Browsing by Author "Hütter, Reinhard"

For over a century, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers have debated the coherence and moral validity of Augustine’s account of self-love. What to make of statements like “Love the Lord, and in so doing learn how to love yourselves” (s. 90.6) and humanity’s ruin “was caused by love of self” (s. 96.2)? Does Augustine’s account of self-love contain an inner contradiction? And does loving oneself by loving God turn God into an instrument in the quest for self-love and happiness?

In this dissertation, I analyze Augustine’s account of self-love and its relevance for pastoral care and redefine the more than a century-old debate in three ways. First, employing Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, enriched by Augustine’s insights, I analyze the prejudgments scholars brought to this debate. I demonstrate that scholars who fault Augustine’s understanding of enjoyment (frui) with instrumentalization read Augustine with wrong assumptions. Aware of how modern utilitarianism’s emphasis on happiness could lead to the instrumentalization of people, critics like Hannah Arendt, Anders Nygren, and Oliver O’Donovan think Augustine’s usage of utilitas (“usefulness”) and uti (“use”) instrumentalizes God and neighbor. Through a detailed analysis of how uti and utilitas appear in ordinary Latin, ancient philosophy, Scripture, and Augustine’s writings, I show that Augustine uses forms of uti to describe the divine order. For Augustine, to use something is not to instrumentalize it but to love it as it should be loved: as an end in itself, situated within the higher end of loving God above all, from which every end receives its order, meaning, and purpose.

Second, situating Augustine’s account of self-love in its historical context—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the debate between Stoicism and the Old Academy about the good life, and Scripture—I refute that his interpretation of self-love is incoherent. Augustine’s understanding of self-love is grounded in the ancient ideal of therapy. In antiquity, therapy is about a new way of seeing and being in the world. Through his writings and preaching, Augustine seeks to move his readers from a competitive self-love that favors the self over others to a connective self-love that flourishes in loving relationships with God and neighbor.

Third, having established the nature and coherence of Augustine’s account of self-love, I go one step further by making explicit the implicit motivation for the entire debate: the relevance of Augustine’s interpretation of self-love for living a good life. I argue that Augustine’s nuanced understanding of self-love offers a good starting point for integrating self-care and self-denial for the common good. And in dialogue with feminist critiques of Augustine and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, I also analyze where Augustine’s account of self-love needs to be corrected and expanded.

Eucharistic sacrifice is both a doctrine of the church and a sacramental practice. Doctrinally, it explains in what manner the sacrament is a sacrifice, or at least its sacrificial dimension; liturgically, it refers to the offering that is made in the church's celebration of the eucharist, that is, who and what is offered and by whom. Since the Reformation, Catholics and Protestants have been divided over of eucharistic sacrifice, and for most of its history after the death of the Wesleys, Methodism somewhat uncritically followed in the Protestant tradition. Now, after four decades of productive ecumenical dialogue, Catholics and Methodists seek to discern the points of convergence and divergence between them on this controversial doctrine. In short, where do Catholics and Methodists agree and disagree on eucharistic sacrifice? This dissertation is a work of systematic theology that draws from the insights of several related fields: liturgical theology, historical theology, sacramental theology, ecclesiology, and ecumenism. An investigation into what Catholics and Methodists have shared with each other to date in ecumenical dialogue serves to elucidate the state of affairs between the two churches. The traditioning voices of Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley provide instances of detailed teaching on eucharistic sacrifice. Aquinas' theology has continued to inform Catholic teaching, while Wesley's was largely forgotten in nineteenth century Methodism. His theology of eucharistic sacrifice anticipates significantly the convergence that the liturgical and ecumenical movements have achieved on this topic through their attention to the theology of the early church, yet only a handful of contemporary Methodist theologians have explored Wesley's theology of eucharistic sacrifice in detail, and fewer still from an ecumenical perspective. In recent decades, Catholic and Methodist churches have circulated official teaching on eucharistic sacrifice and made significant revisions to their eucharistic liturgies. An analysis of these texts demonstrates how each church currently articulates its doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice and celebrates it sacramentally. The analysis also allows for an assessment of the current degree of convergence between the two churches on eucharistic sacrifice. The conclusion is that, first, Methodism has begun to recover a strong doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice, and greater attention to its Wesleyan heritage can only strengthen it further. Second, the two churches share more on eucharistic sacrifice than is frequently appreciated; indeed, Methodism should recognize in Catholicism a doctrine and a liturgy with which it can fully agree. Third, eucharistic sacrifice necessitates a clearly-formulated ecclesiology, which is a topic in the dialogues where Catholics can continue to prompt Methodists for deeper reflection. Convergence on eucharistic sacrifice, if recognized by both churches, would constitute a significant step forward on the path to full communion between them.

What is the relationship between evil and suffering? What is it about being human that causes us to experience suffering in the ways and to the extents that we do? What is suffering? These are questions of fundamental human importance, but surprisingly little of the vast literature on suffering deals with them directly and at length. The present work fills this gap by providing a multifaceted response from a Thomistic perspective. I show how human sufferings occur within a vast web of relationality. In the process, I also undertake a fundamental recovery of the interpersonal orientation of the human creature in Aquinas’s thought.

The framework that I develop for understanding suffering addresses the cognitive, volitional, and bodily components of our nature as deeply relational human persons who are made in the image of God. I argue that suffering is significantly constituted by the deprivation of relational goods in the natural and supernatural orders, and contextualized by other such goods. We long to know, love, and be in communion with beings outside of ourselves: especially with other personal beings, in shared enjoyment of truth and goodness; and, to a lesser extent, with the natural goodness of non-personal creation. This interior orientation points us toward the good things out there that make for our flourishing. And evils, broadly understood, are lamentable lacks and corruptions of the good things out there or of the bodily and internal goods that enable us properly to interact with and assess reality. The present work investigates the deep contextualization of suffering within our life histories and expectations, our understandings and our relational cares.

Part I frames the account of suffering by considering at length what makes for human flourishing. I make explicit the relational emphasis that is latent in Aquinas’s depiction of human nature. Part II addresses the metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology of evil and its implications for how we should understand suffering. Finally, Part III constructs a synthetic account of suffering that brings together considerations of relational flourishing, evil, and human affectivity. I end by examining what I call suffering’s tripartite encounter with evil, the role of awareness in suffering, and the notion of finding meaning in suffering. I argue, inter alia, that this Thomistic characterization of suffering supports a tripartite understanding of suffering vis-à-vis evil: There is the evil that causes suffering, the negative affect that results, and the sufferer’s often-painful awareness of these first two. I also argue that the idea of finding meaning in suffering might helpfully be understood as the possibility of new creation ex nihilitate mali—out of the nothingness of evil.

In building this account, I show why Aquinas is an underappreciated resource for understanding the dynamics of human suffering. In particular, his metaphysics of evil, combined with his relationally oriented anthropology, allows for an incisive diagnostic account of suffering. The present work also makes several interpretive and synthetic contributions to the Aquinas scholarship. My aim throughout is to develop an account that is illuminating for any theorist who seeks to better understand the deceptively complex and ever-pressing issue of human suffering.