Francine Cardman - Discerning the Heart: Intention as Ethical Norm in Augustine's Homilies on 1 John

In his famous injunction to “love, and do as you will,” Augustine crystallizes the principle by which he claims to distinguish among actions that appear outwardly similar in form but are ethically different in intention and therefore moral significance.  This paper will explore the problematic notion of intention in Augustine’s Homilies on 1 John and the divergent practical and theological uses to which he puts it in the Donatist controversy.  

Acting out of charitable intent, according to Augustine, is what differentiates correction or coercion from mere punishment or abuse.   Both terms of this claim require closer examination.  Love has understandably been a major preoccupation among Augustine’s scholarly interpreters.  Intention itself, however, as distinct from the problem of the will or the notorious youthful theft of pears, has received far less notice.  In the case of these homilies that lack of attention extends to their preacher as well as their later interlocutors.

Discernment of intention, whether one’s own or another’s, is an existential and epistemological challenge, one which Augustine at times acknowledges and other times ignores in his dealings with Donatists.  The opaqueness of the human heart, so complexly narrated in the Confessions, is reason enough for him to insist on a church of wheat and tares as opposed to the Donatist demand for a “pure” community.   Yet this insight into the difficulty of discerning hearts – a difficulty compounded by the mysteries of God’s grace and election –  is strikingly at odds with Augustine’s seeming certainty in these homilies about Catholics’ intentions, including his own, for  compelling Donatists to “come in.”  Why does he attend to the problem in one case and disregard it in the other?  How does that difference affect his praxis of ecclesiology?

The tensions generated by the unreflective use of intention as an ethical norm in the homilies and the diverging ecclesiological applications of that norm in regard to Donatists are the central focus of this paper.  Delimiting the remarkably plastic concept of love or charity can only be a secondary consideration here, and then only in the context of the homilies themselves and as this bears on the problematic of intention.