Saeculum

"Almost everyone who confronts this slim 47-year-old book testifies that it brought a fresh understanding of the monumental ancient Christian thinker, St Augustine. Why, you may ask, should he show up when we are trying to make sense of the world around us, and, in the present case, of Bonhoeffer’s letters? Well, what Augustine argued was quite radical. We think of him as one of the four or five greatest Western Christian thinkers, one who is not shelved in the ancient world but who still frames much thought of people who have never heard of him. This book’s title deals with the saeculum , the Latin word for ‘this age’. Augustine took up his theme with an effort to secularise Roman history. His world, 400 years or so after Christ, was a world where many still evoked the old gods of Rome by citizens who saw Rome as sacred. But Augustine said, no, the state may be a wonderful human invention, which needs criticism. So he dealt in undercutting ways with the old political order and ‘civil religious’ order. He in effect wrote a ‘charter for Christendom’, a view of civil and churchly power which lasted for centuries. But if Bonhoeffer was critical at the end of Christendom, Augustine also had concerns for ‘the city of God’ at the beginning of Christendom. The Christians who now ruled did what the Romans had done: they persecuted the dissenters. They tried to coerce people to become Christians. The legacy lived on for centuries. Augustine trained his eye on his important distinction between what he called the eternal city and the other, the human city. The eternal city was the one in which God ruled through the Christian message, to save people and make them moral and all the rest, but he did not think it should be used to rule over the human city. So in a sense he gives autonomy to the human city. Augustine remains a very controversial figure. A lot of people think because Augustine was not a modern feminist or a republican or something like that he isn’t relevant. But actually he is part of all the reading we do in these realms. In the United States, for example, we talk a great deal about the separation of Church and State. The notion that you can have a republic without forcing religion on people was really quite radical. Very few of the people who founded America had been ready for this separation. Then came the Bill of Rights, which says that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the exercise there of.’ The people who wrote it may not have known that these ideas went back to Augustine’s concept of the secular. The same God who ruled the church is the God who is also among people who don’t know about God. It is a very radical notion. That’s right."