Books that Matter: The City of God

Table of contents :
Professor Biography
Table of Contents
Course Scope
Lecture 1—Your Passport to The City of God
Lecture 2—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?
Lecture 3—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.
Lecture 4—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience
Lecture 5—The Problem of Suffering (Book 1)
Lecture 6—The Price of Empire (Books 2-3)
Lecture 7—Augustine’s Political Vision (Book 4)
Lecture 8—Splendid Vices and Happiness in Hope (Book 5)
Lecture 9—Public Religion in Imperial Rome (Books 6-7)
Lecture 10—Who or What Is God? (Books 8-9)
Lecture 11—Sacrifice and Ritual (Book 10)
Lecture 12—Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1-10)
Lecture 13—Metaphysics of Creation and Evil (Book 11)
Lecture 14—Fall of the Rebel Angels (Book 12)
Lecture 15—Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13)
Lecture 16—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14)
Lecture 17—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15-17)
Lecture 18—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)
Lecture 19—Happiness and Politics (Book 19)
Lecture 20—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)
Lecture 21—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)
Lecture 22—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)
Lecture 23—The City of God as a Single Book
Lecture 24—The City of God’s Journey through History
Bibliography

Citation preview

Topic Religion

Books That Matter

Subtopic Christianity

The City of God Professor Charles Mathewes University of Virginia

Transcript Book

PUBLISHED BY: THE GREAT COURSES Corporate Headquarters 4840 Westfields Boulevard, Suite 500 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-2299 Phone: 1-800-832-2412 Fax: 703-378-3819 www.thegreatcourses.com

Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2016

Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company.

Charles Mathewes, Ph.D. Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies University of Virginia

C

harles Mathewes is the Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA). He earned his B.A. in Theology from Georgetown University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion from the University of Chicago. Professor Mathewes is the author of Evil and the Augustinian Tradition; A Theology of Public Life; Understanding Religious Ethics; and The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times. Among other edited volumes, he is the senior editor for a collection titled Comparative Religious Ethics. From 2006 to 2010, Professor Mathewes was the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the flagship journal in the field of religious studies. He has also served as chair of the 2020 Committee on the Future of Christian Ethics for the Society of Christian Ethics and was the inaugural director of the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion. Professor Mathewes currently serves on the House of Bishops Theology Committee of the Episcopal Church.  

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Books That Matter: The City of God

With his wife, Jennifer Geddes, Professor Mathewes served a fouryear term as coprincipal of one of UVA’s residential colleges, Brown College at Monroe Hill.  He spent much of his childhood in Saudi Arabia, but today he lives with his family outside Charlottesville, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Professor Mathewes’s other Great Course is Why Evil Exists. ■

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Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Professor Biography    i Course Scope    1

LECTURE GUIDES LECTURE 1

Your Passport to The City of God   3 LECTURE 2

Who Was Augustine of Hippo?    24 LECTURE 3

The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.    47 LECTURE 4

Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience    67 LECTURE 5

The Problem of Suffering (Book 1)    89 LECTURE 6

The Price of Empire (Books 2–3)     110 LECTURE 7

Augustine’s Political Vision (Book 4)    133 LECTURE 8

Splendid Vices and Happiness in Hope (Book 5)    155 LECTURE 9

Public Religion in Imperial Rome (Books 6–7)    176

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Books That Matter: The City of God

LECTURE 10

Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9)    199 LECTURE 11

Sacrifice and Ritual (Book 10)    222 LECTURE 12

Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1–10)    243 LECTURE 13

Metaphysics of Creation and Evil (Book 11)    265 LECTURE 14

Fall of the Rebel Angels (Book 12)    288 LECTURE 15

Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13)    307 LECTURE 16

The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14)    328 LECTURE 17

Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17)    351 LECTURE 18

Translating the Imperium (Book 18)    372 LECTURE 19

Happiness and Politics (Book 19)    394 LECTURE 20

Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)    415 LECTURE 21

Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)    437 LECTURE 22

Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)    458

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Table of Contents

LECTURE 23

The City of God as a Single Book    480 LECTURE 24

The City of God’s Journey through History    501

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL Bibliography   524 Image Credits     528

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Books That Matter: The City of God Scope

Augustine’s The City of God is one of the most important books in Western civilization. Composed 1,600 years ago, its size and scope are so intimidating that few attempt to make their way through it. This course aims to change that: It serves as an introduction to the text and a guide that will help you navigate The City of God’s main streets and its hidden neighborhoods. While the course proceeds thematically, the general structure of the lectures follows the overall path of The City of God’s many chapters, discussing themes as they appear sequentially in the pages of the work. It begins by exploring the enormously complicated figure of Augustine of Hippo. Then the course analyzes the 410 A.D. Sack of Rome and how it crystallized, both for Augustine and his pagan opponents, a set of questions and concerns that inform every page of The City of God. Augustine leveraged the opportunity to respond to those concerns in order to produce something entirely unprecedented: not just a response to those concerns, but a new vision of history and the duties of humans in this world under God’s providential governance. It is this vision that the course spends most of its time exploring. The course explores many of the most fundamental concepts and categories of Christendom, which stretched from Augustine’s age until the 19th or 20th century and still supplies many of the moral, religious, and political categories people use to understand the world today.  The City of God is the longest single work presenting a sustained argument unified around a single theme to survive from GrecoRoman antiquity. As such, it offers an unparalleled window into the 1

Books That Matter: The City of God

world of classical antiquity: Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Plato, Aristotle, and many others appear in its pages. This course will explore the history of the ancient world, and how Augustine thought about and taught others to think about that world’s grandeur and tragedy. Finally, the work remains a treasure trove of political, philosophical, and religious insight for our own day, informing the thinking of academics, religious leaders, and statespeople even into the 21st century. This course tackles the book in its full depth and breadth, helping you grasp both the architectonics and the detail of The City of God. The course’s goals: to deepen your understanding of the thought of Augustine; to enrich your understanding of the classical world in which he lived; and to grapple with the fundamental questions that drive the book forward.

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Your Passport to The City of God

Lecture 1

T

he metaphor of travel can helpfully illuminate what must happen with a book like The City of God—or De Civitate Dei, as it’s called in Latin. The City of God is the way by which we go to the land of Augustinian Christianity, definitely a foreign country, no matter what your previous education or philosophical or theological training has been. And yet it has had a fundamental, if very ancient, impact on each of us here—who we are, how we think of ourselves, how we think of time and history and the meaning of life.

Structure and Origin „„

The scale and structural complexity of The City of God make it unique. At more than 1,000 pages in Latin, it is the longest single work to have survived from the ancient world that has a coherent theme and an intact argumentative architecture. Twenty-two “books,” or longish chapters, each comprising twenty to thirty subsections, are divided into two parts, corresponding to two large tasks. ›› Books 1 through 10 defend Christians using the technique of immanent critique—that is, a critique that uses interlocutors’ own sources and possibly their own words to reveal contradictions and other flaws in their account. ››

Books 11 through 22 offer a constructive account of the Christian view of how to inhabit the world and to be a good Roman. This shift perhaps signals a fundamental change of mood in Christian thought, from polemic with enemies, foreign or domestic, to pedagogy for believers.

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Books That Matter: The City of God

„„

Provoked initially by the sack of Rome by the Visigoths and pagan charges that the sack and indeed the crumbling of the Roman Empire in the west was the fault of the Christians, Augustine decided to explain why that wasn’t true, adding a positive explanation of how Christians should understand life in this world before the end of time.

Insight and Argument „„

The City of God is not only an impressive relic; it is also a living wellspring of wisdom, insight and argument and a powerful lens through which to view the world today. In it you see a full considered judgment of ancient Rome and a full exposition of what would become the foundation for a comprehensive Christian worldview.

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Augustine’s point was that there is saint and sinner in every person; while he organized his argument formally to distinguish between Christians and pagans, his audience is made up of humans, some Christian and some not. They share a number of assumptions even if they do not completely agree, and each needs to be challenged and taught if they are to live a truly flourishing life. The pagans’ charges are the occasion for his writing, but not the target of it.

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The City of God is a summation of Augustine’s thought, addressed to Roman Christians troubled by the pagans’ charges, confident those accusations are wrong but confused about their condition and their station and duties in the postConstantine world. Understanding this point is very important to understanding the tone of the later books, the way Augustine presents arguments, and indeed a whole way of thinking about and within Christianity.

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Lecture 1—Your Passport to The City of God

Saint Augustine of Hippo 5

Books That Matter: The City of God

Challenging Assumptions „„

A common feature of Augustine’s books is that their titles lead us to expect one thing, but their arguments show us that to understand that thing, we must understand something else entirely. ›› So the Confessions, known as his autobiography, is actually about how rightly to know God; On the Trinity turns out to be about how we can understand the nature of God as triune only if we know what it means to be human. Similarly, The City of God turns out to be less about the Heavenly City at rest than about humanity’s peregrinations in this fallen world. ››

The lesson here about Augustine’s thought is that to answer the question we are asking, we are always advised to step back and examine the assumptions that led us to ask the question in the first place. Only by naming and challenging these assumptions can we really get at the deepest level of our convictions, and only there can the arduous work of change begin.

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For Augustine, this is a conversionist project, not a replacement project; that is, pagans’ visions of how the world hangs together are still rattling around in our heads. Thus, in engaging and exorcising them, we are helping to convert ourselves from the thought-world of the fallen worldly city to the true new meanings of the City of God. This book is not meant to show people that they are wrong, but how they can begin to become right.

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Although The City of God is a rhetorical masterwork, there is a deeply pedagogical aim to this book: It is a kind of beginner’s manual for Christian life in this world. To imagine how to criticize a culture’s basic terms of self-understanding and to suggest to its members a radical revision of those terms is difficult. You must show how the new is within them waiting to be born. You must not change them, but show them how they are already changing. 6

Lecture 1—Your Passport to The City of God

Aims of the Course „„

The City of God expands our understanding of very many things. It is the way by which we go to a deeper understanding of politics, the human condition, and our historical antecedents. ›› Augustine’s aim is for the book to point beyond itself, to our moral and spiritual salvation. That is why he asks questions about whether we are admiring the book or confronting the demands he wants the book to make on us. ››

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Our aim, taking the book on its own terms to understand what it is trying to argue and how it makes its case, is harder in our day than it was in Augustine’s. To accomplish that task, we will go on a guided tour of the city, book by book, with a focus on the large themes each book brings up. We will see that Augustine addresses these themes in roughly the same order that we will discuss them in these lectures.

This tour through the book will offer you multiple layers of learning: ›› First, to understand the structure of the book—its overall architecture and details, its organization, its arguments, how they are composed in a strategic structure that means to mount from one moment to the next, and why Augustine chose this particular structure and this particular method for his argument. ››

Second, to understand the thought of Augustine—what he assumes is true; what he thinks to be right but realizes not everyone agrees; how he conceives the nature of God, of the human, and of many other things; what he takes to be the point of argument; and what sort of conviction an argument can attain.

››

Third, to understand the world of late antiquity—what fundamental questions occupied people, under what crucial assumptions did they operate that led them to those 7

Books That Matter: The City of God

questions, what anxieties or concerns they had, and what hopes they had for themselves and their world. ››

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Finally, to understand the fundamental and perennial philosophical and theological questions raised by this book— that is to say, questions latent in its argument and present in how it argues, both in Augustine’s day and in our own.

Our first job will be to try as best we can to hear what Augustine is saying. This task can be much harder than it seems. Historical inquiries are prone to two errors: assuming subjects never died, and imagining they never lived. Both encourage us to forget that they were humans like us. We are tempted to assume that ancient thinkers, were they alive today, would utter the same things that they did millennia ago. ›› Only by seeing historical figures in their time can we understand the distinct ways in which they may be in significant tension with it. We must understand Augustine as just like us—a man who struggled for clarity, changed his mind, and had to think using tools from a fairly limited range of intellectual options whose parameters he did not set. ››

In apprehending his arguments and feeling their grip, we understand we are at least in the same arena with him, we are the same kind of creature that he is—whether we agree with him or not. He has something to say to us, something of urgent importance for our lives. Augustine would agree: He repeatedly reminded his audiences not to confuse his words with those of Scripture, and not to turn his name into an idol.

››

And yet Augustine is, in important ways, not like us. His particular gifts will likely leave you in awe the more you are able to see their scope. Today we believe that all humans are created equal. In many ways that’s true. But it can also obscure a very deep truth: that we are also very different, and have very diverse gifts. 8

Lecture 1—Your Passport to The City of God

„„

This otherness can itself be a lesson for us—a lesson in the scope of human achievement. Sometimes we think of this as a matter of superhuman genius, or divine inspiration. Exceptionally gifted people share all our frailties and yet in some way rise above them to achieve something whose relevance and importance for our world is sometimes directly correlated to the obscurity of the connections linking them to our world

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Augustine doesn’t want us thinking he’s some sort of superhuman genius. He is far more human, and far less merciful than that: He knows he is a human, and the differences between him and us are not differences of species. So everything he says can be understood—a terrifying challenge. We’ll begin in the next lecture by gaining some brief acquaintance with the author— Augustine of Hippo.

Questions to Consider 1. Augustine’s The City of God involves both critique and affirmation. How do you think critique and affirmation should be related in large projects such as this? 2. What would it mean to write a book for 15 years? How would you sustain continuity across so long a time of composition?

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Lecture 1 Transcript

Your Passport to The City of God

W

hat is a passport? It is a book that lets us travel to another land. The City of God is just such a book. It is the way by which we go to the land of Augustinian Christianity, and it is a strange country. When we travel, we mean to go somewhere different, and then return home. We always fail, to some degree, in this. Typically, when we reach the place we aim to visit, we never see it for what it truly is. Our vision is too clouded by our prejudices, our expectations, ourselves. And when we return, we always return slightly different ourselves, having been infected with the alienness of the place we reached. Sometimes we return very different indeed. Sometimes we don’t even return at all. The metaphor of travel can helpfully illuminate what I think has to happen with a book like The City of God—or De Civitate Dei, as it’s called in Latin. It is definitely a foreign country, no matter what your previous education or your philosophical or theological training has been. And yet it has had a fundamental, if very ancient, impact on each of us—who we are, how we think of ourselves, how we think of time and history and the meaning of life. The scale and structural complexity of The City of God make it unique on their own. He organized the book into 22 books, which are basically longish chapters, and each of those books is subdivided into approximately 20–30 subsections, which we call chapters. It’s huge— it’s over 1,000 pages in Latin, and English translations can easily run much longer, as Latin is actually a much more compact language than is English. 10

Lecture 1 Transcript—Your Passport to The City of God

Augustine wrote it over 15 years, from 411–426 or 27 A.D. It was provoked initially by the sack of Rome and pagan charges that that sack was somehow the Christians’ fault, and indeed that the crumbling of the Roman empire, as a whole, in the West, which Augustine’s lifetime witnessed, was also the fault of the Christians. He decided to explain why that wasn’t true, and as time went on, he added to that defense of Christians a positive explanation of how they should understand life in this world before the end of time. It’s composed in two large parts, corresponding to its two large tasks. The first part, Books 1–10, defends Christians against accusations and countercharges from their opponents through using what philosophers will call an immanent critique of pagan Rome—that is, a critique that uses the interlocutor’s own sources and possibly their own words, their own ideas and concepts, to reveal contradictions and other flaws in their account. This part has two subparts of five books each about the Romans’ beliefs that they could attain happiness, either through this-worldly political achievements or through otherworldly philosophy. The second part of The City, as a whole, is composed of Books 11– 22, and that offers a constructive account of the Christian picture of the world: how to inhabit it, to be worldly and political, and thus to be a good Roman. This shift perhaps signals a fundamental change of mood in Christian thought—at least Augustine’s thought— from polemic with enemies, foreign or domestic, to pedagogy for believers. He begins here to teach his audience how to see the world, what language to use in describing it, what to do and how to learn to feel about what one is doing. Now this part is composed of three subsections of four books each about the origins, the course, and the end of the city of God and the city of this world. Just enumerating the books, describing the structure, and touching on some of the topics can be impressive and exhausting. It is the longest single work to have survived from the ancient world which has a coherent unity of theme and an intact argumentative architecture. 11

Books That Matter: The City of God

Augustine himself, near the end, admits that it was a work great and arduous. If you have read it all, you know he indulged there in a rare understatement. But it’s not only an impressive relic, it is also a living wellspring of wisdom, insight, and argument, and a powerful set of lenses through which to view our world today, letting us see its contours with a different light and a slightly different focus. Prompted by the sack of Rome in 410, the text’s early books possess an urgency of argument that, as the work cooled into the reflective wisdom of maturity, and then accelerates again in its final books as Augustine begins to look forward to his own death, and perhaps foresees something of the changes that were overtaking his world in his final years. In it, you see a full-considered judgment of ancient Rome, and a full exposition of what would become the foundation for a comprehensive Christian worldview, pertinent in Augustine’s day and even into our own. When I teach this book to students, I actually compare it to a Hollywood blockbuster, the kind that Cecil B. DeMille used to make in the 1950s. It has far more characters, subplots, moving pieces, and epic drama than almost anything else we have from the ancient world. For scope, its only rivals are the great epic poems such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, perhaps the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus. Indeed, at times it seems almost aware of those as its peers. As a book, this work is clearly swinging for the fences. Its uniqueness is unquestioned and its scale is unprecedented. But Augustine had been thinking about many of the central themes for this book for a quarter-century before he began to dictate it. And he probably did dictate it, by the way, to a scribe—you can imagine the writer’s cramp you would receive from this book. Themes, motifs, arguments, and concepts have appeared in many other works of his. He’d even delivered a sermon 10 years before using the exact same phrase, City of God, and expositing its theological meaning. So while the work was unprecedented, it was quite clearly also premeditated. 12

Lecture 1 Transcript—Your Passport to The City of God

Why did he write it? Well, obviously it was provoked by the sack of Rome, but it quickly got out of control, growing ever-more expansive as he seems to have realized the importance of grappling with the full scope of the challenges—challenges whose range and depth, he thought, were not even realized by those who flung those challenges at him. Initially provoked by the very immediate historical prompt of the sack, it then more distantly became a forum for Augustine to explore more fully a set of questions far more profound, and issues far more momentous, than the fate of a few buildings of brick and marble on the banks of the Tiber. Like many modern politicians, he firmly believed that you should never let a crisis go to waste, and Augustine uses this crisis to rethink Rome, rethink all of history, in fact, and also offer a new vision of how consciously to inherit the past and inhabit the present. Therefore, he addresses two very different figures, audiences Augustine had engaged throughout his writing career: traditionalist pagans and his fellow Christians. The book’s two parts map on, at least on first acquaintance, to its two audiences’ different needs. First, it replies to pagan Romans and their charges that Christianity is antithetical to Rome since it is anti-civic and in fact anti-worldly, so it begins defensively. But it ends up offering an immanent critique of their culture, arguing that they are the ones who cannot be either properly political or properly worldly. Now, the danger of apologetics in general—defensive arguments of this sort—is that they are reactive, easily more sensitive to the particular challenges an opponent sees fit to launch than to the challenges that might be most interesting. So they are always tempted to let the momentary efface the long term, to let tactics erase concern for strategy, let countercharge and reaction eclipse considered response. Much of earlier Christian writing was apologetic and polemic in this sense. 13

Books That Matter: The City of God

But not The City. In the end, it is not a reactionary book, not even in its first 10 books. As evidence for this, consider just one word: pagan. I’ll use this word fairly often to identify Augustine’s interlocutors, especially in the first 10 books. And often, translations of this book are entitled The City of God against the Pagans. But, in fact, the book does not have that title at all. It’s properly titled The City of God, with no against in the title at all. And there’s an odd absence of the term in the book itself. Across its almost 300,000 Latin words, the word paganus and its variants appears only 7 times. This doesn’t mean that he disrespects the pagans, only that he contests the way they present themselves, and, by extension, their picture of the world. If that offends any pagans, realize that Augustine also argued that the Christian church of his day was no pure precinct of godliness. Saints and sinners populated its pews in at best nearequal proportions. Like any other priest or bishop even today, he knew very well that the church is a place for sinners. Now his point was that there is saint and sinner in every person; pagan and Christian alike. And while he organized his argument formally to distinguish between these two audiences, in the end he wanted the whole book to be readable by all. To him, his audience is mat up of humans—some Christian, some not—all of whom share a number of assumptions in his world, even if they do not completely agree, and each of whom needs to be challenged, and taught, if they are to live a truly flourishing life. The pagans have to be brought into the Christian world, but that doesn’t mean that the Christians have nothing to learn as well. So the pagans’ charges are the occasion for his writing, but they are not the target. To say this book is against the pagans would be to give his opponents too much respect as opponents and not enough as humans; it would pin them in the position of enemies. But the book is not primarily written against anyone. It is a work for people who want to see aright, and who want to be reformed so their vision gets better. It is in this way a positive work, a work of transfiguring therapy. 14

Lecture 1 Transcript—Your Passport to The City of God

Now in part this is due to Augustine’s enormous mental control over the material, and I hope at many times in these lectures to make you realize what kind of mental control that was. But it’s also due to the fact that, while it began as a defensive apology, its motivating energy changed over time, so much so that in later books, in later years, the sack of Rome could be mentioned without any visible emotion from Augustine at all. It had become a trauma metabolized into insight, coolly recollected in tranquility. Maybe time or wisdom allowed the second stage of Augustine’s work to emerge and in some ways to frame and contextualize the first stage, securing the whole from being a mere reaction. Perhaps Augustine knew from the beginning what would be eventually required, for by its final books it has become a summa of Augustine’s thought, addressed to his fellow Roman Christians who are troubled by the pagans’ charges, confident those accusations are wrong but confused about their condition and their station and their duties in the post-Constantinian world after the sack of Rome. How can one be a Roman—which for Augustine and his audience effectively meant being a civilized person—and a Christian? How much care should be given to the world, and in what way? We are living in Christian times, and yet the Second Coming has been indefinitely postponed. What are we going to do now in the interim? Understanding this latter aim is very important to understanding the tone of the later books, and the way in which Augustine presents arguments, and indeed a whole way of thinking about and within Christianity, some of which involves dogmatic assertion, some of which involves confessing ignorance, and some of which involves a very interesting openness to uncertainty, and perhaps even humility— strange in a bishop or a professor. Indeed, Augustine’s vehemence in critiquing the pagans, in the first part, is interestingly and intentionally in tension with his ambiguity and tentativeness in offering a Christian view in the second part. We’ll have reason to think about that, and what it says about how 15

Books That Matter: The City of God

Augustine conceived the theologian’s task, in coming lectures. That might surprise you. But the book will surprise you to its conclusion; upending assumptions you didn’t know you even had, then showing you that we did have them. That was a common trick of Augustine, whose books were titled to make us expect one thing and then whose arguments show us that, to understand that one thing we must understand something else entirely. Consider this. Augustine’s Confessions, known as his autobiography, is actually mostly about how rightly to know God, how to think about God; while his great work On the Trinity, which is putatively about God, turns out to be about how we can only understand the nature of God as triune if we know what it means to be human. Similarly, The City of God turns out to be not so much about the heavenly city at rest, and more about humanity’s peregrinations in this fallen world. There’s a deep lesson about Augustine’s thought in that, and one that we will have time to rediscover again and again, to answer the question we are asking. We are almost always advised to step back and examine the assumptions that led us to ask that question in the first place. Only by naming and challenging these assumptions, Augustine thinks, can we really get at the deepest level of our convictions, and only there can the arduous work of change begin. This gets us to a deep point, and one that I can only telegraphically state now, although I hope you’ll come to see it more deeply in coming lectures: Augustine thinks that his is a conversionist project, not a replacement project. This is why he needs to keep the first 10 books in the whole. The new city of God is coming into being out of the old, fallen cities, going back to the very first city; the one Cain built after he killed Abel. God uses the stones from the Tower of Babel, from the walls of Babylon, the Agora of Athens, and the Forum of Rome to build this new city. And there’s a larger story about Augustine’s construal of Christianity in there: sinners are not replaced by saints; they become them. 16

Lecture 1 Transcript—Your Passport to The City of God

And, for Augustine, those stones, those sinners, they are us. This is why Augustine spends so much time arguing against the pagans. It’s not that the pagan dead need to be dug up and yelled at; it’s that their thoughts, their visions of how the world hangs together, are still rattling around in our heads, the heads of his contemporaries. And so in engaging and exorcising them, we are helping to convert ourselves away from the thought-world of the fallen worldly city and coming to see the true new meanings of The City of God. This is not ultimately a book meant to show people that they are wrong, it’s meant to show them how they can begin to become right. That’s what it means to call it a conversionist strategy. And that is why this book, The City of God, is a rhetorical masterwork, showing how our language needs to be reformed and relearned, and through that reformation, the world re-seen. Understanding what it means to do this involves undertaking the journey it means to take you on. You cannot know what its aims are fully at its beginning—a certain kind of patience is required. Now, not everybody appreciates this. Étienne Gilson, who was a very important French philosopher early in the 20th century and quite affectionate toward the more stilted and technical approach of medieval scholastic theology, once said, in an attempt to be really appreciative of Augustine, that “digression is Augustinism’s natural method.” Behind this faint praise is the impatience of a philosopher who only values direct syllogistic argument. Now, Augustine is a genius at argument, and he shows that in many different works. But in this matter argument is in some deep way not ambitious enough for him. Just consider: how much has direct argument accomplished in your life? I bet as much as mine. Which is to say, damned little. His audience needs not just information, but transformation. They need not simply to be convinced, but to be converted. So he must go deeper than mere argument. And he does. Although it might look like digression, Augustine knows where he is going, and he takes us there by the shortest route possible. It’s just 17

Books That Matter: The City of God

that we have a longer route to follow than less psychologically astute thinkers might realize. So there’s a deeply pedagogical aim to this book—it is a kind of beginner’s guidebook to Christian life, a manual for Christian life in this world. This is a tricky task, to imagine how to criticize a culture’s basic terms of self-understanding, and suggest to them a radical revision of those terms, and, by extension, of that self-understanding. How can they envision the transition you are proposing to them, except with the very terms and categories you are urging them to reject? You have to show them how to transition from the old to the new, how this pilgrimage of conversion can take place. To do this, you have to show the new is there waiting to be born in them, in the old, already—how their wills want to be good, how their minds want to know truth, how their words want to praise. You must not change them, but show them how they are already changing. In this way, Augustine is a pedagogical and rhetorical therapist. He starts with the terms you bring to him, but he engages with you, and with them, with such relentless, ruthless dialectical subtlety, that at some point not just your self-understanding, and not just your understanding of the problem, but the very terms in which you understand the world, what those terms denote, and what you take them to imply, that has been transformed as well. And that is just what he does throughout The City of God. He chose words that were especially important to his context, and formulated arguments meant to show how they were commonly misused, and should be reoriented toward the worship of God. Words like virtue, justice, love, law, empire, mercy, compassion, and above all, city and glory. In reading this book, then, we also read ourselves, and more deeply into ourselves. The City of God expands our understanding of very many things. It is the way by which we go to a deeper understanding of politics, the human condition, and our historical antecedents. But 18

Lecture 1 Transcript—Your Passport to The City of God

is this book also the country to which we go? Is our aim to explore The City of God in itself, and, finally, as an artifact, almost as one might appreciate a painting or a sculpture? That is certainly not Augustine’s aim. He wants the book to point beyond itself, to a larger thing, to our moral and spiritual salvation. And that’s why the author at times, so to speak, steps out of the book, to look at it from the side, so to speak, and asks questions about whether we are admiring the book, or confronting the demands he wants the book to make on us. It is a strange thought, but he knew that people far distant from him in space and time would be struggling to understand his work, and he would have the chance to speak to them as directly as anyone ever could. In some way, he knew you would be reading this book. And if you consider it, that’s a terrifying thought. Augustine is watching you. So we will repeatedly confront the tension between a temptation merely to admire the work, and the author’s conversionist intent. But we’ll also try to take the book as a book, on its own terms, and understand what it is trying to argue, and how it makes its case. That’s harder in our day than it was in Augustine’s, and so from time to time I’ll give you a bit of context on why he is so agitated about some issue, or who his real interlocutors are, or what exactly it is that they are arguing so vehemently about. How will we do this? Effectively, by going on a guided tour of The City. We’ll travel together through the whole book, from beginning to end, with a focus on the large themes that each of its 22 books brings up, and discover—by happy not so much coincidence—that Augustine treats of these themes pretty much in the order that we discuss them in these lectures. I will do this since I take it that your aim is not to have your hand held down each and every one of the many labyrinthine alleys of The City of God, but to have a guide who shows you the major sites—all the grand squares, major avenues, prominent buildings and crucial 19

Books That Matter: The City of God

historical sites—and leaves you to explore all the neighborhoods and backstreets on your own. This tour through the book will offer you multiple layers of learning. First, I want you to come to understand the structure of The City of God—its overall architecture and details, why it is organized this way, what its local arguments are, how they are composed in a strategic structure that means to mount from one moment to the next, and why he chose this particular strategic structure and this particular method for his argument. Second, I want you to come to understand the overall thought of Augustine—what he assumes is true; what he thinks to be right but realizes not everyone thinks to be right; how he conceives the nature of God, of the human, of Creation, of good and evil, and many other things; what he takes to be the point of argument, and what sort of convincingness an argument can attain. Third, I want you to come to understand the world of late antiquity, at least a bit: what the fundamental questions were that people occupied themselves with; what crucial assumptions did they operate under about the nature of humanity, Creation, and God or the gods that led them to those questions; what anxieties and concerns they had; what hopes they had for themselves and their world. And, fourth and finally, I want you to come to understand, a little better than you do already, the fundamental and perennial philosophical and theological questions raised by this book—that is to say, the questions latent in The City’s argument and present in how it argues, both in Augustine’s day and in our own. These questions are both of the “what” and the “how” variety— “what” questions about the meaning of history, the relationship of freedom to virtue; “how” questions about the nature of cultural change and conversion happens; the relation between Christianity and Judaism; how to use a fallen language to describe a redeemed 20

Lecture 1 Transcript—Your Passport to The City of God

world; and, perhaps most subtly, what can you say, and how do you speak, to multiple audiences at the same time? For it’s a challenge to write so frankly and unapologetically out of one’s own deepest religious and philosophical convictions to audiences who will not all share, and perhaps won’t even understand, those commitments. In each lecture, I’ll try to address each of these layers. Our first job will be to try as best we can to hear what Augustine is saying, and that can be much harder than it seems. Let me just mention this to you, for your consideration throughout our tour. Historical enquiries in general are prone to kinds of two errors: first, assuming a thinker never died; and second, imagining that she or he never lived. Both encourage us to forget that they were humans like us. All of this is to say, we’re tempted to assume that ancient thinkers, were they alive today, would utter the exact same things that they did millennia ago, that they would happily repeat pat formulae. Or, on the other hand, we’re tempted to imagine that once we gain a suitably subtle, contextual understanding of a thinker, we’ve done enough, and so we often represent thinkers as simply almost vegetative consequences of their eras, expressive epiphenomena of their age. We have to do better. Only by seeing historical figures in their time can we understand the distinct ways in which they might be in significant tension with that time, and still alive and speaking to us today. So we must think with, and then beyond, Augustine. We must understand him as just like us, a human who struggled for clarity, who changed his mind, and had to think using tools from a fairly limited range of intellectual options whose parameters he did not set, but were given to him. In apprehending his arguments, feeling their grip, we understand that we are at least in the same arena with him, we are the same kind of creature that he is, whether we agree with him or not. He has something to say to us, something of urgent importance for our lives. And Augustine would agree. He repeatedly reminded his audiences 21

Books That Matter: The City of God

not to confuse his words with those of Scripture, not to turn his name into an idol. And yet Augustine is, in important ways, not like us. His particular gifts of symphonic vision, deep insight, and argumentative mastery will likely leave you, as they do me, in awe the more you are able to see their scope. This is a hard thing to get into focus today. Today we believe that all humans are created equals. In many ways that’s very importantly true. But it can also obscure a very deep truth, as well: namely, that we are all also very, very different, and have very diverse gifts from one another. Those gifts make our world a kaleidoscope of geniuses. Johann Sebastian Bach and Thelonious Monk had gifts for music that the rest of us will never possess. George Eliot and Albert Einstein and Srinivasa Ramanujan are not on some sort of continuity with the rest of us, so that we could have written Middlemarch or worked out the general theory of relativity or the Ramanujan conjecture on the size of the tau-function if only we’d tried a teensy-weensy, little bit harder. This is even true in sports and in other competitions. Michael Jordan; Cal Ripken Jr.; Bobby Fischer; Misty Copeland, the dancer—they have capacities of embodied attunement, spatial awareness, and understandings of movement that, while they were cultivated and trained into them, were also importantly gifts for them. Indeed, some of us would call those God-given talents. This otherness about us all, this otherness that we all curiously share, this can itself be a lesson for us—a lesson in the scope of human achievement. Sometimes we think of this as a matter of superhuman genius, divine inspiration, and surely there’s something to that vision, more than we maybe want to admit. But the really terrifying thing about all these people is, in some basic way, they are just like us: flesh and blood, eating food, needing to pee, feeling sleepy, getting antsy, distractible, ill-tempered. They share all our frailties, and yet in some way rise above them to achieve something whose relevance 22

Lecture 1 Transcript—Your Passport to The City of God

and importance for our world is sometimes directly correlated to the obscurity of the connections linking them to that world. Now, Augustine doesn’t want you thinking he’s some sort of superhuman genius. In fact, he worries about it so much and so often that you wonder if he himself thinks that. But he’s far more human in his best moments, and far less merciful to you than that. He knows he is a human, and the differences between him and us are not differences of species. Everything he says can be understood. And that, my friends, is a terrifying challenge. In this way, The City of God is not just a place to go; it is a challenge to meet. To mix metaphors, it’s not a city, but a mountain we can try to climb. It’s an impressive mountain, to be sure; but there are routes up its faces, and many have gone before. Join me in this journey, and you will not be the same after it. We’ll begin in the next lecture by gaining some brief acquaintance with the author himself: Augustine of Hippo.

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Lecture 2

Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

I

f you have heard about Augustine at all, it is likely that you have heard some collection of platitudes: that he was a metaphysical dualist and expressed an escapist animus toward material creation; that he taught a juridical morality of guilt that subjugated humans under the providence of a puppet-master God; and that he is politically a fundamentally antidemocratic thinker, an authoritarian who gave the highest moral imprimatur for the coercion of the Middle Ages that culminated in the Holy Inquisition. All of these are crucial for understanding Augustine and his book. All are crucially wrong.

Early Life and Education „„

Augustine’s world understood itself to be in some deep continuity with Pharaonic Egypt, whereas we feel ourselves severed from the Roman world Augustine inhabited. ›› He was born in 354 in Thagaste, in Roman North Africa—a medium-sized provincial town in the farming heartland of the Roman Empire—a cultural backwater. His father, Patricius, was a Roman transplant. His mother, Monica, may have been from North African stock. ››

Augustine was given a good education and responded well; as a promising youth he was sponsored to go to Carthage to study further and eventually went to Milan to become a teacher of rhetoric.

››

He had a common-law wife whose name he never revealed, and a son, Adeodatus, born in about 371 or 372. Augustine sent his wife away shortly before his conversion in 387. 24

Lecture 2—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

Adeodatus died at age 17, soon after he and his father were baptized. ››

„„

It is one of the mysteries of Augustine—an influence we can never measure—that everything we have that he wrote came from the mind of the father of a dead, much beloved, son and a husband who had sent his wife away.

From his training as a teacher of rhetoric, Augustine learned a certain idea of moral formation, of what it means to become a fully civilized man. Rhetoric was not simply one discipline among others in Roman education; it was the basis of education, the aim of which was to become a certain kind of agent. To be thus educated meant to be civilized.

Involvement with Manicheism „„

Throughout his youth, Augustine was involved with Manicheism, which shared a deep resonance with Neoplatonist beliefs about the lesser nature of material reality and the idea that the truth lies deeply inside us, in the most spiritual part of our beings. ›› From his time with the Manicheans and with Neoplatonism he learned an appreciation of contemplation and a deep suspicion of noise and turbulence. ››

„„

He also acquired the idea that “behind” this world there is another, truer, deeper one; so we must resist the idea that our sensory experience is exhaustive of all reality.

Augustine’s time with the Manicheans and his Platonism more broadly receive the blame for his perceived dualism; that is, his putative belief that people are souls embedded in bodies that are strictly speaking accidental to their being and his hostility to the idea that the material world is worth much.

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Books That Matter: The City of God

„„

Ultimately Augustine was unsatisfied by Manicheism. In Milan he met Ambrose, its Neoplatonist Christian bishop, and found a congenial way of being Christian. He converted and was baptized in 387.

St. Ambrose and Saint Augustine 26

Lecture 2—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

Urban Monasticism „„

North African Christians of Augustine’s day measured moral and religious seriousness by suffering and endurance. It was a good context for thinking of the Christian life as one of ascetic commitment. He set up a religious community in Thagaste, living an austere life of prayer, poverty, and community. ›› His monasticism was not traditional: He chose the city instead of the desert. His decision meant he thought the intensity of the dedicated religious life was best carried out amid the noise and bustle, where the monks could be seen and known. ››

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Augustine had a deep suspicion of private property and privacy in general and insisted on holding things in common as a community and on being open about his own and his community’s weaknesses, believing that perhaps others could be dissuaded from repeating their errors if they saw the consequences.

In 391, Augustine was compelled to accept ordination as a priest, with the clear intent that he become the new bishop of Hippo Regius. He would be bishop, but he would remain monastic; he moved his religious community to Hippo and lived within it throughout his life.

Development as Writer, Teacher, and Theologian „„

„„

Augustine led a busy life, writing constantly—treatises, commentaries, letters, and hundreds of sermons. As bishop he was a prominent citizen and public figure and gained a first-order acquaintance with small-town politics and the complexities of the region and, over time, the whole shape of the empire. As bishop, Augustine remained a teacher, committed to transforming his audience’s affections, believing that theology was accessible to all if the theologian took care to render his language intelligible to ordinary folk. 27

Books That Matter: The City of God

››

Furthermore, as that sort of teacher, and as one who lived a vocation of communality and public openness about his own weaknesses, Augustine taught a radical Christianity that, along with disavowing private property, insisted that the full vocation of the Christian life could be lived out in the ordinary life of the everyday person.

Donatists and Pelagians „„

In Augustine’s lifetime, the North African Christian churches were split into two factions: ›› Christians whose leaders had collaborated in the imperial persecutions a century earlier. ››

Christians whose leaders broke communion with the collaborators. These churches were called Donatist, after one of their leaders.

„„

The crucial division was whether toleration of morally corrupt people had limits. The Donatists wanted to draw clear lines and hold them absolutely; the churches Augustine joined believed that stance was unforgiving. Augustine’s signal accomplishment was to convince the Roman authorities to break the will of the Donatist leaders.

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Augustine’s writings sparked the Pelagian controversy, which began in the 400s and has never really left the western Christian churches since. ›› Pelagius, a British monk, thought Augustine’s emphasis on the priority of grace deflated the urgency of individuals’ moral striving, effaced individual responsibility, and degraded human dignity. ››

Augustine thought Pelagius didn’t understand the actual nature of God’s saving work or the direness of the human condition after the fall. 28

Lecture 2—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

››

The debate between them, and then between Pelagius’s disciples and Augustine, continued for the rest of his life.

Final Years „„

The end of the Donatist controversy, the beginning of the Pelagian controversy, and the beginning of the writing of The City of God converged: The controversy came to its climax and resolution in the Council of Carthage in 411, in which Augustine played a prominent role. ›› He began writing The City of God in late 411 or 412, and kept at it, though often distracted by other work, until he completed it in 426 or 427. ››

The remaining few years of his life were just as busy as the earlier ones, and he kept on writing, teaching, and even occasionally preaching up to a few weeks before his death, on August 28, 430, with the Vandals besieging Hippo.

Sources of Misinterpretation „„

Augustine’s dealings with the Donatists and the Pelagians and his overall practice in the office of bishop constitute the source for his critics’ charge that he is antidemocratic, an authoritarian who gave the highest moral imprimatur for the Inquisition. In fact, in his role as a leader of the Latin Christian churches, he was anything but authoritarian. As a bishop, he continued teaching an anti-authoritarian vision of the Gospel, one that was deeply suspicious of figures such as himself.

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Because Augustine overshadows most other historical figures, we forget the human Augustine and imagine the saint. No post-apostolic thinker has been invoked more successfully—or, paradoxically, more variously—to authorize the western church’s teachings. 29

Books That Matter: The City of God

„„

The churches today have “learned” many things by having them authorized by citations from Augustine’s texts. But what the churches have learned and what Augustine meant to teach need not be the same thing. ›› No other thinker is as rhetorically supple, or as alert to his audience’s expectations. He was a Christian Platonist monastic; a living church father; a savvy civic and ecclesiastical administrator; judge, advocate, and jury; author, reader, preacher, and teacher; philosopher and anti-philosopher. ››

He was never content with his last formulation of a particular issue. His thought reveals a continuous dynamism and flexibility of style, tone, and even argument that makes his position on many matters very hard to pin down.

››

We have treated his books as canonical, and they fossilized into something like divine writ. Augustine feared that people would find in his books whatever they wanted to find, and he tried to stop that from happening. And he mostly failed.

Why Read Augustine Now „„

Consider where he stands in the history of philosophy: He lived roughly 800 years after Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and roughly 800 years before Aquinas, and there are roughly 800 years between Aquinas and today. Augustine marked the transition between ancient and medieval philosophy. ›› In terms of political thought, to read The City of God forces you to grapple with multiple interpretations of that book, rival readings whose alternatives structure much of the history of political thought in the West. ››

Augustine helps us better understand our past. Even nonChristians can find usefulness in understanding this most influential of Christian imaginations of the cosmos, of political order, and of the meaning of history. 30

Lecture 2—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

Reflections for the 21st Century „„

Consider that we stand at the end of “Christendom” if we understand that term as the effort to shape and sustain civilization on explicitly Christian terms. This is so in two senses, one well-known, the other not. ›› The well-known sense is clear. Christendom is over. We have largely left that ambition behind. The status of religious beliefs— their legitimacy in public, and the sincerity with which we try to organize our lives through them—is more contested and far more fragile and recognizably contingent than ever before.

››

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The less well-known sense is more surprising: If, in one way, Christendom is over, in another way Christendom has been accomplished. Many contemporary secular practices, categories, and judgments are in fact Christian. The Christian language is removed, but the deep Christian structure remains in the universalism of our moral ideals, the concept of the individual, the tension between our public and our private lives.

For Christians, Augustine’s work offers clues about how to be authentically Christian. His vision of what is asked by faith retains some of North Africa’s hardness and some of its vehemence as well. For those who are not Christian, Augustine’s was the last generation before the 20th century to genuinely grapple with a religiously pluralistic society and in that condition, he has lessons for us all.

Questions to Consider 1. Augustine was a convert. How might his experience have given him insight into the different ways of being human (pagan and Christian)? How might it have blinded him to aspects of each? 2. He was also a public figure, but also deeply confessional of his private inner life. How do you think he related his public vocation to his private confessions?

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Lecture 2 Transcript

Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

I

n Augustine, we see the fortuitous confluence of eventful epoch and great mind. As the historian Jaroslav Pelikan once said, “He was if not the greatest Latin writer, then the greatest person to ever write Latin.” But if you’ve heard about Augustine at all, it’s likely that you’ve heard some collection of several platitudes about him. That he was a metaphysical dualist and expressed an escapist animus toward material creation. That he taught a juridical morality of guilt that also subjugated humans under the providence of a puppet-master God. And that he is fundamentally and politically an antidemocratic thinker, an authoritarian who gave the highest moral imprimatur to the coercion of the Middle Ages that culminated in the Holy Inquisition. All of these are crucial for understanding Augustine, and for understanding his book. All are crucially wrong, I think, but each does touch on something important in Augustine’s writing, some crucial theme or facet, and so we should be attentive to them. The best way to see where they come from is to see what parts of his life sparked each. That’s what we’ll do here.

I want to map out his life in three big stages. First, we’ll see that in his youth he had been an ambitious pagan Roman rhetor, broadly Neoplatonist in his sympathies, and an interested disciple of another oriental religion, Manicheanism, and this background is the source of the metaphysical charges against him. Second, we’ll see that for most of his adulthood, he was simultaneously a monk, a bishop, and more broadly a church leader, and this background is the source of the moral charges against him. And finally, after his death, as he anticipated, he quickly took on a fourth identity, namely the legacy 32

Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

of the whole Western Latin Church, and this background explains the political charges against him. So to begin. He was born in 354 in Thagaste, in Roman North Africa, a medium-sized provincial town in the farming heartland of the Roman Empire, a place of small farmers, wealthy landowners, and serious religious conservatives suspicious of the urbanities and cosmopolitanism of Italy and the Greek Orient. It was in some ways a cultural backwater of the empire, but in other ways the heartland. Augustine’s world, for starters, culturally, was very different from ours. First of all, it was considerably older than our own. Put it this way: he lived approximately 3,000 years after the pyramids were built and roughly 1,600 years before us. But Augustine’s world understood itself to be in some deep continuity with Pharaonic Egypt, whereas we feel ourselves severed from the Roman world that Augustine inhabited, either by our condition of being moderns or by the brute historical fact of what we imagine to be the Dark Ages. We really think our world extends back just a few hundred years ago, at most. Augustine’s world reached back millennia. He lived in a much older world than we inhabit. His father, Patricius, was originally a Roman. We don’t know if his family came over themselves or if he came over on his own, but he was Roman. His mother, Monnica, might have been from North African stock, and while Patricius was not a Christian—at least until his deathbed conversion—Monnica definitely was. Now, Augustine was not baptized as a child; evidently his parents either disagreed about this, or they held to the very common practice at that time of baptism being performed only at death’s door. Augustine was given a good education, and he responded very well. As a promising youth, he was actually sponsored by wealthy people in Thagaste to go to Carthage to study further. Despite his own recollections in the Confessions of his naughty youth—stealing pears 33

Books That Matter: The City of God

from a neighbor’s orchard with friends; running wild in the streets—he was no real party animal. He was a driven young man on the go. He had a lover, a long-time common-law wife, whose name he never reveals. She gave him a son, Adeodatus. Significantly, the name means God-given, so Augustine was thinking of God before becoming a Christian. It’s also significant that Adeodatus was born in about 371 or 372, that same period when Patricius, his father, died, when Augustine was about 18. Augustine sent his wife and Adeodatus’s mother away from them soon before his conversion as part of his mother’s plan to get him to marry into a noble Roman family. We know nothing more of this woman, and Adeodatus himself would die at age 17, in 390, soon after he and his father were baptized. It is one of the silent mysteries of Augustine, one of the influences we’ll never be able to measure, that everything we have that he wrote was the product of the mind of a father of a dead, much beloved son, and a onetime husband who had sent his wife painfully away from him. From his training as a teacher of rhetoric, he learned above all a certain picture of moral formation, of what it means to become a fully civilized man. And, by the way, man it was; Augustine’s world was deeply sexist. And while Augustine would come in his own ways to challenge that patriarchy on its edges, insisting on women’s full capacities as reasoners and as bearers of the image of God—guided by the respect he always held for his mother, Monnica—he basically agreed that women were to be regarded as weaker versions of men, but in no way qualitatively different from them. Rhetoric was not simply one disciple among others in Roman education; it was the basis of education. The aim of education was not simply the delivery of data or information to a student, but formation—to become a certain kind of agent. To be thus educated meant to be civilized, and this forming required rhetoric. Augustine learned that the model rhetor gave speeches which oriented his 34

Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

hearer’s attention, agitated their feelings, and then moved them to action, all the while also pleasing their intellectual and aesthetic natures. To be educated was to be able both to move and to be moved by such rhetoric, to feel the right things in the right way, and then to act on those feelings. Augustine’s studies and teaching went well, and he moved up the academic ranks, eventually, in 384—around 30 years old—making it to Mediolanum, which is now called Milan, the Western capital of the Roman Empire, where he prospered as a rhetor, a kind of college professor of the arts of rhetoric as a whole. All this time he had been involved in some way with a religion, Manicheanism, which shared with his later Christianity a deep resonance with Neoplatonist beliefs about the lesser being of material reality and the idea that the truth lies deeply inside us, in the most spiritual part of our beings. From his time with this religious group, and other dalliances with Neoplatonism, as well as from Roman culture as a whole, he learned an appreciation of contemplation, quiet, peace, retreat, and a deep suspicion of noise, turbulence, and change. He learned from the Manichees also the idea that behind this world there’s another, truer, deeper one, so we must practice strategies of resistance to the idea that our sensory experience of the world is comprehensively exhaustive of all reality. Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic is a great example of this sort of thing, maybe the ur-example of it. That story suggests that our ordinary perception of the world is actually the perception of a flickering and shadowy representation of some reality, presented to us mostly in a dimly lit space. When we actually end up seeing things in proper light, Plato argues, we are initially disordered and partly blinded, so unprepared are we to see the world rightly. So much of our training in this world is to begin to prepare us for those situations in which we will see rightly, to begin to help us see how to 35

Books That Matter: The City of God

train ourselves, even here and now, to see rightly in the present as well. And, at times, that requires a certain kind of disorientation in the present so that we’ll be properly oriented in the future. You can see how rhetoric’s formational ambitions meshed well with Platonist and Manichean conversionist sensibilities there. But Augustine was not satisfied with Manicheanism. He had had doubts about it for some time, but in Mediolanum he met and listened to Ambrose, the Neoplatonist Christian bishop of the city, and found in him a congenial way of being Christian. Because of this relationship, and his growing disaffection from the Manichees, Augustine was converted to Christianity. He was baptized on Easter weekend of 387, and he left his job as a rhetoric teacher and retreated to a villa with his friends, his son, and his mother. It is his time with the Manichees, and his Platonism more broadly, that people blame for what they see as his dualism—that is, in his case, what they see as his belief that people are souls embedded in bodies that are, strictly speaking, accidental to their being; and for what other critics see as his anti-materialism—that is, what they claim is his hostility toward the idea that the material world is worth much. Now, we’ll see over the course of these lectures that neither of these understandings of his thought are very accurate. He rejected both the Manichees and the Platonists, and his reasons for doing so—explicitly laid out at much length in these lectures—were precisely since neither properly valued the human body or the material world. Eventually he made his way back from Milan to North Africa, set up a religious community in Thagaste, and became a sort of monk, living an austere life of prayer, poverty, and community with his friends. The North African Christianity of his day—what we saw of it in his youth, and what he led of it in his maturity—was unlike Christianity in other places, in some very important ways. It held a deeply hard-core group of believers, unmoved by and suspicious of the doctrinal disputes that got the Greeks and the Egyptians and all the urbane Greekspeaking Eastern Mediterranean all riled up. For them—these North 36

Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

African Christians—moral and religious seriousness was measured by suffering and endurance. It was a good context for thinking of the Christian life as one of ascetic commitment, and that is just what Augustine did. His monasticism was not a traditional one, for he decided to be a monk in the city, instead of the traditional location of the desert. His decision that the city was the appropriate place for religious life was huge. It meant that he thought the intensity of the dedicated religious life was best carried out not in the desert’s austere isolation, far from ordinary people, but instead in the all too human noise and bustle of the city where the monks could be seen and known as all too human, too. And this reflects, of course, a theme we’ll see expressed throughout The City of God. Augustine had a deep and abiding suspicion of private property and privacy in general, and he insisted on holding things in common as a community, and on being open about his own and that community’s weaknesses, even when that caused them embarrassment. God already sees our frailties, you can imagine him saying, so why should we care if others do as well? Perhaps they can be dissuaded from repeating the errors we so publicly make if they see the consequences of us making them. Things changed for Augustine in 391 when, during a church service while visiting the coastal city of Hippo Regius, Augustine was compelled by the community, prompted by their bishop, to accept ordination in their diocese with the clear intent that he would become the city’s new bishop. He agreed, he would be bishop, but he would never not be monastic, living in community with his avowed brethren. So he moved his religious community from Thagaste to Hippo, and throughout his life, even as bishop, he lived amidst it. Augustine would live out his days in Hippo. He traveled all over North Africa, but the city remained his home. He became coadjutor bishop in 395, and then full bishop in 396. He led a busy life, writing constantly. 37

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We have roughly 2 million words from him in treatises, commentaries, letters, hundreds of sermons; many more sermons lost. He saw and oversaw many other bishoprics, informally and formally; he was a kind of überkopf for much of Roman North African Christianity. As Bishop, he was immediately a prominent citizen and public figure, his town’s representative, kind of like a local sports team. Everybody knew him, not just Catholics but also Donatists and pagan citizens, and many would come to him for advice and quite often to settle disputes. It meant that he gained a first-order acquaintance with small-town and big-town politics and the complexities of the region of North Africa as a whole, and even over time the shape of the empire itself. As Bishop, Augustine remained a rhetor, committed to transforming his audience’s affections. Now, many theologians of Augustine’s era doubted the capacities of the simple folk to understand the abstruse metaphysical speculations of high-level theological inquiry. Augustine never did—he believed that the most ordinary illiterate peasants could be great saints, just like Christ’s disciples. So he thought theology was accessible to all, if only the theologian would take care to render his language in a way intelligible to ordinary folk. After all, as Augustine’s teacher Ambrose said, “It was not by dialectic that it pleased God to save His people, ‘for the kingdom of God consists in simplicity of faith, not in wordy contention.’” Great saints, thought Augustine, were the best and truest theologians—all who had faith would inevitably, he thought, seek understanding, and he took it to be his job very definitely to help them in that endeavor. Furthermore, as that sort of teacher, one who lived a vocation of no private property and genuinely squirm-inducing public openness about his own weaknesses and those of his community, Augustine taught a kind of Christianity that was as radical in his day as it would be in our own. After all, along with disavowing private property, he insisted that traditional Roman family structures ought to be treated with some severe suspicion. 38

Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

Indeed, in one sermon, he asked his congregants, quoting from two different texts of Jesus from the New Testament, “What kind of religion do we have that calls us to hate our families and love our enemies?” Furthermore, he insisted that the full vocation of the Christian life could be lived out in the ordinary life of the everyday, common person. In one sermon, he said, “Saeculum autem hoc eremus est,” which means the world itself can be our desert, our place of hermitage, of living out the fully religious life. Think about that in the Latin: the saeculum, the secular world, can be our hermitage. Just as Christ came into the world fully enfleshed, it is the fully fleshly world that will be redeemed. It’s his understanding of the religious life, manifest in his preaching and teaching about the universal corruption of humanity and a sense that much of our ordinary life is deception, that has led many people to believe that morally he is fundamentally a juridical teacher, teaching us only to feel guilty, and that he taught that humans have no freedom but are puppets of God, so as to lock that guilt in place with despair. But again, as with the rumors about his Platonism, we’ll see that here, too, the story about Augustine is something quite other than these rumors report. Finally, he was involved in several Church controversies as a bishop that were very important in his day and beyond. He managed the final resolution of the Donatist controversy, which had wracked North Africa for over 100 years, and his writings sparked the Pelagian controversy, which began in the 400s, but has never really left the Western Christian churches since. These two controversies both play roles in The City of God, so we should say something about each one here. First, the Donatists. The North African Christian churches were split in Augustine’s lifetime between those Christians who followed leaders who had not collaborated in the imperial persecutions of Christians a century earlier, and another group of Christians who remained in communion with leaders that had so collaborated. The churches who 39

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broke communion—the churches who took a harder line on this— were called the Donatist churches, after one of their leaders, Donatus. The crucial thing that divided the two sides was whether there were absolute and final limits to toleration of morally corrupt people— people who had demonstrated some moral corruption. The Donatists wanted to draw clear lines and hold them absolutely; the churches Augustine joined said that was unforgiving. By the time he came to authority, this argument was a century old and both sides were deeply suspicious of one another. It’s one of Augustine’s signal accomplishments to finally convince the Roman authorities to break the will of the Donatist leaders. The Pelagian controversy was an enormously complicated debate about the nature of free will in relation to sin and grace. Could humans earn salvation? And if not that, was it possible for humans after redemption to improve on their own? Was divine grace an external aid, like a coach? Or was it an internal energy and orientation, like a good diet and plenty of vitamins? Pelagius, a British monk working as a spiritual guru to ascetic elites in Rome, thought Augustine’s emphasis on the priority of grace deflated the urgency of individuals’ moral striving, effaced individual responsibility, and degraded human dignity. In reply, Augustine thought Pelagius didn’t understand the actual nature of God’s saving work or the direness of the human condition after the Fall. The debate between them, and then between some of Pelagius’s disciples and Augustine, continued for the rest of Augustine’s life, and indeed beyond. It has been perhaps one of the great theological battles in the Western churches for the past 1,600 years. The end of the Donatist controversy and the beginning of the Pelagian controversy and the beginning of the writing of The City of God all happened at the same time. The Donatist controversy came to its climax and resolution in the Council of Carthage in 411. That was a council in which Augustine played perhaps the most prominent 40

Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

role, and once that was over, his decks had been cleared to begin writing The City of God in late 411 or 412, and he kept at it, although often distracted by other work, until he completed the whole thing 15 years later, in 426 or 427. The last few years of his life were just as busy as the earlier ones, and he kept on writing, teaching, and even occasionally preaching up to a few weeks before his death on August 28, 430, with the Vandals besieging Hippo. And it is here, in his dealings with the Donatists and the Pelagians and his overall practice in the office of Bishop, where his critics find warrant for their charge that he is a fundamentally antidemocratic thinker; in fact, an authoritarian who gave the highest moral and theological imprimatur for the practices of coercion popular in the Middle Ages. And we will see again in these lectures, as in the accusations of his metaphysical anti-worldliness and his moralpsychological promotion of a guilt morality, that his reputed political authoritarianism is vastly overdrawn. In fact, in his role as a leader of the Latin Christian churches, he was anything but authoritarian. As a Bishop, he was more than just a religious leader; he was a political actor and a judicial figure, as well. Moreover, he became, as the historian Peter Brown has put it, a sort of one-man brain trust for the churches of Africa. Although his labors earned him great respect and veneration from others, he continued teaching what was effectively an anti-authoritarian vision of the Gospel, one that was quite suspicious of figures such as he was becoming. And he wasn’t afraid of attacking himself in this way. In one sermon, he said, and this is a quote: Don’t even think of regarding as canonical scripture any debate, or written account of a debate by anyone. If I have said something reasonable, then follow, not me, but reason itself; if I’ve proved it by the clearest divine testimonies, then follow, not me, but the divine scripture. I get angrier with that fan of mine who takes my book as 41

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canonical, than with the man who finds fault in my book with things that are not in fact wrong.

Augustine knew the power and the danger of idolatry and celebrity, and he knew the danger of both was first, to permit the idolator to off-load the duty of thinking onto their idol; and second, to seduce the celebrity in turn into thinking that his fans have nothing insightful to say. That treatment of a fellow human, a fellow Christian, would be not the achievement of theology but the avoidance of it. And he went out of his way in his life and in his words to try to forestall such approaches. But in the end, he couldn’t save himself from his readers. And this explains why the accusations about Augustine that we have listed, even if I think they are quite mistaken, have been so popular. To understand this requires us to realize how powerful was his impact on those who followed after him. In so many ways, Augustine has been a victim of his own success—a victim of the final role he played: the role of legacy. Since Augustine overshadows almost all other historical figures of his era, we forget the human Augustine and imagine the saint. We imagine the singular Father—as the phrase goes, the second founder of the faith. No post-apostolic thinker has been invoked more successfully—or, paradoxically, more variously—to authorize the Western Church’s teachings. The churches today have learned many things by having them authorized by citations from Augustine’s texts. But what the churches have learned and what Augustine meant to teach need not be the same thing whatsoever. First of all, no other thinker is as rhetorically supple or as alert to his audience’s expectations as was Augustine. He was Christian Platonist monastic, living Church Father, a savvy civic and ecclesiastical administrator, judge, advocate and jury, author, reader, preacher and teacher, philosopher and anti-philosopher: each role elicited a different voice. And his audiences were equally varied: simple 42

Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

congregants, catechumens and rude communicants, educated laity of varying degrees of orthodoxy, monks, nuns, anchorites, priests and bishops, heretics and schismatics, old noble pagani, men and women within the Church and without it. Second, like John Henry Newman a millennium later, he realized that to live is to change, and he was never content with his last formulation of a particular issue. His thought reveals a continuous dynamism, flexibility of style, tone, and even argument that makes his position on many matters very hard to pin down. As we’ll see, even when he does offer a theological proposal, he typically hedges it about as one possible way of thinking, not ruling out others. But we, his ill-tutored pupils, fell so much in love with his formulations that we treated his books as statically canonical, and they posthumously fossilized into something like the divine writ he feared they would become. He feared this would happen. He warned us about it. He even tried to booby-trap his own thought to stop it. He even wrote a book, an entire book, called the Retractationes—the rewritings—about his other books, to teach people how to read them. But by the end of his life, he was increasingly aware that the past would be communicated to the future largely through his writings, as through a bottleneck. And he knew enough that he had written so much that people would construct many conflicting positions from the great forest of his writings. Indeed, some of his own opponents were doing that already, quoting the young Augustine, of whom they approved, against the old Augustine, whom they condemned. And this is part of what I meant when I said earlier that he knew we would be reading him. He feared people would find in his multitudinous books whatever they wanted to find there, and he tried to stop that from happening. And he mostly failed. But here, in these lectures, we’ll give him another chance to speak, and maybe this time we can hear him.

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Books That Matter: The City of God

But why should we give him that chance? Why it is should we read Augustine now? First, he helps us understand our past. The history of thought in the West after Augustine can be interpreted largely as a history of readings of Augustine, and indeed as misreadings of him. Consider where he stands in the history of philosophy. He lived roughly 800 years after Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and roughly 800 years before Aquinas, and there are roughly 800 years between Aquinas and today. In a way, Augustine marks the transition between ancient and medieval philosophy, and most medieval philosophy is commentary on Augustine, and a great deal of modern philosophy is commentary on Augustine, as well—more than most people, even some philosophers, know. In terms of political thought, to read The City forces you to grapple with multiple interpretations of that book, rival readings whose alternatives structures much of the history of political thought in the West. Reading him helps us better understand our past, how we got here today. This does not only apply to Christians, or those who are from Christian backgrounds; everyone in our world today might well be educated by this work. Even non-Christians can find it useful to understand this most influential of Christian imaginations of the cosmos, of political order, and of the meaning of history. Furthermore, reading Augustine now might well help us live into our future. For thinking about him helps us understand how and why we organize our secular world today. Consider that we stand at the end of Christendom, and this is so in two senses: one well known, the other not so well known. The well-known sense is clear: Christendom is over. If we understand that term to designate an effort to shape and sustain civilization on explicitly Christian terms, by and large the world we live in has largely left that ambition behind. The status of religious beliefs—their legitimacy in public; the sincerity with which we try to organize our lives through them—is much more contested, and far more fragile and recognizably contingent, than they have ever been before, and there are no signs that that trend is being reversed. 44

Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

The less well-known sense is different and more surprising, since it might seem the opposite of the above. For if, in one way, Christendom is over, finished, in another way we have reached its end since so much of Christendom has been accomplished. Don’t look now, but we are living in the midst of a huge moral revolution lasting the past several centuries. Slavery is now illegal. Equality is a watchword. We feel obliged to people far away who we have no immediate contact with. And this moral revolution is one deeply oriented and driven by Christian history. So many contemporary so-called secular practices, categories, and judgments are in fact Christian practices, categories, and judgments with the Christian language removed but the deep Christian structure retained. Consider the universalism of our moral ideals, the concept of the individual, the tension between our public and our private lives. What does it mean to find ultimate value present in the immanent? What does it mean that the contingencies of our flesh could host the infinite value of the spirit? These are questions intelligible to us only since, for almost 2,000 years, Western intellectual thought was tempered under the pressure of Christian doctrines such as the Incarnation, God’s universal sovereignty and care, and the idea that the human was made in the image of God. In so very many ways we live in a world deeply Christian in shape and detail, even as it has lost the surface appearance of being Christian. Even the most secular among us would be unintelligible to a pagan of Augustine’s day, while a member of his church would find much common ground with a modern atheist. Even in our very worldliness, then, we are worldly in a Christian way today. I don’t say this out of any kind of smug Christian triumphalism by the way. In fact, the greatest explorers of this truth have been non-Christian thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber. So, for Christians in the audience, Augustine’s work has clues about how to be authentically Christian in an age where Christian categories have become second nature and can be absorbed secondhand. And 45

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his vision of what is asked by faith still retains some of North Africa’s hardness; some of its vehemence as well, as we will see. While for those who are not Christian, Augustine’s was the last generation before the 20th century to genuinely grapple with a truly religiously pluralistic society; and in living in that condition, he has lessons for us all. There’s a third reason to read Augustine: to help us inhabit our present. Recall what I said earlier: when we read historical figures, we must not forget that they were real humans. Don’t imagine that they thought the same way that you do, of course. But then again, they are intellectually in some kind of relation with our thought-world, and you do them a disservice if you don’t let yourself feel the grip of their way of imagining and inhabiting the world. You should see them as offering rival potential ways of living, and you should feel attracted to them, threatened by them. So don’t be surprised to find Augustine sometimes disquietingly contemporary to you, aware of a question you had in the back of your mind before you had fully formulated it yourself. He knew what it was to be an unbeliever, after all, as well as a believer; and before he was a Christian, he had been an ironically-minded academic skeptic, the kind you’d meet at a dinner party today. Maybe the real lesson we have to learn from him, after answering the question as to his differences from us, is to realize a final, disquieting thought: he was less different from you than you think.

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The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

Lecture 3

I

f the end of the world has a beginning, we could do far worse than date it to August 24–26, 410 A.D., when Alaric and the Visigoths entered the city of Rome. Almost as soon as it occurred, the Sack of Rome left the space of history and entered the realm of myth. It is in a very real way foundational for the apocalyptic imagination of the west. When we try to depict the end of life as we know it, the outcome turns out to be remarkably like what we imagine the sack of Rome to have been.

The Thrilling Myth „„

Imagine that you live in an empire that has lasted 1,000 years. In that time, almost all other civilizations have been incorporated into it. Its people are prosperous, its cities magnificent, its lands secure. You know of no people, no kingdom, that equals it in greatness—indeed there is little beyond its boundaries to compare. It seems that human society and the empire are bound up in one another.

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Now imagine that in your lifetime, that empire is invaded from the outside by barbarians—people in some sense uncivilized, not quite lawless, but rather operating on a very primitive set of laws that could never suffice to govern a society as sophisticated as yours. They ravage your countryside, besiege and sack your towns and cities, and finally reach the capital of your empire—the greatest city ever known, the center of the world—and overrun it.

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Such was the situation facing the Roman world when Augustine began to write The City of God. Augustine writes in the wake of chaos, attempting to accept what has happened and to learn 47

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from it, to see what it can teach us, what use we can make of our sufferings, and to what end we may direct the essentially unjust acts that we must enact upon others.

The Mundane Truth „„

„„

The historical facts are in no doubt, but they have only passing relationship with our imagination. ›› First, by the time of the sack, Rome had not been the actual capital of the Imperium Romanum—in the sense of the main city of the emperor—for more than a century. Constantine had moved the center of rule to Constantinople in 330; even earlier, the western emperor administered the west from Mediolanum (Milan), and at the time of the sack itself, from Ravenna. ››

Second, the Visigoths who sacked the city were not giant, ignorant cavemen wearing animal skins and wielding unsheathed swords and massive axes. They entered the empire with their families as refugees from the Huns in 376. By the 400s they were themselves Arian Christians and well informed about civilization and its attractions.

››

The initial welcome the authorities offered them in 376 rapidly wore out. There was famine, and the Romans decided to end their threat. A climactic but calamitous battle was fought against them in 378 near Adrianople, in what is now European Turkey. The Roman defeat was total; Emperor Valens himself died either in or soon after the battle. The new emperor, Theodosius, signed a treaty with the Visigoths, letting them settle in Thrace and turning them from enemies within the borders to a rich source of mercenary military power for the empire.

After Theodosius’s death in 395, the youngish Alaric became headman of the Visigoths, and they again became unwelcome, a nomadic people harassed by the locals and harried by imperial troops wherever they went. Eventually they arrived in 48

Lecture 3—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

late 408 under the walls of Rome. Twenty months of negotiations and Machiavellian realpolitik followed, full of missed chances, foiled plans, folly, and sheer stupid accident. „„

In the end, through the mysteries of accident, obscure motives surprisingly inflected by unforeseen forces, and a thousand other microcauses, Rome’s almost millennium-long luck ran out. The Visigoths sacked the city for three days. The sack ended on Alaric’s command, and the Visigoths marched south, looting along their line of march, hoping to winter in Africa. Alaric died, Ataulf took over, and the Goths marched north again into Gaul, finally settling in Aquitaine.

The Aftermath „„

The belief that the Roman Empire had entered a glorious new era with the imperial conversions to Christianity in the fourth century had secured for many people two narratives. ›› One, for Christians, was the story of the triumph of Christianity in Rome, classically told by Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History. ››

The other, for pagans, was the aging and decline of Roman power. But as much as this latter narrative did not approve of 49

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the course the empire was taking, it could not really imagine the empire would end, or that its sacred precincts would be violated. „„

The people for whom the sack was most disastrous—and the people who had the largest voice in recording its details for posterity—were the upper-class survivors and victims who had lost the most in the sack itself. But for most people, the sack had little direct effect on their lives. Yet many people across the Mediterranean world were shocked by the sack, both psychologically and ideologically.

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Why did the sack have this effect? To understand, you have to know at least a little about how Romans saw the world and the spaces outside their imperium, as well as how they saw their imperium itself.

Imperium „„

The Imperium Romanum was where the Romans were obeyed. There were many different ways to issue commands, and to obey them, but the key was obedience, not necessarily direct and continuous control. The Roman idea of limes, of “limits,” at this time was understood to signify how far Rome would go out, not a set of borders (rivers and walls) that Rome would be safe within.

„„

People still believed that after the turbulence of the third-century “crisis” of the empire, and with the conversion of Constantine, there would be newfound peace and stability within the borders and a just and omnipotent God would oversee the imperium’s security. Certainly there was no thought that the barbarians would ever invade the empire, or that they would even want to.

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The imperium, with the awkward exception of the complicated and often-ignored Persian Empire to its east, was not surrounded by rival states, but by wilderness. It did not have borders; it had frontiers. 50

Lecture 3—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

There was in an important sense no boundary to the imperium; there was only the edge of where Rome had deigned to reach. „„

Furthermore, the imperium was a cosmopolitan empire, enabling travel and encouraging trade across thousands of miles and between wildly different peoples. In an age of very limited travel, the imperium was a community of unprecedentedly diverse ways of being human.

„„

Romans’ humanitarian and cosmopolitan self-understanding was manifest in how they governed conquered peoples with a combination of liberality and brutality. They were religiously and culturally tolerant, but politically fascist. Once conquered, a people could do almost anything they wanted, so long as they did a minimal number of things in the Roman way.

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Romans saw the barbarians as we might see Neanderthals— sharing a great deal with us, but fundamentally another kind of creature altogether. But the barbarians turned out to be other than what the Romans had complacently expected them to be, and once they started moving in during the late fourth century, the Romans’ ignorant contempt for all those outside their imperium changed from mild amusement to increasingly paranoid alarm.

Change and the Rise of Christianity „„

It wasn’t just that the sack of Rome challenged ideas throughout the Mediterranean about who the barbarians were and who they themselves were. It also challenged their notion of crisis, for this was a new kind of crisis altogether.

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Rome’s history of success had erased the idea of failure. Quite literally, they had no historical analogy for what was coming. Historically, one civilization had replaced another, but there was no memory of any collapse of civilization itself. Thinkers had developed the idea of cyclical visions of civilizational hegemony, 51

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but no real apocalypse, no real idea of a “dark age.” No one thought in terms of the end of their world. „„

Another point was that they already felt their world was changing, in two ways. ›› First, the Romans of Augustine’s day felt a deep sense of a lost moral integrity. Everywhere they looked, the past stood in mutely eloquent rebuke to the present. The memory of greatness, with all moral murkiness sanded away, provoked a poignant despair to Romans viewing their present situation. They were haunted by the memory of republican glory; the memorial statues and monuments scattered across the empire’s cities made the absence of heroism more palpable and painful and their consciences at their own moral decline all the more guilty. ››

„„

Additionally, the rise of Christianity was a genuinely new thing: the emergence of an empire-wide religion that sought to convert all people, of different nationalities and of all social classes to a new moral and spiritual posture that was possibly fundamentally alien to traditional Roman mores.

The Romans could accommodate the idea of different peoples, with their different rituals and beliefs, and they were eager to incorporate new kinds of human cultures within their empire. But they required all the peoples to fit inside the Roman categories, not to challenge the Romans’ humanitarian and terms on which Rome understood the world. cosmopolitan self-understanding In their evangelism, the was manifest in how they governed Christians mixed groups conquered peoples with a combination and classes of people in ways that the Romans of liberality and brutality. found deeply disturbing. 52

Lecture 3—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

„„

››

First, they were both like and unlike the Jews the Romans had already encountered. The Christians were monotheists, but they seemed to think that their God should be the God for everybody now, not at some point in the future.

››

Also the Christians were pretty clear that their loyalty to the imperium was less important than their loyalty to their Christos, and that Christ had shown them what they should do when the two loyalties conflicted.

››

Finally, the Christians became a pretty apocalyptic group, with expectations for the imminent and radical transformation of the world. Nothing is less welcome to a hegemonic political power than an ideology that says the moral shape of the cosmos is designed to undo that hegemony.

So it was not precisely the sack of Rome in 410 that provoked Augustine to compose The City of God, but the shock it gave the elite—Christian and pagan alike—which was the catalyst that crystallized their concerns. They were already anxious, yet pretty much unprepared. When the shock came, it synthesized a number of forces and arguments running under the surface of the late imperial world. How Augustine came to understand the task he had accepted as, in some sense, a civilization-saving undertaking is the subject of the next lecture.

Questions to Consider 1. Can you imagine a major public figure responding to a contemporary calamity in the way that Augustine responded to the Sack of Rome? What form would such a response take? Imagine an Augustinian response to 9/11 or the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004. 2. What place or symbol of significance for us might be analogous to Rome’s role in the Empire?

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Lecture 3 Transcript

The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

I

magine, just imagine, that you live in an empire that’s lasted 1,000 years. In all that time, almost all other civilizations have been incorporated into this empire. Its people are prosperous, its cities magnificent, its lands secure. You know of no people, no kingdom, that equals it in greatness—indeed, there’s little beyond its boundaries with which to compare it. It seems that human society and the empire are bound up in one another. Now imagine that, in your lifetime, that empire is invaded from the outside by barbarians. Not just outsiders, not just enemies or bad people, but barbarians—people not only with bad teeth and poor hygiene habits, but people in some sense uncivilized, not quite lawless but rather operating on a very primitive set of laws that could never suffice to govern a society as sophisticated as your own. Imagine that these barbarians swarm like ants over your borders, ravage your countryside, besiege and sack your towns and cities. And imagine that these barbarians finally reach the original capital of your empire, the greatest city ever known, the center of the world, and overrun it—run howling down its avenues, kick down the doors of its official buildings of state and religion, run rampant in muddy boots over the plush purple carpets of the offices and palaces of the rulers, raping and killing and plundering as they go. Imagine, that is, that the barbarians win—that civilization, as you know it, comes to an end. Imagine that you inhabit a world that is, by and large, over. You have no idea where your food will come from next year, or if it will come at all, who will guard the streets, or whether the streets even need guarding anymore, now that the barbarians can go into any house with impunity and kill or enslave all the occupants. 54

Lecture 3 Transcript—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

And what happens when the barbarians leave to go home, after killing all the officials and destroying all the buildings? Can you imagine building all over again? But what would it be like if they stay? What would that be like? Such was the situation facing the Roman world when Augustine began to write The City of God. Augustine writes in the wake of chaos, attempting to accept it. Not accept it in a defeatist mode, but accept it as what has happened, and attempt to learn from it, to see what it can teach us, what use we can make of its sufferings, and to what end we might direct the essentially unjust acts that we must enact upon others in its wake. If the end of the world has a beginning, we could do far worse than date it to August 24, 410 A.D., when Alaric and the Visigoths entered the city of Rome and began to sack it. Almost as soon as it occurred, the sack of Rome from August 24 to 26 left the space of history and entered the realm of myth. And, of course, the West has lived through the end of history many times—not just the sack of 410 but the far more savage Vandal assault of 455, the Plague of Justinian in 541–42, the Black Death of 1348—and a full history of the imagination of the end of the world would chart how that imagination is a palimpsest, with each catastrophe overwriting the others, and the whole ensemble being reordered for each era’s apocalyptic needs. But the sack of Rome in 410 is in a very real way foundational for the apocalyptic imagination of the West. When we imagine a catastrophe, when we try to depict the end of life as we know it, life as we know it turns out to be remarkably akin to what we imagine life in Rome was like on August 23 of that year, and the ending turns out to be remarkably akin to what we imagine the sack of Rome to have been. It’s all turned into mythology. Probably, it would be harder to uncover the facts about the sack of Rome than it was, at first, to sack it. This is not to say that the historical facts are in much doubt, but only that they have the most oblique relationship with our imagination 55

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of this disaster. So, we need to inflict a couple of complications on how you likely imagine what all this meant. First of all, by the time of the sack, Rome had not been the actual capital of the Imperium Romanum—in the sense of the main city of the emperor—for over a century. Constantine had moved the center of rule to Constantinople in 330, and even earlier the Western emperor had administered the West from Mediolanum—Milan—and at the time of the sack itself, from Ravenna. Still, Rome remained the central city, and every male inhabitant of the imperium, from the deserts of Syria to the Atlas Mountains to the frigid far north of England, took pride in saying civis Romanus sum, “I am a citizen of Rome.” Second, the Visigoths who sacked the city were not giant, ignorant cavemen wearing animal skins and wielding unsheathed swords and massive axes who had poured over the frontiers in a foaming rage and made straight for Rome. Rather, they had entered the empire with their families, as refugees fleeing the Huns—another barbarian tribe—30-odd years before, in 376. By the 400s they were themselves Arian Christians and well informed about civilization and its many attractions. Furthermore, their route to the sack can only be described as winding. The initial welcome the authorities offered them in 376 rapidly wore out; there was famine, and the Romans decided to end their threat. A climactic battle against them was fought in 378 near Adrianople, in what is now European Turkey. It was calamitous, and the Roman defeat was total. The Emperor Valens himself died either in or soon after the battle. After this the new emperor, Theodosius, signed a treaty with the Visigoths, letting them settle in Thrace, and turning them from enemies within the borders to a rich source of mercenary military power for the empire. After Theodosius’s death in 395, the youngish Alaric became headman of the Visigoths, and they once again became personae 56

Lecture 3 Transcript—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

non gratae, a nomadic people, like Gypsies, harassed by the locals and harried by imperial troops wherever they went. Fleeing into Northern Italy, strengthened by soldiers defecting from the legions— now substantially populated by captured barbarians themselves, hence unreliably Roman—eventually the Visigoths wash up in late 408 under the walls of Rome. Twenty months of negotiations and Machiavellian realpolitik followed, full of missed chances, foiled plans, folly, and sheer stupid accident. At one point, Alaric himself proposed to the Romans that he was besieging that he send some of his own troops to Africa to gather food for them to survive his siege. At another point, Alaric’s forces, on the way to negotiate with the Emperor at Ravenna, fought a Romano-Goth military unit led by another and possibly rival Visigoth barbarian, Sarus. In the end, though, through the mysteries of accident, obscure motives surprisingly inflected by unforeseen forces, and 1,000 other micro-causes, Rome’s almost millennium-long luck ran out. Late one night, slaves unlocked the Salarian Gate, and, as Edward Gibbon put it two centuries and more ago, on August 24, 410: Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilised so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.

The Visigoths sacked the city for three days. The damage was great to shrines and public places and those great city homes of the wealthy, but as far as we can tell, the city as a whole otherwise got off lightly, as far as sacks go. The Visigoths hit only the high-wealth buildings, skimming off the cream while leaving the majority—so long as they stayed out of the way—largely unmolested, although one can suspect that rape and assault was if not universal, at least common, although largely unrecorded in the sources that we have. 57

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The populace was not rounded up for slaves, although some were taken as hostages, including the emperor’s sister, who later became wife to Ataulf, leader of the Visigoths after Alaric. Recall that the Western emperor at this point, Honorius, was in Ravenna. The infrastructure of the city was not harmed; the city itself did not burn. After all, the Visigoths were not utter barbarians. And as Arian Christians—that is, a certain heretical kind of Christian to the Catholics—they still treated the Catholic Christian churches, which had in recent decades become sites of remarkable wealth, as no-go zones, sanctuaries for any who fled to them. And many, pagan and Christian, especially the wealthy, did flee to them. The sack ended on Alaric’s command, and the Visigoths marched south, looting along their line of march, hoping to winter in Africa. But the ships for the journey failed to materialize, having been largely sunk in a storm, and then Alaric died. Ataulf took over, and the Goths, after spending the winter in Calabria, marched north again, through Italy, over the Alps and into Gaul, finally settling in Aquitaine in the west. Most of the population of Rome picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and continued on in their lives. The sack was, as it were, merely a flesh wound. The people for whom the sack was most disastrous—and the people who had the largest voice in recording its details for posterity—were the upper-class survivors and victims, those who had lost the most in the sack itself. Many thousands of these people left Rome behind and went to North Africa. It might be that they had landholdings there—many wealthy farms in North Africa were held by absentee landlords—and so with the loss of their opulent Roman palaces, they decided to move to a land far from the barbarians and closer to the sources of much of their wealth. But for most people, even in Rome itself, the sack had little direct effect on their lives. But many across the Mediterranean world were shocked by the sack, both psychologically and ideologically. In far-off 58

Lecture 3 Transcript—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

Palestine, Saint Jerome’s rather campy panic is exemplary, and this is what he said: For days and nights I could think of nothing but the universal safety; when my friends were captured, I could only imagine myself a captive too. When the brightest light of the world was extinguished, when the very head of the Roman Empire was severed, the entire world perished in a single city.

Now some of this has to be Jerome’s fantastic rhetoric. But there’s no doubt that the entire Roman world suffered a severe shock. The belief that the Roman Empire had entered a glorious new era with the imperial conversions to Christianity in the 4th century—the dramatic conversion, of a sort, of Constantine; then the treachery of Julian the Apostate who had turned against Christianity and restored the old gods; the recovery of Christian Rome under Jovinian, Valens, Valentinian, and Gratian—had secured for many people two narratives. One, for Christians, was the story of the triumph of Christianity in Rome, classically told by Eusebius, in his great Ecclesiastical History. The other, for pagans, was the aging and decline of Roman power, murdered at the hands of the Christian. But as much as the latter narrative did not approve of the course the empire was taking, it could not really imagine the empire would ever end, or that its sacred precincts would be violated. As ever, imagination is far more constricted than the concrete accidents of reality itself. Why did the sack have this effect? To understand, you have to know at least a little bit about how the Romans saw the world, and in particular how they saw the spaces outside their imperium, as well as how they saw their imperium itself. People in what we condescend to call late antiquity did not understand that they were living in late antiquity. They still believed, as had the Christian thinker Eusebius almost a century before, that after the 3rd-century turbulence and crisis of the empire—bloody civil wars—and with the conversion of 59

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Constantine—whatever that conversion amounted to—there would be newfound peace and stability within the borders, and a just and omnipotent God would oversee the imperium’s security. Certainly there was no thought that barbarians would ever invade the empire, or that they would even want to. They were apparently content out there in their misty forests, huddled around their damp and smoky fires. And out there was about as definite as they could put it. On our historical maps, the Roman Empire always has edges. But that’s not how the Romans themselves saw it. The nature of imperium itself was not quite what we mean by empire; it was more akin to rule, without definite geographical boundaries. The Imperium Romanum was where the Romans were obeyed. There were many different ways to issue commands, and many different ways to obey them, too, but the key everywhere was obedience, not necessarily direct and continuous control. The Roman idea of boundaries, what they called limes, or limits, at this time was understood to signify how far Rome would go out, not a set of borders, rivers, or walls that Rome would be safe within. The imperium, with the awkward exception of the complicated and oftenignored Persian Empire to its east, was not surrounded by rival states, but by wilderness. It did not have borders; it had frontiers. There was in an important sense no boundary to the imperium; there was only the edge of where Rome had deigned to reach. As Virgil put it, the Romans possessed an imperium sine fine, an empire without end. And its endlessness was not simply spatial, but also temporal. In 410 A.D. the Romans understood themselves to be in roughly 1,163 years since the founding of the city. By Augustine’s age, that is, they were the inheritors of a genuinely 1,000-year Reich. What’s more, as we’ve seen, this Reich admitted no rivals. They moved easily from talking about imperium as under our command to under our law and then to under law itself. That is to say, an aspect of what it meant to be barbarian, increasing over the centuries, was to 60

Lecture 3 Transcript—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

live outside the law, to live in a lawless, essentially inhumane way. The Romans imagined all those who were outside to be pathetic creatures living without any law in a state of nature. And so the Roman imperium came to be imagined not as a discrete state, but as coterminous with civilization and the rule of law itself. What’s more, this was, to the Romans, a humanitarian empire. The Romans had a habit of identifying their own empire with the scope of humanitas, a word that is usefully ambiguous between humane and human. It was, for example, Roman humanitas that had suppressed the Druids who practiced human sacrifice. Of course, all empires are humanitarian to those who enjoy them, just as all their wars are waged for selfless humanitarian purposes. But the Romans didn’t think this; they saw their imperium as unique, as especially dedicated to helping the rest of the world. Furthermore, the imperium was a deeply cosmopolitan empire, enabling travel and encouraging trade across thousands of miles and between wildly different peoples. In an age of very limited travel, when most people lived their entire lives within 15 miles of the place they were born and never knew anyone who was not basically the same as them, the imperium was a community of unprecedentedly diverse ways of being human—far more than the Greeks, who had never stopped thinking of every non-Greek speaker as basically barbarous. For the Romans, there were many gentes—peoples or nations— within the Empire, and they could remain who they were, so long as they obeyed some basic laws and did some certain minimal kinds of service to the imperium as they could. Their humanitarian and cosmopolitan self-understanding was manifest in how they governed these conquered peoples; in brief, with an almost schizophrenic combination of liberality and brutality. The Romans were quite religiously and culturally tolerant, but they were politically almost fascist. Once conquered, a people could do 61

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almost anything they wanted, as long as they did a number of small things in the Roman way. My use of the phrase 1,000-year Reich was not casual. Ancient Roman rule was very palpably a combination of the most vaporous personal laissez-faire and the tightest political control of Sonoma and Sparta. And it was always justified by the fact that they had civilization and the others did not. They saw the barbarians the way we might see Neanderthals—sharing a great deal with us, of course, but fundamentally another kind of creature altogether, unless we choose to educate them and thereby raise them to our rational heights. But then the barbarians turned out to be other than what the Romans had complacently expected them to be. And so, once the barbarians started moving in during the late 4th century, the ignorant contempt that the Romans typically felt for all those outside their imperium changed its coloring from mild amusement, such as one would feel toward caged animals in a zoo, to increasingly paranoid alarm, such as one would feel when the animals have escaped their cages and are now prowling outside your front door. Now the roles have been reversed; now it is we who are the enclosed. Consider how an anonymous Roman, writing an anonymous military text from the 360s or 370s, described the barbarians. “Wild nations,” he said, “are pressing upon the Imperium Romanum and howling about it everywhere, and treacherous barbarians, protected by natural defenses, menace every frontier.” This evocative image—an image of people standing around a campfire at night, with wolves howling, prowling around just outside the sphere of dim flickering light— captures well the psychology of Rome when it was on its heels. But it derives from the aggressively ignorant bemusement the Romans felt in an earlier, more confident time. It wasn’t just that the sack of Rome challenged their ideas about who the barbarians were, and who they themselves were. It also challenged their notion of just what a crisis itself was. And this was 62

Lecture 3 Transcript—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

a new kind of crisis altogether. Rome, of course, had had a history of crises: rivals from within, enemies from without—Rome knew what a crisis felt like. The 3rd century had been an era of civil war, sometimes coming close to horrible anarchy, as rival emperors struggled for control, before being resolved finally by Constantine at the beginning of the 4th century, when the imperium had seemed to recover. But this felt different. This felt like something new. There had not been a radical challenge from outside since Hannibal and the Carthaginians 600 years and more before. And that had been in the age of Roman virtue, which nostalgia placed far in the past, and a clear-eyed vision of the present showed was definitely not alive now. Then again, the other problem was of their own making. Their history of success had erased in their imagination the idea of failure. Quite literally, they had no historical analogy for what was coming. Historically, one civilization had replaced another on top, but there was no memory of any collapse of civilization itself. Now, there had been civilizational collapses in the deep past—the end of Bronze Age Mediterranean society, which perhaps only the Egyptians remembered in their annals and hieroglyphs carved on ancient temple walls—but not in any kind of religious or political or institutional memory to which the Romans had access. Change wasn’t supposed to be that dramatic. Thinkers had developed the idea of cyclical visions of civilizational hegemony— Plato and Polybius, for example. No one imagined apocalypse; there was no real idea of a dark age. Even Aeneas in myth escaped complete disaster—he carried out his own father on his own back from the burning rubble of Troy to found Rome. No one thought in terms of the end of the world, the end of their world. Another point was that they already felt their world was changing in two ways. First, the Romans of Augustine’s day felt a deep sense of lost moral integrity. Everywhere they looked, the past stood in mutely eloquent rebuke to the present. The memory of greatness, 63

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with all moral murkiness sanded away, provoked a poignant despair to Romans viewing their present situation. They were haunted by the memory of republican glory, memory of Caesar, or of Cato, Scipio Africanus; and the many memorial statues and monuments scattered across the empire’s cities—many of which survive today—made such heroism’s absence more palpable and painful, and their consciences at their own moral decline all the more guilty. Perhaps it was inevitable that as a nation aged and its own history grew richer and deeper, certain episodes or eras or people would stand out as remarkable heroes worthy of emulation. After all, nations always seek heroes, and it’s safer to plant them in the sepia-toned precincts of the distant past—perhaps, for the Romans, the marble precincts—where vital conflicts and clashing values are washed away and the simple, straightforward, moral example is privileged. Additionally, though, the rise of Christianity was a genuinely new thing: the emergence of an empire-wide religion that sought to convert all peoples of all different nationalities—the gentes— and, what was more terrifying, of all social classes to a new moral and spiritual posture, one that was possibly fundamentally alien to traditional Roman mores and pietas. This was a new kind of internal threat. The Romans could accommodate the idea of different peoples, with their different rituals and beliefs, and they were eager to incorporate new kinds of human cultures within their empire; diversity was the spice of life, after all. But they required all of them to fit inside the Roman categories, not to challenge the terms on which Rome understood the world. And the Christians wouldn’t do that. First of all, they were like and oddly unlike the Jews that the Romans had already encountered. The Christians were radical monotheists, too, but they seemed to think that their God should be the God for everybody—now, and not at some distant point in the hazy future. 64

Lecture 3 Transcript—The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D.

