Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 113 - Heaven and Earth - Augustine’s City of God.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Heaven and Earth, Augustine's City of God. Even the tallest tree needs the right soil to grow. Consider Buster Keaton. Though we think of him as a pioneer of cinema, he learned his trade on the stage, touring the vaudeville circuit with his family. In the family's surefire comedy act, the child, Buster, would be kicked around the stage by his father. Buster later claimed to have discovered his stone face screen persona at this literal school of hard knocks, when he noticed that the audience laughed louder when he kept his reactions to a minimum. Or, to move deftly on to the topic of today's podcast, consider the example of Augustine. This giant of the history of Christianity had his feet planted firmly in his historical context. We've already started to get a sense of how his writings respond to other lesser-known church fathers. Augustine's love-hate relationship towards Cicero and other Latin stylists is shared by his contemporary Jerome, and Lactantius anticipates the emphasis on the virtue of charity we find in Augustine's interpretive manual On Christian Teaching. The Augustinian position on freedom and sin responds not only to his opponents, the Pelagians, but also to an idea put forward by Tertullian. You'll remember that for Tertullian, the soul is a material substance, a sort of breath. On this basis, he argued that soul is physically transferred to each child by the child's father, a belief known as traducianism. This explains the weakness of our human souls. Had they been instead created by God, they would have been perfect. To address this, Augustine held that God does create each human soul directly, yet he insisted that all humans share in the sin of their original forefather, Adam. This Augustinian doctrine of original sin can furthermore be understood as an alternative to Origen's theory that originally perfect souls fell as the result of intellectual failure. Augustine agreed with Jerome that this was the wrong way to reconcile divine justice with human imperfection. Augustine attacks Origen's ideas in what may be his most ambitious single work, The City of God. A gargantuan treatise in no fewer than 22 books, The City of God is in part an attack on paganism, not unlike the attack staged by Lactantius. The immediate occasion of the work came not from Augustine's intellectual context, but his historical context. It was written in the wake of one of the most traumatic events to befall the empire during his lifetime, the sack of Rome in the year 410 by the army of the Gothic king Alaric. Like a kind-hearted boss, Alaric was actually rather reluctant in giving Rome the sack. He did so to extract concessions and recognition from the empire, not to bring the empire to its knees, so the sacking of the city was more restrained than it might have been. Still, the symbolism of the event was impossible to ignore. Augustine tells us that pagans in this era complaining about dry weather would say, no rain is the Christians' fault. If Christians could even be blamed when rain didn't fall, they could certainly be blamed when Rome did fall. It was divine payback, the pagans said, for the empire's adoption of Christianity and abandonment of the gods who had protected Rome since its founding. The city of God begins by refuting this accusation, but it doesn't end there. Over the course of the 22 books, Augustine has time to survey Roman history, to mock pagan belief, to envision what awaits us in the afterlife, indeed to recount the entire story of mankind, beginning with the Garden of Eden. At one point, he even provides a concise history of philosophy beginning with the pre-Socratics. Good thing that Augustine lived before the invention of the podcast, that kind of competition I definitely don't need. Still, his first order of business is to absolve Christianity of responsibility for depriving Rome of its divine defense system. He describes some of the disasters that befell Rome long before Christianity came along, such as the civil wars that led to the fall of the Republic. Cleverly using the pagans' literary hero Homer against them, he also points out that if pagan gods could protect cities, then Troy would not have been burnt down by the Greeks. He rebuts the accusation at a more philosophical level too, echoing the value system of the Stoics when he remarks that only a fool would think that defeat in war, or the sack of a city, is the worst of disasters. The real calamity is moral depravity, and Rome fell to the forces of immorality long before Alaric came along. Again, Augustine is able to turn the pagans' own literature against them here. Aristocratic Romans constantly lamented that the moral fiber of their society unraveled when the Republic fell. Augustine gleefully quotes passages from Cicero to this effect, and reminds us that this unraveling occurred before Christ was even born, never mind Christianity coming to dominate the Empire. Similarly, he alludes to Plato's Republic and its critique of tragedy when he is decrying the debauchery of Roman theatrical performances. This polemic may seem to be of limited