Augustine on Christianity and Society

The Christian community lives on, loving the true peace of the heavenly Jerusalem, devoid of illusions about the transient world in which it finds itself. This illusionless existence gives the Christian church a detachment from the secular world that in practice it does not always maintain. While secular governments attempt to create lasting peace in a world destined to know only strife and struggle until the last days, there is a subversive quality about the life that Augustine imagines for the church in these circumstances. She is, he says, to “use the peace of Babylon,” (19.26) that is to say, take advantage of all the limited and partial peace that human society can find for itself, without ever settling for that peace. She is to use, not enjoy, the peace of the earthly city, and always to keep her eyes focused on the ultimate goal. As citizens of the heavenly city, Christians are always to recall where their true allegiance lies.

What then of the warfare of the earthly city? Augustine is often invoked as a kind of patron saint of the Just War. The passage in City of God in which he expounds his theory in its greatest detail deserves quotation in full: “But the wise man, they say, will wage just wars. Surely, if he remembers that he is a human being, he will much rather lament the need to wage even just wars. For if they were not just he would not have to fight them and there would be no wars for him. The injustice of the opposing side is what imposes the duty of waging wars.” (19.7) For Augustine, the Christian’s job is to resist, conceding the justice of a cause only with reluctance, always on the lookout for the moment justice deserts his own cause. The siege of his own Hippo in the last months of his life seemed to Augustine a conflict both just and wretched, a calamity for the people he had served lovingly for forty years.

In earthly terms, the vision of human society City of God provides is unremittingly bleak, even if indisputable. Most human societies, enamored with the daydreams of politics, pretend the human condition is better than it is. Men forget history because they do not want to remember that others have gone down paths of prosperity and complacency before them. But in western Christianity since Augustine there has always been a prophetic voice to proclaim the ultimate weakness of human political societies. Christianity offers mankind a hope besides which the gloom of the human condition is as nothing. Christian theology after Augustine is always hopeful and, in the deepest sense optimistic. But for those who reject that theology, the vision of human society that is left is stark and terrifying. In this sense as well, all history is salvation history. The salvific quality of that history makes it possible to be realistically honest about the damnable qualities of life in the interim; there are no easy ways out for Augustine.

–James J. O’Donnell, “Augustine: Christianity and Society”