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"Often imprecisely quoted, more often still [quite] badly interpreted, this celebrated formula of Augustine was pronounced by him in ep. Jo. tr. 7.8, which was preached to the newly baptised and to the faithful of Hippo [on] the morning of Easter Saturday [(Saturday in the Octave of Easter, i.e. the first Saturday after Easter)] 407. . . .
"Thanks to the simplicity of its vocabulary and structure, it was the first of his formulae to be noticed and is constantly repeated. Forgetting that it is part of an instruction on [fraternal] charity, some have invoked it, be it in favor of laxist theses, be it in support of situation ethics. Taking an uncritical stand on its first word, [some] authors have identified dilection and [the] love of God, though it is [quite] clear that Augustine has here only fraternal love in mind directly. . . .
"Gally claims that the anti-Donatist controversy is the context in which one must read the phrase and that it 'is [therefore] neither more nor less than a justification of measures of repression against Donatism'.
"This rigorous study merits every consideration, but insists too much on the most paradoxical of the applications that can be made of it [(de la maxime)] and appears [therefore] too unilateral. Poque in fact shows that ep. Jo. tr. 7 and 8 were preached on the same Easter Saturday, and that they both make reference to the reading of a long passage from Mt 5 and 6 (cf. ep. Jo. tr. 7.1; 8.2, 4). Moreover, Augustine reveals that he intends to complete on that day the moral instruction of the neophytes by addressing them on the subject of charity.
"Reread thus in its immediate context and in the light of the givens preceding, it becomes obvious that the formula was adopted by moderns who, [by] transform[ing] it into a slogan, [gave it] an exaggerated importance. It has absolutely nothing in any case [to do] with [(n'a absolument rien en tout cas d')] an appeal to the laxism that would open the door to fantasies of every sort, [but] on the contrary is perfectly integrated into an instruction on fraternal charity, its value and its demands, its attitudes and its obligations.
"Augustine proclaims once again thereby the primacy of the charity that must be found at the root of all Christian action, but adds immediately a clarification of the utmost importance for practice: this same charity can in fact inspire in the heart of the faithful behaviors as different as mercy or severity, silence or protestation, correction or indulgence, [behaviors] that must, all of them, be dictated by the true and generous love of neighbor, and take always persons, situations, and times into account. . . ."
"The first word of the sentence is an imperative that leaves no room for anything other than charity, for it [(i.e. charity)] constitutes the whole substance of the Scriptures and formulates of them the 'generalis iussio: diliges' (perf. iust. 11). The second part entrusts to the Christian the responsibility [(soin)] of expressing his love in his actions with all the prudence of his mind and all the inventiveness of his heart: 'et quod uis fac' (ep. Io. tr. 7.8)."
Marie-François Berrouard, "Dilege et quod uis fac," Augustinus-Lexikon, ed. Mayer, vol. 2, fasc. 3/4 (Basel: Schwabe & Co. AG, 1999), cols. 453-455.
Added to this should be also Giles Constable, "'Love and do what you will': the medieval history of an Augustinian precept" (1996), in The Morton W. Bloomfield lectures, 1989-2005, ed. Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, and Nicholas Watson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2010), 65-93, among other works of scholarship. Constable begins by citing (as does Berrouard), in addition to the commentary on 1 John, Serm. Frang. V, 3 (PL 46, col. 985 and Sermones post Maurinos reperti, Miscellanea agostiniana 1, ed. Germain Morin (Rome, 1930), p. 214) on Gal 6:1:
And if you speak out, love within [intus], you exhort; you coax; you chide; you rage; dilige et quicquid uis fac. For a father does not hate his son; and yet a father, if there is need, beats his son; he inflicts pain in order to protect salvation.
Here is the latter in the 1992 translation of Edmund Hill:
"So, brothers and sisters, if a man has been caught out in some
wrongdoing, you who are spiritual, whoever you are that are spiritual, instruct such a one in a spirit of mildness
(Gal. 6:1). And if you shout at him,
love him inwardly; you may urge, wheedle, rebuke, rage; love, and do whatever
you wish. A father, after all, doesn’t
hate his son; and yet if necessary a father gives his son a whipping; he
inflicts pain, to ensure well-being. So
that’s the meaning of in a spirit of mildness.
You see, if a man has been caught out in some wrongdoing, and you say,
‘It’s no business of mine,’ and I say to you, ‘Why isn’t it your business?’ and
you answer me, ‘Because each one will
bear his own burden’; then I will answer you, ‘Why, you certainly have been
willing to hear and understand Bear one
another’s burdens!’ "So then, if a man has been caught out in some
wrongdoing, you who are spiritual instruct such a one in a spirit of mildness. He, certainly, is going to give an account of
his own sin, because each one will carry
his own burden; but you, if you neglect his wound, are going to have a bad
account to give of your sin of negligence. . . .". . . do not ignore and neglect each
other’s sins. Reprimand those who have
confidence enough in you to take it; give a friendly warning to those who don’t
trust you enough to take a reprimand; and should it come to that, pray, beg
someone not to sin" [(WSA III/5 (New Rochelle,
NY: New City Press, 1992), pp. 182-183)].
