Trabajos e investigaciones futuras

For Augustine, temporal life is movement: all created essence progresses either towards or away from God. In this belief, he was not alone. As has been seen, Neoplatonists understood being in terms of its distance from the First Principle, and understood everything outside of the First Principle itself to be either moving through contemplation towards its source or collapsing into nothingness. Because of his fundamental belief in participatory existence, therefore, Augustine could only conceive of redemption in existential terms: he believed that every step towards heaven or hell influenced the very being (esse) of the individual. Such an existence cannot but be precarious. Life hangs on the edge of nothingness, unable on its own to secure a foothold, to continue its existence by its own will or power. People are not even capable of moving by their own volition; every step towards salvation and rest is due to God’s call and grace and every step towards damnation and hell is due to the seduction of sin and the weight of human corruption.

But what is it that actually propels the movement? Augustine’s familiar answer is love: ‘My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me’.⁴⁸⁴ He conceives of this ‘weight’ in terms of natural philosophy, with love acting on the individual as gravity acts on an object:

484 conf. 13.9.10.

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A body by its weight tends to move towards its proper place. The weight’s movement is not necessarily downwards, but to its appropriate position: fire tends to move upwards, a stone downwards....They are acted on by their respective densities, they seek their own place. Things which are not in their intended position are restless.⁴⁸⁵

Augustine’s ‘restless heart’ therefore speaks to the soul’s relentless search for rest in either God’s changeless Being or nothingness. Apart from God, the soul will

inevitably search for rest in oblivion; ‘stirred’ by God however it will seek that rest in praising God, in participating by grace in his Being: ‘You stir man to delight in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you’.⁴⁸⁶

But it is important to recognise that the soul is not the active agent in this search. Rather it is acted upon, stirred by an external force, carried by its love. Part of Augustine’s explanation for this passivity seems to be that for him love itself is beyond human control. People are carried by a love they never invoked. Instead, they are drawn to love by delight. This view is clearly expressed, for example, in sermo 159, preached around 417. There, Augustine asks his congregation whether

they love justice and then goes on to assert that they will only reply ‘I do’ truthfully if justice delights them: one ‘only loves, after all what delights one’.⁴⁸⁷ This connection of love with delight establishes both the whole motivational force behind virtue and vice and defines the contest for the individual soul. Augustine writes:

Your flesh...is delighted even by unlawful pleasures; let your mind take delight in the invisible, beautiful, chaste, holy melodious, sweet thing that is justice, so that you won’t be forced to it out of fear. After all, if you are forced to it out of fear, you don’t yet take delight in it. You ought to refrain from sinning, not out of fear of punishment, but out of love for justice.⁴⁸⁸

485 conf. 13.9.10.

486 conf. 1.1.1.

487 s. 150.3.

488 s. 150.6.

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Augustine takes great pains to convince his congregation that they must not seek God out of fear, as though pleasure itself is sinful. He is keenly aware of the danger, often implicit in Christian moral teaching, of suggesting that sin conquers through pleasure while God conquers through fear.⁴⁸⁹ He asks his congregation dismissively,

When you were sinning, you used to take delight in your sins; was fear dragging you into sinning, or the deliciousness of sin? You will answer, of course, its deliciousness. So you are led into sin because it’s delicious, prodded toward justice because you’re frightened?⁴⁹⁰

Christians ought therefore to pursue justice not because they fear punishment but because justice ‘shines more brilliantly, gleams more brightly, tastes more delicious, is much, much sweeter’ than anything earthly or temporal. Ultimately for Augustine, the alternative is not between hedonism and Puritanism but between two opposing delights: one that carries believers towards God, the other which weighs them down towards wickedness and oblivion. As will be shown, this places delight at the heart of participatory existence.

Again, this delight is not something over which people have control. In his endlessly discussed letter to Simplicianus, Augustine asks, ‘Who can welcome in his mind something that does not give him delight? But who has it in his power to ensure that something that will delight him will turn up, or that he will take delight in what turns up?’⁴⁹¹ Thus, just as love is beyond human control so too is delight.⁴⁹² This is

489 Augustine’s argument here is also influenced by his anti-Pelagian polemic: he understood the Pelagians as teaching that human beings did the good because it presented itself to them as a law which must be obeyed; consequently, they obeyed because they feared punishment.

490 s. 150.6.

491 Simpl. 1.2.21.

492 Burnaby’s discussion of the relationship between delight and the will remains arguably unsurpassed. He argues that Augustine believes that all our willing takes place within a world in which motives determine the direction of the will and those motives are in part a product of an individual’s environment and of the whole complex series of presentations and impressions over which he or she has no control. Delight is the key influence over human motivation. For a full discussion of this subject, see John Burnaby, Amor Dei, A Study of the Religion of Saint Augustine (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1938), 224-247.

