Augustine
Augustine
Aurelius Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo Regius (now Bona) in Africa, is by common consent the greatest name in political philosophy between Cicero and Thomas Aquinas. He was the first thinker to attempt the elaboration of a systematic Christian philosophy of society; he set the stage for the great controversy over the relation between church and state that was to be the central preoccupation of political philosophers throughout the ensuing centuries; and it has been claimed for him, variously, that he is the keystone of a supposed “bridge” that leads from classical political philosophy (much of which he certainly knew at first hand) to modern political philosophy, that he is the founder of the philosophy of history, and that he is one of the remote sources of that emphasis upon “the individual” and “individuality” that some authorities deem to be characteristic of the intellectual tradition of the West. His thought is known to us primarily through two books, The Confessions, written in the years 397–401, and The City of God, which he began in the year 413 and completed in 425. Augustine was, inter alia, a teacher of rhetoric, an ecclesiastical administrator who greatly influenced the history of the Roman Catholic church in Africa, a theologian, and the founder of the “rule” observed even today by many Catholic religious orders.
There are several major doctrines commonly associated with Augustine’s name. (1) Man, in his quest for knowledge of the highest good (which he is duty-bound to achieve) and of the greatest evil (which he is duty-bound to shun), can find infallible guidance only in sacred Scriptures. (2) Man must, therefore, cultivate the “sacred science,” which bases itself upon principles revealed to man by God and treats the subject matters of the several philosophical sciences (such as ethics, politics, and history) with an eye to those principles. (3) While the ancient philosophers rightly held that the life of politics is not the best life (Plato) and that man must pursue a way of life more divine than human (Aristotle), they could not, in the absence of sacred science, define the goal of the best life or discover the path that leads to it; concretely, the higher truth toward which they were groping is the truth that man owes absolute allegiance to no earthly society. (4) Man’s proper goal and the path he must follow are laid down by the holy laws that God gave to the people of Israel, by the Old Testament prophets, and in accordance with the latter’s prophecies, by Jesus Christ and the church Jesus founded; the man who follows that path follows God. (5) Both history and politics achieve a higher unity and acquire new and valid meaning when considered in the context of the principles of sacred science.
The Confessions, an autobiography, is superficially an account of Augustine’s conversion to Christianity and of his subsequent spiritual struggles and ordeals. Many critics, indeed, have read it as merely the record of a single individual’s progress from bad to good and from unbelief to belief. More penetrating critics have seen in it a history, epic in conception and execution, of a representative man’s struggle to find a foothold that will enable him to contemplate reality from the point of view of the Divine. Confession, Augustine argued in Book x, i-iv, is less a profession of faith than a mode of discovery; and in Book x, v ff., he contended that the individual can, through the faculty of memory, become conscious of his own existence in history and thus of himself as the subject of history. Some scholars hold that Augustine’s act of self-awareness constitutes a major turning point in the intellectual and spiritual history of Western man.
Augustine’s contributions to political philosophy may be considered under two categories: “the two visible societies” and “the two invisible cities.”
The two visible societies. Although previous political philosophers had taught that the problems of politics necessarily transcend political philosophy and must be dealt with on the metaphysical or even the religious level and that political authority must therefore be confined within certain bounds, Augustine was the first political philosopher to pose the problem of the limits of political philosophy in the now familiar terms of two “spheres”: the secular, that is, the state, and the religious, or the church, each a distinct “society” and each beneficent. Augustine, echoing Aristotle, defined the state as the rule of free men over free men; it is rendered necessary by the “order of nature” and properly concerns itself with “just dealing” and “good manners.” He did not, as some interpreters suggest, attribute the existence of the state as such to “sin” and “guilt”; rather, sin and guilt, which take the form of “ambition” and “proud sovereignty,” explain only one kind of state, namely, the state whose characteristic is not rule of free men by free men through deliberation (which is the rule prescribed both by nature and by God) but rule by masters through coercive authority. Augustine thus enunciated ideas that are genuine landmarks in the development of antiauthoritarian political philosophy in the West.
The two invisible cities. History, for Augustine, is the unfolding relation between the “earthly city,” the abode of all men dominated by self-love, and the “heavenly city,” made up of men dominated by the love of God. The history of the former is “profane history,” an account of man’s actual political life; the history of the latter is “salvation history,” that is, an account of man’s relatedness to God. Armed with these two concepts—which must not be confused with those of church and state— Augustine attempted (a) a total critique of pagan political order, especially the Roman Empire, which he deemed bad in principle because wrongly related to God and divine law, and (b) the outlines of a Christian philosophy of right order and of the conditions under which man’s history becomes meaningful.
