For Augustine, the state is at the same moment
an instrument of order and instrument of chaos. He did not believe this
ambiguity could be transcended.
The state is, in its origin and essence, “a punishment for sin and a
partial remediation of sin’s worst affects”-(a
proenia el remedium peccati).
Why such a limited and morally suspicious view of the political order? For
Augustine, the human person is not fundamentally rational. Reasoning, to
be sure, is our species peculiar. But reason, so Augustine held, is not in
itself the governing instrumentality of personal life. Rather the human is
primarily a passionate being, a being of being will - or, more simply, a
creature driven by love (dilectio).
For Augustine, reason does not transcend the special love the self has for
its own interests. Rather reason projects those self-interests as of
universal claim. The self is not so often made more imperial by its
reasoning as its reasoning starts to parade its partiality as of universal
merit. It is will and love that rule. And for fallen humanity (the vast
majority), Augustine held that the love which rules cannot be anything
else than that “disorderly love” (dilectio inordinata)
which seeks to advance the self at the expense of all else.
What a person loves, that is what defies their personality and renders
their activity coherent-even if that is only one of wrongly placed love.
Similarly, a collectively of humans - be it tribe or nation or empire - is
rendered understandable when one understands what love it is that unites
them. Augustine looked upon the Roman Empire as an example of the general
form or type of the state. To understand Rome, Augustine concluded, meant
to understand Rome’s common love of glory (their libido
dominandum). It is
this love to dominate that bound Romans together, and gave them a kind of
common life.
Internally, Rome’s common love of glory brought a relative social peace.
It ordered the war of lesser loves - money, family, sex, etc. - into a
common set of admirations. Admiring in common the acquisition of public
recognition and command, the Romans had a kind of common or public life.
It was a kind of domestic peace - the peace of the victors over the
vanquished, cemented by the envy which the vanquished held for the
victors, together with their desire to be like their overlords and not
like themselves.
But this internal, domestic peace was extracted only at a terrible price -
the price of international anarchy. Rome’s common pursuit of glory
secured internally an ordering of the war of lesser loves - providing a
relative order of everyday sacrifice and duty. But it did this only by
producing the international system as
a system of perpetual instability and war. The only peace available
between nations, Augustine held, is what he called “the peace of the
graveyard” where, for a while, the winners preside over a kind of
silence.
Moreover, the relationship between nations inevitably lacks that semblance
of order which hierarchy and authority can secure within a nation. For
there is between states no common agreement as to their lives, no common
orbiter over their system of admirations, and so no agreement as to whose
who are to be admired and regarded as authoritative. Hannibal and Caesar
were leaders of respective communities of shared admiration, but there was
no higher dedication which could unite them. War remained their final
court of appeal. Worse yet, amongst those who share a common religion, as
the struggle between Christian Rome and Christian North Africa showed,
there is no easy approach to common international agreements. Even
religion does not automatically transcend the self’s love of itself and
its own. Sadly, religion is more often but an expression and servant of
that love. Neither natural reason nor natural religion can extract man
from sin - what Hobbes was later to call “the war of all against all.”
Augustine begins his famous City of God by reflecting upon “these shifting sands
where empire rise and fall, ”where “today’s victor becomes
tomorrow’s vanquished,” and in the end “the dead make room for the
dying.” There is this deep strain of pessimism in Augustine. And it
makes for a stark picture of limits to the moral expectations we can
reasonably hold for international life.
All this was built upon Augustine’s view of the human person. The self,
for Augustine, is a mediate being. It stands midway between the fullness
of being which is God, and that lesser thing which is the material world.
Driven by its love, its search for happiness, the self seeks its
satisfactions in that which is inherently fleeting - in the material
finite world. The self, which transcends its every immediateness with the
world, and which cannot unite and exhaust itself with that which has less
reality than itself - namely material goods however otherwise worthy -
this self, I say, restlessly seeks its good - running first to this
material satisfaction, and then to that. Driven by the instability of its
need for significance, the self pursues a practical polytheism, making
gods out of the many goods of
the material world. Or it may practice a henotheism - ordering many goods
under one good - like glory - which itself, however, still finite.
The self is thus either hopelessly divers or prematurely closed.
This lack of internal integrity can be brought into order and tranquility
only when unified by the love of God. “Our hearts are restless,”
Augustine says, “until they find their rest in Thee.”
History, then, is composed of the history of two lovers, and of the two
cities formed by these two lovers - one which “loves the self to the
contempt of God” and the other which “loves God to the contempt of
self.” One is the city of this earth. The other is the city of God, or
the Church - the earthly, but even more the heavenly community of saints.
True, the heavenly city is “to make its peace bear upon the peace of
this world.” But Augustine expected little to come of such efforts. The
history of nation states, their rise and their fall, remained for
Augustine largely a backdrop of absurdity to that only meaningful passage
of time which the pilgrimage of the lost soul finding its way back home to
heaven.
Here are Augustin’s words as he laments upon the human condition.
“Remember the rivers of Babylon,” he says. “What are the rivers of
Babylon? The rivers of Babylon are all things which here loved, and pass
away. For example, one man loves to practice farming, to grow rich by it,
to get his pleasure from it. Let him observe the issue and see that what
he was loved is not a foundation of Jerusalem, but a river of Babylon.
Another ways , it is a grand thing to be a solider; all farmers will fear
me. Madman! thou has cast thyself headlong into another river of Babylon,
and that still more turbulent and sweeping. Thou wishest to be Feared by
thy inferior; fear Him Who is greater than thou. He who fears thee may on
a sudden become greater than thou, but He whom thou oughtest to fear will
never become less.
“To be a lawyer, says another, is a grand thing; eloquence is most
powerful; always to have clients hanging on the lips of their eloquence
solicitor, and from his words looking for loss or gain, death or life,
ruin or security. Thou knowest not whither thou has cast thyself. This too
is another river of Babylon, and its roaring sound is the din of the
waters dashing against the rocks. Mark that it flows, that it glides on;
beware, for it carries things away with it.
“To sail the seas, says another, and to trade is a grand thing-to know
many lands, to make gains from every quarter, never to be answerable to
any powerful man in the country, to be always traveling, and to feed thy
mind with the diversity of the nations and the business met with, and to
return enriched by the increase of thy gains. this too is a river of
Babylon. When will the gains stop? The richer thou art, the more fearful
wilt thou be. Once shipwrecked, thou wilt come forth stripped of all, and
rightly will bewail thy fate in the rivers of Babylon, because thou
wouldest not sit down and weep upon the rivers of Babylon.
“But there are other citizens of the holy Jerusalem, understanding their
captivity, who mark how human wishes and the diverse lusts of men, hurry
and drag them hither and thither, and driver them into the sea. They see
this, and do not throw themselves into the rivers of Babylon, but sit down
upon the rivers of Babylon and upon the rivers of Babylon weep, either for
those who are being carried away by them, or for themselves whose wayward
desires have placed them in Babylon?”
Here is that deep note of pessimism which lies behind what has come to be
called Augustine’s “political realism”. It provides one mainstream
in Christian thought about the state. It is a sober and sobering sense of
limits, which works towards a quiet and unflashy political responsibility,
of fanatical hopes. It’s a realism which knows how many millions have
been killed in the name of justice and honor. And it knows that those who
did the killing always thought they were in the right.
What do we learn when we contemplate the nation state and the search for
world order? For Augustine, we learn to discipline our moral expectations,
and to act only from within that discipline. We learn that the best and
only instrument of peace is uneasy balance of power, and that all such
balances of power are unstable and ultimately fleeting. We learn that
“here there is no abiding peace,” or even can be.