1 Saeculum

For Augustine in the City, and for the most part elsewhere, the noun saeculum has as its core meaning a period of time with a beginning. There are two such periods to which the name is applied. One, hoc saeculum, has an end as well as a beginning: it begins with God’s creation of the world and all that is in it out of nothing, and ends with the last things, to which the return of Christ is central. The second, saeculum futurum, has a beginning but no end: it begins with the end of hoc saeculum and never ends, stretching in aeternum, into eternity. The compound form, saecula saeculorum, designates only the second saeculum, the one without end. And the adjectival form, saecularis, is applied only to things or events that belong to the first saeculum. No other cognates or derivatives occur in the City.

How then to translate? Most translators find it impossible, exactly because of this range of meanings, to render saeculum–saecularis with an English noun–adjective pair that preserves the intimacy of the Latin pair. And even in the case of saeculum alone, it is normal in English to find a wide range of renderings within a single version of a single text: “world,” “age,” and “time” are all common, and promiscuously mixed. The matter is made more complex by the fact that there is a rich vocabulary of time in Augustine (tempus, aetas, and so on) that has no formal or etymological connection with saeculum.¹ Is it possible to do better? Probably not much. I adopt “age” for saeculum, which yields “in this age” for in hoc saeculo, “the future age” for saeculum futurum, and “belonging to this age” for saecularis. This has at least the benefit of preserving in English the relation in Latin between saeculum and saecularis; it indicates, too, the dependence of saeculum and saecularis on aiôn and aiônion. In Augustine’s view, then, all learning about matters belonging to this age can be called saecularis, and the promise of the land to Abraham extends to the end of this age, an end that marks the beginning of the future age. Also the scriptural phrase saecula saeculorum comes out literally as “ages of ages,” embracing thereby both this age and the future one, and meaning, as a result, “for ever.”

This age (hoc saeculum) is constituted exhaustively by the set of events that begins with the creation out of nothing of the cosmos as a beautifully ordered whole (civ. Dei 11.3–6) and ends with the last judgment that definitively and irreversibly separates the Lord’s city from the human city (20.1, 20.14–30). Within it occurs all human history as well as the coming to be and passing away of every non-human creature. This age is the container for everything temporal, and, considered simply as such, it is beautiful, ordered, and a gift of the triune Lord who freely decides to bring it into being. It is also disordered and thereby ugly: that disorder and ugliness came into being with the fall, and thereafter the story is one of increasing and spreading decay and violence, coupled with, at first in a small way and then in an increasingly visible one, God’s action to make this systemic violence peaceful and thus to return the cosmos to the beauty and tranquility of order. That action hinges around Jesus; his coming is prepared for by the call of Abraham and has its principal visible effect in the presence of the Church in the world; it culminates in the final healing of the cosmos by the removal of violence from it, which is depicted scripturally and by Augustine as a new, or second, creation, which is to say the making of a new heaven and a new earth.

2 Saeculum and the secular

If “secular” in English is taken to have “ecclesial” as its antonym, as it is when the process of secularization is depicted as the gradual reduction of the influence of particular churches upon the laws, norms, and customs of particular societies,² then there is a very limited sense in which Augustine’s understanding of the saeculum is like it. For him, the Church as a visible institutional form, a human society with laws and practices and buildings and boundaries, is prepared for by the Jewish societas hominum with its visible laws and forms and then begins to become visibly itself in response to Jesus’ earthly life and to the sending of the Holy Spirit. Outside these two societates – the Jewish and the Christian – there is no Church, no ecclesia, no visible community called out from the mass of humanity to serve as vanguard and representation of its healing. It follows from this that there was no visible ecclesial presence before the call of Abraham, or after that call where there are no Jews or Christians. Assyria–Babylon and Egypt fall under this heading for Augustine, at least until they come to have contact with Jews; and so does Rome before its contact with Jews and Christians. Aeneas may serve as type here: his flight from Troy after the fall of that city and his eventual founding of Rome, as depicted by Virgil (which is largely how Augustine knows the story), is the story of two secular cities (civitates saeculares), both in the sense that they belong to this age (that is true of Jerusalem as well), but also in the modern sense that they are cities without churches, cities whose public life lacks response to institutional forms and laws directly ordained by God. The events in the garden that precede the fall and those that occur between the fall and the call of Abraham are also secular in the modern sense in play here, as well as events of this age in the Augustinian sense; they are thus saecularis for him as well.

There is a second modern sense of “secular” as applied to the principles and practices ordering the life of particular societies. Here the idea is that there are society-ordering principles – laws and other norms – capable of assent both by those who are members of particular churches and those who are not; and that a society is secular to the extent that it is ordered by such norms rather than by ones assent to which requires active membership in a particular church. Translated into Augustine’s terms, this is to say that there are mixed societies, comprising pagans and Christians and Jews – such was Augustine’s Rome; and that some of the laws and norms that order such societies can and should be assented to as right and proper by all those who live within them; from which it follows that there are societal laws and norms properly capable of assent by both Christians and pagans.

