Augustine's Two Cities: Veronica Ogle | Faith & Politics #3

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr.

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Speaker 2: James Spencer.

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Speaker 1: Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer and I'm joined today by Dr. Veronica Roberts-Ogle. And she is the author of a book called Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God. And we're going to be discussing today that book as well as just the City of God more generally. I first heard about this book and about Dr. Ogle on the Civitas podcast, which I think you, you know, peered on a year and a half ago now or something like that. But that was my first introduction. I read the book, love the book, really helpful framing of Augustine. And so I'm excited to have Veronica on the podcast.

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Speaker 2: So welcome.

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Speaker 3: Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. I'm glad that you got to follow that podcast. They're really great over there.

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Speaker 1: They really are. Yeah, I enjoy so much. I think they give me more reading material than any other podcast I listen to.

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Speaker 2: And so really helpful.

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Speaker 1: So yeah, glad we can make this happen. Why don't we just start out a little bit by you telling us a little bit about yourself and what got you into Augustine?

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Speaker 3: Sure. So I am Veronica Ogle. I teach at Villanova University. which happens to be an Augustinian school. So it was founded by the Order of St. Augustine. And we're all very excited because we have one of our graduates is currently the Pope. So I was really excited. Yeah, yeah. So we're all rooting for Pope Leo over here. And yeah, so I'm really so grateful to be here because Augustine has really been an important figure in my life, even from the very beginning. I remember when I was a freshman in college reading the Confessions and really been taken with the idea that our heart is restless until it rests in God. And as an 18-year-old, this sense of the restlessness of my own heart and kind of drawing attention to that and giving meaning to that and directing that. So I feel like Augustine has been part of my journey for a really long time now. And Yeah, I ended up in graduate school deciding to write my dissertation on Augustine's City of God. I ended up studying political theory over at Notre Dame. But it was really the same thing. The way in which Augustine reads the human heart or holds up a mirror to the human heart, I've always just found so illuminating for the human experience. I really think he's really wise, and there's a lot– just existentially that I constantly am returning to and chewing on from his thoughts. So yeah, it's been a long journey with Augustine and I'm glad that I get to teach it to freshmen now because Augustine is very integrated into our program here at Villanova.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: That's amazing.

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Speaker 1: I will say I came to Augustine later. I'm an Old Testament guy, but discovered Augustine doing research on structural evil. And some of the way that he talks about, you know, these offices that pull glory away from God and that almost require it to. surfaced as I was doing some of that research and really amazing. They got reintroduced to him, I suppose, when we went to Germany and were in Erfurt and went to the Augustinian monastery where Luther studied. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So really fantastic character. And I've always been fascinated with his thought introduced through the confessions, very much like you were and then sort of moved into the city of God, which is more where we'll focus today and, but tell people a little bit about what is the city of God? Like why would Augustine write it? How is it situated within his sort of life and context and thought?

