How Stoic cosmology has been 
smuggled into Western thought

In this work published under the banner of the Cambridge Radical Orthodoxy circle, Michael Hanby seeks to do three things: to disassociate the thought of St Augustine from that of Descartes with whom it is often linked; to examine the Stoic contribution to the culture of modernity; and to offer a new interpretation of Augustine’s De Trinitate by which Augustine’s theory of language, anthropology, moral psychology and treatment of voluntas (will) emerges as a function of what is doctrinally most important: Trinitarian theology, Christology, and the ecclesiology and doctrine of grace which flow from them.

Central to all these projects is the rejection of the modern understanding of the will as a faculty of desire having its origins in the thought of Augustine. Following Etienne Gilson, among others, Hanby argues that the notion of the will as a power of choice is a Pelagian fiction, and indeed, that ‘it is precisely this aspect of Pelagianism that Augustine opposes’. For Augustine, acts of the will always entail the work of memory and intellect, and while delight (desire) is integral to the intelligibility of our actions, ‘choice’ is not. The contemporary emphasis upon the so-called autonomy of the individual’s will as the basis of human dignity and the related notion of rationality as thought severed from all affective sensibilities, cannot by this reading be traced back to Augustine but has a much more recent pedigree.

Truth and intention 

Hanby observes that this mutual entailment of memory, intellect and will within the Augustinian framework means that our perception of the truth will be dependent upon the quality of our intention, which is always mediated socially through language and habit. Thus “if ‘truth’ is to mean more than logical coherence, truth claims are dependent upon the cultic context of their utterance, upon the Church as the historic form of the new creation”.

According to this reading, the modern detachment of the two sources of human motivation from one another represents the undoing of the unity of knowledge and love in creatures created in the image of the Trinity. Therefore at issue within the culture of modernity is the Trinity itself and specifically whether the meaning of human nature and human agency are understood to occur within Christ’s mediation of the love and delight shared as donum between the Father and the Son, or beyond it. Since it is Christ who determines for Augustine what it means to be human and Christ working inseparably with the other Trinitarian personae who incorporates us fully and finally into our being, it follows that readings of human nature and human agency which are offered without reference to Christ’s mediation, are radically - that is, from their very roots - different from the Augustinian understanding.

Hanby is critical of Pelagianism for instituting a rupture in this Christological and Trinitarian economy, and he argues that insofar as it determined the direction of subsequent Christian thought, Pelagianism created possibilities for human nature ‘outside’ the Trinity and the mediation of Christ. He further demonstrates how this was due largely to an account of volition which the Pelagians imported from Stoicism. For this reason he defines the Pelagian tendency as ‘philosophising without a mediator’ and an attempt to smuggle Stoic cosmology into Western Christian thought.

Creedal or mechanical?

The different theories of what it means to be human, and in particular rational, are commonly described in theological parlance as exhibiting a difference between a creedal logic and a secular or mechanical logic; while cultures built upon these different notions of humanity and rationality are described as being driven either by a Trinitarian logos or a mechanical logos. For example, John Paul II juxtaposes the utilitarian rationality of the culture of death with the Trinitarian wisdom of the civilisation of love, David Schindler contrasts the disintegrating form of the machine with the integrating form of love, and  Catherine Pickstock speaks of the different desires of the city of death and the liturgical city.

While the above juxtapositions tend to rotate around different notions of rationality, Hanby’s work supplements these distinctions by examining two different understandings of the work of the will: 

In the one, voluntas is the site of our erotic participation in an anterior gift, and it is at once self-moved and moved by the beauty of that gift. Here will, whether human or divine, is constituted in a relation of love for the beloved and its freedom is established as dispossession. In the other, will names an inviolable power, and freedom consists in demonstrating this inviolability, through the double negation both of itself and of created beauty.

Not only is the Augustinian account of the will different from the standard Cartesian caricature, and heretical Pelagian and neo-Stoic accounts, but as a matter of logic it follows that the Augustinian account of freedom must differ from these also. Here Hanby notes that freedom for Augustine consists not in unqualified arbitrium, but in a singleminded love of the good where the need for choice never arises. Accordingly, ‘consent’ merely denotes our acting at last with the continence of a unified desire toward that which supremely attracts us; that is, participation in the life of the Trinity.

Within the culture of modernity Pelagian conceptions of the will and human freedom have profoundly influenced theories of human rights. Here Hanby is critical of scholars who fail to notice that a standard like human dignity is actually a different standard depending upon whether the source to which one appeals is Reason or God.

A similar criticism was recently made by Robert P Kraynak in his work Christian Faith and Modern Democracy. Kraynak observed that whereas modern philosophers see reason as an autonomous power that reflects on itself or legislates for itself, the patristic and Scholastic theologians viewed reason in Platonic and Aristotelian fashion as a kind of eros. According to this classical conception of reason, ‘human dignity and cosmic order appear on a comparative scale of rational substances’ and ‘dignity within the human species depends on one’s fullness of being as a rational substance whose mind and soul are drawn upward to God’. Such an account of human dignity is fundamentally different from that commonly offered by liberal philosophers and human rights lawyers, and it highlights the dangers associated with the Catholic defence of natural law by reference to the rhetoric of rights.

This work is therefore an important contribution to the growing body of literature on the genesis of the culture of modernity. It supplements other accounts of the rise of the modern self which have focused more on the faith-reason relationship than on the intellect-memory-will relationship, and it places Trinitarian theology at the centre of the debates about the compatibility of creedal Christianity with the culture of modernity. Above all, in emphasising the link between love and knowledge it explains why a flourishing Catholic culture is, as Christopher Dawson and others have argued, erotic rather than bourgeois.

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