Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (review)

In the opening sentence of this book Robert Dodaro says that Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine attempts to answer the question "How did Augustine conceive the just society?" (1). Dodaro explains almost immediately that his central question "refers not to the communion of saints in the heavenly city, which is the ideal 'just society,' but to the city of God in its earthly pilgrimage" (1). The central question of Dodaro's book is therefore "How did Augustine conceive of a just society constituted by members of the City of God while on their earthly pilgrimage?" This question is not one to which scholars of Augustine's political thought have given much attention. It is worth beginning a discussion of Dodaro's book by asking why the question it attempts to answer has so often been overlooked.

The standard view of Augustine's political thought takes its bearings from his treatment of Cicero's De re publica in The City of God. In the first book of De re publica, Scipio famously describes a commonwealth as "an assembly united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right and a community of interest" (1.25). Later in the dialogue Cicero has Scipio ask rhetorically "what is a society except a partnership in justice?" (1.25). Augustine mentions the first two of these passages early in The City of God (2.21), and he returns to them in Book 19, where he makes the traditional claim that justice prevails only where each is given his due. Therefore, justice demands, he says, the worship of the true God. Since God was not worshipped in Rome, justice never prevailed there. If Scipio is correct to assert that societies are partnerships in justice, then Augustine's claim implies that Rome was not a society. But since it is granted all around that Rome was a society, it follows that Scipio is wrong. Whatever political societies are, they cannot all be, by definition, partnerships in justice (see 19.24).

When Augustine offers his own characterization of a society, he seems to go further. He seems to imply that no political societies as we know them—no actual political societies existing in the saeculum—are just. All such societies, Augustine says, are composed of members of the City of God and of the earthly city. These societies are not united, as Scipio thought, by agreement about what is right and wrong, for members of the City of God and the earthly city do not agree about right and wrong. Instead, they are united by some common object of love (19.24); political societies are held together by their members' common love of peace. While it is not impossible that the terms of peace be just, Augustine recognizes that nothing guarantees that they will be. According to the standard view of his political thought, he thinks that they never have been: no political society, not even classical Rome at its apogee, has ever been just.

The prevalence of the standard view explains why scholars of Augustine's political thought have generally ignored the central question of Dodaro's book. They have ignored it because that question refers to a just society composed exclusively of members of the City of God and because the standard view implies that such a society is unlike any political society we have ever known or are ever likely to know.

Dodaro does not attempt to rebut what I have described as the standard view of Augustine's political thought, nor does he ever try to demonstrate that there has been or could be a society of the sort to which his central question refers. What he does do is discuss the ways in which individuals can become just and what statesmen should be like who are responsible for making society more just. These discussions suggest that Dodaro is less interested in the question which is ostensibly central to his...