On this, Augustine has things to say both for and against; and his interpreters, ancient and modern, are divided correspondingly, according to what they wish to emphasize. Augustine says, for instance, that the Romans ruled, for a time, as well as humans can, and that the principal difference between the rule of a pagan emperor and a Christian one lies in their understandings of what it is they do rather than in their judgments about what needs to be done. Pagans tend to understand what they do when they rule or in some other way exercise political power as exhaustively explicable by appeal to temporal power and other realities of this age; Christian emperors and administrators understand (or ought to) what they do in terms of constraining damage and giving glory to God (civ. Dei 5.20) – and in any case as not exhaustively explicable or comprehensible in terms of what belongs to this age. Augustine also praises quite extravagantly the virtues of particular pagan Romans, for example Marcus Regulus (1.15), whose sacrifice of his own life in the interests of justice impresses him. The implication of these and other similar statements is that some of what Christians and pagans undertake as rulers and subjects and citizens is substantively the same even when it is understood and explained differently. In the particular case of such judicial acts as using torture to extract confessions, the difference between the pagan and the Christian judge is not that the former does such things and the latter does not; it is rather that the latter laments that he must do them, using the words of Psalm 24:17, “Deliver me from my necessities!” (de necessitatibus meis erue me; civ. Dei 19.6), while the former is unlikely to do so. Both the pagan and the Christian emperor, therefore, might agree that this or that tax needs to be written into law, this or that road needs to be built, this or that man needs to be imprisoned, this or that military campaign needs to be fought; and Augustine is explicit that both the pagan and the Christian judge can agree that this or that prisoner needs to be interrogated by torture. This gives some support to the view that Augustine does think that there are secular society-ordering principles, if by that is meant that some such can be assented to by both pagans and Christians, even if under different descriptions and analyses.

None of this, however, is to say that there are societal laws and norms which are theologically neutral. A theologically neutral law or norm would have no claims about God among its truth (or meaning) conditions; it could thus be fully understood, engaged, explained, defended, explored, and justified without raising any questions about God or God’s action in the world. Those who think there are laws and norms of this kind and who apply the term “secular” to them are employing a third sense of the word “secular.”³

This third sense of the word is in every significant respect unlike Augustine’s use of saeculum and saecularis, and he does not explicitly entertain the thought that there might be such laws and norms. For him, it is axiomatic that every good of whatever kind has what goodness it has by way of its participation in God. A good law or norm, one that, for instance, supports the tranquillitas ordinis (civ. Dei 19.13) necessary for the Church to do what it does, is good because and to the extent that it participates in the principles ordained by God for human flourishing. Any account of such a law or norm’s goodness that prescinds from God, therefore, is incomplete exactly to the extent that it does so. Any account of the principles that do or should order the public life of a society that pretends theological neutrality is, Augustine thinks, confused just to the extent that it pretends so. Those who establish and implement public policy on the assumption that such policy can be secular in this sense are certain to do so with violent, domineering, and self-aggrandizing ends in view; and serving those ends inevitably affects both what is thought politically desirable and how what is thought desirable is put into practice. A judge who laments the necessity of judicial torture will prescribe it not only with less relish but also probably less frequency than one who, equally committed to its necessity, sees nothing to regret in it; and Christians charged with undertaking torture are, because they lament what they have to do, likely to be less energetically excessive in the art of pain-infliction than pagan torturers who enjoy their job.

Societal norms and laws can, therefore, in Augustine’s view, be secular in the first sense: there can be societates hominum or civitates saeculares in which there is no visible ecclesial presence, but which nevertheless have, in different ways and to differing degrees, laws and the public order that accompanies them. Such norms and laws can also be, to a limited extent, secular in the second sense, which is to say that they can be assented to and acted upon by pagans and Christians alike. There are, however, no norms or laws secular in the third sense, the sense of being fully accountable and justifiable independently of speaking to and about God, independently, that is, of acknowledging the participation of good laws and norms in their giver. And this fact explains, from Augustine’s point of view, the limits of secularity in the second sense: while it is certainly true that pagans and Christians may together agree to and actively support a particular law or norm, the fact that they inevitably understand, explain, and justify their support differently limits both what they can agree to and how they implement what they can agree to.

3 The political constitution of the saeculum

If this present age embraces everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen, from the beginning of temporal change at the creation to its ending at the eschaton (civ. Dei 13.1), then it also embraces all creatures, material, immaterial, rational, and irrational. All places, as well as all times, belong to hoc saeculum: there is nothing outside this age other than God and those creatures who have, in one way or another, left this age and entered into the saeculum futurum in which they enjoy eternal life or suffer eternal death (of a metaphorical sort). But not everything in this age is political, if by that we mean, as etymology suggests, what has to do with the city, which is to say the ordered social life of potentially, and occasionally actually, rational creatures. To ask about the political constitution of this age, then, is not to ask about its physical constitution or about the lives of its non-human creatures. It is to ask only about the ordering principles, the constitutive practices, the history, and the ends of human societates.

