‘Harsh Love’ and Forgiveness

On the first page of his chapter 2, ‘Love in War’, Nigel Biggar cites Augustine’s Letter 138 to Marcellinus. ¹ Biggar’s text just before this reference reads as follows:

According to the leading patriarch of Christian just war doctrine, St Augustine, the just warrior loves the unjust aggressor insofar as he withholds himself from vengeance, commits himself to benevolence, and so uses violence to punish him ‘with a sort of kind harshness’, doing him the service of constraining him from further wrongdoing and encouraging him to repent and embrace peace.

Then comes the citation of Letter 138 to Marcellinus, followed by this comment from Biggar: ‘What this amounts to is the qualification of the use of violence by forgiveness.’

This last statement provides a kind of motto for this chapter: the qualification of violence by forgiveness rooted in love. The language used here restates the title of section 1 of this chapter: ‘“Kind harshness”: forgiveness and the qualification of violence’. But Augustine, having made this brief appearance onstage and evoked the accolades attending to a theological reference to him, then disappears as Biggar develops his theme by reference to various recent writers and by a long discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr. Augustine appears onstage again fifteen pages later (about midway in the chapter) in a lengthy note. ² This note concludes with language taken from Letter 95 to Paulinus of Nola, a Christian of the senatorial class who had put his inherited wealth into an endowment for the Catholic Church and forsaken the responsibilities of his social position to live an ascetic life of contemplation in a hermitage he had built for himself and his wife (part of his gift to the Church) in southern Italy. Augustine envied Paulinus, whose retirement from the life of responsibility his social position otherwise would have placed on him was so different from the situation of Augustine himself, who had attempted to create such a retirement for himself (an otium vitae christianae) first as a young man at Cassiciacum and later at Hippo, only to be drawn against his will into another form of such responsibility, that of a bishop in the Catholic Church. In this role he could still think of the soul’s relation to God in the same Neo-Platonic terms as Paulinus and the young Augustine at Cassiciacum, but he also found himself responsible for the spiritual lives of his flock, and this led him inevitably to realise that included also a responsibility for their physical lives and, ultimately, responsibility for the social order in which they lived. The conclusion of the passage Biggar cites from Letter 95 to Paulinus expresses poignantly the inner tensions this created in Augustine. The specific topic is punishment; here is what Augustine says:

On the subject of punishing and refraining from punishment, what am I to say? It is our desire that when we decide whether or not to punish people, in either case it should contribute wholly to their security. These are indeed deep and obscure matters: what limit ought to be set to punishment with regard to both the nature and extent of guilt, and also the strength of spirit the wrongdoers possess? What ought each one to suffer? … What do we do when, as often happens, punishing someone will lead to his destruction, but leaving him unpunished will lead to someone else being destroyed? … What trembling, what darkness! ³

There is no record of a response from Paulinus. It is not clear that Augustine would have expected one, for the life Paulinus had chosen removed him from the necessity of dealing with this kind of problem and the torment it caused Augustine. It is better to read this simply as the cry of anguish it is–anguish that could not be escaped so long as Augustine continued with his life as it had become, and which Augustine did not really expect Paulinus to relieve.

Letter 95 to Paulinus was written in 408, and when one looks at the entire text, what appears is that Augustine was asking about how to deal best with the spiritual welfare of members of his congregation in the church at Hippo. The letter opens with a reference to an earlier query about the future life of the saints, and the context in which punishment is brought up is that of how a bishop should deal with straying members of his flock so as to keep them on the path towards sainthood. Punishment here is not really oriented to forgiveness; it has to do with the restraint of sin and the achievement of moral growth. So it is not clear how citation of this letter supports Biggar’s aim in this chapter: to argue for the work of love in producing ‘forgiveness and the qualification of violence’.

