[Volusianus] says, moreover, that Christ's preaching and teaching are wholly incompatible with our traditions of government, in that (as many people say) it is agreed that Christ taught that we ought to return no one evil for evil, and to offer the other cheek to someone who hits us, and to give our cloak to someone who insists on taking our tunic, and to go twice the distance with someone who requisitions our service. All these, he affirms, are contrary to our traditions of government. For who would endure to have something taken from him by an enemy, or would not wish to repay evil, by right of war, to the raider of a Roman province? Your Reverence understands what could be said about the rest. He thinks that all these concerns can be added to the question at issue, in that under Christian emperors, who strongly maintain the Christian religion, it is evident (even if he himself is silent on this) that such great evils have befallen the commonwealth.Footnote 1
This is part of a letter sent in 411/12 by Marcellinus, a Christian imperial officer, to Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius on the north African coast. They had met in Carthage, the capital city of Roman Africa, where Marcellinus was on a special mission from the imperial court to resolve a century-old dispute between two churches, each claiming to be the true and universal Church because the other had betrayed the faith.Footnote 2 Each also accused the other of appropriating church property and imperial funds, and of endangering public order. Some Christians had lobbied for the application of imperial laws against heretics; others argued that the Church should not call in the empire to settle disagreements, and each side claimed that the other had been the first to do this.Footnote 3
In 411 Marcellinus chaired the Conference of Carthage, a meeting of rival bishops, in which Augustine was prominent.Footnote 4 Also in Carthage, for a different reason, were several members of the traditional Roman elite, who had property in Africa but usually lived in the city of Rome or on their estates in Italy. Among them was the influential senator Volusianus, a former proconsul of Africa.Footnote 5 His concerns about Christianity and empire, passed on in the letter of Marcellinus, were shared by many others who had made the short sea-crossing from Italy to Africa as refugees from a war-band of Goths. In August 410 these Goths, led by Alaric, shocked the Roman world by sacking the city of Rome. The city was no longer the centre of government. Its inland site on the Italian peninsula, some distance from an adequate harbour and on a river which was liable to flood, was not the best base for meeting the challenges of the fifth-century world; in 410 the Western imperial court was based at Ravenna and the Eastern imperial court at Constantinople. But ‘Rome’ still signified the empire as well as the city, and the city was still the historic and symbolic capital of empire.
Marcellinus, Augustine and Volusianus exemplify a range of relationships between Church and empire in the early fifth century. Marcellinus, sent by a Christian emperor to resolve a dispute among churches, evidently did not see a conflict between his own Christian commitment and his role as an imperial civil servant. Augustine, a priest, then a bishop of the minority church in Roman Africa since the early 390s, did see a conflict, for himself if not for others. In his earlier career as a teacher of rhetoric, a skill which was essential for any public role, he had risen to be the publicly funded professor of rhetoric at Milan, where the Western imperial court was then in residence; he had hoped for a post in the imperial service, perhaps in the lowest rank of provincial governors.Footnote 6 His duties included speeches in praise of a boy emperor, and he later wrote that he and his audience knew that what he said was false.Footnote 7 Augustine had renounced this career for a life of prayer and study, and returned from Italy to his homeland in Africa, but after he was ordained he had to engage with imperial officers. Bishops in Late Antiquity were expected to intercede with local officials, and if necessary with the imperial court, both for the enforcement of imperial law against offenders and for mercy in punishing them. Volusianus, the third person in this exchange, was not Christian, but that was not an obstacle to holding senior offices in the service of Christian emperors. His status as a Roman aristocrat allowed him to voice his objections to Christian teaching, if not in public speeches, at least in conversations and letter-exchanges which were not intended to be private. His mother was Christian, and Augustine wrote to him offering to discuss any difficulties he found in Christian Scripture and belief. Volusianus responded politely but without commitment, preferring to converse about literature and philosophy.Footnote 8
Marcellinus was sufficiently impressed by Augustine to ask him (rather than the bishop of Carthage, Aurelius) for an effective response to the views expressed by Volusianus. His letter, with Augustine's reply, survived in Augustine's correspondence to illustrate both the context in which Augustine began work on City of God and the questions which prompted him to do so. As Marcellinus said, Volusianus raised some objections which had been answered many times: that magicians achieved greater miracles than those ascribed to Christ, and that, even if the incarnation could be explained, it was inexplicable that God should have changed his mind about sacrifice between the Old Testament and the New.Footnote 9 But some of the questions Volusianus asked or implied were specifically about empire. Is Christian teaching incompatible with running an empire? Was Christianity to blame for the troubles of the Roman empire, and in particular for the sack of Rome by a band of barbarians, two decades after a Christian emperor banned public and private worship of the gods who had given empire to Rome?
