A Tangle of Two Cities (Essay)

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2012 SAINT AUGUSTINE LECTURE A Tangle of Two Cities We are, each of us, the one who wakens first, who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn, the stranger. Louise Glück, concluding lines of Prism. The long and arduous work that Augustine began in 413, a few years after Alaric’s sack of Rome, and finished in 427, a few years shy of his own death, is basically two things. It begins as an installment in a late antique culture war. Pagan intellectuals, unhappy to be living in Christian times (tempora Christiana), were reading Rome’s vulnerability as evidence for the weakness of the Christian god and the unfitness of his otherworldly followers for the task of running an empire. Better the old gods, the old ways. In the first ten books of City of God, or what amounts to the first two of five parts overall (retr. 2.43), Augustine hammers the Roman gods for their failure to secure

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Transcript of A Tangle of Two Cities (Essay)

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2012 SAINT AUGUSTINE LECTURE

A Tangle of Two Cities

We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,the stranger.—Louise Glück, concluding lines of Prism.

The long and arduous work that Augustine began in 413, a few years after

Alaric’s sack of Rome, and finished in 427, a few years shy of his own death, is basically

two things. It begins as an installment in a late antique culture war. Pagan intellectuals,

unhappy to be living in Christian times (tempora Christiana), were reading Rome’s

vulnerability as evidence for the weakness of the Christian god and the unfitness of his

otherworldly followers for the task of running an empire. Better the old gods, the old

ways. In the first ten books of City of God, or what amounts to the first two of five parts

overall (retr. 2.43), Augustine hammers the Roman gods for their failure to secure the

well-being of their devotees either in this life or the next. Significantly, he does not go on

to develop and defend a Christian politics in the remaining three parts, though arguably

there is one there to be unearthed. His avowed intent for books 11 through 22 of City of

God is to detail the beginning, middle, and anticipated end of two contrasting cities: one

glorifies God and disdains the self; the other glorifies the self and disdains God (ciu.

14.28). Having begun largely as an installment in a culture war, City of God continues as

a theological meditation on the meaning of human history.

It is part of the enduring fascination of the book that the meditation on the two

cities, working their way through a temporary entanglement, far outstrips the motivation

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of the opening anti-pagan polemic. Augustine unsurprisingly favors Christians in a debate

between pagans and Christians over the utility, social and otherwise, of certain religious

beliefs and practices, but he is not willing to claim that a politicized Christianity is

necessarily a boon for God-loving, unselfish people, who unlike their cynical, self-

indulgent detractors, care about higher things.

In the study that has framed four decades of scholarly debate of over what

Augustine is willing to claim about a Christian politics and the meaning of history,

Robert Markus holds Augustine to a religiously motivated agnosticism.1 Unlike a secular

agnostic, who keeps all religious frameworks at arm’s length, the Augustine that Markus

describes does not doubt the reality of God or that the destiny of each and every human

being is either to abide forever with God in heaven or live bereft in hell. What this

Augustine insists on not knowing ahead of time is the particulars of the division. It is

only at the Last Judgment, the eschaton or end-time of history, that it becomes clear to all

who is of God and who not. Meanwhile in the saeculum, the time of mixing between the

first coming of Christ and the show-stopping second, sacred history remains an eerily

flattened landscape. Professing Christians signify through their practices and rituals who

the God of the eschaton is, but nothing that they do or endure, no institution that they

create, historically grand or historically feeble, signifies more than any other thing that

the eschaton is nearing. There are no signs of the promised end of days, only one

damned thing after another. “This invisibility of the presence of eschatological

categories in historical realities, is,” Markus contends, “the foundation of Augustine’s

theology of the saeculum.”2

1 Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; rev. ed. 1988.

2 Markus, Saeculum 1988, 151 (n. 1).

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I will have more to say about Prof. Markus and his sense of an Augustinian

secularity later in the lecture, where I touch upon the politics of the terrena civitas, the

territorial or just plain earthly city, whose deep rootedness in materiality connotes the

mortal. For now I want to pause and admire the conceptual knot that resides at the heart

of Augustine’s political theology: this whole strange business of two eternal cities ending

up entangled in time. In the opening line of City of God (ciu., prae.), Augustine evokes

the paradigmatic civitas, more glorious than the shadow city that derives from it, in its

dual aspect. As the fully revealed seat of eternal stability, the city of God showcases

unfallen angels and resurrected saints; as a colony in time, this same city, now veiled and

rendered foreign (peregrina), takes in mortal saints who wander history in faith and who

share the earth with a dying city, whose eternal counterpart is hell. In this description of

a dual-aspect city, there is already some kind of profound entanglement implied between

the eternal verities of heaven and hell and their shadow-play within time as a struggle

between sin and sanctity. But when Augustine speaks of civitates permixtae—“mixed

cities”—he refers primarily to a mix within time and only indirectly, if at all, to

background entanglements between time and eternity.

In the penultimate chapter of book 1 (ciu. 1.35), a particularly favored bit of City

of God for Augustine’s liberal readership, Augustine warns Christians not to condemn

their pagan adversaries. Members of God’s foreign city on earth need to bear in mind that

some of their kind wander through bad religious allegiances before coming to

acknowledge Christ, the head of the civitas peregrina; they must not think it “a fruitless

labor” (infructuosum), says Augustine, to show patience and restraint in the face of

religious opposition. By the same token, there are members of the earthly city who pass

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through the doors of God’s church, take the sacraments, and call themselves followers of

Christ, and not all do so knowing the falsity of their own hearts. As Augustine describes

it, the foreignness of the civitas peregrina is not a foreignness that is relative only to the

perspective of outsiders, who may not, in fact, notice the foreignness at all; it is primarily,

and perhaps solely, an offering to those on the inside, who are being inducted into the

irony of a healthy self-contempt (amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui; ciu. 14.28). By the

end of the first book of a multi-volume defense of Christianity against its noisiest secular

adversaries, the cultured pagans, Augustine will have definitively denied his own side a

fully defensible form of reverence. For it is not Christianity of any sort that defines for

him the Christian, but Christ, whose divinity is not of this world.

