Rick Santorum's description of President Obama's "phony theology" is by now famous. He immediately defended his choice of words by saying that they applied not to the president's religion but rather to radical environmentalists. Looking at what he said in context, the defense is, basically, sound. That's not surprising. Rick Santorum does not throw around the word "theology" lightly.
More than any other candidate, theology -- particularly the theology of St. Augustine (354-430) -- infuses his message and shapes his worldview. Other commentators have noted this affinity, but they have focused specifically on Augustine and sex, or rather, sexual repression.
Augustine's influence, however, goes beyond the carnal. It's not just about Santorum's odd pronouncements about fornication. It's everywhere. Don't get me wrong. Santorum is no Augustinian scholar, but whether through schooling or churchgoing, his habits of thought reveal fundamentally Augustinian patterns.
Few modern statements sound more like Augustine than this one, taken from an editorial Santorum penned in 2007: "Our Constitution granted unprecedented liberty to the individual. But liberty without virtue devolves into license; and license, into chaos." The diction is John Locke's, but the spirit is pure Augustine.
In the eyes of Augustine and his intellectual heirs, the concept of "liberty" was closely intertwined with free will. It is the classic theological question: If God is omniscient and omnipotent, can human beings truly be called free?
Augustine finessed this problem by changing the terms of debate. Man is free, but there is a difference between man's freedom and God's freedom. No man truly enjoys liberty unless he does what God tells him to do. If he follows his personal inclinations, then he is enslaved to his own fetid desires. The virtuous follow God's will, and their obedience makes them free. Freedom without obedience is sin, and sin is slavery.
Put another way, free will is an offer humanity can't refuse.
What does this mean for a nation of free men and women? If citizens of such a place reject their liberty, rooted in virtue, then it is the duty of government, be it American or Roman, to force freedom upon them.
In the case of Augustine, he advocated aggressive state persecution of heretics. If the heretics refused to convert -- to attend Catholic services -- then the government should, in Augustine's words, "compel them to enter."
Even to Augustine's Christian contemporaries, this was a distasteful idea, but Augustine had a ready defense. He wasn't persecuting heretics. He was saving them -- perhaps even liberating them. Imagine, for comparison, you saw a man at a window inside a burning building and warned him that he needed to escape. If that man refused to believe you and stayed put, then it would be your responsibility to drag him through the window. That is all that Augustine was doing through persecution: liberating sinners from fires whose existence they denied.
To free some people, you must enslave them. Or better still, the only true freedom is to become enserfed to God's will. (Augustine loved paradoxes.)
Freedom, therefore, does not mean "doing whatever you want." It certainly does not imply a right to privacy. If you are not behaving virtuously in your own home, then you are not free.
And with time, your slavery will only grow worse. Birth control and premarital sex are like gateway drugs. As Santorum argued in his legendary man-on-dog interview,
"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does."
Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants hold similar views about the role of government, though I suspect they arrive at them via different cultural and theological byways. (Mainline Protestants are less likely to see the world in this fashion, but Santorum does not care much for them or their ideas.) In any case, many evangelicals find in Sen. Santorum a sympathetic voice for their belief that the state should repress behavior deemed offensive.
Later in life Augustine backed away from his endorsement of state coercion in the name of virtue, perhaps because his main ally against heresy, a man named Marcellinus, got entangled in dirty imperial politics and ended up executed. Even a Christian state, Augustine learned (or at least, I hope he learned) is too imperfect an instrument to enact God's will. Augustine's magnum opus, "The City of God," is a product of this mature period of thought. Not so much a bleak depiction of a universe divided between good and evil, as it is usually described, the book is rather an acknowledgement that this world is hopelessly flawed, the City of Man and the City of God mixed indissolubly together.
Through this tranquil acceptance of humanity's imperfection, Augustine escaped the tyrannical beliefs of his youth. Many of his disciples, however, prefer to stay enslaved to those earlier bad ideas. And we cannot force them to be free.
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Rubinstein get right that true liberty does NOT mean "do whatever you want", but his confused account of Augustinianism obscurs the fact that this idea did NOT come from Augustine, nor from his understanding of the paradox of human freedom and divine omnipotence.
Why, his own Locke citation hints at this failure of his, since Locke was no Augustinian.
The truth is that NONE of our Founding Fathers believed that 'liberty' means what most people carelessly assume today. They were instead far closer to Montesquieu, who admitted quite a different definition: political liberty, he said, was a word that has been used to mean many things. But he used it to mean the freedom to do not whatever you wish, but what was right.
For that matter, nor is it fair to Augustine to take what he said during his long and desperate fight with the Donatists as a complete, final expression of his beliefs about individual liberty or the role of the state dealing with Church issues.
