Several times in Confessions books 3 and 4, Augustine describes himself as loving sorrow. He depicts this love as overwhelming him and guiding his behavior. It is part of the overall overindulgence in love that he experienced in his early life: "What was there to bring me delight except to love and be loved?"⁽²⁾ By the time he wrote the Confessions, Augustine clearly condemns his earlier love of sorrow as sinful, but does he do so because he has decided that it was an improper or misguided love of sorrow, or because he has decided that there is no proper love of sorrow? By comparing his earlier love of sorrow with his two-fold reaction to Monica's death - first reluctance to show sorrow, then an embracing of his sorrow in which he finds fulfillment - we will see that Augustine does allow for a kind of human sorrow that can be loved. In the end, as Stoical as Augustine tries to appear at the death of Monica, he ultimately condemns the Stoic position as a "ruthless insensibility" (de civ. Dei 19.8). Against the Stoics, Augustine will insist that the emotions are not just another physical or psychical disturbance or agitation that take us further from God: they are fundamental parts of the human person, and by trying to eradicate or ignore them we do not become more divine, only less human.

First, what are the occasions in these early books when Augustine describes himself as loving sorrow? He describes such feelings in relation to the theater: "The theater enraptured me, for its shows were filled with pictures of my own miseries and with tinder for my fires.... The spectator likes to experience grief at such scenes, and this very sorrow is a pleasure to him.... Tears and sorrow, therefore, are objects of love" (Conf. 3.2.2). Augustine also experiences love or pleasure in sorrow at the death of his unnamed friend in book 4: "Only weeping was sweet to me, and it succeeded to my friend in my soul's delights....Whence is it, then, that sweet fruit is plucked from life's bitterness, from mourning and weeping, from sighing and lamenting?" (Conf. 4.4.9; 4.5.10). In both cases, Augustine is clear that such a love for such a sorrow was wrong: "But in my wretchedness at that time I loved to feel sorrow, and I sought out opportunities for sorrow.... Therefore I raged, and sighed, and wept, and became distraught, and there was for me neither rest nor reason" (Conf. 3.2.4; 4.7.12).

Why does Augustine condemn these early loves of sorrow? What is wrong about them? It must first be noted that Augustine is not merely condemning here an overindulgence in emotions, nor is he condemning emotionality in general.⁽³⁾ Although he condemns his earlier emotions, Augustine would never advocate the Stoics' apatheia or impassivity. This is clear from his attack on the Stoics' views on the passions in City of God, where he shows that even pain, sorrow, and grief are part of the good life: "But since these feelings are the consequence of right reason when they are exhibited in the proper situation, who would then venture to call them morbid or disordered passions?"⁽⁴⁾ The young Augustine might indeed have benefitted from restraint, but it is not a lack of restraint that makes his early love of sorrow wrong.

It is not the excessiveness of the emotions, but their falseness and their origin in sinfulness that determines Augustine's later condemnation of them. In analyzing the propriety of his own emotions in the Confessions, Augustine focuses on three aspects of the emotions: the source or object of the emotions, the experience of the emotions themselves, and the result or goal of the emotions. Only when all three of these are correct can the total experience of the emotion be considered real and proper, as Augustine describes in the case of love of sorrow: "Now since mercy cannot exist apart from grief, is it for this sole reason that grief is loved? This also has friendship as its source and channel.... At certain times, therefore, sorrows may be loved" (Conf. 3.2.3). If true love for a real and legitimate object is what causes the sorrow, and the result or goal of the sorrow is mercy and compassion towards the beloved, then the sorrow itself may be loved.

