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7/28/2019 Schall Augustine

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On the Place of Augustine inPolitical Philosophy: A Second Lookat Some Augustinian Literature

"Shall it (the happy life) be that of the philosophers, who put

forward as the chief good, the good which is in ourselves? Is this

the true good? Have they found the remedy for our ills? Is

man's pride cured by placing him on an equality with

God?"- Pascal, Penses, #430.

"Salvation, such as it shall be in the world to come, shall itself

be our final happiness. And this happiness these philosophers

refuse to believe in, because they do not see it, and attempt to

fabricate for themselves a happiness in this life, based upon a

virtue which is as deceitful as it is proud."- St. Augustine, The

City of God, XIX, 4.

"When, however, the Gospel and its message of salvation are

rejected, a process of the erosion of moral values is begun,

which easily has negative repercussions on the life of soci-

ety."- John Paul II, Agrigento, May 9, 1993. 1

I

Is the happy life, the beata vita, as conceived by the philosophers,

sufficient for man? And if it is not, ought philosophers to be

content? What alternatives are open to the philosopher who suspects

that virtue, even high virtue, is not necessarily its own reward? The

philosophic life is considered to be the highest human life. The


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The Place of Augustine in Political Philosophy 129

philosophic life is the quest for the truth, for the whole, for the

explanation ofwhat is. "The unexamined life is not worth living,"

Socrates toldus in The Apology. But the examined life, the philo-

sophic life, yields its own perplexities. It knows that it does not know.

But knowing this, it still wants to know the highest things. What has

the philosopher found when he has found all he can find by his own

methods? Can he call it happiness? Dare he call it happiness?

The life of the philosopher, the life of the poet, and the life of the

politician, moreover, have clashed. The poet, the philosopher, and

the politician are not necessarily friends to one another. The poet

accuses the philosopher Socrates. The city condemns him. Socrates

himself, worried about both the poets and the politicians, avoided

public life because it was dangerous to be a philosopher in a

democracy. The philosophers and politicians have quarreled most

dangerously when the politician, thinking himself also to be also a

philosopher, has endeavored to set up the best city in reality, not in

speech, and thereby to command the poets sing its praises.

Is the politician's failure to erect any example of the abiding city

in speech also a failure of philosophy? Is the question of the best

regime itself an illusion? Is the lack of the best city in actuality rather

a failure of virtue? But are there not bad philosophers from whom

the politician must protect the city? Is not philosophy, as Aristotle

implied, the most potent corrupter of man and the city? Philosophyitself must discuss the question of erroneous or bad philosophy; the

politician is aware of this.

To begin a reflection on Augustine in political philosophy with

a citation from Pascal about philosophy, I confess, might seem, at

first sight, altogether odd. No doubt some circuitous link can be

found between the Bishop of Hippo and Port Royal. But Pascal, like

Augustine, did bring up the question of the way of the philosophers,the way of contemplation. Both doubted if philosophy really was the

chief good of man, the best way of life.

Pascal likewise maintained that something was ominously miss-

ing in the way of the philosophers. They had broached a question

they could not themselves resolve, but still, with a touch of pride,

they insisted on finding answers only from within philosophy, within


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130 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

their own way of life. They remained, however, abidingly perplexed.

They needed a "guide," as Maimonides implied. And their calling it

"philosophy," that is, the "love" of wisdom and not wisdom itself, only

served to keep things unsettled. For perpetual quests with notheoretic end in sight appear to be more nightmares than hopes.Philosophy seemed to suggest that man's life was a way, a search, but,

at the same time, it could have in principle no end, a conclusion that

contradicted the very notion of a natural quest.

Pascal's questions, moreover, when looked at closely, already

hinted at the whole subsequent path of modern philosophers,

leading from self-interest in ourselves, to the social causes of evil,

and, finally, to anticipations of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky about

man, in seeking his own meaning, replacing God with himself, with

his own willed order. The philosophers thus have not solved their

own problems.

Those philosophers who were also politicians, moreover, thosewho were tired of contemplating the world, who wanted to change

it, only brought to light again previous problems that somehow

seemed to lie in the path of all true philosophy. In retrospect, Marcus

Aurelius'Meditations seem more abiding than Marx's Manifesto. It

is impossible to change the world correctly without knowing what the

world is, without knowing its distinction from and relation to man,

himself also a being in the world and yet with powers that seem totranscend it.

II

Is the way of the philosophers a false way, then, or is it merely a

dangerous way? Is it a natural way, one following the laws of being,

or is it artificial, a way set in defiance to anything in nature, including

human nature? We might, at times, venture out onto dangerouspaths, of course. But we ought to avoid those paths that lead

nowhere, or worse, those that lead to destruction. Augustine himself,

in the passage from The City of Godcited above, clearly foresaw a

danger in philosophy. The defining of this danger is a principal task

of political philosophy itself.

Augustine, of course, wrote not as some stranger to philosophy.


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Very early in our literature he was aware of the limits of philosophy.

He connected, as not accidental, the rejection of salvation with an

attempt to set up a fabricated end for man, even when it takes, in

agreement with the classics, the exalted form of a life of fine virtue

for its own sake. He understood that if nature did not contain within

itself its own completion, then to treat what is not God, what is not

the end, as an end, all those beautiful things, is to imply that the world

is subject to disorder because of man's relation to it. The corruption

of philosophy somehow does not come from itself. It comes from itsquest, wherein the philosopher chooses finally to reject as not worthy

of consideration something encountered from outside philosophy

though intelligibly related to the search for wisdom.

I have likewise included a brief but related introductory passage

from John Paul II at his philosophical best, for he clearly stands

within this line of thought from St. Augustine to Pascal to modernity.

The rejection of the Gospel-and the Gospel can be read by thephilosophers as something intelligible to them, to their quest-is

seen as a functional thing. Denial of salvation as proposed by

articulated faith paradoxically cuts off one possible understanding of

man's purpose. This avenue so cut off, with its own claim to truth,

forces the philosophers, poets, and politicians to imagine and pro-

pose other lines of happiness for man and for his purpose in

existence. The "erosion" of moral values is seen to follow from afailure to relate these same values to something higher than them-

selves. Virtue manifests an inherent instability the minute it becomes

its own end since it implies an unwarranted self-sufficiency, the self-

sufficiency of the finite good and wise independently of the object of

their goodness and wisdom.

Virtue to be virtue, it appears, cannot be only virtue. It is as if

philosophy is not as abstract and neutral, as calm and contemplativeas it often conceives itself to be. Slight errors in the beginning do in

fact lead to huge errors in the end, as Aristotle had observed. It is as

if correct answers need to be formulated, correct habits followed,

and this under the penalty, when lacking, of the death of philosophic

integrity itself. The failure to do this overall intellectual work will

directly impinge on society, any society. In Augustine's terms, no


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existing civil society is the City of God. On the other hand, all

members of any existing civil society have to choose what ultimatecity they will belong to. The seriousness of life in existing cities is only

comprehended by the universality of the City of God and the City of

Man. Otherwise, the life of the mortal, of the individual existing man,

is only that, mortal, something of no final and ordered meaning.

III

To understand what is at issue here, we cannot avoid considering theguidance we can find in an Augustine, in a Pascal, or in a Pope John

Paul II. Since what they argue is pertinent to the perplexity at hand,

I want to clarify the argument by referring to a brilliant and too little

known essay on Augustine by Charles N. R. McCoy. McCoy wrote:

All virtue, then, as St. Augustine is saying, when not referred to

God is vice by excess.... The inordinateness of seeking virtue on

its own account is of the essence of variable impiety because the

frustration of man's final end (eternal beatitude) leads to an

insane searching for a substitute infinity-as in emperor wor-

ship-and destroys the proper forms by which human life is

well lived on this earth.'

In this remarkably acute analysis of the essence of St. Augustine's

place in political philosophy, McCoy was conscious of the subtleways in which the philosophic and moral virtues, that is, the ways of

the philosopher and of the politician, could lead to frustration in their

own orders. The philosopher was not content with the incomplete-

ness of his mind; the politician was not content with the inadequacy

of his city. The philosopher and the politician became rivals once the

philosopher could not answer his own questions. The politician,

geared to action, thought that he could find the answers in a regime,the spiritual artifact it was the politician's to construct.

