Justice the Form,Love the Content: On Augustine’s Vision of the Moral Life

Introduction

Questions regarding the relation between justice and love have returned to prominence after seeming for a time to have grown stale. The questions are sufficiently perennial that recurrence is not surprising; but it is striking that, in most cases, recent consideration has been driven not by perennial concerns, but rather by strong convictions regarding the insufficiency of contemporary understandings of justice. The challenges presented by climate change and racial injustice are widely taken to reflect the struggles of contract theories to deal with global challenges, and rights-based notions to address de facto perpetuations of injustice even where a de jure granting of rights is in place. In face of these challenges, thinkers from a range of disciplines have inquired into the role that love might play in furthering the pursuit of the just. On one side, figures like Timothy Jackson and Raimond Gaita identify love as a precondition of justice, for both argue that it is love that invests human beings with the sanctity that is the basis of their dignity as rights holders. ¹ On the other side, scholars such as Regina Mara Schwartz and Theodore Jennings suggest that love is required in order to fill spaces left by the abstract formalism of contemporary theories of justice. ² Together, these figures suggest a picture in which love must come before and after structures of justice, preparing the ground for them by uncovering the sanctity in others, and picking up after them by plugging gaps left by their formalism.

The diagnoses of contemporary ills that attend calls for attention to love are often powerful; but, when we pull back from immediate concerns, it is striking how far these calls reverse conceptions that are otherwise formative of our political imagination. Where recent work depicts justice as fragile and needy, wholly dependent on robust forms of love to bring it into being and sustain it in its weakness, a decisive strand of the modern tradition has insisted that stringent conceptions of justice must determine moral and political reasoning because love is fleeting and unreliable. For the modern realist, the root illusion of a fanciful ‘idealism’ is that ‘a little more education and a few more sermons on love’ will render cold calculations of justice unnecessary. ³ Skeptics might point out that recent emphasis on love is grounded in attention to exemplary figures — Gaita emphasises the work of saintly nuns; Jackson attends to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King; Schwartz foregrounds some of Shakespeare’s most noble characters — and argues that emphasis on the exemplary is at best irrelevant and at worst a sign of a kind of bad faith. John Rawls concedes that, in a community of saints bonded by love, the question of justice need not arise, but adds that the qualification has no bearing on concrete communities. ⁴ Jeffrey Stout allows that exemplary figures are central to education in virtue, but argues that contemporary appeals to exemplars are inseparable from a desire for a simpler moral world that reduces in the end to a desire for simple models of moral authority. ⁵ For the critic, even model forms of love do not provide adequate moral guidance for actual communities, and rigid structures of justice must govern our social worlds because, in most of its instances, love falls far short of ideals. While parental love might appear a paragon of human affection, the manifest failures of parents have made enumeration and enforcement of the rights of children a matter of poignant urgency.

Situating recent work within the wider horizon of modern political reflection thus presents us with differing understandings of justice and love that reflect differing conceptions of the fortitude and frailty of our moral lives. For some, structures of justice must be kept rugged, stringent, and strong in order to offset the fickle character of human love. For others, love appears spontaneous and stalwart, capable of springing into action and compensating for a denuded vision of justice. Both positions derive their intelligibility from a complex conception of the structure of human moral and social life. The aim of this article is to take up questions regarding justice, love, and the structure of human moral life, and to ask what progress might be made through dialogue with Augustine’s work. Augustine has been formative in consideration of these topics: prominent contemporary debates have been depicted as opposing appropriations of Augustinian themes; a group of ‘Augustinian democrats’ has emerged as leading voices in attempts to chart new courses for theological ethics. ⁶ Interpretations of Augustine’s work have, however, echoed wider oscillation between emphasising either justice or love. ⁷ My goal is to move beyond this opposition by taking up three tasks. The first is contextualising reflection on justice and love by tracing Augustine’s construal of the moral economy that we inhabit for the sake of highlighting systemic distortions that cripple human capacities for both justice and love. The second is to take up questions regarding justice, and to argue that Augustine’s conception of moral frailty brings with it an alignment of justice and love because, in a moral economy that is distorted by injustice, love may be the face that justice wears in order to appear. The third is to examine questions of love, and to show that, as part of his conception of love as formative of human sociality, Augustine argues that well-ordered love is made fit to serve as a political emotion because it bears the form of justice. The upshot of these inquiries is a picture of an Augustinian moral economy in which love and justice align because love is the content of justice, and justice is the form of love.

Two final preparatory comments are required in order to frame my account. The first is that the argument that follows might seem to suffer from a kind of genre confusion, for I have taken debates about justice and love within modern liberal societies as a point of departure, and, in turning to Augustine, I will develop conceptions that draw explicitly on theological notions like Christology, worship, and salvation. The place of these notions in wider social reflection is contentious; the point to be made is that reflection on justice and love has found new life in part through a refreshing willingness in contemporary work to move across boundaries of discipline and conviction. From the side of Christian thought, Wolterstorff and Jackson have advanced understandings of justice and love that reckon seriously with the theological roots and enduring value of liberal conceptions. From the side of a kind of liberal humanism, Gaita and Schwartz give serious thought to what the Bible and the lives of saints might teach. Within contemporary political theory, the apostle Paul has come to be viewed as a fruitful conversation partner on questions of justice, grace, and the constitution of community. Relativising constructions that set religious or disciplinary perspectives in opposition has been central to the avenues opened up in recent work. My argument is intended to contribute to a trajectory that invests more in teams that beat the brush widely in search of conceptual resources than in guards who patrol the boundaries between differing forms of thought.

