This week I am republishing with slight changes a 2020 blog on Augustine and what he can teach us today. This is an important blog because it shows a connection between ancient Greek and Christian notions of justice.
The years between Augustine’s birth and death (354-430 A.D.) encompass one of the most turbulent times in ancient history. The Roman Empire, instituted by Octavian (Caesar Augustus) and his adopted father Julius Caesar, had reached a point of crisis. Constantine declared the Christian religion to be the official religion of the empire in 313 A.D. By the end of the 4th Century, the Empire was troubled. Chronically over-extended, it was vulnerable to attack, which Aleric’s successful invasion clearly demonstrated (410 A.D.).
More importantly, by the end of Augustine’s life, the intellectual and moral foundations of Greco-Roman civilization were seriously eroded. The virtues of the Roman Republic, which Augustine recognized were fundamental to the earthly success of Rome, had long ago eroded. Its pagan rites and religion were no longer compelling. Roman political and social institutions were decayed. There was great economic inequality and successive emperors and those who put them in power had looted the public treasury. The philosophies of ancient Greece that underpinned the intellectual life of Rome were failing. A sense of cultural and political decay was everywhere. This is the context in which Augustine wrote City of God. [1]
In many ways, the time of Augustine was not so different from our own day. The confident, world-wide extension of Western Civilization, which began about 300 years ago, is now disintegrating into the nihilism and self-doubt of post-modernism.[2] In retrospect, the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was an event that shook American self-confidence in a way similar to Aleric’s three-day occupation of Rome. Modern science, which promised and achieved so much, created the potential for human antihalation and a kind of technological oppression of human freedom that is inhuman. Modern economies, which have produced a standard of living unimaginable only a century ago, have also created a sense of alienation among many people and an ecological crisis of greater or lesser magnitude.
In our nation there is growing economic inequality, and greed and corruption have made many politicians wealthy. There is no way the entire world can consume resources at the level of the currently developed nations without an ecological catastrophe. It is obvious that the way in which the economic growth of the West has occurred cannot continue without some kind of change. Western democracies, the supreme political achievement of the Enlightenment, seem unable to adapt to a new post-industrial culture and give new generations a sense of justice and peace.
Into the his own day, Augustine began the process of integrating the intellectual deposit of Platonic philosophy with the spiritual dynamism of Christian faith, an interaction that ultimately gave rise to the civilization of the European Middle Ages, which ended in the emergence of the Modern world. It is worth studying and adapting the thought of the great Doctor of the Church if for no other reason than the similarities of his and our times and the need for a new synthesis of philosophy, theology, and government. We need a different, new and compelling integration of Christian faith and public life.
Harmony and the Earthly City
One interesting thing inherent in a Biblical look at politics is an understanding that the Bible has less to say about politics than one might imagine. In general, Christians are urged to act wisely, share the gospel, obey rulers and to seek the peace of the cities in which we find ourselves (Jeremiah 29:7; Romans 13:1). This notion of seeking the peace of the cities into which we have been called is important. When the Jews were sent into captivity in Babylon, God sent Jeremiah the following message:
Thus, says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare (Jeremiah 29:4-7).
There is an interesting dialectic in Augustine between peace (”Shalom” in Hebrew) and justice. [3] Human beings by nature seek peace. All human striving, including wars, begin and continue in the search for peace. This peace for which the human race seeks is a kind of harmony where all parts of society are integrated in a just way. Augustine quotes Cicero speaking through the voice of Scipio using a musical analogy as follows:
In the case of music for strings or wind, and in vocal music, there is a certain harmony to be kept between the different parts, and if this is altered or disorganized the cultivated ear finds it intolerable; and the united efforts of dissimilar voices are blended into harmony by the exercise of restraint. In the same way, a community of different classes, high, low, and middle, unites, like the varying sounds of music, to form a harmony of the different parts through the exercise of rational restraint; and what is called harmony in music answers to concord in a community, and is the closest bond of security in a country. And this is not possible without justice. [4]
Social harmony is found when all the various classes of society find their proper place in a kind of social concord that allows the society to prosper.  The ancient world did not assume that absolute equality was the goal of the state. Instead, the goal of the state was the achievement or social harmony among the various groups that comprise it. These groups have different capacities, talents, and abilities. Each needs to be treated fairly with the goal of increasing social harmony.
Augustine accepts the historic definition of justice as “giving each person his or her due.” Implicit in Augustine and Cicero is the idea that justice is not found in complete equality as to all things, because people are different. Societies are made up of people with vastly differing ideas, accomplishments, talents, and intelligence. Differences in outcome are not avoided or entirely eliminated in the just state, but harmonized. Justice is not, in Augustine’s view, any form of absolute equality, social, economic or otherwise, but in a sense that society is constructed so that each person receives his or her due, whatever that may be. [5]
Here we find both a critique of our own society and some notion of a way forward. The identity politics of the past few years, and the increasing level of social distrust and alienation from institutions has created a lack of social harmony that is reflected in the violence of our cities and the impossible hostility of our politics. If we approach the problem from the strategies and tactics of the past, then this situation must continue until one side eliminates the other by some means, legal, constitutional, or otherwise. The alternative is to rebuild the bonds of social harmony and cohesion. This cannot be done by attempting to eliminate differences, but by harmonizing those differences in a just way. In fact, at root it involves rebuilding the bonds of love within our society.
Justice and a Harmonious Government
As mentioned above, a true commonwealth or “weal of the community” cannot exist without justice, and justice is not necessarily to be found in any particular system of government. A monarch may be an unjust tyrant, an aristocrat an unfair oligarch, or an entire people an unreasonable, violent mob or “collective tyranny.” [6] As a basic matter, justice is simply giving to each person his or her due without prejudice. However, the exact characteristics of justice in any concrete moment in history depends upon the leadership of a government, whatever its form. This means that justice. and the peace of a society, cannot be divorced from matters of morality, as too often we attempt to do in the secular West today.
