Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine

by R.A. Markus

In this book Professor Markus's main concern is with those aspects of Augustine's thought which help to answer questions about the purpose of human society, and particularly with his reflections on history, society and the Church. He relates Augustine's ideas to their contemporary context and to older traditions, and shows which aspects of his thought he absorbed from his intellectual environment. Augustine appears from this study as a thinker who rejected the 'sacralization' of the established order of society, and the implications of this for a theology of history are explored in the last chapter.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, History, Medievalism, Theology

284 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1970

About the author

Robert Austin Markus was a distinguished medieval and ecclesiastical historian known principally for his writings on St Augustine and the history of the early Church.

Reviews

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Markus offers a reading of Augustine's deconstruction of previous metanarratives. Markus gives a particularly lucid account of key terminology and moves Augustine made. And I think he is generally correct in his conclusions, though his reading has been challenged by recent Augustinian scholars.

Problem to be faced: Did the “fading night” of the Roman Empire necessarily mean a golden time for Christians? Augustine oscillated on this point. By the end of his life he held a more realistic, sober view. Not only did he make a distinction between pre-Christian time and tempora Christiana, against the Donatists he could distinguish the apostles’ time and the current age (which allowed for the use of the sword in religious matters).

Two Cities (and the time between)

“The two cities are formally defined either in terms of the ultimate loyalties of their members, or of their members’ standing in the sight of God” (59). But Markus hints at a perhaps more radical division: a division of two loves (de Civ. Dei. 14.28). This is a more accurate division and, as Markus notes, forbids any strict identification of a city with an institution (60). This has to be the conclusion if we hold that “membership of the cities is mutually exclusive.” city = citizens, allegiances to values they set before themselves (concors hominem multitudo; Ep. 155.3.9). A city is a “multitude of men linked by a social bond” (Civ. Dei. 15.8).

“Peace” is the realm where the two cities overlap. Yet it is divided into earthly and heavenly peace. The earthly peace is of common concern to all (Markus 69). Augustine’s definition of a res publica allows for this overlap. “The people in the earthly city agree in valuing certain things. They need not agree on the scale of value.”

Ordinata est Res Publica

Markus’s running thesis is that Augustine modified his view on “order” as the years went on. He became disenchanted with the possibility of a good Christian state. The early Augustine held to a cosmic hierarchy and this would be seen in the state. But this was in tension with the biblical view that man was a peregrinus on earth.

saeculum: the historical and empirical interweaving of the two cities (100ff).
a) The two cities can agree in their intermediate principles.
b) This is his sharpest break with the Platonic traditon. The true polis is not a city, but the society of saints and angels.

Criticisms

Markus repeatedly refers to the “ills” of Constantinianism, but it isn’t always clear what he means by it. About the most specific he gets is the “Christianisiation of the empire” (35), but what does that actually mean? And why is it bad? I think he means by “Constantinian” something like Eusebius’s interpretation of Constantine (48ff). But this still begs several questions.

a) Does this mean that church history has undergone a total and official reversal because of Eusebius? That is quite a stretch.

b) Does it mean simply that the Empire is pro-Christian and anti-pagan? But this can’t be that bad. Should we rather hope for lions and stakes?

c) What I think Markus means is that the Empire (and it isn’t always clear whether he means the medieval Latin Church or the Greek East) now sees itself as a focal point of God’s history. If that’s what he means, then sure, Constantinianism is probably bad and points to Augustine for opposing it. But few pro-Constantinian scholars hold that position today.

On another front, it seems rather odd that by the end of Markus’s account, Augustine looks and sounds like a radical Barthian and anabaptist opposing the power structures (177-178)!

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saeculum is a critical text in the study of the political philosophy of Augustine. Published in 1970, a mere three years after Peter Brown’s now famous biography of the saint, Saeculum reinforces H. Richard Niebuhr’s classification of Augustine as a “conversionist” in Christ and Culture. As a conversionist, Augustine affirms the tension between Christ, or for Augustine, the City of God (civitas Dei), and culture, or the earthly city (civitas terrena), yet rejects the view that those en route toward the civitas Dei should excise themselves from political society. In fact, Niebuhr claims that for the conversionist—and Markus supports this—Christ is the transformer of culture, and the Church plays an important conversionist role. In other words, despite the corrupted nature of human persons, the world is still worthy of salvation, and Christ saves those who worship Him through the sacraments of the Church.

