The Goodness of Home: Human and

Divine Love and the Making of the Self

Natalia Marandiuc
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i

The Goodness of Home

ii

ACADEMY SERIES

SERIES EDITOR
Aaron W. Hughes, University at Buffalo

A Publication Series of
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GOD AND THE VICTIM TYPES OF PENTECOSTAL

Traumatic Intrusions on Grace and Freedom THEOLOGY
Jennifer Erin Beste Method, System, Spirit
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THE CREATIVE SUFFERING OF THE
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A THEOLOGY OF CRITICISM LIBERALISM VERSUS

Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic POSTLIBERALISM
Imagination The Great Divide in Twentieth-​Century
Michael P. Murphy Theology
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INCARNATION ANYWAY
Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology IMAGE, IDENTITY, AND THE FORMING
Edwin Chr. Van Driel OF THE AUGUSTINIAN SOUL
Matthew Drever
DISABILITY AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities RIGHTEOUS RHETORIC
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Origen on the Problem of Evil Heike Peckruhn
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THE GOODNESS OF HOME
BEYOND THE WALLS Human and Divine Love and the Making of
Abraham Joshua Heschel and Edith Stein the Self
on the Significance of Empathy for Jewish-​ Natalia Marandiuc
Christian Dialogue
Joseph Redfield Palmisano, SJ
iii

The Goodness
of Home
Human and Divine Love and
the Making of the Self
z
NATALIA MARANDIUC

1
iv

1
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the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marandiuc, Natalia, 1968– author.
Title: The goodness of home : human and divine love and the making of the self /
Natalia Marandiuc.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. |
Series: AAR academy series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017019912 (print) | LCCN 2017050191 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190674519 (updf) | ISBN 9780190674526 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190699024 (oso) | ISBN 9780190674502 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Self—Religious aspects—Christianity. |
Home—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Love—Religious aspects—Christianity.
Classification: LCC BT713 (ebook) | LCC BT713 .M36 2018 (print) |
DDC 248.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019912

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v

For Anna Sophia

vi
vi

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1. Why Home? A Preamble about the Argument’s Theological

Significance 1

2. Human Double Embeddedness: Frameworks of Meaning

and Significant Relationships 21
2.1. Horizons of Meaning 22
2.1.1. Frameworks: Surrounding Us Like the Atmosphere 22
2.1.2. A Three-​Legged Stool 31
2.1.3. Radical Novelty 35
2.1.4. A “Do Not Discard” Label 41
2.2. Authenticity: A Contemporary Siren 46
2.3. Recognition: Subjectivity-​Constituting Gift 52
2.4. The Need for and Goodness of Human Attachments 68
3. Theological Implications from Attachment Theory 74
3.1. Attachment Premises 75
3.2. Uniqueness of Attachment Figures 80
3.3. The Attachment System: A Chiseling Tool for the Human
Self 82
3.4. Attachment Styles 86
3.5. Attachment and the Self: An Indelible Link 89
4. Human Difference and Particular Subjectivity 95
4.1. The Self as Becoming 99
4.2. Universality and Particularity: A Double Layer of Human
Subjectivity 105
vi

viii Contents

4.3. Haecceity: A Medieval Approach to Human Difference 113

4.4. The Bilocated Self 117
4.5. Particular Subjectivities as Fruits of Love 125
5. Human and Divine Love Cocreating the Self 128
5.1. Need and Desire 129
5.2. Neighbors and Lovers, and the Holy Spirit 142
5.3. Duty: A Kantian Interlude 159
5.4. John Duns Scotus on Human and Divine Love 170
5.5. A Letter with a Forwarding Address 175
6. The Goodness of Home: Attachment as Anthropological and
Pneumatological Middle Space 181

