Solidarity, Communion, and The City of God 

Editors’ Note: This essay was adapted from a recent lecture given by the author at Columbia University. 

Let me begin with a very obvious point about the title of Augustine’s great work The City of God. It’s not about a “city” as we understand the word. For the Roman Empire, the civitas was a social unit in quite a wide sense. In Roman Britain, that part of the island on which I now live was the civitas Silurum, the civitas of the Silures, the tribe who at that point inhabited Southeastern Wales (I’m proud to say it gave the Romans a great deal of trouble). A civitas is a tribe, but not just a vague ethnic collectivity; it is a structured social group, a group with conventions, with linguistic and cultural bonds, a group that displays some kind of intelligible common order. 

So when St. Augustine, writing at a time many felt was the end of a world, the end of the Western Roman Empire, speaks about the “two cities” in which human beings live, the civitas terrena and the civitas Dei (the society  belonging to this earth and the social unit belonging to God), he wasn’t simply making some kind of distinction between two kinds of institution, nor is he theorizing about “church and state”: he’s talking about different kinds of social bond, two kinds of connectivity. His basic question is, “What do social bonds look like that are life-giving, truthful? And conversely, what do social bonds look like that end up being corrupt and toxic?” We need to know the difference.  

In addition to reflecting on these different registers of social bonding, Augustine also has a lot to say about different kinds of power and the different contexts in which power is exercised. I hope also to reflect with you on these ideas to do with power, noting that, once again, he wants to differentiate life-giving power from toxic power.  

The final element in this discussion will be to look at what Augustine has to say about justice, about ius, the whole notion of “law” and “right,” and what justice means in the light of that basic terminological enquiry.  

So this talk is meant to be first a reflection on some of Augustine’s leading ideas in The City of God, and then some imperfectly formed thoughts on what challenges they might have to put to us today in our understanding of social connectivity, power, and the language of right and justice. I’ll start, though, with the second of these themes. In Book 19 of his great treatise on the city of God, Augustine discusses at length what it is that constitutes a social unit; but he also discusses a bit what “good” power looks like. One of the phrases he uses is imperant qui consulunt. People who govern are people who … but how do we render consulunt? It’s not exactly “consult” in the modern sense of gathering opinions, but a little more like “deliberate” or even “encourage deliberation.” It certainly includes “taking advice,” allowing some probing and questioning.  

In its context, it relates to an implicit contrast that Augustine sets up between two Roman emperors. The first is Constantine, who is retrospectively a Christian ruler of sorts (although he doesn’t get baptized until the very last possible moment when he’s on his deathbed), and the second is Theodosius the Great. Augustine is, predictably, quite complimentary of Constantine, who ended the persecution of the Church and encouraged and supported its life in a way unheard of before. But in Augustine’s eyes, Theodosius is even better. There are two main reasons: Theodosius is interested in sharing power, we are told; and he is also capable of repentance. What exactly Augustine has in mind when he says that Theodosius believes power is to be shared isn’t completely clear, but it’s obviously a good thing in Augustine’s eyes. And as for Theodosius as a model of repentance, Augustine is thinking of the famous confrontation between the Emperor and St. Ambrose over a massacre performed by imperial troops in Thessalonica, where Theodosius accepts a sentence of excommunication and performs public penance. 

Imperant qui consulunt; those who govern are those who deliberate and invite other perspectives, those who reflect (another meaning of consulere). And Augustine goes on to draw one of the most important contrasts in his general understanding of the nature of power. He says that the two fundamental forms of power we are likely to encounter, healthy and toxic, boil down to the officium consulendi, literally “the job of deliberating,” and the cupiditas dominandi, “the lust for controlling.” Thinking about how political power works involves learning to disentangle those two essentially inimical ideas. If you are exercising any kind of power, it matters to be able to tell the difference between deliberating or fostering deliberation, and giving way to the lust for control as the only thing that matters. 