Augustine, however, did not always reference the Church as the only secular institution with a conversionist role. For many years, he believed that the Roman state could work with the Church to transform secular culture and help those destined for the civitas Dei. The rule of Theodosius, the powerful Roman emperor whose edicts ensured the Christianization of the empire, nurtured this popular Christian sentiment. For other elite Christians, most notably Prudentius, the Roman poet, the so-called Theodosian settlement marked a new era in the history of the Empire. “For the first time, in her old age,” Prudentius writes, “Rome would learn, and blush with shame; ashamed of her past, turning with revulsion from the years passed in foul superstition” (Contra Symmachum 1.506-513). For some time, Augustine followed suite. “There can be no doubt,” Markus notes, “that the vision of the triumphant progress of Christianity . . . had some fascination for his mind” (30). For instance, in an exposition on the sixth Psalm written around 392, Augustine ostensibly affirms the triumphant progress of Christianity with an eye toward its contemporary fulfillment: “Let all my enemies be ashamed and very much troubled. / Let them be turned back and confounded very speedily,” the psalm reads. “Very speedily,” Augustine comments with the assumption that the psalm prophesies contemporary events, may refer to the power of Christ, “who turned the idolatrous persecutors of the Church to the faith of the Gospel within so brief a period of time” (Enarr. In Ps. 6.13). In another example, Augustine alludes to a psalm that also seems to affirm the Christian era (tempora christiana), in which God has brought to fulfillment the promises of the Hebrew Bible: “And all the kings of the earth shall adore him, and all the nations shall serve him” (Ps. 72:11; Markus 30-31). Under the tutelage of the Roman Empire, Augustine implies, all the nations of the known world now worship Christ. “Augustine appears to have joined in the chorus of his contemporaries in their triumphant jubilation over the victory of Christianity,” Markus writes.

From around 392-401, Augustine consistently reinforced an important union between Church and the res publica—the Roman state—in their joint conversionist mission. Like Eusebius, who claimed that the Empire and Church are “twin roots of blessing,” Augustine was for a long time “bewitched by this Theodosian mirage,” Markus claims. While he never quite reached the level of enrapture with the Theodosian settlement evident in the writings of Ambrose or Jerome, he nevertheless strongly believed in a prominent role played by the res publica in converting what was left of the pagan world. These ideas “nourished Augustine’s assent to religious coercion” in the midst of the Donatist Controversy, which I will address later; “his [approval], tragically, survived the repudiation . . . of the ideas which had provided his justification of [such] coercion” (36).

Such a repudiation is where Markus turns next. He notes a dramatic shift in Augustine’s thought that started in the first decade of the fifth century and moved in one direction from then on. This change is especially apparent after the sack of Rome in 410; “the whole myth of the Christianization of the Empire is blown away in [an] optative sigh of Augustine’s,” Markus writes. “The legal, institutional enforcement of Christianity has now lost its importance . . . What ten years ago had seemed to Augustine achieved is now a hope, perhaps a forlorn hope, for the future” (39). Such a notable shift, however, did not mean that Augustine envisioned the civitas terrena or, similarly, the res publica, as particularly hostile and of no import to those on their earthly pilgrimage to the civitas Dei. In fact, the position Augustine came to adopt was unique among the Church Fathers in their stance toward the “world,” or the saeculum. Typically, if the Fathers were at all interested in the Empire, human societies, or their histories, they had two options. “They could follow in the footsteps of Origen and Eusebius and give the Empire a sacral significance in terms of the history of salvation,” writes Markus. “Alternatively, they could follow the ancient apocalyptic tradition of hostility to the Empire, assimilating it to the saeculum of apocalyptic literature,” such as the Book of Revelation (55). Augustine picked a wholly different approach. He took a neutral stance toward the world, stripped the state of its conversionist role, and associated the Church, for all its imperfections, with the civitas Dei. “The purpose of the state and its coercive machinery was to deal with the disorganization and conflict resulting from the Fall,” Markus claims of Augustine’s attitude. “It cannot make men good, but it can secure public order, security, [and] the rights of property. Stated more generally, its purpose is to help in avoiding conflict and to maintain the ‘earthly peace’” (84, 89). The Church, on the other hand, consists of those destined for the civitas Dei. It may be a secular institution, but it nevertheless plays an essential role in salvation through its sacraments. “It is identical with the City of God in a way in which no other human grouping can be with either city [i.e., the civitas terrena or the civitas Dei],” Markus claims. “For only here is salvation to be had, only here are the fruits of Christ’s saving work available for the redemption of men into the heavenly kingdom” (119).

The intellectual shift that Markus identifies marks an important contribution to Augustinian studies. There are, however, a number of problems with such a clear turn in Augustine’s thought to which Markus himself calls our attention. First, if Augustine associates the Church with the civitas Dei, then what does he make of the fact that the Church has known sinners in its ranks? Markus asserts that Tyconius, a fourth century African Donatist writer, provided Augustine with a cogent theological explanation for the “bi-partite body” of the Church, “embracing wicked and holy alike” (120). Tyconius admits that in whatever sense the Church is “holy,” it must allow the possibility for tolerating sinners within it until the end of history. Moreover, the Church’s holiness is not invalidated by the presence of sinners. Most importantly, however, Tyconius offers what Markus calls an “eschatological key” to reconcile the ostensibly mixed identity of the Church. Whereas other Donatists understood the “true Church” in empirical, sociological, or historical terms—i.e., the Church consists of these people in this place at this point in history—Tyconius conceives the true Body of Christ through an eschatological lens. The makeup of the two cities, the civitas terrena and the civitas Dei, will only be completely revealed at the final judgment; until then, “the Church is what it will be, but thanks to the Tyconian ‘eschatologisation’ of the concept, it is also, in the interim, what it will not be at the end” (120). Thus, for Augustine, while the Church is most certainly synonymous with the City of God, there is temporary room in it for the earthly city of sinners as well. At the end, the true Body of Christ in its unpolluted, pure form will become apparent, and the earthly elements of the Church will fall away. It should be noted that this is a remarkably complex conceptualization on behalf of Augustine, subject to confusion and perpetual tension. Yet one must take into account this theological nuance if one is to understand Augustine’s defense against the Donatist schismatics.