So in their evangelism they mixed groups of people, and classes of people, in ways that the Romans found deeply disturbing. Also, the Christians were pretty clear that their loyalty to the imperium was less important than their loyalty to their Christos, and that that Christ had shown them what they should do when the two loyalties conflicted. It’s fairly obvious nowadays that the stories of huge massacres of Christians by the Romans, vast witch hunts and massive martyrdoms in the amphitheaters, were the product of later Christian propaganda. The Romans were eager, by and large, not to persecute Christians, so long as they would keep quietly to themselves and obey the laws. There was not that much anxiety about the need to sacrifice to the emperor. But there was a little anxiety about that, and at hard times that would become even more poignant for the authorities, and make them more nervous, suggest to them the lure of having a convenient scapegoat. And then some Christians would suffer. Furthermore, the Christians became, in their first century or two, a pretty apocalyptic group, with expectations of the radical transformation of the world that we all shared. After all, as I like to point out to my students, the central Christian symbol, the cross, is a mark of state-sanctioned capital punishment. Were Christianity to be born in America today, you could imagine the symbol would be an electric chair. Imagine churches that have the symbol of an electric chair on their altars. Nothing is less welcome to a hegemonic political power than an ideology that says the moral shape of the cosmos is designed to undo that empire. And the ideology becomes more unwelcome still when events in the outside world conspire to suggest that there might be something to that ideology’s message of the transience of worldly power and glory. So it was not precisely the sack of Rome in 410 that provoked Augustine to compose his book, but the shock it gave the elite, Christian and pagan alike. And that shock was itself merely a 65

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catalyzing force that crystallized a whole constellation of their concerns. For some of them, their concerns were framed in a pagan idiom, for others in a Christian one. But whatever the language, they were already anxious; and yet also for these reasons, they were pretty well unprepared for it. When the shock came, it synthesized a number of different forces and arguments running under the surface of the late imperial world. I said earlier that this time, in this sack, there would be no Aeneas— no one would be left with enough fortitude and intelligent will to carry the weight of tradition on their shoulders out of the burning rubble of the past. And many felt that at the time. But in fact there was someone not unlike Aeneas, although also very different. This was Augustine. How he came to understand the task he had accepted as, in some sense, a civilization-saving undertaking is the subject of our next lecture.

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Lecture 4

“W

hat has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” This line, uttered by the third-century North African theologian Tertullian, has echoed down the centuries in Christian thought. Tertullian meant to contrast Christian faith to Greek rationalist philosophy. For him, the questions and attitudes popular among skeptical philosophical types were anathema to the absolute truths of Christian dogma. He asserted that the two approaches were utterly opposed and insisted on affirming Christianity without regard for human reason. The question of conflict between reason and faith has remained alive ever since to haunt Christian theologians and as ammunition to non-Christians.

The Problem of Civic Morality „„

In the context of the writing of The City of God, Augustine knew that his audience, Christian and pagan alike, was asking a slightly different version of Tertullian’s question: What has Rome to do with Jerusalem? Augustine shaped his book to answer that question. In no other of his works was his audience as richly diverse.

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The first sentence of the book is an answer to a request from one Marcellinus, a Christian tribune and notary under the western emperor Honorius. He was a major Roman player and a friend to Augustine, who dedicated The City of God to him. Many years later, Augustine recalled Marcellinus’s prompt: In the last paragraph of Book 22, 15 years after Marcellinus’s death, Augustine describes the completion of the work as recompense for a debt he had accepted long ago. 67

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We can trace the origins of that debt pretty clearly. In the winter of 411–12, Marcellinus reported to Augustine his difficulties in responding to Roman refugees still devoted to the old gods, who angrily blamed the Christians for the sack of Rome and all the imperium’s problems.

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According to Marcellinus, Volusianus, a pagan Roman nobleman considering conversion, was wavering. Volusianus worried that Christ’s teachings about returning good for evil and turning the other cheek were incompatible with the morals of citizenship, and Marcellinus wanted to know how to respond.

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Augustine suggested that the crucial point is that “a city [is] but a group of men united by a specific bond of peace,” and such a peace was secured best by those with the proper disposition. Recognizing that much of the Christian morality was not immediately applicable to public affairs, he argued that Christianity’s theological virtues were in fact a better basis for the civic virtues than paganism—that rather than disabling civic virtue, they properly enable it. This passage succinctly expresses how Augustine imagined morality to relate to politics, an idea developed much more fully in The City of God.

The Challenge of Diversity „„

The foregoing exchange is but one example of the diverse audience Augustine had in mind in writing The City of God. The various challenges by his enemies forced him to articulate carefully his theological views. Further, he imaginatively entered into their worldviews, apprehending both their insights and what made them worry about his own views. Consider the range of audiences Augustine confronted: ›› Civic-minded Roman patriots assumed that whatever happiness humans are to have, we will have in this life. They believed in the basic decency of Roman tradition, including the various political and religious ritual practices and cultural 68

Lecture 4—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

A page from The City of God by Augustine of Hippo

forms that Augustine found morally and spiritually abhorrent. Augustine’s debate with these voices dominates and orders the first five books. ››

Philosophically minded elite Romans who sought wisdom and happiness through retreat into solitude and contemplation—people whom Augustine perceived as tragically prideful, meriting pity more than scorn. He primarily engages them in books six through ten.

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Even within the largely Christian confines of North Africa, many interlocutors contested with him. The Donatist dispute had begun to recede, but it had convinced Augustine that the church must frankly admit its constitution as a mixed group on the way to salvation, not a fortress of righteousness against an irredeemably sinful outside world. 69

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The Pelagians, a small group of Christian intellectuals, often at least as educated and at least as elite as Augustine, found his vision of the nature of human sin and the need for divine grace to be theologically confused and spiritually and psychologically distasteful.

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Christians who would probably never read The City of God, but who might hear their bishop or priest quote it in a sermon, were the people Augustine was most afraid of misleading, especially as the work continues into the latter books, into thinking they could trust him to do their thinking for them.

Part of the power of the work, in its own time and thereafter, lies in how it heard these diverse concerns and how Augustine’s sheer rhetorical and argumentative genius braided them together in its pages.

Theological View of Empire „„

Augustine used the sack of Rome to rethink the meaning of Rome itself and to address fundamental themes of civic life in general. Knowing that pagan suspicion of Christians was not entirely unfounded, he used that civic upheaval to offer a new vision of how Christians ought to behave in the world. These themes are clear in a sermon of Augustine’s that may mark his earliest response to the sack of Rome, in spring 411: ›› Physical suffering and death are not the greatest evils; those who think they are should meditate on Hell. God uses historical traumas to sort the blessed from the damned, so we should see suffering as training and learn to use it. ››

The fall of Rome was not a world-changing event. The human condition remains the same no matter what the political situation and will remain so until the end of time. Rome was “corrected not destroyed” by the violence. 70

Lecture 4—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

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There was no golden age of Rome. Roman rule and the empire it had gained were facts about the world, as much theological as political. All empires are eventually held accountable under God’s sovereignty, for every empire eventually falls into the idolatry of self-worship.

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This theological interpretation of empire gives Augustine tremendous critical leverage—now the argument is not between belief and unbelief, but between rival forms of believing. The problem with Rome was its fusion of this-worldly political order with ultimate transcendent meaning.

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That politics can be misused does not preclude its being rightly used, and Augustine reframes how and why Christians should care for the world as a whole. This point is crucial to The City of God: The pagans’ challenge to the Christians went far beyond the sack of Rome. They doubted Christians could care for the world at all because Christians were always seeking to look beyond it. The title of the work is meant to bring all these concerns to the fore: to suggest a kind of complicated relationship between Creation and Creator, eternal and temporal.

From Civitas to Civitate Dei „„

As a rhetorician, Augustine was sensitive to the construction of persuasive arguments. That includes the title of the work (in Latin, De Civitate Dei) and continues in the first word and sentence of the work as a whole.

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First is the highly important use of the word civitas, one of the most central political terms of the pagan world. The Roman government understood itself not as controlling a homogeneous terrain but as coordinating a collective of cities. Just as the Romans offered an urban politics for a rural countryside, so Augustine wrote a Christian urban theology for a primarily rural audience. 71

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The Greek Christian theologian Eusebius had baptized the language of empire as a legitimately Christian term; but the language of city was far more central to pagan political thought. So Augustine’s use of the phrase was, in its context, noteworthy and even a bit jarring.

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Augustine defines city as an intentional community. It is also a theological community. Augustine thinks the church is a real city, a real community formed by love, yet not perfectly visible on earth. It is incompletely manifest in the imperfect lives of its members.

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The City of God is at one and the same time an ecclesial, a civic, and an existential work. ›› It is ecclesial in how it elucidates the inner nature of Christian communal life, what it means to be a Christian among others, trying to live a life of fellowship and inquiry.

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It is civic in how it describes the real value and dangerous idolatries of worldly politics, how it clarifies our real duties to the civic order, and how those duties can be overridden by other duties.

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It is existential in how it explains why we live in this world, what God is doing to us in and through it, and how we ought best to inhabit it in order most clearly to hear God’s voice and receive God’s love.

The first sentence contains the master themes of the whole book: the tension between time and eternity and between the obscurities of worldly justice and ultimate divine judgment; the role of believers’ patience in waiting for these tensions to be relieved; the impudence of the unbelievers who prefer their own gods; and the need in all things of God’s help.

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The Power of Glory „„

Above all, though, shines the first word, gloriosissimam, “most glorious.” If the Roman political imagination was an imagination of cities, the Romans’ imagination of the good life is organized centrally around glory. Whatever Romans did, they did out of a longing for glory.

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Gloria traditionally described the aim of those who sought to gain renown. As such, gloria shines the light of heroism on its possessors, but it is awarded by those who witness and remember their deeds. It is not, in pagan Roman understanding, a selfgenerated reality: it is a matter of recognition.

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Before Augustine, Christians, fearing that gloria suggested that God needs human recognition, considered it improper. It was only recently that Latin theologians began to talk about gloria as the substance of God, something not bestowed by observers but recognized as emanating from the inner life of the divine. To start the work with gloriosissimam was to trail a red cloak to the pagans.

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Thus part of the contest of the work will be about whose sense of glory is the right one: the Romans’, spoken from the perspective of a conqueror, or the Christians’, spoken of the person of a merciful God? What is the nature of the ultimate glory of the world—is it the mercy we enact, or the mercy God gives us, and the humility that we in turn return to God?

Questions to Consider 1. Augustine says that Christians’ attitudes toward worldly commitment make them better able to handle the challenges of political life. How does he think this works? Do you agree? 2. Augustine is reasonably sanguine about the inescapability of human “empires” in this world, though he is quite damning of them in practice. Describe the tension here: What does it suggest about the relative value of political life in his thinking? 73

Lecture 4 Transcript

Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

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hat has Athens to do with Jerusalem? This line, uttered by the 3rd-century North African theologian Tertullian, has echoed down the centuries in Christian thought. By it, Tertullian meant to oppose Christian faith to Greek rationalist philosophy. He was worried that the kinds of questions and the sort of attitude popular among skeptically-minded philosophical types were anathema to the absolute truths of Christian dogma. He set up this opposition to assert the two approaches were utterly opposed, and to insist on affirming Christianity without regard for human reason. His was a minority position in his time and ever since, but the question he asked has remained alive to haunt Christian theologians, and as ammunition to non-Christians, about the confluence of, or conflict between, reason and faith. The relationship between holy dogma and human inquiry was fraught for Augustine, as well. His awareness of the need for both active human inquiry and receptive human faith is intricate and very influential for the rest of the tradition. But in this context, and in particular in the context of the writing of The City of God, he knew that his audience, Christian and pagan alike, were asking a slightly different version of Tertullian’s question: What has Rome to do with Jerusalem? Augustine shaped his book to answer that question. For, as a teacher of rhetoric, he knew that you must always keep your audience in mind. Writing was always dialogical for him, a matter of conversation between a particular speaker and particular hearers. Thus it behooves us to understand who made up the audience for The City of God, for in no other of his works was his audience as richly diverse as it was here. In this lecture, I want to explore how his audiences invisibly shaped his book, and how their silent, looming presences—in his 74

Lecture 4 Transcript—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

mind and in his world—helps us to understand aspects of the book that we would otherwise not notice. Consider that the book, in its first sentence, is written in answer to a request from one Marcellinus. Who was he? Flavius Marcellinus was a Christian, and a tribune and notary under the Western emperor Honorius. He was the emperor’s personal envoy and direct agent, sent to Africa to oversee the great Council of Carthage in 411 to adjudicate Donatist-Catholic debates in North Africa. He was a major Roman player and a friend to Augustine. Augustine dedicated The City of God to Marcellinus. He looked to be the kind of Christian political actor that Augustine had in mind. But then, in 413, after Augustine had finished and published Books 1–3 of The City, Marcellinus was caught up in a great tumult. Roman North Africa was thrown into chaos by what became known as the Revolt of Heraclian, the Count of Africa, who tried to invade Italy and seize control of the Western Empire. In the aftermath, Marcellinus was arrested, accused of being one of Heraclian’s allies, and despite the pleas of many, not least Augustine, he, together with his brother Apringius, was executed in public, in disgrace, through decapitation by the sword on September 13, 413. Within a year of his death it became clear that he had been innocent, and that the authorities had acted in anxious haste, killing a good man and a loyal servant of the imperium. Augustine never swerved from his loyalty to his friend. Many years later, when the imperium Marcellinus had served seemed shattered beyond repair, Augustine recalled Marcellinus’s prompt for the book. In the very last paragraph of Book 22, 15 years on after Marcellinus’s death, Augustine describes the completion of the work as recompense for a debt he had accepted long ago. We can trace the origins of that debt pretty clearly, in fact. In the winter of 411–412, after the Council of Carthage was over, Marcellinus 75

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wrote to Augustine and reported his difficulties in responding to those Roman refugees still devoted to the old gods. They angrily blamed the sack, and all the imperium’s ills, on the Christians. He reported some questions put to him by one Volusianus, a Roman nobleman who was raised pagan but was considering conversion, but was still now wavering in his consideration. According to Marcellinus, Volusianus worried about Christianity’s negative civic consequences. As Volusianus read the Gospels, Christ’s teachings were incompatible, he said, with the morals of citizenship, of those concerned with public affairs. After all, Marcellinus says, Christ taught us not to return evil for evil, to turn the other cheek, to give our cloak when one asks for a tunic, to go twice the distance with one who asks us. These commands, says Volusianus, are contrary to the morals of citizenship. How might one respond to this? Marcellinus asks Augustine. Augustine wrote back, and in his letter Augustine said that he had heard these arguments as well, put to him from those who charge our faith with hostility to the commonwealth, he said. Augustine suggested that the crucial point to press in response is that a city is but a group of men united by a specific bond of peace, and such a peace was best secured by those with the proper disposition. He allowed that much of the Christian morality was not immediately applicable to public affairs. And then he went on, arguing that Christianity was in fact, however, a better basis for the civic virtues that sustained the city than was paganism, and this is a quote from Augustine: It is in this cesspool of evil characters, where the ancient ethos has been abandoned, that the presence and assistance of heavenly authority is most needed. This exhorts us to voluntary poverty, to restraint, to benevolence, justice and peace, true piety, and other splendid and powerful virtues. It doesn’t do this only for the sake of living this life honorably, or only to provide a peaceful community 76

Lecture 4 Transcript—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

for the earthly city. It does so also to win everlasting security for the heavenly and divine commonwealth of a people that will live forever. Faith, hope, and charity make us adopted citizens of this city, so that as long as we are on our pilgrimage, if we are unable to reform them, we should tolerate those who want the commonwealth to remain with its vices unpunished.

Ultimately, then, Augustine argued the theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—do not disable civic virtue, but in fact they properly enable it. So Christians are not just acceptable citizens; they are the best citizens. This passage succinctly expresses how Augustine imagined morality to relate to politics, an idea developed much more fully in The City of God. What’s more, this letter reveals a deep strategy of the whole work. Christianity rightly understands the true goods that the pagan Romans and all other interlocutors blindly seek. Hence, Christians are best able rightly to inhabit this world, and be exemplary citizens, because they know how to value it properly. So, Christianity does not ruin the Romans’ hopes, but transfigures and fulfills them, though the Romans may not recognize that. We will see this argumentative strategy deployed again and again by Augustine throughout The City. This is a fantastic, remarkable moment in Augustine’s letters. Here, in this exchange between him and Marcellinus, you hear, as if through the door into another room, a snatch of real conversation between flesh and blood humans 1,600 years ago. My historian friends get so excited about moments like this that it’s almost unseemly. Yeah, but we don’t get out much, so that’s OK. This exchange with Marcellinus, and through him Volusianus, is but one example of the diverse kinds of audience that Augustine had in mind in writing The City of God, and I should say something about them here. Augustine was always lucky in his enemies, the various challenges they brought to him, all of which forced him to articulate 77

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carefully his theological views. What’s more, he internalized these opponents—that is, he imaginatively entered into their worldviews, apprehending both their insights, and what made them worry about his own positions. As the historian Peter Brown put it, Augustine absorbed, digested, and transformed his opponents’ positions. People rarely accuse Augustine of misunderstanding the views he opposes—misrepresenting them out of malice, perhaps, but not misunderstanding. For example, unlike contemporaries like his colleague Saint Jerome, Augustine’s relation to the pagan world is calmer, more stable, less prone to melodramatic anathemas or unctuous neediness. Perhaps because of his own pagan upbringing, education, and early adulthood, by the time he came to write The City of God, he knew the pagan world very well, and from the inside. Consider the range of positions that Augustine confronted with every sentence that he wrote of The City. First, there were civically-minded Roman patriots. They assumed that whatever happiness we are to have, we are to have it in this life and no other. And they believed in the basic decency of Roman tradition, including the various political and religious ritual practices, such as sacrifices to the gods, and the cultural forms, such as the stage, and drama, and ritual, which Augustine thought morally and spiritually abhorrent. Augustine’s debate with these voices dominates and orders the first five books. Second, there were philosophically-minded elite Roman questers, we can call them, from Neoplatonic philosophers to Manichean believers; people who sought wisdom and happiness not through worldly success but through retreat into solitude and contemplation far away from the noise of this world. Augustine primarily engages them in Books 6–10. These people, as we will see, were for Augustine tragically prideful, and merit our pity much more than our scorn.

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Lecture 4 Transcript—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

Third, even within the largely Christian confines of North Africa, Augustine found many interlocutors to contest him. There were the Donatists, whom we heard about last time. By the time The City of God was being written, this dispute had begun to recede in import— after all, Marcellinus had helped with that at the Council of Carthage. But even so, Donatism convinced Augustine that the church needed to frankly admit its constitution as a mixed body on the way to salvation, not a fortress of righteousness against an irredeemably sinful outside world. Fourth, there were the Pelagians, initially a small group of Christian intellectuals, at least as educated and at least as elite as Augustine, who found his vision of the nature of human sin and the need for divine grace theologically confused and spiritually and psychologically distasteful. Fifth, behind or alongside all of these, there are his fellow Christians— elites who get his literary allusions and ordinary believers in the pews, people who would probably never read The City of God but who might hear their bishop or priest quote it in a sermon as containing the wisdom of that great Christian mage, Augustine. Especially as the book goes on into the latter books, after 11, Augustine was most afraid it seems of misleading these people in thinking that they could trust him to do their thinking for them. Now, part of the power of the work, in its own time and thereafter, lies in how it heard all these diverse worries and how Augustine’s sheer rhetorical and argumentative genius braids them together in its pages. They’re all constantly there, and while their appearance may become unmistakable only on a few occasions, they are continually influencing the course of his argument, kind of the way that dark and distant celestial bodies affect, through their gravitational power, the orbits of planets that are visible to the naked eye. Most basically, on the principle of never let a crisis go to waste, Augustine used the sack of Rome to rethink the meaning of Rome 79

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itself, and to address fundamental themes of civic life in general, and thus to rethink all of history. What’s more, he used it to offer a new vision of how exactly Christians ought to, and ought not to, be worldly. As the letters from Marcellinus—and, through him, Volusianus—make clear, Augustine understood the pagan suspicions of the Christians, and he knew that they were not entirely unfounded. After all, scorn of the world as flesh waiting to rot was a popular trope across many schools of ancient philosophy and religion, including Christianity. Many expressed a powerful longing to flee this world, and this was popular among Christians and others in his day. And he spoke back to this longing, in turn. We see all of this in a remarkable sermon of Augustine’s, one that may mark his earliest response to the sack of Rome. It seems he preached it in the spring of 411. Here is Augustine’s nearly immediate response to the sack, and it anticipates themes that we’ll see much more developed in The City. First, Augustine insists that physical suffering and death are not the greatest evils, and if you think they are, you ought to meditate on the sufferings involved in Hell. God uses historical traumas the way farmers use threshing floors, he says, to sort out the blessed and the damned. And so we should see suffering as training us, so that we must learn to use suffering aright. Second, he urges an attitude that is neither nostalgic about ancient Rome nor apocalyptic about the sack itself. The fall of Rome is not a world-changing event, he says. The human condition has been the same ever since Adam and Eve left Eden, and no matter what the political situation, these facts about our condition will remain relevant until the end of time. Anyway, Rome perished while Alexandria, Constantinople, and Carthage all stood. All we can say, says Augustine in this sermon, is that Rome is perishable, as Virgil reminds us, right? So, even the pagan sage Virgil knew this. Indeed, the sack wasn’t actually an annihilation. Rome was corrected but not destroyed by this violence, he says. 80

Lecture 4 Transcript—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

Furthermore, there was no golden age of Rome. We should reconsider Roman rule and the empire it has gained. For him, empire was a fact about the world, and in truth it was as much a theological as a political fact. He was by no means unqualifiedly horrified by empire. After all, he believed, God wills that there would be empires: the Bible says this about Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Babylon. There’s every reason to think that Rome fits this mold as well. And all empires are eventually held accountable under God’s sovereignty, for every empire eventually believes its own PR, and falls into the idolatry of self-worship. Empire gives people a taste for ruling, and the taste easily becomes addictive, so that empire begins to be the motive for nothing but more empire. This theological interpretation of empire gives Augustine tremendous critical leverage, because now the argument between pagan Rome and Christians is not between belief and unbelief but between rival forms of believing, rival frames of the absolute. The problem with Rome was its fusion, its confusion, of this-worldly political order with ultimate transcendent meaning. But that politics can be misused doesn’t mean that it can’t be rightly used, so the sermon reframes how and why Christians should care for the world as a whole, too. And this last point is going to be crucial for The City of God. After all, the pagans’ challenge to the Christians went far beyond the sack of Rome. The pagans effectively doubted the Christians could care for the world at all—not just politically, but more broadly still. The Christians, they thought, were always seeking to look beyond this world to another one, and thus devaluing it. Augustine returns to this concern so often in The City that I suspect he thought this was their most profound and most interesting challenge. For it was, from one perspective, not entirely incorrect; but from another, it was the thing about Christianity that the pagans got most disastrously wrong. The title of the work, The City of God, is meant to bring all that to the fore, to suggest a kind of complicated relationship between Creator and Creation, eternal and temporal. 81

Books That Matter: The City of God

I have said already that Augustine was a rhetorician, and rhetoricians are deeply sensitive to the construction of persuasive arguments. And that includes the title of the work, and it continues in the first word and sentence of the work as a whole. First is the highly important use of the word civitas—civitas—or city; you can say it either way, really. For Augustine, he probably would have said civitas. He could have used more common words like kingdom or people or family—regnum or populus or familia—which also have more biblical power. Instead, he chose one of the most central political terms of the ancient pagan world. Civitas is a Roman term, though one with echoes in the Greek word for city: politeia— and it is thus a deeply pagan term, and an overtly worldly and political one at that. The Roman government habitually understood itself not as controlling a homogeneous space—terrain—but as coordinating a collective of cities. That may seem strange, but consider the only visual representation of the empire, from the empire, that we have— or, rather, a 13th-century copy of it. It’s a map called the Peutinger Table, and you need only to glance at it to appreciate how the Roman political imagination could flatten the diversity of landscapes on three continents to accommodate a vision of the empire as an extended network of cities and roads connecting them. To us, it looks less like a topographical map, a map of space, and more like a subway map. The Romans’ fixation on cities is especially remarkable because cities were a relatively small part of their world. Somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the population of the empire worked on farms, and probably more than that in North Africa. Today, by comparison, in our world, only about 2 percent of people work in agriculture. And since 2006, for the first time in human history, we, humanity, has become a majority urban species—only in 2006. The wealthy, then, lived in cities but also in the country, and they would come to town for political and social life, and then retreat again 82

Lecture 4 Transcript—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

to their villas during plague season and the long hot summers, to live the life of simple, healthy republican virtue, cultivated and cultivating on the land. Those who were stuck in cities year round—the poor, prostitutes, people who worked in trade—were often considered unfortunate and suffered high mortality rates. Cities, in other words, were places where you went for power, for fame, or for death. Avernus, the Romans’ land of the dead, is something like a city. So Romans both loved and feared their cities—to be in one was to have a greater chance at glory, and also be at greater risk of death. But dangerous as they were, cities were where things happened. In all this, of course, the Romans were doing nothing but following the Greeks, who were also deeply urbane. Aristotle’s definition of the human as a political animal—you might have heard of this, right?— is actually a transliteration, not a translation, of the Greek phrase zoon politikon—that’s the phrase that gets translated as political animal. And this is actually a transliteration that obscures what it purports to illuminate. What do I mean? I mean that it would have been more accurate to translate that phrase as a citified animal, an animal who lives in cities: zoon politikon; the citied animal. Indeed, you might say that, for the Greeks, real humans are urban creatures, and humans not at least loosely connected to cities—humans who are exiles or barbarians— are not properly full humans at all. While they were worldly spaces, cities were also deeply religious sites, homes to gods as well as humans. Most shrines and temples were located in cities. Neither Roman nor Greek religion was really a nature religion like the Celtic Druids. Now, of course, many of the gods, most of the gods, maybe almost all the gods don’t live in cities, right? But they visited them all the time, for their shrines and temples were there. But, for Augustine, cities are also not just part of the theological foundations of reality. For him, the whole world is ultimately properly 83

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speaking urban, even now. Rome is represented by him as Babylon, not just inside its city walls but wherever its imperium extends, and all sinners, wherever they are, are wandering the streets of Babylon. And the eternal city, Jerusalem, is the saints’ native city and mother, even if they have never been there. So, just as the Romans offered an urban politic for a rural countryside, so Augustine wrote an urban theology for a primarily rural audience. And he wrote a Christian urban theology, which was also strange. Some people, like the Greek Christian theologian Eusebius a century before, had baptized the language of empire as a legitimately Christian term, but the language of city was far more central to pagan political thought, Greek and Latin alike. So Augustine’s use of this phrase was in its context noteworthy and even a bit jarring, like someone today saying the republic of God. Undoubtedly, Augustine wasn’t totally unique in using this metaphor, but he did use it in ways that were unprecedented. The image of the destiny of the blessed as a city is in the Bible, but in more complex and ambivalent ways than the whole-hearted endorsement of city life would make clear. After all, who founds the first city in the Bible? Cain. Augustine defines a city as an intentional community—polity, city, society—a people bound together by some tie of fellowship. We saw that, actually, in the letter with Marcellinus. He uses this definition, in fact, to disagree with Cicero, who thought a city was an association united by a common sense of right and a community of interest— that is, a city is formed by a common sense of justice. Augustine thinks this definition, Cicero’s definition, is much too stringent. Cities pursue different ends by different means, and they have different understandings of peace due to their different loves. The city it is also a theological community. Augustine borrowed a great deal on this idea from the earlier Donatist thinker Tyconius, who wrote a text called The Book of Rules. Tyconius there talked about the two cities in a pretty literal way, as you would expect a Donatist 84

Lecture 4 Transcript—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

would be wont to do. While sometimes Augustine uses the cities in a way that is like this, he typically avoids dualism: the city of God is not contrasted with the city of the Devil but with the earthly city. Like Tyconius, Augustine thinks the Church is a real city, a real community formed by love, but unlike Tyconius, he did not think this city was perfectly visible on earth. It was incompletely manifest in the imperfect lives of its members. Realizing its incompleteness, and one’s own, and how that incompleteness should chasten one’s vehemence about our world and one’s pride about one’s place in it, is one great lesson that Augustine’s urban theology would teach. But we cannot avoid the city’s relationship with its ultimate destiny, he thinks. So The City of God is at one and the same time an ecclesial, a civic, and an existential work. It’s ecclesial in how it elucidates the inner nature of Christian communal life, what it means to be a Christian among others, trying to live out a life of fellowship and inquiry. It is civic in how it describes the real value and dangerous idolatries of this-worldly politics, and how it elucidates our real duties to the civic order, and how those duties can be overridden by other duties. And last, it is existential in how it explains, theologically, why we live in this world and what God is doing to us in and through it, and how we ought best to inhabit this world in response to God in order most clearly to hear God’s voice and receive and share God’s love. Now, if the title of the work makes a certain kind of surprising claim, and sets Augustine up to argue against Cicero, the greatest philosopher of Rome, the first word of the first sentence tells his readers that he will engage in a similarly serious disputation with the great poet of Rome, Vergil. That first word is gloriosissimam, meaning most glorious. Indeed, the whole first sentence of the book is a doozy. Let me read it to you here: Most glorious is the city of God, whether in this passing age where among the ungodly she lives by faith, or in the stability of her eternal 85

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home which now she awaits patiently, ‘until justice is converted to judgment,’ but which she will then fully obtain, in final victory and perfect peace; this is my work’s theme, done for my promise to you to defend her against those who prefer their own gods, most beloved son Marcellinus: a great and arduous work, but God is our helper.

So many of the master themes of the whole book appear here in that one sentence: the tension between time and eternity; the tension between the obscurities of this-worldly justice and ultimate divine judgment; the role of believers’ patience in waiting for these tensions to be relieved at the end of time; the impudence of unbelievers who prefer their own gods—suggesting a bad and shallow kind of agency, this language of preference; and the need in all things, but most definitely in writing this book—and, you might say, in reading it—of God’s help, a plea to God which is also at the same time our opus arduous et magnos, a quotation from Cicero, from Cicero’s last and greatest argument about the importance of rhetoric. Above all, though, shines that first word: gloriosissimam, most glorious. If the political imagination of Rome was an imagination of cities, the Romans’ imagination of the good life is organized centrally around glory. Every Roman boy longed for glory, the recognition of his countrymen for his great deeds, which would give him the only kind of immortality that Romans sought: persistence in cultural memory. Whatever Romans did—however far they went from Rome—in all their labors and striving to bind together Europe, Asia, and Africa in a single harmonious imperium—they did all that they did centrally out of a longing for this glory. Now we may think that glory is a fully legitimate Christian term, just like we might have thought that about the city of God. But in Augustine’s day, glory, like city, had powerful pagan undertones. Gloria traditionally described the aim of those who sought to gain renown to be truly great, to be admirable. As such, gloria was a pagan term a lot like good PR, right? It shines the light of heroism 86

Lecture 4 Transcript—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience

on its possessors, but it’s shined on them by those who witness and remember their deeds. It is not, in pagan Roman understanding, a self-generated reality; it is a matter of recognition by one’s peers. Christians in Augustine’s time and before worried that attributing glory in this sense to God would make God seem to need human recognition. Besides, who is God’s peer? And so, in the several centuries leading up to Augustine, the Latin word gloria was held at arm’s length by the churches as not properly Christian. It was only immediately before Augustine that the Latin theologians began to talk about gloria as the substance of God, something not bestowed by observers but recognized as emanating from within the inner life of the divine. To start the work with gloriosissimam was to trail a red cloak, not just to the Christians but to the pagans as well, and especially to pagan readers of Vergil. Vergil’s Aeneid was more than a great book for the Romans, it was something like a moral and spiritual handbook for the imperium, a yardstick by which their worldly achievements could be measured, and a mirror for the Roman soul to teach it what it should care about, how it should care about it, and why. In the first paragraph of his whole book, right after that fantastic sentence I read to you before, Augustine starts this debate explicitly by contrasting a line of Vergil’s that is meant to guide the Romans, a famous line, “To spare the vanquished and subdue the proud,” with a line from the Epistle of James describing the character of God, who “resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.” That’s a tacit criticism of the swagger that Augustine thinks oozes from Vergil’s line. Thus part of the contest of The City, from the first paragraph, is going to be about whose sense of glory is the right one: the Romans’, spoken from the perspective of a conqueror; or the Christians’, spoken in the person who has received the grace of a merciful God. What is the nature of the ultimate glory of the world? Is it the mercy we enact or the mercy God gives us, and the humility that we in turn return to God? 87

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We can also see that Augustine was driven to his approach by positive theological motives. There’s a deep Christological and incarnational conviction driving his appropriation of this pagan Roman language, for just as the flesh of our fallen world could bear the weight of glory that is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ for Augustine, so, too, the fallen words of the saeculum—of this world, of this era—can bear God’s sanctifying meanings. Indeed, our fallen words are still in fact haunted enough by their true longings that they are somewhat prepared to bear those meanings. Augustine’s rhetorical argument, beginning with civitas or with gloriosissimam—pick your potion—in a way conveys the whole methodological point of the book in those single words. Now, we’ve seen that the challenges that Augustine faced were profound. But he used them, facing them head-on from the very beginning of the work, and making their skepticism part of the energy driving the work as a whole. But never forget—keep this throughout all the rest of our lectures any time you think about The City—that Augustine intentionally and purposefully dedicated this book to a man who was executed by the state unjustly and despite all the good service he had done for it. That will leaven our sense of Augustine’s vision of what the civic life can do. Now, knowing something of what those challenges were, we can now turn to the text, and enter the gate of suffering that leads into The City.

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The Problem of Suffering (Book 1)

Lecture 5

A

ugustine begins The City of God by engaging Roman expectations for happiness. Using the sack of Rome to contrast pagan and Christian responses to suffering, he sees a revealing difference in their understanding of the world and our place within it. He focuses here on the civic-minded Romans’ belief that the happiness of human life might be found centrally in this world—that we can build a secure fortress of felicity in history. Augustine thinks this is tragically mistaken.

The Classical Worldview „„

Modern thought offers two ways of imagining the ancient world: ›› First is the imagination of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, of the classical world as grand, magnificent, calm, and orderly. Christianity is missing from it. This vision sees the coming of Christianity as a collapse, the coming of the “Dark Ages.” Edward Gibbon is the greatest proponent of this view, still the commonly accepted one.

››

In the second view, the classical world is full 89

Friedrich Nietzsche

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of unbridled passion, divine enthusiasm, madness, great cruelty, and great achievement. This is the view of Nietzsche, a classicist before he was a philosopher, who indicted the educators of his age for failing to grasp the psychological profundity of the classical world. For Nietzsche, Christianity is not a light cloak we can throw off and return to our classical roots. There is no going back. There is no rebirth. There is only going forward in full cognizance of all that has made us. „„

The Romans were not like contemporary secularist thinkers. They were deeply religious and deeply passionate, and their morality was real, though much of it we would find terrifyingly inhuman. Are there limits to our humanist identification with one another? How far can we identify with people radically different from us? Or are they so radically different after all?

„„

The following two facts about the Romans, Christian and pagan, make them simultaneously like us and not: ›› On the one hand, they fully understood religious and metaphysical skepticism. The elites of Rome were just as able as we are to imagine that religion is stories made up by people long ago whose human origins are forgotten in time. ››

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On the other hand, they had a vision of moral order that we would find shocking. They were very comfortable with extreme violence, deployed publicly. When Augustine talks about the theater, he is not talking about people putting on sensitive plays by Shakespeare. He is talking about sex shows and snuff films, performed live and on stage, and this is only the surface of what the Romans were willing to countenance in the way of morality, public and private.

Understanding these views of morality helps us to see these first five books as Augustine’s engagement with the most common aspects of Rome’s popular culture—what the people were taught to love, and what to fear—and the political consequences 90

Lecture 5—The Problem of Suffering (Book 1)

of that. The vision of Rome that emerges from these books is a terrifying one.

The Inequity of Suffering „„

Suffering is so pervasive in our world, so powerful in our experience, and so perplexing and vexing to our expectations that any belief in or hope for secure happiness in this world is always a delusion. The question for Augustine is, once we see that suffering is unavoidable, what are we going to do about it?

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Augustine offers a direct response to the immediate challenge posed by the sack of Rome—the inequity of unmerited suffering—and answers pagan accusations that the sack itself was evidence against the Christians’ faith in the providential governance of a loving God.

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Yet, a more fundamental question is the problem of evil, suffering, and the discrepancy between our moral expectations of the world and what the world provides. Augustine suggests that the question was not why innocents suffer, but: ›› Why, on Christian terms, does suffering happen? ››

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Augustine answers that the key is

What should humans do when such sufferings are inflicted upon them?

wrong attachment to the world, and the question should be what use we make of suffering. No one is righteous;

Suffering is common to our human condition. The dilemma is why people suffer to the degree that they do, and why people do not suffer fairly—that is, why some good people

no one properly appreciates the world as it should be appreciated, and therefore all find suffering in their interactions with it.

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suffer a great deal and some nasty people do not. What can we say about suffering? „„

Augustine answers that the key is wrong attachment to the world, and the question should be what use we make of suffering. No one is righteous; no one properly appreciates the world as it should be appreciated, and therefore all find suffering in their interactions with it.

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How, then does one respond to a world that seems immune to the wish to avoid suffering? Before we can get to an answer, Augustine thinks, we must inspect pagan attitudes to these issues, to assess their plausibility, and to see whether we need to expel their assumptions from our own minds.

The Problem of Suicide „„

Augustine wants to explain why Christians, and humans in general should think suicide is never acceptable, that suffering is to be endured, not avoided through self-annihilation. He draws this conclusion through a discussion of what he insinuates is the uttermost form of cruelty—that of convincing another of complicity in his or her own annihilation, particularly through rape.

„„

The Romans saw suicide as eminently acceptable in certain circumstances. If life were to become unendurable, morally or physically, it is wholly reasonable to seek to escape it. In fact, the blood of select suicides was a crucial ingredient in the metaphorical mortar of Rome.

„„

Lucretia and Cato, the alpha and omega of Roman republican history, were both suicides who sacrificed themselves for the good of the city. Both were memorialized as noble and brave heroes in subsequent Roman memory. Yet Augustine uses these examples as revealing deep tensions and contradictions in pagan 92

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values: Lucretia died clearly as a response to social shame, and Cato died clearly out of childish spite. „„

For the Romans, Cato’s suicide was not a momentary and impassioned act of despair. It was a cold-blooded and deliberate act of supremely significant speech. It was a way of expressing contempt for Caesar, and it created an impossible bind for all who survived him and who understood his In Augustine’s Christian approach, to act and admired it: If they face suffering and not flinch or try to agreed and admired Cato’s will, then they should kill escape it by suicide is simply to face the themselves too. destiny God has granted you.

„„

Lucretia is an even more complicated figure. A victim of rape, she usurped the role of judge and condemned herself to death, equating rape with adultery. Romans who idolize her, Augustine says, must choose between affirming that she was right to put herself to death, and thus calling her an adulterer, or denying she was right to put herself to death, and thus implying she was a self-murderer.

„„

In short, the traditional Roman attitude was that evil was to be endured, so long as there was some logic to it that made sense, such as Rome or gaining glory for oneself. But when it became unendurable, suicide was acceptable. For Augustine this approach deeply misconstrues the nature of our world and the character of our responsibility to ourselves and to the God who made us. It is an incoherent strategy of escape or avoidance.

Suffering as Grace „„

In Augustine’s Christian approach, to face suffering and not flinch or try to escape it by suicide, is simply to face the destiny 93

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God has granted you. Although some suffering you deserve for what you do; some may help heal you; and some may be offered as a chance to glorify God as a martyr. But he does not enthusiastically endorse suffering as a simple good. Suffering can be made instrumentally good, but it is not intrinsically so. ›› Suffering is meted out by God in ways that seem utterly random and illogical to us, because we simply don’t share God’s point of view. God has a plan that is not visible to God’s people in its details. So Christians should affirm there is a moral order, but must confess its obscurity to their understanding. ››

„„

Suffering is something Christians can acknowledge, confront, and hope to comfort, if not heal.

Augustine is offering a version of what we may call the therapy of suffering. This therapy has two senses: ›› In the first, it aims to help us overcome suffering by attempting to recover a sense of our own agency in the face of harm. Suffering here appears as a trauma we must try to comprehend for the sake of our own wholeness. While this is an ongoing and imperfect process, we must always insist that suffering, while real, is not the ultimate truth of our situation. ››

The second and more controversial sense tries to help us see suffering as itself therapeutic, offering an opportunity to reset our values, to discover what we should really care about and what we have been mistaken in caring about. Here suffering helps us by teaching us a positive lesson about the value of our release from excessive affections or wrongly attuned attachments. In seeing it this way, we attempt to recover and reaffirm the agency lost in suffering. It is thus essentially empowering: By resisting the temptation to victimhood, we attempt to find in suffering God’s presence, to which we are called to respond.

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„„

None of this aims to exonerate God—God’s righteousness is presumed here—but rather to figure out what humans can do, how to respond to such absurd suffering without appealing to the arid calculus of merit. Nor should this encourage us to seek out more suffering. We need not pursue further suffering, but what suffering we encounter we should seek to use to our advantage.

Questions to Consider 1. Can evil be used rightly? Are there some kinds of evil that cannot be turned to the benefit of those who suffer it? If so, what does that mean for Augustine’s proposal? 2. Augustine thinks that the true evil of war is spiritual, not physical. Do you agree?

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Lecture 5 Transcript

The Problem of Suffering (Book 1)

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ugustine begins The City of God with a five-book engagement with Roman expectations for this-worldly happiness. He uses the occasion of the sack of Rome to contrast Roman pagan and Christian responses to suffering, for he thinks he sees therein a very revealing difference in their understanding of the world and our place within it. He focuses here on the civically-minded Romans, over the possibility that the happiness of human life might be found centrally in this world—that we can, as it were, build some sort of secure fortress of felicity in history. Augustine thinks this is tragically mistaken. Suffering is so pervasive in our world, so powerful in our experience, and so perplexing and vexing to our expectations, that any belief in or hope for secure happiness in this world is always a delusion. The question for Augustine is, once we see that suffering is unavoidable, what are we going to do about that fact? Now, before we begin, we should recognize the distance separating us from the world for which and in which Augustine wrote. It behooves us, then, to think about the ways it is both like and unlike ours. Our world has two ways of imagining the ancient world: Greece and Rome. On the one hand, there’s the imagination that we were bequeathed by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Here, the classical world is one of grandeur, magnificence, calm, and order. What’s relevant about the difference between this world and our own is that Christianity is missing from it. This is the vision that sees the coming of Christianity as a collapse, a catastrophe—the coming of the Dark Ages. Rome is like us, except without the burdens of monkish superstition imposed on us by the Dark Ages of Christianity. 96

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Edward Gibbon is the greatest proponent of this view, but it’s still very often a commonly accepted one. But there’s another view. On this view, the classical world is not just like modern Europe except without churches. It’s not bourgeois civilization. It’s a world of unbridled passion, divine enthusiasms, madness, great cruelty, and great achievement. There’s no simple way for modern people to reach around their Christian heritage and shake hands with Cicero or Marcus Aurelius. This is the view of Nietzsche, who was a classicist before he was a philosopher, and one who indicted the educators of his age for failing to grasp the psychological profundity of the classical world, and the way that they were trying to grab its flowers, its blossoms, without reaching down to seize its deep psychological roots. For Nietzsche, Christianity is not just an optional thing for us, a light cloak we can throw off and return to our classical origins. The centuries between us and Augustus and Cicero have made us into very different creatures altogether. There’s no going back; there’s no rebirth. There is only going forward in full cognizance of all that has made us. I personally hew more to the Nietzschean view of the ancient world than the Gibbonian one, particularly in this: The Romans were not like contemporary secularist thinkers, at least not entirely like that. They were deeply religious, deeply passionate, and they had a morality that was real, but much of which we would find terrifyingly inhuman. That word choice is telling, for in our bourgeois self-satisfaction we find it hard to imagine a way of life as radically different from our own as what these sources seem to think is true, and to still recognize that as a human way of life. The Roman playwright Terence is famously reputed to have said, “Humanus sum, nihil humanum a me alienum puto”; I am a human, and so nothing human is alien to me. Augustine, by the way, knew that line. But is it true? Do you want it to be true? For murderers are human. Sadists are human. Hitler was a human. Are there limits 97

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to our humanist identification with one another? How far can we really identify with people radically different from us? Or are they so radically different after all? We’ll return to this question again and again in these lectures, directly and indirectly, because Augustine himself had to think about it a lot, as well. For now, just keep it in mind, and understand the following two facts about the Romans, Christian and pagan, which make them simultaneously like us and unlike us. On the one hand, as we’ll see, they fully understood religious and metaphysical skepticism. The elites of Rome were just as able as we are today to imagine that religion is a bunch of stories made up by people long ago, stories whose human origins are forgotten in time. Never think that atheism is an invention of the modern world. On the other hand, they had a vision of moral order and purpose that we would, I hope, find shocking. They were very comfortable with extreme violence, deployed publicly. When Augustine talks about the theater, he’s not talking about people putting on sensitive plays by Shakespeare or Thornton Wilder or Wendy Wasserstein. He’s talking about sex shows and snuff films, performed live and on stage. And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what the Romans were willing to countenance in the way of morality, public and private. It’s important to understand this, because it will help us to see Augustine’s engagement in these first five books as an engagement with the most common aspects of Rome’s popular culture. After a first book that starts as explicitly about the sack but then moves into deeper questions, he’ll take the next three books to really explore the moral character of Rome—what the people were taught to love, and what to fear—and the political consequences of that vision. The picture of what Rome truly is that emerges from these books is in many ways a terrifying one.

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Lecture 5 Transcript—The Problem of Suffering (Book 1)

Now, Augustine begins in Book 1 with the most direct response he offers to the immediate challenge posed by the sack of Rome, the question of the inequity of unmerited suffering and what we are to do about it. Here he talks directly about the sufferings experienced by the inhabitants of Rome during the sack in 410, and answers pagan accusations—and Christian worries—that the sack itself was evidence against the Christians’ faith in the providential governance of a loving God. The core of the pagan challenges was quite frank. The Christians are responsible for the sack of Rome, they said, and all the other calamities associated with the decline of Rome, because they have taught their adherents not to care for the city, and they have so insulted and abused the old gods as to cause them to desert their posts, as it were, of guardianship over its walls. To this, Augustine replies in three ways. First, the Roman gods didn’t protect their devotees. Second, the Christian churches were protected, which would be odd if the old gods were the ones offended at the Christians and they were still active. And third, the question is itself confused. The key is the character of wrong attachment to the world, and the question should be to what use we put suffering, not who we can blame for it. Furthermore, he says, the history of Rome itself reveals that calamities far predate the Christians. In Book 2, Chapter 3, he writes, “Let them recall with us, therefore, the many and diverse calamities by which the Roman commonwealth was consumed before Christ came in the flesh.” Rome wasn’t so hot before the Christians. And Augustine will spend the next few books explaining, in detail, from the pagans’ favored historians, how very, very much this is true. Before we get there, though, Augustine has a more fundamental question to take on, a question that haunts his entire career, and will definitely reappear throughout the whole of The City of God— namely, the problem of evil, suffering, and the general ill-fit between 99

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our moral expectations of the world, and what the world provides. Augustine addresses this issue in terms of this specific event—of the sack—and also more fundamentally as well, asking why, on Christian terms, does suffering happen? Then Augustine asks a second question. What ought humans to do when such sufferings are inflicted upon them? Never let anyone tell you that Augustine doesn’t take on big things in The City. So: suffering. Everyone suffers. In Augustine’s world, suffering and death were ever-present realities, much more than they are in ours. Many infants died soon after being born, many women died soon after giving birth, and at any age an infection on Friday could lead to the grave by Monday. Furthermore, suffering was inescapable. Not only was it an age without aspirin, without Novocain, without anesthesia; it was also an age without refrigeration, where the scent of rot, the smell of decay, was ever-present on the streets and in the houses. Feelings of pain, cries of suffering, the sight of grief, the scent of death, gave everyone a taste of the inevitable fate that awaits us all. This is all common to our human condition. But it’s at least unclear why people suffer to the degree that they do, and it may well be clear that people do not suffer in fair ways—that is, that some good people suffer a great deal, and some nasty people get off scot-free. What can we say about suffering? This is not a question Augustine could hide from, and he doesn’t. In Book 1, Chapter 9, he puts himself the question directly. Why do good and bad people both suffer? And he answers straightforwardly, that it is because we all, good and bad alike, improperly love the world. As he says, good and bad are chastised together because both alike, though not in the same degree, love this temporal life. No one is righteous, no one properly appreciates the world as it should be appreciated, and because of this, all find suffering in their interactions with the world. 100

Lecture 5 Transcript—The Problem of Suffering (Book 1)

If that’s so, what then? How do you respond to a world that seems immune to your wish to avoid suffering? Should we conclude it’s absurd? If so, what should we do about it? This question resolves itself in this book into a long discussion of a fundamental issue brought up by the sack and by important moral exemplars in Roman history. Is suicide a sin? Is life worth the effort of living it? This is not a question local only to Augustine’s age, of course. When we are faced with the apparent absurdity of the world, Hamlet asks, “To be, or not to be?” And the French existentialist writer Albert Camus put it frankly in The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is only one truly important philosophical question, and that is suicide.” By the way, for all his atheist, existentialist Frenchness, Camus actually wrote his master’s thesis in large part on Saint Augustine. So suicide is a perennial question, a question of how we are to endure a challenging life. But it’s also one that has a particular purchase on Augustine’s age. In pagan Rome, and even among many Christians in North Africa, suicide did not have all the opprobrium that most of us today associate with it. The Romans honored some suicides, and self-willed martyrs of the faith were a major part of radical Christian ideology and vital Christian memory. Augustine wants to explain why Christians and humans in general should think suicide is never acceptable, and how suffering is to be endured, not avoided through self-annihilation. He concludes this by talking about what he insinuates is the uttermost form of cruelty, the cruelty of convincing another that they are complicit in their own annihilation, particularly through rape, and thus causing them to kill themselves. Augustine’s answer is not theoretically tidy. He doesn’t propose that if we see the world aright, the problem of suffering will go away for us. In fact, if we see the world aright, according to Augustine, a great many things will become more puzzling to us. But before we can get to that, Augustine thinks, we must inspect the pagan attitudes towards these matters, to assess their plausibility, and to see whether we need to expel their assumptions from our own minds. 101

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First of all, as I said, understand that the Romans saw suicide as eminently acceptable, at least in certain circumstances. It was quite possible for life to become unendurable, morally or physically, and if that becomes the case, it’s wholly reasonable to seek to escape it. In fact, the blood of select suicides was a crucial ingredient in the metaphorical mortar of Rome. Lucretia and Cato, the classic Roman heroes, the alpha and omega of Roman republican history, were both suicides who sacrificed themselves for the good of the city—at least on Roman republican memory’s terms. Lucretia’s rape led to the expulsion of the kings from Rome, and thus the beginning of the Republic; Cato, on the other hand, by his death signified the end of the Republic. Both of them were memorialized as noble and brave heroes in subsequent Roman memory. But Augustine revises these accounts, and uses the examples to reveal deep tensions and contradictions in the pagan values they meant to celebrate. Lucretia died clearly as a response to social shame, he says, and Cato died clearly out of a childish spite, so that the Romans killed themselves, according to Augustine, out of fear and shame and pique. We should consider Augustine’s assessment of both here, for it’s really quite a radical condemnation, and it culminates in the suggestion that suicide is the end, the goal, of the Earthly city as a whole, the thing that reveals the true core of that city, what it amounts to, what it tends to in the end. Let’s see how. Now, for the Romans, Cato’s death by suicide was not a momentary and impassioned act of despair. It was a cold-blooded and deliberate act of supremely significant political speech. It was a way of expressing contempt—contempt of a life to be lived in servitude, which is all Cato saw coming with Caesar’s now-visible triumph, but also contempt of what had become of Rome under Caesar, as if it was unworthy of Cato’s continued habitation. And it put all who survived him, and who understood his act and admired it, in a nearly impossible bind. For it was saying the real Rome, the Rome of liberty and virtue, is dead, and all who would live in that city will have no habitation in the flattering and unctuous town that Caesar will now rule. 102

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If someone agreed with this and admired Cato’s will, then they should kill themselves, too. The depth of their admiration stood in mutely eloquent rebuke to the continuation of their lives as Caesar’s servants. Now this is ironic, because Caesar would have let Cato live. He just wanted a kind of desultory respect that no one took seriously, and he wanted that because he knew that such pretense, once admitted into the soul, tends to drive out all sincerity and authenticity. But that was just what Cato would not countenance, and by putting himself beyond Caesar’s costless mercy, he showed both it and the man who sought to bestow it to be fraudulent, and the conditions in Rome that led to that man’s rise to be the deepest betrayal and defeat that the res publica Romana could suffer. A powerful statement, but for Augustine, Cato’s suicide gives another message altogether: He committed self-murder out of childish spite. After all, Augustine notes, Cato was fine with the thought that his son, whom he loved, would live on under Caesar. But this means that he could accept that a life lived out under that reign would not be worse than death. And if that is so, why did he kill himself? For Augustine, the answer can only be he killed himself out of spite for Caesar. Compare this behavior, Augustine says, to that of another Roman hero, Regulus, who promised his Carthaginian captors that if they sent him to Rome with peace terms he would return to them with the Romans’ answer. They released him, he returned home, presented the terms, and there he argued against accepting those terms. He won the argument, and then went back to Carthage, keeping his promise, though knowing he would be tortured to death, probably by being crushed between spiked boards. And he was. Compared to Regulus, who had a gruesome death to look forward to, Cato appears as a coward, trying to avoid the future. Lucretia is an even more complicated figure in Augustine’s retelling. She was a victim of rape, and Augustine surely had had enough encounters with sexual violence in his world to know that rape could be a soul-destroying thing. The lesson of Lucretia is a tragic one, he 103

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thinks. She usurps the role of judge and condemns herself to death for being raped, which she deemed adultery. The Romans who idolize her, Augustine says, must choose between affirming that she was right to put herself to death, and thus would be calling her an adulterer, or denying she was right to put herself to death, and thus would be implying she was an illegitimate self-murderer. Augustine’s point here is not to condemn Lucretia, but to condemn the twinned vision of honor and shame that lies suffocating at the heart of the Roman attitude towards women’s bodies, and men’s bodies as well. In fact, it’s a quite radical condemnation of one of the founding mothers of Rome and the ideology that she was meant to represent. One quick aside here. Before we leave Augustine’s immediate critique of the Romans, note that this is the first example of the kind of critical engagement we’ll see Augustine return to repeatedly in these first 10 books—namely, an internal critique. Throughout this account, Augustine uses Roman stories to argue against the morals that the pagan Romans generally sought to draw from them, which serves to help us understand the kind of argument Augustine most typically uses in the first 10 books, that of immanent critique. An immanent critique here is a critique launched not as an attack from outside a system of belief but an insurgency from within it. It accuses opponents not of being wrong or evil or insane, first and foremost, but of being inconsistent, even hypocritical. “You say X and you say Y,” the critic proposes, “but how can you say both?” Or “You say A but you act quite clearly as if you believe not A. So which is it?” But back to the meat of this critique: What does the traditional Roman response to suffering amount to? In short, evil was to be endured, so long as there was some logic to enduring it that made sense, such as the end of Rome, the glory of Rome, gaining glory for oneself. But when it became unendurable, suicide might be acceptable. 104

Lecture 5 Transcript—The Problem of Suffering (Book 1)

Augustine thinks this approach, in its proposed behavior and in the assumptions that sponsor it, deeply misconstrues the nature of our world and the character of our responsibility to ourselves, and to the God who made us. Suicide is never an acceptable response to challenge, for Augustine. It is an incoherent strategy of escape or avoidance, and Augustine was never one for avoiding anything. In contrast, consider how Christians should deal with victims of rape. Of course this account, Augustine says, is not so much concerned to answer the attacks of those outside as to administer consolation to those within our fellowship. He explicitly here draws on the idea of a consolation. And yet the contrasts between the Christian and Roman accounts are revealing. He addresses the victims’ temptations towards despair, and possibly suicide, arguing that, first of all, the violation is not in fact one that God will hold against them, but that God suffers with them. And, secondly, that the response of suicide would be a nonsensical response, not really a response at all, but merely a perpetuation— indeed, an extension—of the evil that had been done unto them. Affirming that when physical violation has involved no change in the intention of chastity by any consent to the wrong, then the guilt attaches only to the ravisher—and those were Augustine’s own words. He insists that the violation is not a moral fault of the victim, but rather a psychological trauma. The problem is to respond to the traumatic experience in the best possible way. He knows that such traumatic violations of selfhood and agency may tempt one to finish the job, as it were; to collaborate with the attacker and destroy the self. He just simply rejects this. The proper response is not to answer evil with more evil, but rather to attempt to transcend it, to seek to reaffirm the good. As a first step towards doing this, victims of such horrendous depredations should think two things. First, that their actual integrity has not been violated by their attackers. And second, that, insofar as they can—and here 105

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their particular capacities are crucial, and the advice is very tentatively given—they should attempt to see the attack as a further moment in the long and painful process of God’s weaning them away from an excessive attachment to the world. That may seem an unbelievably high bar to ask of a rape victim, and it may seem like it walks right up to a mindset that could be called blaming the victim, but Augustine is clear that he does not want to do that. He’s worried a great deal about masochism and the overvaluing of suffering, as seen in the desire for martyrdom. What he’s trying to do here is something else entirely. He’s trying to help the victim find some way to recover agency and make good come out of the suffering that they have endured. To face suffering and not flinch or try to escape it by suicide is simply to face the destiny that God has granted you. Some suffering you deserve for what you do; some suffering may be a medicine that helps heal you; and some may be offered to you as a chance to glorify God as God’s martyr. Augustine accepts all of these. But he does not enthusiastically endorse suffering as a simple good, though many in his world would have. You do not need to try to think that all suffering is a positive blessing for you, he says. Suffering can be made instrumentally good, but it is not intrinsically so. That is the core of Augustine’s own account of suffering. So, the basic structure of the Christian response is simple: Suffering is meted out by God in ways that seem utterly random and illogical to us, because we don’t share God’s point of view. God’s work has, at its core, what is to us the inscrutable mystery of God’s will. For Augustine, this isn’t a cop-out. What he means is that the living God has a plan, but it’s not visible to God’s people in its details. So Christians should affirm there’s a moral order, but they have to confess—and knowingly confess—that it is obscure to their understanding. This is a weak argument, Augustine admits, but no one else has any stronger. The problem of the ill fit between our moral perceptions 106

Lecture 5 Transcript—The Problem of Suffering (Book 1)

and the distribution of pleasure and pain in the world is notorious and universal across any ethical system. If you want to affirm that there is a moral order, Augustine thinks, you cannot say it is easily visible on the surface of the cosmos. You must make some sort of leap of faith to affirm that order. What you can say is that suffering, when it happens, is something Christians can acknowledge, confront, and hope, at least, to comfort, if not heal. The crucial question for Augustine, then, is: What is the use to which you will put your suffering? How do you respond to it? Blessings and disasters are shared alike by good and evil people. Differences between people do exist as regards virtue and vices, though it’s not always shown in this-worldly consequences. And these sufferings invite the wicked to penitence, just as God’s chastisement trains the good in patient endurance. That’s Augustine, and he says more. What matters is the nature of the sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings. In offering this proposal, Augustine is offering a version of what we can call the therapy of suffering in two senses: one commonsensical, and one a bit more obscure and questionable. In the first sense, he aims to help us overcome suffering by attempting to recover a sense of our own agency in the face of evil’s harms. Here, we primarily acknowledge the negative character of this suffering, and seek, as best we can, to make sense of the wounds that we have endured as things that we have survived. Suffering is a trauma here that we must try—however haltingly and imperfectly—to comprehend, for the sake of our own wholeness. This is an ongoing and imperfect process, and we must always insist that suffering, while real, is not the ultimate truth of our situation. The second and more controversial sense tries to help us see suffering as itself therapeutic, offering an opportunity to reset our values, discover what we should really care about and what we have been mistaken to care too much about. Here, suffering helps us by teaching us a positive lesson about the value of our release from 107

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excessive affections or wrongly attuned attachments to things of this world. We are too proud, too attached to something, and our suffering teaches us to hold it more lightly, as not truly part of who we essentially are. As he puts it in Book 2, Chapter 9, “In this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement.” As to the sufferings of pagans in the sack of Rome, he can see no way in which the similar thing can be affirmed. In seeing it this way, we attempt to recover and reaffirm the agency lost in suffering. It is thus essentially an empowering strategy. By resisting the temptation towards a static victimhood, we attempt to find in suffering God’s presence, to which we are called to respond. At times, the empowering purpose of this therapy has been pushed beyond asceticism to self-destructiveness. But there’s a difference between humility and humiliation, selflessness and self-abnegation, and this practice should remain available to us. Because of this, we must emphasize that not every person can manage this in the same way, and none of us should assume that we can. It should be undertaken with the utmost pastoral tact, and not out of apologetic interests but practical healing ones. Remember, he says we are talking here more as consolation than as apologetic. None of this aims to exonerate God—God’s righteousness is presumed here—but rather to figure out what humans can do, how to respond to such absurd suffering without appealing to the arid calculus of merit. Nor should this encourage us to seek out more suffering. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. We don’t need to go out looking for more suffering; but what suffering we encounter we should seek to use to our own advantage. Is this attitude fully inhabitable, however? Is it possible? Is it wise? It seems to set us up for a life of complicated and transitory happiness, at best. Can you imagine telling a friend who has suffered the death of a spouse, or worse still a child, to try to find some use in this death? To learn from it that they may have cherished their now departed 108

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loved one wrongly? Augustine does not pretend to have answered or solved the problem of evil, just sketched the outlines of how someone with his philosophical and theological convictions might answer it, and he will return to this topic repeatedly in later books, climaxing in the last three on the resurrection of the dead.

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Lecture 6

The Price of Empire (Books 2–3)

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fter beginning in book 1 with the challenge of the problem of evil and the Christian response to it, in book 2 Augustine turns to the task that will occupy the rest of part 1— the dismantling of the Romans’ sense of themselves, their overall worldview. He begins by striking at the center of Rome’s self-understanding: its self-congratulatory story about how it got to be so awesome, why the Romans deserve their empire. Like all people who enjoy benefits throughout history, the Romans constructed elaborate stories justifying what they enjoyed.

The Glory That Was Rome „„

Augustine recognized that the Romans’ self-regard arose from nostalgia for an idyllic time of simplicity and virtue deep in the Roman past. But the success of the Roman Empire had little to do with noble virtues of simpler times and a lot to do with earlier Romans’ luck, paranoia, greed, and organizing principle for their lives and their city: libido dominandi, the “lust to dominate” that is also the “dominating lust.”

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For Augustine the corollary to the question of suffering was how humans could find happiness in this world. Many Romans believed that they could achieve enduring and secure happiness through individual heroism or greatness or through overall societal or worldly progress.

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The most powerful and popular formulation of this view is that Rome, as a liberally minded empire bringing humanitas, civilizing customs, a cosmopolitan mindset, and vast transcontinental 110

Lecture 6—The Price of Empire (Books 2–3)

trade could actually work over time to make the world a fit place for human habitation. ›› Rome had a civilizing mission. Whereas most ancient empires had been effectively vehicles for plunder, the Romans actually spent money on their conquests, bringing them roads and good plumbing, a legal system, and participation in a cosmopolitan pan-Mediterranean economy. ››

Rome understood itself to have a calling to civilize the barbarian north and render less decadent the Greek east. Rome served the rest of the world. That was the grandeur of Rome.

Changing Perception „„

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Augustine’s goal was to get his audience to treat these stories a little more skeptically and to see Rome as a different reality from what they had been taught. Instead of being providentially guided by the traditional gods, Rome’s rise was based on the seduction of the Romans: ›› Most immediately their seduction by their own self-love. ››

More distantly their seduction by a lust for power.

››

Most distantly—though for Augustine decisively—their seduction by the demons who tempted them and who were themselves seduced by a fantasy of escape from and even dominion over the Creator God. Rome understood itself to have a calling to civilize the barbarian north

Whereas the history of Rome had been told as a story of rising greatness and increasing happiness, Augustine wants to retell it

and render less decadent the Greek east. Rome served the rest of the world. That was the grandeur of Rome.

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as a story of series of calamities for all involved, especially the Romans. „„

Augustine’s opponents are in this endeavor are the Roman pagans, who criticize the Christians for being anti-worldly and who affirm the ancient virtues of Roman rule—imperium, gloria, virtus—and hold heroic civic-mindedness as their ideal.

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Yet Rome had had no real threatening enemies for centuries and faced little but civil war. The memory of republican self-rule was more a goad to an ever-guilty conscience than it was any actual longing.

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Augustine assaulted their self-image and their story about their own history with all the cunning and vigor that the barbarians had shown in warfare, asking: ›› What is the nature of the Roman state?

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How and why should we respect it?

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What has fallen in the sack of Rome?

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What, precisely, was Rome? The traditional pagan story offered a very simple answer: glory and justice.

In the first book of Cicero’s De re Publica, Scipio describes a commonwealth as “an assembly united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right and a community of interest.” Later in the dialogue Cicero has Scipio ask rhetorically “what is a society except a partnership in justice?” Augustine makes a two-pronged attack on this picture of Rome: First he offers a definitional attack on politics itself: Romans are mistaken about what constitutes a state. If a polity is defined by a community of justice, and if justice is a matter of all “beings” receiving their due, then the first agent to whom

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justice must be given is God. Therefore, justice demands the worship of the true God. ››

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Second, taking the details from Roman historians themselves, he offers a powerful critique of the nostalgic picture of the past. The antique Romans never were the simple, morally integrated, stern farmer heroes of legend. According to Sallust, who believed that the threat of Carthage was what had kept Rome virtuous, Romans were focused by fear and made dissolute by security.

This picture made Augustine deeply skeptical of any proclamations of moral purity or innocence and helped him to identify, diagnose, and resist the vestiges of belief in that innocence among his contemporaries.

The Pursuit of Happiness „„

For pagan thinkers, happiness—true human flourishing—was to be found as a citizen of a human city, such as Rome. This idea is effectively a morality of patriotism: A man exercises his virtuousness (manly power) to gain imperium (rule, domination), which gives him and his city gloria (splendor).

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For Augustine, this thinking is historically and psychologically deluded. ›› First, consider the physical sufferings and deaths that eventuated from the Romans’ domination over the known world. The civil wars Rome suffered over the centuries were more ferocious and bloody than any barbarian sack. To hold onto their belief that the way to be happy is through civic greatness, the Romans are compelled to forget their own history. ››

Worse than the Romans’ blindness to their history of physical evils is that they see only physical evils, and not the larger and more profound moral evils surrounding and enabling them. 113

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They are more afraid of suffering physical pain than of the corruption of their souls.

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››

Dissolution is harm inflicted upon the self, a kind of suicide. Because humans belong not simply to ourselves but are works of art that God has wrought, we owe to God a basic respect that does not insult the gift that God has given us.

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Depravity exemplifies the religious impiety of those who are drawn to worldly delights. Augustine draws parallels between human dissolution and that of the fallen angels who try to seduce us into sin and servility to their will.

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The end state of the depraved is as much a theological concept as a political one. It encourages self-indulgence and fantasy, which in turn reinforce the belief that domination is the only way we can truly be happy. Once we become people for whom happiness amounts to nothing but the immediate satisfaction of our basest desires, we inevitably begin to treat our gods as we treat our servants.

This debased and dissolute vision of happiness is exhibited in the public spectacles and dramas the Romans put on and flocked to see. Two points are important to understand Augustine’s complaints about the spectacles and the performances. ›› Roman spectacles often involved real violence, inertly witnessed by the audience. He was against rape and murder with real blood spraying the audience. ››

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Spectacles were more than entertainment. They were explicitly rituals, civic and religious at once, that attempted to express something of deep importance to the citizens.

Instead of these perverse entertainments, Augustine offers the spectacles that God provides—the wonders of Creation, the glorious stories of saints and martyrs. The Christian liturgy, 114

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celebrations, feast days, and overall way of life offer a rival set of spectacular entertainments. It is to these true spectacles that we ought to give heed.

The Role of Demons „„

Demons appear in The City of God in a way unlike their portrayal elsewhere in Augustine’s writings. They have a functional role in Augustine’s depiction of the cosmic and social order; they are active and dynamic forces, seducing humans to their doom. The reality of the demons in Augustine’s writing teaches us two lessons worth keeping in mind. ›› First, it underscores how genuinely different was the pagans’ vision of the world they inhabited: one full of violent and terrifying deities able to interfere in the most everyday situations. ››

Second, that very readiness to describe the role of demons means they also have an allegorical role as well as exemplifying the sad fate of a fallen and needy rebellious creature in a world where such rebellion can only be futile. The demons serve to exhibit a particular feature of Augustine’s depiction of the libido dominandi.

The Antithesis of Happiness „„

Book 3 analyzes and diagnoses the Roman psyche and the character of pagan longing. In it, Augustine uncovers how the Romans’ fixation on physical evils and concomitant blindness to moral failings causes them to miss how their very conquests turn into chains.

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The psychological energy driving this enslavement is the libido dominandi, a tricky term whose sense we can capture in the ambivalence of the English translation as “dominating lust,” the idea of the lust to dominate that is also the lust that dominates. 115

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The idea of libido dominandi is susceptible to two sorts of moralistic misreadings, each of which undoes the irony at the heart of the notion. ›› One makes the category all about sex. In this reading, the problem is that humans are in the grip of lust and are beasts, in some way subhuman. ››

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in a way unlike their portrayal elsewhere Augustine’s writings. They have a functional role in Augustine’s depiction of the cosmic and social order; they are active and dynamic forces, seducing humans to their doom.

Another makes the category all about violence. In this reading, we are all about subjugation and are devils, perversely superhuman.

Yet for Augustine, the true tenor and terror of the category lies precisely in its indeterminacy between these two meanings. ›› The libido dominandi can rightly be described as a lust, though in a far broader sense than any reductive sexual categorization; and it can rightly be described as aggression, though again in a far deeper sense than sheer physical abuse. ››

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Demons appear in The City of God

Both are forms of longing for a kind of utterly unconstrained agency, both are forms of slavery, and both are both at the same time.

In fact there is no worldly coherence to the libido dominandi because it is theological: the fundamental form of the longing that governs humans after Eden. It is essentially an unstable, ambivalent, and ambiguous desire precisely because the fallen longing it expresses—rebellion against God—is so.

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„„

Finally, Augustine exhorts the pagans to recognize that they have misconceived the proper shape of their desires and the proper means whereby they might satisfy them. Rome’s old gods are not gods but demons; the Romans should turn to the true liberty of the City of God, where all the old Roman virtues are transfigured.

Questions to Consider 1. Consider Augustine’s disagreement with Cicero’s definition of a commonwealth. Do you think justice plays an essential role in the idea of a political community? What do you think of Augustine’s rejection of this view? 2. Augustine distinguishes between moral evils and physical evils. Give an example of each. Which does Augustine think is worse? Was Rome beset by one kind of evil more than the other?

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A

fter beginning in Book 1 with the challenge of the problem of evil and the Christian response to it, in Book 2 Augustine turns to the larger task that will centrally occupy the work through the end of Book 10—namely, the dismantling of the pagan Romans’ sense of themselves, their overall worldview. He begins by striking right at the center of Rome’s self-understanding, its self-congratulatory story about how it got to be so awesome, why the Romans deserve their empire. Like all people who enjoy benefits throughout history—and I by no means exclude us today from this class of people—the Romans constructed elaborate stories justifying what they enjoyed. Augustine might even say the stories they told about the empire were just as ingenious as the empire itself. Augustine knows enough history to recognize that these stories are built on an unwarranted nostalgia for an idyllic time of simplicity and virtue deep in the Roman past. Indeed, anyone who knows what really happened in history, he says, will be utterly unsurprised by Rome’s current state. The success of the Roman Empire has little to do with noble virtues of simpler times and a lot to do with those earlier Romans’ luck, paranoia, ruthless greed, and the way they came to organize their lives and their city around the tremendous psychological dynamo of the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate. That is also the dominating lust. So, in Books 2 and 3, Augustine begins this analysis by discussing the moral evils that pagan Rome suffered from—corruption of character, distortion of desire, the misvaluing of different goods— all of which, he suggests, arise from the way the pagan Romans desired total domination of the world, captured in the ideas of 118

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imperium and dominium, the Romans’ apparently infinite appetite for complete control. Here, he starts to ask the second great question of the work, alongside the question of the meaning of suffering—namely, how is it that can humans be happy? In this first discussion, he asked one version of this question: Can you find happiness in this world? True happiness? Augustine saw that many Romans in his day and throughout history believed—or at least lived as if they believed— that one can achieve happiness in an enduring and secure way in temporal existence. Whether it was achieved through individual heroism or greatness or overall societal or worldly progress, the key point for them all was that this world, admitting its fragility, could still be a fit habitat for human happiness. That the Romans thought such a thing should not be surprising to us. After all, most of us basically still think it, too. The most powerful and popular formulation of it in Augustine’s world goes as follows. Rome, as a liberally-minded empire bringing humanitas, civilizing customs, a cosmopolitan mindset, and vast transcontinental trade, can actually work over time to make the world a fit place for human habitation. Rome has a truly civilizing mission, sort of nation-building for the rest of the world. And the Romans could point to evidence to back this up, for they behaved, relative to subjugated peoples, in a unique way. Whereas most of the rest of the ancient empires had been effectively vehicles for plunder, snatch-and-grab operations, the Romans actually spent money on their conquests, bringing them roads and good plumbing, a legal system that was reasonably intelligible, and participation in a cosmopolitan pan-Mediterranean economy. Rome understood itself to have a calling to civilize the barbarian north, and render less decadent the Greek east. Rome served the rest of the world. That was the grandeur of Rome. Most of us are, at best, still stuck in belief forms of the sort that Augustine diagnoses here. And his 119

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goal is to get his audience, pagans and Christians alike, to treat the stories they’ve been told with a little more skepticism, and thereby to come to see Rome as a different reality than they had heretofore been taught to see it. Instead of being providentially guided by the traditional gods, Rome’s rise, he thinks, was based on the seduction of the Romans—most immediately their seduction by their own selflove; more distantly their seduction by a lust for power; and most distantly, though for Augustine decisively, by the demons who have tempted them with such seductions, and who are in turn themselves seduced by a fantasy of escape from, and even dominion over, the Creator, God. The key thing here is the attempt by Augustine to achieve what in psychology is called the gestalt switch, a change from seeing one way to seeing the same things in an entirely different way. Whereas the history of Rome had been told as a story of rising greatness and increasing happiness, Augustine wants to retell it as a story of a series of calamities for all involved, especially for the Romans. Recall who Augustine’s opponents are in this endeavor, and what they care about. Preeminently, his interlocutors are the Roman pagans, who criticize the Christians for being anti-worldly, and who affirmed the ancient virtues of Roman rule—imperium, gloria, virtus—and held heroic civic-mindedness as their ideal. As one modern classicist, Jasper Griffin, has put it, these men believed in the great roman monosyllables: pax, ius, mos, lex—peace, justice, order, law. These Romans believed that the right thing to do was a matter of common sense, obvious to everyone with eyes to see. They prided themselves on not being a philosophically sophisticated people. They believed in deeds, not words—not intentions, but results. But by Augustine’s youth, all of this had weathered into nostalgia. Rome had had no real threatening enemies for centuries, and faced little but civil war, and the memory of republican self-rule was more a goad to prick an ever-guilty, if increasingly faint, conscience than it was any actual longing that might stir a citizen to resentment of the emperor 120

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or his agents. They were republicans in name and mindset, but mostly as hobbyists, like Civil War reenactors today. And Augustine assaulted their self-image and their story about their own history with all the cunning and vigor that the barbarians had shown in warfare. What is the nature of the Roman State, Augustine asks, and how and why should we respect it? What has fallen, he asks, in the sack of Rome? Well, Rome itself. But what, precisely, was Rome? The traditional pagan story offered a very simple answer: glory and justice. In the first book of Cicero’s De re publica, Scipio—the character Scipio in the book—famously describes a commonwealth as an assembly united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right and a community of interest in keeping the right. Cicero seems to stand behind this definition. Later in the dialogue, he has the character Scipio ask rhetorically: What is a society except a partnership in justice? This should be respected; it should be honored, almost adored. So Rome for Cicero means law; Rome means decency; Rome means justice. Augustine makes a two-pronged attack on this picture of Rome. First of all, he offers a formal definitional attack on its understanding of politics itself. The Romans, and especially Cicero, are mistaken about what constitutes a state. If a polity is defined by a community of justice, and if justice—as all the ancients believed—is a matter of each “being” being given their due, then the first agent to whom justice must be given, for Augustine, by any state, is God, the Creator and ordainer of all things. Therefore, justice demands, he says, the worship of the true God. Since God was not worshipped in Rome, from the beginning, Augustine says, justice never prevailed there. If Cicero is correct to assert that societies are partnerships in justice, then Augustine’s claim implies that Rome was not a society—was not a city. But since it is granted all around that Rome was a society, it follows that Cicero must be wrong. Whatever political societies are, they cannot be, by definition, partnerships in justice. Now, we’ll see much later that Augustine proposes a different picture of the 121

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political community—not one that is bound by a common sense of justice, but rather by some common object of love. But that’s a long way from here. That’s one attack of Augustine’s. The second attack is a historical one, a powerful critique of the nostalgic picture of the past that the pagans profess. The pagans don’t understand their own history, which, from their own sources, was never a noble tale. The antique Romans never were the simple, morally integrated, stern farmer heroes of legendary days of yore. Every virtue they had arose despite of, perhaps even because of, the vices to which they were captive. Augustine takes the details of this story from the Roman historians themselves, most notably the 1st century B.C. Roman historian Sallust, who believed that the threat of Carthage was what had kept Rome virtuous in the good old days. The Romans were always oppressed and focused by fear, and relaxed and made dissolute by security. Thus, as Augustine makes clear, Rome is condemned on moral grounds by its own scholars, its own historians, even before Christ even appears on the Earth. They were ruthlessly focused and graced with singularity of purpose only when a knife was held at their throat. Things were never simpler. There never was a greatest generation. There never was a golden age. But while some of the details of the revised narrative that Augustine tells come from Roman history, and the psychology is all-too human—common among many of us—the basic logic driving his revision is thoroughly biblical. Anyone who has read Genesis should be surprised by none of this. East of Eden, humans have always been sinners. And if individuals are bad, humans in groups have only been worse. This picture made Augustine deeply skeptical of any proclamations of moral purity or innocence, and helped him to identify, diagnose, and resist the vestiges of belief in that innocence among his contemporaries. 122

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Why must the pagans hang on to this vision of Rome, he asks. What is at stake in them holding onto it? Here, Augustine gets at the great psychological theme of the first 10 books, which is the pursuit of happiness. Now, everyone wants happiness, Augustine argues. For pagan thinkers, happiness—true human flourishing—is found in our lives as citizens of some human city, such as Rome. This is effectively a morality of patriotism. You exercise your virtuousness— your kind of manly power; this is really addressed to men here—to gain imperium—rule, or domination—which gives you and your city gloria—glory, or splendor. Again, this remains a view which many if not most people today share, that human happiness is the product of this-worldly striving, and that to advance such striving, governments are established as one central vehicle for empowering it. Happiness is realized by worldly achievement. But Augustine thinks this is both historically and psychologically deluded. First, consider history, particularly the physical evils experienced by the Romans—the physical sufferings and deaths that eventuated from their rise to domination over the known world. These are clearly part of the cost of Rome’s rise to greatness. There have certainly been enough of these, he thinks. The civil wars that Rome has suffered over the centuries were more ferocious and bloody than any barbarian sack. To hold on to their belief that the way to be happy is through civic greatness, the Romans are compelled to forget their own history. But the Romans’ blindness to their history of physical evils—this is not the worst thing about their attitude. The worst thing is that the Romans can only see physical evils, and not the larger and more profound moral evils surrounding them and enabling them. Here, Augustine notes the curious and ironic fact that the Romans were more afraid of physical evils than the moral evils that he considered deeper and more devastating—more afraid of suffering physical pain than of the corruption of their souls. Thus they exemplify for Augustine the truism, as he put it, that the only thing which the evil regard as evil are those which do not make evil, because anyone 123

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can suffer physical pain. This is not mere rhetoric, as you can see for yourself, if you just ask yourself: Which do you fear more, being evil or being dead? The problem for the Romans is not just a bad conception of evil. Their failure to comprehend the true nature and scope of their situation is also apparent in their conception of the good, of happiness. The kind of happiness that the Pagans want is sheer depravity, Augustine thinks, a desire for utter dissoluteness, unobstructed by any nosy interference by other people. According to Augustine, so long as it feels good and it doesn’t hurt anyone else, the Romans think, what could be wrong with doing it? Here, their ideal, he says, is exemplified by the ancient figure they knew as Sardanapalus, apparently the ancient Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, last of the Assyrian conquerors, known in antiquity for his utter dissoluteness and complete moral depravity. Now, note: this comparison is especially rhetorically cruel on Augustine’s part. It played on Roman prejudices about the Persians, indeed about all the peoples of the East, as decadent, effeminate, and weak. The Romans, he is saying, are not the upstanding simpleminded farmer folk they think they are; they are just one more depraved oriental court. But why does Augustine think depravity is so bad in itself? After all, it’s not cruelty to others, exactly, so why is it so wrong? His answer is that dissolution is a harm inflicted upon the self, a kind of suicide. And because, for Augustine, we are not simply ours but in fact are works of art that God has wrought, we owe to God a certain basic respect for the gift of ourselves that does not insult that gift that God has given us. Snuffling amidst the lower goods of this worldly life, wallowing in them like a pig, debases our being in ways that offend God and injure God’s creation. We are never only answerable to others and ourselves; above us all stands God.

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Nor is the dissoluteness he disapproves of a merely this-worldly decadence. In fact, it exemplifies the religious impiety of those who are drawn to worldly delights. Augustine draws parallels between human dissolution and the dissoluteness of the demons, the fallen angels whom he thinks flit about our world, trying to seduce us into sin and servility before their will. We’ll talk more about the demons more fully a bit later. Here, what’s important is that this dissoluteness spills over from the depraved’s absorption in this-worldly goods and pleasures, their hostility towards their own integrity and dignity as moral agents, and it even infects their dealings with the divine. Everything from food to the gods is treated, Augustine thinks, as a device for the dissolute’s own private pleasure. In this way, Augustine suggests, the end state of the depraved is as much a properly theological concept as it is a political one. It encourages a wholly absorbing self-indulgence and fantasy life, which in turn reinforces our belief that this sort of domination is the only way we can be truly happy in the world. And this in turn infects our dealings with the divine, for once we become people for whom happiness amounts to nothing but the immediate satisfaction of our basest desires, we will inevitably begin to treat our gods just like we treat our servants. This debased and dissolute vision of happiness is exhibited in the public spectacles and dramas that the Romans put on and flocked to see—those moments when, for Augustine, their psycho-political souls, as it were, are most vividly on display, where the spectacles themselves become a spectacle, as the audience as well as the players are now put on the stage. It’s important to remember what I said earlier regarding Augustine’s complaints about the spectacles and the performances. First of all, don’t think he was against what we would recognize as plays or live dramas or operas. The spectacles were far more than this; often they involved real violence, inertly witnessed by the audience. When he 125

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was against the spectacles, he was against rape on the stage; murder with real blood spraying the audience, like snuff films. Furthermore, spectacles were more than just entertainment. They were explicitly rituals for the city, civic and religious at once, and they attempted to express something of deep importance for the citizens. He’s not fulminating against the ancient version of going to the movies; he’s concerned about the kinds of civic rituals that, repeated over a lifetime, groove particular and pernicious channels into peoples’ souls. Instead of attending, rapt, at these perverse entertainments, Augustine says, people should look to the true spectacles that God provides: the wonders of Creation, the glorious stories of saints and martyrs. In sum, he says, the Christian liturgy—the celebrations, feast days, and overall way of life of the churches—offer a rival set of spectacular entertainments to the pagan world’s spectacular selfpresentations, and it is to these true spectacles, he says, that we should give heed. But the spectacles are not the ultimate object of Augustine’s hostility. Through them we are also brought face to face with another set of agents whom Augustine discusses—namely, the demons. For Augustine, following the pagans, it was gods and not humans, who instituted the spectacles and the games. But these gods, for Augustine, were in fact demons. Now, demons appear in The City of God—in Augustine’s text The City of God—in a way unlike their portrayal elsewhere in Augustine’s writing. In the Confessions, for example, evil is all-too-human, and Satan only merits two mentions. But in The City of God, Satan and the demons have a very functional role in Augustine’s depiction of the cosmic and, more importantly, the social order. They are active and dynamic forces, seducing humans to self-deception and doom.

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Now, of course, Augustine’s Confessions are the work of a much younger man, so perhaps The City’s more vivid and troubling demonology suggests a more mature pessimism regarding the susceptibility of humans to forces that he judged were actively demonic in their energy and intentions. And certainly belief in demons was common sense in his world. Pretty much everybody, pagan and Christian alike, believed in them. For the Romans, their world was full of gods, but gods for them meant something more local, more immanent than our ideas of God today. The line between magic and religion that we affirm is very much a consequence of the victory of Christianity in Augustine’s own age, but that wasn’t a line that the Romans understood. Besides that, the Christian scriptures are full of stories of angels and demons, as well. For both pagan and Christian, then, there were spiritual powers who had effective force in our world. The reality of demons in Augustine’s writing, especially in The City of God, teaches us two lessons that will be worth keeping in mind going forward. First, it underscores what I said earlier about how genuinely different the pagans were from secular or non-secular people today. The vision of the world they inhabited was one that was often full of violent and terrifying deities, conceived as able to interfere in the most everyday situation. Recall the last lecture’s discussion of Nietzsche and Gibbon on their depictions, their rival depictions, of the ancient world. Here’s one place where I want to say that Nietzsche is right—we cannot go back to that world, for Christian compassion and universalism are baked into our psyches in a way that is impossible to extirpate, no matter how atheist or post-Christian some of us become. One of our jobs is to see how horrific to us—to modern people—a lot of Roman culture would’ve been. Second, that very readiness to describe the role of the demons means they also have an allegorical role for Augustine, as well as 127

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exemplifying the sad fate of a fallen and needy rebellious creature in a world where such rebellion can only ever be futile. While we’ll see this fleshed out a bit more in later books in The City, here the demons serve to exhibit a particular feature of Augustine’s account of moral psychology, what he labels the libido dominandi. Now, Book 3 analyzes and diagnoses the Roman psyche and the character of pagan longing, and in it he uncovers what he takes to be the basic psychic dynamism at the heart of this desire for thisworldly happiness. The way that the Romans’ fixation on physical evils and concomitant blindness to moral failings means missing the way that their very conquests turn out, over time, to become chains. He calls the psychological energy driving this enslavement the libido dominandi. This means something like that desire which conquers us with the desire to conquer. Now, the libido dominandi is a tricky term. We can capture some of its sense in the tense, equivocating, semantic ambivalence of the English translation: dominating lust. Here, we get the idea of the lust to dominate that is also, and at the same time, the lust that dominates. The master is revealed to be the slave in his own need to be a master. No one is more enslaved to anxieties than the one who is always on his toes to ensure that no one else makes him look like a sucker. That person is most governed by his own fears who always acts preemptively to avoid those fears. Now this idea of the libido dominandi is susceptible to two sorts of moralistic misreadings, and each of which undoes the irony that Augustine sees at the heart of the notion. On one misreading, the category turns out to be all about sex, focusing on our sense of the libido; of lust. On this reading, the problem is that humans are in the grip of lust—we are beasts, in some way subhuman. But there’s a second reading, and on this reading the category is all about violence, all about domination: the dominandi. On this reading, all we want, really, is subjugation, and we’re not so much beasts as devils: perversely, sadistically, superhuman. 128

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But for Augustine, the true tenor and the true terror of this idea, the libido dominandi, lies precisely in its indeterminacy between these two meanings, as we are caught between these two temptations. The libido dominandi can rightly be described as a lust, though that in a far broader sense than any reductive sexual categorization. And it can rightly be described as aggression, though again in a far deeper sense than sheer physical abuse. Both are forms of longing for a kind of utterly unconstrained agency, and both are forms of slavery to a longing that they can never fulfill, and both are both at the same time. It is, for Augustine, precisely when the Roman hero decides he has to destroy the city in order to save it, when he decides he has to kill his own children to save his own family, when he commits an act that is simultaneously savagely brutish and subhuman, and terrifyingly demonic and superhuman, that the libido dominandi is revealed in its full and tragic profundity. Such a picture of moral psychology is more accurate, because more comprehensive Augustine thinks, than either of its moralistic reductionisms would allow. It’s simply shallow to think that we are basically sexual beings, as some Freudians say, and it’s melodramatic to think that we are creatures lusting after some absolute power, as possibly some Nietzscheans suggest. We want love and domination, and they are genuinely different longings for us. Even Freud would allow—we hope—that sometimes sex is not ultimately only about sex. The essential form of the desire is prior to specification as sexual or political or intellectual or anything else. It’s something far more protean, more nebulous, than that. In fact, there is no single worldly coherence to the libido dominandi, because it is, in several senses, irredeemably theological. In its most basic form, it is the longing that governs humans after Eden in their desire to be like God. It is essentially an unstable, ambivalent, and ambiguous desire precisely because the fallen longing it expresses—rebellion against God and envy of God’s power—is unstable, ambivalent, and 129

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ambiguous. That explains both the essential fluidity of the desire and its essential futility. And it is futile for Augustine; it is impossible. It is the form our longing takes when its most basic expression—namely, as Genesis puts it, to be as gods—is stymied; which of course, from Eden forward—from its first formulation forward—it is. Sinful human behavior has a form even in its revolt against form. It can be described in semi-intelligible terms even in rebellion against its existence within God’s prescriptions, because its revolt is not, and perhaps cannot be, entirely serious, radically absolute. So all-encompassing and universally inclusive a description offers a profound diagnosis of our moral calamity. And yet the true power and ultimate irony of this category is that it shows that human activity, even at its very worst, is no more than ambivalent, that it is not wholly nihilistic, that there is always hope. The human cannot destroy itself wholly. The conditions of its own agency forbid such utter selfabnegation. The libido dominandi is that category that, for Augustine, simultaneously sobers us about the depths of human corruption, and rescues us from utter despair. Of course, it’s only obscurely related to any better form of moral action, too. That is to say, the connection between this false category of action, this description of bad action, and some alternative and good description of a good action, will be obscure, at least from the side of the fallen self. But we can expect that kind of obscurity in any account of moral progress. If, at some moment, we already fully apprehended what being better truly would mean, it would be something we already would be on the way to becoming. In a way, that is to say, moral progress in the vision of the world, in the vision of human endeavor that Augustine has, is inescapably only retrospectively understandable and reportable—from the after condition back to the before—and perhaps it is even only retrospectively narratable.

