Saint Augustine on the Two Cities

In this very volatile moment in our history, both of the United States and of the Catholic Church, where so much anger rises to the surface so quickly, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the meaning of our times. This anger and factionalism and the accompanying doom-saying is hardly unique to our age.

Charles Dickens’ great classic, A Tale of Two Cities, begins with words that could apply to any tumultuous age, ours included.

Perhaps especially ours.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

(Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

Dickens, of course was writing of the French Revolution, and the “two cities” were London and Paris.

I wonder, though, if he wasn’t hearkening back to Saint Augustine of Hippo, that great Doctor of the Church whose feast day is today. Augustine also wrote of two cities:

The earthly city was created by self-love reaching the contempt of God, the heavenly city by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the heavenly city glories in the Lord. The former looks for glory from men, the latter finds its highest glory in God, the witness of a good conscience.

(Saint Augustine of Hippo,
City of God)

Augustine wrote his masterpiece following the fall of Rome, the so-called “Eternal City”, to the Visigoths in AD 410. The Christians of his time were in panic at the dissolution of the Empire, for it seemed as though all human society was swiftly coming to an apocalyptic end.

Rome at its height was the capital of a great empire, with its population exceeding a million souls. But even mighty Rome could not last.

In the sixth century the Byzantines and the Goths contested the city three times, and the population fell to thirty thousand clustered in poverty beside the River Tiber, now that the aqueducts had been destroyed and the drinking fountains were dry. The fall of Rome came to be seen by many as the greatest catastrophe in the history of western civilization.

(Christopher Woodward, In Ruins)

In The City of God, the saint sought to assure Christians that even if the earthly Roman Empire fell, the heavenly New Jerusalem would triumph. Our eyes should be fixed on the Kingdom of God, not on the kingdoms of the world. “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).

This is something of which we need to be reminded from time to time. Christ has already triumphed. We’re just marking time. As the Professor said,

I am a Christian… so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

(J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters 255)

No matter what the authorities in power do or how they fare, no matter if the people of God are defeated and thwarted in defending their faith and even their lives, Christ in His eternal sacrifice has already triumphed. The rest is just details.

And as for God’s Church, Christ Himself promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the gates of Hell won’t prevail here and now for awhile.

Defeat comes all the time – just ask the monks who watched their monasteries burn under Henry VIII or the French Revolutionaries – but the Church endures.

We do well to remember the words of the great Cardinal Ercole Consalvi. When Napoléon threatened to destroy the Church, Consalvi laughed at the Emperor and responded, “If in 1,800 years we clergy have failed to destroy the Church, do you really think that you’ll be able to do it?”

As Pope Saint Pius X observed in 1904,

Kingdoms and empires have passed away; peoples once renowned for their history and civilization have disappeared; time and again the nations, as though overwhelmed by the weight of years, have fallen asunder; while the Church, indefectible in her essence, united by ties indissoluble with her heavenly Spouse, is here today radiant with eternal youth, strong with the same primitive vigor with which she came from the Heart of Christ dead upon the Cross.

Men powerful in the world have risen up against her. They have disappeared, and she remains.

Philosophical systems without number, of every form and every kind, rose up against her, arrogantly vaunting themselves her masters, as though they had at last destroyed the doctrine of the Church, refuted the dogmas of her faith, proved the absurdity of her teachings. But those systems, one after another, have passed into books of history, forgotten, bankrupt; while from the Rock of Peter the light of truth shines forth as brilliantly as on the day when Jesus first kindled it on His appearance in the world, and fed it with His Divine words: “Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass” (Matt. 24:35).

(Pope Pius X, Encyclical Iucunda Sane)

Or, in the words of the psalmist, “put not your trust in princes”.

And that’s my advice for you today.

Let us pray for the intercession of the great Saint.

Renew in your Church, we pray, O Lord,
the spirit with which you endowed
your Bishop Saint Augustine
that, filled with the same spirit,
we may thirst for you,
the sole fount of true wisdom,
and seek you, the author of heavenly love.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.