On the Christological Determination of Augustine’s Theology of Love

Introduction

In a probing consideration of the future of Augustinian modes of thought, Etienne Gilson observes that Augustine’s work is sufficiently allusive and incomplete that the history of its reception is not linear and stable, but is rather a history of punctuated revivals as new generations appropriate Augustinian themes and then depart at a ‘tangent’ from the ‘master curve’ in seeking to address contemporary difficulties. ¹ The last hundred years or so have witnessed a revival of this kind, spurred on in large part by thinkers who have sought alternatives to the conceptions that typify intellectual modernity. On the Catholic side, this revival has been concentrated in the sphere of metaphysics, as a line of thinkers descending from Erich Przywara has drawn from Augustine to develop an analogically-oriented metaphysics that resists a modern tendency to elide distinctions between divine and creaturely being. On the Protestant side, this revival has been concentrated in the sphere of ethics, as a line of thinkers descending from Reinhold Niebuhr has drawn from Augustine to develop an ethical realism that resists a modern tendency to elide distinctions between divine and creaturely activity. These developments have made Augustine an influential voice for much of the last hundred years; yet, running alongside these positive appropriations is a different set of studies that suggests that Augustine’s work is poorly suited to enriching contemporary discussions because it conflicts with deep-seated modern convictions about the need to see human beings as ends and not as means. Hannah Arendt and Anders Nygren are perhaps the most famous representatives of the view that Augustine’s work is crippled because the metaphysics and ethics that others celebrate ground a theology of love that reduces creaturely goods to instruments to be used in an individual’s ascent to God.

The most recent century has thus produced two bodies of literature running parallel to each other: considerations of Augustine’s relationship to intellectual and political modernity, on the one hand; and considerations of Augustine’s theology of love, on the other. Both have become self-sustaining cottage industries; they have intersected in two recent works that frame a significant set of historical, dogmatic and ethical questions. The first is the account of Augustine’s relationship to Descartes that is developed by Michael Hanby, which attempts to show that Augustine’s understanding of the self represents a salutary alternative to the ‘rootless self’ of modernity. ² This task takes Hanby into the sphere of Augustine’s theology of love in particular, for Hanby is concerned above all to show that the Augustinian will is antithetical to the voluntarism and incipient nihilism that he takes to be characteristic of the Cartesian will. The second is the account of Augustinian political ethics that is developed by Eric Gregory, which aims to bring Augustine into conversation with modern liberalism in order to construct a moderate perfectionism through attention to the motivations of citizens. ³ This task takes Gregory into the sphere of Augustine’s theology of love because he wishes to show that Augustine’s conception of the ordering of love provides a ‘training in affectivity’ that motivates love for the neighbour. ⁴

My aim in this article is to take up the questions associated with Augustine’s theology of love and his relation to modernity through engagement with Hanby and Gregory. I hope to show, first, that Hanby and Gregory are united as representatives of a new school of thought that seeks to respond to critics of Augustine’s theology of love through a Christological reconsideration of the relation between divine and creaturely objects of love. I hope then to show, secondly, that this school tends to marginalise the pneumatological grounding of Augustine’s theology of love, and that this tendency causes a general breakdown in distinctions between Christology, ecclesiology and the theology of creation. The result is an account of Augustine’s theology of love that reflects a modern tendency to dissolve the particularity of the incarnation into a general notion of Christological presence. In a third section I will then argue that the interplay between Christology and pneumatology in Augustine’s theology of love shows that the love that is shed abroad through the work of the Spirit is constituted by relation to a Christological conception of justice that is generative for consideration of Augustine’s theology of love and his relation to political modernity.

The Christological Context of the Augustinian Will

It ought to be conceded in beginning the development of these claims that the decision to pair reflection on Hanby and Gregory might appear arbitrary and inauspicious. Hanby is virulently opposed to the liberalism that Gregory defends. Gregory is a perceptive critic of the Radical Orthodoxy movement in which Hanby has a full share. ⁵ Overlap between their work is not immediately evident; yet, alongside their differing evaluations of modernity are considerable similarities in their approaches to Augustine. Recognition of this dynamic is crucial, for it permits us to identify a shift towards Christocentric readings of Augustine’s theology of love that has become increasingly influential within Augustine scholarship.