In any case, once again, after making this appearance through Letter 95, Augustine disappears from the stage in Biggar’s chapter 2, and he appears no more. The chapter finishes over the next several pages with a return to present-day authors. So one may ask just what role these appearances of Augustine serve. Is this chapter really developed out of Augustine? I think not; yet Biggar clearly believes there is a link to Augustine’s position. But is there? For the purposes of this chapter it is a good thing Biggar did not delve further into Augustine’s correspondence with Marcellinus, for it does not lead in quite the direction Biggar’s chapter itself moves.

Flavius Marcellinus was a member of the senatorial class who held the military–political rank of tribune and who had been sent to Carthage as Imperial Commissioner to act as judge over the Catholic-Donatist Collatio or ‘Comparison’ that took place in 411. He ruled against the Donatists, and afterwards he was responsible for dealing with their violent reaction and their suppression as a religious movement. He was a baptised Catholic Christian, and like Augustine’s reaction to becoming a bishop, he would likely have preferred not to have had this responsibility thrust upon him. Also like Augustine, as we have seen him in the letter to Paulinus, Marcellinus appears to have experienced internal spiritual conflict over how to reconcile his duty as Imperial Commissioner with the demands of his faith as a Christian. As a further complication and source of internal turmoil, the sack of Rome had taken place only months before the Collatio and Marcellinus’s duties in Carthage had begun, and Roman intellectual life was afire with accusations and counter-accusations as to who had been responsible: was it the Christians, as the pagans argued, or vice versa, as the Christians (including Augustine) argued? While this did not bear directly on the Catholic-Donatist Collatio in Carthage, it was certainly very much in the air, and since the original Catholic-Donatist split had had to do with a question of right moral response in another situation of trial and turmoil, it could only inflame the atmosphere of partisan opposition between these two branches of the African Christian Church.

In this context, Marcellinus sought the advice of the Bishop of Hippo (see Letter 136 from Marcellinus to Augustine), who had already become known as a powerful Christian thinker and a stalwart of the Catholic Church, which after all was by that time the institutional form of the religion of the Empire. Under other circumstances Marcellinus might not have been open to such advice. His social class was far above Augustine’s, and his imperial rank and duties pointed him towards the imperial court, not towards the provincial city of Hippo Regius. But in these circumstances Augustine’s own rank as a bishop raised him to a position of some degree of parity with Marcellinus: he could address him as ‘My Lord’ but also as ‘My Son’, referring to their spiritual relationship as one of father and son. So Augustine did not hesitate to give Marcellinus his counsel, and what he said about dealing with the Donatists is found, not mainly in Letter 138, the one quoted by Biggar at the beginning of chapter 2 of In Defence of War, but rather in Letters 133 and 139.

All these letters were written in 412 within a relatively short space of time, and all reflect the same crisis: after the ruling against them, significant numbers of the Donatists had turned to violence, following the lead of the Circumcellions, the ‘nasties’ of the movement. Specifically, Augustine’s Letters 133 and 139 have to do with Donatists who had taken part in violence against Catholic priests, killing one and blinding and maiming another, as well as damaging Catholic Church property. Roman law governing their punishment was essentially lex taliones–plus: the punishment given out should correspond to the crime, but its specific form might be worse than the acts it punished. To mete out such punishment was what Marcellinus, as an imperial officer, would be expected to do.

But Augustine counselled moderation. Here is what he said in Letter 139 to Marcellinus:

As to the punishment of these men, I beseech you to make it something less severe than sentence of death, although they have, by their own confession, been guilty of such grievous crimes. I ask this out of a regard both for our own consciences and for the testimony thereby given to Catholic clemency. For this is the special advantage secured to us by their confession, that the Catholic Church has found an opportunity of maintaining and exhibiting forbearance towards her most violent enemies; since in a case where such cruelty was practiced, any punishment short of death will be seen by all men to proceed from great leniency … [W]hen the feelings which are wont to be immoderately excited while such events are recent, have subsided after a time, the kindness shown to the guilty will shine with most conspicuous brightness, and men will take much more pleasure in reading these Acts and showing them to others. ⁴

