Alan Jacobs

Not closely related to my main argument, but just a brief note: 

Longtermism is the version of effective altruism that wants us to think about our ethical imperatives on a much vaster historical scale; it warns us against discounting the value of the lives of future people. (In his retelling of the Good Samaritan story, Phil Christman could have added a longtermist who would have scorned the Effective Samaritan for thinking only of the local and immediate. A longtermist, seeing a wounded man by the side of the road, would surely have “passed by on the other side.”)

Augustine is a kind of longtermist, in the sense that he thinks we should focus not on our immediate desires and concerns but on our eternal destiny. Thus his indifference to politics as we usually conceive of it: “As for this mortal life, which ends after a few days' course, what does it matter under whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not force him to impious and wicked acts?” (CD V.17) 

C. S. Lewis is writing very much under the sign of Augustine when, in his great sermon “The Weight of Glory,” he says this: 

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. 

It is a view that, if does not consign politics to the realm of adiaphora, quite radically decenters it.

We often hear that evangelicalism — and, often, other forms of orthodox Christianity — has been “too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good.” It has been so focused on “pie in the sky by and by” that it has neglected the prophets’ call to seek shalom — justice and peace in the City. And that critique is absolutely valid. But maybe we could use a little more longtermist decentering of politics these days. 

In an interview Andy Summers once said “If you’re using alternate tunings, you just don’t know enough chords.” Yeah, but Andy can do things like this with his chord-making hand. Not fair.

My friend Rick Gibson found this in an old issue of the Bell System Technical Journal.

Ezra Klein: “Jonathan Frankle, the chief scientist at MosaicML and a computer scientist at Harvard, described … the ‘boring apocalypse’ scenario for A.I., in which ‘we use ChatGPT to generate long emails and documents, and then the person who received it uses ChatGPT to summarize it back down to a few bullet points, and there is tons of information changing hands, but all of it is just fluff. We’re just inflating and compressing content generated by A.I.’” This is precisely where I think we’re headed.

My friend Brad East wrote with a partial dissent to something I say in this post:

When you say the City of God precedes the church, it seems to me you're making a semantic decision that determines your conceptual interpretation. Such a claim makes sense only if you have predetermined that “church” means something like “the visible institution begun at Pentecost and continued in the public apostolic succession of episcopal administration” (or whatever). But all kinds of Christian writers have used the term "church" to mean something different and larger than that. In which case it's not that the City of God isn't the church; it's that the church means something different than we often suppose in our colloquial speech.

Suppose “church” is coextensive with “the people of God,” which in turn is coextensive with “Abraham's children,” which in turn is coextensive with “God's children.” (You could add other convertible terms: “all the elect” and/or “all the saved” and/or “all who shall see God face to face.”) If that's true, then you no longer have to distinguish between “City of God” and “church,” arguing that in Augustine's or our usage the latter doesn't mean the former. Rather, the conceptual range of “city” clarifies and expands our ordinary, or at least theological, usage and definition of “church.” So that “the City of God is the church and vice versa” redraws the boundaries of the rather [crabbed] definition some of us presuppose when we use the word “church.” So that, further, Augustine is narrating the course of God's church from Adam/Abel to the Parousia and beyond into the new creation, it's just that Augustine is helping us to understand what “church” means, or should mean, in our concepts and speech. 

To which I responded: 

Let’s make a distinction between what we — seeking to speak rightly about God's Church — might want to say and what Augustine says. I’m just trying to understand Augustine, not make any claims myself. So what does he say about the relationship between City and Church? 

Well, he’s not perfectly consistent. At one point he speaks of “the City of God, that is to say, God’s Church” (XIII.16), but I think that’s a moment of carelessness. Much more often he speaks of the Church as the part of the City that hasn’t yet come into its heavenly inheritance, that is still wayfaring. He often says that the angels are the larger part of the City of God, and “with us they make one City of God…. Part of this City, the part which consists of us, is on pilgrimage; part of it, the part which consists of the angels, helps us on our way” (X.7). And the angels are not the children of Abraham, nor are they the “elect.” 

So I think on the Augustinian reading the City of God does precede the Church, because the angels (“all the company of Heaven”) precede the Fall, and it is with the Fall (exitus) that our pilgrimage (reditus) begins. Augustine believed, with virtually the whole Christian tradition, that (a) the serpent in the garden is to be identified with Satan and (b) Satan is a fallen angel. Q.E.D. 