Augustine’s measured insistence on keeping foreign what Christians profess to

hold most dear is doubtless reassuring to religious liberals, like myself, who tend to smell

imperialism in contemptuous self-assurance. But I am also a reader of Augustine who is

convinced of the need to read the entanglement of the two cities—terrena and peregrina,

familiar and foreign—within the context of what must be, for Augustine, the more

fundamental entanglement: that of heaven’s intimate involvement in the earthly lives of

its saints, the shadow side of which is the neglect of everyone else, the walking dead. Not

to take this context into account is to suppose that Augustine’s doctrine of radical grace,

worked out over the course of the Pelagian controversy, has nothing to do with the

political theology of City of God, worked out over the course of that same controversy.3

It was, after all, Alaric’s sack of Rome that had sent a flood of refugees into the

provinces and Augustine’s orbit of attention; some of the cultured among them—Pelagius

3 For my sense of the doctrinal shifts, I still largely follow the classic study of Patout Burns, The Development of Augustine’s Doctrine of Operative Grace, Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1980.

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in Palestine, Caelestius in Carthage—would find a Christian way to convey respect for an

old-world tradition of virtue and its confidence in the power of a resolute human being to

self-sculpt, to cut through the crust of adversity and liberate moral beauty, all-in-all a

work of courage. Well into the City of God, and so late into his struggle against

Pelagianism, or really any form of a Christian idealism, Augustine reaffirms his doctrine

of radical grace and insists that the virtues, unless properly referred to God, are vices and

not virtues, whatever the appearance (ciu. 19.25). And yet who but God is in a position

to guarantee the reference? There can be no doubt, this late in the game, about what

Augustine is assuming: that virtuous self-sculpting falls under Christ’s governance of the

foreign city and so never happens, not even the tiniest bit of it, outside the work of grace.

His broadly anti-Pelagian polemic, read alongside City of God, completes his critique of

his secular antagonists.4

But now let’s consider what happens to the mix of the two cities under a regime

of radical grace. Imagine that I am a contemporary of Augustine’s, an avowed Platonist,

but not a Christian, having been much affected by Porphyry’s polemic against that

superstitious and anti-intellectual faith. But I do know of Christians who, much to my

bemusement, share my love of Plato, and one of them, an acolyte of the renown African

rhetor and high priest, procures for me a codex of book 8 of his master’s so-called

“confessions.” I pause at the portrait there of Marius Victorinus, a great scholar and a

reluctant convert (conf. 8.2.5), and when I get to part where the high priest himself first

puts on Christ and feels embraced by “a securing light” (lux securitatis; conf. 8.12.29), I

4 I owe my sense of this conjunction largely to Robert Dodaro’s brilliantly revisionary study of Augustine’s moral and political theory, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. To see what purchase Dodaro’s Augustine can have for contemporary democratic theory, see Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

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find that I am inexplicably compelled by the notion that flesh is not the pathetic, soul-

imprisoning stuff that I have been taking it to be. I begin to befriend the Christian

Platonists of my acquaintance, and within a year of my having read blessed Augustine’s

words, I become an acolyte of Christ, the universal way to the Father that Porphyry was

seeking but refused to recognize (ciu. 10.29).

Now take a step back from this imagining. What have I, from a two-cities

perspective, just described?

There are two possibilities. I have given you a false confession. I am not learning

how to love God to the point of self-contempt; I am one of those earth-bound, dying city

dwellers who is too narcissistic even to notice his own self-preoccupation. Or, I have

given you a true confession. I am one of those heaven-bound earthlings who feels neither

here nor there. I am a foreigner, even to myself, as I move from a cramped and ultimately

self-defeating self-love into a love that is limitless and yet somehow sustaining of

selfhood. Let’s say that my confession is true. It is absolutely not the case, given the

ingress of grace, that I have changed my city address. I will have always been a member

of the civitas Dei peregrina, and as the head of that city, Christ owns the rights even to

my cramped and self-defeating self-love. Now suppose that my confession is false. Again

I have not, even for the barest of moments, changed my city address. My profession of

the true faith—the faith that knows of the two cities—has been irredeemably superficial.

It has done me no good at all. The point, of course, that I have been trying to dramatize

with all this untethered speculation is that grace gives the lie to the civitates permixtae;

the two cities do not in fact mix.

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But I do not offer this point as a fixture in my reading of Augustine’s political

theology. Indeed I would be reluctant to attribute to a thinker of his theological genius a

form of theologizing that strikes me so plainly as theologically disastrous. Let’s assume

that Markus is basically right when he reads Augustine to be holding fast in City of God

to the invisibility of membership in either of the two cities. He is basically right. On this

side of the eschaton, no one in Augustine’s conception of the saeculum is a position to

know who is being saved, who is not. Nothing about that uncertainty, however, changes

the fact that from God’s superseding point of view, the determination has already been

made. We may be waiting for history to end, but God isn’t. And if we attempt to base

our political theology on an indeterminacy that is more imagined than real, we end up

with a blind idealism.