I do would disagree though.
Augustine was just one of the many great Christian intellectuals opposing freedom of speech. Things got a lot worse during the Middle Ages, when the Church burned a LOT of books, sometimes also books written by great Christian intellectuals, just because they decided that the theology it contained wasn't corresponding to what they preferred. Until it became even more worse during the Inquisition. But does this have something to do with Rick Santorum?
Imho, no. Santorum NEVER questioned that part of the first amendment that has to do with freedom of expression. So this isn't an Augustinian battle against heretics. What Santorum doesn't accept is the other part of the first amendment: freedom of religion. He thinks that the government should force its citizens to respect certain religious prescriptions. I can be wrong, but I don't remember having ever read something like that in one of Augustine's books (but I didn't read all his books, of course).
Santorum for instance thinks that it's WRONG to allow an employee of a company who's CEO is a Catholic to make up her mind for herself and to decide whether to use contraception or not. The law should force such employees, no matter what their religion is, not to shut up and hide their religion, but to refuse insurance for contraception, EVEN when they aren't Catholics at all.
By doing so, imo Santorum is simply denying the very idea of free will. For Catholics, every human has to try to avoid evil and do good (according to what Catholics think is evil and good, of course), and IF you succeed to lead a 'good' life, then God will eternally reward you, at the end of times, if not you'll be eternally punished. If you take away people's liberty to chose and basically already punish them TODAY for not respecting certain Catholic dogmas, the whole idea of hell and personal responsibility becomes absurd.
Conclusion: imho he's not an Augustinian at all (at least not on this point). He's simply being inconsistent. Christianity does NOT have a set of LAWS, as Judaism and Islam have, Christians only have moral prescriptions, and only God punishes, certainly not a human government.
To force someone to convert to Christianity is something very different than forcing him to respect Christian dogmas. Banning heretics means trying to limit different interpretations of the Bible. Imposing a "virtuous" life by law means trying to bypass free will. Imo both are two very different things. Yes, virtue for Augustine means obeying to God's commands. But it's still up to each and every human to decide to obey or not. The one doesn't contradict the other, imo.
Augustine himself has a very interesting theory of the interpretation of Scripture, where literal interpretations are important, but certainly NOT the only way man should read the Bible, on the contrary, the more you are educated, the more you should look for a second, hidden sense, that isn't literalist at all, and more essential. To Augustine, only people who didn't have any education at all should believe in the letter of the Bible. The rest SHOULD go beyond ... .
Fixed that for ya. The trust in religious authorities rather than science or worse, a democratic mob, distinctly refutes the Age of Enlightenment.
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg
"Imagine, for comparison, you saw a man at a window inside a burning building and warned him that he needed to escape. If that man refused to believe you and stayed put, then it would be your responsibility to drag him through the window." But what if the house fire was all in your own imagination?
I can't believe that grown-up people believe this crap.
I'd agree with RIck that it does undermine the fabric of our society. However, I'd caveat that by saying in a free society, you have to permit such activity and independence of thought. As a side note on that, his reference to bigamy and polygamy? As long as they are not getting benefits (tax dependents, etc), I think that this kind of activity simply happens. Likewise with adultery, and consensual adult incest. There is a public interest from a genetic perspective to not have children in that last point....
Back to Augustine, I would turn the argument thusly:
It is the classic theological question: If God is omniscient and omnipotent, can human beings truly be called free? Instead, Since human beings are free, can God be omniscient and omnipotent? And with that view, I'd argue that He probably isn't both (the more likely would be prescient with some ability to affect change).
'Changing the terms of debate' like the three slogans of the Party in 1984 "WAR IS PEACE," "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY," "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."
Humans do not have to freedom not to be expressions of the Cause of all that is. Within that expression choices are made and each and every choice has consequences and this develops every soul as a unique soul.
Ask yourselves, suppose this Cause made every soul perfect with perfect awareness. What would that soul act like, but more important be like? Of course it would act and be just like God. That would not be creation but duplication. Can infinite duplicate itself? Of course the answer is no.
As Aurobindo stated when Oneness became many ignorance was born. This ignorance meaning unawareness is a necessity for creation to occur. Free will is not what the religions teach, far better to state choices within boundaries. Those boundaries are that very ignorance that Aurobindo taught.
We are not robots and we do have choices but always we must express ourselves; we do not have the choice or freedom not to express. To even suggest that man has somehow fallen from perfection or grace is always making a God in man’s image. Always.
Find the meaning and purpose of ignorance, meaning unawareness and a whole new reality will be revealed in one’s view of reality.