Book I: chapter x -- Torture is Good!

Sigh.  Okay, let's be clear:  Augustine is not, in DCD 1:10, taking sides in the debate about torture that raged in the American media during the early 2000s.  He is not arguing, as some people did, that waterboarding is just a bath, or anything close to that.  And yet, truth be told, this is another one of those passages where he seems a little bit harder of heart than one might wish.

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.

Book I: Chapter ix -- Augustine is a Jerk

Can we skip this chapter?  It kind of stinks.

Continuing his discussion of why bad things happen to good people and vice-versa, Augustine comes up with three propositions, one of which he spells out in more detail than the others:

1.  Nobody is really good.  "For though they are very far from being shameful and ungodly criminals, they still do not find themselves ... entirely unacquainted with fault.[...]"  True enough, and evidence for the non-dualistic reading of "good people" and 'bad people" in this whole section.

2.  Seemingly good people don't spend enough time correcting obviously bad people.  This is the really annoying proposition, and Augustine goes on about it at great length.  You know that "Christian" brother-in-law who makes family gatherings such a pain by telling everybody else what they are doing wrong with their lives?  Augustine sounds just like him, and indeed Augustine may have helped to create and empower generations of censorious and self-righteous Puritans.  If he's in Hell now, this is probably why; it's hard to imagine anything much worse he could have done in his life, including the way he got religion and abandoned the mother of his child.

3.  As a test of piety.  Do we, like Job, love God even when there is reward?  God seems to be curious.

They say two out of three ain't bad, and I don't mind his first and third propositions.  But that second one is a doozy.  The idea that God punishes us for being too lenient with [other] sinners seems to fly in the face of God's own forbearance with them, described in Ch. 8.  It actually makes me wonder whether he knew where he was going with this argument, or just throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck.

Book I: Chapter viii -- Fire and Flail

In DCD 1:8, Augustine has proposed that God uses life's ups and downs to draw us closer to himself, inviting the wicked to be good and teaching the good to be better.

But he has another, related idea, which is that the same vicissitude -- the same up or down -- has a different meaning, depending upon the character of the person who experiences it.  As Augustine says (in Dyson's translation):

In the same fire, gold glows but chaff smokes; and under the same flail straw is crushed and and grain purified [....]  Hence it is that, under the same affliction, the wicked hate and blaspheme God while the good pray and praise him.    What is important, then, is not what is suffered, but by whom.

This can be read dualistically, of course, as indicating two entirely different classes of human being.  It can also be read as speaking to the good and bad in each of us.  In the second sense, then, each of the good or bad things that happens to us becomes a challenge.  Will we respond with faith or with faithlessness, with prayer or blasphemy?

Book I: Chapter viii -- "The Scourge of God"

Why does God let bad things happen to good people?  That's a common question nowadays, often called by the theological shorthand word "theodicy."  St Augustine is interested in the matter -- but, true to the pessimism about human nature for which he is famous, he asks it a little differently than we happy modern Americans do.  He wants to know why God lets good things happen to bad people.

When Rome fell to Alaric and his warriors, some people -- both Christian and otherwise -- were spared when they took refuge in Christian churches.  Augustine has already pointed to this as an example of the true strength of the Christian God, as opposed to the weakness of the pagan gods who, in the sacking both of Troy and its daughter Rome, could not even protect their own statues.  Now he asks why God cared to protect the "wicked and ungrateful" pagans who fled to him for refuge.

His first answer is:

[P]atientia Dei ad paenitentiam invitat malos, sicut flagellum Dei ad patientiam erudit bonos [...]

Patientia is not precisely the same as the English "patience."   It is probably related to passio, "I suffer,"  which has a somewhat obsolete sense of "to put up with," the way Jesus does with little children.  Dyson translates it as "forbearance," which is not a common word these days.  A dictionary definition is "endurance," which may be better.  It can mean either physical or mental endurance, in the latter case either an admirable resignation to one's fate or a contemptible lack of spirit.  A flagellum is a whip or scourge, or figuratively the sting of conscience.

