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VI

THE 'DE CIVITATE DEI' IN LATER DAYS

THE mediæval unity was the grandest attempt in human history to base the structure of institutions upon righteousness, political, social and economic, no less than religious. When this unity broke up, a new world--as Luther said--came into being. It might seem as though the ideals connected with the mediæval projection of the Civitas Dei were gone beyond recall. That is true only partially. The break up of the ancient order did destroy this idea for Europe as a whole. Take such works as the 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More and the 'Il Principe' of Macchiavelli. We can see how men's dreams were changed no less than the facts. The Renaissance appeared to have put an end to all such hopes as those which animated S. Thomas.

Macchiavelli's remorseless study of the facts of the inter-state scramble in Italy is more remarkable for what it leaves out than for what it puts in. The conception of natural law has vanished. The passion of nationality furnishes the one ideal. In the moving and pathetic eloquence of the last chapter he cries for a saviour, who shall do for distressed Italy what other saviours have done for their people.

'If, as I said, in order to show the valour of Moses it was necessary for the people of Israel to be enslaved in Egypt; and, for the magnanimity of Cyrus to be seen, it was needful for the Persians to be oppressed by the Medes; and, to illustrate the excellence of Theseus, the Athenians had to be dispersed: so now, for the virtue of an Italian spirit to be seen, it was needful that Italy should be reduced to the state in which she now is, and to be more enslaved than were the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians, without head, without order beaten, dispirited, lacerated, hunted, and in fact enduring every kind of ruin.'

Nothing can be nobler than Macchiavelli's desire for a redeemer of his people. But of justice, whether in the internal government or in the external relations of a people, he took no thought. Everything is reason of state.

Savonarola's ideal for Florence, to be a godfearing city with a true democracy, had been given a trial. It had failed. With this failure, so far as the Italian States were concerned, there disappeared all efforts at ideal politics, until in the nineteenth century Macchiavelli's ideals triumphed by Macchiavelli's own methods. Italy became united under the headship of Victor Emmanuel and the astute diplomacy of Cavour. There was a man after Macchiavelli's heart. He had his reward.

In Europe as a whole the Reformation destroyed the last hopes of a united Christendom. The 'Balance of Power' became the guiding-star of statesmen. From the League of Cambrai to the Partition of Poland was a natural development. We too have seen it even go further. Acton said ' Calvin preached, and Bellarmin lectured, but Macchiavelli reigned.' Here, however, a faint shadow of the old ideal can be discerned in the ideas and principles which underlay modern International Law.

In regard to both these developments it is possible to trace the influence, if not the direct ancestry of ideas, to S. Augustine.

It has been thought that the second definition of a commonwealth in the ' De Civitate Dei,' that in which the ideas of justice and religion do not appear, may have had something to do with the development of the non-moral doctrine of the State. It is doubtful how far this can be proved. This much is clear. Augustine emphasised the aim of the terrene State as being earthly peace and no more. This limitation has much to do with the rapidly developing theory of the secular State. That was developed largely by the Jesuits, in order the better to exalt the Church, the Respublica Christiana. Jesuit writers and others on that side developed frankly a doctrine of the civil State as being purely secular and having no ends that were not material. It can have to do with higher ideals only in so far as it is directed to these ends by the supreme religious guide. That is the principle of Bellarmin developed frankly and without disguise. This is different from the principles of writers like Augustinus Triumphus at the end of the Middle Ages, or of Bozius in the sixteenth century. These definitely make the whole world a single State, of which the Pope as 'King of Kings and Lord of Lords' is head. Bellarmin's doctrine of the indirect power of the Papacy allows to the civil State a being and purpose of its own. On one side it is frankly secular. The State of the Jesuits, when once it threw off its ecclesiastical tutelage, would be more, not less, indifferent in matters of religion--more also than was the old pagan State.

The distinction on which all this argument depends unfortunately comes through S. Augustine. We saw that he was not always thinking of politics. Yet it remains true that the whole conception of the State as Civitas terrena is precisely what enabled the Jesuits to set up their doctrine of the civil State. Since also it virtually coincided with the doctrine of pure politics, which emerged at the Renaissance, it helped to produce our general modern notions.

