Introduction

The previous lectures have dealt with some of the more important attempts in the classical world to make rational sense of their ethical beliefs and the moral norms. They’ve all been set in the context of a flourishing ancient world and have largely agreed on the sorts of things that an ethical theory has to explain or justify. One the one hand, there’s been general agreement that ethics is concerned with achieving some sort of happiness in this world – although the nature of this happiness has been disputed, and sometimes it appears that the happiness that is proposed is not the sort of happiness that most people would aspire to. And on the other hand, it is generally agreed that the way to get happiness is through traditional virtues of wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage – though it’s not always clear that the connection between the virtuous path and the happy end has been convincingly demonstrated.

In this lecture we’ll look at another vision of the good life which builds upon many of the ideas and norms that we’ve already seen, but also begins to appeal to some rather novel ideas. This new vision is Saint Augustine ’s attempt at a coherent Christian ethics. In this new approach to ethics there is still a vision of happiness to aspire to, but it is quite a different sort of happiness from what we seen before; and although there are still virtues that will take you to that happy state, they are no longer just the traditional virtues I mentioned: the list now includes things like love, humility, patience, and other things that the Classical age would have tended to see as defects of character rather than virtues. But more than just this alteration, we will see the continuing move in ethical thought from the character-based systems of the ancient world to the systems of the modern world which take Law as their model. (We noticed last week that the Stoics had already gone far along this road by following some traces that could be observed in Aristotle.)

Fall of Rome

Aurelius Augustinus (354-430AD), whom we know better as Saint Augustine or as St. Augustine of Hippo – Hippo being the small town in what is now Algeria in North Africa where he spent most of his life – lived in interesting times. I mentioned in the first lecture that for administrative convenience the Roman Empire had to be divided in two parts. The West, including Hippo, spoke Latin, and was still ruled from Rome itself, but the East, which spoke Greek, was ruled from the new capital that the emperor Constantine had built – called Constantinople (today’s Istanbul .) At about this time the whole of North and Western Asia (including Europe ) was a turmoil of migrating barbarian peoples. Some of these were primitive, brutal, and warlike tribes who had been pushed out of their lands by even more primitive, brutal and warlike people to their East, and they had been pushed in their turn in a series of movements of peoples that extended all the way across Asia to modern Mongolia . Others were spreading out from the so-called ‘womb of peoples’ in Scandinavia . All of them were attracted by the wealth of the West as well as its vulnerability. For a long time the Romans had tried to ease the pressure on their borders by allowing tribes to enter and settle and become Roman. And they also tried to use these immigrants to fight against other tribes whom they wanted to keep or force outside the borders. Whereas the East was still strong enough to defend itself, the West was not. Augustine was shocked when the city of Rome itself was sacked by barbarians in 410AD. Further disasters followed and by about 500 most people would say that the Western Roman Empire had fallen Though Augustine did not live to see this, the signs of Rome’s decline were clear to everyone.

In his most important book, The City of God, Augustine was concerned to explain how it could be that Rome was great while it was pagan, but now, when Rome was a Christian Empire, it was being torn apart by pagan barbarians. In the course of making his excuses for God, Augustine had to consider many elements of the Christian world-view that was still in the process of formation. That’s useful for us, and it’ll be the source of much of what we claim about his ethical thought.

Soteriological Religions

Christianity arose as one of a number of ‘Salvation’ religions that became popular amongst the people of Rome after the establishment of the Empire, and especially as its moral decline, social inequalities, and political incompetence became more and more obvious, and more and more obviously an impediment to the well-being of its citizens. Just to give an example of the sort of thing that the common people had to put up with, I quote from a book describing the conditions of the 3^rd and 4^th century peasants – a class that had at one time been the backbone of the Roman power: freehold farmers and free citizens. A kind of sturdy yeomanry. Now:

They and their sons were bound to the soil; if they contemplated flight, they were to be put in fetters. … The landowners were finally made responsible for the collection of the taxes paid by their tenants; and this completed the subjection of the coloni. They now formed a class of half-free persons, intermediate between free citizens and slaves.