The similarities between Hanby and Gregory are rooted, first, in the fact that the two face a common problem. Both wish to deploy Augustine’s theology of love within contemporary thought, but both find the way blocked by readings that align Augustine with the tendencies that they wish to escape. On the one hand, Hanby wishes to show that the Augustinian will presents an alternative to the voluntarist and fundamentally nihilist conception that he sees at the root of modernity; yet, his attempt to do so is impeded by the work of scholars such as Charles Taylor, Wayne Hankey and Stephen Menn, which suggests that Augustine’s anthropology is closely aligned with modern understandings of the self. On the other hand, Gregory wishes to show that Augustine’s understanding of the will can lead liberal citizens beyond a minimalist concern to curb violence and into salutary consideration of the virtues of liberal citizens; yet he finds his attempt impeded by the suggestions of Anders Nygren and Hannah Arendt that Augustine’s understanding of the will is sufficiently Platonic that it is inimical to modern conceptions.

Augustine thus appears to critics to be too much the proto-Cartesian to serve for Hanby as an alternative to modern conceptions, and too much the Platonist to serve for Gregory as an alternative within modernity. And it is a shared concern underwriting both of these claims that provides the problem with which both Hanby and Gregory engage. At root, the worry for critics on both sides is that the Augustinian will is of a fundamentally appetitive, or acquisitive, character, and is thus unable to encounter human beings and the goods of the world as anything other than instruments to be used in the soul’s search for satisfaction. One set of readers associates the acquisitive character of the Augustinian will with a Platonic eros that rests only in the final good. Another set presents it as an anticipation of a Cartesian voluntarism that assures itself of its own inviolable sovereignty only by negating the other and then reappropriating it in the form of an abstract idea. ⁶ But whether because of a Platonic desire for God, or a Cartesian desire to be God, ⁷ it is supposed that Augustine’s understanding of will excludes creaturely goods—and the neighbour in particular—from appearing as an object of love.

As a starting point, then, we can see that, despite their differences, Hanby and Gregory are united because both face the common modern worry about Augustine’s capacity to accommodate love of creaturely goods. The second, and more significant, point that we must recognise is that Hanby and Gregory are further united in attempting a solution to this problem that is becoming increasingly common. This solution hinges on the notion that the Augustinian will may be distinguished from problematic conceptions both ancient and modern by virtue of the Christological determination of the ontological and ethical ‘context’ in which it operates. The suggestion is developed first by Hanby, who argues that the Augustinian and Cartesian wills are distinguished by the differing ‘ontologies’, or ‘economies’, within which they are situated. ⁸ For Hanby, the Cartesian will is of a fundamentally acquisitive character because it operates in a featureless, immanentised world in which freedom is found only in self-assertion, while the Augustinian will, by contrast, is of a fundamentally doxological character because it operates in a created sphere in which the beauty and delight of the divine life are manifest, and in which freedom is found not in assertion, but rather in worshipful response to the movements of the divine.

Crucially, Hanby goes on to argue that manifestations of divine beauty characterise the Augustinian economy because of a union between Creator and creation that is effected by Christ. As Hanby puts it, the key to the Augustinian will is that it operates in an ‘ontological context’ defined by a ‘recalling’ of creation into ‘union with its Creator’ through ‘the hypostatic unity’ of Creator and creature in Christ. ⁹ At the heart of Hanby’s work is the suggestion that this ‘hypostatic unity’ corresponds not simply to the particularity of the unity of divine and human in Jesus of Nazareth, but also to a broader, cosmological unity between creation in toto and the Creator. Hanby thus argues that Christ’s function ‘is one whereby he reincorporates an estranged creation into the Trinitarian life of God’. ¹⁰ He then writes that ‘Augustinian “will”’ is determined by the fact that it is ‘situated within Christ’s union of creature and creator’, a space in which Creator and creature are so conjoined that the beauty of the former is manifest in the latter, and creatures are most fully themselves as they serve as signs of this beauty in order to draw human love towards God. ¹¹ Within this Christological space, will can hardly appear as the faculty of a domineering, voluntaristic choosing. It is rather the ‘locus’ through which human beings participate in the beauty and delight of God’s own life. ¹²

