Abstract
This is an essay in comparative ethics within the Platonist tradition. Although the primary focus is on Augustine’s account of rightly ordered love of neighbor in De vera religione, it analyzes Augustine’s account of the love of finite goods by comparing it with Plato’s grounding of the love of imperfect creatures within an ontological hierarchy in Symposium. Against the backdrop of the critique by modern readers that neither thinker’s teleological and hierarchical view of love allows for a real love of particular individuals, this essay will show how for Plato and Augustine alike, the love of the One—the Beautiful, for Plato, and God, for Augustine—conditions all other loves. Augustine’s ontological hierarchy of the one eternal God and the many created goods leads him to insist that the love of God, who alone is loved for his own sake, conditions the Christian’s love of neighbors whom she loves not for their own sake but for God’s. The Platonic ontology of Augustine’s theodicy, it will be argued, allows him to explain how use-love is a genuine expression of love for the neighbor in her particularity and yet remains subordinated to one’s highest love of God.
Highlights
The classic Eleatic problem of the one and the many—the question of whether ultimate reality is single or manifold—evolved in Plato’s writings from a question about metaphysics and cosmology to one of ethics and the nature of love
The Christian distinction between the eternal Creator and finite creatures shares with the Platonic tradition an ontological hierarchy that made the Platonic distinction between the one and the many useful for Augustine’s analysis of sin and suffering. This Platonic ontology is key to the theodicy, i.e., a theory of evil, and theory of love Augustine develops in On True Religion both of which prove foundational for his account of a rightly ordered love for God and neighbor, namely that God alone is to be loved for his own sake while the many created goods are loved neither for their own sake nor ours but for God’s sake
True Religion, we should begin with Plato’s hierarchy of beauty in Symposium and the similar objections raised against the accompanying vision of love
Summary
The classic Eleatic problem of the one and the many—the question of whether ultimate reality is single or manifold—evolved in Plato’s writings from a question about metaphysics and cosmology to one of ethics and the nature of love. The Christian distinction between the eternal Creator and finite creatures shares with the Platonic tradition an ontological hierarchy that made the Platonic distinction between the one and the many useful for Augustine’s analysis of sin and suffering This Platonic ontology is key to the theodicy, i.e., a theory of evil, and theory of love Augustine develops in On True Religion both of which prove foundational for his account of a rightly ordered love for God and neighbor, namely that God alone is to be loved for his own sake while the many created goods are loved neither for their own sake nor ours but for God’s sake. True Religion, we should begin with Plato’s hierarchy of beauty in Symposium and the similar objections raised against the accompanying vision of love
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