In City of God 19.17, St. Augustine profiles two different cities—or households—ordered by two different conceptions of economic activity. For both households, the purpose of mundane business is sacrifice. However, in this age (saeculum) the two households interpret their sacrifices differently.
Instead of joining itself to the pilgrim city’s one sacrifice to God through Christ, the earthly city offers itself as an ad hoc conglomeration of sacrifices to a pantheon of powers, which its members take to be arbiters of the irreducibly manifold goods of this life. Augustine calls these demons. To sacrifice oneself to a plurality of principles that supposedly guarantee one’s well-being requires that one imagine one’s desires leading to ‘heat death.’ Seeking a mélange of goods without acknowledging the unity of the good that they communicate renders personal fulfilment indistinguishable from existential dissipation.
Just like Augustine’s, our contemporary mileu harbors the temptation to interpret economic activity as a cynical collusion between lonely individuals and hostile powers that exploit them through the very process of appearing to be employed by them. But such an interpretation is not the only way of regarding our economic life. One of Augustine’s most powerful insights in City of God is that the sacrifices of the civitas terrena are only intelligible as sacrifices insofar as they implicitly betray their indebtedness to the one sacrifice offered to the only God, who, in the loving unity of his triune life, remains the sole source and end of sacrifice.
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