Augustine’s reflections on memory, time, and eschatology remain rich sources for thinking about how humans relate to the past, present, and future – even as he also troubles standard ways of thinking about temporality. His legacy in political thought in particular has also generated ongoing debate about the degree to which “political Augustinianism” may fund hope for change in the direction of justice and love – or, conversely, enjoins “realist” perseverance. This panel features papers on Augustine's thought and “the future” broadly construed, including Augustine’s thought on time and temporality, eschatology, emotion, and social political progress.
This paper articulates an Augustinian account of hopeful expectation or future thinking that acknowledges its limits and is shaped by exemplarity to imagine and hope otherwise.
First, I argue that since our imaginations of the future are conditioned by and indexed to our memory, Augustine’s use of consuetudo (i.e., "custom"/"habit") provides resources for thinking through the historical contingencies and burdened pasts that shape our present and future expectations. Then, I note how our hopeful expectations of the future are inextricably perspectival and limited given the distorting effects of temporality. I argue that this means we need resources and perspectives other than just our own to coherently imagine hopeful futures, particularly in pluralistic democracies. Finally, I suggest how Augustine’s sermons on the martyrs provides resources for reflection on how exemplarity cultivates imaginative excellences towards expecting and hoping for a liberatory future that exceeds what we alone remember and think possible.
MarthaNussbaum describes emotions as arising from our “neediness and lack of self-sufficiency.” They are eudaimonistic, occurring only in imperfect individuals pursuing the perfective good. Nussbaum observes this same understanding in Augustine’s account of affectivity. In City of God, Augustine speaks of emotions – especially negative ones like grief and fear – as those which “belong to this life, not to the life we hope for in the future,” while simultaneously defending their moral significance, for responding rightly to good and evil. In this paper, I affirm Nussbaum’s understanding of Augustine’s treatment of earthly emotions, labeling them restless affectivity; then, I inquire about the possibility of emotion in the eschaton. Repeatedly, Augustine refers to love and joy as constitutive of eternal felicity. In contrast to the restless affectivity emerging from postlapsarian incompleteness, then, I propose another category of affectivity in Augustine’s account, that of restive affectivity, proceeding from fullness and completeness in grace.
In this paper I argue that progressivist and realist Augustinians mischaracterize Augustine’s theology of hope in ways that diminish its significance for contemporary Christian ethics and politics. Progressivist Augustinians attribute Christian hope’s realization to God’s empowerment of creation’s historical advance, compromising its credibility when environmental and technological developments provoke profound pessimism. Realist Augustinians avoid this vulnerability by ascribing Christian hope’s realization to God’s supra-historical consummation of creation, yet they construe this hope primarily as consolation for inevitable moral failure and so strip the Christian life of its teleology. By contrast, I contend that Augustine presents hope as structured by two anticipations: God’s unilateral consummation of creation and humanity’s participation in that consummation. Moreover, since such participation is constituted by love, this second anticipation orders hope to love. Augustine’s account therefore sustains hope amid historical pessimism with the realists while summoning people to do what good they can with the progressivists.