20
PARTISAN REVIEW
though hardly the father of our concept of history, is probably
the
spiritual author and certainly the greatest theorist of Christian poli–
tics. What was decisive-apart from the fact that he was still firmly
rooted in the Roman tradition-was that in his
Civitas Dei
he con–
ceived of a hereafter in which men would continue to live in a
community. Thus the fact of the plurality of men, one of the fun–
damental prerequisites of political life, bound human "nature" even
under the conditions of individual immortality, and was not among
the characteristics which this "nature" had acquired after Adam's
fall and which made politics in the mere secular sense a necessity
for the sinful life on earth. Augustine's conviction that some kind
of political life must exist even under conditions of sinlessness and,
indeed, sanctity, he summed up in one sentence:
Socialis est vita
sanctorum,
even the life of the saints is a life together with other men
(
Civ. Dei,
XIX 5).
If
the insight into the perishability of all human creations had
no great relevance for Christian thought and could even in its greatest
thinker be in accord with a conception of politics beyond the secular
realm, it became very troublesome in the modern age when the
secular sphere of human life had emancipated itself from religion.
The separation of religion and politics meant that no matter what
an individual might believe as a member of a church, as a citizen
he acted and behaved on the assumption of human mortality. Hobbes'
fear of hell-fire did not influence in the least his construction
of the
Leviathan
as a mortal god to overawe all men. Politically
speaking, within the secular realm itself secularization meant nothing
more or less than that men once more had become mortals.
If
this
led them to a rediscovery of antiquity, which we call humanism, and
in which Greek and Roman sources spoke again a much more fa–
miliar language corresponding to experiences much more similar to
their own, it certainly did not allow them in practice to mold their
behavior in accordance with either the Greek or the Roman ex–
ample. The ancient trust in the world's being more permanent than
individual men and in political structures as a guarantee of earthly
survival after death did not return, so that the ancient opposition
of a mortal life to a more or less immortal world failed them. Now,
both life and world had become perishable, mortal, and futile.
Today we find it difficult to grasp that this situation of ab-