Augustine’s principal term of art for these matters is civitas, “city”; this occurs hundreds of times in City and provides the work’s title. The city for him is a concors hominum multitudo (civ. Dei 1.15), a concordant or harmonious crowd of people; or, slightly more expansively, it is hominum multitudo aliquo societatis vinculo conligata (15.8), a particular crowd of people tied together by a social bond. It is more briefly and frequently called a societas hominum (e.g., 14.1), by which Augustine means, usually, a group of people who ordinarily live in spatial contiguity and under a single body of laws and norms. The members of a city are cives, citizens; and what they do and think and say in so far as they are citizens may be called “civil” or “civic” (civilis, civicus). Consider the following passage for one aspect of Augustine’s city–citizen–civic–civil talk (civ. Dei 19.16):

Being a citizen is a matter of law and of the command and obedience that belong to law. Those who live together in the same house are as much citizens of that household as Roman citizens are of Rome; and the small peace of one, effected by command and obedience, participates in the larger peace of the other. This aspect of the grammar of Augustine’s city-thought is descriptive: according to it, all that is needed for there to be a city with citizens is a sufficient degree of ordered concord that life together occurs, at least for a time, without degenerating into chaos or unrestricted violence. This might be true of a family under the command of a tyrannical paterfamilias, as well as of one ordered by benevolently democratic principles. It might also be true of a dictatorship as well as of a state ordered by Confucian or Islamic principles. There is also no distinction as to size: a civitas might be as small as a single biological family or as large as the fifth-century Roman Empire.

But there is more to Augustine’s civic grammar. The city is not only, and perhaps not even most fundamentally, a society ordered by law and command and obedience, even though it is always at least that. It is also a society ordered by love. Consider the following passage from civ. Dei 15.3, where Augustine is discussing the symbolic significance of the birth of Isaac to Sarah and Ishmael to Hagar:

Here, the citizens of the free city, identical with the city of God, are characterized by a particular kind of amor, or love. It is a love that, positively, directs them toward a good that is communis, or common, which is to say a good open to all, freely and identically given to all who wish to receive it. This common or public good is immutabilis: it does not change in any way, which is to say that by definition it does not belong to this age, to hoc saeculum. It is, of course, God, the triune Lord to whom all citizens of the city of God turn, first and last, in love. That they do so together, loving a public good, is what makes them a city: they participate in a particular form, the ideal form, of concordance. The shared love that constitutes Isaac and his descendants as citizens of God’s city is contrasted here with the love that belongs to the citizens of another city, and those contrasts will be taken up in more detail below. Here it is sufficient to note that the loves that belong to the other city are private in the sense that they are directed by each citizen to what is his or hers, to the nurture of an individual will that is the individual’s own freehold possession. Where the citizens of the city of God have a shared love, a love of the commons, those of the other city have privately proprietary loves, each enclosing a piece of the commons for him or herself.

For Augustine, then, to belong to a city is to belong to a community ordered by law and other norms and at the same time to be a lover of a certain kind, one whose desires and will are ordered to a particular end. The balance between these two – between love and law, desire and obedience – is not always the same: there may be cities principally ordered around obedience and threat and command; and there may be cities, liberae civitates, principally ordered around freely given love. But here below, in hoc saeculo, every city will contain elements of both.

Much of all this can be applied directly to Augustine’s other main term of art for the political, which is to say res publica, which means literally the (or a) public thing. In civ. Dei 2.21 he opens a discussion of the definition of the res publica found in the second book of Cicero’s De republica, a discussion he promises to return to later in the City. He eventually does so in civ. Dei 19.21, perhaps a quarter of a million words later. This is not to say that the term occurs nowhere else in the City: it does, dozens of times. But these are the main places in which he gives definitional attention to it. Cicero’s definition of the res publica (voiced through Scipio) speaks of it as ideally consisting of harmony-concord (the analogy is musical) among its citizens, which yields security; a necessary condition for all this is iustitia, justice. The public thing, then, is ideal–typically a group of people living together in secure and harmonious concord, their common life justly ordered, and with agreement, therefore, both about what the laws should prescribe and proscribe and about what is in their common interest (civ. Dei 2.21). Not just any group of people meets this criterion: the gang of robbers does not (their laws are not just); neither does the city in civil war (it has no consensus about interest or purpose).

It is difficult to know how to translate res publica. “Republic” is the calque, but it is a false friend, much more specific in meaning than Augustine’s (and Cicero’s) res publica and therefore incapable of being used as a kind-term under which every law-governed society might be included. “Commonwealth” is much used (for example by Dyson) as a rendering for res publica, and it has the advantage of preserving the public element of the sense of res publica; but it is now archaic in English in most of its senses and etymologically too intimate with ideas about the common good, which emphatically do not belong to res publica, which is, for Augustine, a value-neutral term of a highly abstract kind: there are just and unjust res publicae. And then there is “state,” the most generic modern term for the institutional forms that provide and constitute government. Of the three, this is the most possible; but it is a quintessentially modern term and conjures, for most contemporary users of English, the apparatus of government (legislatures, judiciaries) and their documentary and institutional affines (constitutions, courts, prisons), all of which is, again, more specific than what Augustine intends by res publica. It is also important to find a rendering capable of preserving Augustine’s play with res publica and res populi: what belongs to the public, its res or thing, is also what belongs to the people. In order to preserve this, and also in order to make Augustine seem stranger than he is often made to seem, I will use “people’s thing” for res populi, and “public thing” for res publica. The “thing” in question is everything that binds a particular public–people together: their laws, if they have any; their norms of custom; their habits of language and gesture and dress and diet – everything, in fact, that makes them a people. On this understanding of res publica, it approaches what we mean by culture; it is certainly broader than what we mean by politics or the state.