What we find in Hanby’s work, then, is an attempt to distinguish the Augustinian will by arguing that it operates in a creation brought into union with God through Christ. This same attempt is central to Gregory’s work. Gregory tells us that he learned a good deal about the ‘doxological context’ of the Augustinian will from Hanby. ¹³ An emphasis on the ‘context’ of the will is important for Gregory as the grounds for a shift in perspective that he wishes to effect in consideration of Augustine’s theology of love. In face of the claim that Augustine’s work is informed by a Platonic eros that leaves no room for neighbour love, Gregory suggests that what is required is a shift from focus on what one ought to love to consideration of how one ought to love, from consideration of objects of love to attention to the disposition of the lover. ¹⁴ Gregory argues that this shift is justified because of the Christological context in which the Augustinian will operates. Where critics suppose that the question of proper objects of love is irreducible because Augustine sees competition between different objects of love, Gregory argues that Augustine’s Christology frees us to consider the disposition of the lover because it relates Creator and creature in such a way that no competition between objects of love is possible. ‘In Christ, Augustinians claim, all loves are bound together—God’s love for humanity and humanity’s love for God and neighbor.’ ¹⁵ In binding differing objects of love in this way, Christology ‘determines’ Augustine’s theology of love. ¹⁶ It establishes an ‘ethical and ontological relation between God and the world’. ¹⁷ In so doing, it ‘shapes a way of seeing the world that offers insights for political citizenship’, ¹⁸ for it ‘mediates between God and neighbor in the self’s vision’ and thus ‘clarifies the otherwise obscure relation between the love commands’. ¹⁹ This clarification issues from the fact that ‘the doctrine of the two natures of Christ in the person of Jesus demonstrates the radical unity of the love of God and love of neighbor’. ²⁰ ‘Because the Word became flesh, “there can be no separation of love”.’ ²¹ Creaturely things can be loved ‘in God’, and love of God amounts to love of ‘the whole of creation existing in God’. ²² Critics such as Arendt go astray because they operate ‘without a Christology that ensures love of God is correlative with love of neighbour’. ²³

For Gregory, then, Christology leaves Augustine’s theology ‘radically transformed’. ²⁴ It ‘places Augustine’s doctrine of love in an altogether different context than a “Platonic” theory of appetitive love’. ²⁵ With these claims, we have come to a set of concepts that mirrors Hanby’s. For both Hanby and Gregory, Augustine’s theology of love is shielded from the instrumentalising tendencies of Platonic and Cartesian volition because it operates in a ‘context’ defined by a Christological ‘union’ of Creator and creature. Creator and creature are so conjoined that they are enfolded by a single love that loves the creaturely ‘in’ the divine, whether as a creature constituted as a sign of divine beauty, or as a creature united to God in Christ. Hanby and Gregory both take it that this understanding is generative within contemporary thought, either as a wholesale alternative to Cartesian voluntarism, or as an ‘integrated motivational ideal’ capable of leading liberal citizens towards virtue. ²⁶

The shared set of notions at which Hanby and Gregory arrive is significant because it typifies a reading of Augustine’s theology of love that is very much in vogue. Hanby’s account is representative of the account of the Radical Orthodoxy movement more broadly, which seeks to show that all aspects of human activity must reflect the Christologically-mediated participation in God that marks creaturely being. Gregory draws from Raymond Canning’s account of the ‘Christological context’ of Augustinian love more particularly, which emphasises the various forms in which Augustine describes the solidarity between Christ and the neighbour. ²⁷ Notions developed by both Hanby and Gregory are taken up in the work of Sarah Stewart-Kroeker most recently, which suggests that Christ’s ‘incarnate mediation establishes the continuity of the heavenly and earthly realms’ and thus ‘heals’ the tension between time and eternity ‘by unifying’. ²⁸ Differences between the work of these figures ought not to be overlooked; yet they are united by a common interpretive strategy that marks something like a new school of thought on Augustine’s theology of love. The strategy consists in integrating the two halves of the dual love command through a Christological reconsideration of the nature of the relationship between Creator and creature. Those who adopt this strategy take Augustine’s Christology as the clue to a broader ‘union’, ²⁹ ‘ontological relation’, ³⁰ ‘unity’ ³¹ or ‘continuity’ ³² between the Creator and the creature. A metaphysical dualism that might bring love of creature and love of the Creator into conflict is identified as the ill to be avoided. ³³ In its place is a heavy emphasis on creation standing in a Christologically-mediated union with God.