interest for us, philosophers being quoted simply to score points in a cultural debate. But in fact, we are being subtly introduced to the main theme of the City of God, which is crucial for the history of philosophy. Augustine divides his discussion of Rome's failings into two parts, one dealing with earthly concerns like the sacking of cities, the other with the more fundamental questions of virtue and vice. This mirrors another contrast that gives the work its name, the contrast between the City of Man and the City of God. The City of God is eternal, and its members seek eternal blessedness. The City of Man is earthly in its concerns, and its members seek happiness in this life. Augustine traces these two cities back to the dawn of man, and then further still. The pride characteristic of the earthly city began with the fallen angels, while the good angels are the most outstanding citizens of the eternal city. Among the earliest humans, the City of Man is associated especially with Cain, who slew his brother Abel. And Augustine makes sure to remind us that another fratricide occurred at the founding of Rome when Romulus killed Remus. To tell the rest of this tale of two cities, Augustine devotes a large section of the City of God to a history of mankind based mostly on the Old Testament. He is not afraid to digress, dwelling on such topics as the practical arrangements on Borde Noah's Ark. Unfortunately, Augustine doesn't address my main question, which is whether the two giraffes had a special birth with high ceilings. He does, however, ask whether the boat was really big enough to hold all those animals. And what did the carnivorous animals eat? But the overall goal of Augustine's City of God is not to figure out whether goats and sheep were safe from lions and tigers on the ark. It is to separate sheep and goats in a more figurative sense. By defending the values of the Eternal City while exposing the fraudulence of the City of Man. To do that, Augustine needs to criticize not just the religious beliefs of pagans, but the core values of the society they have built. Along the way he will expose the failure of philosophers who attempted to provide rational support for this pagan culture. In doing so, he ironically draws inspiration from a pagan historian named Varro. He serves as a foil for Augustine throughout much of the City of God. Rather amusingly, given his own prolific writing career, Augustine marvels at Varro's output and wonders whether anyone could read everything that he wrote. Augustine discusses pagan society first in terms of human affairs, and then with regard to divine affairs, an opposition already used by Varro. We already know that Augustine was unimpressed by pagan society when it came to human affairs, the theatrical shows, and so on. But he also delivers a penetrating analysis of Roman political history. Why did the Romans expand their realm, subjugating one people after another, until their empires stretched from Britain to Mesopotamia? For the sake of glory, the glory that comes through victory, claimed on behalf of some general or emperor, or of Rome itself. Though Augustine sees the lust for glory as the characteristically Roman sin, it is only a version of the sin that besets all mankind, the sin of pride. We are prideful when we bestow an esteem on created things that belongs rightfully to God. Augustine remarks that in the earthly city, love of self leads to contempt for God, whereas in the eternal city, love of God leads to contempt of self. Yet it is not necessarily a sin to love oneself. In fact, Augustine thinks we cannot help loving ourselves. We should also love our fellow human beings. But we should love ourselves and other humans as created things, referring this love to God the creator. By instead pursuing glory above all else, the Romans have shown that they valued themselves, or their empire, in God's place. That's the bad news for the Romans, and in Augustine's opinion, news doesn't get much worse. But there's good news too, because the single-minded quest for glory can help one to avoid other evils. The outstanding men of Rome, especially in its earlier history, were capable of great self-sacrifice, willing to suffer and even die for the sake of renown. This renown is in the end worthless, and military conquests of no real value, either to the conquered conqueror or the conquered. Yet Augustine gives a kind of grudging respect to the great men of the Roman Republic. What they pursued may have been pointless, but they pursued it with relentless self-discipline, and gained an earthly dominion as their reward. He thus favourably compares the love of glory to the mere love of dominion, or political power. Sheer lust for power is compatible with open debauchery and criminality. Later he may be thinking of figures like Commodus or Calicula. Those who seek glory instead act well, because they want to be admired. Augustine's remarks on honor resonate with those of Aristotle who argued that one should not value honor, but rather valued being the sort of person who would be rightfully honored. So glory lovers make better rulers than lovers of power. But that doesn't mean they make good rulers. Augustine rightly observes that many Roman