Self-Love and Augustine: Analytical Outline

This is an outline of Oliver O’Donovan’s The Problem of Self-Love in St Augustine.
Thomas Aquinas identified three different froms of self-love: friendly, hostile, neutral.

1. Augustine’s own use of it identifies with the eudaimonist tradition (O’Donovan 2).
1. Four Aspects of Love
   1. Dilectio and caritas are words better-suited than amor.
      1. There is no caritas about evil things; only cupiditas.
   2. The loving subject stands in a complex relation to the reality he confronts.
      1. “Order” is a teleological notion.
      2. The subject discovers this order.
   3. The final good.
      1. Augustine initially thought this meant happiness.
      2. The supreme Good can’t be below or equal to man; it is above him.
      3. Using language like finis bonum introduces a positivist note (17).
   4. Cosmic love
      1. Metaphysical/ethical realism.
      2. The love of God is a metaphysical movement of the human will towards its final cause.
         1. But this doesn’t really account for deviations.
         2. Augustine then said that the movement of each thing is “proper” in that it occurs without any exterior force as an intervening cause.
      3. Augustine’s “Neo-Platonism.”
         1. The good of each degree is identified with the degree above it.
         2. Yet Augustine the metaphysician had to admit that only one object of love was permissible.
   5. Positive Love
      1. For the early Augustine “use” was opposite of love.
      2. Distinction between things and signs
         1. Things are subdivided
            1. Objects of enjoyment: you cleave to something for its own sake.
            2. Objects of use: not all use of temporal things is love.
      3. This is classical eudaimonism: the end is something one posits (28).
   6. Rational Love
      1. Love is estimation, appreciation, approval, not appetite or movement.
      2. The lover’s response to the object of his admiration is dilectatio.
         1. The basis of this delight is rational.
         2. Love’s order is given by its comprehending conformity to the order of reality.

 

• Self-Love and the Love of God

 

1. The pyramidal ordo amoris supposes that every subordinate good derives its value from its final orientation to God.
2. Knowledge: We require God’s merciful self-communication
   1. The human mind
      1. We also need subjective criteria: the mind loves itself.

 

• Self-Love and Self-Knowledge

 

1. Love follows knowledge.
2. Matter and Mind
   1. To be in matter is to be in space.
   2. The intelligible realm is “in itself.”
3. Soul and Presence
   1. Self-presence: the soul detached from the world of matter
   2. Distance-from-self: the soul in matter.
   3. Augustine identifies the inner self with conscience (71).
4. There is a gulf between self-knowledge and knowledge of God.
5. Commentary on De Trinitate
   1. First three-fold division
   2. Amans, amata, amor
      1. This was the Trinity of external love.
      2. The subject-object-copula only yielded two terms.
      3. New triad can yield three: mens, notitia, amor.
   3. Memoria, intelligentia, voluntas

 

• The Primal Destruction

 

1. Self-love is to reject the good common to all, God himself, in favor of some limited personal good.
2. Platonic echoes: Augustine sees the soul of man occupied in the middle place of the universe.
   1. We must view the soul as expanding (reaching towards God) and contracting (sin).
3. Your private interests should not clash with another’s, for the only true interests have to be communal because the only true goodness was God, who gives himself freely to all (103).
   1. Neglecting the common good is neglecting the transcendent good common to all.

 

• Suum has become an ontological category (104).

 

Thesis: Self-love is notorious to define, be it pagan or Christian.  And it isn’t always clear what Augustine means by it.  O’Donovan, however, does point the way through the morass and gives us something like the following: Augustine takes classical eudaimonianism and gives a “communal” and eschatological cast to it:  self-love finds its true expression in love to God, which orders my love to others (138).

O’Donovan ends with an outstanding presentation of Christian Eudaimonism.  Such a view will have to take a positivist view of the finis bonum.

But in some ways more important than the above is O’Donovan’s wise, judicious handling of the history of ethics in the ancient world.  Among other things, he gives us an outstanding commentary on the latter half of De Trinitate.

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