So the key phrase can be rendered:

God's willingness to put up with them welcomes the wicked, just as God's whip teaches the good to put up with [suffering]

This is an interesting idea, and one worth playing with.

It is common for Christians to think, simplistically, that God rewards the good and punishes the guilty.  This is clearly wrong.  In the present life, as a matter of observable fact, the wicked often prosper, and those who seem to be good (or more often who feel themselves to be good) are required to put up with great suffering.  Moreover, from a the radically Augustinian perspective that shapes the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions, nobody is really "good."  We are all sinners of one sort or another, our only hope in the goodness of Christ.

That may not be quite how Augustine himself sees things.  His famous interpretation of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes is that the Church is a mixed body, in which both good and evil people are gathered until the final judgment.  He can be read hyper-Calvinistically, then, as calling some people ultimately, intrinsically good and others as evil, rather than addressing the mixture of good and evil in each of us.  But he can also be read, I think, in the more moderate fashion -- and let's stick with that for a moment.  Let's say that "good" and "evil" are conditions which exist in every person, to varying degrees.

If that's a fair reading, then to Augustine God's anger is a whip [flagellum] which drives the good -- meaning that part of us which is good -- to be better, by acquiring a new if undesired virtue, while God's mercy is an invitation of some sort to that part of us which is bad.  Presumably, it is either an invitation to abandon our wickedness or an invitation to trust that God's mercy is greater than our capacity for evil.

Neither of these is punishment.  Although Augustine does seem to believe that God offers this-worldly punishments, he also knows that -- since the rain falleth alike on the just and the unjust -- it is an error to treat each of life's vicissitudes as either a reward or a punishment.  Life is, in a sense, a school of morals, or better yet a mystagogy, in which God tries to draw us closer by different means.

Book 1: Chapter iii: Excursus -- "The God That Failed"

I have already mentioned the phrase victos penates, which Augustine borrows from Virgil's Aeneid, 1:67.  But it may be helpful, thinking not only about this phrase but also about the situation of the Roman exiles in northern Africa, to draw a comparison to modern political life.  The "vanquished gods," in R.W. Dyson's translation, have certainly had their echo in our own time.

Penates, of course, are not gods in general.  They are the household gods, the ones kept on a little shrine in one's home and offered a bite of the family meal by way of sacrifice.  The penates that Aeneas carried off after the fall of Troy, which is to say the ones in question here, seem to be a public version of those private deities.  According to tradition, it was these very figures which were kept in the Temple of Vesta.  And so, to Augustine's mind, they are doubly vanquished:  first when Troy fell to the Greeks, and now when Rome has fallen to the Goths.

The God That Failed --which some readers may know better as a song by Metallica -- could have been Augustine;s description of Trojan Juno or Roman Minerva.  But in fact it is the title of a book published in 1949 by six former Communists.  They were a well-known bunch, including Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender and Ignazio Silone.

In the early part of the 20th century, membership in or sympathy with the Communist movement was trendy among young intellectuals, especially those who felt some particular sense of alienation from or even grudge against the social order that was coming to dominate America and Europe.  Koestler, a Hungarian Jew and erstwhile Zionist, hoped that an international movement could resolve "the Jewish problem."  Likewise, Richard Wright wrote that "anyone with common sense could easily guess that I was a Communist because I was a Negro."

On needn't have been young, much less stupid, to believe these things.  George Bernard Shaw, already in his sixties by the time of the Russian Revolution, became and remained throughout his life and enthusiast for the Soviet style of communism -- a disturbing fact, when one considers that he lived until 1950.  For younger and less sophisticated minds to have been taken in by the allure of Marxism is hardly surprising.

By the 1930s, however, the infatuation of these young intellectuals with Communism was fading.  Many left the Party; some turned strongly against it. By the late 1940s, after the Iron Curtain descended on Eastern Europe, the trend accelerated.  W.H. Auden went through his published poetry and made revisions to reflect both the aesthetic and political judgments of his mature years. Of course there were diehards, some of whom, unlike Shaw, genuinely betrayed their own nations -- the Rosenbergs, Kim Philby, Alger Hiss.  But from the late 30s forward, and certainly from the 40s, fashionable lefties made a point of distinguishing themselves from the Soviet Union and its ideology. (Jane Fonda's ill-advised trip to Viet Nam is probably the closest anybody came.)