…

Apathy was the characteristic mood of the peasant, for whom no prospect of better conditions was visible, and whose only object was to avert starvation for the coming year.[1]

According to all the important classical philosophies, happiness was within the power of each man to achieve no matter what his actual circumstances might be. But in order to make this claim at all plausible they had to be very intellectualized and internalized ideas of ‘happiness.’ The sort of highly intellectualized philosophy that could appeal to the elites – philosophies like the Stoicism that we looked at last week, or Epicureanism, or any of the others that I mentioned – were simply not sufficient to satisfy the increasingly oppressed population. And so they turned to the outlandish religions that offered some hope of help to achieve the happiness that was beyond their own power to realize. Sometimes this happiness was promised in this very life and sometimes it was promised in the afterlife, and sometimes it promised both at different times. Amongst the Roman soldiers, for example, it became common to worship the Aryan god Mithras, or Sol Invictus (The Unconquered Sun,) while other Romans adopted the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. And then, of course, there was the religion of the Jewish god of the Christians. All of these involved gods dying and being reborn, and all of them promised salvation. Eventually, of course, Christianity triumphed over its rivals and the ancient paganism. The Emperor Constantine treated Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire from about 300AD.

Jewish Ethics

Apart from its soteriological aspect, which was important for Augustine’s conception of ‘Grace’, but which won’t much concern us here, the fact that Christianity triumphed meant that the Jewish approach to ethics now became a contributing factor in the Western ethical tradition: for Christianity began as a Jewish sect, and all its first leaders were Jews. The most important new idea that the Jews brought to the West was that ethical behaviour was simply behaviour that followed the Law that had been revealed to the Chosen People by God. And, at least at the time in question, it was a profoundly unintellectual approach to ethics. One modern Jewish author makes the point quite forcefully. (I paraphrase:)

The history of the Jews is the history of a human collective that said “we will do and obey,” because it did not make the observance of the commandments conditional on understanding them. “Self-dedication to goals made concrete,” action and not theory, a doctrine that is all imperatives (without any philosophical statement) … The Jewish faith does not perceive reality as the embodiment of cosmic intelligence, but as the embodiment of God’s will. It therefore demands that its believers (as Christianity and Islam later demanded) voluntarily control their impulses and needs, and live accordingly in God’s image.[2]

For a Jew, all the rules for living can be found in the Hebrew Bible and the interpretative literature. Of course the most famous of those rules are the Ten Commandments, but there are plenty more. Many of those rules would be taken over into Christianity, but which ones would apply to Christians was a matter of considerable debate in the early church. We don’t care about that: we’re only concerned with the attitude to ethics that came with it.

You might think that this sort of ethics – the ethics of Divine Command – would be utterly alien to the Classical world. Indeed something like it – the idea that what is right is right because God says it is right – was explicitly debunked by Plato in his dialogue called Euthyphro. On the divine command theory you would be bound to agree that if God willed that random murder was right then that would be what you were morally obliged to do. But as Plato pointed out, no one really thinks that. So they say that because God is good God cannot will what is not right. But that means that things that are right are right whether or not God wills them.

Notwithstanding this previous criticism however, the intellectual atmosphere of the time had actually become quite friendly to such notions. I won’t bore you with an introduction to Neo-Platonism, which was actually Augustine’s favourite pagan philosophy, but you can see in what we’ve previously said about the Stoic philosophy that a more sophisticated version of something like this had already been proposed. The world according to the Stoics, you’ll recall, was organized according to the Will of Zeus; also known as the Law, or as Nature. The right thing for a man to do was to act according to Nature, which is to say according to the Law as laid down by God. The Stoics, of course, had only reason to tell them what God’s will was. Now the Christians had it in writing.

The point to take away from this is that Christian ethics is normative, and the norms are set by known, fixed statements of Law.

I suppose it’s worth pointing out, given the way that Western society has moved away from an overt reliance upon Christian doctrine or even belief, that the importance of the Christian contribution can be recognised without committing yourself to any specifically Christian beliefs, just as recognising the worth of the Classical tradition doesn’t require you to believe in Zeus or Jupiter.

The Problem of Evil

How can there be Evil in the World?

