The first half of Book XIII of the Confessions is a longwinded philosophical commentary over human anthropology, epistemology, Beauty, Wisdom, and our ability to take on form, knowledge, and direct our desire for happiness through participation.  The second half of the book takes a turn to crystalizing what the doctrine of imago Dei is (Chapter 22), from which St. Augustine then turns his focus to the social order and humanity’s place therein.  We begin to move away from the dense philosophical commentary and into a more practical and social philosophy – taking what we have just established and explored and now applying it into action within the order Wisdom has created.

Chapter 22: Imago Dei, the Renewal of the Mind

Imago Dei means “image of God,” this is the Christian idea that humanity has a direct connection to Divinity – that connection being our rationality.  Since God is Reason and Wisdom, the Logos, this is imparted to us according to Augustine.  Humanity’s capacity for reason, its capacity to know (which is one of the three constitutive components of what it means to be human as we read from Chapter 11), and from this capacity for reason which leads us to knowledge is how humans come to possess truth and dignify themselves as their being, knowledge, and will are all wrapped up together on that joyful ascent upward.

“We must live good lives so that the living soul may come to life in us.  We must obey in full message which you gave us through your apostle when you said: ‘Do not fall in with the manners of this world.’”  What Augustine is saying here is linked back to his claim that we must not fall entirely over in love with the things of the world.  Like Plotinus, the ugly soul is the mind who gets lost in the carnal captivity of material beauty without coming to an understanding of what that beauty exists for.  The way of the world, again, is the way of the fishes and the crashing seas that he has just explained in the preceding chapters represent humanity’s lustful devouring of each other and disorderly chaos of being which comes from our rejection of reason as we fall completely into phenomenological desire.  Desire is not bad; it is, properly speaking, something good.  Desire is the parched tongue that seeks wisdom, truth, and beauty – but in this seeking to fulfill desire we must come to know.  Again, reason and desire go together in Augustine’s pluralistic composition of what it means to be human.  “There must be an inward change, a remaking of your minds.”  That remaking of our minds is the orientation of the mind, which is the soul, back to God (the source and fountain of life, beauty, wisdom, joy, order, and love, etc.).

Man’s ability for reason is what sets him apart from the rest of creation.  This is also the greatest gift bestowed by God to humanity because, according to Catholicism, reason itself is a gift of grace.  It allows us to be who we are – humans: a formed being who knows and desires.  Humans are rational animals, part animal with desire, but also part Divine with the gift of reason from which we are able to acquire knowledge.  This is called “Divinization” in Catholic and Orthodox theological anthropology – the ascent of the human upward toward God to be like God.  This is what St. Athanasius meant in his famous defense of the incarnation of the Logos into the world, “God became man so that man might become like God.”  This is not, as certain critics charge, a claim that humans become gods.  Humans are like God insofar that they have the capacity for reason and coming to know the order that Wisdom has decreed all around them.  It is a fully integral part of what it means to be human.  To suppress your rationality and give oneself over to pure desire is to, in effect, be less than human.  It is to become a “brute animal” per Cicero.

“The reason for this,” Augustine explains in describing imago Dei, “is that when he has remade his mind [(talking about humans here)] and can see and understand your truth, he has no need of other men to teach him to imitate his kind.  You show him and he sees for himself what is your will, the good thing, the desirable thing, the perfect thing.”  Only through coming to know truth can humans fully live up to their calling, in other words.  We do not imitate other humans, who are often like the fishes and live like fishes, we imitate God – which is to say we imitate the rational order of all creation and participate with Wisdom itself which calls humans to order their lives to the good, the beautiful, and the joyful.  This allows us to understand who we are, and our place in the order of creation.  “This is how, when we learn to know God, we become new men in the image of our Creator.  We gain spiritual gifts and can scrutinize everything – everything, that is, which it is right for us to judge — without being subject, ourselves, to any other man’s scrutiny.”  This is one of the more confusing passages at first.  What Augustine is saying here is that knowledge allows one to know, knowledge allows you to grow in awareness and power, and allows you to see the order for how it was set up – humans are, in fact, the judges of all, but not judge in the relativistic make-it-up as you go sense per Gorgias, but the judge over the rational order because we have been granted stewardship.  Humans have been placed at the top of the order of earth because of our reasoning capability.  The judgement spoken of here is the judgment to help lift up others from the bottom of the order (the abyss) for acting and living like fishes – we are called to be the stewards of the earth.

Chapters 23: Humanity’s Place in the Natural Order

Because humans have the ability to know, and come into participation with the wisdom and beauty God has decreed, “It is man’s power to judge all things that is symbolized by his rule over the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and the cattle, and the whole earth and all the creeping things that move on the earth.”  So there is a hierarchy to the natural world, of which humans are at top, and all things exist in beauty for some level of happiness for us once we come to understand this (Augustine will explain more about this in the forthcoming chapters).  Knowledge leads to power, from this knowledge and power comes to the understanding of the order to the world and our place in it.  “He rules them,” Augustine says speaking of man, “by his intelligence, which enables him to take in the thoughts of God’s Spirit [(which is truth)].  If this were not so, man, despite the place of honor that is his, would have no understanding.  He would be matched with the brute beasts and no better than they.”

True power comes from knowledge, as Augustine clearly articulates.  This knowledge is what allows us to take our place in the rational order.  Otherwise, without said understanding, we are brute animals, and the beasts – Augustine reminds us – are better than us, they are stronger, more cunning, and so on.  Humans have a choice: to live like the animals, or to live like humans.  Living like animals and claiming that this is to live like humans is the ultimate sign of ignorance.  It is the man living like the fish claiming that this is what is good and what life is meant to be.

Humans are in a harmony with nature, but only through the hierarchy of nature (humans do not abuse creation, but humans are the last of the creation emerging after the sun, moons, stars, seas, land, insects, and land animals).  This is what allows us to know and partake in the joys of wisdom, as well as understand the beauty of the world around us and all that is in it.  To whom much is given, much is required.  And this is the problem.  Reason demands excellence, it calls up the soul and body to higher heights (out of the abyss and toward the light).  But we would rather be fishes, wouldn’t we?

But humans are not God, “Man, therefore, whom you created in your own image, has not received power over the lights of heaven, nor over heaven itself, which is hidden from him, nor over day and night, which you made before heaven was created, no over the waters which were gathered together that is the sea.  He has been given rule over the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and the cattle and the whole earth, and all the creeping things that move on earth.  He judges them, approving what he finds to be right and blaming what he finds to be wrong.”  Humans, then, must understand their place in the created order.  They are not the authors of light and beauty, Wisdom is, and humans do not have the mastery over nature to augment it per the mechanical philosophers of the Enlightenment.  Instead, humans sit atop of the created order of the world and have responsibility for the stewardship of the earth by being in conformity with eternal wisdom.  We have our place, and everything else has its place.  This is what true harmony is.  There is proper place, size, and limit, to all things.  Augustine, in De Genesi ad Litteram, along with the other Church Fathers, noted that humans are at the top of creation because they nearest to God in their reasoning ability which allows them to come to know the creation.

Chapter 24: Sex and Sexuality in the Sacramental Economy

Moving into the decree that “You bless men, O Lord, and bid them to increase and multiply and fill the earth,” Augustine unpacks what this means.  As Augustine notes, this decree has not been given to trees and plants.  This is because they have built in mechanisms through cosmic laws how to reproduce.  To be fruitful and multiply is the participating in the beauty and wisdom of creation, it is about bringing new light and life into the world through sex.  The end to sex is the participation with life and beauty to bring new life and beauty.  This is the true joy of sexuality according to Augustine – not the phenomenological sensation, which would make us more like the fishes and whales which also share in this decree (which represent pure body in Augustine’s reading) – but to grow in understanding and bring forth new life into the world and to participate in life itself which comes about through sexuality and sex.

Sex has a rational end, in other words.  Without the rationality of sex, we would all perish if we chased after just phenomenological stimulation.  This is the happiness that comes from sex – the participating with beauty and life, coming together with another beautiful creature, to bring forth new life and light to the world.  As Augustine writes, the decree is about the uniting of phenomenological desire and rationality, “I therefore understand the reproduction and multiplication of marine creatures to refer to physical signs and manifestations, of which we have need because the flesh which envelops us like the deep sea; and I take the reproduction of human kind to refer to the thoughts which our minds conceive, because reason is fertile and productive.  I am convinced that this is what is meant.”

So the decree to be fruitful and multiply to the marine life is a command for the sexuality of the body, and the command to be fruitful and multiply to human kind is a command for the sexuality of the mind – linking body and mind, reason and will, together, to bring forth new life and enjoy the union of bodies and minds together.  True sex and sexuality, which is something to be enjoyed, can only be enjoyed in its fullest when it is understood to be about the union of the body and soul.  If we seek sexual stimulation through pure bodily sensation, nothing comes from this but temporary physical joy which dissipates soon after.  If we rationalize sex and sexuality too much, we probably come to reject it because we find, as many moderns might say, ‘no good reason for sex besides bodily stimulation’ and we might lose the great beauty of the body in its naturality and ability at the same time by rationalizing to no end.  In other words, we no longer bring new life into the world, which is the most beautiful aspect of creation itself – the birth of new life.  Through their union true sexuality is to be enjoyed.

