This is a long article. It is based on a paper I read at a recent classical educator’s retreat (The Alcuin Retreat) this October in Richmond, VA. About 35 educators gathered at the campus of the Veritas School having read a collection of essays by Robert Wilken in a volume called Remembering the Christian Past, so you will find me referring in this essay often to Wilken. Please note as well that I have not yet corrected and perfected all my citations.
You also will find me quoting Augustine a lot. I think that Augustine is the single most important writer for Christians to consult for the renewal of classical Christian education, but certainly only one great writer among many great writers that we also must read and carefully consider (e.g. Basil, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintillian, Benedict, Boethius, and I am just getting started.)
I think Augustine’s “two-city” description of the complex reality that is life on this earth does justice to the reality that we all generally experience but need to better understand. In these confusing times, there will naturally arise many voices seeking to bring light and clarity. Some of those voices will speak with a misleading clarity that makes clear what is not clear. It is very possible for a captain to successfully muster his troops to march forward and take a hill only to find it was the wrong hill.
Battle plans seldom go as planned, and as one general has remarked it is because after all, the enemy gets a vote.
We could call the mission to renew and advance classical Christian education a battle–and my good friend David Goodwin (along with co-author Peter Hegseth) has published a very popular book on classical education called The Battle for the American Mind. Certainly Goodwin and Hegseth are right that restoring classical Christian education in America is in various ways a battle. But our mission is not metaphorically only or simply a military mission or “war.” We are also seeking to renew something beautiful and pass down an inheritance that is something like an heirloom. There are other metaphors that also describe the renewal of classical Christian education: we are planting trees and gardens (our children) and tending them; we are setting a table for a feast of the true, good, and beautiful; we are bringing students into a museum of wonder, harmony, music, and contemplation. In fact, the most longstanding metaphor for education in the tradition appears to be cultivation—the chief aims of classical education are the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and holiness. Having said that, cultivation involves pruning which can hardly seem welcome to a plant or tree!
Interestingly, Augustine wrote his City of God in response to an actual violent, military mission conducted by the Visgoth king Alaric who successfully sacked and looted Rome in 410 AD. Augustine’s response in The City of God is not to go full in with military metaphor and calls for holy violence (though of course he will use martial metaphor at times because the Scripture do). Augustine seems to be so full of the love of God for him and others that he cannot make “warfare” his governing metaphor—even though he describes an ongoing conflict between the city of God and the city of man. For Augustine, though that conflict was real, it was also not determinative of all life and all experience between Christians and non-Christian sojourning on the earth. For Augustine, yes there was “war” between the cities and yes there could be also a meaningful if limited “peace.” What is more, both “war” and “peace” could exist in various ways at the same time. Such, for Augustine, is the actual, real state of affairs.
For Augustine, Christians and non-Christians will live together in earthly society and like any cohabitation, it will be multidimensional, changing, evolving, complicated. What it will not be is continual, irreconcilable war at all times and places. Neither will it be the New Jerusalem.
What is the relationship between Christians and non-Christians in our time and place? Well, we are working it out aren’t we? And it is hard and complicated as it always is. Augustine tells it will be so (and it had been so in his time) and therefore offers us prudent and sagacious advice: don’t simplify what cannot be simple.
I am reminded of the joke about a clear-spoken pastor: When the Bible is clear, pastor Jones is clear. When the Bible is not clear, pastor Jones is clear.
How to live in society well and with relative peace among all has never been and never will be simple, clear, or easy. Nor will teaching and raising up children. Raising children may mean preparation for spiritual war—for we war not with flesh and blood but with powers and principalities. But raising and educating children is more like planting and cultivating a tree than training a warrior. The marines can train a recruit for battle in three months, a child is educated in two decades and grows slowly like a tree.
In one place Augustine notes that the pagan believed that the gods engaged in regular war and conflict as anyone who has read the Iliad and the Odyssey knows. Augustine writes:
“Thus a battle among divinities, if it really happened, gives excuse for civil wars between men–and one may notice the malice, or the misery, of gods like these. CG81
For Augustine, demons who love the idea of war, are possibly a cause for human war. Those principalities and powers whom we are to battle spiritually (Eph. 6:12ff) may be urging us to take up the physical sword and not just the sword of faith.
Remembering Augustine as Historian, Philosopher, and Teacher
Robert Wilken, in his essay Memory and the Christian Intellectual Life (found in Remembering the Christian Past) recalls what Matthew Arnold says about the benefit of communing with the ancients:
“Commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those who constantly practice it, a steadying and composing effect on their judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general.” (172)
We might paraphrase Arnold to say that commerce with the ancients leads to prudence–a theme that our friends attending the Arete retreat are considering this week. Without the study of history, there can be no prudence, that is no ability to discern the times and no what to do in the various circumstances that confront us.
