The Dynamics of Interiority and its Moral Significance in Augustine and Iris Murdoch

Abstract

In this article, I explore the moral significance of human interiority, examining how one's inner life has moral import vis-à-vis external, observable, or public behaviour. Contrary to views that problematize interiority or introspection, pitting them against truthful self-understanding, sociality, or public moral behaviour, I will draw on Augustine and Iris Murdoch as resources for reconsidering interiority's role in moral growth. First, I will show how both depict objective, ‘public’ moral behaviour as being fundamentally contingent upon subjective, ‘personal’ judgement, deliberation, and reflection. Then, I will consider three overlapping areas of interest regarding subjectivity in Augustine and Murdoch: self-examination, humility, and love. In drawing on Augustine and Murdoch as resources for an enriched account of interiority vis-à-vis moral growth, I hope to reaffirm the significance of subjectivity for ‘public’, objective moral behaviour while re-examining settled, conventional characterisations of subjectivity and objectivity by suggesting that our perspectives and responses to questions concerning the good are irreducibly and inextricably personal.

Introduction

A crucial point of contention in philosophy and theology over the past century has centred on the questions of inwardness and introspection vis-à-vis the self, and whether interiority or subjectivity has a legitimate place in the economy of moral striving. Are interiority or subjectivity necessarily entailed in—or even beneficial to—morality, or does a focus on interiority equate to self-obsession or even obscure the importance of external, public actions towards others? ¹ While there are varieties of philosophical and theological accounts that problematize interiority, many converge in their critical interpretations of Augustine. For example, as the philosopher Galen Strawson charges, Augustine's introspection exemplifies a narrativity rife with ‘exhibitionism and sentiment’. ² Meanwhile, in theology, Colin Gunton has argued that Augustine's introspection propagated an isolated sense of the self-vis-à-vis the external relations in which human persons are situated. ³ Finally, as Charles Taylor and Phillip Cary both suggest, Augustine's interiority is characterized by a radical reflexivity that creates a private inner space that separates the self from others, even as it seeks God. ⁴

Whereas these scholars argue that interiority—especially as articulated by Augustine—encourages self-obsession or an isolated sense of self vis-à-vis others, I will suggest that Augustine ought to be understood as an innovator of interiority who provides resources for contemporary reflection on reconsidering interiority's moral significance. For Augustine, the self is always already intersubjective: to be a creature is to be created by God and for others. ⁵ Therefore, following Augustine, this article seeks to elucidate an intersubjective account of interiority which understands personal subjectivity as complementary and pivotal for public, objective moral action. To illustrate further this revised account of interiority vis-à-vis moral formation, I will pair Augustine's thought with Iris Murdoch's as a kind of diptych that explores their distinctive insights, as well as the overall picture of interiority that they both contribute towards.

Initially, Augustine and Murdoch appear to be an odd pairing given the latter's atheistic commitment and, at times, idiosyncratic views on God and religion. ⁶ Nonetheless, her philosophical writing expressed a mysticism that understood morality and progress in terms of interiority, attention, and vision. Having found in Plato the seeds of her moral philosophy, she shares something in common with Augustine, whose conversion and faith were indelibly shaped by the Platonic tradition—especially Neoplatonism. ⁷ Despite their obvious differences in religious commitment, both writers express a shared interest in the connection between interiority and contemplation, between one's inner orientation and outward actions, and in expressing their ends as gazing at a transcendent reality—for Murdoch, the Good; for Augustine, the uisio Dei. In placing Augustine alongside Iris Murdoch, a non-Christian and Platonic philosopher whose work has recently seen a surge in interest among Christian theologians, I hope both to explore how Augustine's account finds generative, enriching and previously unexplored resonances with hers. ⁸ Without eliding their differences, I aim to demonstrate how both the thought of Augustine and Murdoch might serve as resources towards constructing intersubjective accounts of interiority that challenge modern predilections toward subjective self-obsession while affirming the importance of interiority for moral and spiritual formation. Using this Augustinian–Murdochian diptych, I argue that one discerns resources for a richer, more textured theological grammar of interiority and subjectivity: one that does not constitute a form of self-indulgence which competes against sociality and love for the other—both divine and human—but complements them.

The ‘Inner’, the ‘Outer’, and the Moral in the Thought of Augustine and Iris Murdoch

In beginning to explore Augustine's and Murdoch's respective accounts of interiority, we might first address what we mean by interiority which suggests a distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. At the most basic level, acknowledging this distinction entails acknowledging an anatomical fact. As Denys Turner avers, while looking at another person's hair, dress, or bodily actions entails observations of visible anatomy, the same cannot be done with our observations of another's thoughts or feelings. Since another's thoughts and feelings are beyond our direct observation, there is an irreducible distinction between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. ⁹ Therefore, it follows that moral reflection, learning, and change—among other things—have an irreducibly ‘inward’, subjective character. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily follow that the modern pitting of subjectivity against objectivity is warranted. In what follows, I will explore the distinctive role that interiority or subjectivity plays in moral formation in the thought of Augustine and Murdoch.

