when, for example, he looks to a tree for fruit out of season, simply fail to comprehend these actions from the proper perspective. For Augustine, this sort of logic was akin to the criticism of schoolchildren who correct their classmates according to the letter, rather than the spirit, of the teacher’s rules.59
Human confusion over the actual form of right moral behavior on earth is a function of sin itself. Yet importantly, sins are not a fixed set of actions deemed “wrong” by God, says Augustine, nor are virtues a fixed set of actions deemed “right.” Sins are rather those acts, words, or even desires that fail to preserve the natural order of things as divinely set forth. In humans, Augustine continues, this is a natural order by which reason controls the soul, which in turn controls the body. Reason, furthermore, is divided into contemplation and action, of which contemplation is the superior element. The object of contemplation, says Augustine, is God himself.60 And there is a further complication: on earth, humans are unable to see God. They must rely on their faith for the image of God to appear to them in contemplation; only in the afterlife can humans once again see God as he truly is. The natural order according to Augustine’s argument against Faustus, therefore, was rational action controlled by contemplation of God, which on earth was exercised through faith. And faith, in the end, for Augustine, was a function of love. Humans live righteously when they live, he wrote, “by the genuine faith that works through love” (ex fide non ficta, quae per dilectionem operatur).61
For Augustine, therefore, a man whose faith in God drove his actions was able to restrain all mortal desires within their natural limit—that is to say, he was able to prioritize higher order before the lower. To sin was to indulge in a lower part of the human order at the expense of the higher—to indulge the body at the expense of the soul, for example, or to indulge the soul at the expense of reason. Augustine was careful not to suggest that humans should completely ignore their bodies, for he was uncomfortable with any notion other than that God had created humans to be living, breathing creatures with flesh and desires.62 To indulge the body could never be sinful in and of itself. It was only sinful when this indulgence was directed toward ends beyond the invigoration of the individual or species. Sin occurred only when the desires of the body controlled reason and pushed behavior past the norms of temperance.63
Because Augustine defined sin in terms of preservation of order and not in terms of specific acts, in his philosophy, some actions were sanctioned in some instances while condemned in others: “That eternal law, which commands that the natural order be preserved and forbids that it be disturbed, has located certain deeds in a middle position for human beings so that it deservedly reprehends a boldness in undertaking them and rightly praises an obedience in carrying them out. It makes a great difference in the natural order who does what and under whose authority one acts.”64 That the value of an act depended solely on the actor and the situation and not the act itself was as remarkable to say in the fifth century as it is today because of what it suggests and the potential freedom that it allows in the interpretation of moral rules. For Augustine, New Testament commands could not and should not be understood literally—not just because of the nature of language and interpretation but also because of the very “science” of moral activity on earth. Sins and virtues could never be reduced to a list of good and bad acts.
Augustine developed his point in his argument against Faustus by focusing on the duties of the Roman emperor to conduct war and the apparent clash of such duties with New Testament moral ideals. The evil in war, Augustine wrote, is not in the killing and the use of arms but rather in the love of violence and the hatred that sometimes accompanies it. Humans confuse killing in and of itself with evil when, in fact, it is only the ends of that killing that determine whether the action is right or wrong. Necessities of the general welfare sometimes require behavior that seems contradictory to the ideal of caritas, he explained, but only when this ideal is understood literally and not metaphorically. While it was always necessary for Christians to embody the tenets of New Testament morality in spirit, it was not always practical or even morally correct to act upon them in body. “If, however,” he wrote, “they think that God could not have commanded the waging of war because the Lord Jesus Christ later said, ‘I tell you not to resist evil, but if anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him your left as well,’ let them understand that this disposition lies not in the body but in the heart.”65
Toward a Universal Ideology of Christian Authority
Following this more metaphoric understanding of New Testament morality, late Roman and Merovingian writers debated and developed a far more complicated understanding of the nature of worldly Christian identity than had ever before existed. We see as a result, in contemporary descriptions of the fifth- and sixth-century world, a sense of general uncertainty over the proper moral authority that was to govern human interaction. In his Historiarum libri decem, for example, Gregory of Tours (d. 594) wrote about the holy recluse, Eparchius of Angoulême, who was particularly interested in the needs of the poor and in freeing the imprisoned from incarceration.66 In one episode, a secular count presides over the execution of a thief who was considered by the local inhabitants to be guilty of numerous crimes, not just robberies but murders as well. Eparchius sends a messenger to petition the count to remand the sentence of death and to release the thief, “although guilty,” as he clearly states (scilicet culpabilis), into his custody.67 A mob gathers in opposition to the holy man, however, and demonstrates for the cause of justice: they shout and threaten the judge with insulting language, arguing that to free the man would be prudent for neither the district nor the judge. The count declares it impossible to free the condemned criminal, who is promptly tortured and brought to the gallows. Gregory writes that the messenger returns and recounts the scene to Eparchius, who then declares that “the Lord will grant us of his own gift what man has refused” (quem homo reddere noluit, Dominus suo munere redonabit).68 Eparchius then prays for God’s assistance, and the gallows breaks miraculously. In the ensuing confusion, the holy man is able to gather the thief into his care.
It is an account assumed to express conflict between the Gallo-Roman clergy and new Frankish structures of social power.69 Certainly it does. The source of conflict, however, is not power over coercive force; it is power over the correct arbitration of benevolent force. That is, in Gregory’s story, what is most at issue is the proper form that a good deed should take in the world. Ostensibly, both Eparchius and the count are trying to perform the “right” deed for love of the community. But, demonstrated by God’s miraculous intervention, only one of these men acts correctly in God’s eyes. A hardened, repeat offender stands accused of crimes that he did in fact commit. The holy man, not the count, takes the unpopular political position. Protection of the community and justice for the criminal’s victims seem to demand that the criminal be punished for his unjust actions—and because of the grievous nature of his crimes, that punishment is death. The mob reminds us that clementia does not apply in this case, for it would not serve the common welfare. It is seemingly the count’s duty to protect the integrity of the social order and to secure justice for his people. He has the support not only of his subjects but also of the law. However, this support is precisely what Eparchius seeks to challenge. He is not championing a man unjustly accused; he is championing a higher understanding of God’s love. In this case, Eparchius simply has clearer knowledge—he knows better than the rest that the correct application of pietas in this case is to set the criminal free and not to condemn him to torture and death. Eparchius’s superior knowledge and the reality of the mob’s (and our) inability to discern right morality, which he alone can see, are confirmed only by the miraculous breaking of the gallows and the freeing of the prisoner.
It was another Gregory, Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), who would ultimately articulate these principles of moral discernment and define them as the foundation of elite secular Christianity. For this Gregory, the confusion about God’s love on earth seems to have been something of a personal obsession. His masterpiece, Moralia in Job, is an extended meditation on the human incapacity to comprehend the wisdom of God. Job is a good man, yet God afflicts him with misfortune after horrible misfortune before ultimately