In this context, it’s quite clear that Augustine sees power as, in a very important sense, an educative matter. The job of consulere is not just taking advice; it’s also nurturing deliberation. In Augustine’s immediate context, this means that a good emperor is somebody who listens to his advisors. But take it out of this late Roman imperial context, and the notion that power is inseparable from generating deliberation in a social unit still has something challenging to say to us in our contemporary environment. How do we nourish and exercise educative power, power that builds power, and builds the power precisely to be, in its turn, generative, educative, and nurturing? 

Behind this lies the Roman convention of seeing the life of the city, the life of the social unit, as bound up with the process of ordine et securitate consulere, “deliberating in or with order and security”: a social unit that is durable, viable, and life-giving is, it seems, one that protects the possibility of ordered, intelligent deliberation. What Augustine is telling us in these condensed phrases is that societies, social units, social connectivities that work, are bonds that secure intelligent sharing. That is to say, part of the job of a durable, defensible, just society is to continue to nourish thoughtful, self-aware deliberation, thoughtful and self-aware in the sense that we can acquire and retain perspectives on ourselves that are truthful and honestly critical rather than self-serving. 

All of this presupposes that there is properly a common good for society; that is, there is something that is good for the social unit as such, something that is good news for all its participants. To grasp the idea of such a common good entails learning more about how to make sense of one another’s desire. We need to recognize and engage intelligently with what the other wants. At this point, Augustine picks up what was a quite well-known phrase of Cicero, representing a respectable strand in the world of Stoic, especially Roman Stoic thinking, and gives it a fresh and slightly unexpected twist. Cicero had said that a populus was defined by what he called “communion of utility,” utilitatis communio, that is, by something like shared profit or shared benefit, shared material security, as well as by the common acceptance of and consent to a legal system. 

Well and good, says Augustine, but we might dig a little deeper and go beyond shared profit to think more about the element of people’s active, intentional desire for a good that is not only defined by profit. We are invited to think about a “communion,” a community, of what people want, what people desire. And this leads Augustine to offer his alternative to Cicero: a “people” is a coetus, a gathering of individuals, united in what they want, united in their desire. Ultimately, the social bond that is more significant than a simple “communion of utility,” a system of profit-sharing, is a communion of wanting, a communion of intention and of value. What holds a group together is that people fundamentally want the same thing without knowing it. And you might say that part of the job of consulere, of deliberation, is working out how what apparently seem to be different or even incompatible desires can converge so that people turn out to want the same thing when they thought they wanted something different.  

This insight becomes a fundamental element in what Augustine has to say about social bonds in the De civitate Dei. It gives him a tool for diagnosing where and how societies go most fundamentally wrong. This is where he turns his battery on the ideals of classical Rome. It’s worth at this point just digressing for a moment to remind ourselves of the wider background. Augustine is writing this at a time when, as we noted earlier, the Western Roman Empire is collapsing. In 410 of the Christian era, the Goths sacked Rome, and a large number of refugees turned up in North Africa with traumatic stories about what they’d endured and witnessed in the course of the Gothic campaigns in Italy and the final pillaging of Rome itself. Among these refugees, there are those who are not Christian, or who are rather insecurely Christian, and are much inclined to blame these horrors on the Roman Empire’s having adopted Christianity. The gods of classical Rome have not taken kindly to being abandoned by their worshipers, and the Goths are exacting their revenge for them. 

In response, Augustine invites us to spend some time looking at what pre-Christian Rome was like as a social unit. What were those social bonds really worth? In other words, Augustine implies, is the death of the Roman Empire such a bad thing after all when you think about it? Here, he is pitching his work very much in the direction of the literate and sophisticated groups among the exiles, people who still have a vague nostalgia for the classical world. But, Augustine insists, look back at the supposedly glorious days of Republican Rome: an age of endemic and brutal civil war. It’s the era in which the long conflict with Carthage finally comes to an end with the destruction of Carthage itself. And this leaves the Roman Republic without a useful enemy, an external opponent allowing Rome to rally its population in a unity that depends on a common foe. So that, when Carthage has been destroyed and the Romans have won, the only people left to fight are other Romans: it’s no accident that when the Carthaginian Wars are over, the civil wars begin. 

