Nietzsche on Augustine on Happiness

Gilbert Meilaender is almost always identified as a ‘Christian ethicist’, a title that is mostly true, possibly misleading, and definitely inadequate. It is not the ‘Christian’ part that I wish to question. It is that I am not at all certain whether Gil is best understood as a conventional professional ethicist. For my part, I think of Gil as something much more interesting, if less frequently celebrated. He is, simply, a teacher in both the biblical and classical senses of that word—a person possessed of a deep wisdom about what human life is and how it ought to be lived. It is from this ‘angle of vision’, to use one of Gil’s favorite phrases, that his writings ought to be approached. ¹

I hesitate calling Gil an ethicist because his most enduring interest has involved a concern with what a teacher of ethics cannot accomplish. This is an old topic, of course, and Gil has written brilliantly on the pedagogical riddles of Plato and Aristotle, as well as on modern theories of moral education and development. In doing so, he has shown a characteristic concern to think carefully through the seeming paradox that Christians must learn from God to become who and what they are made to be. ²

But Gil is also motivated by concerns more uniquely of his own. He has made a point of trying to impart an odd and, if I am not mistaken, slightly subversive sort of lesson. He has sought to teach us not only what expertise we ought not to expect from professional ethicists—but also what we should not even expect from ourselves and our own powers of moral discernment, however well-formed they happen to be. ‘My focus is on the limits of love’, he writes, ‘limits to what we can accomplish, limits to what we should do in a good cause, limits to our attempts to be more than finite creatures.’ ³

As a reader of Gil’s, what I have principally learned from him is how little of the moral life can be captured without acknowledging what he often calls the ‘two-sidedness’ of human nature. I intend it as a compliment—a tribute to both the steadiness and breadth of his vision—that Gil’s moral essays tend to work the same way. They work like this: Gil identifies a paradox at the heart of our humanity, he describes the expansive claims made on us by its reciprocal interplay, and he counsels us about the dangers of collapsing or ignoring their tension. Gil calls these tensions ‘dualities’, not dualisms, and his work has involved him in carefully thinking through the dialectic of soul and body, eternity and temporality, creation and redemption, desire and duty, and many others besides. ‘The tensions created by [the] duality in our nature are the stuff of much that is most troubling in the moral life’, he observes. ⁴

Along the way, Gil encouraged us to think about the moral life instead through story, example and parable—and rarely, if ever, by what he arrestingly called the ‘gnostic’ desire for theoretical clarity. ⁵ Narratives, he argues, help us interpret and inhabit a world in which our moral understanding is limited by our creatureliness. ‘The creature is one who understands her life and action in terms of a story God is telling.’ ⁶ Narratives reflect our status as beings who are thrown into the middle of a story, unable to discern its precise direction, unsure whether the plot is ending or just beginning, and uncertain about the significance of our role in it. ‘Only the Author of the drama is in a position to specify clearly the ultimate significance of the roles particular creatures are called upon to play’, Gil warned, and ‘the creature who plays her role may be uncertain of its final significance or importance.’ ⁷

It was Gil’s style as much as his counsel that helped me as a student to understand one of the most challenging theological ironies of modern life. Gil has joked that his method, so far as he has one, has usually been to ‘worry about’ things, a technique he attributes to his own teacher, Paul Ramsey. ⁸ Now, Gil’s worry about modernity was not, on the whole, that it has gravely weakened moral norms. Too often, he countered, the contrary has been true—the expansion of human power and knowledge has tempted us to think of ourselves as morally responsible for more than we ought. Gil’s wisdom as a teacher was to notice how these demands have been particularly exacerbated at those points at the beginning and end of life where we tend to most resent our creaturely limits. Gil rarely approaches his opponents as amoralists or relativists and this explains, I think, why his writings exhibit such unfailing generosity and good will to those with whom he disagrees.

At least some of these concerns were shared by a thinker who will be one of my subjects today, Friedrich Nietzsche. Allow me to anticipate the question almost certainly forming in Gil’s mind at this very moment, ‘Dear God, why?’ Part of the answer is that Nietzsche shares with Gil an interest in Augustine and his conception of human happiness, and the relation between our natural desires and human fulfillment. Nietzsche himself is an awkward part of the legacy of modern hyper-Augustinianism. Like Augustine, he worries about the effects of social formation, spiritual inertia and self-deception; and also, like Augustine, he seeks to overcome them by ordering his loves toward eternity. ⁹

Nietzsche’s interest in Augustine is nevertheless almost entirely hostile (though it is not untouched by a certain queasy fascination). His primary interest in in Augustine’s ethics, which Nietzsche charges with fatally distorting the relationship between a person and his or her actions. On Nietzsche’s telling, Augustine bequeaths to Christian ethics, and hence to Western culture, a conception of happiness that renders our lives not only empty and meaningless, but fraudulent as well. Should we follow Augustine’s teachings, we will affect to possess a happiness we in fact lack—and pretend to lack virtues that we in fact possess. Hence the ramifying duplicities of Augustinian ethics: it compels believers to find happiness in a non-existent transcendent beyond and to deny that the talents required to maintain this illusion are real virtues. Worse and worse.

