Political analysts tend to assume that societies are shaped solely by long-held beliefs, personal incentives, or institutions. Change the laws, fix the incentives, clarify the norms, and the culture will follow suit. The African church Father St. Augustine assumes the opposite position.
In his magnum opus City of God, he offers a more subtle, and more unsettling, civil diagnosis: political orders are built not on ideas but on loves. Mankind does not first think itself into a way of life. We are emotional creatures, and more often than not we love our way into order. For St. Augustine, the nature of politics is only shortly downstream from desire.
This is why St. Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the earthly city is not, in essence, a theological geography lesson. It is a lesson in moral psychology. The two cities, the city of God and the city of man, are made by two separate loves: the love of God even to the contempt of self, and the love of self even to the contempt of God. These loves are not reducible to mere private preferences. They are by nature socially generative forces. They give rise to institutions, customs, laws, cultural norms, all of which lay the foundation for nations.
St. Augustine’s claim quietly undermines the contemporary hope that political and civil dysfunction can be cured by better legal procedures, heightened regulations, or more purely executed ideologies. If a society is disordered, its loves are disordered. No degree of legal or constitutional engineering can fix this because it is grounded in our human nature and not in our civil institutions.
When disorder persists, the assumption is not that the diagnosis was wrong, but that the remedy was insufficient. However, the answer being posited in our public discourse is always more—more law, more civil engagement, more coercive clarity. The painful hubris of the last two centuries of statecraft is that this panacea has been tried with regularity, always manifesting the same disappointing result.
Much of the first book of City of God is devoted to an extended autopsy of Roman political power. St. Augustine was writing during the rapid decline of the Western Empire, when the might of Roman armor had thoroughly rusted through in the face of barbarian invasions. Despite this, he offered the Roman state its profoundest epitaph by memorializing its moral reasoning.
Roman virtues—courage, discipline, loyalty, self-sacrifice—were all extolled as pertinent and fundamental to the healthy functioning of an organized civilization. Despite its later hedonistic infamy, Rome was not built by vice and material excess alone. St. Augustine notes that fundamentally, Rome’s loves were misdirected. Its virtue was aimed at perpetual military glory rather than justice, political domination rather than a lasting peace.
This distinction might seem trivial, but it matters enormously. A society can function impressively, opulently, even heroically, while still being spiritually malformed. Rome’s political achievements were in fact genuine. No state, then or now, has equaled the scale of Rome’s administrative capacity, or maintained the continuity of its institutions for as many centuries.
Nevertheless, the Romans were animated by amor sui—that is, self-love expanded to the impressive scale of an entire civilization. Rome loved its power, its cultural prestige, its perpetuation across time and continents. And so its peace was always fragile, maintained by force rather than a shared sense of commonwealth. While republican pretensions were propped up to the last days of the empire, it had long ago forgotten the plebeian virtues that were foundational to its identity.
This is why St. Augustine defines a people not by a transient state of nationality or ethnicity, but by what it loves in common. Incidentally, this is perhaps a good working definition of culture. “A people,” he writes, “is an assemblage of rational beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love” (Book XIX, 24). Politics is a collective desire made durable through societal agreement.
The later French sociologist Émile Durkheim also speaks to this when he describes religion as the means by which society comes to worship itself, projecting its collective power into sacred form. This Augustinian framework feels uncannily tailored to our contemporary situation. Our political discourse is frequently saturated with moral language, yet strangely disconnected from the art of any real moral formation. We argue endlessly about rights, social norms, and outcomes, but rarely about the loves that animate our virtues and public life.
The lust to dominate (libido dominandi) is not relegated to a tyrant’s vice or a function of unrestrained political power. It is a psychological impulse present wherever control is substituted for trust, whenever the scaffolding of power replaces shared truth. Societies gripped by this love oscillate between arrogance and existential dread.
St. Augustine refuses to let us externalize this kind of pathology. The problem is not solely their ideology or their corruption. It is that we all belong, simultaneously, to both cities. Even Christians, St. Augustine insists, carry the loves of the earthly city perpetually within themselves. The line between the two cities does not run between parties or nations, but through the human heart.
This is also why St. Augustine is so resistant to all forms of political messianism. If political orders are expressions of love, they cannot purify the loves that produce them. At best, politics can restrain vice and preserve a limited internal peace. Fundamentally, because of its limited competency, it cannot make people good. This is perhaps most visible in the historical attempt at establishing sumptuary laws, wherein the object of the law is used as the vehicle of enforcing public morality.
This does not make St. Augustine politically quietist or removed from the agency of the state. On the contrary, he believes Christians should seek the peace of the earthly city, participate in its sundry institutions, and work for justice wherever and whenever that is possible. But they must do so without confusing proximate goods with ultimate goods. Partisan affiliation is reasonable but never absolute, and should never be mistaken as the source of good. When politics becomes the primary arena of moral meaning, it inevitably absorbs unwarranted religious intensity, and inevitably disappoints.
Much of our contemporary exhaustion stems from precisely this confusion. We ask politics and politicians to give us identity, purpose, morality, and, most confusingly, redemption. When that fails, we oscillate between rage and despair. St. Augustine offers a different interpersonal posture: political engagement without political idolatry. If St. Augustine is right, the most important work of statecraft happens offstage. It takes place in families, schools, churches, and the ordinary habits that punctuate daily life. More importantly, it happens in the slow formation of our natural desires. Our selection of virtues, what we teach people to admire, what we reward, what we mock, what we ritualize: these shape the city long before any legislation does.
St. Augustine’s psychological postulations have proven resistant to any easy categorization. His civil outlook is neither liberal nor conservative in the contemporary American sense. He is neither utopian nor cynical. He abides with a moral realism about the nature of sin, the transgression of the natural moral order, and an optimism about the human opportunity for grace.
He rightfully knows that earthly peace is fragile, but also knows that love, rightly ordered, can sustain a genuine, if imperfect, state of justice. “You are what you love” (City of God, XIV.28; Confessions, XIII.9.10) is a proposition that St. Augustine repeats frequently in his writings. It is not, however, born of a charming sense of sentimentality.
It is a political warning. If we love power, we will build cultural ecosystems of interpersonal domination. If we love comfort, we will sacrifice all things for it, up to and including truth. If we love ourselves above all things, we will call it freedom, and be perplexed when it feels so brittle. City of God is not programmatic. It is not a how-to guide for the construction of some future civilization. It offers something more bracing: a mirror of our perennial political expectations and of our human nature.
Dermot Patrick Curtin, PsyD is an Irish-American psychologist and translator of medieval texts. To date he has translated over seven hundred documents dating between the 5th and 15th centuries. He is the author of several books, including a recent study of the Council of Hatfield (680) held in early medieval England.
