Augustine

Augustine was a Christian p He served as bishop for 35 years, proving popular and inspirational to In He matters to us non-Christians today because of what he criticised about Rome, its values and its outlook, and because Rome has so many the Romans believed in two t One, earthly happiness. They were on the whole an optimistic lot. The builders of the Pondugar and the Colosse Writers The Romans were keen practitioners of what we would nowadays call self-help, training their audiences to greater success and effectiveness. In their eyes, the h To adjust social order. For long periods, the Romans trusted that their society was marked by justice, justizia. People of ambition and intelligence could make it to the top. The army was trusted to be meritocratic. The capacity to make money was held to reflect both practical ability and also a degree of inner virtue. Therefore, showing off one's wealth was deemed honourable in a point of pride, and fame was considered a wholly respectable ideal. Augustine disagreed furiously with both of these ass In his masterpiece The City of God, he dissected each of these two points, that h It was Augustine who came up with the idea of original sin. He proposed that all h Our sinful nature gives rise to what Augustine called a libido dominandi, a desire to dominate, we cannot properly love, for we are constantly undermined by our egoism and our pride. Our powers of reasoning and understanding are fragile in the extreme. Lust haunts our days and nights. We fail to understand ourselves. We chase phantoms, we're beset by anxieties. Augustine concluded It might sound depressing, but it may turn out to be a curious relief to be told that our lives are awry, not by coincidence, but by definition, simply because we're h We are creatures fated to intuit virtue in love, w Our relations It isn't anyt We have done. The odds are simply stacked against us from the start. Augustinian pessimism takes off some of the pressure we might feel when we slowly come to terms with the imperfect nature of pretty much everyt We shouldn't rage or feel that we've been persecuted or singled out for undue punishment. It'simply the h Romans had, in their most ambitious moments, thought themselves to be running a meritocracy, a society where those who got to the top were deemed to have done so on the back of their own virtues. After the emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity, the philosopher Eusebius even proposed that earthly power was God's instr What arrogant, boastful and cruel claims responded Augustin. There never was nor ever could be justice in Rome or indeed anywhere else on earth. God didn't give good people wealth and power, and nor did he necessarily condemn those who lacked them. Augustin distinguished between what he called two cities, the city of men and the city of God. The latter was an ideal of the future, a heavenly paradise where the good would finally dominate, where power would be properly allied to justice and where virtue would reign. But men could never build such a city alone, and should never believe themselves capable of doing so. They were condemned to dwell only in the city of men, w In Augustin's formulation, true justice has no existence, save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ. Again, it may sound bleak, but it makes Augustin's p It's not for h From t It's our duty to be skeptical about power and generous towards failure. We don't need to be Christians to be comforted by both these points. They are the religions universal gifts to political philosophy and h They stand as permanent reminders of some of the dangers and cruelties of believing that life can be made perfect, or that poverty and obscurity are reliable indicators of vice in a city of men.