The extant manuscripts of Saint Augustine’s De beata uita contain a missing passage in 3.22. Using literary analysis, Augustine’s penchant for numerology, and modern codicology, this essay argues that we can for the first time reconstruct the size and content of the lacuna. Specifically, we conclude that the lacuna probably contained approximately 400 words that filled two pages, and that in these missing passages, Augustine and the group most likely wrestled with the statement that someone who seeks God, even though God is well-disposed to him, is miserable. The conversation also probably shifted from the theme of wanting or wishing (uolo/uolere), which had hitherto framed the discussion on fulfillment, to that of needing (ego/egere). The group apparently agreed with the statement that every person in need is miserable while Monica concluded that misery is nothing other than need.
This article draws on Augustine’s De trinitate to articulate a logic of fallibilist commitment. It speaks into the wider context of twenty-first century religious pluralism, focusing as a test case on Christian post-supersessionism, in which the problem of fallible commitment emerges for the Christian who seeks, in response to her Jewish co-traditionalists, to repair her own tradition in respect of its long-entrenched supersessionism (the family of claims and practices rooted in the belief that the church has replaced Israel in the purposes of God). With a focus on the work of R. Kendall Soulen, I argue that postliberal post-supersessionist Christian theology is both exemplary in the way it enacts fallibilist commitment and falls short of a more thoroughgoing fallibilism. After tracing the fallibilist commitment, or logic of searching, articulated and enacted by Augustine in response to the questions he poses in De trinitate 10, I return to postliberal post-supersessionism in order to follow through more fully its partial repair of supersessionist Christianity.
This essay makes three points. First, in his work Augustine sought to craft something like what Theodor Adorno called a “late style”—a style achieved after maturity has been realized, when a thinker or artist finds their work frustrated by the received cultural expectations, and they seek to overcome those expectations. So understood, a “late style” expresses both frustration and hope. However, second, Augustine’s late style differs from Adorno’s Romantic aesthetics, in both content and form, and usefully illuminates his overall project: It explains his repeated troubling of his own acts of writing and his culture’s practices of reading, and what reading was expected to produce in its practitioners. Across his whole career he struggled, increasingly self-consciously, against his culture’s formal expectations about authoritative teachings, and its material fantasy of a straightforwardly successful life. He attempted instead to communicate both his own flawed and ongoing path, and the inevitable difficulty and frustrations of post-lapsarian life, as he understood the Christian faith to depict it. The final manifestation of his late style is found in the City of God, where it produces a mode of writing, and a picture of the wayfaring Christian, capable of both skeptical critique, confessional affirmation, lively compassion, and humble gratitude. Third, recognizing and appreciating Augustine’s late style can provoke us to our benefit, in facing the challenges of religious life today, both as individuals and as people seeking to live together for the common good.
One of Augustine’s most controversial ideas is his “order of love,” which he explicates using a distinction between “use” (usus) and “enjoyment” (fruitio). Critics complain that, by encouraging us to “use” each other and the world to “enjoy” God, Augustine instrumentalizes human beings and temporal goods in ways that deny their intrinsic value. In recent years, influential scholars have challenged this critique by offering alternative accounts of Augustine’s order of love and his distinction between use and enjoyment. Often overlooked is an essential aspect of this distinction, namely, its Roman legal context, where rights of “usufruct” and “use” not only authorize others to “use” property owned by others but also prescribe duties of stewardship and sustainability that govern such use. In what follows, I explain the Roman laws of usufruct and use and show how Augustine, as a bishop managing church property and adjudicating cases on the episcopal court, would have likely been familiar with such laws. I then show how recovering these Roman legal concepts supports alternative accounts of Augustine’s order of love. In particular, when properly situated in their Roman legal and linguistic contexts, these concepts furnish a new interpretation of Augustine’s ethics of “use” and cast new light on what it means to “use” and “enjoy” the commonwealth and creation. In addition to offering a new interpretative lens, I show how elevating the concept of usufruct can supply constructive resources for contemporary accounts of political and ecological ethics.
