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Pope Leo XIV, elected last month, is the first pope from the Order of St. Augustine, also known as the Augustinians, with thousands of members worldwide.

This is an order founded about eight centuries ago on the basis of the teachings of St. Augustine, the 4th century saint. This man, Augustine, was very important and I’ve long been struck by how unknown he is even among well-read people, given that a pretty airtight case can be made that he shaped Christianity into the thing we know today, perhaps as much as Saint Paul.

A big chunk of Chapter 10 in my book Emperor Whisperers — fairly expensive online but a gift that all my paying subscribers get for free when they sign up — is devoted to making that case, so here it is. Please let me know about your thoughts on Augustine, and whether you think I’m on the right track here: or I’m perhaps overrating the man who thought Adam was so sinless that he was able to reach erection and breed children with Eve without any lust whatsoever.

By the late 4^th century, it was pretty obvious to Roman elites that the empire was, once again, in serious trouble. North of the Roman borders, a period of global cooling had reduced the carrying capacity of lands that had seen strong population growth in previous years. Germanic tribes, in particular, had benefited from pseudo-democratic arrangements, via assemblies and townhall discussions, to establish effective governance systems under charismatic leaders who were afraid of the cold and of the Hun threat from the East.

In response to pressure, the Romans circled wagons around the new Christian ideology: in 391, Valentinian II, emperor in the West under the aegis of Theodosius, took Ambrose's advice to issue a law that not only prohibited pagan sacrifices but also forbade anyone from visiting pagan temples. Valentinian II quickly followed this law with a second one, which declared that pagan temples were to be closed, a move that in practice outlawed Paganism.

Meanwhile, the widespread practice of debasing coinage to increase the monetary mass and allow the Emperor to pay for more troops with even fewer resources continued unabated. Inflation ravaged the upper classes: money-lenders, and those with capital who had tried to put it to use saw that their paper holdings were worth less and less. As many started to refuse official coins, seeing them lacking in actual gold or silver, transactions became ever more difficult and investment impossible.

The results weren't good. By 410, having defeated depleted and badly-paid imperial armies, the Goths sacked Rome, causing deep distress across the empire. Small towns and cities complained that trade networks had all but collapsed, driving the complex Roman economy into a profound depression. It's hard to overstate the effect of these disasters on the daily lives of millions of Empire inhabitants, grown soft, civilized and accustomed to foreign produce and specialized jobs under the Pax Romana for generations, now suddenly facing a hard world of death, plunder, destruction and home-grown production.

With the fall of Rome, long-distance trade that once took pottery from factories in Tunisia as far as Iona in Scotland collapsed, replaced by local markets dealing only with exchange of petty goods; as measured from pollution in polar ice-caps in Greenland, there was a major contraction in smelting work, with levels falling back to those of prehistoric times. Living and literacy standards crashed down[1].

A strong attachment to Christianity helped to live through these disruptions. The aforementioned Prudentius articulated the late Roman views of a diverse empire united by Christianity instead of the antiquated warrior virtues of the pagans – just at the very moment when the Goths were making it into his native Spain, at the time perhaps the richest and most strategic of all regions in the Western Empire, a process that effectively kickstarted the dark ages[2].

In 413, a rising star in the Christian Church published a book called “City of God.” It’s a great and magnificent and complex book, as we'll see, but its argument can be easily summarized: Rome, the great city of men, may have fallen and burned to the ground, but the city of God will live forever.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430), son of a pagan and a Christian woman, only became a true Christian at the age of 31 and brought a lot of Manichaeist and Platonic baggage (despite being very bad at Greek) with him. In his Christian-rejecting youth, he was also a hedonist; it was then when he composed his “give me chastity, but not yet” ditto of worldwide fame[3].

Focused on the concept that the grace of Christ – that is, Christianity – was indispensable to human freedom, Augustine helped formulate the doctrine of original sin. This boils down to the idea that, in the absence of baptizing and Christian worship, one just goes straight to hell however virtuous from a general point of view.

Already a father of one by the time he became a celibate, baptized Christian in Milan, he moved back to Africa but was shaken by the successive passing of his mother Monica and his son, Adeodatus. In the 390s, he embraced asceticism, became a priest and got rid of earthly possessions. After he became bishop of Hippo, not far from Carthage, he fought Manicheism, his former sect, hard. He lived long enough to see the region overrun by Arian Vandals, a Germanic tribe, but died before they took and sacked Hippo itself.