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But the libido dominandi does say something positive, and precisely because it remains theological. For the reason Augustine thinks humans are gripped by the libido dominandi is because we are creatures who long for a kind of joy that transcends momentary worldly happiness, and we think it promises us the closest simulacra to joy that we can achieve. The scope of our hope shows how silly and sad any merely mundane program of domesticating our appetites must finally be. Thus we are revealed, in our glory and our misery, in our domination by this dominating lust. Furthermore, this libido is not simply psychological and theological. This deeply individual and psychological malady also illuminates our collective political history. For the libido dominandi is the inward correlate of the outward Imperium Romanum, the way that that imperium plants itself in the souls of those who serve it, and whose souls become, in turn, the soil which reaffirms, cultivates, and expands the outward imperium. The empire’s mode of control is domination— it’s fundamentally external. And because of this, it is always inevitably imperfect—crude and resisted by the subjugated and not always complete. There’s always some remainder of power left undominated. But, after all the polemics, the conclusion to these books is then mixed, ambivalent. Augustine exhorts the pagans to recognize that they’ve misconceived the proper shape of their desires, and the proper means whereby they might satisfy them. Rome’s old gods are not gods but demons. The Romans should turn to the true liberty of the city of God, where all the old Roman virtues are not rejected but transfigured—as he puts it, where victory is truth, where dignity is holiness, where peace is happiness, and where life is eternity. Now, note: this suggests that the putative ideals of both the old republic and the Christian congregation might be fulfilled in Christianity. Both groups, despite their differences, believe that true happiness consists of modest and settled joy, not extravagant circuses of libidinality. Their differences lie in how they conceive that joy, and how they aim to partake in it. Augustine says that the Romans 131

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should reject their nostalgia for their imagined ancestors and see that what they say they want is findable in their cities today, in the communities of Christians around them even now. Happiness lies not in domination but in the liberation that Christ’s grace offers.

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Lecture 7

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ook 4 of The City of God asks basic questions about what kind of secure happiness is provided to Rome by its traditional gods. In fact, this happiness is, according to Augustine, an insecure happiness, and so not really any happiness at all. The insecurity itself suggests that the traditional gods are demons who are not in charge of Rome, but who simply encourage the Romans to delude themselves about the providential governance of the one true God.

Political Realism „„

Once we ask whether Rome’s great power has made it happy and see that it has not, the following simple question then presents itself urgently: How did Rome get this way? This question, when investigated, turns out to be three questions: ›› What is the nature of the pseudo-happiness the Romans have been pursuing? ››

How have they convinced themselves that this pseudohappiness is worth pursuing?

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What, if anything, can they do about it?

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Augustine’s understanding of politics is one of the deepest and most influential facets of his thought. Famous for his dubious view of the pretenses of princes and the dour gaze with which he beheld the preening of empires, he is often associated with the larger tradition of political realism.

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Political realism is either a sober or a pessimistic understanding of the limits and possibilities of politics, depending on whether 133

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you agree with it. Despite the manifest corruptions of Rome that he has himself enumerated and the hideous evils that its growth has inflicted on its own people and the people it has conquered, Augustine has argued clearly that Christians ought to obey the state, provided that the state’s demands do not conflict with divine instructions. „„

The value of a political state lies not in its intrinsic goodness, but in what it protects you from and in how it secures the peace and good order necessary for everyday human life to proceed. This was all that the state was expected to do in Augustine’s age. These were not small goods, and Augustine has reason to say they are enough to warrant Christians’ respectful support of the state.

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But putting the empire’s main value in plumbing and upkeep of roads rather than achieving glory and domination was likely to make many pagans feel that something was missing from Augustine’s rationale. He is inviting his audience into a much more cold-blooded vision of what politics is and could be than they have imagined.

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This attitude leads us to the second level of Augustine’s criticism of Rome, one that goes deeper than the facts of Roman history to how much of the ancient world imagines politics. Book 4 offers the first systematic evidence of his political realism: his discussion of what actually keeps worldly political communities together, in which he says that there is no in-principle distinction between gangsters and statesmen.

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In thinking about the politics of the Roman Empire, the first thing to realize is the weakness of the empire’s political structures. In this it was no different from any other state before the modern age. Pre-modern and pre-industrial governmental institutions were not large, and while we may think of governments as basically empowering realities, state systems in ancient times did not so much enable citizens’ power as disable it. 134

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The second thing to realize is that the government therefore could not reliably police the social order to meet problems when they arose; they had to manage by indirect deterrence rather than direct coercion. For pre-modern states, the solution was ideology and spectacle. ›› Such states typically spent much more on propaganda such as statues and monuments and feasts and civic rituals than they did on public works—and what public works they did were covered in propaganda. ››

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There was a gruesome side as well. Horrific punishments were carried out in public—execution by torture, flogging— often with an audience compelled to watch. They were so gruesome not because people naturally enjoyed such brutality more than today, but because the state had to rely on deterrence.

The final thing to realize is that a centerpiece of the rationale for the state was freedom, libertas. The greatness of the imperium was that it made its inhabitants free men. This idea was partly a holdover from the ideology of Republican Rome, but another part seems to have been sincerely believed by the people of the time. ›› Anywhere in the world, all a Roman needed to say to secure himself from harassment or The Romans believed true political indignity was civis Romanus sum, “I am freedom involved hegemonia, a Roman citizen,” and domination or command over others: he would be free of Their liberty was defined in crucial molestation or delay; his hearers would know part by the fact that they held other that behind him stood people in bondage. the weight of all the legions, all the glory of the whole empire. 135

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››

Complicating this freedom was that it was as a zero-sum game: I can have it only if I dominate you. The Romans believed true political freedom involved hegemonia, domination or command over others: Their liberty was defined in crucial part by the fact that they held other people in bondage.

Political Legitimacy „„

Augustine offers a three-pronged attack on the nature of a polity; on the role of the stories that polity tells itself; and on what motivates political actors, whether individual people, communities, nations, or empires.

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First he attacks the ontology—that is, the idea of what constitutes a state and thus what counts as a political community. He denies Cicero’s vision of the nature of a city as a common sense of justice, insisting it is not justice but love and, more crassly, appetite that makes a nation move. ›› This notion radically expands, in ways that do not cast a good light on the noble self-presentations of states, the kind of communities that are counted as political communities.

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It means that political communities are organizations of humans with some generally encompassing common purpose organized to achieve that purpose and allow the members of the community to live as they wish.

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It evacuates states’ claims for a moral legitimacy that marks them out as special and affirms Augustine’s statement that kingdoms without justice are little more than large criminal gangs—in Latin latrocinia, or rackets.

Augustine doesn’t mean simply that political structures are basically protection rackets, though he most definitely means at least that. More broadly, he means that you can understand both states and criminal gangs as working out of a particular logic. Part 136

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of the logic is appetitive: That is, human communities—in this case, states and gangs—are brought together by positive ends; even in their aversions, they are driven by cupidity: desire for wealth, glory, immortality, power, the status of gods. Augustine gives three examples. ›› Alexander the Great comes face to face with a pirate and demands to know how he dares to molest the seas. The pirate replies, “We share a common practice. But because I do it with a small boat, I am labeled a pirate and a thief; while you, with a great navy, molest the whole earth and you are labeled an emperor.”

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››

The gladiator revolt of Spartacus managed to sustain itself for several years as a hostile community in the heart of Italy itself.

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Ninus, the mythical founder of Nineveh, was the first to suffer imperii cupiditate—lust of rule—and made Assyria in its day larger and greater than the Roman Empire itself.

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What Augustine establishes is not that What Augustine establishes is not that politics is crime, politics is crime, but that politics is but that politics is not not essentially different from crime essentially different from crime and vice versa. To and vice versa. To say that politics say that politics is nothing is nothing but criminal would be but criminal would be a a cynical claim, possible only if cynical claim, possible only if you imagine that politics you imagine that politics could be could be something something other than power-driven. other than power-driven. But Augustine refuses to imagine that recognition of political reality should cause outrage and disappointment and encourage a belief that some other sort of politics is possible.

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The second part of the attack is a critique of the rhetoric—of the ways that history and symbols, including religions, are used to obscure political realities. Augustine ruthlessly dissects the piety surrounding Roman patriotism, both its nostalgia for the glorious past and the myths and gods it creates to frame the past as a sign of divine favor. ›› The Romans assumed that their ancestors’ behavior was heroic and morally pure, from which they could judge the present and to which they could aspire. On the contrary, Augustine quotes Sallust’s belief that it was a mortal fear of Carthage that inspired Romans’ focused, ruthlessly selfsacrificial, and collegial behavior, not inherent virtue. 138

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„„

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Romans also believed in a deeply theological character to their polity. Here Augustine suggests that an honest geopolitical imagination recognizes that nations were great before Rome and that when Rome did rise, the causes were contingent factors that bear no marks of inevitability or destiny.

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As to divine favor, Augustine believed that the practice of creating a multiplicity of gods led to enormous idolatry and that polytheism benefits only demons, who leverage the Romans’ belief into a racket whereby they pretend to offer such favor, but for the price of the Romans’ souls.

The final aspect of Augustine’s critique of Roman politics makes three claims—about what motivates political actors to obey, about what motivates political powers to act, and about the addictive nature of the exercise of power. ›› People and states are motivated by the logic of obedience, not consent. It is not reason but force that coordinates between differing political agents, for obedience is purchased not by consent but by force. ››

Positive motivations are much less mobilizing of action than negative ones. While we are gathered together in a community by our loves, our behavior is more typically reactive, responding to perceived threats or rivals. We are driven by fear more than aspiration.

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The possession of political power changes both vision and behavior: Having begun exercising it, the ability to stop is lost; were you to let it go, someone else would gain it and use it against you. Nor does the exercise of power make you happy: Happiness purchased through worldly power is only and always insecure, and its insecurity drains away your happiness in it. Political power is self-subverting: It becomes its own selflegitimating end, and, like political desire for freedom, can enslave. 139

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When we step back from the episodic narrative of Augustine’s story and reflect on its overall vision, the systemic nature can be striking. He has a wide and deep vision, deeply aware of how complicated and intricate all the moves have to be. Seen in this light, books 2 through 4 both sketch an overall political philosophy and critique a certain cultural mythology and the elites who embody, promulgate, and profit from it.

Questions to Consider 1. Do you think the Romans’ pursuit of happiness was ever likely to be successful on Augustine’s terms? Was it wise? 2. Augustine said that kingdoms without justice are little more than large criminal gangs. Do you think he is right? If not, what functionally differentiates states from criminal gangs? 3. Is insecure happiness really happiness? Augustine thinks it is not. Do you? Does true happiness come only after death?

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Lecture 7 Transcript

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nce we ask the question of whether Rome’s great power has made it happy, and answer it as Augustine very clearly thinks we ought to—namely, by saying that it has not—the following simple question then presents itself rather urgently. How then did Rome get this way? And this question, when investigated, turns out to be in turn three questions. First, what is the nature of the pseudo-happiness that the Romans have been pursuing? Second, how have they convinced themselves that this pseudo-happiness really is worth pursuing? And third, what—if anything—can they do about it? Book 4 of The City of God asks these basic questions about what kind of secure happiness is provided to Rome by their traditional gods and their traditional political practices. In fact, this happiness is, according to Augustine, an insecure happiness, and therefore not really any happiness at all. The insecurity itself suggests that the traditional gods are demons, demons who are not in fact in charge of Rome but who simply encourage the Romans to delude themselves about the providential governance of their own demonic powers. Book 4 puts us right in the middle of Augustine’s understanding of politics, which is one of the deepest and most influential facets of his thought. Augustine is famous for his dubious view on the pretenses of princes and emperors, and the dour gaze with which he beheld the preening of nations and empires. And, in all this, he is often associated with the larger tradition of what’s called political realism. Well, what is political realism? It is effectively a sober—if you like it—or a pessimistic—if you don’t—understanding of the limits and possibilities of politics. That Augustine shares much of this view is 141

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hard to deny. Despite the manifest corruptions of Rome, corruptions that he has himself enumerated, and the hideous evils that its growth has inflicted on its own people and the people that it has conquered, by the end of Book 3, Augustine has argued quite clearly that Christians still ought to obey the state. This was you’ll recall a major accusation of the pagans, that the Christians didn’t care about the state, didn’t care about the common good. Of course, after he affirms this need for obedience, then he adds a very interesting caveat: they should obey, provided that the state’s demands do not conflict with divine instructions. What exactly does that mean for Augustine? Well, most importantly, it means that the Christians ought to treat the governing powers respectfully, but warily, as you would treat a guard dog. The value of a political state for him lies not in its intrinsic goodness or its essential magnificence, but in what it protects you from, and in how it secures the peace and good order necessary for everyday human life to proceed. This was all that the state was expected to do in Augustine’s age. Now, this isn’t just a dream of a kind of minimalist night watchman state for some parts of our contemporary political world. For Augustine, securing peace and good order very definitely included maintaining the internal infrastructure of the empire: roads and aqueducts and plumbing in cities, and maybe more things, like possibly care of the poor. So we shouldn’t look to Augustine to settle our contemporary political debates. What we should see is that, in his own day, these were not small goods, and Augustine has reason to say they are enough to warrant Christians’ respectful support of the state. But putting the empire’s main value in these things, in plumbing and upkeep of roads, and not in the this-worldly achievement of glory and domination— this was likely to make many pagans feel that something was left out of Augustine’s account of why the city, why the empire, should be honored. It makes for a very deflationary account. For 142

Lecture 7 Transcript—Augustine’s Political Vision (Book 4)

in enunciating this rationale for support of the state, Augustine is inviting his audience into a much more cold-blooded vision of what politics is, and what it could be, than almost any of them had heretofore imagined. And this attitude—to see the state as a useful bit of technology but nothing more, and definitely nothing grander—leads us into the second level of Augustine’s criticism of Rome, one that goes deeper than the facts of Roman history but criticizes how much of the ancient world, and a great deal of the modern, imagine politics. This vision is a very bracing account, bathing our hopes and our dreams about politics with ice-cold water. Now, Book 4 offers the first systematic evidence of this political realism, namely his discussion of what actually keeps worldly political communities together—which is not what those communities say keeps them together—and in this account he famously says that there is no in-principle distinction between gangsters and statesmen. In truth, however, Augustine’s distinctiveness within political realism is almost as noteworthy as his association with it. Here, I want to get at both, and Book 4 is a pretty good device for letting us do just that. Now, Book 4 is really about, really only about, the Roman Empire of Augustine’s day, and when thinking about that empire, it will help us if we disabuse ourselves of a lot of assumptions that we might bring to this inquiry. Our understanding of what government is for, and what political legitimacy means, and frankly what kinds of things the state is capable of doing—these things are very, very different from the assumptions available for Augustine’s world. The first thing to realize is the weakness of the political structures of the empire. In this it was no different from any other state before the modern age. Pre-modern and pre-industrial government institutions were not very large things. In fact, while we may think of governments as basically empowering realities—organizing schools, building and maintaining roads and water supplies, funding firefighters and 143

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emergency medical crews, mail services, medical care for retirees and others, unemployment insurance, and many other things—these are all pretty much innovations in state power in the past couple centuries. Before then, state systems did not so much enable citizens’ power as disable it. For instance, the emperor Trajan, a very well-regarded, thoughtful emperor of the Roman Empire, was deeply suspicious of local fire brigades, for having them would create in citizens a separate locus of power and possibly political identity that would not rely on the direct command or control of the empire but only on themselves. So the empire often would forgo good government policies out of fear that such actions could subvert its own long-term authority. And this is part of that larger theme that I said, that pre-industrial states—and the Roman Empire was very definitely one of these— were better at stopping things happening than in encouraging new developments. Typically, states did two very distinct things. First, they ran armies and the necessary support systems for the armies; and second, they ran systems for taxing the populace to pay for those armies. The Roman Empire was unusual in the ancient world in effectively using its army—its legions—not simply as a military force but as an engineering force as well, building roads and aqueducts and the like. But the unusualness of this practice speaks not simply to the rarity of it in the ancient world overall, but the fact that, for Rome as well, this was pretty much the single exception to the more basic rule. The second thing to realize is that this meant that the government could not reliably police the social order to meet problems when they first arose, but had to manage such policing mostly by indirect deterrence rather than direct coercion. We actually have vestiges of this today, which is why speeding tickets are priced so high. We compensate for the unlikeliness of speeders being caught by the high cost to them if they are indeed caught. 144

Lecture 7 Transcript—Augustine’s Political Vision (Book 4)

For pre-modern states, the solution to their weakness, to their limited power, was ideology and spectacle. They spent a fair amount of money trying to show that the state in general was worth supporting, and the emperor in particular was majestic, truly someone to be regarded as legitimate, honorable, god-worthy. Indeed, such states typically spent much more on propaganda, such as statues and monuments and feasts and civic rituals, than they did on public works—and what public works they did do were covered in propaganda. For example, throughout Europe even today you can still see versions of the letters SPQR—Senatus Populusque Romanus, “By the Senate and the People of Rome”—adorning buildings. That’s propaganda, you realize, trying to remind everyone in the empire that their tax dollars were at work. Now there’s a gruesome side to this as well, analogous to our speeding tickets. Horrific punishments were carried out in public— execution by torture, flogging, many other things—often with an audience compelled to watch. They were so gruesome not because people then naturally enjoyed such brutality more than today—just watch our movies for evidence to the contrary—but because the state had to rely more on deterrence than on the idea that police could be everywhere watching. Indeed, by and large, the role of the policing forces—not that there were many of them—was different. In Rome, they were not there to stop crime from happening, but more simply to catch the perpetrators and punish them. That’s a big difference. And the power of images and examples and spectacle were very important, by necessity. Third, and finally, a centerpiece of this ideology, the rationale for the state, was freedom: libertas. The greatness of the imperium was that it made its inhabitants free men. Now, part of this was simply giving lip service to a holdover from the ideology of ancient republican Rome, before the empire. But another part seems to have been sincerely believed by the people of the time. 145

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In fact, the 19th-century British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, once put it this way. A Roman could be anywhere in the world, within the imperium or beyond it, and he felt that all he needed to say to secure himself from harassment or indignity was civis Romanus sum: “I am a Roman citizen.” And he would remain free of molestation or delay, for he and his hearers would know that behind him stood the weight of all the legions, all the glory, all the magnificence of the entire empire. But there was a complication, for this freedom was conceived of as integrally involving domination of others. Ever since the Greeks encountered the Persians, freedom had been conceived as a zerosum game: I only am free if I dominate others; if I dominate you. True political freedom involved hegemonia in Greek: domination or command over others. The Romans believed this as well. Their liberty was defined in crucial part by the fact that they held other people in bondage. Augustine takes all of this ideology apart with a pair of pliers. He offers a three-pronged attack on the nature of what constitutes a polity; on what is the role of the stories that a polity tells itself; and on what motivates political actors actually, whether those actors are individual people, communities, nations, or empires. First, he attacks what we can call the ontology of politics—that is, what exactly constitutes a state, and thus what counts as a political community. Now, we’ve seen already that he denies Cicero’s rather self-congratulatory vision of what constitutes a city. Against Cicero’s argument that it was a common sense of justice that held the city together, Augustine insists it is not justice but love, and even more crassly perhaps appetite, that makes a nation move. Now, understand that this radically expands the kinds of communities that get counted as political communities in ways that do not cast a good light on the noble self-presentations of states. It means that political communities are organizations of humans with some generally encompassing common purpose, organized to achieve 146

Lecture 7 Transcript—Augustine’s Political Vision (Book 4)

that purpose and allow the members of the community to live as they wish. That may sound innocuous but it evacuates states’ claims for a kind of moral legitimacy that marks them out as special from other groups. This is why Augustine famously affirms that kingdoms without justice are little more than large criminal gangs—in Latin, latrocinia: larcenies or rackets. I call this Augustine’s Married to the Mob moment. If you remember that movie, there’s a wonderful scene where Michelle Pfeiffer, the mob boss wife, says to the FBI man who’s trying to turn her, make her an informant for the FBI, and she says, “God, you people work just like the mob! There’s no difference.” And the FBI man replies, “Oh, there’s a big difference, Mrs. de Marco. The mob is run by murdering, thieving, lying, cheating psychopaths. We work for the President of the United States of America.” Augustine doesn’t mean simply that political structures are basically protection rackets, with those on top taking money out of the pockets of those weaker down the food chain—though of course he most definitely means at least that. But, more broadly, he means that you can understand both states and criminal gangs as working out a particular, not very pleasant, form of logic. They both have rationales, they both have interests, a logic to doing what they do, and the logics are not so dissimilar as those in either party want sometimes to suggest. Now, part of the logic that they possess is an appetitive logic, a logic about their appetites. Human communities are brought together by positive ends, by loves; even in their aversions, in fact, they are driven by cupidity, desire, lust—lust for wealth, for glory, for immortality, for power, for the status of gods. States and gangs both possess these lusts and are possessed by them, thus they both share a common formal structure. This is why Augustine’s example in Book 4, Chapter 4 of this encounter between Alexander the Great and the captured pirate is so telling. 147

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This is a great scene, one of the set pieces of this whole city. The conqueror comes face to face with the pirate, and demands of him an answer to his question: “How dare you molest the seas?” Pirate, who has been around a bit, replies quickly, “How dare you molest the whole earth? We share a common practice. But because I do it with a small boat, I am labeled a pirate and a thief; while you, with a great navy, molest the whole earth and you are labeled an emperor.” In his next chapter—Chapter 5, Book 4—Augustine gives another example, the gladiator revolt of Spartacus, which managed to sustain itself for several years as a hostile community in opposition to the entire Imperium Romanum, right in the heart of Italy itself. Once again, a real political community was formed, though one that was said to be outside the law. In fact, it showed the law itself to be a particular creation, not a natural fact about the cosmos. And then, following both of these examples of non-states acting in ways that troubles the distinction between states and gangs, pirates and gladiators, he turns in Chapter 6 to an example of a state acting in a way that troubles this distinction as well. He speaks of Ninus, the mythical founder of Nineveh, whom he says was the first to suffer imperii cupiditate—lust of rule; this is kind of a linguistic version, a cousin of libido dominandi—and who made Assyria in its day larger and greater than the Roman Empire itself. Here we have a clear case of a political state, one that no one would question. And yet, Augustine says, Ninus’s motivation was just another version of the highwayman’s greed, the pirate’s appetite, and backed up by the gladiator’s steel. There’s no special qualitative dignity to this cupidity to rule; in fact, it is nothing but another form of theft—or rather, that theft is just another species of conquering. This last equivalence is important. The first thing Augustine establishes in Book 4 is not that politics is crime, not exactly, but rather that politics is not essentially different from crime, and vice versa. To say that politics is nothing but criminal would be a cynical claim, not a realist one; such cynicism is possible only if you imagine that politics 148

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could be something other than power politics. But Augustine, like other political realists, refuses to imagine that the crucial response to our recognition of this political reality is outrage and disappointment, and a belief that some sort of other politics is possible. He goes on, and he next critiques the rhetoric of politics in two ways— in the ways that history and symbols, including religions, are used to obscure realities and so mislead us as to what is going on. Consider here his ruthless critique of the piety surrounding Roman patriotism. This comes in two parts. First, a critique of Roman nostalgia for their glorious past; and second, a critique of the myths and the gods the Romans use to enframe that noble past as a sign of a special divine favor upon them. First, the Romans nostalgically assume that their ancestors’ behavior was essentially especially heroic and morally pure, that there was an era of heroism from which they can judge the shallowness and shabbiness of the present, and to which they can aspire once again. Second, the Romans believe that there is some deeply theologicallycharged character to their polity, unlike every other polity in the world. This kind of what we might call Roman exceptionalism, akin to our present-day American exceptionalism, attracts a great deal of scorn from Augustine. Let’s take each of these in turn. Now, Augustine makes relatively quick work of Roman nostalgia for their own greatest generation. His is a radically anti-nostalgic picture of the past. In Book 4, he repeatedly recalls Sallust—the pagan historian Sallust—on what kept the Romans together in their greatest generation. It was fear, a mortal fear of Carthage, a fear that Carthage might win, might conquer Rome. This is a much more sober account than the one that focuses on the idea that Roman heroic self-sacrifice was motivated fundamentally by some autonomous noble positive vision of the glory of Rome. The Romans were focused, ruthlessly selfsacrificial, and did not quarrel among themselves, not because they were uniquely virtuous, but because they had a wolf at their door and they knew that any dissent or lack of focus could be deadly. 149

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Then Augustine undertakes a more leisurely demolition of the idea that the rise of Rome was caused by special providence. Augustine thinks that a full and honest geopolitical imagination requires recognizing that many nations were great before Rome, and Rome’s rise, when it happened, was caused by many contingent factors that bear no marks of inevitability or destiny. It is only rank parochialism that lets us think that Rome is somehow set apart from the other nations and empires in history. It’s not only Augustine’s arguments that convey this point; it’s the very way he makes those arguments. He always uses multiple examples from across history to illuminate Rome’s behavior. He’s a natural-born comparativist, a radical anti-exceptionalist, who sees Rome as just the latest in a string of human sociopolitical configurations going back to the Tower of Babel, Nineveh, and perhaps Cain’s eponymous city before that. There’s nothing special about Rome here; it is simply playing out the same geopolitical logic of every empire before it. Furthermore, he thinks this belief in Rome’s special favor from the divine is not only self-deceptive, it has in fact led to actual enormous idolatry. He notes in this Book 4 the way the Romans’ conviction that their divinities have specially favored them, has turned them into promiscuous worshippers of all sorts of things. They have even gone so far, as we’ll see in a little bit, as to provide a god of the doorframe and of hinges. Now, respectable Roman intellectuals know that this practice is insane, profligacy of divinity, but they—and here Augustine especially mentions Varro, who we’ll hear more about in upcoming lectures, and Cicero—these thinkers suggest that these gods are all manifestations of one single god, though they are hesitant to condemn popular belief in many gods for fear of running afoul of the crowd. So even though those who knew better at least tacitly approved the popular and ridiculous belief in multitudes of gods, what’s worse here is that they approved the popular practices of sacrificing and honoring those gods, as well. 150

Lecture 7 Transcript—Augustine’s Political Vision (Book 4)

Augustine thinks this is bad because the only things that benefit from this popular polytheism are in fact the demons—immaterial agents who are the fallen rebel angels, Satan and his minions. That is to say, the demons leverage the Romans’ belief in their own uniqueness into a racket whereby those demons get worshipped, honored, and heeded by the masses. The Romans need to believe that they have special divine favor, and they stumble unknowingly across wicked trickster creatures who are willing to pretend to offer such favor—but at the price of the Romans’ souls. And that, Augustine thinks, is a terrible bargain for the Romans to accept. This is coupled with another aspect of Augustine’s political critique of Rome that is part of his overall political realism: a suspicion of the language and symbols employed in politics. It is too easy for political authorities to use language in deceptive ways, and even—perhaps especially—in ways that are self-deceptive. It’s clear for Augustine that the rulers use superstitions to shore up their own authority and position—we see this in how the ruling elite don’t reject the vulgar crowd’s crass polytheism but try to use it. But the rulers are themselves fooled by this language. In Augustine’s case, they think they can use the demons but end up getting used by them instead. Indeed, as he mentions here but doesn’t develop very far, this very critique of the rulers is not basically a Christian critique, but it’s derived from the pagan philosophers’ critique of popular religion, as the examples of Cicero and Varro make clear. Those philosophers are, as we’ve seen, afraid of the crowd, so they do not stand up to them. Finally, he offers a novel political psychology in which three important claims are made: one about what motivates political actors to obey, one about what motivates political powers at all, and the third about how the exercise of power is itself dangerously addictive. First, people and states are motivated by the logic of obedience, not consent. It is not reason but force that coordinates between differing 151

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political agents. This explains part of what Augustine thinks is wrong with Cicero’s definition of the city, for obedience is purchased not by consent but by force, and the two are very different things indeed. We still have cannons that were forged for the French king Louis XIV, and which had stamped around their barrels a motto: ultima ratio regum—ultimate reason of the king. In the famous adage of Thucydides, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. This is not meant normatively; it is not meant as a description of how things should be but, really, how things are. Very rarely, if at all, are political disputes settled by reasoned argument. They are hashed out by bargaining, where the criteria of what counts as an effective reason is something other than sheer simple reason itself. Second, he argues that positive motivations, while they may bring us together in common communities of interest, are much less mobilizing of our actions and our passions than are negative ones. While we are gathered together in a community by our loves, our actions are more typically reactive, responding in fear or anxiety or jealousy to perceived threats or rivals. We are driven by fear much more than by aspiration. And again, Sallust shows us that Rome is no exception here. In the wars with Carthage they were far more motivated by fear than they were by hope. Now, the pagans might claim that this is not vision but Christian cynicism. They would say this shows Christians cannot be patriots, or worse, are effectively inhuman. But Augustine does not teach this lesson by Christian sources, but by thinkers like Sallust, an unimpeachable pagan Roman source. Thus, he can reply, it is not unique to Christians but an apprehension clearly available to pagans as well. The only question is why don’t they see it? Now third, and finally, following a long line of pagan writers again, Augustine is alert to how the possession of political power changes one’s vision and one’s behavior. Most basically, he says, power is 152

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addictive, so that once you have begun exercising it, you very quickly lose the ability to stop doing so. Once you have power, you realize, were you to let it go, someone else would gain it and use it against you. Great power, then, brings great compulsion in its wake, and Vergil’s line imperium sine fine—an empire without end—which sounded so attractive and so pretty becomes not an infinite horizon but a bottomless pit. Nor does the exercise of power, once you have it, make you happy. Happiness purchased through worldly power is only and always insecure, and its insecurity drains away your happiness in its exercise. As he himself says, Augustine says, in Book 4, Chapter 3, is it wise or prudent to wish for glory in the breadth and magnitude of an empire when you cannot show that the men whose empire it is are happy? The joy of such men may be compared to the fragile splendor of glass: they are horribly afraid lest it be suddenly shattered. Here, again, Augustine shares political realists’ skepticism towards nations’ claims to their own unique moral excellence or pronouncements of special virtue. And indeed he finds the Romans’ theological version of this especially dangerous, not just for their political understanding, but for the fate of their very souls. Indeed, has the extension of the Imperium Romanum across all of Europe, much of Africa, and far into Asia brought Rome greater happiness? Or has it brought greater worries? Augustine thinks the latter. Happiness is not magnified by the magnitude of the kingdom—size doesn’t matter. Or if it does, it only matters in the opposite direction. Political power, that is, is selfsubverting. It becomes its own self-legitimating end, and before you know it you are addicted to the exercise of power for the sake of exercising power. A political desire for freedom can become enslaving—this is part of what Augustine means by that phrase libido dominandi.

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Now the systematicity of what I have been describing here may sound impressive to you. It should be. For Augustine is not just a therapist, as I’ve said before, but also a kind of symphony composer, a conductor of a symphony. When we step back from the episodic narrative of his story and reflect on its overall vision, its internal structure, and its ambition and scope, the systemic nature of his project can be striking. He has a wide and deep vision, and is deeply aware of how complicated and intricate all the moves have to be. Seen in this light, Books 2–4, as a unit, both sketch an overall political philosophy and critique a certain cultural mythology and the elites who embody it, promulgate it, and profit from it. But these books are more than just that. They are not just a symphony in being coherent; they are a kind of symphony that claims to be true. This work has a claim to make on you. This means it is more immediately answerable to empirical evidence and counterarguments than any aesthetic artifact like a novel or symphony would be. People can challenge Augustine, that is, in multiple ways. But it also means that it has a different or perhaps at least more direct claim on us. I want you at least to consider that claim, to contemplate the possibility that Augustine is not just awesome, not just wondrous, but right. That’s a different register, and one I think is far more threatening. Now, of course, for Augustine, there are examples of good politics. In fact, there are two good examples: the Christian churches, and the people Israel. Both of these are examples of communities held together, however imperfectly, however limitedly, by a commitment to a common good of love of God and neighbor. In the second half of this vast work, as we will see soon, Augustine explores the lessons that ancient Israel and the churches have for his audience in the way of thinking politically. But that is some time off. Now we have to turn to his final discussion of what politics in this world might be, and how it could be possible to be happy in a political existence, and in what such happiness might truly consist. 154

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Lecture 8

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pagan Roman might think, following book 4, that Augustine had proved the pagans’ suspicion that Christians did not value the world enough to serve it or to fight for it, demonized Rome, and exhibited their basic antipathy toward this world, an attitude incompatible with the morals of citizenship. This was a huge challenge to Augustine, and he confronted it directly in book 5, one of the most historically influential books of The City of God. It is about our prospects for excellence in this world, and how best to think about worldly accomplishments.

The Problem of Virtue „„

In the classical world, humans conceived of human excellence primarily through the language of virtue, a word with a complicated history. The Greek term arête has athletic and militaristic connotations. The Latin word virtus has etymological roots in “manliness” and in magic. Neither is intimately bound up with ethical gentleness.

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One view of the pursuit of excellence is that our dreams of living our lives the way we want to live—our agency, or power to choose—are always illusory. We are driven by motives we do not command and may not even conceive; and we act into situations so complex that the consequences of our actions are unknowable. ›› In many ways, this idea of what our excellence is and how we should understand ourselves to be pursuing it seems bleak: Humans are equipped with certain energies and capacities, 155

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and we use them to overcome adversity, capitalize on opportunity, and achieve our dreams. Yet we face a profound challenge: Our confidence in our agency is radically and utterly challenged by chance. ››

When we look around the world we see that blessings and curses are distributed apparently at random. The problem of theodicy is not just the problem of unjust evil, but also, as Augustine himself knew, of unjust goodness. The converse is that moral virtue seems randomly distributed, as well.

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Furthermore, our ability to exercise whatever virtues we do possess depends on situations and conditions where those virtues become relevant. You do not know if you have courage if you are never put in danger. Thus, who we come to be is actually the product of a negotiation between our latent potentialities and the situations in which we find ourselves.

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We come to know even the seeds of our virtues by being shown them, or awakened to their potentiality in ourselves, by others. If others are so ingredient to our lives, how is who I am so exclusively a matter of what I do?

The Problem of Fatalism „„

Most Romans thought that some kind of fatalism was the wisest attitude to adopt. Things will happen as they will. We cannot know what will happen, so we must understand our acting on terms quite different from what we typically assume.

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Yet Augustine, despite the rumors that he denies human free will, rejects fatalism; indeed he goes out of his way to systematically reject it. He believes that its crucial error is the metaphysical substructure of our world. Fatalists go wrong in identifying what forces that are not under the will’s immediate control oversee the world and how they oversee it. The problem is a failure to 156

Lecture 8—Splendid Vices and Happiness in Hope (Book 5)

understand the nature of divine sovereignty over creation, especially the nature of divine transcendence. „„

of fatalism was the wisest attitude to adopt. Things will happen as they will.

We cannot know what will happen, For Augustine, Providence is neither chance nor fate, so we must understand our acting on and its course cannot terms quite different from what we be traced in any worldly pattern. The principle of typically assume. the world’s order is not immanent to the world; its profile cannot be legibly tracked across the events of history; its integrity and form are real, but fundamentally transcend the chain of events that compose the world. ›› First, against astrologers and others who look to the stars: The fates of people cannot be traced in terms of astrology. ››

„„

Most Romans thought that some kind

Second, against those who believe in divination and other means of descrying fate: They misconstrue how the world’s events will unfold. The only kind of “fate,” the only kind of extra-human sovereign control over events, that the Romans could conceive was that the world is determined for all time in its origins, from moment zero. That is not so.

Providence need not be communicated only through the original moment of creation and then carried in the dumb momentum of matter as it unspools through time and space: as if creation were a line of dominoes, falling down sequentially, but uninfluenced after they start falling. ›› There is another way of conceiving God’s sovereignty: as vertically empowering every moment of creation immediately. Here God is not the figure who tips over the first domino, but the central point of a bicycle wheel with spokes reaching 157

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out to each instant of the wheel’s perimeter, and creation is splayed out in its temporal sequence across an arc of the wheel’s circumference. ››

Thus conceived, this vision of divine sovereignty enables acting principles within the horizontal chain of actions and reactions in the world; indeed, God’s action makes these forms of agency real.

Foreknowledge versus Free Will „„

„„

Nor is foreknowledge an argument against freedom: To know something is going to happen is not the same thing as to compel. ›› God does not, properly speaking, “foreknow” because God is not in time: no before or after, no anticipation or retrospection exist for God. God knows all things eternally, outside the sequentiality of time. Rather eternity knows every instant of time immediately. ››

For this reason, “compulsion” improperly describes God’s creative immediacy to ourselves. Everything we have, indeed even our wills, is willed into being by God. Yet our agency is not constricted, for our agency is part of what God immediately knows as created.

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We contribute nothing to creation outside of God, because there is no “outside” to God’s creative energy: We are nothing before, and nothing outside, God’s action, and we hold nothing in reserve that God did not in fact create. We are nothing but what God has willed, including our capacity for innovation and surprise.

Fatalism only has a bite if we believe that we stand downstream from our destiny, and have some pure reserve of our own agency that can accept or reject it. But if we are ourselves part of the flow 158

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of destiny, then we ourselves and our own agential responses are themselves part of destiny.

Virtue and Glory „„

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Once we know that the world is providentially governed, how are we to make sense of Roman virtue? What is the nature of the ancient Romans’ morals, and why do they look so impressive? The key here is gloria. ›› Romans derived all their virtues from their hunger for gloria; it organized their psyches. In fact, it gave them two serially ordered aims, liberty and domination. Because both glory and dominion must be visible to receive approbation, desire for praise from others was part of this hunger. ››

Glory-seeking could function to organize people in virtue-like ways by checking other appetites; as Augustine said, they “suppressed other desires in their boundless desire for this one thing.” Thus their pursuit of glory gave them a relative coherence, providing moral qualities derived from deliberate effort.

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Yet, because “love of praise is a fault,” the power and organization that it provides the Romans is not true virtue. But it does discipline the Romans and render them at least provisionally coherent.

The reward for this kind of pseudo-virtue is also a pseudo-reward. God gives back temporal goods to those intending temporal ends—with the praise of their age, they’ve received their reward in full. ›› The problem humans face is in the purposes for which they act. Fallen humanity tries to glorify temporal ends. They promote themselves, their causes, their countries. Even among the Christian churches, many seek glory for themselves or their 159

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churches in this way. All are impermanent and ultimately disappointing. ››

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Humans need to seek a happiness outside of our selfsatisfaction. We need to worship. The question is, what will the object of our worship be?

Roman glory should make Christians feel sad for the Romans, that they have attached their longings to a worldly end. Yet Christians also should pursue glory, to glorify not Rome or themselves but God. So when Christian saints and martyrs did their deeds, they reflected the honor that others directed at them by saying “it was not me, but Christ in me, who did these things.”

True Civic Virtue „„

While book 5 is about the nature of the relation between good morals and right faith, it is also and the capstone of the first five books, conceived as a primer on Christian civic virtue. Recall that these books were meant to contest civic minded pagans not only about the prospects for happiness in this world, but also about what might motivate right service to the community. ›› The pagans’ claim that Christians do not have confidence in the possibility of the world’s Humans need to seek a happiness durable improvement outside of our self-satisfaction. We is right. But they are need to worship. The question is, what wrong to think that, therefore, Christians will the object of our worship be? cannot truly care about the world at all. ››

Christians care about it on other grounds altogether. This world, for Christians, cannot be perfected from within. Our efforts must be anchored on some foundation other than 160

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the hope that future generations will be without pain and suffering. The issue must be the right attitude to take to worldly affairs in order to achieve the kind of happiness truly suitable for humans. „„

There is another kind of happiness—the happiness that true Christians find in their worldly engagement, and it has the advantage of being the kind of happiness that understands its roots and its end to lie elsewhere. Augustine sketching this happiness in his model of the ideal political actor, the good Christian Emperor Theodosius. ›› In fact, the true happiness of Christian rulers lies not in power, or their own magnificence, or any of the temporal splendors of this life. Worldly happiness evades them as well as the rest of us. They are instead, happy in hope. ››

“We say [Christian rulers] are happy, if they rule justly; if… they are not inflated with pride, but remember that they are but men…if they do all this not for a burning desire for empty glory, but for the love of eternal blessedness; and if they do not fail to offer to their true God, as a sacrifice for their sins, the oblation of humility, compassion, and prayer…we call them then happy in hope.”

Questions to Consider 1. What does Augustine say about the Roman’s desire for glory? How did it serve a useful function for them? What sort of rewards did they receive from it? 2. For Augustine, do Christians pursue glory? Should they, do you think? What does Augustine say is the true happiness of Christian rulers? Can they be happy in this life? What does their happiness look like? Do they rule for glory?

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Splendid Vices and Happiness in Hope (Book 5)

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ine hundred years before Augustine wrote, in 508 B.C., Rome was at war with the Etruscan city of Clusium, in Tuscany. The Clusian king Lars Porsena marched his army to Rome and besieged it. Gaius Mucius, young citizen and soldier of Rome, gained the Senate’s approval to kill Porsena, but at the decisive moment, he struck and killed the wrong person—Porsena’s scribe. He was captured, and dragged before the king, to be tortured and executed. But he was not afraid. He said, civis Romanus sum, Gaius Mucius vocor—”I am a citizen of Rome, called Gaius Mucius. I came here as an enemy to kill my enemy, and I mean to die as I meant to kill. To do and to suffer bravely, that is the Roman way.” The king was outraged, and threatened Mucius with being burned alive if he did not reveal the whole plot. Mucius was unmoved. “Look and see,” he said, “how cheaply the body is to men who have their eye on great glory.” Mucius thrust his right hand into a fire that had been lit for sacrifice and held it there, watching Porsena, without giving any indication of pain. This so disturbed the king that he released Mucius, and delivered peace terms to the Romans. By his act, Mucius earned for himself and his descendants the cognomen Scaevola. It means left-handed. What could cause someone to act in this way? And what should we think about it? These are the questions driving this lecture. Remember that these first five books are all about finding happiness in this life.

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But now, a pagan Roman might reply, surely, Augustine, you’ve gone too far and proved our point in doing so. The very bleakness of your vision seems to us to give credence to our initial suspicions that the Christians don’t value the world enough to serve it, to fight for it—and our empire, and civilization itself needs such self-sacrificial heroes, it needs the Gaius Muciuss of the world, not just martyrs to some otherworldly kingdom beyond the sky. It seems to us, dear Augustine, that your defense against our charges actually serves as a nice speech for our case against the Christians, both negatively and positively. That is, that they demonize Rome and in so doing exhibit their basic antipathy towards this world, which is incompatible with the morals of citizenship, as we put it to you in that letter Marcellinus sent you in 411. How can Augustine reply to this? It was after all a huge challenge to him. But here in Book 5, he confronts it most directly. This is one of the most historically influential books of The City of God, about our prospects for excellence in this world, and how best to think about worldly accomplishments. Here, Augustine discusses the most common language used in his world—and one of the most common in ours—to understand and perhaps order the moral adventures and logics that structure human lives, the Romans’ ordering language organized around belief in fate. He takes apart that understanding of how the world is organized, and proposes instead a language of providence, as a language that is, he thinks, both more truthful and more able to keep human agency and responsibility alive. Augustine then tries to explain how, if the Romans were so flawed, so deluded and so mistaken, they managed to succeed as well as they did, both morally, producing heroes so noble as to be worth admiring, even for Christians, and materially, creating an empire that controlled pretty much the whole known world. You can see that this is kind of an obvious question. The problem is if true goodness comes 163

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only from faith in the one true God, how can so many non-Christians be apparently morally virtuous people? Augustine’s response is ingenious. The Romans’ very vices function as a principle of psychological and sociocultural organization, so that while those vices were ultimately disastrous for them, from a pragmatic and medium-term point of view they turned out to be enormously self-disciplining, and this was what gave them the power to accomplish all that they did. It made them sufficiently coherent to have intelligible plans, and pretty reliably able to carry them out. This is Augustine’s analysis of the so-called pagan virtues. Later thinkers gave this idea the nice tagline of splendid vices, and so Augustine’s account became a crucial moment for moral thinking about the idea of people who seem internally misdirected or vicious, but outwardly they clearly act in ways that seem virtuous. He then offers a sketch of what he thinks is the right account, a Christian psychology of the energizing powers of correct human motivation and action in a fallen world. So, all in all, Book 5 turns out to be a crucial hinge in the whole work, summarizing the real prospects for happiness in this world, and sketching how Christians, against the pagan accusations, are actually better positioned to care for it in the right way. Let’s see how the argument goes beginning with a simple question: How should we make sense of individual human agency in world history? Consider Tolstoy’s description of the Battle of Borodino. He says the generals did things, and then—and this is a quote from him: Only later did historians furnish the already accomplished facts with ingenious arguments for the foresight and genius of the commanders, who, of all the involuntary instruments of world events were the most enslaved and involuntary agents.

Our dreams of living our lives the way we want to live, Tolstoy seems to be saying, are always illusory. We are driven by motives we do 164

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not understand, and we act into situations so complex that the consequences of our most immediate actions are unknowable to us. In such a world, what does it mean to talk about intelligible, narratable human agency at all? Humans have conceived of human excellence— in the classical world they did definitely—preeminently through the language of virtue. Now this word, in English, has an enormously complicated history. Some of its deep roots are in the Greek term arête, which has very athletic and militaristic connotation. The Latin term virtus, which is the more common local connection for our term virtue, has etymological roots in both manliness and also in magic. Neither term, that is, is intimately bound up with ethical gentility. In many ways, this story of what our excellence is and how we should understand ourselves to be pursuing it may sound quite different from our own. But consider the bare bones of the story: humans are equipped with certain energies and capacities, and they use those to make something of themselves—to overcome adversity, capitalize on opportunity, and achieve our dreams. Unfortunately, accounts like this—the Greeks’ and the Romans’, as well as our own—always run up against a profound challenge. Our confidence in our agency is radically and utterly challenged by chance, fortune, and plain old dumb luck. When we look around the world, we see that blessings and curses are distributed apparently pretty much at random. This was the topic of Book 1, of course, and it drove the following books as well. The problem of theodicy, in this sense, is not just the problem of unjust evil; it is also, as Augustine himself knew, the problem of unjust goodness. Why are some people so lucky? What is luck, after all? And how does the appearance of luck square, for a thinker such as Augustine, with the affirmation of divine providence? The converse to this problem is that an unbiased look around the world will also tell you that moral virtue seems pretty randomly distributed, as well.

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People’s professed beliefs and actual behavior in general come apart. At its most disquieting extremes, this train of thought presents us with the troubling image of the courageous Nazi, who bravely holds off advancing Allied forces, sacrificing his own life, while treating those under his protection decently, all in the service of a horrific, racist, annihilationist worldview. What are we to make of the problem of moral virtue’s apparent, and at least partial, randomness? Furthermore, our ability to exercise whatever virtues we do possess, depends upon us being in situations and placed in conditions where those virtues are possibly relevant. You don’t know if you have courage if you’re never put in danger. And so who we come to be is actually the product of a negotiation between our latent potentialities and the situations in which we find ourselves. Furthermore, we come to know even the seeds of our virtues by being shown them, or awakened to their potentiality in ourselves, by others. A beloved friend—a determined enemy—once said to you, “You always care about being fair,” and so you began to strengthen that moral muscle. If others are so ingredient to our lives, how is who I am so exclusively a matter of what I do? And we haven’t even begun to explore how much each of us is the child of our parents and the products of our family. It’s for these reasons that one of the wisest of Stoic thinkers, Marcus Aurelius, began his Meditations by listing all those who shaped him in fundamental ways, detailing as best he could their particular influence on him. Who I am is due alone to me? Far from it, my friend. Given all this, most Romans thought that some kind of fatalism was the wisest attitude to adopt. Things will happen as they will; we cannot know what will happen, so we must understand our acting on terms quite different than we typically assume. And yet Augustine, for all the rumors that he denies human free will, rejects fatalism— indeed, he goes out of his way to systematically reject it. Why is that? 166

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The crucial thing is that Augustine thinks fatalism gets wrong the metaphysical substructure of our world. Fatalists go wrong, he thinks, in identifying what are the forces not under the will’s immediate control that oversee the world, and how they oversee it. Here, Augustine thinks, the problem is a failure to understand the nature of divine sovereignty over Creation, and especially the nature of divine transcendence. Providence is neither chance nor fate, and its course cannot be traced in any worldly pattern. The principle of the world’s order is not immanent to the world; its profile cannot be legibly tracked across the events of history; its integrity and form are real, but fundamentally transcendent of the chain of events that compose the world. He argues this in several steps. First, against astrologers and others who look to the stars, Augustine says the fates of people cannot be traced in terms of astrology—the case of twins born at the same time with very different fates show us that. Secondly, against those who believe in divination and other means of descrying fate, Augustine says they misconstrue how the world’s events unfolding influence each other. The world is not determined for all time in its origins from moment zero. That is the only kind of fate, the only kind of extrahuman sovereign control over events, that the Romans, both ordinary folk and philosophers, could conceive. But Augustine says that’s because they fail to conceive God’s sovereignty aright. Providence need not be communicated only through the original moment of Creation, and then carried on in the dumb momentum of matter as it unspools through space and time, as if Creation were a line of dominoes falling down sequentially, but uninfluenced after they start falling down. There’s another way of conceiving God’s sovereignty, though it requires a quite vigorous act of imagination, and that is conceiving of God’s action as vertically empowering every moment of Creation immediately.

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Here, God is not the figure who tips over the first domino, but the central point of a bicycle wheel with spokes reaching out to each instant of the wheel’s perimeter, and Creation is the wheel, splayed out in its temporal sequence across an arc of the wheel’s circumference. So conceived, this vision of divine sovereignty doesn’t interfere with the acting principles within the horizontal chain of actions and reactions in the world; indeed, God’s action enables these forms of agency, makes all of them real. But the central way in which God’s sovereignty is manifest in Creation is through this direct, unmediated creation and sustenance of every moment on its own. Nor is foreknowledge an argument against freedom. For Augustine, to foreknow something is going to happen is not the same thing as to compel, for several reasons. First of all, God doesn’t, properly speaking, foreknow anything, because God is not there in time and so there is no before or after, no anticipation or retrospection, for God. God knows all things eternally, totally outside the sequentiality of time, in the way that we theoretically know all history up till the present moment. But God also, in eternity, knows all things not as fundamentally past events, as if eternity were at the end of time. Rather, eternity knows every instant of time immediately in direct, palpable, face-to-face acquaintance. It is as if all times were simultaneously present. Because of this, compulsion improperly describes God’s creative immediacy to our beings, for everything we have, indeed even our wills, are willed into being by God. We have nothing on our own. This does not constrict our agency, for our agency is one of the things that God immediately knows as created. In short, then, everything about us is created by God. We contribute nothing to creation outside of God, because there is no outside to God’s creative energy. We are nothing before, and nothing behind, and nothing outside God’s action, and we hold nothing in reserve that God did not in fact create. We are nothing but what God has willed, in a way, including our capacity for innovation and surprise. 168

Lecture 8 Transcript—Splendid Vices and Happiness in Hope (Book 5)

Providence, then, for Augustine, is not the past compelling the future in the way the Romans conceived of fate. Reality is not a secret network of natural or immanent causes surging beneath the surface of the material world, so that there is always and only one way that reality will unscroll before us. The world is not governed by a fate operating within the causal network of the world, but instead by a providence operating outside of it, guided by the radically transcendent supervening governance of an inscrutable God. In short, Augustine solves the problem of free will versus foreknowledge by doubling down. For him, the solution lies in seeing that everything is immediately providentially governed by God. God is so sovereign that there is nothing outside of God’s agency, including our genuine free will. Isn’t this a still more tyrannical fatalism? No, he says. Fatalism, he thinks, only has a bite if we believe that we stand downstream from our destiny, and have some pure reserve of our own agency that we can accept or reject it. But if we are ourselves part of the flow of destiny, part of that fate, then we ourselves and our own agential responses to destiny are themselves part of destiny. We are not, that is to say, in this picture, slaves to God’s plan, or puppets of God’s will. God’s providence is simultaneously more sovereignly transcendent and mysteriously intimate than those images will allow. With this account of human agency in place, Augustine turns to the pressing question of the specific kinds of human agency displayed in Rome’s rise. And the second question for Augustine is, once we know that the world is providentially governed, how are we to make sense of the success of Roman virtue? What is the nature of the ancient Romans’ morals, the Romanorum mores, and why do they look so impressive? This is the doctrine that eventually became known as the doctrine of splendid vices, though Augustine himself never uses that phrase. The key here is gloria: glory. Romans derived all their virtues, Augustine thinks, from their hunger for gloria. This longing for glory 169

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organized their psyches. In fact, it gave them two serially ordered aims: liberty, and then domination. Augustine says, after liberty, the Romans valued domination so highly as to place it among their greatest glories. And both glory and domination needed to be visible, to be seen by their peers, to receive approbation. So, desire for praise from others was part of this hunger. And this was how glory-seeking could function to organize people in virtue-like ways—by checking other appetites. As Augustine said, the Romans suppressed other desires in their boundless desire for this one thing. Thus their pursuit of glory gave them a relative coherence, and provided moral qualities derived from deliberate effort. Now, Augustine affirms that love of praise is a fault, and the power and organization that it provides the Romans, that’s not true virtue. After all, he says, no virtue is truly such unless it is directed towards that end in which man’s good—the good greater than which nothing exists—is found. The nonphysical nature of glory does not excuse it as somehow an acceptable end for virtue for Augustine. Just because a Roman is not a beast doesn’t mean they are an angel; instead, they are something more akin to a dandy, a glory hound. Now this is wrong, and indeed pathetic, Augustine says, but it does discipline the Romans, and render them at least provisionally coherent—make them, in his words, less vile. That’s quite a compliment. The reward for this kind of pseudo-virtue is also a pseudo-reward. God gives back temporal goods to those intending temporal ends—with the praise of their age, they’ve received their reward in full. Consider Brutus, a famous Roman general who killed his own sons as they were conspiring to bring back the Tarquin kings of Rome. He brought glory and honor on himself and Rome, but he did so for a worldly end, and it cost his sons their lives. It may not be true virtue, but it is true gloryseeking, which is what the Romans sought, and Brutus was honored for killing his boys and loving Rome more than his children. If they find that inadequate, if Brutus feels that’s some cold consolation for 170

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what he has done, they have no grounds to complain to the universe about it. The problem the Romans face, then, is in the ends of their glory, the purposes for which they act. Fallen humanity tries to glorify and raise up temporal ends, so they promote themselves, their causes, their countries. Even among the Christian churches, there are many who seek glory for themselves, or their fleshly churches, in this way, in Augustine’s day as well as our own. All of these are impermanent and ultimately disappointing ends. One thing to see here is a lesson very deep in Augustine’s anthropology: whatever else the human is, the human is a creature who loves; and love means to adore; and to adore means to exult, to delight in the adoration of the object that you love, to seek to find a happiness outside of your self-satisfaction. Humans, Augustine thinks, want to worship. We need to worship. The question is what will the object of our worship be? Once you see that glory is a common human practice, and that the issue is what you give glory to, the question then becomes, for Augustine, what should Christians think of Roman glory? On one level, it’s fundamentally disappointing and tragic. Roman glory should make the Christians feel sad for the pagans, that they have attached their longings to a worldly end. But the Christians should also pursue glory, for they are no less doxological creatures than any other humans. After all, remember—and I can’t say this enough— remember that Augustine begins the whole of The City of God by claiming that that city, the city of God, is the most glorious thing in Creation. Remember, the first word of The City is gloriosissimam— most glorious is the city of God. But Christians seek to glorify not Rome or themselves but God as the true author of all that happens in reality. So when Christian saints and martyrs did their deeds, they, and I’m quoting Augustine here, “did not rest in that glory as if it were the virtue which they sought as their end. Rather, they referred that glory itself to the glory of God, by Whose grace they were who they were.” This referring means they 171

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reflected the honor that others directed at them by saying it was not me, but Christ in me, who did these things. We’ve heard people say this in many award ceremonies. Anytime you thank someone else for all the help they did to get you to some place where you get honor, that’s what you’re doing, effectively. Christians can still be inspired by pagan glory, Augustine thinks. The vision of Rome as seeking glory should work to make Christians humble; Christians can only be impressed at what the pagans managed to do for merely worldly good, and provoked at their heroism. But in the end they do act out of very different aims—to seek to please yourself, whether by flesh or by glory, or to seek to please God, and to understand yourself as coming from God. And that very different aim makes for a very big difference. So we can see that Christians, too, act for glory; seek to become, if not heroes, if not legends, then saints. Is this the full response to the pagan charges that Christians can’t endorse the civic virtues, that they effectively can? Not quite. If we read Augustine symphonically, as I proposed before—that is, as offering insights on multiple levels of the text simultaneously, and thinking about the whole scope of what he’s doing—we begin to discern larger structural parallels and resonances between this book and the work as a whole. Augustine is never only having one conversation, but several simultaneously. And so, while this book really is about the nature of the relation between good morals and right faith, it is also and simultaneously the capstone book of the first five, conceived collectively as a primer on Christian civic virtue. He took the first step by exploring the inescapable fact of suffering and vulnerability in Book 1. The second step, explored the psychological effects of this inescapable vulnerability, and the passions and appetites that sit alongside it—Books 2 and 3. The third step, unpacked how we should see this experience as shaping the state and political behavior; that was Book 4. And now here, Book 5, we get the summation of the whole. What, given this picture, is the 172

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wisest and sanest course to be taken in political life by an actor on the worldly stage? What happiness can the wise person hope for from the vicissitudes of this world? Recall that these first books were meant to contest civically-minded pagans not only about the prospects for happiness in this world, but also about what that happiness could consist in, and what might motivate right service to the community. The pagans know what they think: they serve Rome, a liberally-minded empire that works to make the world a fit place for human habitation. That sounds like a plausible ambition, doesn’t it? One vital enough to get you out of bed even on a cold morning, but modest enough to allow your projects to be leavened with some humility. Augustine allows that it has some psychological efficacy, but he thinks it is wrong. He thinks he has a better rationale for civic virtue than the pagans do. And at the climax of Book 5, he restates his critique of the belief in the possibility of real human happiness in this world, and he exposits his vision of what real civic virtue looks like in this world, and why you should undertake it. He thinks the pagans’ rationale for this-worldly effort bespeaks a noteworthy failure of imagination on their part. He thinks the pagans are right to claim that the Christians do not have the kind of confidence they think we need, he says, in the possibility of the world’s durable improvement. But the pagans are wrong to think that; therefore, the Christians cannot truly care about the world at all. They care about it, Augustine thinks, on other grounds altogether. Christians don’t care about improving the world as a kind of last resort for human happiness. This world, for Christians, cannot be perfected from within. We are as much a part of the problem as we are, at best, part of the solution. The world is tragically and irreparably flawed, and it will remain so through the whole course of human history. Our efforts in this world must be anchored on some foundation other than the hope that 173

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future generations will be without pain and suffering, terror and anger, pride and jealousy. So the issue must be the right attitude to take to worldly affairs in order to achieve the kind of happiness truly suitable for humans. And here at the end of Book 5, Augustine reminds us, his readers, that this has been the primary topic of these first five books all along. If complete and unsettled happiness is unattainable in this world, should we, Augustine asks, despair? No—there’s another kind of happiness, though to the pagans it may be hard to see why we would want to call it happiness at all. This is the happiness that true Christians find in their worldly engagement, and it has the advantage of being the kind of happiness that understands its origins and its end to lie elsewhere than in the transitory flux of this epoch. He details this happiness by sketching its presence in his model of the ideal political actor, namely the good Christian emperor. Surely the emperor, above all people, has all the conditions of life to make for happiness in this condition, in this world. Surely if anyone in the world would be happy, it would be he. And Augustine has an example of such an emperor in Theodosius, emperor from 379 to 395, the last emperor to rule over East and West, and perhaps the last great emperor the Romans ever had. Ironically, many readers take his exposition of the great faith and godliness of Theodosius as an act of a sycophant, as if anyone in the imperial hierarchy in 430 would reward Augustine for being such a vigorous brownnoser of an emperor 30 years dead. But that totally misses the point of his discussion of Theodosius’s virtues. The chilling point for Augustine of this discussion is that those virtues were largely irrelevant to his own happiness; that in fact, if anything, they made his life harder and more unpleasant; that the praise is a positive thing only in retrospect, from the perspective of a whole life lived out. “Call no one happy until they are dead,” goes the ancient Greek’s adage, reportedly first said by Solon. Something like that is 174

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close to the attitude Augustine has in this encomium, this speech in curious and ominous praise of this emperor, this hymn to the strange glory he attained. In fact, Augustine says, the true happiness of Christian rulers does not lie in power, or their own magnificence, or any of the temporal splendors of this life. They’re not happy in any temporal sense, for worldly happiness evades them as well as the rest of us, maybe even more so. They’re instead, in another important but opaque phrase, happy in hope. That’s a famous long quote from Augustine. We say Christian rulers are happy, if they rule justly; if they are not inflated with pride, but remember that they are but men; if they do all this not for a burning desire for empty glory, but for the love of eternal blessedness; and if they do not fail to offer to their true God, as a sacrifice for their sins, the oblation of humility, compassion, and prayer, then we can call them happy in hope.

Now, what is true for the emperor—again, the best-positioned person in this whole world to gain whatever happiness can be gained by this-worldly effort—will also, by extension, be true for others as well. And this meshes well with his account of the logic of this-worldly action, which, recall, is done not out of anxious fear about the ultimate upshot of history. That war is already over. The good guys, for Augustine, have already won. We are exhibiting our responsive gratitude and joyfully praising God as best we can in the interim before the confirmation of that ultimate victory. That is why we are supposed to be, for Augustine, happy in hope: we know joy is coming, though it is not with us yet. A strange kind of happiness, to be sure; but however distended and painful it may be, happiness still he thinks it is.

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I

Public Religion in Imperial Rome (Books 6–7)

n turning to books 6 and 7, we confront one of those moments in The City of God that may shock us with its feeling of contemporaneity. The idea that religious belief mainly conveys civic benefits that justify its practice is a well-known one. People in Augustine’s time thought, as many of us do today, that religion is all right as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. It helps keep us stable and decent to one another, and it shores up social mores. It should by no means gain control over our whole way of life; that would lead to an imbalanced fanaticism, which is surely not what we want.

The Problem of Pagan Philosophy „„

Gibbon’s witty remark that Roman religions “were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful” was right about the Romans. They worried that other attachments and loyalties might damage attachment to the civic good.

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The Romans were in no way idiots. They had questions and doubts about their gods, some profound, and they were too smart to allow themselves to be much troubled by religious questions. Religion, they thought, should be obeyed for its civic benefits, regardless of belief in its literal truth. In books 6 and 7 of The City of God, Augustine critiques this nest of ideas, quite popular among his pagan contemporaries and even among the Christians of the elite classes.

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The first five books were about basic existential problems of humanity—the inescapable fact of suffering and the inevitability of our fragility. They argued that the pagan gods did not ensure worldly success. In a way they were an extended reflection on the 176

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consequences of the loss of moral innocence, recognition of the problem of evil. „„

The second big section of the work is about those elites who seek happiness not in worldly accomplishment, such as the grandeur of Rome, but in the stability of otherworldly tranquility. While the worldviews espoused by these pagan thinkers are more akin to Augustine’s Christian message, their similarities render them more dangerous still.

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The problem of pagan philosophy is not the loss of moral innocence, coming to recognize the power of the problem of evil; it is the loss of intellectual innocence and the problem of learning how to think when the simplicity of myth is replaced with the increased complexity, obscurity, and ambiguity of the world. ›› The general mode of this form of inquiry proceeds as follows: We live in a culture swarming with myths, stories meant to orient and motivate us towards appropriate moral and spiritual ends, and yet of diverse and not infrequently dubious moral value. ››

The wise philosopher comes to see that these myths are in some ways psychologically and culturally inescapable—they have already formed our minds by the time we come to critical self-awareness of them.

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Therefore they must be analyzed for their value and interpreted in such a way as to make them most beneficial; in this way, the myths must be reincorporated into a larger and more healthy picture of the culture’s values.

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Because these inquiries menaced the unquestioning piety of their non-intellectual compatriots, philosophers were wary of sharing their thoughts with the common folk. The basic view of ancient philosophy was that the wise man withdraws from the noise of the world and turns to the peace of quiet retirement in the inner citadel of the soul. 177

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The civic republicans said Christianity was antiworldly, but the philosophers accused it of being just another superstition, a bad form of wishful, magical thinking. They recoiled at Christianity’s vulgarity, its commonness, the way it breached social boundaries. Furthermore, they saw the Christians as all doing rituals, and, what’s worse, believing in them. That was superstition, the sin of the ignorant, rude, common folk.

From Superstition to True Religion „„

The City of God is written in the shadow of the philosophical critique of cultural myth, inaugurated by Plato’s Republic, and Augustine was well aware that the philosophers saw Christianity as just another delusional myth, worse than the others because it lacked the honorable patina of antiquity.

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So Augustine developed a profound Christian reply to the philosophers. It is his analysis of Roman intellectuals’ efforts to explain and legitimate some selection of the Roman pantheon while keeping them in their intellectual place.

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Augustine launches his response through his first serious engagement with a serious intellectual rival, Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), one of the greatest of Roman minds. Varro’s works were almost entirely lost after antiquity, but one in particular was powerfully influential, his Antiquities, Human and Divine, an attempt to talk about the deep past of Roman history.

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In the Antiquities, Varro offers an analysis of Roman religion that Augustine thinks tries to excuse the religion’s obvious absurdities and defend it in light of religion’s civic purposes. According to Augustine, Varro’s basic claim is that we need to identify the right gods, in the right order, for things to work.

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But, for Augustine, Varro immediately goes on to undercut the project, saying that humans made the gods, and the gods served 178

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the central purpose of ordering and legitimating the customs of human society. According to Varro, the gods are most plausibly long-ago humans whose memory the ceaseless waves of history have worn down into heroes, then legends, then gods.

Augustine launches his response through his first serious engagement with a serious intellectual rival, Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), one of the greatest of Roman minds.

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Yet, despite this skeptical demolition of the Roman pantheon, Varro placidly assumes that the gods should still be revered and worshipped by the populace at large, and that the intellectuals should relate to them with gloriously ambiguous silence. He tries to warrant this viewpoint with two different strategies, neither of which, in Augustine’s assessment, works.

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In the primary strategy, Varro distinguishes between three kinds of theology that describe three ways that religion is used in Roman society: ›› First is the “fabulous” theology displayed in the stories of the poets, particularly on the stage, which Varro severely opposed. ››

Second is “natural” theology explained in the work of natural philosophers about the world, with which Varro avoids engaging.

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Third is “civic” theology deployed by political thinkers and actors to discipline the city, which Varro allows while distinguishing it from the other two.

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In other words, religion’s cultural function serves only to mislead those who take it seriously; but its political function has many valid uses, and its basic metaphysical function as 179

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orienting us rightly to the nature and destiny of the cosmos is more valid still. „„

Augustine pounces on Varro’s exposition, asking on what basis the three theologies are distinguishable from one another. In fact, he thinks they three bleed into one another: ›› The lustful gods of the fables warp our political piety and pollute our natural sanctity. ››

The savagery of civic piety gives us a dangerous taste for domination in all spheres of life.

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The hierarchical austerities of natural theology provide pathetic support to the violence and lusts of civic and cultural life and mislead us as to both our real situation and the steps that God is taking to save us.

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As Augustine puts it, “both civil and fabulous theologies are alike fabulous and civil”: The city has fallen in love with dangerous myths, self-created, and worked those myths into its selfunderstanding. But neither of these theologies can grant eternal life or otherwise deliver on their promises.

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In his second strategy, Varro makes a distinction between the “general pantheon” of all the gods that Rome has honored and a group of “select gods.” ›› In other words, Varro can imagine that some selection of the gods should be worshipped in the city, while the rest can be discarded or ignored. ››

Thus, philosophers can respect the common belief in these gods while not letting on to the crowd that they understand them to be something very different than what the common folk take them to be.

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››

Here again Augustine pounces. Varro talks about being pious before the mystery and hints at esoteric and probably naturalistic interpretations of the select gods, but none of his sophistry will get us to the true God. Instead it is all an effort to make the city’s gods palatable to intellectuals and encourage their sloth.

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Augustine asks who “selects” the select gods to receive the false honor of being naturalistic forces. Varro and his cronies may think they do, but in fact, they themselves have been seduced by the demons they direct others to obey.

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Worse yet, these select gods are not what anyone would call natural forces; they are social pathologies such as war and marital rape, camouflaged demons that seem natural only to those trapped inside them. Varro lets them be called gods simply because he is afraid.

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Varro’s cowardice and sloth disgust Augustine, and Varro’s blindness to social pathology angers him. But more deeply still there is a kind of futility to Varro’s efforts that makes Augustine feel pity for him.

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Augustine’s compassion arises from Varro’s ultimate failure of imagination, his unexamined assumption of the idea of the god or gods as the soul’s universe. Varro is a monotheist, but a kind of pantheistic monotheist, who believes that divinity is the way that this material world is charged with a sort of transcendent mystery.

Varro talks about being pious before the mystery and hints at esoteric and probably naturalistic interpretations of the select gods, but none of his sophistry will get us to the true God. Instead it is all an effort to make the city’s gods palatable to intellectuals and encourage their sloth.

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In the end Varro fails to offer any sort of account of true religion, in at least three senses. ›› First, he reduces religion to an account about nature but fails to publicize that. ››

Second, he tries to legitimate a selection of the gods without realizing that he is granting theological legitimacy to social pathologies.

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Third, he fails to get outside the horizon of creation itself, to see the Creator—and so his work is not about real religion at all, but about demons and their various malicious antics to convince others, and themselves, of their superior status. This religion is actually impiety and idolatry.

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And so it turns out that the philosophers’ critique of myth, which they tried to apply to the Christians, is turned by Augustine, at least in the case of Varro and his descendants, against themselves: It is they who are superstitious and impious.

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The Christian church offers the true story, teaches about the true God, and practices true sacrifice, and thereby performs true service to that God.

Questions to Consider 1. Augustine clearly has little patience with arguments that explain religion in terms of its civic benefits or in terms that do not respect the religion’s self-presentation. Yet Augustine’s own critique of pagan Roman religion can’t be said to respect that religion’s self-presentation. So why does he think complaining about Varro’s approach is acceptable while taking the same approach himself?

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2. What does Augustine think of the Roman philosophers’ proposal that some selection of the gods worshipped in the city (the “principal” gods, Augustine calls them) are actual gods, while the rest can be discarded or ignored? What, in particular, does Augustine think of the idea that a variety of deities exists? (Cf. book 7, chapter 30)

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Lecture 9 Transcript

Public Religion in Imperial Rome (Books 6–7)

C

onsider this. Augustine understood what we would call naturalistic reductionism—the belief, common today, that all our complicated beliefs and desires and thoughts about religion and politics and romantic love, our experience of ourselves as subjects, all of this is the expression of more basic, more animalistic drives; that our true nature is no more spiritual than that of a squirrel; that our cities and nations and empires and fellowships and churches and universities are nothing more than vastly overgrown anthills. Indeed, a thousand years before Augustine wrote, the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes had already proposed a projectionist theory of religion, which argued that, while there is a true divinity, every representation of that divinity in every religion humans have produced is the imaginative product of our minds which, when confronted with problems or puzzles of a vastness and amplitude that overwhelms our everyday intellects, inevitably recoiled back to familiar ideas and images that help make the alien feel familiar to us. And so, Xenophanes argued, if cows worshipped gods, their gods would look a lot like cows, and their situation is like unto humanity’s. Many modern thinkers, of course, have said similar things; the 19thcentury German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, a very important antecedent to Marx, and many in recent decades have followed suit as well, and they often thought that they were saying something new. The lesson here is simple. We are fools to dream that the world’s maturity corresponds with our own. People in 1750 or 1050 or 425 were not more naïve than us. We must overcome what the English 184

Lecture 9 Transcript—Public Religion in Imperial Rome (Books 6–7)

historian E. P. Thompson called the enormous condescension of posterity, the idea that ancient figures were naïve or infantile or otherwise misguided in some way that we are not and could never be. It is only the arrogance of the ignorant that generates this condescension. Of course it’s also true that the past is another country, and they do things differently there, but different is not the same as primitive. When I was 20, I thought my grandparents couldn’t have known anything about sex, which, if you think about it for a minute, is kind of impossible. They were, after all, my grandparents. In this lecture, we confront one of those moments in The City of God that may shock us with its familiarity, its feeling of contemporaneity. And we’re going to see Augustine engage something that’s a bit more directly like our world than almost anything we’ve seen yet. For people in his time thought, as many of us do today, that religion is a pretty good thing—it’s all right, just so long as it doesn’t get out of hand. It helps keep us stable and decent to one another, and it shores up social mores. It should by no means gain control over our whole way of life—we should in no circumstance fully invest in it. That would lead to an imbalanced fanaticism, which is surely what we don’t want. The idea that religious belief mainly conveys civic benefits that justify its practice is a well-known one. We might call it the Eisenhower strategy, for its general attitude is encapsulated in President-elect Eisenhower’s infamous claim in 1952: Our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith and I don’t care what it is. In America today, many people still feel less comfortable around overt atheists than they do around people of radically different beliefs than their own. Before Ike gave his quote, this position was perhaps put most pithily by that 18th-century historian we love so much in this lecture series, Edward Gibbon. He famously claimed that the various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by 185

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the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. Gibbon was right about the Romans. They worried that other attachments and loyalties might damage attachment to the civic good. They were in no way idiots. They had questions and doubts about their gods, and some of those doubts and questions were very, very profound. And they were quite smart—smart enough to allow themselves not to be too troubled by religious questions, as well. Religion, they thought, should be obeyed for its civic benefits, regardless of whether you think it is literally true. In this lecture, we look at Books 6 and 7 of The City of God, and especially Augustine’s critique of this nest of ideas. He found this view quite popular among his pagan contemporaries, and even among the Christians who were among the elite classes, as well. He also found it horrifying, and his critique of it is savage, acute, and exemplary. Here, we’ll see why. Here, we want to look at the details of this critique, the character of the view under critique, and assess the advantages and disadvantages of both positions. Now remember, the first five books assessed Roman popular religion and belief in this-worldly happiness. This project foundered, Augustine thought, on the problem of evil, the fact that in our world there’s always enough trouble to undermine our confidence in any secure worldly achievement as lasting. Our inevitable confrontation with this fact works to undo our capacity to be happy wholly in terms of worldly goods. Thus these books were about basic existential problems of humanity—the inescapable fact of suffering and the inevitability of our fragility. And they argued that the pagan gods don’t ensure thisworldly success. In a way, they were an extended reflection on the consequences of the loss of moral innocence, our recognition of the problem of evil. 186

Lecture 9 Transcript—Public Religion in Imperial Rome (Books 6–7)

Now we turn to the second big section of the book, Books 6–10, about those elites who seek happiness not in this-worldly accomplishment, such as the grandeur of Rome, but in the stability of otherworldly tranquility. Thus the worldviews espoused by these pagan thinkers are more akin to Augustine’s Christian message. But their similarities render them more dangerous still. Here, the problem is not the problem of the loss of moral innocence, the coming to recognize the power of the problem of evil. Here, the problem is, rather, the loss of intellectual innocence, as it were, and the problem of learning how to think once you have begun to see through some of the stories you were told in your childhood, and come face-to-face with the question of the increased complexity, obscurity, and ambiguity of the world. So where he earlier dealt primarily with historical and political thinkers, here Augustine begins to engage directly with non-Christian philosophy. These books, six and seven, investigate how one group of philosophers, intellectuals, answered this question—they discuss the Roman intellectuals’ interpretations of popular religion, and how they made peace with it. But Augustine’s aim in expositing this story is not to applaud. In fact, he finds the intellectuals’ attitudes abhorrent. In this book and the following ones, Augustine is engaging these pagan philosophers, especially their critique of myth and popular religion. So, to understand his critique, you have to understand their position. Now, the question of how to understand myth is actually one of the deepest themes of ancient philosophy, and one of the most basic challenges for humanity, the challenge of figuring out how to grow into a fully adult understanding of how the world works. In a way, this problem is the problem of how to get past a relation to the world marked by superstition. Now, by superstition, I mean the idea that we may be deeply mistaken about the structure of the world. We may be being tricked metaphysically to believe things are one way where they are not that way at all. Once we understand the power of Xenophanes’s claim about cows making cow gods, how do we come back to our own world and make sense of it anew? The 187

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general mode of this form of inquiry for the philosophers proceeds as follows. We live in a culture swarming with myths, stories meant to orient and motivate us towards appropriate moral and spiritual ends, and yet of diverse and not infrequently dubious moral and spiritual value. The wise philosopher comes to see that these myths are in some ways psychologically and culturally inescapable. They’ve already formed our minds by the time we come to critical self-awareness of them, therefore they must be analyzed for their value and interpreted in such a way as to make them most beneficial. And in this way, the myths must be reincorporated into a larger and more healthy—and more sane—picture of the culture’s values. From Plato’s Republic through Aristotle’s Poetics through the Alexandrian grammarians to the rhetors of Augustine’s time, this overall practice was the primary intellectual action on received culture by the philosophers and other intellectuals. Few critics of culture fundamentally reject their cultural inheritance—by and large, they mostly reinterpret it. These inquiries menaced the rather unquestioning piety of their nonintellectual, non-philosophical compatriots, and the menace was felt by those non-intellectuals, and from time to time it provoked a backlash against philosophy. All the philosophers remembered what Athens did to Socrates, where he was executed for impiety. And just as an aside here, there is an interesting fact that, in Western civilization as a whole, there are two characters for whom every word we have of theirs is written down in light of their ultimate destiny of being killed by the state, and those two characters are Socrates and Jesus. That’s just an interesting aside. But back to the philosophers and the critique of myth, the popular suspicion of them. The philosophers knew about the suspicions, and they were wary of sharing their thoughts with the mass of people, with the common folk. They generally kept to themselves; they generally 188

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did not evangelize. Over time, indeed, they became increasingly wary of engaging others, increasingly oblique to the everyday world, increasingly seeking to escape it. Some sought this escape through the quiet of leisured ease, or scholarly researches, as did the Middle Platonists and the scholars of the Library of Alexandria. Others became even more socially outcast, like the cynics. A story from the latter can serve to exemplify the philosopher’s overall attitude to worldly affairs. This is the story of the meeting that once took place, supposedly, between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic. Alexander, having just conquered the city of Corinth, went to find its most famous resident Diogenes, who was just then relaxing in the morning sunlight, seated—sitting down, right? Alexander, delighted and excited to meet the famous philosopher, asked him, looming above him, if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes, looking up, replied simply, “Yes. Get out of my sunlight.” This is the basic view of ancient philosophy. The wise man withdraws from the noise of the world and turns to the peace of quiet retirement, whether the quiet life of a villa suitable for the rich, or the inner peace of the Stoic in the inner citadel of the soul. All this goes some way to explaining the fundamentally hostile and snobbish reaction of ancient philosophy when first confronted with Christianity, for they saw it as just another myth. As we’ve seen already, the civic republicans said Christianity was anti-worldly, but for the philosophers that was not their main complaint. Instead, and tellingly, they accused it of being just another superstitio, just another bad collection of myths, a bad form of wishful, magical thinking still stuck in the ignorance of childhood—of being, as it were, an infant’s idea of what divinity might be. The philosophers recoiled at Christianity’s vulgarity, its commonness, the way the religion breached social boundaries. Their leader had been a carpenter, his disciples common workingmen—fishermen, farmers, and the like. Since then, the Christians really hadn’t risen 189

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much in social status. Furthermore, they saw the Christians as all doing rituals, and, what’s worse, still believing in them. And that was superstition; the sin of ignorant, rude, common folk. Now, there’s a large rhetorical debate going on in these books, and you can see some of it already happening here around words such as superstition, superstitio; religion, religio; pietas, piety; and sacrificium, sacrifice. Etymologically, superstitio—superstition— means standing above or standing over, and it was traditionally thought to refer originally to people standing above a grave. One can imagine a simple-minded person refusing to believe that the dead in the grave are truly gone, for they still loiter there. That, at least, was the philosopher’s way of understanding what superstition was. This sort of refusal to accept death was considered cowardly and deeply embarrassing to the Romans. The Romans saw Christians as superstitious, as having wrong relations with gods, as a matter of being impious, which is just about the most potent theological insult the Romans could deliver, effectively amounting to the charge that the Christians were, in fact, atheists—and, in fact, sometimes that’s what the Christians were accused of in the early centuries. True pietas meant justice with regard to the gods, as Cicero once said, and the Christians manifestly did not do that, because they would not sacrifice. Now what exactly is sacrifice? Pagans and Christians fought to the death over that term. Sacrificium, which Augustine uses also to capture the sense of the Greek word latreia, or service to God, means making something holy by putting it apart, fundamentally giving it away, losing it. The Christians ultimately won this battle over the meaning of these words, of course, so that we believe that abstract monotheism is religio, while anything that smacks of ritual-bound polytheism is superstitio. But the battle was still going on in Augustine’s time. And indeed, as we’ll see, he was the Christians’ most effective warrior. 190

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The entire City of God is written in the shadow of this philosophical critique of cultural myth, inaugurated by Plato’s Republic. And Augustine is well aware that the philosophers see Christianity as just another one of these delusional myths, and one worse than the others because it lacks the honorable patina of antiquity—it’s a new religion that’s come out. So Augustine developed a profound Christian reply to the philosophers: it is not our religion that’s superstitious, it is a ritualized going-through-the-motions that is. And he launches this critique as a critique of one Roman intellectual in particular: Varro. These books hold Augustine’s analysis of Roman intellectuals’ efforts to explain and legitimate some selection of the Roman pantheon of gods while keeping them in their intellectual place, as well. Augustine carries this out through his first serious engagement with one single serious intellectual rival: Marcus Terentius Varro, who lived from 116 B.C. to 27 B.C., one of the greatest of Roman minds. Since this is one of the few times that another thinker is given so substantial a treatment in this book, it’s worth understanding why Augustine thought highly enough of him to give him this attention. Varro’s works were almost entirely lost after antiquity, but we know he wrote many books, and one in particular that was very powerfully influential, namely his Antiquities, Human and Divine. The book was an attempt to talk about the deep past of Roman history, and it served many as a sort of archive and encyclopedia. Augustine cites Varro’s Antiquities more than 80 times throughout The City, and he had found and read Varro’s whole work, unlike those pious pagans who cited him at second or third hand as an authority, but who never did actually manage to read the book—another reminder, if one is needed, that you should never fully trust what anyone else says about a book, but you should go and find it and read it for yourself. Augustine’s engagement with Varro, in fact, actually preserves, by and large, the core of what remains to us of Varro’s texts. 191

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Now what’s especially interesting about the Antiquities is that, in it, Varro offers an analysis of Roman religion that Augustine thinks tries to excuse the religion’s obvious absurdities and defend it in light of religion’s civic purposes, making Varro’s among the very first of what we could call social-scientific explanations of religion. In a way, Varro is like one version of that kind of thinker whose basic idiom of value and orientation is the idiom of what’s interesting. He never says this is right or this is wrong, he’s more interested in what’s amusing or worth contemplating a bit. We can then see in this encounter between the bishop and the intellectual a foreshadowing of the sort of encounter we find increasingly common in our world today, the kind of encounter between a confessional account of religion and a wry, ironic, and skeptical vision of religiosity as a possible passion one might have, but one that ought to be kept firmly in check lest one lose one’s cool in overheated enthusiasm. So this book touches on intellectual attitudes towards religion, as well as on issues of religion and politics. Now, according to Augustine, Varro’s basic claim is that we need to identify the right gods, in the right order, for things to work—and by things working, he means things like society functioning well. But Augustine says that Varro immediately goes on to undercut this whole project, for he says, almost right away, that the humans made the gods, and they served the central purpose of ordering and legitimating the customs of human society. That’s at the beginning of Book 6 of Augustine’s City of God. According to Varro, it is most plausible that the gods are actually long-ago humans whose human memory the ceaseless waves of history have worn down into heroes, then legends, then gods. And yet, despite the skeptical demolition of the Roman pantheon that this implies, Varro placidly assumes that the gods still be revered and worshipped by the populace at large, and that the intellectuals should relate to them with gloriously ambiguous silence. 192

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He tries to warrant this, Augustine says, with two different strategies, neither of which, in Augustine’s assessment, work. First of all, Varro distinguishes between three kinds of theology, which describe three ways that religion is used in Roman society. There are the fabulous theologies displayed in the stories of the poets, particularly on the stage. Then there are the natural theologies explained in the works of natural philosophers about the world. And then, finally, there are civic theologies deployed by political thinkers and actors to discipline the city. You can imagine analogues to these three in our world today: entertainment, politics, and science. Varro’s attitude towards these three different uses of religion varied. He severely opposed the fabulous theology; avoids engaging with the natural, at least in this book; and allows the civic to have some role while distinguishing it from the other two. In other words, for Varro, religion’s cultural function serves only to mislead those who take it literally seriously. But its political function has many valid uses, and its basic metaphysical function as telling us the truth about the cosmos and orienting us rightly to it is more valid still, so valid that we really shouldn’t talk about it in a book that might be passed around. Now note something here. Augustine’s own theology—any Christian theology, in fact—is all of these things as well. It is a performative and poetic theology, a theatrical theology, in the liturgy and the scriptural stories and the narratives that the Christians tell. It is a natural theology, for it definitely has a view about the nature of the cosmos. And it is a political theology, because it is about the true polity of the city of God, and how citizens of that city should serve the cities in which they find themselves on earth. But Augustine’s three theologies all harmoniously interlock and reinforce one another—they do not say different things to different audiences. And they are all fully public, expounded in plain sight of all, and actively, avidly taught to all. As we’ll see, it’s both the incoherence and the occultism of Varro’s theology to which Augustine objects.

