Here are some extracts from an article I wrote a long time ago. I hope it will make the reading of the sections from Augustine easier.
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Augustine is widely seen as the architect of a Christian view of history, sharply distinct from the forms of classical history: the view is substantially true, for even though earlier Christian writers had written on the way the history of man must be understood, the clarity and depth of Augustine’s treatment make it the most accessible and exhaustive treatment of its kind. There are however problems of assessing this view simply, for Augustine is primarily a polemical writer and he is often concerned with making hard distinctions, and thus simplifying issues. Another difficulty is terminological, for like many other early Christian writers, Augustine is apt to try to organize his arguments around the particular uses of words: when he says, memorably, for instance “ what is the life of the saints if not a social life?” (si non esset socialis vita sanctorum) he is far from asserting the supreme value of the vita socialis. It takes little thought to realize that many of the key words that figure in a discussion of history – time, eternity, politics, society, fortune, providence, and so on –Augustine continually shades and sharpens the nuances of words.
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Augustine is widely seen as the architect of a Christian view of history, sharply distinct from the forms of classical history: the view is substantially true, for even though earlier Christian writers had written on the way the history of man must be understood, the clarity and depth of Augustine’s treatment make it the most accessible and exhaustive treatment of its kind. There are however problems of assessing this view simply, for Augustine is primarily a polemical writer and he is often concerned with making hard distinctions, and thus simplifying issues. Another difficulty is terminological, for like many other early Christian writers, Augustine is apt to try to organize his arguments around the particular uses of words: when he says, memorably, for instance “ what is the life of the saints if not a social life?” (si non esset socialis vita sanctorum) he is far from asserting the supreme value of the vita socialis. It takes little thought to realize that many of the key words that figure in a discussion of history – time, eternity, politics, society, fortune, providence, and so on –Augustine continually shades and sharpens the nuances of words.
We might start with a point about time, a subject on which Augustine has much to say. The quotation is from XII.14 of the City of God.
The Physicists for their part considered that there was only one possible and credible way of solving this difficulty; and that was by the postulate of periodic cycles. They asserted that by those cycles all things in the universe have been continually renewed and repeated, in the same form and thus there will be hereafter an unceasing sequence of ages, passing away and coming again in revolution. These cycles may take place in one continuing world, or it may at certain periods the world disappears and reappears, showing the same features, which appear as new, but which in fact have been in the past and will return in the future. And they are utterly unable to rescue the immortal soul from this merry-go-round, even when it has attained wisdom: it must proceed on an unremitting alternation bewteen false bliss and genuine misery.[1]
In the present passage he is talking about a restricted and specific issue, that of theories of cyclical recurrence of the universe put forward by pagan writers. The “controversy” that he alludes to at the beginning of the passage cited is discussed in earlier chapters of the twelfth book. Taking the possible objection to the Christian belief that human beings were created less than 6000 years before the present, he strongly argue that such a date in no way impugns human dignity: for, had human beings existed for sixty thousand years or six hundred thousand, this period of time would have no significance in the context of divine being:
For Augustine the doctrine of cyclical recurrence is false because it runs contrary to both the eternal, timeless being of god, and the time-bound existence of the human subject in the world, at the conclusion of which the soul too is delivered into immortality, whether that of suffering or that of happiness.
Undoubtedly Augustine is thinking here both of Plato[3], whom he cites repeatedly, and Aristotle and the Stoics, whom he does not cite at all, all of whom use the image of the circle in trying to understand problems of time and history. Aristotle for instance is trying to understand time in terms of motion when he says:
...all other things are discriminated by time, and end and begin as though conforming to a cycle; for even time itself is thought to be a circle... time is the measure of such locomotion and is itself measured by such. (Physics, iv, 223b-224a)[4]
Of course, Aristotle is clearly aware that the circle is no more than a figure of speech here, and not an inherent quality of time itself. Other classical writers may have expressed the image more simply, constructing a cyclical pattern of historical movement. Though the Graeco-Roman historian Polybius is most often identified with the doctrine of the cycle of constitutions, J.B. Bury points out that the idea is actually very old:
The theory of a recurring cycle of political constitutions which comes from Plato and the Stoics is an application of the cyclical theory of the world process which was propounded by the early philosophers. Such a theory is more or less implied by Anaximander and Heracleitus but it was clearly formulated, in very definite terms by the Pythagorean school [5].
Augustine’s principal criticism of the doctrine of cycles is located in his assertion of the uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice: “For once Christ died for our sins; and, rising from the dead, He dieth no more.” A second point is more argumentatively made. If true happiness is that which is without end (i.e. to be true, happiness must be eternal), it must be put outside of time altogether: “if the soul goes from misery to happiness, nevermore to return, then there is some new state of affairs in time, which will never have an end in time. If so, why cannot the same be true of the world? And of man, created in the world?"[6]
There is little doubt that the image of the circle and of cyclical recurrence is widely disseminated in classical notions of time. It needs to be stressed though that though the image of a cycle could be used to structure forms of human behaviour and social development, it seems correct to point out that the idea that all things come around in circles is often more of a rhetorical commonplace than a considered philosophical doctrine. The oft quoted maxim "there is nothing new under the sun" could coexist with a belief in the uniqueness of certain historical events or political conditions. It need not be said that the idea that classical historiography thas a homogenous character is patently false. Thucydides's sly reference to "the absence of the fabulous" in the first book of his history is clearly directed at his elder confrere Herodotus. Aristotle famously dismissed history as being of limited value because it dealt only with particular events and did not allow an ascent into generality. Aristotle of course is a hostile witness: but then even the great works of Greek history like those of Herodotus and Thucydides while assuming the importance of writing history make no claim for any kind of grand design in history, save occasionally repeating the commonplace that human affairs or fortunes follow a repetitive course. "Whoever shall wish" writes Thucydides, " to have a clear view (saphes skopein) both of the events which have happened, and of those which will some day, in all human probability, happen in the same or a similar way – for these to adjudge my history profitable will be enough for me" (History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.22.4)[7] Both Herodotus and Thucydides – who offer widely different models of historical narrative - evince strong faith in the intelligibility of history: Herodotus’s comparative, ethnographic approach as much as Thucydides’s attempt to study the problem of historical causality.
