I: ULTIMUS ROMANORUM
The Roman town of Hippo Regius, today the city of Annaba in Algeria, owes its name to the Kings of Numidia and thus to the defeat of Carthage, whose ashes were molded by the Roman Republic to create this protectorate, which have been reduced to part of the African province after King Jugurtha of Numidia had grown too confident in his own power.
This was a land of defeat, where the victors settled amongst the ruins and the defeated had to satisfy themselves with assimilation into the conquering society.
However, assimilation was not as advanced as in other places. At the time of the Fall of the Roman Empire, Punic was still spoken in various localities in the province. The descendants of Carthage had continued to engage in extensive commerce throughout the Golden Age of the Roman Republic and the early Principate until the terminal decline of the Empire.
In a way, Africa had been uniquely peaceful - of all the provinces of the Empire, it had been affected the least by civil and foreign wars. Rome had no enemies left to its south-west after the defeat of King Jugurthaof Numidia. Egypt, the only foreign power that could have threatened Roman Africa after that, was in turn defeated and incorporated into the Roman order after the Battle of Actium.
It is no coincidence taht this victory opens the reign of Augustus as sole ruler of Rome and the true Imperial Era.
Aurelius Augustinus was born in this country to a mixed family. His mother Monica have been a Christian, while his father was, prior to his deathbed conversion, a lifelong Pagan. In such a family setting, it is no wonder young Augustine had developed an inquisitive, deliberate attitude to religion.
The pensive boy was sent to Carthage to finish his education. In his case, it meant that he became an accomplished student of Neo-Platonism and have abandoned his father's Paganism in favor of Manicheism. Excelling in his studies and creating beneficial ties with the Manichean intelligentsia he became a teacher. But Carthage was but a backwater where students had little interest in learning, so he moved to establish a school in Rome.
The old capital of Rome had decayed due to centuries of civil wars in which each side sought to capture the Eternal City. Constantinople, the New Rome on the Bosporus, had already eclipsed the Western court, whose emperor shifted his seat between the naval center of Ravenna on the Adriatic shore and the land forces bastion of Milan at the foot of the Alps.
That meant that a dichotomy existed at the heart of Italy: Rome remained the cultural academic and official capital of the Western Empire, but all the benefits of the status of the Capital - administrative incomes, Imperial attention and so forth - was flowing to the far north or east of the Peninsula.
It is no surprise then that the talented Numidian teacher of Rhetoric soon found diminished Rome too limited to his ambitions and took a professoriate in Milan, in near proximity to the Imperial Court.
Augustine had not lingered in Milan, the only important consequence of his stay was his conversion to Christianity. After a very shot career in the Capital of the World, he returned to his hometown of Tagaste in Numidia, where his only son died. In his despair and grief, Augustine sold the family property, now without an heir, set aside his lover (the mother of the boy) and joined the lowest rank of the Christian priesthood, moving to Hippo Regius in 391 AD.
II: DEFESORIS ECCLESIAE
At age 36 we find Augustine a man who either left or was left bereft of his career, his family, his birthright and his home. From a highly celebrated court intellectual he was turned into a lowly Presbyter ("elder"- the lowest rank in the priesthood) in the mainstream African Church. It seemed his candle burned out too brightly and too quickly and now his life shall be dim and obscure.
Nevertheless Augustine spirit and his intellectual capacities seemed to shine brighter under such constraints. Employing his considerable talents against the Donatist sect (which posited that only priests which have not denied Christ under Pagan rule may offer the Sacrament to the believers, and by extension, that a priest must be blameless) and the Pelagians (who claimed One makes Oneself deserving of Divine Grace by Good Works), he quickly rose in fame and rank in the church.
His career again seemed to be shining bright again. He was a bishop of Hippo by 396. An admired hierarch and theologian. Life were not what young Augustine had expected, but the middle aged cleric had an enviable career.
III: FUROR TEUTONICUS
In 406, ice had covered the surface of the Rhine, thick enough for a man to cross over and cross over did three German tribes: the Suebi, Alani and the Vandals.
