Nearly sixteen centuries after its publication, St. Augustine’s City of God remains a seminal text in Christian political philosophy. With the Fall of Rome as his backdrop, the Doctor of Grace contrasts the forces at work that seek to claim men’s souls. History, from the Fall of the Angels to the Fall of Rome, has consisted of battle between the City of God and the City of Man. From the vantage point of over a millennium and a half, one can see how, using the Augustine’s principles, Christendom emerged as the City of God dominated the City of Man. But we seem to be living in a time where the transition is going in reverse and the weeds of secularism are choking out the wheat of Christendom so that Augustine’s text can serve as a blueprint of sorts for restoring the City of God and rebuilding a Christian society.
Without diving into all of the themes Augustine presents, the focus will be on his opening theme: suffering. Why, in introducing the two cities, would Augustine choose to focus on suffering? As he points out, the sack of Rome led to seemingly indiscriminate sufferings; both the good and the bad, the Christian and the Pagan suffered. Suffering doesn’t seem to distinguish them at all. But when we look not at the nature of the sufferings, but the response of the sufferer, we find great differences. He says, “though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different. Virtue and vice are not the same even if they undergo the same treatment…What matters is the nature of the sufferer not the nature of the sufferings.” So then suffering becomes like a great identification card enabling us to determine residency in either of the two cities.
The Two Cities
Why this is so becomes apparent once we grasp that ultimately, the two cities are distinguished by their loves. The “two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point if contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self…The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God ‘I will love You, my Lord, my strength.” For Augustine suffering is brought about when men love the world more than God, the City of Man more than the City of God. The good and bad suffer together because even the good (even if to a much lesser degree) love this world rather than despising it.
Both the Christians and non-Christians were equally affected but the sufferings of the Christians have “tended to their moral improvement because they are viewed through the eyes of faith.” For the residents of the City of God suffering becomes an opportunity for growth in virtue and holiness. “Viewed through the eyes of faith,” sufferings become necessary because they are the most expedient (i.e. most gentle and most merciful) way that God naturalizes us as residents in the heavenly city. They may be free from criminal and godless wickedness they still see that they are not so far removed as to not to deserve to suffer temporal ills for them.
The residents of the City of Man see suffering as the greatest of all evils. Rather than viewing them as opportunities, they see them as something to be avoided at all costs, even to the point of self-inflicted death. From within this context Augustine visits the question of noble suicide within Roman culture. Drawing from two historical examples at key turning points in Roman history, Augustine shows why suicide is always wrong. His first case study is Lucretia. After becoming a victim of rape she killed herself and Rome celebrated the nobility in doing so. Augustine asks why should she, who was innocent, have suffered a worse punishment than the offender? “One does not take vengeance on oneself for another’s crime.” To suffer some injustice and then commit another injustice, even against oneself, is like killing the innocent.
His second example is Cato who killed himself as a political act, a steady refusal to live in a Rome led by Caesar. As the prototypical Stoic, he thought happiness was only to be found in escaping the body and not something that was achieved in the soul through the body.
The City of God and the Culture of Euthanasia
But he does more than simply prove the immorality of suicide. He also shows how one might argue against a suicide culture. In this way he provides us with a blueprint for overcoming a Culture of Euthanasia. In both of his case studies Augustine chose to focus on “cold-blooded” suicides. Both Lucretia and Cato were deliberate suicides, not merely acts of impassioned despair. Augustine thinks there is nothing noble about killing oneself and a culture that elevates it as such is a culture that bestows victimhood on its members. He wants to empower men and women so that they can be truly noble in facing their sufferings, even the final ones, head-on.
Augustine’s argument and ours as well depends upon strong Christian witness. If we are to overcome the Culture of Euthanasia we must preach that the only “sweet death” is one that opens wide the door to eternal life. We cannot “accompany” someone who chooses to kill themselves because it is accompanying a lie that says that God does not use the death He has chosen for us as a means to bring about life. Instead we should accompany them in their sufferings by encouraging them to dying with true nobility, the nobility of Christ. Dying with dignity is dying as conformed to Christ. We will never overcome the emerging Culture of Euthanasia until we suffer like true Christians and encourage others to do the same. This was Augustine’s way and it needs to be ours too.