There is a beauty to sex and sexuality of just the body, which is why Augustine says that they are “physical signs and manifestations” which, are aimed at reminding us, of the intellectual side to sex – the coming to an understanding of the purpose of sex and sexuality.  Fertility is the beauty and joy to be found in sex and sexuality.  There is nothing, properly speaking, bad about the body or sexual desire – this is an integral part of what makes us human after all.  But like all things, there is an end to it.  That end to sex and sexuality is still linked with the harmonious ontological portrait of the human: being, knowledge, and desire.  Sex without knowledge is in-animate sex and therefore cannot produce enduring satisfaction.  Knowledge without sexual desire is equally faulty since this would be a suppression of eros which is natural to our composite human nature.  Only through their unity can the pure health and fertility of being come into fruition and enduring joy in sex and sexuality found.

Chapters 25-End: The Sacramental Economy

Chapters 25 to the end, but also including the preceding chapters we just looked at, have been called Augustine’s defense of the “sacramental economy,” the mysteries, joy, and beauties to be found in life and our odyssey toward participating in this sacrament of life.  The Sacramental Economy, in Catholic philosophy, is the end to which Wisdom established the world and invites us to participate in.  To which sex and sexuality is a part of, but that deserves its own treatment apart from the rest of Augustine’s treatment of the sacramental economy that closes Book XIII.

Augustine ends his commentary on Genesis through a longwinded reflection on the sacramental economy, the “sacred order” that brought all things into being, gave it form, endowed it with beauty, reason, desire, and so on, and what it means for us who live in it.  In continuing to understand the allegorical and figurative language, who reads into the fruits that are borne from trees to represent the good works of humans which is necessary for life to continue to flourish on the earth.  Thus, we live by work.  Without work we will perish.  Both physically and spiritually.  Thus, Augustine reads works as a call to civilization – it is something that builds, produces, “bears fruit,” and from this building and working magnificent joys prop up all over and nourishes the land.  (Unlike certain Protestant groups, however, proper works which bear fruit and new life is a result of the grace of coming into communion with Wisdom itself.  True works, in the sense of bringing life and light, rather than destruction, is a form of grace – after all, St. James says faith without works is dead faith.  Works are the visible sign of Wisdom’s grace in the world.)

There is still a problem though.  “This food nourishes only those who take joy in it, and there is no joy in it for those whose own hungry bellies are the god they worship.”  Augustine is saying here that not all want to partake in this works-oriented process of building.  They would rather be their own idols.  All the works of mercy, art, community-building, plurality of the creation, are of nothing to these people who would rather sink back into the abyss of the sea (which is chaos and disorder) rather than work the land and build the stairway to sing those songs of ascent that Augustine spoke of in Chapter 9.  The sacramental economy, like all other things, is an invitation to participate – to grow, to build, to bear fruit, to extend courteous hand to others, and so on.  From this the true blossoming fruits of civilization emerge, that happiness we seek becomes manifested, but only if we accept our place in the cosmic order.

This is why the renewal of the mind is so important.  Wisdom leads to understanding, from this understanding emerges proper action as a reflection of intellectual virtue which makes life joyful, this is the bearing of fruits.  “His nourishment was joy.”  Man does not live by bread alone.  Toiling away endless just for material consumption does not bring the same level of joy as coming to understand the beauty of the world, helping others, forming families, having children, making art, etc.  As Augustine says, “He now rejoices that they have returned to these good works.  He is glad because they have borne fruit once more, like a field restored to fertility.”  Fertility is joyful.  Work is joyful.  Beauty is joyful.

The problem, again, is ignorant wretches.  “Ignorant men and unbelievers need sacraments of initiation and miraculous portents.”  This is important to remember in light of what Augustine said in Chapter 21, “The living soul no longer looks for great miracles since it is not such as must see signs and miracles happen or it will not believe.”  The miracle of life and new life is right before you.  There are no “miracles” like suspensions of the laws of nature.  Miracles are signs of what is directing you to truth and wisdom.  People who need “miracles” are themselves foolish for not understanding the great continuous “miracle” of life right before their eyes.  The foolish and the unwise, then, are like the fish devouring each other in the sea, constantly twisting and turning back and forth without order – constantly nagging “more, more, more” when they should really just sink in the beauty and majesty of the world, pardon the pun.

From this, all things are very good.  As Augustine goes on to state, “The same can be said of every material thing which has beauty.  For a thing which consists of several parts, each beautiful in itself, is far more beautiful than the individual parts which, properly combined and arranged, compose the whole, even though each part taken separately, is itself a thing of beauty.”  Augustine returns to the notions of beauty in pluralism as being greater than beauty in universality or singularity.  This is, yet again, Augustine’s not-so subtle dig against the materialists and monists who are still prevent in Late Antiquity.  Everything is good and has beauty to it – which is why no thing, properly speaking, is evil (Augustine treats this subject in some detail in Book VII).  There is a hierarchy of beauty, however, the highest beauty found in pluralistic composition which makes a whole and in its wholeness is reflective of the Trinity’s own plurality of Father (Love), Son (Wisdom/Reason), and Spirit (Truth).

Thus, as Augustine claims beginning in Chapter 29, God “speaks” through all the signs of the things he has brought forth into being with beauty, as well as the voice within us (the voice of the Logos) which allows us to come to understanding of the world and our place therein.  “It helped me to understand,” as Augustine notes repeatedly.  Yet, not all want to participate in this beauty, or come to this understanding of the order to the world and everything contained therein.  “The mind hostile” to beauty, to majesty, to fertility, are the claims of the “madmen” as Augustine says.  Thus, the madmen are people who do not possess or recognize truth – they only seek to tear down and destroy, to sink in the abyss of the deep and bring everything and everyone down with them.

Augustine’s epistemology comes onto fuller display in the final chapters, we he begins discussing the nature of signs and things which he more fully articulated in De Doctrina Christiana.  Again, all things exist, properly understood, as signs of something: beauty, wisdom, compassion, etc., which point back to the ultimate thing to be enjoyed: God.  “Thanks be to you, O Lord, for all that we see!” as Augustine proclaims.  Here we can see Augustine’s rejection of idealistic monism – the real world is a combination of things and sings, of corporality and spirituality, of things to be observed which then require thoughtful reflection upon to come to understanding.  The beauty and goodness of the world proclaims the majesty of Wisdom (God).

When coming to a discussion of the Sabbath – the day of rest, Augustine understands this as the eternal and enduring rest (happiness) that we find in God and God alone.  All the beauties, works, and blessings, all the fruit-bearing, artwork, and the building together, all the love, companionship, and all other joys of the earth, all bring us closer to the Author of it all.  Thus, we see, the “hope” is not a transformation of the world, a transformation (which would be a revolution) of the natural order, or any such eschatological expectations (Augustine does not even know of that 19^th century idea of the “Rapture” which began from Anglo-Irish evangelist John Nelson Darby).  It is the goodness and beauty right before us, calling us to participate with it.

CONCLUSION

Having written over 10,000 words on a commentary of just Book XIII of Augustine’s Confessions, and not even remotely touching on all the aspects we could have (entire books and dissertations come from explanations of single chapters), we begin to see how complex the philosophy of Augustine is as well as beginning understand the story of Genesis (he later wrote an entire commentary over the Book of Genesis).  It has nothing to do with “creation” per the fundamentalists whatsoever.  It has everything to do with coming to understand ourselves and the world around us.  It is one giant allegory of anthropology, cosmological anthropology, and epistemology (at least in the foci I have brought forth).

In sum, all things subsist in beauty and wisdom.  Wisdom is eternal; it is the light that shines forth day to day, night to night, illuminating the world and Cosmos in all of its beauty.  The Spirit that moves over the Deep is the Truth of Wisdom calling all things “below” to rise up and participate in the flourishing of life: the enjoyment of beauty, to bring forth greater beauty, to embrace fertility in all its forms, to direct one’s life to the highest Good which will quench your thirsting soul.  It is about the renewal of the mind to come to understanding.  That means truth does exist and we have the possibility of knowing it.

Furthermore, in some sense, Augustine reads Genesis 1, from the very beginning, as the story of human growth from being of desire in chaotic torment to taking on form, coming to acquire knowledge, participating with Wisdom, elevating out of the waters and onto the land, and the building of civilization from which happiness flow.  This is not really an account of evolution as some people claim, it is Augustine’s account of what Latin philosophy remembers as Rationes seminales (seminal reason).  Seminal reason is the process by which life grows from “seed” and develops into being and takes on greater understanding and fertility as it grows.  This idea is not unique to Augustine, it is found in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus, as well as neo-Platonic Christians of earlier generations like Tertullian, Origen, and St. Gregory of Nyssa.  It was retained by the Augustinian tradition in Western Catholicism, especially by people like St. Bonaventure and also St. Thomas Aquinas.  That said, Augustine does see an organic growth and taking on of form, so to speak, as we grow from seed to tree in keeping to his imagery and understanding of what those images actually mean for us.

Humans are, in Augustine’s understanding, beings formed by knowledge and desire.  Lack of knowledge, or lack of desire, essentially means our being crashes and twists about.  We become alienated from our nature, depressed – we lash out, and begin to destroy.  At the same time, “knowledge” without desire misses the beauty of the world itself.  Desire without knowledge means we live like the fish of the sea.  Knowledge (which is to say our capability for reason) and desire (which is to say all phenomenological impulses) are meant to go together.  In this harmony we come to understand, in this understanding we “take form” which is our being at happy rest with itself.  From this begins our opportunity, then, to participate in the wisdom, beauty, love, and truth of the world.  “Late have I loved you, Beauty ever ancient, and Beauty ever new!  Late have I loved you!”

The famous dictum “you are what you love” is Augustinian.  You become what you love according to Augustine.  And this has consequences, far and wide, not just for yourself but everyone and everything around you since we are social animals.  St. Irenaeus summed up what Augustine explained in his commentary on Genesis, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”  For Augustine, all life is called to the light and to take on the form of beauty and flourishing.  And this is the joy to be found in this life.