In beginning with Augustine, contrary to those genealogies of Western subjectivity which claim that Augustine privileges the ‘inner’ over the ‘outer’, I believe that turning again to Augustine might reveal how subjectivity is irreducibly involved in moral self-reflection and learning, but not in a way opposed to the social or public since subjectivity is always already intersubjective. ¹⁰

Towards this, we might consider the final exchange in Augustine's De magistro (‘On the Teacher’), which examines how moral and spiritual learning emerges amidst the distinction between ‘outer’ speech and ‘inner’ understanding. Here, concluding a conversation with his son, Adeodatus, Augustine avers that the only true teacher is Christ, who ‘dwell[s] within the inner man’. ¹¹ Given that mag. begins with a discussion on signs and words but concludes with an affirmation that truth cannot be known except via Christ, who teaches us from within, it might suggest that the inner and outer are to be pitted against one another. Yet, as Susannah Ticciati suggests, this would render learning—along with moral and spiritual reflection, deliberation, and change—merely ‘as a mysterious moment of unaccountable discovery’. ¹²

In attending to the final exchange between Augustine and Adeodatus, following Ticciati, we read that Adeodatus has learned—both through Christ within and from without, via the ‘public’ or ‘external’ processes of dialogue, debate, and deliberation with Augustine. ¹³ While Augustine avers that such learning is from Christ, not himself, Adeodatus acknowledges that Augustine's words have nonetheless prompted his learning and have been confirmed by Christ's interior word of truth. ¹⁴ Rather than simply concluding that external signs are merely incidental to the infallible immediacy of inner truth, Augustine's De magistro suggests that reflecting on and learning about the Truth is more like the dialectical relation between something perceived yet not fully understood since Truth is transcendent. Thus, the Truth speaks in the accents of the particular while exceeding any particular inquriy, language, or form of life.

Augustine is not suggesting that external, visible, or ‘public’ signs and words are inherently untrustworthy—as opposed to interior truth; rather, he is elucidating how one can misperceive and thus misunderstand not only external signs, but also the Truth within. ¹⁵ Thus, for Augustine, learning and growth irreducibly depend on each learner's context and the condition of their inner life. While words prompt our learning, their efficacy hinges on our personal or subjective perception and understanding of the Truth via the inferences we might draw from words and their promptings. As Augustine suggests, the Truth is ‘disclosed to anyone, to the extent that one can apprehend it, according to one's good or evil will’. ¹⁶ Therefore, as Ticciati suggests, ‘Augustine treats the knower as an inhabitant of the world she comes to know, rather than as a detached observer of a world to be neutrally described. Her subjectivity, or inwardness, rather than being an obstacle to knowledge, is pivotal for the objective knowledge she may arrive at’. ¹⁷

Yet, while this process of moral and spiritual learning is ‘interior’, it is not inherently or ultimately ‘private’ since, in being transcendent and disclosed to all, the Truth is not private but common. Therefore, in following Augustine, we find that personal subjectivity is also ‘public’ because the transcendent Truth is always already personal. One's subjectivity is always already open to Christ, who teaches everyone inwardly and thus makes possible the very conditions for learning, dialogue, and growth. ¹⁸ Accordingly, different subjects might find themselves able to discuss and even disagree since they nonetheless share a common measure and object of attention and love. ¹⁹ Thus, following Augustine, while one's subjectivity is irreducibly particular and pivotal for learning, reflection, and ethical action, it is not ultimately private nor incommensurable with other subjects or communities given that the same Truth speaks, corrects, teaches, and confirms both in us and in different persons and communities. ²⁰ Therefore, Augustine's account of truth in De magistro suggests that the subjective is always already intersubjective and also fuses the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ since creaturely (inter)subjectivity is grounded in the transcendent Truth of Christ who invites, corrects, and joins together our irreducibly personal apprehensions of his Word. ²¹

In moving on to the role of subjectivity and inwardness in Murdoch's ethics and the surprising affinities she shares with Augustine, it is crucial to highlight how Murdoch's moral philosophy likewise accords with an Augustinian integration of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, of fact and value. Murdoch's account of interiority vis-à-vis moral reality emerged in reaction to the emotivism of A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson or the subsequent meta-ethical theories of R.M. Hare and Stuart Hampshire, which shaped moral philosophy during Murdoch's formative years. Beginning with emotivism, Ayer—and later Stevenson—launched a sea change in moral philosophy by rejecting moral realism, insisting instead that moral statements or judgements merely conveyed approval or disapproval:

The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to someone, “You acted wrongly in stealing that money”, I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, “You stole that money” … The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker. ²²

