Friendship and Society: An Introduction to Augustine's Practical Philosophy

by Donald X. Burt OSA

Overview

What can I know? What can I hope for? What should I do? These are three perennial questions of life, and few thinkers have offered such penetrating answers as Augustine. FRIENDSHIP AND SOCIETY is a fascinating volume meant for those interested in what one of history's greatest minds had to say about life in an imperfect world. Bridging expert scholarship and a popular readership, this volume assumes no in-depth knowledge of philosophy or prior acquaintance with Augustine's writings. An introductory reflection on the human predicament is followed by a clear and accurate outline of Augustine's thought on such relevant topics as ethics, politics, society, history, the family, war and peace, crime and punishment, and church and state. Unifying the book is a powerful argument that "friendship" can be the tie that binds us all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802846822
Publisher:	Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
Publication date:	10/12/1999
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Donald X. Burt, OSA, PhD, is a member of the Augustinian Order. A professor emeritus in philosophy at Villanova University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Father Burt has written thirteen books and numerous articles on the thought of St. Augustine, including Let Me Know Myself . . ., Let Me Know You . . ., and Reflections on a Dying Life published by Liturgical Press.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1 The Human Predicament: Alienation and Affection (from pages 1-9)

In one of his philosophical treatises Augustine gives a description of the human condition which does much to point out both the wonder of the universe we populate and the reason it is so difficult for us to appreciate its wondrous character. We are, he says, like those who, when confronted with a beautiful mosaic floor, spend all their time focusing their gaze on one tile and, as a result, are unable to grasp the marvelous order of the whole.

Developing his analogy, one might say that most of us are like a troop of ants making their laborious way across the glorious floor of the Sistine Chapel. As we progress along we concentrate all our attention on that one little stone that is before us. We wave our tiny antenna looking for any source of immediate pleasure or immediate pain. We bury our heads in the here and now, never raising our eyes to the whole picture of what in fact this land we are crossing is really like. And as far as raising our eyes to those heavens above where we might see pictured in radiant colors the story of our origins and our destiny—why, that is simply out of the question! The sky is too high, and we have become habituated to looking down at that one little piece of the grand mosaic of time and space which is our own particular rock for the moment. We look at our precious pebble and say: "This is my life!"

It is sad that we live such narrow lives, but we can only get beyond our little piece of the mosaic if we are willing to risk going out and seeing the universe beyond our day by day experience. We must move beyond our narrow geography into a philosophy of history if we are ever to get the grand view and to come to understand where we really are.

This was one of the great ventures attempted by Augustine. He endeavored to tell the story not simply of Aurelius Augustine but of humankind itself—indeed, to tell the story of all reality. It must be admitted that this drive to see the whole mosaic was not present in him from the beginning. In his early years he was more concerned about fun and fame than about philosophy. He began to think about the possibility of getting the "grand picture" only after reading Cicero's Hortensius in his late teens. Reading this work, he was inspired for the first time to raise his sights from the dust of the moment—the daily satisfaction of his bodily wants, the daily contest to be a "winner" in life, a well-paid, well-respected, and sometimes feared manipulator of words. For the first time in his life he began to dream of grasping the whole picture, what everything was like and how he fitted in. He experienced a longing (though, to be truthful, still only intermittently) for an understanding of his place in that multifaceted mosaic that was the world of Creator and creature.

Even in these first days of his tentative search for wisdom, Augustine came to perceive that he was driven by two great thirsts, thirsts much deeper and maddening than his earthy desires for sex and success. He realized that all of his more pedestrian and somewhat perverse thirsts were driven by his desire for happiness and his desire "to get it all together"—to find, in himself and with the world, the peace of union.

He saw the anxious activity of his mind in separating concepts through analysis and bringing them together again in synthesis as an aspect of his love for union. He became convinced that this search for unity was the way to happiness. The experience of happiness depended on his ability to become "one with God" and the necessary means to this end was to become one with the world, especially one with other human beings. The scriptural passage: "Love God with your whole heart; love your neighbor as yourself!" was more than a mandate. It was a prescription for happiness.