One interesting and important aspect of Augustine’s political thought is the relationship between love and justice in his thinking. Augustine distinguishes between the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, and the cardinal virtues of prudence, tolerance, temperance, and justice. The theological virtues provide the source and basis for the other virtues. Because earthly justice flows from God and the character of God, and because God is love, justice finally rests upon love. Even earthly justice is a result of love, for only those who love others and who seek the best of others can actually dispense justice.
The Earthly City cannot dispense absolute justice because it is centered on self-love and not on love of others and of God. The utterly self-giving love that is the “act and being of God” is the only source of lasting justice and social harmony. Only in the self-giving love of the Triune God, manifested in relationship to others, can political leadership give to each what is due to that person in fully other-centered fairness.
Unfortunately, because of human sin and finitude, this is impossible for human beings. Therefore, any concrete Earthly City is inevitably ultimately founded on human desire and love of self rather than the love of God and others. As a result of the Fall, human loves are inevitably and universally “disordered,” resulting in the human propensity to fail to love others as their selves. And, because human loves are disordered, love in the Earthly City is disordered. [7] Therefore, merely human love cannot produce justice and social harmony. In such a situation, absolute justice is impossible.
The result for Augustine is that the Earthly City is without true and lasting justice. In the end, the Earthly City is like a gang of criminals dispensing whatever justice appeals to the whims of its political leaders. Societies experience a greater or lesser degree of true justice, but there can never be full and complete justice. At best, there is a kind of social compact as to how the spoils of their civilization is to be divided, but this division is lacking in true justice. [8]
Augustine’s analysis is an important one in our day. We see evidence that the historic virtues of our own Republic are both under attack and increasingly irrelevant to the lives of many people. We also see evidence in recent scandals that our Earthly City has some characteristics of a “gang of criminals”—crimes are committed by public officials and then covered up by the government, including law enforcement agencies. Large media outlets ignore or suppress the information the public needs to respond to such corruption.
A politics of wisdom and love has much to say to such a situation. There cannot be social peace in the face of a politics that cares only for power. Where wisdom and love, and resulting justice, are given scope to work in a society, there can be an increasing degree of justice and of peace. This is the hope for which Christians in politics must work.
Politics and Augustine
Augustine wrote City of God as both an apologetic for Christian faith and as a defense of Christian faith in light of the pagan attacks against Christianity resulting from the decline of Rome, which pagans attributed to the decline of its ancient martial and political virtues. While it is true that Augustine’s work has a major place in the emergence of “Christendom” in Middle Age Europe, it was not written for that purpose or with that purpose in mind. It was, as mentioned last week, written to promote and encourage tolerance of Christian faith within the late Roman Empire, which was under attack.
Christian faith is under attack in our own day as well, and there are secular figures, well-meaning and otherwise, that desire to expunge faith from public life. There is, therefore, a need to defend Christian faith in our own day, though perhaps not in the same way as Augustine did in City of God.
The Heavenly City has a place in the Earthly City: it is to serve the city and seek its welfare (or peace). The members of the Members of the Heavenly City are pilgrims, so to speak, in the Earthly Cities of which they are a part. Like their leader, they do not come to rule as the pagans do, but to serve in love the Earthly City. But that argument will have to await a later blog.
Copyright 2024, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved
[1] St. Augustine, City of God tr. Gerald G. Walsh, S.J. et all, abridged ed. (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1958), hereinafter “Image Edition.” Unless otherwise specified, all quotes come from this edition. When noted, quotes may come from St. Augustine, City of God tr. Henry Bettenson (London, ENG: Penguin Books, 1984), hereinafter “Penguin Edition.”
[2] I like to reiterate that all “post-modernism” means is “after modernism.” In fact, the deconstructive form of post-modernism may only be last decadent phase of modernism, a modernism that has lost its confidence in human reason and capacity to find and understand truth, beauty, justice, and the like on the basis of reason alone and is now without a foundation for moving forward. If this is the case, then perhaps what we sometimes call “post-modernism” might be better termed “end game modernism.” On the other hand, there are efforts, such as that of the process thinkers and people like Michael Polanyi, that can be called a truly constructive post-modernism.
[3] “Shalom” is taken from the root word “shalam,” which means, “to be safe in mind, body, or estate.” It refers to a condition of completeness, fullness, or wholeness. Although it can describe the absence of war or conflict, a majority of biblical references refer to an inner completeness and tranquility. See, https://firm.org.il/learn/the-meaning-of-shalom/ (downloaded October 9, 2020.
[4] Penguin Edition, at 72. See also, Cicero, On the Commonwealth tr. George Holland Sabine & Stanley Barney Library of the Liberal Arts, ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1929), 183. Augustine studied and appreciated Cicero.
[5] One aspect Augustine has in common with Plato and others is a sense that justice might be a static thing, something that Augustine despairs of attaining in the Earthly City, but which by grace is achievable in the City of God, the heavenly city in which love rules. The kind of static thinking prevalent in Plato and in Augustine leads to the attempt to delineate a perfect city. In Augustine’s case, he recognizes that this eschatological city is not achievable within history.
[6] Id, at 73.
[7] The notion that human loves are disordered, resulting in human beings loving with an ultimate love things that are secondary (pleasure, possessions, and success) and fail to love things that are primary (God and others) properly as primary is a central idea of Augustine’s thought. See for example, Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine” Book 1, Chapters 22-29 in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers First Series Vol. 2 (Peabody, MA: Henricksen 1994), 527-530.
[8] Penguin Edition, at 139.