Introduction
Augustine is one of the great fathers of the church, and his writings have been particularly important for the history of a Christian understanding of the nature of the relationship between the church and the state and therefore Christian civics, including the rightful role of magistrates and just war. He wrote his great magnum opus, The City of God, as the Roman Empire was crumbling, responding to the criticisms of many that the widespread embrace of Christianity had caused the weakening of the empire, angering the old Roman gods.
Augustine’s Early Life & Conversion
Born in 354 in Tagaste, Roman North Africa, Augustine’s mother, Monica, was a devout Christian; his father was a pagan. Augustine lived through a period in which the old Roman gods were still around, but Christianity had been legalized and was in ascent. At the same time, the political stability of the empire was decaying from the inside and would begin to openly crumble during his lifetime. Augustine’s Confessions, is perhaps the most thorough autobiography from ancient times, and it has come to be something of the archetypal testimony of coming to Christian faith.
Tracing his early years, Augustine’s Confessions recalls how he struggled to follow God but also how he didn’t really want to – praying when sick, promising to be baptized, but then putting it off even after he recovered, stealing pears with friends from an orchard just for fun, and later, giving in to sexual lusts. As he pursued his education, he studied Neo-Platonism and Manicheanism and Skepticism, searching for truth, or perhaps trying to hide from the Truth. Eventually, he went to Milan, Italy and met Ambrose, one of the pastors there and began to study with him.
Augustine describes his conversion to Christianity as a long moral and intellectual struggle between his lusts and the truth, finally surrendering to Christ after hearing a child singing tolle lege, tolle lege! – and opening his Bible to a passage in Paul, where he condemns the works of the flesh and says to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. So Augustine did, an answer to the years of prayers of his mother.
Augustine’s Great Work
After his conversion, Augustine pursued monastic studies before eventually being ordained as a pastor and eventually the Bishop of Hippo back in North Africa. In 410, the city of Rome was sacked by the Goths. Led by Alaric, the city was plundered almost without resistance. While the city resumed ordinary life in the years that followed, it was a shocking indication that Rome was not as strong as she seemed to many. And this caused great turmoil in the broader culture of the empire. Wasn’t Rome now Christian? Why hadn’t Christ protected Rome? Or were the old gods angry with the Romans for abandoning them? How should Christians live in the empire? And how should they order their loves and loyalties to Christ and their nation?
Between the years 413-426, Augustine wrote his monumental City of God. Augustine explained the tendency of all humans and human societies to disorder because of Adam’s sin – and that is the city of man, the natural state of the human race. Treachery, crime, mobs, and war come from sin, and only God’s common grace restrains its worst excesses. Only Christ’s blood can truly change men, giving them power to choose and love what is right and good and well-ordered. Those who have been regenerated have become members of the City of God. While Christians can and should work for the good of the city of man, they must not confuse the two. The city of man can and does rise and fall from time to time; it can be sacked. But the City of God can never fall.
Augustine on the State
Augustine’s City of God labored to draw many distinctions where few (if any) existed in the Roman Empire at that time. Augustine distinguished between the city of man and the City of God, but also between the Church and the City of God. The earthly, visible Church, Augustine taught, was a feeble, shadowy copy of the City of God. Augustine knew and taught that the Church had many weaknesses, follies, sects, and heresies – he particularly had to deal with Arians and Donatists.
Many Christians had compromised and caved during persecutions, and Donatists taught that only the most pure, uncompromised Christians were true Christians, especially pastors. The Donatists insisted that the true Church was led by pastors who had never compromised during persecutions, and churches led by pastors that had abandoned their positions or submitted to unjust decrees were not true churches. However, Augustine taught such evaluations had to be done on a case by case basis. He taught that the Church was a messy place, full of wheat and tares, more or less purity at various times, but it was still a good and necessary part of God’s good work in the world. Christians must love the Christian Church.
He also taught that even though the civil government will always be governed by men who are more or less corrupt, nevertheless the civil order is also good and necessary as a natural institution, for preventing the worst excesses of human evil and anarchy. Christians should not put their trust in the state, but they should work for the greatest amount biblical justice and peace as possible. When some of the Donatists stirred up mobs and committed acts of vandalism and violence, Augustine was one of the first Christians to teach extensively on the just causes for magistrates to use force to restrain violence and maintain peace and order. While some have accused Augustine of permitting Christian magistrates to use force to require certain beliefs (conversion by the sword), he was actually merely laying the ground work for Just War theory and Protestant Resistance Theory.
Conclusion
Augustine’s City of God is a masterful refutation of the claim that it was the Christians who brought about the weakening of Rome. Sin (including idolatry) caused weakness and corruption, and Christians were taught to be good citizens, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Christians refused to worship the false gods of Rome, but Christians are dutiful subjects of earthly nations and empires, working for true virtue and the common good.
Augustine acknowledged that in a fallen world, a Christian is often choosing between less than ideal scenarios, or greater or lesser evils. Wisdom often must ask: compared to what? While striving for perfection, Christians must not sacrifice the good on the altar of perfectionism.
So for example, while Augustine argued that war contains many evils, complete pacifism is worse, and sometimes a just war can be fought under lawful authority, for lawful reasons. Against the Greeks, Augustine argued that human harmony cannot be achieved through the State, yet by their faithful presence and service, (like Joseph and Daniel) Christians may be a positive influence, and by God’s providence, He rules history according to His will.
In 430, the Vandals laid siege to Hippo, and in the third month of the siege, Augustine died. Hippo survived the siege, so that Augustine’s library was moved to Italy for safekeeping, and God has used Augustine’s teaching down through the centuries of the middle ages, the Reformation, and the founding of America.
It was Augustine’s covenantal understanding of the mixed nature of the earthly, visible church combined with some of his early insights into the application of God’s moral principles to magistrates and just wars that undergirded the Protestant and puritan vision that established America.
This is helpful, thanks!