Nietzsche’s criticisms of Augustine are often unfair. They contain the standard amount of bluster, misrepresentation and gleeful ad hominem. And yet if we can move past the caricature and place his criticisms within his broader attack on Christian eudaimonism, Nietzsche does press us, I think, for greater clarity on a point of interpretation I learned first and best from Gil. It has to do with how Augustine understands the relation between human action and the final end of life—with what Gil more poetically called, in what I believe to be his finest book, ‘the way that leads there’.

Nietzsche’s sharpest questions lead us to ask whether and how Augustine can recognize an intrinsic relationship—a line of real continuity—between our own natural activity and the supernatural happiness that can come only from divine grace. The absence of any such connection, alleges Nietzsche, is the self-defeating flaw of Augustine’s eudaimonism, a flaw, paradoxically, that only insures human misery. Nietzsche’s criticisms can certainly be rebutted, but doing so, I suggest, might require us to recognize, if only in principle, a form of natural happiness that is proportionate to created human nature—a ‘fulfillment of the longing that is integral to our being’, to use Gil’s phrasing. ¹⁰ Whether Nietzsche or I have any of this right is, I admit, an open question and one that might be put to Gil. ¹¹

Nietzsche’s interest in Augustine is more than casual but certainly less than consuming, and placing him in the broader context of Nietzsche’s thought brings the usual interpretive challenges. (As one satirist put it, ‘Tell me what you need, I’ll supply you with the right Nietzsche quotation’.) I count seven references to Augustine in Nietzsche’s published works. To this could be added comments on the Church Fathers, the theology of Jansenism, and Pascal, the last distinguished for being Nietzsche’s great disappointment. ¹²

Nietzsche’s reading of Augustine combines the historical and the philosophical, and is intended to reveal the origins and consequences of Augustine’s turbulent moral psychology. In the fifth book of The Gay Science, Nietzsche calls Augustine a ‘maker of history’, a title he shares with no less than Socrates. The comment is left unexplained but likely invites us to think of Augustine as one who shaped history by combining two ways of life in such a way as to help give birth to a new human type. Nietzsche’s emphasis is on Augustine as the founder of a new moral ‘type’, that of the Christian eudaemonist.

Nietzsche is something of a believer in the heritability of acquired traits and he often explains individuals as though they possess the historically acquired characteristics of their cultures. ¹³ This approach gives added depth to Augustine’s already rich psychology, since he must appear to Nietzsche as the embattled carrier of two very different cultural experiences, those of Plato and St Paul (both of whom, interestingly, Nietzsche accuses of betraying their teachers).

Their errors are likely familiar to us. Plato committed the most ‘calamitous’ of mistakes by attempting to justify human life through the notions of pure spirit and a realm of immaterial entities. Paul too sought to justify human life, though not through a misguided rational appeal to transcendence, but through uncritical faith in it. For Nietzsche, Paul is the founder of the Christian religion as well as its first priest. Outraged by the impossibility of imitating Jesus in his actions, Paul revenged himself by composing the articles of Christian faith. ¹⁴

Augustine is both a Platonist and a priest in the order of Paul, and this imposes on him a kind of double falsification. He is tasked with applying a distorted version of Platonic philosophy to a counterfeit account of the life of Jesus. Augustine’s compounding errors take dogmatic shape in Western Christianity, which, as Nietzsche endlessly reminds us, sees human life as servile to a God who is hostile to it—hostile, that is, to its healthy self-expression as well as to the conflict and strife that must be affirmed as part of life’s essential conditions. ¹⁵ All of this makes Augustinian Christianity nihilistic in the original sense of Nietzsche’s term: it devalues human life by locating its ultimate meaning and significance outside of its natural conditions. More on this shortly.

