City Of God Research Articles

City of God and Renigunta: the transnational, regional and local in Brazilian and Indian cinemas

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the transnational flows of Brazilian cinema and its manifestations in regional film industries of India. Through a critical elaboration on the topographical, stylistic, figural and narrative re-articulations of the Brazilian film Cidade de Deus (City of God, Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund, 2002) in the Tamil film Renigunta (R. Panneerselvam, 2009), a theoretical deliberation of liminal spatiality is proposed. It is argued that films such as City of God and Renigunta are textual sites where contemporary transnationalism is affirmed as the coalescing of the subjective aspects of narratives, intensified by the temporally fragmented visual stylistic, and a neoliberal industrial context of film-making. This situates films like Renigunta within several in-between spaces like non-mainstream/art-house, regional/sub-regional, independent/multiplex film and locally global. Indeed, a critical reading of the transnational aesthetic expression leads to a re-evaluation of these deterministic categories, suggesting how the liminal, or intermedial, can become a force field for interrogating dominant perspectives of the cinema, in both Brazil and India. A further observation that is presented here proposes the global/local as an active nexus for an emergent new wave of Indian cinema that has shaped the momentous re-emergence of regional film-making in diverse geographies.

Oeconomia Suffocato: The Origins of Antipathy Toward Free Enterprise Among Catholic Intelligentsia

Abstract What is the source of the antipathy of Catholic intellectuals toward free markets? That is the issue addressed in the present paper. We see the antecedents of this viewpoint of theirs in terms of secular humanism, Marxism and mistaken views of morality and economics. One of the explanations for this phenomenon are the teachings of St Augustine. He greatly distrusted the City of Man, seeing it as anarchic and chaotic. In contrast, his City of God is more orderly, but far removed from the hurly burly of free enterprise. Another source of the rejection of capitalism on the part of Catholic intellectuals is liberation theology, which is Marxism minus the atheism of that doctrine. Both economic and cultural Marxism have played a role in the alienation of such intellectuals from the tenets of laissez faire capitalism. Are there any counter currents? Yes, the School of Salamanca, which has been all but forgotten in this community.

“It was totally different than what we had before”: Perceptions of urban militarism under Rio de Janeiro’s Pacifying Policing Units

Scholars argue that military ideologies, discourses, and practices are increasingly deployed in poor urban areas to control populations deemed “dangerous.” However, very little research exists to document how residents in targeted neighborhoods experience these security interventions. This article addresses this gap by considering the case of Rio de Janeiro’s UPP Program, wherein the military police occupied several of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, or low-income marginalized neighborhoods. The intervention began in 2008 and aimed to expel drug traffickers who had controlled these areas since the 1970s and install permanent policing precincts. While many studies suggest that the urban poor tend to reject aggressive policing practices, the UPP received widespread approval by favela residents in the first years of the occupation. This article draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the City of God, one of the first neighborhoods occupied by the UPP, to examine the factors underlying residents’ positive assessment of the UPP. I found that support for the UPP hinged on (a) its deviation from the brutal and ineffective military interventions deployed in the past; (b) the UPP’s ability to subdue violent drug traffickers and restore public security; (c) state investments in social services and resources attributed to the occupation; and (d) the race, gender, and age profiles of participants, wherein women, the elderly, and lighter-skinned residents reported greater approval for the UPP than young Black men. Ultimately, these findings suggest that variability between security interventions, their impact on public security and social development, and demographic diversity within targeted neighborhoods must be considered if we are to fully understand how the urban poor experience militarized security interventions.

Imperiumand the City of God: Augustine on Church and Empire

In early fifth-century Roman Africa, Augustine faced pagan opponents who thought that the Roman empire was at risk because Christian emperors banned the worship of its gods, and that Christian ethics were no way to run an empire. He also faced Christian opponents who held that theirs was the true Church, and that the Roman empire was the oppressive power of Babylon. For Augustine, Church and empire consist of people. Everyone belongs either to the heavenly city, the community of all who love God even to disregard of themselves, or to the earthly city, the community of all who love themselves even to disregard of God. The two cities are intermixed until the final judgement shows that some who share Christian sacraments belong to the earthly city, and some officers of empire belong to the heavenly city. Empire manifests the earthly city's desire to dominate, butimperium, the acknowledged right to give orders, is necessary to avoid permanent conflict. Empire, like everything else, is given or permitted by God, for purposes we do not know.