Those were not the first German tribes to cross over to Roman territory, nor even of individuals and families of these very tribes to do so.
The Goths have been living, sometimes as allies sometimes as foes of Rome, on Roman land for nearly a century and a half. Within Augustine's own lifetime, they have fought three great battles against Roman armies. Their king Alaric, who ascent his throne around the same time Augustine attained his episcopal seat, by cooperating with the Eastern Emperor Theodosius and led the latter's invasion of the West in the Battle of the Frigid River in 394.
The death of the emperor the following year had led to chaos in the administration of the empire, now once again split between East and West, not the least of which was the unclear status of the treaties between Rome and her barbarian allies. The King had chosen to interpret this ambiguity as clearing him from allegiance to either of Theodosius sons and marched on the Balkan provinces.
From then on, in quick succession, the turmoil in Constantinople increased rapidly. A barbarian enemy one day, a foreign chieftain could be declared an ally, friend and Mater of the Soldiers of Rome the next, only to fall from power and fame and have his head delivered as a gift. Alaric's main rival, Stilicho, was a half-Vandal general who had effectively ruled the empire for 13 years before his execution by Honorius, the imbecilic emperor of the West in 408. He was replaced by a minister named Olympius, whose policy was to resist all Germanic influence. The King of the Goths, Alaric could not let the new government stand. In 408, after devastating Northern Italy, he laid siege to Rome itself and by 410, the Eternal City was sacked.
In the next few years, while the Imperial government had continued to plod along in Italy and the western provinces, it was becoming clearer and clearer that the Roman World-Community, the Polis encompassing "all the lands worthy of human habitation" had already ceased to exist as a fully integrated society. As provinces such as Africa became isolated, Rome as the earth-wide city was no more.
III: THE WARRING STATES
In the confusion of the collapse of the Roman order, Augustine offers an alternative point of view to his Christian readership.
Answering allegations (real or imaginary) that the Fall of Rome was the revenge of the old gods for their abandonment, Augustine advances the argument that the old gods had never defended their believers ("it is men who defended images, not images men") and that Christianity actually moderated the sack of Rome since the Germanics, who were largely Christians themselves, refrained from violating the Christian sanctuaries which sheltered many Romans, Christian and Pagan alike.
After comforting Christians that the loss of material goods is of no consequence and the ravishing of the body does not affect the pure soul (the fact that he had to bring up this last point prove that the Germanics' Christianity did not offer complete protection), he offers them an alternative identity to their now-defunct Imperial Citizenship: that of Christians and Citizens of the "State of God".
For Augustine, this identity is not connected to explicit confession of faith or visible presence in the Church. Indeed he outright declares:
But let this city bear in mind, that among her enemies lie hid those who are destined to be fellow citizens, that she may not think it a fruitless labor to bear what they inflict as enemies until they become confessors of the faith.
So, too, as long as she is a stranger in the world, the city of God has in her communion, and bound to her by the sacraments, some who shall not eternally dwell in the lot of the saints. Of these, some are not now recognized; others declare themselves, and do not hesitate to make common cause with our enemies in murmuring against God, whose sacramental badge they wear.
These men you may to-day see thronging the churches with us, to- morrow crowding the theatres with the godless. But we have the less reason to despair of the reclamation even of such persons, if among our most declared enemies there are now some, unknown to themselves, who are destined to become our friends.
In truth, these two cities are entangled together in this world, and intermixed until the last judgment effect their separation. I now proceed to speak, as God shall help me, of the rise, progress, and end of these two cities; and what I write, I write for the glory of the city of God, that, being placed in comparison with the other, it may shine with a brighter luster.
(Augustine of Hippo, City of God I:35)
By this statement Augustine warns his fellow Christians of becoming an earthly , visible faction arraigned for its own earthly gained by political means. Instead he wants them to behave as Christians ought to behave within their state, to love their neighbors and be good and useful to them, by which they would ATTAIN a better state- that of Heaven, which, as long as they have not mended their lives in accordance with Christ's teachings. they STILL LACK, despite all confessions and protestations.