But it is clear that the situations described in books 3 and 4 do not meet such criteria as to either their sources or their ends. This is clearest in the case of the theater, in which the object of sorrow is a deliberately false image, and the goal is not mercy, but only self-indulgent sorrow that has no legitimate end, but is only experienced for its own sake: "But what sort of mercy is to be shown to these unreal things upon the stage? The auditor is not aroused to go to the aid of the others; he is only asked to grieve over them" (Conf. 3.2.2). A similar love of improper objects is illustrated later in book 3, when Augustine describes with disgust the Manichean love and mercy towards the light particles trapped in food: "In my wretched state I believed that more mercy should be shown to the fruits of the earth than to men, for whose sake they were brought forth" (Conf. 3.10.18). Love of the theater is love wasted on a false object, and results in no act of mercy or compassion.⁽⁵⁾ The Manichean love of light particles is a misguided love wasted on a lesser good (plants), and results in wasted acts of mercy, or even in acts of callousness towards other humans: "If a non-Manichee who was sorely hungry begged a mouthful I would think it was like condemning it to capital punishment to give it to him" (Conf. 3.10.18). Both these sorrows are misguided in their objects and ends, and therefore neither could be a legitimate object of love.

In the case of the dead friend, however, the object seems less clearly false, in that the relationship is not feigned, superficial, or based on false impressions. But Augustine nonetheless believes that he loved the friend in an improper manner, because he did not acknowledge the friend's limitedness and his mortality, but idolatrously idealized him: "I marveled that other men should live, because he, whom I had loved as if he would never die, was dead" (Conf. 4.6.11). This does not make the later Augustine any less passionate in his friendships,⁽⁶⁾ it only makes him conceive his loves in their proper context, in which friends and lovers are gratefully accepted and loved as unique gifts from God: "But blessed is the man who loves you, and his friend in you."⁽⁷⁾ In terms of its goal, this sorrow is also misguided, in that Augustine does not wish for or grieve over the well-being of the friend, but only pities himself:⁽⁸⁾ "So wretched was I that I held that life of wretchedness to be more dear to me than my friend himself" (Conf. 4.6.11). Augustine's love and grief for the dead friend are therefore also misguided as to their object and goal, and such grief should not be loved.

In all this it is the falseness of his love of sorrow that so disturbs Augustine later. But this condemnation of falseness should not be seen as an innovation of Augustine's tortured middle age.⁽⁹⁾ Even in his early years, Augustine showed that he wanted this kind of integrity or reality in his life. This is shown when he refuses to participate in a magical ritual that will win him a poetry contest, not because he thinks it is ineffective or sacrilegious, but because it would effectively rob him of the victory, rendering it empty and meaningless: "Yet it was not out of a chaste devotion to you, O God of my heart, that I spurned this evil thing. I did not know how to love you, for I knew only how to think upon gleaming corporeal things" (Conf. 4.2.3). Augustine may be obsessed with earthly things, but he wants them on his own and for himself: he must win the contest, not some magician working on his behalf.⁽¹⁰⁾ Although Augustine may be full of pride and selfishness in this instance, there is a sense in which it shows an innate honesty, a need to live a life that, even if it is not good or virtuous, is real and not fake: throughout Augustine's life, misguidedness would be preferable to falsity.⁽¹¹⁾ Such honesty is also shown when the young Augustine states that he does not want to be loved because of any false perceptions: "I did not want to be praised and loved as actors are, even though I myself would praise and love them. I preferred to live in obscurity rather than to be famous in that way, even to be held in hate rather than loved as they are" (Conf. 4.14.22). Augustine, even in his youth, always demanded that others in their relations to him and to his work have a real emotion for a real object. It is therefore not a repudiation, but a development and extension of his earlier thought (and, indeed, a sign of maturity and consistency) when in writing the Confessions he can hold himself to a similarly high standard and condemn his former love of false objects.

Besides its falseness, Augustine's early love of sorrow is also sinful, according to his threefold analysis of sin around the qualities of pride (superbia), curiosity (curiositas), and concupiscence (concupiscentia carnis).⁽¹²⁾ The guiding principle and driving urge behind his love of the theater would seem to be curiosity,⁽¹³⁾ the drive that goes beyond the desire to experience the pleasurable and leads one to seek out every experience, even the painful, ugly, or destructive.⁽¹⁴⁾ But the other two aspects of sinfulness do not seem absent from this misguided love either. As indicated above, the love is proud in that it is centered on Augustine's own emotions: he only wants to feel and love his "own miseries" (Conf. 3.2.2), not those of anyone else. This is clearly the antithesis of real love, which seeks to go outside of oneself and experience another person or God. Concupiscence is also present in that the sensuality of the emotions is desired and indulged in: "Where does it [the grief] flow? Why does it run down into a torrent of boiling pitch, into those immense surges of loathsome lusts?"⁽¹⁵⁾ The young Augustine wants the feeling of emotion more than the emotions themselves.