Augustine says, after discussing Cicero’s definition of the public thing, which is the same as the people’s thing, the res populi, that he will now try to show that there never was a public thing of that sort because there has been none with true justice (vera iustitia; civ. Dei 2.21). But he at once goes on to modify this dramatic claim: there have of course been public things in a less exalted sense, some of them better (more just) than others. Ancient Rome, for instance, was better ordered than Rome of more recent vintage. And so although true justice is found only in that public thing “whose founder and leader is Christ” (2.21), there are and have been all sorts of cities, res publicae, some of which are more just – and thus more properly cities – than others. To say that true justice is not to be had in cities other than those explicit in their allegiance to Christ is not to say that all those more-or-less pagan cities are on a par with respect to injustice. Or, better put, Augustine is sometimes concerned to explain what all pagan cities have in common, and in that way to place them on a par; and sometimes concerned to discriminate one pagan city from another in terms of the degree to which the perfectly concordant obedience and love of the city of God is evident in it. The two enterprises are not contradictory; but Augustine sometimes veers alarmingly quickly from one to the other.⁴

We now have Augustine’s political vocabulary before us. Central to it, indeed largely constitutive of it, are civitas and its cognates, together with res publica and its glosses. We can now ask again: how is the saeculum, this present age, constituted politically? The answer needs to be divided into two parts. The first has to do with citizens, cives, which is to say with city-inhabitants or city-members; and the second with communities, societates hominum.

Citizens are those individual human beings whose life together constitutes the life of cities. Eschatologically speaking, in terms of final and unchanging citizenship, every human being has citizenship in exactly one of the two cities, the civitas Dei, or city of God, and the civitas terrena, or earthly city. (Each of these cities is given other names, but these are by far the most common, each occurring hundreds of times in the City.) In every case that final citizenship is known to God; but living people typically do not know it with anything approaching clarity or certainty about themselves, and much less about others with whom they have to do; and even in the case of dead people it is the exception rather than the rule that their citizenship is known to those yet living. Even when it is known, it is known only with respect to the citizens of God’s city: there is a list of saints, which is exactly a list of those known to have such citizenship; but there is no corresponding list of the damned, the permanent members of the earthly city. Augustine is sure that there are many of these latter (civ. Dei 20.4–6, 21.17–27); but, unlike Dante, he is chary of providing their names, and in this he is at one with the usual practice of the Church.⁵ This eschatological understanding of citizenship is skeptical exactly because it is eschatological: no particular visible city in this age, not the Church and not Rome, has an unmixed citizenry. Every particular visible city has among its citizens some who are, or will finally be, citizens of the civitas Dei, and some who are or will finally be citizens of the civitas terrena.

Since the fall of Eve and Adam, every human being is born as one marked for eternal citizenship in the civitas terrena, which is to say for damnation (civ. Dei 15.1):

Speaking eschatologically, citizenship is given (predestined); speaking in terms of this age, there is the possibility of a change of citizenship, and for all who are (will finally be) citizens of God’s city, such a change is unavoidable. Augustine here, as often elsewhere in the City, combines two rhetorical and logical registers. The first is sub specie aeternitatis, according to which you will always have been a citizen of whichever city you are finally a citizen of; and the second is sub specie saecularitatis, according to which there is real change in citizenship.

So much for the question of individual citizenship in this age. This is a genuine element in the political constitution of this age, but because final political allegiance in this sense is not knowable, Augustine’s talk about it in the City serves principally as a check on facile identifications of the members of one or another particular visible city (Rome, Babylon, the Church, the United States) with the members of one or another of the two fundamental and eternal cities, the civitas terrena and the civitas Dei.

What then of the societates hominum, the particular human societies of this age? Augustine categorizes these also by way of the distinction between the city of God and the earthly city. But he never identifies any particular human society with either of the two. Or, more exactly, when he does (see, e.g., civ. Dei 8.24, where civitas Dei is identified in passing with sancta ecclesia), he typically qualifies the identification by saying that of course the two fundamental and final cities are inextricably mixed and intertwined,⁶ both in the sense that citizens of each final city are to be found within every visible city, and in the sense that what is done in the name of any particular city of this age exhibits always and necessarily both some features of the city of God as it will finally be, and some features of the earthly city as it will finally be. Within any actual society, then, there is a mixed population: some will finally be (and always have been) citizens of the civitas Dei; and some will finally be (and always have been) citizens of the civitas terrena. Actual human societies are therefore not discriminated one from another by assessing what proportion of their citizens will at the end turn out to have belonged to one or other of the two fundamental cities.