The emperor Theodosius I banned pagan worship in 391, the year Augustine became a priest. This was the culmination of dramatic change, in the years which are now called the fourth century, in the relationship of Church and empire.Footnote 10 For the first three centuries Christians had been at risk of trial and execution by imperial officers, because some Romans saw Christians as terror suspects deluded by a false religion, or held that Christians posed a threat because they would not sacrifice to the gods of Rome and would not obey the authorities when told to do so. Some Christians therefore saw Rome as a new Babylon, the oppressive and idolatrous empire which held God's people captive. Some Christians died as martyrs; some tried to explain that Christianity was no threat but fulfilled Roman ideals; many were more pluralist than their leaders wished. Persecution of Christians was usually local and short-lived, but the fourth century began with a sustained attempt by the emperor Diocletian to ensure that his subjects were united in sacrificing to the gods of Rome. For most people this was not a problem, because local gods were identified with Roman gods, and educated people could understand all these gods as expressions or aspects of the universal divine power. The religion of the Jews was protected by Roman law, and they would have offered sacrifice for the well-being of the empire if their Temple had not been destroyed; some Roman intellectuals equated the God of the Jews with Jupiter.Footnote 11 But Christians were taught that Christ's sacrifice was once for all, and that the gods of Rome were man-made idols or malign demons. For those who would not recant or compromise, Diocletian's attempt was the ‘Great Persecution’. Africa suffered less than some parts of the eastern Mediterranean, but different responses among Christians had led to the schism which still confronted Marcellinus a century later.
Persecution failed, and after the victory of Constantine, the first emperor who openly supported Christianity, only one emperor was openly not Christian. This was Julian, known to Christians as ‘the Apostate’, who dismissed Christians as ‘Galilaeans’ from the backwoods of an obscure province, in contrast with the great religious tradition of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. He did not persecute, but he did try to revive the traditional religion, especially the practice of blood sacrifice. Julian's reign lasted eighteen months, and when he died on a disastrous expedition against the rival power of Persia, his last words (so later historians claimed) were Vicisti, Galilaee: ‘you win, Galilean’. Some fourth-century emperors tolerated the traditional religion and kept their distance from church concerns, others became involved because of their own strong views; some Christians thought that theology and ecclesiastical politics were not the emperor's business, especially if they differed from him. Imperial officials, so far as the evidence goes, were appointed because of their connections and their competence, without any preference for Christians. That did not change when, almost a century after Diocletian, the committed Christian Theodosius I, who ruled both the Eastern and the Western parts of the empire, felt able to ban all public and private worship of the gods of Rome.Footnote 12
Understandably, some Christians saw in this remarkable sequence the triumph of Christianity. Among them was Eusebius, the founder of ecclesiastical history, who lived through the transformation. His beloved teacher Pamphilus died a martyr in the Great Persecution, but Eusebius was among the bishops who in 325 were summoned by Constantine to the Council of Nicaea and invited to dine in the imperial palace, where troops with drawn swords formed a guard of honour, not an execution squad.Footnote 13 Augustine sometimes shared this amazed delight. In a work written around 400 he quoted the prophet Jeremiah: ‘the nations will come to you from the ends of the earth, and will say “Our fathers held falsehood, futility which profited them nothing; shall a man make himself gods, and they are no gods?”’ It is happening now, said Augustine, they are coming to Christ and breaking their images.Footnote 14 But Augustine was not triumphalist, because he knew all too well that banning pagan cult did not make the Roman empire Christian.
Roman Africa extended along the northern seaboard to the west of Egypt and Libya. On its inland borders were people who had not yet heard the gospel.Footnote 15 Even where the gospel was regularly preached, towns were full of temples and statues of the gods, which were legally protected as heritage, and traditional festivals of the gods continued as local holidays. Most officials chose not to notice that some pagan practice continued. Augustine said that many people were still pagan in their hearts, and few were more than one generation away from paganism. Some had no interest in Christian teachings, many delayed making the commitment of baptism, and even baptized Christians compromised. A man would accept an invitation to dinner in the temple complex, in a room adorned with images of gods, rather than offend the powerful person who had invited him; a woman with a sick child would use any amulet on offer.Footnote 16 So the empire was not Christian; nor was there a united Church, for throughout the empire there were disagreements about theology, authority and claims to primacy. This was especially clear in Africa. Augustine's congregation in Hippo could hear from their basilica the distinctive songs of the rival ‘Donatist’ congregation, whose members argued that Augustine and his fellow bishops were in a line of succession from those who had betrayed the faith, so were not validly ordained and could not validly baptize, consecrate the eucharist or ordain other clergy.Footnote 17 Yet, as Augustine said in a sermon, ‘we are brothers, we call upon one God, we believe in one Christ, we hear one gospel, we sing one psalm, we reply with one Amen, we shout one Alleluia, we celebrate one Easter’.Footnote 18 Augustine used scriptural language about ‘the Church’ as the body of Christ and the bride of Christ; he contrasted ‘the Church’ with ‘the synagogue’ which failed to go beyond the Old Testament; he praised the emperor Theodosius for aiding ‘the Church’ in her struggle with heretics and pagans. But he also consistently said that we are the Church.Footnote 19 In this life ‘the Church’ is not an entity: it is people.
