The lesson of history is that there are no lessons from history that apply to our present crisis. This is, in a way, what Augustine is arguing from Books I-V of City of God. In a subsequent post, I will argue the exact opposite: I will suggest that the whole point of City of God is to extract – or, rather, construct – lessons from history. But for now, let me stick with this line of argument: the past is no help in explaining the present.
Here’s a quick and dirty summary of the crisis Augustine was addressing: Alaric’s Visigoth army sacked Rome in 410 AD, slaughtering its residents, plundering its homes, pillaging its riches. laying waste to the city – but sparing, it seems, those who sought refuge in the city’s Christian churches while showing no mercy to those who sought refuge in its pagan temples. Wealthier refugees, both pagan and Christian, resettled in North Africa and other parts of the Roman empire. In the aftershocks of their trauma, in trying to come to terms with the cataclysmic violence and loss that fell upon the Eternal City, they sought to assign blame for the city’s fall. The pagans blamed Christianity, which had led to (and sometimes required) the neglect and abandonment of Rome’s old guardian gods, for the downfall of the city. Some Christians were inclined to agree, after a fashion, in that they saw in the downfall of the city the hand of divine judgment. Others weren’t so sure to what they should attribute this extraordinary violence and destruction. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (modern-day Annaba, Algeria), had both an intellectual and a pastoral concern in seeking to address the questions of the Christians and the accusations of the pagans.
Augustine’s book is a polemic, an apologia for Christianity. But it is not really a theodicy – an attempt to justify God’s ways to man. Instead, it starts out something almost the opposite: a theokatakrima, a condemnation of the pagan gods for their uselessness as guardian deities for their deluded worshippers.*
In the process of making his case, Augustine notes at several points that the disaster that has befallen Rome – the violent sacking of the city, the slaughter of unarmed civilians, the rape of women, the plunder, the blood, the fire, the destruction – is not unique in human history or in human experience. He refers at a few points to Jesus’s exhortation to his followers from the Sermon on the Mount: love your enemies, for God causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the just and the unjust alike. A similar idea pops up in the writings of Paul, an idea that appears both implicitly and explicitly in Augustine’s prose: no suffering has overtaken you beyond what is the common lot of humankind.
We see Augustine seizing upon this premise in Book II of the work, where he begins a long survey of the history of disastrous and lamentable events that Rome suffered before Christ even walked the earth.
Here’s how Chapter 3 of Book II begins:
3. A study of history will show what calamites befell the Romans when they worshipped the pagan gods before Christianity displaced them
You must bear in mind that in mentioning these facts I am still dealing with the ignorant, the people whose stupidity has given rise to the popular proverb, ‘No rain! It’s all the fault of the Christians.’ The well-educated who are fond of history are readily acquainted with these facts, but they wish to inflame the hatred of the illiterate mobs against us, and so they pretend notto know the facts, and do their best to support the vulgar notion that the disasters which are bound to fall on humanity during a given period and over a given area are to be laid at the door of Christianity, which, in opposition to their gods, is being extended everywhere with immense prestige and unexampled popularity. So let us help them recall the many and various disasters which overwhelmed the Roman State before Christ’s incarnation – before his name became known to the nations, and received that honour which arouses their ineffectual envy. And in the face of these facts let them defend their gods if they can, assuming that the gods are worshipped in order that the worshippers may escape such calamaties.
In the rest of this section of the work, to the end of book V, Augustine is busy poking holes in the logic of those who would blame the Christians for Rome’s troubles by showing how similar troubles have afflicted Rome from its foundations. And if the foundations and well-being of Rome were truly overseen by the pagan gods, they were pretty crummy gods – demons, in fact, deluding their worshippers into disaster. While he hits that note of theokatakrinism throughout these first five books, we must not lose sight of his underlying claim: that there are “disasters which are bound to fall on humanity during a given period and over a given area.”
I’m not a classicist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think it’s helpful to give the Latin original for this phrase “disasters which are bound to happen: “per certa…oportet adfligi.” That’s it, but it’s a lot: oportet is an impersonal conjugation derived from the verb “possere,” a verb that encompasses what is possible: what can be, what could be (conditionally), what might be (subjunctively). Translated woodenly, the phrasing means “for sure, there are afflictions.” That instance of “there is/there are” as the translation of an impersonal verb is similar to how we translate the impersonal instance of the Spanish verb “haber”: hay(there is/there are) or, incorporating the sense of inevitability, hay que + infinitive (it must/one must). Hay problemas. There are problems. Hay que respirar para vivir. One must breathe to live. Oportet works somewhat like that.