Instead, actual human societies are discriminated one from another and categorized as bearing affinity to and tending toward one or other of the two fundamental cities by examination and description of their fundamental and constitutive practices. And about our capacity to discern and describe what these are, Augustine thinks, we do not have to be as skeptical as we must be about our capacity to know the final citizenship of particular individuals. What actual cities do is nakedly available to the eye, whether of the historian (a very great deal of the City is historiographic) or of the contemporary observer, and discussion of it need therefore not be constrained by eschatological skepticism.⁷ In much of the City, Augustine describes and contrasts incompatible patterns of social practice, along with their associated (though usually implicit) norms. He then judges one set of practices good, and as belonging, in its pure, ideal–typical form (never actual), to the city of God; the other, with all the same qualifications, he judges bad, and as belonging to the earthly city. The practices in question belong to various spheres of human social practice: shedding blood; seeking power; offering worship; using the body; pursuing peace; taking life; performing punishment; and so on. In all these, and more, there is a spectrum: at one end there is what Babylon, the city of confusion, whose founder among men born of women is Cain, ideal–typically recommends and does; at the other there is what the Church, whose founder among men born of women is Jesus, ideal–typically recommends and does. Babylon is also Rome (an identification Augustine often repeats: e.g., civ. Dei 16.17, 18.2, 18.22), and the relation between those two particular visible cities is in many formal ways like that between the people of Israel and the Church: the one foreshadows the other, and its fundamental and constitutive practices find their fulfilment in those of the latter. In the case of Babylon–Rome, those fundamental and constitutive practices are bloody, idolatrous, and constituted by self-reference as their final good; in the case of Israel–Church they are worshipfully and beautifully peaceful, constituted by reference to God as their final good. It is not, once again, that everything Babylon–Rome does is of that ideal–typical kind; neither is it that everything Israel–Church does belongs to that ideal–typical kind. Rather, it is that when each of these political societies comes to a full understanding of itself and finds itself purged of every element that contradicts its identity, it will stand forth exactly as the civitas terrena in the former case, and the civitas Dei in the latter. The distinction between what the earthly city does and what the city of God does in hoc saeculo is not, however, only eschatological: the peace of the heavenly city and the violence of the earthly one are already evident, even if in chiaroscuro, in the patterns of action they commend and perform here and now.

Augustine’s method in discerning which practices and norms belong to the city of God and which to the earthly city is from beginning to end theological, and also to a considerable extent exegetical, which is to say based upon and justified by a particular reading of Scripture. He discriminates the political good from its opposite by appeal to an understanding of what God is like and how God intends humans to order their lives together. The theological nature of Augustine’s politics is most evident in the fundamental contrast he draws between the political order of Babylon–Rome and that of Israel–Church: the former is constitutively idolatrous, he says, while the latter is ordered around the worship of the one God. This matched pair (idololatreia || veri Dei latreia) is not a distinction that belongs to secular reasoning in any of our contemporary senses. It does in a sense belong to Augustine’s understanding of the saecularis: both kinds of latreia occur in hoc saeculo. But the distinction is still thoroughly theological: a societas hominum, he says in one of his more excitable moments, which is not ordered around the worship of the one God, is ipso facto incapable of being truly just (civ. Dei 19.21), and there can scarcely be a more theological way of judging the justice of particular polities.

The question about the political constitution of the present age as Augustine sees it in the City can now be answered more fully and precisely. There is a very large number of actual political entities, actual societates hominum ordered by law and norm and aspiration and custom, found in this present age; each of them has among its cohabitantes some individuals who belong to the city of God and some who belong to the earthly city; and each commends and performs some political activities that belong properly (finally) to the human city, and others that belong properly (finally) to the divine city. In all those senses, the particular polities of this age are on a par: the formal analysis just given applies identically to each. Particular societies are discriminated one from another, then, according to their degree of corruption, which is to say the distance between what they commend and do and what the city of God commends and does. This abstract characterization cries out for instances; and to those, to contrasts between particular practices proper to Babylon–Rome and those proper to Israel–Church, I now turn.

4 Babylon–Rome and Israel–Church

On the one hand there are polities ordered around the worship, the cultus, of false gods; on the other there are those ordered around the true worship (verax cultus) of the true God, the one God of Jesus Christ. This distinction, between idolatry (idololatreia) and latreia simpliciter (Augustine finds the Greek words unavoidable; civ. Dei 10.1), marks the deepest divide between Babylon and the Church, each a visible city of this age. From it all other distinctions flow, and with it all other distinctions are intertwined (civ. Dei 11.1):

This is couched in terms of the relation between the one God and the many gods, but the points it makes about that apply more or less directly to human citizens of the polities of this age: the impious gods are what the citizens of the earthly city worship, and the axiom that worshippers conform themselves to what they worship means that what is said about the impious gods applies also to their worshippers. There is the distinction between private and public we have already seen: what the ideal–typical citizens of the earthly city seek is something privatus, something of their own, something they can own without remainder. What they especially seek is power (potestas, potentia) that can be held and exercised without reference to any other power: the ideal type of that power is held by the one God, and in seeking private mastery the earthly city attempts to become like him. This attempt fails. The power attained by the earthly city is destitute or indigent (egena): there is an echo here, probably, of the needs of the prodigal son who, having consumed and exhausted the substance his father has given him, began to suffer need (coepit egere; Luke 15:14). Indigent power is an oxymoron that indicates a simulacrum: it is what you get when you seek private power, power that is yours without remainder. It is the kind of power yielded by idolatry, and, therefore, the kind of power that belongs, ideal–typically, to Babylon–Rome. It is the self-cancelling political outflow of misdirected worship.