What does it imply when a society can generate a sense of common purpose only by appealing to an outside threat? Is the deepest social bond no more than a shared hostility to the stranger? If so, this is fragile in the extreme; it will inexorably mean that, in the absence of an external threat, you will have to manufacture an internal one; the social bond becomes something that creates hostility to your neighbor. This is a recipe for violent instability, for a hectic searching for new enemies. This is quite hard work, and it means that you are steadily eroding mutuality, reciprocity, and common desire among your own people. You are taking for granted that once you’ve identified the outside enemy, no other question really needs to be asked. 

I wrote my first article on The City of God some forty years ago, at the height of the Cold War and at a very precarious moment in the nuclear arms race. Reading The City of God closely in that context made a remarkable amount of (rather disturbing) sense. The societies of East and West (so-called), at that time, locked as they were in an unimaginably costly nuclear standoff, seemed to illustrate all too starkly what Augustine was talking about. To put it mildly, the situation of our own day, within and between societies, gives even less encouragement than we might have found in the 1980s. But we might return later to this. The difference between toxic and nourishing social bonds, as Augustine sees it, seems to be that the former depend on having a lasting dysfunctional or violent relationship with somebody else, while nourishing social bonds are those that allow the steady expansion of conciliation, deliberation, a nonviolent opening up of horizons to the neighbor. That, says Augustine, is where the city of God finds its energy. 

Augustine has some quite strong (and quite paradoxical) things to say about power and social order in this connection. One is his acknowledgment in the fourth book of The City of God that when you have a tyrannous and unjust society, you have to worry about the spiritual state of the oppressor as well as the material state of the oppressed. Somebody exercising unjust power is also a victim of “untruthfulness”; they are damaged by their relationship to those they oppress so that emancipating people from oppression is a service to the oppressor, as well as to the oppressed. Many years ago, during the brutal conflicts in Zimbabwe after the end of white rule there, an African church leader from Zimbabwe said, “I’ve spent a lot of my life saying to our white rulers, ‘Where is your black brother?’ And now I realize I also have to say to my own people, ‘Where is your white brother?’” What is the responsibility we have for the good of all, not just the oppressed community? How do we think towards something more commodious? Coming from that particular quarter, it had and has a strong moral force; and it seems a vividly specific illustration of what Augustine is saying. 

A second point has to do with the idea that where the survival of this polity, this social unit, takes precedence over absolutely every other consideration, then the social polity you are preserving is going to be corrupted by that fact. And that is why you may find that the best kind of ruler is the one who doesn’t say “this is to be preserved at all costs.” It’s a theme hinted at especially in Book 22 of The City of God, and, once again, comes across as a singularly challenging point for reflection today. 

So far, then, we have looked at some thoughts from Augustine about power, thoughts about toxic and nourishing forms of social bonds; and about the notion of a common good, which is more than simply utilitatis communio, shared profit, but has something to do with the work of recognizing and curating a common desire, a common intention: what we might describe as a common set of values. Time now to add a word about justice in connection with all this. For Augustine, justice is first and foremost a matter of living in ius, that is, in a state of “right,” a lawful coherence; ius is, in a good classical and stoic sense, a state in which anything and anyone is assured that they will be given what their reality, their nature, merits. This means, says Augustine, that it is important to worship the right God, because if you don’t worship the right God, you’re doing God an injustice. You’re not giving God what God deserves. And if you start giving other things the worship that the true God alone deserves, you are living in a state of injustice, because idolatry, confusing God with what isn’t God, confusing the creator with what creation itself (in the shape of your own mind and imagination) has generated, becomes a form of injustice. This is why, according to Augustine in one of his most striking and fertile ideas, worship is one of the most obvious and powerful forms of doing justice. When we worship God in spirit and truth, we are being just; we are doing exactly what it is fitting to do in the presence of God. If we try to do that sort of thing with what isn’t God, if we treat something other than God as ultimate and unchallengeable, we are in deep trouble. We are unjust. 

If you turn to some other bits of Augustine’s writing, especially to some of what he has to say about the nature of the Church, for example, you’ll see there how he understands this state of living in justice which is very much to do with living with the possibility, day after day, of repentance. Remember his admiration for the emperor Theodosius, who displays his virtue as a prince, as a ruler, by his capacity to say he has been wrong and needs restoration and correction. In the just community of the Body of Christ, justice means recognizing our lack of it.  