On the other hand the influence of Augustine on the growth of International Law is certain. That he laid down principles which might prove fruitful, if they were needed, cannot be denied. The conception of a world of equal States living in harmony and exchanging mutual services we owe to his mind, expressed in the passage about a world consisting of small States We cannot say that the founders of International Law depended upon S. Augustine. In Albericus Gentilis, 'De Jure Belli,' there are no citations from the 'De Civitate Dei.' In the great work of Grotius, 'De Jure Belli et Pads,' Augustine is frequently cited. This need not mean much. Here and there important arguments are based on these quotations. Yet so many authorities are adduced that it is hard to attribute priority to any single one. The avowed doctrine of Grotius is Natural Law. Certainly that is in S. Augustine, but Grotius did not take it from him. Still the general conceptions which are to be found in the ' De Civitate Dei,' of the mitigation of warfare through Christianity, of the sense of a common bond between nations, the insistence upon justice, the bitter condemnation of a policy of mere conquest--all these were among the many influences that helped to keep alive some flickering brands of Christendom, implying something better than the 'law of the beasts.' I am not certain that we can say more. The great ideal of a world ruled by justice had gone. If, however, the nations, now definitely recognised as sovereign and independent, should ever come to concord, they might point to the passage of which I have so often spoken, as laying down the ideal of world-politics in a body of States independent but mutually concordant.

So much for Christendom and the great State. When we come to reduce the scale, the story is different. In the narrower field of compact territorial sovereignty, governments were not necessarily irresponsive to the same ideals that we saw embodied in the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, during the long period of the wars of religion until at least 1609, when the Dutch won their long truce, and in a less degree until 1648, when absolute differences of religion were guaranteed at the Peace of Westphalia, the idea of some sort of Christendom survived. The State, as conceived by the Renaissance, the embodiment of power and nothing but power, did not triumph finally, except later on in Prussia. That was prevented by the Reformation, with its emphasis on theocratic and scriptural ideas of government.

In the first place, the concentrated territorialism of the new States in Germany made the unity of religion with them a feasible aim--a Lutheran could leave a Calvinist State and live elsewhere still under the same 'Kultur.' So much so that one elector could say that 'his subjects' consciences belonged to him.' What triumphed everywhere was Erastianism--the lay power in a Christian State ruling over the clerical. Luther did not desire a State religiously heterogeneous. He did not desire a State founded on power alone. Luther and Melanchthon desired to transfer to civic and family life all the consecration of aim associated heretofore with monastic devotion. Erastus himself declared that he was considering the case of a State in which one religion and one only was tolerated, and that the true one. The control of the inner life of the Church by a Parliament, which might be composed of 'Jews, Turks, infidels and heretics,' was the last thing that Erastus contemplated. What he desired was to take all coercive authority out of the hands of the clergy, and transfer it to the civil magistrate. Stubbs says of Henry VIII 'that he would be the Pope, the whole Pope and something more than the Pope,' referring to the jurisdiction. The movement was a layman's movement, not in itself anti-religious. Its ideal is 'the godly prince.' Its State is a commonwealth in which Christ is King, no whit less than was the mediæval theocracy. All through the period of the Reformation this ideal expresses itself.

With this expression there grew a more explicit recognition of the Commonwealth and the Church as two aspects of the same society. This doctrine was not confined to men of any especial opinion. It is the doctrine of Luther and Musculus and of John Knox but also of Whitgift and Laud and the more extreme Gallican lawyers in France, but not of Bossuet. We in England have this doctrine enshrined for ever by the serene and gracious intelligence of Hooker. Nothing could be clearer than his statement:

'When we oppose the Church, therefore, and the Commonwealth in a Christian society, we mean by the Commonwealth that society with relation unto all the public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion excepted; by the Church the same society with only reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides; when that society which is both a Church and a Commonwealth doth flourish in these things which belong to it as a Commonwealth, we then say the Commonwealth doth flourish; when in the things which concern it as a Church, the Church doth flourish; when in both, then the Church and the Commonwealth flourish together,' (Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, viii. 15 ; Works, iii. 420.)

The opposite doctrine of the two kingdoms, as found in Hooker's adversary, Thomas Cartwright, is greeted by Whitgift with surprise as a strange monstrous birth. This doctrine, that of Church and State as two distinct societies, was developed by Huguenots in France, by Independents like Robert Browne in his treatise 'Reformation without tarrying for any' (any meaning the civil magistrate), but above all by the second generation of Presbyterians. It might be alleged by the Presbyterians that their doctrine was more akin to S. Augustine than that of the Middle Ages. No more than S. Augustine did the Presbyterians leave the State free in the interests of religion, but demanded that the Prince should use force to direct men for their good. The famous words of

Andrew Melville to James I in 1606 are a classical expression of it.