And with the decline of the trendy young Reds arose another category in the American political spectrum, one which continues to play a more active role in our public life than actual Communism ever did:  the Ex-Communist or, in a later and adulterated form, the Neo-Conservative.  This particular transition wasn't automatic -- some ex-Reds remained political liberals, and in any case the emergence of the neocons by name took another generation.  But at Encounter, Spender did work side by side with Irving Kristol, whose son Bill remains a talk-show fixture to this day.

As the title of the book makes clear, Communism -- despite its claims to be scientific, materialistic and atheistic -- was a kind of religion.  A particularly bad one, but a religion nonetheless.  If it was to be accepted, then it could only be accepted on faith, rather than because of any particular evidence that it worked, which of course it manifestly did not.  The six essayists spoke of "conversion" to it; of leaving, they might as well speak of apostasy.

So it seems to me that a modern reader, trying to follow Augustine's argument, can do worse than to think of the Berlin Wall and the sudden collapse of Communism.  The traditional Greco-Roman religion, says Augustine, has failed, and has failed catastrophically.  Its gods have been vanquished, its crown city gutted. 

This is not so different from the triumphalism that was sometimes heard in the West after 1989.  Does anybody remember "the end of history" or, worse yet, the blather about a "unipolar world"?  Perhaps it is just me, but I think I hear the same sort of thing in DCD, at least so far.  Augustine thinks hat the old pagan world has definitively ended and is sounds as though he is about to suggest that Christianity is replacing it.

I hope that's not where DCD goes next, because it's a little shallow.  A theologian as keenly alert to the prevalence of sin surely knows that idolatry, of one sort or another, is an ineluctable part of human existence.  To argue otherwise would move Augsutine, willy nilly, toward Julian of Eclanum and the semi-Pelagian camp.

Still, a certain amount of triumphalism -- if it comes -- will prove to have been vindicated by history.  Christianity did indeed dominate the Mediterranean and Europe, which is what Augustine would have understood to be the World, from the fifth century forward.  The sphere of pagan influence would shrink progressively northward for half a millennium, and eventually disappear into story books.

On the other hand, in just a few hundred years, the Christian society of Egypt and North Africa, the society shaped by Cyprian, Tertullian, and Augustine himself (along with Origen and, erh, Arius) would begin its slow path toward extermination.  Which just proves the point that all triumphalism is premature.

Book I: Chapters ii-vii: "Vanquished Gods"

St. Augustine is many things:  philosopher, theologian, bishop and monk.  He is not, however, a military historian.

So when we get to a chapter (2, in this case) headed "That in no wars ever before recorded have the victors spared the vanquished for the sake of their gods," readers shouldn't be surprised to discover that Augustine is simply mistaken. We've already pointed to two examples in which victors did just that.  And if Augustine had just thrown this in as a bit of trivia, it would not matter that he is wrong.  Unfortunately, it is a big part of his argument.

He is trying to argue that, when some Romans hid in Christian churches and were spared by Alaric's soldiers, this was a demonstration of power unique to the God recognized by Christians.  If the Goths did in fact respect what would later be called the right of sanctuary, as I said last time, it is likely to have been because they were Christians themselves.  And that is the idea that no less than Philip Schaff seems to attribute to Augustine.  However, it is not what Augustine says here.  Over and over, he treats the Goths as "monstrous barbarians (immanitas barbara, ch. 4 & 7)," outsiders, an uncivilized race entirely different from Greeks or Romans, whether pagan or Christian.

The argument of these chapters is, in essence, that the pagan deities were unable to protect Rome, and that trusting them in the first place had not been "prudent." Minerva, the patroness of Rome, was powerless to help her city; indeed, so powerless was she that she depended upon the Romans to defend her statue: "it was not, therefore, the effigy who protected the men, but the men who were protecting the effigy."