Likewise, Stevenson argued that moral language—rather than stating moral truths or facts—simply communicated one's moral beliefs, values, and attitudes en route to action. ²³ Against this increasing separation between moral facts and values, Murdoch argued that this view risked reducing moral disagreements merely to personal differences of choice or preference, thereby threatening to abnegate moral discourse amidst disagreement. ²⁴ Fundamentally, for Murdoch, the fact–value distinction that pits subjectivity and objectivity against one another appears unsatisfactory and thin precisely because it risks ignoring how ‘perception itself is a form of evaluation’. ²⁵

Murdoch instead argued that ‘moral differences look less like differences of choice, given the same facts, and more like differences of vision’. ²⁶ Just as sensory perception can disclose certain aspects of an independent, common world, so Murdoch proposed that moral perception can offer insight into the moral character of agents and our world. ‘Man’, as Murdoch suggests elsewhere, ‘is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture’. ²⁷ Moreover, moral perception is neither reducible to volition nor simply—as Simon Blackburn suggests regarding moral perception—‘a mysterious ability to spot the immutable finesses of things’; ²⁸ rather, as we will soon explore, it is a sense of moral appreciation that can be trained, cultivated, and even practised towards excellence with reference to the Good.

Accordingly, cultivation and training are crucial to the kind of non-dogmatic moral realism that Murdoch proposes given her recognition that human persons are ‘naturally and largely given to fantasy’. ²⁹ By this, Murdoch refers to one's egoistic tendency to see and understand the world principally in reference to oneself, rather than as it truly is and as something that cannot merely be collapsed into the sphere of our own wants, needs, and judgements. ³⁰ Thus, Murdoch avers that right moral action emerges ‘not out of strength of will but out of the quality of our usual attachments’. ³¹ This process inextricably involves both ‘public’ behaviours and ‘private’ or inner intentions, thoughts, and mental images. Thus, for Murdoch, because our inner life is so often marked by egoistic fantasy, it follows that our principal and most pernicious enemy with regards to moral progress is ‘the fat, relentless ego’. ³²

Rather than reducing ethics simply to publicly verifiable moral behaviour or language—thereby regarding the ‘inner’ as merely incidental or even illusory vis-à-vis ethics—Murdoch insists that ‘[t]he inner needs the outer and the outer needs the inner’. ³³ For Murdoch, moral philosophy cannot pit subjectivity and objectivity against one another since the kind and quality of an agent's moral acts are contingent on their subjective perception and judgement.

Of course, as we shall soon see, Murdoch's account differs from Augustine's: her account attends to and loves the impersonal form of the Good, not Christ. Nonetheless, we have seen that Murdoch, like Augustine, fundamentally imagines the relationship between the inner and outer as non-competitive and complementary. In doing so, both upend conventional characterisations of truth and morality as simply ‘objective’ by portraying them as being irreducibly personal and (inter)subjective. In what follows, I will now proceed to offer a constructive account of how interiority might feature in moral growth by exploring three aspects of moral psychology in which Augustine and Murdoch exhibit mutual interest: self-examination, humility, and love.

Self-Examination in Augustine and Murdoch

As Augustine confesses in Book 2 of his Confessions, his inner motivations are an ‘extremely twisted and tangled knot’. ³⁴ From childhood, Augustine observed that, although he ‘hated to be deceived’, he had nonetheless deceived himself by seeking joy ‘not in God but in his creatures, in myself and other created beings’ so that he was ‘plunged into miseries, confusions, and errors’. ³⁵ In opening up before God, Augustine recalls that his self-obsession and disordered love(s) led to unexpected results wherein seeking after and attaining the earthly goods that he hoped would truly make him happy ultimately led to disappointment. ³⁶ Accordingly, Augustine writes of two competing desires within him so that when he is lifted towards the Truth, he also finds himself weighed down by disordered desires, loves, and habits cultivated in his temporal life—thus describing the distentio animi. ³⁷

As Augustine writes in De libero arbitrio voluntatis, it is human weakness under the conditions of sin that move one ‘to approve false things in place of true, so that a person may fall into error despite himself, and to be unable to restrain oneself from lascivious deeds’. ³⁸ Contrary to a classical figure like Plotinus, who approached his inner world with confident reassurance, ³⁹ or a later Enlightenment figure like Rousseau, who began from a confident recollection of the past, ⁴⁰ Augustine knew all too well the pitfalls en route to truthful self-knowledge due to one's sinful propensity towards self-deception and self-aggrandizement. ⁴¹ While everyone desires the beata uita, since the human person is, on account of sin, incuruatus in se, one is always prone to a kind of self-obsession and self-deception that obscures one's true happiness in God. ⁴² Therefore, for Augustine, it is only in laying open his heart and memory before God that he might be healed and made whole, in time and by grace. ⁴³

