The Perjured City

At once a compendious expropriation of enormous diversity and a brisk narrative, this work seeks to "minimally circumscribe" a pivotal figure in Western thought, Saint Augustine. In an effort to satisfy the law of non-contradiction and thereby preserve God's omnipotence and justice - two terms in a configuration of three - Augustine boldly confronted the third, evil. Resorting to what were, by judicial norms, even then obsolescent notions of pollution he instead confounded God with an all the more inscrutable evil, thereby consigning Western civilization to a long blind alley from which it has yet to completely return. Like that of Blumenberg, Ricouer's charge that Augustinian theology is "anti-gnostic gnosticism" is not simply substantiated here but amplified. Meissner goes further, suggesting that Augustine's unforgiving interpretation of Christianity reduced its adherents to an incapacity most recognizable in the figure of the slave; that is, a living nullity, static, undecidable and human - saved - only and always in potentia, neither alive to this world nor certain to gain acceptance in the next.