What interests me most (and may confuse some readers) about these chapters is the use Augustine makes of Virgil.  I looked at it in ch. 1, and see now that it continues through ch. 7, at which point the tone shifts.

Classicists speak of "intertextuality," as when (for example) Virgil self-consciously builds upon Homer to tell the story of Aeneas.  The first seven chapters of DCD are deliberately intertextual, as Augustine uses Virgil's narrative of the mythical foundation of Rome to describe its recent fall.  (It is important to understand that the Romans believed themselves to be descended from Aeneas and his Trojan exiles, one race.)

So while Augustine is talking about how Minerva's shrine in Rome was despoiled by invaders, he also talks about how (in Aeneid 2), King Priam is dragged bodily before the shrine of his own ancestral gods and killed, so that "his blood quenched the sacred flames he had himself kindled."  Likewise, Juno could not protect her shrine in Troy, even though it was guarded by Aerneas himself.  (And, he notes almost with evident delight, while the pagan shrine was a place where treasure was held captive, the Christian shrines were places where people were set free.) The point is that as the gods of the Trojans were impotent, so were the gods of their children.

Augustine quotes a telling phrase from Virgil:  the victos penates, the vanquished gods (Aen. 1:67) carried from Troy by Aeneas.  "Was is prudent," asks Augustine, "to entrust Rome to these 'vanquished gods'?"  Evidently not.

How seriously did Augustine take Virgil?  Would a Christian, and a rather severe one, naturally engage so deeply with a pagan poet?  After all, we can easily find in DCD and other writings of Augustine what looks like an aversion to the arts, especially theater -- both on the grounds that it depicts the false gods, and that it deals in stories that are nor true.  (This argument would be taken over, in various forms, by Christians in later ages, as in the Puritan closure of English theaters in Shakespeare's day; it is at least according to tradition the same argument, as made by Stephen Gosson, that provoked Sidney's brilliant Apologie for Poetry as a counterattack).  It is easy to imagine Augustine sternly condemning Virgil's tale of the false gods, rather than treating is as a basic resource for a theological discussion. 

Or, if not theology per se, Augustine treats Virgil as a basic resource for history.  He even asks whether in fact the Greeks had spared some of their Trojan co-religionists, and whether "Virgil, after the custom of poets, has misled us (ch. 4)."  His answer is no.  On ethe contrary; Virgil is taught to small boys so that they may be steeped in this "greatest and most famous and best of all poets."  He adduces some other witnesses -- Sallust, quoting Caesar -- to demonstrate what any cultured Roman, apparently including Augustine, took for granted: that Virgil was an impeccable source.

Therefore, Augustine argues, we know that the universal custom of war has always been to slaughter the conquered without regard for any appeal to divine power; even Romans themselves have done so (here he cites he cites Marcellus, which again is probably a purposeful contrast with his "beloved son," the Christian Marcellinus)); the mercy shown by Alaric is a new thing, "to be attributed to the name of Christ and to the Christian age."

Bear in mind that this argument is, according to other classical sources, factually incorrect.  Still, it is hard to imagine that, if Augustine were confronted by the examples of Alexander and Agesilaus, he would have simply given up and stopped writing.  Even if Greco-Roman civilization had occasionally shown mercy to those who trusted its gods, I like to imagine he would have argued, it was the Christian God who embodied mercy, whose presence commanded it and enforced the command.

That's the argument I like to imagine Augustine making; but in the passages at hand, he makes one that is a little less edifying -- an argument less about mercy than about power, and therefore (as Lutherans say) less about the Cross than about glory.  Our God, says Augustine, has triumphed, albeit in a limited fashion; their gods, in Rome as in Troy, have been unreservedly vanquished.

Book I: Chapter i -- Who Were the Pissed-Off Pagans?

