Civilization #27: Augustine's Empire of God

Even though Augustine is not as famous as some other thinkers, he's actually very important because he's actually the intellectual architect of the Catholic Church. In this world, the Catholic Church is the largest organization. It has 1.5 billion members. It's been around for almost 2,000 years. Augustine really is the individual who conceptualized the idea of the Catholic Church. For us to understand what the Catholic Church is and why it's endured for so long, I want to introduce a new idea to you called the end of history.

The end of history

This is a concept that was introduced by an American State Department official named Francis Fukuyama at the end of the Cold War when the Berlin Wall fell. His argument is that history has been a struggle of ideology. We've had paganism. We've had communism. We've had socialism. We had democracy. Through this dialectic, through this constant struggle of ideas, we have now reached the end of history, where liberal consumer democracy is the best idea. Not only is it the best idea, but it's the perfect idea that will allow us to endure for the rest of history. Therefore, it is the end of history.

Of course, we know this idea is wrong. But what's interesting for us is this has been a recurring theme in human history, where every major political leader who's come to power has announced that this is the end of history, that all of history has led to this point where I am now ruler, and from now on we can enjoy paradise on Earth.

Let's look at some examples. The first example is King David. When King David came into power, he sponsored the writing of the Bible as an apology to explain why he's king. We also looked at the story constructed by the Yahwist, how Yahweh, the god, builds the world because he's a poet, because he's lonely. His history is a journey of Yahweh trying to find a good friend that could accompany him for eternity. It turns out eventually he finds David. When he finds David, he anoints the House of David as the permanent rulers of our world. That's the Bible.

But then you have Augustus, who sponsored the writing of the Aeneid. Remember, the Aeneid is really the journey of the Trojan hero Aeneas as he leaves Troy, and he is destined by the gods to found the city of Rome and the Roman Empire. Why does he do this? Because eventually Rome will become the greatest empire on Earth, with Augustus as the first emperor. That's the end of history. Once the Roman Empire is constructed, then peace, eternal peace, is now on Earth.

Then you had Constantine, who was emperor after he fought a brutal civil war to reunite the Roman Empire. Once he rebuilt the Roman Empire, he converted to Christianity. He organized, in 325, the Council of Nicaea, where they agreed to introduce the idea of the godhead. The idea of the godhead marks a major intellectual revolution in human history. It's the beginning of monotheism. It's the idea that God is both everything and nothing, which is also the idea of empire.

There's also a major civil war after Constantine dies. Another Roman Emperor, Theodosius, comes to the throne, and in 380 he issues something called the Edict of Thessalonica, which established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. When he does that, they begin to root out paganism and other religions. At this point, we can also think this is the end of history. We've discovered Christianity, which will make paradise on Earth.

A crisis of faith

The problem, of course, is that in 410 Rome is sacked. This is a problem. This creates something called a crisis of faith. Why? Because a lot of people believed that Rome was sacked by the barbarians, by the Visigoths, precisely because Rome converted to Christianity. Before, Rome was a pagan society, and they believed that by converting to Christianity two things happened.

The first thing that happened was the old gods, Jupiter and the others, became furious at the Romans and were determined to punish the Romans by sending the barbarians. Also, they believed that Christianity is a religion of slaves. It teaches us to be merciful and kind and compassionate, but that's not the way the world works. Now you have a crisis of faith, and the very authority of the Catholic Church is challenged.

At this point, Augustine, who is a bishop of the Catholic Church in Northern Africa, comes up with this theory that establishes the Catholic Church as beyond the world. Other individuals have introduced the idea of the end of history, but what Augustine does is he takes the Catholic Church out of history. Out of history. What does that mean? It means that history is really about mortals battling for power, but the Catholic Church is a representative of God on Earth. Therefore, it will remove itself from history. You guys can battle it out, but we will always be the representative of God on Earth.

