Plundering Plato’s Gold
Augustine’s Critical Appropriation of Greek Philosophy
For the Academic Paper form with full citations, see here.
It is well known to students of historical theology that Augustine was influenced by Platonic thought. However, since the relationship between philosophy and theology has not always been viewed in a positive light, some amount of ground clearing is necessary whenever one is drawing from Augustine as a resource. Making this task even more complex is the negative press received by realism in that same anti-philosophical narrative.
Arguably it is Plato himself who had been the philosophical whipping boy of choice among Evangelical scholarship in the last hundred years. To speak in his language or categories was “Gnostic.” To speak of the “immortality of the soul” was to deny the resurrection of the body. To speak of the contemplative life was to be non-pastoral and probably elitist too. And besides, the Augustine that still spoke like Plato was the early Augustine. Once he ran into those dreaded Pelagians and had a solid decade or two of church life under his belt, the bishop of Hippo relinquished himself of all of that ethereal focus. So the story goes.
This essay will argue that Augustine’s approach to theology was self-consciously informed by a “critical Platonic” mold. This will be shown to be the case whether we are speaking of the exegetical, dogmatic, polemical, or practical realms of his thought. This will be true both about Platonic realism concerning universals, as well as about the more general metaphysical categories inherited, concerning being, becoming, participation, and privation.
We will also follow a chronological structure. The thought of Augustine is one of the great stories of a profound mind in the course of change. If anyone would dismiss the transparency of his Confessions (397) as something other than his stated intentions, his Retractions (427) toward the end of his life stands as a monument of intellectual humility. What displays itself from that early classic to the latter work is an intellectual progress that is arguably second to none in church history. Note that what I am calling “critical Platonic realism” is not to speak of some early appendage of his thought that faded away. On the contrary, it remained as a unifying concept throughout his life. Certainly notions like recollection, which Plato rooted in a preexistence life, were discarded soon after conversion. However those elements which most profoundly highlighted the superiority of eternal, immaterial things remained central.
Along the journey, Augustine was shaped by the controversies that met him. Granted that there is much overlap from one phase to the next, we can still get a sense of how Augustine’s mind was developing by how he appropriated the realist conception of theology to each challenge.
At each point an eternal form of this or that part of theology will serve as the root of articulating each doctrine, or for correcting this or that error.
Accordingly, my thesis will be unpacked in the following order, from: 1. the influence of Platonism to 2. Augustine’s hermeneutic (the form of truth) to 3. Augustine’s theology proper (the form of Being); to 4. the Manichean controversy (the form of good), to 5. the Donatist controversy (the form of the church), to finally, 6. his great work of contrast with the disintegrating pagan world (the form of the eternal city). I purposely leave aside the Pelagian controversy partly because, being Reformed, I would have nothing new to say. The main reason for its exclusion, however, is that it represents the one season of Augustine’s thought-life where the plundering of the Greek philosopher gives way in the most total fashion to the mind of the Apostle Paul.
THE INFLUENCE OF PLATONISM
The intrusion of Greek philosophy into early Christian theology has gotten a bad rap for at least a century now. Many have been quick to dismiss any privileging of the invisible and eternal aspects of theology and Christian life as if “Platonic” and “Gnostic” were logically coextensive. However, it is difficult to take Augustine seriously without coming to terms with his deliberate agreement with a few of the main tenets of the Platonists. They came the closest to the truth, Augustine would say, pointing to the invisible and immutable realm as the source of good and solace of the soul. In so conceiving of the highest things, the followers of Plato prepared the mind, at least, to conceive of God more accurately than many professing Christians have done: “They have seen that whatever is changeable is not the most high God…whatever (else is) can only be through Him who truly is, because He is unchangeable” (City of God, VIII.6). For that reason, “If…one is nearer to God the liker he is to Him, there is no other distance from God than unlikeness to Him. And the soul of man is unlike that incorporeal and unchangeable and eternal essence, in proportion as it craves things temporal and mutable” (City of God, IX.17). Our souls become like the objects that we reason are the most real.
While the term realism is more commonly applied to the school in the Middle Ages, historians of philosophy also speak of a Platonic realism, as well as an Aristotelian realism. Put simply, realism is the belief that universals are real things (res). That is to say that beauty, goodness, justice, and truth are not merely useful names for abstract nothings, but rather objects of an invisible, immutable, eternal nature. By contrast to realism, nominalism holds that a universal is merely a name (nomen) that we supply in order to assign meaningful predicates to individual things.
With nominalism, the mind loses unity to the diversity of things we see. It is unclear what objective meaning any of our words possess if the term signifying any referent does not possess greater existence than the particular instance.
Plato called these universals “the Forms.” Indeed, he conceived of a distinct realm of the forms as the “real” world, as opposed to the lower material world of mere appearances. As one simple example of how Platonism discerns these forms, in the dialogue Euthyphro, the search was for the form of justice. The question was: What makes a thing just? Socrates queried his younger interlocutor as to a few candidates. Perhaps justice is (1) what I am doing right now; or (2) what is dear to the gods is just or pious; or it may be (3) what no gods would ever differ on—leading to the famous Euthyphro dilemma—or else finally, (4) what pertains to the “care of” the gods is pious and what remains toward men is justice. None of this would do for Socrates. The upshot was that unless there is an eternal form of Justice, then our use of the concept to describe particular instances of a “just war,” a “just law,” a “just ruling” and so forth, is really a matter of subjectivism.
Now if one were to ask Plato how we come to know these forms, he would say by the “eye of thought,” that is, with the intellect in the process of dialectical (or abstract) reasoning. The Ideas or Forms (what would later be called universals) were the essence of things, whereas all of the particulars in this world of appearances were imperfect examples of that unifying essence. Indeed the knowledge of these forms, or of anything else for that matter, is itself a form: “that knowledge is always of something that is, and that, as being knowledge, it must be infallible.” In other words the object in our minds that we call “knowledge of x” is either true about x or else false. If it is true, then this object is neither x itself, nor a faulty conception of x; but insofar as it truly corresponds to x, that object of knowledge was already true before our minds incorporated it into our act of reasoning. This will be important to remember when we come to Augustine’s theory of illumination.
While we do not tend to think of Aristotle’s emphasis on Augustine, some of his distinctives do come through the Neoplatonists nearer to his time. In Aristotle’s realism, contrary to Plato, (1) universals (or forms) exist in objects of the mind, but not in any other immaterial realm of ideas; (2) every form always has its matter; (3) these exist independently of our perception of them; (4) these are known a posteriori, abstracted from the sense perception of those externals; but in agreement with Plato, (5) such abstract and objective knowledge is the foundation of our knowledge of reality. Likewise these two titans of Greek philosophy agreed that formal realities are more real than all of their material particularities, and that these universals are real, independent of the abilities of finite minds to perceive them.
