St. Augustine: Founding Philosopher of History

by Bradley J. Birzer, TIC co-editor

St. Augustine was the first Christian to offer a comprehensive Philosophy of History, which the Russian Orthodox writer Nicholas Berdyaev called nothing short of “ingenius.”[1] One of his greatest accomplishments was the sanctification of Plato’s understanding of the two realms: the perfect Celestial Kingdom and the corrupt copy. One finds this tension and conflict between this world and the next in all of Christopher Dawson’s ideas and works and in many of Russell Kirk’s. “Christian culture is always in conflict with the world,” Dawson wrote directly.[2] In more complicated form, Dawson wrote, the “conception of the sacred and the secular manifests itself at every stage of culture from the primitive to the most highly civilized and in every form of religion.”[3] 

For Plato, the two realms never met, except on rare and mystical occasions. For St. Augustine and for Dawson, one also cannot readily separate the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, in any Manichean sense. While the two cities do not meet spiritually, they intermingle physically.[4] “We must remember that behind the natural process of social conflict and tension which runs through history there is a deeper law of spiritual duality and polarization,” Dawson argued in no uncertain terms, “which is expressed in the teaching of the Gospel on the opposition of the World and the Kingdom of God and in St. Augustine’s doctrine of the two cities Babylon and Jerusalem whose conflict run through all history and gives it its ultimate significance.”[5]

"Among the Ruins of Carthage" by Russell Kirk, 1963

Nowhere are Roman ruins thicker than in Tunisia. For this, from the days when Scipio took Punic Carthage until the Vandals broke into the city, was the Province of Africa, wondrously rich and populous. St. Augustine was born in Carthage — of a patrician family — and died in neighboring Hippo, when the Vandals were at the gates. 

I have just spent some days in Tunis and the country round about. In Carthaginian and Roman times, the town on the site of Tunis, across the bay from Carthage, was a slum; now it is the capital of a new state. But the greatness of this land is gone, and one comes chiefly to view the ruins. 

If one goes up to the Moslem town of Zaghouan, thirty miles inland from Tunis, he finds the springs from which the Romans took their water to supply the great Antonine baths at Carthage, and from which Tunis' water still comes. Here stands even today the Temple of the Nymphs at the fountainhead, built in the Emperor Hadrian's day. The colossal Roman aqueduct still stands in ruin all down to the coast, across arid hillside and plain. 

The ruined Roman cities of Tunisia are many, sacked by Vandal and Arab. Of them, Carthage by the sea is most evocative of the grandeur that was Rome. Though the Romans, having destroyed forever the Punic power, sowed with salt the site of the Carthaginian capital, later the Romans built their own city on the site. The eminence called the Birsa, where the people of Hannibal made their last ghastly stand in citadel and temples, is surmounted nowadays by the Catholic cathedral. But one sees elsewhere, the Tophet, the pit in which the Carthaginians sacrificed children; and many Carthaginian tombstones. 

Water made this land fruitful. But its forests were hewn down by militant Vandal and Byzantine and Arab, and erosion followed, and the great works of irrigation crumbled to dust. Until Decatur, Eaton, and other Americans taught the Barbary pirates a lesson, blackmail, freebootlng, and kidnapping were the industries of this blasted African shore. 

No strong power endures forever. In those times when Roman emperors were bred up in the Province of Africa, no man expected that all this splendor would become the abomination of desolation. Only after Alaric's barbarian host had taken Rome did St. Augustine see that Roman might, too, was a vanity which must pass; and he wrote The City of God, which endures when the cities of this earth are given up to fire and sword. 

In the amphitheater of Carthage, still to be seen, St. Perpetua and many other Christians gave up the ghost. One finds, too, a little subterranean church dedicated to St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine. Yet early Christian site though Carthage was, Islam triumphed long ago, and virtually the only Christians there now are resident Europeans. Their villas, and those of rich Tunisians, stand on the sites of big Roman houses, looking across the magnificent bay. Habib Bourguiba, president of the new Tunisian Republic and powerful as any Bey of Tunis of old times, is building himself a palace on these heights. 

One day, we must expect New York and Los Angeles will be as Carthage is now, laid low. As the centuries slide by, every civilized people forget or neglect the faith and the principles which raised them up to honor. You and I will be lapped in lead long before that day of wrath, I trust. Yet how soon or late a great city falls depends always on the courage and the wisdom of folk living long before the last agony.

--Russell Kirk, "Among the Ruins of Carthage," To the Point (November 6, 1963); Kirk traveled throughout North Africa with Thomas Molnar.