To establish this, he writes a book called City of God. He talks about two cities. You have Rome, which is the earthly city. It's a city of power and greed. Then you have a city called Jerusalem, which is the spiritual city. It is the city of God, of spirit, of selflessness, of paradise. The Catholic Church will always be centered in Jerusalem. If you follow the Catholic Church, if you're obedient to God, then your spirit can also enter Jerusalem. Otherwise, you'll always be trapped in Rome.

What he also does that's very important is, by establishing his theory, he solves a major problem for political leaders. Before, David, Augustus, Constantine, whenever they came into power, they faced three major problems.

1. The first is legitimacy. Why are you the king?
2. The second is cultural cohesion. How do you unite the people behind a common ideology?
3. The third problem was cultural differentiation. Why are you different from other people?

What the Catholic Church under Augustine proposes is, “We'll solve all three problems for you. We, the Catholic Church, will give you legitimacy because you are the representative of God on Earth.” That's why, even though in the following few centuries there will always be power shifts, the Catholic Church will always be at the center of these power shifts because they are the ones who are able to provide authority and legitimacy to whoever comes into power, like, for example, Charlemagne.

That's what Augustine is proposing. What I want to look at are some of Augustine's writings to see what is the ideology or doctrine that underlies the Catholic Church. This is important for us because it is Augustine's ideology that will drive European history for the next thousand years. In fact, I will make the argument that it is his ideology that will mark the coming of the Dark Ages in Europe, 500 years when society lacked social innovation and you weren't allowed to criticize authority. That's the argument.

Confessions

We are going to look at two major works of Augustine. The first is Confessions. Confessions is very famous. It's something that most people have heard of. It's really the autobiography of Augustine. In fact, it's considered the first authentic autobiography in the world.

In the story, he talks about his life where he grows up with a pagan father and a Christian mother named Monica. In the beginning, he is a very disobedient young man. He refuses to follow the wishes of his mother and refuses Christianity, and he goes on a long journey of youthful sin. He has a mistress who he doesn't marry. He explores heresies like Neoplatonism and Manichaeism.

But then one day he has what we call a Damascus moment. God speaks to him and says, “Augustine, open the Bible.” He opens the Bible and starts his religious journey. At age 42, Augustine becomes the Bishop of Hippo. From then, he begins to construct the ideology that will underpin the Catholic Church.

For whatever reason, historians think this memoir is authentic, or he's telling the truth. The one thing that you will learn in life is whenever a politician or a powerful individual writes a memoir, it's complete BS. There's nothing authentic or true about it.

We're going to read a bit of Confessions, and this is really the most famous part of Confessions. It's really Augustine's rewriting of the story of the Garden of Eden. This is what he says when he's a young boy:

I wanted to carry out an act of theft and did so, driven by no kind of need other than my inner lack of any sense of, or feeling for, justice.

One thing that he points out over and over again is we are born in sin. We are of sin. We are evil people. That's why the Catholic Church is important because only the Catholic Church can steer us into goodness. If left to our own devices, we can only commit sin, and this starts from the womb. We are born in sin. We are born of sin.

I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was not to enjoy what I sought by stealing, but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong.

Why do we sin? Because we enjoy sinning, because that is our nature. When we steal, it is not because we're hungry or because we need something. It's because we enjoy stealing. It's pure pleasure.

There's a pear tree near a vineyard, laden with fruit, though attractive in neither color nor taste.

Again, this is the retelling of the Garden of Eden, where there's a Tree of Knowledge. Here, there's a pear tree.

To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night, after we had continued our game in the streets. We carried off a huge load of pears.

They stole a huge load of pears from someone. He doesn't tell us who, but it's someone. Then they didn't eat any of the pears. They just gave them to pigs. They just did this because they enjoyed sinning.

Let me make a few comments. First of all, we would think this is just boys having fun. They don't mean any harm by this. They're just playing. They're just being curious. They're just exploring, which is part of human nature. What Augustine is saying is that's exactly the problem. Curiosity can only lead to evil. Exploration can only lead to sin. That's why we commit sin because we think curiosity is a good thing, when in fact it's an evil thing that can only harm others.

