There Is No City of Man Without the City of God

There Is No City of Man Without the City of God

The City of Man and the City of God cannot be collapsed into one another without compromising the latter’s identity and mission. Coercing the world into the Christian faith contradicts its teaching regarding free will, while accommodating the City of God to secular beliefs risks undermining, if not vitiating, Christian doctrine.

In the second century, the Greek philosopher and anti-Christian Celsus warned: “If Christians refuse to perform the usual sacrifices and to honor those who preside over them, then they should not be allowed to be emancipated, marry, raise children, or fulfill any obligation in public life.”

For a good Roman citizen, such an opinion made sense: the preservation of the Pax Romana depended not only on the military’s might and citizen’s virtue, but the appeasement of the gods who protected and blessed the empire. By refusing to offer oblations to the pantheon, Christians threatened to throw the entire social order into chaos. “It only remains for them to go far away and leave no posterity behind. In this way such scum will be completely eradicated from the earth,” declared Celsus.

There are signs that some inhabitants of the formerly Christian West are beginning to think similarly. In 2013, British professor Richard Dawkins provocatively claimed that the kind of “religious indoctrination” impressed upon the young by their parents amounted to child abuse. Almost a decade later, such opinions are less unusual. Parents who shield their children from transgender ideology or critical race theory are censured as bigots whose parenting choices are harmful. In 2019, a presidential candidate endorsed financially punishing institutions who refuse to support same-sex marriage, while books that reject the dominant narrative on sex and gender are delisted and defamed. Those who refuse to bow to the twenty-first century gods of sexual and racial identitarianism must be rebuked, canceled, and banished to the margins.

French historian and philosopher Étienne Gilson (1884–1978, a member of the Académie française who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature) saw this crisis coming long ago. Apart from his impressive academic credentials, Gilson was also involved in the attempts to remake Europe in the wake of the devastation of the Second World War. He served as a member of the French delegation in creating the UNESCO Charter and took part in the 1948 Congress of United Europe in The Hague. A newly published translation of his The Metamorphoses of the City of God illuminates the origins, story, and timeless tensions between what St. Augustine termed the City of God and the City of Man.

The City of God and the City of Man

In response to Celsus and other ancient critics of Christianity, many early Christian writers argued that, while it was true that their refusal to participate in Roman religious rites represented a new civic reality, the Christian faith was a blessing rather than a threat to the empire’s survival. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian all made such arguments. “Caesar is more ours than yours, for our God has appointed him,” declared Tertullian, and Christians “do more than you (Romans) for his welfare.” Or, as Gilson writes: “The best thing that can happen to the Empire is that Christian teachings be faithfully observed.”

Much of the reason for this has to do with the nature of Christianity itself. Gilson explains:

The God of Christians requires them to do for love of him what they lack the strength to do for love of their country. Thus, amid the universal shipwreck of morality and civic virtue, divine authority intervenes to impose frugality, continence, friendship, justice, and harmony among citizens, so much so that anyone who professes Christian doctrine and observes its precepts will be found to do for the love of God everything that the mere interest of his fatherland would require that he do for it. . . . Have good Christians, and good citizens will be given to you in addition.

Counterintuitively, the transcendent quality of Christian belief and practice—which directs the worshipper to the eternal—serves as an unparalleled motivator for civic virtue.

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