Figgis insightfully stated, “We can never understand St. Augustine if we think of him as a system maker”. There are logical inconsistencies in his work, changes of emphasis which remain unexplained, and an underlying assumption – especially in some of his later work – that what happens in this world is tarnished by Original Sin to such an extent that it is almost futile. However, if we understand Augustine as a man of passionate faith, who sought to reconcile his Christian devotion with the daily challenges of the world around him, rather than a ‘political theorist’ in the Classical mould, we may extract and synthesise a ‘political picture’ of his thinking, which, like an impressionist painting, may teach us something in spite of its internal conflicts and potential obscurity.

In pursuit of this end, Augustine left us with a penetrating assessment of his own character, in the form of his Confessions. This work is widely recognized as one of the most brilliant explorations of sin, epiphany and redemption ever written, and lays bare Augustine’s profound and passionate personal faith. The implications of this must be held in suspension during a consideration of his political thought, since it is difficult to understand the primacy of human sin in his political (or implicitly political) work, without reference to his extreme personal convictions. Confessions presents a man who literally aches with the memory of his sinful youth:

“You were silent then, and I went on my way, farther and farther from you, proud in my distress and restless in fatigue, sowing more and more seeds whose only crop was grief.”

This may appear as something of a detour from the question of the role of peace in Augustine’s political thought, but the discursive rhetoric of his writing cannot be understood without a brief consideration of the character behind it. This enterprise is less necessary of a self-conscious political and social ‘theorist’ like Hegel or Weber, but there is so much of Augustine himself in his works, that the sense is sometimes obscured without reference to his character and circumstances.

 

Putting St. Augustine in Context

Augustine’s political thought has been described as “a meeting place of two worlds”, with reference to the two main intellectual traditions available to him. Indeed, some have gone so far as to recognise his work as the point at which Classical and Judaeo-Christian thought were amalgamated and made pregnant with the seeds of ideas which would flourish during the Renaissance. Irrespective of this, the two intellectual traditions were not as separate as some historians have supposed, and the intellectual legacy with which Augustine had to work was rather more complex than ‘Classical thought versus Judaeo-Christian thought’.

 

On a superficial level, Augustine appears to have started his career with a broadly ‘Classical’ conception of political thought, which was concerned with the right ordering and government of society in a way that was most conducive to virtue, and hence to human happiness. This neo-Platonic view of the world rested strongly on a belief in the cosmic order, and the cultivation of human virtue via justice. Over time, and certainly by 411, Augustine adopted a stance more integrated with the Judaeo-Christian political tradition, which we might term the ‘politics of salvation’, whereby only God’s saving grace could establish the proper social order; human reason was (and had been shown to be) incapable of doing so, and the human Christian agent could only be a peregrinus in a sinful world. Markus has identified a third period of Augustinian thought, which marked a reconciliation between these two strands, as Augustine looked at ways in which mortal men could (and should) participate politically to mitigate the effects of sin, however imperfectly.

The genesis of Augustine’s political thought is crucial to our understanding of the importance of ‘peace’. In fact, his conception of political thought was heavily conditioned by the work of earlier Christian thinkers such as St. Ambrose and Tertullian. These men had already begun the long and painful process of reconciliation between the two political traditions. Perhaps the most significant of these was St. Ambrose’s De Officiis (a self-conscious reference to the revered Ciceronean work), in which he followed Cicero’s conclusion that “the foundation of justice is faith (fides)”. This was a deliberate are careful use of Roman political vocabulary, reformulated in a Christian context with a Christian meaning. Augustine picked up the Ciceronean notion (crucially re-contextualised by St. Ambrose) that Christian faith underpinned justice, and placed the idea that “the just man lives by faith alone” at the very centre of his political thought. Augustine’s understanding and explanation of ‘peace’ throughout De Citivate Dei rests on the nature of the two traditions of political thought. As the title of Chaper IV puts it, “Philosophers, who have supposed the Supreme Good (i.e. the nautral and good end of mankind) lies in themselves”, was fundamentally at odds with the Christian assumption that “eternal life is the Supreme Good”. The attack on Classical thought is direct: “With wondrous vanity, these philosophers have wished to be happy here and now, and to achieve blessedness by their own efforts.” For Christians, according to Augustine, this is outright blasphemy, which will inevitably be punished since “the Lord knoweth the thoughts of men” (1 Cor. 3,20.). The only hope is through faith, as, “We are saved by hope.” (Rom. 8,24f.)