Augustine actually began as a Manichaean, rather than a Christian. Manichaeism was a popular religion of the time that was founded upon the teachings of a Persian with the title ‘Mani’ (216-278). He had elaborated a cosmology that saw the world as the result of a struggle between two fundamental principles: one we might call the principle of Good, whatever that might be; and the other we might call the principle of Evil. Neither of these is an omnipotent power, and so it’s easy enough for Manichaeans to understand how there can be evil in the world. When Augustine finally decided against Manichaeism and for Christianity the existence of evil became a problem; because, according to the Christians God is all-powerful and wholly benevolent, and surely someone who’s able to make things good and wants to make things good actually would make things good. But things are not good. So what’s going on?

You’ll notice that this was a bit of a problem for the Stoics too. If Nature was the definition of what ought to be and Nature also described how things actually were, then how could there be a conflict between how things ought to be and how they were? The Stoics had a few answers to this, not all of them very satisfactory. For example, they could say that ‘virtue’ was only possible if there was ‘vice’: the two were correlated concepts in the same way that hot and cold are correlated, or light and dark. Of course, it’s true that there’d be little need for a word for virtue if there was no such thing as vice, but that hardly tells us why we do have vice. The Stoics eventually settled on an idea that vice, as a quality of characters, was possible because humans had the ability to act according to their reason, which might be mistaken. But they also said that even those mistakes were really according to Nature, and thus good – so their attitude may not have been quite coherent on the point.

The Stoics also proposed that we should see the evils of the world as only apparent: that they had some part to play according to Natural Law in making the world as a whole good, and that their seeming evilness was only due to our limited perspective. Augustine’s answer to the problem is a version of this idea: he tries to claim that it’s quite possible for God to be omnipotent and all-benevolent and yet not to prevent all the evils that are in the world. If one were able to take a God’s eye view of the world then one would see that it is, overall, very good. At least that’s what God thought when on the 6^th day of creation ‘he saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.’[1] According to this view, the world is good like a pizza which depends for its excellence on the proper mixture of ingredients, which, if taken alone are quite inedible. The evils of the world are like the olives and anchovies in a pizza; or, as Augustine actually says:

A picture may be beautiful when it has touches of black in the appropriate places; in the same way the whole universe is beautiful, if one could see it as a whole, even with its sinners, though their ugliness is disgusting when they are viewed in themselves.[2]

Why do we do Wrong?

But Augustine wasn’t satisfied with this, because even if the world was in fact made better by this sort of leavening of Evil, the fact that little children – who everybody believes are innocent and thus, in a just world would be immune to harm – do in fact suffer great harm, and so God can’t be just. But of course God must be just. So, how can this conundrum be solved? Well, Augustine takes the pretty harsh position that everyone is in fact guilty, and therefore everyone who suffers evil gets what they deserve. Everyone who doesn’t suffer evil is the lucky recipient of God’s undeserved mercy. And what is the source of all this guilt (?): it is the Original Sin of Adam and Eve in tasting of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Of course, we’d say that that only makes Adam and Eve guilty, not their descendants unto Eternity, but God takes that capacity for disobedience as being a characteristic of Humanity in general – it was merely demonstrated by the first people he made. We are all possessed of that flaw and we must all bear the guilt of it.

What is it in us then that makes us Sin? The solution that Augustine proposes is quite similar to the Stoic solution – actually, it is effectively the same solution: he proposes that Sin is possible in the world because Man was created with Free Will, and Free Will is a such good thing to have in the world that it more than makes up for the possibility of Sin that follows from it. I won’t pursue the question of why Free Will is supposed to be a good thing, but we do need to look at why we actually do Sin, rather than just having a capacity to Sin which is never exercised. After all, there’s no logical reason why we couldn’t all be made so as to only ever choose to do good things.

Augustine tells the story of himself as a young man faced with temptations, who did wrong even while knowing it was wrong.

Theft is punished by Thy law, O Lord, and the law written in the hearts of men … Yet I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing, and a pamperedness of iniquity. For I stole that, of which I had enough, and much better. Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself. A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste. To shake and rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night (having according to our pestilent custom prolonged our sports in the streets till then), and took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them. And this, but to do what we liked only, because it was misliked.[3]               

And now, O Lord my God, I enquire what in that theft delighted me; and behold it hath no loveliness[.][4]

Augustine eventually concludes that he stole the fruit mostly so that he could enjoy the feeling of his liberty to do so. From another point of view you might say that this was a distorted way of following the example of God. He had power to do as he pleased, and now Augustine has shown that he has something of the same power. Evil, for Augustine, and so far as we are able to do anything about it, is a problem of disciplining the Will to do what is required. The Will, indeed, turns out to be quite fundamental for Christian ethics, and that has been carried over into modern ethics (as we’ll see.)