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Speaker 3: Yeah. Um, well, it's a really interesting story. So, uh, people sort of say that Augustine lived at the very end of the Roman empire in the West, right? So he dies as Carthage is being overtaken by the Visigoths. Um, So this sort of penetration of the borders of the Roman Empire, the sort of contraction of it, the moving towards Constantinople as its center base, all of this is really happening during Augustine's life. So the big marker, the big impetus for the city of God itself was back in 410 when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, so Alaric and his troops, had um penetrated the gates of the city and this just was a psychologically crushing moment for the romans it had been i think 800 years since any invading force had actually penetrated the walls of the city so think about like 9 11 and just take it to the next level you know um so Jerome, St. Jerome is, is just going out of his mind here. And, and people are sort of trying to figure out, well, what does this mean? Why did this happen? So it's, it's a cultural moment of, we thought we were invincible. You know, we are the great Roman empire. What do we do now? What is the cause of this? And so, you know, if you think about it, Constantine had, you know, half a century earlier, converted, made the religion of the empire Christianity. And so part of the thinking amongst a certain, probably the Senate class of the Romans is, well, that's the cause. You know, that Christianity is not capable of maintaining the kinds of civic virtues that Roman religion had cultivated. So there's that argument going around kind of amongst the population. There's people that say, well, we offended the gods. They abandoned us. And that is why the gates of the city were penetrated. And the Christian god doesn't protect like the Roman gods did. And so all of this, the Christians at this time, you know, they're kind of getting scapegoated. And they're also trying to make sense of things because if you think about it with Constantine, there was for a moment kind of this high, right? Like we're in Christian times now and God has providentially converted the Roman emperor. And this means that he's going to use the Roman empire to, you know, convert the world. And he's going to protect us, of course. So, what do we do now? You know, there were a lot of atrocities, people pouring out of the city of Rome with these horror stories, you know, of, you know, family members being killed, being raped, everything being taken from them, all pouring into North Africa. It's a real crisis moment. It's a real crisis moment. And we have homilies that Augustine gives at the time that are really kind of the beginning, the seed of his whole city of God. So he starts writing the actual text, let's say three, three years later. And it takes him, I think all the way until four 26. So he starts writing in four 13, take it all the way until four 26 to finish the thing. Cause it's, it's like a doorstopper raised 22 books. Um, but he kind of lets it out in bit by bit. So he, he gives it in five, five book chunks to people. And, uh, he says, Hey, did you read it? Did you think it was helpful? You know? Um, But he's really meeting a moment here. And so what does he have in mind? He kind of has to take the Christians who are sort of expecting a kind of temporal protection from God. Maybe you could say under a sort of pagan model of what the gods do. This is what the Christian God is supposed to do too. And he has to kind of zoom out in a really big way to sort of say, well, what is this story about? of salvation history? What is the story of human history? How are these things related to one another? And how do they help us get perspective on the moment in which we find ourselves? So that's really what the City of God is. It's an attempt to kind of give perspective in a crisis moment that I think, while it's incredibly timely, especially for then, but I would say also for now. It's also timeless because he's zooming out of this crisis moment to give this kind of overarching perspective from the perspective of scripture as to why things are the way that they are. Challenging, I think, the expectations both of the pagan readers, but also the Christian readers. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. It's interesting. So I came to your work having started to write on Christian nationalism. And one of the sort of, I don't know whether I'll call it like a trend or a tendency within Christian nationalism, but it felt like it resonates so well with the sort of perspectives that Augustine is addressing early on. That there's this notion somehow that, and the way I approached it was, hey, Christian nation doesn't mean the same thing we mean when we say Christian doctrine or Christian worship. Like we're using this term really flexibly. And if we carry over the concepts of what we mean by Christian worship or Christian doctrine back into Christian nation, we're really losing something. We're missing an essential characteristic that I would call, that I would say is Christ in Christian nation. Christian nation doesn't make Christ essential. And there's a line in your book that you write when you're talking about Augustine and And this is, I think, an important concept that you develop in the book is that we shouldn't be demonizing the nations. And these are my words, not yours, but we shouldn't be demonizing the nations, but we shouldn't be venerating them either. And the way you phrase it is something like, you know, political entities, political structures and organization can make a society healthier or sicker. but it can't transform a society from being the city of man to being the city of God. I think that's a fair paraphrase, hopefully, but maybe you could comment a little on that because I think it's a really crucial point that Augustine is not saying that the city of man is the worst thing ever developed. And it's, it's like, you know, it's not, you know, Dante's Inferno or something, right? Where you have, you know, sort of this clear polarization between the city of God as the demonic realm and the city of, or I'm sorry, the city of man as the demonic realm and the city of God as the divine realm. There is some, there's a real respect for the city of man.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. So this is probably some background. So I was kind of giving the context for how he writes it. How does he end up giving this perspective? he does it exactly as you say, through this idea of there being these two cities and these two cities that kind of reach after, you know, we call it like eschatological. So after time in, in, in eternity, we'll end up having these two cities. One is, is venturing towards life with communion with God forever, right? That's the city of God. And then you've got the earthly city, which you call the city of man, same thing, which is, if it keeps on its own trajectory, will end up, you know, in the inferno. So he has these two kind of eschatological categories, these two types of cities, the archetypal cities, and he's kind of telling a story about what it looks like in time where these two cities are living side by side. So then the question that's really interesting is, well, what are these two cities? And so what you're talking about with this, the city of man, there's two things going on here because on the one hand, he's got this kind of like archetypal idea of the earthly city or the city of man. And I'll talk about that in a minute. And then he's also sort of talking about political communities. Yeah. And so in my work, he uses the same term, earthly city, Civitas Turina for both. So what is the relationship between those two things? But exactly as you're saying, when he's talking about political communities, what he's saying is there's a temptation to turn them into something like a sacred state. And it demands worship. It tends to be a totalizing horizon that gives us our worldview. It is our whole world. And it doesn't really let itself be permeated by something transcendent. And that's the danger of political community. But he says that that danger actually comes from the dynamics of this archetypal earthly city kind of occupying and shaping and making claims about what political life looks like. So maybe to back up a little bit, the city of God is called the city of God because that's its main focus, but then there's also this story that he's telling about the earthly city. So just for basic things, what are these two cities? On the one hand, he says, These two cities are created by two kinds of love. And the city of God is created by God's love carried as far as towards contempt of self. And then he says the earthly city is created by self-love reaching as far as contempt for God. Which is really, really interesting because if you think about it, like the city of God, when he says it's created by divine love that is carried as far as contempt of self, this language of carrying, of course, evokes the cross. So the city of God is created not by our love for God, but rather by God's love for us. It's God's love that brings this community into being. And God carries the cross. so that we might be able to come back into that city. So that's kind of the first thing. So there's this city that was created at the very beginning with the angels. We were created to live in that city, to be in communion with God. We fall away from that. The cross is our, you know, path back to it.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: That's, that's the city of God. And then we've got the earthly city, which he says is created out of a kind of self love, which is sort of so bloated that it reaches the, so far that it even wants to reject God's love, this sort of contempt for God that comes out of self-love here. So there's that, the city, what kind of community would self-love create? And that's when he's talking about the earthly city, a lot of the things that he's pointing out is what kind of behaviors, what kind of community life follow from this form of self-love, this selfish self-love that is contemptuous of. of God and of gift and of all of that. So then when he's talking about political life, he's pointing out that our political communities are really, really shaped by this self-love that we have. And so then when you're talking about sort of like Christian nationalism and maybe the lack of center in Christ, in a certain way, you're sort of asking this question about, well, where does political life lie when you're talking about these two archetypal cities. Yeah. And I think, you know, the idea of the city of God being on pilgrimage, you know, that's a community. And in what way might it dwell within a political community? Well, it's only going to dwell within it as a pilgrim.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: And so I think that that makes the sort of attempt to grasp it or to reify it or to turn it into a useful ideology for political purposes. Like, That's where the dynamics of self-love almost kind of co-opt or take into itself in a way that seems useful. The gifts that are given as pilgrim gifts in a certain sense. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: It's interesting to think through. I mean, I think one thing I want to explore a little bit is contempt of self, just to sort of clarify that concept for people. Because I think it can read as... while we really hate ourselves. And I'm not sure, I'm not exactly sure that's what, I'm pretty sure that's not what Augustine's doing with it. So can you kind of dive into that a little bit and then maybe we'll pivot back to these political entities and how they square the political societies and how they square with city of man, city of God kind of concept. Yeah. Yeah.