________________________________________________________________

Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

Venmo Support: https://www.venmo.com/u/Paul-Krause-48

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@paul.j.krause

Skip to content

Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading

The Journal of the Eric Voegelin Society Aesthetics Alt-Right America American History American Literature Ancient History Anthropology Aquinas Aristophanes Aristotle Art Augustine Beauty Being and Nothingness Bible Bitcoin Book Reviews Books Byzantine History Capitalism Catholicism Christianity Cicero City of God Civilization Classics Confessions Conservatism Cosmology Cryptocurrency Culture Dante Dante’s Inferno Democracy Dialectic Discourses on Livy Divine Comedy Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Eros Ethics Existentialism Fascism Feminism Film Freedom French Revolution Geopolitics German Idealism German Philosophy Gothic Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hebrew Bible Hegel Hell Herder Hiking Historicism Historiography History Homer Humanism Human Nature Ibn Khaldun Idealism Iliad Islam John Locke Judaism Kant Karl Marx Language Lecture Leo Strauss Leo Tolstoy Liberalism Liberty Literary Tales Literature Love Machiavelli Marxism Materialism Metaphysics Modernity Morality Music Mythology Napoleon Natural Law Nature Nietzsche Nihilism Old Testament Paradise Lost Paul Krause Peloponnesian War Phenomenology of Spirit Philosophy Plato Plato’s Dialogues Platonism Plotinus Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theology Political Theory Politics Postmodernism Progressivism Protestantism Puritanism Reaction Religion Roger Scruton Roman History Romanticism Rome Rousseau Russian Literature Sartre Schelling Schmitt Science Science Fiction Sex Shakespeare Sin Social Contract Socialism Sociology soul Sublime Technology The Odyssey of Love Paul Krause Theology The Republic Thomas Hobbes Thucydides Totalitarianism Truth Tyranny Virtue War War and Peace Writing

Discourses on Minerva is the personal blog of a pilgrim scholar, journalist, and cultural critic. Here I have more liberty to speak freely on the subjects that matter to us today: Culture, Politics, Religion, and Literature. Visit the About page for more details.

November 2025

« Oct     America American History Anthropology Art Augustine Bible Book Reviews Books Catholicism Christianity Classics Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Ethics German Philosophy Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hegel History Human Nature Lecture Liberalism Literary Tales Literature Love Modernity Philosophy Plato Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theory Politics Religion Romanticism Science Theology War

Skip to content

Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading

The Journal of the Eric Voegelin Society Aesthetics Alt-Right America American History American Literature Ancient History Anthropology Aquinas Aristophanes Aristotle Art Augustine Beauty Being and Nothingness Bible Bitcoin Book Reviews Books Byzantine History Capitalism Catholicism Christianity Cicero City of God Civilization Classics Confessions Conservatism Cosmology Cryptocurrency Culture Dante Dante’s Inferno Democracy Dialectic Discourses on Livy Divine Comedy Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Eros Ethics Existentialism Fascism Feminism Film Freedom French Revolution Geopolitics German Idealism German Philosophy Gothic Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hebrew Bible Hegel Hell Herder Hiking Historicism Historiography History Homer Humanism Human Nature Ibn Khaldun Idealism Iliad Islam John Locke Judaism Kant Karl Marx Language Lecture Leo Strauss Leo Tolstoy Liberalism Liberty Literary Tales Literature Love Machiavelli Marxism Materialism Metaphysics Modernity Morality Music Mythology Napoleon Natural Law Nature Nietzsche Nihilism Old Testament Paradise Lost Paul Krause Peloponnesian War Phenomenology of Spirit Philosophy Plato Plato’s Dialogues Platonism Plotinus Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theology Political Theory Politics Postmodernism Progressivism Protestantism Puritanism Reaction Religion Roger Scruton Roman History Romanticism Rome Rousseau Russian Literature Sartre Schelling Schmitt Science Science Fiction Sex Shakespeare Sin Social Contract Socialism Sociology soul Sublime Technology The Odyssey of Love Paul Krause Theology The Republic Thomas Hobbes Thucydides Totalitarianism Truth Tyranny Virtue War War and Peace Writing

Discourses on Minerva is the personal blog of a pilgrim scholar, journalist, and cultural critic. Here I have more liberty to speak freely on the subjects that matter to us today: Culture, Politics, Religion, and Literature. Visit the About page for more details.

November 2025

« Oct     America American History Anthropology Art Augustine Bible Book Reviews Books Catholicism Christianity Classics Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Ethics German Philosophy Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hegel History Human Nature Lecture Liberalism Literary Tales Literature Love Modernity Philosophy Plato Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theory Politics Religion Romanticism Science Theology War

Skip to content

Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading

The Journal of the Eric Voegelin Society Aesthetics Alt-Right America American History American Literature Ancient History Anthropology Aquinas Aristophanes Aristotle Art Augustine Beauty Being and Nothingness Bible Bitcoin Book Reviews Books Byzantine History Capitalism Catholicism Christianity Cicero City of God Civilization Classics Confessions Conservatism Cosmology Cryptocurrency Culture Dante Dante’s Inferno Democracy Dialectic Discourses on Livy Divine Comedy Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Eros Ethics Existentialism Fascism Feminism Film Freedom French Revolution Geopolitics German Idealism German Philosophy Gothic Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hebrew Bible Hegel Hell Herder Hiking Historicism Historiography History Homer Humanism Human Nature Ibn Khaldun Idealism Iliad Islam John Locke Judaism Kant Karl Marx Language Lecture Leo Strauss Leo Tolstoy Liberalism Liberty Literary Tales Literature Love Machiavelli Marxism Materialism Metaphysics Modernity Morality Music Mythology Napoleon Natural Law Nature Nietzsche Nihilism Old Testament Paradise Lost Paul Krause Peloponnesian War Phenomenology of Spirit Philosophy Plato Plato’s Dialogues Platonism Plotinus Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theology Political Theory Politics Postmodernism Progressivism Protestantism Puritanism Reaction Religion Roger Scruton Roman History Romanticism Rome Rousseau Russian Literature Sartre Schelling Schmitt Science Science Fiction Sex Shakespeare Sin Social Contract Socialism Sociology soul Sublime Technology The Odyssey of Love Paul Krause Theology The Republic Thomas Hobbes Thucydides Totalitarianism Truth Tyranny Virtue War War and Peace Writing

Discourses on Minerva is the personal blog of a pilgrim scholar, journalist, and cultural critic. Here I have more liberty to speak freely on the subjects that matter to us today: Culture, Politics, Religion, and Literature. Visit the About page for more details.

November 2025

« Oct     America American History Anthropology Art Augustine Bible Book Reviews Books Catholicism Christianity Classics Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Ethics German Philosophy Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hegel History Human Nature Lecture Liberalism Literary Tales Literature Love Modernity Philosophy Plato Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theory Politics Religion Romanticism Science Theology War

“To say that Origen of Alexandria has been a critical figure in the history of the Christian tradition would be an understatement.” Who was Origen of Alexandria? If his name is known to Christians, it is probably known as some ancient heretic who thought all creatures, even the devil and demons, would be reunited with God on the last day. Although a tremendous influence over the eastern fathers, especially the Cappadocians, and even a significant influence on the Latin fathers, especially saints Jerome, Rufinus, and Augustine, Origen was equally controversial in his life and immediately after. The Origenist controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries speak to Origen’s contested life and writings not long after his death. Today’s debates over Origen, including his recent rehabilitation, still contend with his simultaneous influential and controversial legacy.

While Origen’s influence faded by the medieval period, during the Reformation Origen was, perhaps surprisingly to some, recovered by Protestants seeking to free themselves of ecclesiastical subjugation in theological matters. Though now long condemned as a heretic by the Second Council of Constantinople back in the sixth century, Origen was among the many early church fathers championed by the Reformers for their vision of theological freedom: Origen was a pristine example of how the earliest generation of Christians were scriptural theologians and not conciliar or ecclesiastical theologians as the Catholic Church claimed. The Reformers saw themselves standing on the shoulders of those early church fathers who engaged in a purely scriptural theological exegesis without the need for conciliar or ecclesiastical ratification. Even Thomas Jefferson, the man who famously called himself “a sect unto himself,” owned the surviving copies of Origen and spoke highly of him in some of his private letters discussing theological matters.

When I was a student at Yale Divinity School, Origen was one of the key figures in our patristics classes. Yale is, and remains, a small hub for the reevaluation of Origen—an attempt to free the great Alexandrine theologian from the generally negative impression of him both popularly and even academically. Only Augustine shared as much class time as Origen did (each received four weeks of study in our introduction to patristics). Mark Therrien’s new book, Cross and Creation: A Theological Introduction to Origen of Alexandria, would have been a great supplemental guide to Origen had it been available when I took my patristics classes.

One of the problems with Origen is his reception, both immediately after his life and during the patristic revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But in offering a rehabilitation of Origen, something that has grown commonplace among theological scholars over the last 50 years, the nagging question that comes up is this: who was the real Origen? Therrien has an obvious appreciation for Origen, not just in his influence over the subsequent traditions of Christian theology, but also for the supposed real theology gleaned from Origen’s writings now seemingly accessible to us in the twenty-first century. However, are we to believe that nearly 1700 years of interpreters of Origen have all been wrong?

Early on, Therrien sets the stage for why the previous generations of interpreters are wrong. Faulty editions of his works that paint a misleading portrait of Origen; now discredited paradigms of Origen as a pseudo-gnostic; and the false dichotomy going back to Jerome of a praiseworthy Origen as biblical “commentator” and a condemnable Origen as “theologian.” It is this last sticking point that Therrien takes great umbrage with. Rather than these old paradigms, especially Jerome’s division of biblical commentator from biblical theologian, our studious author shows why it is impossible to separate Origen as commentator from Origen as theologian.

