Per Caritatem

Black grief closed over my heart and wherever I looked I saw only death. […] Everything I had shared with my friend turned into hideous anguish without him. My eyes sought him everywhere, but he was missing; I hated all things because they held him not, and could no more say to me, “Look, here he comes!” as they had been wont to do in his lifetime when he had been away. I had become a great enigma to myself, and I questioned my soul, demanding why it was sorrowful and why it so disquieted me, but it had no answer.[1]

In this passage, Augustine the narrator reflects upon the all-consuming grief coloring his world following the death of his beloved friend. Here Augustine pours out his heart to God as he does throughout the book, confessing his sorrows and his struggles, posing philosophical and theological questions to God, himself, and his readers. Augustine’s soul, however, when it comes to providing the answers for which he longs, has no idea how to respond [nihil noverat respondere mihi]. That is, contrary to commonly accepted modern and postmodern interpretations of Augustine, painting him as the precursor to psychoanalysis, I argue that Augustine’s multiple confessions were not primarily about himself; rather, his narrative, which no doubt includes soul-searching, personal stories, and so forth, was first and foremost about God, the unfolding narrative of redemption, and how the self, left to itself, turned in upon itself does not give rise to greater self-revelation and liberation; rather, Augustine’s confessions announce repeatedly that the self-absorbed, incessantly introspecting self—the self whose inward turn does not have as its goal a deeper union with the Christian God—is ultimately left famished, speechless, and restless—“inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te” (“Our heart is unhinged, forever moving to and fro, until it finds in You a peaceful, resting abode”).[2]

Against the rather entrenched view that a more or less straight line can be drawn from Augustine to Cartesian inwardness and thus to the modern introspecting subject, in this post I offer a counterargument, based upon a reading of select texts from the Confessions, that Augustine’s narrative and his understanding of the self has little in common with modern autobiography, autonomous notions of the self, or staticized views of selfhood and subjectivity.[3]

Returning to the passage from book four, we have Augustine’s phenomenological description of grief, his own grief over the death of his beloved friend. “Black grief closed over my heart [quo dolore contenebratum est cor meum], and wherever I looked I saw only death.”[4] As O’Donnell points out, Augustine draws upon language from the Old Testament, specifically Lamentations 5:17,[5] where we read: “Because of this our hearts [cor nostrum] are sick, because of these things our eyes have grown dim [contenebrati]” (NRSV).  In a way similar to the New Testament authors’ appropriation of the Old Testament, Augustine weaves together Scriptural fragments and metaphors, expanding their meanings and applying them for his present purposes. In context, the Lamentations passage speaks of the suffering of God’s people as a result of their turning away from God. Their sins, as Lamentations 5:16 explains, are the cause of their heart sickness and lack of vision. In both the Old and New Testaments, descriptions of darkened eyes and obscured vision are often used metaphorically to connote negative spiritual and moral conditions. Thus, in Scripture we find images depicting a lack of sight and consequent dwelling in darkness set in contrast to living in the light—itself a metaphoric description of God. Whether penned by the Psalmist or St. John the Apostle, to dwell in the light is to live in God and to see oneself, others, and the entire created order in his light.[6]

With the Lamentations connection in mind, that Augustine chose the Scriptural image of a darkened, grieving heart [quo dolore contenebratum est cor meum] suggests a desire to communicate something more than his own pain.  In fact, as the chapter unfolds, Augustine the narrator states explicitly that his sorrow had become excessive and self-focused. In addition, he loved his friend without taking account of the latter’s finitude, and he failed to acknowledge the friendship as a gift which must some day return to its Giver. Discussing why his grief had so overwhelmed him, Augustine asks rhetorically: was it not “because I had poured out my soul into the sand by loving a man doomed to death as though he were never to die?”[7] Then in the following paragraph, Augustine highlights the proper way to love another deeply, namely, the other must be loved in God. “Blessed is he who loves you, and loves his friend in you […] He alone loses no one dear to him, to whom all are dear in the One who is never lost. And who is this but our God.”[8]

Here we should note that Augustine affirms the value and goodness of friendship. Loving others deeply is not in itself problematic or to be avoided.[9] Rather, Augustine is at pains to stress that only God, given his nature and character, can provide the solidity we seek, the abode for our unhinged hearts. On the one hand, that all creation, including human beings, is good, Augustine in no way denies. It must be good because its very existence comes from a God who is good.[10] On the other hand, our loves must be properly ordered, and when we love the creature in place of the Creator—that is, as the final goal or ultimate meaning of our lives—we set ourselves up for sorrow upon sorrow. Whether or not we agree with Augustine’s assessment of his grief is beside the point. Perhaps he is at times too hard on himself when it comes to his emotional life. What is to the point given our present purpose is to foreground Augustine’s primary aim in recounting and analyzing his grief over the loss of his friend.

 

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been preparing for an upcoming conference on Christian friendship and have been contemplating the possible ways in which Christian friendship and claims specific to Christianity are superior to claims found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Below is a new possibility that I am considering addressing in my paper.

