Etienne Gilson’s The Metamorphoses of the City of God

The Metamorphoses of the City of God. Etienne Gilson, translated by James G. Colbert. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020.

In Etienne Gilson’s The Metamorphoses of the City of God, finely translated into English by James G. Colbert, we have a fascinating genealogy of the idea of a universal human society. Originally delivered as a lecture series at the University of Louvain in 1952, Gilson opens up the series by meditating on the zeitgeist of the moment. There was, he explains, a palpable sense that the world was on the cusp of unity; just as clans and families watched the formation of the ciuitas in the ancient world, now nations watched the formation of a new global order. As Remi Brague points out in his foreword to the book, the date of these lectures explains the sentiment: the United Nations had just been formed and the European states were “groping for some sort of union” (ix). With a global world order on the horizon, Gilson steps back to consider how such a possibility might have come about. Mirroring Fustel de Coulanges’ suggestion that it was the familial religion of the ancient people that caused them to live in a closed society, Gilson argues that it is the universality of the Christian religion that has caused his contemporaries to imagine a united world order.

Here, Gilson is not suggesting that modern Europe is deeply Christian; rather, he is suggesting that the origin of the aspiration towards a global order is in an idea only introduced by Christianity: this is the idea of the city of God. As a historian of philosophy, therefore, he proposes to trace this idea from its origin in Augustinian Christianity, through a variety of permutations, to its contemporary secular form. In doing this, Gilson focuses on thinkers particularly transformative of the notion: Roger Bacon, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, Campanella, the Abbé of St. Pierre, Leibniz, and Auguste Comte. Each receive a lecture devoted to expounding their idea, and these form the bulk of the book. While it is clearly Augustine to whom Gilson attributes the genuine vision of the city of God, each of the others appropriate the idea in an attempt to solve central political problems of their day. Roger Bacon imagines a Christian republic governed by clerics, those educated men who might free political life from the corruption plaguing the world as he knows it. Dante shudders at the emergence of papal politics, and envisions a world monarch whose jurisdiction lies beyond the pope’s meddling grasp. Nicholas of Cusa reimagines the concept of a universal society in the face of intractable religious difference, recasting Catholicism as the religion of religions and rooting world peace in a one-size-fits all theology. This de-particularizing of Christianity increasingly takes center stage in our thinkers’ approach, eventually culminating in Leibniz’ religion of reason, a religion that Comte reveals as no religion at all.

For Gilson, the act of tracing out this history is a way of tackling what he calls “the problem of the City of God.” By this, Gilson means man’s inability to determine whether or not the unity made possible by a universal Church actually does translate into a global political order. Interestingly, Gilson tethers this problem to the concept of Christendom, which he wants to probe; Christendom, Gilson explains, is “the notion of a people formed by Christians dispersed throughout all the nations of the earth, whose temporal relations are, or should be, affected by their shared membership in the Church” (1). Whether the very concept stems from an error of perspective, or whether it points to a reality that must be “acknowledged, described, defined and integrated into its place in the concept of the Church,” Gilson is unable to answer (20). His task, he maintains, is that of an intellectual historian: he will simply trace out what happens when thinkers attempt to conceive of a universal society increasingly detached from the Church.

According to Gilson’s historical narrative, then, the concept of a universal society emerged in the Western imagination as an intuition that there should be some kind of political upshot to the rise of the Universal Church; if a universal Church is possible, the reasoning goes, a universal political order should be as well. Yet, because the universality of the Church is not what it first appeared to be—the visible Church has fragmented and has not converted the world over—those who dreamt of a universal political order increasingly set themselves against the Church, seeing it as an obstacle to the universal society’s genesis. For Gilson, this means that the conceptions of a universal society which he traces out are increasingly unmoored from the font of grace that might make them truly possible. Thus, even if there is no genuine Christendom—a question he claims not to answer—he concludes that there are many false ones because “the members of the Earthly City have tried to temporalize the City of God” (2).

And yet, as I finished Gilson’s set of lectures, I was left unsure as to whether he really does refrain from answering his question about the possibility of a genuine Christendom. Despite his disclaimer at the beginning of his text—he does not intend to “dogmatize about a problem that escapes the competence of a historian of philosophy” (1)—there is a kind of ambiguity that haunts the last of Gilson’s lectures; they seem to leave the audience in a different place than Gilson’s Augustine originally placed them.

Let me explain what I mean. Quite rightly, I think, Gilson ends his lectures by speaking to those who yearn for a universal society. His message to them is clear: because it is impossible to will an end without also willing the means, it is impossible to will a universal society without also willing the Universal Church, for the Church alone is the key to its genesis. A historian of ideas, Gilson’s goal is to show that the refusal to recognize the necessity of the Church lay at the heart of every failure to bring the universal society about; “the only thing that the historian could do to help them is to place before their eyes, along with the genuine object of their hope, the cause of their repeated failures to make it a reality, and the means at their disposal to succeed in that” (234). I wonder if Augustine would agree.

To be sure, Augustine would affirm Gilson’s statement that the pilgrim church is the “leaven of the temporal city that seeks to be born” (234). And yet, this is only to say that the Church is meant to be a healing presence in a broken world. If all that Gilson means is that political communities would be bound together in a healthier fashion, and so would be more just, if their members were refashioned in the bosom of the Church, I think Augustine would agree. Yet, I do not get the sense that this is what Gilson is saying. Rather, I think he is arguing that a global political community is possible if it is placed under the authority of the Pope. Here, he has taken several leaps beyond Augustine, and, perhaps inadvertently, has left Augustine behind.

