Learning to Love Someone Besides Yourself: A Reading of Augustine’s Confessions

Learning to Love Someone Besides Yourself: A Reading of Augustine’s Confessions

Augustine’s Confessions lends itself to a rich variety of readings and understandings. There is a lot that can be said about it, a sensus plenum of meanings. I want to propose one way to read the text that sheds light on what Augustine is learning over the course of his conversions and what he is teaching us. In the narrative arc of the book, Augustine depicts his failures to love someone besides himself and how he learned to love someone besides himself. Through his portrayal of learning God-love and neighbor-love, Augustine depicts the widening of his heart in order to help widen ours.

An Augustinian anthropology is always really about love. We spend our loves running around loving. I used to be frustrated by the profligate use of the word love. It bothered me that we use the word love to describe our relationship to pizza, America, our parents, and God. We should not use the same word for our relationship to beer as we should to God, I griped. For an Augustinian, we should use the same word for loving beer and loving God. There is no sharp divide between the lower loving and the higher such that we must use a different word for the action. There is just loving more and loving less, loving rightly or loving wrongly. Augustine is quite comfortable interchanging words for love, noting that he wished to show that Scripture “makes no distinction between amor, dilectio, and caritas.” Not just love God and do what you will but choose whatever word for love and then love.

For Augustine, “there is nobody who does not love. The only question is what he loves.” We see this in The Confessions, which is not a story of someone who went from not loving to loving. It is the story of someone who needed to learn how to love someone besides himself. For Augustine, we always love ourselves, and this is good but insufficient. Christ commands us to “love our neighbors as ourselves.” To the question of what we love, we need to be able to answer not just ourselves but someone (God and neighbor) else. The problem is that too often our love does not extend out of ourselves towards others. We love the self to the extent of contempt for God and neighbor. We must learn to love beyond ourselves. To see this, let us turn to the ways that Augustine’s loves failed to cross the border of himself

Ways of Not Loving Another

Amor sui, as love turned inward, cannot help but love things. Ever unsatisfied with itself, it seeks outside what it cannot find within. But it does this with lust, the perversion of love. The wrong turning of lust is that its love for others is really just an expression of self-love. We can see this in Book 2 of the Confessions, where Augustine writes that he delighted in “only loving and being loved.” In Book 3, he describes himself as “not yet in love, but . . . enamored with the idea of love.” He goes on to describe himself as having been “in love with loving, I was casting about for a what [quid] to love.” The intentionality of love is not towards someone else; the lover just aims for his own loving.

The problem with this love of loving is that it is insufficiently triadic. In On the Trinity, Augustine describes love as essentially triadic: “myself, and that which I love, and love itself. For I do not love love, except I love a lover; for there is no love where nothing is loved. Therefore there are three things—he who loves, and that which is loved, and love.” We need all three for a full sense of love. In the Confessions, Augustine does not fully develop this in a full triune account, but it is already implied in Book 2, where he describes recalling his sins in order “to love you, my God. Out of love for loving you I do this.” We see in his healthy love of God, love, loving, beloved.

What is missing in lust is the third term, the one who is loved. The other in their specificity does not show up, does not manifest in the relationship. Again, we cannot help being triadic in love, and so Augustine, in love with loving, seeks a what to love. Lacking an intentionality for another, such a love does not and cannot see the other. Seeing the other in love can only happen in the “calm light of love” as opposed to the obscurity of the “fog of lust.” The someone we lust after is misidentified as something (quid), and so one can only enjoy a “lover’s body,” not the lover as another.

This is the aptness of the term “to hook up.” One searches for a what to plug into rather than a whom to love. For Augustine, this “polluted his friendship.” Looking for love, the lustful are fine interchanging whatever is at hand, even if the “it” is your friend. Reflecting on what we would call a friend-with-benefits, Augustine sees how he ruined this friendship by treating the friend as a what delivering pleasures. Not in love with him or her, he wants what he can get out of the other rather than wanting the other. This recurs after his breakup with his longtime lover. Augustine—deeply grieved and still deeply interested in sex—finds someone (again really something) to replace his lover. He has a rebound relationship, a relationship disinterested with the other person and seeking only a salve for one’s grief and lust. This is the basic interchangeability of a self unable to love someone besides itself. You just look for someone else to plug into your desires. They are anonymous and interchangeable.