The other thing is this is clearly a retelling of the Garden of Eden story, where Adam and Eve eat that fruit. Here, what Augustine is saying is, first of all, Adam and Eve are stealing. “Stealing” is not a word used in the Bible, but Augustine is saying they are stealing. That's the first thing. The second thing is Augustine is saying that the stealing was intentional. They knew what they were doing was wrong, but they did it because it felt good.

This is a radical reconceptualization of the idea of original sin. Remember, Paul introduced the idea of original sin to us. Why did Jesus have to come to redeem us? Because we disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. It was a mistake, and Jesus had to pay ransom for that mistake. That was Paul's argument.

What Augustine is saying is something radically different. He's saying that, first of all, we didn't make a mistake. We are the mistake. We are the ones born to sin. Therefore, we were always disobedient. What else he's saying is this, and this is really important: this happens in about 350. This is about 300 years after Jesus sacrificed himself for us, and he's still sinning. So he is negating the sacrifice of Jesus. Just because Jesus sacrificed himself does not mean we've stopped sinning. In fact, we continue to sin.

This is a radical reconceptualization of the Christian faith. We are born sinners, and we will always sin unless we are taught to obey God. That is our fundamental mission on Earth: to obey God.

City of God and Lucretia

Let's go to the City of God now. Again, the City of God becomes the intellectual blueprint for the building of the Catholic Church. One thing that he talks a lot about in the City of God is that of rape.

What's happening throughout this time, and what was very common, is if a woman were raped out of wedlock, or if a woman were raped by her husband, what they will often do is kill themselves. Why? Because the Christian faith taught them that chastity was very important. If you're the empire, this is a problem for you because you can't have women killing themselves because of rape. Rape happens all the time. If women kill themselves, eventually you're going to have a population implosion. Actually, what Augustine will do is spend a lot of time explaining why rape is not a bad thing.

To do so, he talks about Lucretia. At first, Rome was a monarchy, and the king's son was a sinful person, and he liked to rape women. Lucretia was famous in Rome for her chastity, for her virtue, so he thought it'd be fun to rape her.

After she was raped, she called her husband and her husband's best friend named Lucius Junius Brutus together. She made them swear that they will avenge her dishonoring, and they did. To make sure that they would follow through on this, she took out a knife, and she stabbed herself in the heart, killing herself. This marks the beginning of the Roman Republic. In the eyes of Romans, her death, her suicide, is what gave birth to the Roman Republic. She's honored and considered a hero by the Roman people.

What Augustine will say is no, she's not a hero because she killed herself not for the good of Rome, but for her own vanity, for her own pride, for the fact that she lost face. She was embarrassed. She didn't have the glory of being considered the most chaste and virtuous woman in Rome, and that's why she killed herself. This is pride. This is arrogance. This is ego, which goes against the will of God. Let's look at what he's saying.

“Her killing of herself”—or suicide—“because, although not adulterous, she had suffered an adulterous embrace, was due to the weakness of shame.” The weakness of shame. She died because she felt ashamed.

Not to the high value she set on chastity. She was ashamed of another's foul deed committed on her, even though not with her. As a Roman woman, she was excessively eager for honor.

Pride. That's what killed her. Her pride.

But Christian women do not kill themselves.

If you are a true Christian, you would never kill yourself. Why? Because murder is a worse crime than rape. Also, rape is something that happens in the mind. It's not real.

Christian women do not kill themselves. They have the glory of chastity within them, the testimony of their conscience. They have this in the sight of God.

If you were raped but you did not consent to it, don't worry because God knows, and so God will forgive. But if you kill yourself, that's committing wrong against God.

This argument is really gaslighting, and he does this a lot in his logic. He's really gaslighting. He's making certain points about the nature of humans. First of all, each and every one of us is God's property. We are not free of ourselves. We are God's property. Therefore, when we kill ourselves, we are offending God. That's the first thing.