This frustration in turn led to attempts to concoct and set into

being alternate worlds to the one that isbecause it is not likely that

man will be content with nothing. It will be very intellectually

difficult, as Aristotle had already observed, especially when other

natural things seem to have a purpose, to accept that, even though


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everything else had a purpose, man alone had no purpose, that his

being was "in vain" (1197a31).

One of the most challenging and unexpected alternatives to

nothing, to this "in-vain-ness,"

no doubt, is revelation itself and its

own integrity. In the subsequent history of philosophy, this philo-

sophical uncertainty about philosophy's own incapacity to explain

the whole is why revelation will come to be seen by some philoso-

phers as merely uncertain or mythical, not to be taken seriously

because it did not derive directly from philosophic methods. By stillother philosophers, revelation will be understood merely as a "sub-

stitute infinity" with no other claim but man's own powers. In neither

of these cases will the coherence of revelation and philosophy be

seen as at least possible, however carefully this coherence must be

spelled out from both the side of philosophy and of revelation.

These very moral and philosophic virtues are described, defined,

and reflected upon in the classics. By being only themselves and byno means denying their objective goodness, moreover, the virtues

could lead to ideology (another more modern word for "substitute

infinities"). This path from virtue to ideology was an effort to break

out of the impasses into which philosophy and politics seemed

invariably to lead if left to themselves. 3 There always remains a

certain haughtiness in error, particularly in the error that erects its

own kingdom from its own resources.Virtue, then, the object of the philosophers to define, of the poets

to praise, and of the politicians to incorporate into life, must itself

have a purpose. It must fit into some higher order whereby it can

remain itself while not denying its own limits. Aristotle understood

much of this danger when he related the practical sciences to the

theoretic ones as their proper ends in the last book of the Ethics. But

the theoretic life, while explaining how the practical life might belimited, itself arrived at the boundaries of a life higher than itself, a

life that included knowing and loving, but one that apparently could

not respond to the philosopher in his own terms.

For the classics, then, politics is the highest of the practical

sciences, but not the highest of the sciences themselves. The "sub-

stitute infinities," as McCoy called them, appear on the scene


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because the higher science that politics proposes is itself a quest and

not a complete finding. The "substitute infinities," that is, theexplanations of the world and man apart from metaphysics and

revelation, appear also out of a failure to acknowledge an end that did

not arise from philosophy, or at least from an explanation of an end

that did not arise from philosophy. Philosophy by itself, again, is a

dangerous enterprise. Augustinian realism requires that we recog-

nize this unexpected threat deep in the heart of philosophy, even if

we do not, as we should not, cease to praise this same philosophy asit is in itself.

IV

Even to ask the question of the place of Augustine in politicalphilosophy, consequently, implies that political philosophy pos-

sesses an intelligible structure both of periods and of ideas, of issues

that can be distinguished, identified, and related. I want to approachthe understanding of Augustine in political philosophy by referring

to something curious in Leo Strauss, one of the greatest thinkers

about the order and sequence of political philosophy in this century.

Even though one might look almost in vain in the works of Leo

Strauss himself for a reference to Augustine, Strauss' three editions

of the History of Political Philosophy contain two very penetrating

essays on Augustine, the one by Charles N. R. McCoy cited aboveand other by Ernest Fortin, whose general work on Augustine is of

fundamental importance. 4

Indeed, the practical absence of Augustine in Strauss' own work

itself presents an intellectual problem that serves to set the stage for

a proper and fresh consideration of Augustine. It is an absence, I

think, occasioned by the way that Augustine related Judaeo-Chris-

tian revelation to classical political philosophy. Augustine integratedrevelation and philosophy as if revelation completed philosophy

while not denying its legitimacy. The highest form of life, for

Augustine, was not merely that of the philosopher aware that he

could not absolutely exclude revelation.

Since this completion evidently implied the truth of the Chris-

tian aspect of revelation as well as the truth of philosophy, Strauss


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retained his characteristic reserve. Strauss himself has taught us totake his own silences and reserve most seriously. This reserve sought

to protect Old Testament revelation, the Hebrew revelation, without

taking a position on New Testament revelation, while at the same

time retaining philosophy as the highest way of living-Jerusalem

and Athens, not Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Strauss, it is to be

noted, does not take a position on the truth of Hebrew revelation

either, but he is more naturally sympathetic to it than to the furtherquestion of the relation of Hebrew and Christian revelation, particu-

larly whether they are inner-related.

The philosopher in Strauss, knowing that he could not, without

contradiction, absolutely exclude the possibility of revelation, since

the philosopher did not know the whole, was still to continue with the

quest for truth.' Strauss's own "restless heart," as it were, carefully

examining texts and traditions, was by choice unwilling to repose

there where Augustine found rest in the striking coherence of reason

with Old and New Testament revelation. The Platonic side of Strauss

corresponded to an awareness, at least, in his own soul of the

"wandering Jew" who still sought the Messiah. Thus, Strauss was not

willing or able to exclude a possibility that the philosopher could not

by himself conceive.

Augustine; of course, never wrote any systematic tract on politics

after the manner of Plato or Aristotle. But he did write The City of

God, obviously a treatise, even in name, with Platonic and political

overtones.' The very title comes from the Psalms-"Glorious things

are spoken of you, 0 City of God" (87:3). Moreover, Augustine's

works are filled with issues and references that can only be called

political.' Augustine discussed war, the place of heretics in the polity,

the disorder of regimes, justice, good rule, bad rulers, and punish-

ment. He is indeed said to be the father of political realism, if not

exactly after the manner of Thucydides or Machiavelli, still with a

definite awareness of the dire conditions that often appear among

actual men in existing states.'

Augustine is also said to be the father of political universalism

and indeed in a more penetratingwaythan even St. Thomas. John

East stated the issue most forcefully:


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To build a bona fide believing ecumenism, the Church willneed to rely more upon the Augustinian perspective, and less

on the Thomistic. Augustine is basic in the Catholic andProtestant traditions of Christianity, and he would have no

peers as a point of departure in building a philosophical unity

of all Christian believers. It is curious that Thomists should find

universalism in Aquinas and provincialism or particularism in

Augustine. The facts seem otherwise, for if you are talking

about Christian universalism, it is Augustine who has the

universalist appeal.... 9

Thus universalism, of course, in East's view is particularly aware of

the limits and even failures of all existing polities.

"Augustine reflects the fundamental Judaic-Christian viewwhich

teaches us there are moral absolutes even though they may be dimly

perceived by finite, fallible man," East continued.

It instructs us that man is not the center and measure of all

things, but rather God is. In contrast to his Creator, man is, in

addition to being finite and fallible, characterized by a nature

that has its "evil"

side. Because of these limitations of man there

will always be imperfections in the world regardless ofthe

structureofhuman institutions Out of this perspective springsthe realization that men will never be as gods, and that some

tragedy is inherent in the human condition.

This realism about the causes and origins of human disorder is not

designed to reduce politics to inert and inept reactions, for Augus-

tine does maintain that something new is in fact available to us.

Augustine's understanding, however, does prevent, on a univer-

sal scale, a kind of misunderstanding of the human condition that, by

expecting too much from human means, ends up further undermin-

ing the human good itself. It is not a formula for inactivity, but is a

formula for alertness. Augustine's realism did not deny the validity

of principles and standards. His universalism did not deny the

distinction of polities and societies into manifestations of differing

degrees of virtue and vice codified into law and custom. It did caution


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against any too easy handling of human nature that would notrecognize the depths of both evil and good that flow in and through

the human will, itself presupposed to any political action or society.

V

No doubt, the question of the place of Augustine in political philoso-

phy implies his place in philosophy itself. In his Confessions, Augus-

tine recounts how, as a young man, he was launched into a consider-ation of philosophy. In a passage that never ceases to strike the placid

reader with great force, Augustine tells how he came across Cicero's

essay, Hortensius. The young Augustine caught from Cicero the

charm of the pursuit of truth for its own sake. He was subsequently

never quite the same; his life had gained a new dimension. In a sense,

Augustine might be called the true son to whom Cicero had dedi-

cated his On Duties,that wonderful final gift of his philosophy to that

son who would read him carefully. Augustine, some four hundred

years later, was much more his spiritual son than Cicero's actual son

Marcus, off studying philosophy haphazardly in Athens.

