Questions Does history have a direction?History is the story of two cities, born of two loves

Does history have a direction?A divine plan

History is the story of two cities, born of two loves

The two cities

Augustine of Hippo 354 · 430Believe to understand: God in the innermost self.

What it claims

History has a meaning, willed by God, but it is not read in the fortunes of empires: it is played out between the two loves and will be fully visible only at the end.

Why

Two loves build two cities mixed together here below; God rules the course of kingdoms by an order only he knows.

The same idea through history

Augustine of Hippo420The version presented here. It takes up biblical themes (Babylon and Jerusalem, Cain and Abel) and gives Christianity its first great universal history. Bossuet, eleven centuries later, will read the empires in a more triumphal way (see his argument).

In short

"History is the story of two cities, born of two loves" is an argument by Augustine of Hippo (The City of God, XIV, 28; I, 35; IV, 33; V, 15 (413-426), 420) on the question "Does history have a direction?" (answer: a divine plan). Its claim: History has a meaning, willed by God, but it is not read in the fortunes of empires: it is played out between the two loves and will be fully visible only at the end. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 4 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The City of God, XIV, 28; I, 35; IV, 33; V, 15 (413-426)

Valid with an implicit premise

In 410 Rome is taken and sacked by the Goths. Pagans blame the Christians: the old gods, no longer worshipped, would have abandoned the city. Augustine answers with an immense book. His idea: human history is not first the story of empires but of two loves. Love of self, to the contempt of God, builds the earthly city; love of God, to the contempt of self, builds the heavenly city. They are mixed together in this world and will be separated only at the end. God leads the whole, but his plan cannot be read in the success or misfortune of kingdoms: he gives them to the good and the wicked alike.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where people love either themselves or God, kingdoms rise and fall, and nothing directs the whole: a true history, but without a willed meaning.

Valid with P4. P4 is the bridge between a description (two mixed cities, kingdoms given by God) and the conclusion (history has a meaning). Without P4, one could grant that people divide between two loves without concluding that a design governs them. P3 is also the hardest premise to test: the order is called "hidden", so no observation can confirm or contradict it.

Analogy. A play watched from the stalls: the audience sees only the scenes, the actors' triumphs and falls. The author knows how the last act will light up everything. For Augustine we are in the theatre, in the middle of the play, and the meaning of earlier acts will appear only at the end.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Voltaire 1756 · attacks premise 3

If a good God rules the course of the world, how do we explain the Lisbon earthquake and its thousands of victims? One cannot say the victims were paying for their crimes: what fault did the children crushed on their mothers' breasts commit? A "plan" that passes through such suffering justifies nothing.

Augustin replies

see the argument

Augustin What Augustine wrote about the sack of Rome (around 413, long before Voltaire)

Augustine treats the same question about the sack of Rome: God makes his sun rise on the good and on the wicked. The trials of this world strike both; what distinguishes them is what they make of them: God's patience invites the wicked to repent, trial teaches the good patience.

The debate goes on (our summary) This reply does not say why innocent children suffer: that is the point Voltaire presses. Augustine treats evil elsewhere as an absence of good, neither willed nor created by God (see his argument on evil). Defenders of Providence have appealed since Leibniz to the "best of all possible worlds". Voltaire answers that this is only a phrase in the face of real suffering. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: can a divine design be consistent with innocent suffering that no fault explains? Defenders answer with human freedom, the order of the whole or eternal life; their opponents find these answers untestable. Open point.

Karl Popper 1945 · attacks premise 3

Seeing God as the author of the play performed on the stage of history is a form of historicism. There is no history of mankind, only many histories. The one raised to the rank of world history is the history of political power, which is largely a history of crime and mass murder: looking for a plan in it amounts to worshipping power. History has no meaning to discover; we can give it one by our choices.

Augustin replies

see the argument

Augustin What Augustine wrote, long before Popper

Augustine precisely refuses to read a judgement of God into success: God gives earthly kingdoms to good and wicked alike, not by chance, but according to an order of times hidden from men and known to him alone.

The debate goes on (our summary) So Augustine too refuses to see success as a sign from God, which brings him partly close to Popper. The disagreement remains on the substance: for Augustine an order willed by God exists even if hidden; for Popper one can speak of a meaning of history only if we give it one. Defenders answer that faith is not judged like a scientific theory. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: does history have a meaning given in advance, or only the one people give it? Believers say faith belongs to another order than science; Popper judges that looking for a plan in history turns us away from our responsibility. Open point.

Polybius 150 BC · attacks premise 3

Rome's rise is explained by the form of her constitution, which mixes kingship, aristocracy and democracy. Rome grew through natural causes, and through natural causes she will decline: the rise and fall of states can be understood without appealing to a hidden order.

Augustin replies

see the argument

Augustin What Augustine wrote about Roman virtues

Augustine does not deny the Romans' virtues: they despised private interests for the public good, resisted avarice, advised their country with a free spirit. He sees in them the means by which they reached honours and glory, and says God gave them that glory as a reward: they have received their reward.

The debate goes on (our summary) Augustine adds the divine cause to the natural one without withdrawing the latter. From Polybius's point of view, the first adds nothing to the explanation. Defenders of Providence answer that God acts through secondary causes, and that explaining the mechanism does not exclude a meaning. Their opponents answer that this meaning then adds nothing to the history we can observe. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: is a meaning added to natural causes one more explanation, or only a way of seeing the same history? Open question, found again with Bossuet, Hegel and their critics.

Hegel 1820 · attacks premise 3

To say that Providence has a plan, but that this plan is unknowable and inconceivable to us, leaves the idea empty. A Providence whose design nobody can show explains nothing of history: reason must be able to know the meaning of history before one has the right to say it has one.

a defender replies

see the argument

No reply possible: objection raised in 1820, after the author's death (430).

Karl Löwith defender of the argument · 1949

Summary: Löwith argues that, for Augustine, the meaning of history cannot be read in events: it is a matter of faith, visible only to the eyes of faith, in expectation of a final triumph beyond historical time. He holds that Hegel, by contrast, secularises Providence by claiming to decipher it in history.

Hans Blumenberg 1966

Summary: Blumenberg answers Löwith that speaking of "secularisation" assumes Christianity held a content that the Moderns wrongly took over. In his view, the modern idea of history rather occupied a place that Christian eschatology had left open ("reoccupation"): the modern age is legitimate on its own terms.

The debate goes on (our summary) Hegel aims at those who speak of Providence while declaring its plan unknowable, which well describes Augustine's position on the "hidden" order. Hegel holds on the contrary that reason can read this plan in history: freedom realised through the passions (see his argument). This reading of history is itself contested: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Popper criticised it. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: must a meaning of history be knowable to count as a meaning? Hegel says yes. Löwith (1949) defends the Augustinian position: the meaning is a matter of faith, and claiming to read it in events amounts to a secularised theology. Blumenberg (1966) disputes this reading of modernity. Open point.

What today's voices say

Defend it

Bishop Robert BarronHe turns to Augustine's City of God: the Church is a little ark on the roiled ocean of human history, never simply the City of God, since corruption runs through the institution too.