This chapter explores connections among one ‘virtue of acknowledged dependence’, humility, as elaborated by Augustine; the right or just according to nature; and human rights. The opening section argues that in defending virtuous humility, Augustine defends a new account of natural right, supporting this thesis with a reading of The City of God, books I-V. After this analysis, our focus shifts a central framer of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Lebanese philosopher-diplomat Charles Habib Malik. Drawing on the archive of Malik’s papers and on his publications and lectures, we offer a select history of Malik’s study of Augustine’s work and his distinctively Augustinian perspective on themes such as humility, natural right and natural law, and human rights. We turn next to the text of the Universal Declaration, considering its Augustinian affinities as well as key divergences from Augustine’s views. The final sections of the chapter argue that Augustinian notions of humility and pride are central to Malik’s appraisal of the Declaration and the contemporary human rights project more generally, in their substance as well as their modes of expression.

Chapter 5 inquires with Augustine into the origins and metaphysics of humility and pride, and how we may come to know them. In books XI–XII of The City of God, Augustine explores this theme by reflecting on biblical and Platonic accounts of creation, especially of angels and human beings, and of the birth of Augustine’s famous “two cities” among them.

Chapter 8 treats books XIX–XXII, the final segment of The City of God, focusing on the last end or summum bonum. In these key books, the antidote to pride, flowing from humility, emerges in Augustine’s narrative as “participation” – free and willing partaking by creatures in God’s being, wisdom, and love. Crucial to this participation, and the genuine community or res publica it makes possible, are recognition of humanity’s creaturely status and the rejection of the pull toward autarchy or a false sense of self-sufficiency.

Chapter 2 explicates Augustine’s critique of political pride, as tending to foment “lust for domination” (libido dominandi), in books I–V of The City of God. In this opening segment, Augustine depicts pride as unnatural for human beings and unjust, thereby paving the way for a greater appreciation of the naturalness and justice of moderation and humility in political life.

Chapter 7 follows Augustine’s argument through books XV–XVIII of The City of God, showcasing humility and pride in action throughout human history, sacred and secular. Augustine presents a long series of exemplars of virtue and vice, including humility and pride, and so invites readers to reflect on these qualities’ roles and ramifications in personal, familial, social, and civic histories.

The Conclusion, marking the end of our long, rhetorical-dialectical journey with Augustine in The City of God, asks what we have learned, and why it might matter. It reflects on the multifaceted nature of Augustine’s defense of humility – experiential, historical, epistemological, metaphysical, and theological – and on the ways it offers hope for humans amid the challenges of civic life, today as well as in Augustine’s troubled era.

Chapter 3 marks the transition of Augustine’s argument in The City of God from politics to philosophy, by means of the civil religion of ancient Rome. In books VI and VII, Augustine endeavors to unmask counterfeits of virtuous humility – conventions propagated by civic and philosophic elites, including in some respects Varro and Seneca – and to exhort people to live and worship only in accord with their true dignity.

Chapter 6 considers The City of God books XIII and XIV, which complete Augustine’s inquiry into the origins of the two cities, one marked by humility and obedience, the other by pride and rebellion, and the metaphysics of pride and humility. Augustine’s defense of humility in this pair of books aims to reveal humility as fertile soil for abundant life, while pride pollutes the ground and withers life at its root.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to Augustine’s life, work, and thought on humility, pride, and politics. It surveys recent literature on this theme, especially works on early modern political thought, arguing that it leads readers back to The City of God, read and interpreted as a whole.

Chapter 4 treats Augustine’s dialogue with the Platonists in books VIII–X of The City of God on philosophic or natural theology. Augustine emphasizes the excessive, false humility he considers Apuleius to have promoted, and the philosophic pride that may have prompted Porphyry’s harsh critique of Christianity, even as he lauds their achievements together with those of Socrates, Plato, and Plotinus.

In ciu. Dei 6 and 7, Augustine turns from addressing arguments that Rome’s traditional pagan cult is requisite for the this-worldly prosperity of the city and its empire, to the prospects of these rituals conducing to personal well-being after death. Books 6 and 7 form a bridge between Augustine’s history of pre-Christian Rome in all its glory and its misery, and his consideration of philosophic or natural theology, especially accounts offered by the Platonic school, and the place it makes for traditional pagan worship. The main material from which this bridge is made, according to leading pagan intellectuals like Marcus Terentius Varro, is the traditional Roman civil religion. Varro variously presents Rome’s traditional civil religion as framed by its founders for political utility on the one hand, and philosophic pedagogy on the other. Civil theology and its rites thus understood bind mythic pagan deities and popular views of their intervention on behalf of Rome to a naturalistic, pantheist account of God or the gods as the world itself or its soul. As Augustine interprets Varro, the latter lends his learned, public-spirited support to the civil cult, even while directing thoughtful readers beyond it to philosophic or natural theology. Varro is thus an indispensable interlocutor for Augustine in completing the political-historical-religious inquiry of ciu. Dei 1–5, and in preparing for the engagement with Platonic natural theology in Books 8–10.