A new book Charity after Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West (OUP 2025) explores why the Augustinian traditions’ efforts to promote solidarity and social cohesion have led to bad outcomes just as much as good ones in the Latin West. This book examines how Augustine’s understanding of love has been put into practice and tries to offer a non-idealized view of love that can promote solidarity without trying to force inclusion. Below is an interview with the book’s author, Jonathan D. Teubner, about what his biggest takeaways are in writing this book and what it helped him realize about Augustine.
Q: When did you first read Augustine and do you remember what your first impression of him was?
Teubner: In high school, I first encountered Augustine within a Calvinist milieu that was perhaps more intellectualist than some. Augustine was a primary figure, mostly the sin-and-grace version so beloved by Protestants. Yet that early exposure was, in retrospect, a narrow, even distinctly American Augustine, with its binary debates and presumed universality. Reading Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church later, I recognized the Augustine in Schaff’s portrait – it was almost point by point what I had come to know of Augustine. My real turning point came at Yale Divinity School, when I had the opportunity to do a directed readings course on Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos. There, I encountered a richer Augustine—an attentive exegete, spinning profound metaphysical insights through his reading and preaching of Scripture. To some extent everything I went on to subsequently write on Augustine has been informed by Augustine’s expositions of the Psalms.
Q: Your new book Charity after Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West looks at how attempts at building social cohesion and solidarity since the fall of Rome have often resulted in disaster. What are some of the key lessons we can learn about why historically this has been the case?
Teubner: I’m somewhat hesitant to derive key lessons from this history, not just on historiographical grounds but because political and social conflict is so deeply enmeshed in particular, local histories and personalities that it’s hard to transfer much from one context to another. But if I were pressed, I’d say that we can’t truly understand much about the nature of conflict without appreciating the ways that transcendent commitments get translated to and instantiated in particular practices. In my experience, there is almost always a religious backstory to socially and politically important practices. This is partly why they have so much staying power within communities – they are grounded in something that transcends the contingent realities of their community. These practices – say, the distribution of charity to the poor – can be genuine forces for good. But they can also become powerful tools of manipulation and control. The “repair,” if you will permit me to use such language, is not to cut off charity or “neutralize” it within a state apparatus, but rather to focus on the ways that the religious backstories went awry. In the pocket of the policy world in which I interact – analysis of non-state actors in certain national security problems – there is a great need for theological sensitivity. Fortunately, some policymakers are starting to pay attention to the spiritual and religious dimensions of our crises. But, I think, those of us with theological and religious training can do more to engage policymakers on the more fundamental problems.
Q: You argue that practices of charity can work to help build solidarity. Can you explain more about how these practices of charity work and how you think they might be put to use today to help in our polarized moment?
Teubner: This is actually one of the more complicated parts of the books because I think Augustine shows us that practices of charity (qua practices) can’t build solidarity in any straightforward way. I wish it were more straightforward, or that the practices could automatically issue into beneficial outcomes, but the sheer messiness of attempting to implement some program or to put virtue into practice draws us into so many contingencies and complications. But Augustine – as well as Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux, both of whom I look at in the second part of the book – does show us some helpful problematics to think through how practices of charity might be put to use today. The practices of charity can help build meaningful, durable, and expandable solidarities when re-imagined as participation in the ongoing practice of granting and receiving forgiveness, a re-interpretation of almsgiving that Augustine offers later in his career. This has, I think, profound implications for our politics. I don’t think our political lives can really go on without learning (anew?) how to forgive – something that is perhaps most difficult and challenging for us in the United States at the moment, when moral righteousness runs high. Forgiveness as a verbal or psychological event alone cannot re-form solidarity, as is evidenced by the failure of some recent attempts to heal wounds through public confessions. It requires, at least in the formulation found in Augustine, something like an almsgiving exchange – it has to be paired with incorporative practice. When forgiveness is realized in and through the charitable community, it allows for those whose pain and trauma cannot be settled within the contours and limitations of this world to still discover bonds of peace with others.
Q: Your book claims that a non-idealized view of love can inform thick, meaningful relations within a community. Why is love a more useful framework rather than tolerance, friendship, or common interests?
