St. Augustine, the Limits

of Moral Action, and Politics  -Part 3

  by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. He is an author and editor and has edited Vols 7 and 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.  His biographical notice is found here. The following is taken from his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, which is available here from the Publisher.  This excerpt is taken from chapter 4 of the book, "Ordo Amoris and Political Prudence" and appears here with permission. It appears in three parts.

 Moral Reasoning in Extreme Circumstances 

§3.   The Possibility of  Tyrannicide  and Rebellion    (concluded)

Augustine's distinction between virtue and officeholder is seen in the fact that he actually treats politics in personalist terms; he refers to each human being, rather than the city's institutions and physical attributes, as the primary element or seed of a city (CD 4.3 ; EnP 9.8). The dictator's power (imperium) was conferred upon citizens, almost always private citizens, by the constitutional form of lex curiata, and the most common and most general function he had was to be the dictatura rei gerundae causa, literally, "the dictatorship for getting things done."

For instance, early in Augustine's career he explicitly regarded such a power as just: "would it not also be right, provided some honest man of great ability was found at the time, to strip these [corrupt] people of the power to elect public officials and to subject them to the rule of a few good men, or even to that of one man?" (DLA 1.6.14). Augustine's recognition of this power is seen in his observation that Cincinnatus was entrusted with Rome's security because of his extreme poverty (Ep. 104; CD 3.17, 5.18). In the case of Hortensius, he notes that instituting a dictator was a "measure commonly adopted in times of gravest peril" (CD 3.17). Thus a Roman, upon reading the above passage, would have heard the gerens publicae potestatis as "the bearer of the public power." He would have understood it as the power conferred to a virtuous human being who would be called in on a particular occasion to save the republic.

Are we bound by the errors of our time?

Escaping through desire and Grace

 

This excerpt is from a conversation between Eric Voegelin and graduate students following a lecture at the St.Thomas More Institute in Montreal. The identified questioners are Richard Jacobsen, Martin O'Hara and Cathleen Going. "Q" designates unidentified questioners.

The Collapse of Doctrine, Religious Deculturation and Renewal

Creating Community à la Woodstock

The following is from a conversation between Eric Voegelin and graduate students after a lecture at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal. His interlocutor was Fr. Eric O'Connor, Director of the Institute.

VOEGELIN: [One] of the imaginary obstacles (to give a time-problem again) is that one believes much has happened in history. Not much has happened. Two thousand years of doctrinization is a very short period — and we are at the end of it now.

O'CONNOR: The end of it in what sense? It won't go that way again?

VOEGELIN: It has run to its death in practice. Everybody knows today that doctrines are wrong. Every leftist student is as much against the communist establishment as against our establishment. They are against doctrine. Their solutions are wrong, but their revolution is right.

The forms are of course atrocious. If you go into the details, say, "community, " and ask "What is it? What are those Beatles ? That Woodstock ?" — it is a perversion (don't be shocked) of the perichoresis of the Trinity. You get an immediacy of reality on the community level but without the dimension of divinity. You are God yourself on that community level.

Political Articulation from Magna Carta to Abraham Lincoln

Democracy: an historical development

Obviously, the representative ruler of an articulated society cannot represent it as a whole without standing in some sort of relationship to the other members of the society. Here is a source of difficulties for political science in our time because, under pressure of the democratic symbolism, the resistance to distinguishing between the two relations terminologically has become so strong that it has also affected political theory.

Ruling power is ruling power even in a democracy, but one is shy of facing the fact. The government represents the people, and the symbol "people" has absorbed the two meanings that, in medieval language, for instance, could be distinguished without emotional resistance as the "realm" and the "subjects."

The Failure of Immanentist Metaphysics

Truth is not about world-immanent objects

The Aristotelian speculation ends in a serious impasse, both practi­cally and theoretically. Practically, the discovery of the truth seems to serve no other purpose than to forge a new instrument for keeping the rest of mankind in the untruth of their existence. Theoretically, we are faced with an aporia that affects the theory of human nature and its actualization.

The philosopher who is in possession of the Truth should consis­tently go the way of Plato in the Republic; he should issue the call for repentance and submission to the theocratic rule of the incar­nate Truth. Aristotle, however, does not issue such a call and, con­sequently, the imperfections of actualization (although technically called "perversions") tend to become essences in their own right, forming the manifold of reality; they become "characters," and the category of character is even extended from human individuals to the types of constitutions.

The dimension of potentiality-actualization, thus, is crossed by a plane on which the grades of imperfection appear as coordinated types to be respected and preserved in their essence; the imperfections become actualizations of their specific types. This theoretical conflict could not be reconciled within the "system" be­cause the problem that caused it had not become sufficiently explicit.