The second thing that he's saying is we can do no good because we are burdened by our pride and our sin. If we choose to act, we can only do wrong. What he's saying is this: if you are walking in the forest, and you see a young boy drowning in the lake, don't jump in the lake to save him because, one, you might die, and, two, everything is controlled by God. Therefore, everything has an intention. When you jump in and save the boy, you might be interfering in God's plan.

Therefore, the only solution to salvation, how do you make yourself good in the eyes of God? Don't do anything. God knows everything. God has a plan. Just obey the will of God, and the will of God means doing nothing. In fact, doing nothing is the best thing you can do because if you are born of sin, and you're only capable of sin, when you do nothing, you are doing good in the world.

Again, this is gaslighting, but this becomes the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and it begins what we call the Dark Ages because it forces people—and most people want salvation, most people want to be good in the eyes of God—it forces people to be passive and obedient and unable to question and explore.

Standards of man and God

Let's look at another line from the City of God:

Thus, when a man lives by the standard of man and not by the standard of God, he is like the devil.

Think about this. When you choose to follow your nature, you are like the devil. It is only by negating yourself, it is only by denying yourself, that you can be good. If you trust your instincts, if you trust your intuition, if you use your imagination, you are like the devil. This is exactly what he's saying with this sentence.

The other thing that he does is he's very repetitive, so he'll keep on going like this for a very long time. This is all just repetition.

Even an angel should not have lived by the angel's standard, but by God's, so as to stand firm in the truth and speak the truth that comes from God's truth, not the lie that derives from his own falsehood.

Even angels must live by God's standard. Only God has the power to choose. We can choose, but we can only do evil, so we should not choose. The thing about Augustine that's very important for us to understand is he studied rhetoric, and so he's very good at gaslighting, twisting things in order to force your compliance. He says:

When a man lives by the standard of truth, he lives not by his own standard but by God's.

He's just repeating himself. Same sentence, but he just repeats himself over and over. Why is he doing this? Why is he doing this?

Who is his audience?

The one thing I'm curious about, both of the Confessions and the City of God, is that at this point, who is his audience? Who is he writing for?

That's exactly it. Who is his audience? His audience is clearly not for us or ordinary people because at this time most people don't read and write. His audience is actually for the priesthood. His audience is for those individuals who are about to be anointed by the Catholic Church to preach to the layman. As a priest, you are forced to encounter a lot of theological issues.

What Augustine is doing when writing City of God and Confessions is creating a rhetorical manual for the priests to basically gaslight their constituencies. Think of this in many ways as the equivalent of the Confucian classics in China. When you apply to become a bureaucrat in China, you have to take the Confucian examinations. How do you pass examinations? By memorizing this crap.

If you think about it rhetorically, if you think about the underlying theories, it's really the same thing. The emperor is always right. Just do what the emperor wants. In many ways, all it is is a rhetorical manual that priests have to memorize if they are to become anointed by the church. Once you memorize this, then whatever problems you may encounter, you can just recite from this manual.

The main argument is, hey, we're born of sin. Therefore, you can do no good. Even by asking questions, you are exposing the devil in yourself. Even by questioning the church, by asking me this question, you're showing the devil in you. Our responsibility, the only path to salvation in this world, is by fighting the devil within us.

Focus your attention on the devil within you. Ignore the fact that the world is corrupt and evil. Ignore the fact that the landlord is exploiting you. Ignore the fact that the Catholic Church is stealing from you. Ignore that. That doesn't matter. What matters is the internal world in you. Life is a constant struggle against sin because the devil is in you, and you must purge the devil if you are to find salvation in God.

That's the logic of the argument. It's not a sophisticated argument, but it's a clever argument that becomes the basis for the dominance of the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages.

Adam and Eve

What he's going to do, and this is very important, is he's going to analyze the story of Adam and Eve. He's going to explore why this happened. Why did Adam and Eve, in paradise, disobey God? Let's look at this logic.

