INTRODUCTION

This video comes from the School of Life’s youtube channel, which is a great library of clips for C1 and above listeners / readers who enjoy contemporary cultural topics and want to take in more complex language at the same time. The speaker has a UK accent and the pace of delivery is quite brisk.

NB. I don’t own the rights to this video.

TRANSCRIPT

INTRODUCTION

Augustine was a Christian philosopher who lived in the 4th and 5th century A.D., on the fringes of the rapidly declining Roman Empire in the North African town of Hippo
He served as bishop for 35 years, proving (to be) popular and inspirational to his largely uneducated and poor congregation
[0:23] In his last days, a Germanic tribe known as ‘the Vandals’ burnt Hippo to the ground, destroyed the legions, made off with the town’s young women but left Augustine’s cathedral and library entirely untouched out of respect for the elderly philosopher’s achievements
He matters to us non-Christians today because of what he criticized about Rome; its values and its outlook and because Rome has so many things in common with the modern West, especially the United States

PART 1 – ROMANS AND AMERICAN BELIEVE IN EARLTHY HAPPINESS

[0:55] The Romans believed in two things in particular; one: Earthly happiness
They were on the whole an optimistic lot
The builders of the Pont du Gard and the Coliseum had faith in technology, in the power of humans to master themselves and in their ability to control nature and plot for their own happiness and satisfaction
[1:12] Writers like Cicero and Plutarch had a degree of pride, ambition and confidence in the future which, with some revisions, wouldn’t be out of place in modern-day Palo Alto or the pages of Wired
The Romans were keen practitioners of what we would nowadays call ‘self-help’; training their audiences to greater success and effectiveness
In their eyes, the human animal was something eminently open to being perfected

PART 2 – THEY BELIEVE IN A JUST SOCIETY

[1:36] Two: a just social order
For long periods, the Romans trusted that their society was marked by justice; ‘Justitia’
People of ambition and intelligence could make it to the top
The army was trusted to be meritocratic
The capacity to make money was held to reflect both practical ability and also a degree of inner virtue
Therefore showing off one’s wealth was deemed honorable and a point of pride
Fame was considered a wholly respectable ideal
Augustine disagreed furiously with both of these assumptions

PART 3 – THE CITY OF GOD

[2:10] In his masterpiece, The City of God, he dissented each of these two points; that human life could be perfected and that societies were just — in ways that continue to prove relevant to us today
It was Augustine who came up with the idea of original sin
He proposed that all humans not really this or that unfortunate example were crooked, because all of us are unwitting heirs to the sins of Adam
Our sinful nature gives rise to what Augustine called a libido dominandi; a desire to dominate, which is evident in a brutal, blinkered, merciless way we treat others in the world around us
We cannot properly love, for we are constantly undermined by our egoism and our pride
Our powers of reasoning and understanding are fragile in the extreme
Lust haunts our days and nights
We fail to understand ourselves
We chase phantoms
We are beset by anxieties
[3:00] Augustine concluded his assault by chiding all those philosophers who, in his words, have wished with amazing folly to be happy here on Earth, and to achieve bliss by their own efforts

PART 4 – THE UPSIDE OF AUGUSTINE’S DOCTRINE OF ORIGINAL SIN

[3:14] It might sound depressing but it may turn out to be a curious relief to be told that our lives are awry, not by coincidence, but by definition simply because we’re human and because nothing human can ever be made entirely straight
We are creatures fated to intuit virtue and love but never quite being able to secure them for ourselves
Our relationships, careers and countries are necessarily not as we want them to be
It isn’t anything specific we have done; the odds are simply stacked against us from the start
[3:43] Augustinian pessimism takes off some of the pressure we might feel when we slowly come to terms with the imperfect nature of pretty much everything we do and are
We shouldn’t rage or feel that we’ve been persecuted or singled out for undue punishment
It’s simply the human condition; the legacy of what we might as well, even if we don’t believe in August in theology, call ‘original sin’
[4:06] Romans had, in their most ambitious moments, thought themselves to be running a meritocracy; a society where those who got to the top were deemed to have done so on the back of their own virtues
After the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity the philosopher Usivius even proposed that earthly power was God’s instrument for establishing Christianity on Earth, so that the powerful in Rome were now not just privileged but also blessed and righteous in God’s eyes
What arrogant boastful and cruel claims, responded Augustine
There never was, not ever could be, justice in Rome or indeed anywhere else on Earth
God didn’t give good people wealth and power and nor did he necessarily condemn those who lacked them
Augustine distinguished between what he called two cities; the City of Men and the City of God
[4:59] The latter was an ideal of the future; a heavenly paradise where the good would finally dominate
Where power would be properly allied to justice and where virtue would reign
But men could never build such a city alone and should never believe themselves capable of doing so
They were condemned to dwell only in the City of Men, which was a pervasive flawed society, where money could never accurately track virtue
[5:23] In Augustíne’s formulation, true justice has no existence, save in that Republic whose founder and ruler is Christ
Again it may sound bleak but it makes Augustine’s philosophy extremely generous towards failure, poverty and defeat; our own and that of others
It’s not for humans to judge each other by outward markers of success
From this analysis flows a lack of moralism and snobbery
It’s our duty to be skeptical about power and generous towards failure
We don’t need to be Christians to be comforted by both these points
They are the religions’ universal gifts to political philosophy and human psychology
[6:02]They stand as permanent reminders of some of the dangers and cruelties of believing that life can be made perfect for the poverty and obscurity are reliable indicators of vice in a City of Men