A Tangle of Two Cities

reflections of his african spiritual sons at their 75, Augustinian Publications, Jos -Nigeria 2014, 362-382. 2 Traditionally ascribed to Daniel himself, modern scholarly consensus considers the book pseudonymous, the stories of the first half legendary in origin, and the visions of the second the product of anonymous authors in the Maccabean period (2nd century BCE), hence we consider it an intertestamental literature. A good study on this question is that of J. J.Collins, "Current Issues in the Study of Daniel", in J. J. Collins et al. (eds.) The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception. Brill, Leida 2002, 2. 3 Dn. 12:2 4 Jn. 5: 28-29. 5 Aug., De civitate Dei, 14, 28 (CCL 48, 451): "Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, caelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui". 6 J. Dougherty, The sacred city and the City of God, in Augustinian Studies 10 (1979), 86. 7 Aug., De civ. Dei, 15, 1(CCL 48, 453): "In duo genera distribuimus [genus humanum], unum eorum, qui secundum hominem, alterum eorum, qui secundum Deum vivunt; quas etiam mystice appellamus civitates duas, hoc est duas societates hominum, quarum est una quae praedestinata est in aeternum regnare cum Deo, altera aeternum supplicium subire cum diabolo".

From The City of Reason vol 3 Universitas by Dr Peter Critchley Augustine is the last great ancient thinker, using all of his pagan education and training for powerful and cogent statement of Christian thought. Augustine “provided the medieval consciousness, amid an entirely different sociological and political reality, with its foundation and spiritual weapons”. Karl Jaspers certainly underestimates the contributions of thinkers before Augustine, but his appraisal of Augustine’s achievement isn’t far from the truth: “No philosopher before Augustine had concerned himself with the uncertainty of freedom, the ground of its possibility or the question of its actual meaning. But Augustine, thanks to his understanding of St Paul, considered these matters with an enduring force of conviction” (Karl Jaspers, Plato and Augustine (New York: Harcourt Brace/Harvest Book, 1962) 95). The basis of St Augustine’s The City of God (civitas dei) is the distinction between the earthly city and the heavenly city; these form two distinctive communities, one of the ungodly and the other of the godly. This paper shows how Augustine targets individualism to define a Christian version of ‘rational freedom’. The root of the evil in the earthly city is selfishness. In Augustine’s view, individuals are restless, seeking to dominate each other and make each other means to private ends. Human life is thus an endless quest for power and self-gratification. In Augustine’s conception, the state is necessary, not to make individuals good or virtuous but to restrain them from doing evil. Augustine’s argument is that whilst government and society are natural for human beings, they are also irredeemably coercive. The state is not a positive instrument for promoting the good life – the ‘rational’ conception - but a neutral instrument for imposing the civil peace – the liberal protective or instrumental view. For this reason, Augustine does not belong in the tradition of ‘rational freedom’. Whereas politics in ancient Greece was defined in terms of the creative self-realisation of the human ontology, in Augustine's conception the earthly political association is more an instrument of division, force and rapacity.

2015

This thesis was completed during a period of Study Leave as Visiting Scholar at the College of St John the Evangelist, Auckland. Thank you to the Principal / Manakura, the Rev'd Canon Tony Gerritsen, and to the St John's College Trust Board for making this possible, and to the faculty, staff and students of the College community for making me so welcome. Thank you also to a number of my clerical colleagues in the Diocese of Wellington and to the Wardens and Vestry of St Anne's Northland-Wilton for ensuring that the mission and ministry of the parish continued in my absence. As a distance student, I am particularly grateful to the staff of both the University of Otago Library in Dunedin and to the John Kinder Theological Library at St John's for their assistance. To the Kinder staff especially: thank you for your friendship and for all the coffee. Finally, thank you to my husband, the Rev'd Alister Hendery, for your love and support. The writing of this thesis coincided with the final stages of the preparation of your book Earthed in Hope on Dying, Death and Funerals. If Augustine is the other man in my life, Death is the other woman in yours: together we, and they, make a good combination. v

St. Augustine's City of God XIX, 19 is the 'locus classicus' for Augustine's ideals regarding the need to balance both one's zeal for contemplation and the needs of the active life. St. Thomas famously quotes this passage while in his effort to demonstrate that the mixed way of life (sharing with others from the fullness of contemplation) is objectively the best way of life in II-II q. 188. However, the standard translation of this essential text is that one 'must' devote himself to contemplation unless some necessity is imposed upon the contemplative. In this article, I argue that this is a mistranslation and that the phrase 'vacandum est' should be understood as emphasizing the freedom to either contemplate or to serve others (which freedom St. Paul speaks of in Galatians 5:14). In the nineteenth chapter of book nineteen of the City of God (the Latin text of which can be found in the appendix), Augustine discusses the tension that Christians can experience when they feel drawn towards the contemplation of God and yet find themselves in need of attending to other duties. After making a division of the kinds (genera) of life Christians can validly dedicate themselves to (the active, the contemplative and the way of life that combines both),1 Augustine provides succinct practical norms for dealing with the occasionally conflicting pull that can be experienced in regard to external acts. In order to most fittingly investigate this chapter in which Augustine's " classic statement on this problem " 2 can be found, we will occasionally consider some other writings found in the Augustinian corpus. Nevertheless, our focus will be on the locus classicus itself, to which we now turn.

