Augustine on Love

Quote

"Love, and do what you will."

— Augustine of Hippo, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Tractate 7, Section 8 (Latin: Dilige et quod vis fac)

Historical Context

Augustine composed the Homilies on the First Epistle of John around 407, in the years after the sack of Rome, when he was bishop of Hippo in North Africa. The homilies are verse-by-verse sermons on John's first letter, and the famous maxim appears in the seventh tractate, in a passage on love as the fulfillment of the moral life. The context is anti-heretical: Augustine was concerned with the Donatist schism and with the problem of distinguishing true Christians from false ones. His answer is that the mark of a true believer is not external observance but love — and that love, rightly understood, does not need a rulebook, because it is itself the principle that generates right action.

The maxim has a long afterlife, and it has often been misread as a license to do whatever one feels like. Augustine's own meaning depends on his doctrine of love, which he had developed through his conversion and his reading of the Platonists. For Augustine, love is not an emotion that happens to us but an orientation of the will — a fundamental ordering of desire toward its proper object. There is a right order of loves: God above all, then neighbor, then the goods of this world, each loved in its proper measure. To "love, and do what you will" is therefore not permission for self-indulgence; it is the claim that once the will is rightly ordered, its spontaneous impulses will be good. The maxim presupposes the transformation of character, not the absence of moral constraints.

Philosophical Interpretation

The maxim condenses an entire moral psychology. Augustine's ethics is an ethics of the will: character, not rules, is the root of right action. The will is the capacity of the soul that loves and chooses, and its condition determines the morality of conduct. When the will loves well — loves what is truly good, in the right measure — then whatever it does flows from that ordering and is good. The maxim expresses this in a deliberately paradoxical form: the absence of rules is the mark of the deepest moral maturity, because the virtuous person does not need to be told what to do.

This is recognizably a version of the ancient ideal that the wise person acts well spontaneously. But Augustine gives it a distinctive twist by identifying the ultimate object of love with God. Human beings are made for God, and their hearts are restless until they rest in God, as the Confessions puts it. The right ordering of love is therefore not primarily a matter of social adjustment but of religious orientation: the soul that loves God above all will love its neighbor rightly, and the goods of the world in their proper place, and its choices will be harmonious. Wrong action, on this account, is a disorder of love — loving the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong measure. The maxim also carries an epistemological point: the person whose love is rightly ordered sees the moral situation aright, because love is a mode of perception and not merely a motive.

The maxim's enduring power is that it poses the deepest question of moral psychology: whether morality is ultimately a matter of rules or of character. If rules, then the maxim is dangerous — it invites antinomianism. If character, then the maxim expresses an ideal of moral freedom in which the agent's desires and duties have become one. Augustine's answer is that both are needed in the order of moral development: rules are the discipline that forms character, but the mature moral life transcends them, because the person who loves rightly is no longer a servant of the law but its friend.

Related Concepts

The maxim belongs to Augustine's ethics of ordered love and to his account of the will as the seat of moral agency. It is the Christian ancestor of the ideal of moral character found in virtue ethics, and it connects to the idea of moral formation — the training of desire so that right action becomes spontaneous. The Latin formula, Dilige et quod vis fac, has become a proverbial expression of the priority of love in the moral life, and it anticipates later debates about the relation between rules and character, law and love, and freedom and discipline in ethics.

Learning Path

Begin with the site's answers on what ethics is and what morality is, to locate Augustine's position on the map of moral theory. Then explore the discussion of love and of the good life, and the ancient tradition of character ethics in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which Augustine transforms by identifying the final object of love with God. For Augustine's full development of the idea, read the discussion of his Confessions, and compare his ethics of ordered love with the Stoic ideal of inner peace and the modern virtue-ethical revival in MacIntyre's After Virtue.