Now Augustine, himself is an auctor–one of the ancients that Wilken calls, “someone who is worthy of trust, a guarantor who attests to the truth of a statement, one who teaches or advises.” Augustine is often cited by Wilken in his collection of essays, and I would like to consult Augustine myself.
Classical educators want to remember the Christian past. Why would we want to do this, or why do we need to do this? For a group of classical Christian educators, the answer should be plain: We wish to restore, renew, and extend the tradition of Christian teaching by means of the liberal arts, fine arts, common arts, and natural sciences. The fact that classical education is a tradition, means that we must know its history if we are to offer it today. The fact that this tradition of education greatly diminished after about 1930 (with the ascendancy of progressive education) means that most of us did not receive much of a classical education ourselves and so the only way we can know what it is, is to study what it once was–and this means reading and studying history.
There is another reason for classical educators to study the Christian past however and it is this: The Christian past is not studied, not understood, and is often maligned even by Christian professors who have been formed by secular university programs to despise the backwardness, oppression, and violence of a past Christian and generally white patriarchy. While atrocities have been committed in the name of Christ, the large catalog of great gifts to humanity provided by the Christian church is regularly overlooked. We murder to dissect.
Tradition, to most today, means something from the past that perhaps is of sentimental interest to some but of little relevance today to what really matters. Tradition is also viewed sometimes as opposed to what is new and therefore superior. Generally speaking, tradition is not commonly understood as authoritative. Some think that we are obliged to seek, find, and follow the endlessly new and thus be “progressive”––without generally asking to what destination we are seeking to progress. Some think democracy, as it reflects the will of the people from decade to decade, will always march “forward” employing policies that are new and better than past decades. Chesterton encountered this thinking over a century ago. In his little book Orthodoxy, he writes:
But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.
We will side with Chesterton, and give the dead–perhaps much more alive than we–a vote. If we are going to wisely restore classical Christian education, we should not trust the current and small oligarchy–like those of us in this room–but that larger class of our wise ancestors.
And so I would like to call up one of the great dead by the name of Aurelius Augustinus who was born on November 13, 354 and died on August 28, 430. Yes, he was the Bishop of Hippo, and yes, he was converted after his mother Monica prayed and wept, prayed and wept, so that Bishop Ambrose of Milan would say to her in a mild fit of annoyance, “the son of so many tears cannot be lost.” Augustine, in his early 30s became the chief rhetorician serving the Roman emperor in Milan. He was clearly gifted by God–as his writings make abundantly clear. His intellect, his rhetoric, his memory, his breadth of knowledge–they are astounding separately and together. The wonder of Augustine, however, is that his profound intellect is embraced by deep, abiding, palpable love for God. His theology, philosophy, history–they are all regularly blended with doxology and praise. Anyone who has read his Confessions knows this.
It is also worth saying today: Yes, Augustine was an African. He was a North African Berber.
Augustine is an universal father of an undivided church and so he is the father of us all. Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants honor Augustine: R.C. Sproul said that “if there is any giant that stands out in the history of the Church as the man upon whose shoulders the whole history of theology stands, it is a man by the name of Aurelius Augustine, St. Augustine.” The nineteenth-century Anglican historian Philip Schaff called him as “a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries.”
I have been reading Augustine for over 30 years. I am convinced that it is not possible to be well-equipped to renew classical education without him. This is simply because he is the key figure who early on in the fourth century, who synthesizes and consolidates Greek, Roman, and Biblical thought into a coherent tradition that we can call classical Christian education.
Augustine wrote a great deal and can teach us a great deal. In this essay, however, I would like to note three ways in which Augustine can inspire and lead us as we continue to renew classical education. These three ways consider Augustine as 1) Confessor and Historian 2) Political Philosopher and 3) Teacher.
Augustine as Confessor and Historian
Confessor
Augustine, writing some 1600 years ago, was nonetheless remembering a long Christian past. First, Augustine remembers his own Christian past–like we all should. He just happened to do this in writing in a book that will stand for all time–The Confessions. In The Confessions, he is not simply confessing his sins over and over across 13 books (or chapters). No, he is confessing the present goodness of God in all aspects of his life and wherever else Augustine has been privileged to see God’s goodness in creation. Confiteor in Latin means not only to confess but to acknowledge or reveal. What Augustine remembers in this book, we now remember with edification and even joy.
In his essay “Memory and the Christian Intellectual Life,” (Remembering the Chrsitian Past) Robert Wilken writes: “Language is a vehicle of memory. Few things are more satisfying than to hear old and familiar words spoken or read anew to us.” (179) How can we not take a moment to enjoy some words from The Confessions that have inspired and shaped countless Christians over the centuries?