Concerned about barbarian invasions destroying the Western Roman empire, he made seminal contributions to the development of just war theory. With the Empire all but gone, he imagined the Church as a spiritual City of God, distinct from the material state that had been, and his thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. The segment of the Church that adhered to the concept of the Trinity as defined by the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople closely identified with Augustine's view as exposed in “On the Trinity,” a book that he published, following much procrastination, after the “City of God” came out.

Augustine was very familiar with the Graeco-Roman classics and all, or at least most, of their sleights of hand[4]. He also had a shrewd mind that was capable of accommodating contradictions and work on their resolution: in some senses, Augustine may appear as the most Catholic of authors from the time before actual Catholicism; and yet many Protestants, especially Calvinists and Lutherans, consider Augustine to be one of the theological fathers of the Protestant Reformation due to his teachings on salvation and divine grace[5].

In Confessions, 2:4, Augustine tells of how he gained his first insight into the nature of sin when, with some friends, he stole fruit they did not want from a neighborhood garden. He remembers that he did not steal the fruit because he was hungry, but because "it was not permitted." His very nature, he says, was flawed: “It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own error – not that for which I erred, but the error itself." From this incident, he claims, he concluded the human person is naturally inclined to sin, and in need of the grace of Christ.

Pelagius, the British monk who came down from the cold whom we met in the previous chapter, rejected the Augustinian concept of grace. At least according to his opponents, Pelagius taught that moral perfection was attainable in this life without the assistance of divine grace through human free will – thus making sinners less dependent on help from the growing industry of priests, ascetics, monks and bishops that was booming in the empire at the time.

Augustine, well connected with the ecclesiastical powers-that-be at Milan, contradicted this by saying that perfection was impossible without properly obtained grace, because we are born sinners with a sinful heart and will. The Pelagians charged Augustine with departing from the accepted teaching (for example, in John 8:11) of the Apostles and the Bible, claiming that the doctrine of original sin amounted to Manicheism, which taught that the flesh was in itself sinful (and thus denied that Jesus came in the flesh). This charge would have carried added weight since contemporaries knew that Augustine had himself been a Manichaean layman before converting to Christianity.

Reading the accusations against the Pelagians, one gets the impression that, to borrow Stalinist terminology, they were the left-leaning deviation to the Arians' right-leaning deviation. The Arians, and other Eastern heretics, preferred the all-powerful, all-seeing, unsentimental, undivided God of the desert. For the Pelagians, the Christian God was closer to Odin or Zeus, an important boss of the sky whom one should appease, but shouldn't worry too much about. It's not a coincidence that the Pelagians were crushed by Augustine, a man from the edge of the desert.

A man of deep conviction, Pelagius was disturbed by the immorality he encountered in Rome, even in so early a time in the Christian era, and saw Christians using the now-traditional psychological trick of human frailty as an excuse for their failure to live a Christian life.

The British monk saw right through Italian trickery, but Italian trickery was there to stay, atop the Church, for another millennium: to some extent, Pelagius was simply a moderate who, as he himself showed, was continuing a tradition of free-will critique of Christian pre-determination along the lines of Clement of Alexandria, but he was also a convenient scapegoat.

With Pelagius lacking a powerbase (Britain was essentially left to its own devices in 383 when Roman troops departed to defend more important provinces, and by 410 it was disconnected from Roman control, flooded by new pagan inhabitants who would later be described as Anglo-Saxons), a somewhat artificial “Pelagianism” was concocted by Augustine, Jerome and other top-ranking clerics who wanted to set some limits for western critics of the Roman hierarchy, and found the concept just as useful for them as Trotskyism was for Stalin[6].

Historian Peter Brown has convincingly argued[7] that the much-maligned Pelagian controversy, long consigned to histories of theology as an abstruse episode over grace and free will, was in fact an urgent debate about power, money and its moral use.

By the early fifth century, a class of Christian plutocrats had come into being. How were they to cope with what Brown calls “the adrenaline of wealth”? Pelagius' apparent preference for a libertarian, populist view of Christianity was at odds with the pre-Protestant views of Augustine, who defended how grace and predestination showed favor for those successful on earth. Augustine, the old fornicator convert who rejected Christ's pacifist ideas when it suited him and openly referred to esoteric learning to be found in the pagan tradition, went hard after Pelagius, likely misquoting and twisting his arguments; and then Pelagius was accused of misrepresenting his own views on his defense – that is, of being esoteric.