Bibliography 199
Index 207
ix

Acknowledgments

My gratitude extends to numerous people on both sides of the

Atlantic whose love, presence, encouragement, and counsel contributed
to creating this book. Some read the manuscript or portions thereof and
offered invaluable advice, some cared for my well-​being through the vari-
ous writing and editing stages, and some did both.
I thank my colleagues from Yale University for the excellent conversa-
tions that refined my argument as I developed it; our collaborative and
formative exchanges contributed much to the shaping of this project. Most
significantly, I appreciate the long-​term dialogue with Miroslav Volf, my
Doktorvater, who supported the book from its inchoate beginning to its
mature completion, read several versions of the manuscript, and gave me
exceptionally erudite feedback along the way. I also owe special thanks
to others who read an earlier incarnation of the text: to Kathryn Tanner,
whose sharp theological mind helped me clarify parts of the constructive
proposal of the book, to John Hare, whose expertise on both Kierkegaard
and Kant provided a fantastic springboard for my thought, and to David
Kelsey, whose intellectual breadth helped me bring together the argument.
I thank Christopher Beeley, Shannon Craigo-​Snell, Margaret Farley, Emilie
Townes, and Denys Turner, with whom I had numerous fruitful talks that
gave the book direct and indirect impetus. The creative formative years
spent alongside Awet Andemicael, Jill Colwell, Scott Dolff, TJ Dumansky,
Brad East, Marcus Elder, Layne Jacobs, Junius Johnson, Steven Jungkeit,
Maurice Lee, Sam Martinez, Ryan McAnnaly-​Linz, Ross McCullough, Luke
Moorhead, Kathryn Reklis, Erinn Staley, Linn Tonstad, and Ed Waggoner
are the foundation upon which the ideas of this book were built.
I offer thanks, too, to my colleagues from Perkins School of Theology,
especially Evelyn Parker, Bill Lawrence, Billy Abraham, Karen Baker-​
Fletcher, Ted Campbell, Carlos Cardoza-​Orlandi, Ruben Habito, Robert
x

x Acknowledgments

Hunt, Jim Lee, Tamara Lewis, Gary MacDonald, Bruce Marshall, Beka
Miles, Heidi Miller, Connie Nelson, and Joerg Rieger, whose support and
dialogue were crucial during the final stages of working on this book.
I particularly appreciate the chance to present the book’s main argument
in a Perkins Faculty Symposium, which engendered discussions that gave
it its final contour. Sarah Coakley from the University of Cambridge also
read a chapter and gave me wonderful feedback that contributed to the
coherence of the book as a whole.
I am particularly indebted to my research assistant, Geoffrey Moore,
whose keen copyediting eye has made the book easier and more pleasant
to read, and to Aaron Hughes of the American Academy of Religion and
Cynthia Read of Oxford University Press, whose editorial excellence has
enabled the book to be born.
I am grateful to my students from Perkins School of Theology and Yale
Divinity School for their engaging conversations and heartwarming intel-
lectual acuity. The book came to fruition amid our teaching and learning
experiences.
Several friends and relatives have been faithful companions through
this journey. My parents, Floarea and Cornel Marandiuc, my sister, Vanda
Marandiuc, and my grandmother, Iuliana Don, have continually supported
my efforts and have offered words of wisdom and affection from Romania.
My spouse, Joseph Casella, has been a most loving, sacrificially caring,
and eagerly present partner, who read the whole manuscript a few times
and gave me impactful counsel. The book is dedicated to our much-​loved
daughter, Anna Sophia, who was born when the book was almost finished
and who deepened my capacity for love beyond all prior imagination.
1