It was in secret that the first human beings began to be evil, and the result was that they slipped into open disobedience.

What this is saying is, why did they disobey? Because Eve and Adam conspired in secret against God. That's what he's saying here. It was in secret. They conspired. The first human beings, Adam and Eve, began to be evil because they talked to each other. They conspired to disobey God.

For they would not have arrived at the evil act if an evil will had not preceded it.

Why did they do this evil act? Because they themselves were evil. That's important to understand. They were not tricked by the serpent. They were not curious. They were just evil.

For pride is the start of every kind of sin, and what is pride except a longing for a perverse kind of exaltation?

They wanted to become God. The serpent told them that if you ate the fruit, you'd become God. That's what tempted them: the pride.

For it is a perverse kind of exaltation to abandon the basis on which the mind should be firmly fixed, and to become, as it were, based on oneself, and so remain.

What this is saying is pride means we are leaving God and becoming more of ourselves. There are two ways you can go. You can move towards God, which means to obey God, or you can move towards yourself, which is to sin.

This happens when a man is too pleased with himself, and a man is self-complacent when he deserts that unchangeable good in which, rather than in himself, he ought to have found his satisfaction.

Pride. Pride makes us happy, makes us ambitious, but it will blind us from God.

This is voluntary. For if the will had been made unshaken in its love of the higher unchangeable good, which shed on it light to see and kindled in it fire to love, it would not have been diverted from this love to follow its own pleasure.

We abandon God.

And the will would not have been so darkened and chilled in consequence as that the woman believed that the serpent had spoken the truth, the man to put his wife's will above God's commandment.

Here's the problem: the man listened to the woman. Adam was tricked by Eve.

Suppose that this was a venal transaction when he refused to desert his life's companion, even though this refusal was to entail companionship in sin.

Adam was forced to make a decision. Eve had already eaten that fruit, so either Adam could follow God and disavow Eve, or he could follow her in sin. He followed her in sin, and that's why we are doomed.

What doomed Adam? What doomed Adam? It was love. He loved Eve, and that's why he decided that, yes, Eve is doomed, but I love her, so I must doom myself as well. That's why Adam ate the fruit because he could not stand to leave Eve. He was bonded by his love.

What is this telling us? This is telling us that there's only one true love, and that's the love of God, which is obedience to God. Every other love, a love for each other, is a falsehood. It is a lie. It can only lead us to sin and disaster.

Let me ask a question: who else said this? Love can only lead you to disaster. It is a disease. You must deny it. You must recognize it for the disease that it is. Who else said this? Virgil. Virgil in the Aeneid talked about Dido, how Dido fell in love with Aeneas, and Aeneas fell in love with Dido. But then the gods tell Aeneas, “Obey us. Go to Italy so you may found Rome, which is your destiny.” Aeneas, because he is a pious man, abandoned his love and did his duty, so he was honored by the gods.

But Dido became consumed by her love for Aeneas, and so she committed suicide. She destroyed herself. Love will destroy you. Love will blind you. Love is evil. Only obedience is good. Let's continue.

Thus the evil act, the transgression of eating the forbidden fruit, was committed only when those who did it were already evil; that bad fruit could only have come from a bad tree. Further, the badness of the tree came about contrary to nature, because without a fault in the will, which is against nature, it certainly could not have happened. But only a nature created out of nothing could have been distorted by a fault. Consequently, although the will derives its existence, as a nature, from its creation by God, its falling away from its true being is due to its creation out of nothing.

This raises a very important question for us. If it is true that we are born of sin, it is also true that God created us. Is that a contradiction? God is perfect. Why would God create a flawed, sinful person? The answer is this: because God created us out of nothing. We are a creation out of nothing. In other words, we are a failed science experiment. We are a science experiment gone wrong.