Yet how can one do this if they are self-deceived and self-absorbed? For Augustine, it is only God who can show one's full true self to themselves—and God often does this by surprise. ⁴⁴ As Augustine recounts in Book 8 of Confessions, God ‘took me up from behind my own back’ so that if he tried to escape, God ‘thrust me before my own eyes so that I should discover my iniquity’. ⁴⁵ Only in an ongoing, transformative (re)orientation to the presence and action of God, to whom all creatures are already related, can Augustine properly learn to love God, as well as other created beings and himself in God. ⁴⁶ As Charles Mathewes astutely notes, while the relation between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is frequently problematized by modern thinkers, it is not an anxiety that Augustine himself shares; rather, as Mathewes writes, Augustine's anthropology holds that ‘at the core of the self is another, God’. ⁴⁷ Therefore, following Augustine, one is already related to God and thereby engaged in the world—as opposed to ‘moving outwards’ from a self-contained, ‘private’ interiority. Thus, human subjectivity or interiority is not ‘private’ self-obsession in competition with one's love for God and other creatures but complementary to such love since creaturely subjectivity is always already intersubjective. Since one's interiority is pivotal to the conditions and possibility of moral learning, self-reflection, and growth, it is also ‘public’ since a change in one's inner life has profound significance for how one loves others. ⁴⁸

In considering the crucial importance that Augustine attributes to subjectivity vis-à-vis moral and spiritual learning, the importance of self-reflection, examination, and confession becomes clearer. For Augustine, this refinement and reorientation occurs in the examination of conscience, that inner realm of subjectivity which is always already coram Deo. ⁴⁹ As Augustine avers, while one's speech and behaviour are public, one's motives and judgements are hidden from others, and perhaps even to oneself, yet open to God. Thus, on one hand, we might be careful of impugning bad motives to others while also testing and refining our motives and judgements before God. ⁵⁰ Since, as Augustine knows, it can be all too easy to evade and avoid the uncomfortable acknowledgement of sinful wrongdoing, an examination of conscience, illumined by Christ, becomes an exercise in practical reason. ⁵¹ Thus, while Augustine may confess that while he is ‘absent’ to God, he is ‘more present to [him]self than to God’, his self-awareness is always already illumined, even in his distended distraction from God, by the ever faithful God in whose light he sees light. ⁵² In advocating for self-examination, Augustine turns to Jesus’ parable of the wise virgins (Mt. 25.1-13), whom he analogises as those vigilantly attending to Christ in their consciences. ⁵³ The fruit of this self-examination is that we might evaluate the voices of others, and our own, in light of the inner Teacher and thereby act in accordance with the Truth—even in personally costly ways. ⁵⁴ Such self-examination, which is inextricably in dialogue with the Truth, reveals how interiority's role vis-à-vis moral growth begins ‘privately’, yet ultimately helps one to love better ‘publicly’.

In Murdoch's reading of Augustine's Confessions, she gestures to her affinity to Augustine by expressing her appreciation for how he emphasizes ‘the importance and ambiguity of motivation, the dense and fallen nature of the soul, so subject to selfish habit, so precariously and imperfectly free … pictur[ing] our consciousness as existing continuously in the presence of God, continually aware of sin and the necessity of prayer’. ⁵⁵ For Murdoch, Augustine's picture of the self is a realistic one given the pervasive presence of egoistic fantasy. However, this is not to suggest that (self-)reflection has a negative role in Murdoch's moral philosophy since, as her example of ‘M and D’ suggests, it is also the crucial arena and means by which moral learning and change occur. Murdoch's famous example of ‘M and D’ features a mother-in-law (‘M’) who feels hostility to her daughter-in-law (‘D’), believing her to be unpolished, undignified, and juvenile, and yet in no way acts outwardly unkind to her. In other words, M's judgements do not, from the observation of D or other onlookers, generate any outward suspicion or harm. ⁵⁶ However, as Murdoch continues, if M is ‘capable of self-criticism’ and ‘capable of giving careful and just attention’ to D, she might find that her vision of D changes. ⁵⁷ M might say to herself, “‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again’”. ⁵⁸

For Murdoch, M's change in her vision of D—even if it, hypothetically, involved no changes in her outward behaviour towards D—constituted moral progress, generated through critical self-reflection and attention to D that could break through her previous, coherent-but-false ‘fantasies’. ⁵⁹ For Murdoch, echoing Simone Weil, such attention is ‘a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’. ⁶⁰ Similar to Edith Stein's account of empathy as the experience of imagining the point of view of a foreign consciousness, loving attention brings one to ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’. ⁶¹ Moreover, for Murdoch, love—which I will explore more fully in the final section of this article—begins with an introspection that demands both attention to the other and that is open to discerning and confessing self-deceit and error.