Augustine's opening argument against the pagans depends upon two historical claims which may be difficult to verify:

1. that when Alaric's Goths sacked Rome in 410, they spared Romans who had taken refuge in Christian places of worship; and 
2. that afterward, the pagan Romans who had been thus spared blamed the misfortunes of their city upon the Empire's move from paganism to Christianity.

The first claim seems probable.  The Goths were themselves Christians.  Their conversion is said to have begun after 238, when their raiders took many Roman captives, notably women, who were already Christians.  Although there was conflict between Christian and pagan Goths throughout the fourth century, a Gothic bishop appears to have been present at the Council of Nicea, and Ulfilas translated the Bible into Gothic sometime in the middle of the century.  It would not be unnatural for these Christians, invading Rome, to show special mercy to Romans who sought sanctuary in Christian churches.

In addition to Augustine, both his friend and collaborator Orosius and his not-so-friendly contemporary Jerome say that this is what happened.  (Of course, neither of them was there at the time, so they would only have heard the same stories Augustine had -- in Orosius's case, from the same people).  Moreover, although Augustine does not seem to know it, there were precedents in Greco-Roman military history.  Both Alexander (at Tyre) and Agesilaus (at Coronea) had spared people who took refuge in various temples temples.

But there are reasons to wonder.  For starters, the Goths were Arian and the Romans were predominantly Catholic -- meaning that their forms of Christianity differed not only in doctrine but in hierarchy.  Nor were they on friendly terms.  After Nicea, the bishops of each group had excommunicated each other, and refused to recognize each other's authority or jurisdiction. Their competition was often rough, and sometimes grew bloody.  So it is just as natural to imagine that, when Romans took refuge in Catholic churches, their Arian enemies would have massacred them on religious grounds.

On top of that, the Goths were not entirely part of Greco-Roman culture.  Although Gothic warriors had, at times, served in the Roman army, they were part of a different society.  Augustine does not identify them as Christians (which would not necessarily undermine his argument about theodicy), but calls them barbari.  Even though they share his faith, in most regards, they are cultural outsiders, strangers to him in a way that the pagan Romans are not.  I have no idea what role mercy toward defeated enemies may have played in their military culture.

As to the second claim, well, it is hard to say.  Were there, in fact, pagan refugees from Rome -- the same ones who had, according to Augustine, sheltered themselves in Christian churches -- who now blamed Christianity for the fall of their city?

It would not be surprising if there were.  Their city had, in point of fact, been attacked by Christians of the Arian persuasion.  But that is not the claim that Augustine attributes to them; he says, rather, that they blamed the Roman Christians, the ones who had been attacked along side themselves, for contributing to Rome's spiritual decay.

If such claims were made in writing, I do not know about it.  That's no surprise; I'm no classicist to begin with, and in any case vast amounts of pagan literature are now lost to us, sometimes through the vagaries of time and sometimes through deliberate destruction by Christians or, later, Muslims.  Still, Origen's rebuttal of the gnostic Celsus managed not only to name the guy but to preserve big portions of his argument; it would be helpful if Augustine had performed a similar service to his opponents -- and the fact that he did not raises my eyebrow a little.

A related question is just how many active pagans remained in the city of Rome at the time of Alaric's attack in 410.  This was almost a full century after Constantine declared Christianity a religio licita within the empire, and promptly began to offer it a variety of special privileges -- tax exemptions, unused government buildings (basilicae) and subsidies -- as well as placing inhibitions upon pagan practice, such as a ban on blood-sacrifice.  From the 380s forward, an increasingly Christian society had clamped down even harder on the remaining pagans.  Theodosius, who from 392 became the last emperor to rule both East and West, closed temples all through the empire, but also took a variety of strong anti-pagan steps in Rome itself:  people were forbidden to visit the temples or "raise their eyes" to the statues of their old gods; the flame in the Temple of Vesta was put out, an appeal to return the Ara Pacis to its former place was rejected, haruspicy and similar practices were (again) forbidden.  Violators forfeited their house, which may suggest that these restrictions were aimed especially at the wealthier classes.

For what it's worth, Theodosius took many of these steps under the heavy influence of Ambrose of Milan -- the bishop whose presentation of the Gospel had so moved Augustine years earlier.

