Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
5.
The Platonic theory of body and soul; more tolerable than the Mankhean view, but to be rejected because it makes the nature of the flesh responsible for all moral faults
There is no need then, in the matter of our sins and faults, to do our Creator the injustice of laying the blame on the nature of the flesh which is good, in its own kind and on its own level. But it is not good to forsake the good Creator and live by the standard of a created good, whether a man chooses the standard of the flesh, or of the soul, or of the entire man, who consists of soul and flesh and hence can be denoted by either term, soul or flesh, by itself. For anyone who exalts the soul as the Supreme Good, and censures the nature of flesh as something evil, is in fact carnal alike in his cult of the soul and in his revulsion from the flesh, since this attitude is prompted by human folly, not by divine truth.
The Platonists, to be sure, do not show quite the folly of the Manicheans.
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They do not go so far as to execrate earthly bodies as the natural substance of evil, since all the elements which compose the structure of this visible and tangible world, and their qualities, are attributed by the Platonists to God the artificer. All the same, they hold that souls are so influenced by ‘earthly limbs and dying members’ that they derive from them their morbid desires and fears, joy and sadness. And those four ‘disturbances’ (to employ Cicero’s word
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) or
‘passions’ (which is a literal translation of the Greek, and is the term in common use), cover the whole range of moral failure in human behaviour.
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But if this is true, how is it that, in Virgil, when Aeneas is told by his father in the world below that souls will return again to bodies, he is amazed at this notion, and cries out,
Father, can we believe that souls return
To dwell beneath the sky, again to assume
The body’s lethargy? Oh, what dread lust
For life under the sun holds them in misery?
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Must we really suppose that this ‘dread lust’, deriving from ‘earthly limbs and dying members’, still finds a place in that purity of souls which we hear so much about? Does not Virgil assert that souls have been purified from all such ‘bodily infections’ (as he calls them)? Yet, after that, they begin to feel the desire ‘again to assume their bodies’.
Hence, even if it were true (it is in fact an utterly baseless assumption) that souls pass through a ceaseless alternation of cleansing and defilement as they depart and return, we must infer that there can have been no truth in the claim that all their culpable and perverted emotions that arise in them are derived from their earthly bodies. For we see that, on the admission of the Flatonists themselves, this ‘dread lust’, as their renowned spokesman puts it, is so far from deriving from the body that of its own accord it urges the soul towards a bodily existence, even when the soul has been purified from all bodily infection, and has been placed in a situation outside any kind of body. Thus on their own confession, it is not only from the influence of the flesh that the soul experiences desire and fear, joy and distress; it can also be disturbed by those emotions from a source within itself.
6.
The character of the human will determines the quality of the emotions
The important factor in those emotions is the character of a man’s will. If the will is wrongly directed, the emotions will be wrong; if the will is right, the emotions will be not only blameless, but praiseworthy. The will is engaged in all of them; in fact they are all essentially acts of will. For what is desire or joy but an act of will in agreement with what we wish for? And what is fear or grief but an act
of will in disagreement with what we reject? We use the term desire when this agreement takes the form of the pursuit of what we wish for, while joy describes our satisfaction in the attainment. In the same way, when we disagree with something we do not wish to happen, such an act of will is fear; but when we disagree with something which happens against our will, that act of will is grief. And in general, as a man’s will is attracted or repelled in accordance with the varied character of different objects which are pursued or shunned, so it changes and turns into feelings of various kinds.
For this reason, the man who lives by God’s standards, and not by man’s, must needs be a lover of the good, and it follows that he must hate what is evil. Further, since no one is evil by nature, but anyone who is evil is evil because of a perversion of nature, the man who lives by God’s standards has a duty of ‘perfect hatred’
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towards those who are evil; that is to say, he should not hate the person because of the fault, nor should he love the fault because of the person. He should hate the fault, but love the man. And when the fault has been cured there will remain only what he ought to love, nothing that he should hate.
7.