All of this leaves us with quite a lot of interesting questions around what Augustine thought a society actually should look like. For all that he (notoriously, if reluctantly) endorsed the idea that the state’s power could be used against religious dissidents for the sake of general security, he is not wholly invested in the idea that the Christian faith has to be the religion of the empire. I don’t mean by this that he’s some sort of modern pluralist or relativist, simply that he understands that the empire will sometimes be friendly and sometimes not. He is writing after nearly a century of experience of a Christian empire, and his attitude seems to be that this is all very well and very welcome, but it cannot be guaranteed to last. Around you, there will be people living by other kinds of value and desire and social bond, and sometimes these other things will work up to a point, even if ultimately they are self-defeating. If they do, just be grateful: these things, he says, “are good, and they are God’s good gifts.”  

If you live in a society that is consistently confused and unjust, be glad that sometimes it works to limit damage in human affairs; that sometimes, as Augustine likes to say, sheer self-regard stops people from being so ridiculously arrogant that their ambition overturns every possible kind of social stability. Be grateful that sometimes this culture of status and heroic “glory” imposes an appearance of decency; but don’t invest entirely in the idea that this can be systematized and secured by us; because of course, within the body of Christ, within the sacramental body, and so in some sense within the city of God, there are elements of the civitas terrena that are still clearly at work. It’s not as if we stop being rivalrous, stupid, acquisitive, greedy for control, simply because we’re baptized; “if only,” says Augustine, in the fifth century, just as much as we might say it in the twenty-first.  

It’s very difficult to work out how Augustine might tell us to vote. But he would, I think, tell us what questions we might want to put to any kind of political program, any set of political ambitions; and it may be that getting those questions clear is one of the most important things Augustine helps us to do. What he will not do is give you a full template for a “Christian society” (other than the civitas that is the Church itself). He will tell you what it is to live by social bonds that keep us open to God: that is where life is to be found, and any other kind of social bond is ultimately death. With any of the ersatz social bonds that are around in the late Roman world, you end up privileging in one way or another private decision, private ambition, private wealth. You can control them to some extent by social shaming, by what he acutely analyzes in terms of the desire for “glory,” for reputation. You can clothe your selfishness in a mantle of public humility because you know that the rewards for public humility are generous. But at the heart of his analysis, what he is diagnosing in Roman society has been called by Augustinian scholars an “anti-politics,” a set of social bonds that are really not social bonds at all, because the unexamined logic by which they work presupposes the craving, the hunger or lust, not only for control, but for recognition. The whole of the classical Roman interest in gloria, public acclaim, is, says Augustine, what gives the game away: if it is gloria you are pursuing, you are committing yourself to a set of bonds, a set of values, protocols, practices, that are ultimately corrosive of social solidarity. 

Before moving on to some concluding reflections, it is worth noting that Augustine is in no sense an anarchist or even an egalitarian as we might understand such words. He doesn’t think that, ideally, we just ought to be able to get along, and nobody needs to tell us what to do. He is clear, as we’ve seen, that there is a destructive form of power that is about control for its own sake. There is also a hierarchical power that comes from the fact that some things and even persons, quite justly and properly, make greater claims on you than others. He has no problem saying some people are wiser than others; they know better and we should go along with what they say. It is an area where most of us, having been through the consistent skepticisms of our own age, might suspect that things are not quite as simple as that; but it is a dimension of Augustine’s thinking that we should not ignore. He does believe that the exercise of power, even at times coercive power, is not in itself an evil. 

The distinction Augustine is trying to make where power is concerned is one between power as something that produces servitude to another individual will and power that protects people both from their own self-enslaving will and from the arbitrary rule of another: a “subordination” that orders us towards something more significant and comprehensive, something to which “superior” and “inferior” are equally accountable. Augustine is attempting to unpack two very different notions: servitude or enslavement. If you’re playing the violin in an orchestra, and you’re playing Mahler while the rest of the orchestra is playing Mozart, you have something of an issue. To produce a state of shared intelligibility, you need to “subordinate” yourself to Mozart, to your fellow musicians, and to your conductor. In this context, the “just” exercise of power is in mediating an order, a proper and truthful order, in which we can make full sense to and of one another. Anything else is chaos, undermining everyone’s liberty and well-being.  

