Between 410-412 AD, Augustine began the City of God, a work that would consume his later life. For years as a bishop, Augustine had been primarily concerned with the care of those souls in his charge at his church in Hippo as well as other inter-Christian conflicts. Nonetheless, Augustine found himself reentering the high Roman cultural circles to defend the need for virtuous humility rooted in the truth and true hope in the love of Jesus Christ. In her recent book entitled Pride, Politics, and Humility in Augustine’s City of God, Mary M. Keys invites her readers to accompany her as she walks through Augustine’s City of God. She successfully shows the way in which Augustine defends the virtue of humility in order to illustrate what a just society truly needs to love each other. Keys writes that the City of God is a book which engages “our human condition in ways that prompt readers to return to it in every era” (1). A daunting task was given to Augustine. He had to balance different and competing priorities of an audience that at least was open to Christianity but deeply invested in the Roman cultural tradition. Nonetheless, as Keys demonstrates, Augustine sought to bring his readers from death into new life by means of a rational defense of humility.
Augustine did not just wish to encourage his Roman readers to humility; he desired to expose them to counterfeits and understand their true dignity as human beings. According to Augustine, true humility leads a person to true life and being, because it acknowledges its dependence on the need of the hope of the unconditional love of an all-powerful God. False humility, which is really a form of excessive pride, actually relies on one’s own efforts to establish a relationship with the divine, but masks itself as true virtue, by insisting that human beings need some kind of mediation to submit to the divine (78). Within the City of God, Augustine is in deep dialogue with the Neo-Platonists, since he considers them the best philosophers which Rome can offer its people. Nonetheless, Augustine shows that Neo-Platonists like Porphyry and Apuleius insist worship must be offered to daemons or human beings rather than just God, and for this reason, it is natural for them to put on this false sense of humility. Their pride becomes their only medicine for preventing them from giving into despair. Without a sense of an all-powerful God, they rationally conclude that they must reach God by their own efforts. As Keys rightly notes concerning Augustine’s critique: “Perhaps it is an effort to combat eschatological despair that humans so readily craft divinities for themselves, in a last spirited resistance to loneliness, insignificance, and death” (80).
In the first ten books of the City of God, Augustine seeks to argue rationally against those cultured Romans who would not only denounce humility, but also espouse a false notion of it. Keys illustrates that Augustine remains a cultured Roman man. Nonetheless, she also shows that he was a Christian bishop who sought to bind up those wounded by a sense of hopelessness, even if they did not necessarily become disciples of Christ. When Augustine begins the second half of the City of God, he is discussing the origins and the ends of the heavenly and earthly cities and offers the metaphysics of humility and pride. From Keys’s perspective, Augustine believes that “humility reflects a rightly ordered love of one’s being and excellence, for the glory of God and in communion with one’s fellow creatures” (111). God as creator wishes that human life flourishes both in terms of soul and body. Only by recognizing our dependance on God and one another does it become possible for human beings to be truly alive; in other words, we need humility in order to be human. When human beings deny their weakness and need for one another, they are not only prideful according to Augustine, but proceed towards their own disintegration, that is to say, death. Augustine shows that the Christian faith is different because it presents a more coherent and more hopeful view of human life by acknowledging that human life is rooted in weakness. Keys aptly calls her sixth chapter “The City of God XIII-XIV: Being-toward-Life, Being-toward-Death.” Augustine desires to bring home to his Roman readers the evil nature of death by showing how pride destroys the human being.
Due to his compassion for his audience, Augustine concludes the City of God by offering the meaning of humanity’s summum bonum: sharing in love of Christ which he humbly offers to humanity. Although one might think God is distant and remains cold, Augustine emphasizes Christ’s humility in taking on human flesh and raising the human body to its proper dignity. It is very difficult for human beings to recognize the power and strength of the virtue of Christ’s humility due to pride and the belief in their own self-sufficiency. “We might have despaired, thinking your Word remote from any conjunction with humankind,” Augustine writes in Confessions, “had he not become flesh and made his dwelling among us” (Conf.X.43.69; tr. Maria Boulding). As Keys notes, however, the virtues of humble individuals “open the soul to faith and hope and to the imperfect yet real joy humans can experience in temporal existence” (206). In the last book of the City of God, Augustine describes how Christ glorifies the body, because he became incarnate. Here, as Augustine enters into his imagination, he invites those readers who are formed by philosophy to throw off their pride and recognize where their true hope lies through humility (230-231). By emphasizing that the body will be glorified and become humble to the soul, Augustine indicates that Christ is the only one who can fill the human desire for unconditional love, since he took on flesh so that human beings could be in fellowship with him.
In summation, Augustine immerses himself once again in his culture to show that humility, which recognizes dependence on God and the equality of human beings, is a necessary and foundational virtue for a society that can flourish in a real and human way. As Keys emphasizes, Augustine sees a people wounded. In this way, Mary Keys provides a great service in advancing our understanding of Augustine, because she shows how Augustine defends the virtue of humility by responding to the culture that he ultimately tries to hope in and to love through the power of the Holy Spirit.