And what do we hear in The Confessions? Everyone has their favorite lines, but this is nearly a universal favorite:
[F]ecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.
You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.
Late have I loved thee, Beauty so ancient and divine, late have I loved thee.
When do we talk of God this way? Why do we not speak of God this way when doing theology? When was the last time you broke out into doxology when discussing some point of theology or when recounting the life of some Christian saint?
Wilken is right when says that we should hear such words, that we need to hear such words that make up our Christian memory. As much as we enjoy hearing these touchstone words, hearing them is not just for personal pleasure. Such words that make up Christian memory give us stability and root:
The Christian intellectual tradition, then, is inescapably historical. Without memory, our intellectual life is impoverished, barren, ephemeral, subject to the whims of the moment. There is no memory that is not rooted in communal experience–a strange fact that we all experience whenever we return to the place where we grew up and talk to family and friends, yet one that is forgotten in abstract thought. (Wilken,170)
Do you recite touchstone passages from either Scripture or the great Christian writers to your students? Do you read great passages to your students–with feeling and love?
Augustine as Historian
Augustine traces his own history (famously) but he also surveys the history of his whole people–the Romans. And just as he invites God to be present with him to help him confess in The Confessions, he regularly invites God to do the same in his great, sweeping work, The City of God against the Pagans. At the start of his book he notes that “the task is long and arduous; but God is our helper.” (CG,6) As just one more example, when Augustine finishes the first part of his book (about 400 pages) he writes:
I shall now proceed to fulfill the promise made in the first book, and, in so far as I receive assistance from on high, I shall put forward what I think ought to be said about the two cities, which are, as I have pointed out, intermixed with one another in this present world; and I shall treat of their origin, development, and their destined ends. (CG, 426)
There is a prompting reason why Augustine wishes to write a 1000 page book: The sack of Rome by the Visigoths, under King Alaric, in 410. Rome had not been looted for 800 years. This was a first and rocked the Roman world. Several influential pagan writers said this defeat was the punishment of the Roman gods, angry because they had been abandoned for the Christian faith. Thus, the full title of Augustine’s work is the City of God against the Pagans (Civitas Dei contra Paganos).
Once Augustine gets started he has quite a story to tell because he must 1) tell the truth about Roman history 2) understand and explain Roman history in light of the providential history of God’s sovereign workings in the affairs of humanity. His reading of Scripture provides him with a “civil” hermeneutic: the doctrine of the two cities.
We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self (Bk XIV. 28)
Augustine begins The City of God with a history of Rome recounted in light of what he has learned as a Christian about God’s sovereign providence and glory. He takes over 200 pages in five books (chapters) to review Roman history pointing out that the gods had failed to protect Rome at other times in the past and had demanded obscene rites on the stage and even in public worship. He pokes fun at the absurd number of Roman gods and futility and falsity of astrology. He summarizes Rome as ever thirsty for glory and dominion (libido dominandi) and he notes with irony that the pagan critics of Christianity, during the sacking of Rome, fled to the only place they would be safe–the churches of the city.
In the second part of The City of God, Augustine continues his examination and critique of Roman polytheism but then turns his attention to those pagan writers who “saw the way but who could not help us to get there.” These are the Platonist or neo-Platonist writers whom Augustine calls “near-Christians.” In another place Augustine writes, “Many wise and beautiful things I have read in Plato and Cicero, but never have I read, Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden.”
We see Augustine as perhaps the chief architect (along with Clement of Alexandria and Basil the Great) of a supersessionist or incorporationist paradigm for understanding the relationship between Jerusalem and Athens–or pagan philosophy and biblical teaching. Here some passages from The City of God and his book Of True Religion:
From Book VIII:5
Sometimes these quotations support the true religion, which our faith has received and now defends; sometimes they seem to show him in opposition to it. (CG, Bk VIII:5)
There are thinkers who have rightly recognized Plato’s pre-eminence over the pagan philosophers and have won praise for the penetration and accuracy of their judgment, and enjoy a widespread reputation as his followers. It may be that they have some conception of God as to find in him the cause of existence, the principle of reason, and the rule of life. Those three things, it will be seen, correspond to the three divisions of philosophy: natural, rational, and moral. (CG, Bk VIII:5)
If Plato says that the wise man is the man who imitates, knows, and loves this God, and that participation in this God brings man happiness, what need is there to examine the other philosophers. There are none who are nearer to us than the Platonists. (CG304)
If these men could have had this love over again with us…They would have become Christians with the change of a few words and statements. (De Ver. Rel, 7)
This should prompt us to ask: Who are the Platonists of our own age? What is the truth (even if held in the context of corruption and rebellion) represented by our secular contemporaries, even those who are attacking the Christian faith?
