Yesterday I finished Habermas’s second chapter on Augustine, and yes, the Bishop of Hippo set up everything you say above - authorized interpreters, right belief, etc. His theological work extended in time beyond the sacking of Rome by Alaric the Goth (410), so organizing secular power, civil defense, enforcement of heresy laws, etc. was not far from his mind. That said, though, his rationale for the theoretical synthesis he came up with had some very interesting echos centuries later.
This sentence here from Habermas about Augustine really got my head spinning in all sorts of directions: “Just as the consciousness of sin provides a key to subjectivity, so the extension of the history of salvation into a theology of history lays the foundation for a philosophical self-understanding of a present experienced as crisis-prone”. Metacrisis, much? Habermas illustrates how Kant and Hegel, among others, cribbed off of Augustine in various ways, so the structure of consciousness described here is consumed currently in post-metaphysical, demythologized manner. (Sin? God no! Shadow work - that’s the proper word for sophisticated discourse!)
Augustine is arguing with pagan philosophers to prove Christianity is better - indeed, that Christianity is even a better philosophy. (For a current analogy, see Hall, Jordan, top of this thread). The pagan philosophy of history, through, was not especially what any of us might recognize as historical. Neither Plato nor Aristotle nor their many schools and followers thought of the flow of pragmatic events as much worth notice. For the pagans, reality is structured in cycles, like movements in the heavens. Minds oriented toward Ideas or the One cast their gaze in that direction, not at grubby kings and battles here below. The sense that pragmatic events MATTER is thoroughly biblical. If history is not salvation history, it’s really not history in the sense that gets people all worked up about stages and spirals and dialectics and so. Only sinners in the hands of an angry God care much anything about a “metacrisis”.
So what, I’m Jordon Hall lite now? Let’s not jump to too many conclusions! I’m reading all this through Habermas, because, post-metaphysical is indeed how I roll. The history of Christian missionary work, for example, speaks volumes. The preachers came to “save” indigenous peoples the world over from the sin of Adam the indigenous themselves had never imagined. My sense is that indigenous peoples - on the level of consciousness - were in fact “without sin”. Lots of raiding, slaving, murder of course, but not any idea of falling short of some spiritual covenant. Salvation religions, in general, are here to save the “lost”. Participants in indigenous cultures were not especially “lost”. They knew who they were. Their dances and stories and rites of passages told them all that. They only became “lost” after conquest or disease or enslavement or wave upon wave of white settlement took it all away from then. Then they were properly lost, that is, people with a problematized sense of self. Lots of destroying the village to “save” the village in the history of that missionary work!
Today, we don’t much need mythology about the Garden to problematize the self. Most of us are pretty problematized already. My own very post-metaphysical “sense of sin” resides mostly in the acute awareness that there are all sorts of things I very much do not know, not all of my actions in life worked out well, and that which I might wish to achieve is not always so readily achieved. I don’t need a mythological angry judge over my head to remind me there is always room for improvement. Then again, were it not for generations of prior forebears who visualized that very angry judge in rather literal ways, would “improvement” even be on my agenda? Perhaps not. Had the pagans won the argument back in the day, we could all just be peeling grapes just now and fiddling while Rome burns. Being very Stoic about it all, of course.