We also fail to love someone besides ourselves when we fail to love others as different from ourselves. We can see this in Augustine’s close friendship from Book 4. Augustine’s description of the friendship is telling. He loves his friend because of his like-mindedness. This is not bad per se, but Augustine has produced that like-mindedness in his friend, having “lured him away from the true faith.” Augustine loves this self-produced like-mindedness in the other, and so when he hears that his dying friend was baptized, he “cared little for this, since I took it for granted that his mind was more likely to retain what he had received from me.” Augustine mocks the baptism. He knows that he has taught his friend to think what he thinks and so is shocked at his friend’s “amazing, newfound independence.” Augustine figures that he will give him some time and then “I would be able to do what I liked with him.” As he waited to remake his friend into an image of himself, his friend dies.

What we see in Augustine loving his friend is not a real friendship. What Augustine has come to love is seeing in his friend what Augustine thinks. His friendship has become a kind of mirror for himself. He looks into his friend, sees himself, and loves himself. What looked like love of another is really a perverse amor sui directed through the other as mirror back onto the self. The friend becomes an idol for Augustine in that he has fallen into the “madness that cherishes a human being as though more than human.” Elevating humans toward divinity makes them an idol. Such idols do not reveal God but are instead mirrors for our desires. Making them, we see ourselves. In such a love—and in the grief it inspires—we cannot escape our amor sui into a love of the other. We have not seen them as the person they are and so remain trapped in ourselves. In his grief he cries, “whither could my heart flee to escape itself? Where could I go and leave myself behind?” Amor sui, directed towards others, always collapses back into itself like the light of a dying star crumples into a black hole.

We fall into this black hole because we delight in our control over our idols. The paradox of idol is that, though we dominate them, we also depend on them.[1] This is at the heart of Augustine’s crushing grief. He had made a god of his friend. As a god of his own making, his friend always expressed Augustine’s own self back to Augustine. And he needed this self-reflection. Dominating, he depended. This relationship of dominant dependence was first shattered by his friend disagreeing and by his friend not being his reflection. Augustine’s friend is not allowed to disagree with him because Augustine depends on his friend reflecting himself back to himself. Augustine lost the mirroring idol that fed his self-love and so is crushed by grief.

We might think that articulating our failures to love someone besides ourselves are purely interpersonal. But I would posit that much of our socio-political problems are rooted in this as well. The libido dominandi is not about other people; the lust is for dominating. Sure, the dominator depends on the dominated to live out their longing to dominate, but that longing is not about them as neighbors. There is something interchangeable about the others that are dominated. Consider the Roman Empire. Their neighbors kept changing as they kept conquering old neighbors. Whoever lived next door to Rome did not matter if the dominating could be lived out. On a more modern level, the factory owner exploiting his workers does not care about them. Should they get uppity, or old, or worn down, the owner will happily replace them from what Marx called “reserve army of labor.” Just as sexual lust is fine plugging in whatever will sate the love for loving, so too the libido dominandi is fine with whatever it can dominate.

The interchangeability, anonymity, and mirroring relation of dominating dependence provides a via negativa to what we should be up to. I want to posit here the beauty of a simple question: “How can I help you?” In the question, the other person actually shows up. To ask this question requires attending to the one being addressed. It is not about me deciding for you, but about you telling me what you need. There can be no anonymity or interchangeability here; there can be no self reflecting itself to itself. There can only be love for another person.

Further, in true friendship, friends delight in each other even when disagreements arise. These disagreements lack “rancor” because we know the friend is not a reflection of ourselves but instead a person we love. So too in our political lives, we should be able to disagree without rancor because the ones we disagree with are our civic friends. In our time, increasing numbers of people refuse to date or be friends with people who are from a different party. People move away from people who disagree with them in what is called the Great Sort. If you can only love people in your own party, people who think the same thing as yourself, then you are really just loving yourself. A democratic republic requires that people love someone besides themselves, love them so much they will accept their votes and their candidates not as the “other side’s” laws or politicians but as our laws and our leaders.

Getting our Love Right

If these are some of the ways we fail to love someone besides ourselves, does Augustine’s Confessions offer a vision of how to love? Augustine writing of his own spiritual transformation offers a kind of spiritual exercise in reading the Confessions that lead his reader to learn how to love. This is not directly expressed but is articulated through the narratival developments and through the meaning of confession. We will look at some of those developments and then some of the meanings of confession.