Recognizing happiness as the goal or end of humanity and unity as the means to that end, he came to see that the great tragedy of the human condition was alienation. Every human being is a cracked pot. We want to be whole but we live fractured lives, afflicted by separations within ourselves, separations between ourselves and other individuals, and separation from that one being who can bring final happiness, the infinite God. The history of humanity as Augustine saw it was a process of separation and "coming together." In the beginning there was God: an absolute unity which yet in the trinity of persons allowed for the possibility of a "love for another." In that world before time there was both infinite unity and infinite love and this was the basis for a happiness which itself was infinite.

The first great mystery in this story is why God would wish to change things. There was no "need" for any other "being" beyond God and for this reason the existence of any created thing could only be described as a purely gratuitous free act. The only pressure upon God to create "humans" or anything else could only be the pressure coming from the Divinity itself to share its goodness and happiness with others. The paradox of creation is that love, the proposed instrument of union, was the cause of the first separation. It was not unlike a parent tossing a baby into the air with the intention and hope of having the infant fall back into love's arms, now laughing with excitement after its brief experience of being on its own. God made humans separate from himself. They were made in his image but they were not God. They were made different but with the power of effecting a new union, a union with the Infinite by a free act of love.

In the first days of their existence humans came close to exercising this power perfectly as they walked together with God in their peaceful paradise. In Eden they were friends with themselves, friends with each other, friends with their God. They had been given the ordered equilibrium of all parts, the balance of appetite, the harmonious correspondence of conduct and conviction that brings internal peace. They had the ordered obedience to God's eternal law that makes for peace between human and God. They had the regulated fellowship that is the root of peace between human and human. In all aspects of their lives they had peace, that "calm that comes from order," and in that peace they were happy.

This idyllic situation was not to last. Those first humans began to look into themselves too much. The object of their love changed from what was outside them to what was inside. They saw their power and their beauty and their shared goodness and became proud, saying to themselves: "Why cannot I stand on my own two feet?" In choosing themselves, the first humans chose isolation. They became alienated from the rest of reality by a narcissistic concentration on self. In becoming withdrawn they sought a unity that had to be spurious because they were meant for something more. They were like a leg, amputated from its nourishing body, trying desperately to make its own way in the world. They separated themselves and created the first true "crack" in reality, a terrible rupture that can come only from free beings choosing to go their own way.

This gap deepened and spread until humans found themselves aliens in a harsh world. They were separated from themselves, from each other, and from their God, and it seemed that nothing could be done about it. They still had the native power to bring about union: they still could love. But they seemed either to be oblivious of their power or incapable of using it well. They were like drunkards sitting in a car, forgetting how to turn it on or unable to control its wild accelerations and misdirections once started. They needed help but were too intoxicated to know it.

The Incarnation (the coming of God as a human being) was the first step in reunification. Through Christ it was again possible for humans to be in union with the Creator. As in the Trinity, so now between human and God, the bonding force was love: now help was given to paralyzed humans sitting immobile in their little vehicles, not knowing how to start or where to go. A healing grace-filled balm was provided so that disabled humans could overcome their wounds and bridge the separations within themselves and in their external relations.

Through this outside help, as well as their own reawakened freedom, individuals were again able to move toward harmony with all reality. Their progress was not to be perfect nor would it be easy, but progress was at least possible and, perhaps most importantly, allowed for false starts and sudden stalls. The process given to humans was never given to their angelic cousins—a way of making amends when inevitable failures in love occurred. They were told: "You are living in a land of hope, a land not of perfection but of forgiveness, a land where humans will always need (and have the right) to say "I'm sorry!"

For Augustine, alienation is the great tragedy of our human condition. But our great glory in these days after Christ is that we can understand that tragedy and remedy it through love. For Augustine, love is the glue by which the divisions inside and outside each one of us can be corrected. Illumination and grace are the remedies for the "fracturing" that we experience within ourselves; and, once healed, we shall be finally "all together." Our spirit will be friends with our body and we shall love ourselves as we ought.

