While the influence, continuity and development of Stoicism in Augustine's thought have received substantial scholarly attention,Footnote 1 less consideration has been given to Augustine's sharp demurral from what he considers a significant limitation of Stoic virtue theory. I want to draw attention to this demurral in Augustine's thought through a reading of De civitate dei 19.4 in which Augustine presents an ‘immanent critique’ of Stoic ethics. Augustine critiques Stoic virtue ethics by entering inside the paradigm of Stoic philosophy in order to uncover ‘from within’ the inconsistencies and contradictions of Stoic thought, particularly by exposing the gap between Stoic theory and lived reality.
Immanent critique
Immanent critique is a hermeneutical approach associated with the Frankfurt school of critical theory, particularly with Theodor Adorno.Footnote 2 Despite the obvious philosophical and theoretical aspects of immanent critique, it is best understood as a method.Footnote 3 That is to say, immanent critique does not propose or defend a philosophical truth claim, but establishes itself as a dissenting voice over and against a prevailing orthodoxy. Adorno terms this a ‘negative dialectic’.Footnote 4 Immanent critique deconstructs an ideology by demonstrating the internal contradictions and incoherency of the ideological paradigm under critique. It seeks to illustrate that, ‘from within’ the logic of the critiqued system, its ideology cannot live out its social, political or moral postulates. The ideology is thereby exposed as logically untenable and morally dubious. Immanent critique holds the suspect ideology up against the light of historically lived reality, forcing it to confront its insincerity. The ‘metaphysics of the concrete’ is the vantage point of immanent critique from whence it highlights ‘the contradiction between ideology and reality’.Footnote 5
Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectic is a tour de force critique of the idealist philosophical tradition (particularly in Kant, Hegel and Heidegger). It is naïve to assume (in the wake of the Reformation, Enlightenment and pervasive secularisation) that philosophy can continue its enterprise of making glib metaphysical assertions, maintains Adorno. The future of philosophy must become a fundamental posture of critique – its role is to deconstruct, to unmask the hubristic, totalising claims of onto-philosophy.Footnote 6 The critique of ontology is carried out by ‘entering’ into philosophies of Being, and ‘from within’ revealing both ontology's tyrannical attempts to conceptualise its object and the impoverished results of this ontology: ‘Our critique of the ontological needs bring us to an immanent critique of ontology itself. We have no power over the philosophy of Being if we reject it generally, from outside, instead of taking it on its own structure – turning its force against it.’Footnote 7 Philosophy from now on is tasked with unmasking ontology as a futile exercise, which fails to deliver the truth of being. Adorno claims his method of ‘negative dialectic’, in contrast to onto-philosophy, does not attempt to construct an ‘identity’ between thought and being, but only to demonstrate the ‘nonidentity’ between thought and being – of its contradiction – and, as such, the impossibility of onto-philosophy: ‘Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity. . . . Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity. It does not begin by taking a standpoint.’Footnote 8
The method through which immanent critique is deployed is the adoption of an initial posture of acceptance towards the ideology under critique. By adopting ‘the methodological presuppositions, substantive premises, and truth-claims of orthodoxy’, the critique can proceed to dismantle the ideology under investigation by testing ‘the postulates of orthodoxy by the latter's own standards of proof and accuracy’.Footnote 9 The critique is intended to clear the ground for subsequent positive theory. David Harvey explains that the method ‘enters its object’ so as to begin ‘boring from within’:
Upon ‘entering’ the theory, orthodoxy's premises and assertions are registered and certain strategic contradictions located. These contradictions are then developed according to their own logic, and at some point in this process of internal expansion, the one-sided proclamations of orthodoxy collapse as material instances and their contradictions are allowed to develop ‘naturally.’Footnote 10
I am using the method of immanent critique as a heuristic device to better understand Augustine's criticism ‘from within’ of Stoic virtue ethics.Footnote 11 The broad contours of Augustine's critique find a fascinating analogue with Adorno's theory of immanent critique: Augustine ‘enters’ into Stoic virtue theory and criticises it from its own postulates, illustrating the striking implausibility of Stoic orthodoxy when lived out in concreto and the absurd, but logical, conclusions to which one is necessarily carried by Stoic ethics. Through this deconstruction, Augustine clears a space to propose his own virtue ethic.