Books That Make Us Human: Carl Olson

1. The Bible. It is one of the first books I read (not cover-to-cover, at first, of course), and the first book I memorized passages from as a child. I cannot imagine trying to think about or comprehend the human condition without it. A few specific books within The Good Book that merit note: Genesis and Exodus, the Psalms and The Book of Wisdom, the Gospel of John, and Apostle Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

2. Confessions, by St. Augustine of Hippo. I've read it several times now, and I am always amazed by the depth of Augustine's thinking and emotions, as well as by the clarity and profundity of his expression.

3. Summa Theologica, by St. Thomas Aquinas. It would be a mistake to assume this seminal work of theology/philosophy is dry or merely didactic, because a careful and reflective reading reveals an understanding of man's origin, nature, and end that has rarely been rivaled.

4. The Sonnets, by William Shakespeare. I've enjoyed and profited from many of Shakespeare's plays, but am drawn again and again back to the sonnets, which express not only the depths of human love, but what it means to be human in the simple and small ways.

5. David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens. I first read them as a young boy and they brought to life a range of characters and aspects of humanity—the good, the bad, and the ugly—I had never seen or experienced before.

6. Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot. The Wasteland got (and gets?) more attention, but this mature, post-conversion poem is, I think, the greatest poem of the twentieth-century, and one of the most moving descriptions of life, death, and spiritual awakening ever written.

7. My Name Is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok. Certainly my most personal pick, a book I first read as a ten-year-old boy, and then several more times thereafter. An aching portrayal of a Jewish boy and his struggles with faith, family, and personal aspirations.

8. The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis. My favorite book by Lewis, a short but penetrating work about the nature of man. If you want to read it in fictional form, check out Lewis' "Space Trilogy": Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

9. Lost in the Cosmos, by Walker Percy. A bit quirky, but more than a bit brilliant, full of wit, wisdom, caustic charm, and some very challenging questions about what it means to be human in a post-Christian, post-modern culture.

10. Redemptor Hominis, by Blessed John Paul II. The late Holy Father's first encyclical (March 1979) is essential for anyone who wishes to understand his thought and his Christ-centric understanding of humanity: "The Redeemer of Man, Jesus Christ, is the centre of the universe and of history." Amen.

Carl Olson is an incredibly cool human.  He's also editor of Ignatius Insight, a husband, a father, an author, an artist, and a collector of good music.  His website is: http://www.carl-olson.com/Site/Welcome.html

The Old Republic, Part II

By Bradley J. Birzer


Continued from: http://www.imaginativeconservative.org/2010/10/old-republic-part-i.html

As Cicero watched his own republic descend into chaos and madness, he recorded as quickly as he could the most important aspects of the Roman Republic, preserved if not in temporal reality, than in poetry, history, and memory.


Famously, he wrote (quoted by our patron Winston often):

Ancestral morality provided outstanding men, and great men preserved the morality of old and the institutions of our ancestors. But our own time, having inherited the commonwealth like a wonderful picture that had faded over time, not only has failed to renew its original colors but has not even taken the trouble to preserve at least its shape and outlines. What remains of the morals of antiquity, upon which Ennius said that the Roman state stood? We see that they are so outworn in oblivion that they are not only not cherished but are now unknown. What am I sot say about the men? The morals themselves have passed away through a shortage of men; and we must not only render an account of such an evil, but in a sense we must defend ourselves like people being tried for a capital crime. It is because of our vices, not because of some bad luck, that we preserve the commonwealth in name alone but have long ago lost its substance. [Cicero, On the Commonwealth, Book 5; Cambridge Texts]

Augustinian History: As Understood by Kirk and Dawson

By Brad Birzer

One would be hard pressed to find a greater influence on two of the finest Catholic Humanists of the twentieth century, Christopher Dawson and Russell Amos Kirk, than St. Augustine.  One only has to employ the imagination to jump back sixteen centuries to see the parallels.  At midnight, August 24, 410, Alaric and his Gothic warriors entered the gates of Rome and sacked the city, pillaging, raping, and murdering for nearly three solid days.[1]  Though the western empire had been crumbling for years due to cultural, political, and economic decadence, the actual event of the breach of Rome’s walls stunned and shattered the western world.  Rome, the common thought ran throughout the Occident, was to last forever.  It was, after all, as Jupiter had promised Venus in the Aeneid, the eternal city. 

And, lest new fears disturb thy happy state, [Jupiter had promised]
Know, I have search'd the mystic rolls of Fate:
Thy son (nor is th' appointed season far)
In Italy shall wage successful war,
Shall tame fierce nations in the bloody field,
And sov'reign laws impose, and cities build,
Of martial tow'rs the founder shall become,
The people Romans call, the city Rome.
To them no bounds of empire I assign,
Nor term of years to their immortal line.

Whatever the promises of Virgilian Stoic Myth, Germanic reality hit the western empire hard.