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not surprising as delight and love are so closely connected for Augustine. Indeed, he seems to suggest here that delight is the vehicle whereby something enters the mind, which is the necessary first step for love. Augustine’s statement comes immediately after he asks who can believe unless they have been called by truth and who can

‘have such a motive present’ in their mind so as to be ‘influenced’ to believe? What Augustine seems to suggest is that delight is a necessary part of receiving and accepting truth. Unless people delight in truth, they cannot even bring it to mind;

they are, in effect, unaware of it. Here perhaps we hear an echo here of Cicero and Victorinus: wisdom/truth presenting itself through eloquence/delight.

As we have seen, Peter Brown makes much of this passage, arguing that in analysing the story of Jacob and Esau, Augustine ‘came to see man as utterly dependent on God, even for his first initiative of believing in Him’.⁴⁹³ According to Brown’s interpretation, Augustine began to believe that delight is the sole source of action, as the only thing that can move the will. Brown concludes: ‘Therefore, a man can act only if he can mobilise his feelings, only if he is ‘affected’ by an object of delight’. This is, of course, the language of persuasion, in which Augustine as a rhetor was well-versed, and its logic brings us back to the language of Cicero. The art of persuasion itself is the ability to move people to action through eloquent speech. Thus, for Cicero, an orator must sway the emotions of his audience in order to achieve victory.⁴⁹⁴ In De oratore, as we have seen, he writes, ‘I think nothing is more admirable than being able, through speech, to lure people’s minds, to win over their inclinations, to drive them at will in one direction, to draw them at will from

493 Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 154.

494 Cicero, Orator 69.

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another’.⁴⁹⁵ This is precisely the same logic Augustine uses in Ad Simplicianum.

God is in control because through delight he takes hold of people’s minds and drives them towards himself.

It is helpful at this time to quote again Margaret Boyle’s distinction between rhetoric and dialectic as it sheds light on Augustine’s argument: ‘Dialectic seeks an act of the intellect (judgment) through compulsion of reason, and it secures its religious end in contemplation. Rhetoric seeks an act of the will (assent) through persuasion of feeling, and it secures its religious end in conversion.” ⁴⁹⁶ At one level this is also Augustine’s contention: one cannot make progress towards God unless the will is affected and moved by a delight of the heart that results in conversion. But what is even more striking is that he envisions a divine persuasion that compels a movement towards contemplation; he effectively combines Boyle’s two goals by making conversion the middle point in a process that ultimately ends in the eternal contemplation of God. To achieve that persuasive goal, God uses his eloquence, which Augustine conceives principally in terms of delectatio.

The first mention in Ad Simplicianum of the idea that people must be

‘affected’ appears during Augustine’s discussion of the verse, ‘Many are called but few are chosen’. Considering all that we have learned about the importance of God’s oratory in both participatory existence and redemption it should not be surprising that Augustine develops this rhetorical approach in the midst of discussing God’s vocatus.

In Ad Simplicianum, Augustine the rhetor explains how God’s redemptive call actually works. God’s vocatus is a persuasive call and just as an orator cannot persuade unless he conquers the audience’s will through pathos, so too God only

495 Cicero, De orat. 1.30 (LCL 22): ‘Neque vero mihi quidquam, inquit, praestibilius videtur, quam posse dicendo tenere hominum coetus, mentes allicere, voluntates impellere quo velit;

unde autem velit, deducere’. The emphasis is mine.

496 Boyle, ‘Fools and Schools’, 183.

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‘chooses’ those called by conquering their hearts through delight. Far from being a new idea, as Brown contends, this is exactly the logic one would expect by one deeply formed by Ciceronian rhetoric. So, Brown is partly right when he points out that in his letter Augustine describes delight as no longer a ‘spontaneous reaction, the natural thrill of the refined soul when confronted with beauty. For it is just this vital capacity to engage one’s feelings on a course of action, to take “delight” in it, that escapes our powers of self-determination: the processes that prepare a man’s heart to take “delight” in his God are not only hidden, but actually unconscious and beyond his control’.⁴⁹⁷ But Brown is mistaken in describing this as something innovative.

Augustine has simply approached the question of conversion by marshalling the insights about persuasion he has acquired as a rhetor. Who better to understand the dynamic of conversion than one deeply versed in the dynamic of persuasion? In both Augustine and Cicero, the audience is passive, the orator is in control, action is achieved through persuasion, and the will is conquered through emotion.

The question now arises as to why God acts in this way: why must God overwhelm the will of individuals in order for them to turn away from wickedness and oblivion towards the fullness of redeemed, participatory life? Augustine’s answer to that question is an ironic one: just as delight draws individuals towards God, so also it draws them towards death. In fact, he believed that not only could delight move people towards death but it already has done so; the bondage of humankind to death came about through a misguided delight. Because Brown is focused on Ad Simplicianum, where Augustine’s interest is about why some respond to God’s call while others do not, he fails to note that Augustine conceives of the devil or sin working in the same manner as God. The question for the individual is

497 Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 155.

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not, as Brown implies, a matter of self-determination but an alternative between two forms of delightful bondage: one to God, the other to death. Augustine understands humankind as already in bondage to the devil through temporal and carnal delight.

Because the human will has been overwhelmed by a diabolical oratory, God must now overcome it with his own oratory. In order to understand how God conquers through delight, we must first establish how Augustine conceives of the human condition under the bondage to sin.