A Christmas Meditation: St. Augustine on the National
Question
By Chilton Williamson Jr.
�Keep order in space,
And order in
time,
For disorder is chaos,
And chaos is
crime.�
�Anonymous
This Christmas Eve, I will be attending mass at my parish church,
St. Laurence O�Toole in Laramie,
Wyoming.
Our parish is one of those big enough to sustain Perpetual,
round-the-clock, Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, a practice
encouraged in the Roman Catholic Church, believing as we do in the
True Presence of Christ in the consecrated communion host. I
generally visit on Friday mornings, between nine and ten.
Remembering St.
Theresa of Avila, who was unable to pray for sixteen years
without a book in her hand, I make a habit of bringing something to
read. For the past year it�s been Augustine of Hippo�s City
of God.
This is a book as worldly-wise as it is impressively spiritual.
Written between 413 and 426 A.D., while the Roman Empire was being
overrun by
barbarian armies, this
work of more than a thousand pages describes the human world as
divided between two cities, the City of God and the City of Man.
They exist side by side and intermingled. One is comprised of God�s
people, the pilgrim Church on Earth. The other is devoted to the
ways of man. Each has its distinct and separate destiny awaiting it
at the end of the world. But until then, they are linked together in
a perplexing and often frustrating symbiosis.
As one of the towering works of the human intellect, City of
God is a book to be studied, not read, certainly with a pen and
perhaps also a notebook at hand to mark passages with and jot down
annotations. The scope of St. Augustine�s mind and his breadth of
learning are immense. They propel the book from one level to the
next, without losing sight of what has gone before. Perhaps because
it was so many years in composition, City of God -- like life
itself -- seems to proceed by phases, each one marked strongly by
distinguishing themes as well as, at times, by a distinctive tone.
It was in the middle of Book XX, some
900 pages into my Pelican Classics edition, that I experienced an
instance of intellectual d�j� vu. I was aware,
suddenly, of treading familiar ground, although I had never set foot
in this place before.
The most likely explanation, of course, was that Augustine
had repeated himself now and again in the course of the previous
nineteen books, and that my subconscious had finally taken due note
of the fact. Curiously, I scanned a couple of hundred pages back,
paying special attention to the marked passages. What I discovered
was not repetition but rather a number of extended disquisitions -
yet another argument pursued, disconnectedly but most definitely, by
the author.
It was nothing less than a fifth-century precursor of the modern
debate on maintaining distinct national identities and preserving
the integrity of the Western world�what VDARE.COM calls the
�National
Question.�
Connect these passages. What do we have but a strong suggestion
that St. Augustine � one of the most influential Fathers of the
Church--held a view much closer to that of us present-day
anti-globalist, anti-immigration reactionaries than to the
universalist dream that all too many Christians have been persuaded
is integral to their faith?
In Book XIX,
Chapter 21, Augustine explains why a Roman Commonwealth as defined
by Scipio in Cicero�s On the Republic never existed. Scipio�s
brief definition of the state or commonwealth was �the weal of the
people.� He described �the people� as a multitude �united in
association by a common sense of right and a community of interest.�
No state, Scipio argued, can be maintained without justice, while
without true justice there can be no right.
�Therefore,� Augustine concludes, where there is no true justice
there can be
no �association of men united
by a common sense of right,� and therefore no people answering to
the definition of Scipio, or Cicero. And if there is no people then
there is no �weal of the people,� but some kind of mob, not
deserving the name of a people. If, therefore, a commonwealth is the
�weal of the people,� and if a people does not exist where there
is no �association by a common sense of right� [my italics], and
there is no right where there is no justice, the irresistible
conclusion is that where there is no justice there is no
commonwealth.
Here is a remarkable anticipation of John Jay�s explanation, in
The
Federalist Papers, of why an American federal union could
work: because there was �one connected country [given] to one united
people�a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same
language, professing the same religion [my italics], attached
to the same principles of government, very similar in manners and
customs� (The Federalist No.2)!
ii.) Augustine agreed with the ancient philosophers that
the life of the wise man should be social. �For�how could that City
[of God] have made its first start, how could it have advanced along
its course, if the life of the saints were not social?� The
fundamental requirement for sociability, he argues, is domestic
peace, since �[a] man�s [most dangerous] enemies are those of his
own household.� Beyond the household, the city or town represents
the next social level, and
[a]fter [them] comes the world, which the philosophers
reckon as the third level of human society�.Now the world, like a
confluence of water, is obviously more full of danger than the
other communities by reason of its greater size. To begin with, on
this level the diversity of languages separates man from
man�.[W]hen men cannot communicate their thoughts to each other,
simply because of difference of language, all the similarity of
their common human nature is of no avail to unite them in
fellowship. So true is this that a man would be more cheerful with
his dog for company than with a foreigner. I shall be told
that the Imperial City has been at pains to impose on conquered
peoples not only her yoke but her language also, as a bond of
peace and fellowship, so that there should be no lack of
interpreters but even a profusion of them. True; but think of the
cost of this achievement! Consider the scale of those wars, with
all that slaughter of human beings, all the human blood that was
shed! (Book XIX,
Chapters 6-7)
This passage speaks for itself: on the importance of linguistic
(and, by implication, social) differences among peoples, the
awkwardness of a foreign presence in society; the evils of
imperialist policies that create a polyglot people.
