Our world is both transfixed and vexed by borders. All of us are supposed to be something—everyone is supposed to have a political identity, and cultural or racial or religious or ethnic identities as well. Our adjectives are typically taken to give us a determinate self in the world. The worst fate in our world is to be a stateless refugee, or a prefix-less human. Click on the box and scroll through the modifiers: Everybody is supposed to be some particular kind of person. These identities bind us, they are ways for us to organize our worlds, tell ourselves apart from one another, and guarantee our freedom from one another.
But we are also all supposed to be united in a global humanity where these differences don’t ultimately matter. If difference is the underlying metaphysics of “liberty,” an insistence on sameness underpins and explains the logic of “equality,” which often pushes us toward a dogmatic affirmation of our fundamental community. Certainly, everyone is different and must be respected as such; but everyone is also supposed to recognize those differences are—what? Not fully differences? Overridden by a common human nature? So, borders, boundaries, absolutely trouble us as well.
Here is a paradox. To survive and flourish, every society needs to cultivate solidarity among its members; on this the right and left agree. But once we affirm the freedom of each to be irreducibly individual and also affirm the equality of all to be the same, how ought we balance these two to permit solidarity?
A new book, Charity After Augustine, by Jonathan Teubner—theologian, contributing editor at The Hedgehog Review, and research associate at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program—means to help us address this problem by appealing to history. He argues that one of the deepest and most powerful streams feeding into the modern mind—the one flowing to us from ancient and medieval Christendom—provides clues to help us understand “why our attempts to build solidarity or social cohesion, at least in the West, have ended in disaster just as often as they have brought about justice.” Understanding this, he thinks, can help us better cultivate solidarity alongside liberty and equality.
Teubner is one of a remarkable young generation of scholars of premodern Christianity, many of whom have fallen under the spell of Augustine. What makes him unusual, apart from his general erudition, is his capacity to straddle the ancient and medieval worlds. He studies not only Augustine but also his intellectual descendants, like Boethius and Benedict. Teubner’s first book, Prayer After Augustine, is a learned study of dimensions of Augustinian contemplative spirituality that is also a methodological advance beyond a too-narrow construal of what counts as “Augustinian.” He proposed an ingenious distinction between “Augustinianism 1” (the explicit citation of Augustine in a thinker’s writing) and “Augustinianism 2” (a thinker’s subtle assumption and application of Augustinian categories and thought-forms without citation) to let our scholarly sensors better detect the full spectrum of Augustine’s influence.
This book builds on his earlier one. It redeploys this distinction to tell the story of the “Augustinian caritas tradition,” starting with Saint Augustine in the fifth century but reaching deep into the medieval world, to see how later figures appropriated Augustinian themes for their own places and times. In two large parts, it tracks Augustine’s efforts to build community around a certain set of charitable practices, telling the story of the development (or, at least, the peregrination) of that project across Augustine’s turbulent times. Then he looks at three later thinkers inspired by Augustine—Benedict of Nursia, Gregory the Great, and Bernard of Clairvaux—as they developed this “Augustinian caritas tradition” and applied it to their own worlds, each very different from Augustine’s. He charts how a series of significant thinkers in this tradition thought about material charity, and especially almsgiving: social practices that transferred material wealth (not so much money as food or goods or, in the case of churches, land) to individuals or institutions, especially the church. These practices were expressions of ascetic care by the givers for both the community as a whole and also for God, thereby creating solidarity, both laterally and vertically. But these efforts were vexed by the terms of its political ethic. On one side, the tight bonds of the “in-group” generated strong solidarity, but only at the cost of sharply driving away everyone outside the group. And on the other, any insistence on care’s universal scope may end up “diluting” the bounded (and bonded) community that promoted that care in the first place. So, the ideological frame that rendered these practices intelligible both encouraged solidarity and stymied it.
Ultimately, then, the book ends in disappointment. The “Augustinian caritas tradition” gifts us with as many problems as positive resources to handle solidarity. Most especially, the tradition, particularly as it has been understood to involve state-governed coercion of its opponents, has failed to imagine the kind of truly stateless vision of community that universalism aspires to. The modern discourse of “solidarity” flows from no deep organic history; its precursors, in the Reformation and Middle Ages and earlier, were not so much its ancestors as simply its antecedents, leaving behind artifacts resuscitated for today’s distinct purposes. Our impulse toward moral universalism, our “charity” in some sense, is after, but not because of, Augustine’s; and while we can learn from his example and from those of his inheritors, our future success will not come from deeper fidelity to their agendas. To borrow from Quentin Skinner, we shall have to do our thinking for ourselves.