Why am I rambling on about a single verb phrase on a single page of Augustine’s thousand-page doorstopper? Because of all that this single verbal phrase does not say. It doesn’t say troubles are “destined” to come to humankind, that they are decreed, that they are planned. It doesn’t say humankind is “fated” to suffer – indeed, Augustine is a big critic of fate. It doesn’t attach particular significance – that is, reason – to the sufferings that are “bound to” befall humanity. It doesn’t imply that suffering comes for any reason at all, or that there is any “lesson” to be found in them. Indeed, the lesson of history that Augustine doubles down on in this section of his work is, to put it crudely, thus: shit happens. Shit was happening before the Christians got here, shit is still happening to Christians and pagans alike, and that’s how human life is.
In this section, Augustine invokes history – quoting throughout from authors of antiquity and those nearer to his own time – in order to utterly dismiss history as any kind of moral corrective. What do we see when we look at the past? Plagues, floods, fires, earthquakes, wars, disasters. What do they teach us? These things happen to people; no particular reason they wouldn’t happen to us.
As I said, in my next post I will argue the opposite: that, for Augustine, there is nothing more important to understand than history, which holds the key to the present, the future, to time itself and to a life beyond it.
In the meantime, I look forward to discussion here in the comments.
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*I have no idea if “theokatakrima” is a real term; I just glommed it together for this blog post. Sounds right anyhow.
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Thanks for this! Good stuff. It seems less that Augustine is dismissing the fact that history can offer lessons than the fact that the histories cited (by him) are not offering the lesson he seeks to give, or to enlighten us about. I mean, “shit happens” is, indeed, a lesson one can learn from our long tradition of historical writing. It is important for people to know that one important lesson from history is that the past is not always prologue to the present. We must be prepared for anything. …Aside: I appreciated your asterisked footnote, because I’ve read a fair amount of theology and had never encountered that one! – TL
One of the weaknesses of Western Culture is the notion of a Just World, one that equates “right living” with the ability to avoid shit happening. As a result, people often reject faith entirely when bad things occur, relegating God to a vindictive old man and wallowing in self-denigration in an effort to win that God’s favor. Both tend to inevitably lead to scapegoating the “other” (insert unpopular minority group du jour here) to relieve this self-imposed suffering. A more useful belief system rejects the fallacy of a Just World, and instead contemplates new, more skillful possibilities with which to respond to the inevitable tragedies of life.
“The lesson of history is that there are no lessons from history that apply to our present crisis. This is, in a way, what Augustine is arguing from Books I-V of City of God.”
Could you elaborate on this point? Do you think Augustine viewed the events he was recording (ad infinitum, it seems, and we’re only talking about the first quarter of his “treatise”!) as a set of data that (cumulatively) would yield insights manageable as a “lesson,” which could then be transmitted through either written or oral discourse to another mind? I’m wondering if his innumerable catalogs of behaviors exhibited by astrologers, statesmen, and the general Roman populace serves to reveal/disclose (in the way Heidegger employed the Greek Aletheia) something other than “history.”
Just to build on what Tim said about Augustine’s motivations for the kind of “lesson he seeks to give,” it seems like he’s wanting to disclose certain wrong practices (errors or deficiencies of reasoning caused by Original Sin?) in human thinking (ex: that the “cause of the greatness of the Roman empire was neither chance nor destiny” or that “Rome had sunk into a morass of moral degradation” decades before Christianity surfaced).* After these faulty modes of cognition are then cast aside, the “scales” would fall away, so to speak, leaving a crystal-clear message.
Maybe a more useful label for what I’m trying to communicate is the tradition of apokalupsis that informed Augustine’s worldview. As Timothy Beal points out in his recent entry in Princeton’s “Lives of Great Religious Books” series, “Northern Africa was a hotbed of millenarianism. . . .”** All this is to say that Augustine might have been using this rhetoric of disclosure to lay bare the hidden patterns of civilizations like Rome; the implicit “lesson” to “come and see” would surface, possibly, only with those with “ears to hear.” This type of “history” book would reveal the “lesson” merely by falsifying the older histories, as opposed to modern historical variants of the “usable past.” I hope what I’m saying is cogent (if not, maybe I can strive towards Augustine’s standards in a follow-up post, minus 1000 pages or so).
* Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, with an Introduction by John O’Meara (New York: Penguin, 1984), 179, 69.