Augustine maintains that a Stoic virtue ethic fails to deliver on its promised eudaimonistic ends because it lacks a robust eschatological vision. For Augustine, the Christian faith offers a more viable virtue ethic. Augustine makes clear that for him, the overriding motivating principle of the moral life is the theological virtue of hope. As such, Augustine's ‘immanent critique’ deconstructs the limited, finite horizons of Stoic virtue theory through the application of its own logic. The space that his critique opens up allows Augustine to propose the primacy of the virtue of hope for a tenable virtue ethic.Footnote 12
Stoic eudaimonism
Contemporary virtue theory is conceived, principally, in Aristotelian terms (often with a Thomistic gloss). The touchstone for this retrieval is the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue – a contemporary reappropriation of Aristotelian virtue ethics. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle held that the man of ‘practical wisdom’ would devote himself to the pursuit of eudaimonia:
Now it is thought to be a mark of a man of practical wisdom (φρονήσεως) to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect, e.g. about what sorts of thing conduce to health or to strength, but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general (εὖ ζῆν ὅλως).Footnote 13
The ‘good life in general’ is the eudaimon life – variously understood as ‘living well’, ‘doing well’, ‘achieving one's end’, ‘living a flourishing life’.Footnote 14 The eudaimon life cannot be (subjectively) reduced to extrinsic goods: pleasure, wealth, fame, etc. Rather, eudaimonia (as an objective state) is proper to the human person qua person, that is to say, eudaimonia ‘fulfils’ human nature – it makes a person ‘happy’ (in the most robust, full-orbed sense of the term). For Aristotle, the fulfilment proper to human nature is virtue. And so, there are intellectual and moral virtues proper to a human person, which, if realised, lead to eudaimonia.Footnote 15
If the eudaimon life is the life of virtue, what of those other ‘good’ things – ordinary, extrinsic ‘good’ things of life such as health, riches and beauty? Are they to be conceived as goods as well? Such ‘life-goods’, for Aristotle, are not only unambiguously ‘good’, but they are, at times, a necessary foundation for virtue. It might be said that while ordinary bodily goods are not intrinsic to eudaimonia, they can be instrumental thereto. Nicholas Wolterstorff gives a helpful example: ‘If getting bifocal glasses would be good for me, it would obviously not be an intrinsic but an instrumental good; its worth for me lies entirely in the fact that bifocals will bring about the intrinsic good for me of being able to see better.’Footnote 16 It is fair to say that for Aristotle (and the Peripatetic tradition) the ordinary, bodily, external ‘life goods’ (what Augustine will term the ‘primary gifts of nature’) are included – ‘taken up’ – in the eudaimon life. The Stoics, by way of contrast, held the eudaimon life to be the exclusive preserve of virtue, which in no way included those extrinsic (and putatively termed) ‘goods’.
Augustine's entry into the discussion of eudaimonism in De civitate dei is not, as most contemporary discussions, through the door of Aristotle's ethics; rather, Augustine is critiquing Stoic eudaimonism. It is appropriate to read De civitate dei 19.4 as the articulation of two competing eudaimonistic accounts of virtue. That is to say, both Augustine and the Stoics understand the aim or goal (telos) of the virtuous life to be happiness. To live a good life is to be happy; it is to achieve eudaimonia or ‘human flourishing’.Footnote 17 Stoics very much identified the moral life with a eudaimonian life.Footnote 18 The only true good – the summum bonum – that brings happiness is the virtuous life, which consists of perfecting the cardinal virtues: justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude. Vice, then, is an impediment to eudaimonia. Going further than other ancient philosophers – such as the Peripatetics – the Stoics maintained that all other external desires (health, wealth and physical beauty) are neutral or, to use their preferred term, ‘indifferent’ (adiaphora). Externals do not bring happiness. Inner moral virtue alone is necessary and sufficient to achieve eudaimonia.Footnote 19
In many ways, one might assume Augustine would find a natural ally in Stoic virtue theory. It would be easy to enumerate multiple examples where Augustine subordinates external good to internal good. However, Augustine criticises Stoic virtue theory in De civitate dei 19.4. The chief intellectual failing of the Stoics, maintains Augustine, is the claim to achieve happiness in this life by means of the cardinal virtues. Augustine rejects this possibility outright. He articulates at the beginning of book 19 that the task set before him is ‘to make clear the great difference between their hollow realities and our hope, the hope given us by God’.Footnote 20 Even the torrential flow of Cicero's eloquence in the Consolatio, exclaims Augustine, could not mask the pain of the loss of his daughter.Footnote 21 This example establishes Augustine's main contention: within its own inherent logic, Stoic virtue ethics fails to offer a compelling ethic.