Cambridge University Press, 2020

In this volume, Veronica Roberts Ogle offers a new reading of Augustine’s political thought as it is presented in City of God. Focusing on the relationship between politics and the earthly city, she argues that a precise understanding of Augustine’s vision can only be reached through a careful consideration of the work’s rhetorical strategy and sacramental worldview. Ogle draws on Christian theology and political thought, moral philosophy, and semiotic theory to make her argument. Laying out Augustine’s understanding of the earthly city, she proceeds by tracing out his rhetorical strategy and concludes by articulating his sacramental vision and the place of politics within it. Ogle thus suggests a new way of determining the status of politics in Augustine’s thought. Her study clarifies seemingly contradictory passages in his text, highlights the nuance of his position, and captures the unity of his vision as presented in City of God.

Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2002

The Imaginative Conservative, 2019

No work of Christian theology has left such an impact on the world and biblical interpretation and understanding as St. Augustine’s “City of God.” We who read the Bible do so, often unknowingly, through the eyes of the bishop of Hippo.

Transformations of Romanness

The Russian author Andrei Gorchakov travelled through Italyi no rder to follow the traces of the composer PavelSosnovsky,who, because he was desperatelyhomesick, had committed suicide. During his journey thath as led him to lieux de mémoire of Sosnovsky'spast,Gorchakov becomes depressed by the discrepancy between an idealized fiction of Italyand the nostalgic places that he visits, and-similar to his compatriot − he suffers more and more from homesickness. This tale, poeticallycaptured in Andrei Tarkovsky's1 983f ilm Nostalghia,s ensitively analyses the indissoluble dichotomies between imagination and reality. In his monumental book De civitatedei Augustine of Hippo follows emphatically the twisted traces of Vergil into an ostalgicallyp oeticized Roman past.T he young Augustine had left Carthagea nd his weepingm other Monnica in order to travel to Rome, just as Aeneas left Troy and the mourning Dido to found the new city.¹ In fact,A ugustine has another destination. The aim of his virtual journey to the City of God is the impassioned plea that the nostalgia for Rome has to be substituted by the desire for the eternal empire,t hati s, for the loveo ft he existential Good.I n the Church Father'sd ramatic cosmos Rome was ap lace full of dichotomies, as Italyw as for Gorchakov.A savital icon Rome symbolized ac omplex semantic field that incorporated lots of aspects − political and historicaln otions of the Roman Empire, antique literature and poetics, grammar and rhetoric, philosophy and erudition,t he intellectual centre of the known world. In short the Urbs had the potential to be ap rojection surface for manyl ate antiques ocial groups.² Romanization, the process that was supposedtoguarantee social cohesion between different groups,was mainlyacodeofsymbolic means, as Clifford Ando put it.³ The multiculturalw orld in which Augustine livedp rovided polymorphicc onceptso fi dentity that wereprocessuallyrelated to each other partlyincoincidenceand harmony, partly in diversification, contradiction, competition, and opposition.⁴ Thus, he had to confront tensions within his own complex rangeo fi dentities. To name just af ew, he was ac osmopolitan membero fR oman society,aphilosophicallyt rained heir of Romane lite culture, ar hetoricallye ducated political agent who wasp repared by his father for office in the Roman administration, aformer Manichean, amember of aR omanized north African-Mediterranean elite family, who spoke lingua Latina and Punica,a nd the Catholic bishop of at owni nAfrica proconsularis,who had to

Augustine unquestionably puts community at the core of his theology, but the shape and definition of that community remain for him an open question. The City of God is, in large part, aimed at approaching this problem of definition. It does so, however, not by providing us with some neat solution, but rather by showing us why the definition of a community might be so difficult in the first place. Time is what makes the contours of a civitas or an ecclesia so tough to sketch out. The passage of time blurs the boundaries of communities: people change, they come and go with their unsteady wills; societies change, they rise and fall with inconstant history. Because of all this, Augustine argues, communities must remain temporally open. Those now within the walls might be without tomorrow—and vice versa. Insofar as we recognize this temporality of community, then, love for one’s community could only be possible as a kind of love that remains open to the outside. This paper will aim to stress the role time plays in defining community, as described throughout the City of God. Due to the size of that work, we’ll have to be selective. Starting with key passages in Books XI and XV, we will first see how Augustine’s description of the Church as a corpus permixtum is not something to be easily explained away. Human communities tend to remain all mixed up in time; only at the eschatological end of time will they truly be sorted out. From there, we’ll move on to the consequences of this eschatological deferral for the community’s own knowledge and love of itself, as discussed in Books XX-XXI. The uncertainty that comes with time and change means that not even the Church could know who will or won’t be saved. For Augustine, though, such uncertainty about limits and boundaries is not a cause for despair, but rather an invitation to pray for and perhaps even love those outside his community.