Although he would have to correct them, it was the Neoplatonists who helped Augustine to bridge the gap between the Manicheans, who he had fallen in with, and the Christianity that he would champion. In the Confessions, he gives a repetition of things he found “there” (in the Platonists) that were similar to Scripture, yet that next step of the same thing he found “nowhere” among them. Augustine found agreement with the Platonists on the following: there had to be one Being unifying even all intellectual reality; this One Being must be simple, immutable, eternal, and so forth; and the Forms or Ideas were “inside” of the divine mind.
Augustine also disagreed with them on some things: that this One was either impersonal or else personally unknowable; that all else came from this one by “emanations” of being; and that this ultimate Being could not directly cause all else. These Platonists posited “intermediaries” for this very reason.
But getting back to Augustine himself—we do not perceive the divine ideas directly via our intellects. Rather, divine illumination works through the media of Nature and Scripture. Copleston makes an interesting analogy between the way illumination functioned for Augustine with the way reminiscence worked for Plato. One obvious difference here is that divine illumination requires no pre-existence of the soul, a point which was echoed by Gilson.
What then was the finished product of “Augustinian Realism”? We must first add that there was Pauline influence on his appropriation of Plato. Romans 1:20 was interpreted by Augustine through the lens of this realism. We might say that Augustine corrected and harnessed Plato with Paul’s help, concerning both the light of nature (Rom. 1:19-20; 2:14-15) and the priority of eternal things (2 Cor. 4:17-18).
In the final analysis, universals were now seen to be two things: 1. attributes of God and 2. ideas in the mind of God.
About those divine attributes, we would more obviously include beauty, goodness, justice, truth, wisdom in a list of these. Now since all universals had to be “eternal, unchangeable, and necessary,” these are just three more divine attributes and so must be added. Then there are also divine ideas. Gilson points to De Spiritu et Litera, 19, and De Genesi ad litteram, IV.32, 49, as two places where Augustine develops this. All that God knows he knows in himself. No works of God ad extra contribute to God’s knowledge either of himself or even of those things. Indeed all of the works of creation are rooted in God’s ideas of himself, as they are patterned after his glory (Ps. 19:1), that is his perfections, rather than being based upon anything else.
Both the exact content and the method of discovery are different than in Plato. First, to content, this is not of “things in God’s ideas,” in other words we do not mean “intuition of the content of God’s ideas,” but rather of the universals themselves. We can easily reconcile Augustine at this point with the Reformed Scholastics who denied that we could possess God’s archetypal knowledge. Gilson later speaks of Augustine’s mystical step, but that idea is not necessary to his realism per se. Second, as to means of communication, one does not abstract to these, as in Plato, but there is an illumination to the soul, immediately, and thus these forms cause the soul to act upon even sensation.
Moving beyond the question of universals, there is that other emphasis inherited from Plato. There is first what we might call his “positive metaphysics” of being and participation. Being is simply that which is. Unlike the Neoplatonists, who envisioned all being emanating from the One on a continuum, for Augustine, there was one action that utterly differentiated the Being who created and all other beings which were creaturely. That action was creation ex nihilo. Because God alone is He who is, it logically follows that no other being has being, properly speaking, in itself. Henry Chadwick summarizes the completed Augustinian metaphysic in this way:
“Creation is ‘participation’ in being. This term implies derivation. It is characteristic of that which is derived, that what one has is then distinct from what one is. For creatures it is one thing to exist, another to be just and wise. But in God to exist and to be just, good, and wise are one and the same. Man can exist without being just, good, or wise; God cannot. God ‘is what he has.’”
This way of expressing the necessity of such Being will be foundational to (we could even say synonymous with) Augustine’s articulation of divine simplicity. We will come back to that concept.
Now if all other being is derived, it follows that all other being is upheld. This is consistent with passages like Hebrews 1:3 or Colossians 1:17. Participation in being may be compared to light reflected on the surface of an illuminated object, with all of its color considered. To one scholar, “Sensible reality points beyond itself to its permanent structure and its source of origination. Equally important, it communicates content.”
There was also the “negative metaphysics” of Plato, where things fell away from being. Here there is being and privation. Privation we might think of as the opposite of participation. If being-in-participation is upheld in the direction of Being, reflecting back to being, then privation is what we might call “the dark side,” or that which is faced away; or it is that which is, to some extent, not upheld. It is not merely defective as a static absence, but a dynamic process of experiencing a withdrawal of Being from it. This is consistent with passages like Job 34:14-15 or Romans 8:20. Being and privation manifest in Beauty, on the one hand, and that which passes in and out its light, on the other. A flower is a simple example of that. There is the full bloom and then there is wilting. The same thing is both beautiful and ugly, only at different times, and in relation to the eternal form of beauty.
In summary, things below were neither Being in himself, nor nothingness, but are always becoming. One more crucial agreement with Plato is the equation of Goodness to Being. There can be no “way things ought to be” back behind Being. And since God is most simple, immutable, and self-sufficient, it follows that this must also be said about the divine decree, and therefore also about the sum or end of all that is decreed.
All things were thus good. Being in itself is intrinsically good, and all else is good extrinsically, or insofar as it is upheld as being. This is certainly a difficult implication, but one that can be parsed out. Specifically, it has implications for evil that are likely to be wholly misunderstood. Is Augustine saying that evil is an illusion? Well, no—not at all. In the Confessions, he makes the case, early in his thinking, that, strictly speaking, there is no such “thing” as evil to God, nor even “is” it in creation as a whole. In other words, evil does not have the power of being as good has. This does not make it “not real” in the sense that we are first thinking of, but we will have more to say about that later. For now, let us at least get the connection between Augustine’s contentment in the God who is and thus in the plan he has set forth. So he wrote of the essential nature of all things, “Far be it for me then to say that these things should not be” (Confessions, 7.13.19). The practical upshot for Augustine is that he would no longer desire a “better” world than that which is.
One last improvement upon Plato should be mentioned. That concerns the means by which truth is known. Both a Platonist and an Augustinian could say that reason is the light of nature. However, reflection upon everything else said thus far begins to demand a difference. All truth has three qualities. Summarizing Augustine, Gilson lists these as “necessity, immutability, eternity.” Why not opt for what modern thought has proven to be the dead ends of empiricism and rationalism? Although the labels are anachronistic, Augustine was not unaware of the basic allure of these tendencies. Is the source of truth found in the objects of external sense? No, because it requires the intellect to organize their data, and everything not in the mind already is contingent, mutable, and temporal. What about the internal reason? No, because if all truth is necessary, immutable, and eternal, then such cannot arise from any individual finite mind. While this light operates inside all, it is also common to all, and so must come to all by some transcendent source. In short, truth is a universal. Intelligible truths judge the lower truths.