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Speaker 3: That's, that's, that's an important clarification. So Augustine, maybe this kind of hit the news that, In the last year or so, he has this idea of an ordo amoris or an order of loves.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. So for Augustine, the real fundamental thing when he's talking about the order of loves is he thinks at bottom, we love everything. We're called upon to love everything in God. Everything in God. we see fundamentally as a gift from God that is loved as a gift from God. So everything is oriented, referred back to God. All of the beauty of creation, all of those people that we love, the peace of our nation, everything is gift fundamentally from God. So we can love everything in God because everything is created in God that can participate in that love. So the order of Morris is, do we love everything in God? So that would be loving things in Amorde, love of God. Or, and this is the temptation, and this is the fallen condition, is we tend to reject God and to love everything in self-love. So the choice fundamentally is to love things in God or to love things in ourselves. What value do I will this to have? I will, you know, my husband to be this way and to do all these things for me. And so I love him in myself, kind of in a spirit of self-love. So that's kind of the fundamental choice. Do we love things in God as they are as gifts, or do we love them as we want them to be for us, for ourselves? So when he's talking about this kind of contempt of self, it's really, am I willing to to let go of what I want these things to be and to love them, to refer them to God? So if you remember, you know, in scripture, Jesus says, you know, unless you hate your father and your mother, it's the same thing, right? You know, it's you follow me first, right? And then there will be room for your father and your mother. But if you put your father and your mother before me, you're really putting yourself before me.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

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Speaker 3: That's the idea here.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I was struck by, and I don't remember where it is in Augustine at all, but he has this image of, I think it's like a stream or a current that's flowing. And the current is, he refers to it, I think, as the current of God's love. And everything else flows along in that current. And just the image that it brings to mind and the way I usually try to explain this to people is it's not a sequential.

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Speaker 2: First, I love God. Second, I love family.

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Speaker 1: Third, I love nation, which is often the way you hear it in more popular treatments. And I think even when Vice President Vance is sort of advanced that he tends to describe it in that way. Yeah. The way I like to think of it is it's almost like going scuba diving. You know, you're so immersed in God's love that your movements, your communication, your everything has changed. You're now, you know, sort of moving and thinking and breathing on in terms of the water that you're immersed in. And that is how it's meant to function as love of God is this immersive thing that we're in. And it now changes the terms of our engagement so that we have to shift.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. So, I mean, a part of it has to do with a kind of loss of platonic metaphysical framework, you know, so you've got, you know, this idea of participation. So God being the world of becoming participates in, in a partial way that which God is fully. And so, so this idea of loving in God is precisely that, that, that, um, yeah, I like this image of swimming, swimming in. So everything is, is in God. It's not that God is first and then a discreet compartmentalized second thing is next.