The Question of Christological Presence

The question for us is what we are to make of these notions. My aim in this section is to suggest that they are attended by a number of difficulties, chief amongst which is a tendency to ground an account of neighbour love in an abstract understanding of divine presence that issues from a generalised blurring of Augustine’s distinctions between Christology, ecclesiology and the theology of creation. We might take an initial step towards the demonstration of this claim by noting something of an oddity in the reading of Augustine that grounds this new school. There are three themes from Augustine’s work that are frequently taken as clues to the Christological context of the Augustinian will. Hanby and Gregory lay especial emphasis on Augustine’s understanding of the unity between Christ and the Church and between believers within the Church. ³⁴ Gregory and Canning emphasise Augustine’s notion of a single love that encompasses both God and neighbour. ³⁵ Hanby and Stewart-Kroeker draw especially from the notion of the Christian life as a journey ‘through Christ towards Christ’. ³⁶ The work of the Holy Spirit is foundational to each of these notions for Augustine and stands at the heart of Augustine’s theology of love more broadly; ³⁷ yet Hanby and Gregory in particular have remarkably little to say about the Holy Spirit. One feature of the interpretive tendency that they share is an emphasis on the interplay between Christology and the theology of creation in Augustine’s theology of love in place of a more classically Augustinian pairing of Christology and pneumatology. We might ask what effect this has on their understanding of the fellowship between God and creatures.

A number of concerns regarding this emphasis could be developed in a lengthier study. Hanby joins Christology and creation in part by interpreting passages in which Augustine is attempting to work out the place of the Holy Spirit in the Godhead as if they apply to creation. ³⁸ His emphasis on the notion that creation is situated in the ‘interval of delight’ between Father and Son risks conflating pneumatology and the theology of creation, for this ‘interval’ is not an indeterminate ‘space’ awaiting an occupant; it is rather the person of the Holy Spirit. ³⁹ Gregory’s version of this pairing, in turn, raises questions about the degree to which he succeeds in shifting attention to the disposition of the lover. Gregory tells us that we ought to attend to the how of Augustinian loving rather than the what, to the subjective rather than the objective pole of love; yet his emphasis on Christology and the theology of creation means that the conceptual groundwork for this shift is laid on the objective pole itself. It is the Christologically-mediated relation created between differing objects that grounds the claim that we need only attend to the disposition of the lover. Consideration of the nature and relation of different objects of love thus remains determinative for his project. It is then not clear that his presentation of this relation assuages the worries of Augustine’s critics. The notion of a love secured by a Christological relation of Creator and creature is unlikely to satisfy Augustine’s critics, for their concern is that love of neighbour does not escape a necessary relation to love of God. Gregory ensures the necessity of the relation by grounding it Christologically. He attempts to make a virtue of this necessity, arguing that Augustine embeds neighbour love in love of God in order to protect the neighbour from a ‘thieving’ love that treats others as possessions under our control. ⁴⁰ The point is spiritually perceptive, but it rests on a tenuous reading of Augustine’s grief over the death of his unnamed friend, ⁴¹ and it does not undo the critic’s worry that, finally, neighbour love is always ‘looking over the neighbour’s shoulder to God’. ⁴²

Leaving aside these worries, the more thoroughgoing concern that I wish to develop is that emphasising a conjunction of Christology and creation apart from an account of the work of the Spirit leads to a collapse of dogmatic distinctions between Christology, ecclesiology and the theology of creation. The point can be seen, first, by considering the exegetical work that grounds Hanby’s reading. The key passage to which Hanby returns repeatedly in defence of his interpretation is the discussion in De Trinitate 13 of the way that believers pass ‘through Christ towards Christ’ in ascending to the vision of God. ⁴³ In this passage, Augustine seeks to show that believers may shift their attention from created things to the eternal truth of God by passing through Christ’s visible humanity to his invisible divinity. Hanby places this movement at the heart of his account of the Christological ‘context’ of the reformation of the cosmos; yet Augustine himself speaks not of the movement of the cosmos, but rather of the movement of the believer’s attention. Hanby defends the notion that a broader ‘reincorporation’ of creation ‘into the trinitarian life of God’ is implicated in this Christological movement through a series of exegetical associations. He pairs Augustine’s description of the movement of attention in De Trinitate 13 with Augustine’s discussion of Christ drawing his ecclesial body towards himself in De Trinitate 4. ⁴⁴ He then claims that, because Augustine offers an ‘ecclesiocentric’ reading of Genesis 1 in Confessions 13, Christ’s drawing of the Church to himself may be seen as ‘coextensive’ with the creation, conversion and reformation of the cosmos as a whole. ⁴⁵ These associations lead Hanby to conclude that the movement of the believer’s attention must really be seen as a movement of the Church, and that the movement of the Church in turn must really be seen as the movement of the cosmos; yet these conclusions are unqualified by the larger framework of Augustine’s thought. The movement ‘through Christ towards Christ’ is a frequent topic in Augustine’s work; it is consistently held apart from Christ’s drawing of the Church to himself. In none of Augustine’s other writings on Genesis does he associate creation and the Church. The result of Hanby’s associations is a thoroughgoing collapse of dogmatic categories. The theology of creation is swallowed up by ecclesiology (creation itself ‘is now understood … as Church’), ⁴⁶ and ecclesiology itself is made a function of a speculative Christological and trinitarian metaphysics (Christ and Church are ‘conflated’; Christology ‘passes over’ into ecclesiology). ⁴⁷ Seasoned readers of Augustine suggest that these moves depart rather dramatically from Augustine’s work. ⁴⁸

