Christian Cosmopolitanism

City of God:

The Christian heaven ws a utopia, and, like all utopias, it bears an upside-down, mirror-inverted relationship to its own contemporary world. the equality of souls in eternal bliss makes the earthly happiness of emperors pitiful by comparison.

Paganism: ideal prince’s rule is like the rule of the head over the body, of the intelligence over the desires, a co-operation so natural taht it ruled out disobedience and the use of force to compel obedience.

explanation of the sack of Roma:

Augustine’s clever question:  Why did Rome last so long? instead  of what has Rome done now to deserve her fate?

Early Augustine saw Christianity as the fulfilment of all that was best in paganism, and a later Augustine saw Christianity as a denial of everything which paganism stood for.

Augustine is walking several tightopes at the same time. the African probelm meant that any view of the Church which he took had to be pure enough to satisfy African sensibilities but not so pure as to exclude too readily those who had abjured the faith and asked to be forgiven.

God creates time. time changes but God not, so time is meaningless to God. To know God’s mind in its entirety is a blasphemous attempt to be like God.

the heavenly city is a city of being, not becoming.

the happiness of a true Christian emperor consists of reigning justly, not being puffed up by flattery, being slow to vengeance and quick to forgive, successful in controlling his lusts and regular in his public prayers for forgiveness.

state is a provisional institution that it can have no value in the scale of values which really matters. the state is essentially a fourth-rate institution, the state is certainly inferior to the heavenly city and to church, probably inferior to the best possible earthly state ruled by a prince inspired by the Gospels, and almost certainly closer to the city of the damned than is generally supposed. 

Augustine on state: the more the state is an inferior institution, the more we need it.  (Rome’s beginning in the murder of his brother Remus by Romulus can stand for the beginning of all early earthly dominion.)

Augustinianism signals the definitive end of the ancient idea that the state is the school of the virtues and the stage on which those virtues are to be seen to their best advantage.