The second preparatory comment is that dialogue with contemporary questions is sufficiently prominent in this article that it is appropriate to follow other readers of Augustine in specifying that what follows is weighted further towards constructive dialogue than towards historical study. Robert Markus speaks of allowing himself ‘to “carve a channel” from Augustine to our own day’; ⁸ Eric Gregory writes that his interest is oriented more towards ‘what Augustine has become’ than towards ‘what he was’; ⁹ my own work conforms more closely to this pattern than to the genre of narrow historical study. At points, my argument involves a measure of conceptual extrapolation in order to fill out notions that are suggested but not fully developed in Augustine’s work; the resulting commentary has moments in which it is perhaps more midrashic than would be allowed by the canons of contemporary historical scholarship. I do not, however, wish to push the qualification too far, in part because Augustine’s work is sufficiently elusive and open-textured that readings tend always to involve a measure of constructive appropriation, and in part because I do not take anything that follows to depart from either the letter or the logic of Augustine’s work. Where Gregory expresses willingness to appropriate misreadings of Augustine, and allows figures like Karl Barth to supply pieces of his argumentative puzzle, I aim at commentary that remains consistent with the lines of Augustine’s thought. ¹⁰

Injustice and the Augustinian Moral Economy

I propose to begin with a sketch of Augustine’s understanding of the moral economy in which human life unfolds, concentrating in particular on the shape of injustice and moral frailty. Consideration of injustice and frailty is frequently omitted from theorising about justice: Judith Shklar argues that philosophers have tended to treat injustice as a negation of justice that does not merit attention on its own terms; John Rawls stipulates that, for the sake of theorising about justice, he will simply assume that people act justly. ¹¹ I wish, however, to suggest that reckoning with questions of justice and love requires reckoning with concrete forms of injustice and frailty. The suggestion is rooted, first, in the differing conceptions of failure and frailty that ground opposing attempts to privilege either justice or love; but it is also rooted, secondly, and more deeply, in the notion that the relation between justice and injustice is marked by a complexity that is crucial to consideration of justice and love. The premise that I wish to deploy is that injustice is not a neatly linear or arithmetical negation of justice, a minus sign that reverses a value but leaves the integrity of the calculation intact; rather, it is more destructive, a kind of quantum agency that bends and distorts the whole economy in which it sits and alters the calculus that takes place within it. The premise has deep roots in theological accounts of the corrupting power of sin, and it provides crucial perspective in approaching questions of justice and love because distortion of a moral economy may alter calculative logic to the point that justice is forced to wear surprising faces in order to appear. To take a fairly straightforward example, lying to the police appears unjust in a context that is marked by justice; but, where police are corrupt and courts are untrustworthy, this same act might appear as a paragon of justice. To take a more freighted example, theological accounts of sin and redemption might be read as reflection on the power of injustice to warp a moral economy to the point that justice adopts the surprising form of a self-emptying act of grace. The surprising faces worn by justice in its concrete confrontations with injustice is a recurring theme in literature, which has long attended to the warping of a moral economy through injustice for the sake of narrative tension. ¹² In face of a sphere that is distorted by her father’s insecurities and her sisters’ manipulations, Cordelia is able to act justly only by determining to ‘love, and be silent’. ¹³ The lesson to be learned is that attention to injustice is crucial in reckoning with justice and love, for consideration of the corrupting influence of injustice opens space for the recognition that justice may adopt unexpected forms, including, perhaps, the form of love.

We can approach questions regarding injustice, frailty, and the shape of the moral economy by reflecting on Augustine’s account of the interplay between justice, power and desire. This interplay arises, on one side, because Augustine supposes that justice and power form a conceptual pair as the two elements that are required for happiness. Happiness requires power because human beings are not happy if they do not get what they want; but it is crucial that justice is also necessary because happiness is found not in the satisfaction of wanton desires, but rather in sating desires that are just. ¹⁴ Happiness arises from the conjunction of power and justice: ‘two things are required to make you happy: to wish well and to be able to do what you wish’; ‘felicity consists in the full attainment of all desirable things’. ¹⁵ As a formula for happiness, power plus justice seems sound enough—it is, after all, the arrangement represented in Plato’s ideal city—but the equation is unstable because desire is present as a third term that renders it intelligible. Power is a condition of happiness (and is not, Augustine argues, to be ‘shunned as something bad’ a priori) because it is required for the fulfilment of desire; ¹⁶ but this reality brings with it a basic difficulty because the reach even of just desires exceeds the capacities of human power. Human beings may justly desire the health, safety, and flourishing of children even though these things often lie outside their power to control. A gap between the reach of desire and the scope of power is a basic feature of human life; and it is determinative of Augustine’s thinking that the gap is not only a relative matter of better or worse health, but also an absolute matter of the difference between life and death. Desire for eternal life is, for Augustine, universal and entirely appropriate (life is, after all, the gift of a good God and a condition of experiencing any happiness at all); ¹⁷ but this desire absolutises the gap between desire and power, for the power to secure eternal life lies absolutely outside of the scope of sinful human capacity. The result is instability amongst the formative elements of human life, for human beings are not happy if they cannot secure the objects of just desires, but desire for eternal life entails an absolute disproportion between the extent of desire and the reach of power.

Augustine’s absolutising of a gap between desire and power represents a decisive moment in Western thought. Classical thinkers had supposed that the moral life is drained of purpose if good behaviour does not bring happiness, and had insisted that happiness lies within the reach of human moral powers because, properly understood, it is found in the formation of these powers through virtue. Identification of happiness with virtue appears to preserve the integrity of the moral life by eliminating any gap between desire and power—after all, even the most helpless prisoner can cultivate virtue ¹⁸ —but Augustine upsets the equation by suggesting that virtue is accompanied by a moral struggle that serves only to testify to the impossibility of finding happiness in this life, and the propriety of locating it in the next. ¹⁹ The effect of associating happiness and immortality on the moral life is a point of decisive concern in assessing his work. Famous criticisms by Hannah Arendt and Anders Nygren amount to objections to the way that classical visions of citizenship and agapic accounts of ethics are destabilised by identification of a desire for eternal life. Contemporary work by Jennifer Herdt argues that a careful reconstruction of Augustine’s position as a desire for God is required if it is not to destabilise moral reasoning. ²⁰ In contrast to these views, my aim is to suggest that acknowledgement of the instability that follows from the gap between desire and power is crucial because it sets us squarely before dynamics that root the difficulty and frailty of the moral life. Two points are important for us in developing this suggestion.

