Response to Dr. William Babcock’s “Of Weights and Millstones: Augustine on Love”

            As a Literature student, I appreciate whenever anybody makes distinctions in fine nuances of words, and, thus, I have a great appreciation for Dr. Babcock’s distinction of Augustine’s use of the phrase “Ponder meum amor meus” in Book 13 of the Confessions as a teleological weight, “hard-wired,” so to speak, in all created beings.  Moreover, as Dr. Babcock further points out, in the subset of the human being the weight of love is split in two:  First is caritas, which is God’s love and which bears the person through the self and towards true, genuine happiness found with rest in God.  Second is cupiditas, a strictly human love, which bears the person down into the self and towards the mutable, false happiness found with restlessness in transient, created beings, including the self.  The personal effect of this cupiditas is anxiety and fear over inevitable loss.  The social and civil effect is a state of fallen nature akin to Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish, and short,” filled with diffidence amongst persons such that, as Dr. Babcock states, the social order exists to “impose restraint on persons’ competing desires.”[1] Of course, the obverse of this common restraint of competing loves is “a common agreement on the objects of their love”,[2] i.e., a social compact.  But whether restraint or agreement, the fear of loss remains, such that human techne must occur to keep the person from being reminded of it.  It is this fear of loss which is the main effect of misguided, human love, a love which Dr. Babcock compares to a millstone around one’s neck.

            This phrase “a millstone around one’s neck” reminds me of the Matthean Gospel passage in which this phrase occurs: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.  Woe to the world because of things that cause sin!  Such things must come, but woe to the one through whom they come!”[3]   Augustine doesn’t expressly state this passage in his Confessions – I checked – but his life story of his pre-conversion days certainly implies this passage, for, as a Manichean, his “friends… were deceived by me and with me.”[4]  The passage and Augustine’s comment of himself as a Manichean speak about temptation to sin and the sinful state of the sinner.  But, more importantly, the Gospel passage also places the millstone as a punishment for sin.  With this Gospel passage in mind, which links “millstone” with “sin,” although Dr. Babcock mentions the word “sin” briefly, it is sin which causes the millstone with which one hangs upon his own neck, and it is the weight of God’s love which removes the millstone of sin, which is of man’s making.  Thus, one can see Augustine’s Confessions as the conversion of love, from millstone to true weight, as seen in chapters 1 – 9, which mirror the creation/incarnation because of Love, as seen in chapters 11 –13: from God, to creation, back to God.  As Augustine states, “First descend that you may ascend, ascend to God.”[5]

            In the Confessions the process of conversion, from the millstone of cupiditas to the true weight of caritas, moves from sin, suffering, humility, and grace (the latter two is almost co-natural and co-temporal with each other).  As one finds early in the Confessions, no human is without his millstone because of Original Sin: “for in Thy sight there is none pure from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth.”[6]  But the Augustinian concept of evil as a lack of good, or as a choice of a lesser good, reminds one of the supremacy of God’s creation as good because it exists, and therefore existence is a gift from God, for, as Augustine states in Book 1, “even that I exist is Thy gift.”[7]  Even early in the narration, Augustine echoes his account of Genesis which ends the book: “It is from the plenitude of Your goodness that Your creature subsists….”[8]  In other words, the substrate of creation is providential such that one cannot destroy the teleological weight of one’s soul, even with Original Sin.  Hence, sin itself is God’s punishment, as Augustine states in Book 10, “my ill deeds are my own faults and Your punishments.”[9]

            Therefore, suffering, the effect of this sin, is part of God’s providence, serving to make one aware of one’s own psychic illness – i.e., the illness of the soul – and preparing the soul for the only cure, as Augustine states in Book 7, “And You kept stirring me with Your secret goad so that I should remain unquiet until You should become clear to the gaze of my soul. …and the troubled and darkened sight of my mind was daily made better by the stinging ointment of sorrow.”[10]  Sin effects the human being’s entire being – his spirit, emotion, and reason.  Thus, suffering, as “the stinging ointment”, not only affects the emotions and spirit of the sinner but also his “darkened” mind as well.  Augustine points out that sin ultimately is from the pride of the sinner, seeing himself as self-sufficient, and suffering breaks down this “hardened heart” – to use an Old Testament term – to a state of humility, of which Christ is the exemplar, as seen in Augustine’s prayerful declaration, “[Y]ou willed to show me how You resist the proud and give grace to the humble, and with how great mercy You have shown men the way of humility in that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among men.”[11]  Christ’s incarnation and suffering shows, states Augustine in Book 10 of the City of God, “humility was the necessary condition for submission to this truth”.[12]  To return to the millstone imagery, suffering brings about humility such that one sees his millstone as a millstone and not as the shining diadem that his proud misguided sight – which is actually a blindness --  had set before him.