Augustine knew that the Roman empire was not Christian, but when the Goths sacked the city of Rome, the easy explanation was ‘Christian times’. Uneducated people, but also others who knew better, declared that the gods who made the Roman empire great were offended by neglect and had withdrawn their protection from Christian emperors and their subjects.Footnote 20 Present-day historians prefer to think in terms of misunderstandings and inconsistent policies in the relationship of Roman officials with the people they called ‘barbarians’.Footnote 21 On the northern frontiers of the empire there were always challenges, and in the later fourth century pressure on Roman territory increased because these northern peoples, who were usually identified as Goths, themselves came under pressure from other groups moving west from central Asia. Sometimes barbarians were encouraged to settle on Roman territory as a border defence force against further immigration. Their warrior culture and their tradition of personal loyalty to a leader made them useful recruits to the Roman army, and some who were especially tall and imposing even served as imperial bodyguards. Many were Christian. But sometimes mismanaged immigration led to conflict, and although it was assumed that disciplined Roman troops would defeat savage barbarians, this did not always happen. In 378 the emperor Valens, and two-thirds of his troops, died in defeat at Adrianople in northern Greece.
It was difficult to have a consistent policy, because the ‘barbarians’ were not all Goths, and even among those who were, shifting alliances and changing demands were usual. In the two years of uneasy negotiation before the attack on Rome in August 410, Alaric led his war-band around Italy, asking at different times for status as a Roman commander, for land where his people could settle, for a guaranteed supply of corn and for treasure. He did not try to occupy and hold the city, or to destroy it and massacre the inhabitants; he allowed some people to take sanctuary in churches and shrines; and he withdrew after three days. It could have been much worse. But Rome was the symbolic capital of empire, and for Christians it was the city of Peter and Paul, of churches and martyr-shrines.Footnote 22
Until recent years, this trauma was understood through the words of Jerome, who, far away in his monastery in Bethlehem, heard the terrible news in letters from friends. Rome was the city of his schooldays and the scene of successes in his early career. In the preface to his long-delayed commentary on Ezekiel, he wrote that he could scarcely finish his work for grief. He invoked Vergil on the fall of Troy, its streets piled with corpses, and the Psalms on the fall of Jerusalem: their blood is poured out like water and there is no one to bury them. The brightest light in the world has gone out, said Jerome; the empire is beheaded, the world perished in one city.Footnote 23 Historians and archaeologists now think that Jerome overstated the case, and that Augustine (who showed no personal attachment to the city of Rome) was right when he told his congregation to keep those three dreadful days in perspective.Footnote 24 Rome, Augustine said, had suffered far worse before Christian times, from invasion, civil war and natural disasters, and had not now been annihilated like Sodom and Gomorrah. Cities are built of stone and timber, and they fall, but Rome is people, Rome is the Romans. What matters, always, is how each person responds to God's judgement and God's mercy.Footnote 25
The world continued much as before, the assault was brief, and casualty figures were relatively low. The city of Rome was no longer a centre of government; some emperors never went there. But these calm reflections were not obvious at the time. Latin-speaking schoolboys were brought up on classical texts, from more than four centuries earlier, in which Rome meant the empire as well as the city. The Aeneid of Vergil was a core text of the late antique curriculum, so every educated person knew how Jupiter, king of the gods, declared that he gave Rome empire without end, without boundaries of space or time: imperium sine fine dedi. Footnote 26 Augustine remarked in a sermon that many people had also read about the visit of Aeneas to the underworld, or had seen stage adaptations.Footnote 27 Perhaps these performances included Anchises, father of Aeneas, showing him a vision of Rome's future glory and declaring Rome's mission statement: other nations may excel in the arts and sciences, but:
You, Roman, remember to rule the peoples with your empire
(These will be your arts) and to impose the custom of peace,
To spare the subject and fight down the proud.Footnote 28
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
Christians too could be impressed by the extent of the empire in which they lived, and could see it as part of the true God's plan for the growth of the Church. Christ, they said, was born at the time when Rome's first emperor, Augustus, imposed peace on the known world; monarchy and monotheism went together; and peace allowed the gospel to spread in the common languages of Greek and Latin.Footnote 29
The exceptional range of the Roman empire was made visible in the Chronological Tables of Eusebius. Augustine had a copy of Jerome's Latin translation and update.Footnote 30 The codex, the spine-hinged book, was in the early fourth century a relatively new form of technology, and Eusebius made impressive use of it to set out kingdoms in parallel columns, from the earliest known until his own time. Sometimes there were as many as nine columns, which required a double-page spread, but gradually they merged or disappeared until only Rome was left.Footnote 31 This was inaccurate, because Persia had made a comeback as the rival great power east of the Euphrates. But even those Romans who knew, as Augustine did, that Persian rule continued, were unlikely to know the extent of the insecure Persian empire.Footnote 32 The late Roman empire extended from Scotland to the Sudan and from Spain to Syria. There was free movement of people within it, because this was an empire of cities and their local territories, not of nation states or ethnic groups, and all freeborn inhabitants of the Roman empire were Roman citizens. The historian Orosius, himself a refugee from barbarian threats to Spain, wrote that refugees found their country and their laws wherever they went.Footnote 33 In the years when he taught rhetoric, Augustine could cross the Mediterranean from North Africa to Italy as an economic migrant in search of better students, because language, culture and system of government were the same. He knew people who, like Jerome, moved to or from the eastern Mediterranean, where Greek was the common language, but Latin was still the language of law and systems of government and education were still the same.