Hanby’s reading is sufficiently idiosyncratic that we ought to be cautious in drawing conclusions from it regarding Christocentric readings of Augustine’s theology of love more generally; yet the dramatic collapse of dogmatic categories that he effects illustrates a pattern that marks Gregory’s work as well. We may examine this pattern by asking what kind of Christology stands at the heart of Gregory’s reading. As we saw earlier, Gregory claims that critics go astray because they fail to employ a Christology that ensures that love of God and neighbour do not drift apart. ⁴⁹ Yet, though myriad references to Christology ‘relating’, ‘mediating’ and ‘unifying’ God and neighbour occur in his work, Gregory does not offer an account of the nature of this Christology. The most concrete indications that he gives come in the form of references to a ‘collectivist Christology’ that is grounded in Augustine’s understanding of the ecclesial totus Christus. In homilies on 1 John, Augustine responds to the fact that John appears to make love of the Son of God synonymous with love of the sons of God by arguing that, because believers are united to Christ as their ecclesial head, there can be no separation between a love of the members of Christ and a love for Christ himself. ⁵⁰ The ‘collectivism’ of this love amongst Christ’s members is crucial for Gregory in grounding the claim that Christology produces an essential unity between love of God and love of neighbour; ⁵¹ yet his account of this point in relation to political ethics more broadly depends on appropriating a conceptual element from Barth that leads him to elide ecclesiology and the theology of creation.

Gregory announces that he will follow Protestant readers of Barth in refusing to identify Christ and the kingdom of God with the Church. ⁵² But, having imported this Barthian element into his account, he proceeds to reverse its significance. Where Barth deploys a refusal to identify Christ with the Church in order to unsettle the Church, Gregory deploys it in order to secure the world as a ‘context’ in which love of neighbour and love of God align. For him, refusing to identify Christ with the Church serves not to leave the Church in a position of prayerful dependence, but rather to compel the acknowledgement that Christ is a ‘common good’ shared by all. ⁵³ Christ is not associated with the Church in particular, but is instead ‘the highest good that is also the common good’. ⁵⁴ The result of this claim is that Church cannot be identified as the proper ‘site’ for virtues such as a Christological love encompassing God and neighbour. ⁵⁵ Rather, a ‘plurality of sites’ for the practice of this love must be acknowledged. ⁵⁶ The ‘collective caritas’ that Augustine identifies with the Church in 1 John is thus made a Christological benefit that is distributed throughout the created sphere generally. Gregory aligns the ecclesial love of 1 John and a general love of neighbour, arguing that both are grounded in Augustine’s conception of the totus Christus. ⁵⁷ The totus Christus is thus stripped of ecclesiological particularity. Together with the development of a ‘weak’ version of Augustine’s theology in which love need only be ‘referable’ to God, this move ensures that ecclesial love need not be distinguished from more public forms of love. ⁵⁸ Liberals are relieved of the need to confess Christ as Lord in order to become good lovers. ⁵⁹ Christ’s presence to the Church passes outwards into a generalised mode of Christological presence that draws all human love of neighbour into the orbit of loves that are ‘referable’ to God.

In the end, then, Gregory, like Hanby, blurs distinctions between Christology, ecclesiology and the theology of creation in order to ground a ‘Christological’ reconsideration of the relation between Creator and creature. Hanby draws creation into ecclesiology and ecclesiology into Christology; Gregory pushes Christology outwards into ecclesiology and ecclesiology outwards into creation; but both break down dogmatic categories that Augustine keeps distinct in order to ground an account of Augustine’s theology of love in a generalised notion of divine presence in the neighbour. Pairing reflection on Christology and creation without the qualifications of the relations between God and creatures that accompany Augustine’s understanding of the work of the Spirit causes the concrete particularity of the incarnation to fade into a general notion of divine presence in creation. Both Hanby and Gregory position themselves to shrug at charges of historical misreading by orienting their work to what Augustine has become rather than to what he was, ⁶⁰ but, in departing at a ‘tangent’ from the ‘master curve’, they have not only strayed from Augustine’s thought, but also sacrificed a notion of divine presence that does not fade into a general notion of incarnation.