Why Home?
A Preamble about the Argument’s
Theological Significance

When I would visit my grandmother in her village in Romania as a

little girl, the moment I stepped off the bus, villagers would ask me, “Tu
a cui eşti?” (Whose are you? [lit.] To whom do you belong?) Yet home and
belonging are hard to find for more and more people, as is the correspond-
ing sense of self that grows out of attachments. This book speaks the-
ologically about the goodness of home, understood as relations of love
and attachment that cocreate human subjectivity. The argument brings
together the notions of home, love, and the self and sets them against
the backdrop of a problem that pervades a significant portion of contem-
porary society: the thinning sense of belonging and correlative alienation
brought about by amplified mobility, increased transience, and technolog-
ical developments that reduce human presence and face-​to-​face intimacy.
On the whole, the contemporary conditions of globalization induce mas-
sive amounts of movement. Countless persons on the move experience
change in their proximate contexts as their location changes or their inter-
locutors, neighbors, or companions move. Mobility often results in attach-
ments that are, at best, fleeting and, more often than not, lost altogether.
Home and belonging increasingly elude people.
In addition to the cosmopolitan disembeddedness that pervades afflu-
ent Western populations, the contemporary phenomenon of forced human
migration adds another dimension to the rupture of the structures of belong-
ing. The world has arguably become filled with migrants largely due to deep
structural economic and political injustices and harms as well as war; the
attachments of such persons have been, to various degrees, wounded.
2

2 The Goodness of Home

In fact, so large are the flows of people who leave their homelands that
migration theorists call our current era “the age of migration.”1 While migra-
tion in itself is not something new in human history—​since human beings
have, in fact, always moved either to search for a new life or to flee from pov-
erty or political persecution—​what is different today is the globalization and
acceleration of migration. According to the United Nations, more than three
percent of the entire world population in 2013 was made up of migrants.2
Only a small fraction of these people have left their homes without being
chased away by fear; many, if not most, of those who left their homes behind
are forced migrants. These are the people who have been compelled to flee
their homes due to terrors and dangers such as ethnic cleansing, extreme
poverty, violence, and natural disasters—​in short, due to fear of death.
The need or longing for home is rarely diminished for migrants; on
the contrary, its loss ruptures and tears a deep part of their sense of self.
Daniel Groody calls migration a “traumatic undertaking.”3 Only in the
hope of overcoming enormous stresses and dangers do people choose
the painful experience of separation from home. “Such a separation
leaves an indelible mark on the heart of the immigrant.”4 Groody notes
that families rarely emigrate together, and I would add that it is even less
common for migrants to depart together with friends, mentors, or other
people for whom they care. “For many immigrants, crossing the border
of death means leaving behind much of what ultimately gives meaning,
value, and cohesion to their lives.”5 Warsan Shire, a Kenyan-​born Somali
poet, writes,

no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
...

1. Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements
in the Modern World (New York: Guilford Press, 2009).
2. United Nations, International Migration 2013, http://​www.un.org/​en/​development/​desa/​
population/​migration/​publications/​wallchart/​docs/​wallchart2013.pdf.
3. Daniel G. Groody, Border of Death, Valley of Life: An Immigrant Journey of Heart and Spirit
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 16.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 19.
3

Why Home? 3

the boy you went to school with

...
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
...
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
...
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
...
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
...
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important6