City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens

City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens

Bergson’s theory of war

Bergson scholars such as Leonard Lawlor, Alexander Lefebvre, Philip Soulez, and Frederic Worms have recently argued that Bergson “places the phenomenon of war at the center of his analysis” in Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). We want to contribute to this line of interpretation. We claim that Bergson’s account of the causes of, and solution to, the problem of war can be effectively understood in light of a central tenet of classical political philosophy, namely, the City of God, both the concept and Augustine’s great text, de Civitate dei contra paganos. We highlight the shared view of the root of war in Augustine and Bergson, namely the lust for domination, libido dominandi. Our contribution provides a useful heuristic for understanding Bergson’s account of war, not a claim of Augustine’s influence on Bergson.

Heidegger’s Metapolitics

Heidegger’s Metapolitics Jeff Love (bio) and Michael Meng (bio) National Socialism is a barbaric principle. That is its essence and its potential greatness. The danger is not National Socialism itself, but that it becomes disarmed in a preaching of the true, the good, and the beautiful (just as at a training seminar). And that those who want to form its philosophy do nothing more than repeat the accepted “logic” of commonplace thinking and exact science instead of realizing that precisely now “logic” comes anew into distress and needs and must arise anew.1 HEIDEGGER Martin Heidegger is a philosopher of the city. He is not devoted to an otherworldly city. He creates no city in speech, no city of God. Heidegger devotes his thought to the city as the site (Stätte) of a history that forecloses and grants certain fundamental creative possibilities. One of those possibilities came to the fore in 1933, and Heidegger chose to seize the moment, to pursue with the utmost energy a thorough and radical program of renewal. Heidegger’s choice was not an aberration, not the blundering of a naive scholar into the rough-and-tumble precincts of political life. To the contrary, this choice made good on a promise that he had not kept hitherto, the revolutionary promise of his own thought as it had developed in the 1920s. For what can one say of a thinking that claims to pose a question—indeed, the question—having lain dormant for more than two millennia while making no corresponding intervention in the life of the city? What kind of attitude to thought might this be, if not one of sardonic derision and dismissal? As we know from his own insistent pronouncements, Heidegger did not see philosophy as so trivial, but rather as sovereign, [End Page 97] ruling (Basic Questions of Philosophy). To be sure, he did reject the direct connection of philosophy with action, but he never tired of proclaiming a far more important indirect connection, a grounding one, whereby philosophy opens up the very horizon that proscribes at any given time the possibilities for action or any series of actions: in short, a history or metapolitics in Heidegger’s own words (Überlegungen II–IV, GA 94, 115). We might then ask why it was that Heidegger chose to intervene in the life of the city under the banner of National Socialism. If Heidegger was not naive nor a mere opportunist, it follows that he must have found some kinship to his own thought in National Socialism. This seemingly simple conclusion has created exceptional controversy for eighty years now. Why, after all, would a thinker of Heidegger’s stature side with National Socialism? The question is a cloying one because it implies that no thinker of stature could have endorsed a movement so fixated on the primitive assertion of inequality, violence, and nationalism. To think against the consensus, stemming from the Enlightenment, about equality, peace, and universality, might seem to be mere folly, an affront to the cherished end of history, that promised land of peace and prosperity whose achievement hangs over us as an unshakable imperative. But it is precisely Heidegger who challenges this consensus as well as its accompanying imperative. He allies himself with the only stream in modern political thought that affirms this challenge: fascism. Heidegger does in fact much more than that. For Heidegger not only allies himself with fascism, he creates his own brand of fascist political thought. We are not speaking here of the ever exculpatory claims of Heidegger’s “private” National Socialism, or private this or that. We have no interest in the private Heidegger. In this respect, we follow Heidegger’s famous advice to ignore the private life of a thinker. And it is easy to do so, since Heidegger’s thought is and was eminently public, published in books and journals, proclaimed in speeches and in the classrooms of one of Germany’s more notable universities. To avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, we do not seek to show that Heidegger is a National Socialist or that he introduces Nazism into philosophy as Emanuel Faye and his supporters are wont to claim. We find that Faye’s...

Augustine on Justice: A Reconsideration of City of God, Book 19

ABSTRACTI argue that Augustine’s message in City of God, Book 19, has been consistently misinterpreted and hence a vital part of his argument in City of God has been misunderstood. The received reading of Book 19, as found in the work of Mary Clark, Rowan Williams, John Milbank, Oliver O’Donovan and Robert Dodaro, is that in Book 19 Augustine rejected the possibility of finding social and political justice among pagans. I argue that Augustine reached no such conclusion in Book 19. On the contrary, I find that the only justice that Augustine denied to pagans in Book 19 was justice as righteousness, that is, the justice of worshipping and serving the true God. He found that pagans claimed justice as righteousness for themselves and on this basis claimed that Rome had been a republic. Augustine denied that pagans could ever possess justice as righteousness, and hence denied that pagan Rome had ever been a republic.

