A Child's Education

Why is a child's education so important?

Augustine writes:

Virgil certainly is held to be a great poet; in fact he is regarded as the best and the most renowned of all poets, and for that reason he is read by children at an early age--they take great draughts of his poetry into their unformed minds, so that they may not easily forget him, for, as Horace remarks,

New vessels will for long retain the taste

Of what is first poured into them (City of God I.3).

Augustine, Distributism, & Empire

In preparing to teach on on Augustine's City of God I ran across the following passage:

Let them see the possibility that good men really shouldn’t rejoice at the expanding of the empire.[1] … ; and human affairs being thus more happy, all kingdoms would have been small, rejoicing in neighborly concord; and thus there would have been very many kingdoms of nations in the world, as there are very many houses of citizens in a city. Therefore, to carry on war and extend a kingdom over wholly subdued nations seems to bad men to be felicity, to good men necessity…. [Victory] would have surely been the case if, instead of a stone on the capitol,[2] the true King of kings and the Lord of lords would have dwelled there and been known.[3]

Augustine believed that the city of God was the last best hope for the city of man. The Roman Empire was too big for its own good and had gotten to where it was by being bad. Rome did not conquer because it had to wage just wars, but because it worshipped Jupiter. It hurled its lightening bolts around the Mediterranean until they began to short circuit.

The Barbarians had been biding their time and now, a la St. Jerome, the city of man that had taken the world was about to be really taken. Too bad they hadn't worshipped the true king of heaven (at least until lately and even then half-heartedly). Maybe then they would have stayed small and neighborly. Trying to do too much as an individual or a nation only diminishes you. Stay small and beautiful. Empires are for chumps.

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[1] Trans. mine: Videant ergo ne forte non pertineat ad uiros bonos gaudere de regni latitudine. The rest is Dod's trans. unless noted otherwise.

[2] Statue to Zeus/Jupiter.

[3] Trans. mine: Quod profecto haberetur, si non lapis in Capitolio, sed uerus rex regum et dominus dominantium cognosceretur atque coleretur.

God's Permissive Will and Divine Necessity

God's will, according to Luther and Calvin, extends beyond salvation to all things, and it imposes necessity on both. When applied to salvation we are talking about predestination, when talking about everything else we are talking about providence.

Augustine says that "the will of God is the necessity of all things" (On Genesis in the Literal Sense 6, 15, 26, PL 34, 350). Calvin quotes this in support of his and Luther's doctrine that everything, even the fall, happens by divine necessity or by divine decree. This means that from God's perspective nothing could be otherwise than it is, though from our perspective most things are contingent or could go in more than one way.

With regard to permissio, or God's permissive will, Augustine wrote, “Nothing, therefore, happens but by the will of the Omnipotent, He either permitting it to be done, or himself doing it” (Enchiridion 95). So there is a difference between God doing something and permitting something to be done, but both are willed by God and thus necessary. Augustine adds: "His permission is not unwilling, but willing" (Enchiridion 100).

For Augustine, God permitted the fall but it was nonetheless his will and thus happened of necessity. This because God didn't add the gift of perseverance to Adam and Eve. When Calvin and Luther speak of the divine "decree" it is simply another way for them to express that all things, even what God permits, happens by divine necessity.

Being downstream from the via moderna, Luther and Calvin use the terminology of "decree" and "ordination," but they gave it the Augustinian sense of necessity. Luther and to some extent Augustine and Calvin, spoke of God's will as preached and hidden. God's hidden will works all in all and thus imposes necessity. His revealed will expressed in the gospel works our salvation.