Here is a quick analogy. You and I are compelled by circumstance to live

together, and we both know that one of us is irredeemably a psychopath; we just don’t

know which of us it is. Still faced with the task of living together, we look to one another

for common interests and goals, and out of whatever commonality we find we resolve to

fashion the principles of conduct that will govern life in our tiny civitas. Our mutually

agreed upon political philosophy, though based on a kind of empirical research, will have

utterly failed to take into account the material reality of our situation. One of us is

irredeemably a psychopath, and that fact is going to trump a procedural idealism. But of

course I have set up the situation in such a way that its underlying material reality is both

determinative and out of bounds. If I were to find myself a character in such a scenario, I

think I would be less inclined to engage in philosophical dialectic than to seek a way to

live on my own and cultivate whatever virtues my solitary mind would permit me. If I

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were forced to live in the company of another, I would encourage the presumption of a

common condition of psychopathology and take my political prescriptions from there.

The analogue in Augustine for a commonly shared psychopathology is the

condition of original sin, a condition that renders a human being, from birth onward,

incapable of resisting sin. Compulsive sinfulness is considerably worse than what most of

us think of as garden-variety selfishness. If I am driving my love of self into contempt for

God, then I am always looking down upon the very being that can give me the self I so

desperately crave: something perfectly beautiful, eternal, and mine. My psychological

posture—and if it is not a pathology, what is?—has me committed to a self-

aggrandizement of diminishing returns, where more is always less. What I really need is

for God, the self-maker, to be looking down upon me, and with benign condescension.

For Augustine, such condescension necessarily takes the form of God’s incarnation in

Christ, who is the head and founder of only one of the two cities. Given, for now, that the

two cities don’t mix, other than in the minds of blinkered historical beings, we get the

maddening scenario I have just described, where you and I don’t know who to trust, but

we do know that we ought not to be trusting someone.

Now add the theological cost of this way of thinking. Once Augustine has

concluded, early in his episcopate, that nothing about a human being inclines God to

favor one and not another, he finds himself open to the wisdom of Ecclesiasticus (33.10-

13; cf. Simpl. 1.2.20). There we learn that human beings, being the stuff of earth, furnish

clay for the heavenly potter’s art. Some clay gets shaped into exulted and beloved

vessels; some gets cursed and cast aside. It is not up to clay to decide. Such is life. Paul

adopts the metaphor of the potter and the clay in Romans 9, the chapter that

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revolutionizes Augustine’s doctrine of election. Augustine reads both Paul and the writer

of Ecclesiasticus to be saying that it is God’s own good pleasure and nothing else that

determines who out of a heap of sin—una massa omnium, veniens de traduce peccati

(Simpl. 1.2.20, CCL 44, p. 51)—gets singled out and perfected. The emphasis that

Augustine has slipped in, on the unworthiness of clay to be potter’s material, need not

divert us from the costly implication of his new-found wisdom: that materiality is being

left out of the difference between the two cities. When Christ incarnates as Jesus of

Nazareth and discloses the nature of God’s foreign city on earth, he enters into a

materiality that, from a redemptive point of view, so far counts for nothing. He may as

well stay at home with his Father and will from there the redemption that comes ex

nihilo.

The usual theological complaint against Augustine’s doctrine of radical grace is

that it makes his God into too much of a perfectionist. There is nothing worth doing that

this God does not insist on starting and finishing himself, leaving the human self-sculptor

reduced to a dumb lump of clay. The theological alternative that tends to accompany this

kind of complaint is to make God into an imperfectionist and grant to human free will its

possibilities for virtue. But it is in his in-house debate with Pelagians and his across-the-

aisle engagements with pagan intellectuals that Augustine has come to realize that

imperfectionist gods, being content with the offerings of an imperfect love, leave

perfectionist energies without a divine context. That makes it all the more likely that

politics—the sacred domain of love of neighbor—will fall to lovers of dominion. And

while it is not wrong for a citizen of either of the two cities to crave a self that is unique,

it is only by way of a materially qualified perfectionism that the desire for uniqueness, or

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more basically the desire for unity, avoids having to idealize matter. By “materially

qualified” I do not mean a perfectionism that is less than ideal; nor do I mean a

perfectionism that is, relative to the ideal, something more. One is false; the other

impossible. I mean perfectionism with a difference. God’s city remains, as it has always

been and will be, something perfect, but its mixture with its counterpart—the imperfect

city—needs to be seen as having more reality than the ghost of a limited perspective.

I owe to Augustine my profoundest sense of the dangers of idealization in

religion, of rendering differences absolute, if only by way of deferral. Of course I readily

admit that secular analogues for the subliming of logic abound and that there is nothing

inextricably religious about the idealizing temptation. Still, I take Augustine to be an

idealizer; I also take him to be an inspired subverter of his own idealizations. In what I

have had to say thus far, I have hued my thoughts mostly to accord with his idealizing

side. Now I would like to attend more closely to the subverter. I find this the more

gratifying, and also the more vexing, labor. It is easy enough to blame the potter for his

blatant disregard of clay, but condemnation is always the shadow side of an idealizing

energy. The subtler alternative, more like stillness than not, is to meditate on clay and

wait for the unexploitable differences to emerge.

