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

Through a unique blend of the personal and historiographical, Charity after Augustine explores why the Augustinian tradition's attempts to build solidarity or social cohesion in the societies of the Latin West have ended in disaster just as often as they have brought about justice. The conceit at the heart of the book is that the concrete practices of love or charity—almsgiving, works of mercy, good works—can tell us much about how religious leaders attempted to bind and hold communities together while also, in fits and starts with some startling reversions, attempting to expand and include others in a given community.

The first part probes Augustine's understanding of how love is put into practice and the ways that this understanding informs a tradition of political action inspired by Christian 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 illustrated by Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux receives this vision, invigorates it with new visions of care and leadership, and puts it into practice in radically different contexts 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, meaningful relations within a community that are not diluted by the incorporation of others.

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