Post-Aristotelian – particularly Roman - writers were more willing to make the connection between time’s movement and that of history. The Polybian anakuklôsis politeiôn summarises the expectation that a study of history could shed light on the pattern of changes in the state of the polity. Here too it would be more correct to say that in general the classical mind did not expect anything radically new in history: at the same time there was no real consensus on the degree of intelligibility the universe – the phusis – had. To study the past in the form of history was to prepare oneself for the future because it could be reasonably expected that the future would not in any radical way differ from it. Yet human life, imagined in the complementary yet distinct forms of epic, tragedy and history, continually pointed the degree to which the past could not in fact fully prepare us for the present or the future. As John Pocock observed the recurrent trope in Greek history is that of irony, the recognition that human affairs rarely turn out the way in which human beings think that they will[8]. The comparison with the great forms of poetry seems all the more relevant.
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For Augustine, secular political life, replete as it was with examples of virtue, it could not be the means to salvation. The institutions of political and social life themselves are so affected by the consequence of Adam's sin that they cannot play any role in man's ultimate destiny. Rome was never a republic, he says, because true justice never had a place in it. The Christian imagination radicalized concepts like justice, liberty and truth, and attributed to them special and unalterable meaning. True justice, writes Augustine, "is found only in that true commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ; if we agree to call it a commonwealth, seeing that we cannot deny that it is the weal of the 'community'" (II.21)[9] .
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Augustine's reflection on society in the City of God, thus, is shaped through difference and contrast. The two cities radiate a whole web of distinctions, which serve to define the life of the elect. These distinctions, one might say are both symptomatic and constitutive: from the earliest phases of its growth, Christian thought reveals the importance of a mode of thought that is based on radical alterity. The emphasis on the unavoidable existence of the Christian saints within the structures of historical time, their vita socialis, serves ultimately to expunge the value of worldly experience altogether. The city of God exists, as it only can, within the saeculum, disordered and tension-ridden as it is. History as a whole, as Robert Markus observes, is:
the consequence of a world plunged into the ambivalence of time: time as the vehicle of sin and tragedy, as well as the redemption ... Man, therefore, creates a historical situation for himself in the very same act in which he provides God with an opportunity to exercise within human history his saving work.[10]
The saint is both in and out of the saeculum, experiencing and sharing its tragic character, but also insulated from it through grace. Society, thus, is for Augustine at the very best remedial. It may try to address the chaotic state that results from the fall, but cannot cure it. H.A.Deane points out that for Augustine, political authority, like illness or distress, is among the consequences of man's fallen condition[11].
This may help us to better understand the nature of the socialis vita sanctorum. Certainly it is a social life, but by the same token it is also full of tension and insecurity. Augustine tells a parable about a wise judge who is forced by circumstance to dispense injustice (XIX.6)[12]. We recognize that his actions are prompted by a desire for justice and order, yet we find that his desire leads him to the commission of unjust acts, like the torturing of innocent witnesses. Ever so often, he suceeds only in bringing death and destruction on the heads of many. "We acquit the judge of malice", says Augustine, but "we must nevertheless condemn human life as miserable". Social life has its needs and to acquit them we entangle ourselves further and further in a web of necessity. The ultimate expression of freedom that Augustine can think of is thus the prayer of the Psalmist: "Deliver me from my necessities". Throughout the City of God we confront this ditsressing and disturbed vison of human life . Suffering inevitably from an infection so deep that no human agency can properly redress it, human society – whether we examine it at the level of household, city or world – is ridden with injustice and sadness. Neither secular ethics nor political virtue can cure this malady.
[1]Augustine, City of God , trans. H Bettenson, ed. D.Knowles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 487
[2]Augustine, City of God, p. 486
[3]The reference is to Timaeus 28-9
[4]The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R.McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 300
[5]J.B.Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians (New York: Dover, 1958), p.205
[6]Augustine, City of God, p. 487
[7]Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1. 22.4; trans. C.F.Smith (Loeb Classical Library, London: William Heinemann, rev.ed. 1928), vol. 1, p. 41
[8]On this, see J G A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) Chap. I; an interesting if somewhat extreme view of the rhetorical character of classical historiography is developed by A J Woodman in Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988). Woodman contends that for the classical intellect, writing history was a "rhetorical genre", for a discussion of Thucydides, see Ch I, esp. pp 23 ff.
[9]Augustine, City of God, p. 75
[10](Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) , 10-11)
[11]H A Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963) p. 117
[12]Augustine, City of God, p. 860
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