Contra Pelagius, Augustine's central teaching was that a person's salvation comes solely through a free gift, the grace of God, but that this was a gift that one had no free choice to accept or refuse. In legal terms, this is called an inalienable right, one that the person (or entity) cannot give up for money. Freedom is one such right in modern parlance: even if you enter freely into a contract to sell yourself as a slave, that contract is null and void. This example helps to show how slavery was in uneasy company with Christianity from very early on: if humans are given rights they can't renounce, how come people end up as slaves of others?

Early Christian thinkers, like Paul, had fudged the issue by insisting that the role of beloved siblings in Christ was more relevant for a slave-owner relationship than the mere contrast of status. Augustine went straight to the heart of the problem, describing slavery as being against God's intention.

This is a brave stance only to some extent: by his time, slavery had decreased significantly in importance for the Roman economy, since the main source of slaves was conquest and Rome hadn't conquer much at all since the times of Hadrian; actually, one could make the case that a more negative view of slavery was very much welcome for the masses of Roman Christians who were themselves in danger of becoming slaves of either the fire-worshiping Persians or the heretic Germanic/Baltic thugs that were constantly pouring through the former borders of the Empire.

This stance also helps explain another controversial statement that Augustine made, often shortened as: “God doesn’t love you as you are; he hates you as you are. You must be born again.” In full, the quotation calls for Christians to make themselves better and to not be sheep that waits to be slaughtered by barbarians or whoever, content that it’s all god’s will[8]:

In other key debate of the time, Augustine, who had indulged in sins of the flesh for such a long time, had a significant role as he developed a less enthusiastic view of fornication in older age. This was, yet again, in opposition to the more relaxed teachings of Pelagius, and did much to define Church doctrine on the matter for centuries.

Augustine also helped to clarify the distinction between body, which can indulge in orgies and be killed by blood-thirsty Hun invaders or forced into slavery, and soul, which is always under God's closer control and can take a longer-term, detached view of cities burned to the ground and palaces ransacked by illiterate foreigners.

Always practical and ready to fight his enemies, Augustine developed his doctrine of the Church principally in reaction to the Donatist sect, which had a strict view of the Church as an institution that had to protect itself and remain effective in helping with the practical lives of Christians. He taught that there is one Church, but that within this Church there are two realities, namely, the visible aspect (the institutional hierarchy, the Catholic sacraments, and the laity, all of which is corruptible and may end up getting bribes and executed by invaders) and the invisible (the souls of those in the Church, who are either dead, sinful members or elect predestined for Heaven), which the barbarians can't touch.

The concept is fully fleshed out in “The City of God,” a wonder of Platonic equivocation. There, he conceives of the church as a heavenly city or kingdom, ruled by love, which will ultimately triumph over all earthly empires which are self-indulgent and ruled by pride and strong, violent men of the kind the Romans had been in short supply of for a long time.

It must be kept in mind that the full title of the book is “The City of God Against the Pagans” (Latin: De civitate Dei contra paganos), and its immediate aim was to quash allegations that Christianity had brought about the decline of Rome. Augustine pulled no stops to make his points, including the Prudentius-like highly fanciful objection that victory or defeat in battle means little in the big scheme of things.

His money quote to clinch this argument (“The people who remained victorious were less like conquerors than conquered”) has remained a favorite of Pacifists and various defeatists and people who lose wars ever since[9].

On the same vein, in the book Augustine considers the possibility that “a people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love,” as he compares the inhabitants of the decadent empire with their warlike ancestors. This is a pretty obvious way to make a descent to second-class status more palatable for the Romans, as Barbarians, many of them already somewhat Christianized, become overlords all around.[10]

However, Augustine feels compelled to flesh this out and clarify that we shouldn't just love those who are intent or murdering us and raping our children:

Augustine, a sophisticated thinker, doesn't fall into the trap of accepting that Christianity may thus be only an Eastern version of stoicism that adds complex theological arguments to the old Roman call for forbearance in the face of disaster. He goes hard against stoics to mark this territory clearly:

In an interesting comment on Augustine's views on pagans, T.H. Irwin[13] notes that “once we understand why Augustine reasonably (given his theological outlook) takes pagan virtues to fall short of true virtue[14], we should also see why he must regard them as something more than splendid vices. If they are combined with arrogance, they are vicious; but they are not themselves part of the arrogance or vice.”[15]

Irwin makes much of key, often misunderstood statement made by Augustine early in City of God (V.13): “The love of praise: though a vice, it counts as a virtue because it checks greater vices.” In Irwin’s words, “If the pagan moralists are judged by the moderately strict criterion, they turn out to have both virtues and vices. If they are judged by the extremely strict criterion, they turn out to have vices and no virtues.”