The first is that Augustine’s account of desire and power entails the irreducibility of relations of mediation that constitute different forms of life. The basic notion that Augustine develops is that, lacking the power to satisfy desire, human beings are always involved in turning to different forms of mediation in order to expand the reach of power and bring objects of desire within reach. This dynamic takes a range of forms: in Confessions, Augustine’s account of infancy anticipates Rousseau in identifying language as a mediating tool that permits human beings to extend the reach of power; ²¹ in City of God, Augustine’s argument as a whole rests on evaluating the capacities of differing forms of mediation—Roman gods, philosophical theurgy, Christian worship—to satisfy human desire. The crucial point for us is that, on Augustine’s account, relations of mediation are sufficiently formative that they constitute different forms of life that bring with them differing sets of moral possibilities. A general human form of life is constituted by the mediation of language, which brings with it moral possibilities rooted in a capacity for narrative and deliberation. Narrower Roman, or Platonic, or Christian forms of life are constituted by their respective relations of mediation, and bring with them differing moral possibilities. Formed by the worship of appetitive gods, the Roman life contains no moral possibility higher than a simulacrum of virtue that is rooted in the suppression of vice by desire for glory. ²² By contrast, Platonists know a good that stands beyond earthly acquisition, but are formed by relations of mediation that blind them to the necessity of humility. ²³ The payoff of these claims is that Augustine is positioned to grapple with moral frailties by considering the constraints that accompany different forms of life. Where both the classical pursuit of virtue and a Kantian ethic sought to make the moral life independent of questions of mediation and contingent forms of life, Augustine supposes that these latter questions are formative. The excess of desire renders relations of mediation a determinative element in human life, and we cannot reckon seriously with our moral possibilities without weighing their conditioning by the mediators who form our lives. Though foreign to some classical and Kantian sets of instincts, the logic of the claim aligns with critiques of the moral limitations of a modern form of life that is constituted by the mediating power of technology. Critics suggest that technological attempts to bridge the gap between desire and power are as determinative of our mode of life as worship in the temple was of a Roman.

The second point that is important for us concerns the attitude that human beings adopt in relation to mediation. Confronted by the limits of their power, Augustine supposes that human beings become involved not only in networks of mediation, but also in taking up a reflective stance in relation to their dependence on mediators. They come to live either in acceptance of the irreducibility of dependence, or in rejection of it as an affront to their dignity. Augustine takes this to represent a morally determinative ur-decision, for he supposes that it amounts to a choice between justice and power as orienting poles of human life. On one side, acceptance of the necessity of mediation creates space in which the capacities of different forms of mediation to facilitate the attainment of just ends may be weighed, but it entails relinquishing visions of the self-sufficiency of human power. On the other side, rejection of dependence creates space in which a vision of self-sufficient power may be pursued, but consideration of just ends is sacrificed as the expansion of power becomes a determinative end. The irreducibility of mediation thus causes justice and power to fall into a competitive relation, for though, on one level, they stand together as the fundamental requirements of happiness, their relation is unsettled by the dependence that accompanies the excess of human desire. In face of dependence, we preserve space for consideration of justice only by accepting that life may not be determined by our own powers, while opting for power entails making power itself an end to the exclusion of reflection on the just. The gap between desire and power proves to be a space through which a wedge is driven between justice and power, and a choice for one or the other is compelled. Augustine takes this decision to be primordial, represented in the stories of both Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. Adam is emblematic of the soul’s preference for power over justice, and Cain of the way that, within a life determined by preference for power, the soul treats all forms of mediation, even worship, as tools that are to be subordinated to the soul’s search for power. ²⁴ Both are, for Augustine, representative of the determination of human history by preference for power, and of human moral capacities by a form of life that is shaped by this preference.

Augustine’s understanding of injustice, moral frailty, and the shape of our moral economy is determined by the suggestion that human moral possibilities are shaped by a form of life rooted in preference for power over justice. We may draw out the elements of this understanding that are important for us through brief comments on a pair of interconnected points. The first concerns an interplay of privacy and hiddenness that confounds the search for justice. The point is rooted in the suggestion that the turn to preference for power is a turn to a form of life that is marked by privacy. Augustine identifies desire for power with desire to possess things in a private sphere in which they can be controlled according to the dictates of private desires. ²⁵ He thus supposes, first, that there is a basic contrast between the social character of a love of justice and the anti-social and private character of a love of power; secondly, that one consequence of the privacy of love of power is that the form of life that is shaped by it is marked by a fundamental hiddenness of human beings from each other. ²⁶ Turn to the privacy of love of power entails a turn into the self, nursing designs and intentions that are hidden from others. Augustine takes the resulting hiddenness to root central difficulties in human life. Within our most immediate circles, we are not certain if our spouses are faithful, our business partners honest, or our friends loyal, and we encounter these difficulties even before we consider the uncertainty of our relations with strangers and speakers of other languages. ²⁷ The uncertainty that accompanies hiddenness is, for Augustine, a coup de grâce for attempts to locate happiness in this life, and it is crucial for him that it grounds the difficulties of life in time in part because it frustrates the struggle for justice. Justice rests on and is enacted through judgement; ²⁸ but judgement is confounded by hiddenness. We cannot see what others think or intend. Duty compels judges to torture guiltless witnesses in pursuit of the truth, and they can never be sure that they have not sent innocent parties to the gallows. ²⁹ The pursuit of justice is dogged by failure because, through preference for power, human beings are turned in on themselves and hidden from each other.