The argument of De civitate dei 19.4 is presented in three steps: first, there is evil in the body; second, there is evil in the soul; and, third, for both these reasons, the summum bonum cannot be found in this life. Augustine's distinction between the goods of the body and those of the soul is significant. He is entering into a vexed Stoic discussion. There was vigorous deliberation in the reception of Plato's teaching as to whether the happy life is found only in the good of the soul (à la the Stoics) or in both the goods of the body and the good of the soul (à la Aristotle and the Peripatetics). In the preceding chapter (De civitate dei 19.3), Augustine related Varro's contribution to the debate: the summum bonum that brings happiness must be appropriate to the human person. We are not asking about the good of a tree or the good of a beast, explains Varro, but of a man. We must ask in the first place, ‘What is man?’ (quid sit ipse homo).Footnote 22 Clearly, the human person is both body and soul, answers Varro. Thus, a combination of goods appropriate to both body and soul is necessary to achieve happiness. The ‘primary gifts of nature’ (prima naturae) are first, and to them virtue is added, ‘the art of living, the most excellent among the goods of the soul’.Footnote 23 Varro admits that no one can be happy who has only the primary gifts of nature; nevertheless, the ability to run, the beauty of body, great physical strength, and all such primary gifts of nature are undoubtedly to be considered goods: ‘This is then the life of man which is rightly called happy – a life which enjoys virtue and the other goods of soul and body without which virtue cannot exist.’Footnote 24 Varro evidently follows the Peripatetics in the debate.
In contrast, the Stoics famously rejected the prima naturae as goods. True good can be only in the soul, and so the Stoic sage would be happy even roasting in the Bull of Phalaris.Footnote 25 External desires (health, wealth and natural beauty) were relegated by the Stoics to the category of ‘indifferents’ (adiaphora). Nevertheless, there were among those ‘indifferents’ those ‘things preferred’ (ta proêgmena) and those ‘things rejected’ (ta apoproêgmena).Footnote 26 For the Stoics, the indifferents ‘to be preferred’ (ta proêgmena), included especially the primary gifts of nature. These proêgmena could be considered relative goods, although they were certainly not to be included in the telos of the summum bonum.Footnote 27 Similarly, apoproêgmena, such as physical pain, are not really evil (because nothing external to the soul can be evil), but are, nevertheless, to be avoided whenever possible without injury to virtue.Footnote 28
Augustine's ‘immanent critique’ enters into the heart of the debate between the Stoics and the Peripatetics. Six times in De civitate dei 19.4, Augustine refers to the ‘primary gifts of nature’ (prima naturae) around which the debate turned.Footnote 29 Like the Stoics, he undermines the claim that happiness is found in the flourishing of the prima naturae: ‘[W]hen, where, how can the ‘primary gifts of nature’, so called, be in so flourishing a state in this life that they escape being tossed about at the mercy of chance and accident?’Footnote 30 Here Augustine seems initially to side with the Stoics in the debate. In a fashion not unlike Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Augustine notes the many evils of this life that can unexpectedly befall anyone.Footnote 31 In the first place, there are evils in the primary gifts of nature, the body: amputation, paralysis, ugliness, sickness and weakness. Augustine asks, ‘What if a man's spine is so curved as to bring his hands to the ground, turning the man into a virtual quadruped?’ Such privations of ‘all beauty and grace of body’ are an evil and, for this reason, the Stoics are right not to include the prima naturae of the body in the summum bonum.
Not only are there evils in the prima naturae of the body, but even in the mind: ‘Then what about the primary goods, so called, of the mind itself?’Footnote 32 Here too evils are ubiquitous, Augustine continues. Consider blindness, deafness and insanity: ‘Crazy people do many incongruous things, for the most part alien to their intentions and characters . . . and when we think about their words and actions, or see them with our eyes, we can scarcely – or possibly we cannot at all – restrain our tears.’Footnote 33 Such debilitating evils of mind strike at our very ability to apprehend truth. Sometimes the evils that befall our body and mind are the attacks of malevolent demons, who make our mind and body playthings of their malignant designs. Our corporeal limitations and challenges at times directly affect our internal disposition. The Book of Wisdom, reminds Augustine, describes the soul as weighed down by the perishable body: ‘[I]s anyone so confident that such a disaster cannot happen to a wise man in this life?’Footnote 34 One cannot say, even of the sage, that this life brings happiness.Footnote 35
Augustine's immanent critique of Stoic eudaimonism
Up to this point, Augustine has tracked with a Stoic virtue ethic. He agrees with them that the summum bonum cannot be found in the primary gifts of nature, because, at best, we hold such goods tenuously; at any moment evil can befall both body and mind. Augustine has hereby laid the foundation for his immanent critique; provisionally accepting the philosophical presuppositions of the Stoics over and against the Peripatetics, he will now begin ‘boring from within’.Footnote 36 He turns to ask about ‘virtue itself’ (ipsa uirtus), the most significant of human goods that are cultivated within. He reminds his Stoic interlocutor that, according to his own anthropology, virtue is not one of the external prima naturae that can suffer dissolution and decay.Footnote 37 The Stoics maintain that eudaimonia or ‘the happy life’ is achieved when the cardinal virtues – prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude – perfectly inhere in the soul. But how can this be, asks Augustine, when the cardinal virtues are, in fact, no different from the primary gifts of nature? They also are held tenuously, existing only in ‘unceasing warfare with vices’ and, for that matter, are not always victorious.Footnote 38 Augustine systematically deconstructs Stoic virtue theory, analysing in turn each of the cardinal virtues, which supposedly offer happiness, to demonstrate that, in fact, such virtue, even from a Stoic perspective, admits the presence and challenge of evil. The necessary conclusion is that happiness cannot be found in the possession of the cardinal virtues. Rather, each cardinal virtue is intelligible only in light of the vices it seeks to contain, so that after this vale of tears, such virtues will no longer be necessary.
