The Age of Division Monastic reformers of Cluny and elsewhere were therefore predisposed to look no further than the West for answers to the problem of the proprietary system.
An Augustinian Solution on Augustine of Hippo (d. 430). Like the reformers, this greatest of the Latin fathers had lived in a time of social and political disorder: Rome had fallen to the barbarians, and North Africa, where he was bishop, was being overrun as well. His greatest work, The City of God, was composed in response to this catastrophe. It was an effort to make sense of a world that may have been nominally Christian but showed little evidence of the kingdom of heaven within it. The City of God was not the first reflection on Christian society. A century earlier, an Eastern bishop named Eusebius had written works celebrating the results of Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. The Church, having long suffered political persecution, now included in her membership the very ruler of Rome. This development amplified an optimism already exhibited in the Christian subculture that had coexisted with pagandom. For Eusebius, the time had come for the emperor to contribute to the Church’s sacramental ministry and bring the eschatological kingdom of heaven into this world. Christian statecraft, in his view, enabled men “to anticipate even here the commencement of [that] future existence.”17 In contrast, The City of God asserted that there exists a fundamental incompatibility of heaven with earth. Paradise, understood as the experience of eschatological peace “even here” in the world (to paraphrase Eusebius), is therefore largely unattainable. “The Supreme Good of the City of God,” Augustine wrote, A ND HER E, INEV ITA BLY, THEY SEIZED
is everlasting and perfect peace, which is not the peace through which men pass in their mortality, in their journey from birth to death, but that peace 17 Eusebius, Oration in Praise of Constantine, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, edited by Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1887), 581–610.
36 Copyright ©2020 by John Strickland. All Rights Reserved. Published by Ancient Faith Publishing
