Charity after Augustine Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West

Charity after Augustine explores why the Augustinian tradition's attempts to build solidarity in the societies of the Latin West have ended in disaster just as often as they have brought about justice. Focusing on the concrete practices of love and charity — almsgiving, works of mercy, good works — Teubner demonstrates how religious leaders attempted simultaneously to bind and hold communities together while also, in fits and starts, to expand and include others in their communities.

The first part probes Augustine' thought is put into practice, informing a tradition of political action inspired by concepts of love and enacted through practices of charity. In a second, more expansive part, Charity after Augustine turns to the ways in which the Benedictine tradition as recieved by Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux transforms this vision and puts it into practice in contexts radically different from those of Augustine's age. At the heart of this book is an attempt to find a non-idealized vision of love that can inform thick relations within a community that are not diluted but are rather strengthened by the incorporation of outsiders.

Jonathan Teubner

Jonathan D. Teubner is a member of the Research Faculty at the Human Flourishing Program in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Previously, Teubner held an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship at the Institut für Antikes Christentum at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Prayer After Augustine (2018).

I. Historiographical Intervention I1. Charity and the Formation of Spiritual Judgment2. Charity and the Limits of Unity3. Charity and the Spirituality of ReciprocityII. Historiographical Intervention II4. Benedict and the New Pastoral Arts5. Gregory the Great and Charity's Professional Demands6. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Fragmentation of CharityEpilogue: Solidarity and the Practice of Theology