Saint Augustine: Faith, History, and the City of God
Socio-Political Order: The City of Land and the City of God
The Two Cities
Faith tells us that God created the human race as one man, and that man disobeyed God. All his descendants are torn between love for God and love for themselves. These are the two attractions experienced by man throughout his life. “This is the inner drama of every man, in which, according to Augustine, is played salvation or eternal damnation.” Just as there are men who love God above themselves, and men who love themselves above God, there are two cities founded by each of those loves: the earthly and the heavenly city. The citizens of each sentence will have final and eternal happiness, but over fight in history between the two until the end. Some say the poor pagan Roman Empire was caused by neglect of the gods and the emergence of Christianity. The early Christian apologists stepped out of this, and Saint Augustine, a direct viewer of the fall of Rome, wrote De Civitate Dei (The City of God) as a great apologetic work that reflects on the meaning of history.
God as Lord of History
Nobody so far had raised the sense of human history, and no one has after given a philosophical answer because the future is contingent (not necessary, not determined). Saint Augustine knows that the answer must come from theology. The world could not exist, but once it is, it is of God and for God. Creator God is the Lord of history. God has revealed that at the end of history, there will be a final trial, which should be separated from both cities, who had lived for centuries. It will be the ultimate triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, the kingdom of God over Satan’s. The sense of history is thus linear with a beginning and an end, not circular as did many later Greek philosophers, and Nietzsche. The elements that shape history are the loving providence of God and human freedom.
Church Relations – State
The state must ensure welfare, peace, and justice while helping the Church to enable it to fulfill its mission because no state is better established and preserved than it is based and is linked to the firm faith and harmony when the highest good and true, God is loved by all, and men love each other. Politics and religion point to the same goal: to discover and to love God who dwells within each human being. But the Church founded by Christ is superior to the state, it must inform shape with its principles and has the right to rely on it. This conception of Church Relations – State will be a constant in the Christian Middle Ages. In any case, the appropriate approach in cases of doubt would be the phrase of Scripture: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.”
Saint Augustine’s Life and Conversion
Born in Tagaste, North Africa, in 354 during the decline of the Roman Empire. Son of a pagan father and Christian mother, passionate and fiery character, led a dissolute life coupled with a relentless search for truth. As recounted in his Confessions, reading, at nineteen, the Hortensius of Cicero, was a change that will take you to abandon wanton pleasures to devote himself entirely to the search for a life with meaning. From 373 to 382, he adhered to Manichaeism, which defended the existence of two principles, one good and one of evil. In 383 AD he moved to Rome where he met the Manichaean bishop Faustus who defrauded him, then he started a new journey, to share intellectual ideas that take the basic thesis of skepticism (current, Hellenistic, stating that nothing could be known with certainty) that is the only attitude was enclosed in their own subjective values, to preserve peace and personal equanimity. In the year 384, he moved to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric, where he met Ambrose, and rediscovered the value of the Scriptures as a sure guide to finding a truth to calm down his intellectuality and granted inner peace to his restless heart. He discovered the works of Plotinus, namely The Enneads. From Neoplatonism, he kept the immortality of the soul and the description of a God present in the sensible realities of daily life and in men. Until his death in 430, he was dedicated to pastoral care and to combating heresy, and defending Christians from the endless interference of political authorities. Saint Augustine’s death coincided with the Vandal invasion in Africa.