publication.
APPENDIX
The Political Ideas of
St. Augustine^
From The Philosophical and Political Backgrounds of The Divine Comedy,^ a series of lectures by Dino Bigongiari, Da Ponte Professor Emeritus of Italian, at Columbia University.
We want to discuss now the by-products—social and political—of the theology of St. Augustine: by-products fully as important as the theological ideas themselves.
The poUtical implications of that theology are not hard to trace. All depends, of course, on the profound pessimism of his theory of predestination, which one cannot dismiss by saying that it is a Lutheran or Jansenist misinterpretation, for it is too clearly present in his own pages. The doctrine hinges on two facts, both very hard to scn^ tinize: one, the contamination of the whole species by one man; the other, the determination of the Creator to save some and not the others. Long
1. Printed with the author's pennission. Readers interested in comparing the political ideas of St. Augustine with those of St. Thomas Aquinas will find Professor Bigongiari's introduction (pp. vii-xxxvii) to The Political Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, New York, 1953, very illuminating.
2. These lectures are currently being prepared for publication.
344 APPENDIX before Adam was created, St. Augustine says, interpreting the words of St. Paul, God knew that Adam would sin, and that all mankind would be corrupted by that sin. But out of that corrupt mass of humanity to come, God picked out certain souls whom he saved by sending them grace in the form of a summons or call of irresistible force irresistible grace, that is the phrase St. Augustine uses. The persons thus chosen have to be saved. They are not good, and therefore saved. They are good because God has sent His irresistible saving grace.
That, briefly, is the doctrine of predestination. And as a result of it you have St. Augustine's entire political structure. God has predestined very few for salvation; the rest, the great majority, are to be damned. Of course, the word predestination is rarely used for the damned. The commonest use reserves it only for salvation; but, obviously, that leaves us to conclude that those who are not to be saved will be forever damned. These latter, always the majority of human beings, act immorally because they have no grace. They are all filled with lusts, desires for wealth, power, and pleasure. St. Augustine goes through the long pageant of their desires. They are the ones whose needs have called into existence the political state. The state is necessary because these people, with all their greed, with all their desires, would otherwise soon have exterminated themselves. To prevent such extermination, God permitted—he did not create, but permitted—the constitution of states. The one advantage that the state has is that it guarantees some kind of peace. And for what purpose is peace necessary? St. Augustine says, so that these people may satisfy some of
APPENDIX 345 their greed. That is what pohty means; that is what the state is.
If we forget the theology for a moment, and consider merely the picture of the world St. Augustine gives us, we can easily see that his poUtical pessimism has roots that extend way back into pagan antiquity. To approach St. Augustine's position in this way, we have only to recall a famous statement of Lucian, the satirist. The gods, according to Lucian, are primarily humorists. They have built this world as a stage for their own entertainment. Man finds his way on to that stage, and he comes with an infinite capacity to create, to produce all sorts of things. This ingenuity he uses all for the purpose of making himself happy; yet he finds that his desires are always one step ahead of his capacity to produce. In other words, man is destined to be always running after something he desires that is always beyond his reach; he cannot be satisfied, because his desires go on to infinity. As a result of this constitution of his, man, according to Lucian, is incapable of acting justly.
To understand the poUtical significance of a statement of this sort, you have to recall some of the positions we touched upon in studying the Greek authors; particularly tiiose of the Sophists and Epicureans. We noted that some of the best Greek philosophers, as well as Cicero, and many
Christian thinkers, including Dante, held a very different view. It was their boast—we may call it a boast—that the state exists by divine providence in order that there may be justice in this world; that as long as there is justice, a community will be able to maintain itself, and as soon as justice goes—I'm quoting Cicero here—the conmiunity
346 APPENDIX goes, collapses, and anarchy sets in. Now this view of man's condition is very different from the Sophist or Epicurean view; and it is the very opposite of the one St. Augustine holds.
