Augustinian Christianity is clearly the foundation of what became the medieval and modern liberal traditions—the traditions that separated the person or the individual from all the monistic pretensions of either the (natural) philosopher or the city. As the civic religionist Rousseau complained, Christianity does nothing to bolster the city or its laws, because it truthfully denies that men are are essentially citizens and that God is particularly concerned with cities. But even Rousseau was so influenced by Christianity that he was not able plausibly to deny the Christian denial that each of us is merely part of some external whole. For Rousseau, even the citizen lives in radical alienation from his true or natural freedom, and the good citizen must suppress what he really knows about himself as a particular individual.
So truthful—from a philosophic view—is the Christian account of personal freedom that every modern attempt to reduce human beings to merely parts of a city or of nature has failed. The Machiavellian hope that some new "armed prophet" might restore healthy civic-religious opinion has not been realized, as has every attempt by false prophets who claimed to know the impersonal mechanism that drives human history to its end in unlimited or unalienated human freedom.
My debt, on the above, is to Brague’s THE LAW OF GOD, which I was reading over this morning. This may not generate any discussion, but I found it therapeutic to write.