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Right away, he pounces on Varro’s exposition. On what basis, he asks, do we distinguish between these three theologies? In fact, he thinks the three kinds bleed into one another: the lustful gods of the fables warp our political piety and pollute our natural sanctity; the savagery of civic piety gives us a dangerous taste, as we’ve seen, for domination in all spheres of life; and the hierarchical austerities of natural theology provide pathetic warrant to the violence and lusts of civic and cultural life, and also mislead us both as to our real situation and as to the steps that God is taking to save us from it. As Augustine puts it, one of the most famous lines for a very nerdy group of theologians like myself from The City of God: “Both civil and fabulous theologies are alike fabulous and civil.” The city has fallen in love with dangerous myths, self-created, and worked those myths into its self-understanding. But neither of these theologies can grant eternal life, or otherwise deliver on their promises. In contrast to Varro, Augustine notes that other pagans, notably Seneca, at least critiqued civil theology, though they too eventually drew back from fully condemning it. The truth, he thinks, is that Varro and all the others knew all this, but he was too afraid to tell the truth about these gods. So the first problem with Varro is his hypocrisy and intellectual cowardice. But Varro makes a second kind of distinction that Augustine also thinks is ridiculous, between the general pantheon of all the gods that Rome has honored—including things like a god of the doorframe—and a group of select gods that Rome really focuses its ritual attention on. Here, Varro’s point seems to be that the general pantheon is a swamp of fervid, superstitious dreams of the mass of ignorant people, while the select gods—selected by philosophers— are really a vulgar and mythologized but still practically accurate way of talking about natural forces, or forces more properly, strictly, and accurately described in terms of some elite philosophical vocabulary. They are a way that the vast mass of illiterate, uneducated, and simple-minded plebs—the common folk of Rome—can comprehend 194

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the truths of religion, at least as far as those low ingrates need to comprehend anything. In other words, Roman philosophers such as Varro can imagine that some selection of the gods should be worshipped in the city—the select gods—while the rest can be discarded or ignored. Because of this, philosophers can respect the common belief in these while not letting on to the crowd that they understand them to be something very different than what the common folk take them to be. And here again Augustine pounces. For what is the point of this whole project, anyway? Varro talks about being pious before the mystery, and he hints at esoteric and probably naturalistic interpretation even of the select gods. But none of this will get us to the true God, Augustine says. Indeed, instead it is all an effort on Varro’s part merely to make the city’s god palatable to intellectuals, and encourage them in their sloth, rather than firing them up to seek the true God. More specifically, who selects just these so-called select gods to be the ones given this false honor of being naturalistic forces? Is it Varro and his cronies? They may think so, but not really. In fact, Augustine says, they themselves were seduced and flattered into thinking this by the demons that they direct others to obey. After all, Augustine argues, if you begin to try to discriminate between some set of gods and other select gods, there’s nowhere to cut at the joints between these theologies; they are all still worldly forces. But things are worse still. These are often not even what Augustine— or we today—would call natural forces. They may be horrible social pathologies, camouflaged demons that only seem naturalized to those of us trapped on the inside of these practices. Consider what Augustine says about the layers of gods included here. First of all, some of the gods that the Romans honor, and Varro lets them honor, are simply ridiculous. There are gods for everything, including, as I pointed out, a lintel over a doorway. Then there are gods which legitimate wholly human social practices, like the practice 195

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of money. Augustine spends a great deal of time talking about the fact that Varro thinks it’s fine that one of the names of Jupiter is pecunia—money. Then things get more disturbing still. Augustine notes that some gods, such as Mars, seem to be naturalizing and even divinizing horrific human activities, such as war. Here, an imagined divinity has been used to grant legitimacy to a savage and by no means necessary human practice. And, at the end of his discussion of Mars, Augustine actually poignantly says, I only wish there were no real war, as much as there is no real Mars. And then, finally, things get even more gruesome indeed. Augustine offers a description of the veritable pantheon of gods who are involved, or so the Romans thought they were involved, in the wedding night of a newly married couple. It is not just that there is a god to baptize their fertility; there are gods whose job is to make the man aroused enough to have sex with the girl he has married—and most definitely it would have been a girl, not a woman—and there are other gods whose job is to hold that girl down while her husband has sex with her. That sounds a lot like marital rape, and in fact Augustine suggests it’s something close to it. He is not saying this, that is, as a way of approving what the Romans think their gods do. What kind of gods approve these things, egg on these behaviors in humanity? These are not gods at all, Augustine says; at best, they are demons. And Varro lets them be called gods simply because he is afraid of the populace. Now, Varro’s cowardice and sloth disgust Augustine, and Varro’s blindness to social pathology angers him. But more deeply still there is a kind of futility to Varro’s efforts that make Augustine most deeply feel pity for him. This is due to Varro’s ultimate failure of imagination, his unexamined assumption of the immanentism of this world, the idea that the god or gods are no more than the soul’s universe. Varro seems to be a 196

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kind of monotheist, but a kind of pantheistic monotheist—that is, one who believes that divinity is, in a way, this material world as charged with a sort of transcendent numinousness which infuses it. In the end, Varro fails to offer any sort of account of true religion, then, in at least three senses. First, he reduces religion to an account about nature, but fails to publicize that, and refuses to condemn people who believe in it as abhorrent and shameful, thus misleading many people as regards the truth. Second, he tries to legitimate a selection of the gods, but doesn’t see that in so doing he is granting theological legitimacy to social pathologies that are ridiculous when they’re not simply horrifying. And third, and most distressingly for Augustine, he fails to get outside the horizon of Creation itself, to see the true Creator. And so it is that his account is not about real religion at all, but at best simply about created demons—that is to say, about rival rebellious bits of Creation and the various malicious antics that those bits of Creation get up to in order to convince others and themselves of their superior status. This religion, then, is actually impiety and idolatry. It is superstitio. And so it turns out that the philosophers’ critique of myth, which they tried to apply to the Christians, is turned by Augustine, at least in the case of Varro and his descendants, against themselves. It is they who are superstitious and impious. By the end of Book 7, Augustine has had enough. Away with all these fables, he seems to say, and the cynical philosophers who mistakenly think they are free from them. God is not found in some sort of order of nature or structures of public culture; God is creator of all these things, and of the ways that we have misused them, and so the first thing to say about God is that God is transcendent. Now, God is no further away from us because of this transcendence. The transcendence, as we’ll see in the next lecture, is easily understood as a formal way to ensure the divine’s inaccessibility to 197

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all created things. That’s true, but it’s not Augustine’s aim—in fact, his aim is quite the opposite. When we abandoned God, God did still not abandon us; God sent Christ to save us. Creation is itself an act and reception of grace, and the Holy Spirit shapes us to receive Christ. The Christian church, then, offers the true story, teaches about the true God, and practices true sacrifice, and thereby performs true service—true latreia —to that God. But more on all of that can wait until the next time. For now, all we need to know is that the Varronian Romans fail because they do not properly understand transcendence; they do not properly understand God’s transcendence of the world. And that makes them, in Augustine’s eyes, the truly superstitious. We will see next that they are not alone in that.

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Lecture 10

H

appiness is a culturally concrete word whereby we try to signify, imperfectly, a human universal. We all want to be happy. The idea is not that all humans through history would self-consciously recognize this desire as their aspiration, but we would at least find that description of our lives intelligible. It certainly was true in Augustine’s world. If he had wanted this to be a book simply about worldly success, he could have stopped at book 5. But he goes on because there is another kind of happiness—philosophical happiness.

Big Questions „„

When Augustine engages religious and philosophical thinkers, the non-material and theological dimensions of the debate about happiness come into their own. ›› In books 6 and 7, Augustine exposes the religion of Rome as instrumentalist, transactional, and idolatrous, and the Roman intellectuals who might have helped as confused about the divine and cowardly before the populace. ››

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In books 8 and 9, Augustine begins to engage those he feels are most thoughtful among the pagans on this issue, the Platonists, for whom happiness is found only in the transcendent realm of the unchanging stabilities upon which our world of flux abides. But he also thinks they are deeply flawed in misunderstanding who that one true God truly is and how we can access such a God.

Augustine debates big questions: Who is God and what does it mean to call God Creator?

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How is God related to us?

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What mediates between God and us?

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What makes us and God able to relate?

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How exactly can God be said to care about Creation in general and our worldly and material existence in particular?

Platonic View of God „„

The Platonists were the most astute philosophers because they focused on morality and purification and affirmed that happiness is the fusion of practical and contemplative aims. ›› They apprehended what other philosophers failed to apprehend: the distinction between Creator and created, immutable and mutable, and that humans can have some intuition of this distinction. ››

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They dimly perceived that divine transcendence means that any literal language of distance cannot properly capture God’s transcendence, thus enabling God’s transcendence to be equally present to and distant from all creation.

They also realized that human happiness consists in the eternal enjoyment of this transcendent God. For them, happiness was found by purifying attachments and values so that the inner, immaterial, rational, and transcendent self could rise to reunion with the One, its source. ›› This union could be accomplished by imitating the disinterested, passionless nature of the gods as far as humans can, thereby becoming like the divine and ascending ever higher, culminating finally in a union of indistinguishability with the One.

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The Augustinian View of God „„

Here Augustine begins to criticize the Platonists. For they err tragically in assuming this God needs mediators to relate to this world, that God is fundamentally elsewhere, and not immediately and intimately concerned with the world. That conviction—of the need for mediators—leads the Platonists to worship demons. ›› For the Platonists, demons do not encourage their devotees to engage in theatricals, but in sacrificial rituals. Their demons wander among different levels of metaphysical reality, undertaking commerce between the transient realm of materiality and the transcendent realm of spirit. ››

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The immediate and functional problem with the Platonists’ understanding of demons is that they are like us in that they share our maladies, but they are like gods in that they can never change. The demons suffer impermanent passions, which makes them incapable of mediating between us and the gods to secure our permanent happiness.

But the real problem with the Platonists is that they are attracted by the idea of demons, because they assume God needs mediation, and they make that assumption because they think God is fundamentally uninterested in the world. ›› The Platonists cannot imagine a God so loving of the world as Neoplatonism imagines our journey to to remain intimately and immediately engaged with it. They cannot conceive that God might not be averse to being directly touched, that God might want to reach us. They cannot imagine that God has

God as a flight from the world because like could only be known by like, and so we and God can only come together in our mutual essential difference from materiality.

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real unsponsored and unprompted and really unwarranted love for humanity. ››

This view entails a deeply negative vision of material reality. The vision of God as supremely immaterial and materiality as nothing but dead matter may exist as two sides of the same coin. Platonists affirm both.

The Platonic Path to God „„

The Platonists’ vision of God as fundamentally repulsed by material reality imposes a basically escapist strategy for getting to God, which in turn implies to them the anthropological claim that we are not naturally worldly, but are exiles in materiality.

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Neoplatonism imagines our journey to God as a flight from the world because like could only be known by like, and so we and God can only come together in our mutual essential difference from materiality.

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The Platonists realized that there was a truly transcendent Creator whose transcendence put all creation equally indeterminately distant from itself, but they underestimated the love of God and the lovability of creation.

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The ancient world, in heaven as on earth, was all about associations. The Greeks and Romans were great believers in connections, in whom you knew, on what networks you were a part of. From this worldview, a basic ethics emerged: Help your friends and harm your enemies. Thus these networks organized your whole life, and potential pagan converts were deeply worried about what would happen to their network access when they converted.

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In the ancient world, different classes of people did not mix; their vision of transcendence was therefore trapped in their snobbishness. ›› They assumed an image of God as a Roman nobleman who would never sully himself by descending to the distasteful lower classes. ››

They saw the transcendence of God from creation, but they imagined that transcendence as akin to the hauteur of ancient nobility toward the plebeians, not the passion of the loving father who would do anything for his child.

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They could not conceive that a transcendent Creator might take any kind of interest, let alone an immediate and lively concern, for such lowly creatures as humanity.

In the end, the Platonists’ social prejudices forced them to surrender their deepest insight. Their initial metaphysical insight about God’s radical transcendence of creation was vexed by their fear of God’s pollution by matter.

The Augustinian Path to God „„

The Platonists’ fear of contaminating God, their fixation on a mistaken conception of divine purity, and their imposition of multiple layers of mediation all work to corrode their conception of divine transcendence, to encourage them to mistake distance and distaste for holiness.

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For Augustine, God’s holiness and transcendence are not matters of the divine being afraid of contamination by the material world. In fact, God loves us and has come to us, in the history of revelation as seen through the history of the people Israel and then in the person of Jesus Christ.

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For Augustine, there is no place in all of Creation where God is not accessible to us. The idea of God as outside space and time misleads the Platonists, he says, because all is inside God. This misconception warped the Platonists’ strategy of how to get to God because, for them, only their minds would be saved. They could not fundamentally imagine that the material world could be valued by a truly transcendent God.

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They see that God is transcendent, that the contingencies of this world cannot be the ultimate framework of the universe, that creation needs a Creator, but they do not see the road to union with God. They do not see that God has already traversed that road and has come to us.

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To respond to this visitation, our first task is to humble ourselves to receive this grace. Augustine understood that what we should flee was not our material bodies, but improper investment in our bodies. ›› This notion came from thinking through the meaning of the Incarnation, of God becoming human and fully taking on human flesh. To arrive at that insight, he had to humble his mind to the discipline of the scriptures, which the Platonists refused to do. ››

Thus, the Platonists practiced a religion centered union with God, but what that might be they never said. They do believe that part of what we must shed in seeking union with God is our emotions. These they think are essentially worldly. Surely feelings like fear, or love, have are 204

The idea of God as outside space and time misleads the Platonists, he says, because all is inside God. This misconception warped the Platonists’ strategy of how to get to God because, for them, only their minds would be saved.

Lecture 10—Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9)

physical in nature, and thus cannot be part of the deepest truth of the universe. They didn’t know much about God, but they were certain that God could not feel anything. ››

The Platonists were not wholly wrong about our need of help in realizing God’s loving presence in this world. Instead, against Platonic pride, we need a mediator who is Christ, the true presence of God in our midst. Eternal and stable like God, but temporal and material like ourselves, Christ is the mediator that the demons can never be.

Union with God „„

But this Christ is no mediator; Christ bypasses the whole idea of mediation entirely, Christ just is God. In this, Augustine violates a basic principle of the ancient metaphysical imagination: that like can only be known by like. For him, the Incarnation shows no fundamental divide exists between layers of reality. All is more joined together than set apart.

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Nor were the Platonists wrong that purification was required to join with this God. But the purification required, the sacrifice, is undertaken by Christ as humanity’s great high priest, and the purification is given to us by God in our walk through our lives. And for either of these to work you must accept Christ. Thus the first act of true philosophy is loving God and submitting humbly to God’s presence.

„„

Augustine’s point about the dangers of imagining God’s transcendence in terms of distance may be of some interest existentially even today. For there may be analogous social forces shaping our imaginations in ways that make it harder for us to see God. When we see the world, we see only blank walls, cleverly camouflaged as faces or trees or buildings or books, upon which we project our self-fashioned hypotheses. 205

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Augustine thinks all of this is a lie. In truth we are present to one another and to the world. And the truth that guarantees this truth—our presence—the truth that is present before all the other presences is God. We are thoroughly secondary. Perhaps Augustine’s vision of how transcendence can secure presence, not forbid it, may be of use today.

Questions to Consider 1. Can you be genuinely happy if you are mortal (chapters 14–16)? Who or what, for Augustine, secures the happiness of the just people of the world? 2. For the Platonists, how is God concerned with Creation, and how not? Can the Platonic demiurge be compared to Christ as the Son of God in the Trinity? How do the two visions have similar functions, and how do they differ?

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Lecture 10 Transcript

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et’s recap where we are. What Augustine does in books 1–10 is challenge the pagans on their own ground about a topic that they and Augustine both hold significant: the nature of happiness and the plausible human routes to achieving it. Now, happiness is a particular culturally concrete word—our word—where we try to signify, imperfectly, what we take to be a human universal. We all want to be happy. It’s not that every human through history would self-consciously recognize this as their main aspiration, but we would all at least find that description of our lives intelligible once it was explained to us. It certainly was the case for pretty much everyone in Augustine’s world. If he had wanted this to be a book simply about worldly success, he could have stopped at Book 5. But he goes on. Why does he go on? Because there’s another kind of happiness than this-worldly happiness, and this is philosophical, otherworldly, contemplative happiness. And while this-worldly happiness is a reasonably straightforward topic, when Augustine engages religious and philosophical thinkers, the nonmaterial and theological dimensions of the debate really come into their own. Books 6 and 7, as we saw, are about Roman public religion, the religion of Rome. Augustine thinks this kind of religiosity is terribly instrumentalist, smugly transactional, and ends in idolatrous demon worship, which leads to happiness to nobody, while the Roman intellectuals who might have helped it are confused about the divine and cowardly before the populace, and so they fail to announce what they very well know; namely, that the Romans, in being this way religious, are worshipping delusions.

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Now, in Books 8 and 9, Augustine begins to engage those he feels most thoughtful among the pagans on this issue, namely the Platonists. For them, happiness is not found securely in this world, but only in the transcendent realm above or beyond or beneath this world—the realm of the unchanging stabilities upon which our world of flux abides. This is interesting not least because Augustine is often said to be a Platonist, and indeed he agrees that happiness has no settled home in the material world, that we must seek it in a transcendent God beyond. But here he also shows how deeply he disagrees with the Platonists’ picture of the world. They’re flawed, he thinks, in misunderstanding who that one true God truly is, and how we can access such a god. So he debates the Platonists over two big questions. First, who is this God? What does it mean to call God Creator? Second, how is God related to us? This is the question of mediation. What mediates between God and us? What makes us and God able to relate? How exactly can God be said to care about Creation in general and our worldly and material embodied existence in particular? Once again, as was the case with the earlier books, Augustine here uses his opponents to make a larger constructive point. Here, he shows how the Platonists exemplify one way of misunderstanding God and God’s plan for us. This helps him demonstrate something of what he thinks it would be to succeed at understanding God’s role as Creator and how God is thereby related positively to the world. In other words, Augustine uses this critical encounter with his opponents to communicate, somewhat indirectly, a great deal about his own metaphysical theology. Thus, again, we see how even the putatively defensive and apologetic first half of The City of God is part of a larger positive project of Christian pedagogy. As I have said before, he uses a method throughout this that is best called therapeutic. And now we see that there is a deeply pedagogical 208

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aim in play here too, making it a handbook for Christian life in the world. Much of what he’s trying to do is make us see our language as not natural or necessary, but as imperfect and able to be improved. This is why so many of the books discuss the meaning of particular words. Book 8 does too, beginning with a fundamental etymological question: what does it mean to use this word philosophy? Philosophy, he says, is loving wisdom in order to be truly happy. But then, what does happiness mean? He undertakes an erudite consideration of various philosophical schools on these positions, their various definitions of happiness. For the Stoics, he says, happiness is nonturbulence or peace. For the Epicureans, happiness is an enjoyment of reasonably low-level pleasures. But he thinks that neither of them is as deep or as insightful as the Platonists. The Platonists are the most astute philosophers because they focus on morality and purification. They affirm that happiness is the fusion of practical and contemplative aims, and they affirm both the body/soul tension in humans, but God’s transcendence of Creation. That is, they manage to apprehend what other philosophers fail to apprehend— namely, the distinction between Creator and created, immutable and mutable, and that we can have some intuition of this distinction, and that we in the mutable realm can reach the immutable. They dimly perceive something truly profound and even exhilarating. Divine transcendence means that any literal language of distance cannot properly capture God’s transcendence, and this enables God’s transcendence to be equally present to and equally distant from all Creation. The Platonists, that is, truly imagined radical transcendence, in a way that the other, to Augustine’s mind, lesser philosophical schools and thinkers—the Epicureans, maybe the Stoics, Varro—did not. The Platonists also realized that human happiness consists in the eternal enjoyment of this transcendent God. For them, happiness was found by purifying your attachments and values so that your inner, 209

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immaterial, rational, and transcendent self could once again rise to reunion with the One, its source. This union could be accomplished by imitating the disinterested, passionless nature of the gods as far as humans can, thereby becoming like the Divine, and ascending ever more highly into the likeness, and culminating finally in a union of indistinguishability with the One. True and complete stillness and imperturbability—what the Greeks called apatheia—is the aim, and this is reached via very determined and intentional training in the philosophical schools. But almost the same outcome can be produced by engaging in theurgy, sacrifice, and other ritual practices of traditional Greco-Roman religion. But here Augustine begins to criticize the Platonists, for they err tragically in assuming this God needs mediators to relate to this world, and I’m quoting Augustine here: They do not consider that the worship of one unchangeable God is sufficient for the attainment of a life of blessedness even after death, but suppose that for this end many gods are to be worshipped, gods who were created and established by him.

So much Augustine. That is to say, they still believe we need mediators to get to God, who is fundamentally elsewhere—not immediately and intimately concerned with the world. And that conviction, for Augustine, led the Platonists to worship demons. Now, the Platonists imagined demons in a slightly different way than other Romans and Greeks did, and they did not worship them in some sort of Black Mass sort of fashion, despite what Augustine says. On their understanding, the demons do not encourage their devotees to engage in theatricals but in theurgical rituals. These demons are much more like deliverymen, the old hotel messengers, moving from floor to floor of different levels of metaphysical reality, undertaking commerce between the transient realm of materiality and the transcendent realms of spirit. So they’re much nicer. 210

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But the immediate and functional problem with the Platonists’ understanding of demons, the problem Augustine argues the Platonists should recognize as a self-contradiction, is that they are positioned backward, as it were, to be proper mediators. The demons are like us in ways that mean they share our maladies, but they are like gods in ways that mean they can never change. In other words, their godlike immortality is corporeal, while their human commonality is spiritual and psychological. The demons suffer impermanent passions, which makes them like us and thus incapable of mediating between us and the infinite stability of God to secure our permanent happiness. We need the opposite to help us mediate. As we have seen, Augustine has very little time for the demons in general. He says, in fact, that the pagan gods were dead men whom the pagans once valued, and whose identities had been usurped by the demons once they had gone to their grave. The demons, that is, imitate corpses, for Augustine. That is a pathetic fate for the fallen angels, first of all—to be reduced to such chicanery—but it also suggests something of the foolishness of the Platonists for heeding them. Now, Augustine is not opposed to recognizing and giving due honor to spiritual beings other than God, of course. Christians honor their martyrs, but not as mediators or demigods. Christians are called to worship only God. No one should worship the dead or honor them through sacrifice; they imitate them, and honor them by worshipping the god they worshipped. But the real problem with the Platonists is not actually their dalliance with demons. The real problem, the deepest problem, is the failure of imagination about God and Creation that backs them into that dalliance with the demons. Platonists are attracted by the idea of demons, Augustine thinks, because they assume God needs mediation, and they assume God needs mediation because they think God is fundamentally not interested in the world. 211

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The Platonists assume God is uninterested in the world because they cannot imagine a God so loving of the world as to remain intimately and immediately engaged with it. They cannot conceive that God might be not averse to being directly touched, that God might want actually to reach us. They cannot imagine that God has real, unsponsored, and unprompted and, really, unwarranted love for humanity. The Platonists imagine God must be more like a ward boss than a loving parent. They fail, that is, because they have a poor theological imagination. They cannot imagine that God could love the world so much as to want to plunge into it. Now, note that this also entails a deeply negative vision of material reality itself. It may be that the vision of God as supremely immaterial, and materiality as itself nothing but disgusting and likely to be dead matter, exist as two sides of the same coin, in which case we can’t be sure which caused which. All we really know is that the Platonists affirm both. Platonists’ vision of God as fundamentally repulsed by material reality is paired with a basically escapist strategy for their own getting to God, which itself in turn implied to them the anthropological claim that we are not naturally, properly worldly, but exiles in materiality. Platonism in general—on Augustine’s reading, and in particular the Neoplatonists who he knew best—imagine our journey to God as a flight from the world, because they believe in the ancient philosophical maxim that like could only be known by like, and so we and God can come together in our mutual essential difference from materiality. And here we see the great pathos of the Platonists’ perplexity. The Platonists realize, with tremendous intellectual effort, that there was a truly transcendent Creator of all, whose transcendence put all Creation equally indeterminately distant from the Creator. But they did not see that this Creator was willed with unconditional love for creation, and so they assumed, silently, never questioning it or even realizing it could be questioned, that God is by nature fundamentally separate from and indifferent to creation, and that creation could 212

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never be the kind of host for divine presence. They underestimated the love of God and the lovability of creation. Everything about their imagination of the way the world works encouraged them to think this way. It was, that is, not just a failure of metaphysical imagination, but of social and cultural imagination as well, both about what let people associate, and about what kept people apart. First: association. Understand that the ancient world, in heaven as on earth, was all about connections. The Greeks and the Romans were great believers in networks, in who you knew, what network you were a part of, who your patron was, who your underlings were, what team you were on. In the ancient world, your very identity depended very much on what networks you were a part of. From this, a basic ethics emerged: you should help your friends and harm your enemies. And please don’t think these important questions are of no interest to us now. Just consider the rise of political partisanship in America over the past few decades. Thus, these networks organized your whole life, and so it was no surprise that potential pagan converts, when they thought about converting to Christianity, were deeply worried about what would happen to their network access when they converted. One large question always was: will this action cut me off from my sources of patronage and social legitimacy? In its own way, this is a very political question. Second: segregation. In the ancient world, different classes of people didn’t mix, and especially those higher up do not concern themselves with those who scuttle along far below them. So the Platonists’ vision of transcendence was trapped, in a way, in their snobbishness. The gates at the entry to the palace of the Divine, the One, would not open for just any illiterate peasant who knocked; nor could any sparrow, or any grain of sand, occupy the interest or concern of Divinity for even the slightest instant. 213

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They assumed an image of God as a Roman nobleman, who would never sully himself by descending down to the distasteful lower classes, with their sweat and their smells. And they imagined material reality as just that sort of disgusting, noisy, crass reality that is the lower classes. They see the transcendence of God from creation— the Platonists do—but they imagine that transcendence as akin to the hauteur of ancient nobility over against the proles, not the agapic passion of a loving parent who would do anything for their child. They could not conceive that a transcendent Creator might take any kind of interest in, let alone an immediate and lively concern for, such lowly creatures. In the end, then, the Platonists’ social prejudices forced them to surrender their deepest metaphysical insight. Their good initial metaphysical conception of God’s radical transcendence from Creation was vexed by their fear of God’s pollution by matter, their fear of contaminating God, their fixation on a mistaken conception of divine purity, and their imposition of multiple layers of mediation between our world and God’s. All this works to corrode their conception of divine transcendence, and to encourage them to mistake distance and distaste for holiness. And, for Augustine, this is their great error. God’s holiness and transcendence is not a matter of the Divine being afraid of getting cooties from the material world. In fact, God loves us, and has come to us in the history of revelation as seen through the history of the people Israel, and then preeminently in the figure of Jesus Christ. And this explains his complaint about the Platonists. They see that there is a God, but they fail to see how we are related to this God, how God is perpetually involved in the world without compromising the Divine’s transcendence. They think that God finds materiality distasteful, and so they disdain to make any effort to imagine that God as reaching us, and thus presume it is up to us, that we must get to God. And so they thrash around, Augustine says, in the darkness of their confusions, for aids in that endeavor, that project of getting to 214

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God. And that’s when they stumble upon the demons, or perhaps the demons present themselves to them. In this light, Augustine’s critique of the demons, his demonstration that the demons cannot be mediators of God because they support the moral depravities that Plato and the Platonists rightly condemn, and so the demons are impure, all of this is to the point for the Platonists, but it doesn’t get to their basic problem. They see that God is transcendent, that the contingencies of this world cannot be the ultimate framework of the universe, that creation needs a true creator. So they see the goal, but they do not see the road to that goal, nor do they see that God has already traversed that road, that God has come to you, as Augustine puts it. And to respond to this visitation, our first task is to humble ourselves to receive this grace. But God helps us with that task, too. These differences relate to radically different visions of Creation itself. If you see the world as a place of exile and distance from God, you will disvalue the world in quite fundamental ways. If you imagine that God’s dignity is secured by being inaccessibly distant from us, many trillions of light years away from the muddy tumult and noisy pandemonium of this world, you will conceive God’s sovereignty as akin to the cold light of a distant star. But what if God’s sovereignty is so profound that God has no need of self-protection from us? What if God’s transcendence is not a matter of distance? Or what if the distance between God and you is entirely confined to the three-inch span of your heart? Perhaps God’s transcendence is simultaneously the most immediate thing—so intimate you cannot but feel it—and yet also the most indistinguishable thing, because its presence is never interrupted by an absence, and so therefore we never know it discreetly. Instead of thinking of God’s transcendence in terms of the idiom of distance, then, consider it as a form of relentless immediacy—the roar you can almost hear behind the silence, the pressure in your eardrums, on your skin, as if someone were pushing down on them from another 215

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dimension altogether. That is what Augustine wants us to think of God’s transcendence, as paradoxically infinitely absent and also infinitely present. For Augustine, there is no place in all of Creation where God is not accessible to us. The idea of God as outside space and time misleads the Platonists, he says, because all is inside God, as it were. In the Confessions, Augustine says that God is “closer to me than I am.” Closer to me than I am—it’s an incredibly paradoxical but profound insight. That kind of intimacy can’t be accomplished; it can’t be achieved; it can’t be earned. If it’s there, it’s always already there, before anything you do. Now the Platonists’ misconception warped their strategy of how to get to God as well, for it would only be a part of them—their minds, their spirits, their immateriality—that would be saved. The rest of them would fall away, as they desired, and that was another problem. They could not imagine that they as whole created creatures would be saved, but only some part of them. They could not imagine that, fundamentally, the material world could be valued by a truly transcendent God. Again, they began with a good principle, one that Augustine shared, namely, that to get to God we must become like God and flee, in some sense, this world. And furthermore, these acts—becoming like God, and fleeing this world—are kind of one act. But they did not understand that the world that was to be fled was not fundamentally one of our meat, but one of our improper care for our meat, improper investment in our bodies. Augustine did not think all of this up on his own; he claimed—and there’s no reason to doubt him—that it came to him by thinking through the meaning of the Incarnation, of God becoming human and fully taking on human flesh, a story that he finds in the Scriptures. But, of course, to discover that, he had to humble his mind to the discipline of the Scriptures, which is something, he says, the Platonists refuse to do. 216

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And because they did not do this, the Platonists’ practiced a religion centered around an underspecified union and an overemphasized hostility to human affection and attachment. They imagine that the aim is union with God, but what that might amount to they never say, except that it is radically unlike our current existence. What they do believe, however, is that part of what we must shed in seeking union with God is our emotions. And so they, like other philosophers, flee feeling, and seek something they call apatheia, which is the condition of being without emotions, feelings, passion. These, they think, are essentially worldly, essentially meat. Surely feelings like fear or love have physical basis in nature, and thus cannot be part of the deepest truth of the universe. They didn’t know much about God, but they were damned certain that God could not feel anything. And damned certain, for Augustine, they remained. The Platonists were not wholly wrong, then, about our need of help in realizing God’s loving presence in this world. It is not an intermediating semi-demi-hemi-divinity who does this, however. Instead, against Platonic pride, we need a mediator who is Christ, the true presence of God in our midst. Eternal and stable like God, but temporal and material like ourselves, Christ is the true mediator that the demons could never be. But, in fact, this Christ is no mediator at all. This Christ bypasses the whole idea of mediation entirely—Christ just is God. In this, Augustine violates a basic principle of the ancient metaphysical imagination, the principle of metaphysical apartheid that I mentioned earlier in this lecture, that like can only be known by like. In fact, he says the Incarnation shows that there is no fundamental divide between layers of reality; all is more joined together than set apart. That is a radical metaphysical claim whose implications are still being worked out today.

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Nor were the Platonists wrong that purification was required to join with this God. But the purification required, the theurgy undertaken, is undertaken first and foremost by Christ as humanity’s great high priest, and the purification is given to us by God in our walk through our lives. And for either of these to work, you need, first and foremost, to accept Christ. Thus, the first act of true philosophy is loving God, submitting humbly to God’s presence in your life, and this is the irony of the Platonists’ brilliance. For all that they got right, a simple Christian, Augustine says, unschooled in anything but Scripture, will still learn all of their wisdom on the first day of their catechumenate teachings. Now, in contrast to the Platonists’ vision of flight or escape, Augustine uses the metaphor of pilgrim to describe the most basic character of human existence in the world. Once we’ve accepted Christ, Augustine thinks, we become pilgrims through the earthly city to true society, but we are still now traversing God’s creation. Indeed, journeying, for Augustine, is part of what the human life is about, for sinner as well as saint. Cain builds a city, we’ve seen, and Abel does not—he’s a shepherd, and also, Augustine says, because of that, a pilgrim. But after the murder, Cain becomes a kind of sinful parody of a pilgrim, a restless wanderer across the face of the earth, with no home and also no hope of a home. No one escapes the condition of wandering, that is. The issue is only to what end do your wanderings tend. It’s worth noting that while we think the language of pilgrim is a relatively respectable metaphor for Christianity, it was far from that in Augustine’s day. First of all, journeying was a much more dangerous proposition in Augustine’s day than it is in our own. Roman roads were among the most great engineering achievements of the ancient world, but they were still very different from ours—different and dangerous. Our roads are built primarily for transport of goods and for large trucks; they’re made wide and smooth, and very easy to travel. But 218

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before 1900 even, most roads were terrible—dirt or mud, rutted and narrow, running alongside fields. Most roads in Europe, even today, are still terrifyingly narrow, which anyone who has driven on them can attest. And what roads were built in the ancient world were built between cities; there was a faint spiderweb of roads, and then cities, placed on a great loamy mound of fields and farms and forests. In fact, very few people traveled at all, let alone traveled any distance. Remember, most people never traveled farther than 15 miles from where they were born, throughout their life. I bet some of you commute quite a bit farther than that every day. In such a context, to say something positive about a life spent wandering far from home is to say something quite counterintuitive. Beyond the larger physical and material problems with this metaphor, there were discreet theological ones, as well. Most other Christian authorities didn’t like the idea of pilgrimage. It was a well-known practice, and considered something that people were likely to do from time to time, but it was considered spiritually mistaken by the authorities. The Greek theologian Gregory of Nyssa wrote a letter to monks arguing against pilgrimage. There, he argued that God need not be sought at a distance; God is very near at all times. Clearly, Augustine agreed with that claim, and Augustine agreed with these worries, somewhat. God is not far from us, not in space—God is only a heartbeat away, if that, he says. But he also saw something powerful and positive in the practice of journeying. In accepting the language of pilgrimage, Augustine is subtly resisting the presumption that elite authorities know better what is really Christian and what is not. In fact, the populace could teach the elites something here, he thought. For this language, understood metaphorically, powerfully brings into focus the drama of Christian life as a whole. Peregrina, this metaphor, is a good metaphor for our journey to God, but not as one fundamentally about space. It is indeed our destiny to follow Jesus, Augustine says, and thus to be a pilgrim, but what 219

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that following amounts to is not so much a travel through space. He makes this point many times, perhaps most vividly in a sermon where he says imus autem non ambulando, sed amando: we follow not by walking—non ambulando—but by loving—sed amando. The Christian life has a level of voyaging and narration attached to it, but the notion of pilgrimage was more of a peregrination through time than it is one through space. It’s no accident that Augustine both emphasized the notion of pilgrimage and was the Church father most attuned to questions of narrative, plot, and the story-formed shape of the Christian life, and the idea that story itself could have a theological significance. We will see very soon, starting with Book 11, how deeply dramatic and story-formed was his understanding of the true nature of Creation and the life of the Christian within it. There’re just a couple last things to note here, and one is a rhetorical point. Remember, he began Book 8 with a discussion of the word philosophy. “What is it?” he said. Now we know. In fact, philosophy is not best found in the philosophers at all. True philosophy, true love of wisdom, is found in church. We’ll see him expand this claim in the next lecture, in book 10. Second, Augustine’s point about the dangers of imagining God’s transcendence in terms of distance may be of some interest existentially to some of this audience even today, whatever your own theological views, for there may be analogous social forces shaping our imaginations in ways that make it harder for us to see God and see our world as one that is infinitely potentially valuable. Today, we don’t live in a world of ancient social networks, we live in an age of individualism and the value of privacy, and in this world many of us see no way to imagine ourselves except as essentially, fundamentally alone, and of the world as an archipelago of alterities, a constellation of solitudes. We think, when we see the world, we see only blank walls, cleverly camouflaged as faces or trees or buildings or books, upon which we project our self-fashioned hypotheses. 220

Lecture 10 Transcript—Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9)

We believe reality is inaccessible to us, and we are inaccessible to reality, and to each other. We moderns typically possess a very lonely metaphysic. Augustine thinks all of this is a lie, a mistake, a madness that we try to inhabit. In truth, we are present to one another, and to the world. And the truth that guarantees this truth, the truth that guarantees our presence, the truth that is present before all the other presences, for him, is God. We are thoroughly secondary. Perhaps Augustine’s vision of how transcendence can secure presence, not forbid it, may even be of use, far from its native land, today.

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Sacrifice and Ritual (Book 10)

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nce we have realized that God is marked not only by absolute transcendence but also by an equally absolute selfless love, we can go on to ask the next question: If God loves us as much as this, then what are we to do in return? Clearly there can be no payback for God’s love: It is unilateral and immeasurable. It produces in us an infinite obligation, to be sure, but what sort of obligation? And how can an infinite obligation be met?

The Need for Theurgy „„

Book 10 contains Augustine’s crucial discussion of the rival understandings of how humanity properly responds to God’s reaching out to Creation. If the Platonists are wrong, how do we thankfully repay God? To whom is piety due? How do we demonstrate that piety?

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The answer is about the nature of worship and sacrifice, as pagans and Christians understand these terms. For Augustine the issue is a matter of the distinct nature of the Christian community, the church, that is called into being by Jesus Christ. True piety is inseparable from ethics, mercy and compassion, and doing works of mercy as participation in God’s plan. ›› The focus on ethics was relatively unusual in the Roman world. Ancient religion was frankly transactional. You get things from the gods in return for giving things to the gods. Augustine says that religion is not the best word to describe this exchange, because it refers to actions not confined to God—one can treat one’s ancestors or one’s city with religious devotion, for example.

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››

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The word Augustine thinks best is the Greek word latreia, meaning service and worship. The main connotation is effort over time, generally organized communally, directed at supernatural ends—a gift to God or the gods. In short, whom do we serve, whose glory do we work for?

For Platonists, our service of the gods is embodied in theurgy, effective use of such devices as rituals and strategies of appeal and inducement to get what you want from immaterial beings. And the need for theurgy turns on the Platonists’ belief that we need some mediator to get access to God. For Augustine, these mediators are the demons. ›› Basically the demons they invoke and serve, in the mistaken hopes that those demons will serve them, are wrongly aligned genuinely to give the philosophers access to the divine. Augustine frames this very pointedly: The demons have knowledge but no compassion. ››

To Augustine, the demons have knowledge, but it is the useless knowledge that inflates the ego without illuminating the mind; it is “knowledge without love.”

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It is indeed a certain description of Hell, to know and yet be unmoved by that knowledge. The problem for the demons is not just that they’ve been there; it’s that they live there. They know their rebellion is futile, but they cannot admit that knowledge in a way that would enable them to change, to return to God.

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In contrast to the demons, Christ is a perfect mediator between human and divine: the one and perfect sacrifice, the Christians’ great high priest and inaugurator of Christian liturgy, teacher of worship, and great exemplar of proper action in this world.

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Christ as Mediator „„

The real mediator is God in Christ. Christ comes to us and becomes human without losing his divinity. And Christ is moved for us, but not fundamentally by us. Christ chooses to see and Christ chooses to love, for the entire triune God has chosen to see and love. Christ can mediate properly, because Christ is both true human (created flesh) and true God (eternally unchanging).

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The invisible God makes God’s engagement with humans visible in a way they can bear—in the Law and the story of Israel and then in the person of Jesus the Messiah, the Christ. ›› Christ’s very presence puts us in touch with the triune God in God’s very being. ››

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The mediation of Christ is a matter of sacrifice, to be sure; but it is not fundamentally our sacrifice. The real sacrifice is Christ’s death on the Cross, which Christ himself enacts. ›› Christ is the wholly innocent victim and thus the perfect sacrifice for our wrongs done to God—the most valuable offering humanity can make, untainted by the crime being propitiated: this is the old reading of the atonement, and of the sacrifice as reparation. ››

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Christ’s deeds are ways of having our attention directed toward the divine: In contrast to theurgy, the miracles wrought by Christ always refer to higher things; they always lift us up to contemplate and love the true God.

Christ voluntarily and finally repays all the debts incurred in our rebellion against God. The sufferings we suffer because of our membership in the line of Adam and Eve are no more.

In this transaction Christ is both true sacrificer and true and truly sacrificed, the great high priest and the sacrificed Lamb of God. In this way, Jesus is the true high priest and only theurgist. 224

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God wants us to do likewise—and so for Augustine, the human response to God’s loving acts, construed as sacrifice, only makes sense in light of this one true sacrifice of Christ.

Christian Sacrifice „„

The key feature of all true sacrifices for humans is a change of heart—an act of inner contrition that gives all glory to God and turns to our neighbors with mercy in our hearts. ›› Yet these outward sacrifices cannot be confused with the true sacrifice. That was Christ’s doing, and it was fundamentally an act of compassion—of feeling one with humanity. ››

„„

The church participates in the work of Christ by becoming the compassion of Christ, by repeating its memorials of Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharist and in acts of compassion and mercy in the world.

This vision of compassion, misericordia, is unlike anything the pagan philosophers offer. ›› For the Stoics, one can have a certain kind of pity for the world, but only insofar as one does not identify with that world and does not allow oneself to be moved by that world. But that is just what Christ did: Christ did indeed feel true compassion and was moved by the world’s suffering. ››

The problem with the Stoics is that they do not want us to be so vulnerable to the world. They imagine a region of radical privacy, an invulnerable citadel of the rational will which can always be locked from the inside.

››

For Augustine, this is misconceived in both directions. The world is always in us, and we in the world, and besides, so is sin, so the putative enemy is always already inside the gates.

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„„

There is no way not to partake of this world’s passions unless we seek to flee our humanity altogether. Happily, God is always more inside us than we are, so our choices are to deny the kind of creatures we are and the kind of creation in which we exist, or to accept them and make of our souls and bodies, a living sacrifice to God, as Christ has shown us how to do.

„„

In this way, our full sacrifice is threefold, and in three directions, up, in, and out: ›› It is a sacrifice of our excessive care for this world, which releases us from bondage to it and allows us to ascend to God. ››

It is the sacrifice of inward contrition, of regret for our own excessive self-love, which releases us from undue self-regard.

››

It is the sacrifice of that undue self-regard that allows us to use ourselves to go out to the neighbor in compassion.

The Purification of Happiness „„

Not all mercy is properly oriented, and so not all mercy is sacrifice. The issue is the end to which you dedicated the sacrifice of your deeds. This proper directedness does not lead immediately to proper joy, but it does The problem with the Stoics is lead there eventually. It that they do not want us to be is the way that we imitate so vulnerable to the world. They Christ and thus become like him. Hence the climax imagine a region of radical privacy, of right service to God, an invulnerable citadel of the which is compassion, is the purification of happiness. rational will which can always be

„„

The that

locked from the inside.

Platonists recognize such purification is 227

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necessary, but they fail to see that it has been accomplished by Christ because they cannot imagine that a human being could actually convey the presence of God to us. If the Platonists had understood, they would have seen the world as sacramental, as a mystery, meaning more than its bare literality. „„

The key sacrament—the one on which the whole sacramentality of creation relies—is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But that sacramental action on the part of God means that all creation in its diverse ways speaks of that mystery, if we only have eyes to see it. The key here is that the world is not to be disdained or anxiously manipulated, but instead gratefully admired and delighted in as a sign of God’s love for humanity.

„„

We can see this only when we understand that the question we must ask is, not how do we sacrifice to get to God, but how do we become the sacrifice that God is working within us to be and to do? For us to see the sacramentality of the world, we must accept that we ourselves are being used by God.

„„

At the end of book 10, then, Christianity has emerged as the best source for religion and philosophy. There is a parallel here between the understanding of political happiness that ends book 5 (“happy in hope”) and the discussion in this book about how true philosophy and religion lead to our ultimate blessedness.

Questions to Consider 1. Augustine finds important common ground for disputing the main opponents in book 10, chapter 1: “the Platonists.” He finally rejects the Platonists as failing to realize something important about God: that we don’t need to “get to God,” because God has come to us.

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2. How is it, in book 10, that we show God the service that is God’s due? What is the right form of sacrifice that we should make? What does Augustine think of the sacrifices that the Platonists make? 3. What do you think of Augustine’s accusation that the Platonists’ apparent tolerance of rival religions is fundamentally a matter of cowardice?

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A

Sacrifice and Ritual (Book 10)

s we’ve seen, Augustine’s major criticism of the Platonists in Books 8 and 9 is that they fail to conceive or realize that God can truly love the world and be intimately concerned with it, even unto the extent of immersing Godself into it in the form of Christ. The pathos of this insight, for Augustine, lies in how close the Platonists came to getting it all right. They understood the truly absolute nature of Divine transcendence, and the way that that transcendence explains what it means to call God truly Creator. With all their hard-won knowledge, all their genius, they missed the next, the most theoretically improbable step—the realization that this Divinity is marked not only by absolute transcendence but also by an equally absolute selfless love. Once we’ve realized this, Augustine thinks, we can go on to ask the next question, which is simple. If God loves us as much as this, then what are we to do in return? Clearly there can be no payback for God’s love—it’s unilateral and immeasurable. It produces in us a kind of infinite obligation, to be sure, but what sort of obligation? And how can an infinite obligation be met? Once we know who God is, and how God is in touch with us, what then? What should we do? For Platonists, our service of the gods is embodied in a practice of effective theurgy. We talked about this phrase, this term, last time. Theurgy is the use of various devices—rituals and incantations, strategies of appeal and inducement—to get immaterial beings to do what you want them to do. And again, as we’ve already seen, the need for theurgy turns on the Platonists’ belief that we need some mediator to get access to God. This assumes several things. First of all, it assumes God is very distant, so we must purge ourselves to get to this God. Second, it assumes that insofar as God is in 230

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communication with materiality, God does not engage directly but uses mediators. So we must engage those mediators with theurgy. The problem with this program, as Augustine tried to make clear in Books 8 and 9, is simple: theurgy fails, and its failure teaches us something about the nature of our cosmos, if we have ears to hear it. We don’t need to get to God; God has come to us. So Book 10 contains Augustine’s crucial discussion of the rival understandings of how humanity properly responds to God’s reaching out to Creation. And just as Book 8, remember, began with an etymological discussion of the meaning of philosophy, so, tellingly, Book 10 begins with a discussion of the meanings of words like religion and worship and service and piety. If the Platonists are wrong, how do we thankfully repay God? To whom is piety due? What is the nature of our religion? And how do we demonstrate that piety? The answer turns out to be something about the nature of worship and sacrifice, as pagans and Christians understand these terms, and for Augustine, there’s a big debate here. This issue is a matter of ecclesiology—a matter, that is, of the distinct nature of the Christian community, the Church, that is called into being by Jesus Christ. How should humans worship this God? What means can humans use to get to God in worship? These are questions that the Church asks and answers. The rituals, sacrifices, instruments—sacred and profane— that we should use to approach God, these are the Church’s instruments. As we will see, true piety turns out to be inseparable from ethics for Augustine, from mercy and compassion—in Latin, misericordia—and the carrying out of works of mercy are done not as a payback but as a participation in God’s plan. This focus on ethics as central to religion was relatively unusual in the Roman world. Ancient religion was, quite frankly, transactional. You get things from the gods in return for giving things to the gods. How best to describe this rhythm of exchange between us and immaterial beings? Interestingly, Augustine says that religio—religion—is not the best word to describe this exchange, because it refers to actions 231

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not confined to God. One can treat one’s ancestors or one’s city with religious devotion, with what he calls pietas, or piety. This shows you something of how different our senses of these words are that Augustine’s world had a debate that, once it was settled, we are the recipients of the victory of that debate. We’ve already talked a bit about the role of sacrifice in earlier books, but here is where that discussion really comes to a climax. Thus, service or sacrifice is really the keyword of this Book 10. But what is the right sacrifice to give to God? The word Augustine thinks best here is the Greek word latreia; it means service and worship. It’s interestingly etymologically related to our word idolatry, the worship of idols. He likes this word for its capaciousness, and he returns to it repeatedly. Sometimes, Augustine also uses the Latin word colere, meaning cult—culture and cultivation—in talking about latreia. But whatever the word used, the main connotation that he’s trying to get across here is effort over time, generally organized communally, directed at supernatural ends. This is the sacrificing, in the broadest sense of that term, something—a gift, your time, your dedication, your effort—to God or to the gods. In short, what is this latreia for us? Whom do we serve? Whose glory do we work for? In short, then, Book 10 is the climax of Augustine’s argument about what religion should be for the Romans, and for humans more generally. It’s a summary of and capstone to what’s come before, and it’s a gateway into Books 11–22, which will, spooling out, tell us the real story of true religion. Book 10 begins with Augustine recapitulating the problem that the Platonists have with theurgy, and explaining why it won’t put them in flourishing contact with God. Basically the demons they invoke and serve, in the mistaken hopes that those demons will serve them, are wrongly aligned genuinely to give the philosophers access to the divine. Augustine frames this very pointedly: the demons, in a 232

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way, have knowledge but they have no compassion; intellect, but no feeling. This representation of a demon’s psychic state has larger implications for Augustine that will become important for thinking about the human condition—in this book, and in the rest of the work. To Augustine, the demons’ situation throws an indirect light on our own. For him, the demons know. Daimon, according to Plato, in Greek, signified knowledge; but this is the useless knowledge that inflates the ego but does not illuminate the mind. It is, in Augustine’s terms, knowledge without love. Theirs is an inert, spectatorial knowledge, a knowledge that does not motivate them at all, does not move them to do anything. It is indeed a certain description of Hell, to know what is the right and yet be unmoved by any capacity to do that right. We’ve all been there, of course. We’ve all been in a situation where we know what the right thing to do is, where we know something is bad for us, or for others, and yet we do it anyway. Or we know something is good for us, and yet we do not do it. Aristotle called this akrasia: weakness of will. But the problem for the demons is not just that they’ve been there, like us. The problem for the demons is that they live there—that is their continuous condition, all the time. Somewhere inside them, they know that their rebellion is futile, but they cannot admit that knowledge to themselves, cannot recognize it in any way that would make it efficacious for them to change, to remove rebellion, to return to God. The truth is a knowledge they can’t properly bear to admit. They are incredibly strong, incredibly stubborn, in some ways, but in this one way they are inhumanly weak. They can never admit they were wrong. They are, as it were, too damned determined to have things their own way. And, as with the demons, so with the Platonists. They rightly see transcendence of our blessedness is in God, but they fail to see that God has come to us, and so their efforts at mediation fail, because their knowledge of God’s transcendence is tragically inert. In contrast 233

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to the demons, Christ is a perfect mediator, we saw, between things human and divine. But Christ as a mediator, for Augustine, upends our expectations about what that mediation must be. So here, in Book 10, Augustine uses this debate to explore the nature of Jesus Christ as the true mediator, the one and perfect sacrifice, and the Christians’ great High Priest and inaugurator of Christian liturgy—that is, the Christians’ great teacher of worship, and the great exemplar of proper action in this world. Augustine’s God, preeminently visible in Christ but presented throughout the Scriptures, is not like the classical gods of Greece and Rome. As we saw in the last lecture, the best devotees of those gods—the Platonists—are too trapped by the social imagination of Ancient Rome, and so imagine their divinities inaccessible by direct appeal to lowlifes such as ourselves. That is to say, the pagan Greeks and Romans assumed, even demanded, that their gods remain marble, immobile, rigid, inflexible, unbending. They did not allow their gods to change or respond to prayers or sacrifice. They could not feel compassion. For union, the higher never condescends to stoop to the lower; it is rather up to the lower to convert and rise to the higher, and then become assimilated into the same immobile character as the higher principle. For them, motion or dynamism of any sort was a sign of weakness or imperfection. But if the real mediator is God in Christ, Christ makes the first move, for Augustine. Christ comes down to us, and becomes human without losing his divinity. And Christ is moved for us, if not fundamentally by us. Christ chooses to see, and Christ chooses to love, for the entire Triune God has chosen to see and love. Hence, Christ can mediate properly, because Christ has chosen to be both true human—created flesh—and true God—eternally unchanging and thus untroubled by any turbulence. This invisible God makes Godself visible in a way that viewers can bear—in the Law and the story of Israel, and then preeminently in the person of Jesus the Messiah, the Christ. And this very presence of 234

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Christ puts us in touch with the Triune God in God’s own being. And Christ’s deeds are also ways of having our attention directed toward the divine, for in contrast to theurgy, the miracles wrought by Christ always refer, Augustine says, to higher things, always lift us up to contemplate and love the true God. Christ is no showboat in that way. So the mediation of Christ is a matter of sacrifice, to be sure, but it’s not fundamentally, nor essentially, our sacrifice. The real sacrifice is Christ’s death on the Cross, which Christ himself enacts. Augustine offers, early in Book 10 actually, what is regarded as the classic patristic discussion of sacrifice, the longest and most elaborate discussion of this complicated theological term of the age. For Augustine, it’s not just that Christ’s very nature enables us to touch God, for Christ is as much human reaching up to God as Christ is also God reaching down to humanity. In a sermon, Augustine says, “Christ as God is the country to which we go; Christ as human is the way by which we go.” We’ve seen something of the country, the way that Christ’s very being coordinates and, indeed, marries humanity and divinity, but how is Christ also the way? Well, in the work of his life, Christ both executed effectively and exhibited pedagogically the proper response to God on behalf of humanity. As such, Christ is great teacher and perfect prophet. But Christ is also the wholly innocent victim, and thus the perfect sacrifice for the wrongs we have done to God—the most valuable thing humanity has to offer, the only thing worthy of being sacrificed because the only thing untainted by the crime being propitiated. This is the old reading of the atonement, and of the sacrifice as a kind of reparation, a payback to God. So, in this sense, Christ voluntarily, for Augustine, and once and for all, pays back all the debts incurred in our rebellion against God. And this is important, though Augustine passes by it more quickly than we might like on his reading: never again should humans say we deserve this suffering, as if we truly merit everything bad that happens to us. 235

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We don’t; not anymore. Conceived as strictly merited, the sufferings we suffer due to our membership in the line of Adam and Eve, after Christ, are no more. Now, in this transaction Christ is both truly the sacrificer and truly the sacrificed; the great High Priest who sacrifices, and the sacrificed Lamb of God. Christ is in charge, for Augustine, of both the Crucifixion and the Passion, even unto being the one human who willed his own physical death. Augustine makes a lot of Jesus saying on the cross, “Into your hands I commend my spirit” and then Jesus actively dying. Augustine thinks this is the only person who actively dies in this way, and so Jesus is the true High Priest and the only theurgist in this. Once we know that Christ accomplished all the sacrifice we need, what are we to do then in response to this? What, then, does God want from us? God wants us to do likewise, and so, for Augustine, the human response to God’s loving acts, construed as sacrifice, only makes sense in light of this one true sacrifice of Christ. In a way, this is pedagogical. We suffer for our mistakes and we can say that God approves this suffering as a way for us to learn. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but in fact it gives a quite distinct tincture to suffering if we think we are suffering pain simply as an end in itself, as payback for our past, or if we think we are suffering as a means of growth for the future form of our souls. The former framework for suffering pain returns us morbidly to brood over our own past; the latter liberates us to look hopefully, if not optimistically, towards a future we will share with others. On this account, human sacrifice is merely responsive to this one true act of God loving us. It does include any and every work that establishes communion between God and humanity. It can be ritual, but it need not be. The Old Testament sacrifices, for example, were external signs of an internal conversion of the person towards God, only the sign of the true sacrifice.

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The key feature of all true sacrifices for humans, he thinks, is a change of heart—an act of inner contrition which gives all glory to God and turns to our neighbors with mercy, misericordia, in our hearts. As he says, all the divine ordinances that we read concerning the sacrifices in the service of the tabernacle or the temple, we should refer to the love of God and of our neighbor. Even so, those outward sacrifices cannot be confused with the true sacrifice. That was Christ’s doing, and it was fundamentally an act quite literally of compassion—of feeling with humanity. The church participates in the work of Christ by itself becoming this compassion of Christ, by repeating its memorials of Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharist, but also in acts of compassion and mercy in the world as well. Now this is very important. This vision of compassion is very unlike anything the pagan philosophers have on offer. Most importantly for Augustine, his account of mercy, of misericordia—compassion— is unlike what the Stoics promote as compassion. For the Stoics, one can have a certain kind of pity for the world, but only insofar as one does not identify with that world; only insofar as one does not allow oneself to be moved by that world. That is just what Jesus did. Christ did indeed feel true compassion, and was moved, in his guts, by the world’s suffering. Of course, Christ did this not as a victim of the world but as the sovereign lord over it, and so this was God’s agency in Christ doing this thing. But don’t doubt that Christ was penetrated fully by the world’s sufferings as the nails went all the way through his hands. The problem, then, with the Stoics, and maybe other philosophers, is that they do not want us to be so penetrated, so vulnerable to the world. They imagine a region of radical privacy, an invulnerable citadel of the rational will which can always be locked from the inside. For Augustine, this is misconceived in both directions. The world is always in us, and we in the world, and besides, so is sin, so the putative enemy is always already inside the gates. 237

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There is no way not to partake of this world’s passions for us unless we seek to flee our humanity altogether—and that, as Augustine has noted, only ends in the futility of suicide. Happily, God also, as we saw last time, is always more inside us than we are, so our choices are to deny the kinds of creatures we are, and the kind of creation in which we exist, or to accept these, and make of ourselves, our souls and bodies, a living sacrifice to God, as Christ has shown us how to do. In this way, our full sacrifice is threefold, and in three directions, up, in, and out. It is a sacrifice of our excessive care for this world, which releases us from enchainment to it and allows us to ascend to God. It is the sacrifice of inward contrition, of regret for our own excessive self-love, which releases us from undue self-regard. And it is the sacrifice of that undue self-regard that allows us to use ourselves to go out to the neighbor in compassion. Of course, not all mercy is properly oriented, and so not all mercy is sacrifice for Augustine. He says a true sacrifice is every work which tends toward a society that inheres in God. Misericordia— mercy—shown to a human not for God’s sake is no sacrifice. In other words, it’s not a matter of simply doing something but doing it for the right reasons. As was the case with Roman glory, the issue is to what end you refer the meaning of your actions, to what have you dedicated the sacrifice of your deeds. This proper directedness does not lead immediately to proper joy, of course, but it does lead there eventually, as it is the way that we imitate Christ and thus become like him, for Augustine. Hence the climax of right service to God, which is compassion, is the purification that culminates in happiness. The Platonists recognize that such purification is necessary, but what they fail to see is that it has been accomplished already in Christ. They fail to see this because they simply cannot imagine that anything fleshly, like a human being, could actually convey the presence of God to us. Augustine chastises the Neoplatonist Porphyry for just this failure, because he could not imagine that materiality could ever bear 238

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the weight of divinity. He remained too proud to see how very much of the philosophical picture he himself carefully constructed through strenuous thought had in fact been realized in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. It was as if he had kept trying to chisel his way through a granite cliff with a toothpick, while nearby a giant tunnel loomed, untraversed. If only Porphyry and the Platonists had understood, Augustine thinks, they would have been able to see the world differently—not as a cage of flesh holding sparks of illuminated spirit down, but as luminous matter, itself glowing in the glory of God’s love. That is, they would have seen the whole world as sacramental, as a mystery, meaning more than its bare literality, having levels of significance far above that. The key sacrament, the one on which the whole sacramentality of Creation itself relies, is of course the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But that sacramental action on the part of God means that all creation in its manifold diverse ways of being speaks of that mystery too, if we only have eyes to see it. This is what we can call Augustine’s sacramental imagination, and he will ask his audience increasingly in coming books to see events and physical things in creation as themselves sacramental, partaking in divine significances, vehicles of God’s communication to the world. Now note: Augustine lived before the technical medieval language of sacrament appears—seven sacraments, that sort of thing—so he uses this term with a licentious enthusiasm that later thinkers would never allow, but which is not without for us a pedagogical point. The key here is that the world is not fundamentally to be disdained or anxiously manipulated, but instead gratefully admired and delighted in, in participation, as a sign of God’s love for humanity. But we can see this only when we understand that the question we must ask is, not how do we sacrifice to get to God, but how do we become the sacrifice that God is making us, that God is working within us to be and to do? How can we become, as Augustine puts it movingly at the end of this book, the sacrifice we already are? For us 239

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to see the sacramentality of the world, that is to say, we must accept that we are ourselves being used by God in this great adventure. We can draw two conclusions from all of this. First, in the rhetorical battle that Augustine is waging against the pagans—and remember, all of this is rhetorical—this is where he finally unleashes his ultimate judgment on the philosophers. Not only do they not give their followers happiness, what’s worse is that they fail to do that because they are more basically impious—that is, they do not properly understand nor love who God is and what God is doing. Why do I say they are impious? Consider this. The previous analysis of sacrifice explains why Augustine disapproves of the Platonists emphasis on theurgy, which is their functional equivalent of sacrifice. The failure of theurgy is that it is really quite scandalously corrupt and a corrupting practice, and the Platonists know it is a corrupt and a corrupting practice, and they still do nothing to correct, let alone stop, it. Far from being the protectors of true religion, philosophers like the Platonists—just as with the case with Varro—are the profaners of true religion. Second, their impiety is deeply tied up in their pride, for the Platonists’ impiety is the reason they do not even begin to see the true nature of wisdom, which lies in the voluntary compassion of Christ, wholly voluntary for the cosmos. They refuse to see this because they are ashamed, in fact, of Christ’s materiality. Here’s a quote from Augustine on this: “You do not believe that this mind is Christ; for you despise Him because of the body that He received from a woman, and because of the shame of the Cross.” And their disbelief and their shame are due to the fact that they are proud. They see the right values, but they do not understand the way to get there. They lack the grace that would allow them to recognize that they need humility to learn. They cannot say, “I do not understand, but I am willing to work hard to try.” And that is why they fail. 240

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At the end of Book 10, then, Christianity has emerged as the best source for religion and philosophy. And note there’s a parallel here between the understanding of political happiness that ends Book 5, with his discussion of happy in hope, and the discussion in this book about how the true philosophy and religion leads to our ultimate blessedness in Christianity. Just as Book 5 argued that a Christian can be a better emperor than can a pagan, and thus better care for the material world—as emperor, as citizen, as ordinary human—now we see Book 10 end with the argument that Christians are the best philosophers, and more generally can better care for, and teach about, humanity’s ultimate spiritual ends. At the end of these first 10 books, then, Augustine takes himself to have shown that Christianity was neither unpatriotic, nor antiphilosophical, nor impious. Christians can be good Romans, truly philosophical, and truly religious as well. And, in contrast, he thinks that he’s shown his rivals to be inadequate philosophers, impious and superstitious, and fundamentally selfish, incapable of true patriotism or any civic virtue. With these responses in place, we see the full initial sketch of Augustine’s account and response to what was behind the original charges about Christianity, namely that that religion is anti-worldly. But to understand Augustine’s response, we must undergo what I have called a gestalt switch and see ourselves as secondary characters in the story in which we are embedded. In Book 10, just as in Books 8 and 9, Augustine reverses our agency to show us how much more deeply we must receive than we must act. Our agency is not denied, just radically decentered and contextualized within a larger story of God’s loving action upon us, so our agency must be reconceived not as on the model of God’s ex nihilo creation of the cosmos, but as responsive to that creation. We’ll see Augustine attempting to help people undertake that reconception from Book 11 forward. 241

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But before we look at that, we should step back and reflect for a lecture on the whole shape of Books 1–10: how he’s made his arguments, and what his method implies about his overall vision of the relationship between the Christian Gospel and the pagan GrecoRoman matrix in which Augustine came to meet it. That is the topic of the next lecture.

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Lecture 12

T

he first 10 books of The City of God give us a glimpse into the wide range of views and attitudes that were available in Augustine’s world—a range of views that bears some interesting similarities with those available in our own. From visions of the greatness of nations and the hypocrisies of power politics, to the perhaps cynical intellectualism of Varro and the profound (if tragically misguided) spiritual questing of the Neoplatonists, we find again and again echoes in antiquity of currents coursing through the spiritual longings of our own age.

Historical Importance „„

While definitely partisan and polemical, these 10 books remain invaluable to all of us—whatever our religious beliefs—as the longest complete contemporary depiction of pagan GrecoRoman culture that has survived to today. We have no larger reflection on the pursuits of happiness that pagan Rome employed, and what Augustine sees as its tragic pathos.

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The first 10 books must be seen as Augustine’s most considered judgment of the pagan culture in which the Christian churches of his day found themselves and as the most elaborate apologetic argument, negative and positive, that Christianity had yet produced.

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Two parallels with other books come to mind here. First is a subtle parallel with the Aeneid, in which a man leaves behind his burning wreck of a home, carrying his ancestry on his back, and travels through several different false homes before he reaches his true new home.

››

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››

In books 1–10, Augustine shows us the pagans’ attempts to find a safe harbor via various bad ways of seeking happiness, before reaching the true home. Each way must be traveled, though we find out why only at the conclusion in book 10: In the journeying, the traveler learns in a way he could never learn by simply being told.

››

The second parallel is Augustine’s own Confessions, which similarly structures conversion as a wandering amid the possibilities of pagan life, dismantling their promise, and ending with a turn to the Christian story.

Structure of the Argument—Negative Apologetics „„

Now, we should say something about the structure of the overall argument of these first 10 books. It is fair, if a bit shallow, to call these books an apology; that is, a defense. In Augustine’s own time, a genre of apologetic writings existed in Christianity. ›› Typically these consisted of what are called negative apologetics, wherein a writer takes up a series of challenges to Christian belief, and shows them to lack the power that their proponents think they have. ››

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We also sometimes see positive apologetics, an argument that attempts to provide its audience with some fresh positive reasons for belief, intended to convince others who are not yet convinced of the truth of the Christian faith.

For right now, let’s focus on the negative apologetics. It is a fundamentally defensive project. In fact, one of the problems of this sort of negative apologetic is that it is so defensive as to be at times tempted toward simply rejecting the proposals put to them by others on those others’ own terms. This argument grants the legitimacy of the terms on which the debate is based.

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This approach is problematic, and Augustine clearly is at times intentionally avoiding this approach, even as he does take on a series of accusations against Christianity and attempt to show they are wrong-headed.

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The negative charges Augustine especially addresses are fundamentally two: ›› First, Christianity is bad for Rome, for it damages care for the city. It is, in short, unpatriotic. Here he is arguing against opponents we can call patriots.

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Second, Christianity is a false philosophy, because it misaligns humans to the world. It is superstitious and impious. Here he is arguing against opponents we can call the philosophers.

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Behind both is the basic claim that Christianity cannot provide the kind of happiness that we as humans always seek, because Christianity does not properly orient humans to the world. It is escapist, a way of avoiding the world.

The most profound form of the patriotism challenge Augustine must address is that of civic thinkers who believe that concrete historical action in the world can do real and permanent good. ›› Rome understood itself as the vessel for values that transcended itself. Part of the psychological shellgame it could play on its adherents was to suggest

Augustine argued that if philosophy is truly the serious pursuit of genuine wisdom and happiness, it is the truest philosophy and broadly available to any who will humbly submit themselves to live in the schools of charity that are the Christian churches.

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that its aims were never just its own parochial aims, but the aims of civilization itself. ››

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The belief was something like this: Whatever the brutality that it may from time to time display, Rome is a liberally minded empire bringing a more humane way of life composed of civilizing customs, a cosmopolitan way of life, and vast transcontinental trade to make the world a more fit place for human habitation.

As to Christianity’s reputed incompatibility with philosophy, Augustine argued that if philosophy is truly the serious pursuit of genuine wisdom and happiness, it is the truest philosophy and broadly available to any who will humbly submit themselves to live in the schools of charity that are the Christian churches. In other words, the truest philosophers are the Christians. ›› First he argues that Christians can make sense of suffering, at least in some way, while Romans cannot do so. ››

Then he argues that the true nature of Roman history suggests that Rome before Christianity was no better than Rome with Christianity—and in a number of ways, it was quite unarguably worse.

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Finally, rejecting the received account of why pagan Rome was able to achieve so much, which argued that Rome’s rise was due to the true virtue of the great Roman heroes and the virtuous populace from which they sprung, he offers an account that differs dramatically, arguing that their success was due more to splendid vices than to any actual greatness of soul.

In general, books 1–5 can be understood as our response to a loss of moral innocence. The answer comes in book 5, with the discussion of the kind of happiness that a Christian emperor can expect—not happiness as the pagans understood it, but 246

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something quite different and deferred until after this transient mortal life.

Structure of the Argument—Positive Apologetics „„

Augustine takes up the second challenge—that Christianity is a bad philosophy—in books 6–10. Just as the first five are a response to the loss of moral innocence, these next books are a response to a loss of intellectual innocence once we saw that our childhood confidence in the surface meanings of our fables and legends was misplaced. ›› What do we do now? ››

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What should our relationship now be to the basic framework of existence?

Augustine explores the official religion of Rome, which cannot be practiced in a coherent way that would secure its adherents a reasonable prospect of otherworldly happiness. Then he explores what he takes to be the most powerful personal philosophy available to Roman elites in his day, Platonism, and argues that despite its many insights, it doesn’t work either: ›› First, the demons it relies on cannot be proper mediators, and the whole idea of mediation that the reliance on them assumes is deeply misconstrued. ››

Second, true mediation must come from a divine reality, like Christ, who also teaches us thereby to live rightly in the world, which also means to have the proper affections and emotional comportment.

››

Third, all this discussion amounts to a different account of how one gets to God, or rather how God gets to us, through the careful reconsideration of what the true sacrifice turns out to be.

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„„

The discussion of books 6–10 climaxes in a specific positive claim: that Christianity is the true philosophy and Christ the ultimate philosopher, and that Christians’ participation in the community in imitation of the sacrifice of Christ embodies what we ought to do as regards our otherworldly duties.

„„

Augustine takes up the pagan accusations, investigates them, reconfigures their terms, and shows how the Christians are actually doing what the pagans accuse them of not doing, and doing so in a better way than the pagans do. More broadly, he is really arguing against pagan Rome and its pursuits of happiness, and we may see that their concerns are not entirely alien to us today.

„„

Although Augustine does not show exactly how the longings of the pagans, as they themselves understand them, will find satisfaction in the Christian church, he does suggest that: ›› If the pagans will work with him on better understanding their own longings, they may well find out that they have misunderstood them in the past.

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His account offers a powerful and more truthful reinterpretation of them.

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They revealed to be vividly connected to Christian practices.

Augustine neither exactly undertakes nor rejects the task of positive apologetics; instead he shows how a therapeutic take on the pagans’ desires may help them understand themselves better.

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Augustine explores the official religion of Rome, which cannot be practiced in a coherent way that would secure its adherents a reasonable prospect of otherworldly happiness.

Lecture 12—Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1–10)

The Semantics of Sociocultural Criticism „„

Much of Augustine’s argument with the pagans can be understood as a series of semantic debates, and Augustine’s project is helpfully depicted by conceiving of it as undertaking the task of building a new language from old words. ›› The words of the Romans—republic, city, empire, providence, justice, virtue, liberty, glory, love, passion, sacrifice, charity, and mercy—are words Augustine retains. But by book 10, he is using them in a very different way than his Roman ancestors or pagan contemporaries.

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What Augustine does with these Roman terms foreshadows how he understands the relationship between the body of Christ and the Jews—continuity amid transformation.

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Augustine seems to be the first thinker to offer something like a fundamental critique of the whole sociocultural system that is Rome and the first to see society as a whole as an object of full analytic interest. This kind of critique is a major change in critical thinking. It offers, we may say, a more radical kind of social analysis and social critique than heretofore had been practiced.

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This way to imagine the problem of historical change is very modern. Augustine is the first modern thinker—the first for whom the classical world is not simply an unquestionable context, but a complicated legacy of inheritance, the first person to ask how to reconnect with an inheritance that is no longer unproblematically our own.

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Now we are about to enter what seems a very different work indeed, one with such differences in style and rhetoric as to make one wonder how the two parts fit together in a single unified whole.

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Questions to Consider 1. Why, for Augustine, are the Romans the way they are? What does Augustine think pagan souls are being shaped for? 2. How do you think that Augustine shows that the intellectual elites of books 6–10 exhibit the libido dominandi he describes as governing the political elites of books 1–5? 3. I said that Augustine would find our practice of religious studies worth comment. Based on books 1–10, what would those comments be? 4. Society can be understood as a performance, or a spectacle. What is the earthly city performing? 5. Why are the first ten books ordered as they are, with the local history of Rome in books 1–5, and then the universalities of philosophy in books 6–10?

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Lecture 12 Transcript

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e’ve come a long way from the savagery of the sack of Rome to the contemplative ecstasy of our union with God through becoming part of Christ’s self-sacrifice, and yet we still have more than half of the book ahead of us, so we have a long way to go. It will be good to review these first 10 books as a whole, to see their overall coherence, what they amount to and towards what are they pointing. While definitely partisan and polemical, they remain invaluable to all of us—whatever our religious or philosophical beliefs—as the longest complete contemporary depiction of pagan Greco-Roman culture as a whole that has survived to this day. We have no larger reflection on the pursuits of happiness that pagan Rome employed and what Augustine sees as its tragic pathos. More than that, they give us a glimpse into the wide range of views and attitudes that were available in Augustine’s world, a range of views that bears some interesting similarities with those available in our own. From visions of the greatness of nations and the hypocrisies of power politics, to the perhaps cynical intellectualism of Varro and the profound, if tragically misguided, spiritual questing of the Neoplatonists, we find again and again echoes in antiquity of currents coursing through the spiritual longings of our own age. Finally, however, the first 10 books must be seen as Augustine’s most considered judgment of the pagan culture in which the Christian churches of his day found themselves embedded, and as the most elaborate apologetic argument—negative and positive—that Christianity had yet produced. So we should think about it on these grounds, to step back and try to gain some perspective on what Augustine thought he was doing and why he was trying to do it. 251

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Now, there are two parallels with other books that we may want to keep in mind here, and I’ve said this before. In these first 10 books, the first one is a subtle parallel being suggested with the Aeneid, a story of a man leaving behind his burning wreck of a home—his sacked city—carrying his ancestry on his back, and then traveling through several different false possible homes before he reaches the true new home that will be his. So Books 1–10 attempt also to find a safe harbor in various bad ways to be happy, before—in Book 11 and following—reaching the true home. And that whole voyage must be traveled, though we only find out why at their conclusion in Book 10, for in the journeying the traveler learns in a way he could never learn by simply being told. This is akin to what I have called Augustine’s therapeutic strategy in this book. Some lessons can only be learned by hard and bitter experience, and never taught by some hectoring lecturer like me. The other parallel to these first 10 books, the other textual parallel, is Augustine’s own book the Confessions. That work similarly structures the conversion as first a wandering amidst the possibilities of pagan life, dismantling their promises, and ending with a turn to the Christian story. And the Confessions actually offers a sort of parallel structure for the following books as well, for after Augustine narrates his life in that work, Books 1–9 of the Confessions, the final books—10, 11, 12, and 13—are a series of explorations of the Christian story; first an exploration of Augustine’s interiority, then in the ecclesial and exegetical exposition of the Christian interpretation of Genesis, the beginning of Creation. Furthermore, just as the Confessions’ final books cover those first three verses of Genesis, the second half of The City of God similarly begins with a rereading of Genesis, though it continues, traversing the whole route of the Bible, from Genesis through to Revelation. So the scale of the ecclesial and exegetical exposition in The City is 252

Lecture 12 Transcript—Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1–10)

much vaster than in the Confessions. Nonetheless, this parallel also tells us something about Augustine’s aims for this book. Now, with these two parallels in mind, we can look back at these 10 books and anticipate a bit what is coming. The larger story here is about the relationship between critique and constructive proposal, so we can say something here about the structure of the overall argument of these first 10 books. It’s fair, if a bit shallow, to call these books an apology, a defense. Recall that I said that, already in Augustine’s own time, there was a genre of apologetical writings in Christianity. Typically, these consisted of what are called negative apologetics, where a writer takes up a series of challenges to Christian belief, and shows them to not have the power, the bite, that their proponents think they have. We sometimes also see a positive apologetics, an argument that attempts to provide its audience with some fresh positive reasons for belief, intended to convince others who are not yet convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. For right now, let’s focus on the negative apologetics. The first thing to note here is that it is a fundamentally defensive project. In fact, one of the problems of this sort of negative apologetic is that, at times, it is so defensive to be tempted towards sheer reactionary thinking—simply rejecting the proposals put to them by others on those others’ own terms. This grants the legitimacy of the terms on which the account to be rejected, and to be defended, is based. This is a problematic approach, and it’s clear that, at times, Augustine is intentionally avoiding it. And yet it is the case that he does take on a series of accusations against Christianity, and attempts to show why and how they are wrongheaded. The negative charges he especially addresses are fundamentally two. First, Christianity is bad for Rome, for it damages our care for the city. It is, in short, unpatriotic. And here, he again is arguing against people we can call political patriots. Second, Christianity is a false philosophy because it misaligns us to 253

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the world and to the realities beyond. It is superstitious and impious. And here he’s arguing against opponents that we call philosophers. And behind both is the basic claim that Christianity cannot provide the kind of happiness that we as humans always seek, because Christianity does not properly orient you to this world and the cosmos enframing it. It is, in short, escapist—it is a way of avoiding the facts about our world, not inhabiting them. That is the challenge. As to Christianity’s purported antipathy to patriotism: as I said before, this may seem like an easy argument for Augustine to win. I mean, we can all see the dangers of patriotism, right? It can easily become a form of national idolatry. But that’s not the most profound form of the challenge he must address. More profoundly, he’s arguing against civic thinkers who believe that concrete historical action in the world can do real and permanent good. Remember what I said much earlier in these lectures: this worry is one that is actually quite easy for us to share today, for Rome did not simply understand itself as one city among others, it understood itself as the vessel for values that transcended the city of Rome itself. And part of the psychological shell game it could play on its adherents was to suggest that its aims were never just its own parochial local aims but the aims of civilization itself. The belief, then, behind all of the formulations of patriotism that Rome had, went something like this: Whatever the brutality that it may from time to time display, Rome is finally a liberally-minded empire bringing a more humane way of life, composed at least of civilizing custom, a cosmopolitan way of living, and vast transcontinental trade. All of this may well actually work over time to make the whole world a more fit place for human habitation, and a more propitious context in which to live a truly flourishing life.

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Lecture 12 Transcript—Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1–10)

When you put it in those terms, it’s harder for people today to dismiss or pooh-pooh it, because it is basically the belief of the overwhelming majority of us today. Most of us, that is, are likely to share beliefs of the sort that Augustine critiques in Books 1–5. A few of us have sought our happiness elsewhere, and thus find ourselves engaged in Books 6–10, but not many. And as to that, as to 6–10, Christianity’s reputed incompatibility with philosophy, we’ve seen Augustine argue that, if philosophy is truly the serious pursuit of genuine wisdom and actual happiness, then Christianity is the truest philosophy, and broadly available to anyone who will humbly submit themselves to live in the schools of charity that are the Christian churches. In other words, the truest philosophers are indeed the Christians. Now we saw him take up the first challenge—that Christianity is bad for Rome, bad for political action, bad for this world in its worldly existence—in Books 1–5, and there he argued that Christians can make some sense of suffering, at least in some way, while the Romans cannot do so. Then he argued that the true nature of Roman history suggests that Rome before Christianity was no better than Rome after Christianity—and in a number of ways, it was quite unarguably worse. And then, finally, he offered an account of why pagan Rome was able to achieve so much, an account that differs dramatically from the received history that all Roman schoolboys had been taught for hundreds of years. Rejecting that received account, which argued that Rome’s rise was due to the true virtue of the great Roman heroes and the virtuous populace from which they sprung, Augustine argues that their success was more due to splendid vices than to any actual moral rectitude or greatness of soul. In general, then, these books can all be understood as a kind of response or analysis of a response to a loss of moral innocence. Once we know that life is hard and its meaning unremittingly obscure, what then? We saw his answer unfold in all 5 books, and come to a climax in Book 5, with his discussion of the kind of happiness that a Christian 255

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emperor can expect, which, as we saw, was not exactly happiness as the pagans understood it, but something quite different, and deferred until after this transient mortal life. Throughout all this, he had a subtle positive aim—to show that Christian faith provides a firmer foundation for the civic virtues, even though it can offer only an eschatologically-deferred happiness in hope for its adherents. Thus, Books 1–5 climax in this discussion of what it means to be happy in hope at the end of Book 5. Now, he takes up the second challenge—that Christianity is a bad philosophy—in Books 6–10. And just as the first five are a response to the loss of moral innocence, here we can see these next five books as a response to a loss of intellectual innocence. Once we’ve seen that our childhood confidence in the surface meanings of the fables and legends that our elders taught us has been misplaced, that confidence has been misplaced, what do we do now? What should our relationship now be to the basic framework of existence? Ought we to simply reject all these fables? Ought we to inhabit them in some ironic, Varronic way? Ought we to see them as obliquely telling a truth, which our dalliances with the demons can get us close to, as the Platonic theurgists seem to have suggested? Or ought we try to do something else entirely? He answers this in stages. First, he explores the official public religion of Rome, which, he argued, cannot be inhabited in a coherent way that would secure its adherents for any viable prospect of otherworldly happiness. Then he explores what he takes to be the most powerful personal philosophy available to Roman elites in his day—namely, Platonism—and he argues that, despite its many insights, it doesn’t work either, for what we’ve seen are three reasons. First, the demons it relies upon cannot be proper mediators, and the whole idea of mediation that the reliance on them assumes is deeply misconstrued. Second, true mediation must come from a divine 256

Lecture 12 Transcript—Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1–10)

reality, like Christ, who also teaches us thereby rightly to live in the world, which also means to have the proper affections and emotional comportment. Third, all of this amounts to a different account of how one gets to God, or rather how God gets to us, through the careful reconsideration of what the true sacrifice turns out to be. Now here, as was the case in Books 1–5, the discussion of Books 6–10 climaxes in a specific positive claim, namely that Christianity is the true philosophy, and Christ the ultimate philosopher, and that Christians’ participation in the community as the sacrifice of Christ embodies what we ought to do as regards our otherworldly and thisworldly duties. Once again, that is, Augustine takes up the pagan accusations, investigates them, reconfigures their terms, and shows how the Christians are actually doing what the pagans accuse them of not doing, and doing so in a better way than the pagans themselves do. More broadly, though, he’s really arguing against pagan Rome and its several pursuits of happiness. And in doing so, we may see that their concerns are not, as I have suggested already, entirely alien to us today. Whether we’re Christian or no, we’re likely to have heard these criticisms before. He puts the challenges in the order he does, with the accusations of the patriots before those of the philosophers, because most people understand the idea of happiness in fundamentally materialistic terms, and in our world often in fundamentally political terms. This is especially true in a situation where our nation, whatever that nation may be, is the top dog in the world, as it was in the case of the Romans. Even today, few people see the problems with the idea of secure worldly happiness, and perhaps fewer still realize that any such happiness must be secured on terms quite different than mere worldly success. So Augustine’s criticisms of both are perhaps not merely of antiquarian interest today. And those few who do reject materialism seem still to reach for forms of psychic transformation and consolation—such as mindfulness or yoga or a kind of Stoic austerity 257

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of purpose—that seem not entirely dissimilar from the philosophers he treats in Books 6–10. This also suggests to us something of how Augustine can be seen to offer a positive apologetics, as well. He doesn’t exactly show how the longings of the pagans, as they understand themselves to understand them, will find satisfaction in the Christian church. But what he does is suggest, therapeutically, that if the pagans will work with him on better understanding their own longings, they may well find out that they have misunderstood them in the past, and that his account offers a powerful reinterpretation of them that is more truthful to those longings’ original wellsprings, and also reveals them to be vividly connected to Christian practices. So Augustine neither exactly undertakes nor rejects the task of positive apologetics; instead, he shows how a therapeutic take on the pagans’ desires and concerns may do much to help them understand themselves better. Now, as we’ve seen, this therapeutic practice is importantly acted out on the level of language, importantly linguistic. That is to say, much of Augustine’s argument with the pagans can be understood as a series of terminological debates, and Augustine’s positive project is helpfully depicted by conceiving of him undertaking the task of building a new language from old words. The words of the Romans— republic, city, empire, providence, justice, virtue, liberty, glory and love, passion, sacrifice, charity, mercy—all of these are words that Augustine retains. But by the time Book 10 rolls around, he’s using them in a very different way than his Roman ancestors or his pagan contemporaries ever did. Interestingly, this may get to a point that’s very deep in Augustine’s thinking, for as we will see, what Augustine does with these Roman terms also foreshadows how he understands the relationship between the body of Christ and the people Israel. It suggests a pattern of continuity amidst transformation. Now, there are very many vast differences between the people Israel, and the Senate and the 258

Lecture 12 Transcript—Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1–10)

people of Rome. Most centrally, for Augustine, the Jews, the people Israel, still have a distinct role as the people Israel in the Christian economy of salvation, and so their existence until the end of time is something that Christians should accept, while Rome is just one more worldly excrescence of the stock of Cain, one more terrestrial consequence of that primordial brother-murder, and it bears no more distinct salvific significance than does a mountain or a forest or a weather front. Equally importantly, Augustine seems to be the first thinker—not just the first Christian thinker, the first one altogether—to offer something like a fundamental critique of the whole sociocultural system that is his society—that is, in his case, Rome. This kind of critique is a major change in critical thinking and social criticism in the ancient world. It offers, we may say, a more radical kind of social analysis and sociopolitical critique than heretofore had ever been practiced. Let me put it this way. Earlier Roman social critics—writers such as Tacitus, Sallust, and Cicero—typically called Rome back to an earlier age of authentic virtue, or at least an age of a less depraved parody of the virtues that they purported to profess. And these critics gave little evidence of believing that such a return was impossible. Their world remained in organic continuity with the whole history of Rome, and with an imagined ideal state that was still possible for people to inhabit. Meanwhile, Greek critics such as Plato were not really that radical either. Plato was always aware of Socrates’s unjust execution for impiety for failing to care for the city in the proper way, and so Plato spent the rest of his days imagining versions of a city that would be more worthy of Socrates, that could hear what he had been trying to tell them. But this imagining always remained rooted in the idea of the polis, the small city-state, with a small philosophical elite and a large class of laboring drones. Plato never imagined a new kind of society altogether. 259

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Even the Stoics and the Neoplatonists, combining Roman psychology and Greek cosmology, were only able to imagine a rival alternative to contemporary social life in terms of the world that they saw around them. But none of them saw the world itself, the conditions that determined the fundamentals of our existence, as susceptible to radical transformation, a cosmic revolution, what Saint Paul calls a new creation. That imagining they left to Augustine. He was the first to see society as a whole, as an object of full analytic interest and possible of complete critique. This is really a very crucial moment in the development of what we can call a critical mindset towards the received and unreflective inhabitation of a given social world, and it is so in two ways. First, as a way to imagine the whole constellation of what we would recognize as human society as contingent, as able to be evaluated as better or worse for human flourishing, and as potentially changeable. Remember Augustine critiquing Varro’s sanctification of money and war, and even gruesome Roman sexual practices. Second, Augustine is unusual also in that he has a very historical framing of the issue. That is to say, we can all admit that there is a proximate history from which we derive—in Augustine’s case, the story of Rome—but for reasons of differences of value, that history is lost to us as a usable past: you can’t go home again. What do we do now? We can’t reattach ourselves to that past. Well, in fact, this is a very modern way to imagine the problem of historical change. It’s not always been that way. And, in a way, Augustine is the first person to imagine it so; he’s the first, in this sense, modern thinker. After him, we’re all asking versions of the following question: What do we do once Rome has fallen? Remember our earlier comments about the loss of innocence, moral or spiritual innocence. Augustine is the first one for whom the classical world is not simply an unquestionable context but a complicated legacy of inheritance. That past is gone. Something is lost, and we 260

Lecture 12 Transcript—Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1–10)

have to decide how to relate to it now. This makes him, in a way, the first modern; the first person to ask the question of how to reconnect in an organic and flourishing way with an inheritance that is no longer unproblematically our own. So, Augustine had a genuine imagination of society as a whole, a way of perceiving the social world entire, imagining it as a coherent reality that is susceptible of being evaluated, and implying by that effort there may be a fundamental disjoint between the way humans live and the way they ought to live, and to suggest that that disjoint is there because the humans are themselves out of sync with the cosmic order as a whole. To generate so radical a critique, one needs a standpoint that allows one to see all of society in a gaze, a single gaze as it were—a transcendental perspective, perhaps one of the sort afforded by Plato’s idea of the distinction between the real world of the transcendental forms and the dimly lit cave of our contemporary embodied existence. What gave Augustine this perspective? I suggest it was a combination of two things. First, the eschatological urgency, the apocalyptic urgency, of ancient Israelite prophecy, and that was accentuated by the newer apocalypticism of Christianity. And then that thing paired with the critical political and psychological language he inherited from the Greeks and the Romans, and that thing intensified and modulated by the Christian doctrine of sin. It’s only really when Augustine combines his fully metabolized pagan classical heritage with the radical preaching of the Israelite prophets, in a way that understands both streams to culminate in Jesus’s preaching and the Book of Revelation’s depiction of the end of the world, that we begin to get a kind of critique of society as a whole whose fundamental terms are rooted neither in a nostalgic past nor an idealized present nor in any easily available otherworldly utopia of contemplative escape, but instead rooted in a future reality that is yet 261

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to come but is even now breaking in on this world, whose first fruits are here, whose flames are beginning to flicker amidst us. It is, that is to say, only when thinkers like Augustine are able to combine the prophetic Israelite denunciation of the current status quo with the fine-grained Roman sociopolitical imagination and vision of history that the idea of so radical a critique becomes possible. And its radicality is itself made more acute by Augustine’s own eschatological hopes. When one imagines a perfect future state, the brilliant light from so hopeful a vision inevitably casts a deep shadow on the current status quo. And this is why, ever since Augustine—but never before him—social criticism, religious and secular, has gone forward always impatiently pressing towards a truly transfigured end state, and it has seen our current situation, whatever that current situation may be, from what the mid-20th-century Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno called the standpoint of redemption. In other words, society requires a standpoint of redemption in order to feel the full range of ways it itself is inadequately living up to the thing it should be. Augustine is the one who taught us that. Now these are big claims about Augustine, that he’s the first one to think about the past in a recognizably modern way; that he is the deep ancestor of critics of the cultural status quo, such as contemporary Marxists. But in making them, I’m not in fact saying anything very surprising to those who know the history of thought. The degree to which this is surprising is merely the degree to which we ourselves simply don’t know that history. Now we’re about to enter what seems a very different work indeed, one with such differences in style and rhetoric as to make you wonder how the two parts fit together in a single unified whole. There’s a marked disparity of stylistic texture between Books 1–10 and 11–22. As we’ve seen already, the first books, frankly though decreasingly apologetic, swim in the Roman thought-world. They cite 262

Lecture 12 Transcript—Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1–10)

Cicero, Sallust, Varro; they refer with familiarity to rhetorical tropes and historical allusions that would put at ease any Roman of solid education. But where the first 10 books rang with classical allusions, from Book 11 forward new words begin to appear—a new vocabulary emerges. In the first 10 books, the allusions to classical antiquity significantly outnumber biblical ones by a ratio of about 3 to 1—and, yes, scholars have counted these things. But things change dramatically in Book 11, and suddenly Scriptural allusions outnumber classical ones by a ratio of about 12 to 1. Furthermore, the kind of allusion here is different. The classical allusions are often tossed off as if with a snap of the fingers, and his readers are left to make out the meaning and significance of the allusion for Augustine’s argument as best they can. This stylistic tic on the part of Augustine has made translating Augustine in our day hard for translators, who struggle to make the allusions mean what they should, both for themselves and for their non-Latin-speaking audiences. In contrast, from Book 11 forward, Augustine’s allusions are most frequently to biblical texts, biblical passages, and he typically spends time explaining the text and unpacking its implications for his overall theology. Where once he was conversing with people who already knew all his allusions, trying to convince them, henceforward he will be speaking with people who are straining to understand his references, and now he is trying to instruct them. We see a similar change even with the style. The magnificent long periodic sentences of Book 1–10 give way, from Book 11 forward, to a more subdued and colloquial prose. It’s as if the speaker had stepped down from a marble plinth on which he had been giving a public speech before a large audience to speak in more intimate, modest, and above all practical tones to a circle of friends around a kitchen table. In these latter books, Augustine’s writing sounds in tone and texture much more like his own other works than they do like the earlier part of The City. 263

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Now, Part I ended with Augustine criticizing the Platonists for their failure to imagine the beginning. Part II picks up again right there. The critique of 1–10 has not been forgotten, but it has now been left behind for a new task; and now, unlike in the Confessions, Augustine has much more to say—much, much more. We turn to that much more in our next lecture.

