Abstract
This chapter argues that Augustine was a “principled realist.” A guarded pessimism about human nature and a non-utopian view of community life explain his realism: his spiritual and moral values make him a principled one. This negativity about human nature, even if you disagree with Augustine’s theology, is empirically confirmed by an honest assessment of human history. After briefly discussing how Plato’s metaphysics informs his politics, I organize my argument around three themes: Augustine’s critique of those who blamed Rome’s fall on the adoption of Christianity, his justification for using force against the Donatists, and his acceptance of war, which he seeks to limit though principles now accepted as seminal to the development of modern just war theory in the west.
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Notes
- 1.
In the last 100–200 years, these moral principles have been couched under the auspices of an international law tradition, one that owes its development to much thinkers such as Vittorio and Suarez, and captured in modern times in various international laws, treaties, and codes, as well as in the works of seminal authors like Michael Walzer and Brian Orend. The Geneva Conventions are an example of this transition. In the Catholic tradition, these principles have been consistently framed as the “natural law” tradition. Augustine implies this, perhaps says so explicitly, but not in the systematic way Aquinas will centuries later.
- 2.
My argument vindicates Niebuhr’s interpretation of Augustine, but while our views are consistent, they have a different focus. In his Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr, as do I, concurs with Augustine on the depth of original sin and the discomforting and chronic tensions inherent in blending the heavenly and earthly cities in various political arrangements. Augustine balances dangerous extremes, providing the realist corrective against impossible, impractical, and hubristic political idealism, but also providing a principled antidote to cynical realpolitik . Both unchecked extremes lead to tyranny. For Niebuhr, the modern solution born out of Augustine’s insights is to relinquish belief in the perfectibility of society, use checks and balances to diffuse power in a polity, and to cultivate humility about one’s moral superiority and judgment. My focus is to show the normative aspects of Augustine’s realism, a reluctant realism that comes to see power as a necessary evil but not in itself a sufficient justification for civil society. Power is subordinate to higher principles that humans can understand and imperfectibly apply to reduce, though not eliminate, social evils.
- 3.
I devote the most pages to Augustine’s response to the Donatists because there one can see the evolution in his thought toward principled realism from an earlier naïve pacifism.
- 4.
In staking out this middle position for Augustine, I recognize a debt to previous writers wrestling with Augustine’s political views on the use of civil and military power. Besides Niebuhr’s articulate Augustinian realism, I acknowledge the important but varied interpretations of Augustine’s realism in other writers such as Elshtain, Heyking, Shklar, and Deane. These other writers defend an attenuated optimism about Augustine and political life I tend to share. I do not see in Augustine a politics of Hobbesian fear used to justify a tyrannical social contract.
- 5.
George Berkeley, Three Dialogs Between Hylas and Philonous (Hackett Classics), ed. Robert M. Adams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1979), pp. 35–46.
- 6.
Interpreting Plato as an idealist owes to confusion about translating Plato’s terminology into English. His theory of the forms refers to forms, or “universals,” as ideas, a complex Greek word that can mean “perceive,” “behold,” “understand,” and “to know.” Our conception of “idea” is normally restricted to mind-locked images. In his Timaeus (27d5–28a1), Plato distinguishes between things that permanently are (forms eternal and unchanging) and things that are becoming (material world marked by opinion and sensation). Thus, with human beings, the physical body becomes, decays, and expires. The soul mediates between these two realms, longing for a return to the perfection of the Divine Realm of the forms as mythologized in the Allegory of the Cave in Republic Book VII.
- 7.
Plato doesn’t seem to raise the issue of whether particulars exist independently of perceiving minds.
- 8.
See Plato, Republic, Book VII, Allegory of the Cave, for a metaphorical reference to the form of the good.
- 9.
Michael Mendelson, philosopher at Lehigh University, lauds Augustine’s adoption of Platonic realism, “the books of the Platonists provided him with a metaphysical framework of extraordinary depth and subtlety, a richly textured tableau upon which the human condition can be plotted … He credits the books of the Platonists with making it possible for him to conceive of a non-physical, spiritual reality.” The German theologian Johannes Brachtendorf augments this formal realism as follows: “The Neoplatonists taught Augustine in Milan the metaphysical truths about God, namely that he is immutable, immaterial, highest unity, and highest good.”
- 10.
Augustine, “On Christian Doctrines,” n.d. CHURCH FATHERS: On Christian Doctrine. Accessed online, May 6, 2020 at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1202.htm.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
For Augustine, freedom of the will is trivially possible for everyone to a point, but grace enables wills to choose the good. It is less radical freedom than Pelagianism but freer than the fatalism of real politick realists committed to the systemic and determined power-centeredness of people and communities.
- 13.
Thucydides, Book 1, paragraph 76.
- 14.