He also speaks fairly often of those who are part of the visible Church, who share the sacraments with the rest of us, but who will not inherit eternal life (I.35).

So for all those reasons I think Augustine does tend to make a fairly clear distinction between the Church — which we might define as “the faithful among the visible ekklesia, those who are genuinely on pilgrimage towards God” — and the City of God, which is a larger and older entity of which the Church (as just defined) is a part. 

Reader, make your own decision! 

Bought this copy in the summer of 1980, for my first semester of grad school. I think it’s gonna hold together for the current reading….

I got an email from a friend regarding this post: “What do you mean ‘Augustine isn’t interested in political theology or ecclesiology’???” 

Hey, that’s not me (I say, evasively), that’s the great David Knowles. But Knowles makes a powerful point. His introduction to the 1972 Pelican edition of the City of God is by some distance the best brief commentary on the book I’ve ever read. Unfortunately, though that translation (by Henry Bettenson) is still in print, the move from Pelican to Penguin Classics was accompanied by the commissioning of a new introduction, and then, some years later, still another one. Neither is as insightful and useful as the Knowles original. (By the way, the chapter on Augustine in Knowles’s best-known book, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, remains, I think, an outstanding survey of Augustine’s mind.) 

Anyway, in his introduction to the City of God Knowles writes this: 

To our eyes it is remarkable that Augustine very rarely identities the City of God with the Catholic Church. He does so at least once: ‘The City of God, that is, God's Church’ (Bk xIll, 16). He identifies the other city with the course of Gentile kingdoms before Christ, and the City of God with the ‘People of God’ from Adam to the birth of Christ. After the resurrection those who believe in Christ, the City of God, are in fact the Church, just as those that disbelieve are in fact the Roman authorities and the pagans of the Empire, but there is no confrontation of Church and State. We can see the reason for this. The constituent qualities of the two cities are their two objects of love, the love of God leading to contempt of self, and the love of self leading to contempt of God (Bk XIV, 28). The two cities are therefore two loves, and these are an inward and spiritual, not an outward and political distinction. 

Augustine repeatedly says that Abel is a citizen of the City of God, so that City not only precedes the Church, it precedes … well, almost everything in human history. 

Later — this regarding political theology — Knowles notes Augustine’s comment (CD V.17) that because life is so short is really doesn’t matter much what kind of political order you live in. And he continues, 

Certainly there is an entire absence of any doctrine of Church-State relationship in the City of God. No doubt it would anachronisic to expect anything of the kind. Yet to most historians who consider the beginnings of that age-old confrontation, the conversion and subsequent patronage, not to say tutelage, of the Church by Constantine marks an epoch, a point of no return, when the Church was first faced with a secular master, benevolent though he might be. Augustine says not a word on this matter, though it had occupied the mind of his father in God, Ambrose. 

That is, for the argument of the City of God, the conversion of Constantine is not significant. Augustine has some things to say about Constantine - for instance, that he was happy (beatus) in a way that no pagan emperor would ever be happy, and was granted the privilege of founding a new city, Constantinople, that contained no temples to demons. But he gives no indication that the existence of Christian emperors changes anything about the characters and conditions of the two cities. Therefore, says Knowles, to think that Augustine is concerned with the nature of the Church or with the proper relationship between the sacred and secular powers is to impose our categories on a book that works in a different manner than we are accustomed to.

Thus for my current project the challenge for me as a reader — and I am just a reader, not a scholar or a theologian — is to try to read him in ways that don’t cram him into the Procrustean bed of my expectations and familiar categories.  

My previous post discussed the way Augustine sets up his City of God as antithetical to the Aeneid. Auden’s witty poem “Secondary Epic” may be seen as a kind of pendant to Augustine’s critique. It focuses not on the prophetic narration of Anchises in Book VI, but rather on a complementary moment, the description in Book VIII of the Shield of Aeneas. About this description Auden has some questions:    

How was your shield-making god to explain
Why his masterpiece, his grand panorama
Of scenes from the coming historical drama
Of an unborn nation, war after war,
All the birthdays needed to pre-ordain
The Octavius the world was waiting for,
Should so abruptly, mysteriously stop,
What cause could he show why he didn’t foresee
The future beyond 31 B.C.,
Why a curtain of darkness should finally drop
On Carians, Morini, Gelonians with quivers,
Converging Romeward in abject file,
Euphrates, Araxes and similar rivers
Learning to flow in a latinate style,
And Caesar be left where prophecy ends,
Inspecting troops and gifts for ever?
Wouldn’t Aeneas have asked: — ‘What next?
After this triumph, what portends?’ 