As classical Christian educators, how do we portray to our students the philosophy and thinking of those outside the Christian faith? Are we always and only negative in our assessment? Or like Augustine, can we see corrupted truth in the presence of virtually every heresy–the truth needed to make the lies seem plausible? The tools in Augustine’s hands are fine tools with which he probes and sifts–they are not blunt instruments. He may occasionally wield a hammer but only when a hammer is what is needed.
How do we respond to, say transgenderism,–the heresy invented five minutes ago? If you read Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, you will not find him pounding away with a hammer in every chapter. Transgenderism has its roots in the Romantic and Enlightenment though––that idea that the world stands opposed to my desires to express my own self-created, self-determined, authentic self; the idea that my own will and reason are able to act autonomously under no authority but my own authority, as “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” In Disney’s terms: Follow your heart.
Now transgenderism is disordered, but that presupposes an order. To be born male and want to be a woman requires one to understand the concept of “woman” in order to know what it means to become one. To say that “woman” is socially-constructed begs the question as to why there has been a universal construct across all times and peoples. To say that “woman” is socially-constructed also involves a self-refuting proposition because if social-construction permeates all thinking and categories, then social-construction is itself socially-constructed and thus not stable or real. So we see at least two truths in transgenderism: it believes at some level in the reality of “gender” or there would be nothing to transition to. It also believes in the reality of social expression to create roles and basis for community. Yes, we do socially de-mark men and women. We still have icons on our bathroom doors (that look like they were drawn by a first-grader) depicting women in a dress and men wearing trousers. We WANT to signal in various social ways what is real about us by biological design. Those social signals do not construct the biological reality but rather reflect them. Still, if not a pure “social construction” these signs are social identifiers that create distinction and meaning.
My point here, is that proceeding as Augustine might, we can point out the truth still present in a heresy. Virtually every heresy in the church was fed by an important truth. Arianism is informed by the truth that Christ was human. Docetism is informed by the truth that Christ was divine. Pelagianism is informed by the truth that our wills are operative and necessary to grow in holiness. Transgenderism is informed, ironically, by the reality of gender. Marxism is informed by the reality that people with power often seek to keep their power by keeping down those who don’t have it. All the way back in the garden, we find the father of lies mixing a truth with a lie:
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Well yes, we might say to Eve, you certainly will die. But also yes (as he said), your eyes will be opened and you will know good and evil.
Augustine, one of the church’s earliest and greatest apologists, helps us to look for the truth mixed in with every lie.
The Intermingled, Interwoven, Mixed Two Cities
There is another way that Augustine the historian notes some important mixing or intermingling. Not only do non-Christians mix truth with lies; but Christians and non-Christians are themselves mixed and intermingled. The two cities–the city of God and the city of man–co-inhabit the earth. By “two cities” Augustine does not mean that the church as an institution is the “city of God” and the political body of the state or nation is the “city of man.” He thinks that in the church there will be people who in fact are not Christians and therefore really members of the “city of man.” He also believes that in the body politic there will be Christians who are in fact members of the “city of God.” So yes, he is speaking metaphorically, as the Scriptures do–for example in Hebrews 11 where we read that”
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
The two cities are a biblical trope or metaphor that Augustine finds throughout Scripture from Genesis to Revelation that describe two kinds of people oriented by two kinds of love:
We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. (CG XIV. 28)
My task is to discuss, to the best of my power, the rise, the development and the destined ends of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, the cities which we find, as I have said interwoven as it were in this present transitory word, and mingled with one another. (CG XI.1)
These “two cities” become a master hermeneutic for Augustine that enable him to assess not only his own life or personal history, but also the arc of history itself. Here is what Augustine scholar (and classical educator) Joseph Claire says about this hermeneutic in his book Reading Augustine:
Where is the arc going? For Augustine, liberal education requires historical imagination of the purposive arc of human civili–an arc that can be detected in the intellectual and literary trail that has come down to us through the ages. Where is the arc going? Where are we in the arc? Which is more important, the rise of the Roman Empire, or the birth of Christ? This is the question that Scripture poses, and Augustine recognizes that sensitivity to story makes all the difference for the coherence of the education cultures provide their you and for the kinds of citizens educational systems produce. We only learn to speak by the words we receive, and these stories give us our deepest sense of human and political purpose. Who gets to narrate the world? The answer to that question, Augustine says, is the educators. The task of a Christian educator, then, is to bring all of the stories of human civilization into fruitful and critical dialogue with Scripture. (RA, 88)
Augustine as Political Philosopher
Augustine is a historian, philosopher, theologian, apologist, and teacher all at the same time. This comment by Joseph Claire, however, leads us to consider Augustine as a political philosopher–form among other things, The City of God is a work of Christian political philosophy.