Love and Justice

The question that I wish to take up in the third section of this article is what might be gained by turning from recent pairings of Christology and creation in consideration of Augustine’s theology of love and attending instead to a more classically Augustinian pairing of Christology and pneumatology. I propose to treat this question by considering the virtues that Augustine associates with the work of Son and Spirit, namely, justice and love. The question of the relation between love and justice is of considerable significance, for it is central not only to Augustine’s thinking about love, but also to contemporary debates about the relationship between Christianity and modern liberalism. My aim is to show that Augustine makes a Christological vision of justice constitutive of Christian love in a way that is generative both in considering Augustine’s theology of love and in considering his relationship to modernity.

We may take our departure here from the fact that Gregory himself attempts to pair love and justice in response to Rawlsian subordinations of love to a proceduralist vision of justice; yet he is not sure how to explain the logic of the pairing. He attempts analogies with the distinction in unity of the hypostatic union and the difference defined by relation between the persons of the Trinity; ⁶¹ yet, the analogies lack firm conceptual grounding. Having downplayed the correlation between the work of the Son and the Spirit, Gregory is not positioned to draw from the fact that Augustine sees justice and love related as the correlates of the work of the divine Son and Spirit. For Augustine, justice typifies the work of the divine Son, for the Son is the perfect form of justice who triumphs over the devil by reversing the devil’s preference for power over justice. ⁶² The work of the Holy Spirit, in turn, is characterised by love, for the Spirit is the love of Father and Son, shed abroad in believers’ hearts in order to draw them back to God. ⁶³ As the correlates of the work of Son and Spirit, justice and love are related according to the pattern of the economic activity of the divine persons.

More particularly, it is the interplay between Christology and pneumatology within Augustine’s account of the movement ‘through Christ towards Christ’ that establishes the pattern on which he conceives of the relation between love and justice. As we have seen, this movement is central to Christocentric readings of Augustine’s theology of love; yet, these readings have said little about the role of the Holy Spirit in this movement. This role is clear, first, in the movement of attention through ‘one and the same Christ’ in De Trinitate 13, for it is basic to Augustine’s psychology that a movement of human attention is a movement of will, or love, and it is basic to his theology more generally that human beings are able to love God only through the work of the Holy Spirit. Augustine thus writes that one who is passing through Christ’s visible flesh towards the eternal ‘is transferring his love from temporal things to eternal, from visible to intelligible’, and that this transfer is possible only through the work of the Spirit, who alone ‘fires man to the love of God’. ⁶⁴ The Spirit’s work is also central to Augustine’s discussion of the soul’s journey to the homeland in book 1 of De doctrina christiana, in which Augustine argues that this journey is possible because, in the divine Son, the eternal wisdom that ‘is actually our homeland … also made himself the road to our homeland’. ⁶⁵ Though Augustine does not mention the Spirit in this discussion, his insistence that the movement is spiritual rather than spatial makes clear that the movement is driven by the Spirit, for it is basic for him that love is the ‘weight’ that moves believers through spiritual space, and that it is the ‘lifting up of love given by your Spirit’ that makes it possible for believers to progress towards God. ⁶⁶

These discussions serve to show that believers pass through Christ towards Christ in the power of the Spirit. Within this picture, the economic work of the Son and the Spirit are related in that the Spirit joins believers to Christ in faith and then propels them through Christ’s visible appearance towards his invisible eternity through a movement of love. It is this pattern that characterises Augustine’s understanding of the relationship between justice and love. Augustine works out this dynamic through his reading of Paul. His Latin copy of the Bible renders Paul’s references to the ‘righteousness’ (dikaiosynē) of faith as references to the ‘justice’ (justitia) of faith. Augustine thus takes it that a basic aim of Paul’s ministry is to show that faith and justice are inextricably linked. That Paul tells us that the ‘just live by faith’ shows, for Augustine, that faith falls under justice in a classical taxonomy of virtues; ⁶⁷ and, more importantly, that faith is itself the form of justice that God gives in order for believers to be justified before him. ⁶⁸ Augustine writes that ‘your justice is your faith’, so that ‘anyone who lives by faith is just’. ⁶⁹ Yet, for Augustine, that faith is a form of justice given to believers by virtue of Christ’s work in time is but half the story, for it is equally foundational for him that faith is teleologically ordered towards the perfect justice of Christ. Augustine holds that the life of faith is to be marked by an imitation of Christ through which believers grow towards the justice of Christ’s life and work. It is as the perfection of justice that Christ can be described as the end of the law. Believers walk in imitation of Christ in order themselves to progress towards the perfection of law. ⁷⁰ ‘Let us do the works of Christ, because to believe in Christ is also itself a work of Christ. Therefore hear now and understand: “He who believes in me, the works that I do, he also will do.” … What works, except that he become just?’ ⁷¹