The love of sorrow at the death of his friend also includes these three qualities of sin. The sorrow is proud, in that it is once again self-centered, as indeed it seems the whole of the friendship might have been: "Then I would deal with him as I wished."⁽¹⁶⁾ Curiosity is perhaps the least important part of this sorrow, though there is a hint that Augustine did seek out the experience: "My eyes sought for him on every side, and he was not given to them" (Conf. 4.4.9). Finally, concupiscence is the prevalent aspect of this improper love. Augustine revels in the sensuality, even the voluptuousness, of sorrow: "Only weeping was sweet to me, and it succeeded to my friend in my soul's delights."⁽¹⁷⁾ The sorrow is once again self-centered and self-indulgent.

Everything examined so far would lead us to believe that Augustine condemns his earlier love of sorrow because it was false, misguided, and sinful, but that a true and edifying love of sorrow would be possible. But at one point in book 3, chapter 2, Augustine would seem to point away from such a possibility: "Hence a certain kind of sorrow can be commended, but none can be loved" (Conf. 3.2.3). It seems to me that this statement is speaking in ideal or absolute terms, while the rest of Augustine's description is in practical terms. Augustine is here saying that one cannot love sorrow in the sense that one would not want to have things any other way, as he indicates in an example given shortly before: "Although any man who sorrows over a sinner is commended for his act of charity, yet one who shows fraternal mercy prefers rather that there be no occasion for his sorrow" (Conf. 3.2.3). This is exactly what is wrong with Augustine's love of his sorrow at the theater, for under the power of curiositas he deliberately seeks it out: "But in my wretchedness at that time I loved to feel sorrow, and I sought out opportunities for sorrow" (Conf. 3.2.4). Clearly, Augustine believes that one should not long for sorrow or seek it out. Further, Augustine indicates that God is capable of love and mercy, but not sorrow, and therefore cannot be said to love sorrow: "Such mercy is yours, O Lord God, for you love our souls with a purity of love more deep and wide than that we have for ourselves, and you are unalterably merciful, because you suffer no wound from sorrow" (Conf. 3.2.3). Augustine can say therefore that sorrow cannot be loved absolutely, since it is an un-Godly wound that comes from human weakness, but it is nonetheless a necessary part of being human, as Augustine indicates elsewhere: ".... if we felt none of those emotions at all, while we are subject to the weakness of this life, there would really be something wrong with our life" (de civ. Dei 14.9). Sorrow may be a wound, but it is a wound that can heal us in our human weakness.

Throughout his life, Augustine needed to feel profound love that was directed towards real objects: "For there was a hunger within me from a lack of that inner food, which is yourself, my God" (Conf. 3.1.1). Such love, even if it were of sorrow, would not be inappropriate if the object and goal of the sorrow were real. Such a love of sorrow is found by Augustine when he mourns for Monica.⁽¹⁸⁾ The object is clearly real, as no one doubts Augustine's feelings for Monica,⁽¹⁹⁾ though many still psychoanalyze them.⁽²⁰⁾ And unlike his previous loves of sorrow, the goal is now clearly mercy for the beloved and not self-love. Free of pride, Augustine mourns for his mother and not just for his own pain: "I took comfort in weeping in your sight over her and for her.... and I now beseech you in behalf of my mother's sins" (Conf. 9.12.33; 9.13.35). Free of curiosity, Augustine does not masochistically seek out pain, but neither does he shun it or become embarrassed by it. Free of concupiscence, Augustine no longer fears or indulges in the sensuousness of weeping, but can now embrace his sorrow for Monica and find in it completion and wholeness: "I gave way to the tears that I had held back, so that they poured forth as much as they wished. I spread them beneath my heart, and it rested upon them" (Conf. 9.12.33). Here is the perfect example of tears that do not hurt, but heal.