Before we consider Augustine’s political philosophy, let me pause and just say this: Now is a time in which we must study deeply and well the philosophy of the polis. Even five years ago, this was not a critical need–now it is. Our society has become so deeply fractured and incoherent that we must become experts on what it means to live peaceably and well together. We can no longer relegate the study of political philosophy to college; we can no longer assume that a college will provide good training in political philosophy. Probably we need to start such study in 7th or 8th grade. Most of us here have not had adequate training in political philosophy; most of us have read popular treatments and have been formed by a smattering of sources, the greatest of which is likely social media and unsystematic reading on the internet. This will no longer do. Augustine is the first and greatest Christian “heavyweight” who helps us to think historically, theologically, philosophically, and systematically about life in the polis. If you wish to be an informed Christian educator who can address political questions–you cannot do this responsibly without having read and studied the City of God. You may disagree with Augustine, but you must know well him with whom you disagree. Whom else should you read and know? Here is my quick list: The Republic, The Politics, The Social Contract, Reflections on the Revolution in France, The Prince, The Divine Comedy, The Federalist Papers, The Essential Writings of Russell Kirk.
Augustine argues often that we must order our loves and affections to harmonize with Christ and our love for God and neighbor–what he calls our obligation of double-love that comes to us in the great commandment of Christ (Matthew 22): We should love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves.
Those who know Christ love him, and this leads us to a life of prayer, contemplation, and praise. Those who know Christ are also compelled to love our neighbors and even our enemies. Ordered love animates those in the city of God so that they serve their non-Christian neighbors–in the neighborhood, at work, in the army, at city hall, at council meetings, in the shops with a Christ-inspired beneficent love. Augustine points out that in the Roman Empire, even before it was Christian, that Christians served well in the army, in government, in all aspects of civil society. They did not, however, worship the Roman gods, and they were willing to be outcast and even martyred rather than worship the gods. In fact, it was this lived life of faith, love, and sacrifice that grew the church and converted so many to the Christian faith. The blood of the martyrs did indeed prove to be like seed sown that produced a plentiful harvest of converted souls so that by 312 the emperor Constantine is converted to the Christian, faith though not baptized until 337.
Robert Wilken, in his essay “No Other Gods” (in Remember the Christian Past) points out that the supreme argument for the truth of Christianity was the lived life of love among Christians and martyrs. Augustine notes this as well. While Christian apologists like Augustine did make use of various philosophical arguments– including arguments made by various pagan philosophers like Plato–he places great emphasis on the reality of God’s manifestation in the incarnation of Christ and the presence of his love in his redeemed ones in the church. This is what Origen means when he says that “the gospel has a proof which is peculiar to itself.” Wilken writes quoting Origen:
The “gospel has a proof which is peculiar to itself and which is more divine that a Greek proof based on dialectical arguments”--the more “divine demonstration” St. Paul (1 Cor. 2:4) calls “demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”
We might pause here and ask ourselves: Are we too enamored with our various apologetic proofs and arguments (taking every thought captive) that we neglect what it means to love our neighbors and enemies such that they witness not polished polemics but a demonstration of the Spirit and of power? Is there a way that we can “take every thought captive” without treating our opponents as if we were trying to make them captives? If we follow Augustine, we will find him speaking a timely and seasoned word, employing a rhetoric of love which knows his audience and which can be firm without being dismissive, pointed while respectful.
Miracles
Many of us will be surprised to read in the final section of the City of God (Book XXII) that Augustine reports the ongoing existence of miracles that substantiate the Christian faith–and miracles surrounding relics. Most protestants are skeptical of prayers to the saints and miracles produced by relics. Augustine is not and he lists several reports of miraculous conversions across the social spectrum from young to old, and from various stations of life. His reports reads very much like Jonathan Edward’s Narrative of Surprising Conversions collected by Edwards during the first Great Awakening in the 1740s. Augustine reports that the relics of St. Stephen (the deacon of Acts 7) were brought to Carthage and a steady stream of miracles apparently resulted from those who would visit the relics and pray. Of course there is a biblical precedent for these kinds of miracles: In Acts 5 even the shadow of Peter brought healing and in Acts 19, we read:
God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.
While the history of the church indicates that miracles cannot be called up on demand, we often do see miracles in the midst of Christian suffering and certainly when God intervenes in mighty acts of redemption (e.g., the Exodus, the life of Christ, the establishment of the church after Pentecost, etc.). Are we open to God acting in such mighty ways in our own time?