Moreover, while Murdochian attention and self-examination might involve discipline, it is not so much a sudden, deliberate choice as it is an act of seeing which can surprise us:

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important … ⁶²

Such an experience, for Murdoch, is an ‘unselfing’ that breaks what she believes is a false picture of the solitary moral agent through a self-forgetful delight in the reality of others and the world. Yet, without meaning to elide the differences between her and Augustine, I do not believe that Murdoch circumvents the potential pitfalls of subjectivity by advocating an account of unselfing as self-abnegation or as a kind of self-transcendence that somehow ‘escapes’ each moral agent's particular first-person perspective. While Murdoch is acutely aware of interiority's dangers on account of egoistic fantasy, her account of unselfing is not quite a ‘view from nowhere’ nor does it quite envision the self's circumvention in simply ‘receiving’ the world: rather, unselfing is something constructive and irreducibly personal, even in its dispossession. ⁶³ Because Murdoch considers human beings to be imaginative creatures, constitutionally, the crux of the matter is not whether we fixate and create images but the quality of those images. So, whereas fantasy conjures a world that one is always at the centre of, attentive unselfing fosters a creative imagining that joins oneself with the reality of the world. Thus, in Murdoch's kestrel example, she concludes that attention can ‘clear our minds of selfish care’—not that attention clears our minds of ourselves. ⁶⁴

Moreover, as the example of M and D suggests, ‘looking again’ necessarily involves the disciplines of self-criticism, introspection, and deliberation in a dialectic that attends to the other and questions oneself. Accordingly, Murdochian unselfing is also ‘looking again’: thus, it is a progressive and ‘endless task’ of loving what is particular, which is irreducibly personal and self-involved. As Murdoch writes,

The world is not given to us “on a plate”, it is given to us as a creative task. We work, using or failing to use our honesty, our courage, our truthful imagination, at the interpretation of what is present to us, as we of necessity shape it and “make something of it”. We help it to be. We work at the meeting point where we deal with a world which is other than ourselves. ⁶⁵

Therefore, Murdochian imagination is not so much an unselfing that abnegates the individual within an objective order but entails the self's integration and participation in building up a moral world that it can properly join. Like Augustine, Murdoch acknowledges that our attention to reality always involves ourselves even in dispossession, transcendence, and growth. Towards this, then, interiority can foster moral growth through critical self-reflection that works against self-deceit and egoism in light of God or the Good.

Humility in Augustine and Murdoch

Integral to such self-reflection, for both Augustine and Murdoch, is the virtue and practice of humility. For both, humility is a kind of submission—though, as we shall see, their accounts exhibit a striking difference. While Murdoch understands humility as a kind of submission to an impersonal Good, Augustine's account of humility is nothing less than one's orientation and conformity to the incarnate Christ—which provides his account of humility a more recognizable pattern as opposed to Murdoch's.

For Augustine, humility (humilitas) is a crucial moral virtue involving the proper recognition of one's limitations and weaknesses. ⁶⁶ Accordingly, humility is not simply a static, other-oriented or self-effacing trait or virtue; rather, it entails a dynamic process through which human pride is graciously healed and transformed by the incarnate Christ. In his City of God, Augustine attributes human sin ultimately to human pride, which nurtures an appetite for a perverse kind of elevation and thereby refuses relationships of mutuality and dependence—instead resorting to a kind of domination that selfishly exploits another's dependence for one's own pleasure. ⁶⁷ Since Augustine understands pride as sin's source, humility is the necessary salve to heal and re-order human desires and loves from disorder, isolation, and domination, thereby lifting us towards God. Accordingly, Augustine describes humility as ‘most highly praised in the City of God and commended to the City of God’ and is most clearly seen in Christ. ⁶⁸ Therefore, Augustinian ‘humility’ is best known in relation to what it is meant to cure: pride, which inhibits one from right relationship with God, others, and themselves, and which entails one's embrace and imitation of Christ. ⁶⁹

In understanding that, for Augustine, the way up is down, we must also attend to how he came to understand Christ as the exemplar of humility. For example, we might attend to Augustine's encounter with the humble Christ in Book 7 of his Confessions. There, Augustine writes of being caught up by God's beauty and being torn away by the weight of his sin—particularly sexual habits. Augustine's contemplation on its own is unable to produce a change in his habits or his imagination, leaving him with ‘a desire for that which [he] had the aroma but … not yet the capacity to eat’. ⁷⁰ While Augustine writes of his desire ‘to obtain strength enough to enjoy [God]’, he admits that ‘[he] was not yet humble enough’ to ‘possess my God’ since that same God is the humble Jesus, who is ‘divinity become weak’. ⁷¹ Here, humility was necessary for embracing the incarnate Christ, the true and living mediator between God and creation and the integrator of the distended, divided soul. As Book 7 of Confessions reveals, the point at which Augustine really begins to see and attend to reality, and even enter into it, is when he begins holding to Christ, recognizing him as the incarnate mediator and as the embodied, ultimate end to every aspect of human life. ⁷² Thus, per Augustine, true knowledge of God, true self-knowledge, and true epistemic virtue emerge from one's humble surrender at the feet of the incarnate Christ. Herein also lies an important Christological principle that pervades Augustine's work: the nature of the self is understood in relation to God and such knowledge builds on ‘the foundation of humility which is Christ Jesus’. ⁷³ In learning from the meek and lowly Christ, as Augustine writes in De Trinitate, one discovers how humility is stronger and safer than a ‘wind-swept’ haughtiness (potentior est enim et tutior solidissima humilitas quam uentosissima celsitudo). ⁷⁴