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Speaker 1: No, no, no.

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Speaker 3: Everything is in that first thing. So if we love things in ourselves, then we make ourselves this first thing, but then everything, you know, goes awry because we are not being itself where we're this limited, limited thing, which means we distort everything around us. There's not room for everything as it is. in ourselves, there only is room for that in God.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. It's not a pie chart where like God gets 99% and then you have this 1% that everything itself, like it's an all encompassing framework. And so you have to have a different image of it than a priority list.

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Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. It's not a priority list. That's right.

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Speaker 1: So when we think about, when, when we think about Augustine's view then of the political society's, Right. He seems to suggest that there is a way to organize political society so that it is more aligned with God's established order, but still bending away from it in the, in the eschatology in the, either in the short term, longterm or eschatological sense. And so there is a, There's a way of organizing ourselves that recognizes aspects of God's order and allows maybe God's goodness to shine through our political arrangements. But ultimately, then in those political arrangements, they're just too narrow because they're bracketing out God. They can't fully see or accept God's self-disclosure in a way that the church does. Is that a fair rendering?

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Speaker 3: So the church, he doesn't really distinguish between the church and the pilgrim city. So the city of God on earth really is, for him, the church that is pilgriming towards its eternal home with God. And so that community, he says, is founded by Christ. It's founded by Christ, by divine love. And in that way, it's a really fundamentally different type of community than any political community, because all political communities are based on human initiative. And that might be a sort of like natural coming together of families. It might be very organic. And even so, it's founded by human beings.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: It comes it's within the natural order of things. And so that means that the church is just a, it's a different type of community. It is bound together in love of God from its very beginning because Christ, the head binds together all of his members and he's purifying them, gathering them back together over the course of time so that, you know, in eternity, they will be, God will be all in all. But a political community does not actually have an eschatological telos, right? There is no, it's simply a temporal arrangement of a group of people seeking earthly peace together. How do we live together in a state of peace and time? And so it's a different type of thing. It's a human project. And the people within that project can do it in a spirit of, I love earthly peace in light of heavenly peace, which means it's just the same thing about the swimming in water, right? Like, do I view my economic structures? Do I view the food that we cultivate in our community? Whatever. All these things, these material benefits that we have, do I view those in light of something higher or greater? Do I love these things in light of something higher or greater? And to the degree that the members of the political community love the things that constitute earthly peace in light of heavenly peace, those things that they share here and now will become more shared and more shareable, which would mean the political community would be more just and there would be, in fact, a more true form of peace here and now. But he really thinks it depends on the loves of the people involved. And there are things get really complicated because it's not enough to say that I'm a Christian and I claim to love things in light of heavenly peace. Actually, it has to be the true case, right? Like what matters is not what you say about your loves. What matters is how do you love these things? And there cannot be a compartmentalization. So I've got my economic life over here and my church life over here. All of these things have to be loved in God. And he says this is very difficult. And so he's not a real optimist when it comes to politics. He thinks that our political communities are constantly wounded, constantly weighed down by selfish self-love. Yeah. Which means that when we make agreements... or like a consensus about what earthly peace looks like, we're often keeping things for ourselves that love would probably tell us not to keep for ourselves. And so there's this sort of tragic perpetual woundedness. He thinks we're constantly wounding our political communities by the actions that we do out of self-love. But he does say that part of the mission, part of the vocation of a Christian is to reveal, bear witness to what it means to love earthly peace in light of heavenly peace. So that's a mission for the whole church, to love these things. Even say you're in office and if you, what would it mean to love your power in light of heavenly peace? And he has this really interesting example where he spends a long time talking about the emperor Theodosius. And he kind of gives a sort of mirror of princes where he says he did this thing and he shared all the money that they got or he shared all the gold that they got. And he forgave the political enemies. And he has this whole vignette of what would it actually look like to not love power and selfish self-love. It's a kind of almost... it's not attached to it in a certain sense.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Understood.

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Speaker 1: So when we think about, I think this is, uh, this is a real question for me cause I kind of get confused on it. So the church and the city of God are two different things. Am I right about that?

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Speaker 3: Well, there's a lot of scholarly debate about that. Um, I think Augustine doesn't, here's what he says. He says that, um, The pilgrim church is on a journey towards his eschatological destiny.

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Speaker 1: Okay.

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Speaker 3: And that is as bride of Christ, you know, to become one in Christ towards the beatific vision, the enjoyment of God and of one another in God. So the church, he says, is already the body of Christ. The church is already the bride of Christ. However, it needs to be purified.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: So all of us on pilgrimage are in this process of becoming purified.