Indecipherable Division

Let’s begin with angels. In a ground-breaking, soon-to-be published essay on the

nature of a civitas in De civitate Dei, my friend and colleague from Bryn Mawr College,

Catherine Conybeare, has observed that “it is,” and I quote, “built into Augustine's notion

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of a civitas that it will be the product of division.”5 The angels tell the story here. In their

apocalyptic split into demons and first-citizens of heaven, or, as I would be inclined to

put it, into perfect and perfection-seeking beings, the angels portend the divisiveness that

will define the human experience of a civitas. For there are, in Augustine’s mind,

fundamentally two cities and not four (ciu. 12.1): the perfect angels and the predestined

saints make up the one; their ragingly imperfect counterparts, darkly angelic and darkly

human, make up the other.

It is not absurd, Augustine insists, to posit a fellowship (societas; still 12.1)

between human beings and angels; for without it, or something of its sort, division within

a mixed community never abates. And angels and human beings together are certainly a

mixed bag. Even in their demonic form, when confined to the air of the lowest heaven

(in hoc infirmo aerio caelo; ciu. 11.33), angels are not creatures of the earth; and human

beings, for their part, are always earthly—even the ones in hell fall within reach of the

earth-born God. Each of two cities, then, is a mixed bag of natures, fleshy and fleshless,

but a distinctive unity of will. Angels and saints in chorus will the good for God’s sake;

demons and their human minions work publicly for worldly glory, while privately

serving the good of their separate and endlessly dissipating selves, for theirs is the unity

of a common lie. Opposing orientations of will, one true, the other false, is what counts

for Augustine as the defining difference between two mixed-natured cities, both angelic

and human, but as different as day and night (ciu. 12.1; cf. ciu. 11.19-20). But here is the

problem. As important as the differential will has been to Augustinian theology, it sheds

no retrospective light on the liability to division that Catherine rightly puts at the heart of

5 From p. 15 of the typescript. The essay, “The city of Augustine: on the interpretation of civitas,” is slated for Gillian Clark’s festschrift, edited by Carol Harrison and Bella Sandwell and forthcoming in 2013 with Oxford University Press. I am grateful to Catherine for giving me a preview.

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Augustine’s notion of a civitas. So far we have been getting from him a heavenly city that

has no such liability and an earthly city that is divisiveness itself. This is all idealization.

We need to move within his thought to a less decipherable form of division. The

first place to be is with the angels prior to the angelic fall and the invention of heaven and

hell. Although Augustine does not have nearly as much to say as a Dante or a Milton

will about the prequel to the drama in Eden, what he does say is rich in significance. For

many centuries his angelic muse has been fueling the Christian imagination for life in

between heaven and hell, a space that is, from an idealizing point of view, beyond

conception. Augustine sees the angels coming to be and, then, in an eye-blink, falling

apart, in less than the time it takes to read two short verses from the Priestly account of

creation (ciu. 11.9; cf. ciu. 11.19-20).

First Genesis 1:3: God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. It is with

the light, Augustine assumes, that the angels first emerge. They are the light, or, more

precisely, they are the light’s communicability, being inseparable in their way of being

from a call to illumination. In their fellowship with God and with one another, the angels

convey the perfect intelligibility of shared wisdom, or love by another name. In this

regard, they are the least private of all God’s creatures. They are civitas itself.

But now Genesis 1:4: And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided

the light from the darkness. The rending of angelic being into angels who remain in

community and ones who bend into a self and fall apart has already happened. As

Augustine reads the verse, God’s dividing of light from darkness is a judgment, not an

initiative. All the initiative for division has come from the peculiar angelic beings whose

message of light is darkness. The creator God sees the original light, sees that it is good,

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calls its “Day” in the next verse, and refrains from looking approvingly at the gathering

of darkness, to which he gives the name of “Night.” For Augustine, the omission of

explicit approval is damning enough. This particular Night is never going to see the light

of Day again. “If an angel turns from God, then that angel,” Augustine writes (ciu. 11.9;

CCL 48, p. 330), “becomes impure.” And as is the case with all impure spirits, fallen

angels are no longer, as Augusitne puts it, echoing Ephesians 5:8, “the light that is in the

Lord” (lux in Domino); “they are the darkness that is in themselves” (in se ipsis

tenebrae). Evil being nothing more to Augustine, but also nothing less, than “a loss of

goodness” (amissio boni), he is willing to read evil into that first and eternal Night.

What strikes me most about Augustine’s exegesis, which is almost wholly a

reading between the lines, is its misplaced pathos. If angels are essentially social beings,

and with a sociality that is far more encompassing and profound than the comparably

puny human experience of it, then how must the survivors have felt when they began to

realize that they would be losing so much of their civitas to an irrevocable darkness?

They will have fallen apart no less grievously than their self-defeating counterparts and

arguably more so: for part of what comes with the darkening of the light is decreased

self-awareness and loss of the capacity to feel compassion for others. The surviving

angels are left to bear the suffering that the fallen angels, eternally dying to themselves,

can feel no longer. It is only in heaven that nightfall stings.

There is nothing about this speculation of mine that would have been beyond

Augustine’s capacity to imagine. Indeed he is rather better at this sort of thing than I am,

and for that and much else, I have been grateful to be his student. But in this case, he is

more unwilling than incapable of reading further between the lines. He bolsters his

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unwillingness in two closely related ways. He emphasizes just how unangelic the demons

are (ciu. 9.19), especially Lucifer, who has given light-bearing a bad name (ciu. 11.15).

