Surely one of the stranger moments of the recently completed U.S. presidential election season was when, on Sunday, October 9th, 2016, Rudy Giuliani compared Donald Trump to Augustine of Hippo. Speaking to John Dickerson on CBS’s Face the Nation, Giuliani was asked to comment on Trump’s horrifying remarks about sexually assaulting women at will. Bizarrely, Giuliani replied, “I hate to get terribly theological about it, but have you ever read the confession of Saint Augustine? I mean, the reality is that men can change, people can change.”
 
Most responses to Giuliani’s comments were less than warm. Scholars such as Dr. Candace West, Dr. Adam Ployd, and Dr. Elissa Cutter rushed to point out flaws in this comparison. But where did Rudy go wrong? Giuliani, it turns out, is no theological novice. Like many second-generation Italian Americans, his childhood was marinated in the Catholic tradition. After attending Manhattan College, Rudy considered the priesthood before deciding on NYU Law instead. (Both Manhattan College and Rudy’s high school were run by the De La Salle Christian Brothers.) He would continue to invoke his Catholicism when seeking forgiveness for public missteps. In 1983, he sought an annulment for his first marriage, which turned out to be to his second cousin. When defending Trump, then, Giuliani unsurprisingly appealed to absolution, the universality of sin, and the uniqueness of Christ’s perfection.
 
Still, scholars found Rudy’s reading of the Confessions to be lacking one crucial ingredient: the humility that is required for true repentance and transformation. Augustine, sinner though he was, knew enough to feel bad about it and ask for a pardon. Trump, his mind mangled by moneyed mania, remains too proud even to realize that he is wrong. On this (correct) reading, any claims about Trump changing fail due to the lack of evidence of Trump repenting.
 
But there’s another humility at work in Augustine. If we wanted to sound like academics, we’d call this “epistemic humility.” Avoiding that tone, we could say that Augustine was humble regarding not just his own moral failings, but also any claims to know who has truly repented and who has not. For Augustine, questions of repentance and change must be looked at in terms of the duration of an entire life. In a later work, The Gift of Perseverance, he most clearly strikes this humble stance concerning whether or not people have truly changed. The line between the apparently altered and the truly transformed becomes fuzzier. To put this into the vocabulary of his City of God, we could say that the borders of the divine city and the earthly city grow increasingly contested.
 
Perseverance, for Augustine, means to persevere until the very end of this life. “It is never certain whether someone has received this gift for as long as that person leads their life,” as he puts it in the first chapter of The Gift of Perseverance: “If they fall before they die, it is said that they did not persevere.” The flip-side of this is that, until someone is dead, we can’t really say that they won’t be radically transformed by the grace of God. Even in the case of a monk who abandoned the monastery for more immoral pleasures, Augustine leaves room for open-ended hope. In the 35th chapter of the same work, he writes that this wayward brother “advanced so far in evil that he abandoned the community of the monastery and became a dog, turning back to his own vomit. And nevertheless, it is still uncertain what he will be like in the future.”
 
In Augustine’s age, as in our own, this degree of humility is hard to attain. Before we admit anyone’s ability to change, we want to see some evidence. Following Augustine’s logic, though, it’s tough to determine how much evidence would suffice. Surprisingly, this struggle played out during that same episode of Face the Nation. After letting Giuliani off the hook, host Dickerson turned to commentators Peggy Noonan and John Heilemann for analysis.
 
Dickerson first remarked to Noonan, “So Rudy Giuliani said Donald Trump could have a St. Augustine moment, change radically after this event and be a totally different man.” To this, Noonan responded, “Well, I know you spoke to him of the city of God and the city of man, in this world all miracles are possible. People do change their nature and change their character. I am not sure what Giuliani was referring to as the reason there might be a change of nature or character there.” Tellingly, Noonan straightaway invokes the “two cities” (which Giuliani did not actually mention) and then asks for a non-miraculous “reason” for Trump’s change.
 
Heilemann next weighs in, observing that “there is a hypothetical miracle that could occur,” namely, that Trump could change for the better. However, he adds, “On the basis of history there is no reason to think that we will see a new Donald Trump—none. There is no reason. I am not saying we won’t but there is no reason to think that we will.” There are unintended Augustinian resonances here. If we want Augustine to intercede for us against Trump, now President-elect of the United States, we may have to admit in humility that perhaps, somewhere down the line, change could become possible even for the one who strikes us as little more than a yellow-crowned demon. According to the logic of perseverance, Trump might still be transformed before his death, which, judging from his predilection for KFC buckets and poorly constructed taco bowls, may not give him much time to repent.

Resources
 
- Augustine of Hippo. The Gift of Perseverance (De Dono Perseverantiae), Patrologia Latina XLV, 933-1034. Migne, 1865.
 
- Bearak, Barry, and Ian Fisher. “RACE FOR CITY HALL: The Republican Candidate; A Mercurial Mayor’s Confident Journey.” The New York Times. October 19, 1997.

- Cutter, Elissa. “Saint Augustine, Donald Trump, and the Possibility of Change.” Women in Theology. October 11, 2016.

- “Face the Nation transcript October 9, 2016: Giuliani, Mook, Schieffer, O'Donnell, Cordes, Garrett.” CBS News. October 9, 2016.

- Ployd, Adam. “Trump, Saint Augustine And True Conversion.” The Huffington Post. October 11, 2016.

- West, Candace E. “Confession Is Not Conversion: Giuliani’s Bizarre Comparison of Trump to St. Augustine.” Religion Dispatches. October 13, 2016.

Photo credit: PictureObelix / Wikimedia Commons (cc)

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Author, Sean Hannan, is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He holds a PhD in the History of Christianity from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His dissertation, entitled "Belatedness: Augustine on Transformation in Time and History," aimed to reconnect the account of time found in the Confessions to the theory of the saeculum found in the City of God. His current research focuses on the afterlife of Augustinian temporality in the intellectual history of Christianity.

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