Matthew Puffer: Ordo Amoris Amidst the Necessities of Human Society: On the Image of God in the City of God

What does virtue look like in a turbulent society of saints and sinners, where “injuries, suspicions, hostility and war, and then peace again” cycle through everyday life (civ. 19.5)? This paper examines the imago deias a template for interpreting Augustine’s reflections in civ. 19 regarding the form of just peacemaking that a wise citizen of the Heavenly City pursues in the saeculum. Having contended that true virtue is “rightly ordered love” (civ. 15.22), Augustine here asks how the virtuous will live in the permixtum, where one encounters miseries and participates in lamentable necessities at every level of society—domestic, civic, terrestrial, and cosmic. Augustine’s earlier expositions of Sg 2.4 – Set charity in order in me – informed by the concord of command and obedience in the image of God are brought to bear in civ. 19 as he advances a form of moral reasoning for pursuing peace and redressing injustice. The Augustinian roots of just peacemaking, “first, to harm no one, and second, to help anyone that one can” (civ. 19.14) emerge where rightly ordered loves, in the image of God, oppose lusts for social domination.