He insists, with the weight of a tradition as witness, that real angels know that no demons

will ever again emerge from their ranks (ciu. 11.13). The psychological defensiveness

behind this exegetical strategy is not hard to fathom: when faced with the soul-rending

task of having to mourn an enemy, think of surviving as vindication and substitute anger

for grief. This is the psychology that moves Aeneas from Carthage to Rome and earns for

Cain a life of rootless wandering.

I trust it is understood that when I unearth defensiveness in Augustine’s reading

of angelic life, my intent is neither to make light of the demonism that can render a once

luminous life unrecognizable nor to criticize Augustine for a lack of sympathy. If

someone of his sensitivity can be tempted to turn a wounded civitas into an occasion for

putting angels and demons firmly into their respective places, then the pain that demands

the idealization must be very great indeed. The thing to notice is not that Augustine gives

in, but that he does not give in completely. He leaves at least one form of the division

between angels indeterminately divisive. I refer to his speculation, most fully set out in

City of God 11.13, about what disposes one angel, but not another, to leave heaven’s

embrace.

One possibility, he suggests, is that the tempted angels lack self-knowledge. They

experience being happy with God and their follow angels, but they do not know who they

are in all this bliss. Fearing that their bliss lacks substance, they leave the heavenly city in

search of themselves; they seek self-knowledge. The problem with this possibility is its

apparent unfairness. All angels must submit to the same divine law, but the perfect angels

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already have what the imperfect angels must perpetually seek. The other possibility,

emphasizing equity, has all of the angels beginning without self-knowledge. Some of

them, not content to wait for it, break out on their own; the others, seeing the results of

that, stand fast. Augustine decides not to decide: “This remains,” he writes (ciu. 11.13;

CCL 48, p. 334), “that either the angels were unequal, or, if equal, that the good ones

came to a solid knowledge of their own everlasting bliss after the ruin of the rest.”

Augustine’s indecisiveness here is more important and less exotic than it may

appear to be. Let’s revisit the possibilities he feels he must hold together, though they

hardly seem to him to cohere. In the civitas of unequal angels, we almost have a city of

God, of mixed composition, that does not require a shadow city to define it. I say

“almost” because Augustine seems to be assuming that imperfection in this city is the

mark of ruin. On that reading, the imperfect angels have never really been in communion

with the perfection that they seek; their exit from heaven is simply the confirmation of a

pre-existing condition. With the other possibility, the civitas of equal angels, imperfection

is clearly not the mark of ruin. Some imperfect angels fall; some refrain from falling and

find perfection. But this city does seem to require a shadow city for its proper definition.

Angels who look for perfection among equals find it through angels who are equal no

longer—and who, in fact, have never been equal. For in keeping with their externally

defined perfection, perfect angels are always looking down at what is entirely foreign to

them. Each of the two cities that Augustine has imagined has to outsource its internal

differences to an idealization that undoes them. His willingness to hold two as one, in

absence of a perfect union, speaks to his desire for a real civitas, a place where difference

is still knowable. That is why his indecisiveness is, in this case, important.

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When I speak of his indecisiveness as being less exotic than it may seem, I mean

to imply that Augustine’s puzzlement over angels is not fundamentally over the ground-

plans for an angelopolis. He begins City of God 11.13, which I have been reading thus far

as a chapter about angelic difference, with a pronouncement about the bliss of a perfectly

intellectual form of life. He is in no doubt about the truth of what he is claiming. “It is not

difficult for it to occur to anyone,” he writes (CCL 48, p. 333), “that an intellectual nature

single-mindedly desires the bliss that comes of this conjunction: that it is enjoying,

trouble-free, the changeless good that is God, and that it is remaining forever in this

enjoyment, hindered by no doubt and deceived by no error.” The first condition of bliss is

a condition of being. You cannot be happy merely by believing that you are happy. You

really have to be happy. The second condition of bliss is a condition of knowing. You

cannot be happy and not know that you are. For an intellectual nature, or a being that is

its knowing, the two conditions are inseparable, identical in fact. The being whose

enjoyment lasts knows itself to be a lasting being, living beyond the touch of time. But

who is this being that Augustine is describing? The word he uses to characterize its

manner of desire—desiderat—strongly connotes desire for what has yet to be possessed.

If Augustine intends the connotation, and I believe that he does, then he is describing a

perfection-seeking being, but not a perfect one. Within the context of City of God 11.13,

that condition would have to denote either an angel about to fall or, more tentatively, any

one of the angels prior to the angelic fall.

I don’t think that Augustine can be right about this. What he is claiming violates

the logic of perfection. If angels begin their careers as imperfect beings, then they are not

purely intellectual beings, and they never will be. If they begin as perfect beings, then

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they are purely intellectual beings, and they have no time for a fall—and so they don’t.

The operative principle here, a metaphysical one, is this: originally perfect, always

perfect. (The corollary principle—originally imperfect, always imperfect—is also true,

but its truth will need to be qualified. More on that at the end.) I take it that what

Augustine is really describing in City of God 11.13 is not two possibilities for an original

city of angels, one a mixture of perfect and imperfect being, the other an undifferentiated

mass of perfection-seekers, but the two human cities: peregrina and terrena. With the

angelic veil partially lifted, let’s look again at these two and do the math: when is one

plus another still one?