To be more specific, Gilson’s argument is tied to a particular form of integralism that jars with Augustine’s teaching about the two cities. From Gilson’s perspective, there are two orders, and the question of how one ought to navigate the relationship between them is posed as a matter of whose authority is greater. He concludes, “in spiritual matters it is better to obey the pope, and in temporal matters it is better to obey the prince, but better still the pope who occupies the summit of the two orders” (223). Here, Gilson is travelling different terrain than Augustine. Going on to argue that the Pope ought to exercise “direct action on politics, like grace on nature and faith on reason,” Gilson locates the political influence of the Church in the apex of its leadership and collapses the distinction between the ecclesial mediation of grace and the authority of the pope (223). For Gilson, the “politics of the Church” is conducted in the world by the “Supreme Pontiff, effectively acting as sovereign” (223—24).

Augustine does not have such a vision. For him, the head of the Church is Christ, and the Church is Christ’s body. It is a community, made one in Christ by the Love that is the Holy Spirit. Viewed in this way, the key to the Church’s ability to bring love into the temporal order is not papal authority, but the sacramental relationship between Christ and His Church. This is not to say that Augustine has no sense of episcopal authority; he does. Famously, for example, he celebrates Theodosius’ willingness to bend to Ambrose’s fatherly rebuke when Ambrose chastised Theodosius for the massacre at Thessolonika. Augustine clearly thinks it good when political leaders submit to the discipline of the Church, just as he thinks it is good for bishops to discipline their flock. Yet, this does not mean that he locates the solution to fallen politics in the subordination of state to Church. Rather, he locates the solution to fallen politics in the conversion of our hearts. While the Holy Spirit works in us, the life of the Church acts as a school of love; in participating in the sacramental life of the Church, in living with and caring for others, in praying together, we are offered the chance to be transformed. Augustine, in other words, thinks in terms of communities of persons, bound together in relationships which generate obligations of care and trust, not in terms of abstract institutional arrangements. The upshot of this difference is that Augustine’s vision is profoundly personal; it cannot be reduced to arrangements of command and obedience, although it contains them in a web of larger meaning.

Further, I do not think Augustine would agree that that the pope’s effect on the temporal sphere is akin to that of grace on nature. That is far too neat. While is not clear that Gilson holds a wedding-cake vision of nature and grace—he does write that “nature is only more perfectly natural by being informed by grace” (125)—it is clear that his vision of the two is shaped by a two-swords model. Again, for Augustine, it is the sacramental and communal life of the Church that have this kind of transformative, integrative, grace-like effect on its members, and, it is these members in turn who can have the transformative, integrative, grace-like effect in their broken political community. The narrowing of focus to those at the apex of the two hierarchies is a simply move that Augustine does not make.

Of course, given the passage of time, it is difficult to fault Gilson for failing to return to Augustine’s personalist read on the Church. What I wonder about is whether Gilson’s message is, in the end, compatible with Augustine’s teaching about the two cities. What I mean is that for Augustine, it is incredibly important to recall that the two cities will co-exist until the end of time. Taking this teaching seriously, an institutional arrangement between Church and state cannot be the salve that Gilson claims; it will not solve the problem of the earthly city. At most, Gilson’s is a theoretical claim, akin to Augustine’s own suggestion that, “if men were always peaceful and just, human affairs would be happier and all kingdoms would be small, rejoicing in concord with their neighbours;” if we all submitted to the Church, in other words, we might have worldwide political unity (ciu. 4.15). This won’t happen, but we should strive to do what it would take, nonetheless.

And yet, I find myself asking, what good is it to suggest that we ought to submit to the Church because if everyone did so, it would yield political unity? From my perspective, the promise is a strange one to hang one’s hat on; if Augustine is right that we cannot rid ourselves of the earthly city in time, worldwide assent to papal power would not perfect politics, but would only provide a sort of superficial solution, building a retaining wall as to what sorts of policies and practices are out of bounds, and creating a cultural consensus just as susceptible to corruptions of self-love as any political arrangement thus far. I suppose my skepticism is partly rooted in the fact that I read this about 70 years too late; it is difficult to imagine the kind of consensus Gilson depicts in our pluralist age. This being so, it seems to me that if one is going to take a kingdom of ends approach—be the change you want to see in the world—I would focus less on assent to papal authority, which does not get at the root of the problem, and more on the radical conversion of heart that does. Thus, while I appreciate Gilson’s project in this lecture series, I remain skeptical that it is truly Augustinian to believe a global political community will flourish if its members simply submit themselves to papal authority. Gilson suggests that it is the refusal to recognize the Church that has led every attempt to erect a universal society to fail. I would suggest that it is the refusal to participate in the love of God that has led every political community to fail to be truly social. These two claims do not amount to the same thing.

All this said, I am sympathetic to the fact that Gilson wants to draw his European audience back to the Church. His goal is to show how much European culture owes to a Church that it is on the cusp of abandoning; Europe, at its best, is a part of Christendom, and, Gilson is convinced, its best chance at unity lies therein. We can imagine how different the world would look today if Gilson’s audience had heeded the call. Nevertheless, it will not do to overstate his case. It is enough to say that the earth’s temporal unity will be better and more lasting if each of us return to the true source of unity, who is God, and that whatever form we wish our politics would take, our true hope is in the city of God, which is beyond any temporal order.

Print