It was, however, the earlier doctrine that long ruled-- the conception of the State as in sort a Church--inside a compact unitary State. The argument for unity which in the Middle Ages had been employed partly on behalf of the Emperor, but more effectively on that of the Pope, could now be made the ground for treating the civil power as 'over all persons and in all causes supreme.' This principle of religious unity as a foundation of the Commonwealth and the only possible source of justice, was proclaimed by people of widely different opinions. In France we have the une loi, un roi, une foi of pamphleteers like Louis d'Orléans. This cry produced the 'conversion' of Henri Quatre, and ultimately the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, parallel with the assertion of extreme royalism in the Gallican Articles of 1682 and the threat to break off from Rome. On the other side we have Erastus proclaiming that there could be no coercive authority in the spiritual power, hinting that if necessary the prince could teach and administer the sacraments, developing into the doctrine of 'the Lord's Anointed' as a persona mixta, partly lay, partly ecclesiastical. A little later we see it expressed in the absolutism of Hobbes; and symbolised on his famous frontispiece. On the largest scale we see Hooker applying it to a nation-state. But it is not confined to that. Anabaptists are often treated as mere anarchists. That is only one side of them. The constructive governing side was shown in the attempt to secure a State inspired in every detail by Christian principles. Knipperdolling, the King, as he was called, of Münster, put this into practice. It is adumbrated in the 'Restitution' of Rothmann, who argues against the Chiliasts and in favour of a Kingdom of Christ on earth now, thus recalling S. Augustine.

Calvin at Geneva and the Puritan polities illustrate the same principle. The reign of the saints, so called, was but the counterpart, on the narrower scale, of the doctrine of the rule of Christ in a truly just republic-- of that rule which the Canonists and Ultramontanes gave to the Pope.

Let us take a literary expression of this. 'Nova Solyma,' which appeared in 1648, is an attempt to imagine the city of God upon earth, 'to build Jerusalem,' as the name implies. It is a work of amazing interest both for its educational and political ideals. Despite much that was irritating in his manner, Mr. Begley, who published a translation in 1902, has done service in recalling this didactic romance from limbo. Let me quote from an article in the Church Quarterly which I wrote on the topic in the following year.

'Puritanism, like nearly all ascetic ideals, had in it a strong Manichean bias. We know it chiefly by its enmities. It was active for destruction. It destroyed the monarchy, the aristocracy, and finally the representative system. It abolished the drama, it proscribed the Liturgy, it persecuted the bishops, it knocked down statues, overturned altars and shattered windows. It first abolished tyranny and then destroyed liberty and finally completed its career of devastation by giving the coup de grâce to itself. Few movements have been to all appearances more uniform in their destructive tendencies than was English political Puritanism. But it is no more right to judge Puritanism by its antipathies than it is Christianity. . . . It is the constructive side of Puritanism that "Nova Solyma" expresses. . . .

'Puritanism at its best was constructive. Starting from the conception, made familiar to us all by Mr. James, of the twice-born soul, it desired to see a new "city of God" upon earth, in which, with whatever latitude for political and natural differences, the life of the Christian should be properly trained and guarded by a State directed by religious principles and acting solely from the highest aims. . . .

'This ideal of a Christian State in accordance with Puritan principles is the whole purpose of "Nova Solyma." . . . It is the XVIIth Century Civitas Dei, as indeed its name implies. . . . Though Puritanism as a politico-religious party was not long in the ascendant, many of its governing ideas found their way into the more serious-minded of all classes, and have had a profound effect upon the national character. These or some of them will be found in "Nova Solyma," where we can learn that the Puritan was no Little Englander, no mere ascetic, no opponent of war, or hunting, or reading as such; but that his ideal was a State governed on principles of righteousness, training its members--body, mind, and spirit--in all the faculties and sentiments which may minister to the efficiency and energy appropriate to the conduct of a Christian member of an orderly and self-controlling society. Religion since the Reformation, said Sir A. F. Hort, has been departmental, and given up the aim of controlling the whole of human life in the way that mediæval Catholicism attempted. This is unfortunately to a certain extent true, but was not so always or in aim ; and such books as "Nova Solyma" are the proof of a broader ideal.' (C.Q.R., lvii. No. 113, Oct. 1903, 125-130.)

That work is English. Take one which is not. Johann Valentin Andreae in 'Christianopolis' affords a similar illustration.[1] Here, too, the main interest of the whole is in its ideals of education. But it is on a smaller scale and in every way inferior to ' Nova Solyma.' Both of them show how deeply men's imaginations were affected by the doctrine of an ideal Christian Commonwealth.

