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Biden's speech quotes St. Augustine's City of God, 19.24 "The Definition Which Must Be Given of a People and a Republic, in Order to Vindicate the Assumption of These Titles by the Romans and by Other Kingdoms." It was a very telling choice. 1/
The previous chapter ends with Augustine rejecting the idea that a true republic can be constituted that is not obedient to the city of God, for without this "there is not an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and by a community of interests." 2/
Without this assemblage, there is no people and "where there is no people there can be no republic." The following chapter begins by discarding this definition and offering another, the one Biden quoted 3/
"A people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love." Augustine then contends "in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love." 4/
By this standard, the Romans were a people and a republic, but given how "it declined into sanguinary seditions and then to social and civil wars, and so burst asunder or rotted off the bond of concord in which the health of a people consists," their republic was inferior 5/
The inferiority of the Roman republic (or any republic) was "in proportion" to the quality of what they loved, as their republic was thus "bound together by lower" interests. Hence, the object of a people's love matters. 6/
Love, following from St. Paul, is not an innate quality but a cultivated virtue, whose seat is the human's reasoned will, not emotion. It's range includes both God and man. 7/
Furthermore, as Augustine clarifies in De Doctrina Christiana, objects are loved (frui) for their own sake or for sake of another (uti). The former type of love is proper only to God. 8/
All other objects, including most importantly for Augustine the neighbor, must be loved for the sake of God. For the Christian, the imperative to love the neighbor is because the neighbor, like the Christian self, is loved by God. 9/
Augustine notes that God's command to love Himself and the neighbor as one loves the self are the two commandments on which "hang all the law and the prophets.' Thus the end of the commandment is love, and that twofold, the love of God and the love of our neighbor." 10/
Thus, the city of the ungodly is marked by the clear breakdown of neighborly love, marked by "sanguinary seditions and social and civil wars,," It cannot give "reason its just authority over the vices" and "is void of true justice." 11/
Biden's quotation is thus a subtle but damning indictment of Trump's ungodly republic, where unreason reigns, where families were brutally separated, where sedition and what Biden calls an "uncivil war" simmered. 12/
It is also worth reading his call for unity and his stern orders to his administration to remain civil with all opponents in this light, as an Augustinian practice of love of the neighbor. 13/
There's been a ton of coverage of the white evangelicism underpinning Trumpism over the last four years. I'd like to see equal coverage of the progressive Catholicism, as well as influences of the Black Church, which were apparent EVERYWHERE today during Biden's tenure. 14/
