by James Wetzel, Ph.D.
They say there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life —
Louise Glück
“Persephone the Wanderer“
I have been trying to think Augustine’s thoughts for the better part of four decades. This is not because I disdain my own. It is simply to admit that Augustine has served me as a much needed horizon for my thinking for nearly the entire course of my adult life. When I find myself at a loss to say another word about God or soul that doesn’t sound like a further footfall into pretentious nonsense, there again is Augustine, traveling well ahead me, venturing the prospect of nonsense for the sake of an unsettling truth. While I do not think that truth always has to be unsettling, when it comes to big truths about the beginning and end of life itself—truths that collect like filaments around the lodestone of divine mystery—I am inclined to expect unsettlement. This is because life exceeds comprehension, and still we are called, specifically as knowers, to love incomprehensible things. Augustine reminds us that we have been made to take primal delight in the bottomless well of our being, even as we haul around, like some benighted pack mule, the burden of having to die. “We who are a part of your creation want to praise you, domine, and we travel in circles,dragging death with us and the testimony of our sin—that you resist our being above it all.”1
Well, I am only into the second paragraph of this reflection, and already I feel as if I am hauling Augustine into the cloud—and not a very mystical one—of my unknowing. I do, however, take some methodological consolation from this sentiment of his, voiced at the end of one of his elusive attempts to pin down God: as remote and present, as beautiful and yet terrifying, as the unchangeable change-maker, as neither old nor new, as serenely angry, as lovingly just, as the paradoxical redeemer of what has never been lost. The list goes on. But its circular logic never shows any sign of straightening out. Augustine wonders whether his words have carried any meaning. Then, all of a sudden, he delivers this warning (on God’s behalf): “Woe to those who keep quiet about you just because those who can’t speak (muti) chatter on.”2 So, if I follow the sentiment here, there are those who can’t speak about God but do (a bad thing) and those who don’t speak about God but can (also a bad thing).
I have been, still am, on both sides of this particular fault-line. But I take from Augustine, whether fairly or not, some encouragement to wed my often interiorized desire for truth to my imagination’s capacity for extroversion and invention. Yes, it is possible, perhaps inevitable, that the desire for truth slips into a need for security and becomes something else. It is even more likely for the imagination to turn in upon itself and become a very exclusive club. But here we are, still on earth, still hauling our mortality around in circles and still looking to praise the truth that is well beyond having. It is best, I think, if only for the sake of some methodological consistency, that I try to illustrate rather than further explicate what I have in mind.
Mainly, I want to talk about angels. But I don’t profess to speak from authority here. I know little about the angelic realm, certainly nothing indubitably first-hand about life in the heaven that exists beyond the sky (the caelum caeli) or, on a different reckoning of who or what counts as an angel, nothing about the hell that heaven births in (or perhaps as) the unfathomable darkness of first night. What I do know something about is what Augustine has to say about angels. He believes them to be beings of primordial light. They convey, and in a certain sense become, the fatherly perfection that runs electric throughout self-undoing matter and that checks the earth’s return to “welter and waste and darkness.”3 Angels, as a rule, manage to delineate neatly two perspectives on the created order. Look at a thing against its divine backdrop. The light overwhelms. The thing disappears. This is morning in God’s good kingdom. Now look away from God (assume you can). The thing disappears again; this time it slips imperceptibly into the nihil. This is evening. As one day of creation unfolds into the next, angels remain indisposed to hold on to separate being. They are, like the order of being itself, a choir. But I say this too late. For there was the part where a host of angels—we call them “demons” in retrospect—grasped for separate being, a world of one, and imagined somehow a home. The actual take-away has been lives locked outside of lives and the emergence of a never-to-be-undone disaster area. Hell is for good.
There is much to ponder in Augustine’s angelology, but for my purposes in this short essay, I aim to keep my focus narrow.4 Here is what draws me in. Augustine attempts, with limited success, to account for the conditions of an angelic fall. (I have in mind mainly book XI of City of God and especially civ.11.13). The task is challenging because it remains hopelessly caught up in a dilemma. Either conceive of the angels as having been equally gifted at their inception and concede the arbitrariness of the thought that some angels, but not others, fall. Or turn the fallen angels into a benighted class, lacking from the start in some essential virtue, and give the demons something real to complain about. Augustine isn’t terribly concerned about securing a resolution to this dilemma, for he deems it no part of Catholic dogma to have the right view of the angelic fall and the rift that results in heaven and hell. What really matters to him—and this he does consider doctrinally essential—is the right view of how a story of an angelic fall must inevitably end. It is a kind of devil-you-know thing: “What Catholic Christian doesn’t know that no new devil will ever emerge from the good angels and that the old devil will never rejoin that angelic host.”4
The problem with Augustine’s ad hoc dogmatism is that the ending of the story, for the angels at least, doesn’t with fit the story’s antecedent possibilities. In keeping with some of those possibilities, I am inclined to entertain the idea of fallen angels who come to see that the separate being business is a losing proposition. They cease to invest in their own demonization; it has become no more for them than the death rattle of sin within, passing through. And so they await confidently the full restoration of the light. Meanwhile, the steadfast angels—think of them as elder brothers in a prodigal’s tale—begin to reflect on the down side of winning. It becomes painfully evident to them that they lose the ones they defeat. And if the lost ones are still as beloved as they must have been while singing in the celestial choir, what then? I imagine unfallen angels resolving to fall out of heaven in order to carry out an extraction mission in hell. (I leave it to you to decide how close hell is here to earth. It is worth noting that Augustine identifies the civitas diaboli with the terrena civitas—the devil’s city with a kingdom of dirt.)