Through that same illumination and grace we are now able to repair the gaps that separate us from each other and from God. Through God's help and our own exercise of free choice we are able to express true affection, that vital energy which seeks to unite conscious free beings in the bond of friendship. In heaven the perfection of our love will "glue us to God" just as, even now in our imperfect state, the objects of our love become glued to us, leaving "footprints" in our mind even when they themselves are absent. Indeed, our ultimate union with God will be much more than a cold intellectual examination of "footprints" of past experiences. We will not simply recall what our love was; we shall become what our love is. Through our affection we shall reach out and embrace the love object and become one with it in a most perfect union.

In our present condition, we do not experience such perfect union with our loves. We only experience the need to love, a need rooted in our humanity itself. Augustine says that when we consider the prospect of loving, it is never a question of whether we shall love or not. The only question is "What shall I love and how shall I love it?" We are forced to love because we are drawn naturally to desire and to acquire those realities perceived as good. When I say "I love you!" this says nothing to an outsider except that I perceive you as being a good. You are not changed by my desire for you, but I am changed in a radical way. In loving you I am not only drawn towards you, I become like you. Augustine once wrote that "My love is my weight; wherever I go it is my love that draws me there." He might just as well have said: "Whatever I become, it is my love which makes me so." Love lifts us to our place in time and eternity just as earth falls downward towards its proper place and fire rises towards its proper place. Earth and fire cannot make a mistake in their direction but we humans can, and it is on the basis of our correct or incorrect loves that our citizenship in the city of God or in the eternal earthly city will be determined.

The perfection of our love of others in this life and in the next is friendship. It is friendship that can cure alienation among human beings. But it can bring with it a deep sorrow, a sorrow not from the affection itself but from our tendency to pour it out on temporal things as though they were eternal. In this life it is inevitable that every delightful coming is followed by an eventual going, and that each going leaves a wound, a gap, an emptiness, a disorder which tears at our very being. We shall fall apart someday, and every precious union with a love will someday experience a separation, by death if by no other cause.

The source of this pain of separation is not a misdirected love. It is right, not wrong, for us to wish "not to fall apart." It is right, not wrong, for us to wish that we "be never separated" from our human loves. The problem is not that our love is bad but that it is too intense, too unrealistic. It does bring about a union which can lead to higher things, but we are dissatisfied with it because it is less than we want. We want it to be more perfect than it could ever be and weep when it is not. But at least our love is a good.

A more serious problem occurs when our love is in fact misdirected—when we love things in an "out of order" way, the lesser more than the greater. When this happens, our drive towards love, our desire to desire, brings about a new alienation rather than unity. Our affection becomes a disaffection which separates us from that which we ought to love and need to possess in order to be happy. We are like the adolescent Augustine who was so "in love with love" that he was prepared to be satisfied with any sort of object of love.

The tragedy of the human condition is that the very force which, when rightly used, brings about unity, brings about separation when used wrongly. Affection gone wild leads to disaffection. If all virtues are aspects of good love, all vices are examples of bad love, a love that tears us apart or tears us up or tears us away from those true goods that our very being thirsts to be one with. The result of such misdirected love is chaos rather than order, isolation rather than community.

Each of our disaffecting loves is an aspect of those inherited wounds, ignorance and concupiscence, that are part of the baggage each of us carries into existence. It is easy to see why these wounds cause us to be disaffected. Ignorance separates us from an understanding of what reality is truly like and what we should do about it. It sends us blindly off in wrong directions or so immobilizes us that we cannot go anywhere at all. Concupiscence has a quite different effect. It does not immobilize. Rather it causes a frenetic activity, a chasing after any reality momentarily perceived as good. It drives us either to love true goods in a disorderly fashion or to race after objects which we have made good for ourselves. In a sad paradox, those mad misdirected loves that we call our vices tear us away from the goods that we want to love or should love and need to possess if ever we are to be truly happy.

