On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self

Ian Clausen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501314209
• eBook ISBN: 9781501314216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Reading Augustine series presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars. Ian Clausen's On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self describes Augustine's central ideas on morality and how he arrived at them. Describing an intellectual journey that will resonate especially with readers at the beginning of their own journey, Clausen shows that Augustine's early writing career was an outworking of his own inner turmoil and discovery, and that both were to summit, triumphantly, on his monumental book Confessions (AD 386-401). On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self offers a way of looking at Augustine's early writing career as an on-going, developing process: a process whose chief result was to shape a conception of the moral self that has lasted and prospered to the present day.

1

Waking Restless Hearts

This chapter sets out to present the moral self as an awakening, restless lover on the way to finding God. It sets out, in short, to explore the human condition by revealing a restless movement of desire at its center: the weight of love. “[M]y weight is my love,” Augustine confesses, “and wherever I am carried, it is this weight that carries me.”

Though the nature of love admits of many different views, some popular views diverge sharply from Augustine’s. For example, some view love as a purely emotional reaction, setting it at odds with the dispassionate reason (“rationalism”). Others view love as a choice one makes as if selecting and investing in an arbitrary object (“voluntarism”). Still others view love as a sentimental affair that is nice if you can get it but is not very common (“romanticism”). Each view captures some element of truth, but none of them quite captures the view of Augustine.

What does he mean by “my weight is my love”? His image seemingly surrenders all control to love, suggesting it not only influences but determines our trajectory. It turns out this suggestion is not far off the mark; the image is not meant to be a flowery metaphor. Instead, it is a statement on the human condition. It means that we are lovers all the time and all the way down. Love is the condition of human being, knowing, and willing. It implies that love is always operating just below the surface: forging new bonds, reinforcing old attachments, claiming us for any number of causes and pursuits. Does this mean love is outside the lover’s control, behaving as a kind of physical law of the universe? Not quite; but nor does it ignore love’s effects. Instead, confessing love to be the weight that bears us (note the passive voice) the statement nonetheless calls it our weight, our love (possessive). Indeed, in acknowledging his position in love Augustine poses a basic question to the reader of his works: “where is my love taking me?”

In this question, I recognize my love has gone before me, and that I may not know exactly where it is or where it is going. By resolving to chase down love’s location and direction I embark upon a process of re-claiming where I am: this is the place that we call the moral self. As we shall see, Augustine’s ventures on this process of discovery tend to work within three interlocking models of self-knowledge: the (m)othered self, rootless self, and seeking self. In each case one discovers and reclaims one’s place as a site of personal encounter with the God of all creation.

The (m)othered self, or lovers in need

It is a fundamental axiom of Augustine’s anthropology that the human is a lover all the time and all the way down. Love is a condition of human being, knowing, willing. Moreover, this love is always love for the good, for the human cannot help but love the good in some sense. At the same time, love of good does not make us good lovers, nor prevent us committing evil deeds in love’s name. Love is also a matter of evaluation and reason. It encompasses both cognitive and affective dimensions (O’Donovan 1980: 29–32). To evaluate the good is to love it, and vice versa, for indeed the good itself is a condition of our being. Put together, we exist in and through love of the good, which encompasses all our activities of knowing and willing.

That said, it is not easy to isolate love, giving it a concise and widely agreed upon meaning. It is more than just emotion, though it certainly includes emotion. It is more than just reason, though it certainly includes reason. And to maximize confusion it takes a wide range of objects: from our love of ice cream to our love of God and neighbor, and every other imaginable relation and attachment (whereas Latin and Greek have multiple words for love, acknowledging the different contexts that love can inhabit, English alas has only the single word “love,” which discourages us from thinking very carefully about its meaning).