The point to take away from this is that Christians take the Will rather than the Act to be the principal carrier of moral value in humans.

Here is Augustine again:

The important factor is the quality of a person’s will, because if the will is perverse, it will have these perverse affections, but if it is right, they will not only be blameless but even praiseworthy. The will is in all of them; indeed, they are nothing other that expressions of will. For what are desire and joy but the will in agreement with that which we want? And what are fear and grief but the will in disagreement with that which we reject?[5]

(It’s because of this new perspective that we now make distinctions between murder and manslaughter, even though the outcome may be the same in both cases.)

The Power of Love

Very well then, so what should shape the Will that it should be properly formed and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil? Augustine agreed with the general opinion of the ancient world that the final end of all actions, the summum bonum, was a type of ‘happiness,’ which was called eudaimonia in Greek and beatitudo in Latin. Do not be fooled by the word beatitudo (which is often also translated as ‘blessedness’) into thinking that this is necessarily religious or spiritual concept. You might recall, for example, that one of the possible readings from last week was Seneca’s essay on ‘the Good Life’ which was actually called ‘De Beata Vita.’ In fact, Augustine’s first book had that same name. Augustine, however, had a particular view of the good life that would distinguish his school – Christianity – from all the others.

It was a characteristic of the pagan philosophers that unhappiness in life was taken to be under the control of the individual who was unhappy. The Stoics and Epicureans and others tended to think that if we could just change our attitudes toward things that were making us happy that they would no longer have the power to upset us. Similarly, by making these changes we could actually achieve happiness in this life, since all the resources required for happiness, they claimed, were internal to ourselves. I’ve mentioned in other places that most of their unphilosophical compatriots would have disagreed with them. It’s obvious to anyone who’s not in the grip of some crazy philosophical theory that a man cannot really be happy while he’s being tortured, or when he’s sick with plague, or when his family are being harmed. What really seems to be behind this sort of claim is a desire to make happiness or success achievable in circumstances where a good deal of what affects one in life is simply not under one’s control. Augustine differed from these philosophers by denying that it could be entirely up to oneself whether one would be happy or not; and he did this in several ways.

Heaven as an Expectation

To begin with, Augustine argued that immortality is a great good and that if people were going to be really happy they do need to be immortal. It’s only if you’re immortal that you can really avoid all worry and anxiety, and presumably all hurt and injury. If happiness is to be equated to being without worry and so on, and if we are to be able to achieve happiness, then we have to be able to achieve immortality. But the pagan philosophers had nothing much to say about the joys of the afterlife, and so their schemes to achieve happiness in this life were fatally flawed. The answer, according to Augustine, was to accept that there was an afterlife and to try to achieve happiness by following the rules which would lead to your achieving it. Augustine doesn’t think that there’s any great likelihood that you can become ultimately happy in this life, but he does think that you can call someone ‘happy’ in this life if they accept what is given to them here and now but with the confident hope of going to Heaven in the future. I have to say that I find this a fairly poor argument: I don’t think you can argue from a position that there’s some state that would make you happy if it were true, and you want to be happy, to the belief that that state is true. It might be equally concluded that you can’t be happy – and that would not involve modifying your picture of the world.

In any case Augustine thinks that we should behave so as to deserve Heaven. And how exactly should we behave? Augustine notes that we are given two fundamental commands by Christ;

1.                    Love God above all.

2.                    Love your neighbour as you love yourself.

Presumably, if we follow these commands we will deserve heaven. On the other hand, if we follow these commands with the intention of using this merely as a means to get to Heaven, which will make us happy, then we can’t really be loving God above all. We actually seem to be loving ourselves above all, and loving God as a way of getting Him to give us happiness. This makes things a bit tricky. But there are ways to convince ourselves that love of this kind is not merely instrumental.

