BEYOND THE REPUBLIC By Asithandile Gxumisa

Not long before the shades of night engulfed the Roman world, men still believed that Rome, the queen of cities, was the Eternal City, almost with the confidence of Etruscan haruspices. Among such men, born about the time when the frontiers of Constantius' dominions were groaning under the feet of hostile barbarians, was Augustine whose illustrious name survived the obscurity of his death and whose fame immortalized the lowly bishopric of Hippo Regius. However, as the great Empire became increasingly a sanguinary scene of misfortunes, of immiseration, and of perpetual intestine convulsions, Augustine was eventually prevailed upon to look elsewhere for permanence. Then there came the fateful event that staggered all Romans out of their romantic dream, that dissolved their pride like butter in a flame, and impelled them headlong into despair: after almost eight centuries of freedom from the ravages of a foreign invasion, in 410 A.D., the Salarian Gates were thrown open and savage Goths, led by the veteran hand of Alaric, poured into the City of Rome and sacked it. The faith of a thousand years, that Rome, the ancient capital of the world, and the cynosure of classical civilization, was destined to last forever, was broken in a sudden tumult of three days. 

Augustine, who, by then, had found the refuge of permanence, rose above the universal shadow of dismay, and drew the eyes of his fellow Romans to that proven Refuge of the Ages, the City of God: exalted, impregnable and most assuredly eternal. He had not utterly despaired of the destiny of the Empire, neither did he expect, like his nerveless pagan contemporaries, that the world should soon be plunged into the Void of Chaos that always whirled before the Word. However, the bishop of Hippo was at pains to persuade his generation that, because great cities and earthly polities rise and fall, the object that ultimately deserved their trust and devotion was that which could transcend the peculiar circumstances of both time and place. That majestic object, to which Augustine justly dedicated two monumental volumes, and virtually fourteen years of his life, was the City of God. As the most significant of all his works, and the most comprehensive he had written, Augustine's City of God deservedly became the archstone of what we might call today Western thought. Moreover, it became a beacon of hope to a world that was losing its nerve, forfeiting its faith and that sense of destiny that raises the dignity of the lives of Men above that of the flies of the Summer. 

The 21st century abounds with its own troubles; but it is still also convulsed by personal and social calamities with which all men in all ages are familiar. Since that cosmic tragedy of Adam's Fall, the City of Men has mostly ever been a theatre of conflicts, afflictions and disorders: nation has risen up against nation, civil discords have irretrievably severed filial bonds, like the dodo whole tribes have suffered the fate of extinction and even the cataclysms of nature have not spared the unhappy fruits of Adam's loins. Lying at the root of these great evils, which have subverted countless human polities, there is the will which, though it is still free, is only at liberty to choose among so many sins. The abuse of the will, which is the essence of our fatal corruption, rendered every man an instrument of unrelenting lusts, and alienated every one of us from the life of virtue. The love of self, synonymous with the contempt of God, upon which the City of Men is founded, continues to work the ruin of souls - with even more catastrophic consequences for our own time in which Goddess Self has won the zealous devotion of willing hearts. 

Thus, as it was in the ancient world so it is in ours still: the order that God graciously designed for the human soul has been hopelessly inverted as the will and reason have long yielded to the sway of inordinate appetites. So, as a just desert for our pride, that venomous wellspring of all human sorrows, we helplessly witness all about us the face of every man set against another man's, the bloody crimes, and the cruel wars. Not only have men suffered blindly and unwittingly as the casualties of the savagery of direful lusts, but, more especially in our own stormy Age, we have ingeniously pioneered moral perversions hitherto unknown and tumbled impetuously into depths of dissipation that make the beasts of the Wild look like angels in contrast with our lot.  The trampling of all moral boundaries is justified as the inevitable if not the salutary March of Mankind. This very day we watch on, hopelessly, as the pioneers of progress conquer one more frontier: a novel series which sexualizes girl pubescents is set to air on a popular online streaming service, and all reasonable disapprobations that have been raised are summarily dismissed as the last desperate gasps of a dying patriarchy. And so I am minded to ask, with Goethe, "What kind of time is this, when one has to envy those who have already been buried?"

