This workshop brings together a group of international scholars of both junior and senior rank to examine the complex interplay of Augustine’s concept of the ‘order of love’ (ordo amoris). The sixteen proposed papers are divided into four sessions, each featuring the distinct, interlocking contexts in which the ordering of love appears: (i) Ordering Love in the Person, (ii) Ordering Love Among Persons, (iii) Ordering Love to God, and (iv) Ordering Love in the Political Community. By taking measure of the range of applications of the concept, the workshop attempts to chronicle Augustine’s contribution to the enduring task of bringing order to human relations.
The first session explores ordering love in the human person. Papers in this session address the dimensions of the interior person, beginning with confusions that surround it in the contemporary study of Augustine (Köhler-Ryan). Topics include the emotion of grief and the uses of memory (Kidd), the practice of confession in personal and ecclesial contexts (Camacho), and the interior evaluation of the self through conscience (Clausen).
The second session exploresordering love among persons, focusing more closely on the ‘social’ dimension in Augustine’s thought. Papers in this session tackle Augustine’s transvaluation of classical friendship found in Aristotle and Cicero (Van Versendaal, Shiffman), his distinctive use of narrative in the formation of pupils (Falcetano), and his re-conception of the place of family life between the two cities (Busch).
The third session exploresordering love to God, the ultimate goal of all attempts at ordering human relations. Papers in this session trace the theological shape of Augustine’s conceptions of love, such as his focus on the ineffability of the God we are commanded to love (Harrison), his radical love-ethic that has its base in the body of Christ (Fitzgerald) and that invites the dramatic reversal of the Johannine ‘God is love’ to ‘love is God’ (Meconi), and his re-signification of the wounds of the martyrs for conceiving Christian life as a pilgrimage toward the heavenly city (Stewart-Kroeker).
The fourth session explores ordering love in the political community, the most demanding and complex of human relations. Papers in this session wrestle with the possibility of virtue in a city of tears (Puffer), the sacramental shape of Augustine’s two-cities framework (Roberts Ogle), the potential and peril of a non-violent ethic of peace (Sweeney), and the different kinds of peace to which the two cities aspire (Wetzel).
This paper focuses on the place of moral conscience in Augustine’s application of the order of love. Beginning with his argument in Enarrationes in Psalmos 31.2 that possession of a good conscience is what gives rise to hope (citing 1 Tim 1:5), I propose to explore the link between hope and conscience as it emerges in Augustine’s portrayal of a redeemed moral agency and a redeemed moral community. How does one convey the inner state of one’s conscience? If conscience is intrinsically private and non-communicable, this poses a serious problem for forming and sustaining a healthy community. Both society and politics suffer on this account, as our basic inability to discern another’s motives – even that of a friend’s! – leaves us vulnerable to the vagaries of the tempted human heart. In this respect, Augustine is distinctive in confronting the tragic dimensions of “the darkness of this social life” (civ. 19.5). Yet he also teaches that pilgrims to the heavenly city have been summoned to testify to the work of divine grace. They have been summoned, that is, to “give rise to hope” through confessing, sharing and dwelling in each other’s interior lives, including the purified conscience. What is Augustine’s precise account of this process, and how does it contribute to the ordering and perseverance of the redeemed community?
Augustine faces a fundamental dilemma: On the one hand the new law of love given by Christ supersedes the old law of fear and punishment in the Old Testament. On the other hand, God continues to instil fear on the yet godless in order to convert them.
At the same time, according to Stoic philosophy, desire and fear (cupiditas and timor) remain two of the basic human motivations which are also exploited by the Tempter, the devil.
The paper intends to expound how Augustine deals with this threefold complex of amor/dilectio/caritas – cupiditas – timor/terror/minae philosophically, theologically and practically, especially in the pastoral teaching of his sermons.
In ciu. 22.12, Augustine affirms that Christ rose with the marks of the wounds on his body. He later writes that although in the resurrection all deformity will be removed, “we feel such extraordinary affection (afficimur amore) for the blessed martyrs that in the kingdom of God we want to see on their bodies the scars of the wounds which they suffered for Christ’s name; and see them perhaps we shall. For in those wounds there will be no deformity, but only dignity, and the beauty of their valour will shine out, a beauty in the body and yet not of the body.” (ciu. 22.19)
Love seems to change the significance of the martyrs’ wounds. Like Christ’s and unlike ordinary human wounds, “in those wounds there will be no deformity.” This seems to reflect both the love of the martyrs’ for Christ and believers’ love for the martyrs. Love’s acts on earth may alter the resurrected bodily form, which Augustine otherwise anticipates following a certain order of restoration. I examine this re-signification of wounds and how the re-ordering by love of the “restoration order” in the case of the martyrs inflects the ordering of love in the earthly life – the mode in which Augustine undertakes this reflection (“we want to see…”). What should we make of the desire to see the martyrs’ wounds and the kind of imagination shaped by wounds in which there will be no deformity but “a beauty in the body and yet not of the body”?