Books can be dangerous because they shape the way we think. Our thoughts shape our actions, and our actions shape our characters, which of course affects how we live our lives—as individuals and as communities. Our age is one quick to laud all things that appear creative, usually with praise for authors who shape our values, whatever that means. The best books, particularly those that have remained important for many centuries, do not create something new or shape anyone’s values. Rather, they are great because, in ways that may be new and exciting, they help us see more fully the structure of reality so that we might better live in accord with the order of creation.
Saint Augustine’s City of God is without doubt on the list of great books that continues to help us see how the natural order is not something bracketed off or separated from spiritual reality. It was written in the 5th century in response to the intellectual class that insisted that Christianity was to blame for the fall of Rome. Christians who insist on being peacemakers on earth while awaiting their rewards in the afterlife made the Romans’ commitment to the city weak and pathetic, it was claimed. Pagan rites bred manliness; Christians, however, preached turning the other cheek. Augustine’s magnificent response provided a strong case that Rome would have fallen regardless of Christian influence, because its foundations were poorly laid.
But not stopping there, Augustine goes on to argue that a greater city exists than Rome, one that has existed since the beginning of time and will never fall. This is the City of God. It is not only the eternal city that Christians hope to enter when their earthly lives come to an end, but it also exists in time and space and is therefore accessible here and now. Refusing to become a citizen of God’s city necessarily means joining the competing City of Man. Citizens of this latter city cut themselves off from God, the Creator of the Universe, and therefore live out of step with the natural order. A person will thus both have a temporal citizenship in Rome (or elsewhere) and simultaneously an eternal citizenship in either the City of God or the City of Man. Hence, the Romans of Augustine’s day were, he argued, both united as citizens and divided as citizens at the same time. Importantly, it is overly simplistic to say that those who profess membership in the Church are all citizens of the City of God. While the Church is certainly part of the City of God, not all within her walls during their temporal lives are committed to her laws, meaning that it is possible, indeed likely, that some portion of those who call themselves Christians belong to the City of Man. This is a complicated response to those Romans upset by barbarian invasions, in large part because Augustine is providing a framework for understanding not only Roman history, but all history.
As Andrew Willard Jones points out in his recent book, The Two Cities, the Augustinian approach is generally not embraced by most historians today. Rather than understanding temporal history in the context of a deeper spiritual reality, historians and others—indeed, most people—speak as though all human activity, including the practice of religion, exists exclusively in a material sense. This is true even of Christians who, Jones says, “tend to mistakenly think of the world as divided into two tidy, distinct realms,” the religious and the secular. The result, Jones tells us, is that modern Christians think of their faith as a private thing that has little to do with their public life. They dutifully go to church on Sundays, but most of the week is reserved for work or hobbies without much thought about how what they do can be—or should be—informed by their faith.
The ambition of Jones’ The Two Cities is to provide a general history of the West using the Augustinian framework as a means of demonstrating the alternative to the misguided secular approach that is too often embraced by people today, including by many Christians. History that is told exclusively from the secular point of view comes from a City of Man mentality, and Jones wants to show us an example of what the other mentality—informed by a viewpoint from the City of God—can reveal. Jones wishes us to see that a Christian historian sensitive to spiritual reality is every bit as capable as a secular historian at accounting for the facts and events that make up the raw historical record, but he also can explain them in the light of a larger field of vision. The meaning of secular history is always questionable because it floats without reference to anything outside itself; the history Jones offers hinges upon the most important historical point of reference, which can explain the meaning of all other events: the Incarnation.
The difficulty of Jones’ approach is that the endeavor to explain all of history in light of the Incarnation in a way that would persuade a skeptical reader would require a tremendous amount of space, probably multiple volumes. One has only to think of the length of Augustine’s City of God, which dealt exclusively with the history of Rome, to grasp the rigor required to succeed in a project that begins with Genesis and ends with last Thursday.
Jones’ Two Cities, however, is much shorter and less thorough than Augustine’s masterpiece. The book’s subject is the Church, and Jones divides his study into six chapters. The first argues that the Church has existed since the first instance of creation; we can therefore speak of the Church during the time of the Old Testament in addition to the New Testament. The second chapter follows the Church during the time of Roman persecution through the fall of the Roman Empire. He moves then in succession from the medieval Church, the early modern Church following the Reformation, the later modern Church that contended with the Enlightenment and its aftermath, and finally the postmodern Church. Jones has given himself a challenging task of depicting all of this in under 350 pages.
