About this episode
Veronica Roberts Ogle teaches at Villanova and wrote Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God. She joins James Spencer for the third episode in the faith and politics series.
She begins with why the book exists. Rome was sacked in 410, the first breach of the city's walls in centuries, and Romans wanted to know whether Christianity had cost them the protection of the old gods — while Christians, riding the high of a converted emperor, were asking why their God hadn't defended them either. Augustine's answer took thirteen years and twenty-two books.
Ogle explains the two cities as loves rather than places: one formed by God's love carried as far as contempt of self, the other by self-love carried as far as contempt of God. She unpacks what "contempt of self" does and doesn't mean, and pushes back on reading the ordo amoris as a ranked list — everything is loved in God, not after God.
The conversation turns to what this means for political life: why no political community has an eschatological end, why Augustine is no optimist about politics, and why he thought a judge should see himself as the woman caught in adultery.
Chapters:
00:00 Introductions, and finding Augustine
04:01 The sack of Rome and why City of God got written
09:19 Nations can be healthier or sicker — but not transformed
13:54 Two cities, two loves
17:06 What "contempt of self" actually means
17:38 Ordered loves: not a ranked list
22:18 Political community and the peace it can reach
28:11 Is the church the same as the city of God?
34:41 What political participation actually is
38:39 Two kinds of father, two kinds of household
43:32 Augustine's letters to Christian judges
45:42 The loaf of bread: need and proximity
48:34 Compassion at a distance, and what we can actually do
53:25 Where to start reading Augustine
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