So empire mattered, and Augustine understood why Marcellinus wanted an effective reply to Volusianus. He responded to the request with a long letter which could be read aloud and circulated, and ended by asking Marcellinus to tell him of any further objections, so that he could offer a further reply in a letter or a treatise.Footnote 34 If that is what Marcellinus expected, it would be misleading to say that what he got was City of God, because he did not survive to read even the opening books: he was executed in 413, soon after Augustine started work, on a false charge of supporting rebellion. But in the preface to City of God Augustine addressed his ‘dearest son Marcellinus’, saying that he undertook this great and demanding work to defend the city of God against its enemies who prefer their own gods to its founder. This declaration shows that City of God is not primarily a book about empire: it is a book about worshipping the true God. That is confirmed by the plan which Augustine summarized at the end of book 1; he did not then expect it to take some thirteen years to complete, delayed because there was always another deadline.Footnote 35
According to this summary, the city of God and the earthly city are intermixed in this age, until they are pulled apart in the final judgement. Augustine's task is to explain the origin, course and due ends of these two cities, so that the glory of the city of God will shine more brightly by comparison. But first there is more to say in answer to those who blame the disasters of the Roman commonwealth on Christianity, which forbids sacrifice to their gods. Augustine will therefore set out the moral and physical evils which affected Rome before Christianity; he will show what Roman qualities were helped by the true God who enlarged their empire, whereas their gods were no help at all; and he will argue against those who say that their gods are to be worshipped, not for blessings in this life, but for benefits after death. He duly followed this plan in twenty-two books, the equivalent of chapters in a present-day academic work. The first ten books rebut the enemies of the city of God: books 1–5 argue against worshipping many gods for benefits in this life, books 6–10 against worshipping many gods for blessings after death. In these ten books Augustine says little about the city of God.Footnote 36 Then twelve books deal with the origins, course and ends of the two cities, four books for each. The opening section of City of God, books 1–5, includes some forceful comments about empire, which is a supposed benefit of worshipping the gods of Rome, but thereafter the Roman empire almost disappears from view until book 18, when it reappears in a rapid survey of the history of the earthly city.
Nonetheless, new readers of City of God could easily conclude that the Roman empire is the earthly city opposed to the Church. The preface begins with the words ‘the most glorious city of God’, gloriosissimam civitatem Dei. Augustine assumed that his readers knew what this meant, and did not define the two cities, heavenly and earthly, which he then contrasted. It was for him a familiar motif. He had used the theme of two cities, symbolized by Jerusalem and Babylon, since the first work he had written as a priest two decades earlier; it recurs in his preaching; and he included a clear account in his advice to an anxious deacon on what to say to a catechism class:
There Jerusalem was founded, that most renowned city of God, which serves as a sign of the free city which is called the heavenly Jerusalem; this is a Hebrew word which is translated ‘vision of peace’. Its citizens are all the sanctified people who were and are and shall be, and all sanctified spirits, including those who in the highest heavens obey God with devotion. The king of this city is the Lord Jesus Christ. . . . This city was taken captive, and much of it was led away to Babylon. Just as Jerusalem signifies the city and society of the holy, so Babylon signifies the city and society of the wicked, for it is said to be translated ‘confusion’. We have spoken earlier of these two cities, which from the beginning of the human race to the end of the age proceed intermixed through changing times, and will be separated in the last judgement.Footnote 37
The best-known definition of the two cities appears much later in City of God, in the conclusion to the four books on the origins of the two cities to which all rational beings, angels and humans, belong. Two loves made two cities: the city of God is the community of all who love God even to disregard of themselves; the earthly city is the community of all who love themselves even to disregard of God. The earthly city glories in itself and is dominated by the lust for domination; the heavenly city glories in God and its citizens serve each other, those in charge by advising and their subordinates by obeying.Footnote 38
Commentators import Augustine's later explanation in discussing the start of book 1, but without it City of God seems to say at the outset that the city of God is the Church and the earthly city is the Roman empire. Resisting the proud and giving grace to the humble, he argued, belongs to God alone; but human pride wants to claim it, and delights to hear, in praise of itself, ‘To spare the subject and fight down the proud’: this is a very familiar quotation from Vergil's mission statement for the Roman empire.Footnote 39 So Augustine must also speak of the earthly city which has entire nations as its slaves, but is itself dominated by the lust for domination. From the earthly city come the enemies of the city of God. Some will see the error of their ways and become adequate citizens. Others are full of hatred, even though they survived to attack the city of God only because they took refuge in its holy places: they sought asylum in churches and martyr-shrines which the barbarians respected.