Nevertheless, in The City of God Augustine lamentably notes how “a learned master” like Origen could have gotten creation and the fall so wrong. Following the singular and narrow reading from First Principles, where Origen seems to imply that humanity—originally purely spiritual and intellectual souls—turned away from intellectual love and contemplation of God and therefore fell into the void and God created the world and bodies to contain them in their drift away from Divine reality, Origen as having too many similarities to Gnosticism has been a common critique of the theologian from Alexandria. Therrien painstakingly shows why this view, too, is mistaken.

*

Looking at Origen’s Peri archon (First Principles) and his Commentary on John—rather than just First Principles which doesn’t paint a full portrait of Origen’s theology—Therrien highlights a far more complex understanding of creation from Origen’s perspective. It is important to point out that Origen had traveled to Rome in his early days before his systematic writings on Scripture and theology got underway; there, it is very plausible as many scholars have acknowledged that Origen likely rubbed up against Monarchism and Valentinian Gnosticism which spurred his writings to be soft rebuttals of these Christian heresies. Any association of Origen as a quasi-Gnostic, then, misses the historical reality to Origen’s time and place.

Against the Gnostics, who, despite their anti-corporeal theology, conceived of God in corporeal terms, “Origen thus rejects a way of thinking about God’s being that would conceive of it as a mere thing with corporeal properties, including subjection to change and division.” The change and division of God through Valentinian theology was something that early Christians had to contend. Origen, like Irenaeus before him, stood at the floodgates of the theological revolution of divine incorporeality, the movement away from Stoic, Gnostic, and even some early Christian (like Tertullian) conceptualizations of God that understood divine nature in corporeal categorizations. Origen’s emphasis on God as transcendent and incorporeal was part of his dedicated effort to confront the errors of various theologies he encountered in his early life. All subsequent Christian theology which rests on divine transcendence owe this view to Origen.

Furthermore, against Monarchism Origen sought to prove the Trinitarian basis for the Rule of Faith. The centrality of Christ as Wisdom in a Christological understanding of the Son of God is the greatest contribution that Origen bequeathed to Christianity. This is not that Christ wasn’t identified with the Divine Wisdom of God before Origen; this is to say that no theologian (sans the author of the Gospel according to John) went to such great lengths to primarily identify Christ with Wisdom in Christological theology.

Christ as Wisdom also seems to be a rebuttal against the unitarian Monarchists and the Gnostics, to whom Sophia is only an accidental bridge between the evil material world and the unknowable supreme Deity. Here, though it is very brief, Therrien does a good job explaining the “anti-gnostic context” of Origen’s writings on Christ and how Christ as Wisdom within the Trinitarian and divine foreknowledge theology of Christianity directly refutes the Gnostic theologies of tragedy. Extending Christ as Wisdom to creation, Therrien highlights the nuanced view of Origen’s pre-existent cosmos: because all things were created in and through Christ, and Christ is the eternal Son of God, creation, being contained in the foreknowledge of God through Christ, always existed (in the mind of God through Christ) and its substantive formation was not willed arbitrarily or accidental (per Gnostic cosmologies). Thus, even though Origen does not cite Gnostic sources in rebuttal, Therrien argues alongside other scholars that it is safe to presume Origen was continuing his anti-gnostic theology in his Christological and cosmological theologies:

Origen’s main concern in speaking of the creation of all things in Wisdom…[is] to emphasize that there is no way to think about creation as existing outside of the providence of God—that is, there is now way of thinking about creation as somehow free from God’s all-embracing rule, because such a way of thinking about creation would construe it not as something freely willed by God according to reason and providence, but rather as merely arbitrarily and unintended, and thus (ultimately) little more than a cosmic accident. Origen rejects such a tragic view entirely.

Continuing onward to Origen’s thinking about the Holy Spirit, the core of Origen’s pneumatology is eschatological. From Origen’s commentaries on the Old Testament to his use of Paul, especially 1 Corinthians, Therrien makes clear that “the eschatological perspective” is the basis for Origen’s theology of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the creative act of judgement and renewal, whether in Noah’s Flood to the becoming a new man in Christ per the Apostle Paul. Thus, the (creative) activity of the Holy Spirit cannot be divorced from its eschatological purpose. The activity of the Holy Spirit aims at an eschatological end, the deification of and salvation of the cosmos and man within it through the person of Jesus Christ.

This brief discussion on the least developed aspect of Origen’s Trinitarian theology permits Therrien to then move into the crux of his book and the heart of Origen’s “disputed” and controversial theology: pre-existence and eschatology, “[the] gift of creation (or re-creation) [as] the work of the Holy Spirit.”

The gift of creation is a manifestation of Divine Love, for God is Love. The creation, then, simply points to, and is an expression of, that Love which exists in the eternal economy of God. Therefore, the creation has an eschatological purpose: to bring all creation to knowledge and love of God that has always existed Transcendentally. This is the principal purpose of the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ which serves this eschatological end. As Therrien summarizes, “creation comes into being through the eternal providence and foreknowledge of God; and second, that all will bend the knee to Jesus eschatologically” and “the end determines the beginning.” (Yes, Origen was a universalist.)

Because creation exists in the mind of God before it does materially, the atoning sacrifice of Christ is the means by which the material “creation is brought back to God.” The revelation of God as Love through the Passion of Christ is “the end for which Christ became incarnate.” Far from an unimportant Passion and crucifixion, Therrien highlights the centrality of the Passion and crucifixion to Origen’s eschatological thinking; Origen’s eschatology is not metaphysically reductionist but Christological because Christ is the eternal Son of God (hence how preexistence and eschatology subsist before the beginning of time in God through Christ, the Wisdom of the Father). Therrien’s reading restores the centrality of Christology to Origen and removes the hyper-philosophical and Platonic readings of Origen which diminish the place of Christ and cross in the master theologian’s thinking.

Cross and Creation is but the latest in the ongoing debate and rehabilitation of the theology of Origen of Alexandria. Therrien has an undeniable love for Origen and his theology and this book is a welcome addition to the critical debates surrounding one of the most influential early church fathers. The greatest contribution of this work isn’t whether it persuades the reader to reject 1700 years of apparent misinterpretations of Origen, but how it reveals Origen as a committed “scriptural theologian.” This Origen was the same theologian partially rehabilitated during the Reformation. Origen was, and remains, one of the preeminent wrestlers with Scripture and the theology it communicates. It shows that Origen the biblical commentator is the same as Origen the theologian. Sorry Jerome, you are wrong.

Cross and Creation: A Theological Introduction to Origen of AlexandriaBy Mark E. Thierren

Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022; 320pp

Is Islam a political threat? That might depend on where you live. Is there a distinction between Islam and Islamism. Some say yes. Others say no. Naive leftists who are anti-political (in the Schmittian sense) believe the universal ark of fraternity triumphs over the tribalisms of politics. The boisterous liberal right, spearheaded by anti-religious libertarians like David Harsanyi and others, routinely peddle the usual “Islam threatens the world” argument. But why is Islam such an enigma to many?

Part of my undergraduate degree in history was in Islamic history. In some regards, I feel exceptionally blessed to having studied Islamic history from ca. 630-1900. Arabic and Islamic literature is also worth a read, One Thousand and One Nights is a classic of literature period. Cotton Mather, the famous Puritan minister, is supposed to have read a Quran and was a devotee of Ibn Tufail. Islam has also had a quiet, but ever present, presence in the New World since its discovery and settlement by Europeans. Muslims were even soldiers in the American Revolutionary army.

*

There is little reason to go through a long history of Islam from its birth to the present, it is more appropriate to start with the present. It is true that the Arab Conquests were often brutal and Islam posed an existential threat to Christendom until it was stopped at Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732, was halted on multiple occasions by the walls of Constantinople until 1453, and was turned back by Catholic forces at Vienna in 1529, Lepanto in 1571, and Vienna once again in 1689. After these events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Islam – under the organ of the Ottoman Empire – experienced a slow decline which earned it the nickname “The Sick Man of Europe.” The Ottoman Empire may be gone, but the European Union is the sick man of Europe and the Muslims of Europe are on the ascendancy.

Islam, in its modern form, is much less attached to its origin as much as it is a product and reactive force against modernity. Unlike Christendom, or post-Christendom, the Islamic World never experienced the anti-religious militant secularism and moral relativism that is plaguing the Western World. Instead, it suffered from foreign rule (British and French, also Italian) and Ba’athist socialism. The latter of which was always friendly to Islam (and to a lesser extent Christianity). Modern Islam, or perhaps “Islamism”, is a two-sided reaction against the failures of Arab Nationalism (domestically) and the encroachment of Western materialism, secularism, and relativism (externally).

As such, we’ll skip to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War (1914-1918). In the 1930s and 1940s, a group of Arab intellectuals studied and obtained doctorates in theology, philosophy, history, and sociology at European and American universities. While there, they were exposed to the ideas of Romanticism: the ideas of language primordialism as the root of the nation, the idea of organic evolutionary historicism, and the consummation of nation, culture, and people in history.

To briefly go over, Johann Gottfried von Herder (one of the most important of the German romantics and historicists) maintained that the roots of a nation and constitutions is in primordialism – language – not religion, ethnicity, or anything else. Language is the basis of the nation and of culture. After all, Germany had a wide religious heritage at the turn of the 1800s, it had Lutheranism, Calvinism, Catholicism, and Pietism, but was slowly envisioned as coming together as one nation. What makes the French nation the French nation? Their language. So on and so forth. This represents a shared cultural heritage found in language, more than anything else.