I end this analysis with some thoughts on the application of Augustine's insights into human emotions. When do we love our sorrow, and when should we? I think it is obvious that most of us usually love our sorrow when it is safe and meaningless to do so,⁽²¹⁾ when a movie, book, or even an encounter with another person fills us with the kind of self-indulgent sentimentality and melodrama that Augustine condemns in his youthful self: I think many of my students last year saw Titanic so many times precisely because their sorrow at this movie feels so good. But such a love of sorrow comes and goes easily, and is neither threatening nor revelatory; its convenience is indeed the antithesis of genuine sorrow, which seizes us inopportunely. Is there, or should there be, a more profound love of sorrow, as I think Augustine believes? To answer this, let me first say that I almost never include personal reflections in my work, but with a work as intensely personal and painfully revealing as the Confessions, it does not seem to me to be completely inappropriate to include them here. When I feel sorrow for my dead mother, do I love my sorrow? As usual, it depends on what one takes the implications of the question to be. If one means by the question, does my sorrow make me happy, or do I deliberately seek out opportunities to feel it, or am I glad that my mother is dead, then clearly the answer is no. Should I therefore hate this sorrow? Clearly I could, and indeed I often have, but this would only seem to lead to bitterness and any of several sinful reactions: envy of those who have not suffered in this way, or pride over them because I have suffered in a way they have not, or anger at them or God. The Stoics would of course say that I should neither love nor hate my sorrow, but only strive to eliminate it. But it is the mistake of the Stoics, Augustine insists, to regard sorrow and the other passions only as another breed of physical or psychical disturbances that the wise person needs to eradicate. When I feel extreme heat or some other discomfort, I should eliminate it, either by removing the source, or by ignoring it Stoically until it no longer affects me; but under no circumstances would I want to rid myself of my sorrow for my mother in either of these ways. Such a response is not the mark of wisdom, it is only inhuman, what Augustine calls a "ruthless insensibility" (de civ. Dei 19.8). I think therefore that in some sense I do love such sorrow: it is genuine and rightly directed , it is now my primary bond with her, and, like my other passions, it is an integral and integrating part of who I am, a part that is in accord with God's omnipotent love, as the souls overcome by passion in Dante's sphere of Venus describe: "...we smile... at the Power that orders and provides. From here we gaze upon that art which works with such effective love; we see the Good by which the world below returns above."⁽²²⁾ Such an ascent is made when sorrow and joy are rightly experienced and embraced, not when they are eliminated or condemned, and it is such an understanding of the passions that Augustine offers us in the Confessions. Grief and sorrow are wounds that are not experienced by the perfection and omnipotence of Divinity, but they are wounds that can heal us in our human imperfection and weakness.

1. Paper originally read at the International Conference on Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies, Villanova University, October 1998.

2. Conf. 2.2.2 (trans. J. K. Ryan; New York: Image Books, 1960); all other references to the Confessions are from this translation.

3. That Augustine was striving for a Stoical kind of self-control is implied by J. J. O'Meara, the Young Augustine: The Growth of St. Augustine's Mind up to His Conversion (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1965) 204: "The twentieth century will easily forgive Augustine his weakness. It should also try to realize how ruthless was the indifference expected of him by himself and others." I do not believe that Augustine was ever indifferent about anything.

4. de civ. Dei 14.9 (trans. H. Bettenson; New York: Penguin, 1984); all future references to City of God are from this translation.

5. Cf. C. Starnes, Augustine's Conversion: A Guide to the Argument of Confessions I-IX (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990) 56: "As opposed to a real or objective friendship... where one is called upon to give real help rather than merely being invited to sorrow, this whole business is entirely subjective."

6. Pace M. Miles, Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions (New York: Crossroad, 1992) 75: "Augustine the bishop has a new and exacting standard of friendship that excludes even such an intense friendship as this." Cf. J. Lienhard, "Friendship in Paulinus of Nola and Augustine," Augustiniana 40 (1990) 279-96, 295: "Augustine's love for friendship never diminished; if anything, it became more intense as his life drew to its close."