Augustine is not, however, a passive recipient of the legacies of Plato and Paul, nor does he succeed in harmonizing them. Augustine combines them into a human type that captivated Nietzsche: the Christian ascetic. Nietzsche’s disgust for Christianity as a religion of and for the weak ought to not blind us to his admiration for the spiritual practices of its saints. Nietzsche is impressed, of course, not by their humility or charity, none of which count even as semblances of virtues, but rather by their capacity for self-cruelty and self-domination, with what he calls the appearance of nature acting against nature. In the life of an ascetic like Augustine, Nietzsche glimpses the pagan who once inflicted violence on others now inflicting it upon himself.

Saying only this much is enough, I hope, to give us a glimpse into Augustine’s psychological economy, which what Nietzsche calls a ‘mixed type’ of person. In his most extended reflection on Augustine, Nietzsche describes him as a man of ‘late cultures and refracted lights’, a man who stores within himself a tumultuous mixture of decaying cultures. ¹⁶

So much for the origins of Augustine’s moral psychology; what of its consequences? Nietzsche’s verdict is not positive: Augustine’s attempt to bring peace to his divided soul is self-impoverishing. It leads him to seek a form of happiness with God that alienates him from his own life.

A critical passage is found in Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche writes the following of Augustine, whom he calls the ‘holy rhetorician’:

His notion of happiness corresponds to that of a medicine and a mentality of pacification… It is a notion of happiness as primarily rest, lack of disturbance, repletion, unity at last, and the ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’. ¹⁷

Here we have one of Nietzsche’s primary charges: Augustine conceives of human happiness as the cessation of all doing, willing or desiring. That is, he understands beatitude as the conclusion of human activity rather than its perfection or enhancement. Hence happiness must appear, as Nietzsche writes elsewhere, as a ‘narcotic, drug, rest, peace, “Sabbath”, a slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs’. ¹⁸

When read in light of his other criticisms of Christian morality, Nietzsche’s allegations seem clear enough. Augustine regards his active will and appetites not only as potential obstacles to happiness, but as somehow the source of unhappiness itself. Hence happiness requires their removal or repose, the ending of life’s vital motions. And this can come only from God, whose grace blesses believers with the good of perfect passivity that they cannot achieve for themselves. ¹⁹ For Augustine, life is motion and God is rest, and our purpose is to be taken from life’s moving periphery to its tranquil center. (Nietzsche, of course, is making a primarily psychological and not theological reading and provides no citations. Augustine is seemingly the kind of man for whom ‘life itself has become a problem’, and hence must imagine perfection as ‘drawing in his senses’ like a ‘turtle’.) ²⁰

Can we say more about what Nietzsche might mean? We can because he twice draws a parallel between Augustine and Epicurus. They are the same ‘type’ of person in that both regard happiness as a particular sort of pleasure. The pairing is revealing, especially the claim, made in Will to Power, that Augustine’s ethics are ‘hedonistic’. For Epicurus, recall, the final end of life is pleasure, but pleasure of a specific sort, and he carefully distinguishes between two different forms of it. There is kinetic pleasure, the pleasure one experiences while a need or lack is being removed; and there is static pleasure, the pleasure of a pain having been removed. This is the difference between the pleasures of drinking and having drunk. Now, Epicurus held that it is the second kind of pleasure, static pleasure, that is our final end. Human happiness therefore consists in what he called tranquility or ataraxia—a state of satisfaction that cannot be disturbed by any further needs or pains. ²¹

And it is just this that Nietzsche appears to criticize in Augustine’s eudaimonism. His ethics orders life toward a form of happiness that is really a form of anesthesia, a happiness that is no longer a matter of what we do or will, but in our being relieved of the activities of a natural, healthy life. Notice that Nietzsche takes Augustine to be saying that happiness is a condition of not only being freed from sin and vice, freed not only from illness, mortality and vulnerability, but relieved of our own vital actions. (I am put in mind here of Wittgenstein’s description of authentic religious experience, ‘the experience of feeling absolutely safe … the state of mind in which one is inclined to say “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens”’. ²² )

This understanding of happiness prepares us to appreciate Nietzsche’s deeper criticism of Augustine, and one that certainly informs his attack on Christianity as a religion ‘inimical’ to life. Namely, that Augustine’s eudaimonism is self-undermining, since human action does not—indeed cannot—have an intrinsic relation to the end that he seeks; and this in at least two related ways.