In a famous phrase E. F. Schumacher used to love to cite from

The City of God, Augustine asked rhetorically, in a sentence that

linked forever happiness with philosophy, "Man has no other reason

for philosophizing than that he maybe happy" (Bk. XIX, c. 1). 1 1 The

very purpose of philosophizing is to examine the alternatives avail-

able to man and to find which of these will be that which corresponds

to his own proper being, the conditions of which are now understood

through his own self-reflection. It is not merely that we are made to

know, but that somehow our very knowing, in all its forms, is what

fulfills us, what makes us happy.

Augustine began to examine his life by scrutinizing the available

philosophies. He tried them all and in this, Augustine presents

something both attractive and challenging to modern students, who

are not nearly so brave. Augustine had real problems and perplexi-

ties. For the solution to these ever-recurring enigmas, he turned to

the major philosophical systems of his day, including Scripture

which, by his own admission, he had underestimated as a source of

knowledge and wisdom. All philosophical systems were unsatisfac-


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tory to him, though he learned much from all of them, especially thePlatonists. Even Scripture needed clarification for Augustine. This

clarification he acquired from the sermons of Ambrose that he was

to hear in Milan before he could take it seriously.

In a wonderful, even amusing remark, he despairs of "being

thirty-two years old and not having found the truth yet" (Confessions,

Ch. VIII, c. 7). He would no doubt be perplexed at his modern

contemporaries who, at the same age, do not despair when they thinkthat they have found, in their various relativist philosophies, that

there is no truth to be found. In this sense, Augustine's philosophy,

rooted in his own experience, allows for less self-deception than

almost any other philosophy ever to have been proposed.

Augustine felt the attraction of Manicheanism, of the idea that

there are two gods, of evil and of good, partly because it enabled him

to continue on his own ways. If what he did was caused by some

necessity beyond himself, then he was not responsible. He clearly

saw a logic that he liked because it enabled him to do what he liked.

Already here we find the intimate relation between moral integrity

and the accuracy of philosophic insight.

Augustine, with considerable honesty, found Faustus, the

Manichean bishop who was, he hoped, to explain philosophic and

religious things to him, to be a rather nice man with some eloquence

but not too learned. Faustus had only read a few treatises of Cicero

and some other things of little import. Faustus would have had to

show more acumen and more literary style to impress this sharp

young man. What really moves Augustine are the philosophers, like

Victorinus, who finally accept the faith. If Augustine is to believe, he

is to do so with the style of the philosophers. Humility, thus, needs

philosophical encouragement.

Augustine, moreover, was astonished that even the local profes-

sors had difficulty reading Aristotle's Categories (Confessions, Bk.

IV, c. 16). These professors were pretty pleased with themselves, as

everyone knew Aristotle's to be a tough work. Augustine, however,

tells us, with no little charm, that he himself had absolutely no

difficulty at all with that perplexing work. We cannot help but to

admit that Augustine was a little vain, yet we have to concede that he


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probably did grasp Aristotle fairly easily, even to our own consterna-

tion if we ourselves have ever tried to read, as we should, this seminal

treatise. Any of us who imitates the example of Augustine to read a

philosophic work of Cicero or the Categories of Aristotle will know

that serious study is required to master the material.

VI

Augustine himself, however, unlike Ambrose in Milan, was never anactual politician. He taught rhetoric that no doubt prepared lawyers

and judges for public life, but it was a life which, at the end of his stay

in Milan, he considered to be mainly empty and boastful. As a bishop

he dealt, as we know from his letters and sermons, with many delicate

political issues. 1 2 One of the most unsettling of these political issues

was his dealings with the Donatists. Augustine's later policies over

the Donatists have merited for him an unduly harsh reputationamong those who think it is a rather simple matter, in any polity,

including a democratic one, to deal with fanatics. It is easy to criticize

Augustine on the Donatist controversy ifwe think them to be merely

pious dissenters.

In the beginning of this controversy, Augustine too thought that

it was best to be tolerant and patient. Reluctantly, he found his kindly

instincts ran stark up against the bloody reality he had to deal with.The theological issue in the light of the Donatist attacks necessarily

required political attention. His fellow bishops and priests were

being tortured, beaten up, killed, even. Augustine, then, is not the

philosopher of the best state in this world, though he does have much

to say about it. Rather he is the philosopher of the worst and those

slightly less bad than the worst states-that is, most actual states in

history.Henry Paolucci put the issue as well as anyone:

Doctrinaire libertarians are not likely to be persuaded by St.

Augustine's arguments supporting the view that, when civil

governments are willing to do so, they have a right to compel

heretics to enter the Church. Yet, upon close examination,

these arguments [of Augustine] seem to stand up rather well as


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compared or contrasted with, say, President Lincoln's views on

compelling the rebellious Southern States to remain in the

Federal Union, or the views of those who have justified the use

of force to compel integration of the races in American schools,

or of the separated provinces in the old Belgian Congo. St.

Augustine pleads eloquently for mercy in the administration of

civil laws, and demands of Christian public officials that they

respect his pleas. Yet, at the same time, he warns all concernedwith the maintenance of civil order not to undermine the

foundations of society by attempting to "legalize" or "legislate"

mercy. 13

In more recent times, situations like Jonestown, or Waco, or Islamic

fanaticism make it clear that changes in ideas are ultimately the only

things that can really stop certain kinds of terrorism. Augustine wasaware of this dilemma that eventually confronts all actual political

societies. Augustine's realism, as it is called, is not a principle for

justifying evil deeds, but it is an awareness that evil deeds and deeply

flawed thoughts that cannot be absolutely separated do exist and do

cause unavoidable problems for any commonwealth, or for any

tyranny, for that matter.

Augustine's realism has, however, been said to protect badregimes. It should be recalled, in this context, of course, that one of

the functions of Aristotle's description of good and bad regimes was

to indicate that a change in regime will not necessarily mean a change

for the better. But change is justified only if it is a change for the

better. For the most part, Augustine advises citizens and Christians

to obey the Emperor, as St. Paul himself recommended (Romans,

13:1-7). By failing to seek a radical change, Augustine is said tocontribute to keeping the worst regime in power. But Augustine's

strategy, like that of Paul, was to realize that changes of regime are

often better achieved by working to save and foster what is good even

in a bad or tyrannical regime.

Augustine was in fact always talking about changing things. His

whole personal life is a witness to such change. In addition to being

aware of Aristotle's notion that we could change from a bad regime


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to one even worse, something Augustine would have had no trouble

understanding, it was primarily a question of what to change first,

oneself or one's state. Indeed, it might be argued that Augustine has

elaborated for us the most radical political philosophy possible by the

very fact that he changed himself, changed himself, that is, as he tells

it in The Confessions,by the grace of God, and, we might add, by the

sharpness of his own insights into himself and others.

Augustine, in fact, does not deny the classical distinctions be-tween the different forms of rule-monarchy, aristocracy, polity,

democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny, together with mixtures of the

same. Augustine does not deny that some forms of rule are better

than others. Rome was better than Carthage, not to mention better

than the invading barbarians, even though these barbarians eventu-

allybecame Christians and good Romans.

Augustine's advice for those caught in bad regimes is that thehighest things are still possible for them, but in the City of God. That

is to say, there is not a one-to-one correlation between the final

destiny of human beings and the sort of city in which they actually

lived. Man is by nature a social animal, but the society to which he

is destined is not a polity after the manner of existing cities. On the

other hand, Augustine thought that right living and rightly ordered

souls would inevitably produce a more prosperous and a more noblepublic order. In fact, in The City of God, he continually pointed out

to the Roman politicians and philosophers that it was the Christians

who were serving in the army and obeying the laws of the Empire.

Thereby, the very backbone of the Empire depended not on the

pagan Romans but on the virtue of the Christians.

VIIIn his reply to Leo Strauss (to recall Strauss's silence on Augustine),

EricVoegelin, as is not uncommon with him, does mention Augus-

tine. "With respect to the relationship of science (and especially

metaphysics) and revelation," Voegelin wrote (April 22, 1951),

Augustine seems to me in principle to have shown the way.