Murdoch too conceives of humility as a virtue marked by submission, albeit to the impersonal Good and not to the incarnate Christ. While Augustine's account of humility has a definite cruciform and Christocentric pattern, Murdochian humility does not; rather, it cooperates with attention in purifying egoistic fantasy vis-à-vis reality of others and the world. ⁷⁵ For Murdoch, humility is not ‘a peculiar habit of self-effacement’ but ‘one of the most difficult and central’ virtues since it entails a ‘selfless respect for reality’. ⁷⁶ For this reason, humility is necessary for attending to the reality of others in light of the Good. For instance, reflecting on how aesthetic or intellectual disciplines might serve as examples for moral formation, Murdoch muses on the correspondence between the humility of a student in accepting instruction and that of a scholar who ‘does not even feel tempted to suppress the fact which damns his theory’. ⁷⁷ For Murdoch, such humility inculcates in both student and scholar a courage that properly attends to reality—to love with ‘attachment or even passion’ but also ‘without sentiment or self’. ⁷⁸ If egoistic, self-referential fantasy is the enemy of moral and artistic excellence, true aesthetic or intellectual excellence which corresponds to moral excellence is that which can attend to the world as it truly is—not as we wish it to be. ⁷⁹ Thus, truly good artists in relation to their art are ‘brave, truthful, patient, humble’. ⁸⁰

It is for this reason that Murdoch calls humility ‘a rare virtue’ that is ‘often hard to discern’ except by the ‘absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self’. ⁸¹ Indeed, Murdoch goes as far as to suggest that humility is a better name for the Good than freedom or courage since it is the humble person who ‘can see other things as they are’ and is thereby the ‘most likely of all to become good’. ⁸² The reason for this is because of the way that humility coordinates with self-examination rather than simply effacing or circumventing the self. Murdoch insists that self-knowledge is important but that true self-knowledge must also entail ‘know[ing] oneself in the world’ in order to have ‘the firmest grasp of the real’. ⁸³ Thus, Murdochian humility is not so much ‘getting out of the self’ as it is about acquiring a proper and humble sense of proportion about oneself in relation to others.

So, despite their differing visions of humility, both Augustine and Murdoch conceive of humility as a virtue which enables proper self-reflection and criticism by allowing the self to recognize its limits and self-defeating vices (e.g., pride or egoistic fantasy). Yet, like their treatments of self-examination, their accounts of humility do not necessarily advocate for the self's abnegation but rather its humble reorientation in reference to God/the Good in order to properly attend to and love the other, which we will now explore.

Love and the Other in Augustine and Murdoch

For both Augustine and Murdoch, attention to the moral psychology of love takes pride of place in their final analysis of interiority's relation to moral growth. However, the objects of their attention differ significantly. In his De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine says that to enjoy (frui) something means ‘adhering with love to something for its own sake’ and to use (uti) something refers to ‘what comes into your use to the acquisition of what you love’. ⁸⁴ For Augustine, love and enjoyment should be reserved only for that which is ‘eternal and unchangeable’—i.e., for God alone. ⁸⁵ As for finite and changeable things (e.g., ourselves and other people), they should be loved not for our own sake but for God's (non propter se, sed propter aliud). ⁸⁶

One must be careful with how Augustine's uti–frui distinction is used since it can be understood to suggest that we should not love any created beings—as if loving God and loving creatures were in competition. ⁸⁷ Rather, as Augustine notes in his later writings, one's fellow creatures—e.g., one's neighbour—ought to be loved and enjoyed but in God. ⁸⁸ Thus, Augustine's uti and frui distinction is intended to point to the reality that finite creatures can only be loved as they are—not as we would want them to be. For example, in Book 9 of De Trinitate, Augustine outlines how we can love other creatures (e.g., our fellow human beings) ‘in covetousness’. ⁸⁹ Going further, he explains that it is not ‘that the creature is not to be loved, but if that love is related to the creator, it will no longer be covetousness but charity. It is only covetousness when the creature is loved on its own account. In this case it does not help you in your use of it but corrupts you in your enjoyment of it.’ Thus, one's fellow creatures, writes Augustine, ‘should be enjoyed, but in God … as you ought to enjoy yourself not in yourself but in him who made you’. ⁹⁰

Such proper enjoyment through use does not equate to a refusal to enjoy nature, good food, friendship, and so forth per se. Indeed, threads of Augustine's thought present him as having an embodied sensuality in which his memory of sensual, embodied experience not only moves him through time but also towards God. For example, in Confessions 10, Augustine's memory takes up his past experiences of delight in God's world and leads him to a fuller enjoyment of the God who has created and yet is also beyond all things:

Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God—a light, voice, odour, food, embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond for union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God. ⁹¹

For Augustine, creaturely life bears witness to and shares in eternal realities; therefore, as Augustine later remarks in De Trinitate, ‘this life cannot be lived’ without using created things by enjoying them in God. ⁹² However, enjoying others in God means enjoying them as creatures—not treating them according to the tyranny of our desires, control, or needs. As an example, in Book 4 of his Confessions, Augustine mentions an episode in which he is overcome with grief for a beloved friend. Yet, as Augustine notes, his love and grief were tied up with himself rather than for his friend; for example, at his friend's death, Augustine felt ‘weighed down’ by his own sense ‘of being tired of living and scared of dying’ rather than truly grieving for his friend. ⁹³

In remembering this episode, Augustine laments that he was foolish ‘not to understand how to love human beings with awareness of the human condition [humaniter]’; in other words, how to love humans ‘humanely’. ⁹⁴ This, Augustine reasons, is why his grief penetrated ‘so easily and deeply’ because he had poured out his soul ‘onto the sand by loving a person sure to die as if we would never die’. ⁹⁵ It is important to catch why this is such a crucial realization for Augustine; it is not that mortal, finite creatures are not ultimately worthy of our love but that we must love them as mortal, finite creatures. To treat a finite, temporal human being as something infinite and unchangeable is a kind of covetousness—which Augustine warns against—that makes them an idol which we can adore or just as easily break. Only God, according to Augustine, can bear the weight of our neediness, dependence, and oft-misdirected loves and desires.

Therefore, far from Augustine's frui and uti distinction as promoting a kind of exploitative, utilitarian perspective on our relations with others and the world, such a distinction—set in the wider ordo amoris––is meant to safeguard other created beings, human or otherwise, as they are and not simply as we would wish them to be. The desire for our creaturely objects of love to remain eternal is not inherently malformed but, for Augustine, such a desire is properly ordered when it is oriented towards and hopes securely in God. Therefore, following Augustine, loving humaniter does not entail loving in a manner that avoids risk and grief but rather it is exemplified in humbly accepting and loving fragile and finite creatures in God. ⁹⁶

To love creatures humaniter also means being able to reckon with their sinfulness and belovedness before the unchanging God—thereby freeing us to love others amid contingency, uncertainty, and disappointment. Augustine has an interesting example of this in Book 9 of De Trinitate, in which he presents a scenario whereby he feels stirred with ‘the fire of brotherly love’ upon hearing of a Christian confessor who withstood severe torture. ⁹⁷ Imagining an opportunity presents itself to meet this confessor, Augustine supposes going and speaking to this confessor, sharing his admiration and hoping to develop a ‘spiritual rapport with him’ on account of his belief in this confessor's ‘inner disposition’. ⁹⁸

Yet, if this confessor ‘confesses or carelessly betrays himself in some fashion as having unworthy beliefs about God’ or even is playing the role of confessor ‘in the greedy hope of financial gain or the vain pursuit of human praise’, Augustine writes of how his love can still remain ‘fixed on that form by which I loved him while I believed him to be like it’. ⁹⁹ Augustine is not necessarily dismissing his love for this confessor but is writing of how he might properly love this man, not as a finished saint—though Augustine might still ‘love him hoping that he may become like it’—but as he is, a sinful and beloved person. Thus, for Augustine, such a love that is humaniter allows him to, ‘at the bidding from above’, counsel and love the man before him as a man while continuing to enjoy the Good that is over them both. ¹⁰⁰

To extend this example beyond what Augustine has written—while seeking to think with Augustine—we might imagine that Augustine, in the example above, feels his love for this supposed confessor withdrawn, yet continues acting kindly and consolingly towards him. Suppose that, unknown to any observers, Augustine feels his former admiration and love transformed into derision and contempt. In this scenario, publicly performing love but feeling inner contempt for this confessor would appear inconsistent at best and, at worst, antithetical to Augustine's ideal of loving other people humaniter. ¹⁰¹ Indeed, what is morally and theologically significant for Augustine is that his inner life is never ‘private’ before God. ¹⁰² Thus, we may glean from this hypothetical scenario that to love humaniter—to love with charity and not covetousness—entails not merely external, laudable performance but also a congruence between public behaviour and personal subjectivity so that one is freed to love others rightly in God. ¹⁰³ Love of God, which transforms the self, properly frees us to love others properly amidst finitude, contingency, and risk. ¹⁰⁴

In this way, we can also note again how Augustine and Murdoch both place moral significance on our inner life because our subjectivity is never totally ‘private’: our subjective judgements inextricably condition and catalyse our public behaviour. Moreover, even if one's inner life is hidden from the view of any observers, or even if we could imagine that our inner life could be divorced from external actions (recall M and D), we always remain sub specie aeternitatis. Thus, we find that moral formation for Augustine and Murdoch is not merely about changing one's actions toward the other but also entails a change in one's affections and subjective judgements towards others as constitutive of learning to love well.

