Civitas Peregrina: Augustine, Oakeshott, and the Fragile Order of Strangers

From Alaric’s sack of Rome to the crowded trains of Manhattan, the vision of the civitas peregrina endures: politics is not salvation but the fragile art of coexistence among strangers in a plural world.

In the crowded subways of New York City, a daily liturgy of strangers unfolds. Lawyers in tailored suits, construction workers in dusty boots, tourists clutching crumpled maps, and students lost in half-read books jostle together, bound for different destinations yet united by the hum of the same train. They share no creed, no common purpose, only the fragile order of a shared journey. This scene—a microcosm of urban democracy—evokes an ancient paradox: to be a citizen is to be a pilgrim, a civis peregrinus, a resident stranger. From the ruins of Rome to the streets of Manhattan, this image, first articulated by Augustine of Hippo and later reimagined by Michael Oakeshott, warns against the hubris of political utopias and points to the humility on which pluralistic freedom depends.

The idea of the citizen as pilgrim is a philosophical bulwark against the temptations of totalizing ideologies. Augustine, writing in the shadow of a crumbling empire, and Oakeshott, navigating the ideological tempests of the twentieth century, both saw politics as a limited but essential enterprise: not a path to salvation but a framework for peaceful coexistence among strangers. In an era when democracies are once again seduced by promises of perfection—whether through nationalism, technocracy, or ideological purity—their vision of the civitas peregrina offers a timely corrective. Here we argue that the pilgrim city metaphor, rooted in humility and pluralism, is not only a defense against political hubris but a necessary condition for sustaining liberty in diverse societies.

When Alaric’s Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, the eternal city’s fall reverberated across the Mediterranean. Pagans blamed Christianity for weakening Rome’s martial spirit; Christians feared God had abandoned them. Into this crisis stepped Augustine of Hippo, whose City of God (426 CE) offered a profound reimagining of political life. Against those who equated Rome’s glory with divine favor, Augustine distinguished between two cities: the civitas terrena, the earthly city driven by self-love (amor sui) “to the contempt of God,” and the civitas Dei, the heavenly city rooted in love of God (amor Dei) “to the contempt of self” (Augustine, City of God, XIV.28, 426). The earthly city, exemplified by Rome’s imperial pride, was marked by libido dominandi—the lust for domination. The heavenly city, by contrast, was a community of pilgrims destined for eternal peace.

Yet Augustine’s genius lies in his refusal to separate these cities entirely. Christians, he argued, are citizens of both: they live in the earthly city, subject to its laws and customs, but their ultimate allegiance is to the heavenly one. “So long as this heavenly city is a pilgrim on earth,” he wrote, “she summons citizens from all nations and all tongues, and so collects a society of pilgrims, all of whom are on their way together” (City of God, XIX.17, 426). This image of the cives peregrini—resident strangers—captures a dual identity: citizens bound by civic duties, pilgrims oriented toward a transcendent end.

Politics, for Augustine, could never deliver salvation; its role was humbler: to restrain disorder, provide a measure of justice, and allow pilgrims to journey in peace.

Augustine’s political theology was sharpened by his rejection of Pelagianism, the heresy that humans could achieve moral perfection through free will alone. Pelagius’s optimism, Augustine warned, was a form of pride that ignored human fallibility. “The earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord” (City of God, XIV.28, 426). Politics, for Augustine, could never deliver salvation; its role was humbler: to restrain disorder, provide a measure of justice, and allow pilgrims to journey in peace. This vision of politics as a modus vivendi—a way of living together without erasing differences—remains a cornerstone of pluralistic thought.

Fifteen centuries later, Michael Oakeshott, a British philosopher of the twentieth century, transposed Augustine’s insight into a secular philosophy of politics. Writing amid the ideological battles of modernity—fascism, communism, and technocratic liberalism—Oakeshott shared Augustine’s suspicion of human pride, particularly in its modern guise: Rationalism. In his seminal essay Rationalism in Politics (1962), he critiqued the belief that technical knowledge and planning could perfect society. “The Rationalist,” he wrote, “stands, for the most part, on the edge of a vast intellectual abyss; and his most characteristic disposition is to be dazzled by it” (Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962). This Rationalist hubris, akin to Augustine’s libido dominandi, sought to impose a single vision on a plural world.