Revealed knowledge is, in the building of human knowledge,


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that knowledge of the pregivens of perception (sapientia,closely related to the Aristotelian noun as distinguished from

episteme). To these pregivens belongs the experience of man of

himself as esse, nosse, velle, the inseparable primal experience:

I am as willing and knowing being; I know myself as being and

willing; I will myself as a being and a knowing human.... To

these pregivens belongs further the being of God beyond

time.... 14

Revelation here is said to stand before (be pregiven to) knowledge or

science. We are ourselves, indeed, pregiven to our own thoughts.

Our reality of being, our ability to know and to will is given to us; we

do not cause these faculties to exist in us in the first place. In

Voegelin, even God curiously stands here among the pregiven. And

Augustine is said to be the authority for this view.That there is some subtle problem with this explanation, Strauss

himself was quick to point out. God is not a philosophical pregiven,

nor even an experiential one. In Aristotle or St. Thomas, the

existence of God is not a pregiven but the result of a careful

philosophic proof beginning with what is clearly given, with actual

things that move or change. Even some form of mystical awareness

of God, beyond proof, as it were, must itself happen in the experienceof the human agent and be judged by some clear criterion as not

being itself deceptive. And Augustine, for his part, does not start with

God, but with his own already existing, already searching self that has

felt and posed the essential questions to itself. These questions,

moreover, are not just idle ones, but they arose because they caused

real unsettlement, real perplexity to an actual mind, to Augustine.

"What is consequently important to grasp is that the program ofChristian philosophy is the same for both St. Thomas and St.Augustine: invisibilia Dei per ea quae facta sunt[the invisible things

of God are known through those things which are made]," as Etienne

Gilson, in a fundamental essay on Augustine, put the matter.

It is in no case possible for man to start from God to deduce

from Him the creature; on the contrary, he must mount from


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the creature to God. The course recommended by St. Augus-tine-and herein lies his personal contribution to the treasures

of tradition-is the path to God, leading through this particular

creature which is man, and in man, thought, and in thought,

truth. But this means, quite beyond the speculations about the

nature of truth and its metaphysical conditions, a sort of moral

dialectic that, taking as object of its search the search itself by

man of God, endeavors to show the presence in the heart of

man of a contingency much more tragic and disturbing than

that of the universe, because it is the contingency of our own

beatitude.''

What is to be noticed in this incisive passage from Gilson is first that

it is in agreement, as we shall see below (footnote #21), with Strauss'

comment that he was closer to Catholicism than Voegelin on this

very topic. God is not, for us, a pregiven, even though, as we read in

The Confessions, we are first sought by God. The primal experiences

of esse, nosse, and velle exist as ontological realities before we

exercise our willing or knowing faculties. Willing and knowing in turn

are first activated not by themselves, but by something else inciting

us to curiosity and wonder. We want to know some finite thing that

is . We affirm that it is and that it is this and not that sort of thing based

not on our thought but on our examination ofwhat it is.

The second thing to be noticed in the Gilson analysis is that the

philosophic life is seen, through the eyes of Augustine, himself a

philosopher, as itself both the location for and a sign of the most

tragic and essential activity in the universe, the activity by which we

choose to accept or reject beatitude. Our beatitude is itself contin-

gent upon our freedom. This contingency suggests that the urgency

that revelation puts into the philosophic quest makes it far moreproblematic than the philosopher himself realizes. The search that

leads through a particular man, through thought, to truth is not

merely an abstraction. It is itself a probe embedded in a life in which

the search exists, pressingly exists.

Perhaps a third aspect that can be remarked in Gilson's analysis

has to do with Augustine's realization that our tragic and contingent


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beatitude is not just a problem for the philosophers, the few who

have the time and talent to devote theirlives to the quest. It is not

without significance, in this regard, that Augustine eventually be-

comes a bishop and not a lawyer, politician, or professional philoso-

pher.

On the other hand, because Augustine sees beatitude as belong-

ing properly to anyone who chooses it, each is to know and love God

and neighbor, it does not mean that the position of the philosopher

is not one of special importance. Augustine, of course, did not think

that many, including many philosophers, in fact chose God above

some other alternative. He is often called a pessimist for this stand,

but it was merely a practical judgment based on the evidence of the

majority of actual human lives, most of which did not by any standard

appear to be just. The optimist who thought everyone was to be saved

not only took all drama out of human existence, but proved himself

incapable of taking notice of what men do "do."

Augustine already knows from his own life that disorder of soul

seeks explanation, theoretic explanation or justification. Philosophy

will always be called in to justify disorder of soul. Thus, in Augustine's

view, philosophy must also be called in to explain itself. Augustine,

in other words, knows that there is such a thing as erroneous

philosophy and that it must be reckoned with on its own terms.

Christianity offered salvation to everyone, not just to the philoso-

pher, but it recognized that the reason why this salvation might not

be accepted or understood was most often, in historical fact, the

result of the opinions of the philosophers of the time.

Ernest Fortin, I think, has rightly suggested the significance of

this aspect of Augustine. The issue involves the question of what

Augustine found to be wrong or ambiguous with Plato, whom he (I

might add along with Strauss and Voegelin) considered to be the bestof the philosophers. The first issue, no doubt, as I have indicated, is

that Augustine did not think beatitude, however much dependent on

the problematic of one's own will, was meant only for the philoso-

phers.

There was a kind of anti-philosophic audacity in revelation about

philosophy, already typified by St. Paul (1Corinthians,1:18-23), that


18/38


upheld the highest of standards without denying that its end orpurpose was that each person, even the myriads of non-philoso-

phers, see God. As opposed to modernity, which sought to lower

standards to include everyone in the happiness of a civil society, but

at the price of constructing its own moral laws, Augustine retains the

standards. But he proposes another way to achieve happiness, one

which does not deny the worthiness of Plato, yet one which sees both

that more than the philosopher must be included in the reality ofbeatitude and that the object of philosophy is itself insufficient for

human happiness though not entirely untrue as far as it went.

"What finally convinced him [Augustine] that happiness was not

to be sought in philosophic contemplation but in the Christian ideal

of the love of God and neighbor?" Fortin asked.

Augustine's works contain avariety of answers to that question

but none more readily intelligible than his probing analysis ofthe internal difficulties besetting classical moral and political

philosophy. Stated in its simplest terms, the argument runs as

follows. The pagan philosophers correctly define happiness in

terms of virtue or excellence, that is to say, in terms of the

highest goals to which human beings can aspire, but they are

unable to show the way to those goals. People are happy when

they are at one with themselves and with one another, and theyachieve this harmony when justice prevails both within and

among them. Yet experience demonstrates that few of them

ever manage to live perfectly just lives.16

It was not that the classic philosophers did not have a theory of justice

that in quite an elaborate fashion recommended justice and even

generosity. The fact is that justice was only rarely achieved, given the

selfishness and disorder in most human lives. Classical thought did

not know what to do about this situation and seemed content to

present at least the possibility of finding a few good men, even if it

could find no example of good regimes.'

This situation then made it clear that philosophy did understand

virtue. This grasp of the importance of virtue was not its problem.

The problem was action, being virtuous, not knowing what virtue is.


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How in fact is it possible to be good in the context of this actualselfishness and disorder we find in every human being and society?

Thus, the classical philosophers, Fortin continues,

were the first to admit that their model of the most desirable

society cannot be translated into action. It exists in speech or

"private discussions" only. De facto, one is always faced with

some sort of trade-off, that is to say, with a choice among a

variety of regimes none of which is superior in every respect toany of the others. Even the mixed regime, which these philoso-

phers present as the "practically" best solution to the problem,

is nothing but an attempt to maximize the advantages and

minimize the disadvantages of each individual regime.' $

The existence of the best regime in speech, the Platonic conclusion,

does not convert into action except at the danger of producing

something far worse. Only by accident and rarely does the best

possible regime exist to any degree. The reason why Aristotle argued

for a multiplicity of small city-states and why Strauss was against

world government was precisely to protect this rare possibility, a

possibility that itself confirmed the validity of the philosophic enter-

prise itself even for a few.