Here we must remember who Augustine was truly writing against. It wasn't the pagans, who were all but done as any sort of organized opposition to Christianity, nor the Barbarians who were unlikely to read his books or be swayed by his arguments, if they did: it was the likes of Pelagians and other Latin or Greek Christians who tried to push their own lines of thought. Since Augustine took a long time to write “The City of God,” he had to tweak his early arguments to make sure they wouldn't be understood as a not-hostile-enough against Pelagians:

From the above, it's clear that it would be wrong to see a strong pacifist strand to Augustine's thought. As James O'Donnell, a scholar at Georgetown University, argued in an influential 1983 paper[17], Augustine wasn't looking to enlighten the masses on geopolitics, or to satisfy anyone's intellectual curiosity on specific points of doctrine, but to advance his own views and the interests of his cronies, who had positions to keep and government funds to receive regardless of who won the actual battles:

Augustine's philosophy, like that of so many other emperor whisperers whom we have discussed in this book, is reactive in that it sought to provide a response to specific problems of its era, and a blueprint for a better-functioning society, taking as a given the existing state and its defects, even if the state itself were in a state of collapse[18]. His impact is due that his contributions went much further than the simple act of reassuring his patrons and friends and the reading populace that all was good, that an idea of a Christian Rome would survive the actual sacking, pillaging, murdering and raping of Christian Romans.

By disconnecting the idea of state and sovereignty from power politics, Augustine somewhat haphazardly came up with a theology of love and reason that would later be expanded upon by Thomas Aquinas, beyond the scope of this book. In “Sovereignty: God, State and Self” (2008), the philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain contends that the modern concept of the state, as well as the self, begins with an understanding of God: absolutism and tyranny emulate a tyrannical God who rules by whim, subject to no law of nature save his own caprice. The constitutional state of self-imposed limits, by contrast, arises from Augustine's notions of an ideal state based on God-inspired popular sovereignty.

We believe this to be an exaggeration, as we have argued in previous chapters that such self-imposed limits precede Augustine and were first the result of the political elevation of the less-warlike trading class across the Mediterranean rim, and later of the political accommodation of newcomers (“Plebeians”) in early Republican Rome. But Elshtain, and others like Michael Novak who have made similar arguments, have a point in that Augustine gave this notion a religious tinge and a universal scope: wherever there are Christians, there can be a City of God.

This also helps to explain why, when in the 18^th century a bunch of anti-Christian or Atheist thinkers attacked absolutism during the Enlightenment, they sought Classical, pagan roots to their political conceptions – they would have courted trouble by admitting that it was a Christian and their Christian followers who had shaped their notion of a limited government.

In fact, Elsthain argues that sovereignty, the one political idea the modern world takes for granted, was not the brainchild of the Enlightenment, but the conceptual bastard of medieval apologists for absolute papal power, who wanted to set limits on the power of secular rulers.

Whatever the afterlife of the arguments set in motion by Augustine, the fact that we still speak in awe of them is testament to his success[19]. That, and the not-unrelated fact that the expression or slur “Pagan,” describing a non-Christian, became dominant during his lifetime[20].

“The City of God” is also great effort to provide Christianity – once a post-tribal, austere, stifling religion of penance and gloomy patience ahead of the eternal life: the religion of Augustine's saintly mother Monica – with a human face: he defended the orthodox stance that Adam and Eve had lived in paradise, in the flesh, even if their own was incorrupt, in coherence with their incorrupt will. Adam, he argued, could even have made his penis reach erection, and have bred children with Eve, all without any lust or sin at all[21].

Augustine's theory of sexuality is described in his minor text De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia, and it defies the classical cliché of a Church concerned that sex caused the Fall of Man: on the contrary, Augustine sees sexuality as a punishment, penitence for original sin[22].

Original sin lies in man's arrogance and pride, and springs from the moment Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge, wanting to elevate himself to the divine heights and to become himself master of all creation. It has nothing to do with sex, whatever sex-obsessed priests in Hollywood movies claim. In Augustine's view, God subsequently punished man – Adam – by implanting in him a certain drive – the sexual drive – that is relentless and self-defeating, that cannot be compared with other drives such as hunger or thirst.

The sexual drive radically exceeds its organic function, the reproduction of the species, and, precisely because of this non-functional character, cannot be mastered or tamed. Augustine claims that, if Adam and Eve had stayed in the Garden of Eden, they would have had sexual intercourse, but they would have accomplished the sexual act in the same way as they accomplished all other instrumental acts (ploughing, sowing, admiring sunsets).

