SEMINAR 2

LETTER 6

Dear Students,

How are you? And your family? With and for you and your loved ones, let me continue to pray:
may the Lord grant all of you health in mind, soul and body!

In this Letter 6, I share with you a reading that, hopefully, would encourage you all the more to
persevere in your study of law. But before we do this exercise, let me summarize what we have
done so far.

Letter 1. Students are assured that SSC-R Seminar is the School’s way of expressing our love for
students of law. You are first God’s beloved before you are “future lawyers”. The study of law is
like a journey… and the Seminar is given as a “companion subject”. Along the way, aided by
Augustinian teachings and principles, students are expected to learn how to:

1. Love and take care of their person, first, as God’s beloved, then as a student who desires to
become a God-fearing lawyer.
2. Read and study, with retention and recall, law books and related literatures... in view of
passing the course and the BAR examinations.
3. Rest in a way that, refreshed, they also give to others the respite they need so that together,
they can continue with their personal and social responsibilities.

Letter 2. Student life is like a tree. There are times when branches are broken, leaves wither and
the tree bears no fruits. What to do when this happen? There are lessons students can learn from
Augustine.

Letter 3. The desire to become a God-fearing lawyer is like a flame. It needs fuel, protection and
other forms of care. Augustine provides some tips on how to nourish and protect the desire of
students to become God-fearing lawyers.

Letter 4. Rest is a must… and how one rests is a question. Augustine has much to say about rest,
and the way we ought to avail of it. And during this kind of rest, students are expected to:

1. Evaluate how the Augustinian teachings and principles (with exercises) accompany and
support you in your family life, work life and studies.
2. Discover how, with your knowledge of law, you can collaborate to help solve social problems
affecting us at present.
3. Appreciate the transcendental value of journaling that fosters personal development and
promotes progress in your pursuit of the legal profession.

Letter 5. An xhortation: What is meant by “Fear of the Lord”? Why does the School desire law
students to become “God-fearing lawyers”? An article entitled - The meaning of the “fear of the

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Lord” – is shared with future legal professionals in the hope that they would desire all the more
to become “God-fearing lawyers”.

Letter 6. This is a follow-up to the first of exhortation: an article that shows some values which
our model student of law, Augustine, shares with professors and all those who aspire to become
lawyers. May this “reading” accompany students in their journey, that is – in their study of law.

In your reading apply the 3R’s technique:

Read and reflect;

Record your discoveries;
Recall and recite what you have recorded to those who
need your help (cf. Exodus 17:14)

Please keep a record (journal) of your reflections because at the end of the Seminar, you will be
asked to present - in summary form - your discoveries and an evaluation of the exercises you
have applied to your person.

At the service of formation-education,

Fray Lauro Larlar 26 March 2022

______________________________

Augustine
(School of Life Articles)

Augustine was a Christian philosopher who lived in the early 5th century AD on the fringes of the
rapidly declining Roman Empire, in the North African town of Hippo (present day Annaba, in
Algeria). He served as Bishop for over thirty years, proving popular and inspirational guidance to
his largely uneducated and poor congregation. In his last days, a Germanic tribe known as the
Vandals burnt Hippo to the ground, destroyed the legions, made off with the town’s young women
but left Augustine’s cathedral and library entirely untouched out of respect for the elderly
philosopher’s achievements.

He matters to us non-Christians today because of what he criticised about Rome, its values and its
outlook – and because Rome has so many things in common with the modern West, especially the
United States, which so revered the Empire that it wanted its capital city on the Potomac to look as
if it might have been magically transported from the banks of the Tiber.

The Romans believed in two things in particular:

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i: Earthly Happiness
They were, on the whole, an optimistic lot. The builders of the Pont du Gard and the Coliseum had
faith in technology, in the power of humans to master themselves, and in their ability to control
nature and plot for their own happiness and satisfaction. In writers like Cicero and Plutarch, one
finds a degree of pride, ambition and confidence in the future which, with some revisions, would
not be out of place in Palo Alto or the pages of Wired. The Romans were keen practitioners of what
we would nowadays call self-help, training their audiences to greater success and effectiveness. In
their eyes, the human animal was something eminently open to being perfected.

ii: A just Social Order

For long periods, the Romans trusted that their society was marked by justice: ‘justitia.’ Although
inheritance was a major factor, they also believed that people of ambition and intelligence could
succeed. The army was trusted to be meritocratic. The capacity to make money was held to reflect
both practical ability and also a degree of inner virtue. Therefore, showing off one’s wealth was
deemed honourable and a point of pride. Consumption was conspicuous; and fame a wholly
respectable ideal.