Remembering the Future and Seeking Provisional Peace
Augustine is the classical representative of the most enduring form of a symbolic or “realized” millenialism. His view of the reign of Christ is straightforward and has been the standard eschatology of the church up until about the 1700s. His view is this: when Christ ascended into heaven he took up his throne at the right hand of the father, and he is now ruling supreme, subduing his enemies before his feet already and now but will complete this subduing yet in the future at his second coming. Thus theologians have often referred to the “already-not yet” characteristic of Christ’s reign. It is a millennial view insofar as it interprets the 1000 year reign of Christ as symbolic number of perfection and a reign that is present now and will be completed and fulfilled when Christ returns.
Some have called this “realized millenialism” because the 1000 year reign of Christ is being realized presently and throughout history since his ascension. Some have called it “amillenialism” to distinguish it from two more recent eschatalogical interpretations: 1) Premillenialism that holds that Christ will return first (before the millennium) and then establish a 1000 year reign 2) Postmillenialsm that holds that the church will grow such that it brings about the millenium–an age of near-complete global domination of the church–after which time Christ will return. I note that both premillenialism and postmillenialism are recent eschatologies in church history (really taking hold in the 1800s).
So what do we teach our students about eschatology? Our eschatology has direct and clear implications of our politics–how we think we should behave in the polis. Various forms of premillenialism will tend to de-emphasize political activity since adherents believe that socially and politically things are going to get worse and worse leading up to the rise of the anti-Christ, great tribulation, then the rapture of the church. If it is “all going to burn” why get politically active or why place any hope in political solutions?
On the other hand, various forms of postmillenialism, lead adherents to optimism, confidence, and even cockiness: Christ’s kingdom will increasingly grow until the glory of the Lord covers the earth like the waters cover the sea. If it is dark now, it is the dark before a dawning light. Postmillenialists often become feisty and pugnacious–ready for the fight that they are confident we will win.
Augustine was neither of these, though he could appear at times pessimistic (like the premillenialist) and optimistic (like the postmillenialst). He was not confident in pagan society to bring about true justice or true peace. But he was confident that those in the city of God could leverage even the relative peace that existed in civil society and grow it and use it to lead others in the city of God where they could taste and know the heavenly peace that Christ brings his own.
Augustine believed that the wheat and the tares would grow up together, intermingled, to be finally separated only when Christ returns in judgment. Until that time, though the kingdom of God spread like leaven through the dough, the kingdom or city would remain intermingled or interwoven with the city of man. This classical eschatology leaves room for pessimism and optimism that acknowledges the reality of living as pilgrims on this earth (like strangers in a strange land with our citizenship ultimately in heaven). It also acknowledges the providence of God over the affairs of men and earth that may lead (given God’s inscrutable purposes) Christians into times of suffering and martyrdom that will bring God glory, grow the church, and bless civil society. As such, Augustine seeks a relative harmony and earthly peace, in service of the city of God. It is worth hearing Augustine on the two cities in his own words:
The earthly city, which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes, in the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and rule, is the combination of men's wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life. The heavenly city, or rather the part of it which sojourns on earth and lives by faith, makes use of this peace only because it must, until this mortal condition which necessitates it shall pass away. Consequently, so long as it lives like a captive and a stranger in the earthly city, though it has already received the promise of redemption, and the gift of the Spirit as the earnest of it, it makes no scruple to obey the laws of the earthly city, whereby the things necessary for the maintenance of this mortal life are administered; and thus, as this life is common to both cities, so there is a harmony between them in regard to what belongs to it.
But, as the earthly city has had some philosophers whose doctrine is condemned by the divine teaching, and who, being deceived either by their own conjectures or by demons, supposed that many gods must be invited to take an interest in human affairs, and assigned to each a separate function and a separate department,--to one the body, to another the soul; and in the body itself, to one the head, to another the neck, and each of the other members to one of the gods; and in like manner, in the soul, to one god the natural capacity was assigned, to another education, to another anger, to another lust; and so the various affairs of life were assigned,--cattle to one, corn to another, wine to another, oil to another, the woods to another, money to another, navigation to another, wars and victories to another, marriages to another, births and fecundity to another, and other things to other gods: and as the celestial city, on the other hand, knew that one God only was to be worshipped, and that to Him alone was due that service which the Greeks call latreia, and which can be given only to a god, it has come to pass that the two cities could not have common laws of religion, and that the heavenly city has been compelled in this matter to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently, and to stand the brunt of their anger and hatred and persecutions, except in so far as the minds of their enemies have been alarmed by the multitude of the Christians and quelled by the manifest protection of God accorded to them. This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced. Even the heavenly city, therefore, while in its state of pilgrimage, avails itself of the peace of earth, and, so far as it can without injuring faith and godliness, desires and maintains a common agreement among men regarding the acquisition of the necessaries of life, and makes this earthly peace bear upon the peace of heaven; for this alone can be truly called and esteemed the peace of the reasonable creatures, consisting as it does in the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God. When we shall have reached that peace, this mortal life shall give place to one that is eternal, and our body shall be no more this animal body which by its corruption weighs down the soul, but a spiritual body feeling no want, and in all its members subjected to the will. In its pilgrim state the heavenly city possesses this peace by faith; and by this faith it lives righteously when it refers to the attainment of that peace every good action towards God and man; for the life of the city is a social life.