The greatest enemy of normal virtue, however, has most often

proved to be the effort to put perfect virtue into the world by political

means. Thus, the classical discussion of regimes-good, bad, and

mixed-is not a discussion that could result in what men really

wanted, either in actual cities or in the very different, though related,

City of God that Augustine used to replace the "Republic" of Plato.

Fortin again describes the difference between modernity, the clas-

sics, and Christianity as it is seen in Augustine's analysis:

Augustine's critique, which is all the more pertinent since it is

based on his opponents' own principles, reminds us of the one

that would later be developed by Machiavelli and his followers,

who likewise took issue with classical thought on the ground of

its impracticality. The difference is that Augustine never thought

of lowering the standards of human behavior in order to


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enhance their effectiveness, as did the early modern philoso-phers when they boldly tried to root all moral principles in some

powerful but selfish passion, such as the desire for self-preser-

vation. If anything, his own standards are even more stringent

than the most stringent standards of the classical tradition. As

he saw it, pagan philosophywasbound to fail, not because it

made unreasonable demands on human nature, but because its

proponents did not know or were unwilling to apply the properremedy to its congenital weakness. That remedy consists in

following Christ, apart from whom one can do nothing (John

15:5), for he alone both reveals the true goal of human existence

and furnishes the means whereby it may be attained.'9

What is striking about Fortin's remarks is the degree to which he sees

in Augustine an agreement of revelation and philosophy in every-thing but the means to achieve a commonly related end.

We may thus have the philosophic ambition to know ourselves,

to know even our faults and defects. What we lack is the means to

achieve regularly and certainly what we know is right or better. We

are first dependent on knowing something else, something not

ourselves. This reliance on something else in turn depends on our

awareness that we do not even cause ourselves to exist in the first

place. Augustine's famous expression, "noverim me, noverim Te"("if

I would know myself, I would have to know Thee"), does not

contradict this requirement that to know either oneself or God, we

must begin with what is neither ourselves nor God. We must examine

all those lovely things that are not God both to see how we might

choose them instead of God and to see that the final source of their

being good or attractive in the first place is not from themselves even

though they be good. What is perplexing about the human condition,

something Christian theology with Augustine calls original sin, is our

inability to achieve the ends that we somehow still understand to be

offered to us both in terms of virtue and in terms of beatitude.

With considerable perception, then, Strauss recognized that this

approach of Voegelin was distinctly curious. Strauss wrote:


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There are criteria that permit a distinction between illegitimate[heretical] and legitimate formulations. If I [Strauss] under-

stand you [Voegelin] correctly,...[this] is your view. On the

basis of the same, you accept Christian dogmas. I do not know,

however, if you do this in the Catholic sense. In case you did

this, we would easily come to an understanding. Because my

distinction between revelation and human knowledge to which

you object is in harmony with the Catholic teaching. But I donot believe that you accept the Catholic teaching.

2

Strauss' "Catholicism," as it were, is spoken both paradoxically and

truly, for he was closer on this point to Catholicism than Voegelin. 21

Strauss's remark to Voegelin that he (Voegelin) did not seem to

"accept the Catholic teaching" acquired its force from Strauss'

doubts about the pregiven positions that were not themselves in anysense subject to philosophy. Revelation in Catholicism, however, as

Strauss knew, had to withstand the test of philosophy as essential to

the coherence of revelation. Gilson himself had pointed out the

danger of a later Augustinianism that sought to use any prevailing

reason to elaborate positions that were derived from faith.22

If faith were to seek intelligence, this meant that human intelli-

gence had to be used to order and clarify what was found inrevelation. 23 Thus, a philosophy did clarify revelation, as the neo-

platonism of the Augustinian tradition undoubtedly showed. But this

clarification was valid only when philosophy itself had already

grounded itself in the permanent questions, in what is. On thecontrary, the only solid basis for revelational positions was when

theologians could at least formulate and understand principles that

were not totally unrelated to philosophic experience.

VIII

In his bookPlato and Augustine, Karl Jaspers tried to show how that

form of philosophic mind, closed in principle to any claim of

revelation, purports to find the origin of ideology in Augustine, only

in an Augustine stripped of the claim to truth within his thought.

"Through the grandeur of his thought," Jaspers concluded,


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Augustine remains the most impressive representative of those

who, human themselves, dare to claim that they can instruct

others about God, and then to go on to cite as their witnesses

to an absolute truth men who, as far as we can know, were

without exception human beings, no less subject to error than

we are. While this claim attests a love of man for man, a joy in

sharing his certainty with others, it also discloses unmistakably

a will to power, having as its corollary awill to submission,

which in the main point has relinquished all striving to think

independently.24

As a description of Augustine, of course, this passage reads almost

like a parody.

The main witness to Augustine's philosophy, of course, was not

other men, but Augustine himself. And what "witnesses" that were

"no less subject to error" than Jaspers himself seemed to be inJaspers' mind the Scriptures. The ideal of "thinking independently"

in spite of the evidence would strike Augustine himself as precisely

ideological, that is, as manifestations of the "substitute infinities."

Jaspers extrapolates his position on Augustine, in a manner

almost contrary to that of Strauss, into a critique of Christianity:

A strange atmosphere of arrogant humility, of sensual asceti-

cism, of perpetual veiling and reversal runs through Christian-

ity more than any other faith. Augustine was the first to perceive

all this. He knew the torrent of inner disharmony, of false and

hidden motives-the dogma of original sin made this evil

absolute in regard to worldly existence and in a manner of

speaking justified it. The self-penetration that set in with

Augustine continued down through the Christian thinkers to

Pascal, to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.2s

Of course, this "strange atmosphere" of veiling and reversal is simply

the doctrine and reality of free will, not of original sin. Inner

disharmony and false motives are the consequences of the Fall, to be

sure. But the "self-penetration", as Jaspers called it, hardly "justifies"

the evil. This self-penetration, however, is the whole point of


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Augustine's life, of his realism, of his idea of free will.

The place of Augustine in political philosophy, I think, does

relate, in a kind of reverse fashion, to Jaspers' thesis. Jaspers had

sought to make Christianity itself an ideology by denying that any of

the witnesses were any more human than he was. This denial left

Jaspers with philosophy as the highest life. By reducing Augustine's

witness, his metaphysics, to just that of another thinker, however

attractive, Jaspers was able to stigmatize Augustine as the founder of

the ideological claim to answers unavailable to the philosophers.

We have noticed in the beginning from Augustine himself, from

Pascal, John Paul II, and even from Strauss' response to Voegelin,

that a path to strange infinities, to alternate structures of the world,

did follow directly or indirectly from the rejection of any coherence

between philosophy and revelation. St. Paul himself had noted

something like this tendency (1 Corinthians, 1:18-24). The funda-mental issue is whether philosophy, without ceasing to be itself, is the

highest science, the highest way of life, or is it a handmaid, necessary

and watchful, to the highest life.26

A philosopher, like Jaspers, open to everything but the possibil-

ity that Augustine was not just addressing himself, sees the threat, the

danger. Christianity-that is, the inner description of salvation as

found in Scripture and Tradition-will appear to such a philosopheras merely another ideology and not as another possible response,

with solid intellectual groundings, to genuine philosophic questions.

The possibility of revelation's truth is repudiated in such wise that

what is rejected takes on the form of a strange infinity. The modern

rejection of Christianity takes on itself the form of identifying

Christianity as fanaticism, as an impossible solution, a strange

infinity, however close it remains to what we actually want and to theprinciples of classical metaphysics.

IX

Augustine's Confessions stand in a particularly crucial position in this

context. Romano Guardini, in his valuable little book The Conver-

sion of St. Augustine, explained what is meant by the term "confes-

sion" for Augustine:


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The word [confession] signifies a stepping forth from theinmost reserve to the open, the public. Here, for religious

reasons, the step is taken God-wards. A private life with its acts,

just as it unfolded from attitude and intellectual struggle, is

displayed-publicly, but also piously-before God, but so that

men may hear.27

Augustine spoke of that small portion of the human race who wouldread his words (Confessions, Bk. II, c. 3). Jaspers saw in this public

presentation of Augustine's journey a "love of men" but more

especially a "will to power." Since the love of men in any Christian

sense cannot in principle be simultaneously a "will to power" in the

pejorative sense of that expression, there is something contradictory

in Jaspers' analysis.