Perhaps, however, disappointment can be the mother of wisdom. We ought to recognize the theological power of Teubner’s argument here, its ultimately theological aim—deeply historically sourced, to be sure, but meant also as a message for Christian intellectuals today. Alasdair MacIntyre convinced many that the deepest critical energy of our world is retrospective, seeking answers in a past we have betrayed but which still exists, if we can only find our way back to it. The path to our rescue, in this reading, lies in a more generous affirmation of the past. But Teubner knows better. The past’s solutions failed in their own time; why would we think that, taken out of the attic and dusted off, they would do any better today? To realize our ideals, we must ultimately face the future.
Teubner, for his part, takes the past more seriously than many nostalgists by depicting it in truer, less flattering colors. He refuses to countenance contemporary (especially “post-liberal”) efforts to excuse previous flawed versions of Christianity as not authentic, or to contend the faith has only partially been realized in any actually existing form. As Teubner nicely puts it, “the disagreeable is easily dispensed with, conveniently set aside as ‘inessential’ to or, more strongly, a ‘corruption’ of, the tradition.” I have seen this tactic deployed for thirty years, in the academy and in public life: Just look at how white American evangelicals today talk about how their tradition has been “hijacked” by supporters of Donald Trump, when that support is vitally connected, as scholars have made abundantly clear, to long-standing misogyny, racism, and shallow reactionary moralism endemic to modern American evangelicalism since its beginnings. After two thousand years, we ought to take the word of those people whom our tradition has systematically abused—Jews, those we label “pagans,” “heathens,” “heretics” and other outsiders, and more than a few presumable “insiders” as well, like women—when they say that, well, the blows they suffered felt “authentically Christian” to them.
None of this is to say, nor does Teubner imply, that Christianity is uniquely or even especially responsible for human cruelty to others. Maybe the problem is not “religion” or “secularism” or “ideology” or “nihilism.” Maybe the problem is simply humans: that we have a predilection to violence, particularly when we think we can get away with it. This is a sobering conclusion, but perhaps sobriety is needed when so much of public discourse, and scholarly discourse as well, is intoxicated by hyperbole.
A book that attempts so much is likely to meet with resistance from any reader. For myself, I do not think that almsgiving is at the core of the practice of solidarity, and anyway solidarity is not exactly lateral in Augustine—rather, it is vertical, in Christ and then through Christ to others. This is one reason why Augustine is so suspicious of Roman religion; he thinks it is flagrantly immanent, transactional, and instrumental, designed to reinforce the structure of Roman social life. In general, Teubner’s account could use more context, more attention to these thinkers’ social worlds and how their own careers course across their lives. Teubner seems to assume that Augustine is essentially available to us without too much hermeneutical labor beyond reading his corpus (an admittedly formidable task). To modify Nicole Loraux’s famous line about Thucydides, we must recall that Augustine is not our colleague but a vibrant civic actor in a very different world.
And are Teubner’s later figures as continuous with Augustine as he assumes? Even someone like Benedict or Gregory the Great, separated by only a century or two from Augustine’s age, seems to possess assumptions and sensibilities far closer to scholastics six or seven hundred years further in the future. Why is that? Simple: Augustine was a Roman; they were not. He lived in a vital civil society of great plurality and tremendous social complexity; they were cloistered religious who turned away from what was in any event a far simpler social order. Western Europe didn’t develop anything to rival the complexity of fourth- and fifth-century empire until the twelfth century, and even then the idea of a widespread body of literate and educated laypeople was still centuries away. Augustine’s works were often composed with an audience of educated and literate laity centrally in mind, while none of the works of Benedict, or Gregory, or Bernard were.
More broadly, there is a large disproportion between the questions Teubner says he wants to address and what the book actually accomplishes, between the prospects for solidarity in our world today and the book’s more reasonably scaled exercise in what used to be called “historical theology,” particularly the subdiscipline of “patristics.” It is a bit too obedient to the scholarly protocols of its subdisciplinary nook to fully generate an answer to the rather galactic questions it claims as its motivating impulses. This is unsurprising. Our thinking is far more path-dependent than we usually recognize. As Samuel Johnson put it, “[n]o man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations, and of kings, sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them.” Still, we should be grateful that Teubner manages to harness so much of the power of his discipline’s methods while still trying to see beyond them.