At this point, then, we can see that Augustine holds that faith enjoys a twofold relationship to justice. Believers move through the justice given in faith towards the perfection of justice in Christ, just as they move through faith in Christ’s temporal appearance towards perception of his perfection in eternity. The movement ‘through Christ towards Christ’ is also a movement ‘through justice towards justice’. Crucially, Augustine holds that the love ‘shed abroad’ by the Holy Spirit moves believers ‘through justice’ just as it moves them ‘through Christ’. Augustine draws this notion from Paul’s claim that faith works through love. He frequently pairs the kind of references to the justice of faith found in Rom. 1:17 and Rom. 3:28 with the reference to faith working itself out through love in Gal. 5:6 in order to make clear that love is the proper work of the justice of faith. ⁷² Yet it is not only that Christian love issues from the justice of faith, but also that this love has the justice of Christ as its proper term. This latter point is crucial for Augustine, both as a way of showing how believers progress from the justice of faith towards the perfect justice of Christ and as a way of distinguishing the works of love that Paul commends from the works of law that he condemns. Augustine wonders how faith can be commanded to work itself out in love without falling into the self-justification of the law. His response is that faith’s works of love are set apart from the self-seeking works of law because they have the justice of Christ as their proper end, while slavish works of the law are driven by a desire to avoid punishment. ‘Clearly, if anyone performs a work prescribed by law out of fear of punishment rather than love of justice, such a person obeys the law unwillingly.’ ⁷³ But the faith that is a saving gift of God ‘works not by fear but by love, not by fearing punishment but by loving justice’. ⁷⁴ This love of justice is itself a gift of God through which ‘we are not cramped by fear in the observance of his commands but led into the broad freedom of love as we delight in justice’. ⁷⁵ Through this love of justice, believers walk in imitation of the justice of Christ, and thus grow towards the eternal perfection of justice through the love of the Holy Spirit. Growth in knowledge of the eternal by moving ‘through Christ towards Christ’ is thus synonymous with growth in justice. Augustine drives this point home by drawing material from the Psalms in order to argue that justice is the primary attribute of God’s eternal kingdom, and so growth towards God’s eternity is precisely growth in justice. ⁷⁶

At this point, then, we can see that, just as the Holy Spirit moves believers ‘through Christ towards Christ’, so the love given by the Spirit moves believers through the justice of faith towards the perfect justice of Christ. This dynamic is central to Augustine’s thinking. It stands at the intersection of his understanding of the work of the Trinity, of Paul’s conception of the interplay of faith, justice and love in the Christian life, and of the emphasis on the justice of the kingdom of God in the Hebrew Bible. It issues in a picture in which justice is constitutive of Christian love. Christian love is characterised by the fact that it issues from the temporal justice of faith and moves towards the perfect justice of Christ and of God’s eternal kingdom. Augustine insists that, where love does not have the justice of faith as its origin and the justice of Christ as its term, it is nothing more than an assertive work of the law. Love must have justice as its formal and final cause, for Augustine makes clear that a love that is unrelated to justice is in fact not love at all, but rather a form of hate. ⁷⁷