Augustine recognizes three major categories of this disaffecting love: concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, pride of life. Those driven by concupiscence of the flesh may be dominated by an eroticism which concentrates only on the pleasures of "their own bodies." Their drive for personal pleasure in the satisfaction of the natural thirst for sex and food and drink makes them concentrate on what is happening inside themselves rather than what is outside. They spend their time "feeling good" rather than reaching out for the good. When this eroticism reaches out to other people it regards them only as objects that bring pleasure. The goal is to be "pleasured" without "getting involved."

This wild desire for temporal pleasures may express itself through an avarice where we become consumed by a passion to possess things. This vice brings about separation for a number of reasons. First of all, we build walls around ourselves by our things. We can never become "one" with them. Indeed, we are in a true sense "subordinate" to them in that they can become more important to us than we are to ourselves. They thus always remain separate from us despite our anxious efforts to clutch them to our hearts. Furthermore they serve as a block to union with other human loves. We may have common property but our property stands in the way of our community. There is always "us" and "them" and "it"—a trinity rather than a unity—perhaps exemplified these days in the prenuptial agreements in which human lovers agree who will get "what" of "it" when their partnership dissolves.

The vain curiosity which is part of the "concupiscence of the eyes" is also disaffecting, separating rather than uniting us with true objects of love. It separates by keeping us on the surface of reality. We are like a paint brush glossing over the house of another with no knowledge of or interest in the life within. Preoccupied with rumors and stories about people, we never get to their essence. We are interested more in what they did or what was done to them than in what they are in themselves. We may touch others by such a process but we can never become bound to them.

Inordinate earthly ambition (the "pride of life") has a similar effect. The passion to "get ahead" in this life can be a disaffecting and isolating exercise. We cannot have people "look up to us" or "fear us" or even "respect us" for our accomplishments without thereby implying some separation. It is neither physically nor psychologically possible to "look up to" someone without being separate from them.

All of these disordered loves that tear us from our friends and from our God are nothing compared to the havoc caused by the greatest divisive force of all: the satanic sin of pride. This was the fatal sin of the first humans. Awed by their own powers, they decided that there was no need for God, that they could make their way very well on their own. No wonder! Pride by its very nature isolates us from others because it makes us think we are answerable to no one else; indeed, it convinces us that we are better than everyone else. We love passionately but our love is an alienating love because we love no one quite as much as we love ourselves.

Augustine did not believe that the cure for our present human predicament was "to stop loving"; rather, it was simply to learn to "love well." Through such ordered affection one can achieve that peace even here that comes only with the unity of order. For peace and happiness to reign triumphant, such ordered love must begin in the individual and then spread out through all the societies that human beings form. The individual, the family, the state, and the heavenly city are related as concentric circles. The individual is at the center: body and soul, passion and reason, impulse and free choice, divisions in himself/herself that make the life of each person a battle. Without peace within the individual, it is difficult to have peace in the family. Without virtuous individuals and peace-filled families, it is difficult to have peace in the larger society. We must be friends with ourselves and with our families before we can have any hope of being friends with fellow human beings.

When there is peace at the center (in the individual human), there are ripples of love that flow out in ever widening circles embracing more and more in the bond of friendship. On earth this expansion is necessarily imperfect and limited, but it hints at that perfect and infinite friendship of the heavenly city once its membership is fixed beyond time. This uniting love affords a glimpse of what is to come. It is also the way to that blessed state. The peacemakers of this world will finally enjoy the perfect peace of union with God. Then there will no longer be alienation. There will be only love.