The scriptural terms for love
When a man’s resolve is to love God, and to love his neighbour as himself, not according to man’s standards but according to God’s, he is undoubtedly said to be a man of good will, because of this love. This attitude is more commonly called ‘charity’ (
caritas
) in holy Scripture; but it appears in the same sacred writings under the appellation ‘love’ (
amor
). For instance, when the Apostle is giving instructions about the choice of a man to rule God’s people, he says that such a man should be a lover (
amator
) of the good.
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And when the Lord himself had asked the apostle Peter, ‘Are you more fond (
diligis
) of me than those?’ Peter replied ‘Lord, you know that I love (
amo
) you.’
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Then the Lord repeated his question, asking, not whether Peter loved him, but whether he was fond of him; and Peter again replied, ‘Lord, you know that I love you.’ However, when Jesus asked for the third time, he himself said, ‘Do you love me?’ instead of, ‘Are you fond of me?’ And then the evangelist goes on, ‘Peter was grieved because the Lord said to him, for the third time: “Do you love me?”’ Whereas in fact it was not the third time; the Lord said, ‘Do you love me?’ only once, but he had twice asked, ‘Are you fond of me?’ From this we infer that
when the Lord said, ‘Are you fond of me?’ he meant precisely the same as when he asked, ‘Do you love me?’ Peter, in contrast, did not change the word used to express the same meaning, when he replied the third time, ‘Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.’
The reason why I thought I should mention this is that quite a number of people imagine that fondness and charity are something different from love. They say, in fact, that ‘fondness’ is to be taken in a good sense, ‘love’ in a bad sense. It is, however, well established that this was not the usage even of authors of secular literature. But the philosophers will have to decide whether they make this distinction, and on what principle. Certainly their books are sufficient evidence of the high value they place on love, when it is concerned with good things and directed towards God himself. My task, however, was to make the point that the Scriptures of our religion, whose authority we rank above all other writings, do not distinguish between ‘love’ and ‘fondness’ or ‘charity’. For I have shown that ‘love’ also is used in a good sense.
But I should not like anyone to suppose that while ‘love’ can be employed both in a bad and a good sense, ‘fondness’ can have only a good connotation. I would draw attention to a passage in one of the psalms, ‘The man that is fond of wickedness hates his own soul’;
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and to a statement of the apostle John, ‘If anyone has become fond of the world, there is no fondness in him for the Father.’
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Notice that in this one text we find ‘fondness’ used both in a good sense and in a bad. As for ‘love’, I have already shown its use in a good sense; and in case anyone should demand an example of its employment with a bad connotation, here is a quotation from Scripture: ‘For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money.’
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And so a rightly directed will is love in a good sense and a perverted will is love in a bad sense. Therefore a love which strains after the possession of the loved object is desire; and the love which possesses and enjoys that object is joy. The love that shuns what opposes it is fear, while the love that feels that opposition when it happens is grief. Consequently, these feelings are bad, if the love is bad, and good if the love is good.
Let me prove this statement from Scripture. The Apostle ‘desires to depart and to be with Christ’;
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and, ‘My soul has desired to long for your judgements’,
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or (to put it more appropriately), ‘My soul has longed to desire your judgements’; and, ‘The desire for wisdom leads to
sovereignty.’
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All the same, it is the established usage that when we use ‘desire’ (
cupiditas
or
concupiscentia
) without specifying its object, it can only be understood in a bad sense. ‘Joy’ has a good connotation: ‘Have joy in the Lord, and exult, you righteous ones’,
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and ‘You have put joy into my heart’;
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and ‘You will fill me with joy by your countenance.’
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‘Fear’ has a good sense in the place where the Apostle says, ‘With fear and trembling work out your own salvation’;
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and, ‘Do not think highly of yourself, but fear’,
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and ‘I fear, however, that as the serpent seduced Eve by’ his craftiness, so your minds will be enticed away from the purity which is in Christ.’
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As for ‘grief, it is a nice question whether any instance can be found of its use in a good sense. Cicero tends to use the word ‘distress’ (
aegritudo
)
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for this feeling, while Virgil prefers ‘pain’ (
dolor
), as in the passage, ‘They feel pain and gladness.’
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The reason why I prefer ‘grief’ is that ‘distress’ and ‘pain’ are more generally employed of physical sensations.
8.
