Politics and Finitude
The Temporal Status of Augustine’sCivitas PermixtaM. B. PrangerIf, generally speaking, readers’ and writers’ attitudes toward the auto-
biographical genre can be characterized as naı ̈ve in that they take for
granted the sincerity of the author, it is even harder for historians to be
professionally effective without taking their products to be authentic
reflections of time. There is a sense, however, in which histories of the
state, histories of the church, and, indeed, histories of great institutions
at large are so many contradictions in terms, at least if state and church
are taken—as they are bound to be—to be bodies whose temporal exis-
tence transcends the moment, to say the least, or are believed to be
continuous to the point of sempiternity, to say the most. Even a title
such as Gibbon’sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire, though record-
ing the inevitability of history’s downward course, is set against the
backdrop of what, in the author’s view, should have gone on forever. It
was not his ambition to look time and transience straight in the face.
Thus the writing of both autobiography and history proceed on the
assumption that inside historical sources and throughout the succession
of events and experiences can be construed identities, both personal and
corporate, that are capable of resisting the disintegration of time.
It is one of the ironies of history that, although via his two major
works,The ConfessionsandThe City of God, Augustine can be seen as
the founder of both Western subjectivity and Western historiography,
in retrospect the Western tradition has seemed bent on undermining
the very concept of Augustinian temporality.^1 The shaky subject of the
self in theConfessionsis forced to cry out for the gift of grace (‘‘give
what you command and command what you will’’^2 ) in order to sustain
its voice and, by implication, its existence, and the body politic, as
evoked inThe City of God, is no less dependent on the creator of time
and history.^3 In other words, there is no moment at which history is
not intrinsically temporal.
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