From the contrast between the Bible and Vergil, and from the allusion to people taking refuge in churches when the barbarians sacked Rome, it seems obvious that the Church is the city of God and the Roman empire is the earthly city. But at the end of book 1 Augustine made an important addition. He called the city of God peregrina civitas, and both these words need consideration. Civitas is conventionally translated ‘city’, but this could be misleading. Civitas is the community of cives, citizens, who live in a city or in its territory.Footnote 40 Peregrina is conventionally translated ‘pilgrim’, but that is also misleading. Pilgrimage to a shrine or a saint or the Holy Land was a new development in Augustine's lifetime and, like many of his contemporaries, he was not in favour. In the classical Latin he was trained to write, peregrinatio is travelling or living away from home, by choice or as an exile, and a peregrinus is a traveller or a resident foreigner: that is, someone who lives in a city, has protection from its laws, but is not one of its citizens.Footnote 41 So peregrina civitas is a conscious paradox. It expresses the situation of Christians in this life: they are the part of the city of God which is away from its everlasting home in heaven and is a resident foreigner in the earthly city. At the end of book 1, Augustine warned this peregrina civitas to remember that some of its future citizens are hidden among its enemies, and that ‘it has with it some of those enemies, joined in communion of the sacraments, who will not be with it in the eternal destiny of the saints’ unless they change; and he repeated what he had said in earlier writings, that ‘the two cities are intertwined and intermingled in this age, until they are pulled apart at the final judgement’.Footnote 42
So there is not a simple opposition of the Church as the city of God and the empire as the earthly city. The difference between them is in what they want, and what the cities want is what their individual citizens want. Just as Rome is the Romans, so the city of God and the earthly city are their citizens. Someone who is formally a member of the Church, as a baptized Christian or even as a member of the clergy, may be a citizen of the earthly city, because he wants to dominate and possess and be praised. An imperial official may be a citizen of the city of God, because he wants God to be praised, and wants to serve and protect the people over whom he has the authority which Romans traditionally called imperium. This is not the same as the domination sought by the earthly city. Imperium is conventionally translated ‘empire’, but its basic meaning is the acknowledged right imperare, to give orders. Specifically, imperium was the power conferred on a military or civil commander who had responsibility for imposing and maintaining peace, and who could therefore give orders to kill. Imperium came to mean also the territory in which that right was acknowledged, so that imperium Romanum means the Roman empire.
Augustine's account of humanity shows why there must be imperium in the sense of ‘acknowledged right to give orders’. In City of God, the definition of the two cities comes at the end of the four books on their origins, in which Augustine interpreted the creation narrative in Genesis as showing how some angels, and the first humans, turned from God to themselves, thus forming the earthly or impious city. He could give no explanation for this turn, because it did not make sense.Footnote 43 But its consequence is that all humans inherit from their common ancestor the tendency to want their own way, not God's. Everyone wants to be the master, dominus, and that means permanent conflict at all levels of society, household and city and world, unless there is agreement on giving and obeying orders: imperandi oboediendique. This agreement is needed also in the peregrina civitas, the part of the city of God which in this mortal life is a resident foreigner in the earthly city.Footnote 44 God created humans as naturally social beings who are also linked by common ancestry; Eve was made from Adam, not created together with Adam, so that all would have the same ancestor.Footnote 45 Humans were meant to cooperate in natural hierarchy, the stronger in reason guiding the weaker, who would willingly follow their guidance. This manifestly does not happen.
Augustine set out the need for imperium in book 19, the first of his last four books on the ‘ends’ of the two cities. ‘Ends’ (fines) has a double sense: what will happen to them and what is the final good for which they pursue all other goods. Book 19 is now the most widely read book of City of God, and is often used in debates on political theory. Are there ways of ordering society so as to maximize human flourishing and to minimize crime and conflict, or does human nature make this an unrealistic aim, so that the most any government can do is to ‘impose the custom of peace’, as in Vergil's mission statement for Rome?Footnote 46 Augustine was not interested in political theory, but in the response of individual human beings to God's love. His views on the use of force are set out in letters to imperial officials, the individuals who had responsibility for law enforcement in specific cases.Footnote 47 Latin does not have a word for ‘the state’ as distinct from the people. The res publica was managed by officials appointed by the emperor; they implemented imperial policy if they knew what it was, but information took time to circulate and requests for guidance could not have an immediate response, so officials often had to make their own decisions. Augustine understood the difficulty in individual cases of establishing the truth as a judge, and of giving orders as a judge or a military commander which would cause the taking of human life.Footnote 48 He is often credited with establishing the principles of just war, but in fact he accepted the standard Roman view expressed by Cicero: wars of aggression are unjust, but (as Volusianus said) Roman officers have a duty to defend the people and their allies against aggression. When he wrote to officials, Augustine urged them to act not from anger but from the wish to protect, and to show mercy wherever possible.Footnote 49
In the great tradition of Roman self-criticism, a speaker in Cicero's philosophical dialogue De re publica, ‘On the Commonwealth’, observed that by defending their allies the Romans have conquered the world.Footnote 50 Augustine read, or re-read, this dialogue in the years when he began work on City of God. Footnote 51 Much of it is now lost, and Augustine is an important source of fragments, but he is not a source for Cicero on forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, the mixed constitution. This lack of interest in political theory is not peculiar to Augustine. In his time there was no live debate on forms of government because there was in practice no alternative to monarchy. Regime change meant only the substitution of one ruler for another. For Augustine, regnum, ‘kingship’, was not an accusation of tyranny, as it was for Cicero; he knew why the old Romans rejected regnum, but he used the word without comment as a synonym for ‘empire’.Footnote 52 Someone (not necessarily one person) has to rule, and everyone benefits when good people rule as far and wide as possible. But Augustine asked: ‘In relation to this mortal life, which is led and finished in a few days, what does it matter under whose orders a man lives, who is so soon to die, provided those who give the orders do not compel people to unjust or impious acts?’Footnote 53
Augustine knew that a comment he had made in one context could be read differently in relation to a later debate; his Retractationes, the annotated list of his writings which he compiled late in his life, included some corrections of possible misunderstandings. This particular question, taken out of context, could be used to argue for passive obedience: all rulers, good or bad, have power by God's will or permission, so a Christian should not try to change the system but should obey the ruler, taking bad rule as moral training or as deserved punishment; if obedience conflicts with moral and religious duty, the Christian should embrace martyrdom. In context, Augustine's question is an argument against imperialism. What, in practice, does it matter who conquers and who is conquered? In the Roman empire, Augustine pointed out, taxes, laws and education are the same for the Romans and for the peoples they conquered, and there are Roman senators who have never seen Rome.Footnote 54 For readers in our post-colonial times, it is worth remembering that though Rome first acquired territory in Africa by victory over Carthage in the mid-second century BCE, Roman Africa in the early centuries CE was not controlled and exploited by a colonial power. There were great estates whose owners lived elsewhere, but Africa was a prosperous part of the empire, exporting grain and olive oil, and from it came teachers of rhetoric, advocates, civil servants and even emperors.