A second point regarding moral frailty follows if we consider love in relation to power and hiddenness rather than justice. Doing so requires that we attend to the impact of fear on the moral life. This impact is crucial: recent work has suggested that fear is at the root of our moral frailty as a master emotion that taints all thought and intention; Augustine anticipates this work in making fear determinative of the form of life that follows from preference for power. ³⁰ On a narrower level, he takes fear to be central because the thoughts and intentions of others are hidden, and we are never free from uncertainty about the maintenance of peace. ³¹ On a broader level, he takes the pursuit of power to remain trapped in a logic of anxiety because success in the pursuit leads to the increase, rather than the alleviation, of fear. Those who do not succeed in attaining power experience the fear of weakness, vulnerability, and inability to achieve an end; but those who succeed find that concern only increases because the powerful have more to fear and more to lose. The rich and powerful experience greater fear than the poor and powerless, but the latter can hardly be said to live at peace. ³² Freedom from fear is not found in a life marked by preference for power. Augustine suggests that fearfulness is not without its uses: a common fear possesses sufficient power to suppress competing desires and create a semblance of unity. ³³ But he is also clear that reckoning with our moral frailty requires reckoning with the degree to which fear crowds out love. Fear, he proposes, ‘constricts the soul and tortures it’, and, in so doing, robs it of its capacities to love. ³⁴ So long as the soul is ‘cramped by fear’, it does not know the freedom in which love may grow. ³⁵ Within the bounds of the life of power, the possibilities of love are as constricted as the possibilities of justice, for preference for power brings a form of life that is stamped by fear.

The aim of this first section has been to trace Augustine’s understanding of the moral economy that we inhabit, concentrating in particular on questions of injustice and moral frailty. We have seen that Augustine takes our moral lives to play out through the interplay of justice, power, desire, and dependence, and that these realities have come to stand in a constellation in which preference for power entails systemic distortion of the economy that we inhabit. Preference for power brings with it a privacy and a hiddenness that confound the search for justice, and, through fear, constrict the space in which love might grow. The result is that our capacities for both justice and love are compromised by a form of life determined by rejection of dependence. Whereas attempts to privilege justice or love rest on supposing that the one may compensate for the frailty of the other, Augustine suggests that neither is stalwart. We inhabit a form of life that curtails our capacities for both. The question going forward is what justice and love might mean under these conditions.

Frailty and the Reconsideration of Justice

I propose to turn now to follow Augustine in an account of the interrelation of justice and love that is informed by his understanding of our moral economy. In taking up this task, we face an initial question of strategy, for if we seek to align justice and love on the assumption that they appear to be opposed, then we must choose whether to proceed by rethinking the character of justice alone, the nature of love alone, or the shape of both together. Signal differences emerge between different understandings depending on the strategy that they adopt. My aim is to follow Augustine through a reconsideration of justice and love together, one that leads to an integrated picture in which love constitutes the content of justice, and justice the form of love. I begin in this section by examining Augustine’s identification of love as the content of the just. The presence of this identification in his work is not unknown; ³⁶ but my aim is to show that the point merits attention because it positions us to think through significant questions regarding the relation of justice and grace.

As a point of departure, the foundational notion that is important for us is that Augustine rethinks the content of the demands of justice even as he retains the form of classical conceptions. Following a formal definition that he appropriates from earlier thinkers, Augustine writes that ‘the golden rule of justice is to grant to each what is his due’; ³⁷ but it is then crucial that he takes Scripture to redefine what is due to others. Where Plato supposes that we owe it to others to fulfil our social role, and Aristotle that we owe others proportional practices of distribution and retribution, Augustine argues that Scripture identifies love as the sum of our dues. Two elements in the biblical picture ground this proposal. The first is Christ’s suggestion that all law is summed up in the twofold command to love God and neighbour. ³⁸ Augustine famously makes this statement central, supposing that all of Scripture is rightly apprehended if it is taken to build up a well-ordered love of God and neighbor because this love is the sum of human obligation. ³⁹ Christ’s dual love command provides initial ground for identification of love as the content of justice, and Augustine goes on to argue that Christ not only commands, but also exemplifies, a form of love that fulfils the demands of justice. This second point emerges as an extension of the first, for Augustine takes Scripture to point to Christ as the ‘perfection’ and ‘consummation’ of the law, and it is thus natural for him to move from identifying love as the demand of law to arguing that Christ models a love that fulfils the demands of justice. ⁴⁰ Augustine proposes that this love is exemplified most clearly in Christ’s giving over of his own life for the sake of others. He writes that, on the basis of this act, biblical writers set ‘the perfection of justice in the love of one’s brother’, a love that is ‘able even to die for the good of our brethren, as the Lord Jesus Christ taught us by his example’. ⁴¹ Love is here identified as the concrete demand of justice. Augustine writes elsewhere that love is to be understood to grow into its place as the fulfilment of justice, progressing from initial imitation of the justice of Christ through simple bestowal of ‘one’s superfluities on a needy person’ towards the ‘perfection’ of justice in readiness ‘to lay down your life for your brothers’. ⁴² Identification of love as the demand of law has thus led to wider identification of Christ as a model of a love that fulfils and perfects the just. Because the content of justice is love, ‘inchoate love is inchoate justice; advanced love is advanced justice; great love is great justice; “perfect love is perfect justice”’. ⁴³