The first is that, on Augustine’s view, human happiness cannot be constituted by activity that is genuinely our own. The principle of Christian morality, Nietzsche writes in The Antichrist, is that ‘it wants in the end to be paid well’. ²³ Nietzsche is not the first to notice that if beatitude is an external good, something that displaces natural human agency, then happiness cannot be constituted by our own doing. And if this is the case, Augustine’s ethics must be judged faulty for much the same reason that Aristotle objected to the idea that happiness is found in honor: since the human good must somehow consist in our own activity, it cannot be something given to us entirely from without. ²⁴

The second is that human action cannot be said to meaningfully aim at happiness. On Nietzsche’s view, tranquility or rest is itself unintelligible as the final goal of human activity, at least as we know and experience it in this life. Augustine’s conception of the final end of life cannot therefore be that end which we seek in seeking all other things. So not only do human actions supposedly lack any intrinsic connection to our final end, it is hard to say even in what sense they are a means to that end. One cannot, after all, will to be relieved of all willing. (This charge assumes Nietzsche’s arguments about the place of the will in the authentic human life. For Nietzsche, to say that happiness is synonymous with a life free of pain, misery and loss is to say it is not a human life but its ceasing.)

The result, in any event, is Augustine’s ethics can only make believers miserable insofar as they are unable to make that unambiguous, unequivocal affirmation of their own lives that Nietzsche calls for. Augustine’s ethics is damaging to human strength and dignity; indeed, by measuring human life from a transcendence point of reference, it leads to that devaluation which Nietzsche calls nihilism. ²⁵ And it is also, finally, dishonest. Nietzsche accuses Augustine of being a ‘Tartuffe’, and by that he plainly means not only an imposter who affects a mask of piety; as a ‘Tartuffe’ Augustine is also unable to make an unembarrassed show of those virtues that he does have (noble virtues such as cunning and a capacity to order and command).

I suspect I have either made too much of Augustine’s appearances in Nietzsche or that I have not said nearly enough. If the latter, more ought to be said about how Nietzsche understands Christian views of the human body and the origins of human knowledge, as well as the life of Jesus.

Let me instead gesture towards one possible way of rounding out this discussion. A serious Augustinian response would need, I think, to challenge the claim that his eudaimonism somehow fundamentally separates the believer from his or her character and natural activity. There is more than one way about this, and the recent work of Jennifer Herdt offers a masterful account of the sources in Augustine that lend themselves to one forceful rebuttal. Another response, however, would undertake to show that there are conceptual resources within Augustine, either stated or implied, that a form of natural happiness is available to those who possess the acquired virtues. If our final happiness as revealed and made possible by God presupposes and perfects a genuinely natural happiness, a happiness expressive of our own inward activities and powers as they are ordered to and dependent upon God, then Nietzsche’s primary charge simply must fail.

So is there natural beatitude in Augustine? Is there a conception of natural happiness, rooted in both faith and reason, that Christians must acknowledge as a presupposition of supernatural happiness? There are some candidates for saying yes, one speculative and the other volitional. The former would point to the happiness Augustine occasionally (and imperfectly) finds in the contemplation of the divine ground of existence, a position most fully discussed in his early dialogues. Augustine’s Confessions recalls his youthful realization that discovering a spiritual substance allowed him to transcend the pains and anxieties of bodily life and to glimpse the peace and order that are found in a knowledge of God apart from revelation.

Another approach focuses more on the will than the intellect, and would recognize a form of natural beatitude achieved in being drawn beyond ourselves through bonds of love to neighbors near and far—through loving those neighbors we have been given to love and opening ourselves to be loved by them. If our deepest desire is a love that seeks union with God, there is for this reason a kind of natural happiness available by learning to love more deeply those we are given to love in this life. As Gil’s writings have described so wonderfully, these creaturely loves can even become a ‘school’ in which we learn through a deeper meaning of love and practice what can become with grace a more perfect love for God. ²⁶

I plot these opening lines of inquiry because I sense the issue is an intentionally unsettled one for Gil, who calls them ‘possible but problematic’. ²⁷ Across his work, Gil has wrestled with the issue of how Christians might ‘acknowledge the inchoate and unthematized longing which all have as a desire for God’ while still recognizing the disorder caused by sin. ²⁸ Is the recognition that human beings can attain a happiness proportionate to their created natures a position that can and must be held in tension with our dependence upon grace for salvation? And if so, how should that happiness be conceptually characterized by Christian ethics and moral philosophy?

I leave our theme without resolution, with what Gil would not, I believe, hesitate to call a permanent ‘tension’. Perhaps we have brushed up against one of those limits of Augustine, whose latter-day student I am celebrating here—or perhaps my friend Gil, as he has so often done, might show us the way that leads there.