In Roman tradition, there was an obvious answer to the question ‘what does it matter who conquers and who is conquered?’ Victory brings glory; Augustine lived in the Roman, not the Carthaginian, empire. He observed that the old Romans were eager for their country's glory, thinking it glorious to dominate and rule but inglorious to serve, and that the desire for glory kept other desires in check.Footnote 55 But was the glory worth it? Augustine did not argue that the Roman empire brought the blessings of civilization, for Egypt and the Near East and Greece were much older civilizations, and had also been part of Rome's empire for many centuries. He did recognize some advantages of empire. The imperiosa civitas, the city that gives orders, imposed a common language, so that there is an abundance of interpreters. Human beings, Augustine thought, cannot get on if they cannot talk to each other, to the point that a man would rather be with his own dog than with another human whose language he does not speak.Footnote 56 Augustine especially recognized the value of peace, maintained by the threat, and if necessary the use, of force. In Cicero's dialogue De re publica, he observed, one speaker argues the case that injustice is necessary for government: it is unjust for some people to serve others, but Rome could not otherwise rule its provinces. Another speaker counters that it is just, because for ‘such people’ slavery is beneficial: unprincipled people lose their freedom to do wrong, so they are better off when subjected.Footnote 57 Augustine could see in his work as a bishop the benefits of limiting the freedom of the wicked, and one of the most poignant examples concerns unlawful servitude. He explained it, a year or so after he wrote book 19, in a letter to his long-standing friend and fellow bishop Alypius, a former legal adviser who went on several diplomatic missions to the imperial court.Footnote 58
Slave traders operating in Africa were shipping overseas people they had bought as slaves. Almost all of these people were freeborn Romans, but once separated from their families and communities, it was much more difficult for them to be reclaimed. Only a few had been sold by their parents, and even then they were bought and marketed as slaves, whereas Roman law allowed only the sale of twenty-five years of labour. The traders hardly ever bought genuine slaves from their owners, and because there was a market, raiders in rural areas were kidnapping and selling free people. The emperor Honorius had addressed to the prefect Hadrianus a law which could be invoked to free the victims, but it condemned the traders to flogging with lead-weighted ropes, which was likely to kill them.Footnote 59 Augustine wanted Alypius to lobby for the law to be reissued, but with a reduced punishment. The proper authorities must decide how to apply the law:
Many people are ransomed from barbarians, but those who are transported to overseas provinces have no access to ransom. Barbarians are resisted when Roman soldiers are successfully deployed to rescue Romans held captive by barbarians. But who resists these traders not in animals but in people, not in barbarians but in Roman provincials? They have spread everywhere, so that for the price they offer people are brought to them everywhere and from everywhere, seized by force or trapped by deception. Who resists them in the name of Roman freedom, not common but individual freedom?Footnote 60
Members of Augustine's congregation at Hippo had rescued a hundred and twenty people who were about to be shipped abroad, but the traders sought to repossess them, and had powerful patrons who were already causing trouble. It was Roman rule, administered by Roman officials according to Roman law, which would safeguard the freedom of Roman citizens.