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Lecture 13

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omplaining is easy in theology and philosophy; offering a constructive alternative is not. The topics and tenor of the discussion change dramatically in book 11, suggesting how Augustine conceives the theological project he is undertaking and how it serves his first theological task—explicating the meaning of God’s existence as Creator. Augustine offers this alternative via a systematic exposition that assumes that the Christian faith can offer a coherent way of seeing the entire world, not just discrete parts, and that this way of seeing is not an esoteric doctrine taught only to a narrow elite but intelligible to all.

A Second Beginning for The City of God „„

A distinctive moral psychology is implied in Augustine’s conviction: He believes that one’s actions are contingent upon one’s understanding, that right vision is the wellspring of good conduct. That is the ambition of a properly systematic approach: It proposes a whole new way of looking at the world. Augustine’s is a public exposition, welcoming whoever tries to read it, and it is organized around a biblical historical narrative.

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Augustine’s choice of biblical narrative as the crucial medium of his exposition has important implications. ›› It prioritizes the worldview and categories of the Bible. Augustine knows language’s capacity to shape thought and is alert to the tension between biblical and philosophical categories. ››

It prioritizes the genre of historical writing over philosophical treatise. 265

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Augustine can restart The City of God halfway through because God has already, in the People Israel and in Christ, offered a new beginning in reality.

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The main point of book 11’s exposition is the original beginning, what we can know about God as Creator and the nature of Creation. Learning this new story will help us begin to see the world correctly and to live in it as we ought.

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The first thing to learn is what it means that we are creatures and that God is Creator. The Platonists failed to see how a perfect God can create our manifestly imperfect world. ›› They continually slip back into a reactionary and dualistic nostalgia for an imagined life of disembodied existence. ››

To do better we need to understand how the world can both be the creation of a loving God and yet have fallen into its present condition.

A Scriptural Textbook „„

Part II begins there, telling the Christian narrative of the Creation, the Fall, redemption and consummation. Augustine explores the Christian doctrine of Creation: ›› That it shows God as wholly stable, singular, and simple. ››

That all creation depends on God and is thus contingent and from nothing.

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That because God’s will is essentially good, all creation is good as well.

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That even if evil is in the world, it is secondary to and parasitic upon creation’s more basic goodness.

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For Augustine, this narrative is a lesson in what it means to call our reality and ourselves God’s creation—the immediate and wholly good consequences of a transcendent God’s exhaustively fulfilled, wholly spontaneous will.

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Augustine’s purpose is to explain the church’s mission as a distinct community, the Christian scriptures as a discrete body of insight about the world, and Christian commitment to believing scriptural testimony as an indispensable component of how right vision of Creation can be cultivated.

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We are learning here about the world outside the church, yet through the church as scriptural learning lovingly overseen and guided by the Holy Spirit. This learning has several components: ›› God’s plan is revealed in Christ, the vehicle for understanding God and Creation.

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››

Christ is revealed to us in scripture: The Old Testament gives us the basic vocabulary and context; the New Testament tells us the story of Jesus’s life, teaching, death, and resurrection and of the first generation of the church.

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Scripture is properly readable only within the loving discipline of the community of belief and practice Jesus created, and to which he taught the right habits of inquiry and principles of understanding.

Circularity is inherent in this learning, as believers move between their efforts as a community to understand the scripture stories and use them to guide their lives as service to God through service to others; in turn, that 267

This vision of God’s transcendence, implies that Creation is contingent, meaning that Creation relies on God for its very being.

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life together informs, focuses, and elucidates their reading of scripture.

Understanding God as Creator „„

In book 11, we learn what it means to say that God is Creator, that God is simple and unchanging and that this simple and unchanging God creates the dimensionalities of space and time in which our created world unfolds.

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To the question of how an immutable God creates a mutable world, Augustine answers that the problem arises only if creation is conceived as an act accomplished in time, rather than an act that creates time itself.

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If time, conceived as a temporally sequenced manifold of phases, is itself created, then God’s reality as Creator can be conceived of as an eternal attribute of God—in God’s absolute and unchanging essence—outside of time.

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This vision of God’s transcendence, implies that Creation is contingent, meaning that Creation relies on God for its very being. Augustine insists on the true transcendence of God and the true contingency of the world. God does not share any of the conditions that delimit Creation. God is unchanging, eternal, and simple, which in this context means utterly singular and unified; without ambivalence or partiality.

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Creation’s temporality means that we are never wholly ourselves— part of us is always in the past and in the future, so that we experience ourselves as fragmented. Therefore, the meaning of history is carried in and by its contingency, and every event is a revelation of part of the true essence of history

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The Problem of Evil „„

If Creation is effortlessly brought into being by a wholly good and omnipotent Creator, then what about the presence of evil? Augustine offers two answers, meant to make the presence of evil barely tolerable.

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Evil amplifies the beauty and glory of Creation; the beauty of the universe is magnified by contrarieties. All evil is a counterpoint to good, setting off the glory of the Lord. Much of what we judge to be noble is recognizable because it struggles against evil. So perhaps evil is necessary for us to see the good and for its true goodness to be revealed. This aesthetic defense poses two problems. ›› It seems reasonable to say that God would never create wickedness unless God could put the wickedness to good use. Yet doesn’t this idea involve God in directly using evil? ››

Aesthetic counterpointing seems to suggest a latent dualism in Augustine’s thinking about good and evil. Is there some essential character to evil that lets it oppose goodness?

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These worries trouble Augustine. Perhaps the charge annoyed him so much because it ignored the second way he argued about evil, which is not an aesthetic argument but an ontological one— not about the place of evil in the beauty and drama of the world, but about the reality of evil in the world itself.

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Augustine was a vigorous non-dualist. Evil is most basically a privation of being and goodness, not a positive force in itself. God is Creator, Creation is contingent upon God, evil exists as an aesthetic ornament and as ontological privation, but no more.

The Stages of Creation „„

Now Augustine turns to the scriptural account of Creation and begins to disabuse believers of misunderstandings to which they are susceptible. Most pointedly, he suggests that they do 269

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not understand what God is doing in the six days of Creation. „„

Aesthetic counterpointing seems to suggest a latent dualism in

Augustine’s thinking about good For Augustine, creation is temporal, but not in any and evil. Is there some essential literal fashion. But just as character to evil that lets it oppose today, there were literalists in goodness? Augustine’s age who read the six days as truly six 24-hour periods, kept by some sort of eternal clock. Their pride led them to a refusal to imagine that God can surprise. But what has God done so far, Augustine asks, that has not surprised?

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Augustine proposes an allegorical account of the text as the stages of Creation, which is also an account of the stages of creatures’ coming to know, as best we can, its true nature.

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Each day has its meaning in knowing something of the different principles that create the cosmos. More basic still are two ways of knowing, repeated in each day—morning and evening. We can distinguish these as two modes of intelligent created existence; Augustine calls them morning knowledge and evening knowledge. ›› Evening knowledge is what we have today: knowledge of creatures in themselves. It is murky, growing more so as night comes on. It is real knowledge but hazy and indistinct. ››

Morning knowledge is the knowledge of creatures in their beginnings in and from God. We come to know creatures as God has created them and through God’s knowing of them. This knowledge, though it may seem like it should dull as the day goes on, will last all eternity.

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„„

Despite our distance from the consummation of creation in the last days, it is still possible to be blessed now, to live a sanctified life: Some morning knowledge can today be ours. We can participate in blessedness now, in several ways. ›› First, we are potentially better off than Adam was before the fall. Adam’s immediate happiness was much happier than anyone’s today can be, but he did not yet have the promise of eschatological consummation given us in the People Israel and Christ. In this way, the redeemed and blessed today are much happier, though theirs is an anticipatory happiness. ››

Second, even in our present we have intimations of the joy to come. Book 11 climaxes in a vision of how what we can affirm about the ultimate endpoint of God’s creation teaches us something about the nature of God. Informed by the story of Creation and the promises of God as contained in scripture, we can participate in God now, seeing God’s work in the world and ourselves.

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We can come to know God through reflecting on ourselves, on our loves. In loving, we see three different kinds of love: a love of existence, of the bare thing that we love; a love of knowledge of the loved and of learning more about it; and a love of love: the delight we take in the fact of our loving.

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Terror, fear, even anxiety may exist in love, but none totally effaces its core meaning, which is recognition that we can love another and value the beloved in a way that does not reduce to merely self-interest or merely a projection of ourselves.

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By recognizing that we partake in this love, we can recognize we partake in the basic dynamic of love and are coming to know God. For God is love.

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Questions to Consider 1. What does Augustine say is the topic of the second half of The City of God? How does that topic appear relevant to what he discusses in book 11? 2. In book 11, Augustine spends a great deal of time discussing the importance of Christ and of faith in Christ as crucial for human salvation. Thus Christianity is the one true religion. Why is Christianity so important to Augustine? Why does he conceive of salvation as coming only through Christianity?

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Lecture 13 Transcript

A

s in so many spheres of life, complaining is easy in theology and philosophy; offering a constructive alternative is not. We begin this latter task here, in Book 11. In doing so, we see at once that the topics and tenor of the discussion change rather dramatically. This change of topic and tone suggests how Augustine conceives the theological project he’s undertaking, and how it serves his first theological task—namely, explicating the meaning of God’s existence as Creator. Augustine’s going to do this via a systematic exposition of the Christian faith, one that assumes, first, that the Christian faith can offer a coherent way of seeing the entire world, not just some discrete parts of it. And second, one that implies that this way of seeing can be public, that it is not an esoteric doctrine taught only to a narrow elite. It is intelligible to all—and they must know it. A distinctive moral psychology is implied in this set of conviction. Augustine believes that one’s actions are contingent upon one’s understanding, that right vision is the wellspring of good conduct. That is the ambition of a properly systematic approach—it proposes that we need a whole new way of looking at the world. There are some antecedents to such a project, most notably the 3rd-century Greek Christian thinker Origen from Alexandria, whose treatise On First Principles is generally recognized as the first major systematic work of Christian Theology. But Origen differs from Augustine in several ways; most basically his treatise is explicitly designed to be read only by an initiated elite of those already in the know and is structured by Platonist philosophical principles.

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In contrast, Augustine’s is a fundamentally public exposition, welcoming of whoever tries to read it, and it is organized around a biblical, historical narrative. Augustine’s choice of biblical narrative as the crucial medium and genre of his exposition has several important implications. First, unlike Origins privileging of platonic categories, Augustine prioritizes the worldview and categories of the Bible. He knows language’s capacity to shape thought and is alert to the tension between biblical categories and philosophical categories. Although he uses philosophy, he always tries to be finally obedient to scriptural concepts and norms. This reveals that Augustine thinks that Christian thinkers must be disciplined by the constraints of their scriptural vocabulary—held to account for the internal coherence and speculative fruitfulness of their proposals—and also for how those proposals draw from, and in turn illuminate, the scripture that remains the fundamental treasure trove for Christian reflection. Augustine is in this way at least as much a biblical, theological mind as he is a speculative, Platonizing one. So while Augustine has dalliances with metaphysical and theological speculation—throughout these books we’ll see that repeatedly—he always returns to scriptural categories, hewing to the deposit of faith, as curated by the churches’ ongoing efforts to live out that deposit of faith. Second, Augustine’s choice of Biblical narrative prioritizes the genre of historical writing over philosophical treatise. This might seem strange to say of Augustine; after all, he is often said to be an abstract, antiworldly metaphysician. But when compared to other early Christian theologians, such as Origen, that’s much less clear. History also helps advance the pedagogical purpose of these books. Whereas in the first ten books assumed that everyone understood what they were about, and he could assume that everyone understood his illusions, and he could build on his audience’s prior education in Roman history, now he has to assume that he has to explain himself 274

Lecture 13 Transcript—Metaphysics of Creation and Evil (Book 11)

over and over again. In these later books, we no longer hear the strident and caustic Augustine, hectoring his opponents with ridicule, impaling them upon contradictions; instead, we see a patiently expositing Augustine, committed less to winning on every point and more to making things clear to everyone. Again and again we’ll come across him saying, “this view or that view, or this other view, all seem sufficiently orthodox and plausible to me, though, for my part, I favor this particular version; but these two views over here, these are not to be held, for the following reasons.” Furthermore, Augustine can re-begin the book halfway through—as he does here, in Book 11—only because of certain beliefs he holds about the nature of creation and God’s providential governance of it. In brief, he can undertake this theological re-beginning project on the page since God has already, in the people Israel and in Christ, offered the re-beginning in reality. This re-beginning underscores a basic theological and anthropological claim for Augustine and allows him, a substantial, if tacit, contrast with Vergil’s Aeneid; a work that we’ve seen is a powerful, if silent, argumentative partner for this City. Vergil’s book is the story of the collapse of an old order and the founding of a new city by refugees from the old. In that way, it is not unlike the city of God. And yet there are two major structural differences. First, the Aeneid climaxes at the moment of the founding, but then stops; in other words, the Aeneid is like the City if the City right at the end of Book 10. Second, while the Aeneid’s ending re-beginning is portrayed in mostly heroic and glorious terms, it is, in fact, haunted by an ambivalence. For in the very final scene of the work, Aeneas, the hero, founds the city by killing his enemy Turnus, planting his sword in the man’s chest as he lays prostrate beneath him. And since the command to Aeneas early in the Aeneid was to spare the vanquished and subdue the proud—remember that’s in the first chapter—the failure to spare Turnus at the very end of the book 275

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injects a profound note of ambivalence into Rome’s founding in this work. Perhaps, Vergil seems to be suggesting here, Aeneas plants Rome too thoroughly in the immanent flow of time. He seems driven by revenge, by payback. Is this a true, new re-beginning at all? Or is it not simply another stage in an ongoing blood feud? In contrast, the founder of Augustine’s city was driven by another energy altogether—the energy of love, as manifest in resurrection and forgiveness. This vision allows for the past not to predetermine the present, but for genuinely new beginnings to occur. The human, bearing the image of God, can do something genuinely new, something unprecedented, unprompted, something the past history of the cosmos does not determine—this is the nature of human freedom, of which we are never permitted on Augustine’s account to despair. This stress on re-beginning is reinforced in many ways in this Book 11. The first chapter of the book repeats the first sentence of the City, “Most glorious is the city of God.” Clearly, while Book 11 is a new beginning, an effort to start to undo our enthrallment to the pagan story of the beginning of Rome; it still has work to do to begin this real new beginning. That is why the main point of Book 11s exposition as a whole is, precisely, the original beginning, what we can know about God as Creator and the nature of creation as created. This true story is a new story, and learning it will help us to learn to begin to see the world aright, and hence to begin to live in this world as we ought to do for Augustine. To do all that, the first thing to learn is what it means that we are creatures and that God is Creator. Recall that the Platonists failed rightly to imagine the beginning in Book 10, to see how a perfect God could create our manifestly imperfect world. Since they fail to explain this, Augustine suggested, they continually slip back into a reactionary and 276

Lecture 13 Transcript—Metaphysics of Creation and Evil (Book 11)

dualistic nostalgia; they continually long for an imagined life of pure disembodied existence. Thus, he suggests, the Platonists do not really love the world, do not really see it as God’s Creation, but as a kind of trap, or a cage. To do better, we need to understand how the world can be both the Creation of a loving God and yet fallen into the condition in which we find it today. So Part Two, Book 11, begins right there, telling the real story of the cosmos—the Christian narrative of creation, fall, redemption and consummation. And here, in Book 11, we focus entirely on God’s beginning of Creation. Here Augustine explores the Christian doctrine of Creation—what it shows about God, as wholly stable and singular and simple; then, how all Creation depends upon God and is thus in some radical way contingent and from nothing, or ex nihilo; then finally how, since God’s will is essentially good, all creation is essentially good as well, even if there is evil in the world, that is to say, that evil is fundamentally secondary to and parasitic upon creation’s more basic goodness for Augustine. In sum, for him, this is a first lesson in learning what it means to call our reality, and ourselves, God’s Creation—the immediate and wholly good consequences of a radically transcendent God’s exhaustively fulfilled, wholly spontaneous willing of us into being. When we come truly to see this, Augustine thinks—and he returns repeatedly to this image of seeing, climaxing at the very last paragraph of the whole of the City— we’ll see this much later on—we will be so transformed in our affections, so revolutionized in our will’s dispositions towards the cosmos, that latreia, true and proper service of God—the putative topic as you recall of Book 8–10—will flow naturally from our hearts, and we will be aflame to serve God in love by loving all creation as God loves it by and in creating it. And thereby in all our works and days, with our lips and in our lives, we will praise God constantly, which practice is the true service 277

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of God, for Augustine; and this life of praise transfigures us as the church, the true city of God, still in pilgrimage in this life yet most glorious, even now, as it refers all the glory of its actions to God. It’s a big long sentence. The puzzle then, at the center of this book, Book 11, is simple: How can we, in the middle of things, imagine the beginning, and all that that beginning entails? Augustine talks about this as described in Scripture. Thus, he thinks engaging scripture in this way will humble our pride in our powers of freestanding speculative reason, and as begun through Christ, thus, he thinks, quickening our hearts in gratitude and love. He does this to explain the purpose of the church as a distinct community, the role of the Christian scriptures as a discrete body of insight and wisdom about the world, and to understand Christian commitment to believing those scriptures’ testimony as an indispensable component of how right vision of creation can be cultivated in people. After all, the lesson of the first ten books is that seeing rightly is not obvious; we actually have to be actively taught to see the world the right way. The failure of the Platonists, you recall, is that, despite their glimpse of the true nature of divine transcendence, they failed properly to imagine, properly to see the beginning of creation, and in particular to understand God’s unmerited and unsolicited absolute loving regard for it. That is why Augustine must be explicit here about the role of faith in the Christian scriptures, as taught and learned in the church, for they are the primordial condition for learning to see the world aright, and learning the lessons conveyed from Book 11 forward. Let’s just sketch out how this learning takes place for Augustine. In this learning, the fundamental teacher is God in Christ, and the primary school is the school of the church, and the textbook is the Book of Scripture. This textbook, in turn, helps us to understand the physical world around us, to teach us properly to see it, to read it aright. There was an old trope in Christian teaching, in 278

Lecture 13 Transcript—Metaphysics of Creation and Evil (Book 11)

Christian theology, that the universe was composed of two books, the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, and you could only read the former—the Book of Nature—by knowing how to read it by reading the Book of Scripture aright .So here in the church, believers learn about the world outside the church, but to learn about that world truly, they must learn through the church, and that learning through the church takes place as a scriptural learning, and it has several components. First, God’s plan is revealed in Christ, the vehicle for understanding God and Creation. And Christ is revealed to us believers in Scripture, both the Old Testament, which gives us the basic vocabulary and context within which to understand Jesus’s life, teaching, death, and resurrection, and the New Testament which tells us the story of Jesus and of the first generation of the church that followed in his footsteps. But, second, Scripture is properly readable only if we are placed within the loving discipline of the community of belief and practice that Jesus created, and to which he taught the right habits of inquiry and principles of understanding. So Christ is known properly only by reading sacred scripture within the community of the church, the body of Christ. And this community is lovingly overseen and guided by the Holy Spirit. So there is a circularity to this learning, this community formation, as believers tack back and forth between their efforts as a community to understand the stories that Scripture is telling them, and then to use those stories to guide their life together, a life which is most basically a form of service to God though that is, in turn, manifest as service to others here on earth; and in turn that life together reinforms, refocuses and sharpens their reading of Scripture. So, that’s a lot of prolegomena to thinking about what’s coming up in these books, but it’s a necessary one. With it out of the way, what are we called upon to learn in this Book 11? First and foremost, Augustine thinks, we must learn what it means to say that God is Creator. To say 279

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this means that God is simple and unchanging and that this simple and unchanging God creates the dimensionalities of space and time in which our created world as a whole unfolds. But how does an immutable God create a mutating world? Would not the very act of creating be a change in God? This is true only, Augustine says if creation is conceived as an act accomplished in time, rather than an act creative of time itself. If time, conceived as a temporally sequenced manifold of phases, is itself created— part of creation—then God’s reality as Creator can be conceived of as an eternal attribute of God—who God is, in God’s absolute and unchanging essence – outside of time. This is the fundamental distinction between God and all Creation. Nor again is there any need for any sort of mediating power to communicate God’s creative decisions to a lower realm from which God absents Godself. Any such mediator would be another part of contingent creation and needing creation themselves, and thereby the questions we have about how God created a contingent creation would simply transfer to God’s Creation of the mediator of that creation. Besides, a mediator would be required were creation something fundamentally apart from God in a spatial matrix, as if some larger space enframed both God and the place of creation. But there is no such enframing reality beyond God. God is as beyond as it gets. There is indeed no outside to God. This vision of God’s transcendence implies Augustine’s next point. If God is Creator so absolute, creation is contingent. Contingency here means that creation relies radically on God for its very being. Nothing about the world is properly its own possession; it owes everything to God’s creative activity. Indeed, so radical is this dependence, Augustine says, that when Genesis says that God “saw that it was good”—which, of course, Genesis repeatedly said in the first couple chapters— the verb saw is not just a recognition or acknowledgement 280

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of a things’ goodness, but far more causative than that—so that our goodness itself springs from God’s eternal and sovereign knowledge and will. God’s seeing makes it so. Here Augustine begins his distinctively Christian metaphysics of creation. Against other ancient thinkers, pagan and Christian alike, Augustine insists on the true transcendence of God, the true contingency of the world. Creation and God do not share a common context. God does not share any of the conditions that delimit creation. God is unchanging, eternal, and simple, which in this context means completely and utterly singular and unified, so that God never does anything with mixed motives or half-heartedly or with any ambivalence or partiality. So he tells his audience, do not try to think about something called pre-creation; no time existed before the world; time is part of creation itself; and indeed from God’s eternal and transcendent perspective all times are simultaneous, copresent to the divine. Thus for God, as we saw earlier in talking about Book 5, there is no foreknowledge; God's knowledge of every instant is eternal and entirely and instantaneously immediate to God for all instances of temporally-extended reality. Furthermore, creation’s temporality means several important things. First of all, it means that in time we are never wholly ourselves—there is always part of us in the past, and part of us in the future, and so we experience ourselves as mutable and indeed fragmented. Secondly, since creation is temporal, history’s very formation across time is what constitutes it; its meaning is carried in and by its contingency, and every event of history is a revelation of part of the true essence of history. Nothing, absolutely nothing in history, in world history or in your own personal history, is somehow irrelative or beside the point to your true self. Everything matters, and this is a point we'll return to repeatedly. So far, so splendid. But the highlighting of God’s transcendence, God’s effortless sovereignty over creation, might make the absurd 281

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sinful resistance to God in the creation that we find today seem all the more impossible to understand. After all, if creation is so sovereignly and effortlessly and straightforwardly brought into being by a wholly good and omnipotent Creator, then what are we to say about the presence of evil? Augustine offers two answers to this, meant to make the presence of evil barely tolerable in God’s Creation—barely, but no more. First, he offers what is called an aesthetic argument for evil’s amplifying the beauty and glory of Creation; the beauty and magnificence of the universe are amplified and magnified by contrarieties. Thus, even in falling, the Fallen angels give glory to God, in several senses in spite of themselves. This is an aesthetic defense of evil—all evil is a counterpoint to good, setting off the glory of the Lord. This is still used by us today in talking about gripping works of art; Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment would make no sense without the malice that Raskolnikov talks himself into early in the book, and Star Wars would be a very empty story indeed without Darth Vader. Much of what we judge to be noble in our world—much of what we admire—is recognizable as noble because it struggles against evil. So perhaps evil is the necessary force that enables us to see the good, and for its true goodness to be revealed. Now this defense might make us ask two questions. First, doesn’t this justify evil, even make too much sense of it? It seems reasonable to say that God would never create one whose wickedness God foreknew unless God could put them, in their wickedness, to good use. That seems OK, doesn’t it? But then, doesn’t it involve God in directly, positively needing evil for God’s purposes? That’s troubling. Second, doesn’t this aesthetic counterpointing suggest a latent dualism in Augustine’s thinking about good and evil? Is there some essential character to evil that lets it oppose goodness? I’m not going to worry about either of these worries right now, except to say that they should trouble Augustine, and, to judge by the vehemence of his response to such critics in their debates they clearly did. 282

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Perhaps the charge annoyed him so much since it ignored the second way he argued about evil, which is not an aesthetic argument but an ontological one—not about the place of evil in the beauty and drama of the world, but about the reality of evil in the world itself. We’ll soon see that he was a vigorous non-dualist. Evil is most basically a privation of being and goodness, not a positive force in itself. But let’s put that aside until the next lecture. So, God is Creator, Creation is contingent upon God, evil exists as an aesthetic ornament, and as an ontological privation, but no more. So far we might feel that we’re seeing the same old movie of Augustine declaiming his views and chastising his pagan opponents, just with the proportions modestly adjusted. But now the book takes an unprecedented turn, and suddenly Augustine is no longer hectoring embittered opponents, but lecturing confused or bemused believers. For now, he turns to scriptural accounts of creation and begins to disabuse believers of misunderstandings to which they are, he thinks, predictably susceptible. Most pointedly, he suggests to them that they don’t understand what God is doing in the six days of Creation. For Augustine, creation is temporal, but not in any easy literalistic fashion. But just as today, there were literalists in Augustine’s age who read the six days of Creation in Genesis as truly six twenty-four hour periods, kept by some sort of eternal clock in heaven. In responding to them, Augustine ends up sounding a bit like the character Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride when he says, “You keep using that word, creation. I do not think it means what you think it means.” The fundamentalists’ pride, like the Platonists’, Augustine suggests, leads them to an equally sad failure of imagination, a refusal to imagine God can surprise. But what has God done so far, Augustine asks, that has not surprised? The whole story, starting with Creation and culminating in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, is a thriller. 283

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If we are not to think of creation as literally six days, but how then should we think of creation as sequential and temporally durational? Augustine proposes an allegorical account of the text as an account of the stages of God’s Creation, which is also an account of the stages of creatures’ coming to know the true nature of that Creation, as best we can. Here Augustine finds in the six days not just a basic metaphysics of creation but also an epistemology of our knowing of that account, both of which are vitally important for him. Ontologically let me say something here. Ontologically Augustine wants to say, creation is itself a matter of stages and layers. But there cannot be a day before there is a sun in the sky, he points out, so clearly even the writer of the six days of Creation, whom Augustine thinks is God, even that writer knows that the first day must mean something other literally than a day, for there was no sun to mark it. That’s the first ontological point he wants to make. But secondly, each of the days has its meaning, for him, in knowing something of the different principles that create sequentially the cosmos. But more basic still—equally basic—are two ways of knowing, which he sees repeated in each day—morning and evening. Here, he says, we learn an epistemological lesson, a lesson about our knowing. Here we can distinguish, he says, these as two modes of intelligent created existence; Augustine calls them morning knowledge and evening knowledge. Evening knowledge is what we by and large have today. It is knowledge of creatures in themselves, which is shadowy, and murky, growing more so as night comes on. It is real knowledge—our condition is not that of a moonless night—but it is hazy, indistinct, not full. But, if we come to know creatures as God has created them, and in a way through God’s knowing of them—if we route our knowledge through God’s knowing, and learn to see them as Creations of God and in God—the kind of lesson of Book 11—then we gain the first fruits of what he calls morning knowledge, which is the knowledge of creatures in their beginnings in and from God, the bright morning sun of their lives. 284

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And this knowledge, while it might seem like it should dull as the day goes on, will last, he thinks, durably through all eternity. As we will see later on, the end of time is not like an evening at all, but more like the first sun of morning. For the eschaton, the end, is actually, Augustine thinks, our true beginning. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves in that. This distinction between morning and evening knowledge might sound very odd to you. But consider this, when you begin building a house, part of what you see is what is before you when you come to the worksite every day; you have an evening knowledge of the house, in its struts and its frame and its plumbing, its foundation. The things that are there getting built. But you also imaginatively see the finished house, the completed thing. And that image guides your vision of the present as well; it structures what lies before you even when only the foundation has been poured. That is the morning knowledge of the house that you possess from the beginning. You see as it were, from the consummation of the thing, backward. That is a small analogy to what Augustine is suggesting here. To understand it better, he implies, you must begin to undertake the disciplines that the church teaches to learn to see creation. And fundamental to those disciplines are the reading and contemplation of scripture. There is more to say about creation than this, of course. One important thing he says is that, despite our distance from the consummation of creation in the last days, it is still possible to be blessed now, to live a sanctified life, at least partially: so some morning knowledge can today be ours. After all, for all our current twilight existence, creatures are never utterly severed from God; the metaphysics of creation doesn’t allow that. So we can participate in blessedness now, in several ways. First of all, we’re potentially better off than Adam was before the Fall. Adam's immediate happiness, in his lived present, was much happier 285

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than anyone’s today can be, but he did not yet have the promise of eschatological consummation that has been bequeathed to us in the people Israel and the person of Jesus Christ. So in this way, the redeemed and blessed today, although they live in hope, are much happier, though again, theirs is only an anticipatory happiness. Secondly, even in our present, we have anticipatory intimations of the joy to come. This is how Book 11 climaxes, in a kind of eschatological natural theology, which is a vision of how what we can affirm about the ultimate endpoint of God’s Creation teaches us something important about the nature of God in Godself and our destiny as joined with God. Informed by the story of Creation and the promises of God as contained in scripture, we can participate in God now, seeing God’s work in the world and in ourselves. We can come to see all creation as part of a symphonic poem of God’s gratuitous love of the world. The marks of God’s Creation are obvious, when we see them, though not so obvious when we do not—they involve, again, a kind of gestalt switch for us. We can come to know God through reflecting on ourselves, on our loves. At the end of Book 11, Augustine lays out a kind of psychology of the human that lets this theology shine through. In loving, we actually see he proposes three distinct kinds of love—a love of existence, of the bare thing that we love; a love of our knowledge of them, a love of learning more about them, and a love of our love, a delight we take in the fact of our loving. Yes, there can be terror, fear, even anxiety in love; but none of these totally effaces the core meaning of love, which is a recognition that we can love another and value them in a way that does not reduce to merely self-interest, or merely a projection of ourselves; we have the ability genuinely to love another. By recognizing that we partake in this love, we can recognize we partake in the basic dynamic of love that is God’s Creation of, sustaining of, and culminating engagement with all of creation. In 286

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loving in this way, that is to say, we are coming to know God. For God just is this love. All this requires a commitment to Christian revelation, as communicated by Christian scriptures, as taught in the churches, that whole regime again. There is no practical way to avoid that communal and textual context if you want to attempt to understand what it means to call God the Creator and to love that Creator God. So Book 11 is not simply about the cosmos; it also teaches us a way of imagining the implications for this picture for our own selfunderstanding. We are creatures who have in a way not yet begun; we must learn what it is to be beginning, to be mere beginners, to get underway in our living, and we do that through our love. All this leaves a powerful question still unanswered. What does he think evil is in itself, in its essence? Does it even have an essence? We’ll see, in the next lecture, that Augustine takes up these issues in the very next book—Book 12.

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Fall of the Rebel Angels (Book 12)

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f book 11 explores the most basic fact about our world, the fact that it was created and has a beginning, book 12 addresses the next issue: If there are right beginnings, there are also wrong ones; most fundamentally the “wrong beginning” of creatures who decide inexplicably to rebel against God’s plan for them in Creation— that is, the wrong beginning of the Fall and evil. Here is the core of Augustine’s analysis of the problem as an account of the origins of sin and the nature of evil in any creature with a will of its own.

The Nature of Evil „„

We study the language of evil because, despite the many legitimate worries about it, it may articulate an ineradicable element of the experience of humanity as a whole. Whatever you think of arguments about evil in general, for many people today Augustine’s account seems both experientially and conceptually implausible. ›› It seems experientially implausible because the world doesn’t seem to be simply good. Without the revelation of the Bible, the idea that nature itself bears some generative power for evil is actually empirically powerful and hard to defeat. ››

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It seems conceptually incoherent, because it seems too rigorously tilted toward the basic goodness of Creation and may seem to offer too little in the way of a purchase for evil.

Augustine’s account of Creation as in itself wholly good leads ineluctably to a powerful question: How is evil even possible?

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„„

He unpacks his answer through a discussion of the angelic fall because the fall of the angels is a way to study the origin of evil in almost laboratory conditions. Angelic agency is not immured in the muck of the material world; the less our view is clouded by the dirt of materiality in which the roots of our agency are anchored, the more clearly we see its roots.

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According to Augustine, evil is embedded within a framework of goodness. The existence of evil is intelligible only within God’s larger framework of Creation: To have being is the singular characteristic of goodness. Therefore, when we say something is evil, we mean ultimately that the thing tends toward non-being, which is contrary to God.

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The good angels accepted God’s gift of creating them in gratitude, while the bad angels resented the conditions of the gift, and thereby resented their being itself. Thus the demons are, for Augustine, fundamentally fallen angels and therefore good.

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Evil is a vacuity where something should be. The evil will is opposed to both God and its own nature, and we can only properly talk about a nature being evil as a way of its testifying to the good form that it should have retained. We recognize evil only by contrast to good, and by recognizing fault as fault, we necessarily praise what the nature as created was meant to be.

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Evil is also inescapably secondary because it is a failed nothing. Its nihilism always carries with it the pathos of a nothing that should have been a something or a somebody. The secondariness of evil is also ironic, because its whole self-understanding as rebellion is meant to express a longing for autonomy, for separation from God, and that is the one thing it can never achieve.

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Augustine is saying that for things to be less good than they ought to be, they must be able to vary in the degree to which they fulfill their cosmic destinies. This is a far cry from saying that 289

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creation is necessarily sinful. In this account, sin is the failure of creation to live up to the ideals that God has set for it.

Agency and Causality „„

Saint John’s statement that “the devil did not stand fast in the truth” means, for Augustine, that wickedness is not natural. He says, “The choice of evil is an impressive proof that the nature is good,” because the chooser must choose evil as an act of rebellion against a context of absolute goodness.

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Rebellious agency is not an excess of action but a failure to follow through. God creates angels with a good will; the bad angels simply fail to accept all the goodness that God offers. This choice is actually a dissent. Thus devil is not evil by nature; by the choice or exercise of its own volitional existence, it fails to be good.

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For Augustine, a second text of Saint John’s—“the devil sins from the beginning”—means that despite not being a part of Creation, evil is relentless and comprehensive. Nothing innocent remains in the rebellious soul. Furthermore, once begun, evil will never stop by itself. The devil is petulantly stubborn.

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In Augustinian terms, evil is a mode of using otherwise good realities. The evil does not necessarily infect the instrument; the key is the use to which we put the instrument. Against what he takes to be Origen’s argument, that selfhood itself—and thus otherness from God—is the metaphysically sufficient reality that constitutes evil, Augustine says the decision to turn to the self, not the self in itself, is the source of evil.

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One way of getting at the core explanation of evil is to ask what causes evil. To ask this question is to seek the cause of the very first evil will, the first fault of the fallen angels. Augustine concludes that the evil act had no actual material point. An end was in sight, the perverse end of radical autonomous separation 290

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from God, but this end cannot be understood except as derivative from the aim to reject the good that God had given. „„

Saint John’s statement that “the devil did not stand fast in the truth” means, for Augustine, that

wickedness is not natural. And what caused that rejecting aim to develop? What caused Satan, when offered life, to shrug? There is no cause. There is no “efficient causality” in this case, Augustine says, only a deficient causality.

The Absurdity of Evil „„

For many other early Christian and pagan thinkers, such as the Christian Origen, evil is contained within cyclical structures that constrain it and make it an integral part of a larger system, not a radical rupture in Creation. Irenaeus proposed that evil was a necessary stage of painful separation from a loving God. In such accounts evil is part of a larger system that will be wholly reconciled back to God, only to begin the whole cycle of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and return, ad infinitum.

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For Augustine, endless cycles or necessity for evil or separation fails to sustain the distinctiveness of good and evil and undercuts creatures’ attachment to the final moment of presumably consummated union in God.

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Such a view makes history both superficially frivolous and relentlessly despairing: Not only does nothing really matter, but what matters is the nothing—the absent thing that is yet to come but never arrives, for the arrival of each new event simply pushes the thing yet to come one step into the future. The idea of perfect reconciliation is bought at the price of infinite indeterminacy.

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Augustine struggles mightily against any veneer of dualism, either between God and some other malevolent force (as in Manicheism) or within God or God’s plan, as in Origen. Augustine’s account tries very hard to insist that God is wholly good and absolutely sovereign, and yet that evil is truly evil.

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Augustine feels compelled to affirm that evil is absurd, an inexplicable reality. For him the absurdity of evil is not an implication of his account that must be accepted, but one of its findings that should be expounded. For him, the emphasis on the absurdity of evil is not a limitation, but one of its central achievements.

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We are invited to see with new eyes—not as fallen creatures for whom sin and evil are all-too-explicable—as God does, the truly absurd and pathetic nature of Creation’s own revolt against the loving Creator who gave it being in the first place.

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Recalling Augustine’s aesthetic defense of evil in book 11 as a counterpoint to goodness, one might say that the rebel angels exist to show the full range of what creatures can do with the gifts God has given them. ›› Thus God enables Satan and the rebellious angels to use their agency even so far as to try to refuse that agency by attempting to refuse their being altogether. ››

In this way the whole account of the fall of the rebel angels that Augustine offers here, culminating in his depiction of their deficient causality, is not seen as a flaw in his overall account, but a positive Behind all these questions is a basic and pedagogically fruitful explication of the actual existential one: Is this account of nature of evil. evil workable?

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„„

Book 12 is about seeing evil as truly evil, to be befuddled by it, to see it as in itself annihilating of physical realities like one’s own or other peoples’ lives and of rationality and intelligibility at all.

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Still, we may wonder whether some questions remain unanswered or not answered sufficiently: ›› Is the overall privationist account of evil adequate?

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Is Augustine trying to confuse us with his theodicy?

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Is the idea of evil’s ex nihilo entrance into reality as absurd truly accurate?

Behind all these questions is a basic existential one: Is this account of evil workable? We have a clue to how Augustine will answer that by the end of book 12, for Adam has come on the scene. Adam is not just one human; he is, in a way, all humans; all humanity’s destiny is contained in his flesh. In Augustine’s mind, what happens to Adam has consequences for the rest of the species.

Questions to Consider 1. In book 12, Augustine discusses evil at length. What does he think evil is in its essence? 2. Given this metaphysical and ontological account of evil, how does Augustine explain wicked acts? What, for example, causes the angels to fall? Can we conceive of evildoing in these terms? 3. Do you think Augustine’s account captures something important about the phenomenon of evil? Do you think it leaves anything important out?

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Lecture 14 Transcript

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Fall of the Rebel Angels (Book 12)

f Book 11 explores the most basic fact about our world, the fact that it was created and has a beginning Book 12 addresses the next issue. If there are right beginnings, there are also wrong ones; most famously and fundamentally, there is the wrong beginning of creatures who decide inexplicably to rebel against God’s plan for them in creation—that is, the wrong beginning of the Fall and evil. So here we find the core of Augustine’s analysis of the problem of evil, conceived here in terms of the Fall of the rebel angels, as an exemplary account of the origins of sin and the nature of evil in a creature with a will of its own. We will focus especially on Augustine’s curious insistence that, when considered aright and taken with full seriousness, the Fall is inconceivable, means that literally, we’ll see. We believe we know what caused the Fall, but we are mistaken, Augustine thinks. Hence we must learn, and I’m quoting him here, “how not to know what cannot be known.” Before we get into the weeds on this issue, step back and ask, Why do we want to think about evil at all? Many people today think the language of evil is irredeemably mythological and should just be kicked to the side. Typically, when we respond in the affirmative, we offer two kinds of positive replies to why we’d want to think about evil. One a relatively straightforward one, one more complicated. The straightforward one is simple. We study the language of evil to understand others, both historical others and our contemporaries, who still operate with this language and believe that it has illuminative power. The second argument is a bit more challenging. We study this language since, despite the many legitimate worries about it, it might irreplaceably articulate an ineliminable element of the experience of 294

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humanity as a whole. Even if you never expect, and never accomplish, to ever experience evil, we would do our species as a whole a great disservice were we to let this language atrophy, as we will continue, across history, to encounter situations where we will need it. Whatever you think about these arguments about evil in general, it is the case that, for many people today, Augustine’s account seems both experientially and conceptually implausible. It seems experientially implausible since the world doesn’t seem to be simply good; as the early Enlightenment thinker Pierre Bayle put it, absent the special revelation of the Bible, the position of the Manichees—Augustine’s opponents—that nature itself bears some originary power for evil, is actually quite empirically powerful and hard to defeat. Augustine’s account also seems conceptually incoherent since it seems too rigorously positive. As we’ll see, his account is so rigorously tilted toward the basic goodness of creation that it might seem to offer too little in the way of a purchase for evil. Augustine’s account of creation as in itself wholly good leads ineluctably to a powerful question, How is evil even possible? Given this metaphysical and ontological account of evil, how does Augustine explain wicked acts? What, for example, causes the angels to fall? Can we conceive of evildoing in these terms at all? Augustine recognizes both these concerns about his account. He feels their power. But he thinks that he has a response to them. For his metaphysics of creation implies what is called a privationist account of evil. And this gets him into some complications about the nature of evil. He’s driven to these claims by the logic of his metaphysical system, I think; but then he doubles down on them and argues that they contain important phenomenological and metaphysical insight. Phenomenologically, it seems even the sinful creature will try to convince itself that its rebellion is done for some truly good end; metaphysically, it means that the basic structure of reality makes a total fall, a complete self-evacuation from being impossible. 295

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He unpacks his account of evil through a discussion of the angelic fall. He does this since he reads the Bible as implying—not telling but implying—the story of the Fall of the angels, and so he sees the textual hints of that story to be the material out of which his account should be constructed. But why, we might ask, should humans concern themselves with angelic malice, when the problems attended upon mere human wickedness is itself so much more readily available to all of us? Well, for Augustine, the Fall of the angels is a way to study the origin of evil in almost laboratory conditions, in, as it were, a petri dish, under a microscope. Angelic agency is, so to speak, a more hydroponic kind of agency—since it is not immured in the muck of the material world—in flesh and meat—we see its roots more clearly, the less our view is clouded by the dirt of materiality in which the roots of our agency are anchored. In undertaking this expedition, it will be good to be reminded of some of Augustine’s axiomatic conclusions. First, recall that evil is always embedded within a framework of goodness. The existence of evil is intelligible only within God’s larger framework of good creation. There is an ultimate identity of those two concepts, in fact, being and goodness. To have being, to be real, is the singular characteristic of goodness; and what is good is what really, truly exists. On the other hand, for Augustine, when we say something is evil, we mean ultimately that the thing tends toward nonbeing. Thus being itself is not simply adjectivally good, as if there were some neutral substance—some goop of being—that could be flavored for good or evil; to begin with that imagination of the world is already to be succumbing to the devil’s story about creation not being fundamentally God’s work, but a potentially neutral battlefield upon which the forces of good and evil contend. Dualism is what the Devil wants us to believe, Augustine thinks. But no existence is contrary to God; rather, it is non-existence that is contrary to God. 296

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The basic goodness of being is only an ultimate orientation of an evil thing, of course; unhappily, nothing precludes some phenomena that we recognize to be evil as having more this-worldly vigor or vitality than some other phenomenon that we affirm to be good. All we mean is that the ultimate tendency of evil, the end toward which it strives, whether it knows it or not, is nihilation; and insofar as it does not, insofar as it wants to stay in being as itself, which is to say as a creature made by God, it is good. As for the demons, this is why they are for Augustine fundamentally fallen angels, and hence good. Their difference is due to their differing responses to God’s gift of creating them. The good angels accepted that gift in gratitude and cleaved to God, while the bad angels immediately resented the conditions under which their existence was given to them, and hence they resented their very being itself. The Fall is a kind of teenage solemnness in this picture. Second, as so embedded, evil is inescapably and ironically secondary, a vacuity where something should be. It is a loss of integrity, a form of self-harm—good might exist on its own, Augustine says, but evil cannot. The evil will is opposed to both God and its own nature, for its own nature comes from God, And we can only properly talk about a nature being evil as a way of its testifying to the good form that it should have retained. After all, Augustine says, we only recognize evil by contrast to good; and by recognizing fault as fault, we necessarily praise what the nature as created was meant to be. After all, even irrational and inanimate natures have a place in the universe—they might be lower ranked, but they are not defective, and in their being they give glory to God as well, for they are all in their constitution good. Evil is also inescapably secondary in this way since it is derivative, parasitic upon goodness. It is a privation, which is not exactly the same thing as the primordial nothing, the nihil, out of which God called Creation. It is a failed nothing, a something that tried to be a nothing and failed. 297

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It is the dark and empty room that should be filled with life and light, but now contains only a few shreds of what used to be there—scraps of paper, marks on a wall, perhaps a broom leaning up against a corner—rubble, not sheer emptiness. The nihil of evil always carries with it the pathos of a nothing that should have been a something, or could have been a somebody. And this secondariness of evil is also ironic since its whole self-understanding as rebellion is meant to express a longing for autonomy, for independence, for separation, for apartness from God, and that is the one thing it can never achieve. Third, the very possibility of evil choice arises out of the instability of created natures as created from nothing, ex nihilo. Why is that? Is that suggesting that creation is in some sense naturally tending toward evil? No, it only means that they are contingent and thus mutable, not necessarily one way or the other, as God is necessarily God. Evil cannot come into existence unless it comes into existence, so there must be a way for existence to be warped by it. Note that this is not the cause of evil again, just a necessary condition of it. And that it is a necessary condition does not make it a sufficient one. Augustine is often accused of being hostile to material created reality. At least here, that is far from the case. All he is saying here is that for things to be less good than they ought to be, they must be able to vary in the degree to which they fulfill their cosmic destinies, their purposes in the universe. This is a far cry from saying that creation is necessarily sinful. If we have to choose between God and Creation as the locus of sin, then yes, Creation is where we find sin. But sin is not properly Creation, in this account; sin is the failure of creation, sin is Creation failing to live up to the ideals that God has set for it. Now remember, Augustine’s was a world without Novocain, without painkillers, antibiotics or refrigeration; suffering, pain, decay, death, and rot were all much more palpable and inescapable in his world than in our own. And that world swarmed with thinkers of diverse religions 298

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and philosophies who had very careful and well thought-through arguments explaining why the corrupt material reality all around them was either antithetical to true divine goodness or fundamentally severed from it, and yet Augustine expressly and repeatedly critiqued and rejected those positions. This is not an anti-materialist thinker. Indeed, he does some amazing metaphysical gymnastics to avoid siding with people like the Manicheans in any way on these matters most of all. So while Augustine is reputed to be a doom-and-gloom thinker, emphasizing sin and apocalypse in the created world, in fact, his basic vision of creation is a profoundly, fundamentally positive one. And he elaborated it in a time where such hopefulness was not as easily proclaimed as perhaps it is in our own time, and against others, within the church and without it, whose visions of the cosmos were far more sinister than his own. Thus it was, in very many ways, radically counter-cultural for its time, and perhaps even for our own. Once we’ve understood the metaphysical preconditions for the possibility of evil, Augustine says, we can turn to the existential and agential character of the evil agent. We move, that is, from the ontology of evil to the psychology of evil. Here we ask, who is the devil? What is the devil like? Augustine goes through a series of scriptural texts which he and the tradition he inherits take to be especially important for establishing the truth about the devil. Two, in particular, are important. First, the text from John, “The Devil did not stand fast in the truth since there is no truth in him.” Second, the text from the First Epistle of John, “The devil sins from the beginning.” Let’s look at these in turn, not so much for what they say about the devil, but for what they say about the nature of evil agency itself. The idea that the devil did not stand fast in the truth means, for Augustine, that wickedness is not natural. As he says, and this is a quote of his, “The choice of evil is an impressive proof that the nature is good,” since the chooser must choose evil not against a blank 299

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backdrop of essentially indifferent, neutral, dull matter, but as an act of rebellion against a context of absolute goodness. God creates angels with a good will; the bad angels simply add, as it were, their defection, and thereby contribute their decision to opt out. But this addition is, in reality, a subtraction, as what the bad angels do most basically is fail to realize what they should be, they fail to accept all the goodness that God offers. This choice is actually a dissent. Rebellious agency is not an excess of action on their part, but a failure to follow through. Thus the devil is not evil by nature, but by the choice or exercise of the devil’s own volitional goodness, the devil fails to be as good as the devil could be. Augustine critiques Origen’s claim at least according to Augustine, that the reason for the world's creation was to restrain evil, not to establish good, as if creation were a net to catch falling angels after they had splintered themselves off from God into autonomous subjectivity; against this, Augustine insists that there was only one cause of the world, that the world was created out of pure free goodness; no necessary dualism attends Creation’s origins. Hence, against all those who affirm that part of Creation, maybe all of Creation, is evil, Augustine replies, no, by nature, Creation is good—a derivative or participatory good, perhaps but good nonetheless. As he puts it, it is not nature but the defection itself of the will from nature against nature that is evil. So evil has no positive nature—it is, strictly speaking, no thing, but a move that signifies most properly an absence where a thing should be. To believe otherwise is to misconstrue the nature of God, whose pure goodness and integrity of will mean that all that this God creates will also be good. Indeed, if sin were natural, then, Augustine says, there would be no such thing as sin, for sin is a crime against nature. The second text—the devil sins from the beginning—means that, despite evil’s ontological non-primordiality, it’s non-originality, evil is relentless and comprehensive. Everything is marked by this malice— 300

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there is nothing left in the rebellious soul that is innocent, no oasis of purity in the good intentions of the heart, the right thinking of the mind. Furthermore, once begun, it will never stop by itself. The devil that is. Indeed all wicked agents, are petulantly stubborn. Just consider people in your own life, when you consider the power of humans to do bad, even to harm themselves, and to keep at that self-harming, you have to be amazed. So, even as we condemn the twisted will, we ought still to be impressed at the sheer persistence of malevolence. Once, in fact, reflecting on a close friend who had a certain capacity for picking apart almost anyone else’s happiness and leaving it in shards on the floor, my mother said to me in a moment of brilliance, “It must be exhausting to be him.” That’s kind of what Augustine is saying, it must be exhausting to be the devil, to be a sinner. And yet, Augustine says, here we are. Given all this, what can we understand of the nature of evil agency? Evil is, in Augustinian terms, a determination of use, not a substance; it is a mode of using otherwise good realities. A rock can be a beautiful thing, and it has lessons for us about natural history and sometimes the very origins of our planet. It can be used to build a house or a playground bench or a garden path. It can be used in a game or for a child’s toy. But when it is used to smash in the heads of small children, it has become an instrument of evil. But its instrumentality in that situation does not speak to the rock’s fundamental goodness. Great ingenuity and aesthetic sensibility can be invested in creating the most hideously cruel devices, and of course, cruelty can eventuate in the most beautiful of creations. The evil does not necessarily infect the creation, even though we need to know the whole history of our pasts, to understand who we are and where we come from and to what or whom we owe our thanks. What is key is the use to which, again, we put the creation. Again, against what he takes to be Origen’s argument, that selfhood itself— otherness from God—is the metaphysically sufficient reality that 301

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constitutes evil, for Augustine it is not selfhood, but the decision to turn to the self, not the self in itself, that is the source of evil. And this all culminates in Augustine’s account of the core explanation of evil. One way of getting at this question is to ask after what causes evil. What is the intelligible nature of evil’s origins? To what extent can we make sense of it, and what is the sense that we can make of it? To ask this question is to ask, what was the cause of the very first evil will, the first fault of the Fallen angels? Here we see one of Augustine’s most profound microscopic investigations of an act. Ultimately, he concludes, there was no positive reason, no actual material point to the evil act—there was an end in sight, of course, the perverse end of radical autonomous separation from God; but this end cannot be understood itself, except as itself derivative from a prior aim to reject the good that God has given. The yes is dependent upon the no. And what caused that rejecting aim to develop? What caused Satan, when offered life, to shrug? There is no cause. There is no efficient causality, in this case, Augustine says, only a deficient causality, in Latin the term is a causa deficiens. And he concludes this account with a wonderful description. The evil will is not itself an effect of something, but a defect, to have such an evil will is to defect from that which supremely is [namely, God] to that which has a less perfect degree of being. Now to seek the causes of such defections is like wishing to see darkness, or to hear silence. Both of these [darkness and silence] are known to us, the former by means of the eye and the latter by the ear; but not by any positive appearance, but by their lack of appearance.

That’s all Augustine. Then he says something very revealing, and something we will return to, “Let no one seek to know from me what I know that I do not know—unless, perhaps, he wishes to know how not to know that which we should know cannot be known.”

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Let me read this again to you; it’s very dense. “Let no one seek to know from me what I know that I do not know—unless, perhaps, he wishes to know how not to know that which we should know cannot be known.” In this passage, Augustine reveals something very deep. What he is saying here is that the difficulty we have in properly understanding that there is, strictly speaking, no cause to evil is itself a sign of our own need to change our vision of the world—to change what is obvious to us, and what is puzzling to us. But we’ll come back to that in a little bit. Focus now on how this really is a radically different account than the one found in many other early Christian and pagan thinkers, such as, for example, the Christian Origen. There, evil is contained within cyclical structures which constrain it and make it not a radical rupture in the integration of creation as a whole, but rather an integral part of a larger system. And Origen is not far away from another Christian theologian, Irenaeus, who proposed that evil was a necessary stage of painful separation from a loving God, much as teenagers today rebel against their parents but are eventually, we hope, able to reconcile with them, in no small part due to the independence and hence maturity that their rebellion brought them. On such accounts as these, evil is part of a larger system again which will be wholly reconciled back to God—only then, on Origen’s account, to re-begin the whole cycle of Creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and return, on and on. For Augustine, such accounts make a large mistake, Endless cycles or even any necessity for evil or separation at all, fail to sustain the distinctiveness of good and evil. They blend everything into a kind of metaphysical smoothie, where the distinct tastes of all the discrete realities have been smooshed together. Such an account, Augustine thinks, cannot really respect the metaphysically peculiar and particular nature of history. 303

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It would immediately undercut creatures’ attachment to any particular moment, including the final moment of presumably consummated union in God, to such a degree that that moment would no longer be what we take it now to be—that is, to be truly utter and final bliss in God. It would make history finally both superficially frivolous and relentlessly despairing. It’s frivolous since nothing really matters on this account—no condition is permanent, each is followed quickly by another, and the real truth is in the changing. But it’s also relentless and despairing since not only does nothing really matter, but what matters is the nothing—the absent thing that is yet to come, but which never fully arrives, for the arrival of each new event, simply pushes the thing yet to come one step ahead into the future. The idea of perfect reconciliation here is bought at the ultimate price of infinite, ultimate indeterminacy. That is the core of Augustine’s suspicion of Origen. Augustine, on the other hand, wants to affirm that history is permanent and irrevocable—a oneway street—and he thinks Origen won’t let him do that. He worries that Origen’s metaphysics makes history—and thus Creation as a whole— meaningless. The root cause of Origen’s proposal, Augustine came to believe, is not any positive attraction to such a vision of history, with all the pernicious consequences pertaining to it. The root cause is Origen’s failure to understand the radicality of God’s transcendence. This picture cannot conceive a God, radically unconditioned by sequentiality, who would create a finite sequential series—or that, to put it more succinctly, the eternal God can create new things, without any novelty of will. Here Augustine is lecturing to Origin in the same way he was lecturing to the people in his church in the last lecture, and he’s surprised that a theologian of Origen’s stature has failed to understand this. One thing that is key here—Augustine struggles mightily against any veneer of dualism, either between God and some other malevolent force as in Manicheanism or within God or within God’s plan, as in Origen. A dualism between God and some other malevolent force 304

Lecture 14 Transcript—Fall of the Rebel Angels (Book 12)

limits God’s sovereignty; a dualism embedded within God’s plan, redescribes evil so that it is not ultimately evil at all. Augustine’s account tries very hard to insist that God is wholly good and absolutely sovereign, and yet that evil is truly evil. He feels compelled to affirm that evil is absurd, an inexplicable reality. But we should be wary of claim that he feels compelled to affirm that insight. Indeed, he thinks this is a positive insight of his account. For him, this claim, about the absurdity of evil, is not an implication of his account that must be begrudgingly accepted, it is one of its findings that should be happily expounded. For we should be astonished at evil. For him, the account’s emphasis on the absurdity of evil is not a limit of the account, but one of its central achievements. We are, by it, invited to see with new eyes—not as fallen creatures for whom sin and evil are all too explicable, even almost natural; but to see as God does, with properly rational and wholly good eyes, the truly absurd and even pathetic nature of creation’s own revolt against the loving Creator who gave Creation being in the first place. One might recall Augustine’s aesthetic defense of evil in the previous Book 11 as a glorious counterpoint to goodness, and say that the rebel angels exist in some way to show the full range of what creatures can do with the gifts that God has given them. Thus God enables Satan and the rebellious angels to use their agency even so far as to try to refuse that agency, by attempting to refuse their being altogether. In this way, the whole account of the Fall of the rebel angels that Augustine offers here, culminating in his depiction of their deficient causality, is not seen as a flaw in his overall account, but a positive and pedagogically fruitful explication of the actual nature of evil. We should conclude this lecture on this point, on how Book 12 teaches us to see in an analogous way to the lesson of Book 11. For just as Book 11 was about seeing Creation as creation, so Book 12 is about seeing evil as truly evil. Just as we needed to learn to see Creation as 305

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a gift, as creation, for Augustine—to see it all as the direct handiwork of a truly transcendent, astonishing Creator God—here we need to learn, as we saw Augustine himself put it, rightly to in-comprehend evil, to be befuddled by it, to see it as itself, in itself nihilating, selfdamaging, and not simply of physical realities like one’s own or other peoples’ lives, but also of rationality and intelligibility at all. We need to see it as a kind of moral black hole that emits no light whatsoever and sucks everything into it completely in abyss. And yet it is reasonable to wonder whether some questions still remain unanswered, or not answered sufficiently on this account. Most basically, is the overall privationist account of evil adequate? Is Augustine trying to confuse us with this theodicy? Is the idea of evil’s ex nihilo entrance into reality as absurd truly accurate? Doesn’t this account simultaneously invest evil with too much rebellious grandeur since it came out of nowhere and yet also offer us the false metaphysical consolation of a vision of evil too empty of positive maliciousness? Behind all these questions stands an even more basic existential one, is this account of evil workable? Is it inhabitable? We have a clue to how Augustine will answer that by the end of Book 12, for Adam has come on the scene. Adam is not just one human, he is, in a way, all humans; all humanity’s destiny is contained in his flesh, as all humans will descend from him—including, for Augustine, Eve formed from one of Adam’s ribs. Here there is a crucial fact about us, namely that, in Augustine’s mind, what happens to Adam has consequences for the rest of the species. We’ll turn to exploring those consequences, and why they are consequences, and how they should inform our lives today, next.

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Lecture 15

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eath is everywhere in this book. It stands as a discrete topic and subtly lurks behind the other great topic, the human body. Augustine wants us to feel the stench and stiffness of suffering and death in our bodies as we move about in our daily life and work. We may be disturbed by so much attention to death. We do not think about it very often. And yet apart from birth it is, so far, the only reality guaranteed to be common to all human beings. Every one of us will die—some sooner, some later, but eventually all.

The Wages of Sin „„

The idea of death in life was a well-established one for Augustine’s age, within the Christian churches and outside them. And not only was the diagnosis of living death not unheard-of, there was a common prescription: Our solution was to flee this world by ourselves “dying” to it. Many early Christians eagerly sought martyrdom as a way to “get to God.” It was a logical thing, to flee the world once you saw that it brought only death.

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Augustine was not wholly opposed to this rhetoric, but he was wary of where it might lead. The fault of our difficulty in this material world lay not in the world itself, but in our basic orientation toward it. Augustine’s proposed strategy amounts to a new orientation that is the gracious gift of the one true healer, Christ.

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What is death, exactly? What does Augustine mean when he calls our existence a kind of death? Augustine understands death as not natural to the human condition. Augustine is a free interpreter 307

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of scripture, but here he is clear that he believes that there was a literal historical Adam, created directly by God. ›› And yet, now we are fallen. Adam forsakes God—the “first death of the soul.” When Adam forsakes God, it means that God in turn has “forsaken” Adam, though the human sin is what has caused God to forsake him. ››

The first sin is disobedience; human nature thus became subject to decay, and we became “distracted” and torn in multiple directions. Because we cannot totally deny our good creation, we “come close to nothingness.”

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Note the crucially interior character of this first sin. The real sin occurs in secret, in the hidden interiority of the self. That is to say, the real sin is not the eating of the fruit; the real sin is the hiding, the attempt to create the secret, dark inaccessibility of the self. In this way sin is the creation of our privacy, our apartness from God.

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This hiding is dramatic and absurd, but the psychic drama it proclaims is actually more melodramatic than truly dramatic, for this rebellion is more fundamentally a dissent from a certain kind of action than it is a consent to a full, rival action. The core of this rebellion is to have an evil will, which is simply the act of valuing the self over God; that is, to take the self as the standard by which to judge and value all things, instead of listening to and trusting God. ›› Augustine makes very clear that the devil’s role was really more the fall guy than the main actor in the drama. Recall how the demons were able to seduce the Roman pagans to sacrifice to them and honor them with games and spectacles, but only because those pagans wanted to be seduced. ››

Similarly here: The serpent would have had no power to effect the sin had Adam not been receptive to his temptations.

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„„

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Indeed, to conceive of something as a temptation already bespeaks an ambivalence in one’s soul about whether one’s values and aims are most suitable for happiness. To feel tempted, for Augustine, is already to be fallen.

fundamentally good. Our captivity by fleshly ends and worldly goods, then, does not speak to any evil inherent in flesh or world, but rather to our own self-inflicted

perversion of our appetites. The description of the fall as trivial but devastating is worth reflection. The interiority of the act makes it seem insubstantial, but the consequence of the deed is truly dramatic, for it produces in us a powerful incoherence. ›› The first punishment was shame, which is a disharmony in the body, a frustrated recognition of a rebellion in our flesh that we find sometimes unable to put down. That is to say, the first perversion in which the soul delighted caused the division of the self into flesh versus spirit: will suffocated by appetite. ››

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God created all things

This punishment certainly feels like a kind of death. Furthermore, all inherit this punishment, for all inherit the condition: In Adam, human nature is vitiated and degraded. All suffer this death, for while our first parents were created upright, from their first wills’ perversion followed “a chain of disasters” which affect us all, as we were all “in” Adam.

Augustine characterizes the inherited condition of all humanity after the fall as a kind of living death. He uses death in a way we would characterize as metaphorical, and yet many who have experienced some form of despair might agree that his metaphorical use is not entirely hyperbolic. ›› While our bodies have not yet died, the Fall causes the immediate death of the soul, for our souls have rebelled 309

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against the life-giving love of God. This death of the soul is what happens when God departs the soul. ››

We live with no hope, no real sense of meaning or joy, no true expectations for the future. In this condition, we are like zombies, living and dead at the same time, going through our days with the monotonous automaticity of the undead.

Transformation of Death „„

All this raises a pointed question for Augustine. If we are partly dead, what would it mean to come alive?

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Augustine thought the Platonists were effectively embarrassed by their bodies. They saw the soul’s attachment to the body as our problem and sought to teach the soul not to be afraid of leaving the body behind.

„„

Augustine did not think of our flesh per se as the locus of sin. He takes the Christian doctrine of God as direct creator of the whole world and the world as wholly good, and the Christian confession of Christ’s resurrection and ascension, as demonstrating that neither materiality per se nor our embodiment is the problem; rather it is our way of being embodied, our way of relating to materiality, that is the problem.

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God created all things fundamentally good. Our captivity by fleshly ends and worldly goods, then, does not speak to any evil inherent in flesh or world, but rather to our own self-inflicted perversion of our appetites.

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Those who have been redeemed from the death of the soul and have God again in their souls will still suffer the death of the body. Although the souls of the redeemed are made pure across their histories, they are still suffering from the physical maladies of original sin in the corruption of their bodies; this is part of the 310

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human race’s destiny, until the end of time. Even Jesus’s body was mortal. ›› We are called on not simply to accept this fact, but look forward to its transformation. For we know that the dead Jesus was resurrected, and resurrected in the flesh; so the body can be transformed. ››

The appropriate Christian response to physical death is to use it to the end of our proper conditioning—to see life as death, and reinterpret good life as “dying to the world” in order to achieve true life abundant. We do this by cultivating our faith.

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Effectively we should turn death into an act of martyrdom, a death with a purpose and a meaning as a witness to something larger than death itself, a witness to what has caused you to live in this way. This is a pretty remarkable thing to do, to appropriate the title of “martyr” for ordinary Christians living their everyday lives.

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The emotional work of this kind of martyrdom starts well before physical death. Its sufferings are twofold, and together they comprise a fundamental component of the Christian soul for Augustine. We are meant to experience them simultaneously, though he thinks we must cultivate each one separately in ourselves. ›› First, we must own up to the reality of our genuine suffering here and now. We ought not flinch from our sufferings nor deny their reality. We must own up to all the pains that we feel and not try to deny in some sort of Stoic manner that they are not real. ››

Second, we must also be constantly growing in anticipation of joy to come. And while this anticipation is no physical pain or suffering, it definitely dislodges us from slothful ease in our world today.

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››

Both of these emotional practices are premised on a deepening understanding of the doctrine of the Resurrection, which is both restoration and transfiguration.

The Question of Responsibility „„

Given Augustine’s picture of what is voluntary and what is involuntary, how do we define responsibility? Putting aside the question of abstract legal fault, we have all been in situations where, though it was not obviously our fault, we were still the ones who had to figure out what to do about it.

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Many will be surprised that I might suggest that a picture of inherited sin that seems as bleak as Augustine’s could have positive lessons for people today. But his was an activist and dynamic faith, seeking to reach out well beyond the churches’ walls. It was meant to be empowering on the individual level as well—a word of liberation.

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It will help us to understand how this was possible if we reset our expectations about responsibility from a juridical understanding culminating in judgment, to a therapeutic understanding oriented toward analysis and repair.

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Augustine is talking about grace as divine medicine. For him, the church is better conceived as a hospital, and we are usefully understood in this life as recovering patients under the hand of a true—which does not mean gentle—healer. Given Augustine’s picture of

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Augustine did not invent original sin, though he gave the most powerful and fruitful account of it that anyone has yet offered, and embedded 312

what is voluntary and what is involuntary, how do we define responsibility?

Lecture 15—Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13)

it tightly in a larger account of the human condition and God’s salvific action in which it made sense and played a functional role. „„

In doing this, he was trying to come to grips with our human condition, to recognize the depths of our captivity to it, and to say that nonetheless this captivity is not the creation’s fault, and thus not the Creator’s fault. He tried to take with true moral seriousness the idea that we have a past and that we can track the whole course of human history as it vectors into a single human soul.

Questions to Consider 1. What do you think of Augustine’s account of the relationship between human sin and human mortality? Does it illuminate something about sin? About death? 2. What do you think of Augustine’s claim that even if death is not a good thing, we can still use death well to make good come of it? 3. Given this picture of voluntary and involuntary action, how can we be condemned justly? Can it be fair to be blamed for something you do if you do not understand the consequences of your action? Where does responsibility lie?

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Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13)

eath is everywhere in this book. It stands as its own discrete topic and subtly lurks behind the other great topic, the human body. For Augustine wants us to feel the stench and stiffness of suffering and death in our bodies as we move about now, in our daily life and work. We might be disturbed by so much attention to death. We do not think about it very often. And yet apart from birth, it is, so far, the only reality guaranteed to be common to all human beings. Every one of us will die—some sooner, some later, but eventually all. It is a curious fact that despite all our talk of facing difference and daring to know, we do not, in fact, talk directly very much if at all about the inevitability of our deaths. Much human ingenuity, power, and wealth are dedicated to defeating death nowadays. And even if we determine a way to not have our cells simply wear out, we remain contingent, fragile, physical beings in a volatile and dangerous world. It seems that if the problem is death, the solution must be, can only be, escape from the flesh. It was, perhaps, more of a good fortune than it first appears that in Augustine’s world the reality of death was more physically unavoidable and the phantasy of its escape more visibly absurd. Not just as a priest but as a human being, Augustine’s world was filled with reminders of the adage that appears in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, in the midst of life, we are in death. Yet that claim—that life and death are less unrelated than we would like to assume is a fascinating one and continues to fascinate us even today, even amidst our panicked attempts to avoid or escape or otherwise deny the reality of death, we are still interested. 314

Lecture 15 Transcript—Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13)

The idea of death in life was a well-established one for Augustine’s age, within the Christian churches and outside them. The Manicheans, for example, believed that materiality itself was formed from the carcasses of the corpses of the archons of darkness, the lords of the negative forces whose war against the angels of light had led to the creation of the cosmos. And not only was the diagnosis of living death not unheard-of, there was a common prescription. Our solution was to flee this world by ourselves dying to it. Sometimes that strategy seems to have been rhetorical, but sometimes it was vividly literal, Augustine himself would have heard of the Manichean Illuminati who starved themselves to death, and many early Christians eagerly sought martyrdom as a way to get to God. It was a logical thing, to flee the world once you saw that it brought only death. Augustine was not wholly opposed to this rhetoric. But he was wary of where it might lead. For the fault of our ill-habitation of this material world lay not in that world itself, but in our basic orientation toward it. As another writer would put it over a thousand years later, “the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves.” Thus as we will see Augustine’s proposed strategy amounts not to a withdrawal from the world, but to a new orientation to it. A new orientation that is not our doing, not the work of our wills, but the gracious gift of the one true healer, Christ. Gifted with such mercy, we can turn to ourselves and so endure their sin-begotten turbulence in ways that make for a gracious, if severe, mysterious pedagogy of merciful conversion. This lecture looks at Augustine’s account, in Book 13, of original sin and inherited sin, and the effect of sin on human nature—some of the aspects of Augustine’s thought for which he is most notorious for many people, and for many interestingly different, and perhaps even incompatible, reasons. Here we explore how Augustine made his argument and assess the strengths and weaknesses of his argument 315

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and his overall view. How does the Fall happen? What does it do to human nature? And why, on this account, should later generations be held accountable for Adam and Eve’s disobedience? What I will eventually suggest to you is that to attempt to understand Augustine’s analysis of the consequences of sin, as diagnostic and therapeutic, and not juridical is the right way to go—that is, we should understand Augustine as describing our malady not in a way that makes us feel bad about it, most basically, or make others feel good about our feeling bad, but in a way that helps us understand what we are going through. What I mean by this contrast will, I hope, become clear. Now, start with death. What is death, exactly? What does he mean when he calls our existence a kind of living death? First of all, we should understand that Augustine understands death as not natural to the human condition. Most basically, the human was created as a kind of mean between angels and beasts, capable of apprehending the glory and grandeur of God’s works and responding to them in exultant praise, able to be transformed into a kind of angelic state through some sort of transformative process without death. Furthermore, as we saw, Augustine believed that one human was directly created by God, and the rest of the species, from Eve forward, followed out of him. Augustine is, as we’ve seen, a free interpreter of scripture, but here he is clear that he believes that there was a literal historical Adam, created directly by God. And yet, now we are fallen. How precisely does this happen? Well, in the originary moment of the Fall, Adam forsook God. This is the first death of the soul—for when Adam forsakes God, Augustin says, it means that God, in turn, has forsaken Adam, though the human sin is what has caused God to so forsake him. The nature of the first sin then is disobedience; human nature became subject to decay, and we became distracted and torn in multiple directions. We cannot totally deny our good creation, so all we can 316

Lecture 15 Transcript—Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13)

do is come close to nothingness as we’ve seen already. But we do that to the best of our damned ability. Now, it’s important to note here the crucially interior character of this first sin, this forsaking that Adam does. The real sin for Augustine occurs in occulto, that is in Latin in secret, in the hidden interiority of the self. That is to say; the real sin is not the eating of the fruit; the real sin just is the hiding, just is the attempt to fabricate the occulto, the secret, the deep dark inaccessibility of the self that decides to eat that fruit. In this way, sin is the creation of our privacy, our privating, depriving apartness from God. This hiding is dramatic, and absurd, to be sure, as we saw in the last lecture. But the psychic drama it proclaims is actually more melodramatic than truly dramatic, for this rebellion is not, in fact, Augustine says a substantive act, but a failure to act—more fundamentally a dissent from a certain kind of action than a consent to a full, rival kind of action. The core of this rebellion is to have an evil will, and the evil will is just the act of valuing the self over God, which is to take the self as the standard by which to judge and value all things, instead of listening to and trusting God. Now this emphasis on the interiority of the human’s sin diminishes the import of the fruit. Eating the fruit was, as it were, merely the fruit of our sin, merely the consequence of our already bad will. The outward crime was in some important way trivial, but its consequences were devastating. And Augustine makes very clear that the Devil’s role in all of this was really more of the fall guy than the main actor in the drama. Recall again how for Augustine the demons were able to seduce the Roman pagans to sacrifice to them and honor them with games and spectacles, but only because those pagans wanted, in a sense, to be seduced.

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Similarly, here, the serpent would have had no power to effect anything had we not been receptive to his temptations. Indeed, to conceive of something as a temptation already bespeaks an ambivalence in one’s soul about whether one’s values and aims are the ones most suitable for your own happiness. To feel tempted, for Augustine, is already to be fallen. Which brings us back to the idea that the sin was already there, waiting in the privacy, the secrecy, of the heart. This description of the Fall as trivial but devastating is worth reflecting on a bit more. The interiority of the act makes it seem inconsequential, insubstantial. But, the consequence of the deed is truly dramatic, for it produces in us a powerfully shattering incoherence. The first punishment we felt was shame, which is a disharmony in the body, a frustrated recognition of a rebellion in our flesh and in our soul that we find sometimes unable to put down, a punishment, Augustine says, which answered to their own disobedience. That is to say, the first perversion in which the soul delighted left it bereft of the body's good service, and caused the division of the self into flesh versus spirit; will suffocate by appetite. And this is our first punishment, one which certainly feels, Augustine says, like a kind of death, an opposition between body and soul in this way. But our malady is not just psychological; even the body changes in sin. The body’s forms of agency and control are vastly reduced, and those powers that remain are severely weakened. Augustine actually has a fantastic list of things that some bodies can do, that give partial witness to what all bodies were once able to do effortlessly. I’ll read this to you, and understand that when I teach this to my students this is the thing I always begin with since they could never imagine that some bishop 1600 years ago would list this stuff. It’s fantastic. This is Augustine. We know, too, that humans are differently constituted from one another, and some have rare and remarkable powers of doing with 318

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their body what others can never do, and, indeed, scarcely believe when they hear of others doing. Some people can move their ears, either one at a time, or both together; some, without moving the head, can bring the hair down upon the forehead, and move the whole scalp back and forth at will. Some, by lightly pressing their stomach, bring up an incredible number and variety of things they have swallowed, and produce whatever they please, quite whole, as if out of a sack. Some so accurately mimic the voices of birds and beasts and other men, that, unless they are seen, no one knows the difference. Some people produce at will such musical sounds from their behind—without any smell—that they seem indeed to be singing from that region. I myself knew a man who was accustomed to sweat whenever he wished. It is well known that some weep when they please and shed a flood of tears.

This gives you a sense of what Augustine thought was the nature of the damage to human bodies caused by the Fall. It’s also an incredible hook for undergrads by the way. Furthermore, all inherit this punishment, the punishment of a broken, physical capacity, and a broken joint between the soul and the body for all inherit the condition. In Adam, and then also in Eve, human nature, is vitiated and degraded. And this sin was not a relapse into the rudimentary condition of infancy, Augustine says, Rather, [he goes on] human nature in him [in Adam] was vitiated and altered, so that he experienced the rebellion and disobedience of desire in his body, and was bound by the necessity of dying, and he procured offspring in the same condition to which his fault and its punishment had reduced him, that is, liable to sin and death.

So, all suffer this death, for while our first parents were created upright, from their first wills' perversion followed a chain of disasters which affect us all, as we were all in Adam. Sometimes people find this account of inherited sin shamefully primitive as if Augustine’s account of inherited sin makes our sexual generation the reason why we were sinners, burdening each generation with the helpless 319

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inheritance of its elders through some crude belief that our moral character is conveyed by biologically physical matter from our parents to ourselves. But this misses the point. It obscures what exactly our sexual lives can tell us about our sinfulness, on which more in the next lecture, by the way. More basically, it fails to grapple with the obvious facts of our genuine inheritance of corruption from our parents, and the clear fact that a great deal of our personality and our affective and intellectual capacity is indeed communicated to us through our biological inheritance from our genetic ancestors. Hence Augustine characterizes the inherited condition of all humanity after the Fall as a kind of death, a kind of living death. Now, he uses death in a way we would characterize as metaphorical, and yet many who have experienced some form of despair might well agree with him that this metaphorical use is not entirely hyperbolic. This is our condition, While our bodies have not yet died, the fall causes the immediate death of the soul, for our souls have rebelled against the life-giving love of God. This death of the soul is what happens when God departs the soul, The life of the bodies of the ungodly is not the life of their souls but of their bodies alone. We live in this condition with no hope, no real sense of meaning or joy, no true expectations for the future. In this condition, we are like zombies, living and dead at the same time, going through our days with the monotonous automaticity of the undead. All this raises a very pointed question for Augustine, namely, if we are partly dead, what would it mean to come alive? Once again, this kind of diagnosis was not peculiar to Augustine, nor unique to Christians. For example, Augustine thought, the Platonists were effectively embarrassed by their bodies. They saw the soul’s attachment to the body as our problem and sought to teach the soul not to be afraid of leaving the body behind. 320

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Augustine disagreed concerning both the present status and ultimate destiny of our enfleshed embodiment in relation to our fallenness. In contrast to the Platonists then, Augustine saw the character of our experienced embodiment as a sign of our fallenness; but he did not think of our flesh per se in itself as the locus of sin. Against them, Augustine takes the Christian doctrine of God as direct creator of the whole world, and that world as wholly good, and the Christian confession of Christ’s resurrection and ascension, he takes all of this to demonstrate that neither materiality per se nor our own embodiment is the core problem; rather it is our way of being embodied, our way of relating to materiality, that is the problem. Indeed, for Augustine, Christ's ascension proves that bodies can ascend into the heavenly realm; besides, he says, even Plato conceived in some places of eternally enduring bodies. After all, Augustine wants to argue, God created all things fundamentally good. Our captivity by fleshly ends and worldly goods, then, does not speak to any evil inherent in flesh or world, but rather to our own selfinflicted perversion of our appetites. The key is, again, the Platonists’ failure of imagination, they don’t see that bodies could be otherwise than corrupt and corrupting. So even those who have been redeemed from the death of the soul, and have God again in their souls, will suffer the second death, the death of the body. That’s inescapable for humans now. While the souls of the redeemed are made pure across their histories, they are still suffering from the physical maladies of original sin, in the corruption of their bodies; this is part of the human race’s destiny, until the end of time. Even Jesus’s body was mortal. But we are called on not simply to accept this fact, but look forward to its transformation. For we know that the dead Jesus was resurrected, and resurrected in the flesh; so the body can be transformed. All this leaves the question of how, precisely, to live now, in order to look forward to that proper reintegration of body and soul. And here Augustine makes a lame kind of joke, a grammatical pun if you can 321

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believe it, the kind of thing you’d expect a professor to do, that’s why I like it so much. It reveals his overall strategy. He says, “We know that we are mortal, and yet, and this is the quote from Augustine, we might yet be able to decline in Latin declinare, which means to refuse, but also to inflect, as in grammar that second death he says, the death of the body itself. Now for once, that pun is actually far from trivial. For these two senses of decline cohere here, and reveal that we are best advised, on Augustine’s reading, to resist death not with efforts at direct blocking, but by accepting it, though in a slanted and oblique manner. What does that mean? The appropriate Christian response to this condition, this condition of being in a mortal body, is to use it to the end of our proper conditioning—to see life as death, and re-interpret good life as dying to the world, dying to our wrong attachment to the world, to achieve true life abundant. How do we do this? Well, Augustine says, by cultivating our faith. We are trained in faith, in hope—and death has become a grace by which we pass into new life; as Augustine says, It is not that death has turned into a good thing when it was formerly an evil. What has happened is that God has granted to faith so great a gift of grace that death, which all agree to be the contrary of life, has become the means by which men pass into life.

The blessed are brought to learn to endure this physical death in such a way as to convert their affections to escape the more terrible spiritual death. Note, Augustine doesn’t deny that the death of the body is terrible; the anguish of death is real. So death is itself in some sense evil, but it can be used for good. Effectively, we should turn our death into an act of martyrdom, turn, that is, the blank, pointless givenness of mortality after the Fall into a death with a purpose and a meaning as a witness to something larger than death itself, a witness to what has caused you to live your life 322

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even unto death in this graceful way. This is a pretty remarkable thing to do, to appropriate the title of martyr for the ordinary Christian living their everyday life. He goes even further, suggesting that some who are not even baptized can still be martyrs for Christ—if you die for the confession of Christ, it is efficacious, even if you’re not baptized, he says. None of this means that we ought to seek death, to worship it, or see it as a good or an end that something we should aim at. It is never acceptable to flee life. But we are all going to die; and we might as well make it count for something, Augustine thinks. This kind of martyrdom is a fascinating reconception of martyrdom, a relativization of it for Augustine. It turns it into a palpably apolitical act, where most traditional martyrs were quite political creatures, including Christ if you think about it. And this transformation also explicitly condemns the tendency toward masochism and suicide that some people worry about in talk about martyrs. The emotional work of this martyrdom, this process of martyrdom, starts well before our physical death for Augustine, as we learn this way of being embodied mortals. In fact, we learn two different kinds of suffering, a twofold of suffering, which together comprise a fundamental component of the Christian soul for Augustine, part of our affective economy, the emotional practices we inhabit and enroll in when we become Christians; this is Augustine’s argument. We are meant to experience them simultaneously, though he thinks we must cultivate each one somewhat distinctively, somewhat separately in the soul. First, Christians must own up to the reality of genuine suffering here and now. Augustine says we ought not flinch from our sufferings, nor deny their reality. We must own up to all the pains that we feel and not try to deny in some sort of stoic manner that they are not real pains, or that we know that they do not, in fact, tend to where we know they tend. 323

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Second, in contrast to the first, we must also be constantly growing in ever-deepening anticipation of the joy to come in the end of time, the eschaton. And while this anticipation is no physical pain or suffering at all, it definitely dislodges us from slothful ease in our world today. After all, anticipation of future goods can be painful in the present, as the 20th-century philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe put it, “Possibility is the destruction of contentment.” In sum then, we must keep looking out for the resurrection of the body; we must live in the body now as if it were a problem, but not a tragedy as the Platonists do. Both of these emotional practices are premised on a deepening understanding of the belief in the doctrine of the resurrection, which is both restoration and transfiguration for Augustine. It will be a restoration since the bodies of saints will be restored to their originally intended obedient integrity. But they will also be made better than the bodies of Adam and Eve. He says it will not even be such as it was in the first human beings, before their sin. Why is this? Because unlike Adam’s animal body, the blessed will be resurrected into Christ’s spiritual body. What exactly this difference amounts to is hard to see in Augustine, though he clearly thinks the spiritual body is real—it was into the side of Christ’s spiritual body that Thomas stuck his finger, and it was the hands of this spiritual body that bore the marks of the nails. So it won’t be a ghostly immaterial cloud. It is not a body that has been transmuted into spirit, but flesh sustained by a quickening spirit, he says. So perhaps it will be especially vigorous flesh. And yet it has some crucial differences from our animal bodies today. Resurrected bodies won't need nourishment since they will be spiritual, though they’ll be able to eat just like Christ after the resurrection ate. So while we are not fleeing the body in this restoration, we are on the lookout for not quite what the body was initially, but something else. This is Augustine’s attempt to work through the paradox of what 324

Lecture 15 Transcript—Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13)

Paul said when he said that if anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creation. We are genuinely new; and yet our newness still bears some kind of organic relation to our old creation. Let me be very clear. This account of the Fall is not meant ultimately to make people feel bad, but to make believers look forward in a way that is not delusionally consoling, but sober and enabling. So this account of sin in the Fall does not mean to be juridical, but therapeutic. How, given this picture of what is voluntary and what is involuntary, can we be condemned justly? Where does responsibility fall, as it were in this account? Are you responsible for what you do if you don't understand the consequences of your actions? Well, it depends on what you mean by responsibility. Put aside the question of abstract legal fault for a minute. We’ve all been in situations where, though it was not obviously our fault, we were still the ones stuck in a context and had to figure out what to do about it. On an individual level, this insight is the legitimating core of the last century of psychotherapy, after all. The therapist says to the patient,”This is who you are, now, what are you going to do about it?” This is not a question of blame. It is a rescue mission, a salvage project in a way. Here we are, in this world, with these passions, these affections, these torrent attachments—how should we respond given these facts about us? For they are definitely facts about us. We’re all of us products, in very many different ways, of our culture, our families, the people we’ve chanced to meet through our lives. Yes, of course, we’ve been the ones who metabolized all those encounters and integrated them, as best we could, into our own overall sense of self. But none of us, not even the most remarkable of us, are selfmade men or women. In fact, the very idea that we could be so selfmade, so very prominent in some circles especially in the U. S. today, is itself a product of our own local, particular, parochial history, and 325

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one of the things about Americans that many people coming from other cultures find most patently absurd and bewildering. Many will be surprised that I might suggest that a picture of inherited sin that seems so bleak as Augustine’s could have positive lessons for people today. We have an image of doctrines like this as weapons of unremitting bleakness, driving believers into paralysis and despair. God knows they’ve been used that way enough across history. But to Augustine and most of his immediate audience, they seemed to have had the opposite effect. His was an activist and dynamic faith, seeking to reach out well beyond the churches’ walls, meaning to be empowering on the individual level as well—he was speaking a word of liberation to people and the communities. It will help us to understand how this was possible if we reset our expectations about responsibility from a juridical understanding culminating in judgment, to a therapeutic understanding oriented toward analysis and repair. For Augustine is talking about grace as divine therapy, divine medicine. For him, the church is better conceived as a hospital than as a gymnasium, and we are more usefully understood in this life as recovering patients, rather than athletes. Patients under the hand of a true—which does not, by the way, mean gentle—healer. Augustine is sometimes called the inventor of original sin, and he is frequently condemned for it. But that’s not quite right. The notion of original sin was in place in the North African Church before Augustine; so he did not invent the concept, though he gave the most powerful and fruitful account of it that anyone has yet offered, and embedded it more tightly in a larger account of the human condition and God’s salvific action in which it made sense and served a functional role. In doing this, he was trying most basically to come to grips with the stubborn gruesomeness of our condition, and to recognize the depths of our captivity to it, and then to say that nonetheless this captivity is still against the Manicheans and others not the Creation’s 326

Lecture 15 Transcript—Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13)

fault, and thus not the Creator’s fault. Indeed, the Creator is trying to help us out of it. He tried to take with true moral seriousness than the idea that we have a past, that we can track the whole course of human history as it vectors into a single human soul. So his work contributed directly and intentionally to the deepening power of the notion of original sin for later Western Christian thought. His diagnostic zombification of the human condition is often condemned by those who find it too despairing or world-denying. These things are true. But in his context, these things were anything but world-denying. There were real world-deniers in his world; you knew them since they said the solution to our problems is to flee the world and flee the body. Augustine didn’t say that. And his proposed prescription to deal with this diagnosis was anything but escapist. He proposed not escape but affirmation, more vigorous plunging into created reality, not denying our created status at all. Even today, it might be considered not so world-denying if we understand what he’s saying. In teaching us to see ourselves as radically flawed in this way, but still suffering from those flaws, still feeling the pain, Augustine has tried to teach us something of the contingency of his doctrine of sin. Those who think of him as pessimistic have not, from an Augustinian perspective, properly grappled with the evidence, both around us and within us, of human corruption. We ourselves are far from done with human corruption. We’ll turn to it again in the next lecture.

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Lecture 16

The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14)

I

f everyone, saint and sinner alike, shares the same ailments, how can we learn to tell the good from the bad, or at least the less bad from the worse? In a way, book 14 is the most all-encompassing of the books in The City of God, for it attempts to describe the human condition in all its essentials after the Fall. It talks about it in terms of the human’s core psychological dynamics, their emotional instability and “immaturity,” especially as exhibited in our propensity toward anger and lust, and how these are all paradigmatically exhibited in human sexual relations.

The Two Cities „„

Augustine needs to distinguish the citizens of the two cities for two reasons. ›› He wishes to resist those who believe deeply that the world is clearly divided between the righteous and the reprobate. For Augustine, the most voluble representatives were the Donatists. ››

He must account for what we can call the obscurity of vice— the fact that sin, because it is disguised inside the self, is not obviously and reliably trackable in incontestable ways.