 

                The emphasis on the sinfulness of the “earthly city” has led many to question why Augustine should be concerned with any form of “earthly peace”, when the true and only salvation of mankind lay outside the realm of the here and now. This tension is implicit in Augustine’s own phrase from De Civitate Dei, “what difference does it make under what rule a man lives who is soon to die?”  Augustine’s pessimistic realism, writing of “this hell on earth”, seems to have reached almost the point of nihilism. Here, again, it is instructive to remember that consistency in political theory was not in the forefront of Augustine’s mind, and the comment should perhaps be taken as an outburst of frustration at the sinful condition of man, akin to those which appear in his Confessions. In any case, the question of why Augustine wrote his greatest ‘political’ work, De Civitate Dei, has long interested historians. Figgis saw it as a straightforward livre de circonstance, in response to the challenges presented by the Church’s association with the fallen Roman Empire after 410. Markus took a more nuanced approach, and showed how elements in Augustine’s thinking had moved down a more Judaeo-Christian line of reasoning before 410, especially after his intensive reading of St. Paul in the 390s. This argument led Markus to the conclusion that Augustine’s reflection on human history had already led him to deny the Empire (and, indeed, and political or social institution in the saeculum) any role whatsoever in the salvation of man. In this sense, since Augustine was a political agent himself and at the mercy of political expedients, the fall of Rome in 410 was a catalyst rather than a root cause of his re-appraisal of the state of man in De Civitate Dei. Therefore, when Augustine set out his purpose as, “to say something against those who attribute to our religion the disasters greatly sustained by the Roman commonwealth”, he had already developed the intellectual position from which he would make his argument, and had broken from the Tertullian idea of an alliance of Empire and Church.

 

The meaning of ‘peace’

 

To the modern scholar, the word ‘peace’, outside of an Augustinian context, may be defined broadly as the ‘freedom from conflict’, whether that ‘conflict’ is internal or external, moral or military. In Augustinian thought, ‘peace’ is a more pliable concept, which is used at times more narrowly and at times more broadly. It is such an important term in Augustinian thought, that he devotes an entire chapter of De Civitate Dei to it, notwithstanding the numerous references to it in other chapters. Augustine introduces it thus:

“We may say of peace, then, what we have already said of eternal life: that it is our Final Good.”

In fact, Augustine goes so far as to argue that “the name of the City [of God] itself...means ‘Vision of Peace’”.  This predominantly theological explanation of Christian peace, which Augustine subsequently refines to “peace in life eternal” or, “life in eternal peace”, initially appears to have little place in the ‘Earthly City’, mired as it is in the effects of inescapable human sin. How, then, is Augustine later able to speak of “the sweetness of peace, which all [mortal] men love”? The answer lies in a neo-Platonic understanding of Augustine’s concept of the ‘peace of Babylon’. While Augustine admits that “the peace of the unjust is not worthy to be called peace at all”, he also contends “that which is perverse [the peace of Babylon], however, must of necessity be in, or derived from, or associated with, and to that extent at peace with, some part of the order of things.” This (rather ineloquent) statement is a neo-Platonic expression of the theory of Forms, since the “peace of the unjust” on earth is a perversion of “peace in life eternal”, but, in order to be ‘a perversion’, it must have some kind of relation to it in first instance. This line of reasoning also allows Augustine to attack, but explain, the philosophers who thought they could find true peace in the earthly world, since their “pride is a perverted imitation of God”, which “loves its own unjust peace”.

Are we to let Augustine away with such a malleable conception of ‘peace’, or are we better to see a duality of ‘peaces’ depending on whether they tend to the earthly or heavenly City? It is worth understanding Augustine’s mature conception of divine providence at this stage, which is fundamental to understanding how he felt he was able to talk of one ‘peace’ in both cities, and how it was true that “no vice is entirely contrary to nature”.  The two types of divine providence reflect the two types of order in the world. Providentia naturalis provides God’s ‘natural order’, whilst providential voluntaria provides order expressed in human choices and enacted in human action and its consequences. This distinction represented Augustine’s final repudiation of the Classical notion of a ‘cosmic order’, and had tremendous earthly political implications as God’s providence covered both the ‘natural order’ of a father’s rule over his household, and the (sinful) ‘human-willed’ order of a state or an individual over other humans. From here we can see how Augustine’s conception of the purpose of government as being the “control of the wicked within the bonds of a certain earthly peace” developed. This Augustinian innovation, sometimes termed the ‘politics of imperfection’ in contrast with the perfectibility of man and polis assumed in Classical philosophy, rests on the idea that a perfect man (if he were to exist) would have lost his autonomy before God. The only exception to this was Christ Himself, who was borne out of God to die for mankind’s sins as an act of mercy.