Similarly, Murdoch, when reflecting on the question of ‘[h]ow we can make ourselves better’, looks with Augustine to religion—along with modern psychology—in emphasizing ‘states of mind as well as actions’ as well as the ‘devices for the purification of states of mind’. ¹⁰⁵ Given her diagnosis of the egoistic human propensity towards fantasy—so that even self-scrutiny can be mistaken for goodness—Murdoch argues that the only means of liberation is ‘an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism’. ¹⁰⁶ Thus, such purification of vision is mediated through means that draw one's attention to an object beyond the confines of the self-referential ego. Whether one attends to art and beauty or to God through prayer and liturgical worship, one learns to foster truthful and loving attention by reorienting oneself properly to the object of our loving attention. ¹⁰⁷ In truly attending to another, we learn to recognize that others have ‘needs and wishes as demanding as one's own’, thereby protecting them from the tyranny of our own interests. ¹⁰⁸ As quoted earlier, for Murdoch, love is ‘the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’. ¹⁰⁹ Thus, to engage in the dynamically endless task of seeking to see others clearly, justly, and lovingly is a moral matter of the greatest difficulty and importance, even though such seeing is irreducibly still from our own vantage point or perspective.

However, while recognizing the resonances between Augustine and Murdoch on love, there is a crucial difference in how they understand love. Unlike Augustine, Murdoch resists identifying love with the Good given the ‘self-assertive’ nature of human love vis-à-vis how the Good, in her view, is impersonal, non-representable, and indefinable. ¹¹⁰ For Murdoch, echoing Simone Weil, the human will is so curved in on itself—and therefore prone to fantasy and deceit—that choosing is an insufficient means for moving towards the Good. ¹¹¹ Instead, for Murdoch, moral growth is akin to a kind of magnetism wherein the impersonal Good is the centre towards our love ‘naturally moves’ and is thereby purified. ¹¹² Conversely, for Augustine, the will curved in on itself can be reoriented and redeemed—rather than circumvented. Moreover, this process of ordering and transforming human volition and love is not merely via contemplation but, ultimately, in loving relation to the God who is recognized in the incarnate, humble Jesus: ¹¹³ In being loved by God in Christ, the human beloved learns to love God and, in loving God, can be (re)oriented and transformed to love those whom God also loves. While Augustine describes love as a ‘weight’ (pondus) ¹¹⁴ that ‘moves a thing in the direction toward it tends’, ¹¹⁵ his experience of love is not the magnetic pull of the impersonal Good; for Augustine, love has an indelible name. ¹¹⁶

Nonetheless, Murdoch's account of love in the moral life still shares marked resonances with Augustine's in how both find love's end in properly loving both the Good and others as they are. For Murdoch, creatures are loved analogously to Augustine's humaniter by one's attempt to ‘love what is imperfect’ so that ‘our love goes to its object via the Good to be thus purified and made unselfish and just’. ¹¹⁷ To love in such a way that we are moved to see others justly and clearly is ‘to use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it’. ¹¹⁸ Therefore, Murdoch's account of love does not find its fulfilment in enlightened self-satisfaction since it is most truly realized as ‘the creative energy required for amendment of life’. ¹¹⁹ For Murdoch, like Augustine, love grows and flourishes amidst what is quotidian: something like caring for a child or loving a difficult, elderly relation shows how love ‘joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good’. ¹²⁰ Therefore Murdoch, like Augustine, understands love and goodness as being inextricably tied to ‘the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience’—which fosters our concern for ‘what is not ourselves’ as our love moves ‘to the world through Good’. ¹²¹

Conclusion

Over the course of this article, I have argued that both Augustine and Murdoch provide resources for reconsidering human interiority or subjectivity as being always already intersubjective so that one's moral growth is inextricably conditioned by their (inter)subjectivity. Moreover, in following Augustine and Murdoch, we discover that what we might conventionally consider ‘objective’—e.g., the truth or the good—is always discerned and apprehended in the accents of the particular. This perhaps suggests, going forward, a greater need for attending to the interrelation between spiritual and moral theology in Christian theological ethics. Since to be a creature is to be created by and for others, seeking to know the good for oneself is to find oneself already joined to others seeking the common Good in our shared world. Through the cultivation of self-reflection, humility, and love, one learns or rediscovers how to live as one created by God and for others in that same good God who is interior intimo meo et superior summo meo. ¹²² Therefore, in attending to Augustine and Murdoch as inheritors and innovators of interiority, we find that interiority does not compete with or diminish one's love, concern, or engagement with others or the world; indeed, the contexts and conditions of our subjectivity are both the inescapable entry point and the crucible through which we learn, practice, and grow in love. ¹²³