It is clear that paganism endured in rural areas and far from the Eternal City.  But in Rome, its central practices had been illegal for a generation by the time Alaric attacked.  This does not mean, of course, that the laws were followed, nor that they were loved even by those who did follow them; there seems to be no agreement among historians about that.

The timing suggests two things:  first, that the number of pagans among the refugees may have been comparatively small, and they were under great legal pressure to keep quiet about their religious preferences; and second, that if there were any pagans left, they were likely to be pissed off.  In the course of a century, they had been discriminated against with increasing fervor.  Their relatively tolerant regime of worshipping any gods at all, so long as you were pious about it, had been legislated out of existence, and replaced with an authoritarian system under which one God was to be recognized - a system enforced by imperial official working hand in glove with the leaders of the upstart religion.

So Augustine's claim at the outset is likely to be true -- pagans may well have complained that Christianity had somehow left Rome open to defeat.  But if so, we should remember that (a) Rome was defeated by other Christians; (b) the number of pagans making such a claim is likely to have been very small; and (c) Augustine doesn't identify any particular people making the claim.  This leaves open the possibility that Augustine is responding to some very minor claims, the bitching and moaning of a few displaced persons, rather than a major philosophical movement -- and even the possibility (however remote) that Augustine has made the complaint up, constructing a straw man for the exercise in apologetics he has planned.

Book 1: Preface

"The most glorious city of God," says Augustine, is what he has taken pen in hand to defend, at the request of his "dear son Marcellinus."

This Marcellinus was a Roman imperial official, who a few years earlier had granted the Donatist schismatics in Carthage the right to worship.  In short order, he came to regret this decision, as the Donatists oppressed the Catholics.  In 411, he reversed course, and ordered the army to seize the Donatist churches and return them to the Catholics.  The violence with which this order was followed shocked even Augustine, himself no friend to the Donatists.  The Donatists got their revenge, though.  In 413, they arranged for Marcellinus to be arrested and ultimately executed; he is now regarded as a saint and martyr.

413, of course, is just the year in which Augustine began The City of God (which from this point forward in my blogging I will call DCD for short). Whether he began it before or after the death of his friend I do not know, although I can probably find out.  And after what I've just figured out, I think I'm gonna need to.

Let's start with the basics.

The Preface to Bk 1 is brief, but worth a close look. It shows something of Augustine's prose style, as well as opening up his theme.

The first lines would be, were they written in English, a jumbled run-on sentence.  Dods finds it best to thoroughly rearrange the clauses to create a good English paragraph.  The original word order, rendered without much attention to grammar, looks like this:

The most glorious City of God -- whether in the course of this time, as a pilgrim who lives by faith (Hab. 2:4) among the impious, or in the fixity of its everlasting seat, which it now awaits by patience  ("for justice shall be turned to righteousness" (Ps. 94:15) one after another, gaining by eminence the final victory and perfect peace) -- is the object of this work I have taken up, along with my promise to you that I should defend it against those who to its Founder prefer their own gods (my dear son Marcellinus) ; it is a great and difficult work, but God is our helper (Ps. 61:9).

That's pretty rough, but it gives a sense of how the opening lines flow. It also demonstrates one consistent characteristic of Augustine's writing:  his use of densely-packed Biblical quotations and near-quotations.  The frequency with which he drops a phrase or two from the psalms, in particular demonstrates a very, very deep familiarity.  He was a monk, after all, and no doubt spent a good portion of his day reciting them.

The quotation from Ps. 94 demonstrates another Augustinian characteristic.  In Latin, it says quoadusque iustitia convertatur in iudicium.  The words can be translated in different ways:  justice, judgment, righteousness, and so forth.  What interests me is the alliteration.  This and assonance -- words that sound alike -- are an important part of Augustine's style, and one that is easily lost in translation.

