15. Cf. Introduction to the City of God, below. (continued)
PREFACE
false goods—pleasure, riches, glory—and seeking happiness through the love of that Wisdom which is God, the only good. This eudemonism is itself suspect in the eyes of some people. Recently it was maintained that Augustine falsified the Christian idea of love by confining it in the schema frui-uti.1° There can be no doubt that the Augustinian ideal is certainly generous and disinterested love. However, it requires being able to practice it, that is, stripping oneself of egotism, of a possessive love, and uniting oneself to God, the universal Good, pure generosity, the Principle of all generosity. For there are two loves: one that is holy and one that is impure; one that is social, the other private; one that is mindful of the common good in view of the heavenly society, the other that reduces even the common good to private property with a view to arrogant domination.'* And these loves are rivals in the heart of man as in the story of the two cities.1>
Certainly Augustine, in his reflection, made free use of various philosophical themes that he judged, rightly or wrongly, in harmony with Christian teaching; but these themes were included in a train of thought that was specifically Christian, Christic. Indeed, the thought of Augustine is developed entirely in the framework of the theme of the two Adams. Before sin, in paradise, God refreshed man by an interior spring; man had no need to receive words from without; he drank of the spring itself—the Truth that came forth from the intimacy of his being. Pride destroyed this regime of interiority. Man turned away from God; he cast out his intimate being, thus drying up the interior spring. Henceforth he has need of the rain that falls from the clouds, that is, from Revelation, from the teaching of God formulated in human language by the Prophets and uniquely by Christ the Incarnate Word.!© The Word became man in order to meet man in his actual condition, in the regime of exteriority, the consequence of original sin; in order to bring him back to the regime of interiority and to restore the mind to the image of God. "There is only one teacher: incorruptible Truth, the only interior teacher, who has become the exterior teacher in order to recall exterior
13. Cf. J. Brechthen, Augustinus doctor caritatis (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1975). 14. Cf. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, X1.15.20. 15. Cf. Introduction to the City of God, below. 16. Cf. Augustine, De Genesi Contra Manichaeos, I1.4.5—5.6.