As a starting point, we can see that a reading of the biblical law and a vision of Christ’s work as the perfection of that law led Augustine to the notion that love represents the content of justice. The notion is familiar enough in commentary on Augustine’s work that the sheer fact of it need not be labored; but it is important that we probe its basis and logic, for doing so leads us to ambiguities in Augustine’s thought that touch on a significant set of theological questions. A critic might, at this point, concede that, in view of Christ’s account of love as the fulfilment of the law, there is a level on which love may be identified as the content of justice; but the critic might also propose that the identification should not be pushed too far because we must understand Christ’s actions to model a form of love that stands apart from the demands of justice if we are to understand them as instances of grace. The critic might argue that, if law specifies that love is what is due to others, and Christ ‘consummates’ this law in laying down his life for others, then this act seems to issue from a law of love, and not a decision of grace. Aligning justice and love by identifying love as the demand of justice is a dubious gain if it entails that Christ’s work ceases to appear as an instance of grace. We might conclude that, while biblical law specifies a sphere in which this identification is appropriate, the need to associate Christ’s love with grace rather than justice sets a concrete limit on how far the identification may be adopted as an ordering principle of Christian thought. Christology appears to represent a point of distinctive difficulty for theological attempts to align justice and love. This dynamic is illustrated in recent work by Nicholas Wolterstorff, which aims to counter influential modern accounts that take Christ’s self-sacrifice to model a divine love that is indifferent to justice, but is able to do so only by marginalizing Christology. Wolterstorff argues that we see the shaping of divine love by concern for justice in Paul’s insistence that the gift of justification is distributed to Jew and gentile alike ‘without distinction’; but it is crucial that the argument rests on privileging the justifying declaration of the divine judge as the element on which the justice of divine love is to be judged apart from reference to the work of Christ. ⁴⁴ Divine love is aligned with justice by bracketing the work of Christ as the ground of justification and an exemplification of divine love. ⁴⁵ The result is an illustration of how far Christology presents difficulties for attempts to reconcile justice and love, for Wolterstorff leaves us to choose between following him in reconciling justice and love by downplaying Christ’s role, or following thinkers like Kierkegaard and Niebuhr in attending to Christ’s work, and accepting that its exemplification of gracious love forces us to hold justice and love apart.

We can see, then, Augustine’s approach to questions of justice and love has brought us around to a set of important theological questions. Does identification of Christ’s love as an instance of grace not mean that it must be distinguished from the demands of justice? The question is of perennial significance, and it merits attention because it is in fact a matter of particular concern for Augustine. This is the case, first, because questions regarding justice, love, and grace were central to his disputes with the Pelagians. For the Pelagians, Augustine’s work as a whole reflected basic confusions regarding the relation of justice and grace, for they supposed that justice must give to each what is their due ‘without fraud and without grace’, and so divine judgement, if it is to be just, must be meted out on the basis of some element of human merit. ⁴⁶ In seeking to respond, Augustine took it to be necessary to show how Christ’s love can be understood to represent a justice that ‘cheats no one’ even as it ‘gives many gifts as a favour to those who do not merit them’. ⁴⁷ Debate with the Pelagians called for an account that aligns a gracious love with justice, and Augustine ought to have been well-prepared to provide one because the topic is central to the wider logic of his soteriology. Salvation occurs, on Augustine’s telling, as a result of a competition between Christ, as the archetype of preference for justice, and the devil, as the archetype of preference for power, and Augustine suggests that the intelligibility of Christ’s work hinges on our capacity to see the gracious love that Christ enacts as an instance of justice. ⁴⁸ In face of inquirers who wonder if salvation might have been accomplished by some other means, Augustine argues that Christ had the capacity to free sinners simply by overpowering the devil, effecting salvation through a straightforward triumph of irresistible divine power, but that doing so would entail imitating a preference for power, and would provide no example that human beings could follow. ⁴⁹ It would have been unfitting, Augustine suggests, for Christ to triumph by way of power. Thus, if we are to grasp the logic of God’s chosen means of salvation, then we must see how Christ’s work enacts the preference for justice that marks his life as a whole. ⁵⁰

In sum, we can see both that Augustine’s work raises significant questions regarding the relation between justice, love, and grace, and that Augustine ought to be positioned to give compelling answers because the questions are central to his cosmology, soteriology, and debates with the Pelagians. The important point for us now is that, on one level at least, his handling of these topics is not always satisfactory. In responding to the Pelagians, he turns almost immediately to appeal to divine mystery. ⁵¹ In developing his own soteriology, his account is somewhat evasive, and does not land on a clear description of the justice of Christ’s work of grace. He argues that justice triumphs insofar as it is ‘perfectly just’ for the devil to relinquish his claim over sinners after killing Christ, over whom he had no claim; ⁵² but the sense in which Augustine is justified in speaking, as he does, of ‘the justice of Jesus Christ’ as the hinge on which salvation turns is not clear. ⁵³ In his death, Christ is, Augustine writes, paying ‘the debt that he did not himself owe’. ⁵⁴ It is clear enough why it is just for payment of the debt to compel the devil to set sinners free, but the point hinges on a conventional vision of distributive and retributive justice rather than an account that is qualified by the dual love command, and it is less clear why it is just for Christ to submit to death in order to pay a debt that he does not owe. An amount of uncertainty seems to mark Augustine’s attempts to associate Christ’s work with justice; but I wish to suggest that he points towards a road forward that rests on considering what it means for justice to appear in a moral economy that is distorted by injustice. I argued earlier that consideration of injustice is pivotal in reflecting on justice because injustice warps a moral calculus and, in so doing, shapes the guises in which justice may appear. I aim to show now that Augustine’s work may be taken to reflect this dynamic, and to point to Christ’s love as an exemplification of justice because it is the form that justice must take in order to appear and to reintroduce its own possibility within a sphere corrupted by sin.

We can approach this dynamic through a rhetorical question that appears at a culminating moment in Augustine’s account of Christ’s salvific work. Having identified ‘the justice of Jesus Christ’ as a decisive theme, Augustine asks: ‘what could be more just than to go and face even death on a cross for justice’s sake?’ ⁵⁵ The question is important. Augustine does not spell out its logic; the reliance on a rhetorical question is reflective of the argumentative indeterminacy that marks this section of his work more generally; but the reference to an act undertaken pro iustitia, ‘for justice’s sake’, is significant in the wider context of his work. The notion of works done pro iustitia is crucial to his account of the form of Christian action, which is marked by being done ‘for the sake of justice’ rather than out of fear, and the suggestion that Christ’s work represents an example of works that are undertaken pro iustitia recurs elsewhere in his corpus. ⁵⁶ A clear account of the significance of the phrase in relation to Christ’s work does not appear; but the wider logic of Augustine’s work suggests that he is gesturing towards a form of justice that is constituted not by giving to others what is their due, but rather by doing what is necessary in order for justice to appear in a moral space from which it is otherwise absent. The surrounding discussion concerns the way that, through pride, human beings found themselves participating in an unjust form of life, and needing the intervention of Christ’s death and resurrection in order to reintroduce the possibility of justice. ⁵⁷ On these terms, Christ’s work may be said to be undertaken pro iustitia because it is the form of action that was required in order for justice to appear again in the creaturely sphere, and Augustine’s rhetorical question suggests that nothing could be more just than an action that is undertaken in this way. To suggest that nothing could be more just than facing death ‘for justice’s sake’ is to suggest that, however much this death may be an act of grace that is not owed to sinners, it is also an act of justice because it is undertaken for the sake of making justice possible again. It is a form of action that may be reckoned as just because it is the form of action that was required in order for justice to appear again within a particular moral economy.

