POLITICS AND FINITUDEtion (although Aristotle should be taken into account also), with the big difference that,
in thecorpus mysticum, it was the organization that was hypostatized into durability,
rather than any real body of flesh and blood or even of bread and wine (such as, e.g.,
Christ in the sacrament). In that respect, one might say that we witness here the birth of
the modernWesternstate, which, unlike alternatives from the Byzantine Empire up to
the communist corporate ideals of Stalin’s Soviet Union, identified itself in terms of the
(ambiguous) formal structure ofaevumrather than of the (simple) fullness of eternity.
Let us now return to Augustine. Considering the growing stability—and atempora-
lity—of church and state outlined above, what exactly does it mean to say that for August-
ine time contains both more flux and more stability than thecivitas permixtawould seem
to allow? With regard to flux as the expression of historicity, the problem seems relatively
simple. As Markus has pointed out, ‘‘the realities of thesaeculummust be spoken of in
historical or political, not in theological terms.’’ In other words, they are basically tempo-
ral, part of the flux of time. Indeed, in book 5 ofThe City of GodAugustine assesses the
merits of the Roman Empire from a realistic and secular point of view. Taking as his
point of departure the words of Jesus about the Pharisees, ‘‘I tell you in truth, they have
received their reward in full’’ (Matthew 6:1), he assesses the undeniable merits of the
Romans. True, underlying all their activities is a fundamentalinsignifiance des choses—
‘‘Take away national complacency, and what are all men but simply men? If the perverse
standards of the world would allow men to receive honours proportional to their deserts,
even so the honor of men should not be accounted an important matter; smoke has no
weight.’’^11 Yet the Romans have, in a sense, rightly received their reward. ‘‘Let us consider
all the hardships these conquerors made light of, all the sufferings they endured, and the
desires they suppressed to gain the glory of men. They deserved to receive that glory as a
reward for such virtues.’’^12 ‘‘If we do not display, in the service of the most glorious City
of God, the qualities of which the Romans, after their fashion, gave us something as a
model, in their pursuit of the glory of their earthly city, then we ought to feel the prick of
shame.’’^13
It is clear, then, that Augustine has no wish to extend the glory of history, honorable
though it may have been in its kind and in its time and place. For him, there is noRoma
aeterna. What so many of his contemporaries experienced as the end of Rome, given
Alaric’s sack of the city in 410, did not mean anything to him—and he undertook to write
The City of Godboth to allay anxieties concerning the end of the ‘‘world’’ and to quash
false expectations that had arisen through substituting for the longevity of the Roman
Empire that of the church on earth.
If Kantorowicz is correct in arguing that, as the temporal characterization of the
mystical body,aevumsucceeded in merging time and eternity, thereby opening up the
possibility of institutional history, inThe City of Godwe can also discern an intertwining
of time and eternity, albeit it in reverse order. Whereas thecorpus mysticum, as the body
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