Augustine (354-430) was the dominant theologian in many religious matters for centuries. His shadow also loomed large over discussions about matters of state. The classic work which addresses these matters, The City of God, seeks to illustrate the rival and antithetical strains characteristic of belief and unbelief throughout the history of mankind. For him, one city was organized around the prowess and pride of man, complete with its materialism, violence, unbelief, lust for domination, and oppression; on the other hand, the civitatis dei was characterized by a profound love for God, valuation of the eternal over the temporal, high ethical standards, and equitable treatment of neighbors. Interestingly, Augustine’s very taxonomy draws upon a political unit: the city. The recognition that people would organize themselves in civilized units, such as cities, occurred early. An ardent believer in human depravity and the limitations of the goodness of man, Augustine saw the necessity of government as a restraining mechanism for the good society. Augustine did not expect non-Christian thought to spawn good civil government, nor to be the seat of liberty: “Sinful man [actually] hates the equality of all men under God and, as though he were God, loves to impose his sovereignty on his fellow men. He hates the peace of God which is just and prefers his own peace which is unjust. However, he is powerless not to love peace of some sort. For, no man’s sin is so unnatural as to wipe out all traces whatsoever of human nature.”^[1]

Augustine’s City of God was an apology for the Christian Church and its ethical values. In answer to the secular critics who sought to blame the fall of the Roman Empire on Christian beliefs and practices (Rome fell during the reign of Honorarius, a Christian emperor.), Augustine strove to demonstrate instead that the seeds of societal corruption lie in the very morals and concepts of pre-Christian Roman paganism. Augustine alleged that the Roman Empire did not spread because imitators found great justice and freedom in it; rather, it spread by sheer force of conquest. Much of the City of Godchronicled the decline of Roman society which had “so utterly cast [virtue] to the winds that morals are not merely unobserved, but are positively ignored.”^[2] Manifesting a belief that morality and virtue are at the heart of stable government, Augustine also placed the blame for societal decay in the eclipse of virtue in the Roman era: “the good old customs have been lost, and for so great an evil not only are we responsible but we should face judgment, like culprits fearing the penalty of death. By our own vices, not by chance, we have lost the republic, though we retain the name.”^[3]Certainly, Christian virtues did not cause the collapse of the Roman Empire, but Christians were liable to the judgment awarded to a corporate entity that had lost its ethical compass.

For Augustine, Rome’s fall was but another chapter in the unfolding providence of God. There was no reason to think that the Roman Empire, complete with its stunning collapse, should necessarily be seen as an apocalyptic fulfillment. It was perhaps merely the latest instance of God “bringing princes to naught and reducing the rulers of this world to nothing. No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown . . . than he blows on them and they wither and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff” (Is. 40:23-24). Changes among the administrations of the City of Man were but epiphenomena—not the real substrata of important history. Nations would rise and fall; and those accessions and declensions were part of the plan of God. Nonetheless, Augustine refused to categorize a government as exclusively pro-God or anti-God, each having mixed strains of justice and injustice.

One Augustine scholar clarifies: “These two cities, divided on moral ground, co-exist within the same political and geographical limits. The civitatis terrena [earthly city], comprising all the cities that have existed, presently exist, and ever will exist in actuality, carries within itself the two mystical cities or societies . . . Moreover, no external sign reliably identifies them as members of one of the other mystical city. . . . Consequently, the whole of human history, past, present, and future is marked by the co-existence of both moral types in all times and places.”^[4] George J. Lavere has observed Augustine’s refusal to identify strictly the City of God with a particular nation or institution. In so doing, Augustine does not accept the dilemma maintained prior to his writing.

Prior to Augustine, the two primary options were to follow Origen (185-154) and Eusebius in blessing the Roman Empire as the divine means of God’s providence, or to follow Hippolytus and other apocalyptists in viewing the Roman Empire as the Satanic incarnation of the Beast predicted in Revelation 13. Ambrose, Jerome, and other theologians tended to adopt the first view, while persecuted Christians such as Cyprian, Tertullian,^[5] and other martyrs tended to see a fundamental enmity between church and state. As Augustine reflected on these two major options, he split the horns of the dilemma and adopted a transformational view. Rather than condoning the Roman state as the means of God’s decree, and instead of seeing the state as the instrument of Anti-Christ, Augustine preferred to minimize the state’s importance in the overall evaluation.