The entry in the Augustinus-Lexikon caught my eye in part because I had recently watched Robert Gagnon demolish Walter Wink's use of this against him in the opening minutes of a presentation that is no longer at the URL at which I first encountered it. That said, Gagnon has since reduced this to print from p. 87 in Horizons in biblical theology 24 (2002): 72-125.
"despite building his reputation on the back of excoriating attacks on George III and indeed on the concept of monarchy itself, most famously in his incendiary pamphlet Common Sense (1776), Paine subsequently went to great lengths to defend Louis XVI. To some extent these contradictions can be ascribed to Paine's slow maturation as a writer following his incarceration in France, where he was a political prisoner under daily threat of the guillotine. Having come very near to being destroyed by the very means of violent social change he had once advocated, he began to doubt some of his radical convictions. He emerged a more modest man, no longer convinced that he was charged with a divine mission to lead people to freedom."
Jonathan Pearson, "'Tis then that man will happy be," Times literary supplement, April 30, 2010, 8.
"Scotus criticizes another axiom of Thomas: esse simpliciter est proprius effectus Dei. God alone gives esse to particular beings; creatures can only prepare for this divine gift by effecting composition. But for Scotus this is false, because every efficient cause that effects a composite [(composé)] entity causes at the same time its existence: it can therefore be the efficient cause of the esse of such a composite entity. A composite entity can be caused by an agent though God gives no being to said composite entity [(sans que Dieu donne l'être à cet étant composé)]. And reciprocally, one cannot constrain God in any way: he is absolutely free, which implies that by right, in his absolute power, he is not obliged to give [(il pourrait ne pas donner)] being to a composite nevertheless already produced by its cause: it would [then] be necessary to say that this composite both is and is not. In order to avoid these absurdities, it is necessary to recognize that to produce the composite and to give it being are two faces of the same act.
"Duns Scotus therefore rejects the traces of Neo-Platonism still present in the interpretation of Thomas, for whom absolute being (esse simpliciter) is the effect proper to God, and the [act of] being (esse), the term proper to creation. This is why God alone can create, give being to something. Because God is subsistent esse, he can give participated esse to entities that share in ens commune [(aux étants communs)] (to entia). Community in being [(La communauté de l'étant)] is at the same time the principle of causal participation in it [(sa participation causale)]. It accounts for the fact that God transcends what he has created [(le créé)]. The principle of universality is, at the same time, the principle of causality.
"For Scotus, it is very different and very simple. In the order of predication, community in being extends to everything, God included. God is included in the concept of being, which is first in the order of predication [(pp. 101 ff.)]. God is not anterior to this concept of being because there is nothing anterior to it in this order. He merits precisely the name 'first being'. But in the order of perfection, God is anterior to creatures. The two orders are coherent because in the order of causality and perfection, God is understood as an ens primum, cause of all the rest (creatures), but in the order of predication he is included in being, which is at once the first object of the human intellect and that of metaphysics. Within being, predicative object of metaphysics, there is a relation of causality between the first term, God, and the second term, the creature.
"In Thomas the two orders were coordinated: the divine, understood as ipsum esse, was at the same time a principle of community and causality. For Scotus, one order is subordinated to the other: the primacy of virtuality or causality is included in being and subordinated to the primacy of predication. This has consequences in [the following] three domains: the status of the first concept, the universality of being, [and] the inclusion of God in a concept."
"'This is why transcendental metaphysics [(Metaphysica transcendens)] is anterior to divine science [(scientia divina)], and, thus, there will be four speculative sciences: the one, transcendental [(transcendens)], and the three others, special' [(Duns Scotus, In metaphysicam I, q 1, §47 (ed. Vivès VII, 36 a))]. Thus, theology, [a] special science, is posterior to metaphysics, [the] transcendental science. We are far from the priority given by Thomas to the principle of the common esse. Here we have the first division of metaphysics into the two modern sciences, ontology as metaphysica generalis, and theology as metaphysica specialis. The first science is independant of the second, and the second is subordinated to the first. [And] this is precisely and truly what Heidegger calls an ontotheology in the second sense [(cf. p. 87 pars. 5-6)]."
Géry Prouvost, “Quand commence l’ontothéologie? Aristote, Thomas d’Aquin et Duns Scot,” Revue thomiste 95 (1995): 102-103, 105-106 (85-108). Prouvost concludes the article with a distinction between the sense in which Duns Scotus is the father of ontotheology and the sense in which Henry of Ghent is.
