Abstract
In Discerning the Good, Joseph Clair joins the ranks of a small but growing set of scholars eschewing (or at least relativizing) Augustine’s well-known treatises in favour of a vast, understudied set of texts: his letters and sermons. Clair makes excellent use of these texts to offer insight into Augustine’s thought on topics that are either all but absent in the formal treatises or greatly enriched by attention to how he develops them in homiletical, pastoral, or counselling modes: wealth and poverty, marriage and family life, and public office. Clair shines a light on these lesser-known texts that show Augustine offering ‘concrete advice on how to interact with the various goods relevant to social and political life’ (p. 4) with an ‘artful blend of Scriptural interpretation, virtue theory, and sensitivity to the circumstances of individual lives’ (p. 5). While Augustine certainly discusses the task of discerning the good in his treatises, the letters and sermons reveal Augustine actually performing the practical moral reasoning involved. The epistolary and homiletical texture does not simply enliven the philosophical concepts—these texts can be funny, warm, impassioned—but substantively clarifies them as well.
In a pleasingly holistic way, Clair opens up a range of topics in Augustine’s ethics and puts them in relationship with one another. As Clair notes, there is less scholarship on Augustine’s ethics than one might expect, outside a few topics like lying and war (p. 2). Further, while a significant literature exists on Augustine’s view of marriage and sexuality, for example, it is often isolated from the broader strokes of Augustine’s moral thought. Clair introduces the engaged ethical reflection on display in the letters and sermons while simultaneously clarifying an underappreciated element of Augustine’s conceptual framework—oikeiosis—for weighing the relative value of various goods, temporal and eternal. In doing so, Clair’s book makes a valuable contribution to the study of Augustine’s ethics.
In the first chapter, ‘Degrees of Good’, Clair sets out Augustine’s basic conceptual framework, much of it inherited from late antique philosophical currents (Stoic, Aristotelian, Neoplatonist), which Clair surveys deftly. He demonstrates that oikeiosis—an ancient Greek philosophical concept that denotes the outward-rippling spheres of regard, from self to strangers—is a conceptual key to Augustine’s moral vision. Oikeiosis pertains to the narrower and wider spheres of proximity in human relationships or, more accurately, lower- and higher-level forms of association. Lower-level oikeiosis ‘is inherent in the nature and impulse we share with other animals’ (to care for offspring, for example), while higher-level oikeiosis ‘is inherent in specifically human nature and is anchored in the duty we owe to the human race on account of our common nature’ (p. 45). In Augustine’s adaptation of the concept, higher-level oikeiosis is encapsulated in the dual love command (p. 46). Oikeiosis pertains both to temporal goods and to the eternal goods, and as such it has both horizontal and vertical dimensions. As Clair notes, oikeiosis is not a static scale of objective value, but a ‘dynamic and improvisational’ way of balancing the values of proximity and priority (p. 45).
In the central chapters on temporal goods, Clair focuses on three topics that come up repeatedly in Augustine’s sermons and letters: marriage and family life (‘Household Goods’, chapter 2), public office (‘Public Goods’, chapter 3), and wealth (‘Private Goods’, chapter 4). As Clair takes the reader through these and then into the final chapter on ‘Eternal Goods’ (chapter 5), he holds the higher- and lower-level dimensions of oikeiosis in tension throughout, demonstrating how they reciprocally inform the discernment and ordering of goods. As Augustine’s correspondence with Ecdicia demonstrates, for example, one cannot pursue higher-level oikeiosis in the love of God and neighbour at the expense of neglecting one’s responsibilities related to the temporal goods of lower-level oikeiosis (in Ecdicia’s case, pursue radical austerity without tending the goods of her marriage and family). One compromises the pursuit of higher-level oikeiosis by neglecting the lower-level. In the same way that one cannot spiritually love Christ without practically caring for the neighbour in need, one cannot pursue eternal goods at the expense of attending to the range of temporal goods in the purview of one’s care or responsibility.