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Speaker 1: Which is why he.

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Speaker 3: Says that the the, the greatest activity, um, or the greatest mark of, of, of the pilgrim churches task for forgiveness.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Um, and that's really important. So one of the things he says about Theodosius is that he admit he did something really bad politically. He like ordered a massacre. Wasn't good. Uh, he gets excommunicated. He asked for forgiveness to the people that, um, So that's a really important thing, this ability to ask for forgiveness. So the whole pilgrim church is wounded. The whole pilgrim church is in need of this healing that only comes from God. He has this idea that the visible church that we see is a sort of sacrament, which points beyond itself to an invisible reality, but it's not separated from the invisible reality. It really is. the church really is the invisible city of God, but it's a sacrament. So it points beyond itself to, to that deeper reality that it is, but it's not fully right. So, so the church for him, all this to say within the body of the visible church, it's possible to participate in the sacramental life of the church only by explicitly and not also within the heart, right? So you could, for example, be baptized. You could, for example, receive the Eucharist, all these things, live within the liturgical life of the church, go to church. And yet it's possible to do those things only externally and not also internally. And he says that we just don't know whether or not, um, people that we see in the, in the, in the community of, of our parish, our church will all be together, uh, enjoying God and each other in God. Right. So there's a sort of like unknowingness of whether even we, you know, we ourselves, we hope, right. Like God is faithful. There's no one he's, you know, no one, he doesn't desire, uh, anyone to fall away from him. God is constantly extending his grace to us. And yet there remains the possibility to say no. There remains the possibility to feign things, right? And so God knows the heart. And as much as he is continually offering grace, continually offering grace, it is possible for us to say no to that grace. And so in the visible church, it may be that there are people walking within the community of this visible church that won't end up in the city of God.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. And it really does seem to me. So that, that is the way I understand it. So I'm really appreciate that explanation. That's how I was reading Augustine. Like the church is moving toward the city of God, but you have to then make this distinction of true and false. false church, which I think rings true with like what we're reading in Hebrews, for instance, that there's assurance of salvation so long as there's an endurance of the saints and like these sort of weird interconnections that you have to make in there. I think you see it gestured in at first John, where he talks about if they were really of us, they would not have gone out from us. But what this assumes is that they were part of the group. but then showed themselves not to be part of the group in their exit. And so you, you see this in the new Testament that there is this tension and a recognition that, yeah, everybody's participating, but then at some points we see this sort of fracture where people, you know, the leopard really shows its spots, so to speak. And, and now we recognize something different. Yeah.

00:33:37
Speaker 3: And, you know, I mean, I think this, this story of grace is a really complicated one because it, I think it's possible to receive graces and then at a certain point to reject them. It's sort of like this cling to me always, says Christ. Don't be presumptive that you have clung to me. Things can atrophy. The life of the pilgrim is to constantly say, today I will cling to you again. Today I will cling to you again. And so, so he doesn't linguistically, he does not distinguish between the city of God on pilgrimage and the church that, that, that is not a distinction that he makes, but he does sort of say there's this tension between the unfolding of time and what will be gathered together in eternity. And so, so he really does want to emphasize like be on guard, be on guard and make sure that today you are, you, you continue to cling to, Continue to recognize that you are dependent on and need to receive grace from God to continue to walk with him. So that's, I think, as a pastor, really important on his mind, this sort of way in which we can kind of rest on our laurels. You know, that's always a bad idea.

00:35:03
Speaker 1: When you think about. Obviously, political participation in the Roman Empire is going to be very different than what we have, at least in the United States today. When Augustine thinks about that political participation of this pilgrim community within the Roman Empire, is there any sort of guidance you see for Christians today, particularly Christians in the United States?

00:35:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's actually perhaps... a helpful corrective because sometimes I think we think of political participation as showing up at the ballot box and discerning between different proposed policy platforms.

00:35:50
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:35:52
Speaker 3: Which I think is sort of an illusion. I think actually it's what, what Augustine is pointing out is always true that political life is is the life of living in pursuit of building, well, participating in the cultivation of an earthly peace in a community. So political life really is cultivating and nurturing the bonds that make possible earthly peace within a real community. And we have lost that idea, right? So if we sort of say that politics is something very small where I pick between different platforms, once every two or four years, we've forgotten that we as Americans are constantly called upon to nurture and build thick ties that perpetuate and teach the meaning of liberty from one generation to the next. And it's hard to know what genuine liberty is, right? We fall into visions of easy freedom, license, things like this, things that you can buy, right? The freedom to buy things.

00:37:02
Speaker 1: Right.