This excessive, non-functional, deliberately perverse character of human sexuality represents God's punishment for man's pride and his want of power. Thus, Augustine proposes his theory of the phallus, as a sort of response, a remedy against God's challenge: so, if man has a strong will and self-control, he can master the movement of this part of his body, same as any other; as an example, the worldly Augustine proposes the case of an Indian fakir who is able to stop the beating of his heart for a moment[23].

Augustine further supported this conclusion by describing, in a famous analogy, the gifted people he had seen in Rome and other cities, who could fart musically: men who "have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at will, and without any odor, so as to produce the effect of singing."[24]

It's not a great surprise that a frequent, even serial, sinner like Augustine went to the heart of the sinning problem. He discussed extensively the unexciting problem of original sin and the derivative sins of choice, which he described in his most famous quotation: "Love the sinner and hate the sin."

Late in life, taking his cue from the example of other Berber Christians, like Tertullian and Cyprian, Augustine came to be part of a long-standing tradition of strict personal asceticism that crossed over into the extremes personified by Novatian, Donatus Magnus, and Montanus. Augustine never did reach the extremes personified by true critics of the flesh like Cyprian and Athanasius, or Origen of Alexandria, who cut his own penis to ensure he would remain celibate, but his mark on the future church was profound: the impact of African attitudes towards celibacy and asceticism, therefore, cannot be overstated when considering the Western decision to mandate clerical celibacy[25].

Augustine was unique in many ways, but he was most notable, among early theological giants, for his lack of working Greek – Augustine was perhaps the only monolingual thinker of late antiquity. Many of the men who had shaped the church in the precedent centuries hail from the east. Men like Origen, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and others. They debated and defined Christian teaching, in technical Greek terms, homoousion, hypostasis, prosopon, and such. They met in ecumenical councils set in the Eastern Roman Empire: Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), in which there was little or no participation from the West[26].

Isolated from this intellectual hotbed, Augustine tweaked the theology of the Trinity, arguing that the holy triad reflects the one-and-many aspects of human personality. But he came close to unbalancing the precarious mystical edifice, as Chesterton wrote, noting that the “the grandeur of Augustine's contribution to Christianity” must not hide what he called “a more subtle danger” lurking in Augustine's Platonist conceptions, which he considered potentially riskier for the early Church than his Manichean background:

These risks, and others, Augustine fought off with his convincing wit, enthusiastic argumentation and ability to play back-office politics. For Augustine was a dedicated networker who, later in life, wrote much about the importance of friendship and/or connections.

In “Augustine and Friendship: Friendship as a Product and Proponent of Love for God,” a 2008 paper, Emily Rowell notes that Augustine often spoke about the importance of friendship, with the condition that it had to include a shared love of God – that is, a commitment to Christianity and its aims, a qualifier that would have been hard to expect from earlier thinkers used to deal amicably with intellectual enemies, like Socrates.

Augustine, always learned and ready with the right (Latin) quotation, cited Cicero’s definition of friendship in a letter to his friend Marcianus: “Friendship is agreement, with goodwill and affection, in things human and divine.”[27]

Enthusiastically supported by his elite and bishop friends, he echoed Cyprian call that the bishops and priests of the Church are the successors of the Apostles, and that their authority in the Church is God-given, and whoever does not like it is in serious danger of being tossed out of the perfect heavenly Church.

His views on other subjects follow closely from these: Augustine originally believed in Christian pre-millennial fantasies, namely that Christ would establish a literal 1,000-year kingdom prior to the general resurrection; he later rejected the belief, viewing it as simplistic and unhelpful for a Church that could be easily proved wrong if somebody couldn't find a way to stop the Huns from razing the whole empire.

With Augustine, we see the completed transition from visionary preacher of new Truths to high official of the new established ministry of Truth, with useful features as a purgatory for those who weren't either properly good or properly bad (this was largely an invention of Augustine), and openness to involve ancient cults such as those of fertility into the enlarged, institutionalized, Neo-Platonic Church[28].

He wrote much about Mary, Christ's mother, opening up a new field of inquiry and speculation for future theologians, as well as creating a useful precedent for practical Christians looking for a way to de-paganize shrines to Mother Earth and the like. He insisted on Mary's virginity, a way to stay faithful to the Nicene creed and reject Arianism, as virginal birth helped evade questions about Jesus earthly parentage.