How are we to reconcile the need to pursue ‘peace’ on earth, the rejection of the Classical cosmic order, and the notion that “the peace of all things lies in the tranquillity of order”? This can partly be achieved by Augustine’s conception of a duality of ‘order’ in the world, based on the two kinds of divine providence discussed earlier, but this does not explain why peace on earth is desirable in itself. Augustine writes that “the earthly city...desires an earthly peace, and it establishes an ordered concord of civic obedience and rule in order to secure a kind of co-operation of men’s wills for the sake of attaining things which belong to this mortal life.” The italicised words carry an implicit suggestion that there are some things which are of value in themselves in the earthly world. Augustine goes on, “the Heavenly City...must of necessity make use of this [earthly] peace also”, which, using the same reasoning by which Augustine established that the very perversion of earthly peace implies a direct connection to heavenly peace, suggests that there is a direct connection between the earthly and heavenly cities. This is not merely the Heavenly City “as a captive and a pilgrim”, which Augustine declares it at one point, but the idea that the Heavenly City “directs earthly peace towards heavenly peace”. This assertion implies that aspects of the City of God are actually present in the City of Man, and the two are not as distinct and separate as their eschatological definitions would imply.

 

There is a tension between the earthly peace and heavenly peace within individuals themselves. The following passage is from Chapter XIX of De Civitate Dei:

“Every mortal who makes right use of these [mortal] goods suited to the peace of mortal men shall receive ampler and better goods, namely, the peace of immortality and the glory and honour appropriate to it, in an enternal life.”

This passage appears to suggest that human actions on earth (“who makes right use of these goods”) will result in “the peace of immortality”, which is to be found in the Heavenly City. This appears to contradict the idea that everything within the saeculum is sinful, and cannot fit with the statement that “In the earthly city, then, the whole use of temporal things is directed towards the enjoyment of earthly peace”. Either everything is directed towards the earthly peace (and hence not the heavenly) or not everything is. In addition, “the infirmity of the human mind”, which Augustine assumes throughout his discussion, would not appear to tally with the human capacity to “make right use of these goods”, since the human mind is necessarily ‘infirm’.

Augustine attempts to reconcile these apparently contradictory views by bringing in a third meaning of ‘peace’, namely, “that peace which mortal man has with the immortal God”. In its fullest sense, this peace is built, like the Heavenly City, on “love of God and contempt of self”, but in sinful man this is by definition impossible in the saeculum. Perhaps this understanding depends on the notion that between the two cities, “a harmony is preserved...with respect to the things which belong to this condition (i.e. the earthly and sinful).” The precise nature of this “harmony” only becomes clear at the end of time, when the corpus permixtam is finally divided into the saved and the condemned, and until that point it is ‘held in preparation’ by Christians. This would fit in with Augustine’s central mantra that “the just man lives by faith alone”, faithful of the coming of “the eternal and perfect peace”. Happiness, according to Augustine, exists “rather by future hope than in present reality.” The Christian concept of ‘faith’ (fides) is at the centre of Augustine’s political thought, just as it was for Ambrose, and it would be for centuries to come. It is the basis of justice and peace since what kind of justice “takes a man away from the true God”? “Justice” has by implication been replaced by divine grace, as Augustine makes explicit: “Justice is found where one supreme God rules and obedient city according to his grace”. Thus, on earth, there is no true peace:

“The peace which we have here, whether shared with other men or peculiar to ourselves, is only a source of solace for our wretchedness rather than the joy of blessedness”

Therefore, the only ‘peace’ which cities on earth can hope for is a transient peace based on the fear of violence. Even the faithful Christian will have to object himself to the libido dominandi of tyrants, since “By Me kings reign, and tyrants possess the land”. (Prov. 8,15.) The Lord’s justice is invisible on earth, and may be expressed though the sins of man via the providential voluntaria, and this “hidden justice” man cannot see or interpret in the earthly world.