Others say: – I belong to the latter.– The disappointment which follows utopianism, always and necessarily, makes it impossible to speak like this to people if you know better, because the disappointment is worse than the weakening of fanaticism. This would be my decision, but this decision is very questionable. But today even in this doctrine of eternal condemnation – you know that in Augustine even the unbaptized children are not condemned to hell but to the limbus infantium where they are excluded from the eternal blessedness, from the Divine love. Now such an idea might have a tremendous educational and ecclesiastical value in some periods of history, it doesn’t have for us any more. It produces very often – especially the personal fear of condemnation – neurotic stages, and therefore we cannot say it is superior to the others.
Now let me give you finally something about Augustine’s Philosophy of History.
Each of these doctrines is world-historical, and therefore we must dwell on them so much. If you know him, you know the Middle Ages and much of the Reformation and Renaissance. The philosophy of history is based – as philosophy of history usually is – on a dualism; not an ontological dualism, of course – -this is impossible – but a dualism in history: on the one hand, the city of God, and on the other hand the city of earth or the Devil. The city of God is the actualization of love. It is present in the Church, but the Church is a corpus mixtum , a mixed body, with people who belong to it and others who do not, essentially, Spiritually. But on the other hand, there is a mediation between these two characters of the Church, representing the Kingdom of God and being a mixed body, (I. e., -not being the Kingdom of God), and this is the hierarchy, that is, all those who have the consecrations, who mediate between the two. In them Christ rules the Church and Christ is present. So the Catholic 61urch could use Augustine in both ways. It could identify the Kingdom of God with the Church to such a degree that the Church became absolutized – this was the one development which actually happened. On the other hand, the difference could be made very clear, and this was what the sectarian movement and the Protestants did. There is a dialectical relationship between the Kingdom of God and the Church in Augustine, which was ambiguous and therefore useful for different points of view. But one thing was clear for him: there is no thousand-year (I. e., no third stage in world history. Chiliasm, or millenialism,was denied by him.
