Charity after Augustine

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.