Augustine acknowledged that imperfect human peace is very different from heavenly peace, but recognized that everyone benefits from it, and ‘the civitas peregrina, the heavenly city while it lives away from home, makes use of the various instruments for human peace’.Footnote 61 Human peace and common language are valuable achievements – but at what a cost in blood!Footnote 62 Because of the human drive to dominate, there has to be imperium in the sense of ‘acknowledged right to give orders’. But there does not have to be imperium in the sense of ‘extensive territory in which the right to give orders is acknowledged’. Empire in this sense manifests the domination and possessiveness which characterize the earthly city. At the start of his rapid survey of its history, in book 18, Augustine explained that human society has the double bond of common human nature and common ancestry, but conflict arises as people pursue their own interests; the stronger oppress the weaker, and empires result because the weaker prefer subjection to death.Footnote 63 In the opening books of City of God he showed how empires begin with injustice and expand by war. Augustine cited a summary of ‘foreign’ history (that is, history other than Greek and Roman) for the claim that at first, kingdoms were small and peaceful, their frontiers were protected but not extended, and kings ruled because their people acknowledged their wisdom.Footnote 64 The first empire, the Assyrian, began when King Ninus made the first war of aggression against inoffensive neighbours. That empire extended far and wide, like the Roman empire, and lasted longer than the Roman empire had yet lasted in Augustine's time.Footnote 65 Augustine thought that Babylon, the symbol of the earthly city, was the capital of Assyria, and he characterized Rome as a second, Western, Babylon, in the extent and duration of its empire.Footnote 66 He exploited Roman authorities to show that Rome was founded in fratricide and in wars with kindred peoples, and that it always manifested injustice and conflict. Rome's empire expanded in reaction to foreign injustice; perhaps, Augustine suggested, the Romans who deified so many abstracts, such as Victory and Fortune, should also deify Foreign Iniquity and worship her as the goddess who gave them empire.Footnote 67
Empires depend on war and on someone's injustice. Volusianus argued that Christian ethics were not compatible with Roman traditions of government, because unjust demands must be resisted, in person or by right of war when a Roman province is raided. Augustine found a more fundamental challenge to Roman traditions in Cicero's dialogue De re publica. The character Philus, reluctantly but forcefully arguing the case for injustice, says that ‘He extended the frontiers of empire’ is engraved on the monuments of Rome's greatest commanders, but how could that be done without taking something from someone else?Footnote 68 Philus concludes that nations, like individuals, prefer to rule unjustly than to be enslaved justly, and to take things from other people rather than have things taken from them.Footnote 69 Augustine, as always, insisted on thinking of empire in terms of individuals, not of nations:
What is the reason, where is the sense, in wanting to be famous for the extent and greatness of empire? You cannot demonstrate the happiness of people who live always among the disasters of war, in blood which is human whether shed by fellow citizens or by enemies, in fearful darkness and bloodstained cruelty. Their happiness is like the fragile brilliance of glass, which prompts greater fear that it will suddenly shatter. To judge this more readily, let us not be carried away by empty pomposity, or blunt the edge of our attention with lofty-sounding names for things, when we hear ‘peoples, kingdoms, provinces’. Let us posit two people, for the individual is the basic unit of city and kingdom, however extensive its occupation of land.Footnote 70
One of the two people is rich and famous, with great estates, but constantly stressed and suspicious; the other is moderately prosperous but has enough for his needs, and is beloved by his family, on excellent terms with his kin and neighbours and friends, dutiful, kind, healthy, frugal, decent and with a quiet conscience. Augustine asked his readers which they would choose to be. Moving up the scale from individual to group, he challenged them to find a difference between empire and highway robbery: ‘Take away justice, and what are kingdoms but large-scale gangs (magna latrocinia)? For what are gangs but small kingdoms? This too is a band of people, ruled by the orders of a leader, held together by a bond of society, its loot shared out by agreed law.’Footnote 71 The gang has a social contract, but that is not enough for justice. Augustine borrowed from Cicero the pirate's answer to Alexander the Great, who had asked what he thought he was doing infesting the sea: ‘The same as you do infesting the world, but because I do it in a little boat I am called latro, and because you do it with a big fleet you are called imperator.’Footnote 72 Latrones are not ordinary thieves, but outlaws, armed robbers who operate as part of a group. Those in authority may impose the name on people who consider themselves to be freedom fighters, but even so, latrones use force to take what they want. On the first ever war of aggression, Augustine commented: ‘to wage war on neighbours, and advance from there to more wars, to crush and subject, from sheer desire for rule, peoples who offered no provocation – what is this but latrocinium on a grand scale?’Footnote 73
Empires depend on war and injustice, but victory in war and advancement of empire gave glory, and the desire for glory had its uses. Vergil presented Rome's empire as the reward of piety and virtue, and as he moved towards the end of his first five books, Augustine acknowledged the moral qualities for which the true God saw fit to enlarge it:
When the kingdoms of the East had long been famous, God decided that there should also be a Western kingdom, later in time but more famous in extent and greatness of empire; and to repress the grievous suffering of many peoples, he granted it especially to men who, for the sake of honour, praise and glory, were concerned for the homeland in which they sought glory, and did not hesitate to put its security before their own, holding in check, for this one vice, namely the love of praise, desire for money and many other vices.Footnote 74
Such people, Augustine said, can be a moral example to Christians, but they were motivated not by love of God and neighbour, but by concern for their own reputation. So they were citizens of the earthly city, and as Jesus said of people who give alms conspicuously, they have their reward already: they are remembered and praised:
They disregarded their private property for the sake of common property, that is, for the commonwealth and its treasury; they resisted avarice; they gave impartial advice to their fatherland; they were not guilty of crimes as defined by their laws, or of lust. By all these arts they strove, on the apparently true way, for honours and imperium and glory. They were honoured by almost all peoples; they imposed the laws of their imperium on many peoples; today they are glorious in literature and history among almost all peoples. They have no grounds for complaint against the justice of the supreme and true God: they have their reward.Footnote 75
Augustine concluded: ‘I absolutely do not see what difference it makes to security and morality, which give people authentic dignity, that some conquered and some were conquered . . . Take away boasting, and what are people but people?’Footnote 76 Victory, glory, rule without limits of space and time, all the lofty claims of empire are dismissed.
