Estimated Reading Time: 8 Minutes
My segment on Epistemic Treasures will not only house recommendations of a select everything in what I previously consumed among art, best practices, essays, music, and research, but it will also include my journey in exploring ideas that prevailed some time in the past.
As I waded through the depths of The City of God Against the Pagans, I felt a strange pull towards Augustine's unflinching conviction in the incongruity of philosophy and Scripture. There was something arresting in his steadfast refusal to reconcile reason with faith, the temporal with the eternal, Athens with Jerusalem.
The political, it seemed to Augustine, could never transcend its earthly constraints. It remained shackled to the ephemeral, rotating around the fleeting shadows of power and government as though they were forms of truth. Only in the light cast by Christian revelation could one glimpse, if fleetingly, the contours of a deeper reality.
Here, beyond the chatter of philosophies and principalities, was a more profound drama--one spanning all of creation, the long denouement of history, and our consequent final redemption. Besides this, what were the petty games of politicians and emperors but the diversions of children, their kingdoms vanishing mist? Better instead to fix one's gaze on the City of God, eternal in the heavens, says Augustine, toward which all true believers bend.
Where others saw an endless cycle of reincarnation, Augustine gazed upon the divine with a fixed conclusion, written by an all-powerful and benevolent God. The world, he knew, would not spin on forever; everything turned on this—sin and redemption, exile and return.
Because of Adam's fall, humanity was condemned to wander estranged from grace, stumbling through history beset by a ceaseless longing for salvation. Original sin had marred us, and now we could catch only fleeting glimpses of a lost intimacy with the divine.
Augustine saw in the state a divine reckoning with our iniquity. Without it, there would be only chaos and tumult, the Hobbesian war of all against all. The state was a necessary evil, a mechanism of order that stayed the descent into pandemonium we deserved. If privatization and injustice persisted, if slavery and property spoke of a continued alienation from grace, they were but outward signs of an inward condition. So the rise and fall of principalities, the clash of armies, even our own attempts at justice were in the end authored by God alone for his own purposes. We inhabit a world already damned, bereft of justice, able to catch only fleeting glimpses of the City of God that might have been.
The only navigation possible is through grace alone, an unmerited gift gazing not at what we have made but at what we have unmade. The state could not absolve, only restrain; it was at best a temporary bulwark against the deluge, preserving a semblance of peace amid the ruins.
History, for Augustine, is our slow reckoning, a means of sorting sheep from goats. Our inherited sin had placed us under a sentence of judgment, one carried out as much through the swords of empires as the whisperings of grace. Those who would be saved, and those damned, were gradually revealed in the procession of events.
In this, Augustine stood far from the philosophers, who had seen in history's movements only the out-workings of human liberty, an endless undirected becoming. However, he deviated so sharply from his contemporaries precisely because it began and ended in faith.
There was something bracing in this, his refusal to abandon Christian convictions for the mechanical symmetries of reason. If at times it led him into strange terrain, it also anchored him amid a world adrift, so that he could say, “Our hearts shall not rest until they rest in Thee." In the end only one kingdom remains, eternal in the heavens, toward which all true believers bend.
. . .
As I lingered on the brink of comprehension, plumbing the depths of Augustine's theological ruminations, I felt the heaviness of an ancient schism that penetrated the very essence of humankind the instant I uncovered that he discoursed of a world split into the perpetually damned and the preordained redeemed, with their fates engraved in stone from the very moment Adam's lapse fractured paradise.
Here lies the unfathomable abyss that separated those who languished in earthly cities, everlastingly banished from the embrace of divine love, and from those destined to transcend into the celestial kingdoms of the City of God.
I saw the forlorn souls of the earthly kingdom, shackled to their insatiable longings for material trappings and ensnared by the temptation of temporal power. They are everlastingly barred from the transcendent love that lingered on the horizon where paradise lay. Meanwhile, the redeemed wandered like fleeting sojourners in the physical realm, their hearts and minds drawn towards a realm of being that could not be uncovered on this mortal plane, biding their time.
This is a stark reminder, from Augustine, that no earthly establishment, no political state, nor any established church could ever substitute the City of God. He cautioned against the seduction of this dual citizenship, a principle that bore no practical consequence for the reality we inhabited. If we are to devote ourselves to the notions of Augustine, we should recognize that these concepts only served to obscure the true purpose of our journey.
There is a certain fatalism implied here, a sense in which we are all prisoners of forces beyond our control or comprehension. This is the stuff of revelation, not reason. It casts all of human history as a passion play in which the outcome has already been written, the final scene preordained before the first players took the stage. I want to resist this vision with every fiber of my being, yet it exerts a strange gravity, pulling at convictions I have long held sacrosanct. Belief and doubt chase each other in endless circles, leaving me adrift between them.