Truth is “independent of the mind it rules.” Thus there are truths, by which we ascend to Truth. And when the finite mind participates in the Being of truth, conforming to those attributes of necessity, immutability, and eternality, the mind is reflecting upon none other than those divine attributes.
He means this as a proof for God’s existence, from the premise that anticipates Descartes—“Even if I doubt, I exist” (City of God, XI.26; cf. On the Trinity 10.10.14; Enchiridion, 7.20). In summary, Augustine moves “from the exterior to the interior and from the interior to the superior.” Unlike Descartes, however, the insight of the self was not its causal source.
Instead, Augustine appealed to the concept of illumination. While the universe is “a clear mirror wherein the mind sees God’s reflection in everything,” God’s light does not think for us, but rather enlivens the mind so that it becomes more like a mind via proper secondary causes. The logos is the Light itself. Obviously that part was not unique to Augustine, as Justin Martyr and virtually all of the Alexandrian theologians made much of this concept. Some may have incorporated the “seminal logoi” from the Stoics, but there is no evidence that Augustine was as influenced by their writers as he was by the Platonists. He used the imagery of “light” whereas they imagined a “fire” or a divine “spark” in the soul of man.
AUGUSTINE’S HERMENEUTIC: THE FORM OF TRUTH
In his book On Christian Doctrine, Augustine develops a theory of things (res), signs (signum), and words (verbum). The relationship between this and realism will become immediately apparent. “A sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses” (On Christian Doctrine, II.1). For example, a tree is associated with the linguistic symbol “tree.” Yet is it not also the case in the Bible that the cross is a “tree” (Gal. 3:13, 1 Pet. 2:24), and a very special one at that? So both the word “tree” and each individual tree are signs, or in other words, instances of a form of life and death, blessing and cursing. Think also of the “milk” of the word (1 Pet. 2:2) or, stretching the mind further, the link between the “vine” that is Christ and the “branches” that are the church (Jn. 15:1-5). Even more abstract examples deal with language and quantity: the sounds of Greek versus Latin are different. The thing signified is one, just as mathematical lines are intuited within the self, not by their exemplars. So also in any translation of the Bible. There are different words in the various languages, and yet each signifies the same thing. The priority of things over signs, form over instances, is why dynamic equivalent is often a better translation than “word for word.”
There is a parallel concept that runs through this work. Some things are to be enjoyed, and others to be used. We will see this concept in several other works of Augustine. These two are “modes of love.” Not all that is to be used is to be loved. We should note how this corresponds to the same circles of signs (used) and things (loved). There are temporal things and eternal things. The temporal things are always examples of and signs toward the eternal. In the City of God, Noah’s ark is both reliable history and symbolic of the city, so that all “history is irreducibly linear and participatory.” Another good example of this would be a husband and wife in relation to Christ and the church. Levering notes the connection between the two sides of this parallel: “Treating things in themselves (not as signs) … Because things are good, they attract us.” Platonic realism is operative here in the goodness of being as such. The soul senses the goodness of being as such, but is not yet perfected in discerning the ultimate and lasting from the proximate and passing.
In all of these, the immaterial form of the thing is more real than the sign, which is more real than the word. What is true of ordering our desires is true about ordering our biblical interpretation.
Christ is envisioned as the form of the Word; the Old and the New making up the matter of their diverse signs. This parallels his Answer to Faustus, a Manichean (398). Faustus rejected the Old Testament for two reasons: (i) its inheritance was not promised to him; (ii) its laws did not apply to him. This was such an obsession, that he denied any of its prophecies. So let us take the Platonic forms and appearances, applying them to the Word and the Bible’s words. We have the essential logos, or form (archetype), and then the examples (typoi) of its logic. Among the examples, the inheritance (laws and promises) of old were literally to the Jews, yes, but spiritually they signify something greater. The Manichees would have none of that. However Augustine knew that they at least accepted Paul, so he drew this from the Apostle’s statements to that effect: the Rock was Christ and from that sign the Jews partook of the same substance as the church (cf. 1 Cor. 10:6, 11). To the Manichean objection that Catholics do not keep the law, Augustine replies that there are two kinds: what we would call the moral (regulative) and ceremonial (prophetic, or symbolic). This is not simply a convenient polemic, but a totalizing hermeneutic.
Moving into the specifics of interpretation, he distinguishes between the spiritual sense (sensus spiritualis) and literal sense (sensus literalis) of a text. It is instructive to remember his own journey here. By previously failing to distinguish positive from natural, the letter from the spirit, the younger Augustine could only mock the biblical prophets, wallowing in his ignorance. It was Ambrose who peeled back for him the “mystic veil,” by the spirit and not the letter. Now as the teacher of those Scriptures, his own division begins with two reasons why things are not understood: (1) unknown signs; (2) ambiguous signs. Of the unknown there are (1a) literal, that is by direct designation; and then there are (1b) figurative, signifying something else. For example, the ox from Deuteronomy 25:4 is used in the latter way by Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:9-10. Against Faustus, he especially has to argue this about the Sabbath, circumcision, and clean versus unclean animals.
Ignorance of the form of things makes figurative expressions obscure; likewise with ignorance of numbers. Not all locutions admit of the same use, as in leaven which is figurative in the same and in contrary ways. So knowing the form of leaven as an expanding thing is insufficient. One must know the form of a good expanding thing to see why the bad leaven is bad. He exposes a “miserable servitude of the spirit” explained very well in these words: “He is a slave to a sign who uses or worships a significant thing without knowing what it signifies” (On Christian Doctrine, III.9.13). Lurking behind the hermeneutic is that same common ground with Plato:
“Not by [the physical] does God speak, but by truth itself, if anyone is prepared to hear with the mind rather than with the body. For he speaks to that part of man which is better than all else that is in him, and that by which God Himself alone is better. For since man is most properly understood…to be made in God’s image, no doubt it is that part of Him by which he rises above those lower parts he had in common with the beasts, which brings him nearer to the Supreme” (City of God, XI.2).
For the mind to graduate from words to concepts, and then on finally to things, means discovering the unity of all truth. It means seeing the form of Truth. For Augustine, “It is not a question of defining philosophy and theology; it is a matter of knowing things … What questions really interest him? Every question suggested to him by the text of Scripture.” Scripture is about what is most real, which it cannot be if its words and signs are about anything less than the things of reality.
This realist hermeneutic also provides a hierarchy in his own fides anologia. When presented with the hermeneutical principle that we interpret the less clear in light of the more clear, it is natural enough to reply: “But who gets to decide what is the ‘more clear’?” Augustine would answer with two senses, or two pillars, we might say, of the rule of faith. When literal signs cause ambiguity, the largest context is to appeal to a rule of faith; but then there is also the immediate context of the passage itself. The same applies to ambiguous constructions. Another rule emerges from these, namely, a “reign of charity.” It is a kind of moral fides analogia: if vice is condemned, it is not figurative; if vice is commended, it is figurative. That is quite reasonable on the assumption that the Scriptures would not commend vice. Other examples include two statements in Romans 12:20. To “heap burning coals” would be a figure. On the other hand, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him,” would not be a figure. Very interestingly, the body and blood of Christ is a “figure” even in the admonition to eat and drink.