Let us now take instances from men of opposite Political sympathies. The doctrine of the 'Divine Right of Kings,' on its religious as distinct from its legal and historical side, is an expression of the notion that the civil State ought to be a commonwealth of Christians, the Civitas Dei. It is this half-romantic, half-sacramental doctrine which consecrated to many the cause of the Stuarts. This religious side of the doctrine was as a rule stronger in England than in France.

Yet Bossuet's 'Politique Tirée de l'Ecriture Sainte' is a good illustration of it. Bossuet prided himself on this dull work which looked towards the past, although it must be admitted that Bossuet never merged the Church in the State, but always regarded them as two societies. It is well to take this work as an illustration. With the beginning of the eighteenth century the end had come, so far as this country was concerned. The Nonjuring schism had considerable importance It developed strongly in the minds of men like William Law (in his letters to Hoadly) the doctrine of the Church, as a society in itself distinct from the State, though it might be composed of the same persons. Each body was, in the later phrase of Leo XIII, a societas genere et jure perfecta. The Bangorian controversy which was aroused by Hoadly's sermon 'The Kingdom of Christ,' showed the same notion in the religious sphere. Hoadly was dominated by the ancient notion which made the Church co-extensive with the nation; and therefore desired the comprehension within it of anybody and everybody. Sherlock and his other opponents asserted the distinctness and historic independence of the Church, and the incompetence of the civil power to control it. This tendency had been increased by other causes. The Toleration Act and the Union with Scotland destroyed the notion of a uniform religious State. True it left some basis, for the Toleration Act stopped short of Unitarianism or the Papacy, and the Scots refused to tolerate episcopacy. But now the Kingdom, united as never before, was not even professedly uniform in religion. It boasted two different established churches. Naturally, this led to a resuscitation, even among establishment Divines, of the doctrine of the two Societies.

Warburton's 'Alliance between Church and State' is a better book than many people think. It lays down that the two bodies are entirely distinct in nature, though they may be composed of the same individuals. But the State establishes a Church from a utilitarian, not from a religious motive. It is not the business of the State to seek the truth, but merely to take the religion of the majority of its members and establish that. As the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proceeded, the old Augustinian doctrine of a Christian Church-State prevailing in the Middle Ages, and through the Reformation, gradually disappeared. Toleration gave way to complete civil rights for Dissenters, Roman Catholics, Jews, and finally Atheists. It has been recently decided in the Courts that a bequest to a Free Thinking Association was legal. Religious heterogeneity is recognised as a principle of the modern State. In Mr. Gladstone's early book, ' The State in its Relations with the Church,' we find a last echo of the old view. But he does not contemplate, like Hooker, a single society. Rather, he treats the Church as the conscience of the State, and deprecates on that ground the admission of the Jews to full political rights.

The notion of a theocracy has more and more receded from discussions on general politics. The notion of the principles of Christian ethics--i.e. the golden rule, which is held by many non-Christians on different grounds --as the governing doctrine of political and social justice, has tended to increase in importance. Not merely Christian socialism, but many more general doctrines of humanity, are content to argue that (in this sense) the world is or ought to be Christian, and its legislation ought to be framed according to the Jewish-Christian rule of fraternity. This tendency has been enhanced by the war. Many who before regarded Christianity as an effete system of impossible dogmas awakened to find that the real difference between the belligerents was nothing less than the prevalence of certain ethical ideals, of which the most eminent if not the only expression was the Christian system. Reconstruction,

it is alleged, in order to be stable, must follow these lines--whether applied to Europe as a whole in the relations between States, or to the domestic economy of peoples, or to the relations of classes. As the doctrine of absolute state-sovereignty is criticised, so also is the companion doctrine of absolute rights in private property. Neither of these criticisms is new, even in modern times. Both have been rendered more acute by the war, i.e. the ideal of a State is more and more seen to be dependent on justice.

Only, as S. Augustine failed to see, justice in politics and in social economy has reference only to those ideals of cuique suum tribuere and the Golden Rule, which are not necessarily in fact bound up with religion. Men can unite in those, who yet differ in toto on the theological foundation. In this sense indeed it may be natural to look forward to a Christian State; but certainly it is neither natural nor wise to do so in the sense of a State which promulgates the Christian religion and none other. Consequently, while legislation or custom may well be pressed on the ground of its accordance with Christian principles, so far as they are confined to the social doctrine, it is impolitic and even wrong to condemn or promote legislation on the ground that it conflicts with the law of the Christian Church. That is to attempt to make what is true only of one society govern the whole.