The suggestion that an act of grace is also an act of justice if its aim is the promotion of the just accords well with the wider logic of Augustine’s thinking. For Augustine, justice is always rooted in love of justice, and to love a thing is to seek its spread and flourishing. On these terms, it is not unreasonable to say that an act that is rooted in a love of justice and is undertaken for justice’s sake is itself just. A gift of grace may be reckoned an act of justice if it is undertaken pro iustitia. This notion is not wholly unfamiliar in contemporary work: Theodore Jennings has recently argued that Derrida’s work aligns closely with Pauline conceptions in emphasising the need for grace to make possible justice in spheres from which it is otherwise structurally absent. ⁵⁸ The payoff of this notion is that Augustine is positioned to align justice and love within a framework that reckons seriously with Christ’s work. Where recent work seems to present a choice between downplaying Christology or holding justice and love apart, Augustine permits us to acknowledge Christ’s work as an act of self-giving love that is yet to be taken seriously as an act of justice because it is undertaken for the sake of justice. The key to this dynamic is a strategy for thinking about justice that reckons seriously with the surprising faces that justice might wear in contexts that are marked by injustice. Rather than bypassing attention to injustice, and standing at one remove from consideration of the concrete contexts of our moral lives, Augustine attends to the warping of a moral economy by injustice, and the difficulties that it raises for consideration of justice. The rich sense of historical drama that shapes City of God lays the foundation for reflections on justice that are distinctively diachronic and hermeneutical, attentive to the complexities of an unfolding moral history and the appearances of justice within it. The result is an account in which love appears as the content of justice, not only because it is mandated by law, but also because it is acts of gracious love that allow justice to appear again in an economy distorted by sin.

Justice and the Formation of Love

To this point, I have argued that a wide-ranging synthesis of biblical and theological material results in a conception of love as the concrete content of justice. We may position ourselves to take a further step in considering the relation of justice and love by asking what this vision means for social and political life. Justice is widely taken to form the foundations of communities because it has a capacity to maintain order that love does not. Identification of love as the fulfilment of justice raises important questions about the forms of social life that are entailed. What kind of society may be founded on love? This question has a twofold significance, for Augustine’s work is marked by identifying love not only as the content of justice, but also as constitutive of the social. In City of God, Augustine argues that established understandings of sociality cannot stand because they identify justice as constitutive of community without reckoning with its absence. ⁵⁹ For him, the scarring of our moral economy by injustice compels not only attention to the surprising appearances of the just, but also a conception of sociality that is not reliant on justice. His solution is to propose that sociality, like justice, is to be rethought in the direction of love. Communities are best understood as constituted by common objects of love rather than agreement about justice. ⁶⁰ The move is crucial: Oliver O’Donovan argues that City of God is a milestone within Western political thought because it offers a theory of sociality from the standpoint of a theological reading of the moral economy; ⁶¹ but it also raises questions regarding the capacities of love to constitute and sustain community. Critics reject Augustine’s account as the death of meaningful sociality, and his sympathisers have been inclined to suggest that the argument is weighted more towards an ironic critique of pagan community than a positive vision of sociality. ⁶² The power of love to form community is a matter of long-standing concern in relation to Augustine’s work. My account thus far might seem to have heightened the difficulty by redefining justice in terms of love. The question we face concerns the capacities for social life that are left to us if justice and sociality are both redefined in terms of love.

I propose to approach this question by reversing the direction in which we have moved to this point and inquiring into the formation of love by justice. In the previous section, we traced a reconsideration through which acts of love are identified as the fulfilment of justice; but I indicated that Augustine does not rethink either justice or love alone, but rather reexamines both together. My aim now is to argue that, alongside a depiction of love as the content of justice, Augustine develops a conception of justice as the form of love that positions love to emerge as a distinctively political emotion. I will argue that, for Augustine, love merits the name only when justice constitutes its form, and the formation of love by justice opens new social and political possibilities.

We can approach this dynamic through recognition of a formal pattern that marks Augustine’s understanding of love. On this pattern, love is marked by moving from a proximal form of justice that is given to faith towards a final form of justice that is represented by Christ. This pattern is rooted in a synthesis of theological and exegetical considerations. Theologically, it issues from reflection on the work of the divine Son and Spirit. On Augustine’s terms, justice is associated with the work of the divine Son and love with the work of the divine Spirit, and the relation of justice and love is modelled on the relation of the work of Son and Spirit. ⁶³ Just as the Spirit leads believers through faith’s attachment to Christ’s visible humanity, a mode of scientia, towards wisdom’s apprehension of the Son’s invisible divinity in the consummation of sapientia, so love is to trace a movement through the justice that is given to faith towards the perfection of justice that is represented by the eternal Son and the eschatological kingdom of God. ⁶⁴ Love is to lead believers ‘through justice, towards justice’, just as the Spirit leads them ‘through Christ, towards Christ’. ⁶⁵ We encountered an echo of this pattern earlier in Augustine’s understanding of the beginning of love in modest acts of self-giving and the perfecting of love in growth towards the fullness of Christ. The important point for us now is that Augustine fills out the pattern through a construal of the conjunction between Pauline references to the ‘justice of faith’ and faith’s ‘working by love’. ⁶⁶ On his interpretation, this conjunction indicates, first, the beginnings of love in the justice that is given to faith. Love, he claims, merits the name only when it is shaped by preference for justice rather than preference for power, and it is thus to be understood to begin in a gift of justice that breaks the hold of love for power and sets human beings free for true affections rooted in a love of justice. ⁶⁷ Love begins when, through a gift of justice, justice displaces power as the root object of our attraction, and it is then crucial that love is guided in its growth towards the perfection of justice by a twofold law that specifies its obligations, and the example of Christ that is set before it as the end of the law. ⁶⁸ Human beings are given a gift of justice and a law that instructs in a just love in order that, through love of justice, they may grow towards the perfection of justice in Christ. Love thus moves ‘through justice, towards justice’, through the justice given to faith towards the justice of Christ through the guidance of the Spirit and the law of love.

