It may be my catholic school
background, or maybe I was just not reading closely enough, but I found St.
Augustine to be fairly easy to understand.
I even found myself agreeing with many of his overarching ideas and drawing
parallels between many things that he called attention to and what I see in our
world today.
Of all that I read, I found his
discussion of the two cities to be the most interesting. For a while, I could not discover what the
second city was. Obviously, the first of
the two cities is the City of God, in which there is all encompassing happiness
and love because all is as it should be and God is the only one with
power. The second city, we find out in
Book XI at the end of chapter 1, is the earthly city. I found almost all of what St. Augustine to
be saying throughout this book focusing on these two cities and the ways in
which they differ.
If I am not mistaken, he does not
like mankind and believes that they do not understand spirituality of the
workings of God. He feels very strongly
that the City of God “does not depend on the chance impulses of the minds of
men, but is manifestly due to the guiding power of God’s supreme province,”
(Book XI, Ch.1). Throughout this reading, St. Augustine compares the earthly
city to the heavenly city. All of his commentaries
about the two focus on the differences between the supreme, perfect nature of
God and the fickle, imperfect nature of mankind. The largest section of comparison comes in
Book XIV, chapter 28 when he is discussing the origins of the two cities. He states that the “earthly city was created
by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God” and “the Heavenly City by
the love of God carried as far as contempt itself,” (Book XIV, Ch. 28). He makes a clearer distinction saying, “the
earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly city glories in the Lord,” (Book
XIV, Ch. 28). According to St.
Augustine, the major difference between these two cities is the power given to
God and the complete submission to his word and deed. He favors this over all other ways of
thinking and states that those who favor the Heavenly city will be much happier
than those that continue to reside in the earthly city.
When reading these comparisons, I
cannot help but find similarities between some of the problems that St.
Augustine highlights and those that I see in the world today. Many of the points that he raises about
humans and their focus on pride and power hold true today. His comments about how in the earthly city,
“the lust for domination lords over its princes as over the nations it
subjugates,” (Book XIV, Ch. 28). There
is no difference between his assertion then and what we see in our world
today. As a nation, we still look to
dominate other countries, and we always have.
Even among the people of our nation, competition for the best clothes,
or the best car, or the best grades dictate our actions and our
priorities. While I do not agree fully
with St. Augustine’s solution, I do believe that something needs to be done
about the desire to be the best. I think
that his idea of a city where competition and domination are nonexistent is
wonderful. I think that this connects
back to the first day of class and our first blog post. Many of us had a plan to change the world
that revolved around the idea that our world needs more understanding and
acceptance of others. I think that,
while St. Augustine may have had a different solution to the problems that he
was finding in the world (through God and spirituality) than we did in our
class, I think that the desire for a solution to the problem shows that there
has been very little change in the nature of humans and their priorities since
this was written. Maybe St. Augustine is
on to something and there really is a city that could exist, where all of the
issues we discussed on the first day of class are resolved, in a sphere
beyond our imagination.
I agree with you that the text was not as terrible as I was imagining on the day it was assigned. I was prepared to be absolutely clueless since I was not brought up on the bible. However, the ideas and summaries included in his writing were fairly easy to understand and the majority of them were agreeable. There were, of course, some parts that made no personal sense to me that I was completely against, but the majority of material presented was agreeable or I could see why he would find them plausible in his two worlds.I like the idea of two different worlds. While I personally don't necessarily agree with one earthly and one heavenly and think more along the lines of reincarnation, I do think that the majority of people on this earth live their lives in order to prepare themselves for whatever world lies beyond. Some aim to make sure they are welcomed into the gates of heaven and not into the depths of hell, others wish to be promoted to a different portion of the caste system their next time around and some are just doing good deeds and prayer in order to have a restful and peaceful death or afterlife. It seems that whether you believe in a specific something or nothing at all, everyone is intent on doing things that get them to a certain place or point when they are done with their time on earth. It makes us wonder if we should spend all of our time in this "earthly world" preparing for a world where a God or something better exists, or if we should just be focusing on the present and present alone.
ReplyDeleteI also really like how you have said that "Something needs to be done about the desire to be the best". I do think that selfishness and the desire to fight for ourselves over others is what brings us down as a global community. If everyone is for themselves, then who is for everyone else? We need to show a little empathy towards other people and make it a goal to reach out and change or help a life that is separate from ours. Imagine if every person just helped at least one other person! I know a lot of our ideas to change the world focused on connecting with other people and communities and that definitely is a giant leap to make our world a better place. Life seems pretty grand when all you're worried about is yourself. We each have a boatload of problems, I know my selfish list reads pretty long, but it is our selfishness that brings us down. If we're all competing to be number one at everything we do, everyone is putting themselves against each other. Life becomes a dirty competition where only one person can be the winner and everyone is only in it for themselves. Is it so hard for us to live not just for ourselves, but the world around us?
I definitely agree with a good number of your points and with Logan's emphasis of them, mostly that our pep-talk about this text made it seem much more daunting than it turned out to be, and that the majority of Augustine's ideas were agreeable despite their lack of convincing reasoning as far as I'm personally concerned. It's no wonder, though, that plenty of people were 100% on the same page as him.
ReplyDeleteI don't think anyone would (or could) argue your point about mankind's lust and vanity ringing true still today. The time and the place changes, the people and the cities change, but mankind still wants the same stuff, and does the same stuff. Everyone wants happiness, lots of people want money and power, and too many people are willing to do terrible things to their fellow humans for personal gain.
In the end, Augustine's City of God is just an idea as far as any of us know, but if it's real enough to have some people leading fulfilling lives because of it, that's great, too. It's a bit sad to think that because humanity has always suffered from the same afflictions of greed and pride, we are unlikely ever to overcome them as a species, but that certainly doesn't mean we stop fighting them or doing our best to keep them at bay. Wherever we go afterwards, if it's anywhere at all, I should think we might all agree that the City of God Augustine proposes would not be a bad place to be.