6. Warsan Shire, “Home,” https://​www.umcnic.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2015/​06/​Home-​

Poem-​by-​Warsan-​Shire.pdf.
4

4 The Goodness of Home

Roberto Goizueta argues that the human self is birthed in community

and that the migrant’s memories of home often sit side by side with the
memories of the loss of home and the consequent sense of homelessness
as one “bear[s]‌that community, those men and women, in the deepest
recesses of [one’s] soul.”7 Goizueta then shows that seeking a connection
to others and attempting to recover a sense of home is seeking “a connec-
tion to [one’s] very self.”8
In addition to international migration, economic and job precarious-
ness together with the absence of safety nets, particularly in the United
States, engender further mobility. Hedging against physical homeless-
ness, which looms large when jobs are gone, people move and end up
with relational homelessness. Economic-​based mobility driven by glob-
alization benefits transnational corporations for whom human lives
serve as mere resources, while human beings become commodified. The
pervasive presence of global neoliberal markets of goods, services, and
especially financial instruments affects human lives even more systemi-
cally;9 but these human lives themselves are not as readily detachable and
movable as such instruments. Nonetheless, persons participate in this
neoliberal economic dance in ways that are decoupled from their wills,
and they undergo costly and wounding interpersonal ruptures. The con-
temporary cultural production of an ideology of never-​ending possession
of “more,” intrinsic to the logic of capitalist expansion, in tandem with
societal power dynamics that ensnare particular lives in macrosystems,
with multiple dimensions ranging from the political, to the legal, the eco-
nomic, and the social sphere, creates a diminished existential space for
community, rest, nonrushed time, and other features of belonging and
enduring attachment.
These represent only a few facets of a broad contemporary problem
which I call “relational impoverishment” and which I engage theologically.
I use tools of theological reflection to enter into the story and mystery of
the triune God’s relation to human beings as revealed in the incarnation,

7. Roberto S. Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/​

Latino Theology of
Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 2.
8. Ibid.
9. See Kathryn Tanner’s compelling argument in her Gifford Lectures, “Christianity and the
New Spirit of Capitalism,” University of Edinburgh, May 2–​12, 2016, http://​www.ed.ac.uk/​
arts-​humanities-​soc-​sci/​news-​events/​lectures/​gifford-​lectures/​gifford-​lectures-​2015-​2016/​
professor-​tanner-​christianity-​and-​capitalism/​christianity-​new-​spirit-​capitalism-​introduction.
5

Why Home? 5

and I show the consequent interplay of divine and human relational love-​
streams that cocreate the self and enable its belonging. I argue, therefore,
for the goodness of a home understood relationally, rather than spatially,10
as I claim that human love attachments are irreducibly needed for the
actualization of the human self, and I argue that love is a source of sub-
jectivity. Relational impoverishment goes against the grain of what home
means, as it hinders the development and performance of the self as such.
The book’s argument is broadly situated in the conversational context of
theological anthropology, with considerations about the self’s dynamic
nature and how it is impacted by divine grace when grace is conceived as
God’s pneumatological presence in the experience of human love.11
I conceptualize home relationally particularly in light of the shifting
meanings of locality that globalization engenders. Current work in neuro-
scientific research and attachment psychology indicate that secure human
attachments directly support the proper and healthy functioning of the
human body and its systems, as well as one’s cognitive, volitional, and
affective capacities.12 In short, human attachments produce human selves.
While such sciences attempt to explicate naturalistically the complex inter-
dependence between human attachments and the making of the self as
well as the self’s freedom, I argue along theological lines that the love
that overflows from God’s plenitude constitutes the necessary condition
for the very possibility of human attachments and, further, that this love
is planted constitutively in each human person as a seed whose growth
needs to be nurtured.
The greatest commandment in the gospels is to love God as well as human
beings—​our neighbors.13 Numerous theologies have been proposed around

10. While my argument focuses on the relational dimension of what we call “home,” I do
not intend to diminish the significance of a home’s spatial reality, however complex it may
be in the age of globalization, even while discussing home in spatial terms is beyond the
scope of this book.
11. I do not argue that God’s presence is exclusive to human loves; however, I assume divine
grace to be equivalent to God’s presence, since God gives creation the gift of God’s very self,
both in the incarnation and in the Holy Spirit. This book’s accent is on grace as the divine
pneumatological presence in human loves.
12. See Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver, eds., Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and
Clinical Applications (New York: The Guilford Press, 2008); Peter Fonagy, György Gergely,
Elliot L. Jurist, and Mary Target, Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the
Self (New York: Other Press, 2004); Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships
and the Brain Interact to Shape Who we are (New York: The Guilford Press, 2012).
13. Cf. Mark 12:28–​31, Matthew 22:35–​40, Luke 10:25–​28.
6