What is the common thread to all of this? It is that the word of truth, which calls you out of the shadows into light, is itself unchanging. There is an ontological unity to Scripture and nature.
Words mean things: whether those word-signs are communicated in Scripture or by the theologian about Scripture or about nature. It is on this realist ground that Scripture’s accommodating speech borrows from nature.
“In order, therefore, that the human mind might be purged from falsities of this kind, Holy Scripture, which suits itself to babes, has not avoided words drawn from any class of things really existing, through which, as by nourishment, our understanding might rise gradually to things divine and transcendent” (On the Trinity, I.1.2). Since this book was written that the teacher may learn both to interpret and to instruct, the key is knowing the nature of things. Plunder the gold from the “Egypt” of nature, since all truth is God’s truth. That includes the use of history. But one must distinguish between objective history and the pagan histories. Much more so can formulations of logic be mined, as its form is uncreated. The pagans’ laws were discovered “in the order of things,” every bit as much as with numbers. The import of this discussion to the question of legitimate uses of natural theology is evident as well.
AUGUSTINE’S THEOLOGY PROPER: THE FORM OF BEING
Let us return to Augustine’s own intellectual journey. Even though, prior to conversion, philosophy taught him that the incorruptible excels the corruptible, he would repeat in the Confessions about how he perceived no such substance. As he was still escaping Manichaeism, he reasoned that, if the incorruptible is greatest of all, then the greatest Being could not be corruptible. So though Scripture cannot be blamed for young Augustine’s failure to appreciate its analogical speech, yet God used the general revelation of the form of immutability to beckon the convert onward. In Book X of the Confessions, he picks up his search for God by analyzing the faculty of memory. Where is God in one’s memory? God is immutable and all that comprises the mind of a creature admits of change. Thus while the mind may retain the thought of God, his being cannot be confined to sequence of thought. What about place? If wherever truth is, God is, then God is truth. But truth is true in all places. So it is not “in a place” where one finds God in memory.
Although there is no structured “section” on natural theology in Augustine’s works, as one might find in Thomas’ Summa, we can still speak of an “Augustinian argument” of sorts. It is summarized diversely in Gilson, Copleston, Chadwick, Levering, and Feser; but all seem to agree that the “Augustinian proof” is an epistemological one in the sense that its focus is the necessary objects of mind. Taking Copleston’s more concise summation: Some propositions are analytically true. Even those we might call “synthetic” are still necessarily true insofar as their negation (once the corresponding state of affairs comes to be) would be a contradiction in terms. Thus there is “a necessity and immutability of such propositions … they are discovered by the human mind, and they are neither created nor alterable by the human mind … [Thus] necessary and immutable truths depend on the eternal ground and foundation of all truth, namely God. In other words, the existence of eternal truths which are superior to the human mind implies or reveals the existence of the eternal being, God.”
His natural theology stays with him as he is explaining God in dogmatic terms. At the heart of his doctrine is that God’s essence is to be. Divine attributes are all identical to each other. Augustine wrote, “God however is indeed called in multiple ways great, good, wise, blessed, true, and anything else that seems not to be unworthy of him; but his greatness is identical with his wisdom (he is not great in mass but in might), and his goodness is identical with his wisdom and greatness, and his truth is identical with them all” (On the Trinity, VI.8). The doctrine inherited from Plato necessarily implied the simplicity, immutability, and even goodness of God, as there must be that being that “is what it has,” possessing “not anything which it can lose, and because it is not one thing and its contents another.” God could not be anything but simple, since any aspect of God’s essence in which “quality and substance” are not identical would imply “extraneous supplement.”
While not in any way suggesting that the Trinity is an article founded upon rational speculation—“he nowhere attempts to prove it”—yet the doctrine is set forth as Augustine’s ultimate resolution of the One and Many. Citing De Trinitate, V.10, Gavin Ortund remarks that, “Augustine sought to ground divine unity amidst the Trinity by means of divine simplicity. He claimed, for example, that God's attributes belonged to his one essence, not his three persons, because of divine simplicity. Specifically, he claimed that God has one greatness, not three greatnesses, because God is his own greatness - and so with his goodness, eternity, omnipotence, and indeed whatever may be predicated of him.”
Two things should be pointed out about this Augustinian doctrine of the Trinity, especially in light of criticisms in the past century. First, that Augustine “grounded” the divine attributes in the essence “over against the persons” is nothing but a logical distinction. It does not imply that there is some separate ontological deity “at the foundation,” with the persons as an “extension.” Second, we must remember the polemical importance of establishing all that is divine first, such that when it is predicated of all three persons, there is no wiggle room for the likes of the Arians or Modalists.
Of God’s relation to the world Augustine has much to say. Above and beyond Rome and whatever passing empires may follow, God is eternal. The primal mark of Lordship over the secular realm is creation ex nihilo. First he must explain it philosophically. A human designer can only take what already is (material) and shape it (formal); but of God he confesses, “Neither in heaven or on earth did you make heaven and earth.” But how does one speak them into being? Such a voice could not begin and end. “You call us, then, to understand the word—the God who is God with you—which is spoken eternally and by which all things are spoken eternally.” “But there is nothing in your word that passes away or returns to its place; for it is truly immortal and eternal” (Confessions, 11.6.8; 7.9.).
Many have since considered the relationship between God’s eternity and time to be a philosophical weak point for Christian theology. Augustine clearly did not. In the eternal, nothing passes away, but is simultaneously present. The past and future are not. But both arise out of and participate in the eternally present. For what is time? Neither the past, nor the present, nor the future simply is. Each participates in being. The cause of any of their being cannot cease to be without being one of them. Thus for God to know all units of time is to know more (not less) than if he “knew” them by being confined to them. The latter is not knowledge of their being at all. To show this, Augustine embarks on a process of whittling down “now-time,” starting with “this year,” into smaller units in the manner of Zeno’s paradox, so that no one unit can really be said to be “present.” In short, what we perceive in intervals of time are the passings of time.
All of this answers conundrums such as “What was God doing before he created?” It is a question that he specifically answers. In answering it philosophically he winds up answering it more pastorally than the traditional reply, “He was cutting canes (or preparing hell) for those who ask such impertinent questions!” If God made time, then there was no “then.” God’s “years” neither come nor go. “Your today is eternity … ‘This day I have begotten you,’ and “there was never a time when there was no time.”