First, to love another person we must learn to say their names. A notable feature of the Confessions is the development of naming. In Books 1-4, Augustine names almost no one; his relationships were, as noted, anonymous and interchangeable. As the narrative advances, more and more names are used, especially in Books 8 and 9. To name is to know something as having an identity separate from your own. To speak the name of the other person is an action of respect. This was the perniciousness of the American practice of calling Black men boy. Their name, their identity, their status as adult person was denied to them. They were anonymized. We see this in the film In the Heat of the Night. The southern sheriff demands to know what Sidney Poitier’s character is called in Philadelphia. Having been called boy, he responds “they call me Mr. Tibbs.” The force of the scene is the centrality of the name, a centrality depicted in Augustine’s narrative. Augustine’s transition from non-naming to naming shows a process of seeing others as having their own identity, a self that is not one’s own. To name is to give back to the other the recognition of the other’s identity.

To know the name of another requires that we listen to them. To love requires this listening. We see this in two listening episodes in the Confessions. The first is in Book 3 when Augustine is reading Cicero. It is a bit like a marketing class in which you are assigned a successful marketing campaign of old. The point is not to be convinced to buy the product but to pay attention to the marketing style. That is what Augustine is doing when he is reading Cicero’s Hortensius. But as he read, he found himself listening to Cicero and “what he had to say.” To truly listen to another is a risk; by opening yourself to them you allow for the possibility of influence. Where Augustine had been used to imposing his views on others, listening to others opens the possibility of learning from them. And so, “under [Cicero’s] influence my petitions and desires altered.” Augustine is not fully converted. Though he has fallen in love with wisdom, he is still too proud to listen to what Scripture has to say. For that he will have to learn to listen to Ambrose. He initially goes to Ambrose with an eagerness to listen to how he said things rather than “what Ambrose was saying.” But he gradually finds himself hearing what Ambrose was saying. In this listening, Augustine learns to listen to scripture.

Naming and listening enables another development in the Confessions. Augustine’s self narrative has no stories of others early in the text. But as the Confessions develops, Augustine increasingly tells the stories of others. His story of himself becomes the stories of others. Book 6 has a six-page narrative about Alypius, most of which has nothing to do with Augustine. Book 8, which tells the conversion of Augustine, is mostly the conversion stories of others: St. Anthony, Victorinus, the court officials, and Alypius. Most of Book 9 is not the story of Augustine’s baptism but the life story of Monica (finally named in Book 9) and to a lesser extent Patricius and Adeodatus. To tell the story of another requires caring enough about them to hear them and then care enough about them to talk about them instead of oneself.

In seeing these three things, we understand other people as other people. But this is not yet to love them. For that, we would need what Augustine’s friendship lacked, the “charity poured abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.” There is a rich theological claim being made here. The Holy Spirit is the relation of Charity in the Trinity and so in being poured into our hearts the Holy Spirit opens us to actual relationship with others. Just as the Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son, so too charity opens a relationship between human persons. In this, we do not just want the good for ourselves but also for the other.

Amor sui always just wants to get goods; love of neighbor wants to share goods with others. We can see this in Augustine’s depiction of language. Augustine learns to use language as a toddler and throughout school to get stuff out of others. As a toddler he would “throw a tantrum because my elders were not subject to me.” Augustine the child learns language to say what he wants from others. Language is a tool to acquire benefits from others. More pointedly, it is a way to subject others to our desires. The better we get at language the more we can get from more people. But this is in marked contrast to The Confessions themselves and what the text enacts through language and so teaches about language. Augustine does not write to get stuff from us. He writes The Confessions as a gift to us. The gift aims to invite us into sharing in the good together. Augustine learns to give language as a gift for the good of his neighbors. His words do not extract or subject but give in his desire that some good for the other will arise.