Having now been exposed to this conceptual notion of the origin of civilization and destiny, the Pan-Arabists looked back to the Middle East and saw a people’s united in language: Arabic, but not united in nation. In fact, the Arab speaking peoples were scattered in many nations. This became an embarrassment for the Pan-Arabists. If what the romantics were saying was true, how could this great civilization united by the Arabic language have fallen on such hard times? (Of course, there’s other motives to this story, politics, anti-imperialism, sovereignism and so forth that adds another layer to the story, but we won’t cover that here.)

Returning to the Middle East, the Pan-Arabists began promoting a politicized romanticism that is remembered as Pan-Arab Nationalism. It was consciously and deliberately modeled after European Romanticism. Michel Aflaq, a Syrian Christian, was the leading intellectual of the movement (PhD, Sorbonne). As were other prominent Syrian writers and intellectuals: Constantin Zureiq (also a Christian, PhD Princeton), Sati’ al-Husri (a classicist by training), Zaki al-Arsuzi (an Alawi, PhD Sorbnne) and Salah al-Din al-Bitar (Sunni, PhD Sorbonne). The Sorbonne connection was also strong,as all these Sorbonne students got to know each other and all studied philosophy together; when they returned home they formed their intellectual circle akin to the Viennese and Parisian café philosophical societies they had grown accustomed to being part of as graduate students.

We start to see something very common among these intellectuals, they generally belonged to religious minority groups, though not exclusively. This will become important later on for Islamism’s understanding of Pan-Arab Nationalism.

These thinkers and their ideas became the basis for the Ba’athist-Revolutionary parties that propped up in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt following the end of the Second World War. It is important to know that the word Ba’ath means “renaissance.” The Ba’athist parties incorporated Romanticist historicism into their understanding of history and married this with elements of Marxist-Leninist Vanguard progressive revolutionary ideology to achieve their goals. As Lenin said in What is to be Done? (1901), a revolutionary political vanguard had to go to the masses to spread their ideas. Hence, we see an astonishing rise of education, literacy, philology, philosophy, and cultural studies in many of these Arab nations at the same time – they are bringing their ideas to the people to make them more amenable to their political goals. The lead thinkers often incorporated the ideas of Hamann, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Spengler into their ideology. (They were extremely well-read but rejected Marx’s Dialectical Materialism).

Aflaq published the important work The Battle of One Destiny, which outlined his thoughts on Pan-Arab nationalism. Exploring a romaniticst reading of Arabism as leading to a collective destiny for the Arab peoples, he explored how historicism was leading the Arab people to a three-fold ideology of: unity, freedom, and socialism. Aflaq ended his treatise by claiming Euro-American imperialism and corporate interests in Middle East oil and Israeli Zionism were the two greatest threats to Pan-Arab unity which sought to keep the Arab world divided (rather than united), oppressed (rather than free), and commercialized export-based economies (rather than national socialist). The divided Arab world would be easy pawns to control unless they united under a single regime; hence the battle for one destiny and the trans-national Ba’athist ideology.

Al-Arsuzi’s most important work was The Genius of Arabic in its Tongue, another treatise of primordialism and the importance of language as the basis of civilization and how Arabic gave rise to the great flourishing of Arabic culture and civilization. Zureiq, equally, rejected philosophical monism, positivism, and the Whig view of history in his writings. For Arsuzi, the Arab future rested on realizing the unity of a peoples based on tongue, or language. Most of the other nations in the world (with the exception of the Anglosphere and former Spanish colonies) had national entities not premised on religion but on language. As such, the Arab people shared a culture, history, and destiny because of the Arabic language – Arsuzi also believed there was a religious dimension to this reality because the holy language of Islam was revealed in the Arabic tongue but the Arab people were not exclusively Muslim (and Arsuzi himself was an Alawi).

This movement found its prime in Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, the public face of the Pan-Arab nationalist movement. Nominally, the movement was “secular” insofar that it promoted a separation of religion and state (remember, many of the leading intellectuals of the movement were Christian or various “heretical” Islamic offshoots like Alawism, so they had much invested in freedom of religion against the Sunni majorities; some 20-25% of the populations of the prospective Arab nations were also Christian back in the day). However, all the pan-Arab intellectuals were ardent anti-atheists and opposed state atheism; this was because they were also moralists of a sort – atheism was the road to moral relativism and liberalism. Befitting their romantic and quasi-Marxist heritage, the movement was also largely “socialist” (social-democratic really) in political-economy. (Fearful of the atomistic nature of capitalism.)

The Pan-Arab aspirations of this movement met its demise in the Six Day War in 1967 which fragmented the movement. It splintered off into three sections: Iraqi Ba’athism (generally dominated by the Christian pan-Arab intellectuals like Aflaq), Syrian Ba’athism (generally dominated by the Alawi pan-Arab intellectuals like al-Arsuzi), and Egyptian corporatism (generally dominated by the Egyptian military elite). Nevertheless, the Six Day War shattered Pan-Arabist thought and ideology. With this knowledge in mind, we should also see why most religious minorities, today, strongly support (or supported) the “authoritarian” heirs of the Ba’athist Pan-Arab movement, especially in Syria and Iraq.

*

At the same time as Pan-Arabism was destroyed, another movement arose from the ruins to replace it: Islamism. Islamism’s most important thinkers were Sayyid Qutb, Abul A’la Maududi, and Muhammad Iqbal (all Sunnis). Islamism has antecedent roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, but the MB is not an Islamist movement (Hassan al-Banna was the movement’s founder, also a Sunni). We find, here, a link with Islamism just as we did with Pan-Arab Nationalism. Just as most of the Pan-Arab nationalists were Christians or minority traditions in Islam (like the Alawites whom the current Assad Family is in Syria), the Islamists tended to be Sunnis (and not Shi’a). (Shi’a Revolutionary Islamism has its roots more in Marxism which is another story.)

The story of the rise and fall of the Pan-Arabists is important to understanding the rise of Islamism. The Islamist writers, themselves well-read and many trained in American and European academies in the 1930s-1940s. Sayyid Qutb, for instance, studied here in America at the University of Northern Colorado, A’la Maududi studied philosophy, sociology, and history in British India. Muhammad Iqbal studied philosophy and sociology at Cambridge University in England, eventually gaining his PhD at the University of Munich.

In their studies, they too were influenced by the ideas of romanticism – but owing to their Sunni beliefs, they didn’t adopt Romanticism in the same way that the Pan-Arabists did. Instead, they read into Islamic history the ideas of Romanticism with a particular, and novel (if not modern), hermeneutic and sociology of understanding Islam and Islamic history. Contrary to the news media, the Islamist movement is extremely modern, it is a modern phenomenon that grew in the intellectual milieu of European reaction to the so-called Enlightenment.

The core of Islamist thought revolved around certain Romantic ideas about nationalism and historicism. Unlike the Pan-Arabists, whose romantic nationalism was rooted in language and shared culture, the Islamists’ nationalism was rooted in the Sunni Islamic tradition. To these thinkers, the reason why Pan-Arabism failed was because it was insufficiently Islamic. God, therefore, destined the movement to fall to allow a growth and awareness of the consciousness of Sunni Muslims as to why they had fallen on hard times (by adopting insufficiently Islamic philosophies and ideologies). Hence, they championed a “return to the Qur’an.” But their reading of the Qur’an was not part of older Islamic hermeneutical traditions, and the irony is that their reading of Islam and Islamic history was deeply influenced by European philosophy and sociology.

The greatest of these works was from Sayyid Qutb, who was jailed in Egypt and wrote his multi-volume exegesis of the Qur’an called In the Shade of the Qur’an. It’s published in multiple languages, including English for those who have the time and money and runs over 7,000 pages in 18 volumes. In the work, Qutb outlines, verse by verse, a reading of the “essence” of each Qur’anic verse and links it to Islamic history and esoterically to modern problems that beset the Muslim people. He outlines the importance of how to live, where Muslims went wrong, and how they can once again be faithful followers and gain the blessings of God.

In the work, Qutb takes aims at improper governments that are oppressive to Sunni interests. Here, he attacks the Pan-Arab nationalists and notes how they are almost all non-Sunni (some exceptions). Because, again, the Pan-Arabists were mostly Christian or heretical Muslims (like the Alawi), they must oppress the Sunnis in order to maintain their power and control. Hence Classical Islamism is born with the ideal of overthrowing the insufficiently Islamic domestic governments and replacing them with sufficiently Islamic governments.

The classical Islamists looked back to the past to find examples of how one should act in the present. Here, they returned to classical Islamic political theology. The Abbasid Caliphate was an example of a past manifestation of the blessings God handed to his people. Islamists, however, do not want to return to the past despite the usual depiction of this being the case by the media. Instead, the classical Islamists are working to create a new, modern, and modernist Caliphate. (Hence why ISIS was very good at social media work.) It amounts to what political philosophers call “reactionary modernism.” The barrier to this project remains the domestic insufficiently Islamic States. This is why Islamist movements have, historically, operated only within the countries of their origin and have sought a sort of neo-national independence (from these insufficiently Islamic and authoritarian States). The more associated figures with contemporary classical Islamist thought include Abu Musab al-Suri (another Sunni and Salafist) who wrote The Call of the Global Islamic Resistance and Abu Bakr Naji (again, Sunni and Salafist) and his book The Management of Savagery.