What do we teach our children about our engagement with civic life? Do we pray with them for the peace of the city? Do we note the existence of demons and demonic forces that are at work in society? Do we even lay out the options for how Christians have thought about our engagement with civic life? How do we address questions that are before us now in the 21st century, that cannot be ignored: What is man? What is a woman? What is a family? What is sex for? What is oppression? What is justice?
I think that reading and remembering Augustine will help supply us with prudence that comes from seeing that what comes around has been around and that the insights gained by Augustine in the early 400s can still guide us today.
Dual Citizenship–One Provisional
Before we move on to consider Augustine as a teacher, I would like to note two more important contributions he makes to political philosophy. He believes we hold dual citizenship. Have you ever met someone who had two passports, two citizenships? I know someone who is an American citizen and has residency status in Italy and Israel. He is considering getting Italian citizenship. He leads the Gordon in Orvieto program in Italy, his two sons were educated in Italian schools but now they are finishing high school in Jerusalem. Sound complicated?
Augustine is not a purist when life is complex. He does not reduce the complexity of life to simple maxims and categories. On the other hand, he is not lost in the forest, unable to see the forest for all the trees. He toggles back forth between the one and the many–seeing unity in diversity. Americans right now seem unable to think with this kind of deftness, preferring simple slogans that retard thought. Just as anarchy leads eventually to a dictator or despot, so anarchy of thought leads many (out of sheer mental exhaustion) to heed a clear, strong voice. And perhaps we do need a voice crying in the wilderness–but it ought not to be a simple voice.
Augustine writes 1000 pages so you might not think he writes simply. And we might not want to start our 8th graders with the reading of this book. We might ourselves even start with an excellent summary like Joseph Claire’s book, Reading Augustine (120 pages!), or Peter Brown's biography of Augustine.
Augustine notes that we have dual citizenship. This means that we are citizens of the heavenly city, but we are also civic participants in our own polis and nation. Claire writes:
For Augustine, there are ultimately only two cities and two kinds of citizens. But in a second sense we are all always already dual citizens: citizens of a temporal political community and of an ultimate eschatological reality in which we mysteriously already participate by anticipation. (RA, 99)
Claire goes on to note that because our primary allegiance is always to the heavenly city, that our participation civil affairs will be limited:
The universal conception of “humanity”--and the fellow-feeling and identification with all other human beings that it denotes–flowers in the new form of limited politics found in the Christian community. The church, in Augustine’s eyes, should strive to become the site of achievement for true diversity, meted out through love of both neighbor and enemy–as a signal to the political community in which it finds itself of the heavenly city’s reality. (RA, 100)
This kind of “human” participation does mean that we find politics a “neutral place.” To be sure, we live in a saeculum–an age–and this secular age means the age of Christ’s reign in the midst of the intermingling of the city of God and the city of man. To be intermingled does not mean, however, that Christians submit to some kind of “neutral space” in which we must lay down our commitments to Christ as Lord over all. Here is Wilken on the subject from his essay “No Other Gods:”
It has sometimes been argued that in the City of God, his apology contra paganos, Augustine made place for a neutral secular space that could accommodate paganism and promote a “coherence of wills” about things relevant to this mortal life. Here there could be a joining of hands of the city of God and the earthly city for the cultivation of the arts of civilization. But for Augustine, a neutral secular space could only be a society without God, subject to the libido dominandi, the lust for power. He was convinced that even in this fallen world there could be no genuine peace or justice where God is not honored. RCP61 ‘When a man does not serve God, what amount of justice are we to suppose exists in his being?’ Where a people has no regard for God, there can be no social bond, no common life, no virtue. ‘Although the virtues are reckoned by some people to be genuine and honorable when they are related only to themselves and are sought for no other end, even then they are puffed up and proud, and so are to be accounted vices rather than virtues.’” (RCP61)
The secular is not a non-religious space of neutrality but rather a time of the entanglement of the two cities on their way toward their eternal destinations in heaven or hell. It is the time where the two kinds of citizens are mixed together, both in the church and in the nation. It is the time we have been allotted to bear this interwovenness in society and within ourselves–and to reorder our loves, making us fit to become heavenly citizens. Each individual is torn between the two cities and daily must renew her loyalty. This provides a chastened, self-critical edge to Augustine’s view of education and citizenship. In his reading of pagan literature, there are bright moments of self-transcendence for the common good to be found and imitated even in pagan history. There is also the possibility that we can delude ourselves and become even more prideful through the reading of Scripture, as Augustine says is the case with the Pelagian doctrine of Christian perfectionism. For Augustine, all of these distinctions–the enemy and friend, the prideful and humble, the lovers of God and the lovers of the self, the two kinds of citizens, and the two cities and our judgments about them–are always provisional from the human point of view. They are provisional because the inhabitants of the two cities, the ultimately prideful and humble, are intermingled in this present age. They are provisional because we are already dual citizens; our ultimate citizenship and our provisional citizenship (as in citizens of of the USA or some other political body).