We see the same thing in the next passage:  "For I know how much force the work requires, that the proud be persuaded how much is the excellence of humility."  Force, viribus, sounds like virtus, excellence.  The inflection makes the similarity seem greater than it is; viribus is the dative plural of vis, virtus is a noun derived from vir, a man.  And again, in a wonderful phrase that Dods translates as "the earthly city, which itself ... is ruled by its lust to rule." The key expression there is dominandi libido dominatur.  Say it a few times, and then try applying it to your tyrant of choice; it's a memorable slur.

But the stylistic hammer really comes down toward the end of the preface, when Augustine juxtaposes the mottoes of the two cities that are his master metaphor.

The motto of the heavenly city, we read, is Deus superbis resistit, humilibus autem dat gratiam.  This means "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the the humble."  It occurs in both James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5 (and the words are the same in Greek, too, suggesting a common source).

For the motto of the earthly city, meanwhile, Augustine takes these words:  Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.  Roughly, it means to spare the oppressed and fight the proud -- not a bad parallel to the Biblical motto.  It is taken from from Virgil's Aeneid (6:854), and is a phrase that Augustine's readers would have recognized immediately.  For those who may not know, the Aeneid is an essential work of Latin literature, an epic poem offering a mythical, Homeric history of Rome mixed in with praise for the leadership of Octavian, better known as Caesar Augustus.  Written just around the time of Christ, it was an instant classic, read, memorized and recited throughout the Roman world, a masterpiece both of literature and, strangely, of political propaganda.  In many ways, it told the ancient Romans, who had recently traded their republic for an empire, who they had now become.  And the expression Parcere subiectis is central to that message.

It occurs during Aeneas' visit to the underworld, where he sees the dead spritis of Dido, who killed herself for love of him, and of his father Anchises.  His father foretells the story of the nation Aeneas is fighting to build, the nation that will become Rome, and in the midst of it offers what we would today call a mission statement.  Other nations may be better at forging bronze, carving marble, scanning the stars, even pleading legal causes -- Greece, as all Romans knew, was better at all these things.

           But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power
           the peoples of the earth -- these will be your arts:
           to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,
           to spare the defeated, break the break the proud in war.

           (Robert Fagles translation)

It is an aggressive move, deliberately getting in the face of the Roman refugees then living in in North Africa by sniping -- from the outset -- at a beloved emblem of their imperial self-image.

Here is Augustine, setting up his two "cities".  The motto of one is taken from the Scripture, of the other from Virgil -- one motto constitutes the marching orders of the Christian Church, the other of the Roman state.  And although they are not so very different in meaning, they are opposed (says Augustine) because the Romans have claimed for themselves a prerogative which belongs only to God.

This claim would have been strange to non-Christian readers, if Augustine actually had any.  "After all," they might answer, "Virgil wrote before your James and Peter -- perhaps they were stealing from him.  Rome's power was assured not by one supposed god, but by an entire pantheon.  And if, since the city fell to Alaric and his Goths, Rome's blessedness has been called into question -- a dubious claim -- certainly no Christian empire has arisen to replace it."

You can see why medieval Christians, especially in the West, liked this book so much -- to them, it must have actually seemed that Augustine was a prophet of their Carolingian world order, their "Christendom" -- a replacement for Virgil.  (It is not at all clear that Augustine had anything like this in mind; as I keep reading, one thing I will watch for carefully is how "visible" [in Lutheran terms] Augsutine's divine city is meant to be -- is it an actual community, or the spiritual condition of a community?)

But even if he did not mean to portray himself as a new Virgil, it is possible that Augustine embedded a rather audacious literary joke in the Preface to Book 1.  Because in Aeneid 6, a few lines after Parcere subiectis, Aeaneas sees two men not yet born.  The first is a man, a warrior decked in the spoils of war; this, says Anchises, is Marcellus, a hero in battle against the Gauls.  And the second is also named Marcellus, but he is a beautiful youth -- the beloved nephew, adopted son and heir presumptive of Augustus.

