Abstract
Book I of Augustine’s work On Free Choice (De Libero Arbitrio) offers a helpful introduction to some of the most important themes of political philosophy. The paper makes a case for teaching this text in introductory courses on political thought, theology of social life, and similar topics, alongside or even in place of the more usually assigned excerpts from City of God. The text is written as a dialogue in which Augustine seeks to introduce a student of his to reflection on the ways in which our moral outlook is profoundly shaped by our political citizenship. It invites all of us, whether Christian or non-Christian citizens, to enter into the dialogue ourselves as Augustine’s students and so to reflect on the moral significance of our own citizenship.
Highlights
Some even seem to think that having Augustine on a syllabus about political thought is comparable to having him on a syllabus about visions of human sexuality
One fascinating aspect of this text that I have not discussed here is the way in which Evodius, the character, embodies the difficulty that Augustine sees in convincing Christians to have such a moderate view of the limits of politics as I have just attributed to Augustine himself
Think a kind of typical Christian citizen, vacillates visibly over the course of the dialogue between tendencies toward an apolitical despair or pacifism on the one hand, and a hyperpolitical moralism or even revolutionarism on the other. Both of these are errors that the author seems to think represent dangerous and typically Christian tendencies, both in different ways are traceable to unrealistically high expectations from politics, and both are tendencies that, by the end of this book, Augustine has successfully combatted in Evodius, as he would go on to try to combat them in millions of his fellow Christians [10]
Summary
When Augustine gets taught in survey courses of the history of political thought, he usually appears as something of an outlier. There is a case to be made for beginning where Augustine himself begins and following out his own original reflections on politics; in light of these, students interested in pursuing the matter further may in later studies turn to City of God with more of the background needed to appreciate its subtleties Since this text has many features that recommend it to our students, and I would say to all of us as well, I would like to walk through a few of the ways in which this very compact and extraordinarily rich dialogue could provoke reflection and stimulate discussion over the course of a week or so in an undergraduate survey course
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