This change in orientation makes the person aware of God’s original grace as found in that person’s existence, i.e., the awareness of the human’s ontological dependence upon God’s grace.  But this awareness of original grace is caused by grace such that the sinner’s acceptance of God’s grace and the grace that allows the sinner to accept God’s grace is simultaneous, co-natural, co-temporal, as seen in Augustine’s prayer to God, “I call Thee into my soul, which Thou dost make ready to receive Thee by the desire that Thou dost inspire in it”.[13]  (The interaction of grace and human free-will is difficult to describe without going into a “chicken-and-the-egg” conundrum: Q. “Which came first, the grace to turn away from sin or the free-will to accept the grace?”  A. “Yes.”)  While the interaction of grace and free-will may be complicated, the effects of grace, which is –to use Aristotelian terminology – the actualization of the human being’s teleological weight as his love for God, is certainly less so.  Through Christ’s humanity and charity, the human, natural, created loves have become restored as caused by God’s love.  Moreover, God’s love, Augustine says, “granted us the faculty and the power both the express”,[14] i.e., we become aware of our wisdom as created wisdom, reflecting the divine Intellect.  Augustine states the social effects of grace as, “Blessed is the man that loves Thee, O God, and his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thee.”[15]  In other words, grace removes the millstone of cupiditas such that the teleological weight of divine caritas remains, which has been there from the very beginning, which, in Augustine’s interpretation of “the Beginning,” in his Genesis meditation, is from Eternity.[16]

Thus, as mentioned earlier, “First descend that you may ascend, ascend to God.”  The images, millstone and weight, are not so much oppositions as two ends of the path of conversion in the human being, just like Justice and Mercy are the two sides of God’s Love.  Consequently, one can see Augustine’s Confessions as the conversion of love, from millstone to weight, which mirror the creation/incarnation account, of God creating because of Love.  What is noteworthy in the Confessions, in which one sees Augustine mired in sin, dragged down with his millstone for the majority of the book, is that Augustine stops his Genesis meditation just short of the origin of that common millstone, Original Sin in Fall of Adam and Eve.  I would speculate, in light of the Easter Sunday that has just recently passed, that Augustine presents his conversion story, filled with, as Dr. Babcock describes, “images of cauldrons of lust set a-boil in ancient Carthage”[17]—among other examples of sin – as the contemporary unfolding of the original millstone.  Every human being is born with this millstone, as mentioned before; we know this story in our very being.  But, in living with the restlessness of our soul, distended through the time of our life, we may not always remember the original goodness of creation, the original loving intent, so to speak, of the Author.  So Augustine ends his meditation on Genesis with God as rest, with His Creation at rest in God, where it should be, and, as Augustine ends his Confessions, where it shall be.  Augustine ends with God in repose in Eternity and with the first parents in Paradise of the past.  But he does not end with us in that Paradise but with an imperative in the present, to act for the sake of our future repose, which is God, for we can never be in repose while we live in Time: “Of You we must ask, in You we must seek, at You we must knock.  Thus only shall we receive, thus shall we find, thus will it be opened to us.”[18]  With these words, Augustine shows himself from fellow sinner to his ministerial and teaching role as priest, teaching his flock, which includes us, his readers, the lessons of his conversion.

Again, as a Literature student, I am reminded of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, whose millstone – i.e., the albatross – was literally around his neck, until it dropped into the sea after he is able to pray after suffering and humility.[19]  And like Augustine, the Ancient Mariner recounts his conversion story and ends with a call to caritas as a teaching to his student, the Wedding Guest: “He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all.”[20]

Augustine, as with Coleridge, ends with a call to us, for our life is our conversion story.

Bibliography

Augustine. City of God. Trans. John O’Meara. 1972. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. F. J. Sheed. 1942. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1993.

Babcock, Williams S. “Of Weights and Millstones: Augustine on Love.” Presented Univ. of Dallas: IPS Colloquium, 4/21/200

© 21 April 2001 Rufel F. Ramos

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