Augustine on the beatific vision as ubique totus

AbstractA constant in Augustine's long literary career is his understanding of God's presence as ubique totus, or ‘whole and everywhere’. I will first consider how Augustine came to perceive of the divine presence in this life (here I will look especially at the Confessions); second, how he theologically articulates the nature of the divine presence (here I will draw on Ep. 187), and, finally, how he understands the divine presence in the life to come (and here I will focus on the conclusion of the City of God). I suggest that a fundamental continuity obtains between how Augustine understands seeing God in this life and the next and that this continuity is predicated on his conception of the divine presence as ubique totus.

What is Postsecularism?

What is Postsecularism? Clayton Crockett (bio) Amid the debates about the nature and role of the secular and the question whether we have moved into a post-secular society due to the resurgence of religion, I argue for a specific understanding of postsecularism. In many ways, postsecularism is an analogue to postmodernism. Both terms indicate the limits of Western culture and what can be called liberalism. The concept of postsecularism refers to a breakdown of modern liberalism because modern liberalism relegates "religion" to a specific sphere of private belief. Secularism is an ideology of European modernity. It relegates religion to a private sphere while reserving the public realm for a non-religious civil discourse. An absolute secularism is impossible in practice, but it was imagined that religion could be restricted to private belief so that civic and political discourse could be deemed rational and universal. In John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration, we can see a paradigmatic example of this separation. Locke says, "I regard it as necessary above all to distinguish between the business of civil government and that of religion, and to mark the true bounds between the church and the commonwealth." The business of government is the state, whereas the business of religion is the church. The church is the private sphere of voluntary association and activity within the context of a liberal state. In secularism, religion takes the form of private belief, and it is subtracted from public political activity. In recent decades, scholars have examined the resurgence of non-liberal forms of religion, often under the name of fundamentalism. What is sometimes called the "return of religion" is what José Casanova calls a "deprivatization" of religion. Religion abandons the mask of privacy and emerges on the political scene in non-liberal ways. What philosophers such as Jacques Derrida demonstrate is that the strict opposition between public and private religion, as well as the opposition between the religious and the secular, is untenable—it deconstructs. I call this inability to fully separate religion from secular politics postsecularism. Postsecularism indicates an epistemological distance from the premises of secularism, but its not a rejection of the secular or the triumphalist claim that we are postsecular in the sense of returning to some fully religious sphere without or beyond the secular. The secular is not a foundation, but neither is religion. There is no grounding foundation, which does not mean that there are no grounds for anything, including our thinking and our being. We can undertake a genealogy of the secular, which Talal Asad provides in his important book Formations of the Secular. The secular is of course also a theological term in medieval Christianity, from the Latin saeculum, but it ultimately has a less religious origin. The word secular originally comes from the Etruscan language, where it meant a span of years encompassing the lives of everyone who witnessed a particular significant event. This was about 90-100 years, and it informed the Latin conception of a century. For the later Christian theologian Augustine, the saeculum refers to the time period in which we live, where the "City of God" is entangled with the earthly city of human beings. In later medieval theology, however, secularization comes to refer to "a legal transition from monastic life," as Asad explains. Although Asad does not use the term in this way, the saeculum as period and as transition from monastic to non-monastic life can also be thought in terms of the theology of Joachim of Fiore. In Fiore's eschatological framework, the secular comes to be associated with the third age, the age of the Holy Spirit, which is to follow the age of the Father and the age of the Son. Here the secular is a time of eschatological realization, the hope and the promise of a better, utopian world. Later, however, after the Protestant Reformation, secularization came to refer to "the transfer of ecclesiastical real property to laypersons." Asad shows the continuity between Protestant conceptions of the secular and Enlightenment ones. In modern secularism, the idea of the secular comes to distinguish between true and false religion. True religion is tolerant and able to conform to the...