The three emotions of the wise, according to the Stoics
The Stoics wished to find in the mind of the wise man three dispositions, called in Greek
eupatheiai
, and by Cicero, in Latin,
constantiae
, ‘constant states’.
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These were to replace three mental disorders; there would be will instead of desire, gladness instead of joy, caution instead of fear. But they denied the possibility of any emotion in the wise man’s mind answering to distress or pain, which I have preferred to call ‘grief’, to avoid ambiguity.
The will, say the Stoics, undoubtedly pursues the good, and this is what the wise man does; gladness is felt in the attainment of the good, which the wise man attains in every situation; caution avoids evil, and that is what the wise man ought to avoid. Furthermore, grief is occasioned by evil which has already happened; and since they think that no evil can happen to a wise man, they have asserted that there can be no corresponding emotion in a wise man’s mind. What they are saying then comes to this – that only a wise man can have will, gladness, and caution, while a fool can only experience desire, joy, fear, and grief, the three former being ‘constant states’, while the latter four are disorders, called ‘perturbations’ in Cicero, but ‘passions’
in the majority of authors. While in Greek, as I have already said, the three former states are called
eupatheiai
, while the four latter are known as
pathê
.
When I was examining, as carefully as I could, the question whether this usage agreed with the practice of holy Scripture, I found this text in one of the prophets, ‘There is no gladness for the wicked, says the Lord.’
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This implies that the wicked can feel joy, rather than gladness, because gladness properly belongs to the good and the devout. Again, the text in the Gospel, ‘Whatever you will that men should do to you, do that also to them’,
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seems to imply that no one can
will
anything in an evil or dishonourable way; he can only so
desire
. In fact, because of this linguistic convention a number of translators have added the words ‘good things’ in their translation, rendering the passage thus: ‘Whatever good things you will that man should do to you.’ This was because they imagined it advisable to guard against the chance of anyone’s wishing to have dishonourable things done for him by others – the provision of extravagant banquets, for example, to say nothing of more discreditable possibilities. Such a one might suppose that he would be fulfilling this instruction, if he did the same for others. But in the Greek Gospel, of which the Latin is a translation, ‘good things’ is not in the text, which says, ‘Whatever you will that men should do to you, do that also to them.’ The reason being, I suppose, that the use of ‘you
will
’, is intended in itself to imply ‘good things’. For the text avoids saying ‘you
desire
’.
For all that, we are not obliged always to curb our use of language by such niceties of interpretation; they are, however, to be employed occasionally. And when we are reading those writers whose authority we cannot reject without sin, these precisions of meaning are to be understood in places where the straightforward sense can find no other way out; for example in the illustrations I quoted above, from the prophet and from the Gospel. For everyone knows that the ungodly exult with joy, and yet, ‘There is no gladness for the wicked, says the Lord.’ This can only make sense because ‘gladness’ has a special meaning when it is used in a precise and prescribed sense. Again, no one would deny that it is wrong for men to be told to do to others what they desire to have done to themselves by others, in case they should gratify each other in disgraceful and forbidden indulgences. And yet the most wholesome and the truest of all injunctions is this: ‘Whatever you will that men should do to you, do that also to them.’ And this is because in this context ‘will’ is used in a precise
sense, and cannot be given a bad connotation. On the other hand if there were not also such a thing as an evil will, there would not be the more familiar usage, very frequently employed in ordinary speech, which produces the command, ‘Let it not be your will to tell any lie.’
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And a distinction is made between the depravity of an evil will and the will of which the angels spoke when they proclaimed ‘Peace on earth to men of good will.’
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The addition of ‘good’ was otiose if will can only be good. Again, there would have been no great commendation of charity in the Apostle’s statement that ‘charity feels no gladness in wickedness’
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were it not that malignity does feel gladness in it.
A similarly indiscriminate use of these terms is seen also in secular authors. Cicero, for example a most resourceful speaker, says, ‘I desire, conscript fathers, to be merciful.’
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He used the word ‘desire’ in a good sense; and no one would be so pedantic as to maintain that he should have said, ‘My will is.’ instead of ‘I desire.’ Again, in Terence’s play, there is an immoral young man who is crazed with the heat of his desire; and he says,