Herbert A. Deane’s The
Political and Social Thought of Augustine (1963) serves as a blueprint for
the Harper government’s political agenda – in particular its notions on
crime. Central is Augustine’s own idea
of original sin, when “human life in this world became penal” after the Fall of
Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.[1] Augustine is also replete with notions of
pre-Calvinist predestination; those in the City of God are a self-described
minority elected to salvation, where liberty is achieved by an avoidance of
sin.[2]
The innocent are best protected when criminals are punished, and offenders must
be prevented from abusing their liberty.[3] In other words, Deane’s book puts Augustine
at the heart of Christianity’s Old Testament tradition, where the
divinely-established state works to subdue and penalize wickedness.[4]
Where Deane’s book is truly pathbreaking, however, is in the
link from Augustine to Hobbes. Hobbes’s
“war of all against all” is compared to Augustine’s famous pre-Darwinian
statement: “And when one fish hath devoured, the greater the less, itself also
is devoured by some greater.”[5] Moreover, Hobbes’s well-known statement about
the “perpetual and restless desire for power that ceaseth only in death” can be
compared to Augustine’s claim that no one is innocent (that is, because
everyone is conceived in sin) even babes at the bosom of their mother.[6] Augustine’s notions of “original” sin thus re-affirms
Hobbes’s argument that all men are by nature self-interested.
The alleged link between Hobbes and Augustine caters to
Harper’s Calvinism (which acts like a bridge), and it explains the Conservative
government’s current tendencies towards a coercive state. Deane’s book was reissued in 2013, and in the
Forward (“A Response to Herbert Deane”) Richard Munkelt suggests that Augustine
could not possibly have anticipated a Hobbesian-type police state for early
Christianity.[7] Indeed there are no references to Augustine
by Hobbes in his landmark work, and Hobbes thought little about On the Trinity (Augustine’s other major
work aside from Confessions and City of God), with the exception of
Chapter 34 in Part 3 of Leviathan
where he writes “Of the significance of spirit, angel and inspiration in the
Book of the Holy Scripture.”
Deane might have found inspiration for his argument from the
following succinct aphorism by Hobbes, where religion is considered not as philosophy
but is explained as law:[8]
These dictates of
reason men used to call by the name of laws, but improperly; for they are but
conclusions or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and
defence of themselves; whereas law, properly, is the word of him that by right
hath command over others. But yet if we
consider the same theorems as delivered in the word of God that by right
commandeth all things, then are they properly called laws.[9]
As the philosopher A.E. Taylor puts it otherwise: an “authorised
religion” is about “our submission to the rightful political authority of the
sovereign.”[10] In other words religion is a form of social
discipline - subjects are to obey dutifully, but at the same time rulers are
prone to abusing the state by actually seeking to stimulate piety and eternal salvation
among their peoples. The latter nuance was
a problem Augustine’s conscience wrestled with,[11]
and it would appear that the “Harper government” has trappings of this
evangelical tone, in addition to appealing to church discipline, but what
matters to Hobbes – in his scientific way - is whether a law promotes peace or
discord.[12]
Hobbes spent most of the rest of his life after writing Leviathan arguing against the claim that
he was atheistic. It is towards his
conclusion of Part 3 (“Of a Christian Commonwealth”) that he famously purges
himself of the Papacy, the early Christians, and by implication Augustine, who
had been Bishop for 15 years when Christianity became the official state
religion of Rome:[13]
For, from that the
Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence
of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy or kingdom of darkness may be
compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies, that is, to the old wives’
fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats that they play
in the night. And if a man consider the
original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the
papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned
upon the grave thereof. For so did the
papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.[14]
If the Bishop of Rome can be compared to a “kingdom of
fairies”, then perhaps there is not much room for Augustine, the Bishop of
Hippo. In other words, the link between
Hobbes and Augustine is more imaginary than real, but unfortunately the Harper
Conservatives are not about to revise the Deane thesis. Hobbes is central to
Conservative ideology, which is not prepared to give up on the Church Father. More importantly, the argument that Augustine
is all about some form of state repression severely limits the importance of
his vast oeuvre which goes in all so
many directions, including concepts of the ‘middle’, the will, and arguments pre-dating
Descartes’ cogito, among many others. Canada’s conservatives need to put down their
1963 version of Deane’s book – and consider reading the 2013 “Forward”, which,
while not salutary in its entirety, does justice to Augustine.
[1] Herbert
A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas
of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 17.
[2] Ibid., pp. 24, 25.
[3] Ibid., p. 165.
[4] Ibid., p. 223.
[5] Ibid., p. 47.
[6] Ibid., pp. 56, 57. See also Saint Augustine, Confessions, tr. Henry Chadwick (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 9.
[7]
Richard A Munkelt “Forward” in Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of Augustine (Tacoma, WA: Angelico
Press, 2013), p. XI
[8]
A.E. Taylor, Thomas Hobbes (Bristol:
Thoemmes Press, 1997), p. 117. This reprint
of a 1908 Edition belongs to the Thoemmes collection of “Key Texts: Classic Studies
in the History of Ideas.” It was very
helpful in this assessment of Hobbes.
[9] Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich
(Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002). p. 119 (Chapter 15, para. 41)
[10]
Taylor, Thomas Hobbes, p. 117.
[11]
Deane, Political and Social Ideas of
Augustine, p. 133.
[12]
Taylor, Thomas Hobbes, p. 117.
[13]
Munkelt, “Forward” in Political and
Social Thought of St. Augustine, p. VI note.
[14]
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 519 (Chapter
47, para 21).
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