Those who worship the one God, in contrast to idolaters, understand themselves to be constituted as citizens of the particular polities they inhabit, including the Church, by their response to God’s action upon them; no polity, therefore, is taken to be self-constituted, self-explanatory, or exhaustively explicable in terms given by this age. Worshippers of the one God understand, too, that the constitutive practices of their particular polities in hoc saeculo point beyond themselves and will either cease or be radically transformed when this age is folded into the future age. These understandings yield a particular mode of political existence, for which Augustine’s favored term is peregrinatio, wandering or pilgrimage (civ. Dei 15.1, citing Gen. 4:17):

The extent to which a polity’s constitutive practices are idolatrous is tightly indexed to the extent to which it understands itself as an enduring city with a firm location here below. By contrast, wanderers in this age know themselves to be wanderers because they are worshippers of the one God: they cannot rest in the citizenships of this age (not even in ecclesial citizenship) because they know that those citizenships have only temporary significance (which is not to say that they have none), and because they know it to be characteristic of the constitutive practices of those polities that participate most fully in the earthly city precisely to imply the denial of this by presenting what is local and temporary and partial as if it were otherwise. The polities of this age that participate most fully in the city of God have constitutive practices that enshrine, dramatize, and represent their own incompleteness, constantly pointing to the fact that they are what they are by gift rather than possession, and that even what they are will, eventually, be brought to nothing or radically transformed. Those practices are liturgical: it is in the explicit sacramental worship of the one God undertaken by the body of Christ, that the Church shows itself to be, in its politics – the practices that order its common life as a polity, a city – the fullest possible participant in the city of God.

At the end of the fourteenth book of the City, Augustine treats at length the distinction between the two genera humanae (the one belonging to the city of God and the other to the earthly city), and then writes, by way of summary (civ. Dei 14.28):

The love typical of and proper to the earthly city is, in origin and end, self-love: what the citizens of that city do, and what visible cities whose laws and norms participate in those of the earthly city require of their citizens and enshrine in their laws, is love and glorify themselves as their own proper end. “Glory,” for Augustine, as for Scripture, is a technical term: it belongs to God and is to be returned to him. Self-glorying, therefore, is an idolatrous act by definition, with all the deleterious consequences of such acts. Among these consequences is a desire for domination that can find no terminus: it proliferates without end, and makes those who dance to its tune by attempting to subordinate others to their will themselves subject to (not masters of) their desire. To have the libido dominandi is to seek dominatio, which is, in turn, to seek to be a dominus. Dominus is the Latin rendering of the Tetragrammaton, the unsayable four-lettered name of God, a fact of which Augustine is much aware. When he writes of the libido dominandi as characteristic of the earthly city, then, he is depicting a desire to be God: idolatry again, in an elegantly lexical key, and again an explicitly theological account of what constitutes the politics of the earthly city.

In practice, the proliferative nature of the libido dominandi makes it recognizable. It can be seen most clearly in attempts to bring in all those not (yet) citizens of Babylon–Rome, typically by force, with death as the other option. The extent to which a particular visible city performs actions like this is the extent to which (what we would call) its foreign policy participates in the desires proper to the earthly city. Augustine takes as an instance of libido dominandi in this sense the Roman Republic’s destruction of Carthage, its principle economic and military rival, in the Third Punic War (civ. Dei 3.16–29). Rome’s libido dominandi, as Augustine depicts it, made it impossible for it to tolerate the continued existence of any rival; and so Carthage had to be destroyed, which it was, its people slaughtered, its buildings razed, and its ground salted (methods that Rome would later use on Jerusalem itself). From this destruction, Augustine says, came violence and suffering of much greater magnitude than would have occurred had Carthage been permitted to remain in being as a check upon Roman passions (3.22). It is also what distinguishes it from the violence deployed by visible cities whose laws and norms participate more fully in those of the city of God. The violence of those cities is restricted, lamented, and defensively protective (3.10); the violence of Babylon–Rome is in every way the other thing, and it is so because it is something the earthly city is itself dominated by.

Service in loving-kindness (servitium in caritate; civ. Dei 14.28) is the heavenly city’s version of libido dominandi. Internally, such service relates the sovereign of that city to its subjects; externally, it relates sovereign and subjects to those outside, whether enemies or neutrals or friends. The model here is the love of God for his people: God’s bringing into being of the cosmos is his first act of loving-kindness; his election of a people his second; and his third the incarnation and passion of Christ. These are gifts and offerings of peace, without a trace of violence. They are, however, accompanied by divine judgments upon those who do not receive the offered gifts with gratitude. Those acts of judgment Augustine typically describes under the heading of punishment (the central category of Book 21), and he is detailed and enthusiastic in his depictions of it. The visible Church, in its internal economy, participates in and represents this combination of service and judgment; this explains the violence it uses.⁸ Any violence there is in the visible cities that participate in the city of God is, however, limited and responsive to the violence already present in the world’s fabric because of the fall. The heavenly city has no interest in it for its own sake, whereas the earthly city is defined by its tendency toward the unrestricted use of violence.

