What I'm Working On: Augustinian Eudaimonism

“When you finish the dissertation, you should write a short, accessible book on Augustine and ethics.” So said my wise doctoral advisor, David Solomon, when we met to discuss the first draft of chapter 3 of my dissertation. That was many years ago, and I’ve worked in fits and starts to bring that idea to fruition. But last summer a lot of my ideas that I’ve had over the years on Augustine and ethics really took shape, and I can give you all an overview of the basic idea and argument of my project.

Augustine’s ethical thinking, like pretty much all ancient ethical thinking, asks two basic and related questions. What is the best life for human beings? And what is the best good for human beings that results from or completes the best life for human beings? This second question is the telos question: What is the end or goal of human life? Ancient Greek philosophy used the term eudaimonia (meaning very roughly: happiness or flourishing) to refer to the telos of human life. So I use the term eudaimonism for views that answer the question “how should we live” by providing a characterization and account of the best life for human beings and the telos of human life.

In short, it is my view that Augustine’s view shares central elements with ancient philosophical eudaimonism.

Indeed, my main claim is that Augustinian eudaimonism is the most compelling version of ancient philosophical eudaimonism.

Pierre Hadot suggests that ancient philosophical traditions unpacked the idea that the best life for human beings is a life characterized by love of wisdom, and eudaimonia is a transformative, fulfilling vision and enjoyment of genuine goodness which culminates a life of loving wisdom. The best life (love of wisdom) is then characterized as the cultivation of the capacity to disclose and enjoy genuine goodness (and to be able to distinguish it from its counterfeits). This cultivation of our sensitivity to goodness is the cultivation of wisdom, and is also the cultivation of our other capacities - our capacities that constitute and enable human creativity, understanding, enjoyment, achievement, excellence. This entails cultivation of our capacities to love and enjoy genuine goodness, and to eschew counterfeits. So, it requires the education and cultivation of our desires. Hadot calls this life “philosophy as a way of life.” We can call such a life an examined life, or even a “contemplative life” (not because it is spent in an armchair, but because of its emphasis on the cultivation of our sensitivity to and appreciation of goodness). The telos of such a life is loving vision and appreciation of genuine goodness (another reason to call this kind of eudaimonism “contemplative.”)

My idea is that Augustine affirms this broad contemplative eudaimonist outlook, thus stated. Augustine’s distinctive contribution then lies in his insistence that the best life for human beings cannot be brought to completion in temporal life. And my view is that this has profound implications for: how we think of the best life of human beings; the motivations and practical reasoning involved in such a life; and the contrary motivational energies we must confront and resist in such a life (and the remedies to our inevitable acquiescence to such contrary motivations).

So Augustine conceives of the best life for human beings as fitting us to enjoy a goodness from which we must remain alienated in temporal life. So we have to think about the relationship between our life, reasons, goals and the telos for human life in this indirect way. The best life for human beings is a life that prepares us to enjoy that which it cannot achieve or make fully present to us. So Augustine characterizes the good life for human beings as the life of a wayfarer or sojourner. As James K.A. Smith put it in his great book on Augustine, we are “on the road.” (And it’s we. Augustine conceives of this life as a communal life - a household of wayfarers)

Augustine conceives of a sojourner as one who lives in a foreign land, but arranges his life in such a way that his life refers to life in his homeland. The idea is the way of life for the sake of which the sojourner lives is not fully available to him and cannot be fully realized as long as he is a sojourner. So Augustine has in mind a displaced sojourner or exile, displaced in such a way that a way of life previously available is no longer available in the same way. But Augustine considers the possibility of nonetheless organizing one's life with reference to and for the sake of that lost way of life. As an example, we can think of a rural community continuing agricultural and related practices when the economic and social conditions that made these practices more fully intelligible as a way of life are no longer present. In Augustine's conception of this way of organizing life, sojourners live in such a way that is suited for thriving in a way of life that is not fully available to them. And in so doing they bear witness to both the goodness of that way of life and to their alienation from it. One key feature of such a life is that it must bear witness to the goodness it loves and longs for even when doing so appears fruitless and ineffective. Unpacking what that means will, I think, uncover some of the deepest reasons that Augustinian eudaimonism offers a compelling ethical vision, and enriches the practical vision of ancient eudaimonism.

That’s a lot to digest, but I wanted to give an overview of what I’m working on; I’d like to unpack some of the ideas here in future posts. I think this vision of a wayfaring life is one that we’ll return to a lot in these pages to talk about some of our other interests and preoccupations with respect to the arts, modernity, practices, leisure, and more.

One closing thought: I’ve encountered suspicion from theologically sophisticated friends about any version of eudaimonism. The thought seems to be that any version of eudaimonism undermines the radical nature of the gospel (there’s more to it than that, but that’s a quick summary). I take the concern seriously, and hope to unpack in future posts why I find Augustine’s vision so compelling, and why I think it addresses these kinds of suspicions about eudaimonism (and also provides a robust framework for thinking about grace, original sin, and salvation).

Historically accurate depiction of Augustine…Go Giants!

For those of you suspicious of eudaimonism/Aristotle/virtue ethics, what are your objections?

What other questions do you have about the idea that the good life is “contemplative”? Does it seem too much like something “a philosopher would say” about the good life