Beyond Balance
From Augustine’s Confessions, Book X:
Yet when I remember the tears I shed, moved by the songs of the Church in the early days of my new faith: and again when I see that I am moved not by the singing but by the things that are sung — when they are sung by a clear voice and proper modulation — I recognize once more the usefulness of this practice. Thus I fluctuate between the peril of indulgence and the profit I have found: and on the whole am inclined — though I am not propounding an irrevocable opinion — to approve the custom of singing in church, that by the pleasures of the ear the weaker minds might be roused to a feeling of devotion. Yet whenever it happens that I am more moved by the singing that by the thing that is sung, I admit that I have grievously sinned, and then I should wish rather not to have heard the singing. See what state I am in! (10.33.50, emphasis added)
This is from the sections in Book X where Augustine narrates his own experience of dealing with particular sins. In the case cited here he is dealing with the “pleasures of the ear.” But what is the sin? It is no mere abstract demon. It is a particular and personal relationship that he has to his body that he wants to regulate, not annihilate. There is no firm pronouncement here of a hard-and-fast law — thou shalt ignore the singing and concentrate on the unemotional, rational content. “I am not propounding an irrevocable opinion.” This passage is about how he negotiates and regulates a highly personal relationship between indulgence and profit. This is how Augustinian moral development happens: it is a fluctuation that doesn’t seek an end to that fluctuation. This fluctuation arise from the care of one’s soul. As such, he is not seeking an end state, but the recognition of an ongoing “infirmity” that needs to be regulated. “Thou in whose eyes I have become a question to myself: and that is my infirmity.”
Infirmity here does not mean an original sin as an irrevocable evil embedded deep in ourselves as our human condition. I resist wholly placing Augustine into Nietzsche’s morality of good and evil. This would be far too Manichean for Augustine who explicitly rejected the hard distinction between good and evil as completely separate things. Instead, Augustine’s infirmity marks the need to keep our attention on the moral challenges we face as a matter of our internal dispositions to ourself, others and the world. Not everyone will experience the Psalms the way that he has experienced them. Indeed, he even marks the difference in his experience between his “early days of my new faith” and where he is at the time of this writing: “See in what state I am in!”
What is the nature of this fluctuation? It would be far too easy if we simply label this, using our postmodern languages of “self help,” as balance. We miss the point if we reduce this passage — and all of the similar passages in Book X — to the seeking of a static mean between opposites. While these passages may have strong echoes of Aristotle’s ethics where goodness is to find the mean between extremes, Augustine’s relationship to sin is not quite that. There is a stronger temporal dimension to Augustine’s self-evaluation than Aristotle’s more spatial formulation.
What is the temporal nature of this fluctuation, and why is it different than balance? We have to go to the beginning of the citation and then jump to the end. These bookends lay out a temporality that should not be ignored. The passage starts as recitation of a memory, and how he was benefited by the singing of the Psalms “in the early days of my new faith.” This benefit had to do with making the truth of the message sink into himself and “aid the reason” in the internalization of that truth (49). But at the later state he is in at the moment of writing his Confessions, the relevance of the practice of singing the Psalms is different. He has become skeptical of the “pleasures of the ear” for their own sake, though he recognizes their earlier value to him. He also, therefore, recognizes that others may be on a similar spiritual progression, and for them the usefulness of this pleasure must be acknowledged and even encouraged.
To try to summarize the issue: There is no absolute condemnation of the pleasures of the ear as pleasures of the body. Rather, there is a recognition that these pleasures can be quite useful in one’s ethical practice. (He clearly refers to the signing of the Psalms as a useful practice in the passage cited.) Yet this practice easily leads to sin when he is “moved [more] by the singing than by the thing that is sung.”
But it often ensnares me, in that the bodily sense does not accompany the reason as following after it in proper order, but having been admitted to aid the reason, strives to run before and take the lead. In this matter I sin unawares, and then grow aware. (10.33.49)
The practice itself is neither good nor bad in itself. Whether it is good or ill arises from how one applies the practice and where one is in their moral development. Yes, there is a “proper order” between the body’s pleasure and one’s reason, but that order is changeable — it fluctuates. It can be useful to reverse it from time to time to “aid the reason.” Fluctuation and the embrace of bodily pleasures is, therefore, not always and necessarily a bad condition. It is the condition of a soul that is aware of itself — that may “sin unawares, and then grow aware.” Becoming aware of this fluctuation and finding ways to guide it through practice is the moral challenge.
This is different than Aristotle’s formulation of virtue as the mean between extremes. Not completely different of course, but a difference that is best understood by emphasizing Aristotle’s bias toward balance that I don’t think is present in Augustine. For Aristotle, the mean between extremes is about finding a balance between the two extremes. Sometimes the mean can be named, but sometimes it can’t. The moral challenge is to recognize the “opportune moment” (kairos) and to self-activate the virtue that is called for at that moment. The required skill is discernment of the situation — what Aristotle calls prudence — and thus applying the right virtue at the right time. Most often this means finding the mean between extremes. For example, courage in battle means prudently discerning what the situation calls for — retreat, advance, or holding your ground. Courage can be any of these things at that moment of kairos. It just can’t be cowardice on one side or rashness on the other. If one has prudence, one will discern what specific action the virtue of courage calls for at that moment.
This is not the same for Augustine’s moral development. Discernment and awareness are not of the external situation and which external virtue is called for. Discernment and awareness are purely internally focused on the condition of one’s soul as it is progressing spiritually and morally. Thus Augustine’s fluctuation is very personal and depends almost completely on the specific moral characterstics that you are dealing on your long-term spiritual journey. In this way, there is a temporality to Augustine’s moral vision that Aristotle’s doesn’t fully contain. As Augustine makes clear in Book X, what is good practice at one time in one’s life is not good practice at another. Even more crucially, the same practice can be good or bad depending on the moral effects you are trying to achieve within yourself on your own journey.