In a violent debate with Cicero across the centuries, St. Augustine says: Not only does the removal of justice not lead to the breaking up of a state, but in fact there never has been a state that was maintained by justice. Behind this is Lucian*s idea that man is incapable of justice because of his infinite desires, and also the Sophistic and Epicurean position according to which justice comes into existence as a result of a contract—a social contract. Those thinkers, especially the Epicurean philosophers of pleasure, held that all men had it in their hearts to satisfy to the uttermost, to infinity, all their desires, whatever they might be. By experience, however, they have come to realize that if they were to go all out to get such satisfaction, they would probably end up in such disorder that nobody would get anything. They concluded, therefore, that in order to have at least some satisfaction, we have to give up the possibility of satisfying all our desires, and concentrate on enjoying the maximum amount of pleasure our fellow-citizens will permit us to have. Through the centuries ideas of this sort have been presented again and again by serious thinkers. We have only to recall the name of Thomas Hobbes and his doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes.
Let us see how St. Augustine's political philosophy fits into this series of pessimistic views of man. For him, too, men (though not all, not those destined for salvation) are animated with imquenchable desires for goods that are such that as you increase the share of one, the quantity that
APPENDIX 347 remains to be shared among the others diminishes. This is true, surely, of sexual pleasure, the possession of a woman, the attainment of glory on the battlefield or in the arena. Are there any pleasures of which it is not true? Long before St. Augustine's time the ancients had pointed out some of them. Seneca, for instance, had noted that our pleasure in contemplation, in singing, in dancing, increases the more people share in it. But it is not so with material goods. As civilization advances, and men learn how to produce more and more wealth, so that all might have more material goods, instead of diminishing, strife mounts. It seems that men contend more, die more there is to be had.
Against this argument, of course, you have the Baconian idea that has dominated our popular thinking for the last few centuries—the idea that we can remove the occasion for struggle over material goods not by limiting our desires but by forcing nature to do our bidding. That's the Baconian attitude: force nature to supply all needs, to supply the means of satisfying all desires, and thereby put an end to this economic and political striving that has characterized the life of man on earth. Look around you, and judge for yourselves whether Lucian or Bacon was right.
Well, our interest in this sort of Baconian utopianism is limited to St. Augustine's criticism. To be sure, St. Augustine has given us some indication as to how we may hve happily in the enjoyment of goods which give greater pleasure the more people share in them. The moral principle is clear and rather easy to apply individually. But how to socialize the principle is the problem.
Suggestions had been heard even before St. Augustine's time as thinking people, like Plotinus,
348 APPENDIX became alarmed at the progress of material civilization, or rather, at the strife that accompanies it. Centuries later we will hear St. Francis express a similar pessimism about material progress. In a Marxian vein, though to a very opposite purpose, St. Francis reduced all the evil desires that lead mankind away from goodness to a common denominator: the desire for wealth. Wealth, or rather, the desire for wealth is the source of all evil. It is in poverty, therefore, that we should seek salvation. And k we seek it there, St. Francis beUeved, we will surely find it. You know how much of his time, of his genius,
St. Francis dedicated to singing, in Italy and out of Italy, the praises of Lady Poverty. And strangely enough, occasionally he had a response. We know of whole communities that responded, acting as if they were indeed all to be counted among those few who—St. Augustine would say —are predestined for salvation. Yet it was a response and a happiness that was obviously not to be of great duration. Dante, who sings of that response in the eleventh canto of the Paradiso, the canto devoted to St. Francis, grasps why it could not last on the social level. Realizing how destructive of individuals and communities the insatiable desire for wealth is, Dante begins the canto with a terrible invective that has shocked many of his readers. It is a very Augustinian moment in the Divine Comedy. He bundles together rulers, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, corrupt priests, prostitutes, idlers—all who have set for themselves as an aim the satisfaction, the beatitude, the happiness that comes from material goods. Whether they strive for the satisfactions of political rule,
APPENDIX 349 or sexual indulgence, or banqueting, these people, Dante says, are all alike, all equally bad.
St. Augustine does not go quite that far. These people are not all the same, he says, though they are aU of one camp. When there is a struggle for the goods they desire, and a struggle is always forthcoming, all these people will do what the old Sophists said: they will transform themselves into the powers that constitute the political order. They will form a state.
