THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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thus into something greater according to Catholic doctrine. Augustine's dark pessimism with regard to the worldly life of the state is countered by a kind of priestishly
ardent yet space­making, and even in the following period richly secularizable optimism of the civitas Dei, founded on the existence of saints and their growth in the
Church. Casting off the works of the old Adam, putting on Christ, in short the hopes for a spiritual rebirth of more and more people, thus became a utopian political
issue in Augustine's City of God.
And yet it is strange how these dreams are not automatically directed towards the future. They rush ahead as anywhere else, but the future apparently cloaks itself in
present existence. The question thus becomes possible: is civitas Dei strictly speaking a utopia? Or is it the manifestation of an already existing transcendence circulating
in this world? Is the waking dream of a socially Not­Yet­Become really developed here, or is a finished transcendental whole (‘ecclesia perennis’) sunk into the world?
Often of course the City of God seems to be only germinating in Augustine's history, and therefore future­utopian. But it often also seems to be an existing great power,
great anti­power, which has come into existence in the same way as the other dramatis persona, the City of the Devil. Civitas Dei is celebrated in the work of Augustine
as almost present, in the Jewish Levite state and in the Church of Christ. Precisely such a powerful dream of the future as that of the millennium is sacrificed to the
Church, in which it is supposed to be already fulfilled. And a major point here is that the existence of the civitas Dei ultimately poses as a fixed pattern of grace,
embracing the predestined chosen few. Whether they wish to be citizens or not, whether they aspire to, dream of, or work for the kingdom of God or not. One can no
more work for the kingdom of God than for any other good in Augustine's theology, it comes from grace and exists by virtue of grace, not of good works. Thanks to
divine predestination the outcome of historical discrepancy (between civitas terrena and civitas Dei) is also fixed from the start; just like grace, its content of light and
heaven is irresistibly victorious. All this actually distances Augustine's ideal state from the truly utopian will and conceptual plan: and yet the civitas Dei is a utopia. It is of
course not one which wills change, according to Augustine there is just one freedom, that of psychological willing to will, but since Adam's fall there is no freedom of
moral ability to will (non possumus non peccare). But as grace stirs man not merely to do good but to be prepared to do good, so the city of God marches ahead of
man and is an active utopian force within him; as an expectation predestined