The indeterminacy that has kept Augustine’s hypothetically angelic cities shaded

together plays directly into the figure of his Adam, who is, in his unfallen condition, a

corpus permixtum. This is the term that Augustine uses to refer to the historical church as

an unsorted body (doc. Chr. 3.32.45; cf. ciu. 18.49); he never thinks to apply it to Adam,

but just wait. Eden, as Augustine conceives of it, is a material and social paradise where

psychologically well-adjusted people are given a chance to couple, raise children, and

commune with God (ciu. 14.10, 14.23). It is also a place of great spiritual opportunity. If

you refrain from taking fruit from the tree of knowledge and keep at the family life, you

will one day discover that you no longer need to eat from the tree of life to stave off

aging and death. Your vision of God perfectly sustains you, but by then, of course, your

flesh will have undergone a considerable upgrade (ciu. 13.20). What I have described is

doubtless a place of wonder, but Eden is not perfection. We know this because Adam

himself, who is a part of the place, is not perfect. He lacks the essential ingredients of

perfect being: he does not begin his life knowing that he will forever enjoy God, and, not

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knowing this, the enjoyment that he does have is necessarily incomplete and open to

doubt. Adam’s imperfection leaves him with selfhood that is less than ideal. But does it

also mark him for the terrena civitas, where amor sui always spells ruin?

Augustine thinks not. He conceives of Adam as beginning with the important if

limited freedom of “being able not to sin” (posse non peccare, corrept. 12.33; cf. exp.

prop. Rm. 13-18). And yet it is precisely in that regard that Adam is bizarrely

unrepresentative, a citizen without a city. His citied heirs, without exception, have been

one of two types. There are the earthers who cannot help but sin (non posse non peccare):

their experience of their own imperfection propels them from one partial vision of the self

to the next, with no wholeness in sight. And then there are the heavenists who are

invisibly claimed by perfection, the power that is beyond sin’s domain (non posse

peccare): their experience of themselves is still one of imperfection, but for some reason,

known only to God, their imperfection is not writing their story. Augustine’s idea of a

corpus permixtum is basically the idea that imperfection signifies neither the absence of

perfection nor its impossibility. In that sense, Adam, no less than the historical church,

conveys the idea. Adam conveys it through the indeterminacy of his freedom; the church

conveys it through its mixing of hidden determinacies. But still it must be conceded that

a failure to signify is not in itself mode of signification. Left to negotiate a fundamentally

insignificant form of imperfection, that of matter divorced from goodness, Augustine’s

brand of politics, like anyone else’s, becomes earthly by default. Then politics is all more

or less a game of imposition.

When Markus attempts to make a political virtue out of the invisibility of the

civitas peregrina, the godly but foreign city, he gets criticized by a number of astute

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theologians for secularizing Augustine’s theology and blunting the church’s critique of

the world.6 One of that number, John Milbank, the mover of Radical Orthodoxy, has

been particularly uninterested in church-and-world détente. Here is the essence of what

he has had to say about the earthly city:

For the ends sought by the civitas terrena are not merely limited, finite goods,

they are those finite goods regarded without ‘referral’ to the infinite good, and, in

consequence, they are unconditionally bad ends. The realm of the merely

practical, cut off from the ecclesial, is quite simply a realm of sin.7

Milbank’s provocative assimilation of worldliness to sin catches the attention of Markus,

who responds to Milbank and other anti-secularists in his last major reconsideration of

Augustinian secularity, his Blessed Pope John XXIII lectures.8 Basically Markus faults

Milbank for failing to distinguish between two senses of the earthly city, as strictly a

collection of arrogant and selfish individuals, having no hope of becoming anything else,

and, in the extended sense, as a community defined by a less determinative form of self-

interest. In a parenthetical aside, Markus concedes that Augustine favors the strict sense

whenever he is bothering to define things, but the strict sense, insists Markus, is never

exclusive. “If I labor this point,” he writes, “it is because it is critically important to be

6 See especially Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” Milltown Studies 19/20, 1987: 55-72 and Oliver O’Donovan, “The Political Thought of City of God 19,” in Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present, essays by Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, 48-72.

7 Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, Milbank 2006, 411. The original edition came out in 1990.

8 Published as Christianity and the Secular, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. For my review of this work, see Church History 76:2, 2007: 395-397.

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clear that empirical groups, institutions, and societies are, for Augustine, always and

necessarily composites of the two Cities, taken in their strict eschatological meaning.”9

The nature of the composite that Markus has in mind is more purely secular than a

mix of heaven and earth would seem to suggest. With Augustine’s blessing presumed,

Markus opts to double down on the terrena civitas. His bet is that a corpus permixtum

composed of pretenders to virtue and the truly graced can come to a limited but valuable

consensus, the basis of an earthly peace (cf. ciu. 19.17), without having to settle accounts

with all the pretence—which, in intermediate times, would be impossible to do in any

case. Since it is the earthly city that is getting most of the release time from its “strict

eschatological meaning,” Markus ends up assimilating most of the church, that other

corpus permixtum, to the world. The part left-over is purely a symbolic power, called to

interject humility and a dose of prophetic clarity into murky negotiations of worldly

power.10

Robert Dodaro, who best knows the pulse of post-Markus Augustinianism, has

brilliantly characterized the difference between Markus and Milbank in terms of

antithetical emphases.11 Milbank and Markus turn out to be the bookends of Augustine’s

political theology. For while Milbank showcases the church as corpus Christi and tends

to sideline the body-part that is more worldly, Markus underscores the church’s

worldliness and appears content to reduce its claim to corpus Christi to mere signage.

Bob himself prefers to inhabit the place in the middle, which is less a fixed center than a

9 Markus, Christianity and the Secular, 47 (n. 8).10 An authentic theology of the church would, for Markus, clarify the church’s role as a signum as opposed

to a res; it would, in other words, be a species of semiotics. Markus does not claim to find such an ecclesiology in Augustine. See Saeculum 1988 (rev. ed), 183-186, and the whole, quite marvelous chapter on “signposts” (n. 1).