God created Adam out of dust, and he created Eve out of Adam's rib, basically. He's creating us out of nothing, and this was an experiment. Because we were created out of nothing, we were born of sin. The only way forward is for us to embrace God, to become more like God by obeying him, and to deny who we are. Because if we were to become more of who we are, if we listened to ourselves, if we loved, if we thought, if we were curious, we move into our nothingness. But the more we obey God, the more we move towards enlightenment and salvation. That's the logic here.

He concludes:

That is why humility is highly prized in the City of God and especially enjoined on the City of God during the time of its pilgrimage in this world; and it receives particular emphasis in the character of Christ, the king of that City. We are also taught by the sacred Scriptures that the fault of exaltation, the contrary of humility, exercises supreme dominion in Christ's adversary, the Devil.

Humility just means self-denial, self-negation, complete obedience. Forget who you are. It doesn't matter. Just obey God, which is the Catholic Church. God really means the Catholic Church.

Pride.

He's creating a dichotomy. In the city of Rome, in the city of Earth, pride triumphs because that's the seat of the devil. In the City of God, humility triumphs because that's the seat of Jesus.

This is assuredly the great difference that sunders the two cities of which we are speaking. The one is a community of devout men, the other a company of the irreligious, and each has its own angels attached to it. In one city, love of God has been given first place; in the other, love of self.

Pride, ego, all this is found in the city of Rome. But in the City of God, the only thing that exists is humility and love of God.

Jesus's role

Jesus is dead, and Jesus didn't really do anything because we're still born of sin. So why did God send Jesus? The answer is to awaken us, to show us that there's something wrong, and we must correct ourselves, to show us the light. But it is we who must walk towards the light.

The Heavenly City

We'll conclude with this passage. This is towards the end of the City of God:

In the Heavenly City, then, there will be freedom of will.

This is really curious because for the entire book he's been talking about how freedom of will is bad because we're born of sin.

It will be one and the same freedom in all, and indivisible in the separate individuals. It will be freed from all evil and filled with all good, enjoying unfailingly the delight of eternal joys, forgetting all offenses, forgetting all punishments.

What's the logic here? The logic is this: when we are on Earth, we are by ourselves. We are separate from God. But in the City of God, we have achieved reunion with God. We will have returned to God. We will be the same as God. God is in us, and we are in God, and therefore we will be incapable of sin. At that point, we will have complete freedom of will because our will is the same as God's.

I know that it's hard. Life sucks on Earth. You're getting exploited by the landlord. You're getting raped by the landlord. You're getting killed by your neighbors, who knows? Life sucks. But just focus on your eternal salvation. Focus on obedience because when you do so, you will ascend to Jerusalem. At that point, you will be one with God, and everything that you suffered on Earth will be forgotten. It will just be endless paradise. You are making a sacrifice so that you may be saved. You're sacrificing yourself so that you may be saved.

This is a very powerful logic because this becomes the logic of many powerful movements throughout human history, including that of communism. Think about the logic here. Communism. What is communism? Communism is we work really hard today to build a socialist paradise, but once we build the socialist paradise, we have complete freedom of will. We will be one and the same. We will be indivisible from each other. We have complete freedom to do what we please. As Marx says, we can fish in the afternoon and read in the evening and discuss politics with our friends whenever. We will achieve paradise.

The power of the City of God not only provides a framework for the Catholic Church to assert dominion over all of Europe, but it becomes the catalyst for revolutionary movements throughout human history, especially communism, but including other movements as well.

This is the very ending of the City of God. Let's look at the ending together.

Yet it will not forget its own liberation, nor be ungrateful to its liberator.

We have escaped this world of evil and of sin, and we are with God, who's our great liberator.

If we remember even its past evils, as far as intellectual knowledge is concerned, it will utterly forget them as far as sense-experience is concerned.

What this means is, yes, we will remember the pain we suffered on Earth, but the pain will mean nothing. We will remember what we experienced, but we will not remember the pain. It will be eternal paradise: no more pain, no more suffering, no more sin.