military campaigns were undertaken mostly to win prestige. Glory seekers thus initiate pointless violence with horrendous consequences for everyone else concerned. A good ruler would instead look to the true welfare of his people. Predictably, Augustine sees Christian rulers like Constantine as paradigm examples. So even though he excludes political rule from the goals of the city of God, he thinks the best political rulers are those who pursue the goal of eternal life. That exemplifies a tension that runs throughout the city of God. On the one hand, Augustine dismisses even the most basic physical needs as being of little importance compared to the need to improve one's soul. For instance, at one point he remarks that it is obviously preferable to be enslaved to another human than to one's own desires. In this same passage, he indicates that slavery is unnatural and a result of sin, but gives no sign that it might be a Christian's duty to try to eliminate the practice of slavery or even to free a single slave if the possibility arises. In such passages, Augustine seems disturbingly quietist, so concerned with dismissing the importance of earthly goods that no earthly evil can shock him into recommending political action. Yet Augustine clearly does think it matters whether people suffer or enslaved go hungry. He emphasizes the good results that follow here on earth when political rule is founded in Christian piety. And at the level of the individual, he says that the man who belongs to the city of God will help others and never do harm. For, such a man loves God and shares God's love of other men. These remarks of course fit well with the praise of charity we observed in On Christian Teaching, and to some extent Augustine practiced what he preached. He tried to use his position as a bishop to do good, and he would have had the opportunity since his position involved not just preaching, but significant legal authority. We also find him, for instance, writing a letter that laments the abduction of free people who are sold as slaves. But it strikes me that he was more interested in crusading against, say, the false theological doctrines of the Pelagians and Donatists than against the violent treatment of women or the practice of slavery. The city of God helps to explain this. Here Augustine argues that humans have no hope of stamping out evils in this life. The city of God, unlike the city of man, knows its limits. The rather half-hearted commitment to practical action that results, both at the political and individual level, is reminiscent of what we find in Plotinus. Indeed, Augustine echoes Plotinus's point that those who fight in wars, even wars in a just cause, see themselves as impelled by a regrettable necessity, rather than given a welcome chance to display courage or other virtues. This is not to say that the city of God was intended as an endorsement of Plotinus's philosophy. Far from it. In fact, it contains some of Augustine's most direct criticisms of the Platonists. He admits that the Platonists came closest to articulating the values embraced by citizens of the heavenly city. But this just makes it more disappointing that they failed in the end. Augustine thinks that Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry all recognize the reality of a single divine cause, and gives Porphyry in particular extra credit for expressing doubts about the pagan ritual practices of theurgy in the letter to Annibo, which you may recall as the now-lost work that provoked Iamblichus to write his defense of theurgy on mysteries. Yet, the Platonists persisted in accepting a multiplicity of deities. This began with Plato himself, whose dialogue Timaeus speaks of lesser gods who assist the divine craftsmen in creating the world. Later to Augustine's own day, Porphyry lost his nerve and failed to reject theurgy entirely, or to abolish the other divinities and accept the one true god. Augustine has already mocked the absurdities of the pagan gods earlier in the city of God. He enjoys himself tremendously as he describes the various minor divinities needed for a pagan marriage—one god to lead the bride home, another to keep her faithful to her and the god Priapus, whose responsibilities can't be explained in a family podcast like this one. How, Augustine wonders, can the young couple even enjoy their wedding night with this crowd of gods standing around watching? More importantly, how can the Platonists lend their intellectual credibility to such absurd religious beliefs? The same question goes for Varro, who supplied Augustine not only with historical information, but also ample discussion of pagan religion. Varro was too wise a man to accept such beliefs at face value, and was quietly critical of the building of idols and other pagan practices. But like Porphyry, who should also have known better, he fell short of the true monotheism championed by the Jews and Christians. Augustine's criticism of Hellenic philosophy goes deeper than this though. If he is really to expose the false promises of the city of man, he must show that no earthly realm and no earthly life can lead us to happiness. The Platonists and the Stoic schools taught that the wise man can achieve blessedness in this