Of course Augustine is free to confute my possibilities. Indeed he will want to confute them, for I am well on my way toward affirming an inter-angelic redemptive economy that is universally inclusive. Here unfallen angels give up their gated integrity and become sensitive to loss. Here fallen angels come to their senses and resist the dying of the light. Here no one gets left to languish in separate darkness. All told the picture is, I admit, radically out of keeping with what Augustine takes to be the truth. As a Catholic Christian, I should know better. Demons don’t get better; angels don’t get worse. Fair enough, but I should say, just by way of clarification, that I have not been vying to replace Augustine’s picture—or, if you prefer, the Catholic picture—with one of my own. My aim has been to imagine my way back into the strangeness of feeling the need to remove the redemptive element from the angelic drama. And remove it really in mid-story.
I don’t buy the moralist’s imperative. That would have demons being too wicked ever to be redeemed and angels too good. Growing up Catholic, I was taught to believe that not even the foulest demon, not even Satan himself, was wholly bereft of the light of the divine image. I found the doctrine compelling but also perplexing. Do irredeemable beings—demons and the damned—bury shards of divine light within unreachable inner darkness, leaving God, the light-maker, irredeemably scattered? It occurred to me early on to question the doctrine of hell. It would take decades before I would think to question my manner of parsing divine light. I had been imagining wicked beings as literally having the power to diminish the light of the imago Dei and holy beings as literally having the power to augment it. The picture is beholden to a qualified version of the moralist’s imperative. Augustine, who religiously inquires his way into incomprehensible matters, gradually freed me from the death-grip of a confident moralism. I began to hear the Gospel imperative—”be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect”—differently.6 One does not ever become perfect (the moralist’s conceit). One enters into the perfection that one already is. Such is oneness with the Father. Jesus is the paradigm: “The Father and I are one.”7
Here is a clue to the union. Go to the crucifixion scene in the Gospel of John and try to imagine what is being described there.8 A bloodied Jesus, looking down from his cross, sees his mother, his mother’s sister (also Mary), and Mary the Magdalene. We are also given to know that John, the beloved disciple, is there, standing next to Jesus’s mother. Jesus notices John and Mary together, both devastated (she, perhaps, barely able to stand; he, holding her up, but faltering). Jesus then says to his mother: “Woman, look, your son.” Pause here. If you were actually in the scene and not on the outside, reading your way in, you might have noticed that Jesus is looking at John when he says those words. He speaks out of a love that is particular, primordial, and—wait for it—perfect. But from your reader’s perspective, you have yet to see the face of God. You still have to reckon with the possibility that Jesus is looking at his mother, referencing himself, and trying to elicit from her (and the beloved disciple) a pity and a rage that befits a son so grievously wronged. You have to reckon, that is, until you don’t. There is the other part of the offering. Jesus turns to John and says, “Look, your mother.” The specter of defeat is nowhere evident in that directive. Jesus is just concerned for the well-being of Mary. He doesn’t want her to have to live alone. John gets the message. We are told that “from that hour the disciple took her to his home.”
It is not that the forces of hell aren’t at work in the scene. The setting, after all, is that of a crucifixion—a site of torture, cruelty, and death. My thought is simply that some acts of love are neither augmented nor diminished by their setting. As such they require little in the way of eschatological packaging. When Augustine insists on the strictness of the border that sets off heaven from hell, his theology can be read to be a clearing house for great, cosmos-shaping dramas: the harrowing of hell, the resurrection of the dead, the life of the world to come. Without wishing to deny the interest or the importance of this Augustine, I have been exploring a different possibility, albeit still, I think, in persona Augustini: that first love—snaking preemptively through angelic division—falls beyond redemption. But not because it is bad.
Footnotes
1 At the very beginning of the Confessions, conf. 1.1.1, Augustine speaks of a human being as always “carrying around” (circumferens) its own mortality and the testimony of its sin. I follow Sarah Ruden (her 2017 translation) in my inclination to hear “circumference”, and hence “circle,” in circumferens. There is a certain amount of futility that goes along with traveling in a circle.
2 conf. 1.4.4: et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt. The religiously serious philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, thought of Augustine’s Confessions as quite possibly “the most serious book ever written. “ Wittgenstein was especially enamored of the “et vae” line, in conf. 1.4.4. Here he is offering his student, M. O’C. Drury, some translation advice: “But this translation in your edition misses the point entirely. It reads: ‘And woe to those who say nothing concerning thee seeing that those who say most are dumb.’ It should be translated, ‘And woe to those who say nothing concerning thee just because the chatterboxes talk a lot of nonsense.’ Loquaces is a term of contempt.” For the exchange between Wittgenstein and Drury over Augustine, see Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) pp. 104-105.
3 Gen 1:2, trans. Robert Alter (New York: Norton, 1996).
4 I have written about Augustine’s angelology at greater length in two essays: “Augustine on the origin of evil: myth and metaphysics,” in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. J. Wetzel (Cambridge 2012), and “Angels and Demons: The Eternal Framing of the Two Cities,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine’s City of God, ed. D. Meconi (Cambridge 2021).
5 civ. 11:13.
6 The fuller context of the imperative—Matthew 5:43-48—is worth pondering. Jesus weds the perfection imperative to love of enemies.
7 John 10:30.
8 Dwell specifically on John 19:25-27.
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Dr James Wetzel is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, holder of the Augustinian Endowed Chair, and Director of the Augustinian Institute. He is author of numerous academic articles and books, including Augustine: A Guide for the Perplexed, Parting Knowledge, and Augustine and the Limits of Virtue.
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