Augustine had offered similar counsel of moderation in Letter 133, but here he is much more explicit about the reasons for this: It is, first, ‘out of regard for our own consciences’: thus Augustine addresses the interior spiritual torment that he had earlier remarked in himself and that Marcellinus had shown in Letter 136. It is, second, out of regard for ‘the testimony thereby given to Catholic clemency’: thus it was a way of showing the superiority of Catholic Christianity over the Donatist variety, which had produced the violent criminal behaviour being punished. And third, as time passes, ‘the kindness shown to the guilty will shine with most conspicuous brightness, and men will take much more pleasure in reading these Acts and showing them to others’: that is, the ‘leniency’ will be remembered more positively over the long run than more severe punishment would be.

Only this third reason clearly offers an opening to an argument for social reconciliation, but none of these reasons speaks of forgiveness, even when forgiveness is deconstructed into Biggar’s two ‘moments’ of compassion and absolution. ⁵ The convicted Donatists are not to be forgiven; they are to be punished. But the punishment given them should not be so severe as to appear to involve wrongful motivation on the part of Marcellinus and the Roman Government on the one hand or Augustine and the Catholic Church on the other. That is the message of the first two reasons for leniency offered by Augustine: regard for ‘our own consciences’ and for the ‘testimony’ thus given to ‘Catholic clemency’.

To understand what is going on here we need to recall Augustine’s understanding of the Christian obligation to love God and to love the neighbour as oneself. We Protestants have been taught, following Luther, that to love the neighbour as oneself means to love the neighbour instead of oneself: Christian love for the neighbour is self-love inverted. More recently, we have been taught that love for the neighbour means loving him or her for whoever he or she is. One finds a bit of this in Biggar’s discussion of the first moment of forgiveness, compassion towards one who has done wrong, where he describes it as involving ‘a measure of sympathy for the perpetrator’. ⁶ Indeed, in the climate of recent theological ethics it would be hard indeed not to think of love of neighbour in such a way. But this is not at all what Augustine had in mind.

He makes his conception of love of neighbour clear in his discussion of love in Book I of On Christian Doctrine, which he was writing around the same time. (This treatise was begun in the late 390s and not finished until 426.) Here he employs the categories of ‘use’ and ‘enjoyment’ (usus and frui) to explain right and wrong ways of loving, making it clear that only God as Trinity is worthy of being loved so as to be enjoyed. ⁷ But the words he uses for such love are the verb deligere and the noun dilectio, the former basically meaning ‘to choose’ and the latter ‘delight’. Again, much theological training has taught us that Augustine’s concept of Christian love is caritas, but when he uses this word-and in most of his works he does not use it at all when he speaks of love-it is to indicate the motivation of the will that is directed solely to loving God. To love this way is not caritare—there was no such word-but to choose (deligere) that which can rightly be enjoyed or delighted in, that which alone is capable of producing happiness (felicitas, which is also often translated as ‘blessedness’). But if only God can be rightly loved in this way, what of love of neighbour? Augustine’s answer grates on modern Christian ears: the neighbour is to be ‘used’ so that God can be ‘enjoyed’. ⁸