Teubner: Love is a really messy framework. Tolerance, friendship, and common interests are actually much easier to use in some respects. But they each have a kind of natural limit to them – they are restricted in scope and more easily separated from other parts of our lives. Love, however, infuses the whole of life, and can’t really be restricted to one domain or another. In the Augustinian tradition, love is woven into the very fabric of existence. But by being so, it is just as messy as our communities. In this respect, love is what we need to attend to if we actually want to repair our communities because it is, in corrupted forms, found at the sites of conflict and violence. And because corrupted love is so often found in these places of manifest failure, often of a political system and its processes, there are good reasons to be suspicious of simplistic frameworks and proposals to insert love (or rather a love discourse) into our politics. I go into this a bit in the introduction when discussing Hannah Arendt’s criticism of Augustinian love and some more recent responses, including Eric Gregory’s sophisticated recovery of a politics of love. From my vantage point now, I would say that we need to make sure we aren’t just licensing a conceptual scheme to be manipulated and abused by whoever happens to be articulate enough to gain the attention of others. We need to tie our conceptualizations to concrete practices that help to hold us accountable for their outcomes, something I don’t actually see being really possible (or maybe even desirable) for tolerance, friendship, and common interests.
Q: Your work illustrates that Augustine remains influential for thinking about politics today. What is one thing in particular you think Augustine can teach us that our current culture overlooks?
Teubner: Augustine is indeed having a moment in our politics. It was just over four years ago that we heard a president invoke the City of God in his inauguration speech. I think Augustine can help us think through some of our core dilemmas we are facing at the moment in our politics, especially how we might generate solidarity while avoiding the temptation to pre-define who counts as “us.” When writing the book, I was actually thinking quite a lot about Richard Rorty’s call for a “we” that is “dedicated to enlarging itself, to creating an ever larger and more variegated ethnos.” I think Rorty is directionally right, and I think he also takes more seriously than most the appeal of traditional forms of solidarity. But his “we” is still one of a fixed identity. The solidarity Augustine pursues in the final stage of his career, when he was occupied by concerns that arose from Pelagius and his followers, is one that is not found in some kind of natural or artificial social division. Rather, it is made in and through the practices of giving and receiving alms, in and through giving and receiving forgiveness. It is thus not best seen as an identity, but rather a commitment to enter into a long-term practice. I think, in many respects, our culture is searching for some be-all, end-all solution in our politics – if we just elect this candidate, pass that law, enforce these rules … Augustine cautions us against such aspirations, and instead returns us to the slow, hard work of living together in the give and take of offense and pardon.
Q: Did you learn anything about Augustine (or yourself) in the process of writing this book?
Teubner: I definitely learned a lot about both Augustine and myself in writing this book. I mention this at one point in the acknowledgements, but my life was considerably disrupted by some major international moves as well as co-founding a company that leveraged some of the research I did at UVA on tracking religious violence. Over the course of writing this book, mostly in Berlin, where I was based for the better part of four years (and meant to be writing a book on Adolf von Harnack), I was toggling between meeting the demands of a company that was growing faster than I had imagined and fulfilling my faculty duties as a member of the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University and then later at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, where I’m now happily based. Relocations between Melbourne, Berlin, and Cambridge, MA and the demands of toggling between intellectual and more “practical” endeavors made me appreciate how hard-won Augustine’s intellectual life was. Any scholar with significant administrative duties would surely also be able to appreciate how difficult it is to shift from practical affairs to the life of the mind. But Augustine was doing this day after day, night after night, for pretty much his entire career. Until I experienced something similar, I didn’t really appreciate just how much of the practical stuff informed his writings, even those speculations that seemed to be as far from worldly affairs as they could be. Equally, I didn’t realize just how helpful it was to be able to draw on some concrete experiences and contexts to think through the social and political implications of Augustine’s teaching on charity and its practices. I think I actually needed some kind of engagement outside the university to be able to write this book.
Q: Are there any questions that you have since writing this book?
Teubner: One thing that has regularly emerged since finishing the book is the profound gap I think we have in understanding what the human person is to Augustine. There have been some attempts here and there at discerning the outlines of an Augustinian theological anthropology. But I think if what I have attempted to say in this book (as well as the previous one, Prayer after Augustine) can really hold together as a coherent account I need to have a better sense of how the bodily and material intersect with the spiritual and intellectual in the human person as he is embedded in communities and creation. I’m starting to think about the third book in this little trilogy I devised on Augustinian Christian existence based on the three practices of prayer, charity, and fasting. I think there is something in Augustine’s reflections on fasting that might help excavate the missing piece of Augustine’s theological anthropology.
Q: Do you have a favorite passage from Augustine’s writing?
Teubner: No, I don’t think I do. I think I might have a preference for a certain kind of Augustinian mood of questioning, one that is captured by sequences in the Confessions. I’m thinking in particular of book ten – mihi queastio factus sum, “I have become a question to myself” – and perhaps also, as a kind of photo negative of this mood, the episode of Augustine’s joining his friends for some rather harmless pear-stealing in book two. That single episode, surely informed by the tradition of Menippean satire, calls into question so much of what Augustine was attempting to do when building and nurturing community.
Jonathan D. Teubner is Research Faculty at the Program on Human Flourishing in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. In 2022, he founded FilterLabs.AI.