The description of this second Marcellus is another oft-quoted Virgilian moment.  He is "the child of heartbreak," and a tearful Anchises tells Aeneas (by which means Virgil no doubt assured Augustus) of how the young man's death had saddened the whole nation.  "O, fill my arms with lilies," says Anchises; "let me scatter flowers ... and perform a funeral rite."  Even the dead mourn Marcellus yet unborn.

Here then are Augustus and his adopted son Marcellus, great figures in the story of the earthly city -- in a book written by Augustinus for his metaphorical son Marcellinus about the heavenly city.  Whether Marcellus was living or dead when Augustine began to write, the parallel is striking.  And remember, many readers would have memorized the Aeneid, and so the parallel would ahve been instantly clear.

It is hard to be sure, but Augustine's use of Aeneid 6 looks doubly bold.  Not only does he set up the deeply-held self-image of the Roman people as a straw man to be knocked down by the Church, he replaces the emperor with a bishop -- himself -- and the emperor's child with a layman in his congregation.  It is a modestly subtle satire, but one which I suspect Roman readers would have recognized, and by which many would have been enraged.

All this, mind you, in two short paragraphs.  It's gonna be a loooong year.

Worst Resolution Ever

In what may well prove to be the worst New Year's resolution ever, I have decided to read through St. Augustine's massive City of God.  I am torn, honestly, between excitement and dread.

It is one of the masterpieces of early Christian theology, a book with long and continuing influence.  I admire Augustine; he is easily my favorite among the Church Fathers, and a terrific Latin stylist.  It is actually exciting to read his sermons and pretend you are preaching them, at least if you're a complete preaching nerd.

But the City of God is not a sermon.  It is big and dense and, frankly, likely to get pretty boring in places.  Like most modern people, I have a comically short attention span -- measurable in seconds, these days, more than minutes or hours or days.  Attention spans have been deteriorating for a while:   Tolstoy wrote War and Peace; Hemingway, a generation later, wrote novels a tenth as long.  Today, we have compressed our thoughts to 140 characters or six seconds of video.  There may never be another Paradise Lost, because we live in an age of haiku.

The good news is that, for all its massive weight, the City of God is divided up into many small, manageable morsels.  It consists of 22 "books," each divided into 30-50 or so "chapters."  My plan is to take it a chapter or two at a time, reading in English and occasionally checking the Latin, following up on the topical references and literary allusions, and then jot down a few notes.

I expect to spend about a year breaking the book into small, manageable morsels, and taking time to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest" them, as the old collect for Advent 2 says of the Scriptures.  I'll feel free to chase some rabbits here and there, trying to figure out what a 5th-century theological meditation on the sack of Rome has to offer 21st-century Americans.  The result won't be a Cliff's Notes guide to the book, and it most certainly won't be an academic commentary.  It will be more a personal reflection, a few talking points for conversation with people smarter than I am, and the rough material for some later and more rigorous study.

Really, all I want to do is finish the thing.

So far as English editions go, there aren't all that many to choose from.  My plan is to use the 1998 translation by R.W. Dyson, published in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series.  Unfortunately, the copy I ordered from Alibris has been delivered to an old address, so at the moment I am stuck with the old and fusty Marcus Dods version.  I don't like it, and will swap it out as soon as possible.

I'll supplement this with the Latin original, available online at the incredible Augustini Omnia Opera, an Italian website that I simply cannot recommend highly enough.  It offers many Augustine resources, including his entire works in Latin and Italian.  They aren't necesarily the most up-to-date critical editions, but ... come on.  It's a magnificent resource.  In a perfect world, I'd be using the seven-volume Loeb Classical Library bilingual edition, supplemented with the incomplete P.G. Walsh edition, with commentary.  Sadly, those are well beyond my modest preacher's book allowance.

Anyway, that's the plan.  We'll see if it works out, or if instead I get distracted by the mundane details of my daily life and this blog is left unattended for months at a time.  That is not by any means impossible.  But spero meliora and all that.

And, finally, this: I'd love it if you were to join me.  Pick up your own copy (and a highlighter, and some pencils for marking the margins) and read along.  Share your own thoughts, respond to mine, raise your own questions or help to answer mine.  We can have some fun with this.