7. Conf. 4.9.14. God is not only not at the center of friendship for the young Augustine, he is completely absent, as noted by cf. J. J. O'Donnell, Confessions (3 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) 2:221, "The depiction of grief is almost literally God-less." For friends as gifts of God, see my "God in the Friend, or the Friend in God? The Meaning of Friendship for Augustine," Augustinian Heritage 38 (1992) 123-36; cf. also J. Lienhard, "Friendship in Paulinus of Nola and Augustine," 291-95; J. H. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 162, 178.

8. Cf. W. Mallard, Language and Love: Introducing Augustine's Religious Thought through the Confessions Story (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) 61: "With Augustine, the pity for himself effected a chaos of narcissistic pleasure and agony." On Augustine's narcissism, see also D. Capps, "Augustine as Narcissist: Of Grandiosity and Shame," in The Hunger of the Heart: Reflections on the Confessions of Augustine (eds. D. Capps and J. E. Dittes; Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Monograph Series 8; West Lafayette, IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1990) 169-84. Cf. also Starnes, Augustine's Conversion, 95-96, who sees the source of Augustine's self-referential grief in his Manichean beliefs.

9. Such a dichotomy between the young Augustine's experiences and his later interpretations of them is asserted as a general rule by Miles, Desire and Delight, 75: "In the Confessions, there is a profound incommensurability between the passionate experiences of his youth and the interpretation he gave those experiences in early middle age."

10. On Augustine's relation to magicians, see O'Meara, Young Augustine, 56; see also Conf. 4.3.4 and 7.6.8 on Augustine's belief in astrology.

11. Cf. the echo of this sentiment in Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (trans. A. Hannay; London, New York, et. al.: Penguin, 1985) 122: "...there dwells infinitely more good in a demonic than in a superficial person."

12. On Augustine's triadic analysis of sin, see N. J. Torchia, "St. Augustine's Triadic Interpretation of Iniquity in the Confessiones," in Collectanea Augustiniana. Augustine: Second Founder of the Faith (eds. J. C. Schnaubelt and F. Van Fleteren; New York, et. al.: Peter Lang, 1990) 159-73.

13. On the role of curiosity in Conf. 3.2.2-3.2.4, see O'Donnell, Confessions, 2:150-58.

14. For such a definition, see Torchia, "Triadic Interpretation of Iniquity," 161: "While carnal concupiscence seeks those things that gratify on a purely sensual level, curiosity refers to the 'appetite for knowledge' of an experimental nature."

15. Conf. 3.2.3; on concupiscentia here, see O'Donnell, Confessions, 2:155.

16. Conf. 4.4.8; cf. above on Augustine's narcissism.

17. Conf. 4.4.9; on concupiscentia here, see O'Donnell, Confessions, 2:217. The vivid sensuality of Augustine's feelings has even led W. T. Smith, Augustine: His Life and Thought (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1980) 34-36, to speculate that the friendship had real or latent homosexuality in it.

18. On Augustine's grief over Monica, see my "Tears of Grief and Joy. Confessions Book 9: Chronological Sequence and Structure," Augustinian Studies 28 (1997) 141-54.

19. On Augustine's relation to Monica, see P. Alfaric, L'évolution intellectuelle de saint Augustin (Paris: 1918) 50-52; P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967) 28-34.

20. E.g. recently, Charles Kligerman, "A Psychoanalytic Study of the Confessions of St. Augustine"; David Bakan, "Augustine's Confessions: The Unentailed Self"; and James E. Dittes, "Continuities Between the Life and Thought of Augustine"; as well as the interesting critique by David Burrell, "Reading the Confessions of Augustine: The Case of Oedipal Analyses"; all four to be found in The Hunger of the Heart: Reflections on the Confessions of Augustine (eds. Donald Capps and James E. Dittes; Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Monograph Series 8; West Lafayette, IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1990) pp. 95-108, 109-15, 117-31, 133-42.

21. Cf. Starnes, Augustine's Conversion, 56: "[The theatre's] griefs are safe because they have not happened to him but he has willed them."

22. Dante Alighieri, Paradise (trans. M. Musa; New York: Penguin Books, 1984) canto IX, lines 103-08.