By state, remember, St. Augustine does not mean any given city or kingdom. Wheil he speaks of the civitas terrena, the city of the earth, which he also calls the civitas diaboli, the diabolical city, he means all who through all the centuries have striven for the sort of goods I have described. It began in Adam's time, with the first fratricide,
Cain, and continues through the time of Remus and Romulus, the reconstituted fratricide, down to the present. All of these people who strive for self-satisfaction in this way, as they are grouped in different states, under different rulers, constitute the city of the devil. God in His mercy has given them, as we said, this utilitarian suggestion or insight: give up that boundless lust for wealth, come to terms; take a little, let others have a little; otherwise nobody will have anything—you will all be dead. And when men, following this utilitarian suggestion, agree to give up their absolute lust, to accept a share of the common good, and to punish those who exceed their shares, we call the result a state—an association dictated by utility for the purpose of enabling a group of people to enjoy, without destroying one another, whatever goods they like best. Some people will
350 APPENDIX like one thing and some will like another. We will have, therefore, a hierarchy of states, some not as bad as others, yet all corrupt to some degree, for the original sin contaminates them all. Whatever it may be that they want, it is still selfseeking that moves them to form a political community, the self-seeking that St. Augustine calls cupiditas. The Romans, who sacrificed enjoyment of the pleasures of the flesh that they might enjoy the satisfaction of dominating as a nation, might have been less ignoble than SardanapoHs, who said he wished he had thirty stomachs and as many genital organs so that he might indulge himself as much as he wanted; but they were not more just in the eyes of God. Their motive was that same cupiditas on a higher level. That's one pole of the Augustinian ethics. The other pole, the sharing of spiritual goods, is caritas. Everybody who has read a page of St. Augustine knows these two.
Men need the state, St. Augustine emphasizes, because they need coercion, in two ways. They need it, first of all, within the bounds of this city of the devil, to keep within proper confines the desires for material goods. And they need it, also, to keep other states from invading the territory of the commonwealth to secure by violence the goods on which they have set their hearts. That is
Sie civitas terrena. It provides those who are to have no peace in eternity with a certain degree of peace on earth. It restrains civil war. When one state, at peace internally, comes up against another that it cannot coerce, the war of greed continues on a higher level, until one or the other is overcome.
In the midst of this civitas terrena live also
APPENDIX 351 those few who are predestined for salvation. Should they try to separate themselves and form a state of their own, apart from the others? They cannot, says St. Augustine; and the reason is that, if all men in a state were really such as these, you wouldn't need a state. The state is Uke a hospital.
If mankind were to become physically perfect, you would not have a perfect hospital; you would have no hospital at all. The state exists because of the immorahty of human beings. If people were not immoral, if—taking the impossible— all people were noble, there would not be any state.
And so those who are predestined to be saved —who they are nobody knows, or rather, God knows—will stay in the midst of this city of the devil, as foreigners, peregrini, viatori, until they are called to their true home, which is not of this world. While they are here, they are to obey the laws of the state, doing all it commands them to do, provided what it commands does not go against the commandments of God. If, in the relations of individuals to the state, or of one state to another, the constituted power should order you to do something that is against the commandments of God, then refuse, then assert yourselves; but refuse, St. Augustine insists, not by doing, but by not doing. Refuse by cHnging to your duty before God to the point of martyrdom and selfsacrifice. The wars for Christ are won, St. Augustine reminds his readers, not by kiUing, but by dying.
That is the Augustinian scheme. It is important, even for those of us who do not accept its theological basis, because of its very powerful criticism of this life of ours. All of us, more or less, share in, or admire that certain kind of virtue—civic
352 APPENDIX spirit, patriotism, world-brotherhood, call it what you will—which is built up in the hearts of people who willingly associate themselves together to pursue happiness in this world. Whether it be a tiny city-state, or a large nation-state, or empire, or some dreamed-of world community, your willing association with it makes this peace-enforcing institution dear to you. You don't want to see it fail, you don't want to see it die. You would rather die yourself. And you may wonder why everyone in the world has not rushed to associate himself willingly with your group, which you think is so wonderfully suited for the task of securing peace and happiness.
