He starts by considering the Romans who lost all their worldly possessions when Rome was sacked, and argues that those who were Christians did not lose anything of great importance, so long as they held onto their faith.
He pulls out a number of Biblical texts to support this idea, including classics like "love of money is the root of all evil" and "naked came I from my mother's womb." And at first, I found this argument persuasive. Look, Buddhists aren't the only ones who practice non-attachment. Christianity has its own ascetical streak. Augustine points to his friend, Paulinus of Nola, a bishop and poet, who had given up great wealth in pursuit of holiness, and who was regarded even in his own lifetime as a saint.
But as Augustine keeps going, the argument gets harder to love.
By the end of the chapter, he is not talking any longer about having the barbarians ransack your villa, but about being physically tortured and then exposed to the sort of famine that so often accompanies war. This is quite different, at least to modern sensibilities, than simply losing your gold and silver. Augustine, however, proposes that
Perhaps ... the tortures which taught them to love an incorruptible good were of more benefit to them than those goods whose love brought torture upon their head ....Get it? Torture is good, as long as it teaches you to love God more than Mammon. This is Taliban-quality reasoning, and I'm glad Augustine qualifies it with a "perhaps."
He treats famine the same way:
For those whom famine slew it rescued from the ills of this life ... and those whom it did not slay it taught to live more moderately.My head hurts from following the logic here: famine rescued them from the ills of this life. Like famine. Or torture.
In fairness to Augustine, he was most likely thinking of different "ills" -- things like moral backsliding, theological doubt, apostasy. Those, to a monk in late antiquity, may very well have appeared to be the greatest dangers of living in the world.
But this reveals a common problem with Christian asceticism, doesn't it? With the best of intentions, it nonetheless, sometimes, devalues the body at the expense of the spirit. That was a Gnostic trick, of course, and is at odds both with the traditional Hebraic anthropology and with the common patristic assertion about the Incarnation: "that which was not assumed could not be redeemed."
In other words, monks have a nasty habit of denying that our flesh matters to God, even though our flesh is precisely what God became in the person of Jesus. A more balanced theological approach recognizes the value and dignity of the human body -- and therefore inspires Christians to recognize the inherent evil of murder, kidnaping, and torture, as well as a famine created (as they usually are) by human action.
For a moment, I wondered if Augustine wasn't sucked into this false step by the fact that he was an African. After all, Christianity in Africa had been shaped by an especially vigorous cycle of persecution and resistance, which might -- in theory -- have created a mindset that took torture for granted. But Augustine lived well after the era of the official persecutions. Christianity, in his time, was not only a legal religion but the preferred faith of the imperial authorities. Emperors built churches and doled out tax benefits to bishops. What is now pejoratively called "Christendom" was not fully limned, but its outline could be seen clearly enough. Times, and the Church, had changed dramatically. So I'm suspicious of my own suspicion on this point.
No, I'm inclined to blame Augustine's monasticism for this. Which is funny, since in the argument of Semi-Pelagianism it was Augustine who so masterfully stood up against the monastic mafia composed of people like Julian of Eclanum, and argued for a Christianity which (because it was based on God's grace rather than human works) was more readily accessible to non-monastics.
Anyway, here's the bottom line: Torture and famine are not good, no matter what Augustine says.