11 “Ecclesia and Res Publica: How Augustinian Are Neo-Augustinian Politics?” in L. Boeve, M. Lamberigts, and M. Wisse, eds. Augustine and Postmodern Thought: A New Alliance Against Modernity, Leuven: Peters, 2009, 237-271.

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constant dodging of extremes. “In Augustine’s thought,” he writes, “corpus Christi and

ecclesia permixta interpenetrate one another in time, with the consequence that it is only

in its final, complete form that Augustine considers the church to be a truly just

society.”12

Bob is the sanest eschatologist that I know. But in this lecture I have been

lingering with the original angels, the first Adam, and God’s foreign city on earth to

make the case for one, not-so-simple lesson: that material difference escapes

eschatological analysis. And thank God for that. When I speak of material difference, I

speak of the difference that keeps the conjunction between perfection and perfection-

seeking from defaulting into antithesis. I speak of the difference that puts prodigal saints

and unerring angels within the same civitas. I speak of the difference between an

idealized civitas and a real one. Eschatology is a form of idealization. Specifically, it is

the idealization of time. It looks to time at the end of history, not the last moment of time,

but its fulfillment, the perfection. The problem for eschatology is that time is never ideal.

It is just not that kind of a creature. Whenever the civitas Dei peregrina is made to fit an

idealized end of time, it segments along the lines of an untenable conjunction. On one

side, there is perfection-seeking absent all perfection; that is the eschatologist’s hell. Its

politics are those of the earthly city. On the other side, there is perfection absent all

seeking; that is heaven, which sounds nicer, but bear in mind that no one who has had to

seek the place ever really enters there. This particular paradise is a tomb for memory.13

In those relatively rare places in his theologizing where we find Augustine collapsing

12 Dodaro, “Ecclesia and Res Publica,” 264 (n. 11).13 Augustine finds such a prospect terrifying; see sol. 2.36.

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saints into angels, sinners into demons, we are witnessing the effects of an overheated

eschatology.14

I am not claiming that eschatology is a bad thing. On the contrary, I believe that it

is an essential ingredient of Augustine’s theology, of Christian theology in general, of

redemption itself. We live, we die, we live again. When we aim to speak of the

mysteries of birth, death, and resurrection but deny ourselves the use of eschatological

categories, we end up describing the ups and downs of a self-imposed perfectionism. So,

again, I am not claiming that eschatology is a bad thing. My claim is only that

eschatology requires for its proper office an irreducibly material context. I have been

wanting throughout my lecture to distinguish imperfectionism, which for me is

synonymous with the politics of the earthly city, from perfectionism with a difference. I

will conclude my thoughts about a tangle of two cities with a brief and imperfect

meditation on what that difference is.

The Paradox of Perfection (That It Is An Undoing)

This may be where Christianity and Platonism definitively part company.

Compare two ways of thinking about God. Here is the first. Think of perfection not as a

condition of being, as an achievement of some sort, but as being itself. When perfection

is a condition of being, I can sensibly speak of something being more or less perfect. The

aim of a mixed civitas is that of a more perfect union, but we earthers know how that one

14 For an admiring critique of Augustine’s tendency to “transhumanize” saints, leaving them to look too much like the fleshless angels, see Andrea Nightingale, Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011 and cf. my review of her book in Notre Dame On-Line Philosophical Reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edu, posted January 11, 2012. As for Augustine’s proclivity towards demonization, that has much to do with his talk of sinners as “not able not to sin” (non posse non peccare; exp. prop. Rm. 13-18). The literature that touches upon this topic is enormous, but consider that Markus, in his own exemplary fashion, has been holding the line in Augustine against the strict implications of all such talk.

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can go. Perfection, as being itself, always is what it is and never is anything else. Let’s

call this perfection ‘God.’ God does not have a past. There is never a time when

perfection, as being, is no longer. What is no longer does not exist, and being, if it is

anything, is not nothing. Using the same reasoning, we can see that God does not have a

future. There is never a time when perfection is not yet perfect; the future, like the past,

lacks being, lacks the perfect, lacks God. You and I, for whom perfection is a condition

of being, are deeply invested in having a past and future. Those two compelling bits of

nothingness—the no longer, and the not yet—orient us towards a self-knowledge the lack

of which makes life with the perfect God unlivable. So much for Eden. We’re not going

back.

Here is the other way to think about God. Keep the same logic of perfection. God

is still the perfect being, and, as such, God is eternal and not time-defined. But now add

this supposition: that perfection has incarnated, taken on human form, and lived out the

life and death of one perfection-seeker in particular, that of Jesus of Nazareth, whom

Christians call Christ, the Son of God. Christ, for the Christian Augustine, heads God’s

city in heaven and on earth and discloses the nature of the perfection that is divine but

with a difference.

So what is the difference? God has not changed. I have stipulated, in conformity

with Platonist metaphysics and Christian dogma, that God is the perfect being or, in

short, that God is. When Christians speak of God becoming human, they do not mean to

imply that God, in becoming human, ceases to be God. But so as not to be speaking for

all Christians, some of whom may be process theologians, I will simply say that this is

surely Augustine’s view of the matter, however much I may lapse, as I doubtless do, into

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speaking for him. Granting that God remains perfectly God while incarnate, the

alternative way of thinking about God must engage with God’s humanity. If this is a

humanness that somehow admits of perfection, then we have our perfection with a

difference.