The task of discussing so much history in such a limited space necessarily requires that the narrative remain at a high altitude where breadth is considerable but depth impossible. I don’t believe it is Jones’ purpose to convince his audience of the truth of his account of this or that part of Western history, nor should a reader be so easily persuaded about some of the more important events covered in a paragraph or two. Instead, I understand Jones to want to move his audience to accept that the Augustinian frame for studying history is more authentically Christian and true than its far more prevalent secular counterpart. His real argument is not actually historical, but theological and moral. Theologically, Jones holds that God is the creator of all things and that human things, including politics, must be subjected to His will. Morally, he argues that we are wrong to think that our private religious beliefs can be separated from our public lives. The way we act politically must reflect what we believe. Actually, the claim is stronger than this: the political community itself must reflect what we believe, and satisfaction with anything less is an affront to the Gospel.
Jones’ purpose, therefore, is to challenge the postmodern assumptions that shape our current political discourse and laws. These assumptions, he holds, should be rejected because they are inconsistent with reality. Like the Romans that Augustine contended with in the 5th century, Jones claims that the citizens of modernity and postmodernity are pagans who believe Christianity is a threat to stability and order. These new pagans do not worship emblems or statues, but the ideologies of liberalism, socialism, and nationalism. He describes the first two as Christian heresies, and he reminds us that heresy “must either convert back into orthodoxy or drift forward into paganism because, in the final analysis, there are only two options: sin or redemption.” Nationalism is the most common form of paganism the world knows today. It is a love of force and a rejection of the Logos.
The rhetorical strength of Jones’s approach is that he combines his sweeping political history with helpful reminders of the simple faith of common people who in most eras of history are subject to the heretical and pagan leaders, but who mostly want powerful people and governments to leave them alone so that they can build meaningful communities and worship God in peace. Though usually uneducated, these people resist the thinking that has led to the postmodern hostility to traditional Christian living. These reminders have a subtle appeal to an audience, Christian though it may be, habituated to favor democratic forms of government. The general sensibility of the people is depicted as reliable. Common sense is usually good sense in Jones’ history. Most of the world’s troubles are the fault of a group of crafty, elite philosophers, often too clever for their own good. The result is a unique combination of an argument that is unsympathetic to modern, democratic ideologies without opposing democracy per se.
And yet Jones’ democratic sympathies are ill at ease with his incorporation of the United States into his account of Western history at the end of The Two Cities. The setting of the book up to the final chapter is almost exclusively western Europe, but it then pivots to the New World in the closing pages. The change in setting corresponds with a change in tone. The authoritative historical voice is replaced with that of the critic. A harshness towards his homeland takes over and leaves the impression that everything leading up to the final pages was a preparation for something approaching the polemical. I don’t mean to suggest that Jones takes up the cause of one American party over the other, but that he becomes critical of America itself.
The Two Cities lacks an account of the American Founding. The first paragraph in the book dealing with America covers the Civil War, which is compared to the unification of European nation states. The conflict of the 1860s is depicted as a contest between rival versions of nationalism: the northerners were attached to a nation they called the United States and southerners were attached to the nations of Virginia, North Carolina, etc. The moral-political questions surrounding slavery are reduced to almost nothing in Jones’ brief account. Later in the book, America is depicted as the liberal champion of order against a socialist aggressor in the Cold War, but we are reminded that both ideologies are heretical, and eventually lead to nationalism, which is completely antithetical to the Church. The irony of America’s 20th century victories in World War II and the Cold War, Jones tells us, is that they are now forgotten. The political Right has embraced the nationalism that was defeated in Nazi Germany and the political Left has embraced the socialism that was defeated in the Cold War. America has become, in other words, completely post-Christian. It is not even heretically Christian anymore.
Jones ends the book with a set of poignant questions:
Contemporary Christians are being forced into a fundamental decision. Will they allow the Church’s already well-advanced integration into the postmodern world to become complete, or will they launch a reform? Will they extract themselves from a corrupt system so that they might turn and convert that system? Will they start to build again the City of God?
The reforms he suggests are modest, but important. He reminds us that most people desire an integrated life with real meaning and are open to faith. Reform depends upon their willingness to serve their neighbors and enrich their communities. The Church, for its part, must disentangle itself from the power structures of postmodernity and again assert its moral authority. He ends on a note of hope, confident that the “Church has already won the war.” This is all quite sensible and important.
Nonetheless, I believe Jones’ approach requires a more nuanced, deeper account of America, even at the high altitude at which he flies. Saint Augustine was quite hard on the Roman regime, but he also took its own understanding of itself seriously. He discussed Rome’s Founding stories and engaged Cicero’s definition of the res publica. Something similar is needed from Jones in his criticism of America. An account of the Founding that seeks to understand the Founders as they understood themselves would yield a more complicated picture than the one painted in The Two Cities. And until the complexities are acknowledged, we will have a hard time convincing secular scholars and citizens of the deep and valuable insights into reality offered by the Augustinian approach.