This, in summary form, is Augustine’s vision of justice as the form of love. The summary is compressed; I have spelled out the formal pattern in more detail elsewhere. ⁶⁹ The task that I wish to take up here involves examining the formation of love by justice for service in constituting a community. For present purposes, brief sketches of five points must suffice. The first concerns the relation of love and fear. We saw earlier that Augustine anticipates contemporary work in presenting fear as an anti-political emotion that saps our moral powers by constricting our capacities for love. The important point for us now is that the emergence of love from justice entails both the establishment of its possibility and its formation for service as a political emotion because it entails the freedom of love from fear. This point rests on Augustine’s construal of a nexus of biblical claims: the assertion that love is ‘shed abroad’ in the heart by the Holy Spirit; the notion that, where the Spirit is, there is freedom; and the suggestion that perfect love drives out fear. ⁷⁰ On a broad level, Augustine takes these verses to suggest that the Holy Spirit is to be identified with a gift of love that brings freedom from fear: ‘the tutor who puts in fear shall be removed when fear has given place to charity: for “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”’; ⁷¹ ‘the spreading abroad of charity in our hearts brings us into unrestricted freedom, because charity made perfect casts out fear’. ⁷² But it is then crucial that, at points, Augustine thickens an account of this dynamic by introducing justice as a mediating term that grounds the freedom of love from fear. The move is natural for him because his wider work trades on the supposition that justice and fear stand in a fundamental antithesis. He executes the move by suggesting that the Holy Spirit creates space for love by bringing a gift of justice, rooted in the work of Christ, that drives out fear. ⁷³ Augustine writes that love is ‘born’ when, through a gift of justice, justice becomes an object of love. ⁷⁴ He argues that, when we receive justice as a gift, ‘we are not cramped by fear . . . but led into the broad freedom of love as we delight in justice’. ⁷⁵ On these terms, it is the task of justice to nurture freedom for love by driving out fear. As a first point, love’s formation by a movement ‘through justice’ entails its fitting for service as a political emotion by being marked by freedom from the anti-political power of fear.

The second point concerns the way that love’s movement ‘through justice’ stamps it with a public character. Attention to this dimension requires reference back to two notions that we encountered earlier: the suggestion that love of power is marked by a privacy that confounds sociality; and the claim that justice retains its form as the fulfilment of obligation even as the content of obligation is identified with love. These points are important for us now because, by retaining its form, justice is able to impart a public character to love by specifying obligations that impress a common shape on human affections. Formation of shared affections is crucial to Augustine’s vision of sociality, for he supposes that a ‘people’ is best understood as ‘an assembled multitude of rational creatures bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love’, but the critic will respond that human love is too individual and idiosyncratic to ground meaningful commonality. ⁷⁶ Love, the critic might suggest, is the least promising location of agreement because it is the sphere in which human individuality is most manifest; yet Augustine’s account of justice as the form of love positions himself to respond that genuine love is shared in common with others because it is stamped with the form of justice. All love that is formed by justice is shaped by a shared law and shared vision of perfection. This love is able to ‘make one heart out of many’, unifying not only human lovers of justice but also earthly and angelic members of the City of God, because it is marked by a common form. ⁷⁷ Insistence that love of justice is marked by a social and public character that sets it apart from the privacy of love of power is foundational to Augustine’s work. ⁷⁸ One key ground of the insistence is the notion that this love is uniquely suited to forming a ‘people’ because ‘agreement as to the objects of their love’ issues from agreement about the law that commands and the example that models what is to be loved.

The third point involves furthering Augustine’s understanding of the public character of love by considering love’s movement ‘towards justice’. Doing so requires attending to the connection between this movement and a wider shifting of human love from temporal to eternal realities. The topics are connected because love’s progress ‘towards justice’ is bound up with its growth towards the form of justice in the perfection of the divine Son, and Augustine identifies growth towards this perfection with a gradual ‘transfer’ of love ‘from temporal things to eternal’. ⁷⁹ Progress ‘towards justice’ is bound up with broader maturation in love of the eternal, and this dynamic contributes to the social character of love because attachment to eternal goods is attachment to goods that are properly possessed in common. ⁸⁰ The point develops by way of a contrast between the goods that are pursued by a love of power and the goods that are pursued by love of justice. On one side, love of power is fundamentally private not only because it is steered by private interests, but also because it pursues goods that are lessened by being shared. Romulus slew Remus because ‘his power is diminished by the presence of a living colleague’. ⁸¹ The earthly city is riven by strife because it pursues goods like wealth and fame that are marked by the same zero sum logic. By contrast, the heavenly city knows peace because the enjoyment of its goods is increased by sharing. ‘A man’s possession of goodness is in no way lessened by the advent or continued presence of a sharer in it. On the contrary, goodness is a possession which is enjoyed more fully in proportion to the concord that exists between partners united in charity.’ ⁸² Eternal goods as a whole do not, Augustine supposes, admit of private possession, but are instead open only to those who enjoy them together with others. ⁸³ On these terms, love of justice is public and social not only because it is free of fear and stamped with a common form, but also because the goods that it seeks may only be possessed in common. The formation of love as a social emotion is furthered by its movement ‘towards justice’ because this movement is identical with growth towards eternal goods that are enjoyed publicly rather than privately.