With these two attitudes in particular, Augustine disagreed furiously. In his masterpiece, The City
of God, he dissected each one in turn in ways that continue to prove relevant to anyone who might
harbour doubts of their own about them – even if his proposed solutions, drawn from Christian
theology, will only ever appeal to believers. Augustine’s rebuttals ran like this:
i: We’re all lustful, mad, erratic, deluded deviants with no earthly chance of
happiness
It was Augustine who came up with the idea of ‘Original Sin’. He proposed that all humans, not
merely this or that unfortunate example, were crooked, because all of us are unwitting heirs to the
sins of Adam. Our sinful nature gives rise to what Augustine called a ‘libido dominandi’, a desire to
dominate, which is evident in the brutal, blinkered, merciless way we treat others and the world
around us. We cannot properly love, for we are constantly undermined by our egoism and our pride.
Our powers of reasoning and understanding are fragile in the extreme. Lust – a particular concern
of Augustine’s, who had spent much of his youth fantasising about women in church – haunts our
days and nights. We fail to understand ourselves, we chase fantoms, we are beset by anxieties…
Augustine concluded his assault by chiding all those philosophers who ‘have wished, with amazing
folly, to be happy here on earth and to achieve bliss by their own efforts.’

It might sound depressing, but it may turn out to be a curious relief to be told that our lives are awry
not by coincidence but by definition, because we are human, and because nothing human can ever
be made entirely straight (perfection being an exclusively prerogative of the divine). We are
creatures fated to intuit virtue and love, while never quite being able to secure them for ourselves.
Our relationships, careers, countries are necessarily not as we’d want them to be. It isn’t anything
we have done – the odds have been stacked against us from the start.
Augustinian pessimism takes off some of the pressure we might feel (especially late at night, on
Sunday evenings and at any time after forty) when we slowly come to terms with the imperfect
nature of pretty much everything we do and are. We should not rage or feel that we have been
persecuted or singled out for undue punishment. It is simply the human condition, the legacy of
what we might as well, even if we don’t believe in Augustine’s theology, call ‘Original Sin’.
ii. All hierarchies are unfair; there is no social justice; those at the top naturally
won’t all be good or those at the bottom bad – and vice versa

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Romans had – in their most ambitious moments – thought themselves to be running a society with
some strongly meritocratic features.. Family tended to influence opportunity but you couldn’t get
near the top just on that, you had to rely on the genuine virtues and abilities of your own. Above all
they saw the grandeur of the Roman State as a sign of the collective merits of the Roman population.
They ruled large parts of the earth because they deserved to. Their Empire was the reward for their
virtue. It’s a hugely tempting view today for those on the inside of successful corporations or states
– to see their great prosperity and power as the just reward for collective merit.

What arrogant, boastful and cruel claims, responded Augustine. There never was nor could ever be
‘justitia’ in Rome or anywhere else on earth. God didn’t give good people wealth and power – nor
did he necessarily condemn those who lacked them to poverty. The social order was a complete
muddle of the deserving and the undeserving – and moreover, any attempt by human beings to
judge who was a good person and who a bad one, was a gross sin, an attempt to appropriate a task
that only God could carry out, and would do so only at the end of time, on the day of Judgement, to
the sound of trumpets and phalanxes of angels.

Augustine distinguished between what he called two cities, the City of Men and the City of God. The
latter was an ideal, a heavenly paradise, where the good would finally dominate, where power would
be properly allied to justice and where virtue would reign. But men could never build such a city,
and should never believe themselves capable of doing so. They were condemned to dwell only in
the City of Men, which was a pervasively flawed society, where money could never accurately track
virtue. In Augustine’s formulation: ‘True justice has no existence save in that republic whose
founder and ruler is Christ.’ That is, the fully fair distribution of reward is not something we can or
should expect on earth.

Again, it may sound bleak, but it makes Augustine’s philosophy extremely generous towards failure,
poverty and defeat – our own and that of others. Unlike what the Romans might claim, earthly
failure is no indication of being an inherently bad person – just as success can’t mean anything too
profound either. It is not for humans to judge each other by outward markers of success. From this
analysis flows a lack of moralism and snobbery. It is our duty to be sceptical about power and
generous towards failure.

We don’t need to be Christians to be comforted by both these points. They are the religion’s
universal gifts to political philosophy and human psychology. They stand as permanent reminders
of some of the dangers and cruelties of believing that life can be made perfect or that poverty and
obscurity are reliable indicators of vice.

https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-great-philosophers-augustine/