Love, Will, and Imagination in Saint Augustine – Discourses on Minerva
Saint Augustine is considered by many as one of the greatest writers on the relationship between love, the will, and imagination. Although Augustine never wrote a single treatise on this subject, his scattered reflections on these realities in his many writings, most famously Confessions, De Trinitate (On the Trinity), and On Free Will, constitute the heart of his arguments. For Augustine, love, will, and imagination are inseparable from each other, love touches the will and imagination, imagination includes love and the will, the will is continuation of our love and imagination.
In the Confessions, Augustine famously stated that he was “in love with the idea of love.” He also wrote that “My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” In the City of God, Augustine continued to elaborate the power of the will and love by saying “we are nothing but wills of love.” In declaring himself to be in love with the idea of love, Augustine is reflecting on the power of imaginative love, a love that governs the mind, the human imagination, which influences action. To be in love with the idea of love means the mind, where the seat of imagination is enthroned (per Plotinus), is governed by the reality of love. Thus, we see the unity of love with mind, the imagination. But when he goes on to say by the end of the Confessions that “my weight is my love. Wherever I am carried my love is carrying me,” love in the mind has united with the will to create action. The love we experience in our mind, our imagination, eventually impacts the will.
Although Augustine wrote On Free Will as part of a dispute over grace and salvation among monks where he offered a middle road of Grace acting first in our life which then required cooperation with antecedent grace against those who were articulating what we might call the proto-Calvinist position of grace-only and the Pelagian view of free will choosing God without any prior grace touching the soul, Augustine’s reflection on love (as an extension of God’s grace) is important for us to realize with regard to unity of love, will, and imagination. Augustine articulated the view that we first love by sight. We love what we see, which includes what we “see” in our imagination since the mind is a creative organ of sensation. As Augustine wrote, “the will is not enticed to do anything except by something that has been perceived.”
Augustine, here, follows in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle in the view that humans are imagistic creatures. We learn by images. We love by images. We are moved by images. (Augustine, here, was also important in the development of Catholic aesthetic theology whereby souls are moved to love God by the use of images, not that the image itself is the object of desire but that God is expressed through the image and therefore God is the object of our love through the image which represents him.) When read in the relational unity of love, will, and imagination, we see how the will acts in love through the image of imagination: “the will is not enticed to do anything except by something that has been perceived.” In constructing an image of love in our mind to which the will acts upon, we see the tripartite unity.
For Augustine, this tripartite unity of will, love, and imagination (or the mind, if you prefer), is a human instantiation of the Trinity. The Divine Trinity can be known, although only imperfectly, through this human manifestation of constitutive parts: The Mind or Imagination is the Father (the starting point), Will is Christ the Son, and Love is the Holy Spirit which binds the Mind and the Will together. When the will and mind are united in love (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), we have perfect action, and perfect action is love realized, love manifested.
The imagination, therefore, perceives a good in the image of its love. For as Augustine says, all love is itself Divine—dilectio Deus est (to translate the Latin literally, word for word: Love God is). The perception of this good in the image of love in the mind then compels the will to action. The will seeks to be united with the image of love in its mind. This begins the movement toward astonishment, or awe, or wonder. Love creates the experience of wonder, of awe, of astonishment between Lover and Beloved.
This basic understanding of love and how will, love, and imagination are all interrelated with each other becomes the important vision of love in medieval romance poetry, especially Dante and Petrarch. Dante is awoken to new life through Beatrice, whose image as a female carries within her the image of Divinity, Divine Love incarnate in a human. So too is this true for Petrarch and Laura. The pilgrimage of the soul is the movement of love to meet the image of love which has roused it from slumber.
The movement of the soul to action, to love, through the images of love the will seeks, is good as Augustine explains:
This word is conceived in love of either the creature or the creator, that is of the changeable nature or unchangeable truth; which means either in covetousness or in charity. Not that the creature is not to be loved, but if that love is related to the creator it will no longer be covetousness but charity…the lower creature should be used to bring us to God, the creature on a par should be in enjoyed, but in God.
The beauty, the goodness, the worthiness of all things ultimately point to God. This recognition of God in all things is what Augustine considers to be discerned wisdom. Wisdom is the fulfillment of Eros, of love, where will, love, and imagination come together as a singularity. (This is also a Platonic concept found in Plato and Plotinus but more thoroughly explored and transformed by Augustine.)
In sum, what can we say about Augustine’s revolutionary tying together of will, love, and imagination? Will, love, and imagination are not independent faculties of the human self but constitutively interdependent realities within the human person. Love is found in an image of the mind, which is the imagination, whose desire for the image of love rouses the self to action (the will). The unity of imagination and will is found through love. Hence, as Augustine implies elsewhere, Love is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things. Nothing exists and nothing moves without love. Love rouses the mind. Love rouses the will. Love governs all things. When the imagination, the most powerful faculty of the human mind and soul, realizes this profound metaphysical reality, then the will, the body, is moved to act. This is love realized, love manifested, love sanctified.
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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