Temperance ‘bridles the lust of the flesh’, explains Augustine. The desires of the flesh war against those of the spirit. We await the day when the desires of the flesh will no longer oppose those of the spirit. Nevertheless, ‘in our present life’, temperance is needed lest we give way to the desires of the flesh. Augustine writes, ‘God forbid, then, that, so long as we are engaged in this internal strife, we should believe ourselves to have already attained that happiness, the end we desire to reach by our victory.’Footnote 39 The repeated charge levied against the Stoics is that they immanentise the eschaton by claiming victory in virtue when virtue is, in fact, always held tenuously and involves struggle. Pointedly, Augustine asks the Stoic sage whether he has reached ‘such a height of wisdom’ so as to no longer need to struggle against lust.Footnote 40
Prudence likewise demonstrates that in this life ‘we are in the midst of evils, or rather that evils are in us’.Footnote 41 Even when prudence is successful and her counsel to avail oneself of temperance in the face of evil is heeded, this does not remove evil from life, but offers (at best) one example of self-control. Justice is the virtue that gives each his due. The Stoics claim that one ought to attend to nature to discern what each is due. Again, Augustine ‘enters’ into Stoic thought to critique it ‘from within’: the substantive premise to the Stoic principle of justice is the aphorism sequi naturam; nature teaches the justice that each is due. Augustine traces this Stoic logic: nature proposes a hierarchy whereby the body ought to be subordinated to the soul and both body and soul subordinated to God. However, ‘from within’, Augustine points out that such rightly ordered hierarchy (such justice) is realised infrequently and then only with great difficulty: ‘Does not justice demonstrate, in performing this function, that she is still laboring at her task rather than resting after reaching its completion?’Footnote 42 When we look to nature as our guide we are confronted with the fact that in this life, perfect justice does not inhere in our soul, but ‘weakness’, ‘disease’ and ‘lethargy’.Footnote 43
Fortitude is the clearest example indicating that the cardinal virtues cannot be equated with the summum bonum. After all, fortitude calls one to bear evil with patient endurance.Footnote 44 Eudaimonia cannot exist when one is forced to endure ills. Augustine knows well how the Stoic will respond: those ills are not really ills; as a Stoic sage, I am called to display apatheia in the face of such ‘indifferents’ (adiaphora). But Augustine is not convinced: ‘I am astounded at the effrontery of the Stoics in their contention that those ills are not ills at all, when they admit that if they should be so great that a wise man cannot or ought not to endure them, he is forced to put himself to death and to depart from this life.’Footnote 45 Augustine allows the contradiction inherent in Stoic logic to unfold naturally. Can the virtuous life, the happy life, life in union with the summum bonum really be so miserable that the Stoic sage is called to kill himself? But this is precisely the model set out by the great Stoic philosopher Cato the Younger. He could no longer bear with fortitude to live under Caesar's victory. He ended the ‘happy life’, notes Augustine, on account of ‘indifferents’. Cato's fortitude evaporated in the face of evil. Augustine asks, ‘How can it be that those circumstances were not evil, if they make life a misery from which a man should escape?’Footnote 46 Augustine deconstructs Stoic virtue ethics ‘from within’ by revealing the blatant and inherent contradictions of its system. The last movement of his immanent critique points to the absurd conclusions of Stoic ethics:
[T]heir ‘wise man’ (that is, the wise man as described by them in their amazing idiocy), even if he goes blind, deaf, and dumb, even if enfeebled in limb and tormented with pain, and the victim of every other kind of ill that could be mentioned or imagined, and thus is driven to do himself to death – that such a man would not blush to call that life of his, in the setting of all those ills, a life of happiness! What a life of bliss, that seeks the aid of death to end it!Footnote 47
The Stoics are wrong to claim that the cardinal virtues – temperance, prudence, justice and fortitude – are the summum bonum in which happiness is found, insists Augustine; rather, they are only the highest human goods that we have in via.Footnote 48