What about other classical divine attributes? First, Augustine’s philosophical tools help us see how God can be immutable and yet change things. The divine will is of God’s entire essence, and thus it is as eternal and immutable as is God himself. So the whole “What was God doing?” dilemma may be restated: “If anything has arisen in the essence of God that was not there before, then that essence cannot truly be called eternal. But if it was the eternal will of God that the creation should come to be, why, then, is not the creation itself also from eternity?” (Confessions, 11.10.12) The answer is no, and partly because of the ontological distinction between Being and becoming.
God’s knowledge works in the same way as the decree in that respect. It follows from the simplicity of God that divine foreknowledge and decree are also one. Moreover, all that precedes our knowledge is by virtue of the whole created medium proceeding from His knowledge:
“But if He knew all that He made, He made only those things which He had known. Whence flows a very striking but true conclusion, that this world could not be known to us unless it existed, but could not have existed unless it had been known to God” (City of God, XI.10).
This eternal knowing he references is not a literal “foreknowledge” that places God back in time “before,” but is only a manner of speaking. Augustine does not mean that God decrees what he knows because he foreknows. That would amount to something like Molinism. This knowing he speaks of is that knowledge of what Paul refers to as God's “purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:5, 9, 11) and “council of his will” (v. 11).
How are such reflections in any sense aided by Augustine’s realism? God’s decree is one with his essence, and yet implicit in that divine counsel are God’s ideas (archetypes or forms) out of which flow all secondary causes and effects (ectypes or examples). He seems even to hint at this about the Incarnation. So the Word of God (the Son) is not inferior to God in being sent, as that Word of decree was indivisible and atemporal. At any rate, that the divine intellect and will are one, and that he “beholds all things with absolute unchangeableness,” is the very foundation for truth. All true propositions are unchangeably true insofar as they are known by God, and the state of affairs to which they correspond all caused by God. So even here, eternal form grounds all particular truths in the Truth and all decrees in one singular Will.
THE MANICHEAN CONTROVERSY: THE FORM OF GOOD
We ought to make a brief review of being and participation in order to see the nature and the end of good. Of the greatest Good in itself, he says (i) nothing can be greater and (ii) it cannot be lost against the will; and, as a consequence, the greatest good in participation must (i) be ever increasing and (ii) neverending. Participated good is an ordered good: lesser goods-in-themselves are ordered to that greater use that God has of them. All of this will set Augustine up both for his polemic against the Manicheans and his profound exposition of the heavenly pilgrim using earthly goods.
What exactly did the Manicheans believe? First, an utter dualism signified by light and darkness. Clearly there was a Gnostic influence. Matter was the great evil and so whoever is responsible for this world as it currently is could not possibly be the real God. So they were actually forced to say there were two gods, “one good and the other bad” (Of the Morals of the Catholic Church, I.10.16). Second, for this same reason, the Old Testament deity could not be the true God, since not only did the physical world get away from him, but so did human virtue. As all turned to vice, the response of Moses’ deity was nothing but thunder from Mount Sinai. Thus a Gnostic theology leads straight to a Marcionite bibliology, and the followers of Mani had simply recapitulated that pattern. Only Paul could truly interpret Christ as the great ethereal liberator from our prison planet. Such thinking leads to absurd particular details. For instance, this implies evil was its own substance, even that it was physical and had its own bodily extension.
A crucial point follows. This does not simply imply two deities. The reason it implies the two deities is that, denying any possible kind of causal relationship between God and evil, one’s system is left with two ultimate reference points. In short, the vast majority of ways that Christians tend to handle the problem of evil lands one into one form of metaphysical dualism or another.
There really are only a few options in the final analysis: (1) God is the only First, and thus Efficient Cause of all that appears; (2) Evil had some other ultimate origin, and thus there are more than one First Cause. Augustine’s insight that provides a third option could have come into his mind only as a result of these “Platonic” categories.
This is stated most clearly in his work On Free Choice of the Will. In the first place, “Nothing can give itself form, since nothing can give to itself what it does not have” (II.17.172). Now we have already established that Augustine inherited from Plato the category that what is good is ultimately what is. This simplifies things. On the most basic level, what does the word “evil” mean? We get a clearer sight by using the even more common word “bad.” Now what else does bad mean but “not good”? “[Evil] was nothing but privation of good” (Confessions, 3.7.12). With this review of the metaphysical basics we are prepared to ask the question.
What was the first evil inclination in Adam or Lucifer? Free will was the going candidate for evil’s origin even before Augustine. That was as true then as it is today. But the answer rings hollow. In fact it does not answer the question at all, but alludes it. It puts it off a step, hoping the questioner will be content. In short, even if Adam chose the wrong by the devil’s suggestion, whence his first evil inclination, etc? It cannot be a divine creation of an evil nature, as he writes elsewhere, that “the flaw of wickedness is not nature, but contrary to nature, and has its origin, not in the Creator, but in the will” (City of God, XI.17).
Although Augustine would like to say to his interlocutor that he does not know, in fact his questions lead onward to an answer: “Because the will is moved when it turns away from an immutable good to a changeable one … Thus, if all good is completely removed, no vestige of reality persists; indeed nothing remains” (On Free Choice of the Will, II.20.201, 204).
The distinction between God causing an effect efficiently as opposed to permissively became the future language. As deep as such a concept is, a very simple illustration unavailable to Augustine’s day, but ready at hand to us, is the daily experience of flipping on and off a lightswitch. At the off switch, we have nothing more or less causal than the on position. And yet when we switch to on, light is released; and when we switch to off, we do not “activate darkness.” Dark is no substance at all, but the absence of light. With both darkness and evil, there is no creation of new substance required at all, but rather a withdrawal of that nature in the secondary cause by degrees.
Note that God’s withdrawal of operative grace neither 1. creates evil nor 2. commits evil nor 3. condones evil. Those three terms are crucial and often suffer under the fallacy of equivocation, whether unwittingly or not. “Cause” is mouthed as if it were logically coextensive with “create,” no questions asked, and “commits” simply follows, all under the potentially ambiguous terminology of God being the “author of evil,” which all Christians shudder to apply to God. Rightly so if the causal action could be justly equated to “creates,” “commits,” or “condones.” Augustine’s reflections here seem perfectly capable of maintaining that God can cause all “states of affairs” (to use a modern philosophical phrase)—such that, of the evil therein, we can say of God’s ordination: cause but not create, cause but not commit, cause but not condone. It is a great pity that Augustine did not relate this to an exegesis of texts like Isaiah 45:7 or Romans 8:20.
Nor can man shift blame, as the secondary nature in question here is a volition quite literally in free fall. “No one wills a thing unwillingly,” he adds. Anywhere the created and finite volition roams free, there it acts according to its nature, but it is now deprived nature, and thus “turned to lesser goods by necessity” (On Free Choice of the Will, III.1.2).