The unrestricted violence of the earthly city’s politics, and its contrast with the limited violence of the heavenly city, is matched in Augustine’s thought by a contrast between the norms of the two cities with respect to suicide. Augustine thinks it clear that the fifth commandment’s ban against killing extends to self-killing (civ. Dei 1.20), and that there are no conceivable circumstances that justify that act (1.22–24). He is concerned about the case of Christian women who might (or in some cases did), following the example of the Sabines, kill themselves as a result of being raped, or in order to avoid an imminent rape. To the first case he says that there is no sin in being raped, and indeed no real loss, not even of virginity properly understood. From this he takes it to follow that killing oneself because one has been raped is both an excessive and a sinful response. And to the second case he says that even if there were sin in being raped, the idea that one should sin by committing suicide in order to avoid sin is absurd. It would lead, if pressed, to the conclusion that Christians should commit suicide immediately upon being baptized (1.27), for that would guarantee no future sin; and that is a reductio ad absurdum of the position.

Suicide, then, does not belong to the city of God. The earthly city, by contrast, not only tolerates suicide but also in some circumstances is required by its own logic to embrace and advocate it. If, as the norms of the earthly city suggest, the fully happy life (vita beata) can be had here below, in this age, by such things as the cultivation and control of virtue and the carefully ordered enjoyment of local and temporal goods; and if, too, those goods and joys can be removed by violence and other calamities, as they obviously can, then suicide is the proper (and perhaps the only proper) response to the imminent and unavoidable threat of such removal. This kind of argument has special purchase on Stoic views, and Augustine probably has in mind famous instances of Stoic suicide, such as that of Seneca. But Augustine generalizes it to all those who think that happiness can be found in hoc saeculo (there are strong words about this view in civ. Dei 19.4–5). The civitas terrena is, in his view, necessarily necrophiliac because it does not acknowledge its own insufficiency, while necessarily acknowledging the presence of violent contingency. The suicide’s gesture, on this view, is one of control over contingency; in this it is like the earthly city’s attempt to erase all those who refuse subjection to it; and both gestures flow from the earthly city’s attempt to live consistently secundum carnem and not secundum spiritum.

Israel–Church rejects suicide, which is of course not to say that none of its members perform that act; but it affirms martyrdom, which is its approximate functional equivalent of Babylon–Rome’s endorsement of suicide. Augustine has a lot to say about the martyrs in the City: he discusses the proper and improper forms of veneration directed toward them (civ. Dei 8.27); he depicts them as Christian heroes (10.21), serving a function for Israel–Church analogous to that performed by Hector and Priam for Romans; and he is very interested in (and for the most part endorses) stories of miracles resulting from prayer at the shrines of martyrs (22.8 at length, and elsewhere). But most importantly, martyrs are those who willingly accept death at the hands of pagans as a mode of witness to the truth. By that act they are coronati, crowned; and it is that act which constitutes the ideal death for Christians (18.52, 20.13, 21.26, and elsewhere). The bodily marks of martyrdom – the wounds – are sufficiently important as witnesses to who they are and what they have done that Augustine thinks they will remain upon their resurrected bodies in order to give delight to the saints (22.19; he hastens to add that if a martyr has lost limbs or head, those will be restored in the resurrection). Martyrs are not suicides because they do not seek death but rather accept it when given. Augustine is aware that this is a difficult line to draw, especially because the literary accounts of the deaths of martyrs, the passiones martyrum, which were very popular among Christians in the North Africa of his time, and for two centuries before, sometimes depict particular martyrs as dying in ways that approach uncomfortably close to Augustine’s understanding of suicide. But it is a line he consistently affirms as normatively important, and his arguments for it are one of the roots of the Church’s later categorization of suicide as a mortal sin. The martyr–suicide distinction encapsulates, therefore, one of the distinctive differences between the norms of the two cities with respect to death.

5 An Augustinian secularity

Augustine’s understanding of the political constitution of the saeculum is essentially theological. This is true of his eschatology, according to which there are only sheep and goats, only, eventually, citizens of God’s city and of the earthly city, the saved and the damned. It is true, too, of his assessment of the laws and norms and customs of visible polities, visible public things: these laws and norms are divided and categorized according to a theological and scriptural–exegetical understanding of the political activities that belong, ideal–typically, to each of the two cities. His politics is most fundamentally one of longing for what is not,⁹ which is to say a truly public thing where love and peace are harmoniously and indefectibly shared by all those who are intimate with God. It is also, and correspondingly, a politics of lament for what is in hoc saeculo: bloody violence in the service of a self-defeating, nihilist, and necrophiliac self-love. And there is, threaded through his historical account of the rise and fall of particular, visible, public things (Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Rome), occasional delightedly surprised recognition of the vestigia, the traces, of God’s city even where there are only pagans, or where Israel–Church and Babylon–Rome cohabit. It is not (quite) all lament.