The key, I think, lies in Augustine's wholeness. In his Encyclicalon "Augustine of Hippo," John Paul II observed that Augustine

realized that it was impossible that the path to truth should be

closed to the human mind; if it is not found, it is because men

neglect and despise the means that will lead to the discovery of

truth.... Reason and faith are two forces that are to cooperate

to bring the human person to know the truth, and that each of

these has its own primacy: faith comes first in the sequence of

time, reason has the absolute primacy.28

Again here, there is the persistent theme that truth can be found and

that the failure to find it has internal and personal consequences.

Philosophy, the "absolute primacy" of reason, retains its importance.

Will to power is not a substitute for reason but a denial of it.

This account of Augustine's conversion and its meaning as apublic testimony has received recent attention from James J.

O'Donnell in his brilliant "Introduction" to his new edition and

commentary on the Confessions. To a position such as that of Jaspers,

that Christianity was another man-made projection of ideology,

O'Donnell wrote:

The "truth" of which Augustine spoke was not merely a quality

of a verbal formula, but veracity itself, a quality of a living


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human person. Augustine "made the truth"-in this sensebecame himself truthful-when he found a pattern of words to

say the true thing well. But both the "truth" that Augustine

made and the "light" to which it led were for him scripturally

guaranteed epithets of Christ, the pre-existent second person

of the trinity. For Augustine to write a book, then, that pur-

ported to make truth and seek light was not merely a reflection

upon the actions of his life but pure act itself, thought andwriting become the enactment of ideas.

29

Augustine, as Gilson had said in his essay on "The Future of

Augustinian Metaphysics," led us to metaphysics through one actual

being, Augustine himself.3 Augustine starts with his inner motion,

accurately remembered and described, clearly spoken. The unity of

faith and reason exist in Augustine, in someone for whom theproblems exist and for whom the account of faith exists in an

intelligible whole.

O'Donnell further pointed out that Christianity is not merely a

body of doctrines, but it is also rite. Augustine embraced the

sacraments as his major decision about how properly to worship

God.31

The reading ofThe Confessions is always paradigmatic for the

reader as it takes him through his own life, its own grounding.But the life of this particular act of "confession," the writing of

this text by a man self-consciously turning from youth to middle

age, is as present to us on the page as our own lives-indeed,

it becomes as we read it a part of our own lives. It is that

fragment of the "life" of Augustine that is most accessible to

US.32

The "public" aspect ofThe Confessions is, then, not something just

for Augustine, because what he has described is a guide for any

honest life.

X

This account of the inner life as it is made public brings us back to the

relation between philosophy and revelation. The central issue has to


26/38


do with Augustine's celibacy and why he did not simply settle down,marry, and have a normal public life. Contained within this problem-

atic, in O'Donnell's view, is a discussion of a treatise of Ambrose that

was written on the sacrament of baptism and its relation to philoso-

phy. Clearly this is an odd relationship. But, as O'Donnell points out,

it is the key to Augustine's relation to philosophy. For we must

remember that celibacy was not merely a Christian counsel but also

a pagan ideal for the philosopher.

33

O'Donnell explains the point accurately:

The way of life of the philosopher is not the true way, it is not

enough to know the truth, one must have in addition sacramen-

tal membership in the Christian church. Phrased this way, the

relevance to Augustine's position is clear. What is of greater

interest, however, is that in that treatise, Ambrose found it

polemically necessary and useful to counter the claims of thephilosophers to have achieved a higher standard of moral life by

their chastity; "continence is the pedestal on which right

worship rests," says Ambrose. That was the challenge August-

ine accepted: to become not merely Christian, but a Christian

who outdoes the philosophers in all their excellences. In order

to present himself for baptism, Augustine felt that he had to

have achieved a degree of moral self-control that assured himof a lifetime of continence.

34

We relate this position in Augustine back to the problem of the

insufficiency of virtue, even a lofty philosophic continence. How-

ever, the practice of philosophy by itself, especially supported by this

high form of life, can and does lead to a pride that is destructive of

virtue in its ends.

If we must reconsider the very nature of Augustine in political

philosophy as seen in much of the literature about him-his moder-

nity, as it were-as I think we must, it is because political realism,

while valuable, is not the principal legacy of Augustine, nor is it that

of his supposed influence in inspiring ideology or political fanaticism

into the modern world. What Augustine teaches is the philosophical

insufficiency of virtue, of the philosophic life. But that life is really


27/38


dangerous when it is presented with and subsequently refuses to seethe completion of the virtuous life in revelation.

The fanaticism, Augustine himself thinks, comes from precisely

this source:

Salvation, such as it shall be in the world to come, shall itself be

our final happiness. And this happiness these philosophers

refuse to believe in, because they do not see it, and attempt to

fabricate for themselves a happiness in this life, based upon avirtue which is as deceitful as it is proud (The City of God, Bk.

XIX, c. 4).

All the elements of the modern formation of ideology are already

here, in the philosophers who actively refuse to believe, and who

therefore see no final end to virtue, so that they have to "fabricate"

an alternative over against the salvation that contains the true end of

virtue.

XI

Ernest Fortin, in a profound essay, has suggested that we need "a

fresh inquiry into the nature of Augustinian political thought"

because . of Augustine's indirect relation to Nietzsche, to his

(Augustine's) critique "of classicism in the name of faith."35 Augustine's

bond of love and faith between all citizens of any city, the bond that

replaced justice in Cicero's definition of the state, tended to under-

mine the basis of any actual city. As a result, Augustine himself had

to spend much time explaining why Christians were also obedient to

existing states in the things that mattered to the state.

The fact was, however, that no political life or life of virtue was

capable "of exhausting the full range of human possibilities or

satisfying completely man's longing for wholeness." 36Nietzsche had

tried to restore specifically human greatness but on the basis of the

modern critique of reason. What mattered was not the objective

order but "the sincerity and intensity of one's commitment to one's

freely chosen goal. Concern had replaced truth as the unique and

ultimate criterion of the worth of one's actions.'' 37Nietzsche himself,

as Fortin observed, regarded Augustine and Pascal as the true


28/38


representatives of the Christian tradition.

Yet this presumed subjective side of Augustine that is seen in

Nietzsche and in jaspers neglects the fact that, while he understands

the insufficiency of virtue, Augustine in no way denigrates virtue,

even when he emphasizes the consequences of the Fall. The modern

political theory that replaced the classical and Christian theory is

characterized, in Fortin's view, by a new "doctrinairism." Classical

thought discussed differing regimes in the context of differing kinds

of chosen virtue or vice. In modernity, there is only one regime

allowed and this is a "just regime ... attainable anywhere and at any

time." The varieties of actual virtue and accident become irrelevant

as aspects of real regimes.

Science in modernity became a project to transform the world.

"Man could look forward not indeed to a new heaven, but to a new

earth with its glittering prospect of a `shared, abundant, and secured'

but otherwise unregulated life."38 We would now have a "realizableutopia" that would succeed where classical philosophy and Chris-

tianity had failed. It was the failure of this modern project that

Nietzsche explained. It was a failure that had Augustinian roots,

Fortin thought, because Augustine's love and faith could, when lost

and transformed into sincerity and concern, make it seem like a this-

worldly paradise was possible.

XII

In The City ofGod(Bk. V, c. 12), Augustine wrote, "For there is notrue virtue except that which is directed towards that end in which

is the highest and ultimate good of man. 739 In a sense, this is the most

important sentence in his works to understand Augustine's political

philosophy. It is simply that the history of the City of God and the

City of Man areso interrelated that the rejection of the former causesthe other, in the sense of the state, to change its form and limited

nature, which is itself possible only if not confused with the City of

God.

For although some suppose that virtues which have a reference

only to themselves, and are desired only on their own account,


29/38


are yet true and genuine virtues, the fact is that even then they

are inflated with pride, and are therefore to be reckoned vices

rather than virtues. For as that which gives life to the flesh is not

derived from flesh, but is above it, so that which gives blessed

life to man is not derived from man, but is something above

him... (The City of God, Bk. XIX, c. 25).