But this was not Augustine’s only insight concerning the being of good and relative “becomings” of all other goods and evils. Drawing back on signs (used) and things (enjoyed), we derived the notion of the “Good” and the “good for another,” so that all things can be enjoyed just insofar as their good is a use for that Good that has no greater end. The soul properly pursuing ends has an ordered love of goods. Each good is seen to be good in order to attain one’s final and unlimited good. He confesses to God that, “He loves you too little who loves anything together with you, which he loved not for your sake” (Confessions, 10.29.40).
Now all of this talk of ordering things to be used toward the end of that which alone may be enjoyed without loss (God)—this also includes a scale of relating to persons. Smith notes that this has been misinterpreted as allowing for exploitation of those lesser persons, rightly pointing out that for Augustine “usus is presented as ‘a form of possession,’” that is, as having that person all to oneself, or without respect to their own chief end in God. He notes Arendt’s criticism that love of our enemies in Augustine is nothing but “sublime indifference,” since “the enemy cannot deprive her of what she loves most—God.”
The paradoxical form of love is missed, namely that one must love a finite soul toward the end of gaining God in order to be any good for that lesser soul. That is true of both friend and foe. The critic of Augustine’s eudaimonist ethic here is assuming that finite persons can define for themselves what is most loving for them.
If we begin with Augustine’s presupposition, the soul of the other is designed to be happy in God as much as the soul who “uses” them to see more of God’s glory. Hence there is mutual and maximal benefit in both finite souls relating to each other for the enjoyment of God they can “get out of it.”
Virtue perfects the soul that longs to be happy; virtue is acquired by following God; therefore, following God is the happy life. Virtue is a “habit and disposition of the soul” (Of the Morals of the Catholic Church, I.6.9), and since the happy soul cannot pursue itself as its end, from whence is virtue? It is in pursuit of that same supreme Good.
Returning now to the Manichean view, let us bear in mind that their utter metaphysical duality led to the same in morality. Evil in the heart was “a malevolent element [that] had compromised their characters, making them malicious and unable to recognize how they participated in evil personally.” If the Manicheans so badly misunderstood the nature of good and evil, it is no coincidence that they also had no real answer for morality within that good life. What for example is the essence of the law and of sin? Augustine goes to the root in answering: “Pride is a rejection of the participatory character of human existence.” This would imply that pride’s opposite, humility, is proper creaturely participation.
The one moral law forms a unity to the diverse applications of divine commands. Augustine uses something like the analogy C. S. Lewis would make between the piano keys and the instincts—except with meter in the poems he wrote—with the moral law being something more like the sheet of music. Indeed the influence of Augustine on Lewis was strongest here. Another question that clarified the difference between Augustinian and Manichean morality is this: What is offense against God? Violence to law cannot violate the impassible Being. However, sin dishonors God, destroys others, and disintegrates one’s own soul. According to the Manichees it was something in the material of pleasurable things that corrupted the heart through the body. Augustine noticed a “permanence of evil in human actions,” such that the sinful nature could not be reduced to mere physicality. Nor is evil in “the overt act itself.”
Against Faustus’ threefold division of natural, Jewish, and “law of truth” in the new covenant (the first fulfilled in the third, the second made obsolete), Augustine’s division of “regulative” and “prophetic” correspond to the moral and ceremonial laws in this writing: the eternal law being the form to which the moral (Jews) and natural (Gentiles) are instances. The First Table of the Decalogue is immutable moral law. That civil law is longstanding does not, in itself, translate into natural law. Finally, there is a corollary to this in truth and falsehood. Falsehood is “the existence in thought of what does not exist in fact” (Confessions, 7.15.21). The wicked become unfit for truth, as their soul becomes more unlike God; and the righteous become more like God as they are harmonized with truth.
THE DONATIST CONTROVERSY: THE FORM OF THE CHURCH
At the same time that Manicheans were making the case that catholics were simpletons, Donatists were making the case that they were libertine. Donatist Christianity was in the majority in North Africa when Augustine took up the post of bishop of Hippo.
What emerges from Augustine’s vision is a church very different from Donatism, certainly; but if we catch his reasoning, also quite different from eventual Romanism.
Brown understood Augustine’s invisible-versus-visible “layering” to be not a fixed division between elect and reprobate, but rather between elite-holy clergy and the common-secular public. To be sure, it was a church with two layers, the true and false, or invisible and visible, so that it could accommodate that which was true in what Donatists maintained. Yet the communion of saints was not merely invisible and visible. The order mattered. Since the word birthed the church and nourished it, the church’s form moved from the invisible to the visible. That is because it moved from election to the call of the word (and regeneration) to finally the whole life of faith and good works.
We ought to notice one common thread between the Manichees and Donatists: a superstitious fear of corruption from the outside. What was Augustine’s remedy for the latter superstition? The defining mark of his confident catholicity was that it was powerful enough to absorb the world without losing its identity. Psalm 2:7-8 is referenced through the church: “This Church was hungry for souls: let it eat, indiscriminately if needs be.” The essence of their small minded retreat was captured with a memorable depiction from Augustine: “The clouds roll with thunder, that the House of the Lord shall be built throughout the earth: and these frogs sit in their marsh and croak—We are the only Christians!”
For Donatists the church was the ark, but for Augustine it was the flood: not of our judgment, but of heaven colonizing all the earth. He also saw Pentecost as the firstfruit for which Catholicism was the driving force that was reversing the division of Babel.
How then was Platonism a factor here? First, we will recall that the world is always participating in the perfect intelligible realm. Accordingly, God’s idea of the church, reproduced its form in the informative seed of the word, and manifests outward into the world of appearance. Thus also, “The rites of the church were undeniably ‘holy,’ because of the objective holiness of a Church which ‘participated’ in Christ.” The logos was the form of holiness into which we are transformed. Though Augustine nowhere to my finding draws this out, it would have massive exegetical support from Colossians 3:10, Romans 8:29, 2 Corinthians 3:18, and 4:6. Should the Donatist object that this is all imperfect, Augustine could reply that so is everything else in the world of the temporary shadows. Second, if one must criticize, the mature Christian measures such a participation (or conversely any deviation) by the mind alone. Scripture and its teachers are for building up the one church. The church cannot confuse the finish line of moral perfection for the starting line of discipleship, otherwise the course of perfection will never be run. All would be disqualified.
A third implication followed. Being innocent was not enough. That was one-third of a grander threefold task: 1. to be holy, 2. to be charitable, so as to co-exist with the sinner, and therefore 3. to earn the right to bring correction. As love and holiness are also one in God, so that church would be most true by locating their examples of the most holy in the most loving. By contrast, Augustine takes special note of the exponential tendency of smaller and smaller sects of the Donatists, to fragment in pursuit of a “purity” which mistakes the brightest among many shadows for the one light.
Baptism played a central role in the debate with the Donatists. On the one hand, one can receive baptism from a schismatic, and should such a one come into the catholic fold, Augustine would say that their former baptism is valid. On the other hand, the schismatic baptism itself is invalid insofar as the person remains divided from the one church. Now how can he say both? It is because there is one baptism (Eph. 4:5).
