Pathology, Therapeutic Discipline and Its Limits in Augustine: A Dialogue with Foucauldian Readings

Eun Young Hwang

doi:10.3390/rel11070326

Abstract

Recently, there have been some attempts to reframe the Augustinian view of political realism in terms of the Foucauldian concept of resistance and discipline; attempts which resonate with another Foucauldian, post-colonial understanding of Augustine. This paper addresses both political realist and post-colonial ‘Foucauldian approaches’ to Augustine, examining how Augustine envisages critical resistance and counter-disciplines in the midst of the earthly city’s domination. Redefining political realism as the tragic ambiguity of healing intermixed with disease, it will examine how Augustine allows (and offers) social criticism of the earthly city’s ethos, civic rituals and networks of disciplinary power, not least through the heavenly city’s counter-disciplines, including the sacraments, oration, rebuke, coercion, and civic virtues. It is argued that, as Augustine’s understanding of social criticism and counter-discipline is concerned with spiritual freedom and the effect of grace, it does not collapse into support for disciplinary measures of human control.

Highlights

Foucault has been considered an important reference point for reading Augustine’s idea of discipline
Augustinian ethicists who refer to Foucault come to reframe political realism as a matter of grappling with the tragic ambiguity of political power and domination through resistance, social criticism, and discipline in the midst of the networks of power (Morgan 2020, pp. 15–23; Schuld 2000, pp. 1–22)
Talal Asad, a renowned anthropologist influenced by Foucault, addresses Augustine’s idea of discipline to emphasize that there is no essence of religion as a matter of some interior, symbolic experience, but instead the ongoing disciplinary exercise of power that constructs human subjectivity through various institutional forces (Asad 1993, p. 35)

Summary

Introduction

Foucault has been considered an important reference point for reading Augustine’s idea of discipline. The recent trend of Augustinian scholarship in moral theology and patristic theology grapples with the therapy of desire through self-examination, rhetoric, and education that corrects the complex of passions, misguided beliefs, and disoriented desires (Sorabji 2000; Kolbet 2010) Following this frame, the current project shows how the heavenly city’s therapeutic pursuit of the right ordering of love involves resistance through social criticism negatively and counter-disciplines positively amidst the earthly city’s disciplinary networks of power and their effects on desires, affects, and disoriented perspectives on the ends of civic peace, civic ethos, and cults. The frame of therapy and pathology complements the political realist concern for the tragic ambiguity of political reality and social criticism and the post-colonialist concern for disciplinary measures by addressing perspectives, desires, and affects, while tackling Foucault’s account of the technology of the self as a matter of setting up right uses and ends within the networks of domination. The fifth section analyzes how these two Foucauldian readings, both the political realist reading and the post-colonial reading, can be corrected and improved, when reading Augustine’s views on the two cities in light of Foucault’s accounts of the tension between the discipline of domination and that of self-transformation

The Intermixture of the Therapeutic and the Pathological in Political Reality

The Social Criticism on the Pathology of the Earthly City

Therapeutic Disciplines of the Heavenly City

The Limits of Discipline

Rethinking Foucauldian Readings of Augustine