How awful would it be, he wonders, to have to torture an innocent man for information in a case that was not his own, to have to put to death an innocent man who pleads guilty to escape further torture, or to set free a guilty man who by some inhuman stolidity in the face of torture refuses to confess to his crime? Though such things may not weigh on the conscience of a philosopher-judge because he knows that his intent is for the good, Augustine maintains that, “surely his cannot be the ‘happy life’ even though his philosophy may save him from a sense of wrongdoing” (City, 19.6).
In this section, Augustine details the immense burden that such a life represents because of our natural human ignorance of the hearts of others. One of Augustine’s key arguments against the idea that the political life fulfills our nature and brings us closer to divinity consists in the grim portrait that he paints of the life of a judge in book 19.6 of City of God. Tom imaginatively depicts human experiences that challenge these oppositions and knock some of the rigidity out of them, without necessarily discrediting them he thereby rehabilitates intellectual heirlooms for current service.
A Consideration and Critique of Aristotle and Augustine’s Perspectives on the Political Life By Tom Butler '12įor all their empirical detail, the classics Tom addresses here, Augustine’s City of God and Aristotle’s Politics, trade in some apparently brittle conceptual oppositions, which inform much reflection on the good life.
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