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Augustine roots the key to human behavior in psychology. In the Fall, human nature was changed, and Augustine thinks we can begin to differentiate the two cities by way of humans’ divergent attitudes toward that change.

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In principle, as belief informs behavior so the inner psychology should be manifest in the outer behavior. But its hiddenness and 328

Lecture 16—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14)

the jumbled nature of our inner lives typically make it very hard to employ. ›› No one is wholly and purely rooted in one set of dispositions: The good are weak and even the wicked can commit a noble deed. So the connections between our beliefs and our behaviors are at best only loose. ››

The task of interpreting others’ acts (and even our own) is beset with innumerable difficulties. We can never fully trust our own best judgment.

The Two Loves „„

Augustine begins by trying to characterize humanity in terms of two diverse loyalties through a discussion of the flags flown by the two cities. These two standards symbolize the two loves, which stand for two different dispositions embodied in their devotees: ›› The earthly city reflects “love of self even to contempt of God” ››

The city of God reflects “love of God even to contempt of self.”

„„

He explains that “flesh” stands for an attitude of valuing our physical lives above our spiritual ones. The point is that living according to this world is bad. Thus the cause of sin lies in the soul, not fundamentally in the flesh.

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Sin is, fundamentally, to live according to self-will, which is self-destructive and selfdeceptive. It was not flesh that dragged down and entrapped the material soul; rather, it was the sinful soul that made flesh corruptible.

For Augustine this Stoic proposal is wrong, especially for Christians because of the particular models that scripture offers of exemplary human behavior.

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In rebelling against God, humanity has rebelled as well against God’s order, and thus against itself. „„

Humans are alike in the fact that we love; even as we differ dramatically in the facts of what we love. The central organizing principle for ordering and differentiating all of humanity is not belief, not action, not thinking; what differentiates the citizens of the two cities is their different objects of love.

Emotions after the Fall „„

According to the Stoics, the emotions are derived from the character of the person, and we should subject all our attachments to remorseless scrutiny. When we do, we see that all our emotional responses are the consequences of overestimating the significance of whatever episode solicited the response. We should work to eliminate it, replacing desire with will, joy with gladness, and fear with caution.

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For Augustine, this Stoic proposal is wrong, especially for Christians because of the particular models that scripture offers of exemplary human behavior. ›› The Stoics’ dream of apatheia could be good if it were understood as calmness, purity, integrity, and stability. But in this life, such stability is impossible, and when anyone approaches such a state, it is not tranquility that they realize, but the moral defect of stupor. ››

„„

Augustine also accuses the Stoics of existential inadequacy. They deny the possibility, for example, of wise grief. But we should feel sadness and grief for our own condition, still so far away from redemption and fulfillment. Sometimes emotions such as grief and fear are signs of growing moral maturity.

Both sides agree that the emotions are essential to our affective orientation to the world. They differ over the proper content of 330

Lecture 16—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14)

emotions and their different judgments about the right affective orientation to take toward the world. „„

Christians can know they are mistaken from an entirely different authority than philosophical argument—the example of scripture. Jesus is represented as being profoundly moved in episodes in his life; and of course he suffers the Passion, the ultimate experience of the world affecting him.

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Paul, too, exemplifies the good human life, and in doing so exhibits the full emotional range, from the deepest despair to the heights of exultation and joy. All of them are good, for Paul’s emotions are ordered to the glory of God, not his own anxious self-interest; his fear, his jealousy, his anger are all holy emotions.

„„

Augustine’s critique of the Stoics tacitly answers a fundamental question: What does proper human life look like? ›› Proper life, he says, was undisturbed love and gladness and a smooth and easy emotional life marked by happiness, tranquility, gratitude, and awe—before the Fall. ››

There were no negative emotions because there were no evils to prompt such emotions, no sources of suffering or pain outside the self, and no incoherence or rebellion within it.

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The instability and constant flux of our emotional life is due to our rebellion against God. But the punishment is not the affections themselves, only the anarchic way they course through our everyday life.

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We have to come to know ourselves as distinct from ourselves in a way. That splitting, that incoherence: that is sin. Grief and fear and pain arise directly from our bad judgments and actions and indirectly from the disordered relations between the soul and the body. The punishment, then, fits the crime perfectly. 331

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„„

The irony of this punishment is that it is precisely the opposite of what we thought we would gain. We wanted what we thought was mastery and were delivered over to servitude. The pride of the transgressor was worse than the sin itself and so we are made impotent by our very desire for inordinate power. This is the deep logic of punishment: the most immediate victim of our sin is ourselves.

True Emotions and Human Sexuality „„

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Augustine is often accused of being against the body and especially of being against the sexual body. In fact, unlike other theologians of his time and many non-Christian thinkers as well, he thought sexuality was part of our created There were no negative emotions nature, created as a good because there were no evils to by God, not a consequence prompt such emotions, no sources of our fallenness. of suffering or pain outside the self, For Augustine, the problem and no incoherence or rebellion with human sexuality lies within it. not in the fact that we have sex but in the fact that we have sex badly, and the badness with which we have sex serves him as an especially visible site for examining the calamity that has befallen us on account of what we did.

Consider why we feel so embarrassed, even ashamed about sex. Augustine’s answer is that in sexual activity, we are seen to be not simple voluntary agents, but rather a passel of involuntary appetites. ›› Sexuality is distinct from other lusts because it is more totally under the command of ungovernable passion than any other sphere of human behavior. This is why it causes us shame. 332

Lecture 16—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14)

››

„„

Augustine worked in an environment of profound suspicion of human embodiment and sexuality. Augustine’s claims, which sound to us so antiworldly, were liberating and worldly in their setting.

What exactly is it about sex that Augustine thinks we find so fundamentally embarrassing, even humiliating? Crucial here is the character of sexual activity as effacing self-control, even, Augustine thinks, effacing mental experience altogether. ›› In our fallen state we do not experience that loss of control in positive terms, as a liberation from subjectivity or escape from self. Rather we experience it as an event of domination by our lusts. ››

„„

Augustine is complaining of the loss of the simple harmony of self with self: The soul is ashamed of the body’s resistance to its commands. Anger and lust were not naturally part of the human’s healthy state before the Fall. After the Fall, it seems that all the world is a matter of domination, not just interpersonal relations, but even relations wholly inside the person.

For Augustine, the reason lust exists is that we rebelled against God because we did not want to serve God. So now all serve, not themselves, but one part of themselves. Thus, this most intimate, most existentially consequential act is experienced as reminding us of our separation from ourselves and our subjugation to blind lust.

Our agency and our persons are not in our control, and this loss of control is most visible in sex. But sex is not in itself sin, nor the locus of sin, nor evil. Its anarchy is merely a vivid sign of how far we have fallen. 333

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„„

Augustine does not say that sexuality is evil or satanic. On the contrary, sexuality is good but disordered; it may be used, and may use us, for profoundly unloving, uncharitable, self- and otherdestroying, violent, dominating ends.

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This is news for many who imagine Augustine as being behind many of our problems with sexuality. They accuse him of driving a wedge between sexual passion and reproduction. This suggests that, before Augustine, no such division was apparent. There are two ways to take this claim; in each, things are more complex than first appears.

„„

Augustine spent a good deal of his intellectual resources thinking about human sexuality. Not with an intent to warp some healthy inheritance, but to give such matters expression in a new way. ›› Augustine worked in an environment of profound suspicion of human embodiment and sexuality. Augustine’s claims, which sound to us so antiworldly, were liberating and worldly in their setting. ››

His predecessors and contemporaries assumed sexual intercourse was so obviously bad as not to need analysis. In contrast, Augustine challenged this silence, and set a new course by arguing that humans are created with sexual natures.

„„

The whole point of Augustine’s exposition of human psychology and sexuality was to explore how the logic of the distinction between the two cities should play out in our world today. The aim was to distinguish them in a way that was able to resist the presumption of confident moralist discrimination without escaping into the stratosphere of theological abstraction.

„„

The two cities, of God and of the world, have two loves, of God and self. This is a real distinction, but it is doubly difficult to discern in the present age. 334

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Questions to Consider 1. Does it make sense to talk about the world divided between those driven by “love of God even to the contempt of self” and those driven by “love of self even to the contempt of God”? Why can Augustine talk of them as two forms of love, even if one is bad and the other good? Wouldn’t a lot of people fall inbetween? What do you think Augustine would say to this? 2. How does Augustine understand our emotional lives? Does he think that apatheia—a calm implacability—is a realistic goal for humans or even an ideal to be aimed at? Why or why not? And if not, does he think that we simply suffer our emotions with no way to control them? 3. What do you think of Augustine’s view of human sexuality, both before the Fall and after it?

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Lecture 16 Transcript

The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14)

P

erhaps Augustine has painted a picture of humanity so dark that it is like a night in which all cows are equally black. If everyone, saint and sinner alike, shares the same ailments, how are we to learn to tell the good from the bad, or at least the less bad from the worse? We saw the general contours of Augustine’s answer to that question last time. Here, in this lecture, we’ll see the way those different modes of inhabitation manifest themselves in the personalities and behavior of members of the two cities, which is the topic of the city’s Book 14. In a way, this Book 14 is the most all-encompassing of the City of God’s books, for it attempts to describe the human condition in all its essentials after the Fall. It talks about it in terms of the human’s core psychological dynamics, their emotional instability and immaturity, especially as exhibited in our propensity toward anger and lust; and how these are all paradigmatically exhibited in human sexual relations. Augustine needs to distinguish the citizens of these two cities, in a delicate and tentative way, for two reasons. First, he wishes to resist those in his world who believe deeply that the world is clearly divided between the righteous and the reprobate. For Augustine, the most voluble representatives were the Donatists. Now, to remind you, the Donatists were purists in North Africa, Christian Purists who refused to accept so-called Catholic bishops, and so thought North African Catholic Christianity was not a legitimate kind of Christianity. It was very convenient for Augustine to have these Donatists as the most obvious opponent, for it allowed him to construct, rhetorically, a model of an ideal smug moralistic dualist, which he could then let his audience safely identify with someone other than themselves—namely with the Donatists. Then he 336

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could turn the model on them, and himself, and show them that the temptation, to smugly despise others, that they were in the process of some ugly despising the Donatists for inhabiting, was just what they themselves were doing, in despising the Donatists.  So these temptations in other words he showed, also gripped themselves. Augustine’s strategy here reminds me of that old joke about the guy who says, “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide everyone into two kinds, and those thoughtful and nuanced people, like me, who don’t do that.” In response to such moral dualists, we’ll see Augustine resist the temptation toward such polarization. The practice of drawing lines, of marking an inside and an outside, is pretty much inescapable in human life; but we must try as best we can, Augustine thinks, to make those boundaries porous and provisional. There is a second reason why he must seek such a way to distinguish these two cities, a reason rooted in the more permanent facts of human moral psychology. Augustine must account for what we can call the obscurity of vice, the fact that sin since it is disguised inside the self, is not obviously and reliably trackable in non-contestable ways. Augustine is alive to the perilous and ironic character of the human moral adventure, manifest here in terms of the fact that we simply cannot count on being ourselves morally durable, either for good or for evil. Saints and sinners we might from time to time be, but we are rarely if ever reliably or predictably so. This is, as it were, annoying. Where is the key to the humans’ behavior to be found, then? Augustine roots it in psychology, in the inner life of humans, in how humans are innately constituted, in their souls. Remember, psychology just means the logic of the soul, the logic of the succos. For in the Fall, human nature was changed, he says in Book 14. And it is as regards humans’ divergent attitudes toward that change that Augustine thinks we can begin to differentiate the two cities. In principle, this distinction is theoretically apprehensible, as belief informs behavior, so the inner psychology of each of us should be manifest in the outer behavior. 337

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But its hiddenness and the jumbled nature of our inner lives typically make this distinction very hard to use. First of all, no one is wholly and purely rooted in one set of dispositions; the good are weak and even the most wicked can from time stumble into committing a noble deed. So the connections between our beliefs and our behaviors are always at best only loose. Second, the task of interpreting others’ acts indeed, the task of interpreting even our own is beset with innumerable interpretive difficulties. We can never fully trust our own best judgment of ourselves or of others. In other words, people might surprise us and even themselves by performing acts that are out of character, either more noble or more base; and even if those acts reveal something significant about the actors’ general inner character, we cannot be wholly confident that we understand precisely how and what those acts reveal. Augustine begins here by trying to characterize humanity in terms of two diverse loyalties through a discussion of the two standards, or flags, flown by the two cities. These two standards symbolize the two loves, which stand for two different dispositions embodied in their devotees, the earthly city reflects love of self even to contempt of God while the city of God reflects love of God even to contempt of self. The famous polar of opposition [inaudible 5:46] up there. And here he immediately turns to a scriptural passage to provide the crucial conceptual distinction—Paul’s discussion, in 1 Corinthians, 2 and 3, between a life lived according to the flesh, and a life lived according to the spirit. By citing a scriptural text, Augustine is reminding his readers that his is not a freestanding speculative account of the human condition, but one that understands itself to be serving what the scriptures say about these things. He explains here that in the rule of flesh for Paul, flesh stands not for our meat, but for an attitude of valuing our fleshly lives above our spiritual ones. The point, he says, is this, flesh itself is not bad, 338

Lecture 16 Transcript—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14)

but living by the rule of flesh, attuned exclusively or primarily to this world, that is bad. So the cause of sin does not lie in our meat but in the soul, not fundamentally in our flesh, but in our attitude toward our flesh. What, then, is sin? Sin is, most fundamentally, to live according to the self, to live by the standard of man, which standard is selfdestructive and self-deceptive. It was not flesh that dragged down and entrapped the material soul; rather, it was the sinful soul which made flesh corruptible. In fact, Augustine insists that the flesh itself is intrinsically good, not surprising giving his metaphysics of Creation. Even the pagans saw this, he said, in the Aeneid, he points out, souls return to bodies, and thinkers even like Cicero saw that turbulent emotions, the passions, are not the fault of the flesh, but of the soul’s wrong attachment to flesh. Even pain itself is due fundamentally to the soul, and not to the body, Augustine says, for it is caused by the soul’s misconnection to the body. His is not, then, a condemnation of human nature in its physicality, but an analysis of how that nature has gone wrong in itself, against itself. Human nature was changed in the Fall, Augustine says, and in rebelling against God humanity has rebelled as well against God’s order, and thus against itself. So what we are looking at, when we are looking at a descendant of Adam and Eve, is a self-harming creature, one literally doing its damnedest to escape the conditions of its own wholly gratuitous existence. Augustine unpacks this by his exposition of psychology of fallen humanity. As the first note of this exposition, Augustine insists that we are adoring beings. Humans are all alike in the fact that we love; even as we differ dramatically in the facts of what we love. The central organizing principle for ordering and differentiating all of humanity then is not belief, not action, not thinking; what differentiates the citizens of the two cities is their different objects of love and how they 339

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order them. It might seem undignified to talk about the essence of adults lying in their adorations, resting in their adorations. Mature humans are supposed to be cooler than this, calmer, to keep their emotions in check. Certainly, the Stoics thought so; they say that the emotions are not basic. They say that they are derivative of the character of the person and that we should subject all our attachments which generate these emotions to remorseless scrutiny. When we do, the Stoics say, we see that all our emotional responses are the consequences of us overestimating the significance of whatever episode solicited that emoted response in the first place. This, they thought, is one of the most infantile things about us, and we should work, they said, to eliminate it. So the Stoics wanted to replace emotions, what they called pathe with constant states, eupathe or eupatheiai. This means replacing words like desire with words like will, or a word like joy with a word like gladness, and a word like fear with a word like caution. For Augustine, though, this Stoic proposal is wrong, in ways that even the Stoics, were they fair-minded, might be brought to see; and wrong for Christians since of the particular models that scripture offers of exemplary human behavior, which reliably involve emotion. But first of all, in the Stoics’ own terms, Augustine says that their dream of apatheia, of impassability, of an emotion-free state, it could be good if it were understood as calmness, purity, integrity, and stability. But in this life, such stability is practically impossible, and when anyone approaches such a state, it is not tranquility that they realize, but tranquilization, the moral defect of stupor. Augustine also accuses the Stoics of existential inadequacy. They deny the possibility, for example, of wise grief. But we should, at times, feel grief—not nostalgia for Adam and Eve, say, but sadness and grief for our own condition, still so far away from proper redemption and fulfillment. Sometimes emotions such as grief and fear are signs of a growing moral maturity. I just want to pitch him over the side entirely. 340

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Furthermore, Augustine thinks we cannot avoid being ridiculous—if we are embarrassed by that, by our propensity to being ridiculous, we have to address our embarrassment, not our ridiculousness, for our embarrassment is the only kind of ridiculousness that we can, in fact, avoid. The basic ridiculousness that is an ingredient in humans is the fact of our adoration; that is inescapable. Everyone, he says loves; everyone over-invests, in Stoic terms, in something outside of themselves, just watch parents at a soccer game or a baseball game. To wish to escape such involuntary affective responses—which, for Augustine, is what the Stoics wish us to do—is to wish to escape the human condition. As he says, the Stoics desire escape not from our infirmity, but from our humanity. Now let’s be clear, Augustine here is not an adolescent romantic. Both he and the stoics agree that the emotions are essential to our affective orientation to the world. They might call it different things, but they agree, that’s important. They just differ over the proper content of human emotions, and their different judgments about the right intensity of affective orientation to take toward that world. Augustine is not rejecting the idea of taking responsibility for our emotional responses to things; he simply proposes different terms than the Stoics whereby to formulate that responsibility. So the Stoics are philosophically confused, for Augustine. But Christians can know that they are mistaken from an entirely different authority than philosophical argument, namely, the example of scripture. Jesus is represented in the gospels as being profoundly moved in episodes throughout his life; and of course, he suffers the passio, the ultimate experience of the world affecting him, the passion. In a way Jesus has more powerful emotions than the rest of us do, in part because he wills to have those emotions, to be properly affected by the world. He has more integrity, and so he can feel more. But it’s not just Jesus, Saint Paul, too, whom Augustine takes to be the exemplary human. He exemplifies the good human life, and in doing so, he plays the full range of what we can call the emotional 341

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xylophone, from the deepest despair to the highest heights of exultation and joy. And all of those emotions can be good; and they are good for Paul, for Paul’s emotions are properly ordered to the glory of God, not his own anxious self-interest; his fear, his jealousy, his anger, they are all ordered to God’s ends, and so they are all, Augustine says, holy emotions. Augustine’s critique of the Stoics here tacitly answers a fundamental question. What does proper human life look like? And can we get it back? Proper life, Augustine says, was undisturbed—there’s a kind of quasi-Stoic moment—undisturbed love and gladness, a smooth and easy emotional life—so there is how it’s not Stoic—marked by happiness, tranquility, gratitude and awe. There was no violent turbulence in our soul; Augustine and the Stoics agree with that. We never lost sleep; we never woke up grumpy; we never felt jealous of one another’s successes in Eden. It’s not that we did not feel emotions—and here is the disagreement with the Stoics—but the emotions we had were rightly ordered. They were properly attuned to whatever prompted them in the world. In Eden, our first parents felt grateful awe at the beauty of the created world, and they were uplifted in joy and gratitude when they reflected on God’s expressed purposes in creating them in the divine image and likeness. There were no negative emotions before the Fall since there were no evils to prompt such emotions, no sources of suffering or pain outside the self, and no incoherence or rebellion within it, either. But after the Fall, as the example of Paul teaches, such emotions—anger, fear, jealousy—these emotions can be holy, too. Our basic problem is really due to our fall. The instability and constant flux of our emotional life are due to our rebellion against God. But the punishment is not the affections themselves, but only the anarchic way that they course through us, they surge through our everyday life. We have to come to know ourselves as other people, as distinct from 342

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ourselves in a way. That splitting, that incoherence, that ability to step back from yourself and say, “Wow, I’m really angry here. I wonder why” that is sin. For Augustine, we were not meant to be able to do that. Grief and fear and pain in our world typically arise directly from our bad judgments and actions, and indirectly from the misordered relations between our soul and our embodiment. We lost our simple integrity in the rebellion that constitutes original sin. We shattered into separate centers of reason, will, and appetite. And often, more than censure for each. The punishment, then, of sin, fits the crime of sin perfectly. And as Augustine says a bit further on, “It was since man forsook God by pleasing himself that he was handed over to himself and because he did not obey God he could not obey himself. Hence came the more obvious misery where man does not live as he wishes to live.” The great irony of this punishment is that it is precisely the opposite of what we thought in sin we would gain. What Adam and Eve wanted, Augustine proposes is what we thought was mastery, and yet they were delivered over to their servitude. The pride of the transgressor, shown in search for excuses, was worse than the sin itself; and so we are made more impotent by our very desire for inordinate power. This is the deep logic of punishment, the most immediate victim of our sin is ourselves. This language of the disobedience of the body might make us think about sex. And Augustine treats sexuality at length here, for he sees it as a paradigm example of our moral calamitousness. But the calamity does not lie in our sexuality itself, but in its disorderedness. Augustine is often accused of being against the body, and especially of being against the sexual body. That’s not quite right. In fact, unlike other theologians of his time, and many non-Christian thinkers as well, he thought sexuality was part of our created nature, and thus created good by God; not a consequence, as many Christians did, of our fallenness. 343

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For Augustine, the problem with human sexuality does not lie in the fact that we have sex; rather, the calamity lies in the fact that we have sex badly, and the badness with which we have sex serves him not as the anchor of our fallenness but rather as an especially visible site for examining the calamity that has befallen us on account of what we did. In a way, he was the original sex therapist. Consider, for a start, as Augustine does, the fact of human embarrassment, even shame at sex. Today, of course, the only thing we are typically more secretive about than our sex lives, is our salaries—which suggests a whole other kind of pathology, but one more local to our current culture, and not basic to the human condition; so I’ll let that pass here. But Augustine notes we would rather blow our cool in public, blow up in anger at everyone in public than let one other person see us having sex with our rightful spouse. Why do we feel so embarrassed, even ashamed, at so natural and appropriate an act? Augustine’s answer is that in sexual activity, we are seen to be not simple voluntary agents, but rather most vividly a passel of involuntary appetites. Here is the key, sexuality is distinct from other lusts because, Augustine thinks, it is more totally under the command of ungovernable passion, more totally than pretty much any other sphere of human behavior. This is why it causes us shame. Augustine is not complaining here of the loss of a kind of Stoic [inaudible 19:41] control, but rather the disappearance of the simple harmony of self with itself. The soul is ashamed of the body’s resistance to its commands, humiliated by that resistance. Anger and lust are not naturally part of the human’s healthy state before the Fall. After the Fall, it seems that all the world is a matter of domination, including not just inter-human relations, but even relations wholly inside the person. We’re kind of constantly at war with even ourselves. This is how he reads Adam and Eve’s discovery of their own nakedness and their shame at it—the pain of knowledge, and in particular their partial knowledge. Their eyes were opened, he says, opened to their 344

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sin, but not enough opened enough to see God’s grace. This for Augustine is what Genesis means when Adam and Eve, after eating the fruit, have their eyes opened. This is the nakedness by which they feel ashamed. What exactly is it about sex that Augustine thinks we find so fundamentally embarrassing, even humiliating? Consider the experience of sex that your average human. Crucial here is the character of sexual activity, for Augustine, as effacing self-control, even, he thinks, effacing mental experience altogether; he talks about the eclipse of the mind, the eclipse of rationality as you move toward climax. For Augustine, this is, of course, explicitly a masculine description, though he wouldn’t think women are in a better state in terms of their mental control during sex either, for this is a human condition in a way. In our fallen state, Augustine submits, we do not experience that loss of control in positive terms, as a liberation from subjectivity or an escape from self. Rather we experience this loss of control as an event of domination by our lusts. Sexuality is a sign of our sinfulness for him, not as some sort of synecdoche of magnificent demonic heroism; instead, sexuality here is experienced as a kind of form of captivity, of kidnapping. Note the irony here—for Augustine, the whole reason this lust exists is because we rebelled against God because we did not want to serve God. So now, instead, all serve, not themselves even, but one part of themselves. Furthermore, this lust is an untrustworthy master. Augustine points out, sometimes we cannot be aroused when we want to have sex, and sometimes we are aroused when we do not want to have sex. For Augustine, thinking exclusively here in terms of the male body, what we call erectile dysfunction is as much a sign of the Fall as is an unwanted erection. In fact, wanted erection, unwanted erection, or a wanted erection that doesn’t appear, both are for him forms of erectile dysfunction. It’s amazing that he said this and that he said it out loud. In a context of the very macho culture of Roman antiquity, 345

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this was an almost unspeakable thing that Augustine says. And to many people, it’s still squirm-worthy today despite the many ads we see on TV. But whether the immediate experienced problem was, whether it was a lack of desire or an excess of it, the key, he wants to bring to our attention here, is that this most intimate, most existentially consequential act is experienced by us as reminding us of our sunderedness from ourselves, and our subjugation to blind, dumb lust. Finally, even if we do manage to have sex, Augustine thinks the pleasure we actually take from the act is so overlaid with appetitive lust and reflexivity that we have merely empty or vain pleasure. The true joy of sexuality for Augustine is in the mutuality and creativity of new life, both the life together of the spouses and the life that their sex will produce in children. When sex becomes lust, it loses something, our lust gets in the way, as it were, of our sex, making it one more kind of soliloquy about how we have performed once again our mastery over things outside of us. In this way, for Augustine after the Fall no one actually has sex, people, just a series of extremely proximate masturbatory acts. If this is so, then what is—or what was— sex supposed to be like? The possibility of real sex was available in Eden, Augustine against many theologians at this time, insisted that Adam and Eve were going to be fruitful and multiply, that sex would have happened in Eden. But after the Fall that possibility was lost. It’s only possible now to have the capabilities for it restored in the eschaton. Though whether we’ll have sex in the eschaton is a topic for another time. Until then, though, we are condemned to have nothing but fallen sex. What would edenic sex have been like? The organs would have been obedient to the mind, Augustine said, so sexual agency would have been under both parties’ rational voluntary control. It’s very difficult for us to imagine what sexual agency would be like; but that just suggests the problem we have—that we cannot imagine sexuality 346

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in agential terms, but as a kind of madness that possesses us. For Augustine, our sexual organs worked voluntarily then, just as our hands and feet work voluntarily now. Indeed, in Eden, marriage was a faithful partnership based on love and mutual respect—those were Augustine’s words—and sexual intercourse would not have involved the violence that is manifest for Augustine in the rupturing of the virgin female’s hymen in sex. This might seem a pale kind of passion, this edenic sex, but note two things. First, Augustine suspects that our concept of pleasure is so confused with appetite that he doesn’t think we even know what real pleasure is. On his proposal, edenic sex would have involved no empty pleasure, as sex does now, but real joy. That’s an astonishing claim if you think about it. We are so fallen, we don’t even know what true happiness is. That’s what it is, to be truly lost. Second, we also misunderstand what rational control means here since we confuse reason with what our intellective capacities are now, after the Fall. In this condition, we’re dealing with ruined minds. So Augustine thinks we don’t know what reason truly was either. Once it was as passionate as it is logical. Now it is never the first and only rarely the second. Our agency and our persons are not fully in our control, and this loss of control, for Augustine, is most visible in sex. But note, sex is not in itself sin, nor the locus of sin, nor evil. Its anarchy is merely a vivid sign of how far we have fallen. So Augustine does not say that sexuality is evil or satanic. Sexuality is good but disordered; it might be used, and might use us, for profoundly unloving, uncharitable, self- and other destroying, violent, dominating ends. In his context, this was a broadly affirmative picture of human sexuality. Though understanding Augustine’s account takes some patience, if you manage to hear what he is trying to say through it, it is more fundamentally affirming the possibilities of human sex than it is condemning it.

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This is news for many people today, who imagine Augustine as being behind many of our problems with sexuality. They accuse him of driving a wedge between sexual passion and reproduction. This suggests that, before Augustine, no such division was apparent. Is this true? There are two ways to take this claim; in each of them, things are more complex than first appears. Phenomenologically, or experientially, we might mean that Augustine is responsible for making us think that sex is morally troubling, which implies that there is a clear, natural experience of sexuality that Augustine himself in his writing worked to muddy. Such a phenomenology of sexual intercourse might be defensible by appeal to an experience of sex as properly experienced by a rightly matured agent, someone unencumbered by the weight of Christianity’s assumed hostility to sex, at least after Augustine. But this would only partially capture our experience of sex; for it ignores how sexual activity can, and often does, lead to self- not to mention other objectification and even brutalization, and the curious fact that, partners in sexual intercourse seem increasingly solipsistic, increasingly bent on satisfying what seems entirely involuntary, largely physical needs as sex proceeds. We might call this the phenomenological grain of sand that becomes the pearl of experience in the doctrine of original sin in Augustine’s thought. Though, as I’ve mentioned, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin here is hardly his ex nihilo concoction; he inherited much of it from the North African Church. And also among non-Christian thinkers, a likewise claim was true. The worries about sex dampening human intellective capacities were widely shared and discussed in the classical world by thinkers from Plato to Marcus Aurelius. There is a second, historical, aspect of the claim that Augustine drove a wedge between our experience of sexuality and reproduction. Here the implication is that Augustine’s work split asunder what earlier thinkers had managed to keep together. But this isn’t true either. Augustine spent a good deal of his intellectual resources thinking 348

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about human sexuality. Not with an intent to warp some healthy historical inheritance, but rather to give such matters expression in a new way. Remember, Augustine worked in an environment of profound suspicion of human embodiment and sexuality. We do not appreciate how Augustine’s claims, which sound to us so anti-worldly, were liberating and pro-worldly in their setting. His predecessors and his contemporaries assumed that sexual intercourse was so obviously bad as to not need much analysis. In contrast, Augustine challenged this silence and set a new course by arguing that humans are created with sexual natures. Historically, that is, Augustine did not drive a wedge between sex as passion and sex as reproduction; he brought together, however imperfectly, what previous thinkers had put—or kept—or left—asunder. It’s also worth noting, finally, that the whole point of his exposition of human psychology and human sexuality, was not to yell about sex, but to explore how the logic of the distinction between the two cities should play out in our world today. Recall that the aim here was to distinguish them, in a way that was able to resist the presumption of confident moralist discrimination, without escaping into the stratosphere of pure theological abstraction. Augustine’s approach aims to do just that. The two cities of God and of the world have two loves, of God and self. This is a real distinction, but it is doubly difficult to discern in the present age. First, as I said at the beginning of this lecture, human interiority, and our opacity to ourselves and each other makes it hard to see what is really going on inside—even inside ourselves. Second, this is an eschatological distinction, not finally fixed within history, so that peoples’ locations in one or the other city might change over time. We can never rest in the presumption that our loves are rightly aligned, but too, we should never despair that they are not in the process of being more perfectly converted to the love of God. Hope here begins to be almost obligatory.

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This whole program has an inescapable political character for Augustine. For this moral distinction does not send humans off into a solitude, but it enrolls them in a community of those whose vision of the world aligns and resonates with their own. Here Augustine’s vision of what unites a city, a vision he articulated in Book 2, against Cicero, again illuminates the situation. People, he says, are brought together by a common set of values, of commitments, of loves. To talk about a polity’s most basic constitution, you must talk about what goods it pursues, and what evils it seeks to avoid and punish, whether or not the community admits to pursuing and avoiding those goods and evils at all. This means that talk about love raises for us when pursued seriously, political issues. So, political issues are essential to sex, and thus to humans. In this way, Augustine is actually at one with those contemporary feminist thinkers who insist that the personal is political, that the whole shape of our lives, private as well as public, must be subjected to critical scrutiny, even critical suspicion. This lecture, about Book 14, brings us to the end of the first part of the second half of the city as a whole; these last four books, 11–14 have told the beginnings of Creation and the calamity we have made of it. But despite this calamity, God’s providential sovereignty has not been vexed. Now we turn to how that providential sovereignty has governed our species from the very start.

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Lecture 17

“O

n or about December 1910, human character changed,” wrote the great modernist Virginia Woolf in 1924. For her, the change in human nature was akin to exile from the Garden of Eden. Modernist writers were not simply dismissive of religion. They were obsessed by the problem of reestablishing fruitful contact with our new knowledge in a way that transmuted antiquity into something inhabitable today. They imagined that the answer would be universally applicable; because they assumed there was only one path of modernization, there would be only one way to be religious in modernity.

Modernist Approach to History „„

According to Karl Marx, “Men make their own history … under … circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”; that is, how we think in the present—the very framework into which we fit new events—is powerfully, almost determinately, informed by the past. Yet, many thinkers believe that we have entered an entirely new age that is historically unprecedented. For these thinkers, history can teach us nothing, or next to nothing.

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The new situation is called “modernity,” and the first thinkers who formulated it meant it to express a crisis of relation to our traditions—a feeling of irrevocable loss. They saw religion as a set of antiquated intuitions and passions steeped in a reactionary, resentful nostalgia for an earlier, wholly imagined, integrity of feeling, thought, action, character, and cosmos.

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Today our challenge is pluralism—the challenge of inhabiting a world filled with many kinds of belief and unbelief. Modernity is not the only formulation of this problem, nor has modernity let us escape it. Other ages confronted analogous problems and their accomplishments may have something useful to teach us today.

God’s determinate historical presence in Jesus serves as both an exemplary pattern of a human life and announces the salvation of humanity to a fallen world.

Such is the case with Augustine. He too underwent the wrenching transition from the end of one age to the beginning of another. All his writing is gripped by the question of how to render useful a heritage now grown radically problematic but that retained some claim of continuity and that he wanted to pass on to the future.

Augustinian Theology of History „„

Augustine is one of the greatest of thinkers to reflect on the purpose for writing and reading history. His vision of history decisively shaped the next thousand years and more of European historiography. ›› When compared with such classical historical thinkers as Herodotus and Thucydides, he was far more like us, particularly in his rejection of the idea that human history is trapped in repetitive patterns that we can come to understand, anticipate, and master. ››

He is also like us in his affirmation of the uniqueness and singularity of human history whose significance is granted not by the patterns it reveals, but in the story it embodies and the way it unfolds a singular revelation of God. 352

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Augustine’s writings often discuss the significance of historical events. Most notable for him, of course, is the idiosyncratic individual life of Jesus of Nazareth that reveals the route to reconciliation between the beings of determinate creation, and all being’s unconditioned ground in the Creator.

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God’s determinate historical presence in Jesus serves as both an exemplary pattern of a human life and announces the salvation of humanity to a fallen world. The Incarnation thus reveals, for Augustine, the ultimate structure of history from which the other real historical turning points have their significance: the Fall, the Election of Israel, Pentecost, and the Last Judgment. ›› Other events are intelligible and have interest and meaning, but their meaning is borrowed from and echoes or recapitulates these crux events, and their significance is real only insofar as they express moments that are typologically and sacramentally significant. ››

We are able to perceive meaningful moments not through reading human history, but through reading the larger salvation history from Adam to Christ to today.

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Crucial for Augustine is the story of the two cities, mapped out by Cain and Abel and by Romulus and Remus: manifestations of the struggle between siblings over goods they should share. By tracing the history of the two cities in time, Augustine offers a kind of theological journalism: an interpretation of events that uses the theological categories of the Christian faith to show people directly how those categories usefully illuminate the everyday world we inhabit and indirectly how to use those categories on their own.

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For Augustine, the Bible is the true moral lens that lets us see the world correctly. We must replace the old stories with new stories, for they are the true ones. His is an allegorical mode of 353

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reading, meant to cultivate in us what we can call a typological imagination.

The Typological Reading of History „„

The term “typological imagination” refers to the way ordinary events in our lives can signify another event, revealing its true significance. In fact, all our thinking is frankly comparative in this way. All our actions are not simply there in their glorious irreducible singularity; they are almost all tokens of some underlying type. Breaking a diet, or cheating on an exam, or on your spouse, echoes the Fall; a conversion recapitulates the Resurrection; a judge handing down a sentence, the Last Judgment.

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This picture of a life lived in reading is powerful and vivid. It begins in recognizing that we are formed by texts, so that ethical change and maturation come from exchanging less adequate narratives for more adequate ones. And these practices of reading take place in religious communities, where others guide and shape our understanding.

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Augustine is important not because he is innovative, but because his deployment of this strategy becomes the prototype for all other uses of it in the West. ›› In general, Augustine thinks that scripture is best understood by employing a simplified language and fitting its formulations to the physical minds of humans, to make the stories’ meanings vivid to as large an audience as possible. ››

Conversely, at other times Augustine tries to teach his audience to understand historical events by expanding and reshaping them to fit the overall story he wants them to find in history. The stories should be read as expressing fundamental historical themes. Thus the story of Babel is not just about Babylon, but about the contest between sin and grace in the world, and therefore his “two cities” schema. 354

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››

While the first example diminishes the text, the second amplifies it; both tactics serve the strategic aim of showing his audience how the Bible can offer a moral and spiritual frame within which past and present and future should be understood.

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Such a typological imagination creates a certain kind of self. It is not simply informative; it is also quite powerfully formative. To experience the meaning of time in this way is to feel how we are divided: We’re never fully here, but always caught up in various historical moments.

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The word Augustine uses for this experience is distentio, an experience of being stretched out across time. Feeling it is meant to make us feel more pointedly our need for reintegration and more vividly to seek God’s help.

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Seeking God’s help is why this experience of reading is so integral to the formation of the Christian community in general. The church’s fundamental activity, along with praising God, is to call upon God for help. Far from being simply a way of talking about the past, Augustine’s method is a profound strategy for forming the Christian self.

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Augustine’s proposal for reading history and for seeing one’s whole life as a practice of reading is a powerful one—both psychologically and historically. It has been tremendously influential in Christian practice, and stands behind the continued insistence among the churches of the West that the Bible is 355

Augustine is important not because he is innovative, but because his deployment of this strategy becomes the prototype for all other uses of it in the West.

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a text that should be read and reread by Christians throughout their lives. „„

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Yet in the modern world, we are typically skeptical of such typological efforts. ›› First, this approach seems to not take the literality of history with sufficient seriousness. Why is the most important thing about an event that it reinforces some other moral whose point we can know only abstractly? Why isn’t cheating on my spouse just bad? ››

Second, the typological enterprise seems to have confused “understanding” with “decoding,” perceiving all as a cryptogram whose singular meaning can be definitely unlocked. But to unlock it we need a key that already tells us what it “really” means.

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The third tricky thing about allegory is the inescapable ascription of authorial intent and the apparently inescapable fact of arbitrariness in the allegory itself. By “arbitrary” I mean the original sense here of will, of the decision of a writer to make this stand for that. Why do we think these particular moments, these significances, are the ones that govern history’s structure? Why could there not be some other set?

These are powerful criticisms. The only way they might be met is by showing, in the execution of the community’s practices of reading that in fact a community can avoid them—that a community can understand history with as much seriousness as history demands; that its

Why is the most important thing about an event that it reinforces some other moral whose point we can know only abstractly? Why isn’t cheating on my spouse just bad?

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understanding of history does respect the reality of history in its manifold details, and so ends in no oversimplified conclusions; and that finally its vision of what truly matters in history proves itself true. Questions to Consider 1. What do you think of how Augustine construes what he sees as problematic anthropomorphizing in the Bible (e.g., when God is said to get angry)? Is this a useful way of thinking theologically, or does something important get lost? 2. What does Augustine think is the point of letting history go so long before ending it at the Last Judgment? Why did all this history have to happen?

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Lecture 17 Transcript

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onsider this quote from Karl Marx: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they make it under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, and the Revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

For professional historians, this is one of the classic statements on how history gets written and used. It says how you think in the present, the very framework into which you fit new events—all this, and more—are powerfully, almost determinately, informed by our past. But in recent centuries, many thinkers have come to believe that we have entered an entirely new age, one which is historically unprecedented. For these thinkers, history can teach us nothing, or next to nothing. This new situation we face is often called modernity, and the first thinkers who formulated it meant it to express a crisis of revelation from our tradition—a feeling of irrevocable loss. “On or about December 358

Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17)

1910, human character changed,” wrote the great modernist Virginia Woolf in 1924. And for her, the change in human nature was akin to exile from the Garden of Eden. These modernists saw religion as a set of antiquated institutions and passions steeped in reactionary, resentful nostalgia for an earlier, wholly-imagined integrity of feeling, and thought, and action, and character, and cosmos. And yet, these modernist writers were not simply dismissive of religion. In fact, they were obsessed by the question of how to reestablish fruitful contact with our new knowledge in a way that transmuted that antiquity into something inhabitable today. And they imagined that if there was a way to do that, it would be universally applicable—that, since they assumed there was only one path of modernization, there would only be one way to be religious in modernity. Today we doubt that modernity is a necessarily universalizing, or even unidirectional, process. And this is part of what makes us potentially— most of us, anyway—postmodern. Postmodernity happens, it is argued, when you realize that the West’s experience of modernization is not a universal and natural path of development, but just how these particular cultures have changed over the past few centuries so that others could modernize in very different ways. Today, our challenge is not the challenge of belief or unbelief, as the modernists used to perhaps believe, but the challenge of pluralism—a challenge of inhabiting a world filled with many kinds of belief, as well as many kinds of unbelief. Modernity has not let us escape this problem, nor is our modernity the only formulation of it. Other ages confronted analogous problems, and their accomplishments might have something useful to teach us today. Such is the case with Augustine. Like the modernists of the early 20th century, he too underwent the wrenching transition from the end of one age to the beginning of another. All his writing is gripped by the question of how to render useful a heritage now grown radically problematic—how to repot, as it were, a tradition whose original soil 359

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has grown sterile or poisonous, but which retained some claim of continuity for him and his peers in his present, and which he wanted to pass on to the future. In this way, Augustine was a kind of modernist in his own time. But how should this repotting be done? How does he understand the value of his past for his future? We find the answer to this in his understanding of the meaning and significance of history for our lives—in how he thinks history is meaningful, and in what precisely its meaning consists. Now, Augustine is no progressivist, believing history will inevitably culminate in a permanent and secure earthly paradise of morally righteous agents. But if we shouldn’t understand history in that way, then how should we understand it? In other words, what does Augustine think is the point of letting history run on for so long before ending it at the Last Judgment for God? This lecture explores the rich field of Books 15, 16, and 17; the books in which Augustine begins to tell the story of the history of the world, centrally based on his reading of the history conveyed by the Christian Bible—both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Now, these books are often overlooked in studies of the city of God. Many scholars see these books—set 15, 16, 17—as mere chronicles, ways of legitimating the scriptural narratives by stapling them on to the classical understanding of the history of the world. But I this is a big mistake. In fact, these books are doing several things that are crucial to the success of Augustine’s overall project. And here we can see Augustine’s development of the theme of the two cities as always at war across history, ever since Cain slew Abel; and ending definitely with the echo of Rome’s founding brothers, Romulus and Remus. And we see him use this history as teaching his audience both by plentiful example and more deeply by communicating his sense of how to read history, and how that teaches us what it means to be a Christian for him. 360

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It’s in these books, then, that Augustine’s picture of history, and of the way humans should understand their experience of history, finally begins to come into view for us. Here, he offers us what we could call a geo-theo-political picture of history and the place of the human condition within it. It’s a picture of our world; but it’s also a picture which, if we try to learn to see this way, it works to form the self—and form the community, as well—in certain ways that make us more apt to see history, and our ongoing existence in historical time, in a way that both helps our current vision and aides our future perfection. This picture and what he thinks its effects on us should be is what this lecture will explore, and I want to do so in three big steps. First, I want to talk about this vision of the world—both about its details and the overall vision of history that undergirds and produces it. Second, I want to talk about how Augustine understands our self-formation through absorbing this vision and coming to inhabit it. And third and finally, I want to step back from the details of his argument and reflect a bit on how this is possible, discussing what we can call Augustine’s typological imagination, and his vision of theology, and the Christian life as it is intelligently inhabited as overall understandable through the metaphor of reading—life as a kind of reading. So first, consider, what is the nature of an Augustinian theology of history? This can sound paradoxical. Augustine’s often accused, of course, of being a profoundly anti-historical, anti-worldly thinker. He’s considered exemplary of—perhaps partially responsible for—a larger Christian view of history, and of life in the world in general, in which today we live in the after anything of any importance has already happened; an whose ending is already quite literally scripted. Now there’s something true about these suspicions. After all, the word epilogue means literally “after the word,” and we live after Christ to the word of God. And the Book of Revelation quite clearly means to offer the last word on everything. Augustine takes that book and the rest of scripture, as it were, as gospel.

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But these accusations are also misleading; they take part of the truth for the whole truth, and thereby permit readers to stop thinking that there’s something worth considering here since, in fact, Augustine is one of the greatest of thinkers to reflect on the purpose of the writing and reading of history. His answers to these questions, and to the vision of history to which those answers gave shape, decisively shaped the next 1,000 years and more of European historiography. Indeed, when compared with many classical historical thinkers who preceded him—writers like Herodotus and Thucydides—he was far more like us than they were, particularly in his rejection of the idea that human history was, in any way, cyclical; trapped in repetitive patterns, which we could come to understand, anticipate, and master. He’s also like us in his affirmation of the uniqueness and singularity of human history—its character as a one-way street, told one time, whose significance is granted not by the patterns it reveals, but in itself, in the story it fully embodies, in the way it unfolds a singular revelation of God. And yet, Augustine’s picture of history is also quite odd to us. But it might be precisely in its oddity where we might find what is of most value. Augustine’s writings often discuss the significance of historical events. Most notably for him, of course, is the Incarnation, which one can describe very abstractly as the entrance into history of the very source of history itself, namely God; of the conditionality and contingency of historical existence, namely the idiosyncratic individual life of Jesus of Nazareth being born into the absolute being of God to reveal the route for reconciliation between beings of determinate Creation and all being’s unconditioned, ground in the Creator. Now, God’s determinate historical presence in Jesus serves as both an exemplary patterning of a human life—Jesus’s life—and also effects, or at least announces, the salvation of humanity to a fallen world. For Augustine, the Incarnation thus reveals the ultimate structure of history from which the other real historical turning points 362

Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17)

have their significance—the Fall, the Election of Israel, Pentecost and the formation of church, the body of Christ, and the Last Judgment. Now to us today, of course, that structure of history seems remarkably austere. You could teach it to anyone in about five minutes. But for Augustine, that’s really pretty much all there is that’s truly significant about history. Everything else in history is, in some way, trivia—moving the deck chairs around the Titanic before Christ or around the deck of the Love Boat after him, in our ue. And yet why do we think history is more cluttered with truly significant events than this? I think there are two major reasons, one good and one bad—one reason Augustine would approve, and one he would condemn. First, we grant that the singularity of history makes each moment uniquely valuable. The value of today lies, in part, in its coming once into existence and never again. Augustine would, in fact, agree with that; he would simply deny that those moments are hinge moments in history. Second—and this is a bad reason—our massive self-congratulation, amplified by a kind of narcissistic consumer-entertainment complex, has accustomed us to the expectation that bloviating hyperbole is the right volume to handle every moment. But the noise here, I suggest, is due to our lack of confidence that anything can truly matter beyond our own assertion that it matters for us. And so we amplify that assertion as much as we can. In a way, Augustine’s account makes history more obviously intelligible than these just previous modern beliefs, precisely since history at least has a meaning for Augustine; whereas on many bloviating modern accounts, it either does not, or it’s extremely hard to see how it might. Often for us, history is mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is at least partially because of the collision between a severe historical austerity and our self-aggrandizing self-importance that we see Augustine as an ahistorical or anti-historical thinker. But he 363

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is no more ahistorical than modernist architects were anti-aesthetic. And for him, form follows function. History has meaning since it has a determinate shape, and the determinate shape determines the significance of the events therein. Other events are intelligible, and they have interest and meaning for Augustine—he wrote his own autobiography; he would have to have this. But their meaning is borrowed from, and it echoes or recapitulates these truly crux events; and their significance is real only insofar as they express these primary moments’ significance in a new light. These other moments are, then—and we’ll see this later, more fully—typologically and sacramentally significant. Now how does this vision of history organize these books? In a way, he offers herein a kind of theological journalism. He goes through the events of a scripture, and he offers an interpretation of those events that uses the theological categories of the Christian faith to show people directly how those categories—those theological categories—usefully illuminate the everyday world we inhabit; and thereby also indirectly show people how to use those categories on their own to see the world through these theological lenses, and to trust those lenses to discover the truth about the world. He practices this journalism by tracing the history of the two cities in time, thereby exhibiting the usefulness of his analytic schema—both its conceptual tools and its overall style and method of seeing or reading the world. Some of what he does is simply to explain how to read the Bible. One way he does this is by showing how a scriptural story exemplifies a technical theological concept. Consider his use of the story of Cain and Abel to exhibit both the category of idolatry and the psychology of domination. For Augustine, the precise problem with Cain, the reason God rejects his sacrifice, is that he does not give himself to God fully but tries to strike a deal, an exchange with God, and thereby reveals a lust for domination, for winning—a mindset that is utterly 364

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inappropriate for relations with other persons, and all the more so when that person is God. Clearly, Augustine says, Cain’s sacrifice was self-interested, a kind of bit of technology. As Augustine puts it, They suppose that they are by this means purchasing God’s help, not in healing their base desires, but in fulfilling them. And this is the way of the earthly city, to worship a god or gods so that, with their aid, that city might reign in victory and earthly peace, not by the council of charity, but with lust for mastery.

It’s hard not to imagine that as thinking about Rome for Augustine. This teaches us, he thinks, a crucial difference—the good use of the world to enjoy God versus the evil use of God to enjoy the world. But in instrumentalizing God for the world, the wicked instrumentalize even themselves as well. Hence Cain reveals the tragedy of the lust for domination. As Augustine says, A man will have the mastery of his sin if he does not place it over himself by defending it, but makes it subject to himself by repenting of it. Otherwise, he will indeed be its slave, and it will have the mastery of him, if he lends it his protection when it rises.

Augustine even recognizes the need for history to be artistically composed and literarily constructed, as not every moment or event in history is as important as every other. So he allows that there might have been other people when Cain built the city; but in this moment, their stories are in the deep background, whereas Cain’s is in the foreground. The writer of the sacred history had no need, he says, to name all the men who might have then existed, but only those required by the plan of the work which he had undertaken. Insofar as history has a shape and a moral, some moments in it are necessarily going to be more meaningful than others. 365

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How do we know, though, how to pick out those meaningful moments? Well, by a principle of selection. But whence comes that principal of selection? Not from a bare reading of history, but for Augustine, from the larger salvation story—from Adam to Christ to today. Hence what is crucial here, for Augustine, is the spinal story of the two cities, mapped out in these books as tracking the generations of men and the generations of the sons of God, Cain and Abel; even, in Roman history, by Romulus and Remus. All of these are manifestations of the struggle between siblings over goods they should share, and this story would be more tragic if it were less pathetic. But it is pathetic since, as he says, “A man’s possession of goodness is in no way diminished by the arrival, or the continuance, of a sharer in it,” despite each of these situations being one where the sibling annihilates the other. The point of this conflict between brothers, then, is that in the Ancient Near East, as in any city today, most violence is intimate violence within families, within a context where people are attached by bonds of blood and, we hope, of love. Any policeman will tell you, the most dangerous call you can get is a call to a so-called “domestic disturbance.” For Augustine, the history of humanity from Cain and Abel forward is a history of domestic disturbances. In general, Augustine thinks—as many theologians have—that scripture is best understood as employing what is called an accommodationist use of language; simplifying its syntax, fitting its formulations to the overly-physical and simple minds of us humans, to make its meanings vivid to as large an audience of us as possible. Augustine says, “If scripture did not use such terms, it would not communicate its meaning so clearly to all the race of men for whom it has care.” Through this, Augustine tries, then, to teach his audience to understand historical events by reshaping them to fit the overall story he wants them to find in history. Now, that’s what he does at some times. At other times, he does not want to diminish an episode’s significance, but to expand it. 366

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So he says that some stories should be read as vast, as expressive of fundamental historical themes. Thus the story of Babel is not just about Babylon, it’s about the fundamental contest between sin and grace in this world, and thus of his whole two cities schema. Here the moralizing energy helps us see the pathologies manifest in one instance are, in fact, abstractable from the details of that context and generalizable across many settings. We do this all the time, of course. So, for example, we consider building nuclear weapons kind of like opening Pandora ’s Box—there’s an analogy drawn right there. Now, note that although these reading strategies move tactically in opposite directions—one to diminish, one to expand the significance of these events—both are in the service of a single strategic aim. The first example diminishes the text; it makes it seem less important or central to the narrative. The second amplifies the text; it makes it seem larger, more allegorically revelatory than its literal details might suggest. But both tactics serve the single strategic aim of showing his audience how the Bible can offer a moral and spiritual frame within which the past, and the present, and the future should be understood. The aim here is to show how this imaginative framework displayed in the Bible can remarkably illuminate our world. Recall Augustine’s repeated attention to the pagan Roman poet Vergil throughout previous books of The City. He knew the power Vergil had over the imagination and the understanding of the Romans, Pagan and Christian alike, in his audience. He knew the power Vergil had over his own imagination, in fact. Here in these books, we see the fullest unfolding of the contrasting imaginative frame—the frame provided by the Bible. For Augustine, the Bible is the true moral lens that lets us see the world aright, whereas Vergil’s stories warp our vision and distort our affective responses. “To learn to accept God’s grace, we must replace the old Roman stories we were once taught,” he says, “with these new stories, for they are the true ones.” This is, in short, an allegorical mode of reading meant to cultivate in us what we can call a typological imagination. 367

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Now, this typological imagination might sound very abstruse, but it needn’t be so. We typically use some such imagination all the time. These ordinary events in our lives can signify another event—evoke it, reveal the other event’s true significance, and this event’s significance in relation to the other one. In fact, almost all of our thinking is frankly comparative in this way. All of our actions are not simply there in their glorious irreducible singularity; they are almost all repetitions, another token of some underlying type. Breaking a diet, cheating on an exam, cheating on your spouse echoes the Fall; a conversion recapitulates the resurrection; a teacher grading, a movie critic reviewing a film, a soccer referee handing out a yellow card at a kid’s game, a judge handing down a sentence—all these foreshadow the Last Judgment. Every morning is somehow like the first morning. And every night seems to loom closer to us as some ultimate judgment. This isn’t Augustine’s invention; even the Bible uses this method. All the stories of Christ’s passion partake in a tacit typological association, silently comparing the Crucifixion and the Genesis story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham on Mount Moriah. Augustine is important not because he’s innovative in developing this idea, but because his deployment of this strategy becomes the prototype for all other uses of it in the West—from his time, effectively to today. This picture of a life lived in reading is powerful and vivid. It begins in recognizing that we are formed by texts, and so ethical change and maturation can come from exchanging less adequate narratives for more adequate, more sophisticated ones. And these practices of reading, for Augustine, take place in communities; and for him, religious communities where others guide and shape our understanding. All of this is organized around cultivating our apprehension of ourselves and our world in terms of what he calls distentio—being here and not here; now and not yet; capable of agency, but not creatures who are simply self-started entirely on our own.

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Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17)

This typological imagination, in other words, creates a certain kind of self. It’s not simply informative; it is also quite powerfully formative. Consider, for example, the connection between reading typologically and an experience of boredom or tedium, which, let’s admit, might just accompany a reading of Books 15–17—I encourage you to check them out and see what I mean. To see what he means, reflect on boredom itself. It’s actually an interesting thing to do. Boredom frustrates the self in certain ways. The 20th-century intellectual Susan Sontag once said, “Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration.” I think that’s pretty interesting. One mark of boredom, then, is a feeling of claustrophobic impatience—as if time cannot pass fast enough for us; as if we were doing nothing but killing time. Furthermore, we are self-aware in this state that we are partially the problem—so there’s no escape from boredom since we are what is boring. This boredom splits the self. When we are bored, we are typically painfully aware of ourselves as bored. Now in contrast, when you’re totally wrapped up in an experience, you typically don’t notice yourself in so self-conscious a way. In talking about tedium, then, Augustine thinks that what he’s talking about is the core of what it means to be alive today. In a way, all that comes before is prolegomena to this experience of our present. To experience the meaning of time in this way is to feel, in our experience of time itself, how we are divided. We’re never fully here. We’re always still caught up in various historical moments. Our history is what we're trying to render coherent, to master, to reintegrate into ourselves. This experience of ourselves as stretched out across time is meant, for Augustine, to teach us our need of help, our need of reintegration. And again, the word he uses for this experience of stretchedoutedness is distentio—this Latin word that does mean stretchedout, as one would be distended; stretched out on a rack, if one were 369

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being tortured. Feeling this distentio is meant to make us feel our need for help more pointedly, and more vividly seek God’s assistance. This seeking of God’s help is why this experience of reading is so integral to the formation of the Christian community in general. For, Augustine says, the church’s fundamental activity, along with praising God, is always to call upon God for more help. As he puts it in these books—and this is a quote from Augustine—“The supreme task, in this world, of the pilgrim city of God, its whole task during this mortal life, is to call upon God;” to call upon God for help. So Augustine’s proposal for reading history is not simply one that gives us a nice lens to understand the events of history, it’s actually largely centered around reading history through the scriptural stories, reading history typologically; not, again, just to give us a vision of history, but also to enable us to experience ourselves as a certain kind of creature, to make us aware of a certain kind of stretched-outedness across time from which we suffer and from which we need a certain kind of healing. Far from being simply a way of talking about the past, then, Augustine’s method for reading history is a profound strategy for forming the Christian self as a creature with a certain relationship to time, and one who knows they stand in need of divine aid to help them reintegrate themselves. Augustine’s proposal for reading history, then, and for seeing one’s whole life as a practice of reading, is a very powerful one—both psychologically and historically. It’s been tremendously influential in Christian practice, and it stands behind the continued insistence among the churches of the West that the Bible is a text that should be read and reread by Christians throughout their lives. But it’s not without its suspicions. In the modern world, we’re typically skeptical of such typological strategies for reading, or for history. And our suspicions are threefold. First, this approach seems to not take the literality of history with sufficient seriousness. Why is the most important thing about an event that it reinforces some other moral 370

Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17)

whose point we can know independently of the first event? Why isn’t cheating on my spouse, or eating an extra cookie just bad—not because it echoes the Fall, but just because it is this particular crime, in this particular circumstance? Second, this typological enterprise seems to have confused understanding with decoding, where it sees all as a cryptogram whose singular meaning can be definitely unlocked. But to unlock it, we need a key that, in a way, already tells us what the thing we are trying to decode really means. Now, there’s a third problem, too—a third tricky thing about allegory typology. This is the inescapable ascription of authorial intent and the apparently inescapable fact of arbitrariness in the allegory itself. Now by arbitrary here, I mean the original sense—the Latin sense here—of will, of decision, of action; the decision of a writer to make this stand for that. This turtle stands for the struggles that America must undergo in the 19th century. Why is that? Why do we think these particular moments, these significances, are the ones that governs history’s structure? Why couldn’t there be some other set? These are powerful criticisms. The only way they might be met is by showing, in the execution of the community’s practices of reading, that, in fact, a community can avoid them—that a community can understand history with as much seriousness as history demands; that its understanding of history does respect the reality of history in its manifold details, and so ends in no over-simple conclusions; and that finally, its vision of what truly matters in history proves itself true. This last point, Augustine thinks, can only be demonstrated in the eschaton; but the first two are able to be demonstrated, at least somewhat, in how the community inhabits history even today. And so, in the next lecture, we’ll see Augustine try to explain how it does just that.

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Lecture 18

Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

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nderstanding begins as a matter of translation, of taking one set of details and transposing them onto another, to reveal some similarities of meaning between the two. Book 18 completes the survey of the history of the earthly city from Assyria to Rome and recounts the history of the city of God from the Israelite prophets to the coming of Christ and the Christian church. It turns from the biblical narratives to the pagan histories and asks its readers to imagine these histories from a scriptural perspective.

The Earthly Babylon „„

More deeply, it asks a simple question: After Rome, what? It addresses how we should reconceive the idea of imperium once the worldly empires have fallen and how we should translate the governance of history—translate the past for the future.

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The word “translate” here more generally refers to the movement of world governance, imperial preeminence, from one polity to another—from Babylon to Assyria to Egypt to Persia to Greece to Rome.

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Now that Rome has been sacked, Augustine thinks the imperium has been translated once again, this time from Rome to God. Or rather, that this final translation has now been announced; now we are beginning the translation of governance from an earthly reign to the true imperium of God.

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Augustine also was concerned with the translation of Judaism into Christianity because it was not only Rome that flowed into the city of God, for Augustine; it was also the People Israel. The idea that 372

Lecture 18—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

Judaism’s heritage is now folded into Christianity is a part of this translation practice, too—and a far more troubling one. „„

Because much of world history was not directly known by the ancient Israelites, Augustine uses classical sources, not biblical, to construct his account of the history of the ancient world. Augustine is still able to extract an essentially biblical message from his narration. ›› Rome is not conceived here as superior to Assyria; they are fundamentally the same to Augustine, for both are human attempts at domination. ››

He discovers a basically theological story in which Assyria and Rome are two types of human imperia, both implicitly contending with God for true sovereignty. They are, however, different from each other; Babylon and Assyria were sinful humanity’s parody of the Old Covenant, while Rome is sinful humanity’s parody of the New Covenant.

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He complements the theological story with the psychological one he developed from Sallust, about the libido dominandi, showing how the human desire for imperium always seeks to dominate. Not only domination’s spatial reach is extended in this generalization of imperium: The type of activity that counts as a manifestation of the libido dominandi is broadened as well.

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Domination is the basic lesson to be drawn from the logic of human empire: However noble or primitive its origins may be, the structural trajectory, both psychologically and sociologically, is to make the polity long to bring all under its control and to elevate the ruler into a quasi-divine status.

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Human history is therefore a history of confusion, with a false clarity imposed by various kinds of force. The earthly city means confusion: debates are inevitable and intractable. Its unity is not a spontaneous harmony of a multitude but must be incessantly 373

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reestablished through multitudinous forms of violence. It is a rigid singularity, imposed precariously only by force, and typically the force of imperium. In this way, the history of the world is a history of domination. „„

In the earthly city, human society is at war with itself because everyone desires some of the same things, and each is at war with herself or himself, because our desires are inconstant. Just as the earthly city has no true harmony or coherence, neither has it true originality. It has no novelty, but simply reiterates its own claim to be free of divine sponsorship.

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In sum, Augustine says the earthly city’s day is already over. It goes on, but it lives entirely in the past. Its time is out of joint with the new eon that the Christian churches proclaim and pray to represent. It is already dead; it simply doesn’t know it.

The Heavenly Jerusalem „„

In contrast to the parodic incoherence of the pagan political actors and philosophers who sought answers by human powers, the harmony and unity of the city of God is communicated by the prophetic conveyance of divine words, received gracefully by the community and obeyed as true nourishment.

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None of this about the heavenly Jerusalem is actually true, and Augustine knows it.

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The city of God on pilgrimage still lives in the morally and spiritually homogeneous era of the world and partakes in all ways in the tedium and sinfulness of humanity before the Second Coming. This fact severely complicates, some would say utterly obstructs, any hope for a stable or durable progress or sanctification of humans in the church during history. ›› There will be fallbacks, failures, and all sorts of other disappointments. 374

Lecture 18—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

››

The churches will grow, shrink, be filled with saints, and overflow with sinners.

Augustine says the earthly city’s day is already over. It goes on, but

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This raises deep questions it lives entirely in the past. Its time about the relationship is out of joint with the new eon that between exegesis and the Christian churches proclaim ontology, between what we are supposed to take history and pray to represent. to signify typologically and its actual first-order experience and significance for its inhabitants. Furthermore, there are deep questions for members of the churches here, about whether this leaves the city of God too fugitive in history.

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Augustine’s answer to the question of the meaning of history is simple. The Israelite prophets and pagan sages anticipate and prefigure the Christian Gospel by offering hints of and clues to its coming that signify something far beyond their literal significance. So we live in the “now” of the church by understanding that the “then” of the past was always leading to this church, in some way intending it, prefiguring it in partial ways.

Prefiguration and Supersession „„

Prefiguration means that we must learn to see all human actions, including our own, as having their full and complete determination at some point in the indefinite future, so that all our actions now must be undertaken with fear and trembling in the knowledge that they will receive their full and final meaning at a time that we cannot control.

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The story of Jonah, the whale, and Nineveh and how Augustine handles it show how prefiguration works. It has at least three distinct layers of meaning for Augustine. 375

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The sheer events of Jonah’s life: being called to Nineveh, flight from that calling, discovery that he cannot flee from God, preaching, Nineveh’s repentance, and Jonah’s petulant response to God’s mercy.

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The ever-present, indeed relentless, mercy of God—first to Jonah, then to the whole city of Nineveh, then to Jonah again.

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The way he was taken up by God in a larger plan than he ever had for himself and used as a prominent tool of God’s providential governance of the world.

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In this way Jonah prefigures Christ, who is the preeminent and perfect example of God using Creation to govern creation. Christ’s human nature is prefigured by Jonah’s acts even as Christ’s divine nature is prefigured by God’s use of Jonah. Jonah’s just a character in this story—not the main actor at all.

„„

Augustine lived in a civilization of utter continuity that venerated age in a way that we do not. In such a setting, a tradition like Christianity, whose oldest relative was the primitive desert tribe of the Israelites, was suspect. ›› So Augustine sets out to show that the prophets actually predate the pagan philosophers, and while the prophets in turn are not as old as the Greek According to Augustine, the people theological poets, those of Israel refused the promise of poets are in turn less ancient than Moses. God and so now are outside the ››

Thus the wisdom of the city of God is more ancient than that of the earthly city, though Augustine 376

salvation history that continued from ancient Israel through Jesus Christ into the church.

Lecture 18—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

grudgingly admits that there was pre-Mosaic wisdom in Egypt and elsewhere. „„

A more troubling way in which the past is said to prefigure the Christian present is how Augustine understands the relationship between ancient Israel and the Christian churches. Although the ancient community of believers plays a role in the history of salvation and the tradition of ancient Israel is honored, for contemporary Judaism Augustine’s vision is ambivalent. ›› He affirms that the Jews are the residual people of the first promise and that the first promise was important as prefiguring the coming of Christ. The history of Israel is important, but can be properly understood only as leading to Christianity. ››

The people of Israel refused the promise of God and so now are outside the salvation history that continued from ancient Israel through Jesus Christ into the church. So the Jews are not properly saved.

„„

Supersessionism, the idea that Christianity supersedes Judaism, engendered a great deal of anti-Judaic violence over the centuries and curdled into the more savage idea of anti-Semitism, the idea that the Jews as a race are in some way marked out as wicked and evil.

„„

Another part of the legacy of Augustine’s allegorical reading of Judaism is his insistence not only that the Jews of his day are an important reminder of God’s promise to Christianity, but that they are themselves a salvifically significant people.

„„

Augustine wants to ensure a certain level of ambiguity among Christians about their comprehension of God’s purposes—a vision of the world that is simultaneously confident about the promises of God in Christ and uncertain about how those promises will be and are being fulfilled in believers’ lives and 377

Books That Matter: The City of God

the lives of others. Specifically, he wants to promote two kinds of ambiguity: temporal and spatial. „„

We should be humbly uncertain about where we are when it comes to enumerating who is inside the city of God and who is not. Even in the heartland of the pagan religious traditions themselves, Augustine finds moments of true witness to Christ: Job, for example, or the mysterious oracles of the Sibylline prophesies, which we now know point to Christ. ›› Christ, in his life, used all for good, moving from humiliation to exaltation. So should we treat our own challenges as opportunities for spiritual growth. We know neither who among our opponents is our true enemy nor who will turn out to be our true friend. ››

„„

The city of God, when it is on pilgrimage, should deal with the wicked by using the suffering caused thereby to exercise patience, charity, and forgiveness.

We should also be humbly uncertain about when we are—what time it is in relation to the Last Days. Hence, against those devotees of apocalyptic eschatology, he insists that we must not attempt to anticipate the Last Judgment. Against those who see a fixed time frame for the church’s persecutions, he insists that there are no limits we could imagine to the times that the church will be persecuted.

Questions to Consider 1. What do you think of Augustine’s proposal for how Christians should understand the ongoing life of Judaism? 2. What is the relevance of Augustine’s vision of world history for his account of the salvation history of the People Israel, Jesus Christ, and the Christian churches?

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Lecture 18 Transcript

R

ecall the passage from Marx that I used to begin the last lecture. In it, he compared a person just learning a new language, who always translates every sentence back into their native tongue with the experienced speaker of both, who can move freely in either, forgetting for the moment which was their native speech. The best translation, then, is not in a way translation at all; the speaker has moved from one language fully into another. Understanding begins as a matter of translation, of taking one set of details and awkwardly transposing them onto another to reveal some similarities of meaning between the two. Yet it ends not with a mechanism to match episode with episode, but with a vision of what history as a whole means. While we saw in the last lecture how history helps us to understand our present, it does so by translating our past. Here I want to look directly at that activity, for it bears on crucial parts of Augustine’s project as a whole. Book 18 is the last of the four books that comprise the middle section of the second half of Augustine’s vast work. It completes the survey of this history of the worldly city from Assyria to Rome, and it recounts the history of the city of God from the Israelite prophets to the coming of Christ and the Christian Church. It turns from the biblical narratives to the pagan histories and asks its readers to imagine these histories from a scriptural perspective. But it’s not simply the completion of Augustine’s survey of all possible knowledge of the world. More deeply, it asks a simple question: After Rome, now what? How should we reconceive the idea of imperium once the worldly empires have all fallen, or once we have seen that they were never in charge in the first place? Into what should we 379

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translate our understanding of the governance of history? How, more generally, should we translate the past for the future? The word “translation” here is used advisedly. We today understand it, as we saw, primarily linguistically—translating from one language to another. But there’s another sense of translation captured in the medieval phrase translatio imperii—translation of empire. Now, this actual phrase appears only after Augustine, but he was well acquainted with the general idea. Aeneas translated the power of Troy to Rome through his long peregrinations to the new city. Constantine translated the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantium half a century before Augustine was born. More generally, it referred to the movement of world governance, imperial preeminence, from one polity to another—from Babylon to Assyria to Egypt to Persia to Greece to Rome. And now that Rome has been sacked—even though the capital has moved to Ravenna and Byzantium—Augustine thinks the imperium has been translated once again, this time from the Roman Empire as a whole to God. Or rather this final translation has now been announced; now we are beginning the translation of governance from an earthly reign to the true imperium—the imperium sine fine of God. And there is another translation that Augustine was concerned with—the translation of Judaism into Christianity. For it was not only Rome that flowed into the city of God for Augustine, it was also the people Israel. And this heritage, which we can loosely call Christian supersessionism—the idea that Judaism’s history is now folded into Christianity—is a part of this translation practice, too; and historically, and even today, a far more troubling one. And we will look at both in this lecture. Now, to see what I mean by this, I want to talk about this translation between now and then. Augustine, in a way, thinks that we live in both now and then today, with the then being the past—the ancient, old worldly city—while the now is the new in-breaking city of God. 380

Lecture 18 Transcript—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

Augustine wants to show his readers, who are trying to live in the city of God, how to begin to translate their being from the then—the then of the past, in which we are all still stuck—into the now of the coming kingdom. So to begin with then. As I mentioned early on in these lectures, Augustine lives in a world that conceives of itself as very old. The building of the Great Pyramid at Giza happened 3,000 years before Augustine’s age, making it twice as far away from him as he is to us. Even in Augustine’s day, though, there were records and some record-keepers in Egypt who measured time back that far. Even his Rome understood itself to have lasted for 1,000 years. I suspect our world feels, in very many ways, quite a bit younger than Augustine’s does to him. Furthermore, much of this history was not directly known by the ancient Israelites, so it is no surprise that Augustine has to use classical sources to construct his account of the history of the ancient world, as he understood it, for his audience. And it’s, therefore, worth noting that he does this, actually, with a surprising amount of accurate detail, exploring the history of Assyria and Babylon, Greece, and Rome. In this book, then, the history recounted is mostly classical in origins, not biblical. In fact, this is the one book in the second half of the whole City of God that is most like the first 10 books in its references. He’s clearly relying upon a vast amount of learning in the various world histories and the chronicles to which he had access, firmly setting each one within the more basic framework, for him, of the biblical narrative. So, this is an impressive display of erudition, and done in such a lucid way that his many readers, who overwhelmingly would not have had access to hardly any of the resources he did, will go away from this text with a rough-and-ready history of the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean that’s as good as, if not better, than almost all of our contemporary undergraduates today. 381

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For all his use of classical knowledge, however, Augustine is still able to extract an essentially biblical message from his narration. He relies heavily for this book’s framework on Origen and Eusebius—these two major Christian historians who had produced major historical works. So he discovers a basically theological story in which Assyria and Rome, in fact, are the two types of human empires, both of which implicitly contend with God for true sovereignty. But they’re different from each other. Assyria, harkening back to Babylon, was a sinful parody of the Old Covenant; while Rome was, in Augustine’s view, founded as a kind of second Babylon, but it’s a sinful parody of the New Covenant. But interestingly enough, Rome is not conceived here as superior to Assyria—that’s pagan Rome’s snobbery and Eusebius’s complacency, for example. Now, of course, both are fundamentally the same to Augustine, for both are human attempts at domination. That’s the basic lesson to be drawn from the logic of human empire; that however noble or primitive its origins may be, the structural trajectory—both psychologically and sociologically—is to make the polity long to bring all of the world under its control, and to elevate its rule and its ruler into a quasi-divine status. It’s thus not surprising that one large central theme for Augustine in this history is the history of the human attempts at domination. We saw this emerge at the very beginning of The City of God, right in the prologue to the entire work, where he says that the rebellious humans are themselves in their sin dominated by the very lust to dominate— the libido dominandi—and then, again, more empirically through Augustine’s critique of the rise of Roman imperium in Books 2–4. But here, however, he generalizes that account beyond the particular history of Rome and roots it deep in various episodes, figures, and kingdoms from the history of the Ancient Near East. In this, he’s in part extending and amplifying the older trope of ancient Israelite critiques of the larger empires that loomed around them. And the crucial figure here is Daniel and Daniel’s vision of a 382

Lecture 18 Transcript—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

statue whose head is of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of brass, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay; all were shattered, Daniel saw in his vision, by a stone cut out of a mountain without human hands. Powerful Israelite critique of empire—Augustine takes this in; takes this on. But he complements this theological story with a psychological one he develops from Sallust about the libido dominandi, showing how the human desire for imperium, for rule, for always seeking to dominate—whether in Egypt, or Babylon, or Persia, or Macedon, or Rome—always captures the central public concern. However, and this is quite important, it’s not only that domination’s spatial reach is extended in this generalization of imperium from Rome to the rest of the Ancient Near East, it’s also the type of activity that counts as a manifestation of the libido dominandi—the lust to dominate—that is broadened here. Human history, in general, is now seen as a history of confusion with various forms of false clarity imposed by various kinds of force. This should not be surprising; after all, the worldly city, in general—symbolized always by Babylon for Augustine—means, for him, confusion. Debates—philosophical, literary, cultural; not just political—are always, in this city, inevitable and intractable. The unity of the earthly city is never a spontaneous harmony of a multitude, but must be reestablished through multitudinous forms of violence incessantly. It is a rigid singularity, imposed precariously only by force and typically by the force of imperium. In this way, the history of the world—the history of the saeculum—is nothing more than a history of various moments and kinds of domination. Augustine suggests here that the central characteristic of the city of the world, its common nature, is the way it is dedicated to the satisfaction of desire—the desires of its fallen members. And these desires seem multiple, but in their essence, they are actually drearily uniform, for everyone competes for the same objects. Thus, human society is at war with itself—each at war with his or her neighbor 383

Books That Matter: The City of God

because everyone desires some of the same things, and each at war with her or himself because our desires are fickle, inconstant, and so also in conflict with each other. Furthermore, just as this earthly city has no true harmony or coherence, it has no true originality either. Just as sinning is a parody of a true action, this city’s entire structure is a parody of good order. It has no novelty, but simply reiterates its own claim to be free of divine sponsorship. But that very claim to rebellion is itself simply a jealous rivalry of God’s true founding, of God’s genuine city. Like an adolescent, the sinful city simultaneously tries to copy what it denies it has any ambition to be—namely, an adult. This is what it means to exist as a parody, to exist parasitically on the thing that you envy. As the singer Elvis Costello once put it, “There’s no such thing as an original sin.” While Augustine argues this directly throughout his book, he also demonstrates it structurally. For in Books 15–17, he seems to be able to talk about the city of God without talking about the city of this world. But now, in Book 18, it turns out that the earthly city can’t be talked about without continual repeated reference to the city of God it is trying to be and, of course, trying not to be. So in sum, Augustine says the earthly city’s day is already over. It goes on, but it lives entirely in the past. Its time is out of joint with a new eon that the Christian churches proclaim and pray to represent. It is not now; it is then. It is already dead; it simply doesn’t know it. Now, in contrast to the parodic incoherence of the pagan political actors and philosophers who sought their answers by human powers, the heavenly Jerusalem, even today, has the ambition—if not always the reality—of being coherent and harmonious. The harmony and unity of the city of God is visible in its universality and harmony; communicated by the prophetic conveyance of divine words, received gracefully by the community, and obeyed as true nourishment. Augustine knows this is a very idealized picture of the Christian 384

Lecture 18 Transcript—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

community, but he knows that it’s a possibility for that community—at least as he believes it. That’s why he holds it out there as an option. For none of this about the heavenly Jerusalem is actually true, and Augustine knows it. For the New Jerusalem, the city of God on pilgrimage still lives in the morally and spiritually homogeneous era of the saeculum and still partakes in all ways of the tedium and the sinfulness of the rest of humanity before the Second Coming. While the Christ event punctuates and structures the otherwise mundane and empty account of history, it does not completely alter the fact that all humanity still lives in the era between Eden and Armageddon. It inaugurates the resolution of this history, but it does not decisively complete it. This severely complicates—some would say, utterly obstructs—any hope for a sort of stable or durable progress or sanctification of humans in the church during history. There will be fallbacks, failures, and all sorts of other disappointments. The churches will grow and then shrink; they’ll be filled with saints and then overflow with sinners. During this whole time, the shape of history is not mounting steadily to some final climax. No moment is in any meaningful way closer to the eschaton than any other; some are just more temporally proximate to it. This raises deep questions about the relationship between exegesis and historical ontology—between what we are supposed to take history to signify typologically and its actual first-order experience and significance for its concrete inhabitants. If historical events take on other meanings, is there one definitive real sense to them? Why should we seek to read and understand history at all, according to Augustine? Is the whole value of all this merely a series of cautionary tales? What exactly does this understanding amount to? Doesn’t it require an empathetic and intimate curiosity about the felt experience of other people, in other ages? Doesn’t Augustine’s approach actively discourage this kind of understanding? 385

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Furthermore, there are deep questions for members of the churches here about whether this leaves the city of God too fugitive in history— that is to say, is Augustine’s description of Christ’s presence in history and effect on it, is it too thin? Does our historical existence have the same full quality before and after the life of Jesus? Or after Christ, do we just walk simply more deeply into a fog? Is history just a shadowplay now? Doesn’t the church’s inauguration of the new age amount to something like a real change for its inhabitants? Aren’t they all, after all, the new Creations that Paul said they would be? You can imagine believers—not just unbelievers asking about history, but believers asking Augustine about the church. If we are done with the then, then what does the now that we have entered into amount to? Augustine’s basic answer to the question of the meaning of history is simple. Israelite prophets and the pagan sages—both the Jewish and the classical Greco-Roman streams—both of them anticipate and prefigure, he says, the Christian Gospel. They do so by offering hints of and clues to its coming—some of them knowing something of what they are saying, some of them thoroughly clueless about it; but all of them meaning something with their lips and in their lives, through their acts, that signify something far beyond their literal significances. So we live in the now of the church by understanding that the then of the past, he says, was always leading to this church—in some way intending it; prefiguring it in partial ways. But what does this prefiguration mean? Most basically, it means that we must learn to see all human actions, including our own, as having their full and complete determination; not in a present now, but at some point in an indefinite future, so that all our actions now must be undertaken with fear and trembling in the knowledge that they will receive their full and final meaning at a time, and in a place, that we cannot control. Consider, as an example of how Augustine reads these moments of history, the story of Jonah, the whale, and Nineveh. This is a story with at least three distinct layers of meaning for Augustine. First, the sheer 386

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events of Jonah’s life. His being called to Nineveh, his flight from that calling, his discovery that he cannot flee from God—he gets trapped in the belly of a whale, among other things—his preaching, Nineveh’s repentance, and his petulant response to God’s mercy. A second layer is the story of the ever-present, indeed relentless, mercy of God— first to Jonah, then to the whole city of Nineveh, and then to Jonah again. And then there’s a third level in which Jonah, for Augustine, prophesied Christ more by what he suffered than by what he said—so much Augustine—by the way he was taken up by God in a larger plan than he ever had for himself and used as a prominent tool of God’s providential governance of the world. In this final way, Jonah prefigures Christ, who is the preeminent and perfect example of God using Creation to govern Creation. Christ’s human nature is, in this way, prefigured by Jonah’s acts even as Christ’s divine nature is prefigured by God’s use of Jonah. Jonah’s just a character in this story, not the main actor at all. The primary actor in the story of Jonah is God. Now, the story of Jonah, and how Augustine handles it, shows how prefiguration works and also how God’s provenance will act. Augustine used this both because he thought it was spiritually powerful, but also because he needed to find a way to authorize his new community in terms of the antiquity of the histories surrounding it. Let’s consider again that Augustine lived in a civilization of remarkable continuity with the past, and his world privileged age in a way that our world does not. In such a setting, a true newcomer tradition like Christianity, whose oldest relative was the primitive desert tribe of the Israelites—that’s how the Greeks and the Romans saw them— was a very low-status proposition. So, Augustine sets out to show in this book as well that the prophets actually predate the pagan philosophers. And while the prophets, in turn, are not as old as the Greek theological poets—like Homer and Hesiod—those poets are, in turn, not as ancient as was Moses. 387

Books That Matter: The City of God

In this way, the wisdom of the city of God, Augustine argues, is more ancient than that of the city of Man—although Augustine begrudgingly admits that there was pre-Mosaic wisdom in Egypt and elsewhere. For while Moses was the primary source of divine wisdom, even he had been taught and had been given what Augustine actually calls a liberal education in Egypt—so, Moses went to college. Indeed, Augustine goes so far as to propound the antiquity of Hebrew wisdom over all other kinds, especially Egyptians, he says, who are, he says, mostly fakers; they claim that their wisdom goes back 100,000 years, which is clearly a lie. But there’s another and altogether more troubling way in which the past is said to prefigure the Christian present for Augustine, and this is how Augustine understands the relationship between ancient Israel and the Christian Churches. Again, the ancient community of believers plays a role in the history of salvation, and so the tradition of Ancient Israel is honored in this account. But as for the Judaism that was contemporary to Augustine, Augustine’s vision is far more ambiguous—perhaps, at best, ambivalent—and has had disastrous consequences sine his life. Augustine affirms, in this context, two things. First of all, the people Israel—the Jews of his time, anyway; the Judaism as practiced in his day—this is the residual people of the first promise. And that first promise was important; but, he says, only as prefiguring the coming of Christ. So the history of Israel is important but cannot be properly understood, Augustine thinks, on its own terms, but only as leading to Christianity. And then the people of Israel did, for Augustine—in some important way—miss the boat. They refused the promise of God, and so now seem to be outside the salvation history that continued from ancient Israel into Jesus Christ, and then through Christ into the church. So the Jews, as the Jews, are not properly saved on his account.

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This is the part of Augustine’s legacy that was widely shared in the first few centuries after the coming of Jesus, and it is the part that, authorized by Augustine after his life, became a major part of the buttresses of what we call Christian supersessionism—the idea that Christianity succeeds Judaism, replaces it as God’s favored community, as God’s elect. This was a very dangerous idea in its worldly effects, and many Christians think theologically mistaken. This supersessionism warranted a great deal of anti-Judaic violence over the centuries. And then sometime in the past millennium, it curdled into the more savage idea of antisemitism—namely, the idea that the people Israel, the Jews as a race, as a physical collection of humans, are in some way marked out as wicked and evil. This stands behind many Christian pogroms against the Jews in the Middle Ages and up to today, and also behind the more gruesome forms of antisemitism, including but not limited to the Holocaust or Shoah, that have marked the past few centuries of history, first in Europe and the Americas, but now, alas, extending far beyond the West. Now, that is a grim legacy of Augustine’s thinking, but there’s another part of the legacy of Augustine’s allegorical reading of Judaism, one more unusual in his age and less adopted by those who came after. And this is his insistence not only that the Jews of his day are an important reminder of God’s promise to Christianity, but that they still themselves are a salvifically significant people. The most anti-Jewish of Augustine’s contemporaries, remember, were Manicheans, and Gnostics, and other more radical Platonists who suspected any attempt to inhabit or affirm the literal bodies that we have. And they saw Judaism and its attachment to ritual and fleshly existence, and they saw that as deeply problematic. As we have seen, Augustine’s views are far more aligned with Jewish practice here. He, too, saw God caring for body and soul, and insisted on our collective concern for both. Besides, he points out, Jesus and the apostles, including Paul, lived according to the law—the Torah—throughout their lives. 389

Books That Matter: The City of God

Judaism’s continued communal existence serves, then, Augustine thinks, as a powerful witness to the antiquity of God’s promises, and also to the power of God’s word to keep a community bound together. Though they may now only have a shadow of the faithful energy they once possessed, Augustine thought, they still bear the marks of God’s care for them. And one day, he says, in a reading of Paul—he explicitly ties this to his reading of Paul—they will be converted, yet again, back to fidelity to the Christian conception of God. And so, because of that, they should not be attacked or abused, nor should their faith as a whole be attacked—though efforts at conversion on an individual basis were certainly acceptable for Augustine. So, these two forms of prefiguration—Ancient Greece and Rome; Ancient Israel—do more than simply authorize Christianity’s antiquity and undertake to fight with Judaism over who gets to inherit the promises that God made to Abraham. They also, for Augustine, offer a strategy for ensuring that the Christian readings of history, and of the present, do not settle into a self-satisfied literalism. These typological readings destabilize simple presumption for Augustine and thus inject ambiguity into the community’s sense of itself. And Augustine was worried about ensuring a certain level of ambiguity among Christians; about their comprehension of God’s purposes in the here and now, and going forward. Recall, he’s anxious to avoid giving any space in his theology to anything that smacks of a Donatist presumption about the community as purely or truly Christian, or any warrant for an exclusion of others as finally and ultimately non-Christian. He lives in a world of dualists—of people who want to draw bright lines between the light and the dark, the holy and the wicked, the damned and the saved—and he doesn’t want that. He wants a vision of the world that is simultaneously confident about the promises of God in Christ and also uncertain about how those promises will be fulfilled, and are being fulfilled, in believers’ lives and the lives of others.

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More specifically, he wants to promote two kinds of ambiguity here—one temporal, the other spatial. We should be fully certain of neither where we are in this world, or when. To inhabit this stance, Augustine counsels patience, waiting, not trying to presume that we can achieve ultimate ends now. To live in history is to accept obscurity and ambiguity into our lives. The events in which we participate have meanings, for sure, but the full determinate shape of those meanings are deferred until the eschaton. So, we need to be humbly uncertain about where we are and where our interlocutors are when it comes to enumerating who is inside the city of God and who is not. Even outside the definitive borders of revelation, even in the heartland of the pagan religious traditions themselves, Augustine finds moments of true witness to Christ. And besides, consider the good man Job who was, after all, not a descendant of Abraham but an Uzzite, living long before Abraham. Or, consider the mysterious oracles of the Sibylline prophesies, some of which we now know, he says, point to Christ, even though they were central to pagan religious tradition. Especially interesting here is Augustine’s discussion of the life of the city of God on pilgrimage in this world as a life of a mixed church, composed of both the eventually elect and the eventually reprobate. Can you tell them neatly apart? Furthermore, in the worldly context of today, some present-day non-Christians will eventually become Christian. All of this should make us think back to what Christ did in Christ’s life, Augustine says. And Christ, in his life, used all for good. He used people like Judas as well and established what Augustin calls a pattern of forbearance with wicked men, moving from his own humiliation to his later exaltation through this use. So should we treat our own challenges, Augustine says to his fellow Christians, as opportunities for spiritual growth on the part of the faithful, and possibly spiritual growth on the part of those who are non-faithful now. We know neither—who among our opponents is our true 391

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enemy, he says, nor who will turn out to be our true friend. The city of God, when it is on pilgrimage, should deal with the wicked who exist within its community, and outside its walls, by using the suffering that they cause to exercise itself in patience, and charity, and forgiveness. Secondly, we should be humbly uncertain about when we are—what time it is in relation to the last days. Hence, against those devotees of apocalyptic eschatology who were very common in Augustine’s world, he insists that we must not attempt to anticipate the Last Judgment. Against those who see a fixed time frame for the church’s persecutions, he insists that there are no limits we could imagine to the times that the church will be persecuted, or even troubled. We shouldn’t believe the view apparently popular in Augustine’s age that there would be 10 persecutions until the Antichrist returns. Nor, he says, is Christianity restricted to a 365-year lifespan, as apparently many in his day believed. He views such expectations as deeply presumptuous, trying to seize the inscrutable providence of God and control it for ourselves. He says, “No limit can be set to the number of persecutions which the church must endure for her training”—for her, in Latin, exerceri, which is exercise. In fact, the timeline of the final persecution is known to none on earth. So he tells his readers, relax your fingers from counting; give them a rest. All the ingenious accounts of how the apocalypse can be predicted from within history are examples of people misusing their intelligence while forgetting the main thing. I love this line of Augustine; it’s one of my favorite ones—he says, “It takes a truly educated mind to believe such things about Christ, while refusing to believe in Christ.” We’ve all known people like that, right? Maybe we’ve been people like that. The upshot of all this is that we live not just in a situation where two communities—the city of God and the earthly city—are intermixed. We also live in a situation where two times are intermixed. Living in this condition demands that we patiently and humbly accept a certain 392

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degree of ambiguity and ambivalence as intrinsic to our journey in this time, and know that the time is not for you to know; and in dealing with enemies, you may be entertaining angels unawares; and the greatest danger is always the one that is closest to your breast. And now that we’ve seen how to deal with plurality and ambiguity in the church, we can turn to Book 19, to the other stage, the arena of those affairs that we call worldly. How should we enact such an ambiguous account in our care for this fallen world? That is the question Book 19 sets out to answer, and which we will ask next time.