6 The Goodness of Home

how to negotiate these two together. I propose that correlative to the “ought”
implied in this commandment, there is a need. We are creatures of both need
and desire: while the commandment targets the right orientation of our desires,
they are matched by a powerful need to experience love. We are the kind of
creatures whose being and well-​being is rooted in love, both human and divine.
I argue, therefore, that since we are creatures of both need and desire,
love precedes the formation of the human self, is needed for one’s own
actualization, and is also essential for mending subjectivity when it has
been harmed. I draw from multiple sources to construct my argument,
starting with the texts of Charles Taylor, whose retrieval of a modern under-
standing of the self in tandem with a rich description of the self’s rela-
tional embeddedness is both comprehensive and compelling. I augment
this portrait of the relational self with a theological interpretation of con-
temporary attachment research. Thereafter, I draw most extensively from
the theological work of Søren Kierkegaard, whose thought on love, human
difference, and deep equality is surprisingly in sync with our contempo-
rary context. Although Kierkegaard’s thought precedes the research of
attachment theorists, his texts, especially Works of Love14 read together with
Sickness Unto Death,15 make a case that evokes striking parallels with the
claims of attachment theory. I choose Kierkegaard as an interlocutor also
because his understanding of the self as a process of becoming and a pro-
gression that moves forward, albeit nonlinearly, as subjectivity is shaped,
reshaped, and perfected, is a portrayal that fits well with the contemporary
predicament of mobility and its consequent relational impoverishment.
While feminist theologians16 have argued for ubiquitous relationality,
such claims are often couched in rather universal, panhuman terms.17 My

14. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
15. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
16. See Catherine Keller’s classic From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and the Self (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1986) alongside her recent Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and
Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), Elizabeth A. Johnson,
She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 2002),
and Mary Grey, Redeeming the Dream: Feminism, Redemption, and Christian Tradition (London:
SPCK, 1989) and Prophecy and Mysticism: The Heart of the Postmodern Church (Edinburgh:
Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2000).
17. At the same time, Catherine Keller argues for the inescapable particularity through which
we relate to the whole of reality. This accent on particularity is especially congruous with my
project, as I develop it in c­ hapter 4.
7

Why Home? 7

project not only grows from these limits but also extends the conversation
past them, as I argue that particular love attachments are sine qua non for
the establishment and sustenance, as well as the flourishing, of human
subjectivity. Attachment theories, I suggest, are in fact enriched by a theo-
logical argument that the confluence of human and divine streams of love
establishes the possibility of the bonds of belonging that the human self
needs in order both to emerge in the first place and to be repaired when
broken. The assumption is that a human being is not yet a self simply by
being alive; one becomes a self only under certain conditions. The irreduc-
ible condition I describe is the experience of love.
Certainly, not all attachments are good or conducive to human flour-
ishing. In fact, attachment is an ambiguous good in its existential con-
creteness, as many close relationships, in fact, harm the self or prevent
its emergence. Nonetheless, rightly contoured human attachments are a
necessary good; conversely, a lack of belonging is a difficult predicament
that hinders the self from operating with a robust agency or, in extreme
cases, from operating at all.
The theological significance of this argument for the goodness of home
has much to do with its import for a theological anthropology that looks
carefully at the sources of the making of the human self: relational impov-
erishment is an existential penury that results in an atrophied, debilitated,
or even nonexistent self. One difficulty in making the case theologically,
however, lies in a tradition that conceives of home as not located any-
where within creation, let alone in human attachments, both because of
creation’s finiteness and because of its fall. Instead, home awaits us in
a transtemporal heaven. Attachment to transient things, therefore, has
been viewed as a problematic state of affairs. In De Doctrina Christiana,
Augustine notoriously depicts our “home country” away from “this mortal
life in which we are exiles,” and he claims that we ought only to use this
world and human beings, and not to enjoy them, as they are not ends in
themselves but only means toward our true end, which is beyond human
attachments; enjoyment and proper attachment are to be reserved for eter-
nal and infallible things.18
Augustine’s concern is twofold: on the one hand, he finds it dangerous
that human beings would cleave to creaturely things and to other people,