As a good student of the Classical corpus, full of sniggering about the alleged deeds of mythological heroes and semi-gods, Augustine also took the view that literal interpretations of the Bible should be avoided, and metaphorical interpretations could be relied upon when necessary. While each passage of Scripture has a literal sense, this "literal sense" does not always mean that the Scriptures are mere history, he argued: at times they are rather an extended metaphor.

At the same time, he took up the Classic good fight against actors and theater (we made a reference to this subject in Chapter Five), which he saw, not incorrectly, as a dangerous nest of potential anti-social subversion: many ancient Romans, especially those closer to stoicism, denounced the art of acting and complained that theater performances involving females were closely linked with excessive eroticism[29].

Augustine strongly condemned play-acting in Confessions, stating how, as a young passionate man, he loved and would frequent the theater. Eventually, he developed a disdain for the seductive aspects of theater as an institution, stating that it inflames passion and mimetic desires in uncultivated minds and that actors conduct a vulgar art form due to the imitation of truth, rather than being seekers of truth.[30]

One other thing that Augustine learned in the Classics that astrology was not to be trusted, a lesson reinforced by the continued failure of his former Manichean friends to predict anything just by looking at horoscopes and astral charts. This was of much help for future Christians.

Even of more help was Augustine's staunch support for Classical learning in general. He did more than anyone else to shut down the debate about the intrinsic worth of pagan books; he wrote this in “De Doctrina Christiana”[31]:

As the latter quote proves, Augustine's talent is evident even in his lesser-known books. It's striking, for example, how he solves the problem of evil, the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient God, with a simply, straightforward phrase in Enchiridion, a short treatise he published in 420: “God judged it better to bring good out of evil, than to allow no evil to exist.”[32]

In “The City of God”[33], Augustine forever connects the Church with an avoidance of excessive opulence and wasteful spending, albeit he does it in a rather roundabout way. He points out that Christianity shall survive even if the empire falls, because it was never meant to protect the empire and its earthly benefits in the first place.

An intelligent man like Augustine surely understood that an empire eaten from the inside by hedonism, multiculturalism and unsustainable entitlements would inexorably give way to successor kingdoms obsessed by machoism, warfare, ethnic identity and strict protection covenants between the rulers and the ruled, firmly setting the roots of medieval feudalism. In fact, the way Augustine explains it, maybe the fact that the empire is falling is itself evidence that the time has come to build the celestial city:

[1] In the countryside, the fall of the Empire almost immediately brought forward a renewal of folk beliefs in evil spirits and bewitching. By the 6th century, the Spanish Visigoths issued laws against the tempestarii, people who claimed to be able to conjure up storms which would ruin the crops, unless paid by the peasants. It was decreed that a storm-maker should get 200 lashes, have his head shorn and be paraded through the villages of the locality in this condition, Norman Cohn noted in “Europe's Inner Demons” (1993). In 8th century Bavaria, fines were stipulated against these tempestarii. As late as in 1493, Elna Dalok publicly claimed in London control over storms and the ability to kill people by cursing them. And the truth is that the system to produce storms was simple enough: tempestarii splashed water from ponds or, if none was available, from holes filled with water or their own urine. Unsurprisingly, they were frequently credited with the ability to fly.

[2] Pagan thinkers, as rule, were less naïve and starry-eyed about the capacity of Christianism to turn Barbarians into productive, law-abiding Romans. The pagan Themistius wrote in 383 that the Goths of Thrace “are now converting the iron from their swords and cuirasses into mattocks and scythes.” Christians tended to see that glass half full: in AD 417, the theologian Orosius observed: “the barbarians [in Spain], having forsworn their swords, have turned to the plow, and now nurture the surviving Romans as allies and friends.” Cited by Mathisen, 2006, p. 33.

[3] Confessions, 8:17

[4] “For, as Plato liked and constantly affected the well-known method of his master Socrates, namely, that of dissimulating his knowledge or his opinions, it is not easy to discover clearly what he himself thought on various matters, any more than it is to discover what were the real opinions of Socrates.” City of God, p. 248

[5] Lutherans, and Martin Luther in particular, have held Augustine in preeminence (after the Bible and Paul). Luther himself was, from 1505 to 1521, a member of the Order of the Augustinian Eremites.

[6] Under the current, progressive Pope Francis, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith emphasized "neo-Pelagianism" in a letter of February 2018 titled Placuit Deo, stating: "A new form of Pelagianism is spreading in our days, one in which the individual, understood to be radically autonomous, presumes to save oneself, without recognizing that, at the deepest level of being, he or she derives from God and from others." This is a clear response to neo-traditionalists who won't put up with Francis' latest fads and are drifting away from Rome's grasp. It's not a new idea, though: Benedict, Francis' predecessor, also labelled as Pelagians those Catholics who try to ignore Papal diktats and gain salvation by themselves, outside of the Pope's control.