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Lecture 19

Happiness and Politics (Book 19)

G

iven that the widespread classical conviction that the richest form of life is that which is involved not just in private pursuits of happiness but takes some direct responsibility for the common good of the civic public order, the fact that Augustine engages the question of how caring for worldly politics can help Christians realize their spiritual ends makes sense. For the readers of The City of God, and especially Christian grandees particularly worried about the relation between their Christian faith and their duties to the commonwealth, this is something of a secular climax for the work.

The Happiness Debate „„

Augustine discusses the pagan philosophers’ analysis of the various ideal templates for human life, the various ways in which they have mapped the nature of and prospects for human happiness, given various conceptions of our nature and end.

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Amid this bewildering diversity, Augustine agrees with Varro that really only one truly wise view is possible, that of the “old Academy,” which affirmed a life that cared for body and soul in community and with due attention to both contemplation and worldly action. ›› But Augustine says that Christians have a distinct vision of the end of human life that stands in profound and unanticipated tension with all these pagan accounts. It differs from them because both the nature of happiness and how one might attain it must be radically transfigured. The right Christian story must refuse the pagan way of conceiving the challenges facing human life and elaborate its own. 394

Lecture 19—Happiness and Politics (Book 19)

››

The highest good that Christians seek is eternal life, but Christians understand themselves to be doubly incapacitated in the pursuit of that end. They know they cannot know the proper nature of this good, nor can they do the things necessary to attain it, without divine help.

„„

Thus Christians are constantly made more aware of and must constantly publicly confess their need of faith and grace. The good life is not found here on earth; this life is too fragile, and true harmony of body and spirit is never reached in this life.

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Even virtue’s life on earth must “wage perpetual war,” against the vices: the virtue of temperance in unending resistance to desires of flesh; prudence in a constant monitoring for evil; justice in an endless struggle to order all that is always tending entropically toward disorder; and courage in the need to bear with patience the evils of this world.

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Yet we cannot conclude that our happiness lies in escaping our embodied condition and becoming a sort of Stoic sage who confuses insensate stupor with true tranquility, or a philosopher like Cato who conflated the end of life with ending this life, seeking secure and settled happiness through an escapist suicidal flight.

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For Augustine, true virtues can exist only in those in whom there is true piety and godliness, and even so true virtue does not promise full happiness here; we can only be happy in hope. According to Augustine, then, All the routes to happiness that Christians differ from pagan the philosophers and others have philosophers both in their conception of the good and scouted out are shown to be in their understanding of how inadequate. that good will be realized in their own lives. 395

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„„

All the routes to happiness that the philosophers and others have scouted out are shown to be inadequate. This world is filled with opportunities for destabilizing misery, and any attempt to avoid that misery would simply leave us more miserable still. The world for Christians is full of blessings, but no matter how cannily we seek them, none offers secure happiness.

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The first four chapters of book 19 are a classic example of a wellestablished philosophical genre in the ancient world—calmly and lucidly laying out the possible options for the wise man to consider in the leisure of his study.

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Augustine says this whole approach is built on the illusion that some technique or trick or gimmick that will help us acquire this happiness for ourselves. This idea is the root of our error.

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Ironically, the very failure of our hopes reveals a clue to a better way. The ways in which our happiness is vexed, in their various modes of frustration, exhibit the depth and breadth of the universal longing for happiness. For Augustine, the true happiness must be the truest kind of peace. Once happiness is reimagined as peace, we have a useful concept for understanding any society.

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In looking for happiness, we have been subtly misconceiving our desired end. We imagine we can achieve happiness by doing something. But peace is not something you do. Peace is something you are. ›› Describing our end as peace challenges the presumption that our capacities for agency are a centrally useful tool in our quest for happiness. Perhaps our end is not something we can accomplish, but gift to us that we must at best receive. ››

Christians thus face something of a quandary. The conditions of sinful worldly existence make our lives inhospitable sites for the cultivation of our true happiness, which is genuine peace. 396

Lecture 19—Happiness and Politics (Book 19)

The problem then becomes how we should use our agency to seek peace. „„

Christians should seek their happiness in hope and use their agency to fulfill their duties of care for the world. To do this for the earthly city requires divine direction and guidance. Thus true virtue works in the earthly city by using the goods and ills of this life to achieve its ends, which are various kinds of peace, from domestic peace to the civic peace of the city.

Political Morality and Justice „„

In explicitly political terms, citizens of the heavenly city should care for the earthly city’s sustenance, at least with regard to their common interest in peace and order. The issue is how exactly Christians should coordinate their efforts on pilgrimage toward the city of God to seek the peace of the earthly city.

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Our proper expectations for political life should be minimal; this minimum of expectation allows Christians to participate in worldly political life, with one crucial provision: that the temporal authorities not impede the religion. All the externals of life are unimportant if the Christian churches can obey the law of Christ.

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While the agents of the earthly city work desperately, though futilely, to secure an ultimate peace, the citizens of the heavenly city can work alongside them as long as they understand their hopes cannot rest in this world; they must seek true peace using temporal things and reside in this world as in captivity.

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This minimalist vision of what politics can accomplish rests on the conviction that the realm of human politics is in an important and inescapable way, tragic. That is, in this sin-riddled world, individuals and groups will find their political hopes and expectations vexed by the very conditions that give rise to the need for politics. 397

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Politics is the coordination of desires among different people with different desires, and whose individual desires are not even themselves collectively coherent or durably stable. It is an attempt to create conditions in which humans can flourish, but which at best only partially satisfy our ends. This view understands politics as always shadowed by the threat—and not infrequently by the reality—of violence.

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The conditions of the fallen world and the unruliness of our fallen wills make compulsion necessary. Thus compromise is not only imperfect, but typically held together by the tacit threat of violence. So force is necessary. Augustine reframes the issue: The question is not about whether Christians should participate in social life, but how. ›› Augustine offers the example of the hard case: the judge who, as part of Our proper expectations for the legitimate civil authority, political life should be minimal; is compelled to use violence in order to determine this minimum of expectation the truth and who may, in allows Christians to participate fact, kill the one person in worldly political life, with from whom he might have learned that truth. one crucial provision: that the ››

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temporal authorities not impede Augustine takes the judge’s tragic and paradoxical the religion. situation as a kind of summit from which we may view the whole expanse of the miserable necessities of human society. And it raises a profound question: Given such inescapable tragedy, should the judge serve, should any of us serve? Augustine’s answer: Sociality is part of our existence, required for our flourishing, but accepting this burden may involve 398

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manifold tragic necessities. Christians should accept these duties: If they do not, the social order may perish. ››

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We may need to use violence in order to protect the blessings of society as a whole. It is a moral duty to engage in these sorts of activities, though they may, accidentally and in no way as part of the essence of the thing, cause unjust suffering to innocent victims. But they should cause us torment.

Augustine does not excuse the judge from involvement, nor does he exculpate him for the evils he causes, however inadvertently he causes them. Instead he says the judge should feel these evils as evils. He should not deny their reality, but recognize that the evils we cause to happen in this world are genuine evils, and while we may be obliged to inflict them, that necessity does not erase those evils or our complicity in them.

The Nature of the Commonwealth „„

With this vision of the darkness and tragedy of political life in place, Augustine turns back to his philosophical dispute with Cicero about the analytic nature of the commonwealth. Augustine argues that since justice is a matter of giving all their due, a city that does not give God God’s due is not just, and thus not a city. Because God was never worshipped in pagan Rome, justice was never done there, and the city was never a true city, at least on Cicero’s definition.

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This argument is a critique of Cicero’s analytic political vocabulary, and by extension the dominant political understanding of the ancient world. Justice, Augustine is saying, is first and foremost a form of worship. True justice is not defined by mere equity. For justice to be truly good, it must flow from some source other than our perception of what is our due. Our due is what God has decided to give us, far beyond any merit we might conceive. 399

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For Augustine, what God has done to justice is like what God has done to cities: Every city, to be a real city, must be the city of God. Cities may think that they are systems of justice, righteous noble nations, but no earthly city is actually that.

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Cities are defined by their common object of love. Yet they aspire to so much more: Justice and cities are to be founded on grounds fundamentally other than what we, in our fallenness, have imagined them to be. Cain’s city must become the New Jerusalem, but it cannot become that from within history; its healing must come from without.

Questions to Consider 1. What do you think of Augustine’s proposal about the necessity of using force and violence in ordering society (i.e., in political matters) in book 19, chapter 6? To what degree do you think that vision is related to his understanding of human sin, and is that a good or a bad thing? 2. In book 19, chapters 11–13, Augustine discusses the relationship between happiness and peace. How does Augustine think they are related? Can we say that for Augustine, happiness and peace are the same thing? Why or why not? What do you think of Augustine’s understanding of human desire for happiness and peace?

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Lecture 19 Transcript

W

e have now reached Book 19 in our tour of the City. This is the first of the final four books that collectively discuss the ends of the two cities. It should be something of a valediction, a wrap-up of the world and a turning toward the last things, the Last Judgment and the twin eternal destinies of Heaven and Hell. It should be, that is, a stairway out of the city of this age, up and down, to its two different destinations. But Book 19 is, in a way, the most worldly book of the whole of the City of God. It turns out to be largely a study of what life is like in the two cities now, today, after Christ, in the epilogue, during the world. It pursues the answer to this question of what life is like for those citizens of the city of God on pilgrimage in the world, by examining particularly those people who have civic duties or offices to perform for their earthly societies. It’s famous also for its discussion of the nature of happiness, the nature of peace, and the real relationship between them, and also for how it returns at last. to the discussion opened in Book 2, written more than 10 years before, the question of the nature of a commonwealth’s coherence, and Cicero’s proposal that a commonwealth can be defined by its common sense of justice. The overall integrity of the book is secured by its focus on ends, on the fact that the human is a ruthlessly end-centered creature. Furthermore, given the widespread classical conviction that the richest form of life is that which is involved not just in private pursuits of happiness but takes some direct responsibility for the common good of the civic order, it makes sense that Augustine here engages the question of how caring for worldly politics can help Christians realize their spiritual ends. In this way, for the readers of The City, and 401

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especially Christian grandees particularly worried about the relation between their Christian faith and their duties to the commonwealth, this is something of a secular climax to this work as a whole. It is, to mix metaphors, simultaneously the highest point in the precincts of the City and the lowest depth, at least as regards the concerns for worldly life. Everything prior in the work builds up to this book, and everything after it flows down from it. The structure of the book is complicated. Basically, it argues for reconceiving the human good not as a matter of achieving goodness but as a matter of participating in peace. It does this in several steps. First, it lays out the logic of the order of human goods, in good classical fashion; but then it undoes that received account of order, climaxing with a Christian account of how all creatures long for peace, though all do not pursue the same thing under that name. It then details how the city of God should understand peace properly, and how that city can make use of the peace of the various earthly cities in which it finds itself. It ends by returning to the long-ago debate with Cicero over the nature of a city, arguing here that after the Fall and before the Second Coming of Christ, no real and enduring justice is possible, except as a fugitive momentary thing, and anyone who thinks that we can presume to have achieved it is fooling themselves. But if there is no justice, then we cannot have any real peace; and that, in turn, means that our life now cannot help but be tragic. It is in recognizing this tragedy, lamenting it for what it is, but not flinching from acknowledging it, that wisdom resides. The book begins with a simple question, one hearkening back to the first 10 books, What is the nature of happiness? Augustine discusses the pagan philosophers’ analysis of the various possible ideal templates for human life, the various ways in which they have mapped the nature of and prospects for human goodness, given 402

Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19)

various conceptions of our nature and end. Borrowing one last time from Varro, Augustine explains that the philosophers collectively enumerated essentially what he argues are essentially 288 possible conceptions of the good life. You don’t have to worry about how he got that number; just trust me, it’s a lot. Amidst all this bewildering diversity, Augustine agrees with Varro that there really is only one truly wise view—namely, that of the old academy, which affirmed a life that cared for body and soul, in community, and with due attention to both contemplation and worldly action, that would be the happy life. So far so good; Augustine’s account is in line with innumerable other ancient accounts of the good life and how the wise man can be happy. But then Augustine does something surprising. He says that Christians have a distinct vision of the end of human life that stands in profound and unanticipated tension with all these pagan accounts. It differs from them because both the nature of that happiness and how one might attain it must be radically transfigured. Here is Augustine’s final rejection of the logic of a purely reactive apologetics, one that accepts the opponent’s terms and tries to show how its account meets those terms as well. Far from that, Augustine says, lies wisdom; the truth is rather that the pagans’ errors begin in the very way they see the world itself. So the right Christian story must refuse that very way of conceiving the challenges facing human life, and elaborate its own. And that is what Augustine aims to do. In contrast to the pagans’ conceptions of happiness, the supreme good that Christians seek is eternal life, but Christians understand themselves to be doubly incapacitated in the pursuit of that end. First, they know they cannot know the proper nature of this good, nor, second, can they do the things necessary to attain it without divine help.

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Thus Christians are constantly made more aware of, and must constantly publicly confess, their need of faith and grace. The good life is not found here on earth; this life is too fragile, and true harmony of body and spirit is never realized here. Even virtue’s life on earth must wage perpetual war against the vices. Each of the virtues is known in its struggles, not in its accomplished, quiet [plaid ?-0:06:42] placidity. The virtue of temperance, Augustine says, is manifest in unending resistance to desires of flesh; the virtue of prudence in a constant monitoring of our situation for evil; the virtue of justice is discovered in an endless struggle to order all that is always tending entropically toward disorder; and the virtue of courage is found in the need to bear, with patience, the evils of this world. So not even the life of virtue in our world is a realm of settled delight; to seek to live rightly in this life is to pick a fight with the very structures of the cosmos as we find them, the inextricable conditions of life in this fallen world. And yet, we cannot conclude that our happiness lies in escaping our embodied condition, in becoming some sort of strong Stoic sage, who confuses true tranquility with insensate stupor, or those other philosophers like Cato again who conflate the end of life with ending this life/ with seeking secure and settled happiness through an escapist suicidal flight from here. For Augustine, true virtues can exist only in those in whom there is true piety and godliness, and even so, in those people, true virtue does not promise full happiness here; we can only ever at best be happy in hope. According to Augustine, then, Christians differ from pagan philosophers both in their conception of the good and in their understanding of how that good will be realized in their own lives. All the routes to happiness that the philosophers and others have scouted out are shown here to be inadequate. This world is filled with opportunities for destabilizing misery, and even any attempt to avoid that misery would simply leave us more miserable still. The world for 404

Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19)

Christians is full of blessings, of course, but no matter how cannily we seek to inhabit them, none of those blessings offer secure happiness. Christians affirm the necessity and genuine good of social life, and especially the happiness of domestic family life. But society is corrupt and dangerously unstable, and family life is, as both experience and scripture teach us, just as perilous. Neither of these settings offers secure happiness. The perils of the polity are even more vivid; the necessity of judgment and the use of violence screams out the wretched corruption of the human condition in the polities of this world. The differences of language and the misery of war offer still further evidence of humanity’s corruption. Not even friendship is carefree because we fear the loss of our friends, whether to death or distance or the sheer changes of character and personality that happen over life. In short, the world as we find it gives hints of being a sort of suitable host for a flourishing life; but when scrutinized close-up, the tantalizing promise of settled joy turns out to be a taunting mirage. The world is a site wherein creatures could perchance be happy; but particular features of this specific world, and certain characteristics apparently inherent in us, at least in this dispensation, invariably subvert our plans to be happy here, and vex our hopes for joy. It is worth noting the depth of Augustine’s acquaintance with the ancient philosophical traditions here, and the radicalness of his critique and rejection of them. The first four chapters of Book 19 comprise a treatise on the nature of the good life, a classic example of a well-established philosophical genre in the ancient world— calmly and lucidly laying out the possible options for the sapiens, the wise man, to consider in the leisure of his study. But then, what Augustine does with and to this genre is unprecedented. He says the whole approach is built upon illusion, the illusion that there is some technique or trick or gimmick that we can do to acquire this happiness for ourselves—there’s a fantasy that we 405

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are or can be the captains, as it were, of our own particular, individual ships. This, Augustine thinks, is the root of our error. No one in the Roman world had held such a theological or philosophical view. The closest anyone came to it would be the ancient Greek tragedians, 800 and more years before Augustine, they had held to a vision of human life significantly and inescapably under the whim of fate or luck. The philosophical tradition from Socrates and Plato forward had dedicated themselves to rejecting that view, and even in the City we earlier saw Cicero rejecting fatalism on grounds that recapitulate that tradition’s overall critique of the tragedians. And we saw also that for Augustine this criticism misunderstood the alternatives available to it, and that providence, while functionally similar in some ways to fatalism, was ultimately very different indeed. Ironically, the very failure of our hopes reveals to us a crucial clue for a better way. The multitudinous ways in which our happiness is vexed show us something positive, in their various modes of frustration, they exhibit the depth and breadth of the universal longing for happiness, and they give us some clues as to what that happiness looks like. The true happiness must be, Augustine says, the truest kind of peace. Once happiness is redescribed as peace, for Augustine, then we have a useful concept with which to understand any society. For peace is the instinctive aim of all—even wars, he says, are fought for peace; the body needs the peace of equilibrium; even pride desires peace, though its peace is a perverted imitatio Dei. In the ancient world’s most careful analysis of the idea of peace, effectively, in fact, the ancient world’s only analysis of the idea of peace. Augustine spends 10 chapters in this book analyzing the multiple kinds of peace we find in the cosmos, to show that true peace is the tranquility of order, what he calls “the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God,” wherein each receives its due; peace then, is a kind of consummation of justice.

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Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19)

In looking for happiness, Augustine says, we have been subtly misdescribing our desired end. We imagine we can achieve happiness by doing something. But peace—peace is not something you do. Peace is something you are. Describing our end as peace once again challenges our presumption that our capacities for agency are a centrally useful tool in our quest for happiness. Perhaps, peace suggests, our end is not something we can accomplish; perhaps it is as much a gift to us that we must at best receive. So it appears that Christians face something of a quandary. The conditions of sinful worldly existence make our lives inhospitable sites for the cultivation of our true happiness, which is genuine peace. But if belief in our agency is part of the problem, how should we use our agency to seek peace? How should Christians inhabit this world, and live this life? They should not flee it, for Augustine; they do have duties of care for the world so understood. Most basically they should seek their happiness in hope, and make use of temporal things directed toward earthly peace in the earthly city or toward heavenly peace in the city of God. Even to do this for the earthly city, however, requires divine direction and guidance to love—to love the neighbor, the self, and God. Thus true virtue works in this world graciously by using the goods and ills of this life to achieve its ends, and its ends in this life are, in fact, various kinds of peace, from domestic peace to the civic peace of the city. And it is not afraid to cooperate with others, even non-Christians, to achieve this peace. Just remember here, Augustine grew up in a distinctively religiously mixed household. His father was not a Christian; his mother was a Christian. He knows what it’s like to try to engage interface relations in this way.

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This is true in explicitly political terms as well. Citizens of the heavenly city should care for the earthly city’s sustenance, at least in terms of the two cities’ common interest in peace and order. But how exactly should Christians coordinate their efforts on pilgrimage toward the City of God to seek, as scripture commands, the peace of the physical city in which they find themselves? The first thing to note here is that for Augustine, our proper expectations for political life should be quite minimal, and it is this minimum of expectation that allows for Christians to participate in worldly political life at all. Christians should obey their worldly cities, with one crucial criterion needing to be met. And this is a quote from Augustine, “Provided only that they [the temporal authorities] do not impede the religion by which we are taught that the one supreme and true God is to be worshiped” provided that the heavenly city can work for the earthly peace of the earthly city. All the externalities of life— modes of clothing, local customs, and the like—are unimportant, if only the state allows the Christian churches can obey the law of Christ. Of course, this is an enormously under-specified criterion. What does impeding the religion mean? Does it mean only allowing explicit acts of worship? Or does it mean accepting the moral affirmations that Christians—some Christians, maybe many Christians, different Christians—the moral affirmations that Christians can think flow from their core theological convictions? Or does it mean that Christians’ efforts to sanctify their civic orders by strenuously attempting to make of all men disciples of Christ must not be forbidden or blocked in any way by the state? Each of these positions has been affirmed at some time or another in the last 1,600 years; you can see that the political consequences of this criteria can be quite complicated. Furthermore, how exactly are the citizens of the heavenly city supposed to work with those of the earthly city? Consider that the earthly city itself rests on a compromise between its citizens for 408

Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19)

earthly peace. They may not know that that is all they can attain, but it is. So while the agents of the earthly city work desperately, though futilely, to secure an ultimate peace in this fleeting age, the citizens of the heavenly city have to work alongside them and slipping into their slipstream, as it were, so long as they understand that their hopes cannot rest in the kind of flactual muck of this world, but must seek true peace through the use of temporal things and reside in this world as in captivity. This minimalist vision of what politics can accomplish rests on the conviction that the whole realm of human politics is in an important and inescapable way, tragic. By tragic here I mean that, in this sinriddled world, individuals and groups will find their political hopes and expectations vexed by the very conditions that give rise to the need for politics itself. Politics is the art of compromise and cohesion where such compromise is required for the achievement of even provisional good. It is the creation of alliances about which parties will inevitably have second thoughts and resentments. It is the coordination of desires among different people with different desires, and whose individual desires are not even themselves collectively coherent or durably stable. It is an attempt to create conditions in which humans can flourish, but which at best only partially satisfy our ends. It is building a house on shifting foundations because no other foundations are available, and some habitation must be built. So understood, this vision of politics is not very inspiring; it makes for poor campaign slogans. But what it lacks in pizzazz, Augustine thinks, it more than makes up for in truthfulness. This vision of politics understands politics as always shadowed by the threat; not infrequently by the reality, of violence, a cure that at best does almost as much to harm as to help. Here some real idealism appears, but it is an idealism about what this politics lacks, not what it offers. For Augustine, on his reading of Genesis, God created humans with no need of political power—no lordship, no dominari—or domination— 409

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was visible across the whole of the Garden. Nor was there supposed to be domination within the household or family, between husband and wife or father and children. Slavery, all forms of domination, are a consequence of the Fall, not a part of God’s created order, and an uncoerced symphonic harmony was supposed to characterize the relationships among all of us. Creation held no lords and no servants. The first humans were shepherds, not kings. It is the conditions of the fallen world, and the unruliness of our fallen wills, that make compulsion necessary. Thus compromise is not only imperfect but typically held together by the tacit threat of violence. Remember the words stamped on Louis XIV’s cannons, ultima ratio regum; where the words are not legible, their sense will readily be felt on the bodies of those who contest them. So force is necessary, for Augustine. But why would you want to get involved in this? Why accept a role in this world of force? Why enter politics then? Here Augustine reframes the issue, the question, he thinks, is not about whether Christians should participate in public life, in social life—social life is for him part of the human good—but rather about how Christians should participate. To answer this Augustine discusses the hardest case he can conceive, the judge who, as part of the legitimate civil authority, is compelled by social necessity to engage in acts of violence, at times even potentially upon the innocent. And this is a quote from Augustine, “Because they cannot discern the consciences of those whom they judge.” And this is continuing this vast and troubling quote of Augustine, The ignorance of the judge generally results in the calamity of the innocent. And what is still more greatly intolerable and deplorable, is that the judge, to avoid killing an innocent man, out of miserable ignorance tortures the accused, and kills him—tortured and innocent—whom he tortured in order not to kill him if he were innocent. 410

Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19)

Ancient Roman legal procedure involved the exercise of what was called judicial torture, the impacting of a person’s body of pain, to cause this was standard legal practice in Rome. In trying to learn the truth then, the judge kills the one person, possibly innocent, at least not obviously guilty, by whom he might have learned that truth. Augustine takes the judge’s tragic and paradoxical situation here as a kind of summit from which we might view the whole expanse of the miserable necessities of human society. And it raises a profound question, given such inescapable tragedy, should the judge serve, should any of us serve? As Augustine puts it, “In light of such darkness in our social life, should the wise judge dare to sit in judgment?” And he replies, Sit he will; for he is constrained by and drawn to his duties to human society, to desert which he regards as wicked. For he does not think it wicked to torture the innocent in others’ cases, or that the accused are overcome and confess falsely and are punished, though innocent. All these many evils he does not count as sins because the wise judge does them not out of a malicious will, but out of the necessity of ignorance, and also, out of consideration of society, out of the necessity to judge. Here, therefore, we speak not the maliciousness of the judge, but of the sure misery of humanity.

And there you have his answer, Sociality is part of our existence, and required for our flourishing, but accepting this may involve us in manifold tragic necessities. Christians should accept these duties, for if they do not, the whole social order may perish. In our sin-riddled world, we may need to use violence, in order to protect the blessings of society as a whole. If you don’t like the image of the judge, think about the police officer, who walks a beat and who knows that one day they may be called upon to use violence; they may not want to, but it might be necessary. Note, Augustine is not saying this is advisory; he’s not recommending that the judge do this. He says that it’s wicked— nefas that’s the word he uses if the judge refuses. It is a moral duty to engage in these sorts of activities, not an optional, 411

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though they may, accidentally and in no way as part of the essence of the thing, cause unjust suffering to innocent victims. Augustine could have left it at that, he could have just said, “Look, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to judge, that’s just the way things are.”. But instead, he went further. For this duty should not make the judge happy, but, in fact, torment him or her. And here is the Augustine quote, If his necessary ignorance condemns him to torture and punish the innocent, is it a problem if, while he is innocent [while the judge is innocent of a crime], he is yet not happy? How much more considerable and worthy is it when he acknowledges his miserable necessities, hates his part in them, and, if he is pious and wise, cries out to God, “From my necessities deliver me!” Here we have something remarkable. Augustine does not excuse the judge from involvement, in fact, he obligates him to be involved, nor does he exculpate him for the evils he causes. In fact, he wants him to realize them more fully than he knows. Instead, he says the judge should feel these evils as evils. He should not deny their reality, but recognize that the evils we cause to happen in this world are genuine evils, and while we may be obliged to inflict them, that necessity does not erase those evils or our complicity in them. You will have to answer to God for what you have done; so you might as well start regretting it now. Political responsibility is real, for Augustine; but so is the duty of theological and moral lament. With this vision of the darkness and tragedy of political life in place, Augustine, at last, turns back to his philosophical dispute with Cicero about the analytic nature of the commonwealth, the proper definition of what a commonwealth is. Recall that in Book 2 Augustine took up this issue of Cicero’s definition, of a city as an assembly united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right and a community of interest, a city is a partnership of justice for Cicero here. 412

Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19)

Here at last Augustine returns to this topic and argues that, since justice is a matter of giving each their due, a city that does not give God God’s due is not just, and thus not a city. Because God was never worshiped in pagan Rome, justice was never done there, and the city was never a true city, at least on Cicero’s definition. This is partly one last smack at Rome, in its own self-regard. But it’s more primarily a critique of Cicero’s analytic political vocabulary and by extension the whole dominant political understanding of the ancient world. Justice, Augustine is saying, is first and foremost a form of worship. True justice is not defined by some grim vision of mere equity, a cold-hearted parceling out of finite goods to finite parties, after which each turns away from the others to feast on its own little grub in smug, solipsistic satisfaction. Besides, if we all got what we truly deserved, there’s no way we would like it. For justice to be truly good news, it must flow from some source other than our sin-inflected perception of a finite world divvied up into lots like Jesus’s robes were divvied up at the foot of the cross. What is our due is what God has decided, gratuitously, to give us far beyond any merit we might conceive. What, for Augustine, God has done to justice is like unto what God has done to cities. Every city, to be a true city, must be the city of God. Worldly cities can never be true cities—a real city must exceed the worldly city and reach for the divine. Cities may think, in orgies of self-congratulation, that they are systems of justice, righteous, noble nations; but no earthly city is actually that. Far more psychologically accurate, if morally grubby, is Augustine’s proposal, cities are defined by what they love, by their common object of love. And yet, they aspire to so much more, justice and cities are to be founded on grounds fundamentally other than what we, in our fallenness, have imagined them to be. Cain’s city must become the New Jerusalem. But it cannot become that, from within history, 413

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for history is a record of continual crime and tragedy at best; so its healing must come from without. In all these ways, Book 19 is the climax of Augustine’s depiction of our worldly existence, and his radical transfiguration of politics, his final summative judgment about what this worldly life is like. And it is the last debate, between Augustine and the pagans, about the nature of the city and the nature of the happy life. For Augustine, politics, and worldly life in general, is at best a tragedy. True peace is utter tranquility, but that is never attainable in this life; our lives are continuous, low-level struggles with vice. Yet while this peace is absent, it can still be operationalized for Christians—not as a fully present reality, perhaps, but as an absent reality made yet palpable for Christians by the ache, they feel for it. The happy life is then at best a matter of endurance, and righteousness in this world consists, for Augustine, more in the remission of sins than in the perfection of virtue. This is what has come to replace the happy life of which the philosophers disputed, and which with this book began. It is not a dismissal of care for this world, but it is a very sober, very cold-eyed judgment on the character of the world about which we are called to care. This is not the last word of the book, though; far from it. For in the life to come, at the end of time, the end of the good will be harmony and stability, while the end of the wicked will be everlasting wretchedness and suffering., and both ends are composed in part by the histories that the two communities have traveled through time. We will turn now to Augustine’s exploration of that final determination and those several alternative ends.

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Lecture 20

B

ook 20 is a study not just of the Last Judgment, but of the meaning and purpose of judgment in general, a reflection on the meaning and significance of Creation’s history, and an indirect reflection on how well we can understand the end of time. These topics are popular for spiritual and religious thinkers and popular targets for their opponents. Some philosophers have taken Christians’ interest in a Last Judgment as a consummate example of their resentment at those who reject the idea that the meek will inherit the earth or as hostility toward our existence in this life.

The Limits of Knowing „„

The German theologian Ernst Käsemann has said that “apocalyptic is the mother of theology.” He meant that early Christians’ expectations of the immediate end of the world, continually frustrated, provoked believers into theological investigations of why the delay had occurred and what it might possibly mean. From these questions, others began to arise about the nature of the end and the logic behind its necessity, whence spring most of the theological energies that have occupied the Christian world ever since. To ask about the apocalypse is to ask indirectly about the legitimacy of theological speculation in the Christian life. ›› Both of these points of view—skepticism about Christian apocalyptic preoccupation and interest in how Christian theology goes about its eschatological duties—gain interesting illumination from thinking about what Augustine says can, and cannot, be known about the last things.

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››

In this book Augustine critiques the repeated practice of looking for concrete predictions of the coming of the End of Days, urging what he sees as a better approach: to think about the end of time in a way that encourages us to abandon the quest for concrete forebodings of the apocalypse and seek to become people who will be ready for the end of time whenever it arrives.

„„

In thinking about the Last Judgment, Augustine is especially emphatic that scripture is the sole canonical source of inquiry, because these matters lie outside the realm of natural reason at the edges of created order where the contingency of creation is revealed. Reason cannot determine the actual contours of created contingency; it can only respond to those edges when they appear, and their correct response is to stop.

„„

Augustine uses the issues around the Last Judgment as a teaching device to show his audience how to read scripture as a guide to life in this world. He shows that the struggle to “read” the Last Judgment properly is just as hard as the struggle to understand scripture’s proposals about the rest of life.

„„

According to Augustine, we must master the difficult task of admitting the limits of our knowing: affirming the truth of theological claims without presuming that we understand what they mean. We are tempted to affirmations of complete clarity as an anxious response to our authentic experience of the world as a profound ambivalence and ambiguity. ›› As an example, Augustine offers the distribution of good and evil in our world and the deep moral obscurity that a clear-eyed assessment of that distribution would suggest. Punishments and rewards seem not to track with any moral pattern. Not only is good not always rewarded, nor good reliably rewarded and evil punished, nor good reliably harmed while evil predictably benefits. Rather, good generally does seem to get rewarded and evil does seem to harm itself, but the exceptions are so 416

Lecture 20—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

vast and frequent as to make that general pattern insufficiently visible. ››

The proper response is humility. In the mysteries of human affairs, Augustine insists that God’s judgment is still present, even when it can’t be observed. We know that God's final judgments are just from the moral framework of the story of the cosmos that the Christian churches offer us and within which we set experience of the world.

››

The point is not to care about things in this life too much, not because they don’t matter, but because they are obscure. We have to see that judgment is God’s task, not ours; we will await the judgment of God in patience and learn to see life as a trial and a training ground for that.

God’s Judgment „„

For Augustine, God’s judgment is part of God’s very being, so that part of what it means to affirm God is to affirm a selfconscious moral order to the cosmos. We will have access to God’s knowledge and God’s judgments only at the Last Judgment.

„„

Thus, we can unequivocally affirm that judgment is real, even as we possess only highly equivocating glimpses of that judgment itself. For Augustine, this confidence is warranted on scriptural grounds. Jesus spoke of the Last Judgment in all four gospels.

„„

We can even know that Christians can experience two kinds of regeneration, keyed to the two resurrections: the regeneration of the soul via baptism and the regeneration of the body at the Last Judgment. We already have a kind of visible proof in the way that baptism both reflects and intensifies serious moral and spiritual change in some people. 417

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The Last Judgment

„„

For Augustine, the question of offering proofs or evidence to a skeptical audience is of decidedly secondary interest. His conviction, which is pretty general across Christian theologians, is that propositional argument is not the most powerful means of proclaiming the Gospel; rather, the witness of vital and vibrant Christian lives, lived out in community for others, is the best witness.

The Nature of the Apocalypse „„

This point also bears on his immediate concern about how Christians should think about the end of time. The temporal duration of our age is immaterial. We always have enough time to do God’s will or to refuse it. Besides, in the true present of the presence of God’s eternity, all times are co-present. 418

Lecture 20—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

„„

Thus Augustine can affirm both that this is the day of salvation and that it is indeterminately deferred.

„„

In Augustine’s age, Christians professed one of two general views about the apocalypse. ›› The literalists believed in a literal end of the world as detailed in the book of Revelation. Some saw the “millennium” prophesied in Revelation to be a literal period of a thousand years. ››

The metaphoricalists saw in Revelation primarily an inner or spiritual meaning about a struggle within the soul.

„„

The apocalypse leads to a transfigured life: not an escape from Creation, but a final and full reception of the gift. Now we live in the world, and the grammar of the word “world” does not imply any need for a God. But if the world is Creation, that word immediately implies that this reality depends on another, whom we label Creator.

„„

Together with this knowledge of God as Creator will be knowledge of God as one who knows truly all about our world. God is not just decisive agential will but also effortlessly and relentlessly inescapable knowledge and understanding. God is not just Creator and sustainer; God is also judge.

„„

The knowledge of judgment that humans will have is complicated and limited in ways that underscore the differences between God and the human, even in the human’s eternal state. Yet some things we may be able to know are interesting. ›› Reflect on the knowledge that the blessed have of evil. In what way, Augustine asks, will the blessed know the damned, as the scriptures say they will? They will know what happens to them, but indirectly. They will not be deflected from their direct knowledge of God; they will know by implication from knowledge of God’s justice. 419

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››

„„

„„

On the other hand, consider the knowledge that the damned will not have about heaven. The damned will not know what is going on “inside” heaven. They will be wholly consumed with the utter frustration of their own desires and will have no time to be interested in anything outside themselves. They cannot know goodness.

But while Augustine teaches us to be modest in our speculations, we must also be emphatic in our affirmations of the Christian mission of shaping our souls in the right way to receive the judgment now and the inauguration of the Openness to exploration kingdom. and questioning is at the From within a failing way of life, no heart of Augustine’s picture beams of light pointing a way to a of the Christian life. new future of hope are visible. We cannot anticipate. The apocalypse must be spiritualized because the lesson that emerges from it is that we are saved not because of what we do, but despite ourselves. We must be always prepared, always on our toes, for the messiah.

„„

Augustine resists all temptations toward literal apocalyptic thought and loosens the semiotic cord between the present moment and the eschatological end of all things without cutting it—thus giving history and its scriptural script a significant amount of flexibility and ambiguity. But the ambiguity about the details of the event do not lead him to be uncertain about the fact of the event.

„„

Openness to exploration and questioning is at the heart of Augustine’s picture of the Christian life, and he means here to show his audience how to go about thinking about these matters—how to inhabit intellectually the central speculative, contemplative, and affective dynamics of the Christian faith, 420

Lecture 20—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

which Augustine thinks central to every Christian’s faith. In this way, apocalyptic speculation—Käsemann’s “mother of all theology”—is made a fruitful part of Christian life. Questions to Consider 1. To what degree do you think Augustine understood “judgment” correctly when he said it was properly a property of God and not humans? What does that mean for our ongoing assessments of our own actions and those of others? 2. If Augustine “spiritualizes the eschaton,” as this lecture argued, what constructive role does he think belief in the end of all things can have for Christians? Do you think this is a good thing or not?

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Lecture 20 Transcript

Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

W

e are now in the ends of the two cities. Twenty is the first of three books that talk about the last things, that is, the ultimate fate of all things, their final determination to be for God in Heaven or against God in Hell. And so we might expect Augustine’s argument to become ever more assertive, absolute, even strident. So it’s highly interesting that in these books it becomes increasingly important to notice how much of Augustine’s teaching lurks in the conditional sense. Much of what he is trying to say is couched in terms that are very tentative, but also important to affirm. He is trying to give his audience their ultimate bearings, without downplaying how very ultimate they are, and helping his audience to understand how to inhabit them now needs a degree of tentativeness in concrete affirmation. And yet, while Book 20 inaugurates these last three books, it also stands in interestingly tacit conversation with the one that came before it, Book 19. If Book 19 was about this-worldly wisdom, about what we can learn from the life we are currently in, Book 20 is about other-worldly wisdom—what we can know about the life to come. In this way Book 20 is not just a study of the Last Judgment, but an exploration of the meaning and purpose of judgment in general, a reflection on the meaning and significance of the whole scope of creation’s history in this theology, and an indirect reflection on the quality of the understanding of the last things that we can have now, in contrast to what we will know at the eschaton. These topics are famously popular ones for spiritual and religious thinkers. And they are popular targets for their opponents. Indeed, some philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, have taken Christians’ 422

Lecture 20 Transcript—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

interest in the Last Judgment as a consummate example of their resentment at those who reject the idea that the meek will inherit the earth. Opponents have also taken Christian fascination with the end of the world as a deep hostility toward our current existence in this one. On the other side, there’s a long history of affirming that, as the German theologian Ernst Käsemann once put it, “Apocalyptic is the mother of theology.” By this he meant that early Christians’ expectations of the end of the world, continually frustrated, provoked believers into theological investigations as to why the delay had occurred, and what it might possibly mean; and from the question of the delay of the end others began to ask about the nature of that end and the logic behind our need to imagine the necessity of an end; and from all these questions spring most of the theological energies that have occupied the Christian world ever since. To ask about the apocalypse, then, is to ask indirectly about the legitimacy of theological speculation in the Christian life—its purpose and function in that life. Both of these points of view—skepticism about Christian apocalypticism and interest in how Christian theology goes about its eschatological and apocalyptic duties—gain interesting illumination from thinking about what Augustine says can, and cannot, be known and affirmed about the last things. For what he proposes that Christians can affirm about the last things is surprisingly minimal. By the end of this book, all Augustine will allow is that, in his words, and this is a quote from him, We have learned that the following things are going to happen [and he lists a few of the details, and then he says], But, how they are going to take place, and in what order, is something that the experience of the actual events will teach us then far more fully than any human intelligence can grasp them now. My own view, however, is that they are going to happen in the order in which I have listed them. 423

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Listen to the tone in that passage. It is Augustine at his most flatly didactic. I know of no other place in the whole of the City of God where he so to speak steps back from the writing and explicitly and self-consciously so frankly breaks frame to tell his audience now this is what you should know by now about what I’ve been talking about in this book, and not these other things, these other things are wrong. And I think this is right, but I’m not so entirely certain as I would want to die on it. The awkward, almost clumsily blunt frankness with which he is eager to have his meaning not misconstrued here is remarkable. Why? Because he had said nothing up to this point that he expected to be so contrary to his audience’s expectations as this. For in this book Augustine famously “spiritualizes the apocalypse”—that is, he critiques the repeated practice of people looking for concrete predictions of the coming End of Days. Augustine urges what he sees as a better approach, one that cultivates our disposition to think about the end of time in a way that encourages us to abandon the quest to seek out some concrete forebodings of the apocalypse, and look instead to become the kind of people who will be ready for the end of time whenever it arrives. The serious problem with these apocalyptical quests for signs, if we were only able to decode them, is that they would guarantee us firm foreknowledge of God’s plan—and thereby constrain God’s freedom. And this is not, for Augustine, a good thing. Instead, we ought to live our lives as if the Last Judgment were already happening, here and now—for our distance from it is finally, for Augustine, utterly unimportant to its significance for our lives even today. This is crucial. You might have thought that his skeptical demolition of this worldly wisdom, which was presented and prosecuted really, with such relentless vigor in Book 19, would lead to a triumphalist promotion and proclamation of the power and security of other-worldly wisdom in Book 20. 424

Lecture 20 Transcript—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

But if you’ve been paying attention during our journey through the City, you’ll not be wholly surprised to learn that that is far from his aim here. Certainly he talks about major theological topics, including in no particular order, how the saints will finally know what reality ultimately is, and what the New Creation will be; how the saints will know the condition of the damned; and the nature of privacy in Augustine’s thought, both in terms of his understanding of the human person, and his understanding of the human race standing before God at the end of time, and its host of other topics. But in all cases, Augustine here is at pains to remind his readers of the tentativeness and ambiguities inherent in the claims that people can, in this world, make about the nature of the next. And if we’ve learned not to trust this worldly wisdom too much in Book 19, here he’s going to show us how slight, and frail is our purchase on the world to come. In this way, Book 20 is the perfect entry into the upcoming speculative accounts about Heaven and Hell. For while some minimal affirmations must be made about each, very little can be said definitively and determinately about either, and this lesson should instruct the audience—whom he seems to think, not unreasonably, will be largely Christian by this point in the book— it should instruct them about the proper etiquette of conducting theological discussion in the church, namely, with radical humility and absolute charity. In thinking about the last Judgment, Augustine is especially emphatic that Scripture is the sole canonical source of inquiry when it comes to these matters. Why is this so? Well, because this is about what lies outside the realm of natural reason—at the edges of this created order. And the edges are where the contingency of creation is revealed, and reason cannot determine the actual contours of created contingency, it can only respond to those edges when they appear, and the whole character of their right response is to stop. So in one very real way, in this book Augustine uses the issues around the Last Judgment as a teaching device to show how his audience 425

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should read scripture as a guide to life in this world. He shows how the struggle to read the Last Judgment properly is just as hard as the struggle to read scripture’s proposals about the rest of life properly. According to Augustine, then, we must master the difficult task of admitting the limits of our knowing, while yet affirming the truth of theological claims without thereby presuming that we ourselves understand what those claims fully and exhaustively mean. We are tempted toward such grandiose affirmations of complete clarity, Augustine suggests, as an anxious response to our authentic experience of the world, an experience whose primary note, he says, is one of a profound ambivalence and ambiguity. In fact, it is this felt ambiguity to the world, and our own experienced ambivalence at it, that might make us lunge for doubt-silencing certainty in the first place. Here Augustine offers us an example. Consider, he says, the distribution of good and evil in our world, and the deep moral obscurity that a clear-eyed assessment of that distribution would suggest. For the world is deeply obscure. Punishments and reward seem not to track with any moral pattern whatsoever. It’s not only that good is not always rewarded, nor is it that by and large good is reliably rewarded and evil punished, nor is it even a matter of the inversion of good and evil, so that good gets reliably harmed in this life while evil predictably benefits; it is rather that, in general, good does seem to get rewarded, and evil does seem to harm itself, but the exceptions are so vast, and broad, and frequent, as to make that general pattern not sufficiently visible unless one strains one’s eyes really hard. All we have, it seems, is randomness, noise. In fact, it would be easier to bear, Augustine says, if goodness were reliably punished with suffering—for then, at least, we would know what to expect. We would most prefer perfect justice, that is to say, but if we cannot have that or even a reliable approximation of that, we would at least appreciate some predictability, even if that predictability were that good was punished, and evil was rewarded. 426

Lecture 20 Transcript—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

But, instead, we seem to see goodness getting rewarded with a greater frequency than evil, but not with enough trustworthiness for us to be able to count on it. That is maddening to us. Nearreliability is more unendurable than perverse anti-reliability, or no reliability at all. The proper response to this situation, Augustine thinks, is humility. In the mysteries of human affairs, Augustine insists that God’s judgment is still present, even when it can’t be observed. Yet one thing is not hidden—that God’s final judgments are truly just. Augustine says, we know this from the get-go, and we know this from the scriptures. We know this, not just, he says, from first personal acquaintance with the empirical realities of our experience of the world, but from the moral framework of the story of the cosmos that the Christian churches offer us in the scriptures, and within which we set our first-personal experience of the world. And this is why Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, taught us about vanity. The point—Augustine says, not Solomon—is not to care about things in this life too much, not because they don’t matter, but because they are presently obscure. We have to see that judgment is God’s task, not ours; we will await the judgment of God, in patience, and learn to see our life as a trial and a training ground for that exercise of judgment. This humility does not eventuate in any dogmatic skepticism or any in-principle rejection of there being a moral or theological fact of the matter about our world and the events and creatures that compose it. That there is such a fact of the matter, Augustine has very little doubt. He is in this way a moral and theological realist. But we do not, in our present life, have any clear and easy epistemic access to those facts of the matter. But God does not suffer from our epistemic impairments. Indeed, for Augustine, God is always judging; indeed, God’s judgment is part of God’s very being. So that part of what it means to affirm God then is to affirm a self-conscious moral order that suffuses the cosmos. But we will only have access to God’s knowledge and God’s judgments 427

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at the Last Judgment—the full and final judgment. In this way, we can unequivocally affirm that judgment is real, even as we possess at best highly equivocating glimpses of that judgment itself. If it is not grounded in empirical reality, then, where does this confidence come from for Augustine, and what does he take to warrant it? Well, we know that there will be such a publicly-enunciated judgment, Augustine says, on scriptural grounds. After all, for instance, Jesus spoke of the Last Judgment in all four gospels. We can even know that there are two kinds of regeneration, keyed to the two resurrections—the first being the regeneration of the soul via baptism, and the second being the regeneration of the body at the Last Judgment. We have the first now, and this is a kind of visible proof; all of us have seen the way that baptism is both a reflection of and an intensifier for serious moral and spiritual change in some people. This is confident empirical knowledge—at least, it’s the kind of confident empirical knowledge that we can have access to in this life. But for Augustine, the question of offering proofs or evidence to a skeptical audience is of decidedly secondary interest. His main aim here, and in the coming books, is not apologetic but pedagogic; he’s not defending his construal of Christian convictions but explaining them, teaching them to fellow believers who might be misled by other depictions of the faith. This is an important general point for Augustine overall, and also a very important point for this book. It speaks to his conviction, which is not only his but which is pretty general across Christian theologians, that propositional argument is not the most powerful means of proclaiming the gospel; rather, the witness of vital and vibrant Christian lives lived out in community for others, is always that best witness. In that light Augustine’s best apologetics is still a kind of pedagogics, a way of teaching Christian communities under his care, helping them 428

Lecture 20 Transcript—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

see what it means to be followers of Christ in love. This is not just a point of general theological method for Augustine but also bears on his immediate concern about how Christians should think about the End of time. In brief, they should have confidence in the Apocalypse’s happening, but they should confess agnosticism about when exactly it will occur. The temporal duration of our age, Augustine insists, is immaterial. We always have enough time to do God’s will or to do our own damnedest to refuse it. Besides, in the true present of the presence of God’s eternity, all times are co-present. Thus, Augustine can affirm both that this is the day of salvation and that it is indeterminately deferred, that the Lord will return unexpected, like a thief in the night. This view is significantly unlike the other options that were available in Augustine’s age. In particular, Christians typically professed one of two general views about the apocalypse. First, they were literalists who believed in a literal end of the world, pretty much along the lines as detailed in the Book of Revelation. Some of them even saw the millennium prophesied in Revelation to be a literal period of a thousand years, and they spent a great deal of energy—mental energy—figuring out where exactly where exactly we were in this calendrical succession. Second, there were those that we can call the metaphoricalists. They saw in the Book of Revelation primarily an inner or spiritual meaning, about a struggle within the soul. Against both of these groups, Augustine argues that the meaning of the thousand years in the millennium, in the Book of Revelation, is not literally a thousand years, but something either like the sixth day of creation as a whole or the present age or eon. The key is not some precise count of years, but a sense of where we are now, in the last days; but those days may be long, and anyway the judgment will not come as a kind of apocalyptic weather front that our exegetical satellites can easily track as it heads for our ecclesiastical coast. Instead, again, the end will come like a thief in the night—he loves that metaphor. There will be a conflagration, a burning, from 429

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which there will come a new creation, he says, made through a transformation of the old. That’s important; it’s not the rejection of the old, it’s a transformation of it. The apocalypse leads to a transfigured life, not an escape from creation, but a final and full reception of the gift of creation. Indeed, for Augustine, as we will see in later books, it is the damned who get so to speak raptured out of creation, taken out of creation into Hell—the blessed, the character of the blessing that the blessed receive is precisely the gift of creation itself. Now we live in the world, and the grammar of the word world does not imply so easily any need for a God. But if we see that this world is Creation, that very word itself, Creation, immediately implies that this reality depends upon another, whom we label Creator. Together with this knowledge of God as Creator, and indeed then ingredient in it will also be knowledge of God the Creator as one who knows truly all about our world, all the details of it. To speak very crudely, God is not just muscle; God is also brain, not just decisive agency but also effortlessly inclusive—from our perspective, relentlessly inescapable—knowledge and understanding. This is to say, God is not just Creator and Sustainer; God is also Judge. The knowledge of judgment that humans will have, even in the eschaton, is complicated and limited in ways that underscore the differences between God and the human, both in the eschaton and today, and the limited character of human nature, even in the human eternal state. And yet there are some things we may be able to know that are interesting, even for what they suggest about now. First of all, reflect on the knowledge that the blessed have of evil. In what way, Augustine asks, will the blessed go out to know the damned, as the scriptures say they will? They will know what happens to the damned, but indirectly. They will not be deflected from their direct knowledge of God. They will not be perceiving the suffering the sufferings of the damned; they will only know by implication from their knowledge of God’s justice.

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On the other hand, consider the knowledge that the damned will not have about Heaven. The damned will not know what is going on inside heaven at all. They will be wholly consumed with the utter frustration of their own desires. They will have no time at all to be interested in anything outside themselves. In other words—and this may apply for today—they cannot know goodness. It’s not that they are frustrated about not knowing Heaven; in a way, it’s that they seem to have no idea that there is any other place than the one they are at. This raises the interesting question of how this situation, at the end of time, speaks to a more general condition across the whole life-course of fallen humanity. What exactly is the knowledge that good and evil can know each other? Can they know each other fully, or is there some chasm of incomprehension that separates them irrevocably, rendering each, in different ways, perplexing to the other? On Augustine’s account the good cannot understand wickedness, in part because there’s nothing to understand there; while wickedness as wickedness knows nothing at all, has refused knowledge and so encounters the good but cannot see it as the good, but see it only as a rival version of its sin-mutilated self. The main upshot of this whole discussion, however, is not poignant knowledge about our life now, shining on us like light reflected from the eschatological Kingdom of God. It is humility about what we can know, and how much more we ought to affirm without knowing the concrete contours of its realization. We know that Christ is going to return to judge the earth. We know a series of things will happen, but we can’t fully understand or properly order them. Again and again, as in all the past books, Augustine’s claims here amount to a radical call for theological modesty. What can we truly know? Very little. We can hypothesize, but it’s really not that important. We already know what we need to do here and now, and that’s hard enough. Effectively Augustine asks, do you really want to spend time on theological speculation until God comes and asks us whether we spent our lives following Jesus or sitting around and 431

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spit-balling theological hypotheticals? I think I know what answer Augustine would hope people would give to that question. There will be no anticipating. It will come, once again, like a thief in the night. The contradictions of history will mount, and not resolve themselves, as history approaches its end—but it will be neither predictable nor progressive. All of this is part of what people meant when they say Augustine spiritualized the apocalypse. It means that there is no immediate literal sense which is relevant to his anticipation of the apocalypse. That there is a literal apocalypse Augustine does not doubt; though as we have seen, he is remarkably agnostic about what that will look like. So we must be humble in the details of our expectation. But while he teaches us to be modest in our speculations, we must also be emphatic in our affirmations of the Christian mission, and the inauguration of the kingdom, or so he says. This apocalyptic chastity then, is only the flip side of our more basic task for the church, of shaping our souls in the right way to receive the judgment even now, for it is always already here, in Jesus and coming still. Speaking eschatologically, that is to say, while we cannot say with any kind of confidence that the end is near, we must always simultaneously proclaim for Augustine that the end is here. We can be so on the lookout for its literal arrival, so eager to have it answer all our voyeuristic questions, Augustine says, that we miss the spiritual meaning inherent in the proclamation of the end; and in fact, by missing the spiritual meanings we fail to equip ourselves, as best we can now, for the literal apocalypse that will occur in some indeterminate then. In this way the spiritual meaning of the apocalypse is not some sort of deflated consolation prize, it is the route into the true meaning of the event in its full significance, flesh and spirit. And our lunging for the literal in this instance is just one more example of our perpetual failure to keep the spiritual and the literal properly 432

Lecture 20 Transcript—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

ordered. And even our typical treatment of Augustine’s eschatology recapitulates this failing. For most of the time, scholars treat his interpretation of the end of all things as a response to the failure of apocalyptic expectations, a kind of rescue mission for an ideological prediction that has failed to come true. On this account, Augustine’s proposal is not so much a rationale, as it is a rationalization. But there is another way of looking at his proposal. Consider one of the most common, if not the most common, forms of general moral failure; we experience this all the time. Such failure is what we could call today hitting rock bottom, where we finally realize there is nowhere else for us to go; we’ve reached the end of our resources, maybe gone beyond them. There is no anticipating this. It comes with no warning signs or anticipations that are discernible to the person in that situation. Sure you can retrospectively pick out some intimations or clues to your world’s imminent dissolution. There are metaphorical flashing klaxon warning signs whose sound or light should have been apprehensible but were not. We’ve all had this experience of having ourselves said or hearing someone else say, “I should have seen at that point that I was lost. I should have seen that I was living a lie.” But all this is crucially, inescapably retrospective. It makes no sense to imagine someone saying, “Well this currently, right now, is a sign that I’m close to the end of this form of life, and I will soon have to undergo a radical change of life.” We never say that. From within a failing way of life, no beams of light are visible, pointing a way to a new future of hope. Moral collapse does not admit of being seen from outside and inside at the same time; it’s a far more claustrophobic phenomenon than that. The beams of light emerging through cracking shell of our despair, do not presage redemption; they simply are that redemption itself. The collapse is good news, not the anticipation of it. Life is a one-way street; it has no reverse gear. There is no way out but through. We cannot anticipate. The apocalypse has to be spiritualized because the lesson that emerges from it is the literal truth that we keep telling ourselves fictions to try to forget, and that lesson is this. 433

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We are saved not because of what we do, but, importantly, despite ourselves. We must be always prepared, always be on our toes, for the Messiah. So Augustine resists all temptations toward literal apocalypticism, and loosens the semiotic umbilical cord, if you will, between the present moment and the eschatological end of all things without cutting it, and this all gives history, and its scriptural script, a significant amount of flexibility and ambiguity. But the ambiguity about the details of that event does not lead him to be uncertain about the fact of the event. He offers, we may say, epistemic ambiguity without eschatological uncertainty. In these two ways, Augustine spiritualizes the eschaton; indeed, he’s generally recognized as the first person to do this. The fact that time will one day end should shape our lives, not as an apocalyptic storm front, but rather as a foreboding or anticipation of the way we will ultimately have to come to see the meaning and value of our lives. We cannot hasten the Messiah’s return, but we can think and feel and live even now, in our minds and in our hearts, as if this were the day of judgment. That is what spiritualizing the apocalypse means. And while the eschaton is supposed to provide the determinate meaning of our lives’ histories, it bears a mark of genuine novelty— the new heavens and new earth of which he speaks. And this raises questions about the character of what continuity there will be between now and then. Again, history, as we experience it today, does not bear within itself its own solutions. History is, itself, contingent—its coherence as a unitary history comes not from the slow assemblage of its imminent components into some final determinate shape; rather, its coherence comes from outside itself—from God, as it were. We have to recognize that the apocalypse is coming, but it is always also already and not yet, and in that way it is already here. The indeterminacy of our situation is that, for Augustine, we are caught in the flux of time, and also that we are already groaning with the birth-pangs of redemption. Referring to the New Jerusalem, the city has been coming down, Augustine says that “This city has been 434

Lecture 20 Transcript—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20)

coming from heaven since its beginning.” So the eschaton is already on its way to us, simultaneously with that, The Six Days of Creation have themselves not yet been completed, are not in the past. For Augustine, we are still living in the sixth day. We are simultaneously in Genesis and Revelation, at the alpha and the omega, amphibian creatures, living in a kind of pre-eschatological suspension, distended across time but also distended, in a sense, between time and its end. Our moral condition should help us amplify this experience of distentio, to live its pains and longings more fully. But this will not simply be a matter of happiness and cheering, but as much, painful longing. In fact, as he says, “In this life,” and this is a quote from Augustine, “the holier a man is, the more full of holy desire he, so much the more abundant is his weeping when he prays.” We said in Book 19 that it offers the summation of worldly wisdom, and I have said here that Book 20 offers a kind of summation of next-worldly wisdom as well. What interesting about this that this wisdom is both remarkably chaste in its claims about the future, and remarkably urgent in its demands on believers in the here and now. Augustine affirms his austere certitudes about the eschaton because they usefully fence in a space for speculation, albeit speculation informed by good sense, doctrinal propriety, and dialogical charity. And Christians are allowed, indeed encouraged, to speculate and hypothesize so long as they keep hold of the rule of faith and do not pridefully presume their own capacities to be equal to God’s. This openness to theological exploration and theological questioning is at the heart of Augustine’s picture of the Christian life, and he means here to show his audience how to go about thinking in your own life about these matters—how to inhabit intellectually the central speculative, contemplative, and affective dynamics of the Christian faith, which Augustine thinks central to every Christian’s faith. In this way, apocalyptic speculation—Käsemann’s mother of all theology—is always made a fruitful part of the Christian life. 435

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But wondering about when the end of time will be, is only part of what Christians consider the last things. We must next turn to Augustine’s discussion of Hell and Heaven, to complete this picture. And so in our next lecture, I will see you in Hell.

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Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

Lecture 21

A

ugustine focuses on the idea of hell in terms of the continuity and distance between sinning in time and being damned. Augustine thinks the doctrine of hell is not only just but gives us good reason to believe that hell is a creation of God’s goodness. Belief in hell has declined in the past century. We have a hard time imagining why anyone would suffer endlessly in a lake of fire for crimes they committed while on earth. So unlike most people in his own time, we face an initial blockage in struggling to see what Augustine was propounding.

Immortal Suffering „„

In addressing hell, Augustine first distinguishes between two big issues that should be separately addressed: ›› First is the question of how the situation of hell is possible at all; how plausible it is that we can imagine immortal bodies continually consumed but continually recreated in ceaseless fire.

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Second is the question of the precise nature of the punishment of the human soul and body.

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On the issue of plausibility, Augustine appeals to the wide range of realities in that extend beyond our everyday experience. Sure, he says; consider salamanders, creatures who in Augustine’s age were widely considered to live in fire and volcanoes. The crucial point of his claim is that the world is much stranger than our normal experience would suggest.

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On the issue of immortal bodies that suffer endlessly, he responds that demons certainly have suffered permanently since Creation 437

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without any extinction or lessening of their power. Augustine’s point is that our ordinary experience should not be presumed to delimit the absolute boundaries of what is possible. „„

Having established the range of possibility, we can begin to explore just what happens to the damned in hell and how it happens. For Augustine, the point is that the suffering will be real and endless. Every moment will be freshly painful.

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But not only will the sufferers feel immediate pain. They will also suffer reflexive psychological regret. ›› They will know their ultimate destiny, and they will not be able fully to deny that knowledge. They will realize the full extent of their self-deception. ››

They will also not know. They will remain what they have been all along and still be in denial about their situation, even though they are in hell.

The Nature of Punishment „„

Augustine next takes up the question of the nature of the infernal suffering of the damned. Why, in particular, material fire? Fire is the utmost extension of changing matter—the most temporary state of matter. The soul’s relation to matter is the problem— it wants stability, it wants matter not to change. But fire is the quickest, most volatile form of matter, and so it teaches the soul that its hopes are foiled.

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The temptation is to think that hell’s torments are fundamentally fleshly. Augustine says that the soul, not the body, is what really suffers. The key is the way the soul participates in our embodiment. If the soul expects to find its stability in flesh, it will be disappointed and feel pain; if the soul seeks stability instead in God, it will not be disappointed. 438

Lecture 21—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

„„

Another question is the infinite punishment for a finite On the issue of immortal bodies crime. Augustine refers to that suffer endlessly, Augustine what the scriptures say about punishment, and in particular responds that demons certainly what Christ says. But he finds have suffered permanently since more reasons for why hell is Creation without any extinction permanent and endless. ›› The punishment for a crime is or lessening of their power. measured to the magnitude of the transgression. In this case the core transgression— the utterly absurd rejection of God’s gifts to humanity and the attempt to rebel against God—is infinitely immense. This is why hell is eternal. ››

The magnitude of the crime is connected to the fact that the crime’s consequences for the criminal’s soul are not selfreparable. If God chooses not to heal the sinful soul from its self-inflicted wound, one cannot accuse God of injustice.

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To the argument that punishment might be remedial, rather than eternal, Augustine responds that some punishments are purgatorial, but the ultimate punishments of hell follow the Last Judgment, which means that God’s judgments have been finalized.

The Possibility of Universal Salvation „„

Augustine is wary of the danger of bad mercy, which is that our innate sympathy can see only the suffering soul and not the transgression. It can make us forget the details of the crimes committed and overlook the real problem, which is the wickedness intrinsic to the damned.

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„„

This kind of spectatorial pity does not compel itself to gather an honest assessment of the moral situation at hand; it simply finds unpleasant the idea of people suffering. It implies that God is making them suffer, that the cause of their suffering lies outside themselves. In this way, it is much like the fruitless repentance suffered by the damned in hell.

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According to Augustine, the various church practices that the merciful think might sponsor a belief in universalism do not in fact do so. There are distinct limits on God’s mercy, though they are unknown to us, and they are a part of God’s love for Creation, extended across time. Those limits give Creation a space to be what it will be and not be undone by God. God gives creatures a terrible honor to let them be whom they will be.

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The problem with universalism is that it can suggest that history doesn’t ultimately matter. It doesn’t respect the idea that some things are determinately negative, that there are remainders.

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The utopianism of universalist temptation, for Augustine, at its utmost asks not just whether evil will turn out for the good, but whether it will prove not to have been evil at all. For him this idea leads one to believe that cosmic history leaves no refuse behind; everything is incorporated in the final reconciliation of all with all.

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Such a dream of seamless reconciliation is dangerous; a doctrine of universal salvation, cyclically undertaken, undoes the meaning of history. If history first repeats itself as tragedy, and second as farce, what about the twentieth time? Such repetition simply sands away meaning from the events, making them literally more of 440

According to Augustine, the various church practices that the merciful think might sponsor a belief in universalism do not in fact do so.

Lecture 21—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

the same. Any such utopia gives license to almost any horror in the present, for such horrors’ true meaning will be determined— and whitewashed—in the utopian eschaton yet to come.

Augustine’s Definition of Hell „„

Hell, on Augustine’s reading, is entirely personal. Hell is the complete inability genuinely to relate to other people—no way to see yourself in another or feel another’s pain in yourself; no way to empathize with, to have the barriers of self and other break down in a larger, more powerful “we”; no sense of the possibility of self-transcendence. Hell is suffocating solitude, crucially self-inflicted, a condition appropriate for damned souls, and caused by their own agency.

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More amazing—and harder to understand—is that hell, like all else in Creation, is for Augustine in itself good. Augustine’s metaphysics make it impossible for something to be truly evil in itself. Hell is good in two ways: ›› It is an instrument of justice, whereby those who are wicked get what they deserve. In fact their problem is that heaven is where they do not want to go, for that would be to acknowledge God’s sovereignty. ››

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It is also an instrument of mercy and of God’s love, whereby those who are wicked, and who in their wickedness desire to harm God by destroying God’s most basic gift to themselves— their own being—are protected against the consummation of their own tragically misguided intentions.

Indeed, it may be easiest for us today to imagine hell not in terms of fire, but as essentially the condition of being in God’s presence and not wanting to be there, so trying to move as far away from that presence as possible.

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„„

While the blessed want ever fuller acquaintance with God because they are properly integrated and affirm their being as creatures of God, the damned are deeply ambivalent about their existence. They want to escape God, but they also want to keep being themselves. But to keep being themselves means to keep being in relation to God, for they are themselves only because God has made them so.

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The problem for the damned is precisely that there is no “away” from God. And that is hell to them—the final realization that there is no escape from God, and they still, and permanently, desire such escape.

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Perhaps Augustine’s conception of hell is best understood thus: At the end of time some creatures are still allowed to exist in ambivalent opposition to God. Their existence at all is good, though not as good as it would otherwise be. By allowing these creatures the ability to dissent from God, God is in no way harming them, but simply allowing them to harm themselves. Even so selfharmed, the damned are still intrinsically good, and hell turns out to be simply the decision they have made all along, to be in the dolorous kingdom in which they choose to believe that they reign.

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The question of hell is one that we often think of in purely juridical terms. But it is not clear that the terms we use should be juridical. Hell clearly looks like it is a wholly juridical reality—it is, after all, not at all a means of healing humans, or anyone else. It is a deposit of utter suffering and pain. But it can be voyeuristically sadistic, perhaps by encouraging a psychologically self-harming fixation on suffering and its details, in two abstract ways that make us less sensitive to actual suffering: ›› By focusing on the mechanics of suffering, we get used to paying attention to how suffering happens, not that it is happening, and so we grow less immediately concerned to stop it. 442

Lecture 21—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

››

„„

A speculative attitude anesthetizes us from the human face of suffering, makes us not think of others as our equals, and seduces us into a problematic “God’s eye” view. Here the danger of reflection on hell is what it does to us in this world.

Some continuity exists between sinning on earth and suffering in hell, but a great deal of disruption as well. Augustine tries not to let speculation have the upper hand; he tries to make it useful to think about these things for our lives in the here and now. Not apocalyptic voyeurism but an existential attempt to make sense of beliefs he takes to be essential to the Christian faith is driving his account.

Questions to Consider 1. What does the saints’ beatific knowledge of the damned consist of, for Augustine? Should the saints have any knowledge of the damned at all? Why or why not? 2. Having read Augustine, ask if he is right: Should Christians understand hell as self-inflicted? Is hell good writ little? Why is hell eternal punishment for a temporal crime? 3. In hell, what exactly does the suffering consist in? Does the soul burn or the body?

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Lecture 21 Transcript

Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

I

n these last three books Augustine is talking about the relationship between the provisional and the final, the relationship between our ultimate determinate situation, fixed for all eternity, and our mutable condition now, amidst the flux of time. In these final books, then a myriad of themes come together, and we can only gesture at them all here. But centrally they all address the relationship between our partial and provisional life here and now, and the full life we are promised, Augustine thinks, in the world to come. In Book 21, the topic of this lecture, he focuses on the idea of Hell, and he especially explores this relationship in terms of its poles of continuity and distance—between sinning in time and being damned in Hell. This has speculative import for how we imagine that life to come, of course; but as the previous book might suggest to you, Augustine’s main interest here lies in what these inquiries about some other condition have to say about how we should live our lives here, in the inescapably partial and blessedly—and terrifyingly—everrevisable now. In a way, this is akin to the way we can learn about our current condition, our hopes and fears, our assumptions, by reading science fiction novels. Though such works are putatively about some distant future, there is always a fair amount of revelatory leaven regarding the present lurking therein, from which we can learn a great deal about ourselves and our world today. Here we will ask the following questions about this kind of science fiction investigation of Hell. What reasons does Augustine give, in this book, for thinking Hell is real? What is the deepest nature of suffering in Hell, for Augustine? Why does he think that an eternal punishment 444

Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

is fitting for a temporal crime? And why is the fate of the damned, not a suitable object, in his mind, for our or God’s mercy? These are some of the questions we ask in this lecture. They are all really facets of one question that we may ask of Augustine, namely, why does he think that this doctrine of Hell is not only just, but itself gives us good reason to believe that Hell is a creation of God’s goodness? This question is one that Augustine might have understood but not felt to be as gripping as we do. In our world, belief in Hell has declined precipitously. We have a hard time imagining any reason why anyone would suffer endlessly in a lake of fire, for crimes they committed while on earth.In fact, the decline of belief in Hell in our world is a very new development, happening only in the past century, and scholars are interested in what caused this decline. So unlike most people in his own time, we face an initial blockage in struggling to see what Augustine was propounding and why he was propounding it. But we don’t want to overstate the distance between Augustine’s world and our own. Our questions are not ones Augustine would have found entirely strange. For it is the case that he begins this book by asking the basic question that we asked, which he apparently had heard as well, of why believe in Hell at all? He addresses this question straight off. Hell is to be addressed before Heaven, he says, precisely since Hell seems more incredible than Heaven to people. Thus we should acknowledge and engage peoples’ skepticism about Hell straightaway. Furthermore, he says, this order is consonant with the order of topics as given in scripture. Hell is discussed before Heaven by and large in the biblical texts. Does this mean, you might wonder, that dire threats are conceived as more focusing, maybe more initially mobilizing of our moral energies, than good promises? I’ll leave you to consider that. In addressing Hell, Augustine organizes the discussion into several distinct topics. First, he says, we should consider the nature of infernal punishment. How do the damned exactly experience hellfire? 445

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Here Augustine distinguishes between two big issues that need to be separately addressed. First, there is the question of how the situation of Hell is possible at all; how plausible is it, he asks, that we can imagine immortal bodies continually consumed but also continually recreated, in a ceaseless fire? Second, he says, there is the precise question of the nature of the punishment of the human, soul and body—how does this punishment, this pain, precisely happen? Does the soul burn, or does the body? Concerning the possibility of this fire, Augustine appeals to the wide range of realities that extend beyond our everyday experience. So then to the question can material bodies be endlessly consumed in fire, he replies, sure, consider salamanders, creatures who in Augustine’s age were widely considered to live in fire and volcanoes. If salamanders can do this, so can we. This might sound absurd to us, but consider, as an analogy to Augustine’s time, an example he might use today that many creatures now, we now live in unbelievably infernal conditions of high pressure and high temperature around undersea thermal vents at the base of the middle of the ocean. The crucial point of this whole thought experiment, for Augustine though, is his claim that the world is much stranger than our normal experience would suggest, and we should not expect that experience to be the sole canon for determining the possibility of any kind of condition. Furthermore, is it possible to imagine bodies that suffer endlessly but do not die? Demons certainly suffer, and have suffered permanently, Augustine says, since the beginning of creation, without any extinction or effective lessening of their power—at least since their initial fall. And while there are now there are no such immortal bodies available for the demons or for us, then there will be bodies that can so endure. Here again, Augustine today would find a contemporary analogy to this idea, in the medically-recognized phenomena that we know as chronic pain, that is, a phenomenon of apparently ceaseless duration of suffering, which we expect suffering to have a finite temporal end. Today we recognize that there are people in our world, so of them are friends, who suffer in this way. But typically, and historically it’s been 446

Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

the case, our ordinary thinking that any pain has to seize at some point, makes it hard for us to believe, or even empathize, for their condition. But we know now that that suffering is all too true for them. Really, what Augustine is to get at here is the idea that our ordinary experience should not be presumed to delimit the absolute boundaries of what is possible in creation. In this way, the discussion about Hell also concerns the nature of the miraculous and he makes both the epistemological point that we don’t know the full scope of the world, and so our knowledge cannot delimit what the world is possible off; and the ontological point that God as Creator can do whatever God wants. Augustine, that is, is offering a cautionary argument here, really concerning the limits of what we consider rational or empirically based arguments in everyday experience; effectively, he is arguing that we cannot argue from our own everyday experience of epistemological limits to ontological impossibility. For those who doubt that human nature can change into the kind of thing that would endure eternally in eternal fire, he says we already have such a change—the concept of the Fall, and what it did to distort Adam and Eve’s bodies, and the bodies of all born from them, make the body wholly plastic. Even today in our world we have ways of redesigning human nature, so it’s easy to imagine Augustine again making an analogous argument about the possibility of changing human persons from the rapidly developing science today of DNA. Now again, the upshot of all this is that the world is far more plastic, far more surprising than our ordinary experience would lead us to believe. Once we have established the wider range of possibilities, we can begin to explore just what happens to the damned in Hell, and how it happens. Consider first, Augustine says, what God says in scripture about Hell. Is it punishment of the soul or of the body? Either explanation, he thinks, is open right now. But whatever the manner, for Augustine what is crucial is that the suffering will be real and endless. There will be no callousing of our sensorium toward an 447

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insensate condition. There will be no getting used to the torment; every moment in Hell will be as freshly painful, as newly cruel, as the first terror-inducing dip into the infernal cauldron. But not only will the sufferers feel immediate pain. They will also suffer a reflexive kind of psychological regret, a kind of what he calls fruitless repentance. Finally, now, they will know what their ultimate destiny is, and they will not be able fully to deny that knowledge. They will now realize the full extent of their self-deception. And yet, in another way, they will also not know. They will also still be able to deny. They will develop accounts that try to explain and excuse and evade their situation. In other words, they will remain what they have been all along, and still will be in denial about their situation, even though they are in Hell. This is teaching us something important Augustine thinks about the nature of evil and its connection of selfdeception even here. He next takes up the question of the nature of the infernal suffering of the damned. And here his first question is, How, exactly, does endless suffering happen? I bet you’ve never really thought about how exactly Hell is supposed to work, but these are the kinds of questions that we need to answer here, Augustine thinks. Why, in particular, does everyone, even demons, suffer from material fire? Maybe it’s since material bodies are connected to resurrected souls; for even the immaterial demons are in Hell connected to materiality in something like this way. But why do humans in Hell need their bodies at all? Well, Augustine says because they are bodies just as much as souls. Remember humans are created embodied—even the damned; that is key for Augustine. Now here’s a question that Augustine doesn’t really answer, but it’s there in his text. Why is Hell conceived of as flames? We can kind of imagine how he might answer in this way. Fire is the uttermost extension of changing matter, perhaps, indeed, the most temporary state of matter, flickering and changing constantly. Given that the soul’s relation to matter is the problem—the fact that the soul wants fixity, it wants stability, it wants matter not to change. The soul in Hell 448

Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

would be annoyed at continental drift because it’s still trying to fix itself in materiality. But fire is the quickest and most volatile form of matter of the material world, and so fire teaches the self that its hopes for fixity are foiled far more effectively and far more efficiently than any other kind of materiality. That might make you think that Hell’s torments are fundamentally fleshly. But Augustine says that’s not so. In fact, it’s the soul, not the body, which is what really suffers anyway. Just as he said way back in Book 14, what may seem like the pains of flesh are really the pains of the soul as it intersects with the flesh, as it takes in the information that the flesh gives it. The key, that is, is the way that the soul participates in our embodiment, our enfleshment, for Augustine. Again, if the soul expects to find its stability in flesh, it will be disappointed in it, and feel pain. But, if the soul does not expect that stability, but seeks it instead in God, it will be able to understand and inhabit the flesh without that disappointment attaching to it. Another question presents itself here. Why is suffering endless? How can an infinite punishment be merited by a finite crime? Many people must have asked this of Augustine. The first thing to do, Augustine thinks, is to get clear on what the scriptures say about punishment, and in particular what Christ says. It turns out, on Augustine’s reading, that Jesus says a fair amount about Hell, and none of it good. Augustine reads the scriptural testimony to confirm what he imagines Hell to be—horrible and permanent. But there is more in the way of reasons we can give, he thinks, for why Hell is permanent, why it is an endless punishment. The punishment for a crime is measured by the magnitude of the transgression, and in this case, the core transgression, the utterly absurd rejection of God’s gifts to humanity, and the attempt to rebel against God, this is infinitely immense. This is why Hell is an eternal punishment; as Augustine puts it, “The more enjoyment man found in God, the greater was his wickedness in abandoning God; and he who 449

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destroyed in himself a good which might have been eternal, became worthy of eternal evil.” Furthermore, the magnitude of the crime is connected to the fact that the crime’s consequences for the criminal’s soul are not selfrepairable. If God chooses not to heal the sinful soul from its own self-inflicted wound, no one cannot accuse God of any injustice. In fact, as we will see, the punishment of Hell is the only suitable place for one whose soul is disorganized in this way. What about possibility that the punishment might be remedial and not simply punitive? What if we would have replaced Hell with something like purgatory? Now Augustine didn’t have any concept of purgatory in the way that we think of that, but let’s got with this idea right now. The Platonists, among others, suggest something like this. Admittedly, Augustine allows, some current punishments are purgatorial, both in this life, obviously, and perhaps, he says, beyond. But the ultimate punishments of Hell, from all the evidence of scripture that we have, are not so remedial. Furthermore, because this punishment follows after the Last Judgment, in a way that means that God’s judgments have been finalized. It would suggest to say otherwise that God might change God’s mind after having delivered the verdict; and that seems to Augustine implausible, even bracketing the question of scriptural evidence. Against the so-called merciful who think the saints can get the damned out of Hell, Augustine notes that such people do not pray for the Devil. Why is that, Augustine wonders? Why are they not interested, as say Origen was interested, in arguing that even the Devil will be saved? Augustine notes that perhaps they are trying to extrapolate from the Church’s practice of praying for its enemies as commanded by Jesus; but the problem with that is that the church prays for its enemies to stop being enemies, which they can only do in this life, they cannot do it once they die. If the Church knew who was predestined and who wasn’t to stay an enemy, Augustine argues, it would be very odd to 450

Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

pray for the souls of those whom you know will not be saved. It would be a waste of breath in a way. In short, Augustine thinks, there is such a thing—and think about this idea—there is such a thing as bad mercy. The danger of this bad mercy is that our innate sympathy can see only the person set before us, the person suffering in Hell, and lure us to forget what brought them there. What are the crimes they committed? Who are their victims? It can make us forget, that is, the details of the crimes committed.It can silence the victims, erase them from the situation. It can overlook, in other words, the real problem, which is the wickedness that is intrinsic to the damned. This kind of bad mercy, this kind of spectatorial pity is actually, Augustine suggests, morally lazy. It does not compel itself to gather an honest assessment of the moral situation at hand; it simply finds unpleasant the idea that these people, so much like us, are suffering, and it wishes to stop them from suffering. In doing so, it implies that God somehow is making them suffer and that the cause of this suffering lies somehow most fundamentally outside of themselves. In this way, it is a kind of whining, much like the fruitless repentance suffered by the damned in Hell themselves. Well, if there is no way of getting out of Hell, what about the possibility that Hell is empty? What about the possibility of universal salvation? Can God’s anger last? So the various church practices that the merciful think might sponsor a belief in universalism, for Augustine, do not in fact sponsor that belief, he argues. There are distinct limits on God’s mercy, though they are unknown to us. But God knows them. The limits on mercy are in a way a part of God’s love for Creation, extended across time; for those limits give Creation a space to be what it will be, and not to be undone by God. That is a terrible honor that God gives to some creatures, to let them be whom they will be.

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Furthermore, as we’ve seen several times throughout these lectures, the problem with universalism is that it can suggest that history doesn’t matter ultimately, that it can all be swept up neatly. It doesn’t respect the idea that some things are determinately negative, that there are, effectively, remainders in the cosmos, aspects of things that don’t finally get fixed or healed. The utopianism of these universalist temptations, for Augustine, at their uttermost asks not just whether evil will turn out for the good, but rather whether it will prove not to have been evil at all. For him this idea is of a perfectly swept-up historical process, it leads one to believe that cosmic history leaves no refuse behind; everything is finally digested, everything incorporated, in the final homogenous reconciliation of all with all. But such a dream of seamless reconciliation is dangerous, Augustine worries, for a doctrine of universal salvation, cyclically undertaken, undoes the very meaning of history. We’ve seen some of this before. But if history repeats itself as tragedy first time and second time as farce, the famous line of Karl Marx, what about the twentieth time? Such repetition simply sands away any particular meaning from the events, making them simply and quite literally more of the same. Any such utopia of perfect reconciliation gives license to almost any horror in the present, for such horrors’ true meaning will be determined— and whitewashed—in the utopian eschaton that is yet to come. The upshot of all this is in a way, the consummation of Augustine’s discussion of evil as a whole in the City. For Hell, on this reading, teaches us a lot about evil as we experience it today. First of all, it’s entirely first-personal. Against the famous line of Jean-Paul Sartre, Hell is not, it turns out, other people, rather Hell is the complete inability genuinely to relate to other people—to find no way to see yourself in another, or feel another’s pain in yourself, no way to empathize with them, to have the barriers of self and other break down in a larger, more powerful we, no sense of the possibility, let alone the promise, of self-transcendence. Hell is a suffocating solitude, and with no way out of yourself. And in all this, Hell is crucially self-inflicted, a condition appropriate for these souls, because it is caused by their own agency. 452

Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

What’s more amazing—and harder to understand—is that Hell, as a place, like all else in Creation, for Augustine, is in itself good. This is a consequence of his metaphysics of creation for Augustine, and he knew this was a consequence as far back as Book 12 because there he said, and this is a quote from him, “Even the nature of the eternal fire is without doubt worthy of praise, even though it will be the punishment of the ungodly when they are damned.” Augustine’s metaphysics make it impossible for something to be truly evil, for something’s bare existence to be in itself evil. Evil is only the privation of being in goodness. But, we can reasonably ask, what beyond merely lexical gymnastics divorced from any real grasp of the horrors they communicate can we make of this claim? Can we give this claim any sense at all that Hell would be in itself good? It would be hard to say something briefly about this, except to say the following, Hell can be good in two ways. First of all, it is an instrument of justice, whereby those who are wicked get what they deserve. Now, deserve here is not simply punitive, it is ontological, Hell is the appropriate place for the wicked to be. After all, they wouldn’t want to be in Heaven. They spent their entire existence desiring to be apart from God. Do you think Heaven would be a nicer place for them? In fact, their whole problem is just that Heaven is where they do not want to go, for that would be to acknowledge God’s sovereignty. So they must go elsewhere. But Hell is also an instrument of mercy, and of God’s love, whereby those who are wicked, and who in their wickedness desire to harm God by destroying God’s most basic gift to themselves—namely, their own beings—are protected against the consummation of their own tragically misguided intentions. Say what you will, Augustine thinks, but the condition of being in Hell is better than not being at all. Indeed, it might be easiest for us today to imagine Hell intelligibly in Augustinian terms—if we dare to do that, and I’m not sure all of us will dare to do that or want to do it—not most basically in terms of fire, but as most essentially the condition of being in God’s 453

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presence and not wanting to be there, so trying to move as far away from that presence as possible. While the blessed want ever more full acquaintance with God, ever deeper intimacy with God because they are properly integrated in themselves and thus already relate positively to God, and so affirm their being as creatures of God because of all that, that’s how the blessed relate. But the damned are deeply ambivalent about their existence—they want to escape God, but they also want to keep being themselves, but to keep being themselves means to keep being in relation to God, for they are themselves only because God has made them that; and so on. Their ambivalence in this way is bottomless. The problem for the damned—from their own sinful perspective—is precisely that they can’t fulfill their wishes. There is no away to which they can get from God. There is no such useful distance. And that is Hell to them—for what it is, is the final realization that there is no escape from God, and they still, and now permanently, if still only at best ambivalently, desire that escape. This understanding of Hell actually may help us understand something deep about Augustine’s metaphysics again—which, as we’ve seen, requires multiple imaginative exercises for us to begin to comprehend it. And these imaginative exercises are very important to Augustine. He’s trying to teach us how to see the world in a new way. The insight this affords us is this, Augustine’s conception of God’s transcendence makes the idea of distance, or of away, finally inapplicable to the reality of God. We can say it frees up the idea of distance from our imagination’s enchainment of that category to our idea of space. And that might be one way to redeem this language of distance. And Augustine suggests as much, He says in one place that to live there in the world in lustful passion is to live far from your face. We’ve all been there—we’ve all been close to somebody, but very far away from them at the same time. Distance, then, is a matter of disposition, not of physical proximity or absence. After all, even we talk about being emotionally distant, and anyone by the age of 20 has had the experience of being physically 454

Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21)

around other people while they are also emotionally, intellectually, existentially light years’ away. Perhaps Augustine’s conception of Hell is best understood today by us, then, as this, at the end of time, some creatures are still allowed to exist in ambivalent opposition to God. Their existence at all is good, though not as good as it would otherwise be; but by allowing these creatures this ability to dissent from God, God is in no way adding an extra harm to them, but simply allowing them to continue harming themselves in the way that they want to. But even as so self-harmed, the damned are still intrinsically good. And Hell turns out to be simply the decision they have made, all along, to be the dolorous kingdom in which they choose to believe, when they can, that they will reign. Now let’s conclude. The question of Hell is a question that we often think of in purely juridical terms. But it is not clear that the terms we should use should be juridical. Hell clearly looks like it is a wholly juridical reality—it is, after all, not at all a means of healing humans, or anyone else. It is a deposit of utter suffering and pain. There are good worries about this doctrine—very good worries. One worry is that it can be a voyeuristically sadistic doctrine, perhaps by encouraging a psychologically self-harming fixation on suffering and its details, in two abstract ways that make us less sensitive to actual suffering, first, by letting us focus on the mechanics of suffering, we get used to paying attention to how suffering happens, not that it is happening, and so we grow less immediately concerned to stop it and more spectatorially interested in the mechanics of it. A second worry is that, in general, a speculative attitude such as this book perhaps encourages, anesthetizes us from the human face of actual suffering, makes us not think of others as our equals, but seduces us into a problematic God’s eye view. Here the danger of reflection on Hell is not so much about what it says about our thinking of hell, but what it does to us in this world. But then again, what if we imagine Hell, not as something that is added to fallen humans and demons, not an extrinsic punishment attached to them 455

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at the end of their lives, but simply the place in the created order where fallen angels and fallen humans fall to? You’ve got to put them somewhere in Creation, unless you want simply to annihilate them. But I don’t think you want to do that, do you? So where, then, are you going to put the damned, if not in Hell? Where would be a better place for them? There is some continuity between sinning on earth and suffering in Hell, as we’ve seen, but a great deal of disruption as well. The key thing here, as with his other eschatological reflections, is that Augustine tries not to let sheer spectatorial speculation have the upper hand; he tries to make it useful to think about these things for our lives in the here and now. That’s why he’s doing this. This is not a kind of apocalyptic voyeurism driving his account, but an existential attempt to make sense, as best he can, of the beliefs he takes to be essential to the Christian faith. Admittedly, Hell is one of most neuralgic things for many people, and for good reasons. I doubt that Augustine can satisfy them to not fear the very idea of Hell, and not to be angry at him, Augustine, for offering so forceful and, I would argue, compelling a view of it. But let me say one last thing to them, extrapolating not from anything Augustine ever said, so far as I know, about Hell, but about some things he said about the doctrine of predestination, about how to preach this doctrine in his works On the Predestination of the Saints and The Gift of Perseverance. Many of the worries People have about predestination seem related to the worry they have about Hell. Let me give you two bits of hypothetical pastoral, theological advice, drawn from Augustine about Hell. First, he would say that believers should not be motivated by fear of Hell but by longing for Heaven, to do so via longing for Heaven in Christ. This is why Augustine repeatedly insists that believers must have Christ as a foundation, not any kind of fear. The key here is loving all else in and through and for Christ. No one has ever been saved by belief in Hell. It has no positive pedagogical 456

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role in Augustine’s catechesis of believers. As a doctrine it is not pedagogical, it is kind of an abstract remainder issue that he kind of has to figure out what to do with. Second, understand that, if you do fear Hell, if you have anxiety about it, you must understand that Augustine thinks this is a word of comfort—you are on the right path, being carried toward another place. He’s not trying to encourage you to cultivate fear of Hell, he is saying that if you have it already, you should be reassured that it is, in fact, something that you are not going to face. It may sound very surprising, but there are two things about the damned in Hell, on Augustinian terms, that could be comforting to you. First of all, the damned are, always, in some sense surprised to find themselves in Hell. They didn’t really expect that this would happen to them. If you find yourself worried about it, he says. that’s a good sign. The second thing is a bit odder still, Ultimately, he argues, the damned don’t mind being in Hell. They’d rather be there than anywhere else. Yes, they complain, yes they’re in torment, but really—for them, is there a more suitable place? Augustine doesn’t think so. So if you find Hell troubling, Augustine would say—take that as a good sign that you yourself would never say, as Milton’s Satan famously does, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Once we have seen Augustine on Hell, now we can turn, perhaps all the more gratefully, to his reflections on Heaven. That is what we will do next.

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Lecture 22

Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

A

nd so at last we come to Augustine’s vision of the final fulfilled state of the human, of Creation, and the full realization of God. Augustine manages to demarcate once again what believers can affirm with confidence, what they can hypothesize with more or less probability, and what they must simply admit they do not or cannot know. In a way he exposits the eschaton, in order to show us what the implications of that doctrine are for humans now, and how very little else of determinate doctrinal or metaphysical content we can reliably derive from it today. „„

The challenge to Augustine is to show exactly how our experience of history has significance, and in what ways the particularities of our lives’ journeys really matter. It will help to recall that Augustine spiritualizes the eschaton. The end of time is definitely real for Augustine, but its value lies in how it affects our behavior, our character, and our loves now in our inhabitation of the present.