What philosophers find maddening about Augustine is precisely his

questioning of their virtue, not on his grounds, but on theirs. The

virtues of the philosophers are in fact splendid vices, pride, when

they stand by themselves. Philosophers, by the historic record,

cannot keep them to be virtues. Thus, they do not just stand by

themselves but seek a rationale, an explanation of their indepen-

dence.

It is from this background that McCoy's remarks about The City

of Godbecome important. He calls Augustine's contribution here"altogether original." This originality of Augustine consists in the fact

that "matters that belong to the separate philosophical sciences

(such as ethics and politics) are given a higher unity by reason of the

more universal formality under which they are regarded, namely,

Divine Revelation. "4 The point of this new relationship is not that

man does not owe final allegiance to the state. This understanding of

the limited nature of the state is already in Plato and Aristotle. Whatis lacking to natural virtue is precisely the final end of man, a clear

understanding of his duty and his happiness. This understanding is

supplied in revelation and not in philosophy, though there is nothing

in it with which philosophy can find ultimate fault.

Augustine never tires of describing the disorders present in

human society. For this blunt reminder, he is often considered to be

a consummate pessimist. But in fact what he describes is no differentthan what is read in any daily newspaper or history book in any place

or any time about what actually happens among men. Augustine in

fact is surprisingly encouraging about the possibilities of a relatively

civil public order, once the deeper questions of man's ultimate end

and the means to achieve it are known, something that is the burden

of revelation.


30/38


The key text here is found in The City of God(Bk. XIX, c. 13):God, then, the most wise Creator and most just Ordainer of all

natures, who placed the human race upon earth as its greatest

ornament, imparted to men some good things adapted to this

life, to wit, temporal peace, such as we can enjoy in this life from

health and safety and human fellowship, and all things needful

for the preservation and recovery of this peace, such as the

objects which are accommodated to our outward senses, light,night, the air, and waters suitable for us, and everything the

body requires to sustain, shelter, heal, or beautify it: and all

under the most equitable condition, that every man who made

a good use of these advantages suited to the peace of this mortal

condition, should receive ampler and better blessings, namely,

the peace of immortality, accompanied by glory and honor in

an endless life made fit for the enjoyment of God and of oneanother in God; but that he who used the present blessings

badly should both lose them and should not receive the others.

No Enlightenment utopia could be more fulsome.

Augustine, of course, would not be surprised that historically

such a more pleasant earthly existence did not often occur. He

understood human will too well. But the fact is that there is present

in Augustine a positive appreciation of earthly peace provided that

its conditions are clearly recognized, namely, that it itself depends

upon the relation of the virtues to the higher end of man.

"Far from eliminating the State by referring its temporal peace

to eternal peace," McCoy explained,

St. Augustine's thought rather would re-establish the State's

integrity both in the mode of its operation (which is free) andin the order of its end (which is the temporal human common

good). 41

For this to happen, the moral rectitude and the understanding of

man's final end must be known. That is, the end of man is understood

to be the life of the Trinity. The moral means of grace and spiritual

life are needed to address the consequences of the Fall. These ends


31/38


and means must be present in the citizens' own inner life.Virtue, when sought for itself, however, is not neutral. All civil

and personal life is shot through with the presence of a humandestiny higher than the state. Thus, in McCoy's conclusion, "the

central idea, the chief significance for politics and political philoso-

phyofThe City of God" is precisely the freedom given to the citizen

and the state not to have to solve transcendent questions by political

means. This liberty leaves the citizen free to know his higher end, anend that includes virtues and goals that enable the natural virtues to

work without the pride that would corrupt their integrity.

The place of Augustine in political philosophy, therefore, in-

cludes both his talung seriously Plato's effort to locate the best polity,

now for Augustine in the City of God, and his proposing that the best

practical city is also more frequently possible than for the classics

because of grace, because more than the philosopher, men are aware

of the real nature of the highest end. As to the worst states, those

Augustine looks at with a cold eye, he realizes that they do not inprinciple prevent anyone from achieving man's final end and that

they themselves cannot prevent that conversion of heart from which

all societal change in principle originates. On the other hand,

Augustine's realism requires that we also know clearly the terrible

things men do "do" precisely so that we will not underestimate the

seriousness and difficulty of fallen men ruling fallen men.

XIII

From John R. Meuther's "Story of an Encounter," itself an account

of conversations about Augustine, two final aspects of the scope of

Augustine's political philosophy need to be spelled out. In these

discussions, Ernest Fortin had observed that there is no discussion

of the best regime in Augustine. Since this was the essential question

of classical political philosophy, its absence was surely significant.42

The problem of the best regime lay at the heart of the City of

God, according to Robert Markus. The only good regime, let

alone the best regime, is one which cannot be established by

human agency. "So what does Augustine settle for?" Markus


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asked. "Rather than describing any one of a number of alterna-

tive possible utopias, he talks about a state in which you do the

best that you can in purely pragmatic terms. This is the point of

the City of God. It is to formulate a concept of theses publicato which the Christian and the pagan alike will be able to give

loyalty. That is the fundamental point, once you get all the

polemics out of the way: how to speak of an ideologically neutral

community."43

This neutrality, of course, must leave open the possibility of lives

being influenced by the norms of revelation, even of living according

to these standards in public. That is, the content of the civil order was

itself the major factor on whether one could be loyal to it.

But what this pragmatic argument misses, I think, is that Augus-

tine does not entirely abandon the question of the best regime.Indeed, his whole genius is to recognize that this Platonic question

about the best regime is quite legitimate. It is a necessary question

posed by the very dynamics of living itself. The best regime, however,

isprecisely the City of God. We ought not to deny the significance

of this fundamental affirmation, while we acknowledge that by

comparison to it, all actual regimes are pragmatic and imperfect.

Rather Augustine sees the profound worthiness of Plato inposing the question about the best regime in the first place. It is

because Plato had asked the question as a philosopher that the

response ofrevelation made intellectual sense. Without Plato, what

is revealed would appear as arbitrary or chaotic. The location, not the

legitimacy, of the best regime is what The City of God is about. The

fact that it is not in this world does not denigrate political philosophy

but raises it to its proper horizon and defines more clearly what is its

own taskor scope.

Hannah Arendt, to stress a second final point, had remarked that

Augustine was the founder of the discussion of will in Western

philosophy.44

Jean Elshtain commented on the influence of Augus-

tine on Arendt:

The one great twentieth-century philosopher who turned to

Augustine repeatedly was Hannah Arendt. What she found in


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Augustine that figures in all of her work is the power of hisargument against the cyclical theory of history. He creates

space for new beginnings that the cyclical theory denies. He

also has a profound sense of living in fallen times.... Much of her

politics is about keeping the worst from happening.45

The linear theory of history is what makes willed actions significant

in their non-repeatability."Augustine, the first Christian philosopher and, one is tempted

to add, the only philosopher the Romans ever had," Arendt herself

observed, "was also the first man ofthought who himself turned to

religion because of philosophical perplexities." 46 As I have sug-

gested, this turning was itself made possible because Augustine did

have philosophical problems that were not being met by philosophy

itself but which did serve as a link to revelation. Worldly politics isindeed important in preventing the worst from happening. This

again is Augustinian realism. The location of the best regime,

however, was the more profound philosophic problem, the one that

could lead to the much deeper disorders of society and polity if some

adequate response to its location were not given. This response was

what Augustine did in The City of God.

Christopher Dawson, I think, at the end of his remarkable essay"St. Augustine and His Age," drew together the various strands of

Augustinian political thought. He underscored the revolution that

the discovery or more precise clarification of the nature of will made

in political philosophy. Augustine's reflection on will, beginning with

his own, really implied a new founding for both for the City of God

and for civil society.

