Thoughts on St. Augustine

            While reading St. Augustine’s text, I had a hard time immediately connecting his ideas to the concept of Utopia.  In Plato’s writing, Socrates and his two companions were directly discussing how to create and ideal society. Though, “utopia” is never actually stated, the connections between Plato’s ideas and our explorations of utopia were very clear. I wonder if I was supposed to read St. Augustine’s views about Christianity and think of it as though he is presenting that a utopia is founded on well-followed Christian principles.  I know Augustine is not directly taking about “utopia,” but this is the connection that I made between the two subjects.

            I liked that the introduction provided a third person overview of Augustine’s writing.  It helped set up the rest of the reading and helped me think critically about Augustine’s argument and how he set it up.  John O’Meara’s introduction gives a little background on Augustine himself; people haven’t been able to determine whether he was a pessimist or an optimist, which would in turn shed an interesting light on Augustine’s overall theological and theoretical discussion. On page x of John O’Meara’s introduction, he mentions, “It is unfortunate that Augustine, in placing the positive part of his argument in the final twelve books and the negative in the first ten, gives the impression that he is opposed to Rome and Greek philosophy.  If he had stated the basis of his positive doctrine first, it would be seen that…his general outlook is positive.”  On the one hand, I admire Augustine for addressing the conflicts that would negate his beliefs directly in order to strengthen his own theory.  However, I think O’Meara is trying to say that if Augustine addressed the problems he had with the pagan religion later on in his text, his argument would have become more accessible.  There would be less disagreement at the beginning of his writing so his readers would have stayed engaged longer. But this is the way that Augustine chose to write it and its not like he can edit it now.

            There is a lot of negativity in this text, but right away in Book I’s preface, I thought the idea that “God is our helper” (6) is a nice one.  I have always thought that God was traditionally considered a ruler or a commander, but Augustine’s statement seems like a friendlier one. It seems to allow for free will and the view that God is there to give advice rather than commands.  He later talks about how his two proposed cities are both founded on love.  I thought statements like this one provided evidence of Augustine being a positive person.  This view really aids his argument because it gives the reader a reason to like and to trust him.  However, I felt that a lot of his arguments were sometimes just statements.  They seemed to lack a “why” or evidence to make them persuasive. I’m interested in knowing more about how other people perceived him and the strength of his argument: people during his time, people during our time, and your own thoughts.