** Timothy Beal, The Book of Revelation: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 58.
Thanks all for your comments. Will reply in reverse order…
Yes, it’s true that North African Christianity was a seedbed/hotbed of millenarian (and other) enthusiasms — Tertullian and the Montanists being the best known example. But Augustine was not a millenarian and as a pastor was constantly battling against such enthusiasms (which I think also characterized the circumcelliones, against whom he directed some of his polemical ire). He has an eschatological vision to bring forth in City of God, but it’s a great deal more subtle than what flourished in that “hotbed.” He begins to shift emphasis or show his hand a bit more in book IV, in discussing divine providence, Fate, and human will — but still, I do think he’s focused on history and spends a lot of time quoting not just from poets but from those regarded as historians in/of the Roman world.
Diane, I think you’re reading me (or Augustine here) as I intend: it’s not possible to draw a moral lesson from bounty or want, from suffering or ease. Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people. What’s interesting about Augustine’s comment above re: what is “bound to happen” is that he frames this as an issue of extent — given such a huge expanse of land, given such a long stretch of time, for any people, these things are going to occur. Of course he does ascribe this to God’s providence or God’s will, certainly in the sense of “this is how God has set up the world to work” and — pulling more from chapters beyond book V — in more particular senses as well. But in book IV chapter 7, he doubles down on the idea that there is no particular “lesson” to be drawn from the fall of Rome or no way of knowing what it could “mean” in the whole scheme of time: “The Roman Empire has been shaken rather than transformed, and that happened to it at other periods, before the preaching of Christ’s name; and it recovered. There is no need to despair of its recovery at this present time. Who knows what is God’s will in this matter?” There the claim to agnosticism is important, a disavowal of moral certainty about the meaning of afflictions. As snarky as Augustine gets in mocking the pagan gods, he doesn’t step into the tempting but morally deplorable position of the “friends” of Job, who seek to ascribe a “cause” to Job’s suffering. This still leaves us, of course, with the problem of Augustine’s conception of God’s will, but that’s for a later post.
Tim, I think Augustine is invoking history and historians here in these first few books so that he can entirely supersede them and their understanding of time, causality, agency, and so forth. Augustine is going to argue that the past makes zero sense apart from a Christian understanding — his Christian understanding — of the purpose of time. But he disavows drawing any correlation between suffering/blessing and merit or unworthiness. The good and bad suffer the same afflictions, and it’s not even possible to know who “the good” and “the bad” really are: who belongs to the City of God and who does not. Indeed, Augustine would argue that precisely because God’s will is inscrutable, any lesson drawn from history is presumptuous. All our lessons have to come from the end of time (so here Mark is right to point to eschatology) and cast light backward on the past.
It would be interesting to examine, as scholars already have, what happens to the “decline and fall” of Rome when it gets removed from Augustine’s frame of reference, and Augustine’s reluctance or refusal to draw lessons from it (other than “s*** happens”) is replaced by an eagerness to draw lessons.
The “republican” tradition (as analyzed e.g. by Pocock) viewed expansion and conquest as, ultimately, sources of corruption and decline. But this “lesson” got tweaked and transmuted. As Pocock observes, James Harrington thought it was land war in Europe, not war at sea, that was corrupting (_The Machiavellian Moment_, pp. 510-511). Then Madison in The Federalist reversed the whole “lesson” by arguing that expansion and a resulting large territory were actually healthy for a republic, supposedly ensuring that no single interest or faction would be dominant. And God’s will, viewed by Augustine as inscrutable, comes to be seen as very scrutable by those who argue that (white) America’s “manifest destiny” to conquer the whole continent is divinely sanctioned or inspired.
But the fall of Rome remains available, at least at the metaphorical level, to those who want to refer to it to oppose expansion and ’empire’ as hubristic and/or dangerous. G.B. Shaw in Misalliance warned that “Rome fell, Babylon fell, Hindhead’s turn will come,” tweaked by Paul Kennedy to read “Rome fell, Babylon fell, Scarsdale’s turn will come.” (For the line and an explanation in an endnote of what “Hindhead” referred to, see Kennedy, _The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers_, p. 533.)
All fair enough, Louis. But contrary to Augustine’s view of history and time, where the reason/meaning of events in the past is not fully legible until past, present and future are brought to a conclusion. Similarly, who is and is not a citizen of the “City of God” is unknown to all but God and will only be revealed at the curtain call. Augustine has become an anchor of predestinarian theology. He can’t really be an anchor of “process theology” because God doesn’t change in his view — but I am interested to see what other paths Augustine’s thought opens up, backwards and forwards.