Before venturing into that hesitant conditional, I need to spend a moment with a

hypothetical Platonist, one not so interested in my Christian piety. This Platonist would

like me to see that when I was just speaking about the non-being of the past and future, I

was availing myself, and necessarily so, of the language of being. To say that the past is

no longer is still to say that the past is, that it exists. The same goes for the future: the

future is not yet, and there it is. Perfection, my Platonist reminds me, is eternally open to

the imperfect; it is the condition of its possibility. If I am thinking about imperfection at

all, I have already called to mind the perfection that makes the imperfect conceivable. But

now comes the part that my Platonist is most anxious for me to take in. Just I can father

my son but my son cannot father me, the imperfect can come of the perfect but it can

never fully return there. Imperfect being, the child of eternity and time, is eternally of the

Father and eternally apart.

My hypothetical Platonist is not quite as hypothetical as I have been making him

out to be. I have drawn him directly from book 11 of the Confessions, where Augustine

meditates on the eternal origin of all things and confesses that when he thinks about it, he

does not know what time is (conf. 11.14.17). As he presses his thinking on the matter, he

comes to two important conclusions, both absolutely crucial to his sense of God. One that

is he would have no recollection, not even enough to be confused about time, were it not

for the presence of eternity in his every moment. The eternal turns his finite mind,

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otherwise subject to constant distraction, into a collector of time. Once in his mind’s

grasp, the present ceases to be just the infinitesimal sliver of being that divides the not yet

from the no longer; it becomes as well the nub of memory, attention, and expectation, the

coordination of which is recollection (conf. 11.22.26; cf. 10.11.18). Augustine begins to

recollect that he craves for more satisfaction than a life of distraction can possibly offer

him. He wants the peace of God, perfection itself. But his other insight into the

conjunction between time and eternity shapes this desire of his even more profoundly

than the first. Augustine is quite aware, throughout his confession, that his mind’s manner

of grasping time does not exempt him from dissolution (conf. 11.29.39). Time exceeds

and eventually overwhelms its container. Augustine concludes from this that if God is

beyond time, as the perfect being must be, then God is not time’s container (conf.

11.31.41).15

The Augustine of Confessions 11, the confessor of time, comes closest to

understanding and conceding the Platonist’s complaint against all eschatology: that it

tries to imagine perfect imperfection. It is surely no accident that we humans lack a good

sense of what a perfected human being, resurrected and freed from further death, is

supposed to look like. Is he old, young, tall, short, slim, hefty, or always mid 30s with a

finely cropped beard, longish chestnut hair, sensitive eyes, and hands like butter? Is he

sometimes a she, or perhaps a tertium quid—a male and female blend or a beauty without

gender? The Platonist in Augustine will tell us to stop imagining. In his sermon on Psalm

15 For my understanding of Augustine on time, I owe an enormous debt to Burcht Pranger, whose depth of insight far exceeds my own. For his reading of historical time in City of God, see “Politics and Finitude: The Temporal Status of Augustine’s Civitas Permixta,” in Hent De Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, eds. Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2006, 113-121. For his extended analysis of Augustinian temporality, see Eternity’s Ennui: Temporality, Perseverance, and Voice in Augustine and Western Literature, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2010, a study that defies classification.

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86, the Psalm that sings of God’s glorious city (Ps. 87, RSV), Augustine cautions his

congregants not to extrapolate from their best pleasures to a heavenly bliss. If they do,

their self-restraint in this life (continentia) will be no better than greed (avaritia)—greed

being, in this case, an unreasoning appetite for what no one can hope to imagine (en. Ps.

86.9).

But it can scarcely be denied that the writer of City of God is an unrepentant

eschatologist. I’ll leave to another time the question of whether this closes the book on

his Platonism. For now, and in closing, I simply want to suggest that Augustine’s true

genius for eschatology lies not in his speculations, bordering on the bizarre, about the

look of resurrected flesh (ciu. 22.16-17; 22.30).16 It lies in his thinking about sacrifice.

The civitas peregrina, he insists (ciu. 10.6), is itself one big sacrifice, made acceptable to

God “by way of the great priest” (per sacerdotum magnum; CCL, p. 279). Think of that

priest consecrating the host; he will not break what is not first broken in himself. Christ’s

human relation to perfection is perfect because his self-sacrifice to God is perfect. He

holds back nothing, and in that sense, he ceases to relate. As he tells us in the Gospel of

John (10:33): “The Father and I are one.” But if Christ is one with God, it is because

God is first one with him. Perfection that eternally conjoins itself to the imperfect is

letting go and not just giving up: here is the beginning of the difference between love and

deprivation.

But what of the rest of us strangers, who are the grasping limbs of a foreign city

and not its head? Perhaps it comes as no surprise that a person of my mixed pieties—

Platonist and Christian—looks to love for the difference that perfection makes. I confess

16 Here is Nightingale, Once Out of Nature, 48 (n. 14), glossing a passage from ciu. 22.30: “The resurrected body will look a bit like the Pompidou Center, with inner organs on view.”

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that I have found no vindication there. Christianity is a religion for the broken-hearted.

Augustine is confident that the saints in heaven will remember their brokenness, but

without the pain of recognition (ciu. 22.30). Meanwhile Christ waits and grieves for

those who choose to live within too guarded a knowing. In between consolations of

heaven and hell, there is an awakening. The city that has seemed so familiar unveils itself

as foreign; each of us wakes up, at first light, to see the stranger.

JAMES WETZEL

VILLANOVA, PA.

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