In times such as ours it can be easy to lose our Christian faith amidst the polarization of civil society. It is not at all obvious how the tenets of the catholic and apostolic faith bear upon the place of the Christian in contemporary society. Rather than commending a particular political theology for our present cultural moment in early 21st-century North America, I would like to draw attention to the important role played by pride and humility in the political theology at work in part of one of the most influential works of Christian late antiquity, namely, Augustine of Hippo’s City of God.
In the first half of City of God (Books 1-10) Augustine undertakes to expose the false theology underlying the politics of the Roman empire. The second half (11-22) promotes the kind of society that arises from a true embrace of the apostolic faith. There is a powerful convergence of these critical and constructive tasks within the tenth book, which functions as a joint between the two halves. In making his apologetic case that Christ’s Church and its sacrifices of worship offer the universal way of salvation, Augustine at once exposes the unsavory politics implicit in Platonic philosophy and promotes his vision of the politics enjoined by the true faith and worship of the catholic Church2. In short, Augustine lifts up the cruciform Christian community over against the political upshot of Platonism, which still attracted many of his contemporaries. Ingredient to Augustine’s argument is the contrast between the pride (superbia) of the Platonists and Christian humility (humilitas).3
Augustine presents the Church as the locus of true worship that forms and commends the humility necessary for aspiring to genuine human community, a community that prepares pilgrims (peregrini) in this life for the formation of the true res publica in eternal union with God.4 In contrast, alongside his strong affirmation of the shared commitments of Platonism and Christianity, he subtly traces the pervasive presence of pride and its effects on even the most superior form of Roman philosophy. It promotes at best a collection of individuals pursuing their own honor, station, and glory in competition with one another as well as the gods to whom they commend worship.
In book ten of his City of God, Augustine provides a compelling political-theological, apologetic argument for Christ’s provision of the universal way of salvation Porphyry believes must exist as a gift of divine providence despite never finding it in the philosophies and religions with which he was familiar. Augustine’s apology for Christianity as the true religion that offers proper worship is itself an exercise in political theology inasmuch as it “is the explicit attempt to relate discourse about God to the organization of bodies in space and time.”5 Augustine suggests that the Church forms its members to become exemplary participants in civil society. The sacrificial mediation of Christ (which lies at the heart of what Porphyry would consider divine providence and what Augustine would often spell out in terms of the “economy of salvation”) commends an alternative form of human community to the “community that is no community” in the Roman Empire insofar as it is a manifestation of the “earthly city” (ciuitas terrena).6 In the course of his argument, Augustine exposes the false worship, theology, and politics of the prevailing Platonism of his day and promotes the true worship, theology, and political vision intrinsic to Christianity.7
Augustine grants that as a Platonist, Porphyry is in a position to discover Christ and his grace, but rejects both. Porphyry understands that the initiatory rites of the gods do not purify the mind of ignorance or the faults to which it leads. This can “only be done through the ‘fatherly mind’ (πατρικός νοῦς), that is, the Mind or Intellect” whom Augustine identifies with the Wisdom or Word of God, the second Person of the Trinity.8 Unfortunately, Porphyry does not recognize “Christ, the Power of God and the Wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24), but “[shies] away from his saving humility, inflated with the swollen pride of useless learning.”9 He despises Christ “on account of the body which he received from a woman, and because of the shame of the cross.”10 Porphyry could not assent to the Wisdom of God‘s undergoing physical embodiment and tangible suffering being anything more than “folly and weakness.”11 What he fails to recognize is that the crucified Christ he considers to be shameful and foolish is the “grace, which heals the weakness of those who do not proudly boast of their delusive happiness, but instead make a humble admission of their genuine misery.”12 On the subject of grace, Augustine implores his reader in the wake of the now deceased Porphyry to see the Word’s incarnation as “the supreme instance of grace” that should elicit deep gratitude and bestows on Christ’s members “the spirit of [the Son of God’s] love by the mediation of a man.”13 While “humility was the necessary condition for submission to this truth,” Augustine suggests, the philosophers are simply too proud to be persuaded that “God has assumed a human soul and body.”14 Augustine expresses astonishment at their incredulity, however, for although Platonists uphold a consubstantial relationship between corporeal and incorporeal realities in the body-soul composition of human persons (and the world, for that matter), they reject such a relationship between two incorporeal realities: the Word and the soul assumed in the incarnation.