This view is clearly in line with his anti-Donatist and anti-Pelagian views - it matters not if someone professed himself a Christian or a Pagan at any time. God accepts all unto His kingdom, as long as they truly belong to Him. This is not EARNED by good works, but proved by them.
He further explains that the politics of the Earthly State, fueled by vanity, envy, hatred and greed originates and is sustained by the Devil and his rebellion against God. This State is arraigned and entangled with the Heavenly State and its citizens. Only by obeying the Law of God, that is, by living good, pure life and loving their neighbors, can the citizens of the latter be distinguished from that of the former.
It is by Love of God that One arrives at the State of God, and the Love of God demands the Love of One's neighbor. The Love of Self can bring men unto the Earthly State which exists to preserve their fortune and bodies, but is ultimately destined to decay and corruption, even when maintained by the useful virtues, such as the ones that led Rome to earthly success and peace.
The Earthly State is not bad because it is aimed towards plunder, lechery and war. While it thrives, it does so because it seeks peace, justice and virtue for its own sake and its citizens' self-love. But this very same self-love brings about the corruption of the State as rulers focus on their own fortune at the expense of their subjects which brings it to ruin. Even at its height, sacrifice and virtue in service of the Earthly State still cannot bring a man to the ultimate reward of Heaven, since it is motivated by self love.
Therefore, to conclude, to become a citizen of the Heavenly State, a Christian must be a good citizen of his Earthly State but not out of loyalty towards the latter, borne out of Self-Love, but out of that of the former, which stems from the love of God, which demands love of neighbor.
IV: THAT HEAVENLY CROWN
When the dust have settled and the former European provinces of Rome settled into the established kingdoms of Medieval Christendom, Augustine's answer to the collapse of the Roman State proved extremely influential in its application.
Christian political thought, for the next few centuries, will be influenced greatly by Augustine. But Augustine was writing a tract of comfort and encouragement to Roman citizens who now had to live without the Earthly State in which they were brought up, not a manual for rulers.
Therefore some adaptation had to be made. There were thinkers such as Giles of Rome who concluded from it that only Christians can be full citizens. This opinion, which flies in the face of Augustine's declaration that only the Final Judgment shall discern between the Citizenship of the Earthly and Heavenly States, was fortunately rejected by most medieval thinkers, but were still invoked from time to time in regards to the treatments of Jews throughout Europe and Muslims in the reemerging Christian kingdoms of Spain and Sicily.
The theory that was gleaned from Augustine held that the State as it actually exists is a pact between persons of good intent who are citizens of both the Earthly and Heavenly States. As long as Self-Love directs the citizens of the Earthly State towards justice and peace, those of the Heavenly State can and ought maintain the pact and the resulting mixed State out of their Love of God which demands Love of Neighbor, whether said neighbor upholds the same love or not. Whenever faced with a choice, the Christian must strive to give his State a "godly prince" who is himself a Citizen of the Heavenly State - that is, who rules out of love of his neighbor-subjects stemming from his love of God (and as Augustine says above, this ruler's confession of the Christian faith is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for his citizenship of the Heavenly State). Such a ruler must demonstrate his virtue in his private life as well as in his public functions.
That the practice of such virtues as patience, forgiveness and forbearance may cost the ruler his kingdom is of some concern to the medieval theories, but not a great one. A kingdom that can be maintained only by vice is not worth having, since a crown retained by sin is a manifestation of the Earthly State alone and is destined to destruction either way, as the example of Rome shows.
By giving up such a corruptible crown, the Godly Prince gains an incorruptible one in Heaven, or as Charles I is made to say in his pseudo-autobiography "Eikon Basilike" :
Tho' clogg'd with weighs of miseries / Palm-like Depress'd, I higher rise
And as th'unmoved Rock outbraues / The boist'rous Windes and raging waues
So triumph I. And shine more bright / In sad Affliction's darksom night.
That Splendid, but yet toilsom Crown / Regardlessly I trample down.
With joie I take this Crown of thorn / Though sharp, yet easie to be born.
That heavn'nlie Crown, already mine / I view with eies of Faith diuine.
I slight vaine things, and do embrace / Glorie, the just reward of Grace.
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