In men like al-Suri and Naji there are calls for the toppling of local governments and for them to be replaced by governments committed to Fiqh (legal jurisprudence), promotion of collective welfare, and establishment of an Islamic civil society. The goals are readily visible and apparent: 1) topple insufficiently Islamic domestic governments; 2) replace them with “proper” Islamic governments; 3) allow the organic consummation of Sunni Islamism to occur which is the equivalent of the “restored Caliphate.” We see then, the true romantic inheritance of the Islamists who see the evolutionary historicism having got derailed and they are emerging to fix the tracks and allow Islamic historicism to return to its proper evolution and consummation to its rightful destiny. There is no “going backward” and everyone who studied philosophical historicism knows this – it’s just the media that has never read a work of philosophy of history so misunderstands because of its ignorance the notion of rooting out the poisonous germ so to “reset” on the right path of development.

A second school of Islamism emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s which is sometimes called “Revisionist Islamism.” Unlike Classical Islamism, which attempted to overthrow the remnant Pan-Arab Ba’athist governments that supposedly oppress Sunni Islamic life and idealism, the revisionist Islamists made an even further claim. They feared that the monism, rationalism, and capitalism of Western Europe, and especially America, would perpetuate a universal globalism that would threaten Islamic culture just as much as these insufficiently and oppressive local governments. Why save the garden when the weather is poisonous?

This is where al-Qaeda emerges, the pristine revisionist Islamist organization. And ISIS and al-Qaeda hate one another because they have fundamentally different goals in mind – this is outlined in detail in Will McCants’ The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (2015) in some detail, and I highly recommend the book to be brought up to speed with some basic aspects of Islamist thought even if the Islamic State has now mostly been defeated. As McCants states, “This is not Bin Laden’s jihad.”

*

Islam was stopped by Christians in Europe because Europe, when it was threatened, was spiritually confident and vigorous in its defense of its homeland and spiritual soil. The real crisis of the West is not political. It is spiritual. It is moral. The hedonistic relativism of mere life, what the Greeks called zoe, is no life at all.

Classical political philosophy maintained that life was best in community. The aim of politics was to instruct and inculcate virtue (what Aristotle called phronesis) which would make the city “excellent” when all persons became excellent in their vocation. To the ancients, life was about virtue, pietas, and manifesting the summum bonum in life.[1] Self-pleasuring oneself in endless leisure and rolling around in cash was never seen as “the good life” and rightly identified by intellectual luminaries like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to be dangerous and corrosive to the political society.

The natural law, to the pre-Christian world, was founded on pietas (piety, or duty) to the gods, to your family, and to your country. With the advent of Christianity, Christianity added love to the cornerstone of natural law and became, through the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas (most especially), natural moral law where moral joy would be consummated by a loving discharge of the natural law to God, family, and community. Anyone who has read Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially The Inferno, should now understand why treachery is considered the worst sin and punished in the ninth circle of hell. In many ways, German idealist thought sought to revive this outlook but without the appeal to revelation as was the case with Christianity.

If the concept of the political rests on the bios-zoe distinction, or more radicalized and bluntly stated by Carl Schmitt as “friend-enemy,” the moral life demands closed communities. The moral life also demands rootedness. This is not an endorsement of xenophobia as ignorant and illiterate liberals immediately devolve to in their apoplectic ignorant indignation; what is asserts is that humans are rooted ethical participators but to be rooted ethical beings means one must have a home, roots in that home, and relations in that home in a manner similar to what Hegel explained in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right.

Leo Strauss, the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century, noted that “German Nihilism” was not nihilistic at all; instead, it was a deeply moral movement. It said no to the emptiness of modernity and therefore had a destructive and combative end to it. But there was a deep moral core to it as well:

German nihilism desires the destruction of modem civilisation as far as modern civilisation has a moral meaning. As everyone knows, it does not object so much to modem technical devices. That moral meaning of modem civilisation to which the German nihilists object, is expressed in formulations such as these: to relieve man’s estate; or: to safeguard the rights of man; or: the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number. What is the motive underlying the protest against modem civilisation, against the spirit of the West, and in particular of the Anglo-Saxon West?

The answer must be: it is a moral protest. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modem civilisation, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modem civilisation, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Moral life, it is asserted, means serious life. Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness the flag and the oath to the flag, are the distinctive features of the closed society, of the society which by its very nature, is constantly confronted with, and basically oriented toward, the Ernstfall, the serious moment, M-day, war. Only life in such a tense atmosphere, only a life which is based on constant awareness of the sacrifices to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of life and all worldly goods, is truly human: the sublime is unknown to the open society. The societies of the West which claim to aspire toward the open society, actually are closed societies in a state of disintegration: their moral value, their respectability, depends entirely on their still being closed societies.

The crisis of the West is that it is a society in disintegration. This disintegration is the result of a moral crisis. The rise of relativism is not the cause of this disintegration. Rather, it is the animalistic life, zoe, which is the cause of the crisis which has culminated in the rise of moral relativism. Thomas Hobbes argued that concepts like “good” and “bad” had no transcendent meaning. Instead, we simply used language to denote bodily feelings. Stimulating and pleasurable feelings were called good. Painful and harmful feelings were called bad. From Hobbes and Locke and Spinoza, up through Mill and Rawls, the liberal tradition of philosophy asserts that there is no summum bonum, no moral law, and that the highest good in life is to avoid physical pain through material prosperity.

Knowing that this is the true seed of Western secularity and liberalism, the Islamists (and Pan-Arab nationalists) who rebelled against this encroachment – like their European intellectual godfathers (the romantics) – saw that the mere life, zoe, offered by “modernism” would culminate in a disintegrative crisis of Arab and or Islamic society. This was to be avoided at all costs, as Sayyid Qut’b explained in In the Shade of the Quran. Modern Islam, Islamism, is a moral protest against the emptiness of modernity (especially as it emanates out of the cancerous seed of the “West”).

Because the modern “West” has opted for a first principle with nothing higher than the lowest common denominator in human nature: the want for material comfort, the formerly ordered Western World directed to the stars of the heavens, the country, and the family, has been obliterated in the fantastical and illusory dream of individualistic abolitionism. As C.S. Lewis noted, this project would culminate itself in the abolition of man. As Jonathan Swift satirically prophesied nearly 300 years ago, such a life would lead to the degradation of mankind.[2] Or, perhaps most well-known, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World captures the madness and stupidity of the current trajectory of Western hedonistic and technological, and technocratic, nihilism.

Humans are intensely moral creatures. Humans want a life of meaning and moral meaning more than anything else. Humans crave the moral life. This is what Nietzsche fundamentally understood and what is at the center of his concept of self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung). While Nietzsche’s solution is no tenable solution, Nietzsche’s deeply moral philosophy of continuous self-overcoming, which is a form of engagement in the world, puts its thumb on the present crisis of modernity. For Nietzsche’s outlook gives man something to strive for, something to ascend to, something to wake up and get out of bed for.

Because Christianity has largely sold its soul to nihilistic hedonism, resigning itself to be the merciful prostitute of the culture of death with nonsense like “death with dignity,” the moral esprit de corps of the Westerners has no where to turn in its own pastures. Its moral pasture has been utterly and totally eviscerated by the anti-political, and therefore anti-moral, ideologies of liberalism and Marxism and the liberal and crypto-Marxist clerics and pastors who dominate the face of contemporary Christianity. Liberalism and Marxism are anti-political and anti-moral because they reject the proper understanding of man; their utopianism dreams, in their own forms, of a withering away of the state, all closed relationships and boundaries, all attachments to and with others, and to arrive at that leisurely end state utopia where one can live like a beast in the field choosing to be whatever the hell he or she wants to be at any given time of the day. As Strauss commented about the romantic vision toward liberalism and socialism, “That [moral] protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.”

The lack of seriousness offered in the end goal lifestyle (utopian garden) of liberalism and socialism is, definitionally, the antithesis of the political which is rooted in well-defined boundaries, borders, closed societies, friends and enemies, nations, peoples, and kinsmen to whom you direct the energy of the soul to actualize phronesis and contribute to the common good. The end-state, end of history, end of politics, utopian dream of a life of perpetual leisure is one giant masturbation party until you finally come to your finite extirpation. As George C. Scott’s General Patton said in the biopic film, “War is the only place where a man lives.” How Nietzschean.

The point of the political is to gather people into a defined, and closed, community where people work with one another in rooted lives of ethical participation to actualize moral joy. All other forms of “politics” are, in fact, anti-political. Since the end of the Cold War we have not been living in the end of history, but the stasis of the end of politics. The boldness of Islam, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of rightwing populism, all portend a return to politics in its classical and most traditional form. A moral life in closed community with defined friends and enemies. Islam, as such, situates itself perfectly to counteract the crisis of modernity; it is moral, it is spiritual, it is closed. It offers everything that decrepit Western man longs for.

The decadence of the relativistic West has yet to run its course though it has exhausted itself. There is nothing left but for the lifeless corpse to be left behind by the moral soul of the World Spirit. The next revival in the West may very well be an Islamic one because Islam is a strong opponent to the stupidity of the relativism of Western man. Since Christianity continues to backslide to being the prostituted whore of relativism, giving it a false veil of humanistic dignity in the name of Christ, there are two soulful movements that offer a return to strict moral, and political, living: nationalism and Islam. Since nationalism seems to be trashed the only option left for serious men is Islam. (Plus, Islam has a sort of protected status from criticism being a “minority” religion.) And that is already happening.