It is the general tendency of all mankind to resort to such flattering self-justification, is it not? How can those Russians—you hear some people ask—be so enthusiastic in the pubUc square, when they have before them, in our way of Ufe, a picture of almost perfect goodness, justice, welfare, and freedom? We can say the same for the little state of Israel, or the Arab states on its borders, for England, Spain, China, India; all are disposed to flatter themselves in this way. That is how the world goes, A certain group of people invade and occupy certain lands, arm themselves, and set about protecting the lands. Today the image of some ugly imperialist power comes to our mind when we say this. But it is true of all societies that hold or occupy territory and defend it: Switzerland, Cuba, India, Israel, as well as England,
Russia, or the United States. Immediately this group of people begins to say: this is our land these beautiful frontiers, these beautiful bays, these rivers—this is God's country, God has given it to us. So the defense of these lands and these rivers
APPENDIX 353 comes to seem just, and the willingness to defend them comes to seem a virtue. But in reality, the only justification, St. Augustine would say, is that the people from whom you took these lands had taken them equally unjustly. Our only real excuse for what we do is that there has been an infinite series of plunders, of iniquities behind ours. But, the other line of argument is more flattering. Here is a man on his own soil; obviously he has a perfect right to protect it against attack. It is his soil; God has given it to him. Well, if there is a fight, under these circumstances, and our side wins, we call it a "just" defense, a just war. You are familiar with the term, I am sure. You hear it and read it daily, coming from people in all parts of the worid. Their wars are all just wars. Of course, we must not forget that St. Augustine himself has given us the Christian theory of a just war. That is certainly true. Those knights, crusaders, of the Middle Ages—when they spoke of war, endeavoring to see if there might be a way to make wars and fighting less brutal—invariably cited the arguments of the Augustinian doctrine of a just war. Those arguments were later taken up by St. Thomas, and he did not add anything to them or take anything away. We can say, therefore, that the Roman Catholic Church today has a doctrine of just war that comes entirely out of the pages of St. Augustine.
But now we ought to ask: How can a man who says there can be no just state hold that there can be a just war? We can ask the same question with regard to his doctrine of property. We can speak of justice in the administration of property rights,
St. Augustine says, provided we recall that these rights are not administered according to the law
354 APPENDIX of God, but according to the law of the emperor. By divine law there should not be private property. And if some great wealth were to fall into the hands of an individual, it should immediately be used as God commands, by those who want to be perfect or, if not perfect, good. For those who want to be perfect—what does Christ say? If you want to be perfect, sell all your goods and give all to the poor. And if you want to be just good, live in such a way that all people around you will love you for having permitted them to share in the goods of the world that made you happy. Property rights exist for the peace of the city of the devil; but we cannot say they are just in terms of the divine law.
And the same is true of wars. Wars occur, St. Augustine tells us clearly, only in this earthly city. What he says of war, therefore, applies only to his civitas terrena. As with the laws of property, so with the rules of war. The main point is that the situation of man would be much worse without such rules.
What are the justifications for war? The world being what it is, defensive war is obviously justified, for what happens in defensive war is better than what would happen if a nation under attack did not defend itself. What is important in this doctrine, what chivalry saw and what people no longer see, unfortunately, is that the cruel necessities of war can be mitigated in certain things by applying a few realistic rules that can serve to confine the fighting to its proper objectives. One rule is: Never pursue a war beyond the treaty of peace; when a war is ended, let it be really ended. But above all, see to it that you never fight a war with a feeling of thoroughgoing hatred in your
APPENDIX 355 heart. Of all the people I can think of, the man who, I'm sure, would have been most horrified by the trials at Nuremberg is St. Augustine. The enemy may have been as brutal as you like, may have been wholly wrong in his conduct of the war; but, however horribly he has comported himself, the only way to make your defensive war just in any sense is to show mercy when victory is won. St. Thomas holds this, and he says himself that he takes it out of St. Augustine.
Related to his doctrine of a just war is St.