Doesn’t this position of Augustine, towards the past that is, contradict much of what he’s written in The Confessions? The Confessions is all about the Augustine’s past and how it informs his mature self, and his teachings. He may not be trying to forecast but he’s drawing lessons and inspiration from it. BTW, I’m really enjoying this discussion, thanks.
Thanks for the reply, L.D.
Unfortunately I can’t comment further right now, might have a (backchannel) thought or two later on.
Paul, yes — and with a few areas of further complication.
1) Augustine deploys a really interesting conception of the relationship between a single life and the commonwealth/”city” — the City of God is like an individual soul writ large, and an individual soul is like the divine commonwealth in miniature. This is where he really tweaks Cicero. So in Confessions (written quite early), he does what he claims can’t be done in his later City of God: he writes as if he knows how his story will end (and knowing how it ends tells you what it was from the beginning all along).
2) That said, I really resist systematizing a body of thought in a way that de-historicizes it. In other words, if we look at Augustine’s (or anyone’s) work for what was/is axiomatically or syllogistically true, we are either going to miss development or downplay contradiction, or both. Augustine was first of all a rhetorician — a literal master/teacher/imperial official of the art of persuasion. The (worldly?) rhetorical purpose of Confessions was to legitimize his claim to be a true Christian and have found the real philosophy so that he could exercise his talents and ambitions within the Church. So he’s putting his best foot forward with a certainty in the Confessions that he dials back a little bit in the first part of COG.
3) In Confessions, his summation of his whole life / interests / education before his conversion was that it was all a waste and that there was nothing of value to be had from the study of the pagans. He is using rhetoric to disown the professional practice of rhetoric — all so that he can deploy his considerable skills in rhetoric in a churchly career. But whatever he claimed about the uselessness of studying Virgil, he quotes Virgil extensively in City of God.
All this to say that many claims about Augustine’s thought (including my own re: Augustine’s view on the lessons of history) may be true for a particular work of Augustine, or part of a work, but may contradict or be contradicted by something else he wrote elsewhere. City of God is much closer to an attempt at what would later be called systematic theology than Confessions — but it’s lovely to read as a reminder that all intentionally “systematic” theology is in fact historical, deeply rooted in the moment of its articulation. So to read Augustine expecting (or claiming) the internal consistency of Aquinas could be theologically useful but historically suspect.
That’s not to say there aren’t deep internal consistencies running through Augustine’s work — and I think the most consistent thing about him, for our readers here, is that he returned again and again to the problem of the relationship between past, present, and future, time and eternity.
So I’m reading him narrowly for this blog post — but as I promised, in the next post in this series, I will argue the opposite. 🙂
Here are some quotes from the earlier Penguin edition (John O’Meara, 1984) that might assist for Part II:
“The City of God is no more purely theoretical than it is purely theological. It is, of course, mainly theological, but it is at the same time founded upon Augustine’s own experience. It will be seen that it is an application of the theme of his own development and conversion, as described in the burning pages of the Confessions, to the broader, less immediate, canvas of man’s destiny” (vii).
“[Augustine] shows how the Old Testament . . . is one long prophecy and symbolization of Christ’s coming. Its prophecies, which he repeatedly calls ‘oracles,’ are superior in every way to the oracles of the pagans. . . . One has to accept that Augustine felt it necessary in his apostolate to beat the pagans at their own game” (xxxiv).
“Neither in Books XV-XVIII of the City of God, nor elsewhere in the work, is there any serious attempt at a philosophy of history other than his repudiation of the Platonic theory of the cycle of existences and the substitution for it of the linear progress implicit in the Christian view of the creation, fall, redemption and final destiny” (ibid).
So, no “serious attempt at a philosophy of history other than his repudiation of the Platonic theory of the cycle of existences” and the embrace instead of the idea of “linear progress” to a “final destiny”? oh, nothing other than that? I have to believe, or at least to hope, that this was an ironic/sarcastic observation on the part of the commentator. I mean, this is a pretty far-reaching engagement with philosophy of history. But what do I know?
No, this was written (presumably) with a straight face (one reason why I added it to the post; I’ve had it highlighted for a long time). However, the rest of his introduction is informative. My assumption is he’s treating both “philosophy” and “history” in a very straight laced, formal manner. But what do I know?