This account of the constitutive place of justice for Christian love is crucial for Augustine; yet, it has played little role in discussions of Augustine’s theology of love. It is not among the ‘aspects’ of love discussed in O’Donovan’s work on Augustine’s theology of love; it does not figure in either John Burnaby’s classic study of the topic or more recent Christocentric readings. ⁷⁸ A great deal of work would be required in order to sort through this conception of Christian love in relation to other aspects of Augustine’s thinking. The space that remains can afford us only summary indications. As a starting point, we might note simply that, on a formal level, Augustine’s notion of a just love is synonymous with his notion of well-ordered love, for Augustine does not distinguish between the notion of justice that he finds in Scripture and the classical conception of justice as giving to all what is their due, and so a just love, like a well-ordered love, is a love that gives to each what is their due. ⁷⁹ It thus appears natural on one level for Augustine to think through his theology of well-ordered love in terms of justice; yet, on a material level, there may be some tension between the notions of a just love and a well-ordered love, for the notion of well-ordered love has reference to a neo-Platonic hierarchy of being as the factor that determines the love that each is due, while the notion of just love has reference to the example and commands of Christ as the source of its material determination. The question of the harmony between these notions can perhaps be thought of as the question of the harmony between the moral force of the person and the work of Christ. On the one hand, Christ’s person is inseparable from the ontological order that, for Augustine, determines the classical understanding of the ordering of love, for Christ is the incarnation of the Logos that is the structuring principle of creation’s order. On the other hand, Christ’s work is inseparable from a notion of justice that is constituted by self-sacrificial love, for in both word and deed Christ teaches his followers to follow in a just love that is ‘ready and able even to die for the good of our brethren’. ⁸⁰

The task of integrating these elements in Augustine’s thinking cannot be taken up here. We may conclude by considering an influential account of love in Augustine’s mature work that makes the constitutive place of justice in Christian love clear, and that suggests one form in which the differing strands in Augustine’s thinking about love are bound together. This passage is found in a consideration of the possibility of love of God in De Trinitate 8. The question of this possibility is raised for Augustine by the axiom that we cannot love that which we do not know, for Augustine takes it that it is not clear that human beings possess the capacity to know God in order to love him. Because they tend to think of a material image when they are told of a triune, spiritual substance, they appear to be in considerable danger of directing their love to an idol rather than to God.

Augustine responds to this difficulty by developing the programmatic suggestions, first, that believers need only comprehend the nature of true love in order to come to know God; secondly, that true love is constituted by its relation to justice. ⁸¹ His aim in bringing love’s relationship to justice to the fore is to show that, though believers may not be sure how to love the one to whom their love is due, there is a love that is made proper for them through its conformity to the justice of Christ, and this love serves in turn as the key to knowledge and love of God. This latter claim rests on the notion that, when love is constituted by justice as its formal and final cause, it may itself stand as an object of love, and, when a just love is itself loved, we have found our way to love of God, for John tells us that God himself is love. ⁸² On this account, love of God is found through reflexive love of a love that is made worthy of love by its relationship to justice. ⁸³ Here the erotic love that seeks God finds fulfilment, not in a flight from the earthly particularity of the neighbour, but rather in the love of neighbour that Christ demands. Eros is fulfilled in agape, for it is in the just love that is instituted by Christ that believers find a reality to which they may turn in order to love God. ⁸⁴ ‘Because God is love, the man who loves love certainly loves God.’ ⁸⁵ Here the Johannine identification of love with God joins with Paul’s interweaving of faith, justice and love in order to produce a picture in which love for the temporal and love for the eternal are correlated. The more we love our brothers in accordance with the justice of Christ, the more we are in a love in which God too is loved and the more we progress towards the eternal justice of Christ and of God’s kingdom. Love for the eternal grows as love for the temporal grows, so long as love for the temporal is governed by justice.

Conclusion

What emerges from these concepts is a picture of Augustine’s understanding of love that is markedly different from the interpretations of sympathetic readers such as Hanby and Gregory, diametrically opposed to the interpretations of critics such as Nygren and Arendt, and generative for consideration of the place of Christian love in modern, liberal democracies. To speak, first, of Augustine’s sympathisers, what we find here is a notion of love that is Christologically-conditioned, not because it has led us to blur dogmatic distinctions in reconsidering the nature of the relation between God and creatures, but rather because Augustine makes a Christological vision of justice constitutive of Christian loving. To speak, secondly, of Augustine’s critics, what we find here is not an account in which love of neighbour is sacrificed to an all-consuming love of God, but rather a love for God that finds its fulfilment in love of the neighbour, for it is when we turn to a self-sacrificial love of brother in imitation of Christ that we encounter a just love through which we come to love God. To speak, finally, of contemporary political ethics, what we find is an account of the ordering of the relationship between justice and love that is anchored in an account of the work of the Trinity and a reading of Scripture. It is an account that echoes influential liberal voices in making justice constitutive of proper loving, but then mounts a fundamental challenge to liberal thought in deploying a notion of justice grounded in Hebrew understandings of the kingdom of God, Christian understandings of the sacrifice of Christ and a Scriptural understanding of the life of faith.