The Hierarchical Order of Lovability

In one of his early works Augustine made the point about happiness that there are certain things that we know to be true about it:

The title ‘happy’ cannot, in my opinion, belong either to him who has not what he loves, whatever it may be, or to him who has what he loves if it is hurtful, or to him who does not love what he has, although it is good in perfection.[1]

And as a consequence Augustine is able to say that it is what we love that determines whether we are able to attain happiness; or that, together with the availability of that which we choose to love; for happiness is found when we possess that which we love. But what is it that we ought to love? Can we know this without simply looking at the commands that we have found in the New Testament?

Augustine thinks we can, but to make this argument he has to appeal to a piece of metaphysics that he adopted from the Neo-Platonists. This was a school that had developed from the old Academy that Plato started, although their teachings were a very long way from what Plato could have brought himself to agree to. They were the favourite philosophers of Augustine because they had a view of the world which agreed with his own religious view in many ways – much more so that the materialist world views of the Stoics and Epicureans, even though he tended to approve the moral theories of the latter more than those of the Neo-Platonists. In any case, we’re only interested now in the Neo-Platonist idea of a ‘Ladder of Being’ which ranked all things in the universe according to their degrees of perfection, which was equivalent to ranking them according to their distance from the Creator God. (Note that the Neo-Platonist ideas concerning God the Creator were not at all agreeable to the Christian Church, but that’d be a subject for another course.)

According to this idea, as Augustine interpreted it, God is at the top of this ladder: God is perfect and this perfection is manifested in His immutable nature. A perfect thing does not change. Why should it? Why would it change from being perfect to being something other than perfect? I know I wouldn’t. Not is it possible for it to be changed. No other thing, which must be imperfect, can harm something which is perfect – that’s part of being perfect. God created a number of other things to populate His universe. None of these other things is perfect, and in virtue of their being imperfect they are changeable. These other things, however, are imperfect in varying degrees. The material world of rocks and water and air is most imperfect, furthest from God, and most changeable. Between that world and God are the animals and angels and right in the middle – or perhaps a little closer to the top – is Man. Indeed Man has a mixed nature, for he is a combination of Soul and Body, and whereas the body is merely matter and thus highly changeable, his soul is immaterial and shares in the spiritual nature of the creatures above him on the scale.

If, therefore you wish to love something that will lead to permanent happiness, you should love that which is least changing; for if you love something and it changes then you have lost what you love and you must be sad, whereas if you love something which is unchanging you will never lose what you love through change. It is thus more reasonable to love people animals than rocks, and more rational to love people than animals, and more rational again to love the soul of another than to love their body, and most rational of all to love God who is perfect and quite unchanging.

We must now inquire what is man’s chief good, which of course cannot be anything inferior to himself. For whoever follows what is inferior to himself, becomes inferior. But every man is bound to follow what is best. Wherefore man’s chief good is not inferior to man. Is it then something similar to man himself? It must be so, If there is nothing above man which he is capable of enjoying. But if we find something which is both superior to man, and can be possessed by the man who loves it, who can doubt that in seeking for happiness man should endeavour to reach that which is more excellent than the being who made the endeavour. For if happiness consists in the enjoyment of a good than which there is nothing better, which we call the chief good, how can a man properly be called happy who has not yet attained to his chief good?[2]

So happiness, or beatitude, is to be identified with the loving union with God.

The Worth of Others

This is enough to explain what is going on when we are commanded to love God above all others; but what is the effect of the other command that we were given: to love others as we love ourselves? The explanation of this again refers to the hierarchy of things in the universe. This time we need to consider the hierarchy as defining a scale of absolute values. That which is at the very top of the scale (i.e. God) has maximum absolute value – perhaps even infinite value, though I’m not quite sure what that can mean. And everything which is below God on the scale has lesser and finite absolute value because it is less perfect, more alterable, further from God, and so on. The rocks and dirt have the lowest values and animals have higher values and Man is more valuable than them and angels are more valuable than Man.