Augustine's teaching—and here we must touch upon something you are not apt to Hke—concerning the use of force in matters of faith. You know how the Roman Empire used its civil power to combat heresy by force, as it had used force against the Christians before the time of Constantine. St. Augustine for a long time fought against it. Then, suddenly, for reasons we cannot go into deeply here, he changes his mind. He ceases to be the advocate of adherence according to conscience, and becomes the apostle of compulsion. Compelle intrare. To support his position he gives the example from the gospels of the celebration to which some who were invited did not come; the feast was then opened to the maimed, the poor, the halt, and the blind, but still there was room. The Saviour then said: compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. St. Augustine interprets it to mean: force these heretics to come in. Thus he completely reverses his original position, going from day to night, from white to black. You can imagine how many people were resentful and disturbed by this change. And he did not try to conceal the fact that he had reversed himself. Whatever else you
356 APPENDIX may want to say, you have to admit of St. Augustine that he was a most honest thinker.
And remember, he distinctly said: no death penalty for heretics. Many critics have forgotten that. His attitude was that coercion is to be merely a device for facilitating eventual voluntary adherence. It is like the breaking of the shell of an Qgg. Once these people who have been misled into heresy come out of the broken shell, they will see how magnificent is the orthodox faith, and how much they have almost lost. We must remember that St. Augustine wrote thousands of pages on the subject. Unfortunately, many critics cite only some isolated statement, without noticing all the quaUfications and limitations placed upon it, or any of St. Augustine's arguments in justification of his position.
In conclusion we must say a word about St.
Augustine's philosophy of history, or rather, about his idea of the relation between providence and history. For here we see the culmination of something that had been preparing itself for a long time in the course of ancient thought. We discussed the question of teleology in connection with the Greeks. Aristotle had estabUshed that there is teleology or purpose not only in the volitional acts of man but also in nature. All that we see around us, the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, is regulated by purpose. The purpose is not conscious, not felt, not regulated by these things themselves; yet what happens is purposeful, because they are activated by a higher being which is called nature. This is, of course, the great Aristotelian doctrine of the teleology of nature. It has often been criticized, repeatedly challenged, sometimes apparently completely rejected, but always
APPENDIX 357 it comes back. And even today great scientists have come forward to acknowledge that it cannot be totally rejected, even in their sphere. It does not suflBce to explain all phenomena; yet there are obviously large areas of natural phenomena that cannot be sufficiently explained without it.
Well, St. Augustine opened the sphere of history to teleology. There is a design in history, even though individuals have not intended the result accomphshed. Historians are always talking as if the sequence of historical events were meaningful, are they not? For example: here comes the philosophical enlightenment of the eighteenth century; that, of course, was the intellectual preparation for the French Revolution; and that in turn was the basis for the appearance of Napoleon, who became, with his arms, the means of spreading the revolutionary ideas throughout Europe. And that, again, was the basis for the resurgence of nationahsm in Germany and Italy—and so on. But the question is, was the enlightenment aiming at the Revolution? Did Voltaire want the Revolution? Obviously not. Did the Revolution plan Napoleon? Obviously not. Read the records of the Revolutionary Conventions. And did the France of Napoleon want the rise of the various nationalities—Italian, German? You can answer that for yourselves. Yet, if there is this concatenation, not willed by the agents involved—agents who often aimed at the very opposite effect—who shall we say willed it?
For St. Augustine and his contemporaries the sequence of events under examination was the history of Rome from the legendary fall of Troy to the attacks of the Germanic barbarians. The fall of Troy, whether it be fiction or not, and the
358 APPENDIX consequent development of the Mediterranean world—the rise of Rome—was willed by divine providence. Hector fought as he did for Troy so that Aeneas would have to do what he did. It was the way to realize God's purposes. The players, the agents, had to be, like puppets, unconscious of their true roles.
In other words, externally at least, this Augustinian historical teleology resembles the modem doctrine of Hegel on the cunning of reason in history, does it not? You might say that this conception of history, which has gained a certain amount of notoriety through the Marxian version of it, is full of difficulties. Some people say it is all nonsense. And yet, admitting that the individuals involved were not conscious of the results toward which their deeds tended, how are yoa going to be able to see any logic in the sequence of political, economic, and social events—unless there is meaning on a higher level? If you deny providence, or the cunning of reason, it is pretty hard to justify what we are all prone to do namely, to discern some plan in the sequence of historical events in this world.
Well, whether you are prepared to accept it or not, this Augustinian doctrine we have touched upon in our study of his political thought has made its impression.
This collection, token from the works of
St. Augustine, has been arronged so as fo give the reader an organized, comprehensive view of ti e great African saint's political ideas. These, no less than his ideas on sin, grace and predestination, have long been an object of study and controversy.