Saturday, January 9, 2010

St Augustine Speaks to the American Republic

Spengler interacts with a piece that former Holy See Envoy and Harvard Learned Hand Prof Mary Ann Glendon’s wrote.

See Cicero vs. Augustine on the Republic. He talks about St Augustine and I thought this was a interesting observation made by St Aug among others he mentions.

Augustine [Book XIX, Chapter 23) makes the more unsettling claim that without faith in the true God, there can be neither republic nor people:

God rules the obedient city according to His grace, so that it sacrifices to none but Him, and whereby, in all the citizens of this obedient city, the soul consequently rules the body and reason the vices in the rightful order, so that, as the individual just man, so also the community and people of the just, live by faith, which works by love, that love whereby man loves God as He ought to be loved, and his neighbor as himself - there, I say, there is not an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and by a community of interests. But if there is not this, there is not a people, if our definition be true, and therefore there is no republic; for where there is no people there can be no republic .

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