And then the poem concludes, returning to Anchises: 

No, Virgil, no:
Behind your verse so masterfully made
We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed.
Your Anchises isn’t convincing at all:
It’s asking too much of us to be told
A shade so long-sighted, a father who knows
That Romulus will build a wall,
Augustus found an Age of Gold,
And is trying to teach a dutiful son
The love of what will be in the long run,
Would mention them both but not disclose
(Surely no prophet could afford to miss,
No man of destiny fail to enjoy
So clear a proof of Providence as this)
The names predestined for the Catholic boy
Whom Arian Odovacer will depose. 

The names of that “Catholic boy”? Romulus Augustulus. What poet could resist the irony? 

Auden borrows the title of his poem from A Preface to Paradise Lost, in which C. S. Lewis distinguishes primary epic — poems like the Iliad and Beowulf that show no obvious awareness that what they’re doing is, you know, epic — from secondary epic, which is always aware of its tradition its inheritance. Poems like the Aeneid and Paradise Lost are always gesturing towards their predecessors to make sure you know they are indeed epics. Secondary epics tend therefore to be at least somewhat polemical, in tension with their predecessors, because after all if those predecessors has said everything and said it perfectly there would be no need for later poems. Virgil has therefore set himself up to make an argument through his narrative, an argument about the destiny of Rome and the nature of heroism, and Auden joins Augustine in pointing out that the argument doesn’t work: No poet writing in the midst of history can plausibly convince us that a historical city is eternal and that heroic service to it can therefore have eternal consequences. The Pax Romana is not a telos, it’s merely an event among other events, subject to varying interpretations and to the power of change. “No, Virgil, no.” 

A terrific first-hand report/memoir by James Conaway on the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon. It’s such a bizarre story. Wikipedia gives more of the details.

Brian Phillips: “Talking about ‘prestige TV’ rather than good TV became a way to take the thorny question of aesthetic value out of the conversation. It was a way to sidestep difficult political discussions about representation and genre and how we distribute cultural spoils. But the faint derisiveness of the term also seemed to mark its user as more in the know, hipper, less naive about human motives. It was a way to talk about art that showed you weren’t enough of a sap to think art was really the goal. It showed you understood that the only things people really care about are gossip and money.”

Crime scene snapshot

There’s a general sense among athletes that, as Sloane Stephens says here, racial abuse is getting worse. What I find especially strange about this is how important it is for many people to abuse people whose race differs from theirs. They’re risking arrest and maybe imprisonment, losing their jobs, lifetime bans from stadiums. Nothing deters them, because they feel that public declaration of race hatred is absolutely necessary — maybe a compulsion.

Here’s the hypothesis I’m working with now: The problem with every theology of culture is that “culture” isn’t a biblical concept — isn’t clearly rooted in salvation history. And that is why I’m turning to Augustine. The idea of the two cities is deeply rooted in the biblical story and may be generative of certain important ideas that we can’t get through the use of a term like “culture.”

I think this is especially true because, as David Knowles points out, Augustine really isn’t interested in political theology, or for that matter in ecclesiology. In Book XV he says, “I classify the human race into two branches [generis]: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God’s will. I also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorically [mystice]. By two cities I mean two societies of human beings [duas societates hominum].” Two societies — this is what we might call a sociological or an ethnographic inquiry, and that’s much of what we’re after, or anyway I’m after, in a theology of culture. But, as James Davison Hunter says, with an emphasis on the symbols by which a given society is constituted and sustained. This is also where — see my previous post — Augustine’s application of rhetorical strategies to salvation history is especially imaginative and potent. I find remarkable and stimulating the idea that God’s providential shaping of history is a rhetorical act. For one thing, it implies that cities are in a sense rhetorical acts, saturated with symbolic and even archetypal meaning. 

Also: it’s somehow typical of Augustine that when he’s trying to think sociologically he looks first at the city that Cain founded and then at the City of God in Revelation 21, and hangs his whole inquiry on a line suspended between the two. What a peculiar and fascinating mind, and that’s why, I suppose, we keep returning to him. 

P.S. I wrote a bit about why I’m pursuing this project here over at my Buy Me a Coffee page. 

It’s newsletter day, and I’ve posted my second entry on the City of God.

This is good from Matt Yglesias: All political sides are vulnerable to misinformation.