M. B. PRANGERThis seems less a truism if the razor of time is recognized as cutting through any
attempt to lend either the self or the community duration beyond the dynamics of time
as a relentless drive from the future, through the present, to the past. If there is any thread
to be detected throughout Augustine’s work, it is this prominence of time and creation,
not surprisingly so, since the created and temporal status of the world had been his great
discovery in his search for wisdom. Regrettably, too much emphasis on the fact of August-
ine’s conversion to Christianity as a logical step away from skepticism toward the certainty
of faith has tended to distract attention from the implications of this ‘‘conversion’’ for
life inside creation and time. Instead, that conversion has itself been seen as an almost
atemporal event. Yet for Augustine, being a converted Christian turned out to be a far
from stable affair. Being the divine response to theda quod iubes, grace and grace alone
is able to sustain life, whether personal or communal, as it is given, here and now. And
though Augustine’s later works on grace and predestination are often judged to be a
deflection from his early acceptance of faith, as well as from his captivating and playful
ruminations on time, memory, and the soul—a matter of interest even to the non-
committed intellectual—they should rather be seen as consistent with this primordial
discovery of temporality, their increasingly repetitive and monomaniac wording
notwithstanding.
As if the fragility of temporal and created existence as such were not troublesome
enough, Augustine tirelessly draws attention to the fact that existence is tainted with sin.
As a result, the distance between creator and creation, which before Adam’s fall was
bridged by the natural access of man to the divine light, has become quite problematic.
In order to bridge that gap, the notion of authority—and, therefore, of grace—becomes
tantamount. It has often been pointed out that, obsolete though the Augustinian concept
of sin may have become, it resulted in the skepticism concerning the status of political
institutions, as well as the emphasis on the necessity of authority (both negative and
positive), that laid the foundations of the modern state.
By stressing the need for curbing violence and the sins that men will commit...
Augustine unwittingly erected the signposts to what would emerge as the much later
theory of the modern state, despite his intention, in his own times, to liberate the
church from its dependence on the secular framework. This liberation would itself
lead, much further down the road, to a kind of secularization of history and politics.
The civil community, for the Christian, is to be used in its maintenance of peace and
order, serving simply to protect men from the invasion of chaos. But in this view,
the sphere of politics still belongs irrevocably to the realm infected with sin. It is for
this reason that absolute authority alone can constrain the psychology of the state of
nature and, even with man’s reason somewhat weakened, he can still at least agree to
go this far and transfer to an absolute sovereign authority his free will to do as hePAGE 114114.................16224$ $CH3 10-13-06 12:34:19 PS