To put a point on the difference between Aristotle’s balance and Augustine’s fluctuation: for Aristotle courage is always finding the mean between extremes, and this requires discernment of an external situation (kairos) and the momentary application of the courageous mean to the situation. To be courageous in this situation is almost completely an orientation to the external situation and the external virtue of courage. One recognizes what is called for and then participates in the virtue of courage — a virtue that is the same for everyone who needs to access it. Thus for Aristotle, anyone can be courageous with the proper training, and the courage of one general should be substantially the same as another in the same situation. Though their actions might be somewhat different based on how courage has been habituated in the different generals, their actions won’t be all that that different. While they might call forth different tactical actions from the troops, they will read the situation in the same way and find the same virtue of courage if they have been trained (habituated, in Aristotle’s terminology) to discern the courageous mean between the extremes of cowardice and rashness. The point of the matter is to hold a balance between the two throughout the kairos.
This concept of balance doesn’t quite apply to Augustine, and it is too easy an assessment of his moral vision. I frequently find myself disappointed when I hear people reduce the complexity of modern life to self-help cliches about seeking balance. “We just need to find balance in our lives.” This feels like a cop out. It feels like seeking stasis. It’s the simplistic brand of neo-Stoicism, I think. But I’m quite certain that it is Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal and slave morality as the embrace of weakness as moral consolation for a world that has become too complex to manage. Balance can too easily become an apathetic withdrawal that Nietzsche despised in his own time and is an all-to-human coping mechanism in our own. Meanwhile, the planet continues to heat up, school children continue to be the victims of gun violence, and our churches stand aside watching it all from the sidelines, sending out nothing more than “thoughts and prayers” — certainly not meaningful action. Slave morality in (non)action.
To be more precise about it: self-help balance feels too spatially biased to me, to borrow a thought from Henri Bergson. The spatial bias that I resist — and I believe I share this resistance with Augustine — is that balance seeks an end point. It seeks to stop all of the fluctuation and be done with it. For Augustine, this kind of fetishizing of end points is a moral and spiritual problem. His Christianity is not Pauline in the way that Nietzsche saw Paul: as a one-and-done salvation that is based on one’s acceptance of a doctrine. (I’m not saying Nietzsche was right about Paul, but I do think he was right about what doctrinal Christianity has largely become.) Augustinian salvation is a process, not a state. It requires an ongoing regulation of the relationship between our bodies and our souls. At times, this will require renewal through the body as he allows the singing to carry the content of the song. At times, it will require the recognition that this can go too far, just as it can go too far in the other direction. The goal is not to stop the pendulum from swinging, but to recognize that the swinging of the pendulum is what makes us human and that it plays a key regulatory role in our moral and spiritual development.
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End Note One: My comparison in this meditation between Augustine and Aristotle has tended to favor Augustine, but that has not been my intention. Aristotle’s vision of prudence as the ability to discern what is called for in a given kairos is vitally important in anyone’s moral development. This requires an external orientation and openness to the the kairos that is profoundly Augustinian. If we ignore this aspect of both thinkers, we end up atomizing ourselves and withdrawing into ourselves and out of the world. We lose the ability to recognize what others are calling us to be for the world and those with whom we live. I only compare the two in order to sort out for myself the differences and to make Augustine a bit more clear for me than simply trying to read his on his own. In this way, the strengths and weaknesses of his moral and spiritual practices can be better understood.
To give Aristotle his due: this external orientation is a crucial corrective to a purely internally focused morality. While it offers a notion of self-help balance that I resist (at least in this meditation), I find its external orientation a powerful corrective to the purely internal and atomizing perspective. At the root of my reading of Aristotle is the ability to recognize kairos — those opportune moments outside of ourselves where the world is asking us to bring our talents to bear for the benefit of others. Those talents may be courage, may be temperance, may be a sense of justice, may be the power of friendship. If our sole perspective is only how those things reside within us, we bottle them up in a way that definitely leads to slave morality and the ascetic ideal as our consolation prizes.
End Note Two: I’m using Nietzsche’s terms “ascetic ideal” and “slave morality” not in any kind of doctrinal sense. I realize that Nietzsche never fully intended to offer these as hard-and-fast concepts. Rather, they are heuristic devices that allow me to recognize how the flow of moral energy works. For example, slave morality happens when weakness becomes embraced a consolation prize and cuts off our desire to make changes for the better. This is what happens, I think, when our self-help apparatus wants us to seek mindfulness as a way to achieve apathy disguised as balance. By itself, there is nothing wrong with mindfulness practices. But when we seek the inward turn as a self-congratulatory perfection of the practice, then the benefits of these practices are transforming into the slave morality fueled by the ascetic ideal — a turning inward that never turns back outward to try to do good in the world.
Yet, the point is not to say, “There is slave morality! There is the ascetic ideal! I’ve found them, and we should all recognize them and root them out as a sinful.” This is simply to play the same game over and over again as a bad version of eternal recurrence. The point is to recognize the dynamics that lead beneficial practices to become end points because we think the practices are themselves good. I must take my lessons from both Aristotle and Augustine — that the game is always changing, and the power of discernment must be both externally and internally focused. As Plato reminds me, the philosopher must return to the cave: he “must go down again to the prisoners in the cave to share their labors and honors, whether inferior ones or the more excellent ones,” or his exit to experience the goodness and beauty of the sun is utterly useless — it would be the ascetic ideal unless he (always a he for Plato) returns to share the good and the bad labors and honors with our fellow citizens (The Republic 519d).