life by freeing himself of emotion and placing no value on earthly things. Augustine uses all his rhetorical powers against these claims in the city of God, asking whether it is really credible that someone could be subjected to extreme physical tortures or the ravages of illness and still count himself happy. Nor should we aspire to the emotionless state of apatheia praised by the Stoics. Augustine is frankly appalled by the suggestion that one could fail to grieve the death of a beloved friend, a point given added resonance by the tales of grief over the death of a good friend and of his son Adeodatus in the Confessions. But what about a life of virtue, identified as the highest good by Aristotle and also by Varro? Admirable though virtue may be, in this life it consists of an unceasing battle against evil, whether the evil is done by others or the evil within oneself. This can hardly be the basis of true happiness. It seems then that the Hellenic philosophical schools offer us no path to supreme blessedness but only something akin to what Buster Keaton's father offered him, a lesson in remaining unfazed by adversity. Augustine has not given up the idea that philosophy should be the pursuit of happiness, but he has abandoned the notion that happiness can be attained in this life. One might imagine a city of men more enlightened than Rome, which would pursue justice and peace instead of glory, but no earthly realm can promise permanent peace and permanent felicity. That reward is given only to those who live in the City of God and not in this life, but in the eternal hereafter. Who among us then are the citizens of the eternal city, the ones who will be truly happy? For now, we cannot tell. It is tempting to assume that the earthly representation of this city is the Christian church, but that is not Augustine's view. It would be more like the position of his rivals the Donatists, who saw their church as something like a walled city, separating the righteous few from the sinful multitude. For Augustine, a staunch critic of the Donatists, joining a church cannot exempt one from the empty seductions of the earthly city. And at least in theory, there could already have been citizens of the City of God before the time of Jesus, never mind the institutions of the church, though Augustine thinks that such people would have needed a special revelation of Christ's saving grace. The upshot is that in this world the two cities are mixed together. Only in the afterlife will we find out who is a sheep and who a goat. But it seems pretty clear that the pagan philosophers at least are goats, maybe that's why they insisted on wearing beards. Augustine accuses even the best of them, the Platonists, of using their powerful intellects for prideful ends. In the Confessions, Augustine spoke of being helped by Platonists to understand how God could be an immaterial substance, but here in the City of God, he attacks the Platonists' presumption in identifying themselves with such immaterial substances. Humans are not just souls, but souls inhabiting bodies. The Platonists should have marveled at the way that God has fused the immaterial soul with the material body. Instead, they marveled at themselves, pridefully claiming the status of an elite few who alone among humans could free themselves from bodily concerns. Augustine throws this accusation at Porphyry, among others, suggesting that he reserved true intellectual purification for philosophers, like himself, and condescendingly allowed lesser humans to participate in the profane practices of theurgy. Nonetheless, Augustine continues to make use of Platonist themes and metaphors. Platonists frequently describe themselves as exiles, or as prisoners, longing to flee the body and return to the intelligible world. Augustine instead speaks of the City of God itself as a captive here on earth, or as being on a pilgrimage. Augustine urges us to become, not separate souls freed from evil by individual effort, but members of a human society that gratefully receives an undeserved salvation. These are just a few examples of the way the City of God critically responds to the wisdom of the Greeks, and especially of Plato and his disciples. Augustine is inspired by the Platonists, yet disappointed. Of all the Greeks, they came closest to recognizing the one true God, but instead they embraced pagan belief. Ironically, they could have understood God more fully had they obeyed the inscription at their own temple at Delphi, Know thyself. For every human is an image of God, and knowing the nature of oneself is a path to knowing the divine. Augustine traveled this path, and wrote a guidebook for those who were willing to follow him. The result is probably the greatest work of philosophy by any late ancient Christian, on the Trinity. But before we get to this final Augustinian masterpiece, I want to look a bit more at Augustine's views on the Hellenic philosophical tradition. For this, I'll be turning to a guest who won't be sheepish in sharing her thoughts on how Augustine reacted to that tradition. It would really get my goat if you didn't tune in for an interview with Sarah Byers on Augustinian Ethics here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.