Saint Augustine was the first Christian to offer a comprehensive Philosophy of History, which the Russian Orthodox writer Nicholas Berdyaev called nothing short of “ingenious.”[1] One of his greatest accomplishments was the sanctification of Plato’s understanding of the two realms: the perfect Celestial Kingdom and the corrupt copy. One finds this tension and conflict between this world and the next in all of Christopher Dawson’s ideas and works and in many of Russell Kirk’s. “Christian culture is always in conflict with the world,” Dawson wrote directly.[2] In more complicated form, Dawson wrote, the “conception of the sacred and the secular manifests itself at every stage of culture from the primitive to the most highly civilized and in every form of religion.”[3]
For Plato, the two realms never met, except on rare and mystical occasions. For St. Augustine and for Dawson, one also cannot readily separate the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, in any Manichean sense.
See the full article by Bradley J. Birzer, August 27, 2022