In Rome But Not of It: Augustine Between Eusebius and Donatus

Abstract

The continuing importance of Augustine’s political philosophy today becomes clearer when we understand its historical context. Augustine developed his political philosophy as a response to a specific problem that had become acute in the late fourth and early fifth centuries: whether and how political structures inherited from Rome’s pre-Christian history could be reconciled with the claims of the Christian religion. Competing religious communities were forced into a shared social space in the fourth century, producing a pluralism that acutely challenged old structures in politics and religion alike. Before and during the writing of City of God, Augustine was an active participant in intellectual debates and political conflicts arising from two inadequate solutions to this problem—the attempt to fully harmonize Christianity with Roman political life, advocated by figures such as Eusebius, and the strict withdrawal from Roman politics demanded by the heretical Donatist movement. These two alternatives were locked in a highly polarized dialectic, producing battles that consumed a great deal of Augustine’s professional time and intellectual attention. By developing an alternative approach that allowed the relationship between religion and politics to become more complex and ambiguous than either of the simplified extremes of Eusebianism and Donatism, Augustine set the stage for the drama of medieval political thought and also laid critical theoretical groundwork for the emergence of religious freedom and social pluralism in early modernity. These lessons are especially important as religious freedom endures a deep theoretical crisis in the advanced modern world.