Last Monday got the better of me, but today was a different story. If any of you have been following my Light Through the Past podcast, you know I have been working through St Augustine. There is a lot in Augustine that I admire and truly find pleasurable to read and ponder. As one of my students once said to me, while she loves the Greek fathers, there’s something about Augustine that seems homely and familiar. I can agree with this to a point, because I was born in the West, which means that I am of necessity a son of Augustine.
I am, however, by confession, affection, and conviction, a son of the Greek fathers. It was they who taught me to make a great deal of sense out of the world, but also make sense of my own religious mind. Yet having said all that, there is much in Augustine that demands our thought. I am going to talk about this on the podcast but I thought I would actually bring it up here on the blog first.
Augustine was a Platonist. He made no bones about it, and it was a good bit of Platonism that helped him disentangle himself from the Manichees. But he also realized, especially following the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, that his Platonism wasn’t going to cut it. The problem however, as I see it, is that how he now handles these things takes an unhelpful turn. For Augustine, and his doctrine of original sin, he ended up seeing even the Pagan virtues as lacking true virtue. This seems very strange considering his love of the liberal arts, and in particular his defense of them by what he called plundering the Egyptians. This last happy phrase concerns his taking of the skills and beauty of the Latin language found in Cicero and Virgil and then using them for Christian ends. I will talk about this on the podcast as well, but for now I merely want to call attention to what this then does with respect to the beautiful, good and true aspects of the natural world.
For Augustine the powers that be exist because men are not angels. The government exists to keep my hand out of your back pocket, and to keep your knife away from my throat. It would seem then that the state exists for a purely negative reason (and I must say here that our modern notion of the state bears absolutely no resemblance to anything that Augustine or any of the ancients would have meant when talking about human government, whether it be the polis for the Greeks, or the civitas of the Latins).
This having been said, it should also be noted that if the state exists ratione peccati, then so also does the Church. Now the reason for something’s existence doesn’t circumscribe the nature of the thing. I have a very nice watch that was given to me by Rob, the husband of my niece and goddaughter Emily. Rob loves timepieces, and he gave me a very nice gift with this watch, and I think of him and pray for him when I wear it. It is not a cheap watch. At the same time I have in my top desk drawer an old Casio watch. It seems never to need a battery, it has velcro for a wristband, and I generally only ever pull it out if I’m going to go fishing. In a sense they both serve the same purpose of telling time. It is an essential nature of why they exist. But anyone would be daft if they thought the one watch actually performs the same function as the other watch. And so with the state and the church.
I make this distinction because the church has its roots in eternity, since for Augustine the church comes into existence in order to make up the number of the fallen angels, who had at one time been numbered among the original citizens of the City of God. Thus the church exists to rectify the marred order of the cosmos. The state on the other hand exists for this same end, but in an ancillary matter. It exists to keep the peace of the Church intact, and thus serves the purpose of facilitating the redemption found within the Church, which itself then serves the purposes of the kingdom of God.
To that end, the city of man is not the same as the state. The city of man exists in opposition to God, and is built on fear, hatred, and most of all a lust for domination. This phrase, lust for domination, or libido dominandi in the Latin, recurs often through the first books of Augustine’s The City of God (De civitate Dei). While these vices can certainly appear in earthly polities, and it is Augustine’s argument that they so appear in the Empire and city of Rome, it would seem that Augustine in an attempt to ward off the arguments made by the Platonists of his own day, namely Plotinus and Porphyry, somehow leaned back into his old Manichaeism. How do I mean this?
Quite simply that Augustine at places sees none of the virtues of Rome as in any way good things. He writes that for a Christian it is not enough to see that a man is angry, but instead to look to the root of anger. By the same token, it is not enough to see that a man is courageous, but why he is courageous. St. Paul’s courage and that of the Roman Regulus are of two species, since St. Paul’s courage was aimed at the City of God, whereas Regulus’s was aimed at the city of Rome.
Augustine actually seems of two minds here, not ust in The City of God, but in letters that he wrote talking about who is saved from out of the Pagan past, when Christ descends to the dead to preach to them. Augustine is of the hope that perhaps they all repent and believe, for we can see in them such great virtues (though does add that they are of no worth), but he then writes that of course cannot say we can say that.
Trying to set up his distinctions between the two cities, however, it would seem that Augustine in order to gild the lily, poisons too many wells. I am not accusing him of Manichaeism, but I think that in trying to answer Porphyry’s criticisms of the church, criticisms that had been made by Celsus in the second century, that the church lacked universality, he therefore undercuts at times the goodness of human nature when setting up his distinction of the two cities. In saying this, I am saying that a good bit of Augustine’s earlier writing seem to be subject now to revision in The City of God. I might think differently about this in a day or so, so if you have any thoughts please leave them in the comments. I hope to be writing again next Monday, though that is Holy Week and we all shall be very busy.
Lux Christi 