Augustine and politics

The City of God by Augustine deeply influenced the development of Western political thought. This is because he provided important insights that were taken up by scholars and practitioners of politics and government. These thoughts by later scholars that were based on Augustinian foundations generally developed along lines that Augustine presumably would not have wished. This was because for Augustine it was impossible to separate politics appropriately from theology. This was particularly true in the case of his theology of history and his teachings on the original Fall, as well as on predestination.

The understanding of Augustine on politics - as well as the role of history, ethics, justice, the anthropology of the human race, and his world view - were unavoidably tied to his perceived hierarchy of creation. In this hierarchy, the purposes of God for the world and for the human species had precedence over the desired politics of any organisation or any human being. Hence to assess the political theory of Augustine first requires that attention be given to his theology. To attempt to distil his thoughts on politics as if independent from his theology is to attempt to take from Augustine rather than to receive what benefit he offers in this regard.  People look for the insights of Augustine on politics mainly in his De Civitate Dei ("On the City of God"). In doing this, they often read the City of God in a far different way than Augustine intended when he wrote it progressively over the fourteen years between the years 413 and 427.

In the City of God, Augustine distinguished religion and morality from politics and tried to establish the proper relations among them. He never focused primarily on politics in the medieval mode of Nicolo Machiavelli. In other words, Augustine never treated politics as a distinct and secular art or science concerned with the manipulation of civil government. In the context of his world view that was very much centred on God, Augustine wrote, "The state is a disposition rooted in sin." Yet in pragmatic terms he was nevertheless willing to collaborate with the government around Carthage to defeat his main foe of the time, the Donatists. It has been asserted that Augustine believed that, while government should be used, it should not be enjoyed nor improved.

In the City of God, the world view of Augustine is shaped by the Biblical sin of Adam and the Fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Augustine asserted that, had these not been a reality, there would been no need for social inequality, or for rulers to oversee the ruled. Social hierarchy became necessary in an imperfect world in order to place some control on the evil actions of people. The ruler was not to be seen as privileged, but as carrying a heavy responsibility to encourage virtue and to punish vice, and to give aid and counsel in the name and spirit of love. Being the master over slaves (and, by extension, the rule of presidents and monarchs over their subjects) is a responsibility of the ruler for the ruled, and it is limited to this world of sin.

In heaven, the rulers will be freed from their responsibilities, and slaves will be freed from their servitude. Masters and slaves, kings and subjects, will be equal in the next world. Therefore they should behave in this world with awareness of their fundamental, spiritual equality. Here was a Christian manifesto on "the right of kings" that was the opposite to what many a civic ruler wished to hear. It was the right of being responsible and of being a servant, and not the right of privilege and domination. In his Confessions he reflected on the time when nevertheless he had ended up in the politics. Recalling his service at the imperial court in Milan as the official professor of rhetoric or "spin doctor" for the Emperor, he wrote , "How unhappy I was, O Lord, and how conscious You made me of my misery on that day when I was preparing to deliver a panegyric on the emperor! In the course of it I would tell numerous lies and by my lies would win the good opinion of people who knew [them] to be untrue." From about the year 410 (by which time he had been a Christian leader in Hippo for fifteen years) until the end of his life, Augustine remained completely disillusioned with politics. He was never convinced that he was living in Christian times. Only once in all his voluminous writings did he mention that the Christian church might sanctify the empire. Such a political goal was not a focus in his line of thinking or teaching.

Political theory

To write about any aspect of the thought of Augustine in simple terms is fraught with danger, and cannot do justice to his great intellect. This is especially so on any topic upon which Augustine never directly or intentionally expounded but merely touched in passing while covering another topic. The political theory of Augustine is an example of this situation. Scholars have attempted to attribute a political theory to Augustine even though he did not consciously reveal one in his writings, but nevertheless he deeply influenced Western political thought in the early Middle Ages and successively.

Augustine never wrote a political theory, in the sense that this term is technically used today, although he definitely had a world view. Furthermore, he never even wrote as essentially a political thinker, but merely touched on politics and civil society while thinking as a theologian and as a philosopher about the relationship of God to the world and to humanity. In that Augustine based his thought on Revelation rather than on reason, the “political thought” of Augustine must necessarily be interpreted in a theological context rather than in rationalist, sociological and political contexts. His world view was firmly centred on the role of God in all of Creation.

It is somewhat paradoxical, therefore, that Augustine receives attention in chronological surveys of political innovators and theorists, unless therein he is recorded as having a theocentric (God-centred) political theory. His major work, De civitate Dei ("City of God") is a case in point, and even is significant in making this very point. Nowhere in its hundreds of pages does Augustine depart from its theological focus to examine politics objectively as such. He does not therein detail any specific political methods, nor highlight any particular form of government, nor suggest political changes for better governance. Augustine never even dwelt directly upon any of the datum points for defining a political theory, such as the nature of the state, the mutual duties of the state and the populace, and the rights of the individual citizen.

Indeed, Augustine in his theological image of the City of God is ambiguous about civil government, sometimes negative towards it, and at times objects to its real potential to harm those marginalised by society. On the other hand, at times he sought the intervention of civil authorities to suppress the religious heresy of the Donatists. Augustine’s writings are so voluminous that his accumulated references to aspects of politics give Augustine the status of a political thinker, notwithstanding the reasons given above which go against giving him this appellation that he would not have wanted.

Link 

The political thought of St Augustine. "Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self." (De Civitate Dei XIV. 28) 
http://internationalpoliticaltheory.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/political-thought-of-st-augustine.html

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