The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature by Suzanne M. Edwards

Reviewed by: The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature by Suzanne M. Edwards Vickie Larsen Suzanne M. Edwards. The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii, 193. $95.00. Suzanne Edwards's The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature is not about rape, but about having been raped, about living on within the dominant epistemology of the European Middle Ages as a survivor of sexual assault. Edwards's challenging, deeply troubling—and also supremely timely—introduction challenges her readers to acknowledge [End Page 465] how their own investments in condemning rape and in calling for justice may come at the expense of accompanying survivors in their survival. It opens with a passage from City of God, in which Augustine offers theological consolation to the rape victims of invading Visigoth soldiers during the siege of Rome in 410 ce. For Augustine, Edwards tells us, rape is "an extreme bodily experience of dispossession" that "reorganizes embodiment around the knowledge that one has never been as self-possessed as one might have thought." Augustine defends the "moral, ethical and material" integrity of the rape victim and claims that any shame that a survivor might feel results not from guilt, but from "a consciousness of the self as constitutively dispossessed" (7). Regardless of how others might view the victims of 410, Augustine attributes to them a "painful—but spiritually valuable" knowledge of human limitation (8). I read and I rage at Augustine's homage to the survivor, and at Edwards's investment in it, and perhaps even at her willingness to work through it—carefully and disinterestedly—for her readers. In an age (like every other) when people of all gender identities suffer from sexual violence, some of it inside Christian spaces, Augustine's commitment to seeing victims as they live on after rape—rather than simply averting his eyes—is hardly consoling, and the supreme knowledge of "dispossession" that he accords to rape victims—with its implications of a universal powerlessness against predation—stings like salt in a wound. In Chapter 1, Edwards examines Thomas Aquinas's determination in Summa theologiae that suffering rape in obedience to God counts as martyrdom. Edwards patiently untangles Aquinas's "strained" negotiation of the problem that martyrdom must be chosen willingly while rape is, by definition, a violation of the will (23). She uses Aquinas's understanding of fear in rape narratives—fear of the loss of virginity and fear of surviving the separation of the self from the will—to frame her comparison of Ambrose's and Goscelin of St. Bertin's hagiographic retellings of the life of the Virgin of Antioch. In De virginibus, Ambrose narrates the story of the virgin's double bind: a traditional martyrdom is off the table; the virgin must choose between worshipping idols and being sent to work in a brothel. She chooses the brothel in obedience to her god, and in so doing chooses her own rape. Her first client helps her escape, and they both end up properly martyred, but not until she has consented to rape. According to Edwards, Ambrose's version emphasizes the virgin's understanding of rape as martyrdom, her rescue from it [End Page 466] being convenient for readers, but not essential to her own progress toward martyrdom. Goscelin's telling of the same tale in his Liber confortatorius emphasizes instead the virgin's fear of rape and its shameful aftermath. Goscelin's survivor will not so much be dead to the world, martyred through rape, but will live out whatever remains of her life in penitent humiliation as a whore. Edwards closes this chapter by mapping the links between rape and death in the pseudo-hagiographic Life of Christina of Markyate. Christina is not a martyr, but her pursuit of sanctity requires her to live in fear of rape and repeatedly escape from impending sexual assault. Edwards's partnering of Christina's vita with the hagiographic narratives is not entirely satisfying, insomuch as martyrdom by death or rape do not factor into the narrative (Christina valiantly rescues her virginity for her chosen spouse, Jesus). The hagio-graphic narratives might have been more...

Shakespeare and War

How does Shakespeare represent war? Guest editor Patrick Gray reviews scholarship to date on the question, as well as contributions to a special issue of Critical Survey, “Shakespeare and War.” Drawing upon St. Augustine’s City of God, the basis for later just war theory, Gray argues that progressive optimism regarding the perfectibility of what St. Augustine calls the “City of Man” makes it difficult for modern commentators to discern Shakespeare’s own more tragic, Augustinian sense of warfare as a necessary evil, given the fallenness of human nature. Modern misgivings about “honour” also lead to misinterpretation. As Francis Fukuyama points out, present-day liberal democracies tend to follow Hobbes and Locke in attempting to “banish the desire for recognition from politics.” Shakespeare in contrast, like Hegel, as well as latter-day Hegelians such as Fukuyama, Charles Taylor, and Axel Honneth, sees the faculty that Plato calls thymos as an ineradicable and invaluable instrument of statecraft.

Rebuilding the City of God: Locating the Politics of Virtue within the Politics of Sin and Grace

Rebuilding the City of God: Locating the Politics of Virtue within the Politics of Sin and Grace

ST AUGUSTINE AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF VARRO

Abstract: This paper argues that St Augustine's presentation of Varro's Antiquitates rerum divinarum in City of God was pivotal to the latter text's disappearance. It shows how Augustine used the Antiquitates' tripartite theology (poetic, civil, and natural) to destroy Varro's authority on traditional Roman religion. In Augustine's reading, Varro's open criticism of the gods of myth and poetry implied an equal rejection of the civil cult. This left the natural gods of the philosophers, but Augustine derided Varro's attempts at philosophical theology. The result was that, to readers of the City of God, the Antiquitates rerum divinarum appeared as a failure: Varro had been incapable of justifying traditional Roman religion, while lacking the courage to attack it openly. Readers could then turn to the City of God itself as a better guide to the Roman gods, and there was no further need to read or copy the Antiquitates.