To sum up, with the Renaissance the secular or pagan State tended to become the ideal. This effect was counteracted by the Reformation. Yet that destroyed the ancient unity of Western Christendom and made impossible the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire, of a single Catholic Commonwealth of princes and lords and peoples, a unity of all culture. Vestiges of this lingered on and helped towards the beginning of modern International Law. On the smaller scale of the separate State, the effect of the Reformation was different. It tightened instead of loosening all those ties that made for a concentrated unitary State. So much so, that it is even now but slowly and with infinite reluctance that political problems can be discussed on any other basis. For the more part within that State it shifted the balance of power from the clergy to the laity, the Church to the State, the Pope to the King. If we recognise that change, we can say that the ideal of a uniform Christian commonwealth was as real to Hooker as it was to Alfred the Great. This was the aim of the great national States like England and France, of the smaller territorial sovereignties in Germany, with their maxim cujus regio ejus religio, and even of bodies like the Anabaptists and Pilgrim Fathers, as soon as they obtained rule. We see this expressed on the grand scale by Hooker and Whitgift, on the smaller scale by Rothmann and 'Nova Solyma.' In some of the arguments adduced in favour of established churches, and in certain vague appeals to Christian principles, it can be discerned in our own days, and can be traced right back to S. Augustine. On the whole, however, religious heterogeneity is recognised as a fundamental part of the modern State, but in regard to certain fundamental ethical principles of neighbourliness, mutual love and so forth, Christian morals (as apart from any kind of theology) are increasingly recognised as integral to a just and even to a stable organisation of life.

On the other hand, the development of the secular, this-worldly theory of the State, whether by Jesuits or Presbyterians in their own interest, owes much to the other and more commonly neglected side of S. Augustine--that in which he openly discarded the principles of religion in the idea of a commonwealth. The sharp distinction between secular and sacred, holy and profane, which ruled historical writing until recently, though not introduced, was enormously strengthened by S. Augustine.

The problem which S. Augustine discussed in this book is fundamental, nor has it ever been finally resolved. It is a conflict not primarily between two polities. To make it that, is to externalise it and to make it relatively superficial, deep down in history though even that goes. Rather the conflict is one between two religions-- Christianity and Paganism. That is S. Augustine's primary and predominating thought. It never leaves him. These two religions are conceived as the binding force of two societies, the expression of two opposing passions: Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo-- the passion for God and the passion for self. That is the direction alike of angelic and human wills, which makes the whole time-process since the fall of Lucifer a drama of eternal tragedy, and conditions the Redemption. If we seek to understand S. Augustine mainly by the outcome to which his system led in history, we shall do wrong. Rather we must seek to understand that by the deeper antagonism--between the other-worldly and the this-worldly reference of all institutions. This we shall realise better by a more intimate personal knowledge of the most intimate and personal of all divines until John Henry Newman. In Augustine there were struggling two men, like Esau and Jacob in the womb of Rebecca. There was Augustine of Thagaste, of Madaura, of Carthage, of Rome, of Milan, the brilliant boy, the splendid and expansive youthful leader, 'skilled in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,' possessed of the antique culture, rhetorical, dialectic, Roman-- the man of the world, the developed humanist with enough tincture of Platonism to gild the humanism; and there is the Augustine of the 'Confessions,' of the 'Sermons,' of the 'De Civitate,' the monk, the ascetic, the other-worldly preacher, the biblical expositor, the mortified priest. These two beings struggle for ever within him, the natural man filled with the sense of beauty and the joy of living, expansive, passionate, artful--and the supernatural Christian fleeing from the world, shunning it, burning what he adored, and adoring what he burnt, celibate and (at times) almost anti-social.

This book itself is too great to be consistent. We can see in it traces of this ceaseless conflict. The otherworldly aim is predominant, the annihilation of all earthly values in comparison with the summum bonum.

But evidences, we have noted, remain of the humane, social, cultured ideal. The conflict is eternal in human life. No change of religion will put a term to it. Not even as some think, as I suppose Augustine thought, the abolition of all eternal values. On the one hand is the world, the present, the course of life, the immediate 'nice things'; and on the other the Eternal, the far-off, the spiritual city, the altar of sacrifice, the chalice of suffering--each calls us, each finds response in our nature. How can this problem be resolved? One way is by complete world-flight, the extreme of asceticism, i.e. asceticism not as discipline but as self-annihilation, or, as seen in the sphere of institutions, in the utter subjection of the city of this world to the rule of those who speak in the name of the Eternal. On the other is the pagan solution, frankly materialistic, developing on its better side a grand picture of human society, and a high development of all human arts, but ruling out as irrelevant all interests that look beyond. Neither by itself can satisfy.