For the highly trained physician is acquainted with almost all diseases, as far as they can be known in theory, while he's ignorant of most of them in respect of personal experience, since he has not suffered from them.

We will become godlike in our understanding. We will understand why we suffered, and then we will understand suffering means nothing because we are now united with God. That's the logic of the City of God and Augustine.

Augustine's biography

There's a lot of controversy over who he is in his biography. Again, remember, if a biography is written by a politician, it's going to be BS. He tells us that he comes from a pretty normal family. His father's a pagan. His mother Monica is a devout Christian. Through his own hard work, he started to study rhetoric in university. He became a professor of rhetoric. Then, when he was converted, when he saw the light, when God spoke to him, when he had his Damascus moment, he started to study the Bible rigorously. He was spotted for his talent by the church. At 42, he was appointed to become the Bishop of Hippo, which is in Northern Africa. He was in that position until his death.

One thing that Augustine is known for is the fact that he's prolific, which meant that he wrote a lot of books. It's possible he wrote hundreds of thousands of pages, and his two most famous are Confessions and the City of God. Most scholars take his story for what it is. They believe him. One thing that you learn is to always be skeptical of power.

If at age 42 he's appointed the head of the church in this region, what does it tell us? It tells us that he comes from an extremely powerful family, because the way the Catholic Church grew, the way that Christianity grew, is by marrying itself to power. Christianity had a very strict hierarchy, and that enabled it to be co-opted by the power elite. This tells us, the fact that he was appointed bishop, that he comes from an extremely powerful family. It's possible his father was a Roman governor or possibly a general. But this is not a typical, normal, middle-class family. It can't be. That's the first thing.

The second thing is he was prolific, which meant he wrote a lot. There's also another individual who is extremely prolific. Who was that person? Meaning that he wrote a lot, like way too much. This person is Aristotle. The thing that we said about Aristotle is he was a censor, a propagandist for the Macedonian Empire. He was trying to justify the supremacy of Greek civilization. When he wrote, he probably didn't write anything by himself, but he had a team of students around him who wrote everything for him.

You can surmise something similar about Augustine. As bishop, he had hundreds of scribes, hundreds of priests who basically took his theories and turned them into books. That's how he was able to be so prolific. Think of him as a professor, basically, a university professor, a science professor who's in charge of a lab. He doesn't actually do his own work. He has assistants for that. But he's the one directing the research and the writing. You can also see him as a propagandist. But he's clearly a genius. There's no denying he is a genius.

Even though this is all genius, it's only because they're an empire, and they can gaslight their people. The logic is basically like this. The logic is I push you down, and you turn around and say, “Hey, why did you push me down?” I say to you, “I didn't push you down. You slipped.” There's a difference. I can do that because I'm powerful, and you're not. This is really the logic of empire. Augustine is really using the logic of empire, and he's trying to force people to be obedient because obedience leads to salvation.

“Hey, you can disobey me. You can fool around, but this means you'll burn in hell for all eternity. Do you really want to take that chance?” Most people don't. Most people at this time choose to become passive in order to avoid sin, and this will mark the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe.

Arabia

But there are many people who choose to rebel. There are many who believe that exploration, curiosity, intuition, imagination are fundamental to being human. If you refuse to let me be human, then I will go somewhere else. Where do they go? They go east. They go east to two places. The first is the Sassanian Persian Empire.

But another place they go that's very interesting is Arabia. Why do they go to Arabia? Because Arabia is basically a lawless desert. There's no real authority in the desert, and there are lots of Jewish people and Christians who escaped to Arabia in order to practice their faith. One thing that you have learned is that people take their faith very seriously. I'd rather die than not practice my faith.

All these people are going to the desert in order to practice their faith. Why is this important? Because from Arabia will come a new religious movement called Islam. These are the people who will give birth to a revolutionary new religion called Islam that will challenge the authority of the Catholic Church of Augustine.