The task of the state was “remedial and protective,” and “a corrective device for the restraint of self-centered human beings.”^[6] Augustine saw the state as a necessary but un-natural institution, insofar as it was erected primarily to restrain sin after the Fall. Human governments, for Augustine, had their origin in the consequences of the Fall, not in the order of creation. Seeing the Fall as the origination of human governments inherently delimited both the successes as well as defeats that Christians might experience in political matters. Such a view necessarily de-emphasizes the political, or restores it to its proper perspective as less than all-dominating. Christians in the fourth century needed this reminder, as do Christians of all centuries. Too close identification of any earthly polis with the heavenly polis is a danger to avoid.

Augustine clearly intended to defend the City of God and blame the City of Man (in this case, Rome) for the loss of virtue and morality that sped the decline of the republic. Moreover, he questioned whether Rome, as such, was ever based on true justice: “Let them ask whether true justice and inspired morality flourished or was merely a colored painting of justice.”^[7] In addition, he also questioned that the ancient Roman state “was ever a true republic, because in it true justice was never practiced.”^[8] Justice was “giving to each what belongs to each.”^[9] Such true justice, according to Augustine, was both the foundation of the state, and also was the fruit of Christianity: “True justice is not to be found save in that commonwealth . . .whose Founder and Ruler is Jesus Christ.”

Augustine agreed with Scipio that, “the state is fashioned into a concordant whole by the consent of very diverse elements. What musicians call harmony in music, in the state is known as concord, the closest and strongest bond of security in any commonwealth, and which can in no way exist without justice. . . . how much the state has to gain from justice and how much to lose from the lack of it . . . the state could not be governed without justice,”^[10] even “absolute justice.”

In his analysis of the absence of Roman justice, Augustine comments:

It follows that, wherever true justice is lacking, there cannot be a multitude of men bound together by a mutual recognition of rights; consequently, neither can there be a ‘people’ in the sense of Scipio’s definition. Further, if there is no ‘people,’ there is no weal of the ‘people,’ or commonwealth, but only the weal of a nondescript mob undeserving of the designation ‘the people.’. . . If a commonwealth is the weal of the people, and if there is no people save one bound together by mutual recognition of rights, and if there are no rights where there is no justice, it follows beyond question that where there is no justice, there is no commonwealth. . . . Justice is the virtue which accords to every man what is his due. What, then, shall we say of a man’s ‘justice’ when he takes himself away from the true God and hands himself over to dirty demons? Is this a giving to each what is his due? If a man who takes away a farm from its purchaser and delivers it to another man who has no claim upon it is unjust, how can a man who removes himself from the overlordship of the God who made him and goes into the service of wicked spirits be just?^[11]

“What fragment of justice can there be in a man who is not subject to God?” queries Augustine: “And if there is no justice in a man of this kind, then there is certainly no justice, either, in an assembly made up of such men. As a result, there is lacking that mutual recognition of rights which makes a mere mob into a ‘people,’ a people whose common weal is a commonwealth. . . . Careful scrutiny will show that there is no such good for those who live irreligiously, as all do who serve not God but demons . . . I consider sufficient to show that, on the basis of the definition itself, a people devoid of justice is not such a people as can constitute a commonwealth.”^[12] In sum, Rome had substituted power for justice.

Augustine was a pioneer in asserting that the divine will was more foundational in human affairs than even the greatest of human governments. According to Augustine, “Divine Providence alone explains the establishment of kingdoms among men.”^[13] Even the Roman Empire did not rise and fall apart from the sovereignty of God, and those attempting to account for the rise and fall of governments were counselled not to ignore the active outworking of the provident will of God in nations: “God allows nothing to remain unordered and he knows all things before they come to pass. He is the Cause of causes, although not of all choices.”^[14] He applies this directly in that God gave rise to strong leaders in the early Roman Empire: “The power to give a people a kingdom or empire belongs [to God] . . . The one true God, who never permits the human race to be without the working of his wisdom and his power, granted to the Roman people an empire, when he willed it and as large as he willed it. It was the same God who gave kingdoms to the Assyrians and even to the Persians . . . It was this God, too, who gave power to me, to Marius and Caesar, to Augustus and Nero, to the Vespacians,”^[15] etc. Contrary to the notion of human government being autonomous, Augustine asserted that the sovereign God raises and fells rulers, even though they may not be believers. Nothing escapes his decree.

