|
City of God
By Augustine
(Written 413-426 A.D.)
City of God, by Aurelius Augustinus-or
Augustine of Hippo, or, more familiarly, St. Augustine-is one of the
towering works of the human intellect: a book to be studied, not read.
Together with his contemporaries, St. Ambrose and St. Jerome, among
the fathers of the Christian Church, Augustine is also the foundation
block of Western thought in the post-classical, Christian era. The
importance of City of God has to do with its reconciliation of
ancient paganism, pre-Christian Hebraicism, imperial Roman paganism,
and early Christianity in making sense, for Christian minds, of
Western history in all its confusing, paradoxical, and contradictory
elements. This feat, Augustine's book accomplishes by explaining
history as a reciprocating process of the divine and the profane, the
supernatural and the natural, the elect and the unredeemed, operating
through the medium of time across the ages. It is fair to say that the
intellectual tradition of the Christian West, with all its fundamental
and distinctive components come together at last, begins with the
"publication" of City of God, whose twenty-two books were
written over a period of thirteen years, between 413 and 426.
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius (after Carthage
the second largest town in North Africa) where he had settled four
years after his baptism in Milan in 387 to live as a monk in his
native land, had lesser ambitions and a narrower end in mind as he
began his book. Three years earlier, in 410, Alaric and his army had
sacked Rome; a disaster for which the city's senatorial families and
others of the pagan upper class blamed the Christians, whom they
accused of bringing down upon all Romans, impartially and without
distinction, the wrath of the flouted gods of Rome, against whom even
their own God of the Cross had been helpless or unwilling to save His
own people. Numerous wealthy and powerful citizens fled across the
Mediterranean to Africa, where they continued to inveigh against the
impious Christians. "This," Augustine later explained, "fired me with
zeal for the house of God and I began to write the City of God
to confute their blasphemies and falsehood."
City of God, composed over a period of many
years and amid frequent interruptions, is neither a well-formed book
nor, for the most part, a stylistically distinguished one. Owing to
the intellectual decadence of the times, Augustine's education was
largely in rhetoric, of which he had been a professor in Milan;
ignorant of Greek history, thought, and literature, he knew almost
nothing of Plato, and nothing at all of Aristotle. As David Knowles
has observed, "It is a measure of the capacity and power of
Augustine's mind that one who had never been trained in philosophical
method.could himself join the select company of the world's greatest
thinkers and be a prime agency in weaving Greek thought into Christian
theology." Augustine's intellectual triumph was made possible to a
considerable extent by a familiarity with the Neoplatonists. Yet his
book is shapeless, discursive, and self-distracted. Hardly a model of
classic literary form, it fails to present its author as a systematic
social or political thinker. City of God is among those works
of genius that succeed against the odds, and against themselves.
Augustine's main preoccupation in this sprawling
book of over a thousand pages is to present the human world as divided
between two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, existing side
by side throughout history but overlapping also and intermingling,
institutionally as well as in terms of individual souls. The first is
comprised of God's people (the Pilgrim Church on Earth), the second of
those self-dedicated to the ways of man rather than to the ways of
God. Each city progresses toward its own separate destiny awaiting it
at the end of the world; until then, the two remain yoked together in
a perplexing, sometimes tragic, and often frustrating symbiosis in
which, however, men with the aid of Scripture and the Church may
discern God's scheme for the salvation of man.
".God's City," Augustine explains, "lives in this
world's city, as far as its human element is concerned; but it lives
there as an alien sojourner." In his view, the City-or People-of God
has always existed, at times in families or as a tribe. Thus, having
refuted the enemies of God at the beginning of his book, he "write[s]
about the origin, the development, and the destined ends of the two
cities." Augustine traces humanity's twin lines of descent as we read
of them in the Old Testament, starting with the offspring of Adam and
Eve and proceeding on their separate ways: "Now Cain was the first son
born to those two parents of mankind, and he belonged to the City of
Man; the later son, Abel, belonged to the City of God.. Scripture
tells us that Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not
found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it
produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on
pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes." Augustine next
recounts the history of the earthly kingdom (the Egyptians, the
Greeks, the Assyrians, the Romans) in parallel with the history of the
Jews, from the birth of Abraham down to the coming of Christ, and to
the Jewish prophets' foretelling the of Christ's birth. In conclusion
to Book XVIII, immediately before his speculations on the last
persecutions and the coming of the Antichrist, Augustine makes the
famous assertion that, just as the Church contains the reprobate, or
damned, in addition to the elect, so the earthly city and the Jewish
people both number many godly persons, whom God in His wisdom has
ordained to dwell apart, physically or institutionally, from the
People of God. Plainly, Augustine fails to draw clear distinctions
between God's People as a leaven within pagan society; God's People as
the Church (the mystical Body of Christ); and God's People ordered as
a nation-a failing, if such it is, that has been noted by innumerable
of his readers.
