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To Love the World Most Deeply: The Phenomenology of the World as Gift in Augustine's Confessions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Jeffrey McCurry
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Abstract

While there is a tradition in western religious thought of “contemptus mundi”–hating the world–there is also a tradition of loving the world. Figures as diverse as Augustine, Nietzsche, and Freud have queried whether and how we can love the world: how we can enjoy it for its value. Whereas Nietzsche and Freud thought that a Christian theistic framework prevented us from loving the world, a close reading of Augustine's Confessions shows that this is not true, at least in one sense. For Augustine, this article tries to show, theorizes how it is precisely within a Christian theistic framework that we can love the world most deeply and take the most delight in the world. This vision of Augustine's is not without its own challenges, but it offers at the least a significant “response” to claims by those like Nietzsche and Freud who believe that Christian theism and loving the world are irreconcilable.

Keywords

PhenomenologyAugustineGiftWorld
Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 92 , Issue 1037 , January 2011 , pp. 46 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2010 The Dominican Society.

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References

1 Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion, tr. Strachey, James (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 63.Google Scholar

2 This is not foreign to what Taylor, Charles in Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar calls the “affirmation of ordinary life” that defines modernity.

3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Anti‐Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Norman, Judith and Ridley, Aaron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 15–16).Google Scholar

4 Augustine, Confessions, ed. and tr. Chadwick, Henry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 267,Google Scholar 12.28.38.

5 Ibid., p. 126, 7.14.20.

6 Ibid., p. 206, 10.31.46.

7 Miles, Margaret, Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions (New York: Crossroad, 1992), p. 7.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., p. 131.

9 Augustine, Confessions, p. 63, 4.12.18.

10 Ibid., pp. 63–64, 4.12.18.

11 Ibid., p. 31, 2.6.13.

12 Latin text of Confessions, 2.6.13. My translation follows.

13 Augustine, Confessions, p. 3, 1.1.1.

14 Ibid., p. 81, 5.8.14.

15 Ibid., p. 25, 2.2.4.

16 Ibid., p. 39, 3.4.8.

17 Ibid., p. 206, 10.31.46.

18 Latin text of Confessions, 10.31.46. My translation follows.

19 Augustine, Confessions, p. 207, 10.33.49.

20 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 42–45.Google Scholar

21 Nietzsche, of course, would have problems with the whole grammar of self‐gift in Augustine as something that is fundamentally masochistic.

22 I would like to thank Profs. Patrick Miller and Ronald Polansky for their help with developing this essay.