The real change in S. Augustine took place when he was converted to Platonism by reading Cicero's 'Hortensius' and not in the later well-known scene in the garden at Milan. From that first moment related in the 'Confessions' he had the nostalgia of the infinite, and all earthly goods were annihilated to his restless spirit. The charge brought by Nietzsche against Plato that he did the real damage, preparatory to Christianity, by setting up the doctrine of another world is true.

Perhaps it is this which makes Augustine's apologetic more impressive on the general theistic, than it is on its distinctively Christian, side.

Yet that fact suggests the solution. Plato, and still more the Neo-Platonists, showed that a mere humanistic culture is bankrupt at the last, for man's heart is restless until he find God. Even humanism as an ideal cannot be carried out without an infusion of the otherworldly principle--present pleasure must be given up for future bliss even by an Alexander.

Augustine calls attention to this. The Romans, he said, were moved by earthly motives of ambition, no more. To that end they were prodigal of sacrifice. Christians for their end, which is so much higher, would do well if they were to learn the devotion to the heavenly patria which the Romans gave to an earthly one. In other words, the Roman State, the earthly aim, could not be maintained except by sacrifice. True, the sacrifice is for an end of this world alone. Yet it is equally sacrifice of the immediate for a far-off end, for an individual and even for a community like Saguntum it means the surrender of life itself for the good of the whole. What makes this possible?

Even earthly ambitions apart from the State, even sheer individualism, can make no progress without sacrifice and what Christians call the Cross. Any successful merchant knows that. Even the hardest voluptuary must postpone immediate goods--in the Christian phrase, must die to live--and take risks, or he will not fulfil the demands of his passions.

Thus then the edifce of humane culture cannot but rest its foundations on the principle of the Cross, and also upon social and communal interdependence. ' Man cannot live for himself alone.' Yet this principle has in many cases no meaning and no appeal to the individual, if there be no world beyond.

Take the other side. Sheer world-flight is not possible. The extremest ascetic--S. Simon on his pillar--must be fed. In the 'De Opere Monachorum S. Augustine points this out.[2] It is all very well, he says, for people to say that a man ought to be entirely occupied with the things of God, and therefore need do no labour. This cannot be. The dinner must be cooked. Some manual work is a necessity in any self-sufficing society. Therefore it cannot be contrary to true monastic life to do some secular work.

Besides, whether for the selfish end which we considered above, or for the religious, sheer individualism would be the final abutment of either, world-flight or world-acceptance, taken by itself. Sheer individualism is literally unthinkable. A selfish man of culture needs the help of society at every turn. A world-renouncing monk cannot do without security. Social and communal activities are of the essence of human life, for no one can dispense with them. If they are, then sacrifice of what we want, even, on occasion, of life itself, becomes a necessity at times, a fact of which to-day we have lurid evidence. Nor in the long run can such sacrifice be justified to the individual apart from an other-worldly aim. The goods of human sacrifice are real goods. But just as the individual is driven to the larger life of the community by the natural fact of the family, so human society and all human culture is possible only by the ultimate recognition of the eternal goal. Otherwise there will come the decadence, such as overcame Greece and Rome and the Renaissance. That is the lesson of the 'De Civitate Dei.' Our ideals of beauty must be rooted in the hope of eternal life--earthly glories are symbols and sacraments--if they be not evil; for 'God created man to be immortal and made him an image of his own eternity,' or in his own words: 'Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it find thee.'

Notes to Lecture VI

[1] Christianopolis, trs. by Dr. F. E. Held (Oxford University Press, New York, 1916).

[2] 'De opere monachorum,' C. xvii.

'Quid enim agant qui operari corporaliter nolunt, cui rei vacent scire desidero. Orationibus inquiunt et psalmis et lectioni et verbo dei. Sancta plane vita, et Christi suauitate laudabilis. Sed si ab his auocandi non sumus, nee manducandum est, nee ipsae escae quotidie praeparandae ut possint apponi et adsumi. Si autem ad ista vacare seruos dei certis interuallis temporum ipsius infirmitatis necessitas cogit, cur non et apostolicis praeceptis obseruandis aliquas partes temporum deputamus?


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