Eudaimonism and hope
Stoic virtue theory, as Augustine views it, falsely claims to offer a happiness it cannot provide. In short, Augustine maintains that the absence of an eschatological vision in Stoic virtue theory means it is insufficient to secure happiness. Augustine challenges the conclusion that the sage who has perfected the cardinal virtues will be happy despite his external circumstances. Augustine repeats that the sage will not be happy, because happiness is not found in this life. In fact, each of the cardinal virtues is, in itself, demonstrative of the fact that we are not at rest, but at war.Footnote 49 In his critique of Stoic eudaimonism, Augustine mitigates the significance of the cardinal virtues; or rather, he situates them in their temporal context, identifying them with what the Apostle Paul calls ‘genuine piety’ (ueram pietatem), but not happiness.Footnote 50 The cardinal virtues make no claim that those who possess them will not suffer misery. Rather, their very existence claims the opposite: that ‘human life is compelled to be wretched’.Footnote 51 The cardinal virtues might put the sage on the road to happiness, but they have need of the theological virtues to realise their end. Augustine even asserts that the Stoics twist the cardinal virtues into ‘falsity’ when they claim happiness can be achieved through their appropriation.Footnote 52 The cardinal virtues are falsified by the Stoics since they fail to situate them as subordinate and penultimate to the theological virtues. For Augustine, virtue theory can deliver on its promised eudaimonism only when fulfilled by the theological virtues, particularly the virtue of hope, in which the ‘happy life’ is found.
It seems Nicholas Wolterstorff overstates the case when he argues that Augustine rejected eudaimonism tout court.Footnote 53 It is certainly true that the Stoic principle of emotional detachment (apatheia) was, for Augustine, inhuman and devoid of charity, particularly in its censure of compassion. Likewise, Wolterstorff is correct to point out that Augustine had no confidence in fallen human nature's ability to achieve the equanimity of soul required of the Stoic sage. From this Wolterstorff concludes: ‘Augustine, rather than developing a distinct version of eudaimonism, broke with eudaimonism.’Footnote 54 However, this conclusion does not account for the underlying ratio of Augustine's immanent critique of Stoicism, which is to deconstruct a particular (Stoic) account of eudaimonism in favour of his own (Christian) eudaimonism. Augustine's constant equation of hope and happiness in De civitate dei 19.4 suggest that the quest for eudaimonism – the search for the happy life – is not abandoned, but transposed into a new (eschatological) key.
Augustine's entire critique of Stoic virtue theory in De civitate dei 19.4 is presented within the structure of an inclusio, bookended with quotations from Paul's letter to the Romans about the hope of what is to come. At the outset, Augustine makes clear that he will demonstrate that only eternal life is appropriately named the summum bonum.Footnote 55 For this reason the Apostle Paul teaches: ‘The just man lives on the basis of faith’ (cf. Rom 1:17).Footnote 56 Augustine writes, ‘For we do not yet see our good, and hence we have to see it by believing.’Footnote 57 After the deconstruction of Stoic virtue theory by means of his imminent critique, Augustine concludes De civitate dei 19.4 by returning again to Romans. Commenting on Romans 8:24 (‘It is in hope that we are saved. But when hope is seen fulfilled it is hope no longer: why should a man hope for what he already sees?’), Augustine notes that Paul is speaking to people already in possession of the cardinal virtues. The Romans whom Paul addresses possess prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice; that is to say, they had ‘genuine piety’.Footnote 58 Nevertheless, Paul goes on to tell them that only the theological virtue of hope brings happiness: ‘As, therefore, we are saved in hope, it is in hope that we have been made happy.’Footnote 59 Augustine's immanent critique initially adopts the Stoic position on virtue theory. He then begins ‘boring from within’ to reveal the inconsistencies of the Stoic system when it is fully extended according to its own logic. In so doing, Augustine clears space to present a different eudaimonistic theory of virtue that is anchored on moorings that are more eschatologically secure.Footnote 60
