Augustine of Hippo
Christian Platonism · Late antiquity, 354–430 CE
The lens
The Augustinian lens reads an event as a contest of loves, asking what a person or society actually loves and in what order. Its vocabulary is the two cities—one built on love of God, the other on love of self extending to contempt of God—the libido dominandi or lust for domination, disordered desire, and peace defined in City of God as the tranquility of order. This lens asks whether public glory conceals the drive to dominate that Augustine names as the engine of empire, and whether justice is present or merely the settled advantage of the strong, since a kingdom without justice is called a band of robbers writ large. From the Confessions it treats the human will as divided against itself, distrusting any politics that promises to perfect what remains restless and prone to self-deception. It reads virtues detached from rightly ordered love as splendid vices. Where other lenses take stated ideals at face value, the Augustinian lens presses beneath them to the object of desire and the will's complicity. It notices the self-congratulation of the earthly city, the substitution of security for justice, and the endless mistaking of the penultimate for the final good.
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