The second paradox that Markus identifies with respect to Augustine’s intellectual shift involves his endorsement of coercive practices undertaken by Roman officials to stamp out Donatist schismatics. The Edict of Unity issued in 405 sparked a sustained attempt by the Roman state to repress Donatism in North Africa via bald-faced coercive policies, which Augustine initially rejected. He worried that coercion would result in the conversion of fake (ficti) Catholics, whereas measured discussion and reasoned debates with Donatists could make them true believers. Nevertheless, Augustine soon came to support the state’s coercive practices having seen the Edict work quite well, even brining Donatists into his own congregation. Of course, this presents a problem; as discussed earlier, Augustine had come “to reject decisively the views about the Theodosian establishment . . . which were one of the chief theoretical props of religious coercion” (139). If the state had no role to play in salvation, then how could Augustine endorse its coercive policies to bring Donatists back into the Catholic fold? Was this not the work of the Church?

With respect to the notion of coercion itself, Markus points out that Augustine’s “theory” of coercion was part of a pastoral strategy. “Harshness, fear, threats, coercion are not . . . rejected on principle,” Markus says of Augustine’s so-called theory. “They are modes of the exercise of pastoral office, but modes which must be kept in reserve, not to be used indiscriminately” (140-141). Markus also calls attention to Augustine’s famous letter to Vincentius written around 408, in which Augustine uses “pastoral arguments” to justify the use of coercion against the Donatists: “We see many who have renounced their former blindness; how could I begrudge them their salvation, by dissuading my colleagues from exercising their fatherly care, by which this has been brought about?” (Epistulae 93.1.1). In fact, coercion is a work of love, writes Augustine, for “it is better to love with severity than to deceive with indulgence” (Ep. 93.2.4). Thus, for Augustine, “coercing schismatics was, in a sense in which coercing pagans could never be, part of the Church’s pastoral activity among its own flock” (142). The Church reserves the right to resort to coercive practices out of concern for the salvation of fellow Christians. While it makes sense that the Church can use coercion as a pastoral tool, however, there still remains the paradox with respect to coercion used by the state. To be sure, “there is an unresolved tension,” Markus comments, “between Augustine’s mature theology of the saeculum and his views on coercion” (146). Can this tension be resolved?

Markus makes an admirable attempt. He notes that a modern notion of separation of Church and state was simply not as clear to Augustine as it is today. Indeed, in his letters, Augustine speaks of Christian rulers and officials owing specific service to God in their public capacity. Yet “neither in his dealings with imperial officials nor in his writings in defense of religious coercion did he ever consider Christian rulers and civil servants as parts of a governmental machinery, of the ‘state’” (148). Rather, he seemed to think of these individuals as members of the Church, and through them, the Church exercised its pastoral care. It was not as if the state used coercion to convert the Donatists—in fact, it did not occur to him to think in terms of the ‘state’ at all in this context. Instead, in his letters, Augustine seems to reduce “political institutions into their component personal atoms,” so that when he writes to a Roman official about his support for what looks like state-sponsored coercion, he writes to that individual as a fellow Catholic and representative of the Church. Markus ties this all back to Augustine’s theology of the saeculum. “Terms such as the ‘state,’” he writes, “disguised the fact that . . . the entity designated by them was a composite one, consisting of the two ‘cities’ in their overlap” (150). Roman officials were both members of the civitas terrena insofar as they were representatives of the res publica and, at the same time, potential members of the civitas Dei due to their Catholic identity. When they used coercion to suppress the Donatist schism, they did so, in Augustine’s mind at least, in cooperation with the latter city. Whereas one would expect that his theology of the saeculum—i.e., the desacralization of the Roman Empire so that it played no role in salvation—would point in a very different direction with respect to coercion—e.g., that the state could not use coercion to convert Donatists—it was, in fact, the fundamentals of his theology that led Augustine to this apparent paradox, and perhaps even concealed it from him.

In sum, Saeculum is a remarkable work of scholarship. Despite the date of its publication, it remains an essential text in Augustinian studies to this day. There are reasons, however, to challenge Markus’s conclusions. More work needs to be done on the problem of coercion; while Markus attempts to resolve the tension I identified above, his account is not entirely persuasive. Could Augustine truly have been blind to the paradoxical nature of his stance on coercion? Is there another way, perhaps, to resolve this tension, one that Augustine would better recognize? While these questions remain, Markus sets us on the right track. I recommend Saeculum to any burgeoning Augustinian scholar like myself.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good source for examining Augustine's works, notably City of God. Not the greatest source, but a helpful starting point. Also, it's a bit outdated (published in the 1970s, I believe).