Nietzsche’s madman announces the death of God in The Gay Science.  By this, Nietzsche intended a sociological claim as much as, if not more than, a metaphysical one. The point of the madman’s discourse is not that God doesn’t exist but that people no longer believe in God and that the cultural consequences of this unbelief have not been fully appreciated. Centuries prior to this, Machiavelli’s work introduced an understanding of politics that can be described, analogically, as announcing the death of the city of God.

There is no documentary evidence that Machiavelli read Augustine, although many scholars admit that there is a strong likelihood that he did or was at least familiar with Augustinian political thought. The unclarity on this issue is fitting, since it reflects a more philosophically substantive lack of clarity on the relationship between Machiavelli’s doctrines and those of Augustine. The first point to make here is that there is an obvious and important sense in which Machiavelli’s positions appear as the antithesis to Augustine’s. Machiavelli’s political philosophy strikes many as a decisive choice for the city of man over and against the city of God. And so, things seem clear. But a fog rolls over this clarity when we contrast their view of politics with that of representative ancient philosophers, such as Plato or Aristotle, and discover the proximity of Machiavellianism to Augustinianism.

For the ancient tradition, politics was understood as the highest science, since it was concerned with creating the material conditions necessary for living the best possible life. For Aristotle, man is by nature a political animal; the city is, as he argues in The Politics, the natural habitat for human beings (Politics 1253a). He notes in the Metaphysics that a minimum degree of peace and security is a precondition for philosophical reflection (Metaphysics 982b). While it was well known that politics at its worst could be Thucydidean mess, the ancient tradition nevertheless understood politics to be aimed at something higher.

This is where the proximity of Augustine and Machiavelli becomes apparent. Neither Augustine nor Machiavelli presents the city as natural in the classical sense. For Augustine, cities are the fruit of Cain’s murder; for Machiavelli, living in cities is so contrary to nature that it happens only by accident and is preserved only by violence. Likewise, both disagree with the view that the political per se is ordered towards anything higher. It just is a Thucydidean mess of power struggle, betrayal and vice.

We see this clearly in Augustine’s deconstruction of Roman history in the early book of The City of God. Later, in the same text, Augustine turns his attention towards the city of God as something higher than politics and, in a certain way, heteronomous to earthly politics. The city of God loves God rather than itself, and in this way turns towards something radically exterior. The city of man is turned inwards, loving only itself. This inward turn creates a kind of closed system, an endless cycle of vice and struggle that will occasionally – almost despite itself – produce something like peace and security. This cycle is only interrupted when the city of God breaks in as a kind of heteronomous force. Political life in the city of man is, in general, a sordid affair and at best can only dimly intimate the glory of the city of God. Augustinian political theory, in its various guises ranging, typically asserts the priority of things divine over things political, and a properly ordered political system preserves the hierarchical ranking of the divine (and often its representatives) over the political.

Machiavelli’s view is much closer to Augustine than that of the ancients. For him as well as the sainted bishop, political life is inseparable from the lust for domination, for the desire to seize il stato. His principle disagreement with Augustine, as far as the city of man is concerned, is that he thinks one can manage this strife in such a way that peace is secured and the people can benefit. This peace and security are not seen as a precondition to metaphysics or an intimation of the peace of God that will someday pass away.

And thus, Machiavelli is often described (by Augustinians at least) as choosing the city of man over the city of God. But this is misleading, for what Machiavelli really does is to deny the existence of two cities altogether. There is only one city: the city of God is only an imagined principality. Machiavelli’s world is eternal; it does not anticipate the city of God; in fact, he reduces the city of God to a ruse of the city of man. Religion is, at best, a part of the educazione of citizens; its doctrines are understood only in terms of their effect on political life. To be sure, in doing so he departs far from the metaphysical theology of Augustine, but he remains closer to Augustine than to the ancients, offering an Augustinian politics without salvation.

To the extent that Machiavelli’s work inaugurated modern political thought, it bears a complicated relationship to Augustine. Violating and rejecting the principles of Augustine’s theology, Machiavelli nevertheless carries with him the effects of Augustine’s undermining of ancient political philosophy. It is not simply a rejection of Augustinianism, as sometimes characterized, but an inversion. Augustine saw the political as a theological problem, as something in need of theological interpretation; Machiavelli – and modern thought in his wake – instead sees theology as a political problem. The question changes from “how does Christian theology make sense of political life” to “how does political thinking manage religious belief.”  Machiavelli realizes that people still believe in God, but his political thought removes theology from its rarified place in the firmament of sciences and reinterprets it as a part of civic educazione.