What this meant optimally for Augustine is, as Peter Brown has so well described it, exemplified in his relations with the other Christian Neo-Platonists he gathered around him at Cassiciacum ⁹ and, later, the relations he intended in his effort to recreate that type of community in the monastic house he established first at his home town of Thagaste and then at Hippo. ¹⁰ All the people in these communities thought of loving God in the same way: seeking to fix their entire wills on God understood in the Neo-Platonic way as the fullness of Truth and Being. Augustine could love God through loving one of these neighbours because they were all engaged in loving God in the same way as he. What he could love in them was the same thing he could love in himself: the devotion of the soul towards God. ¹¹ He could not love anything else in himself, or in them, for that would be to love the sin that is in all humankind after the Fall. After he was made a priest and then a bishop Augustine no longer had the intimacy of close friends all engaged in the same effort, but as his sermons show-and, again, Peter Brown is a wonderful guide on this ¹² -his preaching to his congregation at Hippo sought to draw them into this same model of relation to God, to one another, and to everything that might distract them in this life from that sort of love. Dealing with this last might require punishment-that is what Letter 95 to Paulinus is about-and it is all the more necessary because each person’s sin is so reprehensible that any punishment we may receive now to turn us away from it and towards God pales into insignificance compared to the punishment God will rightly deliver to those who have not come to love him ‘with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’. Reconciliation with God requires such love; only when it is given does God forgive us. In turn, loving the neighbour rightly means drawing that person into this same sort of love of God, using punishment if need be. Punishment for this purpose-to root out sinful forms of love-is thus an act of the utmost benevolence; it is ‘kind harshness’.

But what of the Donatists? Augustine definitely had an interest in their reconciliation: the Donatist Church in Africa was about as numerous and as prosperous as the Catholic Church, and not only did it thus stand as a rival for people and resources, it stood as a rival in the quest for truth. But for Augustine truth lay only in the teachings of the Catholic Church; so it was his duty as a bishop in that church to draw the Donatists into relationship with the Catholic Church so that they too could be directed towards this truth. But this truth was God; and being directed towards it meant learning to love God in the right way. Augustine’s aim, then, very much in line with the outline provided in Book I of On Christian Doctrine and on the model of the communities he drew together at Cassiciacum and Hippo, was to draw those who had been Donatists into fellowship within the Catholic Church, where all could join in striving to love God and could love one another insofar as they were doing so. This meant that they must be reconciled, but this reconciliation does not at all strike me as being the same sort of reconciliation described by the recent authors Biggar employs to explain the reconciliation he wants to have take place at the end of war. Indeed, so far as the Donatists remained obdurate, Augustine was convinced of the need for their punishment.

It is, I think, a good thing that Augustine makes only those two brief appearances I have noted in chapter 2 of Biggar’s book. Augustine was after something rather different from the kind of reconciliation towards which Biggar’s more recent sources point. The reconciliation Augustine wanted with the Donatists was reconciliation on his own terms. Brown describes him in this context in these words: ‘A passionate and sensitive campaigner, Augustine will show himself a hard victor.’ ¹³

In this paper I use the points of entry provided by Biggar in his two references to Augustine in his chapter on reconciliation to try to re-enter Augustine’s own world. For when we do not understand the world of an author from another time so distant, we are inevitably going to read our own assumptions back onto him, arguing that what we believe must be what he meant. Despite his statement about ‘the qualification of violence by forgiveness’, I don’t think Biggar locates such an idea in Augustine in this chapter, though his long footnote on ‘Augustinianism’ on pages 76–77 makes a powerful argument for the relevance of another aspect of Augustine’s thought for the matter at hand. ¹⁴ What he says about ‘Augustinian modesty’ fits well with Augustine’s counsel to Marcellinus in Letter 139.

Rather, I think his purpose in bringing Augustine onstage only for those two brief appearances noted is fundamentally rhetorical: he draws his readers in by these appearances, and knowing that they must believe that Augustine on love of neighbour meant what we have been taught to believe love of neighbour requires-reconciliation with our enemies, with those who have done us wrong-he can go on in the chapter as a whole to make his own argument for a link between love, punishment, justice and reconciliation. It is a powerful argument, but it does not seem to me at all to represent Augustine’s position. We are all to some degree the prisoners of our education and of our times and experiences. Augustine was certainly a prisoner of his. In seeking to uncover what he was thinking, I am not in any way suggesting it is better than other ways of thinking we know about or may conceive. Yet I think it is important to know what it was, so that we may better understand how our own thinking relates to it.