"The whole effort of Thomas tended towards theology. And metaphysics is for him only a program given by some definitions of science (in the commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate above all), and by his commentary on Aristotle. But he never develops a proper metaphysics. We can say still more: he did not give metaphysics the status of a rigorous science, but only [a science] in the broad sense. A rigorous science is founded on univocal concepts. But, as Thomas stresses, being is not univocal. Metaphysics does not function except with analogous terms: it is therefore a science only in a broad, supple sense."
Géry Prouvost, “Quand commence l’ontothéologie? Aristote, Thomas d’Aquin et Duns Scot,” Revue thomiste 95 (1995): 101 (85-108).
"The confession [of Heidegger] is patent: we cannot find directly the bond between ontology and theology in the works of Aristotle. This bond is produced by the interpreter (Heidegger), from an indirect point of view: it is deduced from the terminal stage of metaphysics in the philosophy of Hegel, and [then] projected back onto [(reporté sur)] the original stage of metaphysics in Aristotle, which Hegel is felt to have brought to full flower [(accomplir)]."
Géry Prouvost, “Quand commence l’ontothéologie? Aristote, Thomas d’Aquin et Duns Scot,” Revue thomiste 95 (1995): 89 (85-108).
"the inner light of faith cannot deliver the truth without a corresponding external catechesis--the one as objective as the other--a linguistically configured and propositionally structured 'form of teaching' [(τύπος διδαχῆς, forma doctrinae, Rom 6:17)] by way of which the things hoped for are received as well as passed on. This indispensable external catechetical side of the faith is not simply a speculative theological stipulation based on the composite nature of the human being. It is, on the contrary, central to the apostle Paul's understanding of faith. . . ."
"Christians are given over to the First Truth by way of the forma doctrinae, the standard of teaching, and the infused inchoatio of eternal life, faith, takes its concrete form as an act of fidelity, a deep commitment (obsequium religiosum) to the Church's teaching, to the doctrina catholicae fidei. . . . Hence, faith is not what it came to be in the wake of liberal Protestantism and a Catholic modernism eager to adopt such a notion, that is, faith as an existential, pre-conceptual act of trust, primordially and ineffably enacted in the depths of the religious subject and only subsequently expressed and confessed in community and in categories and expressions relative to the age, culture, and society in which they are made. . . . [T]he substance [(ὑπόστασις)] of things hoped for is only to be had, is only accessible, in and through the Church's living faith, which passes on publicly--for all to hear and to have--the 'form of teaching,' the typos didaches, to which one needs to be given over in baptism in order to receive in turn this new substance inwardly, the principle of the new life (the inchoatio vitae aeternae) that gives rise to the light of faith, an inner illumination which is the source of that certitude to which the intellect has to assent."
"'In embryo--and thus according to the 'substance'--there is already present in us the things that are hoped for: a whole true life' ([Spe salvi] §7). That this hope is not to be misunderstood as a romantic flirtation with a mode of religious enthusiasm Paul also adamantly maintains. The hope that does not disappoint has its exterior objective correspondence in the 'form of teaching' to which we are given over at baptism. And the profound insight that the warrant for the truth of this faith is neither subjective sincerity or piety, nor a successful philosophical argument, but the authority of the apostolic Church, is well and alive in the first generation after the apostle Paul. Either Paul . . . or one of his own very close disciples . . . characterized in 1 Timothy 3:15 the household of God as 'the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.'"
Reinhard Hütter, "'In hope he believed against hope' (Rom 4:18): faith and hope, two Pauline motifs as interpreted by Aquinas: a re-lecture of Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical letter Spe salvi," Nova et vetera: the English edition of the international theological journal 7, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 848, 851-853, and 866 (839-867).
"modern Christianity . . . has increasingly defined itself by way of the project of modernity and its characteristic hopes, in short, has come to see itself almost exclusively as the religious aspect of modernity and consequently has become oblivious and even resentful of the faith that comes from the apostles."
Reinhard Hütter, "'In hope he believed against hope' (Rom 4:18): faith and hope, two Pauline motifs as interpreted by Aquinas: a re-lecture of Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical letter Spe salvi," Nova et vetera: the English edition of the international theological journal 7, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 841 (839-867). The "characteristic hopes" of modernity are, at best, hopes in the lower case: "the hope against which Abraham believes in [H]ope is the kind of ordinary hope we can find in all human beings to a smaller or lesser degree" (855, italics mine; Hütter cites fruitfully Aquinas (n. 26) and Chrysostom (n. 27) on "Christian hope in contrast to what we might want to call 'ordinary hope'").