This implies that Augustine has some sense of how power properly used is power that educates, in the sense of opening the possibilities of proper orderliness, power that opens up a door into mutuality, power that liberates from the tyranny of the all-powerful ego, which loves nothing better than to enslave, to bring to servitude, all that lies around. And although this is far from Augustine’s conscious mind, there is something to be said here about human attitudes to the nonhuman environment as well, in terms of the compulsion to enslave and exploit.  

To sum up: what The City of God is offering is, above all, a set of diagnostic tools for analyzing when and how power becomes corrupt and poisonous, and what kinds of social bonds do and do not work towards enduring life and blessedness. In this work, Augustine says a little about what he will discuss more extensively in other places, the question of what is the nature of the Body of Christ. In his treatises on the Donatist controversy, in his commentaries on John and in numerous other places, he will say a good deal positively about what the bond of charity looks like in the Church’s common life. Caritas is one of the words most regularly associated with Augustine’s teaching; he has long been called the Doctor Caritatis, the teacher of love. Mostly, in the complex and sophisticated arguments of The City of God, he is approaching this the other way around, telling us how not to do it, telling us about the distortions and pathologies of life together; though, as I have hinted, he will give us vivid glimpses, as in his discussion of the nature of worship as justice, that provide deeply fruitful insight about what the life of the Body is and is there for.  

The Church’s identity as “city of God,” the social unit that belongs to God as the Body of Christ, doesn’t depend on any particular polity, any particular system, owning it or reinforcing it. Augustine, of course, believes that so long as the Christian Empire does exist, he wants to work with it and make it work for him and for the Church. He accepts the idea of deploying the state’s resources and power against Christian dissidents, a view that, earlier in his career, he had not endorsed. He does not approve of torturing or executing heretics, but he is content to think of their suffering various civic disabilities and being disadvantaged. But for all this, the logic of what he writes in The City of God is that the Church’s integrity finally does not depend on having a compliant police force. The Church is what it is because of its identity as the Body of Christ. Within that, as we have seen, we must come to terms with the stubborn persistence in our hearts and minds of the civitas terrena, the habits of rivalry and selfishness that corrupt.  

It is possible to see in the historical actuality of the Church itself forms of social bonding that are toxic. Yet fundamentally what the Church is there for, and there to share and communicate, is a different possibility: the possibility of recognizing in one another, in and through habits of “counsel’” or deliberation, that common goal or common interest that is ultimately, for Augustine, the gift of growing into the likeness of Jesus Christ in full communion with God the Father by the grace of the Holy Spirit. This is where we all finally belong; this is where all human power, all human organization should (implicitly or explicitly) be directing us if it is not to collapse into violence and conflict.  

Augustine thinks what he thinks about social bonds and power primarily because he believes human beings are made in the divine image. He believes that what we most need to be delivered from, therefore, is a set of individual and social habits that canonize the lust for control. We have to be delivered from our insistent longing to be in charge of everything and secure in a position of advantage against everyone. Thus we have to accept our fallibility and make a virtue, a strength, of that acceptance. By proclaiming our repentant self-recognition, we declare that we are responsible for more than ourselves and our private, individually defined interests.  

Augustine leaves us with what is not at all a simple question about how, in a society where convictions about the image of God are not in abundance, we keep such perspectives, in whatever language or idiom or imagery they may be phrased, on the radar of public discussion. What is the nature of human dignity? What is it to act justly towards another human being? For Augustine, the answer is that justice towards another human being is a matter of recognizing God’s image in them, and all that follows from that, the deep solidarity and communion that arises from this. Absent such a conviction about what is due to humanity as such, where do we find the resources for social bonds that are not corrupt, imprisoning, antihuman, and antipolitical? 

Author photo credit: Brian from Toronto, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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