Augustine and saeculum

In responding to Witherington the other week, I criticized what I called the “two-step” that is evident in a good bit of Christian political thought – the move from explicitly Christian norms that apply to the church and the private sphere to “natural” norms for the public sphere. I urged instead what I described as an Augustinian logic, and attempted to make sense of acts of public justice, including public violence, without abandoning the evangelical demands of Jesus. Steven Wedgeworth wrote to suggest that Augustine himself advocates natural law, and engages in this very two-step. Here I want to briefly defend and clarify what I said about Augustine.

First, my main beef is with theologies that implicitly or explicitly endorse secular order, in the sense of a bounded public space where religiously grounded moral norms and religiously founded rationality are ruled off limits. I think secular political order is mainly a phenomenon of the past four centuries. There would be some versions of this in pre-modern Christian political thought, but it would be complicated and improved by other commitments. What I had in mind was something like Niebuhr’s tragic moral man/immoral society dualism.

Second, that position is not, I think, what Augustine teaches. Here I am relying on a recent, as-yet unpublished paper by Paul Griffiths.

Augustine did not believe in secular order as moderns understand it because for Augustine (as Milbank argues) the saeculum was a time and not a space. The saeculum is simply the pre-eschatological time, the pre-eschatological condition, in which every human institution partakes. The church is a “secular” institution in this sense as much as the state is.

We mighty take “secular” in a more modern sense as referring to universally-accepted rules and foundational assumptions that ground human society. Does Augustine believe that there are such things are secular norms for political life? Does he believe that there are norms that Christians and pagans share? Augustine has a nuanced position on this. On the one hand, there is a great range of public activities that both Christian and non-Christian rulers would engage in, and do so virtually indistinguishably. There would be little visible difference between Christian and pagan on questions like whether or where to build a road.

Even when Christian and pagan rulers do the same thing, however, there are times when they do the same thing differently. Even when building roads, the pious Christian ruler would engage in the activity for the glory of God and to benefit his subjects, rather than, for instance to win fame. Both Christian and pagan emperors employ torture, but the Christian would order torture penitently: ” de necessitatibus meis erue me ,” he will say; “deliver my from my necessities.”

But Augustine rejects the notion that there is such a thing as a theologically neutral social norm or premise. Goodness is goodness by participation in the original and ultimate Good, and so no law can be, or be judged, good that does not in some fashion share in God’s goodness. There are no norms that can be evaluated or discussed without reference to God. Hence his famous departure from the Ciceronian definition of the res publicae and his denial that Rome qualified as a just society: For how can a society be just that does not render everyone his due, most especially render God due thanks for His gifts?

There is clearly a dualism in Augustine. He writes of two cities, after all. But the dualism does not lend itself to secular order.