Everyday experience demonstrates that this ideal state is not our present condition. We must still fight for that inner peace that comes from a life lived in accordance with rational ethical principles. We must still seek to develop healthy relationships with others: friends, family, and fellow citizens. In the chapters that follow we shall examine Augustine's thoughts on how we should go about this daunting task. But first we must say something about his philosophy of history, that discipline which sets the scene for the human struggle to achieve peace and happiness in this world and (hopefully) in the next.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	Introduction	x
1.	The Human Predicament: Alienation and Affection	1
2.	Philosophy of History	10
A.	Introduction	10
B.	Augustine's Philosophy of History	12
3.	Ethics	30
I.	The Questions Raised by Ethics	30
II.	Augustine's Ethical Theory	33
A.	The Meaning of Happiness	33
B.	Augustine's Answer to "What Is Good?"	38
C.	Augustine's Answer to "Why Be Good?"	42
D.	The Characteristics of the Good Person	46
III.	Concluding Thought: Hopeful Optimism	54
4.	Friendship and Society	55
I.	Introduction: The Human as Social Animal	55
II.	The Nature and Characteristics of Friendship	57
A.	The Need and Value of Friendship	57
B.	The Characteristics of Friendship	59
III.	Authority in a Society of Friends	68
IV.	Augustine and the Friendly Society	73
5.	The Family: A Society of Friends	77
I.	Introduction	77
A.	Influences on Augustine's Teaching	77
B.	The Forms of Society	79
II.	Augustine's Views on Marriage and the Family	80
A.	The Nature and Goods of Marriage	80
B.	Husband and Wife: A Union of Friends	86
C.	Friendship between Parent and Child	90
6.	The Family: Obstacles to Friendship	99
A.	Introduction: The Problem	99
B.	Objection 1: The Inequality of Women	100
C.	Objection 2: Subordination of Wife to Husband	102
D.	Objection 3: Sexual Desire	112
E.	Concluding Thought	118
7.	The Nature of the State	120
I.	Introduction	120
A.	A Tale of Two Cities	120
B.	The Cultural Context	122
II.	Augustine's Political Philosophy	123
A.	Preliminary Points	123
B.	Nature and Purpose of the State	124
1.	Essential Characteristics	124
2.	The Purpose of the State	129
C.	Is the State a Natural Society?	130
1.	The Structure and Importance of the Question	130
2.	The Need for the State	131
3.	Development of the Argument	133
4.	The Meaning of Natural Authority	136
5.	Objection: "Shepherds, Not Kings"	141
6.	"Dreaming of Jerusalem": The Ideal State	145
7.	Conclusion	149
8.	Law and Violence	150
A.	Introduction: Coping with Babylon	150
B.	The Nature and Limits of Civil Law	152
C.	Dealing with the Imperfect State	154
D.	The Moral Response to Violence	157
1.	Introduction	157
2.	The Causes of Violence	158
3.	The Morality of Violent Acts	161
4.	Killing Humans: General Principles	164
9.	War and Peace	169
A.	The Nature of Peace	169
B.	The Nature and Morality of War	175
10.	Crime and Punishment	184
A.	Introduction	184
B.	Augustine's Views on Punishment	187
C.	The Morality of Capital Punishment	193
11.	Church and State	200
A.	Introduction	200
1.	The Nature of the Church	202
2.	History of Donatism	206
B.	Augustine on the Justification of State Intervention in Religious Disputes	210
C.	Justifying Reasons for State Intervention	212
D.	Toleration of Pagans, Jews, and Manicheans	218
	Bibliography	228
	Index	237

Editorial Reviews

Jean Bethke Elshtain in Journal of Religion
"Burt's treatment of Augustinian ethics has much to recommend it, including the clarity and lucidity of his prose and his argument. . . . Other pleasures of this text include a nuanced treatment of Augustine on the family yielding, as an ideal, the family as a ‘society of friends.' . . . This is a fascinating work."

Journal of Early Christian Studies
"This volume is well-written and is an ideal book for classroom use. It is suitable for the upper-division undergraduate courses or lower-level graduate courses. Burt's clear style and deliberate avoidance of academic jargon also make the book both a spiritual feast and enjoyable reading for the non-professional English-speaking audience as well."

Theological Studies
"Burt readably and plausibly turns the formidable 4th- and 5th-century bishop into a companionable, compassionate, sometimes compelling practical and spiritual guide."

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