18. Augustine, Teaching Christianity (De Doctrina Christiana), trans. Edmund Hill (New York:
New City Press, 1996), 106–​11.
8

8 The Goodness of Home

all of whom are passing away, rather than cleave to the stability of what is
immutable and eternal. That would be the holy trinity of God alone, who
is the highest and ultimate good and, therefore, our own highest and ulti-
mate end. God is not only beyond any possibility of transience, but also the
only real terminus of our creaturely needfulness. According to Augustine,
God is the final goal of our creaturely journey, the one in whom alone we
can rest, because, having arrived at our eternal destination, we will be fully
happy and fully blessed. There is nothing further to seek, to desire, or to
pursue. Simply put, God is our home.
On the other hand, Augustine wants to fight the concomitant danger
of discarding creation altogether and rejecting fellow human beings under
the delusion that we could actually reach our telos in God without the help
of creaturely realities. We are not teleported, so to speak, into union with
God; rather, we are traveling across the lands and seas of this world, using
carriages and ships that we share with travel companions as we cross the
spaces of our earthly exile en route to our heavenly homeland. These vehi-
cles and our companions are meant to help us reach our homeland, but
they themselves are certainly not our home—​at least, they are not meant
to be that for Augustine. If we were to forget that and make ourselves
comfortable within these vehicles, enjoying them as if they were our des-
tination, being “perversely captivated by such agreeable experiences,” we
would lose our focus on our celestial home “where alone we could find real
happiness.”19 In the Augustinian imaginary, we are neither to succumb to
the illusion that our means of travel are our home country, nor to forgo
using them to get there.
That said, our travel to our home with God is not a spatial one, but
rather one of love. God is neither material nor finite; therefore, our voyage
is one whereby we are purified so as to be able to perceive the divine light
and to cling to it. We are returning home to our creator not by locomotion
across physical lands—​the homeland metaphor notwithstanding—​but on
a road “traveled by our affections.”20 It is a road of love with transformative
effects on who we are.
Having set this framework, Augustine presents a vision for understand-
ing what the right order of love needs to be in order for us to reach our only
true home: God. In this context, he makes his famous distinction, which

19. Ibid., 107–​8.

20. Ibid., 113.
9

Why Home? 9

plays a central role in his argument contra any worldly home, between frui
love and uti love. To love in the mode of frui is to enjoy that which is loved
in the sense of loving it for its own sake, cleaving to it or attaching one-
self to it with one’s entire heart and life. “Enjoyment, after all, consists in
clinging to something lovingly for its own sake.”21 In other words, it can-
not be a stepping stone to or an intermediary object for the sake of some-
thing else. Therefore, when we pursue something with frui love, looking
to enjoy it, it means for Augustine that we are seeking it as the end of our
desires. When we obtain it, we desire nothing further and seek nothing
else. We were created precisely for this telos and this telos alone: to enjoy
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Clearly, the trinity in Augustine’s
rhetoric is not to be loved for the sake of something else.
Contrastingly, uti love is instrumental love. It amounts to loving things
from the created universe in order to help us reach our telos of enjoying
the trinity. We are to use the various objects in our path in order to reach
our home, but we are never to enjoy them as final things or objects of
ultimate attachment. While it is true that on our journey to God we need
the medium of worldly things, it is equally true that we need to transcend
them and by no means get attached to what is not our home. Creation is
good, but it merely serves as a vehicle to the uncreated. It is not the infi-
nite good in God that we were made to enjoy; and because of its finitude,
creation cannot bear the weight of being a true home for us. God made the
world in order for humanity to use it as a means of return to God.
The “great question,” then, is what is the status of human beings, given
that they, too, are part of the world: “ought [they] to regard themselves
as things to be enjoyed, or used, or both”?22 In other words, the issue is
whether we ought to love other people for their own sake or for the sake
of something else. If we were to love them for their own sake, we would
enjoy them or relate to them in frui fashion, whereas if we loved them for
the sake of something else, we would use them, as uti denotes. At face
value, Augustine’s answer is straightforward: we are not to love human
persons for their own sake, because we would thereby make them the ter-
minus of our desires and transform them into idols. We are only to love
God for God’s own sake; no human being, including our own selves, can

