“Socii ad participationem boni”. De civitate Dei 19: the way of Augustine towards peace

Augustine’s account of the citizen’s life in human community is philosophically superior to what is found in his inheritance because Augustine transforms the latter in a twofold manner. In the first place, Augustine takes Cicero’s teaching through the criteria of a pagan Neoplatonic doctrine of participation but secondly, and more significantly, Augustine guides what results from the latter through the content of Christian wisdom. By this means a superior doctrine of participation is forged through considering not only the doctrine of creation, which is shared with pagan Neoplatonism, but, more importantly, the unique Christian Platonist doctrine of mediation by Christ, ‘The Word made flesh.’ On this basis, Augustine evinces that Christian citizens can enjoy a genuine unity of purpose and action that was impossible for pagans. How so? Since the absence of a doctrine of participation or the presence of a merely Neoplatonic doctrine of participation could mandate some opposition between love of God and love of neighbor (i.e. between love of self, community and God or between love of temporal and of eternal justice) the Christian transformation of the Neoplatonic teaching on participation unites each of these loves into a simultaneous love of God and neighbor. Taking his cue both from Augustine’s scholarship and from Rist’s, Alici argues his point in several stages. First, he considers Augustine’s handling of Varro’s Ciceronian account of man and society to show that Augustine prefers to analyze the question of man’s orientation and end, i.e. his pursuit of happiness, from a Platonic perspective since the Platonists, unlike Cicero and the Stoics, have awareness of human finitude in relationship to the realities of (i) the limited nature of this life and (ii) divine creation. Second, Alici maintains that Augustine’s focus on the universal quest for peace (in 19.10) represents a decisive turn towards Platonism since understanding peace as “the ordered form of participation in the order of the good” (II. Autonomy and Heteronomy) shows that the pursuit of virtue encompasses both this world (as Cicero and the Stoics would agree) and the afterlife or celestial world (as the Platonists would agree based on recognizing the soul’s immortality). Hence, the pursuit of earthly peace, which is horizontal, and enduring peace, which is vertical, are inextricably linked on the outside, i.e. in terms of ontology, and on the inside, i.e. in terms of human motivation, since virtue “is essentially a form of ordered love … that consists in adhering to the truth in order to live in justice” (ibid). Third, after arguing that citizens of the city of God on earth have a “kind of paradoxical citizenship” insofar as “they tend toward pax aeterna” on account “of grace” but “live in the pax terrena” because “of nature” (3. Civitas Dei peregrina), Alici asserts (4. Love and justice) that Augustine reforms coherently the aforementioned Neoplatonic account of participation by his account of Christ as Mediator. This is because both love, i.e. the motive beneath man’s quest for happiness, and justice, i.e. what community pursues in this world, have a common origin and end that can be partly attained in this life while fully attained in the afterlife—so long as man embraces Christ as the remedy for his waywardness. Therefore through considering, on the one hand, divine creation and, on the other hand, human redemption in Christ, Alici argues that “the paradigm of justice” and “the paradigm of love” are grounded in what is objective and essentially complementary. Most importantly, this transformation of the Neoplatonist teaching on participation means that the Christian, at least, can pursue at once true justice by true love and, contrariwise, true love by true justice. Hence, the Christian teaching on participation gives a unity to the life of the citizen that was missing from the pagan Neoplatonic teaching on participation insofar as the latter is clear about man’s origin but leaves open the matter of man’s end. Put differently, while the pagan’s love of God can, in varying ways, oppose love of neighbor and vice-versa, the Christian can, at least in principle, everywhere practice love of God and love of neighbor. Since the Christian is ordained by grace to a celestial community, his love for God and neighbor can never be opposed in any earthly community. Thus, by contrast with the rival Stoic and pagan Neoplatonist paradigms of thought and action, the Christian Platonist paradigm does not present any contradiction between horizontal love and vertical love or, looked at another way, between autonomy and heteronomy.