Suffering Injustice and Suffering Violence: Augustine on the Sermon on the Mount
Sorting Out The Dynamics of Loving Our Enemies with Augustine
We’ve been sketching out the contours of how moral obligations happen for the last few weeks, and may yet return, as there’s much more to say.
But, in November, I’m giving a paper for a gathering sponsored by Plough, on the Sermon on the Mount. I’ll be asking what two very different figures—Augustine of Hippo and Howard Thurman of Daytona Beach—help us to see about the Sermon on the question of how Christians think about the relationship between violence, virtue, and justice.
Consider this a peek inside the writing workshop. And stay to the end for announcements.—The Management
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Augustine?
Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, better known simply as “Augustine”, is one of the most significant, if not controversial figures in Christian history. Depending on who you read, Augustine is either the genius who helped crystalize the problem of the will in the Christian life or the villain who hated sex, the Church Father who elegantly resolved questions of Christian political life or the rhetorician who subjugated Christian questions of civic life to the pragmatism of Roman power.
He’s complicated. And easy, I think, to misinterpret: I’ve been reading Augustine for years, and by no means consider myself an expert. And on few questions is he more complicated than the question of violence. Famously, Augustine was one of the first to codify a way of thinking about the Christian use of violence that said, in a nutshell, the use of violence for the sake of disciplining (i.e. administering justice in society) is permissible provided that one is ordering our actions toward love and not destruction. Prior to Augustine1, the default for Christians was decidedly against “exercising the sword”, i.e. being in the place of taking life, not just in a private fashion but in a public one as well.
At stake, at all times, is the state of the soul for Augustine: better to lose an eye that to wind up thrown into the darkness eternally. This affects the ways in which he reads Scripture as a kind of ladder, ascending through the letter to the spiritual meaning, and what it means for how Christians think about the use of force: that violence can be used politically, but under very particular circumstances—better to suffer wrongdoing than to risk doing damage to yourself in exercising violence out of vengeance or in a state of passion.
So, in this brief series, what I want to turn our attention to in particular is the way in which Augustine thinks about the Sermon on the Mount, and what its import is for the Christian moral life. If you come to Augustine only knowing that he’s a kind of just warrior or thinks that violence is permissible, I think you’ll be surprised by his reading of the Sermon, particularly on questions of violence.
Suffering Injustice and the Culmination of Virtue
As a preacher, Augustine preached on the Sermon several times that we know of, and finally, in 393-394, sat down to write a full-length exposition of it. The sermons on the Sermon are interesting for their own sake, but in his exposition, Augustine is able to offer us the large vision of Jesus’ most sustained teaching in the Gospels. The Sermon is ultimately a teaching on the nature of wisdom, he thinks: the Beatitudes are a kind of ladder to be climbed, with each step preparation for the next. The culmination of them all, then, is the injunction to “suffer persecution for justice’s sake” (Mt. 5:9).
Let me say this again: Augustine held that the culmination of the Christian’s life was to suffer persecution for justice’s sake. Treating the beatitudes as maxims which build on one another, he writes:
“Therefore, there are seven maxims which constitutes perfection, for the eight starts anew, as it were from the very beginning: it clarifies and approves what is already complete. Thus, all the other grades of perfection are accomplished through these seven” (26).2
If each of the Beatitudes before this last one is given the perfect number of seven, then 7x7 gives us 49, plus one more to clarify them all: 50, the number of days between the ascension and Pentecost. And thus, this final beatitude is identified with the work of the Spirit:
And hope does not confound, because the love of God is diffused in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Now the profitable thing is, not suffering those evils, but bearing them with equanimity and cheerfulness for the sake of Christ (31).
To refuse to strike back against injustice done against you is to be the kind of person that displays God’s life through the Spirit. The way we learn to be meek, to hunger after righteousness, to mourn wickedness—it all leads us to this: to be the kind of people who would rather suffer for being the people of God than to give it up.3 It’s not because suffering injustice is a great thing, but because it is that which preserves the other things: if you’re able to suffer injustice well, you’ll be the kind of person who is able to continually mourn wickedness rather than justify it for your own ends.
The Imperfection of Virtuous Living: An Augustinian Account
This vision of virtue given in the Beatitudes sets the table for us to be the salt of the earth (Mt. 5:13), and more broadly, to be bearers of the justice that exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees (5:20). At this point, the way Augustine is talking about this vision as the summit of what justice looks like should be spinning our head around. But it’s completely consistent with Augustine: we approach God through the life in the body, and so, what would be more appropriate to participating in God’s own life than in counting persecution for the faith as nothing?
This approach—that there is a higher justice to which the Christian bears witness—permeates his approach to the Sermon. It is why anger is forbidden instead of just refraining from killing; it’s why lust is forbidden instead of just refraining from adultery. At each point in the Sermon, the justice to which Christians are called to image is the “higher righteousness”.
But the world is not an ideal place: there are occasions when we might take an oath (Mt. 5:33), for example, because it is compelled of us to do, arising from “the infirmity of those whom you are trying to persuade with regard to something” (75). He doesn’t advise doing things for some greater good, breaking commands so that good will enventuate—trying to justify a sin so that goodness abounds is straight out. It is “the infirmity”, i.e. the sinfulness of the person who commands the oath that Augustine says obliges you to do it, but even these compromises can lead to habits that become self-justifying (76).