On the other hand, it is difficult to identify a case in which love is either absent or void of significance. If we resist its reduction to a special kind of relation—a romance, for instance—we can observe it “at work” in many places and situations, including the simplest of interactions and decisions. For example, why do we sit down at the table to eat? Love of food and good company and the need to unwind. These motives are natural, mundane, automatic, yet no less determinative for why we choose to eat. By focusing on a specific case of eating at the table we can begin to uncover motives that are specific to the case. We observe sitting down at this table this evening a couple who are dedicated to staying together. To know this about them, that they are committed to each other, can provide a fuller account of why they do what they do. Love pops up in the ordinary and incredible, encompassing a wide range of intensities and intentions. But if the temptation on one side is to wax sentimental, idealizing love to the point of absurdity (Hauerwas 1972; May 2011), the far greater temptation, which may amount to the same thing, is to discount and trivialize its real-world significance. Excluding it, therefore, from how we view the world, we run the risk of blotting out humanity’s place in the world. How so?

How does love “place” the human being in the world? The experience of being human is the experience of being placed; as one author puts it, “To be at all—to exist in any way—is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place” (Casey 1998: ix; cited in Bartholomew 2011: 4). To be somewhere does not equate to self-knowledge, but it is the precondition for pursuing self-knowledge. Reaching self-knowledge requires taking an extra step, gaining a perspective on our place in the world. To hold such a perspective or first-personal point of view, the “I” (Scruton 2012: 31, 32), defines the uniquely human way of inhabiting a place. This, though, does not mean one constitutes one’s place—at least alone—but comes to discover it through encountering the other. Self-knowledge depends on acknowledging the other, through whom we slowly come into awareness of our placement. The gift of the other is the place of the self, for the other makes possible the self’s realization.

From this perspective, it is evident that the modern self-image—the self-made self, existing unto itself—is not so much a self as a fatal extrapolation, taking its location in the other for granted. It denies that the self has been othered into existence, and that it would not be without the other as a gift. Augustine examines this location in a memorable way when he narrates his infancy early on in Confessions. Exploring the hidden origins of his budding self-awareness he reflects upon the infant’s slow emergence in the world. “Little by little I began to notice where I was [ubi essem], and I would try to make my wishes known to those who might satisfy them” (C I.6.8). The beginning of the infant’s recognition of its place gains ground through expressing its need for the other. In the infant’s dawning awareness of his place in the world, Augustine finds a useful analogy for his present adult struggles. Just as infants stand helpless in their place before others, so Augustine stands helpless to recall his own infancy. By relying on other people (testimony) and infants (inference) for insight, he can begin to draw a picture of that shrouded period of life. As he does, he realizes that his needs and desires had been met by some “other” who had been there all along: his mother Monica. The self-as-othered is the self-as-mothered, for mothers stand to provide what the infant cannot give itself: a place (Power 1996: 77, 78).

However, this prompts him to reach further back and to ask where he was before encountering his mother. Who can account for his prior existence? Neither testimony nor inference can help him with that, his whereabouts at that point remaining shrouded in mystery. “Where could a living creature like this have come from, if not from you, Lord? Are any of us skillful enough to fashion ourselves?” (C I.6.10). By drawing an analogy with the mother–infant encounter, he can begin to cry out to the Mother of all: “Tell me, I beg you, tell your miserable suppliant, O merciful God, whether my infancy was a sequel to some earlier age now dead and gone … Was I somewhere else? Was I even someone? I have nobody to tell me …” (C 1.6.9; cf. O’Connell 1996, 38, 39). As the infant cries out to its mother for milk, so Augustine cries out to his God for understanding. Even here, in the mysteries of the origin of the soul (a question never settled by Augustine), God’s Otherness and “Motherness” holds a place for the self.

By locating the self through the other and mother Augustine challenges modern notions of the place of humanity. If we need other people to secure us a place—if we need other people to exist full stop—then our place is not secured by an autonomous act of will, any more than our identity is defined on its own. In the case of the infant this is obviously true, but less so, perhaps, of the self-possessed adult. However, Augustine argues that human vulnerability is a perpetual condition of the human qua creature. The reason this condition escapes our awareness is partly due to the complexity of mature adult relationships, and partly due to our tendency to take others for granted: not confessing the role that others play in our lives. In general, it can be difficult to recognize oneself as dependent on others who surround and precede it. If “everything is connected,” this is not self-evident, nor indeed is it (always) obvious what it demands or requires.