To do justice to Augustine’s theory of the state and to his indictment of the pagan empire one must understand the visible societies against the background of the invisible cities. Despite what some commentators have said, Augustine was not a detractor of the state but taught rather that the citizens of the heavenly city have a duty to work within the state on behalf of the rule of free men and so against the ambition and pride that are its typical vices; only the “blessed” can move the state toward its proper end, which is the temporal common good; any attempt, like that of the empire, to develop within the state the virtues necessary to that end without reference to God and divine law, is foredoomed to failure; the virtues it develops, because pursued not for God’s sake, but their own, are in fact vices. The state, then, far from being simply evil, is more or less good to the extent that it is penetrated—through the ministrations of the second visible society, the church—by the heavenly city. The critical problem for political philosophy thus became with Augustine (and continued to be through many centuries) that of the relation between church and state.
The meaning of history, Augustine argued, is not to be found within history itself, since historical events are, as such, empty of inner significance; it is to be found rather in the eruption into history of transhistorical purpose. The history of the earthly city is a history of sin, death, and human failure; that of the heavenly city, beginning with Adam, is a record of meaningful growth and development down through the centuries to the time of Christ, whose redemptive ministry initiates a final, nondevelopmental historical epoch, to end with the Second Coming of Christ. Augustine repudiated the hitherto regnant notions of historical inevitability and of historical development as “cyclical” and taught that while God “foreknows” some events and while there is a Divine Providence at work in history, historical events are nevertheless caused by free decisions made by man in the context of Divine Governance. If Western man typically thinks of himself as living in a historical present, between a past made by the free decisions of his forbears and a future for whose shape he and other men are responsible—that is, in historical time—Augustine has certainly been one of his great teachers.
Willmoore Kendall
[Related to Augustine’s work arePolitical theory; State; and the biographies ofAquinas; Aristotle; Plato.]
WORKS BY AUGUSTINE
Basic Writings of Saint Augustine. 2 vols., edited with an introduction and notes by Whitney J. Oates. New York: Random House, 1948. ? Volume 1: The Confessions; Twelve Treaties. Volume 2: The City of God; On the Trinity.
Introduction to St. Augustine: The City of God, Being Selections From the De civitate Dei, Including Most of the XIXth Book, With Text. Translated and with a running commentary by A. H. Barrow. London: Faber, 1950.
The Works of Aurelius Augustine. 15 vols., edited by Marcus Dods. Edinburgh: Clark, 1872–1934.
WORKS ABOUT AUGUSTINE
Andresen, Carl (editor) 1962 Zum Augustin-Gespräch der Gegenwart. Darmstadt (Germany): Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ? See especially the bibliography on pages 459–583.
Burleigh, John H. S. 1949 The City of God: A Study of St. Augustine’s Philosophy. London: Nisbet.
Callahan, John F. 1948 Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Chroust, Anton-hermann 1950 St. Augustine’s Philosophical Theory of Law. Notre Dame Lawyer 25:285–315.
Deane, Herbert A. 1963 The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Figgis, John N. 1921 The Political Aspects of St. Augustine’s City of God. London: Longmans.
Friberg, Hans D. 1944 Love and Justice in Political Theory: A Study of Augustine’s Definition of the Commonwealth. Univ. of Chicago Press.
Garrett, Thomas M. 1956 St. Augustine and the Nature of Society. New Scholasticism 30:16–36.
Gilson, ÉTienne H. (1931) 1960 The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine. Translated by L. E. M. Lynch. New York: Random House. ? First published as Introduction à l’étude de Saint Augustin.
Guardini, Romano (1935) 1960 The Conversion of Augustine. Westminster, Md.: Newman. ? First published as Die Bekehrung des heiligen Aurelius Augustinus.
Hearnshaw, Fossey J. C.; and Carlyle, A. J. (1923) 1950 St. Augustine and The City of God. Pages 34–52 in Fossey J. C. Hearnshaw (editor), The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Mediaeval Thinkers. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Ladner, Gerhart B. 1953 The History of Ideas in the Christian Middle Ages From the Fathers to Dante in American and Canadian Publications of the Years 1940–1952. Traditio 9:439–514.
Ladner, Gerhart B. 1959 The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. ? See especially pages 153–283 on “St. Augustine and the Difference Between the Reform Ideas of the Christian East and West.”
McCoy, Charles N. R. 1963 The Structure of Political Thought: A Study in the History of Political Ideas. New York: McGraw-Hill. ? See especially pages 99–131 on “Christianity and Political Philosophy: The Relation of Church and State.”
Marshall, Robert T. 1952 Studies in the Political and Socio-religious Terminology of the De civitate Dei. Washington: Catholic Univ. of America Press.
Millar, Moorhouse F. X. 1930 The Significance of St. Augustine’s Criticism of Cicero’s Definition of the State. Volume 1, pages 99–109 in Philosophia perennis: Abhandlungen zu ihrer Vergangheit und Gegenwart. Edited by Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen. Regensburg (Germany): Habbel.