Unfortunately, albeit providentially instituted of God for the purpose of reining in these dreadful passions by the sanctions of the law, the City of Men, with all its clever institutions and structures, is also perennially vulnerable to corruption. Truly, being no more than a community of sinners it cannot help but manifest the many imperfections of the human heart. So, while the Republic is necessary to the degree that it fulfils its God-ordained functions, rewarding the doer of good and punishing the doer of evil, we must always remember that it is governed by men who are themselves enslaved to concupiscence, particularly the insatiable lust for power. Accordingly, those who look for permanence in, and expect salvation from, the political order will be grievously disappointed. The City of Men stands unredeemed and, while it subsists in this impotent condition of spiritual palsy, whatsoever form it assumes, be it a democracy, a Republic, or an Empire, it cannot survive forever. The Roman Empire is no more, so is the British Empire, and all the cosmological kingdoms of antiquity are level with the dust. 

Lo and behold! not all is lost. The City of God, established upon the love of the Divine, which is synonymous with the contempt even of self, offers us all the hope of an order that is both enduring and unassailable. This is the spiritual pilgrimage of the Church while she tarries upon this rugged Earth, and the life of eternal blessedness when all her children will have ascended into the society of angels after the end of all things. To this pilgrimage, we are credibly told, many are called, but so few are chosen. For reasons known only to the Sovereign of the Cosmos, the citizens of this world were foredoomed to be vessels of wrath, and the pilgrims who sojourn through it to be vessels of mercy, "predestined by grace, elected by grace, by grace strangers below, and by grace citizens above". Russell Kirk, commenting on the wonder and mystery of this grace, wrote: "Those whom God redeems are the "elect", brands snatched from the fires of lust for reasons only God knows. Out of His compassion God saves some, by His grace leading their steps aright. We cannot guess who those elect are. Worldly success is no sign of a man's having been chosen by God, and those who think themselves righteous may be deceived." 

Now, the Church, not unlike the society of the unredeemed, is not a brotherhood of saints, as such. However, though it is not impervious to the ravages of sin, it remains the only sanctuary of hope in the long struggle against our fatal corruption. Already, by the time Rome fell to Alaric the Goth, the name of Christ commanded enough reverence that the licentious barbarians obsequiously obeyed the order of their king to keep their grasping hands away from the churches of the apostles, St. Peter's and St. Paul's. In the midst of the mayhem occasioned by the sacking of the City, the door of the lowly abode of some elderly virgin was prized open by one of the Goths. Forthwith the Goth, who must have been inflamed by the lust of plunder, demanded of the woman all the gold and silver she might have in her possession. To his astonishment, the woman readily led him to a glorious hoard that was brimming with almost every treasure that strikes the eye with wondrous delight. However, while the triumphant Goth reflected with awe upon such an elusive stroke of good fortune, he was admonished by the virgin with these solemn words: "These are the consecrated vessels belonging to St. Peter; if you presume to touch them, the sacrilegious deed will remain on your conscience. For my part, I dare not keep what I am unable to defend." 

The Gothic warrior, who was immediately overwhelmed with reverential fear, sent a messenger to inform the king of this magnificent discovery. The superstitious Gothic king gave a peremptory injunction that all the consecrated plates and ornaments be conducted, without damage or delay, to St. Peter's church. Although quite isolated, this is one of the earliest examples that instructively demonstrate to us how the City of God, about three centuries after the Resurrection, had begun to become a trustworthy stronghold for mortals. However, the bottomless despair of the Roman pagan, especially the stubborn devotee of the old religion that had just been supplanted by Christianity,  led him to impudently attribute to the new religion the social upheavals that were wrecking the City of Rome. Augustine, with the zeal of an Hebraic prophet and the penetration of a Grecian philosopher, eloquently dismantled these baseless indictments. Drawing upon the examples of history, he demonstrated to those blabbering blasphemous enemies of the name of Christ that, before ever the Virgin was with child, in every age and in every land, men have been groaning under the burden of afflictions and tribulations, so much that it was not without justice that Edward Gibbon once memorably wrote: "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."  