00:37:03
Speaker 3: However, genuine liberty, I think, is absolutely in harmony with thick responsibilities toward others and being dependent on one another. And so Augustine shows us that actually our mission in political life is to build thick bonds of genuine liberty. peace with one another. And that involves the way that we live day in and day out. We are cultivating a set of virtues alongside one another. We're living out of those virtues. We're teaching people to trust one another, that people can be trustworthy. We're showing what, why character matters. I mean, all of these things I'm putting in the language of civic.

00:37:54
Speaker 1: Virtue, right?

00:37:54
Speaker 3: Like why would this be important politically? There's more to it than that. But I think Augustine is really, really emphatic that how we conduct our social responsibilities bears witness and teaches the community around us what kind of peace is possible.

00:38:13
Speaker 1: Okay.

00:38:15
Speaker 3: So he gives the example of the pater familias, the head of the household, the father. And he says that you can be a head of household and, and love to dominate other people. And so everyone's scared of you, everyone flatters you, and you love lording it over other people. And so peace in that household is really all about doing what you can to flatter the leader and making sure that you're not harmed by that leader. So it's a very negative form of peace. People are living together in fear. People are learning to manipulate each other, right? You could think about like King Lear's daughters. How did they end up, you know, saying those things that they said? Well, I mean, I think there was a sort of climate where they learned you flatter dad and that's how you get what you want, you know? So there's that kind of paterfamilias. And then he talks about the paterfamilias who sees his authority as service.

00:39:19
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.

00:39:22
Speaker 3: And he's constantly recognizing where the people, he listens and he recognizes that where there are wounds within his household. And he tries to bind those wounds by, you know, there, there is punishment involved, right? Like, you know, you, you hit your brother with the Legos again. So the Legos have to go, you know, But there's a sort of teaching of the importance of loving one another, of thick bonds where our relationships with one another really, really matters. And we need to live in a way where everyone is listened to. Everyone is learning to grow in these virtues. And everyone recognizes that they have an important place. And so these kinds of leadership roles are all about service. and we all have them, right? We have different parts of our lives where we have, um, responsibilities to others that, that, um, that create a culture.

00:40:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:40:34
Speaker 3: And I think we can all learn from that in Augustine rather than sort of compartmentalizing politics to this little place where we're choosing between platforms. We're learning to recognize the importance of our own, uh, characters and what kind of community that will create, what kind of culture we're knitting together day in and day out.

00:40:53
Speaker 1: And it strikes me, you see this, obviously, I think you see it in some of the household codes in Paul's work, you know, Ephesians, Colossians. But I think the place you almost see it, where you could arguably make a really strong case for Romans 14 and 15, this weak, strong argument, particularly where he talks about look, the weak answer to God in the same way that the strong, you know, relate to God. And so that then should condition the way that the weak and the strong interrelate with one another. There shouldn't be judgment or condemnation or what have you.

00:41:28
Speaker 2: Like that's, that's a level up.

00:41:31
Speaker 1: God's going to handle that part. And so this then provides the basis for living peaceably with one another and, and really fostering growth within that community. And, And so there is this orientation, as you were talking about the authoritarian paterfamilias, right, where everything is about the head of the household. You see this sort of misorientation. I know Augustine talks a lot about misdirected desire. This is almost like a misdirected peace. It's like it doesn't foster the right sort of virtues. it can create a pseudo peace, but it's not around the right set of virtues. And so reorienting those so that the true fear that you have is around God. It sort of lead, there's this great quote in Jonathan train wrote it in a book on theologies of memory in relation to the Vietnam war.

00:42:25
Speaker 2: I'm blanking on the title exactly.

00:42:27
Speaker 1: But he says for Christians, as a people called to obedience, they are always free to obey. And he has this notion of true liberty found in deep obedience to God. Yeah. It just strikes me that all of that is sort of what Augustine is swimming around. Yeah.

00:42:48
Speaker 3: And he really, he, so he, there's two things going on. First of all, he thinks that naturally God has put in the paternal heart, a deep love for his children that, you know, obviously self-love, withers away, but this sort of natural love is a mirror of God's love for us, which is deep. And, you know, if you think about the confessions and how it's modeled on the prodigal son, the story of the prodigal son has affected Augustine so very deeply. And so the way in which all of these, this compassion for one's own children, the desire to help them, to heal them, All these things he thinks that, you know, is naturally there. And then God's love only strengthens it and will also gives it a measure so that when it's not there, God indicts that absence, right? But yeah, it's really about how do we think about our roles of authority as service? Well, only by seeing the face of the other and being moved by that face. in love. So he has these remarkable letters where he writes to Christian judges, you know, involved in Senate, like the, there, there were some, there was some unrest in North Africa with, with these different Christian groups. One was called the Donatists who it was kind of, they really didn't like the Roman empire, for example. So it was a bit involved in national separatism, but the Donatists got a bit violent and they would, you know, throw lime in the eyes of the Catholics and kind of they would blind them. And so they were charged with, you know, public unrest. And Augustine writes these letters to Christian judges and says, look, you know, do not torture them. Do not execute them. Rather, with the heart of a loving father, seek to rehabilitate them. So he really thinks that the heart of the father is one of compassion that seeks a kind of restoration or healing. And it's really interesting the way that he takes that model and he applies it to politics. But it can't really be understood without this kind of compassionate heart that seeks healing rather than just destruction of people.