We live in an entangled world, and our virtue, worked out in the way our lives are ordered, is ultimately iconic: it images the work of Christ for others. Repeatedly, Augustine appeals not to the situation, but to the weakness of others as the reason for taking the long view with respect to practicing the perfection of the Sermon. He’s very careful to counsel not to tarry long there, as habits build, and with habits, the things which we love: make oaths long enough, and you’ll learn to love them, and build a whole business or governing philosophy around loyalty and oaths. But this is where virtue gets complicated: it’s never just about you.
Suffering Violence For the Sake of Justice: Augustine’s Verdict
When we come to Mt. 5:38-42, then, Augustine has this account of bearing witness to the perfect justice of God in view. To return an eye for an eye, he says, is part of the journey toward justice, because it’s better than escalating revenge. And to show some forgiveness in this way is to be on the way to the perfection of the Kingdom (81). But the fullness here is not simply to forgo violence which would otherwise be permitted by the Law. If the Beatitudes’ capstone is being willing to suffer injustice, then how we respond to violence ups the bar beyond simply not returning violence for violence:
Even if a man rises above this degree of perfection, and does not retaliate at all, he is, of course, coming closer to the Lord’s precept, but he has not yet reached it. For even if you return no evil for the evil you receive, the Lord seems to deem it insufficient unless you are ready to receive even further evil (82).
This again is for “the welfare of those persons” who commit the injustice.
As the Physicians of souls, therefore, what other instruction could the Lord give to those whom He was preparing to heal their fellow men, except the precept that they should bear with equanimity the infirmities of those for whose health they were to be ready to prescribe? (82)
It is not sufficient, in other words, to simply pull back from situations of violence, or to refrain from revenge when wrong is done, but--insofar as one cares about the state of the violent--to prepare for suffer for their sake. Uunlike previous issues in the Sermon, Augustine backs this one up by saying that “[Jesus] was prepared not only to be struck on the other cheek for the salvation of all, but even to have His whole body nailed to a cross.” (85).4
Suffering Violence, from the Father of the Just War
As an aside, Augustine is not interested in your masochism: he says plainly that he’s not talking about abusive situations, or about looking for suffering. And yet, the bar for this one is pretty high. How we respond to violence done against us for the sake of Christ is identified not only with Pentecost, but with Christ’s own example. Next time, we’ll say more about how Augustine squares this with the use of violence, but suffice it to say, it is a very slender eye of the needle that violence will have to thread itself through.
Better to have injustice done to you than to do violence, even when permissible by Law or by laws, because this teaching is connected with the economy of God’s work in creation. Better to suffer injustice, to suffer violence to one’s own person for the sake of the violent, even if a partial forgiveness or a partial justice of striking back is on the table. This framing brings up a lot of questions, which we’ll take up in Thursday’s newsletter.
The most interesting aspect of this, I think, is what this might mean for those who are in the midst of suffering, or who are Christians among a suffering people. Howard Thurman will have much more to say to us on this question, but for now, I find it interesting how Augustine’s description of not just refraining from violence but preparing to suffer violence for the sake of bearing witness to God’s justice lies at the heart of his treatment of one of the trickiest parts of the Sermon.
Paying Attention: I thought about this a lot while hearing about a recent massacre in Thailand at a daycare, in which over 30 people were killed by an ex-cop. All I could do is stop and pray.
Reading: Augustine’s treatments of the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the passages on loving our enemies. Revisiting some of Howard Thurman’s work, and several secondary things around both of these. Brothers K remains miraculous.
Future Event: The long-promised reading night with Ivan Illich is happening later this month for paid subscribers: details went out to paid subscribers yesterday. Each month going forward, I’m hoping to offer an evening Zoom session as a chance to dig a little deeper into a work in Christian ethics that challenges and confronts us, including some recent work complete with the authors present.
This next bit is heavily debated, but I think it’s not much of a debate to be honest: in canons, sermons, martyr testimonies, and treatises, the assumption is that Christians shouldn’t take up the sword for a whole raft of reasons. Some will say that the testimony is mixed prior to Augustine in the 5th century, such that Augustine is simply tipping the scale away from the “abstain from violence” position, but that seems dubious just based on the writings available from the first five centuries of Christian thought—which are many. Skip all the hot takes and ill-formed apologists and see George Kalantzis’ Caesar and the Lamb for the receipts on the texts from this period.
All quotes from St. Augustine: Commentary on the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, transl. Denis J. Kavanagh (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1951)
Interestingly, in Augustine’s Sermon 53, on the beatitudes, not only is this beatitude not treated, but “blessed are the pure of heart” is the capstone, emphasizing the way in which difficulty and perseverance produce in us the knowledge of God.
That this is named as “justice” should cause us to be careful how we name “the just war” in Augustine’s work. This is a much broader question and not one which we’ll resolve here, but my working hypothesis is that when Augustine says that the just person goes to war, based on the criteria he’s developed here after years of preaching and reflection, one of two three things is happening: 1) Augustine is being inconsistent (unlikely), 2) Augustine is speaking in terms of spheres of responsibility (again, his caveat here is only to lead people to higher righteousness, not because “my job demands it”), or 3) he’s describing “the just war” as that which is imperfect and not justified, even if undertaken out of a corrective love for the enemy.