For those condemned, there is no point of return. The reprobate will wander eternally, untethered in a fugue of despair while the blessed stand relieved of responsibility. Their virtue is superfluous, fated from the beginning. In Augustine's reckoning, the city of man offers a fragile peace where there would otherwise be only turmoil. A glint of tranquility in the roiling sea of existence. This oasis demands defense against the encroaching dark, especially in those fleeting moments when light seems to break anew. When a flicker on the horizon promises elevation, transport from the wreckage of our estate begins.
The city is the emblem of the celestial kingdom made manifest on earth, a shelter where solace might finally be taken. Deprived of this scaffold, Augustine's faith in what Christianity reveals of the human condition would crumble into ash.
For all his meditations on the celestial, Augustine fails to chart an adequate path for humanity to actively pursue heaven in its ideal perfection. His attentions are earthbound, weighed down by the strictures of our political existence on this terrestrial plane.
He posits that the peace for which we yearn so ardently shall never be the ultimate goal but simply a stance we assume to achieve harmony with the divine, despite our transgressions against God. Within this context the constraints of Augustine's philosophy reveal themselves: unwittingly, he insinuates that our entanglement with sin and the state ought to propel our submission to the latter, for it is only through surrender to the political that we surrender to God who shall ultimately mend our fractured, sin-stained souls.
. . .
Exploring Christian theology and its insinuation into the modern social sciences compels us to confront the peculiar figure of Aquinas, standing as if a sentinel at the crossroads of free will and inherent corruption. His musings echo Augustine’s in their shared yet elusive yearning to decipher the gnarled roots of the human condition. And yet within the subtleties of Aquinas’s philosophy we locate a perspective that belies his contemporaries: neither a capricious God nor the abyss of Hell preside over our fatal decisions in those shattering moments when we cede to the siren song of wickedness. While God may have granted us the liberty to conjure our own darkness, it is we alone who must shoulder the burden of sin. For sin emerges from the choices that etch the ragged contours of a life.
His words dangle before us, enigmatic yet alluring, hinting at truths we instinctively recognize yet struggle to articulate. In intuiting that neither divine provenance nor infernal forces predetermine our descent into sinister acts, Aquinas demands that we confront the discomfiting reality that the darkness which stains our souls arises from within. Such is the sum of our own choices, the consequences of our own moral capitulations and failings, that give rise to the burden of sin. God grants us freedom only to see what we will make of it, watchful yet removed as we chart our course into light or shadow. The responsibility is ours alone. Our darkness is of our own making.
In Summa Theologica, Aquinas invites not to stark pronouncements but to dialogue—a dialogue about the small moralities that shape who we become and how we find our way through this life. Aquinas welcomed believers into a conversation about the natural laws that were said to lead us rightly, even in the wash of human freedom. Amid the fray, Aquinas counselled us to hold reason before us as a pale guiding star so that we might not lose the way.
His was a philosophy not of absolutes but of wayfaring and wisdom dearly bought, of ethical struggle and grace that could be withdrawn. If at times it echoed Augustine in speaking of original sin, it differed in addressing us not as prisoners in a cell but as pilgrims on a road we had not chosen. We have not lost all power of free choice but must exercise it vigilantly, doggedly, faithfully in the face of each temptation. Only then might we progress toward the dawn and a time when desire no longer pulled us from the path.
Until that day there was work to do: the work of discernment, of sounding the depths of each moral choice to find in the silt and shadows the glint of truth. Truth would light our way if we had the will to seek it. Like lost pilots scanning the horizon for a once-familiar constellation we required a guide to lead us home. But the guide was elusive, the constellation obscured. The journey went on. The dialogue remained. The moral life would be lived in the breaks along the way.
. . .
The vast inland expanses of doctrine stretch endlessly, empty and shimmering in the harsh light of centuries. As I trace the worn pathways that wind from Augustine to Aquinas, the terrain begins to shift. The serpentine turnings of thought uncover a new vista, casting shadows where once there was only searing clarity.
In the intricate choreography of faith and philosophy, Aquinas broke from Augustine. Against Augustine, Aquinas did not believe human reason was irreparably flawed, but instead entangled with divine grace. Thus he rejected the notion of original sin as a biological stain that shackled humanity entirely. Rather, Aquinas saw a world in which our sinful nature arose from distance from that divine perfection which once illuminated Eden. Banished from the garden, we were left to struggle in shadows of ignorance, ill will and frailty not as punishment but as a natural consequence of turning from grace.
In Aquinas’ vision, God had not abandoned us to sin but honored the gift of free will, whose exercise might yet guide us home. We required not absolution from guilt so much as direction to find our way. Sin was not inherent but chosen, not a permanent mark but a turning aside that could be remedied.
In this philosophy I found hope that through faith and reason joined, we might trace our path to its source. For Aquinas, the light that lit Eden still shone, if dimly – we had only to raise our eyes and look for it. Though tarnished by distance from the divine, human reason was not corrupted irredeemably. It remained a candle to light our way, if only we could grasp it. And in that light, perhaps discern the path ahead, and glimpse the distant gates of Eden once more.
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