Oakeshott’s alternative, articulated in On Human Conduct (1975), was a vision of the state as a “civil association” rather than an “enterprise association.” An enterprise association pursues a collective goal—say, salvation or progress—while a civil association provides a framework of rules within which individuals pursue their own ends. “The civil condition,” he wrote, “is a relationship of cives (citizens) who are associated solely in terms of their common recognition of a system of law” (Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 1975). Like Augustine’s pilgrims, Oakeshott’s citizens are resident strangers, bound by shared institutions but not by a shared destiny. Politics, in this view, is “a conversation, not an argument,” a companionship of strangers walking side by side without demanding consensus (Rationalism in Politics, 1962).

Oakeshott’s philosophy echoes Augustine’s rejection of Pelagian optimism. Where Augustine saw pride in the belief that humans could perfect themselves, Oakeshott saw it in the Rationalist faith that reason could engineer utopia. Both insisted on humility: politics must respect human limits and the diversity of human ends.

The resonance of the pilgrim city metaphor is vivid in modern urban life. Consider New York City’s subway, where millions of peregrini—immigrants, natives, exiles, dreamers—coexist under common rules without a common purpose. The subway is a civil association in miniature: a space where strangers share a journey, not a destination. This image stands in stark contrast to the recurring temptation of modern politics: to transform the state into an instrument of salvation. Nationalists promise unity through blood and soil; progressives envision emancipation through technocratic mastery; ideologues of all stripes insist politics can forge strangers into kin. Augustine and Oakeshott warn that such projects, rooted in Pelagian confidence, lead to coercion and disillusion.

This warning finds historical echoes. The French Revolution, with its dream of universal fraternity, descended into the Terror’s guillotine. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke, a thinker attuned to human limits, cautioned against the “geometrical” precision of revolutionary ideologies: “The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics” (Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790). More recently, the twentieth century’s totalitarian experiments—Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia—showed how the quest for a unified “people” annihilates pluralism. As Hannah Arendt observed, totalitarianism begins when “the idea of the one is imposed upon the many” (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951).

The pilgrim city metaphor carries three urgent lessons for contemporary democracies:

1. Humility About Human Limits. Augustine’s rejection of Pelagianism and Oakeshott’s critique of Rationalism converge on a shared truth: humans are fallible, finite, and incapable of building heaven on earth. Political projects that ignore this—whether religious crusades or secular utopias—end in despotism or despair. Democracy must begin with modesty about what politics can achieve.
2. Pluralism as Condition, Not Problem. If citizens are pilgrims, difference is not a flaw but the essence of political life. Democracy’s task is not to erase divergence but to sustain peace amid it. This requires what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—the freedom to pursue one’s own path without interference, not the imposition of a collective ideal (Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958).
3. Democracy as Companionship. Politics is less about conquest than coexistence. Alexis de Tocqueville, steeped in Augustinian thought, warned of the “tyranny of the majority,” which enforces conformity through social pressure (Democracy in America, 1835). The pilgrim city offers an antidote: a vision of democracy as a fragile order among strangers, where shared laws enable diverse journeys without demanding agreement.

Return to the New York subway, that unlikely communion of strangers. Each passenger, a pilgrim in their own right, moves through a shared world without a shared end. This is the paradox of the civitas peregrina: a community bound not by unity but by humility, not by a single destiny but by the acceptance of many. Augustine and Oakeshott, across centuries, remind us that politics cannot redeem us, but it can protect the space where we walk together as strangers.

Augustine and Oakeshott, across centuries, remind us that politics cannot redeem us, but it can protect the space where we walk together as strangers.

In an age of resurgent utopias—populist, technocratic, or ideological—the pilgrim city stands as a warning and a hope. To embrace it is to reject the illusion of perfection and to affirm the fragile, human order of pluralism. As Oakeshott put it, “In political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage” (Rationalism in Politics, 1962). The task of democracy is not to conquer the sea but to keep the ship afloat, carrying its pilgrims safely through the storm.

“In political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage” Oakeshott (Rationalism in Politics, 1962).