Erika Kidd: Grief, Memory, and the Order of Love

In the Confessions and elsewhere, Augustine learns to order his heart to love of God byreflecting on his past loves and failures of love. His reflection often prompts him to reevaluate his relation to the objects of his love. Though we might take the notion of“ordering loves” to be a forward-looking moral imperative, this ordering of the heart often involves looking backward and can be done in the space of the memory. In this paper, I focus on a particular species of that revaluation: the ordering of love in the aftermath of loss. Drawing on material from the Confessions, I examine Augustine’s love for Adeodatus and for his unnamed friend. Augustine was tormented by the memory of his friend and by his failures of love; I explain how learning to love that friend in God gave Augustine release from his torment. I examine the contrasting account of Augustine’s love for his son; the fact that Augustine loved his son in God offers his heart healing. I examine these stories to argue that the ordering of love is not always a forward-looking moral imperative; in these cases, it is a retrospective move that gives healing and rest to Augustine’s grief.