Of all the books of The City of God, Book 10 surely comes across to us as among the strangest. It treats the “Platonists,” whom we tend to call the “Neoplatonists,” and especially the thought and writings of Porphyry of Tyre. Most of us know very little about Porphyry and even less about the strange theurgic rites Augustine says he and the Platonists advocated. In his new book, The Universal Way of Salvation in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Thomas Harmon does us a great favor by explaining not only the argument between Augustine and Porphyry in Book 10, but also by explaining the significant and even essential role that the argument must play in our contemporary understanding of the great African saint.
Porphyry lived principally in the third century, A.D. He and his contemporary Plotinus are generally recognized as the most talented of the Neoplatonic philosophers. Porphyry, in particular, was also known for his antipathy toward Christianity. Harmon is especially interested in Porphyry’s use of a distinction going back at least to Plato himself—the distinction between the few and the many. The few, Porphyry explains, are the philosophers; the true philosophers have attained salvation by turning away from sensation and attaining unity with the divine intelligence; the neophyte philosophers have not yet attained such salvific unity, and perhaps never will. In the meantime, they live a life of moral restraint, cultivating moral virtue without having yet attained the One. The many, according to Porphyry, are still completely entwined with sensation. They are ignorant of the true return to God, but they can practice theurgic rituals that will, to some modest extent, guide them toward the divine. The theurgic rites definitely have limitations, but they are still worthwhile for the many. Thus, in Harmon’s interpretation, Porphyry really divides the human race into three groups, each with its own salvation.
Neoplatonism is usually viewed as being apolitical or transpolitical—but at any rate “non-political.” In this way, it is similar to Christianity, which also preaches a transcendence to political concerns and considerations. Harmon’s explication of Porphyry’s teaching on salvation, however, also insists that there is a sense in which Porphyry’s thought is quite political. For the Roman empire, the third century was marked not only by the persecution of Christians, but also from time to time by widespread instability, violence, and lawlessness. Harmon argues that especially during the second century, religious sentiment turned away from paganism, with its panoply of local, almost indigenous gods, and toward more universal themes in religion. The Roman empire did not need local gods but universal or at least much broader religious doctrines. Vast lands and peoples could thereby be better yoked under imperial domination. A number of these more universal religions advanced; among the philosophers it was the “religion” of the Neoplatonists that prospered.
Porphyry’s “religious” philosophy, however, was not truly “universal,” for it still divided human beings into the few and the many, and the few were still divided into the true philosophers and the flailing neophytes. Christianity, however, did not grant differentiated salvations to differentiated groups of human beings, and in this way it was actually a better “political” religion than Neoplatonism. How was Christianity able to avoid the mistakes of the Neoplatonists? How could it reasonably reject Porphyry’s claims? To answer such questions, Harmon turns to Augustine’s critical discussion of Christ as Mediator.
Neoplatonism did not advocate for the complete salvation of the whole human being but only for the salvation of the rational soul. Such salvation, moreover, was only for the philosophers who had truly perfected their rational soul. Lower human types were still aided by following the path of moral virtue or of theurgy, but the distinction between the few and the many, the great and the small, the strong and the weak, extended even into the next life. The Christians had a different view, of course—what Harmon calls, in borrowing a phrase from Augustine himself, “the universal way of salvation” (City of God 10.32). In our time, joining the words “universal” and “salvation” reminds one of controversies surrounding Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Harmon notes the possible ambiguity (p. 11, n. 31). It is easy enough to see, however, that Augustine’s “universal salvation” does not mean that everyone is saved, but rather that real salvation will mean saving the whole or universal human being.
In order to save the whole human being, Augustine says, what is needed will be a Mediator who is fully human and fully divine. The second and central part of The Universal Way of Salvation is devoted to Augustine’s explanation of just why this sort of Mediator is necessary and indeed available through union with Christ Jesus and his sacraments. Whereas the Neoplatonist philosophers asserted that only the soul, and indeed only the rational part of the soul, of a human being would be saved, Christ the Mediator can save all parts of the human being, including the body. After reading Harmon’s analysis of Augustine’s understanding of the function of a Mediator, one grasps immediately the shallowness of those who criticize Augustine on the grounds that his Christianity is too influenced by Porphyrian philosophy’s view of the human body. Indeed, Manicheanism seems also to argue that only soul can be saved, not body. But Augustine’s grasp of “mediation” means that any suggestions—such as we often hear—of Augustine being a Manichean at heart are untenable.
In the third section of his book, Harmon turns to explaining how Augustine and Porphyry disagree about the salvation of an individual human being, and the main text is Confessions, especially Book 7. In the first part of The Universal Way of Salvation, Harmon is relying mainly on Porphyry as his Neoplatonic source; in explaining Confessions 7, he must rely on “the books of the Platonists” more generally. In reading Confessions 7 in light of his thesis about universal salvation, Harmon is able to cast that text in a new light. In particular, the discussion of Augustine’s inability to understand “Mediator” immediately after encountering the Platonic books suddenly becomes much easier to grasp (Confessions 7.18-19).
In the interests of “full disclosure,” I conclude by acknowledging that Thomas Harmon was once an undergraduate student of mine. I can take credit for nothing, however, that has found its way into The Universal Way of Salvation in the Thought of Augustine. What is especially exciting is that Harmon’s book joins a large and growing list of fine monographs on Augustine and politics that have been written recently by young, North American, Anglophone authors. Indeed, we may be witnessing the rise of a whole “school” or “movement” within Augustine studies. Be that as it may, it is surely the case that the study of Augustine and politics is particularly rich in our time.