To explore this, Augustine returns to his condition as an infant. “And if I was even conceived in iniquity, and with sin my mother nourished me in her womb [Ps. 50:7], where, I beg of you, my God, where was I, your servant, ever innocent? Where, Lord, and when?” (C I.7.12). Strange as it seems to hold an infant to account, his goal is to shore up his position before God by taking responsibility for his response to God’s call. In this case, though his infancy remains to him a mystery and eludes his ability to give an account, his attempt nevertheless reminds us that our life is not our own, but unfolds before the others and the Other who have claimed us.

Our location is not only obscure circumstantially. It can also be obscured through a willful self-deceit. To the extent that it commands us to act or to attend; to the extent that it calls us to responsible self-questioning; then the opportunity to ignore it or evade it entirely is a prospect typically seized without question by humans. This is evident most of all in the God–self relation, which serves as the template for Augustine’s moral reflections. In Confessions book I, drawing on the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk. 15), he likens himself to the son who went astray, squandering his inheritance as the father looked on. Observing God’s “silence” during his turbulent youth, he wonders at the reasons for God’s leniency and forbearance: “How hidden you are, dwelling on high in your silence [Isa. 33:5] …!” (C I.18.29). In book III, he returns to this theme of God’s silence and starts to probe God’s location in relation to himself. “Where were you at that time, how far from me?” To which he adds, “I was certainly roving far away from you, and debarred even from the pods I was feeding to pigs” (C III.6.11). Who was the distant one, God or Augustine? By calling into question not God’s love but his, Augustine uncovers the hidden truth behind his creaturely displacement: “I was seeking you, my God, not through that power of the mind by which you have chosen to rank me above the beasts, but only through carnal inclination … [While y]ou were more intimately present to me than my innermost being, and higher than the highest peak of my soul” (C III.6.11).

This statement, one of the most celebrated lines of Confessions, offers a model for how to think about the self in its place. Experiencing God’s absence is here re-interpreted as indicating a prior moral displacement of the self. It is the self, not God, who willfully stands apart. In wandering from God Augustine strayed from himself; and in allowing him to stray God had stayed where he is, “holding in place” the only place Augustine could be: in God’s presence (Marion 2012: 238). If to claim that place is to enter God’s presence, to enter God’s presence necessarily begins with confession: “you were more intimately present to me than my innermost being ….”

Pressing further, it is clear that God holds us in place not just as God of Creation, the condition of the possibility of creation; but also as the self-communicating God of revelation, a Being who calls us and invites us to himself. Insights on the latter can be drawn from Confessions. Primarily, God communicates by the gift of Holy Scripture, the “other” that reveals God’s work on our behalf. One reason Scripture floods the narrative in Confessions is that its author wants Scripture to claim control of his story; he wants it to show him where he is and where he is going. In seeking authorization from God for his story, he pursues his Confessions as something other than (mere) autobiography. If it is such a thing, it is not straightforwardly so, for its author wishes to give up his authorial “rights” to acknowledge the one Author who has held him in place.

Moreover, within the story our author tells about himself, he acknowledges multiple witnesses who helped him along the way. Even in the opening lines of his Confessions, the role of the witness is made plain in the general case, when he asks of God, “which comes first: to call upon you or to praise you?” (C I.1.1) This he will resolve by an appeal to Romans 10:14, determining that one calls upon hearing God’s word. “[F]or to us you have indeed been preached. My faith calls upon you, Lord, this faith which is your gift to me, which you have breathed into me through the humanity of your Son and the ministry of your preacher” (C I.1.1). In book III, he returns once again to his mother, confessing her role as a witness to the faith. He recalls her dream in which an angel had approached her, declaring “where she stood, there also stood I” (C III.11.19). Monica once more held a place for her son. Her prayers were God’s words conveyed directly to him (C II.3.7). In the place of Augustine Monica stood her ground, even evoking the admiration of the Bishop of Milan: “it is inconceivable that he should perish, a son of tears like yours” (C III.12.21). What Augustine above all wants to show in this passage is how thoroughly his position is a gift from the other, a gift that testifies to the faithfulness of God.