That is to say, there is one form and essence of baptism. Modes and ministerial applications are instances of the form itself.
Augustine uses an analogy to a military mark: “which, though it can both be retained, as by deserters, and, also be received by those who are not in the army, yet ought not to be either received or retained outside its ranks; and, at the same time, it is not changed or renewed when a man is enlisted or brought back to his service” (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, I.4-5).
The Donatists thought they had a card to play in Cyprian's example of rebaptizing heretics once they returned to the fold. Augustine begins his refutation with some logic. If we want to maintain that no true church exists where baptism is received from heretics, but it took Donatus to tell us this, then where was the church before him? It remained to show how Cyprian and others broke from universal custom, and even then only on occasion through “epistolary correspondence,” rather from any rule from a Council. The letter of Cyprian they cited made it clear that “in times past, [those] coming to the Church from heresy, were admitted without baptism” (On Baptism, Against the Donatists, III.5-7).
So even on their strongest case, if this was not his overall practice, how was he then not polluted by receiving other heretics? If he was, how then was his a true church, and thus in what sense was he a sufficient authority? So much for the argument for a pure church from material particulars. Torn from the immaterial form of the pure church, the idea collapses. This very same logic should have led to the realization that Roman Catholicism collapses for the same reason, as the two terms are mutually exclusive. Rome is a material locale, a shadow at best. It is certainly not the eternal city. Jerusalem was that, and that because of the Jerusalem above.
THE FORM OF THE ETERNAL CITY RISING OUT OF THE PAGAN SHADOWS
In 410 an army of Goths sacked the city of Rome. One of Augustine’s Christian friends—a younger man named Marcellinus—was appointed by Emperor Honorius to oversee the continuing Catholic-Donatist dispute in North Africa where Augustine had now been bishop for over a decade. As the charge that Christianity was to blame for the sack of Rome began to gather steam, Augustine wrote to Marcellinus what started as a letter, but what became the seminal work of the Christian worldview throughout the Middle Ages. The City of God was first penned in 412 and the finishing touches were added and then published in 415, and then amended more, until finally in 426 we have the version that we read today. The first ten books are his response to the charge.
After reminding the Romans about the humane treatment by the barbarians in the name of Christ or else in one of the Christian churches, and that this was unheard of in times past, he arrives at the real critique. If Christian influence is to be blamed because the pagan sacrifices ceased, we might ask what sort of gods these are to begin with. They could not protect their cities in part because they are sort of things that need men to protect them! Moreover, the fall of Rome came from within and very early on—as Cicero himself already laments four centuries earlier—and it is evidenced by the fact that even as civilization slips away, the animal passions drive the pagan to the theaters of decadence for a final titillation.
Indeed, the pagan gods had never protected men’s souls, as all that is wrong with Rome in his time had always been wrong with Rome. He cites many comments of their own authors to make the point. And then he breaks in, “And ought prudent men to have entrusted the defense of Rome to these conquered gods?” (City of God, I.3) Even on the testimony of Virgil, Rome was made of the stuff of Troy’s fallen debris, as the gods of that mythical city prostituted themselves to chase the next citadel of power.
It is when he comes to the origin and nature of the gods that we begin to discern the concept of unifying form by way of contrast. Here he appeals to Marcus Varro, that there was actually the knowledge of one God, quickly called Jupiter, just as abruptly paired with a sister-spouse, Juno, then subsequently divided into a seeming infinity of friends and foes based upon all of the diverse things in nature. Actually there were two origins of the gods: one on earth and one in heaven; the bigger problem of course being that they had origins to begin with. What does Rome gain by worshiping parts of an ultimate thing; and what would she lose if she worshiped the one true whole God? In summary, they “have set diverse gods over diverse parts of the world” (City of God, IV.10). It is as if they sensed that only omnipresence can hold together a society, just as much as only one infinite Spirit could ever hold together a cosmos. For all that seed of religion, everywhere in their lore, “we have accounts of the lusts, cares, and angers of the gods” (City of God, IV.30).
In this vein, Augustine takes on two theologies among the philosophical theologians of the Empire: one party holding that God is “the soul of the world” (Cicero and Varro) and the other that “only rational animals are parts of the one true God” (Seneca). To both he could ask: “why is God angry at those who do not worship Him, since these offenders are parts of Himself” (City of God, IV.13). Now can we identify a basic thesis in Augustine’s critique here? I think we can in the problem of many ultimate reference points.
Whether one considers the gods as many forces of nature, many personifications of virtues, or many parts of a singular divine, the problem will not be any more resolved than if one were to settle for straightforward polytheism. Unless there is one infinite personal Being that is all true being that could be called original, and from which all effects are derivative, then one’s whole worldview will land in contradiction.
The moral life of a people also requires a sufficient unity to the diversity of norms, virtues, rewards, character examples, and proposed actions. Augustine’s logic here is a clear, straight line: fractured metaphysics begets fractured morality. “First of all, we would ask why their gods took no steps to improve the morals of their worshipers” (City of God, II.4). Where were the pagan prophets and where was a linear eschatology, so that there would be both a warner and a warning of something of ultimate consequence? One could object that Cato and Cicero were their prophets; but with an original to eternal Law that they were not sure about, and concerning eternal realities that they lamented could not be proven. The closest thing to hell was the loss of Rome’s glory, their chief virtue. If the philosophers had paid attention to their craft they would have recognized that ultimate reference points in nature forces one to worship the most ultimate person thing we can find—namely, the state: “Thou desirest to worship the natural gods; thou art compelled to worship the civil” (City of God, VI.6). Even Cicero’s laudable attention to natural law is impotent if there is no clear word from God to hold all of life together.
Polemics aside, how does Augustine define the City of God? He describes it as, “a city surpassingly glorious, whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course of time, as sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it now with patience waits for, expecting until ‘righteousness shall return unto judgment,’ and obtain, by virtue of its excellence, final victory and perfect peace.” “In truth, these two cities are entangled together in this world, and intermixed until the last judgment effect their separation” (City of God, I.35). He wants the reader to understand that the Christian is not claiming, nor resting his hope in, some temporal changing of the guard due to anything superior in us. For the same God who gave us Constantine, turned to give us Julian the Apostate.
What follows is a very historical approach. That is an interesting fact that critics of Augustine’s “ethereal” philosophy rarely appreciate. He moves from the origin of the two cities, to the nature of the two cities, specifically as they move parallel to each other in time, to finally their two destinies. Even given the eternal roots that my thesis draws out, the reader is struck by the book’s resemblance to a biblical theology of modern times. Borrowing language from Psalms 46 and 48 as his launch points, the sketch of the city begins with the majesty of God himself, who dwells in nothing but his own eternal glory. Then as he creates, his habitation is spoken of as a city primarily because other intelligent beings are made to see and savor His greatness: enlightened as a city, populated as a city, all earthly cities merely reflecting the archetype. Angels are those “first citizens” of the heavenly city. That God made man and woman in His image means, first, that God made man in order to communicate His glory: and this to his intellect. The three faculties of the soul are hinted as reflections of the Trinity.