Plato, Republic, Book II.
- 15.
Augustine, City of God, Book III, Chap. 1; hereafter “COG.”
- 16.
Some have argued that Rome fell because Christianity made people passive, otherworldly, less loyal to the state, and sap** civic virtue. This view is echoed in Gibbon. It’s a straw man, for many factors led to Rome’s demise, economic malaise, mercenary use, slave labor, deficit spending, and the migration of barbarians.
- 17.
See Ososius’ History Against the Pagans.
- 18.
This brief discussion of Augustine’s rejection that Christianity caused the fall of Rome is admittedly problematic for its brevity. I resurrect the point was to show Augustine’s realist orientation to politics. Human nature is constant. A candid historical survey reveals equitable misery across pagan and Christian history. Politics is a necessary evil hedging against anarchy, which is worse.
- 19.
It would be an interesting study to see what in North African culture contributed to the susceptibility of so many people to be sympathetic with Donatist interpretations of saintliness and the sacraments that it didn’t remain and insignificant clique. Donatus was a clever propagandist, categorizing Latin Romans as foreign occupiers to disaffected Berbers, Punics, and others. I understand questioning the veracity of a cleric’s faith if they surrendered quickly and then wanted their job back afterward, especially if I had suffered a great deal for my own fortitude. Donatus shrewdly exploited these trust issues.
- 20.
Augustine mentions one instance where a zealous group of Donatists that said they’d kill a Catholic man if he didn’t martyr them. He agreed to do so if he could bind them, making the work easier. They agreed. He bound them, beat them with a stick, and walked away, a clever response indeed.
- 21.
The Pelagians remained Roman Catholic in orientation and didn’t have such a schismatic view of fundamental church sacraments that they rebelled and formed their own churches and a separate clerical class. They didn’t rebaptize converts, didn’t necessarily view themselves as the “true church,” and hence separatists.
- 22.
Letter 111: 1–2.
- 23.
On True Religion, Book XVI, Chap. 31.
- 24.
John 2:4.
- 25.
Mark 12:17.
- 26.
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102087.htm Augustine, Letter 87 to Emeritus, paragraph 7. Romans 13, 2–4 is quoted there in the text.
- 27.
Augustine, Letter 93. Chap. 1, section 3. One could see in this quote a veiled justification for forced conversion to orthodoxy, though I don’t consider that to be the best charitable interpretation of this passage.
- 28.
Augustine’s principled realism is evident with Vincentius as with Pelagius. Letter 93 refers to the Rogatist as “My Brother Dearly Beloved” someone with which to debate, not to suppress.
- 29.
Augustine, Letter 93, Chap. 5, section 17.
- 30.
He seems to grasp a church/state conflict in the making. It’s not that he had a modern view of the issue, but he does recognize that the use of force is a potential problem.
- 31.
Bishop Maximianus Bagai is venerated as a saint. Augustine discusses the abuse of Bagai in On the Correction of the Donatists, Chap. VII, 25–6.
- 32.
Plato, Statesman, 307e–8a.
- 33.
Augustine, Contra Faustus the Manichean, book 22, Chap. 74.
- 34.
Letter 189 to Boniface. I’ll add here that this position is also a strong indictment of the Rogatist position mentioned in the last section, the pacifistic sect that sees force and holiness as inconsistent with one another.
- 35.
Letter 189 to Boniface.
- 36.
On Free Choice of the Will, Book I.
- 37.
COG, XIX.11.
- 38.
COG, XIX.12.
- 39.
Letter 229 to Darius.
- 40.
I hesitate to use “state” here, though talking that way is part of my paradigm. Empire seems errant. I use community, knowing it’s ambiguous or monarch.
- 41.
Augustine, Contra Faustus the Manichean, book XX, Chap. 75.
- 42.
Augustine, Contra Faustus the Manichean, book XX, Chap. 75.
- 43.
COG, XVII.13.
- 44.
I think Peter Iver Kaufman may be overly pessimistic at the end of Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) when he writes that both Augustine and More believed that “political regimes were to be used and could not be appreciably improved” (p. 230), although I agree with his anti-utopian reading of the author of City of God. I am in greater agreement with the way Kaufman characterizes the fifth-century political theologian’s modest expectations from politics in Augustine’s Leaders (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017), where the idea is that Augustine looked for leaders who demonstrated “trust in God’s sovereignty and divine grace, exemplary humility, compassion, prudence, drams of pessimism about the chances of perfecting righteousness in this world, but a brand of optimism that, he thought, was always in season—optimism about the celestial fate of the faithful” (6).
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Hallgarth, M.W. (2021). Augustine’s Principled Realism. In: Kabala, B.Z., Menchaca-Bagnulo, A., Pinkoski, N. (eds) Augustine in a Time of Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61485-0_18
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