One benefit to Clair’s approach, which takes the reader through a series of distinct queries and specific dilemmas, is that the reader is introduced to a varied cast of interlocutors. We meet Ecdicia, the ascetic enthusiast whose zealous austerity has apparently driven her husband into the arms of another woman, and Proba, the wealthy, widowed head of a large household. We observe Augustine’s political ethics in practice as he counsels Macedonius, the imperial vicar of Africa; Boniface, a military commander; and Marcellinus, a Christian public official. We see colourful snippets of how Augustine preaches on almsgiving, rhetorically layering his arguments in order to speak to a range of ethical motivations. Clair stitches together all of these examples to illustrate the fundamental task of the moral life for Augustine: discerning the good and thereby ordering one’s loves.
Clair’s aim is not to provide a comprehensive scholarly treatment of the specific topics he treats, but rather to elucidate a framework for ordering goods, making use of the key underlying principle of oikeiosis, and to demonstrate via the sermons and letters how it applies in practical moral reasoning. Clair executes this contribution to Augustinian scholarship with a clarity that is remarkable considering the conceptual complexity of the task and the range of texts and topics at hand, and does so without failing to communicate the human messiness of such discernment in practice. This nuanced conceptual clarity—carried out in direct, unaffected prose—is an achievement that should not go underappreciated.
Clair states that his book focuses on the sermons and letters and ‘turn[s] to the treatises for elucidation when necessary’ (p. 4). There are a couple of points where I thought further elucidation with reference to the treatises would have strengthened the book. The first regards use and enjoyment, the distinction Augustine draws between uti and frui in De doctrina christiana that has generated a longstanding debate about the right ordering of temporal and eternal goods in Augustine’s thought, which Clair references briefly (pp. 36, 53). Clair often uses the terms ‘preferring’ and ‘referring’ which, as he rightly notes, retain important parallels with the distinction between use and enjoyment while having a distinct accent mark (p. 36, n. 89). Clair nevertheless employs the concept of good, proper, or right ‘use’ pervasively throughout the book (see pp. 52–53, 63, 66, 68–69, 72, 78, 92, 106–108, 112, 127–29, 131, 133–37, 142–43, 146–48, 155–56, 161, 163, 167, 170). Given the importance for Clair’s account of the notion of use in the pursuit of eternal beatitude, a more substantial discussion of the relation of uti and frui and the corresponding scholarly debate would be helpful. Such a discussion could also strengthen Clair’s argument for Augustine’s nuanced affirmation of the genuine value of temporal goods when ‘used’ rightly, rather than the dismissively instrumental attitude critics often attribute to him.
The second point regards the discussion of necessity in public office. Clair writes that, for Augustine, ‘there are certain actions in military and political life that fall nowhere within necessity (e.g. certain forms of torture and punishment that threaten the basic standards of health)’ (p. 90). In support of this claim, Clair twice cites De civitate Dei (ciu.) 19.6, the portrait of the ‘wise judge’ who tortures to obtain a confession (p. 91, nn. 42, 43). Such an interpretation of this text—particularly to support an argument against permissibly ‘necessary’ use of torture—is far from given, however, and prominent scholars (Reinhold Niebuhr, Jean Bethke Elshtain) support a ‘dirty hands’ or ‘tragic necessity’ reading. Without elaboration, the reference to ciu. 19.6 complicates rather than elucidates Clair’s claim. An alternative reading of ciu. 19.6 in light of the letters would be a significant contribution to Augustinian political ethics in itself but, more importantly for the book as such, it would strengthen Clair’s interpretation of Augustine’s letters as representative of a coherent line of ethical reasoning.
Clair’s book offers a refined portrait of Augustine the ethicist. He draws this portrait in social-practical detail that is also infused with insight into Augustine’s conceptual framework for ‘discerning the good’, a fundamental contribution to the study of Augustine’s ethics that one can hope will inspire further work in this vein and with this kind of range.