[7] In his 2015 book “The Ransom of the soul: Afterlife and wealth in early Western Christianity.”

[8] Cit. “Sermons, (1-19) on the Old Testament. Volume III/1” (1991) from the series The Works of Saint Augustine: A translation for the 21st Century.”

[9] On Dec 14, 1941, as the US joined World War II, the noted pacifist John Haynes Holmes, a co-founder of ACLU, invoked Augustine’s quote to warn of the dangers, and added: “The precious treasure of our civilization is about to be swept away.”

[10] The quote is in “The City of God” XIX.24. In his 2011 paper “Augustine and the Pagan Virtues,” Chris Kramer, who relies extensively on Paul Weithman's essay “Augustine's Political Philosophy” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, edited by Eleonor Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003) notes that the ancient Romans' virtues didn't really make them virtuous, but only “less vile.” Kramer adds: “It is hard to uncover in any of these descriptions an asset Augustine would find worthy of praise. But this raises the question, what sort of society is possible for pagans in Augustine’s estimation? In answering this question, which will also aid in answering the query of why Rome ultimately fell, it might be helpful to note what Augustine says about society in general, as humans are social beings and living in a commonwealth with many others requires virtue... Obviously, the better the objects of this agreement, the better the people; the worse the objects of this love, the worse the people. So the Romans might have had a commonwealth, as they were united in their love for what they thought to be justice or at least the drive for peace. But this is based upon an erroneous representation of a society... Public service toward justice sounds like a laudable goal, but unless the ultimate goal of God in the end is adopted at the same time, it is not real virtue for Augustine... This means that to the extent that Rome was truly a city (Augustine does not even allow this much), it was definitely not a truly just one, and in effect, it could be argued, as it will be below, that it was bereft of any and all virtues.

[11] City of God XV. 22. We might also add: “And so a rightly directed will is love in a good sense and a perverted will is love in a bad sense.” City of God XIV. 7

[12] City of God XIX. 4.

[13] T.H. Irwin "Splendid Vices? Augustine For and Against." Medieval Philosophy and Theology 8 (1999)

[14] Etienne Gilson, in “The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine” (New York: Random House, 1960), writes that, for Augustine, “every human man becomes virtuous only by making his soul conform to the immutable rules and lights of the Virtues dwelling eternally within the Truth and Wisdom common to all men. The four cardinal virtues, prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice, have no other source but this.”

[15] Kramer, on Op. Cit., writes: “Irwin seems to end with a compromise of sorts in which Augustine allows for pagans (some of them some of the time) to be virtuous, to an extent; at least when they are not seeking domination over others or praise and glory from their own actions, then they can be capable of virtuous acts. But will this be enough to make them virtuous people? “In his [Augustine’s] view, we are closer to happiness if we have the right aims and find them frustrated than if we have the wrong aims and fulfill them. Someone who aims at living according to the virtues for their own sake has one important element in happiness, since having the right aims is itself a part of happiness. A pagan who has the moral virtues aims to live in accord with them, and has the morally correct conception of the ultimate end. To this extent, therefore, someone with the pagan virtues has genuine virtues.”

[16] Brett Gaul, "Augustine on the Virtues of the Pagans." Augustinian Studies 40, no. 2 (2009), p.248

[17] Available online: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/civ.html

[18] In that sense, Augustine is not as unique as he is sometimes deemed to be: Socrates saw Pericles' Athens collapse around him too and, as we saw, Aristotle and many others died in exile.

[19] In a story published in the “Washington Post,” June 18, 2014, Manuel Roig-Franzia wrote that James Bennett, then-editor in chief of The Atlantic, the famous middle-brow magazine, told him in some shock that staffer James Goldberg once engaged in a debate with popular columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates on the issue of gun control. Goldberg then referred to Augustine and Coates confessed that he didn’t know who Augustine was.

[20] This is according to Christopher Francese's book of Latin word histories “Ancient Rome in So Many Words,“ New York: Hippocrene Books, Inc., 2007.

