas that largely shaped the intellectual countenance of Western (Latin) Europe for centuries were transformed in the hands of Descartes into forces that led to its destruction” exemplifies the transvaluation of values, and thus provides exquisite evidence for Christianity’s intrinsic nihilism.² Questions about Augustine and Descartes, or about the relationship between Augustinian and modern selves, are therefore questions about what kind of event modernity is, what, if anything, can be done about it, and whether Christianity has any place in it.³

Despite the common plotline in the story of the proto-Cartesian Augustine (and despite real material differences among its proponents), the Augustines produced by this narrative tend to obey the contemporary divisions between the academic guilds, though this obedience is neither universal nor perfect.⁴ There are undoubtedly deep reasons for this conformity. Some are historical, and some, for historical reasons, are built into the structures of these disciplines themselves, which are not apt to recognize certain events—the decline of the Church or changes in sacramental practice, for instance—as ontological problems.⁵ The current principles organizing what counts as ontology exclude those for practical reasons which are traceable to the schism between the guilds. In this same vein, the Reformation, which both foreshadowed and was embroiled in the fracturing of the disciplines, produced an Augustinianism fearful of Augustine’s “Platonism,” an anxiety carried forward into several of the contemporary theological critiques of Augustine.⁶ The ironic result was to make possible for subsequent study by disciplines unhinged from theology an Augustine who would be nothing but a Platonist. So, on the one hand, it is typical to find an “Augustine of philosophical interest,” usually the Augustine of the Cassiciacum dialogues, the Confessiones (especially book VII), and De Trinitate, inasmuch as the purpose of the latter is to establish the mind’s self-relatedness. For this Augustine the ecclesial concerns of De Civitate Dei, or the Christology of De Trin. XIII, are relegated to a merely practical realm if they appear at all, and he is a far cry from the doctor caritatis of the later Pelagian disputes. On the other hand, there remains “the Augustine of doctrinal interest,” the doctor caritatis, codifier of predestination, inventor of the two cities, an Augustine long held at arms length by theologians embarrassed over this legacy, now of interest primarily to historians.

I want to reconstruct an Augustinianism more inclusive of these diverse aspects of Augustine’s thought. Given what the “Augustinian question” has come to mean, doing so will necessarily mean restating the meaning of the modern. But, before we can do that, we must first consider both the grand story of modern origins in which Augustine plays such a crucial role and the various cases against him.

The grand architect and the builders

“On the way from Plato to Descartes stands Augustine.”⁷ Charles Taylor’s remark is more than a historical observation. Rather it denotes Augustine’s crucial status as a lynchpin connecting the ancient to the modern, within a history which moves almost ineluctably toward a modern telos that casts a retrospective shadow over all that preceded it. This, in fact, is one of Taylor’s weaknesses.

Augustine is important to Taylor’s story because of his contribution to the “moral sources” constitutive of modern identity and because this contribution anticipates Descartes. Foremost among these contributions is radical reflexivity or a profound sense of “inwardness.” This reflexive self will later combine a Protestant affirmation of everyday life with deistic and romantic conceptions of nature to produce a self that grounds both a liberal agreement on moral standards and a general agnosticism over the sources of those standards. Taylor cites a famous passage in support of this inwardness. “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.”⁸ Yet beneath this general rubric are a number of more specific contributions that specifically foreshadow Descartes’ cogito. The first and most obvious of these are the proto-cogitarian arguments that appear variously throughout the Augustinian corpus, but the contributions do not end there.⁹ Taylor adduces a strong dualism between the bodily and the non-bodily underlying “inwardness” in both thinkers. Augustine’s proof of God’s existence in De Lib. II anticipates Descartes’ third Meditation, a point that Stephen Menn will later develop more thoroughly.¹⁰ And he follows Charles Kahn (who more or less concurs with Albrecht Dihle), in claiming that Augustine’s concept of will, at least in one of its senses as the stoic “power to confer or withhold all-things-considered-assent,” marks a crucial turning point in the history of philosophy and the self and anticipates the later Cartesian notion.¹¹

