Hoping rightly

I remember a fellow student in graduate school mocking my pronunciation of "Augustine." I pronounced the name like the city in Florida. He taught me better. Augustine's ideas were and are rather more important than the proper pronunciation though. From "‘A Commonwealth of Hope’ Review: The Uplifting St. Augustine":

The liberal political philosopher John Rawls bestowed on St. Augustine of Hippo a dubious honor. He identified Augustine, along with the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, as one of “the two dark minds in Western thought.” Rawls said this because Augustine based his conception of man on the reality and depth of human sin.

Augustine’s emphasis on sin is evident in his Confessions. ....

Political theorists sometimes turned to Augustine to understand the terrors of the 20^th century. These philosophers emphasized passages in which Augustine was fixated on evil. The “dark” Augustine that emerged in 20^th-century scholarship considered the world a vale of tears. He thought of government as a necessary evil. He was a pessimist about the prospects for peace on earth. ....

Augustine was not a pessimist but a champion of hope. He encouraged his hearers to hope for the well-being of the city. And he possessed an expansive vision of Christians and non-Christians working together to improve their lives on earth. ....

Augustine...did not define hope as a naive expectation that something good will happen. It is not the belief that we can accomplish all things—including the building of heaven on earth—by our own power, without the grace of God. That is presumption. At the same time, Augustine did not endorse passivity or inaction in the face of life’s many injustices. That is despair, an outlook as condemnable as presumption. ....

Augustine famously argued that there are two cities. The earthly city is defined “by love of self extending even to contempt of God.” The heavenly city is defined “by love of God extending to contempt of self.” He recognized that the two cities are intermingled on earth. Here, the heavenly city must “make use of the peace of Babylon.” And here, before the final judgment, we do not know who belongs to what city.  ....

In any case, Augustine learned what it meant to be a good citizen by looking heavenward, to the city of God. There, “the king is Truth, the law is Love and the duration is Eternity.” His hope for the heavenly city led him to look after the good of the earthly city. ....

Aaron Alexander Zubia, "‘A Commonwealth of Hope’ Review: The Uplifting St. Augustine," The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 4, 2022.