It has been observed, fairly, that City of God
is less a discrete book than it is a succession of commentaries on
various aspects of a single loosely defined subject. Only the first
few Books, for instance, directly address the author's stated purpose
in writing his book, which was to confound the pagan Romans who
asserted that the sack of Rome amounted to the revenge of the city's
gods for having been denied and insulted by the Christian minority.
(Rather, Augustine argues, those Romans "should give credit to this
Christian era for the fact that these savage barbarians showed mercy
beyond the custom of war-whether they so acted in general in honor of
the name of Christ, or in places specially dedicated to Christ's name,
buildings of such size and capacity as to give mercy a wider range.")
The gods failed to save Ilium, as well as Rome, who owed her success
not to the gods-who delight in, and even demand, obscenity both on
stage and in their own religious ceremonies--but to her own virtue.
These gods, if they exist at all, are rather demons, who can bless men
neither with worldly happiness nor with eternal life.
Having dealt to his satisfaction with the
denigrators of Christianity, Augustine proceeds to ridicule the
"select" gods of Rome, and to praise by contrast the Platonists as
being near-Christians. He defends the truth of Scripture, discussing
the scriptural understanding of creation, time, and of angels, and
also the nature of evil, which he calls nonexistent of itself, and
causeless. ("Evil is contrary to nature; in fact it can only do harm
to nature; and it would not be a fault to withdraw from God were it
not that it is more natural to adhere to him. It is that fact which
makes the withdrawal a fault. That is why the choice of evil is
an impressive proof that the nature is good.") He confronts
apparent scriptural "problems" such as man's creation, the existence
of human monsters, unnatural longevity, and so forth, and suggests
explanations for these mysteries. After this, he fixes the histories
of the People of God and their earthly nemesis in relation to one
another. Finally, in the last four Books, Augustine deals with the
nature of mankind's supreme good (which he identifies as peace), with
the Last Judgment, the nature of eternal punishment, the Creation and
Resurrection, and the Vision of God. Also, he returns to the subject
of Scipio Aemilianus's understanding of the nature of the Republic,
which he has discussed earlier in the text. (Scipio, for having
destroyed Carthage and Numantia, was one of the great heroes of the
second century B.C.) And here he appears to make a profound
contribution to the modern (though not postmodern) understanding of
the state, and of society itself.
G.K. Chesterton said that the problem with the
modern world is not that it is wrong, but that it is crazed. Craze is
a function of modernism's addiction to, and worship of, chaos: the
satanic perversion of the divine order established by God. Augustine,
in City of God, shows himself to have been keenly aware that
the interests of the City of God are directly advanced by the
encouragement of worldly peace and order in the City of Man. (That is
why St. Paul instructs us to pray for our rulers.) And peace and order
in the City of Man are furthered by the reocgnition of distinctions
among individual men and among the peoples of the earth. If these
distinctions are not observed, the social order of the earthly city
tends to break toward chaos; and chaos operates to the detriment of
the heavenly one, whose tribulations on earth are only deepened by
social (and political) turmoil and confusion.
Augustine seems to have recognized the difficulties
socially complicated societies face in maintaining order and holding
chaos at bay, thus securing the ultimate salvation of the City of God.
A degree of social complexity is, of course, not just inevitable but a
part of God's plan for humanity as long as the present world shall
last. On the other hand, complexity needs to be minimized wherever
possible, to ensure the social order, intellectual coherence, and
religious orthodoxy the Christian faith requires to accomplish its
task of saving the greatest number of souls, while preparing the world
as a final offering to be laid at the feet of Christ at the Second
Coming.
"While the Heavenly City," Augustine writes, "is on
a pilgrimage in this world, she calls out citizens from all nations
and so collects a society of aliens, speaking all languages. She takes
no account of any differences in laws, customs, and institutions, by
which earthly peace is achieved and preserved-not that she annuls or
abolishes any of these, rather she maintains them (for whatever
divergences there are among the diverse nations, those institutions
have one aim-earthly peace), provided that no hindrance is presented
thereby to the religion which teaches that the one and true God is to
be worshipped."
At first glance, this passage might easily be
construed as advocating the creation of what a contemporary journalist
has advertised as the First Universal Nation, comprising "a society of
nations, speaking all languages." A closer reading shows that the
"citizens" are called "out" in a spiritual way, rather than in a
physical sense: not from within the boundaries of their earthly
nations to create a supernation in some other part of the world (such
as America), but from the confinements of their spiritual ignorance
and sin, to bear witness to the God Who is Truth in their own lands.
And so today's shibboleth-multiculturalism--for St.
Augustine would not be the outrageous contradiction in terms as we
know it, but the genuine thing: what used to be called the
international community, its international components leavened to a
greater or lesser extent by centers or outposts of the heavenly one. |
