THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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and the soul; nothing else? nothing else at all’). So acute is the tension at work within him, stemming from the Manichaean convictions of his youth, between the god of
light and the god of night, between Ormuzd and Ahriman, a political tension. The City of God is an ark, often also a mere catacomb hidden over and over again; its
revelation occurs only at the end of present history. Which is why even the Church does not completely coincide with the civitas Dei, at least since the Church extended
the right of forgiveness of sins to mortal sin as well, and also to apostates (since the Decian persecution of the Christians), and consequently comprises a very mixed
society. Only as the number of the Chosen, as the corpus verum, is the Church wholly the City of God, whereas the existing Church, as the corpus permixtum of sinners
and Chosen, does not coincide with the City of God, but only borders on it in a preparatory way. The existing Church does of course coincide in Augustine with the
millennium, as the first awakening, the first resurrection before the second definitive one (Revelation 30, 5f.); this first awakening is initiated and maintained by the
Church's means of grace. Chiliasm is thereby defused, yet civitas Dei is not handed over to the existing Church; instead, civitas Dei builds itself up for heaven from Abel
onwards, in fragments, and only reveals itself as complete with the appearance of the Kingdom. Civitas Dei is a foundation like Plato's ideal polis, but more consistently
than the latter in its complete orderliness it is not conceived as being founded by men but as being founded in a God of order. Every utopia of order of a pure kind, so
that it does not fall into the opposite of its order, namely into the merely arranged and not ordered character of chance or fate, Tyche or Moira, presupposes an
economy of salvation which founds the order and in which the utopia itself is founded. This fundament of transcendentally communicated or inspired order, without any
admixture of chance and Moira, was not to be found in Plato's idea of the polis and god of the polis, nor in that of the Stoics; it was only to be found in the Christian
concept of God. It is not in and not behind the existing world, but after it that the civitas Dei, as the timeless­elapsed polis in its highest form, becomes completely
manifest. And the basic utopian goal of society, towards which only the Church can lead us, remains the acquisition of the divine image for man (De civ. Dei XXII).
This is the radically supra­temporal directing and ordering principle of the one and only best state as against the others, the systems of sin. Civitas Dei was quite literally
conceived as a piece of heaven on earth, from the angle of happiness and above all from that of cleanliness, which does not make people into angels of course, but into
saints, and