Augustine as Teacher
By now it should be clear that Augustine is a good teacher. He does his research, he thinks deeply, he analyzes, he synthesizes; he thinks analogically, he allows the Scriptures to flow through everything he writes and says; he frequently breaks into doxology and praise. In The City of God as in The Confessions–he models good teaching. We as educators should emulate him.
Augustine also writes directly about teaching–chiefly in his book De Doctrina Christiana (sometimes translated as On Christian Teaching). There are dozens of insights about teaching in this rich little book that should be studied by any classical educator. Here are just a few:
But no one disputes that it is much more pleasant to learn lessons presented through imagery, and much more rewarding to discover meanings that are won only with difficulty. Those who fail to discover what they are looking for suffer from hunger whereas those who do not look, because they have it in front of them often die of boredom. In both situations the danger is lethargy. (DDC32)
Regarding tortuous rules about various matters: It is as if someone who wanted to give rules about walking were to tell you that your back foot should not be raised until you have put down your front foot, and then describe in minute detail how you should move the joints of your limbs and knees. He would be right; walking in any other way is impossible. But people find it easier to walk by actually doing these things than by paying attention to them as they do them or by assimilating rules when they hear them.
In all these matters it is often true that the pleasure derived from the open display of truth is great that the assistance gained from discussing or examining it, though indeed these things can sharpen the intellect, which is a good thing provided that they do not also make people more mischievous or conceited or, in other words, more inclined to deceive others by plausible talk and questioning, or to think that by learning these things they have done something marvelous which entitles them to consider themselves superior to ordinary unsophisticated people. (DDC II: XXXVII 62)
Let us then adapt ourselves to our students with a love which is at once the love of a brother, of a father and of a mother.n When once we are linked to them in heart, the old familiar things will seem new to us. So great is the influence of a sympathetic mind that, when our students are affected by us as we speak and we by them as they learn, we dwell in each other and thus both they, as it were, speak within us what they hear, while we after a fashion learn in them what we teach. (De cat.rud., 17)
The more we love those to whom we speak, the more we want them to like what we speak and so the more careful we are in speaking to them what they need.(De cat.rud., 14)
Note the subtlety of Augustine’s thinking here about pedagogy, just as we have seen it about politics. Teaching and learning is an art and is complex–so is politics. Augustine is a blended thinker who tracks with the one and the many, substance and accidents, sameness and difference. He is, after all, trinitarian (and wrote a book about the Trinity) and has learned that God himself is one and many (and mysterious), his creation is the same, as are we humans who are at the same time both flesh and spirit–and who knows how?
The affairs of men in society are also mysterious and complex. The affairs of student and teacher are the same.
But note once more Augustine’s emphasis on love in the last passages. The pedagogy of Augustine is a pedagogy of love–rightly ordered love inspired by Christ’s love for us, compelling us to love God in our teaching, and love the students he has given us in mutual indwelling of truth which is Christ himself.
Conclusion
Are you an Augustinian? If you are a classical educator, chances are that you are whether you knew it or not. How conscious of an Augustinian you are is another matter. I believe the renewal of classical Christian education is already largely Augustinian, but not sufficiently so, not consciously enough. Augustine offers us a blended wine, like the great wines of Italy that might be 80% cabernet and 20% syrah, aged in oaken barrels–two wines to match the two cities. Others offer us a hard, strong cabernet that wakes one up with a powerful front end and serves as a tonic and even a shock to the senses–but which does not reflect the subtle, mingled reality which is the life of a pilgrim. Let the renewal of classical education continue as a pilgrimage while we love our Lord, our neighbors, and our enemies in the midst of the tumultuous times.