I shall use this opportunity to reconsider the compatibility of Christianity and Politics through Letter 91, which forms part of a series of prolonged correspondences exchanged between the two in 408 AD. Nectarius, a pagan and civil servant, wrote to Augustine in search of mercy for those responsible for stoning and setting fire to a church in Calama, which is in present day Algeria.¹ The letter deals largely with what Atkins and Dodaro describe as “the clash between traditional Roman patriotism (love for one’s own hometown or patria), rooted in civil theology, and Augustinian Christian civic ideals” (242).

The Roman State was built on a foundation of civic patriotism, as can be deduced from Cicero’s On The Republic. Augustine notes that Nectarius learned his “devoted citizen’s attitude that ‘a good man’s service of his hometown has no limit or terminus’,” (91.3), stressing that this sense of the patriotism and civic duty stems from both a philosophical and religious tradition that is corrupt. We see this in Augustine’s discussion of the corruptness of the pagan gods and the reactionary violence they embark on to keep the status quo alive, even though the worship of pagan gods was banned in 480 by the Edict of Thessalonica. The state, here, is not a proxy for the different gods but a step toward the actualisation of the City of God. The City of Man, because it derives its telos from the flesh and not the spirit, is subject to the same decadence and self-centered opulence that had come to mar the Roman Empire, Augustine posits, and consequently finds relief in Christianity, which governs both intent and act.

Furthermore, Augustine here shows how practical justice in the Christian Roman Empire differs from other conceptions of justice. The decision to strip those responsible for the destruction of church property of their own property and reduce them to effective poverty is justified by Augustine in Letter 104, where he counters Nectarius’ supposition that poverty is worse than death by postulating that poverty prevents one from committing many sins and that life itself is sacrosanct and should not be treated in such a trivial manner. The Rome Augustine conceptualises is not one based on honour or pride — pagan Rome was afflicted with such preoccupations, which were not always noble in either thought or action.

However, there is something to be said in defence of Ciceronian republicanism. To fend for one’s own hometown is to recognise and cultivate one’s links with one’s origins, and is essential in facilitating the layers of identities that were carefully assembled to create the Roman empire and the feeling of being Roman — Romanitas — which is essential for any state to function. This, in some ways, also set up the opposition between the home and the world, for this form of patriotism ensured that factionalism rooted in one’s place of origin was an intrinsic part of Roman politics.

Augustine further argues that only if “this deceitful idiocy … [is] done away with” and the peoples of Calama embrace Christ and the Church will Nectarius be able to see his patria flourish (91.6). Does one need to be Christian to be wise and to have “chaste and pious habits” (91.6)? The problem with monotheistic religions is that those stemming from the Abrahamic tradition always claim a monopoly on both truth and virtue. Is this not to be a suitable issue to consider, particularly in a world so varied and diverse as ours? The Christian basis of the nation-state, as a study of history will reveal to even the most flippant reader, is not a guarantee of goodness or virtuosity. Certainly there can be virtuous nations that recognise the same virtues and the same concepts of truth but eschew the Christian tradition almost entirely, and this is precisely why one must be reminded of the schools of political philosophy that do not stem from this tradition or have been influenced remarkably minimally by it.

Rome was founded in 753 BC, as the legend goes. From Ab Urbe Condita to the fall of Rome, Christianity and Christian conceptions of political being were late entrants into the Roman world. The Gibbonian hypothesis, of which yours truly has great admiration for even though parts of the logic used may render the less essential parts of it to be of the non sequitur genus, is still essential in the study of the decline and the fall of the Roman empire in the West. Sir Isaiah Berlin pointed this out more poignantly than anyone else from a close reading of the work of Niccolò Machiavelli: that if “a State of a Roman type is to be established, these [Christian] qualities will not promote it: those who live by the precepts of Christian morality are bound to be trampled on by the ruthless pursuit of power …. The combination of virtù and Christian values is for him an impossibility.” Whatever one says about civic theology in Ancient Rome, it stands that the State as we know it is not the result of Christian morality but of pagan values that Augustine so scathingly excoriates. While some may praise Augustine for being a political realist, and other historians may take aim at other factors such as the Crisis of the Third Century for the fall of Rome in the West, a careful, discerning leader will assign an iota of blame for this collapse to the Christians themselves. Rome survived for a millennium as a pagan state, but the story of its decline begins with Constantine in 314 and ends with the banning of paganism in 380.