As John 15 declares, Christ informs his disciples of a radical change in their relationship with Him, viz., they are no longer called servants, but are now called friends because they have been brought into the circle of intertrinitarian love.  With this claim, we encounter a concept of vertical and horizontal friendship that is not possible on Aristotle’s view.  Not only has a way been opened up for the most intimate communion between God and human beings-a relationship in which Aristotle’s god (noesis noeseos) has no interest-but also on the horizontal level, those who accept the Trinitarian God’s invitation of friendship are proclaimed both as equals with reference to one another ontologically speaking and with regard to their status before God.  If we compare St. Paul’s claim in Galatians 3:28[1] with Aristotle’s view of the moral superiority of men over women in book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, the contrast is striking.  According to St. Paul,  “[t]here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28, ESV).”[2]  Whereas Aristotle, although placing the husband/wife relationship under a type of virtuous friendship, he nonetheless further qualifies this relationship as unequal because the male is taken to be the superior partner, who confers a greater benefit on the female, and therefore, ought to be loved more than he loves (1158b13-29).[3]  As John M. Cooper explains,

Aristotle’s idea seems to be that men as such are morally superior to women, so that a friendship between the absolutely best man and the absolutely best woman, each recognized as such, would be an unequal friendship.  In such a friendship the disparity in goodness does not imply any deficiency on the side of the lesser person with respect to her own appropriate excellences; she will be perfect of her kind, but the kind in question is inherently lower (emphasis added).[4]

In other words, for Aristotle, female qua female is in some way inherently deficient and the assumed human standard of perfection is the male.  On St. Paul’s view to assert that either a male or a female believer is somehow intrinsically lacking or that one is superior in nature to the other would involve serious soteriological, anthropological, and Christological problems.  After all, the Christian claim is that fellowship with the Father comes only through union with the Son by way of the Spirit.  To suggest, for example, that female Christians are deficient because they are of an intrinsically lower kind would be in some significant way to downgrade their status as human beings, and consequently, to deny that both male and female are created in God’s image.  Such a position seems to entail at least the following rather unpleasant theological consequences.  For example, being less than human, how could women fully partake in the redemption effected by Christ who became everything that human beings are excepting sin?  In addition, such a degraded view of women would no doubt have serious ramifications in connection with a proper understanding of the importance of Mary’s role in the history of redemption.

Up to this point, I have only addressed the equality between genders with relation to friendships among Christians.  As one would expect, this exclusivity naturally raises the question of how or whether this equality translates to non-Christian females.  Although an honest Christian would have to admit that the Church has been inconsistent and has often failed to recognize that by virtue of their creation imago Dei, which is essential to human beings qua human beings, all men and women (whether Christian or not) are created equal in nature and possess an intrinsic value.  From a Christian perspective, one would also have to affirm that male/female friendships between Christians and non-Christians, though genuine and often long-lasting are in a significant sense incomplete because the two do not share faith in Christ.  However, that which is found wanting in such friendships has nothing to do with a putative gender deficiency, but everything to do with whether or not one has by grace through Christ entered into intimate fellowship with the Triune God.  And as St. Paul makes emphatically clear, entrance into such a relationship with God is not the result of any intellectual, moral, or other alleged superiority on the part of the Christian (Eph 2:8-9; 1 Cor 1:20-31).[5]

Notes

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[1] N.T. Wright argues that it is significant that Paul in Gal 3:28 says, “no male and female,” rather than the common mistranslation, “neither male nor female,” because he is actually quoting Gen 1:27.  With this Wright is emphatically not suggesting that Paul is advocating an undoing of the creation order, or that we adopt of a kind of gnostic perspective so as to deal with gender differences, or that we have moved into a kind of enlightened, sexless, genderless view of humanity.  Rather, Wright’s argument “is that Paul’s main point in this passage is that God has one family, not two, and that this family consists of all those who believe in Jesus, that this is the family God promised to Abraham, and that nothing in the Torah can stand in the way of this unity which is now revealed through the faithfulness of the Messiah” (p. 5).  Wright goes on to say that Paul “is controverting in particular those who wanted to enforce Jewish regulations, and indeed Jewish ethnicity, upon Gentile converts. Remember the synagogue prayer in which the man who prays thanks God that he has not made him a Gentile, a slave, or a woman. I think Paul is deliberately marking out the family of Abraham reformed in the Messiah as a people who cannot pray that prayer, since within this family these distinctions are now irrelevant.The presenting issue in Galatians is male circumcision. We sometimes think of circumcision as a painful obstacle for con­verts, as indeed in some ways it was; but for those who embraced circumcision, it was a matter of pride and privilege. It not only distinguished Jews from Gentiles; it also distinguished them in a way that automatically privileged males. By contrast, imagine the thrill of equality brought about by baptism, the identical rite for Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. And that’s not all. Though this is somewhat more speculative, the story of Abraham’s family did of course privilege the male line of descent: Isaac, Jacob, and so on. What we find in Paul, both in Galatians 4 and in Romans 9, is careful attention-rather like Matthew 1, in fact, though from a different angle-to the women in the story. If those in Christ are the true family of Abraham, which is the point of the whole story, then the manner of this identity and unity takes a quantum leap beyond the way in which first-century Judaism construed them, bringing male and female together as surely and as equally as Jew and Gentile. What Paul seems to do in this passage, then, is rule out any attempt to per­petuate male privilege in Abraham’s family by an appeal to Gen­esis 1, as though someone were to say, ‘But of course the male line is what matters, and of course male circumcision is what counts, because God made male and female.’ No, says Paul, none of that counts when it comes to membership in the renewed people of Abraham” (p. 6).  N.T. Wright, “The Biblical Basis for Women’s Service in the Church,” Priscilla Papers Vol. 20, no. 4 (Autumn 2006): 5-10.  (This article is available online at: http://www.cbeinternational.org/new/pdf_files/wright_biblical_basis.pdf).

[2] This is not to suggest that maleness and femaleness are eradicated and that what remains is a kind of genderless individual.  One possible way that a Christian might begin to successfully navigate the commonness and difference between males and females is to proffer a Trinitarian analogy.  That is, just as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are equal in nature, they exhibit different functions.[3] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (VIII.7), p. 152.

[4] Cooper, “Aristotle on Friendship,” p. 307, as found in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics. 

[5] “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8-9, ESV).  “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.  For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor 1:20-31, ESV).