21. Ibid., 107.

22. Ibid., 114.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Their memory who saved us from all talking Hebrew,—
A toast that to deluge with water is good,
For in Scripture they come in just after the flood:
I give you the men but for whom, as I guess, sir,
Modern languages ne’er could have had a professor,
The builders of Babel, to whose zeal the lungs
Of the children of men owe confusion of tongues;
And a name all-embracing I couple therewith,
Which is that of my founder—the late Mr. Smith.

A PARABLE.

An ass munched thistles, while a nightingale

From passion’s fountain flooded all the vale.
“Hee-haw!” cried he, “I hearken,” as who knew
For such ear-largess humble thanks were due.
“Friend,” said the wingèd pain, “in vain you bray,
Who tunnels bring, not cisterns, for my lay;
None but his peers the poet rightly hear,
Nor mete we listeners by their length of ear.”

Colonna, Italy, 1852.

 V.

EPIGRAMS.

SAYINGS.

1.

In life’s small things be resolute and great

To keep thy muscle trained: know’st thou when Fate
Thy measure takes, or when she’ll say to thee,
“I find thee worthy; do this deed for me”?

2.

A camel-driver, angry with his drudge,

Beating him, called him hunchback; to the hind
Thus spake a dervish: “Friend, the Eternal Judge
Dooms not His work, but ours, the crooked mind.”

3.

Swiftly the politic goes: is it dark?—he borrows a lantern;

Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his steps by the stars.

4.
 “Where lies the capital, pilgrim, seat of who governs the Faithful?”
“Thither my footsteps are bent: it is where Saadi is lodged.”

INSCRIPTIONS.

FOR A BELL AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

I call as fly the irrevocable hours,

Futile as air or strong as fate to make
Your lives of sand or granite; awful powers,
Even as men choose, they either give or take.

FOR A MEMORIAL WINDOW TO SIR WALTER RALEIGH, SET UP

IN ST. MARGARET’S, WESTMINSTER, BY AMERICAN
CONTRIBUTORS.

The New World’s sons, from England’s breasts we drew

Such milk as bids remember whence we came;
Proud of her Past wherefrom our Present grew,
This window we inscribe with Raleigh’s name.

PROPOSED FOR A SOLDIERS' AND SAILORS' MONUMENT IN

BOSTON.

To those who died for her on land and sea,

That she might have a country great and free,
Boston builds this: build ye her monument
In lives like theirs, at duty’s summons spent.

A MISCONCEPTION.
 B, taught by Pope to do his good by stealth,
’Twixt participle and noun no difference feeling,
In office placed to serve the Commonwealth,
Does himself all the good he can by stealing.

THE BOSS.

Skilled to pull wires, he baffles Nature’s hope,

Who sure intended him to stretch a rope.

SUN-WORSHIP.

If I were the rose at your window,

Happiest rose of its crew,
Every blossom I bore would bend inward,
They’d know where the sunshine grew.

CHANGED PERSPECTIVE.

Full oft the pathway to her door

I’ve measured by the selfsame track,
Yet doubt the distance more and more,
’Tis so much longer coming back!

WITH A PAIR OF GLOVES LOST IN A WAGER.

We wagered, she for sunshine, I for rain,

And I should hint sharp practice if I dared;
For was not she beforehand sure to gain
Who made the sunshine we together shared?
 SIXTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY.

As life runs on, the road grows strange

With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
’Neath every one a friend.
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