어거스틴의 부활사상과 기독교윤리

In the history of the Christianity, the theme of ‘resurrection,’ due to its connection to the death of Jesus Christ on the cross, that is, the revelation of God the Trinity, is understood as the core element of Christian faith. Various ethical viewpoints have been formed regarding the resurrection. To an individual, resurrection is the end-goal of faith but it also carries communal characteristics since it’s related to the advent of the ‘Kingdom of God.’ The author became interested on the theory resurrection by Augustine from the Christian ethics’ standpoint for the following reasons. Firstly, although Augustine didn’t possess imminent eschatological viewpoint, he ultimately viewed resurrection as the end-goal of all believers forming ethical principles allowing one to live a life that befits resurrection. Secondly, various themes covered by Augustine which are related to resurrection are not limited to personal dimensions but extends to form communal principles, providing public theological motif which the modern christian ethics seeks. Thirdly, the theory of revival by Augustine progresses to re-illuminate the God’s created universe and presents outstanding spiritual insight on the ecological civilization that is being destroyed nowadays. Therefore the author will emphasize, through the works of Augustine with ‘The City of God’ at the center, ‘the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the model of resurrection,’ ‘resurrection towards the judgement,’ ‘resurrection as the completion of the faith,’ that demands human’s responsible actions, ‘the resurrection towards the order of creation,’ that values ecosystems, and ‘the sign of the Kingdom of God.’

The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature. Suzanne M. Edwards. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xv+193.

<i>The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature</i>. Suzanne M. Edwards. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xv+193.

“In My End Is My Beginning”

A vertical reading of the Commedia exposes Dante's practice of continually revising his text, such that it looks back on itself as it moves forward. The poet accomplishes this in part through dramatic contrasts and reversals. One way to follow these “repetitions-with-difference” is to observe their relationship with a theme that Dante explores throughout his career: loss. The loss of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova becomes the loss of Florence in Dante's works written in exile. It then becomes the spiritual desolation explored among those in the Inferno who have lost “the good of the intellect.” Looking back from the end of the Commedia, however, reveals that what has been lost is eventually found in a new form. In the beatific “white rose” of Paradise we recall the “dark wood” of the poem's opening; when Beatrice is no longer by the pilgrim's side in the Empyrean we remember the tragic disappearance of Virgil on the top of Mount Purgatory; anticipating the joys of the City of God not only mitigates the pain of Dante's Florentine exile but also gives the poet a foretaste of true citizenship.

Women and the Imago Dei: Gender Ontology in St. Augustine’s Thought

To rebuild gender relations in the church we need to unpack the source of the current complementarian beliefs, which take their origin in the teachings of the church fathers. In this interpretative paper, I will attempt to provide a new reading of St. Augustine’s philosophy regarding women in light of The Trinity and City of God. It is my argument that Augustine has a twofold vision of the Imago Dei in humans. One based on the rational “inner man” —in which women do not participate— and another based on shared humanity. In this view women retain their own and independent part in the image of God and have their own unique and necessary role in earthly affairs. I further compare gender relation to Augustine’s vision of relation between celibacy and married life, as one focuses towards the spiritual, the other towards temporal. Both are equally good in God’s eyes, for both are based on calling and necessity. One is, however, the preferred option and appointed for leadership over the other.

Modernity and Tyranny

ABSTRACTWaller R. Newell in Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror explores how ideas, and the philosophers responsible for them, can aid us in understanding tyranny. In the process, Newell also broaches the possibility that the ideas of these thinkers actually shape succeeding political events. Although the second part, entitled “City of God or City of Man? The Tyrant as Modern State Builder,” has an extensive cast of characters, its fulcrum is the combination of Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine writer, and Henry VIII, the English ruler. Newell raises the question of whether the writer presented the ruler with the blueprint for overturning the rule of the Catholic Church in England. Machiavelli would thus be the teacher of the modernizing tyrant. A reader is left to wonder whether, in Newell's assessment, the articulation of Machiavelli's fundamental insight that the world can and should be remade by the human will does not lead necessarily to ever deepening violations which characterize totalitarian tyranny.

A Study on Spiritual Discipline for Teacher's Personality Formation: Focus on Augustinus' 'City of God'

A Study on Spiritual Discipline for Teacher's Personality Formation: Focus on Augustinus' 'City of God'