To Love Somebody Else is to Confess to Them

Any true confession is always a gift to another. We can see this in different senses of confession. First is the confession of truth. Language is a gift and it is meant, as gift, to convey truth to others. Lying is always a sin because it violates that economy of gift and so violates the very meaning of words and so of the Word. To lie is not to give what you should be giving. To confess the truth is to offer it to others. As Paul Griffith writes, “true speech . . . is returned as gift to its giver. . . . The true antonym of mendacium . . . is adoratio, or its close cousin, confessio.” We can see this in Augustine’s story of the drunk beggar. Augustine is heading for his great career success: giving a speech full of lies in honor of the emperor. On the way, he sees a drunk beggar wishing others a good day. The drunk is kind to others and speaks truly. The moment shatters Augustine’s sense of career, in part, because he sees himself as a liar. He must learn to confess the truth as a gift to others. The Confessions are that confession of truth for us.

Next is the confession of fault. To confess one’s fault before the other is not only to give the truth but to give the truth about oneself for the other. To confess one’s sin is to say to the other that I have done something wrong to you and to say this for the one you speak to. Such a true confession is other-oriented. We can see this especially in how it makes the confessors vulnerable. Think of Augustine awkwardly admitting to mixing sex with friendship or to having bailed on his concubine and rushed off to find someone to fill the gap. Confession reveals oneself in an unflattering way such that one is open to being hurt but also open to what can arise from the other: forgiveness.

The confession of fault is only operative within the context of praise. Augustine prays, “let me confess my disgraceful deeds to you, and in confessing praise you.” We confess our faults not only because we have failed, but because we think others are worthy of our confession. “Great are you O Lord and worthy of all praise,” Augustine begins his confession. The whole work is saturated with praise of God. But we might miss another aspect of praise in the book. As the narrative develops, Augustine increasingly praises other people: Nebridius, Alypius, Monica, Ambrose, Adeodatus, the drunk beggar, his former concubine. To love another is to be able to speak the good of them. Augustine does little to none of that early in the Confessions, but increasingly speaks in praise of those around him. Language then is a gift not only in that we give the truth to others but that we give the truth in praise of them.

We give this gift of praise (adoratio) as the confession of love. It is not enough to love someone; we must tell them that we do. Augustine’s Confessions are a work of love for God. Confessing to God he often wonders why he is telling God these things. Why confess to God the truth, our faults, our praise, and our love? God already knows. I want to propose an analogy. Every time I get off the phone with my mother, every time I get home to my wife, every day I pick up my kids, I tell them that I love them. They already know. Heck, I started telling my mother that I love her during the Reagan administration. So why do it? Because love cannot help but communicate itself. Loving our love for the beloved, one loves to tell them. We should all tell others and God that we love them more. God may not need to hear it, but others do, and we need to say it.

Open Wide Our Hearts to Another

It is here that I want to close with the love of God. For Augustine, there is something unique about the love of God. To love God truly will inevitably lead you to love others. As Augustine writes in his Homilies on the First Letter of St John, “Love is God. It must be that whoever loves God loves his brother.” For Augustine, to love God is to love Love and so in loving Love to love others. To love Love without loving those that Love loves is not to love Love. Thus “if you do not love your brother whom you see, how can you love God, whom you do not see? “All things are made by God, are contained in God. To love the Creator must summon forth the love of others because God created them. To love God is to love someone besides yourself and so to be enabled to love all those other someones who are besides us.

Augustine opens his Confessions with the prayer, “the house of my soul is too small for you to enter; make it more spacious by your coming.” Augustine’s heart is too narrow. His skinny heart is too full of what Iris Murdoch calls the “fat relentless ego.” His prayer is that God make his heart big enough to love another beyond his own amor sui. To make our heart big enough for God must inevitably make our hearts big enough for our neighbors precisely in that our heart is being enlarged to contain the One who contains all things. To have God’s charity poured into our narrow hearts widens those hearts for the love of others.

We are always late in this, always not quite big enough in our loves. And so we can pray with Augustine: God I was late in loving you, but you were always on time. I was too busy not loving you but instead loving the good things I could get out of you. Yet even in my lateness and amor sui, your Love was working on me. You touched me and I fell in love not with myself, not with my loving, not with my own image, not with the good I could get out of you, but with you. You, not as anonymous, interchangeable, mirror to myself, but You broke through my amor sui and in so doing, you taught me how to love not just myself but my God and my neighbor. As you have taught me, so continue to teach me to love someone besides myself.


[1] This paradoxical union of dependence on the one we dominate was later expressed in Hegel’s and Marx’s articulation of the master-slave dialectic.

Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer