While working through John Milbank’s essay “Augustine and the Indo-European Soul,” I came across a paragraph that “confirmed” for me the proper relationship between philosophy and theology, and also the proper relationship between myself and St. Augustine. Milbank writes:
For Augustine, the objectifying gaze of philosophy without love produces no truth, but merely satisfies a perverse voyeuristic desire, or curiositas. By contrast, only when something is genuinely loved for its goodness, and to an appropriate degree given or allowed to be by us in its goodness, is it truly seen, although this implies inversely that we should love the thing in the light of how we judge it should be. Judgment is something which, as Augustine makes clear in Books 8 and 9 of De Trinitate, arrives afresh with each new circumstance and is not the implementation of a priori standards but the active application of the concrete standard which is Christ-justice incarnate. Indeed, its implication with desire shows that to judge truly is nothing but the aspiration to judge with infinite, divine exactitude. Desire and Vision have become inseparable, supplying each other.
If the philosopher asks, “what is the meaning of being?” there can only be silence. The theologian, however, can come over and answer: “the meaning of being is love” (Milbank a la Augustine). Without love, philosophy will only continue to manipulate and explain the objects of consciousness through autonomous Reason. A truly robust Augustinian theology, however, has no place for such things as “objects,” but instead it has gifts being given by God to creation, and creation returning the gifts through doxology. There are no “objects” because there is no “given,” only an exchange of gifts. Following Augustine, I must turn my “erotic” gaze to the City of God and let philosophy be consummated by liturgical theology!
Filed under: Blogroll, Philosophy, Theology