I intend the Augustinianism of subsequent chapters to stand as my material response to this interpretation; in this chapter I intend only to raise questions about the structure of Taylor’s narrative, the “sources” it omits, and the questions it neglects to ask. It should be noted from the outset that Taylor is eminently fair to Augustine if not adequate to him. In fact his account of the relationship between Augustinian and Cartesian thought notes many significant differences between them which I will later use to call this general story into question, differences neglected by others who further develop the case for continuity. Taylor rightly notes that Augustinian interiority, constituted in a relationship to a God more intimately related to the self than itself, is in a sense radically exterior. “In an important sense, the truth is not in me. I see truth ‘in’ God. Where the meeting takes place, there is a reversal.”¹² He notes another sense of “will,” as “a basic disposition of our being,” which, whether an adequate characterization, differs markedly from Descartes’ stoic version.¹³ Taylor notes Descartes’ dependence upon stoicism and the neostoic revival both for his ethics and physics, a dependence which signals a further departure from Augustine. The result in Descartes is not only a new, mechanistic cosmology and a more radical dualism of body and soul but a new conception of “self-mastery,” evident in his novel account of the passions, in which “the hegemony of reason is a matter of instrumental control.”¹⁴ This instrumentalist self will soon merge with liberal capitalist conceptions of selfhood rooted in proprietorship.

Postmodern critics like Eric Alliez will allege that this instrumentalism is endemic to Augustine’s understanding of will, his distinction between enjoyment and use, and even the division between the celestial and terrestrial cities, but Taylor seems to recognize an almost anti-Augustinian novelty here—certainly in the realm of ontology.¹⁵ Yet if this is true, why does this observation not complicate the argument for continuity? Would different ontologies not constitute different “language games”—to put it in Wittgensteinian terms—that govern the sense of the terms, the “pieces” in the “game”? Can we say that Augustinian inwardness and Cartesian inwardness are the same? What criterion of identity determines the meaning of “same” here? This problem haunts not only Taylor’s treatment of Augustine and Descartes but also his notion of modern identity as well. In the words of one set of critics, “he does not entertain the question whether a standard like dignity is actually a different standard depending upon whether the source to which you appeal is Reason or God.”¹⁶

The thinness in the modern identity that binds the narrative into a unity results in a thin account of the thinkers who compose this unity. Absent from the relationship between the soul and God in Taylor’s Augustine is anything either particularly theological or, indeed, particularly Christian. His one mention of the triunity of memoria, intelligentia and voluntas makes the trinitarian context of its elaboration appear incidental, and it certainly is incidental to Taylor.¹⁷ This is particularly odd given his insistence on the necessity and inevitability of “frameworks” for even initiating a quest for the good life and Augustine’s insistence in De Trinitate that the one Christ himself, God and human, is the context or “framework” of the quest.¹⁸ Surely this remark is cause for wondering if perhaps Taylor is understating the difference between the Augustinian and Cartesian selves. And if the primary utility of this trinitarian similitude is its analogy with the filiation of the Son and procession of the Spirit (to take the conventional but problematic interpretation), this would seem to call for some analysis of how the Augustinian self is constituted in relation to the sites where this trinitarian economy manifests itself, namely, Christ and the Church. This is especially true since both the soul and the city “answer” to each other by obeying the same dynamnic of sin, dissolution and conversion, just one of many macrocosmic/microcosmic isomorphisms that complicate the meaning of Augustinian interiority, as we shall see in subsequent chapters.¹⁹ Indeed for Augustine, the self is only finally realized in the heavenly city.²⁰ This is not merely the lesson of De Civitate Dei, but of the final books of the Confessiones, and it is exhibited throughout the latter work in Augustine’s typological self-understanding.²¹ As the self undergoes its conversio, its interiority comes to be constituted, not simply in relation to the God who transcends the distinction between inner and outer, but by the “exterior” politics of the heavenly city that mediate this relationship as the body to the headship of Christ.²² This is where the criticisms of Hauerwas and Matzko strike their sharpest blow. Taylor “does not see that Augustine’s politics is a counter-interpretation of his account of the modern self.”²³ A more adequate reading of Augustine, one which accounted for the interpretive role of the heavenly city and Christ’s ecclesial body, might have made Taylor less sanguine about Augustine’s role as a bridge, and it might have altered his characterization of the modern. Inasmuch as questions about the continuity between Augustine and Descartes are questions about what kind of event modernity is, omissions which call this continuity into question also call into question both Taylor’s characterization of the present and its relationship to the past.

Any historical narrative (the present one included) presupposes a plot structure, and, consequently, a priori standards and subsequent historical events which implicitly organize the narrative. Taylor takes great care to avoid anachronism (es...