Augustine also gave considerable counsel for rulers. His de Magistro (“Concerning the Teacher”) is one of the earliest sets of advice for leaders on the maintenance of virtue, wisdom, and justice. He urged them to seek justice and offered prudential caveats about the dangers of expansionism: “The bigger a city is, the fuller it is of legal battles, civil and criminal, and the more frequent are wild and bloody seditions or civil wars. Even when the frays are over, there is never any freedom from fear.”^[16]

Augustine also followed the OT precept that the most fundamental unit of government was the home: “[E]very home should be a beginning or fragmentary constituent of a civil community.”^[17] He spoke of three main spheres of civil government: “First we have the home;^[18] then the city; finally the globe. And, of course, as with the perils of the ocean, the bigger the community, the fuller it is of misfortunes.”^[19]

Almost sounding libertarian, Augustine stated that God had ordained domination within the family, not prescribing such originally for the state:

This family arrangement is what nature prescribes, and what God intended in creating man: ‘let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air . . .’ God wanted rational man, made to his image, to have no dominion except over irrational nature. He meant no man, therefore, to have dominion over man, but only man over beast. . . . the normal hierarchy of creatures is different from that which punishment for sin had made imperative. For, when subjection came, it was merely a condition deservedly imposed on sinful man.^[20]

He also provided an early form of nullification of legitimacy, if a ruler lapsed into tyranny: “But if the prince is unjust or a tyrant, or if the aristocrats are unjust (in which case their group is merely a faction), or if the people themselves are unjust (and must be called, for lack of a better word, a tyrant also), then the commonwealth is not merely bad . . . but is no commonwealth at all. The reason for that is that there is no longer the welfare [the weal] of the people, once a tyrant or a faction seizes it.”^[21]

Augustine is often cited as a pioneer of the Just War doctrine: “I know they object that a good ruler will wage wars only if they are just. But, surely, if he will only remember that he is a man, he will begin by bewailing the necessity he is under of waging even just wars. A good man would be under compulsion to wage no wars at all, if there were not such things as just wars. A just war, moreover, is justified only by the injustice of an aggressor.”^[22]

Augustine cast an enormous shadow over the next centuries of theology. Until the time of Aquinas, even perhaps until the dawn of the Reformation, the political theology of Augustine was the dominant paradigm in medieval constructions. However, several of his latter day disciples, Gelasius, Gregory the Great, and Isidore of Seville were clearly theocratic in their thought.

^[1] Augustine, The City of God (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 454.

^[2] Augustine, op. cit., p. 74.

^[3] Ibid., p. 75.

^[4] George J. Lavere, “The Political Realism of Saint Augustine,” Augustinian Studies, vol. 11, 1980, p. 138.

^[5] Tertullian’s view may be gleaned from the following: “There is also another and a greater necessity for our offering prayer in behalf of the emperor . . . For we know that a mighty shock impending over the whole earth—in fact, the very end of all things threatening dreadful woes—is only retarded by the continued existence of the Roman empire. We have no desire, then, to be overtaken by these dire events; and in praying that their coming may be delayed, we are lending our aid to Rome’s duration. . . . But why dwell on the reverence and sacred respect of Christians to the emperor, whom we cannot but look up to as called by our Lord to his office? So that on valid grounds I might say Caesar is more ours than yours, for our God has appointed him. . . . I make him alone inferior. But I place him in subjection to one I regard as more glorious than himself. Never will I call the emperor God, and that either because it is not in me to be guilty of falsehood; or that I dare not turn him into ridicule; . . . If he is but a man, it is his interest as a man to give God his higher place. Let him think it enough to bear the name of emperor. That, too, is a great name of God’s giving. To call him God, is to rob him of his title. . . . Even when, amid the honors of a triumph, he sits on that lofty chariot, he is reminded that he is only human. . . . It adds to his greatness that he needs such a reminiscence, lest he should think himself divine.” Tertullian, “Apology,” Ante-Nicene Fathers, Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds. (1885, rpr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995), vol. 3, pp. 42-43.

^[6] George J. Lavere, op. cit., p. 141.

^[7] Augustine, op. cit., p. 75.

^[8] Ibid., p. 75.

^[9] Ibid., p. 439.

^[10] Ibid., pp. 72-73.

^[11] Ibid., p. 469.

^[12] Ibid., pp. 470-471.

^[13] Ibid., p. 99.

^[14] Ibid., p. 103.

^[15] Ibid., pp. 116-117.

^[16] Ibid., p. 444.

^[17] Ibid., p. 463.

^[18] D. J. MacQueen, “The Origin and Dynamics of Society and the State According to St. Augustine,” Augustinian Studies, vol. 4, 1973, p. 85, describes the family as the seminarium civitatis.

^[19] Augustine, City of God, p. 446.

^[20] Ibid., pp. 460-461.

^[21] Ibid., p. 74.

^[22] Ibid., p. 447.