iii.) In his gloss on the Book of Revelation�s account of
the chaos which will precede the end of the world, Augustine
says,
As for the words, �and they went up over the breadth of the
earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved City,�
this clearly does not mean that they have come, or will come, to
one place, as if the camp of the saints and the beloved City are
one and the same place. For these are simply the Church of Christ
spread all over the world. It follows that wherever the Church is
at that time, and it will be among all the nations--which is the
meaning of �over the breadth of the earth�--there the camp of the
saints will be, and there God�s beloved City. There it will be
surrounded by its enemies - for they also will be present with
that City, among all nations - in the savagery of that
persecution. That is, the City will be hemmed in, hard pressed,
shut up, in the straits of tribulation, yet it will not abandon
its warfare, which is here called �the camp.� (Book XX, Chapter
11)
The vision expressed here seems identical to that which inspired
Jean Raspail�s novel The Camp of the Saints: A worldwide
assault, less racial than cultural and religious, against the West
and the Christian religion that, with Hellenism, is one of its two
major components.
iv.) Describing of the fate of the City of Man, Augustine
writes, �The earthly city will not be everlasting; for when it is
condemned to the final punishment it will no longer be a
city.� (Book XV,
Chapter 4�my italics)
This seems a clear prediction that the destroyer of the present
world will be neither fire nor ice but social chaos - the end of
national identity, Babel
Unbound.
G.K. Chesterton said that the problem with the modern world is
not that it is wrong, but that it is crazed.
Craze is a function of modernism�s addiction to and worship of
chaos, the satanic perversion of the divine order established by
God. In City of God, Augustine shows himself deeply aware
that the interests of the City of God are directly advanced by the
encouragement of worldly peace and order in the City of Man. That is
why St. Paul tells
us to pray for our
rulers.
And peace and order in the City of Man are furthered by the
recognition of distinctions among individual men and among the
peoples of the earth. If these distinctions are not observed, the
social order of the earthly city tends to break toward chaos. And
chaos, as pointed out by the anonymous poet who provides my
epigraph, operates to the detriment of the heavenly city. Its
tribulations on earth are only deepened by social and political
turmoil.
Augustine appears to have understood the difficulties that
socially-complicated societies face in maintaining order and holding
chaos at bay - thus securing the ultimate salvation of the City of
God. A degree of social complexity is not just inevitable, but a
part of God�s plan for humanity. But complexity needs to be
minimized wherever possible. This will ensure the social order,
intellectual coherence, and religious orthodoxy that the Christian
faith requires to accomplish its task: saving the greatest number of
souls - while also preparing the world as a final offering to be
laid at the feet of Christ Come Again.
As I wrote in The
Immigration Mystique, �The Western nations, degenerate as
they have become, continue to represent systems of relative order in
a world that succumbs a little more each day to radical disorder.
Can the salvation of man arise from chaos?�
Consider this final extract from The City Of God:
While the Heavenly City�is on a pilgrimage in this world,
she calls out citizens from all nations and so collects a society
of aliens, speaking all languages. She takes no account of any
differences in customs, laws, and institutions, by which earthly
peace is achieved and preserved - not that she annuls or abolishes
any of these, rather she maintains them (for whatever divergences
there are among the diverse nations, those institutions have one
aim - earthly peace), provided that no hindrance is presented
thereby to the religion which teaches that the one and true God is
to be worshipped.( Book XIX,
Chapter 17)
At first glance, Augustine might be read as advocating here the
creation of the First Universal Nation comprising �a society of
nations, speaking all languages.�
A closer reading shows, however, that the �citizens� are called
�out� in a spiritual rather than a physical sense. They are �called
out,� not from within the boundaries of their earthly nations to
create a supernation in some other part of the world, but from the
confinements of their spiritual ignorance and sin, to bear witness
to the God Who Is Truth in their own lands.
As John
Vinson points out in a letter in the February 2002 number of
Chronicles,
�Jesus told His followers to go to all nations, not to invite
all nations.�
Multiculturalism for St. Augustine would not be the outrageous
contradiction in terms as we know it in America today. It would be
the genuine article - what used to be called the international
community, its international components leavened to a greater or
lesser extent by centers or outposts of the heavenly one.
So remember: If, this Christmas, you hear from your pastor
or bishop
that the spirit of brotherly love demands abolishing our borders and
welcoming the entire population of Congo into the state of Maryland,
remind him that one Very High Up authority--though not visibly
present among us--could tell him differently.
I plan on remembering our readers in my prayers from St. Laurence
on Christmas Eve. And I humbly solicit their own communications on
behalf of all of us at VDARE.COM, who need them as much as
anyone.
Merry Christmas to all!
Chilton Williamson Jr. is the
author of The
Immigration Mystique: America�s False Conscience and an
editor and columnist for Chronicles
Magazine, where he writes the The Hundredth Meridian column about
life in the Rocky Mountain West.
December 23, 2001
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