We might remember Augustine’s insistence on the simplicity of God in this very book. It was not a random diversion. There are three basic reasons why this is foundational. First, it is because the two cities are not a duality of being. One is the original and the other is the rebel or the parasite; one the light, the other the shadow, one shining its light, the other reveling in the shadows. The original is always the greater and the better; the copy, to the degree that it copies not, is always the worse. Second, it matters because, as the being of creatures is not the same as what they have, it follows that “they can be deprived of what they have” (City of God, XI.10), so that the creaturely does, by definition, fall away if left to itself. The unoriginal must be the inherently corruptible. Third, it matters because the City of God is, first and foremost, eternal being, so that it is an immutable body of truth before it is a progressing, becoming, or advancing kingdom realized on the stage of history. Thus both the petition, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Mat. 6:10) and the statement, “these things are copies of the heavenly things” (Heb. 8:5, cf. 9:23-24, 10:1). Or, said another way, both the eternal form as a pattern, and the historical examples. In short, the City of God is the Form of forms: it is eternally what Plato’s Republic attempted to be but could not, the Idea of the Real and the Real itself.
One implication of what has been said so far is a perennial conflict between the two cities, “two lines of the human race which from first to last divide it.” The heavenly city is created by regeneration. God starts over by His Word, so that the new creation runs, side by side, through time along with the old. Each new citizen is “predestined by grace, elected by grace, by grace a stranger below, and by grace a citizen above.” The church on earth is not merely a company of pilgrims moving toward the eternal city. They are that to be sure; but they are also participating in its form, and its main outpost, Jerusalem, becomes a sign or type. Augustine utilizes the words of Paul in Galatians 4 to unify not only Old to New, but earth to heaven: “This interpretation of the passage, handed down to us with apostolic authority, shows how we ought to understand the Scriptures of the two covenants—the old and the new. One portion of the earthly city became an image of the heavenly city, not having a significance of its own, but signifying another city, and therefore serving, or ‘being in bondage.’ For it was founded not for its own sake, but to prefigure another city; and this shadow of a city was also itself foreshadowed by another preceding figure” (City of God, XV.2).
By contrast, Rome had become a microcosm of the history of the city of man, as Romulus founded the city on his brother’s blood, as his forefather, Cain, had first built the city of man after killing his brother Abel. Though these are the Hebrew scriptures, the warnings contained in the prophecies “are said to the adversaries of the city of God who belong to Babylon, who presume in their own strength, and glory in themselves, not in the Lord,” which then leads to many proof-texts showing that God’s city on earth is jam packed with the population of the damned. In fact the circles of Babylon and Jerusalem overlap in the visible, rightly divided only by the invisible. The true city waits for its life like a barren woman waiting on God to make her a mother (cf. Gal. 4:26-27). That is the significance of Augustine spending the time he does on Hannah’s song.
Augustine sees fit to show what the other city has been more famously doing since the times of Abraham who began the lineage of the heavenly city. In spite of everything that Adam’s race has in common, as they spread again from that ancient Tower, they are a city, “for the most part divided against itself, and the strongest oppress the others, because all follow after their own interests and lusts, while what is longed for either suffices for none, or not at all, because it is not the very thing. For the vanquished succumb to the victorious, preferring any sort of peace and safety to freedom itself; so that they who chose to die rather than be slaves have been greatly wondered at” (City of God, XVIII.2).
A final comparison is made between the two ultimate visions, which visions move the heart of both cities. Each city has an end cause: a love or hate for which it strives, and a price that embodies that end. “For the end of our good is that for the sake of which other things are to be desired, while it is to be desired for its own sake; and the end of evil is that on account of which other things are to be shunned, while it is avoided on its own account.” He cites Varro’s breakdown of various ends. At this point, however, it is impossible not to think of Aristotle’s etiology. In fact not as much is said by historians, as I think warranted, about how the City of God especially shows a masterful incorporation of Platonic and Aristotelian themes. The consummated eternal city is the end for which the inaugurated kingdom has already been reigning as an intelligible form. Even the resurrection has an essence in Christ’s work, the first and second risings of the believer exemplifying its attributes. This issues forth into one of the clearest statements of Amillennialism among the great theologians: “The evangelist John has spoken of these two resurrections in the book which is called the Apocalypse, but in such a way that some Christians do not understand the first of the two, and so construe the passage into ridiculous fancies…which we may literally reproduce by the name Millenarians,” the thousand years standing for the church age, or “an equivalent for the whole duration of this world, employing the number of perfection to mark the fullness of time” (City of God, XX.7).
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
One may wonder how practical such a lofty view of Christian truth is, or perhaps, how pastoral. An example that is brought up in at least two books may help. Concerning the resurrection of the flesh on the last day, Augustine faced the mocking question about abortions and about the decomposed bodies of all of the dead. Shall all of this rise? He answers by pointing out Scripture’s silence on specifics, but as to the philosophical objection he exposes that it is groundless. There is no violation of any law of thought to consider the power of God in raising all such life to what it was intended to be. He revisits this subject of the resurrection body in his Enchiridion. He imagines the state of bodies in the resurrection, those now deformed restored, and what is unequal never causing offense. All of this may surprise readers today who suspect Augustine of being aloof from real concerns of the heart: particularly with regard to those most forgotten: aborted babies, conjoined twins, and those with other deformities, such as mental illnesses, will all be raised to perfect bodies of their own.
Granting that Platonism as an “ism” was what one author called a “way of life” more than an academic school in the modern sense, we can agree with his assessment that, “Christians were never really Platonists in antiquity when we understand more fully what being a Platonist actually meant. Their Platonism was informal and fragmentary and borrowed.” Augustine’s Platonic appropriation, therefore, was just that. It would be putting things too colloquially to suggest it was a mere “box of tools,” even if for one of the most impressive intellectual building projects in all of history. A more suitable analogy is needed.
That analogy is just what we find in Augustine’s appeal to the Israelites’ looting of the Egyptian gold. The gold was God’s in at least two ways. It not only belonged to him, by right and by power; but, lest we forget, gold was God’s idea. He knew very well his people would make a golden calf out of it. He ordained it for the use of his tabernacle all the same. So it is with the use of philosophy—with reason and nature—as Augustine clearly answered Tertullian’s famous question very differently than did that other North African father. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has Plato to do with Augustine’s work? The question is asked as if truth was the pagan’s invention, as if Athens gave some home field advantage to doubt and vanity. Augustine’s greatness was, at least in part, that he had no such anxieties.
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