The fourth point concerns the interrelation of love of the eternal and attention to the good of the neighbour. We have just seen that Augustine depicts love of the eternal as social in a way that love of the temporal is not because eternal goods are enjoyed communally rather than competitively; but the picture is counterintuitive because love of the eternal is widely taken to be anti-social in its direction of attention away from corporeal spaces that are shared together with others. Critics suppose that Augustine’s theology of love is ‘repulsive’ because love of the neighbour is sacrificed for the sake of abstract eternals; ⁸⁴ apparent competition between temporal and eternal objects of love is the most frequently recurring concern regarding Augustine’s work. The point to be made in response is that love of the neighbour and love of the eternal are positively rather than inversely correlated because love of the eternal develops only through growth in love of the neighbour. This notion comes to the fore through Augustine’s reflection on human capacities to love the eternal. The topic is important for him because he supposes that we can love only what we know, and the supposition poses difficulties because the eternal is not present to thought in the way that the temporal is. ⁸⁵ Our habits of mind are adapted to a sphere of bodies and images to the point that we cannot hear even of the spiritual being of God without an image of a bodily thing coming to mind. ⁸⁶ Love for the eternal is not self-evidently with the range of human capacities. Augustine’s solution is to suggest that this love emerges as a function of a love of the neighbour that is formed by justice. In considering love of God, he argues that, though God does not come to mind, he may yet be loved because he is love itself, and becomes an object of love where love itself is made an object of affection. Love of love is the road to love of the God who is love; the question of the love of God is, for Augustine, the question of how loves that are themselves loveable may be cultivated. His answer is that love is worthy of affection where it is formed by justice for love of the neighbour. ⁸⁷ As a love determined by justice, love of neighbour is itself loveable. In sharing in it, human beings stand in the form of love of God that is given to them in time. ‘If a man loves his neighbor, it follows that above all he loves love itself. But God is love … so it follows that above all he loves God’. ⁸⁸ ‘Let no one say “I don’t know what to love.” Let him love his brother, and love that love; after all, he knows the love he loves with better than the brother he loves. There now, he can already have God better known to him than his brother.’ ⁸⁹ On these terms, love of the eternal drives rather than saps a fundamental sociality, for it arises only in conjunction with love of the neighbour. ‘Love, then, cannot be separated.’ ⁹⁰

The final point concerns renewal in judgement that follows from the formation of love by justice. We saw earlier that Augustine identifies judgement as formative of communal life, and supposes that love of power drains our capacities for community by founding a privacy and hiddenness that confounds the exercise of judgement. It is important for us now that Augustine takes love’s progression towards justice to entail a movement of renewal through which capacities for judgement begin to be restored. This notion trades on a theology of vocation that marks Augustine’s work as a whole. On his telling, human beings are created in the image of God for a vocation of judgement, distinguishing good and evil and mediating an eternal order in time by making judgements about temporal things according to eternal meanings, and they are renewed in the divine image through the work of salvation for the sake of this same vocation. ⁹¹ Paul’s claim that the ‘spiritual person judges all things’ is, for Augustine, an indication that spiritual growth is aimed at renewal of the capacity to discern the presence of God and differentiate good from evil, and it is crucial for him that this renewal occurs through the formation of love by justice because justice and judgement go hand in hand. Judgement is properly marked by justice, and is justice’s proper mode of operation. ⁹² The two are so coupled that the powers of judgement are unequivocally denied to the unjust (Augustine suggests that the exercise of judgement is the very thing that lovers of power crave, and the thing that is unequivocally denied to them), and are restored only where justice reigns. ⁹³ Renewal in justice is thus crucial to recovery of judgement. Augustine supposes that this restoration is rooted in an initial gift of justice that begins the renewal of the mind, and is furthered as love shifts from a gift and law of justice towards the eternal perfection of the justice of Christ. ⁹⁴ In its proper form, exercise of judgement is rooted in wisdom’s apprehension of the eternal within time. This apprehension is furthered as the movement of love ‘towards justice’ draws human beings towards the eternal. The formation of love through justice fits it for social function by renewing it in capacity for judgement.

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to develop Augustine’s account of the relation between justice and love. The relation between these virtues has received renewed attention as discontent with regnant models of justice has grown; but this attention has succeeded primarily in presenting us with opposing emphases on justice or love that rest on opposing visions of moral fortitude and frailty. In face of this opposition, I have laid out Augustine’s vision of justice, love, and the moral economy that we inhabit as a compelling model of reflection on these themes. As a matter of strategy, Augustine shows that situating reflection on justice and love within the context of an account of injustice and the moral economy opens space for recognition of the possibility that justice and love may align because love is the face that justice wears in order to appear within a warped moral space. As a concrete proposal, Augustine suggests that justice and love align because love represents the content of justice, and justice constitutes the form of love. Love is the content of justice because it is the sum of the obligations laid out in divine law and exemplified in the work of Christ. Justice is the form of love because love is drawn away from the distorting attractions of power and made itself only when it traces a movement from the just to the just, from a gift of justice that sets human beings free for love towards the perfection of justice in Christ. In this way, justice and love support and qualify each other. At points in his work, Augustine treats love and justice as almost interchangeable; but it is crucial that he preserves their distinctive logics, the one standing as form, the other as content, for doing so allows him to show how the one makes possible the growth of justice in a sphere that is otherwise given over to power, and how the other makes possible the formation of love for service as a political emotion. This picture rests on a remarkable synthesis of biblical, theological, and existential considerations. Our capacity to learn from or inhabit it will depend in part on how far we are willing to concede that, in face of a warped moral economy, both justice and love need to be rethought if they are to shape a meaningful movement towards peace.