Augustine’s Confessions XII as a Response to Plato’s Republic

• In Event: Intersecting Themes in Classical Political Thought

Abstract

Augustine viewed Christianity as completing the political and ethical aspirations of ancient political philosophy. Just as the ancients viewed friendship as the form of political life, Augustine viewed love of God and neighbor as the form for a new political form, the church (ecclesia). By doing so, he attempts to resolve certain paradoxes that lay within the ancients’ account of friendship’s relationship to political life. This paper explores Augustine’s attempt and extends my previous work both on the ancient view of friendship (The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship [2016]) and on Augustine (Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World [2001]).

Augustine’s Confessions Book XIII has rightly been read as an outline for the constitution of the Christian church (ecclesia). However, commentators have been too quick to read retrospectively Augustine as offering a prospective justification of Catholicism or Protestantism. Further, none have considered its precedents in political philosophy and its broader political teaching.

This paper considers Augustine’s argument in Confessions XIII as his answer to the good regime as set out by Plato’s Republic. Just as Plato has Socrates set out the good regime in speech patterned after the paradigm laid up in the heavens, so too Augustine sets out the good ecclesia in speech that has been created, with the heavens, by his God. By treating the Biblical narrative of the seven days of creation both ontologically and historically, he claims the ecclesia exists both eternally and in time, and constitutes the apex of creation insofar as humanity’s song of praise for its creator fulfils its own aspirations for completion; such completion expresses justice. Just as kallipolis is THE just city for Plato, so too the ecclesia is THE just regime for Augustine. Moreover, Plato’s philosopher, whose soul is the model for kallipolis, finds its counterpart in Augustine’s homo spiritualis. Augustine’s argument that the ecclesia stands at the apex of historical creation is also precursor to the Enlightenment ideal that the universal homogeneous state constitutes the completion of history, and shares with it both its humane aspirations as well as its concealed modes of unjust domination.

The political teaching of Confessions XIII that stands in relation to his teaching on the ecclesia is twofold. First, political founding—as an act of constituting shelter for the oppressed against the strong— is treated in terms of neighborly love, and as a moment of his historico-ontological account of creation. The creation of political order is in continuity with the creation of the ecclesia. This reading reflects Augustine’s view of political life as a natural good for human beings, though one that is corrupted through original sin.

Second, as Augustine’s version of the just city that, like Plato’s kallipolis, purports to fulfill human being’s longings for completion, it serves as a model for its main competitor, historically existent political regimes. While not to be equated with the figurative earthly city, political regimes are confronted with the same fundamental logic of domination that Augustine ascribes to the earthly city, which is that as mortal creatures they seek to perpetuate themselves as immortal. As images of cosmic order, they seek to impose their rule by means of glorification onto the future in a godlike manner, which is the route of their injustice.

In Confessions XIII, Augustine claims that the ecclesia is created by his God and so escapes this logic of mortal domination in the mode of the immortal; God permits the ecclesia to endure even if its worldly manifestation disappears or transforms which is alien and even a scandal to political regimes. The example of this free societas, whose form it is to be unburdened by the necessity of imposing political form, offers the latter a salve for the toxic passions (e.g., lust for glory) that political regimes produce. Despite Augustine’s own mixed record on this score (i.e., his advocacy for coercing Donatists who had threatened the integrity of the Catholic church in North Africa), Confessions XIII exhibits a societas predicated upon non-dominating practices of freedom and of love.

As a societas formed by love of God and neighbor, Augustine treats the ecclesia as the culmination of the political friendship teachings of the ancient philosophers. They prayed for the good regime composed by friends who find their ultimate freedom in leisure, and whose founding is nonviolent. Augustine thought he found that recipe in the ecclesia as described in Confessions XIII.

Author

• John F. von Heyking, University of Lethbridge