In Europe, the existential threat poses no possibility of cooperation with Islam to tackle the problem of moral relativism. Europe will either return to its Christian roots or die. In death, the crescent will triumph. Only naive idiots believe atheism and secularism are the future. North America is another story. Until the September 11 attacks, Muslims used to be a strong Republican voting bloc on account of Islam’s moralism. If Muslims in America are corrupted by the acidic poison of liberalism, then there isn’t much to discuss. But Islam remains a deeply moral movement in the United States. Islam doesn’t threaten the cultural and institutional integrity of the United States. Islam’s moralism may even become its ticket to a safe return into American society when American conservatives and traditionalists – not the ilk like David Harsanyi and others – see Muslims as their friend in the struggle against relativism. After all, serious moral politics is about identifying friends and enemies. The enemy is moral relativism. Muslims are therefore natural friends to conservatives and traditionalists across North (and South) America because Muslims are not a cultural and integralist threat. Europe is a different story where relativism in the enemy, but so too is Islam if culture, history, and heritage matter to people. (And any sensible person not blinded by the anti-politics of utopianism knows that.)

Islam, from this metaphysical reality, is not a danger to the West. On the contrary, from just a purely moral perspective, it is the energy that the West needs to overcome the malaise of modernity. But this raises the question of whether in overcoming this crisis of relativism the West will still be “the West” after successfully overcoming the anti-political and moral relativist tsunami currently engulfing it. Ironically, Islam and its vigorous optimism may just well lead to the real rebirth of the political. On this account alone Islam is a welcome force in the modern world and going forward into the brave new century.

[1] You can read my essay on classical political thought from Aristotle and Cicero as mediated through St. Thomas Aquinas, “Virtue and the City.”

[2] You can read my essay exploring Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a political and theological allegory about the devolution (or fall) of man: “The Fall and Degeneration of Man in Gulliver’s Travels.”

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Beyond philosophical anthropology and philosophical theology, St. Augustine was a political philosopher and his political thoughts have been an interest of many political theorists for some time, especially in the 20^th century.  Augustine’s political thoughts, as contained primarily in Book XIX of City of God (but elsewhere as well within City of God), and also his letters (especially to the Roman general Count Boniface), influenced (rightly or wrongly) the political treatises of the Renaissance, especially Dante’s De Monarchia and Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis.  More recently, Augustine’s realism was a major influence upon Reinhold Neibuhr, and Augustine’s political theory has experienced a renaissance in scholarship ever since the publication of Robert Markus’s Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine.

Augustine’s political philosophy carries the labels “realist” and “pluralist” to it.  It is realist in the sense that Augustine is not a utopian or a progressive – he understands the realm of the political as basically limited and flawed, prone to injustice, conquest, and tyranny.  His political philosophy is considered pluralist because Augustine speaks of the mixed city, the struggle between the civitas terrena and the civitas Dei, the struggle between justice and injustice, and the general differences among a society’s citizenry and their loves.  At its heart, Augustine’s political project is the attempt to navigate this “pessimistic” reality of the political, and how to best achieve and maintain a sensible and reasonable order to society that allows the greatest allowance of the citizens of the civitas terrena to pursue their loves without conquering others.

The foundation of Augustine’s political philosophy rests on what is called “the Saeculum.”  The Saeculum is, ironically, the source of eventual secular political theory – especially from Dante and Marsilius, who interpreted the city of man as having the authorial responsibility of maintaining the peace and welfare of its citizens over and against the Church, which was primarily concerned with the spiritual health of people.  For Augustine, the Saeculum – which is Latin “for of the age” – reflects his own pluralistic metaphysics and ontology, it is the not only the time of the age in which we live, it is also the plane of pluralistic reality, a mixture in other words: saints and sinners, the just and unjust, the philosopher kings and the political tyrants, of empires and republics, of those seeking life and those aiming to destroy and conquer. Augustine takes the Saeculum as the basis for the foundation of his political thought and informs his political realism.  He does not start with an ideal, he works from what he observes and knows from history.

In this Saeculum of irredeemably mixed pluralism, the next point of reference is how do we have a society that bests maintains a “compromise of wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life” (19.17) and abide by Augustine’s two principles of political order: “that a man, in the first place, injure no one, and, in the second, do good to everyone he can reach” (19.14)?  As Augustine lays out in the City of God, the two cities are mixed together in this plane of history called the saeculum and will remain so until the end of days (14.28).  The City of Man, of course, is defined by its love of self and ethos of domination.  The City of God, by contrast, is defined by its want for compromise, peace, and love of others and worship of God.  This dialectic plays itself out in history with people being part of either camp based on their loves.

For Augustine, as Professor Linda Raeder wrote in her article “Augustine and the Case for Limited Government,” political authority and power should be limited on the basis that the greater the power of political authority the greater the tendency toward injustice, conquest, and vain glory seeking such political entities tend to engage in.  The result of this injustice, conquest, and glory seeking behavior is the destruction of small communities, the ablation of peoples and their loves and concerns in life, and the push toward tyranny.  Augustine’s political philosophy aims at compromise, rightful order and devolution of political authority and power, and codifies the principle of non-harm and communal justice – these are the principles by which Augustine believes we can limit the tendency of libido dominandi (lust for domination).

For Augustine, his political theory cannot be separated from his anthropology.  According to Augustine, happiness and wisdom is what humanity seeks, and no government can provide the happiness and wisdom that we all desire.  Human flourishing is the result on ontological happiness, which is principally the result one’s reason coming to understand oneself and the coming into communion with the source of all that which humans desire.  It is very neo-Platonic with a Christianized theological bent to it.

Contra to Hobbes and Locke, Augustine rejects outright the view that power and state orthodoxy (the social contract) are the sources of flourishing and happiness.  This is because Augustine – and the broader Augustinian tradition in general – rejects the view that happiness and flourishing is principally found in things external to humans.  As St. Thomas Aquinas explained in the second volume of the Summa Theologica when discussing the nature of happiness, “because man is ordained to happiness through principles that are in him; since he is ordained thereto naturally. Now the four goods mentioned above are due rather to external causes, and in most cases to fortune; for which reason they are called goods of fortune. Therefore it is evident that happiness nowise consists in the foregoing.”  Much like with Plato and Plotinus, the sources of happiness are within us.  Thus, political happiness is not to be found in a State or its ambitions.

If happiness is to be found in things external to humanity, than this desire can never be satisfied.  If happiness is something internal and natural to us, then it is dependent upon us to discover that happiness.  It necessarily follows that no State, political movement, or amount of “wealth” can produce the happiness that humans naturally seek.  This is Augustine’s foundation for his political theory: (1) we live in a mixed world that is constantly in tension and not homogenized (the Saeculum), (2) that humans have a natural end and that this end is happiness, (3) political authority principally seeks to erase tension by destroying the forces that are in tension to it and its desires (political libido dominandi), and (4) that political authority cannot produce the flourishing and happiness that humans seek.  (Only humans are capable of this.)

As a result, Augustine argues that civil freedom is to be the highest value in civil society because “liberty leaves the citizen free to know his higher end, an end that includes virtues and goals that enable the natural virtues to work without the pride that would corrupt their integrity.”  Again, Augustine’s defense of limited State power and advocacy for civil liberty rests upon his notion of human nature and who is the source and understanding of happiness (the self, not the State or State law).

But Augustine is no anarchist or minarchist.  Instead, the political is real and rooted in society – and it does provide many benefits.  Though most of these benefits are tangible: welfare, order, and (imperfect) justice, these tangible benefits of the political do allow for humans to seek happiness when they are “held in check.”

Augustine, then, rejects anarchism for the same reason that Aristotle rejects political minimalism – a State that is too small is incapable of dispensing the necessary job of the civitas terrena, principally the welfare of its citizens and maintaining order through law.  These responsibilities of the political do not, in of themselves, produce happiness, but they provide an orderly outlet for citizens to be able to pursue either cupiditas (love of greed and material desires) and caritas (love of God and Logos).  Augustine, ironically, is a strong defender of cupiditas because of his account of sin – human sin, which is “misdirected desire” (or misdirected attempts at achieving love and happiness) characterizes humanity in the post-Fall world, therefore sinful humans pursuing cupiditas is a norm and we cannot get around this.  (Unlike Puritanism, Augustine does not see “the spread of the faith” entailing a universalizing of “goodness” however that is conceived.)  So long as the love of greed is not disintegrating society through too much material inequality (hence Augustine’s view that politics serves the interest of social justice and human welfare), or leading to bodily abuse, cupiditas is permitted in the political order because that’s just how the world is.  Now, certain things are to be “outlawed” by the force of law – but law, then, is primarily corrective and reactive, rather than positivistic and shaping.  Law reacts to violation and “corrects” for the outcomes violated, it does not shape and mold humans to their end because only human reason can do that.  Law equally cannot do this because Augustine does not see humans as “man-machines” with blank slates waiting to be filled.

Because the concept of the political in Augustine serves the interest of welfare, order, and (imperfect) justice, political order has a low good to it – a low good that, even in the twisted realm of the Roman Empire (his view), should nevertheless be defended.  This is not a contradiction in Augustine’s thought as some charge.  It is, instead, a reflection of his “pessimistic” realism.

In his letters to the Roman general Count Boniface, Augustine charges Boniface with, in effect, dereliction of duty and responsibility.  However imperfect the Roman Empire is, and was, the Roman Empire still produces and provides tangible benefits to society that Pagan and Christian alike benefit from: order, welfare, and some sense of justice (though it is imperfect).  The Barbarians (the Vandals) invading Rome, on the other hand, represent chaos and disorder, destruction, and injustice writ large.  As Augustine writes to Boniface, “the barbarians to be so bold, to encroach so far, to destroy and plunder so much, and to turn into deserts such vast regions once densely peopled?”  Boniface’s lack of action, a dereliction of duty, has led to the citizens of the empire, whom Boniface is supposed to protect, to suffer the most.  (One cannot pursue wisdom and happiness when they are dead or have been forced to flee their homes.)