00:45:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, like a putting away of the rabble-rousers. without any sort of rehabilitation or, or desire to transform them. Is that a fair way to think about it?

00:45:30
Speaker 3: That's right. Yeah.

00:45:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:45:32
Speaker 3: That's what he, he says, avoid this, that, uh, you, he, he even writes like, think about yourself as the woman caught in adultery. How can you be a judge in light of that? You are that woman, right? And so you judge out of recognizing you have been radically forgiven and which doesn't mean laxity, but rather it means applying the law with a heart for rehabilitation and forgiveness.

00:46:00
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:46:02
Speaker 3: And reform.

00:46:02
Speaker 1: Yeah. Let me think for a minute because Augustine, and again, I'm not, I don't remember where I read this, but I know it's from Augustine. So maybe you'll be able to place it, but he's talking about everyone deserving love, right? Everyone deserves love, but, because we have a limited capacity, we ultimately can't give everyone the love that they deserve. And so he suggests that God has placed us in a position and around a certain degree, number of people to love them in a particular manner, right? And it strikes me that well, first I'm wondering if you know that passage better than I do. Do you recognize that teaching from a Justin? Yeah.

00:46:54
Speaker 3: So I think here, I think this is night city of God, 1914. Okay. Um, where he's talking about, uh, the two great commandments, love of God and love of neighbor.

00:47:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:47:07
Speaker 3: And so he says, you know, seek peace with all, uh, do no harm, uh, And then he has this really interesting thing where he says, well, you have a, you have a responsibility to those close to you and your family. But there's this tension between, in a certain sense, the principle of need and the principle of proximity. Yeah. Let's say you have a, you know, one loaf of bread, the heart, aches because we recognize that if I have one loaf of bread, I have to choose between the starving person and my child, for example. And so what he's really doing there is he's recognizing there's this tension between the needs of the whole world and then the people that have been given to us. Now, I think what he's doing there is he's not kind of making he's not making a law of you always, you know, you always give the bread to your child in the face of a starving person, because what if your kid just had four peanut butter jelly sandwiches? You know what I mean? So it's, it's a really, it's a matter of prudence and deliberation about what is called for in this particular circumstance. But he does recognize that there is this tension because there are, there are people who need things and there are people that we have responsibilities towards and, there. And so that's kind of the logic of what's going on in that part. But yeah, he doesn't really give us a go-to, easily applicable rule for what to do in that circumstance.

00:48:56
Speaker 2: Right.

00:48:56
Speaker 1: It's not normative. I think the reason I'm bringing it up is as you talk about the development of these thick relationships, it seems to me that that's a crucial concept to bring up, particularly in our day and age, where I can read things about any nation on the planet that I have very little. I remember at one point I was asked to do a piece on the Deadpool. Um, and, and I just made the comment, I'm like, I don't know anyone who's ever been to a Diddy party. And so to me, it's like, I have compassion for them. I have a sense that this is truly impactful and harmful to a lot of people. I also have no real recourse to do anything about it. I wouldn't even know where to start. Like for me, the line to get to someone that are where I could go, yes, I can have compassion on this person in the generic sense versus the line I'd have to walk to figure out, okay, who's been there and how do I get in touch with them?

00:50:00
Speaker 2: And what can I do?

00:50:00
Speaker 1: You know, like develop that relationship, it's way far down.

00:50:03
Speaker 2: The line, right? There's multiple steps there.

00:50:06
Speaker 1: And I think that as we look at this and we're thinking about developing these thick relationships, there's something about being careful not to get so involved in the big picture things where we haven't been placed and then ignoring what's happening closer to us. Again, not as a normative rule like, hey, never watch the world news or something crazy like that. Yeah. But just recognizing our limitations and trying to judge and discern in a really sober and mature way. What can I do? Not how should I feel, but what can I do? Yeah. There's some sort of distinction there.