Under the Roman Empire, as in the sacred monarchies of theoriental type, the state is exalted as a superhuman power

against which the individual personality had no rights and the

individual will had no power. In the East, even Christianity

proved powerless to change this tradition, and alike in the

Byzantine Empire and in Russia the Church consecrated anew

the old oriental ideal of an omnipotent sacred state and a


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passive people. In the West, however, St. Augustine brokedecisively with this tradition by depriving the state of its aura of

divinity and seeking the principle of social order in the human

will. In this way, the Augustinian theory, for all its

otherworldliness, first made possible the ideal of a social order

resting upon the free personality and a common effort towards

moral ends. And thus the Western ideals of freedom and

progress and social justice owe more than we realize to theprofound thought of the great African who was himself indif-

ferent to secular progress and to the transitory fortunes of the

earthly state, "for he looked for a city that has foundations

whose builder and maker is God." 47

What is to be noted here, as in the earlier remarks of McCoy, is that

the effort to acquire a consistent understanding of both reason andrevelation, of experience and of philosophy, does serve to correct

principles of polity and to specify the virtuous quality of public life.

This connection between will and society is precarious both for

ultimate questions-Gilson's "tragic and disturbing contingency of

our beatitude "-and for civil society. But it does leave open theoption to live well in the world, even in radically disordered societies.

The final resolution of man's beatitude is not inphilosophy itself or

in politics. Yet both philosophy and politics succeed in understand-

ing their own limited truth because each can, with Augustine, ask the

proper questions and each can understand the errors of choices that

cannot in principle reach the City of God.

The place of Augustine in political philosophy, then, is not

merely as a founder of political realism, though it is at least that. Nor

is Augustine simply someone who stands for the transcendent over

against the historical disorders of every regime, even the best

practical regimes. Augustine's theory ofwill does mean that the heartof change, even political change, does exist in every human person,

that the state is not the ultimate locus of human action. But essen-

tially Augustine stands for the completion and coherence of political

philosophy, not by itself, but through itself, through its own ques-

tions honestly posed and open to answers strikingly related to its own


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inadequacies, to the "restless hearts" that Augustine knew to befound amidst all those beautiful things that surround us all.

James V. Schall, S.J.

Georgetown University

NOTES

1. John Paul II, Address in Agrigento, Sicily, May 9, 1993, in

L'Osservatore Romano, English, May 12, 1993, p. 2. See John Paul

II, "Augustine of Hippo," (Apostolic Letter, August 28, 1986), The

Pope Speaks, 31 (1986), 361-88).

2. Charles N. R. McCoy, "St. Augustine," History of Political

Philosophy, Edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago:

Rand-McNally, 1963), pp. 157-58.

3. See Eric Voegelin,Science,Politics, and Gnosticism (Chicago:

Regnery, 1968).

4. See especially Ernest Fortin,PoliticalIdealism and Christian-ity in the Thought of St. Augustine (Villanova: Villanova University

Press, 1972); "St. Augustine,"History of Political Philosophy, Edited

by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (2d Edition; Chicago: Rand-

McNally, 1972), pp. 151-79. (This same essay is also in the Third

Edition).

5.Leo Strauss, "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philoso-

phy,"Faith and Political Philosophy, Edited by P. Emberley and B.Cooper (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press,

1993), pp. 217-34.

6. See James V. Schall, "St. Augustine and Christian Political

Philosophy,"ThePolitics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from

Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy (Lanham,

MD.: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 39-66; "Augustine: On

Teaching and Being Taught,"What Is God Like? (Collegeville, MI.:Michael Glazer/Liturgical Press, 1992), pp. 207-30.

7. See The Political Writings of St. Augustine, Edited by Henry

Paolucci (Chicago: Gateway, 1962).

8. Herbert Deane's Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine

(New York: Columbia, 1956) remains the best statement of this view.

See William Stevenson, Christian Love and Just War: Moral Para-


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dox and Political Life in St. Augustine and His Modern Interpreters( Macon, GA.: Mercer University Press, 1987). Two essays of perma-

nentvalue need also to be mentioned: Reinhold Niebuhr, "Augustine's

Political Realism,"Perspectives on Political Philosophy, Edited by J.

V . Downton and David Hart (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and

Winston, 1971), 243-57, and Ernest Barker, ""Introduction," The

City of God (Everyman Edition; New York:Dutton, 1945), pp. vii-

xxxvii i .

9. John P. East, "The Political Relevance of St. Augustine,"

Modern Age, 16 (Spring 1972), 170-71. See especially Etienne

Gilson, "St Augustine and the Problem ofWorld Society,"Introduc-

tion to The City of God(New York: Fathers of the Church Edition,

1960), Vol. VI. pp. xi-xcviii; R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and

Society in the Thought of St. Augustine (Cambridge:Atthe Univer-

sity Press, 1970).

10.East, ibid., p. 172.

11. E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York:

Harper Colophon, 1977), Dedication.

12. See The Political Writings of St. Augustine, Edited by Henry

Paolucci,ibid.; Peter Brown,Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: Univer-

sity ofCalifornia Press, 1969).

13.Paolucci, "Introduction,"ThePoliticalWritings of St. Augus-

tine, ibid., pp.xxi-ii.

14. Eric Voegelin, Letter#38, Faith and Political Philosophy,

ibid., pp. 82-83.

15. See Etienne Gilson, "The Future of Augustinian Metaphys-

ics,"A Gilson Reader( Garden City, N . Y.: Doubleday Image, 1957),

pp. 101-02.

16. Ernest L. Fortin, "Augustine and the Hermeneutics of

Love," Augustine Today, Edited by Richard J. Neuhaus (GrandRapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 40.

17. See Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1964), p. 49.

18. Fortin, ibid.,p. 41.

19. Ibid., pp. 41-42.

20. Strauss, Letter #39 (June 4, 1951), Faith and Political


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Philosophy, ibid., p. 88.21. See James V. Schall, "Revelation, Reason, and Politics:

Catholic Reflexions on Strauss," Gregorianum, 62 (1981), #2, 349-

66; #3, 467-98; "A Latitude for Statesmanship? Strauss on St.

Thomas," The Review of Politics, 53 (Winter 1991), 126-45;Reason,

Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), pp. 182-224.

22. Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages

(New York: Scribner's, 1938), pp. 35-66.

23. Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages

ibid., Chapter I. See also James V. Schall, "`An Atheist in the

Sacristy': Why Does Faith Seek Intelligence?" Faith dr Reason,

'XVIII (Winter 1992), 315-34.

24. Karl Jaspers, Plato and Augustine, Translated by Ralph

Mannheim (San Diego: Harvest, 1962), pp. 118-19.

25.Ibid.,p. 119.

26. This was Strauss' own wonder at the beginning ofThe City

and Man, ibid., p. 1.

27. Romano Guardini, The Conversion ofSt. Augustine (Chi-

cago: Regnery,1969), p. 3

28. John Paul II, "Augustine of Hippo," ibid.,p. 364.

29. James V. O'Donnell, "Introduction,"Augustine: Confessions

( Oxford: Carendon Press, 1992), Vol. I, Introduction and Text, p.

xvii .

30. Etienne Gilson, "The Future of Augustinian Metaphysics,"

A Gilson Reader (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1957), 82-

104.

31. O'Donnell, ibid.,pp. xxvi, xxviii.

32.Ibid.,p. xxx.

33. Schall, "The Christian Guardians," The Politics of Heaven

and Hell, ibid.,pp. 67-82.

34. O'Donnell, ibid.,p. xxxix.

35. Ernest Fortin, PoliticalIdealism and Christianity in the

Thought of St. Augustine (Villanova, PA.: Villanova University Press,

1972), p. 38.

36.Ibid.,p. 35.


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37.Ibid., pp. 37-38.38.Ibid.,p. 36.

39. "But that is true virtue, when it refers all the advantages it

makes a good use of, and all that it does in making good use of good

and evil things, and itself also, to that end inwhich we shall enjoy the

best and greatest peace possible" (The City ofGod, Bk. XIX, c. 10).

40. McCoy, "St. Augustine," ibid., p. 151.

41.Ibid., p.155.

42. John R. Meuther, "The Story of an Encounter,"Augustine

Today, ibid, p. 149.

43.Ibid.

44. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind(New York: Harcourt,

1978), Vol. II, pp. 84-110.

45.Ibid.,p. 147.

46.Ibid.,p. 84.

47. Christopher Dawson, "St. Augustine and His Age," St.

Augustine (New York: Meridian,

schall augustine

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