For Christians, Augustine does provide properly political guidance, mostly by giving the lexicon and syntax of a Christian account of the public thing, and by illustrating that grammar historically. This grammar has peregrinatio as its central term of art. To say that Christians are wanderers in hoc saeculo is, first, to restrict the kind and intensity of love and loyalty that may properly be directed toward any visible public thing that is not the Church. Even in the case of the Church, a distinction must be drawn between the Church visible, the corpus permixtum that embraces both kinds of citizen among its members, and that is perplexingly intertwined with pagan public things; and the Church as she will finally be. The love for the Church that Augustine commends to Christians is different (more intense, less hedged, vastly more intimate) from the love for other public things because Christians know that the visible Church shows, in the activities definitive and constitutive of itself – that is, liturgical acts – the fullest and most beautiful foreshadowing in this age of what the resurrected life of the city of God will be in futuro saeculo. But Christian love for the visible Church is nonetheless constrained to some degree by the knowledge that some of what is done in the Church’s name is contradictory to what she is – or, as Augustine would prefer to say, it rends her rather than builds her up. In the hierarchy of loves for particular visible political things, the Church stands at the top; but love for her is not lament-free.

Emphasizing peregrinatio also requires the judgment that political perfectionism (the view that we can, in this age, get our politics right) and most kinds of political progressivism (the view that we can, in this age, significantly improve our politics) are utopian and may never be endorsed by Christians. The particulars of perfectionist and progressivist programs, whether broad-scope (the worldwide establishment of Sharia law; the spread of international socialism; the Great Leap Forward; the colonization of the Americas; making the world safe for democracy) or local (privately financed prison systems; regressive taxation; proportional representation; this candidate for office or that one) may or may not be capable of endorsement or support by Christians. But the progressivist or perfectionist claims with which commendations of these particulars are associated and in terms of which they are justified – this will make the world perfect; this will make the world better – are never acceptable.

This implication of peregrinatio suggests a kind of political quietism, not with respect to recommendation of political particulars, but with respect to concern for their outcome.¹⁰ That outcome will always be, in a formal sense, exactly the same: an unpredictable blend of the good and the dreadful, and a blend that has much less to do with the intentions of the agents advocating political change than with other things. A useful illustration of this limited quietism can be found in Augustine’s twin claims that it doesn’t matter how long you live so long as you live well and are resurrected to eternal life rather than to eternal death (civ. Dei 1.11), and that it doesn’t matter by whom you’re ruled so long as they don’t force you to do what is impious and iniquitous (5.17). On this view, the principal significance of the laws and norms of the public thing, whether it is pagan or mixed or inhabited entirely by Christians (the last possibility is not one that Augustine imagines clearly), is negative: they are on a par one with another so long as they don’t order you to do what contradicts God’s intentions. Suppose they do? Suppose a Christian is faced with a public law that requires just such an action? That is straightforward enough: Christians are not to obey such laws, and must joyously suffer the penalty for refusing to do so (19.17). Martyrdom is the proper and delightful end of that practice, when circumstance requires.

There is, however, one positive thing to say about the politics of the public thing for Christians, a thing in addition to the negatives just mentioned. It is that earthly peace is a good (a preliminary good, but still a good) that Christians should seek, support, and celebrate (with qualifications) when it occurs. This requires them to obey and to support the laws that provide such peace. For example (civ. Dei 19.26):

Peace in this age, the tranquility of order (civ. Dei 19.13; cf. 14.9, on the tranquillitas caritatis), is to be loved by the Church for what it is: a breathing-space, a short pause in the shedding of blood; and those who provide it prayed for and supported in their provision of it. Such prayer, however, occurs always with the warning, as in the passage just quoted, that what is prayed for will not last, and that those prayed for may well be evil and evildoers. Prayer for the rulers of Babylon–Rome is therefore always to be accompanied by lament (Ps. 137:1, often quoted by Augustine). Just so with the work Christians may properly do in making and administering the laws and norms of a particular visible public thing. There can, for a fully Augustinian view of the secular, be Christian presidents or elected representatives or judges or police or soldiers; but any who do not lament their necessities as such are misunderstanding what they do. The stance of lament, implying as it does an accurate (as Augustine sees it) understanding of what the laws and norms of visible public things can do, may lead to less bloody and damaging political judgments than would be made by those who do not occupy it; but there is no guarantee of that.¹¹

So much for the political guidance Augustine gives to Christians in hoc saeculo. The principal guidance he provides for pagans is as an illustration of the grammar of one variety of Christian thought about human social life. Absent the theology that frames and supports Augustine’s views on that matter, nothing is left but disjecta membra. Those have often been taken up; but when they are, Augustine is left far behind. Augustine’s yield for political theory in our secular sense of that term is also very small, in large part because he has no interest in the theoretical questions central to the discipline. One element in the City may, however, be of considerable current relevance, and this provides, perhaps, a partial explanation of the recent flood of publication on Augustine and Augustinian politics. It is the idea that the saeculum is not and cannot be a political space neutral to and capable of framing, accounting for, and explaining the Church.¹² That element in secular political theory has less and less purchase on our political life. Its four-century or so prominence for us is waning; and so Augustine, for whom it would have seemed ludicrous, may be of increasing interest to us as a theorist of the saeculum, if not of the secular.