00:50:56
Speaker 3: I think that's right. I think there's– for Augustine, a real sense of providence and a vocation and mission that can't be discerned outside of prayer. So, you know, he didn't choose to be ordained. He was kind of pounced upon and ordained by the people of Hippo when he shows up. So that's very much like, well, this was out of my hands, but this is clearly the mission, the vocation that I've been given. he would be much rather reading his books with his buddies and have like the contemplative life than the active life. So there's a sense in which he sort of, he has the disposition where he thinks that active posts are sort of given to you as a cross in a certain sense. I think, yeah. So I think that that's, that's right. A sort of recognition that God is, gives us our mission. So there's this prayer by John Henry Newman. I don't remember all of it, but it goes something like, I am a link in the chain. I have my mission. I may not know what it is in this life, but I will know in the next what it was. And I think that disposition and that openness is exactly the right thing. Because who knows, maybe you find yourself in prayer, deeply called to go to a mission in Africa, right? Very far from home. Or, you know, think about the apostles. This guy is going, you know, to India, or whatever it might be, right? Like, who knows where the Spirit is going to lead you. But it's not an abstraction. It's not.

00:52:47
Speaker 1: A.

00:52:47
Speaker 3: And I certainly agree that we can become morose and uh, heavy laden with all the things we cannot do in the world. And I think the entertainment news industry is, is really, uh, you know, but I think perhaps larger than that, it's just the, the immediacy of the digital medium in general is a sort of distraction from, from the given reality that we do have to attend to. Um, I do think that's a real danger today. Um, that we, we, we live in, in a digital medium that transports us everywhere and nowhere at once. So we're, we're not even where we are, you know?

00:53:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:53:31
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, it's a good way to put it.

00:53:34
Speaker 3: Where concretely in my life, who am I called upon to love and to serve? Um, is a, is a really important question we have to constantly return to, you know, and vocation.

00:53:45
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:53:45
Speaker 3: Thinking about vocation.

00:53:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:53:49
Speaker 1: So we're coming up on time.

00:53:50
Speaker 2: We're almost done.

00:53:52
Speaker 1: The interview so i think augustine has a lot to say to the contemporary world i find his writing really rich and helpful um as a you know sort of a someone who's had the benefit of going through phd studies and doing research and all that kind of fun stuff um even i find it difficult to access augustine in all its aspects like it it's a project right to jump into you don't just So I'm wondering if you can give listeners some sense of where they might start to get sort of an introduction to Augustine and maybe start reading some of his work. Like if you could give them a little bit of a step-by-step, how would you, how would you suggest to someone who's really interested in this? How do they start to get to know Augustine and his work?

00:54:38
Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, I, I would start with his sermons because, uh, Augustine is writing to everyday people in his sermons. It's not a high intellectual class or anything like that. He is meditating on the scriptures. And, you know, some of them are really long. There is one where he was trying to keep the Christians in the church because outside this pagan festival that was going on and it was a little bit bacchanalian-like. So he goes really long on that one. But by and large, you can pray with them and you can also see the way that they have a kind of arc to them, and you can learn the way that he's speaking to people. So I would say the best way to think about Augustine as a writer is he's giving us a spiritual exercise. It's not like, here's some information. It's all about the soul and helping us return to God. So everything that he writes is a spiritual exercise for the reader. We're supposed to approach it in a spirit of contemplation, a spirit of meditation. the spirit of listening and of looking at our hearts and letting God heal our hearts. So start with the sermons.

00:55:53
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:55:53
Speaker 3: There's some really beautiful ones. He has a whole collection on the Psalms. That is amazing. He also has sermons, you know, on first John, he's got one there. There's so many of them. You can get like the essential sermons if you like, but start with the sermons. Okay.

00:56:14
Speaker 1: Well, Veronica, this has been awesome. I actually really love talking to Augustine. And as I said in my email to you, I really enjoyed the book. It was so helpful and clarifying and informative for some of the other work that I was doing that I just really appreciated it. I think you got deeper into Augustine than I would have been able to myself. And so it was just really helpful. I actually thought it was a pretty accessible book for an academic book. I think it's worth people wading through. And so, um, I would encourage listeners to go out and check it out politics in the earthly city in Augustine city of God by Veronica Roberts Ogle. The link will be in the description. Do you have anywhere else I could route people to get more familiar with you and your work?

00:57:00
Speaker 3: Oh, you know, I write here and there. I'm not, I'm not, I have little kids, so I have limited time, but I have a couple of things, you know, in public discourse here or there, or, um, Church Life Journal, but that's really it. It's mostly when people ask me to do something, I'll do it, but I don't have time to do it otherwise.

00:57:19
Speaker 1: Understood. Well, thanks for taking the time to be on the show today and really appreciate you and your work. And again, just encourage everybody to check the book out.

00:57:28
Speaker 2: And that's it. We'll catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everyone.

00:57:33
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. Take care.

00:57:34
Speaker 1: Bye-bye. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.