Monica was not alone in witnessing to Augustine. The entire created world bore witness to God and would beckon him forth to investigate its goodness. It took him some time to discover the good, though, on account of his allegiance to the Manichean sect. Inspired to write his first book “On the Beautiful and the Fitting,” now lost, he devoted time to studying the “beautiful things below me …” (C IV.13.20). Although this book marked a beginning in his quest for the truth, it would also witness against him as a misguided attempt. Heavy desires lay waste to his endeavors of comprehension. “I was thinking about the beautiful and the harmonious, and longing to stand and hear you, that my joy might be perfect at the sound of the Bridegroom’s voice [Jn. 3:29], but I could not, because I was carried off outside myself by the clamor of my errors, and I fell low, dragged down by the weight of my pride” (C IV.15.27).

At the same time, his desire for beauty would persist and cause further questions to “well … up in my mind from my innermost heart” (C IV.13.20). Down at that level, the level of desire and love, God was still lingering in the place of Augustine. The more he learned to stand in that place in stillness, the closer he came to finding the truth of his desire. In the end, he would learn to come down from his pride just as God had come down to show the way of true love. “Life has come down to you, and are you reluctant to ascend and live? But what room is there for you to ascend, you with your high-flown ways and lofty talk? Come down, that you may ascend, ascend even to God, for you have fallen in your attempts to ascend in defiance of God” (C IV.12.18). As we shall see, this advice echoes across Augustine’s writings.

The rootless self, or lovers in search of home

“Out of love for loving you do I do this [act of recollection]” (C II.1.1). So Augustine reveals his true motive for confessing. It unfolds within the horizon of his love for the divine, itself a response to God’s love in creation. His confession is a performance of the event he longs to enjoy: an intimate conversation and encounter with the truth. As he gathers up his longings for the good, the true, the beautiful, he finds himself heavy with the desire for salvation: “Say to my soul, I am your salvation [Ps. 34:3]” (C I.5.5) is his constant refrain. His confession serves to build up this longing even more by disclosing God’s presence throughout his past wandering journey. One such disclosure occurs in Confessions book IV.

Recollecting a period of intense grief in book IV, Augustine unveils the hidden anchors of his wandering restless heart. Ultimately, his answer to the question of desire, “what do we want?,” circles around the human need for a place to call a home: for “home” is a place unlike any other place, and cannot be treated as just a project among many. Instead, home constitutes a need of the soul (in Simone Weil’s sense). Endemic as an object of human desire, home is at the root of all joys, troubles, and strife. Everything we struggle to attain and defend has a notion of home somewhere lurking in the background. Even its absence gives substance to our being. If not at home or on the way to it, we are probably running from it or trying to find it somewhere else. Synonymous in some sense with happiness itself, “home is where the heart is” in reality and in hope. As often happens, Augustine’s experience of losing such a home ultimately revealed the true depth of its significance to his life. Let us explain.

In book IV, Augustine relates the tragic death of his childhood friend, an unnamed companion he had cherished very dearly. In a way, this event marks a moment of decisive clarity, but not before he suffers the excruciating pain of separation. The process is vividly described by th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Text and Translations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Being Where We Are
• 1. Waking Restless Hearts
• 2. Avoiding the Question
• 3. Engaging the Despair of Skepticism
• 4. Escaping the Folly of Manichaeism
• 5. Entering the Problem of Adam’s Place
• Conclusion: The Long Surrender
• References
• Index
• Imprint