But his scale of absolute values is not the scale that we typically use when valuing things. We would all rather have a diamond than a mouse. We might even prefer to own a diamond mine over owning an angel. We make these judgements of preference because in comparing those objects we use a scale of instrumental values in which the values are given by the supposed utility of the object to ourselves. Thus: I can do nothing with either a mouse or an angel, whereas I can do a great deal with a diamond, therefore I instrumentally value the diamond more highly. I am more likely to spend thousands of dollars on an electronic toy for myself than I am to give that amount of money to a starving person on the street; so, apparently, I instrumentally value the toy more highly than the person – and yet I don’t really think that the computer has an absolute value greater than that person (whether or not they are starving.) On the other hand, I never value myself on the instrumental scale, largely, I suppose, because it simply wouldn’t make sense to do so. What would it mean to sacrifice my own interests in order to serve my own interests? No, I always consider myself according to the absolute scale (at the very least.) The command that I must love – i.e. value – others as I value myself tells us that we may not interact with others using the instrumental scale of values, but only using the absolute scale. This is a command that Kant would take up as a fundamental rule of a non-theistic ethics in his Principle of Ends, where he states that we must always treat others as ends and never as means.

The virtuous person, for Augustine, would thus be the person who treats others according to their absolute value, and loves them appropriately, and loves and obeys God above all. In this way one may achieve happiness. A failure to order your love according to this way is a failure of the Will.

Law and Grace

In fact, however, it is possible for any person to be a virtuous person in this way, whether they are explicit Christians or not, because all people are rational and are able to derive and to understand the laws of God. These laws are the lex aeterna, and they are purely rational. On the other hand, and this is a rather strange point in Augustine’s philosophy, it is not possible for just anyone to understand these laws without assistance. The assistance of God in understanding these laws is required and this is given purely at God’s whim. This is the Augustinian doctrine of Grace. It is because of this requirement for grace – which is not granted as something that we deserve or that can be extorted from God – that Augustine does not hold that happiness can be achieved purely by the individual.

Peace

That lex aeterna that I just mentioned, however, is to be contrasted with the lex temporalis, which is the law that Man makes for himself on Earth. The point of this law is the preservation of peace, which is one of the fundamental requirements for happiness – at least for that degree of happiness that we can achieve on Earth. The establishment of peace on Earth is also the supposed reason for wars. As Augustine says:

Whoever gives even moderate attention to human affairs and to our common nature, will recognise that there is no man who does not wish to be joyful, neither is there any one who does not wish to have peace. For even they who make war desire nothing but victory – desire that is to say, to attain to peace with glory. … For even they who intentionally interrupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but wish it changed into a peace that suits them better.[1]

We’ll have more to say about wars and their justification in the next lecture, but we shall just make a final point relating this to the role of love in Augustine’s philosophy. He claims that it is impossible for us to be happy in an unjust peace, and by an unjust peace he means a peace in which things are not valued or loved in their proper order. And the proper order is, of course, the order ordained by God, the order of absolute values that we have seen Augustine use in his other arguments.

On a gloomy note, Augustine thinks that it’s almost impossible for any such just ordering to be established on Earth, because the desires of Men are so strong that they will cause them to allow a deformity of their will which allows the use of others instrumentally, and to treat material things as more important than they should be. It is only in the community that will be established after our deaths when we are in Heaven that we can be sure that a just and happy peace will be established.

Summary

With the rise of Christianity, then, a new set of moral beliefs came into prominence: sin, humility, kindness, love of God and one’s fellow man, forgiveness, and mercy. They and their justifications are encapsulated in the small phrase in 1 Corinthians 13 listing the Christian virtues of ‘Faith, Hope, and Charity… but the greatest of these is Charity.’ You’ll note that these were quite different from the previous norms. In fact, it is a common criticism of the pre-Christian Greek morality that there was so little of human sympathy in it. The new norms fill in that gap and did markedly improve the quality of ethical feeling. We also find that the Christian ethical system was in some places directly opposed to the ancient moral system. For example, the seven deadly sins included wrath and pride, which were certainly not considered culpable under the pre-Christian systems.

Other very important aspects are:

1.                    The new importance of the Will, which was suggested by the Stoic philosophy, but not properly developed there, and which is now fundamental to our moral theories

2.                    The rather new idea of a respect for the ultimate worth of others, an idea which derives from a view of the absolute value of persons in general.

3.                    The continuing importance of the notion of a Law. Also an adaptation of a Stoic view of law to the new religion. The tendency over time was to say that since God is the ruler of the universe, His commands are binding on us and form a ‘legal’ structure independent of human law. Note that this wasn’t actually Augustine’s view.