City of God is not primarily a book about empire: it is a book about worshipping the true God. Augustine's opponents claimed that empire was owed to the gods of Rome; he was certain that empire, like everything else, happens by the will or permission of God, who for his own inscrutable reasons gives power to good and to bad rulers.Footnote 77 Can God's purpose for the Roman empire be discerned in divinely inspired Scripture? According to the Chronological Tables of Eusebius there were 2,242 years of biblical history, from Adam to Abraham, before any other Greek or non-Greek history was known; so when Augustine discussed the course of the two cities in books 15–18 of City of God, the Bible was for this period his source not only for the history of the people of God, but also for the history of the earthly city which began with Cain. At the start of book 18 Augustine acknowledged that from the time of Abraham he had continued to discuss the history of the people of God, and must therefore expound the history of the earthly city, at least as much as seemed sufficient for comparison.Footnote 78 From the Chronological Tables he could see that at the start of the Assyrian empire, Abraham was promised that all nations descended from him should be blessed; and that at the start of ‘the Western Babylon’ in whose rule Christ was to come and fulfil those promises, there appeared prophets whose message was not just for the people of Israel, but for the future benefit of the Gentiles.Footnote 79 These were the Old Testament prophets who were interpreted as foretelling Christ.
Augustine said, in very Roman language, that ‘Rome was founded as a kind of second Babylon, like a daughter of the first Babylon, through which it pleased God to subject the world and pacify it far and wide in one society of commonwealth and laws.’Footnote 80 He commented that subjecting the world was a harder task for Rome than it had been for Assyria, because Rome was surrounded by well-trained warlike peoples. But he said nothing else on what it meant to be a second Babylon. He did not argue that Rome was an oppressive empire like Babylon, as some of his Donatist opponents maintained; or that Rome would inevitably fall as Babylon had fallen; or that Rome was transformed by the birth of Christ and by the achievement of peace under Rome's first emperor.Footnote 81 In Augustine's brief narrative, civil wars bring Augustus to power, Christ is born while Augustus has imperium, then Augustus fights more wars.Footnote 82 The successors of Augustus continued to fight wars. In 412, just before Augustine started work on City of God, he preached on Psalm 46, which includes the prophecy about God ‘making wars cease even to the ends of the earth’. This, he said, we do not yet see fulfilled.Footnote 83 In City of God he had very little to say about Rome and its emperors after the coming of Christ, except when, in the conclusion of the first five books, he gave a few examples to illustrate his general argument about imperial power. Felix, ‘fortunate’, was one of the conventional titles of a Roman emperor. Christian emperors, Augustine said, are called fortunate not because they are victorious or because their long and tranquil reign ends in peaceful succession, but because they rule with justice and mercy, making their own power subject to God. If Christian emperors were always successful, we might conclude that God is to be worshipped for benefits in this life. But God allocates imperial power to good and to bad; for emperors as for everyone else, what matters is the relationship of the individual to God.Footnote 84
For Augustine, the Roman empire was the current manifestation of the earthly city which is symbolized by Babylon. But imperium is necessary, and power is not in itself either bad or good; the question is whether the holder of earthly power worships the true God, rather than loving inferior earthly power.Footnote 85 It is possible to serve, or to be, a ruler of Babylon and still to be a citizen of the city of God. Augustine argued that Rome had never been a res publica according to Cicero's definition, that is, a community united by agreement on ius (which covers both positive law and a sense of justice) and by common interest, because from the outset there was injustice and conflict, and because there can be no true res publica where the true God is not worshipped. Justice requires that everyone should have his due, and it cannot be just, either to people or to God, to remove people from God's service. But Augustine did not suggest that there could be a true Christian commonwealth, united in agreement on ius and common interest, in an empire or in a church where the true God is worshipped, and where there is justice because all receive their due. Only the city of God, the community of angels and humans who love God, could be called such a true res publica.Footnote 86 The city of God is also the true Church. But the Church in this world is made up of people, just as Rome is the Romans, and only some of them are citizens of the city of God.
As Augustine's reputation grew, to make him the most influential theologian of Western European Christianity, many people sought to co-opt him in support of their own ideas, including their ideas about a Christian commonwealth.Footnote 87 He was often quoted selectively and out of context, sometimes by readers who had read only excerpts, or who did not have full texts.Footnote 88 Those who argued that the temporal power of empire should be guided or judged or validated by the spiritual power of the Church did not take into account Augustine's belief that in this world the two cities are mixed: temporal rulers and their servants may be citizens of the city of God, office-holders in the Church may be citizens of the earthly city. His own advice in City of God remains a protection: do not be misled by big words, by abstracts and entities such as Church and empire, but think about the people. What matters, always, is individual citizenship in one of the two cities, and that depends on the response of an individual human being to the love of God.