[21] In a conversation with a novelist friend (Aug. 1, 1957), Jorge Luis Borges noted that Augustine's view is that love-making by Adam and Eve was entirely based on will: he would get erections when needed, not because of any sexual arousal, same as when one need to shake his head (“Borges en los Diarios de Bioy Casares,” p. 325). Surprisingly, Augustine adds that, this place being Paradise and the best possible place in Creation, the logical consequence of this is not that Adam and Eve lacked sexual pleasure, but that all senses (taste, sight, touch, smell, and sound) were much more intense than our sexual pleasures. In Chapter XIV, Augustine describes mere human fornication as a sort of epileptic state.

[22] Here we closely follow Slavoj Zizek's reading of De Nuptiis in “The Sublime Object of Ideology”

[23] “All parts of the body are thus in principle submitted to man's will, their uncontrollabilities subsisting only in the factual degree of weakness or power of man's will - all parts except one; the erection of the phallus escapes in principle man' s free will. This is therefore according to St Augustine, the 'meaning of the phallus': the part of man's body which escapes his control, the point at which man's own body takes revenge on him for his false pride. Someone with a strong enough will can starve to death in the middle of a room full of delicious food, but if a naked virgin passes his way, the erection of his phallus is in no way dependent on the strength of his will.” Zizek, “The Sublime...”

[24] Le Pétomane, a French professional farter and entertainer named Joseph Pujol, dead in 1945, would later become the most famous of these curious people. This sort of entertainment is not fashionable anymore, but was for a long time.

[25] We follow here a fascinating essay by Walter Devereux, published in May 2018 in Thermidor Magazine. Deveraux notes that the influence of Africa on Western Europe is a defining feature of the difference between Western and Eastern Church; to this day, Western Christian scholars still regard Tertullian and Origen to be appropriate subjects of Patristic studies, despite both being condemned as heretics and therefore largely ignored in the East; Tertullian, as a matter of fact, was among the first writers to claim that all the Apostles were celibate except Peter.

[26] In an intriguing essay in the New York Review of Books, Jan. 14, 2016, Garry Wills argued that, by overcoming this early obstacle, Augustine may have used the handicap to his benefit. Wills quoted the scholar James O’Donnell, who concluded that Augustine’s Greek was “pathetic,” and then a string of modern commentators who have agreed with Wills' view: the eminent classicist Albrecht Dihle who, after devoting his famous Sather Lectures to a survey of Greek and Latin writings on the human will, concluded: “It is mainly through this entirely new concept of his own self that St. Augustine superseded the conceptual system of Graeco-Roman culture”; the philosopher Gareth Mathews, who called De Trinitate “the first…treatise on mind in the modern sense of ‘mind”; the Plotinus scholar Paul Henry, who claimed that Augustine was “the first thinker who brought into prominence and understood an analysis of the philosophical and psychological concepts of person and personality.”

[27] Letters 222; Letter 31.

[28] Augustine's Platonism is suspect, and heavily traduced by Cicero, as O'Donnell notes in Op. Cit.: “The loss of most of Cicero's De Republica prevents us from tracing closely the influence it exercised on Augustine. But some of what Augustine found there was important to him, e.g., the definition of a populus quoted from Cicero in Book 2 and taken up, seventeen books and ten years later, to become an important part of the elegant and beautiful Book 19. There are affinities between the underlying themes of the Ciceronian work and Augustine's own effort in ciu., for all that Augustine is deliberately attempting to suggest an entirely new way of thinking about human society and the responsibilities of its citizens. (That Macrobius, it now seems, wrote his own imitation of the De Republica – his Saturnalia – in Africa around 430 could even be taken as an indication that this learned traditionalist saw the intended rejoinder to De Republica in Augustine and posed his more loving imitation to counteract Augustine.) At any rate, it is clear that ciu. – among many other things – Augustine's final debate and settling of accounts with Cicero. But what of Plato? There is just a trace in ciu. (22.28) that Augustine knew enough of Plato's Republic to conceive his own work as the third stage of a debate that connected Greek with Roman with Christian ideas about justice, peace, and human society. That the first work ended with the eschatological myth of Er, the second with the dream of Scipio, and the third with Augustine's own evocation of last things suggests that if the De Republica had survived intact we might be in a position to descry a clearer line of descent than we now know.”

[29] Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1981)

[30] Dox, Donnalee, “The Idea Of Theater In Latin Christian Thought, Augustine To The Fourteenth Century.” (University of Michigan Press, 2004): 39-41.

[31] Book II, 40.60.

[32] The argument from evil – hugely influential in modern ethics – claims that because evil exists, either God does not exist or does not have all three of those properties. Attempts to show the contrary have traditionally been discussed under the heading of theodicy.

[33] Book I, Chapter 30