In truth, so contended Augustine, it was the disintegration of the moral order of the Roman world, in which every varlet Roman was implicated, that brought about the destruction of the Empire. For long before the stones and timbers of the City were involved in a ruin of flames kindled by foreign invaders, the conflagration of the wayward passions of the hearts of Romans had already consumed the moral bulwarks and ornaments of Rome, effectively undermining what was the surest safeguard of the City against calamity. So, once more, a salutary lesson that cities and states, the City of Men, all have their terminus. However, this does not mean that those who by grace have been naturalized as the blessed citizens of the City of God have no business participating in the civil order of their Republics. Quite the contrary. While they aspire to have peace with God, which is the orderly obedience of faith to eternal law, they seek, with the same spirited alacrity, peace with their fellow citizens, which is orderly concord. And while their peace in the City of Men will always be subject to the vicissitudes of fortune and circumstance, they may yet be encouraged by the hope that the peace of the heavenly city, which is "the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God", stands far above all the ills, the griefs and the sorrows of this mortal life.

Thus, though only a sojourner through the earthly city, on account of his genuine godly aspirations to peace, he is thus empowered to meaningfully enrich the human adventure here below by giving himself wholeheartedly to the maintenance of concord between his neighbour and himself. However, all the labours and all the efforts of the pilgrim, even when selflessly dedicated to the service of the earthly city, are invariably undertaken with an unswerving eye towards that Other world whose beatitude shall be enjoyed without end, whose Light shall be beheld without the memory of ignominy, and whose holy halls shall resound with angelic melodies. Convinced, with king Solomon, that the alluring pleasures of this life are all vanity, he shall not so willingly suffer himself to fall into that vituperable folly of those whose vistas are benighted by the passing shadows of this dwindling world, of whom, that honest friend of democracy Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote that he "...clings to this world as if he were never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications." 

Verily, it was this all-consuming materialism that was at the heart of the consternations of Romans, who lamented the loss of their houses and treasures in the whirlblast of war more than they regretted the long exile of honour and virtue over the length of time when Rome wasted away in the throes of moral turpitude. It was not so for the denizens of the City of God who, though they loved Rome with the warm ardour of patriots, fixed their gaze upon the glory of the celestial City, wherein neither moth nor rust shall destroy their treasures, and whose high walls tens of thousands of Alarics can neither storm nor breach. They heeded Augustine's inspired counsel: not to glory in earthly polities or kingdoms, not to put faith in presumptuous princes or in capricious peoples. This is the high hope, the treasure only of the redeemed of the City of God, that the celebrated bishop of Hippo bequeathed to Adam's progeny, upon whose neck the yoke of mortality lies heavy. It is the hope that you also, all unworthy, beyond time and death, may attain to the inestimable bequest of the Son, which is everlasting felicity and peace in the company of angels. 

Augustine, in A.D. 430, at the ripe age of seventy-six, lay dying upon the threshold of the City of God. Hippo Regius was under siege from King Gaiseric of the Vandals, a crowd of barbarians that had taken up the cudgel, and the sword, for the Arian heresy. With the courage of a Stoic, Augustine refused to abandon his flock. Possidius, faithful friend of Augustine and bishop of Calama, would honestly testify of the last moments of his friend: "Those days, therefore, that he lived through, or endured, almost at the very end of his life, were the bitterest and most mournful of all his old age. A man such as he had to see cities overthrown and destroyed and, with them, their citizens and inhabitants and the buildings on their estates wiped out by a murderous enemy, and others put to flight and scattered. He saw churches denuded of priests and ministers; holy virgins and others vowed to chastity dispersed, some among them succumbing to tortures, others taken captive and losing innocence of soul and body, and faith itself, in evil and cruel slavery to their foes." 

Even in the article of death, Augustine would selflessly pray for the liberation of Hippo Regius - or at the very least for the grace for its unhappy inhabitants to bear patiently the judgement of Providence. This was to be his last service to the City of Men, a moment in which the magnanimity of his soul shone through with the empyrean light of the City of God, into which he presently passed. We are told that just before he died, with the resignation of a Stoic, he solaced himself with these words: "No great man will think it a great matter when sticks and stones fall and mortals die." The siege of Hippo Regius would be miraculously lifted a year after Augustine's departure, and the people were rescued from the savagery of a murderous army. But Augustine would only behold the outcomes of his last orisons from the bosom of Abraham. Still, as only the passing of this world shall break the despotic empire of Sin, the sieges, the wars, the invasions, the plunders would go on long after he slept, as they do to this very day. Thankfully, by then Augustine had conveyed to his world the "doctrine of the last things", that when all the triumphal arches have been reduced to rubble, when all the splendid palaces have become the haunt of vultures, when all the cities have become tenebrous wastelands, and when all the earthly kingdoms have sunk into a vast sea of oblivion, only faith and hope, in the City of God, will endure.