Augustine informs Boniface in another letter that his responsibility as Roman general and master of the soldiers is akin to a pastoral shepherd – just from within the sphere of the civil and political.  “there remains upon you the yet greater duty of seeing not only that those be punished with wholesome severity who dare to prate more openly their declaration of that error, most dangerously hostile to the Christian name, but also that with pastoral vigilance, on behalf of the weaker and simpler sheep of the Lord.”  Thus, the task of the general, in defending the civil, is akin to the pastor of a church – the shepherding protection that the civil order grants and provides allows citizens, the sheep, to seek the source of their desire for wisdom and happiness.

The outcome of Augustine’s political philosophy (really political anthropology) is as followed: (1) we live in a political world of mixed pluralism and difference, we cannot get away from this and the attempt to curb difference results in tyranny (the purging of difference to maintain homogeneity which, if supposedly achieved, would end all internal societal conflict), (2) since humans desire happiness and happiness is a natural state of being and to be found in reason’s understanding of one’s own desire, the State cannot provide the happiness that humanity seeks – no amount of State power can provide for humanity’s happiness (incidentally this means that human nature is a barrier against State power, if one believes in human nature that is), (3) despite the imperfections of the realm of the political, the realm of the political (the civitas terrena) provides indispensable services: primarily welfare, justice, and law and order, which helps allow humans to pursue their loves and desire for happiness in relative peace and stability, (4) because of what the political provides, it is worth defending (for even imperfect order and justice is better than no order and no justice), (5) politics is primarily concerned with compromise and cooperation between the plurality of difference forces and peoples in society, not the conquest of one over the other, and (6) this tug-of-war between compromise and conquest, between a defense of pluralism and desire to exterminate plurality on the belief that universalization will bring lasting peace and prosperity, is the fundamental nature of politics and will remain the fundamental nature of politics until the end of time (Augustine didn’t have a concept of the “end of history” or belief that tyranny’s universalizing tendency would “win”).

Thus, Augustine’s political anthropology and political philosophy is characterized by his defenders as one of pluralistic realism.  Augustine’s detractors, on the other hand, charge him with maintaining injustice with a faux advocacy for social justice and that imperfect political order is still worth defending because of the imperfect benefits that it provides.  Others have characterized Augustine’s political theory as “pessimism.”  Furthermore, Augustine’s political legacy is hotly contested, with many viewing him, paradoxically, as one of the founding fathers of secular political theory, the father of limited government, and an important defender and shaper of “the Western ideals of freedom and progress and social justice.”

One of the most important elements to Augustine’s political philosophy was the development of what is remembered as subsidiarity.  Subsidiarity is the principal that devolves political responsibility away from the central State and back to the local level.  This is enshrined as official Catholic political theory and is defined as, “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”  Likewise, from Augustine, political subsidiarity “is opposed to all forms of collectivism. It sets limits for state intervention. It aims at harmonizing the relationships between individuals and societies.”  Finding the balance, or harmonizing relationship between individuals and society, is the impetus of Augustine’s political philosophy.  Politics is not the push for utopia, domination, or other such fantasies which permit the pursuit of libido dominadi, politics is about compromise, finding balance between individuals and society, delegating political power and responsibility away from central authorities back to local authorities, dispensing justice (however imperfect), and maintaining civil order so to allow the citizens to grow into their loves.  Happiness cannot come from the State, only from within the person.

________________________________________________________________

Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

Venmo Support: https://www.venmo.com/u/Paul-Krause-48

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@paul.j.krause

Saint Augustine is the towering figure who looms over western theology. Almost all people are familiar with his name through the Confessions, his semi-autobiographical work. Others know he wrote a big book called The City of God, even if they haven’t taken the adventure of reading that monumental tome. Others also know him as the Doctor of Grace, the theologian who confront the Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian crisis of the early fifth century and articulated a salvific theology where God’s grace acts and moves first in all human life. Yet Augustine the theologian was, for most of his Christian life, Augustine the preacher—a man who would preach to his congregation in Hippo as much as three times a day, surrounded not by the educated and elite audience his liberal arts education trained him but a more plainspoken and common people of farmers, fishermen, and slaves.

Augustine’s theology of preaching, in comparison to his other contributions, remain understudied. Charles G. Kim Jr., an assistant professor of theology and classical languages at Saint Louis University, tries to correct this problematic hole in Augustinian scholarship with his latest work, The Way of Humility: St. Augustine’s Theology of Preaching. While there have been some studies on Augustine’s preaching in the past, Kim is keen to point out that our reliance on dated scholarship is problematic. Even the great Peter Brown, Augustine’s preeminent biographer and historian of late antiquity, falls into the trap of thinking Augustine’s primary congregational audience was a more educated middle-class in Hippo rather than a poorer and more commonfolk audience that becomes apparent when carefully studying the language and metaphors of Augustine’s surviving sermons.

In the Confessions and City of God, Augustine, though indebted to the Platonists for helping him move closer to Christ, accosts them for their pride—their lack of humility. This is especially true when Augustine turns his focus to the Neoplatonist Porphyry in the latter half of the first half of the City of God. Augustine argues that the Platonists cannot accept Christ as the Mediator between God and man and therefore the embodied wisdom that they seek because of their self-love, their pride, which they jealously protect: I and I alone am the discoverer of truth. It wasn’t until Augustine was humbled through his encounter with the scriptures coupled with the infant Christ speaking to him in Milan: Tolle Lege, Tolle Lege, that he was able to throw off his intellectual pride and submit himself to the humility of a Galilean carpenter and fisherman who was also the incarnate Deity, the only mediator between God and man.

“Humility,” Kim says, “both in word and deed, is central to the preaching of Augustine.” In fact, “it is impossible to think of Augustine’s theology of preaching without considering the virtue of humility.” What follows in The Way of Humility is a tremendous examination of Augustine’s preaching style and what it reveals about him and the theology communicated in his surviving sermons. Kim asserts that Augustine understood his role as a preacher was as a teacher, not to showcase his intelligence and education as a teacher, but to serve as a humble servant of the Saving Teacher, Christ, “Augustine recognizes that he is an example for his congregation as their preacher. He wants that example to be drawn from the bible witness of Paul and of Christ.”

…

Read the rest of the review, first published at VOEGELINVIEW, 25 August 2024.

________________________________________________________________

Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Muses of a Fire, Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

Venmo Support: https://www.venmo.com/u/Paul-Krause-48

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@paul.j.krause

Skip to content

Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading Continue Reading

The Journal of the Eric Voegelin Society Aesthetics Alt-Right America American History American Literature Ancient History Anthropology Aquinas Aristophanes Aristotle Art Augustine Beauty Being and Nothingness Bible Bitcoin Book Reviews Books Byzantine History Capitalism Catholicism Christianity Cicero City of God Civilization Classics Confessions Conservatism Cosmology Cryptocurrency Culture Dante Dante’s Inferno Democracy Dialectic Discourses on Livy Divine Comedy Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Eros Ethics Existentialism Fascism Feminism Film Freedom French Revolution Geopolitics German Idealism German Philosophy Gothic Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hebrew Bible Hegel Hell Herder Hiking Historicism Historiography History Homer Humanism Human Nature Ibn Khaldun Idealism Iliad Islam John Locke Judaism Kant Karl Marx Language Lecture Leo Strauss Leo Tolstoy Liberalism Liberty Literary Tales Literature Love Machiavelli Marxism Materialism Metaphysics Modernity Morality Music Mythology Napoleon Natural Law Nature Nietzsche Nihilism Old Testament Paradise Lost Paul Krause Peloponnesian War Phenomenology of Spirit Philosophy Plato Plato’s Dialogues Platonism Plotinus Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theology Political Theory Politics Postmodernism Progressivism Protestantism Puritanism Reaction Religion Roger Scruton Roman History Romanticism Rome Rousseau Russian Literature Sartre Schelling Schmitt Science Science Fiction Sex Shakespeare Sin Social Contract Socialism Sociology soul Sublime Technology The Odyssey of Love Paul Krause Theology The Republic Thomas Hobbes Thucydides Totalitarianism Truth Tyranny Virtue War War and Peace Writing

Discourses on Minerva is the personal blog of a pilgrim scholar, journalist, and cultural critic. Here I have more liberty to speak freely on the subjects that matter to us today: Culture, Politics, Religion, and Literature. Visit the About page for more details.

America American History Anthropology Art Augustine Bible Book Reviews Books Catholicism Christianity Classics Economics English Literature Enlightenment Epistemology Ethics German Philosophy Great Books Greek Philosophy Greek poetry Hegel History Human Nature Lecture Liberalism Literary Tales Literature Love Modernity Philosophy Plato Poetry Political Philosophy Political Theory Politics Religion Romanticism Science Theology War

Niccolò Machiavelli is one of the most important philosophers and arguably one of the catalysts of modernity. He is famous for his short work, a Primer for Princes, also known as The Prince. But his other great work, The Discourses on Livy, is more profound and deals with politics, religion, liberty, slavery, and civilization. In this series of online lectures, I explain and explore the core concepts of Machiavelli’s epic masterpiece of philosophy and politics.

LECTURE ONE: SUMMARY & ANALYSIS OF THE DISCOURSES ON LIVY

LECTURE TWO: LIBERTY & SLAVERY IN THE DISCOURSES

LECTURE THREE: WHAT IS LIBERTY ACCORDING TO MACHIAVELLI?

LECTURE FOUR: MACHIAVELLI ON RELIGION

________________________________________________________________

Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

Venmo Support: https://www.venmo.com/u/Paul-Krause-48

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@paul.j.krause