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The doctrine of the inaugurated eschatology, an eschaton that has begun but has not yet reached its climactic form or realization, cultivates in us an attitude and disposition of knowing something about the determinate shape of our lives, but not enough to speak with much confidence.

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It demands that believers have faith and hope in a continuity between now and then. That is why Christians live in sacramental suspension. For Augustine, Christians are at best “happy in hope.” Here Augustine gives us what he can of the inner details of that hope—his reasoning about the hope that sustains Christians 458

Lecture 22—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

in this life and that serves as a promise of what their true life in the world to come will be. „„

Augustine discusses three big topics in this book: the resurrection of the body and the significance of history, his vision of God that will occupy the blessed in the life to come, and his reflections on the nature of human agency in heaven, and in particular on the four stages of freedom humans experience over the course of history.

Resurrection of the Body „„

At the end of time, all will be resurrected into bodies. The bodies will be flesh, but they will be spiritual flesh. Furthermore, this embodiment will be historical. We are our histories, and we are our bodies, and our eschatological happiness must be related to our past, which is not entirely happy.

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Thus the details of our bodies will not be erased. Curly hair, eye color, face shapes, everything truly part of our bodies will be retained and transfigured. Even sex is not a problem. There will be no sexual intercourse in heaven, for its essential purpose of reproduction is accomplished; but our desires for intimacy and connection that sex served in history will be met in the kingdom in far more profound ways.

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Even in this life, something miraculous and wondrous exists in the joining of immaterial soul and material body. The amazing thing is that our physical world is intelligible, that physical matter has been made a fit home for divine meaning. And yet we know it must be true, because of the physical Incarnation of Jesus. Because Jesus was truly God made flesh, we see that at the end of time, this material world will be transfigured as worthy of bearing glorious and immortal permanence.

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„„

Belief in resurrection requires a transformation in our imaginations, a transformation in where we seek the miraculous; it should no longer be sought in extraordinariness, but in the ordinary. Consider the astonishing material fact of the resurrection of Christ and the even more astonishing historical fact of its common belief, beginning as it did with a tiny band of illiterate fishermen.

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Augustine uses his perception of the flawed character of the world to argue that those who reject his belief in our bodies’ ultimate sanctification are basing their rejection on the belief that the bodies we have now are the best kind of bodies that we have. But, says Augustine, our bodies are not normative bodies, but corrupted by the fall; hence, he argues that the problem is not with bodies per se, but with our bodies’ corruption.

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Augustine affirms that bodies retain their distinct individuality, and their individuality is in part the way they each develop across time, in their own distinct physicality. People will not all be resurrected according to some ideal type of human; the full diversity of humanity will be represented. The blessed will be immediately visually recognizable by others for who they are.

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Creation’s diversity is also at times marked in pains on our bodies that make up the world as well. The world is a cycle of violence and turbulence; the question is whether the history of violence, an ingredient of the history of creation can itself be part of what is redeemed.

„„

Augustine extends his aesthetics to show how the 460

Christ’s resurrected body has gone through death and transfiguration and is not undone. Christ’s resurrection completes and transfigures Christ’s death; it is not an undoing of it.

Lecture 22—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

wounds of time will not be erased, but will be made of positive value for us and for the world. History will matter in the eschaton, so its marks must have some purchase on humans even after the resurrection of the body. „„

This intuition is confirmed, for Augustine, in the wounds of the martyrs. We know bodies will retain their natural characteristics; some of the infirmities of age will be reversed. But other injuries will not be so easily effaced.

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The wounds of the martyrs who died for the faith will remain. A beauty will shine out from those wounds, though the glory will not be directly of those wounds. The defects will not be there, but the proof of their valor will be.

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Christ’s resurrected body has gone through death and transfiguration and is not undone. Christ’s resurrection completes and transfigures Christ’s death; it is not an undoing of it. History is singular and permanent, though we do not know its full meaning at present. “Death and resurrection” are thus part of the meaning of history and the role of creation in the economy of God.

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In heaven, the blessed will know evil in this way—what they have directly suffered, and what evil still persists. By extrapolation from what they know of God’s goodness and justice, they will recollect both their past misery and the eternal suffering of the damned.

The Vision of God „„

All the above is about how the redeemed life will relate to earlier and other forms of existence. Yet Augustine expressly attends to two additional features: the nature of human vision and the character of the redeemed human will. These two features together collect the two most fundamental features of our existence as creatures—how we know and how we act. 461

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Augustine knows well the Beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The saints in paradise will see God in the spirit, so they see God even if their eyes are shut. Yet the seeing is not by means of the flesh, though it is seeing in the flesh. And they will see without interruption or intermediation, seeing God continually and truly.

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This vision is God’s own peace, understood fully only by God, of which the blessed will partake. This kind of seeing will be continuous in some way with vision as we experience it now, though it will be immeasurably more powerful and revealing; the eyes will discern things of an immaterial nature.

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When the blessed see created things, they will see not just them, but God in them. They will see God as “all in all,” as manifest in things of this world. The objects of creation reveal God as integral to what they truly are, and God is using them to exhibit God’s glory in a particular way. It is seeing creation itself, but now we see creation as having a point and a purpose, as created matter speaking of its Creator.

The Four Stages of Freedom „„

In the heavenly city the blessing will be not simply of vision but of agency, and this free agency is very different from what we know as freedom today. For Augustine, the fullest picture of good human agency is characterized by humans’ finding that to sin is not possible.

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Augustine thinks the history of humanity can be divided into four stages of human freedom. ›› Before the Fall, it was possible for humans to sin. ››

After the Fall and before the grace of Christ, it is not possible for humans not to sin. 462

Lecture 22—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

››

››

After the grace of Christ has been received it becomes possible for humans not to sin.

Augustine knows well the Beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in

heart, for they shall see God.” After the Second Coming, when history has reached its end and the souls of the blessed rest with all the company of heaven in perfect love of God, human wills will be strengthened in such a way that it is no longer possible for humans to sin.

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The blessed will be fully liberated from the slavery to sin to which all humans are manifestly captive. That enslavement splits the will and thereby sunders our integrity. When we are liberated, the singular goodness of God will not simply be the primary good—it will be the obvious good.

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Augustine draws a picture of idealized agency where the center is not a wide range of options, but no options at all—human agency whose flourishing lies wholly in the complete and unimpeded engagement of the whole person in the dynamic joy of paradise. For him, true, fully achieved human agency is one where “choice” plays no role, where one is wholly and willingly engaged—but where one seems to have no choice.

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To characterize this end in a more straightforwardly positive way Augustine offers a powerful single sentence that sums up so much of his eschatological imagination: “There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold, this is what shall be in the end without end. For what other end is there for us, but to arrive at the kingdom which has no end?”

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Augustine’s claim that eternity is being co-present to all moments of time offers some comfort. If that is the case, each instant of life is ultimately no less real than every other instant. That means that 463

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redemption, when it happens, happens to every instant. It’s not that the course of one’s life is a runway and the soul lifts off like an airplane at the moment of death; but that the whole course of your life is gathered into God each and every moment. Questions to Consider 1. Is the eschatological kingdom of God fundamentally a restoration of Eden or something else altogether for Augustine? What does the answer tell us about Christian life in our world today? 2. What does Augustine think are the four stages of human freedom? Why are they ordered in this way? Do you think this account of freedom makes sense? 3. What does seeing God amount to, for Augustine? 4. What does a resurrected body look like? If I have a scar on my knee from arthroscopic surgery, is it still there in my resurrected flesh?

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Lecture 22 Transcript

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nd so at last—and after our recent quick trip to Hell it couldn’t come more welcomely—we come to Augustine’s account of heaven, his vision of the final fulfilled state of the human, of Creation, and the full realization of God. Here Augustine offers to tell us as much as we can know now about this final state to which all creation tends, and for which it longs. What does the blessed state of the saved look like at the end of time? What does seeing God amount to? What exactly do the blessed do in heaven? And when the blessed are resurrected, are the scars and marks that they suffered in life entirely erased from their bodies? What, if anything, happens in heaven? What is the nature of the human condition there? And is the eschatological Kingdom of God fundamentally a restoration of Eden, or something else altogether? And finally, what do the answers to all these questions tell us about Christian life in this world today? In answering these questions, Augustine is using them to expose and explore one of the deepest, if not the deepest, puzzle of Christian theology, the question of the tension between now and then, here and there, earth and heaven. Note that he does not think, as many Christians seem to do today, that the full and final state of heaven begins right after the individual died. Augustine would probably see that as deeply mistaken. For him, our individual demises, as dramatic as they might seem to us, are in no way the same thing as the Kingdom of God. The state in which the blessed subsist as dead is not the full state of ecstatic joy promised to the blessed in paradise; it’s rather a vague and vaguely pleasant 465

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sleep. Here again, Augustine’s exposition is highly unusual. Popular beliefs about the afterlife abound, but there’s not much extended and systematic philosophical discussion, pagan or Christian, about it. Augustine seems to have felt a duty to explicate these matters directly in a way that few if any others did. So Augustine is quite unusual in addressing the details of the eschatological Kingdom of God. Indeed, Book 22 of the City might be the single most elaborate and sustained, systematic discussion of the eschatological state by a major theologian in the Christian tradition. It certainly has no rivals in the first millennium of Christian thought. One can reasonably wonder why that is—for who would deny that the whole point of Christianity is consummated in that final state? But others have been hesitant to speak of it and for good reason, after all, Saint Paul says, quoting Isaiah, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of mankind, the things that God has prepared for them that love Him.” There is, then, along with the exuberant emphasis on eschatology in the tradition, a nice dogmatic chastity, even an agnosticism, about the details of that future state. Augustine manages to demarcate once again, as clearly as he can, what believers can affirm with confidence, what they can hypothesize with more or less probability, and what they must admit they simply do not maybe cannot know. In a way he exposits the eschaton in order to show us what the implications of that doctrine are for humans now, and how very little else of determinate doctrinal or metaphysical content we can reliably derive from it today. In a way, then, part of the point of this exposition, 22, is to show us how little such an exposition can teach us about our future, and how much it can teach us about our present. The challenge to Augustine here then is to show how exactly our experience of history has any significance, once that skeletal structure of history is set—Fall, Election of Israel, Incarnation, that. In what ways 466

Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

do the particularities of our concrete lives’ journeys really matter— how, that is, should we understand the particular course of our lives to effect who we ultimately are eschatologically? It will help to recall what I said earlier, namely that Augustine in general, spiritualizes the eschaton. The end of time is definitely a real thing for him, but the import of our belief in it is not primarily, in its value for us as a spectatorial prognostication—a weather report— about some hypothesized predicted future. Instead, its value lies in how it affects our behavior and our character and our loves now, how we are trained to expect the Kingdom of God to arrive today in our inhabitation of the present. It’s not that this belief pushes off the end to some comfortably indeterminate future. Rather, if it is not yet, it is still also already now—today is the day of salvation, after all. Perhaps the apocalypse has already begun, Augustine suggests, just now, just this morning, and there is still time for you, for everyone. And Augustine believes there truly is still time. The doctrine of the inaugurated eschaton then, an eschaton that has begun but has not yet reached its climactic and final form cultivates in us, for Augustine, an attitude, and disposition of knowing something about the determinate shape of our lives now as well as then, but not enough to speak with much confidence. As Augustine says in this lecture, “To tell the truth, I do not know what will be the nature of that activity” when he’s considering the life of the saints in paradise. For a dogmatist, then, he was quite interestingly tentative. This doctrine demands that believers have faith and hope that there is some continuity between now and then. That’s why Christians live in a kind of sacramental suspension, and not just in a blank, negative, empty waiting and what Christians call apophatism, a complete unknowing. As we have repeatedly seen, for Augustine, Christians are at best happy in hope; but even in that condition, there is some proleptic foretaste—an anticipatory foretaste—in that of what is to come. 467

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Here at the end of this massive tome, he gives us what he can of the inner details of that hope—his reasoning about the hope within, the hope that’s supposed to sustain Christians in this life and which serves as a promise of what their true life in the world to come will be. This lecture will address three big topics that Augustine discusses in this book, in the order that he discusses them. First, the resurrection of the body and the significance of history. Second, we’ll look at his account of the vision of God that will occupy the blessed in the life to come. And third and finally, we’ll look at his final reflections on the nature of human agency in heaven, and in particular on the four stages of freedom that humans experience over the course of history and his final idea that freedom in heaven, while offering no options at all, is still the greatest kind of freedom there will be. Now, there’s one important thing to get out of the way first here— people have asked me this time and time again about Augustine. What does Augustine say about how many humans will get into heaven? Augustine is not clear on this, but he says that they will at least equal the number of angels who fell, thus keeping the City of God fully populated. And, Augustine says, God might well accept more, so that that city and this is a quote of Augustine’s, “may perhaps rejoice in a still more abundant population.” Maybe God is still allowing there to be new condos developed in the city of God for the newcomers. But let’s consider, first, the general claim here about the Resurrection. We know this, Augustine says, at the end of time, all will be resurrected into bodies. The bodies will be flesh, but they will be spiritual flesh, the new and spiritual bodies of the saints. Augustine says, these bodies will be subject to spirit, but it will be flesh, just as carnal spirit was subject to flesh, but was spirit, and not flesh. Furthermore, this embodiment will be historical. We are our histories, and we are our bodies, and our eschatological happiness must be related to our past, which is not entirely happy. Thus the details of our 468

Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

bodies will not be erased. Curly hair or no hair, eye color, face shapes, everything truly part of our bodies will be retained and transfigured. Even sex is not a problem. Women will be raised as women and men as men. Women’s sexual form is not a defect—some Christians thought that—but Augustine says it is natural as the man’s, and both are appropriate for the symmetry of aesthetic oppositions and the symbolic power of the way that male and female differentiation for Augustine, symbolizes Christ and the church. Now, there will be no sexual intercourse in heaven, for its essential purpose—that of reproduction—Augustine thinks is accomplished, but our manifold desires for intimacy and connection, desires that sex has served in history, those desires will still be real and still be met in the Kingdom, with God, and with our fellow humans, in far more profound ways than we could imagine now. Recall, he insists that people dislike not the body, but the body’s corruption, and that there are still many goods in this life—especially propagation and the conformation of body to body—which speak to the blessings that bodies are meant to convey. Furthermore, he says, even in this life, there is something miraculous and wondrous in the joining of immaterial soul and material body. He says, the amazing thing about our physical world is that it is intelligible, that brute physical matter has been made a fit home for divine meaning, the wet, sticky, bloody mass of meat that we are, this skin-bag of guts and gristle and brittle bone, this has been deemed a fit home for a soul and even for the absolute, Christ. How astonishing is that? Augustine says. And yet we know it must be true, since of the physical Incarnation of Jesus. Since Augustine says, Jesus was truly God enfleshed, and not just an especially convincing spiritual hologram that we see; we can recognize that at the end of time, this material world will be transfigured as worthy of bearing glorious and immortal permanence, and be seen as bearing God’s own impress. Now, as we’ve said repeatedly, this vision of materiality was by no means a universal opinion in Augustine’s age. Many non-Christians were quite clear that however it worked out, we would be saved from 469

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materiality, not for it. But Augustine professed the opposite. And even among Christians, while Augustine affirmed that there will be a bodily resurrection, many of his contemporaries didn’t believe in this. So he spends a fair amount of time in these chapters in the early part of Book 22, arguing with those who find such a belief conceptually implausible or spiritually or morally horrific. In other words, for Augustine, part of what belief in resurrection requires is a transformation in our imaginations, a transformation in where we seek the miraculous. It should no longer be sought in disembodied extraordinariness but in the most ordinary stuff imaginable—the meat and potatoes of our everyday world. Just consider the miracles around us that we accept, he says. Consider the astonishing material fact first, of the resurrection of Christ—and for skeptics, the even more astonishing historical fact of its common belief, especially beginning, as it did, with a tiny band of illiterate fishermen apostles. In some ways, the spread of Christianity is almost as miraculous for Augustine as adorations itself. Now none of this implies that Augustine has an unqualified enthusiasm for our current world. We’ve seen how much he recognizes the suffering that suffuses it. Furthermore, he uses his perception of the flawed character of the world to argue that those who reject his belief in our body’s ultimate sanctification are basing their rejection on the belief that the bodies we have now are the best kind of bodies that we could have. But, Augustine says, our bodies are not now normative bodies, they’re corrupted by the Fall, hence, against those who deny the resurrection of the body, he argues that the problem with bodies is not with bodies per se, but with our bodies’ corruption. Those who reject the idea of bodily resurrection are always forgetting that he says. Now, some pagans do understand this. Plato says the resurrected will return to bodies, while Porphyry says they will not return to 470

Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

evils. Augustine suggests, we can synthesize their views to say that the blessed will return to bodies but bodies that are not evil, not corroding, or changing. It’s just too bad, he says, that neither Plato nor Porphyry could allow this conclusion to be drawn. In fact, Augustine affirms the following position about bodies, bodies retain their distinct individuality, and their individuality is in part the way they each develop across time, in their own distinct physicality. People will not all be resurrected according to some ideal type of human as if we had one clone army of resurrected Adams and another clone army of resurrected Eves—the full diversity of human being will be represented. The blessed will be immediately visually recognizable by others for who they are. Indeed, all these diversities Augustine includes in the broadly aesthetic symphonic vision of the diversities of creation, all of them will be singing to God in the end of time. So the diversity of creation as we experience it, here physically, in its manifold differences and alternative courses, mountain and plain, river and stream, countryside and town, tree after tree, forest and sea and field, individual creature after individual creature, each in their uniquely precious singularity, all of that will be retained. More than that, however, creation’s diversity is also at times marked in pains and flaws on our bodies. These pains, these wounds, make up the world as well. In many ways the world’s a cycle of violence and turbulence, creating our reality ever anew once again out of pain from the old. Can these things—this history of violence, an ingredient part of the history of creation itself—can these things be part of what is redeemed? Yes, says Augustine, and he extends his aesthetics—his aesthetics of the resurrection—to include the problem of evil, to show how the wounds of time will not be erased, but will be made of positive value for us and for the world. History, even the history of suffering, 471

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will matter in the eschaton, so its marks must have some purchase on humans even after the resurrection of the body. Now, this intuition for Augustine is confirmed, in the wounds of the martyrs. Now, we said already, we know bodies will retain their natural characteristics—curly hair, brown eyes, the like. Some of the infirmities of age, however, will be done away with—bad backs, weak knees, I’m happy to say baldness, these will be reversed, he says. But there are other marks, other injuries that will not be so easily effaced. The resurrection will not simply present the immaculate, theologically air-brushed bodies of a J. Crew catalog; the resolution of history is not the forgetting or effacing of what has happened. And this is so aesthetically, but also more fundamentally. In this discussion, he mentions what seems on first glance, a fairly esoteric issue, whether people will be resurrected with the scars they have suffered in their lives, or if those scars will be erased in the resurrection. Augustine does not directly answer this question, but he does say we can know that at least scars of one group, the wounds of the martyrs—those who died for the faith—will not be effaced, but will remain, although in those wounds, he says, there will be no deformity only dignity. A beauty will shine out from those wounds, although the glory will not be directly of those wounds. The defects will not be there, but the proof, Augustine says, of their valor will be. How can we know this, you might wonder? Augustine's answer is interestingly based on his understanding of the eschatological Christ as revealed in Scripture, for just as Jesus kept his wounds after the Resurrection—the marks on his body—so God will retain on human bodies at least the marks that were suffered for the faith. The direction of his thinking is clear, it is Christ’s resurrected body, the one that’s gone through death and transfiguration, and is not undone, that is the crucial anchor for the nature of history’s significance for our bodies. Christ’s resurrection is not the un-doing of Christ’s death then, 472

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but rather a new thing, a completion of that process, and thereby transfiguring the whole story. But that is quite different from a cosmic do-over, as it were. History is singular and permanent, although we do not know its full meaning at present for we are still in the midst of it. Death and resurrection is thus a picture of the meaning of history, and the role of creation, even fallen creation, in the economy of God. So the marks of suffering are on us, and yet they are transformed. And in a similar way, in our memories, and in our souls we will forget the sufferings of evil, what we have done as well as those we have committed to others, even as we remember how and what was done to us but not in a painful way. And here again, we have clear examples of this in our everyday life, he says, in the difference between simply forgetting an insult that once wounded us, and reconsidering a wounding insult, with a new maturity that one did not possess when one was first stung by it, a more mature vision that resituates that insult in one’s own life and perhaps in the life of the insulter as well, in such a way as to no longer to feel the insult as itself wounding of us. In Heaven, Augustine says, the blessed will know evil in this way— what they have directly suffered, and what evil still persists. There will be no sensible recollection of past evils, but they will recollect both their past misery and of the eternal suffering of the damned. They will not know this by vision, but by extrapolation from what they know of God’s goodness and justice. By their knowledge they will “go forth,” says Augustine, quoting Scripture. All the above is about the negativity, as it were, of the redeemed life, how this life will relate to earlier and other forms of existence. But what will this life be like in itself? There are two features to which Augustine expressly attends, the nature of human vision and the character of the redeemed human will. In a way, these two features together collect the two most fundamental features of our existence as creatures—how we know and how we act, and I want to turn to them now. 473

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First, consider the question of knowledge. Augustine knows well the line “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” But what does this seeing God amount to? The saints in paradise will see God in the spirit, for they see God, Augustine says, even if their eyes are shut. Yet the seeing is not by means of the flesh, he says, although it is seeing in the flesh—it is me in my fleshly body who will see. And they will see, he says, face to face, that is, without interruption or intermediation, they will see God continually, truly, directly, raw. This vision is then the peace of God, that passeth all understanding— this is God's own peace, which we partake of in heaven, Augustine says, understood fully only by God. This kind of seeing then will be continuous in some way with vision as we experience it now, although it will be immeasurably more powerful and revealing, and the eyes will discern things of a greater immaterial nature. And the blessed will still see created things, but when they see created things they will not just see them, they will see God in them, they will see God as all in all, as manifest in the things of this world. This is very complicated, so let me unpack it a bit here. The objects of creation will not mask God; they will reveal God as integral to what they truly are—God’s creatures and God will use them to exhibit God’s glory in the particular ways that God has chosen to do so. This seeing of God here, in all things, is not a kind of x-ray vision, revealing what is more basically hidden, seeing through the camouflage of flesh that has no point but to mask the divinity inside—what a sad picture of materiality it is that we would begin with if we had that. It’s not that flesh is a merely mystifying cloak for creation, we see creation itself, but now, at last, we see creation, fully, seeing it as creation, as having a point, a purpose, as created matter speaking of its creator. In a way, he says, the immaterial will be more real than the material, so that we shall then see the physical bodies of the new Heaven and the new Earth in such a way that, wherever we look, and this is a big quote from Augustine here, 474

Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

We shall see God with brilliant clarity, everywhere present and governing all things including bodily things—seeing Him both through the bodies we shall be wearing and the bodies we shall be looking at... Wherever we turn the spiritual eyes of our bodies, we shall discern, by means of our bodies, the incorporeal God directing the whole universe.

Just as an aside, I urge you to think about the pathos of this vision for Augustine, this eschatological vision of being fully revealed in oneself and seeing God in all things—the power this must have had for him personally. If you know much about Augustine you know that throughout his career, he always reflected on our opacity to one another, indeed our opacity to ourselves, the dull obscurity of so much of visible creation, how hard it is to see God in it at all. Now, here near the end of his life and at the end of the City of God, looking forward to the eschaton, he gives us an account of what he was looking for all those years. He says we will one day be able to see the obvious union of all with all, not by avoiding reality but by finally seeing it truly for what it is. It’s a poignant moment for Augustine, as an author obsessed with obscurity, to confess here and to reach the idea that in the eschaton God will be obvious. Furthermore, in the heavenly city, the blessing will be not simply of vision but of agency. And this free agency is very different from what we know as freedom today. For Augustine, the fullest picture of good human agency is characterized in his phrase, non posse peccare, when humans will find it not possible to sin. We’ll come back to that phrase in a minute but to understand it, you have to understand that Augustine thinks the whole history of humanity can be divided into four stages of the history of human freedom. First, before the Fall, it was possible for humans to sin, this is what he calls posse peccare, possible to sin. Second, after the Fall and before the grace of Christ, it is not possible for humans not to sin, non posse non peccare. And then third, after the grace of Christ has been received it becomes occasionally and begrudgingly possible for humans to not sin, posse 475

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non peccare. And fourth and finally, after the Second Coming, at the end of time, when history has reached its end and the souls of the blessed rest with all the company of Heaven in perfect love of God, the human will will be strengthened in such a way that it is no longer possible for humans to sin, non posse peccare. The blessed will be fully liberated from the slavery to sin to which all humans are manifestly, for Augustine, captive. It is that enslavement that divides or splits our will and so sunders our integrity. When we are so liberated, the singular goodness of God will not simply be the primary good—it will be, in a way, the obvious good, in a way that is hard for us to understand today. Augustine has scriptural arguments for this, and experiential analogies to make it comprehensible. First of all, many biblical passages talk about service to God as a kind of enslavement, a yoke, or a chain linking us to God, which is also at the same time a liberation. And Paul himself talks about Christians being “slaves to righteousness.” Furthermore, experientially, we have all been in situations when our agency, our activity, was no less our own for being involuntary. We can be involuntary about our agency in much the same way that one has no choice about laughing at a funny movie, but one laughs, at times, indeed if it’s really funny with more than one's voice, but in a way with one's whole being. So this notion of a non-choice centered freedom, this does not require compulsion of any dangerous sort. Here then, is a picture of idealized agency where the center of the picture is not a wide range of options, but no options at all—a picture of human agency whose flourishing lies wholly in the complete and unimpeded engagement of the whole person in the dynamic joy of paradise. For Augustine, true, fully achieved human agency is not one where choice plays any role at all, it is rather a kind of full voluntary exercise of one's being, where one is wholly and willingly engaged— but where one seems to have no choice about this at all. This may seem a strange notion, an alien notion, of true freedom for us. 476

Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

And what is it that we do in this eternal life? It’s not quite simply more of what we do now, but something slightly more integral and coherent. It’s a form of perduring, but not a form of perduring stability that is marked essentially by a sequential process of before, and then now, and then to come. He’s very careful about what he can say about this situation of us at the end of time. Mostly he works in what sound like paradoxes for us. For example, in one sermon he says that, in heaven, “busy idleness will be our beatitude” in Latin that’s even more paradoxical because the two words busy and idleness and the same root, otioso negotio. So can we characterize this end in more straightforwardly positive ways? Yes, we can, Augustine says. And there at the very end of Book 22, at the very end of the City of God, he offers a powerful single sentence that sums up so much of his eschatological imagination, and behind that his overall theological anthropology. His vision of what it is that humans have always been called to be and one day will finally be allowed fully to be. Here is the sentence, There, there in the eschaton, we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold, this is what shall be in the end without end. For what other end is there for us, but to arrive at this kingdom which has no end?

So many things about this cry out for elaboration. Consider the succession of dimensions of our being, we rest, and our rest quiets our mind and lets us truly see; and when we see, what we see we truly love; and when we love, we naturally turn to praise. Think about it—here at the very end of this book, we return again to praise, to the giving of credit, of glory, to God, to giving the kind of glory to God that Augustine began the whole book with, 16 years before, 22 books earlier, in its first word, gloriosissimam.

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But for us now, along with this turning outward to God in ecstatic praise, the other dimension of this eschatological life that’s worth considering is the absolute integrity it offers us—beyond the present tensions of flesh and spirit, beyond the current turbulence of distentio, beyond our experience of longing for these tensions to be relieved, these turbulences to subside. Consider the integrity that is promised herein to us. As a thought experiment, consider your attitude to remembering the past. So much of our past seems impossibly distant to us. Did we really live it at all? Is there really no way to go back? Why is time a oneway street? When you think like that, you might take some comfort in Augustine’s claim that eternity is being co-present to all moments of time. For if that is the case, each instant of your life is ultimately no less real than every other instant. This means that redemption when it happens, happens to every instant at the same time. It's not that the course of one’s life is a runway, and your soul lifts off, like an airplane, at the moment of death, but that the whole course of your life is gathered into God each and every moment. Death is something the self might experience, subjectively and in our fallenness, as a terminus, as an end, just as birth was an incipit, a beginning. But for God, a human life is a broken, fragmented, shattered, yet still single thing, alpha to omega. Since of this, when we miss the past, of 20 years ago or only yesterday, it does not mean that that past has fallen into oblivion, but that that past is waiting, just as we are now waiting, to be gathered into God. And from God's eternal perspective, all those moments are already so gathered; indeed, they always already have been, we always already have been. And so transfiguration and resurrection are also, on this account, things that happen to our whole selves, not just the final version or iteration of ourselves. There, at the end of time, you can say, we are waiting for ourselves, waiting to become, fully, finally, ultimately, the we that we were meant to be from the beginning, at last. The whole you—unimpeded, uninstructed, by the disjunctive and 478

Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22)

distention of temporality, you fully you, you at 80 you at 20, a young child of 4 full of wonder and terror, an adult of 34 full of love and concern, you as a student and you as a teacher, a novice and an expert, you at every instant of your life, all at once and all together, all the million myriad individual yous, all will finally be brought together, as one finally allowed simply to be you. It is the oldest cliché in the world, at that the moment of your death your whole life flashes before your eyes. Well maybe on an Augustinian account that is entirely understandable. In any event, it is the image on which the City of God chooses to end. And thus, so will we.

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The City of God as a Single Book

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book worthy of study will engage a bewilderingly diverse set of issues—through characters and plot lines, perhaps, or through a complicated series of thematic issues. It will do so because life, as we experience it, is bewilderingly diverse. To be the composition of a reasonably coherent intelligence, the book will sustain a singularity of vision amid the diversity, and we ourselves, encountering the book, will find ourselves challenged to develop our intellectual and attentive muscles to be able to absorb its point of view as a singular point of view. „„

Augustine’s The City of God is such a book. It is a work so searching, so wide-ranging, so vast, and so remarkably coherent that it has few rivals as an achievement of the human mind. As an effort to come to grips with the inheritance of a civilization that raised you, but which you now find radically faulty, and as a way of coming to terms with the conversion of the world from one worldview to another, it knows few rivals for its diversity of views.

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For Christians and those raised in Christian (or post-Christian societies), it is much more than this: it remains one of the most important and influential works of thinking about politics, human community, the shape of human life, and the nature and destiny of the world.

Augustine and Politics „„

The work’s first great theme is Christianity as a political religion: the accusation that the Christians did not rightly care for Rome and could not properly care for worldly political life. Augustine replies with a threefold response that articulates his vision of 480

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the essential nature of politics, his understanding of its origins, and its aspirations, all in the service of showing how Christians should and should not be political creatures. „„

Augustine has a clear sense of the nature of politics as a consequence of the Fall. We need something to coordinate our various passions and interests and at least loosely organize our fears because they do not naturally gain organization on their own.

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But this practice of coordination is really only a restraining endeavor for disordered loves. As an essentially this-worldly project, it has no hope of achieving any permanent or stable goods. In this way, politics may be important as a site for reflection on the human condition and for revealing the configuration of our pathologies, but not as a vehicle to achieve our ends.

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We must be constantly reminded that politics cannot be an ultimately consequential arena for achieving our genuine goods because politics is but one permutation of our deepest theological passions. In this way politics is wrapped up in theological longings, and indeed idolatry, from the very beginning.

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Every political community courts what we might call the fusion of church and state. The human longing for God is not solitary, nor does it seek an individual end. We were created for a social communion, with one another Once we are untethered from God and God, and even after the Fall, that longing for society after the Fall, our affections keep has not departed; it has flowing from us. only warped into our various political passions.

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Much of this point of view is captured in Augustine’s choice of the word “city” in his title and as his central operational concept of this work. And so we need 481

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to see that our politics is always, inescapably, a disappointed politics of heaven. Knowing that, for Augustine, is the first axiom of political wisdom. „„

Augustine offers no discrete and portable political philosophy at all, but only a political theology in which the activities and affections that we count as political are a haphazard collection of phenomena scattered across the several dimensions of human life in the world as a whole. Humans must inhabit political communities, in part out of a need to suppress or expel the kinds of turbulent passions and people who make social life so dangerous in a fallen world.

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We must critique the religious propriety of patriotism, but we cannot deny the religious duty of public service. Christians must seek the welfare of the city where they live, and in doing so they serve that city better than its more fanatically attached devotees.

Vision of Humanity „„

The second great theme of The City of God is the picture of the human it propounds: a theological anthropology. ›› The human is a creature of excess, of gratuity. We are eccentric—that is, having our centers outside of ourselves. We find our true end not in enclosed self-satisfaction, but in ecstatic going outside of ourselves in praise and union with God. ››

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Once we are untethered from God after the Fall, our affections keep flowing from us. We are, essentially, a creature who loves to praise, to give glory, to worship.

Augustine chooses to capture this fact about us by making love the key term of his anthropology. It is hard to overestimate the decisiveness of this choice for future thought—not just politically, but theologically and morally—in the West. Theologically and 482

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psychologically it means that who we most definitely are is discoverable by finding out where we invest our affections. „„

Morally it means that the core matter for us to address in thinking about ethics is not the quality of the act itself, nor its consequences, but the intention behind the act. If your heart is rightly directed, Augustine argued your actions cannot be other than good. Instead of worrying about principles or maximizing utility, we ought to work on our hearts as the primary object of our ethical labors.

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More profoundly, this focus on love really does alter our vision of the kind of agents we are and invites us to reconceive our agency. We are creatures who come to knowledge of our agential powers only within a horizon of preset attachments and affections. Thus our action is never unprompted, but always in the context of and in response to a world lit up by our loves.

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Augustine conceives action within a larger framing context of responding, or even more extremely, of suffering.

Vision of the Church „„

A third great theme is the right kind of human community, the truest politics we can find in this world, and the right context in which to live our lives: the city of God on pilgrimage in this life, found in the community of the church and the practices it undertakes.

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The church is not only a community bound together by the profession of a creed and practice of a liturgy; for Augustine it is more deeply a community of moral formation, a people who have come together and understand themselves to be receiving the healing grace of God and trying as explicitly as possible in their communal lives to receive that grace. 483

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This effort to receive healing must be taken up assiduously. No sloth is permitted in the city of God. ›› Christians are called upon to perform positive acts of charity sponsored by the compassion they are required to cultivate toward those vulnerable in their communities and to all humans. ››

They are required to exercise forbearance and patience, even to the most outrageous provocations and the most painful persecutions.

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They are also called upon to see these practices as helping them to cultivate an understanding of themselves as stretched out over time and to see themselves as ever more deeply in need of God’s help.

Vision of the World „„

Augustine’s fourth great theme is the transfigured vision of the world as creation and his efforts to cultivate in his audience not only a typological but a sacramental imagination of the world. ›› Augustine was accused not just of despising politics, but also of despising the world. From his perspective, this accusation makes sense only if your own attachment to the world is so desperate as to prevent your seeing that he loves it in God, as a gift of God and as composed of signs of God. ››

Augustine’s affection for the world is real, but it is rooted in his perception of the world as the primordial unprompted expression of God’s love for what is outside of God. He sees it as the context of If your heart is rightly directed, redemption, for humanity’s movement ever more fully Augustine argued your actions into God at the end of cannot be other than good. time. 484

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Vision of God „„

Augustine’s last great theme is his vision of God. But even here, the God Augustine calls his readers to believe in is something quite radically different than what they may have previously understood God to be. Where the Romans and Greeks had seemed to believe in divinity as set apart and indifferent to the world, Augustine’s reading of the Bible made him see that God was rather the father of the prodigal son, who runs to meet his returning repentant child, heedless of his own dignity.

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In this vision of religion, God has already accomplished everything we need to get to God. In an age where religion was still largely conceived transactionally, this idea actually is quite revolutionary.

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God has already done everything for us. In return, we are called on to go deeper into God, into God’s love, deeper into being the creatures we were always meant to be.

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Much of the time, Augustine thought, this God is literally too good for humans to believe. Yet God has graciously offered routes into believing through our participation in the church, the body of Christ—one of the gifts that God has given us to help us get to God.

Where the Romans and Greeks had seemed to believe in divinity as set apart and indifferent to the world, Augustine’s reading of the Bible made him see that God was rather the father of the prodigal son, who runs to meet his returning repentant child, heedless of his own dignity.

We do this “going deeper” within the church by loving one another, loving the world, and working out works of compassion and charity. Thus for Augustine, this form of religion is as 485

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thoroughly a form of ethics as of piety. To know God is to participate in God and to participate in God is to love God’s creation. „„

These large themes go some way to explaining why Augustine calls this book The City of God and why he started the work with the word gloriosissimam: most glorious. We live in a political world, though we do not know the true meaning either of politics or of world today. The community that helps us learn both of those words’ true meanings, the church, exists only because of God’s loving action; and we need that community, under that God’s gracious tutelage, just because we are the kinds of creatures that we are.

Questions to Consider 1. If Augustine were to rewrite The City of God today, what would its title be? And what would the first word be? (Make sure to explain what significances you think the title and first word have for The City of God.) 2. Pride, despair, praise: Which of these concepts is closest to the center of gravity of Augustine’s theological anthropology? Why? 3. Can one be an Augustinian Christian and also a patriot? How would that work?

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Lecture 23 Transcript

A

t some point in your life, everybody should have the experience of reading one book. Travel is important; friendship is crucial. Being engaged in your community, caring for others and being cared for by them, finding a meaningful vocation which might, but need not, eventuate in a career—all that is really vital. You can do lots of other things, too. But reading one book is crucial. What does reading one book get you? Well, much depends on the topic of the book, of course. And typically the kinds of books that fit this classification will engage their explicit theme with such command of the topic, profundity of understanding, and brilliance of execution that you can simply be dazzled by the surface of the work. And that can be enough to reward your reading. But by and large, there will be more. For behind the putative topic of one of these books, they will share a common feature. There are many ways to say it, but in honor of Augustine’s classical philosophical interlocutors, let me use their language. A book like this will bring into view the old philosophical puzzle of the one and the many. A book worthy of this kind of engagement will address a bewilderingly diverse set of issues—through diverse characters and plot lines, perhaps; through a manifoldly complicated series of thematic issues, distinguished and braided together. It will reach its tendrils, like an octopus, into many different nooks and crannies of the human experience or the natural world. And it will do so—it must do so—since life, as we experience it, is bewilderingly diverse. And yet that book, for it to be one book and the composition of a reasonably coherent intelligence, will sustain a singularity of vision amidst the diversity. And we ourselves, in 487

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encountering that book, will find ourselves challenged to develop our intellectual and attentive muscles so as to be able to absorb that point of view as a singular point of view to make it our own. That is one of the great blessings of works like these—an author whose vision of the world is perhaps in some ways more finegrained, more matured, at least more encompassing than yours currently is. It gives you something of a ladder into their own brain, their own way of seeing the world. Reading books in this way is educative. It trains the mind not just to inhabit the view on offer, but to understand the obligation of the human to be intelligent in some way like this, to attempt to understand and inhabit some vision of the world that aspires to be all-encompassing and still dares to affirm it as a singular vision. The more fully we come to appreciate the depth, and breadth, and symphonic coherence of these kinds of works, the more they reveal the world to us in new ways and still retain a coherence of perspective that makes the experience of reading them a unified experience. We come to regard them with something akin to awe, and wonder, and reverence. A truly great book will help us understand the problem of the one and the many since it will embody a single solution to that problem for us. Now, not every book will do this, of course. Each of us has to meet the books that we are ready to encounter at the right time. And the book itself should be worthy of that attention, as well. But there are many books that are so worthy. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, through Austen, and Dickens, and Tocqueville, and Tolstoy, and Elliot, we’re gifted with hundreds of works that reward such scrutiny. Indeed, the chosen object of study needn’t even be a book; there are many human artefacts that are worthy of such attention—Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, paintings, sculptures, Coppola’s first two Godfather movies—not the third—even perhaps Bob Dylan’s album Blonde on Blonde or The Basement Tapes. The capaciousness of comprehension, the profundity of investigation, the symphonic 488

Lecture 23 Transcript—The City of God as a Single Book

harmony of the focus can all be manifest in many different kinds of products of the human intelligence. But it’s safe to say that the least uncommon way to encounter such a vision is between the covers of a single book. Augustine’s City of God is clearly one such book. It is a work so searching, so wide-ranging, so vast, and so remarkably coherent, it has few rivals for an achievement of the human mind. As an effort to come to grips with one’s inheritance of a civilization that raised you but which you now find radically faulty, and as a way of coming to terms with the conversion of the world from one worldview to another, it knows few rivals for the radical diversity of views it encompasses in its pages. For Christians and those raised in Christian or post-Christian societies, it is much more than this. It remains one of the most important and influential works of thinking about politics, human community, the shape of human life, and the nature and destiny of the cosmos. But what makes so rambling and vast a book into a single entity, into one book? In this lecture, I want to say something about some of the most prominent themes we have identified in this book to offer you one last attempt at a coherent picture of so sprawling an object. Then I want to suggest an overall theme that brings everything else together. And then at the end, I’ll raise some questions as to how exactly Augustine would think about these lectures—that is, what he might think about my efforts at explaining him to you. To begin with, consider just some of the themes that the book has discussed. Let’s talk about five in particular—five is about the most we can do, really: Augustine’s understanding of politics, his vision of the human, his vision of the church, his vision of the world, and his vision of God. First, consider the obvious theme of Christianity as a political religion. Remember that the initial prompt for writing this book was the accusation that the Christians did not rightly care for Rome and could 489

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not properly care for worldly political life in general. Augustine replies with a threefold response that articulates his vision of the essential nature of politics, and his understanding of its origins, and finally its aspirations all in the service of showing how Christians should, and how they should not, be political creatures. First of all, he has a very clear sense of the nature of politics itself. Politics is a postlapsarian reality, a consequence of the Fall. Our unruliness, East of Eden, means that we need something to coordinate our various passions and interests, and at least loosely organize our fears since they do not naturally gain organization on their own. But this practice of coordination is really only a restraining endeavor for disordered loves. As an essentially this-worldly project, it has no hope of achieving any permanent or stable goods. In this way, politics might be very important as a site for reflection on the human condition and an illuminating vehicle for revealing the particular configuration of our pathologies, but it is not so important as a vehicle to achieve our genuine ends. But he also understands why we must be constantly reminded that politics cannot be an ultimately consequential arena for the achievement of our genuine goods or the satisfaction of our most profound longings. We must be reminded of these things since politics is one particular permutation of our deepest theological, indeed eschatological, passions. Recall, the very first thing Cain does after killing Abel is build a city. And the core act of Babel is to try to build a tower whereby humans can reach up to God. In this way, for Augustine, politics is wrapped up in theological longings—and, indeed, idolatry—from its very beginnings. Every political community, no matter its best efforts to avoid it, will court what we might call a fusion of church and state. For indeed, the human longing for God is not a solitary longing, nor does it seek an individual end. We were created for a social communion with God, but also with one another. And even after the Fall, that longing for 490

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sociality has not gone away; it has only become warped into our various political passions. So much of this is actually captured in Augustine’s choice of the word “city” in his title and as his central operational concept of the whole work. And so we need to see that our politics is always, inescapably, a disappointed politics of heaven. And knowing that, for Augustine, is the first axiom of political wisdom. And so Augustine affirms the necessity of politics, and even its significance while refusing it direct salvific importance. In this way, we can say that Augustine offers no discrete and portable political philosophy at all, but only a political theology in which the activities and affections that we count as political appear to be a rather haphazard collection of phenomena scattered across the several dimensions of human life in the world as a whole—human life in which what we call politics has a small subsidiary part. Yes, humans must inhabit political communities in no small part out of a positive need, the mutuality of sustenance—although this could also be accomplished by families—but also out of a negative need, the need to suppress or expel the kinds of turbulent passions and people who make a social life so dangerous in a fallen world. And that is a tricky path to take, but Augustine saw no other viable route through worldly life. We must critique the religious propriety of patriotism, but we cannot deny the religious duty of public service. Christians must seek the welfare of the city where they live, and in so doing, they serve that city better than its more fanatically attached devotees, whatever those latter groups think. The 20th-century political thinker Hannah Arendt, who knew Augustine’s work very well, once said that Augustine was the last man before modernity who knew what politics truly was, what it meant to be a citizen. And it’s true; one can get quite a political education from him. But that education would be for naught if you miss the way that such a political education can only be a secondary and inadvertent 491

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education—part of a larger education about the true nature of the longings that our politics imperfectly, indeed perversely, expresses. And so politics opens into deeper longings, longings that the human does not always want honestly to express. And this gets us to our second great theme of The City, namely, the anthropology—the picture of the human that it propounds and that it assumes. And this anthropology is ineliminably a theological anthropology. As he says in the Confessions, “You, God, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it rests in thee.” The human is a creature who longs for God. And as such, the human is a creature of excess, of gratuity. We are eccentric—that is, having our centers outside of ourselves. We find our true end not in enclosed self-satisfaction, but in ecstatic going outside of ourselves in praise and union with God. Wherever we are, we over-spill our bounds, overrun our ends. And once we are untethered from God after the Fall, our affections keep flowing from us, snaking crazily across the surface of this world like a fire hose out of control, shooting water this way and that. This is clearly manifest in our political lives, but it’s also manifest elsewhere in our worldly lives in how we love one another; in how we adore sports teams, musicians, artists, yes, even books; how we are patriots, lovers, fans. We are, essentially, a doxological creature—a creature who loves to praise; to give glory; to, in one way or another, worship. Augustine chooses to capture this fact about us by making love the key term of his anthropology. It’s hard to over-estimate the decisiveness of this decision for future thought—not just politically, as before, but theologically and morally as well in the West. Theologically and psychologically, it means that who we most definitely are is discoverable by finding out in what we invest our affections. We cannot help but adore things; the question is what we will choose to adore. Morally, it also means that the core matter for us to address in thinking about ethical matters is not the quality of the act itself, 492

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nor its consequences, but the character of the intention behind the act. This is the logic of Augustine’s famous dispositionalism—what allowed him to say, famously, “Love and do what you will.” If your heart is rightly directed, he argued, there is no way that your actions will be other than good. And so, instead of worrying about principles or maximizing utility, we ought to work on our hearts as the primary object of our ethical labors. More profoundly, I think, in ways that we still miss, this focus on love really does alter our vision of the kind of agents we are and invite us to recognize and reconceive our acting, moving us from understanding ourselves as paralleling God’s totally spontaneous ex nihilo Creation of the world. Indeed, our ambition to rival God by seeking to be that kind of an actor is itself, for Augustine, one good description of the demonic temptation we face—the Promethean temptation to rival God. Instead, we should see ourselves as actors not as primarily acting, but as responding to our situation—always already placed in a context, and with passions and affections; and participating in those passions, and affections, and our situation more or less well. We are creatures who come to knowledge of our agential powers only within a horizon of preset attachments and affections. Now this means that our action is never properly unprompted, but is always action in the context of, and in response to, a world lit up by our loves. Action is thus, for Augustine, perhaps more importantly conceived within a larger enframing context of responding—or even more extremely, even more rhetorically, perhaps powerfully of suffering—than we usually understand. I can’t say much more about this here, except to say that this is a very large theme in The City, but one that often goes unnoticed in our age. So committed are we generally to the idea that we do possess such demonic, Promethean powers of action. A third great theme is the picture of the right kind of human community, the truest politics we can find in this world now, the right context in which to live our lives as adoring beings after the Fall—namely, the city of God on pilgrimage in this life, found in the 493

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community of the body of Christ, the church, and the practices that it undertakes. And here there are, I think, two basic facts to recognize. First, the church is not only a community bound together by the profession of a creed and the practice of a liturgy; for Augustine, it’s more deeply a community of moral formation, of a people who have come together and understand themselves to be, in their peregrination through the world, receiving the healing grace of God and trying as explicitly as possible in their communal lives fully to receive that grace. Augustine, remember, thinks of the church as a hospital, not a gymnasium—a site to receive healing from others, not in a way most basically to work on making oneself even more fabulous than one already is. And remember that Book 19 says, “In this life, moral progress consists more in the forgiveness of sins than in the perfection of virtues.” And yet this effort to receive healing must be taken up assiduously. There is no sloth permitted in the city of God; it is strenuous formation, outwardly and inwardly. People are called upon to perform positive acts of charity, sponsored by their compassion. And they are called upon to cultivate toward those vulnerable in their communities, and indeed, all humans they come across, that same love. And they are required to exercise forbearance and patience, we saw, even to the most outrageous provocations and the most painful persecutions. But this formation is not only an outward formation. Members are also called upon to see these outward practices as helping them to cultivate an understanding of themselves as stretched out over time— this old phrase we’ve used, distentio—and also to see themselves as ever-more-deeply in need of God’s help. And both this inward and outward formation are undertaken and understood through the interpretive lens of scripture—through Augustine’s serious scriptural hermeneutics and his cultivation in believers of a typological imagination through which to read both scripture and the world. The church is active, outwardly and inwardly, 494

Lecture 23 Transcript—The City of God as a Single Book

but most basically, it is constituted receptively, receiving God’s grace. And the material structures of that grace are not only the liturgical practices it undertakes but equally primordially a certain practice of reading. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the church is constituted as a certain kind of reading for Augustine. He was, in this way, ever the rhetor—ever the literature professor. The fourth theme is the transfigured vision of the world that Augustine teaches—a vision of the world as Creation and his efforts to cultivate in his audience not only a typological but a sacramental imagination of the world. Recall that Augustine was accused not just of despising politics, but of despising the world. I hope it’s become clear through these lectures that, from his perspective, this accusation only makes sense if your own attachment to the world is so desperate as to fail to let you see how he does love the world, although he loves it in God, as a gift of God, and as comprised of signs of God. Recall that his basic response to this, prosecuted most fully in his conversations—debates, really—with the Platonists, is that his theology actually affirms the goods of Creation in a way that others cannot. Augustine’s affection for the world is real, but it’s rooted ultimately in the world’s protological and eschatological significance—that is to say, he sees it as Creation, as the primordial unprompted expression of God’s love for what is outside of God, as we read in Genesis. And he sees it as the context of redemption, as the setting for the eschaton for humanity’s sanctification and, indeed, divinization—our movement ever more fully into God at the end of time. So Augustine promotes a sacramental ontology of the world in a way that makes our best inhabitation of it, and affection for it, ambivalently dialectical. We should see the world as a good place for us, indeed our natural home, our natural setting; but in its current condition, deeply ambiguously so—a sacramental presence with a pre-eschatological apophatic absence held in tension. What’s more, 495

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the world is moving as the scriptures tell us it will move—from being a garden to being a city, from Eden to Jerusalem. Augustine’s God undertakes, as it were, an urbanization project over Creation. And indeed, politically, God undertakes an urban renewal project. Now this is not for Augustine a movement away from nature. We, after the Romantics, imagine cities to be artificial and unnatural. But Augustine’s city was as much a part of nature or Creation as any swamp or garden; it has rivers, streams, gardens within it. We cannot think of the heavenly city of the New Jerusalem as extracting us from our created context. It is not an escape; instead, it is a final and finally full placement of us in Creation. The human is truly a citified animal, and Creation is meant to have a city at its natural center. Indeed, each stage, in a sense, reaches beyond itself. The human inhabits and delights in a world, and the world wants there to be a city, and the city wants there to be a God of the city. Each stage delights us, but only as it opens onto the next one. And so, of course, the final stage is God, and it’s our final theme as well. But even here, the God Augustine calls his readers to believe in is something quite radically different than what they might have previously understood God to be. Recall, the Romans and the Greeks both had seemed to believe in divinity as somehow set radically apart and indifferent to the world, indifferent to the cosmos. But Augustine’s reading of the Bible made him see that this God was no stiff Roman nobleman indifferent to the world, but rather the father of the Prodigal Son, who runs to meet his returning repentant child, heedless of his own dignity. In a way, this is the deepest working out of what Augustine thinks the meaning of Christ is. And by this, I don’t just mean simply that Christ is a nice guy and shows us that God, the Father, is a nice guy, too. I mean that on this vision of religion, God has already accomplished everything we need to get to God. In an age where religion was still largely conceived transactionally and sacrificially, this 496

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is quite a revolutionary idea. God has already done everything for us; the ancient anxieties about sacrifice, about what is the right kind of sacrifice, are answered for Augustine by God’s own action. Now, what are we called to do in return? Well, not nothing, but not quite what we have been expecting, either. There’s no payback, but there is participation. We are called on to go deeper into God, into God’s love, deeper into being the creatures we were always meant to be. Much of the time, Augustine thought, “This God is, quite literally, too good for humans to believe in.” What to do about that? Well, God has graciously offered us routes into believing—through our participation in the church, the body of Christ, which is itself one of the gifts that God has given us to help us get to God. And we do this going deeper within the church, importantly by loving one another, and loving the world, and working out works of compassion and charity—misericordia and caritas. Thus, for Augustine, this form of religion is as thoroughly a form of ethics as of piety. To know God, then, is to participate in God; and to participate in God is to love God’s Creation. Of course, there are many, many more themes. But these are some of the largest ones, and they go some way to explaining why he calls this book, as he does, The City of God, and why he started the work with the words gloriosissimam—most glorious. We live in a political world, although we do not know the true meaning either of politics or of world today, and the community that helps us learn both of those words’ true meanings—the church—is only there because of God’s loving action. And we need that community, under God’s gracious tutelage, just because we are the kinds of creatures that we are. More deeply though than all of this, all of Augustine’s work in this book points to one larger theme, what we can sort of call a metatheme—the theme of language change, conversion, and wisdom. Remember, one of the first things I said, in maybe the first lecture, 497

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was that this book was not written against anybody fundamentally. It is not the contra Paganos, it is just The City of God—De Civitate Dei. It is a conversionist and therapeutic work, using a hermeneutics of charity to understand the longings behind his interlocutors’ visions, and then to address those longings directly. This argument is primarily executed rhetorically and linguistically, as a strategy for arguing over the proper meaning of words. Augustine is so alert to language and how linguistic matters are crucial. And this question of language change touches on the larger question still, of what it means to change your mind. How can you change your mind? What is conversion, after all? Think about all the words you use today, how they have changed their meanings and depth in the time you have used them over your life. Love, hope, work, decency, surprise; so many words. And we all have our own personal lexicon of words and the distinctive meanings they have come to bear for us. Some of those meanings might be useful for others to know, but how do we share them with those others? So this question about language turns out to be about the possibility of wisdom, of deepening wisdom, and the possibility of communicating that wisdom; of whether what one of us has learned of wisdom can be shared by the rest of us, without going through all the experiences that brought the wise one that wisdom in the first place. In other words, this is about how directly you can talk about wisdom, and what changes can actually effect it in another. Is wisdom something we only see retrospectively? Is wisdom something we can directly pursue? How much of a guide do we need? These, anyway, are some of the questions that I find interesting in thinking about the overall shape of the book. There is one last thing. To what degree can we treat this book as a book, as, so to speak, a great book—a book that matters? Is there some tension between what we have discovered of Augustine’s purposes and how we are ourselves treating this work in this process of discovery? I suspect there might be. I suspect he could see our 498

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admiration of him as a kind of dangerous glory—a problematic glory. And he might fear for our fascination with his work, if that fascination did not lead us beyond his work, to the larger convictions that drove him to write it. Let me give you an example of what I mean. I was once, as a college kid, in a seminar where we dedicated our entire efforts to reading the works of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s a powerful critic of modern moral philosophy and one who argues that we live in a condition significantly after virtue, and we need to reinstitute those cultural forces that might make it possible for us to have virtue to have coherent moral lives today. Well, at the end of the semester, Professor MacIntyre graciously visited our class and spent the whole day with us. I was more than a little in love with his philosophy, or what I thought was his philosophy. And at lunch, one of us asked him a question—a rather self-congratulatory one, really—inviting a complimentary response. And the question was: “So, what do you think of us spending the semester reading your work?” Professor MacIntyre, without skipping a beat or even looking very engaged—without even putting down his sandwich—said, “Oh, I think it’s a disaster.” Silence descended on the table as everyone except Professor MacIntyre stopped eating their sandwiches. “But— but why?” one of us managed to ask. “Well,” he said, putting down his sandwich and looking slightly more engaged, “if you had all understood anything I had read, you would have put my books down at once and spent your time reading Aquinas and Aristotle.” The truth was, we found it more fun hearing him berate us, and the rest of the world, for not being properly morally formed than it would be for us to actually heed his advice and begin the long, slow boring of very hard boards that would be the process of coming to understand the philosophers who had been his own teachers. I wonder if Augustine, were he able to have lunch with us today, might 499

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say something similar. I wonder if he might ask us if we had gained the meaning of his work but missed its message. I have no answer for that now; but I owe it to you, in the sincerity of our efforts together, to give you that question to work out for yourselves.

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The City of God’s Journey through History

Lecture 24

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ugustine’s city outlived him by merely a matter of months. The Vandals, making their way through Gaul, over the Mediterranean, and across the North African coast were besieging Hippo by the summer of 430. Augustine died on August 28, 430, knowing that his city was surrounded and no rescue was coming from Carthage. The city surrendered and was occupied in the spring of 431 and went into decline at once. The trans-Mediterranean economy in which it flourished fell into decrepitude, and it shrank into a fishing town. Within a century there was little left of the city Augustine had served.

Barbarians and the Rise of Christianity „„

After Augustine’s death and the end of the siege, somehow his staff saved his library, including all his own works. They made it across the sea to Italy and were copied and distributed in the West, wherever the Christian churches prayed and preached and thought in Latin.

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His bones made it too: Removed by his church first to Cagliari in Sardinia, they finally found a home in Pavia, in the basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, where they rest to this day.

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We have his books. We have his bones. Do we, then, have him? In a very real way we do not. We lack Augustine because our organic connection to him was severed by the chaos that followed his death and erased the audiences to which his works were addressed and with whom he shared a coherent worldview. 501

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Unlike the thought of Thomas Aquinas, who spawned a continuous and still-living tradition of commentators, Augustine’s work has no such descendants, so his thought is continually rediscovered, but the organic assumptions behind his work died with him.

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Each age has to reinvent the Augustine it will use. And perhaps Augustine would have enjoyed that irony about himself: that the contingencies of history and the vicissitudes of human society have rendered his work simultaneously foundational and oblique; treated with admiration and skepticism, with honor and suspicion, reverence and scrutiny.

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Historians who insist that the fall of Rome is too melodramatic and ideologically self-congratulatory a description for late antiquity have a point. Civilization went on. But something momentous changed: The barbarians stopped becoming Roman. Furthermore, the barbarians were convertible to Christianity as a civilizing step up for them.

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With the barbarians’ ascendancy came a change in Christianity’s cultural status. Legally it had been long allowed, then endorsed, then prescribed; now it gained cultural status as tradition, and insofar as the barbarians wanted access to Rome’s political and existential legitimacy, conversion to Christianity was the clear way to do that.

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In accepting conversion, the barbarians did not need to leave behind their political or tribal identities. Christianity became a supra-political unifying force across multiple barbarian kingdoms, and something like Christendom was born: a world of multiple political communities, yet unified by a common religious culture.

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That condition prevailed, more or less, from then until very close to now, for it is only in living memory that, at least superficially, Christianity ceased to provide the glue of a common culture holding Europe and its progeny together. 502

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Figure of a barbarian

Augustine’s Influence on Western Thought „„

Again and again, the history of Augustinianism is the repeated history of the rediscovery of Augustine, not because he was ever truly forgotten, but because successive generations found ways to find their world pertinently addressed in the endless plenitude of wisdom and insight that flowed ceaselessly from his works.

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These rediscoveries were necessary not only because a new age asked new questions; ironically, they were necessary because the church Augustine served attempts ceaselessly to forget the lessons that he tried to teach it. His beliefs were too inconvenient, too unsettling, too antiauthoritarian, and too demanding for those who want a well-ordered church and a stable and clear marker of the city of God.

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Medieval thought is hugely informed by Augustine, but so is the Reformation, which might not have happened had it not been for that errant Augustinian monk Luther’s brooding over Augustine, 503

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and Calvin then reflecting on his political thought and his theory of divine providence. „„

Modernity itself bears a great debt to him, or rather to those who misread him. The voluntarism of thinkers like William of Ockham and Duns Scotus, whose picture of action has deeply shaped our own, begins in readings of Augustine on the will and sin.

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A version of Cartesian rationalism’s key phrase, cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” actually literally appears in de Civitate Dei, though in some of his earliest writings, he had already refuted the worries that so vexed Descartes, and in fact is now seen as having anticipated some of Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s own thinking about the mind’s being-in-the-world.

Misreadings of Augustine „„

The City of God was much copied, but was apparently not much read. The best evidence we have against careful attention is the kind of views it was thought to underwrite. For instance, pretty quickly after Augustine died a tradition emerged that read Augustine but retreated into received ideas and could not understand the radical nature of the revolution Augustine was instigating.

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This tradition baptized him into what was later labeled “Political Augustinianism.” This was taken as authentically Augustinian, though you can judge for yourself if it should be considered such: In its view, the city of God was the church, the earthly city was the world, and Christian kings were types of Christ, so people in the church serve Christ by obeying the king.

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In the 20th century, a new vision developed that saw Augustine as more suspicious of the political pretenses of human beings. Some, like Reinhold Niebuhr, developed it in more fundamentally coldly realist directions; others emphasized the eschatological 504

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complexity, but reality, of the vision’s moralism. On this reading of Augustine, humans always make a botch of ordering society. „„

Still more recent thinkers have modified this vision, urging a more ambivalent account of Augustine’s views on politics. He did not endorse whatever authorities were out there, nor did he condemn all politics as an abyssal night in which we are nevertheless condemned to stumble. It is possible for politics to be an oblique medium of grace and revelatory insight.

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To read The City of God is to be equipped with the tools to understand all these accounts and to appreciate places in the text that function as the nodes of especially dense interpretive debate and to make your own decision about those rival interpretations.

Augustine’s Influence on World History „„

In the 1st century, roughly half of humanity was governed by two empires, China’s and Rome’s. These empires were run by semi-divine emperors in cities far vaster than any before in the world. They were similarly structured and faced similar internal struggles and difficulties from tensions between provincial localities and the imperial metropolitan center.

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Both came to grief in similar ways, through struggles for power between rival forces in the heartland, then swamped by barbarian invasions, though both also survived as ongoing states outside the original core.

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And then, from the 6th century forward, the Chinese empire began to rebuild itself, eventually reappearing as a coherent structure across its old territory and enduring up to today through a series of dynastic cycles. In the Mediterranean and Europe, however, no such reconstitution happened. Today there is a recognizable China, but the Roman Empire exists only as a dream or a nightmare. 505

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What caused these divergent histories? It seems clear that part of the reason was broadly ideological. ›› Han China affirmed Confucianism, which emphasized the value of a unified state, horizontally and vertically integrated and governed by wise scholar–bureaucrats, as an essential part of a harmoniously ordered cosmos. ››

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to be equipped with the tools to understand all these accounts and to appreciate places in the text that function as the nodes of especially dense interpretive debate and to make your own decision about those rival interpretations.

In the West, Christian ideology could give lip service to Rome, but it could never wholeheartedly endorse the idea that the political structure of the empire was an essential part of God’s plan for the world.

Thus, political actors in the East would operate in a context where restoring the empire was a widely affirmed immediate good, while political actors in the West held instead that the empire had a hint of the demonic about it. And the decisive force for the way political thinkers in the West thought, it seems clear, was Augustine.

Failure To Understand Augustine „„

To read The City of God is

The conditions that would have made understanding available, at least to the educated elites of the day, disappeared quickly after Augustine died. He was in Henri-Irene Marrou’s phrase, a Latin Byzantine: someone who imagined the continuity of civilization on its linguistic, cultural, and political bases from ancient Greece through Rome to 5th-century North Africa.

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This school believed in the analogies and even the continuities between psyche and polis, soul and city, and polis and theopolis—the city and the city of God. It taught that through education we might come to appreciate. Augustine dissented from this view in its confidence that such harmony is available after the Fall, though some believe his basic thought remained rooted in the idea that analogies between these different levels were real and useful.

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In two ways, the barbarian occupation of the west undercut this school of thought. ›› Education could never survive such an experience. The confidence of the culture that its heritage would sustain the next generation was undercut when that next generation saw that it was ruled by barbarians. ››

The political vision was not easily translated into a logic of multiple states. The secular political opposite of the city of God had to be as all-encompassing in its realm as God’s is in its own.

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If this story of Latin Byzantism is true, then a disquieting possibility arises: We who think of ourselves as descendants of Augustine may in fact be more clearly inheritors of a different tradition, the tradition of the austere monastics of the Egyptian desert.

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Such monastics rejected the continuities between the preChristian world and the Christian one. This tradition was the basis in the West for the infrastructure of the Latin church and for the universities, when they appeared; it may still influence the way we see the world.

Augustine’s Legacy „„

Nonetheless, what insight we can glean from Augustine’s books seems substantial enough. All his lessons are powerful; all are 507

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relevant. His work is philosophically and theologically profound; politically acute and wise; culturally erudite. „„

It is astonishing how much is “known” by people almost entirely by hearsay and how much of that hearsay is demonstrably false. Such is the case with Augustine. Despite being so well-known, the book remains to an astonishing degree an unsummited alp, an undiscovered country. To do better, you must expect to see Augustine not as words on a page, but the quicksilver mind behind them.

Questions to Consider 1. What would Augustine say about how The City of God has been treated in this lecture series? What does the answer tell us about how he would view reading his work as a book that shaped world history? 2. If Augustine were able to read the history of thought after his death until today, would he feel that his work had done what he wanted it to do?

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Lecture 24 Transcript

A

ugustine’s city outlived him by merely a matter of months. The Vandals—kind of the Visigoths’ barbarian cousins—had made their way through Gaul, over the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, and across the North African coast. By the summer of 430, they were besieging Hippo. Augustine died there on August 28, 430, knowing his city was surrounded, and no rescue was coming from Carthage. The city itself surrendered in the spring of 431, and it was occupied by its new overlords. It went into decline at once. The transMediterranean economy that had let it flourish for perhaps 1,000 years fell into decrepitude, and it shrank back into a fishing town with a local farmer’s market. Within 100 years there was little left functional of the city that Augustine had served. Roman North Africa fell with it. The Vandals established their own kingdom, which they ran until the Byzantines tried to take it back a century later in the wars of the Eastern Emperor Justinian and his General Belisarius. They mostly succeeded in destroying much of what civilization was left. By the time the Muslim armies flooded across the Maghreb, 200 years after Augustine’s death, little trace of the greater Roman presence remained, and the peasants they encountered accepted their new overlords as readily as they had the Byzantines and the Vandals before them. By the time all that had happened, Augustine’s world had been largely forgotten. But he, in a way, survived the sack and its subsequent collapse. After his death and the end of the siege, somehow his staff saved his library, including all his own writings. They made it across the sea to Italy sometime in the 6th century, and they were copied and 509

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distributed far and wide in the West, wherever the Christian churches prayed, and preached, and thought in Latin. We may still have some of Augustine’s physical books even now; we definitely still possess some of that first Italian publication project. His bones made it, too. First, they were removed by his church to Cagliari in Sardinia, and then they finally found a home in Pavia, in the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, where they rest to this day near to the bones of that other great Latin Christian thinker Boethius. You can go and visit them even tomorrow, if you like, almost 1,600 years after his death. Walk into the church, past the other tourists flitting about, gawking at the art on the walls and the ceiling, gazing up at Saint Peter in his golden sky which covers the ceiling of the apse of the basilica, wondering uncomfortably what else they should do while they’re in this church. You are not here to look up. Walk steadily forward, up the stairs and into the apse; there the tomb stands, and you can walk all around it, brooding, two or three feet from the mortal remains of our saint. It’s monumental, set up on a base of stone. And it looks like it was made of a giant piece of ivory, beautifully carved with scenes of his life, encasing his remains. It’s fitting that Augustine now rests up there, back in the apse, behind the main altar, where the only sounds that can reach his bones now are those of the life of the church as it goes about its everyday business of prayer, communion, marriage, graving the freshly dead, and baptizing the newly born of 8 days or 80 years. After all, he was finally most interested in inhabiting that church and helping others come to inhabit it, too—counting it the least ill-suited home for the city of God in its pilgrimage upon this earth. For all these reasons, it seems to me a suitable place for our saint to rest. So we have his books, we have his bones. Do we then have him? In a very real way, we do not. In a very real way, he is lost to us forever, and all we have are relics—partial salvages, hypothesized 510

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reconstructions—of a mosaic whose full scope is lost, whose final framing perimeter is as shattered as the marble rubble of Hippo Regius, his ancient city. We lack Augustine because our organic connection to him was severed by the chaos and the confusion that followed his death, and ended his world, and erased and altered the audiences to which his works were addressed and with whom he shared a coherent worldview. This is unlike the thought, for example, of Thomas Aquinas, who spawned a continuous and still-living tradition of commentators. But Augustine’s work had no such descendants. He may have had disciples, and he certainly had friends, but the lines burned out quickly in the collapse of Roman North Africa and the tumult that followed in the old territories of the Western Imperium Romanum. One might even argue that his genius was so incommensurate with others in his day that he had few if any, contemporaries either. But be that as may be, Augustine is certainly cut off from all who came after him. And so today, as through history, his thought is continually rediscovered, but the organic assumptions behind his work seems to have largely died with him. We have the flowers, but not the roots. So in a very important way, we lack Augustine. And yet here we are, you and I, not necessarily sharing his worldview, not even necessarily sharing the faith he strove to serve; and we still read, and talk, and think about him—some of us every day—in an age and a world that would be unimaginable to him, and in lands his world never even dreamed of discovering. Why is that? What makes it possible for us to find him available to us, even as he lived so far away? His disconnection from us obviously causes a great deal of trouble. But such a systematic disjunction from others is a kind of blessing, as well. Each age has to reinvent the Augustine it will use, and it does so out of necessity. And perhaps Augustine would have enjoyed this 511

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last irony about himself, that the contingencies of history and the vicissitudes of human society have rendered his work simultaneously foundational and oblique in our world to be treated with admiration and skepticism, honor and suspicion, reverence and scrutiny—and sometimes by the same person, in the same moment. As I said at the beginning, as his life drew to its close, Augustine seems to have foreseen that something like this would happen. The world had changed immeasurably since he was a boy and seemed very likely to change even more. And he was right. A man born early in Augustine's Christian career could have, as a child, seen and lauded Theodosius, the last great emperor, who died in 395; and then lived on into his 80s, this young man, to see the final Westerner with a claim to the title Imperator, Romulus Augustulus—little more than a boy of 14 or 15—be ignominiously deposed and sent contemptuously out of Ravenna into exile, to live in a castle, by the barbarian chief Odoacer in September of 476. People cope, of course, and what we imagine as tectonic changes were probably not felt in their full radicality at all moments by everyone who had managed to live through them. Historians who insist that the fall of Rome is too melodramatic, and ideologically and self-congratulatory a description for late antiquity, they have a point. Civilization went on. No one lived in caves huddled around open fires, wearing animal furs and Viking helmets. But then again, something did change—something momentous. The barbarians stopped becoming Roman. Cultural change became a two-way street. Roma turned out to be not so aeterna—eternal—after all. Furthermore, the barbarians were convertible to Christianity as a civilizing step up for them, not—as was the case with the old Roman pagans—as an embarrassing fall from some noble sublimity. So with the barbarians’ ascendancy came a change in Christianity’s cultural status. Legally it had been long allowed, then endorsed, then prescribed; but now it gained cultural status as tradition. And insofar as the barbarians wanted access to the political and existential 512

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legitimacy that the 1,000-year rule of Rome provided, conversion to Christianity became the clear way to do that. In accepting conversion, they did not need to leave behind their political or tribal identities. And so, Christianity became a suprapolitical unifying force across multiple barbarian kingdoms, and something like Christendom was born—a world of multiple political communities, each autonomous on their own, yet still unified by a common religious culture. That condition, more or less, prevailed from then—right at Augustine’s death—till very close to now. For it is only in living memory that, at least superficially, Christianity no longer provides any glue for a common culture holding Europe and its progeny together. Augustine could not foresee the details of this new world, of course; but one suspects he knew that some such changes were coming. This is a hugely complicated scholarly issue, of whether Augustine understood that his world was radically changing; that he was, in some sense, late. Arguments about this matter have roiled the field of Augustine studies for the past 40 years and more. I would answer with a yes and a no. There’s a clear sense in which he didn’t see what was happening. The fall of Rome was, for him, epoch-marking, not epoch-making. It did not signal a new translatio imperii to some new imperial capital as we saw, except insofar as it meant the transition into tempora Christiana—Christian times—where the new emperor was properly God. And yet, he also knew that his world, by moving into these Christian times, was in dire need of serious revision. And he tried very hard in all his writings, but nowhere more openly than in The City of God, to give it that revision. That’s also why he wrote The Retractions, that curious work meant to tell people how to read his works, who he was talking to, what worried him, and what not to think he meant by his works to argue. 513

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And by writing this book, Augustine became, in a way, the first Augustinian—the first to try to live after Augustine; the first one to see that Augustine’s works are both resource for future thinking and living, and a tricky and by no means self-interpreting resource. He was the first then to realize the dangers of misreading his own texts. And he was the first to do what we have tried to do here, to make his writings—written so astutely for their own place and time—historically and contextually portable, communicable, applicable to worlds and eras unimaginable to the old bishop of Hippo. He was the first, but he was only the first of many. Again and again, the history of Augustinianism is the repeated history of the rediscovery of Augustine, not because he was ever truly forgotten, but because successive generations have to find ways to find their world pertinently addressed in the endless plenitude of wisdom and insight that seems to flow ceaselessly from his works. These rediscoveries were not only necessary because a new age asked new questions, and so demanded new things of the bishop and his works; ironically, they were also necessary since the church that he served attempted ceaselessly to forget the lessons that he had tried to teach it. The scholar who is perhaps the greatest historian of the Christian churches ever to have lived, Adolf von Harnack, once said, as a summary statement of his studies, that—and this is a quote from him: “The history of church doctrine in the West is a much-disguised struggle against Augustinianism.” He meant, I think that the church kept trying to forget Augustine, to misplace him. His beliefs were too inconvenient, too unsettling, too anti-authoritarian, and too demanding for those who want a well-ordered church and a stable and clear marker of the city of God. Such people want crisp lines and clear confessions, simple affirmations and brisk anathemas; and Augustine wanted none of this. Or rather, he might have wanted it, but he knew that it was impossible in this 514

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life that we have been granted in the world as we find it today. So he knew that the message he was teaching would always have to swim upstream against the currents of human prejudice, sloth, and even what passes for common sense. And so it has proved. Much of the history of Western thought has been a series of remarkable readings, and some of us would say misreadings, of Augustine’s thought. Indeed, I would say that all later Western thought is largely a series of footnotes to Augustine. I said earlier in these lectures that Western civilization has often identified Augustine with the whole heritage of the past, and so sought authorization for some view by finding it authorized, however tenuously, in the lines of one of his works. Examples of this abound. For instance, in the Decretum—the major work of medieval canon law—the 12th-century jurist Gratian quotes Augustine over 500 times, which seems to be the most number of citations outside of citations of scripture. Now, the Decretum was hugely important to all later legal thinking in the West; and through it, Augustine’s thinking has a subtle, silent impact on every parking ticket you have ever received. And it was not only legal thought that was influenced by Augustine; his impress is felt across our world. Medieval thought, obviously, is hugely informed by Augustine, of course; but so is the Reformation, which might never have happened had it not been for that errant Augustinian monk—he was a member of the Order of Saint Augustine—Luther, and his brooding over Augustine’s texts. And then Calvin reflecting on Augustine’s political thought and his theory of divine providence. Modernity bears itself a great debt to him, or rather to a series of misreaders of him. The voluntarism of thinkers like William of Ockham and Duns Scotus, thinkers whose picture of action and freedom has deeply shaped our own, begins in readings— and I would say misreadings—of Augustine on the will and sin. A version of Cartesian rationalism’s key phrase cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—actually, literally appears in The City of God 515

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itself as the phrase “If I am mistaken, I still exist”—Si fallor, sum. Although, Augustine was smart enough so that in some of his earliest writings, he had already refuted the worries that so vexed Descartes; and in fact, is now today seen by scholars as having anticipated some of Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s own thinking about the mind’s being-in-the-world that has moved us beyond a Cartesian rationalism’s paradoxes. Even that postmodernity itself, drawing as it does from thinkers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein, finds a way to learn from Augustine, and still does so today. Although, here again, with our own penchant for autobiography and subjective solipsism, it’s reasonable to suspect that we are more misreading him often than hearing his true voice. And in all of this, The City of God is especially important because among all of Augustine's works, The City was the one most copied for the next 1,500 years, and the one most carefully copied, as well. Given its scope and mass, imagine that among all of Augustine’s books, this 1,000 pages of Latin, we have the most copies of this. And understand, these were all done by hand. Only in the 20th century—in the mid-20th century, in fact—did the Confessions overtake it as the center of gravity for understanding who Augustine was and what he was arguing. So The City was much copied, but was it much read? Of this, there can be doubt. The best evidence we have against careful attention being frequently given to it is the kind of views that it was thought to underwrite. For instance, pretty quickly after Augustine died, a tradition emerged which read Augustine but retreated back into received ideas and could not understand the radicality of the revolution Augustine was proposing that we instigate. This view was a view about politics. It was propagated by Pope Gregory the Great, who lives from 540–604, and it governed much of the political thought of the High Middle Ages, although there were some dissenters and closer readers of Augustine.

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This tradition baptized Augustine into what was later labeled political Augustinianism. Now, this was taken as authentically Augustinian, though you can judge for yourself whether it should be considered such. On this view, the city of God was the church, the earthly city was the world, and Christian kings were types of Christ, so people in the church could serve Christ simply by obeying the king. Now, in our just past century—the 20th century—a new vision developed, one that saw Augustine as more suspicious of the political pretenses of human beings. Some thinkers in this tradition, like Reinhold Niebuhr, developed it in more fundamentally coldly realist directions. Other thinkers—among them, several actual Roman Catholic popes—emphasized the eschatological complexity, but reality, of the vision's moralism. On this reading of Augustine though, whether optimistic or more pessimistic, humans typically make a botch of ordering society, and politics is not a realm in which the human good can be realized. More recently still, other thinkers have modified this vision—not rejected it wholesale, but specified it in slightly different ways—and urge a more ambivalent account of Augustine's views on politics. These thinkers think he did not baptize whatever authorities were out there, yet nor did he condemn all politics as an abyssal night in which we are nevertheless condemned to stumble. It’s possible, they argued, for Augustine, for politics to be an oblique medium of grace and revelatory insight. And it’s only fair to let you know that your lecturer belongs to this school of interpreters of Augustine’s political thought. No doubt, further interpretations await development. To read The City is, after all, to be equipped with the tools to understand all these accounts; and to appreciate those places in that text, and in the Bible, which function as the nodes of especially dense interpretive contestation about these matters; and to be equipped with at least some of the tools to make your own decisions, both about those rival interpretations and the shape of political life in our world today. 517

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In short, to read The City is to come face to face with the history of political thought in the West and possibly live political thought today. Nor is Augustine’s influence limited to the world of thought alone. There’s a plausible case to be made that he even had some effect on actual world history. Consider the curious cases of China and Rome. In the 1st century C.E., roughly half of humanity was governed by two empires—China’s and Rome’s. These empires were both run by semidivine emperors in cities far vaster than any known before in the world. Both were similarly structured and faced similar internal struggles and difficulties due to tensions between provincial localities and the imperial metropolitan center. Both of these empires came to grief in similar ways— through struggles for power between rival forces in the heartland, and then swamped by barbarian invasions—although both also survived as ongoing states outside of the original core. And this all happened from the 1st–5th century or so, in both contexts. And then from the 6th century forward, the Chinese Empire began to rebuild itself, eventually reappearing as a coherent structure across all of its old territory and enduring up to today through a series of dynastic cycles. In the Mediterranean and Europe, however, no such reconstitution happened. Today there is a recognizable China, but Rome exists only as a dream, or a nightmare, and in the idea of things like the European Union. Now, what caused these divergent histories? There were a lot of different forces, but it seems clear that part of the reason was broadly ideological. Han China affirmed the value of Confucianism, which emphasizes the value of a unified state, horizontally and vertically integrated, governed by wise scholar-bureaucrats as an essential part of a harmoniously ordered cosmos, from divine forces down to terrestrial ones. In the West, Christian ideology could give lip service to Rome, but it could never wholeheartedly endorse the idea that the political structure of the empire was an essential part of God’s perduring plan for the world. 518

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And so political actors in the East would operate in a context where restoring the empire was a widely affirmed immediate good— existentially as well as politically—while political actors in the West held instead that the empire had a hint of the demonic about it. And the decisive force for the way political thinkers in the West thought of after this crisis was, it seems clear, Augustine. So some people understood what he had been trying to teach, even if when they, in turn, tried to teach those lessons to others, they found themselves speaking to people with stones in their head and mud in their ears. But their audiences cannot be entirely blamed for their failure to understand Augustine. For perhaps the conditions that would have made such understanding much more typically available, at least to the educated elites of the day, disappeared very quickly after Augustine’s demise. For he was in Henri-Irenee Marrou’s phrase—Marrou is a famous Augustinian scholar, among other things—Augustine was a Latin Byzantine; a figure who imagined the continuity of civilization on its linguistic, cultural, and political bases, from ancient Greece, through Rome, to 5th-century North Africa. This Latin Byzantinism believed in the analogies, even the continuities, between psyche and polis, soul and city, and polis and theopolis, city and the city of God. It taught that through education—through paideia—and it suggested that we might come to appreciate these harmonies in our own lives if we were properly educated in them. Now, while Augustine dissented from this vision—at least in its confidence that such harmony is available after the Fall—his basic thought-world, it is proposed, remained rooted in the idea that analogies between these different levels were real and useful. This culture of Latin Byzantinism disappears after Augustine. For those snug in its assumptions, the coming of the barbarians really was the end of their world. A civilization that understood itself to be 1,500 years old, and an empire that really was a 1,000-year reich collapsed in the West in a matter of 30 years. 519

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As I said earlier, there were men in the West who lived long enough for their experience to encompass both a vital memory, at least, of the greatness of the Emperor Theodosius and the shame of the last emperor of the West being sent into ignominious exile by a crude barbarian king. Much else went into exile with him, and like that emperor, it never came back. In two ways, the barbarian occupation of the West undercut this Latin Byzantine imagination. First, the belief in paideia in culture and education could never survive such an experience. The confidence of the culture that its heritage would sustain the next generation was undercut when that next generation saw that it was ruled by barbarians. Second, neither was the political vision easily translated into a logic of multiple states. For the theopolis to have a secular political antipode, it must be as all-encompassing in its realm as God’s empire was in its own. This imagination had a very hard time with the idea of multiple political states, each equally legitimate, not engaged in a constant war for rivalry and domination. But for us, and for centuries before us, Christendom has become merely a spiritual fact at best, never a political one. And this was not the way a Latin Byzantinist would have imagined the world to work. If Marrou’s story of Latin Byzantinism is true, and if Augustine was one of the last Latin Byzantinists, then a disquieting possibility rears its head. We, who think of ourselves as descendants of Augustine, may in fact not be his descendants, but rather more clearly inheritors of a different tradition altogether—the tradition of the austere monastics of the Egyptian desert. These monastics communicated to France and became in Gaul, and then across Europe, the central institutional forces for the Western church. They rejected the continuities between the pre-Christian world and the Christian one, and they saw the ancient culture as a shipwreck it had to flee. And this tradition was the basis in the West for the infrastructure of the Latin churches, and also the universities when they appeared 500/600 years later. And 520

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maybe this tradition still influences the way we see the world today. So perhaps we have made a mistake about our real ancestors. It’s a disquieting thought, and I’ll leave you to be disquieted by it. Nonetheless, what insight we can glean from his substantial books seems substantial enough. All his lessons are powerful; all of them are relevant. And of course, our world is very different from Augustine’s, but there are some echoes. In America today, the nation is dealing with war in Afghanistan, just as Alexander the Great did 700 years before Augustine lived. The timeliness of this work is sometimes astounding. All this is true and good. It’s philosophically and theologically profound; politically acute and wise; culturally erudite. But for me, the central value of the work is the challenge it puts before your mind— what I’ve called the pedagogy of threat. Our minds are sharpened if we imagine that the work we are engaged with can answer back to us, can contradict us, show us to be bad readers, reveal us to be enmeshed in hypocrisies and contradictions. I said something earlier in these lectures that I want to return to now. It’s astonishing to me how much is known by people almost entirely by hearsay, and how much of that hearsay is demonstrably false—such is the case, as I’ve tried to show with Augustine and The City of God. Despite being so well-known, the book remains to an astonishing degree—perhaps because of its very well-knownness and its sheer scale—an unsummited alp and an undiscovered country. For you to do better, you have to learn to see Augustine not as fixed words on a page, but as a quicksilver mind behind it. For you to do better, that is, it helps to see Augustine not fundamentally as a book, but as a man. We know that Saint Augustine’s bones rest in the basilica in Pavia, alongside the bones of Boethius. He was a real human being. If you let yourself believe it, that vision can reshape you. That belief bespeaks a kind of awe, a kind of admiration, a kind of love. 521

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Once at a conference, I met an eminent French scholar of Augustine, one of the greatest of the 20th century—a man named Claude Lepelley. I told him, nervously, that I was but an amateur when it came to the study of Augustine. As I remember him, he was a tall man with a deep and rich voice, and I believe I saw sympathy and fellow-feeling in his eyes as he looked down on me from his heights of altitude and erudition and replied: "But of course, when it comes to Augustine, we are all amatores." He was making a joke and a deep one. For our word “amateur” does indeed come from “amatore,” from “lover.” An amateur is not a skilled executor of a craft—a professional—but has instead the blessing of enthusiasm. That scholar was saying we are nothing but amateurs in trying to keep up with Augustine. And so Augustine seems to us, the more we understand him, impossibly, inhumanly great. The breadth, and depth, and range of his thought, its color, its vibrancy, make it easier for us to imagine him as not continuous with us at all—as not properly part of the human race, but some other kind of a genius. We need an antidote to that image and all the other fixed images akin to it. For Augustine was, in the end, a living human being; and he wanted us to know that. And his thought cannot be understood unless you understand that it was put together, in its genius and its errors, its blindnesses and its insights, its tedium and its ecstasy, by a human just like you. When you realize this, the limits you have settled for in your life will seem flimsy, and perhaps rightly so; and your failures to understand Augustine, to keep up with him in his arguments in his readings, will seem all the more inexcusable. And then, when you turn back to his book, it will come alive for you, talk back to you, in new and usefully annoying ways. So, as a first stab at such an antidote, and as a final envoi for these lectures, I want to give you an image of a real place and a sketch of an imaginary scene—both of which are meant to give you this book in a different way than we have heretofore tried to receive it. 522

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Consider this: Augustine’s city of Hippo Regius still stands there, near the coast, in Algeria. If you go, you can walk amidst those ruins, too, in the middle of what is now Annaba, Algeria; about a mile from the modern coastline, on a plane beneath a hill with a rather emphatic French Colonial Basilica of Saint Augustine, which sits awkwardly above the Muslim city surrounding it. But the ruins of Augustine’s own ancient basilica remain on that flat plane below the hill, mostly now stones set in the ground, as almost all the other stones—the stones above ground—were taken away for other buildings. It’s still pleasant to stand there and look toward the coast and imagine that the light must have looked like this, some days, as Augustine stood there, wondering what was the news that the ship coming into the harbor was bringing. And if you go, here is the image that may serve to focus this book in your mind. Walk amidst the ruined grounds of the ancient basilica. Find the space of the monastic residences, the cloister garden, perhaps an area that became the scriptorium. And when you do, imagine this: Sometime in the fall of 411, probably, 1,600 and more years ago, perhaps in that cloister garden there; perhaps in the scriptorium in one of the buildings there; perhaps in a small quiet study he used for his composition over there, Augustine stood at a window looking out—or in the middle of a room—hands clasped behind his back, looking down. And then he nodded to the scribe who perched his pen above the paper, and Augustine began to dictate, saying: “Gloriosissimam.”

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Bibliography Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. (1st ed. 1967) ———. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. ———. Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002. ———. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Bruno, Michael. Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014. Burnaby, John. Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938. Burnell, Peter. The Augustinian Person. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005. Cooper, Kate. The Fall of the Roman Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. De Lubac, Henri. Augustinianism and Modern Theology. Translated by Lancelot Sheppard. London: G. Chapman, 1969. Dodaro, Robert. Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of St. Augustine. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dodaro, Robert, ed. Augustine: Political Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 524

Bibliography

Dodaro, Robert, and George Lawless, eds. Augustine and His Critics. London: Routledge, 2000. Doody, John, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth, eds. Augustine and Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Augustine and the Limits of Politics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Fitzgerald, Allan D., O.S.A., ed. Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009. Fitzgerald, Allan D., O.S.A., Mark Vessey, and Karla Pollmann, eds. History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God. Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999. Friedricksen, Paula. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Gregory, Eric. Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Harmless, William. Augustine and the Catechumenate. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995. Harrison, Carol. Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Heather, Peter. The Fall of the Roman Empire. London: Macmillan, 2005.

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Books That Matter: The City of God

Heyman, George. The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Kotkin, Joel. The City: A Global History. New York: Modern Library, 2005. Lendon, J. Edward. Empire of Honor: The Art of Governance in the Roman World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Leyser, Conrad. Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Markus, Robert. Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. ———. The End of Ancient Christianity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Mathewes, Charles. Evil and the Augustinian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. O’Daly, Gerard. Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pollman, Karla, et al., eds. Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. TeSelle, Eugene. Augustine the Theologian. New York: Herder & Herder, 1970. Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Wetzel, James. Augustine and the Limits of Virtue. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 526

Bibliography

———. Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Wilken, Robert L. The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Williams, Rowan. On Augustine. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

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